*** Frank Parrish: Sting of the Honeybee, Dodd, Mead, $7.95. Dan Mallett, rural English poacher, is more Robin Hood than detective in this second adventure, beautifully written and full of striking nature passages. Though the plot is reminiscent of an old-fashioned stage melodrama, the figures of hero, villain, and victims are all far from standard.
*** Donald Olson: Sleep Before Evening, St. Martin’s, $8.95. Olson’s second novel, a diverting account of tangled relationships, is long on atmosphere and plotting, short on sympathetic characters. Genealogist Devillo Green is a truly memorable villain.
*** Robert B. Parker: Wilderness, Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, $8.95. Here is a genuinely suspenseful tale of outdoor revenge, centered on a middle-aged writer with a machismo hang-up and his college professor-wife. Parker is a very readable writer, and he involves his readers in the lives of his characters so completely they will even put up with some laughably pretentious dialogue.
*** William L. DeAndrea: The HOG Murders, Avon, $1.95. A promising new Great Detective candidate, Professor Niccolo Benedetti, finds a worthy opponent in HOG, perhaps the most terrifying versatile serial killer in mystery annals. Fair play is manifest, and the solution is so logical and inevitable that many readers will probably anticipate it. On balance, this is probably a better book than the author’s Edgar-winning debut, Killed in the Ratings (1978).
*** Simon Brett: A Comedian Dies, Scribners, $7.95. Although actor-sleuth Charles Paris is not at his best in this fifth adventure — Brett’s plot is his weakest to date, and Charles’s detecting is ineffectual to the end — the background of British nightclubs and television and the beautifully drawn character of comebacking comedian Willie Barber save the day.
*** Michelle Collins: Murder at Willow Run, Zebra Mystery Puzzler #32, $1.95. The story of a locked-room murder in an upstate New York artists’ community is a smoothly professional job, the best Zebra sealed-ending mystery I’ve sampled to date. (Note for pseudonym buffs: Clues to the contrary, I am assured that this Collins is not Dennis Lynds.)
** Robert Bloch: There Is a Serpent in Eden, Zebra, $2.25. A retirement community provides the scene for Bloch’s latest suspense novel, packed as usual with puns, nostalgia, and downbeat social commentary. This is minor Bloch, with twists easier to anticipate than usual, but it is never less than readable and entertaining.
** Anthony Shaffer: Murderer, Marion Boyars, $3.95. This grisly stage shocker, alternately amusing and revolting, is far from the author’s classic Sleuth in terms of quality. For true-crime buffs, there are many references to famous cases.
Among the reprints is F. Lee Bailey’s 1978 novel, Secrets (Bantam, $2.50), an enthralling and instructive courtroom drama for readers (like me) who could never get enough of Perry Mason... Though his life at times seemed like a long-running soap opera, theatrical producer Peter Duluth was one of the best series detectives of the Forties and Fifties. Too long out of print, his cases (as recounted by Patrick Quentin) are now being reissued in paperback, beginning with Puzzle for Fiends (1946) and Puzzle for Pilgrims (1948) (Avon, $2.25 each)... Fred Halliday’s three flamboyant and satirical novels about tastemaking gourmet Stanley Delphond have been gathered in an omnibus edition, Murder in the Kitchen (Pinnacle, $2.50). Only in the first, The Chocolate Mousse Murders (1974), does the recipe really work, however, and all three will be too gross for some palates.
The Glass Slipper Murder
by Betty Jochmans
© 1979 by Betty Jochmans.
This is the 541st “first story” to be published by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine... a detective debut in the classical tradition...
The author, Betty Jochmans, was born in 1924 in Illinois. She started “writing mystery stories at the age of nine, but was sidetracked for 45 years.” Her husband is a retired professor, but Mrs. Jochmans teaches part-time at the University of Nebraska and at Nebraska Wesleyan University. The Jochmans have traveled extensively in Europe, Africa, and Central America, and they have “noticed while traveling on trains and planes all over the world that more people read mysteries than anything else.” Naturally!...
Funny, thought Lieutenant-Detective Alvin V. Baker, how some people look so right for their profession or line of work. Eric Moffatt, youngish owner and publisher of the country’s most successful line of children’s books — Little Folks Fiction, Inc. — was lying on a hay-colored shag rug in front of Baker, looking for all the world like an oversized Little Boy Blue, sound asleep in the barn where he was taking time out from his horn-blowing. Wavy blond hair lay charmingly disheveled across a high broad forehead. Eyes, widely set, were closed, but Baker would have given odds they were blue. The cheeks still had a touch of healthy pink, and a disturbingly sweet smile turned up the corners of the mouth.
The rest of him was a mess. A red-black hole in the middle of the chest still glistened with blood that was just beginning to coagulate. In his left hand Eric was grasping a copy of a Little Folks anthology of fairy tales titled The Glass Slipper. The picture on the dust jacket was a collage of well-known objects from fairy stories — a gleaming glass slipper surrounded by smaller versions of a gingerbread house, a spilled bucket, a frog, and some other objects that Baker decided he was too old to identify.
The fingers of Eric’s right hand were curled as though still clutching the ballpoint pen that now lay on the rug, several feet from the body. It looked as though that hand had been stabbing at the picture of the glass slipper on the jacket, trying to draw an X through it with the ballpoint. The last stroke might have been accomplished after death when the lifeless body fell forward over the book. With his last bit of strength, thought Baker, the murdered man had tried to call our attention to the glass slipper.
Moffatt’s body had been found just an hour earlier. An early riser, the young publisher was in the habit of coming in to work before the rest of the office staff. His secretary, Miss Hunzel, (who looked, thought Baker, like the Wicked Witch of the North), had found her employer lying face down on the floor. Rolling him over, she had gone into hysterics when she saw the gaping bloody wound in his chest.
Nothing, according to Miss Hunzel, had been stolen. What was missing was the murder weapon.
Someone had known that the young publisher would be alone in his office; someone had had access to the building and his office; someone had been able to walk up to him quite naturally... After nearly 30 years of investigating murder, Baker still shuddered at the sight of that wound. Death hadn’t even been mercifully quick. Moffatt had evidently reeled and fallen from the attack just a few feet from his desk and had just had the time, after his murderer left, to get his hands on the book of fairy tales, grasp the ballpoint, and make that painful, sinister X through the picture of the glass slipper.
Baker replaced the sheet over the body and sat back on his heels. Murder was such a waste...
“Seen enough?” Detective-Sergeant Gary Steig swung in through the door and plopped himself down in a blue leather chair, draping one leg over the padded arm. Steig was half of Baker’s age.
“Yes, I’ve seen it all,” Baker murmured. “You can let the picture boys in now — and get that book and the ballpoint over to the lab.”