Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine - September/October 2022

In this issue

In real life, many crimes are opportunistic, unpremeditated, even unintentional. In fiction, stories feature characters wrestling with the long-term consequences of things deep in their past. Just as our understanding of past events changes over time, many of the characters in this issue come to view their personal histories, or those of others, through new, perhaps world-weary, eyes.
In James A. Hearn’s "When the Dam Breaks," a popular politician reflects on his early life as an up-and-comer. In Michael Nethercott’s “Polk, Pitts, and Cadaver,” a dying confession leads a young vaudeville performer to suss out the truth. A writer in Janice Law’s “The Bosky Dell” finds a portal to his earlier life. And a horrible incident in the past and a split-second decision in the present unite two women in Iain Rowan’s “Scars.”
The past also offers rich settings. A young man is on his way to his first job when his stagecoach is beset by bandits in John M. Floyd’s “The Donovan Gang.” The owner of a gambling riverboat in 1950s St. Louis tracks down the story behind some uncomfortable news in “The People Said Beware,” by Christopher Latragna. James R. Benn’s “Irish Tommy” is a colorful procedural set in World War II Boston. Dr. John H. Watson looks into vandalism at a Welsh railway tunnel project in James Tipton’s “The Green Man.” And Edith Maxwell continues her series set in 1921, with two female detectives taking on the case of a woman scientist’s murder.
In other tales, evil is close at hand in “A Stranger in the House,” by Sharon Hunt. A drink in a hotel bar leads to a disorienting cascade of events in L. A. Wilson, Jr.’s “Victim of Circumstance.” Martin Limón’s private eye travels to an ancient, underground Beijing city to retrieve a tycoon’s kidnapped son in “Dragon Well.” In “Becoming Ian Fleming,” Kevin Egan tells the story of two boys at a pivotal point in their lives. And Melissa Yi’s “My Two-Legs” features a protagonist who is a perceptive and loyal companion.