In Hotel Bertram

At Bertram’s Hotel the intrepid Miss Marple, on holiday in London, must solve a deadly mystery at the end of a chain of very violent events. An old-fashioned London hotel is not quite as reputable as it makes out to be.… When Miss Marple comes up from the country for a holiday in London, she finds what she’s looking for at Bertram’s Hotel: traditional decor, impeccable service, and an unmistakable atmosphere of danger behind the highly-polished veneer. Yet, not even Miss Marple can foresee the violent chain of events set in motion when an eccentric guest makes his way to the airport on the wrong day.…

A grand old London hotel A series of alarming coincidences Danger lurking down every corridor

Hotel Bertram tampak anggun, penuh daya tarik, dan mengundang nostalgia bagi orang-orang yang pernah mengenalnya berpuluh-puluh tahun lalu. Para tamu yang berdatangan pun tetap dari kalangan yang sama: pejabat gereja, janda kaum ningrat yang kaya raya, gadis-gadis yang berlibur dari sekolah-sekolah mahal, sampai dengan para pensiunan jenderal. Siapa yang mengira di tempat seperti itu ada kejahatan yang mengancam? Siapa yang mengira bahwa di antara orang-orang itu ada yang tidak mengenakan identitas aslinya? Hotel Bertram penuh misteri tak terduga. Tapi, bagi Jane Marple, tak ada yang dapat disembunyikan dari pandangannya yang tajam. Kesenangannya mengamati segala sesuatu yang terjadi di sekelilingnya ternyata secara tidak langsung membantu Inspektur Kepala Davy dalam memecahkan misteri di Hotel Bertram ini.

During a vacation in London, Miss Marple becomes suspicious of the other guests in her too-dignified West End hotel.

Miss Jane Marple finds the genteel, traditional atmosphere of Bertram's Hotel tainted by crime.

Hotel Bertram is deftig, rustig, onopvallend en erg duur. Een stukje Londen waar de laatste zestig jaar niets veranderd lijkt te zijn. De meeste hotelgasten zijn daar alleen maar blij om. Miss Marple, die een week in het hotel logeert, vindt het echter een beetje verdacht. En natuurlijk blijkt ze gelijk te hebben. In het deftige, ouderwetse hotel gebeuren raadselachtige dingen. En sommige van de gasten zijn heel wat minder keurig dan ze lijken.

Before Sex and the City there was Bridget Jones. And before Bridget Jones was The Artificial Silk Girl. In 1931, a young woman writer living in Germany was inspired by Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes to describe pre-war Berlin and the age of cinematic glamour through the eyes of a woman. The resulting novel, The Artificial Silk Girl, became an acclaimed bestseller and a masterwork of German literature, in the tradition of Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories and Bertolt Brecht's Three Penny Opera. Like Isherwood and Brecht, Keun revealed the dark underside of Berlin's "golden twenties" with empathy and honesty. Unfortunately, a Nazi censorship board banned Keun's work in 1933 and destroyed all existing copies of The Artificial Silk Girl. Only one English translation was published, in Great Britain, before the book disappeared in the chaos of the ensuing war. Today, more than seven decades later, the story of this quintessential "material girl" remains as relevant as ever, as an accessible new translation brings this lost classic to light once more. Other Press is pleased to announce the republication of The Artificial Silk Girl, elegantly translated by noted Germanist Kathie von Ankum, and with a new introduction by Harvard professor Maria Tatar.