An Avalanche of Anthologies

It's not too early to be thinking about Christmas presents, or at least, that's what the stores are telling me with displays already out to try and entice shoppers to stretch the buying season as long as possible. (Remember when no one put out decorations until the day after Thanksgiving and took them down the day after Christmas?) Still, there are a lot of interesting crime fiction short-story anthologies that are being released over the next couple of months that might make a nice present. Just saying.

Later this month (September 23), Otto Penzler's latest homage, The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories, pays tribute to the Black Mask magazine where the first hardboiled detective story, written by Carroll John Daly, appeared and where legends like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Erle Stanley Gardner all cut their chops. Penzler calls these stories the "best of the best, the hardest of the hardboiled, and the darkest of the dark of America’s finest crime fiction. This masterpiece collection represents a high watermark of America’s underbelly."

Ed Gorman and Martin Greenburg's latest installment in their year's best mystery stories is due October 1st. This year's offering, titled By Hook or By Crook and 30 More of the Best Crime and Mystery Stories of the Year, has stories by Elizabeth George, Laura Lippmann, Nancy Pickard, Max Allan Collins, S.J. Rozan, Ace Atkins, Dana Cameron, Jim Fusilli, Dennis Lehane, Luis Alberto Urrea and Dave Zeltserman.

Akashic Books continues its parade of "city noir" anthologies with two new titles on November 1st. Carlin Romano edits the Philly version and says in his introduction that Philadelphia noir is different from the mood, the sensibility and the dimensions of noir encountered in more glamorous American cities like New York or L.A. because it's "ordinary noir"—the humble killings, robberies, collars and cold cases that confront people largely occupied with getting by. The book includes new stories by Diane Ayres, Cordelia Frances Biddle, Keith Gilman, Cary Holladay, Solomon Jones, Gerald Kolpan, Aimee LaBrie, Halimah Marcus, Carlin Romano, Asali Solomon, Laura Spagnoli, Duane Swierczynski, Dennis Tafoya, and Jim Zervanos.

Lone Star Noir is edited by the father and son team of Johnny and Bobby Byrd, publishers of Cinco Puntos Press in El Paso. Bobby contributes a story to the project, along with James Crumley, Joe R. Lansdale, Claudia Smith, Ito Romo, Luis Alberto Urrea, David Corbett, George Weir, Sarah Cortez, Jesse Sublett, Dean James, Tim Tingle, Milton Burton, Lisa Sandlin and Jessica Powers. It's introduction adds, "You can drive around Texas for a long time and never meet J.R. Ewing or Woodrow Call. The real Texas hides out in towns and cities like you'll find in Lone Star Noir, and in that very Texas reality, among the everyday good folks of Texas, you'll find the hard-boiled understanding of guns and dope and blood money and greed and hatred and delusion that makes these fourteen
stories come alive on the page."

November 3rd sees the release of a new combo anthology/reference work by John Cullen Gruesser, A Century of Sleuths: Twenty Great Stories of Detection, 1841-1940. Gruesser, a professor of English at Kean University who has published other works on detective fiction, takes a look at the history of the genre during that period to provide a chronological and thematic survey. He includes stories by Edgar Allen Poe, Wilkie Collins, Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle, Bret Harte, G. K. Chesterton, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Anna Katherine Green, Baroness Orzcy, Susan Glaspell, Carroll John Daly, Dashiell Hammett, Cornell Woolrich, Pauline Hopkins, Chester Himes and Ralph Ellison.

Not enough? Need more? Keith Rawson, currently editing Crimefactory's first anthology, took time out to list his recommendations of the new anthologies he's read this summer, including what is likely the final Thuglit anthology, Thuglit presents:  Blood,Guts, & Whiskey.