The Folio Treasury of Shorter Crime Fiction, Volume 1: Early Escapades

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Whether it's a classic whodunit, a brilliantly plotted detective story or a sophisticated psychological chiller, there's no greater pleasure than settling down with a good crime story.

These stories introduce many of crime fiction's finest heroes, including the crucial episodes that formed Ian Rankin's John Rebus and John Le Carré's spy–master George Smiley.

Acclaimed masters of mystery such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Rex Stout and Edgar Wallace rub shoulders with less well known yet equally compelling writers like American mystery queen Anna Katharine Green and Cornell Woolrich, best known for 'Rear Window', famously immortalized in film by Alfred Hitchcock. Each story is introduced either by the authors themselves, by fellow crime writers, including Colin Dexter, Reginald Hill and Margaret Yorke, or by aficionados of the genre, like Patrick Marnham, Simon Brett and Marcel Berlins. Full of menace and diabolical twists, pitting rationalism against the supernatural, good against evil, these twenty masterpieces will baffle and entertain the most ingenious of armchair detectives.

Volume 1: Early Escapades
Early Escapades opens with addictive, cunningly plotted stories by the leading lights of Victorian 'sensation' fiction, Mary E. Braddon and Wilkie Collins. These are jewels from the gothic origins of crime and mystery writing, as precious as the amethyst box which unleashes a trail of murder in Anna Katharine Green's disturbing tale, and as immaculately presented as Maurice Leblanc's delightful Gallic burglar, Arséne Lupin. But the world they present is a treacherous one and those who journey there should beware...

The Mystery at Fernwood by Mary E. Braddon
The Professor's Story or the Yellow Mask by Wilkie Collins
The Mystery of Cloomber by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Amethyst Box by Anna Katharine Green
The Seven of Hearts by Maurice Leblanc

Quarter bound in cloth with blocked paper sides.
Set in Garamond.
4 volumes, with 44 illustrations 4 in colour by Nick Hardcastle
6½" x 9"