A Lost Dream, by Dave Zeltserman

 

"A Lost Dream," by Dave Zeltserman, in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, July/August 2026.

This is the second story by Zeltserman to make my page.  

Ah, what we have is a breath of fresh noir.  The formula of classic noir is the American dream seen through a funhouse mirror:  A nobody tries to make something of himself,  but his method is connected to  a crime and  the universe stomps him.  But this story takes an interesting twist on the formula.

When the tale starts Dan Sutton is already a successful burglar, but one night he has a dream (an American dream)  of the perfect crime.  In the morning he can't remember it and he is so upset he tells his girlfriend, who doesn't realize what he does for a living.

To save his relationship, and because no crime is as good as the one he dreamed, he seeks a way to go straight.  He succeeds, but as is so often the case in noir, you can change yourself but the hard part is changing your past. A very satisfying tale.   

 

The Hanging Judge, by Dave Zeltserman

 "The Hanging Judge," by  Dave Zeltserman, in Black Cat Weekly, #163, 2024.

World-building is a topic that gets discussed a lot among writers of science fiction and fantasy, but not so much  in mystery.  The assumption there is you are trying to set your story in the world we live in.  (Historical mysteries are different, especially if they are set in the distant past where we have to speculate about how people lived.)

But this story is all about world-building.  Of course, it is a fantasy mystery. Mike Stone begins by telling us "I might be hell's only operating private eye."     

So the world Zeltserman has to show us is hell, but not just any ol' Hades.  It turns out that every resident with a strong enough personality or "enough self-awareness" generates his or her own private hell, and can drag less aware persons into it.

Stone's problem is that he isn't getting any business.  (Well, his bigger problem is that he's in hell, and the worst part of that, he explains, is the monotony.  So having no business is a real drag.)  He concludes that the problem might be that he did a lousy job on an earlier case, and "everything has consequences in hell."  So Stone sets out to determine, this time for sure, who killed his client, a corrupt judge.

No need for me to detail his investigation.  You either enjoy this sort of thing or you don't.  I enjoyed it very much.