Oh goodie. I didn't want to pay $16 or whatever for the earlier offerings, but I don't mind paying mass marketish prices for the novella collections. They seem like a good place to start. Shorter always is.
This is one of those series I've been meaning to try. For a while, it was so annoying to find that most bookstores only carried the post-Stout sequels rather than reprints of the originals.