Review: "Safe Enough and Other Stories" by Lee Child

 

Safe Enough and Other Stories by Lee Child Mysterious Press, 2024   Lee Child is best known as the creator of Jack Reacher, which makes sense because estimates place the number of books sold north of 200-million. This, along with a couple big budget Hollywood movies and a hit television series, have made Reacher a pop-culture icon. But—and many of you will disagree with me here—my favorite of Lee Child’s writing are his standalone short stories. I like them because they showcase Child’s craft, the precise plotting, and the subtle and ironic humor without the built-in expectations of a series character. All of this is why Child’s new collection, Safe Enough and Other Stories, featuring 20 of his standalone tales, made me happy when it crossed my desk. The stories, published between 2004 and 2020, are easily categorized as mystery and thriller and there is nary a dud in the pack. “The Greatest Trick of All” is a wicked-ironic take on an altogether too greedy hitman. The titular, “Safe Enough,” is a smashing story about murder and betrayal, but it ranges far from the expected and it left this reader with a smile. “The .50 Solution” is another hitman job but this time the surprise is—well, it’s better left unsaid, but it is a surprising, if somewhat violent, solution. “Me and Mr. Rafferty” is a cockeyed serial killer tale about the symbiotic relationship between detective and deviant. “Addicted to Sweetness” is about drugs and murder and, ultimately, just rewards (of a sort). “My First Drug Trial” is a clever take on marijuana use and laws in the United States. It felt just about right, too, with the added benefit of being fun. “New Blank Document,” which is the most serious story in the collection, is about racism and secrets. And my favorite story, “Normal in Every Way,” is about a brilliant but awkward policeman relegated to file clerk duty in the San Francisco of the 1950s. He was the police department’s database before everything was moved into the ether, but did he get any of the credit? Safe Enough and Other Stories is the kind of collection that reads easy. Most readers will devour its stories in a few sittings and enjoy every second of it, but don’t take my word—read it yourself.

Click here to purchase the Kindle edition or here for the hardcover at Amazon.

TV Guide Interview with Tom Selleck: "I Don't Want to Look Macho" (1980)

 

“I Don’t Want to Look Macho,” by Arnold Hano, appeared in the Dec. 27, 1980, issue of TV Guide. The series premiered on Dec. 11, 1980 on CBS and so this interview hit print shortly after the Magnum, P.I. pilot aired. It’s an entertaining read, that discusses the changes Selleck wanted in the original script with a hint about Glen A. Larson’s exit and Donald P. Bellisario’s entry. But why should I tell you—read it below. [Click on the images for a bigger view]

Review: "An Honorable Assassin" by Steve Hamilton

 

An Honorable Assassin by Steve Hamilton Blackstone, 2024   Steve Hamilton is best known for his series featuring former Detroit cop turned reluctant Upper Peninsula private eye, Alex McKnight. McKnight appeared in eleven novels between 1999 and 2018. The first, A Cold Day in Paradise—which I heartily recommend—netted Hamilton an Edgar Award for Best First Novel. The McKnight books are meaty, well-plotted, character-driven extravaganzas, but they never attracted many readers outside the P.I. genre. Which is a shame because they are as good as anything the mystery genre has to offer. In 2016, Hamilton changed course and released a crime thriller, The Second Life of Nick Mason, to great fanfare. It made multiple best-of-year lists, including from NPR and Kirkus Reviews and, perhaps most telling, it landed on the New York Times bestseller list. The Second Life of Nick Mason combined a rich Chicago setting with solid characterization and an intricate (and surprising) plot. It, frankly, surpassed most thrillers of its kind on every level. Hamilton followed it up with the second Nick Mason book, Exit Strategy, in 2017, then in 2018 released an oddball Alex McKnight book—odd because, unlike the other McKnight books, it alternates between first and third person and is told from multiple character perspectives—titled Dead Man Running. Since then, other than a co-authored novel with Janet Evanovich, Steve Hamilton has been silent. At least until now, because his third Nick Mason title, An Honorable Assassin, is scheduled for release tomorrow (Aug. 27). The Second Life of Nick Mason opened with Mason being released from a 25-years-to-life sentence, for a truck heist gone wrong, after serving only five years. Part of the deal is Mason must work as an assassin for a Chicago gangster named Darius Cole; the guy who arranged for Mason’s release. Those first two books are about Mason’s struggle to break free from Cole and now in An Honorable Assassin, after he has finally escaped Cole, he finds himself bound to a mysterious and sinister international cartel. An Honorable Assassin begins only hours after Exit Strategy ends. Mason is sent to the world’s second largest city, Jakarta, Indonesia, without any instructions except that he’ll be met at the airport. When he arrives in Jakarta, even before he has left the airport, Mason’s first assignment is dished out—assassinate a wealthy terrorist sponsor named Hasham Baya as he arrives on a skyscraper’s helipad. Everything goes wrong: Baya escapes, the building is overrun by Indonesia’s paramilitary unit, Detachement-88, and Mason is arrested. The mission planning seems non-existent to Mason and, even worse, before he can get out of police custody a French Interpol agent, Martin Sauvage, takes an interest in him. Unlike Hamilton’s first two Nick Mason novels, which are a marvelous marriage of the crime and the thriller genres, An Honorable Assassin is a straight-line rocket propelled thriller. It is closer to Lee Child and David Baldacci than what we are used to seeing from Hamilton, but the electric style and frenetic pacing keep the pages turning and the reader from wandering into the improbabilities of the plot. A step below the first two books in the series, An Honorable Assassin is still a bunch of fun and very much worth reading.

Click here to purchase the Kindle edition or here for the paperback at Amazon.

Review: "Long Haul: Hunting the Highway Serial Killers" by Frank Figliuzzi

 

Long Haul by Frank Figliuzzi Mariner Books, 2024   I don’t review much non-fiction here, or anywhere else, but a slim true crime, Long Haul by a former FBI Assistant Director, Frank Figliuzzi, grabbed me by the nose and kicked me in the gut. Long Haul is a different kind of true crime tale than I usually read because its focus is a broad view of a specific type of crime (murders around the U.S. highway system) with a specific type of victim (generally female sex workers) committed by men working in the trucking industry; i.e. long-haul truck drivers. While Figliuzzi discusses specific cases of truck driver murderers, such as John Robert Williams, the so-called “Big Rig Killer,” who confessed to killing dozens of women he picked up at truck stops, he primarily focuses on the FBI’s Highway Serial Killings (HSK) initiative while questioning—without making any conclusions—if the lonely isolation of the road creates murderous monsters or these monstrous men are drawn to the industry for some reason. According to the HSK, there have been at least 850 killings in the United States in the past few decades linked to long-haul truck drivers with more than 200 of those festering in the unsolved bin. Figliuzzi tackles the murders from three angles. The first is by gaining an understanding of the trucking industry. He interviews an old-time truck driver, now retired, with more than 40-years pushing rigs and tags along for a week with a current driver to see what the roads are like today. He provides the reader with a bug-spattered view of both the rewards and the problems of driving—isolation and a type of sedentary overwork coupled with low pay and the chaos of quotas, deadlines and uncontrollable factors like weather, traffic, and truck maintenance. Second, Figliuzzi interviews the FBI’s lead analyst in the HSK, and an expert with the Oklahoma Bureau of Investigation, to get a handle on the breadth of the issue. What he discovers is the problem may be larger than the numbers indicate because the initiative relies on local law enforcement agencies to enter data in the FBI’s ViCAP (Violent Criminal Apprehension Program) database, but many don’t. And finally, Figliuzzi interviews social workers and survivors of truck stop human trafficking. These women’s stories are harrowing and sobering. Sobering to me because my father spent the better part of his working life in the trucking industry as a diesel mechanic and later, after retiring, as a driver for a large commercial outfit. He told stories that seemed funny to my much younger self. Like, as a mechanic, finding a woman stashed away in a truck’s sleeper against company rules. She was screaming high and my dad figured the driver was trying to hide his girlfriend, but maybe it was more sinister than that. Long Haul was like listening to my dad tell stories about long roads, angry customers, spoiled loads, infuriating break-downs, and all the strange things he encountered as both a driver and a mechanic. But while his antidotes were meant as entertainment, Long Haul’s perspective is darker. It is as fascinating and as hair-raising as anything I’ve ever read; and I tell you, I’ll never look at a truck stop the same way.

Click here to purchase the Kindle edition or here for the hardcover at Amazon.

From Ed Gorman's Desk: "Doubleday Crime Club"

from ED GORMAN’S Desk

Doubleday Crime Club from Nov. 13, 2005   I’m glad Ellen Nehr lived long enough to see her enormous volume about the Doubleday Crime Club appear1. It detailed the contents of every single Club volume ever published. I doubt that people under the age of 35 have ever seen a Crime Club book. In the beginning, back in the late Twenties and well into the Thirties, the line was known for its covers as well as the fiction inside. Over the years they published writers as diverse as Dorothy B. Hughes, Sax Rohmer, Stuart Palmer, Leslie Charteris, Wm. DeAndrea, and Charlotte McLeod along with innumerable one-shot writers and writers whose books have vanished utterly. They published hundreds of good, readable mysteries by pulp pros who wanted the pleasure of seeing their material between boards. Fredrick C. Davis comes to mind. He had his flaws but of the forty or so of his books I’ve read over my lifetime, I can’t recall a dull one. And several of his novels were exceptional in every respect. Certainly I’d say the same about Dolores Hitchens, an even better writer who could turn cozies pretty damned dark. She had the ability to swing from her atmospheric cozies to outright brutal private eye stories. She even wrote a first-rate western. It was essentially a library line and that’s what made me think of it. The other day I looked through boxes that were the remnants of a recent library book sale and found several Club titles to take home. Of all the hardcover mystery lines of the past, the Club is the one I get most nostalgic about. By the end of its run, its packaging was a disappointment to anybody who remembered its glory days—cheap paper, abysmal binding, horrible covers. One thing never changed and that was the wonderful inky smell of the books that seemed to last for months after you’d first read them. For book junkies, that is the smell of heaven. Having lived in various small towns after the big war, I got used to book mobiles serving places that didn’t have libraries close by. And in those days book mobiles were packed with Doubleday westerns, science fiction, and Club titles. Libraries subscribed to the list and received the books once a month, like magazines. I suppose Five Star2 is not unlike a version of the old Club, a library line that fulfills the needs of virtually every kind of mystery reader. I hope we’re fulfilling the needs of mystery readers as well as the Club once did. There is more than a little remorse in this particular post. Two years before she died, Ellen and I got into an argument over something she was alleged to have said. Only a year later did I learn that Ellen was telling the truth and that this other person, a prominent editor, was lying because that was her wont—not just about Ellen but about everybody who crossed her threshold. She loves mischief. I apologized then and I apologize now. I sure miss you, Ellen. ____________ 1.      Ellen Nehr’s Doubleday Crime Club Compendium 1928-1991 was published by Offspring Press in 1992. As far as I can tell, it has been out of print for some time. 2.      Ed Gorman partnered with Tekno Books, which was owned by the prominent anthologist Martin H. Greenberg, to produce the now defunct Five Star mystery line.

This article originally appeared on Ed Gorman’s blog, Gormania, on Nov. 13, 2005. It is reprinted here by permission. Ed wrote dozens of novels in a variety of genres, but his most popular work (and my favorite of his work) was in the crime and western genres. His ten Sam McCain mysteries—set in the fictional Iowa town of Black River Falls during the 1950s, ’60, and ’70s—are suspenseful, mysterious, and often funny excursions into small town America. The New York Times called Sam McCain, “The kind of hero any small town could take to its heart” and The Seattle Times called McCain “an intriguing mix of knight errant and realist…”      But Ed was also a tireless reader and promoter of other writers’ work. His blogs—there were three, none of them operating at the same time—are treasure troves for readers of crime, horror, and western fiction both old and new. Ed died Oct. 14, 2016.   Click here to check out Ed Gorman’s Sam McCain novels on Amazon.

 

Review: "Madman on a Drum" by David Housewright

 

Madman on a Drum by David Housewright Minotaur Books, 2008     David Housewright’s fifth Rushmore McKenzie mystery, Madman on a Drum, is a hardboiled tour-de-force private eye novel about justice and revenge. In the Acknowledgements, Housewright recognizes Carrol John Daly and Mickey Spillane’s influence on Madman on a Drum, which is easy to see. It has the same violence and anger—an anger at an out-of-control world—coupled with the desire for an old-school, almost Old Testament-style, dark vengeance. McKenzie’s world crumbles when he is called to his lifelong buddy, Bobby Dunston’s house, and told Bobby’s preteen daughter, Victoria, was kidnapped on her way home from school: “They kidnapped Bobby Dunston’s daughter in the middle of a bright September afternoon off a city street I had traveled safely maybe a thousand times when I was a kid.” When McKenzie arrives, the F.B.I. is already on scene and Bobby, a St. Paul, Minnesota, homicide detective, has a steely mask of professional self-control. A mask McKenzie hopes his friend can keep in place until Victoria is recovered. In short order, the kidnappers demand $1,000,000 of McKenzie’s money in exchange for the girl’s life. An amount McKenzie is glad to provide, but his plans don’t include letting the kidnappers slip away into the night. And it has nothing to do with getting his money back. Madman on a Drum received a starred review from Publishers Weekly—“Hate, revenge and old-fashioned greed propel… Housewright’s stellar fifth mystery”—which parallels my own thoughts about the tale. It is damn good. The St. Paul setting is rich and vibrant; from outlaw biker bars to McKenzie’s reminiscences about the old St. Paul: “The city was originally called Pig’s Eye Landing after its founder, Pierre ‘Pig’s Eye’ Parrant, a notorious and thoroughly likable fur trader turned moonshiner, until a French priest came along and decided it wasn’t PC enough.” McKenzie’s humorous commentary is muted in this one, although it is still there in smaller doses, and replaced by a seething anger. In a way, Madman on a Drum is a morality play with McKenzie dangling as both witness and defendant in a shadowy tribunal. The plotting is concise, twisty—in all the right ways—and surprising in a perfectly sensible manner. Madman on a Drum is the best of McKenzie’s early tales and it announces both McKenzie and Housewright as serious players in the mystery and private eye genres.

Click here for the Kindle edition and here for the paperback at Amazon.

Booked (and Printed): July 2024

 

July always plays better on paper than in the real world. It is too hot, the days are too damn long, and I never get as much reading done as I would like. This July was no different than any other. I read a sparse five books—sparse because two were far short of novel length. The first of these thin interludes is Divvy Up: Science Fiction Stories, which is a marvelous collection of three tales—one novelette and two shorts—written by Stephen Marlowe in the 1950s. Marlowe was best known as a crime writer but he could write just about anything and he truly excelled at turning out entertaining science fiction. You can read more about Marlowe and this collection here, which I should tell you was retitled as Alternatives: Science Fiction Stories. The other shorty was the mediocre thriller Come and Get Us, by Shan Serafin, about a family being hunted in the Utah-Arizona desert. Published in 2016 as part of James Patterson’s BookShots series of novellas, which was a cool idea that never worked out in either quality or sales, Come and Get Us lacks plausibility and characterization, but the setting and action sequences are sharp enough to have kept me turning the pages. Speaking of short stories—the latest single author collection from Stark House, Cream of the Crop: Best Mystery & Suspense Stories of Bill Pronzini (2024), is as good a collection as I’ve read this year. It covers Pronzini’s entire career from the late-1960s to 2023. There are standalones, Nameless detective tales, and one entry from the historical detectives series, Quincannon & Carpenter. It is highly recommended and you can read more of my thoughts about it here. Of the five individual short stories I read, which were all enjoyable, my favorite was Ed Gorman’s “A Disgrace to the Badge”—a standalone western about an alcoholic lawman, a spoiled rich kid, and a locked-room murder—is rich with characterization and atmosphere and, best of all, it is ironic and surprising. I’m not sure when “A Disgrace to the Badge” was originally published since The Long Ride Back (2004), where I read it, had a disappointing copyright page. The two shorts I read by James Reasoner—“Down in the Valley” (1979), “Death and the Dancing Shadows” (1980)—both fit comfortably in the crime / detective field. I had read “Down in the Valley” once before and Reasoner’s ability to shift perspective from one character to another so easily, and without any confusion for the reader, is amazing. I liked “Death of the Dancing Shadows” just as well and reviewed it in detail here.

I dug both full-length novels I read in July. Robak’s Witch, by Joe L. Hensley (1997)—which is my favorite read of the month—is the eleventh (of twelve) book in the Don Robak series. Robak is a rural Ohio attorney, soon to be judge, with experience working death penalty cases. When he is called in to help an old friend from law school defend a woman accused of murdering her teenage niece and nephew, Robak finds a community convinced of her guilt. A wacky fundamentalist church spreading rumors she is a witch and far too many citizens, including the County Sheriff, content with going along. You can read my review here. Then, of course, I read the next in David Housewright’s McKenzie series, Curse of the Jade Lady (2012), because boy do I love these books. McKenzie is a witty, funny, and likable cuss with several million dollars in the bank and nothing to do but favors for friends. In this one, McKenzie helps a museum get a priceless artwork back after it was stolen by their security chief. The busy opening and sprawling character list mark this one down from the best in the series, but it is still good fun. The only book I started and chose not to finish was Jack Higgins’s 1992 Eye of the Storm, which is where Higgins’s longtime series-character Sean Dillon was introduced. The Dillon books have never been my cuppa but I have fond memories of reading Eye of the Storm back in my innocent youth. While Eye of the Storm still held some attraction for me, I simply wasn’t in the mood. Maybe I’ll try reading it again in one of the colder months when I’m not quite as grumpy. Fin— Now on to next month…

Review: "Cream of the Crop: Best Mystery & Suspense Stories of Bill Pronzini"

 

Cream of the Crop: Best Mystery & Suspense Stories by Bill Pronzini Stark House, 2024   Cream of the Crop: Best Mystery & Suspense Stories of Bill Pronzini is the story collection I’ve been waiting for—without realizing it until now. Included are 26 of Pronzini’s best stories, selected by the author himself (and who am to argue?), originally published in magazines like Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, The Strand Magazine, and New Black Mask between 1967 and 2023. Which is to say, these tales are representative of Pronzini’s entire criminous career from his Nameless Detective, featured in 10 of the stories, his standalone work, which total 15, and a solitary tale in the Quincannon & Carpenter historical private eye series. My usual reading modus operandi is a preference for standalone tales—shorts, novels, and everything in between—and this collection is no different. The standalones are my favorites. A good example is “Opportunity”—which is the earliest tale in the collection from 1967—about an honest cop facing an expensive medical treatment and a moral dilemma when a chance to siphon more off the streets than his salary arises. “Proof of Guilt,” published in 1973, is a nifty variation on an impossible crime that left me with a smile. “Smuggler’s Island”—published in 1977—is one of my favorite stories because it beautifully intertwines a past crime with a present crime. There is an uninhabited island and a murder, too. “Liar’s Dice,” from 1992, is a brilliantly conceived psychological thriller with a dark bent about a dice game and deciphering truth from lies. And those are only a few of the standouts! Now for the Nameless tales, and despite my preference for standalones, each of these is a gem of serial private detection. You see, I really do like Nameless a bunch because Pronzini has an ability to keep the character fresh with intriguing plots and expanding characterization. “Thin Air,” which was published in 1979, is a great old school detective story about a scorned wife, a thief, and a cheating husband. A murder happens, too, and while it is close to an impossible murder, Nameless takes care of it with pulpy pizazz. “Incident in a Neighborhood Tavern,” from 1988, is a little different because the crime—a tavern is held up—happens while Nameless is drinking a beer and chatting with the friendly barkeep. But that’s only the start and it ends somewhere else entirely. “Stakeout” finds Nameless doing a skip-trace on a deadbeat dad that turns into a waiting game that goes sideways and takes all of Nameless’ deductive prowess to find the truth. And the rest are just as good. Cream of the Crop is a marvelous collection you’ll want to rush through, but it is best read slowly to better experience its savory taste. Afterall, it took Bill Pronzini parts of seven decades to write these stories and just because they finally arrived in a single package is no reason to gorge yourself, no matter how much you’d like to. Get it. Read it. You’ll like it, I promise.

Go here for the Kindle version and here for the paperback edition at Amazon. Go here to purchase a copy at the Stark House website.

Review: "Pistol Belt" by Dean Owen

 

Pistol Belt by Dean Owen Monarch Books, 1961     reviewed by Mike Baker     Hazard Coyle was ending the American Civil War as poor as he’d started it. Hanging Niles Tree, the day after the surrender at Appomattox, made sense. Tree’s neighbors hated him and his wealth, not in a bank, was in a massive cattle herd and a mercantile business. Killing Niles Tree in front of his wife and children made sense too. It would be easier to run them off. Coyle reinvents himself in the border town of La Casitas by single handedly cleansing the town of hardcases, whores, loafers, drunks and gamblers with a bullwhip and a pistol. Hazard Coyle has everything he’s ever wanted. Wealth. Power. The love of a beautiful woman. And all of this is spoiled by former Confederate officer Martin Tree, brother of the man he murdered at war’s end, driving his own herd to graze on his new partner’s spread right next door to Coyle’s Hub Ranch. Yancey Noughton, Martin Tree’s partner, is a broke, drunken aristocrat with a ranch to sell—when Martin Tree offers him 50% of Tree’s herd for 50% of Naughton’s spread. Tree also plans to Murder Coyle, for the cold blooded murder of Niles, but Naughton is desperate so he agrees. Also, Naughton has a wife whose desperate for a dude who doesn’t have whiskey dick. Sorry. That was cheap. She starts in on convincing Tree to run off or kill her husband Yancey. Wading into this roiling melodrama was not appetizing to me at all. The whole plot stretches the oft times already over stretched credulity of a western plot and this one was straddling pulp zaniness and mid-century melodrama in the awfulest possible way. Don’t let that stop you because the book is much more complex than that. Martin Tree has been running wild cattle hunts in the Texas brasada, which is a brutal and deadly place, to build a herd—while looking after his inept and immature adopted brother Bud since childhood. He’s also been hunting Coyle on the vengeance trail for three years and on the cusp of getting him, Martin is mentally and emotionally exhausted. He is coming apart at the seams. Underneath the ridiculous plotting is a character study of a man whose need to avenge his brother is at odds with his need to build something for him and his remaining brother. The book is really about how the selfish nature of hate destroys us and how can we find a way to survive our own self-immolation. Granted, I had to wade through about 40 pages before I realized that but it was worth it. The novel gets darker and more violent as we move closer to the inevitable confrontation’s murderous conclusion. Dean Owen (Dudley Dean McGaughy) came recommended to me as a hardboiled western author and reading this, I came to understand I wasn’t sure what hardboiled meant. I can define noir* but hardboiled was only vaguely defined for me. It was something I understood from Hemingway’s dead souled ex-soldiers and Hammett’s coldly pragmatic detectives. Neither made sense in a western story though. Post wars America (those times after major conflicts: WWII, Korea, Vietnam) left many needing a way to reconcile their war time experience with the world they now inhabited. I can’t speak for other “hardboiled” western authors or even Dean Owen’s other books but, if we apply the term here, it seems to refer to the question, how do you learn to thrive after massive trauma. And forgive me for this very topical language, the hardboiled post wars writers seem to be trying to understand how to heal themselves, and the men around them, which seems to be a concept they themselves didn’t even understand they were doing. *               *              * I wrote all this leaving out what you probably are here to read. Owen writes a slow boiling tense western with sporadic but visceral and gory fight scenes. The dialogue is clunky at times and the narrative is, as previously mentioned, a bit ridiculous but hang in. Owen slowly builds his case. He’s setting us up for something big and it’s worth the wait.

*My definition of noir is a story told from the criminal’s perspective where the reader understands that the criminal’s plan is doomed to failure ahead of the narrator. Noir never works out. Thus, the Parker books aren’t noir but Double Indemnity is noir.

Review: “Death and the Dancing Shadows” by James Reasoner

 

“Death and the  Dancing Shadows” by James Reasoner in The Black Lizard  Anthology of Crime Fiction, 1987   “Death and the Dancing Shadows”—which was originally published in the March 1980 issue of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine (MSMM)—is an atmospheric and clever novelette featuring West Hollywood private eye, Markham. Retired B-Western movie star, Eliot “Lucky” Tremaine, summons Markham to help him with a “delicate” matter. When Markham arrives at Lucky’s sprawling ranch house, he finds the old actor screening one of his own films. It feels like Norma Desmond drowning herself in her own past in Billy Wilder’s 1950 film, Sunset Boulevard, but (as Tremaine explains) it’s not about vanity but rather a desire to see Hollywood, and by extension the world, the way it once was: “Good, clean, excitin’ stories with a hero and without all this trashy stuff they put in today.” And for all that, Tremaine seems well adjusted, if perhaps too nostalgic for his glory days and maybe a little too keen about his sense of honor and morality, and so Markham readily agrees to help him. We’ll keep Tremaine’s problem on the QT so it will be a surprise when you read the story. What Markham’s investigation uncovers will test Tremaine’s sense of morality in a close and personal way. It will test Markham’s, too… “Death and the Dancing Shadows” is a nifty hardboiled tale with a Raymond Chandler vibe—sharp dialogue, twisty plotting, and heaps of irony—that is as easy to read as it is appealing. And the ending is pitch perfect with an almost noir reflection broken only by Markham’s stolid refusal to succumb to his baser instincts. Maybe not quite as good as Reasoner’s Cody stories, but still pretty damn good.

Go here for the Kindle version of “Death and the Dancing Shadows” at Amazon.

Five Markham stories were published between 1979 and 1982: “All the Way Home” [April 1979, MSMM) “Death and the Dancing Shadows” [March 1980, MSMM] “The Man in the Moon” [April 1980, MSMM] “The Double Edge” [Summer 1981, Skullduggery] “War Games” [April 1982, MSMM] Three, including “Death and the Dancing Shadows,” have been released in Kindle, which you can see here.