The World's Finest Mystery...

by Ed Gorman

  Fans of the amateur detective should seek out Simon Brett's The Body on the Beach (Berkley), first in a new series about the English village of Fethering; Joan Hess's satirical A Conventional Corpse (St. Martin's Minotaur), in which bookseller Claire Malloy ventures among the crime writers; Val McDermid's Booked for Murder (Spinsters Ink), a case for journalist Lindsay Gordon first published in Britain in 1996; Lee Harris's latest holiday mystery, The Mother's Day Murder (Fawcett); and Nora DeLoach's Mama Pursues Murderous Shadows (Bantam), about small-town South Carolina social worker Grace (Candi) Covington. Though Dorothy Gilman's Mrs. Pollifax Unveiled (Ballantine) concerns a spy rather than a sleuth, it fits well in this cozy company.

  Those in search of the classical puzzle-spinning of the "Golden Age" can look to Parnell Hall's Cora Felton in her second crossword case, Last Clue & Puzzlement (Bantam); and Francis M. Nevins's Loren Mensing in the Queenian Beneficiaries' Requiem (Five Star), plus a bunch of British cops: Paul Charles's Christy Kennedy in the locked-room problem, The Ballad of Sean and Wilko (Do-Not/Dufour); Peter Lovesey's Peter Diamond in The Vault (Soho); Graham Thomas's Erskine Powell in Malice in London (Fawcett); and of course Colin Dexter's Chief Inspector Morse in his final case, The Remorseful Day (Crown), though it's more notable as a character study than a puzzle.

  Police detectives from outside the classical tradition who were in strong form include James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux in Purple Cane Road (Doubleday), and Ken Bruen's Brant and Roberts in the satirical Taming the Alien (Do-Not/Dufour).

  Historicals continue to have a growing mystery-market share. Anne Perry's two Victorian series, though not at their peak, were well enough represented by Slaves of Obsession (Ballantine), about William Monk, Hester Latterly, and Sir Oliver Rathbone; and Half Moon Street (Ballantine), about Thomas Pitt with wife Charlotte mostly offstage. A good addition to the continuing Watsonian pastiche industry was Val Andrews's Sherlock Holmes at the Varieties (Breese), one of several from this prolific author and publisher. Conrad Allen's Cunard Line detectives put to sea again in Murder on the Mauretania (St. Martin's Minotaur), about a 1907 maiden voyage. Steven Saylor's Last Seen in Massilia (St. Martin's Minotaur) is an exception to the general rule that Roman detectives like Gordianus the Finder shouldn't venture out of town. In an example of the past/present hybrid, William J. Mann's The Biograph Girl (Kensington) speculates that pioneering movie star Florence Lawrence didn't really die by suicide in 1938.

  Considering that the second edition of my Novel Verdicts: A Guide to Courtroom Fiction (Scarecrow) was published early in the year (officially 1999 per the title page), I spent surprisingly little time in the company of the lawyer detectives, but I can recommend Andrew Pyper's first novel, Lost Girls (Delacorte); and Gini Hartzmark's noncourtroom Dead Certain (Fawcett) to my fellow legal buffs.

  SHORT STORIES

  The best book in an extraordinary year for single-author collections was Carolyn Wheat's Tales out of School (Crippen & Landru), which displays the lawyer-author's astonishing craftsmanship and versatility to maximum advantage. Close runners-up were the first two collections by Clark Howard, published within months of each other: Crowded Lives and Other Stories of Desperation and Danger (Five Star) and Challenge the Widow-Maker and Other Stories of People in Peril (Crippen & Landru).

  Others of special merit from Crippen & Landru included Michael Collins's second volume of Dan Fortune private-eye stories, Fortune's World; Edward D. Hoch's The Velvet Touch (Crippen & Landru), about thief-of-the-valueless Nick Velvet; Marcia Muller's McCone and Friends, in which members of the San Francisco private eyes' extended family of co-workers take center stage; and Hugh B. Cave's Long Live the Dead, gathering the venerable writer's Black Mask stories. Among Five Star's notable offerings were Barbara D'Amato's Of Course You Know that Chocolate Is a Vegetable and Other Stories; Lia Matera's Counsel for the Defense and Other Stories; Dick Lochte's Lucky Dog and Other Tales of Murder; and two collections by Evan Hunter/Ed McBain: Barking at Butterflies and Other Stories and Running from Legs and Other Stories. Other publishers got into the act with Lawrence Block's 754-page The Collected Mystery Stories (Orion/Trafalger); and Peter Sellers's Whistle Past the Graveyard (Mosaic).

  It was also a strong year for multiauthor collections. As you might expect at the close of a century, chubby historical reprint anthologies were numerous. Tony Hillerman and Otto Penzler edited The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century (Houghton Mifflin). Anne Perry edited a British equivalent, A Century of British Mystery and Suspense (Mystery Guild), to which I was honored to provide an introduction. Ed Gorman and I edited Sleuths of the Century (Carroll & Graf), which included authors of both nationalities plus Georges Simenon.

  Star-studded original anthologies of note included the Adams Round Table's Murder Among Friends (Berkley); the Private Eye Writers of America's The Shamus Game (Signet), edited by that organization's indefatigable founder, Robert J. Randisi; the Mystery Writers of America's The Night Awakens (Pocket), edited by Mary Higgins Clark; and Crime Through Time III (Berkley), edited by Sharan Newman. More concentrated on newer names was the Brit noir volume Fresh Blood 3 (Do-Not/Dufour), edited by Mike Ripley and Maxim Jakubowski.

  The Tennessee publisher Cumberland House became a key player in the anthology game with theme volumes both original (Murder Most Confederate, edited by Martin H. Greenberg; and Murder Most Medieval, edited by Greenberg and John Helfers) and reprint (Opening Shots: Great Mystery and Crime Writers Share Their First Published Stories, edited by Lawrence Block; and Murder Most Delectable, edited by Greenberg).

  My favorite anthology of the year, combining old stories and originals with an editorial apparatus of genuine reference value was Mike Ashley's The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes (Carroll & Graf). As with other volumes in the publisher's Mammoth series, though, I wish it were in more permanent form, i.e., hardcovers and better paper.

  See Edward D. Hoch's bibliography for the year's full story on both anthologies and single-author collections.

  REFERENCE BOOKS AND SECONDARY SOURCES

  Book of the year in this category was surely Marvin Lachman's The American Regional Mystery (Crossover Press), a criminous cross-country tour by one of the most knowledgeable, readable, and reliable commentators on crime fiction.

  Also of note are the collection of Charles Willeford's essays, Writing & Other Blood Sports (Dennis McMillan); Hugh Merrill's The Red Hot Typewriter: The Life and Times of John D. MacDonald (St. Martin's Minotaur), which has undeniable value despite indifferent writing and a lousy title; Martha Hailey DuBose's Women of Mystery: The Lives and Works of Notable Women Crime Novelists (St. Martin's Minotaur); Otto Penzler's 101 Greatest Films of Mystery and Suspense (Simon & Schuster); and Matthew Bunson's The Complete Christie: An Agatha Christie Encyclopedia (Pocket), doing a job you may think is redundant, but doing it well. A more original Christie volume, though one less likely to appeal to a wide readership, was Pierre Bayard's Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? (New Press), translated from the French by Carol Cosman— if you can wade through the academic jargon, Bayard has an interesting theory to promote.

  They Wrote the Book: Thirteen Women Mystery Writers Tell All (Spinsters Ink), edited by Helen Windrath, is both a valuable technical manual for writers and entertaining reading for fans; while the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association's 100 Favorite Mysteries of the Century (Crum Creek), edited by Jim Huang, provides a good reading list, heavy on authors of the '80s and '90s, with commentary.

  Again, Ed Hoch's bibliography will provide the full story.

  A SENSE OF HISTORY

  Rue Morgue Press publishers Tom and Enid Schantz continued to reprint worthy writers of the past, including the first American edition of Joanna Cannan's 1939 novel They Rang Up the Police, an outstanding piece of classical detective fiction that can stand comparison with Allingham, Marsh, Sayers, and other Golden Age icons; and Juanita Sheridan's The Chinese Chop, the 1949 novel that introduced Chinese American sleuth Li
ly Wu, whose other three cases are on Rue Morgue's future schedule.

  Five Star brought us new editions, with an introduction by the author, of Donald E. Westlake's first two Mitchell Tobin novels, Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death (1966) and Murder Among Children (1967), originally published as by Tucker Coe; while Vera Caspary's 1943 classic Laura became the first in a series, edited by Otto Penzler for ibooks, of mysteries that became Hollywood films. The e-books/books-on-demand phenomenon allowed contemporary writers like Stuart M. Kaminsky, Dick Lochte, Annette Meyers, and Loren D. Estleman to make their backlists available to readers, a trend that can be expected to grow.

  AT THE MOVIES

  The quality of 2000's crime and mystery movies was far below that of 1999's bumper crop, but there were some good ones, mostly playing the art houses rather than the multiplexes. Best crime film released in the U.S.A. during the year was probably the 1998 British film noir Croupier, directed by Mike Hodges from Paul Mayersberg's script and boasting a great performance by Clive Owen as the title character, a bored writer who takes a casino job that leads him into a web of crime. The Virgin Suicides, directed by Sofia Coppola, who also wrote the screenplay from Jeffrey Eugenides's 1993 novel, is a dark coming-of-age story about the hidden horrors of suburbia and a rare example of the pure whydunit. Writer-director Rod Lurie's The Contender, like his 1999 film Deterrence, shows him as a nimble plotter in the political thriller vein. Under Suspicion, directed by Stephen Hopkins and scripted by Tom Provost and W. Peter Iliff from (via an earlier French version) John Wainwright's 1979 novel Brainwash, may be somewhat stagy in feel, but it's cunningly constructed and makes a great vehicle for the talents of Gene Hackman and Morgan Freeman. Gregory Hoblit's Frequency, written by Toby Emmerich, is a suspenseful mystery/science-fiction hybrid: time travel meets get-the-serial-killer.

  Some of the crime films I admired during the year were less well-received by critics, so take these recommendations with a grain of salt. The Harrison Ford/Michelle Pfeiffer vehicle What Lies Beneath, directed by Robert Zemeckis from Clark Gregg's screenplay, struck me as an admirably tricky variation of the Before the Fact am-I-married-to-a-murderer plot. Director Nick Gomez's Drowning Mona, written by Peter Steinfeld, is a tongue-in-cheek small-town black comedy asking which of several reasonable suspects murdered the poisonous title character played by Bette Midler. The Yards, James Gray's downbeat film of civic corruption (scripted with Matt Reeves), had a terrific cast and should have done better at the box office than it did. Where the Money Is, the enjoyable caper movie in which ex-con Paul Newman impersonates a stroke victim, had three screenplay writers (E. Max Frye, Topper Lilien, and Carroll Cartwright, from Frye's story) and was directed by Marek Kanievska. (Is Newman embarked on a series of senior-citizen variations on crime-fiction conventions? This one follows his 1998 "geezer noir" private-eye vehicle, Twilight. I liked that one, too, though not everybody did.) Up at the Villa, directed by Philip Haas and scripted by Belinda Haas from a Somerset Maugham novella, qualifies as a crime story and a highly entertaining one for those who value the sedate and understated approach to high emotion.

  A 2000 Yearbook of Crime and Mystery

  compiled by Edward D. Hoch

  Collections and Single Stories

  (Anonymous). Herlock Shomes At It Again. New York: The Mysterious Bookshop. A single twenty-page parody first published in 1918. One of the Mysterious Sherlock Holmes series.

  BISHOP, PAUL. Pattern of Behavior. Unity, Maine: Five Star. Fourteen stories, including one new novelette, from various sources, 1982–2000.

  BRACKEN, MICHAEL. Bad Girls: One Dozen Dangerous Dames Who Lie, Cheat, Steal, and Kill. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Wildside Press. Twelve stories, two new, from Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine and other sources.

  ———. Tequila Sunrise: Hardboiled P. I. Nathaniel Rose: Bullets, Booze, and Broads. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Wildside Press. Seven stories, two new, from various sources.

  BREEN, JON L. The Drowning Icecube and Other Stories. Unity, Maine: Five Star. Seventeen stories, 1977–99, mainly detection, including three parodies and one mystery-fantasy.

  BRETT, SIMON. A Crime in Rhyme and Other Mysterious Fragments. Burpham, West Sussex, U.K.: Frith House. A rhyming playlet and seven brief pieces supposedly written by well-known authors.

  BRIETMAN, GREGORY. The Marriage of Sherlock Holmes. New York: The Mysterious Bookshop. A 1926 parody of twenty-eight pages, translated from the Russian. One of the Mysterious Sherlock Holmes series.

  CASSIDAY, BRUCE. None but the Vengeful: Classic Pulp Crime and Suspense. Brooklyn: Gryphon Books. Eight stories and novelettes from the pulps, 1948–52. Introduction by Gary Lovisi.

  CAVE, HUGH B. Bottled in Blonde: The Peter Kane Detective Stories. Minneapolis: Fedogan & Bremer. Nine tales from Dime Detective. Introduction by Don Hutchinson.

  ———. Danse Macabre. Norfolk, VA: Crippen & Landru. A single short story from Clues Detective Stories, 4/37, in a pamphlet accompanying the limited edition of Long Live the Dead.

  ———. The Lady Wore Black and Other Weird Cat Tails. Ashcroft, BC, Canada: Ash-Tree Press. Nineteen fantasy tales, some from Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. Introduction by Mike Ashley.

  ———. Long Live the Dead. Norfolk, VA: Crippen & Landru. All ten of Cave's stories from Black Mask, 1934–41, with an introduction and interview with the author by Keith Alan Deutsch.

  ———. Officer Coffey Stories. Burton, MI: Subterranean Press. Two stories from Dime Detective, 1940.

  COEL, MARGARET. Stolen Smoke. Mission Viejo, CA: A.S.A.P. Publishing. A single limited-edition short story, fourth in a series, about an Arapaho Native American sleuth. Introduction by Marcia Muller.

  COLLINS, BARBARA. Too Many Tomcats and Other Feline Tales of Suspense. Unity, Maine: Five Star. Eleven cat stories, two new and one in collaboration with husband, Max Allan Collins, who contributes the introduction.

  COLLINS, MICHAEL. Fortune's World. Norfolk, VA: Crippen & Landru. Fourteen stories, one new, one first American publication, 1965–2000, about private eye Dan Fortune. Introduction by Richard Carpenter.

  ———. The Dreamer. Norfolk, VA: Crippen & Landru. A single Slot-Machine Kelly story from Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, 9/62, in a pamphlet accompanying the limited edition of Fortune's World.

  D'AMATO, BARBARA. Of Course You Know Chocolate Is a Vegetable and Other Stories. Unity, Maine: Five Star. Twelve stories, 1991–99, from various sources.

  DE NOUX, O'NEIL. Hollow Point/The Mystery of Rochelle Marais. Brooklyn: Gryphon Books. Two new police stories and a historical mystery from EQMM, all set in New Orleans.

  DOYLE, ARTHUR CONAN. The Surgeon of Gaster Fell. Norfolk, VA: Crippen & Landru. A pamphlet containing the original magazine text of a Doyle novelette, later revised for book publication. Afterword by Daniel Stashower. A limited edition published for Malice Domestic XII.

  DUNDEE, WAYNE D. & DEREK MUK. Tuck Tip & Three Parts. Brooklyn: Gryphon Books. Two private-eye novelettes by Dundee, one new, teamed with three stories by Muk about San Francisco cops.

  ESTLEMAN, LOREN D. The Midnight Man. New York: ibooks. Reprint of a 1982 novel with an Amos Walker short story, "Redneck," appended.

  FASSBENDER, TOM & JIM PASCOE. Five Shots and a Funeral: The Short Fiction of Dashiell Loveless. Los Angeles: Uglytown. Five connected stories by fictional author Dashiell Loveless.

  FORTUNE, DION. The Secrets of Dr. Taverner. Ashcroft, BC, Canada: Ash-Tree Press. Complete collection of all twelve stories about an occult detective, six published in Royal Magazine (London) during 1922. The third of a continuing series, Ash-Tree Press Occult Detectives Library, edited and introduced by Jack Adrian.

  GILBERT, MICHAEL. The Mathematics of Murder: A Fearne & Bracknell Collection. London: Robert Hale. Fourteen stories about law partners and their firm, some new, 1995–2000.

  GORES, JOE. File #9: Double-Header. Norfolk, VA: Crippen & Landru. A single unpublished DKA story, later rewritten as two separate stories, in a pamphlet accompanying the limit
ed edition of Stakeout on Page Street.

  ———. Stakeout on Page Street and Other DKA Files. Norfolk, VA: Crippen & Landru. All twelve stories about the skip-tracers of Daniel Kearney Associates, mainly from EQMM, 1967–89.

  HOCH, EDWARD D. The Gold Buddha Caper. Norfolk, VA: Crippen & Landru. A single Ulysses S. Bird story from EQMM, 12/73, in a pamphlet accompanying the limited edition of The Velvet Touch.

  ———. The Velvet Touch. Norfolk, VA: Crippen & Landru. Fourteen stories from EQMM about thief-detective Nick Velvet, 1975–99, including eight about Velvet's admiring adversary Sandra Paris.

  HOWARD, CLARK. Challenge the Widow-Maker and Other Stories of People in Peril. Norfolk, VA: Crippen & Landru. Twelve stories, 1980–94, mainly from EQMM.

  ———. Crowded Lives and Other Stories of Desperation and Danger. Unity, Maine: Five Star. Nine stories. 1967–89.

  ———. The Killing Floor. Norfolk, VA: Crippen & Landru. A single new short story in a pamphlet accompanying the limited edition of Challenge the Widow-Maker.