Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine - May - June 2019

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One of the great divides in mystery fiction is that between the professional investigator and the amateur sleuth. The interplay between vocation and avocation can unfold in any number of interesting ways, as the stories in this issue demonstrate. Whether it’s the anointed law enforcement officers whose personal passions inform their work, or the accidental sleuth whose profession sheds light on a problem, or crimes that arise from personal passions, this month’s stories reveal this complex feedback.
An NYPD data analyst’s love of trivia proves anything but trivial in Joseph S. Walker’s “Bonus Round.” Sheriff “Huck Finn” returns in Joe Helgerson’s latest humorous historical, “The Case of the Thirteenth Beard.” WWI soldiers are in no mood for a joker, but Father Kiernan offers understanding in Chris Muessig’s “Finite Jest.” And a patrolman who prides himself on his knowledge of his neighborhood bumps up against the limits of that knowledge in Mark Thielman’s “Blind Spot.”
A veterinarian visiting a Florida retirement village brings expertise in Terrie Farley Moran’s “Flamingo Bingo.” An unemployed columnist gets caught in a murder investigation in Melissa Fall’s “Photo Finished.” Colorado Rancher Katie discovers that someone has been trespassing on her land to plant marijuana and has booby-trapped the crop in Catherine Dilts’s story “Real Cowgirls Don’t Cry.”
A cowboy and his trusted horse witness a robbery in Parker Littlewood’s “Buck and Wiley Make Their Own Luck.” Gigi Vernon’s “Thick as Thieves” takes us to eighteenth-century London as pickpockets befriend a young widow. Elizabeth Zelvin’s mystery-writing heroine hones her craft at a retreat, despite the intrusion of her ex and his young bride, in “A Work in Progress.”
When an academic is murdered Steven Gore’s “Private Justice,” a detective confronts the consequences of overstepping boundaries. And in our Mystery Classic, details make up conflicting narratives in Anna Katharine Green’s story “The Thief.”