There are fifteen stories in this collection of vintage crime fiction in translation, written by authors from Hungary, Japan, Denmark, India, Germany, Mexico, Belgium, the Netherlands, Russia and France. Some are detective stories in the same tradition of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, or in the same style as Agatha Christie; there are ‘locked room’ mysteries and stories mixing mystery and horror. Martin Edwards has prefaced each one with a brief biographical note, which I found useful as, unsurprisingly, the authors were all new to me, with the exception of Anton Chekhov (although I haven’t read any of his works).

Edwards presents the stories in approximately the chronological order of their publication from 1883 to 1960 and notes that these authors were writing in the same styles at much the same time as Agatha Christie and other Golden Age crime fiction writers.

When I began reading I was disappointed as I didn’t enjoy the first few stories. Short story collections are often a mixed bag and some stories are better than others, so after putting the book aside for a while I carried on reading. Some are very short and are predictable and really easy to see where they will end, but others are much more satisfying.

The ones that appealed to me the most are (in the order I read them):

The Spider (1930) by Koga Saburo who founded the Mystery Writers of Japan in 1947. His work was very popular in Japan and he wrote in the traditionalist style, favouring the puzzle element of a mystery. Edwards writes that it ‘is a pleasing fusion of macabre fiction and the classic detective puzzle‘, which explains why I like it. It’s set in a bizarre laboratory in a nine metre high round tower in which a professor is carrying out research on spiders. One night another professor visited him and fell to his death from the tower having been bitten by a poisonous spider. The circumstances of his death, however are not at all straightforward and are most ingenious. Probably my favourite story.

Murder a la Carte (1931) by Jean-Toussaint Samat, born in the Camargue, a journalist and writer of crime and adventure novels. This story is about a case of poisoning, but poisoning with a difference. A guest at a dinner party explains how to get away with murder – by using a non-poisonous substance. It’s one of the shorter stories that I did find satisfying.

The Venom of the Tarantula (1933) by Sharadindu Bandyopadhya from Bengal, educated in Calcutta, whose crime writing is similar to that of Arthur Conan Doyle. A writer called Ajit and detective Byomkesh Bakshi join forces to investigate what is an apparently ‘impossible crime’ featuring an ingenious poisoning. Nandadulalbabu is a hypochondriac who is writing fiction using black and red ink. He is addicted to venomous ‘spider juice’, extracted from tarantulas. His family have prevented him from getting the juice but somehow he is able to trick them and is still getting his fix. Although I was able to work out the solution it’s still a satisfying and interesting story.

The Mystery of the Green Room (1936) by Pierre Véry from France. This story is dedicated to the memory of Gaston Leroux, and plays on the events in his story, The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1907), which I haven’t read, another ‘locked room’ whodunnit. I enjoyed this one , particularly where the private investigator points out to the detective the similarities between the yellow room mystery to this one, the green room mystery – this is an ‘open-room’ mystery as opposed to a ‘locked-room’ puzzle.

John Flanders, born in Ghent was one of the pen-names of Jean-Raymond-Marie De Kremer. He wrote imaginative and fantastical stories and Kippers, originally written in Flemish is one of his many short stories. It’s one of the shortest stories in the book and entertained me in a very different way – it is not a puzzle or even really a mystery story, but is focused on one of Flanders’ fictional preoccupations with food and drink and as the title indicates it is a story about

Kippers, delectable, salmony kippers, smoky as a chimney, dripping with fat, one for each of us, of course, the real thing.

Even Bertie the cabin boy got one.

A sinister tale about a shipwrecked crew on a desert island that ends in horror.

My thanks to the publishers, Poisoned Pen Press, for my review copy via NetGalley.

A really interesting and well told story with wonderful writing. I found myself thinking about it when I was reading it and raced pack to pick it up. Another great addition to the crime collection and well worth being bought back into the publics attention.

Thank you NetGalley and Poisoned Pen Press for my copy of this book. I enjoyed the selection of short stories gathered in this book, specially “The Swedish Match”, by Anton Chekhov. I thought it was such a clever, witty and funny short detective story, and it was certainly the best choice to start the book with. “The Stage Box Murder”, by Paul Rosenhayn, was also one of my favorites. What I liked most about this book is that it introduced me to extraordinary writers I have never heard about and now I can’t wait to read the rest of their work. Certainly a must read.

This collection of fifteen stories, edited by Martin Edwards, presents samples of mystery writing from Europe, Asia and South America, some translated into English here for the first time. My personal favorites were two Japanese entries, "The Spider", and "The Cold Night's Clearing", which seemed the most smoothly written and plotted. Of course, with translated texts, it's impossible to know how much is the original vs translation. If the translator is good, I believe we see the true story written by the author, as closely as possible.

There are several other stories that I also liked though many used motifs or techniques that are now dated but were, at the time of original publication, quite new. Some still make for interesting reading due to clever turns of phrase or plot development, but a few simply felt antiquated. Some of this is personal choice, perhaps, but I can't enjoy a story simply because it is historical. All in all, worthwhile for serious mystery lovers. And don't miss the Japanese stories.

Rating 3.5

A copy of this book was provided by the publisher through NetGalley in return for an honest review.

Two years in the making, the international crime short story collection Foreign Bodies from British Library Crime Classics (U.K) and Poisoned Pen Press (U.S.) answers an intriguing question: what do Golden Age mystery tales from other countries look like? Many of us are familiar with contemporary cultural crime stories, whether they are brooding Scandinavian thrillers or French urban police procedurals or gritty espionage accounts with spies trotting the globe. I, for one, was particularly interested to explore examples of mystery stories from the first half of the 20th century by non-British, non-American authors.
It turns out, as curator and editor Martin Edwards notes in his informative introduction, that those familiar Golden Age mystery stories from England had a far-flung effect on writers around the world. And this influence is helpful—there is no denying the appeal of an impossible crime or locked room story—but it is also potentially limiting, because it suggests that authors with access to unique settings sometimes ignore them to instead meet and copy the expectations of the genre.

Full credit should be given to Edwards, who worked with translators and publishers such as Josh Pachter and John Pugmire to locate and select these stories and present them to English language readers, some translated especially for this anthology. There are fifteen stories in all, with the most successful for me being the ones that incorporate observations and themes from the author’s home country and cultural philosophy.

Take the collection’s first and oldest entry, “The Swedish Match” (1884), a slyly sardonic story by Anton Chekhov. The plotline is comfortably familiar, with the irritable examining magistrate Tchubikov and his hypothesizing assistant Dyukovsky looking into the disappearance of a retired guardsman. There is a mystery, an investigation, multiple exchanges between two detectives who have differing perspectives (one is old, cantankerous, and prone to surface generalities; the other is young, nimble, and inclined to wild surmises), and finally a resolution. But the comic characterization, the ironic solution, and the very human view of these ordinary people bumbling about and making mistakes is in perfect harmony with Chekhov’s more celebrated playwriting and the worldview he fosters. The story also feels ahead of its time, as it both celebrates and punctures the traditional mystery tropes which, at the turn of the century, were still being shaped and solidified.

In contrast, consider the later story “The Venom of the Tarantula,” written by Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay and set in his native Nepal. The plot: a hedonistic old man under medical surveillance manages to regularly smuggle spider venom into his room to use as a dangerous narcotic. Assistant Ajit describes this mystery to his friend, the brilliant detective Byomkesh Bakshi, hoping that the puzzle will take Bakshi’s mind off of a consuming forgery case. Despite the exotic contraband at its center, “Venom” feels the most English of all the collected stories, which is beat-for-beat a detective story in the tradition of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes adventures. (The solution also recalls one of G.K. Chesterton’s most famous Father Brown tales.) If setting and Indian ensemble were replaced with Anglo-Saxon counterparts, the tone and characterization would lose nothing in translation because there is nothing unique to lose.

Personally, the best examples of genre fiction being enhanced by the social and geographical perspectives of their authors are found in the two stories from Japan. Martin Edwards introduces Koga Saburo’s atmospheric and entertaining tale “The Spider” (1930) as “a pleasing fusion of elements from macabre fiction and the classic detective puzzle.” Death occurs in an odd, silo-shaped laboratory where Professor Tsujikawa houses hundreds of specimens of exotic arachnids, some of them very lethal. The murder method—which isn’t a spider bite, enjoyably—is memorable and connects (for me) with the Japanese virtues of order and balance, especially when the murderer’s motive is revenge or righting a perceived wrong. The first-person narrative from a Poe-esque observer of the horrors adds a layer of personal-yet-objective reporting to an otherwise Gothic story.

Arguably the most successful tale in the collection is provided by Keikichi Osaka. “The Cold Night’s Clearing” (1936) is a haunting piece where we discover the circumstances that turned a secluded, snow-surrounded home into the scene of a violent murder-kidnapping. The author creates a foreboding sense of tragedy, and a senseless act of murder starts to reveal a logic that is both rooted in the Japanese notion of honor and a sadly inevitable cause-and-effect fatalism for the people involved. Tone, action, and setting all synthesize to deliver an intelligently mournful work of short fiction that transcends any potential genre limitations.

Inevitably, a few of the stories here fall short in premise or execution. “Murder à la Carte” by Jean-Toussaint Samat finds a narrator musing (vaguely) on lethal combinations of non-poisonous foods, although such murderous menus would be more likely to deliver indigestion instead of death, and “The Lipstick and the Teacup” by Dutch writer Havank turns on a clue so simplistic that it could have been rejected by boy detective Encyclopedia Brown.

Luckily, there are short, caustic entries to reward the omnivorous reader: Maurice Level's 1920 conte cruel “The Kennel” finds hounds baying outside while a cuckolded husband decides what to do with his wife's lover, whom he discovers in their bedroom. Flemish author John Flanders contributes “Kippers”, a story with a Roald Dahl-type sting where a sudden shipwreck turns the tables on a bullying member of a crew. Also highly enjoyable are Pierre Véry's “The Mystery of the Green Room”, which pays clever homage to Gaston Leroux's landmark novel The Mystery of the Yellow Room, and Maurice LeBlanc's 1923 story “Footprints in the Snow”, a colorful detective tale featuring an apparent murder occurring around a deep well.

Martin Edwards and his partners in international crime are to be commended for gathering and sharing these intriguing, relatively unknown stories from around the world. Even while a few authors lean a bit too heavily on the familiar British mystery fiction that clearly inspired them and mute the originality of their own settings and cultures, there is much here to enjoy, explore, and celebrate. An eBook reading edition of Foreign Bodies was provided by Poisoned Pen Press through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

A very different entry in the series of crime classics. Instead of focusing on stories from British writers, this collection includes entries by authors outside the UK, some translated into English for the first time.

The writers hail from Russia, Japan, India, France, and other countries. Many of the stories and detectives are greatly influenced by the early classics of crime as well as by classic and Golden Age detectives.

As you might expect, it's a very eclectic set of stories including "locked room" mysteries, straightforward detective stories, and some that merge mystery with horror.

It's a bit more uneven than some of the other collections, but very satisfying.

A nicely curated collection of translated (into English) short mystery stories, some of which play more fast and loose with the conventions of a detective story than others. Don't expect too much fair play with the reader also, but that's kind of a given with the structure/constraints of the short story mystery. A strong recommend for Golden Age fans that want to stretch their literary boundaries.

A really interesting collection of short stories written from nearly unknown writers from different countries.
Really entertaining, the story are fascinating description of how mystery were written during the Golden Age outside the English speaking countries.
Recommended.
Many thanks to Poisoned Pen Press and Netgalley

This collection contains two excellent Japanese mysteries by authors I had never encountered before: The Cold Night's Clearing by Keikichi Osaka and The Spider by Koga Saburo. Both have the form of classic puzzle mysteries but the main interest is in the distinctively Japanese characters. Both are fine examples of literary craftsmanship, and you can easily see both the elements borrowed from English detective stories and the more traditional Japanese features. Neither one could be credibly set in England. The translations are crisp and precise (to be clear, I don't read Japanese so I can't compare to the original, I mean the stories are a pleasure to read in English while preserving some flavor of Japanese expression).

Another good story, which is an absurdist joke thinly cloaked in the mantle of a procedural mystery, is Swedish Match by Anton Chekhov, an author I had hear of. Unfortunately, the rest of the collection is less impressive.Murder a la Carte by Jean-Toussaint Samat seems like a pointless fragment of a bad mystery. The Kennel by Maurice Level and Kippers by John Flanders are crude and unpleasant horror stories.

The remaining stories range from mediocre to bad (A Sensible Course of Action, Palle Rosenkrantz; Strange Tracks, Balduin Groller; Footprints in the Snow, Maurice Leblanc; The Return of Lord Kingwood, Ivans; The Stage Box Murder, Paul Rosenhayn; Venom of the Tarantula, Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay; The Mystery of the Green Room, PIerre Very; The Lipstick and the Teacup, Havank; The Puzzle of the Broken Watch, Maria Elvira Bermudez). They appear to be deliberate and mostly unskillful attempts to imitate standard English mysteries. The biggest problem is that when translated to the foreign places at the times, there is no credible detective.

In the classic English-language tradition, there is usually a central character who may be a police officer, or a private investigator, or an amateur, or some other official like a lawyer or coroner who takes an interest in a case. Despite their differing professional situations, these characters pursue investigations in broadly similar ways. Of course, there are deviations from convention as well, but they are deliberate by the author. And in the modern world, there are detectives of this type nearly everywhere.

In the stories above, however, there was little cultural place for this type of detective. In some cases, an English-style detective is shoehorned in where he obviously doesn't fit. In other cases, the detective role is taken by a character with a very different approach to the mystery. English language writers are sometimes guilty of setting their stories in foreign places with all characters behaving like English villagers. These writers have the opposite problem, they know how their countrymates behave, but they don't know how to set an English detective among them. The result is convoluted procedurals and baffling solutions.

If these were really good writers with original ideas the stories might work anyway, but these seem to be mostly rushed imitations by run-of-the-mill authors. The ones that might have been okay set in England are mediocre, and the ones that would have been mediocre are bad.

I recommend this book for readers familiar with Golden Age mysteries who would like to get a broader international appreciation for the genre and era. Also, all readers should enjoy the best stories. But if you are just looking for some pretty good vintage mystery stories, this is not the book for you.

Martin Edwards offers short stories in translation in this volume. Normally I'll discover one or two real duds among a few gems and mostly mediocre to slightly above average offerings. Nothing really hit me as being a "dud" or even below average in this collection. "The Kennel" by Maurice Level became the first "standout story." I enjoyed the twist at the end. The introduction compared his work to Guy de Maupassant and Edgar Allan Poe. Perhaps that is why it resonated so well with me. I usually enjoy short stories by both of those authors. Told in the form of letters, "The Stage Box Murder" by Paul Rosenhayn provides the story of a murderer who lacks the cleverness he thinks he possesses. Although I guessed it, I still loved it. "The Mystery of the Green Room" by Pierre Very makes a statement about reading's importance, drawing heavily from <i>The Mystery of the Yellow Room</i> throughout. The author also mentions Poe's "The Purloined Letter." I received an advance copy from the publisher through NetGalley with the expectation of an honest review.

Foreign Bodies
Martin Edwards

Poisoned Pen Press, March 6, 2018

261 pages, ebook, paperback

Collection, Foreign, Short Stories

✮✮✮✮
I was provided an e-ARC of this book by Poisoned Pen Press and NetGalley. This is my honest review for which I receive no compensation of any type.

The cover is what drew me to this book initially. The wonderful use of the complementary color scheme and the mysterious feeling of the picture. You’d think it should be romantic, and yet the couple is draped in mystery. They don’t quite seem to belong together. The man appears to be an older type of gentleman and is all tucked up with his walking stick and cigar all held close. Rather looks quite high class and yet there is something about his face that makes him seem not quite so polished as I’m sure his shoes are. The woman appears to be young and fashionable. She stands a bit away from the man, at a distance, almost as if reluctantly meeting with him. Perhaps this is fanciful of me, but when I look at this cover that’s what I see.

There are fifteen short stories in this book written originally in various foreign languages, now translated into English. Some of these have been translated into English before, but for most, this is their first time being read by an English-speaking audience. As I have commented before in other reviews, foreign writers do write differently than American writers. There is an austerity about their writing that American writers simply can’t achieve. And they combine it with perfect, crisp diction that Americans simply don’t speak, even well-educated ones. This all comes through in the writing of foreign stories, and I found it in these stories.

I read them all and made notes on each as I went. I hadn’t decided how to review the book when I started it because I didn’t really know what I was getting into. As I read, I found myself still wondering how I would review this book of dark stories. I can’t classify them as mysteries because they aren’t all mysteries. There is a mix of types of stories in here. Some of them so short that I couldn’t figure out what they were. Some of them so ugly that I couldn’t figure out why they were written. Some of them quite entertaining. In the end, I liked about 50% of the stories in here, with about half of those being quite good. There was about 25% of the whole that was very dark and I found rather off-putting, with a few really too ugly for me to ever want to see again. The title was no clue of any sort, either. You would think that something called The Venom of the Tarantula would be rather dark, while something called The Kennel would be okay. When instead, The Venom of the Tarantula was very entertaining, and The Kennel was an extremely ugly story with its only redeeming quality being its briefness. A couple of others that I really liked were, The Puzzle of the Broken Watch, The Lipstick and the Teacup, The Mystery of the Green Room, The Return of Lord Kingwood, and The Swedish Match. These were well-written and had either very clever characters or a great twist to them that created very satisfying reading. The Spider was creepy and twisted. The Cold Night’s Clearing was very sad and depressing, and Kippers was just ugly. I want you to keep in mind that I read a lot of women’s literature and romance, fantasy and paranormal fiction and don’t like horror at all. For those of you who like the darker types of literature, this compilation of stories may be much more appealing and your percentages totally different from mine.

Recommended.

This is a collection of short mysteries from classic crime writers all over the world that were not originally published in English. I will review each story individually since collections are always a mixed bag. I did like the vast array of countries the writers came from and liked being able to compare the different flavors each brought to the classic crime story. One of the pitfalls of such a collection is that others have copied these masters repeatedly since they published and now some of these original twists come off as cliché twists. You've got to keep in mind while reading them that they were much more clever and groundbreaking when originally released than they may read today. Overall a very worthwhile read for the armchair sleuth.

"The Swedish Match" by Anton Chekhov
***
A magistrate and his assistant are working on figuring out who murdered Mark Ivanitch who hasn't been seen in a week and his rooms are locked from the inside. Hard evidence, including a body are proving hard to come by and yet they manage to piece together a theory of how the man died and by whose hand. Now they just have to prove it with the help of one piece of evidence, a Swedish match.
I figured out the mystery to this pretty quickly based on the tone. Russian names are confusing in the way they switch based on the situation and that makes it a teensy bit challenging to keep everyone straight even though this is short. Eventually, though, names don't matter all that much for the main plot so don't sweat it. It is a nice little different twist on the typical mystery story though.
Notes on content: One swear word I think. No sexual content (though it is mentioned that a married woman is seeing men other than her husband, but no details at all). No violent details.

"A Sensible Course of Action" by Palle Rosenkrantz
***
Interesting side note, the author's ancestor had a colleague named Gyldenstierne pre-Shakespeare.
A Russian countess shows up at a Danish police station begging for them to protect her from her brother-in-law who she says is going to kill her. The police can't tell if she is insane or telling the truth, and meeting her brother-in-law doesn't clear the air at all.
This feels different from the typical mystery I'm used to in the way it is laid out and the conclusion. I'm not 100% satisfied with the ending, but it is probably truer to life than most mysteries.
Notes on content: No language or sexual content. One death by hanging.

"Strange Tracks" by Balduin Groller
****
Inspector Dagobert is called in to help solve the case of a murdered groundskeeper and does so in record time.
I totally figured this one out before the inspector. Still, a clever short mystery.
Notes on content: No language or sexual content. One death, but not bloody.

"The Kennel" by Maurice Level
**
A husband finds a man dead in his wife's bedroom.
This is super short. At first it seems like there is no mystery until the last couple of sentences and then readers must make their own decisions.
Notes on content: No language, and only some vague implied sexually related content. One death.

"Footprints in the Snow" by Maurice Leblanc
****
After hearing three shots in the night and no response at the gate the next morning, the town's people are convinced that no good came to a certain man. The inspector of the case believes it is an open and shut case based on footprints in the snow, but the amateur detective has another interpretation.
Ok, that one was pretty clever. I didn't figure that one out before the Prince.
Notes on content: No content issues.

"The Return of Lord Kingwood" by Ivans
****
Mr Monk of Scotland Yard is asked to come round to the manor of of Lord Kingwood. The caretaker of the manor was rather cryptic as to the why, but Mr Monk was intrigued, especially since the caretaker asked that the Yard please not contact the newly returned Lord Kingwood until they had spoken to him. When Monk arrives at the manor the next morning, it is to the news that there has been a murder and art theft.
I totally figured this one out before the reveal, but partly because I think I've seen an adaptation of this very plotline in a TV murder mystery series. It sounds super familiar. It's also fun to learn that the more modern detective Monk was inspired by an older Mr Monk (who is described as a funny little man, though not with OCD). A nice puzzle and I loved the humorous voice. I would be interested to find out if more of Ivans mysteries have been translated into English.
Notes on content: No language issues or sexual content. Two deaths are mentioned that aren't super pleasant but not described in much detail.


"The Stage Box Murder" by Paul Rosenhayn
****
A theater owner in Germany is murdered in his own box during an evening production. Famous American detective Joe Jenkins is called on to solve the crime, and all events are relayed through letters from a journalist starting up a sensational newspaper to his fiancé.
I figured this one out pretty fast, but that doesn't mean it wasn't well done. (It more likely means that so many other mystery writers liked this idea it has been redone a couple times since this was written almost a century ago.) I liked the letter format and the clever twist at the end even if I saw it coming. It's a cleverly constructed mystery story.
Notes on content: One minor swearword. No sexual content. One death that isn't bloody.

"The Spider" by Koga Saburo
****
A physical chemistry professor suddenly quits his profession, builds an oddly designed laboratory in the middle of nowhere, and takes up a study of spiders. But why?
A calm mystery story in that at first there seems to be nothing untoward going on, but as the layers are peeled back you figure out everything had a nefarious purpose. Clever. May have to find more by this author in English too. If you don't like spiders, just skip this one. It'll probably only fuel your arachnophobia.
Notes on content: No language issues or sexual content. Two deaths, neither described in much gory detail.

"The Venom of the Tarantula" by Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay
***
Investigator Byomkesh and his assistant Ajit are taking a forced break from a forgery case to walk around when they bump into an old classmate of Ajit's who is now a doctor. The doctor of course has heard of the famous Byomkesh and has a puzzle for him. A certain patient is in very bad shape but insists on continuing to take his drug of choice - tarantula venom. The doctor, the patient's family and household help are all extremely vigilant and yet the man is still getting the drug somehow and no one can figure it out. Byomkesh sends Ajit to observe the situation and see if he can figure out the case.
A decent puzzle and very believable situation, though I question the solution a teensy bit. I think it would've been found out before the detective was needed…but then that wouldn't make as good of a story. The patient is lucky he didn't reappear as a murder victim in a future case. He wasn't a very nice guy.
Notes on content: Swearing is mentioned but only first letters of words related. No sexual content, though some very big words and vague hints refer to past indiscretions. No violence, except the patient harming himself with a crazy drug of choice.

"Murder à la Carte" by Jean-Toussaint Samat
**
The narrator relates a secret he says that no one will believe…a way to poison without poison.
Most of this is absolute hogwash based on old wives tales which were prevalent at the time of writing and/or a poor understanding of the term poison…afterall, death from drinking too much water is called water poisoning even if we don't consider water a poison. But it is effective in making the narrator's listeners pause.
Notes on content: No language or sexual content. Lots of poisonings mentioned.
P.S. You can totally eat artichoke and drink milk and be fine, those with pre-existing bile duct conditions or stomach issues are the only ones likely to suffer and they'll suffer from eating many other innocuous things too.


"The Cold Night's Clearing" by Keikichi Osaka
***
On Christmas eve a teacher is summoned by a student to the house of a former teacher, now placed at a different school but still has his wife, son, and a visiting cousin living in this area. A grisly scene meets his eyes with the wife and cousin murdered and the child gone from the scene. A tantalizing set of ski prints seem to be the only clue but they end in the middle of a field. Another teacher summoned to the scene has some ideas of what really happened.
A fairly well done puzzle. I had narrowed things down to two options, and the answer was one of them. Kind of surprised to have the Santa Claus and Christmas Eve elements to this mystery in a Japanese writing. This may be the grisliest murder case so far in this collection. But then again, the Japanese do have a penchant for the dark and sad endings so that shouldn't be surprising.
Notes on content: No language issues. No sexual content beyond mention of "an intimate embrace." Multiple murders, and a messy mystery scene (no blood described but the few details given let your imagination fill in plenty).

"The Mystery of the Green Room" by Pierre Véry
****
A robbery of a middle-aged woman who has fallen on hard times is remarkable for where the thief didn't go. He didn't go into the woman's bedroom even though she is well known to have expensive jewelry, the last of the riches she has held onto. A police man and a detective ponder the case and one of them remarks that the case seems like the opposite of Leroux's Yellow Room mystery. This proves to be a case-breaking comment.
Quite a clever nod to a classic piece of French crime writing. Of course, best appreciated if you're familiar with Leroux's original story but that is also explained enough (and spoiled) so you don't have to know it before reading this.
No content issues.

"Kippers" by John Flanders
***
A ship's pilot relates the tale of surviving a shipwreck on an island with only the cabin boy, who is hiding a secret.
Yeah, that kid may need some serious mental health care. Yikes! The crime isn't so surprising given the opening scene, but the method is a bit…umm, creative in all the worst ways. Those who like reading about devious revenge should relish this short thing.
Notes on content: No language or sexual content. Several deaths due to a storm but one due to a cruel form of murder, not bloody but certainly gross.

"The Lipstick and the Teacup" by Havank
***
A man is found dead in his flat and the only evidence of someone else there is a still smoking cigarette with lipstick on it beside a teacup. Three suspects have non-confirmable allibies. But the cigarette and the teacup together are enough to point to the killer.
The first case in this collection that actually uses forensic evidence to catch the criminal. And a smart little piece of work it is too. Of course, the downside is that certain details are withheld from the reader till the last moment so only guesswork is possible until the inspector is willing to share his evidence.
Notes on content: No language or sexual content. One somewhat bloody murder with just the victim afterward briefly described.

"The Puzzle of the Broken Watch" by Maria Elvira Bermudez
****
A young woman is left home sick. Her sister and little niece go out to get her medicine, and her brother-in-law is away at work, though he leaves for a period of time. When she is found dead upon the return of her sister, the brother-in-law is accused of the crime but the lawyer defending him is not convinced he committed the crime. He goes to Armando Zozaya for help in puzzling out the crime.
This was a convoluted tale that required serious attention to detail to figure out. A nice conclusion to this collection. I also appreciated being introduced to the Queen of the Mexican crime novel through this story.

Thank you to NetGalley and Martin Edwards for allowing me to read and review Foreign Bodies. This book just didn't hold my interest. 2/5

A collection of non-English stories (translated) from the 'Golden Era' of detective fiction. An interesting, variable, collection of stories with only two I didn't really care for.

I tried. I only got about 20% into this book and it just completely did nothing for me. I didn't like the story or the way it was written. Sorry

Anton Chekhov: The Swedish Match
A murder has happened. The victim was far from popular so there’s no shortage of suspect. Enter the eager detective who finds important clues (likes the eponymous Swedish match), makes lots of deduction (much to the chagrin of his colleagues) and just won’t stop investigating. His final conclusion shocks everybody…but is he right?

It actually reads more like an author had gone ‘I’m bloody sick of this Holmes and how every little scrap he finds tells him volumes. I’ll write a character using his methods and have him end up in a really awkward situation because of it’, only that The Swedish Match is from 1883, which is a bit early for a Holmes-parody, considering A Study in Scarlet wasn’t published till 1887

It’s not great: there are lots of coincidences, and suspects appear at the drop of a hat without having been mentioned before. No matter how many crime-novels you’ve read before you will not guess the resolution. It still is an amusing story and (as somebody who had to read Lady with Dog for university and sat went to see a questionable version of Uncle Wanja neither of which could awaken my admiration for Chekhov), it did make me curious about some of his other works, since the introduction mentioned he wrote quite a few detective stories.


Palle Rosenkrantz: A Sensible Course of Action
A Russian countess comes to Holt and claims her brother-in-law wants to kill her. However she doesn’t appear too trustworthy, while said brother-in-law is calm, collected, and has a perfectly reasonable explanation for the countess’ behavior.

In the end, the solution is more complicated than either of the parties stories. Or is it? And that’s the problem this story has: in one paragraph it implies that not everything is black and white and that stories have more than one side, only to describe a character as “one of the blackest villains upon whom the sun of Russia has ever shone.” It almost seems the author got afraid of his own courage to tell a more unconventional detective story. So one moment it’s all ‘there’s no real hero or innocent person in this story’ only to go ‘but don’t worry, the person punished at the end was still the true villain’ a moment later.



Balduin Groller: Strange Tracks
A man has been murdered. There are no footprints near his body even though it had been raining and there should be. There are, however, some very peculiar other tracks…

Reading older stories we inevitably come across parts with sexist, racist, ableist or other -ist elements. At the time of writing these things might have been considered perfectly fine because most people though [group] is just like this. That doesn’t make it OK. But it also doesn’t make the authors who wrote these things 100% horrible people with no redeeming qualities.

In the end, everybody has to decide for themselves how much they can stomach and I’m not judging anybody who can put up with more than I do. But I expect from a modern anthology that the editor doesn’t pick one of the stories that don’t dive head-first and with full force into offensiveness and problematic content. Which this story does. And that also means it’s not a particularly good story. There are no fiendish motives to discover. The bad guy is bad because he’s different…



Maurice Level: The Kennel
A man finds his dead friend in his wife’s bedroom…but is everything as it seems?

(No. It is not. I hope you don’t mind me spoiling that much). This is more a gothic story than a mystery of any kind and while it is certainly atmospheric (there is a properly described creepy thunderstorm because of course) it’s over before the atmosphere can take any effect and the final twist is rather cheap.



Maurice Leblanc: Footprints in the Snow
A beautiful woman who is unhappily married to a jealous man and a suitor who is hell-bent on saving her. I am sure this will end happily for everybody.

This story has ‘influenced by Sherlock Holmes’ written all over it. A crime that seems to not only have an obvious solution but one with circumstances that make any other solution impossible. A damsel in distress (who does very little apart from being in distress). A dastardly and evil villain, and of course a sleuth who can explain why everything isn’t like it seems. So if you enjoy Holmes you’ll enjoy this one as well. (You might also strain a muscle from rolling your eyes at the behaviour of the women in it but in that aspect, the story isn’t exactly unique for the time).



Ivans (Jakob van Schevichaven): The Return of Lord Kingwood
Lord Kingwood has not returned to his home estate in years. When he does return it doesn’t take long till a murder happens.

It is somewhat amusing to have a story in a foreign-language detective fiction anthology by a Dutch author that is set…in England. It’s also not a great story. Not bad, either but simply average. A motive that’s easy to guess (at least parts of it) and a sleuth that is not particularly memorable



Paul Rosenhayn: The Stage Box Murder
A theatre-director has been murdered. He has been seen quarreling with his son not long before. Surprising to crime-fiction readers everywhere, everything isn’t as it seems at first.

This story is told only through letters (and the occasional newspaper-clipping) which is nice. However, if you’ve ever been near a crime-story, you will be able to guess the killer about two lines after the murder is mentioned for the first time.



Koga Saburo: The Spider
A famous physics professor abandons his position at the university to study spiders. Less than a year later he is dead.

The story is memorable for the method of murder that makes The Hound of the Baskervilles or The Adventure of the Speckled Band look really dull and ordinary. It also lacks any actual sleuthing. The killer was considerate enough to write a diary in which he laid out his motive and the details of his plan. The narrator just stumbles over that diary.

Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay: The Venom of the Tarantula
A doctor despairs. His patient is addicted to a dangerous drug and refuses to give it up, despite the dangers to his health. The man’s family and the doctor do everything to stop him from getting fresh supplies but somehow he always manages.

Another story with very obvious Holmes-inspiration. Ajit, the narrator is not the investigator (that’s Byomkesh) but his close friend. They live together. Ajit publishes stories about Byomkesh’s cases that make him famous. And Byomkesh is such a genius that he doesn’t even need to visit the man’s home. What Ajit tells him about his own visit there is enough. Byomkesh even thinks that “if there was a logical inference that could be made, even if it appeared improbable, one had to take it to be the only possible solution.” I feel I’ve heard something like this somewhere before…

In the introduction to the story, Martin Edwards quotes another writer who explains that unlike Doyle and other Eurocentric writers, Bandyopadhyay doesn’t write about middle class and rich people but “ordinary Indians in and around the subaltern metropolis of colonial Kolkota”…but this story is as rich-people-problems as you can get. A horrible old man refuses to listen to his doctor and spends his day insulting him and his whole family. Part of me wonders if Holmes in this situation wouldn’t have just said ‘If he wants to poison himself, just let him.’



Jean-Toussaint Samat: Murder à la Carte
A well-traveled stranger has a story to tell.

Imagine Holmes hadn’t just claimed that he can tell apart 140 types of tobacco ash but had gone on and on about it, essentially just repeating the claim over and over again with different words. Imagine he would have just given very vague examples, without ever saying anything concrete. No explanation of how he is distinguishing them all. He would have dropped a few names of people involved in cases that were solved due to his knowledge of tobacco ash but he’d told none of them from start to finish. That’s what happens in this story. It’s as boring as it sounds.



Keikichi Osaka: The Cold Night’s Clearing
A murdered couple, a disappeared child and the only hint to what has happened are tracks in the snow…that lead nowhere. (Isn’t it convenient how many murders are committed after it has snowed? What would genius detectives do without all these mysterious tracks?)



This is an unusually dark story. Detective-stories are often more about the puzzles than about the people. Often enough the murder-victims were unlikeable anyway so that you don’t need to worry about them too much and can focus totally on the detective’s genius. This is not the case here, The Cold Night’s Clearing doesn’t spare the reader anything, which makes it really stand out.



Pierry Véry: The Mystery of the Green Room
A house has been burgled. Strangely the robber took only some of the less valuable items and left the owner’s precious jewelry (which wasn’t even locked up in a safe. She kept it in a drawer in the Green Room).

As you might guess from the title this is an homage to Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room, a book I haven’t read yet. Which is a shame because The Mystery of the Green Room has now spoiled its entirety for me. The detective who investigates the case is a big fan of the story and doesn’t get tired of pointing out how everything mirrors the events of Leroux’s tale. If you have read it, you might find this story much more entertaining than I did.



John Flanders: Kippers
Two sailors get stranded on an island. Two?

Repeat after me: just because someone gets murdered in a story, it doesn’t make it a detective story.



Havank (Hendrikus Frederikus van Kallen): The Lipstick and the Teacup
A murdered man. The only clues to the murdered are a cigarette with lipstick-traces and a teacup. Killers should probably stop smoking and wearing lipstick.

Another story that’s nothing special but still entertaining.

Maria Elvira Bermudez: The Puzzle of the Broken Watch
Armando Zozoya gets asked by his friend, the lawyer Miguel Prado, to help one of his clients who is accused of murder. Miguel is convinced he is innocent but all the evidence points towards him, including the watch of the murder-victim that broke at the time of death. (*ominous music* but did it really?)

Not the most original of plot-points for a mystery novel but here it is incorporated into an enjoyable plot. Also, compared to many of the other stories (especially those by the Dutch and French authors) it doesn’t feel like it could be set anywhere. I’m not saying that this story would only work in Mexico, but the location is still an important part of it. Which is nice, especially considering the topic of this anthology.



So in the end…this anthology could probably be described as ‘interesting’, rather than ‘good’. None of the stories made me jump up and search for the author to see if any of their works are available in a language I understand. But then neither did my first Holmes story. I just happened to have a collection, read on and enjoyed them more and more. Here, I definitely will keep the names Bermudez and Rosenkrantz in mind since their stories might not have been outstanding, their detectives were interesting enough. I might also search for more of Bandyopadhyay’s work, just to see if the story was unfortunately chosen or if the introduction was lying, and Keikichi Osaka’s work could also be worth checking out further.

Still, I don’t think this is a must-have, especially for casual golden age/detective stories readers. But if you’re really interested what Holmes’ foreign colleagues were up to, this anthology gives a nice overview. It’s still a rather Eurocentric one, but I understand that finding stories that fit the topic (and have easily obtainable rights) is probably not easy.

Foreign Bodies is a lovely collection of vintage crime stories from authors around the world. The stories are from the Golden Age of crime writers,most are unknown to me, and some have only been recently translated.
This collection gives an interesting insight into the art of detective work and how this genre is tackled worldwide. Logical thinking wins the day,and detection is sometimes down to old fashioned luck,as these stories predate fingerprints and forensic knowledge . The appeal is for all,but then,the middle and upper classes were probably the target readers.
I was pleased that the locked room mystery made a welcome return,and I found the two Japanese stories to be quite eerie and chilling in their oriental manner. I loved the following stories,' The Spider' ( I'm even more scared of them now!) and Footprints in the Snow ( reminds me of Holmes and Watson) . Some stories were clunky and wooden,difficult to get involved in,others invited you in and trap you in their evil designs.
I love the Art Deco cover of this collection! It screams of class,money and the excitement of foreign adventures. A worthy addition to the classic crime collection. I have posted this review to Goodreads today.

Some of the translations are a bit clunky but generally the stories are interesting, wide ranging and showcase the genre (detective fiction) in other cultures. An interesting read.

As ever with story collections, the quality is variable and each reader will have their own favourites. What makes this selection interesting is the fact that they're translated - who knew that Chekhov had a go at a mystery? This is certainly of interest to crime aficionados, or anyone interested in the development of the genre outside of England: 3.5 stars.

This collection trawls through decades of unknown crime stories. The opening introduction explains the genesis of the book and thanks a number of colleagues for their contributions in finding and translating their top choices. There are slight introductions to each story, beginning with Chekhov. The earlier the story the more likely it is to turn on a clever twist. It isn't always kind to retrieve early work, even by the best writers. Here is Chekhov's opening sentence:

On the morning of October 6, 1885, a well-dressed young man presented himself at the office of the 2nd division of the S. district, and announced that his employer, a retired cornet of the guards, called Mark Ivanovitch Klyauzov, had been murdered.

Too many aristocrats (though slightly fewer as we reach more modern writers), too many women as mere victims or wicked schemers, more spiders than necessary, and all but one of the authors is a man. Almost all the acknowledged assistants in creating the collection are men. As usual with Edwards, there are facts but no analysis.

A possible book for a rainy day.

Even the information that Chekhov needed the money doesn't justify the paint-by-numbers prose or plot.