Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School, by Brian Thornton

 "Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School," by Brian Thornton, in Lawyers, Guns, and Money: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Music of Warren Zevon, edited by Libby Cudmore and Art Taylor, Down and Out Books, 2022.

My friend and fellow SleuthSayer Brian Thornton has written something unusual and strangely familiar. 

The story takes place during prohibition in a Western mining town. The narrator is an unnamed private detective, working for an equally unnamed agency.  His boss is the Old Man.

If you are familiar with the classics of our field you already know which author is being saluted here (or, if you prefer, ripped off).  It's a good story, although I prefer the more elaborate version of this game that  Evan Lewis did a few years ago.

I suppose the moral is, if you don't give your protagonist a name it is not hard for an other author to borrow him.

Getting back to the story, our nameless hero is spending a week in a brothel, because the agency has heard that a guy they are looking for might drop by.  The target does show up, with a gun, and things get complicated.  I liked the ending a lot.

Just Like In The Movies, by Kate Thornton

"Just Like In The Movies," by Kate Thornton, in Inhuman Condition, Denouement Press, 2010.

The author gave me this book two years ago and I have been shamefully slow about getting around to reading it. 

Are you familiar with cryptic crosswords?  These are popular in England; never caught on much here.  Each clue is a puzzle in itself.  Wikipedia gives the example of: Very sad unfinished story about rising smoke (8) which is a clue for the word "Tragical."  Go to the article if you want to see how that works.  It baffles me.

Which has nothing to do with Thornton's story, but have faith.  We will get there.

Years ago I read about one of the famous setters (i.e. creators) of cryptic crosswords who created a puzzle in which the first clue could lead to two possible answers, one correct and one almost correct.  Whichever of those you chose you could answer all the clues successfully - until the very last one.  If you started down the wrong path, you wound up with one one final clue you could not answer.

And that almost  brings us to Thornton's story.  The narrator is a teenage girl who compares herself to Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window.  She has been watching a lot of movies because she can't leave the house.  Not because of a broken leg like Jimmy, but because of a monitoring device on her ankle.  Seems she brought a knife to school for protection, and they accused her of some other stuff she denies.

When she's not watching the TV she watches her neighbors the Blatniks, who fight a lot, often about the wife's brother, Norm.  Mr. Blatnik clearly doesn't want his brother-in-law around, for some reason.  Like maybe he's done something worse than bring a knife to school.  And now Norm is interested in our narrator...

At one point in the story there is a sentence that can be read two ways, just like that first cryptic crossword clue, and if you interpret it the wrong way (trust me, you will), Thornton will lead you merrily in the wrong direction.  And that's a very enjoyable trip.