Audiobook · read by volunteers
Case of the Pocket Diary Found in the Snow
Auguste Groner (1850–1929)
Read by Dawn Larsen · 3 chapters · 1 h 47
About the book
A pocket diary is found in the snow, and with it begins a puzzle that draws in a member of the Imperial Austrian Police. Auguste Groner, who wrote some of the earliest detective stories in German, tells this tale in three chapters: the discovery in the snow, the story of the notebook and the lonely cottage. The account is presented as an episode from the professional experience of a police officer, and it has the patient, step-by-step feel of classic detection, where small observations lead to larger conclusions. Translated into English by Grace Isabel Colbron, it is read by a single LibriVox volunteer in a little under two hours, a compact mystery for a winter evening. Short enough for a single sitting, it offers the pleasures of the early detective story: a modest crime, a methodical mind and a solution reached by patient attention to detail.
Introduction
Auguste Groner was an Austrian writer who lived from 1850 to 1929. Born in Vienna, she is remembered as one of the first women to write detective fiction in German, and her stories feature the Viennese detective Joseph Müller, who appears in a number of her books, which were translated into several languages. Her work belongs to the early period of the genre, when the figure of the investigator was still being shaped.
The Case of the Pocket Diary Found in the Snow was published in English in 1910, in a translation by Grace Isabel Colbron. The story is told as an episode from the professional experience of a member of the Imperial Austrian Police, which sets the tone: this is a procedural mystery, with a calm narrator and a careful accumulation of detail rather than violent action.
Its three chapters are titled The Discovery in the Snow, The Story of the Notebook and The Lonely Cottage, and they move from a chance find in the snow to a story of the notebook and a lonely cottage. The tale gives a glimpse of a Central European setting and of police work as it was imagined at the beginning of the twentieth century.
The recording is read by a single LibriVox volunteer and lasts a little under two hours. It is short enough to enjoy in one sitting, perhaps on a winter evening. Today it is worth hearing for those who like early detective fiction, who want to discover a woman author of the genre, or who enjoy the particular atmosphere of imperial Austria.
Public domain
Auguste Groner died in 1929: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text