Short Story Wednesday: Stories from Murder and Other Acts of Literature

Murder and Other Acts of Literature is an anthology of 24 short stories that include a crime but are written by authors who are not crime fiction authors. Some examples are William Faulkner, W.S. Gilbert, Nadine Gordimer, Gabriel García Márquez, Rudyard Kipling, and Naguib Mahfouz. The stories are not whodunnits or puzzle mysteries, just stories that often include a death.This is my husband's book. He bought it at the 2025 book sale and read all of the stories in May. He liked a bit more than half of the stories. His favorite stories were "The Hotel of the Idle Moon" by William Trevor and "Mr. Loveday's Little Outing" by Evelyn Waugh. Here are my reviews of three of the stories in the anthology."Montraldo" by John CheeverThis is the first story in the book and it is 9 pages long. It was first published published in the print edition of the June 6, 1964, issue of The New Yorker. The first sentence is very good, and sets the tone of the story:"The first time I robbed Tiffany’s, it was…