Hillerman, Tony, and Rosemary Herbert, eds. A new omnibus of crime. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-19-518214-6.

Summary: This story collection is patterned after Dorothy L. Sayers's 1928 collection An omnibus of crime. The editors intended to showcase representative and influential short mystery stories published since 1928.

They didn't choose any really bad stories (though their focus on short fiction led them to choose too many “gimmicky” ones), and they broadly achieved their goal of illustrating the large-scale trends in the genre. They probably overemphasized recent authors; it's surprising to find nothing by Rex Stout, for instance. It was a lapse of taste to include two of Hillerman's own stories -- the space devoted to “First lead gasser” would have been better occupied by one of Lawrence Block's “Hit man” stories or by a longer selection from Donald Westlake. On the whole, though, I enjoyed re-reading the few choices that I already knew and was pleased by most of the fresh encounters.