Uncertain Endings: The World's Greatest Unsolved Mystery Stories

Uncertain Endings, edited by Otto Penzler, is a collection of mostly out-of-copyright and renewed copyright stories, the earliest from the 1850s and the most recent from 1958, about mysteries where the author doesn’t provide a solution, but leaves it up to the reader to decide. Most famous is Frank Stockton’s “The Lady or the Tiger?” which isn’t remembered as a story published in 1882 but as an existential dilemma - which door to choose, between death and love? There’s a lot of fun to be had here, but also a lot of classism, racism, sexism (pretty much in *every* story) and just, well, wrong-headedness. About halfway through, we also find stories that *do* provide solutions, so it’s not entirely true to its own premise, either. All that said, though, it’s a diversion in terms of having the stories being short, removed from modern times, and clever enough to engage the reader’s mind. I myself read it less than 3 weeks after my mother’s death, and it’s helped to divert my thoughts a bit, but I’m not sure I can say if anything is good or bad in it, given my own state of mind. ( )