FRANK KANE – Ring-a-Ding-Ding. PI Johnny Lindell. Dell 7451, paperback original; 1st printing, May 1963. Cover art: Ron Lesser.

Private eye Johnny Lindell, loosely cooperating with the police, helps them solve the murder of a hatcheck girl who threatened to expose a blackmail racket. Life in the underworld is taken for granted, and its nastiness is revealed without excessive finger pointing.

But author Frank Kane’s prose is often cheap and uninspired. For example, the line: “The bodice of her gown seemed inadequate to contain the fullness of her breasts.” (page 10)

Characters act at the whim of the author, who is omniscient in relating past histories and present thoughts, The credibility of the plot is stretched when, for another example, Liddell tells the police who his client is on page 114 and later groans when he learns that they know on page 153.

Easy surface reading.

Rating: **

HAL CLEMENT – Ocean on Top. Serialized in If Science Fiction, October through December 1967. Daw, paperback, June 1973. Cover art: Jack Gaughan.

   Begun as a perceptive narrative, with no conversation occurring in the first installment of the serial, the story is bogged down from the start, with no sign of human relationships being portrayed. Focused as it is on a separate culture existing at the bottom of the Pacific independently of the rest of the human race, Clement’s tale revolves around four humans, three men and the obligatory woman, who discover these people, but he fails to make any of these natives real.

   The difficulty of existence in this strange environment, even with advanced scientific capabilities, are not gone into far enough, not nearly so. Is the problem too difficult, so impossible, even for an author of Clement’s “hard science” reputation?

   Referring again to the serial ( I have not read the later paperback version which was perhaps expanded from the magazine in which it first appeared), I found myself objecting to learning more about the story from the synopses provided at the beginnings of the last two installments. Granted, there were implications as to the nature of the (Power) Board were present, for example, but why were they spelled out in detail in these synopses?

Rating: ***½

IF SCIENCE FICTION. December 1967. Cover art: Douglas Chaffee. Editor: Frederik Pohl. Overall rating: **½.

JAMES WHITE “All Judgment Fled.: Serial, part 1 of 3. See report following my review of the February 1968 issue.

JAY KAY KLEIN “On Conquered Earth.” Another story of unsuspecting aliens being outsmarted by dumb Earthlings. (2)

FRITZ LEIBER “Answering Service.” An old woman who says she is dying of a heart attack needs help. (4)

C. C. MacAPP “When Sea Is Born Again.” Novelette. Life on an alien world, well-pictured, complicated by the forces of an unknown sea and by visitors from space. (3)

TERRY CARR “City of Yesterday.” The control of humans by machines reaches its final stages, (4)

ROBERT E. MARGROFF & ANDREW OFFUTT “Swordsmen of the Stars,” Novelette. A typical story of mercenary swordsmen hired to fight each other to decide quarrels between rulers of worlds. (2)

ROGER DEELEY “The Time Travellers.” Napoleon revisited. (3)

HAL CLEMENT “Ocean on Top.” Serial, part 3 of 3. See report to be posted soon here.

A. E. van VOGT – The House That Stood Still. Greenberg, hardcover, 1950. Detective Book Magazine, Winter 1952. Beacon 298, paperback, September 1960, as The Mating Cry. Paperback Librar 52-873, paperback, November 1965 (cover art by Jack Gaughan). Carroll & Graf, paperback, January 1993.

   Van Vogt tries a clumsy hand at sex in the midst of a looseness in plot, and the result is predictably poor.

   A massive, imperturbable house, dating from the pre-Spanish days of California, gives its inhabitants eternal life. And naturally the inhabitants command economic power enough to maintain the house in their possession through the years. Crisis comes about when nuclear war of Earth threatens them, and the group splits on the question of strategy.

   There is a flavor of Spanish California in this book that is attractive, but the going of the arbitrary plot is jumpy and is not. There is no involvement withe the mixed-up characters, certainly not enough to bother seeing if the story really does fit together or to spend any time understanding a very poor ending.

   It took a long time to read this one.

Rating: *

FANTASTIC UNIVERSE SF – February 1956. Editor: Leo Margulies. Cover art: Kelly Freas. Overall rating: **½.

EDMUND COOPER “The End of the Journey.” The captain is the only survivor of a voyage testing a new experimental space drive. (3)

ROBERT ABERNATHY “Grandpa’s Lie Soap.” One man is capable of telling lies is a world he made incapable of interpreting falsehoods. (3)

THEODORE PRATT “Shades of Davy Crockett.” Davy comes back to dicover the commercial success of his name and fame. (2)

ROGER DEE “The Man Who Had Spiders.” Extraterrestrial spiders have advantages, but who wants spiders around all the time? (4)

SAM MERWIN, JR. “Passage to Anywhere.” Novelette. Matter transmitter fails on Earth, but does make space travel feasible. An argument for world government. (2)

ETHEL G. LEWIS “The Vapor Horn.” An international healing device contains other worlds. (0)

ROBERT SILVERBERG “A Woman’s Right.” A psychometrist, hired by a man to help his wife and save their marriage cures the man;s psychosis instead, (3)

F. B. BRYNING “For Man Must Work.” The marital problems of an engineer of a space station: his wife wants to return to Earth. (3)

FRANK BELKNAP LONG “Young Man with a Trumpet.”How animals carried on after the departure of man. (3)

JOHN JAKES “The Cybernetic Kid.” A boy genius competes against the latest electronic marvels (3)

GEORGE BAGBY – Dirty Pool. Inspector Schmidt #34. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1966. Curtis, paperback, date?

   The transit strike New York City recently suffered through brings forth a mystery, initially so tense that it isn’t even noticed that the victim has no name!

   Trapped in in the rain in the midst of ignoring traffic, a girl is placed in a commandeered automobile by a sympathetic policeman. To say it was against the wishes of the driver is an understatement – a fourth man in the car has just been fatally stabbed, and now the killers have both a corpse and a witness to worry about.

   Her escape brings her in contact with bumbling Bagby, and nothing can convince her that he is not one of the gang. Even Inspector Schmidt loses her confidence with his friendship with Bagby, adding to her problems.

   The tale as told is a bit contradictory with respect to the girl’s cool behavior in the car and her later hysterical fears – but can it be justified as being “just like a woman”? Accept the basic premise, and you will have a lot lively reading ahead of you.

Rating: ****½

THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION. December 1967. Cover artist: Jack Gaughan. Editor: Edward L. Ferman. Overall rating: ***½.

DAVID REDD “Sundown.” Novelette. The confrontation between man and creatures of fantasy; creatures not of love, but of hate, yet capable of understanding, and of pity. (5)

LARRY EISENBERG “The Saga of DMM.” Emmett Duckworth. The discovery of a new chemical stimulant. (4)

STUART & JENNIFER PALMER “Brain Wave,” Novelette. Telepathic contact with another galaxy – anticlimactic, like a long bad joke. (3)

ALGIS BUDRYS “Carberus.” Not Sf, or even fantasy, but four long puns. (3)

DEAN R. KOONTZ “To Behold the Sun.” Adventure and trauma upon an expedition to the sun. (3)

GAHAN WILSON “The Power of the Mandarin.” A series character not unlike Fun Manchu comes to life and to have power over the author (and editor). (4)

LEONARD TUSHNET “The Chalmlins.” The guardian angels of some Jewish Polish-Americans, who need them. (3)

J. G. BALLARD “The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D.” Vermilion Sands. Three, no, four men who sculpt clouds, and the insane woman whose portrait they create. Haunting. (4)

THE SAINT DETECTIVE MAGAZINE – September 1957. Editor: Hans Stefan Santesson. Overall rating: ***

LESLIE CHARTERIS “The Good Medicine.” Simon Templar (The Saint). Novelette. The Saint brings pills to the rescue of a man whose wife has used him to build up a large pharmaceutical business. Pills guaranteed to keep away insects, but not the Saint’s brand of justice. (4)

AARON MARC STEIN “Battle of Wits.” A man patiently builds up a lot to get rid of his wife, but it fails by being smarter than the sheriff it’s supposed to fool. (3)

AUGUST DERLETH “Adventure of the Little Hangman.” Solar Pons. Novelette. Solar Pons discovers the murderer, but provincial solidarity keeps the man from prison, in its own form of absolute justice. (4)

LOUIS GOLDING “The Vandyke Beard.” A man’s return from prison, and his effect on his family and relatives. (3)

RICHARD HARDWICK “He Came Back.” Murder on a shrimp boat, and retribution, pulp-style. (3)

RICHARD SALE “Ghosts Don’t Make Noise.” Daffy Dill. Novelette. Published previously as “Ghosts Don’t Make No Noise” in Detective Fiction Weekly, 07 June 1941. Daffy Dill is almost convinced that a ghost does exist, and this fact helps trap the murdered man’s killer. (3)

FREDRIC BROWN “Mr. Smith Kicks the Bucket.” Henry Smith. Published previously in Detective Story Magazine, August 1944, as “Bucket of Gems Case.” Mr. Smith, insurance investigator, is on the scene when a candy jewel is stolen, and then has the real one, to the surprise of all. (4)

SAX ROHMER “The Headless Mummies.” Morris Klaw. Published previously in The New Magazine (UK) October 1913, as “Case of the Headless Mummies.” Morris Klaw knows the secret of why museum mummies are being decapitated. Oriental poppycock. (1)

CHARLES FRITCH “First Job.” Illuminating story of how a juvenile delinquent is born. (2)

FRANK GRUBER – The Laughing Fox. Johnny Fletcher & Sam Cragg #5. Farrar & Rinehart, hardcover, 1940. Serialized earlier (?) in Short Stories magazine, July 10 through August 25, 1940. Penguin, paperback, May 1944. Belmont-Tower, paperback, 1972.

   Book salesmen Johnny Fletcher and Sam Cragg, on the scene at a midwestern cattle convention, are forced to act as detectives when a man is found murdered in their hotel room. The man was a fox breeder, with enemies among the other exhibitors, but he was killed as the consequence of a mystery involving a missing heir who disappeared twenty years before.

   With a story meant primarily as fun, Gruber has too casual an attitude toward his plot, Fletcher and Cragg are happy scoundrels who mostly enjoy the scrapes they get into. But on page 49 [of the Penguin edition], Fletcher tells the police the whole story of how they found the body in their room, then on page 99, he is confronted with the story as if the previous episode had never happened.

   Not for serious deduction

Rating: **

EDMOND HAMILTON – The Weapon from Beyond. Starwolf #1. Ace G-639. Paperback original; 1st printing, 1967. Cover art by Jack Gaughan. Collected in Starwolf (Ace, paperback, 1982); and in Starwolves and the Interstellar Patrol (Baen, paperback, 2008).

   Space opera in the old tradition, but with an added measure of characterization and ideas.

   Margan Chane, ex-Starwolf, hunted by his former allies in pirating and raiding, joins a crew of mercenaries from Earth in a hunt for a weapon supposedly hidden in the depths of Corvus Nebula. There is no weapon, only the remains of a wrecked alien spaceship, but there are indication that a rescue fleet is on the way.

   The mercenaries, interesting in themselves, are the realization of Earth’s most valuable resources in a universe of riches: Men. Men capable of doing the job asked of them. Chane has to sort out his emotions in a personal conflict caused by his sudden change of environment, now having to be hunted and perhaps having to fight his old comrades on the side of fellow Earthmen, with one he can like and even respect.

   Humans of this future have their scientific research oriented toward weaponry, while the liens do not seem to have had to suffer and learn to turn away from violence. Which is better?

   Logically constructed, except that the mercenaries still expect to fin the “weapon” after landing when the enemy cruisers leave the planet “defenseless.” Otherwise, the story has both action and thoughtful passages in the right proportion. Most entertaining,

Rating: ****