Foreign Bodies (British Library Crime Classics)

A brilliant anthology of crime short stories from around the world. Another spectacular volume from the British Library Crime Classics series. I don't want to single out individual stories because each one of them was highly entertaining and as a whole they offered a remarkable variety in terms of length, style, subject matter and ingenuity. Reading such literature is sheer pleasure and credit again to the people editing and bringing out the entire collection.

I wasn't overly looking forward to reading this anthology of short crime fiction stories (listed below) from authors who wrote and published their stories in a foreign language. Many of which were never until now even translated into English. The reason for this is that I am an avid fan of British classic crime and wondered why the British Library have ventured down this path as there are many hundreds of excellent English short stories that are just waiting to be found and re-issued. I have tried to be open minded with this collection and at first I was NOT rewarded - within the first 5 stories I only enjoyed one - A Sensible Course of Action. Two of the first five stories are by authors I have read before (Chekhov & Leblanc) - I found bewildering, exasperating and frankly very lazy authors e.g. in the Footprints story someone comes along at the end with all the solutions - all detective work done off stage and this says to me that the author was simply lazy. However I did persist with the remaining stories and was pleasantly surprised as from story six onwards - most of them are well written (translated) and are enjoyable to very enjoyable to read. Such a contrast was not expected - it made me wonder why on earth the collator of theses stories included such duff stories and put them all at the beginning of this volume? Many of the later stories have plot devices and storylines that are similar to Conan Doyle and Christie - and are easy to read - and don't for instance have the cultural differences in humour that are lost in translation like the Chekhov and Leblanc stories. My advice is to read A Sensible Course of Action and then start reading again from The Return of Lord Kingwood. I would give this book 7 out of 10 as readers like myself will feel frustrated with some of the earlier stories. If you are new to reading anthologies of crime short stories published by the British Library then I recommend reading Miraculous Mysteries which is by far the best.The Swedish Match - Anton ChekhovA Sensible Course of Action - Palle RosenkrantzStrange Tracks - Balduin GrollerThe Kennel - Maurice LevelFootprints in the Snow - Maurice LeblancThe Return of Lord Kingwood - IvansThe Stage Box Murder - Paul RosenhaynThe Spider - Koga SaburoThe Venom of the Tarantula - Sharadindu BandyopadhyayMurdera la Carte - Jean-Toussaint SamatThe Cold Night's Clearing - Keikichi OsakaThe Mystery of the Green Room - Pierre VeryKippers - John FlandersThe Lipstick and the Teacup - HavankThe Puzzle of the Broken Watch - Maria Elvira Bermudez

This was an interesting read. Certainly some of the writers show promise but in general theymake us very grateful for the more famous American and British writers with whom we are familiar. I am not tempted to seek out other works of the authors mentioned but equally I did not find it a waste of time. A few stories were quite ingenious and amusing but in general they seemed poor attempts at imitating those of greater and just fame. This anthology, to me, showed the vital difference between amateur and professional writers.

Brilliant

I was a little apprehensive about this collection: the previous foray into Continental Crime ,I found to be by far the weakest of most of the otherwise excellent BLibrary collections . I wasnt too impressed by the first few stories although even here there was a refreshing absence of the British " prissiness " which so affected authors even into the 50's .Like the other reviewer I felt the temperature really went up with the Kingwood story and when the first Japanese story by Saburo came there was a real 5 + stars ...worth the price for this story alone. The standard kept at this level ,with the other story by Osaka being both haunting and memorable . I found the last story to be really weak but overall what a fascinating collection.Due to limited typing skills I won't list all the stories --one can just click on " take a peep inside " on the cover page to see them listed . I found the introduction by Martin Edwards to be fascinating and added to my enjoyment of this book . It cannot have been an easy call to tackle this more unusual area when so many of us GAdetction readers have been weaned on British/US crime fiction . Full marks then for this adventurous and enjoyable excursion.