Game Without Rules

The mystery critic Anthony Boucher called Game without Rules the second-best volume of spy short stories ever published, next only to Somerset Maugham's Ashenden.^[6]

Kirkus Reviews considered the book to be a coup, a "stellar collection of short stories in a very difficult form — episodes and espionage". The reviewer thought the stories to be highly diverting and sometimes touching.^[7]

The New York Times Book Review called the stories "entertaining and exciting", and found it hard to say which element was the most effective: the smooth ingenuity of plotting, the disconcerting combination of elegance and harshness, or the shock of amoral realism.^[8] The New Yorker opined that Gilbert "has given us an evening of pure joy in this collection of tales".^[8] And Life Magazine praised the author's almost perfect timing and surprise, elegance of language, and general sense of economy.^[8]

In their encyclopedic Catalogue of Crime, Barzun and Taylor noted that while the story-telling is first-rate, "the genre seems to us more liable to repetition of effects than crime and detection".^[9]

In a 1984 essay, George N Dove considered that one of the reasons for the lasting popularity of Calder and Behrens was the happy contrast between their outward appearance of elderly, quiet gentility and the pair's ability to take forceful action.^[5]

A series of twenty radio plays by Gilbert under the general title Game without Rules was broadcast by BBC Radio 2 between October 1968 and January 1969, including the following derived from stories collected in this anthology:^[10][11]

• "The Spoilers"
• "The Road to Damascus"
• "Cat Cracker"
• "Cross-Over"
• "Heilige Nacht"