12 stories, one of them a reprint. Four authors I know (Hoch, Richie, Powell and Gilbert), 8 which are ether new for me (or I do not remember them well).

Ernest Savage opens the issue with a series story (in the Sam Train series) called The Best Man in Town. Sam Train, a 19 years veteran of the San Francisco police, now a PI (a lot of these in crime fiction) is asked to look after the seemingly random death of a rich boy. He knows it is not random (because otherwise he cannot help - so even if he does not know, he hopes) so he starts digging. The direction of the story was obvious almost from the start, the end - not so much. The execution carried the story though - even when you knew what comes next.

Jack Ritchie's Body Check has a killer who is not getting paid until the body of his latest victim is found. Then things get an almost comical direction. Short and well done and keeps you guessing through almost the whole story.

In Mary Amlaw's The Old Lady Keeps Cool, a woman is absolutely resolute that she will reach 100, preferably in her own home, despite all the nagging from her descendants -- one way or another. You can cross her at your own peril - and if she decides you want to kill her, you may get surprised by her actions.

The only reprint in the issue, Michael Gilbert's Source Seven from the August 29, 1953 issue of "John Bull" is another series story, this time a Patrick Petrella one. Set early in the protagonist career, when he was still just a Constable, it has him assist with the investigation of one of the sources of drugs which had flooded London. For a story written in the 50s, it sounds refreshingly non-dated. According to a list I saw, this may be the first published Petrella story.

Phyllis Benson gives us the 580th "First" story with On the Upgrade Curve - a neat western about a pair of guys guarding the payroll and dealing with Kelly's gang which plagues the train route. You can see that there is going to be a twist somewhere, I did not expect it to be what it ended up being (which is always a good surprise in this kind of stories).

And on the hill of that one, come a "Second Story" Richard Grant's Commute to Murder. A twist on the "husband hires someone to kill his wife while he is at work" trope -- which worked better than I expected.

James Powell follows with another Ganelon storyBlind Man’s Cuff set in the Principality principality of San Sebastiano: this one set in 1932 and having Ambrose Ganelon III investigating the death of a blind man and as usual finding more than he expected. In the middle of this investigation, Ambrose Ganelon II tells him another story from his own investigations, that one being from 1892, connected to the first because of the blindness of the first victim in the later story. The more Ganelon stories I read, the more I like them.

George Baxt follows with Show Me a Hero where a man is tired from his wife (because she had gotten fat) and is trying to get himself out from his marriage. There is a young side piece of course. But there is also the kind of language which will make this story un-publishable today - Baxt's idea of what happens when a woman adds 80 pounds on her frame is laughable if it was not annoying (no, your eyes don't get lost when you laugh unless you somehow carried a lot of that extra weight on your head...). There were some murders of course and there is a very annoying neighbor who is shrewd at one moment and totally obtuse in another. And then the final reveal clinches it - it is a badly done story, almost designed to mock obese people. This type of story can work occasionally but it needs proper handling and Baxt lack the subtlety here.

The non-fiction in this issue is nestled after this story:
- R. E. Porter's "The Crime Beat" with the usual news from the crime publishing world (a lot of reference works being published - things that these days will be websites; a surprising note at the bottom is the forthcoming publication of the horror novel Cujo (I would have expected it over in the sister magazine Alfred Hitchcock's but not in EQMM).
- Chris Steinbrunner's "Bloody Visions" talks about the various movie versions of "The Postman Always Rings Twice" (the Jack Nicholson/Jessica Lange had just come out in March thus giving the topic of the TV/movies column for this issue)
- The second part of a Jack Richie interview (I seem to be reading these 2-part interviews always in the wrong order - which is not a problem as it might be with a story for example). One of the good mystery writers out there explains how he used to think reading mysteries were beneath him for awhile (plus other things about where he had lived and where he wants to live and so on).
-Jon L. Breen's "The Jury Box" which talks about pseudonyms and reviews 8 books (I've heard of only 2 of them).

Henry T. Parry's The Final Secret has a man who spend years in jail come back to try to prove his innocence - because he still claims he is not a killer. Old town secrets and maps make this story better than I expected it to be. And I liked the ending.

Celia Fremlin's Anything May Happen introduces us to a widow whose only fun in life is in the cruises she takes twice a year since her husband dies. Part of her enjoyment is her ability to make people trust her while on board of the ship. Too bad she never learned how to recognize kindred souls. It was not a really original story but the execution and the end make it a nice version of an old trope.

Lionel Booker's The Big Break is set in Hollywood where knowing the business is as important as being a good actor (if not more important really). When a man dies, another one is set to take the fall - unless a friend manages to find out what really happened.

Edward D. Hoch closes the issue with another series story: Captain Leopold Goes Fishing. The one time the Captain and Lieutenant Fletcher take a vacation together, they manage to get themselves in the middle of a crime. Of course, that may not have happened if a smuggler paid more attention to who he was dealing with... The story starts as two distinct narratives (the smuggler and the vacation ones) but as it is a story, it is obvious they need to merge and it is almost obvious how exactly. A nice story - but not one of my favorite Hoch stories (I am rarely impressed by the Leopold stories - they are good stories but they almost never shine).

An overall good issue despite the Baxt story...

PS: If anyone is interested, the 8 books being reviewed here are:
1. "Death in a Tenured Position" by Amanda Cross aka the scholar Carolyn Heilbrun
2. "Steal Big" by Patrick Mann" (who also writes as Leslie Waller)
3. "Carpenter, Detective" by Hamilton T. Caine (aka Stephen L. Smoke)
4. "The Last Crime" by John Domatilla who is known to be a pseudonym but it is unclear whose (although the reviewer does have a guess) - that is one of the two I had heard of before.
5. "Paragon Walk" by Anne Perry (the second familiar one)
6. "Trouble for Tallon" by John Ball
7. "A Flight of Lies" by Gavin Scott
8. "Weep for Her" by Sara Woods ( )