Fri 4 Oct 2019
PI Stories I’m Reading: JIM DAVIS “Gone Fishing.”
Posted by Steve under Stories I'm Reading[3] Comments
JIM DAVIS “Gone Fishing.” Short story. Brad Carter #2. Published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, November 2012.
This one’s eleven pages long, but it reads so quickly, once you’re done, you’ll think you’ve read only a longish vignette. That’s a fact also probably true because the story itself is so quick and dirty, and well deserving of its placement in the Black Mask section of that particular issue of EQMM in which it appeared.
As a PI Brad Carter ekes out a living in Fayetteville, Arkansas, but when he’s hired by a prim and proper maiden aunt to find her nephew, wanted and on the run for rape and aggravated assault, the trail takes him deep into the Ozarks, from a biker bar to a meth lab way up in the hills. Any resemblance to the hillbillies of old, such as in the Li’l Abner comic strip, is purely illusional.
The introduction to the story says that Jim Davis, the author, was planning on further adventures of Bradley Carter, who proves himself as a survivor a couple of times over in this one, but there was only one other, that being “Golf Etiquette” in the February 2011 issue of EQMM. That’s too bad. I enjoyed this one.
October 5th, 2019 at 5:30 pm
Nice to know EQMM finally restored the Black Mask section. For years they ignored it save for a rare story.
October 5th, 2019 at 9:12 pm
Calling it the BLACK MAGAZINE section in EQMM is probably a stretch. Maybe a department? I’ve not bought the magazine in well over a year now, so I have idea whether they’re even still doing it, but I doubt they ever ran more than two BM stories per issue, and maybe in some issues none at all.
October 5th, 2019 at 11:43 pm
When I started reading mid sixties there was no BM section, and when I stopped in the eighties there still wasn’t. I’ve only seen it in older issues, so I was surprised it had been restored.