Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Vol. 108, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 661 & 662, September/October 1996

The Jury Box by Jon L. Breen

© 1996 by Jon L. Breen

Is the author a good authority on which of his or her novels are best or worst? Most, of course, never venture a public opinion on the subject beyond liking the latest book the best, but frequent EQMM contributor Robert Barnard is an exception. In an interview in the January/February 1996 issue of Mystery Scene, he sings the praises of Death of an Old Goat (1974), Sheer Torture (1981; American title Death By Sheer Torture), Out of the Blackout (1985), Political Suicide (1986), The Skeleton in the Grass (1987), A City of Strangers (1990), and A Scandal in Belgravia (1991), but warns readers off The Missing Bronte (1983; American title The Case of the Missing Bronte), Little Victims (1983; American title School for Murder), and A Hovering of Vultures (1993). Of the two novels most recently reprinted by Penguin at $5.95 each, Barnard speaks fondly of Corpse in a Gilded Cage (1984) but disparages The Cherry Blossom Corpse (1987; British title Death in Purple Prose). The latter book, set at a romance writers’ convention, is one I remember as hugely enjoyable, but then I never met a Barnard novel or story I didn’t like, including his latest pseudonymous foray into historical fiction.

*** Robert Barnard as Bernard Bastable: Too Many Notes, Mr. Mozart, Carroll & Graf, $21. In the parallel universe of this novel, second in the Mozart series, the great composer did not die a young man but lived on to become music tutor to Princess Victoria, likable and precocious heiress presumptive to the British throne, in 1830. The combination of court intrigues, murder, historical revision, and distinctive Barnard humor in Mozart’s first-person narration make this another winner.

**** Sharyn McCrumb: The Rosewood Casket, Dutton, $23.95. In the fourth novel of the author’s Appalachian series, dying farmer Randall Stargill’s four sons — a local naturalist who entertains and instructs school children as Daniel Boone, a country-western singing star, a Cincinnati businessman, and a military officer — set to work hand-building a coffin according to their father’s wishes. Also involved are a developer seeking farm land to build houses on, the ghost of a small girl who wanders the woods, some unidentified human bones, and Sheriff Spencer Arrowood’s local police force. McCrumb, always enjoyable, is at her best in this series. She is one of the finest novelists currently working in the mystery-suspense field.

**** Ed Gorman: Cage of Night, White Wolf, $5.95. One of suspense fiction’s best storytellers is in peak form in the smalltown saga of outsider Spence, back from an army tour, whose life is changed by his encounter with homecoming queen Cindy Marie Brasher, the sort of girl he could only dream about in his high-school geekhood. What makes the story of murder, pursuit, and possible extraterrestrials work so well is that nearly all the characters are such recognizably ordinary and likable people. Gorman asks the usual dark suspense questions: Can the story possibly end happily? Are the terrors supernatural or mundane? At the end, most of the questions have been answered, but the reader still wonders what will happen next.

*** Francis M. Nevins, Jr.: Into the Same River Twice, Carroll & Graf, $21. Eighteen years after his previous book-length appearance in Corrupt and Ensnare, law professor Loren Mensing returns, seeking a lost love and a wide-ranging conspiracy in 1987 New York and St. Louis. The author’s three self-identified influences are all apparent: two highly ingenious dying messages a la Ellery Queen appear, one of them in a self-contained short story in the first chapter (first published as “Murder of a Male Chauvinist,” EQMM, May 1973); the second chapter has a lady-vanishes situation out of Cornell Woolrich; and the central plot involves citizen dissatisfaction with the adversarial justice system that was Erie Stanley Gardner’s home ground. Nevins’s combination of these elements is both distinctive and totally involving.

** John B. Spencer: Quake City, The Do-Not Press, P. O. Box 4215, London SE23 2QD; £5.99. Though private eye Charley Case tells his tale in Chandleresque forties style, he lives in 21st-Century Los Angeles, now an island separated from the mainland in the great ’quake of 1997. You may lose track of the routine plot, but the telling and some of the s.f. elements will probably keep you reading. The British author writes pretty good faux American, but the phrase “assist [the police] with their enquiries” and the terms “windscreen” and “baseball pitch” (referring to the field, not the throw) betray him.

A rating for Stephen King’s serial novel The Green Mile will have to wait until all six installments are published. For now, be advised that Part 1, The Two Dead Girls (Signet, $2.99), set in 1932 at a Southern prison’s equivalent of death row, demonstrates the sense of background and character and the storytelling mastery that have made its author so overwhelmingly successful and popular.

Gambling and games-playing stories from EQMM and AHMM are gathered in Win, Lose, or Die (Carroll & Graf, $21), edited by Cynthia Manson and Constance Scarborough and including contributors as diverse as John Steinbeck, Agatha Christie, Anthony Boucher, Ruth Rendell, Stanley Ellin, Jack Ritchie, Lord Dunsany, and “Pat Hand” (pseudonym of historical novelist Thomas B. Costain). Other inventive theme anthologies from the two magazines have self-explanatory titles: Senior Sleuths (Berkley, $5.99), edited by the same team and including such admirable figures as Phyllis Bentley’s Miss Phipps and William Brittain’s Mr. Strang, and Mysterious Menagerie (Berkley, $5.99), edited by Manson alone, featuring an especially nice cover by an uncredited artist and names like Asimov, Wodehouse, Hoch, and Chesterton on the contents page.

Enthusiasts of real-life mysteries should seek out Murder and Spies, Lovers and Lies (Avon, $12.50), in which historian Marc Mappen recounts and weighs the evidence in eighteen American controversies, most of them either definitely or arguably criminous, e.g. Lizzie Borden, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Lindbergh kidnapping, and the deaths of Meriwether Lewis, Marilyn Monroe, and Martin Luther King, Jr. His accounts are entertaining and even-handed, his conclusion usually running to the least sensational (and most likely) solution, and he includes valuable annotated bibliographies.