Short Story Wednesday: book received: THE LOST COAST AND OTHER SHARON McCONE STORIES by Marcia Muller (Stark House Press, January 2026)

In Wednesday's mail is a book I hope I don't have to persuade you to snap up, or at least take a look at--Marcia Muller's selections of what she considers her best stories about her most popular series character, detective McCone, who is featured in a long string of novels, beginning with Edwin of the Iron Shoes in 1977, and, as Muller notes, had her short-fiction debut about a decade later. After an impressive string of retrospective collections from her husband and frequent collaborator Bill Pronzini, the McCone stories selection is also more than welcome. 

Muller's McCone is one of the earliest pragmatic female private investigator series, notably preceding in publication the first Sara Paretsky's V. I. Warshawski and Sara Grafton's Kinsey Milhone volumes, and loses nothing by not including much that is stereotypical or fanciful, as opposed to McCone using her wits and courage to get through the hardest parts of her job, working with a cooperative private detection agency, All Souls (and a number of times working with the "Nameless Detective", the most populous series of  'tec' fiction from Pronzini; they also have collaborated on a historical PI mystery series, the Carpenter and Quincannon stories, while also writing stories about their respective PIs on their own).

I started reading the McCone novels with the rather brilliant Trophies and Dead Things (1990), in part a farewell to the late '60s in largely youthful progressive and radical political subcultures, and those who were hangers-on, and a look at those still or newly working for the better aspects of society, and dealing with those who would exploit their "marks" in those interacting communities. 

I've read some of the stories collected here, and others are new to me...I will be digging in here, along with the delayed reads of the recent Pronzini retrospectives.

Greg Shepard's Stark House is doing very good work with these. Muller's preface is a very welcome account of how she fleshed out McCone's life and experience, many other times hewing closely to some of the other most remarkable events in San Francisco and its environs (and the larger world).  More thorough review coming when I get a chance to get it down on screen...

The Lost Coast and Other Sharon McCone Stories by Marcia Muller (Stark House, 2026, 260 pp, $15.95 trade paperback: ISBN 979-8-88601-176-0)

7 * Preface * Marcia Muller (all stories by Muller)

10 * Deceptions * from A Matter of Crime #1 (HBJ 1981)

28 * All the Lonely People * Sisters in Crime (1989)

40 * The Land that Time Forgot * Sisters in Crime #2 (1990)

54 * Somewhere in the City * The Armchair Detective * 1990

69 * Silent Night * Mistletoe Mysteries (1990)

82 * Benny's Space * A Woman's Eye (1992)

98 * The Lost Coast * Deadly Allies (1992)

117 * The Holes in the System * Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine  June 1996

136  * "Knives at Midnight" * Guilty as Charged (1996)

155 * Up at the Riverside * Irreconcilable Differences (1999)

 170 * Irrefutable Evidence * Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine November 2005

185 * Telegraphing * Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine June 2009

196 * Tell Me Who I Am * (a short e-book) Grand Central Publishing (2016)

212 * April 13 * Deadly Anniversaries (2020)

227 * Scamming the Scammer * Shamus & Anthony Commit Capers (2024)

239 * The McCone Files * The McCone Files (as "The Last Open File" and "File Closed") (1995)

258 * Marcia Muller Bibliography (apparently by Muller) (2026)

[More to come]

Bowling Green State University's Browne Popular Culture Library finding guide for Muller's papers.

TM

See Patti Abbott's blog for more Short Story Wednesday (more complete!) reviews for this week.

Short Story Wednesday: short stories from THE SUN magazine: August 2024: "Clean Breaks" by Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum; May 2025: "The Healer" by Rob Keast. THE SUN, edited by Rob Bowers

Links to the online texts from The Sun, which will allow two free accesses before asking for subscription money (subs can be print and online, or online only, for the same price):

"Clean Breaks" by Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum (my review of her first collection, This Life She's Chosen) Lunstrum's website

Lunstrum's story is about a woman not quite adrift, but unsure of her destination, as she takes a small boat up and down the coast of the northwestern contiguous U. S. and southwestern Canada, who finds herself helping a man and his daughter in distress in another craft. He's been sold some watered-down diesel by shady dealers, and, worse, his young daughter is suffering from a raging fever. As a nurse who's taking a sort of sabbatical, she reflects on this in comparison with her own situation with her daughter, going years back, as she diagnoses and tries to stabilize the young girl.

It's a meditative story, even given the urgency of the crises before them...and those in the past. This story seems more informed by life experience than those in her first collection, and is worth the read.

"The Healer" by Rob Keast (improbably, there are at least three Rob Keasts going by that version of their first name in some sort of public life on the web, at least, but this Rob Keast does have this essay online from Writer's Digest)

The only story in this later issue is a vignette, albeit just long enough to be long for a vignette...another meditative work (The Sun does gravitate in that direction), in which a young man, teaching conversational/business English in Japan, hopes that certain rituals he engages in help a close college friend and his mother, who have some health crises back home. He's not so very sure that anything he does has any effect, but engages in the mildly ritualistic behavior, riding his local subway circuit with a kind of Shinto (I think that, rather than Buddhist) talisman, in hopes of somehow lending or engendering what amounts to good karma for his loved ones. It's a reasonable portrait of what we do when we can do little, if anything, else, in the face of peril to others...more, whether one realizes it or not, to soothe ourselves and with the wan but desperate hope we can make a difference thus. The first story I've read by Keast, and solid work, with some wit added to the protagonist's perplexity.

For more, and much more prompt, examples of Weds. Short Stories this week, please see Patti Abbott's blog.