If every fiction is at heart a mystery, then the detective story is fiction distilled to its purest essence, combining the intellectual appeal of puzzles with the psychological fascination of human motivation. These sixteen classic tales of crimes and those who unravel them, collected from across the past two centuries, offer ample evidence of the form’s enduring allure. Beginning with modern masters such as Sara Paretsky, Ruth Rendell and Ian Rankin, Detective Stories works its way back through the golden age of the 1920s and ’30s to the genre’s iconic sources in Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle. The famous detectives who stalk these pages range from the eccentric (Sherlock Holmes, C. Auguste Dupin) to the unlikely (Father Brown, Miss Marple), from the delightful (Inspectors Maigret and Ghote) to the absurd (Bret Harte’s Hemlock Jones). But among them all, whether in Chicago, New Delhi or London, the nineteenth century or the twenty-first, there is also an abiding human sympathy which engages the heart as well as the mind, making our favourite detectives and their prey not only diversions but also our lifelong imaginative companions.