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A review by tombomp
Foreign Bodies by John Flanders, Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay, Havank, Jean-Toussaint Samat, Koga Saburo, Maurice Leblanc, Palle Rosenkrantz, Balduin Groller, Paul Rosenhayn, María Elvira Bermúdez, Maurice Level, Keikichi Ōsaka, Pierre Véry, Anton Chekhov, Ivans, Martin Edwards
3.0
As usual, an enjoyable collection - and a particularly valuable one given it collects stories mostly not readily available in English - and with no really bad stories but unfortunately only a few that really made me take notice.
The Swedish Match by Chekhov is pleasingly absurd and humorous although I worry the translation might have dulled the comedy a bit.
The Spider by Koga Saburo isn't particularly great as a mystery but it really stands out by its fantastical setting - a laboratory shaped like a cylinder sitting on top of a 9m high pillar full of poisonous spiders.
Kippers by John Flanders is probably the stand out - it's not a mystery and it's very short but the method of killing is so over-the-top gross and cruel and well described and justified by revenge it really sticks in the mind.
Again, the other stories are a good read but there's nothing really distinctive about them. If you love mysteries though you'll definitely enjoy it
The Swedish Match by Chekhov is pleasingly absurd and humorous although I worry the translation might have dulled the comedy a bit.
The Spider by Koga Saburo isn't particularly great as a mystery but it really stands out by its fantastical setting - a laboratory shaped like a cylinder sitting on top of a 9m high pillar full of poisonous spiders.
Kippers by John Flanders is probably the stand out - it's not a mystery and it's very short but the method of killing is so over-the-top gross and cruel and well described and justified by revenge it really sticks in the mind.
Again, the other stories are a good read but there's nothing really distinctive about them. If you love mysteries though you'll definitely enjoy it