Doug Allyn - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 104, No. 4 & 5. Whole No. 633 & 634, October 1994

For a moment Weston said nothing. He seemed to be watching two couples who’d left the Cajan Queen together and were chatting on the dock by a moored powerboat. One couple apparently had come by water and now they were parting. “You’re a smart guy, Velvet. You always were. Maybe we should have switched jobs back about twenty years ago. You’d probably have made a better cop than I did.” He paused and asked, “Is Abe still on board?”

“No,” Nick told him. “I needed to have him change the ship’s clocks and have the employees change their watches. I told him it was my best trick — I was going to save his life.”

The detective glanced at the car’s clock. “It’s almost a quarter to twelve, real time.”

“Where’s the bomb hidden, Charlie? Abe Roster’s safe. What good will it do you or Burdeck to kill the innocent people still on board?”

“Tell me how you did the trick with the watches,” Weston countered.

Nick sighed. “My assistants left the real bags behind the last row of seats and picked up duplicate bags full of junk to bring on stage. While everyone was watching me go to work with the sledgehammer Gloria sneaked out behind the audience and picked up the real bags. She and the girls changed the times backstage. Now where’s the bomb?”

“There isn’t any bomb on the ship.”

“Then why were you so anxious to get the people off early?”

“Burdeck is launching a radio-controlled motorboat from across the lake. It’s filled with explosives. It’ll hit the Cajan Queen at midnight or just before.”

Nick heard the words even as his eyes caught sight of a familiar figure running back up the gangplank. It was Clair, one of his four assistants, and Gloria was running about twenty feet behind her.

Nick was out of the car in an instant, shouting to Gloria as she ran up the gangplank after the girl. “Gloria! Come back! It’s ten to twelve!”

Weston was out of the car too. “She’s a fool to go back on board.”

Nick turned and grabbed him by the shirt. “You’ve got to stop Burdeck’s boat!”

“Can’t be done. I think it’s already started. He must have seen that everyone was leaving early.”

“What do you mean?”

“Out there,” the detective pointed. “See the running lights? That’s the direction it would be coming from.”

Nick couldn’t see it for a moment. Then he spotted it, moving moderately fast and definitely headed toward them. He glanced quickly around, his options fading. He took a deep breath and plunged forward toward the couple just getting into their little boat. “Police!” he shouted. “I’m commandeering your boat!” He shoved the man back into the woman’s arms, grabbing the key already in his hand. Then he was into the powerboat, casting off the line as the man shouted after him.

He gunned the engine and shot straight forward, swerving just in time to avoid his own collision with the riverboat. He felt comfortable on the water, remembering his sailing days on Long Island Sound, and headed straight out onto the lake. For a moment he couldn’t see the running lights on the other craft, but then he picked them up, a hundred yards away and closing fast. He turned on his boat’s spotlight and targeted the other craft. There was no one visible aboard it.

Nick took a deep breath and turned the wheel slightly, setting a course to intercept it. The explosion, when it came, lit up the shoreline like a sudden midnight sun.

When Gloria unlocked the door of their hotel room Nick was just stepping out of the shower. “My God, Nicky, I thought you were—!”

“Dead?” he asked with a grin. “Only a bit messy from swimming around in that scummy water. I feel better now. I swam in a bit up the shoreline and didn’t want to bother explaining it all to the police. I found a cab to bring me back. Sorry to give you a fright.”

She hugged him, close to tears. “Lieutenant Weston thought you were dead for sure. When I left he was telling them all about it, about Billy Burdeck wanting to blow up the Cajan Queen and kill Abe Roster.”

“When I saw you run back after Clair I knew I had to save that boat somehow. What happened? What went wrong?”

Gloria shook her head. “You wouldn’t believe it! I told the girls we’d gotten everyone off early because something would happen on board at midnight. As soon as she heard that, Clair went wild. It seems they’d started having an affair when she appeared in that other show on the ship recently. She was in love with Roster and was trying to save him.”

Nick finished drying his hair with the bath towel. “Did Weston tell the police about my stealing twenty-nine minutes from the customers?”

“I doubt it,” Gloria told him. “Who would ever believe that?”

© 1994 by Jon L. Breen

The husband-and-wife detecting team has a long and mostly jolly history. A pioneering example were Agatha Christie’s Tuppence and Tommy Beresford, who first appeared unmarried in The Secret Adversary (1922), acquired a detective agency in the semi-parodic 1929 collection Partners in Crime, and made several widely spaced return engagements in Christie thrillers, ending with Postern of Fate (1973). Nick and Nora Charles of Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man (1934) appeared with their dog Asta in no additional novels but became series characters in a half-dozen films starring William Powell and Myrna Loy. In the forties, Frances and Richard Lockridge’s Mr. and Mrs. North followed in the insouciant, heavy-drinking pattern of Nick and Nora, as did Jake and Helene Justus, secondary characters to John J. Malone in Craig Rice’s novels.

Though Nick narrated The Thin Man and the cases of the Beresfords, Norths, and Justuses were told in the third person, the husband-and-wife mysteries have most commonly been narrated by the wife. This was true of several of the other married detecting teams of the forties, including Frances Crane’s Pat and Jean Abbott, Theodora DuBois’s Jeffrey and Anne McNeill, and my personal favorites, Kelley Roos’s Jeff and Haila Troy. The Troys, along with Patrick Quentin’s Peter and Iris Duluth, were one of the few detecting couples to have serious marital problems, actually separating at one point. One of the contemporary mystery’s favorite marriages has also had its ups and downs.

*** Nancy Pickard: Confession, Pocket Books, $20. Pickard’s novels are not usually considered husband-and-wife mysteries, since narrator Jenny Cain, Massachusetts foundation director and detecting amateur, is consistently identified as series star and cop husband Geof Bushfield is offstage in many of her adventures. But in this case, involving a teenage boy who appears on their doorstep claiming to be Geof s biological son and seeking a true solution to the alleged murder-suicide of his mother and legal father, they are clearly in co-sleuthing harness. Though the plot and a heavily portentous opening chapter lead the reader to expect tough emotional going, the book proves to be in a lighter vein than some of Pickard’s recent, particularly the Edgar-nominated I.O.U., at least until the dramatic final chapter. I’m not sure the conclusion really works, but a Pickard novel is never less than readable and involving.

*** Gar Anthony Haywood: Going Nowhere Fast, Putnam, $19.95. Dottie and Joe Loudermilk, an African-American couple in their fifties, are a likable variation on the traditional married sleuthing team. Touring the country in happy retirement while evading their worrisome children, they become embroiled in a crime problem at the Grand Canyon when their shiftless son Bad Dog turns up just in time to find a sitting dead man in the bathroom of their Airstream trailer. Husband Joe is the ex-cop, but narrator Dottie does most of the detecting, assisted by Bad Dog. Haywood observes what should be the first rule of a comic mystery: he keeps it short. The plot is slight, but the telling is charming — to my admittedly masculine ear, Haywood does the feminine viewpoint flawlessly — and I look forward to repeat visits by the Loudermilk family.