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.

HOWARD BROWNE “So Dark for April.” Paul Pine. Novelette. First published in Manhunt, February 1953 [Vol. 1 No. 2] as by John Evans. Collected in The Paper Gun (Dennis McMillan, 1985) under the author’s real name, Howard Browne. Reprinted also under the author’s real name in The Mammoth Book of Private Eye Stories, edited by Bill Pronzini and Martin H. Greenberg (Carrol & Graf, 1988).

   Unless I am mistaken, this is the only instance of Chicago-based PI Paul Pine appearing in a work of short fiction. Not only that, but if you’re a fan of Raymond Chandler, you really need to read this one. If Raymond Chandler never existed, neither would Paul Pine. He’s his own man, mind you, with his own particular brand of cases he tackled, so I can’t, nor wouldn’t, call the stories pastiches in any sense of term. What they are are a lot of fun to read. I’ll list all of Pine’s novel length investigations at the end of this review.

   It (probably) goes without saying, but you can’t get the full flavor of a Paul Pine story in one as short as “So Dark for April.” It has a semi-wacky opening, though, one that will draw any reader of PI stories right on in. Pine walks into his office one day only to find a dead man in his outer waiting room. The man has been shot in the chest. He has very little by which he could be identified, and his clothes do not match. A good new coat, dirty slacks, and shoes but no socks.

   The detective sergeant on the case is belligerent to Pine, nothing new there. Very seldom do cops and PI’s get along. The day is rainy, hence the title, but that’s nothing that people living in Chicago take much note about. Pine’s detective work is excellent, but it’s the telling that makes the story:

—

      The Paul Pine series —

         As by John Evans:

Halo in Blood. Bobbs Merrill 1946
Halo for Satan. Bobbs Merrill 1948
Halo in Brass. Bobbs Merrill 1949

         As by Howard Browne:

The Taste of Ashes. Simon & Schuster 1957
The Paper Gun. Dennis McMillan 1985 (collection)

DOROTHY B. HUGHES “The Homecoming.” Short story. First published in Murder Cavalcade (Duell Sloane & Pearce, 1946, the first MWA Anthology). Reprinted in Rex Stout’s Mystery Monthly #9, 1947, and Verdict, July 1953. Also reprinted in Best American Noir of the Century, edited by James Ellroy & Otto Penzler (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010).

   There isn’t a lot that’s new in this chilling short story of a jilted lover’s leap into madness and revenge. When “Hero Jim” comes home from the war as just that, while stay-at-home Benny’s contribution to the war effort was limited to working in his home town’s recruiting center, it’s no wonder that the latter feels the way he does when Nan takes up with Jim again.

   No, it’s the telling that will this tale stuck in your head for a while. Hughes’s prose is both poetic and incisive. The reader knows exactly what is going to happen and can’t look away. An ordinary writer whose talent was confined to the level of the pulp magazines at the time simply wouldn’t have been up to the challenge. Dorothy B. Hughes simply nails it in “The Homecoming,” a small noirish gem of a tale.

   And one quite worthy of an author whose novel-length work was responsible for movies such as The Fallen Sparrow (1943), In a Lonely Place (1950), and Ride the Pink Horse (1947), each one an absolute classic of the film noir genre.

CORNELL WOOLRICH. “Dipped in Blood.” Novelette. First published in Detective Story Magazine, April 1945. Reprinted in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, October 1964, as “Adventures of a Fountain Pen.” Collected in The Ten Faces of Cornell Woolrich (Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1965) also as “Adventures of a Fountain Pen.” Film: US title, Oh, Bomb! (Japan, 1964, directed by Kihachi Okamoto).

   There is a small but significant subgenre of both fiction and the movies in which the story follows an object of some importance is followed through its lifetime as it’s passed from hand to hand in small vignettes. It may be a gun, an automobile, almost anything, including a similar chain connecting people in all walks of lives. (If there’s a name to such a subgenre, I don’t know what it is. Maybe someone reading this can help.)

   The object in this richly ironic story by Woolrich is a fountain pen, manufactured to order as a means of assassination by one gangster meant for another. Things go awry, however, as they always do in a Woolrich story, with one final twist at the end, about which I will tell you only that it’s there but nothing more. There are things best to be discovered on one’s own.

   I don’t believe this is one of Woolrich’s better known stories, but what it has is both an ending worth waiting for and people in it who are described to perfection in just a few words or lines. This is why, when back in the 1970s when I first started to seriously read mysteries, if I was asked who my favorite mystery writer was, it was always a tossup between Erle Stanley Gardner, Rex Stout, or Cornell Woolrich, in alphabetical order. That still holds true today.

DAY KEENE “Nothing to Worry About.” Short story. First published in Detective Tales, August 1945. Collected in League of the Grateful Dead and Other Stories (Ramble House, 2010). Reprinted in Best American Noir of the Century, edited by James Ellroy & Otto Penzler (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010).

   There is a long tradition of stories such as this one. It is a prime example of tales in which one half of a married couple plans to kill the other one, but even though the planning is perfect, things do not work out as well as the guilty person had in mind.

   In this one – and far from the very first one in its subgenre – an Assistant State’s Attorney named Sorrell, and someone who should know better but who’s arrogant enough to think he can get away with it, decides to kill his wife, a woman he now hates and who, he is convinced, is holding his career back. But even more, he has another woman in mind already to replace her.

   It doesn’t work out, of course, but in addition to than the well-timed twist in the end, author Day Keene fleshes out the other characters, too, ones that other writers might even have omitted, or at best glossed over. And yet I demur. There’s nothing really new in this one. It’s a good story, but why (I wonder) was it recently selected as one of the “Best American Noir of the Century”?