“Hangman’s Break” by Albert Tucher, in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, July 2013.
I have written before about the type of story I call the Unknown Narrator. That means that all the reader knows about the narrator is what other people say about him/her -- and those people are wrong. Tucher's story is a variation - the people really do know about the narrator's secrets, but the reader has to slowly figure them out.
The year is 1969 and hero is a police chief who got his job in part because during World War II he fought alongside the son of the local industrialist. Now that same son is found hanged on a railroad bridge. Suicide, or something else? We learn the grim details of his war experience, and then we learn how the after-war yearas have effected our hero. And some rough semblance of justice is meted out.
Good story.
Hi Robert, great to see Al Tucher getting his props on this marvelous, period tale.
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