Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 104, Nos. 4 & 5. Whole Nos. 633 & 634, October 1994

The Jury Box by Jon L. Breen

© 1994 by Jon L. Breen

The husband-and-wife detecting team has a long and mostly jolly history. A pioneering example were Agatha Christie’s Tuppence and Tommy Beresford, who first appeared unmarried in The Secret Adversary (1922), acquired a detective agency in the semi-parodic 1929 collection Partners in Crime, and made several widely spaced return engagements in Christie thrillers, ending with Postern of Fate (1973). Nick and Nora Charles of Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man (1934) appeared with their dog Asta in no additional novels but became series characters in a half-dozen films starring William Powell and Myrna Loy. In the forties, Frances and Richard Lockridge’s Mr. and Mrs. North followed in the insouciant, heavy-drinking pattern of Nick and Nora, as did Jake and Helene Justus, secondary characters to John J. Malone in Craig Rice’s novels.

Though Nick narrated The Thin Man and the cases of the Beresfords, Norths, and Justuses were told in the third person, the husband-and-wife mysteries have most commonly been narrated by the wife. This was true of several of the other married detecting teams of the forties, including Frances Crane’s Pat and Jean Abbott, Theodora DuBois’s Jeffrey and Anne McNeill, and my personal favorites, Kelley Roos’s Jeff and Haila Troy. The Troys, along with Patrick Quentin’s Peter and Iris Duluth, were one of the few detecting couples to have serious marital problems, actually separating at one point. One of the contemporary mystery’s favorite marriages has also had its ups and downs.

*** Nancy Pickard: Confession, Pocket Books, $20. Pickard’s novels are not usually considered husband-and-wife mysteries, since narrator Jenny Cain, Massachusetts foundation director and detecting amateur, is consistently identified as series star and cop husband Geof Bushfield is offstage in many of her adventures. But in this case, involving a teenage boy who appears on their doorstep claiming to be Geof s biological son and seeking a true solution to the alleged murder-suicide of his mother and legal father, they are clearly in co-sleuthing harness. Though the plot and a heavily portentous opening chapter lead the reader to expect tough emotional going, the book proves to be in a lighter vein than some of Pickard’s recent, particularly the Edgar-nominated I.O.U., at least until the dramatic final chapter. I’m not sure the conclusion really works, but a Pickard novel is never less than readable and involving.

*** Gar Anthony Haywood: Going Nowhere Fast, Putnam, $19.95. Dottie and Joe Loudermilk, an African-American couple in their fifties, are a likable variation on the traditional married sleuthing team. Touring the country in happy retirement while evading their worrisome children, they become embroiled in a crime problem at the Grand Canyon when their shiftless son Bad Dog turns up just in time to find a sitting dead man in the bathroom of their Airstream trailer. Husband Joe is the ex-cop, but narrator Dottie does most of the detecting, assisted by Bad Dog. Haywood observes what should be the first rule of a comic mystery: he keeps it short. The plot is slight, but the telling is charming — to my admittedly masculine ear, Haywood does the feminine viewpoint flawlessly — and I look forward to repeat visits by the Loudermilk family.

*** Aaron Elkins: Dead Men’s Hearts, Mysterious, $18.95. Like the Jenny Cains, the cases of Skeleton Detective Gideon Oliver are not usually considered husband-and-wife mysteries, but spouse Julie is always on the scene to help demonstrate one of mystery fiction’s happiest marriages. This time the couple travel to Egypt for the filming of a documentary on an institute called Horizon House and wind up looking into the murder of its overbearing director. As usual in this series, a strong sense of background combines with solid classical puzzlespinning. Then there’s the fun of toting up the food references.

*** R.D. Zimmerman: Red Trance, Morrow, $20. Maddy and Alex Phillips, appearing for the third time, are another and rarer variety of male/female sleuthing team. She is a blind and paraplegic forensic hypnotist who lives in wealthy seclusion on Lake Michigan, while he is her brother, legman, and Watson. Most of the novel is in flashback as Alex, in a hypnotic trance that heightens his memory and observation, recounts to Maddy his dangerous adventures in St. Petersburg, where an old friend has been murdered. The picture of post-Soviet Russia, a locale the author knows well, is vivid and fascinating. The unusual structural technique, combined with an emotionally charged, not-quite-over-the-top first-person narrative style, places Zimmerman among the most individual voices in the genre.

*** Nick Gaitano: Special Victims, Simon and Schuster, $21. Some of the best ironic titles (e.g. The Best Years of Our Lives, All Quiet on the Western Front) allude to war. This one, referring to a Chicago police section that, says one character, “they created for dead people who got money,” takes its resonance from the war on crime — and the probing reader can undoubtedly find multiple meanings for it. Lieutenant Tony Tulio, head of the unit, goes after a unique serial killer known as the Collector, who harvests body parts for the ailing relatives of his clients. Though the set-up seems conventional, the way it plays out is anything but, finishing with as thorough a bloodbath as any Shakespearean tragedy. Gaitano is a pseudonym of the Edgar-nominated Eugene Izzi.

*** Paul Bishop: Kill Me Again, Avon, $4.99. The latest from one of the Los Angeles Police Department’s best-known officer-novelists has at its center a fascinating legal issue: can a man who years before was tried and convicted for killing his wife, although her body was never found, be charged with killing her again when she turns up as a fresh corpse shortly after he has been released on parole? Legal buffs may be disappointed that the matter isn’t resolved in court, but satisfying plot twists, exciting action sequences, and insider details of police work make up for the lapse. Homicide detective Fey Croaker is a strong central figure, though she shares her last initial with too many other characters: Colby, Cordell, Craven, and Cahill.

In a field as crowded and competitive as the contemporary mystery, how does the overwhelmed reader navigate from one worthwhile author to another with similar qualities? One way is through a book like By a Woman’s Hand: A Guide to Mystery Fiction by Women (Berkley, $10), expertly written by Jean Swanson and Dean James and covering about 250 contemporary female writers. The alleged male ascendancy in secondary coverage, which has been overstated to put it mildly, is used to justify such a helpful encyclopedic reference source as this being confined to writers of one sex.

Rarely does one renowned American mystery novelist write the life of another. The late Dorothy B. Hughes’s 1978 book on Erle Stanley Gardner was one example of the phenomenon. Charlotte MacLeod gives us another in Had She But Known: A Biography of Mary Roberts Rinehart (Mysterious, $21.95). MacLeod emphasizes the early life of her subject, a gifted and important writer of popular fiction who has sometimes been unfairly patronized by the mystery genre’s historians.