Category Archives: short story

***Three Ellery Queens

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Green Door, Arizona

(photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

The three latest Ellery Queen Mystery Magazines contain 31 short stories—historical, locked room, humorous, and many other splinter categories from U.S. and international authors. Reaching into this Santa’s bag of offerings, I’ll pull out some of my favorites:

  • “The Lure of the Green Door” by Norizuki Rintarō is a locked room mystery featuring a Japanese sleuth named, yes, Norizuki Rintarō and his humorously prickly girlfriend Sawada Honami. Says EQMM, he’s part of the “new traditionalist” movement in Japanese mystery writing, emphasizing puzzles, and he’s put together a good one here! (11/14)
  • Suzanne Arruda’s “Deep Shaft” effectively conjures Prohibition-era Kansas and the trouble city slicker outsiders can get themselves into. She’s the author of the mystery series featuring adventuresome, world-traveling photojournalist Jade Del Cameron Mysteries set in WWI and the 1920s. (11/14)
  • “Getaway Girl,” by Zoë Z. Dean, her first published story and one with a great last line: “there was something terrifying about a girl that good at living.” (11/14)
  • Joyce Carol Oates’s equivocal “Equatorial” is an accomplished cat-and-mouse game, but who is which? (12/14)
  • “Concrete Town” by Michael Wiley is set mostly in a bar, perhaps inspired by work on his irresistibly titled detective novel, The Bad Kitty Lounge. (12/14)
  • Another first story, “Chung Ling Soo’s Greatest Trick,” by Russell W. Johnson, was most entertaining, but then, I like mysteries featuring magicians! (1/15)
  • Accomplished novelist Kristine Kathryn Rusch wrote the tension-filled “Christmas Eve at the Exit” about a woman’s attempted escape from an abusive husband. (1/15)

Always something to admire in these EQMM collections! Available in many bookstores and digitally.

*** New Jersey Noir

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New Jersey NoirEdited by Joyce Carol Oates. It isn’t a coincidence that I’m reviewing this 2011 book of noir short stories in the middle of two weeks of Sunday blog posts about a celebration of JCO’s teaching. When I knew I was going to the event, I grabbed this book from the “to read” pile.

Noir is distinguished from other types of mystery and suspense fiction by having a protagonist who’s a suspect, a perpetrator, or even a victim—an insider to the situation. Pretty much anyone but a detective/investigator. Often the main characters have a boatload of problems, usually of their own making. My favorite definition of these protagonists is crime writer Dennis Lehane’s: “In Greek tragedy, they fall from great heights. In noir, they fall from the curb.”

I’ve been an “in principle” admirer of Akashic Books’ now lengthy series of place-based noir anthologies, and picked up New Jersey Noir at a local bookstore event, where Oates spoke about it and introduced (I think) one or two of the contributors. Now I’ve finally read it and am disappointed to say many of the 19 stories and poems felt as if they could have happened anywhere.

Sheila Kohler’s creepy “Wunderlich,” for example, is about the bleak territory of aging, not the peculiar dynamic of New Jersey. Various other tales have no more than a whiff of Garden State verisimilitude, which violates the underlying rationale of the series, I’d think. Collectively, these stories hardly scratch the surface of the state’s noir potential, as a glance at any of our daily newspapers would reveal. People in New Jersey fall from curbs like lemmings.

Too many of the stories (for my taste) lean heavily on substance abuse problems, which it won’t surprise the reader to learn cause all kinds of heartache. I rather liked the Bradford Morrow story set in Grover’s Mill, perhaps because I’d just spent considerable creative time there, myself. “Glass Eels” by Jeffrey Ford captures the loneliness of New Jersey’s Pine Barrens, but is too similar in action to Robert Arellano’s “Kettle Run.” A story by Oates, “Run Kiss Daddy,” delivers a sufficiently oppressive atmosphere and dark underbelly to be the setup for a longer piece of writing. To me, the most interesting story is Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Too Near Real,” in which the protagonist follows the Google street view vehicle around Princeton, then watches himself “on the map.” Fresh and entertaining.

****Glimmer Train – Fall 2014

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Jewish man, Miami beach

(photo: by Sagie, Creative Commons license)

Glimmer Train doesn’t usually announce theme issues, except for the “Family Matters” issue, but a clear current in the 11 short stories in this issue is the desires and dislocations of immigrants and the desperation of those who want to immigrate. This is also the issue that includes the wonderful interview with Junot Diaz, covered in part by the First Draft blog.

The frustrations of would-be immigrants are explored in the story “Stowaways,” by Joseph Chavez, in which a man falls from the sky; in the poignant story “Hialeah” by Kim Brooks, about a gathering of Jewish men in Miami, strategizing how to convince the Roosevelt Administration to let a boatload of Jewish refugees land (you’ll remember this real-life episode of the SS Exodus 1947), and “Maghreb and the Sea,” by Robert Powers, which takes on the voice of a would-be African immigrant facing impossible hurdles trying to get to Europe, America—away. Told without dialog, it has the genuine feel of writing from that part of the world.

Other stories tell the trials and uncertainties of people newly in America and the pull of “home.” As author Mehdi Tavana Okasi says in his biosketch, his mother is convinced that, in Iran, he would have become a doctor. “Perhaps she is right. But there is no way to know the other scars I would bear. These are questions that can never be answered, and as immigrants, our lives are filled with them, the what ifs and if only I hads. It’s fantastical and dangerous.” And, thus, the stuff of fiction.

The wide-ranging interview with Junot Diaz also touches on immigration, in his case between the Dominican Republic and the United States. Of the two countries, he says “their shadows fall on each other.” He finds it a useful metaphor because, “all of us are haunted by the other world we call our past.” The immigrant can double down on that haunting.

*** Three Ellery Queens

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jaguar

“Spotted Ghost” by Lou Hedge

Finished three issues of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine recently—August 2014, September/October 2014, and, embarrassingly, August 2012. Some items in my reading pile are truly “aging in place”! For variety of locale and time, the monthly collections in this deliciously pulpy magazine can’t be beat. These three issues contain stories from Colonial America, to 1890s San Francisco, to modern Taiwan, to Belize City, where tourists hunt the elusive jaguar.

One of the scariest involved the escalating war of nerves between an adolescent boy and his new neighbor, written by popular short story writer David Dean, author of the novel The Thirteenth Child. A funny tale about a couple who owns a dry cleaners’ shop also appeared in the 8/14 issue, by British author Belinda Bauer, known for the “blackly funny” style of some of her books.

The most recent issue departs from longstanding EQMM tradition by including some stories with paranormal elements. Despite its title, “Ghost Town,” by Terence Faherty, does not. It refers to the near-abandoned Ocean City, New Jersey, in February, plagued by a series of mysterious break-ins. One of the shorter stories—“The Hard Type” by Carl Robinette—packed the most emotional punch. In it a young boy questions his actions when he sees a couple terrorized by a motorcycle gang.

I also enjoyed “Jaguar,” about a young girl brought to New York as part of a human trafficking ring. Short stories by its author, Joseph Wallace, have appeared in several anthologies, including the Best American Mystery Stories. His most recent novel, Invasive Species, is a science fiction thriller.

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*****Miracle Boy and Other Stories

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cock fight, cockfight

(photo: wikimedia)

It’s hard to pass up a book by someone with the irresistible name of Pinckney Benedict, and you shouldn’t. His 14-story collection, Miracle Boy and Other Stories, is something that will stay with you a long time. (“Miracle Boy” was made into an award-winning short film—trailer). I came away with a strong sense of the people, animals, and the not-necessarily-explainable happenings in his narrow, timeless Seneca River valley setting, an oasis where myth, history, modernity, and even the future exist side-by side. Other readers have been similarly entranced.

The following quote, from a boy talking about how he copes with the world, demonstrates the deceptive simplicity of Benedict’s prose: I could usually get along by just looking them straight in the eyes and smiling and nodding and making little noises like I understood [what they said] and I thought what they were saying was just great. (“Bridge of Sighs”)

How many of us have faked it just like that?

Several themes (no doubt many more than my weak skills can identify) pervade many of these stories. The possibility of falling, literally and symbolically, is a strong one. It appears in the eponymous story, in “Joe Messinger is Dreaming,” and in the jet crash of “The World, The Flesh, and the Devil”: The wet soil of the field looked soft as a featherbed. It seemed inviting, as though it wanted him simply to loose his hold on the ladder, to spread his arms, and drop down sprawling onto it. (“Mudman”)

The close melding of humans and their animals weaves throughout. Benedict’s dogs are not the bright, cute fellows cocking their photogenic heads at us in our friends’ Facebook posts. Animals can be victims, when an epizootic plague strikes the valley’s farms, or aggressors in stories of dog and cock fights. They can take on (distressingly) human qualities and tend to look out for #1 (not you). Feel the speed and powerful movement in this passage about a pack of wild dogs chasing a downed aviator: He shoved his way forward in the pack, striving for all he was worth, until there were no dogs in front of him. He flew through the forest, and the frontrunner’s howl broke from his throat, and the dogs behind him took it up adding their voices to the awful wail. (“The World, The Flesh, and the Devil”)

The river valley’s isolation nurtures altered mental states in which interpersonal connection falter and sizzle out: For a brief instant (my father) stood still, motionless as I had never seen him. It was as though a breaker somewhere inside him had popped, and he had been shut off. (“Mercy”)

I ordered this book because of an interesting interview with Benedict in Glimmer Train, and feel quite smug that I ordered it from his independent publisher, Press 53 of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, not Amazon. At the time I ordered, Press 53 was engaged in its “Books for Soldiers” campaign, and because of my purchase, mailed a book to a deployed or recovering U.S. soldier at no additional charge. Nice!

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Another Story in Tweets

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cloudsA fan of British author David Mitchell—I know, I know, lots of people didn’t like Cloud Atlas—I’m happy he’s experimenting again. This time with a short story, “The Right Sort,” in tweets (read it here, from the bottom up). First tweet: We get off the Number 10 bus at a pub called ‘The Fox and Hounds’. ‘If anyone asks,’ Mum tells me, ‘say we came by taxi.’ The narrator sees the world in staccato bursts—“bite-sized sentences”—because he’s taking his mom’s Valium. I’ve read the story so far, and cannot tell yet whether this device feels like the medium calling attention to itself. Already, though, as in his excellent novel Black Swan Green, Mitchell deftly captures the voice and preoccupations of an early adolescent British male.

Mitchell has tried other innovations: a linked narrative in his first book, Ghostwritten, which takes a while to take shape in the reader’s mind (“we’re all connected”!); Number 9 Dream, where you aren’t exactly sure where the dreams begin and end, though it would make a terrific mixed manga/live-action movie; and, of course, Cloud Atlas, where you work forward in time getting the first half of five semi-linked and intergenerational stories, followed by a whole story set in the future, then step backward through the decades with the latter half of the five. (Amazon includes a reader advisory that this is NOT a misprint!) More a straight novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, was one of my favorite reads of 2012.

“The Right Sort” walks “the tightrope between the fabulous and realism,” Mitchell said in a recent interview in The Guardian, and with his books, he’s proved he’s up for such highwire acts. This outing may soften up the media landscape for a new novel coming out this fall.

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****Glimmer Train

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Recently finished the Winter 2013 issue of Glimmer Train, one of the most competitive literary magazines on the U.S. scene, with 32,000 submissions a year. Its almost 200 pages included nine short stories and an interview with author Pinckney Benedict (after reading this interview and reveling in his awe-inspiring name, I bought his most recent book, Miracle Boy and Other Stories; apparently, he’s inspired other readers, too). $19.95 from Benedict’s hard-working small publisher, Press 53; $17.96 from amazon. Hoping my extra $1.99 is nurturing the dream of small publishers.

wrecked boat, ribs, sea

(photo: pixabay.com)

Among the stories, I especially liked “Angstschweiss” by Susan Messer, and anyone who’s had to make a trepidatious visit to a nursing home, rehab hospital, or other institution caring for the wreck of a loved one remembered in full-sail, will identify. The title of her novel, Grand River and Joy, Detroiters will recognize as an intersection, and far from being an uplifting statement, the book explores the city’s racial tensions that exploded with the 1967 riots—“complex, challenging, and bitterly funny.” On the “to read” list.

Two stories—“Wilderness of Ghosts” by Janis Hubschman and “Patient History” by Baird Harper—focused on young women troubled at leaping the chasm from late adolescence to “what’s next.” “Gladstone,” a charming story by Marjorie Celona, nicely capture the skewed neighborhood observations and preoccupations of a group of 10-year-old boys. Her novel Y—about the fractured life of a newborn baby left at the YMCA with a great many questions—one Goodreads reader said, “I don’t think I have ever been so sad to see a book end.”

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Hollywood Vice

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Los Angeles, Hollywood

(photo source: farm9.staticflickr.com)

Vice—the international cultural and political magazine of the Vice media empire—devotes its fiction issue this year to Hollywood and the movies. Careful with that link, the magazine cover is NSFW, depending on where you work. Literary bright lights and Hollywood insiders like David Mamet, James Franco (a story about Lindsey Lohan), and Alec Sokolow are among the authors. Blake Bailey does a run-down of some of Vladimir Nabokov’s unpublished notes for the Lolita screenplay, about which Nabokov said after a screening of the finished film, “only ragged odds and ends of my script had been used,” though he received the picture’s only scriptwriting credit.

Vice was launched in Montreal in 1994, and the company is currently valued at more than $2 billion. In the last few days, it launched a sports channel to add to its publishing, online, and video stable. Since Vice is distributed free, with distribution points in major cities, you can read the content online or download it with an iTunes app, if you are at least 17 years old.

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***Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine

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Just finished the May, June, and July 2014 (how do they assign the date to this publication?) issues of EQMM. As always, a real mix of styles, eras, and plotting in the 28 stories therein, by both new and established mystery writers. Among the stories I liked best were those by:

homeless, dog

(photo: shiftfrequency.com)

  • Frankie Y. Bailey really got my curiosity going. She has a new book out, The Red Queen Dies
  • Alex Grecian – in whose story, a woman’s wireless pacemaker is threatened by a mysterious caller. Grecian, author of the NYT bestselling historical mystery The Yard, might have read the April 30 story on this website!
  • Brian Tobin’s “Teddy,” about a homeless man’s love for his dog, was powerful writing. Tobin’s two novels, The Ransom and A Victimless Crime, have been well-received.
  • I’ve grown to like the EQMM stories by Dave Zeltserman—two of whose mystery tales, A Killer’s Essence and Outsourced, are being optioned for film—which put a 21st century twist on the Archie-Nero Wolfe relationship. In Zeltserman’s version, “archie” is a “two-inch rectangular piece of advanced computer technology” that his owner, Julius, wears as a tie-pin. While Julius talks, Archie researches. Cute.
  • Liza Cody has created an engaging, not-so-sure of herself police constable Shareen Manasseh to good effect, and another story with Manasseh appears in the British Crime Writers’ Association’s new collection, Deadly Pleasures, and many novels, most recently, the Dickensian Lady Bag.
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