An enjoyable mix of mystery stories ( )

Ever since the magazine changed to a 6 issues per year frequency, the usual yearly Holmes issue had turned into an issue with a harder concentration of Holmes and Holmesque stories in the first issue of the year.

Steve Hockensmith opens the issue with "Bad News", a new story in his Holmes on the Range Mystery series. You do not need to have read earlier installments (novels or stories) to enjoy this one but knowing some of the back story makes it even better. This time the two brothers travel to a small town where a weird robbery had taken place - someone waylaid a man and stole the newspapers he was carrying - just the newspapers. While the Amlingmeyer brothers try to figure out what is happening, we get a tale of the newspapers industry just starting to appear in the States - the rivalries and the naivete of a period which is lost to time. That series is also tied to the Holmes series directly - this tale takes place soon after Holmes falls down the waterfall and that plays a role in the story.

In K. L. Abrahamson's "Paleolithic", a family moves to a new house just to realize that their next door neighbor is a man they both know - he used to be in a relationship with the wife. The wife tells the story, in a style which can feel overwritten in places. The end comes almost as a surprise despite being logical.

Doug Allyn transports us back in time to 1943 where a soldier is discharged after a bad injury and comes home to Port Gracie, New Jersey in "The Death-Camp Angel". After almost losing his life on the front, now he needs to deal with the home front - where the monsters get protected because they have information and people make their fortunes of the war. New Jersey's harbors were never the most honest places on Earth so that is not surprising but when the army protects a Nazi, who on top of everything else, stole a child, the narrator needs to do something. The story is never black and white - wars make monsters of everyone and it works because of it - the only innocent is the child. And that child needs help.

In B. A. Paul's "Stone Still", a policeman takes the place of one of the Shakespearean performers/statues after the original disappears. It was a nice story but it sounded very familiar, all the way to and including its solution - although it felt more like different pieces from different places mixed into one (and I am sure I had not read the story before).

"The Scarlet Box" by Alex Grecian is part of his Murder Squad series - set in the early days of Scotland Days (October 1889 for this story). A few characters from the main series are mentioned but the story protagonist is one of the secondary characters which we rarely see, Constable Colin Pringles. A daughter is convinced that her mother is missing and calls Colin for help - just to have the father explain to him that there is no trouble of that type. Except that something is not what it seems - and things get sinister as the tale proceeds. It is a nice period piece - regardless if you had read the main series (and if you had not, it is worth checking).

"Best Served Cold" by Alice Hatcher gets us back to our century but deals with the past. Years earlier, 3 girls were in a crash but due to who they were, they got treated differently and the one who caused the issue seems to have survived unscathed (unlike the other 2). The narrator is one of the three and the story is provoked by one of the others stopping by - with distressing news. And while the past and the present stories merge and expand, the narrator may not really understand what her friend is telling her... not for awhile anyway. It is a tightly written story which works because of the style of the narration.

"Their Last Bow" by Josh Pachter is a Puzzle Club story with Richard Queen and his old friends solving a new mysteries (it is a revived series - a pastiche/continuation of the old Ellery Queen one). But if you read the story carefully, you will realize that it is also a Holmes pastiche (or if you pay attention to the title). There is death in this one - and a brilliant solution at the end. A nicely done story which makes you want reread both the Holmes tale and the old Puzzle Club stories.

Another apparently missing wife (while the husband insists that she is not missing at all), starts "The Sound of Laughing" by Jack Fredrickson - but unlike Grecian story, this one is set nowadays in Florida. The husband appears more and more guilty as the story progresses - all the way to the end. Surprise endings are not uncommon in this kind of stories but I've rarely seen it done as well as it was done here.

"True Companion" by Libby Cudmore is another series story (P.I. Martin Wide - it seems to contain only short stories for now). A not very successful musician who had turned into a not very successful P.I. ends up helping the homeless of his city looking for their disappearing dogs.

"On the Side of the Angels" by Merrilee Robson is another historical mystery - this one set in Vancouver, a few months after Pearl Harbor. The local store owners keep getting robbed and everyone thinks they know who the robber is - except that things don't add up. The end of the story made me laugh - trying to solve a case when you already think you know the answer never works, not when the answer is under your nose.

In Bill Pronzini's "The Wind", the protagonist is alone at home while the storm outside reminds him of another storm, years earlier, in which he lost the woman he loved. Although "lost" may not be the correct word. I really liked this very short tale.

"The Musgrave Ritual" by Terence Faherty is the yearly Holmes parodyby Faherty. As usual, the title tells you which Holmes story you should be thinking of. Add a butler (who feels almost stolen from Wodehouse) and things get weirder than usual. I am not a huge fan of these parodies - they are well done but they are just not my thing.

"The Favor" by Michael Z. Lewin is another short story which is very clearly set in our times - an old man stays outside of a store because he forgot his mask and asks a man going into the store for a favor. Who would not help an old man? I loved the ending of the story.

In "It's All in the Telling" by Ariel Dodson, the carnival comes back to the town for the first time in years and 5 friends which used to always go together decide to do it again. Except that friends may be too strong a word (or at least once people grow up, things are not as innocent as they look). I liked the feeling of doom permeating this story and the final twist in the story made it even more believable.

The two stories in the "Department of First Stories" were as different from each other as humanly possible: "Into Thin Air" by Karen Jobst has a man going away from home telling the story of where he is going and why. It is somewhat predictable (you almost know there is something coming) but it is still a nice story. In the second story, "The Policeman and the Dead" by Raghu Roy, transports us to India (the author is based in Mumbai; the tale is set somewhere in India), where an Assistant Commissioner of the local police department is sent to the home of a prominent family after one of its members dies from an apparent suicide. He should not be there - but politics are important and the police needs to be seen as helpful but the elite - so off he goes. To noone's surprise, things start looking not so clear once he decides to actually investigate... and old ghosts seem to be showing from any corner he looks in. Maybe sending him was not such a good idea - but it is too late to change the plans.

"Double Fly Rocket 87" by Eli Cranor is in the "Black Mask" section and feels like a noir tale that would find its place in a modern incarnation of the magazine (it would not have worked in the original - though - it is too modern in some elements). 2 ex-college football players hold up the concession stands at the stadium after a big game - it should be easy money. This kind of plans work properly only in the heads of the people who dream them up - so before long things go in a direction noone expects.

The last story in the issue is the translation of Olavo Bilac's "The Crime" from the Portuguese (Brazil); translated by Clifford E. Landers. A man walks the streets of Rio de Janeiro and thinks about a woman - and tries to decide if what he did was a crime. It is unclear when the story is set (the author died in 1918 so it is sometime before it) but it almost does not matter - it is really a question about the choices a man makes and finding ways to live with them.

Steve Steinbock's reviews contain a lot of Holmes-related books (it's that issue after all) and as usual sent a few on my TBR list. Kristopher Zgorski's "Blog Bytes" is entertaining as usual although I rarely check the sites he mentions - maybe if I read that section while on an actual computer, they will have more of a chance.
The issue closes with a review of a non-fiction piece by Arthur Conan Doyle ("The Bravoes of Market-Dayton", printed in the August 1889 issue of Chambers's Journal) and the murders that he described in that piece. The Doyle article is available in archive.org (https://archive.org/details/chambersjournalo6188cham/page/540/mode/2up) - as part of the magazine it was in. I may or may not have spent some time reading other things published in this magazine in this year...

A solid issue for the start of the year (even if nothing really shined). ( )