Francis M. Nevins’s Night Forms (Perfect Crime, $16.95), includes everything in his earlier collections Night of Silken Snow (2001) and Leap Day (2003) plus four previously uncollected, among them his brilliant Ellery Queen pastiche “Open Letter to Survivors” and the Harry Stephen Keeler parody “The Skull of the Stuttering Gunfighter.” An extensive introduction and story afterwords add to the interest.
The title novella of Philip Wylie’s Ten Thousand Blunt Instruments and Other Tales of Mystery (Crippen & Landru, $29 hardcover, $19 trade paper) is a good 1944 American Magazine whodunit notable for its specialized background (the American Museum of Natural History) and its World War II period. Bill Pronzini’s introduction summarizes the author’s remarkably prolific and versatile literary career... Loren D. Estleman’s Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection (Tyrus, $32.95) brings together 32 cases of the Detroit private eye, most previously uncollected and one new, plus an introduction by the author about his famous character... An obscurely-published and excellent 1959 short story, “Hard Case Redhead,” is included along with a novel and novella previously unpublished in the latest Peter Rabe omnibus, The Silent Wall/The Return of Marvin Palaver (Stark House, $19.95), introduced by Rick Ollerman... A mixed collection of Arthur Upfield’s fiction, Up and Down Australia (Lulu, $24.96), edited by Kees de Hoog, includes “Wisp of Wool and Disk of Silver,” the only short story about Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, originally published in EQMM in 1979 after being lost for decades, plus the first chapter of an unfinished Bony novel featuring the half-Aborigine sleuth’s wife, an off-stage presence in most of his cases.
The advent of the e-book reader has made easily accessible many old books expensive and scarce in their original editions, including some classic short-story collections. Anna Katharine Green’s 1915 volume about a young woman detective from the ranks of New York high society, The Golden Slipper and Other Problems for Violet Strange, contains delightful period detail, agreeably old-fashioned prose and dialogue, and some offbeat and cunningly plotted mysteries, including the bizarre classic “The Second Bullet.” It’s available from Amazon’s Kindle store for free.
Copyright © 2011 by Jon L. Breen
Shelf-Cocked
by Erika Jahneke
Erika Jahneke is an author and blogger whose subjects (for publications such as Smile, Hon) range from how the city of Baltimore is depicted in pop culture to women’s reproductive health. Her fiction has appeared in several e-zines, but this is her first paid print short story. The Phoenix resident says her writing almost makes up for the physical power she lost when she developed a brain injury at birth and became a life-long wheelchair user.
It was the most perfect copy of The Maltese Falcon any of the antiques-shop owners of downtown Glendale had ever seen, and it was in my dad’s store. I missed not having to care about things like that, but the recession had brought such tough times to writers that nowadays I had to try to convince myself there were worse fates than feeling twelve years old every time someone’s old book was pronounced “shelf-cocked” and therefore too bent and damaged to sell. I had only worked there a short time, but I was feeling shelf-cocked myself.
I tried to feel lucky. The old man had thought of me, for once, rare books being a big part of his trade; just the fact that he’d pitched me the job at all could represent a real turning point from our past: criticism on his side, rebellion on mine. Although, in view of what eventually happened, I suppose I should say that my father neither touched me inappropriately nor locked me in a closet for whole nights at a time. Does it count as inappropriate touching if you remember the one time he rubbed eucalyptus on your congested chest more clearly than when the space shuttle blew up? Because I still do, along with the little jingle that may have kept me from joining my friends in college in fierce denunciations of television commercials. I think it’s inappropriate that I can count the times he hugged me on one hand. I use all the fingers, but just barely. I suppose if he didn’t spend his days and nights pricing snuff boxes and thimbles it would be easier to think of him as the strong, silent type, but at least my mother’s post-divorce nickname for him, Claude Rains, made sense now. Once in a while, though, he had a sentimental craving to be on Mom’s good side, and she probably told him that my term-paper editing business had gotten slow and my articles weren’t selling like they used to. For too much of my life, he’d been invisible. While it was probably too late for him to save the day with soft words and circus tickets, I admit that I came into the job very determined to get something at last. The role of model employee was definitely out, as he and Lola spent most of every work day together, laughing at private jokes and poring over eBay on her pink laptop. I tried hard to impress for a few weeks, though, as the something I wanted started out recession-modest and as naked as a good girl’s need for gold stars. At least you have a job, I told myself. And I did get to take a book with me and read in the back sometimes, which was good — if I could edit out the way Lola treated me as if I left Pig-Pen stink-lines as I walked away.
It was hard to have much faith in my good fortune, though, with demented old duffers attempting to grope me while I bent to show their wives something from our bulky display cases. But even I was psyched by the discovery of the Falcon, though I was mostly a Chandler girl at heart. I was also one of the few people to come in here who saw books as more than investment opportunities or something to match the couch.
I was not among my people.
And that was before I thought about Lola, the other sales assistant, who’d been an eighth-grade classmate, although not a friend, and who only seemed to come to life to accept my father’s compliments about her “good eye” for glassware and thirties brooches. She wasn’t pretty when we were in school together, and I had to admit she had ripened a lot, but this knowledge hadn’t made her calmly confident of anything but wrapping men around her little finger. She whiled away her mornings watching me work. If you’ve never worked retail, you’d be surprised at how little time selling stuff to people actually takes up. When I worked in a gift store during college, we were expected to vacuum, dust, and fill any holes in the display cases on a regular basis. Lola never felt such pressure, so between that and my drive to be worthwhile, that old carpet had never seen so much attention.
“I was about to vacuum... I hope it doesn’t interrupt your reading or anything.” I was more tart than I expected after holding my tongue for weeks.
If you can mouse with attitude, Lola did, and completely missed the point of my sarcasm. “Oh, it’s no big deal,” she said, after a desultory keystroke.
“In case it’s not clear, I doubt my dad is paying you to sit around and read TMZ and Go Fug Yourself all day. But I’ve only been here doing all your cleaning and dusting for four weeks so I could be wrong.” When I thought about it later, I wondered how much of my subsequent pain could have been avoided if I, a grown woman with publications and everything, hadn’t been so childish as to talk about my dad like that at work.