Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine 10/01/12
Page 14
THE STORY THAT WON
EDWARD W. L. SMITH
The April Mysterious Photograph contest was won by Edward W. L. Smith of Statesboro, Georgia. Honorable mentions go to Paul Ryan of Lansdale, Pennsylvania; Thomas Buice of Blountville, Tennessee; Jed...
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REX BURNS won an Edgar Award for his first novel, The Alvarez Journal (1975), newly made available, along with his other novels, as an e-book from Mysteriouspress.com.
DAVID EDGERLEY GATES is a two-time nominee for the Edgar Award for Best Short Story. His last story for AHMM was "Burning Daylight," from the July/August 2012 issue.
RAYMOND GOREE lives in Nevada and works for the U.S. Department of Justice. "A Change of Heart" is his first published short story.
Booked & Printed columnist ROBERT C. HAHN reviews mysteries for Publishers Weekly and New York Post, and is a former columnist for the Cincinnati Post.
STEVE HOCKENSMITH is the author of the Holmes on the Range series. His new short fiction collection "Blarney: 12 Tales of Lies, Crime & Mystery" is available in print and e-book formats.
CHRIS MUESSIG is a public communication specialist for NC State University. His last story for AHMM was "The Sunny South" (March 2012).
When JAS. R. PETRIN isn't writing, he plays bass with the Kitchen Party House Band on soundcloud.com. His story "A New Pair of Pants" (AHMM, September 2011) is a nominee for the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Crime Short Story.
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Copyright © 2012 nadirco/Shutterstock.com
Fortress of Solitude
We will give a prize of $25 to the person who invents the best mystery story (in 250 words or less, and be sure to include a crime) based on the above photograph. The story will be printed in a future issue. Reply to AHMM, Dell Magazines, 267 Broadway, New York, New York 10007-2352. Please label your entry "October Contest," and be sure your name and address are written on the story you submit. If you would like your story returned, please include an SASE.
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BOOKED & PRINTED
ROBERT C. HAHN
This month's books feature unlikely heroes forced into dangerous or daunting action by the deeds of others. All three novels also involve historical backgrounds with intriguing glimpses of pasts both real and imagined.
William Dietrich's American adventurer Ethan Gage has already survived four previous outings including The Barbary Pirates, The Dakota Cipher, The Rosetta Key, and Napoleon's Pyramids. Now in The Emerald Storm (Harper, $25.99) the intrepid rascal is forced into a series of harrowing escapades that take him from the French Alps to the Caribbean.
At the start of the novel, Ethan Gage wants nothing more than to retire from his adventuring and settle down with his bride Astiza (married in 1802) and their son Horus (or Harry). A valuable emerald stolen from Barbary pirates in a previous adventure, if pawned, would give him the means to "emulate the rich and never do anything interesting again." But first, Gage, who often finds himself made a pawn in the plans of bigger men with bigger dreams, is pressed by American envoy Robert Livingston to approach Napoleon about the "wasteland" that will constitute the Louisiana Purchase. Surprisingly, Napoleon wants Gage to convince the Americans to buy the territory, and it seems like an obvious win-win situation for our hero.
All Gage has to do is pawn the emerald, see to the conclusion of the deal between the eager Americans and the equally eager French, and retire. Instead his attempt to sell the gem results in his "arrest" and torture by renegade policeman Leon Martel, who believes that Gage holds the key to a great treasure.
Gage is rescued from the attentions of Martel by the British only to find that they intend to use him to rescue the "King of Saint-Domingue," Toussaint L'Ouverture, liberator of Haiti, from the notorious French prison in the Jura Mountains. The British believe that Toussaint's rebels have found treasure looted from Montezuma's Aztec kingdom.
While Gage is being rescued from Martel's clutches, his young son Harry is not so lucky. The British, French, and Americans all seek to have Gage do their bidding but his goal is clear—rescue Harry and then revenge himself on Martel.
Ingenious plotting allows Gage to tread history's stage in the company of the famous and the infamous, using the lessons of his mentor Benjamin Franklin, and the inventions of contemporaries, such as the glider of George Cayley. Dietrich's Ethan Gage adventures are a marvelous combination of swashbuckling daring against a vivid historical background narrated with a great deal of wit and charm.
A less well-equipped man, disgraced journalist Tom Sagan, is pressed into action to save an estranged daughter in Steve Berry's latest standalone, The Columbus Affair (Ballantine, $27).
Sagan is not a natural adventurer like Gage, and his daughter, Alle, is not a youngster, but an adult with an agenda of her own. Sagan is in fact on the verge of committing suicide—his once stellar journalistic reputation burnished by a Pulitzer Prize, now tarnished by irrefutable charges that he fabricated an important story. His last act is interrupted by the arrival of Zachariah Simon, who claims Alle is his prisoner and shows him a video of his daughter about to be raped and tortured by the men holding her. To save his daughter, Simon says, Sagan must agree to have his father's body exhumed!
Sagan not only signs the order for his father Abiram's exhumation but attends it and claims from the body a thin packet before Simon's representative can take it. That packet, along with the last letter Abiram sent to his son, estranged from both him and Judaism, provides the impetus for Sagan to rejoin the living instead of joining the dead.
Sagan calls upon his dormant investigative skills to follow clues beginning with that provided by the packet from his father's grave. It's a trail that will lead him first to Vienna and eventually to Cuba and Jamaica.
Along the way, Sagan encounters another on this trail, Jamaican Bene Rowe, although his purposes are very different from Simon's. While one seeks an answer to benefit his people, the other nurtures far more sinister designs. Berry's characters pursue a goal shaped by the history of the voyages of Columbus—and by the speculation that the navigator buried a secret treasure on the island of Jamaica during the year he was stranded there.
Gyles Brandreth who has authored several mysteries featuring Oscar Wilde (Oscar Wilde and the Nest of Vipers, etc.) teams the wild poet and playwright with his friend Arthur Conan Doyle in Oscar Wilde and the Vatican Murders (Touchstone, $14) as gruesome clues sent to Sherlock Holmes lead the two from Germany to Rome.
Gyles Brandreth has turned Oscar Wilde into a sleuth rivaling Sherlock Holmes in some ways, although Wilde is an excitable, flamboyant, and impulsive sort given to both poetic flights and extravagant philosophy. In his latest adventure, Wilde runs into his friend Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle in Homburg, Germany where Conan Doyle has come to rest and to deal with the voluminous correspondence addressed to Sherlock Holmes.
Together Wilde and Conan Doyle tackle the job until a package from Rome disgorges a severed, embalmed hand. An examination of the package, mailed four months previous, reveals no note, no return address, and prompts the friends to search the mail where they discover two similar mailings: one containing a lock of hair and the other a single finger bearing a rose-gold ring etched with the keys of St. Peter—the symbol of the Pope. It is Wilde who immediately decides that there is a murder or at least a mystery that requires them to go to Rome to investigate what is obviously (to Wilde) a desperate cry for help.
On the way to Rome by train the pair meet Irene Sadler (note the similarity to Conan Doyle's character Irene Adler) and her brother, Martin, the newly appointed Anglican chaplain in Rome. Once in Rome, by whim (Wilde's
of course) they visit the pensione where John Keats once lived and find it inhabited by Dr. Axel Munthe, a Swede and a prominent figure in Rome.
The celebrity of Wilde and Conan Doyle provides entrée to much of Rome society as does the discovery that an old schoolmate of Conan Doyle's is the Monsignor Nicholas Breakspear, Grand Penitentiary at St. Peters. It is among the papal chaplains, the men closest to the Pope, that Wilde and Conan Doyle find the mystery they are seeking. And among them the pair must find who sent the anonymous summons and who among them might be guilty of murder.
Brandreth weaves his mystery carefully around the careers of his heroes and includes many historical characters and anecdotes into the mysteries built around the ebullient character of Oscar Wilde.
Copyright © 2012 Robert C. Hahn
ALL POINTS BULLETIN: Camilla Läckberg released her new thriller THE STONECUTTER from Pegasus/Open Road this spring. • David Goodis's dark signature style is celebrated with a new book out from the Library of America: FIVE NOIR NOVELS OF THE 1940S AND 50S (edited by Robert Polito). • William Burton McCormick's debut novel LENIN'S HAREM will be released in December 2012 by Knox Robinson Publishing, Ltd. • Rex Burns' fifteen out-of-print mysteries are now available in electronic format from Mysterious Press (mysteriouspress.com).
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THE STORY THAT WON
SMOKE, BUT NO MIRRORS
EDWARD W. L. SMITH
Copyright © 2012 Adrian Britton/Shutterstock.com
The April Mysterious Photograph contest was won by Edward W. L. Smith of Statesboro, Georgia. Honorable mentions go to Paul Ryan of Lansdale, Pennsylvania; Thomas Buice of Blountville, Tennessee; Jed Power of Peabody, Massachusetts; Barbara Hardee of Morehead City, North Carolina; Nikki S. May of Lyons, Michigan; Lynda Unick of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada; Vincent Stacy Henry of San Jose, California; Nathan Culp of Beaufort, South Carolina; and Jain Makepeace of Westfield, Massachusetts.
"Yes, I was jealous, but I didn't kill him! I dated her before he did. He won her. We all remained friends."
The questioning continued until everyone at the cookout had been cross-examined to the inspector's satisfaction. Except for one.
"How did we meet? We were all in the same Chemistry 101 lab our freshman year. Yes, I did go on for a PhD in chemistry. Of course I know about combustible gases."
Now, sensing both possible motive and expert knowledge that could suggest a means for murder, the inspector pressed.
"Jealous? I mean I still care for her, and have always envied him. He won her. I thought about her even when I went off to graduate school. But I was in second place."
Now the questions took an unexpected turn.
"What? I didn't know about any life insurance policy. Becoming rich doesn't make me love her any more or any less."
Further motive? Perhaps.
"What do I know about the missing propane tank? Nothing. Someone must have disconnected it after the explosion and removed it."
On a whim, the inspector turned to the newly widowed woman. Then he saw what he had missed before. In the excitement of the explosion, and the ensuing confusion, apparently everyone missed it. On her otherwise immaculate face were the telltale smudges, not of the kitchen where she had been when the grill exploded, but of the grill itself. The inspector knew that even Chemistry 101 students knew the dangers of hydrogen gas.
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ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE (ISSN:0002-5224), Vol. 57, No. 10, October 2012. Published monthly except for combined January/February and July/August double issues by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications. Annual subscription $55.90 in the U.S.A. and possessions, $65.90 elsewhere, payable in advance in U.S. funds (GST included in Canada). Subscription orders and correspondence regarding subscriptions should be sent to 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855. Or, to subscribe, call 1-800-220-7443. Editorial Offices: 267 Broadway, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10007-2352. Executive Offices: 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855. Periodical postage paid at Norwalk, CT and additional mailing offices. Canadian postage paid at Montreal, Quebec, Canada Post International Publications Mail, Product Sales Agreement No. 40012460. © 2012 by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications, all rights reserved. Dell is a trademark registered in the U.S. Patent Office. The stories in this magazine are all fictitious, and any resemblance between the characters in them and actual persons is completely coincidental. Reproduction or use, in any manner, of editorial or pictorial content without express written permission is prohibited. Submissions must be accompanied by a self-addressed stamped envelope. The publisher assume
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