Sat 23 May 2020
Stories I’m Reading: KEVIN PRUFER “The River Market Murders.â€
Posted by Steve under Stories I'm Reading[3] Comments
KEVIN PRUFER “The River Market Murders.†Detective Armand #2. Short story. First appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, September 2006. Probably never reprinted.
Armand is a homicide detective in Kansas City, a town that hardly ever shows up as the scene of a detective fiction story, except maybe in the pulps. In this tale, River Market is an area undergoing urban renewal, and at least one person is violently opposed to young people moving in and squeezing the former residents out. Several of these newcomers have been murdered, all with the same M.O., but the latest doesn’t quite fit the pattern.
She’s older, for one thing, and she lives out in the suburbs. Her husband doesn’t know why she’d be downtown. She had no friends in the area, no reason to be there.
Armand is an excellent detective, and the puzzle continues to gnaw at him. He also can relate to the anguish the woman’s husband is going through. He lost his wife in an automobile accident a year or so ago, and the thought of it often keeps him up at night.
As a detective story, this is a good one, but it’s also one of the darker ones I’ve read recently. Armand finds himself identifying more and more with the victim’s husband, and whether the end of the story is a happy one, I will leave you to decide, if ever you get a chance to read this one.
Armand’s first appearance was in “The Body in the Spring,†published in the June 2005 issue of AHMM. There were only the two. As to why I thought this one was so well written, I went investigating and discovered that Kevin Prufer is a very well known poet and a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Houston. His Wikipedia page is here.
May 23rd, 2020 at 8:21 pm
There was a P.I. series set in Kansas City in the eighties I seem to recall, but for the love of me I can’t recall the author or character involved.
May 23rd, 2020 at 9:17 pm
I’ve done some searching on my own, and so far have come up with the Johnny April stories by Mike Roscoe, but those came out in the early 50s. If you’re thinking of a series of books from the 80s, I’ll have to look some more.
May 23rd, 2020 at 10:41 pm
How about the Mitch Roberts books by Gaylord Dold? Right time period. Is Wichita close enough to Kansas City to be the one you’re thinking of?