Foreword
Selecting short stories for an anthology is always difficult, especially when
you have more than 150 years of accumulated stories to choose from. There must
exist tens of thousands of Swedish mysteries, detective and criminal stories
published in hundreds of entertaining periodicals and obscure books. Most of
them have never been reprinted, much less translated into other languages. As
the title of this anthology suggests, the stories here are confined to
mysteries, murders and disappearances taking place in locked rooms, or open
spaces or in similar seemingly impossible circumstances. When selecting, I have
killed a few darlings, often because they were too long to be considered short
stories. There is a quantum leap between Lars Blom and His Disappearing Gun
(1857) by August Blanche and The Murder of ‘Swedish Annie' (1906) by Ernst
Lindblom, a gap of forty-nine years. To be sure, August Strindberg, Victoria
Benedictsson, Gustaf af Geijerstam, Ola Hansson and many other authors wrote
crime fiction in Sweden during that period, but they were not "impossible" crime
stories. However, there is actually one short story that without stretching the
definition too far may fit the description "a strange disappearance story,"
namely The Sealed Letter by Aurora Ljungstedt. That story has already been
published in the collection The Hastfordian Escutcheon: Two Detective Stories
from Sweden in 1870 (The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, Shelburne, Canada 2005).
And to furthermore respond to the itching forty-nine-year-wide gap, we do not
know what the future will bring, when ardent and diligent enthusiasts continue
their digging in enormous, dust-collecting Swedish archives.
I
would also like to thank George A. Vanderburgh, John Robert Colombo, Johan
Wopenka. Nicolas Krizan and the copyright owners for making this project
possible.
—
Bertil Falk
Other Volumes of Victorian Detective Fiction from The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box
