Deep Waters: Murder on the Waves

This enjoyable reprint anthology showcases 16 crime stories “connected, in one way or another, with water,” as Edwards (Crimson Snow) notes in his introduction. Among the highlights are William Hope Hodgson’s “Bullion!,” in which boxes of gold bullion appear and disappear aboard a ship, and Gwyn Evans’s “The Pool of Secrets,” a clever variation on The Hound of the Baskervilles, in which a murder is purportedly the work of the ghost of a woman who drowned herself in her silver wedding gown. Fans of the Columbo TV series will appreciate R. Austin Freeman’s “The Echo of a Mutiny,” in which the author’s Holmesian detective, Dr. John Thorndyke, is able to apprehend a killer by examining the clues he left at the murder scene, a lighthouse. Drawing on an encyclopedic knowledge of the genre, Edwards includes writers who will be new to most readers, notably James Pattinson, whose tricky “The Man Who Was Drowned” centers on a suspicious account of a man falling overboard from an ocean liner. This volume is a welcome addition to the British Library Crime Classics series. (Sept.)