Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover. It was the comic-esque art and coloring that drew my eye to THE ADVENTURE OF THE MISSING DETECTIVE AND 19 OF THE YEAR’S FINEST CRIME AND MYSTERY STORIES. Lucky for me, the words within held my attention just as much and then some. Edited by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg, the volume showcases the best of 2004, about half of them pulled from the pages of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and even a few from online fiction sites.
The collection takes its title from the first story, by Gary Lovisi, an amusing Sherlock Holmes story set immediately after his near-death experience at Reichenbach Falls, temporarily transferred into a bizarro world that’s the flipside of his own. This is followed by Jeffery Deaver’s “The Westphalian Ring,” about a thieving antiques shopkeeper who steals – and then attempts to conceal – a valuable piece of jewelry. Any new short story from Deaver is a cause for celebration, but as clever as the turn of events are, I was more surprised by the late-in-the-game cameo from one of literature’s all-time greats.
The impossibly prolific Joyce Carol Oates’ “The Banshee” isn’t quite up to her usual excellence, but remains pretty good nonetheless, succeeding in raising my blood pressure by putting young children in peril. My favorite was Duane Swierczynski’s “The Last Case of Hilly Palmer,” in which a fledging journalist tries to interview one of his town’s last gumshoes, who’s somewhat of a crusty old bastard. As funny as it is, the powerful ending is anything but. Of the 19 stories, only two failed to engage me, making for an excellent track record.
This collection doubles as a yearbook of sorts, with Jon L. Breen and Edward D. Hoch providing two separate but similar overviews of the year in crime fiction, complete with numerous awards lists, while Maxim Jakubowski weighs in with a short essay on the state of the mystery in Great Britain and Sarah Weinman discusses the emergence of blogs as a marketing tool for mystery writers. But it’s the stories – those of gay priests, hired guns, college girls and Japanese nerve-gas terrorists, even a quasi-Western and magic-laden fantasy – that will stick with you, hopefully holding you over until the next year’s edition.
UPDATE: The biggest mystery of all is how the book made it onto shelves with the misspelled word “MISSSING” emblazoned on its spine. Credit for eagle-eyeing that one goes to my wife.
Buy it at Amazon.
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