Nostalgia City Mysteries

Mark S. Bacon

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About mbaconauthor

Mystery writer and journalist; former newspaper police reporter.

8:08 am - May 29, 2013 -

Christie, Conan Doyle and 38 more     cook up crime and puzzlement

Masterpieces of Mystery and Suspense
Compiled by Martin H. Greenberg
International Collectors Library
651 pages
1988
See below for prices and availability

 

It’s the late 1950s, Ginger works in a dime-a-dance joint in a rundown part of town, and someone is killing taxi dancers.

When two police detectives show up at the dance hall one night, Ginger falls for the taller one.  “…if I’d had any dreams left, he coulda moved right into them.”

The cops only know the killer’s favorite song, the kind of ring he has on one finger and the bizarre way he leaves the dancers’ bodies.  With nothing more to go on, they try a stake out.   Luckily, Ginger is one sharp cookie and a step ahead of the police.  Question is, will she be a step ahead of the serial killer?

This carefully crafted tale, The Dancing Detective, is classic noir by Cornell Woolrich and it’s one of 40 short stories in Masterpieces of Mystery and Suspense, a must for the library of every mystery and short story lover.  The stories are short–10-20 pages–and not quite short enough to qualify as flash fiction.   But they clearly demonstrate how a skilled mystery/suspense writer can weave a tale, create characters with depth and have you guessing right up to the end–all in a tiny package.masterpieces of mystery

Woolrich’s story is a good example, combing rich characters and dialog with a snappy plot.   Aspiring mystery writers: read this story.  See how Woolrich creates a thick, gloomy atmosphere and tells us so much about his characters through the way they talk in addition to what they talk about.  Woolrich, like many of the authors in the anthology, were or are known as much for novels as well as short stories.  And again, like other authors, many of Woolrich’s stories became movies.  One of his most famous was Hitchcock’s 1954 Rear Window.

I discovered this collection of gems in a used book store.   It can be found easily online.  See the note at the end of this review.

Writers from Poe to Sue Grafton and Lawrence Block are represented here.  Stories of suspense, mystery and those featuring hard boiled detectives fill the pages.  The collection’s anthologist, Martin Greenberg, introduces each story with a brief biographical sketch of the author and a few words about the selection.

The usual suspects are all here: Dorothy Sayers, Earl Stanley Gardner, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, P.D. James, Ross Macdonald, Ellery Queen, Dick Francis and John Dickson Carr.  A few writers not known for mysteries also provide fascinating stories.  Greenberg included Mark Twain, Ray Bradbury and Stephen King in the collection.

King’s Quitters, Inc. has Dick Morrison run into an old friend in an airport lounge, back when you could smoke in an airport.  The friend has quit the habit for good, he tells Morrison, with the help of an organization that guarantees its results.  In this suspenseful story, the method is the mystery and Morrison’s trials trying to stay off cigarettes can be most appreciated by ex-smokers.

In Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Copper Beeches, Holmes and Watson are approached by a  governess who lives in a country house and works for an eccentric gentleman.  She becomes fearful when her employers ask her to pose for them in certain ways.

Frederick Forsyth’s contribution is, There Are No Snakes In Ireland, a creepy tale of revenge set in Ireland and India.

Rex Stout offers, Help Wanted, Male.  One of the longest entries in the collection, the story begins with a man who has received an anonymous letter saying he is about to die.  He goes to Nero Wolfe for help.  Archie Goodwin figures the man would need to look elsewhere:

“In the years I had been living in Nero Wolfe’s house…I had heard him tell at least fifty scared people, of all conditions and ages, that if someone had determined to kill them and was going to be stubborn about it, he would probably succeed.”

The next day, of course, the man is killed and the police want to know what Wolfe and Goodwin know about it.

If you’re looking for a collection of new crime and detection stories, obviously this isn’t it.  The book is 25 years old and many of the stories are decades older than that.  If, however, you want to be challenged and entertained by some of the best mystery and suspense writers who ever pounded a typewriter, this is the collection for you, if you can find it.

Note on availability:  The book is out of print, but used copies are available from many online sellers.   I purchased my hardbound copy (International Collectors Library edition, listed above) from our local library’s  used book store.   A check of listings for the book at Amazon and other online stores yielded the names of three other publishers and page lengths.  Most common was an edition from St. Martin’s Press at 672 pages.  Minotaur and Doubleday are also listed as the publisher on some sites.   Most available copies are paperback going for $1 or less; shipping charges vary.

Categories: New mystery book, previews, Reviews of mystery/suspense books, short stories Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
8:28 pm - May 23, 2013 -

More flash fiction

This entry is a day late due–quoting an old-fashioned TV expression–to technical difficulties beyond my control.   I just returned from San Francisco where we visited three major museums picking up enough inspiration to last for months.

Inspiration for today’s sample comes in part from my first job in journalism.

 

Tank Towns

Blake steered his car down the country highway. On his forearm he wore a reminder of years past. He was taking his teenage son on a journey to explain who his father was. He owed him that, and more.

“Every little town we’ve been through has its own water tower,” said his son, Scott. “I see another one ahead. Is that where you used to live?”

Blake nodded.

As they approached the tower and the cluster of buildings around it, Scott read the lettering on the tank: “Centerville State Penitentiary.”

Blake involuntarily rubbed the prison tattoo on his arm.

Categories: craft of writing, flash fiction, flash fiction writers, New mystery book Tags: , , , , , ,
8:47 am - May 15, 2013 -

But can your Kindle or Nook do this?

Second of two parts

A memory-filled meander through an airport bookstore last week prompted some comparisons between e-books and the real thing.  I also discovered that English provides few ways to distinguish a book that’s printed on paper versus one that’s contained in a digital file.  Are they both simply books?  More about that in a later entry.  For now, here are a few other shortcomings of reading electronically:

Buying or making bookmarks  Gift shops, bookstores, tourist attractions and other places still sell bookmarks.  They’re not nearly as efficient as their automated counterparts that let you stop reading an e-book in your e-reader and pick it up in the same spot, days later, on your computer or tablet.   But then electronic bookmarks are not tangible.

My small collection of bookmarks includes one with a reproduction of Ecstasy (a painting by American artist Maxfield Parrish), another containing a brief history of San Francisco’s Ferry Building and one courtesy of my alma mater, UNLV.  Ribbons are good bookmarks, but my favorites are ones I’ve made by laminating cartoon strips.   They’re just the right size for paperbacks or larger books, and they make me smile.

(One of my favorite cartoon bookmarks is from the Wizard of Id.  The wizard complains to his wife that as he gets older he keeps repeating himself.  His wife tells him not to worry because no one listens to old people anyway.)

Airline boarding passes, before they became electronic, made dandy bookmarks and I have often simply used bookstore cash register receipts to save my place in a book.   Recently I read a book I’d purchased some years before.  Inside, I found the receipt–dated 2002.  Obviously that book had been sitting on my shelf longer than I realized.

Sometimes to make a bookmark I will reach for whatever’s handy, a torn strip from a magazine, a corner of a newspaper page, a pencil or even a sheet of toilet paper.

A final form of bookmark, popular in years past–now often associated only with scripture or with fancy leather editions of classics–is the bound-in ribbon.  I recently bought a faux leather-bound collection of mystery short stories (to be reviewed in an upcoming blog entry) with a long, slender ribbon attached.  Handy.

Dog-ears  In addition to the often-heard prohibition regarding writing in a book, dog-earing a page is another bibliographic sin.  And perhaps it should be.  Pages in books printed on inexpensive paper or in ancient paperbacks may break off if they’re folded.  Better quality paper can withstand folding and straightening.

Dog-earing is useful, however, to identify locations within a book, sometimes a page on which you’ve highlighted or annotated (thus compounding your sin). To save the corners of pages, I used to tear Post-it notes into strips to create crude tabs in a book, then someone invented the convenient little self-adhesive plastic tabs you can stick on.

The latest generation Kindle automatically saves your place when you turn off the reader, but also allows you to make bookmarks–or more accurately place savers–throughout an e-book simply by touching the upper right corner of the screen.   A tiny electronic symbol, looking like a book page folded over, appears in the corner.  So, in a sense, you can dog-ear a page in an e-book.

One characteristic of some books–that thankfully has not been synthesized in e-books–is the deckle edge.  More than a century ago this uneven, textured edge of pages used to be a common byproduct of papermaking.  Now it’s used to give a book literary airs.  Put a deckle edge and a thicker than normal cover on a trade paperback and voila, you have classic in the making, a $20+ pricetag and a book that’s far less accessible or useful because you can’t riffle it.

Finally, a row of e-readers is not very decorative on a bookshelf, and you can’t press flowers in a Kindle.

Categories: e-readers, ebooks, Kindle, paper books Tags: , , , , , , , ,