Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 133, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 805 & 806, September/October 2008

The Jury Box by Jon L. Breen

© 2008 by Jon L. Breen

Why are so many writers who already have serious reputations in the wider world of literature turning to crime fiction? It could be the realization that the genre, far from limiting comment and creativity, offers infinite possibilities for exploring serious themes and societal mores. It could be dissatisfaction with the downgrading of plot in so-called literary fiction. In many cases, it is undoubtedly a commercial decision, in recognition of the shrinking audience for general fiction. Whatever the reason, many have made significant contributions, e.g. Joyce Carol Oates, James Lee Burke, and Michael Chabon. Invaders from the mainstream are especially welcome when they come not to subvert or “transcend” the genre but rather, armed with a knowledge and appreciation of its history and conventions, to practice it with a high level of skill. Take the recent example of Benjamin Black, pseudonym of Booker Prize winner John Banville, who demonstrates that a whodunit can keep the reader guessing without distorting or falsifying the characters.

**** Benjamin Black: The Lemur, Picador, $13. Burnt-out investigative journalist John Glass, an Irishman transplanted to Manhattan, is asked by his father-in-law, communications tycoon and former CIA agent Big Bill Mulholland, to write his biography. The Lemur of the title is researcher-for-hire Dylan Riley, who hints at blackmail and is murdered, leaving Glass to figure out who killed him and what family secret he had uncovered. The novel is beautifully written, admirably brief, and effective both as character study and mystery.

**** Ruth Rendell: Not in the Flesh, Crown, $25.95. Rendell achieved a serious literary reputation while working within the crime-fiction genre. Her Chief Inspector Wexford’s debut, From Doon With Death, appeared in 1964, making the English cop one of the longest active current sleuths. He remains in excellent form in a case involving an eleven-years-dead murder victim, whose skeleton is uncovered by a truffle-sniffing dog, and an ailing novelist on Biblical themes whose odd household includes both an ex-wife and a current one. A subplot concerns the appalling practice of female genital mutilation among Somali immigrants.

*** Laura Lippman: Another Thing to Fall, Morrow, $24.95. Baltimore private eye Tess Monaghan takes a job babysitting an accident-plagued TV series’s female star, whose unhealthy thinness and apparent vacuity are both pathetic and terrifying. Some of the characters, particularly one of Tess’s unlikely night-school students, are hard to believe, but the depiction of the city and of TV production are rich in amusing insights.

*** Max Allan Collins: Strip for Murder, illustrations by Terry Beatty, Berkley, $14. In 1953 Manhattan, former stripper Maggie Starr returns to the stage in a Broadway musical based on Hal Rapp’s hillbilly comic strip Tall Paul, leaving her Goodwinesque stepson Jack in charge of their newspaper syndicate. Was the death of Rapp’s bitter rival Sam Fizer, creator of the classic boxing strip Mug O’Malley, suicide or murder? The second in this good series offers conflicting clues, compulsive punning, period cultural references, and more thinly-disguised figures from the show biz and comics worlds, culminating in a Queenian challenge to the reader delivered via Beatty’s cartoons.

*** Parnell Hall: The Sudoku Puzzle Murders, St. Martin’s Minotaur/Dunne, $23.95. As regular readers know, alleged Puzzle Lady Cora Felton couldn’t solve or construct a crossword to save her life, but it turns out she’s a whiz at sudokus. Both types of puzzles figure in a case involving two Japanese publishers, who are professional and romantic rivals, and a stolen samurai sword. Much of the bright dialogue, albeit used as an extending ingredient, is very funny, and the denouement features one of the most unusual comic courtroom scenes in fictional annals. Four sudokus of varying difficulty are credited to New York Times and NPR puzzle maven Will Shortz.

*** Mary Higgins Clark: Where Are You Now?, Simon and Schuster, $25.95. Ten years ago, Columbia University senior Mack MacKenzie disappeared, his only communications with his family annual phone calls on Mother’s Day. When his younger sister Carolyn sets out to find him, a wonderfully complicated plot involving a large cast is set in motion. You don’t read Clark for her prose, dialogue, or characterization (all serviceable at best), but her gift for story structure and personnel management explains her status as perennial bestseller.

*** Katherine Hall Page: The Body in the Gallery, Morrow, $23.95. Faith Fairchild, caterer and pastor’s wife in small-town Massachusetts, takes over the local museum’s restaurant operation in order to find out who replaced a friend’s donated art-work with a forgery. The titular body is a young shaven-headed woman who has taken the place of a goldfish in one of the alleged artworks on display. Ultimately the domestic side, including a subplot on the alarming phenomenon of cyberbullying, is more interesting than the mystery. This is a lesser entry in a literate, informative, and often amusing series that is always worth reading.

*** Dennis Palumbo: From Crime to Crime, Tallfellow, $24.95. In acknowledged homage to Isaac Asimov’s Black Widowers (to the extent that the ultimate detective is a mutton-chopped elder named Isaac), the suburban husbands of the Smart Guys Marching Society turn their Sunday afternoon male-bonding sessions to armchair detection. Their EQMM debut, a locked-room mystery, is joined by eight cases new to print (with a dying message and ghost sightings among the trappings) and three non-series tales, one new and one (from The Strand) casting a young Albert Einstein as detective. While some of the plots stretch credulity (as did some of Asimov’s), classical detection buffs will enjoy these good-humored puzzles.

*** David Ossman: The Ronald Reagan Murder Case, BearManor, $19.95. In 1945 Hollywood, 25-year-old director and radio star George Tirebiter encounters murders old (a 1920 case combining elements of William Desmond Taylor and Thomas Ince) and new (a Reagan lookalike found wearing a duck suit in the Santa Monica surf by Lt. Reagan himself). Considering Tirebiter’s origin in the satirical Firesign Theatre and the broadness of some of the jokes — he works for Paranoid Pictures, and WOP is a Chicago radio station — the mystery is played fairly straight. Wartime Southern California and the network radio background are nicely captured, and the prose, pace, and dialogue are strong.

Two important writers have been added to the Rue Morgue Press reprint list ($14.95 each): John Dickson Carr with two classic locked-room puzzles from his peak year of 1938, The Crooked Hinge and The Judas Window, the latter written as Carter Dickson; and Colin Watson with the 1958 debut of his comic Flaxborough series, Coffin, Scarcely Used. As usual, publishers Tom and Enid Schantz provide informative introductions.

Shepard Rifkin’s excellent 1970 civil rights-era novel, The Murderer Vine ($6.99) is the latest in Hard Case Crime’s distinguished reprint line... In honor of Ian Fleming’s centenary, Penguin has all 14 James Bond books (twelve novels and two collections) in print in handsome trade paper editions. A rereading of the 1959 classic Goldfinger ($14) shows how good 007’s creator could be at his best.