Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 129, No. 6. Whole No. 790, June 2007

The Jury Box by Jon L. Breen

© 2007 by Jon L. Breen

Washington Post critic Patrick Anderson has written a survey of recent bestselling crime fiction, The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction (Random House, $24.95). While his knowledge of mystery history seems spotty and I question his implication that the best of crime fiction present is artistically superior to the best of crime fiction past, he writes engagingly about such estimable contemporaries as Michael Connelly, Sue Grafton, Scott Turow, and George P. Pelecanos, among many others. The emphasis is American, but a few British writers are discussed, notably Scotland’s Ian Rankin, the creator of maverick cop John Rebus, one of the great characters in contemporary crime fiction now twenty years on the job. In-creased length, a broad canvas, a multitude of apparently unconnected cases, and an emphasis on the personal lives of the cops are not always happy trends in the hands of lesser writers, but Rankin is a master.

***** Ian Rankin: The Naming of the Dead, Little, Brown, $24.99. In 2005 Edinburgh, the G8 economic summit and associated demonstrations complicate life for Rebus, now approaching retirement age and mourning the death of a brother, and his colleague Siobhan Clarke, whose aging hippie parents have traveled north to join the protests. A Scottish Member of Parliament has died by fall, jump, or push from Edinburgh Castle, and a serial killer has apparently used a weird shrine to witchcraft and superstition called a Clootie Well to link three seemingly unrelated crimes. One of the best mystery plots in recent memory accompanies a detailed and harrowing account of the historic events attending the summit, peopled by a wide range of vividly drawn characters.

**** Dick Lochte: Croaked! Five Star $25.95. In 1965 Los Angeles, young Harry Trauble works on his potential best-selling novel Child of the Gap while writing advertising and promotion copy for Ogle, a high-class girly magazine second only to that one in Chicago with the rabbit. In a workplace whodunit somewhat in the mode of Dorothy L. Sayers’s Murder Must Advertise, the circulation director dies when a sculpture of the magazine’s trademark frog falls on his head. Lochte’s satirical eye captures the period flawlessly, and there’s even a broad clue to the surprising murderer.

**** Margaret Frazer: The Traitor’s Tale, Berkley, $24.95. In 1450 England, nun-detective Sister Frevisse and Simon Joliffe, actor-turned-intelligence-agent for the Duke of York, join forces to solve a series of murders possibly connected to a plot against King Henry VI. A richly detailed mix of political, social, and domestic history is balanced by nimble plotting, strong characterization, humor, and lively give and take. Both prose and dialogue avoid archaism and stiltedness without seeming anachronistic.

*** Lee Goldberg: Mr. Monk and the Blue Flu, Signet, $6.99. When San Francisco police engage in a sick-out to protest the mayor’s budget cuts, Tv’s obsessive-compulsive homicide consultant Adrian Monk returns to official police work and confronts a variety of cases (serial killings of female joggers by a shoe fetishist, a murdered astrologer, and others, some connected and some not), aided by minder and Watson-narrator Natalie Teeger and a trio of comically impaired ex-cops. At least two chapters could stand alone as short stories. This is a very funny and inventively plotted book, and you don’t have to be a fan of the TV show (created by Andy Breckman) to enjoy it.

*** Deborah Donnelly: Bride and Doom, Dell, $6.99. Wedding planner Carnegie Kincaid’s latest murder-interrupted assignment involves the nuptials of a baseball slugger for the fictitious Seattle Navigators and a Goth rocker known professionally as Honeysuckle Hell. She also has her own coming marriage to worry about in a strong entry from a consistently good seriocomic series. Many will spot the murderer, either through veteran whodunit reader’s instincts or some commendably fair clues.

*** Robert B. Parker: Edenville Owls, Sleuth Philomel, $17.99. In 1946 Massachusetts, eighth-grader Bobby Murphy prepares his coachless basketball team for a state tournament and tries to save his admired teacher from a mysterious threat. The author’s first young-adult novel, aimed at readers 12 and up, is a juvenile equivalent of a Spenser caper, including noble hero in embryo, simple straight-ahead plot, and wise and supportive adolescent Susan Silverman figure, clearly a tribute to Parker’s wife of fifty years. Some elements might appeal more to adults than to the target audience, who could use more context for pop-culture references familiar and nostalgic to Parker’s contemporaries.

** Ruth Dudley Edwards: Murdering Americans, Poisoned Pen, $24.95. Offering more right-wing cultural satire than mystery, Edwards has taken every embarrassing anecdote about the failures and excesses of American universities (political correctness, lowered standards, culturally illiterate students, grade inflation, liberal bias) and visited them on a single fictitious Indiana campus, where colorful series sleuth Baroness Troutbeck serves as Visiting Professor. Even those who don’t share the political perspective may find at least some bits funny. The British author’s take on American lingo isn’t bad, but she has, like, no idea where the likes are properly placed in youth speech.

Two new anthologies will be of special interest to EQMM readers. Passport to Crime (Carroll & Graf, $16.95), edited by Janet Hutchings, gathers 26 stories from the magazine’s regular feature of mysteries in translation, neatly bookended by Fred Kassak’s droll contemporary variation on an Edgar Allan Poe classic, “Who’s Afraid of Ed Garpo?”, and Norizuki Rintaro’s cleverly plotted Ellery Queen homage, “An Urban Legend Puzzle.” While some of the writers have books available in English — e.g., Boris Akunin, Baantjer, Paul Halter — others, for all their award-winning accomplishments, still have not appeared in translation outside of “Passport to Crime,” an addition to this magazine that surely would have Fred Dannay and Anthony Boucher smiling.

The latest collection from prolific editor Mike Ashley, The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries (Carroll & Graf, $14.95), has among its 29 entries six stories from EQMM (two by Edward D. Hoch), five from AHMM, and eight originals, including an entertaining (if not quite completely solved) Bat Masterson story — “The Hook” by Robert Randisi — and an excellent World War II-era locked-room mystery set on an Army base — “The Benning School for Boys” by Richard A. Lupoff. While Ashley has deliberately avoided much-reprinted icons of the miracle problem like Carr, Futrelle, Rawson, and Chesterton, he has included relatively unfamiliar tales by such present-day specialists as Bill Pronzini and Peter Tremayne, plus past masters like Joseph Commings, Vincent Cornier, Arthur Porges, C. Daly King, and Peter Godfrey.