Come Seven, Come Death
For my full review, along with reviews of each story, please visit Casual Debris.When I was a kid my parents invested in a small apartment building. They didn't own it for very long: the area was sketchy, the work was just too much, and a large number of tenants turned out to be problematic. Among the problems were midnight moves; people jumping back rent by moving out in the middle of the night. The only advantage to these midnight moves is that tenants were forced to leave some belongings behind and my parents had to content themselves with rent replacements, such as furniture, a kitchen knife they still use, assorted miscellanea, and of course books. Lots of books. From first edition Nancy Drew titles to Harlequins from the 1970s, along with a wide assortment of mystery paperbacks. Many of these paperbacks we later sold to second hand shops, which I now regret as they are (or might be) collectables. Among those was this tiny anthology I hung onto and have finally gotten around to reading.
The anthology is an interesting mix, a selection of the great mystery detectives from the 1950s brought together in the mid-1960s. The stories are original to the anthology, no reprints, and clearly some of the veteran authors either had fresher ideas for their aging detectives, or took the project more seriously than others. Which is to say there is quite a discrepancy between the quality of the different stories.
