POUL ANDERSON “The Martian Crown Jewels.” Short story. Freehatched Syaloch #1. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, February 1958. Reprinted in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1959; in A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, Volume One, edited by Anthony Boucher (Doubleday, hardcover, 1959); and in (among others) Ellery Queen’s Murder — in Spades! (Pyramid, paperback, 1969) as “The Theft of the Martian Crown Jewels.” Collected in Call Me Joe: The Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson #1. (NESFA Press, hardcover, 2009).

   If you are roughly the same age as I, and if you’ve read the story yourself, there’s a good chance that you did so in the two volume set of the Treasury edited by Anthony Boucher (see above) and given out as a premium to untold new members of the SF Book Club back the 1960s and for many years beyond. It’s also been reprinted many times; I didn’t begin to list them all.

   One reason for the story’s popularity, I think, is that there really aren’t many examples of combining traditional detective stories with hardcore SF, and this is a good one. The detective on the case is Martian private detective Freehatched Syaloch, but this seems to have been his only appearance in print. Missing are the Martian Crown Jewels, which have been on display on Earth, but on their state secret return to Mars, via Phobos, one of the planet’s moons, they have completely disappeared.

   The rocket they were on was unmanned. They were definitely loaded onto the ship on Earth, but once the ship landed on Phobos, they are nowhere to be seen. The chances of the ship having bee being boarded along the way in the vast expanses of space is impossible, but yet, they are nowhere on the ship, which is hastily taken apart, piece by piece, to be sure.

   While he wrote a few out-and-out mysteries, Poul Anderson was far better known as the writer of hundreds of both fantasy and science fiction stories, but this is no fantasy. As a combo of both mystery and SF, it’s far stronger as SF, with just enough skill on Anderson’s part to cover its somewhat weaker standing as a impossible crime puzzle. Are all the facts the reader needs to solve the theft on his or her own? The answer is yes, if you follow the basic rule that when all the possibles are eliminated, keep on looking!

JOHN S. ENDICOTT “Double Murder.” Novelette. First published in Thrilling Detective, November 1942. Reprinted in Thrilling Detective Pulp Tales, Vol. 1, edited by Jonathan W. Sweet (Brick Pickle Media, paperback/Kindle, 2019).

   Even though John S. Endicott has dozens of story credits for the detective pulp magazines, it wouldn’t be of much help for me to print a list of then all. “Endicott” was a house name, used as a cover by many authors. For what purpose, I don’t really know, but some of the authors whose stories are known to have been published under that byline are Norman Daniels. George A. McDonald and Donald Bayne Hobart.

   For almost of its run of over 20 years and 213 issues, Thrilling Detective was a second or third-rate pulp magazine, but “Double Murder,” whoever wrote it, is a solid notch better than average. The hero is a police detective named Mortimer Tracy who treats a bum to a meal but is suspended from the force when the guy turns out to be an escaped homicidal maniac who knifes two people to death after absconding with a knife from the diner. (Tracy, whose only appearance this probably is, does his best to be known only as Tracy.)

   Working on his own, Tracy is not that sure about what actually happened, and decides to investigate on his own. The rest of the story is a well-written combination of a hardboiled tale with a puzzle story. The first is to be expected in a pulp story from the early 40s; the second not as much. It makes a story all the more pleasurable when it catches you a bit off guard like this.

   The publisher, Brick Pickle Media, already has three collections such as this one, with (I am hoping) more in the works. Even if not all the stories are as good as this one, the Kindle editions are inexpensive enough that I’m quite sure I will be purchasing and downloading more of them as time goes on.

   Other stories in this first collection are: “Murder’s Mandate,” by W. T. Ballard; :Murder Trap” by Johnston McCulley; and “Shed No tears fo Me” by Frederick C. Davis.

EDWARD D. HOCH “The Problem of the Tin Goose.” Dr. Sam Hawthorne #24. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, December 1982. Collected in More Things Impossible: The Second Casebook of Dr Sam Hawthorne (Crippen & Landru, 2006). Previously reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Roaring Twenties Whodunits, edited by Mike Ashley (Running Press, US, 2004).

   In the 1920s troupes of barnstorming pilots were all the rage, doing al sorts of fancy flying maneuvers and such daredevil stunts such as wing-walking, including stepping from the wing of one plane onto that of another. And even though Dr. Sam Hawthorne was but a young man then and new to his practice, he was around to watch – and to solve a murder that on the face of it had no possible explanation.

   To wit: When one of the planes involved in such activities comes back down to the ground, the pilot is found stabbed to death in the cockpit, which was locked from the inside, nor was there any feasible way for the knife to be thrown through the open window from the other plane.

   Hoch’s stories were almost always perfect models of pure puzzle stories, with only occasional attempts at in depth characterizations. If that is what you’re looking for in the crime stories you read, Hoch is probably not the author for you. And even so, I thought the crucial part of the clue to howdunit could have been amped up a little without letting any of the cat out of the bag.

   A mere quibble. “Tin Goose” is not only a really neat puzzle yarn, but it’s fun to read simply for the brief incursion into the past it provides, showing us what kinds of local events got small town America excited between the wars.

J. J. des ORMEAUX “The Poisoned Bowl.” Novelette. First published in Clues Detective Stories, April 1939. Reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries, edited by Mike Ashley (Running Press, softcover, 2006), as by Forrest Rosaire.

   I used the term “Locked Room Mystery” up there in the heading, but that’s only in the loosest of terms. “Impossible Mystery” is far better: in “The Poisoned Bowl” a man falls dead of an instantly fatal poison with several people standing around him and no one giving him anything to eat or drink, including himself. How could it be done?

   It’s an interesting question, and J. J. des Ormeaux, a modestly prolific pulp writer whose real name was Forrest Rosaire, does his best to confuse the issue by a lot of hand-waving and other such means of distraction. Lots of coincidences, in other words, not to mention keeping relevant information from the reader. The final result is a veritable hodge-podge of a story, but … it all does make sense in the end, sort of.

   A question is, could a better writer (or editor) have taken this story, cleaned it up and made something more presentable out of it? Answer: There’s a germ of a good story at the base of it, so I’d like to think so, but in all honesty, without the hand-waving and the holding back of vital information from the reader, it would be awfully tough. Fun to read, especially if you love pulps, but all in all, no cigars for this one.

JOSEPH COMMINGS “The X Street Murders.” Short story. Senator Brooks U. Banner #12. First published in Mystery Digest, March-April 1962. Reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries, edited by Mike Ashley (Running Press, softcover, 2006). Collected in Banner Deadlines: The Impossible Files of Senator Brooks U. Banner (Crippen & Landru, hardcover/paperback, 2004). [See Comment #4.]

   Joseph Commings’ stories of his larger-than-life and impossible-crime-solving sleuth Brooks Banner in the pulps (10-Story Magazine, Ten Detective Aces, etc.) of the late 1940s before transitioning to the digest magazine of the 1950s and 60s (Mystery Digest, The Saint, Mike Shayne), but for some reason, while there were a couple dozen of them, he was never able to get one accepted for EQMM. And that’s a shame, since all of them that I’ve read have ben excellent examples of the form.

   â€œThe X Street Murders” is no exception. It involves the shooting of a man in an inner office by a gun which is immediately found but even though it is definitely the gun that was used, it’s in a sealed envelope (both before and after) with no holes in the packaging. Impossible? Yes!

   Yes, that is, until the explanation, which is a good one. As a character, Senator Banner is a little hard to take. Commings wrote very much in the John Dickson Carr mode, and if you find Dr. Gideon Fell or Sir Henry Merrivale a little over the top, they have met their match and then some in Brooks Banner. But then again, you probably don’t love stories such as this one for the characters; it’s for the puzzle, and I don’t think I’m speaking only for myself.

LOU MANFREDO “A Study in Mint.” Short story. Gus Oliver #5. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, November 2013. Probably never reprinted or collected.

   Lou Manfredo, befoe he turned his hand to writing, was a 25-year veteran of the Brooklyn criminal justice system. Upon his retirement he wrote three well-regarded novels about a Brooklyn cop named Joe Rizzo, who also appeared in a handful of short stories about life of a policeman whose primary goal was to do his job and do it well.

   He also wrote five stories about Gus Oliver, who at the time of this story, was the constable in the small farming of Central Islip, Long Island. “A Study in Mint” is in fact the prequel to the other four, taking place in 1939 and telling the tale of how Oliver cracked the case of the first murder to have taken place there since its founding, or well over 200 years earlier.

   The death of one its inhabitants is designed to look like suicide, or so the state trooper who is first on the scene is convinced. By why was the body found near a well-kept garden, Gus asks himself, and why had he already contracted for some home improvements to be done with he month?

   It’s a case of the local cop knowing the people in the town he’s close to, not the outside one who comes in and sees things that are of surface value only. There are no surprises in this story, only good old-fashioned police work. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
   

      The Gus Oliver series –

Central Islin, U.S.A. Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Aug 2009
The Home of the Brave. Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Jan 2012
A Path to Somewhere. Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Sep/Oct 2012
The Star of the Running Blood. Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine May 2013
A Study in Mint. Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Nov 2013

RAYMOND CHANDLER “Wrong Pigeon.” Short story. PI Philip Marlowe. First magazine publication in Manhunt, February 1960. Previouslypublished, possibly in abridged form, in a British newspaper as “Marlowe Takes on the Syndicate.” Later reprinted as “Philip Marlowe’s Last Case” in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (January 1962) and as “The Pencil” in Argosy (September 1965). Collected as “The Pencil” in The Smell of Fear (H. Hamilton, UK, 1965). Reprinted in Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe: A Centennial Celebration, edited by Byron Preiss (Knopf, 1988) and as “Wrong Pigeon” in The Mammoth Book of Private Eye Stories, edited by Bill Pronzini and Martin H. Greenberg (Carroll & Graf, 1988), among others. TV adaptation: As “The Pencil” on Philip Marlowe, Private Eye, 16 April 1983 (season 1, episode 1), starring Powers Boothe.

   And with all of that, I’ve still probably missing something obvious. It was, as the title of the story as it appeared in EQMM, PI Philip Marlowe’s last case, Raymond Chandler having died in 1959, and it’s a good one. Marlowe takes on a job for a guy who wants to get out of the mob, but there’s been a pencil drawn through his name, and he knows the syndicate does not take defections lightly.

   It’s a fool’s task, but the promise of $5000 upon completion of a successful escape has a loud way of talking, and that’s in 1959 money. And Marlowe is no fool. He knows that there’s a reason why the job is done so easily. He’s right, of course, and you should be. too, the reader.

   It’s been a long time for me to get around to reading this one, and I’m glad I did. I don’t know what the general opinion is of this story, but I think Chandler was still in fine form when he wrote it. The story is light and breezily told, but when it comes down to it, Marlowe is as hardboiled as private eyes really ought to be, especially when it comes to dealing with the syndicate. Very enjoyable.

POUL ANDERSON “Flight to Forever.” Novella. First published in Super Science Stories, November 1950 First reprinted in Year’s Best Science Fiction Novels: 1952, edited by Everett F. Bleiler & T. E. Dikty (Frederick Fell, hardcover, 1952), and The Mammoth Book of Vintage Science Fiction: Short Novels of the 1950s, edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, & Charles G. Waugh (Carroll & Graf, softcover, 1990), among others. Collected in Past Times (Tor, paperback, 1984) and Alight in the Void (Tor, paperback, 1991), among others.

   This is one of Poul Anderson’s earliest stories, written when he was only 24, and a better story of Gosh Wow time travel, I can think of none better. And I do not mean that disparagingly! This tale was written back when time-traveling machines could be constructed in a garage, or if not, then in a single scientist’s laboratory, with only a modicum of assistance. Such a scientist is Martin Saunders, and his machine has been working perfectly. Inanimate objects have been sent farther and farther into the future, and in case they have also returned.

   Until now. An object sent 100 into the future has not come back, and Saunders an assistant decide to take a trip there themselves and see if they can’t figure out what went wrong. Now you and I know that this might not be the wisest thing to do, but this was also in the age (1950) when scientists did not think things out too clearly ahead of time before jumping into either homemade spaceships or time machines as they should.

   The problem does not consist of getting there. It seems, however, that there is a limit of only 70 years in going backward in time. The solution: keep going ahead into the future until they reach such a time when scientists have figured out a way to overcome the difficulty in going backward in time. Ahead they go, each stage of the in larger and larger increments of time. Fifty tears, a hundred years, a thousand years, five thousand years. Empires come and go, as they discover, oftentimes with barbarians at the gates. Some people they find are friendly; others not. A million years, a million million years, and on to the end of time?

   Well, I will leave it to you to read this to see if Saunders ever finds his way home again, but wow, what a trip he makes!
   

T. T. FLYNN “Bushwhackers Die Hard.” Novelette. First published in Dime Western, January 1933. Collected in Prodigal of Death: A Western Quintet (Five Star, hardcover, 2001).

   T. T. Flynn was one of the more prolific pulp writers, with hundreds of stories in both the detective and western pulp magazines. He tried but never really made the switch over to mass market paperbacks when the pulps began to die out, as some of his contemporary authors did.

   The two featured players in “Bushwhackers Die Hard” are a couple of rambling cowpokes named Lonesome Lang and Tarnation Tucker, who seem to delight in poking their noses into other people’s business, however, rather than poking cows. Even though team-ups such as this were quite commonplace in the western pulps, this appears to be their only recorded adventure together.

   Which begins by finding a dead man beside his buggy, which they had watched fly off the side of a mountaintop road, Investigating, they discover it wasn’t the fall hat killed him. He’d been shot and killed instead while maneuvering his way down the treacherous road. Their services the are offered to the man’s beautiful daughter, unwillingly on her part, as she believes they are on the rancher working against her father.

   Ah, misunderstandings. How could western stories such as this ever have been written without them? Flynn had a smooth and flowing writing style, which serves him in good stead in this average to middling pulp yarn, that and a good sense of what life was like in the west in a time when automobiles were just beginning to appear in such tales.

JOHNSTON McCULLEY “The Man Who Changed Rooms.” Novelette. Creighton Marpe #1. First published in Clues, February #2, 1929. Collected in The Johnston McCulley Megapack (Wildside Press, Kindle edition, March 2015).

   Johnston McCulley is known today, if at all, as the creator of the pulp western hero Zorro, and if it hadn’t been for Walt Disney, even such a dashing character as Zorro may be unknown to readers as some of the other series characters he came up with. Only the most dedicated collectors of old pulp magazines will remember these folks: Black Star, The Spider (the earlier version), The Mongoose, Thubway Tham, Green Ghost, The Thunderbolt, The Avenging Twins, and The Crimson Clown.

   He also wrote hundreds of standalone stories for the pulp magazines in all genres but primarily mysteries and westerns, along with several dozen hardcover novels. As for secret agent Creighton Marpe, I’ve listed this as his first story, but in fact, while there are possibilities in the character, it seems as though there never was another one.

   His task in “The Man Who Changed Rooms” is outwardly a simple one. He’s to take the train from New York City to Kansas City, pick up a top secret document, and bring it back to Manhattan. A job to be completed with code words and the utmost caution. The reason Creighton Marpe is called “the man who changed rooms” is that when he needs a room in a hotel, he books three, and when he buys tickets for a train, he buys at least two.

   Along the way he runs across various operatives for the other side, whom he invariably taunts in jaunty carefree fashion. Also along the way his path crosses that of a fellow agent on his side, Alla Stimney, a young woman he is rather fond of, a fact that causes them problems when both are being held captive by the aforementioned other side.

   There is no depth to the story, nor is the prose anything but rudimentary. but it’s told in such breakneck fashion, the non-sophisticated reader may not even notice. Of course you must realize that I’m paid to notice such things, but somehow or another, I enjoyed the story anyway. Stories taking place largely on trains often have that effect on me.