Sponer is at first oblivious and then (when he discovers the body) panicky: after two failed attempts to tell the police he becomes anxious they will simply assume that he is the murderer. That fare is, of course, Jack Mortimer, whose journey to the Hotel Bristol is interrupted by the three shots which kill him. Its protagonist is Frederick Sponer, a taxi driver, whose life is turned upside down by one unlucky fare. I Was Jack Mortimer uses the now familiar (though, no doubt, less so in 1933) starting point of many a thriller: the ordinary man innocently caught up in extraordinary circumstances. It perhaps shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that Pushkin Press has unearthed I Was Jack Mortimer (one of his entertainments) for translation given their previous success with Mitteleuropean writers such as Stefan Zweig and Arthur Schnitzler. He was a prolific author, writing not only novels but poetry and plays even his novels can be apparently divided into those that are intended to be serious works of literature and those that are primarily entertainment. Alexander Lernet-Holenia was an Austrian writer who had the misfortune to be of an age to fight in both the first and second world wars, and the good fortune to survive both.
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