No doubt, I picked this book up because I thought it was a compendium of true cases (back in the old days, I hoped to write for DamnInteresting.com and expected I would need constant pointers to interesting cases). But, no, this book is a collection of short fiction collected from Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine<\/i> and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine<\/i> and was edited by the Director of Marketing for those two brands. Trying to extend the brand, you see, into some hardcover publishing dollars since Ellery Queen aren’t churning out the books like they used to.<\/p>\n
The anthology collects its stories from a number of decades, so some seem dated (not that I disprove), but others are remarkably contemporary. As you might have noticed, gentle reader, I’ve returned to a fondness for short fiction because it lends itself to easy truncation of a night’s reading when I need to go to bed. Forgive me that I don’t enumerate the stories here, but I’m lazy. Overall, the book was entertaining and short and worth the buck I paid for it. There you go.<\/p>\n