The Last Sitcom, by Lawrence Maddox

"The Last Sitcom" by Lawrence Maddox, at Beat To A Pulp, 2013.

I remember reading a supposedly-true story (maybe in the I, Anonymous column  of The Stranger?) about someone who found a cell phone on election night 2008.  The owner had been texting and receiving viciously racist jokes.  The finder composed a note in the owner's name confessing that his racism was a disguise for his sexual longing for Black men.  He sent it to everyone on the owner's mailing list except his mother.

I was reminded of this by Maddox's story (freely available, by the way), about a sitcom writer who wanders into a computer cafe in L.A. and discovers that the previous user hadn't signed out.  Turns out he was a member of a band called the Hillbilly Death Squad.

Doug, our alleged hero, decides to amuse himself by sending out some inappropriate emails in the name of the musician.  As you can guess, bad things result.

It's a funny story, a sort of good luck/bad luck roller coaster as Doug and the musicians strive to get the upper hand.  As for who wins, well, it isn't so much that have to find out for yourself, as that you have to decide for yourself.

Dress Blues, by Chirs Muessig

"Dress Blues," by Chris Muessig, in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, October 2013.

Why did this story, definitely not science fiction, make me think of Isaac Asimov?

Glad you asked.

Some thirty years ago I heard Asimov speak and he said (I am paraphrasing, obviously) that science fiction's great contribution to literature was starting in the middle.  If you think about it, nineteenth century fiction (and earlier) often started by telling you the hero's ancestry and background, describing the town, etc.

If science fiction began that way, you would never get to the story and readers would give up before you were halfway through detailing the planet's history.  So science fiction writers learned to leap in and fill in the details where and when needed.  Readers had to keep up and most of them found that they enjoyed it, I think because it gave them a mystery to solve (Oh, there are different bases on Luna, each founded by a different country as you can tell by their names...)

But one problem for a reviewer is: how much should he or she reveal?  Take Muessig's story.  It's not like there is a a big twist ending but he definitely expects you to sort out the time, place, and circumstance a bit at a time.  And why should I deprive you of the pleasure?

The protagonist is Sergeant Nolan, a Marine sergeant who suddenly finds himself facing multiple crises.  His wife has left him for reasons you will discover.  He has to decide whether to re-enlist for another six-year hitch.  And his boss goes off on extended duty, leaving him as the only Corps member to look after a private who has been arrested for murder.  Worse, that private is a Black man and this story takes place in a time and place where that can be a dangerous place to be -- especially if you are accused of killing a white man.

A fascinating tale, and one that told me a lot I didn't know about its time period.

Borrowed Time, by Doug Allyn

"Borrowed Time," by Doug Allyn, in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, September/October 2013.

The word "prequel" was apparently coined by Anthony Boucher in the 1950s, but I first heard it twenty years later when someone had the unfortunate idea of making a movie about Butch and Sundance before things started to get messy for them.

Prequels are one of those ideas that tend to sound better than they turn out.  (Cough, cough, Star Wars)  But as always the proof is in the pudding.

This story is a prequel to "Wood Smoke Boys," which made a lot of best-of lists last year, including mine.  "Boys" is about  Dylan LaCrosse, a cop in the north territory of Michigan.  In the present story we learn about the circumstances that caused him to leave the Detroit Police Department and retreat back to his home turf in the north.

And the circumstances involve taking a bullet in the head in the middle of the kind of hellish cop's nightmare in which there can be no good action to take.  LaCrosse survives the injury and is booted out of the force.  Now to survive he has to deal with crooked cops and missing money.

A very satisfactory prequel.  Maybe George Lucas should have hired Doug Allyn.

The Hunting Party, by Tony Richards

"The Hunting Party," by Tony Richards, in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, October 2013.

Editor Linda Landrigan has been doing something risky in AHMM in the last couple of years and I haven't seen anyone else mention it.  She has occasionally published science fiction mysteries.

The usual thinking is that mystery fans don't want to read science fiction.  I think it goes back to the idea that you can't have a fair-play mystery if the solution depends on the detective knowing that the Model K3 ray guy has a defenerator switch on the left side, not the right, or who was elected emperor in 2994.  Of course, that's nonsense; a fair-play set in the present or past can be just as unfair. 

Besides, most mystery stories today are not traditional fair-play, anyway.


Which is also true of Richards' tale.  It is (at least) the second story about Lieutenant Abel Enetame, a cop in Federated Africa, a continent that has made tremendous gains over today's gloomy situation.  Unfortunately there are some fanatics who want to force a return to the good old days of tribal violence. 

The leader of this group, Chief Manuza, appeared in the first story.  Now he is more dangerous because he has an ally,  a Nobel Prize-winning physicist named Kanai. 

"There is a saying in the scientific world," Mweru told me.  "Einstein stood on the shoulders of others.  Kanai stood on the shoulders of Einstein...and then just floated off into thin air."

Such a man could give Manuza's rebels a dangerous weapon in their fight against progress.  But weapons can be dangerous in more ways than one as we learn in the stories very satisfying ending.

The Samsa File, by Jim Weikart

"The Samsa File," by Jim Weikart, in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, September 2013.

I wonder what percentage of AHMM's readers got a few pages into this story and said "What the hell?"  Maybe five percent?  Ten?

I, on the other hand, eat this sort of thing up.

Unless you are in that undefined percentage, the title should give a good hint as to what you are in for.  Havel, a police detective in present-day Prague is assigned to investigate the apparent murder by poisoning of a young man named Gregor Samsa.  Except - surprise! - Gregor had somehow transformed into a giant cockroach.

This is sort of reverse steampunk, transforming a Victorian plot -- Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, of course -- into the modern era, and a modern genre, the police procedural.  Weikart even offers something that Kafka had no interest in, an explanation for Samsa's transformation. 

Of all the stories I have read so far this year, this one is probably the one I most wish I had written.

Departmental Issue, by John H. Dirckx

"

Departmental Issue," by John H. Dirckx, in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, September 2013.

For many  years John H. Dirckx has been publishing stories about Cyrus Auburn, a police detective in what I had thought was an unnamed city.  In this one it appears to be Cleveland.  Who knew?

The stories tend to be pretty straight police procedurals, without a lot of personal side trips, but in this case Auburn, newly promoted to lieutenant is feeling a certain amount of paranoia.  His old boss asks him to take on a case too ticklish to share with anyone else in the department: a custodian fell to his death from the roof of skyscraper, leaving behind a former- police department laptop that  was sold to someone at an auction.  Is a cop the killer?

This story lacks one of my favorite things about Dirckx's stories: the interaction between all the regulars.  Since Auburn is on his own we get much less of his co-workers than usual.  But the other wonderful characteristic is Dirckx's imaginative writing style.  Consider: how can you describe a pile of dirt on the floor and make it interesting?

A pile of refuse had been swept into a corner, where it skulked in the lee of a wide broomleaning against the wall.

"Skulked in the lee."  Lovely.

Some more examples:

Rober's wallet was as devoid of interest as a wet paper towel, and his cell phone had come out of the fall with an incurable case of amnesia.

Amid an atmosphere thick with the scent of scorched grease and freshly chopped onions, white-capped and white-aproned servers of both genders took orders, delivered food and drink, and bussed tables with unflagging lethargy.

The Secret Life of Books, by Angela Gerst

"The Secret Life of Books," by Angela Gerst,  in Mystery Writers of America Presents The Mystery Box, edited by Brad Meltzer, Grand Central Publishing, 2013.

It is a tricky business, writing fiction about real people; more so if the non-fictioner is your main character.  Besides the boring risk of being sued, there is the problem or doing research, and the fact that many of your readers may have a strong sense of what your character should be like, and that may disagree with yours.

I think Gerst does a good job, although I have to say that before I knew the story I knew nothing about Colette except that she was a famous French author, and the creator of Gigi, which became a famous movie.   So I may be off in my assessment of the story, but Gerst certainly convinced me she was drawing an accurate picture.

The story takes place late in Colette's life when her health makes her almost a prisoner in her apartment.  A famous prisoner, with a steady stream of visitors, some famous, and some not.  One of them is Roland, an ambitious chef whose boring chatter she tolerates for the extravagant dishes he brings her.  Roland is marrying a much younger country lass, who hopes to save her family's dwindling estate.  When someone gets killed, Colette must come to the rescue. 

The writing is good, and here is my favorite example.

"How long will your dear husband be away?"

"Too long."  Colette explained that Maurice was promoting her books in the world's richest land, "now that Europe has again reduced itself to ashes."

My darling Colette" -- Liane helped herself to more coffee -- "nobody reads in America."

"Oh, but there are so many of them, even nobody is ten thousand."

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.

The Remaining Unknowns, by Tony Broadbent

"The Remaining Unknowns," by Tony Broadbent, in Mystery Writers of America Presents The Mystery Box, edited by Brad Meltzer, Grand Central Publishing, 2013.

True confessions: I am not a big reader of suspense or thriller fiction, and that's what we have here.  Mr. Broadbent has presented a fine example of the genre, taut and well-written.  I enjoyed it a lot.

Bobby is a member of the bomb squad in New York City and he is tasked with disarming a van full of nasty stuff.  He reminds us of the saying that when you are about to die your life goes through your mind, and so we see his life, including the tragic circumstances that may have led him to the bomb squad.  The story flashes between the bomb job and the story of his life.

Hell of a life.  Here is part of his explanation of why he is unmarried:

Love may conquer all, but not all fears.  Love opens you up to fear in ways unimaginable before that love ever took hold of your heart.  I can walk into the mouth of hell every single day, but I will not take a woman or child I love in there with me.