Saturday Selection

Encouraged by the response to the first Saturday Selection, I've decided to continue with the concept as a means of highlighting recent or forthcoming titles. So here is news of a couple of very interesting new short story collections.

I’m delighted that Tangled Web UK, one of my favourite online crime resources, has asked me to review a new book of short stories written by the late Michael Gilbert, one of my all-time writing heroes. Gilbert was a prolific short story writer, and several posthumous collections have appeared, but A Pity about the Girl and other stories, published by Robert Hale, is expected to be the last. (A previous collection, The Mathematics of Murder, is very hard to find and I've been looking for a copy for ages - so if anyone has a copy they'd be willing to lend or let go, do get in touch.)

John Cooper, an expert on classic detective fiction, furnishes a short but informative introduction to this book, outlining Gilbert’s achievements in the field of short fiction. This collection features characters familiar to Gilbert fans, including the lawyer Henry Bohun, and includes both a ghost story and a Sherlock Holmes pastiche. I intend to devour it imminently and I hope the review will appear soon.

Killer Year (sub-title, Stories to die for) is a gathering of short thriller stories edited by Lee Child and published by Mira. These are new stories by writers whose names are (with a few notable exceptions such as Ken Bruen and Sean Chercover) unfamiliar to me, but they look promising and this is another book that I’m looking forward to reading.