EQMM, July 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "I hope Dad didn't gouge you.” He rewound the spool. “I know what it's like to work under budgetary constraints."

  The visitor shook himself into the present. The film was worth the nasty old man's company, the icy dive, the severe cold he felt coming on. It offered a solid twenty minutes after editing, and the prospect of a fascinating voiceover; thanks to the circumstances under which it had been obtained, the department could afford to hire Ben Gazzara to narrate. “I'm not at liberty do discuss the terms.” He sneezed violently.

  "Bless you.” Denise Sigurson had entered the room. “Won't you stay for dinner? A hot meal may not cure the sniffles, but it makes them easier to bear."

  "Thank you, but I have an early flight. Tomorrow."

  The next morning, groggy from the hour and stuffed up tight, he pushed away his tasteless ham and eggs and held up his mug for Cora to refill.

  "This stuff's no good for a cold,” said the waitress, pouring. “Why don't I fetch you some orange juice?"

  "I'll survive. Has Leonard Sigurson been in yet?"

  "Poor old Ziggy. He died."

  Valentino froze with the mug half raised to his lips. “I just saw him last n—yesterday. What happened?"

  "Asa Getz—that's his next-door neighbor—found him lying in his front yard just after dawn. I guess he was on his way here when his heart gave out. I told him he should order oatmeal once in a while, clean out his pipes. Anything else?"

  "Just the check.” He was still stunned. The excitement of the previous evening had put his own heart to the test.

  "Poor old Ziggy.” She wrote on her pad. “Some folks won't miss him, I guess. He wasn't what you'd call the sociable type, and he didn't tip for sour apples. I was used to him coming around, though."

  "What a sad waste."

  "I wouldn't say that. His son turned out all right, and the daughter-in-law's nice. This'll be tough on them. I don't imagine Ziggy had life insurance. Funerals cost money, and they're just squeaking by."

  "What's the law in this state regarding the property of someone who dies intestate?"

  "I know that word: means no will.” She tore off the sheet and laid it on the table. “Unless it's changed since my ma died, everything goes to next of kin. Not that I wound up with anything but a bunch of old clothes that didn't fit me. Ziggy didn't even own that little-bitty house he was living in. Spent most of his Social Security on rent. Roger and Denise are in for a rough surprise."

  "A surprise, anyway.” Valentino paid his bill, left a generous tip, and drove his rental to the airport with the film in his carry-on, blowing his nose frequently.

  Copyright © 2009 by Loren D. Estleman

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  Passport to Crime: WHAT YOU INHERIT FROM YOUR FATHERS by Andrea C. Busch

  In November of 2007, EQMM published a delightful sailing mystery ("Baltic Bail-Out") by German writer Andrea Busch. Only a few months ago, we received the sad news that Ms. Busch had died suddenly in 2008. She was not only a writer but one of her country's noted anthologists; someone who'll surely be missed in the mystery field.

  Translated from the German by Mary Tannert

  With some people, it's their own fault that they shuffle off this mortal coil so early, thought Hans-Dieter Janssen as he listened grumpily to the racket from the shredder in the garden next-door. The garden that was actually his garden. And just what was there in that garden to keep a shredder running so long, anyway? It couldn't possibly all be from the spring pruning!

  Well, okay, the whole place had become a little wild and overgrown. It had taken longer than usual this last time to find a buyer for the house. But the basic form of the garden was intact and perfect. There were apple, cherry, and plum trees; there were currant bushes and raspberry bushes and a hedge of blackberries that turned the garden into a nearly unbreachable fortress. There was a wonderful rose pavilion tentacled with a great variety of clematises and beautiful old climbing roses that outdid themselves in a breathtaking show once a year. There were beds for kitchen plants, there was a romantic cottage garden with peonies, snapdragons, cosmos, hollyhocks, monkshood,and larkspur—in short, everything to delight a true gardener's heart. But it was the roses that meant the most to Hans-Dieter, the roses whose blooming splendor he admired every May and June from his attic window.

  He snuck along the high hedge of boxwood at the end of his tiny garden. It stood back-to-back with the blackberries and together they formed an almost impenetrable protective wall. He pushed aside the branches at the spot where he had carefully thinned the boxwood and peered through the blackberry canes, which sported spring's first shimmer of green. But still he couldn't see what was being shredded in there, and to judge by the noise, it could be anything—old rose canes, tree trimmings...

  Hans-Dieter was sure the man in the neighbor's yard was going about the job allwrong, butchering the garden in the process. None of the frequently changing owners of the imposing old brick house had known how to take care of that botanic splendor. His botanic splendor. The house and garden ought to be his; after all, he was the last twig on the tree of a dynasty founded on a fortune made in sugar beets, the last of the family that had built the house and designed its magnificent garden for use and delight alike. But he was, unfortunately, an illegitimate twig: His mother's pregnancy had resulted in her immediate dismissal by old Meyerink personally, and he had never acknowledged Hans-Dieter as his son.

  The trees in the garden were older than he was; the roses and bushes had been lovingly planted by his mother herself, whose beauty was then also in bloom, whose wide hips and gentle curves had promised fruitfulness. Old Meyerink probably hadn't been able to resist.

  Hans-Dieter felt anger flush his cheeks when he thought of how the Meyerink villa and grounds had been sold to that snob from Dusseldorf who wanted to tear up the garden to make room for a swimming pool. Luckily he and his plans hadn't gotten much further than the construction estimate. A tragic accident. A marten, they said, had chewed through his brake lines.

  And then that harebrained Munsterland hussy who just had to move to the Lower Rhine because she'd read somewhere that the people who lived there were particularly broad-minded. She was very broad-minded too, she was fond of pointing out. She had an opinion on everyone and everything. She'd never held a shovel or a rake in her hand, but that didn't stop her from knowing better than anyone else when it came to gardening. Within five minutes of Hans-Dieter's meeting her, she had begun to confide the details of her digestion. Unappetizing details. It didn't take long before people in the village avoided her; probably no one was broad-minded enough. And nobody really grieved when she fell from the top floor while washing the windows and broke her neck. The whole village turned out for her funeral to be sure that her powers of speech were really buried along with the rest of her. Hans-Dieter remembered that the minister spoke of a tragic accident and that her soul would surely find its rest with God. “Not even God will be able to put up with that chatter!” one of the congregants had joked, and for the first time in the many centuries of the little cemetery chapel's existence, laughter filled its walls.

  Hans-Dieter's mother had never said a word as to whether she'd taken old Meyerink into her bed of her own free will. She'd never said a bad word about the man at all, and yet Hans-Dieter knew she was disappointed that Meyerink didn't ask her to come back to the big house after his wife died. Instead, he'd taken the servants’ quarters, where Hans-Dieter grew up, and a tiny piece of garden and parceled them off from his grounds and planted dense hedges between the two. This strange arrangement ensured that mother and son were out of sight but still not so very far away. And he'd gotten Hans-Dieter an apprenticeship as a gardener, as if he instinctively knew where the seventeen-year-old lad's heart lay. But he'd never acknowledged him as his son, and instead of leaving the house and garden to him, he'd willed the place to his much younger sister, who wanted nothing more than to peddle it to the nearest buyer, take the money, and get herself a condominium
in the city.

  After the Munsterland hussy, there'd been a family with lots of children. Hans-Dieter had had to watch helplessly as the little monsters carved their initials into the bark of his beloved fruit trees. But he was even more horrified at what he heard one day, spying through the thin spot in the boxwood hedge. The children's mother announced that she wanted to get rid of the old climbing roses. It wasn't enough for her that Annchen von Tharau, Paul's Himalayan Musk Rambler, and Félicité et Perpétue bloomed once a year as if their lives depended on it, unfolded their beauty in dense clusters of spectacular flowers that took your breath away. She wanted hybrid tea roses that bloomed all year long and were easier to arrange in vases than the rambler roses with their floppy stems. His gardener's heart bled as he heard the woman speak so disrespectfully about his darlings. Those roses had been growing there since before she was born! One ancient legend said they'd arisen out of a fleck of foam from the sea, and another claimed they'd been born of a drop of sweat from the prophet Mohammed. Innocence and purity, fiery love and passion were united in them. You don't simply eradicate such wonderful creations as if they were pests!

  Naturally he'd felt sorry for the children, who'd had to find their mother dead in the rose pavilion one afternoon after school. That must have been a dreadful shock for them. She lay, limbs all twisted, next to the overturned ladder, the secateurs still in her hand. At least, that's what the villagers said. Her husband took the children and moved to the city.

  All this time, the village had been whispering that the house had not been blessed since the Meyerinks left it. Meanwhile, the mere absence of blessings had developed into a positive curse. Most of the interested parties had asked aroundthe village to find out why the house was priced so affordably. And even if everyone claimed not to believe in curses, all the deaths did scare people off. The onlyperson who seemed not to be bothered was the man with the shredder. Did he perhaps not know how dangerous an old shredder like that can be? That a person can accidentally get caught in the branches and be pulled in up to his elbow? And some shredders have technical defects. An electric shock can happen so quickly!

  * * * *

  Four weeks later, Hans-Dieter Janssen stood studying the real-estate ads displayed in the plate-glass window of the realtor's office. The price of the Meyerink villa had sunk to less than a third of its original asking price, and thus moved into the realm of possibility for him. Maybe he should approach the grieving widow directly so as to save the realtor's fees? Surely she would be pleased to get rid of the house and all its sad memories.

  It was with sincere gratitude in his heart that Hans-Dieter thought of his mother. “I don't have much to leave you, son,” she'd said on her deathbed. With a great effort she'd pushed herself up to a sitting position and reached into the depths of her nightstand, drawing out a tiny velvet bag that she pressed into his hand. “Those are the keys to the house that ought to be yours by rights. The locks are good solid old security locks, and they've never been replaced. I think you know what you need to do."

  Lovingly he patted the ring of keys in his pants pocket. Oh yes, he'd always known.

  "What you inherit from your fathers, earn it first to make it yours."—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  ©2009 by Andrea C. Busch; translation ©2009 by Mary Tannert

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  Reviews: THE JURY BOX by Jon L. Breen

  Since 2009 marks the Edgar Allan Poe bicentenary, we kick off our annual short story review with the Father of the Detective Story. The first tale in Joyce Carol Oates's 2008 collection Wild Nights!: Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway (Ecco, $24.95) is a beautifully written and terrifying pastiche, “Poe Posthumous; or, The Light-House.” The Mystery Writers of America's In the Shadow of the Master (Morrow, $25.99), edited by Michael Connelly, collects some of Poe's best-known tales and poems, accompanied by personal essays about his work and its movie adaptations by Lawrence Block, Lisa Scottoline, Tess Gerritsen, Stephen King, Peter Robinson, Sara Paretsky, Thomas H. Cook, Edward D. Hoch, and others. And there is a new collection by the twentieth-century giant who was arguably most directly influenced by Poe.

  **** Edogawa Rampo: The Edogawa Rampo Reader, edited and translated from the Japanese by Seth Jacobowitz, Kurodahan, $16. For the first time in English, eight short stories, most from 1926 or 1927, are joined by ten autobiographical and critical essays. The fiction ranges from Poe-inspired mood pieces to a bizarre wartime love story, “The Air Raid Shelter.” Longest and closest to conventional detective fiction is “The Stalker in the Attic,” a Columbo-like inverted mystery. The translator's thirty-page introduction is an excellent career survey.

  **** Walter Mosley: The Right Mistake: The Further Philosophical Investigations of Socrates Fortlow, BasicCivitas, $23. The contents of this third volume about guilt-ridden, ethically-engaged ex-con Fortlow, whose Thinkers’ Club is a South Central Los Angeles salon for the discussion of life's great questions, are neither mysteries nor even crime stories in the usual sense, though the specter of crime hovers constantly. Deeply human and profoundly moral, their underlying theme is the hope of redemption. Take it from a longtime fan of private eye Easy Rawlins: Socrates Fortlow may be Mosley's greatest creation.

  **** Laura Lippman: Hardly Knew Her: Stories, introduction by George Pelecanos, Morrow, $23.95. Fifteen stories from original anthologies, two plus a mock newspaper profile concerning Baltimore private eye Tess Monaghan, are joined by an extraordinary new Edgar-nominated novella about a single soccer-mom prostitute and her unhappily married sister, “Scratch a Woman.” The queen of suburban noir has produced one of the finest collections of recent years.

  **** Christopher Fowler: Old Devil Moon, Serpent's Tail, $14.95. The author of the Bryant and May books is a good detective novelist but a superb writer of short stories. Of these 22, most are criminous, a few supernatural, predominantly dark and acerbic but some surprisingly tender, ranging from horror stories of Brits behaving badly in foreign climes to humor and satire both subtle and sophomoric.

  *** John M. Floyd: Midnight, Dogwood, $22.95. Thirty tales, most very short, from various print and online publications reveal a consummate pro at work. Nearly all crime stories, they overlap the science fiction, fantasy, Western, and romance genres, with a specialty in surprise twists. My favorites were eight fair-play detections from Woman's World about retired schoolteacher Angela Potts and small-town sheriff Chunky Jones.

  *** Bill Pronzini: Dago Red: Tales of Dark Suspense, Ramble House, $18. Of these 22 stories, most previously uncollected, two are new, six from EQMM, one from AHMM, the rest from a variety of magazines and original anthologies. Variety is great, and quality is high. Two of the stories, including a mordant satire on commercialized TV sportscasts, were written with Barry N. Malzberg.

  *** Robert Silverberg and Randall Garrett: A Little Intelligence and Other Stories, Crippen & Landru, $42 limited hardcover, $16 trade paper. Early in their careers, two celebrated science fiction writers collaborated (usually as Robert Randall) on these seven highly entertaining stories from 1950s SF digests, combining future speculations that have since been superseded by events with elements more eternal: fair-play detection and (in the last three entries) theological ponderings. Surviving partner Silverberg provides an illuminating introduction.

  *** Victor Canning: The Minerva Club, The Department of Patterns, and Others, edited by John Higgins, Crippen & Landru, $29 hardcover, $19 trade paper. Between 1957 and 1965, EQMM reprinted most of the prolific thriller writer's three short-story series: the titular club of criminals (all five), an unconventional French police agency (all but the first), and the mysterious Dr. Kang, who like so many series criminals ends up as a detective (five of the twelve). Though a better novelist, Canning was capable at shorts, several with enough plot to be spun out to book length.

  *** James Reasoner: Old Times’ Sake, introduction by Ed Gorman, Ramble House, $18. For decades Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, wh
erein the author of these 17 stories developed his talent in the 1970s and ‘80s, was the number three digest, well behind EQMM and AHMM in pay and prestige but valued as a proving ground. Ranging from private eye to police procedural to pure detection to crime and suspense, these stories, in their chronological arrangement, show the steady development of a fine professional writer.

  *** Ralph McInerny: The Wisdom of Father Dowling, Five Star, $25.95. Fifteen stories from Catholic Dossier Magazine, 1995 to 2001, are nothing special purely as detective stories but deliver the low-key charm in characters and telling, plus the illustration of moral and theological issues, we expect from the Dowling series.

  *** Peter Corris: The Big Score, Allen & Unwin, $12.95. Similarly these eleven cases for old-school Sydney private eye Cliff Hardy are more enjoyable for the writing, the characters, and the Australian background than for any special distinction of plot.

  ** Henning Mankell: The Pyramid and Four Other Kurt Wallander Mysteries, translated from the Swedish by Ebba Segerberg with Laurie Thompson, New Press, $26.95. Two novellas and three longish short stories, like the author's novels, offer interesting crimes, char-acters, and background somewhat undermined by bland style, excessive repetition, and snail-like pace.

  ** Ed Lynskey: A Clear Path to Cross, Ramble House, $18. Twenty underdeveloped but agreeably written tales of private eye Sharon Knowles, drawn from various print and online journals, suggest there is good work to come from the poet and mystery scholar.

  ** Max Afford: Two Locked-Room Mysteries and a Ripping Yarn, Ramble House, $13. The two locked rooms, from 1940s Australian periodicals, are well told and inventive in problem and solution. Sleuth Jeffery Blackburn reminded me of the radio EQ. The final and longest story is an early-30s SF novelette from the Yellow Peril school.