Lawrence Block - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 129, No. 6. Whole No. 790, June 2007

I began to sob and I sank to the floor. The scissors I’d grabbed from the coffee table were in my hand and I threw them to one side. I was shaking and crying hysterically by the time Paul entered the room. And when he took me in his arms I slumped against him in a dead faint.

I pretended to be unconscious when the doctor and the police arrived. I thought it was best. And when I came round, in my own good time, I told my story in a weak voice. Carter had arrived and pushed his way in, then he had tried to... I hesitated at this point for maximum effect, but the policewoman with the sympathetic eyes knew just what I meant. Women alone in the countryside were so vulnerable and hard-drinking men like Carter, sensing weakness, knowing a woman would be alone... She was the sort of woman who believes all men are potential rapists and she believed every word I said. I was the victim, she said, and I mustn’t feel guilty. I never liked to tell her that I didn’t.

We left Manton Worthy soon after, of course, and made a tidy profit on the Old Rectory, which we sold to a city broker who wanted it for a weekend retreat. I told Paul that I couldn’t bear to stay there after what had happened and he was very sympathetic: He even blamed himself for getting too pally with Carter. The day before we left I wandered into the church and I looked at the angel on the screen, the one with the sword, and I couldn’t help smiling. I was Manton Worthy’s angel of death... and nobody would ever know.

Once we were back in London I resumed my old life. I was Petra, Paul’s wife; a lady who lunched and did very little else. Karen was dead.

It was six months later when Paul was found dead at the foot of the stairs in his office. He’d been working late and I’d been at the gym, working out with Karl, my personal trainer. Of course, when I say working out, I use the term loosely: What we were doing had very little to do with exercise bikes and weights. Karl had a girlfriend, but I wasn’t worried about that: He was just a bit of fun, a way of passing the time... and Paul would never get to know.

The policeman who came to tell me about Paul’s death wasn’t very sympathetic. He questioned me for hours about where I’d been and about my relationship with Paul. I said nothing about Karl, of course. And when he asked me how much I stood to inherit on Paul’s death, I told him the truth. Five and a half million, give or take a few quid. Of course I’d assumed that Paul’s death was an accident, cut and dried. But it just shows you how wrong you can be.

The police said that Paul hadn’t fallen; there were signs of a struggle and fibres from my coat were found under one of his fingernails. I told the police that he’d caught his nail on my coat that morning. And I told them he had some pretty dodgy business associates... he’d even moved to Devon once to get away from them. But they wouldn’t listen, and when they charged me with Paul’s murder even Karl turned his back on me and refused to give me an alibi because he was scared of his cow of a girlfriend.

I was convinced it would never come to trial. After all, I hadn’t done anything. But every time I tried to convince the police of my innocence, they wouldn’t listen. My defence barrister told the court how six months ago I’d been the victim of an attempted rape, but even that didn’t seem to earn me much sympathy. The jury was full of brain-dead idiots who found me guilty by a majority of ten to two, and as the police bundled me past the crowds waiting outside the Old Bailey, someone flung a coat over my head and pushed me into a van that smelled of unwashed bodies and urine.

Even when they took the coat off my head the windows in the van were too high to see out of and I couldn’t tell where we were or what direction we were driving in. We seemed to drive for hours on a fast, straight road, then we slowed down and the roads started to wind.

I asked the sour-faced woman I was handcuffed to where we were going and she turned to me and smiled, as though she was enjoying some private joke.

“Oh, you’re going to Gampton Prison. You’ll like it there. It’s in the country... right in the middle of nowhere.”

When she started to laugh I screamed and banged on the side of the prison van until my hands were sore.

© 2007 by Jon L. Breen

Washington Post critic Patrick Anderson has written a survey of recent bestselling crime fiction, The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction (Random House, $24.95). While his knowledge of mystery history seems spotty and I question his implication that the best of crime fiction present is artistically superior to the best of crime fiction past, he writes engagingly about such estimable contemporaries as Michael Connelly, Sue Grafton, Scott Turow, and George P. Pelecanos, among many others. The emphasis is American, but a few British writers are discussed, notably Scotland’s Ian Rankin, the creator of maverick cop John Rebus, one of the great characters in contemporary crime fiction now twenty years on the job. In-creased length, a broad canvas, a multitude of apparently unconnected cases, and an emphasis on the personal lives of the cops are not always happy trends in the hands of lesser writers, but Rankin is a master.

***** Ian Rankin: The Naming of the Dead, Little, Brown, $24.99. In 2005 Edinburgh, the G8 economic summit and associated demonstrations complicate life for Rebus, now approaching retirement age and mourning the death of a brother, and his colleague Siobhan Clarke, whose aging hippie parents have traveled north to join the protests. A Scottish Member of Parliament has died by fall, jump, or push from Edinburgh Castle, and a serial killer has apparently used a weird shrine to witchcraft and superstition called a Clootie Well to link three seemingly unrelated crimes. One of the best mystery plots in recent memory accompanies a detailed and harrowing account of the historic events attending the summit, peopled by a wide range of vividly drawn characters.

**** Dick Lochte: Croaked! Five Star $25.95. In 1965 Los Angeles, young Harry Trauble works on his potential best-selling novel Child of the Gap while writing advertising and promotion copy for Ogle, a high-class girly magazine second only to that one in Chicago with the rabbit. In a workplace whodunit somewhat in the mode of Dorothy L. Sayers’s Murder Must Advertise, the circulation director dies when a sculpture of the magazine’s trademark frog falls on his head. Lochte’s satirical eye captures the period flawlessly, and there’s even a broad clue to the surprising murderer.

**** Margaret Frazer: The Traitor’s Tale, Berkley, $24.95. In 1450 England, nun-detective Sister Frevisse and Simon Joliffe, actor-turned-intelligence-agent for the Duke of York, join forces to solve a series of murders possibly connected to a plot against King Henry VI. A richly detailed mix of political, social, and domestic history is balanced by nimble plotting, strong characterization, humor, and lively give and take. Both prose and dialogue avoid archaism and stiltedness without seeming anachronistic.

*** Lee Goldberg: Mr. Monk and the Blue Flu, Signet, $6.99. When San Francisco police engage in a sick-out to protest the mayor’s budget cuts, Tv’s obsessive-compulsive homicide consultant Adrian Monk returns to official police work and confronts a variety of cases (serial killings of female joggers by a shoe fetishist, a murdered astrologer, and others, some connected and some not), aided by minder and Watson-narrator Natalie Teeger and a trio of comically impaired ex-cops. At least two chapters could stand alone as short stories. This is a very funny and inventively plotted book, and you don’t have to be a fan of the TV show (created by Andy Breckman) to enjoy it.