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Desperation and Danger (Five Star) and Challenge the Widow-Maker and Other Stories of People in Peril (Crippen & Landru).
     
     
Others of special merit from Crippen & Landru included Michael Collins's second volume of Dan Fortune private-eye stories, Fortune's World ; Edward D. Hoch's The Velvet Touch (Crippen & Landru), about thief-of-the-valueless Nick Velvet; Marcia Muller's McCone and Friends , in which members of the San Francisco private eyes' extended family of co-workers take center stage; and Hugh B. Cave's Long Live the Dead , gathering the venerable writer's Black Mask stories. Among Five Star's notable offerings were Barbara D'Amato's Of Course You Know that Chocolate Is a Vegetable and Other Stories ; Lia Matera's Counsel for the Defense and Other Stories ; Dick Lochte's Lucky Dog and Other Tales of Murder ; and two collections by Evan Hunter/Ed McBain: Barking at Butter fl ies and Other Stories and Running from Legs and Other Stories . Other publishers got into the act with Lawrence Block's 754-page The Collected Mystery Stories (Orion/Trafalger); and Peter Sellers's Whistle Past the Graveyard (Mosaic).
     
     
It was also a strong year for multiauthor collections. As you might expect at the close of a century, chubby historical reprint anthologies were numerous. Tony Hillerman and Otto Penzler edited The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century (Houghton Mifflin). Anne Perry edited a British equivalent, A Century of British Mystery and Suspense (Mystery Guild), to which I was honored to provide an introduction. Ed Gorman and I edited Sleuths of the Century (Carroll & Graf), which included authors of both nationalities plus Georges Simenon.
     
     
Star-studded original anthologies of note included the Adams Round Table's Murder Among Friends (Berkley); the Private Eye Writers of America's The Shamus Game (Signet), edited by that organization's indefatigable founder, Robert J. Randisi; the Mystery Writers of America's The Night Awakens (Pocket), edited by Mary Higgins Clark; and Crime Through Time III (Berkley), edited by Sharan Newman. More concentrated on newer names was the Brit noir volume Fresh Blood 3 (Do-Not/Dufour), edited by Mike Ripley and Maxim Jakubowski.
     
     
The Tennessee publisher Cumberland House became a key player in the anthology game with theme volumes both original ( Murder Most Confederate , edited by Martin H. Greenberg; and Murder Most Medieval , edited by Greenberg and John Helfers) and reprint ( Opening Shots: Great Mystery and Crime Writers Share Their First Published Stories , edited by Lawrence Block; and Murder Most Delectable , edited by Greenberg).
     
     
My favorite anthology of the year, combining old stories and originals with an editorial apparatus of genuine reference value was Mike Ashley's The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes (Carroll & Graf). As with other volumes in the publisher's Mammoth series, though, I wish it were in more permanent form, i.e., hardcovers and better paper.
     
     
See Edward D. Hoch's bibliography for the year's full story on both anthologies and single-author collections.
     
     
    REFERENCE BOOKS AND SECONDARY SOURCES
Book of the year in this category was surely Marvin Lachman's The American Regional Mystery (Crossover Press), a criminous cross-country tour by one of the most knowledgeable, readable, and reliable commentators on crime fiction.
     
     
Also of note are the collection of Charles Willeford's essays, Writing & Other Blood Sports (Dennis McMillan); Hugh Merrill's The Red Hot Typewriter: The Life and Times of John D. MacDonald (St. Martin's Minotaur), which has undeniable value despite indifferent writing and a lousy title; Martha Hailey DuBose's Women of Mystery: The Lives and Works of Notable Women Crime Novelists (St. Martin's Minotaur); Otto Penzler's 101 Greatest Films of Mystery and Suspense (Simon & Schuster); and Matthew Bunson's The Complete Christie: An Agatha Christie Encyclopedia (Pocket),