EQMM, December 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Since you said it was all right to show the dummy Captain Grand Comics to Charlie Potts and some of the local kids, I've got some reactions to share with you. Everybody likes Captain Grand but they think he needs a good enemy. A guy who can do all the things Captain Grand can do is wasted on kidnappers and bank robbers. One of the local kids suggested a mad scientist for an enemy. Another kid says he'd like to see a beautiful, evil woman in the strip. Charlie Potts says he's starting to outgrow some of these wild stories. He's getting very literary, thinks you should read Steinbeck or Hemingway for inspiration.

  Ho, ho, ho.

  I was thinking of another character myself. So many of these heroes are musclemen, what about somebody who uses his brains to fight crime? I was thinking of a strip called “The Scholar.” Something like Sherlock Holmes. He tackles crimes that the police can't solve because they're just not smart enough.

  What would you think of that, Izzy? Do let me know.

  I've got to turn in now, roomie. Tomorrow's a school day down at the Gazette and I can't stay up all night the way I used to back at North Cheshire Central, not if I'm going to be all full of pep and energy in the morning.

  Oh, one more thing. Tony LoPresto says that he and Jennie are planning a trip back to Massachusetts for the big homecoming game next month. Going to bring all their youngsters with them, too. The old campus is in for a real treat! I wish I could make it but every time I look my budget in the eye and ask, How about it? the old budget looks right back at me and says, Not this year, old fellow!

  So maybe next year, Izzy. I assume that you and Carolyn will attend; it can't be much of a trip from New York City. Say hello to Tony and Jennie for me, and congratulations again to yourself and Carolyn. You lucky dog—or should I say, Cheshire Cat!

  Meow, Cats, Meow!

  Robert “Bobcat” O'Brien

  * * * *

  KEWEENAW BAY GAZETTE

  Keweenaw Bay, Michigan

  September 20, 1940

  —

  Mr. Zachary Grand

  Editor-in-Chief

  Grand Publications

  143 West 43rd Street

  New York, 16, New York

  —

  Dear Izzy,

  This is a letter I never expected to write, old roomie. You know, Keweenaw Bay may be isolated and all, but we do have radios and we get out-of-town newspapers even if we have to wait a few days to see what's happening in the rest of the world. But Tony LoPresto telephoned and gave me the lowdown on events during homecoming weekend, and then there were reports in the Boston and New York dailies.

  Now we know what happened to Henry von Eisen.

  Who would ever have expected an Atlantic hurricane to make it all the way to Massachusetts, and then to sweep inland as far as Cheshire County, setting off that waterspout from Big Star Pond and then turning into a tornado and ripping up the old landfill near the old Cheshire Pike? Mainly, everybody was upset that the big homecoming parade was cancelled, the football game against Billerica Tech was called off, and the gymnasium flooded so the homecoming dance never happened.

  At least, that's what Tony LoPresto said when he phoned me. I don't know if he paid for the call himself or found some way to get the city fathers in Bayou Richelieu to foot the bill, but one way or another all that gab must have cost plenty.

  The kids at North Cheshire were disappointed by the mess the storm made of homecoming weekend, but Tony was more interested in what the storm pulled out of the old landfill. Tony told me that the human remains that turned up were identified as belonging to some old tramp who'd fallen into the landfill years before and died there. The local authorities gave Tony the run of the place. Professional courtesy, they call it.

  But Tony knew better. He didn't say so, but he knew better.

  We both knew who that corpse was, or what was left of it after almost eight years lying there in the landfill. There are raccoons and lynxes and even a few wolves in those woods. There wasn't much left of that fellow. But Tony told me there was one odd thing about the body. You know how freakish Old Ma Nature can be, and somehow, for all the scavengers who'd worked over that body and then the effects of lying in the earth all these years, the flesh was almost perfectly preserved on the left hand.

  Isn't that odd, Izzy?

  Tony told me that the left hand of the body showed a big scar running straight across the palm. As if the owner of that hand had got into a fight and his opponent came at him with a really nasty knife, and that fellow put up his hand to try and stop the knife and wound up with a terrible gash running right across the palm of his hand.

  Looked as if the cut had healed up all right, Tony said, but the scar was something to behold. And Tony figured that whoever owned that hand would never be able to do very much with it ever again, even after the wound had healed.

  Oh, it was Henry von Eisen all right. Tony has some wild theory about von Eisen getting into a scrape with poor old Percival Dunning that icy night back in the winter of ‘32-'33, and maybe beating old Percival into a helpless state and then putting him in his old Pullman coupe and sending it out onto the ice of Big Star Pond.

  And then, Tony figures, somebody else comes along, somebody von Eisen doesn't like to start with, and now this other person has seen von Eisen practically murder poor old Percival Dunning. So von Eisen goes after this other person, too. You'd think von Eisen would win a fight, but who knows, under those conditions, anything could happen. Anything. Right, Izz?

  Even though I'm not a religious person, I know a few Bible stories. I know about David and Goliath. Do you think Henry von Eisen might have been a kind of Goliath? And who would be David?

  Who, Izzy?

  Well, I guess I missed all the excitement of homecoming weekend, the hurricane, the waterspout, the tornado, the body in the landfill. Things are quiet here in Keweenaw Bay. Must be more exciting back East where you are, Izzy.

  Congratulations again on your marriage. Give Carolyn my best wishes. You are one lucky son of a gun!

  Meow, Cats, Meow!

  Robert “Bobcat” O'Brien

  Copyright © 2009 Richard A. Lupoff

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  Reviews: BLOG BYTES by Bill Crider

  So here it is December again, or at least that's the date on our favorite magazine. Meanwhile we here in Alvin, Texas, have been suffering through a seemingly endless succession of days with temperatures of 100 degrees or more, and our only escape is the Internet.

  So where shall we go first? Well, if you're an old-time radio fan but would like something a little bit different, how about the Decoder Ring Theater (www.decoderringtheatre.com), where you're promised “all-new audio adventures in the tradition of the classic programs of Radio's Golden Age.... [With] full-length, full-cast tales of mystery and adventure to fire your imagination"? You can choose “the pulse-pounding thrills of The Red Panda Adventures, the noir stylings of Black Jack Justice [or a] grab-bag of suspense, science fiction, and comedy.” You can give a donation if you want to, but it's all free for download or for listening on your computer.

  Or maybe you'd prefer to escape into reality. If so, True Crime Report (www.truecrimereport.com) is for you. You can find “True Crime, all the time—covering breaking crime stories and high-profile investigations across the U.S. and elsewhere.” Among the categories covered are assault (48 posts so far), classroom creepiness (3 posts), missing persons (157 posts), homicide (216 posts), and, well, you get the idea.

  If fictional crime is more to your liking, take a look at Shots (www.shotsmag.co.uk), billed as “The UK's #1 Crime & Thriller E-zine.” It has just about everything: interviews, book reviews, fiction, author profiles, Nick Stone's column on films and DVDs, Michael Carlson on detective fiction, and Mike Ripley's wide-ranging musings in “Getting Away with Murder."

  For crime in the USA, you can visit Criminal Minds: A Virtual Panel (7criminalminds.blogspot.com), where “Each week, seven crime fiction authors respond to a question about writing,
reading, murder and mayhem.” The authors are CJ Lyons, Rebecca Cantrell, Sophie Littlefield, Kelli Stanley, Shane Gericke, Tim Maleeny, and Gabrella Herkert. They tackle questions like “Why do I write mysteries?", “Why do I read mysteries?", “Do you think like the hero or the villian?", and “What's your favorite crime movie of the last 30 years?” You can even win signed books for commenting on the answers.

  So there you have them, four perfect escapes from whatever weather you might be having right now. Works for me. Why, I think I even hear sleigh bells outside.

  Copyright © 2009 Bill Crider

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  Reviews: THE JURY BOX by Jon L. Breen

  It's no secret that some of the best crime fiction on the market today was originally written in languages other than English. Leading off our annual survey of mysteries in translation are three novels (two of them highly experimental) that are at least in part disquisitions on the fiction writer's creative process, followed by three from distinguished series, more conventional but no less notable.

  **** Domenico Starnone: First Execution, translated from the Italian by Antony Shugaar, Europa, $15. Partly about retired teacher Domenico Stasi, apparently being recruited for terrorist activity by a former student, and partly about the similarly-named novelist telling his story, this puzzle-box narrative shifts between reality and fiction, third and first person. Though not for everybody, it's rich in political, social, and psychological insights while demonstrating the virtues of brevity, an excellent reading experience for those who don't insist all questions be answered definitively.

  *** Carmen Posadas: Child's Play, translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor and Amanda Hopkinson, Harper, $24.99. By contrast, this novel is exasperatingly longwinded, especially after the midway switch from third to first person, but an intriguing story, building to a satisfactorily shocking conclusion, compensates. Successful mystery writer Luisa Davila, writing a police procedural centered on the murder of a child in an exclusive Madrid private school even as her eleven-year-old daughter Elba enters a similar school, reconnects with old friends who share the painful memory of a death (accident or murder?) in their own schooldays.

  *** Selcuk Altun: Songs My Mother Never Taught Me, translated from the Turkish by Ruth Christie and Selcuk Berilgen, Telegram, $13.95. The parallel stories of a wealthy young man trying to discover who killed his mathematician father and the religiously bent professional assassin who did the job make for an unconventional thriller cum Istanbul travelogue. The author himself appears as an unpleasant secondary character, a sort of on-call deus ex machina.

  **** Leonardo Padura: Havana Fever, translated from the Spanish by Peter Bush, Bitter Lemon, $14.95. Former Havana cop Mario Conde, now working as a book scout, finds a bibliographic treasure trove in the long-untouched library of a wealthy Cuban who fled after Castro's revolution. A 1960 newspaper clipping about a beautiful bolero singer who abruptly ended her career reignites Conde's detective instinct. In a familiar series-novel twist, the ex-cop himself becomes a murder suspect. Is his extreme reaction to the humiliation of being fingerprinted and questioned a cultural reflection, a political one, or merely an aspect of his personality? Again Padura demonstrates that he is one of the very best contemporary crime writers regardless of language. (It's just as well this book has fewer baseball references than usual. The British translator, refusing to check with anyone who knows the lingo, tells of a catcher “distinguished by the elegant way he received hits and, most of all, caught foul-flys.")

  *** Andrea Camilleri: August Heat, translated from the Italian by Stephen Sartarelli, Penguin, $14. The latest case for quirky Sicilian Inspector Salvo Montalbano, avid swimmer and skater on thin professional ice, involves Italy's loose and graft-greased building regulations and the ever-present tentacles of the Mafia. Pleasantly reshuffled are time-honored mystery elements, some of which were already well-worn a hundred years ago. While Montalbano's rocky romantic life is a part of the story, the emphasis as in all the best procedurals is on the case at hand. Though the humor probably works even better in the original Italian, the English version is funny enough thanks to an expert translator, whose notes are always a valuable bonus.

  *** Karin Fossum: The Water's Edge, translated from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund, Houghton Mifflin, $25. The Norwegian cop team of Konrad Sejer and Jacob Scarre investigate the murder of a small boy, whose body is discovered by an unhappy and ill-matched young married couple who nonetheless take a weekly Sunday walk together. The disappearance of another boy, this one morbidly obese, heightens community fears of a serial molester and killer. Marked by unexpected turns and a chilling finale, this is a fine specimen of Scandinavian-style procedural by an author far superior to the over-hyped Henning Mankell.

  *** Mariko Koike: The Cat in the Coffin, translated from the Japanese by Deborah Boliver Boehm, Vertical, $14.95. When the appearance of a stray white cat brings back painful memories, reclusive artist Masayo Haryu recounts to her housekeeper how she came to Tokyo in the mid 1950s for a job as live-in tutor to the troubled eight-year-old daughter of widowed art teacher Goro Kawakubo. Masayo gains the respect of her young charge, who has made a mother substitute of her cat, but the advent of Goro's beautiful fiancée brings disaster for all concerned, human and feline. This deeply involving novel is neither a cat cozy nor the romantic suspense the basic situation suggests. Dark, unpredictable, and disturbing, it includes a slight suggestion of the supernatural that the reader may accept or reject.

  *** Tanguy Viel: Beyond Suspicion, translated from the French by Linda Coverdale, New Press, $19.95. Sam attends the wedding of bar girl Lise and the much older (and wealthy) auctioneer Henri posing as brother of the bride, but his true role becomes apparent in a fake kidnap plot that goes awry. In long poetic sentences, eschewing quotation marks for dialogue, Viel spins a tale reminiscent in plot and brevity of a James M. Cain novel and in suspense of a Hitchcock film. For other comparisons, see Jonathan Lethem's laudatory foreword.

  ** Baantjer: DeKok and the Mask of Death, translated from the Dutch by H.G. Smittenaar, Speck, $24. Veteran cop DeKok and his younger partner Vledder confront a classic lady-vanishes situation: a young man claims he helped his girlfriend check into an Amsterdam hospital, only to have the admitting personnel and the hospital records deny she was ever there. Partly because the solution is familiar from past variations on the problem, partly because the telling is bit too repetitious, this is a lesser entry in an enjoyable series. Still, every DeKok case is a sort of criminous comfort food—brief, simply written, likeably peopled, and marked by old-fashioned fair-play clue planting.

  ** Jef Geeraerts: The Public Prosecutor, translated from the Dutch by Brian Doyle, Bitter Lemon, $14.95. Albert Savelkoul, the Antwerp official of the title, is the target of an elaborate plot resulting from his wife's association with the controversial (and here quite sinister) Roman Catholic organization Opus Dei. (This novel was published in its original language in 1998, several years before Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code.) While the story is well enough written and organized, lack of character in-volvement prevented its taking wing, for this reader at least.

  Copyright © 2009 by Jon L. Breen

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  Fiction: AN AFTERNOON AT THE COTTAGE by Jean Rae Baxter

  Canadian Jean Rae Baxter was a secondary-school teacher for many years, and when she turned to fiction writing she thought her work would be confined to stories for teens. As it turned out, although she has produced one young-adult historical (The Way Lies North) and other short young-adult pieces, she proved at least equally talented at adult noir fiction. Her second novel, which was released in April 2008, is the criminous Looking for Cardenio.

  "Wow!” Terry said. “So this is where you disappear to on weekends."

  Davey stood watching, amused, as she walked around the great room, staring up at the tongue-in-groove cathedral ceiling, down at the pine-plank floor, and through the huge picture window at the spa
rkling blue water of Cranberry Lake.

  Terry Loucks was one of the secretaries at Strathcona Secondary School, where Davey Sturmont taught biology. She was a pretty brunette with long black hair and olive skin. For this afternoon at the cottage, she was wearing a ski sweater and slacks. At thirty, Terry had been married once and would like to be married again, preferably to Davey. But he already had a wife.

  On that same afternoon, Davey's wife Sue and their two little girls were in Toronto, enjoying a Saturday matinee performance of The Lion King, thus providing Davey with an opportunity to bring Terry to the cottage. Terry did not like motels. For her, this would be a treat.

  While Terry roamed about saying “Wow!” at everything in sight, Davey turned on the electric baseboard heating. This was the first weekend of October, and the cottage had been closed up since the previous Sunday.

  Terry, standing on the thick sheepskin rug that lay in front of the massive stone fireplace, turned to Davey.

  "May I have a tour?"

  "Of course.” He had looked forward to showing off his summer home.

  With a wave he directed her toward the kitchen, which was open to the great room. Following her, he could not help grinning at the way she stared about.

  "Wow! You have way more appliances in this cottage than I have in my whole apartment. Stove. Fridge. Washer. Dryer. Dishwasher. Indoor grill. Microwave. Talk about taking life easy!"

  Her enthusiasm pleased him.

  "My mother-in-law was responsible for most of the upgrades. She didn't like roughing it. The only way she would come up to the cottage was if she could have every convenience of her house in town. The microwave is the only thing Sue has added since she took over."

  "So it's your wife's cottage, really?"

  He flinched. “It's our family cottage. But yes, she holds title."