Second place this year goes to Doug Allyn for the darkly evocative story “The Black Chapel” (September/October 2006). A perennial favorite of EQMM readers, Mr. Allyn claimed a Readers Award scroll this time with the return of his series character Dan Shea from the roughneck crew of contractor/builders who ply their trade in Michigan's north woods. The author has seven previous first-place finishes for the EQMM Readers Award, and he has earned more (seven!) Edgar Allan Poe Award nominations for his short stories than any other author in the history of the Edgars. It's also worth mentioning that his very first short story claimed the 1986 Robert L. Fish Award. His success with the short story sometimes overshadows the fact that Mr. Allyn is also an esteemed novelist whose critically acclaimed The Burning of Rachel Hayes was issued in paperback toward the end of 2005. But after twenty years as a published author, fiction-writing is still the second of Doug Allyn's careers in the arts. Until recently he, his wife Eve, and their band performed music regularly in clubs all over Michigan, and he tells us that music will always be a central part of his life.
This year's three winning stories have one striking similarity, different as they are in most respects: All employ interestingly unusual settings. In L. Leigh's tale it's a remote area of swampland, in Doug Allyn's an abandoned cathedral with a dark past, and in Edward D. Hoch's third-place story “A Convergence of Clerics” (December 2006), the closed world of a cruise ship at sea. Ed Hoch has an enormous following among EQMM readers, something we know from the frequent letters we receive about him. But with votes from his fans split among the many stories he contributes each year, he rarely receives enough votes for any single story to reach the Readers Award's winners circle. This year, when he brought back series character Susan Holt after an eight-year hiatus, he could have no idea how well she and her new case would be received, but he tells us that winning a scroll for the story may inspire him to bring the series back again soon. Mr. Hoch is an MWA Grand Master, a Lifetime Achievement award winner of the Private Eye Writers of America, and a winner of the Edgar and Anthony awards.
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Fourth: “The Theft of the Blue-Ribbon Pie” by Edward D. Hoch
Fifth: “When the Levees Break” by O'Neil De Noux
Sixth: (tied) “Wolves in Winter” by Steve Hockensmith and “The Precision of the Agent of Death” by Isaka Kotaro
Seventh: “The Book of Truth” by Nancy Pickard
Eighth: (tied) “Framed” by James H. Cobb and “The Right Call” by Brendan DuBois
Ninth: (tied) “Arizona Heat” by Clark Howard and “Dead Even” by Clark Howard and “Babysitter” by Joyce Carol Oates and “Investment in Vevey” by Olen Steinhauer
Tenth: (tied) “Lost Luggage” by Mick Herron and “The Problem of the Devil's Orchard” by Edward D. Hoch and “The Alimony Prison” by Lou Manfredo
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THE JURY BOX by Jon L. Breen
As the Manhattan “bigs” troll for the next blockbuster while dropping worthy writers right and left, bread-and-butter mystery practitioners and their readers turn more and more to regional and independent publishers, some well-established and carefully-edited, and others unfamiliar and variable.
*** Robert S. Napier: Love, Death, and the Toyman, Five Star, $25.95. Jack Lorentz, a Tacoma-based collectible toy dealer, is asked by an old lover to look into a mysterious death on the property of her husband's wealthy and influential family. The first novel from the longtime fanzine editor known as Cap'n Bob is a commendable job, including surprising variations on familiar hardboiled elements: the rocky romance, the dysfunctional rich, and the hero's loyal but somewhat un-stable sidekick.
*** Kit Ehrman: Triple Cross, Poisoned Pen, $24.95. Steve Cline, in Louisville to help his trainer father prepare a horse for the Kentucky Derby, winds up in the middle of a murder investigation. An impressive thriller in the Dick Francis mode, with strong equine background, clued detection, smooth style, intriguing characters, and an inventive plot.
*** John R. Corrigan: Out of Bounds, Hardscrabble/University Press of New England, $24.95. PGA pro Jack Austin's latest case, involving whispers of performance-enhancing drug use, is even more steeped in golf than previous novels in the series. It may not hold the interest of a reader uninterested in the sport, but players and fans will love it. As usual, Jack turns to the poetry of Philip Levine for wisdom and inspiration.
*** Janet LaPierre: Family Business, Perseverance, $13.95. One year after 9/11, a peace demonstration in the California coastal town of Port Silva ends in violence: two unidentified men fall over a cliff, presumably to their deaths. Mother/daughter private eyes Patience and Verity Mackellar do most of the detective work, but the town is the star of this involving and solidly professional addition to a well-regarded series.
** Patrick Hyde: The Only Pure Thing, Beckham, $14.95. Washington D.C. attorney Stuart Clay defends a crazy-but-lucid homeless man accused of a beheading murder. Until the ludicrously over-the-top events of the closing chapters, I wondered why this well-written thriller, for all its editing and proofreading lapses, wasn't picked up by a major publisher. Its insider insights on the legal system, vivid characters, and fresh plot ideas suggest this lawyer-turned-novelist may have better books to come.
** Karen MacInerney: Murder on the Rocks, Midnight Ink, $12.95. Natalie Barnes, proprietor of the Gray Whale Inn on Maine's Cranberry Island and leader of a local group determined to save the tern from encroaching development, has among her guests the obnoxious developer-in-chief. Pluses: characters, style, background, and recipes. Minuses: incessant repetition and plot clichés. (The second in the series, Dead and Berried [same publisher and price], was announced for early 2007.)
** L.C. Hayden: Why Casey Had to Die, Five Star, $25.95. Retired Dallas cop Harry Bronson serves as consultant to a mystery-game conference in small-town Arizona while reexamining an unsolved case from early in his career. Hayden's prose, dialogue, and plotting are undistinguished, but her knack for gripping the reader is undeniable.
** Ed Lynskey: The Dirt-Brown Derby, Mundania, $12. Private eye Frank Johnson is asked by the owner of a Virginia stud farm to prove her teenage daughter, ostensibly trampled by her horse, was really murdered. In contrast to Hayden, Lynskey is stylistically ambitious with nice narrative touches and observations, but irrelevant side issues and extraneous detail sabotage the flow.
Independent presses are also the most prolific reprinters of long-lost crime fiction. Rue Morgue Press, specializing in humorous and traditional mysteries, adds Kelley Roos's 1944 novel Sailor, Take Warning! ($14.95), involving an impossible crime among Central Park's toy boat enthusiasts, to its previous reprints about Jeff and Haila Troy, this department's favorite detecting couple.
Greatest independent of them all, at least in terms of big-name roster, is Crippen & Landru. The specialist in single-author short-story collections has its first multi-hand anthology in The Verdict of Us All: Stories by the Detection Club for H.R.F. Keating ($20 trade paper, $43 hardcover), edited by Peter Lovesey, in which British authors as distinguished as P.D. James, Len Deighton, and Reginald Hill offer original stories in 80th-birthday tribute to the distinguished novelist and critic, a beloved figure in the mystery world for his kindness and humanity as much as for the high quality of his writing. Series characters on board include Tim Heald's too-long-absent comic sleuth Simon Bognor and Colin Dexter's Inspector Lewis, whom a fictional version of Keating himself challenges with a puzzle to delight the late Chief Inspector Morse. Nearly all the stories, many playfully humorous (Simon Brett's is in verse) and a few very serious, are good. This department's favorites came from Catherine Aird, editor Lovesey, Robert Barnard, and (despite some errors in American English) Andrew Taylor. Keating himself is represented by an Inspector Ghote tale previously published in EQMM.
Keating is an example of a “writer's writer,” one whose success with the general public (however great) is exceeded by the reverence accorded by other writers. Another such was Fredric Bro
wn. As Bill Pron-zini's substantial introduction to his experimental 1950 crime novel Here Comes a Candle (Millipede, $14) points out, not all of Brown's alternative narrative riffs (radio drama, mo-tion picture, sportscast, stage play, early TV show) are equally successful, but the depictions of mid-20th-century angst, off-kilter psychology, and an internal battle of conscience are remarkable.
A present-day “writer's writer” is Ed Gorman, whose complete short stories will be published in a seven-volume set from a British publisher. The first two volumes of The Collected Ed Gorman (PS Publishing, $45 each), Out There in the Darkness, introduced by Lawrence Block, and The Moving Coffin, introduced by Max Allan Collins, contain 19 and 20 stories respectively, most previously collected, with a concluding section of story notes by the author. “Mom and Dad at Home” and “Beauty,” two chilling tales in volume one, and the novelette “Intent to Deceive,” a grimly realistic view of the World War II home front in volume two, were new to me. Gorman is one of our finest contemporary short-story writers regardless of genre.
The Best of “10-Story Book” (Ramble House, $22), edited by Chris Mikul, gathers 34 stories from a magazine edited from 1919 to 1940 by Harry Stephen Keeler, who denounced the formulas and taboos of most magazine fiction of his time. Offbeat stories, not all criminous, by such familiar names as Carroll John Daly, Kenneth Fearing, August Derleth, Vincent Starrett, Harold Q. Masur, Len Zinberg (later known to mystery readers as Edgar winner Ed Lacy), and Keeler himself, share the pages with nude photos, daringly risqué at the time but innocent by current standards. Based on my sampling, a re-markable collection.
Copyright © 2007 Jon L. Breen
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