Upon The Stair, by Declan Hughes

"Upon The Stair," by Declan Hughes, in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, March/April 2016.

Last week my choice was about a private eye as bodyguard.  This week it is private eye as social worker / couple's counselor.  Varied juob description these fictional P.I.'s have.

Ed Loy works in Dublin and he hired to keep an eye on Thomas Harrington who has recently become, as Loy puts it, a Famous Irish Writer, and like a number of  others in that category, is having trouble adjusting to it.  His problems invovle booze, reckless behavior, and possible infidelity.  HIs wife wants to know what's going on.

But just about everybody in this story has a hidden agenda.  All except our hero, and he has to figure it out.  A satisfying story.

The Jaguar at Sunset, by John Lantigua

"The Jaguar at Sunset," by John Lantigua, in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, March/April 2016.

A nice private eye story by Mr. Lantigua. 

A Brazilian couple named the Mattos led the fight against development in their region and are murdered for it.  Now their daughter Constancia has taken up the cause and is supposed to make a speech in the Everglades National Park in Florida.

The bad guys would like to her silence her too but they know that a political assassination in the United States would cause more trouble than it would end.  But they can give a plane ticket to Constanzia's bitter former lover, and set him loose in Florida.  A lover's quarrel ending in tragedy is no cause for an international incident.  Did I mention he is an expert marksman with a rifle and a bow and arrow?

Connie's new lover contacts Mimi P.I. Willie Cuesta, and Willie, trying to provide bodyguard service on a shoestring, gathers some unlikely allies...

A good tale with a strong sense of place.

The Best is Yet to Come, by Chris Knopf

"The Best is Yet to Come,"  by Chris Knopf, in Eight Mystery Writers You Should Be Reading Now, edited by Michael Guillebeau and Stacy Pethel, Madison Press, 2016.

This is not an anthology of short stories.  It contains interviews, book excerpts, interviews, and a few stories thrown in.  Now on to Mr. Knopf's contribution...

Two paisans, sitting in their favorite Italian restaurant in Brooklyn, are waxing nostalgic.  Bogart laments that today's hit men lack the style of the great mechanics of yesteryear.  His friend Two Step agrees that contract killers just ain't what they used to be.  Relevant war stories are exchanged.  Then other stuff happens.

I saw where this was going, but the perfect last paragraph made it worth the trip.  Very amusing tale.

Being Fred, by Travis Richardson

"Being Fred," by Travis Richardson, in Thuglit 21, 2016.

Pity poor Fred.  He's a nice guy but he happens to share a body with Conner, a hit man for the Russian mob. 

Conner, his alternate personality tells us, is "a bad man who does awful things, but he's not a sociopath.  If he was, I wouldn't exist."

So when Fred, the reluctant coping mechanism, wakes up he always know it means Conner has done something so horrific he can't face it.  Which leaves poor Fred to clean up the mess, sometimes quite literally.

In this case Conner has killed a friend for his boss Vlad.  ("He looks like what you think a Vlad would look like - dark-haired, goateed, and imposing...")   But a piece of jewelry is missing and Fred has to find it.  Which means finding the piece of the corpse it was attached to...

Or as Fred would swear, "Fiddlesticks!"

This story is a lot of fun.

The Blue Carbuncle, by Terence Faherty

"The Blue Carbuncle," by Terence Faherty, in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, February 2016.

This is the sixth appearance in this space by my former fellow-SleuthSayer, Terence Faherty.  That puts him ahead of all the other writers in the universe.  No doubt he is thrilled.

And this is the third winner in this bizarre series.  You see, Faherty claims to have found Dr John Watson's notebooks, containing the original drafts of the Sherlock Holmes stories, explaining what really  happened.  And they are pretty hilarious.

You may remember that in Doyle's version someone has stolen the precious jewel of the title from the Countess of Morcar.  A plumber is arrested but then Peters, a hotel commissionaire, gets involved in a street fight and ends up with a goose which, turns out to contain the precious bauble.  Now let's look at a passage from Faherty's tale:

    "Until now," Holmes added as he tossed the paper aside.  "The question before us is how the stone got out of the jewelry case and into the goose."
     "Excuse me for saying so," Peters interrupted, "but who gives a tinker's tintype?  We don't need to explain how it got in the goose to collect the reward."
    "What was I thinking?" Holmes said.  "Right you are.  Case closed.  Drinks all around."

Which might have been an amusing place to end the story, but Faherty has other, uh, geese to roast.  In fact he is about to skewer one of the great mystery tales of all time, and it is not by Doyle.  I will stop right here except to say the whole piece is very funny and clever. 

The Devil You Know, by Jas. R. Petrin

"The Devil You Know," by Jas. R. Petrin, in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, March 2016.

This is Petrin's third appearance in this blog.

Reading a new adventure of a favorite character fells like meeting up with an old friend.  But some friends are definitely better in fiction than in real life.

Which leads us to Leo "Skig" Skorzeny, a tough-as-nails loan shark in Halifax, Canada.  Skig is too old to be doing this stuff, and he has an "imp" in his guts he expects will kill him, if someone else doesn't do it first.

Among his enemies are the Halifax police who have "found" a block of cocaine in his ancient smelly Crown Vic - in an earlier story it spent a few hours in the harbor - and they offer him a deal: they won't press charges if he helps them find a truckload of old furniture that was stolen while being shifted from police headquarters.

Skig has good reason not to trust the cops.  As his friend Creeper says about the sergeant running the operation: "When she says win-win, she really means a double win for them.  Nothng for you."

But Skig figures out that what they are really after is not the old desks and tables but some filing cabinets that were in the truck.  And if he can find them - and determine which file they are desperate for - he might get out of the mess with a whole skin.

As usual, a good story from Petrin.


 

To Kill a Rocking Horse, by James Powell

"To Kill a Rocking Horse," by James Powell, in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, January 2016.

I have said it before.  My friend James Powell (who makes his fifth appearance in this column today) has more imagination that any three authors should be permitted to possess.   This is particularly obvious in his annual Christmas stories in which ideas go flying across the page like bullets from a machine gun.

Exhibit A is this tale about Canadian private eye Gladstone Tydings (ponder that name for a moment), who gets visited by Santa Claus.  The fat man needs help because his elves have gone on strike.  They feel that someone is trying to destroy all the rocking horses they created in honor of the now extinct species of ski-footed ponies that helped the elves survive when they first came to the Americas.  (Why did the elves wind up at the North Pole?  They were the last to cross the Bering Sea land bridge, because they had the shortest legs, of course).

I won't give away much more except to tell you about two groups who appear in the story: militant women who attack phony santas and are known as the Slay Belles,  and the North Pole's crack paramilitary unit, the Christmas Seals.  And then there is the rule about camp followers with a heart of gold, and --  Somebody stop me!

Read the story.  You'll love it.

Inquiry and Assistance, by Terrie Farley Moran

"Inquiry and Assistance," by Terrie Farley Moran, in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, January-February 2016.

We start reviewing 2016  with a nice story in the P.I. vein by my friend Terrie Farley Moran.

New York City, the Great Depression.  Tommy Flood, unemployed bookkeeper is looking desperately for work, and surviving through family ties.

And speaking of family, he gets an invitation from Van Helden, the wealthy man who employs his cousin Kathleen.  He has a dangerously wild daughter, and Van Helden has decided the solution is to find an attractive but tame gentleman to escort her safely to the risky sorts of establishments she enjoys.

"You, Mr. Flood, are reasonably presentable and so unsuitiable that I'm sure my daughter would find you attractive."

And, of course, if anything goes wrong, cousin Kathleen will immediately join the ranks of the desperate unemployed.

Tommy meets the daughter by pretending to be a private eye.  And guess what?  Turns out he's good at it.  The story has a couple of minor plot holes, but I enjoyed it very much.

Little Big News: Best Stories of the Year

At SleuthSayers today I list the best short mysteries of 2015, as decided by me.  Well, somebody's got to do it. 

'Twas The Night Before, by Todd Robinson

"'Twas The Night Before," by Todd Robinson, in Thuglit presents: CRUEL YULE, 2015.

The best story in this collection of holiday tales from Thuglit Magazine was penned by the editor himself, alias Big Daddy Thug.

Boo and Junior are lifelong buddies, stuck holding down the fort in an empty Boston bar on Christmas Eve.  They are both orphans, no one to get festive with.  Noel makes  Boo  miserable and Junior happy, which makes Boo feel even worse.  (Oh, and one thing to get straight: Boo calls Junior his "heterosexual life partner," but they are both male (unless I am reading the story wrong).  So either Robinson or Boo really means platonic life partners.)

Back to the story.  Into the joint wanders a semi-regular customer name Darla and a man she has apparently just met at another bar where she works.

Boo says: "I didn't like him immediately.  He had that cocky Ivy League swagger, chin held at an arrogant angle.  His overcoat looked extremely soft and extremely expensive.  But maybe I was just feeling jealous of somebody with a beautiful woman on his arm on the worst night of my year...."

Turns out Boo's instincts are on target.  Caleb, for such is the jerk's name, attempts to give Darla a date rape drug.  Our heroes spot the scheme and things get complicated.  And messy.  And funny.

"So...do you guys have a  plan?"
"For what?" Junior asked.
"To get him back into his room past the front desk."
 "Improvise?" I said.
"That sounded like a question," Darla said.
I thought for a second.  "Yes.  Yes it did."
From the floor of the backseat erupted a terrified, "FLUMMWRAAAA!"

And happy holidays to all you thugs out there..