The Last of Their Line, by Robin Hazard Ray

 "The Last of Their Line," by Robin Hazard Ray, in Mystery Magazine, April, 2022.

A nice historical story.  

It's Boston, 1857.  Sumner Bascomb is the superintendent of Mount Auburn Cemetery and he receives a letter from Thomas Damon, wishing to purchase a lot big enough to accommodate 24 bodies.  He has decided to move all the remains of his family from the Trinity Church Burying Ground.

If that doesn't sound complicated enough, it turns out that Damon is not actually in charge of his family's estate.  That privilege belongs to his sister, who lives in the same house as him, but they haven't spoke in twenty years.

A lot of family secrets here, with interesting motives...

Amnesty Box, by Tim McLoughlin

 

"Amnesty Box," by Tim McLoughlin, in Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, Akashic Press, 2022.

This is a collection of stories and essays.  If I am reading the acknowledgements correctly, this story is one of three new ones.

It is sometimes poor form for a reviewer to reveal that a story has an unreliable narrator.  But since McLoughlin's character  begins by saying "Appearance is everything and I'm a fraud" I don't think I'm giving away any secrets.

The protagonist is a postal service police officer in New York City.  One reason he describes himself as a fraud is that he can accurately say he has been shot twice, in combat and on the job, but this ignores the fact that they were both minor injuries caused by friendly fire.  Not as heroic as it sounds.

But the main thread of the story is a stunt he creates to speed up the occasional metal detector check which they run on post office customers, always on Friday because that is the lightest work day.  You see, nobody want to spend the beginning of their weekend processing a bust.

Arrests go down on weekends, they go down in nice weather, they go down when they are inconvenient. Conversely, they spike shortly after Halloween and remain high through Thanksgiving, when overtime checks will arrive in time for Christmas shopping.

The cop invents the Amnesty Box, explaining that customers can drop into this cardboard box anything they know they shouldn't be taking through the metal detector.  The catch is they won't get the dumped items back.  "Even on a slow day we would collect a couple small bags of weed and a few knives."

A harmless-enough trick until something much more dangerous is dumped in the box.  Then the story takes several surprising turns...

The Book of Eve (The First Mystery), by Steve Hockensmith

 "The Book of Eve (The First Mystery)," by Steve Hockensmith, Death of a Bad Neighbour: Revenge is Criminal, edited by Jack Calverley, Logic of Dreams, 2022.

I have a story in this book.

This is the sixth appearance in this column by my friend and fellow SleuthSayer Steve Hockensmith.

As the title suggests, this is a retelling of the first murder mystery.  Abel has gone missing and his mother Eve is looking for him.  

Much of the pleasure in this story is in the way it's told, the language of the characters.  And not all of them are human.  For example, here is a sheep complaining of the absence of Abel, the shepherd.

"It's a bummer, too.  We've had lions come by, hyenas, wild dogs.  There's an eagle that's gotten, like six lambs.  It's a wonder the jerk can still fly."

The ewe bent her head and tore out another mouthful of grass.

"I can hardly believe I'm still alive," she muttered.

"Why didn't you come down out of the hills?" Eve asked her.  "Get me and Adam? Or Cain?"

The eye lifted her head again.  But it wasn't to look at Eve and the serpent.  It was to glance around at the other sheep languidly gazing nearby.

"What?" she said.  "And leave the flock?"

A very funny story that manages to be surprisingly moving as well.

Crime Scene, by Joseph S. Walker.

"Crime Scene," by Joseph S. Walker, in Malice in Dallas: Metroplex Mysteries Volume 1, edited by Barb Goffman, Sisters in Crime North Dallas, 2022.

This is the fifth appearance in this column by Walker.

Adler had done a lot of jobs in fields of work where nobody writes a résumé.  

In recent times, in fact, he's been working as a hitman.  His latest assignment is a very strange one: Kill a millionaire businessman in Dealey Plaza on November 22.  

The contract is so bizarre that Adler's curiosity is piqued.  Why is someone willing to  pay a large amount to see Alex Lersch killed, and why at this time and place?  

His research doesn't help much.  Lersch's fortune is going to big institutions, not likely to rush the inheritance illegally.  No one seems to hate or fear the man.  His only unusual characteristic is that he is obsessed with  a certain assassination...

A clever and thoughtful story.

The Peculiar Affliction of Allison White, by Jesse Bethea

 

"The Peculiar Affliction of Allison White," by Jesse Bethea, in Chilling Crime Short Stories, Flame Tree Publishing, 2022.

Most of the stories in this book are reprints, including one by me.  Bethea's tale is one of nine originals, if I counted correctly.

This is a story about science versus superstition.  We are in rural New England in the late nineteenth century. The narrator is a physician.

His problem is that a young girl - his own niece - is claiming to be ill and furthermore saying that she is being attacked by vampires.  The irrational villagers believe her bizarre story and are digging up the graves of the supposed monsters, searching for signs that the dead have been escaping from their graves.  "T]here are no signs of things that don't exist," the doctor grumbles.

If he can't find a way of conquering this madness corpses are not the only victims who will be harmed.  This is a very clever story.

Morbid Phenomena of the Most Varied Kind, by Mat Coward

 

"Morbid Phenomena of the Most Varied Kind," by Mat Coward, in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, March/April 2022.

This is the seventh appearance in this column by Mat Coward.  He writes extremely silly stories and he does it very well.  Consider this opening paragraph:

If you were thinking of assassinating a politician, my main advice would be don't bother -- they keep spares.  You could spend a whole week popping off the corrupt, the cruel, the ruthless, and the irritating, and they'd just keep replacing them faster than you could reload.

Josh has just fired three shots at a businessman-cum-politician.  He missed, but that was the idea.  He and his roommate are totally against violence.  They simply want to make the big man look imperiled because they want to make money by selling his stock short. 

Amazingly enough, the plan works.  Now all they need to do is keep from getting caught.  The potentially fatal piece of evidence is the rifle Josh fired at the bigwig.  See, it could be traced to Oscar.  They found a clever way to dispose of it but because of crooked businesses and surprisingly efficient government bureaucrats - you can't trust anyone these days -  the rifle has disappeared into a landfill.  Our heroes feel they need to rescue it before a bad guy - or worse, an investigating lawman - finds it.

Then we could take it back home and think of another way of getting rid of it.  Being back at square one with no idea what to do next would be  a huge relief.

Hilarious.

Death Floor, by Martin Limón,

 

"Death Floor," by Martin Limón, in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, March/April 2022.

This is the sixth appearance in this space by Martin LimKimchi Kitty, by Martin Limonn and I believe it is the fourth showing for George Sueño and Ernie Bascom, investigators for the CID of the American Eighth Army.  They work in South Korea, eternally in the mid-seventies.  (They have starred in a dozen novels.)

In this story senior clerk Riley, their old frenemy, has been put in a hospital by a beating.  The colonel in charge of CID had sent him on an off-the-books operation, and it had gone badly.  

It seems an officer had a gambling problem and the bad guys he owed money too swiped the half-American little boy he wanted to adopt, as collateral.  Hence the colonel's desire to keep the case hush-hush.

So Sueño and  Bascom have to find and rescue the little boy and punish the people who beat up Riley, and do it all if possible without making a stink.   Good luck, soldiers.

I wrote two weeks ago that Rafe McGregor convinced me he knew all about nineteenth century British army life.  In the same way Limón is absolutely sure-footed in describing Korea in the 1970s and the tricky lives of the CID agents.  Always a fascinating journey with them.

Red Flag, by Gregory Fallis

"Red Flag," by Gregory Fallis, in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, March/April 2022. 

This is the second appearance in this column by Gregory Fallis.

There are many ways to tell a story.  First things first is not always the best approach.  Fallis starts in the middle of the action and then fills in the backstory; a very common method these days.

But it leaves the critic in an awkward position, doesn't it?  I have to explain some of the backstory so you know what's going on.

Porter moved from Michigan to Los Angeles and had a relatively successful acting career, which was interrupted when he was injured during a mass shooting.

Back in Lansing he leads a quiet life until one day his financial advisor asks him to talk to a client's son. Seems the son has expressed an interest in committing mass murder.  Maybe Porter can talk him out of it? 

Porter talks to the young man, a terrifying and depressing encounter.  Then he talks to the cops who explain that there is basically nothing they can do until the man buys a gun and starts shooting.

Which leaves Porter holding the bag.

A fascinating story.  The ending is not a surprise, but it is a satisfactory one.

 

The Case of the Colonel's Suicide, by Rafe McGregor

 

"The Case of the Colonel's Suicide," by Rafe McGregor, in Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, Issue 29, 2022.

A pastiche is a story written in the style and characters of another author, attempting to add to the existing corpus of those works.  Fan fiction, if you like.

A homage, on the other hand, uses  elements of the original author's universe in a new way. 

You could call this story a homage since it name-checks two characters by a well-known author. But that would be a stretch, because the tale would work just as well if those two names were replaced by Smith and Jones.

We are in Victorian England and the narrator is Chief Inspector Langham of the Metropolitan Police.  A retired colonel has committed suicide and Langham, himself a former military man, is asked to examine the scene.

What he sees convinces him that the colonel, although burdened with debts and other serious problems, was murdered.  And so Langham begins to delve deeper into the man's troubled past.

What makes this story stand out for me is its use of detail.  My knowledge of 19th century English military customs is nil, but I am convinced that McGregor knows his stuff, and he makes it fascinating.

Bad News, by Steve Hockensmith

"Bad News," by Steve Hockensmith , in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, January.February 2022.

This is the fifth appearance here by my friend and former SleuthSayer Steve Hockensmith.  It is the second showing by the characters who star in his highly original novel series.

For those of you who are new to the tales, these are westerns starring Gustav and Otto Amlingmeyer, better known as Old Red and Big Red.  Big Red narrates the tales with a breezy sense of humor.  His older brother is a sour pessimist who, after discovering the reports on Sherlock Holmes's adventures, has determined to become a detective.  He has the brains but his big liability is that he never learned to read.

In this story the brothers, now running the A.A. Western Detective Agency, arrive in Little, Colorado to help a publisher who has been held up and robbed of a whole edition of the paper - apparently by a lone Ku Klux Klansman.  The obvious suspect is a rival publisher who hails from the south.  

But Old Red is no sucker for obvious solutions.

Half the joy in these tales is Gustav's deductions.  The other is Otto's witty asides.   "I'd say I know my brother like the back of my hand even though it's another kind of backside he more often brings to mind."

The story is a treat.