"The Return of Lord Kingwood" by Ivans

"The Lipstick and the Teacup" by Havank

"Kippers" by John Flanders

I first met Martin Edwards at Malice Domestic, when EQMM editor Janet Hutchings invited Laurie and me to join her, Martin, and several other EQMM contributors for Sunday breakfast. In 2016 and again in 2017, Martin invited me to sit at his table at Malice's Agatha Awards Banquet.

In between those two banquets, I got another invitation from the talented Mr. Edwards: he was putting together a collection of classic short crime stories for the British Library, and he asked me to dig up and translate some stories by early Dutch and Belgian authors.

With a little help from friends in Holland and Belgium and a lot of help from André Verbrugghen at the Vriendenkring Jean Ray, I was able to locate copies of stories by two Dutch crime writers (who wrote pseudonymously as Ivans and Havank) and one Belgian (who wrote pseudonymously as both Jean Ray and John Flanders).

Foreign Bodies was published in England in October 2017 and in the US (by the Poisoned Pen Press) in March 2018. It contains a total of fifteen stories. In his introduction, Martin wrote: "I am especially grateful to ... Josh Pachter, a highly capable crime writer with a particular flair for the short story."

Martin Edwards truly is both a gentleman and a scholar, and I appreciate his friendship even more than his invitation to contribute to this excellent volume.

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