Foreign Bodies

Starred review from January 1, 2018
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.

January 1, 2018
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 Very 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.

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