"I Knew All Three of the Victims, and I Know the Connection Among Them, and I Know Who’s Doing It, and I Know I’m the Next One To Be Killed."

"The Pun Detective."

By Jon L. Breen (born 1943; French Wikipedia HERE and the ISFDb HERE).

The Pun Detective No. 1.

First appearance: EQMM, April 1977.

Short short short story (3 pages).

Reprinted in The Drowning Ice Cube and Other Stories, 1999 (HERE).

Online at Archive.org (HERE).

   "And now he’s bumping you off one by one, and they haven’t caught him."

In a TV interview Alfred Hitchcock once said, "Puns are the highest form of literature." We won't dispute the Master of Suspense because, like Cleopatra said to Mark Antony, we're not prone to argue. An understandably anxious performer is certain he's next on a hit list and comes to Clement Boore, the Pun Detective himself, for suggestions about how to get stricken from the list without being stricken in other, more unsavory, ways. The solution, of course, is barely a problem for our dedicated punster. (Hint: "Here's looking at you, kid.")

Principal characters (some of them deceased):

~ Clement Boore, Freddy Cosgrove, Monty Baby, George Balin, Andy Schmidt, Clarence Westwood, and Bill Kolmar.

References (most links are to Wikipedia):

- "I'm an impressionist" (HERE).

- "the President" (Jimmy Carter at the time) (HERE); "Bill Buckley" (HERE); "Robert Redford" (HERE); "Humphrey Bogart" (HERE).

- "W. C. Fields" (HERE); "James Cagney" (HERE); "Edward G. Robinson" (HERE).

- "George Brent" (HERE); "Robert Young" (HERE); and "John Ireland" (HERE).

- "break into vaudeville. It’s dead, man" (HERE).

- "at UCLA" (HERE).

- "The fight game" (HERE).

- "stabbed in the parking lot at a pro basketball game” (a slanted reference to EQ's "Mind Over Matter"; see HERE).

- "Making his horse, Strummer, disappear right on stage" (a slanted reference to EQ's "The Trojan Horse"; see HERE: Mike Grost, and HERE: A Website on Deduction).

- "Poisoned hot dog at a baseball game" (a slanted reference to EQ's "Man Bites Dog"; see HERE: Mike Grost, and HERE: A Website on Deduction).

Resources:

- Jon L. Breen has produced only three Pun Detective tales (FictionMags data; vi = vignette).

  "The Pun Detective," (vi) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, April 1977 (above)

  "The Pun Detective and the Great Seal Mystery," (vi) Cloak-and-Dagger, April 7, 1978

  "The Pun Detective and the Danny Boy Killer," (vi) Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, March 1982. (Reprinted in Old-Time Detection, Summer 2026. Spring issue outlined HERE).

- Recent ONTOS postings featuring the versatility of Jon L. Breen include "The Lithuanian Eraser Mystery" (HERE), "The Circle Murder Case" (HERE), and his nonfictional "The Ellery Queen Mystery - Why Is the Corpus No Longer Alive?" (HERE).

The bottom line:

Unless otherwise noted, all bibliographical data are derived from The FictionMags Index created by William G. Contento & edited by Phil Stephensen-Payne.

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