Doug Allyn - Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Vol. 129, No. 1. Whole No. 785, January 2007

Colin glared at her. “How do you know that? You weren’t even there.”

Laura said, “Pastry crumbs in your pocket, the obvious place to hide it. I checked your coat just now. That was what all the fuss was about. The vicar thought I was a thief.”

Rosemary said to Colin, “Thanks to Laura getting the poor man to hospital, the police were alerted. News of the poisoning went quickly around the village and at some point over Christmas, Ben Black got suspicious enough to come and see you. He threatened to tell the police. You panicked, cracked him on the head, and killed him.”

Laura said, “And transferred the body to Gertrude’s greenhouse in your pickup and trailer. She was under suspicion, so you thought you’d add to it. While you were in church just now I checked under the tarpaulin in the trailer. Bloodstains. The police will match them to Ben’s blood group.”

Colin’s shoulders sagged. All the fight had gone out of him.

In all the excitement, Laura hadn’t given a thought to her main reason for being in the house. Over supper that evening, she dropped her knife and fork and said, “The orchids. I’ve completely forgotten about them.”

She had visions of dead and drooping plants in their dried-up trays.

“What am I going to say to Mike?” she said as she raced to the conservatory.

But the orchids were doing fine, better than when she’d taken over. The droopy ones were standing tall.

“They benefited from being left alone,” Rosemary said. “He’s a novice at this. The roots of an orchid are covered by a spongy material that holds water.”

“Like a camel’s hump?”

“Well... I’m saying he must have overwatered them.”

That evening Wilbur was rewarded with a supper of chopped turkey and baked ham. After he’d curled up in front of the fire, Rosemary and Laura slipped out of the front door to make a call on a neighbour.

Gertrude invited them in and poured large glasses of sherry.

“I’m so grateful to you both,” she said. “I must have had calls from half the village saying how sorry they are for all I’ve been through. I kept telling them you two are the heroes.”

“Far from it,” Rosemary said with modesty.

“But you are. And you, Laura, being mistaken for a thief and wrestling with the vicar.”

“That wasn’t so bad.”

Rosemary said, “He’s rather dishy. She enjoyed getting into a clinch.”

They all laughed.

“And now,” Gertrude said, looking happier than they’d seen her, “another Christmas tradition. To ensure good fortune for us all in the new year, I insist that you have a slice of my homemade Christmas cake. You can make a wish.” She went out to the kitchen.

Rosemary said in confidence, “I’m going to wish that I survive this.”

Laura said, “I’m so glad I wore this cardigan. It’s got pockets.”

Copyright ©2006 by Peter Lovesey

Looking for holiday gift suggestions? Consider first Ed McBain’s landmark retrospective Learning to Kill (Harcourt/Penzler, $25). Of the 25 stories, first published in Manhunt and other magazines between 1952 and 1957, over half have previously been collected, but the introduction, story notes, and afterword the author provided before his death in 2005 are full of autobiographical and professional insights into the 87th Precinct’s creator, one of the greatest twentieth-century crime writers.

**** Edward D. Hoch: More Things Impossible: The Second Casebook of Dr. Sam Hawthorne, Crippen & Landru, $43 signed limited hardcover, $18 trade paper. Fifteen locked rooms and miracle problems, all from EQMM, cover November 1978 to December 1983 in publication date and Fall 1927 to December 1931 (the Christmas tale “The Problem of Santa’s Lighthouse”) in the New England small-town doctor’s chronology. Only the greatest names in Golden Age detection have been as ingenious in fair-play puzzle-spinning as Hoch, and even they were not as prolific.

**** Robert Barnard: Dying Flames, Scribner, $24. In a typically literate and enthralling entry from another EQMM favorite, novelist Graham Broadbent is visited at his hotel by a teenage girl claiming to be his daughter and becomes involved in the complicated mendacities of a former girlfriend. Like most of Barnard’s work, the novel refuses to develop along predictable lines. Much is written about plot-driven versus character-driven novels, but in the best mysteries (like this one), the elements are blended too well for the reader to tell who’s driving.

*** Bernard Knight: The Elixir of Death, Simon & Schuster UK/Trafalgar Square, $24.95. Twelfth-century English coroner Sir John de Wolfe, known as Crowner John, investigates a mysterious shipwreck and the beheading of a Norman knight in a novel notable for readable style, historical detail, well-drawn characters, and relevance to present-day events. Knight rivals medievalist colleague Michael Jecks in the provision of scholarly extras: opening and closing notes, maps, and glossary.

*** Harlan Coben: Promise Me, Dutton, $26.95. Returning after a six-year absence, sports and show-biz agent and wisecracking do-gooder Myron Bolitor looks for a missing teenage girl to whom he had made an ill-advised promise of help. Coben keeps the pages flying with a complex plot and a masterful final surprise, while addressing serious societal issues, but some of the comic-book supporting characters belong in another book.

*** Pamela Branch: Murder Every Monday, Rue Morgue, $14.95. In the American debut of a 1954 British novel, the wrongly acquitted murderers of the Asterisk Club train others in their art at a remote Dorset manor house. The droll black comedy, complete with slapstick climax, could have made a ‘50s movie vehicle for Alec Guinness. (Rue Morgue also offers Branch’s other three mysteries, all but one new to American print.)

*** Dean Koontz: The Husband, Bantam, $27. Why would anyone kidnap the wife of a landscape gardener, who is obviously unable to raise the $2,000,000 ransom demanded? Some readers may question the decision to dispel most of the mystery before the halfway point and depend on pure suspense to carry the load, but the wild plotting, vivid action, and storytelling gusto will keep most hanging on till the end.

*** Ken Bruen: Calibre, St. Martin’s/Minotaur, $12.95. London cop Brant, an Ed McBain fan who hopes to follow the equally objectionable Fat Ollie Weeks into a literary career, is up against a good-manners-crusading serial killer who admires Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me. Fast-reading fun, if far from the author’s best.

*** Katherine John: The Corpse’s Tale, Accent/Dufour, $6.95. A mentally retarded man wrongfully convicted of the hat-chet murder of a local beauty returns to his Welsh village to a less than warm welcome, while police detective Trevor Joseph investigates the reopened case. The novella inaugurates the Quick Reads series “aimed at emergent readers and adult literacy learners,” but many outside that category will appreciate its solid storytelling.

*** Edward Wright: Red Sky Lament, Orion/Trafalgar Square, $29.95. In late-1940s Hollywood, former cowboy star turned unlicensed private eye John Ray Horn tries to find out who fingered an Academy Award-winning screenwriter as a Communist. The whodunit plot will keep readers guessing, and the pre-blacklist mood in the film industry is conveyed with a painful sense of reality. Woody Guthrie makes a memorable guest appearance.

** Paul Goldstein: Errors and Omissions, Doubleday, $24.95. This first novel also considers the Hollywood blacklist, though set in the present. Why won’t the aged portrait photographer who wrote the screenplay for a classic mid-century film noir sign over his rights to the studio that has turned it into a moneymaking movie franchise? The legal and historical details carry much more interest than the thriller and soap opera elements. Intellectual property lawyer Michael Seeley is a familiar fictional figure: an alcoholic with a failed marriage but flawless ethics and untarnished idealism.