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

Nick prided himself on being prompt and businesslike in his dealings. He checked over his records to find why he had been slow in delivering the last Cleve order. It took a lot of thumbing of sheets to arrive at the reason. He had gone first, he found, to Martie Allen’s apartment and had learned there about the murder, after which he had been so disturbed over the blighting of her romance he had bought a paper of his own and had read it through. This had made him late in his deliveries. He was wondering how he could square himself with Mr. Cleve when his eye happened to go back to the sheet containing the order.

Twenty minutes later the district police station was disrupted by the entrance of a highly excited Nick with Mr. Cyrus Hubbard Cleve in tow. Mr. Cleve, collarless and in carpet slippers, did not seem to know what it was all about.

“She’s not guilty, Mr. Officer, she’s not guilty!” Nick kept repeating. He was waving a dirty sheet of foolscap in the air.

“Lissen,” said the sergeant, shoving him back from the desk. “Who’s not guilty? And who in hell are you?”

“I am Nick Sforzak, merchant, Second Avenue. Mr. Officer, see, I have system. I keep sheets at door so customers can write down orders when I’m not there. Mr. Cleve, who is prominent citizen, will swear he write his order down at quarter to nine.”

“So what?” demanded the law impatiently.

“So this, Mr. Officer. It was night of Mr. Hames’s murder. Officer, please, I close always nine o’clock sharp. I swear to that. So order after Mr. Cleve’s was written on sheet between quarter to nine and nine sharp. Can be no mistake. Here, see, plain as day.”

The sergeant, beginning to feel that he might have his hands on something after all, took the sheet and studied the last two entries. He read first what the retired executive had written in his neat Spencerian hand:

C. H. Cleve, kindling wood, 25 cents worth. Don’t skimp and make it snappy.

The entry beneath was in a large and sprawling hand:

Miss M. Allen. 20 cents worth cannel coal. You never skimp and you can take your time.

The News in English by Graham Greene

Graham Greene, as you know, is the author of THIS GUN FOR HIRE and THE MINISTRY OF FEAR. It has been said that his literary preoccupation is with abnormal psychology — remember Alan Ladd in the moving picture version of THIS GUN FOR HIRE? Phyllis Bentley once wrote that Graham Greene “seems able to investigate sinister psychologies without sentimentalizing them.”

And yet the story we bring you by Graham Greene is not one of abnormal psychology at all Quite the contrary, it illustrates an heroic form of normal psychology. Nor does this story avoid sentimentality. Quite the contrary, it illustrates an heroic form of sentimentality. It illustrates something else too — what William Rose Benét meant when he said of Mr. Greene that “no man writing today is more a master of suspense.”

“The News in English” is one of the finest secret service stories to come out of The War of Liberation.

* * *

Lord Haw-Haw of Zeesen was off the air.

All over England the new voice was noticed: precise and rather lifeless, it was the voice of a typical English don.

In his first broadcast he referred to himself as a man young enough to sympathize with what he called “the resurgence of youth all over the new Germany,” and that was the reason — combined with the pedantic tone — he was at once nicknamed Dr. Funkhole.

It is the tragedy of such men that they are never alone in the world.