Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Death Going Down
WORK NOTES: trans by Lucy Greaves
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 8/23/1909-10/3/2006
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: Argentine
https://shinynewbooks.co.uk/death-going-down-by-matia-angelica-bosco/ * http://www.thebookbag.co.uk/reviews/index.php?title=Death_Going_Down_by_Maria_Angelica_Bosco_and_Lucy_Greaves_(translator)
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1917, in Buenos Aires, Argentina; died 2006.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, journalist, and novelist. Clarin (a newspaper), journalist, 1960.
AWARDS:Emece Novel Award, 1954, for Death Going Down (in original Spanish version as La muerte baja en el ascensor); Personality of the Year, Rotary Club of Buenos Aires, 1987; recipient of an award from the Italian government, 1990.
WRITINGS
Author of numerous novels in Spanish.
SIDELIGHTS
Maria Angelica Bosco was an Argentine writer and novelist who wrote primarily in the mystery and detective genre. She was so well known for these types of books that she has been called the “Argentinian Agatha Christie” for her “dedication to the detective genre,” noted a writer on the Argosy Agency Website. She also worked as a translator. Bosco was born in Buenos Aires in 1917 and died in 2006.
Despite her lengthy writing career and her reputation in Argentina, most of Bosco’s books remain untranslated. Death Going Down, her first novel, is also the first of her works to be translated into English. Originally published as La muerte baja en el ascensor in the early 1950s, the book earned Bosco an Emece Novel Award in 1954.
The novel hinges on a murder mystery and the efforts of a detective, Santiago Ericourt, to solve it. At the beginning of the book, Pancho Soler comes home to his well-secured upscale apartment after a night of drinking. When he gets into the elevator, however, he discovers a dead woman sprawled inside. The deceased turns out to be Frida Eidinger, a young woman who had recently moved to Argentina with her husband, Gustavo. The evidence shows that she died of cyanide poisoning in what appears to be a suicide. However, Ericourt believes that she was killed, and he spends the remainder of the book sorting out Frida’s connections with the residents of the apartment building and reconstructing the murder.
Reviewer Gill Davies, writing on the website Shiny New Books, found Death Going Down to be not only a mystery but a social commentary on Bosco’s time. The book “conforms to some of the conventions of the whodunnit,” Davies stated. However, “Bosco also seems to want to expose some truths about her contemporary society under cover of the mystery. Bosco is critical of many of her characters, foregrounding their misogyny, laziness, or selfishness and positioning them quite carefully in their class (and sometimes national) identity. Thus, this novel is quite innovative for its date in its take on classical crime writing,” Davies further remarked.
A Publishers Weekly reviewer called Death Going Down a “competent if unexceptional puzzler.” Reviewer Chris Roberts, writing on the website Crime Review, commented that the novel “despite being more than sixty years old still reads well. The style of the crime and its detection is of a different time, but those who find the form engaging will discover plenty to enjoy here.” The “writing thrusts the peculiar people at us—and struggles with the more normal-seeming characters. But it also manages to dump peculiar events on everyone concerned, which is ultimately why this book is worth investigating,” observed Bookbag writer John Lloyd.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, January 23, 2017, review of Death Going Down. p. 58.
ONLINE
Argosy Agency Website, http://www.argosyagency.com/ (October 31, 2017), biography of Maria Angelica Bosco.
Bookbag, http://www.thebookbag.co.uk/ (October 41, 2017), John Lloyd, review of Death Going Down.
Crime Review, http://crimereview.co.uk/ (May 27, 2017), Chris Roberts, review of Death Going Down
His Futile Preoccupations . . . , https://swiftlytiltingplanet.wordpress.com/ (December 7, 2017), review of Death Going Down.
Shiny New Books, https://shinynewbooks.co.uk/ (October 31, 2017), Gill Davies, review of Death Going Down.
María Angélica Bosco (Buenos Aires 1917 -2006) was an award-winning author, known as the Argentinean Agatha Christie for her dedication to detective fiction. Death Going Down was her first novel, and won the Emecé Novel Award in 1954.
María Angélica Bosco (Buenos Aires 1917 -2006) was an Argentinian writer and translator, who received numerous prizes and awards. Her first novel was La muerte baja en el ascensor, which won the Emecé Novel Award in 1954. She was known as the Argentinian Agatha Christie, for her dedication to detective fiction, and yet this is her first title be be translated into English.
María Angélica Bosco (Buenos Aires 1909 -2006) has built a proven literary career from her young age. La trampa, El comedor de diario, ¿Dónde está el cordero?, Borges y los otros, La negra Vélez y su ángel, Carta abierta a Judas, Cartas de mujeres, En la piel del otro, Burlas del porvenir, La muerte vino de afuera, Memoria de las casas and La noche anticipada are some of her books.
In 1954 she won the second place of the Emecé Novel Prize with La muerte baja en el ascensor.
Since then, the awards and the successes of this writer didn’t stop. After publishing La muerte soborna a Pandora, she started to work for the newspaper Clarín and in 1960 she won the third novel place on the Buenos Aires city prize.
In 1987, Maria Angelica Literary Bosco was named Personality of the Year by the Rotary Club of Buenos Aires and in 1990 she was awarded by the Italian government.
The writer was considered by many of his colleagues as Argentinian Agatha Christie for their dedication to the detective genre.
Death Going Down
264.4 (Jan. 23, 2017): p58.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Death Going Down
Maria Angelica Bosco, trans. from the
Spanish by Lucy Greaves. Pushkin Vertigo, $13.95 trade paper (160p) ISBN 978-1-78227223-6
Known as the Argentinian Agatha Christie, Bosco (1917-2006) published her first crime novel in 1954. This competent if unexceptional puzzler is now available in English for the first time. Early one morning, an inebriated Pancho Soler returns home to his upscale apartment building in Buenos Aires. Inside the elevator is a pale young woman in a fur coat slumped against a back panel. Soler gets a rude shock when he touches the woman's cold skin. She's later identified as Frida Eidinger, who recently moved to Argentina from Germany with her new husband, Gustavo; she died of cyanide poisoning, an apparent suicide. While not a resident, Eidinger had a key to the building. Supt. Insp. Santiago Ericourt, a somewhat generic sleuth, investigates what becomes a murder case. Ericourt must sort out the victim's complex relationships with Gustavo and the building's residents, as well as the interrelationships among the latter. In the end, Ericourt gathers all the suspects for a reconstruction of the crime in a denouement that falls short of Christie's standard. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Death Going Down." Publishers Weekly, 23 Jan. 2017, p. 58. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479714164&it=r&asid=5510e6e3543a869c4c4a58b4eb275988. Accessed 28 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479714164
Publisher
Pushkin Vertigo
Date Published
24 November 2016
ISBN-10
1782272232
ISBN-13
978-1782272236
Format
hardcover
Pages
160
Price
£ 7.99
Death Going Down
by María Angélica Bosco (translated by Lucy Greaves)
A beautiful young woman is found dead in the lift of a luxury Buenos Aires apartment block. Inspector Ericort and his assistant Blasi try to find out why.
Review
The body of Frida Eidinger is discovered late one night in the lift of a small block of Buenos Aires luxury flats. It is established that she was poisoned, and suicide or murder both seem to be possibilities. The police soon establish that the residents have many secrets, and the death is only the first of a series as investigations continue. For a long time, however, the motive for the deaths remains obscure.
Eidinger was discovered by Soler, a womanising drunk, who arrived only shortly before Luchter, a doctor. Torres the caretaker and his wife have plenty of tittle-tattle about the others currently in residence: Inarra, his wife and daughter, and a Bolivian, Czerbo, and his sister. Frida Eidinger’s husband lives elsewhere. All of these key persons have alibis.
Inspector Ericort and his assistant Blasi proceed by interview and cross-checking of facts, but have one or two unusual methods too. Ericort feigns a snooze on the bench in the square outside, enabling him to hear the remarks of the local gossips, who sit outside with their knitting shredding reputations. Blasi becomes obsessed with a laundry delivery boy who has unaccountably gone missing.
The police think it likely that Frida was in the building to visit one of three men: Luchter, Czerbo or Soler. Inarra, an invalid, they rule out. But why was Inarra’s daughter out so late and why didn’t she use the lift? And why does Eidinger’s husband display such unease?
This novel was first published in Spanish in 1954, and was the first of María Angélica Bosco’s detective fictions. Bosco was known as the Argentinian Agatha Christie for her dedication to the genre, and this book displays many of the trademarks. Apparently respectable families generate plenty of food for gossip which is exposed through police enquiries; Ericort brings them all together in the final chapter to receive a comprehensive explanation of events, and of course identification of the guilty party.
If Christie’s appeal lies with the veil of middle-class respectability torn aside by a moment of extreme violence, Bosco’s domain is very similar but as far as UK readers are concerned given an exotic twist by the location. What is traditionally known as a Latin temperament is in evidence, although several characters are recent arrivals from Germany. This suggested a plot development which misled me for while.
The book is one of a substantial list of classic crime now being re-issued by Pushkin Vertigo, and despite being more than 60 years old still reads well. The style of the crime and its detection is of a different time, but those who find the form engaging will discover plenty to enjoy here.
Reviewed 27 May 2017 by Chris Roberts
December 7, 2016 · 9:12 am
↓ Jump to Comments
Death Going Down: María Angélica Bosco (1955)
“That’s what happens to people who go out at night. Just look how they end up.”
I’ve posted previously on the crime books from Pushkin Vertigo. So far there have been some marvelous reads for crime fans: She Who Was No More, Vertigo, The Disappearance of Signora Chiara and several Frédéric Dard titles (all highly recommended by the way). Vertigo has also released a number of a number of novels from Augusto de Angelis–all much more standard police procedurals. Given the rather dramatic division between the book types (makes me think of Simeon’s Romans Durs vs. his Maigret novels), I’ve formed two figurative piles of books with the Augusto de Angelis on the left and all the other Vertigo titles on the right. That brings me to Death Going Down (original title: La Muerte Baja en Ascensor) from María Angélica Bosco–a police procedural that I’m going to place in the left stack with the Augusto de Angelis novels. However, I’ll add a caveat to that decision later.
Death Going Down opens on a cold night in Buenos Aires as Pancho Soler arrives home drunk to his apartment house. It’s an atmospheric scene as Soler stumbles from his car into the lobby of the building. He has just three minutes of light in the lobby (a regulation we’re told) and he makes it to the lift but sees it’s already in use.
All of a sudden he noticed that the lift shaft had filled with light and at the same moment, as if choreographed, the lobby plunged into darkness.
Someone had come down in the lift. He could make out a blurry shape on the other side of the door. Still leaning on the wall, Pancho moved to one side to make way for the person in the lift but the door remained stubbornly closed. All he could see was the shadow puppet outline of a shape curled up in the corner.
I don’t think I’m giving anything away to say that Soler opens the door and discovers a dead blonde in the lift. The police arrive, the residents gather, and the investigation begins. …
Death Going Down, a prize-winning crime novel, was published in 1955, and the story’s emphasis is the duplicitous lives lead by those in the apartment house along with the idea that the investigation is clouded by the number of immigrants involved. These relative newcomers to Argentina from Europe have lives shrouded in mystery. Are they victims of the nazis fleeing for their lives or do they have pasts they wish to escape from? And herein lies my hesitation in placing Death Going Down in that figurative left pile of Vertigo titles. Yes it is a police procedural but the refugees & immigrants, flotsam and jetsam from WWII still bring the war to Argentina’s shores a decade later, and that’s a nice twist.
There’s a solid assortment of suspects: playboy Pancho Soler, Dr Adolfo Luchter, caretakers Andrés and his bitter wife, Aurora Torres (she hopes the murder victim is the resident she likes the least,) the invalid Señor Iñarra and his family, the abrasive Bulgarian (former resident of Germany) Czerbó and his long-suffering sister Rita, and of course, the murder victim’s husband who married his wife by proxy.
There are three police figures in the book: Inspector Ericourt, Superintendent Lahore, and detective Blasi (my favourite of the three). That’s rather a lot of policemen for a 160 page book, and the result was that I was unable to get a firm grasp on any of their characters–although Blasi is the strongest drawn of the three. Here’s his approach to crime:
What do you do when you’re standing in front of a painting? You adopt different positions until you get the best perspective.
These days a common complaint about crime books is that they are too fleshed out with extraneous detail. In Death Going Down, the opposite is true, and while I can’t give away spoilers, the plot would have benefitted from further explanation of the past connections between the characters.
Finally, the author made mention of what happened to the victim’s dog, and this was a nice little touch to the tale.
Review copy
Translated by Lucy Greaves
Death Going Down by Maria Angelica Bosco
Argentinian Fiction, Author: Bosco Angelica, Classic crime, Reviewer: Gill Davies, Translated: Spanish
Reviewed by Gill Davies
Translated by Lucy Greaves
Thanks to Shiny – and the publishers – I am discovering and enjoying new crime writers. The latest one is the Argentine María Angélica Bosco who I had never heard of but whose work is well known and admired in Argentina. Death Going Down is reprinted in a new translation by Lucy Greaves for Pushkin Press who are planning more. The publishers say that
Pushkin Press was founded in 1997, and publishes novels, essays, memoirs, children’s books—everything from timeless classics to the urgent and contemporary. Our books represent exciting, high-quality writing from around the world…. Pushkin Press publishes the world’s best stories, to be read and read again.
It was quite a bold decision to publish Bosco and I do hope that crime fiction fans will try her.
Bosco has been described as the Argentine Agatha Christie but I think this is a selling point rather than an accurate description. The novel was first published in 1955 and it conforms to some of the conventions of the whodunnit. But, unlike Christie, Bosco also seems to want to expose some truths about her contemporary society under cover of the mystery. Bosco is critical of many of her characters, foregrounding their misogyny, laziness, or selfishness and positioning them quite carefully in their class (and sometimes national) identity. Thus, this novel is quite innovative for its date in its take on classical crime writing.
The title refers to a woman’s body discovered in a lift in an apartment building in the wealthy middle class area of Buenos Aires. It seems like a classic whodunnit: who is the woman? how did she get there? who was she visiting? was she even murdered or did she kill herself? The setting introduces a wide range of characters with potentially dubious backgrounds. It also permits strange encounters and movement across the city, exposing secrets that extend round the world and include recent history.
Soler, the man who finds the body is a drunk and a womaniser. Also living in the building are the harsh and arrogant German expatriate Boris Czerbo who lives with his sister who acts as his housekeeper and to whom he is cruel and vicious. With the murder, he senses “the bitter taste of the past being churned up”. There is Dr Luchter, also a resident, who inexplicably looks through the victim’s handbag and may have secrets of his own. There is a caretaker and his nosy wife. And to round off the cast of shifty and unpleasant characters there’s an invalid with a flighty daughter and a second wife who used to be the nursemaid. The investigation is carried out in an understated way by Detectives Ericourt and Blasi. They too follow a conventional pattern but are not perhaps as idealised as the classic detective figure in English and American Golden Age crime. Ericourt is older and experienced, somewhat taciturn, with idiosyncratic methods; Blasi is his young assistant. Their role in the novel is of course to find the murderer, but it is also a way of exposing the darker pasts and unsavoury secrets of most of the characters. Ericourt’s methods are occasionally described by the narrator, but we mostly learn via indirection. He reveals his thinking after the event, in contrast with Blasi (and others) who tend jump to conclusions. Ericourt, like all great classical detectives, is ingenious and always ahead of the game, even when the reader thinks that nothing is really being resolved. The narrative adopts his point of view at several points to show him puzzling out the clues.
Compared with contemporary crime fiction, Bosco like Christie has no interest in actual police procedures. Despite Bosco’s interest in social and cultural types, this is not realism or naturalism. For example, she quickly dismisses the routines of police work describing the forensic back-up team as getting on with “their nosy search of the past. … the men whose job it was to construct an event outside its real place time unleashed a chain of possibilities: climbing of walls, forced locks, fingerprints, footprints. Clues blossomed on powdered surfaces.” Crimes are solved by intuition and intellect, not by routine work.
As the investigation progresses, further crimes are committed and further puzzles introduced: “We started with one death and now we’ve got three deaths and a disappearance.” There is a murder that may be suicide; a second murder; another suicide; blackmail; adultery; deception. All is of course revealed by the end and every mystery is solved. But what remained for me was a question: what to make of its setting? It is set immediately after the end of World War 2. It includes German emigres, recently settled in the city, as did so many fleeing Nazis. It’s not apparently a “serious” political novel but it makes clear that the secrets below the surface are more than the business of literary games. For me this added an intriguing dimension to the whodunnit plot. Everyone in the novel has a secret whether a Nazi past, betrayal and adultery, or private revenge. This is mixed with some humour, social satire and other mystery conventions that tend to distance the reader and reinforce a sense of detachment and unreality. The climax of this comes with the finale of the novel when the detective re-stages the crime with the participation of all the major characters in order to reveal the villain. I felt a little bit uneasy about the mixing of serious history and trivial fictional exercises – but I suspect that Bosco went on in later novels to resolve this tension. This was her first novel and it seems that she went on to be bolder in her treatment of contemporary issues and found a way of integrating them into a crime fiction format. Still, this was an entertaining and enjoyable read – see what you think of it!
Maria Angelica Bosco, Death Going Down (Pushkin Vertigo, 2016). 978-1782272236, 151pp., paperback.
Death Going Down by Maria Angelica Bosco and Lucy Greaves (translator)
Jump to: navigation, search
Death Going Down by Maria Angelica Bosco and Lucy Greaves (translator)
Category: Crime
Reviewer: John Lloyd
Summary: More for the genre fan, this look at unusual events in 1950s Buenos Aires has exoticism in bounds.
Buy? Maybe
Borrow? Yes
Pages: 160
Date: November 2016
Publisher: Pushkin Vertigo
ISBN: 9781782272236
Share on:
Video:
In a strange time, in the years after World War Two, Buenos Aires is a strange city – peopled by her native residents, and many who fled the European theatre of war. And in a building that houses some of the more strange examples of those people on six levels of large apartments, something strange happens – one of them struggles home the worse for drink late one night and finds the lift descend to fetch him to his door, but carrying a blonde woman's corpse. A resident doctor soon turns up too, and the pair kicks into action the police investigation into her presence, which soon seems to point to suicide. This not being in a genre called suicide mystery, however, we know differently – but will certainly have to wait to piece the whole story together.
And by the time that happens, some other strange things will have happened – some of them brilliant and compelling, others, unfortunately, less so. I felt it imperative to mention the strangeness of things here, as I found it the overlying feature. It might be a problem with the translation, but I didn't feel as if I was getting everything out of all the people, and quite a few scenes caused me to reread. The book is contrasting – at one regard it's definitely in line with those mysteries featuring a small, insular band of suspects with one outsider policeman to solve everything, but at the other it's not always playing ball with what we'd expect. The discovery of keys is relevant, but we never learn til the end where it was made; people just have the sense of being off; and our policeman certainly doesn't fit into the clever-but-flawed character pattern we now know so well.
In fact, he is very light on character, and I found too much effort had been put in making the suspects quite so bizarre that that became just one element that was at fault. Here's an immigrant brother and sister couple, where he is a complete tyrant to her. Here's a family where the man is housebound with illness, with a dutiful stepwife, and a lovely daughter who is so utterly wilful in breaking with her father's wishes and stopping out all night. Here's the womanising drinker who finds the corpse in the first place – but there he goes, quite unused (to the extent that a line about him wondering when he'd be told why his presence somewhere was needed becomes an arch in-joke).
So the writing thrusts the peculiar people at us – and struggles with the more normal-seeming characters. But it also manages to dump peculiar events on everyone concerned, which is ultimately why this book is worth investigating. It's not the best by far from this young imprint, but it does have more than the specialist interest provided by it being the debut novel of a woman dubbed the Argentine Agatha Christie. I felt I certainly had to work to get to the end – if the page count was any longer, and if even more than is already here was packed in, I would have been struggling. It's a pity for me that that awkwardness will be what I take from this read the most, but at the core of it is a classical murder mystery, and one that does unusual things and presents them in unexpected ways.
I must thank the publishers for my review copy.