Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens -- Short Stories

This February I have been reading short stories for Short Story February, as suggested by Rick Robinson at Tip the Wink. I did this once before, and I hope to continue doing it every February. This is the first set of stories I am reporting on. I have also been reading from two other collections, which I will post on next week.

Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens are spies, working for a secret government group in the UK called the Joint Services Standing Intelligence Committee (JSSIC). They are in their fifties and live in a fictional village in Kent. Mr. Behrens lives with his aunt and tends bees. Mr. Calder lives nearby, alone, and has a Persian deerhound named Rasselas. They are called upon when needed to handle special projects and missions. This book is comprised of twelve short stories featuring these characters.

Each story averages about 20 pages in length and follows an incident that one or both of the agents have been asked to address. They don't always work together and the cases are quite varied. Rasselas is often quite useful. Calder and Behrens carry out their tasks with ruthlessness when necessary.

The stories featuring Calder and Behrens were written from 1962 to 1982. Eleven short stories were published in Game Without Rules in 1968, and those stories were first published in Argosy.

The Spy Guys and Gals site has a good summary of the publication history of the Calder and Behrens stories. There is also more detail on that page about the order of publication. The stories in the books are not in the order published.

       The terrific pair of Daniel Calder and Samuel Behrens first appeared to readers in the pages of the U.K. magazine Argosy in early 1962 and would continue to show up there off and on for just over a decade with the last one appearing in 1973. While many of these adventures would get turned into teleplays for BBC Radio, two of the last three from the Argosy period were either up-to-then unpublished stories turned into teleplays or novelizations of the episodes.

       Just over half a decade would go by before they would again show up in print, this time in the U.S. magazine Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Again there were a couple that had been aired on radio before being shown in print.

It has been almost exactly three years ago I purchased my copy of Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens and read the first three short stories in the book, after having read all of the stories in Game Without Rules. It took until this February for me to finish up all the stories in the book. I don't know why it took me so long. I love all the stories. However, they are not light reading. They are packed with details and nuances, most of which I am sure I miss. I like the two agents and their matter of fact approach to their work, and other characters in the stories are also interesting, although usually not so well fleshed out.

See also:

Post on Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens at Tip the Wink.

Post on Game Without Rules at Existential Ennui.


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Publisher:   House of Stratus, 2011 (orig. pub. 1982)
Length:      245 pages
Format:      Trade paperback
Setting:      UK, mostly; also in Germany.
Genre:        Espionage, short stories
Source:      On my TBR pile for three years.