Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 11/01/12 (20 page)

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

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