EQMM, June 2012 Read online

  “Perfect,” he repeated, starting toward the front door. Stopping when he saw lights outside, through a casement window. A narrow window in the Tudor style, with diamond-shaped panes of antique glass that distorted the light, making it dance. Turning him paler than Kline's grotesque puppet-clown. He dropped the rolled-up paintings like pieces of litter and his head started spinning. The old lady must have gotten free somehow and called 9-1-1. Reminded of his mother, the kid must have tied her too loosely, or not at all.

  In the midst of all this abstraction, was this really happening? His life had been clearly defined by hard knocks and poor choices. There were no gray areas in prison cells. No paint splashes open to discussion, other than how to remove them. He was the puppet master, behind the curtain. Making the kid dance, having his way with the old man, taking what should belong to him. He saw it all when that clutch blew in the tunnel, and there was light at the end—but not like this.

  Copyright © 2012 by Gene Breaznell

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  WHO THEY ARE

  In EQMM's 70th Anniversary issue—September/October 2011—I asked longtime subscribers to write and tell us about their history with EQMM. I suspected there might still be some readers on our rolls who'd been with us since the beginning. We received no letter from anyone falling into that category (which does not, of course, mean there isn't such a subscriber still with us). But we did hear from several devoted fans whose readership goes back decades. Below you'll find them listed in order of the length of their connection to EQMM (as best we can determine). We thank them all not only for their loyalty to this magazine, but for telling us their stories. —Janet Hutchings

  David M. Elovitz: subscriber since fall 1944.

  Virginia A. Cudd: started subscribing in 1947; various moves, including one to Mexico City, made it hard to keep up the subscription but she has been with EQMM most of the time since 1947.

  Janet Gillies: subscriber since 1948.

  Janice Temple: subscriber since the early 1950s.

  Ruy José Furst Consalves: began reading Brazilian edition of EQMM as a young child; by 1955 had learned English and began reading the American edition.

  Harry Sheather: subscriber since 1960.

  Guido Marino: has been “reading and enjoying each issue for over 50 years.”

  Mildred O. Grife: subscriber since 1966.

  Forrest T. Athey: no date determined, but he has “an extensive relationship with the magazine” and has read most of the stories in his collection of 823 issues.

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  Reviews: THE JURY BOX

  by Steve Steinbock

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  This month let's whet your appetites with a tasty tour of seven mysteries that prominently feature food, restaurants, or recipes in their plots. While it's easy to package culinary crime fiction into a narrow subgenre, these novels are diverse in style and setting.

  *** Leslie Meier: Chocolate Covered Murder, Kensington Books, $24.00. In the twentieth “Lucy Stone” mystery by a veteran EQMM contributor, it's a cold Maine winter and a body is discovered on the lake, apparently the result of ice fishing with too much alcohol. Small-town journalist Lucy Stone's suspicions of foul play are confirmed when a second body is found: the village tart spread naked with herentire body coated in chocolate. In the background is a quiet rivalrybetween two confectioners, one producing local fudge, and the other selling overpriced truffles. Meier's characters and setting are believable andwritten with a spicy, semi-sweet wit.

  *** Carol Culver: A Good Day to Pie, Midnight Ink, $14.95. In this debut, heroine Hanna Denton has returned to her California hometown to take over her grandmother's pie shop while Grannie enjoys life in a ritzy retirement village. But when an acerbic bridge player and suspected card cheat drops dead in front of Grannie after tasting Hanna's Cranberry Walnut Cream Pie, the young pie-maker has to play detective in order to prove her grandmother's innocence. Added to the challenge is that the local police chief is Hanna's high-school flame. The novel is a low-cal treat filled with fresh pieces of romance.

  *** Lucy Burdette: An Appetite for Murder, Obsidian, $7.99. Hayley Snow is trying to break into work as a Key West food critic. But as her bad luck would have it, on the very day her article “Key Lime Pie to Die For” appears in the paper, her ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend dies from a poisoned Key lime pie. Writing under the new pen name “Lucy Burdette,” Roberta Isleib packs this first in a new series with Key West color, giving readers a glimpse of Key West's restaurants, street vendors, and the houseboat-packed marinas.

  *** Elaine Viets: Death on a Platter, Obsidian, $7.99. With her seventh “Josie Marcus, Mystery Shopper” novel, Viets gets high marks for humor and for her loving and informative culinary travelogue of St. Louis.

  Hired to review the best tourist eateries, Josie finds herself in a bind when a customer dies after eating tainted ravioli at a restaurant owned by a friend of her mother's. Along the way, the reader gets a savory tour that includes local specialties like St. Louis -style pizza, fried brain sandwiches, pig's ears, St. Louis barbecue, and, most importantly, Toasted Ravioli. The story is garnished with Josie's family dynamics and seasoned with romance.

  *** Sandra Balzo: Triple Shot, Severn House, $27.95. Something is rotten in the Wisconsin coffeehouse Uncommon Grounds, and it's not sour milk. A documentary film crew is in town to explore a mafia shootout across the street almost forty years earlier, but a search beneath the floorboards of the old train station housing the coffeehouse uncovers the body of a newly murdered apprentice realtor. Coffee-house owner Maggie Thorsen is the hero of this seventh book in the series. But the real star of Balzo's book is the coffeehouse itself, which comes to life with secret rooms, mafia treasure, plenty of caffeine, and a wild assortment of coffeehouse denizens.

  *** Marian Babson: No Cooperation from the Cat, St. Martin's Minotaur, $24.99. Siblings and retired actresses Trixie Dolan and Evangeline Sinclair, who first appeared in Babson's Reel Murder (1986) are back in a cozy romp set in a mansion with as many madcap oddballs as Blandings Castle. As the deadline for her cookbook looms, Trixie's daughter, Martha, is frantically testing recipes. A handsome but insufferable world traveler arrives with his entourage of doting admirers only to discover that his wife, originally slated to write the cookbook, was poisoned by one of her own recipes. As is usual in Babson's novels, there are numerous cats who share in the fun.

  *** Betsy Draine and Michael Hinden: Murder in Lascaux, University of Wisconsin Books, $26.95 / e-book $14.95. While art history teacher Nora Barnes and her antiques dealer husband are in France to attend a cooking school, they pull some strings in order to see the prehistoric cave paintings at Lascaux. But during their tour, the lights in the cave go out. And when they return, one of their party lies dead with a dead bird ceremonially posed nearby. Dialogue and characters often fall flat, but the background and descriptions of the Lascaux cave paintings, regional art history, and local color are fascinating and well researched. Into the intricate plot the authors were able to weave Cro-Magnon art, a medieval religious sect, and Nazi intrigue, not to mention cooking lessons.

  When your Jury Box foreman set out to write a column featuring culinary mysteries, he had no idea how many there were, or how clever their titles could be. Here are some of the recent books that were released too close to this column's publication date for us to review: Julie Hyzy's latest featuring White House executive chef Olivia Paras, Affairs of Steak (Berkley Prime Crime), Jenn McKinlay's “Cupcake Bakery” mystery, Red Velvet Revenge (Berkley Prime Crime), Jacklyn Brady's “Piece of Cake” mystery, Cake on a Hot Tin Roof (Berkley Prime Crime), Laura Childs’ “Tea Shop” mystery, Agony of the Leaves (Berkley Prime Crime), and Sarah Zettel's second “Vampire Chef” novel, Let Them Eat Stake (Obsidian).

  In the reference-book department, Leslie Budewitz has put together a handy and entertaining resource for mystery writers, Books, Crooks, and Counselors: How to Write
Accurately About Criminal Lawand Courtroom Proceedings (Quill Driver, $14.95). Budewitz, whose stories have appeared in both AHMM and EQMM, addresses 160 different topics and questions about law, including criminal investigation, Latin legal terminology, how judges think, and what happens when a person is arrested. Coincidentally, Budewitz's “Food Lovers Village” mystery series (Berkley Prime Crime), set in northwestern Montana, is set to premier in summer 2013.

  Jigsaw puzzles and detective stories are a natural pairing of pastimes. Since 1988, Bepuzzled has been publishing mystery-related jigsaw puzzles with accompanying short-story booklets. The story stops just before the solution is revealed, and the reader is asked to put together the jigsaw puzzle to solve the crime. While many of these are food related (Henry Slesar's “Foul Play and Cabernet” and “Grounds for Murder” by John Lutz), “Murder on the Rocks” (Bepuzzled, $19.98) involves no food. A group of former college friends get together for an annual mountain climb, but one of them comes home in a body bag. The story, by Mike Barr, packs in the clues. But it isn't until the 1,000 piece puzzle is completed that the visual clues are available to prove who killed Phoebe. The only disappointment about this product is the flimsy paper on which the story booklet is printed. In addition to writing various Batman, superhero, and science-fiction titles for DC Comics, Barr is the creator of “Maze Agency,” which has the distinction of being one of the few “fair play” mystery comics, and was inspired, Barr admits, by his love of Ellery Queen.

  Copyright © 2012 by Steve Steinbock

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  Novelette: MR. MONK AND THE TALKING CAR

  by Lee Goldberg

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  Art by Mark Evan Walker

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  Lee Goldberg is this year's winner of the Malice Domestic Convention's Poirot Award. Normally the award honors individuals other than writers who have made outstanding contributions to the Malice Domestic genre. Lee Goldberg is not only an exceptional writer, he's also a producer who has done much to further the field through TV. For the past couple of years EQMM has been publishing the self-contained Monk stories that the author eventually weaves into the novels he writes for NAL/Signet (see Mr. Monk Is a Mess, out next month).

  The hours pass very slowly when you're sitting in a squad car, parked behind a billboard on a New Jersey country road, waiting for speeders to whiz by.

  It's not the most glamorous side of law enforcement, but writing $390 speeding tickets pays the bills, especially when a handful of corrupt politicians have looted the town treasury to finance their outrageously extravagant lifestyles.

  So that's why Adrian Monk and I, the lovely and resourceful Natalie Teeger, had to do our stint early that Monday morning out on the old highway, a remote, curving stretch of two-lane asphalt surrounded by rolling hills no driver could resist taking at high speed.

  We were into our third week working as uniformed police officers in Summit, thousands of miles away from our homes in San Francisco, where Monk was usually employed as a police consultant and I toiled, underpaid and under-appreciated, as his long-suffering assistant.

  Summit was basically an upscale bedroom community for highly educated, well-off professionals who worked in New York City, which was only a thirty-minute train ride away. The town's roots as a pastoral farming community were still evident in the rolling hills, tree-lined streets, and the lush landscaping around the homes, many of which dated back to the early 1900s and had been impeccably restored and maintained. That costs lots of money, but, from what I could see, there was no shortage of that in Summit, except in the recently looted town treasury.

  We were in Summit as a favor to Police Chief Randy Disher, who'd once been a San Francisco homicide detective, and his live-in girlfriend Sharona Fleming, who'd once been Monk's nurse and assistant.

  With all the local politicians in jail or out on bail awaiting trial, Disher found himself drafted as acting mayor and in desperate need of temporary help enforcing the law. So he called on us.

  I'd worked around a lot of cops over the years while helping Monk solve murders but I'd never had a badge myself. But now that I'd worn one for a few weeks, I'd discovered that I liked it.

  “Thank God for cars and paved roads,” Monk said. He sat in the passenger seat, aiming his radar gun out the window, waiting for our next victim.

  I had to think about the reasoning behind his comment because he reasoned like nobody else. That's partly a result of Monk's obsessive-compulsive disorder, but mostly it's due to the bizarre way he looks at the world. It's what makes him a brilliant detective and an enormous pain in the ass.

  I knew he liked cars because they had four wheels and were symmetrical, but he also firmly believed that the steering wheel should be in the center of the dashboard instead of on one side or the other. He would have settled for cars having two steering wheels, one on each side, even if one was only for show, but so far none of the major automakers had agreed to his gracious compromise (despite the fact that he'd sent them countless letters arguing his point).

  So why was he thanking God for cars now? Perhaps it had less to do with cars than the pavement, which I knew he liked without reservation.

  “You're grateful because cars are symmetrical,” I said, “and the roads they use are flat, level, and divided into lanes that dictate an orderly flow of traffic.”

  “That's only part of it,” he said. “I'm eternally grateful that nobody has to use horses for transportation anymore. Back in the old days, before we had paved roads, horses should have been outlawed in populated areas.”

  “That would have made it awfully difficult for people to get around.”

  “Horses made it worse.”

  “I don't see how.”

  “On a typical day in New York City in the eighteen hundreds, horses dropped two and a half million pounds of manure and expelled sixty-five thousand gallons of urine onto dirt roads. You try walking through that.” Monk did a full-body shudder, which people unfamiliar with him often mistook for an epileptic seizure instead of extreme revulsion. “Before cars came along, the Big Apple was the Big Poop.”

  Ever since Monk became improbably enamored with Ellen Morse, the ecologically-conscious and obsessive-compulsive proprietor of Poop, a store on Summit's main street that sold an astonishing array of art, shampoos, creams, stationery, fossils, coffee, and cooking oils derived from excrement, he'd become a walking encyclopedia of crap.

  “I never thought of it from that perspective,” I said. “And I'm sorry that I can now.”

  “It's a wonder humanity survived that apocalypse.”

  “That wasn't an apocalypse,” I said.

  “When the streets are piled with four hundred thousand tons of poo soaked in twenty-three million, seven hundred twenty-five thousand gallons of pee in a year, that's an apocalypse,” Monk said. “That's why four horsemen, and not four guys in Toyotas, are your first warning that it's coming.”

  I sighed and shook my head. I couldn't believe we were having this stupid discussion when there were far more important things we could be talking about, like the enormous changes we were making in our lives.

  In forty-eight hours, we'd be back in San Francisco, but only for a few weeks to settle our affairs and pack up our belongings. That's because Disher had offered us full-time jobs as cops on his force and we'd accepted.

  Well, I had.

  Monk kept flip-flopping.

  But no matter what he ultimately decided, our relationship had already changed in a big way. From the moment I put on the Summit Police uniform, I stopped being his employee and became his partner, although I couldn't bring myself to call him by his first name.

  And if he decided to stay in San Francisco, and I came back to Summit, he'd have to decide whether to hire a new assistant or try to make it on his own for the first time since his wife was killed and he was discharged from the SFPD on psychological grounds.

  I was about to bring up the topic when a b
right red, mud-splattered Range Rover sped past the billboard we were hiding behind and on towards Summit.

  Monk lowered his radar gun and looked at me. “Let's roll.”

  I flicked on the lights, cranked up the siren, and punched the gas, peeling out in a spray of gravel. The driver of the Range Rover wasn't the only one who couldn't resist speeding on that lonely highway.

  We caught up to the Range Rover in seconds and the driver dutifully pulled over to the shoulder without a fight.

  I parked a few feet behind the car and observed that the driver was a woman and that the vehicle had New Jersey plates.

  Monk was scowling, presumably because her bumper was splashed with mud thick with twigs and bits of leaves. He hated dirt.

  I typed the numbers into the computer on our center console and discovered the Range Rover was registered to Kelsey Turek of Summit. There were no wants or warrants associated with her or the vehicle.

  I got out and approached the driver's side of the car and the woman at the wheel. Monk remained behind me, on the passenger side of the car, peering into the back of the vehicle, just in case there were a couple of bank robbers, a kidnapped heiress, a dozen illegal aliens, piles of cocaine, or maybe a stolen nuclear warhead in plain sight. Her backseat was folded down flat, but the cargo area was empty. All I saw was a bottle of vinegar on the floor. As far as I knew, that wasn't contraband.