THE NEW MYSTERY
edited by Jerome Charyn
A generously defined (unfashionably so) anthology of mystery stories, over a third of them (16 of 42) new. Charyn's brief introduction argues for a broadening and deepening of crime fiction since the Sixties, and if these stories are any evidence, he's right about the broadening: Where else could you find Borges, Babel, Mishima, and Garc°a M†rquez between the same covers as Andrew Vachss and Tony Hillerman? Aside from reliable standards like Sara Paretsky's Marlowe pastiche, ``Dealer's Choice,'' Sue Grafton's ``The Parker Shotgun,'' and Patricia Highsmith's ``Snail Watcher,'' the reprints tend toward the sedate, marginally criminal experiments familiar from such Ellery Queen collections as The Literature of Crime. The newer, generally more exciting, stories—headlined by Walter Mosley's ``The Watts Lions,'' Didier Daeninckx's ``Goldfish,'' Mickey Friedman's ``No Radio,'' and James Ellroy's unexpectedly funny ``Gravy Train''—are notable mainly for their demotic style, extreme compression, and emphasis on pain. Though it doesn't live up to the promise of its title, this is still the best one-volume bundle of mystery stories around.