Review for A New Omnibus of Crime

I'm always wary of collections of short stories. I don't usually read short story collections (and have generally avoided them since writing some for English exams many years ago). So I thought that maybe another collection from my favourite thriller genre would get me into this niche market. So I approached this collection of short story thrillers with an open mind.

This new collection by Tony Hillerman and Rosemary Herbert, with help from Sue Grafton and Jeffery Deaver picks up where Dorothy L. Sayers famously left off in 1929 with her landmark 1929 anthology The Omnibus of Crime. This time round, they have attempted to bring together short crime fiction published over the last eight decades, including Patricia Highsmith, Sue Grafton, Jeffrey Deaver, Catherine Aird, Alexander McCall Smith, P D James, Ruth Rendell, John Mortimer, Dennis Lehane, Elmore Leonard and Ian Rankin.

If you like short stories, then this collection will certainly be right up your street. For me, thrillers need to be at least two or three hundred pages long, in order to give time for characters to develop, to build tension, or to get the pacing right. Short stories like these are just like one chapter from the books that I normally read. Twenty pages is about the right length for a chapter, it's too short for a whole story in my opinion. Some of these stories could have spread for hundreds of pages, but instead they resemble the life of a mayfly (born, eat, reproduce, die).

There's a heavy US bias with most of these stories (as is the case with much thriller writing) but there are also some stories by British writers. Each story has a nice introduction by one of the editors, trying to place each story in the context of the author's work and the genre's literary history, and sometimes there are notes from the authors, which is a nice touch.

So if you are a fan of the shorter story, there's plenty for you here. If you prefer your thrillers to take their time, then pick something else...