Foreign Bodies - a new British Library anthology

Over the past twenty-plus years, I've had the pleasure of compiling and editing a great many anthologies of crime writing. This year sees the publication of no fewer than five of my anthologies - four from the British Library, and the CWA collection Mystery Tour, due later in the year. But of all the anthologies I've been associated with, Foreign Bodies is one of the most exciting. And after a great deal of work behind the scenes, it finally hits the shelves tomorrow.

Classic crime fiction is usually associated in the public mind with stories written in the English language. Christie, Sayers and company in Britain, of course, and their American counterparts, the likes of Ellery Queen and C. Daly King. Few people realise how many detective stories were written in other languages at much the same time. And not only those by Georges Simenon, either.

The appeal of the detective story is worldwide,and that has long been the case. Sherlock Holmes inspired a host of writers to flatter Conan Doyle by imitation. Maurice Leblanc's stories about Arsene Lupin (which feature "Holmlock Shears",among other characters!) are quite well-known, the tales by the German Paul Rosenhayn about an American sleuth in the Holmes mould are long-forgotten. And even writers in Asia and South America were taking note of what Doyle and his successors were doing in Britain, and seeking to follow their example.

There are a number of reasons why compiling Foreign Bodies has proved quite a challenge. For a start, it's far from easy to track down some of the stories in their original forms. Acquiring the rights has sometimes been far from easy - we missed out on one intriguing "impossible crime" story aa a result of rights problems, for example - and getting the translations sorted out with a satisfying period feel has been another hurdle. Thankfully, I and the British Library have benefited from a great deal of help, in particular from John Pugmire of Locked Room International and American short story writer and translator Josh Pachter. I hope that readers find the result of our labours as fascinating to read as I have found it to put together.

Forgotten Book - Joe Jenkins: Detective

Readers of this blog are, as their comments regularly demonstrate, a very well-read bunch, but I'd like to bet that few of them have come across my Forgotten Book for today. Joe Jenkins; Detective was written by Paul Rosenhayn, and trnnslated from the German by Jane Head. The book was published in Britain by William Heinemann - a firm which always had an eye for good material -in 1929. But it's rather got lost in the mists of time.

The fact that its appearance coincided with global economic meltdown may well have been a contributing factor. Perhaps more significant was the fact that, unfortunately, the author died in 1929. So who was Paul Rosenhayn? He was born in Hamburg in 1877, and was educated in both England and Germany. He travelled extensively, not only in Europe and the USA, but also in India, and he wrote for British and German newspapers.

Rosenhayn turned to writing fiction, and as far as I can tell, he started writing stories about an American private detective called Joe Jenkins rather more than a decade before the Heinemann book appeared. A set of the stories seem to have been collected for publication in Germany in 1916, and they enjoyed great success. Rosenhayn became a prolific writer during the last twelve years or so of his life, and also wrote screenplays.

What of the stories? They are set in various locations in Germany, and also in France, and are quite a varied bunch. Jenkins is a sort of poor man's Sherlock, a master of disguise, and renowned for his brilliance, but thinly characterised. We really learn nothing about him as a man - for Rosenhayn, the plot was the thing. And one or two of the plots are really pretty good. Some of the stories have worn better than others, but I found my introduction to this once-popular sleuth quite entertaining.