Murder on Deck! Shipboard & Shoreline Mystery Stories

The sea itself has always been a mystery--cold, dark, vast, and unfathomable--indifferent to human wishes and perilous to the ill-prepared. So what more appropriate setting for the ultimate human mystery, the seemingly unsolvable murder. In Murder on Deck! Rosemary Herbert proves that the opulence of the cruise ship and seaside resort has attracted some of the greatest writers in the genre. From Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Viola Brothers Shore to William Faulkner, Ellery Queen, John Mortimer, Susan Moody, andmany others, Murder on Deck! offers 25 stories that plumb the depths of ghastly crimes. Many of these stories take place on luxury liners, or holiday shorelines, where mostly privileged vacationers have sought a pleasant and highly civilized escape from their daily lives. Imagine their chagrin whenmurder is thrust into their midst and the high tide of anxiety rolls in. Our detectives, too, are often on vacation, taking time off from pondering the impenetrable and are thus forced into a busman's holiday of restoring order and calm to a shattered idyll. In addition to acclaimed stories inEnglish, Murder on Deck! sails into international waters with stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Colombia), Saho Sasazawa (Japan), and for the first time ever in English, Chris Rippen (The Netherlands). Dutch author Janwillem van de Wetering rewrote his 1985 story "Messing About in Boats,"especially for this anthology. A marvelous collection for the mystery lover or armchair traveler, and perfect reading for any vacation, especially the ocean cruise or trip to the beach, Murder on Deck! weighs anchor and heads for the high seas of unforgettable intrigue and watertight suspense.

Rosemary Herbert is mystery book review columnist for the Boston Herald, coeditor with Tony Hillerman of The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories, editor of Twelve American Crime Stories, and editor in chief of the forthcoming Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing. She lives in Newtonville, Massachusetts.