HAROLD Q. MASUR “The Corpse Maker.” Short story. Scott Jordan. First published in Come Seven, Come Death, edited by Henry Morrison (Pocket, paperback original, 1965). Never collected or reprinted (unless advised otherwise).

   Attorney Scott Jordan’s client, a notorious fence, is guilty as charged, but when the D.A. offers to make a deal, he turns him down. It seems that the police forced their way into the man’s apartment and searched it without a warrant. So why then does the man not show up for his trial? Has he skipped bail just when he’s about to go free?

   Totally baffled, Jordan tracks him down and finds him at home almost beaten to death. He names his assailant and an (almost) dying message, which of course gives Jordan a lot to go on. And he needs it, as the case is (almost) as complicated as a full-length novel, complete with another killing and (of course) a beautiful girl.

   All to the good, but the story is badly marred by heavy coincidence – two, in fact, occurring on the very same page. Nor in the length of the tale (22 pages) is there time for any real detection. Jordan’s explanation fits all the facts, but how he managed to put them all together is not gone into. And in spite of the fact that I’ve enjoyed all of the Scott Jordan novels I’ve read, that was a long time ago, and I was disappointed with this one. In “The Corpse Maker,” he’s as straight and narrow as white bread, with not a ounce of grittiness to him.

   I’ll have to go back and read some of his early books again.

RICHARD S. PRATHER “The Guilty Party.” Short story. PI Shell Scott. First published in Come Seven, Come Death, edited by Henry Morrison (Pocket, paperback original, 1965). Collected in The Shell Scott Sampler (Pocket, paperback original, 1969).

   Shell doesn’t have anything close to a major crime to solve in this one, and a full page of its full thirteen is taken up in describing his newest client, from the top of her head to her toes. She’s quite an eyeful, and Shell doesn’t know whether to ogle, leer, or just outright stare:

   
   It also turns out that she is quite wealthy, in the multi-million dollar range,

   So why has she come to hire Shell Scott? It turns out that a small metal device fell out from under her bed when got up that morning. Shell quickly deduces that it was a listening device of some kind. A bedbug, if you will. Who could have put it there? The only person who’s been in Lydia’s apartment recently is her fiancé.

   If nothing else, Shell knows a cad when he sees him, or in this case, learns about him.

   Once in Lydia’s apartment, he puts on a show for her, bouncing up and down on her bed, yelling YOWZA! (I’m paraphrasing), while she’s yelling back, STOP! and WHAT ARE YOU DOING? And he replies, DARLING!!

   It’s one way to flush out a cad when you need to in a hurry.

   Obviously this is a very minor effort, but it’s also exactly what devout readers of Shell Scott’s wackier adventures had come to expect, and it’s also exactly what they got.

EDWARD D. HOCH “The Theft of the Brazen Letters.” Short story. Nick Velvet #4. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, November 1968 (their 300th issue). First collected in The Spy and the Thief (Davis, digest-sized paperback; 1st printing, December 1971).

   The reason I like Hoch’s Nick Velvet series so much is that there’s always a twofold mystery to be solved in them. Nick’s fee is $20,000 per each commissioned theft he agrees to take on, and each time it is always for some insignificant object that no one would ever think worth stealing. Mystery number one: How does he mange to steal that very insignificant object? Mystery number two: Nick is also a very inquisitive guy, and of course he’s always also interested as to why he was asked to steal the item he does.

   For example, from the introduction to this story in EQMM, previous thefts he’s taken as assignments include stealing a tiger from a zoo, water from a swimming pool and a toy mouse from the prop room of a movie studio. In “The Theft of the Brazen Letters,” he asked to steal three of seven neon letters from the outside of a commercial building. The seven letters are SATOMEX. I think you can deduce on your own which three letters Nick’s client wants stolen, but I don’t think you’ll have any more idea than I did as to why.

   As is usual for Ed Hoch’s stories, this is purely a puzzle tale. Nothing more nor anything less, and that’s super fine for me. There’s even a bonus in this one, as Nick has the local cops to contend with, and as a surprise to me, he’s one up on them as well. The zinger at the end is simple, but a zinger nonetheless.

THEODORE STURGEON. “Agnes, Accent and Access.” Short story. First published in Galaxy SF, October 1973. Reprinted in The Best from Galaxy, Volume II, edited anonymously by Ejler Jakobsson. Collected in Case and the Dreamer, Volume XIII: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon (North Atlantic Books, 2010).

   This is the second of three short stories in this issue of Galaxy that I’ve been reading, ignoring the two long serial installments by James White and Arthur C. Clarke that take up a full two-thirds of the magazine. As far as ISFDb knows, the story has appeared in only two other places, which seems strange to me, as it’s a good one.

   When a company who stock in trade is the information retrieval business, it seems strange that they have to hire an outside consultant when problems arrive internally: requests from departments of the firm are being replied to with very incorrect responses. His way of investigating: to sit outside the president’s office ostensibly waiting for an appointment but in reality watching the very efficient secretary, named Agnes, working at her desk throughout the day.

   This story was written in 1973, long before Siri and Alexa came along, but if science fiction could ever have been said to predict the future, and the describe the problems that come along with it, this is a story that fits the bill to perfection. Adding even more to the enjoyment of the tale is the fact that Theodore Sturgeon was a flows along.

   Examples. This one line sentence, a mere throwaway in fact, sums up a fact that you might not of thought of yourself, but once read, you say, “Of course.”

   Or how about this longer passage, describing only the office itself where the consultant is waiting and observing:

HARLAN ELLISON “Cold Friend.” First published in Galaxy SF, October 1973. Reprinted in The Best from Galaxy, Volume II, edited anonymously by Ejler Jakobsson. Collected in Approaching Oblivion: Road Signs on the Treadmill Toward Tomorrow (Walker, hardcover, 1974).

   A man who has died on cancer wakes up and finds that except for a chunk of land surrounding the hospital in Hanover, New Hampshire, perhaps only three blocks in radius, the rest of the world has disappeared. Electricity is still on, and food is always stocked in the stores. At the edge of his world, things dangle from underneath, cables, water linesand the like.

   He is the only one there, except at first strange barbarians from all eras from Earth’s past, who ride through then vanish over the edge. Until, finally, a young girl from Boston shows up. She is very pale and is wearing only a translucent dress. She is also very cold to the touch. She claims to have been responsible for the situation they are in, but Eugene Harrison (that’s his name), is not so sure.

   There is a little more to the story, but not a lot. (I have glossed over the finer details.) Readers who want solid endings to their reading matter may not like this one, but it’s told in such a way, — as if Eugene Harrison is telling us his story in words an ordinary person would use (or if Harlan Ellison, in proxy, was leaving an audio recording for us to listen to) — you may not mind at all either.

PostScript: You may be able to discern from the cover of Galaxy SF above that this was a special issue, the 23rd Anniversary issue, with quite a few name authors in it. If I’d bought this issue from the newsstand, and I probably did, I might have been disappointed. One chunk of 50 pages is the first part of a serial by James White (“The Dream Millennium”), and another chunk of almost 70 pages is the end of a serial by Arthur C. Clarke (“Rendezvous with Rama”).

   That’s 120 pages of a 180 page magazine. This leaves space for only a one page poem by Ray Bradbury, and three short stories. The other two are by Theodore Sturgeon and Ursula K. LeGuin. If you skip the serial installments, that’s not a lot of reading for 75 cents.

ROSS MACDONALD. “Guilt-Edged Blonde.” Lew Archer. Short story. First appeared in Manhunt, January 1954, as by John Ross Macdonald. Reprinted in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, February 1974. Collected in The Name Is Archer (Bantam, paperback, 1955), also as by John Ross Macdonald. Two stories were added to the collection when it was reprinted by Mysterious Press as Lew Archer: Private Investigator in 1977 under the name Ross Macdonald. Reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Private Eye Stories, edited by Bill Pronzini and Martin H. Greenberg (Carrol & Graf, 1988), and in Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories, edited by Bill Pronzini & Jack Adrian (Oxford Press, 1995). Film: Le loup de la côte ouest (The Wolf of the West Coast), France, 2002. [James Faulkner played protagonist “Lew Millar.”]

   PI Lew Archer is hired for a six day job as a bodyguard for a man who is afraid to leave his house after receiving a phone call that morning. He’s met at the airport by the man’s brother, but the job doesn’t last all that long. When they reach the house, they find his client shot and dying outside on the lawn and a blonde-haired girl driving away in a hurry.

   After Archer persuades the brother to pay him to stay on the case, he learns that the dead man had a past. He’d been a treasurer for the mob in his younger days, and it’s apparent that his past had finally caught up with him. The brother, though, is also clearly trying to cover up for the girl.

   After tracking down the girl and learning what she tells him, Archer finds himself unlucky with a client a second time. He’s also been shot, and Archer finds him dying outside his home. I won’t go into details, but this is an early version of the stories involving dysfunctional families and their secrets that Ross Macdonald became famous for, and even as short as it is, it’s one told well.

   CARTER DICKSON  “The Footprint in the Sky.” Short story. Colonel March. First published in The Strand, January 1940, as “Clue in the Snow.” Collected in The Department of Queer Complaints (Morrow, hardcover, 1940). Also collected in Merrivale, March and Murder (IPL, hardcover, 1991) as by John Dickson Carr. Reprinted in Murder in Spades, edited by Ellery Queen (Pyramid, paperback, 1969), also as by Carr.

   Strictly speaking, perhaps, not a locked room mystery, but an impossible crime, once you accept the fact that the young girl framed for the crime is innocent, a premise hard to believe, given the facts. A woman living in the house next door, separated by a tall hedge, has been clubbed several times on the head and robbed. It has snowed overnight and the only footprints going back and forth between the two houses are hers. She has size four shoes and the bottoms of hers are soaking wet.

   Carr’s books and stories are always permeated with eerie settings and backgrounds, and this one is no exception. The girl is known for sleepwalking and waking up having no idea what she may have done while doing so. For all she knows, she may have done it. Only Colonel March, head of Scotland Yard’s Department of Queer Complaints, believes her story at once, as soon as he’s on the scene.

   Carr was also known for playing “fair” with the reader, and again this one is no exception, but only once the reader, as soon as the rather outrageous solution is revealed, says, “Hey! What?” (quoting me exactly) and goes back into the story to discover what it was the March used to base his deductions on. Sure enough, it’s there. Right in plain sight, but totally buried in a paragraph used quite innocuously to describe a room.

   Note my use of the word “outrageous” in the paragraph above. I still don’t believe what he says happened could actually be done, but I guess I’d have to grant you that it *could* have.

WILLIAM CAMPBELL GAULT “Stolen Star.” Short story. Joe Puma. First published in Manhunt, November 1957. Reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Private Eye Stories, edited by Bill Pronzini and Martin H. Greenberg (Carrol & Graf, 1988). Collected in Marksman & Other Stories (Crippen & Landru, 2003).

   I may have this totally wrong, but even though PI Joe Puma’s home base is southern California, I don’t remember many of the novels and other fiction he was in involving Hollywood and the world of glamorous movie stars, beautiful starlets, and famous directors.

   I think of him rather as a blue-collar kind of guy, so my sense is that his brushes with the film industry were at the lower ends of it: chiseling movie producers at independent studios, conniving agents, and the like. Maybe I’m wrong, but at least in “Stolen Star” he gets to bump elbows (so to speak) with some of the major players in the industry which keeps all those millions if not billions of entertainment money flowing into the L.A. area.

   And even that may be an exaggeration: “Laura Spain had been kidnapped. Laura wasn’t the youngest star in the business, but she still had her figure and enough looks to pull all the men over thirty into any theatre showing one of her pictures. […] The thing had a bad odor right from the first ransom note.”

   Or in other words, maybe Laura thinks she’s slipping. That her career needs a boost, however sketchy the plan may be.

   Even though he smells something wrong, Puma agrees to be the go-between in getting the money to the kidnappers. And he’s right. Things do not work out well, and making what goes wrong as right as he can is the rest of the story. As always in these early stories, written just after the pulps died, Gault’s prose is snappy and smooth and goes down awfully easily.

   I do wish, though, that he had let the reader know more what Puma learns when he learned it, and even then, there’s a bit of jump between knowing it and knowing exactly who did it and why. I hope I don’t sound overly picky about this. It’s a very good story.

STEVE LINDLEY “Man Buries Man.” Kubiak #? Novelette. Published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, June 2014. Probably never reprinted.

   Kubiak (no first name known) is an ex-Chicago cop who maintains good relations with the members still on the force or also retired. He also has a long list of contacts who come in handy whenever he needs them, which is rather often, given of course he’s no longer on the job.

   It’s his wife Denise, though, who takes the lead on this one. A downstairs neighbor in the apartment building they live in has noticed that the appearance of an unidentified body found in Belmont Harbor matches the sudden disappearance of a homeless man who until then could be seen everyday sitting on the same bench in the park. He was a gentle man who liked to talk but with whom no one did because, well, of his odor.

   To that end, though, he always had a supply of sausages he’d offer to passers-by. It takes a while for the officer in charge of the body in the bay to agree, but yes, it turns out that he and the homeless man are one in the same. More than that, he’s not interested. Kubiak leaves Denise in charge of her investigation, but soon he’s interested, too.

   It’s a classic casebook of both detective work and footwork by the two, and before long the miscreants in the case, totally convinced they’d gotten away with something, are proven wrong. Nicely done.
   

      The Kubiak series   [as presently known] —

Hallway Dog. AHMM, April 1998
Death Takes Center Stage. AHMM, January/February 2008
Small Favors,. AHMM, March 2011
Man Buries Man. AHMM, June 2014
A Matter of Trust and Surveillance. AHMM, January/February 2019.

● Kubiak’s Daughter, as by Stephen Lindley. Novel. Thomas & Mercer, November 2012.

ALFRED BESTER “Galatea Galante, the Perfect Popsy.” Novella. First published in Omni, April 1979. Reprinted in The Best of Omni Science Fiction, edited by Ben Bova & Don Myrus (1980) and The Best Science Fiction of the Year #9, edited by Terry Carr (Del Rey/Ballantine, 1980). Collected in Virtual Unrealities: The Short Fiction of Alfred Bester (Vintage, 1997).

   The word “biodroid” may be as new to you as it was to me, but it didn’t me take long to figure out what one is, and Dominie Regis Manwright is the number one craftsman in the field of making them, and always to his client’s complete specifications. He’s commissioned in this highly amusing tale to create just that: a young and attractive woman, perfect in every way: intelligent but compliant, perceptive but instantly available; that is to say,  completely perfect in every way.

   But as Manwright explains to his client, such a woman would also be completely boring. What he suggests is a “wild” factor, a random ingredient that would also make her interesting. Which of course, when Galatea comes of age, it does.

   Keep in mind that this story was written when men’s magazines such as Playboy and Penthouse were at their peaks of popularity. This rollicking romp of a story may have a harder time of it being accepted for publication today, based as it is on the emphasis on the male perception of the ideal woman, much less ending up in a “Best of the Year” anthology (and the lead-off story, to boot). Maybe I’m wrong, but if I’m right, we the readers today are the losers for it.

   But it should also be noted that it was Omni (a slick magazine with connections with Penthouse, and generally assumed to be rather sophisticated) that first published it, not Analog or Asimov’s. I never bought the magazine myself, thinking that the fiction in it was always outweighed by the scientific articles in each issue, of which I had much less time for at the time.