Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 09/01/12 (35 page)

“Velma, call an ambulance,” I said. She fought off the drug and got on the blower
fast. “Hang on, Joe. They’re on their way.”

“Frank,” he said.

“Yes, Joe?”

“Can you light a
bleu
for me?” I dug his last Gauloises out of the pack
in his pocket, lit it up, and put it between his lips. He took a drag and smiled
at me with moist brown eyes.
“Des ennuis des chagrins s’effacent; heureux,
heureux à en mourir,”
he said, and exhaled his last. Troubles, sorrows
disappear, happy, happy to die. It was a line from “La Vie en rose.”

I put an arm around Velma’s waist and walked her around the apartment while we
waited for the police. I felt tired, cold with grief for Jane, hollow from the
loss of Joe Damas. “I want those pictures, Frank,” she said.

“There are no pictures, sweetheart. Three dead and there’s nothing to show for
any of it.” She leaned in close and wrapped her arms around my waist.

She was holding me up by the time the cops got there. Velma had always been
tougher than me.

Copyright © 2012 by Harley Mazuk.
Black Mask Magazine title, logo, and mask
device
Copyright © 2012 by Keith Alan Deutsch.
Licensed by written
permission.

John Sheridan and C. T. Henry are the duo in charge of The
Mystery Bookshelf
(henryct.wordpress.com),
where “helping you select truly excellent mystery fiction” is their goal. It’s primarily a review site, but there’s an occasional interview, too, most recently with author Charlie Newton. Sheridan seems to be carrying most of the load in 2012, and he’s set himself a challenge that includes reading some of the “classic” crime novels, reading new authors, and reading books from different geographical areas. Both authors have posted links to lists of their favorite books, so you can find out how their tastes align with yours. I’ve found this kind of thing helpful when considering reviews.

Kittling: Books
(www.kittlingbooks.com)
might strike you as an odd title for a blog unless you know a bit of Gaelic.
Kittling,
we’re told by Cathy, the blog’s writer, is “a Gaelic word that means ‘anything that strikes [my] fancy,’ and that pretty much sums up my reading tastes.” Mostly her tastes run to mysteries, and while there are plenty of reviews here, other features include link roundups, interviews, photographs, and book news. If you have time, find the link to “Library Memories.” You’ll find some things there that might strike a chord. The writer also has a list of her favorite series, so as with the blog mentioned above, you can see if her tastes accord with your own.

When a blog has a title like Nick Jones’
Existential Ennui
(existentialennui.blogspot.co.uk),
you might not expect it to be devoted to “Crime & spy fiction, SF, book collecting, comics,” but that’s what this one is. One of the first links you’ll want to click when you pay a visit is “Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s.” It’s just what it claims to be, and book collectors will find it irresistible. Jones does reviews of the books he collects, and recently he’s discussed novels by Victor Canning, Donald E.
Westlake, Adam Hall, and Jeremy Duns. There’s also a long interview with spy novelist Duns that I recommend.

Some of Jones’ reviews also show up on
The Violent World of Parker
(violentworldofparker.com),
an excellent blog mainly concerned with Westlake/Richard Stark’s memorable character but also with a lot of related material. Don’t miss the links to other Parker things on the site, all highly recommended.

Copyright © 2012 by Bill Crider

Bill Crider is the author of
The Blacklin County Files,
a short-story collection available for Kindle.

From time to time a certain word or theme serendipitously recurs in books that arrive in The Jury Box. This month, for example, we lead off with three books that feature “crow” in the title. We will also look at a new U.K. publisher whose science-fiction titles often veer headlong into the realm of crime and detection.

 
**** Craig Johnson,
As the Crow Flies,
Viking, $25.95. Just in time for the new A&E Network series based on his books, Johnson delivers his eighth novel featuring Sheriff Walt Longmire of Absaroka County. The Wyoming lawman is visiting the Cheyenne Reservation to make preparations for his daughter’s wedding when he witnesses a young woman falling to her death from a rock outcropping, a swaddled infant in her arms. Longmire finds himself begrudgingly playing mentor to the new police chief of the Northern Cheyenne Nation, a pretty but hard-nosed veteran of the Iraq war. Johnson’s dialogue is written with laugh-out-loud wit, while the prose stays in tune with genuine human characters and a colorful setting.

 
**** Marc Strange,
Woman Chased by Crows,
ECW, $24.95. In this smartly told tale by Edgar-winner Strange, a Toronto police detective makes a visit to a small Ontario town, giving an inconsistent explanation about a dead Russian in a hotel. But the dead man turns out to be the detective himself. Local police chief Orwell Brennan juggles family issues while investigating the murder and its connection to a paranoid Russian ballet instructor and a promiscuous psychologist. Crows, like magpies, are attracted to shiny objects, like the ninety-seven-carat ruby that once belonged to the Tsarina and may have made its way into this small Canadian town.

 
*** Randall Silvis,
The Boy Who Shoots Crows,
Berkley Prime Crime, $15.00. In rural Pennsylvania, a twelve-year-old boy, last seen shooting at crows by a local artist, has gone missing. The lonely sheriff is drawn toward the artist, who recently moved from New York to escape an oppressive marriage. But she can’t escape migraines, haunting feelings, or her reliance on pain pills. Silvis’s novel is less a mystery than it is a novel of psychological suspense and it might have worked better had the dialogue and inner thoughts of the characters been better distinguished from one another.

 
**** Stef Penney,
The Invisible Ones
, Putnam, $25.95. In a departure from her first novel,
The Tenderness of Wolves,
Penney tells a story in two voices about the search for a Gypsy girl who disappeared seven years earlier. Ray Lovell, a half-Gypsy P.I. reeling from the breakup of his marriage, becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to Rose Janko and unwrapping the secrets of the Janko family. His narrative is interwoven with chapters told from the perspective of a fourteen-year-old nephew of the missing girl, a fatherless Gypsy boy trying to find his own place in the world.

 
**** Dennis Palumbo,
Fever Dream,
Poisoned Pen Press, $24.95 HC, $14.95 TPB. Running at a fever pitch, Palumbo’s second novel featuring Pitts-burgh psychotherapist Dan Rinaldi opens with the trauma expert called to the scene of a bank robbery and hostage situation. Rinaldi’s commitment to the case and uneasy attraction to the detective in charge lead him to old adversaries, political wheeling and dealing, and an upcoming gubernatorial election. Multiple twists attest to the fact that Palumbo, a psychotherapist himself, got his chops in Hollywood.

 
**** Margaret Maron,
Three-Day Town,
Grand Central Publishing, $25.99. In this entertaining crossover, Maron brings two series protagonists—Judge Deborah Knott and Lt. Sigrid Harald—together in a case involving stolen art, New York society, and murder. Judge Knott and her husband are in New York for a belated honeymoon, having brought along a package for one of Knott’s distant cousins. The cousin turns out to be the mother of Harald, (last seen in 1995’s
Fugitive Colors),
and the package contains a rare erotic statuette. Maron took risks reviving an old character and interweaving stories from both perspectives, but the result is a fun fish-out-of-water adventure.

 
*** Donald E. Westlake,
The Comedy is Finished,
Hard Case Crime, $25.99. This newly discovered novel written by Westlake thirty years ago was ultimately shelved, in part because of its plot’s similarity to Martin Scorsese’s 1983 film
The King of Comedy.
The book, the first hardcover book to be published by Hard Case Crime, is pure Westlake: part caper, part thriller, and part darkly comedic character study. In the wake of Watergate, ageing comedian Koo Davis is kidnapped by a revolutionary fringe group. The showdown with the FBI is tense, tragic, and at times touching.

 
*** Charles Beckman, Jr.,
Honky-Tonk Girl,
Borgo Press, $14.99. First published in 1953 and featuring cover art from the original Falcon digest paperback,
Honky-Tonk Girl
is a hardboiled novel set in the world of jazz, by Texas pulp-writer and jazzman Beckman. Drummer Miff Smith was a ladies’ man, in the habit of dating multiple women every night until one shot him in the head. Brooding bandleader Johnny Nickles measures up the suspects while dodging a corrupt local sheriff.

Angry Robot Books is a UK-based publisher specializing in noir, offbeat, and cutting-edge science fiction. What drew them to our attention was the number of titles that crossed genres into crime and detection. While trans-genre isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, adventurous readers will want to check them out. All titles are also available in electronic formats. We had a chance to sample four new novels.

Chris Holm,
Dead Harvest,
Angry Robot Books, $7.99. With a gritty three-tone cover reminiscent of the old Penguin paperbacks,
Dead Harvest
features an otherworldly bounty hunter, The Collector, whose job is to capture the souls of the departed bound for purgatory. But when sent to retrieve a teenage girl accused of slaughtering her family, The Collector is convinced she’s innocent and so begins a single-minded mission to dismantle a cosmic conspiracy.

Adam Christopher,
Empire State,
Angry Robot Books, $12.99. When the woman P.I. Rad Bradley is searching for turns up dead, the jaded detective learns her killer may have been a doppelganger of himself from a parallel version of New York City. Set in several alternative universes where police airships patrol the skies and superheroes battle supervillains, Empire State works as a P.I. story, an homage to comic-book heroes, and a science fiction mind-twister with parallel “pocket” universes.

Guy Haley,
Omega Point,
Angry Robot Books, $7.99. Otto Klein is an emotionally restrained cyborg. His partner is a Class 5 Artificial Intelligence who wears a trenchcoat and fedora. Together they travel between the real world and several dozen virtual reality realms pursuing a rogue Artificial Intelligence determined to take over all of reality. The result is a thriller that explores how realms of virtual reality might bleed into the real world.

Lavie Tidhar,
The Great Game,
Angry Robot Books, $7.99. This third in a series of steampunk adventures with fictional and historical characters from the Victorian age is packed with references from classical crime and horror fiction. Doctors Jekyll, Frankenstein, and Moreau all make appearances, as does Irene Adler, Bram Stoker, several characters from
Dracula,
and Agatha Christie’s village of St. Mary Mead. Looming in the background is a famous detective referred to only as “the beekeeper.” But the central plot of the novel involves a hero named Smith on a mission to find the killer of Mycroft Holmes.

Copyright © 2012 by Steve Steinbock