The World's Finest Mystery and Crime Stories: Fifth Annual Collection

Indefatigable anthologists Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg have assembled a fifth go-round of The World's Finest Mystery and Crime Stories.  The title is a bit of a misnomer, as the "world" largely consists of North America and Britain, with occasional look-ins from countries like Germany and Belgium.  Unlike the Best American Mystery Stories annuals, which often emphasize psychological mood pieces, the World's Finest... entries normally focus on traditional genre stories (police procedurals, amateur and private detectives, and so on).  That generalization certainly holds true for this outing, although it features a few generic crossovers into occult and ghost fiction. 

This collection was an oddly disconcerting read, in the sense that the stories were so anonymous.  They all appeared to have been written by the same author, according to the same rules of the genre, and in the same "transparent" prose style.  To quote an unenthusiastic theater review I read many years ago, almost everything here is "more than competent," but little is memorable.  That being said, little is bad, either.  Those stories that stand out do so on account of their gimmicks, most of them topical enough to raise a wry smile of recognition.  Elaine Viets' "Red Meat," for example, features one older man's fearful vengeance on his tyrannical personal trainer; her other entry, "Sex and Bingo," deals with the more erotic points of cruise ship culture.  John Vermeulen's "The Corpse That Lost Its Head," a nice bit of black comedy, details one man's increasingly desperate attempts to dispose of his wife's corpse at sea.  And Antony Mann's "Esther Gordon Framlingham" sends up the economics of popular publishing.  Although the supernatural stories are not especially frightening, Sharyn McCrumb's "The Gallows Necklace" does have an intriguing premise--a woman who avoids hanging by wearing a noose around her neck for the rest of her life--and an evocative, appropriately gloomy mood.  Marion Arnott's "Dollface," which relies heavily on flashbacks, wears out its welcome by the time we reach the too-sentimental ending, but Arnott strongly delineates the protagonist's fragmented memories of his childhood.  Finally, Clark Howard's "The Leper Colony" is a nice twist on the police procedural; I wouldn't mind seeing this group of policemen again.  Overall, this is a good anthology for readers who prefer their mysteries straight up, without a twist; those more interested in literary or experimental mysteries should probably head elsewhere.