Showing posts with label EQMM. Show all posts
Showing posts with label EQMM. Show all posts

Saturday, March 16, 2024

What is Your... by Mat Coward

 


"What is Your..." by Mat Coward, in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, January/February 2024.

This is the eighth story by Coward to appear in this blog.

Sometimes a writer faces the challenge of finding something new in a formula.  But sometimes there is no formula and the writer is producing something sui generis, belonging to no category. Not for the first time, Coward has done the latter.

Our protagonist is an actor, not as young or successful as he would like to be, but with enough fame that he is occasional asked to fill out the type of questionnaires  that show up in popular magazines.  What is your chief failing?  Where are you at your happiest?

He is tired of filling them out and says he is always tempted to answer What is your guilty pleasure? with "Child molestation and fox hunting."

This story takes the form of such a questionnaire and his dry comments on each query and the answers he would like to give.

Is there a crime involved?  Oh yes, and the nature will slowly reveal itself in this charming, witty, tale.

Sunday, November 26, 2023

Kit's Pad, by David Krugler


"Kit's Pad," by David Krugler, in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, November/December 2023.

 Kit's life went to hell two years ago and he has been homeless in Chicago ever since. One freezing day  he figures out a way to break into a mansion which is empty and for sale.  The perfect place to get a warm night's sleep!

It turns out to not be so easy.  Every night someone new shows up, searching for a hard drive the absentee owner possibly hid in the building.

What's on the drive? Who are all the people who want it?  And, most important, where the heck is it?

A fun story.

Sunday, November 19, 2023

Spear Carriers, by Richard Helms


 "Spear Carriers," by Richard Helms, in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, November/December 2023.

As far as I can tell, this is only the second time an author has appeared in my best-of column twice in the same month.  Even more impressive (to me, at any rate), this is Helms' tenth story to make it here, which puts him in a tie for first place with Mark Thielman, Joseph S. Walker, and Terence Faherty.  

Dave and Sam have bit parts in a Broadway play, as policemen.  They only show up at the very end which leaves them with a lot of time on their hands.  One night Dave goes out for a bite and the clerk gives him his food for free. "Thank you for your service."

This happens because Dave is wearing his costume - which is to say, something that looks very much like a police uniform.

Hmm...

Dave reports this to Sam who is the imaginative type.  I'll bet you can think of some of the plans he comes up with.  And being brighter than Sam you can probably foresee some of the things that could go wrong.

But not all of the ones Helms dreams up. 

Clever plot and very funny writing.  

"If we're caught, we'll be fired!" I yelled.

"We're actors!" Sam yelled back.  "Getting fired is part of the deal!"


Sunday, July 23, 2023

Her Upstairs, by Michael Z. Lewin

 


"Her Upstairs," by Michael Z. Lewin, in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, July/August 2023.

This is the fourth appearance in this column by Mr. Lewin.

I just checked.  I have used the word "silly" in reviews here at least fifteen times.  Last time I wrote: "A very silly story, but satisfying.  (Hey, what's that but about?  Let's say and satisfying.)"

And here we are again.

Barry and Evvie are an older couple whose happy home is disturbed by a very annoying upstairs neighbor.  They get desperate enough that they start thinking about killing the bad lady.  But first they decide to pray on it.

Well, not pray exactly.  You see, they believe in the old gods, the Greek ones, and they know that the gods communicate with humans through... cribbage?  Seriously?

There's a lot of technical cribbage stuff in here I mostly ignored but the  dialog between Olympian deities was right up my alley.  

Aphrodite, known for her reason and passion, was first to speak.  "Aw, isn't that lovely. They have a problem and they want our help."

"That's not what The Game is for," Zeus roared again...

"Blow them away!" Ares, the God of War, urged.  "Rules are rules."

Aphrodite is known for reason?  Don't think so.  But the story is a treat.

Sunday, July 9, 2023

Martin, the Novelist, by Marcel Aymé

 


"Martin, the Novelist," by Marcel Aymé, in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, July/August 2023. 

Can I call this a 2023 story?  It seems to have been written (or set) in the 1930s, and the author died in 1967.  But I think this is it's first publication in English.

And it is a treat.

Martin is a successful novelist with one great flaw.  He kills off his characters.  Even his protagonists.  Sometimes in the middle of a book.  In one novel he killed off everybody.

His publisher can't stand it anymore and extracts a promise that no one important will die in his next book, or no money.

That's hard enough for Martin to bear but even worse is a visit from one of his characters, who is very unhappy with the plot.  Everybody's a critic, right? 

And then one of his friends comes with a special request: Could Martin put a certain real person in his book, kill her, and thereby bump her off for real?

Talk about meta.  Aymé rings more changes on the theme and they are delightful.   


Sunday, June 4, 2023

A Flash of Headlights, by Ken Linn


"A Flash of Headlights," by Ken Linn, in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, May/June 2023.

This one is right in my wheelhouse, as they say.   I am drawn to stories about people who screw up and then seek redemption, successfully or not.  

Brody does yard maintenance.  A year earlier he was charged with a DUI.  He has been sober ever since, just barely.

But that's not the issue for which he seeks redemption.

He makes a casual spur-of-the-moment decision to do what he considers a friendly gesture.  This leads to a tragedy - a tragedy which affects people he cares about.  

Many years ago I wrote here: "There is a streak of puritanism running through some noir literature.  Take one step off the straight-and-narrow and you are inevitably doomed.  Things keep getting worse and every attempt you make to correct your path only drags you inexorably toward the pit."

This story doesn't have the feel of noir, but it does have that sense. Every move Brody can make feels like it will make his situation worse.

If there is a moral in this fine story it is this: To achieve your goal you first need to figure out what your goal really is.  

Sunday, May 28, 2023

The Incurious Man, by Terence Faherty


"The Incurious Man," by Terence Faherty, in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, May/June 2023.

This is the tenth appearance in this column by Faherty, which ties him at the tippy-top with Mark Thielman.  Mark is a fellow SleuthSayer while Faherty is a SleuthSayer alum.

I think it was Michael Mallory who predicted that most crime fiction in the future would  be set in the days before smart phones and the Internet made certain kinds of research (and calls for help) inconveniently convenient.  This story is an example.  It is set in the 1990s and if it were written about the world of today it would have to be quite different.

Owen Keane is a private detective and he is starting a job at a law firm.  Well, not much of a job.  He has been hired on a temporary basis mostly to provide company for a friend who has reluctantly taken over the family business.

But on his first day, taking the train from New Jersey to New York City, he encounters something very strange.  Every day for a week a woman near Rahway has held up a sign for people on the train to see.  The signs seem ominous, if not threatening, and refer to Giovanni and Elvira, whoever they are.

Everyone on the train is fascinated by the signs except one man who ignores them.  And that attitude fascinates Keane, and makes him suspicious, because he is a curious man.  His lawyer friend says: "It might be dangerous for you  two to come together.  Like matter meeting antimatter.  There could be an explosion."

Of course Keane ignores his advice and discovers a particularly cruel  scheme.  Terrific story.

Monday, April 24, 2023

Drinking in the Afternoon, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

 


"Drinking in the Afternoon," by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, March/April 2023.

This is the eighth appearance on this blog by Rusch.

Here is a proposition I would hate to have to defend: Maybe writing a compelling low-key story requires more skill than writing a fast-paced action tale.  I think bullets and mayhem may tend to keep me turning pages more than subtle psychological stuff.

On the other hand, come back next week and I may disagree with myself.

This is a low-key but compelling story that caught my attention immediately and never let go.  Here is how it starts:

When it was all over, he didn't count how many friends he had lost.  He just walked out of the hospital into the thin sunlight on that hot August afternoon, tossed his uniform in the nearest bin, and did not look back.  He left his car in the employee parking lot.

Good writing?  Oh yes.  And so many questions we want answers to.  When what was all over? Did his friends die or simply cease to be his friends?  What type of job did he have that required a uniform?  And why would he abandon his job, his car, and presumably the life he has been living?

On the side of avoiding spoilers I will fail to answer these questions but I will say that Quinn (like everything else going forward, his name is brand new and almost randomly chosen) is not a criminal and is not on the run from anything except bad memories.

He winds up in the southwest, a thousand miles from his past, and starts to build a new life, totally different from the one he left.  Then there is the possibility of a crime, and a puzzle that needs solving.  And oddly enough, the solution may connect to the choice he made...

 


Sunday, March 26, 2023

Mrs. Hyde, by David Dean

 


"Mrs. Hyde," by David Dean, in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, March/April 2023.

This is the seventh appearance here by my friend and fellow SleuthSayer.

Regular readers of this column may recall that I am not a big fan of pastiches, but I do like homages.

The pastiche is fan fiction: Author B trying to create a story in the style of and with the characters of Author A. Consider, for example, ten zillion Sherlock Holmes stories not written by Conan Doyle.  

A homage on the other hand is something more subtle. B delves into the universe A has created and produces something new and different.

Dean has offered us a homage here and, boy, it is a doozy.

This is apparently the first in a series of Victorian-era stories about Dr. Beckett Marchland.  He is an alienist, which is to say, an early psychologist.  One day he receives a troubling letter from a woman who reports that her once loving and kindhearted husband is being changed for the worse by a bad companion.

The woman is Mrs. Edward Hyde.  The wicked friend is Dr. Henry Jekyll.

At this point the reader may be excused for saying: Huh?

Dean has turned Robert Louis Stevenson's novella inside out and takes us to very interesting territory indeed.  I should mention that this tale takes place in London, 1888, during the plague of attacks by Jack the Ripper.  Could Jekyll and/or Hyde be involved in those grisly crimes?

Purists may point out that Stevenson's book appeared in 1886, but that's a small bit of disbelief to suspend for such a wonderful story.  The characterization is rich and one twist literally made  my jaw drop.

   

 

Sunday, February 12, 2023

The Soiled Dove of Shallow Hollow, by Sean McCluskey

 


"The Soiled Dove of Shallow Hollow," by Sean McCluskey, in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, January/February 2023.

It is rare that a first story makes my best-of-the-week list, rarer still when that first story  is a long, possibly novelette-length piece.  This is one.

And it's a private eye story, of sorts.  What's a private eye story?  If you say a story about a private eye you are clearly unaware of what I call the Scudder exception.

When the Private Eye Writers of America were creating the rules for their Shamus Awards one of the very best characters in the field was Lawrence Block's Matt Scudder.  For most of his career he had no P.I. licence.  So it is not surprising that the rules said, essentially, that a P.I. story had to be about someone who investigates crimes for pay, but doesn't work for the government.  

So a lawyer or journalist would qualify but not  a cop or a spy.  And people like Scudder who, as he put it, did favors for friends who then bought him gifts, was eligible. 

Which brings us to Shane Caine, the narrator of our tale.  One night in a bar in Georgia he brags about some crimes he solved, not a P.I., but as a person who  "just sort of stumble[d] into things."

A man named McDounagh overhears him and is desperate for his help.  He lost his wallet to a couple of con artists in a  badger game.  The wallet contains a top-security I.D. card and if he doesn't get it back by 8 A.M. he will lose his job.

Caine immediately recognizes that  the badger game was not the usual variety.  Something odd is going on, something beyond a casual theft.  What follows is a long but fast investigation that ends in a trail of blood.

I enjoyed the adventure and hope Shane Caine stumbles into some more of them.


Saturday, December 3, 2022

Street Versus the Stalker, by Pam Barnsley

 


"Street Versus the Stalker," by Pam Barnsley, in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, November/December 2022.

A modest little story that gets most things right.

Gina is an inner-city teacher and a genuinely nice person, the kind who makes friends easily with people you and I might cross the street to avoid.

When some of these folks notice a van following her in a suspicious manner they react, much like antibodies to an infection.  But they are busy and not the best organized crowd, so it is not certain whether the good guys will win...

Nice writing, too. Here is a description of the woman who runs a produce store:

Ava rattled off the math for the oranges under her breath, offered a discount, entered the amount in the cash register, loaded oranges into Gina's cloth bag, nudged a box of apples back into place with her hip, held the portable credit-card machine for Gina to swipe, scratched her shin with her running shoe, and tilted her head to watch the street.

No wonder her grandson says she has ADHD.

I enjoyed this tale a lot.



Tuesday, September 13, 2022

Deconstruction, by David Dean


"Deconstruction," by David Dean, in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, September/October 2022.

 This is the sixth appearance by my fellow SleuthSayer on this page. 

Bruce is terribly excited to get his first permanent job as an electrician for a construction company.  But problems start piling up.  His coworker/roommate is a pothead who seems to only keep his job because the boss is his uncle.  And then there is a lot of equipment from other contractors going missing.  By the way, whatever happened to the guy Bruce replaced?

From the very beginning you can guess where this story is going but you will enjoy the trip.

Tuesday, July 26, 2022

Storm Warning, by Dana Haynes


"Storm Warning
," by Dana Haynes, in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, July/August 2022.

This is the third appearance on this page by Dana Haynes.

Some stories are all about suspense, building slowly up like a weather system.

The main participants in this situation are Jordan and Lizette Birdsall.  Jordan is a wealth Texas oilman.  The insurance company is sending an expert to examine his collection of rare paintings.

That in itself is not the cause of the suspense.  The paintings are everything they should be. But the inspector's assistant is a beautiful blond woman who looks a lot like Lizette did when she first caught the eye of her now-husband a decade before.  And that makes her very uncomfortable.

Another source of tension is the nasty relationship between the two insurance people. But worse is the tornado watch which quickly turns into a tornado warning. Most of the characters retreat to the storm-proof basement where tensions of all kinds escalate.  Did I mention that Jordan keeps his firearms collection down there?          

I did NOT guess where this clever tale was headed.



Monday, July 18, 2022

The Secret Sharer, by W. Edward Blain


 "The Secret Sharer," by W. Edward Blain, in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, July/August 2022.

In the last two years many fiction writers, me included, have had to deal with the knotty issue of Covid.  How do you include it in a story?  You can ignore it, setting the tale in the near past  or (hopefully) near future.  You can include it in passing, with casual references to masks and vaccinations, etc.  Or you can build a story around it.  

Blain's is one of the best I have read in the last category.

Henley teaches English at a boarding school.  Because of the pandemic his students are scattered to several continents and he is teaching via zoom with all the messy issues involved in that technology.  But none of those compared to the catastrophic disaster of  the home of his favorite student exploding during a class, taking the entire family with it.   

There's more to this than meets the eye, beginning with the fact that the boy's parent's seemed to know something was wrong.  So why didn't they act?  And what was the mother's mysterious profession?  Is it possible the father was somehow involved in building the bomb?

The solution is very satisfactory - and wouldn't have worked before the lockdown.

Monday, March 14, 2022

Morbid Phenomena of the Most Varied Kind, by Mat Coward

 


"Morbid Phenomena of the Most Varied Kind," by Mat Coward, in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, March/April 2022.

This is the seventh appearance in this column by Mat Coward.  He writes extremely silly stories and he does it very well.  Consider this opening paragraph:

If you were thinking of assassinating a politician, my main advice would be don't bother -- they keep spares.  You could spend a whole week popping off the corrupt, the cruel, the ruthless, and the irritating, and they'd just keep replacing them faster than you could reload.

Josh has just fired three shots at a businessman-cum-politician.  He missed, but that was the idea.  He and his roommate are totally against violence.  They simply want to make the big man look imperiled because they want to make money by selling his stock short. 

Amazingly enough, the plan works.  Now all they need to do is keep from getting caught.  The potentially fatal piece of evidence is the rifle Josh fired at the bigwig.  See, it could be traced to Oscar.  They found a clever way to dispose of it but because of crooked businesses and surprisingly efficient government bureaucrats - you can't trust anyone these days -  the rifle has disappeared into a landfill.  Our heroes feel they need to rescue it before a bad guy - or worse, an investigating lawman - finds it.

Then we could take it back home and think of another way of getting rid of it.  Being back at square one with no idea what to do next would be  a huge relief.

Hilarious.

Monday, February 14, 2022

Bad News, by Steve Hockensmith


"Bad News," by Steve Hockensmith , in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, January.February 2022.

This is the fifth appearance here by my friend and former SleuthSayer Steve Hockensmith.  It is the second showing by the characters who star in his highly original novel series.

For those of you who are new to the tales, these are westerns starring Gustav and Otto Amlingmeyer, better known as Old Red and Big Red.  Big Red narrates the tales with a breezy sense of humor.  His older brother is a sour pessimist who, after discovering the reports on Sherlock Holmes's adventures, has determined to become a detective.  He has the brains but his big liability is that he never learned to read.

In this story the brothers, now running the A.A. Western Detective Agency, arrive in Little, Colorado to help a publisher who has been held up and robbed of a whole edition of the paper - apparently by a lone Ku Klux Klansman.  The obvious suspect is a rival publisher who hails from the south.  

But Old Red is no sucker for obvious solutions.

Half the joy in these tales is Gustav's deductions.  The other is Otto's witty asides.   "I'd say I know my brother like the back of my hand even though it's another kind of backside he more often brings to mind."

The story is a treat. 

 

Sunday, November 28, 2021

Hit and Run, by Doug Allyn


"Hit and Run," by Doug Allyn, in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, November/December 2021.

This is the fifth appearance here by Allyn. It is also the second week in a row that I chose a short story by authors known for much longer tales.

Imagine you are stuck in traffic on your way to an important, even life-and-death meeting.  Not good.

Now imagine you get rear-ended by a woman who is not paying attention.  Even worse.

But the frosting on the cake is that the accident makes your trunk fly open, revealing the bag of cocaine you are bringing to the meeting...

What follows is more twists and turns per page than any story I can remember in years.  Quite a ride. 


Sunday, August 1, 2021

Sweeps Week, by Richard Helms


 "Sweeps Week," by Richard Helms, in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, July/August 2021.

This is the eighth appearance in this column by Richard Helms, and his third in 2021.  Somebody's having a good year.

I'm the Invisible Man.

That's the opening sentence.  The narrator is a homeless guy, an ex-cop.  An ex-dirty cop, he would be quick to add.

Sonny, a homeless guy with mental problems, has gone missing. Worse, a national political convention is coming to town, which means it is Sweeps Week.  That doesn't refer to the time when the TV networks put out their best, but the time when the city kicks out its worst - or at least most unpleasant-to-look-at.  

So our hero is trying to figure out what happened to Sonny.  One of the places  he looks is, well: "Hospital ER waiting rooms are like resort spas for homeless guys.  You get AC, free TV - even if they always seem to be tuned to the Disney channel -  and a place to sit unmolested as long as you don't draw attention to yourself."

Gritty and well-written.

Tuesday, May 11, 2021

Frank Scarso Finds His Life, by Doug Crandall

 


"Frank Scarso Finds His Life," by Doug Crandall, in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, May/June 2021.

Walter Mosley, who knows a thing or two about writing fiction, said "Story is what happens. Plot is when the reason it happens or the reasons that it happens are revealed to the reader."

In other words, you don't necessarily want to have the beginning, middle, and end of your story in that order.  

The first thing we learn in this tale is that whatever occurs in it  lands our protagonist in prison. And he doesn't seem to be too upset about that.

Frank Scarso was  in prison before because of a tragic mistake he made.  Now, in his sixties, he is looking for a chance to do a little good. In a word, he is hunting for redemption.

He gets a job in a home for kids with serious problems and finds himself oddly bonding with an autistic boy whose life has been one horror after another.  Frank thinks he can maybe help, and if that brings him grief, so be it...     

What does Crandall gain by putting the cart before the horse, so to speak, telling us how Frank's story will end?  I will paraphrase another author, Jean Anouilh, who said the difference between tragedy and melodrama is that we know how tragedy will end, so the struggle to survive takes on a sort of nobility. We know where this is going but it is a fascinating trip...  

Sunday, April 18, 2021

Yeah, I Meant To Do That, by Mat Coward


"Yeah, I Meant To Do That," by Mat Coward, in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, March/April 2021.

This is the sixth appearance in my column by Mat Coward, who writes very funny stories.  Here is how this one begins:

"At some point you're going to have to grab everything and run.  And the chances are, when that happens, you'll be wearing duck feet and a blindfold and trying to carry twenty thousand pounds in coins in a wet paper sack."

How's that for an arresting image?  These words of wisdom are spoken by Barber, an aging con man trying to educate a group of proteges.  They want his help in scamming a bad guy named Spencer who has gotten rich on ripping off people in trouble.

Barber has a cunning plan, if he can trust his new friends to carry it out correctly.  Ah, but can con men ever trust each other?  This one is a treat.