Continental Crimes by Martin Edwards (editor)

Continental Crimes by Martin Edwards (editor)
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Category: Historical Crime
Reviewer: Lesley Mason
Summary: Easy-reading crime from yester-year…all of it set in continental Europe. Russian jewel thieves, dubious policeman, miracle-working teachers and a fair slathering of the jet-set glamour were what made these stories popular in their time. You need to be wary of reading with a modern mindset, but for those with a love of old-school detective stories there are some workable puzzles and some interesting historical insights into the development of the genre.
Buy? Maybe	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 352	Date: June 2017
Publisher: British Library Publishing
ISBN: 978-0712356794
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It's not clear whether the short story has gone out of fashion, relegated to the pages of certain types of women's magazines, or whether the magazines in which the format still holds its own are themselves not as high-profile as once they might have been. Perhaps they never were, perhaps we only know about them in retrospect. Whatever the truth of that it would seem that the golden age of the short story, coincided delightfully with the golden age of crime.

Many of the tales in this treasure chest come from the inter war years, editor Edwards has cast his net slightly wider with the earliest story dating from 1898 and the latest from 1959. They are presented in broadly chronological order, with only one being definitively out of such a sequence and two being undated. They are linked by the fact that all are set sur le continent.

British crime fiction, particularly of that era, has a reputation for being incredibly parochial set in country houses, cloistered colleges or the claustrophobic streets of smokey London's underworld. Edwards points out that even those authors most famous for such tropes regularly ventured much further afield.

Among the well-known names in here we find Agatha Christie (naturally) but with a one of her lesser-known characters Parker Pyne in Have you got everything you want; G K Chesterton's Father Brown gets an outing with the one story of the collection with which I am familiar as it seems to turn up everywhere (The Secret Garden) and Arthur Conan Doyle takes students of history into newly discovered catacombs in Rome (The New Catacomb), whilst Arnold Bennett has society beauties fretting about a dropped Bracelet at Bruges

The remaining ten stories are from authors unknown to me.

Short is a mutable word. The longest comes in at 44 pages and the shortest at 18, but there is remarkable consistency with most not drifting too far from the median of 25 pages. Clearly the optimum length as dictated by the magazines of the day.

To be fair: it probably is. Each of these tales is long enough to be worth sitting down to read, undistracted…but short enough to be satisfyingly read in a single sitting…over a coffee or a lunch break.

Satisfaction not necessarily guaranteed. Some of the narratives I naturally liked better than others. Those where it was found that there had in fact been no crime committed, or where the criminal was allowed to escape, jarred against my personal sensibilities. The former leave me feeling duped and the latter cheated. So much for plot.

Reading at this remove however we have to also consider style. Each of the pieces is very much of its time, and there is a certain charm in that. It's hard to put oneself in the place of a reader of the day for whom all of this intercontinental stuff would have been a dream-world of unimagined glamour. It's tarnished now, obviously. The characters have to carry a heavier weight and many of them are ciphers not entirely up to it.

Whilst I wouldn't go so far as to level that criticism at Monsieur Hercules Popeau, of Popeau Intervenes and whilst I can see why his creator Marie Belloc Lowndes resented the more successful appearance of a certain M. Poirot (who owes a great deal to his predecessor), I can also see why the one remains perennial, and the other sadly does not. Christie made her character adorably silly, terribly foreign in a way that appeals to the British, whilst allowing him to be redeemably clever. Popeau fails by being too real, not quite clever enough, and also by – to my mind – not being ruthless enough. Lowndes also fails her character by keeping him a the fringes of the story telling…bringing him centre stage and letting him grandstand, that was the real trick that Christie deployed on Poirot's behalf.

I enjoyed The Perfect Murder up to a (for me) fatal flaw in the final unravelling.

If forced to select a top three, H C Bailey's The Long Dinner would get serious kudos for solidity of police investigation, rationality and a wonderful use of English to depict French (worthy of the mastery deployed by the creators of 'Allo 'Allo decades later). Petit Jean gets second-placed accreditation for being not only the most believable but added points for squaddie humour, well placed in its war-time setting.

If I have to pick a favourite, though, I do come back to the beheading in the police chief's Secret Garden and our old friend Father Brown. It follows all of the rooms of the game…and the baddie is done for at the end.

Which brings me to the question of whether I recommend the book or not.

I do, but only to those who already know they want to read it. If you enjoy Christie and Allingham and Chesterton, if you read your crime for the puzzle, if you're prepared to pretend you've never been abroad and that Russian emigres carry a fortune in jewels in their travel case, and that men and women don’t even begin to understand each other…then you'll while away some happy hours indulging your fancy.

If you like your crime a bit more realistic, then obviously: no so much.

I'm probably in the former camp.

For more treasures from the short story chest check out Murder at the Manor: Country House Mysteries (British Library Crime Classics) by Martin Edwards (editor)

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