TO BE READ BEFORE MIDNIGHT

A hardy perennial, this is established through its selective standards, and the current crop from Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine holds the line. Allen Lang's The Trail of the Calfish is something for librarians with its knowledge of biblioklepts, biblioclasts and illegitimate book borrowing; Robert Twohy's Out of This Nettle has TV in its blood; Stanley Ellin's The Nine to-Five Man is a methodical arsonist. Robert Bloch, William McGivern, Victor Canning, Hugh Pentecost, Avram Davidson are among those presented, and the 21 (with as bonus) stories rate high.