The thrill of the chase, the steely-eyed detective (either gentle or hardboiled), the dark alleys and the double-cross, the unsolvable crime by a masterful criminal mind: this new title in our Gothic Fantasy Short Stories series features chills and double twists, unexpected turns and private investigators with an eye for the unusual, and contains a cunning mix of classic and brand new writing.

Great detective thriller writers such as Arthur Conan Doyle, John Buchan, G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Morrison and the Mother of Detective fiction herself, Anna Katharine Green, join rarely seen tales by modern authors, and completely new stories, published here for the first time by, amongst others, T.Y. Euliano, Tracy Fahey, Tom Mead Marie Vibbert. As always our submission windows are packed with great reads so the successful stories are always a joy to publish.

Lee Horsley (foreword) is a retired Reader in Literature and Culture at Lancaster University. She has written books on twentieth-century politics and literature, including Fictions of Power in English Literature 1900-1950 (1995). During the last couple of decades she has written numerous articles and books about crime and detective fiction. Her publications include
The Noir Thriller (2001; 2009), Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction (2005), and (as co-editor) The Blackwell Companion to Crime Fiction (2010; paperback reissue 2020). Her strongest interest is in the hard-boiled and noir writing which came to dominate pulp publishing in the 1920s and which has, over the whole of the last century, continued to exert a hugely important and varied influence on both film and fiction.