The Shamus Winners: America's Best Private Eye Stories: Volume I: 1982-1995

by Robert J. Randisi

Fast-paced gumshoe tales that have won the coveted Shamus award from the Private Eye Writers of America. Volume I includes stories by John Lutz, Bill Pronzini, Lawrence Block, Brendan DuBois, Loren D. Estleman, Ed Gorman, Mickey Spillane, Marcia Muller, Nancy Pickard, Benjamin M. Schutz, Linda Barnes, Max Allan Collins, and Sue Grafton. Collected and introduced by Robert J. Randisi.

Genres: Short Stories

428 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 14, 2010

About the author

Robert Joseph Randisi was a prolific American author, editor, and screenwriter, best known for his work in detective and Western fiction. He wrote over 650 books, including The Gunsmith series under the pen name J.R. Roberts, and edited more than 30 anthologies. A co-founder of Mystery Scene magazine, the American Crime Writers League, and Western Fictioneers, he also established The Private Eye Writers of America and created the Shamus Award. Randisi collaborated on novels with Eileen Davidson and Vince Van Patten, and created memorable characters such as Miles Jacoby, Joe Keough, and The Rat Pack. He received multiple lifetime achievement awards and the John Seigenthaler Humanitarian Award.

Reviews

[Pat · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read nearly all

Ok stories. Some I really liked and others that were too unusual for me to understand. I seem to prefer mystery stories and books written some fifty to a hundred years before these.

[Davidg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyable light read. One or two are weaker, but the standard is pretty good.

[Donald Davidson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful way to read through the pandemic

A well balanced collection to shake you up. Nice mixture of characters and a good variety of themes. Well worth your time

[Julie Morales · Rating 3 out of 5]

SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE

This book has a little something for everyone here. I don't much care for short stories because so many of them leave me wondering what happens next. They just don't seem finished to me. There might have been one or two like that here, but for the most part, you finish the story and pretty much know how things turned out, just like I like it. Unless I know it's a series and I'll find out more later, I want to know the outcome when I'm finished.
These are all pretty popular authors, but I hadn't read anything from some of them, while some I was familiar with and it was nice to read more from them too. An overall good book.
For some reason, when I finished Volume 2 of this set, both Amazon and Goodreads lump them together in the rating and review, so I'll just add here that I think the first volume was much better. There were some good ones in here, particularly the last one, but the first volume seemed to captivate me more. Both had entries I didn't particularly care for, although they were all good, but overall, I liked more of the first.

[Mather K. Waltrip · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some stories are better than others, as you might expect.