EQMM 1959-04 by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

Author:Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine [Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Lee Sheridan Cox

The Male Io Glasses

Remember “A Simple Incident; or, Andy Blair and Willie Perkins, Private Eyes” in EQMM’s June ’55 issue? Well, here is “The Truth About Ronald; or, The Second Case of Blair & Perkins, Boy Sleuths” — and utterly charming!

Ronald Pruitt is the kind of person that if a teacher wants to send a note to another teacher she picks Ronald to deliver it. He is also the type who not only reads the note but looks in everybody’s locker on the way down the hall. What I mean, Ronald Pruitt is a born creep.

I keep telling Willie Perkins how having Ronald to guard against all our lives has toughened us up and prepared us for the detective business. But lately Ronald has been making a certain remark about Willie, and Willie is getting so he can’t see the bright side any more. So he has been urging me to write up our second big case and let everybody know the truth about Ronald.

What has happened, we had an assignment in English last week to write A Simple Incident, and I turned in a story on Willie’s and my first big case as private eyes, which Miss Hawkins, our seventh grade English teacher as everybody knows, praised for three minutes and eight seconds. I know this for a fact because Willie, who is pretty scientific, timed it. It was the longest anyone was praised. Ronald was praised one minute and forty-seven seconds. So Ronald is mad and he has been going around saying about me that the reason I asked Miss Hawkins not to read my paper in class is that I’m the kind of writer who makes it up.

But this certain remark he is making about Willie is even worse.

To explain beforehand, so no one will get the wrong idea about Willie, when we entered Junior High School this year, everything was different from grade school. We didn’t know our way around the building, and we had a whole bunch of teachers’ dispositions to get used to instead of just one. The first day when we got to our last class, which was Health and Safety, the teacher wasn’t there when the bell rang. We were all walking around kind of getting the feel of the room when the teacher appeared in the doorway and yelled in her scary voice, “In your seats!”

Willie, who was up at the pencil sharpener getting his pencils ready, said later he had a chill go clear down his backbone. He made a run for a seat and who should be making a run from a different direction but Jackie Carr. Running into Jackie is just like hitting an inner-spring mattress. Willie bounced off Jackie and shot backwards with his arms waving right into the teacher, which she may have taken as a personal insult. When everything got settled down, she told us that we were to be in our seats when the bell rang or else, but she concentrated the telling most on Willie.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.