Murder Intercontinental: Stories from Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine - Hardcover

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9 ratings by Goodreads

9780786703555: Murder Intercontinental: Stories from Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786703555 ISBN 13: 9780786703555

Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub, 1996

Set against the backdrop of some of the world's most exotic locales, an international anthology of outstanding short crime fiction features the work of Patricia Highsmith, Ruth Rendell, Georges Simenon, Shizuko Natsuki, Walter Satterthwait, Agatha Christie, and others.

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From Publishers Weekly:

Of these 20 stories, which take place all around the world, the best are those in which the substance, as well as the setting, is exotic. Shizuko Natsuki accomplishes this when depicting how "The Sole of the Foot" links a bank robbery at a Japanese resort town to the suicide of a temple employee. Barbara Callahan's "The Mists of Ballyclough" considers how a young man's gift for "storifying" can both weave a magical world and destroy a life. On a whimsical note, Hayford Peirce's Kansas-born PI, who is scrounging a living in Tahiti, must find (without help from the great and powerful Oz) "The Missing House" that the owner swears was stolen?and not by a recent cyclone. In Batya Swift Yasgur's "Kaddish," set in the U.S., a cop who is a nonpracticing Jew investigates the shooting death of a rabbi and finds himself facing the same sort of question that troubled the victim: Just how stringently should one follow the law? Some household names also make welcome appearances, as Ruth Rendell's Chief Inspector Wexford and Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret follow crime trails in their native countries and Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot visits an Egyptian archeological dig. Collectively, the volume portrays a worldful of crime, a prospect mitigated by the spectacle of a worldful of engaging, quirky sleuths and their inventive creators.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Exoticism is the keynote in this crop of 20 stories (192396) reprinted from Ellery Queen's and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazines. Hayford Pierce's private eye searches for a house missing from its lot in Tahiti (which the editors unaccountably place in the Caribbean); Pat McGerr's Selena Pierce plays amateur spy in Moscow; Walter Satterthwait asks whodunit in Somalia. Even familiar settings are played for their local color in tales that dip into the past (David Braly's 1481 Venice, Ruth Rendell's fin-de-siŠcle England) or plumb the depths of minority subcultures (Batya Swift Yagur's Orthodox Jewish New Yorkers, Hughes Allison's 1948 African-Americans, Manly Wade Wellman's and William T. Lowe's Native Americans). Minor but typical stories by Agatha Christie, Georges Simenon, and Patricia Highsmith broaden the geographical canvas, but only James Sarafin's haunting Eskimo idyll goes far beneath its colorful surface. A relaxing Cook's tour that doesn't ask too much either of you or the authors assembled. -- Copyright �1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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