The Key, by Ferdinand Von Schirach

"The Key," by Ferdinand Von Schirach,  in Guilt,  Knopf Books, 2012. 

I reviewed a story in Von Schirach's previous book Crime last year.  He is a criminal attorney in Germany and all of his stories are narrated by an attorney named Von Schirach. leading to some debate as to fictional they are. 

In most of the stories the lawyer is a minor character, but none more so than in "The Key."  You could remove the part about Von Schirach without altering the plot a bit.

And speaking of plot: Frank and Atris are German criminals who visit Amsterdam to obtain, from a nasty and believable Russian general, some designer drugs that encourage women to do things they might otherwise prefer not to.  Frank is the brains, Atris the brawn, and when Frank gets picked up by the cops things start to get very messy for Atris, and for the dog Frank has left in his care.  Atris then finds him in a deepening pool of trouble with a series of sinister people.

At this point I need to say that if cruelty to animals is a turn-off for you, you do NOT want to read this story.

There is a flaw in this story: in order to make everything turn out okay a certain person has to perform out of character - or at least to have hidden reserves which we had not been left to expect.  It made it hard to suspend disbelief, but I enjoyed the story anyway.

The Snow Birds, by Gary Phillips

"The Snow Birds," (2009) by Gary Phillips, in Treacherous: Grifters, Ruffians, and Killer, Perfect Crime Books. 2012.

Gary Phillips is a very smooth, professional writer (and a hell of a lot of fun to sit next to at a dinner party, by the way).  I was reading through this book and finding mostly what I expected: grim stories about various levels of bad guys.  And suddenly I find him channeling, of all people, Ring Lardner.

Now one time it comes on Thanksgiving or rather two days prior, and we were standing on the sidelines in the midst of our permitating as the Silver Slicers of Bowler Street went at the Cruze Cru of Avenue J.  Sidelines is a relative term when it comes to street polo as it was of necessity that we and the other onlookers had to, at times, quickly move about to avoid say a smashed toe or bruised shin,.  The lads and lasses zoomed back and forth, to and fro, on their steeds of battered alloy whacking the bejeezus out of a croquet ball with their homemade plastic mallets while adroitly slaloming their bikes, most of the time barely sluicing past one another, on the field of play.

So the tale begins, and clearly we are not on the usual mean streets, nor are we in the prose of, say Ernest Hemingway.  I happen to be a fan of rococo language in mystery shorts (James Powell, Avram Davidson, and John Collier come leaping to mind).and have often wished it was a road I could travel further myself.

Phillips is clearly having a fine time as he tells the story of two small gangs battling over a load of Thanksgiving turkeys.  The plot is silly, the joy is in the language.

At this juncture I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that there was an ongoing tiff between the two as, one might suspect, it involved a dame.  In this case it was a lovely young woman named Annakosta, who'd come this close to gracing the pages of a KING magazine thong special.

Enjoy.

A Closed Book, by Mary Hoffman

"A Closed Book," by Mary Hoffman, in Venice Noir, edited by Maxim Jakubowski, Akashic Press, 2012.

Jakubowski saved the best for last in this book.  In Hoffman's story an Englishwoman visits Venice, chooses a gondolier, and starts peppering him with questions about the city's most notorious crimes.   She's working on a collection of short stories, she explains, but something about her makes Taddeo, the gondolier, quite uncomfortable. 

When the tourist is found murdered in her hotel room Taddeo is the only suspect and is promptly arrested.  His fellow gondolieri don't believe in his guilt and conduct their own investigation.  The reader knows more than the characters and it is fun to watch as the net closes in. 

I like the subtle way in which the underlying motive -- the crimes behind the crime -- is left below the surface.  We can figure out what is in the victim's short story about Venice; the details are left to our imagination.

A very nice piece of work.

After Cana, by Terence Faherty

"After Cana," by Terence Faherty, in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, September/October, 2012.

"You usually go door-to-door bothering people until one of them knocks you in the head."  That is a friend of Owen Keane, explaining his usual style of amateur detective work.  In this story his approach is more armchair-ish, if that's a word, but very satisfactory.

Keane is a troubled guy with a murky past, explored in previous Faherty tales, and when the current story opens he is accompanying a friend to the wedding of a couple he doesn't know.  The minister's familiar sermon on weddings creating a new community gets him thinking about people in his past, but a few days later the new couple is killed on their honeymoon, and that's what really gets him thinking.

Was it, as it appeared to be, a meaningless mugging death, or is something even more sinister going on?  Keane cleverly traces the roots back to an event that happened fifty years ago, and then forward again to the present day.  The story is well-written with nice characterization of the minor players, which help Keane reach the final deduction.  A nice piece of work.

My Life With The Butcher Girl, by Heath Lowrance

"My Life With The Butcher Girl," by Heath Lowrance, in Pulp Ink 2, edited by Nigel Bird and Chris Rhatigan,  Snubnose Press, 2012.

 This is a dark ride, a very dark ride.  I am not usually a big fan of stories full of sex and violence, because the authors often seem to forget to include other elements, like a plot and a point. 

I'll be the first to admit a story doesn't necessarily need a point - it can just be an entertaining read - but I do insist on a plot, and if it manages to also raise an interesting question, so much the better.  Lowrance manages all of the above.

The question that he pursues is the psychology of  death groupies - the people who fall in love with serial killers.   As far as I know most of these sad cases are women (because most  of the murderers are men?) but Lowrance's protagonist, Jim, is a guy who becomes obsessed with the Butcher Girl, who is convicted of what used to be called thrill killings, slaughtering three men in sexual situations.

We see their relationship begin and grow and when she is released due to a botched trial, it's inevitable that they wind up together.  But what does Jim want from her?  And what does she want from him?

I certainly didn't guess what was coming.  And the sex and violence are essential to the story.  A good job all around.

Murder... Now And Then, by Penny Mickelbury

Murder...Then And Now" by Penny Mickelbury, in Send my Love and a Molotov Cocktail, PM Press, 2011. 

I missed this book when it came out last year. All the stories involve rebellion,crime and love. They are set in the current war, and the early twentieth century trade union fights, and plenty other places in between.

 My favorite  tale starts in the sixties when five Black college students in the south are planning to disrupt a KKK parade with molotov cocktails. Things go disastrously wrong.

Forty years ater the survivors of the debacle meet to determne what happened... and to settle the accounts. As it happens, one of them is a private eye, Boxer Gordon. While not a traditional private eye story at all, this is still the best P.I. tale I have read so far this year.

The Fruit At The Bottom Of The Bowl, by Ray Bradbury

"The Fruit At The Bottom Of The Bowl" by Ray Bradbury, in The Golden Apples of the Sun.  (1948)

This is the first time  in a year and a half this review has been late.  Stuff happens, but it didn't help that nothing I read this week rang my chimes, so for the third time in a year and a half I have had to resort to my list of fifty favorite stories.  It seemed appropriate to honor the late, great Ray Bradbury.

I think most people tend to remember Bradbury for his inspiring go-to-space stories, and forget that he learned his chops on horror.  There is psychological horror in this little masterpiece, but it is first and foremost a crime story.  In fact, it appeared first in Detective Book Magazine and was reprinted five years later in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (under the cutesy title "Touch and Go."  Shame on you, Frederick Dannay.).

The protagonist has just gone to another man's home where they had an argument about a woman, and the home owner gets killed.  The protagonist can get away with murder - if he is sure that he doesn't leave any fingerprints behind.  And soon we are in territory that would be quite familiar to Edgar Allan Poe.

The last paragraph is worth the price of the book.