Several SMFS list members
are published in the Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine: July/
August 2020 issue. The issue is available from Dell Magazines as well as at Amazon
and other vendors. The SMFS list members published in this issue are:
R. T. Lawton with “Reckoning with Your Host.”
Robert Lopresti with the cover story, “The Library of
Poisonville.”
Susan Oleksiw with “The Pledge.”
Publisher Synopsis:
Crime on Parallel Planes
One of the attractions of crime
fiction is the complexity of the plotlines. In addition to the narrative of the
investigation, there is a parallel retelling of the crime, the story of the
cover-up is also the story of its unveiling. A tale told from multiple
perspectives, each informed by history and personal experience and emotion, can
turn in surprising ways. In “Second Sight,” David Edgerley Gates explores how
two officers, at two points in time, approach a case of a missing boy in New
Mexico. In “The Amputation Pit,” Nancy Pauline Simpson’s early twentieth
century Sheriff Stickley and the nurse he is sweet on, Miss Polk, put their
heads together to figure out how the remains of a young woman came to be in a
pit of bones of amputated limbs dating back to the Civil War. A woman trying to
understand her son’s suicide recreates his social network in “The Substitute
Dealer” by Jeff Soloway, while an art student confronts some uncomfortable
truths when he stalks his teacher in Elaine Menge’s “Plein Air.”
The landscape of a good mystery
story can be as twisty as its plot. In a nod to Borges, Robert Lopresti places
“The Library of Poisonville” in an underground bunker with beguiling contents.
A fraternity pursues a solo hike on a winter’s night through the New Hampshire
woods in Susan Oleksiw’s “The Pledge.” Competitive half brothers navigate their
drug lord father’s business in R. T. Lawton’s sixth Shan Army story, “Reckoning
with Your Host.” A young defense advocate navigates a legal maze in “A Beastly
Trial,” a historical which author Mark Thielman notes is very much based on
actual practices of the time. A famous jockey pursues the truth behind a losing
horse in “Mystic Dream” by John F. Dobbyn
The streets of San Francisco
in a near distant future offers an unusual setting for our thirteenth
Black Orchid Novella Award-winning story, “The Red Taxi” by Ted Burge. The
beautiful, volcanic landscape of Hawaii can be perilous to tourists in
Albert Tucher’s “JDLR.” And Wayne J. Gardiner considers the
particular challenges of interviewing for a job with the Mob in “Strickly
Business.”
In crime fiction, there are
always two or more versions to a story, making for twice the pleasure (or
more!) from each of this issue's tales.
