EQMM, May 2011

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Crimeculture (www.crimeculture.com) is another site with considerable news and information. It's maintained by Lee and Kate Horsley, and here's what they have to say about it: “Crimecultureis a site designed to appeal to anyone interested in representations of criminality. It provides introductions to crime fiction, crime films, and true crime. Our Rogue's Gallery section deals with the early literature of crime from the 16th through the 18th century; and 21st-Century Crime offers interviews, reviews of fiction, nonfiction, and classics reissued from 2000 on.” The latest interviews posted are with Hilary Davidson and Joelle Charbonneau, and they're worth your time. Crime writer Robert Skinner has written an article for the site, and I'm eager to read that one as soon as it's posted.

  Wayne Dundee is best known for his stories and novels about a blue-collar private eye named Joe Hannibal, but his blog, From Dundee's Desk (fromdundeesdesk.blogspot.com), while it does have some mentions of news about Hannibal, is mostly devoted to reviews of books by other writers like Don Winslow, Andrew Vachss, and William G. Tapply. I'm always interested in what writers have to say about the work of their peers, and Dundee's blog doesn't disappoint.

  On the true crime front there's Hook ‘em and Book ‘em (hookembookem.blogspot.com), which bills itself as a place “where readers, writers & law enforcement connect.” The blogger is Mark Young, a Vietnam vet who has thirty years of law enforcement experience. When he tells you how to do a building search or explains why traffic stops are deadly business, you have to figure he knows what he's talking about. Good information for writers or for readers who like a little dose of reality along with their crime fiction.

  Bill Crider's Pop Culture Magazine can be found at billcrider.blogspot.com.

  Copyright © 2011 Bill Crider

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  Reviews: THE JURY BOX by Jon L. Breen

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  My last column as regular “Jury Box” proprietor affords a chance to salute a dozen writers who have given me particular pleasure over the past few decades. These, along with many others, make the reviewer's job worthwhile.

  **** Loren D. Estleman: The Left-Handed Dollar, Forge, $24.99. Retro Detroit private eye Amos Walker takes a case for a criminal lawyer known as Lefty Lucy, who is trying to clear a mobster of an old charge of attempted murder, the victim of which was a close friend of Walker. His sharp eye for detail, mastery of character and plot, and beautifully crafted prose and dialogue place Estleman in the first half dozen in any ranking of classic private-eye writers, and this is one of his best.

  **** Michael Connelly: The Reversal,Little, Brown, $27.99. L.A. defense attorney Mickey Haller takes on the unfamiliar role of prosecutor, ap-pointed to handle the retrial of Jason Jessup, whose 1986 conviction in the murder of a 12-year-old girl was thrown out because of DNA analysis of a key piece of evidence. With his ex-wife as second chair and half-brother Harry Bosch as investigator, Haller confronts a morass of legal and factual complications. Though some may consider it a police-proceduralist's sideline, non-lawyer Connelly has written some of the finest courtroom novels in the history of the form. This is another.

  **** Richard A. Lupoff: The Emerald Cat Killer, Minotaur, $24.99. The saga of insurance investigator Hobart Lindsey and Berkeley cop Marvia Plum is brought to a very satisfactory conclusion 13 years after the previous novel-length entry, The Radio Red Killer (1997). Their case, which they approach from different directions, is the murder by laptop computer of a paperback mystery writer whose last work may have been plagiarized by the company that is Lindsey's firm's client. The killer of the title, known to the reader from the first, is chillingly, heart-breakingly believable. This is one of the best of an outstanding series.

  *** Jill Paton Walsh: The Attenbury Emeralds, Minotaur, $25.95. The author of two novels in posthumous collaboration with Dorothy L. Sayers, Thrones, Dominations (1999) and A Presumption of Death (2003), is on her own bringing the saga of Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane into the early 1950s. The plot, a shell-and-pea game with emeralds that harks back to one of Wimsey's earliest cases, is nicely managed and the familiar characters, including Jeevesian man-servant Bunter, are expertly realized. Efforts to continue a detective series after the original author's death have had varying degrees of success. Walsh's channeling of Sayers ranks at or near the top.

  *** Sharyn McCrumb: The Devil Amongst the Lawyers, St. Martin's/ Dunne, $24.99. In Wise County, Virginia, the trial of young schoolteacher Erma Morton for the murder of her father precipitates the 1935 version of a media frenzy. Young and ambitious Carl Jenkins, reporter for a small-town Tennessee paper, wants to get it right; other journalists, veterans of New York dailies, are more interested in ignoring reality in favor of hill-country stereotypes. Carl's psychic cousin Nora Bonesteel, a memorable adult character in the author's earlier Appalachian novels, appears here as a wise-beyond-her-years 12-year-old. Combining the mundane everyday with a touch of the supernatural is not an easy trick, but McCrumb manages it beautifully.

  *** Bill Pronzini: The Hidden, Walker, $24. An environmentalist serial killer is terrorizing the remote California coast where unemployed Jay Macklin has taken his reluctant wife Shelby for the week between Christmas and New Year's in the hope of repairing their fraying relationship. Complications ensue and storm-tossed tension builds in an expert novel of pure suspense. Can a writer receive a Grand Master Award from Mystery Writers of America and still be underrated? I think so.

  *** Parnell Hall: Caper, Pegasus, $25. New York private eye Stanley Hastings takes a rare case from other than his personal-injury-attorney employer: a woman who expresses concern that her teenage daughter is turning tricks. Like departed masters Westlake and McBain, Hall carries the reader along with snappy dialogue, and the semi-farcical, constantly puzzling but never confusing plot would have delighted his fiction-writing model, Erle Stanley Gardner.

  *** Lee Goldberg: Mr. Monk is Cleaned Out, Obsidian, $22.95. The latest hilariously funny and devilishly clever novel about TV's obsessive-compulsive sleuth Adrian Monk is an impossible-crime lover's delight. How could the driver of an otherwise empty, constantly observed vehicle be garroted? How could a Madoff-style Ponzi scheme operator under house arrest and constantly wearing a state-of-the-art tracking device leave his home to murder former associates? The best comic set-piece, in which the financially ruined Monk, having lost his consultancy job with the San Francisco P.D., becomes a supermarket employee, is also one of three self-contained mystery puzzles unrelated to the main plot.

  *** Ed Gorman: Stranglehold, Minotaur, $24.99. Political consultant Dev Conrad has plenty of challenges in his efforts to get Congresswoman Susan Cooper reelected: her awkward stepmother, the murder of an opposing political consultant, an insider sabotaging the campaign, and the candidate's own erratic behavior. The plot, the characters, the humor and hu-manity, and Gorman's frighteningly believable description of campaign dirty tricks make this a first-rate piece of political fiction.

  *** Ken Bruen: The Devil, Minotaur, $24.99. This is a wild one, even by standards of the over-the-top series about Galway private eye Jack Taylor: a variation on Faust (literally, not metaphorically). Once you get into the rhythm of his one-sentence paragraphs, multi-paragraph sentences, and epigraphs set off by blank pages, minimalist Bruen can be as compulsive a pleasure as a bag of potato chips.

  *** Bill Crider: Murder in the Air, Minotaur, $24.99. The overwhelming stench emanating from a chicken farm and the murder of the farm's owner precipitate the latest en-thralling case for Dan Rhodes, sheriff of Blacklin County, Texas. Other elements are a mysterious mischief-making archer, inevitably dubbed Robin Hood, and a dangerous and illegal form of fishing called noodling. Though typically light and humorous, the novel makes an important point about pollution from rural factory farms.

  The landmark first novel about Max Allan Collins's series hit man, Quarry (Perfect Crime, $14.95), originally pub-lished in 1976 as The Broker, has a new afterword by the author. The next
in the series, Quarry's Ex, originally announced for September 2010, is now scheduled for fall 2011, as its publisher Hard Case Crime changed distributors.

  Steve Steinbock will assume the juror's chair in the next issue, and I'm looking forward to his debut as much as anyone. I owe gratitude to the EQMM editors who have made my work better and my life easier over the past few decades, from the late Fred Dannay and Eleanor Sullivan to the successor who impressively upholds their demanding tradition, Janet Hutchings. Thanks as well to assistant editor Emily Giglierano and all her predecessors and to all readers of this column, especially its first reader, my wife and in-house editor Rita.

  Copyright © 2011 by Jon L. Breen

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  Special Feature: 2010 EQMM READERS AWARD

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  Dave Zeltserman

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  Doug Allyn

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  This year's Readers Award results are notable for the fictional time spectrum they span: both forward in time with first-place winner Dave Zeltserman's “Archie's Been Framed,” whose technology requires a bit of suspension of disbelief to imagine put in practice in the here and now, and backward in time in Doug Allyn's second and third place stories “The Scent of Lilacs” and “Days of Rage,” which, respectively, look at the American Civil War and revisit the turbulent 1960s.

  Last year, Dave Zeltserman came in third in the Readers Award voting for the first story in the series to which “Archie's Been Framed” belongs, “Julius Katz.” Rarely have we seen a premise as original as that behind this series—a miniature computer who, in the spirit of the Nero Wolfe novels of Rex Stout, plays Archie to the stories’ private detective; and the manner in which the idea is executed is equally fresh. Of course, Dave Zeltserman already had a leg up in writing of the endearing computer Archie: For twenty years he worked as a software engineer. Much of the rest of his fiction, however, is in the noir genre, including 2008's Small Crimes, which was chosen by NPR as one of the top five novels of its year. This past autumn the Needham, Massachusetts author won a Shamus Award for Best Short Story for “Julius Katz.” His novel The Caretaker of Lorne Field is currently nominated for a Black Quill Award, and the 2011 Zeltserman novel Outsourced has been optioned for film.

  Doug Allyn is not new to the historical mystery. His 1994 Edgar-winning story “The Dancing Bear” (AHMM) belongs to that genre. But “The Scent of Lilacs” is more personal, based on his own family's lore, and it provides a most unusual perspective on the Civil War. As always, the eight-time Readers Award winner earned his spectacular finish in this competition with engaging characters, memorable setting, and sweeping action. His third-place winner, “Days of Rage,” brought back series character Dan Shea and demonstrated the Michigan author's ability to weave controversial social and political issues into his fiction. In 2010 Doug Allyn was the winner of the Best Long Story Derringer Award of the Short Mystery Fiction Society for “Famous Last Words” (EQMM November 2009).

  Congratulations to these gifted writers and to all of the finalists listed below!

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  Fourth: “Mr. Monk and the Seventeen Steps” by Lee Goldberg

  Fifth: “To Kill an Ump” by Brendan DuBois

  Sixth: “Winter's End” by Clark Howard

  Seventh: “Last Dance in Shanghai” by Clark Howard

  Eighth: “Skyler Hobbs and the Rabbit Man” by Evan Lewis

  Ninth: “The Man With One Eye” by Stephen Ross

  Tenth: “The Changelings: A Very Grim Fairytale” by Carol Biederman

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  Fiction: TURNING LEO by Clark Howard

  A ward of Cook County, Illinois by age twelve, Clark Howard grew up on the lower West Side of Chicago, living in a succession of foster homes, from which he habitually ran away. His latest story, about friends from that West Side neighborhood whomeet decades later on opposite sides of the law, draws from that period in his life. Mr. Howard went on to becomeone of the most honored writers in our field, with Edgar, Derringer, and EQMM Readers Awards to his credit and several movies made from his work.

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  Art by Mark Evans

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  Leo Pilsen answered his front doorbell at six-thirty in the morning, wearing a satin robe over his silk pajamas. The scowl on his face was testament to the fact that he usually slept until noon after going to bed at three or four a.m. Gangsters like Leo did not keep normal business hours.

  Opening the door, he stood face-to-face with an old friend from Chicago's Lower West Side streets, Danny Manley. The two had run together in a teenage gang called the West End Dukes. The gang owned two blocks of West End Avenue, and patrolled and protected it like an old-time fiefdom. When away from those two blocks, they broke into boxcars in the railroad yards, burglarized chain drugstores, stole and emptied small delivery trucks, and in general lived by the dogma of their streets: Live Fast, Die Young, and Have a Good-looking Corpse.

  There were five of them. Two were shot dead trying to hold up a savings and loan office in the suburbs, and a third was bludgeoned to death by the brother of a young Hispanic girl, age thirteen, whom he had impregnated after getting her drunk at a block-party dance.

  Of the two who were left, Leo Pilsen managed to swing a low-level job with the Outfit, Chicago's organized crime family, and over the years had risen, via brains, bullets, and boldness, to a position of high authority in the mob.

  The remaining member of the Dukes, Danny Manley, had, in desperation to get off the streets, joined the Marine Corps, and served honorably for four years. He was awarded two combat medals in Desert Storm, and upon his return home was recruited to join the Chicago Police Department. He too had risen through the ranks, through patrol, custody, robbery, vice, homicide, and eventually back to patrol with the rank of lieutenant.

  That morning, when Pilsen an-swered the doorbell and faced Dan Manley, they had not seen each other since several weeks earlier, when they had split a pizza and a pitcher of beer at Danno's out on Cicero Avenue, at the monthly meeting they had carried on for a number of years. Leo's mouth dropped open at the sight of Danny at his front door at six-thirty in the morning.

  "What is it?” he asked urgently, his gangster mind immediately going into high gear. This had to be something bad. “What's wrong?"

  "It's Katie,” Manley said. “They've got her in the lockup down at Central on some kind of open charge, waiting for an incident report to be filed."

  Leo's head swung around. “Diane! Diane, check Katie's bedroom—now!"

  Katie, given name Katherine Eileen, was the elder daughter of Leo and Diane Pilsen. She was barely eighteen, by a few days. Their younger daughter, Barbara, was fifteen.

  Moments later, Leo's wife, Diane, her face ashen, hurried to his side.

  "Katie's bed hasn't been slept in."

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  An hour later, Lieutenant Dan Manley was in his office at headquarters, on a speaker phone with Fred Summar, a special agent in Chicago's FBI office.

  "How do you read him?” Summar asked.

  "So far he's hanging tough. Right now he's probably on the phone with a mob lawyer and their bail bondsman trying to sort everything out."

  "His wife?"

  "Losing it. Visions of lesbian rape driving her crazy. Her poor little girl in a lockup."

  "What did you tell Pilsen you'd do for him?"

  "I said I'd check everything out. Try to make sure the kid was kept in isolation. Break down the evidence to see how serious it is, and get back to him."

  "Well,” Summar said, “why don't you do that, then. I'll see if I can pull in some favors with the county to postpone bail if it's offered. Meet for lunch?"

  "Okay. Scarpi's at noon?"

  "Copy that."

  Leo Pilsen, meanwhile, was burning up the phone lines.

  "How soon can you get her out of there?” he demanded of the Outfit's top attorney, J. Mitchell Britten, who had been awakened by Pi
lsen's call.

  "I have no idea, Leo. I don't even know what kind of charge they have against her. Let me see what I can find out—"

  "I want her out by noon, Britten!” Leo ordered, and hung up.

  Next he called Harry Lewis, who operated the Outfit's bail bond business, and was always in his office early every morning to approve overnight bail postings.

  "I need to get her out on bond as quickly as possible, Harry. Diane is hysterical over this—"

  "I'll get on it right away, Leo. Did Manley say where she was being held, or what for exactly?"

  "No, he just saw her name on a central booking computer or something. He's looking into it for me now."

  There was a pause, as Harry Lewis weighed Leo's last statement. Then: “Manley's not on our pad, is he, Leo?"

  "No. Just a friend of mine from the streets in the old days. We've kept in touch, but he's straight."

  Hanging up, Leo kept his hand on the receiver as he mulled over Harry's question. He did know several policemen who were on the Outfit's pad—its payoff list. One of them was a vice officer, Captain John Taft. Accessing his private directory, Leo called him and explained his plight.

  "I'll get to the bottom of it, Leo,” Taft said. “This is Katherine, the older girl, right? How old is she again?"

  "Seventeen—no, I mean eighteen. She just turned eighteen last week."

  That made her an adult, Captain John Taft automatically thought. “I'll get back to you quick as I can, Leo. Try to stay calm."

  Behind Leo, as he hung up the phone, his wife Diane was sobbing and pounding her fists on a counter in the kitchen.