Fancy Car Lover, by Ed Teja

 "Fancy Car Lover," by Ed Teja, in Crimeucopia: A Load of Balls, edited by John Connor, Murderous Ink Press, 2025.

This is Ed Teja's second appearance in this blog.

Jimmy just got out of the army and he knows just where to look for work: a garage that used to pay his brother to steal cars to order, for parts.   

 But let's take a moment to enjoy the language here.

"I went in [the army] and they taught me how to fight and then kicked me out for using what they taught me. Go figure." 

"I think the issue was probably it matters who you fight," Eddie said.

"Yeah, well, they could have said that earlier." 

Nice. 

Jimmy has a strategy for finding and swiping those cars and  it works fine, although not so fine for the car owners who sometimes get a bit damaged in the process.  His sweet deal with crooked Eddie gets complicated when  he meets Kathy, who gets interested in his job.  Maybe a little too interested...

A lovely noir tale with a nice twist. 

Under Hard Rock, by Ed Teja

 "Under Hard Rock," by Ed Teja, in Black Cat Weekly, #164.

This  is a good example of what I call the Unknown Narrator story. The master, though probably not inventor, of the subgenre, was Jack Ritchie who won an Edgar for such a one.  In this type of tale all the reader  knows about the main character (usually the narrator) is what he or other people say about him, and that turns out not to be true.

In this case the narrator makes it clear early on that he is lying to the people he meets but that intrigues you; you  want to know what's really going on. He visits a small mining town and says he is a private eye, hired to find a man named Randall Cook.  But when the owner of the town's only restaurant tells him that Cook died a week before we find out that he already knew that.  So what's going on?

Cook died in a mining accident and it seems impossible that it could have been a murder.  And he had no obvious enemies.  What exactly is our hero hoping to learn - and what is there to learn?

Part of the solution is a little weak in my opinion. (It requires someone to be awfully gullible.) But it was enjoyable and avoided the usual cliches.