"This Time Oughta Go Different," by Robert Mangeot, in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, September/October 2025.
This is the sixth appearance in this space by my fellow SleuthSayer.
Mangeot's stories are mostly about character and language. For example, glom onto this opening paragraph.
In need of his five o'clock Tanqueray and tonic, a dire need after an all-day mandatory ethics seminar, Vernon took his chances at the Hotel DeLuxa. Nashville had gone hotter than hell's boiler room, and the DeLuxa offered the lone walkable glimmer of refinement in this South of Broadway wasteland. A glimmer only. The DeLuxa was sterile and grayed over, with not one velour cushion to ease Vernon's trick back moaning from the seminar's unforgiving stackable chair. He'd been non-chargable all week, sidelined, and without much glimmer there on that turning around, either.
From this we know the location, the season, the tone, and mostly we know that our protagonist is an ethically-challenged lawyer down on his luck.
But wait! The bartender has a mild pain which Vernon is convinced can be stretched into a profitable workman's comp case. The only problems are that the hotel seems to be mobbed up, the bartender isn't interested in suing, and, uh, she has disappeared.
Okay, those issues might worry a lesser man than Vernon. Or a less desperate one.
Very funny story.
No comments:
Post a Comment