Dangerous Dames [antikvár]

Foreword I'm very much afraid I lifted a supercilious eyebrow (or maybe two) when Michael Shayne first told me he had agreed to edit a volume of short mystery stories to be titled DANGEROUS DAMES. Not that Mike probably hasn't run into more Dangerous Dames than any man in the country. I grant him that—and I did grant it at the time. And I realized that was why the publisher had picked Mike to select the stories to go into the book. But Michael Shayne is a detective, not an editor. I had a strong feeling that detectives should stick to detecting, and leave the job of editing to editors. I didn't say this to Mike, of course. He's an old and valued friend, and I immediately agreed to write a foreword for his book, arguing with myself that it probably wouldn't be any worse than most anthologies, that all an editor has to do nowadays is to go back through previous selections and cull out a dozen or more Tried and True Classics in the field. He couldn't have gone wrong that way. No editor can be accused of poor judgment if he stays in bounds and picks only those stories that already have the stamp of approval of several previous anthologists. But when he turned his collection over to me, I found not one single Tried and True Classic in the lot. Not one Tired Old Name among the twelve authors in his table of contents. Reading these twelve stories hand-picked by Michael Shayne leads me to the definite conclusion that what contemporary anthologies need are more detectives to act as editors. There isn't a weak story in the collection. Not one story here that I would not be proud to have written. I have no idea how he went about digging up these stories. Only one of them has ever appeared before in any collection.