Golden Age Detective Stories ed. Otto Penzler
Published under the American Mystery Classics imprint. 14 stories from the mid-1920s through the mid-1950s. During that era mystery writers focused mainly on plot, so these read quickly and efficiently as carriers of plot, and whether you like them or not probably depends on how you react to the writer's style and how tolerant you are about toward the implausible. Of the 14 I didn't care for "The Enemy" by Charlotte Armstrong -- a bit too stylized, much too earnest, but given the premise she sticks the landing pretty well. Also, "Locked Doors" by Mary Roberts Rinehart which felt creaky in the telling, though the strong-willed heroine felt a bit more modern than most women in the fiction of the time. I enjoyed the shenanigans of Craig Rice's "Goodbye, Goodbye" with its quick-talking lawyer, the convoluted story in Erle Stanley Gardner's "The Enchanted Gardner," the sprightliness of "Puzzle for Poppy" by Peter Quentin, and the harsher, grungier world implied by Cornell Woolrich in "The Mystery in Room 913". The other stories were agreeable time passers.
I was a bit surprised to find I had already read two stories in this one, first, "The Stripper" by Anthony Boucher, one Penzler's anthologized before -- it's fun, even though the solution relies on a bit of academic knowledge most readers wouldn't have, and features the sleuths from his novel, A Rocket to the Morgue, of at least tangential interest to sf/fantasy readers. Second, "There’s Death for Remembrance" by Frances and Richard Lockridge which I'd read just a month earlier in an old anthology with the title, "Pattern for Murder." Given I've never read anything by them before, it was an odd coincidence.
