The Two-Body Problem, by Josh Pachter

"The Two-Body Problem," by Josh Pachter, in Mystery Weekly Magazine, October 2019.

I admit to being a sucker for stories set in higher education.  Comes from three-plus decades in the academe mob.

My friend Josh Pachter has offered a nice example.  The narrator and his  fiance are both marine biologists, hustling toward the completion of their PhDs.  And that is what brings up the titular dilemma.

With the job market the way it is, it's tough enough for one let's say marine biologist to find a tenure-track position at an R1 -- which is, for the uninitiated, a top-level university... When there are two of you in the same competitive field, the challenge is exponentially compounded.

How do two bodies, excuse me, two academics find jobs at the same top school?  And what happens if they don't? 

I very much enjoyed the light and sparkling tone used in this tale to describe the complexities of the higher ed biz.

My only complaint about this story is that Pachter doesn't explain the origin of the "Two Body Problem."  It's a physics issue having to do with objects in orbit.  This adds another level of academic complexity to the whole shebang.

Miss Martin, by Sheila Kohler

"Miss Martin," by Sheila Kohler, in Cutting Edge, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, Akashic Press, 2019.

The publisher sent me a free ARC of this book.

Diane is a teenager and she is making a special trip home from her private boarding school.  It is the first visit since her father married his secretary, Miss Martin.  This followed her mother running off with a lover.  You will not be surprised to know this is a family with problems.

Take a moment to think about stepmothers.  Trophy wives.  Secretaries who marry their bosses.

Got it?  Okay, throw out all those stereotypes because Miss Martin and Diane are going to write a very different tale...  Nice piece of work.

OBF, Inc, by Bernice L. McFadden

"OBF, Inc," by Bernice L. McFadden, in Cutting Edge, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, Akashic Press, 2019.


The publisher sent me an advance reading copy of this book.

I pondered long before choosing this as my best story of the week, simply because it is so far from what most people would call a mystery.  Like most people these days I use Otto Penzler's definition - a story in which crime or the threat of crime is a major element - and there is crime involved here.

Nonetheless, it is not what the average mystery reader would expect.  It is more political fiction, or social commentary.

However, it is a terrific story, and it does have that saving grace of a crime element, so here goes.  It starts like this:

Andrew was entering his third month of unemployment when he sat down at his computer and opened the inbox of his LinkedIn account.  He'd received a response to a query he'd sent off four days after his friend-turned-manager walked him into a conference room swimming with sunlight, smelling of cologne, and the faintest hint of perfume left behind by a group of attorneys who'd recently vacated the space after a five-hour meeting.

Nice detail there.  Andrew is being laid off because the head of his company has been accused of multiple sexual harassment issues, leading the corporate stock to walk off a cliff. 

But good news!  OBF, Inc. wants to talk to him about a possible job.

And here is the rub, of course.  What is OBF exactly and what do they do?  Obviously I can't tell you that.  But it's extremely interesting and thought-provoking.

The story reminds me of Stephen King's great little tale "Quitters, Inc." about an equally unusual  but very different company.

Pentecost, by Eve Fisher

"Pentecost," by Eve Fisher, in Me Too Stories, edited by Elizabeth Zelvin, Level Best Books, 2019.

This is the second appearance on this page by my fellow SleuthSayer, Eve Fisher.  All the stories in this book deal with sexual violence/harrassment against women.

As usual for Fisher, the story is set in rural South Dakota. It is 1990 and the Lutheran Church in Laskin has just acquired its first female pastor. Darla Koenig actually grew up in Laskin but has just moved back, giving her a unique insider/outsider perspective.  She is trying to settle in with her young daughter, finding her place in the delicate social web.

Her daughter loves the dance classes and there lies the rub, because the girls' dressing room shares an interior window with a respected local attorney.  And somehow the paint covering that window keeps getting scraped away...

Darla knows that raising a stink about it will make her enemies she can't afford.  Can she find another way to deal with it?

You bet.

A fun story.

Stumped, by Gary Pettigrew

"Stumped," by  Gary Pettigrew, in Mystery Weekly Magazine, September 2019.

A charming historical mystery this week.  Let's read the first paragraph...

The summer of 1927 was as idyllic as ever remembered in the South of England.  Old John Ayres had decided to retire to spend more time with his family in Dorset and so the council of Lower Dunston was forced to choose a new village policeman; by popular opinion, George Mahoney was the first name suggested.  Fred Hurst nominated himself, of course, but this was quickly discarded because of the obvious reasons that nobody talked about...

And there is the gaff, the hook.  Are we going to find out "the obvious reasons" or is this just a casual element thrown in to suggest that the village knows too much about its residents?

It turns out to be the former. 

The new copper is found dead two days later and Fred Hurst, obvious reasons and all, finds himself a rookie officer struggling with a murder.  He isn't getting a lot of help from the higher-ups who, when he asks for immediate help, respond "basically, that Mr. Mahoney would not be any deader tomorrow."

And he gets no respect from his fellow villagers, who are at least willing to tell him what he's doing wrong. 

Will Fred solve the crime?  And if he does, considering those annoying "reasons," will he even remember the solution?

The Dead Man in the Pearl Gray Hat,by Bruce W. Most

"The Dead Man in the Pearl Gray Hat," by Bruce W. Most, in Mystery Weekly Magazine, August 2019.

Lillian de la Torre was the pioneer, as far as I know. In the 1940s she started writing stories about "Samuel Johnson, detector."  This was the earliest example I am aware of of mystery writers using real people as their protagonists.  Nowadays you can find everyone from Eleanor Roosevelt to Barack Obama starring in crime novels.

In this case the main character is Weegee the Famous, who was indeed a famous photographer, specializing in street scenes of New York City.

Unlike de la Torre's Johnson, Weegee is not shown as a detective here.  His connection to crime is photographing it, and in the era of Murder, Inc., there is plenty of death to document.  In fact, that is the problem he faces in the story.  Jaded reader are getting tired of his photos of countless thugs and gangsters shot to death.  Editors have stopped buying?  What to do?

Weegee finds a solution.  It is perfectly legal, and as near as I can surmise, it doesn't even violate journalistic canons (unlike his habit of rearranging props at the murder scene to make a more interesting shot).  But boy, it does seem unethical in the extreme.

I have no idea whether Most is describing something that actually happened to Weegee or making it up.  But it's an interesting story that makes you think.   

Niall Nelson is on my Flight, by Jim Fusilli

"Niall Nelson is on my Flight," by Jim Fusilli, in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, September/October 2019.

This is the second appearance here by Jim Fusilli.

Betty's point: You don't send money back.  You don't negotiate out of insecurity.  You push hard.  You demand.
My question: Do they really want me?

Paul has written a treatment for a movie based on the life of musician Nick Drake and now he is flying to France to talk to a studio interested in  making the flick.  He is afraid he is not good enough.  His much-younger wife Betty clearly thinks he is not ambitious enough.  (He suspects she only stays married to him to provide a father figure for her son.)  And it turns out a famous A-list actor is on their flight, someone Betty thinks he should find a way to talk to...

That's all I will tell you about the plot.  There are two things that made this story stand out for me.

One is Fusilli's use of real people and institutions.  I think most writers would have had their fictional characters fly on Paris Airlines to talk to executives at Seine Studio, but he just flat out says Air France and Canal+.  And Nick Drake too, was a real-life person.  Niall Nelson, of course, is not real, but you don't have to be an addict of Hollywood gossip shows to guess what sixty-ish Irish action star Fusilli is invoking.

The second element is a very blunt form of foreshadowing.  Early twentieth-century crime writer Mary Roberts Rinehard is credited/blamed with being the queen of the "Had I But Known" school of writing, in which suspense is created by lamenting bad decisions.

Fusilli doesn't do the lamenting but he simply warns us that bad things are about to happen.  It was one of those men, I later learned, who set out to harm us.  That's the first of several notes.

I feel like it shouldn't work but it certainly does.  Good story.

The Surrogate Initiative, by Brian Cox

"The Surrogate Initiative," by Brian Cox, in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, September/October 2019.

One of the many things I like about AHMM is that they are willing to push genre boundaries.  They occasionally publish a western, science fiction, or even fantasy story if it has a strong crime element.

Take this tale as an example.  It tells of the first criminal case decided by a jury of AI surrogates.  Nobody wants to be called to jury duty so computer programs are developed with the personalities of potential jurors.  Unlike their real life counterparts they never get sick, or bored, they automatically understand all the technical jargon of expert witnesses and their biases can be tuned by the judge. 

Could it ever happen?  Probably not.  But it's fascinating to think about it, and Cox's story provides several twists along the way to what might be justice.

Do Not Disturb, by Steve Hockensmith

"Do Not Disturb," by Steve Hockensmith, in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, July/August 2019.

This is the fourth appearance in this column by my friend and fellow SleuthSayer Steve Hockensmith.  And it's a very different story from him. I expect shorter,usually comic pieces but this is a straight-forward novella. And while he often writes about the old west this is, I think, the first time I have read him delving into the 1940s.

In fact it is 1940 in New York.  Colleen Flynn, a former cop, is an assistant hotel detective at the Grand American, a second-string house.  "The guys from Ford and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and General Foods stayed elsewhere.  The Grand American got Studebaker and Republic Pictures and Dr. Ross's Dog and Cat Food."

And the hotel also got a death.  Longtime guest Laurence Kaufman hung himself in the shower.  Except one of the maids, a Polish refugee, informs Colleen that he was probably murdered.  Colleen investigates although her boss points out that her boss points out that bringing bad guys to justice is no longer her job.

Actually, the boss is one of the pleasant surprises in this story, since he goes quite against type.

I wonder if this is to be part of a series because we are definitely left wondering about our heroine.  What's her backstory?  Why did she leave the force?

Ah, so many mysteries.

Get a Life, by Judith Janeway

"Get a Life," by Judith Janeway, in Fault Lines: Stories by Northern California Crime Writers, edited by Margaret Lucke, 2019.

This is a books of stories by members of the Northern California chapter of Sisters in Crime.

Our narrator is an identity thief and she cheerfully explains all the tricks of her trade.  She's verygood at it but she gets a little too obsessed with her latest conquest, if I may use that term.  She not only steals Nadine Gale's credit cards and steals her money, but she starts dressing like her.  Even though, she insists, it's nothing personal.

Nadine, the original Nadine, oddly enough, gets quite grumpy about all this.  She even tracks her copy down but is unable to get any restitution.  But she doesn't quit easily.

Watch out, Nadine.  Nadine is on your trail.  I didn't see what was coming in this twisty tale.