More than 200,000 words of great crime and suspense fiction Each year, Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg, editors of The World's Finest Mystery and Crime Stories , have reached farther past the boundaries of the United States to find the very best suspense from the world over. In this third volume of their series they have included stories from Germany, Belgium, and the United Kingdom as well as, of course, a number of fine stories from the U.S.A. Among these tales are winners of the Edgar Award, the Silver Dagger Award of the British Crime Writers, and other major awards in the field. In addition, here are reports on the field of mystery and crime writing from correspondents in the U.S. (Jon L. Breen), England (Maxim Jakubowski), Canada (Edo Van Belkom), Australia (David Honeybone), and Germany (Thomas Woertche). Altogether, with nearly 250,000 words of the best short suspense published in 2001, this bounteous volume is, as the Wall Street Journal said of the previous year's compilation, "the best value-for-money of any such anthology." The A-to-Z of the authors should excite the interest of any mystery reader: Robert Barnard • Lawrence Block • Jon L. Breen • Wolfgang Burger • Lillian Stewart Carl • Margaret Coel • Max Allan Collins • Bill Crider • Jeffery Deaver • Brendan DuBois • Susanna Gregory • Joseph Hansen • Carolyn G. Hart • Lauren Henderson • Edward D. Hoch • Clark Howard • Tatjana Kruse • Paul Lascaux • Dick Lochte • Peter Lovesey • Mary Jane Maffini • Ed McBain • Val McDermid • Marcia Muller • Joyce Carol Oates • Anne Perry • Nancy Pickard • Bill Pronzini • Ruth Rendell • S. J. Rozan • Billie Rubin • Kristine Kathryn Rusch • Stephan Rykena • David B. Silva • Nancy Springer • Jac. Toes • John Vermeulen • Donald E. Westlake • Carolyn Wheat. “Something for every mystery taste. An excellent value for the money.” ― Publishers Weekly (starred review) “The first 50 pages of this giant volume are packed with valuable and fascinating material--and you haven't even gotten to the stories yet. . . . As for the stories, they literally provide something for every mystery taste.” ― Publishers Weekly (starred review) on The World's Finest Mystery and Crime Stories: Second Annual Collection “Veteran anthologists Gorman and Greenberg have pulled out all the stops in an ambitious attempt to produce the definitive yearbook of the short mystery. . . . Indeed the biggest mystery is how a single year could have produced a bumper crop of so many outstanding tales.” ― Kirkus Reviews on The World's Finest Mystery and Crime Stories: Second Annual Collection Ed Gorman , the Shamus Award winning author of more than a dozen novels and many short stories, has edited a number of anthologies, including T he World's Finest Mystery and Crime Stories series. He lives in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The World's Finest Mystery and Crime Stories: 3 Third Annual Collection By Forge Books ISBN: 9780765302359 The World's Finest Mystery and Crime Stories: 3 The Year in Mystery and Crime Fiction: 2001 Jon L. Breen       It has never been so difficult to assign a handy label to the year in mystery fiction. Of course, the specter of September 11 hangs over every attempt to sum up the year. The mystery world reacted to that cataclysm much as did everyone else, with anger, reflection, reassessment, determination, and symbolic acts of community. Despite fears of flying and the possibility of further terrorist attack, Washington, D.C., hosted the Bouchercon as scheduled. What lasting effects, if any, the terrorist acts will have on the narrow world of fictional crime remains to be seen.You could call 2001 the Year of Change, but we're embarked on a century of change in literary delivery systems. Time will tell what the ultimate effect of the electronic revolution will be on book publishing. On the plus side, new technologies give writers, both established and neophyte, new ways to reach their audience. On the downside, writers and other artists must ponder how intellectual property can be protected in a time of rapid change in modes of delivery.The New York publishing mainstream continued to show more interest in the blockbuster and less in the standard bread-and-butter mystery novel. As a partial result, a number of writers whose names are familiar from major publishing lists had new novels published through smaller specialist or regional publishers, among them Taffy Cannon, Shelley Singer, Jeremiah Healy, Les Roberts, Ralph Mclnerny, and Michael Bowen.Vanity (or more politely, subsidy) publishing used to be a sucker play, but with the relatively inexpensive dissemination of e-books and books-on-demand, writers of genuine talent who are frustrated by the difficulty of breaking into mainstream markets are able to go that route much more economically In 2000, I reviewed an author-financed on-demand novel for the first time, Daniel Ferry's Death on Delivery (iUniverse), and found it a thoroughly professional job that would