Richard Deming’s four enjoyable novels about one-legged World War II-vet P.I. Manville Moon — The Gallows in My Garden (1952), Tweak the Devil’s Nose (1953), Whistle Past the Graveyard (1954, reprinted as Give the Girl a Gun), and Juvenile Delinquent (1958), the latter previously published in book form only in Great Britain — are all available as e-books (Prologue Books, $3.99 each). Moon, who operates in an unnamed Midwestern city, has some associates (long-term girlfriend, annoying comic sidekick, irascible police contact) that seem made for radio. Deming believed in fair-play clues as well as hardboiled set-pieces. The first and best seems to be following the plot of a classic detective novel but may surprise you.
Ennis Willie’s Sand’s War (Ramble House, $32 hardcover, $18 trade paper) has two wildly plotted, energetically writ-ten 1963 cases for the mobster-turned-sleuth known only as Sand.
Haven for the Damned, set in a castle that serves as a hotel for fugitives, is unsatisfactory as a locked-room mystery but cleverly constructed. Fantastic as it is, it looks like gritty realism next to the Spillane-inspired Scarlet Goddess, concerning that old P.I. staple, the sinister religious cult, and a serial rapist-killer who resembles a Sasquatch.
Also recommended: Douglas C. Jones’s beautifully written 1979 novel Winding Stair (New American Library, $15), a superlative historical-Western-courtroom-mystery hybrid; the 1941 title novel in William G. Bogart’s Hell on Friday: The Johnny Saxon Trilogy (Altus Press, $34.95, e-book $4.99), introduced by Will Murray, far from classic but notable for its background of the cutthroat pulp magazine business; Georges Simenon’s World War II romance The Train (Melville House, $14), translated by Robert Baldick, first published in French in 1961 and in English in 1964, intensely suspenseful, subtle and acute in characterization, with a powerful surprise conclusion; and John Gardner’s Victorian gangster epic The Return of Moriarty (Pegasus, $25), introduced by Otto Penzler, one of the earliest (1974) and one of the finest book-length examples of Sherlockian spin-off and revisionist history, though Holmes himself is only an offstage presence.
Sax Rohmer’s The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu (1913; original U.S. title The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu) and The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu (1916; original British title The Devil Doctor), both short story collections disguised as novels, have been reprinted in handsome trade paperbacks (Titan, $9.95 each), with other Fu-Manchu volumes to come. If Leslie Klinger’s excellent afterword to the first volume is correct that the evil doctor’s exploits, enormously entertaining but undeniably racist, attract more contemporary readers than Earl Derr Biggers’s Charlie Chan, created as a corrective to racism, what a sad irony.
Copyright © 2012 by Jon L. Breen
Gone Fishing
by Jim Davis
When Jim Davis debuted in EQMM’s Department of First Stories in February of 2011 he said he had more short story ideas for his private detective Bradley Carter. Here we have the fruit of one of those ideas, a case in which Carter goes on a high-tension chase through the Ozark Mountains, a scene familiar to his creator, a veterinarian who lives on a farm near the Lake of the Ozarks.
I was sitting at a corner table in a smoke-filled biker bar just off Route 16 in northwest Arkansas. My stack of quarters glinted on the bumper under the Stag Beer light that illuminated the stained felt of the pool table. My momma, if she were still alive, would not have approved.
I nursed a lukewarm Budweiser longneck waiting for Seymour “Tiny” Buckman to hustle twenty bucks off a half-breed kid who was way too drunk to steer his bike back to Oklahoma. Tiny had probably been drinking all day himself, from the looks of it. I was sure of it when he double-tapped the cue ball before sinking the eight ball in the corner pocket. He stared the breed down as he chalked his cue; his glare daring the kid to call him on it. His eyes were red, and his pupils were dilated like he might be on something besides an alcohol buzz.
The kid reached in his pocket and flipped a wadded-up pair of tens out onto the felt and handed the cue to me. He staggered toward the door without a word. He was listing slightly to the left as he aimed for the opening. He suddenly reeled and fell headlong into the shuffleboard table, scattering pucks and sending up a cloud of Ultra Glide powder. He rolled off and slid under the table and lay still. No one seemed to notice.
Tiny scooped the money off the table as he staggered over to where I sat. He wore a jean jacket with the sleeves cut out, the armpits wet with sweat, and a pair of Levis so shiny and dark that I would guess they had never been washed since they came off the shelf at Walmart. He weighed at least two-fifty and smelled like a hog eating onions. He reached out a hairy paw, snatched my beer off the table, and chugged it in two gulps. He wiped the foam from his beard with the back of his arm and tossed the bottle on the table, where it spun to a stop. He leaned down into my face and let out a mighty belch. I felt my hair move, but I managed to keep from breathing until he stood back up and said, “Rack ’em.”
It is always in the wee hours in a place like this that I wonder why I wanted to be a private investigator. The air was close and damp, and smelled of stale beer. The establishment had one window air conditioner stuffed through a hole at the end of the bar, where it chugged away; condensation ran down the wall and disappeared through a crack in the floor. I had ridden here on a 1969 Shovelhead Harley-Davidson that my granddaddy had bought new, and I was wearing an old leather flight jacket over a black T-shirt. But that was as far as my biker cover went. I didn’t have a single tattoo and would have been more at home in a Polo shirt and golf shorts. I was beginning to doubt the wisdom of leaving the old Colt semiauto in the saddlebag.
I was put on the trail of one Delbert Fish by his maiden aunt, Miss Etta Mae Fish, who had been my Sunday-school teacher twenty-five years ago. Delbert was wanted in connection with a rape and assault that had occurred down by Fort Smith. According to the news reports, it was a brutal crime, and the victim was in a coma. Miss Etta Mae was certain that her nephew was not capable of such abominations. She had come to see me in the back-room office that I occasionally used at the Fayetteville, Arkansas, law firm of Gantry and Grizzell, a couple of fraternity brothers of mine.
“It is inconceivable that little Delbert could have done those — those horrible things.” She sat upright and prim in a captain’s chair across from my desk. She wore a light-blue, floral-print dress that she had probably made herself and clutched a big black purse with both hands. “I’m not familiar with what a private eye charges,” she said, opening the purse. “I can give you two hundred dollars.” She pulled out a wad of fives and ones that I knew had come from piano lessons she’d given over the years.
“Miss Etta Mae,” I began, wondering how I was going to get out of this. “I’ve got other cases right now...”
“Young man,” she interrupted. “Don’t you tell a story to me! That nice woman out front told me that you needed the work.”
“Now Miss Etta...”
“Bradley Carter, you listen to me. Half the law-enforcement officers in the state are looking for Delbert down in the delta. If they find him, they will shoot him. Now I’m coming to you because I want you to find him first, so he can turn himself in. Besides, he’s not in the delta.”