EQMM, February 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "Fancy talk,” Teague said. “Say it in plain English, man. How'd they break into that safe?"

  "Strictly speaking, they didn't. The safe was opened from the inside."

  "From the inside? What the devil are you talking about?"

  "The application of a simple law of physics,” Quincannon said. “After the safe had been allowed to chill inside the icehouse, the Schneiders turned it on its back and hammered a wedge into the crack of the door along the bottom edge, the purpose being to widen the crack through to the inside, similar to their objective with the express-office door. Then, using a bucket and a funnel, they poured water into the safe until it was full. The final steps were to seal the crack with hard-drying putty"—he glanced meaningly at the constable as he spoke—"and then pack ice around the safe and cover the whole with straw. The object being to completely freeze the water inside."

  Newell, the engineer, clapped his hands. “Of course! Water expands as much as one-seventh of its volume when it freezes."

  "Exactly. When the water in the safe froze, the intense pressure from the ice caused the door's hinges to give way. It was a simple matter, then, for them to chip out the ice and remove the gold. Whatever residue remained in the safe melted after they carried it away to the field."

  Quincannon stood basking in the further approbation that followed these explanations. It was only fitting, of course, for once again he had solved the seemingly insoluble. Superior detective work was a combination of intelligence, observation, deductive reasoning, and supreme self-confidence. These qualities, which he possessed in abundance, made him the most celebrated sleuth west of the Mississippi River. Any man who didn't agree with that assessment was a dunderhead.

  Marshal James B. Halloran of Jamestown, for instance.

  Quincannon chuckled evilly to himself. Halloran, all unwittingly, had provided him with one other clue to the solution of this case—one he hadn't mentioned in his summation. He was saving it to use as part of his gloat when he sought out that dunderhead marshal before leaving the Queen of the Mines.

  "You may be a fancy-pants detective in San Francisco,” Halloran had said in Cromarty's office, “but you don't cut no ice up here.” Ah, but he had—figuratively if not literally. He'd cut more ice in Tuttletown last night, by godfrey, than the Schneiders had inside that so-called burglarproof safe!

  Copyright © 2010 Bill Pronzini

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  Reviews: THE JURY BOX by Jon L. Breen

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  The year just past has been an unusually strong one for Baker Street aficionados. The Sherlock Holmes Reference Library added a volume of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's extra-canonical writings, The Apocrypha of Sherlock Holmes (Gasogene, $19.95), edited and fulsomely annotated by Leslie S. Klinger. In-cluded are two brief comic vignettes, two tales in which Holmes arguably appears as an anonymous writer of letters to the editor, three stage plays, and an unrealized plot outline that may not (per Daniel Stashower's introduction) be an authentic work of Watson or Doyle.

  The two-CD set Voices from Baker Street (Wessex Press, $18.95) re-issues rare recordings of Sherlockian events from the 1950s to early 1980s, high-spirited and humorous for the most part, including the voices of such luminaries as Vincent Starrett, Anthony Boucher, Rex Stout, Isaac Asimov, and Basil Rathbone. A mock radio broadcast of Silver Blaze's Wessex Plate race by famed sportswriters Red Smith and Joe Palmer is especially memorable.

  Non-British pastiche writers sometimes relocate Holmes to their own countries. Among the writers given that patriotic assignment in Sherlock Holmes in America (Skyhorse, $24.95), edited by Martin H. Greenberg, Jon Lellenberg, and Daniel Stashower, are Texan blog columnist Bill Crider and your Californian juror. Coincidentally, we both brought Holmes to (where else?) Chicago. Sherlock Holmes in Russia (Robert Hale/Trafalgar, $24.95), edited and translated by Alex Auswaks, presents seven early-20th-century tales by Russian writers.

  The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Night Shade, $15.95) gathers editor John Joseph Adams's picks of the best pastiches of the past thirty years, a mixed bag with a little too much supernatural stuff for some tastes but a distinguished roster of contributors, including Stephen King, Anne Perry, Sharyn McCrumb, Laurie R. King, and Michael Moorcock. The 65-page "Watson!” and Other Unauthorized Sherlock Holmes Pastiches, Parodies, and Sequels (Wildside, $4.99) consists of the title story by Captain A.E. Dingle, and other early-20th-century takeoffs by G. F. Forrest, Bret Harte, O. Henry, and John Kendrick Bangs.

  The first of the great book-length pastiches, H.F. Heard's 1941 novel A Taste for Honey, in which Sherlock takes up beekeeping under the alias Mr. Mycroft, has been reprinted in a new edition (Blue Dolphin, $16.95), with a foreword by Stacy Gillis and an afterword by John Roger Barrie, Heard's literary executor. Joining this classic as one of the best dozen or so extra-canonical novels is the first from a new star on the scene.

  **** Lyndsay Faye: Dust and Shadow, Simon & Schuster, $25. Of the many attempts to involve Holmes with Jack the Ripper, this is probably the best. Dr. Watson, whose narrative style is well captured, is happily de-picted as more heroic than comic, and the sleuth himself is at his most intellectually keen and personally complex. The facts of the crimes are depicted in careful, scholarly fashion, and the well-managed ending reprises a viable theory of how the Ripper might have avoided detection. (Faye also leads off Sherlock Holmes in America, referenced above, with a fresh look at “The Case of Colonel Warburton's Madness.")

  **** Donald Thomas: Sherlock Holmes and the King's Evil, Pegasus, $25. Supreme among the pastiche writers, Thomas includes more history and detailed detective work, often from physical evidence, than almost anyone. Most of the stories have their origin in real events, culminating in World War I cryptography and espionage in “The Case of the Zimmermann Telegram.” Other stories concern forged manuscript detection, lighthouse management, and fingerprint evidence, which gets an unusual treatment in “The Case of the Tell-Tale Hands,” based on Oscar Wilde's “Lord Arthur Savile's Crime."

  **** Gyles Brandreth: Oscar Wilde and the Dead Man's Smile, Touchstone, $14. Speaking of Wilde, his third outing as fictional detective concerns a series of murders, some borderline locked rooms, in the circle of a French theatrical family. Though the principal events occur in the early 1880s, a framing story set a decade later invites his friend Conan Doyle's participation in the detection and in-cludes the speculation that Wilde was the model for Mycroft Holmes. The prose and dialogue are first rate, and Oscar's final summing up is as close in spirit and intricacy to one of Ellery Queen's as you'll find in the current market.

  ** Paul D. Gilbert: The Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes, Robert Hale/Trafalgar, $24.95. These seven stories reflect love and respect for the canon in their fresh takes on such untold cases as the vanishing of James Phillimore, the aluminum crutch, the red leech, and the remarkable worm unknown to science. On the downside, narrative and dialogue are appallingly wordy; some anachronisms creep in (most glaringly, “cut to the chase” in the 1890s!); and the lead-off story has the most unconvincing of the many deaths of Moriarty recounted on page or screen.

  **** Martin Edwards: Dancing for the Hangman, Five Star, $25.95. In one of the finest fictionalizations of a classic criminal case I've ever read, Hawley Harvey Crippen, hanged in 1910 for the murder of his wife Cora (known on the music hall stage as Belle Elmore), tells the story of his life, her death, and his unsuccessful flight from justice with mistress Ethel Le Neve disguised as a boy. An American practitioner of medical quackery living in Britain, he insists he is not a murderer, and that the real murder in the case was never even recognized as such. Edwards, inventing freely without contradicting any of the settled facts of the case, credits his sources in a closing note titled (in homage to John Dickson Carr) “Notes for the Curious.” One example of the excellent and sometimes amusing writing: “To ask a man and a woman to describe a person is akin to commissioning a portrait from painters of diff
erent schools."

  *** Colin Harrison: Risk, Picador, $13. Manhattan insurance company lawyer George Young is asked by the elderly and ailing widow of the firm's founder to find out what her late son was doing the night of his apparently accidental death outside a bar. Though most readers will probably see the main secret coming, this shortish novel (originally a New York Times Magazine serial) offers good writing, an intriguing story, engaging characters, and a vivid rendering of the Manhattan scene.

  *** H. R. F. Keating: Inspector Ghote's First Case, Minotaur, $24.99. The series that began with The Perfect Murder (1964) and seemingly ended with Breaking and Entering (2000) is happily revisited in this prequel. In 1960, newly promoted to full inspector in the Bombay Police Crime Branch, Ghote receives an assignment that will take him away from the city as wife Protima awaits their first child: to find out why the wife of an English friend of the Indian police commissioner killed herself. Character touches, quirky dialect, and Hamlet references support a plot more complex than first appears.

  *** Gladys Mitchell: The Longer Bodies, Rue Morgue, $14.95. The first American publication of this 1930 detective novel is remarkably timely, since its plot sounds like a TV reality show: a rich old lady wants to choose the heir to her fortune by having the candidates compete to be the first to represent England in an athletic event (discus, long jump, high jump, pole vault, javelin, shotput). All the Golden Age greats had some humor, but Mitchell was the most determinedly comic, and this elaborate structural edifice could almost be a parody of the classical time-table mystery.

  Copyright © 2010 Jon L. Breen

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  Fiction: THE CAMERA NEVER LIES by John Morgan Wilson

  A past Edgar Allan Poe Award winner (for his novel Simple Justice, an entry in a series starring disgraced reporter Benjamin Justice), John Morgan Wilson is continuing to arouse critical enthusiasm for his work. MysteryScene said of his new book, Spider Season: “This exquisite novel is the finest yet in a powerful series.” New readers of the series who want to start at the beginning will be glad to know that Bold Strokes Books has just reissued the first four Benjamin Justice novels.

  A Super 8 video camera pans along a sidewalk in a suburban working-class neighborhood. It turns up the front walk of a plain, one-story stucco house. The camera's weak light points the way through the deepening dusk. The audio records the sound of sneakers softly slapping the pavement.

  The footsteps stop as the shooter pauses to focus on an afternoon newspaper lying midway up the walk. He zooms in on the printed date to establish the timeline visually, the way he's seen it done in the movies. The date is November 3, twenty-two years ago.

  The camera rises to slowly pan across the front of the modest house. On either side of the door the windows are dark and the curtains drawn. The camera briefly lingers, as if the shooter is surprised to see them pulled shut so early, or at all.

  The camera swings to a Ford pickup parked on a gravel drive. The camera's POV shifts to the rear of the truck, where it settles for a moment on a green-and-gold decal, shaped like a shield, affixed in a corner of the rear window. Inside the gold border are the words: Los Angeles Sheriff's Department. Below, a bumper sticker proclaims: My Child Made the Honor Roll at Cesar Chavez Junior High. At the other end, another bumper sticker declares: Guns Don't Kill. People Do. The shooter fixes purposefully on these details before moving on.

  The camera turns up the drive alongside the house. Light glows from a kitchen window that's set too high for the camera's eye. A slender hand briefly reaches into frame to push open a gate. The camera enters, pausing to survey a flagstone patio, a small swimming pool, and a towering palm tree at the rear of the yard, rising above several fruit trees.

  The camera swings suddenly to the left as a dog bounds across the patio. The dog jumps up, its muzzle going fuzzy as it fills the frame, nose pressed to the lens. A moment later, the dog races back, whimpering and scratching at the back door. A section of white T-shirt comes into frame and wipes the lens clean. The camera's eye is drawn to the light from a window off the patio. It pushes in to see a man hurry into the kitchen from a hallway—burly, balding, about forty, his mouth grimly set. His brown eyes dart about the room in seeming agitation before he turns abruptly toward the back door. The camera backs quickly away, across the patio and into the shadows of the detached garage. Its light shuts off as the rear porch light comes on. The man opens the door, grabbing the dog before it can get inside. Using a leash, he secures the dog to a post on the patio, ordering the dog to stay in a gruff voice.

  The camera follows the man back to the door and into the light from the house. Two or three times, he swings the door on its hinges, studying it intently. He raps his knuckles on the unscreened window in the door's upper half, as if testing it. Finally, he closes the door from the outside. He grabs a brick from a garden border and smashes the door's window with a quick, sharp blow. Glass shatters to the floor inside. In the silence that follows, he pricks up his ears and glances furtively about. Satisfied that he's raised no alarm, he replaces the brick where he found it. He opens the door and steps back into the house.

  The camera emerges from the shadows and approaches the kitchen window. It observes the man turn over a chair, knock utensils and a carton of eggs off the counter, and slam his shoulder into the refrigerator with such force that a blender topples, crashing to the floor. He pauses, surveying the mess, then hurries from the kitchen, turning right.

  Outside the house, the camera swings urgently in the same direction. On the soundtrack can be heard the whining of the dog, footfalls on the patio, and breathing that grows more rapid.

  The camera pulls up at another lighted window and looks into a bedroom. A woman not much younger than the man lies faceup on the disheveled bed, clad in a lacy bra and satiny slip panties of matching pink. Her peroxide blond hair is splayed about her head. An arm is twisted awkwardly beneath her. Smudged red lipstick and an ashen pallor mar her pretty features. Her blue eyes are opened wide, unblinking, and her mouth is agape. The camera loses focus. Its movements become erratic, grabbing images almost at random: Bruising encircling the woman's throat like a collar. A long, glossy fingernail that looks freshly broken. A striped necktie, lying twisted and crumpled on the pillow beneath her head.

  The camera moves to the man's troubled eyes, where tears start to brim. Then it pulls back to see the entire room. Pieces of the woman's clothing are strewn about the bed and floor. The man snatches them up and sets about dressing her, while the unsteady camera stays with him. His eyes rove the bed, fixing on the necktie. He grabs it, wads it up, and shoves it deep into one of his pants pockets. Then he makes the sign of the cross, lifts the woman in his muscular arms, and carries her from the room, turning left.

  The camera pulls back haphazardly, slipping out of focus. The footsteps quicken and stumble as they retrace their path across the patio. Through the kitchen window, the camera frames the man awkwardly as he kneels and sets the woman's body gently on the floor. The shooter pushes in shakily, trying to focus, as the man arranges her legs and arms into ungainly positions. Her limbs appear stiff and the effort causes the man to swoon. He rises unsteadily, looking queasy, glistening with sweat. He staggers to the sink, splashes water on his face, gulps from the tap.

  The lens suddenly points downward at flagstone, then at a stoop, then at linoleum as the shooter enters the house. The camera is set aside atop a washing machine and forgotten but its microphone continues recording: sneakers crunching broken glass, the dog barking outside, a man's startled voice as footsteps stop in the kitchen.

  "Nicky!"

  Then a boy's frightened voice, high and cracking: “What's wrong with Mom?"

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  Nick Falco kept his camera on Deputy Ramirez as he climbed from the patrol car and approached the two corpses in the graffiti-scarred alley.

  It was a grim scene, a boy and girl murdered execution-style. The boy was still on his knees, toppled sideways, sh
ot once in the back of the head. The girl was sprawled faceup a few yards away, with blood on her chest. Both victims bore distinct tattoos. A gang deal, Nick figured. Two teenagers caught in the wrong neighborhood and gunned down for it. He panned from the deputy to the bodies and then back again. Always show the action from the cop's POV—that was the mantra of Police in Action, one of the key reasons it was still on the air after twenty years.

  Nick knew all the rules, all the tricks. After twelve years on the job, he thought, I'd better know what I'm doing. Because this isn't just a job, documenting the horror of violent crime, cops chasing down bad guys.

  It's a mission, what I live for. It gets me through the day, keeps me sane.

  He pushed in on Deputy Ramirez as he called in the double homicide to dispatch. It was July, a warm L.A. morning. Ramirez, who was on the stocky side, wiped his brow with his shirtsleeve. Behind Nick, the sound man did his dance, staying out of Nick's way but keeping the boom overhead, without creating a shadow. Nick kept his camera moving, missing nothing. An average Police in Action segment lasted only six or seven minutes but it was pure cinéma vérité—no script, no narrator—so Nick had to give the editors plenty to work with. He grabbed as many extra shots as he could: patrol officers stringing yellow tape to cordon off the alley, uneasy residents peering over back fences, flies buzzing about the corpses before settling to crawl around the eyes and mouths. He knew the network might not approve a cutaway to the flies—too realistic for the eight p.m. time slot—but he got the shot anyway, for insurance.

  It's not for nothing that I'm known as one of the best shooters in the business. If that's cocky, tough luck.

  He heard a car roll up behind him and glanced back from the corner of his eye without losing the shot. A sheriff's detective climbed from a spotless Crown Victoria. Sometimes they were in pairs, but this one was alone. She was a trim woman in her fifties, wearing a navy blue pants suit and flat shoes. Her graying hair was short-cropped, her bearing ramrod straight. Nick recognized her instantly: Katherine Forrest, rank of sergeant, twenty-eight years with the sheriff's department, known for her no-nonsense manner and independent style. Nick knew she wasn't keen on having a camera crew around, but she wouldn't break his balls about it, either. As long as he and his sound man stayed out of her way and didn't disturb evidence she tolerated them.