Short Reviews – Crime Fiction in 2024

Andrew Leon Hudson

F irst of our four bonus suggestions is Your Hometown Station: A Vermont Radio Mystery by Nikki Knight. It’s a characterful piece narrated by a small town deejay during a difficult winter, whose regular programming is interrupted by an automated emergency broadcast to the locals of a flood warning. In keeping with their community service role, our protagonist is able to go the extra mile due to their familiarity with the region, personalising the (ironically) rather dry alert with valuable detail that transforms the merely informative to potentially life saving.

Perhaps you’re still waiting for the genre of the day to raise its head. Well, Your Hometown Station does pay its dues, but perhaps appropriately it threatens to be very easy to miss, the kind of thing that goes unnoticed should one look the other way, by distraction or intent. Not here though: we get the cosy resolution the characters and the story both deserve. It appears in the webzine Tough, which since March of this year is based at redneck-press.blogspot.com. More on them later.

I heard of Zach Dundas a few years ago as part of the team behind the impressive true crime podcast Death in the West. Their first season focused on the brutal 1917 murder of union man Frank Little in the hard Montana mining town of Butte, which inspired one of crime fiction’s iconic novels, Dashiel Hammett’s Red Harvest. The murder, I mean, not the podcast.

Anyway, Dundas’s story is Some Form of Promotion, and like our own The Amazing Mermaid it harks back to the ancient days of the United States of America (sometime in the early-to-mid Twentieth Century, probably) and classic shenanigans involving dames on the lam and grizzled store dicks, advertisements on sandwich boards and heaters stored under the bar for troublemaking rummies, all that sort of thing. In fact, few of those terms make an appearance (“dame” only shows up inside “fundamental”), but the effect is a tight and tidy, fun little incident. Published in The Yard: Crime Blog, check it out.

B efore Tough relocated itself to pastures new halfway through the year it hosted a bunch of stories, one of which in particular stood out: Mine by Eleanor Keisman, a bleakly engrossing portrait of an unstable mind. What begins with the sour but harmless observation of a happy soon-to-be-mother by a woman rendered unhappy by the path of her own life ever so gently escalates, first perhaps to voyeurism, then perhaps to stalking, then - perhaps - to something much, much worse.

That last (actually, penultimate) perhaps carries a lot of weight, though. The finale of Mine is striking and viceral and, one must no question admit, quite possibly not happening at all. Or, perhaps, what we get is very much a “romanticised” version of something equally grim if not quite so fantastical. Either way, it really stuck with me this year.

M ichelle Tang provides our last main rec for the year in Rustic Getaway at Shotgun Honey, going all in on the social media format with episodic epistolary updates that skirt around something iffy going on in the background.

Influencer Samantha @Ain’t_Chiu_Pretty Chiu is going all but off the grid with her man Jared to meet his clan and, she anticipates, have him finally pop the question. All good for her clicks and comments, nothing like an engagement to boost audience engagement, etc. Of course, things don’t quite meet her expectations, though there’s a chance that the relentlessly upbeat Sam comes through things entirely oblivious as to how close she came to having her account cancelled, like the lucky headphone wearer who stops to pick up a quarter and so doesn’t get hit by the falling piano. Wholesome silly fun.

I’ll leave you with a couple of parting nods to close out the issue, starting with the very short Everything Rises again in Shotgun Honey. Almost a companion piece to Your Hometown Station given the crisis that rears its head, I liked it right up to the final sentence or so, which landed a bit cheap to me, but maybe a matter of taste. And another that I found to be fine was A Hunting Place from Close to the Bone Publishing; both these stories evoking their settings nicely, I thought, and that’s not nothing.

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And with that, we at Mythaxis would like to wish you all the best for the coming year!

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