| Jon L. Breen (in Eller's Queen's Mystery Magazine) writes: FOUR STARS. "Thirteen wildly varied stories, most previously uncollected, constitute the versatile and original author’s best all-mystery collection. Two first appeared in EQMM, most of the rest in other magazines or original anthologies. Styles range from classical detection to hardboiled, settings from a 1940’s summer camp to the set of a made-for-TV boxing movie. A teenage Sherlock Holmes appears on trans-Atlantic shipboard in “Inga Sigerson
Weds” from the recent anthology Sherlock Holmes: The American Years (Minotaur, $25.99), edited by Michael Kurland. A 1976 story, “The Square Root of Dead,” written with Kurland, belongs in the dying message hall of fame." ("The Jury Box,” September-October 2010).
From the Introduction by Ed Gorman: If there's one thing Dick Lupoff understands (with perverse glee) it's the sorry state of the human condition. In this collection you'll find a wide variety of humans whose conditions leave much to be desired. -
A pit bull owner who's just as nasty as his dog -
A thief who believes his father-in-law was a real Nazi -
A dead-end boxer who has come back in a boxing movie -
A detective named Caligula Foxx who might be Nero Wolfe in drag -
A crooked corporal whose payoff is death Not only are the storylines original, the writing is indelibly stamped with Dick's vision and voice. Dick's writing talents really can't be defined by the usual means. Yes, he writes science fiction. Yes, he writes fantasy. Yes, he writes mystery. But what he really writes are Lupoffs. Long, short, hilarious, whimsical, dark, mysterious-they're all Lupoffs. Richard A. Lupoff is the author of many books including the popular Lindsey-and-Plum mysteries. The next of these, The Emerald Cat Killer, will be published by St. Martin's Press in October, 2010. His most recent collection of mysteries is Quintet: The Cases of Chase and Delacroix, published by Crippen & Landru. |
