ED GORMAN “Our Kind of Guy.” First appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, July 1996. Collected in Famous Blue Raincoat, Crippen & Landru, trade paperback, 1999, and in Out There in the Darkness: The Collected Ed Gorman – Volume One, PS Publishing, hardcover (limited edition), 2007.

   The late Ed Gorman spent over twenty years in the advertising and public relations business before becoming a full-time writer, and I wonder if he ever put that background to better use than in this story.

   Two partners in a multimillion-dollar advertising agency in a small Midwestern town have 64.3 percent of their business tied up with one client, the Hancher Chicken account, and a crisis is brewing. It turns out that Ted Hancher, the CEO of the company has gotten religion and is about to cancel the account. Apparently he no longer wants his company to be associated with the boozing and high life of Bill and Roy, co-owners of the agency. Drinking, smoking, cursing, women? All verboten.

   What to do? They come up with a plan, one involving a local former call girl named Brandy, a motel, a camera, a little blackmail, and hey presto, no more worries. What could go wrong?

   Well, of course something does, and what a tricky twist of the knickers it is that fate plays on the luckless perpetrators of this far from foolproof plan. But wait! Fate steps in again. A double twist. Most stories manage only one. This one has two.

   Combine this with Gorman’s usual semi-sour look at the world he always wrote about anyway, and prose written so smoothly that you think anyone can do it, but you can’t. The result is a noirish gem of the highest magnitude. An absolute winner.