Three LIttle Words, by Nancy Pickard

"Three Little Words," by Nancy Pickard, in Mystery Writers of America present Manhattan Mayhem, edited by Mary Higgins Clark, Quirk,2015. 

Priscilla Windsor is a poor little rich girl.  Not only does she come from a horrible wealthy family, but on the first page she discovers that she is about to die.  "Death could only improve my life, she thought, and giggled wildly again."

Her long-time doctor, Sam Waterford, suggests she make a bucket list.  Priscilla's has only one item: TELL THE TRUTH.

Three days later, she is murdered.  Sam feels obliged to look into, not her death so much as her life.  What he finds is disturbing, but does it include the motive for murder?

A lot of twists in here, including one I found unsatisfactory, but a very nice story anyway.

Naomi, by Christopher Rice

"Naomi," by Christopher Rice, in nEvermore!, edited by Nancy Kilpatrick and Caro Soles, EDGE, 2015.

Full disclosure: I have a story in this collection of Poe-inspired tales.

You could argue that this piece is fantasy or horror, not a mystery.  And you'd be right.  But a wise man (me) once pointed out that there seems to be an affinity between mysteries and ghost stories, that does not exist with vampire, zombie, etc. stories.

Besides, this is a tale of crime and revenge, which seems to be right in our wheelhouse.  But enough special pleading. 

Franklin, the narrator, is tormented by the recent death of his niece.  Naomi, a transsexual woman,  was bullied by other students at her high school and committed suicide.

Reporters wait outside the family house and demand: Mr. Franklin, did you do enough to help your niece?  He doesn't respond, although he longs to say, at least you stopped calling her Nathan.  

Now other students from the school have killed themselves.  Copycats, is the community's first thought.   Then: they were the bullies and they did it out of guilt.

But Franklin, a gay man who attended the same school, is convinced that kids like that never feel guilt or remorse.  So what - or who - is causing their deaths?

The answer?  Well, let's say this is a thoroughly modern ghost story, and a very good one.

Meet and Greet, by Ian Rankin

"Meet and Greet," by Ian Rankin, The Strand Magazine, July-October 2015.  

Sometimes you wonder where an author possibly got the idea for  a story.  In the case of this clever tale I think we can all make a guess.

Peppard and Jarman have a plan to make some quick dishonest cash.  Go to an airport and imitate the drivers who stand, holding signs, waiting for passengers to get off planes.  Collect the passenger before the real driver does, whisk him away and rob him.  A sure thing.
 
Well, if you have read any crime fiction at all, you know a sure thing is sure to go all to hell.  The reason this made my favorites list is the clever, and perfectly logical twist at the very end.
 

Solo for Shoehorn, by John H. Dirckx

"Solo for Shoehorn," by John H. Dirckx, in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, October 2015.

For many years Dirckx has been creating a dependable series of private eye stories for AHMM about Detective (recently Lieutenant) Cyrus Auburn, set in a midwestern city. 

The tale begins when Auburn meets Walter Bottrace, a seventy-five year old man with a mobile van full of vintage LPs and 45s for sale.  When Bottrace is found killed in the woods with a passel of fake IDs, Auburn uncovers a complicated scheme of robberies that have more to do with drugs and, yes, shoehorns, than music.

What makes the stories work are mostly the characters and how they are described.  There is a regular cast, each of whom gets their scene on stage.  For example, evidence tech Kestrel dislikes Stamaty, the coroner's clerk who slows down his work, and in this episode he calls him "the Last Responder."

Big Hard Squall, by Lane Kareska

"Big Hard Squall," by Lane Kareska, in Thuglit, issue 17, 2015.

This review is late because I was at Sasquan, where, among other things,  I heard two editors being interviewed.  They were asked: what type of story are you so tired of you don't want to see any more?  They refused to answer because (and I am paraphrasing, of course), no matter how cliched a category might be, someone is going to come up with the next new and original work in it, and they don't want to miss it.

This week's story starts with a bit of a cliche: The main character has been brutally attacked and locked in the trunk of her car, which is now headed for parts unknown.  We stay in Abby's head as she runs through her life and concludes that there is no one who would want to do this to her.  Therefore the target must be her daughter Margaret, a prosecuting attorney.  Either someone wants to punish Margaret or else put a squeeze on her, and Abby is the pawn in jeopardy.

(By the way, this story is set in 1990.  It stretched my disbelief that a white collar woman born in 1925 would swear like the proverbial sailor.  But maybe that's just me.)

Back to the plot.  So far we are in territory we have seen many times before.  But when the trunk lid comes up, all bets are off.  Nothing after that is predictable at all.  Very nice piece of work.

A Box of Horses, by Steve Bailey.

"A Box of Horses," by Steve Bailey, in Thuglit", 17, 2015.

Some stories you read on the edge of your seat, not because of the suspense in the telling, but because there are so many ways the author could go wrong.  Will he make it to the end without screwing up?   Obviously Steve Bailey did or we wouldn't be having this discussion. 

Dianne is a woman who does bad things.  She has her reasons, ugly events that happened in her past. 

She makes her living cleaning people's houses and she is "an explorer, a secret digger inside people's hidden places."  Yes, she steals from her clients, but she is much more interested in investigating their lives than in copping their goods, which in any case she is more likely to keep as souvenirs than to sell.

One day she discovers that a client - a woman with MS and her nine-year-old daughter - have a new neighbor, and she immediately recognizes that this man is in some ways like her.  Up to no good.  And maybe now she knows why several young girls in the city have vanished in the last year. 

Trouble is, he also recognizes her for what she is...  And you think YOUR relationships are problematic.

Shooting Stars, by Richard Helms

"Shooting Stars," by Richard Helms, in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, September/October 2015.

Mr. Helms makes his third appearance on this page, with his second story in this series.  (Here is the first.)

Boy Boatright is a down-on-his-luck police detective, as you can tell from this opening sentence:

Even after the crime-scene guys finished wrecking it, Nigel Bowles's trailer looked nicer than my apartment.

Lovely.  Bowles is, or was, the favorite judge on a top TV talent show, visiting town to film a special episode.  Everyone involved in the series had multiple reasons to want him dead, and most had opportunities.


But that isn't Boatright's real problem.  That would be the fact that one of the other judges is a client of an alleged psychic with the amazing name of Bowie Crapster, and he is the reason Boyright keeps threatening to retire.  Forced, again to work with the Crapster - No more than five and a half feet tall, built like the Pillsbury Doughboy, resplendent in an Italian ice-cream suit with silk cravat and gleaming white patent-leather shoes. His hair, cut in a sort of Caesar style with short bleached bangs, was reflected in his silver Elvis sunglasses.  He looked like a Good Humor Man in Key West. - our hero threatens to resign , but that would spoil the fun.

Crapster isn't quite as charmingly annoying this time, largely because he explains to Boatright and us how he achieves some of his allegedly mystical effects.  A nice example of working your way through the suspects.

One complaint:  Helms is stuck with the names he chose for his heroes but with so many letters in the alphabet why does this story include: Boy Boatwright, Bowie, Belinda, Billy, Baggs, and Bliss?  Why make it harder for the reader to keep the characters straight?

Red Jacks Wild, by Kim Newman

"Red Jacks Wild," by Kim Newman, in Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, Issue 17, 2015.

You could argue that this is not the best mystery story I read this week.  At approximately ten thousand words it's more like a novella.  And you could say it's fantasy/horror rather than mystery.

Don't care. 

In any case, it's in a mystery magazine, and a series of murders are solved, and if you don't like that you can start your own review blog.  So there.

I try not to reveal the plot but there is a lot of premise here to explain before we get to the plot.

The narrator is John Carmody, a psychologist in New York in 1951.  He also happens to be Jack the Ripper.

Wait a minute, you say.  He'd have to be a hundred years old. 

Well, he is.  But he looks the same age he did in the 1880s when he started making human sacrifices to Hecate.  Which he still does, every three years.

But not prostitutes every time.  He alters his "disposables-"  And now we come to the first thing I love about this story.

You may be familiar with the theory that popular horror movies are the ones that capture the zeitgeist - I might say the frightgeist - the main thing that people of the time are scared of.  So right after World War II we had Godzilla and other monsters created by nuclear radiation.  At the height of the Cold War we had Invasion of the Body Snatchers in which your best friend or neighbor might turn out to be the enemy!  When AIDS made blood a scary thing Dracula made a big comeback.  I lieave it up to you to decide what the current popularity of brain-seeking zombies means.

My point is that this Jack the Ripper understands the concept.

In New Orleans in 1909 I tok colored children.  They called me the Voo-Doo Man.  The cops didn't listen to the parents until I was done.  In California in 1933, as the Hobo Hacker, I picked on jobless transients.  Last time, the Red Knife, preyed on card-carrying communists...

Carmody picks the people we don't care about.   And, as the FBI's favorite shrink, he gets to steer them to the wrong killers.  But now someone is slaughtering juvenile delinquents - surely a classic "disposable" in America of the 1950s - and it isn't him.

It seems to have something to do with his most famous patient, a publisher of horror comics, who is being tormented by another psychoanalyst, who blames the comics for all the nations ills.  Yes, this story is all about America's twisted psyche, and I loved it.

Canyon Ladies, by Sarah M. Chen

"Canyon Ladies," by Sarah M. Chen, in Sisters in Crime Los Angeles presents LAdies Night, edited by Naomi Hirahara, Kate Thornton, and Jeri Westerson, Down and Out Books, 2015. 

Before we get to the main order of business, may I grumble a bit?  No one has ever been able to stop me before, so I guess I can. 

This is always an awkward time of year for me.  I have run out of paper magazines to review.  That means I either have to buy paper copies of anthologies or get e-versions and in that case I need to drag my iPad to work to read them on my lunch hour.  Yeah, poor me.

None of this is a complaint about this book, which I am enjoying.  In fact, I am grateful to SIC-LA for publishing over the summer.  So many anthologies come out in late fall.  Just in time for Christmas shopping, sure, but a real bummer for people trying to finish their reviews of 2015 before 2016. 

Okay.  Kvetch over.

Speaking of kvetching, Chen's narrator has a reason or two to complain.  Shelby's husband has been caught in dirty business dealings and, although he was miraculously (and suspiciously) acquitted, the social world of Laurel Canyon has not forgiven him. His wife, innocent of any wrong-doing, is a social pariah.

Shelby's having a hard time coping.  "I looked in the mirror as I washed  my hands, and shame, wearing last season's bathing suit, stared back at me.  I bet this is how the fat girl in school felt like every day."

But she a plan for vengeance.  The question is: on whom, exactly?

Canary, by Matthew J. Hockey

"Canary," by Matthew J. Hockey, in Thuglit, 18, 2015.

There is a streak of puritanism running through some noir literature.  Take one step off the straight-and-narrow and you are inevitably doomed.  Things keep getting worse and every attempt you make to correct your path only drags you inexorably toward the pit.

Which brings us to Booster, a fireman with a chemistry degree, which earns him the dubious privilege of being the first into a meth lab gone deadly.  He's the one who enters first in full HAZMAT gear and has to determine if all the idiots inside were killed by the poisonous brew they created or whether there might be survivors.

And this time he finds  a bag stuffed with four hundred grand.  Obviously he ought to leave it where it lies, but who will know if he doesn't?  And so he takes one step off the straight-and-narrow...

Excellent story that kept surprising me.

Mr. Kill-Me, by David Dean

"Mr. Kill-Me, by David Dean, in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, August 2015.

With this story by my SleuthSayers blogmate David Dean, it seems unnecessary to ask: where did you get your idea?  Anyone who has ever had a close call on the road will probably think they can guess.

Larry is a real estate agent in a shore town.  One day he backs his BMW out of a driveway and almost hits a man on a bicycle; a strange homeless-looking guy with angry eyes and a weird smile.  The biker disappears before Larry can confront him. 

A few days later, driving down the road, the biker pulls out in front of him again, seeming to demand to be run over.

What the hell is going on?  Is Larry imaging things?  Is someone plotting against him?  If so, what the hell is the purpose?

I should say I saw the end pages before it arrived, but it's a hell of a tale, and worth the trip.

Knock-Out Whist, by David Levien

"Knock-Out Whist," by David Levien, in in Dark City Lights, edited by Lawrence Block, Three Rooms Press, 2015.

This is a story about the levels of life in New York City, and those going up versus those going down.  Jerry Riser - a riser is, of course, one who rises; it is also the part of a step that doesn't get stepped on - is a disgraced ex-cop, reborn as a shady private eye. 

He has just finished a big case for one of the people at the top, causing major trouble for another one, a mayoral candidate.  The politician sends thugs around to find out who hired Riser, and they offer his choice of a beating or a payoff.

He could also use the cash.  On the other hand it was a question of honor, the old vintage.  There were still a few bottles of it left around, and once it was uncorked, it was sticky stuff.

One of the best P.I. stories I have read this year.

Red's White F-150 Blues, by Scott Montgomery

"Red's White F-150 Blues," by Scott Montgomery, in Murder on Wheels, Eleven Tales of Crime on the Move, presented by the Austin Mystery Writers, Wildside Press, 2015.  

The editors sent me a free copy of this book.

Red Clark spends a lot of time taking care of his baby son, because the factory put him on half time and Britney has had to take on more nursing shifts at the hospital.  One day his old friend Billy Ray - part-time drug dealer and non-stop trouble -- shows up to ask a favor.  The bank wants to repossess his truck.  Can he hide it in Red's garage for a while?

Of course, Red says yes.   Of course, Britney gets mad.  While they're arguing about it - and about meatloaf and other affairs of state -- the TV announces that a guard was killed in a bank robbery.  Police are looking for a certain truck.

Uh oh.

What follows are a lot of bad decisions, some startling secrets and - oh yes - a beheading.  This is pretty much what Texas noir means to me. 

Bowery Station, 3:15 A.M., by Warren Moore

"Bowery Station, 3:15 A.M.," by Warren Moore, in Dark City Lights, edited by Lawrence Block, Three Rooms Press, 2015.

A little snippet of  a story, but a memorable one.  The nameless narrator is hanging around one of the least used subway stations in the middle of the night, when...

I saw the girl standing on the Brooklyn bound side of the platform.  You might not have noticed anything, but I saw the firsts clenched at her sides and I saw her lips moving, and I knew what she was gearing up to do.

Can he prevent her from taking her own life?  And if he does, what will happen next?

Worth finding out.

Drone, by Rob Hart

"Drone," by Rob Hart, in Thuglit, Issue 16.

I can't find the name of the comedian who complained, approximately: "You always hear on the news about drug deals that went wrong.  Why don't they ever talk about the thousands of drug deals that went right?"

Because they aren't newsworthy, of course.  And they wouldn't make very good fiction.

So you can be pretty sure something is going to go pear-shaped in this tale of three crooks who come up with a brilliant new way to move cocaine around the city.

Melinda is the bright one, and she has built a drone capable of flying five pounds of product.  Billy the narrator, and his short-on-impulse-control brother Richie have the connections with a major drug dealer with the not-at-all-ominous name of T. Rex..  All they need is to demonstrate what inventors call "proof of concept" and they are in for a very profitable partnership.

What could go wrong?  Oh, something or other.  Take it away, Richie:

"Well, there was a wrench up on the roof, and I hit him with it, and that all turned into a thing."

Yeah, I hate it when that happens.  Good story.

Dyed to Death, by K.G. McAbee

K.G. McAbee. "Dyed to Death," in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, July/August 2015. 

Last week I said my favorite story was all about setting.  And here we are again.

McAbee's story won the Black Orchid Novella Award, given each year bu AHMM and the Wolfe Pack for a novella that best carries on the Rex Stout  tradition.  The winners usually have a Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin format, meaning a great detective and an assistant narrates the story.  This is true in "Dyed to Death," but as I said, it is the setting that is the true main character.

It is the late twenties in a company town somewhere in the south.  Our narrator is Sam, a boy in his late teens.  He never recovered from an injury in the cotton mill when he was fifteen (the same mill killed his father) so he works at the company store.  His boss is Guy Henson who, beside running the store is also the village constable.  He also is a former millworker, but  experiences in the Great War left him unable to tolerate loud noises.

When Sam finds a woman drowned in the river, dyed purple from the weekly dumping of a mill vat, Henson has to find out what happened.  Sam, a dedicated reader of Black Mask, is thrilled to be able to participate.

I should say I didn't think the ending of this story was as strong as the rest of it.  But McAbee gives us a strong sense of what life was like in a town where the mill owner set the rules and could throw you out of your home on a whim.  I hope to see more of Guy and Sam.

The Monkey's Ghost, by Rosalind Barden

"The Monkey's Ghost," by Rosalind Barden, in History and Mystery, Oh My!, edited by Sarah E. Glenn, Mystery and History, LLC, 2015.

The publisher's sent me a copy of this book for free. 

This story is mostly about setting, if you stretch setting to include the minor characters, which I think you can.

The narrator grew up during the depression in the Bunker Hill neighborhood of Los Angeles.

To live there was the height of fashion in the Gay Nineties of the previous century,.  The prominent families of the day decorated Bunker Hill's steep streets with colorful candy-like fantasies of Victorian homes.

But by the 1930s the area had fallen on hard times and the narrator and her family live in an apartment building surrounded by these old homes and some old, eccentric neighbors.  One of them (according to a local gossip, an elderly magician) was the only child of a wealthy man, and she married a scoundrel who abandoned her.  But first he bought her a monkey, and the story goes, one day she threw the ape out the window, killing it.  Or maybe the monkey was already dead. Or maybe it wasn't a monkey...

Naturally the local kids become obsessed with this strange story.  I did not expect the outcome.  This was a fun read.

A Theory of Murder, by Dennis Palumbo

"A Theory of Murder," by Dennis Palumbo, in And All Our Yesterdays, edited by Andrew MacRae, Darkhouse Books, 2015.


Mea culpa: It took me so long to get around to reading this book that I forgot how I received it.  I should say it was a gift from the publisher.

Wish I'd thought of that.

It's Bern, Switzerland, 1904.  Hector, a clerk in the patent office, is suspected of a series of grisly murders.  Luckily a friend of his, also a patent clerk, is looking into the crimes.  And Albert Einstein is a pretty bright guy...

You may know that 1905 was the "Annus Mirabilis" in which Einstein published four papers that turned Physics on its head.  In this story we see him pondering on some of these points, providing some of the most amusing moments.

For example, he shows up at Hector's house in the middle of the night:

"My God, Albert, do you know the time?"

"More intimately than most, I promise you." 

A very clever story.

The Beethoven House, by Albert Tucher

"The Beethoven House," by Albert Tucher, in And All Our Yesterdays, edited by Andrew MacRae, Darkhouse Books, 2015.  

Mea culpa: It took me so long to get around to reading this book that I forgot how I received it.  I should say it was a gift from the publisher.

Last year I noted in this space how cold war spy stories tend to center on Berlin.  In the highlight, so far, of this collection of historical mysteries,  Mr. Tucher moves southeast to another hotbed of espionage: the capital of neutral Austria.

It is 1955, three years after Vienna ceased to be a divided city.  Benjamin is a CIA agent and a local cop calls to inform him that one of his contacts has been found murdered.  Apparently Wolfi Stendl had acquired two tickets to the hottest show in town - the grand reopening of the Opera, after many years of reconstruction after the war.  Why did someone want those seats enough to kill for them?

There are wheels within wheels here, betrayals of betrayals, which as Benjamin notes, is the Viennese way.  An entertaining story of the bad old days.

On Borrowed Time, by Mat Coward

"On Borrowed Time," by Mat Coward, in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, May 2015.

I'm a big fan of Mat Coward's funny stories about muddled and desperate  criminals.  The hero, if that's the word I'm looking for, in this story is Nash, a British public servant, of sorts.  He is paid by the government but he is frank that he works for big business.  The job of the Section is to spy on labor leaders, and non-profits, anyone who might upset the corporate status quo.  His personal tasks include secretly opening the mail of a major union boss.

And one day he finds a very expensive watch in the man's mail. Being desperate for money - we don't find out why until much later - he swipes it.  Then he gets worried that - well...

There were several people he might need to kill, and the way he saw it, if all of them were still alive a week from now, that'd be the nearest thing to a proper result he'd have achieved in years.  

It's always good to have goals.
 
Indeed it is.  You might not think a civil servant would be well-equipped to kill people, but you wouldn't know about the special training sessions the Section provides for it's worker bees. 

Nash had once attended an upskilling weekend on The Rudiments of Self-Defence, which included rudiments such as how to sneak up behind someone in the dark and self-defend yourself against them with a garrotte.

 A very funny tale with a lot of pointed comments on the world we find ourselves living in

An Invisible Minus Sign, by Denise Mina

"An Invisible Minus Sign," by Denise Mina, in Deadly Housewives, edited by Christine Matthews, HarperCollins e-books, 2015.

Many of the stories I have read in this collection have been jollyish tales of women trying to kill errant husbands, so this detour to noir stands out for contrast.

Moira is a housewife, sick of making no impression on the world.

She no longer knew if she liked strong cheddar or the boys did, whether France was somewhere she wanted to go on holiday or David's choice.  And she didn't even think she liked the hidden Moira enough to send out a search party.

After trying to revive herself with an affair "and a hundred other suburban redemptions," she decides to kill herself.

Of course, she doesn't.  Something else happens and I can't tell you what, but it is worth finding out.  But the main attraction in this story is the language, as demonstrated above.

The Edgars are announced

And the winner for Best Short Story is:


"What Do You Do?” – Rogues by Gillian Flynn
(Penguin Random House Publishing – Bantam Books)


Congratulations!

We On The Train! by Margaret Maron

"We On The Train!" by Margaret Maron, in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, May 2015.  

If you have ever read a book to a small child you know that the highest possible accolade they can offer is an immediate "Read it again!"  The first thing I did after finishing this story is start it over.

Of course, it helps that the story is very short - flash fiction or close to it - but it is so clever that I had to take another look at.

Greg McInnis is a DEA agent who prefers to do his business traveling by train.  On a trip up the east coast he is amused by a young African-American woman who is gleefully phoning everyone she knows to tell them that she is going to visit New York with an older man she says is her Uncle Leon.

Sounds innocent enough, but this is a crime story, so something else must be going on here.  Will our hero figure it out in time?  He only has four pages...

Two Bad Hamiltons and a Hirsute Jackson, by Robert Mangeot

"Two Bad Hamiltons and a Hirsute Jackson," by Robert Mangeot, in Alfred Hitchcock's mystery Magazine, May 2015.

Mr. Mangeot makes his second appearance here.  This story is all about language and character.

The character is Vi Celucci, and she is an Optimizer, which means she specializes in making your life and workplace more efficient, healthier, and better organized.  Obsession is either funny or tragic, depending on how close you are standing to the fallout, and Ms. Celucci is obsessive about her field, and maybe about everything else.

She received two counterfeit ten dollar bills and  feels the authorities are not up to the job of finding the counterfeiters.  "The Secret Service guy asked me to repeat myself, which did not bode well for either his cognitive or listening skills."

So she decides to crack the case herself.  And this is a formidable lady, determined, and very sure of herself.

I shook my head, and I only shook my head one way: hard right, soft return.  Anything more was wasted motion.

Hilarious.

The Continental Opposite, by Evan Lewis

"The Continental Opposite," by Evan Lewis, in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, May 2015.

This dude Lewis is turning into a major threat.  First there were his stories about Skyler Hobbs,who thinks he is the reincarnation of Sherlock Holmes.  Then tales of Davy Crockett's ghost, who harasses his descendents into solving crimes.  And now he has revived Dashiell Hammett's famous character the Continental Op.

Brief pause for confusion from the readers.  But Hammett's family owns the copyright!  And Lopresti doesn't like fan fiction (Author B writing new stories with the characters of Author A)!

True.  But I am sometimes a sucker for reboots, in which Author B rethinks the original and comes up with a new twist.

This story takes place in the fifties, decades after the Op's last appearance.  The main character is a young detective named Peter Collins (he notes bitterly that his father deliberately gave him a name that is gangland slang for "nobody").  Peter works for the Portland, Oregon branch of a national detective agency and when he accuses his boss of corruption the company sends in a retired op who used to work for the San Francisco branch("sometime in the forties Continental had put him out to pasture, and he'd spent the years since killing a vegetable garden, sneering at golf course, and not catching fish.") .  Peter finds him sinister and refers to him as the Old Man.

Hmm.  In Hammett's stories the Op's boss was the Old Man, but it is clearly not the same person.  In fact, this new guy strongly resembles Hammett's hero, much older and, if possible, more cynical.

Now let's address the copyright issue.  Does Lewis use the name of the characters?  No, because the Op never had one.  (And Old Man is hardly a unique moniker either.)  The Op worked for the Continental Detective Agency.  Peter works for Continental Investigations, which recently changed its name from something or other.

A brilliant story, and the first of a series.  I can hardly wait.

The Fedora, by Terrell Lee Lankford

"The Fedora," by Terrell Lee Lankford, in The Private Eye Writers of America present Fifty Shades of Grey Fedora, edited by Robert J. Randisi, Riverdale Avenue Books, 2015.

The first story I reviewed form this book was a private eye story.  Now we're into noir. The nameless narrator makes a living doing low-level investigatory work for his uncle, a P.I.  Then uncle's friend Milo explains that he is going overseas for six months and wants someone to keep an eye on his wife, make sure she isn't fooling around.


And of course, she's gorgeous.

If you have read any noir at all I don't have to tell you what happens next.  And the ending will bring bad news for somebody.  

A well-written, moody little story.

I Wish I Had Your Job, by Ted Fitzgerald.

"I Wish I Had Your Job," by Ted Fitzgerald.   The Private Eye Writers of America present Fifty Shades of Grey Fedora, edited by Robert J. Randisi, Riverdale Avenue Books, 2015.

It has been many years since PWA put out an anthology and, as you can tell by the title, this time they went with a theme: private eyes and sex.  Some qualify as erotica, some not so much.

Mr. Fitzgerald's is my favorite so far.  Notice the title of the story?  The first line is: No, you don't.

Tex Texeira is a private eye and one of his clients is an adult magazine.  He checks out potential centerfolds for them, making sure they have no outstanding warrants and at least eighteen orbits of the sun. 

Some of his friends think this is a great job, hence the title.  Tex is not so sure.  He spends most of his time doing background checks, not so much with the potential models, whom he is forbidden to get involved with, anyway.

The latest candidate is Dulce Nunes, but it looks like she may not be interested.  It appears that her mother got a couple of naked photographs of Dulce and sent them to the magazine.  Here's the loving mama: "Dulce's strong-willed.  She won't say what she doesn't want to say, but expects you to listen to whatever it is that she wants to say when she wants to say it.  Make a great husband for someone, that girl."

  Dulce has disappeared, and her past has some definite shadows.  When Tex tries to investigate he gets beaten up by four bikers.   Is she a damsel in distress or is something else going on?

A solid, witty, private eye story.

Chin Yong-Yun Meets A Ghost, by S.J. Rozan

"Chin Yong-Yun Meets A Ghost," by S.J. Rozan, in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, March-April 2015.

My buddy S.J. Rozan does her best work in the first person.  She started out writing stories about New York private eye Bill Smith.  When she switched to novels she added Smith's occasional partner Lydia Chin.  Now there is a third voice in that universe.  This is the second story told by Lydia's formidable mother.

And what a wonderful voice Mrs. Chin has.  "The other ladies agreed with me, as they often do, because I am usually right."  

The lady is making dinner when she gets a phone call from Gerald Yu.  This is annoying for three reasons.  First, Yu is a gambler and not very bright.  Second, he wants to involve daughter Lydia in his troubles.  And third, he happens to be dead.

"It's about my death, but it's not vengeance I'm after.  Also, it's not really about my death, because I'm not dead."
"Who told you that?  They're lying."

I almost wrote that Chin seems confused about whether Yu is alive or a ghost, but that would be precisely wrong.  She is completely unconcerned about the question, and seems to find the two conditions fluid.

So she decides to solve Yu's puzzle to keep her daughter from getting involved.  Her daughter disapproves of her doing detective work.

"Why?"  I asked her quite innocently.  "Is it dangerous?"

Try to think of a way Lydia could answer that one.

Wonderful, character, wonderful story.

First Dragon, by Martin Limón

"First Dragon," by Martin Limón, in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, April 2015.

I think this may be the first fiction my friend Martin Limón has written that is not set in Korea.  For

this new series he slipped a few miles over the border into Manchuria.

Il Yong, the title character, is the son of an American serviceman and a Korean mother, who did various classified jobs for Defense contractor and is now the head of security for a medical missionary group.  They are supposed to be helping the Chinese peasants but they don't turn away starving North Korean refugees who slip over from the Hermit Kingdom.

But that's not the current problem.  A group of Manchurian bandits have kidnapped an American nurse.  Il Yong has both professional and personal reasons to want to get her back, no matter the danger.

Fascinating story.

The Trouble With Virgins, by Thomas K. Carpenter.

"The Trouble With Virgins," by Thomas K. Carpenter, in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, February 2015.

Interesting title. 

This first story by the author of several historical novels is set in first century A.D. Alexandria. Magistrate Ovid, an unambitious son of Roman aristocrats, has the job of administering justice in a section of the city.  Alas, he finds himself between the proverbial rock and a hard place.

A vestal virgin informs him that a crime has been committed: a body has been burned in the city proper.  The culprit, a young man, cheerfully admits to the crime.  But his father, a senator, demands that Ovid find him innocent.  Either the virgin or the senator can destroy Ovid's career.  How can he satisfy both?

The answer requires a knowledge of Roman law and a willingness to stretch the truth.  Very clever story.

The Man With The Twisted Lip, by Terence Faherty

"The Man With The Twisted Lip," by Terence Faherty, in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, February 2015.

Last week I noted that Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Brendan Dubois were tied for first place with five appearances in my best-of-the-week list.  By coincidence, a third writer enters that august rank today.

My former co-blogger Terence Faherty has come up with a great gimmick.  He claims to have discovered Dr. John Watson's notebooks, containing the rough drafts of Sherlock Holmes adventures, before they were "cleaned up for publication."  This is the fourth such publication and I consider it a significant improvement of the oroginal, which was not one of Doyle's masterpieces.

Both versions begin with a woman calling at the home of Watson and his wife, desperate because her husband has disappeared.  In Doyle's version the man is a drug addict and has vanished into an opium den.  In Faherty's tale the same man is a serial philanderer and is apparently staying in a hotel of bad repute.  In both tales Watson finds Holmes there in disguise but what he is seeking is different - although the solution has some amusing similarities. 

I won't go into detail.  Watson correctly notes that the story has the elements of a French farce and Holmes says he is just trying to prevent it from turning into a Greek tragedy.

"My husband returns!" Rita exclaimed.
"Not a moment too soon," Holmes said.
"You don't understand.  He's insanely jealous.  And violent.  If he finds me in here--"
Holmes sprang up.  "Watson, I bow to your experience.  Under the bed?"

Heresy of the best kind.  And it provides an answer to one of the eternal questions debated by players of the Game.

Christmas Eve at the Exit, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

"Christmas Eve at the Exit," by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, January 2015.

This is Rusch's fifth appearance on my best-of-the-week list, which I believe puts her in a tie for first place with Brendon Dubois.

It is Christmas eve and Rachel and her little girl are on the run.  Many pages will pass before we find out from who, and about the shadowy support system that is helping them.

Rachel is terrified, not sure who to trust, and desperately trying to keep up an appearance of normality for her daughter who, heartbreakingly, seems mostly concerned about Santa Claus.

And that's enough from me.  Rusch carries the story off with great audacity.  I am sure it will appear in holiday-themed anthologies for years to come.

Juba Good, by Vicki Delany

"Juba Good" by Vicki Delany, Rapid Reads, Orca Book Publishing, 2014.

A terrific novella about the thankless task of policing in one of the world's newest nations, South Sudan. 

Ray Robertson is a Canadian cop finishing a year as an advisor to the new police force of the city of Juba.  His routine is shattered by the serial killings of  several prostitutes.  Ray is a patrol sergeant with no experience as a detective, but he is the best they have.  Complicating matters: such modern techniques as DNA analysis are beyond the local labs, so if the bad guy is going to be caught it's going to take interrogations, fingertip searches of crime scenes, and plain old cop-thinking.

And the bad guy knows Ray is a threat, and is taking steps of his own...

The Crossing, by Brendan Dubois

"The Crossing," by Brendan DuBois, in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, January-February, 2015.

So a trio of mobsters decide to slip out of the country a few hours ahead of an indictment.  A seaplane lands them on an island on a lake by the Canadian border.  Now they just have to wait for their friend to arrive with a boat to slip them across.

Sure, there is a resident on the island, but she's just a beautiful young woman, grading papers.  Surely she can't cause any trouble for three armed hoodlums.

What could possibly go wrong?

This is Mr. DuBois's fifth appearance in my best-of-the-week column.  I guess I like his stuff.

The Really Big Ka-Boom, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

"The Really Big Ka-Boom," by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, January/February, 2015.

Apologies for misspelling Ms. Rusch's name, now fixed.

I may have to revise my rule about what makes a story one of my favorites.  I have said they tend to have at least one of three characteristics: a great concept, a twist ending, or heightened language.  Ms. Rusch has reminded me of a fourth method to reach the winner's circle.

Great characters.

The plot of this story is not brilliant, but that doesn't matter.  The characters carry it.  (Let's face it: Wolfe and Archie lifted Rex Stout above some pretty poor plots.)

The narrator is Spade, a three-hundred-fifty pound retired software millionaire whose life revolves around science fiction conventions, for which he provides accounting skills.  His soulmate (he wishes) is Paladin, a young private eye who is everything he isn't (except dumb and socially competent): she is small, beautiful, perpetually angry, and rash.  Clearly they balance each other out.

In this story they wind up in Portland, Oregon at Christmas time, accompanied by Caspar, a homeless thirteen-year-old computer whiz they rescued in an earlier adventure.  The main story begins when they go out to eat and a nearby building explodes.   And Paladin, as Spade notes, is the sort of person who rushes into a burning building.

Now, my first paragraph did not mean that  Rusch does not provide some wonderful language in this story.  Try out this paragraph:

Paramedics had moved a lot of the people Paladin saved, sorting them as if they were damaged collectibles and someone had to grade them: Fair, Very Fair, Good.  The folks in Mint condition stood to one side, and those who were judged Poor had already been stuffed into ambulances and driven to hospitals.

Lovely.

The Hit-Man, by Roger Angle

"The Hit-Man," by Roger Angle, in Murder At The Beach: The Bouchercon Anthology, edited by Dana Cameron, Down & Out Books, 2014.

The good news is that Amanda's little shop in Venice, California is doing well.

The bad news is that some bad guys want to buy her building at a fraction of its worth.

The good news is that her father is a hit-man with an arsenal in his car trunk, all ready to wreak havoc on her enemies.

The bad news is that he's actually a retired hit-man, half-blind, limping, and his hearing isn't so good either.

The good news is that he remains determined to do anything necessary for his little girl.

And that's also the bad news...

Very funny story.

Little Big News: Best short stories of the year

And for an alternative point of view, at SleuthSayers I provide my list of the best stories of the year.

The Ice Cream Snatcher, by Bryan Paul Rouleau

"The Ice Cream Snatcher," by Bryan Paul Rouleau, in Thuglit, issue 13, 2014.

Thuglit has upped its game since the last time I looked in at it.  Lot of good stories here.

But lets talk about Mr. Rouleau's contribution.  I have said I am a sucker for stories in which a character is offered a chance at redemption, whether or not he takes it.  And that's what this tale is all about.

Sunrise thinks he's beyond such things.  All though he doesn't have the vocabulary to say it, he feels he's doomed, predestined to crime.  You see, someone told him you never recover from bad things that happened to you before you turn three, and really bad stuff happened to him.  And that, he figures, is why he keeps ending up in jail.

On this particular occasion he had his friend Pedro steal a Maserati.  They get away clean but they don't notice that there's somebody in the back seat.

A three-year-old boy. 

What I love about this story is that Sunrise interprets what happens so differently than the reader is likely to.  If there is doom here, I suppose that his attitude is it.

The Killing of General Patton, by William E. Chambers

"The Killing of General Patton," by William E. Chambers, in Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, issue 12, 2014.  

Burton Wells is a veteran of World War II, during part of which he served as an aid to General George Patton.  In current times he is haunted by nightmares about Patton's death in a jeep accident shortly after the war attended.  And he has reasons for those nightmares.

Things get worse when a young Ukrainian shows up at Wells' apartment.  He has a fat file of KGB secrets and a plan to get rich with them... 

Mr. Chambers has written an intriguing story.  I wonder if he was aiming for the MWA anthology of cold war stories?  It would have been a good fit there.

Their Little Secret, by Anita Page

"Their Little Secret," by Anita Page, in  Murder New York Style: Family Secrets, edited by Anita Page, Glenmere Press, 2014.

Full disclosure: The editor of this book sent me a free copy.  The editor, as it happens, is the author of my favorite story in the book.  So you have to decide whether I can be bought off with a free paperback.  (Hint: I generally refuse to sell my soul for less than a new hardcover.  Inflation.)

This anthology, by the way, was created by the New York/Tri State Chapter of Sisters in Crime.

The story is about a disfunctional family and focuses on fifteen-year-old Cassie, the only child.  Her parents don't get along so well.

Cassie, expert reader of moods and body language, figured they were minutes away from the Sunday  night fight.

Cassie's mother - drunken, mean, and blatantly unfaithful - has decided that she and her daughter are going off to Long Island for the summer, even though her husband can't get away.  Cassie ain't thrilled.  "I call this hell."

Things get bad.  Then they get worse.  The whole story is good but what makes it a winner for me is one sentence on the last page.  I wouldn't call it a twist ending, but it is a neat sting that gives us a new persective on what has gone on before.