The crime stories selected for this consistently imaginative collection shun the simple whodunit formula. Instead, Eudora Welty, Patrick O'Brian, Edith Wharton, and John Cheever, along with the twenty other masterful writers found here, take the compelling fact of murder or sudden death and proceed well beyond the business of clues or alibis. The result is the two dozen chilling and unforgettably diverting tales that make up Murder & Other Acts of Literature. The authors she's chosen include distinguished writers from North and South America, Britain, Africa, and Europe; among them are realists, ironists, dramatists, and Nobelists, living and dead, each of whom understands the strangeness and danger of the murderous mind unleashed. (In the few "innocent" cases here, where no murder actually has occurred, society's rules are nonetheless violated, always with decidedly unexpected outcomes.).