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Saturday, January 1, 2011
EDITOR'S NOTES
HAPPY HOLIDAYS . . . FROM THE STAFF OF AHMM...
The Lineup
JEFFREY COHEN is the author of three novels featuring reporter/amateur sleuth Aaron Tucker, and two books about parenting autistic children. An Uninvited Ghost: A Haunted Guesthouse Mystery, written...
MYSTERIOUS PHOTOGRAPH
The Passage 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...
BOOKED & PRINTED
ROBERT C. HAHN
This month’s column takes us to the British Isles. In Galway, Ireland, Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor is not only fighting familiar demons but takes on the devil himself. Farther up the Irish coast in...
THE STORY THAT WON
The July/August Mysterious Photograph contest was won by Kent Brown of Green Bay, Wisconsin. Honorable mentions go to Kathy Chencharik of South Royalston, Massachusetts; Alice Gilliland of Puyallup,...
LITTLE DEEPER
KENT BROWN
“I thought you told me we wanted Mansfield?” Joe asked. “Yeah, Mansfield,” Tim replied. “Better read the headstone again,” Joe said. “This is the Manfield grave,” a gravelly voice announced behind them. Joe and Tim turned. Standing before them was Patrolman Higgins. “What are you boys up to?” It...
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HAPPY HOLIDAYS . . .
FROM THE STAFF OF AHMM
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The Lineup
JEFFREY COHEN is the author of three novels featuring reporter/amateur sleuth Aaron Tucker, and two books about parenting autistic children. An Uninvited Ghost: A Haunted Guesthouse Mystery, written under the name E.J. Copperman, comes out in April.
Since DAN CRAWFORD’s first appearance in this magazine (July 1987), AHMM has published more than 50 of the Chicago resident’s stories.
MIKE CULPEPPER has finished a novel featuring Colm, the former slave in ancient Iceland. “The Berserk Feud” is his sixth story for AHMM.
JOHN H. DIRCKX retired from his primary care medical practice in 2003. He has been publishing stories in AHMM since 1978.
DOC FINCH makes his fourth appearance in AHMM this month. He is finishing a novel about a houseboat that sails the Mississippi River from its source to its outlet and from the past to the future.
EVE FISHER teaches university-level history and lives in a small town in South Dakota “with 5000 books, a husband, and a cat.”
Booked & Printed columnist ROBERT C. HAHN reviews mysteries for Publishers Weekly and New York Post, among other places, and is the former mystery columnist for the Cincinnati Post.
JANICE LAW has a story in the upcoming International Association of Crime Writers anthology, A World of Crime and Mystery, edited by Douglas Preston. She is the author of the novel Voices.
R.T. LAWTON, a retired federal law enforcement agent, is a 2010 Derringer award nominee. “The Alchemist” is fourth in his 1660s Paris Underworld series, and his 21st story for AHMM.
Over the next year, KRISTINE KATHRYN RUSCH’s entire short fiction backlist will be available electronically from WMG Publishing, including the first ever appearance of Spade (1998) in a story called “Stomping Mad.” Her next Kris Nelscott mystery novel will appear late in 2011.
WILLIAM F. SMITH’s last story for AHMM was “Who Put the Poison in Mrs. Murphy’s Chowder?” (June 1997). He passed away in December 2009 at the age of 87.
L.A. WILSON, JR. is a full-time physician in Atlanta who plans to retire by 2012 to spend more time writing. Some of his stories, including a sequel to “Dancer in a Storm” titled “Darktown Strutters,” are available as audiobooks from Mind Wings Audio (mindwingsaudio.com).
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MYSTERIOUS PHOTOGRAPH
© 2010, by Mark F. Russell
The Passage
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, 4th Floor, New York, New York 10007-2352. Please label your entry “January/February 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 column takes us to the British Isles. In Galway, Ireland, Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor is not only fighting familiar demons but takes on the devil himself. Farther up the Irish coast in Donegal, Inspector Benedict Devlin contends with a wealthy mine owner, illegal immigrants, and the visit of a U.S. senator in Brian McGilloway’s gloomy new novel. Then it’s much farther north to the tiny speck in the North Sea above Scotland called Fair Isle, where Inspector Jimmy Perez has taken his fiancée to meet his parents in Ann Cleeves’s enthralling conclusion to her Shetland Island series.
Jack Taylor is a former member of the Garda Síochána who was dismissed because of his drinking problem—a problem that follows and bedevils him periodically in his new life as a “finder,” a sort of unofficial private eye. A fierce drinker when not fighting the habit, Taylor is given to bouts of guilt and depression and occasional hopes for the future. In his eighth outing in THE DEVIL (St. Martin’s Minotaur, $24.99), Taylor is six months clean and looking forward to a new start in America when he’s turned back at the airport gate and has his first encounter with a man, who may not be a man at all. While Taylor has his doubts about who the stranger is, Bruen leaves the reader no doubt at all that the suave entity bedeviling Taylor is indeed the Devil.
Returning to Galway, Taylor hits the bottle again, even as he takes on a case for a mother whose son has dropped out of sight. That case inevitably leads back to the man calling himself “Kurt” on one occasion, Mr. K on another, and other names at other times—there are plenty of names for the Devil. Taylor seems to be the lightning rod attracting the Devil’s attentions.
Bruen’s brilliant dialogue between Taylor and the Devil combines philosophical depth, the Devil’s glibness, and Taylor’s increasingly desperate responses. This book may also be the most unconventional in a series of unconventional novels, but it is filled with Bruen’s usual eclectic literary and musical allusions and the savage poetry that makes the author one of the most exciting stylists in the mystery genre. I’ve yet to read anything by Bruen that wasn’t top-notch, but it is his Jack Taylor series that stands out above the rest of his nearly thirty novels so far.
If Jack Taylor is the wild, untamed face of Irish crime fiction, Brian McGilloway’s Inspector Benedict Devlin might well be the new polite face of reason and justice. Introduced in Borderlands and returning in Gallows Lane, the Garda inspector deals with multiple intractable problems in BLEED A RIVER DEEP (St. Martin’s Minotaur, $24.99).
Devlin’s ongoing problem is Superintendent Harry Patterson, who could be a poster boy for Worst Boss. Patterson is a petty, ambitious, glory-seeking toady ready to jettison or stab his inferiors. And to top it off, he’s incompetent and unprofessional as well.
Devlin’s been assigned res
ponsibility for security for the impending visit of U.S. Senator Cathal Hagan, an Irish-American with links to Heal Ireland, a charity that serves as a front for funding Republican causes in the North. The site chosen for Hagan’s visit is Orcas, a relatively new, prosperous, and controversial gold mine owned by John Weston, a wealthy American who has returned to live, and invest, in Ireland.
A series of errors—misidentification of a slain bank robber, involvement with a case that crosses the border to Northern Ireland, and a screwup in the security arrangements for Hagan’s visit—result in a two-week suspension for Devlin, even though they were not all of his making.
It is Devlin’s decency and humanity that come to the fore in McGilloway’s capable hands. He refuses to stop working the cases he’s involved with in spite of his suspension. Devlin’s attempt to protect a Polish woman who is a victim of human trafficking tests his wife’s patience to the breaking point. And he makes efforts to help the son of an old college friend when his break-in at the Orcas mining operations lands him in jail.
McGilloway tackles a number of tricky subjects in this novel, including the sometimes uneasy cooperation between North and South in the Borderlands area; legal and illegal immigration in Ireland, and Irish-American relations and the new Irish economy.
Benedict Devlin, thorough, kind, and tough, is the kind of detective any force would be proud to have and McGilloway’s well-crafted novels promise to test his mettle to the fullest.
The first volume in Ann Cleeves’s Shetland Island series featuring Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez, Raven Black, won the Gold Dagger in 2006. It was followed by White Nights and Red Bones and concludes with blue lightning (St. Martin’s Minotaur, $24.99).
Perez is a native of Fair Isle, the tiny island that is “the U.K.’s most remote inhabited island.” Fair Isle boasts little in the way of attractions other than its isolation and the Fair Isle Field Center for the study of migratory birds.
Jimmy Perez, whose ancestors are said to have settled on Fair Isle when their ship sank during the time of the Spanish Armada, takes his fiancée Fran Hunter to the island to meet his parents and see where he grew up. But the visit becomes a murder investigation when a victim is discovered at the Center.
Angela Moore, the scientist and TV celebrity who gives the Fair Isle Field Center its cachet, is discovered murdered with a knife in her back. She and her husband, Maurice Parry, run the Center along with assistant Ben Catchpole and cook Jane Latimer. Weather frequently disrupts Fair Isle’s connections with the mainland, and the Center has few guests other than avid birders when the weather turns bad.
So only a handful are staying there when Angela’s body is discovered.
Unfortunately the bad weather moves in and Jimmy is on his own with neither forensic support nor investigative help. As Jimmy interviews the staff and the guests (Maurice’s teenage daughter, Poppy, who disliked and argued with her now deceased stepmother; the Fowlers, John and Sarah; avid birder Dougie Barr; and handsome gadabout Hugh Shaw) he discovers connections and undercurrents that make it difficult to eliminate any as suspects.
Before Jimmy can sort out the signal clue to the Angela’s killing, a second murder occurs. When the weather clears enough for help from the mainland to arrive, Jimmy and his colleagues must hurry if they are to prevent further deaths.
Cleeves succeeds in making Fair Isle a fascinating place, in spite of its forbidding weather and terrain, much as she did in her George Palmer-Jones series (High Island Blues). Here she makes the most of the foibles and enthusiasms of bird-watchers.
This is a highly polished and engrossing conclusion to a fine quartet of mysteries.
Copyright © 2010 Robert C. Hahn
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THE STORY THAT WON
© Myrna Yancey
The July/August Mysterious Photograph contest was won by Kent Brown of Green Bay, Wisconsin. Honorable mentions go to Kathy Chencharik of South Royalston, Massachusetts; Alice Gilliland of Puyallup, Washington; Brian McCullough of Kanata, Ontario, Canada; Melody Street of Mulvane, Kansas; Loretta K. Rolison of Ionia, Michigan; Jason Hunt of Hopedale, Massachusetts; Ray Mileur of Thompsonville, Illinois; and Nikki S. May of Lyons, Michigan.
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LITTLE DEEPER
KENT BROWN
“I thought you told me we wanted Mansfield?” Joe asked.
“Yeah, Mansfield,” Tim replied.
“Better read the headstone again,” Joe said.
“This is the Manfield grave,” a gravelly voice announced behind them.
Joe and Tim turned. Standing before them was Patrolman Higgins. “What are you boys up to?”
It took a little prodding, but they confessed. Treasure buried in Mansfield’s coffin by his eccentric grandson. “The family gold! All coin,” Tim said, with a used car salesman’s voice.
Higgins knew the story. And the Mansfield heir was loony as a cartoon woodpecker. “You two are about ten miles from the Mansfield resting place. And it’s a crypt, no shovels needed.”
Tim and Joe looked at each other, uncertain. Higgins added, “There’s enough in the coffin, if it’s true, to split three ways, happy-like.”
Higgins took the boys’ drivers’ licenses, saying, “I’ll catch up with you later.”
Joe and Tim dropped their shovels, hopped into their car, and drove off to the other gravesite thinking they had it made, with help from local law enforcement.
When the two buffoons had driven out of sight, Officer Higgins rolled up his shirt sleeves, took a shovel, and started digging. He tapped the shovel against the headstone and some smartly placed granite-colored plaster fell off the stone, revealing the name MANSFIELD. Higgins muttered to himself, “You gotta dig a little deeper to get the whole story for it to pay off.”
Copyright © 2010 Kent Brown
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THE WRITING WORKSHOP
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“Just to recapitulate, gentlemen: Last time we discussed ‘finding your topic’ and ‘writing what you know.’ I trust you’ve been thinking along those lines. Yes, Tommy?” “Pharmaceuticals,” he said....
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The funeral was at nine in the morning on that June day of 1885, and by the time everyone got back to the house, the hot prairie air had a smell like baking bread. Nell was stifling in her black bombazine, her bodice drenched with sweat. She looked over at her two boys, Bill and John, stiff in their...
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When Colm got back from raiding, it was almost winter and there was little to be done on the farm. The ewe and her daughter had just gone into heat and needed breeding and there was a decision to be...
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“Your end needs to go about another yard north, Chris.” In the harsh glare of the working lights above the stage at Pierce Hall, Ron Reese of Aardvark Amusements and his solitary helper were struggling to assemble a dunking stool. By two in the afternoon they had already put in a long day, and it...
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From the start, I said it was a bad idea. I told the organizers of CelebCon Five that paying the exorbitant appearance fee for Dmitri Karnikov would backfire. Yes, Dmitri Karnikov had starred in the...
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They said they would pay me to bring the old man to them after nightfall. It wasn’t to be a lot of money but enough to get my interest, especially since I needed to eat, yet my criminal talents on the streets of Paris were still, shall we say, developing. Of course, some folk in our community of...
DANCER IN A STORM
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THE GUN ALSO RISES
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“Here we harvest the wind’s free bounty,” said Leo Albertson, the manager of the Lamancha Wind Ranch. “If only it didn’t cost so much for the tools to reap it.” He waved at the window, beyond which...
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“Apples, apples!” “Come away. I think she’s selling apples.” “Apples!” Polijn sang each iteration of the word with a slightly different tone, in hopes that they might ask for a song later on. If she was interesting enough, the cries could also conceal the fact that the old tree just beyond the...
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JANICE LAW
Art by Kelly Denato
“Just to recapitulate, gentlemen: Last time we discussed ‘finding your topic’ and ‘writing what you know.’ I trust you’ve been thinking along those lines. Yes, Tommy?”
Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine 01/01/11 Page 1
