Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 5, No. 19, November 1944

Joe says Butch Krieger, had the right dope when he warned me about dizzy blonds which Annabell used to be before the apothecary who makes up your doctor’s perscription and who will not resemble the salty mariner who has sailed the seven seas put her wise to henna, and Joe says she steered him wrong or he would have shot me accidentally last Friday and then this story would have had a happy ending. She talked him out of it because she hates the sight of blood. But Joe is a good scout and he is glad I shot him in the right shoulder where he has been shot before so he does not mind it much and ditto about his nose which has been broken so often that he is beginning to lose count. He says you got to be philosophical about life, sometimes you’re up and sometimes you’re down, and he had never been in prison in Connecticut and he is curious to find out what it is like and if they will let him have a violin. He wants to play the violin, having such a good groove on the underside of his jaw in which to put it, and he expects he will have plenty of time to practise where he is going now. But he can’t make his plans for the future till he knows how much they knock off for good behavior, and if he never sees that redhead Annabell again, why it is O.K. with him.

A gorjous brunett stopped me on the street outside the post-office last night and she says, “Excuse me for talking to a total stranger which I never do, but you are Mr. Moran, aren’t you? I recognized you from your pictures. Mr. Moran, do you know you are my hero?”

I says, “No, I didn’t know that.”

“Well, you are, especially after I read that piece about you in the Lakeville Journal.”

I says, “Tonight is my night off and I haven’t got a date. Maybe I could give you a lift wherever you’re going.”

“Oh, could you? I am in no hurry to get there.”

She squeezes up close to me as I let in the gears. “I’m so thrilled, Mr. Moran, to have a real hero driving for me!”

“I don’t know,” I says, “if you could call this sensual driving.”

She says, “Oh, Mr. Moran!” and then she squeezes up still closer. “To a hero,” she says, “all things are permitted.”

Death on the South Wind by Valma Clark

EQMM boasts an honorable roster of husband-and-wife detective teams. True, we have not brought you an escapade of Mr. and Mrs. North, or an exploit of Nick and Nora Charles, but we cannot be held responsible for these glaring omissions — neither duo exists in short-story form. We have brought you, however, Agatha Christie’s Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, Margaret Manners’s Desdemona (Squeakie) and David Meadow, and Cyril Plunkett’s Joe and Jeri Jones, And now we offer another domestic duet, another ’tecting twosome, another crime-crushing couple. Flippancy aside, meet “Professor” Hollis Mears and his wife Marjorie, in the strange case that linked Honeymoon Island and Mangrove Island. It happened in tropical Florida during that languid period when the south wind, like the mistral of Mediterranean France, blew hot and sultry and maddening... when sabotage and death were invisible fingers of the wind...

Your Editor found a certain fascinating femininity in this story — in the domestic scenes, in the romantic interludes, even in Miss Clark’s deft strokes of characterization. Women readers will recognize the authentic touch of a talented woman-writer; and male fans will welcome a distaff detective story that skillfully avoids the down filling and purple patchwork of the Had-I-But-Known school of sleuthery.

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