"GOMAAKOD"

This is the tenth story in which my Texas PI Helmut Erhard appears, the second one to show up in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. (The first nine 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," and "Murder on the North Pole Express.")

The first of Helmut's cases I sold to EQMM was "Texas Kinda Attitude," and when editor Janet Hutchings bought that one, she told me that, if I wanted her to run any more entries in the series, Helmut would have to do more actual detecting. That was a legitimate criticism, since he really doesn't do much more in "TKA" than follow and ultimately confront the suspect identified for him by his client.

So I set out here, as instructed, to give Helmut a more active investigatory role. (The story's title is a variation on an acronym I read in one of Lawrence Block's novels. In Block's book, it was GOYAAKOD, standing for "Get Off Your Ass And Knock On Doors." In my story, Helmut credits Block and adapts it into "Get Off My Ass And Knock On Doors." Which is what he does, as he tracks down the person who's been embezzling money from a local bank.

I submitted "GOMAAKOD" to EQMM in October of 2024 ... and two months later, after an astounding thirty-four years at the helm of the magazine, Janet retired. She was succeeded by Jackie Sherbow, who'd served as her second-in-command for around a decade, and it was Jackie who purchased "GOMAAKOD" in January of 2025 -- and has as of this writing (March 2026) bought two more Helmut stories, "The Dance of the Lemons" and "The Green Death." (She also turned one down ... and that one, "The Texas Chain-Store Manager," was published in the Murderous Ink Press anthology A Coterie of Dicks, which came out right aeound the same time as the March/April 2026 issue of EQMM.)

As is usual in my Erhard series, "GOMAAKOD" includes the mother of all Easter eggs....

(PS: The cover illustration visible at the left announces that my good friend Joe Walker has a story in this issue of EQMM. In fact, he was originally supposed to ... but, in fact, he does not. Whoopsie!

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