The Orient Club, by Robin Hazard Ray

 

"The Orient Club," by Robin Hazard Ray, in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, May/June 2026.

You are probably familiar with the phrase TMI, meaning Too Much Information.  Imagine a stranger telling you about their kidney operation, or love life. Or both.

In the world of fiction we usually call TMI an expository dump. Here is an undigested heap of information you, the reader, needs to know.

But what about Too Little Information? Sometimes the writer deliberately doesn't explain things, forcing the reader to make the last connections for themselves.  This is great if you do make the connections, annoying if you don't. 

In this story Ray does a little of both and makes it work.

Carol is an older woman, living in Boston, and the bane of her neighborhood is the Orient Club, a forlorn building that has stood untouched since it partially burned down two years earlier.  One day she sees a young man - just turned 18 - named Brandon who thinks he is now the owner of the property.  Brandon was a foster kid with a complicated history.

Carol tells him about the equally complicated history of the Orient Club which, over the decades, has had many owners and many different businesses   And here we have our expository dump, which Ray makes fascinating.

Brendan moves into Carol's house as they try to figure out the mysteries of the Orient Club, especially the fact that someone is paying the city taxes on the property to keep it from being torn down.  I don't mean to suggest that the two are comfortable partners.  The relationship between them is one of the stories best elements.

One night Brandon did not come home from the restaurant. When he finally opened the door late the next day, Carol was waiting. She called him an ingrate and graphically described the kind of sexually transmitted diseases he was likely to pick up. He listened impassively until she was done, then he took the house keys out of his jeans pocket and jingled them.

"Where did [your son] leave his? The mantlepiece? I'm eighteen and fuck off."

But this unlikely team pursues the mystery and -- we don't immediately understand how Carol figures out the answer.  The reader has to work that out for themselves.  And you will have fun doing it.