L.A. CONFIDENTIAL

“If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.” When Thomas De Quincey uttered his warning more than a century and a half ago, he did not know how soon his black humor would inspire Edgar Allan Poe to launch the murder mystery and the detective story. Ten thousand master sleuths have since schussed the slippery slope down which perps and perps-to-be will slide from vice to worse. Now, Tony Hillerman and Otto Penzler, old lags in the mystery trade, have come to demonstrate the variety and the attractions of the genre.

In more than 800 pages, “Best American Mystery Stories” presents 46 shockers by as many authors departing from their novelists’ last: some expectably wonderful, like Raymond Chandler’s pages; some workmanlike but disappointingly unexceptional, like those of Dashiell Hammett; some deliberately grim and galling, like Patricia Highsmith’s writing; but almost all teasing and goading the reader to read on.

The surprise of the collection (at least for me) was how many bright lights of straight literature had tried their hands at a kind of life-scape that has long been considered rather crude. O. Henry opens the show, as pleasantly sentimental and insignificant as you would expect for 1903; Willa Cather proves dull as ditchwater, though far more wordy; Ring Lardner is wryly jokey and noir; James Cain proffers a foretaste of postmen who ring once too often; while John Steinbeck tramples a weary vintage where grapes of wrath are stored. Pattering in his peculiar vernacular, Damon Runyon stages not guys and dolls but guys and guys negotiating a sly case of murder; William Faulkner proves first-rate on his gritty home ground; James Thurber is as brief as he is delightful; and Pearl S. Buck’s “Ransom,” published in 1938, the year she won the Nobel Prize for literature, is obviously inspired by the most celebrated crime of the 1930s: the kidnap-murder of the 2-year-old Lindbergh boy.

Joyce Carol Oates’ name does not appear in Penzler’s now-classic “Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection.” A quarter-century ago, when that came out, Oates, who has written on pretty much everything, may not have been visible in the murky waters of crime. This time around, Penzler--with his co-editor’s help--makes up handsomely for that omission by reprinting a brilliantly clever 1973 Oates piece that makes very plain how little truth, justice and lawyering have in common.

The regulars, or many of them, are drawn up on parade. The slickest, wittiest of them, Robert B. Parker, is not here. But perhaps he does not bother with short stories when he turns out great long ones as if they were short to write. On the other hand, Jacques Futrelle, who died on the Titanic, is represented by the infallible but tedious Professor Van Dusen, whose cerebrations earned him the title of Thinking Machine; Ellery Queen by boilerplate; Evan Hunter (of 87th Precinct fame) by a mercilessly revealing cameo; Ross Macdonald’s pages feature Lew Archer in good hard-boiled California fare; and Donald Westlake entertains with a pleasantly amoral caper. We also get Cornell Woolrich’s suspenseful “Rear Window,” eventually turned into Hitchcock’s stylish thriller of the same name; and Sara Paretsky, whose resolute Vic Warshawski solves a murder with the help of a heroic golden retriever. It being Paretsky, the dog is a bitch but a nice, brave, engaging bitch; and the story, though a bit unconvincing, is warming as usual--which, in a Chicago winter, is a very good thing.

All this is fine, and there’s lots more of the same. However high the overall quality, though, in the 1960s the stories get nastier, more shrill, more hopeless and more doomed, especially for the innocent. You’re not supposed to enjoy this fare, just quake as beetles crawl over you. Representative of that tone are Highsmith, uneasy-making and corrosive as usual; Shirley Jackson, typically horrifying and unpleasant; Flannery O’Connor, disconcerting her readers with murder most foul, strange and unnatural . . . but maybe they asked for it.

If you judge the best best stories by their impact and by how long they scratch at your memory, the one that’s truly worth the price of admission (less than 4 cents a page!) was written by an artist I had not read before: Brendan DuBois. It is the tale of a man who retires to bucolic New Hampshire, where he is harassed by persistent and increasingly malevolent neighbors. We underrate the pleasure and sheer fun some people get by hurting others. DuBois makes it clear, as he makes clear how difficult it is to cope with forms of harassment hard to pin down and scarcely illegal. Isolated, the flawed hero flounders, but he won’t run away and learns to cope by toying with illegality as his tormentors do. A common murderer in the end but an uncommon planner, the hero handles his predicament successfully and to this reader’s immense satisfaction.

DuBois’ pessimism is as acute as that of other contemporaries, but the solution his protagonist finds to problems posed by predatory, self-indulgent humans is plausible, economical and inspiriting. Stories like this are about wish fulfillment, of course, but in a positive sense. They are about reasoning one’s way through trouble and out of it, about those who deserve getting their comeuppance and those who have suffered getting their own back; and that is something that we want to believe even when we remain unconvinced.

Here’s one more reason, then, to follow your taste for mystery stories into this big fat volume. If you just seek, you’ll find. As G.K. Chesterton might have said but didn’t, “For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be read, before we go to Paradise where we can read in bed.”