Short Story Wednesday: Feuille D'Album by Katherine Mansfield

 

I discovered this story accidentally when I ran across some short story collections by Katherine Mansfield on Amazon. I had not read anything else by Katherine Mansfield and I looked for one of her stories to try out online. This was the first one I found.

"Feuille D'Album" 

The setting is Paris. The story was published first in The New Age in 1917, under the title of "An Album Leaf." A revised version later appeared in Bliss and Other Stories, a collection published in 1920.

A young man is noticed by several women. He looks sad and forlorn and seems very shy. Various women approach him, try to befriend him. He is civil but not really interested in them so they finally give up on him. 

The story continues on to describe the young man and his life in a small studio at the top of a tall building. Eventually he notices a young woman about his age who lives in a small shabby house across the way from his small studio. From this distance he falls in love with her and imagines what her life is like. The story has a nice, ambiguous ending.

Mansfield's descriptive writing is lovely in this story. Here is an example:

He lived at the top of a tall mournful building overlooking the river. One of those buildings that look so romantic on rainy nights and moonlight nights, when the shutters are shut, and the heavy door, and the sign advertising "a little apartment to let immediately" gleams forlorn beyond words. One of those buildings that smell so unromantic all the year round, and where the concierge lives in a glass cage on the ground floor, wrapped up in a filthy shawl, stirring something in a saucepan and ladling out tit-bits to the swollen old dog lolling on a bead cushion. . . . Perched up in the air the studio had a wonderful view. The two big windows faced the water; he could see the boats and the barges swinging up and down, and the fringe of an island planted with trees, like a round bouquet.

The story was very short and simple and I liked it. At first I saw it as a slice of life story, but later decided it may be too romantic or imaginative to be categorized that way.

I found a copy of the story online here.

I later discovered that I already own a Kindle version of The Garden Party and Other Stories, with an introduction by Colm Toibin. I also recently purchased a Kindle copy of The Complete Short Stories by Katherine Mansfield, and I read an additional story from Bliss and Other Stories, titled "The Dill Pickle." That story was sadder, and more serious, than "Feuille D'Album." It was about a man and a woman who meet unexpectedly after not having seen each other for six years. Their memories of the time they spent together when they were younger are different. I enjoyed that story equally as well. I am motivated to read more stories by Mansfield and will look for a print copy of one of her short story collections soon.

Murder on the Yellow Brick Road: Stuart M. Kaminsky

The Toby Peters mystery series is set primarily in Hollywood, California. Each book in the series is centered around a celebrity. Toby is a perpetually down-on-his-luck private eye; the books are humorous and clever. There are 24 books in the series.

Murder on the Yellow Brick Road is set in 1940, and Judy Garland is one of the primary characters. Toby gets a call from Warren Hoff at M.G.M., who requests that he look into the death of a little person dressed up as a Munchkin. The body was found on an old set of The Wizard of Oz, which had come out the previous year. Toby soon meets Judy Garland, who had heard his name at a party recently and wants him to work on the case. In addition to the humor and the intricate mystery plot, this book also features cameos of Clark Gable and Raymond Chandler.

About the author:

Stuart M. Kaminsky (September 29, 1934 – October 9, 2009) was an American mystery writer and film professor. He is best known for the Toby Peters mysteries and the Inspector Rostnikov series set in Russia, consisting of 16 books. He received the 1989 Edgar Award for Best Novel for A Cold Red Sunrise, a novel in the Inspector Rostnikov series. He was a past president of the Mystery Writers of America and in 2006 received the Grand Master Award from that organization. 

Kaminsky also published two shorter series. The Abe Lieberman series of ten books is set in Chicago; Lieberman is a sixty-year-old Chicago police detective. The Lew Fonesca series is set in Sarasota, Florida. Fonesca is a process server who ends up investigating crimes. There are 6 books in the series.

I am a big fan of Kaminsky's mysteries. I have read all but the last book in the Inspector Rostnikov series. I would like to read all of the Toby Peters books, but I have to find out how many books I already own. I have read the first book in both of the other two series and I thought they were excellent. The series are all different. 

Short Story Wednesday: "Kill Now—Pay Later" by Rex Stout

 

I read "Kill Now—Pay Later" in June, I think. Or it may have been early July. I have been having trouble reading short stories lately. This is one of the mystery novellas starring Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. The length was 70 pages. It is one of three stories in Trio for Blunt Instruments by Rex Stout, published in 1964.

This is how the  story begins:

That Monday morning Pete didn’t give me his usual polite grin, contrasting the white gleam of his teeth with the maple-syrup shade of the skin of his square leathery face. He did give me his usual greeting, “Hi-ho, Mr. Goodwin,” but with no grin in his voice either, and he ignored the established fact that I expected to take his cap and jacket and put them on the rack. By the time I turned from shutting the door he had dropped his jacket on the hall bench and was picking up his box, which he had put on the floor to free his hands for the jacket.

“You’re an hour early,” I said. “They going barefoot?”

 “Naw, they’re busy,” he said, and headed down the hall to the office. I followed, snubbed; after all, we had been friends for more than three years.

Pete came three days a week—Monday, Wednesday, and Friday—around noon, after he had finished his rounds in an office building on Eighth Avenue. Wolfe always gave him a dollar, since it was a five-minute walk for him to the old brownstone on West 35th Street, and I only gave him a quarter, but he gave my shoes as good a shine as he did Wolfe’s. None better. I never pretended to keep busy while he was working on Wolfe because I liked to listen. It was instructive. Wolfe’s line was that a man who had been born in Greece, even though he had left at the age of six, should be familiar with the ancient glories of his native land, and he had been hammering away at Pete for forty months. That morning, as Wolfe swiveled his oversized chair, in which he was seated behind his desk, and Pete knelt and got his box in place, and I crossed to my desk, Wolfe demanded, “Who was Eratosthenes and who accused him of murder in a great and famous speech in four-oh-three B.C.?”

 

Pete Vassos is a bootblack. He had walked into the office of Dennis Ashby, vice-president of Mercer's Bobbin's, for his first scheduled appointment of the day, and the room was empty. He looked out the office window to the street below and saw a man's body on the sidewalk, with police around the body. It was his client, and Pete left the building and came directly to Nero Wolfe's office. When he described the situation, Wolfe tells him to go the police immediately. Pete is clearly perturbed and leaves.

A day later, Pete's daughter, Elma, comes to see Wolfe to tell him that Pete is dead. He was found at the base of a cliff, dead. And from there the story gets very complicated.

My thoughts on the story

This is one of those stories where the mystery is so-so but the content of the story is interesting and entertaining. In the Nero Wolfe mysteries, I like the setting in New York City (in this case, in the late 1950s). I spent some time looking into the history of bootblacks and whether there are bootblacks today (the answer is yes). It was all very interesting.

In this story, Wolfe works for nothing. That is not unheard of, but it is unusual. Pete Vasso's daughter insists that Wolfe clear her father's name and find out who killed him because Pete worshiped Nero Wolfe. 

Regular characters featured: Inspector Cramer, at his crankiest. Two of the freelance investigators, Saul and Fred. Saul is a genius but prefers to freelance.

Archie has a lot to do in this one; he does get quite irritated with Wolfe for not keeping him in the loop, but that is is a normal occurrence in this series.

 

Short Story Wednesday: The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century

 

The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century is an anthology edited by Tony Hillerman and Otto Penzler and published in 2000. The anthology contains 46 short stories, and is 813 pages long. This is my husband's book, which he purchased in 2025 at the Planned Parenthood book sale which we attend every September.

In addition to the short stories, the book has a Foreward by Penzler, an Introduction by Hillerman, and Biographical Notes for each author at the end.

I haven't read any of the stories in this book, but I have read several of the stories from other sources. All the stories listed below were good reads.

• I read "A Jury of Her Peers" by Susan Glaspell, published in 1917, from an anthology of short stories selected by Elizabeth George, A Moment on the Edge. 
• I read "The Possibility of Evil" by Shirley Jackson online. I think it was the first short story I read by her, except for "The Lottery." It was published posthumously, in 1965.
• Two of the stories I have read were published in 1996. I read "Red Clay" from Red Clay, Blue Cadillac by Michael Malone. 
• The other story from 1996 was "The Dark Snow" by Brendan DuBois. My notes indicate that it was very well done, a great read, but the ending so very dark that it turned me off.

As with most anthologies of short stories, there are mixed reactions to this volume and the stories chosen. For anyone interested in comparing how the styles of the mystery short story changed over the years, this book would probably be very useful.

I am including a list of the stories in the book below. The list is in chronological order. 

• A Retrieved Reformation / O. Henry
• Paul's Case / Willa Cather
• The Problem of Cell 13 / Jacques Futrelle
• Blind man's Buff / Frederick Irving Anderson
• Naboth's Vineyard / Melville Davisson Post
• A Jury of Her Peers / Susan Glaspell
• The Gutting of Couffignal / Dashiell Hammett
• Haircut / Ring Lardner
• Blue Murder / Wilbur Daniel Steele
• The Perfect Crime / Ben Ray Redman
• The Baby in the Icebox / James M. Cain
• The Murder / John Steinbeck
• Sense of Humor / Damon Runyan
• Ransom / Pearl S. Buck
• Red Wind / Raymond Chandler
• The Catbird Seat / James Thurber
• The Rear Window / Cornell Woolrich
• An Error in Chemistry / William Faulkner
• The Nine Mile Walk / Harry Kemelman
• The Adventure of the President's Half Disme / Ellery Queen
• The Homesick Buick / John D. MacDonald
• Gone Girl / Ross Macdonald
• The Moment of Decision / Stanley Ellin
• First Offense / Evan Hunter
• The Couple Next Door / Margaret Millar
• The Day of the Execution / Henry Slesar
• The Terrapin / Patricia Highsmith
• The Possibility of Evil / Shirley Jackson
• The Comforts of Home / Flannery O'Connor
• Good Man, Bad Man / Jerome Weidman
• Goodbye, Pops / Joe Gores
• The Whimper of Whipped Dogs / Harlan Ellison
• The Wager / Robert L. Fish
• Do With Me What You Will / Joyce Carol Oates
• Quitters, Inc. / Stephen King
• The Absence of Emily / Jack Ritchie
• By the Dawn's Early Light / Lawrence Block
• Iris / Stephen Greenleaf
• Three-Dot Po / Sara Paretsky
• The Parker Shotgun / Sue Grafton
• Too Many Crooks / Donald E. Westlake
• Hot Springs / James Crumley
• The Dark Snow / Brendan DuBois
• Red Clay / Michael Malone
• Poachers / Tom Franklin
• Running Out of Dog / Dennis Lehane