BILL’S BRIEFS

by John M. Floyd

I’ll start out with what I’m sure will be a stunning revelation: I sometimes have a tendency to stray from the main subject of this blog. Today, though, I’m not. Today my topic is short crime fiction. In fact it’s very short crime fiction.

About a year ago, in a comment posted in response to one of my columns, Jeff Baker mentioned a collection of short stories called Small Felonies, by Bill Pronzini. At that time I had read a lot of Pronzini’s fiction but I’d never before heard of that book. Long story short (sorry!), I found it, ordered it, and had it in hand a week later. And, like most of Jeff’s recommendations, this turned out to be a good one.

An appropriate title

Pronzini’s book (St. Martin’s Press, 1988) contains fifty mystery/suspense stories that deliver their punch in not eighty thousand words, or even eight thousand; these tales are all less than two thousand words each. In the preface, the author says Small Felonies is “the first single-author collection of exclusively short-short . . . and exclusively criminous stories.” He adds that he’s quite proud of that, since a first of any kind in the mystery field is a rare treat.

I’ve always loved the short-short form whether it’s in the mystery genre or not, and I have great respect for someone who can group that many stories of that length into a single volume and still hold the reader’s interest throughout. The secret, of course, is that Pronzini’s writing is never formulaic or repetitive; each story is different from the others. In that way he reminds me of Jack Ritchie, another author whose work I’ve always admired.

Jolly good felons

How much variety is featured in Small Felonies? Well, it contains (again in the author’s own words) “upbeat stories, downbeat stories, offbeat stories . . . detection, ratiocination, impossible crime, psychological suspense, satire, farce, horror, light fantasy, apocalyptic fantasy, lady-or-the-tiger dilemmas, the cautionary tale, the biter-bitten, the O. Henry twist . . . and my candidate for the shortest murder mystery ever written.” There are also humorous stories, a locked-room mystery, a collaboration with Marcia Muller told only via dialogue, and three of his “Nameless Detective” adventures.

I could say a lot more about this unique little book, and certainly about its author, but in keeping with the topic at hand, I’ll keep this short.

Maybe you can use the extra time reading Bill Pronzini.