Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine - September - October 2019

In this issue

It’s not hard to see why travel is a recurring motif in a lot of crime fiction. Travel takes us out of the familiar to places where anything can happen. Desperados, miscreants, con artists abound: No pocket of the world is immune—and lucky for us, too, for the result can produce some pretty good tales, as this issue shows.

The motives for travel vary as much as those for crimes. Chance encounters on a business trip to Paris propel a C-list scriptwriter up a few notches in “Niall Nelson Is on My Flight” by Jim Fusilli. A Chicago couple’s drying-out trip to a New Mexico resort proves troublesome for its Native American employee in David Hagerty’s “Drinks at the El Navajo.” Marital discord sets sail on a cruise ship in Eve Fisher’s mystery “The Seven-Day Itch.” Ecuadoran P.I. Wilson Salinas takes an unexpected ride when he encounters a distraught mother and an unorthodox shaman in “Aliento del Diablo” by Tom Larsen.

The urge to distance oneself from the quotidian may be ill advised. A quick Caribbean getaway to escape the gray winter of Boston reveals the true nature of two lifelong friends’ bonds in Janice Law’s haunting tale “The Island.” And a remote estate off the coast of England is accessible only by a deadly cable car in Tom Mead’s who- and how-dunit “Incident at Widow’s Perch.”

Elsewhere in this issue: Ancient Rome is the setting of Angela Zeman’s “The Second Tale of Roxanne,” where a favored scribe of the emperor is undermined by vandals. An artist’s obsessions prick the interest—and skepticism—of the law in Emily Devenport’s “Not My Circus, But They Are My Monkeys.” High tech meets the jury trial system in in Brian Cox’s poignant “The Surrogate Initiative,” while a question of adverbs proves surprisingly consequential for two technical writers in Mysti Berry’s “Yorkshire Ripper.” And a struggling playwright confronts her devious old mentor on Brooklyn’s Promenade in Meredith Anthony’s “Eddy Gets His.”