We don’t often review short story collections here at Crime Fiction Lover, but this collection of 20 by award-winning American story writer and president of the Short Mystery Fiction Society Joseph S Walker is well worth diving into. For all those times when you’re waiting in the dentist’s office, have a medium-long train ride, are kept waiting by your kids, spouse, SO. Each one is just enough to keep you deeply entertained but not like a novel where there’s a lot to keep track of.
What strikes me most about these stories is the sheer diversity of crimes, criminals and good guys involved. Walker is not shy about delving into the minds and motivations – criminal or otherwise – of both male and female characters, gay and straight, black and white, rural and urban. People living in New York, California, Texas. What results is a persuasive demonstration of the broad array of crimes out there and their widespread impact.
Some of the crimes are violent, of course, but not all are. Sometimes a character just wants what he thinks is due him. Four stories near the end of the volume illustrate this well.
Each starts with the same line: ‘Heston says you used to be a cop.’ Heston is the bartender at the downmarket Blue Light bar, where former NYPD detective Tim Chadwick hangs out every evening, drinking his five shots of whiskey. On Heston’s recommendation, strangers bring him problems that aren’t necessarily that easy to solve. The first is a barmaid whose necklace was stolen by the man who raped her. He’s the young son of a powerful mob family, and the authorities aren’t about to shake that hornets’ nest. The necklace isn’t valuable in monetary terms but priceless in sentiment. She wants Heston to get it back. He has a bigger agenda – get the kid who stole it on a much shorter leash. In another story in this series, a man wants him to stop the porch bandits terrorising his mother’s neighbourhood. Each individual crime is too petty for the police to spend time on, but real risk is there.
Abused wives and girlfriends, baseball players denied their big chance, cold cases, kids who need something more growing up, or something different, anyway, than what their parents can give them. These are the kinds of problems Walker’s protagonists take on. Putting things right is more in the author’s line than making arrests. Justice, rather than the law, though sometimes the law helps too.
Another dimension of Walker’s stories that I enjoy is how he submerges you in different worlds. It might be a sport, a special event, a movie set. He provides enough interesting and specific details about that world to draw you in and, if you know anything about that milieu, he offers validation. This high quotient of believability helps you care about what the characters care about, which is much harder to achieve in the few thousand words of a short story than in a novel’s 90,000 or so.
Walker’s stories often provide a nice ‘I didn’t see that coming’ twist at the end that makes them especially worth remembering. One of the features of a short story that distinguishes it from longer works, other than the obvious, is that a short story has to be about one thing. Every element of the story should point to that thing. That’s what makes for a satisfying conclusion. A twist at the end reveals that, all the while the reader thought the story was about this one particular thing, it was actually about something else entirely.
Walker has been nominated multiple times for various US short crime fiction awards, twice won the Al Blanchard Award and his stories have appeared in the annual Best Mystery Stories of the Year. This is a truly enjoyable and multifaceted collection.
Read about a recent short story anthology Bat Out of Hell and watch our video about the collection, inspired by the music of Meatloaf.
Level Short
Print/Kindle/iTunes
£13.99
CFL Rating: 5 Stars