Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 39, No. 13, Mid-December 1994

Editor’s Notes

About a year ago, in AHMM’s December 1993 issue, we published a story called “Nobody Wins” by Charles Ardai. We are pleased to let you know that the story has been nominated for a Shamus Award for Best P.I. Short Story of 1993, given by the Private Eye Writers of America (PWA). The PWA awards will be announced at Bouchercon in October; we will bring you the complete list of nominees and winners in all categories in our February 1995 issue.

In the meantime, of course, we’ll keep our fingers crossed. Mr. Ardai has written ten stories for us starting with “From Zaire to Eternity” in 1989 (about a mysterious African diamond) and including such varied tales as “The Balancing Man,” which defies description but has to do with an old man on a tightwire in an old barn; “The Investigation of Things,” set in Sung Dynasty China about A.D. 1000; and “Carmine and the Christmas Presence,” the story of a woodcarver and a brush with magic, in 1992. He published his first story in EQMM when he was seventeen.

Ken Lester’s “A Boy Named Tzu” is his second story for AHMM, the first having been “Dance of the Hours” way back in 1962. He’s been doing other things in the interim, but tells us that once in 1969, while checking into a hotel in Geneva where he was to present an air safety seminar, he was startled to hear, coming over French radio in the lobby, the French announcer saying, “... la Danse des Heures, par Ken Lester,” followed by an adaptation of his story. An amazing coincidence, n’est-ce pas?

We have four new authors to welcome this time, who bring us four first stories. Frank Snyder, author of “The Slump,” is an attorney in rural New York who took up the practice of small town law recently after having been a partner in a large law firm in Washington, D.C. His most unusual cases, he tells us, “include trips to the Greenland ice cap for a government investigation of the Distant Early Warning System and representing the International Human Rights Law Group before the U.S. Supreme Court in a case involving the deportation of a convicted IRA terrorist.” His previous publications were such legal articles as “Employer Withdrawal from Multiemployer Bargaining.” “The Slump,” we promise, is a whole lot more fun.

Bobby Lee, author of “The Domino Drug Bust: A Love Story,” has also written professionally, but also only nonfiction. He says, “I am (in order of importance): (1) a hillbilly from the Ozarks; (2) a country music fan madly in love with Reba; (3) a Ph.D. in educational psychology who loved teaching and hated being a teacher.” He has taken up writing full time now, for which we, at least, are glad; “The Domino Drug Bust” is a delight.

Nancy Bartholomew, author of “Dead in the Water,” is a psychiatric social worker in private practice. She presently lives near Atlanta but grew up in Pennsylvania. “I began writing the songs I sang in little honky-tonks around Philadelphia, while in college. I also wrote poetry and short stories that were published in the college literary supplement and yearbook. I returned to writing after the birth of my second son. It was merely a case of write or go crazy.” Like her characters in this story, she sometimes goes fishing.

Maude Miller, author of “Out of Order,” is a registered nurse and a former teacher who says that she “won some money in a local writing contest (sponsored by, of all things, a casino in Nevada), and that got me started.” She lives in Idaho, where she grew up, and has “lived in Japan and traveled in the Orient and Europe, England especially... I started writing when my six-year-old students were out at recess; instead of using the old excuse of not having time to write, I first learned to quickly refocus my attention from the grisly details of murder to Beatrix Potter and Mrs. Tiggy Winkle.”