Dutch Treats: Crime Fiction by Dutch and Flemish Authors

by Josh Pachter

I translated two of Janwillem van de Wetering's short stories for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in 1985 but didn't do any further translation for EQMM until 2004, when editor Janet Hutchings asked me to find a Dutch story for the magazine's new "Passport to Crime" department. I contacted my old friend Theo Capel, and my translation of his "The Red Mercedes" appeared in the June 2004 issue.

I continued to translate stories by Dutch authors for Janet over the next several years and in 2011 branched out a bit and found her a story by Bavo Dhooge, a Flemish writer. Eventually, I started translating one-off stories by people working in an assortment of other languages -- Spanish, Italian, Danish, Finnish, Romanian, Afrikaans, even Chinese -- but most of the dozens of translations I contributed to "Passport" were by Dutch and Flemish writers.

In the early 2020s, I translated a novel by my friend René Appel, and it was published as The Amsterdam Lawyer by Steven and Leah Booth at Genius Book Publishing, who subsequently also published my own novel, Dutch Threat.

In 2025, I pitched Steven and Leah the idea of an anthology of my translations of short stories by Dutch and Flemish authors, and they agreed to publish it. The result was Dutch Treats, which includes twenty-one stories by a Who's Who of contemporary crime writers from The Netherlands and the Flemish region of Belgium. Fourteen of the stories originally appeared in EQMM, two in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, and five in other places.

I came up with the cover concept, and I think it turned out really well. (My only regret is that the imagery is all Dutch and not at all Flemish. What could we have put to suggest Belgium to American readers, though, let alone Flanders? The Belgian flag is almost identical to the better-known German one. Belgian fries are known to Americans as French fries. And chocolates, beer, and lace are, well, just chocolates, beer, and lace....)

The book was published on September 1, 2025, and is available at this link.

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