Stories I’m Reading: ARTHUR PORGES “Her Last Bow.”

ARTHUR PORGES “Her Last Bow.” Stately Homes #1. First appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, February 1957, Collected in Three Porges Parodies and a Pastiche, edited by Michael H. Kean (Magico, 1988) and in The Adventures of Stately Homes and Sherman Horn: Being the Compleat Sherlockian Writings of Arthur Porges, edited by Richard Sims (The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, trade paperback, 2008). Arthur Porges’s Wikipedia page begins thusly: “Arthur Porges (20 August 1915 – 12 May 2006) was an American writer of numerous short stories, most notably during the 1950s and 1960s, though he continued to write and publish stories until his death.” I haven’t found an accurate countless of the short fiction, essays and poems he had published over his lifetime, but the list is a long one. He, on the other hand, never wrote a novel. He began writing science fiction in 1950. “Her Last Bow” is not his first work in crime fiction, but it is close to it. It is his first story to appear in EQMM,…