New Mystery
Herein NMM staff members look at some of the short story anthologies just out or due soon. The Houghton-Mifflin annual, THE YEAR’S BEST MYSTERY STORIES, is perhaps the most prestigious and polished of the current offerings. The series editor is Otto Penzler but each year a guest editor chooses a final group of stories from a longer list presented by Mr Penzler. This year the guest editor is Sue Grafton, next year look for Ed McBain. The editors should be praised for looking far and wide for mystery short stories, especially doing outreach to the small literary, academic and regional magazines in order to find stories with crime as a central component. We won’t mention that two fine stories from New Mystery were selected, Dog Support, Child Support by David Ballard and Find Miriam by Stuart Kaminsky. Inside also find The Rest of Her Life by Steve Yarborough from the Missouri Review, and a great little Donald Westlake story from another mystery magazine. Affectionately called The Donald, this author continues to stand atop the pile of talents working in the form. Some last minute scribbles by other Big Names found there way into these pages, but thanks to the very strong stories already mentioned, the book stays afloat.
What? Is this Otto Penzler again? THE 50 GREATEST MYSTERIES OF ALL TIME, yes, edited by Penzler. Dove Books. He has dug up Thomas Hardy, Edith Wharton, Jack London and Thurber and even Doyle with his Red-Headed League masterpiece, (see below). The arguers may rage over his selections. Bottles will always be thrown at anyone who attempts to assemble the ‘greatest’ of anything. His first selection is Poe’s The Purloined Letter. After re-reading that embryo, one begins to warm to the editor’s presumptuous task. AA Milne’s Nearly Perfect is here and is swell to read. Stanley Ellin is remembered with The Specialty of the House. Also great to revisit Jack Ritchie with A New Leaf. This is a great anthology for younger readers, under 40, I mean. When I think of the long years it took some of us to find these stories on our own, without such guidance, there is a fearful shudder of lives wasted. And another jewel in the crown is Ring Lardner’s Haircut, which so inspired these readers that one went out and actually had a haircut. Recommended.
What? Is this Otto Penzler again. Otto, hey go take a nap. Yes, it’s spelled the same and it’s MURDER AND OBSESSION with 15 new original stories. This is a great mix of new and veteran authors, including Michael Malone, Shel Silverstein, (RIP), James Crumbly, and for some reason, a few women writers are included. Meanwhile, this is a getdown volume of neo-noire. Some fine writing here, driving narratives, actual style, characters with depth and purpose and lotsa lust and murder. The LeHane piece, Running Out Of Dog is wonderful. This is a loose brooding southern tale of friendship gone wrong and did we mention lust? Eventually the story forces decency to confront evil the way stories by Flannery O’Conner do. See this small southern town has dogs running all over the place and onto I-95 and the tourists are beginning to complain about the .74 dead dog per mile. So the mayor hires this guy to shoot all the strays before they can get to the highway. And he runs out of dog. Recommended.
There are a few more anthologies here edited by the ubiquitous Mr Penzler, but that’s enough for us, for now.
Does this bring us to Lawrence Block’s great little anthology, DEATH CRUISE, Crime Stories on the High Seas? Cumberland House. Adventure, romance and cruise nightlife featuring crime on the high seas make this a refreshing new read. That Arnaldo Correa’s The Merry Ghosts of the Grampus and Jose LaTour’s Havanightmare are both here is alone worth the $24.95. These two fine Cuban authors have a large following in Spanish and we hope they can move to English and the States with as much success as their baseball-playing compadres. Both authors helped with editing New Mystery Magazine ten years ago and reading their punchy masculine ironic work is still like a cold Moquita on a hot day.
On to more books.
A new biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is out which takes the time to discuss his other characters besides you-know-who. His eventual obsession with the spiritual world, the psychic and transmedium palaver that nearly ruined his reputation is charted here with sympathy by Daniel Stashhower. The life of the young Irish kid who became an Edinburgh surgeon - from his whaling ship adventures to his stormy friendships with Shaw and Houdini - is told here very well. The biographer takes us through the great adventure and scifi novels which anticipate the Channel Tunnel, space travel and Trek-style matter transmission. This may be a definitive study of Doyle and his sixty books, but the central question is still unanswered: How can the creator of Sherlock Holmes, that machine of raw reasoning power, have succumbed to the ditsy flakes of psychic phenomenon. Unbelievable. Highly Recommended.
Here is another one of those weak bent cerebral-transvestite narratives where a middle class white woman tries to write in the first person as a man, a policeman yet. BREACH OF DUTY by J A Jance is not at this time, nor ever will be a novel. It is a sketch from a suburban shoulder-padder scribbler fresh from some brush with pop sociology . Mrs Jance tries to tell a story about a tough, twice-divorced, former alcoholic homicide detective as if she had just cut her chin shaving and knew what a sting came from the aftershave. As though she had to reach down there and scratch every once and a while. When this narrator creature gets an assertive female new partner, and they start working the beat of New Seattle’s twentysomething airheads, bimbos and shallow hipsters, the book falls from your lap by its own weight. Not Recommended. Never mind what publishing house. Why don’t these targeted readers go back to romance novels where they belong? Why don't they go back to their husbands or try to make something out of their marriages?
Holy jockstrap-tampon, dear reader, here’s another one by JA Jance. This time our hero, no, heroine, is an assertive lady sheriff in rural Arizona, a widow who is thriving in a man’s world. Here we have another murder of an elderly free-spirited widow, as in the last piece described above. Capable and strong-minded Sheriff Joanna Brady knows better than to assume all is as it seems and she investigates greedy relatives and a seedy live-in younger man. Mrs Jance doesn’t know what a sentence is. (A sentence is a complete thought.) Which makes it tough to create paragraphs. This assertive female swig of mint-flavored Geritol is not for us. Oh all right, it’s from Avon Books.
Thank God for Marcia Muller, who creates a believable female detective in Sharon McCone of San Francisco. The early books from the series are the best, the latest, A WALK THROUGH FIRE from Mysterious Press is just out to acclaim. McCone travels to Hawaii and gets between locals and a film company where, of course, murder occurs. The lady detective spends a lot her time here being horny for some reason, but otherwise it reads well. Recommended. Mullers’ WHILE OTHER PEOPLE SLEEP just out in paperback from the same house, has her back on her more surefooted ‘Frisco’s turf where a doppelganger plays cat and mouse down the gritty streets of Bagdad-by-the-Bay. Highly Recommended.
BLUEBOTTLE by James Sallis is just out from Walker and it’s a great ride by a fine writer. Here again we find Lew Griffin in his fifth crime investigation. The New Orleans anti-hero comes out of a one year coma with a shattered memory, driven by the need to understand what happened to him that night…before he was shot. Who was the white woman he was with that night? We loved all these books: EYE OF THE CRICKET, BLACK HORNET, MOTH, and LONG-LEGGED FLY. Recommended.
Villard is soon out with WELCOME TO PARADISE, the seventh Key West adventure by the outrageous and smooth Laurence Shames. Mid-level mafiosi carouse on the beach dodging absurdist hitmen and a bizarre cast of supporting characters including the New Jersey dinette salesman of the year and a mistress who lacks poise. This is Elmore Leonard with the giggles. Recommended.
Hey for a great thriller romp with Hollywood moguls, hobos and a beutiful microbiologist, try THE DEVIL’S WORKSHOP by Stephen Cannell, (Morrow). A co-ed grad student gets word that her husband has commited suicide while at a super secret bio-weapons program called, you guessed it, The Devil’s Workshop. We got a bad admiral Zoll who may be testing viruses in a desolate Texas prison. The writing is brisk and keeps the medical thriller genre healthy as we enter the millennium. Recommended.
The most popular book this season with the gang at a downtown hangout where many of the junior editors poison themselves on weekends, is HART’S WAR. John Katzenbach has written a powerful and emotional prisoner of war saga where the kriegies, captured WWII US and Brit pilots, are held in a bleak Bavarian camp by Luftwaffe administrators and their thuggy but not all bad German guards. A downed Negro pilot, one of the fabled Tuskegee Airmen sets off a near riot when charged with the murder of a white racist American wheeler-dealer. We got good Germans and bad Germans and good Americans and bad Americans and all in all there is a fine overview of the mixed loyalties and absolute fear on both sides in the closing days of the war. The author is a little harsh on the Southern US pilots and the black airman, who rattles off Latin quotes during his trial to show the bad Nazis he is a man and not a sub-human, gets idealized a bit. It’s one of the best POW novels since KING RAT. And we got a tunnel, too. Highest Recommendation.
In closing remember that KK Beck is back with THE REVENGE OF KALI-RA from Mysterious Press; Barbara D’Amato’s HARD EVIDENCE WITH Cat Marsala, from Scribner; and Linda Barnes is soon out with FLASHPOINT from Hyperion…don’t miss ‘em.
Reviews by Staff
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