Treasures from Alexander McCall Smith, in PIANOS AND FLOWERS, a Book of Stories

Perhaps your high school teacher gave you the assignment: Here's a photo—write a short story based on it. Poets do it often, and even have a name for when the image is actually artwork. The resulting poem is described as ekphrastic.

But when Alexander McCall Smith tackled a similar assignment a year or so ago, he accepted a selection of photos from the archives of The Sunday Times and created a world of affection and often loss around each of them. The result, including some that were published in the newspaper, became his newest stand-alone book: PIANOS AND FLOWERS, BRIEF ENCOUNTERS OF THE ROMANTIC KIND.

Some meander from one person in the photo to the next, tracing the odd connections of our lives; some tell love stories; and my favorite of the 14 of them is "I'd Cry Buckets," which opens with a photo of two young men waking with a pack horse that in turn is carrying a dead deer (or, as it's called in England, a stag). The opening is evocative:

The sweep of the hills. The burn tumbling joyously across the rock. The pony sure-footed but scared of moving water, picking his way gingerly under the burden of the dead stag. And the two boys, who were sixteen, and who were tired from being up on the hill since six that morning when it was still chill and misty and not quite yet light. They had two uncomfortable house to go before they would be back at the lodge.

Bruce, the boy in front, checks that David is all right, in a conversation that stays determinedly on the mundane at first -- until David asks, "Do animals ever think they're going to die?"

The teens continue this pattern of surface discussion with abrupt deep moments, and it gradually becomes clear that they share some secret knowledge of each other, in a protective fashion. Of course they grow up and take divergent paths, only to meet during wartime, aware again of each other's interiors in ways they choose to silence. In tiny details, Smith allows a slow recognition that the bond between the two is deeper than friendship. And trembles under the weight of knowing that death comes to everyone, not just the stag on the ridge.

The wide variety of images, and hence of characters that Smith breathes life into, takes him far deeper than his usual mystery series have time to probe, with a lush descriptive narrative that depends on and interacts with the small photos provided. PIANOS AND FLOWERS evokes a tenderness founded in shared human pain and delight, and demonstrates that the big things in life are grown from the small one, treasured and gathered and finally, in meticulous description, known and loved.

Order two copies: one for your own shelf of Pandemic Relief, and one for a person you care about.

PS: Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

When Mary Higgins Clark Edits the Stories ... and Lee Child and Thomas Cook (and More!) Join Her in Writing Them

In 2015, Mystery Writers of America celebrated its 70th birthday. For the occasion, a leader of 20th-century mystery writing, Mary Higgins Clark, brought together and edited a collection of new stories set in MWA's own city: MANHATTAN MAYHEM. Not only are the stories lively, quirky, and wonderfully clever, but they are accompanied by classic photos of the city neighborhoods where they take place, from Chinatown to Hell's Kitchen to the Empire State Building's own district, as well as Harlem, Wall Street, Little Italy, and more. The Flatiron Building has its own photo -- it has a starring and romantic role in a Jack Reacher story that showcases the tough generosity of one of my favorite mythic characters, the man Clark calls "Lee Child's drifting modern warrior."

The great news for this week is, Quirk Books just released a paperback edition of MANHATTAN MAYHEM. Bookended by a story from Mary Higgins Clark, "The Five-Dollar Dress," and another from Jeffrey Deaver (World War II espionage, who would have guessed?) called "The Baker of Bleecker Street," the authors also include Nancy Pickard, Julie Hyzy, Lee Child, Thomas H. Cook, Brendan DuBois, Jon L. Breen, Ben H. Winters, Angela Zeman, N. J. Ayres, Margaret Maron, Judith Kelman, Persia Walker, T. Jefferson Parker, Justin Scott, and S. J. Rozan.

At least four of the stories in here suit my taste so well that I would have bought the collection for those alone -- and it's not just the fun of sampling these fine writers in short form that makes the book sing, but also the way each one creates a different way to pace the challenging form that encapsulates a crime, a character worth caring about, and an unexpected but satisfying resolution.

If you're looking for a summer reading choice that can be savored in short bits of time before you nod into a nap on the hammock or beach chair (or late in the evening after the work's done), here's a prime candidate. MANHATTAN MAYHEM is both a reader's and a viewer's delight, and MWA was brilliant in choosing Mary Higgins Clark to pull it together.

Haunting Photos, Frightening Tales, in THE STARLINGS, editor Ann Cleeves

There's a certain inevitability to it: When your best friends are crime writers, and everyone gets together around a stack of scary photographs, each picture can easily become the seed of suspense, twisted desire, and murder.

At least, that's what happened when British crime fiction author Ann Cleeves and the group calling itself Murder Squad -- a team of half a dozen writers co-promoting each other's bloody endeavors -- received a stack of photos of Pembrokeshire, Wales, with a proposal to write short stories to accompany the black-and-white-and-spooky images.

Hence: THE STARLINGS. Published in 2015 in Britain and just arriving in the US now (publication date April 1), this elegant and professional photo exhibit calls forth shudders of anticipation before the text starts to unfold. Packed for more than 200 pages with bizarre and calculated crime from a dozen writers (six in Murder Squad and six added partners), the book brings the hard-boiled home for these Britishers, who oddly enough all had connections somehow to the landscape of the photos that David Wilson had taken. And for us in "the States," the images recapitulate our own ghosts: deserted houses, unexpected and inhuman visitations, unfinished desperate circumstances of the past.

I particularly enjoyed Cleeves's own brief twist of plot and characters in the title story, "The Starlings" (and yes, the adjoining photo does call forth Hitchcock's "The Birds"):

She closed her eyes and thought that even an odd snatch of conversation might help.

When she opened them there was a face staring in through the Land Rover window. She was startled. At first she thought it might be the local officers, though the siren had been a long way off and even deep in thought surely she would have heard their car on the track. And the face belonged to an elderly woman. ... The woman was pale and dishevelled with white hair straggling over her face. Vera felt ridiculous. She might be haunted by the past but Forbes' death could be something more commonplace -- a domestic situation that had developed into a tragedy; she could see that this woman might have mental health problems. ... Vera introduced herself.

"You'll have seen that Edward's shot himself. The bloody fool."

"I can see that he's dead. No idea yet how it happened."

The woman blinked as though she'd been slapped.

Though the stories are all impressively compact crime narratives, they have an unexpected result, at least for me: What I wanted to do after reading the book was keep returning to those photos, the way they captured desolation and betrayal and death.

What a collection! From Graffed, brought to the US by Trafalgar Square Publishing.

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