An early female detective found in these pages is Violet Strange, in Anna Katharine Green's «Missing: Page Thirteen.» But until the work of Hammett in the 1930's and Raymond Chandler in the 1940's began to have its effect, the puzzle generally remained at the heart of the work. Certainly in the minds of the publishing fraternity, that was what the public wanted. But even Chandler encountered editing that sought to trim his appeal to readers' emotions. In a letter to a friend written in 1947, Chandler noted that when he was writing short stories for the pulp-magazine market, editors cut out the language he used to establish mood and emotion on the grounds that their readers wanted action, not description: "My theory was that the readers just thought they cared about nothing but the action, that really, although they didn't know it, the thing they cared about, was the creation of emotion through dialogue and description." As our selection «I'll Be Waiting» shows, Chandler was not interested in producing the classic form as outlined by Knox's rules. He was interested in using crime as the centre around which he could spin a novel that illuminates social decadence and the human condition.

In this volume, Rosemary Herbert and I have assembled thirty-three stories that represent the evolution of the American detective story. Because the wealth of talent over the past century and a half was so great, we found ourselves in a position reminiscent of that of professional football coaches facing the deadline for cutting their teams down to the legal limit with too many outstanding players to chose among. Just as coaches sometimes keep a player because he can serve in more than one position, we chose our stories to illustrate more than one development in the field. Rex Stout's «Christmas Party,» for example, shows Nero Wolfe unusually active for an 'armchair detective'-but it beautifully illuminates how the 'Holmes and Watson' relationship had been modified. In making another selection, we evaluated several journalist sleuths, including George Harmon Coxe's photojournalist Flashgun Casey, but we picked Joe 'Daffy' Dill for this volume because we found Richard Sale's story «A Nose for News «irresistibly entertaining.