Berthold Brecht once observed that the people who thought all mystery stories were the "same old thing" were missing the point; they might as well say it's the "same old thing" when the curtain rises at the theater. Brecht was making the point that the mystery story, like all storytelling craft, relies upon the varied and artful manipulation of standard elements. In The Vintage Book Of Classic Crime, Michael Dibdin has done an excellent job of choosing and excerpting work which brilliantly demonstrates this idea. Raymond Chandler, Elmore Leonard, Dashiell Hammett, and the rest of the recognized masters are, of course, well represented. So is widely varied, almost subversive crime writing by authors of equal quality but less reputation, notably Patricia Highsmith's deeply psychological, everyday-world brutalizations; Walter Mosley's tales of L.A.'s "Darktown" in the '50s; and the odd populism of Swedish Marxist crime authors Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. But the real treat here is the inclusion of work and criticism by "legitimate" authors—Anton Chekhov, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Franz Kafka, Émile Zola, James Joyce, ad infinitum. Dibdin's daring and comprehensive editorial process in assembling this masterful collection is an attempt to demonstrate that good crime writing is not much different from good writing. Many of the authors Dibdin uses here are using crime fiction as a way to sharply define universal concepts of anger, fear, weakness, hatred or guilt. A good number of the excerpts by more famous authors, including The Picture Of Dorian Gray, weren't intended to be crime stories at all, but this merely demonstrates the universality and humanity of the genre at its best. Thanks in no small part to Vintage Books and its fine Black Lizard imprint, crime novels are slowly becoming less of a ghettoized fiction. Fans of good writing in general and crime writing in particular now have Dibdin to thank as well.