I met Troy Soos at a Mid-Atlantic Mystery Convention 30ish years ago. He'd just published the first Mickey Rawlings mystery and I couldn't resist. Mickey was a young baseball player in 1910, destined to be a team-hopping utility guy, and somehow he keeps stumbling across and solving murders. Mickey played for 6 teams through 1921 and then...well, I guess Soos's contract ended and he didn't get another one. In 2014, he wrote one more installment for a small publisher, The House That Ruth Built. It's 1923 and Mickey is playing (very occasionally) for the Yankees and tasked with keeping an eye on his road roommate, Babe Ruth. Well, that's not working out very well, but at least Mickey gets a few clutch hits and Miller Huggins sees him as a potential manager and uses him as an unofficial bench coach.
He's living happily with Maggie who has a job as a stunt coordinator with a New York based film company (showing how women had more behind the scenes jobs in the days of silents than even in the 1990s) when Yankees management gives him an extra task - find out who put a corpse behind a wall next to one of the concession stands at the new Yankee Stadium. Mickey solves the crime, of course, before being cut from the team for some kid from Columbia named Gherig. I solved the crime as well - as soon as I met the murderer in fact. As a mystery, The House That Ruth Built is only so-so but it was an enjoyable book, one last visit with Mickey and Maggie where I saw them finally marry and him embark on his career as a manager.
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