SCARECROW AND MRS. KING “The First Time.” CBS, 03 October 1983 (Season 1, Episode 1). Kate Jackson (Mrs. Amanda King), Bruce Boxleitner (Lee Stetson, aka “Scarecrow”), Beverly Garland, Mel Stewart, Martha Smith. Creators & co-screenwriters: Eugenie Ross-Leming & Brad Buckner. Directed by Burt Brinckerhoff & Rod Holcomb.

   When a young divorced housewife and the mother or two boys drops off her semi-boy friend at a train station, she has no idea how soon her world is going to be turned upside down. A federal agent, code name “Scarecrow,” is on the run from a man with a gun, and in desperation, he hands off a small package to Mrs. King so as to keep it from the hands of a gang of thugs, terrorists and thieves.

   Well, sure enough, things do not go smoothly. Dire straits? Not particularly. On the contrary, this is precisely where the fun begins. And so the viewers agreed. The series lasted for four years, with Amanda King (the eternally cute and perky Kate Jackson) becoming more and more involved with the agency and (ahem) romantically with Bruce Boxleitner’s character.

   Most of the time, Amanda’s secret had to be kept from her mother, played by Beverly Garland, who mostly stayed home and took care of the two boys while their mother was off playing spy games. I don’t think any of the stories that ensued had any more depth than in this, the first episode. Light and frothy, but the viewers loved it.

ALGIS BUDRYS – The Iron Thorn. Serialized in If Science Fiction, January-April 1967, the latter issue of which was reviewed here. Published in book form as The Amsirs and the Iron Thorn (Gold Medal d1852, paperback original, 1967; cover art by Frank Frazetta).

   On a cold desert planet, later discovered to be Mars, two races live – men, and the Amsirs they hunt. Both colonies surround Thorn, metal towers which provide air and warmth within a small radius.

   Honor Jackson discovers that the Amsirs are intelligent, not vicious, and allows himself to be captured. In the Amsir settlement, he fins a spaceship and eventually the truth behind the experimental genetic colonization of Mars. Returning to Earth, he finds civilization has become sterile and the experiment forgotten.

   Three of the installments [in If SF] are exciting and well done, but the fourth is a distinct disappointment. Maybe Budrys has a point to make, but it doesn’t come through. Flat. Of characterization, the cybernetic spaceship and its robot doctor seemed the most real, and it was from the time of their destruction immediately upon bringing Jackson to Earth that the story faded fast.

   Jackson himself is sympathetically portrayed. Rugged and individualistic enough to escape Mars, but one wonders how he shall fare on the Earth of the future.

Rating: ****

DAVID DELMAN – He Who Digs a Grave. Lt. Jacob Horowitz #2. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1973. No paperback edition.

   The combination of protagonists David Delman has used in this engaging novel — that of a small-town female sheriff and a male cop from New York-is an inspired one. Sheriff Helen Bly and Lieutenant Jacob Horowitz are as different on the surface as two people can be.

   She’s a country woman with strong roots in the area around Cedarstown, an elected official who’s never had to handle a murder before. He’s a tough city cop who’s seen more than enough violent death. And they hold opposing views about whether Horowitz’s old army acquaintance Ian Kirk (who has asked Horowitz to come to town and investigate in an unofficial capacity) murdered his wife and her lover. But Bly and Horowitz are both strong, fair, and sensitive people-characteristics that allow them to work together and also allow them to fall in love.

   As Bly and Horowitz piece together such facts as a missing suicide note, an unwanted pregnancy, a vanished housekeeper, and a pair of thugs who have been paid to intimidate the outsider from New York, the author skillfully depicts small-town life through his characterization of the other residents. A well-plotted novel with a realistic and satisfying conclusion.

   Delman’s other mysteries: A Week to Kill (1972), Sudden Death ( 1972), One Man’s Murder ( 1975), and The Nice Murderers ( 1977)-feature Jacob Horowitz. His most recent book, Murder in the Family, appeared in 1985.

———
Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

TED ALLBEURY – The Lantern Network. Peter Davies, UK. hardcover, 1978. Mysterious Press, US, hardcover, 1989.

   Another first class novel of espionage by one of my three favourite British spy writers {the other two are Deighton and le Carre). In this one Commander Nicholas Bailey of the Special .Branch is called upon to carry out a routine interrogation of a man not really suspected of anything concrete.

   To his surprise and horror the man commits suicide, practically in front of him and the big question is why. Bailey eventually finds the reasons but only after a long flashback (more than half of the book) in which we learn in detail of the wartime career of Captain Charles Parker with the resistance in France. How Parker organizes the resistance teams against the Germans and how this all fits in with the suicide make fascinating reading.

   Mr. Allbeury knows his stuff and certainly can write.

BURKE’S LAW “Who Killed the Lifeguard?” CBS, 25 May 1995 (New Season 2, Episode 6). Gene Barry (Chief Amos Burke), Peter Barton (Detective Peter Burke), Dom DeLuise. Guest Cast: Downtown Julie Brown, Samantha Eggar, Catherine Hicks. Director: Jefferson Kibbee. Currently available on YouTube.

   This is an episode from the second incarnation of the popular TV mystery show Burke’s Law, or maybe the third. After a successful two years on ABC from 1963 to 1965, it changed focus nearly 180 degrees and retitled itself to become Amos Burke Secret Agent, which had viewers across the entire country yawning with disinterest. The series was revived, literally brought back from the dead, for two seasons on CBS (1994-1995), with Gene Barry once again playing the role of the millionaire homicide detective with a tendency for quoting various “laws” as the cases he is investigating moved along.

   In this later version, a son played by Peter Barton was added. From the one episode I’ve seen, his presence was only minimally involved, but he was a young actor with a lot of “hunk” appeal, and maybe he helped boost the number of young teenyboppers watching the show.

   As this episode goes along, the number of suspects involved in the death of the titular lifeguard grows and grows. There are at least four, perhaps five. The Burkes’ method of investigation is to question each of them in turn, and each in turn accuses the next one, sometimes looping back to someone for another round of questions. This may be unique to only this episode, but perhaps it was a standard procedure for the entire series. This also may be true for the final scene in which all the suspects are gathered together, and … well, you know the drill.

   And perhaps only incidentally, whenever the action takes the Burkes to the beach, which is often, there are also quite a few bikini-clad beauties strolling back and forth across the screen. It sometimes made it difficult to follow the actual story line.

   Not essential viewing by any means, but still fun to watch. Quite a few episodes can be found currently on YouTube.

T. C. H. JACOBS – The Red Eyes of Kali. Temple Fortune #2. Stanley Paul & Co., Ltd., hardcover, 1950. No US edition.

   
   Chief Inspector Barnard in particular looks forward to the day Fortune steps over the line, and of course there wouldn’t be a book if this wasn’t the time Fortune and his associate Sailor Milligan took that step while trying to protect attractive client American Julie Somerset and recover the rubies of the title, the red eyes of Kali (colorful story about their origin in Burma included, but no curses).

   Breathless is how the jacket copy describes it, and it is a fair description of this book and most of the British thriller genre. Here there is even a little bit of scientific detection thrown into the mix as Fortune struggles against the police and on the other side of the game his first suspect, Leon Markovitch, who mistaking Fortune for a gentleman thief tries to hire him to steal the jewels from Julie Somerset’s father.

   With a name like Leon Markovitch in the hands of any British thriller writer but John Creasey you know he is up to no good.

   The easy way out being closed, Fortune now finds himself at odds with two known elements and a third yet to be discovered, never a bad set up to keep the action moving which is the prime reason for the thriller genre.

   This is the second Temple Fortune novel, after Dangerous Fortune (luckily Jacobs gave up early on all the titles having Fortune in the title), and the beginning of Jacobs’ association with his most popular creation. Jacobs began writing in the Thirties, mostly about Chief Inspector Barnard and Detective Superintendent John Bellamy, who appeared in nineteen novels between 1930 and 1947. And yes, it is the same Barnard, a bit of an oddity as if Leslie Charteris had written a series of Claude Eustace Teal novels along with the Saint (though Barnard still gets a few chapters to shine). 1948 saw the birth of Fortune, Jacobs most successful creation, but far from his last.

   Jacobs was one of those prolific British thriller writers, virtually unknown on this side of the Atlantic, but who had a long career in popular fiction (his last book was released in 1974) in multiple genres. Aside from Jacobs he also wrote the Slade McGinty books under his own name Jacques Pendower, twenty three of them between 1955 and 1974, and books about Mike Seton and Jim Malone as Jacobs, romance novels as Pam Dower, Marilyn Pender, Anne Penn, and Kathleen Carstairs, and Westerns as Tom Curtis. Most of his later books are sub-Bondian spy novels.

   Along the way he found time to write three true crime books and a radio play based on his own novel.

   Temple Fortune is a private eye, but in name only. He’s basically the gentleman adventurer a la the Toff or Norman Conquest dressed up with an office and clients instead of stumbling into adventure. He has little relationship to his American cousins ,or for that matter to Peter Cheyney’s slightly shady tough guys or David Hume’s Mick Cardby. Fortune is the type the forelock tugging classes call “guv” and his friend Sailor tends to say “Sink me…” fairly often when taken aback.

   Sailor is mostly there as semi comic relief and to give Fortune someone to explain to while once in a while lending a helping fist when needed, the role of good sidekicks from the earliest days of the genre, violent, but not overly smart.

   This is the kind of book with characters called Hambly Hogban, Freddy Flack, a Chinese thug named Charlie Yeo, and the Honorable Charles Falconridge referred too once to often as the Hon. Charles.

   While not bad, Jacobs really doesn’t deserve reviving. There is some historical importance as the Fortune and Pendower books demonstrate how the British thriller was changing in the Post War era. Jacobs managed to ring enough changes on his writing over the years to graduate from minor Edgar Wallace imitation to the Peter Cheyney era and eventually a curious mix of the first two with a little James Bond thrown in. The Fortune stories tend to be detective stories and the McGinty’s spy novels.

   He wasn’t unique in evolving with the times, but he did it well enough to survive and prosper over the years, no mean talent. Broken Alibi, a Bellamy novel, based on the Brighton Trunk murders from 1957, is a good one if you are interested, or 1954’s Good-Night, Sailor with Fortune.

   The Nero Wolfe series comprises 46 books published during Rex Stout’s lifetime (1886-1975), from Fer-de-Lance (1934) to A Family Affair (1975), plus spin-offs featuring his supporting characters Dol Bonner and Inspector Cramer, The Hand in the Glove (1937) and Red Threads (1939), respectively. The few domestic screen adaptations include two failed pilots: “Count the Man Down” (1959), with Kurt Kasznar and William Shatner as “legman” Archie Goodwin, and an adaptation of The Doorbell Rang (1965) with Thayer David — who died before it aired — as Nero Wolfe (1979). Series did eventuate, starring William Conrad/Lee Horsley (1981) and Maury Chaykin/Timothy Hutton (2001-2002).

   Interestingly, however, Fer-de-Lance and the second novel, The League of Frightened Men (1935), were quickly filmed by Columbia with Lionel Stander (miscast, in Stout’s and my opinion) as Archie. Impeccably filling the title role of Meet Nero Wolfe (1936), the great Edward Arnold was replaced by Walter Connolly — originally envisioned in the part by the studio, although Stout would have preferred Charles Laughton — when Arnold declined to re-up for The League of Frightened Men (1937). David Vineyard admirably analyzed the strengths and, more pointedly, weaknesses of the onscreen League here in a 2020 review so I will, with some relief, turn back to Wolfe’s literary and cinematic debut.

   I say this with no authority whatsoever, but suspect that few series have had conventions as numerous and specific as Wolfe’s, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing — with the rules so firmly established, it’s even more fun when you occasionally break them (more on that and the Conrad series in a future post). Stout wastes no time laying them down when we, well, meet Nero Wolfe; an abridgement appeared, as “Point of Death,” in The American Magazine in November 1934. Fer-de-Lance opens, as usual, on New York’s West 35th Street, in “the old brownstone less than a block from the Hudson River where Wolfe had lived for twenty years and where I had been with him a third of that,” per narrator Archie.

   A man of gargantuan girth, appetite, and intellect, Wolfe never (well, hardly ever) leaves the brownstone, wherein also reside those who service his obsessions: food and orchids. Gourmet Swiss cook Fritz Brenner doubles as butler/majordomo; Theodore Horstmann presides over the plant-rooms where Wolfe spends 9:00-11:00 and 4:00-6:00 daily in his unvarying routine, arising at 8:00, breakfasting with the newspapers in his second-floor bedroom, and descending to the office at 11:00. Wolfe sometimes hires outside help in the form of “the three ’teers” — Saul Panzer, Fred Durkin, and Orrie Cather — and Fred sets this plot in motion when, on behalf of wife Fanny, he brings Maria Maffei to Wolfe.

   Her brother, immigrant metal-worker Carlo, vanished after receiving a threatening phone call at his rooming-house, where maid Anna Fiore recalls his cutting an article out of the Times about the sudden death of Peter Oliver Barstow. The Holland University president had keeled over while golfing with son Lawrence and friends E.D. and Manuel Kimball at the Green Meadow Club near Pleasantville, his death ruled as coronary thrombosis by eminent Dr. Nathaniel Bradford. In short order, Wolfe dispatches Archie to White Plains with an offer to bet Westchester County D.A. Fletcher M. Anderson $10,000 that, if it is exhumed, Barstow’s body will reveal poison and “a short, sharp, thin needle” in his belly.

   He has deduced that Carlo, found stabbed, was hired, and then silenced after a blackmail attempt, to make a club  — switched for Barstow’s driver — that would shoot a needle from the handle on impact. When it is found, Ellen Barstow offers $50,000 for her husband’s killer in an ad that her daughter Sarah asks Wolfe to disregard on behalf of the family and Bradford; they were trying to shield Ellen, whose mental instability had led her to take a shot at him months earlier. To Sarah’s relief, circumstantial evidence rules Ellen out, but the absence of any apparent motive remains baffling until Wolfe questions the caddies to learn that on the first tee, with his off looking for a ball, Barstow borrowed E.D.’s driver.

   The real target, grain-trader Kimball admits that while living in the Argentine, he’d killed his wife and her lover as his two-year-old son played on the floor, returning 26 years later for Manuel, an aviator and now the obvious suspect. Visiting Wolfe, he rejects the theory about the not-yet-found driver and demands retraction of the warning that E.D.’s life is in danger, but an ad of Wolfe’s own confirms that a plane was seen landing in a pasture near Hawthorne, enabling Carlo’s murder. Q.E.D. when Wolfe, having been lured upstairs on a pretext, and learned that snake venom killed Barstow, finds the titular South American reptile in his desk drawer full of beer-bottle caps, aptly smashing its head with some suds.

   Some series take a while to get up to speed, but this isn’t one of them — the characters and dynamics, Archie’s perfect narration and repartee with Wolfe, all spring full-grown from Stout’s brow, and revisiting this after 40+ years, I found myself laughing aloud at regular intervals. Per Wolfe, “it would be futile for a man to labor at establishing a reputation for oddity if he were ready at the slightest provocation to revert to normal action.” He utters his favorite exclamation (“Pfui!”); only the gathering of interested parties in his office for him to do his ’splainin’, soon a commonplace, is missing as Manuel, confronted with the proof that a faux hold-up has elicited from Anna, kills himself and E.D. in a plane crash…

   Written by Howard J. Green, Bruce Manning, and Joseph Anthony, Meet Nero Wolfe was directed by Herbert J. Biberman, later one of the blacklisted, HUAC-defying “Hollywood Ten”; Maria (now Marie Maringola) was played by Rita Cansino, better known under her subsequent stage name, Hayworth. It opens with the foursome among Emanuel Jeremiah (E.J.) (Walter Kingsford) and Manuel (Russell Hardie) Kimball, Professor Edgar Barstow (Boyd Irwin, Sr.), and Claude Roberts (Victor Jory), engaged to his daughter, Ellen (Joan Perry). We also see Carlo (Juan Torena) apparently poisoned after he cuts out the article, plus the sorry spectacle of would-be wife Mazie Gray (Dennie Moore) harassing Archie.

   For some reason, the names of Ellen and Sarah (Nana Bryant) have been switched, while Fritz has been supplanted by Scandinavian chef Olaf, a typical role for John Qualen, part of John Ford’s stock company. Arnold’s joviality as Wolfe — whom Mazie dismisses as a “beer-guzzling orchid-grower” — is the one discordant note as both his physicality and the script stick closely to Stout’s characterization. No sooner has the maid (Martha Tibbetts) identified the article than Wolfe intuits both murders, but when the m.o. he posits results in the exhumation, Det. Lt. O’Grady (Gene Morgan) takes credit, so Wolfe sends Archie to get in writing the offer that Dr. Bradford (Frank Conroy) counsels Sarah to withdraw.

   As everyone converges on Wolfe to threaten legal action, Roberts fabricates an excuse to avoid the imminent Manuel, later explaining that he’d been fired as the golf instructor at a Buenos Aires club for allegedly stealing money from E.J.’s locker. The luncheon with caddies Bill (William Anderson), Johnny (William “Billy” Benedict), and Tommy (Roy Borzage) is marred by unwelcome “comic” relief as Mike (George Offerman, Jr.), who’d been fetching E.J.’s visor from the clubhouse, steals frankfurters from Archie’s plate. On learning that his chauffeur was killed by the bite of a fer-de-lance — whose venom did in the others, as well — in his car, E.J. decides that Wolfe’s theory is not “twaddle” after all.

   E.J. requests Wolfe’s protection, and Roberts, persuaded to relate his sordid history, adds that Ellen was born in South America and came to the U.S. as a baby, signalling a drastic detour from Stout’s story. E.J. was acquitted of his wife’s murder, believed to have been committed by Sarah’s first husband, Henderson, who vanished that day; she believes that an entity named Hamansa controls her life, and that E.J. killed Henderson. This provides Wolfe with a half-dozen people who had possible motives to kill E.J., so Archie winds up playing Monopoly with the Kimballs while guarding him, and after they narrowly avoid a burst of machine-gun fire, Wolfe orders him to round up, and bring in, the usual suspects.

   E.J., Manuel, Ellen, Sarah, Roberts, and Bradford are assembled as reluctant houseguests, ostensibly for protection, though we later learn that it was Marie, firing blanks at Wolfe’s behest. Wolfe receives a package containing a “bomb” that will actually release poisoned gas if submerged in water as a precaution, and after neutralizing it he uses it to smoke out Manuel, who accidentally killed their chauffeur as well as Barstow while trying to avenge his mother. If you’ll forgive a mixed metaphor, Hamansa is a red herring out of left field, and at the close, Archie unthinkably marries the insufferable Mazie — but Wolfe turns out to have an ulterior motive for his wedding gift, a cruise to Paris on the S.S. ÃŽle de France.

   Mind you, this is the man who, in The League of Frightened Gentlemen, relates, “I’m funny about women. I’ve seen dozens of them I wouldn’t mind marrying, but I’ve never been pulled so hard I lost my balance”; mercifully, there is neither sign nor mention of Mazie (or of Olaf) in the screen version, directed by Alfred E. Green. Guy Endore, who scripted with Eugene Solow, is notable — at least in my circles — as the author of The Werewolf of Paris (1933), filmed as Hammer’s The Curse of the Werewolf (1961), and as a scenarist on Mark of the Vampire, Mad Love (both 1935), and The Devil Doll (1936). The novel was serialized in six issues of The Saturday Evening Post (from June 15 to July 20 of 1935) as The Frightened Men.

   Featuring an actual excursion by Wolfe, it concerns Paul Chapin, who wrote Devil Take the Hindmost as his quasi-confession for murdering one of the “League of Atonement,” who crippled his leg in a hazing accident. Two die in apparent accidents or suicides, the rest terrified by anonymous verses. Onscreen, after psychologist Prof. Andrew Hibbard (Leonard Mudie) vanishes, taxi driver Pitney Scott (Victor Kilian) opts out when banker Ferdinand Bowen (Walter Kingsford), Dr. Loring A. Burton (Kenneth Hunter), architect Augustus Farrell (Charles Irwin), journalist Michael Ayers (Jameson Thomas), attorney Nicholas Cabot (Ien Wulf), and florist Alexander Drummond (Jonathan Hale) hire Wolfe.

   The novel introduces Wolfe’s frequent but mutually respectful sparring partner, Inspector Cramer (whose assistant, Sgt. Purley Stebbins, was invoked but unseen in Fer-de-Lance); Wolfe’s friend and neighbor, Dr. Vollmer; and his sometime freelance hirees Del Bascom and Johnny Keems. As David relates, League is more faithful than Meet Nero Wolfe, yet despite old reliable Eduardo Ciannelli as Chapin, Connolly’s not-at-all-housebound, beer-eschewing Wolfe compounded Stander’s presence. Nana Bryant and Kingsford returned in new roles, the former as Agnes Burton, anticipating the Chaykin series, which — unlike Conrad’s — used only Stout material with a repertory cast as killers, suspects, and victims.

   Only after more than 40 years and Stout’s death would Wolfe reappear on U.S. screens…

            — Copyright © 2023 by Matthew R. Bradley.
   
   

   Editions cited:

Fer-de-Lance: Pyramid (1964)
The League of Frightened Men: Pyramid (1963)
   

   Online sources:

RAY LORIGA – Tokyo Doesn’t Love Us Anymore. Translated by John King. Grove Press, softcover, 2004. First published in Spain, 1999.

   Futuristic tale about a drug company rep who sells pills that erase memories. Long term or short term. Want to get over grief? Erase the memory that the person ever existed. Want to get rid of trauma? Eliminate the traumatic memory. Want to be happy? Take out all the sad.

   The book starts with the salesman in Arizona. He’s very good at his work. But he starts to use his own stuff. He has his own tragic memories he can’t handle. And soon he can’t remember anymore.

   Each day becomes the same. He cannot remember his parents’ names. Is he married? Is she alive?

   He’s transferred to Thailand. But he can’t stop using.

   And as the book progresses, the salesman’s memory continues to deteriorate until he can no longer function.

   And the narrative itself, fairly straightforward to begin with, starts to become repetitive and confused, as the text and the salesman’s mind deteriorate together.

   It’s a similar theme to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. But where the protagonist there decides that keeping a tragic memory of love is still better than nothingness — this book shows what would have happened had the character proceeded with the severance of a memory of a failed relationship that served as a core particle of one’s soul. The soul can no longer hold.

   Aside from the story and execution being compelling, the author’s use of simile is as good as anything I’ve read since Raymond Chandler:

   It’s a good book. It’s not as revolutionary as the blurbs on the cover insinuate. But it’s good. Don’t kill yourself trying to get ahold of it. But if you like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Philip K. Dick, it’s worth checking out.

JAMESON COLE – A Killing in Quail County. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1996. Worldwide Library, paperback, 1997.

   Cole lives in Colorado, and this is his first novel.

   It’s the Summer of 1957 in Bob White, Oklahoma, and Mark Stoddard is 15. He’s been living with his Deputy Sheriff brother since their parents were killed in an accident a year ago, and not having an easy time of it.

   This summer an old man who hates his brother will be released from prison, return to Bob White and set up a bootlegger’s still, and begin to haunt Mark’s life. This summer his best friend’s cousin, a young girl, will come to spend the summer with them, and Mark will find that girls can be more, much more, than just pests. This summer human beings will die by violence in Bob White, and Mark’s childhood will end forever.

   This is a coming-of-age novel, a story of the rites of passage from one view of the world to another, and a damned good one. I hate to see it published as a genre novel by a house that won’t promote it, because it deserves better.

   Cole does as good a job of showing small town rural life in the 50s as you’re likely to find, and you can trust me on this; I was there, a hundred or so miles south and a couple of years earlier. He tells his story in straightforward first-person prose, and creates characters you can believe in. It may not work for everybody, but it sure did for me.

JOHN D. MacDONALD “Ring Around the Redhead.” First published in Startling Stories, November 1948. First reprinted in Science-Fiction Adventures in Dimension, edited by Groff Conklin (Vanguard Press, hardcover, 1953). First collected in Other Times, Other Worlds (Fawcett Gold Medal, paperback original, October 1978).

   I don’t imagine that any young SF reader coming across this story in the (at the time) most recent issue of Startling Stories had any idea that the author would become rich and famous a few years later as the John D. MacDonald you and I know today as, for example, the author of the series of mystery novels for which he is most remembered, thous about “salvage expert” Travis McGee.

   Nor did, I suppose, those fans of the Travis McGee books happen to know that he started out writing SF stories — as well as mysteries — for the pulp magazines of the late 1940s. I don’t know if all of his early SF work were later collected in Other Times, Other Worlds (1978), but there are sixteen of them, and ones MacDonald much have felt worth reprinting at the time.

   â€œRing Around the Redhead” is, well, one of them, and it begins with a defendant in court having been accused of murdering his next door neighbor, and in a most vicious fashion: the dead man had been decapitated as if by a mammoth pair of tin snips. When the defendant, an amateur tinkerer, gets to tell his story to the jury, it really is quite a story. Having strangely discovered a mysterious ring in his workshop in the basement, he learns by trial and error that by reaching through it, he can bring back, among other items, valuable jewels, for example. (This is why he is seen arguing with the neighbor, who has discovered this.)

   One day, then, he brings a beautiful girl back through the ring, a redhead, who is wearing next to nothing but strangely still something.

   Hence the title of the story, which has no other objective than to be fun and amusing. No deep scientific principles are discussed in this tale. What this tale reminded me of, more than anything else, are the SF stories very common back in the early 30s, based on speculation but not a whole lot of down-to-earth physics – but, in this case, a tale that’s a whole lot better written.

   Nonetheless, without a solid background in science, JDM must have decided that science fiction was not a field where he had much of a future. Considering how things worked out for him, this was a wise choice.