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    The Case of Pilgrim Hugh: Five Strange Detective Short Stories
    The Case of Pilgrim Hugh: Five Strange Detective Short Stories
    The Case of Pilgrim Hugh: Five Strange Detective Short Stories
    Ebook99 pages1 hour

    The Case of Pilgrim Hugh: Five Strange Detective Short Stories

    By Dean Wesley Smith

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    About this ebook

    Dean Wesley Smith, famous for being one of the most prolific and wide-ranging authors working today, draws on his library of strange detective stories to produce this collection of short stories featuring Pilgrim Hugh, one of the weirdest detectives in modern fiction.

    The Case of Pilgrim Hugh collects five of the bestselling Pilgrim Hugh detective stories. The collection opens with “The Case of Intrusive Furniture,” a story of why a beat-up old couch, wrapped in plastic, ended up on an expensive home’s front lawn. The collection ends with “The Case of the Dead Lady Blues,” a story about how a woman by the name of Blue ended up dead, on the floor of her empty apartment, died blue. And the three stories in the middle puzzle just as much.

    Ride along with Pilgrim Hugh in his limo and discover why fans love Pilgrim Hugh and his strange way of solving crimes.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWMG Publishing
    Release dateApr 19, 2017
    ISBN9781386312499
    The Case of Pilgrim Hugh: Five Strange Detective Short Stories
    Author

    Dean Wesley Smith

    Considered one of the most prolific writers working in modern fiction, USA Today bestselling writer Dean Wesley Smith published far more than a hundred novels in forty years, and hundreds of short stories across many genres. At the moment he produces novels in several major series, including the time travel Thunder Mountain novels set in the Old West, the galaxy-spanning Seeders Universe series, the urban fantasy Ghost of a Chance series, a superhero series starring Poker Boy, and a mystery series featuring the retired detectives of the Cold Poker Gang. His monthly magazine, Smith’s Monthly, which consists of only his own fiction, premiered in October 2013 and offers readers more than 70,000 words per issue, including a new and original novel every month. During his career, Dean also wrote a couple dozen Star Trek novels, the only two original Men in Black novels, Spider-Man and X-Men novels, plus novels set in gaming and television worlds. Writing with his wife Kristine Kathryn Rusch under the name Kathryn Wesley, he wrote the novel for the NBC miniseries The Tenth Kingdom and other books for Hallmark Hall of Fame movies. He wrote novels under dozens of pen names in the worlds of comic books and movies, including novelizations of almost a dozen films, from The Final Fantasy to Steel to Rundown. Dean also worked as a fiction editor off and on, starting at Pulphouse Publishing, then at VB Tech Journal, then Pocket Books, and now at WMG Publishing, where he and Kristine Kathryn Rusch serve as series editors for the acclaimed Fiction River anthology series. For more information about Dean’s books and ongoing projects, please visit his website at www.deanwesleysmith.com and sign up for his newsletter.

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      Book preview

      The Case of Pilgrim Hugh - Dean Wesley Smith

      The Case of Pilgrim Hugh

      The Case of Pilgrim Hugh

      Five Strange Detective Short Stories

      Dean Wesley Smith

      WMG Publishing

      Contents

      Introduction

      The Case of the Intrusive Furniture

      Introduction

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      The Case of the Dog-Bit Arm

      Introduction

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      The Case of the Lost Treasure

      Introduction

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      The Case Of The Man Who Saw

      Introduction

      Chapter 1

      The Case of the Dead Lady Blues

      Introduction

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      About the Author

      Also by Dean Wesley Smith

      Introduction

      I had always thought it would be fun to write a story with a private detective as the main character. And I tend to write what I think would be fun.

      I wanted to write a story with a private eye, down on his luck in his crappy office, his shoes up on his scarred wooden desk, a bottle of cheap booze in his hand waiting for a client to bring him that one special case.

      I kept thinking that would be fun, but then never seemed to get to it.

      Back in my days of writing for Star Trek, I wrote an entire novel from the character Dixon Hill, who is a hardboiled private detective on a holodeck created by Captain Picard. Dixon Hill had the ratty old office. The fine folks at Star Trek thought it would be great for me to write an entire novel with just Picard being Dixon Hill.

      I didn’t argue with them, that was for sure. The book is called Star Trek: Next Generation: A Hard Rain.

      As strange as that was having a private eye in space, that was my first attempt at writing a private detective and I had so much fun I wanted to do more.

      Just never did.

      Years pass.

      Now granted, over those passing years I wrote a lot of mystery and thrillers, but the characters never seemed to be private detectives. They are superheroes, ghosts, retired police detectives, professional poker players, or a young police detective couple.

      But never a private detective.

      Then about four years ago I started a story and realized that, for the first time, I could actually do a private detective for the short story for the first time.

      I was excited. But as I went along, the private detective turned out to be pretty strange.

      Not sure why it surprised me any character I write would be strange, but it did.

      And I liked him, even though he wasn’t broke and didn’t have a shabby office to meet clients.

      Every time I used him in a story, his cases got stranger and stranger.

      I gave him a beautiful assistant who wears very little to work who might be smarter than he is and he knows it. His assistant is an expert in everything he thinks a private detective might need including high-speed driving.

      But mostly his assistant is a computer expert.

      He is rich, really rich, so he decks out a massive limo to be his traveling office and since he gets bored easily, he gives his services for free to all the local police departments around his area.

      And he tells the police that the stranger the case, the more puzzling the case, the better.

      Cases like an arm appearing in a yard without reason, a treasure hidden in plain sight, and an old couch on an expensive home’s front lawn.

      And so on.

      No case is too strange or weird for Pilgrim Hugh to take on.

      And he can solve them all.

      So now I finally have a private detective to write about after all these years.

      Honestly, I have a hunch there will be a lot more Pilgrim Hugh stories as the years go by.

      I hope you enjoy these stories as much as I enjoyed writing them.

      And I hope you enjoy riding along in the limo with Pilgrim. He’s strange, but likeable, I promise.

      Thanks for reading.

      —Dean Wesley Smith

      Lincoln City, Oregon

      Pilgrim Hugh solved some odd cases before, but an old, smelly couch sitting in the middle of a beautiful lawn seems to have full-blown strange written all over it.

      With his friend and beautiful assistant, Carrie, he must figure out why the couch ended up there and what the woman living in the perfect home hid (besides a bad facelift and a heart of stone).

      A very cold case on a very hot day.

      1

      Pilgrim Hugh hadn’t seen a piece of furniture so ugly since the night his first wife had attended an auction in a barn and mistaken chicken droppings for a French designer signature on a chaise lounge.

      Just like that chaise lounge, the standard American couch in front of him on the perfectly mowed, perfectly green lawn could not have been given away, let alone sold. The once tan cloth had faded to a pale, dirty white and one of the three cushions had a very large dark spot on it that looked to be the remains of a cola stain from a distant time in the past. Even the stain had faded.

      And he hoped it was cola. Safer to just think it was and move on.

      The couch looked long, like a full adult could stretch out and not touch either end, but damned if he was going to test that. What had started as a decorative wood trim on both arms and across the front of the couch was now scarred and dirty and the cloth on both arms had worn through to the threads.

      The entire thing smelled musty and of long storage. He had spent many

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