Sunday, September 23, 2012

Window of Time, by John H. Dirckx

"Window of Time," by John H. Dirckx, in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, November 2012.

I wrote once before about Dirckx's series of stories about Cyrus Auburn. I think that one of the things that make these police procedurals memorable is that while Auburn works alone he has a cast of supporting bit characters with recognizable personalities who get to play thier small roles in each episode.  We know that the crime scene man is going to bump horns with the coroner's guy, and so on.

In this case, a nasty gossip columnist has been killed in his own apartment i a high securtiy high rise.  Aubusrn has to figure out who done it, of course.

The other thing that makes these stories stand out is the cleverness of the writing style.  For example, Dirckx could have written "Auburn thought the workmen had probably not been as prompt as they claimed."  Instead he wrote: "Auburn suspected the roundness of these numbers."  Nice.

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