Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 140, No. 6. Whole No. 856, December 2012

The Jury Box by Steve Steinbock

A thousand books pass through The Jury Box every year. Of those, only a handful are chosen for review each month. I was asked how I select the books I review. Like any other mystery fan, I pick books that grab my attention. I look for themes among the books. And I try to seek variety.

The question that inevitably comes next is, how can I evaluate “fluffy” mysteries alongside “serious” crime fiction? Easy. I judge each book on its own merits. A novel featuring a crime-solving canine chef might be likely to have less literary merit than an epic coming-of-age novel with a serial killer or a work of historical noir. But I’d rather read well-written “fluff” that keeps its promise to the reader than a mediocre or pretentious version of either of the latter.

Every book is a promise made by the author to the reader. It’s a promise that the book is the author’s sincere attempt to tell a good story with integrity and skill. As individual readers, we may choose cozies or noir, historical or contemporary, humorous or starkly serious. It’s the mission of The Jury Box to place as many titles as possible before you under the wide umbrella of “mystery fiction” and let you choose. It’s also my goal to give my readers honest evaluations of the books I review. I’ve been finding that my star ratings have been sliding upward. I find myself less inclined to finish an average or below average book, so I’m less likely to review two- or three-star books. A three-star book is a solid novel that keeps its promise, while a four-star book exceeds it. A five-star book, of which I include two this month, takes me completely by surprise and raises the literary experience. With that in mind, this month we look at a very wide variety of titles, running the gamut of crime fiction.

*** Bailey Cates, Brownies and Broomsticks, Obsidian, $7.99. A cozy mystery set around a bakery run by witches is about as lightweight as crime fiction gets. The heroine is, in fact, named Katie Lightfoot. But I couldn’t help but smile all the way through Katie’s antics as she tries to open a new business and solve the murder of the curmudgeonly community leader who wanted to close it down, all the while discovering her covenous family background. An enjoyable first-in-a-series by Cricket McRae (writing as Bailey Cates).

*** Lisa Lutz, Trail of the Spellmans, Simon & Schuster, $25.00. Document #5 of the Spellman Files series continues to follow the misadventures of Isabel “Izzy” Spellman, the thirty-something slacker who probably wouldn’t be in her parents’ detective business if she didn’t do it so well. Her younger sister is now in college, her brother married with a child. The family takes a series of separate cases that seem to be at cross-purposes. Lutz’s style is offbeat and unique, but very accessible, making this series one of my favorite guilty pleasures.

Lutz and ex-boyfriend David Hayward worked together on another off-beat project, Heads You Lose, which recently was released in trade paperback (Berkley, $15.00). The result is a tag-team collaborative novel about a headless body that won’t stay put. This modern-day “Trouble With Harry” echoes the affectionate rivalry between the two authors.

**** Jess Lourey, November Hunt, Midnight Ink, $14.95. I’ve been following Lourey since her 2006 debut, May Day. Lourey’s heroine, rural Minnesota librarian and accidental detective Mira James, worked her way through eight months of sleuthing. The series started off on a high note and has only gotten better. November Hunt opens with a fatal hunting incident; but the victim’s daughter suspects it was not an accident. Mira wades through a field of local pot growers, a library fundraiser, and a long-kept community secret. A good story told well, with solid writing.

***** Howard Shrier, Boston Cream, Vintage Canada, $17.95. Shrier is my top find of the year. The Toronto-based author is not well known below the Canadian border, but his excellent P.I. series deserves much wider attention. Hired by an Orthodox Jewish couple to travel to Boston to locate their medical-student son, P.I. Jonah Geller and his partner Jenn cross paths with an evil but altogether believable criminal consortium. Geller is an exceptionally well-drawn character, a true man of peace who is forced to harness his own inner violence.

***** Ariel S. Winter, The Twenty-Year Death, Hard Case Crime, $25.99. At 672 pages, The Twenty-Year Death is the biggest book yet from Hard Case Crime. Contained in this first novel are actually three separate interconnected novels, each set a decade apart. Malniveau Prison, set in 1931, is written in the style of Georges Simenon. The Falling Star (1941) is modeled on Raymond Chandler’s work. Police at the Funeral (1951) is an homage to the dark style of Jim Thompson. The entire volume, which bears some comparison to Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, is a dark, affectionate tribute to the genre.

There’s been an upsurge in the number of novellas and short novels published recently. Some may blame it on the short attention spans of electronic-age readers. But I welcome it as the return of a neglected literary form.

James Sallis, Driven, Poisoned Pen Press, $19.95 (HC), $11.95 (TPB). This sequel to Sallis’s 2005 novel Drive (the basis for the 2011 film starring Ryan Gosling) follows the semi-fugitive former stunt driver as he’s pursued by vengeful gangsters. When they kill his fiancée, he sets out on his own quest for vengeance. While it’s not imperative to have read Drive, an important aspect of the plot hinges on a character and event from that earlier novel. Sallis has created a starkly heroic anti-hero.

Melodie Campbell, The Goddaughter, Raven Books, $9.95. Canadian publisher Orca Books, in an attempt to aid adult literacy, publishes a series of “Rapid Read” novels through their Raven Books imprint. Melodie Campbell tells a hilarious story of the goddaughter of a mafia leader drafted into a jewel-smuggling operation. The caper goes bad when high heels containing the contraband are stolen.

Max Allan Collins, Triple Play: A Nathan Heller Casebook, Thomas and Mercer, $14.95. In his introduction to this collection of three of his novellas, Collins discusses the short novel and its place in detective-fiction history. He rightfully mentions that it was once not uncommon to find a 40,000 to 50,000 word “novel” published in Manhunt, Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, or EQMM. Collins has gathered three such novellas, in the style of Rex Stout, featuring P.I. Nathan Heller, each set amidst actual crime cases from the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s.

Collins has also teamed up with James L. Traylor to produce Mickey Spillane on Screen (McFarland www.mcfarlandpub.com, $45.00), which chronicles the many film and TV adaptations of Spillane’s work, in-cluding details on the cast and crew, episode guides to four different Mike Hammer TV series, and multiple TV movies. The book, throughout, is filled with black-and-white photos.

Finally, I couldn’t let another column go by without making mention of a collection of stories by one of our favorite EQMM contributors, Melodie Johnson Howe. Shooting Hollywood (Crippen & Landru, $43.00 HC/$17.00 TPB), contains nine stories about aging starlet Diana Poole, eight of which originally appeared in EQMM.

Copyright © 2012 by Steve Steinbock