D. H. REDDALL “Dark Matter.” PI Charles Stubblefield. Published in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, November 2004. Not known to have been either reprinted or collected.

   Only the most dedicated reader of AHMM will recognize the author’s name. He (or she) wrote a couple dozen stories for the magazine, at least five others of which feature the adventures of a young PI by the name of Charles Stubblefield. There may be more. Using the online Crime Fiction Index as a guide, this is not (yet) known to be one of them.

   At least he sounds young as he tells the story at  hand himself. He is a fellow who doesn’t reveal a whole lot about himself, or even much about  the town he lives and works in.( I may have missed details like that, the first time through.) The nursing home where his client is staying is four miles from the ocean, if that helps.

   The man needs a PI  to look into he death of his half-brother, whose body found in the ashes of a building that has recently burned to the ground. While looking into the facts of the case, Stubblefield quickly learns a second body has been found, presumably the janitor for the building. Which spreads the motive for the crime a but more thinly. Money, he thinks, with the deaths only incidental.

   This is a quiet but never sedate sort of case. Asking questions and interpreting the replies is the way to go, and the author is quite good at dialogue. One line toward to beginning had me hoping for better things in that regard, but it wasn’t followed up upon in any meaningful way. Describing the manager of the nursing home, it is said of him that he had a voice like “oil poured over waxed paper.”