The Purple Flame and Other Detective Stories

Frederick Irving Anderson (1877-1947) “has shown perhaps the greatest mastery of the American short detective story . . . in ingenuity, command of plot, and the carefully integrated backgrounds of his work.”  So wrote the great mystery critic and historian, Howard Haycraft, in 1941.   Ellery Queen added that “his style is rich in detail and double-rich in expression.”

Many of Anderson’s stories take place in New York City during the 1920s and the 1930s, and they feature the manhunter Deputy Parr and the “extinct author,” Oliver Armiston, who stopped writing ingenious crime stories because criminals were copying his gimmicks.

The book is edited and introduced by the Anderson expert (and Poe scholar), Benjamin F. Fisher.

"His ability to add dimension to his characters and their environments and his carefully modulated diction ('Anderson leavens his fiction with abundant colloquial language') all combined to make Frederick Irving Anderson not only a good detective fiction writer but also an important local color author and a chronicler of the American scene as it existed in the first third of the 20th century." by Mike Tooney