Honor Guard, by Tom Barlow

"Honor Guard," by Tom Barlow, in Columbus Noir, edited by Andrew Welsh-Huggins, Akashic Press, 2020.

The publisher sent me an advance copy of this book. 

I must say I never thought of the birthplace of James Thurber as a particularly noir city, but so far this book is doing its best to prove me wrong.  (And by the way, if you love noir read Thurber's short story "The Whip-Poor-Will." )

One way of writing a crime story is to take something that happens to many of us and violently crank it up a notch.  The narrator is the only child of Tommy, a former navy man turned plumber.  (He stopped calling him "Dad" when he realized that the man's odd behavior "was the senility speaking."

Tommy is undergoing dementia which is making him violent, profane, and racist, not characteristics he had shown previously.  All very sad, and not an uncommon phenomenon in these modern times, but Barlow takes it up that notch.  On Veterans Day there is a violent confrontation with tragic consequences. 

Which is all very noir but would not have made this the best story of the week.  That is the result of several surprises.  Jeffery Deaver said "Short stories exist only to stun you."  This one qualifies.

A Significant Find, by Jeffery Deaver

"A Significant Find," by Jeffery Deaver, Alive in Shape and Color, edited by Lawrence Block, Pegasus Books, 2017.

This is Deaver's third appearance in this column, second one this year.

Each story in the book is inspired by a work of art, which appears in front of it.  In this case it the Cave Paintings of Lascaux, some of the oldest art work in the world.

Sometimes the difference between a good story and a great one is the structure.  I can't imagine this tale working nearly as well without the simple device Deaver uses to introduce it.

It begins with Roger and Della having a crisis of conscience.  They are a married couple, both moderately successful mid-career archaeologists, and they are in France for a conference.

Why the crisis?  Well, let's put it this way.  Suppose Professor A gets a clue to a career-changing discovery but doesn't realize how to use it.  If he tells Professors B and C about it and they are more clever at interpreting the puzzle, are B and C required to share the credit with A?

An ethical dilemma indeed.  And Roger and Della are about to face more dilemmas, but I can't tell you about that without giving away the store.  Or the cave.  Some lovely twists in this one. 

Hard to Get, by Jeffery Deaver

"Hard to Get," by Jeffery Deaver, in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, July/August 2017.

It's a classic concept of the espionage story: an amateur is forced to into the spy game to play against the deadly professionals.

In Deaver's variation Albert Lessing is not a complete amateur.  He is an analyst for the CIA; a desk jockey.  But when an agent dies in an accident while preparing for a vital mission, Lessing is the only person with the language and academic abilities to fill the gap.

So all of a sudden he is in a small town in Poland trying to attract the attention of the deputy to the Russian spymaster who is running a ring of seditionists in the United States.  But he has to attract the man subtly.  If he is too obvious they will know hit's a trap.  Play hard to get, he is told...

And Lessing turns out to be very good at this new trade.  Or is he?  Or isn't he?  As in a lot of the best spy stories its hard to tell for a while.  And there are plenty of plot twists, one of which made me laugh out loud.  A most enjoyable trip through eastern Europe. 

A People Person, by Michael Koryta

"A People Person," by Michael Koryta, in The Strand Magazine, November-February 2012-2013.

The Private Eye Writers of America named the Shamus nominees today and one of them is the story I chose last week: "The Sequel," by Jeffrey Deaver.  Excellent choice, but I am still feeling justified in listing Deaver's story and this one as 2013 because 1) I didn't read them until this year, and 2) the issue date covers through February of this year.  So there.

What Koryta has given us is a lovely little character study about Thor, who has been the hit man for two decades for Belov, who is the head of organized crime in Cleveland.  These two have been through tough times on two continents and, in a business that doesn't  support long-lasting relationships, they seem inseparable.

Thor had seen his father killed at age six, and that was not the first corpse he had viewed.

 The English word for the way Thor felt about killing was "desensitized," but he did not know that it was a proper fit.  Maybe he was overly sensitized.  Maybe he understood it more than most.  Maybe the poeple who had not killed or could not imagine being killed were the desensitized breed.

What could come between Thor and his boss?  Could there, to his own amazement, be a line he could not cross? 

Yup, and a very unexpected one it turns out to be.

The Sequel, vy Jeffrey Deaver

"The Sequel," by Jeffrey Deaver, in The Strand Magazine, November-February 2012-2013.

What do these novels have in common?
A Confederacy of Dunces
Gone With The Wind
Mister Roberts 
Raintree Country
To Kill A Mockingbird

Well, besides being considered important American novels, they are each the only book by their authors.  There seems to be a special catgory in the American imagination for these books that stand alone either because the author died soon after writing it, or because the author chose to give up the field.

But imagine if another manuscript by such an author was found.  And what if it is a sequel to the classic?

That's the concept of Deaver's novella, and it is great fun.  Frederick Lowell is an elderly literary agent and one day he gets a letter that hints that one of his deceased clients wrote a sequel to his classic novel.  Lowell travels around the country in pursuit of it and - well, a lot of things happen.  In fact, it almost feels like Deaver made a list of every way this story could work out and then rang  the changes, covering every possibility. 

In the first half of the story he gives us a classic quest structure but when that ends we get a mystery, one with several red herring solutions, clever reversals and unexpected twists.  Highly recommended.