Isaac Asimov - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Vol. 73, No. 3. Whole No. 424, March 1979

**** Robert L. Fish: Pursuit, Doubleday, $10.00. Few of the novels in the current glut of Nazi fiction begin with as ingenious a premise as this one: as Germany faces inevitable defeat, a war criminal takes the identity of an imprisoned Jew to escape postwar punishment. Working on a larger canvas than usual, Fish reaffirms in this powerful novel his standing as one of the crime field’s great story-tellers. (As so often with this publisher, the jacket copy is overinformative to an almost criminal extent.)

**** Ruth Rendell: A Sleeping Life, Doubleday, $7.95. In what must be accounted an exceptional month, another of the big guns hits a bullseye. Chief Inspector Wexford, though troubled by his married daughter’s blossoming feminism, solves a murder through his understanding of the ambiguities of male and female roles and relationships. Rendell handles the tricky plot with almost Christie-like skill.

*** S. S. Rafferty: Fatal Flourishes, Avon, $1.95. Though you might not guess it from the title, this volume collects thirteen of the stories about Captain Jeremy Cork and his amusing “financial yeoman” and Watson, Wellman Oaks. Their adventures, set in Revolutionary-era America, comprise a series nearly as ratiocinatively distinguished and historically intriguing as Lillian de la Torre’s Johnson-Boswell stories. Though most of the tales have appeared in EQMM or AH MM, a few, notably “The Curse of the Connecticut Clock” and “The Massachusetts Peep-O’Night,” are original to this volume.

*** William Hjortsberg: Falling Angel, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $8.95. In a neat cross-breeding of seemingly disparate species, Hjortsberg introduces genuine occult elements into a vividly written New York-based private-eye novel. The result is a performance as flashy as the eyecatching gold dustjacket.

*** Richard Condon: Death of a Politician, Richard Marek, $9.95. Like the author’s earlier Winter Kills, this novel features some very thinly disguised recent political figures in a satirical whodunit. Not surprisingly, the lampooning outstrips the detection. For readers not too outraged by bad-taste humor, the book offers entertainment and occasional insights.

*** Nick Christian: Homicide Zone 4, Signet, $1.95. In the first of a new procedural series, two psychopathic killers (connected in an unusual and ironic way) are the quarry of New York cops. It’s familiar ground mostly, but Christian travels it very well.

Peter Israel: The Stiff Upper Lip, Crowell, $8.95. Traditional private-eye stuff — gangsters, drug-trafficking, etc. — in a Parisian setting. The most unusual element is the background of French professional basketball. The constant use of racial epithets limits detective B. F. Cage’s likeability.

** Ann B. Ross: The Murder Cure, Avon, $1.50. For most of the distance, this is routine romantic suspense, redeemed somewhat by interesting observations on hospital life by the nurse-narrator. The conclusion, though, is quite striking and (in a gothic) unusual.

** Victor Miller: Hide the Children, Ballantine, $1.95. This novel of a kidnaped busload of school children rouses ambivalent feelings. The numerous sadistic passages seem distastefully exploitative, giving the enterprise a sleazy air, but some of the scenes and characters (adult and child) are quite nicely done.

** Don Pendleton: Monday’s Mob, Pinnacle, $1.50. To many, Mack Bolan (the Executioner) symbolizes everything that is wrong with the contemporary crime novel. While Pendleton is no stylist and the philosophy of vigilanteism his novels espouse may revolt many, the man can tell a story. To me, the Executioner’s philosophical self-justifications are more interesting than the ample bloody violence.

As has happened so often in the past, we are giving you two “first stories” by the same author in the same issue. Russell Martin, of Beaconsfield, Quebec, Canada, submitted two stories simultaneously, and we couldn’t choose between them — so here are first stories numbers 513 and 514, back to back.

The most interesting fact in Mr. Martins dossier is his age. He was born in Montreal in 1961 — which made him only 17 when he sent in his two stories. At the time of this writing he is a student at John Abbott College in Ste. Anne de Bellevue, Quebec. His “major” hobbies include reading omnivorously, trying to perfect his command of French, and “living life to the fullest extent possible — there is nothing like it for getting ideas for stories.”

“Courtesy Call” is a dying-message detective story — “a kind of a crazy” case...

When you’re the Detective Lieutenant in charge of the Homicide Squad of a fair-sized city, and you only get a few weeks off each year, you try to make every day count toward forgetting your job. But when the town you’re passing through on the way to this year’s resort has a Chief of Police who is an old friend, you feel obliged to talk shop for a few hours more, anyway.

Art Nye’s town doesn’t have many major crimes committed in it, so I felt no qualms about disturbing him during working hours. But he wasn’t in his office when I arrived at his station house; the desk sergeant said he was in the interrogation room.

If Art was busy, I had no intention of disturbing him. I could just leave word I had called and come back some other time. But as it happened, Art came into the sergeant’s room just as I was about to leave.

“Hello there, Nye.”

It took him a few seconds. “Fall! Ev Fall, of all people!” There was some back-pounding.

“I was going to drop by to chew the fat, Art, but I’m told you’re busy, so—”

“Uh — wait a minute, Ev. I may need some help on this.”

“ ‘This’?”

“A murder case. You’re still on your city’s Homicide Squad?”

“In charge of it.”

“Oh! Congratulations! Maybe that’s even better.”

“What do you mean?”

“The first homicide we’ve had in town since that barroom brawl nine years ago, and there was no mystery in that one, just lots of gore. Maybe I need some big-city expertise on this one — it’s a nasty case, and kind of a crazy one.”

“Well, Art, if you need my help, I’ll be glad to give it.” I wasn’t sure I was so keen on this, but there I was.

“Thanks. Let’s go into my office. I’ll tell you about it there.”

When he had sat down at his desk and lit a cigar, he resumed. “Did I ever mention the Reardons to you, Ev?”

“Reardons?”

“Rich family. Live here in town. Old man owned the dye works a few miles off.”

“I don’t think you have. I presume they’re part of the town nobility—”

“Yup.”

“Look rather down on other people—”

“Right.”

“And now they’ve come a big cropper because they’ve got trouble — trouble that involves the police.”

“You know it. The trouble, to be exact, is murder. Old Julian Reardon was stabbed to death a couple of days ago. Julian was the owner of the dye works.”

“Got any idea who did it?”

“I’ve narrowed it down to three people. Julian left a will leaving all his estate — quite a sum — to be equally distributed among his three children.”

“You suspect them?”

“No, I don’t. Because they’re dead.”