WILL THOMAS – An Awkward Way to Die. Cyrus Barker & Thomas Llewellyn. Minotaur Books, eBook, novelette, 85 pages. August 2017.

First Sentence: The telephone set jangled on the corner of Cyrus Barker’s desk, and we both turned our head to stare at it.

   The personal tobacconist to Private Inquiry Agent Cyrus Barker has died. He was murdered in his shop. His body found in his humidor. It is up to Scotsman Barker, and his Welsh assistant Thomas Llewellyn, to find the killer.

   If one has not previously read Will Thomas, this is a wonderful introduction to his Barker and Llewelyn series.

   Thomas’s dialogue and subtle wry humor are always a pleasure to read— “Someone had died,” I stated. “Aye,” the Guv answered, “It is Vasilos Dimitriadis.” “Your tobacconist?” “The same.” “Isn’t he the one who blends your tobacco for you but won’t say what is in it?” “Not ‘isn’t,’ Mr. Llewelyn. ‘Wasn’t.’ Scotland Yard has required our presence immediately. Come along.”

   With the story set in Victorian England, Thomas cleverly calls out the dismissiveness toward women and prejudice towards foreigners— “It was always easier to blame a foreigner, as if England had no criminal class of its own.” —demonstrating that little has changed over time.

   â€œAn Awkward Way to Die” is a clever story with the solution proving that it’s all about noticing the details. It is a delight to read, as is the entire series.

MARCIA MULLER “The Holes in the System.” Rae Kelleher #2. First appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, June 1996. Reprinted in Detective Duos, edited by Marcia Muller & Bill Pronzini (Oxford University Press, 1997). Collected in McCone and Friends (Crippen & Landru, softcover, 2000).

   From what I have been able to determine, this is the second story in which Rae Kelleher, Sharon McCone’s assistant at the All Souls Legal Cooperative, gets the top billing. I do not believe that there was a third one, but as I’ve only discovered an earlier one after this review was first posted, I could very easily be wrong again. (See comment #3.) No matter. I just finished reading this one, and it’s a good one.

   Rae is asked to look into a case brought to them by the Texas-born owner of a pawn shop in San Francisco by the name of the Cash Cow. It seems that he has recently hired a young deaf and mute boy he found on his doorstep, and he would like to find the boy’s mother, who has disappeared.

   Even though Rae tells the story, fans of Sharon McCone should know that not only does she shows up to help crack the case, but this time around we get to see her through the eyes of someone else, one who considers her a mentor as well as a boss, and a friend.

   What we also get is a mystery story in which some detective work is actually done, has its amusing moments, and as a bonus, is a story in which the mean streets that Raymond Chandler talked about come into play as well. Quite an accomplishment for a tale only 22 pages long!

LESLIE T. WHITE “Tough Guy.” Reprinted in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, September-October 2017. This issue’s Mystery Classic, selected and introduced by Jim Doherty. First published in Liberty, 21 June 1941. Reprinted in Liberty Quarterly: 19 Tales of Intrigue, Mystery & Adventure (Vol. 1, No. 1, ca. 1950).

    In his introduction to this story, Jim Doherty makes a solid case for Leslie White as one of the very first practitioners of the police procedural novel. Up for discussion in particular are Me, Detective (1936), a biographical account of White’s own career, Harness Bull (1937), and Homicide (1937).

    Most of White’s work was done for the pulp magazines, producing as he did well over 100 short stories for that market, beginning with “Phoney Evidence” in The Dragnet Magazine, January 1930. To substantiate his case, Doherty describes some of White’s career in police work, and how he used it to give all of his crime fiction a solid, believable setting.

    “Tough Guy” was written toward the end of his pulp fiction days, and that’s even a stretch, as Liberty magazine was not really a pulp. It’s the story of a tough cop named Gahagan who lives for nothing other than his job, a primary part of which is nailing a notorious killer and crime boss by the name of Danny Trumbull.

    Things go awry in his life when the trail leads him to Trumbull’s eight-year-old daughter Penny, who lives alone with her father but who has no idea how totally bad he is. This one starts out in full tilt pulp mode, but by the end, it’s become, as you might have expected, a long way from being a hard-boiled tale of a tough guy cop. Quite the opposite.

    Which does not make it a bad story, by any means. In fact, I enjoyed this one more than any of the other twelve stories in this latest issue of AHMM, many of them (to my mind) rather weak efforts and/or not interesting to me. It’s starting to get difficult to justify spending $7.99 an issue for a magazine that I can’t get excited about any more.

DAVID GERROLD “The Thing in the Back Yard.” First published in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Sept-Oct 2014. Collected in Entanglements and Terrors (DG Media, softcover, 2015).

   For an author who’s been around for almost 50 years (I believe his firs published work was “Oracle for a White Rabbit,” which appeared in the December 1968 issue of Galaxy SF), why has it taken so long for me to have read anything he’s written? (I have seen the Tribbles episode he wrote for Star Trek, but then so has every SF fan in the world, at least those of a certain age.)

   Better late than never, I say, and “The Thing in the Back Yard” begins in very familiar territory: Bob’s Big Boy restaurant in Toluca Lake CA, a true landmark of its kind. I’ve never stopped in, but I’ve passed by in a car many, many times. This is where the narrator of the story tells his friend Pesky Dan Goodman about the problem he’s been having with burglars getting into his home and stealing stuff.

   Pesky Dan Goodman’s solution: hire a troll. Not a mere garden gnome, but a real life troll. Big mistake. Trolls grow, and the more you hate them, the more they grow. And the more territorial they get.

   This falls into the category of Famous Last Words. This also is the funniest story I’ve read so far this year.

ALEXANDER JABLOKOV “How Sere Picked Up Her Laundry.” Sere Glagolit #1. Novella. Lead story in Asimov’s Science Fiction, July/August 2017.

   Of the three (or maybe four) SF print magazines still remaining, I think the best science fiction stories come from Asimov’s. (Not surprisingly, the best fantasy stories appear in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.)

   Analog SF is tied a little too closely to the traditional SF tale, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s what the magazine’s readers want and have come to expect. The science fiction in Asimov’s is considerably more adventurous and what’s more, the stories in it are noticeably better written.

   Case in point, this the first appearance of PI Sere Glagolit. Having had her business stolen out from under her by her former partner, she’s working on her own now, and having a difficult time of it. The planet where she lives, by the way, is not Earth. It’s a world with two suns and in particular, Sere works in a city called Tempest, one that is populated by pockets of all shapes and varieties of alien races, including humans (called the Om).

   She’s hired to find out who’s been buying up the leases of a collected sequence of properties leading from the bottom of Drur Reef to the top. She soon learns that a cleaning organization called Ferrulin is involved, not a criminal enterprise, by any means, but as Sere says, they have “more than a couple of toes over the line.” While working on the case, she also learns how it was that a small time exterminator accidentally killed himself in a tunnel through the mysterious butte, a landmark of some note in the city.

   As in all good private eye stories, there is a lot of footwork (and more) to be done, lots of false leads, lots of non-human characters with non-human motivations to talk to, and above all, a setting with lots of exotic scenery for the reader to gradually learn his/her own way around in. Thankfully, at novella length (over 30 oversized pages of solid print), there’s plenty of time and space to do so.

   More stories are promised, which is good news indeed.

MARTIN L. SHOEMAKER “Not Far Enough.” Novella. Captain Nick Aames #4. Lead story in Analog SF, July/August 2017.

    Michael L. Shoemaker is a new author for me, but he’s been writing science fiction since 2011, mostly of the nuts and bolts “hard” variety, and was nominated for a Nebula for Best Short Story in 2016 (“Today I Am Paul,” Clarkesworld #107).

    “Not Far Enough” is the fourth in a series of stories chronicling the adventures of a space captain named Nick Aames, but the blurb a the beginning of the story adds the additional information that a pair of crew members named Anson Carter (Lieutenant Jr. Grade) and Smith (Ensign, and female) are in at least two of the three earlier ones.

    The latter is the one telling this particular tale, that of the fate of a pair of simultaneous landing parties on Mars, six members in each. After a series of serious accidents, including one to the mother ship still in orbit, they find themselves stranded there, with little hope of rescue. How they manage to survive is the crux of the story. What it takes is sheer smartness and determination, and despite some serious interpersonal relationships that have to be worked through.

    Typical Analog material, in other words. Parts of the story are very good, especially the technical end of things. Details at the beginning could have been more clearly delineated, however, and some of the dialogue seems awkward and stilted to me. But overall, though, if you’re interested in what the early history of what exploration in space might be like, keep an eye out for this one.

  ROBERT SILVERBERG “Passengers.” First appeared in Orbit 4, edited by Damon Knight (Putnam, hardcover, 1968; Berkley, paperback, August 1969). First collected in in The Cube Root of Uncertainty (Macmillan, hardcover, 1970) and in Moonferns and Starsongs (Ballantine, paperback, June 1971). Reprinted elsewhere many times.

   At some time in the near future, “near” in the relatively speaking sense, since this story first appeared in 1968 but takes place in 1987, aliens have landed on Earth, and I mean aliens. No one has seen them, no one knows what they want, but whenever they want, they take over a human being’s body and do what they want with it for as long as they want. And when they leave, the person they have ridden with does not remember anything about the trip.

   Except for maybe this time. A man named Charles wakes up after haven been ridden for three days, and this time he remembers that he was with a girl, a girl named Helen. What’s more by some freak of luck, he meets her. Helen, that is. Does she remember him? No. But Charles is attracted to her, and he persists.

   It was no freak of luck. The aliens, whoever they are, like to play games, and sometimes their games are mean.

   It is difficult to say how it is possible for a story that could have been novel length to be compressed in the space of only 18 pages, but with spare prose, minimal exposition, a heap of fatalism, and best of all, a wryly tragic ending, that is exactly what Robert Silverberg does with this tale.

   The story was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1970, and won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story in 1969.

ED GORMAN “Our Kind of Guy.” First appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, July 1996. Collected in Famous Blue Raincoat, Crippen & Landru, trade paperback, 1999, and in Out There in the Darkness: The Collected Ed Gorman – Volume One, PS Publishing, hardcover (limited edition), 2007.

   The late Ed Gorman spent over twenty years in the advertising and public relations business before becoming a full-time writer, and I wonder if he ever put that background to better use than in this story.

   Two partners in a multimillion-dollar advertising agency in a small Midwestern town have 64.3 percent of their business tied up with one client, the Hancher Chicken account, and a crisis is brewing. It turns out that Ted Hancher, the CEO of the company has gotten religion and is about to cancel the account. Apparently he no longer wants his company to be associated with the boozing and high life of Bill and Roy, co-owners of the agency. Drinking, smoking, cursing, women? All verboten.

   What to do? They come up with a plan, one involving a local former call girl named Brandy, a motel, a camera, a little blackmail, and hey presto, no more worries. What could go wrong?

   Well, of course something does, and what a tricky twist of the knickers it is that fate plays on the luckless perpetrators of this far from foolproof plan. But wait! Fate steps in again. A double twist. Most stories manage only one. This one has two.

   Combine this with Gorman’s usual semi-sour look at the world he always wrote about anyway, and prose written so smoothly that you think anyone can do it, but you can’t. The result is a noirish gem of the highest magnitude. An absolute winner.

KEITH LAUMER “Ballots and Bandits.” First published in If, September-October 1970. Collected in Retief of the CDT (Doubleday, hardcover, 1971; Pocket, paperback, July 1978).

   After reading and reporting back on a novel by Keith Laumer called Catastrophe Planet a while back, I realized that I hadn’t read any of the series of stories he wrote about an intergalactic diplomatic troubleshooter named Retief in quite a while. I enjoyed them immensely back in the 60s and early 70s, but as time went on, I started to forget how good they were.

   Shame on me. I read this one a couple of days ago, and I found it as funny as I remember all of Retief’s adventures for the CDT were. Retief is “fighter” spelled backwards, or so I’m told (well, it’s close), and what the initials CDT stand for is Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne. The stories themselves are wicked, satirical jabs at diplomatic missions around the world, and the US in particular, based on Laumer’s previous career in the foreign service.

   The only difference being that instead of traveling around the world, Retief’s job takes him to all kinds of alien planets all over the galaxy. What’s the same is the dunderheadedness of all ambassadors and their ilk — all Retief’s superiors, but none of them, not one, can maneuver their way through an interworld diplomatic crisis if their lives depend on it. And often they do.

   In “Ballots and Bandits” Retief and entourage (well, technically speaking, he’s part of the entourage) are on the planet Oberon where the enemy Groaci have recently been sent packing, and the various races on the planet are about to have independent elections for the first time.

   Two problems: Ambassador Clawhammer thinks the Terrans should have their say in the matter, and worse, the various races on Oberon have mistakenly taken the idea of election battles and political war chests far more literally as the people of other worlds do. The question is, which is better, being pushed around by local hoodlums, of being exploited from afar?

   Retief is the kind of guy that cuts through diplomatic double talk with total impatience, and as a mere Second Secretary solves the problem as a man who thinks with his head instead of using it as only a place to rest his hat. And in the process this time around he teaches the Oberonians the Rituals of “Whistle-stopping, Baby-kisisng, Fence-sitting, and Mid-slinging, plus a considerable amount of Viewing-with-Alarm.”

   Great stuff. I’ve only scratched the surface of what made me laugh out loud with this one, and more than once.

CHARLIE JANE ANDERS “A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime.” First published in Cosmic Powers, edited by John Joseph Adams (Saga Press, trade paperback; 1st printing, April 2017).

    Browsing at Barnes & Noble yesterday, a brand new science fiction anthology called Cosmic Powers caught my eye. I bought it almost immediately, brought it home, and I’m already three stories and 70 pages into it. The overall theme, according to the editor, John Joseph Adams, in his introduction are “stories of larger than life heroes battling menacing force, in far-flung galaxies, with the fate of the universe at stake.”

   Well, yippee! As long as the authors don’t go all early Edmond Hamilton on us, or E. E. Smith, Ph.D., this is the kind of science fiction I’m always on the lookout for, and so far, I’m happy to tell you, they haven’t. The stories are huge in scope, but up close and personal in scale. (I hope that makes sense.)

   The first story in the book, “A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime,” by Hugo award-winner Charlie Jane Anders, is a pretty good example. In fact, compared to the deadly dull military SF being published (what I’ve seen of it), it could be faulted in going too far in the other direction; that is to say, making too light of the affair — which in this case consists entering the realm of a huge blob of existence called The Vastness, escaping with a device called a hypernautic synchrotrix on a spaceship called the Spicy Meatball, one of the two perpetrators thereof (one male and one female) being someone who calls on a pair of gods totally new to me (“Thank Hall and Oates!”), and all this in only the first eight pages, with 26 more to go.

   I enjoyed this one. I think the author manages to keep both feet on the right side of fun versus slapstick, but this may very well be one of those situations where simply said, your mileage may vary.