A Dream Collection: Dream No More (2026), by Philip Macdonald

Golden Age mystery writer Philip MacDonald had one of the more unusual careers of the genre writers of his generation, enjoying a sort of rebirth after World War Two with short crime fiction written in much a different style. He embodied in his one person the transition from the more labored formal ratiocinative detective fiction of the Golden Age to the sleeker, faster-paced suspense fiction of the modern mid-century. To be sure, MacDonald, a native Englishman who at the height of his mystery writing career in 1932 migrated to Hollywood to write film screenplays, was something of an odd man out even in the Twenties and Thirties. Strong suspense or "thriller" elements often invaded his detective fiction and some of his crime novels, like Murder Gone Mad, X v. Rex, Menace, aka RIP and Escape, aka Mystery in Kensington Gore, essentially are thrillers. Although in the mid-Thirties he wrote the first original screenplays for the Charlie Chan mystery series (Charlie Chan in London and…