The Oxford Book of Detective Stories, ed. Patricia Craig (Oxford University Press, £12.99 in UK)

This anthology is subtitled "an international selection", which is not a vain claim; besides British classics such as Conan Doyle and (if the word is not misapplied) Agatha Christie, it includes Americans, Frenchmen, a Czech (Skvorecky), an Italian, a Japanese, and two Irish writers, Vincent Banville and Ruth Dudley Edwards. Chandler and Dashiell Hammett are present, of course, though the Chandler choice is a curious and unfamiliar one - a wartime story called No Crime in the Mountains, which begins very well but tails off in melodrama and leaves numerous loose ends untied. Thurber is a surprise entry, and Patricia Craig does not disdain to use a story by Erle Stanley Gardner - a mechanical writer, no doubt, but in his own way an ultra-professional one. With nearly 600 pages, the anthology is excellent value.