Crime Comes Calling

My idea here was to publish, in Dutch, a collection of crime stories by non-Dutch authors but with Dutch settings and/or characters. Unfortunately, I couldn't find enough of them to fill a book, so I sort of cheated a little: a couple of the tales were revised by their authors to include a Dutch connection, one is set in England and revolves around a conman who is pretending to be Dutch but really isn't, and I even snuck in Janwillem van de Wetering's "There Goes Ravelaar," written in Dutch by a Dutchman and around the same time translated by me into English for EQMM.

My own contribution, "Skyjack" (here titled "De Kaper") had an American setting and characters when I sold it to EQMM in 1973. By 1984, when I "samengesteld" (edited) this volume, the scene had shifted from New York's JFK to Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport, and all the characters had changed their names and their citizenships from American to Dutch.

I also wrote kind of a cute introduction, which talks about how what Hollanders call an "American party" is almost identical to what we Amurricans call a Dutch treat. You learn something new every day, now, of niet soms?

Return to Bibliography.