Back in 1979, the Mystery Writers of America did the just-starting-out anthologist me—I’d published my first book, Crime on Her Mind: Fifteen Stories of Female Sleuths from the Victorian Era to the Forties, only four years earlier—the honor of asking if I’d edit their annual collection, its theme being “women.” What came out of that request is the book which you’re now looking at, one I hope will keep you entertained...while guessing its contents’ nineteen outcomes.
To edit collections of stories I regard as an absorbing, challenging treasure hunt, and for all of my now-long career, what I’ve chosen to say is that I “read for a living.” It’s been a complete joy. Yet there’s a—to me—amusing anecdote I’d like to tell here, that I think bears on the notion of distaff mayhem and murder, and my own history with same.
Almost twenty years after I’d put together Women’s Wiles—and with quite a few more books under my editorial belt by then—the Book-of-the-Month Club came to me, wanting to know if I’d take charge of assembling a Main Selection they hoped to do, containing crime stories written over the previous century by celebrated non-genre writers. The well-praised volume I wound up with included two dozen tales by authors ranging from Trollope to Thurber, Alice Walker to Evelyn Waugh, and García Márquez to A. A. Milne. Its title was Murder & Other Acts of Literature.
Fine, you may think. However, the problem for me was that it wasn’t the title I’d devised, merely the subtitle. What I’d wanted to call the anthology was Out, Damned Spot! Murder & Other Acts of Literature. But the powers-that-be then at BOMC resisted, and I believe it was simply because they feared would-be readers wouldn’t get it.
The reason it occurs to me, at this moment, to mention that long-ago tussle—which I lost—is simply to have the chance to restore to Lady Macbeth her position as the patron saint of women’s wiles, their dastardly deeds and their often dark fates. I claim no originality. Many, many others, certainly, have done this, I know.
It’s my turn now, is all.
Finally.
—Michele Slung