"Now You Shall Pay a Much Higher Price"

"The Several Murders of Roger Ackroyd."
By Barry Malzberg (born 1939).

First appearance: Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, 

Winter 1977.

Reprinted in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Anthology, 

Volume 1 (1979), as well as (THESE).

Short short story (6 pages).
Online at Archive.org (HERE).

     "But now a wind is rising. It is time for the mysterists to return to their original and honored place."

The trouble with bureaucrats isn't that they're bureaucrats; the trouble is they enjoy being bureaucrats . . .

Resources:
- Prolific is the word for Barry Nathaniel Malzberg; see (HERE; Wikipedia), (HERE; the SFE), and (HERE; the ISFDb bibliography) for more.

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"A Cameo Ring, Cream Ground, with a Woman's Head in White Relief, of Sixteenth Century Italian Workmanship"

"Pugh's Poisoned Ring."
By Richard Marsh (Richard Bernard Heldmann, 1857-1915).
Illustrations by B. E. Minns.
First appearance: The London Magazine, October 1900.
Short story (11 pages, 6 illos).
Online at Hathi Trust (HERE).

     "I thought I'd call and tell you, because"—what he meant for a smile grew more pronounced—"that ring is possessed of peculiar properties."

Mr. Tress, a rabid collector of oddities, discovers to his peril that rabidly collecting items without being careful of their origin can not only be a pain, it could also prove fatal . . .

Resources:

- Richard Marsh could take a piece of exotica and spin a story around it. From Wikipedia:
   "He also published serial short stories, developing characters whose adventures could be related in discrete stories in numerous editions of a magazine. Mr. Pugh and Mr. Tress of Curios: Some Strange Adventures of Two Bachelors [1898; Valancourt Books reprint HERE and HERE; reviews HERE] are rival collectors between whom pass a series of bizarre and discomfiting objects—poisoned rings, pipes which seem to come to life, a phonograph record on which a murdered woman seems to speak from the dead, and the severed hand of a 13th-century aristocrat."

~ ~ ~

RICHARD MARSH HAD several series characters, including an unusual sleuth whom he featured in stories running from 1911 to 1915 in The Strand and other magazines (collection HERE); Wikipedia again:
   "One of Marsh’s most striking creations is Miss Judith Lee, a young teacher of deaf pupils whose lip-reading ability involves her with mysteries that she solves by acting as a detective."

One of the Judith Lee stories, "The Man Who Cut Off My Hair" (1911), saw reprinting in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine (AHMM) thirty years ago. (Data from FictionMags.)

Here is a link to Judith's introductory story—plus a few more; perhaps, after reading these, you might find the character as charming as contemporary readers seem to have:

(1) "The Man Who Cut Off My Hair."
By Richard Marsh (1857-1915).
Illustrations by W. R. S. Stott (1878-1939; HERE).
First appearance: The Strand Magazine, August 1911.
Reprint: AHMM, July 1988.
Short story (10 pages, 4 illos).
Online at Hathi Trust (HERE).

     "A new detective method is such a rare thing that it is with unusual pleasure we introduce our readers to Judith Lee, the fortunate possessor of a gift which gives her a place apart in detective fiction. Mr. Marsh's heroine is one whose fortunes, we predict with confidence, will be followed with the greatest interest from month to month."

~ ~ ~

(2) "Eavesdropping at Interlaken."
By Richard Marsh (1857-1915).
Illustrations by J. R. Skelton (1865-1927; HERE).
First appearance: The Strand Magazine, October 1911.
Short story (13 pages, 3 illos).
Online at Hathi Trust (HERE).

~ ~ ~

(3) "Conscience."
By Richard Marsh (1857-1915).
Illustrations by J. R. Skelton (1865-1927; HERE).
First appearance: The Strand Magazine, November 1911.
Short story (12 pages,  5 illos).
Online at Hathi Trust (HERE).

~ ~ ~

(4) "Matched."

By Richard Marsh (1857-1915).
Illustrations by J. R. Skelton (1865-1927; HERE).
First appearance: The Strand Magazine, December 1911.
Short story (12 pages, 4 illos).
Online at Hathi Trust (HERE).

~ ~ ~

(5) "The Miracle."
By Richard Marsh (1857-1915).
Illustrations by J. R. Skelton (1865-1927; HERE).
First appearance: The Strand Magazine, January 1912.
Short story (14 pages, 5 illos).
Online at Hathi Trust (HERE).

~ ~ ~

(6) "Auld Lang Syne."
By Richard Marsh (1857-1915).
Illustrations by J. R. Skelton (1865-1927; HERE).
First appearance: The Strand Magazine, February 1912.
Short story (11 pages, 3 illos).
Online at Hathi Trust (HERE).

. . . which is immediately followed by this non-fiction article:

"Lip-Reading: The Art of Judith Lee."
By C. Sibley Haycock.
Article (6 pages, illustrated).
Online at Hathi Trust (HERE); Wikipedia (HERE).

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BONUS STUFF

We also found two other of Marsh's criminous stories, both sharing the theme of burglary, in one of his collections, Frivolities, Especially Addressed to Those Who Are Tired of Being Serious (1899):

"The Burglar's Blunder."
First appearance: Unknown.
Online at Project Gutenberg (HERE).

(Note: Two clicks may be necessary to get to this item.)

     "The principal cause of failure is that you are too subjective. You have quite one of the most subjective organisations I have yet encountered. The ideal criminal must keep himself abreast with the advance of science."

~ ~ ~

"A Burglar Alarm."
First appearance: The Grand Magazine of Fiction, November 1908.
Online at Project Gutenberg (HERE).
(Note: Two clicks may be necessary to get to this item.)
    "I am of a plethoric habit, and by the time I had done all the stooping which Leila thought was indispensable if the burglar alarm was to be all that a burglar alarm ought to be, I was, I am convinced, within a measurable distance of apoplexy."

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"I Really Had to Exercise My Brain More Than Common Before I Hit Upon What I May Now Consider the Only Perfect Method of Handling Burglars"

"Our First Burglar."
By Ellis Parker Butler (1869-1937).
Illustrations by Irma Deremeaux.
First appearance: Everybody's Magazine, February 1909.
Reprinted in The Golden Book Magazine, July 1935.
Short short story (6 pages).
Online at Hathi Trust (HERE).
(Note: Be sure to hit the "Full Screen" button.)

     "I am sure there were only two reasons why I had never killed a burglar with a pistol: one was that no burglar had ever entered our flat, and the other was that I never had a pistol."

If you're going to baffle a burglar, then make sure he's as dumb as the proverbial post . . .

Resources:
- There was a time when humorist Ellis Parker Butler enjoyed instant name recognition, right up there with Mark Twain. Prolific? FictionMags's short story listing for him runs over four pages—and this despite the fact that "Butler was, for most of his life, only a part-time author" (Wikipedia HERE). He had several series characters, one of whom was Jane Sprool, Detective (6 stories in The Green Book Magazine, 1919-20). (FictionMags data.)

- Jane Sprool notwithstanding, Butler's most famous character is Philo Gubb, The Correspondence School Deteckative (HERE; first collection HERE), who managed 

to make it to the (silent) silver screen: (HERE), (HERE), and (HERE).

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"The Score of a Lifetime"

"Decoy."
By Eric Lewis.
Illustration by JACEY.
First appearance: Nature/Futures, 15 February 2018.
Short short short story (1 page).
Online at Nature.com (HERE; PDF).

     "This is it. It’s finally happening, after all these years. My big payoff. No more pennyante con jobs, no more rackets. No more bowing and scraping before thugs like the Regent . . ."

Impatience is bad enough; mix that with anger and greed and you've got a recipe for 
murder . . .

Characters:
~ Braygin:
  "Look, this is the score of a lifetime—I’ll take the risk. Unless you want to be the one to bring the Regent the bad news?"
~ Tesca:
  "Whatever we do, it’d better be fast—security system comes back online in 15 minutes, and we’ll need 5 of those to get back to the ship and blast off."

The bottom line:
  "He that can have patience can have what he will."
    ― The first American Postmaster General
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"Not Only Sabotage, but Cold-Blooded Murder"

"High Iron Rolling."
By William Edward Hayes (1897-1965).
First appearance: Argosy, January 24, 1942.
Novelette (11 pages, 3 illos).
Online at Archive.org (HERE).

     "The telegraph key clicks no warning: the special is running on schedule. Yet disaster rides the rails tonight, and Operator Fred Markey must learn to read a strange and sinister timetable—if he's to keep the steel road from flaming."

It isn't bad enough that Fred is nearly killed in a horrendous wreck involving a train loaded with critical war materiel, but he also finds himself designated by the FBI and the railroad as the prime suspect in causing the crash; he's innocent, of course, but proving it will thrust him into a life-or-death struggle with, as his boss puts it, "as pretty a sabotage setup the country's yet uncovered."

A fine description of a steam locomotive in its heyday: "Five hundred tons of charging steam and steel, with five thousand tons hurtling behind."

Typos: "he ridden those things"; "who's little eyes".

Resources:
- FictionMags on William Edward Hayes: "Born in Muncie, Indiana; had numerous jobs with railroad lines, then reporter and drama critic for New York Evening Journal; editor of Railroad Magazine; later executive with Rock Island Lines." As far as railway operations are concern-
ed, then, we can be confident that the details are accurate.

- Naturally quite a few of Hayes's stories centered on railroads, with even many of his Westerns, sports adventures, and detective fiction for both the slicks and the pulps of the day somehow involving trains. His crime fiction usually appeared in Detective Fiction Weekly, Detective Story, Dime Detective (series character: Daniel C. Howell, 4 stories in 1935), Star Detective, and Detective Short Stories. Practically none of his work has seen recent reprinting, with "The Finger of the Dead" (1937) in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine (1963) being the exception. (All data from FictionMags.)

- The scenario of an isolated railroad telegrapher in dire straits seems to have appealed to veteran pulpster Johnston McCulley as well; see (HERE).
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