A night in the cemetery And other stories of crime & suspense

Best known today as a playwright, Chekhov (1860-1904) was also a prolific and accomplished writer of short fiction, as shown by this collection of 42 stories, most of which have previously been unavailable in English translation. As Sekirin notes in the preface, these stories appeared in a variety of periodicals "and until now have managed to escape the notice of contemporary editors and translators." Though billed as featuring crime and suspense, the volume has a broad range, including morality tales and stories of both dark and puckish humor. In the amusingly macabre "A Night of Horror," a man finds a coffin in his apartment. "Task," about a college student and bad checks, has a thoroughly modern ring. "A Crime: A Double Murder Case" is classic noir. Not all the selections shine, but enough do that the collection should appeal to more than just Chekhov fanatics. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Forty-two stories, many new to English-language readers, that reveal not only the range of the Russian master (1860-1904) but what crime stories were like before they became their own genre. As the brilliant sketch "What You Usually Find in Novels" points out, the 19th-century novel was encrusted with clichs. Not so the crime story, whose rules had yet to be set in stone. So Chekhov is free to explore the frontiers among persons, events and tones not yet established as generic types. The comically, often disastrously unprepossessing heroes of these tales can awaken from a night at the cemetery or a night of horror to realize how vacuous were the bogeymen that frightened them; virtuous souls can take unspeakable actions without quite noticing what they're up to, and end up dragging even more innocent passersby to their doom; compulsive confessors can bare their darkest secrets without realizing how anticlimactic they are; and the author can repeatedly lay the groundwork for dramatic courtroom scenes and then cut away from them, thumbing his nose at any assumptions about suspense. Chekhov's lifelong habit of throwing away scenes he's portentously built up to is nowhere more obvious than in the three longest stories here. "The Swedish Match" and "The Drama at the Hunt," for example, begin like well-behaved whodunits before tailing off mischievously into regions the writers' manuals warn you away from. And in the third, "Thieves," an ordinary man who falls among seducers and robbers shows in the end that he's even more ordinary than he knows. The translation, by turns stately (the patronymics remain intact) and colloquial, takes some getting used to, but it certainly frees the author from any Victorian overlay. A splendidly lightweight collection whose satiric touch is so deft that it seems to be sending up a genre yet unborn. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.