When I was in grade school there were basically two lines of mysteries you could read. One was the Hardy Boys / Nancy Drew and the other was Encyclopedia Brown. The chief advantage of one over the other was that while HBND were novel length stories, Encyclopedia Brown tended to have a collection of shorter mysteries which had all the clues laid out in front of you. You’d read them and then turn to the back of the book where the solutions were explained, and some little-known fact given that helped explain how young Leroy “Encyclopedia” Brown had worked it out. Almost all of them were written by Donald J. Sobol starting in 1963. Several years later, however, I discovered that this was not where Sobol had started. Instead, in 1959, he began by writing a syndicated series called Two-Minute Mysteries which starred someone called Dr. Haledjian. They took a couple minutes to read and followed much the same pattern as the Encyclopedia series. In fact, many of the plots and key clues were reused for Encyclopedia. All of which is to say that Kwik Krimes is exactly the same sort of thing except written for adults by a variety of different authors. And it was fun to read. ( )

"Kwik Krimes" is an anthology comprised entirely of (very) short crime stories. By design none of the stories much exceed 1,000 words. Many of them aren't even that long. Editor Otto Penzler's experiment to assemble and present works of fairly extreme brevity without sacrificing consistently high writing quality largely succeeds, as far as it goes. That said, while some of the stories are interesting, none of them are allotted sufficient word count to be truly gripping. This is a collection of literary appetizers--it serves well to pique an appetite to pursue some of the contributors' weightier works, but nothing between the book's covers can satiate a hunger to sink teeth into a meaty tale of dastardly crime and punishment. Still, in our time-strapped world where a mere 140 characters can instantly foment anything from a flashmob to a revolution, there's something equally appropriate and timely about boiling the traditional crime story into something reasonably intriguing that can be digested quicker even than an egg boils hard. ( )