From a regional setting in which two farmers' wives develop a taste for detection, to a murder in the fast paced world of New York high finance, the tales included in Twelve American Crime Stories offer readers the opportunity to play detective and solve the mysteries for themselves.

Featuring distinctly American language and locales, the stories in this collection range from those with a strongly regional flavor to hard-boiled fiction. Included here are the best of the genre from Jacques Futrelle's omniscient detective known as `The Thinking Machine', and early female sleuths created by Anna Katherine Green, to a private-eye story by Raymond Chandler, and Clinton H. Stagg's early introduction of the handicapped sleuth.

For anyone who has ever been gripped by a good crime story, and for those who never have but are tempted, Twelve American Crime Stories is a delightful guide to who did what to whom, and how.

Contents:

• The Cask of Amontillado (1846) by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Silver Protector (“Our First Burglar”, 1909) by Ellis Parker Butler
• A Jury of Her Peers (1917) by Susan Glaspell
• The Other Hangman (1935) by Carter Dickson
• Murder at the Automat (1937) by Cornell Woolrich
• Red Wind (1938) by Raymond Chandler
• The Couple Next Door (1954) • Margaret Millar
• So Pale, So Cold, So Fair (1957) by Leigh Brackett
• Take Care of Yourself (1957) by William Campbell Gault
• The Sailing Club (1962) by David Ely
• The Oblong Room (1967) by Edward D. Hoch
• First Lead Gasser (1993) by Tony Hillerman