Death on the Verandah - Softcover

What fun awaits the reader of this anthology of mystery short stories, all with southern settings and drawn from the pages of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. The three stories by big names will attract the most attention. Flannery O'Connor's piece, "The Comforts of Home," is typical of her marvelous perversity; it tells of a strange, haunted man who deeply resents the young woman whom his elderly, do-gooding mother has brought into their household. Raymond Carver is represented by the exemplary, bare-bones "Tell the Women We're Going," in which two married men pick up some girls, and one of the men, for no apparent reason, kills both of them. "Old Mr. Marblehall" by Eudora Welty is more a character study than a story (of an old man disregarded in town as uninteresting, when in fact he's leading a double life with two wives), but there's no one better than Welty at carving characters as if she were Michelangelo. And the stories by lesser-known writers aren't chopped liver by any means, particularly John Lutz's ambience-laden "The Right to Sing the Blues," about a private eye investigating a jazz pianist for a nervous New Orleans club owner--with a plot twist that hits the spot, much like a good serving of jambalaya. For all active mystery collections. Brad Hooper

Perhaps it's the daunting presence of such masters as Flannery O'Connor and Raymond Carver, but this collection of Southern crime tales gathered from Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine seems somewhat off-balance. O'Connor's prose, in a tale about a young man whose kindly mother takes a "slut" into their home, is deceptively simple, setting up a conclusion that is both shocking and expected at the same time. Carver exposes midlife crises, terminal boredom and a callous propensity for violence in his verbally spare manner as two pals get away from their women and their families to drink a few beers. Manson follows Carver's minimalism with the wordy Eudora Welty writing about an old man found living a double life on two sides of a small town. Representing the best of the more recent, strictly mystery fiction is John Lutz, who takes his St. Louis shamus, Alo Nudger, to New Orleans in a story with an understated gothic edge. These four tales stand out from the other 12, at best workmanlike stories.
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