Plot or Premise

This book is an amazing collection of 36 shortstories from a master storyteller combining romance, history, danger, twists, international intrigue, and domestic angst.

What I Liked

The collection is a really nice mix, particularly some of the ones with twist endings. Here is an overview of each of the stories and the ratings for each.

• NEVER STOP ON THE MOTORWAY: Woman driver is chased by a van down the motorway, with the context backlit by recent rapes and murders. Fantastic twist. 5.00
• OLD LOVE: Two competitors, one boy, one girl compete against each other in everything including who loves the other more and are inseparable throughout life. 4.50
• SHOESHINE BOY: Mountbatten (sic) pays a visit to St. George’s where a drastically underfunded Governor rolls out the red carpet. 4.50
• CHEAP AT HALF THE PRICE: Mrs. Rosenheim wants a bauble from the jewelry store but has to play hustle to get the men in her life to commit to buying it. 4.00
• BROKEN ROUTINE: A man whose routine is unflappable is somewhat disturbed by a brash youth on the train who wants to read his paper and smoke his cigarettes. Nice twist. 4.50
• AN EYE FOR AN EYE: A woman has an alibi for the death of her husband: she was not only in the hospital (although the time is shaky) but also blind…or is she? 4.00
• THE LUNCHEON: A up and coming man takes an attractive (married) woman to lunch to try and get business favours. Unfortunately, lunch is expensive and he has no budget. 3.50
• THE COUP: Two business rivals are stranded in Nigeria during a coup, and they end up resolving their differences and being the real coup. 3.50
• THE PERFECT MURDER: A man commits an accidental murder of his mistress after finding out she was also stepping out with another man and manages to frame the man for the murder. A cute twist at the end. 4.00
• YOU’LL NEVER LEARN TO REGRET IT: David is dying of AIDS and leaving everything to Pat. They trick the insurance company despite his condition and collect handsomely on David’s death. But insurance companies are sometimes trickier than one might think, as are their brokers. 3.75
• THE FIRST MIRACLE: A cute twist on an old tale has a historical figure running errands around the birth of Christ. 3.50
• THE LOOPHOLE: Two friends get into a heated argument at the club and not only engage in slander but also physical fighting, leading to a legal battle and an eventual settlement, yet the two remain friends. 4.00
• THE HUNGARIAN PROFESSOR: An Englishman visits Hungary for the Olympics and meets a Professor who knows all about England and wants to practice his English and talk about all the sites in London. 4.25
• THE STEAL: A tightly-budgeted couple takes a vacation and is forced to endure the overblown ramblings of an obnoxiously rich couple, up to and including the purchase of an oriental rug. 4.75
• CHRISTINA ROSENTHAL: A strange story of a Jewish marathon runner and the gentile woman he fell in love with, and the strange stories of their love over time. 4.25
• COLONEL BULLFROG: A Colonel becomes a POW in Asia shortly before the end of WWII and the strange relationship that develops between the captive and the captors. 4.00
• DO NOT PASS GO: A political refugee resettles in America, but during a return flight to the area of his birth, his plane is forced to land in Iraq, where there is a bounty on his head. 3.50
• CHUNNEL VISION: A strange tale of a man about to be dumped by his latest fling, where the woman runs up expensive charges at a restaurant where the man explains to an old friend a detailed plot of an upcoming novel. The old friend, also a novelist, is horrified as the plot is the plot of his latest best-seller, and the man doesn’t know. 4.00
• DOUGIE MORTIMER’S RIGHT ARM: A story of rowers and the mysterious cast of the arm of one of the first rowers which keeps disappearing from the rower’s club. 3.75
• CLEAN SWEEP IGNATIUS: A Nigerian Minister of Finance wants to cut out the heart of corruption and flys to Switzerland to get the names of the citizens in his country who have Swiss bank accounts. 4.00
• NOT FOR SALE: An up-and-coming artist gets swept off her feet by a gallery owner who wines and dines her to finish some stunning paintings for her first showing, with initially tragic results. 4.00
• ONE-NIGHT STAND: Two male friends are inseparable until they meet a woman that impresses both of them, despite each being already married, and they both pursue her with reckless abandon, cutting each other off in each attempt until one finally succeeds. Neat feminist twist. 4.50
• A CHAPTER OF ACCIDENTS: An art hustler likes to borrow paintings and then return them, while at the same time picking up the nearest available wife for a turn around the studio. Burned twice, a gallery owner plots an act of terminal revenge. 4.00
• CHECKMATE: An elaborate plan to trick a woman into bed revolves around a game of “strip”-chess. But the plan goes too well for a while, and then a final twist to set things right. 4.00
• THE CENTURY: A sports tale of an elaborate cricket match of Herculean competition between two giants at Oxford and Cambridge. 3.50
• JUST GOOD FRIENDS: A strange bar tale leading to a new companion for a recently-bruised male ego. 4.00
• HENRY’S HICCUP: A rich man tries to hold on to his comfortable life despite the impact of the Great War in Europe. After the war, he’s disappointed to find privilege doesn’t return to the owner. 4.00
• A MATTER OF PRINCIPLE: An upright (and uptight) businessman tries to export his business values to Mexico when he tries to get a construction contract. 4.50
• TRIAL AND ERROR: More of a short novella than a short story, this is the tale of a man convicted of murder who hires the straightest arrow at Scotland Yard to find the corpse which he thinks is still walking around very much alive, and that his wife was in on the frame. 4.50
• THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN: A publisher visits a club in NYC and grabs hold of a story of a backgammon championship from the 1930s and how a non-player apparently beat the world champion despite numerous setbacks that week. 4.50
• À LA CARTE: A boy wants to follow his father’s footsteps working at a car factory, but his father makes him work for a year in London to see if he can find something more upwardly mobile, and he does: chef! 4.00
• THE CHINESE STATUE: A man travels to China as a diplomat and is given a statue of some value by a peasant, and has to try and find a way to repay the debt. 4.50
• THE WINE TASTER: A wine taster is challenged to a duel of palates by an unscrupulous rich upstart. 4.00
• TIMEO DANAOS…: A bank branch manager with pretensions to grandeur takes his wife on a Mediterranean cruise, and she wants to buy a new dinner service. 4.00
• NOT THE REAL THING: A strange combination of foreign governments, an engineer who helps rebuild their basic services, a woman with two suitors who marries the engineer, and the desire of the engineer to show up his now important former rival (despite the fact that the engineer won the girl). All in all, a story worthy of medals (a subplot of the story). 4.50
• ONE MAN’S MEAT…: A story told in two parts. The first part is the intro — a man sees a beautiful woman entering a theatre, and finagles a seat next to her. Then, he asks her to dinner and the story diverges into four possible endings.
  • RARE: Everything goes perfectly, all too well in fact, and the ending is a depressing twist. 4.00
  • BURNT: The woman’s husband turns up, so the night is a bust and goes downhill from there. 4.25
  • OVERDONE: Everything goes horrible between the two, and the woman is basically a shrew and the meal feels like a battle scene. 4.00
  • À POINT: An amazing combination of optimism and lightheartedness that outshines the other three endings by far. 5.00

What I Didn’t Like

That there weren’t even more stories or that some of the really good ones weren’t longer!

The Bottom Line

An excellent collection.