Sherlock (2026) by Various Authors

The subtitle to Sherlock really says it all: "Ten New Stories. Ten Incredible Writers. The Game Is Afoot...Again." Add the terrific introduction by the always interesting Stephen Fry to this mix, and Sherlock turns out to be a real treat for longtime fans of the adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson.

As Fry points out, despite the enduring popularity of Holmes and Watson stories, the volume of Conan Doyle's Holmes output, respectable as it is, is really not overly impressive, consisting of only four novels and fifty-six short stories. What is perhaps more impressive is the sheer number of Sherlock Holmes stories written by others after Doyle's death that keep the character as alive and as fresh today as he ever was. Even Doyle's son Adrian participated in the deluge of Holmes material produced after his father's death by co-authoring a collection of Holmes short stories alongside author John Dickson Carr. And, especially now that all of the Sherlock Holmes stories have entered the public domain, new stories are likely to keep coming for a long, long time. 

And that's a good thing for those of us who can never get enough of Sherlock Holmes and John  Watson.

There are ten brand new stories in Sherlock, some more traditional than others, some set in the late nineteenth century and even one or two set in the twenty-first. The best of the stories focus first and foremost on the characters longtime Sherlock Holmes fans already know and love. Of course, as in any compilation featuring the work of ten different authors, some stories appeal to me more than others, and it's safe to assume that that will be the case for other readers who may enjoy the stories for reasons different than my own. I like character development, especially the interplay between characters I've been reading of for decades now. For other readers, the appeal may be more in the action sequences or the actual solving of the various mysteries that come Sherlock's way. We might have different favorite stories, but we will all be happy. 

My own particular favorites are: "The Glentorrance Mystery" (Abir Mukerje), "The Mystery of the Forsbrook Walkers" (Kate Mosse), and "Sherlock Holmes and the Game of Murder" (Steve Cavanagh). Over the last few years, I've become quite the fan of Sherlock Holmes stories set in the present day, so "Sherlock Holmes and the Game of Murder," in which Holmes matches wits with an AI-driven detective is the story that turned out to be the most fun for me.

If you are already a fan, you need to grab this collection and find out which story turns out to be the most fun for you. (Even the cover of Sherlock is fun. Take a look at the "Sherlock silhouettes" and you will notice that three of them are female, some have facial hair, some not, etc. Two are even wearing eyeglasses. All is not what it seems to be at first glance.)

(Review Copy of Sherlock was provided by the publisher. Sherlock is scheduled for December 1, 2026 publication.)

Have Courage (November 2026) - Craig Johnson

 

For me, reading a Craig Johnson novel or short story is very much akin to enjoying the kind of comfort food I grew up on as a kid. After having read Johnson for so many years, I feel completely at home in the Absaroka County world that he has created for the sheriff, and I always look forward to the next chance to visit Walt and his friends there. 

Have Courage, scheduled to be published in early November, is Johnson's latest collection of Longmire short stories. Each of the thirteen stories takes place during the Christmas season just when the sheriff's office is as short-handed as it ever will be and everyone is expecting things to have pretty much quieted down for the rest of the year. But as Walt has learned the hard way, that's not the way things work in Absaroka County, Wyoming.

The thirteen stories cover the entirety of Walt's policing career, from the early days when Walt was just a green young deputy learning the trade at the knee of Lucian Connally, to when Walt has become a fixture in the job he ultimately inherited from Lucian. Along the way, a cast of familiar deputies comes and goes - although I do think that Walt's best friend, Henry Standing Bear, is under-utilized in this collection of stories. (I am one who doesn't think that you can ever have enough Henry Standing Bear.)

The stories offer insights into Walt Longmire's character and how he got to be the man he turned out to be. They are stories of reclaimed lives, violent hostage situations, seeing the best in people during the worst day in their lives, havoc caused by the surprising results of DNA testing, dealing with a skunk that decides to crash a Christmas party, an old dog needing a new friend, and much more. And best of all, no matter how violent or sad the situation might be, it's all narrated with the same wit that Craig Johnson fans have come to expect over the years. I don't usually do "Christmas in July" stuff, but I'm grateful that that reluctance didn't keep me from reading Have Courage when I got the chance. 

This one is for the Walt Longmire fans.

Blasphemy (2012) - Sherman Alexie

 

Blasphemy is a collection of thirty-one short stories written by a favorite storyteller of mine, Sherman Alexie. It should be noted, however, that Mr. Alexie got caught up in that whole “Me Too” movement back in 2018 after perhaps as many as fifty women came forward to say that he had sexually harassed them. The ensuing fallout was real and deserved: scholarships with his name on them got renamed, for instance, and although Alexie publishes weekly on Substack these days, I don’t know of a single major publication of his since his 2017 memoir You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me. I have been told that some bookstores refuse to carry even his previously published work now. That’s quite a fall from grace for someone who has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Hemingway, the PEN/Faulkner, and the PEN/Malamud among other awards. 

Myself, I have been able to separate the man’s work from his personal life (at least to this point), but I think it is only fair to mention all of this because I know that many of you, perhaps even most of you, will not want to do the same. Thus the full disclosure.

Some of the stories in Blasphemy were previously published in magazines such as Harper’s, Narrative, and The New Yorker. Each of the stories features Indian (as Alexie himself calls his people) characters and settings, most of them being of the Spokane tribe. Alexie himself grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation about an hour from Spokane, Washington. 

Alexie has a special talent for creating fully-fleshed characters within the space of just a few pages, often using a cutting sense of humor and irony to make the characters or their situations more relatable to his readers. Here are a few examples of his style: 

“So I felt sorry for the protestors who believed in what they were doing. They were good-hearted people looking to change the system. But when you start fighting for every Indian, you end up defending the terrible ones, too.” (From “Cry Cry Cry”)

 

'“I saw you in my head,” Frank said. “You’re supposed to be dead. I saw you dead.”

“You have blurry vision,” said Harrison”’  (From “What Ever Happened to Frank Snake Church)

“After Norma left me, I’d occasionally get postcards from powwows all over the country. She missed me in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and California. I just stayed on the Spokane Indian Reservation and missed her from the doorway of my HUD house, from the living room window, waiting for the day that she would come back.”  (From “The Approximate Size of my Favorite Tumor”)

'“Your father was always half crazy,” my mother told me more than once. “And the other half was on medication.”’  (From “What My Father Always Said…”)

The stories in Blasphemy range from lighthearted ones to deadly serious ones, and some of them can be difficult to categorize because Alexie always manages to see a good bit of dark humor where you might least expect to find it. Some of the stories are set on the reservation, some in Spokane, and a few in Seattle, but no matter where they take place, Alexie’s characters are all fighting the same fight for survival. And the odds always seem to be stacked against them. 

 For example, in “This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona,” he says of his main character:

“The only real thing he shared with anybody was a bottle and broken dreams."

And in “Protest” he offers this observation about a character:

“Jimmy’s last act was to disappear, and that was probably the most Indian thing he had ever done."

A Sherman Alexie short story is always interesting despite the inherent despair that he so often writes about. Alexie can be particularly revealing when writing through the eyes of a white character interacting with the Indians he knows so well, an approach he often uses, and one that works well for him.

So there you have it. If you still want to read Sherman Alexie, Blasphemy is a good place to start. He is, I think, still an important writer for readers who want to get a close, frank look at the Native American culture of today. That he let himself down, and disappointed his people to the degree that he did is sad for all concerned - especially for his victims, most of whom were fellow Native Americans.

Dear Life - Alice Munro

 

Dear Life, published in 2012, was Alice Munro’s last book. She won the Nobel Prize the following year, becoming the first and only Canadian for having done so. At the time, she was called a “master of the contemporary short story,” and I very much agree with that assessment of her talents.

Dear Life contains fourteen short stories, the final four of which Munro tells us are based upon her own life:

“The final four works in this book are not quite stories. They form a separate unit, one that is autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact. I believe they are the first and last - and the closest - things I have to say about my own life.” (Page 233)

Most of the stories involve small town women whose ordinary lives are forever changed by a chance meeting or occurrence they can never stop thinking about, sometimes even after they are the only one left who remembers what really happened.

In “Train,” my favorite of the stories, for example, a young World War II soldier returning to rural Canada, jumps off the train one town before arriving back in his hometown. He begins walking down the track in the direction he’s come from, and stumbles upon a rundown farm in need of numerous repairs. The woman who lives there alone asks for help, and the man ends up living there for years, never going home. But that’s not even the strangest thing about how their relationship evolves.

In another story, “Dolly,” the pre-World War II girlfriend of a woman’s husband coincidentally shows up at her front door one morning years later selling cosmetics door to door. Lives are changed in ways unforeseen just a few hours earlier. 

Over and over again lives are changed in an instant.

These are stories where sheer chance changes everything for the small town characters involved. Some are led into life-changing experiences by people wandering through their lives on a whim; some are powerfully impacted by the single decision they did or did not make; some wish they had escaped small town Canada when they had the chance; others wish they had never left. The stories are about real people living during and around the World War II years, a time when many were seeking ways to change - or put back together - their lives. It is a time when nothing seems impossible - so chances are taken.

Surprisingly, the least affective stories for me are the autobiographical ones, probably because I could not forget they are somewhere between memoir and short story. As a reader, I found myself wondering over and over where the truth stopped and the fiction began. That is probably not something that will bother all, or even most readers, but it kept me from losing myself in the stories enough to really enjoy them. 

Alice Munro is an excellent short story writer, and I look forward to reading much more of her work. Luckily, she wrote fourteen collections of short stories and one novel between 1968 and 2012. Lots to look forward to.  

Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird - Agustina Bazterrica

 

I really enjoy short stories, and I probably read around 200 of them a year. Some are standalones culled from magazines, but most come from the half-dozen or so short story compilations that I read every year. I started reading short stories primarily as a way to "test drive" an author's prose style, but I've long since become a fan of the genre itself and the reading experience that can only come from short fiction. All that said, I can't remember the last time I was left so horrified, mystified, frustrated, or pleased by a single collection of stories as I was by Agustina Bazterrica's Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird. 

I suppose I should have seen it coming. After all, the Scribner publicity describes the book as a "collection of twenty brutal, darkly funny short stories" that "takes readers into their deepest fears and most disturbing fantasies." I agree with all of that except for the publisher's use of the word "funny." And it's not as if there are no really excellent stories in the collection either, because there are several. What strikes me as so unusual is that even though I loved a few of the stories, I equally despised as many as I thought were top-notch. The extreme contrast in my reaction to the stories is what I will remember most about the book.

The last story in the collection, "The Solitary Ones," about a young woman trying to make her way home on New Year's Eve's last train of the night is my favorite of the twenty. Bazterrica builds the tension in this one slowly, but steadily, until the young woman simply keeps making one bad decision after another because she is fast running out of options. 

Among the others I really like is "The Dead," a story about a little girl searching for ways to reunite her dead mother and her still very much alive father. This is one of those stories that a director with Alfred Hitchcock's skills and temperament could do so much with today. Others I enjoyed are "Perfect Symmetry," a prison story in which Bazterrica's imagery is memorable despite the brutality that evokes it, and "Earth," one of the saddest stories I have read in a long, long time.

But there are also some stories that made me feel nothing but revulsion, and that's probably exactly what the author was going for with stories about the sexual abuse of children, self-mutilation, and animal abuse. "Roberto," "The Continuous Equality of the Circumference," "A Hole in the House," "Hell," and "Mary Carminum," come to mind. And then there are stories so obtuse (like "Architecture" and "Unamuno's Boxes") that I can only guess about her intent. 

Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird is not necessarily a bad short story collection. Bazterrica wanted to shock and horrify the reader with a group of stories that define in the darkest terms imaginable what it means to be a human being. In that, she most certainly achieved her goal.

Agustina Bazterrica jacket photo

The Reservoir - David Duchovny

 

David Duchovny's novella The Reservoir was originally published in 2022 but a new paperback edition, which includes the addition of a short story titled "The Scare Owl," will be available in bookstores on January 30, 2024. (Shown above is the new edition's cover.)

Ridley is a Wall Street retiree who has been self-trapped inside his New York City apartment pretty much since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. He lives in such fear of this mysterious new virus that he does little else all day long but stare out the apartment window  overlooking Central Park while contemplating his past personal failures. It doesn't help that Ridley is divorced and hasn't risked a visit with his daughter in months now. He lives alone, and he is a lonely man.

So when Ridley late one night notices flashing lights coming from an apartment window on the opposite side of the park, he is eager to connect with the mystery light-flasher, a person he convinces himself has to be a woman. He is so eager for some kind of human contact that he ventures outside, and into the park, in search of the woman he has fallen into a strange love-trance relationship with despite her, so far at least, living only in his imagination. Ridley is slowly, inevitably, being driven mad by his extreme isolation, and there is no one there to help him.

What happens to Ridley on the freezing nights he ventures into Central Park is at times surreal, and it is not always clear what is real and what occurs only in the man's head. Fearing now that he has foolishly exposed himself to COVID-19, Ridley retreats to the relative safety of his apartment, convinces his doctor to send the approved treatment to his door, and waits to see what happens next.

The Reservoir is about the way that people coped with the recent pandemic, but it is also a critique of the lifestyle choices and cultural changes initiated by the virus that are still with us today. The feelings of isolation, loss, and detachment from other human beings have become a way of life for too many people - and we were not made to live in that kind of world. The Reservoir may not be a long book, but it one that leaves behind a lot for the reader to ponder well after its last page has been turned.

But that's not nearly all there is to this book because its short story bonus, "The Scare Owl," also offers plenty to think about. This fable about a newly hatched crow raised by a murderous owl is one of the saddest coming-of-age tales I've encountered in a while, one that I am still mining for its complete message several days after reading it.

David Duchovny may be better known as an actor than as an author, but I'll tell you one thing...the man can write.

David Duchovny jacket photo

If I Survive You - Jonathan Escoffery

 

As I continue to explore the thirteen 2023 Booker Prize nominees (two of the books will not actually be published in the U.S. until after the prize winner is announced), Jonathan Escoffery's If I Survive You has been the most pleasant surprise to me so far. By its very nature, this one is unusual because it is the only book of short stories on a nominee list otherwise comprised of twelve novels. Escoffery's eight stories, however, are so well connected that If I Survive You tells a more coherent story than several of the Booker novels I've read this year. 

This is the 1970s coming-of-age story of two brothers, one born in Jamaica where his parents then lived, the other in Miami after the family fled Jamaican political violence for a safer life in the United States. Although the stories are mostly told from the point of view of Trelawny, the youngest of the two brothers, Escoffery sometimes uses first person, sometimes second person, and sometimes third to tell them.

Trelawny is the only member of the family born in the U.S. but that doesn't keep him from being the family's most conflicted member. As a boy, he struggles to find a comfortable niche for himself among his fellow public school students but soon learns that no group will have him around for long. Trelawny is a light-skinned Jamaican, so he is not black enough for the Blacks to claim him; but he is obviously enough not white that the White students don't want him around either; and although he is often at first glance mistaken for a Hispanic, Trelawny speaks no Spanish, so the hispanic kids also want no part of him. 

The family begins to fall apart almost from the beginning because Topper, the boys' father, is more interested in drinking and chasing women than he is in bringing home a regular paycheck. Then Sanya, their mother, becomes so disillusioned with her husband and life in America that she returns to Jamaica on her own, only to find that she no longer feels Jamaican enough to live in that country. And Delano, Trelawny's older brother, seems to believe that being first born entitles him to disinherit Trelawny. So he does so.

The eight stories in If I Survive You are chronologically linked together so well that they could just as easily be called chapters in a novel as called short stories, so it's easy to see why the Booker judges included the book on their shortlist. The stories combine to portray vividly the immigrant experience, especially that of first generation Americans as they walk the fine line between the culture of their parents and that of the only country they themselves have ever known. 

This is a worthy addition to the 2023 Booker shortlist, and I would not be at all surprised if it were to win the prize.

Jonathan Escoffery jacket photo

Last Day on Earth - Eric Puchner

 

Last Day on Earth, published in 2017, is a nine-story collection from Eric Puchner that focuses on family relationships and difficult coming-of-age situations. None of the characters in the nine stories can be said to be having an easy time negotiating their way through the lives they are living. But even with all of that in common, the nine stories are very different from each other in style - one of them even being outright science fiction. 

The stories are largely of two distinct types. They either feature a boy struggling at a key juncture in his coming-of-age experience, or they feature characters in middle age who are disappointed by the lives they find themselves living. As I look back on the collection, four of the stories particularly jump out to me:

"Mothership" is a story about an unstable woman who is taken into her older sister's home after being released from a psychological care facility. The lack of control exhibited by the younger sister and how her behavior impacts her sister's whole family is fascinating to watch.

"Independence" explores the deep friendship that has developed between three book nerds who work in a small indie bookshop together. The story explores the fragility of a relationship comprised of two men and one woman and how easily the relationship can be destroyed.

"Expression" is the story of two unpopular teens who find themselves at the same arts seminar one summer. The two boys share a dorm room even though one of the two actually lives within walking distance of the campus. It's a story about the exploitation of another family's secrets for personal gain.

"Last Day on Earth" explores the relationship between a fifteen-year-old boy and his single-parent mother whose ex-husband left her burdened with the care of his two hunting dogs when he left. She is in the process of carrying the two elder dogs to a shelter that will only try to place them for seventy-two hours before euthanizing them. Her son is desperate to save them.

At first glance, I thought that the stories in Last Day on Earth would be a good bit over the top in their exploration of the relationships between family members and close friends. Turns out that I was wrong about that; these stories all have something important to say, and Puchner says it well.

Eric Pucher author photo

Harbor Lights - James Lee Burke

 

Harbor Lights, which includes seven short stories and one novella, is the first collection of short fiction from James Lee Burke since 2007 when the author published a ten-story collection titled Jesus Out to Sea. 

Burke's stories, no matter their length, have always focused on the very real battle between good and evil, and have featured main characters incapable of ignoring evil when confronted with it. At one point in "Strange Cargo," the novella's central character explains this impossible to deny obligation to directly confront evil when it drops into his lap by saying that he really doesn't want to do what he is about to do, but knows that if he doesn't do it he will never again find peace of mind or be able to live with himself. This is typical of a James Lee Burke hero. The author's books have always been darker than most, with the very real forces of evil, no matter what form they take, portrayed as formidable obstacles for good people to survive, much less overcome. Now, if anything, Burke manages to up the ante with Harbor Lights.

In one story, a man is just trying to get his son home safely after their car has broken down in the middle of nowhere, and he has to seek the help of  threatening strangers. In another, a college professor is drawn into the fight when his seventeen-year-old daughter comes home in a taxi after being brutally beaten outside a local bar. What both men will learn is that sometimes there is simply no one turn to for help, even those paid to do so; that if they are not willing to fight back, they and those closest to them will lose everything. 

The evil that Burke portrays in Harbor Lights often exists in the form of corrupt law enforcement officers. Some of these stories expose the utter darkness of prison life dominated by brutal guards who exploit the system and the inmates. One is about WWII federal agents who try to destroy a man after he reveals details to the press about the enemy submarine he and his son watched sink an oil tanker off the U.S. coast. The stories in Harbor Lights are a reminder that evil does not always appear where it is expected, that it is often embodied by the very people tasked with the difficult job of fighting it. 

Readers of the Holland Family series of books will recognize some of the central characters in these stories as direct descendants of Hackberry Holland often reflect on their gunfighter ancestor, a man who himself teetered on the border of good and evil during his lifetime. 

By my count (far from official), James Lee Burke has now published forty-seven books, and I have read some thirty-eight of them. For that reason, I knew what to expect from Harbor Lights. What I did not expect is how much a page-turner it is, or how much I enjoyed it. I highly recommend this one to Burke fans, and I warn the rest of you to hang on tight because Harbor Lights is a wild ride. 

Cleveland Noir - Edited by Michael Ruhlman & Miesha Wilson Headen

 

Cleveland Noir, edited by Michael Ruhlman and Miesha Wilson Headen, is the latest in the long line of dark short story collections from Akashic Books. As in past collections, the selected authors are all from the title city, and they still live in, or have close connections, there. What makes Cleveland Noir a little different is that eleven of the collection's fifteen stories are written by women, only four by men. Women have been writing in the noire genre as long as it has existed, of course, but their work completely dominates this particular collection. A bigger surprise here is that the darkest and most violent stories, especially those about female victims, are stories authored by women.

Among my favorite stories in Cleveland Noir are Susan Petrone's "The Silent Partner," Dana McSwain's "Bus Stop," D.M. Pulley's "Tremonster," and  Daniel Stashower's "Lenny, but Not Corky." The Petrone story uses the real life 1920 death on the baseball field of Ray Chapman to explore what might still happen today if some enterprising reporter were to delve too deeply into the tragedy. Was it an accidental beaning or was it murder? One reporter is determined to find out.

McSwain's "Bus Stop" is about a man who sees dead people, specifically young women who meet with him on the anniversary of their deaths to offer a little more information about what happened to them. Is there a serial killer still out there, and is it all starting to make too much sense to ignore?

Pulley's "Tremonster" is about a neighborhood monster who preys on young women without much concern that the Cleveland police will spend a lot of time trying to solve the murders of the young women he chooses. The suspense builds slowly but steadily all the way up to the story's climactic ending.

"Lenny, but Not Corky" by Daniel Stashower is a fun story about ego and how it affects a 73-year-old man who still believes that he earned a bigger reputation than the one Cleveland music fans grant him. What happens when a reporter interviews him almost fifty years after his limited impact on the Cleveland music scene has largely been forgotten, surprises both of them.

Cleveland Noir is one of the most consistently good collection of short stories I've read in the Akashic series, and I've read near twenty of them now. Fans of really dark crime fiction will enjoy it, and it will serve as a good introduction to readers not overly familiar with the noir genre already.

Review: Playing Games, edited by Lawrence Block

 

I have been a fan of Lawrence Block's books for a whole lot of years, but Playing Games has somehow managed to make me appreciate him now more than ever. Block invited sixteen authors to write short stories, each of them centering around the common theme of making a specific game the core of their story, and it appears that all of them were eager to respond with one. The result is seventeen (Block contributed the last story in the book) really good tales - all of them written in 2023. 

Quick Aside - I got a kick out of the book's "About the Editor" section, a career biography obviously written by Block himself, because of this sentence beginning the section's second paragraph: "In recent years, Lawrence Block has found a new career as an anthologist, having realized how much easier it is to dash off an introduction while inveigling others to supply the actual stories." I love that.

The "bigger" names contributing stories to the collection are probably Block, S.A. Cosby, Robert Silverberg, Jeffery Deaver, and Joe R. Lansdale. Surprisingly to me, none of the five authored one of the stories I most enjoyed - although Cosby came very close. 

One of my favorites is Tod Goldberg's "Paladin," one of the longest stories in the collection. It tells the story of a cop's best friend who is lost at sea while attempting to rescue a distressed vessel. I was particularly impressed at how much like a full novel this one reads, with so much information and so many twists packed into relatively few pages.

Another favorite is "Lighting Round" by Warren Moore. "Lightning Round" is about a man who loves from afar the woman who is running the Trivia Night game at his local pub every week. He has given it his best shot, but she has firmly rebuffed him and now he just comes to the weekly game to see her. But once he begins to suspect that she has serious boyfriend trouble, something very clever and dramatic is about to happen on Trivia Night.

Similarly, David Morrell's "The Puzzle Master" puts an entirely new twist on jigsaw puzzles and those who illustrate the boxes and puzzles. One couple, new to puzzling but loving it, notices a pattern in one artist's puzzles when they go back and begin to work them in chronological order. What they learn makes them suspect that a serious crime is being hinted at - and they decide to solve a whole different kind of puzzle for themselves.

The best thing about Playing Games is the consistency of the work. I've read a whole lot of short story compilations, and their biggest flaw is almost always the same: three or four really great stories, a bunch of average ones, and two or three real stinkers. Playing Games, on the other hand, is made up almost entirely of very good stories, with a handful of excellent ones and only one real stinker (which will remain nameless). If you're a crime fiction fan but are new to reading crime fiction short stories, I can't think of a better place to begin.

My thanks go to Tracy over at Bitter Tea and Mystery who alerted me to this collection via a post earlier this month. Click here to read her post.

Review - The Lineup: The World's Greatest Crime Writers Tell the Inside Story of Their Greatest Detectives

 

Otto Penzler's The Lineup is a fascinating look at the origin stories of more than twenty of the most popular fictional crimefighters of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Some twenty-two writers (Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child are co-authors of the Pendergast books) were turned loose to share the inspirations that created such characters as Jack Reacher, Hieronymus Bosch, Inspector Morse, Tess Monaghan, Rambo, Spenser, and Precious Ramotswe. Some chose to give a straightforward nonfictional version of how the characters that made them famous were born, and others decided to take the short story or fictional interview approach to revealing the same. 

Along the way, I learned some things about even those characters I was already familiar with, became curious about a few authors I haven't tried yet, and confirmed that a few of them are just not meant for me despite their immense popularity. 

These are some of the surprises I had:

• Hieronymus Bosch did not receive that name until Michael Connelly was working on the second draft of the first Bosch novel The Black Echo. Until then he was called Detective Pierce.
• John Connolly's Charlie Parker is American and not Irish (Connolly is Irish) mainly because "mystery fiction has never really been part of the Irish literary tradition."
• Colin Dexter made the decision to end his Inspector Morse series at only thirteen books because he himself was getting older and in poor health - and because he felt as if he were beginning to repeat himself.
  
• Carol O'Connell's Mallory is a genuine sociopath, and as such, the character does not change over time. Take her or leave her is the author's attitude and that's why each of the novels can be read as a standalone. 

I was pleased to see that the twenty-one fictional characters or teams include five of my all-time favorites: Jack Taylor, Harry Bosch, Charlie Resnick, Spenser, and John Rebus. Of the five, two are American, one Irish, one English, and one Scottish...where are the great Welsh fictional detectives/cops? Of the ones I haven't tried yet, I'm most curious about Elvis Cole and Joe Pike (Robert Crais), Alex Delaware (Jonathan Kellerman), and Lincoln Rhyme (Jeffery Deaver). On the flip side, I'm also certain now that Aloysius X.L. Pendergast, Rambo, and Precious Ramotswe are just not for me so I can check them off the list. And then there's the sleeper in the bunch, a writer so personally repellant to me that I haven't read them in over a decade and never will read them again. 

As you can see, there are a lot of good reasons to read The Lineup: a chance to learn something new about an old favorite, the possibility that you will learn about a character that will become a new favorite, and the chance maybe to eliminate quickly a couple of series you've been wondering about for a long time.

A solid four stars of five to this excellent compilation by Otto Penzler.

Missing in the Snow by Ann Cleeves

 

It was really good to get a glimpse of Jimmy Perez's new lifestyle now that he's turned over the bulk of his day-to-day Shetland policing duties to the more than able Tosh, a young mother of two who came up through the ranks under Jimmy's guiding hand. 

The basic premise of this eight-page short story is that an English author has come to Shetland to do some research for his next project and he has suddenly gone missing. Tosh asks Jimmy to fly in so that she can discuss the missing persons case with him, and so that they can look over the man's rented cottage together. Jimmy, of course, knows everyone on the island, including their history, so a little brainstorming with Jimmy Perez goes a long way toward solving any crime there.

So why am I not thrilled by this short story (you can get a copy free for yourself just by signing up for "The Best of Pan Macmillan" newsletter at this link). I suppose my "blah" feeling about the story comes from the author having crammed too much plot into such a short piece. I can see how good this plot could have been if fleshed out a little into a novella, or even given the full-novel treatment by Cleeves. So while it was wonderful to see Jimmy and Tosh together again, the way the story ends in one sudden summation of all that has happened in the dark of the background left me feeling way less than satisfied with the reading. Sadly, I have to give "Missing in the Snow" only two of five stars.

Crime Hits Home - S. J. Rozan (Editor and Contributor)

Crime Hits Home is a nice collection of crime related short stories exploring the most jarring type of crime imaginable, those that invade a victim’s most personal space: the home. Keep in mind that, as S. J. Rozan points out in her introduction to Crime Hits Home, “home” does not mean the same thing to everyone. Some people, Rozan says, are living in the home they want to spend the rest of their lives in, others hate where they are, and still others are desperate to return to the place they never should have left in the first place. But what all of these homes have in common is that we feel safest when we are there. So what happens when those safe spaces are violated in the worst ways imaginable?

Twenty authors, including Rozan, give their take on how that feels to the victim and what happens next. Mystery fans, of course, will recognize names like Sara Paretsky and Walter Mosley among the twenty, but some of the best stories in the book come from authors with whose work I am less familiar. 

Among my favorites are “Oyster Creek,” a story by Neil S. Plakey in which a man comes home after his mother has been killed on the roadway in a tragic hit and run accident. After what he learns about the accident and who was behind the wheel, the young man faces a decision that there is no coming back from. 

I enjoyed Ellen Hart’s “Calling Mr. Smith” because it is so easy to imagine what a movie director like Alfred Hitchcock could do with a plot like this one in which a woman mouths off in a bar one night that she would be better off without her elderly mother. Was the wrong person perhaps listening? 

Then there’s G. Miki Hayden’s story, “Forever Unconquered,” about a Seminole Indian family whose home turf in swampy Florida is invaded by drug dealers who make the mistake of hijacking the wrong man’s airboat. Let’s just say that it’s not a mistake they are going to make twice.

What is my favorite story of them all is also the shortest in the book: S. J.  Rozan’s “Playing for Keeps.” This is a deceptively simple story about a little girl who not only survived a German concentration camp but made sure that her younger brother did the same. Now, the children are living in the US where the girl is being mocked and bullied by a boy because of her accent and religion. If he only knew who he was picking on…

Bottom Line: The stories in Crime Hits Home, despite the theme common to them all, are very different from one another. They were, however, all chosen for the collection because of how clearly they address that theme: nothing is worse, and no one feels more cornered, than when a criminal dares invade a person’s home space, be that a physical home or a place you live in only in your mind. Bad things can happen to bad people when they push their intended victims too far — and in Crime Hits Home, those things do happen. 

S. J. Rozan, editor & contributor

Crime Hits Home is schedule for an April 19, 2022 publication by Harlequin Trade Publishing's Hanover Press. Review copy was provided by publisher. 

Short Story Thursday: "Natural Light" by Kathleen Alcott

I love short stories for many reasons, but I particularly love them because I’ve discovered several of my favorite novelists by first reading one of their stories. Perhaps I would have discovered those writers at some point anyway, but reading their shorter work led me to them much earlier than would have otherwise been the case. That, I don’t doubt. 

Along those lines, this morning I read a story by new-to-me author Kathleen Alcott called “Natural Light” in which she explores one’s relationship with a dead parent — and what can happen when new information about that parent is exposed long after their death. The story immediately opens with a hook that I could not resist:

I won’t tell you what my mother was doing in the photograph — or rather, what was being done to her — just that when I saw it for the first time, in the museum crowded with tourists, she’d been dead five years. It broke an explicit promise, the only (one) we keep with the deceased, which is that there will be no more contact, no new information.

The story’s narrator knew that her mother had lived in New York City for six months before she met the narrator’s future father. Her mother, however, had always brushed off any questions about that period in her life by literally waving them away when asked. Now, completely out of the blue, our unhappy narrator (who has obvious problems of her own) comes across photographic evidence that her mother had good reason to keep her secrets. The narrator’s heart breaks when she studies the filthy room in which the picture was taken and realizes just how low her mother had sunk in just a few short months in the big city.

She wants to know more — but, try as she does, no one really wants to help her.

Bottom Line: “Natural Light” left me as mystified as the narrator must have still felt at the end of this seventeen-page story. And that was probably the point. The story is disturbing and moody, even frustrating — and I think this mirrors the emotions that the narrator must have felt while trying to figure out her mother’s past. I get it. But as a reader, I can’t help wanting a little more from “Natural Light.” I prefer to have my mysteries solved before the last page is turned, and I’m still trying to figure out exactly what the picture portrayed. (I have a good guess, but I won’t speculate in fear of spoiling the story for others.) 

Kathleen Alcott

“Natural Light” was originally published in 2018 in Zoetrope: All Story, vol. 22, no. 1. I read it from the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt collection The Best American Short Stories (2019). Alcott is the author of numerous short stories and at least three novels (I don’t see that she has published a novel since 2019.) 

An Elderly Lady Must Not Be Crossed - Helene Tursten

In An Elderly Lady Must Not Be Crossed, Helene Tursten provides the backstory of the 89-year-old killer she first introduced to the world in her five-story compilation, An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good. As her victims would attest to if only they could, Maud was most definitely up to no good in that first collection, and in this second book featuring her, anyone crossing Maud is still likely to pay the ultimate price for doing so. This time around Maud, who has decided it’s time to enjoy the money she’s accumulated over her long lifetime, is embarking on a luxury vacation to South Africa. This is the structure Tursten uses to tie the book’s six stories together so that they read more like a short novel than as a collection of short stories.

If Maud has any kind of motto to live by, it’s probably this thought that she has at the end of “Lancing a Boil,” the third story in the book:

“Certain Problems have only one solution. That’s just the way it is.”

In the book’s first story,”An Elderly Lady Begins to Remember Her Past,” Maud has attracted the interest of two police detectives who do not buy her explanation about the dead antique dealer she supposedly discovered in her apartment (in a story from the previous collection). The two cops keep returning for follow-up interviews, and Maud is beginning to fear that she may have finally gone too far in solving her own problems. She decides the best thing to do is to make it impossible for them to question her for a while, and decides that this is the perfect time for a return visit to South Africa. 

It takes a while to get from Sweden to South Africa, though, and Maud, who is determined to get every penny’s worth of what she has payed for her first class ticket, is enjoying more — and better — booze than most of her fellow passengers. She can barely hold her eyes open anymore, and when she falls asleep, it is only to dream vividly about some of the memories she has more or less suppressed over her long lifetime of solving “Certain Problems” for herself. 

In the next four stories, we learn: how Maud dealt with two boys who were bullying her older sister; how, as a fresh graduate, she turned a part-time teaching job into the full-time job she held for the rest of her life; the truth about how she was finally freed from having to be her sister’s caretaker; and how she rescued her only friend from certain financial ruin. But Tursten saves the best for last, a story titled “An Elderly Lady Takes a Trip to Africa,” which comprises just over half the book’s total pages. 

This final story is a blending of two Maud’s, one we’ve seen before, and one we never expected to see at all. Maud has discovered her soft side now that she’s approaching the end of her life, and although she’s not above using her usual solution to solving Certain Problems, she finds herself wanting to keep a family she’s met from becoming homeless in just a few weeks. But because there’s no one to kill to make this new problem go away, Maud comes up with a creative solution that will change their lives — and hers — forever. 

“In Maud’s case, it had taken an unusually long time, but now everything felt right. She’d even gained a little family in the process. Not bad for an elderly lady, she thought. She decided to treat herself to a little dose of Power of Life with her coffee.”

Bottom Line: So are Maud’s killing days over for good now? It remains to be seen whether or not Helene Tursten has more in mind for Maud, but it’s already been one heck of a ride with one of the most memorable serial killers the fiction world has ever seen. It’s been fun. 

Helene Tursten

An Elderly Lady Is Up To No Good - Helene Tursten

Like Dexter, Maud’s more famous fictional serial killer peer, Maud doesn’t kill anyone that doesn’t pretty much deserve killing. Dexter probably has killed more bad people than Maud will ever manage to knock off, but then Dexter isn’t 88-years-old either. Maude, on the other hand, is very near 89 by the end of Helene Tursten’s An Elderly Lady Is Up To No Good, and she’s still going strong, so who knows what her final bodycount will total?

An Elderly Lady Is Up To No Good is a collection of five stories featuring Maud, the “elderly lady” in question, who has lived in the same large apartment in Gothenburg, Sweden, for her whole life. Due to a legal clause her father managed to slip into a sales contract, Maud has lived in the apartment entirely rent-free for the last several decades, something that is a constant irritant to its owner and her fellow apartment building tenants. Maud has no real friends, and she likes it that way. She is not a lady to ignore the small stuff, and those who threaten her emotional peace or threaten to harm her in any way often pay the ultimate price for their behavior. That may sound a little drastic on Maude’s part, but Tursten’s stories are so funny, and Maude’s victims so deserving of a whack or two on the head, that readers can’t help but laugh at Maude’s shenanigans while cheering her on. 

The five stories collected here were written between 2007 and 2018, but Maud’s attitude  changes very little over time (the five stories are not even presented in the order in which they were written). Sometimes Maud is out there avenging old friends, sometimes neighbors (she has a vested interest in this one), and sometimes just — as she sees it — defending herself. Interestingly, the fifth story turns out to be a prequel to the story that comes just before it so that everything can be seen again from Maud’s point of view rather than that of the first person narrator (and neighbor of Maud’s) who gives us the original version of why a dead body was found in Maud’s apartment. That fourth story (“The Antique Dealer’s Death) is the only one of the five told in the first person; the other four are all in the third person.

Bottom Line: Maud is a hoot. Readers may feel a little guilty about laughing at the way Maud eliminates her problems, but it is impossible not to cheer her on. A second collection, of six stories, titled An Elderly Lady Must Not Be Crossed has just been published, and it promises to continue Maud’s adventures and test her skills to stay out of prison. Go, Maud, go…

(Both collections are translated into English by Marlaine DeLargy.)

Helene Tursten

In the Company of Sherlock Holmes: "The Crooked Man" by Michael Connelly

Talking about the collection of Nero Wolfe pastiches and parodies, The Misadventures of Nero Wolfe, last week reminded me of a book that has sat neglected on my shelves for five or six years now. This one is titled In the Company of Sherlock Holmes: Stories Inspired by the Holmes Canon and it was published in 2014. I think I was probably inspired to purchase it because its fifteen stories include ones by some of the writers whose work I've enjoyed reading for several decades. That's why I bought it; I just wish I had an answer for why I never read it.  

Anyway, the six authors that immediately caught my eye were: Michael Connelly, Sara Paretsky, Jeffery Deaver, Cornelia Funke, Harlan Ellison, and John Lescroart. Of these half-dozen, I'm particularly fond of Connelly and his Harry Bosch books, so when I saw that Connelly's "The Crooked Man" was the first story in the collection and that it was a Harry Bosch short story, I knew I had to have the collection. 

"The Crooked Man" opens with Harry and his partner, Jerry Edgar, being called to an early-morning murder scene in what seems to be the most prestigious gated-community in all of Los Angeles, one that sits on top of a mountain looking down on the rest of the city - in more ways than one. There, the detectives find a Hollywood studio exec sprawled out dead on the floor of his library and displaying a massive head wound. They also find, much to Bosch's delight, coroner Art Doyle, a man so well known for correctly assessing death scenes that everyone calls him Sherlock. And that's when the real fun begins for Sherlock Holmes fans.

Before this fifteen-page story is over, "Sherlock" will have successfully led Bosch to a solution of the murder, identified the culprit, and even diagnosed a hidden illness that Bosch has attributed to his fast approaching old-age (Bosch is about to turn 60 in this story). 

"The Crooked Man" was particular fun for me because it gave me another glimpse into Harry Bosch's world, but I'm intrigued now about the other stories, so I'll be reading the other fourteen soon. I am pleased to see that the collection even includes the first graphic short story I've ever seen, one by Leah Moore and John Reppion called "The Problem of the Empty Slipper." Too, Gahan Wilson's contribution to the collection includes three of his classic cartoons, all of them, of course, related to Sherlock Holmes. 

Maybe In the Company of Sherlock Holmes: Stories Inspired by the Holmes Canon had to sit on my shelves until the moment I would most appreciate it. Now feels like the perfect time.

Editor Laurie R. King
(also edited by Leslie S. Klinger)

The Misadventures of Nero Wolfe: "The Damned Doorbell Rang"

My recent re-introduction to Rex Stout's terrific Nero Wolfe mysteries led me to a 2020 short story compilation with a title as long as Nero Wolfe was wide: The Misadventures of Nero Wolfe: Parodies and Pastiches Featuring the Great Detective of West 35th Street. What I find most intriguing about the collection is that none of the stories in it were written by Rex Stout. Instead, all of them were written by authors who were fans enough of the series that they consider Stout to have been an influence on their own work. Interestingly, the collection even includes a story written by Rebecca Stout Bradbury, the daughter of Rex and Pola Stout. Other contributors include the likes of Lawrence Block, Loren D. Estleman, Robert Goldsborough, John Lescroart, and Otto Penzler.

The book is divided into three sections titled: "Pastiches," "Parodies," and "Potpourri," and the story title that jumped right out at me turned out to be the very last one in the collection, "The Damned Doorbell Rang," by Robert Lopresti. I figure this one caught my attention first because I recently purchased a copy of Stout's novel The Doorbell Rang and I've found myself more and more eager to begin reading it.

The biggest surprise about "The Damned Doorbell Rang" is that Nero and Archie only make an appearance in the story at all via the memories of a woman explaining to her granddaughter why she and the girl's grandfather moved out of New York City decades earlier - and she doesn't even know the names of the two men who lived next door to them there in the city. And she never did.

"The Damned Doorbell Rang" begins as one of those "worst neighbors ever" stories, this one about various comings-and-goings at all hours of the night, oddball visitors who often rang the wrong doorbell, celebrity sightings, explosions, and attempts on the life of the fat man next door. Nero Wolfe fans, of course, will recognize early on who these horrible neighbors have to be, so it's hard not to laugh out loud when the grandmother assures her husband that he is wrong about the two men being gay - and that she knows this for certain only because the younger one "gave her the eye" on occasion. Turns out that Gran even deserves credit for saving Wolfe's life not too long before she and her husband fled to a quieter lifestyle in New Jersey - a lifestyle that her granddaughter now finds terribly boring.

 The Misadventures of Nero Wolfe, which even includes a story envisioning Nero Wolfe as the son of Sherlock Holmes, promises to be great fun. As much as I would love to read all of the stories in it, the clock started ticking on this one a few days before I could get to it, and the library will electronically yank it away from me my in just a few days. But if this one is half the fun I'm hoping it will be, I'll gladly get back in line for a second go at it. 

The Best American Short Stories 2021 - Selected by Jesmyn Ward

As these things work, all of the stories selected by two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward for The Best American Short Stories 2021 compilation were actually published in English in American or Canadian periodicals between January 2020 and January 2021 by writers who call either the United States or Canada home. For that reason, the stories reflect much of the craziness that the world experienced during the chaotic year that 2020 so unexpectedly turned out to be for all of us. The stories told to us here by the especially diverse group of writers chosen to represent America’s best short writing of 2021 are thought-provoking reminders of just how different we all are now from who we were just one year earlier. 

Almost every short story compilation will read differently to different readers. The favorite stories of one reader may barely impact another reader at all; some readers will love almost every story in the collection while others toss the book aside in frustration that none of the stories work for them. That’s just the way it happens, and with that caveat in mind, I want to give special mention to four of the twenty stories in The Best American Short Stories 2021 that most directly spoke to me. 

The first is “Clementine, Carmelita Dog” (originally published in Granta) by David Means, a story that captures much of the feeling of isolation and despair that seems to have been so common during much of 2020. This story, although it uses the third person voice, is told largely through the eyes of Clementine, a “middle-aged dachshund,” who positively impacts the lives of two separate households, once as “Clementine” and then as “Carmelita.” While not exactly a feel-good story, this one leaves the reader in a hopeful mood about the things we can learn from the year we’ve just endured. 

“Paradise,” by Maya Murray (originally published in The Southern Review), more directly addresses one of 2020’s disasters, the California wildfires that annually devastate portions of that state. In this character-driven story, we watch a woman trying to convince her 80-year-old father-in-law, a man for whom she now feels responsible despite his lifelong antagonism toward her, that it is time to abandon their home and run for their lives before it is too late to escape the fires. As I watched the interplay between the characters, I found myself wishing this one was much longer than it is.

Stephanie Soilleau’s “Haguillory” (originally published in Zoetrope: All-Story) is a revealing story about a deeply, probably permanently, flawed old man who confirms what kind of man he really is at the very end of the story. The story takes place in Louisiana, shortly after a hurricane has passed through the state, during a crabbing expedition the man and his wife have decided to make. Haguillory is a hard-to-forget fictional character that has earned his place in my memory — even though I can’t tell you why without spoiling the story. 

Finally, there is “Biology,” by Kevin Wilson (originally published in The Southern Review), the story I found to be most touching one of the twenty in the collection.  “Biology” is told largely in flashback through the eyes of a gay man who has just heard that his favorite high school teacher has died, the biology teacher who is responsible for having practically saved the man’s life by showing him, by example, how to survive his high school years. The teacher is a very complicated character, and I found myself being completely immersed in the world that Wilson created in the limited number of pages he allowed himself to tell the man’s story.

Bottom Line: The Best American Short Stories 2021 is an outstanding addition to this long-running series of short story compilations. That it reflects the work and world-views of such a diverse group of writers is an added bonus to readers looking to experience the writing of a group of young, new-to-them, authors.

Two-time National Book Award Winner, Jesmyn Ward