AHMM, May 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Back at the second floor window, Pollock sees the darkening clouds in the west and wonders if it's going to storm. Then he returns to his reading. An hour later the rain is thudding against the glass. Then just after nightfall the thunder and lightning come crashing and booming overhead. Suddenly, the lights go out. Pollock folds up his newspaper and sits there. Local thunderstorms often double back. When he's sure the storm has moved on he'll go down to the switchbox. Otherwise, he might have to go twice.

  But then he hears something, a tap-tap-tapping coming from the basement. He listens. It comes again. Tap-tap-tap. Curious, Pollock gets up, feels his way to the fireplace mantel where he keeps a flashlight and a box of matches, and heads downstairs.

  "I know, I know,” Dean told Wallace, “if you were in the dark on a stormy night and you heard a noise from the basement you'd stay put. Me too. But characters in books, they're a different breed."

  Dean went back to his story. When Pollock reaches the cellar door, the tap-tap-tapping is louder. He pulls the door open and steps inside, his flashlight sweeping across the cement floor. Suddenly, there it is right at his feet, a mechanical rabbit with a battery stuck in its back, beating on a drum. It swivels sharply, scoots right past him and outside just as the door swings shut. Pollock hears the key turn in the lock.

  "Hold it,” said Wallace. “The Energizer Bunny can turn keys in locks?"

  "If he can beat a drum, why not?” said Dean.

  "Well, it's a stretch."

  "Not if he stands on his drum,” insisted Dean.

  Wallace shrugged and Dean returned to Pollock. As the man rattles the doorknob, the batteries in his flashlight—they were not the bunny's brand—dim and die. Pollock strikes a match. When it flares up someone blows out the flame. “Oooh!” goes Pollock. “Oooh!” echo two dozen voices.

  "Kind of crowded down there,” said Wallace.

  "Character was never my strong suit,” admitted Dean.

  Wallace laughed. “My wife's words exactly."

  "I sometimes get careless with characters,” Dean explained, “particularly with red herrings who're only there to cloud the issue. But in mystery novels when you come right down to it—except for the murderer, the detective, and a victim or two—mostly what you've got are red herrings."

  "Well, I like the part about the Energizer Bunny trapping Mr. Inertia in the cellar,” said Wallace, adding, “How long do you keep them down there?"

  "My will provides that when I die the lady aluminum siding telemarketer who calls Pollock at mealtime will become concerned because he isn't answering the phone. She'll call the police, and my Inspector Trudge will take the call. ‘Hey, I always wanted aluminum siding,’ he'll say. ‘Get serious, sir,’ she'll reply. ‘Maybe Mr. Pollock has fallen and can't get up.'

  "So Trudge, happy to get any work at all since nice Mr. Dean died, goes to investigate. He knocks on the door and gets no answer. The neighbors tell him they haven't seen any sign of life there since before the last big thunderstorm when everybody's lights went out. So Trudge goes back, forces the front door, and searches the house. When he sees the key in the lock of the door to the cellar, he gives it a turn. The door flies open with such force it slams him against the wall, knocking him unconscious. A small crowd of people pounds past his body and up the stairs.

  "That's how it'll work for Pollock and his bunch. And the others too. That tap-tap-tapping from the basement gets book characters every time."

  "Hold it,” said Wallace. “You mean you've got more cellars full of red herrings?”

  "One for every novel and one for more false starts than I care to count,” said Dean. “Imaginary real estate comes cheap."

  * * * *

  One summer, a year or two after this conversation, Wallace took his visiting daughter and his grandchildren on an outing to a park in the country. (Mrs. Wallace didn't care much for picnics.) After the meal, while his daughter and the girls cleared off the picnic table and put things back in the car, Wallace and the boys were passing the old pigskin around. All of a sudden a compact crowd of twenty or so people came marching out of the woods, squinting against the sunshine and carrying with them the faint odor of mouse. Looking straight ahead, they reached the roadway, turned, and vanished from sight.

  On the drive home, Wallace passed those same people heading toward Pickering with a determined stride. Somehow, he felt he knew them from somewhere.

  Wallace had a lot of time to think about these people in the following weeks while stuck in traffic, which seemed to have gotten worse, or driving around and around trying to find a place to park or waiting for a table in crowded restaurants.

  One day while he stood in line at the supermarket checkout—Mrs. Wallace didn't care much for grocery shopping—it occurred to Wallace that he'd never seen the lines so long at the registers. Looking the people over he told himself that if they'd been characters out of one of Dean's novels, none would be murderer, victim, or detective. They'd just be there like red herrings to clutter the plot and confuse the issue.

  Somehow this thought reminded him of the people he'd seen marching out of the woods that picnic day. Suddenly he knew his friend Dean had died. He was sad for a moment. Then he felt a chill, and looking around again, he wondered how much imaginary real estate Dean had owned, how many cellars.

  Copyright (c) 2008 James Powell

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  Department: BOOKED AND PRINTED by Robert C. Hahn

  Mixing humor and murder successfully can be a killing combination. As mystery fans know there are few plots that haven't already been concocted, but there are infinite ways in which an author can make the recipe their own. This issue's authors take vastly different approaches to seasoning their mysteries with humor.

  British author John Mortimer's Rumpole Misbehaves (Viking, $23.95) offers sly, acerbic humor largely directed at the minions of the legal system. Rumpole, “the Old Bailey hack,” is one of the iconic figures of the modern mystery, having entered the lists more than twenty times to joust with his legal opponents. Hopelessly out of step with more ambitious colleagues, and generally out of favor with them as well as with the judges who preside over his cases, he nonetheless emerges victorious time after time. And the pompous, the priggish, and the sanctimonious are pricked and deflated by Rumpole's deadly combination of wit, bluster, and knowledge of the law.

  * * * *

  * * * *

  Rumpole may be the only barrister who finds himself simultaneously defending a boy accused of violating an ASBO (Anti-Social Behavior Order), defending a man accused of murdering a Russian prostitute, and defending himself against an ASBO brought by his own colleagues.

  The boy is a child of the Timson clan, whose members Rumpole has successfully defended before. Twelve-year-old Peter's offense is to have kicked a football into a neighboring yard. Despite Rumpole's pleas, an ASBO was issued against Peter. A subsequent violation of the the order leaves Peter facing the possibility of jail time for his offense.

  Meanwhile, Rumpole faces an ASBO of his own for flouting chamber rules against smoking, drinking, and eating in chambers—activities that annoy his cohorts enough that they foolishly seek an ASBO as a solution.

  But there is more at stake than a boy's freedom, more than a man's life, more than Rumpole's own freedom to eat and smoke in chambers—Rumpole is on the cusp of becoming a QC (Queen's Counsel), or, as he prefers to call it, a Queer Customer.

  Hilda, Rumpole's wife, also known as She Who Must Be Obeyed, adds her perspective to the narrative as she puts herself out to further his chances for becoming QC but also entertains the delightful idea of reading for the Bar herself.

  Mortimer keeps all his elements spinning merrily until they fall into place with a perfectly executed flourish.

  Sarah Graves not only mixes murder and mirth, but also cashes in on the whole do-it-yourself remodeling craze in her Home Repair is Homicide series. The mysteries are set in Eastport, Maine, where Jacobia “Jake” Tiptree relocate
d in the series debut The Dead Cat Bounce (1998). In The Book of Old Houses (Bantam, $22), the eleventh in the series, domestic humor is built around the endless frustrations (and unmatched pleasures) of restoring an early nineteenth century fixer-upper.

  Jake is a former New York investment banker whose job involved laundering money for “the absolute cream of New York mobster society.” She also had a husband, Victor, a brain surgeon who earned the nickname of the “Sperminator” for his extracurricular (and extramarital) affairs.

  Leaving that life (and that husband) and starting over in Eastport, she bought an 1823 fixer-upper and began the arduous task of restoration and repair—tasks made all the more difficult by her complete lack of knowledge about home repair.

  Graves has surrounded Jake with an evolving cast of characters who offer myriad opportunities for both humor and plot developments. Her teenage son Sam is on his second attempt at overcoming addiction, and her father is an explosives expert and ex-federal fugitive, for instance. But also there are the homely Bella, who's become almost a part of the household, best friend Ellie, and new husband Wade.

  This time the house itself provides the catalyst for the mystery when an unusual book is discovered in the cellar. Not only does the book appear to be very, very old, but also to have been written in human blood. Odder still, the book listed all the owners of the house up to and including Jake.

  The murder of Horace Robotham, a rare book expert who was examining the book, and the disappearance of the book itself bring Dave DiMaio to Eastport and to Jake. DiMaio, bent on avenging the death of his friend, shows up first at Jake's house, and Jake and Ellie are quickly involved in trying to deflect DiMaio and locate the book, and perhaps the killer, themselves.

  At the same time, Jake has been talked into hosting a party for local doyenne Merrie Fargeorge, who has never quite accepted her. When Jake is overcome by an impulse to demolish and remove an old cast-iron bathtub from an upstairs bathroom less than two days before the party, the stage is set for a disaster.

  More disasters loom ahead as murder, theft, party, domestic disputes, and home renovations make a heady mix. Graves and her heroine may have been novices when the series launched, but they are now extremely capable and entertaining experts in their chosen fields.

  * * * *

  Californian Lisa Lutz belongs to the venerable category of screwball mystery authors, and her Curse of the Spellmans (Simon & Schuster, $25) follows her debut in 2007 with The Spellman Files, where she introduced the dysfunctional family of private eyes. Now the oddball group is back for a zany encore narrated by the zaniest of the group, thirty-year-old Isabel (a k a Izzy or Izzila).

  * * * *

  * * * *

  The rest of the family includes brother David (lawyer, age 32), who's married to Isabel's best friend, Petra; fifteen-year-old sister Rae, precocious and dangerous; and parents Albert and Olivia, owners of home-based Spellman Investigations of San Francisco, California.

  Isabel was according to her own admission a “difficult child"—and adolescent and young adult. She's still the most difficult of the Spellmans, although the others have high difficulty quotients of their own.

  Rae, for instance, is learning to drive, but then she runs over her instructor. Albert and Olivia are having troubles getting together on a “disappearance” that they can both enjoy. A disappearance is what the Spellmans call a vacation.

  But it is Isabel's obsession with a new neighbor that initiates and sustains the confusion and mayhem. Isabel becomes convinced the neighbor, who calls himself “John Brown,” is up to no good. And when her attempts to investigate him reveal little verifiable data, she resorts to increasingly bizarre methods—methods with unintended consequences.

  Lutz's storytelling style is a bit on the wacky side as well, with short, punchy chapters that zigzag across the timeline and a plethora of footnotes that can be amusing or irritating depending on your tolerance for such things.

  Copyright (c) 2008 Robert Hahn

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  Mystery Classic: MYSTERY CLASSIC: THE ROOM OVER THE BATHHOUSE by Okamoto Kido

  From The Curious Casebook of Inspector Hanschichi by Okamoto Kido, translated by Ian MacDonald, University of Hawai'i Press, 2007. “The Room Over the Bathhouse” ("Y-uya no nikai") first appeared in the April 1917 edition of Bungei Kurabu.

  On another occasion, I again paid old Hanshichi a visit around New Year's.

  "Happy New Year!” I sang out unceremoniously.

  "New Year's felicitations to you, too, my good fellow, and best wishes for health and happiness."

  The formality of Hanshichi's greeting took me, as a young student, slightly aback. But then he produced the customary bottle of New Year's mulled sake. Since the old man had a low tolerance for alcohol, and I was a virtual teetotaler, it was not long before both our faces had taken on a springlike flush, and the conversation grew more and more animated.

  "Could you tell me one of your usual stories—something suitable for spring perhaps?"

  "That's a tall order!” the old man said with a laugh, rubbing his forehead thoughtfully. “Almost all the stories in my repertoire are about murderers and thieves. I don't know if I have any that are light and cheerful! Now, let me see ... I did slip up rather badly a few times. We detectives aren't gods, you know—we don't always get our man. Sometimes we miscalculate. Sometimes we just plain make mistakes. You might say that detective work is a comedy of errors. I'm always bragging about my great deeds, so today, why don't I confess one of my blunders instead? Looking back on it, it really is quite a laughable story!"

  * * * *

  The year was 1863. The New Year's pine-tree decorations had already been taken down. Early in the evening of the sixth—the day people used to call “The Sixth Day of New Year's"—a deputy by the name of Kumazo paid Hanshichi a visit at his home in Kanda's Mikawacho district. Kumazo ran a bathhouse in Atagoshita, so the other deputies had given him the nickname Bathhouse Kuma, or “Bathhouse Bear.” He tended to do things in a slapdash manner and often fouled things up, turning in reports that were utter nonsense and making the most outrageous assertions. For that reason, he was also known familiarly as “Boastful Bear."

  "Good evening."

  "What's up, Kuma?” Hanshichi asked, seated in front of the charcoal brazier. “Got any interesting stories for the New Year?"

  "Er ... matter of fact, boss, that's what I came to see you about ... there's something I need to tell you."

  "Well, out with it. Not another one of your cockamamie stories, is it, Boastful Bear?"

  "No ... not at all,” Kumazo replied. “This time there isn't even a hint of boastfulness in it. You see, this past winter—around the middle of the eleventh month—a couple of men started coming every day to use the room over my bathhouse. I felt there was something peculiar about them ... just odd, if you know what I mean."

  People who have read Shikitei Samba's The Bathhouse of the Floating World will understand what Kumazo was talking about.[1] From the Edo period on into the early years of the Meiji era, most bathhouses had a room upstairs where young women served tea and cakes. Lazy fellows went there to take naps. Idlers sat about playing chess. Some fast types even went there, wasting their money, just so they could gawk at a pretty woman. Kumazo had just such a room on the second floor of his bathhouse, where he employed an attractive girl by the name of Okichi to serve his customers.

  [FOOTNOTE 1. Ukiyo-buro, a comic novel published in installments from 1809 to 1813.]

  "Get this, boss—the men are samurai. Don't you think that's strange?"

  "There's nothing strange about it. Samurai take baths, too, you know."

  When a samurai went to a public bathhouse, he was required to take his swords upstairs and check them before entering the bath.[2] There was always a sword rack on the second floor for this purpose.

  [FOOTNOTE 2. Samurai carried two swords, one long and one short.]

  "But they come every single day wit
hout fail!"

  "They've been sent up from the provinces,[3] I imagine—and probably have designs on Okichi!” said Hanshichi, laughing.

  [FOOTNOTE 3. As part of the system of sankin-kotai, or “alternate attendance,” mandated by the shogun in 1631, provincial lords were required to maintain a residence in Edo and live there every other year. These “secondary residences” were staffed with retainers from the lord's own domain.]

  "If you don't think it's a bit strange, then listen to this.... They've been coming every day for nearly two months. They even showed up on New Year's Eve, New Year's Day, and the day after that! I don't care if they are just provincial samurai stationed here in Edo—no samurai spends the New Year's holidays lazing around in a bathhouse! It doesn't make sense. Not only that, but these two usually show up together in the morning, then come and go as they please during the day. But as soon as it gets dark, they always leave together. And I'll say it again—this has been going on day in and day out since the beginning of winter. Don't you think that's peculiar? I can't help thinking these aren't your usual samurai."

  "I see what you mean,” Hanshichi said thoughtfully, looking more serious.

  "What do you think, boss? What do you suppose the two of them are up to?"

  "Imposters, perhaps..."

  "Exactly!” Kumazo exclaimed, clapping his hands. “That's what I figured! Just pretending to be samurai as a cover for some sinister purpose. They probably meet at my place during the day to hatch their plans, then go out at night and get up to no good. I'm sure that's it."

  "It's quite possible. What do these two men look like?"

  "They're both young. One guy—must be twenty-two or -three—he's kinda pasty but not bad-looking. The other one ... same age, a little taller ... he doesn't look too disreputable either. I guess you could say they're your typical well-heeled playboys. You know the type ... tip well, don't go prattling on to Okichi about sardines and whale meat like country bumpkins. Matter of fact, I think Okichi's a bit sweet on that pasty one ... can you believe it? I asked Okichi what those two were always talking about up there, but I don't think she's being straight with me. Today I climbed halfway up the ladder and listened to see if I could catch anything. I heard one of them say, ‘We can't just cut him down with our swords. We'll try to talk some sense into him, but if he puts up a fuss, we'll just have to get rough and grab him....’ Well, what do you think of that? Sounds like they're up to no good!"