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THE DETECTION COLLECTION
by Simon Brett (editor)
St Martin's Minotaur, May 2006
208 pages
$23.95
ISBN: 031235763X


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Simon Brett, known for his British TV productions and mystery novels, is the current president of The Detection Club. In this short volume he has gathered 11 stories by well-known members of the club, all written just for the book. None is by Brett, although he has included his own introduction and a brief history of the club. The authors are PD James, Michael Ridpath, HRF Keating, John Harvey, Lindsey Davis, Colin Dexter, Robert Barnard, Margaret Yorke, Robert Goddard, Clare Francis, and Reginald Hill.

I might have expected some other authors in there also, but perhaps some were not available due to other commitments, and of course there had to be a limit on size. For the benefit of those who do not know of The Detection Club, I should explain that it is generally considered the cream of the cream of British mystery writer organizations.

Great Britain also has a Crime Writers Association, of which I was once a member, open in several categories to anyone who wishes to join who can pay the annual dues, with regular membership limited to those who have had published at least one mystery novel.

Many members of The Detection Club are also CWA members, but the reverse is not true, because membership in the club is limited to invitation only. Some members no longer among the living include Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham. Michael Innes, and Ngaio Marsh, among many others. Only one non-British author has ever been a member, and that is one I fully agree belongs in such distinguished company: John Dickson Carr. One of the main purposes of the club is for members to get together and have convivial dinners. I can imagine the scintillating talk taking place at such dinners, having had the opportunity to converse at CWA functions with many of this book's authors.

Now, to the stories themselves, Colin Dexter gives us a clever one from the same-event-as-seen by-different-people category in Between the Lines, while Robert Barnard has spun a delightful historical yarn taking place with Henrik Ibsen in Norway in The Life-lie. PD James and Reginald Hill have concocted stories with surprising twists at the end (The Part-Time Job and Fool of Myself respectively), and Margaret Yorke, a most pleasant woman in person as well as a wonderful writer, shows the apprehension of a criminal by means of traditional detection in The Woman from Marlow. I especially liked Lindsey Davis's Going Anywhere Nice? in which she puts aside her ancient Rome setting, but shows us that she certainly knows today's Naples.

While I liked all the stories, I must confess that I'm not normally much of a short story fan, but chose to get this book because of the known skill of the writers. In this I was not disappointed, and feel that other readers, especially the short story aficionados, will feel well rewarded on reading it.

Reviewed by Eugene Aubrey Stratton, June 2006

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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