UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Anton Chekhov, The Shooting Party (1884)

           Ivan Petrovich Kamyshev, “retired investigating magistrate,” brings a manuscript to an editor identified as “A. C.” (Chekhov published this novel serially under the name Antosha Chekhonte). The first-person narration purports to be by an investigating magistrate named Sergey Petrovich Zinovyev, drinking partner of the local Count, Alexey Karneyev, but affecting to despise him. Zinovyev fancies himself an expert on women and denies his sycophancy by asserting his mental superiority to the Count.

            The Count has just returned from several years’ absence, and the first half of the book is taken up with the revels of the two men and others of the Count’s hangers-on. The characters are not pleasant and the going is fairly tedious until Olga, the pretty daughter of a local forester, makes an appearance, and both the Count and Zinovyev become infatuated with her. She, however, marries the Count’s estate manager, Urbenin, who is almost three times as old as she. On her wedding day she confesses to Zinovyev having made a terrible mistake in marrying Urbenin, and she begins an affair with the much younger Zinovyev. But after a short while she leaves her husband to live with the Count.

            At a shooting party, Olga is found stabbed some distance away from the others. Her husband is charged with the crime, and Zinovyev conducts a ham-handed investigation. Olga regains consciousness before dying, but will not name her attacker. The one-eyed servant Kuzma knows something about the crime but will not tell it to Zinovyev. Before the servant can speak with the Prosecutor who’s been called in, he is murdered in the cell where he’s being kept. Zinovyev gave free run of the jail to Urbenin before this, so Urbenin is charged with the new crime as well. Eventually he is convicted and sent to Siberia.

            In a postscript to the manuscript, the editor describes how Kamyshev returns to get the editor’s verdict on the manuscript, and how the editor then accuses him of the murders described in it. Kamyshev does not deny the accusation. Chekhov’s story thus anticipates Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) in the narrator’s being the culprit.