Johnny Christmas, by Ivy Pochoda

 "Johnny Christmas," by Ivy Pochoda, in Eight Very Bad Nights: A Collection og Hanukkah Noir, edited by Tod Goldberg, Soho Crime, 2024.

This story is essentially a character study, and a very good one.

The narrator, Davo, recently got out of the army and decides to get a tattoo.  He gets linked up to an artist named Johnny Christmas and immediately recognizes him as Mike Goldfarb, who he had known many years before at the Brooklyn House of Detention. Goldfarb was awaiting trial for running over his grandmother's landlord. Twice.  

Lovers and relatives of the prisoners stood outside the House of D in the cold, shouting at their loved ones.  One of them was Goldfarb's grandmother, holding a chanukiah.  Goldfarb refuses to come up to see the old woman, baffling and infuriating the other prisoners.  What is it with this guy?  He is cold and emotionless with sudden shifts to violence.     

Davo eventually finds out a lot about the man, as do we. This is one of those stories that didn't make my best list until after I read it, thought about it, and read it again.

Hole in my Soul, by John M. Floyd

  "Hole in my Soul," by John M. Floyd, in Janie's Got a Gun: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Music of Aerosmith, edited by Michael Bracken, White City Press, 2024.

 This is the fourth appearance here by my friend and fellow SleuthSayer.

What can I say about this terrific story? Not much without giving things away.  So let's talk about two different stories I read decades ago.  I don't recall the authors or titles.

The first tale I think I read in Queen or Hitchcock, probably the latter.  We follow a man walking through a city street, doing petty, nasty things.  It was my first encounter with the concept of keying a car.  He meets a young couple with their newborn baby and tells them "He doesn't look like either of you," leaving them in a shouting match.  Then he gets to his office and we realize that he works for the manufacturer of a  headache remedy and we have just seen him doing his job.

I believe I heard a high school teacher read the second story aloud.  I long thought it was by James Thurber, but I have never found it in his work.  We follow a man down a city street as he does minor good deeds, making everyone's life just a little nicer.  He gets home and his wife cheerfully tells him about her day, keying cars, and otherwise making people's lives slightly worse.  They agree that the next day they will change roles.

Okay, now on to Floyd's story.  We follow a man, the narrator, as he strolls down a city street, but first he saves a child from dying in a horrible accident...  And I won't tell you about the rest of his day.

These tales are all variations on what I have named the Unknown Narrator story in which the reader knows nothing about the main character except what he does or what people say about him.  The fun is finding out what he is up to.  And this one was a lot of fun.

Retro Rhapsody by Hugh Lessig

 

"Retro Rhapsody," by Hugh Lessig,   in Scattered, Smothered, Covered & Chunked: Crime Fiction Inspired by Waffle House, edited by Michael Bracken and Stacy Woodson, Down and Out Books, 2024.

Judy manages a diner.  Her problem employee is a fifty-something guy, twice her age, named Doutree who, wrongly, thinks he has a chance with her.

Her new employee is a cook named Army who is dependable, good-looking, and maybe has a secret.  Or a whole lot of secrets. 

Maybe one of these guys can help with the other. Or maybe he can make things much worse.

This is one of those stories where new layers are revealed every few pages.  I enjoyed uncovering them.

Melelani's Mana, by Lono Waiwai'ole

Melelani's Mana, by Lono Waiwai'ole, in Honolulu Noir, edited by Chris McKinney, Akashic Press, 2024.

The publisher sent me a copy of this book.

I paid this story a high compliment: as soon as I finished it I put the author's debut novel on my TBR list, because I wanted to know more about the characters. It's clear that he has written about them before and they are interesting folks.

But since I am not fully informed, forgive me if I make false assumptions.  Melelani appears to be Native Hawaiian.  Her lover Wiley is also, but grew up on the mainland.  Now he's a gambler, preparing for a big poker night, with a ten grand buy-in.  Mele wants to come to the game but she seems less interested in poker than the security issues.

And there are big issues because one of the players plans to rob the game.  Things turn very nasty. 

The story is well-written and I loved the characters. The casual supernatural element is a turn-off for me but your mileage may vary. 

 

Truth or Die, by Austin S. Camacho

 "Truth or Die," by Austin S. Camacho, in Scattered, Smothered, Covered & Chunked: Crime Fiction Inspired by Waffle House, edited by Michael Bracken and Stacy Woodson, Down and Out Books, 2024.

A few pages into this tale I felt awash in a cozy wave of nostalgia, which is odd since it is not a cozy or nostalgic story. Let me explain.

A century ago a staple of Black Mask Magazine was a tale in which a stranger arrived in a corrupt big town or  small city and started clashing with the resident gang of crooks (or competing gangs).  It takes a while for the reader to figure out whether the newcomer is a good guy or a bad guy - or, this being the world of hardboiled, a good bad guy or bad good one. 

This story begins with Skye getting off a bus at 4:25 in the morning.  She quickly finds an injured man in a dumpster and she pulls him out. Does that make her a good guy? Then she arranges to meet up with the head of one of two rival mobs.  Bad guy?

A nice and suspenseful story.  I was left with one question: Where does the first dead body end up? 

Windfall, by Michael Bracken

 "Windfall," by Michael Bracken, in Scattered, Smothered, Covered & Chunked: Crime Fiction Inspired by Waffle House, edited by Michael Bracken and Stacy Woodson, Down and Out Books, 2024.

This is the tenth appearance here by my friend and fellow SleuthSayer Michael Bracken.

Let me begin by saying of all the anthology themes I've run across this might be the most unexpected.  Admittedly, I have never been in a Waffle House.

Mike, Jerry, and Bill, three old pals, go fishing one day and make an unexpected catch: half a million bucks that fall (falls?) out of an armored car when it's robbed. 

But that kind of money is like fairy gold, hard to hold onto.  Mike keeps urging his friends not to spend conspicuously, but as one of them says "What good is having it if we can't spend it?"

You know what they say about the love of money. They could have added that it's the root of a whole lot of trouble.

I admit that what put this story over the top for me is the clever connection between it and the title of the book.  But you will have to figure that out for yourself.

 

The Grim, by Donna Andrews

"The Grim," by Donna Andrews, in Black Cat Weekly, #165.

This is Andrews' second appearance here. 

What we have this week is a fantasy-detective story.  Not the easiest mashup to make work, but I enjoyed it.

The narrator, nameless unless I missed it, is in charge of spooks in his area and a problem has come up, wouldn't you know it, in the busy season right before Halloween.

A few weeks ago I talked about world-building, and this is another example, although we might call this other-world-building, because we are discussing the rules of the afterlife.  It turns out that the first body buried in a cemetery can't leave it. It becomes the Grim, a fierce black dog which guards the graves and helps new spirits to find their way to the underworld.

For this reason, the narrator explains, wise cemetery-managers bury a dog before they bury other humans.  Because no person is likely to want the job of death-pooch.

In our story the problem is that the Grim at a new cemetery is clearly suffering from job dissatisfaction and is causing trouble.  Our hero has to figure out the cause of Fido's dilemma and find a solution.  

His work is satisfactory and so is the story.

 

 

Shakedown Street, by James D.F. Hannah

 

"Shakedown Street," by James D.F. Hannah, in Friend of the Devil: Crime Fiction Inspired by Songs of the Grateful Dead, edited by Josh Pachter, Down and Out Books, 2024.

 This is the second story by Hannah to appear here.

Beau is a bartender, a retired boxer, and an ex-con.  His big problem is Phil, who comes around regularly to collect his "taxes," which are paid to a gang boss named Swerve.  His second problem is that Leigh, a woman who frequents the bar, is Phil's ex and Phil doesn't take kindly to being exed.  Beau finds himself in the middle, and he gets squeezed.

There is lovely use of language in this one.

When they say you never forget your first time, they don't mean concussions.

 The drinkers are recovering from weekend sins, reciting empty promises like the Rosary, vowing they'll never do again what they did last weekend -- at least until next weekend.  They count on memories to be short, nature to be healing, livers to be regenerative.

Under Hard Rock, by Ed Teja

 "Under Hard Rock," by Ed Teja, in Black Cat Weekly, #164.

This  is a good example of what I call the Unknown Narrator story. The master, though probably not inventor, of the subgenre, was Jack Ritchie who won an Edgar for such a one.  In this type of tale all the reader  knows about the main character (usually the narrator) is what he or other people say about him, and that turns out not to be true.

In this case the narrator makes it clear early on that he is lying to the people he meets but that intrigues you; you  want to know what's really going on. He visits a small mining town and says he is a private eye, hired to find a man named Randall Cook.  But when the owner of the town's only restaurant tells him that Cook died a week before we find out that he already knew that.  So what's going on?

Cook died in a mining accident and it seems impossible that it could have been a murder.  And he had no obvious enemies.  What exactly is our hero hoping to learn - and what is there to learn?

Part of the solution is a little weak in my opinion. (It requires someone to be awfully gullible.) But it was enjoyable and avoided the usual cliches. 

The Hanging Judge, by Dave Zeltserman

 "The Hanging Judge," by  Dave Zeltserman, in Black Cat Weekly, #163, 2024.

World-building is a topic that gets discussed a lot among writers of science fiction and fantasy, but not so much  in mystery.  The assumption there is you are trying to set your story in the world we live in.  (Historical mysteries are different, especially if they are set in the distant past where we have to speculate about how people lived.)

But this story is all about world-building.  Of course, it is a fantasy mystery. Mike Stone begins by telling us "I might be hell's only operating private eye."     

So the world Zeltserman has to show us is hell, but not just any ol' Hades.  It turns out that every resident with a strong enough personality or "enough self-awareness" generates his or her own private hell, and can drag less aware persons into it.

Stone's problem is that he isn't getting any business.  (Well, his bigger problem is that he's in hell, and the worst part of that, he explains, is the monotony.  So having no business is a real drag.)  He concludes that the problem might be that he did a lousy job on an earlier case, and "everything has consequences in hell."  So Stone sets out to determine, this time for sure, who killed his client, a corrupt judge.

No need for me to detail his investigation.  You either enjoy this sort of thing or you don't.  I enjoyed it very much.