Burning Daylight, by David Edgerley Gates

"Burning Daylight" by David Edgerley Gates, in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, July/August 2012.

Well, Mr. Gates is having a good year.  This is the third time in nine months he has made my best-of-the-week list.  And the stories have been very different.  One historical, one urban, and now a rural police procedural.

Hector is a deputy in Montana, near a national forest.  When two kids report seeing a double-wide trailer explode he knows it was a meth lab.  Since the drug-maker went up with his product Hector could have let it go at that but he is a good cop and wants to know what happened: specifically, how did a Gulf War vet wind up making drugs out in the wilderness?  And which comes first, supply or demand?  The trail becomes darker and grimmer.

"With all due respect, don't preach the law to me."
"The law's all we've got between us and the stone age."
"Frank, for Christ's sake, this IS the stone age."


A powerful piece of work.

Acting On A Tip, by Barbara Arno Modrack

"Acting On A Tip," by Barbara Arno Modrack, in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, July 2012.

 I have said before that I am a sucker for stories about the possibility of redemption, whether the protagonist chooses to take it or not.  This is a nice example.

Marty had been a reporter for the Detroit Free Press for decades when the buyouts started.  One day his editor urged him to take the proffered buyout, and the reason clearly had less to do with his age than with the booze Marty was drinking for breakfast. 

When he found himself unemployed and probably unemployable Marty's wife made him the following offer:

They would sell the house and move Up North to the family cottage she had just inherited.  Ryan, their youngest, would complete his senior year in high school there.  Jenny would refresh her nursing license and become the breadwinner.  And if they did all that and Marty quit drinking, they could do it together and Jenny would not leave him.

A few months later Marty is clinging to sobriety by his fingernails when he wakes to a radio report of three murders in the little town where they are living.  Maybe the Free Press would like a reporter on the scene?  Maybe he can drag a scrap of self-worth out of the ruins?

Very satisfactory piece of work.

Five Stars, by Mike Baron

"Five Stars," by Mike Baron, in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, July 2012.

I am not surprised that Baron got his start writing comic books.  This is one of the most intensely visual stories I have read in a long time.  Or, to be more specific, the climax is wildly, inventively, visual.

Bill Scald is a restaurant critic (and what a wonderful name for a critic!). Much to his disgust his boss orders him to review a new Italian restaurant that is clearly owned as  a money-laundering site by a mob family.  Scald points out that in this case a bad review could have extremely nasty results.  His editor, blithely uninterested in such niceties as journalistic integrity, tells him to go off and say something nice.

So Scald decides to dine with protection in the form of  his nephew, "a human pit bull with shaved skull, tribal tats, and the flat eyes of a shark.  Dyson's favorite cuisine was buffalo wings, but he...was too stupid to know fear."  And that's when things get lively and, as I have already indicated, visual.  Fun stuff.

His Daughter's Island, by Brendan DuBois

"His Daughter's Island," by Brendan DuBois, in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, July 2012.

Very nice piece opens the new issue of EQMM.  Zach Ford is a mild-mannered accountant in a small town in Maine.  His beloved daughter goes off to a party at the home of a millionaire and dies.  The millionaire's son is whisked out of the country, far from the possibility of justice.

In some stories the next step would be a whole lot of guns and blood, but Mr. Ford has a different idea.  He studies up on the millionaire, and then he studies the state and local ordinances.  And starts plotting a completely legal vengeance.

DuBois' story reminds me of one of my all-time favorites, "Privilege," by Frederick Forsyth.  Both are about a "little man" who uses lateral thinking to go after a foe who seems to powerful to attack.  Good piece.

Jenny's Ghost, by David Dean

"Jenny's Ghost" by David Dean, in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, June 2012.

After I read this story I asked my friend David if there was a crime in it.  He replied: "there is no crime in 'Jenny's Ghost'; only consequences."   But, he noted, there is a mystery.  Having thought about it, I decided there is a crime, of sorts. I'd be interested to know what you thought.

David wrote about the genesis of this story last month at SleuthSayers, but even if he hadn't I would have suspected it started with the location.

Picture the setting: you are in an airport, stuck in that endless half-life between flights and suddenly you spot something that can't possibly be there: a woman who died a decade before.  Hell of a set-up, isn't it?

David noted that this is a story about consequences.  Not surprisingly it is also about guilt, and the chance of redemption.  These are subjects for fiction I am very much drawn to.  (Hey, my CD is called Can I Blame You?)  David's stories often have a strong spiritual component.  (One of his recurring characters is a priest.)  As I said, there is a possibility of redemption at the end of this story.  Airports can seem like hell, but you don't have to stay in one forever.

One Soul At A Time, by Dana Cameron

"One Soul At A Time," by Dana Cameron, in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, June 2012.

The latest issue of EQMM gets off to a bang with this story by Dana Cameron.  The narrator is a woman who has recently changed names and started a new life.  We find out a little bit about why she made this switch, and can guess more.  She has had, shall we say, an interesting career.

The story begins with her receiving the obituary of her mentor, a former college professor who changed her life forever.  She spots a clue in the obituary that the death was not the accident the authorities claimed and goes rushing off to Maine to discover the truth.  This turns out to involve some very bad locals with even worse allies.  Our nameless character reluctantly finds herself getting deeper and deeper into the mess, first to pay the debt to her mentor and then, when that is done, for "extra credit, bonus points."

The wise heads tell me that suspense stories are personal and thrillers are global.  The world is in danger!  But to my mind a suspense story is about what we might call a civilian in danger, while a thriller is about a pro.  This story is a thriller, and a very good one.

Teed Off, by Mark Troy

"Teed Off," by Mark Troy, in Game Face.

This ebook was available for free.   It is a collection of stories about Val Lyons, a Hawaii-based private eye.

Glenn Floeck moved down Concourse C of Honolulu International Airport as if he expected everyone to get out of his way.

This first sentence tells us a good deal about Mr. Floeck, doesn't it?  Val has signed on as personal driver for this obnoxious golf millionaire who is actually a lousy golfer and a worse human being.  we will discover she has an ulterior motive for tolerating his crude advances.  She is working on behalf of a client whose sister got a restraining order against Flock, not long before falling of a hotel balcony to her death.  Interesting protagonist, good story.

By the way, it first appeared in Fedora, edited by Michael Bracken.

In Brightest Day, by Toni L.P. Kelner

"In Brightest Day" by Toni L.P. Kelner, in Home Improvement: Undead Edition, edited by Charlaine Harris and Toni L.P. Kelner.  Ace.  2011.

Now that the voting for the Derringer Awards are over I can report that my favorite nominee, among those I didn't read last year, was this novella by an author I have long admired, Toni Kelner.  Apparently this whole book is full of "surreal estate," horror stories related to do-it-yourself.  (This makes good sense.  All of my attempts at home repair have turned into horror stories.)

“Rebound Resurrections,” I said in my best business voice. “How can I help you?”

“Dodie? It’s Shelia Hopkins. Gottfried is dead.”

“Well, yeah.” He’d been dead for a couple of weeks.

“I mean he’s dead again.”

The best fantasy and science fiction tales create a world with its own rules and logic and that's what we have here.  Dodie  Kilburn is a hougan in a reality in which these zombie-creators have their own professional organization and code of ethics.  It turns out you can only bring someone back from the dead if the deceased was obsesses about an uncompleted task.  In the case of Gottfried he wanted to finish retrofitting a house, so that's all well and good.  But someone doesn't want the house finished and is willing to keep killing Gottfried over and over to get his way...



An added treat here is Dodie's conflict with the hougan guild which disapproves of her methods.  Fun story.

House Rules, by Libby Fischer Hellmann

"House Rules," by Libby Fischer Hellmann, in A Woman's Touch, Sniplets Publishing.  2010.

I've been reading the e-anthology,  A Woman's Touch. So far this is my favorite.  Marge and Larry Farley take a vacation in Las Vegas, but Larry isn't much impressed.  First, he loses a bundle in a casino, then he finds the great outdoors "too hot.  And dusty.  Let's go back."   His view changes when  he finds a mysterious box in the sand. When he brings it back to the hotel all hell breaks loose.  Turns out somebody ditched the box in the desert for a reason. Turns out a whole lot of people want it back.  No one is who they seem and Marge, who is a self-help book kind of person, may or may not be able to rescue Larry from the mess he has gotten them into.

A fun read.

Come Back, Come Back, by Donald E. Westlake

"Come Back, Come Back," by Donald E. Westlake, in Levine, 1984.

Well, it has happened again.  For the second time in fifteen months I haven't read any new stories I liked enough to write about here, so I am going to review one of my all-time favorite stories.

I actually read this one as a teenager in one of those Alfred Hitchcock paperback story collections.  It was my first introduction to Donald E. Westlake, and while I always remembered the story, it was many years before I connected this tale with the author of so many comic crime classics.

In the early sixties Westlake wrote a series of stories about Abe Levine, a New York City cop with one distinguishing feature: he has a heart condition which he quite reasonably fears will kill him.  So each of his cases is colored by this, you might say, existential lens.

Take this story.  Levine and his partner are rushed to a skyscraper where a businessman is threatening to jump off a high ledge.  See the ironic contrast: a young, healthy, successful man who apparently wants to die and Levine, a middle-aged, broke, cop with a heart condition who desperately wants to live.  Can these two guys teach each other anything?

A stunning piece of work and a demonstration of the unusual things that can be done in the name of crime fiction.