GOLDEN AGE BIBLIOMYSTERIES

Dust off your specs and light your reading lamp. Veteran anthologist Penzler has collected 14 reprints from between 1920 and 1946 uniting two of his favorite subjects: books and murder.

Except for three items of mostly historical interest—“The Jorgenson Plates,” Frederick Irving Anderson’s dated tale of prolific thief Sophie Lang’s latest con; Carolyn Wells’ well-informed but overplotted “The Shakespeare Title-Page Mystery”; and Frank Gruber’s “State Fair Murder,” which records the sleuthing adventures of Oliver Quade, the Human Encyclopedia, at the Minnesota State Fair—the rest of these entries range from Fine to Very Fine. The Fines include Vincent Starrett’s “A Volume of Poe,” in which a bookseller’s friend conceals from the police a visit from a young woman the night before the bookseller’s murder; “The Book That Squealed,” in which Cornell Woolrich embeds clues to a kidnapping in a library book; and “The Episode of the Codex Curse,” a locked-room theft in which C. Daly King introduces the curious Mr. Trevis Tarrant. The Very Fines include Starrett’s “The Unique Hamlet,” the closest anyone’s come to a definitive Sherlock Holmes pastiche; Lawrence G. Blochman’s clever, tightly plotted “The Aldine Folio Murders,” Anthony Boucher’s library murder “QL 696 .C9”; Lillian de la Torre’s “The Missing Shakespeare Manuscript,” solved by Dr. Samuel Johnson; Ellery Queen’s “The Adventure of the Three R’s,” which follows the disappearance of a local author in Missouri; and a pair of rapid-fire bonbons by James Gould Cozzens and the team of Lassiter Wren and Randle McKay. The jewel in the crown is “Death Walks in Marble Halls,” another tale by Blochman, in which murder and menace stalk the stacks of the New York Public Library.

A real treat for bibliophiles, assuming they’re not subject to nightmares.