The Greatest Russian Stories of Crime and Suspense

October 18, 2010
Penzler's anthology of Russian crime stories doesn't quite live up to the billing of its title, given the mediocrity of P. Nikitin's "The Strangler," a Sherlock Holmes pastiche that cribs from Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue." Fortunately, that tale is the sole dud among the 19 selections, many of which were penned by such 19th-century literary giants as Gogol, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, whose short but powerful "Sleepy" depicts an overworked servant girl driven by despair to commit murder. The most interesting story is Lev Sheinen's "The Hunting Knife," in which the author, a former prosecutor for Stalin during the purge trials of the 1930s, introduces an impossible crime element. The murder scene from Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment may strike some as padding, while others will wonder why Penzler (Christmas at the Mysterious Bookshop) includes no examples of contemporary Russian noir.

December 15, 2010
Penzler, who knows crime fiction like few others, has selected 19 short stories or book chapters that he believes represent the best of Russian crime. Many of Russias greatest writers are showcased, including Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Pushkin, Gogol, Gorky, and Nabokov. Curiously, however, theres little crime in these stories, and few police, private eyes, or amateur sleuths. Penzler explains why in a brief but informative opening essay: the detective story cannot flourish in a non-democratic society. That said, Penzler gives us Raskolnikovs brutal murder of an odious moneylender and her half sister from Crime and Punishment. He also offers Militia Inspector Fyodor Aniskin, who has policed the same remote Siberian village for 40 years. Aniskin knows his beat intimately, and in Genka PaltsevSon of Dimitri, he dispenses some unexpected Siberian justice. Some crime aficionados may pass on a crime collection short on crime and heroic defenders of the rule of law, but that would be a mistake. Russias grand literary tradition, its genius authors, and its tragic history make Penzlers collection charming and compelling.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)

October 15, 2010

Nineteen reprints with one foot on earth and the other elsewhere.

One of the two biggest surprises here is how generously veteran anthologist Penzler defines the genre: Would anyone else call "The Portrait," Nikolai Gogol's allegory of a spooky painting's power to change lives, or "The Gentleman from San Francisco," Ivan Bunin's massively sarcastic meditation on mortality, crime stories? The other is how readily and rewardingly Russian tales of crime turn transcendental. "Sleepy," Anton Chekhov's sympathetic evocation of a baby-killer, is as earthbound as "Table Talk, 1888," Boris Akunin's morsel of armchair detection, P. Nikitin's surprisingly idiomatic Sherlock Holmes pastiche "The Strangler," Lev Sheinen's Arctic expansion of the locked-room formula in "The Hunting Knife" or Vladimir Nabokov's macabre resolution of domestic difficulties in "Revenge." But Maxim Gorky's portrait of a compulsive killer in "A Strange Murderer" and the showdown between detective and his quarry in Vil Lipatov's "Genka Paltsev, Son of Dimitri" already suggest a metaphysical dimension that blossoms into full strength in Alexander Pushkin's spectral fairy tale "The Queen of Spades," Gogol's peerless tragicomedy "The Overcoat" and a pair of tales--Leo Tolstoy's "God Sees the Truth, But Waits" and Chekhov's "The Bet"--about the casting-off of earthly shackles. Strangest of all is Boris Sokoloff's "The Crime of Dr. Garine," whose investigation into a physician's murder of his much-loved wife ends even more mysteriously than it began.

An entertaining collection of stories. Readers with no taste for the uncanny can enjoy two tart anecdotes about capital punishment--Tolstoy's "Too Dear" and Chekhov's "The Head Gardner's Story"--and Chekhov's deft and amusing whodunit, "The Swedish Match."

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