THE EDGE OF THE CHAIR

For mature connoisseurs of crime, a splendid collection that offers a ""constant change of pace, impact and taste"" throughout its 690 pages. There are true crime accounts--Edmund Pearson's poisoning at a select girls' boarding school at the turn of the century, Andre Castellot's historical episode, de Saint-Exupery, among others; but the distinctive short stories dominate and are almost all startlers of one sort or another-- Harold Pinter's opaque Tea Party about what a man tries not to see through bandaged eyes; John Collier's Sleeping Beauty; Ambrose Bierce's sick hoax, A Watcher by the Dead; Kipling, Chesterton, Buchan, de Maupassant, Faulkner, Pushkin, Jack London, Bradbury, etc. Decidedly a galaxy.