The editors do a generally fine job of tracing the detective's history as an iconic figure in American fiction. Because it addresses a broader phenomenon than most books of this type that I've reviewed, The Great American Detective touches on a number of characters--both male and female (Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe, Mignon Eberhart's Susan Dare)--in the traditional mystery vein. But of primary interest to me is the hard-boiled stuff, and there's quite a bit of it here: Dashiell Hammett's "Too Many Have Lived" (one of the Sam Spade stories he wrote to fill the enormous demand that followed the success of The Maltese Falcon), Raymond Chandler's possibly over-anthologized "Red Wind" (which turns up so often precisely because it's Chandler's greatest piece of short fiction), and "Midnight Blue," one of a bare handful of short stories featuring Ross Macdonald's private eye Lew Archer. This is among the very best, too, with as much intrigue and melancholy SoCal atmosphere as any of Macdonald's novels.

And, of course, there's some goofy shit. Try as I might, I've never been able to share in the widespread appreciation for Cornell Woolrich; to me he was an average exponent of the subgenre, not terrible but not someone whose work should ever be mistaken for great literature, either. In "Angel Face," Woolrich's histrionic heroine sounds eerily like Kelly Coffield playing Velma Mulholland the Film Noir Girl on In Living Color (if anyone remembers that): "I've been around plenty, and 'around' wasn't pretty. Maybe you think it was fun wrestling my way home each morning at five, and no holds barred, just so--so...Oh, I didn't know why myself sometimes; just so you wouldn't turn out to be another corner lizard, a sharp-shooter, a bum like the rest of them." This veers dangerously close to Carroll John Daly territory, but at least Woolrich wrote with a sense of momentum. All pretense to storytelling ability goes out the window, however, in Don Pendleton's "Willing to Kill": "Five, now, yeah--count 'em--with a minimum of five guns per vehicle. Not a pistol force, either--bet on that--they would be toting automatics and big boomers, for sure." That's not writing; it's someone jerking off on the page. (And it's an action hero piece, not a detective story, which is why I would have argued against its inclusion in this book.)

I was pleasantly surprised by the oldest story here, 1894's "A Clever Little Woman." Authored anonymously and featuring long-running dime novel sleuth Nick Carter, it's actually a pretty nifty tale of detection not so different in essence from an early Hammett story like "The Creeping Siamese." Its attitude of wariness towards sentimentality and idealization would become a vital component of hard-boiled detective fiction a few decades later. ( )

A compilation of great mysteries by the greatest of American mystery writers, Erle Stanley Gardner, Dashiell Hammett, Ross MacDonald, Raymond Chandler, Carroll John Daly, etc. Some pulp mysteries and some more modern day. ( )