2. As they are lined up, Mrs. Saunders stands just behind Brett's wife and just ahead of the lady with green fabric luggage, who is just ahead of Clara.
3. Jim's wife is just behind Betty and just ahead of the lady with green leather luggage, who is two places ahead of Mrs. Rappaport.
4. Floyd is just behind Mr. Yager and just ahead of the man with purple fabric luggage, who stands immediately ahead of Greta's husband. Two of their wives have red hair
5. The second, fourth, sixth, and ninth place men include (in some order) Claude (who is immediately ahead of George), Mr. VanDusen, and the two gents with the tan and leather and plaid fabric luggage.
6. Mrs. Xander is four places behind the lady with orange fabric luggage and two places ahead of Helen. They include two redheads and one brunette. They are married to Brett, Claude, and Allen (who is neither first nor last in line).
7. Flora is three places behind Ed's wife (who is not Iris) and two places ahead of the lady with the red canvas luggage (who isn't married to Dan or George). Each has hair of a different color. Their last names are (in some order) Tompkins, Unser, and VanDusen.
8. Ivan's wife stands just behind Mrs. Tompkins; more than two places farther back in line is Alice. Two of them are blondes. Their luggage (in some order) includes the black leather, the plaid fabric, and the blue leather.
9. Joyce is just behind Mrs. Quigley and just ahead of the lady with tan leather luggage.
10. Harry stands three places behind Mr. Zinger (who is not first in line) and two places ahead of the man with red leather luggage. They are married (in some order) to Alice, Betty, and Clara, two of whom are brunettes and the other a blonde.
As Mr. Chekov got the names straightened out, a commotion broke out. A redhaired woman snatched the luggage of the brunette immediately in front of her and dashed for the exit!
Impulsively, the victim cried out, “Omigod! There go all the diamonds!"
The Customs agent promptly signaled for the area to be sealed off. The thief was quickly subdued and handcuffed. “And now,"said Ernest Chekov, “let's have a look at the contents of that luggage."
His experienced fingers soon discovered the bulge in the lining, which when slit revealed a fortune in diamonds. “Aha!” he declared. “A double-header—a would-be thief and a would-be smuggler. Thanks for tipping me off, Leda."
What were the names of the thief and smuggler?
The solution will appear in the July-August issue.
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The Mysterious Photograph
How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?
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We will give a prize of $25 to the person who invents the best mystery story (in 250 words or less, and be sure to include a crime) based on the above photograph. The story will be printed in a future issue. Reply to AHMM, Dell Magazines, 475 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10016. Please label your entry “June Contest,” and be sure your name and address are written on the story you submit. If possible, please also include your Social Security number.
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The Story That Won
The December contest was won by Richard Howard of Conway, AR. Honorable mentions go to Lorna M. Kaine of Oviedo, FL; Grant Hurley of St. Andrews, NB; Mark L. Cook of Williamsburg, ON; Bill Raines of Naples, FL; Todd Riggs of Elkhart, KS; Rudy Uribe, Jr. of Van Nuys, CA; Ed Lynskey of Annandale, VA; Adrian Ludens of Rapid City, SD; and C. T. Landry of Destrehan, LA.
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Payday by Richard Howard
The day after spending the last twenty years in prison Marty Rumbach drove down Highway 65 with the radio blaring and a smile on his face. He could have gotten out ten years sooner if he had accepted the deal with the authorities and told them where the money was, all one million dollars of it. He never really considered it; that much money stretches a long way south of the border.
Marty knew the chances of getting caught were likely when he stole the money from the bank. But he was willing to do time in prison if he could hide the money first where no one would find it, and he had. He had buried it about three feet deep under the dirt floor of the wooden barn on the old Henderson place. Now, he was almost giddy with anticipation as he drew closer. The big payday was here and the last twenty years would soon be a distant memory.
He turned off the highway onto what was once a gravel road, but was now paved. Things had sure changed in the last two decades, he thought. Lots of new houses and traffic.
A few miles down the road, Marty suddenly stopped the car after making the last curve before the Henderson farm; or at least where the farm had been. The Hillside Mall now sat on about a hundred acres of farmland, and where the Henderson's barn had once been there was now ... a bank.
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Booked & Printed
Reviews by Robert C. Hahn
The age of the World Wide Web is also the age of the World Wide Mystery, as the form has won fans in every corner of the globe. Exquisite mysteries are now being published everywhere, and some are winning wide readership in the United States. For American readers, such books combine the pleasures of detection with the stimulation of armchair travel, and this month we feature three relatively recent imports. Brazilian author Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza, Japanese author Miyuki Miyabe, and British author Jon Courtenay Grimwood are among those writers who can offer a glimpse of foreign cultures and exotic locales along with their carefully crafted mysteries.
The first of Jon Courtenay Grimwood's Arabesk series of crime novels, Pashazade: The First Arabesk, originally published by Earthlight in the U.K. in 2001, is just now being introduced to American audiences by Bantam Spectra ($12). It is a brilliant combination of science fiction and mystery. In an alternative future of great subtlety and effectiveness, its hero, Zee Zee, is plucked out of his American prison and transported literally and figuratively into a new role in the African-Mediterranean city of El Iskandryia, an exotic locale he created for the series.
As an inmate of uncertain parentage in a Seattle prison, Zee Zee is a drug courier convicted (falsely) of murder and with certain prospects of becoming a murder victim himself until he is presented with a take-it-or-leave-it escape that starts him on a transforming journey of danger and discovery.
Grimwood, best known perhaps for his science fiction efforts such as Neo Addix and Lucifer's Dragon, here develops a world politically and religiously transformed by a radically different outcome to the conflicts that led to World War I. In this world Islam is triumphant, and in El Iskandryia, Zee Zee arrives with a diplomatic pass identifying him as Ashraf Al-Mansur, a pashazade, or son of a pasha, senior grade. In other words, a bey and an important figure in this society.
This new world and Ashraf's place in it are as dangerous as the world he left and he soon finds himself rebelling against the role assigned him, which is typical. He also finds himself once again the primary suspect in a murder he didn't commit—also typical. Atypically, he finds himself responsible for someone else—a precocious young girl who seems as much a pawn as he himself.
Though not developed in great detail, the political realities of this alternative world are vividly sketched and the technological changes are both credible and easily understood. Against that excellent background, Ashraf (or Zee Zee) emerges as a heroic figure learning, adapting, and trying to control his fate where the odds are stacked against him.
Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza's fourth Inspector Espinosa mystery set in Rio de Janeiro is A Window in Copacabana (Holt, $23). In a police force where corruption is taken for granted, Inspector Espinosa is something of an anomaly. He neither glories in his role of officer of the law, nor uses it to feather his nest. Rather he dreams of the day he can quit the force and use his pension and his large collection of books to open a bookstore.
Meanwhile, he plugs along during a summer season when mostly petty crimes are the norm, until a serial killer begins to strike. A serial
killer is always a nightmare, but imagine the consternation when the killer's targets are policemen. Such is the case that lands on Espinosa's plate when three policeman are killed in a short span of time, each shot with the same gun in a very professional manner.
Espinosa forms a small special investigative team that the other police fear almost as much as the unknown killer—or perhaps killers—as Espinosa and his crew begin looking into the lives of the dead policemen and examining the scant forensic evidence.
It is the person of Espinosa rather than the crime or its investigation that is both captivating and endearing. He gives serious thought to his meals, to the routes he takes walking to work, to “trivial errands” like buying a new toaster that let him dream of a life beyond that of a policeman. At the same time, Espinosa takes his job very seriously and approaches the task of finding the killer with determination, imagination, and skill. Garcia-Roza's relaxed style blends the sights, sounds, and smells of Rio de Janeiro into every fiber of the story as the number of killings grows and the hunt for the killer grows more intense.
Also, Picador is issuing the first three mysteries in the Inspector Espinosa series, The Silence of the Rain, December Heat, and Southwesterly Wind, in handsome trade paperback editions.
Miyuki Miyabe is a best-selling author in Japan, and a prolific one as well with more than thirty-five full-length novels to her credit since her debut in 1992. Her first novel, All She Was Worth (published in English by Kodansha International in 1996), won both Best Mystery Novel and Best Novel of the Year in Japan. Shadow Family (Kodansha, $22.95) is only her second mystery to be published in English, but if others are as skillfully executed more should certainly follow.
In Shadow Family two separate murders are obviously connected—that of Tokyo businessman Ryosuke Tokoroda and that of his former lover, a young woman named Naoko Imai. So though the murders took place in different squad districts, the investigations are merged into one. As a team of detectives comes together to probe the exact relationship between the two victims, they discover that Tokoroda had two families—the wife and daughter he lived with and a fantasy family consisting of a wife, son, and daughter on the Internet, a “shadow family."
Lacking forensic evidence sufficient to identify a suspect explicitly, the police team employ an unusual stratagem to bring the murderer to justice. With Tokoroda's daughter observing through a one-way mirror, the various members of Tokoroda's “shadow family” are brought into the interview room and subjected to questioning. The result is a psychological drama of the first order as the workings of the real family and the fantasy family unfold in often painful fashion and physical evidence assumes secondary importance to emotional truths.
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Reel Crime
Column by Steve Hockensmith
Most years, it's big cities like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles that vie for the dubious title of Murder Capital of America. But throughout the 1980's and into the 1990's, the nation's most dangerous community wasn't a major metropolis. It was tiny Cabot Cove, Maine, an otherwise charming seaside hamlet cursed with the highest per capita murder rate in the world.
Cabot Cove may have been a perilous place, but that didn't stop millions of people from visiting there each week—courtesy of their television sets. As the many devoted fans of the long-running series Murder, She Wrote know well, Cabot Cove was home to mystery writer/amateur sleuth Jessica Fletcher (Angela Lansbury). And now those fans can time-warp back to Cabot Cove's deadly heyday thanks to a new DVD collection, Murder, She Wrote: The Complete First Season.
Though known for its rigid whodunit formula (nearly every episode found Jessica using her crime-solving skills to prove a friend or family member didn't commit murder), the series was groundbreaking in ways it doesn't always get credit for. Before Jessica Fletcher came along, for instance, the TV Detectives Clubhouse had a strict “No Girls Allowed” policy—unless you wanted to be a secretary, girlfriend, or victim, that is.
"There never really had been a woman protagonist who carried the whole show without any help from the males who surround her,” says William Link, who co-created Murder, She Wrote with longtime writing-producing partner Richard Levinson and Peter S. Fischer. “There was Police Woman [in the 1970's], but on that show the males were always bailing Angie Dickinson out. We created a strong woman protagonist who solved cases on her own and didn't need to be rescued by men."
Perhaps surprisingly, that innovation wasn't something Link and his collaborators had to fight to get past cautious network suits. Quite the opposite: It's what the network wanted from the get-go. Murder, She Wrote was born from a meeting Link and Levinson had in the early 1980's with CBS programming honcho Harvey Shephard. Shephard specifically wanted a detective show with a female lead for his network's schedule, and he thought Link and Levinson (the writing-producing team that had created Columbo and brought such series as Ellery Queen to the airwaves) had the TV mystery know-how to dream one up. Working with Fischer, Link and Levinson created Jessica Fletcher and came up with the plot for a movie-of-the-week, The Murder of Sherlock Holmes, that would introduce her to America.
But before they could get a definitive green light from Shephard, they had to find the right actress to bring their heroine to life. They knew exactly who they wanted, however ... Jean Stapleton.
Yes, that Jean Stapleton—Archie Bunker's “dingbat” wife from All in the Family. Unfortunately for Stapleton (but fortunately, perhaps, for everyone else), the actress chose to pass on the project.
"We sent her the script [for the TV movie] and she said she didn't understand it,” Link recalls. “That seemed very strange—it's not quantum physics. We thought it was a quality murder mystery script and that it sold the Fletcher character well. So we were really nonplussed and we went back to see Harvey at CBS thinking he would put a headstone on the whole thing."
Instead, Shephard gave Link and company one more chance to come up with a lead. This time around they suggested a respected film character actress and Broadway performer with almost no television credits on her long resumé: Angela Lansbury. Despite the her low “TV Q” (the rating that assesses a celebrity's name recognition amongst television viewers), Shephard was enthusiastic about the idea. Only one task remained: convincing Lansbury herself.
"We had a meeting with Angela at five o'clock on a Friday afternoon in the ‘Black Tower’ [the fabled headquarters for high-level studio execs] at Universal, and she said, ‘I'll read your script, but I have to tell you—I have another script to read this weekend. It's [All in the Family producer] Norman Lear's new sitcom,'” Link says. “My heart just sank. I thought, Ugh. Up against Norman! For an actress, a half-hour sitcom is much easier to do than an hour-long drama. But Angela said, ‘I will definitely get back to you Monday morning. I'm always good on my word.’ And sure enough she called us Monday morning and said, ‘I'm yours.’ Those were very sweet words to hear!"
Not just sweet—Lansbury's decision was pivotal. Though he's a big believer in the importance of good scripts, Link is canny enough about TV audiences to know that it's actors, not writers, who bring viewers back week after week. And in Angela Lansbury, he'd found someone who could bring those viewers back by the millions.
"When Angela said yes, that sealed the fate of Murder, She Wrote,” Link says. “Jean Stapleton is a wonderful actress, but I don't think she has the strength that Angela has. Angela has the same thing Peter Falk has as Columbo—a charm and a projected intelligence. The audience has to believe that this character actually has the brain cells. Peter as a person is smart, and that comes through on screen. And the same goes for Angela."
After The Murder of Sherlock Holmes was a hit, CBS quickly put in an order for twenty-one episodes of a series. (It's those twenty-one episodes, along with the initial TV movie, that are available on the new DVD collection.) Levinson (who passed away in 1987) and Link stayed involved as story consultants, while Fischer signed on as the series's executive producer. Mu
rder, She Wrote premiered September 30, 1984, and ran for twelve seasons, racking up huge ratings and dozens of Emmy nominations in the process.
But eventually Jessica Fletcher fell victim to perhaps the most puzzling stab in the back of her long mystery-solving career: CBS killed her series even though it was still hugely popular.
The problem wasn't that Murder, She Wrote didn't draw enough viewers. It simply didn't draw enough of the young viewers advertisers prefer.
"Murder, She Wrote could have gone on for many more years if it hadn't skewed to an older audience,” Link says. “Television is obsessed with genuflecting at the fountain of youth. It doesn't make any sense, because the kids will buy a six-pack of Coca-Cola whereas the older audience is going to buy a Lexus. But it doesn't make any difference—[networks] want the young demographic."
So CBS execs gave Jessica Fletcher the axe ... and like the culprits on Murder, She Wrote, they were darned sneaky about it.
"Angela was not told by CBS. She was told on the set by an executive from Universal,” Link fumes. “No one—including Les Moonves, the head of CBS—had the courtesy after twelve years and all the money they made from that show to call Angela."
Sadly, the ageism that knocked off Jessica Fletcher in 1996 hasn't faded away. In fact, it's stronger than ever. Even a TV veteran like Link, with multiple successes under his belt (not to mention Emmys and Edgars), has fallen victim to it: He says he had to take his latest series idea overseas because American studios and networks aren't interested in pitches from producers his age.
"They just want the kids,” sighs Link (who got his start in television adapting his own stories from Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine for the Alfred Hitchcock Presents series). “You hit your sixties, and forget it. And now it's really back in your forties. It's getting very, very bad."
AHMM, June 2005 Page 17