"The Grammar Dick," by Randy Eggert, in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, November/December 2026.
Parody, boy. That's a tricky thing.
For every thousand people who think they can parody what they think is the style of hardboiled fiction, maybe one pulls it off without being embarrassing. And what works for me may not work for thee.
Well, this one works very well for moi.
One cliche of the subgenre is the detective describing in detail the physical attributes of an attractive woman, typically a prospective client. Consider this example:
She had legs like two run-on sentences, but the good kind, the kind written by one of the masters, those whose linguistic skills are so beyond reproach that not only do we forgive them their grammatical lapses, we applaud them their lapses, their stranded prepositions, their comma splices, their vernacular colloquiums, uea, even their malapropisms. The hem of her dress cut the sentences shy of their endings, and what lay above were ellipses, the author leaving the rest to the reader's imagination. And I am a careful reader.
Whew. Still with me?
Our hero, Ed Wolfe, is not a private eye. He is, as the title indicates, a private grammarian.
Nineteen times out of twenty, the person who pays me isn't the one I'm hired to correct... Sadly most cases come from custody hearings, where one spouse wants to show the other's unfitness to rear children by presenting a list of infractions: "Seven split infinitives, 3 uses of hopefully as a sentential adverb..."
I think it was around this point that I flipped to the back of the magazine to learn that the author is a linguistics professor. Makes sense.
But this story is not about crimes to the English language. There is plagiarism, a missing person, and a possible suicide note.
I laughed out loud several times. Especially when Wolfe is being interrogated by cops who, with excellent reason, get pretty annoyed by his unique approach.
"When did you first meet Sheila Walburton?"
"I can't answer that question. It contains a false presupposition."
This story is a real treat.
