Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 135, No. 1. Whole No. 821, January 2010

The Jury Box by Jon L. Breen

Once, Christmas mysteries were relatively rare, but in today’s commercially driven market we get a slew of them annually. (My own contribution is the Big Trial comedy Probable Claus [Five Star, $25.95].) Some writers have become specialists in the subgenre: Mary Higgins Clark and Carol Higgins Clark have collaborated on several novellas, and Steve Hockensmith has done various seasonal stories for EQMM. Another holiday specialist is longtime EQMM fixture James Powell, whose A Pocketful of Noses: Stories of One Ganelon or Another (Crippen & Landru, $42 signed limited hardcover, $17 trade paper) gathers a dozen stories from these pages about four sleuthing generations in the fictional European principality San Sebastiano. Among them is one of the most chilling and unforgettable Christmas ghost stories you’ll ever read: “Harps of Gold,” in which opposing World War I leaders want to be certain that the previous year’s unseemly fraternization with the enemy is not repeated on December 24, 1916.

*** Anne Perry: A Christmas Promise, Ballantine, $18. In each annual holiday novella, Perry focuses on a different secondary character from one of her Victorian series, in this case Gracie Phipps, thirteen years old in 1883, a few years before becoming a servant to London cop Thomas Pitt and wife Charlotte. Gracie helps a younger East End child, whose uncle, a rag-and-bone man, has died suspiciously, his donkey and cart disappeared. First-rate description and atmosphere, neat plot, and inspirational denouement mark this one of the best in the series, with one drawback: the Zane Grey method of rendering dialect phonetically makes it harder to read. It’s even more bothersome when nearly all the characters are Cockneys.

*** John Mortimer: A Rumpole Christmas, Viking, $21.95. Most of the five stories in this slim collection about barrister Horace Rumpole saw first U.S. publication in the Strand magazine. Only “Old Familiar Faces,” which appeared in Rumpole Rests His Case (2002), has previously been collected. “Slimmed-Down Christmas” is one of the purest detective puzzles in the saga. “Christmas Break,” in which a Muslim university student is accused of the murder of a professor, has some similarities to the novel Rumpole and the Reign of Terror (2006), though this time it is the unpleasant Judge Graves with whom She Who Must Be Obeyed gets chummy. With the passing of the irreplaceable Mortimer, the following may be the final in-print stats on Rumpole: sixteen volumes, including four novels and seventy-five short stories.

*** Kaitlyn Dunnett: A Wee Christmas Homicide, Kensington, $22. Liss MacCrimmon’s Scottish Emporium and a couple of other Moosetookalook, Maine, merchants are the only New England retailers that still have the holiday-hot Tiny Teddies in stock. The success of Liss’s plan to help the town’s economy with a twelve-days-of-Christmas promotion depends on the trendy toy remaining available. Mischief and murder follow in a neatly written and plotted mystery with an intriguing afterword about Scottish yuletide customs. (Dunnett is the pseudonym of historical specialist Kathy Lynn Emerson.)

*** Jeff Markowitz: It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Murder, Five Star, $25.95. In the third recorded case for writer’s-block-afflicted Jersey Knews [sic] magazine reporter Cassie O’Malley, a mobster is murdered in a Mall of New Jersey men’s room. Among the other characters are a heavily indebted Santa Claus, a movie-obsessed security guard, and a Woody Allen lookalike fence-cum-pawnbroker. Some of the gags are groaners — Bhait’s Motel, run by an Indian immigrant with a voluble, unseen mother; lead cop Eggs Bebedict; radio DJs Dick Joakes and Lou Spowels — but the inventive plotting, powered by outrageous coincidences, won me over.

**** John Hart: The Last Child, Minotaur, $24.95. North Carolina thirteen-year-old Johnny Merrimon and local police Detective Clyde Hunt are both obsessed with the unsolved disappearance a year before of Johnny’s twin sister Alyssa. A large cast of vivid characters inhabit an intricately constructed plot. Some of the clues are broad enough to tip a couple of the surprises, but no one is likely to anticipate them all. Prose and suspense generation are first-rate, with the only drawback a forgivable longwindedness typical of the current market. The audio version (Macmillan Audio, $39.95) is read by Scott Sowers.

**** Anne Perry: Execution Dock, Ballantine, $26. In 1860s London, William Monk, of the River Police, thinks he has the goods on vicious child pornographer Jericho Phillips, but Sir Oliver Rathbone risks his friendship with Monk and wife Hester by using all his legal wiles to get Phillips off in his Old Bailey trial. Expertly written, with effective action sequences along with legal and moral pondering, this is the best book in years in a series that had been slipping.

*** Donald E. Westlake: Get Real, Grand Central, $23.99. In what will presumably be the last comic novel about ill-starred crook John Dortmunder, whose creator died in 2008, the gang is recruited for a TV reality show and seeks an answer to the obvious problem: How do you commit a crime in full view of the public without going to jail when it’s over? Many laughs come at the expense of a dubious entertainment genre: The writers don’t write, they only suggest, obviating union membership, and when a character in one of the company’s shows makes an unexpected revelation, the producer insists, “In the world of reality, we do not have surprises.” Like his fellow MWA Grand Master Ed Hoch, Westlake was good to the very end.

*** Thomas B. Sawyer: No Place to Run, Sterling & Ross, $14.95. Claudia Lawrence, twenty-four, is snatched from her happy life, along with her parents and teenage brother, when a secret revealed by a client to her lawyer father Bill lands them all in the witness protection program. The parents are murdered, and the kids go on the run, with government agents as the enemy. However you feel about 9/11 conspiracy theories, this is a model pursuit thriller, with mystery, menace, strong characters, and cross-cutting action managed with a screenwriter’s flair. (Murder, She Wrote, of which Sawyer was head writer, was nothing like this.)

*** Aaron Elkins: Skull Duggery, Berkley, $25.95. The series about skeleton detective Gideon Oliver has been reliably combining travelogue with fair-play puzzle, leaving no meal uneaten or undescribed, for a quarter century. When Gideon travels to Mexico, where wife Julie has agreed to fill in for her cousin, who operates the family dude ranch, local law enforcement calls on Gideon’s specialized skills with bones of the long and recently dead. Not one of the best Olivers, but a solid effort.

** Janet Evanovich: Finger Lickin’ Fifteen, St. Martin’s, $27.95. The latest about New Jersey skip tracer Jennifer Plum introduces some promising mystery situations — the beheading murder of a celebrity chef and a series of robberies plaguing secondary boy-friend Ranger’s security firm — but neglects them for the usual family sitcom, slapstick, comic-strip humor, and romantic thumb twiddling. Evanovich can be very funny, but a few good lines won’t be enough to please any but the most devoted fans. Lorelei King’s reading of the audio version (Macmillan Audio, $34.95) includes some good vocal characterizations.

Copyright © 2010 Jon L. Breen