EQMM, January 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  ** David Morrell: The Spy Who Came for Christmas, Vanguard, $15.95. On Christmas Eve in snowy Santa Fe, double agent Paul Kagan, on the run from the Russian mafia with a baby under his parka, seeks refuge with a battered wife and her courageous son. From an icon of the action thriller, the book provides real suspense once it gets rolling, plus solid research into infant care and weaponry, and an inventive retelling of Jesus’ birth as an espionage saga. But flat, flavorless dialogue and narrative with clunkily inserted local color suggest a rush job. Also, the plot is hard to swallow. Can men capable of cruel violence against their fellow human beings be magically redeemed with Christmas standards playing in the background? See what you think.

  ** C.S. Challinor: Christmas is Murder, Midnight Ink, $13.95. In the first of a projected series about Scottish barrister Rex Graves, an assortment of snowed-in holiday guests at a small East Sussex hotel begin to die one by one. It's enjoyable enough low-key reading for classical nostalgics until a gathering-of-the-suspects windup that lacks credibility and conviction. Still, Graves's next case may be worth watching for.

  ** Maggie Sefton: Fleece Navidad, Berkley, $23.95. Readers who are neither series regulars nor knitters could be lost early by this latest about Kelly Flynn and her fellow habitués of Fort Connor, Colorado's House of Lambspun. When a three-time widow of alarmingly accident-prone husbands breezes into the knitting shop, things begin to pick up, based on the reader's expectation that in a mystery things cannot be what they seem, but the people and the solution strain credulity. Recipes and knitting patterns are appended.

  *** Hugh Pentecost: The Battles of Jericho, introduction by S.T. Karnick, Crippen & Landru, $20 trade paper, $29 hardcover. Red-bearded giant John Jericho, famed painter and crusading righter of wrongs, appeared in several novels along with these 15 EQMM short stories between 1964 and 1976. Reflecting the author's concern with the social problems of that troubled era, and drawing on his long experience as a prolific pulp and slick-magazine story-teller, these emotionally charged and cunningly plotted tales should win new fans for MWA Grand Master Pentecost (Judson Philips). Karnick's introduction and an afterword by Daniel Philips, the author's son, are added features.

  *** L. Ron Hubbard: Spy Killer, Galaxy Press, $9.95. On the run from a murder charge in Shanghai, sailor Kurt Reid becomes embroiled in Chinese vs. Japanese espionage, helped or hindered in turn by two femmes fatales. First published in the April 1936 issue of Five-Novels Monthly, this vividly written, super-fast-paced action story shows what an expert pulp writer the controversial founder of Scientology was. Also available in an effective multi-cast audio production at the same price, it's a handsome product in both formats, including period cover and internal illustrations and author hagiography.

  *** Sam Stall: Dracula's Heir, Quirk, $24.95. In the same dossier format as Duane Swierczynski's The Crimes of Dr. Watson (reviewed here in May 2008), this sequel to Bram Stoker's classic novel is an equally effective novella-length combination of pastiche and fair-play mystery, spinning off from the short story, “Dracula's Guest,” presented as a first chapter omitted from the novel at the last minute. The present-day story of lawyer Jon Kelso, recipient of the various journals, letters, photographs, and other documents for reasons he does not understand, is played fairly straight, but there's some pointed humor along the way, especially in the clue-rich reproduction of a 1905 London tabloid. (Another great gift for vampire buffs is The New Annotated Dracula [Norton, $39.95], an exhaustive work of scholarship from Leslie A. Klinger, whose New Annotated Sherlock Holmes was an Edgar winner.)

  The first book from Surinam Turtle Press, a new imprint of Ramble House (ramblehouse.com), is Gelett Burgess's 1912 collection Master of Mysteries ($20 trade paper, $30 hardcover), with an introduction by editor Richard A. Lupoff, a striking cover by Gavin L.

  O'Keefe, and interior illustrations from the original volume. Phony clairvoyant Astro solves his clients’ mysteries via Sherlockian intellect and credits the results to his crystal ball, while training a beautiful young assistant with whom he becomes romantically involved. Based on a sampling, the plots, characters, and humorous style hold up beautifully nearly a century after they first appeared.

  The latest from Rue Morgue Press are the 1935 school mystery A Question of Proof ($14.95), the first Nigel Strangeways book by Nicholas Blake, pseudonym of one-time poet laureate of Great Britain Cecil Day-Lewis, with an excellent biographical/critical introduction by publishers Tom and Enid Schantz; and Catherine Aird's 1970 novel The Stately Home Murder ($14.95), with its sure-fire background for classical detection and a solution with special (but obviously unmentionable) delight for traditionalists.

  ©2008 by Jon L. Breen

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Passport to Crime: O CHRISTMAS TREE by Susanne Mischke

  Susanne Mischke says she was “excellently prepared” for a life in crime fiction by early employment as a waitress, an actress, and a test subject for psychology experiments. She holds a degree in business administration and worked for a time as a systems analyst and logician, but soon turned to freelance writing and journalism. She has appeared once before in Passport to Crime (July 2008).

  Translated from the German by Mary Tannert

  When Luise put down the ax, there was nothing left but the bloody stump.

  She wiped the sweat from her forehead, went into the kitchen, and fortified herself with a swallow of Malteser schnapps. Then she picked up the phone.

  "This is Mrs. Knochenhauer. You can pick it up now. Yes, right away. The address is Bachstelzenweg 12.” She put the phone down without saying goodbye.

  Standing at the kitchen window, Luise grimly contemplated the scattered limbs of the slain enemy as they stretched up into the winter sky. Twenty-five feet of richly green, unsuspecting fir tree sprawled in pieces across the driveway, blocking the entrance to the garage.

  "How lovely are thy branches...” ran through her mind. But not for long! Perhaps the Grim Reaper was sucking the last breath from those plump green needles at this very moment? Luise Knochenhauer decided not to brood any longer. Instead, she poured herself another fortifying dose of the Malteser.

  * * * *

  It's difficult to say how and when the tragedy began. The grip of disaster may even stretch back as far as two years ago, when Aldi had a sale on strings of Christmas lights and the Knochenhauers bought one of them and wound it around the stunted pine tree in their little front yard.

  That didn't bother me very much back then. Sometimes, when I came home late, I even found the light cheery and homey. And I let myself be talked into buying one of those wooden Christmas pyramids with electric candles and setting it up at the window in the front hall. I got it at the Christmas market—a horrible place, but Steve had talked me into going down there with him. The pyramid's yellowish glow was controlled by a timer, so that it turned itself on at twilight and off late in the morning, by which time it was light enough that the moment when the bulbs winked out went almost unnoticed. That's the way the Knochenhauers set up the lights on their pine tree, too, and, a little later, the rope lights that they used to outline their front door. I joked that they were afraid that Santa Claus wouldn't be able to find the entrance to their home, but Helmut Knochenhauer replied pedantically that in the usual run of things Santa Claus came down the chimney, which I certainly ought to know since my husband was American. (The Knochenhauers know that Steve and I aren't married, but they stubbornly refuse to acknowledge the fact.)

  I found the rope lights obscene. Steve said nothing, but a day later he bought two strings of Aldi lights himself. In the absence of any conifers in our front yard (unfortunately, all the potted Christmas trees we'd ever bought had died), he draped them around the spikes of the antique wrought-iron fence. I didn't much care for this assault on the admittedly severe dignity of my lovely old fence, but I kept my mouth shut. Christmas would be over at some point. Even so, it seemed to me he could at least have asked me whether I minded.

  F
or my taste, we now had plenty of electrically powered Advent cheer on all sides, particularly since at the Knochenhauers', more Christmas spirit had broken out in the form of rope lights in every window, shaped to form holiday motifs—a star, an angel, a Christmas tree, or a Santa Claus. I shuddered in horror every time I looked out the side window. And yet, that was just the beginning.

  The following year, Steve and I spent the first week in December visiting his sister, who lived in an upscale Texas neighborhood. Every time anyone came or went by the front door, a plastic snowman the size of a Masai warrior brandished his plastic broom and bawled “Merry Christmas!” I won't describe the inside of the house except to say that the traumatic effects lasted for a long time.

  After a long, hard week abroad, the taxi wound through the dark one-way streets of our neighborhood while I anticipated the comforts of home.... But the Knochenhauers had adopted carpe diem as this year's decorating philosophy. Last year's lights had been wound around their chimney. And clearly Christmas lights had been on sale again at Aldi, because they adorned every cypress and every bare-limbed shrub in the Knochenhauers’ front yard. If it went on like this, I prophesied, they would soon be festooning the molehills in the lawn. Their front door was framed with sequentially blinking lights in four different colors—an effect that at first reminded me of the light-therapy effects in the sauna of the local day spa, but on second thought had the cheap look of the basement entrance to the village discotheque. The taxi driver couldn't stop grinning. I was deeply ashamed of my neighborhood.

  Steve spent the following afternoon outside, stringing lights on the fence just like last year. I loved the simple little tract house that my parents had built. I'd bought the wrought-iron fence from a dealer whose rather dubious sources I was careful not to inquire about, and had it installed in place of the hunter's fence of my youth. Roses were supposed to wind around its iron spikes, not Christmas lights from Aldi. Why had I ever allowed this mischief the previous year?

  After dinner, Steve sat for a few hours in front of the computer and then went to bed, while I forced myself to stay awake until just after midnight in spite of my jet lag. Then I pulled on a hooded parka, stuck a flashlight and the rose shears in my pocket, and snuck out into the damp, cold December night. It could have been lovely: a sickle moon shone above the rooftops and the Big Dipper twinkled elegantly, but it was all utterly pointless against the competition from the light show next-door. I took a deep breath of suburban air and got to work. No, not work—I was undertaking an act of self-defense!

  Quietly I crept over to the Knochenhauers’ front yard. Gently I pulled the plug out of the outdoor socket, cut through the cable a few inches from the plug, chewed a little on the plastic coating of both cut ends, stuck the plug back into the socket, and left the cable lying on the ground. The effect was wonderful, the way you feel when a persistent headache finally lifts. A blanket of peaceful darkness settled over the door, the chimney, and the garden. Only the stars, angels, Christmas trees, and Santa Clauses went on lighting up the windows: They were connected to the power supply inside the house.

  Soon the first packages arrived. The Knochenhauers had been kind enough to take delivery of them for us, and when Luise and her husband brought them over—their size and weight necessitated a strong pair of arms—they complained about the marten who'd chewed through the power cords of their Christmas lighting more than once over the past few days.

  "Well, it'll be a little relief for your electric bill,” I comforted my helpful neighbors. “He did quite a bit of damage over here, too.” And that was true: For two days now, our fence had been just a fence.

  "Tonight Helmut's going to lie in wait with his gun,” whispered Luise Knochenhauer, and then clapped one hand guiltily over her mouth as Helmut surreptitiously elbowed her.

  "It's my father's old shotgun. You can keep an old gun like that without a license,” Helmut said, his bald head gleaming with rectitude and his fat chest thrust forward in righteousness over his short little legs. Luise nodded eagerly and her permed curls shook in affirmation. Their eyes were aglow with the fever of the hunt.

  "Weidmannsheil!” I wished Helmut Knochenhauer in the traditional German hunter's greeting, and wrestled the packages into the house. There were two of them, a small one and a big heavy one, both addressed to Steve.

  "E-Bay,” said Steve by way of explanation, and carried his treasures into the basement. That very evening, I got to see the dancing Christmas tree, which treated me to a tinny rendition of “Jingle Bells” as it waved its plastic arms like a Balinese temple dancer. I asked Steve to move it into his workroom immediately. My tone of voice may have been just a little harsh. Steve called me narrow-minded and intolerant and suspected me of having cut the cable of “his” Christmas lights.

  "Which are hanging on my fence,” I made sure to note.

  And as far as that goes, he said, I was treating him like a tenant with whom I was merely coincidentally having a relationship.

  We fought about all kinds of things, the frozen pizza burned in the oven, and we went to bed angry and fell asleep back to back.

  While our neighbor held a lonely vigil at his kitchen window, I tried to find my way through the maze of stalls at the Christmas market, past the trails of steam and smoke left by mulled wine and sausage stands, doing my best to escape from a giant green plastic octopus croaking “Jingle Bells.” I asked a Santa Claus for help, but he turned out to be Steve in disguise, who used the opportunity to put a bag over my head and call the octopus on his mobile phone. Then there was a loud bang. I sat upright in bed, tangled in the sheets. It was ten minutes after two A.M., and Helmut Knochenhauer had clearly bagged his prey. The next day, Luise shed tears of regret, sent Helmut to the optician to get his eyes examined, and made him get rid of the shotgun. This relieved me greatly, but they still got the cold shoulder from the rest of the neighborhood for quite some time; the gray tomcat from Number 8 had been very popular with everyone.

  When I got home late that evening, a red sphere of light the size of a golf ball gleamed in the dark next to our front door. Had the hunt for the marten been upgraded to infrared weapons? A few more steps, and what to my wondering eyes should appear—in the truest sense of the word—but a life-sized reindeer (at least, that's what I'm assuming). Behind it, perched on the obligatory sleigh, was a fat, white-bearded Santa in a red coat. I approached this ensemble with the caution necessary when closing in on a wounded boar. My experiences in Texas had taught me to be prepared for anything. Right on cue, the reindeer's ears began to waggle and Santa let out a throaty “Ho, ho, ho,” before the whole thing fell dark and silent. Then Rudolph's nose lit up again....

  I stood frozen for several minutes, unable to move. The reindeer had sweet little ears and a gentle look. Santa Claus looked like God in a grandfatherly moment. There was something moving about them both. I jumped when the front door opened and Steve looked out, a guilty expression on his face like a basset hound caught stealing the Sunday roast.

  "Can you set it so that Rudolph's nose always glows?” I asked.

  * * * *

  Soon people began to make pilgrimages to our street. The reindeer was the biggest hit since sliced bread. Luise and Helmut were greeting us somewhat curtly by then. The Saturday before the fourth Sunday of Advent, they could be seen in their front yard maneuvering a very long ladder. It had surprised me the entire time that the mighty fir tree, which had stood next to our fence alongside the Knochenhauers’ driveway for as long as I could remember, had been spared the brunt of the Christmas decoration orgy. Maybe that was because it had long been much taller than their house and was therefore difficult and surely expensive to illuminate. Just wrapping a couple of strings of lights around the bottom third would have looked amateurish, and Helmut Knochenhauer was a perfectionist. All day he could be seen up on the ladder with strings of lights dangling from his shoulders, balancing in dangerous gymnastic-looking poses between the tree and the rungs of the ladder. By evenin
g, the entire tree gleamed triumphantly with hundreds, even thousands of tiny lights. At the very top, blinking on and off, was a large silver star with a tail.

  The reindeer continued to be a favorite with small children, but when I stood surreptitiously at our bedroom window in the dark listening to the commentary, I could tell that the grownups preferred Helmut's tree.

  Two days before Christmas Eve, I caught Steve at dawn red-handed, standing at the open window of our bathroom in his red Santa Claus bathrobe and shooting gravel with a slingshot at the silver Star of Bethlehem on the Knochenhauers’ tree. I turned away wordlessly. Neither of us mentioned the event again.

  When I looked out the window on the morning of Christmas Eve, I saw a snowy landscape like something out of a picture book. And our neighbors had put up yet another decoration to admire. They had acquired one of those Santa Claus figures, popular in recent years, which dangles from the side of the building like the victim of a lynching. Except that the Knochenhauers had hung it in the big fir tree. And upon closer examination, it wasn't a Santa Claus. As I stood staring, trying to make sense of the sight, my Texan, his Santa Claus bathrobe flapping behind him, lurched past me out of the house and began to climb the icy, snow-covered fir tree in his bare feet. The gesture was noble but pointless. There was nothing left for the fire department to do but free Helmut Knochenhauer from the tangle of lights that had caught and strangled him as he was trying to replace a couple of burned-out bulbs.

  At least, that's what Luise Knochenhauer said. She'd been standing in line at the butcher's to buy the Christmas goose when it happened. Lucky for her.

  I, on the other hand, had seen Steve fall from the tree.

  * * * *

  I watched as the workmen sawed up and carted away the remnants of the fir tree. Dusk fell, and I opened a bottle of Bordeaux. Our yard and the Knochenhauers’ were both quiet and dark. The reindeer had found a new home with the family at Number 8. Steve was presumably somewhere over the Atlantic in the cargo hold of a Boeing 747. The spikes of the wrought-iron fence glowed dimly in the last light of the day. The fire department had had to saw off a couple of them, the ones that Steve had impaled himself on when he fell, but after the holidays I would make sure the fence was expertly repaired, and then everything would be as it had been. Still, I'd miss the big tree.