Ellery Queen's Poetic Justice

Ellery Queen chose the title Poetic Justice because it combined, in one phrase, the two different yet related themes of this unique anthology - tales of justice written by poets - 23 mystery stories by 23 world-famous poets, from Geoffrey Chaucer to Dylan Thomas. More than half of the stories are the only mysteries written by some of the greatest names in Western literature-stories of crime, suspense, and detection by, among others, Longfellow, Walt Whitman, John Masefield, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Joyce Kilmer, and Lord Byron, whose unfinished story was conceived at a fireside scare-session in Switzerland on the same night Mary Shelley gave birth to Frankenstein.One story is an important critico-historical "discovery." Edgar Allan Poe's "The Man of the Crowd," published before "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," offered the world its first fictional detective - preceding Dupin! (For an analysis of the internal evidence see Ellery Queen's editorial comment.)There are also stories of detection, crime, and mystery by - of all people! - Thomas Hardy, Sir Walter Scott, William Butler Yeats, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Graves, Conrad Aiken,and Ogden Nash.A book to treasure, to read again and again ...And now - let us begin with Chaucer : "Let us sit and drink and make joy, and afterward we will bury his body."