Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Mystery of the Sintra Road
    The Mystery of the Sintra Road
    The Mystery of the Sintra Road
    Ebook300 pages4 hours

    The Mystery of the Sintra Road

    By José Duarte oOrtigão and Eça de Queiroz

    3.5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Eça de Queiroz's first novel and Portugal’s first mystery-cum-detective novel in its first English translation
    Two friends are kidnapped by several masked men, who, to judge by their manners and their accent are men of the best society. One of the friends is a doctor, and the masked men say that they need him to assist a noblewoman, who is about to give birth. When they reach the house, they find no such noblewoman, only a dead man. Another man, known only as A.M.C., bursts in at this point and declares that the man died of opium poisoning. The doctor writes a letter to a newspaper editor, setting out the facts as he knows them. These facts are rebutted first by a friend of A.M.C. and then by the first masked man, who explains the whole story...
    Eça de Queiroz wrote this spoof ‘mystery’ with his friend Ramalho Ortigão, publishing it in the form of a series of anonymous letters in the Diário de Notícias between 24 July and 27 September 1870. Many readers believed the letters to be genuine. As the book progresses, one sees Eça gradually getting into his stride as a novelist, equally at home with humour and with human drama.
    Recently turned into a major Portuguese feature film it will delight avid Eça fans and lovers of mysteries.


    'It is pleasing to have this jeu d'esprit by one of Europe's finest writers available in English, in the idiomatically fluent style typical of Margaret Jull Costa,in collaboration with Nick Phillips.'It wears', to quote from the authors' preface,'an impudent air of triumph that rather suits it.'
    T L S

    'One of the greatest novelists of the novel's greatest age, Eca is also amongst the most readable due to his narrative energy, sweeping range and tart sense of humour.'
    Michael Kerrigan in The Scotsman

    'Queiroz is far greater than my own dear master, Flaubert.'
    Emile Zola
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDedalus Ebooks
    Release dateMar 25, 2014
    ISBN9781909232600
    The Mystery of the Sintra Road

    Related to The Mystery of the Sintra Road

    Related ebooks

    Literary Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      'De Gaulle' Paints An Excellently Clear Portrait Of A 20th-century Myth

      Aug 28, 2018

      Biographer Julian Jackson manages to be always thorough but never pedantic, always clarifying but never simplifying.

      3 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Hisham Matar

      Dec 18, 2018

      The fact that this isn’t recognized for what it is, a magisterial work and a 20th-century masterpiece, makes me even more anxious about our times. The post A Year in Reading: Hisham Matar appeared first on The Millions.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Jan 1, 2023

      watching my beloveds through Facetimethe tens of tens of apps downloadedso I can hear the scattered voicesof everyone I love & the silenceof my apartment building so loudmy whole world is now my kitchen& yellow couch & I haven’t touchedanyone in days

      3 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Jan 1, 2023

      And god created the waves and we the graves beneath, bodies madeparticulate by the force of water against water, water against rock, againsttime. I descend into the deep in a kind of prayer, listen to its centuries.Make me pay, will you, make me hurt

      3 min read

    • Article

      A Soothing Retreat

      Aug 1, 2023

      A Soothing Retreat
      1 min read

    • Article

      ‘Bitter, Gentle, Funny’: Irish Stars Unite To Celebrate Overlooked Poet Patrick Kavanagh

      Sep 18, 2022

      Patrick Kavanagh is one of Ireland’s most revered poets – a genius from a rural backwater who made the parochial universal. Yet his fame never really reached other shores. While William Butler Yeats and Seamus Heaney won Nobel prizes and were quoted

      2 min read

    • Article

      Revisiting Malcolm Lowry’s ‘Under The Volcano’ On The Day Of The Dead

      Jan 17, 2019

      The ultimate tragedy of Under the Volcano is that of humanity’s wasted potential. Can, Lowry pondered, the psyche repair itself? The post Revisiting Malcolm Lowry’s ‘Under the Volcano’ on the Day of the Dead appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    • Article

      To Hell And Back

      Sep 1, 2022

      The first complete English translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy appeared in 1802, and over the past two centuries, new versions have proliferated beyond count, like Beatles covers or Sherlock Holmes movies. A diverting literary parlor game is to imag

      4 min read

    • Article

      Samuel Pepys Would Have Been Huge on the Internet

      May 29, 2019

      Pepys’s fragmentary, digressive, contradictory, messy diary foreshadows our own individual self-fashioning. In Pepys we see Facebook; we see Twitter. The post Samuel Pepys Would Have Been Huge on the Internet appeared first on The Millions.

      13 min read

    • Article

      Re-Covered: The Mischief

      Dec 2, 2019

      Re-Covered: The Mischief
      8 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Nov 1, 2020

      The American linden sways nonplussed by the storm,a bounce here, a shimmy there, just shaking like musicleft over from the night’s end wafting into the avenues before sleep.I remember once walking down Clinton Street, and singingthat line returning,

      4 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Oct 16, 2023

      What a thing of joy is a new Francis Spufford novel. Golden Hill, his debut, was a transporting piece of historical fiction that captured life in early New York in all its quirk and contingence, and deservedly won a bag of awards. His second, Light P

      3 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems by Charles Baudelaire

      Jun 9, 2020

      After my friend and I left the tobacco shop, he carefully sorted his loose change; slipped some small gold coins in his left jacket pocket; into the right went the silver pieces; in his left pants pocket, a handful of centimes; and in the right, a si

      2 min read

    • Article

      No Detail Spared: ‘Warhol’ Expands On The Life Of The Pop Art Icon

      Jul 29, 2020

      Biographer Blake Gopnik mines the archives of the famously self-involved, and cannily entrepreneurial, painter of soup cans and Hollywood stars.

      2 min read

    • Article

      Joshua Ferris Writes a Work of Hope

      Aug 2, 2021

      This was always going to be about Joshua Ferris’s dad. “You catch me pretty fresh,” the author deadpans over Zoom. “I haven’t talked about it.” The “it” refers to his long-awaited new novel, A Calling for Charlie Barnes, which publishes in September.

      4 min read

    • Article

      Lover of Cars

      Sep 12, 2023

      all those Stingers Jaguars Tiguans Fiat 500sand San Remo Green Beemer i4s I love allthose model numbers numb-sexy like cashmerethrown over a dinosaur skeleton like a robot’skiss I fell asleep watching an Audi documentaryand dreamt of a low low R8 sco

      1 min read

    • Article

      Year in Reading: Jennifer Acker

      Dec 11, 2020

      I first read The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard in college in a fiction workshop taught by Anita Shreve, who once, with the best of intentions, lectured our class on the “banality” of the subjects we chose to write about, and who, when her most

      3 min read

    • Article

      Jena-gadda-da-vida

      Sep 1, 2022

      For a few years at the turn of the 19th century, Jena, a small university town in the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar, was an intellectual Shangri-La. And then, suddenly, it wasn’t. Though its population was barely 4,500, Jena was for a while home to many of th

      4 min read

    • Article

      It’s The Remix

      Feb 8, 2022

      Covid-19 and its unwelcome variants have managed to transform the very landscape of our current whiskey imbibing frontier. It has made dining out and whiskeysponsored happy hours more cumbersome as patrons fumble for vaccination cards, or try to reca

      3 min read

    • Article

      Sommelier Cheating Scandal Leaves Bitter Taste In The Wine World

      Oct 12, 2018

      Someone apparently revealed secrets about the test for aspiring Master Sommeliers. Organizers can't tell who got the unfair edge, so they dumped results for 23 applicants.

      2 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Adam Dalva

      Dec 14, 2020

      Anyone who teaches creative writing knows that our students bring us to the most implausible worlds—in one class, you might experience a sword fight on Mars, a break-up in a college dorm, and an admission that changes an identity forever. In an impos

      7 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Mystery of the Sintra Road

    3.5/5

    15 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      "Dr ***" and his friend "F" are abducted from the Sintra Road by four masked men, brought to a mysterious house to ascertain that an opium overdose is actually dead. While at said house, another man - "A.M.C." - bursts in on the group, and as a result, the mystery of the dead body is slowly unraveled, revealing a tale of love, passion, deceit, and murder. This is considered the first detective story published in Portugal and was written in 1870 by friends José Maria Eça de Queiroz and Ramalho Ortigão to shake up Lisbon and show that literary styles were changing. Published in installments in a Lisbon newspaper as a series of letters to the editor, many Lisboetas thought the story of the murder was true and it caused some commotion in the capital city. The last installment, however, included a note announcing that the story was fiction, signed by its two authors, who both went on to become huge influences on Portuguese literature's progression from Romanticism to Realism. The remarkable thing is, though, that not only was this a progressive experiment, it is a genuinely exciting story that holds up surprisingly well, even by today's standards. It does include some passages of excessive Romanticism that sound bloated to contemporary ears, but that's easily made up by the authors' genuine talent for telling a captivating story with characters that are allowed to be flawed and pathetic without being pitiable. I'll gladly admit to being a huge fan of Eça de Queiroz's already and this, his first novel, only added to my admiration of his skill.

    Book preview

    The Mystery of the Sintra Road - José Duarte oOrtigão

    J1^book_preview_excerpt.html}\ˮ$qVʲ1Ĉ2kH$2*beiK+WO%>DdVGfS^iS|7O|6y?V%Vڴ|xҿߴ?܎Uې*;ߵ?U.pڡ\]ФWS8 2& Uav Shg|z}'c~akܐP5kpGHW?,|5ǮMo{jXs[&ƾ 4;]{"10ԑ xE vȇx7V9Nas<{1bزnnܭD{>F5c66W|gGt8ӘU90 YQkC035Ms2[ MWFv}$#}{dn(:EӶ&HƉgRf.fG,!-k#J#$-?tw}roF_g-]kMVP?PpcA7v3%L6kD>[2 @< mQn{5X epr8"==Tff3!)>SqFZ' 9-Ռ%[z> in̖_;vDH8MT jL#s-}L1\ 1Z;90sxuSt!MHT-݂ ޘ\Na -ҷ T0086%WL]A>`^IuLgdub\F7Yw"RU0C+#)nkҪ= ]xgOx=#bYï"5f=c2nrZS p G*rf^Wo=%/Dk*YnZ+`&+vWIc mF-Ayf`F<-n"!_OҎ2/Y (ݰ\"~fEX4qOdx@ 5Ģ)l:gSJInRԮgBSNm0u)5+=7#/s-YĬ@qyPh TD@uӴ|ut3yCs/eҌ^vb(ieFWڂ/\@Y`Z IkVR| ӾC=E/V P`DÒYnO]k{0Vl\PuEvX,#*72T_â=/>lUVbFe X1"']f("$YPm=&KJxvLGZs6-Um$#Y .&bs]:z ^OeT70pƯY.5HcYy4|5.yOϥ5y 5&9>ZJݴ]yA%q/i&S4QޓRC?YPfĴͰ +<(T C*5YC3p~`LDA=̧#?JOCfԯ3o![\F^ZE/BrŁ, ]OvP21.DA־٣Y|r]0cxy+օ aqa NdH&8T-EbވVPG PD{@}X΅5f③͘ ғ .(+Q oC&-1ZM3nY DjhRpA7&إ;Me7M=9wȫ.6|iA@ٟl# `fsxƍ`ڈ@&ʏjT2G'WQRC{Dýֻn~y-G-8C C@Q4eBe(M#pF<jwzdX9yPoCw@B?mv&X5̸m&C& rj8~ '=Dv4ߘvӖ(#AV@ZfuE=%-i*UA\.d8&y%R1L&P"[r-7a .Y(~X-6f1@͊ MkmuRxNsVHa bLeDziO,D{tR4u#%Sܞ !?,jA*pfO@kPftmqxFbO iLpWӶn :—HᢃJٴvP/oPq4kD42 m#ϵeC(Xq:):RRѷu`qO4CNN%}UwcN@jb`v,ۣ+AŽ\*BknVˌT t 2g¾"PYi30ڴi μ%}WTgrjnUj={rUI .QuPzDV{^=RB,(y]wYr2c6a-n\8J.P!N{:L 5 d؈:SA|(!B)sqzS%na(YJZH\yO~RmeL2rNRG*}7:o\bNaJ̀I-;8RxMT J)߈=EcnjE} ]ӅE#.{B(GDH.Ȳ__8o7 l͓ȝQx(޲!dkZE+l ZJC(Ag` )F,"}gGqR|(=K B`*GW#O_G vNFW={T-@<^{~ Ql~/c¼$A*Qo B,Ʊ(اSjdW7|N_0x Z+ywþQbnŵG %DC-( &B֞o8TĊ=/6Ca_l̀fw]]ۓܧS2^b%C6aFX ݟVVKSܑ_o/`wl6,6R~B0q(LD0TXx(Wp5ʪAs2~}c]SlO'$+b4Hixqٛ #)r#"ʞ}LܫM εFXdID]ZlUny4rVE 29tni^&gvl""ҏ(bDSdi)L-,vUKߪ PٝEvg**L|V" 9*cJ0dc ygiTi?Uÿ7i-Ifk̶0Hf7udM?yxqEÅOv2 nV=KC2J\S춖?T"7Oqk^6vp ;Ն8?D&ofYI߱kJ#gPuZӸTmAS>*R?j_+֤%31 ,o `eGA8ɐ5_dUD>1ȊN?d *]4[ŎXi8Rn(qZ k o|N LX1Y4D \1uUj(y7,qh`"{7-mEɻZhFhL+] t>D&Z‡҂-eЄ^䒍gtaϱl'y:Ѿ>bHl砾Zmsa2ֻ qsa`*ICH˦bԗ7O# ^MJΰ%nI-\5z3Iv,4RUDΆBU)cpz~X9!g{xGrE>+jn67L'}ͣi}yD59E>]+[x$W_qnRL76p 6Y]vyB(g#%iA=Wiv)`kM.I&YȼSѴo2msd0v(YL)O1 ? vN ,.Gcy45^))l!Ve*4A3aMYfЊi.l̮m6o9TTEÞly>u~GvyvB,g/RH:}6P/ u>[<񖅏g<ݡCCCc`D/ٲVY<,Dl!r2Mb9+|cx8U@w`ڌT76-Nfь Jk-#\Fr ;8$O& %t3Mb6njp*9f/Ɗii8 {B$yXYۛg9m\}#]M<؞D\t Lo٫V]o3G;Vo &K^(6 4d\W<7a 9\Xzk >y*@vazlχxD 'XWf-uz4W3ٮaf-w)<0Φ,IH&&qn]?y~@Kfs#O}/; 9_P+E,Q̉86[%ghw0RnlWm$;2գ ]jɭVߏsZ!;52zcm/ݑe+"A-k8§Zs Fl3ʭX>5i}#y (D淝8&6]Ƙ6LZ^?>8Y[MI|'i :spÛy#uf*W267 S8Ƽ׹)ѬR܇}qhk1҄T<;?c}^=̹3 ;ϵl~>H"YR97t\X8A| `j6Qi[侃Ԑj;îd*":Ѕ3dͭ T;񀑪T͈(SŇBKD"~ #zfW_M"tvyTb ToaF! UK}:2 qFq㎫rso\xq ꏀ8҈\B6+bnf'OuWꨠB7U}R+gs(!P&TX6Yѥ #*#|s/v`vVq\BrfƐfVQ_{Fڠ-$EF@L7í︽7pTiRj"aV`,j6~V !Κ:! CF+tҮ`m)ϸ2ws~fK4LYAL5R^w- XH0g~Jibnlh*8læ qp:^ bsi)z'PUխD# 1$VjS[bL2C-VqYǯvYM.C3RvbD~c;)V2D3fvAZYIsl6l>-Phr6R*Y`V>ͥ فE*q{F`!f*.tb &kSGev\ĺŶaNsVwe+L0I{@$Gxز1j=D*J>ξ/_cO6NSLR;c#08n.z?w^4ai#X_eÎ\u[cq^N܂}#\S(,:$ogT;zvkxmm N}[)'ShLf<`k3 д'H[ٚBgw70T1>4qg1ZZANVaYm 2sN潻T"g}j .pj,)λ nv5h0 lH-l:-'),CFf> Vm3eвwݒPW9nXbˤf1r'J 5 :SK;4ȷ=wn?" p")>Zy%F4~(s+5ot,d]} %R錥cVI4lv\A q@?lJd XcQiy̢NHgUAGuظ[mbM=dLnQ{@GEf%l+/9'FC~~45Ωy<⪆=ο2[D6rqrel,ެm?`/v"ittq?HNfm7qW$ 2huclN#__0rC9 h sۏՠQ)YZ&18?Alp2Cյm s>oe;!dhP"~k ,|T~@i[nN@Pjqtl%$竀;Rrpz)خ"C&s!axni/R~Ӷs-vtijJ>[]x 7{OO.v䏞):Ό0zqqaQ}h }.MȊgtǏtNl))vbSye>ƳwX!LV k"_m#Q J$&з~ڣM3 ="5!׍F4 X*rA#š x8fi;뿈dl_zc3]EDv̙wqdUEJ'%f~9]FZ& vPĢU5j vz1Y t )1[udo"Svx)`8ܝ_H߶>G-cD%뇛lDqXKo1 FqfzJ416s_gn}46[pO ~ަ&o% 9+P#gW%/i폏<ՋMzOm'ĊSx8=ܭ|̹h^|@BMc¹bq~DշNdse$ہW⇚!A(Y~c/$3 tewDM^YP¹͓oIo$E9FyYj!+_3ې3EdSЀ
    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1