Who Wants to Kill Someone? by Michael Mallory

 

"Who Wants to Kill Someone?" by Michael Mallory, in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, January/February 2024. 

This is the sixth appearance in this blog by my friend Michael Mallory. He is also an actor and, as is often the case, his show biz experience shows in this story.  

Last year I wrote here about "if this goes on" stories, the subgenre of science fiction which looks at a current trend and considers where it might be leading.  In this case the trend is reality TV.  

Bruce Locklear was a casting director until a disastrous mistake got him blackballed from the business.  In  desperation he signs up for a TV show called Who Wants to Kill Someone?  The cast is flown to a Central American country and one member is assigned the role of murderer and is then actually expected to kill a fellow performer.  Not surprisingly, the show has been a huge hit.

Not surprisingly, fiction being what it is, Bruce is given the role of murderer.  And that's when things get complicated because not everyone is who they appear to be and the actual plot of the show is different than it seems - but no less dangerous.  

A clever concept and a fun, suspenseful story.

Aramis and the Worm, by Michael Mallory

"Aramis and the Worm," by Michael Mallory, in ALfed Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, September/October 2017.

My friend Michael Mallory is making his fourth appearance in this space, his second time this year.  Being an actor he often writes about show biz and this is the case today.

Adrian Keel used to star in a lot of Grade-B movies filmed in exotic locations.  Key phrase is "used to."  He is ninety years old, lives in an apartment in London, and has all kinds of medical problems.  He wears adult diapers.

But he is called back to duty once more.  Not because of his acting talents, but because of his other job.  You see, he worked for MI-6, taking parts in terrible movies so he could go to trouble spots and report back.  Now his old boss has set him up in a movie that is filming in Cuba, so he can spot the Russian spy

"The Cold War is coming back, Adrian, and worse than ever."
"You believe Putin to be that dangerous?"
"Vladimir Putin is dead."
Adrian set down his wineglass.  "I've heard nothing of that."
:Nor has anyone else on the outside.  That bald, glowering, bare-chested man you see on the television is not Vladimir Putin., it is a brilliant double."

And then things get complicated.  A wild ride.

The Premature Murder, by Michael Mallory

"The Premature Murder," by Michael Mallory, in Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, Issue 7.

I have indicated before I am a sucker for stories that try to rethink some elements of our genre's history.  My old friend Michael Mallory does a fine job in this story.

The time is 1852, the place is Baltimore, and the narrator (anonymous, unless I missed his name somewhere along the line) is a new recruit for a private detective agency, trying to prove he is good for more than filing papers and fetching growlers of beer.

In a bar one night he meets a potential client, a down-on-his-luck actor who wants him to investigate the mysterious death of the actor's estranged son, one Edgar Allan Poe...

The story is full of detail and atmospheric language (our hero doesn't carry a pocket watch, he carries a repeater.  The gun in the story is a Philadelphia Deringer, spelled correctly for once.)  A treat, all in all.

This is my first encounter with Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, and I am enjoying it, but I resent paying for the twenty pages that repeat a Holmes story by Arthur Conan Doyle.  Don't most of us already have a copy of those books?