Mary, Mary, Shut the Door

Benjamin M. Schutz

Description

Stories of murder, vengeance, and that dangerous feeling called love

When Derek Marshall meets Gina’s family, he doesn’t behave like a man in love. He can’t look his fiancée in the eye, instead ogling the maid or walking around the house examining furniture and tapestries with the greedy smirk of an insurance investigator. To expose this fortune hunter, Gina’s uncle hires private investigator Leo Haggerty, who soon finds that greed can overwhelm any kind of love.
 
The Edgar and Shamus Award–winning title story of this collection introduced the world to Leo Haggerty, the tortured star of six remarkable novels by Benjamin M. Schutz. “Mary, Mary, Shut the Door” is paired with a series of spellbinding tales of violence and deceit, starring sleuths from all walks of life, each marked by the gripping psychological realism that is Schutz’s trademark. 
 

Sujets

• Suspense
• Détective
• Legall de Kermeur
• Crime
• Psychology
• Short story
• Hardboiled

Informations

• Publié par: Open Road Media
• Date de parution: 23 février 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 3
• EAN13: 9781480493308
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

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Mary, Mary, Shut the Door
Benjamin M. Schutz

MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
Dedication
For JoAnne,
my best friend and
the love of my life
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Whatever It Takes
2. Til Death Do Us Part
3. What Goes Around
4. Mary, Mary, Shut the Door
5. Lost and Found
6. The Black Eyed Blonde
7. Not Enough Monkeys
8. Expert Opinion
9. The State versus Adam Shelley
10. Christmas in Dodge City
11. Open and Shut
12. Meeting of the Minds
Introduction
I did not start out writing short stories. I had already written three Leo Haggerty novels, when I was invited to submit a short story to the centenary celebration volume: Raymond Chandler s Philip Marlowe . I did not learn my craft from doing short stories and then tackle the transformation to the novel, a format without limits. Rather, I had already developed a style (I think you will see a consistency across these stories, written over the span of seventeen years) and had to learn to adapt this style to the rigors of the short story.
As I reread these stories, some for the first time in fifteen years, I saw commonalities in how I structure short stories and as a consequence what the major tasks are that I deal with in writing them.
Generally, they are time-bound tales; the clock is ticking; something terrible must be averted. I use time to compress my stories, to give them shape and limit. As such they function as mini-thrillers. Pace is very important. You have to lay out the challenge, introduce the protagonist and get moving. Without that, the heart will not race. Many stories begin with the hero already engaged in the central action of the story.
Time also provides the pressure for Hemingway s dictum Courage is grace under pressure. What is that grace ? For me, and my characters, it s the ability to keep a clear head and fashion effective actions when there are very high stakes, and failure is not an option. It s also the ability to keep a clear moral compass, when the gales of seduction and danger threaten to throw you off course. That s a tall order for twenty pages. So economy of language is important; you don t have any words to waste. Misdirection of the reader to preserve suspense is often the result of ambiguity in the text. Ambiguity is achieved by precision in expression. What is revealed and what is omitted, and how that is done. These were elements I had to learn and relearn as I wrote short stories; pace, economy, precision.
I spend a substantial amount of time researching my short stories. For a thriller to work, there has to be an ever-present sense of inevitability to the increasing peril. Nothing deflates the blood pressure cuff on a thriller faster than a stupid protagonist. My research helps me understand how an experienced, knowledgeable person would respond to the predicaments I construct. I then use that insider knowledge to be creative in how they resolve it. I want the reader to feel that they would have done all the same things as the hero, would still be facing the impending danger with only two pages to go, and be surprised at the very end.
I think that style is especially important in genre fiction. The major dangers of genre fiction are clich and boredom. A genre s conventions are a contract. Like all contracts, they tell you what is the minimum you can expect from the tale-not the maximum. The minimum is a Sisyphean reading experience-you push the same tale with the same characters up that damn hill. Style, a unique way of telling the story, provides freshness and vitality to not-so-novel plots or characters. For me, I try to use dialogue and metaphors to make the story fresh; to put memorable lines in my characters mouths; provide resonant images for the readers minds, and pithy insights into the human condition. When successful, these tools create a depth to the story without adding length or slowing the pace.
My debt to Raymond Chandler is obvious in what I have just written. In fact, when I wrote my first short story, I reflected on what attracted me to Chandler s writing. I wrote:
Chandler brought a poet s intensity to the mystery. His images made the same old scenes fresh and vibrant and lodged them firmly in my memory. He wrote dialogue in the language we wished we spoke and he made it sound natural anyway. Sometimes I would read pages out loud just to savor the sound of those words.
I d settle for being remembered that way.
I ve grouped this collection around different protagonists: Private Eyes; Forensic Psychologists; Police Officers; and last, the anomaly in my writings, a story without a hero of any sort; the last tango of two serial killers.
The private eye stories start with two about the Ellis brothers, Matt and Sean. They are based on my sons, who worked as private eyes/process servers for a couple of summers in college. I remember what they said about the job. They liked it because it had consequences; it had impact; and you had to think on the run. Not like mis-flipping a burger. The first, Whatever it Takes, was a finalist for the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Reader s Award. The second story, Til Death Do Us Part, was written for this collection. Next are my three Leo Haggerty short stories. The second one, Mary, Mary, Shut the Door, is my best-known short story. It won both the Edgar and Shamus awards for short story (1992). Only Lawrence Block s By the Dawn s Early Light (1984) has also pulled off that double. Trying to emulate Lawrence Block is always a pathway to excellence. The third Leo Haggerty story, Lost and Found, gave me a chance to tie up loose ends from Mary, Mary, Shut the Door, and the last Haggerty novel, Mexico is Forever . It was reprinted in A Century of Noir , chosen by Max Collins and Mickey Spillane. The last story, The Black Eyed Blonde, has been changed slightly from the original. The detective is no longer Philip Marlowe, but now his lesser known, but equally effective, fellow L.A. gumshoe, Max Barlow. Other characters names taken from Marlowe short stories have also been changed. In all other respects it is the original story, from the collection Raymond Chandler s Philip Marlowe .
That collection was the subject of an interesting research paper. The Not So Simple Art of Imitation: Pastiche, Literary Style, and Raymond Chandler by Sigelman and Jacoby in Computers and the Humanities , volume thirty, pages eleven through twenty-eight, 1996. It s a fascinating computer analysis of style and concludes, unsurprisingly, that none of us who wrote stories for that volume would be mistaken for Chandler. Of the twenty-three stories in the collection, mine was rated fifth closest to Chandler s style. I was pleased to learn that I had achieved a modicum of success in carrying my appreciation of Chandler into my own work.
The next section is my forensic psychologist stories. The first two feature Dr. Ransom Triplett (Who is in a peer supervision group with Dr. Morgan Reece of The Mongol Reply ). Expert Opinion was cited as a distinguished story in Best American Mystery Stories of 2000 , and the other, Not Enough Monkeys, was chosen by long time Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine editor, Janet Hutchings, for her anthology, Cr me de la Crime . This section ends with my one foray into science fiction. I retold the story of Frankenstein s monster as a forensic pre-sentencing report. I ve always seen the story as that of the unloved child, cursed by the gift of life, who destroys himself and those who reject him. We have thousands of such children in our jails and hospitals.
The next section has two stories infused with my brother s experiences as a Washington D.C. police officer. Open and Shut was chosen by Jon Breen for his anthology Mystery: The Best of 2001 .
The last section has one short story in it. Meeting of the Minds or what happens when two cats mistake each other for mice.
I d like to thank my agent and friend Lynn Swifty Myers, Jr., for all his help bringing this project to fruition. The leap from legal pad to computer disk was long indeed. My wife, JoAnne Lindenberger, was as always, an enthusiastic researcher and my best editor. What crosses other people s desks has had the benefit of her tempering of my excesses.
Time to let the stories speak for themselves. I hope you find them gripping, surprising, and that they linger longer than the reading.
Benjamin M. Schutz
Woodbridge, Virginia
February 2005
PRIVATE EYES
MATTAND SEAN ELLIS
LEO HAGGERTY
MAX BARLOW
Whatever If Takes
Wake up, Sean, Mickey called. We ve got work.
His brother, Matthew, prodded him with a toe.
You need a shower too. You ve still got paint in your hair.
Sean Ellis grunted but didn t move. He entered each day with the ease of a twelve-pound breech birth.
You better get a move on. I m not waiting. I ll take all the work myself.
Like hell you will. He rolled over, swung his legs over the side and followed his brother out of the bedroom. He went into the shower and watched his brother go into the kitchen.
Matthew Ellis opened the refrigerator, took out two bagels and a block of cream cheese. Dropping a bagel into the toaster, he reached up and got down two coffee mugs and poured a cup for himself and one for his brother. He carried his cup, milked and sugared, into the living room.
His mother lay aslee