The Collected Stories of Amanda Cross by Amanda Cross

Author:Amanda Cross [Cross, Amanda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-80340-5
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-08-03T04:00:00+00:00

WHO SHOT

MRS. BYRON BOYD?

Mark Stampede wrote the most macho books that could still pass for crime fiction, at least as most of the other members of the Crime Writers’ Association of America defined it. Mariana Phillips’s mystery novels, while far from what anyone could call ladylike or, heaven forfend, romantic, deprecated male violence and brought into fictional disrepute the male vision that classed women, in E. M. Forster’s immortal words, with motor cars if they were attractive and with eye flies if they were not. Mark Stampede worked out in a gym, with the result that the muscles in his upper body were highly developed while his protruding belly betrayed his voracious appetite and ready thirst. Mariana Phillips, who possessed neither biceps nor belly, tended to place women at the center of her fictions, pleasant, kindly men at the periphery, and macho men either as villains or, preferably, as corpses. How the two of them turned up on one platform in a very large hall during the course of a rather high-flown fiction writers’ series was a question no one would answer, either when asked politely at the beginning of the event by Mariana Phillips, with considerably less gallantry during the course of the event by Stampede, or with no courtesy at all by the police as the evening wore on.

Mariana Phillips, a woman of honor and a scholar of sorts, had read at least two of Stampede’s books before the panel to see what she was up against, and out of courtesy. Stampede had never heard of Phillips’s books, considered courtesy an effete maneuver to enslave men, and would not have read a syllable Phillips wrote if no other words had been available on the proverbial desert island.

The event or panel never did end, leaving forever unresolved the question of how in the world anyone was going to get out of this unfortunate confrontation; rather it was interrupted, after the two panelists had disagreed with one another on every possible subject in an atmosphere growing increasingly unpleasant, by a gunshot. For whom the bullet was intended was unclear: indeed, establishing that was the first priority of the police and the unfortunate institution sponsoring the event. What was unhappily obvious was who the bullet hit: an elderly woman who had been persuaded at the last moment to moderate the panel. Perhaps, given the youth-worshipping qualities of our culture, “middle-aged” was the kinder phrase for the victim, although, as Mark Stampede had earlier made clear in tones that reverberated throughout the acoustically alive hall, dames over thirty-five were like Australia: everyone knew it was down there and nobody gave a damn.

The original moderator had been held up by a personal crisis, and the dead woman, Mrs. Byron Boyd (as she preferred to be called) had been persuaded to preside in his place at the latest possible moment. She was on the “hostess” committee, and near to hand when the telephone message announcing his inability to arrive was received from the original moderator.

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