So, in a way to tackle my physical TBR which is about 220 at the moment. I have been trying to focus on reading a short story a day from my short story collections I own. This has made the lighter reading days feel more accomplished. So, today I thought I would list what collections I plan on reading this year.

Synopsis: This expertly curated thespian anthology features fourteen stories from giants of the classic crime genre such as Dorothy L. Sayers, Julian Symons and Ngaio Marsh, as well as firm favourites from the British Library Crime Classics Anthony Wynne, Christianna Brand, Bernard J. Farmer and many more. Mysteries abound when a player’s fate hangs on a single performance, and opening night may very well be their last.

So far I am 3 stories in and it’s not a great collection. Very low ratings but I am holding out hope that some of these will be better.

Plot: Out of his smoke-filled rooms in Baker Street stalks a figure to cause the criminal classes to quake in their boots and rush from their dens of inequity. The twelve mysteries gathered in this first collection of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson’s adventures reveal the brilliant consulting detective at the height of his powers. Problems involving a man with a twisted lip, a fabulous blue carbuncle, and five orange pips tax Sherlock Holmes’ intellect alongside some of his most famous cases, including “A Scandal in Bohemia” and “The Red-Headed League.”

Synopsis: From chudails and peris to jinn and goddesses, this lush collection of South Asian folklore, legends, and epics reimagines stories of old for a modern audience. This fantasy and science fiction teen anthology edited by Samira Ahmed and Sona Charaipotra contains a wide range of stories from fourteen bestselling, award-winning, and emerging writers from the South Asian diaspora that will surprise, delight, and move you. So read on, for after all, magic has no borders.

Synopsis: It a time when crime and thriller writing has once again overtaken the sales of general and literary fiction, Bodies from the Library unearths lost stories from the Golden Age, that period between the World Wars when detective fiction captured the public’s imagination and saw the emergence of some of the world’s cleverest and most popular storytellers. This anthology brings together 16 forgotten tales that have either been published only once before – perhaps in a newspaper or rare magazine – or have never before appeared in print. From a previously unpublished 1917 script featuring Ernest Bramah’s blind detective Max Carrados, to early 1950s crime stories written for London’s Evening Standard by Cyril Hare, Freeman Wills Crofts and A.A. Milne, it spans five decades of writing by masters of the Golden Age.

Plot: Shabby and lumbering, with a face like a Norfolk dumpling, Father Brown makes for an improbable super-sleuth. But his innocence is the secret of his success: refusing the scientific method of detection, he adopts instead an approach of simple sympathy, interpreting each crime as a work of art, and each criminal as a man no worse than himself. 

Synopsis: The summer holidays are a chance to escape from it all, to shrug off the troubles and cares of everyday life, and lounge on warm sands or sip a cool drink in the shade of a city square. But, as the characters in this murderously good collection of classic crime stories discover to their cost … sometimes it’s not that easy to escape your fate. An impossible murder on a Cornish beach. A honeymoon in the Italian lakes that becomes a desperate search for the truth. An African safari that ends with the tables being turned. Even in a heatwave, these tales of murder and malice will chill you like a shadow sliding across the sun.

Plot: Once upon a time fairy tales weren’t meant just for children, and neither is Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales. This collection contains lyrical tales, bloody tales and hilariously funny and ripely bawdy stories from countries all around the world – from the Arctic to Asia – and no dippy princesses or soppy fairies. Instead, we have pretty maids and old crones; crafty women and bad girls; enchantresses and midwives; rascal aunts and odd sisters.