Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine - November - December 2019

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Crime and mystery stories regularly turn on fraught and fundamental questions of trust. “Miss Starr’s Good-bye” by Leslie Budewitz features the return of Stagecoach Mary, who finds that she has won the trust of woman accused of murder. A psychology professor is entrusted with babysitting an actress as a movie wraps up production in James L. Ross’s “Last Night in Malibu.” In Janice Law’s “The Stop-In Motel,” an undocumented worker puts himself at risk to aid a stranger who has no one else to trust. And airborne half-siblings are lacking in trust as they squabble over the family beer-brewing business in Deborah Lacy’s locked-room tale, “The Sky’s the Limit.”

A Paris urchin must take care in R. T. Lawton’s “A Loaf of Bread.” In a Boer War field hospital, Dr. John Watson finds his trust in human nature shaken in James Tipton’s “The Candy Box.” A transgendered woman in Chicago is the reluctant trustee of distressing information in S. L. Franklin’s “The Seal of the Confessional.” And a social worker in western Massachusetts trusts her instincts in Susan Oleksiw’s “Just Another Runaway.”

A karate master setting up shop encounters conflict with neighborhood teens in Melissa Yi’s “Dueling Dojos.” A Vietnam vet and his girlfriend find themselves in the wrong bank at the wrong time in Peter Colt’s “The Hippie.” A “friendly” poker game in an RV camp precedes a drowning in John H. Dirckx’s procedural, “Tragedy at Daybreak.” One man’s obsessions are matched when he finds his soul mate in Dave Zeltserman’s wry “Terrible Thoughts.” Two runaways fall afoul of fate in O’Neil De Noux’s “A Meanness in Me.” On the lighter side, a holiday mix-up could have serious consequences for a young probationer in Mark Thielman’s “Thanksgiving Eve.”

Our Case File column features Gary Phillips talking about his career in graphic literature and some mid-century African American comic strips.