Foreign Bodies: Martin Edwards ed.

“We want to murder someone. We haven’t the courage to walk up to him and attack him, or for that matter to strike him from behind. So we go to the corner drug store, buy a penny’s worth of rat poison, and give it to the son-in-law, the man across the street, the husband, the lover.”

Regular readers of this blog know that I’m a fan of The British Crime Classics series, published here in America by Poisoned Pen Press. The short story collection, Foreign Bodies, edited and introduced by Martin Edwards, contains a wide range of short stories from all over the globe. We readers often seek out books from other countries and chew over the customs, traditions and beliefs. Foreign Bodies shows that international flare aside, murder… occurs everywhere and for the same reasons: greed, rage, jealousy are all ingredients that, when explosive enough, can add up to murder.

Here’s the list of contents:

The Swedish Match: Anton Chekhov (Russia) Translated by Peter Sekerin

A Sensible Course of Action: Palle Rosenkrantz (Denmark)

Strange Tracks: Balduin Groller (Hungary: Romania after his death)

The Kennel: Maurice Level (France)

Footprints in the Snow: Maurice Leblanc (France)

The Return of Lord Kingwood: Ivans (Netherlands) Translated by Josh Pachter

The Stage Box Murder: Paul Rosenhayn  (Germany)

The Spider: Koga Saburo (Japan) Translated by Ho-Ling Wong

The Venom of the Tarantula: Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay (India) Translated by Sreejata Guha

Murder à la Carte: Jean-Toussaint Samat (France)

The Cold Night’s Clearing: Keikichi Osaka (Japan) Translated by Ho-Ling Wong

The Mystery of the Green Room: Pierre Véry (France)

Kippers: John Flanders (Belgium) Translated by Josh Pachter

The Lipstick and the Teacup: Havank (Dutch) Translated by Josh Pachter

The Puzzle of the Broken Watch: Maria Elvira Bermudez (Mexico) Translated by Donald A. Yates

I’m not going to discuss all the stories in this wonderful collection–after all, the themes are murder and detection, but I will discuss some of my favourites. The Chekhov story, The Swedish Match seems to have fun with the detective genre, while The Kennel is short, vicious and horrific. Shades of Joseph Conrad linger in Kippers.

If spiders creep you out, then you will shiver over The Venom of the Tarantula and The Spider. In The Venom of the Tarantula, a man is asked to discover how a bedbound “foul-mouthed; mistrustful, crafty malicious” writer continues to get a supply of his favourite drug: the venom of tarantulas.

The Spider is eerie, unusual and gripping. In this tale, a young man is employed to enter the abandoned laboratory of Tsujikawa, a dead professor, who died of …  yes you guessed it … a bite from a poisonous spider.

At first sight, the laboratory resembled a misshapen lighthouse or a time-worn fire watchtower. I gazed up at the building in awe. 

The narrator is asked by the dead professor’s family to go into the building which is full of jars of “monstrous spiders.” He’s supposed to dispose of them, and after all … the one that killed the professor may still be loose.

I knew where The Return of Lord Kingwood was headed, but I enjoyed the character of Mr Monk (and his bribery of a local lad) so much that I didn’t care that the story’s trajectory was predictable.

Murder à la Carte deals with the subject of poisoning in an intriguing way:

Poisoning? What with? With anything you choose! Or nothing whatever! I mean just that. People don’t realize it, that’s all. They think they know; they really don’t know anything about it. They think that you have to use a poison. Strychnine? Obviously strychnine is a poison. A killer. But the symptoms of strychnine poisoning are too well know. And besides, you have to get strychnine. But why bother with strychnine? You talk about poisons. There are hundreds of effective poisons. Ah, but their symptoms, too, are all known? And even those whose symptoms aren’t known reveal themselves in the autopsy? Well there are things which are poison, and things which are not poison. Poison and nonpoison. There’s no trick about murdering with poison; any fool can do it, provided he has the killer instinct, or the desire, or the need. 

The Stage Box Murder is an epistolary between a young man and the girl he hopes to marry when his fortunes improve. A murder opens up a career opportunity for the young man, but the crime brings a famous American detective to the scene…

A Sensible Course of Action from Danish writer Palle Rosenkrantz is set right after the Russian civil war and concerns a beautiful Russian countess who claims that her vengeful brother-in-law, who is hot on her heels, intends to kill her. Lieutenant Holst is called in to investigate a situation that requires no small amount of diplomacy. Holst tends to dismiss the Countess’s claim (the fact that she’s female works against her), and yet … there’s always the thought of recent Russian political events:

The whole business mighty have come out of a Russian novel, but in Russia, as one knew from the newspapers, anything was possible. 

Included here is yet another new name for me: Maria Elvira Bermudez “One of the most prolific female detective fiction writers in the Spanish-speaking world,” and here I’d (shamefully) never heard of her, and that brings me back to the collection’s merit. I’d never heard of most of these writers, but according to the intro before each story, these authors were prolific, popular and important to the genre in their respective countries.

This is a wonderful collection for crime aficionados and it’s a great way to collect names that we may not have heard of before. Martin Edwards provides a brief, yet informative intro, focusing on literary careers, of each writer.

review copy.

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The Beauties: Essential Stories: Chekhov

“I realized how unnecessary, trivial and false everything had been that prevented us from loving each other. I realized that when you are in love, you must start your reflections about your love with what is highest, what is more important than happiness or unhappiness, or sin or virtue in their accepted senses–or you shouldn’t reflect at all.”

The Beauties, from Pushkin Press, is a splendid collection of Chekhov short stories. These 13 stories examine many facets of Russian life through the themes of love and loss, and that elusive, shimmering moment: when all that is important in life becomes crystal clear.

Here’s the contents:

The Beauties

The Man in a Box

A Day in the Country

A Blunder

About Love

Grief

The Bet

A Misfortune

Sergeant Prishibeyev

The Lady With the Little Dog

The Huntsman

The Privy Councillor

The Kiss

The Beauties is told by a man who recalls seeing two remarkably beautiful girls over the course of his life, and he notes how this beauty struck him on two different occasions: the desire to be near beauty, and also a sadness, a sense of longing.

Whether I envied her beauty, or whether I was sorry that this girl was not mine and never would be mine and that I was a stranger to her, or whether I had a vague feeling that her rare beauty was accidental , and like everything on earth, would not last; or whether my sadness was that special feeling aroused when a person contemplates real beauty-God only knows!

I loved The Man in a Box (a Burkin/Ivan Ivanovich story) for its intense character study of the neurotic teacher Belikov:

That man showed a constant, overpowering urge to surround himself with a sort of wrapping, to create an outer box for himself, which would isolate him and protect him from outside influences. Reality upset him, frightened him, kept him in a constant state of alarm; and perhaps it was to justify this timidity on his part, his aversion towards the present time, that he always praised the past, and things which had never been. 

Although Belikov is in many ways, an introvert, nonetheless he dominates his surroundings and manages, through his warped sense of duty, to make everyone in his circle miserable. Belikov’s downfall, his bête noire, if you like, is love which appears in the form of Varenka, the sister of another teacher.

About Love is another one of Chekhov’s Burkin/Ivan Ivanovich stories. The narrator, Aliokhin relates how he fell in love with a married woman, and how we question love too much, intellectualize it when in fact we should just act:

And we too, when we’re in love, never stop asking ourselves questions–whether this is honorable or dishonourable, sensible or stupid, where this love is leading, and so forth. Whether all that’s good or not, I don’t know, but I do know that it’s unsatisfying and upsetting and gets in the way. 

My favourite story in the entire collection is The Bet. This is a story that covers a fifteen year period and concerns a bet (19th century Russian bets always seem extreme) that takes place over the question of whether or not the death penalty is preferable to a long, solitary prison sentence. I can’t say much about this story without giving away some of its most delightful elements, but I will say that this story shows how well Chekhov understood human nature and why he is a master of the short story.

A couple of the short stories are a touch too sentimental for me, but overall, this is a magnificent collection. Of course, it includes The Lady With the Little Dog, which is arguably Chekhov’s most famous story–at least it seems to be the one that makes the anthologies so often. I’ve read this story many times, and yet I read it again, and this time I found it even more poignant than I remember. This collection is superb: either a great introduction of those new to Chekhov, or a great reminder of this writer’s phenomenal talent.

I wish Gooseberries had been included, but it isn’t, so now off to read it.

Translated by Nicolas Pasternak Slater

Review copy

Bodily Secrets: William Trevor

William Trevor’s Bodily Secrets is a collection of 5 short stories in Penguin’s Great Loves series. As you’d expect, the topic is love, but the selection here offers a wide range of aspects on this complicated topic. We see the end of love, a love that cannot endure poverty, compromises in love, and a love that is destroyed by shame.

In The Day We Got Drunk On Cake, Mike is persuaded to spend a night out on the town with a disreputable acquaintance:

Garbed in a crushed tweed coat, fingering the ragged end of a tie that might have already done a year’s service around his waist, Swann de Lisle uttered a convivial obscenity in the four hundred cubic feet of air they euphemistically called my office. I had not seen him for some years: he is the kind of person who is often, for no reason one can deduce, out of the country. In passing, one may assume that his lengthy absences are due in some way to the element of disaster that features so commandingly in his make-up.  

That’s the opening paragraph of the story. “Swann is a great one for getting the best out of life,” and he persuades Mike to ditch work and join him in a pub for the afternoon. Swann has arranged to meet two women, “Margo and Jo, a smart pair who drew pictures for magazines.” Margo starts complaining about her husband Nigel who keeps bringing home gangs of elderly women, and somehow or another, Mike is strong-armed into becoming involved. During the hours that pass, Mike is supposed to call Nigel and harass him about his old ladies, but instead, at first at least, he calls a woman named Lucy. He’s in love with Lucy and finds any excuse he can to pester her on the phone, but she’s clearly moved on…

This is one of my two favourite stories in the book. It’s a funny story but bitter-sweet. Mike realises that in this precious moment in time, he still loves Lucy, but he knows that time will eventually blur those feelings.

Lovers Of Their Time concerns a married travel agent, Norman Britt who begins an affair with Marie, a girl who works at the chemists. I won’t say anything much more about the story, but I will mention his marriage to Hilda, a woman who works at home making jewelry. Hilda is a bit of a dark horse:

‘All right then?’ she said when he carried his tray of food into the sitting-room and sat down in front of the television set. ‘Want some V.P., eh?’

Her eyes continued to watch the figures on the screen as she spoke. He knew she’d prefer to be in the Fowlers’ house or at the Club, although now that they’d acquired a Tv set the evenings passed easier when they were alone together.

‘No, thanks,’ he said in reply to her offer of wine and he began to eat something that appeared to be a rissole. There were two of them, round and brown in a tin-foil container that also contained gravy. He hoped she wasn’t going to be demanding in their bedroom. He eyed her, for sometimes he could tell.

‘Hi,’ she said, noticing the glance.’Feeling fruity, dear?’ She laughed and winked, her suggestive voice seeming odd as it issued from her thin, rather dried-up face. 

Lovers of Their Time explores the idea that the 60s intoxicated the behaviour of the middle-aged–not just the young. A sort of Pandora’s Box of possibilities, and one that Norman opens. This is an affair, like most affairs, that has a glamour that’s removed from the details of day-to-day life, such as dried out rissoles from the oven. What’s also fun here is Norman’s assumption that he’s the only one with longings.

The next two stories are nicely contrasted. Bodily Secrets is the story of a middle-aged, wealthy widow who flouts convention when she decides to marry one of the family’s employees. Honeymoon in Tramore concerns a young couple who get married–she’s pregnant by someone else, and her new husband is an employee on the family farm.

In Love With Ariadne is the story of a young medical student who falls in love with the daughter of his landlady. This is another bittersweet story of a love that’s nursed for years and that survives in memory.

If you’ve never read Irish author William Trevor before, Bodily Secrets is a wonderful introduction. The gentle humour tinged with bittersweet poignancy, it’s all here.

German Stories and Tales: Robert Rick ed. (Part III)

Back to German Stories and Tales, and here’s part I and part II for anyone interested in the contents of this modest OOP book. Readers who are seeking German stories really can’t go wrong with this collection, for most of the tales here are excellent.

In Moritz Heimann’s  (1868-1925) story The Message That Failed, a tale of unrequited love, humble revenue clerk/poet Vincentius Hüttenvogel returns from the theatre following a performance of The Marriage of Figaro. In a burst of enthusiasm, he writes a poem to the singer who played the role of Cherubino in a sexually ambiguous fashion:

Vincentius, who had often seen and heard her, but had formerly resented her crude, naturalistic vocal style, was at first vexed and then enkindled by her Cherubino’s ambiguity. Artlessness this time impressed him as superior art; no love song had ever had the elemental quality of this gay, careless outpouring from a creature who did not lure a woman with male wiles or try as a woman to seduce a man. This was no longer yearning or mere concupiscence. This was rapture itself an all its sweetness. 

Vincentius considers sending the singer, Nanette, the poem, but decides against it. His landlady. however, finds the poem, copies it, and sends it to Nanette. Nanette is used to fan mail, but this poem strikes at her heart, and somehow the adulation shown by its author make her impatient with her young, wealthy lover, Xavier. So begins a search for the poet, a search laced with irony and a bittersweet ending. (translated by E.B. Ashton)

Arthur Schnitzler’s The Bachelor’s Death reminded me, slightly,  of the old film, Letter to Three Wives. A doctor, a writer, and a businessman are called to the bedside of their friend, a bachelor, but they all arrive too late; the bachelor is dead. The doctor discovers a letter written by the bachelor and reads it aloud. To state the contents of the letter would be to give away too much, but I’ll say that the letter is a confession which has profound implications for the three men. (translated by Richard and Clara Winston)

Another great favourite is Hermann Broch’s Zerline, the Old Servant Girl. At first it seemed as though the focus would be A., an affluent businessman with the Midas touch. But no, the focus is Zerline, a bitter, nasty old servant who tells a story of her youth and the competition between her and her mistress, the Baroness, for the love of a dissolute man.

Man is cheap, and his memory is full of holes that he can never patch up. How much of what you forget forever you have to do in order for what you have done to be able to carry the little that you keep forever. Everyone forgets his everyday life. With me it was all the furniture that I dusted day after day, all the plates that had to be wiped, and like everyone else. I sat down every day to eat. But as with everyone, it’s only a knowing about it, not a real remembering, as though it had all happened without any weather, good or bad. Even the lust I enjoyed has become a space without weather, and though my gratitude for what was alive has remained, the names and features that once meant lust and even love to me have vanished more and more from my mind, vanished into a glass gratitude that has no content any more.Empty glasses, empty glasses. And yet if it weren’t for the emptiness, if it weren’t for the forgotten, the forgettable wouldn’t have been able to grow. The forgotten carries empty-handed the unforgettable, and we are carried by the unforgettable. 

It’s a long quote, slightly awkward in the beginning, but it captures life and memories so well, and how at the end of our lives, we forget all the meals we’ve eaten, all the boring stuff, and instead our lives are accordioned into some “unforgettable” memories. In the case of Zerline, the unforgettable shrinks down to a few days with Herr von Juna…. (translated by Jane B. Greene)

German Stories and Tales: Robert Pick Ed. (part II)

Following on from the first post about German Stories and Tales ed. by Robert Pick, I’m going to cover a few more of my favourite selections from this stellar collection. The three stories described here (I’m not counting Krambambuli by Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach) explore various scenarios regarding tragic love.

An Episode in the Life of the Marshall de Bassompierre by Hugo von Hofmannsthal is a story told in retrospect by a man who’s attracted to a beautiful French shopkeeper. She has formed the habit of standing outside of her shop and greeting the narrator as he passes by on his horse. The woman’s interest is so noticeable, that the Marshall de Bassompierre sends a servant to secure an assignation with this beauty.

The assignation is a bit tawdry with the meeting taking place at a procuress’s grubby establishment. Since there’s plague in the city, the Marshall takes along (by his servant’s advice) his own mattress and sheets. Bassompierre’s new mistress, it turns out is married, and the assignation, while enjoyed by Bassompierre, clearly means a great deal more to the woman who has given herself freely but may suffer consequences. The couple make another assignation. …

There’s a gothic feel along with an accompanying sense of dread to An Episode in the Life of the Marshall de Bassompierre. What means so much to the young woman is clearly less meaningful to Bassompierre, yet the incident haunts him for years to come. (Translated by Mary Hottinger)

Lukardis by Jakob Wasserman has a similar theme of a woman who sacrifices a great deal for a man. This story is set in Russia and concerns a young dragoon named Evgen who, when he hears that his sister has been deported to Siberia for subversive activity, revolts when he’s ordered to suppress a protest in the streets. In the skirmish that follows, Evgen joins the protestors and is shot by his fellow dragoons. Subsequently, Evgen is smuggled into a network of sympathetic people, but with the police on the hunt for Evgen, hiding this badly wounded man is a liability that most households won’t risk. Enter Anastasia Karlovna, an influential woman who agrees to hide Evgen, but finds that she soon runs out of options until she comes up with a brilliant plan. But she needs a respectable young woman who is willing to make a sacrifice.  … (Translated by Lewis Galantière)

For animal lovers, I’d recommend passing on Krambambuli by Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach. It’s a short story that shows that we humans mostly don’t deserve, or understand, the animals in our lives, and it has scenes of  animal cruelty.

Cardiac Suture from Ernst Weiss is an unusual story for its depiction of an operation. The story begins in an auditorium where students attend lectures, but the auditorium converts into an operating room when, mid-lecture, a young woman who stabbed herself through the heart, is rushed into the room. The lecture turns into demo, and as fate would have it, one of the students is the love interest of the dying girl.  It’s a strange story which leaves the reasons for the suicide attempt vague, but instead focuses on the doctor who lectures and then operates on the girl in front of his students. While the doctor (he’s known as the General) who operates dehumanises his patient, he’s nonetheless efficient–all business while the girl’s lover, who assists, is patently disturbed.

Upon reflection, the story is terrifying as the silent, anguished emotional drama between the student and the girl is subsumed by the efficient process of the operation. We know that the operation, in full view of a class full of students, will conclude, but what will happen afterwards? (Translated by E.B. Ashton)

Operating time: seven minutes and a half. A hundred years ago Napoleon’s personal physician could amputate a leg in that time, including everything, blood-stilling, et cetera. But those were other masters than we are. Well, pick the patient up carefully and lift her into the bed-or rather, let me do it. That’s it-that’s the way. Hot-water bottles ready? Cover her. Cover her! Everything all right. Everything else we’ll leave to luck. Good morning, gentleman, good morning. 

German Stories and Tales: Ed. by Robert Pick (Part I)

As part of my 2017 TBR project, I committed to read 48 books that I’d bought any time prior to January 1st. One of the books that made the cut is German Stories and Tales edited by Robert Pick. This paperback was given to me in 1987, but it was published more than 20 years prior to that: 1966. I mention the date of the publication as a couple of the authors whose stories appear in the collection were still alive in 1966. It was eerie reading about Alexander Lernet-Holenia in the present tense, living in “Vienna and Sankt Wolfgang, Upper Austria,” and Hermann Kesten living in NYC.

So here I am thirty years after being given this book, finally reading it. This is such a modest looking little paperback but what treasures it contains:

Youth, Beautiful Youth by Hermann Hesse
Kannitverstan by Johann Peter Hebel
An Episode in the Life of the Marshal de Bassompierre by Hugo von Hofmannsthal
Lukardis by Jakob Wassermann
Krambambuli by Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
Cardiac Suture by Ernst Weiss
The Message that Failed by Moritz Heimann
Rock Crystal by Adalbert Stifter
The Bachelor’s Death by Arthur Schnitzler
Unexpected Reunion by Johann Peter Hebel
Mona Lisa by Alexander Lernet-Holenia
The Picnic of Mores the Cat by Clemens Brentano
Zerline, the Old Servant Girl by Hermann Broch
The Friend in the Closet by Hermann Kesten
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
A Little Legend of the Dance by Gottfried Keller
Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
The Hussar by Johann Peter Hebel

I’ve never read Herman Hesse although I’ve looked at, and passed on, his books many times. Youth, Beautiful Youth is a wonderful bitter-sweet short story that captures the feeling of lost youth. The story is told in retrospect, by Hermann, a man who recalls his visit home. He’s been away for a few years and has employment lined up for the autumn. This then is his last summer before settling down, possibly permanently, so this is an auspicious visit home:

With creeping caution the train descended the hill in great winding curves, and with each turn the houses, streets, river, and gardens of the town below came closer and grew more distinct. Soon I could distinguish the roofs and pick out the familiar ones; soon, too, I could count the windows and recognize the stork nests. And while childhood and boyhood and a thousand precious memories of home were wafted toward me out of the valley, my sense of arrogant triumph at the homecoming slowly melted away. My desire to make a big impression upon all the people down there yielded to a feeling of grateful astonishment. Homesickness, which in the course of the years had ceased to trouble me, assailed me powerfully in this last quarter-hour. Every clump of broom near the station platform and every familiar garden fence became strangely precious to me, and I asked each to forgive me  for having to be able to forget it and get along without it for so long. 

It’s a wonderful carefree summer with the narrator taking long walks, reading, setting off fireworks with his brother Fritz, and falling in love. The summer stretches out far ahead, and yet it ends all too soon.

And as all loveliness and sweetness is mortal and has its destined end, day after day of this summer, too, slipped through my fingers-this summer which in memory seems to have brought my youth to a close.

This summer is a moment in time–a moment that will never be repeated. Hermann presses memories and scenes into his mind where they remain even though the world Hermann knew passed away. There’s the sense that something happened after the narrator left–was it WWI? And here is how the story ends.

As the train approached our garden, I caught sight of a powerful blood-red flare. There stood my brother, Fritz, holding a Bengal light in each hand. At the very moment that I waved to him and rode by, he sent a skyrocket shooting straight up into the air. Leaning out, I saw it mount and pause, describe a gentle arc, and vanish in a rain of red sparks.

Translated by Richard and Clara Winston.

Crimson Snow: Winter Mysteries. ed. by Martin Edwards

“It’s the bloke who spends the night in the haunted chamber who always cops it in the neck.”

Crimson Snow, a collection of crime stories set around the Christmas season is a perfect companion read to Mystery in White. Short story collections are a wonderful way to ‘try out’ new authors, and in the case of Crimson Snow, I had a reunion with Margery Allingham and met some new (to me) interesting authors. And here’s the line-up:

The Ghost’s Touch: Fergus Hume

The Chopham Affair: Edgar Wallace

The Man with the Sack: Margery Allingham

Christmas Eve: S.C. Roberts

Death in December: Victor Gunn

Murder at Christmas: Christopher Bush

Off the Tiles: Ianthe Jerrold

Mr Cork’s Secret: Macdonald Hastings

The Santa Claus Club: Julian Symons

Deep and Crisp and Even: Michael Gilbert

The Carol Singers: Josephine Bell

Solution to Mr Cork’s Secret: (author’s solution and two winning entries)

I shan’t cover every story in the review, but will instead focus on some favourites. The collection itself presents a pleasant variety with private citizens, an unpaid PI, and a few policemen in the mix. While there’s a range of stories, I found myself really enjoying the blend of voices here.

I’ve been meaning to read Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of the Hansom Cab for years, so I was delighted to read his short story, The Ghost’s Touch, in which the narrator, Doctor Lascalles is invited by an Australian friend, Frank Ringan to spend Christmas at the “family seat near Christchurch.” Frank, whose father made his fortune in the “gold-digging days”  is the wealthy member of the family, but the “head of the family” is Frank’s cousin impoverished Percy Ringan. Alarm bells ring in the mind of any self-respecting crime reader when we learn that the Ringan cousins have made their wills in each other’s favour.

Frank is extremely proud of the ancestral estate and “the position and antiquity of his family,” so he’s thrilled to spend a traditional English Christmas at the ancestral estate at Ringshaw Grange.

It was a wonderful old barrack of a place, with broad passages, twisting interminable like the labyrinth of Daedalus; small bedrooms furnished in an old-fashioned manner; and vast reception apartments with polished floors and painted ceilings. 

At Ringshaw Grange, however, things begin to go wrong when there’s an unexplained fire in Frank’s bedroom and he’s moved to the notorious haunted chamber, the Blue Room. …

Edgar Wallace’s The Chopham Affair was another pleasant surprise. In the introduction, Martin Edwards states that while “subtlety was not” Wallace’s strongest point, “his short stories have arguably stood the test of time.”  The Chopham Affair, a story of blackmail and murder, was excellent, and this is how it begins:

Lawyers who write books are not, as a rule, popular with their confrères, but Archibald Lenton, the most brilliant of prosecuting attorneys, was an exception.

Off the Tiles from Ianthe Jerrold is a short story with a twist as it ends not so much with a solution (which does occur) as with an observation on the unwavering consistency of human behaviour. The story is an investigation into the death of a woman who appears to have fallen off of her roof. Hostilities exist between the dead woman and her neighbours and the dead woman’s sister insists that murder has occurred.

The Man with the Sack from Margery Allingham was a delight. It’s a story in which we find poor Albert Campion roped into being an unpaid PI during a Christmas gathering which takes place at the home of some old friends. In The Santa Claus Club from Julian Symons, private investigator Francis Quarles is employed by the wealthy Lord Acrise who has been receiving threatening letters from a man who went to prison decades earlier. Christopher Bush’s Murder at Christmas is the story of a golfing holiday interrupted, most inconveniently, by a murder. Victor Gunn’s amusing Death in December features Chief Inspector Bill ‘Ironsides’ Cromwell who investigates a murder that takes place during the holidays at a castle. A dead body pops up and then everyone finds themselves snowed in….

“A fine place to bring me to for Christmas,” he said sourly. “Ghosts all over the place before we even get indoors!”

Crimson Snow, and what a apt title that is, is a most enjoyable read for the season.

Review copy

A Very Russian Christmas from New Vessel Press

“In California they drink gin instead of tea.” 

I saved A Very Russian Christmas from New Vessel Press for the right time of year, and while I can’t say that the stories made me full of good cheer, they all definitely contained elements of Christmas in one way of another. There’s a universality to these stories which show Christmas as a troubling time, a time for reflection and, as cheesy as it may sound, being grateful for what we have. Here’s the line-up:

The New Year’s Tree: Mikhail Zoshchenko

The Boys: Anton Chekhov

A Christmas Tree and a Wedding: Fyodor Dostoevsky

At Christmastide: Anton Chekhov

Dream of the Young Tsar: Lev Tolstoy

Makar’s Dream: Vladimir Korolenko (translated by Victoria Zinde Walsh)

A Woman’s Kingdom: Anton Chekhov

A Distant Christmas Eve: Klaudia Lukashevich

The Little Boy at Christ’s Christmas Tree: Fyodor Dostoevsky

Christmas Phantoms: Maxim Gorky

A Lifeless Animal: Teffi

My Last Christmas: Mikhail Zoshchenko

Chekhov’s The Boys is the tale of a planned escape to America; In Mikhail Zoshchenko’s, The New Year’s Tree, the forty-year-old narrator recalls the lessons learned 35 years earlier. In another story from Chekhov, At Christmastide, an older couple pay someone to write a letter to their daughter who has married and moved away. Dream of the Young Tsar from Tolstoy was a bit of a disappointment; it’s sort of a Russian version of A Christmas Carol, heavy handed and moralistic.I’m not going to review all the stories, and instead I’m going to concentrate on my favourites in the collection.

Maxim Gorky’s story, Christmas Phantoms, is the story of a writer who, on one very cold night, is finishing a story about two peasants–a blind husband and his elderly wife, who, after an unsuccessful day begging on Christmas Eve, freeze together to death in the snow. What a dreadful story, I thought to myself, and I felt disappointed (too soon) by Gorky, but he pulled a few tricks and before the story was done, I had a few chuckles. All I’ll say is ‘writers beware what you do to your characters.’

Another favorite was Chekhov’s A Woman’s Kingdom. The story opens on Christmas Eve and focuses on unmarried Anna Akimovna, a young woman who owns substantial property, including a factory which employs 1800 workers. Every year at Christmas, she distributes a certain amount of money to the poor, but this year, an extra 1500 roubles lands in her lap, and she decides to give it away. But who to give it to? She’s faced with a stack of begging letters (and hateful letters), and letting fate award the 1500 roubles, she picks a begging letter at random.

A Woman’s Kingdom is a fairly long story, and one that could have been worked into a novel. We see Anna’s Christmas when she is visited by the local poor who shivering with cold, pay respects, Anna notes “in reality there is something cruel in these Christmas customs,” but she’s powerless to stop the century old traditions.

For Christmas dinner she’s joined by a civil councillor and a slimey barrister, Lysevitch. These men can be seen, ostensibly, as suitors, but neither of them court Anna-although sleek Lysevitch, “like a spoiled horse fresh from the stable,”  is full of stupid advice about Anna taking multiple lovers.He’d “long ceased to believe in anything he had to say in the law courts, or perhaps he did believe in it, but attached no kind of significance to it–it had all so long been familiar, stale, ordinary ..”

Anna, an extremely sympathetic character, was raised from peasantry to wealth by inheritance. She’s not entirely comfortable with her position. She longs for love and marriage, but it seems that she’s destined to remain unmarried. We see a life of privilege but a life that’s sterile. She has wealth but she’s being ripped off in various ways; she’d like to help those in need and give charity, but her actions are either thwarted or futile.

My favourite story in the collection was Dostoevsky’s A Christmas Tree and a Wedding. The narrator is an unnamed man who sees a wedding, and then casts his mind back to a children’s party which took place five years earlier on New Year’s Eve. The family who threw the party were wealthy, and the narrator, an outsider, observes the other guests, the children and their accompanying governesses.

Particularly charming was a blackeyed, curly-headed boy, who kept trying to shoot me with his wooden gun. But my attention was still more attracted by his sister, a girl of eleven, quiet, pensive, pale with big, prominent, pensive eyes, exquisite as a little cupid. 

Idle gossip between the guests whispers that the little girl will inherit 300,o00 roubles, and the supposedly disingenuous narrator notices that gifts, which seem to be randomly distributed, are awarded to the children with “presents diminishing in value in accordance with the rank of the parents of these happy children.” The son of the governess, “the child of the lowest degree” gets a cheap book while the little heiress receives the most expensive doll. To say what happens next would be to spoil the story for other readers, but once again Dostoevsky chronicles the lowest points of human behaviour.

Review copy

Makar’s Dream translated by Victoria Zinde Walsh

My last Christmas and The New Year’s Tree copyright estate of Mikhail Zoshchenko

Christine Stead Week: November 14-20, 2016

Lisa at ANZLITLOVERS organised a week honouring Christina Stead. I’m swamped at the moment, but I ordered Ocean of Story: the Uncollected Stories of Christina Stead. Since it’s OOP, there wasn’t much information out there, but my copy arrived and here’s the contents of this 552 page book:

1: The Early Years: Australia

The Old School

The Milk Run

A Little Demon

2: Apprentice Writer

A Night in the Indian Ocean

La Toussaint

O, If I Could But Shiver!

About the House

Uncle Morgan at the Nats

3: Pre-War Europe

The Azhdanov Sailors

Private Matters

Lost American

4: New York

Life is Difficult

A Harmless Affair

I Live in You

My Friend, Lafe Tilly

An Iced Cake with Cherries

UNO

The Fathers

5: Post War Europe

The Captains’ House

Yac, Yac

The Hotel-Keeper’s Story

A Household

The Woman in the Bed

The Boy

Trains

6: England

Street Idyll

1954: Days of the Roomers

A Routine

Accents

7: Biographical and Autobiographical

A Waker and a Dreamer

A Writer’s Friends

Les Amoureux

Another View of the Homestead

Did it Sell?

The Magic Woman and Other Stories

Afterword from R. G. Geering, literary executor and life-long friend.

This post is created for anyone else out there interested in the contents of this book. My review of The Little Hotel is here.

Marseille Noir: ed. Cédric Fabre

“As long as I was only whacking them in my dreams.”

It was a bizarre coincidence that the night I finished watching the French-Belgian film, The Connection, I started a story from Marseille Noir which mentioned Gaetan Zampa and the murder of a judge. The film doesn’t leave the impression that things were ‘cleaned up’ in Marseille–rather the opposite–that political and police corruption triumphed in the end. But that was in the 70s, so let’s fast forward to 2015 and Marseille Noir. How do a group of writers depict this famous city now? I’ll have to say that after finishing this collection, I don’t think any reader is going to rush out and book a trip to Marseille.

The book contains an introduction from author, contributor & Marseille resident, Cédric Fabre, which gives an overview of the current crime situation in Marseille and just why Marseilles is such great raw material for the crime novelist.

However, Marseille-bashing–the city is a byword for economic stagnation, political patronage, drug trafficking in the northern suburbs, organized crime (actually in decline since the demise of the French Connection smuggling chain), recurrent drive-by killings and, of course, police corruption–is grist for the mill of crime fiction.

Here’s a breakdown of the stories.

The Josettes Really Liked Me: Christian Garcin

Extreme Unction: François Thomazeau

Silence is Your Best Friend: Patrick Coulomb

The Dead Pay a Price for the Living: René Frégni

I’ll go away with the First man Who says I Love You: Marie Neuser

On Borrowed Time: Emmanuel Loi

What Can I Say: Rebecca Lighieri

Katrina: François Beaune

The Problem with the Rotary: Philippe Carrese

The Prosecution: Pia Petersen

Green, Slightly Gray: Serge Scotto

The Red Mule: Minna Sif

The Warehouse for People From Before: Salim Hatubou

La Solidarité: Cédric Fabre

I’m not going to discuss every story in the book, but instead I’ll mention my favourites: The Josettes Really Liked Me–a wonderful story set against a backdrop of the shifting face of crime in Marseille,  Extreme Unction– the tale of a young boy who has a series of strange meetings with an even stranger man, and The Problem with the Rotary, a tale packed with atmosphere and dark rancid humour. In one story, The Prosecution: Pia Petersen, a disgruntled man finds himself stuck in Marseille, a “city where anything was possible.” In some of the stories, crime comes to the average person;  In Silence is Your Best Friend, a teacher in Le Panier neighbourhood is plagued by noisy neighbours, and in I’ll go away with the First man Who Says I Love You–a woman takes her strayed lover on a bizarre, gory trip. Other stories argue that the past never really goes away; in The Dead Pay a Price for the Living, a ex-prisoner returns home to exact vengeance, and in On Borrowed Time, a man’s past catches up with him after ten years. I’ll also mention the story The Red Mule about a violent punk who works for the “narco-jihad” and poses for bloody selfies. Well you know that story isn’t going to end well…

The Josettes Really Liked Me (Christian Garcin) is told by a man who recalls the four sisters of Ange Malatesta.

I never knew which one of Ange Malatesta’s four sisters was the craziest. I don’t know anything about the symptoms of dementia, psychosis, schizophrenia, or any other mental illness, so I certainly wouldn’t dare to diagnose them, but I do know they were all nuts. Besides, they took turns in a mental hospital, sometimes even together.

The narrator’s father is supposed to be a “salesman of wine and spirits” but is rumoured to work for the mob.

Sure, he was a mobster, but a small-time mobster, someone who never threatened anyone. Or not very often–or let’s say, not on a regular basis. Who in any case had never stolen, or killed anyone. He had connections to the Corsicans, who controlled the slot machines in the bars and cafes. He was a collector. Otherwise he was a very nice, sensitive, and generous man who loved his wife and son. I was an only child.

The narrator grows up with Ange, who comes from a Sicilian family. Ange’s father is a frightening presence, and Ange’s four sisters, known as “the four Joes,” are all completely crazy. When the narrator is nine, something strange occurs between him and one of ‘the Joes.’ It’s an event that reveals Ange Malatesta’s violent nature, but it’s also an event that leads to payback years later when the narrator is called to an appointment with Raymond Burr:

 the nickname of a baron of the Damiani branch of the powerful Altieri family, who ran part of the city. Raymond Burr was mostly in charge of the Endoume-Corderie Catalans sector, going up toward Notre-Dame de la Garde. He was said to be utterly devoid of scruples. Some claimed his nickname came from his temperament, others said it was because he was paralyzed and in a wheelchair, which still others denied. Me, I had no idea: I’d never met him.

Extreme Unction (François Thomazeau) is a story centred on the Vélodrome Stadium. A narrator, now an adult, recalls 4 times  when he was picked up from his grandmother’s home by a man and taken to Vélodrome Stadium.

We wouldn’t exchange a word. He’d light up a cigarette, lower his window, stick out his arm, and cough all the way. At the stadium, a flunkey would open the gate for him and we’d park smack in the middle of the empty parking lot in front of the main entrance that said Jean Bouin. When there was someone there beside the guard, he’d politely say hello to André, lowering his eyes. Occasionally some bolder guys would throw out a “Hi, Dédé.” And he’d cough to answer them.

André tells the teenage boy stories while passing crumpled bags of potato chips, and the trips end with a pizza from the stadium pizzeria. It’s not until the narrator is an adult that he finally figures some things out about these four trips.

With various Marseille locations central to the action, one of the really good things about this collection is that you can’t imagine that you are anywhere else in the world but Marseille.

The problem with Marseille’s South End is how strangely mixed it is. Opulent homes stand alongside sordid housing projects, luxurious villas next to derelict cabins, and terraces with swimming pools look down on boat garages with rusty doors turned into summer dwellings. The beautiful Roy d’Espagne park spread its lawns one alley away from the dilapidated Cayolle projects where the former shantytown that Le Corbusier had invented was razed to make way for a supermarket on permanent borrowed time by local vandals. Baumettes prison is at the end of all the dead ends, the old stone mansions still shelter a handful of end-of-the line aristocrats holding onto their ghosts and past glory, a few wealthy families are holed up in their famous architect-built houses, their windows stained with the sticky resin of the ever-present Aleppo pines. The nouveau riches and the old poor, the show-offs and the sluts. The sun weighs down on minds, the sea cools them off, the most beautiful streams in the whole world are within any tourist’s reach, and the dealers are two bus stops away from the nearby junior high. Marseille, its pervasive mess, its generalized thoughtlessness. But is that really a problem…? (from The Problem with the Rotary: Philippe Carrese)

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: short story collections are a great way to discover new authors, and in this case, many of the authors are not available in English. Finally a word on the Akashic Noir series which was launched in 2004… If you like crime and have an interest in a particular country or city, this is a great way to be a safe armchair traveler. For those interested, I read Mexico City Noir and really liked it.

Translated by David Ball and Nicole Ball

Review copy