Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 11/01/12
Page 18
Ellie squinted. She couldn't even see where Brad was calling from.
"Fine!" she shouted. "I'll tell David but he won't be happy!"
Brad would start to look again, she figured. At least give it one more try.
She stepped into the house, pushing the door shut loudly, so Brad would think she had really left. Then she tore upstairs.
The screams coming from the closet were so loud they hurt her ears. It was like running straight into a wall of sound. Ellie's eyes teared, her head smarted.
She didn't even have to use the map in her head of where Brad's room must be—directly across from David's—to locate the little girl. She flung herself around a corner into Brad's room and ran straight for the dresser. It was tall, higher than any of the furniture in their own house. The key had to be somewhere on top, but Ellie couldn't see it. She looked around wildly, knowing she'd never be able to hear Brad coming up over all this screaming. But her brother's friend seemed as unbothered by it as David always was. Ellie stood on tiptoes, straining the backs of her legs till something felt ready to rip inside, and swiped her palm across the top.
The key fell off. It dropped beneath the dresser.
Heaving a grunt of pure frustration, which was lost beneath the little girl's cries, Ellie dropped to her knees and looked down.
The key was out of reach.
Ellie stretched her fingers, feeling splinters from the underside of the wood break off and stab the skin on her hand, before she touched its jagged edge. She forced herself to go slowly, nudging the key out, so she wouldn't lose it again. For a moment she paused to clap her hands over her ears, shutting out the sound of those awful screams. But she knew she couldn't stay like this because she wouldn't hear if Brad came upstairs, not even if he walked right up behind her.
On hands and knees, she swung around.
It didn't seem possible, but the little girl had gotten even louder, the whole room shaking now. Ellie understood. She could remember pushing her own voice beyond limits she hadn't known it had, stopping only when her tongue blocked her throat and she started to choke.
The key was in her hand.
Ellie stood up and fitted it into the lock on the closet door.
There wasn't so much as a break in the little girl's screaming before Ellie pulled the door shut again and dropped down beside her in the dark.
"Shhh!" Ellie hissed. "You have to stop screaming! Now!"
Unbelievably, the girl fell silent. She didn't question Ellie's presence, or why Ellie hadn't let both of them out. All went quiet around them, two girls huddled in dark as complete as any Ellie had ever known, but somehow not as scary, as paralyzing as it had been only a day ago.
And then they heard footsteps coming into the room.
"Lily?" they heard Brad say.
Ellie located the jackknife in her pocket in the dark. She had to prod out its blade by feel, pushing the can opener back in when she ran her thumb across it and didn't feel a sharp tip.
Beside her, the little girl's breath heaved in and out, as if she were a small animal. Ellie couldn't see anything, but she gave the little girl—Lily—a nod, hoping she could somehow sense it in the dark.
"Lily? You in there?" Brad said again.
They would be blinded when the door opened, Ellie knew that.
She raised the knife to what she hoped would be mid-section height on Brad, gauging it by feeling her own chest, then moving up several inches, and turning the tip so it faced out.
Footsteps strode across the room and the door was yanked open.
Ellie thrust forward with the sharp end of her blade.
She missed completely—Ellie could tell because the knife had sunk into nothing but air—but it didn't matter. The second he knew who she was, and what she had done, Brad fell backwards onto the floor, like he did when David wrestled him, soft belly exposed.
Ellie crawled across the floor. The knife was still open; she was holding it out. She bent down over Brad and whispered into his hot, red ear. "If you ever put her in the closet again—"
"No—" Brad shook his head. He had started to cry. "No, okay, I won't, I promise—"
Ellie jumped to her feet. She turned around and took one look at Lily. The little girl's face was all smeary with tears and she'd bitten right through a spot on her lip. But she didn't look scared anymore. Her eyes were big and shining as they gazed up at Ellie.
Ellie pocketed the knife, and ran.
They ate Ellie's macaroni and cheese for dinner, and her mom said it was good.
David kept his eyes cast down, refusing to look at Ellie. He wouldn't quit cradling his cast, which already looked grimy.
When their mother tried to coax him to speak, David's voice reached a high-pitched, teetering note. "I said I don't want to talk!"
The next day, David stayed home from school because he said his arm was hurting. Ellie figured he'd play his DS all day long. He'd gotten pretty good at it left-handed.
At recess, Ellie spotted a little boy in the grade below hers. He was sitting on a railroad tie at the edge of the playground, clenching his hand.
Ellie went over and sat down beside him. "How come you're not playing?"
"I can't play," the little boy said. After a moment, he slowly opened his hand.
Ellie looked down and studied his palm. He seemed to be holding a fistful of rosebuds, small red blooms across the skin.
"What happened?" Ellie asked.
"My sister," the little boy said. "She made me hold onto a whole bunch of rocks. Little tiny ones. Then she squeezed my hand as hard as she could."
Ellie nodded.
"She likes to do medical speriments," the boy went on. "Today I have to tell her if it hurts a lot or a little less. Like a seven or a two."
Ellie nodded again.
After a while she asked, "Do you have a closet?"
Copyright © 2012 by Jenny Milchman
REVIEWS
REVIEWS
THE JURY BOX
by Jon L. Breen
The five novels of Derek Raymond's Factory series (Melville House, $14.95 each) represent a landmark in British detective fiction. Downbeat, violent, sometimes depressing or even revolting in their...
BLOG BYTES
by bill crider
Chad de Lisle of the NoirWHALE site (noirwhale.com) says that his "fascination [with all things noir] extends through film noir (both vintage and contemporary), noir-themed music, video games, femme...
DEPARTMENT OF FIRST STORIES
INFORMATION
Next Article
REVIEWS
THE JURY BOX
by Jon L. Breen
The five novels of Derek Raymond's Factory series (Melville House, $14.95 each) represent a landmark in British detective fiction. Downbeat, violent, sometimes depressing or even revolting in their uncompromising exploration of urban crime and morbid psychology, they are made palatable by superb prose style, very dark humor, and the un-compromising morality of their un-named narrator, a lone-wolf London detective sergeant. They are both searing social documents and genuine if unconventional detective stories. In the first of them, He Died With His Eyes Open (1984), introduced by James Sallis, the sergeant becomes obsessed with a beating murder no one else seems to care about and the voluminous audiotapes the victim left behind. Unusual as it is, it follows a comparatively standard mystery structure, but the last, Dead Man Upright (1993), previously unpublished in the U.S., eschews by-the-numbers suspense for an anticlimactic arrest and a case study of the serial killer's twisted mentality that fills up nearly the last third of the book. Others are The Devil's Home on Leave (1985), How the Dead Live (1986), introduced by Will Self, and I Was Dora Suarez (1990).
Philip Wylie was one of the most versatile and (with his coinage of "momism") controversial popular writers of the twentieth century. Surinam Turtle, Richard A. Lupoff's Ramble House imprint, has revived two curiosities from early in his career. The real rarity is Blondy's Boy Friend ($18), a romantic mystery redolent of
the roaring '20s, originally published in book form in 1930 as by Leatrice Homesley. The titular blonde turns detective initially to try to clear of murder her doctor boy-friend, who has offered the following sage advice: "Don't bother your pretty head. Women weren't cut out for detective work." Plot and romance are equally preposterous, but it's interesting as a period piece, and the nuttily ingenious whodunit surprise somewhat anticipates a fam-ous detective novel. (Save Lupoff's introduction for the end, if you don't want to know which one.) The 1935 satire The Smiling Corpse ($18), written with Bernard A. Bergman, is notable for a cast of real people, including former Pinkerton man Dashiell Hammett and amateur sleuths S.S. Van Dine, Sax Rohmer, and G.K. Chesterton. J. Randolph Cox's introduction describes his efforts to pin down the true authorship of a novel originally published anonymously.
The death in 2011 of Enid Schantz, proprietor with husband Tom of the Rue Morgue Press, was a great loss to the mystery world. But Rue Morgue continues its policy of reprinting outstanding English and American detective stories from the 1930s and after. Latter-day classicist Patricia Moyes joins the list with her 1959 debut Dead Men Don't Ski ($14.95), introduced by Katherine Hall Page, first of 19 novels about Chief Inspector Henry Tibbett and wife Emmy. Anthony Boucher praised the early work of P.D. James by averring that she was almost as good as Patricia Moyes. At the same price are accounts of impossible or inexplicable crimes by three stars of the Golden Age of Detection, American branch: Carter Dickson's (John Dickson Carr's) The Peacock Feather Murders (1937), about the outrageous Sir Henry Merrivale; Stuart Palmer's second novel about schoolteacher Hildegarde Withers, Murder on Wheels (1932); and Clyde B. Clason's The Purple Parrot (1937), one of the better cases for classical historian Theocritus Lucius Westborough.
Also recommended to impossible-crime fanciers are Daniel Stashower's The Dime Museum Murders (1999) and The Floating Lady Murder (2000) (Titan, $9.95 each), which offer a colorful view of late 1890s show biz and Harry Houdini, an admiring quoter of Sherlock Holmes, as likeable if egotistical comic sleuth. But is fellow illusionist Dash Hardeen, his brother and Watson, the real detective? The puzzle plots, with a locked room in the first and an illusion-gone-wrong in the second, are well managed with clues and surprises.
Patricia Wentworth's Miss Maud Silver, an elderly and constantly knitting spinster sleuth, is quite different from the superficially similar Miss Marple: she's a P.I. rather than an amateur, and her 1928 debut Grey Mask (Open Road e-book, $9.99) calls to mind Edgar Wallace and P.G. Wodehouse more than Agatha Christie. But with its nice writing, rocky romance, and sinister masked villain, it's loads of fun.
Perfect .38 (Ramble House, $30 hardcover, $18 trade paper) comprises two of William Ard's novels about New York shamus Timothy Dane. His first-person debut The Perfect Frame (1951) takes the familiar P.I. jumps with flair, but the third-person .38 (1952), in which Dane the conflicted romantic meets his mirror image in a new- style white-collar mobster, is a vast improvement, with characters better drawn and the story arc more original. As Francis M. Nevins's introduction suggests, Ard began by imitating Spillane but his heart wasn't in it.
Richard Deming's four enjoyable novels about one-legged World War II-vet P.I. Manville Moon—The Gallows in My Garden (1952), Tweak the Devil's Nose (1953), Whistle Past the Graveyard (1954, reprinted as Give the Girl a Gun), and Juvenile Delinquent (1958), the latter previously published in book form only in Great Britain—are all available as e-books (Prologue Books, $3.99 each). Moon, who operates in an unnamed Midwestern city, has some associates (long-term girlfriend, annoying comic sidekick, irascible police contact) that seem made for radio. Deming believed in fair-play clues as well as hardboiled set-pieces. The first and best seems to be following the plot of a classic detective novel but may surprise you.
Ennis Willie's Sand's War (Ramble House, $32 hardcover, $18 trade paper) has two wildly plotted, energetically writ-ten 1963 cases for the mobster-turned-sleuth known only as Sand.
Haven for the Damned, set in a castle that serves as a hotel for fugitives, is unsatisfactory as a locked-room mystery but cleverly constructed. Fantastic as it is, it looks like gritty realism next to the Spillane-inspired Scarlet Goddess, concerning that old P.I. staple, the sinister religious cult, and a serial rapist-killer who resembles a Sasquatch.
Also recommended: Douglas C. Jones's beautifully written 1979 novel Winding Stair (New American Library, $15), a superlative historical-Western-courtroom-mystery hybrid; the 1941 title novel in William G. Bogart's Hell on Friday: The Johnny Saxon Trilogy (Altus Press, $34.95, e-book $4.99), introduced by Will Murray, far from classic but notable for its background of the cutthroat pulp magazine business; Georges Simenon's World War II romance The Train (Melville House, $14), translated by Robert Baldick, first published in French in 1961 and in English in 1964, intensely suspenseful, subtle and acute in characterization, with a powerful surprise conclusion; and John Gardner's Victorian gangster epic The Return of Moriarty (Pegasus, $25), introduced by Otto Penzler, one of the earliest (1974) and one of the finest book-length examples of Sherlockian spin-off and revisionist history, though Holmes himself is only an offstage presence.
Sax Rohmer's The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu (1913; original U.S. title The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu) and The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu (1916; original British title The Devil Doctor), both short story collections disguised as novels, have been reprinted in handsome trade paperbacks (Titan, $9.95 each), with other Fu-Manchu volumes to come. If Leslie Klinger's excellent afterword to the first volume is correct that the evil doctor's exploits, enormously entertaining but undeniably racist, attract more contemporary readers than Earl Derr Biggers's Charlie Chan, created as a corrective to racism, what a sad irony.
Copyright © 2012 by Jon L. Breen
Next Article
Previous Article
INFORMATION
REVIEWS
BLOG BYTES
by bill crider
Chad de Lisle of the NoirWHALE site (noirwhale.com) says that his "fascination [with all things noir] extends through film noir (both vintage and contemporary), noir-themed music, video games, femme fatales, smoldering cigarettes and slimy plot lines." De Lisle's site is one of those with lots of material for browsing, so allow yourself some time. He's even brave enough to offer a definition of noir. Some of his current posts include a discussion of the noir art of Glen Orbik, with lots of illustrative material; commentary on Jean Luc Godard's Breathless; and a review of a noir comic, Max Payne: After the Fall. You'll also find some noir music and a noir quote of the week. This is a good-looking site and one even people who aren't noir enthusiasts will enjoy.
Pulp Flakes (pulpflakes.blogspot.com/) is a brand-new blog about material straight from the flaking pages of the pulp magazines, specifically the "authors and their stories. Adventure and Detective pulps." If you have an interest in authors like Talbot Mundy, B.M. Bower, and Paul Hosmer and would like to read about them or to read some of their work, Pulp Flakes is the place to go.
Those of you who frequented the paperback racks in the 1970s and 1980s will no doubt recall some of the dozens (or was it hundreds?) of books in the subgenre that Brad Mengel writes about on The Serial Vigilante Blog (my.opera.com/AggressorBrad1), books with protagonists like the Avenger, the Black Samurai, the Hell-Rider, the Death Merchant, and so on and on. These are some of the series that Mengel discusses, but he goes to places you might not expect with his comments on the Watchmen. He has a nice photo section, too, with book covers and movie material. Check it out.
Judy Alter is a Texan and an award-winning author of Western fiction, with sixty or so books to her credit. She also writes mysteries about Kelly O'Connell, a real estate agent who finds herself stumbling over bodies. Alter's blog is Judy's Stew (judys-stew.blogspot.com/). It's a personal blog rather than a review site. Sometimes Alter talks about her writing ("That Awful First Page") and sometimes about other things, like dogs and book signings and her family. Whatever the topic, Alter's always engaging and wo
rth your reading time.
Copyright © 2012 by Bill Crider
Bill Crider is the author of The Blacklin County Files, a short-story collection available for Kindle.
Previous Article
INFORMATION
INFORMATION
Information
JANET HUTCHINGS Editor JACKIE SHERBOW Editorial Assistant SUSAN MANGAN Vice President, Design & Production VICTORIA GREEN Senior Art Director CINDY TIBERI Production Artist LAURA TULLEY Senior Production Manager JENNIFER CONE Production Associate ABIGAIL BROWNING Director of Marketing, Brand...
REVIEWS
INFORMATION
Information
JANET HUTCHINGS
Editor
JACKIE SHERBOW
Editorial Assistant
SUSAN MANGAN
Vice President,
Design & Production
VICTORIA GREEN
Senior Art Director
CINDY TIBERI
Production Artist
LAURA TULLEY
Senior Production Manager
JENNIFER CONE
Production Associate
ABIGAIL BROWNING
Director of Marketing,
Brand Licensing & E-Commerce
TERRIE POLY
Digital Publishing Manager
JAYNE KEISER
Typesetting Director
SUZANNE LEMKE
Assistant Typesetting Manager