JOHN GREGORY BETANCOURT “Pit and the Princess.” First appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, December 2014, Not reprinted or collected.

   Peter (Pit) Geller is what;s called a fixer, and he works primarily for a mob boss in Philadelphia. One distinguishing feature is that he has a photographic memory, but while it’s mentioned a couple of times, it really doesn’t come into play in this case, which involves his being sent to Vegas to look for his boss’s niece who has gone missing.

   The case nearly solves itself. When he;s dropped off at a guest house once he arrives, the niece and her boy friend are already camped out there. Case over? Not so fast. So is a dead body. The kids didn’t do it. But who did?

   Being only a short story, there aren’t many suspects, and Pit makes short work of the rest of the case. Betancourt is head honcho at Wildside Press (editor and publisher), but he’s a decent writer as well, although being perhaps better known in SF and fantasy circles. This is no more than a medium-boiled tale hovering around the middle of ranking from 0 to 5, You can do better. Or– very easily — a whole lot worse.

       The Peter “Pit” Geller series –

Pit and the Pendulum, (nv) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine July/August 2005
A Christmas Pit, (nv) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine January/February 2006
Pit on the Road to Hell, (nv) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine July/August 2006
Horse Pit, (na) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine July/August 2008
Pit and the Princess, (ss) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine December 2014

TED KOSMATKA “The Art of Alchemy.” First appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 2008. Reprinted in The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Three, edited by Jonathan Strahan (Night Shade Books, 2009) and The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2009 Edition, edited by Rich Horton (Prime Books, 2010).

   There is a recurring th4eme to a certain number of similar stories, perhaps not as many as there used to be, in which an inventor of an improved means of propelling automobiles goes to a gigantic company which produces and sells gasoline worldwide, and he ends up in all kinds of trouble. You man consider this as one of them, although the invention is rather a material stranger than steel, which someone brings a thread of to research scientists at a steel company.

   Which is all I tell you, as what’s the fun in that, just in case you run across a copy of the story which you can read for yourself. It is of course embellished with several other major factors, and in fact it is also a romance, although it is absolutely not a necessary part of the story.

   This is the first story I’ve ever read by the author, and between you and me, I confess that I had never even noticed his name before. He is, however, the author of three novels and several dozen short stories, starting in 2000, so he’s been around for a while. While this story may not be an award-winner, it is very very good. It is also nice to be confirmed in this statement by being able to point out that it also appeared r in two different “Best SF of Year” collections later on.

WILLIAM F. NOLAN & GEORGE CLAYTON JOHNSON: Logan’s Run. The Dial Press, hardcover, 1967. Dell, paperback; 1st printing thus, March 1969. Bantam, paperback, 1976. Film: 1976, wih Michael York, Jenny Agutter. TV series: CBS, September 16, 1977, to February 6, 1978.

   In the year 2116, youth has taken over the Earth. The maximum age allowed in 21, with death mandatory after that date, enforced by the Sandman police force. Logan is a Sandman, and his problems begin just as he is turning 21. There are rumors of a Sanctuary, and while he is tracking it down [on behalf of his job] through the worldwide underground railway, designed to show off Earth’s hellspots, he discovers that he wants it for himself.

   His motivations lose significance in the chase, and we have nothing more than a picturesque adventure story, extremely suitable for a large budget motion picture, while much better science fiction stays confined to its own pages. The plot jumps, the characters are too often emotionless. Why does it seem all too typical of SF with major promotion behind it?

Overall rating: **½

H. C, BAILEY “The Superfluous Clues.” Reggie Fortune. First published (?) in Mr. Fortune’s Practice (Methuen, UK, hardcover, 1923), as “The Young Doctor.” Reprinted in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, March 1954.

   H. C. Bailey is an author I sampled long ago – perhaps 50 or 60 years long past – and decided at the time that his work was not for me. I no longer remember why, but I held to the vow until I postedan old fanzine review of Call Mr. Fortune, and the short discussion of the merits of Mt. Bailey’s approach to writing detective fiction that followed brought back to mind the prior difficulties I had found in his work.

   So when, by pure coincidence I came across this tale from his followup collection of Mt. Fortune stories, I said to myself, “This can’t be a coincidence. There must be higher hand at work here. I must read this story.” And so I have.

   Some thoughts. A young doctor has been tried, convicted and jailed for robbing another resident of the same building where he resides. Found in his room a small collection of diamonds not belonging to him. Another man has claimed he saw the doctor of leaving the victim’s apartment and entering his own room.

   The superfluous clues referred to in the title are minor, and neither the police nor Mr. Fortune claim otherwise. But by accident, now after the fact, some objects in the room are now seen to be German-made, and the doctor having known to have no interest in German-made items, it is a small puzzle. The doctor, now despondent, refuses to aid in the investigation that follows.

   More important, however, is the fact that both the victim of the robbery and the witness that clinched the case against the doctor have completely disappeared. This is the extent of the case to be solved.

   And it is a sterile one, at least it seems to me, through the telling. Lots of talking and events taking place off screen. It is a judgment based perhaps on how old the story is now, but it was my impression that Mr. Bailey’s world at the time of the story is far different from mine at any time of my life. There is some action in the second half of the tale – a mad chase down the rives Thames to nab the real culprits – that too seemed (unaccountably) slow and uninteresting.

   It does not aid the story that the facts that help name the true culprits are largely not available to the reader when it would have helped the most.

   The detection is light and unsteady on its feet, the pace is slow, and even though I am very much aware that Mr. Bailey and Reggie Fortune, his most well-known detective, still have their fans today, I am forced to admit that I am not convinced, and that I remain to be not one of them.

ANNA KATHARINE GREEN – The Leavenworth Case. Dover, softcover, 1981. (Reprint of the 1878 hardcover edition.)

   This is a cornerstone novel of the mystery genre — the nineteenth-century American best seller that brought the detective novel into the public eye and raised it to hitherto unknown .. “respectable” status. First published in 1878, it is the best known of Green’s more than thirty novels and is thought by many critics to set the pattern for subsequent detective stories. As Alma E. Murch points out in The Development of the Detective Novel (1958), “… Green not only made her detective the leading figure and formulated a plan of construction that later became conventional. She also introduced characters and incidents that were new in her day, though they have since become familiar in novels of this type….”

   Indeed the contemporary reader will find nothing new or surprising about The Leavenworth Case. Mr. Leavenworth, a “retired merchant of great wealth and fine social position,” is found shot to death in the library of his New York City home. The murder weapon and the key to the library door are missing; a servant girl has mysteriously disappeared; the murder could not have been perpetrated by an intruder. The cast of characters present at the scene includes Mr. Leavenworth’s wards — Mary, who is his sole heir, and Eleanore, who stands to inherit nothing; Trueman Harwell, the dead man’s private secretary; assorted servants, including a butler; policeman Ebenezer Gryce, “a portly, comfortable personage with an eye that never pierced, that did not even rest on you”; and Everett Raymond, a young lawyer from the firm that represented Leavenworth and who is the narrator of the story.

   An inquest is held and suspicion falls on Eleanore Leavenworth, whose behavior is odd at best. Clues tum up in unexpected places; entranced by Eleanore, Everett Raymond allows himself to become involved in the investigation; a dark secret surfaces; and Ebenezer Gryce, proving that his eyes are more piercing than they appear, sets a clever trap for the killer.

   Told in what now seems a turgid style, this predictable (by current standards) tale is nonetheless interesting for the way Green integrates the various elements into a logical, . believable story. The Leavenworth Case is “must” reading for any serious student of the field, as well as a good choice for an evening when one is in the mood for the bloodless mayhem of a gentler age.

   Green also created two other detectives, both women. Mrs. Amelia Butterworth (whom Michele Slung, in her excellent introduction to the Dover edition of The Leavenworth Case, claims is “the prototype for such elderly female amateur detectives as Mary Roberts Rinehart’s Miss Rachel Innes, Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Silver, and Stuart Palmer’s Hildegarde Withers”) appears with Ebenezer Grycc in such novels as The Affair Next Door (1897) and The Circular Study (1900). Violet Strange, a society-girl detective (whom Slung claims is a forerunner of Nancy Drew), appears in the 1915 short-story collection The Golden Slipper and Other Problems for Violet Strange.

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

H. C. BAILEY – Call Mr. Fortune.  Methuen, UK, hardcover, 1920; Dutton, US, hardcover, 1921. Remploy, UK, hardcover reprint, 1979. Many other reprint editions currently exist.

   This is the first collection of Reginald Fortune short stories and, if the problems I had getting a copy are any indication, the scarcest one. Six stories are in this volume, and they range in quality from very good to excellent. There are, I might add, no bad or even poor Fortune short stories in any of the collections.

   “The Criminal Investigation Department, solicitors, and others dealing with those experiments in social reform which are called crimes, by continually appealing to his multifarious knowledge and his all-observant eye, turned Dr. Reginald Fortune, general practitioner at Westhampton, into Mr. Fortune of Wimpole Street, specialist in- — what shall we say?- — the surgery of crime. And Reggie Fortune, though richer for the change, was not grateful. He liked ordinary things, and any day would have gladly bartered a murder for a case of chicken-pox. This accounts for his unequalled sanity of judgment.”

   Fortune investigates usually with great reluctance and frequent complaints In one case he says, “I believe the beggars get murdered just to bother me” and “They only do it to annoy because they know it teases.” Indeed, at one point he is “elaborating a scheme by which the murder and the cricket seasons should be conterminous.” In those cases where he willingly joins in the chase, children or friends are usually involved.

   Fortune is not to everyone’s tastes. He, like most males, hasn’t really matured, only he never pretends that he has. While he is something of a gourmet, he has a penchant for sweets and muffins. He likes to play with puppets and write his own scenarios. Cold and discomfort he complains about bitterly, as would a small boy, particularly when he is taken away from his toys or his lei sure and when he drives an automobile it is with the complete abandon of youth.

   Certainly even less mature, however, are Stanley Lomas of the Criminal Investigation Department and the various policemen that Fortune works with. Despite the unfailing accuracy of the Fortune eye and intellect, they continue to scout his ideas and ignore his warnings.

   Read this collection, if you can find it, or any of the Fortune short story collections. Each puzzle in all of the books ranges from good to superb And if Reggie irritates you in the beginning, as he did me when I first read him 30 years ago, you may find, as I did, that he grows upon you if he is given a chance.

SMARTEST GIRL IN TOWN. RKO Radio Pictures, 1936. Gene Raymond, Ann Sothern, Helen Broderick. Director: Joseph Santley.

   Ann Sothern plays a fashion model who wants to marry money. Gene Raymond is a millionaire pretending to be male model so he can get to know her, but so that she won’t know he’s rich and take him for his money. He falls in love with her anyway, and …

   Um. I guess the plot doesn’t make any sense. It did while I was watching it, or at least I thought it did, and I enjoyed every minute of it, The 1930’s version of TV sitcom, but sophisticated and elegant, and would you believe, cozy and fun?

TOP DETECTIVE ANNUAL, 1952. (Volume 1, Number 3.) Editor: David X. Manners, Cover art: Samuel Cherry. Overall rating: **

HAROLD HELFER “The Cell.” Listed as a short story, it is more a short [two page] documentary of a man’s strange punishment for his sex crimes. (4)

STEWART STERLING “The Glass Guillotine.” Novella. Gil Vine. Originally published in Thrilling Detective, November 1940. Former FBI agent Gil Vine intervenes in a political kidnapping on the eve of the nominating convention. Mostly unbelievable. (2)

WILLIAM CAMPBELL GAULT “Four Kings and a Jack.” Originally published in Thrilling Detective, December 1942, The story of a jazz musician in murder trouble. (2)

FREDRIC BROWN “The Spherical Ghoul.” Novelet. Originally published in Thrilling Mystery, January 1943. A graduate student, whose thesis is on superstitions, and who works nights in a morgue, discovers a half-eaten corpse. Has good mood, but how did trigonometry get in there? (3)

DWIGHT V. BABCOCK “Jumbled Justice.” Originally published in Thrilling Detective, December 1934. The name “Ruby” turns out to be a last name. (2)

G, T. FLEMING-ROBERTS “Dig Three Graves.” Novelet. Originally published in Exciting Detective, Summer 1942. A nightmare face haunts a famed scientist, and murder threat make him decide to change his will. Melodramatic. (2)

HAL.K. WELLS “Green-Haired Murder.” Originally published in The Phantom Detective, August 1946. Strange circumstances do not make a mystery. (1)

WYATT BLASSINGAME “Shark River Manhunt.” Novelet. Originally published in Thrilling Adventure, January 1943. A hunt for a man hiding out in the Everglades for a crime he didn’t commit; he is guilty of subsequent crimes of murder, however. (2)

JOE ARCHIBALD “No Place Like Homicide.” Originally published in Popular Detective, April 1940. Willie Klump, president of the Hawkeye Detective Agency, fumbles around, Hard to take all this humor. (0)

RAY CUMMINGS “Psychological Approach.” Originally published in Black Book Detective, October 1947. Actually fails; it takes a woman’s touch. (2)

MURRAY LEINSTER “Chuckles.: Originally published in Popular Detective, December 1943, Killer is haunted by his victim’s laugh, (1)

WARD HAWKINS “Murder Beach.” Novelet. Originally published in Thrilling Mystery, July 1941. Murders seem to be committed by a fierce dog, Hints of werewolvery, but not really. (1)

ALAN GREEN – What a Body! Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1949. Dell, paperback, 1951.

   The dust jacket blurb calls this first mystery “the funniest, risibility-ticklingest book … since Wodehouse.” It isn’t that good, but it does have its moments — so many of them, in fact, that What a Body! was voted a Best First Novel Edgar. It is not only comical in the droll, barbed fashion of the Forties, but has an “impossible crime” plot of the sort that John Dickson Carr  loved to hefuddle his readers with.

   When Merlin Broadstone is murdered in his fourth-floor room at the Broadstone Hotel on the island of Broadstone, Florida, millions of people cheer. Broadstone, the “Caliph of Calisthenics,” the “Dictator of Diet,” had made a fortune by zealously depriving people of liquor, tobacco, starchy foods, slothful behavior, and the joy of sex — all in the name of health and fitness. The Broadstone Hotel (and Broadstone Island) is a large and austere health spa, his monument to clean (if unhappy) living; it has been open only short while, and is populated at the time of Broadstone amazing demise by hundreds of his followers, members of his immediate family, and a number of VIPs, among the a Democratic senator, a Republican congressman, and a famous criminal lawyer.

   And Broadstone’s death truly is amazing. It seems he was shot to death inside his locked room, through a window open only a few inches, and at an angle that indicating the fatal bullet came from the swimming pool in the courtyard below. Not only that, but there is evidence that the murderer somehow entered the locked room after the shooting, on an inexplicable errand. According to Police Lieutenant John Hugo, the book’s nominal hero (who spends more ti courting Broadstone’s sexy blond niece, Sandra, than he does detecting), the person responsible is someone “who can walk on the surface of a body of water six feet deep while remaining invisible. He must also be a guy who has a compulsion to put pajamas on his victim after shooting him and who would walk through the walls of a locked room to do so.”

   The immediate suspects include Sandra; Broadstone; brother-in-law, Arthur Hutch; and the four other member of the family, none of whom liked the tyrannical old faddist; Senator Happy Ned Dumbrow, the owner of different island that Broadstone didn’t buy; a hulking young man named Lovechild who has a penchant for togas; and Daniel Joyce, the plump and middle-aged family lawyer to whom the damnedest things happen. It isn’t exactly love-smitten and bumbling Hugo who determines which of th4g is guilty and explains how the crime was accomplished (a simple and dexterous solution it is, too); actually, one of the suspects has to do it for him.

   The only real flaw in What a Body! is Green’s determinedly author-omniscient style, which at times becomes intrusive and gets in the way of continuity. The same is true of his only other mystery, They Died Laughing (1952), an equally clever and amusing locked-room puzzle about the murder of a TV comedian — on and off television.

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

ARTHUR PORGES “Her Last Bow.” Stately Homes #1. First appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, February 1957, Collected in Three Porges Parodies and a Pastiche, edited by Michael H. Kean (Magico, 1988) and in The Adventures of Stately Homes and Sherman Horn: Being the Compleat Sherlockian Writings of Arthur Porges, edited by Richard Sims (The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, trade paperback, 2008).

   Arthur Porges’s Wikipedia page begins thusly: “Arthur Porges (20 August 1915 – 12 May 2006) was an American writer of numerous short stories, most notably during the 1950s and 1960s, though he continued to write and publish stories until his death.” I haven’t found an accurate countless of the short fiction, essays and poems he had published over his lifetime, but the list is a long one. He, on the other hand, never wrote a novel.

   He began writing science fiction in 1950. “Her Last Bow” is not his first work in crime fiction, but it is close to it. It is his first story to appear in EQMM, and it is also the first of several adventures of Stately Homes stories he wrote over the years.

   It is also a Locked Room Mystery, as Jane Marple’s body is found in one such. The room is completely inaccessible, with only a five inch circular opening in the door to be found. Even more puzzling is the way in which the body has been mutilated, sliced up vertically, from head to toe, and then tied up together again.

   The tale is humorous (his assistant is a gent by the name of Sun Wat) but not as laugh-out-loud funny as Robert L. Fish’s stories of Schlock Homes stories are. I could expound on the tale considerably, but I have decided that I have already told you enough about the plot for you solve it on your own. (The story is only five pages long.) I do not own either of the two collections of Stately Homes stories, but I wish I did.

         The Stately Homes series —

Her Last Bow (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Feb 1957
Another Adventure of Stately Homes (ss) The Saint Mystery Magazine (UK) Nov 1961
Stately Homes and the Invisible Slasher (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Feb 2001
Stately Homes and the Invisible Giant (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Feb 2003
Stately Homes and the Impossible Shot (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Feb 2004