Debra Goldstein of Birmingham is a retired attorney and judge so, naturally, knows a good deal about crime. She is previously the author of several mystery novels but this volume is collection of mystery/crime/murder stories.
We do not see a lot of crime short stories these days, but it is good to remember that before novelists like Grisham, McDonald, Parker, Patterson, even before Rex Stout, Mickey Spillane, Dashiell Hammett, Erle Stanley Gardner and so on, the roots of the genre were in stories by Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle. Agatha Christie collected all the Miss Marple stories in one volume, 20 of them in 346 pages.
In this book there are 18 stories in 147 pages. The shortest is 2 pages, the longest 16. Of course, not all are wonderful, but all are short. Just move on. The 2-page story “Grandma’s Garden” is about death only in the sense that all things, including grandmothers, pass. The 3-pager, “Violet Eyes,” begins “Sometimes marriages get stale. It’s worse, Roger thought, when they start out that way.” The protagonist is a crooked tax accountant and Goldstein manages all the action, through murder and denouement, in a few hundred words.
Several stories were written and submitted to very specific requirements of contests or magazines. “Forensic Magic” appeared in “Best New England Crime Stories” and is set in 1953 in Newport, Rhode Island. It features a 12-year-old detective who has been studying crime in a book, “Magic of Forensic Science,” that came with his mail order detective kit. The boy comes upon the recently killed body of his local pastor and observes small round holes in the soft ground around the body. That is all he needs. “Who Dat? Dat the Indian Chief” is set, appropriate to this season, at a Mardi Gras parade a year after Hurricane Katrina, and was published in a “Mardi Gras Murder” anthology. The characters here are in the Black krewes dressed as Indians.
The best story, I think, is “Bucket List Deams.” Here Goldstein employs a classic private eye, “Maltese Falcon” style, complete with desk and cigar and the femme fatale client, a beautiful young brunette wearing a diamond ring between four and five carats, who slides him an envelope full of hundred-dollar bills. He thinks she wants him to help her kill her aging, rich husband. It was logical. But that’s not what she wanted at all. She wants him to be a companion for her husband while he does those things he had always meant to do.
The concluding story has a great first sentence: “This is where I buried my wives,” spoken on a pleasant rural hilltop by a 44-year-old husband to his new 26-year-old wife. It sounds as if that wife may join the others in the ground. Don’t bet on it.
