Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 106, No. 4 & 5. Whole No. 648 & 649, October 1995

The Jury Box by Jon L. Breen

© 1995 by Jon L. Breen

On any annual competition, whether it’s Miss America or the Kentucky Derby or the movie Oscars, there are great years and solid years and relatively weak years. If there had been an Edgar Award for best American first mystery novel in 1929, contenders would have included Ellery Queen, Dashiell Hammett, and Mignon G. Eberhart, who launched one of the longest and most distinguished careers in American mystery fiction with the recently-reissued The Patient in Room 18 (University of Nebraska Press, $9.95).

A hospital mystery introducing plucky narrator Nurse Sarah Keate and charismatic Great Detective Lance O’Leary, Room 18 has many of the familiar features of mystery novels of its period: characters who sneak around acting suspicious, withholding information and dropping clues at every turn; an incredibly complicated solution; and a McGuffin (in this case a gram of radium) that moves from hiding place to hiding place as if possessing a will of its own. Eberhart would do better later, but many of her strengths are in place here: the ability to create a tense and brooding atmosphere, the leavening of humor, and the fully-drawn, prickly but likeable central character. In a novel that is a period piece without being a museum piece (an important distinction), the details of another time, notably the medical procedures and attitudes, are fascinating.

The same publisher has also reissued the second novel in the Keate series, 1930’s While the Patient Slept, at the same price. Both books have meaty introductions by editor Jay Fultz and terrific surrealistic cover illustrations by Ed Lindlof, making the whole project an appropriate tribute to one of the last surviving Golden Age writers.

If not quite another 1929, 1985 was also a notable year for debuts. The Edgar winner, Jonathan Kellerman’s When the Bough Breaks, launched a series that has become a fixture of the bestseller lists, and the best-known runner-up, Dick Lochte’s Sleeping Dog, has achieved as near classic status as any novel so recent. Below are considered a new collection of short stories by another writer whose first mystery novel appeared in 1985, Ed Gorman; the most recent novels of Lochte and Kellerman; and the latest from two formidable writers from the also notable crop of 1984, K. K. Beck and Sharyn McCrumb.

**** Ed Gorman: Cages and Other Stories, Deadline Press, P.O. Box 2808, Apache Junction, AZ 85217; $35. Published in a limited edition of 500 copies, this generous 150,000-word collection demonstrates its author’s ability to work in (and sometimes combine), a variety of fiction genres: detection, suspense, horror, fantasy, western, and science fiction. Among the highlights are “Moonchasers,” a novella-length memoir of a fifties boyhood, and the 1993 EQMM story, “Seasons of the Heart.” Gorman offers interesting afterwords for most of the stories.

*** Jonathan Kellerman, Self-Defense, Bantam, $22.95. In his ninth case, Southern California child psychologist sleuth Dr. Alex Delaware has an adult for a patient: a young woman, traumatized by her service as a juror in the trial of a serial killer, whose recurrent nightmare may hold clues to a crime that occurred when she was a small child. Among the characters is an aging literary icon whose career bears some resemblance to Norman Mailer’s. While the book may not rank with the best of Delaware’s cases, it confirms that this gifted storyteller’s bestselling status is well-deserved.

*** Dick Lochte: The Neon Smile, Simon and Schuster, $21. The second novel about New Orleans private eye Terry Manion features the kind of complex structure its author specializes in. Hired by a tabloid TV show to look into the thirty-year-old murder of black militant Tyrone Pano, Manion finds connections to another mid-sixties case, the brutal crimes of a serial killer known as the Meddler. The book flashes back to the 1965 investigations of Manion’s mentor, outsider homicide detective J. J. Legendre. Lochte sets the scene and deploys the characters and plot elements with a pro’s practiced touch.

*** Sharyn McCrumb: If Yd Killed Him When I Met Him..., Ballantine, $20. McCrumb also combines past and present crime, as forensic anthropologist Elizabeth MacPherson tries to solve two cases of arsenic poisoning, occurring in the same house a century apart. On the plus side, McCrumb is readable as ever, juggling several plotlines with skill and providing solutions to the two arsenic cases that merit the novel’s inclusion in any list of outstanding poisoning mysteries. On the minus side, MacPherson and her family are a more exasperating group than ever, from a mother with no trust (perhaps appropriately) in her children to a brother who must be the slowest-witted lawyer in all of fiction; and the comic subplots, involving a woman betrothed to a dolphin and the mother’s apparent re-emergence as a radical lesbian, detract from the main story line.

*** K. K. Beck: Cold Smoked, Mysterious, $18.95. If you like educational mysteries, try this specialized background: seafood journalism. Investigating the murder of a hostess at a Seattle fishing industry convention, Jane da Silva, forced into sleuthing for the fourth time under the terms of her detective uncle’s nutty will, becomes a reporter for Seafood Now and travels to Norway and the Shetland Isles. Beck is among the most amusing, readable, and versatile of current crime writers.

*** Perri O’Shaughnessy: Motion to Suppress, Delacorte, $21.95. Courtroom fiction buffs will relish this first novel from the sister collaboration that took second in the recent MWA short-story contest. Lake Tahoe attorney Nina Reilly defends a casino waitress accused of the murder of her abusive husband. Part of the elaborate and surprising double-whammy climax invites more comment than the ethics of mystery reviewing permit. A hint: The first name of one participant will bring a smile to fans of the courtroom genre.

Cathleen Jordan and Cynthia Manson have combed the backfiles of EQMM and AHMM for Murder Most Medical (Carroll & Graf, $21), finding vintage medical puzzles from Dorothy L. Sayers, Michael Innes, and Conan Doyle, along with newer tales, including a clever case for Edward D. Hoch’s Dr. Hawthorne, “The Problem of the Dying Patient.”