DICK STODGHILL “A Deceitful Way of Dying.” Novelette. Jack Eddy #4. First published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, September 1989, Collected in The Jack Eddy Stories, Volume 1 (JLT-Charatan Publications, paperback, 2006).

   Between 1979 and his death in 2009, long time newspaper columnist Dick Stodghill was also a prolific writer of short stories, producing several dozen of them over those years. His only series character was a fellow named Jack Eddy, a PI working for the Wellington National Detective Agency back around 1937 or so.

   Eddy was based in Akron OH and lived in the same boarding house as the narrator of his stories, Abraham “Bram” Geary. The latter is the crime reporter for one of the local newspapers, and even though he resents Eddy for going out with their landlady’s daughter, whom he has worshiped from afar, he also does not want to miss the scoops that working with Eddy always produce.

   In this, their fourth case together of maybe 18 or 19 in all, most appearing in AHMM, a man who has been presumed dead for several months, having run his car straight into an oncoming train, turns up dead in another town some 40 miles over. Eddy is hired by the man’s insurance company, who has already paid off once. They don’t want to pay off twice.

   It takes quite a bit of detective work to unravel the complicated plot the killer has set up — and I’m not sure I followed the explanation completely — but the solidly constructed atmosphere of several working class towns in Depression-era Ohio is pitch perfect, in a style strongly reminiscent of Black Mask of that very same era: only semi-hardboiled, with a dash of humor.

CHARLAINE HARRIS “Small Chances.” Short story. Anne DeWitt #3. First published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, September/October 2016. Collected in Small Kingdoms and Other Stories (Subterranean, hardcover, May 2019); and JABberwocky Literary Agency, paperback, 2019).

   Chatelaine Harris is best known now as the author of the Sookie Stackhouse series upon which the HBO television series True Blood is based. Sookie is a telepathic waitress who works in a Northern Louisiana bar and solves mysteries involving werewolves, vampires and the like.

   I’ve never read the book or watched the TV series, but my sense is tht the stories are a lot darker in tone than the two series Harris began her career with: (1) the Aurora Teagarden series, featuring a librarian who likes solves crimes as well, and (2) the Lily Bard books, about a cleaning lady detective based in rural Arkansas. (Correction: See comment #1.)

   The success of the Sookie Stackhouse books has made it possible for Harris to write anything she wants and have her many fans clamoring for more, so she has and they do. Included among these other efforts are four stories about a high school principal now named Anne DeWitt. Due to a fatal incident at a training course she was taking, the people in charge have forced her out of the program, changed her name, and started her off in a new career.

   In which to get ahead, one or two convenient deaths have already occurred. Always in the interest in the children in her school, mind you, but neither does anyone want to get in her way as she moves her way up in her new profession.

   “Small Chances” begins with a man stopping at her office and announcing himself as her first husband. Anne knows something is wrong immediately She’s never been married. So who is Tom Wilson and what does he want? Or perhaps the question is, who sent him?

   This is dark comedy at its finest. This is the only one of the four stories I’ve read, and I don’t know if there’s much potential for a fifth one, or even a novel, but in this one small dose so far, I found this short tale divertingly wicked and a lot of fun to read.

        The Anne DeWitt series —

“Small Kingdoms.” EQMM, Nov 2013
“Sarah Smiles.” EQMM, Sep/Oct 2014
“Small Chances.” EQMM, Sept/Oct 2016
“Small Signs.” EQMM, Nov/Dec 2017

   L. M. MONTGOMERY “The House Party at Smoky Island.” Short story. First published in Weird Tales, August 1935. Reprinted in Startling Mystery Stories, Fall 1968, and Visions from the Edge: An Anthology of Atlantic Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy (Pottersfield Press, trade paperback, 1981). First collected in Among the Shadows (Bantam Starfire, paperback, 1991).

   Whenever I read a ghost story — which isn’t often, but on occasion I do — I want a story that gives me shivers and goosebumps. No gross out gruesome stuff for me. There’s an obvious difference between chills and shock and disgust. You know where the line is as well as I do, and “The House Party at Smoky Island” stays completely on the right side of it.

   It helps, though, when a tale takes place on an island somewhere in the isolated wilderness– of central Ontario, for example, and Lake Muskoka in particular. The manor house in full of people, but it has rained all week, and by Saturday night the guests have been on each other’s nerves for far too long.

   One of the married couples is especially on edge. She has become more and more obsessed with the thought that he killed his first wife. She does not know this for a fact. She only suspects it. As Saturday night arrives, with the wind howling and the rain pouring down, there is a call for each of the members of the house party to tell the rest of the company a ghost story, which only builds up to what happens next.

   And that’s all I can tell you without telling you the whole story, but if ever a ghost story can give you a brief shiver or shill at exactly the right moment, this one will.

   You may have recognized the author’s name, or you think you may have, and if so, you are correct. This is the same L. M. Montgomery who wrote Anne of Green Gables and all of its sequels, plus many other stories meant for children. She is one of Canada’s most well-known and beloved authors, and this is a rarity: the only story she wrote for the pulp magazines.

  AUGUST DERLETH “The China Cottage.” Solar Pons. Short story. First published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, March 1965. First collected in The The Casebook of Solar Pons (Mycroft & Moran, hardcover, 1965), as “The Adventure of the China Cottage.” Reprinted in Alfred Hitchcock’s Games Killers Play (Dell, paperback, 1968.

   I wonder if this story marked the first appearance of Solar Pons’ brother Bancroft, a man of some size and weight and who worked, not surprisingly, for the British Foreign Office. Dead in a locked room is an eccentric breaker of codes and ciphers, found slumped over the latest set of papers he was working on.

   But as it turns out, Pons quickly deduces that the papers and the secrets that may have been in them were not the reason for his murder, and the problem of the locked room is disposed of almost as quickly. If it was indeed murder, the killer simply walked out of the room, closing the door behind him. Or her.

   No, the puzzle, as Pons finally works it out, and I hope I’m not giving too much away, has to do with the china cottage of the title, an ordinary incense burner in the shape of … a cottage. It is imagined, by me at least, that at one time these were quite popular in England.

   As a consulting detective whose cases you may decide to follow when you’ve read the entire Holmes canon several times over, Solar Pons certainly has his fans, even today, but I’ve always found his tales to be a mixed bag. This one’s better than many, but in my opinion, no way near the best of them. I found the shift in focus from a case in Bancroft’s purview to a much more domestic one disconcerting, but your opinion may vary.

 EDWARD D. HOCH “The Theft from the Onyx Pool.” Nick Velvet #2. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, June 1967. Collected in The Spy and the Thief (Davis, digest-sized paperback; 1st printing, December 1971 (Ellery Queen Presents #3) and The Thefts of Nick Velvet (Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1978.)

   The charm of the Nick Velvet stories to me is how clever they are, and in fact, they have to be. Not only does Nick have to figure out how to steal the essentially valueless objects he’s hired to obtain, but he also has to work out why he was hired to steal them in the first place. (In this story originally published in 1967, his fee is $20,000.)

   In this case Nick is hired by a young woman of some beauty and obvious social standing to steal the water from a famous writer’s pool. She does not want the pool drained. She wants him to steal the water. That’s the job. Nick, being am inquisitive fellow, once again needs to know why.

   Two detective stories in one, both cleverly worked out to the finest detail. How did Hoch do it, over and over again, and this time in only eleven pages?

  EDWARD D. HOCH “The Spy Who Came to the Brink.” Short story. Jeffrey Rand #3. First appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, December 1965. Collected in The Spy and the Thief (Davis, digest-sized paperback; 1st printing, December 1971 (Ellery Queen Presents #3.)

   As you might easily deduce from the title, the 1971 collection of tales reprinted from EQMM is evenly split between those of Jeffrey Rand (7) and those with master thief Nick Velvet (also 7). I’ve always liked the Velvet stories more, but the ones with Rand are also extremely good.

   Rand is head of Britain’s Department of Concealed Communications — a spy agency, that is to say, one dealings primarily, but entirely, with codes and ciphers. It’s a job that keeps him busy, with dozens of his adventures to have been told, many of which have taken him around the world several times over.

   In “The Spy Who Came to the Brink,” Rand must puzzle out why a small time TV actor who has gone to great length to steal a secret diplomatic code is shot to death on orders from Russia before he could do so.

   It isn’t that he knew too much, as Rand finally concludes, but rather that he knew too little. Hoch had a devious mind as a writer, second to none, and how he managed to tell short stories as short as this one (ten pages) and still include a strong amount of actual detective work in them, is a absolute mystery to me.

BILL PRONZINI “Incident in a Neighborhood Tavern.” Short story. “Nameless” PI. First published in An Eye for Justice, edited by Robert J. Randisi (Mysterious Press, 1988). Collected in Small Felonies (St. Martin’s, 1988). [See comment #5 for other collections this story has appeared in.] Reprinted in Under the Gun, edited by Edward Gorman & Robert J. Randisi (Plume, 1990).

   Bill Pronzini’s “nameless” PI is sitting in a bar talking to the owner about a series of robberies local merchants have asked him to look into, the police having made no headway in the case. It’s that time of he evening, just before seven, when only two other customers are in the place, when in comes a hopped up kid with a gun. Object: robbery.

   The story’s only eight pages long, but not only does this turn out to be a pretty good detective story, but what makes this story all the more compelling is Pronzini’s ability to describe what it must feel like to be facing the wrong end pf a gun, the other end in the hand of someone who obviously doesn’t care if it goes off or not.

   You’ve got to keep your head in situations such this, and “Nameless” does just that, in more ways than one.

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER “Night Birds.” Novelette. El Paisano, aka The Roadrunner #1. Argosy Weekly, August 5, 1933. Probably never reprinted.

   This is the first of five recorded adventures of yet another of Erle Stanley Gardner’s series characters he created for the pulp magazines in the 20 and 30s. Known as both El Paisano and the Roadrunner, and yet no other name, he is a man of mystery, flitting across the Mexican border and back with ease, invariably leaving dead villains, gang leaders and various henchmen in his wake.

   What makes him such a formidable foe is that he can see in the dark far better than most men. Whether better able to see unsavory characters with knives waiting for him in the night, or young beautiful women he can then follow across darkened rooms without them knowing, it makes his tales of adventure and narrow escapes all the more interesting.

   Being the first time any of Gardner’s readers had met this new hero, he spends considerable time making his abilities clear, but not to the expense of the story, which consists of a dead man in an alley, pursuit, rescue (in an inadvertent way) by a slip of a girl with her mind focused on a suitcase filled with a fortune in stolen money.

   It all ends well, but only once the young slip of a girl is fully convinced that the Roadrunner is on her side, which she finally does. There’s otherwise not a lot of depth to this tale, but I certainly wouldn’t mind reading another.

STUART PALMER “The Riddle of the Dangling Pearl.” Novelette. Hildegarde Withers. First published in Mystery, November 1933. Collected in Hildegarde Withers: Uncollected Riddles (Crippen & Landru, 2002). Reprinted in The Big Book of Reel Murders: Stories that Inspired Great Crime Films, edited by Otto Penzler (Vintage Crime, softcover, forthcoming November 2019). Film: The Plot Thickens, RKO, 1936, with Zasu Pitts as Miss Withers and James Gleason as Oscar Piper.

   Things were different back in 1933. When Inspector Oscar Piper of the NYPD gets a call from an associate curator at the Cosmopolitan Museum of Art asking for police assistance, he being shorthanded at the moment, sends schoolteacher Miss Hildegarde Withers to act in his stead.

   It’s a good thing she’s on hand, though, for as soon as she arrives she sees the man she is to meet falling down a long flight of stairs and landing on the floor below, quite dead. This is only the prelude to several other extraordinary things happening at the museum that day, including the disappearance of a extremely valuable Cellini cup, ordinarily kept under close guard at all times.

   While I was reading this early Miss Withers tale, I was somewhat annoyed by the clutter of characters, much more than usual, I thought, not to mention the flurry of activity surrounding them, almost non-stop. Once finished, though, and looking back, it’s easy to see how well the story was constructed, brick by brick, and everything in its place, precisely when needed.

   While there’s no depth to either the characters or the story, it is a lot of fun to read.

   I’ve not seen the movie based on this story in a long time, but I have to agree with Otto Penzler’s assessment in his introduction to the story that Zasu Pitts was the wrong person chosen to replace Edna May Oliver in the leading role. He adds that “The screenplay provides a different motive for the murder, different suspects, and a different murderer.” He does go on to say that the movie retains the same comic tone as the story, however.

THOMAS WALSH “Murder Twist.” Short story. First published in Ace-High Detective, August 1936. Probably never reprinted.

   I haven’t taken the time to check this theory out, but it’s my sense of things that most Edgar winners for Best First Novel come from nowhere, so to speak, or in other words are brand new to the mystery field. Not so in the case of Thomas Walsh, whose novel Nightmare in Manhattan (Little Brown, 1950) was indeed a winner, but he’d been writing short mystery fiction since 1933, when a story titled “Double Check” appeared in the July issue of Black Mask magazine.

   Walsh gradually graduated to the slicks, magazines such as Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post, many of them later being reprinted in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Almost all of these, if not out-and-out police procedurals, were cases solved by policemen largely working alone but in their ordinary tours of duty.

   Such a one is “Mystery Twist,” in which a cop named Gannet — his only appearance, I believe — tackles what appears to be a straightforward suicide, that of a woman whose grieving husband claims she jumped out of a window on the 20th floor of an apartment building.

   Gannet is the kind of cop who doesn’t like to take anything for granted, however, but it takes some psychological prodding on the part of his immediate superior, Inspector Powell, to make sure he follows up on his instincts in cases such as this.

   As the title of the story suggests, there is a twist in tale, and I’m going to pat myself on the back by telling you that I figured it out as quickly as Gannet did. But if the story’s well told, and this one definitely is, then the facts should point to the conclusion all along the way, shouldn’t they?