If I, alone, were stuck with the Herculean task of selecting the best mystery stories of the twentieth century, I'm afraid they would be clustered in periods. I'd give you a lot of tales from the years between the wars when thousands of good writers were supporting their families with yarns spun for the pulps. I'd pick out a dozen or so from those slick magazines that paid living-wage prices for short stories until television destroyed both them and national literacy. Finally, I'd give you another bunch from the 1990s, when enough folks had been turned off by the tube to produce a new market for the short story form. In other words I would impose upon you my personal taste.

Fortunately, Otto Penzler was also involved in the selection process. To those of you who bring a mature love of mystery and detective fiction to this book, the Penzler name means the Mysterious Press, the Mysterious Bookshops, and other key contributions to the field, recognized by an Edgar for the Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection and an Ellery Queen Award from the Mystery Writers of America for lifetime achievement in the publishing world. Penzler helped select works that give us a broader outlook than I'd have managed on my own. All the eras in which the American mystery took its special form, wresting leadership from the British, defying the academicians, and—more than any other genre—making popular American literature dominant worldwide are represented between these covers.

For a quick glimpse of the progress that American popular literature has made in the twentieth century, first read “The Problem of Cell 13,” published in 1905, and then jump ahead ninety-three years to “Poachers.” I'm asking you to skip O. Henry's “A Retrieved Reformation” and Willa Cather for the moment. O. Henry, being a genius of the short form, was too far ahead of his time to be typical, while Futrelle's tale is a fine example of what American writers were doing at the turn of the century.

At that time, American mystery writers generally copied the British, who were copying Edgar Allan Poe. They produced puzzles involving the wealthy educated leisure class. That was logical because the educated leisure class included the folks with the ability to read, the time to do it, and the money to buy the stories. Was Futrelle himself upperclass? He drowned (heroically saving others) when the Titanic hit an iceberg, and he wasn't traveling steerage class. Thus it's no accident that “The Thinking Machine” character he invented reminds one of Sherlock Holmes and that his characters aren't likely candidates for AFL-CIO membership.

But in 1905 the characters in mysteries were not important. Only the puzzle mattered. Now, skip ahead to 1998 and “Poachers.” In Tom Franklin's story, the puzzle matters hardly at all. Here you meet real people—three orphaned and brutish brothers who live as predators in the wet woods of the Gulf Coast south, the old widower who loves them, and the sheriff who pitied them all. Who killed two of these brutal boys and blinded the third? You never really know. If you care, you can take your pick. In any case, the muddy river, the endless rain, the half-wild hunting dogs, are more important than the plot.

Futrelle and most of his contemporaries produced puzzling whodunits as pastimes for the educated few. But, even as he wrote, the market was changing. Pulitzer, Hearst, Greeley, McCormick, Nelson, and a host of other publishers were building their empires with the so-called “Penny Press,” published for blue-collar workers. Public education was making the hod carriers, farmers, miners, maids, and millers as literate as lords and ladies.

Many of these newspapers of the “Yellow Journalism” days published short mystery stories, helping set the stage for the golden years of the pulp magazines. By the second decade of the century (and on through the third and fourth), virtually every drugstore in the nation big enough to have its own soda fountain had a magazine rack made glorious and alive by the gaudy reds, yellows, greens, and blues favored by the publishers of such journals as Black Mask, Hollywood Detective, Spicy Detective, and so on. They usually boasted “bodice-ripper” illustrations and promised as much blood, violence, and raunch in their headlines as the mores of the times would allow.

With the pulps, American writers made the big break from the British. The pay scale ranged from two cents a word downward (though a really spectacular yarn might merit three cents a word). As a young fellow making ＄1.25 per ten-hour hay-baling day when I first paid a dime for a detective pulp, two cents a word sounded generous. Personally, I rated only rejection slips from the pulps, but many of the writers herein did well with them—especially Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

The pulps took the mystery story out of the parlors and drawing rooms and onto the “mean streets” among the people who were actually the victims of the crime. One of the old rules had been “the butler didn't do it,” implying that the criminal, as well as the victim, must be an upper-crust person—someone the well-bred reader would care about. Such rules made no sense when neither you, nor those for whom you were writing, had ever seen a butler.

By midcentury the American mystery genre was generally being written in American English. It had left the manicured lawns of the manor houses behind to focus on those folks I like to call “real people.” Local color had crept in (though rarely as emphatically as in “Poachers”), as well as social issues. The tales of pure ratiocination still thrived in the form of U.S. versions of the polite British “cozies.” The segment of American fiction devoted to crime and its solution was not only booming, it was developing in a variety of channels. Most important of all—certainly for me—mystery fiction was elbowing its way from the shelves that bookstores reserve for mere tales to the front, where the novels are stocked.

In [The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century], you'll encounter many writers who had a hand in this movement—including the great Raymond Chandler. I consider Chandler the Thomas Paine of this twentieth-century American revolution. That analogy makes Professor Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor the spokesmen for the counterrevolution in their landmark A Catalogue of Crime, but the first blast fired by the Tories came from Edmund Wilson, who in the 1940s was America's most portentous literary critic. Someone had called his attention to The Maltese Falcon, which I consider Hammett's masterwork. Wilson rated it on the level of newspaper serial comic strips and wrote a New Yorker essay denouncing the entire mystery-detection field as trash that served only to worsen the wartime paper shortage. Then, persuaded by a friend that to be fair he should read an Agatha Christie, he did, and wrote “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” While I agree that's a fair enough question, I disagree with his summary judgment that the entire genre was devoid of value. (Those too young to remember Wilson might like to know that he's the fellow most responsible for introducing Americans to Marcel Proust and James Joyce, causing untold thousands of college students to suffer through Remembrance of Things Past and Joyce's stream of consciousness.)

Chandler's rebuttal “The Simple Art of Murder” was published by The Atlantic Monthly in 1944, a sort of declaration of independence from the British detective form and an argument that mystery fiction was as likely to have social importance as any other work of fiction—the implication being that literature didn't have to be boring.

“The British may not always be the best writers in the world,” he said, “but they are incomparably the best dull writers.” One of Chandler's points was that many American writers had been copying this British business of turning out mystery stories in which the whole purpose was the puzzle—avoiding character development or any real effort at realistic settings or situations. S. S. Van Dine, America's best-selling mystery writer of the 1920s and 1930s, created Philo Vance, probably the most insufferable snob in all of literature, and gave him an upper-class British accent and foreign cigarettes. Van Dine even used phony footnotes to underline Philo's intellectual superiority.

Chandler argues that unless the plots really worked in such books (and they rarely did), the reader received nothing for his two dollars. Dorothy Sayers had just published an essay stating that detective fiction could never attain “the loftiest levels of literary achievement” because it was literature of escape and not “literature of expression.” Chandler rated this critical jargon as nonsense. This isn't the place to reprint “The Simple Art of Murder,” but as you read this book you'll note that Chandler's position—that detective fiction could, and should, include the same elements that deemed novels “literature of expression”—was adopted by most of the writers who followed him.

In their introductory essay to A Catalogue of Crime in 1971, Barzun and Taylor fired their broadside in favor of preserving mystery fiction in its classical form. Mystery stories should be “tales of ratiocination,” written for those who wish to entertain themselves with amusing intellectual exercises. They should be set in quiet havens without intrusions of realism to distract the reader from the puzzle. Detective fiction, said Barzun, is a tale, not a novel. It should deal with the intellect, not with emotions. It should not pretend to have social importance. “The characters it presents are not persons but types, as in the gospels: the servant, the rich man, the camel driver (now a chauffeur).”

As you will note in the short stories [in The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century], the argument didn't end in the 1970s. It still hasn't. It never will. There will always be room under the tent for the classic form and the novel form, with untold variations in between. I'd guess that approximately half of the audience for mysteries today still prefers the puzzle to the novel. What's important is the example Chandler gave us with his own novels. His use of the work of a private detective to illuminate the corruption of society has attracted into the genre many mystery writers who wish to produce “literature of expression” and shoot for lofty literary goals. Driven out of the so-called mainstream of American writing by the academic critics and the academic trends—minimalism, deconstructionism, and whatever is next—we have found a home in the mystery form.