What is Charley Crompton hiding? The police in a small town aren't sure, but when he is reported digging in his garden in the middle of the night soon after his wife disappears, it seems like something is up. This is the intriguing premise for Robert L. Fish's enigmatic, Edgar-award-winning short story "Moonlight Gardener." When we meet him, Charley seems both crazy and evasive. Why does he answer the door holding a bloodstained hatchet? And do we believe him when he claims that he was only digging up his peach trees "to let the roots breathe"? The police investigation is both an inquiry into Mrs. Crompton's disappearance and a look behind closed doors into the private life of the main suspect and his missing wife. Is Charley acting so strange because he is guilty, or did the severe and judgmental Mrs. Crompton decide she finally had enough of her strange husband? Or is something even stranger going on? Police investigations routinely work by paying close attention to the norms of life, and finding cause for suspicion when those norms are violated. But what happens when a criminal inquiry meets genuine eccentricity? Do the police have sufficient imaginative resources to untangle the mystery of the moonlight gardener?

Robert Fish is the Edgar-award winning author of over 30 novels and countless short stories. Fish was born in Ohio and 1912 and studied mechanical engineering at Case University. While working as an engineer in Brazil, Fish wrote his first short story, which was published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. His experiences in Brazil also provided some of the key details for his first novel, The Fugitive. Unrelated to the popular television show and movie of that name, The Fugitive features a concentration camp survivor who travels to Brazil incognito in the early 1960's to infiltrate a burgeoning Nazi-revivalist movement. The novel won Mr. Fish an Edgar for Best First Mystery.

Fish wrote many more novels centering on Interpol detective Jose daSilva, who first appears in The Fugitive. They include: Isle of the Snakes (1963), Brazilian Sleigh Ride (1965) and The Xavier Affair (1969). Fish's novels often feature recurrent characters. Lieutenant Clancy, who first appears in 1963's Mute Witness reappears in The Quarry (1964) and Police Blotter (1965). Mute Witness, which was later reprinted as Bullitt, was turned into a movie starring Steve McQueen as Lieutenant Clancy.
Robert Fish died in 1981 in Connecticut.

 

Moonlight Gardener by Robert L. Fish
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