EQMM, March-April 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "Then?"

  "Well, then we dressed them. It's not easy dressing a dead body."

  "I can imagine."

  "But we managed it. Took them out and laid them side by side in a field. Herbert Richardson said, ‘That'll fox ‘em.’”

  Which it did, Hennessey thought, and there lay your undoing.

  "Where will we find Richardson now?"

  "At home. He said to carry on as though nothing had happened. So he'll be at Penny Farm. There's nothing between us, me and him. We have nothing in common."

  And Hennessey thought, but did not say, Except double murder. You've got that in common.

  * * * *

  That evening, with both Herbert Richardson and Miranda Westwood in the cells, having been charged with the murders of Dominic Westwood and Wendy Richardson, Hennessey drove out to Skelton, taking an overnight bag with him. He walked up to a half-timbered house and tapped on the door. The door was opened by a woman who smiled warmly at him.

  "Evening, madam.” Hennessey stepped over the threshold and kissed the woman.

  "The children are in bed,” said Louise D'Acre. “We can go straight up."

  ©2009 by Peter Turnbull

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  Reviews: THE JURY BOX by Jon L. Breen

  Are locked rooms, impossible crimes, and miracle problems a lost art? As long ago as 1941, Howard Haycraft warned against their use by newcomers, but some writers have persisted in introducing new variations, notably the late Edward D. Hoch, prolific historical specialist P.C. Doherty, and frequent EQMM contributor Paul Halter. The king of impossible crime was, of course, my “Jury Box” predecessor John Dickson Carr (1906-1977).

  **** John Dickson Carr and Val Gielgud: 13 to the Gallows, Crippen & Landru, $43 hardcover, $20 trade paper. These four stage plays have never before been published in book form. Inspector Silence Takes the Air and the title work are semi-comic three-act plays written and produced during World War II, both set in provincial BBC studios and involving apparently impossible situations. They combine Gielgud's radio expertise with Carr's puzzle-spinning gen-ius, and one can imagine them playing well, though they never achieved West End productions. The two one-acts, Intruding Shadow and She Slept Lightly are by Carr alone, based on his radio scripts. Editor Tony Medawar provides explanatory notes and production histories, including original casts and quotes from reviews. This is an excellent compilation no Carr or classical detection buff will want to be without.

  **** Glyn Carr: Death Finds a Foothold, Rue Morgue, $14.95. This 1961 novel, considered the best of the series about mountain-climbing actor manager Abercrombie Lewker, was previously available in the U.S. only in a 1983 reprint set for the library market. In their author note, publishers Tom and Enid Schantz argue that Showell Styles's audacious choice of pseudonymous surname was appropriate, noting that “a mountain climb [takes] place in a large, open-air locked room” and that “Styles managed to find a way to lock the door of a room that has no walls, only the sky for a ceiling.” Involving the inexplicable fall of a veteran climber in Wales's Snowdon Horseshoe, the novel combines specialized detail, evocative description, literate dialogue, well-defined characters, and expert clue planting. It is infinitely superior to the general run of contemporary amateur-detective fiction. (Another impossible-crime specialist on the distinguished Rue Morgue list is Clyde B. Clason, represented most recently by the 1940 case Poison Jasmine [$14.95].)

  *** Christopher Fowler: The Victoria Vanishes, Bantam, $24. Recalling John Dickson Carr's Department of Queer Complaints, Fowler's Peculiar Crimes Unit takes on outre cases that resist normal police work. It is headed by elderly sleuths Arthur Bryant (unorthodox and flamboyant as Dr. Fell or Rumpole of the Bailey) and John May (in better shape though only slightly younger and a steadying Watsonian influence). While Fowler shares Carr's love of elaborate plotting, devotion to fair play, contrast of the serious with the broadly comic, sentimentality about London, interest in British history, and charmingly ornate style, on the basis of his two most recent books he is not doing impossible crimes in the Carr tradition. When Bryant sees a murder victim coming out of a pub that hasn't existed for years, classical enthusiasts may be reminded of Edmund Crispin's The Moving Toyshop, but the solution is an offhand throwaway, the least interesting element of the wild plot. The recently reprinted 2007 novel White Corridor (Bantam, $13) is an even better book, but still not the locked-room mystery it pretends to be.

  ** Frederick Ramsay: Stranger Room, Poisoned Pen, $24.95. At least the fourth case for Virginia sheriff Ike Schwartz presents a genuine locked-room problem, though it stretches a short-story plot to novel length via soap-opera padding. The title refers to separate rooms in private homes that were rented to passengers along the old stagecoach routes. A Civil War-era traveler was shot to death in one such room locked from the inside, and 150 years later, a similarly impossible murder occurs in the same house, restored as a historic site by its patrician owner.

  ***** Joyce Carol Oates: My Sister, My Love, Ecco, $25.95. The murder of Bliss Rampike, six-year-old New Jersey ice-skating champion, which has admitted parallels to the notorious JonBenet Ramsey case, is recounted ten years later by older brother Skyler, now a troubled nineteen-year-old with self-conscious literary ambition. This is an extraordinary novel, notable for insights into adolescent psychology, structural innovation, social observation, and inimitable style. Apart from providing a whodunit with the reader as detective, Oates turns a satirical eye on the excesses and absurdities of contemporary upscale suburban life, with particular emphasis on dubious child-rearing practices carried to a pernicious extreme. (For a sample, see the definition of “playdate” on page 117.) While it's unlikely the Nobel Prize for Literature will go to an American any time soon, Oates is invariably listed in the top handful of candidates. Her increasing identification with crime fiction, including a genuine enthusiasm for its special attributes, is a cause for celebration.

  *** Stuart M. Kaminsky: People WhoWalk in Darkness, Forge, $23.95. Russian detective Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov returns for his fifteenth case and first since Murder on the Trans-Siberian Express (2001). The aging sleuth's Office of Special Investigations is threatened with dissolution if he and his team can't solve a murder at a Siberian diamond mine that is reportedly haunted by the singing ghost of a little girl. Plot, prose, and continuing characters will keep you involved to the well-managed conclusion.

  ** Mickey Spillane with Max Allan Collins: The Goliath Bone, Harcourt/ Penzler, $23. New York private eye Mike Hammer, though now an AARP member, is tough and dangerous as ever, helping a couple of menaced university students who have discovered an astonishing Biblical artifact. To the credit of Spillane's posthumous collaborator, this reads like the real thing from start to finish, and the late author's many admirers won't want to miss it. While respecting his unique style, I never really got Spillane, who for me lacks the compulsive readability and driving pace vital to this kind of mystery.

  The Mystery Writers of America anthology On a Raven's Wing: New Tales in Honor of Edgar Allan Poe (Harper, $14.95), edited by the prolific and versatile Stuart Kaminsky (see above), presents twenty original stories from a star-studded lineup in commemoration of the bicentennial of Poe's birth. Included is one of the last stories by Edward D. Hoch, the typically deft “The Poe Collector.” (Your juror is also represented.)

  Two great series, important landmarks of the cultural and stylistic diversity of American detective fiction, are represented in new trade paper reprints: Chester Himes's Harlem cops Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones in two 1960 novels, The Big Gold Dream and All Shot Up (Pegasus, $13.95 each); and Earl Derr Biggers's Charlie Chan in his first two cases, The House Without a Key (1925) and The Chinese Parrot (1926) (Academy Chicago, $14.95 each). Both projects, though handsomely packaged, would be more attractive to collectors and scholars with introductions to put them in historical context.

  ©2009 by Jon L. Breen

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ntents]

  Fiction: THE VALHALLA VERDICT by Doug Allyn

  Doug Allyn is simply incredible. Hardly a year goes by when he isn't nominated or claiming one of the mystery field's major awards. In 2007, for instance, not only did the Michigan author win a third-place scroll in EQMM's Readers Award Competition for “Stone Cold Christmas” (1/07), he also received a nomination for the Barry Award for Best Short Story for the EQMM tale “Dead as a Dog” (7/07). This new story is shorter than most of Mr. Allyn's, but of the same high quality.

  * * * *

  Art by Mark Evans

  * * * *

  The jury wouldn't look at us when they filed back in. Even the foreman, a rumpled old-timer who'd offered my mother sympathetic glances during the course of the trial, was avoiding our eyes now.

  A bad sign. But I wasn't really worried. The case was open and shut.

  A rich playboy knocks up his girlfriend. He offered to pay for an abortion but she refused his money. She wanted the child whether he did or not. A week later, as she was walking home from work, my nineteen-year-old sister, Lisa Marie Canfield, was clipped by a hit-and-run driver who never even slowed down. Dead at the side of the road. Killed like a stray dog.

  Police found traces of blood on the bumper of her boyfriend's Cadillac SUV. Lisa's blood. A simple, straightforward homicide. In Detroit. Or New York.

  But Valhalla is a small, northern Michigan resort village and Lisa's boyfriend, Mel Bennett, is a hometown hero here. A football star at Michigan State and later for the Detroit Lions, Mel owns the biggest Cadillac/GMC dealership in five counties.

  Lisa, on the other hand, was only a shopgirl, a wistful little retro-hippie who sold candles and incense in one of the tourist traps on Lake Street. She was too young to get involved with a player like Mel. If I'd known she was seeing him ... but I didn't know. I'd been too wrapped up in my teaching career to pay much attention to my little sister's life.

  And now it was too late for brotherly advice. Or anything else. Only justice remained.

  But Mel Bennett was a sympathetic figure on the witness stand. Tanned, tailored, and charismatic, Mel sheepishly admitted that my sister wasn't his only girlfriend, he was dating several other women. And one of his lovers, Fawn Daniels, still had keys to his apartment. And to his car.

  When Fawn took the stand, she refused to say where she was at the time of the killing. She took the Fifth Amendment instead, scowling at the jury, hard-eyed and defiant as a Mafia don.

  And now the jury looked uneasy, even angry. Like they'd been arguing. Perhaps they'd settled on a charge less than murder. Manslaughter, maybe.

  It never occurred to me they'd let the bastard walk.

  But that's exactly what they did.

  The foreman read the verdict aloud from the verdict slip. “On the sole charge of murder in the second degree, we find the defendant, Mel Bennett, not guilty.” And the packed courtroom actually burst into applause.

  Outside, on the courthouse steps, the foreman told a ring of reporters: “We thought Mr. Bennett was credible when he swore he cared for Lisa Canfield and would never harm her. And when his mistress, Fawn Daniels, refused to answer, many of us felt there was reasonable doubt. Maybe she—"

  But he was talking to the air. Mel and his entourage swept out of the courthouse and the reporters flocked around them like gulls at a fish market.

  Smiling for the cameras, Mel said he had no idea who'd killed poor Lisa, but he was sure the authorities would find the person responsible. He offered his sincerest condolences to her family.

  "How does it feel to be a free man?” a reporter shouted.

  "I was never worried,” Mel said solemnly. “I knew I could count on a Valhalla jury for a fair shake."

  Scrambling into a gleaming red Escalade, Mel roared away, waving to the crowd, grinning like he'd just scored the biggest touchdown of his life. Or gotten away with murder.

  When the prosecutor was interviewed, he griped that Mel Bennett got a Valhalla verdict. A reporter asked him to explain, but he just shrugged and stalked off. Implication? What do you expect from a hick-town jury?

  And he was right. Valhalla is a small town. By New York or even Detroit standards, most folks who live up north are hicks. More or less.

  My extended family, Canfields and La Mottes, are redneck to the bone, and proud of it. My uncle Deke's clan, the La Mottes, are the roughest of our bunch, jackpine savages who grow reefer and cook crystal meth in the trackless forests. The rest of us are solid, working-class citizens. Blue collar, for the most part.

  All but me. I'm Paul Canfield, the first of my family to earn a bachelor's degree. I teach political science at Valhalla High School. My relatives call me Professor. A compliment or an insult, depending on the tone.

  After the trial, on a golden, autumn afternoon, our small clan assembled in my uncle Deke's garage, still stunned by the verdict. We'd intended to hold a delayed wake in honor of my sister. Lisa Marie was dead, but at least the monster had been punished. Or so we'd expected.

  Instead it felt like Lisa had been slaughtered all over again. Along with her unborn child. A Canfield baby none of us would ever hold.

  But there was beer on ice, hot dogs and potato salad already laid out. And folks have to eat.

  So we gathered around the banquet table in somber silence, Canfields and La Mottes, in-laws and cousins. But with none of the usual good-natured banter. No one spoke at all. Until my mother, Mabel Canfield, turned to me for an explanation.

  "I don't understand it, Paul,” she said simply. “How could this happen? Where's the justice in it?"

  "Justice doesn't actually exist, Ma. It's only a concept. An ideal."

  "I still don't—"

  "When people go to court, they expect to win because they're in the right. But the truth is, every trial is a contest. Like a debating match between lawyers with a judge for a referee. The jury chooses the winning side and we call it justice. And usually, it works pretty well."

  "Not this time,” my cousin Bo La Motte snorted. “The jurors were morons."

  "No,” I said, “they were just home folks. Like us. Mel Bennett's a professional salesman and that jury was just one more deal to close. He had a sharp lawyer and the prosecutor thought the case was a slam dunk—"

  "It should have been!” Bo snapped. “Lisa's blood was splattered all over Bennett's damn car!"

  "But the Daniels woman had keys to that car. When she took the Fifth and refused to say where she was at the time of Lisa's death, the jury had reasonable doubts. And they gave Mel the benefit of those doubts."

  "Is there any chance at all that Daniels woman could actually have done this thing?” my mother asked.

  "No,” Uncle Deke said quietly. “I had some people look into that. Word is, she was shooting pool at the Sailor's Rest when Lisa was run down. She'll probably claim she bought dope or committed some other petty crime to justify taking the Fifth, but her alibi is rock solid. She didn't kill Lisa, Mel Bennett did. I expect Fawn collected a fat payoff to cover for him."

  "Then I say we should pop that bastard today,” Bo said. Burly and surly, my cousin Bo is the hothead of the family. He inherited his father's straight dark hair, obsidian eyes, and black temper. But in school, nobody ever picked on me when my cousin Bo was around.

  "Popping Bennett is a great idea, Cousin,” I said, “as long as you've got no plans for the rest of your natural life."

  "Bull! No jury in the world would convict me! They'd—"

  "You just saw firsthand what a small-town jury can do! You're already a two-time loser for weed and grand theft auto, Bo. Nobody'd give you the benefit of a doubt."

  "Then to hell with them! And to hell with you too, Professor!” Bo snapped. “If you got no belly for this, go back to school and leave the rat killin’ to men who ain't afraid to—"

  Whirling in her chair, my mother backhanded Bo across the mouth. Hard! Spilling him over backwards onto the garage floor.

  He was up like a cat, fire in
his eyes, his fist cocked—but of course he didn't swing.

  Instead, he shook his head to clear it, then gingerly touched his split lip with his fingertips. They came away dripping blood.

  "Damn, Aunt May,” he groused, “most girls just slap my face."

  "Not Canfield girls,” my mother said. Uncle Deke chuckled, and gradually the rest of us joined in. It was a thin joke, but our family hadn't done much laughing lately.

  Uncle Deke tossed Bo a paper towel to mop up the blood and we all resumed our seats.

  "All right, Professor,” the old man growled. “You're the closest thing we got to a legal expert in this family. What are our options now? Is there any way to get justice for Lisa? If we dig up more evidence—?"

  "I don't think it would make any difference,” I said. “Now that Mel's been found not guilty, he can't be tried again, period. He could confess to killing Lisa in a church full of witnesses and the worst he could get is a perjury charge. A year or two, no more."

  "You're saying the law can't touch him?” Bo said dangerously. “Is that what you're telling us?"

  "Look, I'm only a teacher, Bo, not a lawyer. But I don't believe there's anything we can do. Legally, it's over."

  "Except it ain't,” Bo said.

  "It is for now,” my mother said firmly, rising stiffly, looking up and down the banquet table. “Deacon, you're my older brother and I love you, but you've got an evil temper and your three boys are no better. Lisa was my daughter, not yours. You missed most of her growing years while you were in prison. I absolutely forbid you to throw any more of your life away in some mad-dog quest for vengeance."