Created by Josh Pachter
HELMUT ERHARD, who appears in a series of short stories by Josh Pachter, isn’t exactly speediest P.I. in the Lone Star state. But eventually he gets there.
Helmut grew up in a small town in Texas, the son of a German POW in one of the camps the US Army set up in Texas during the Second World War, and in the first story, “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” we learn all about his schoolboy crush on grade school hottie Bonnie Barnes, who was two years ahead of him in school. Alas, it wasn’t meant to be–Bonnie ended up marrying the town’s sheriff. But life happens (usually while you’re making plans), and as the stories pile up we learn that Bonnie gets divorced and, as the author puts it, “finally screws up the courage to ask her out. I’d say hanging onto a teenage crush for fifty years is a pretty quirky quirk.”
Okay, so Helmut’s no lady killer, but the stories have a nice laidback vibe to them, just plain good mysteries reminiscent at times of those by Bill Crider.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
THE Josh Pachter is an editor, translator and the author of a ton of short crime stories, which have appeared in EQMM, AHMM, and a zillion other magazines and anthologies. He’s also the editor of a literary jukebox full of crime anthologies, inspired by the music of the Beatles, Joni Mitchell, Jimmy Buffet, Paul Simon and… the Marx Brothers? A finalist for the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity, Thriller, and Derringer Awards, he finally received the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s Golden Derringer Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2020. And rightly so.
SHORT STORIES
- “The Yellow Rose of Texas” (2019, The Eyes of Texas)
- “The Stopwatch of Death” (2020, Black Cat Mystery Magazine # 3)
- “The Great Filling Station Holdup” (2021, The Great Filling Station Holdup: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Jimmy Buffett)
- “KLDI” was in (2021, Mickey Finn: Volume 2)
- “The Vampire Shift” (July/August 20222, AHMM)
- “Murder on the North Pole Express”(2022, Crippen & Landru Christmas Pamphlet)
- “Red Roses For a Blue Lady” (October 2023, Black Cat Mystery Magazine)
- “Texas Kinda Attitude” (May/June 2024, EQMM)
FURTHER INVESTIGATION
- Lone Star Eyes
The Eyes of Texas are Upon You
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.
