By Hook or By Crook Read online

  BY HOOK

  OR BY CROOK

  AND 27 MORE OF THE BEST

  CRIME +

  MYSTERY

  STORIES OF THE YEAR

  EDITED BY

  Ed Gorman and

  Martin H. Greenberg

  Published by

  TYRUS BOOKS

  a division of F+W Media, Inc.

  4700 East Galbraith Road

  Cincinnati, Ohio 45236

  www.tyrusbooks.com

  Copyright © 2010 by Ed Gorman & Martin Greenberg

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction.

  Any similarities to people or places, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  eISBN 10: 1-4405-3104-8

  eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-3104-0

  This work has been previously published in print format under the following ISBNs:

  978-1-935562-31-3 (hardcover)

  978-1-935562-32-0 (paperback)

  CONTENTS

  The Mystery in 2009 BY JON L. BREEN

  Animal Rescue BY DENNIS LEHANE

  Family Affair: A Smokey Dalton Story BY KRIS NELSCOTT*

  Survival Instincts BY SANDRA SEAMANS

  Julius Katz BY DAVE ZELTSERMAN

  Seeing the Moon BY S.J. ROZAN

  Dark Chocolate BY NANCY PICKARD

  Telegraphing BY MARCIA MULLER

  The Valhalla Verdict BY DOUG ALLYN

  Pure Pulp BY BILL CRIDER

  Blood Sacrifices and the Catatonic Kid BY TOM PICIRRILLI

  Patterns BY RICHARD LUPOFF

  The Tell-Tale Purr BY MARY HIGGINS CLARK

  The Big Switch: A Mike Hammer Story BY MICKEY SPILLANE AND MAX ALLAN COLLINS

  Crazy Larry Smells Bacon BY GREG BARDSLEY

  Femme Sole BY DANA CAMERON

  The Dark Island BY BRENDAN DUBOIS

  The Caretaker BY TERENCE FAHERTY

  The Case of Colonel Crockett’s Violin BY GILLIAN LINSCOTT

  The Case of Colonel Warburton’s Madness BY LYNDSAY FAYE

  Time Will Tell BY TWIST PHELAN

  By Hook or By Crook BY CHARLIE DREES

  The Final Nail: A Val O’Farrell Story BY BOB RANDISI

  Amapola BY LUIS ALBERTO URREA

  Cougar BY LAURA LIPPMAN

  Digby, Attorney at Law BY JIM FUSILLI

  The Way They Limp BY CLARK HOWARD

  O’Nelligan’s Glory BY MICHAEL NETHERCOTT

  Between Sins BY ROBERT LEVINSON

  Also Available

  COPYRIGHTS

  Volume copyright: © 2010 by Ed Gorman and Tekno Books

  “The Year in Mystery: 2009,” copyright © 2010 by Jon L. Breen.

  “Animal Rescue,” copyright © 2009 by Dennis Lehane. First published in Boston Noir. Reprinted by permission of the author and his agent, Ann Rittenberg.

  “Family Affair: A Smokey Dalton Story,” copyright © 2009 by Kristine K. Rusch. First published in Subterranean, Fall 2009. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Survival Instincts,” copyright © 2009 by Sandra Seamans. First published in PulpPusher.moonfruit.com. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Julius Katz,” copyright © 2009 by Dave Zeltserman. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, September/October 2009. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Seeing the Moon,” copyright © 2009 by S.J. Rozan. First published in On a Raven’s Wing. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Dark Chocolate,” copyright © 2009 by Nancy Pickard. First published in Two of the Deadliest. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Telegraphing,” copyright © 2009 by Marcia Muller. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, June 2009. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Valhalla Verdict,” copyright © 2009 by Doug Allyn. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, March/April 2009. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Pure Pulp,” copyright © 2009 by Bill Crider. First published in Murder Past, Murder Present. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Blood Sacrifices and the Catatonic Kid,” copyright © 2009 by Tom Piccirilli. First published in The Death Panel: Murder, Mayhem and Madness. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Patterns,” copyright © 2009 by Richard Lupoff. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, December 2009. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Tell-Tale Purr,” copyright © 2009 by Mary Higgins Clark. First published in On a Raven’s Wing. Reprinted by permission of the author and her agent, Sam Pinkus, Veritas Media.

  “The Big Switch: A Mike Hammer Story,” copyright © 2010 by Mickey Spillane Publishing, L.L.C. First published in The Strand Magazine, January 2009. Reprinted by permission of Mickey Spillane Publishing, L.L.C.

  “Crazy Larry Smells Bacon,” copyright © 2009 Greg Bardsley. First published in Plots with Guns #5, Winter 2009. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Femme Sole,” copyright © 2009 by Dana Cameron. First published in Boston Noir. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Dark Island,” copyright © 2009 by Brendan DuBois. First published in Boston Noir. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Caretaker,” copyright © 2009 Terence Faherty. First published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, December 2009. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Case of Colonel Crockett’s Violin,” copyright © 2009 by Gillian Linscott. First published in Sherlock Holmes in America. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Case of Colonel Warburton’s Madness,” copyright © 2009 by Lyndsay Faye. First published in Sherlock Holmes in America. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Time Will Tell,” copyright © 2009 by Twist Phelan. First published in The Prosecution Rests. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “By Hook or By Crook,” copyright © 2009 by Charlie Drees. First published in The Prosecution Rests. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Final Nail: A Val O’Farrell Story,” copyright © 2009 by Bob Randisi. First published in Murder Past, Murder Present. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Amapola,” copyright © 2009 by Luis Alberto Urrea. First published in Phoenix Noir. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Cougar,” copyright © 2009 by Laura Lippmann. First published in Two of the Deadliest. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Digby, Attorney at Law,” copyright © 2009 by Jim Fusilli. First published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, May 2009. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Way They Limp,” copyright © 2009 by Clark Howard. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, September/October 2009. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “O’Nelligan’s Glory,” copyright © 2009 by Michael Nethercott. First published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, July/August 2009. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Between Sins,” copyright © 2009 by Robert Levinson. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, June 2009. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  THE MYSTERY IN 2009

  By Jon L. Breen

  Call 2009 the Year of Landmark Anniversaries. Eighty years have passed since the September 1929 issue of Black Mask presented the first installment of a serial that would become one of the most influential detective novels in history, Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. Whether intended to mark that occasion or not, two of the best novels of the year paid homage to
Hammett, one to his style and fictional world and one to his personal character. (See Gores and Atkins respectively in the best-of-the-year list below.) A key reference book on Hammett’s San Francisco had a new and expanded edition: Don Herron’s The Dashiell Hammett Tour: Thirtieth Anniversary Guidebook (Vince Emery).

  The bicentennial of Edgar Allan Poe’s birth in 1809 was celebrated throughout the year in Baltimore with such events as a Poe funeral reenactment, various theatrical presentations, and The Cask of Amontillado Wine Tasting, apparently successful enough to be repeated in 2010. The Mystery Writers of America recognized the birthday with two volumes: In the Shadow of the Master (William Morrow), edited by Michael Connelly, which gathered some of Poe’s best-known tales, accompanied by essays from present-day writers influenced by the father of the detective story; and On a Raven’s Wing, edited by Stuart Kaminsky, featuring homages to Poe by many of today’s top writers.

  Speaking of Poe and MWA, the organization’s leadership made a surprising decision regarding one of his namesake Edgar Awards. There is no shortage of awards in the mystery genre, as the compilation at the end of this piece demonstrates. While there may be no need to add more, those that are unique, prestigious, and/or longstanding ought to be maintained. The Edgar for Best Motion Picture, given every year save two since 1946, has been scuttled for reasons never revealed to the membership.

  The first film honored, in 1946, was the previous year’s Murder, My Sweet, scripted by John Paxton from Raymond Chandler’s novel Farewell, My Lovely. Subsequent years honored such classic films as The Asphalt Jungle, Rear Window, 12 Angry Men Psycho, The French Connection, The Last of Sheila, Chinatown, Witness, The Silence of the Lambs, Pulp Fiction, and L.A. Confidential, and such screenwriters as Donald E. Westlake, Dennis Potter, Joseph Wambaugh, Michael Crichton, William Goldman, and Truman Capote. Honored for best of 2008, from a very strong list of nominees, was Martin McDonagh’s script for In Bruges. But there will be no Edgar Award for the best of 2009, the award having been put “on hiatus” by the MWA Board of Directors without explanation.

  Recent years have taken an unusually heavy toll on the crime fiction community. In reviewing 2008, I noted the passing of no fewer than five MWA Grand Masters. In 2009, they were joined by another from that exclusive club, the prolific and versatile Stuart M. Kaminsky, and in early 2010 by two more, Dick Francis and Robert B. Parker.

  Other mystery-world deaths in 2009 included novelists William Tapply, Barbara Parker, Robert Terrall, Lyn Hamilton, Celia Fremlin, and Sister Carol Anne O’Marie, and short-story specialists Barbara Callahan and Dick Stodghill. An important figure in mystery scholarship, Ray B. Browne, a pioneer of the study of popular culture as writer, publisher, and Bowling Green University professor, died at age eighty-seven.

  Best Novels of the Year 2009

  Before unveiling the fifteen best new books I read and reviewed during the year, here’s the boilerplate disclaimer: I don’t pretend to cover the whole field — no single reviewer does — but if you have a better list of fifteen, I’d love to see it.

  • Ace Atkins, Devil’s Garden (Putnam). San Francisco of the 1920s and the complex personalities of Pinkerton operative Dashiell Hammett and manslaughter suspect Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle are central to a remarkable fictionalization.

  • Gyles Brandreth, Oscar Wilde and the Dead Man’s Smile (Touchstone). The third novel casting the 1890s celebrity playwright as sleuth is a throwback to Golden Age puzzle-spinning with a downright Queenian finale.

  • Michael Connelly, Nine Dragons (Little, Brown). L.A cop Harry Bosch travels to Hong Kong in one of his best cases. Connelly’s other 2009 book, The Scarecrow (Little, Brown) is notable for a grim picture of the declining newspaper business.

  • Mat Coward, Acts of Destruction (Alia Mondo). While it’s unusual to cover a self-published British novel here, Coward’s nearfuture police procedural, offering stimulating ideas, good modular plotting, and trademark humor, deserves to be read, and American fans of his work need to know about it.

  • Martin Edwards, Dancing for the Hangman (Five Star). Hawley Harvey Crippen’s first person account is one of the best fictionalizations of a classic criminal case in memory.

  • Hallie Ephron, Never Tell a Lie (William Morrow). Constructed as well as a top-notch Mary Higgins Clark, this prime contribution to the am-I-married-to-a-murderer subgenre is also distinguished for its style.

  • Lyndsay Faye, Dust and Shadow (Simon & Schuster). Of all the attempts to put Sherlock Holmes on the trail of Jack the Ripper, this may well be the best.

  • Joe Gores, Spade & Archer (Knopf). The prequel to The Maltese Falcon perfectly recaptures Hammett’s objective narrative style.

  • Ed Gorman, The Midnight Room (Leisure). The small-town Midwestern milieu is brilliantly depicted in a deliberate throwback to the great days of paperback originals.

  • John Hart, The Last Child (Minotaur). The tale of a rural North Carolina teenager obsessed with the murder of his sister was a deserving Edgar nominee.

  • Margaret Lawrence, Roanoke (Delacorte). One of the best historical mystery writers offers a possible solution to a mystery of colonial America in the Elizabethan era.

  • Leonardo Padura, Havana Fever, translated from the Spanish by Peter Bush (Bitter Lemon). Havana cop turned book scout Mario Conde is featured in one of the most consistently excellent series in the current market.

  • Anne Perry, Execution Dock (Ballantine). Set in 1860 London, this was the best book in some time about amnesiac cop William Monk and wife Hester.

  • Andrew Taylor, Bleeding Heart Square (Hyperion). Politics and everyday life of 1934 London come to life in a beautifully structured historical mystery.

  • Joseph Teller, Bronx Justice (MIRA). New life for the courtroom drama from one of the best lawyer-writers to enter the legal mystery subgenre.

  Sub-Genres

  Private eyes. Sleuths for hire in commendable action included a pair of San Franciscans, Bill Pronzini’s Nameless Detective in Schemers (Forge) and Mark Coggins’s August Riordan in The Big Wake-Up (Bleak House), plus Sharon Fiffer’s Illinois part-timer Jane Wheel in Scary Stuff (Minotaur) and Las Vegas’s Trevor Oaks, whose first book-length case is Percy Spurlark Parker’s The Good-Looking Dead Guy (PublishAmerica). Ten years after his debut, Russell Atwood’s Payton Sherwood finally had a second case in Losers Live Longer (Hard Case Crime). TV’s Adrian Monk, usually a police consultant, briefly turns PI in Lee Goldberg’s Mr. Monk and the Dirty Cop (Penguin Putnam).

  Amateur sleuths. Puzzle Lady Cora Felton in Parnell Hall’s Dead Man’s Puzzle (Minotaur) and Skeleton Detective Gideon Oliver in Aaron Elkins’s Skull Duggery (Berkley) kept alive the spirit of fair-play puzzle spinning. In Yuletide action were Maine shopkeeper Liss MacCrimmon in Kaitlyn Dunnett’s A Wee Christmas Homicide (Kensington), New Jersey reporter Cassie O’Malley in Jeff Markowitz’s It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Murder (Five Star), and early-teen Gracie Phipps (later a servant to Thomas and Charlotte Pitt) in Anne Perry’s Victorian-era A Christmas Promise (Ballantine). Movie buffs welcomed the reappearance of film detective Valentino in Loren D. Estleman’s Alone (Forge). The Today Show’s Al Roker and frequent celebrity collaborator Dick Lochte introduced chef and TV personality Billy Blessing in The Morning Show Murders (Delacorte).

  Police. Cops walking their beats included Texas sheriff Dan Rhodes in Bill Crider’s Murder in Four Parts (Minotaur), Sicily’s Salvo Montalbano in Andrea Camilleri’s August Heat (Penguin), translated from the Italian by Stephen Sartarelli, Konrad Sejer, and Jacob Scarre in Karin Fossum’s The Water’s Edge (Houghton Mifflin), translated from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund, and (in a 1960 prequel to his previously recorded cases) one of the great series police in H.R.F. Keating’s Inspector Ghote’s First Case (Minotaur).

  Lawyers. A Manhattan insurance lawyer figured in Colin Harrison’s Risk (Picador), a shortish novel that began life as a New York Times Magazine serial. The Christian market provided a good legal mystery in
Randy Singer’s The Justice Game (Tyndale), while Robert Rotenberg’s Old City Hall (Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus Giroux) was a strong Canadian debut. Series advocates in good form were David Rosenfelt’s New Jerseyite Andy Carpenter in New Tricks (Grand Central), Philip Margolin’s Oregonian Amanda Jaffe in Fugitive (Harper), Margaret Maron’s North Carolinian judge Deborah Knott in Sand Sharks (Grand Central), and William Bernhardt’s Oklahoma Senator Ben Perkins, happily back in the courtroom in Capitol Offense (Ballantine). On the other hand, Steve Martini’s Californian Paul Madriani appears regrettably poised to desert the courtroom for more world-shattering events in Guardian of Lies (William Morrow).

  Historicals. Michael Jecks’s team of Sir Baldwin Furnshill and Bailiff Simon Puttock carried on in 1320s England in The Prophecy of Death and The King of Thieves (both Headline/Trafalgar Square). Other past sleuths with strong new cases included Yashim, eunuchdetective of nineteenth century Turkey, in Jason Goodwin’s The Bellini Card (Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims in P.C. Doherty’s A Haunt of Murder (Minotaur), and Alan Gordon’s thirteenth century Fools Guild members in The Parisian Prodigal (Minotaur). Barbara Hamilton (pseudonym of Barbara Hambly) launched Abigail Adams as series sleuth in The Ninth Daughter (Berkley).

  Criminals. Sadly, the late Donald E. Westlake’s Get Real (Grand Central) is presumably the last of the comic novels about ill-starred crook John Dortmunder. Also active on the wrong side of the law was Max Allan Collins’s killer-for-hire in Quarry in the Middle (Hard Case Crime).

  Thrillers. It’s a long list, but remember my convenient definition: anything that doesn’t fit the other subgenres. Jeffery Deaver and other members of the International Thriller Writers collaborated efficiently on the two short novels in Watchlist (Vanguard). Kenneth Abel’s Down in the Flood (Minotaur) must rank with the best Hurricane Katrina novels. In reviewing Dean Koontz’s Relentless (Bantam), I enumerated the mix of elements — “suspense, horror, satire, conspiracy thriller, science fiction, fantasy, spiritual allegory” — that make its author a one-of-a-kind entertainer. Another genre-bender is George Zebrowski’s Empties (Golden Gryphon), enjoyably combining police procedural, romantic suspense, science fiction, fantasy, fiction noir, and horror. Laura Lippman’s Life Sentences (William Morrow), Carmen Posadas’s Child’s Play(Harper), translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor and Amanda Hopkinson, Rhodi Hawk’s A Twisted Ladder (Forge), and Thomas H. Cook’s The Fate of Katherine Carr (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) all describe present-day investigations of past mysteries. Thomas B. Sawyer’s No Place to Run (Sterling & Ross) is a superbly managed novel advancing controversial 9/11 conspiracy theories. In C.J. Box’s Three Weeks to Say Goodbye (Minotaur), a couple is threatened with the loss of their adopted baby. Mariko Koike’s disturbing and unclassifiable The Cat in the Coffin (Vertical), translated from the Japanese by Deborah Boliver Boehm, is not the romantic suspense it for a time appears to be. Tanguy Viel’s brief and unconventional Beyond Suspicion (New Press), translated from the French by Linda Coverdale, led me to evoke James M. Cain and Hitchcock. Domenico Starnone’s puzzle-box novel First Execution (Europa), translated from the Italian by Antony Shugaar, combines reality and fiction in a way that isn’t for everybody but is recommended to those who don’t mind a lack of pat answers.