(Some of you will probably want to know why Chesterton and Futrelle haven't been referenced either, but we'll get to them later. Promise. And if you've any suggestions of other good impossible crime collections, I won't mind getting tips in the comments...)
If you've followed this blog (and read some of my comments on other people's blogs), you will by now know that some time ago, I translated all short stories by Queen, Carr, Christie (and also Clayton Rawson, who has already been featured here with his two collections) into Swedish, because I wanted everything from these three giants to be available in my mother tongue.
While doing so, I also took the time to shuffle the stories around a bit, because for both Carr and Christie (and to some extent Ellery Queen), the available collections are a bit haphazard, featuring stories that are unconnected and very different, content-wise, chronologically and thematically. Christie admittedly has a couple that work rather well (e.g. "The Labours of Hercules" and "Partners in Crime"), but while some of the others are thematically linked at least by featured detective, they do not feature everything with the detective in question (cf. "Parker Pyne Investigates", "The Mysterious Mr. Quin", "Poirot Investigates"). Carr's collections are generally even worse.
So instead of going through each of these three authors' somewhat arbitrary collections I will use my own edited collections as the basis of the coming posts. We'll begin here with a quick runthrough of what these modified editions actually contain.
Agatha Christie
When I'd finished I ended up with seven different Christie collections. The first one collects all of Poirot's appearances in the shorter format (and is obviously a huge tome, since he is the most common protagonist in Christie's short fiction). In all, there are 55 Poirot short stories.
The second collection has all Miss Marple stories, as I'm sure you could guess. It's a somewhat slimmer collection, but still features 20 stories in all. Volume no. 3 is actually just "Partners in Crime", which features all 15 of the short stories with Tommy & Tuppence.
As for the fourth and fifth collections, they are simply expanded versions of "Parker Pyne investigates" and "The Mysterious Mr. Quin" respectively, where I've added the two stories featuring each detective that were not originally in those volumes, making them both 14 stories long.
The sixth collection features all mystery and adventure short stories published by Christie, having none of the aforementioned detectives as their main character. (One or two does use a minor character from elsewhere in Christie's canon, but I've chosen to ignore that.) There are only 12 stories here.
The seventh and final Christie volume collects stories that cannot be said to be mysteries. They are romances, horror or supernatural. This is the second largest volume of stories, featuring 24 stories in all.
John Dickson Carr/Carter Dickson
When it comes to the collections of Carr's short fiction, I've chosen to ignore whether they were published as Carr or Dickson, because frankly, there seems to be no general rule for what type of fiction was published as either. (Of course, Dr. Fell stories were published under the author's real name, while the Colonel March and Henry Merrivale stories appeared under the Dickson pseudonym.) Instead, I've created three volumes of short stories, somewhat based on the later anthologies "Fell and Foul Play" and "Merrivale, March & Murder".
The first collection uses all four Bencolin stories and adds all Carr's short stories that are historical mysteries and/or supernatural/horror stories, making a total of 14 stories. I've put all March and Merrivale stories in the second volume (11 stories in all). And finally, the third collection is where we find the five Dr. Fell stories, as well as those mystery stories that are set in present time where none of the main detectives are featured. That makes another 11 stories.
Ellery Queen
When it comes to Queen, I almost left the first three collections untouched. Almost? Yes, well. "Calendar of Crime" is entirely untouched, since that is a themed collection that works well as is.
As for "Adventures" and "New Adventures", they contain stories that were written close to each other chronologically, but since I'm kinda anal about things like that, I decided to shuffle the stories around so they are actually in chronological order inside the collection as well. That means that in "New Adventures" we get to see Queen change from the more rigid period one writers into the slicker period two Hollywood screenplay wannabe authors.
However, when it comes to the rest of Queen's short fiction, I made a jumble of everything in order to get them more thematic. I did, however, try to keep the title of the original collections.
So the fourth collection is QBI - Queen's Bureau of Investigation. The original collection made some kind of concession to having a theme by assigning the different stories to different police departments ("Department of Blackmail", "Department of Murder" etc.) For some reason, a couple of such stories were published in a later collection. I made the tough editor's choice (yeah right!) of moving those stories here...
The fifth volume is Q.E.D. - Queen's Experiments in Detection. What I created here is a sort of hodgepodge of this and that. The stories in QBI were all very short, just a few pages each. But in the same timeframe, the authors also wrote some longer stories; in some cases they could arguably be called novellas. There were also a couple of shorter ones that were not tied into the whole QBI theme. Those stories are the ones featured in this collection.
The sixth collection I called Ellery Queen's Journal of Crime, because it really is just a catch-all for everything that didn't really fit in the previous volumes. They are all from the later period of Queen's writing. There are some longer stories, and also a brace of shorter ones, the shorter ones featuring the so called Mystery Club. There are also another couple of stories with a challenge to the reader, and finally I included the only story which doesn't feature Ellery Queen the detective, "Terror Town". As you can see, it's sort of a mess...
Conclusion
This project was a fairly huge one, as I'm sure you can imagine. When it came to Christie, quite a lot of the stories had been translated into Swedish (there are several Swedish Christie collections), so there weren't that many that I had to translate myself. It was mainly T&T, Parker Pyne and some of the non-series stories that I had to translate.
(Of course, some ten years later someone finally had the bright idea of publishing "Partners in Crime" in Swedish, but by then I'd already translated them all, so I kept my own versions.)
However, when it came to Carr and Queen, none of them have any true collections of stories, though there are admittedly quite a few translated stories in anthologies as well as in Swedish magazines. I did have to translate at least one third of their short fiction.
It was quite a fun undertaking, though. I'm very glad to have finished the whole project and now I have everything available in an eBook format whenever I want.
In coming posts here on the blog, I will go through these collections more closely so we can see what stories I intend to use in my new impossible mystery project.
No comments:
Post a Comment