Sunday Shorts is a series where I blog about short fiction – from flash to novellas. For the time being, I’m sticking to prose, although it’s been suggested I could expand this feature to include single episodes of anthology television series like The Twilight Zone or individual stories/issues of anthology comics (like the 1970s DC horror or war anthology titles). So anything is possible. But for now, the focus is on short stories.
Today’s Sunday Shorts takes a look at two entries in the Bibliomystery series from The Mysterious Bookshop. The central conceit of the Bibliomysteries is that every story in the series involves books in some way. Thirty-nine individual stories have been issued so far.
The Gospel of Sheba (Bibliomystery #18) by Lyndsay Faye is a wonderful Sherlockian mystery that only peripherally features the Great Detective and his Boswell. The central character is A. Davenport Lomax, a well-regarded but under-paid sub-librarian at the London Library. Because of his prodigious researching skills, Lomax is approached by a patron who believes he’s been in contact with a cursed book, which the librarian then investigates. Is there a mundane explanation for why most people who touch this book become gravely ill, or is there something more supernatural afoot? We all know Holmes’ adage that “ghosts need not apply,” but plenty of Holmes pastiches feature supernatural elements so I won’t spoil that reveal at all here. In general, I enjoy Lyndsay Faye’s Holmes pastiches and this one is no exception. Faye introduces the mystery, builds tension, and reveals the truth with perfect timing and detail. But the mystery of the Gospel of Sheba itself is only part of the whole story. Rather than give us another Holmes adventure narrated by Watson, Faye gives us an epistolary short story (a style I love), the events cobbled together through letters, notes, and journal entries by Lomax, his absent Opera-star wife Colette, and their young daughter. The author paints a picture of a family at a crossroads, caught between Lomax’s low-paying job and Colette’s not-quite-stellar opera tour, and the reader gets to piece together what the characters are not saying in these documents which is also fun. I was as interested in how Lomax and Colette would resolve their family tension for the good of their child as I was interested in the mystery of the cursed book. Holmes and Watson do put in a delightfully droll appearance towards the end of the story that had me almost chuckling.
Hoodoo Harry (Bibliomystery #33) by Joe R. Lansdale is a Hap and Leonard story, and I think it’s the first Hap and Leonard story I’ve ever read (yes, I know. I’m embarrassed too.). It definitely made me want to read more. The story starts with a bang – Hap and Leonard run off the road by an out-of-control bookmobile driven by a scared child – and doesn’t let up. Even the quiet personal moments have momentum. The duo learn that the bookmobile and its former driver (the Hoodoo Harry of the title) have been missing for several years, and that there are several corpses stored in the vehicle’s waste compartment who might be children who have gone missing locally. Naturally, they investigate. They discover numerous suspects along the Bookmobile’s original route, some more potential than others. The conversation scenes with the suspects walked that wonderful line between giving too many hints and not giving enough, and also gave me what I think is an excellent sense of who Hap and Leonard are as individuals. The suspects also felt like well-rounded individuals and not just convenient placeholders in the search for the truth. The story is narrated by Hap, in a very down-home-folksy style that I found engaging; if he narrates the books I suspect I’ll enjoy them when I finally get around to reading them. I also didn’t feel like I was missing anything – if there were nods to other installments in the series in the dialogue or narration, they weren’t obvious in a spoilery way. I do feel like I need to give people a content warning, though: while there’s nothing truly graphic, there is discussion of child torture and murder.
Note: The stories in the Bibliomystery series are written exclusively for The Mysterious Bookshop by a string of great mystery, crime, and thriller authors. The store issues them in limited edition hardcover versions but also in very affordable slim paperback volumes (usually priced $6.95), and so far there have been two hardcover compendiums. Me being me, I love buying the individual stories because of the “trade dress” of the series. The stories fall into the novelette range in terms of word-count.