Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller (ed.): The Deadly Arts (USA 1985)

From the Publisher:
Here is a wonderful array of mystery and suspense stories revolving around the arts -- legitimate and not so legitimate -- by the masters of the field. Mystifying tales by Cornell Woolrich, Julian Symons, Robert Bloch, Frederic Brown, Stanley Ellin, John Dickson Carr, John Jakes, Ellery Queen, and other greats await the reader of The Deadly Arts.

The arts have always been a rich source of inspiration for crime writers. Because of the legendary competitiveness among individuals of artistic temperament, the world of the arts teems with jealousies and passions. Museums, galleries, orchestra pits, dressing rooms, cabarets, jazz clubs, and movie and TV studios furnish colorful backgrounds populated by memorable and devious-minded characters. Almost every area of the world of the arts has been at one time or another the setting for a tale of mystery and mayhem.

Veteran mystery writers and aficionados Bill Pronzini and Marcia Muller here choose for your astonishment and pleasure the best of these criminous tales they have found in their extensive reading.

In these pages we meet, in a lapidary gem by Julian Symons, the mad Shakespearean actor who acts his role in Hamlet very convincingly -- too convincingly -- and whose crime is discovered by the least obvious, or perhaps most obvious, sleuth of all. We also meet, in a just-discovered classic by Cornell Woolrich (long buried in its original pulp magazine and here reprinted for the first time), the cop who solves a burlesque murder in a most unorthodox way.

Valuable paintings, sculptures, and objets d'art are natural targets for thieves and confidence men, and the elaborate security measures undertaken to protect them provide a challenge to the clever author's ingenuity.

And in story after story, set in the worlds of ballet, vaudeville, opera, taxi dancing, jazz, TV, sculpture, and other equally fascinating fields, the most exciting practitioners of The Deadly Arts will mystify, spellbind, and delight you.

BILL PRONZINI and MARCIA MULLER, individually and collectively, have written numerous mystery novels, and are the authors of the definitive critical encyclopedia of mystery and suspense fiction, 1001 Midnights, also published by Arbor House. They live in San Francisco.

CONTENTS
Introduction
PART I - THE FINE ARTS
The Stolen Rubens • BY JACQUES FUTRELLE (Art Collecting)
Specter of the Rose • BY BEN HECHT (Ballet)
The Spy Who Went to the Opera • By EDWARD D. Носн (Opera)
Credit to Shakespeare • BY JULIAN SYMONS (Theater)
When a Felon Needs a Friend • BY MORRIS HERSHMAN (Poetry)
The Melting Man • BY R. L. STEVENS (Sculpture)
Mr. Steinway • BY ROBERT BLOCH (Classical Music)
Who's Got the Lady? • BY JACK RITCHIE (Painting)
"As Drink the Dead..." • BY JOHN DICKSON CARR (Artifact Collecting)
Good Night, Good Knight • BY FREDRIC BroWN (Stage)

PART II - THE POPULAR ARTS
The Twelfth Statue • BY STANLEY ELLIN (Filmmaking) Horn Man • BY Clark HowarD (Jazz)
Out of the Inkwell • BY RON GOULART (Cartooning)
A Hard Way to Die • BY R. R. IRVINE (Television)
The Lady and the Dragon • BY PETER GODFREY (Photography)
You Can't Trust a Man • BY HELEN NIELSEN (Cabaret Singing)
The Man Who Wanted to Be in the Movies • BY JOHN JAKES (Film)

PART III - THE UNCONVENTIONAL ARTS
The Adventure of the Hanging Acrobat • BY ELLERY QUEEN (Vaudeville)
The Leopard Man's Story • BY JACK LONDON (Animal Taming)
Death at the Burlesque • BY CORNELL WOOLRICH (Burlesque)
The Waxwork • BY A. M. BURRAGE (Wax Museum)
The Dancing Detective • BY WILLIAM IRISH (Taxi Dancing)
Vanishing Act • BY BILL PRONZINI AND MICHAEL KURLAND (Magic Show)

Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller (ed.): The Deadly Arts. A Collection of Artful Suspense. Arbor House, ISBN: 087795688X (August, 1985), 313 p., $15.95.