"Murder in F Sharp," by Stephen Ross, in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, September/October 2025.
This is the fourth appearance here for my fellow SleuthSayer Stephen Ross.
There are plenty of cliche plots, or if you prefer tropes, that show up in mystery short stories. I think I read two or three stories a year about a child - usually a boy - discovering a dead body and deciding to investigate.
That's how we start here but as always the question is what you do with the material. Ross uses it in highly original ways.
My name is Thomas Phipps, and I discovered a dead body today.
Thomas is sixteen and he doesn't have to investigate the murder because he has a strong suspicion about who did it. And anyway, he has a bigger problem: his father wants him to keep taking classical piano lessons but Thomas wants to learn jazz. Now that's an important issue.
As I have said before, sometimes I read the first sentence of a story and find myself hoping the author can keep up that quality to the end and be my best-of-the-week. But this story belongs to the other extreme: I didn't know it was my Best until the next morning when I woke up, still thinking about it. Fine work.
