Golden Age Whodunits

Stephen Benét’s "The Amateur of Crime" (1927) (is) a very good read. Anthony Boucher’s "Black Murder" (1943) is a...impressive wartime murder story, but the collection really gets going with Frederic Brown’s futuristic "Crisis 1999" (1949) in which the technology of detection is at risk in a troubled future Chicago. Mignon Eberhart’s "The Flowering Face" (1934) has sexual tension and a high-place fall while Thomas Stribling’s "A Passage to Benares" (1929) is a brilliant, hallucinatory tale from Port of Spain with an extraordinary punch at the end. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s "The Dance" (1926) a very effective and well-written story set in the small-town South with sexual jealousy the key theme.

The Critic