Don't Push Me, by Liza Cody

 "Don't Push Me," by Liza Cody, in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, July/August 2024.

 This is the fourth story by Cody to make this page. 

I have said before that dialog is character and so is first person narration.  

I'm unfairly known in my regiment as Basher Belker.  The joke is that I hit first and think later.  I don't care.  Women are outnumbered twenty to one where I work, so it's not a bad nickname to have.  It's certainly better than my other moniker -- Shrimp.

Debby Belker is a squaddy - a British soldier.  She has seen a lot of combat overseas but this story takes place in England and the trouble starts when she sees a man beating a small boy. True enough, she hits first and asks questions after.  Turns out the boy  is a thief, but the man is selling counterfeit goods.  The police have no interest in prosecuting him but Belker takes advantage of a possibility that does not exist in the United  States: She organizes a private prosecution.

Turns out the syndicate the bad guy is working for objects to this.  They have some violent plans for our hero.  But Basher Belker is a long way from a soft target.  A terrific story of an underdog that bites hard.

I am not Fluffy, by Liza Cody

"I Am Not Fluffy," by Liza Cody, in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, December 2013.

There's a lot going on in this one.  It takes a while to piece the story together and understand the way the narrator is telling it.  So, who is she (besides not being Fluffy, I mean)?

I worked as a hostess and greeter at a bar-restaurant six nights a week for five years while Harvey qualified to be a tax lawyer.  And for two nights a week Harvey was going round to Alicia's flat to bounce her bones.  "you were never there," he complained.  "What was I supposed to do all by myself every night?"

What indeed.  Insult to injury: Alicia was an old friend of hers.  And now that Harvey is making a bundle he wants a no-fault divorce and a big white wedding to his new love.

Our narrator goes for textbook passive-aggressive tactics: refusing to sign the divorce papers.  She can't afford a lawyer on her hostess salary so she changes to a less respectable but more remunerative profession.   

And she begins writing her protests against the world around her in chalk on the sidewalk, signing them Fluffy.

Is this a story about a nervous breakdown?  A split personality?  Or is our heroine learning to not be Fluffy anymore, to be a person who can take care of herself?

Damn good work.