A Hitchcock short-story compilation (remember when he had his brand on everything — books, TV shows, everything?).   I don’t usually read much detective/suspense fiction, but the old-school stuff is good; the diction is more formal, but the writing is just uniformly better than in a lot of contemporary crime fiction.   I don’t know what that means; I do get the feeling that it’s a vicious circle, where nobody expects better prose from genre fiction so nobody insists on it or turns any out…?   I don’t know.   Anyway, you can probably find the book on Half.com for about a buck, and it’s good commute reading.   (9/23/05)

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