Foreign Bodies
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Mystery crime fiction written in the Golden Age of Murder
"Edwards 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." —Publishers Weekly STARRED review
Today, translated crime fiction is in vogue—but this was not always the case. A century before Scandi noir, writers across Europe and beyond were publishing detective stories of high quality. Often these did not appear in English and they have been known only by a small number of experts. This is the first ever collection of classic crime in translation from the golden age of the genre in the 20th century. Many of these stories are exceptionally rare, and several have been translated for the first time to appear in this volume.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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 V ry, 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 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.
