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Talmage Powell

The Second Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 20 More Classic Mystery Stories

A Note from the Publisher

Welcome to our second Talmage Powell collection!

Talmage Powell (1920–2000) was one of the all-time great mystery writers of the pulps (and later the digest mystery magazines). He claimed to have written more than 500 short stories (and I have no reason to doubt him — I am working on a bibliography of his work, and so far I can document 373 magazine stories... and who knows how many are out there under pseudonyms or buried in obscure magazines!) His pen names included Robert Hart Davis, Robert Henry, Milton T. Lamb, Milton T. Land, Jack McCready, Anne Talmage, and Dave Sands. Some (like Robert Hart Davis) were “house names” shared by many different authors. (Bill Pronzini also wrote as “Robert Hart Davis,” for example.) His work appeared in Dime Mystery, Black Mask, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Magazine, Manhunt, and many, many more

He wrote his first novel, The Smasher, in 1959. He went on to pen 11 more novels under his own name, 4 as “Ellery Queen,” and 2 novelizations of the TV series Mission: Impossible. Clearly, though short stories were his first love.

Enjoy!

— John Betancourt

The Vital Element

Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, November 1967.

I would never again love the warm water of the Gulf of Mexico... never find beauty in its blue-green color... never hear music in its rustling surf...

The dead girl had been hurriedly buried in the Gulf. She was anchored in about thirty feet of water with a hempen rope that linked her lashed ankles to a pair of cement blocks.

I’d stirred the water, swimming down to her depth. Her body bobbed and swayed, with her bare toes about three feet off the clean, sandy bottom. It was almost as if a strange, macabre, new life had come to her. Her long blonde hair swirled about her lovely gamine face with every tremor of the water. A living ballerina might have enjoyed her grace of motion, but not her state of being. I wept silently behind my face mask.

A single stroke sent me drifting, with my shoulder stirring silt from the bottom. I touched the rope where it passed into the holes in the cement blocks and out again. A natural process of wear and tear had set in. The sharp, ragged edges of the blocks were cutting the rope. In a matter of time, the rope would part. Her buoyancy would drift her toward the sunlight, to the surface, to discovery.

I eeled about, careful not to look at her again, and plunged up toward the shadow of the skiff. My flippers fired me into open air with a shower of spray and a small, quick explosion in my ears.

I rolled over the side of the skiff and lay a moment with my stomach churning with reaction. Sun, blue sky, the primitive shoreline of mangrove and palmetto, everything around me was weirdly unreal. It was as if all the clocks in the world had gone tick, then forgot to tock.

“You’re a too-sensitive, chicken-hearted fink,” I said aloud. I forced myself to peel out of my diving gear, picked up the oars, and put my back into the job of rowing in.

I docked and tied the skiff, then walked to the cottage with my gear slung across my shoulder. Sheltered by scraggly pines, the lonely cottage creaked tiredly in the heat.

I stood on the sagging front porch. For a moment I didn’t have the strength or nerve to go inside. The cottage was its usual mess, a hodgepodge of broken down furniture, dirty dishes, empty beer bottles and bean cans, none of which bothered me. But she was strewn all over the place, the dead girl out there in the water. She was portrayed in oil, sketched in charcoal, delicately impressed in pink and tan watercolors. She was half finished on the easel in the center of the room, like a naked skull.

Shivering and dry-throated, I slipped dingy ducks over my damp swim trunks, wriggled into a tattered T-shirt, and slid my feet into strap sandals. The greasy feeling was working again in the pit of my stomach as I half-ran from the cottage.

Palmetto City lay like a humid landscape done with dirty brushes as my eight-year-old station wagon nosed into DeSota Street. Off the beaten tourist paths, the town was an unpainted clapboard mecca for lantern-jawed farmers, fishermen, swamp muckers.

I angled the steaming wagon beside a dusty pickup at the curb and got out. On the sidewalk, I glimpsed myself in the murky window of the hardware store: six feet of bone and cartilage without enough meat; thatch of unkempt sandy hair; a lean face that wished for character; huge sockets holding eyes that looked as if they hadn’t slept for a week.