Foreign Bodies Read online

  Foreign Bodies

  Edited and Introduced

  by Martin Edwards

  Poisoned Pen Press

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2018

  Introduction and notes copyright © 2018 Martin Edwards

  Published by Poisoned Pen Press in association with the British Library

  First E-book Edition 2018

  ISBN: 9781464209166 ebook

  ‘A Sensible Course of Action’ translation reproduced by permission of David Higham Associates on behalf of Michael Meyer.

  ‘Strange Tracks’ reproduced courtesy of Locked Room International.

  ‘Footprints in the Snow’ reproduced courtesy of Locked Room International.

  ‘The Return of Lord Kingwood’ translation © 2017 Josh Pachter.

  ‘The Spider’ translation © 2015 by John Pugmire and Ho-Ling Wong. Reproduced courtesy of Locked Room International, first published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

  ‘The Venom of the Tarantula’ reproduced by courtesy of Penguin India and Locked Room International.

  ‘The Cold Night’s Clearing’ translation by Ho-Ling Wong. Reproduced courtesy of Locked Room International, first published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

  ‘The Mystery of the Green Room’ translation © 2011 by John Pugmire. Reproduced courtesy of Locked Room International, first published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

  ‘Kippers’ © Estate of John Flanders. Translation © 2017 Josh Pachter.

  ‘The Lipstick and the Teacup’ © 1957 A.W. Bruna Publishers, Amsterdam. Translation © 2017 Josh Pachter.

  ‘The Puzzle of the Broken Watch’ translation by permission of Donald A. Yates.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  The historical characters and events portrayed in this book are inventions of the author or used fictitiously.

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  Contents

  Foreign Bodies

  Copyright

  Contents

  Introduction

  The Swedish Match

  Anton Chekhov

  A Sensible Course of Action

  Palle Rosenkrantz

  Strange Tracks

  Baldiun Groller

  The Kennel

  Maurice Level

  Footprints in the Snow

  Maurice Leblanc

  The Return of Lord Kingwood

  Ivans

  The Stage Box Murder

  Paul Rosenhayn

  The Spider

  Koga Saburo

  The Venom of the Tarantula

  Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay

  Murder à la Carte

  Jean-Toussaint Samat

  The Cold Night’s Clearing

  Keikichi Osaka

  The Mystery of the Green Room

  Pierre Véry

  Kippers

  John Flanders

  The Lipstick and the Teacup

  Havank

  The Puzzle of the Broken Watch

  Maria Elvira Bermudez

  More from this Author

  Contact Us

  Introduction

  Classic crime fiction is usually associated with authors writing in the English language. Yet in countries as distant from each other, geographically and culturally, as Japan, the Netherlands, and Mexico, foreign language mysteries flourished long, long before the days of Nordic Noir and subtitled TV thriller serials.

  Far from the gas-lit streets of Sherlock Holmes’ London, far from Miss Marple’s peaceful (well, except for the body count) village of St Mary Mead, overseas contemporaries of Conan Doyle and Christie created criminals and detectives in an astonishingly eclectic range of mystery stories. The names of many of those authors are unfamiliar to us today—in most cases, because their work was seldom translated into English.

  Foreign Bodies celebrates their achievements. Until now, the British Library’s Crime Classics series has focused on home-grown writers, but this book is very different. It will, I hope, offer a new perspective on crime fiction in translation.

  This collection brings together vintage crime stories written by authors from Hungary, Japan, Denmark, India, Germany, Mexico, Belgium, the Netherlands, Russia, and France. Several of the stories have been translated into English for the very first time, especially for this anthology.

  As a result, present day detective fiction fans have a chance to investigate fictional mysteries which were long unavailable, yet which deserve to be remembered. In one or two cases, the stories are notable primarily for their historic or curiosity value; in other instances, they offer memorable samples of the world’s most popular fictional genre.

  Most people agree that the first detective story was Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, but the crime story pre-dates that masterpiece, and its origins are arguably far removed from the Anglo-American tradition of detective fiction. Unfortunately, almost every different historian of the genre has come up with a fresh opinion about precisely where and how the crime story began. Dorothy L. Sayers, for instance, identified elements of the genre in ‘The History of Bel’ and ‘The History of Susanna’ from the Apocryphal Scriptures, Virgil’s ‘The Story of Hercules and Cacus’, and ‘The Story of Rhampsinitus’ Treasure House’ by Herodotus. She included each of these pieces in her ground-breaking anthology Great Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror (1928), arguing that they treated, respectively, ‘analysis of material evidence’, ‘analysis of testimony’, ‘fabrication of false clues’, and ‘psychological detection’.

  Conceivably, Voltaire’s Zadig (1747) and E.T.A. Hoffmann’s novella Mademoiselle de Scuderi (1819) influenced Poe when he came to write ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’. And even Poe’s status as a pioneer in the field of classic detection is not beyond dispute. In an article published in the magazine CADS in May 2017, Per Bonesmo contended that ‘the world’s first detective novel was written by a Norwegian’, namely Mauritz Hansen, who published The Murder of Machine-Builder Roolfsen in 1839/40. Conversely, in Crime Fiction in German (2016), Mary Tannert makes a case for Adolph Mullner’s The Caliber (1828) as ‘the first German-language detective story’. This debate seems certain to run and run.

  After Poe, and before the creation of Sherlock Holmes, Emile Gaboriau created the detective Lecoq. Although Holmes brutally dismissed his predecessor as ‘a miserable bungler’ in A Study in Scarlet (1887), Lecoq was popular in his day, and Conan Doyle enjoyed Gaboriau’s work. A wide range of books first written in languages other than English influenced the work of British and American writers during the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. A striking example is Gaston Leroux’s ‘locked room mystery’ The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1907), which inspired both Agatha Christie and the king of the sealed room puzzle, John Dickson Carr.

  Some commentators argue that Anton Chekhov’s The Shooting Party (1884) is a forerunner of Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), and that the Belgian writer Stanislas-Andre Steeman’s Six Dead Men (1931) anticipates key elements of Christie’s And Then There Were None (1939). These are interesting debating points, but even more thought-provoking is the fact that H
ansen, Chekhov, and Steeman were not writing in English, and that consequently, their work in the crime genre (thankfully Chekhov did have more than one string to his bow!) has been under-estimated.

  An avalanche of detective novels appeared in Britain during the Golden Age, but hardly any mysteries were translated from other languages. Among the rare exceptions was Aux Abois by Tristan Bernard, but even this book was the subject of what was described as ‘a free adaptation’ by the Americans Virginia and Frank Vernon as The Diary of a Murderer (1934). In a review for the Sunday Times, Sayers called the story ‘interesting’ and ‘vivid’, but it did not make a lasting impression.

  The reality is that publishers took the view, rightly or wrongly, that readers of the time had little interest in crime novels by foreign writers, and thus did not go to the trouble of commissioning translations. Extraordinarily, even some of the early novels written by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, the gifted authors whose collaborations resulted in superb films such as Vertigo and Les Diaboliques, have to this day never appeared in English language versions.

  If the work of French, German, and other European mystery novelists attracted minimal attention, the lack of interest in crime stories from countries such as Japan and South America was even more conspicuous. Because such books were unavailable, crime readers and critics in Britain and the US often made the assumption that they didn’t exist, and that, even if the likes of Conan Doyle and Christie appealed to people all around the world, they lacked foreign counterparts.

  Yet even if no other fictional detective surpasses Sherlock, even if no other crime novelist can match Christie’s sales, there is much pleasure to be had in discovering the work of long-forgotten examples of ‘crime in translation’. The British Library’s Crime Classics series is, naturally, focused on the work of authors from or working in Britain, but I have long believed that many fans of the Crime Classics would relish the chance to sample classic crime fiction from overseas. Luckily, my editor Rob Davies agreed, and this book is the outcome.

  My interest in ‘crime in translation’, and in particular in translated short stories, dates back to my teens, when I was given as a Christmas present a hardback copy of More Rivals of Sherlock Holmes: Cosmopolitan Crimes (1971), one of a series of four excellent anthologies edited by Sir Hugh Greene. Although most of the authors featured were British or wrote in English, that book introduced me to Baron Palle Rosenkrantz and Balduin Groller, both of whom are represented here. Whilst this book ranges more widely than Greene’s anthology, in terms of time as well as in terms of geography and the nationalities of contributing authors, I take this opportunity to pay tribute to the pleasure that his collections afforded me in the 1970s. To this day, they remain worth seeking out.

  The stories in Foreign Bodies are presented, very approximately, in chronological order of publication. When one reads the stories, the influence of Conan Doyle is often evident, but what is truly captivating, to my mind, is the variety of story-telling styles adopted by writers in different parts of the world at much the same time as Christie and her English-speaking colleagues were debating the so-called ‘rules’ of the classic whodunit.

  In researching this book, I have benefited from a great deal of help from widely-read and multilingual friends who have great insight into foreign crime fiction. I am especially grateful to John Pugmire, whose Locked Room International imprint has revived a range of splendid and unfairly neglected impossible crime novels, and to Josh Pachter, a highly capable crime writer with a particular flair for the short story. John and Josh drew my attention to many hidden gems with which I was unfamiliar, and kindly translated several stories of special interest, as well as checking through my introductions. Josh in turn was assisted by Els Depuydt, Frans de Jong, Piet Schreuders, Hilde Vandermeeren, and especially André Verbrugghen (chairman of the Vriendenkring Jean Ray).

  The complexity of this project was increased by the need to trace rights holders in respect of translations as well as authors. Some appealing stories eluded us, but after rather more than two years of work, we are all delighted that this unique book has finally achieved publication. My thanks go to all those who have contributed to Foreign Bodies, and especially John, Josh, and Rob and his marvellous team at the British Library.

  Martin Edwards

  www.martinedwardsbooks.com

  The Swedish Match

  Anton Chekhov

  The great Russian man of letters Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) needs no introduction to readers—except, perhaps, in his guise as a crime writer. It will come as a surprise to many that, during his twenties, Chekhov indulged his enthusiasm for the genre—and made an invaluable contribution to his family’s finances—by writing enough stories to fill out an enjoyable book which gathers much of his work in this field, A Night in the Cemetery: And Other Stories of Crime and Suspense (2008), translated by Peter Sekerin.

  Chekhov also wrote The Shooting Party (1884), a full-length mystery which boasts a clever structural ploy. The distinguished critic Julian Symons went so far as to argue that the story represents a landmark in the genre’s history, although a British novel utilizing a comparable twist, and published during the Golden Age of Murder between the world wars, is much better known. Chekhov’s book did, however, receive the Hollywood treatment, being filmed in 1944 as Summer Storm, starring George Sanders and Linda Darnell. ‘The Swedish Match’ is one of the stories that Chekhov published in magazines such as Dragonfly, Spectator, and Alarm Clock. This light-hearted tale has been reprinted in English from time to time, for instance in The Mystery Book, edited by genre historian H. Douglas Thomson, in 1934.

  I

  On the morning of October 6, 1885, a well-dressed young man presented himself at the office of the police superintendent 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. The young man was pale and extremely agitated as he made this announcement. His hands trembled and there was a look of horror in his eyes.

  ‘To whom have I the honour of speaking?’ the superintendent asked him.

  ‘Psyekov, Klyauzov’s steward. Agricultural and engineering expert.’

  The police superintendent, on reaching the spot with Psyekov and the necessary witnesses, found the position as follows.

  Masses of people were crowding about the lodge in which Klyauzov lived. The news of the event had flown round the neighbourhood with the rapidity of lightning, and, thanks to its being a holiday, the people were flocking to the lodge from all the neighbouring villages. There was a regular hubbub of talk. Pale and tearful faces were to be seen here and there. The door into Klyauzov’s bedroom was found to be locked. The key was in the lock on the inside.

  ‘Evidently the criminals made their way in by the window,’ Psyekov observed, as they examined the door.

  They went into the garden into which the bedroom window looked. The window had a gloomy, ominous air. It was covered by a faded green curtain. One corner of the curtain was slightly turned back, which made it possible to peep into the bedroom.

  ‘Has any one of you looked in at the window?’ inquired the superintendent.

  ‘No, your honour,’ said Yefrem, the gardener, a little, grey-haired old man with the face of a veteran non-commissioned officer. ‘No one feels like looking when they are shaking in every limb!’

  ‘Ech, Mark Ivanitch! Mark Ivanitch!’ sighed the superintendent, as he looked at the window. ‘I told you that you would come to a bad end! I told you, poor dear—you wouldn’t listen! Dissipation leads to no good!’

  ‘It’s thanks to Yefrem,’ said Psyekov. ‘We should never have guessed it but for him. It was he who first thought that something was wrong. He came to me this morning and said: “Why is it our master hasn’t waked up for so long? He hasn’t been out of his bedroom for a whole week!” When he said that to me I was struck all of a heap…The though
t flashed through my mind at once. He hasn’t made an appearance since Saturday of last week, and today’s Sunday. Seven days is no joke!’

  ‘Yes, poor man,’ the superintendent sighed again. ‘A clever fellow, well-educated, and so good-hearted. There was no one like him, one may say, in company. But a rake; the kingdom of heaven be his! I’m not surprised at anything with him! Stepan,’ he said, addressing one of the witnesses, ‘ride off this minute to my house and send Andryushka to the police captain’s, let him report to him. Say Mark Ivanitch has been murdered! Yes, and run to the inspector—why should he sit in comfort doing nothing? Let him come here. And you go yourself as fast as you can to the examining magistrate, Nikolay Yermolaitch, and tell him to come here. Wait a bit, I will write him a note.’

  The police superintendent stationed watchmen round the lodge, and went off to the steward’s to have tea. Ten minutes later he was sitting on a stool, carefully nibbling lumps of sugar, and sipping tea as hot as a red-hot coal.

  ‘There it is!…’ he said to Psyekov, ‘there it is!…a gentleman, and a well-to-do one, too…a favourite of the gods, one may say, to use Pushkin’s expression, and what has he made of it? Nothing! He gave himself up to drinking and debauchery, and…here now…he has been murdered!’

  Two hours later the examining magistrate drove up. Nikolay Yermolaitch Tchubikov (that was the magistrate’s name), a tall, thick-set old man of sixty, had been hard at work for a quarter of a century. He was known to the whole district as an honest, intelligent, energetic man, devoted to his work. His invariable companion, assistant, and secretary, a tall young man of six and twenty, called Dyukovsky, arrived on the scene of action with him.

  ‘Is it possible, gentlemen?’ Tchubikov began, going into Psyekov’s room and rapidly shaking hands with everyone. ‘Is it possible? Mark Ivanitch? Murdered? No, it’s impossible! Im-poss-i-ble!’