Тимоти Уилльямз - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 126, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 769 & 770, September/October 2005

“Then you agree with me...?” Sylvie was pleased.

“You may be on to something,” Bernie said. It was that or there would be no sleep for either of them. “Good work, love.” He reached across her to the light. “And good night.”

The following evening Bernie got home well before his wife. By the time Sylvie opened the front door he had chilled two glasses in the freezer and filled a pitcher to the brim with ice in anticipation of a celebratory round of his widely respected martinis.

“You’ve solved the soap-opera murder,” Sylvie said, even before her coat was off.

“With a full confession.” They were in the kitchen, where he had assembled gin, vermouth, and olives for the sacred ceremony.

“A confession. That was fast,” Sylvie said, wriggling out of her coat and throwing it over the back of a chair. “The killer must have done something really dumb.”

“Don’t they all?” Bernie said. “That’s why we cops usually win.”

“Peck. It had to be Peck. Come on. Give.”

Bernie didn’t have to be coaxed. “The Saw Mill River Parkway did him in,” he began. “He was smart enough to avoid the toll station, but dumb enough to drive on the Parkway at all. An alert Westchester patrol car ticketed him at four-fifteen A.M.”

“For what?”

“Driving on a parkway with commercial plates. There’s a law against that.”

“Not Peck. Then who—?”

“Mitch Keller, in his van, ‘Keller Designs.’ ”

“The man she was engaged to? For heaven’s sake, why?”

“Call it the persuasiveness of the medium. The poor sap watched his girl three afternoons a week wrecking homes and wreaking havoc. A seed was planted and it took. He began to wonder whether she had more Willa Wade in her than the role called for. The suspicions finally broke into the open. He accused Marsha of having an affair with someone, anyone, probably her dentist. Marsha could give as good as she got and the argument escalated into a shoving match. The final shove from Mitch sent her falling backwards against a vise clamped to a worktable. The M.E. thinks the blow to the head killed her almost instantly.”

“Not a pretty way to go,” Sylvie breathed.

“Mitch was left with a dead fiancee and a live dog. He hid the body and walked Buster a few blocks south to the dentist’s office. With a hope and a prayer.”

“Was Marsha having an affair with that dentist?”

“Who knows? And does it matter? The perception was enough for Mitch.”

Sylvie sank into the chair beside her coat. “The power of make-believe. Awesome.”

Bernie held up the gin bottle. “A toast to good police work?”

Sylvie said, “I thought you’d never ask.”

Copyright (c); 2005 by Gordon Cotler.

The glory days of radio mystery extended from the 1930s through ’50s, but some are determined to keep the lost (or maybe just misplaced) art of dramatic radio alive through recordings of old shows — that admirable outfit Radio Spirits (radiospirits.com), for example, offers tapes of Dragnet, Richard Diamond, Suspense, The Whistler, and many other mystery series — or through new programs in the traditional style.

Jim French Productions (jimfrenchproductions.com) offers an array of fully professional programs, of which the flagship is The Adventures of Harry Nile, which debuted on Seattle radio in 1976 and now totals more than 150 episodes. Chronologically based between the late ’30s and early ’50s, eleven volumes of shows, usually six to a CD, are available at $15.95 each. Sampling volume 11, I found the programs unremarkable in plotting but rich in old-radio ambience, most reminiscent of the Sam Spade program, though less insistently facetious. Also on offer are fine Raffles adaptations, new Sherlock Holmes adventures, and an enjoyable paranormal investigative series, Kincaid The Strange-Seeker.

Only a few episodes of The Adventures of Ellery Queen, one of the best of the 1940s mystery series, have been available on tape. Some scripts were published in EQMM or in Queen anthologies, but most of those in a new collection of 14 have been unavailable in any form since their initial broadcast.

**** Ellery Queen: The Adventure of the Murdered Moths and Other Radio Mysteries, Crippen & Landru, $45 hardcover with additional short play in pamphlet form, $20 trade paper. The volume begins superbly with “The Adventure of the Last Man Club,” broadcast on June 25, 1939, and finishes with the especially ingenious title story, broadcast on May 9, 1945. The early one-hour scripts, represented by the first nine, are often more complex in plot and fully-fleshed in characters. Apart from dying messages, impossible crimes, and fairly presented clues, the scripts display the Queenian knack for varied backgrounds and telling period details. (Along with Marvin Lachman and Ted Hertel, Jr., I read some of the scripts and made selection recommendations to publisher Douglas G. Greene.)

*** Max Allan Collins: The War of the Worlds Murder, Berkley, $7.50. The radio medium’s most notorious prank, the H.G. Wells adaptation that caused a national panic in 1938, is the latest subject in a fine historical series, featuring an excellent depiction of Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre cohorts. The mystery is slighter than usual but appropriate to the subject matter. Collins’s reminiscences of the 1975 Chicago Bouchercon (including a skewering of the pseudonymous guest of honor) lead into the fictional plot with Shadow creator Walter B. Gibson as amateur sleuth.

*** Rupert Holmes: Swing, Random, $24.95. In his second novel, a multitalented double Edgar winner in the Best Play category takes us back to 1940 and the Golden Gate Exposition, where Ray Sherwood, a jazz-band saxophonist haunted by family tragedy, agrees to arrange a student musical composition and becomes involved in murder and intrigue. Musicians especially should appreciate the clever use of the orchestration process as key to a mystery plot. The novel is accompanied by a half-hour CD of excellent original music in period style, with music and lyrics (and in some cases vocal performance) by author Holmes. (One rare anachronism: Today in the San Francisco Bay Area, and certainly in 1940, the University of California campus is known simply as Cal, not Cal Berkeley.)

*** Lyn Hamilton: The Moai Murders, Berkley, $22.95. Toronto antique dealer Lara McClintoch travels to Rapa Nui (a.k.a. Easter Island) and be-comes involved with the various attendees at a conference on the mysterious statues of the title. In an example of the travelogue mystery at its best, geographical and historical de-tails are perfectly balanced with the surprising and fairly clued whodunit plot.

*** Deborah Donnelly: Death Takes a Honeymoon, Dell, $5.99. Seattle wedding planner Carnegie Kincaid goes to Idaho’s Sun Valley for the wedding of an old college friend turned TV star and winds up working in both her professional and amateur sleuthing capacities. Was her firefighter cousin’s death in a smoke-jumping accident actually murder? Though this one lacks the fair-play cluing of Died to Match (2002) and I hated the cliffhanger ending, Carnegie remains one of my favorite current amateur detectives thanks to the nice handling of the disparate plot elements, the effective action-suspense climax, and the customary verbal and situational humor.

*** Kathy Lynn Emerson: Face Down Below the Banqueting House, Perseverance, $13.95. In 1573, a pernicious advance man for Queen Elizabeth I who is planning a not-entirely-welcome visit to the estate of the happily widowed herbalist sleuth Susanna, Lady Appleton, causes no end of trouble. A remarkable store of vivid historical detail adds to the interest of an intriguing plot.