This is the second of Canning's stories about the Department of Patterns, and the first to feature Papa Grand. It went through several reprints, with the title changed to something less offensive.
A young policeman working for the Department of Patterns of the Sûreté in Paris has noticed that a series of unsolved murders have occurred on the same date each year, and that the names are in alphabetical order. He investigates and discovers a link in that the victims all belonged to the same angling club.
Suspense, April 1961.
Reprinted as "The Sunday fishing
club", Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine #219, February, 1962.
Included
in the Ellery Queen anthology To be read before midnight, Random
House, 1962, and in another Ellery Queen collection,
The most wanted man in the world, NEL, 1968.
It then
reappeared as "Nine little fishermen" in Argosy, May 1971