TURNING OVER OLD LEAVES

by Steven Steinbock

I’ve been looking through some of my old issues of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (EQMM). Periodically over the next weeks or months I’ll take a close look at some of these and use this space to share with you what I find.

This week I’m looking at the March 1977 issue. Despite a fairly bland (text-only) cover, it’s a double anniversary issue. This was the 400th overall issue of EQMM, and it appeared on the 36th anniversary of the launching of the magazine.

(Note: from October 1955 to September 1959 each issue of EQMM came out with two different cover designs: a plain text cover for subscribers and risqué covers for the newsstands. I wonder if this had to do with the postal service shipping overly spicy material. From mid 1961 until the end of 1974, all issues had text-only cover art. That changed with the October 1974 issue, when more covers sported art than didn’t. Oddly, though, all of the March issues from 1977 until 1981 had the only text-only covers during those years.)

The opening story in the issue is called “EQMM Number 400” and is written by R. L. Stevens. In it, a pair of intellectual rivals meet to match wits on the subject of Ellery Queen trivia. Things don’t turn out well for one of them. It’s an amusing and clever story filled with tasty tidbits of trivia. R. L. Stevens, incidentally, is in reality Ed Hoch. The pseudonym, a spin on Robert Louis Stevenson, is one of several that he used when he had more than one story in a single issue.

Story two in the issue is “One of the Oldest Con Games” by Robert L. Fish. It’s a cute tale of what happens when con-men pick the wrong mark.

The Department of “First Stories” story has the byline “Edward Mananitas,” but in Fred Dannay’s introduction, he explains that it is the pseudonym of “a native-born American of Dutch Mennonite ancestry.” I’m curious who it is, and if he wrote any other stories for EQMM. The story is very short, and is in its entirety a message to a burglar who happened on the wrong house to burgle. The story involves a clever burglar trap and a homeowner on vacation. (I recently read a very similar story, except in that one the homeowner was recently deceased; but I can’t remember who wrote that story or where I read it).

Skipping around a bit, Georges Simenon’s “The Man from Out There” is unlike any Simenon story I’ve ever encountered. The central character is an old man, trying to forget his past as a prison escapee by living his life out as a lazy fisherman. But the past always catches up. The man receives his just desserts, but Simenon leaves it up to interpretation whether the man is visited by his old colleague, a ghost, or his own guilt. Nicely written and haunting story.

If anyone thinks the Criminal Brief crew are guilty of bad puns, the story “Malice in Blunderland” by Kevin Goldstein-Jackson leaves us in the proverbial dust. I won’t bother to relate the story. It’s fun reading, but will elicit more than a few groans.

Veteran mystery readers know that Sue Grafton wasn’t the first to use letters of the alphabet as themes for her titles. From 1940 (with the novel B as in Banshee until 1981 (with the story “M as in Mayhem” which appeared in EQMM of June 17 of that year) Treat used the alphabet gimmick to tell many a clever police procedural. This issue of EQMM contains “T as in Terror” which features the Homicide Squad’s Mitch Taylor and Bill Decker. For those who haven’t read Treat, his stories are a [pun omitted by the author], and may remind readers of McBain’s 87th Precinct novels, which Treat may have helped inspire. Incidentally, in the February 1966 issue of EQMM we have Treat’s story “A as in Alibi” which is oddly similar to the title of Grafton’s first Kinsey Milhone novel.

Finally, bookending the issue, Ed Hoch is back again (this time as “Edward D. Hoch”) with a Dr. Sam Hawthorne story, “The Problem of Cell 16.” The story features multiple mysteries, the most important being an impossible escape from a jail cell with more than a few nods to Jacques Futrelle’s classic “The Problem of Cell 13.”

In all, it’s a great issue. And in coming weeks as opportunity permits, I’ll invite you back in time with me to skim through the leaves of other classic issue.