Book review: Pushkin Press’s crime imprint opens up a new world of thrills

Pushkin’s Vertigo imprint is off to a gripping start as it introduces its English-speaking readers to some of the best classic crime fiction never before translated.

The imprint takes its name from one of its titles – Vertigo by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac.

Since its inception in 1997, Pushkin Press has made a wealth of international literature available to anglophone readers. While it has gone beyond its original remit by publishing a select range of contemporary writers, it is famous for unearthing or reviving past European masters whose books either languished out of print for decades or were never translated into English in the first place. It was Pushkin that orchestrated the long overdue comeback of Stefan Zweig, and that introduced us to the works of Antal Szerb, starting with his magical novel Journey by Moonlight.

Now Pushkin Press has launched a crime imprint. Pushkin Vertigo promises to offer “a treasure-trove of classics from all around the world”. On the strength of the first four books published this month – each one slick, pacy, rich with intrigue and expertly translated – it has all the hallmarks of being a winning series.

The imprint takes its name from one of its titles – Vertigo by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. This 1954 crime thriller about possession and obsession by one of France's most successful writing duos was the inspiration for the Hitchcock classic. One of the pleasures of reading the book is noting how it compares with, and in places even improves on, the film version. The original setting is not post-war San Francisco but wartime France, and the authors crank up the tension by inserting routine snatches of news updates about the German advance on the country. Like the film, the book features an acrophobic former detective who becomes infatuated with a "lady in grey". But Boileau-Narcejac's Flavières is more complex and ultimately more broken than James Stewart's Scottie, being "prey to that mysterious inner pendulum which swung from despair to hope, from misery to joy, from timidity to audacity. No respite."

The book cuts to the chase by outlining Flavières’ case – “I want you to keep an eye on my wife” – in the first couple of pages. However, Madeleine’s bizarre behaviour is downplayed to mere “queer” antics: “she’s someone else,” Flavières is told. In contrast, Hitchcock rendered the mystery more mind-boggling by heightening the supernatural element: “Do you believe that someone out of the past, someone dead, can enter and take possession of a living being?”

While the film reprises the famous clock tower scene for its dramatic finale, the book’s denouement shocks by revealing the intricate web of deceit in the closing pages and showing Flavières commit a last, desperate, untelegraphed act.

An out-of-character wife is also at the centre of Piero Chiara's The Disappearance of Signora Giulia, the first of the celebrated Italian writer's novels to be translated into English. Set in a small town in Lombardy in the 1950s, it follows Commissario Sciancalepre on the hunt for a top criminal lawyer's missing wife. Sciancalepre sifts the testimonies of concierges, gardeners and gigolos and interviews suspects in Milan and Rome, all the time wondering if Giulia has run off and broken free of a loveless marriage or if she has been murdered by a cuckolded husband or vengeful Romeo.

Chiara’s novel is unique in various ways. Its slenderness (it weighs in at just over 100 pages) is matched by its lean or non-existent descriptions of people and of places (Sciancalepre has a big nose “the colour and shape of cooked macaroni” but is otherwise faceless). Chiara thickens the plot by having Giulia’s husband arrested – only for him to fight back from behind bars and loosely work with Sciancalepre by refuting his flimsy accusations and putting forward theories of his own about the true culprit. But Chiara saves his most original touch until last, with an audacious ending that readers will find either refreshingly ambiguous or maddeningly open-ended.

Another title that revolves around a falsely accused man protesting his innocence is Master of the Day of Judgement by the Prague-born author Leo Perutz. His books were admired by contemporaries such as Graham Greene, Ian Fleming and Jorge Luis Borges, and indeed Master reads like a heady blend of all three, a concoction of suspense and atmospherics, with a tangy dash of the fantastic. The unexpected death of a renowned actor is the latest in a string of motiveless suicides to rock Viennese polite society in the autumn of 1909. But not everyone believes it was suicide and fingers soon point to Baron von Yosch, the erstwhile lover of the deceased's wife and the owner of the pipe found at the death scene. The baron begins his frantic investigations in an attempt to clear his name, and his hunt for the killer turns into "the pursuit of an invisible enemy who was not of flesh and blood but a fearsome ghost from past centuries".

As Perutz’s desperate hero gets nearer to the truth, the crime’s supernatural elements are exposed as smoke-and-mirrors artifice concealing more down-to-earth but no less dastardly shenanigans. An ever-rising body count, a cryptic phone call and life-threatening hallucinations keep us hooked until Perutz explains all in the conclusion – then pulls the rug from under us in a postscript.

The black sheep of the quartet is Soji Shimada's The Tokyo Zodiac Murders. It is the longest of the books (it even comes with a dramatis personae), the most modern (first published in 1981), easily the most bizarre and grotesque, and it is the only Pushkin Vertigo title by an author who is still alive.

Shimada’s novel is a classic of the popular Japanese honkaku or “authentic” subgenre of crime fiction, which prioritises tight plots and carefully scattered clues. In 1936 an unhinged artist hatches a plan to kill and dismember seven women. Shortly after his violent death the murders are carried out, but no perpetrator is ever found. We jump to 1979 where two amateur detectives – one an illustrator, the other an astrologer – re-examine a mystery that has stumped and fascinated the nation for more than 40 years.

Shimada’s sleuths travel the length of the country following missed leads. They bicker, bounce ideas off each other and debate the flaws and merits of Sherlock Holmes. Towards the end, Shimada interrupts the narrative to throw down a gauntlet for the reader: all the facts needed to solve the crime have been laid out, so can we unravel the mystery before his two heroes? We weigh up dubious alibis and colourful testimonies, and peruse the assorted illustrations, including maps, charts, crime scene diagrams and family trees, and even if we are incapable of unmasking the killer, we still marvel at Shimada’s ingenuity.

However, there will be some readers who find Shimada's puzzle too convoluted, just as there will be others who complain there is not enough meat on Chiara's bare bones. Those wishing to play safe should begin with Perutz or Vertigo and then hold out until the next two titles are released in November: Boileau-Narcejac's first page-turning thriller, She Who Was No More, about murder and madness; and I Was Jack Mortimer, another brilliant Vienna-set mystery from between the wars, this time by Alexander Lernet-Holenia.

From 2016 on, Pushkin Vertigo will publish between eight and 12 titles a year, and we can look forward to more offerings from Perutz, along with the first of several fiendish cases for Augusto De Angelis’s famous creation Inspector De Vincenzi. De Angelis has been hailed as the father of the Italian crime novel and yet none of his books have appeared in English. We should be grateful that Pushkin Vertigo, like Pushkin Press, is amplifying these distant-yet-vital voices from the past.

Malcolm Forbes is a freelance writer based in Edinburgh.