The Jury Box
by Steve Steinbock
I consider myself an omnivorous mystery reader, consuming crime fiction in all its various flavors. I respect the definitions and differences between the various mystery subgenres. But I also appreciate it when a novelist adeptly and successfully breaks and blends the limitations of subgenre. In this installment of The Jury Box, I’ve found a number of recent books that challenge categorization, crossing boundaries and blending styles to create unique and compelling mysteries.
John McMahon, Inside Man, Minotaur, $29.00. My top read this month is the sequel to McMahon’s Head Case (Minotaur, 2024), featuring a quirky team of misfits who serve on the FBI’s Patterns and Recognition (PAR) unit. Self-identifiably neurodivergent, the PAR team’s head, Gardner Camden, sees the world in puzzles while often missing normative social cues. Gardner and his team—three other quirky agents, each with their own savantlike skills—are following a lead on a major illegal-weapons operation when they learn that their confidential informant (their “inside man”) has been murdered. As they set out to enlist a new informant, they discover a connection between the death of their man and a string of unsolved disappearances. McMahon’s characters are richly drawn and likeably realistic. His prose is lively and filled with tangible details that make the story engaging. There’s a natural impulse to compare McMahon’s “head cases” to Mick Herron’s “slow horses” (see next review), but aside from the fact that both series are about teams of oddball outsiders working for national security agencies, the analogy is unfair to both authors. Herron’s books deal largely with espionage and political corruption, while McMahon’s are essentially plotted as police procedurals. Jackson Lamb, the leader of Herron’s “slow horses,” is a coarse and curmudgeonly loner, while the “head cases’ “chief Gardner Camden is a likeable—albeit awkward—friend to his colleagues and a devoted father to his young daughter.
Mick Herron, Clown Town, Soho Crime, $29.95. Clown Town, the ninth in Herron’s Slough House series, opens with River Cartwright (on possible permanent leave after the events in the 2021 novel Slough House) going over the volumes of his late grandfather’s library when he discovers that a book is missing. Meanwhile, a team of aging former spies known as the Brain Trust have been reactivated in an operation that backfires, pitting Jackson Lamb and his “slow horses” against MI5 First Desk Diana Taverner in what may be a final bloody showdown. As always, Herron’s writing is witty, often laugh-out-loud clever, and brilliantly plotted. Soho Crime recently published a deluxe reissue edition of Herron’s 2003 novel, Down Cemetery Road, (Soho Crime, $19.95), including a foreword by actress Emma Thompson who plays Zo. Boehm in the recent Apple TV series of the same name. When a house explodes down the street killing a man and woman, a young child goes missing from the hospital. Oxford housewife Sarah Tucker enlists private eyes Joe Silvermann and Zo. Boehm to find out what happened to the child—only to find she’s uncovering secrets that people in high places would prefer to keep buried.
Also fresh off the press is a special Collector’s Edition of Slow Horses (Soho Crime, $39.95), reprinting the first novel in the Slough House series, originally published in 2010, featuring stenciled page edges, a die-cut cover (showing Jackson Lamb in the crosshairs), endpaper art illustrating the interior of the upper floor of Slough House, a bound-in foldout poster depicting the entire house, and a new afterword (“Frequently Unanswered Questions”) by the author.
Seichō Matsumoto, Tokyo Express, translated by Jesse Kirkwood, Modern Library, $18.00. Originally published in Japan in 1958 as Ten to Sen (Points and Lines), Tokyo Express is arguably one of the most influential works in Japanese detective fiction, prompting a new movement of “socially conscious” detective stories that would dominate the genre for decades. When Fukuoka-based police detective Jutaro Torigai is called to a crime scene on a rocky seashore, it appears to be a case of shinjuu—lovers’ suicide. The couple apparently took the train together from Tokyo before ending their lives. But Torigai is puzzled by one detail: a single-passenger dining car receipt. Later joined by a young Tokyo police inspector who shares Torigai’s doubts, the two detectives unravel a complex case of fabricated alibis involving train routes, timetables, and airline schedules, ultimately exposing corporate and political corruption. Jesse Kirkwood’s translation is very faithful to the original, at times perhaps being literal to the point that English style and clarity are compromised. One example is that the nuanced term “shinjuu,” throughout the book, is translated as “suicide,” with the detectives continuing to refer to it as such even when they suspect the crime was staged. I also question the choice of title as Tokyo Express. An earlier translation (from Kodansha USA, 1986) used the more literal title Points and Lines, which I find more subtly relevant to the story. Nevertheless, Tokyo Express is an excellent, well-plotted mystery which bridges the postwar fair-play detection and the gritty social crime fiction genres.
Delia Pitts, Death of an Ex, Minotaur, $28.00. When two works of women’s crime fiction came across my desk, both dealing with dead exes, I couldn’t resist. Black female private eye Vandy Myrick has resettled in her hometown of Queenstown, New Jersey. After visiting the graves of her mother and her recently deceased daughter, Vandy finds herself reconnecting with the church where her mother had been active. Then, after a prep school homecoming celebration, she encounters her ex-husband, a wealthy real-estate investor and local philanthropist. Philip Bolden may have been a lousy husband, but he was a great lover (which is part of what made him a lousy husband). Phil walks back into her life and the two share grief over their daughter, which leads to a more intimate sharing. The next morning, after learning that her ex had been killed after leaving her house, Vandy is determined to find his killer, uncovering a series of local secrets that lead to a fiery climax and, ultimately, redemption.
Leodora Darlington, The Exes, Dutton, $29.00. Redemption plays a major role in this debut novel, also about dead exes. Natalie is a young woman struggling with trauma, memory, and inner violence. Her story leaps back and forth between past and present, with the flashback chapters looking at three points of her life, each ending with the violent death of an ex-boyfriend. Her memory of all three tragedies is fuzzy, clouded by blackouts and inner turmoil. But now that Natalie’s marriage is falling apart, she’s worried about the rage building up inside her.
Frank M. Young, Never Odd or Even, Stark House, $15.95. On a quest for realism, how far is a filmmaker willing to go? Opening in 1962 and spanning several decades, Never Odd or Even is filled with so many precise aspects of film history, told so credibly, that more than once I had to remind myself that I was reading a work of fiction. Los Angeles filmmaker Charlie Jerome’s career, up to this point, has been dominated by directing dog food commercials. But he dreams of making a crime film, an ultimate work of cinéma vérité. that breaks the line between fact and fiction. He decides to commit a series of actual bank robberies while a colleague films it, telling the story of crime literally “from the driver’s seat.” Outlandish,
funny, and at the same time hard-edged, Never Odd or Even is a loving nod to 1960s film noir.
On Fire and Under Water: A Climate Change Crime Fiction Anthology, edited by Curtis Ippolito, Rock and a Hard Place Press, $12.99. Anthony Award winner Curtis Ippolito has assembled fifteen crime stories that explore the ways in which climate change affects real people. Authors include C.W. Blackwell, Puja Guha, and Meagan Lucas. As the title suggests, most of the stories pit their protagonists against floods and wildfires, as well as corrupt corporations and politicians.
Rebecca Josephy, editor, Magic, Magicians and Detective Fiction: Essays on Interesting Modes of Mystery, McFarland, $65.00. I’ve long been interested in the intersection of detective fiction and the art of stage magic, so this collection of nine academic articles was particularly satisfying. In one essay, “Creating the Impossible: Magician-Authors and the Mystery-Making Process,” Chicago magician and playwright Neil Tobin provides an overview of practicing magicians who wrote detective fiction during the first half of the twentieth century, including Walter B. Gibson (creator of “The Shadow”), science fiction and mystery writer Bruce Elliott, and MWA cofounder (and former managing editor of EQMM) Clayton Rawson. Josephy’s own contribution is an article about the art of deception in Maurice Leblanc’s stories about Gentleman-thief Arsène Lupin. The book concludes with three essays on magic in global detective
fiction, including an article by Robert Del Greco contrasting the works of Japanese writers Edogawa Ranpo and Haruki Murakami.
Amnon Kabatchnik, Bloody Broadway: Plays of Menace, Murder, and Mystery: Volume I 1900-1930, BearManor Media, $45.00 (hardcover), $35.00 (trade paperback). Retired theater professor and Rodgers & Hammerstein Award winner Kabatchnik has more than a dozen encyclopedic volumes dealing with the intersection of crime fiction and the theater. His latest book takes a close look at seventy-nine plays that appeared on Broadway stages between 1902 and 1930. In his introduction, Kabatchnik highlights
the role of William Gillette—the actor and playwright who first portrayed Sherlock Holmes on stage—in helping shape Broadway. Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman, based on the stories by E.W. Hornung, opened in October 1903 and ran 168 performances. It would have a lasting influence on stage and screen, including a 1917 film adaptation starring John Barrymore in the title role. Other plays include George M. Cohan’s 1913 adaptation of Earl Derr Biggers’s “Seven Keys to Baldpate” and Eugene O’Neill’s 1924 Desire Under the Elms. He also tells the story of “Diamond Lil,” written by and starring Mae West. Bloody Broadway is a testament to Kabatchnik’s readable, entertaining, and informative style.