My July-Aug 2024 EQMM column.

My column, The Jury Box, appears in the July/Aug 2024 Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. In it, I review recent classic reprints and short story collections that offer elements atypical in mystery fiction (like the unreliable narrator). Authors covered are Joan Cockin (aka Edith Joan Burbidge Macintosh), Sebastian Farr (aka Eric Walter Blom), Lorenz Heller, Edward D. Hoch, R. M. Laurenson, Helen Nielsen, Isabel Ostrander, and Florence Ryerson and Colin Clements.

Vera Caspary's Murder in the Stork Club.

Crippen & Landru has published The Murder in the Stork Club and Other Mysteries, an anthology of Vera Caspary's short stories. I played a small part in the book, as A. B. Emrys, who wrote the Clues 23.3 article "Laura, Vera, and Wilkie," mentioned that mystery stories, which had only been published in magazines, existed in the Caspary papers at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research; I suggested that she contact C&L's Doug Greene regarding a possible publication.

Emrys (University of Nebraska–Kearney) has done significant critical work on Caspary; in addition to her Clues article, she wrote afterwords to the new editions of Caspary's Laura and Bedelia published by Feminist Press. Her introduction to the collection connects Caspary's fiction, play, and film work with events in her life.

As Emrys notes (pp. 8, 15), Caspary was not a great mystery fan, although she admired the work of Wilkie Collins and Cornell Woolrich, as well as Before the Fact by Francis Iles (aka Anthony Berkeley Cox; filmed as Suspicion by Alfred Hitchcock). The stories continue Caspary's interest in sexual politics and racial issues, and further illuminate her role as a trailblazing writer and professional woman. The menace in her "Stranger in the House" (1943) recalls Charlotte Armstrong or Celia Fremlin. "The Murder in the Stork Club" offers a possible future scenario for the relationship between Laura's Mark McPherson and Laura Hunt, as it features a detective husband and his wife, a writer of radio programs (echoing the Ann Sothern character in A Letter to Three Wives, on which Caspary served as screenwriter). It also includes a Christie-like gathering of suspects at the glamorous club.

For my take on Caspary's wry autobiography, The Secrets of Grown-ups, go here.

... to my mind crime is sordid and inevitably associated with gangsters, frustrated choir singers in dusty suburban towns, and starving old ladies supposed to have hidden vast fortunes in the bedsprings.

—Vera Caspary, "Sugar and Spice." 1943. The Murder in the Stork Club and Other Mysteries 60

About the photo: Vera Caspary, by Jane Rady. From The Secrets of Grown-ups.

Recent releases from Crippen and Landru.

Virginia-based small press Crippen & Landru is always uncovering gems from writers known in other fields who "moonlighted" in mystery (such as Western icon Max Brand). Its latest release, A Little Intelligence, collects mystery short stories by two science fiction authors, Robert Silverberg and Randall Garrett, who teamed up to write under the name Robert Randall.

Another recent release is The Minerva Club, the Department of Patterns, and Others by Victor Canning, in which the club, intriguingly, is made up of criminals involved in various, usually illegal, capers.

New from Crippen and Landru.

Featured on the snazzily redesigned Web site of mystery short story publisher Crippen & Landru:

Two works by locked-room master John Dickson Carr: 13 to the Gallows and Speak of the Devil

The Battles of Jericho by the talented and sorely missed Hugh Pentecost, featuring his formidable artist-sleuth John Jericho (I loved Pentecost's hotel series with the urbane Pierre Chambrun and the Archie Goodwin-like Mark Haskell)

• Murder on the Short List by Peter Lovesey, including stories with my favorite hapless sleuth—Bertie, Prince of Wales.

And teasers for C&L goodies yet to come: works by British novelist Phyllis Bentley (best known for Inheritance, 1932), Norbert Davis, Loren Estleman, E. X. Ferrars, Erle Stanley Gardner, and S. J. Rozan, among others.