Win, Lose or Die

Dangerous games are played out in this compilation of mystery stories taken from the pages of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Chess, offering an ideal analogy for the strategies between murderer and victim, is superbly represented in such tales as ""Gentlemen's Agreement"" by Lawrence Block and ""King's Knight Gambit Declined"" by R.L. Stevens. Card playing, another favorite of mystery writers, is the attraction in ""Card Sense"" by the lesser-known James Holding. Craps takes an unlucky roll in John Steinbeck's forgettable ""The Crapshooter,"" but the art of trivia is played to its finest in ""Life, Death and Other Trivial Concerns"" by Robert Loy. Scrabble spells the solution in both H.R.F. Keating's masterful ""Scrabble Babble Dabble"" and John Philip Cohane's ""The Scrabble Clue."" Some esteemed detectives, such as Agatha Christie's Poirot (""Beware the King of Clubs"") and Sara Paretsky's V.I. Warshawski (""The Takamoku Joseki"") don't fare as well as some of the newcomers, but the variety of talents thrown together here makes for a mystery lover's delight. (June)