Short Story Wednesday: Stories from Murder and Other Acts of Literature

Murder and Other Acts of Literature is an anthology of 24 short stories that include a crime but are written by authors who are not crime fiction authors. Some examples are William Faulkner, W.S. Gilbert, Nadine Gordimer, Gabriel García Márquez,  Rudyard Kipling, and Naguib Mahfouz. The stories are not whodunnits or puzzle mysteries, just stories that often include a death.

This is my husband's book. He bought it at the 2025 book sale and read all of the stories in May. He liked a bit more than half of the stories. His favorite stories were "The Hotel of the Idle Moon" by William Trevor and "Mr. Loveday's Little Outing" by Evelyn Waugh. 

Here are my reviews of three of the stories in the anthology.

"Montraldo" by John Cheever

This is the first story in the book and it is 9 pages long. It was first published in the print edition of the June 6, 1964, issue of The New Yorker. 

The first sentence is very good, and sets the tone of the story:

"The first time I robbed Tiffany’s, it was raining."

That is how the narrator of the story finances his trip to Italy. After his sea voyage to Genoa, he buys a second-hand car and drives to Montraldo. Instead of staying in a hotel, he decides to stay in a rundown villa on the cliff. Why would he stay there when he could stay in two luxurious hotels in the area?

He says:

"I stayed because of the view, because I had paid my rent in advance, and because I was curious about the eccentric old spinster and her cranky servant."

The spinster owns the villa, and she and her servant have a very contentious relationship.

I do not remember reading any of John Cheever's short stories before now. I liked this story a lot, and I want to try more stories by him. I like the style of his writing.

"The Hitch-Hikers" by Eudora Welty

A traveling salesman picks up two hitch-hikers. One has a guitar, the other man is kind of surly, and it appears that they have been traveling together for a while. The salesman decides to stay at a motel, one of his normal stops on his route. While he tries to get the motel manager to let the two men sleep on the porch in the back, the two hitch-hikers have a fight, and the man with the guitar is badly injured. There are reports that the two men were trying to steal the salesman's car.  

I haven't had much luck reading stories by Eudora Welty. I have read a few stories from The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, and I did not like any of them. I have not given up on her stories, but I did not like this one particularly. It sets a mood, which to me was depressing. It was not a bad story, it just did not do anything for me. It was not engaging, and I kept expecting more out of it. It was first published in 1939.

"The Portobello Road" by Muriel Spark

This was the only story in Murder and Other Acts of Literature that I had read previously. I covered it in a previous post, and I have copied my review from that post.

In this story, the narrator is a ghost. For some reason not described in detail, this ghost has not left the earth. She often strolls down Portobello Road, visiting the marketers and their stalls on the pavement. On one of her strolls she sees two people she knows, Kathleen and George. She speaks to the man and he can see her, although the woman cannot. From this point the ghost tells the story of four children who were friends: herself, nicknamed "Needle"; Kathleen; George; and a boy named "Skinny." They are very close friends while in school, but after they graduate, they go off to other areas, even other continents. George goes to manage his uncle's farm in Africa, and Skinny and Needle end up visiting him there. George later returns to Great Britain to see Kathleen, and eventually marries her. I am not that fond of ghost stories, but I liked this one.