Songs in the Key of Death

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Bankier, William

[Short stories. Selections]

Songs in the key of death / William Bankier.

(Dime crime)

Some stories were previously published.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-77161-073-5 (pbk.).--ISBN 978-1-77161-074-2 (html).--

ISBN 978-1-77161-075-9 (pdf)

I. Title.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, information storage and retrieval systems, without permissiosn in writing from the publisher, except by a review who may quote brief passage in a review.

Pubished by Mosaic Press, Oakville, Ontario, Canada, 2014.

Distributed in the United States by Bookmasters (
www.bookmasters.com
).

Distributed in the U.K. by Gazelle Book Services (
www.gazellebookservices.co.uk
).

MOSAIC PRESS, Publishers

Copyright © 2014 the estate of William Bankier

Printed and Bound in Canada.

ISBN Paperback 978-1-77161-073-5

ePub 978-1-77161-074-2

ePDF 978-1-77161-075-9

Designed by Eric Normann

MOSAIC PRESS

1252 Speers Road, Units 1 & 2

Oakville, Ontario L6L 5N9

phone: (905) 825-2130

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VOLUME 2

SONGS IN THE
KEY OF

DEATH

WILLIAM BANKIER

Enter the lively and lurid world
of DIME CRIME!

Dime Crime is an exciting new series collecting some of the best crime short stories by many of the legendary and overlooked authors in the genre. To learn more about past and future volumes in the series, or details about the authors and their stories, visit the Dime Crime website for details:

www.dimecrime.com

Contents

Songs in the Key of Death: The Fiction of William Bankier by Peter Sellers

The Choirboy

Making a Killing with Mama Cass

The Prize in the Pack

Silently, in the Dead of Night

Fear is a Killer

The Last Act was Deadly

Songs in the Key of
Death

The Fiction of William Bankier

by Peter Sellers

A MAN HEARS A WOMAN OPERATOR’S VOICE ON THE phone and, attracted and intrigued, he makes an appointment to meet her. Three questions spring to mind. What drives a man to ask? What kind of woman responds? And what godawful things are going to happen?

That basic premise, from William Bankier’s story “Her Voice On The Phone Was Magic”, is typical of his work. Acts committed on whim or on the basis of incomplete or incorrect information lead, invariably, to nightmare. But the characters involved aren’t often given the blessed relief of waking up. At least, not in time. Also typical of Bankier, and evident in that outline, is the recurring theme of relationships as destructive and a breeding ground for all manner of evil.

Bankier himself is no stranger to acting on a whim. In 1974, having grown as he describes, “incurably dissatisfied with life as it stood”, Bankier and his wife Phyllis packed up their two daughters, packed in his career in advertising, and headed for London where he was to live for ten years, much of it on a cramped houseboat moored on the Thames. Bankier left England after Phyllis’ untimely death. He now lives in West Hollywood with his second wife, editor and gag-writer Felice Nelson. His daughters, Heather and Amy, continue to live and work in London.

Prior to his move, Bankier had published sporadically. He sold his first story to
Liberty Magazine
in 1954. A few years later, two horror stories appeared in the
Magazine of Fantasy
and
Science Fiction
. Then in 1962,
Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine
published “What Happened in Act One”, Bankier’s first professional crime fiction sale. Over the next ten years, he sold seven or eight more crime stories to the major mystery magazines. But once he left the advertising business in which he’d laboured for 25 years and became a full time writer, the floodgates opened. There were over 45 romantic “nurse” novelettes under a variety of women’s names, and a steady stream of increasingly assured crime fiction.

That assurance has been reflected in Bankier’s status as one of the most frequent contributors to
Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine
over the past two decades; an Edgar Award nomination in 1980; three Crime Writers of Canada Arthur Ellis Award nominations, and the 1992 CWC Derrick Murdoch Award for his lifetime of achievement.

Bankier started writing crime stories as a child in his native Belleville, Ontario. “A brother and I used to write a story together often on a Sunday afternoon, one writing a paragraph, the other coming along and reading it and adding the next paragraph. We killed off each other’s characters and left the plot in impossible situations.”

Decades later and three thousand miles away in LA, the killings continue. And characters are still thrust into impossible situations.

In Bankier’s world, families aren’t just unhealthy, they’re dangerous. He doesn’t always restrict himself to dysfunctional relationships between husbands and wives, or parents and children. Siblings, as in the deeply unsettling “The Prize In The Pack”, included here, or the wonderfully titled “How Dangerous is Your Brother?”, have their moments, too.

Titles and first lines are a Bankier strength. Richly evocative, the names of his stories often hint strongly at his underlying themes. “Girls, Like White Birds”, “By the Neck Until Dead”, “Only If You Get Caught”. And the opening lines (“Darius Dolan climbed the iron stairs with another beer for his wife’s lover”) reinforce the menace and the message. Relationships don’t work. Happiness is not a realistic goal. Shocking violence appears when you least expect it.

Despite the violent death in many of Bankier’s stories, his work is not about bloodshed. His concern is motivation. What drives people to the actions they ultimately take? In stories such as “What Really Happened?” he goes so far as to apply that concern to real life, offering his solution to one of history’s most fascinating murders, the Lizzie Borden case.

Although he played detective himself in that case (as well as later in “Death of a Noverint”, about the killing of playwright Christopher Marlowe) Bankier has written about detectives only infrequently. Bankier’s sole entry into the detective pantheon is Professor Harry Lawson, known as the “Praw”, a former professional stage magician who specializes in finding people and objects that have disappeared. He, along with his voluptuous wife Lola and her slightly thick brother Al, made his first appearance in “The Mystery of the Missing Penelope” in December 1978. “The Mystery of the Missing Guy”, followed the next year. However, after his third case, “The Missing Missile” in February, 1980, Praw Lawson himself disappeared without a trace. Lawson could possibly have stepped into the guild of detective magicians peopled by the likes of Clayton Rawson’s Great Merlini, but whodunits are neither Bankier’s interest nor his forte. They lie elsewhere: in Baytown, in sports, and in music.

In the geography of longitude and latitude, Baytown lies on the north shore of the St. Lawrence River, a little less than halfway along the main highway between Toronto and Montreal. In the inner geography of the soul, however, it lies about equidistant between despair and tragedy.

The people of Baytown are Bankier’s true recurring characters. People who drift in and out of the ongoing series, changing, aging, gaining a promotion or losing their hair, giving the series a ring of truth beyond the emotional, forming a consistent backdrop for the action, occasionally stepping to centre stage. Radio station personality Clement Foy. Sammy Luftspring, the bellboy at the Coronet Hotel. Police chief Don Cleary. Coronet owner Jack Danforth.