The Greatest Russian Stories of Crime and Suspense

by Otto Penzler (Editor)

The greatest Russian crime and mystery fiction―including Acunin, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Nabokov, Pushkin, and Tolstoy. Many of the greatest Russian authors, including Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov and Pushkin, produced crime and mystery fiction, a type of literature that was largely suppressed during the Soviet era because it did not glorify the state but, instead, gave individual characters the significance that the U.S.S.R. despised. With the fall of the Soviet Union, mystery writers have become some of the most successful novelists in Russia, and there is a renewed interest in, and appreciation of, the great crime classics of an earlier era.

There have been few policemen, and virtually no private detectives or amateur sleuths, in Russian history worthy of approbation, and in consequence its literature is dramatically different from its Western counterparts. Criminals in Mother Russia tend to be caught or punished by their own consciences or by ghosts, and the notion of a criminal trial as we know it is utterly alien. Nonetheless, the enormous talent and passion of Russian authors has long been justly acclaimed, and the rare forays they made into the loosely defined genre of mystery fiction rank among the world’s classics. This volume is the first collection ever devoted entirely to Russian crime fiction.

Among the esteemed contributors are Anton Chekhov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nicolai Gogol, Maxim Gorky, Vladimir Nabokov, Vil Lipitov, Alexander Pushkin, Lev Sheinen, Boris Sokoloff and Leo Tolstoy.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Russia, Mystery, Anthologies, Crime, Russian Literature

368 pages, Hardcover

First published December 15, 2010

About the author

Otto Penzler is an editor of mystery fiction in the United States, and proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City, where he lives.

Otto Penzler founded The Mysteriour Press in 1975 and was the publisher of The Armchair Detective, the Edgar-winning quarterly journal devoted to the study of mystery and suspense fiction, for seventeen years.

Penzler has won two Edgar Awards, for The Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection in 1977, and The Lineup in 2010. The Mystery Writers of America awarded him the prestigious Ellery Queen Award in 1994, and the Raven--the group's highest non-writing award--in 2003.

Reviews

[Jeff Hobbs · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tabletalk, 1882 / Boris Akunin --3
Murder/ Fyodor Dostoevsky --see Crime and Punishment
Genka Paltsev, son of Dmitri / Vil Lipatov --2
The portrait / Nikolai Gogol --3
The Swedish match / Anton Chekhov --3
Sleepy /Anton Chekhov --3
The head-gardener's story / Anton Chekhov --3
The bet / Anton Chekhov --2
The queen of spades / Alexander Pushkin --3
The hunting knife / Lev Sheinen --3
The gentleman from San Francisco / Ivan Bunin --3
The strangler / P. Nikitin --2
Revenge / Vladimir Nabokov --2
The sentry / Nikolai Lyeskov --3
A strange murderer / Maxim Gorky --2
The crime of Dr. Garine / Boris Sokoloff --2
The overcoat / Nikolai Gogol --2
God sees the truth, but waits / Leo Tolstoy --2
Too dear / Leo Tolstoy--3

[Hal Brodsky · Rating 4 out of 5]

A mixed bag containing excellent short stories by Gogol, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Gorky, and Nabakov, mixed in with some weak Soviet era stories. While all the stories involve a crime or possible crime, I would not say that any of them are suspenseful, nor what the American reader is expecting; ie no hard-boiled crime drama here. This is mostly an excuse to publish some excellent classis Russian fiction under a theme.

[Kat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent excerpts of Russian literature. So great. Love it.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's nothing to match Russian literature <3

[Ann · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is worth a read If you can handle some short, dark, tragic stories. Quite a few are from the 1800s. All unique in their own way, with brief introductions about the authors to put them in context.

[db · Rating 3 out of 5]

All of these stories and authors are the best. However, for me, I wasn’t in the mood for this kind of fiction for when I read it. Might read again later?

[Sarahtar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Delightful.

[Cat. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Weirdly uneven, but (generally) at the highest level of writing. Still, these Russians do get tedious. I gave up in the middle of "The Overcoat" because...OMG...tediously foreshadowy.

The Sherlock Holmes ripoff was all wrong as well--none of his quick-witted misanthropic personality shows through at all. I understand that this was essentially a dime novel type of story, but it didn't set well.

Oh, well, the majority were well-written and interesting. In the introduction, Penzler talks about how the Russian mystery is a very young, very different critter than western mystery fiction, much as Russian literature as a whole has its own tone. That explained a great deal, but I have to say that I like western stories better. ;-)

[Kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some old, some new, some good, some okay, and other stories I really didn't like. Perhaps it's just because I'm not a huge crime/mystery reader.

[Brenda]

What I read I mostly liked as classics rather than mysteries, and the Sherlock Holmes story made for a silly pulpy break. I'm not rating this because I skipped 2 stories I really liked but had read recently. I also skipped the excerpt from Crime & Punishment because I'd like to read the novel again, and I don't like reading excerpts as if they were short stories.