SOURCE: Hillerman, Tony. Introduction to The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century, edited by Tony Hillerman, pp. xiv-xviii. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

In the following essay, Hillerman provides a brief overview of the development of the crime-mystery-detective story over the course of the twentieth century.

If I, alone, were stuck with the Herculean task of selecting the best mystery stories of the twentieth century, I'm afraid they would be clustered in periods. I'd give you a lot of tales from the years between the wars when thousands of good writers were supporting their families with yarns spun for the pulps. I'd pick out a dozen or so from those slick magazines that paid living-wage prices for short stories until television destroyed both them and national literacy. Finally, I'd give you another bunch from the 1990s, when enough folks had been turned off by the tube to produce a...