Twelve Women Detective Stories, edited by Laura Marcus (OUP, £4.99 in UK)

The awkward title means that the protagonist in each story is a woman, and not that the stories were all written by women. The criterion appears to be that the authors be as obscure as possible - Catherine Louisa Pirkis and F. Tennyson Jesse are not exactly household names. The only ones familiar to me among the twelve are Gladys Mitchell, Henry Cecil and Baroness Orczy. Most of the stories have a dated, turn-of-the-century Strand Magazine feel to them, the prose formal and stilted, the characters stereotyped, the settings melodramatic. But all of these tales are very carefully plotted, and one must remember that these pieces are forerunners of their modern ilk, and if they appear old-hat now, they weren't then. I think they're great.