Foreign bodies

Book - 2018

Today translated crime fiction is in vogue-- but this was not always the case. A century before Scandi noir, writers across Europe and beyond were publishing detective stories of high quality. Often these did not appear in English and they have been known only by a small number of experts. This is the first ever collection of classic crime in translation from the golden age of the genre in the 20th century. Many of these stories are exceptionally rare, and several have been translated for the first time to appear in this volume.

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  • Introduction / Martin Edwards
  • The Swedish match / Anton Chekhov
  • A sensible course of action / Palle Rosenkrantz
  • Strange tracks / Balduin Groller
  • The kennel / Maurice Level
  • Footprints in the snow / Maurice Leblanc
  • The return of Lord Kingwood / Ivans
  • The stage box murder / Paul Rosenhayn
  • The spider / Koga Saburo
  • The venom of the tarantula / Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay
  • Murder a la carte / Jean-Toussaint Samat
  • The cold night's clearing / Keikichi Osaka
  • The mystery of the green room / Pierre Very
  • Kippers / John Flanders
  • The lipstick and the teacup / Havank
  • The puzzle of the broken watch / Maria Elvira Bermudez.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Edwards (Continental Crimes) has done mystery readers a great service by providing the first-ever anthology of golden age short stories in translation, with 15 superior offerings from authors from France, Japan, Denmark, Austria, Germany, Holland, Mexico, Russia, and elsewhere; even Anton Chekhov makes a contribution ("The Swedish Match"). Many tales make creative use of the conventions of Ronald Knox's ten commandments for detective fiction. For example, Pierre Véry, a French author unaccountably ignored by American and British publishers, centers "The Mystery of the Green Room," a clever and amusing homage to a locked-room classic, on an open-room puzzle. Another highlight is Koga Saburo's "The Spider," in which a zoology lab assistant looks into unsettling deaths connected with an odd laboratory shaped like a cylinder that rests on top of a towering pillar. Also notable is Jean-Toussaint Samat's "Murder à la Carte," which features poisoning by "nonpoisonous" substances. This thoughtfully assembled volume is a nice complement to The Realm of the Impossible, a 2017 reprint anthology of international impossible crime fiction. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Ever resourceful anthologist Edwards, who recently showed British mysterymongers of the golden age venturing abroad (Continental Crimes, 2017), takes the next logical step: contemporaneous (1885-1960) stories by non-Anglophone authors.The second biggest surprise these 15 reprints offer is how rich the mystery field is beyond England and the United States. Anton Chekhov's amusingly orthodox whodunit "The Swedish Match" may be familiar to many readers, as is Maurice Leblanc's "Footprints in the Snow" to genre aficionados, but most of these stories have long been forgotten, and most of them richly deserve another look. Palle Rosenkrantz's lowly police sergeant has a sudden brilliant inspiration about how to protect a witness no one will take seriously; the pseudonymous Ivans marks an English lord's homecoming with burglary and murder; Maurice Level stages a brutal duel between a husband and the wife he has just caught in flagrante; John Flanders recounts a shipwrecked cabin boy's grisly revenge on a bullying sailor; and, in perhaps the very best tale in a strong collection, Pierre Vry spins a sublimely witty inversion of Gaston Leroux's Mystery of the Yellow Room. Though most of the stories date from the 1920s and '30s, the geographical range is as wide as the different approaches to crime and detection: France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Russia, India, Japan, and Mexico are all represented. One complaint: there are three stories featuring deceptive footprints or tracks and two featuring spiders in prominent roles but only one written by a woman, Maria Elvira Bermudez's lightning-fast puzzle considering three suspects in what seems like a routine shooting before plucking the criminal from behind the curtain.The biggest surprise, of course, is the parochialism Edwards' introduction, headnotes, and selections reveal in readers and editors who limit their own investigations of the field to stories in the English language. You know who you are. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.