Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 101, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 610 & 611, March 1993

And he’s wrong about the Sultans, too. They aren’t gone. Not really. Nor are the hundreds of others who sang their souls out in warehouses and storefronts for pocket change. And altered the musical culture of the world. Shysters like Sol were so intent on cheating them out of every last nickel’s worth of rights and royalties that they let one minor asset slip past.

Immortality.

When Sol and his ilk are gone, who will remember? But the Sultans? And Sam Cooke? Otis Redding? As long as anyone’s left to listen, they’ll sing. Forever young.

I slid the worn cassette into the Buick’s player, felt the pulse of the kick drum in the pit of my stomach, then the thump of the bass. And Horace DeWitt sang to me. Not the stroke-shattered hulk in Riverine Heights, but the big-shouldered, brown-eyed, handsome man with conked hair, grinning up from the Warfield Theater program. And he was young again.

And so was I.

“I’m comin’ home, Motown Mama, I just can’t live without ya...”

The Man Who Was the God of Love by Ruth Rendell

We are especially glad to be able to include in this 52nd anniversary issue a story by one of the most distinguished of contemporary crime writers. With her eerily acute depiction of character, Ruth Rendell often transcends the crime genre, producing mainstream novels and stories, but here she gives us a mystery almost in the classic vein...

* * *

“Have you got the Times there?” Henry would say, usually at about eight, when she had cleared the dinner table and put the things in the dishwasher.

The Times was on the coffee table with the two other dailies they took, but it was part of the ritual to ask her. Fiona liked to be asked. She liked to watch Henry do the crossword puzzle, the real one of course, not the quick crossword, and watch him frown a little, his handsome brow clear as the answer to a clue came to him. She could not have done a crossword puzzle to save her life (as she was fond of saying), she could not even have done the simple ones in the tabloids.

While she watched him, before he carried the newspaper off into his study as he often did, Fiona told herself how lucky she was to be married to Henry. Her luck had been almost miraculous. There she was, a temp who had come into his office to work for him while his secretary had a baby, an ordinary, not particularly good-looking girl, who had no credentials but a tidy mind and a proficient way with a word processor. She had nothing but her admiration for him, which she had felt from the first and was quite unable to hide.

He was not appreciated in that company as he should have been. It had often seemed to her that only she saw him for what he was. After she had been there a week she told him he had a first-class mind.

Henry had said modestly, “As a matter of fact, I have got rather a high IQ, but it doesn’t exactly get stretched round here.”

“I suppose they haven’t the brains to recognise it,” she said. “It must be marvellous to be really intelligent. Did you win scholarships and get a double first and all that?”

He only smiled. Instead of answering he asked her to have dinner with him. One afternoon, half an hour before they were due to pack up and go, she came upon him doing the Times crossword.

“In the firm’s time, I’m afraid, Fiona,” he said with one of his wonderful, half-rueful smiles.

He hadn’t finished the puzzle but at least half of it was already filled in and when she asked him he said he had started it ten minutes before. She was lost in admiration. Henry said he would finish the puzzle later and in the meantime would she have a drink with him on the way home?

That was three years ago. The firm, which deserved bankruptcy it was so mismanaged, got into difficulties and Henry was among those made redundant. Of course he soon got another job, though the salary was pitiful for someone of his intellectual grasp. He was earning very little more than she was, as she told him indignantly. Soon afterwards he asked her to marry him. Fiona was overcome. She told him humbly that she would have gladly lived with him without marriage, there was no one else she had ever known to compare with him in intellectual terms, it would have been enough to be allowed to share his life. But he said no, marriage or nothing, it would be unfair on her not to marry her.