*** Stuart M. Kaminsky: Terror Town, Forge, $23.95. Chicago cop Abe Lieberman works on cases involving a troubled former Chicago Cub, a murdered single mother with un-explained sudden wealth, a street-preaching son of a rabbi who may be madman or conman or both, and an inner-city savior with political aspirations but a closet full of skeletons. Though this one lacks the resonance of some other books in a distinguished series, Lieberman is always stimulating company.
*** Linda Fairstein: Death Dance, Scribner, $26. In a case with acknowledged similarities to a real-life 1980 murder, the Metropolitan Opera House again becomes a crime scene, as a prima ballerina first disappears and later is found dead, with a multiplicity of possible suspects for D.A. Alex Cooper and her police colleagues. Part of the plot involves a proposed musical based on the early-20th-century Harry K. Thaw-Stanford White-Evelyn Nesbit case. Always determined to give her readers their money’s worth, Fairstein provides a wealth of detail about New York theater history along with the crime problem.
The spirit of Ellery Queen lives on in a new character from Jim French Productions, that prolific provider of radio mysteries. The sleuth in Hilary Caine Mysteries ($9.95 for a CD of three shows), as written by M. J. Elliott and played by Karen Heaven, is an engaging and original character. The resident “girl detective” for a 1930s English tabloid will amuse some listeners, irritate others, and have both effects on many, in the mode of Golden Age sleuths like Lord Peter Wimsey, Philo Vance, Roger Sheringham, Reggie Fortune, and the early EQ. (The similarity of name, as made clear in the first episode, is a deliberate homage.) The plots are ingenious and fairly clued, though amenable to nitpicking; the tone humorous and ironic.
Among the reprints is one of the best formal detective novels of the past twenty years, Aaron Elkins’s 1987 Edgar best-novel winner Old Bones (Berkley, $6.99), about Skeleton Detective Gideon Oliver. One of the top paperback characters of the 1950s, Stephen Marlowe’s Washington, D.C., private eye Chester Drum, is revisited in the un-usual and suspenseful Violence Is My Business (1958), paired with the earlier non-series Turn Left for Murder (1955) in a new omnibus (Stark House, $19.95) introduced by Marlowe.
The fifteenth edition of the loose-leaf Edward D. Hoch Bibliography (Moffatt House, P.O. Box 4456, Downey, CA 90241-1456; $10 plus $5 postage and handling), compiled by June M. Moffatt and Francis M. Nevins with several essays by Marvin Lachman, covers 1955 to early 2006 in an exhaustive 161 pages. For the statistically minded: Captain Leopold leads all Hoch series characters in appearances with 106 since March 1957, while Simon Ark is unchallenged in longevity with 59 cases since December 1955. Other long-lived and busy characters: Ben Snow (41 since 1961), Jeffery Rand (83 since 1965), Nick Velvet (84 since 1966), and Dr. Sam Hawthorne (68 since 1974).
Backroom Boys
by Peter Sellers
Copyright © 2006 Peter Sellers
Art by Mark Evan Walker
A former EQMM Readers Award winner, an esteemed editor of mystery anthologies, and a driving force behind several conventions and banquets for Canadian crime writers, Peter Sellers is one of the best known if least prolific of current writers. His rare short stories are always a treat. Over the past year the author’s energy has gone to restoring his 100-year-old home (not to mention his advertising career) but he plans to begin writing more soon.
At one-thirty, after the Backroom had closed, Kevin served us draft beer in coffee cups. We could have swilled from bottles because no cops ever came, but Kevin had been well brought up and liked to break the law discreetly.
The Backroom was a live music club at the rear of a rib-and-burger joint on Bloor Street, across the road from the Royal Conservatory of Music. I didn’t work there myself. I had a job in a bookstore up at Yonge and St. Clair. But I was drinking a fair amount in those days and the Backroom was as good a place as any to do it. The music was okay most of the time. Occasionally Kevin would slip me free food. And it seemed like a good place to meet chicks.
Sometimes, after hours, the musicians would stick around, try out new tunes and tell stories about life on the road. When they talked about the number of girls they’d had I got to wishing I could play an instrument. Unfortunately, I wasn’t musical. In Grade Four, when every kid had to be in the choir, the teacher took me aside and told me just to mouth the words.
The musicians would describe gigs they played, from yacht-club dances to bars in Northern Ontario with screens in front of the stage to protect them from beer bottles and draft glasses. One balladeer, who sang of peace and romantic love, was booked into such a place by an unhappy accident. When the bottles wouldn’t reach him, the locals pressed their faces against the screen and spat.
“Thank you,” he’d say after each booed song. “I’m so glad you liked that one. Here’s another new tune you might enjoy.”
Kevin had been running the Backroom since spring. He had made the leap from waiter to manager on the strength of one stroke of good fortune. His girlfriend had previously gone out with the piano player in a local bar band. This group, Jerry Spoon and the Tectonic Plates, played three nights a week at the Victoria Hotel, a run-down beer joint at Queen and Soho. The residents of the hotel sat at a round table in front of the stage getting drunk. The rest of the crowd was loud and mostly pissed, and the owner, a former CFL fullback, kept in shape by throwing rowdies out. Jerry and the band wanted a better gig. Kevin saw his opportunity.
The Backroom’s budget for music was four hundred bucks a week. For one guy and a guitar, that wasn’t bad. For a five-piece band, it was laughable, even in 1977. But Jerry and the boys were so anxious to get out of the Victoria that they took the offer with little haggling. The usual working week was Tuesday to Saturday, four sets a night, from nine to one. The Plates wouldn’t play Tuesday and they got all the food and beer they could consume. That was sure to add up to more than four hundred dollars, but Kevin figured it was worth it.
From the first Wednesday night, the Backroom was jammed. Spoon and the Plates drew students from University of Toronto residences and from the frat houses of the Annex, all within easy crawling distance. There was no cover, and the beer prices weren’t bad.
That week the owners made more money than they ever had in one week before. They thanked Kevin by telling him to make sure it continued.
The first thing he did was to offer the Plates two more weeks. Over the previous seven days, Jerry had become a much shrewder businessman. The band agreed, for eight hundred a week.
With the success of the Plates, people started paying attention to the Backroom. Singers phoned looking for gigs. Kevin didn’t have to settle for whoever he could get. He was able to hire some of the brightest lights of the Canadian folk scene. Jackie Washington played the Backroom. So did David Wilcox, Willie P. Bennett, and a fourteen-year-old guitar hotshot who had to be smuggled in the back door and who filled the place by word of mouth.
Kevin would bring in the odd classical player from the Conservatory. There was a wicked lutist named Geordie, some impressive violin players, and the occasional classical guitarist who had chops, but none of them was as good a draw as the folk and blues musicians. The classical players didn’t have loyal fans that would come and drink too much.