"The Texas Chain-Store Manager"

This is the thirteenth story in which my Texas PI Helmut Erhard appears, although like "Murder on the North Pole Express" (qv) it was published out of sequence, thanks to the vagaries of the publishing industry. (The first twelve, in sequence, were "The Yellow Rose of Texas," "The Stopwatch of Death," "The Great Filling Station Holdup," "KLDI," "The Vampire Shift," "Red Roses For a Blue Lady," "Texas Kinda Attitude," "The Land of Entrapment," "Murder on the North Pole Express," "GOMAAKOD," and "The Dance of the Lemons," the last two of which were written before "The Texas Chain-Store Manager" but published in EQMM after its appearance in A Coterie of Dicks, a British anthology edited by John Connor and published by his Murderous Ink Press in March 2026. (Helmut also makes a cameo appearance in "Woulda Coulda Shoulda," although that's not really his story.)

In this one, Helmut is hired to investigate a price-switching scheme at a new big-box store that's opened just outside the Hearne city limits, and for the first time Bonnie helps with his investigation.

This is probably the best pun title of any of my stories (although "The Cremains of the Day" was pretty good, too!) ... and, as always in my Helmut series, I've continued to include the world's biggest (and still undiscovered) Easter egg.

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