"Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School," by Brian Thornton, in Lawyers, Guns, and Money: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Music of Warren Zevon, edited by Libby Cudmore and Art Taylor, Down and Out Books, 2022.
My friend and fellow SleuthSayer Brian Thornton has written something unusual and strangely familiar.
The story takes place during prohibition in a Western mining town. The narrator is an unnamed private detective, working for an equally unnamed agency. His boss is the Old Man.
If you are familiar with the classics of our field you already know which author is being saluted here (or, if you prefer, ripped off). It's a good story, although I prefer the more elaborate version of this game that Evan Lewis did a few years ago.
I suppose the moral is, if you don't give your protagonist a name it is not hard for an other author to borrow him.
Getting back to the story, our nameless hero is spending a week in a brothel, because the agency has heard that a guy they are looking for might drop by. The target does show up, with a gun, and things get complicated. I liked the ending a lot.
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