Our local
library has a little shop on the main floor, operated by volunteers from the
library association, where it sells gifts, sundries, and quality used books. I
usually gravitate to the bookshelf near the
window, where one can find hardback and quality paperback mysteries for $5.00
and sometimes less (like the occasional half marked price sale). The books are
donated, and culled out from the mountains that will be sold at the annual book
sale.
Not long ago I
found Murder
and Other Acts of Literature, edited by Michele Slung, and as soon as I
looked at the table of contents, I knew the shop was going to get my $5.00. In
this rather intriguing collection of stories about (mostly) murder, one finds
authors like William Faulkner, Muriel Spark, Isabel Allende, A.A. Milne,
Rudyard Kipling, Anthony Trollope. Isak Dineson, Louisa May Alcott, Gabriel
Garcia Marquez, Virginia Woolf, Alice Walker, and some 12 more of equal or
greater literary fame. It was published in 1997.
A.A. Milne, he
of Winne-the-Pooh fame, and Louisa May Alcott writing about murder?
Well, yes. Sort
of. These stories are all classic murder mysteries. In some, the murder is
never solved. In others, the reader knows the murderer from the start.
Instead, these
are stories, literary stories, that involved murder to some degree.
In Muriel Spark’s
“The Portobello Road,” the story is narrated by the ghost of a woman who died
some years before. It turns out that she’s accidentally haunting the person who
killed her. Alice Walker’s teenaged heroine goes calmly about the business of
killing a man in “How Did I Get Away with Killing One of the Biggest Lawyers in
the State? It Was Easy.” Paul Theroux’s “The Johore Murders” has an embassy
official figure out what the local police can’t (and this story comes closest
to a traditional murder mystery).
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| Michele Slung |
Rudyard Kipling’s
“Mary Postgate” is a story of World War I, grief, and how a woman passing
middle age “does her bit” for the war effort. In “The Woman and the Parrot,” a
parrot repays kindness with kindness. Louisa May Alcott tells a story of
star-crossed lovers who happened to be Shakespearean actors in “A Double
Tragedy: An actor’s Story.” A.A. Milne’s “In Vino Veritas” present a police
detective and a mystery writer who find a twist within a twist.
Slung had edited
quite a number of similar collections, including I
Shudder at Your Touch
(1991); Living
with Cannibals and Other Women’s Adventures (2000); Murder
for Halloween
(2010); Garden
of Reading: Contemporary Short Fiction about Gardeners and Gardening (2012); and many more.
Murder and Other Acts of Literature, properly speaking, isn’t really a
collection of mystery stories. The stories, or most of them, have a more literary
bent, which is what one would expect from the authors. But who knew Faulkner
could tell a gripping tale of justice gone wrong, with a prison mystery to
solve to boot, in a story like “Monk?”
Related:
Top photograph by George Hodan via Public
Domain Pictures. Used with permission.
