MANNING COLES -The House at Pluck’s Gutter. Tommy Hambledon #26 (including one collection of short stories). Pyramid X-1782; paperback, first US edition, April 1968. Published earlier in the UK by Hodder and Stoughton, hardcover, 1963.
A pair of binoculars with a concealed piece of microfilm leads Tommy Hambledon and his amateur assistants on a chase from Belgium to Rome and finally back to England. Forgan and Campbell are given brief tours of [every] prison along the way, and Hambleldon himself is arrested at least twice, endures several blows on the head, is thrown overboard in a sack, and then trapped at the top of a radio tower.
The microfilm ends up in the hands of the diplomatically immune Knights of the Reconciliation, who plan to blackmail England for its return.
The humor [of Hambledon’s previous escapades this time] affords only an occasional smile — too close to slapstick? — but the ending, with a film company’s version of the Marines to the rescue, was lunatic genius. In fact, the concluding chapters were much easier to take than all of the initial running around. The author’s use of punctuation was bewildering at times, with lots of exclamation points, but that’s a minor quibble.
Rating: ***½.
— June 1968.
Update: Until the former’s death, hidden behind the Manning Coles byline was a long-running collaboration between two British writers, Adelaide Frances Oke Manning (1891 – 1959) and Cyril Henry Coles (1899 – 1965).
The last two Hambledon books, including this one as the last, were written by Coles and Tom Hammerton. Why this one first appeared only as a paperback original in this country is a mystery.
JAMES CRUMLEY – Bordersnakes. C. W. Sughrue & Milo Milodragovitch #3 (each, not together). Dennis McMillan, hardcover, limited edition, 1996. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1996. Warner, paperback, 1997. Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, softcover, 2016.
The man by whose largess I read this thought this was top-notch stuff. This heartened me less than you might think, because he also liked The Mexican Tree Duck, which I thought was about as thoroughgoing a piece of garbage as I read that whole year. But excelsior …
Milodragovitch has come into his middle-age inheritance — just in time to find that a crooked banker has relieved him of most of it. He’s in a frame of mind for revenge and recovery, and heads to Texas to find his old drinking, doping, and PI buddy C. W. Sughrue to help him.
He finds C. W., all right; scarred, married, and hiding out from people who wanted to kill him and almost did. Together they set out on an odyssey across Texas, hunting for the banker and maybe themselves. They find whiskey, dope, and danger everywhere they tum, and there are more turns than they looked for.
The thing that still bothers me about Crumley’ s books is that the people he writes about are adolescent fantasies of the kind of people it would be cool to be: hard-fighting, hard-doping, romantic idiots who are moved only by their addictions. And that Crumley himself seems to admire this, and to think it’s the way a man should be.
Another reason [to be bothered] is that the plot is a maze of wild, unlikely coincidences; plot never was Crumley’s thing. Balanced against all that, and in the end overcoming it, is the fact that the son of a bitch can write. He can tell you a story well enough to drag you along over the rough spots so fast and enjoyably that you barely feel them until later, much like the bruises from an athletic contest. And while the things his people do may not make much sense at times, the people themselves are real while he’s writing about them, and you find yourself cheering their antics as mindlessly as they perform them.
— Reprinted from Ah Sweet Mysteries #26, July 1996.
Spike Walters drives a cab. He’s waiting on a train. It’s midnight. A frigid winter.
A woman comes out, fancy in a fur coat, hails him thru the hail.
She gives him an address way out in the boonies. But when he gets to the address, she’s gone and a dead man is lying in her place. Shot thru the heart. A bursted vein. She gives love a bad name.
Spike calls the cops. It is laid upon Detective David Carroll to solve the crime.
Carroll calls himself a “psychological” detective. But he’s not, really. He’s just a really good conversationalist. He inspires trust, and people talk to him.
The story proceeds as a pleasant procedural, as Carroll interviews and re-interviews various suspects. Nary a sign of the “scientific methods” of other detectives. Carroll says he doesn’t care what people say to him. He just wants them to speak freely so he can watch them as they speak. The way folks tell their stories, a lie may contain as much as the truth.
Carroll is very likeable, and convinces the Chief of Police to hold off on any 3rd degree methods. So no rough stuff. Just soft shoe conversation with upper crust suspects until they crack as the accumulation of facts and the natural contradictions of false alibis crumble under their own weight.
Speaking of weight, this thing is so light it could fly away with a soft wind. But it’s a pleasant way to fritter the time away.
DOROTHY DUNNETT – Dolly and the Bird of Paradise. Johnson Johnson #6. Michael Joseph, UK, hardcover, 1983. A. A. Knopf, US, hardcover, 1984.
Dorothy Dunnett’s “Dolly” series is about spy Johnson Johnson, skipper of the yacht Dolly. Each novel is titled for the “bird” (British slang for woman) who narrates it. The “bird” in this case is Rita Geddes, a punked-out young makeup artist with blue and orange hair who is hired to travel with a client, TV personality Natalie Sheridan. In Madeira, however, Rita is severely beaten and then her friend, Kim-Jim Curtis, another makeup artist, is killed. The nefarious doings seem to involve drugs, but in fact, much, much more is going on.
As must all Dunnett’ s “birds,” Rita becomes professionally involved with Johnson Johnson, who, in addition to being a yachtsman and sort of spy, is a famous portrait painter.
Johnson enlists Rita’s aid in running to ground the drug smugglers, but she really wants to avenge Kim-Jim, for reasons that she withholds from the reader. Though Rita is the narrator, Dunnell (a pseudonym of Dorothy Halliday) skillfully sees to it that she withholds any number of pertinent details-including the fact that she has a serious disability. The real mystery, locked within Rita herself unfolds satisfyingly and amid plenty of action, including piracy on the high seas and a rip-roaring hurricane.
Dunnett, also a noted author of historical fiction, is a very deft, very literate writer; Johnson is a sardonic, quasi-hero who grows on the reader as he grows on the birds on whom he tends to make poor-to-awful first impressions. Other titles in this series include Dolly and the Singing Bird (1982; original 1968 title, The Photogenic Soprano); Dolly and the Cookie Bird (1982; original 1970 title, Murder in the Round); Dolly and the Starry Bird(1982, original 1973 title, Murder in Focus); and Dolly and the Nanny Bird (1982).
MACK REYNOLDS – Computer War. Ace Double H-34; paperback original, December 1967. Previously serialized in Analog SF, June & July 1967. Reprinted as half of Ace Double 11650, paperback, February 1973.
Economic reasons lead the government of Alphaland to go to war with the second planetary power Betastan. Computer predictions are that a two-month conflict will be enough for [an Alphaville] victory, but the Betastani have read Ho Chi Minh (page 62) and retaliate with sabotage, high-level infiltration and other forms of standard guerilla warfare.
The result is predictable. The excuse for a hero is needed only to have everything explained to him; enough of nerdy cloddy flats! The subversive Karlists have good ideas — it might be more interesting to see how they succeed in victory.
SLAVOMIR RAWICZ – The Long Walk. Constable, UK, hardcover, 1956. Lyons Press, hardcover, 1997. Reprinted several times.
THE WAY BACK. Exclusive Films, 2010. Dragos Bucur, Colin Farrell, Ed Harris, Alexandru Potocean, Saoirse Ronan Saoirse, Gustaf Skarsgård, Mark Strong, Jim Sturgess. Written & directed by Peter Weir, from the book by Slavomir Rawicz.
I think it was back in 1998 when I first encountered The Long Walkin a new edition of a book well worth keeping in print, a straightforward true adventure of seven men who, if ghostwriter Ronald Downing can be believed, walked from Siberia to India, across the Gobi Desert and over the Himalayas, to escape a Soviet Labor Camp in World War II.
In 1939, Slavomir Rawicz was a Lieutenant in the Polish Cavalry (Yes, there were still mounted Cavalry charges against Tanks and machine guns then.) Following Poland’s defeat and partition by Russia and Germany, he — along with most other Poles in positions of any authority — was arrested for espionage, tortured and shipped off to Siberia. But Rawicz was a young man with no taste for spending 25 years in a forced labor camp, and he proceeds to tells us how he organized an escape that led to over a year’s walk across some of the most forbidding terrain on earth.
This is quite simply a tale to be treasured. The author describes fatigue, starvation and thirst so vividly you feel them right along with him. And he fills his tale with enough colorful anecdote and terse characterization that by mid-point I felt I really knew these people. Add all this to a story of Homeric struggle and you get something quite special indeed.
One caveat: Skip the co-author’s introduction until you’ve finished the book. It reveals a plot twist the reader really should happen across on his or her own. And enjoy.
One other caveat: The Long Walk may be a work of fiction. There has been considerable doubt raised over the years — some by Rawicz himself — about the veracity of this narrative, including a book-length study, Looking for Mr. Smith. What it comes down to is that there is some evidence that such a trek did take place, but the circumstances of Rawicz’s life seem to preclude his having done it.
All that aside, this is a superior tale of endurance and high adventure, vivid, compelling, and well worth your time.
The movie is even moreso. Peter Weir’s fast-paced, fluid direction takes full advantage of a lavish production budget, dazzling locations, and makes excellent use of capable actors like Ed Harris, Colin Farrell, and a dozen others unknown to me. He also provided them with a script filled with memorable lines and dramatic incident. Drop whatever you’re doing, and catch this one!
THE FULLER BRUSH MAN. Columbia Pictures, 1948. 93 minutes. Red Skelton, Janet Blair, Don McGuire, Adele Jergens, Donald Curtis, Arthur Space, Hillary Brooke, Ross Ford, Trudy Marshall, Nicholas Joy, Selmer Jackson, Jimmy Hunt (the Mean Widdle Kid). Based on The Saturday Evening Post short story “Appointment with Fear” by Roy Huggins (28 September 1946) .
Red, recently fired from the sanitation department, tries his hand at door-to-door salesmanship, without much success. But there is some pain — e. g., the Mean Widdle Kid (one of Skelton’s characters), who gives him a horrible time (ironic, since Red played the Kid on radio). And not only pain — Red manages to get himself designated as the prime suspect in a murder, an impossible crime in which the deadly weapon mysteriously disappears (actually it never appears in the first place — perplexing, huh?).
Before he can finally clear himself, Red and Janet Blair almost get rubbed out in a war surplus warehouse filled with explosives. Congratulations are due the stunt people, who definitely earned their paychecks on this picture.
At one point Red refers to himself as “Philo Jones,” a still-meaningful reference to society sleuth Philo Vance.
Oddly enough, this Red Skelton vehicle got its start as a hard-boiled private eye story in The Saturday Evening Post, but by the time the screenwriters (principally Frank Tashlin) got through with it there was no resemblance to the source material.
For you trivia hounds, the original story featured P. I. Stu(art) Bailey, played on TV a decade later by Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., in the 77 Sunset Strip series. At almost the same time as The Fuller Brush Man was being filmed, a more serious movie featuring the Stu Bailey character (I Love Troublewith Franchot Tone in the lead) was also being lensed; it even had a few actors from the Skelton film (Janet Blair, Adele Jergens, Donald Curtis). Coincidence? We don’t think so.
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Related 2013 Mystery*File article about Roy Huggins:
MILTON “MEZZ” MEZZROW & BERNARD WOLFE – Really the Blues. Random House, hardcover, 1946. Reprinted several times since, including Dell D118, paperback, 1953, and Signet, paperback, 1964.
“To all the hipsters, hustlers, and fly cats tipping along The Stroll. (Keep scuffling.) To all the cons in all the houses of many slammers, wrastling with chinches. (Short time, boys.) To all the junkies and lushheads in twobit scratchpads, and the flophouse grads in morgue iceboxes. (R.I.P.) To all the sweettalkers, the gumbeaters, the highjivers, out of the gallion for good and never going to take low again. (You got it made, daddy.)â€
Mezz Mezzrow was a Jewish dude who longed to be a black jazzman. He lived a life that had him in the orbit of Louis Armstrong (he was Armstrong’s marijuana dealer), playing jazz with Sidney Bichet, Bix Beiderbecke and Gene Krupa, he played the clubs of Al Capone and Legs Diamond, he got hooked on heroin, jailed at Riker’s, lived in Harlem married across the miscegenation lines and lived to tell the tale.
At Riker’s, Mezz insisted on being classified as Black because “colored cons were different; almost any colored guy can land in jail, not just the soulless zombies who have already shriveled up and died inside and are just postponing their date with the undertaker’s icebox. Some of the finest, most high-spirited guys of the race landed in jail because of their conditions of life, not because they were rotted and maggot-eaten inside –far away from all this grimy, grating white underworld, up in Harlem where people were real and earthy.”
Jazz, to Mezz, was the soundtrack of Roaring Twenties America: “jazz was only a musical version of the hard-cutting broadsides that two foxy studs named Mencken and Nathan were beginning to shoot at Joe Public in the pages of The American Mercury — a collectively improvised nose-thumbing at all pillars of all communities, one big syncopated Bronx cheer for the righteous squares everywhere. jazz, making itself heard above the rattle of machine guns and the clink of whisky bottles. The sprawling outside world, they found, was raw and bubbling, crude, brutal, unscrubbed behind the ears but jim-jam-jumping with vital spirits; its collar might be grimy and tattered, but it was popping with life and lusty energy, ready for anything and everything, with a gusto you couldn’t down. And jazz, its theme song. These kids went for that unwashed, untidy world, and they made up their minds to learn its unwashed, untidy music –all the decent, respectable citizens who were home in bed having decent, respectable nightmares instead of braying through their horns at the stars –jazz music was, in a way, practically the theme-song of the underworld because, thanks to prohibition, about the only places we could play like we wanted were illegal dives…..turbanned Hindus, ramrod-spined Englishmen balancing monocles, swarthy cattlemen from the Argentine, sugar planters from Batavia, sabre-scarred Prussian officers, bullfighters from Madrid, college kids with crew haircuts from Wilkes-Barre and Des Moines”.
The book has a host of great hardboiled one-liners:
● He had more music in him than Heinz has pickles.
● It takes a long, tall, brown-skin gal to make a preacher lay his Bible down.
● Don’t look for no chitlins before you kill your hawg.
● I was locked up in a cage that would have cramped a canary.
● The poor guy squirmed and wriggled like a jellyfish with the d.t.’s.
● It’™s a hell of a life, said the Queen of Spain, Three minutes’ pleasure and nine months’ pain
● … as winded as Paul Revere’s horse.
● there wasn’t enough room in it for a midget to swing an underfed kitten,
· corny? Sure, the husks are still on it
● Rotgut and remorse trickled through Uncle Sammy’s veins.
● … his face as long as a sigh
· blow my nose and call me Snorty
● … frail as a nail and twice as pale
● That town was sad as a map and twice as flat
● … no bigger than a blink
· the chorus lumbered around like a herd of asthmatic cows.
● … emotional pickpockets
● The days oozed by like a melted movie film, all run together.
● (ode to the dead): Plant you now, dig you later
● If you pried the lid off my skull with a can-opener, you might have spotted some weird eels snaking through the whirlpool I lugged around under my hat.
In the end, after a life drug thru the wringer, jailed, drug addled, left out soggy in the rain, Mezz’s reward was to finally understand jazz and be able to finally play it:
“F]or the very first time in my life, you see, I had fallen all the way into the groove and I was playing real authentic jazz, and it was right, not Chicago, not Dixieland. …Now I was no more afraid. All the rambling years behind suddenly began to make sense, fitted into the picture: the prison days, the miss-meal blues, the hophead oblivion, the jangled nerves, the reefer flights, the underworld meemies. They were all part of my education, had gone into my make-up until I was battered and bruised enough to stumble into the New Orleans idiom and have something to say in it ..We here, and we going to stay put … don’t recognize no eviction notices from the good green earth. Life gets neurotic and bestial when people can’t be at peace with each other, say amen to each other, chime in with each other’s feeling and personality; and if discord is going to rule the world, with each guy at the next guy’s throat, all harmony gone. Why, the only thing for a man to do, if he wants to survive, if he won’t get evil like all the other beasts in the jungle, is to make that harmony inside himself, be at peace with himself, unify his own insides while the snarling world gets pulverized. He carried his own environment around inside him.”
His only dream remains: “I don’t aim to have my fillings and bridgework picked out, to fatten the Bull Durham sack in some junkie’s or lushhead’s pocket. Uh, uh. Just take my body and shove it in one of them blast furnaces, and when I’m melted down good, scrape out the dust and mix it up with some shellac and press it into a record with a King Jazz label on and then take it up to Harlem and give it to some raggedy kid on The Corner who hasn’t got the price of admission to see the stage show at the Apollo or a deuce of blips to buy himself a glass of foam. until he gets tired of it, and then let him throw it away and that’s that. Just do that, and you’ll know I’ll be happy. That’s memorial enough for me.”
—
I dug it. It lags in the middle when Mezz gets addicted to heroin and lands in the clink. But it’s real and the lag was a lag Mezz experienced and was important to his coming out on the other side. If, as Welles says, movies are life with the boring bits cut out,”this one leaves in the boring bits. But without the boring bits (for Kierkegaard tells us that “boredom is the root of all evil”) how are we to understand the motivation towards redemption. Towards some jazzy heaven Mezz Mezzrow bebops towards with every breath and footstep.
Nero Wolfe on Page and (Small U.S.) Screen:
“Christmas Party”
by Matthew R. Bradley
In Rex Stout’s If Death Ever Slept (1957), Archie is posing as secretary “Alan Green” to learn if millionaire Otis Jarrell’s daughter-in-law, Susan, is stealing business secrets and cheating on his son, only to find predecessor James Eber with a bullet in the head. Wolfe tells Archie to “be guided by your intelligence and experience,” later expressed — e.g., in Gambit(1962) — as using his “intelligence guided by experience.†He hires Dol Bonner and Sally Colt, whom he met in “Too Many Detectives†(1956), to reinforce Archie and the ’teers; they find the .38 that killed two men in Susan’s locker at Clarinda Day’s, “an establishment…where women could get almost anything done that occurred to them…â€
As its title suggests, the next collection, And Four to Go (1958), is unique in containing a quartet of novellas, including “Christmas Party,†which debuted as “The Christmas-Party Murder†in the final issue of Collier’s (January 4, 1957). Two appeared in Look: “Easter Parade†(as “The Easter Parade Murder,†April 16, 1957) and “Fourth of July Picnic†(as “The Labor Union Murder,†July 9, 1957). Published there for the first time, “Murder Is No Joke†was subsequently rewritten and expanded into “Frame-Up for Murder,†which was serialized in three issues of The Saturday Evening Post (June 21-July 5, 1958), and finally appeared in book form in the posthumous collection Death Times Three (1985).
In “Easter,†Wolfe has Archie hire a thief, Tabby, to snatch the spray of Millard Bynoe’s unique, flamingo-pink Vanda from his wife’s shoulder…just as she collapses, shot with a strychnine-filled needle at the titular event. With typical insouciance regarding character continuity, Bob Skinner is yet again the D.A. despite apparently becoming Commisioner, replaced by Ed Bowen, in Prisoner’s Base (1952); an A.D.A. Doyle also appears, but as Stout used the surname repeatedly, it is unclear if this one has any specific antecedent. In “Fourth of July,†Wolfe reluctantly agrees to deliver a speech for the Independence Day picnic of the United Restaurant Workers of America at Culp’s Meadows on Long Island.
He is persuaded by Felix Martin, the maitre d’ at Rusterman’s, which he has supervised since Marko Vukcic died; Paul Rago, the Churchill’s sauce chef; food and wine importer H.L. Griffin; and the URWA president and director of organization, respectively, James Korby and Philip Holt. Waiting on deck, Wolfe finds Holt stabbed to death, alerting only Archie, but while he is speaking, Korby’s daughter, Flora, screams upon discovering the body. We learn that after two weeks of college, Archie “came to New York and got a job guarding a pier, shot and killed two men and was fired, was recommended to Nero Wolfe for a chore he wanted done, did it, was offered a full-time job…took it [and] still have it.â€
In “Joke,†Bianca Voss is hit with a marble paperweight and strangled with a scarf while on the phone with Wolfe, whom Flora Gallant has asked to end a pernicious influence on her brother, star couturier Alec. Or so it seems until Sarah Yare, a customer of his who’d infatuated Archie with her performance in the play Thumb a Ride, is found an apparent suicide, so Wolfe deduces that she’d acted a part to conceal, perhaps unknowingly, the fact that Voss was already dead. With 31 additional pages, “Frame-Up†turns Flora from a frump into a subject of Archie’s admiration; innocently devised to protect the interests of Alec (a hero of the French Resistance), Flora’s charade was hijacked by the killer of Bianca and Sarah.
In “Christmas,†Archie refuses to drive Wolfe to Lewis Hewitt’s on Long Island to meet British hybridizer Thompson, citing a prior engagement — a party at the office of interior decorator Kurt Bottweil, for whom they recovered some stolen tapestries—and showing a license to wed sales representative Margot Dickey. Also present are “angel†Mrs. Perry Porter (Edith) Jerome; her playboy son, Leo; fellow employees receptionist Cherry Quon, business manager Alfred Kiernan, and “pet wizard†Emil Hatch; and Santa…tending bar. In mid-toast, Bottweil succumbs to cyanide in his Pernod, and Archie realizes that Santa has vanished in the tumult, leaving behind his mask and costume in the private elevator.
The license was, of course, “for the birds,†a ploy requested by Margot, merely a frequent dancing partner, to make Kurt — who tore it up — stop stalling and marry her, warding off a bid by Cherry. Wolfe took seriously enough the threat of either losing Archie or having the brownstone invaded by a female to forego Thompson and observe the “happy couple†incognito, making him by default a fugitive from justice and the primary suspect. Unlike the police, he knows that the bottle in Kurt’s desk was unadulterated before Wolfe put the costume on but, unwilling to explain to Cramer the reasons for his presence there, asserts he must crack the case before the Santa-hunt inevitably leads the law to West 35th Street.
Arriving uninvited, Cherry reveals knowledge that Wolfe was Santa, but says she has not yet told the police, fearing they’d be diverted from the real culprit, allegedly Margot; she wants “evidence†(i.e., a frame-up), because everyone knew Emil had potassium cyanide in his workshop, and agrees to give Wolfe time to assemble the facts. After making some arrangements with Saul, typically keeping Archie in the dark, he convenes the suspects in his office, where Emil offers motives: Edith and Al were jealous of a Kurt/Cherry union, and Leo did not want his inheritance drained. With Purley in tow, Cramer shows up and tries to arrest Saul, but Wolfe puts him in his place, and is ready to identify the murderer.
Offering an edited version of the truth, with Santa a vagabond who couldn’t have known about the poison, Wolfe explains that he had Saul send each suspect a note in which “St. Nick†professes to have seen what they did, offering to meet at Grand Central. Emil and both Jeromes took theirs to the police, as did Al, who agreed to attend the rendezvous and signal them, but Margot showed up without having done so. Guilty after all, she had lied about Kurt agreeing to marry her, to deflect suspicion from herself; Wolfe tells Cherry in private after the arrest that her objective was achieved, even if not by the method she had suggested — leaving her with no reason to muddy the waters by identifying the true Santa.
“Christmas Party†(7/1/01) and the previous first-season entry of A Nero Wolfe Mystery, “Door to Death†(6/4/01) — both directed by Holly Dale and adapted by Sharon Elizabeth Doyle — were linked for international broadcast and DVD as the faux telefilm Wolfe Goes Out. Margot (Francie Swift) cuts in on Lily Rowan (Kari Matchett) and Archie (Timothy Hutton) at the Flamingo Club to discuss her proposal; we flash forward to Wolfe (Maury Chaykin) broaching the invitation from Hewitt, which here includes his former employee, Andy Krasicki. Like Lily, Theodore’s sometime substitute is not seen in the novella, nor does he appear on screen, but is obviously invoked to connect this with “Door to Death.â€
Doyle has Wolfe dismiss Christmas as “an excuse for wretched excess, aptly symbolized by an elephantine elf who delivers gifts to the whole world in one night,†and order Fritz (Colin Fox) to remove his Santa hat. M.J. Kang, in her only series appearance as Cherry, and Jody Racicot — previously seen in “Prisoner’s Base†(5/13 & 20/01)—as Leo join rep players David Schurmann (playing Al), Richard Waugh (Emil), Nicky Guadagni (Edith), and Robert Bockstael (Kurt). Wolfe’s indirect method of revealing “Santa’s†identity is retained, sending Archie to his room ostensibly to fetch his copy of Herbert Block’s Here and Now , found with the white gloves Wolfe himself purchased to complete the costume.
Stout makes much of Cherry’s “Oriental inscrutability,†unsurprisingly eliminated for the 21st-century audience, although Kang is dressed and coiffed to emphasize the character’s ethnicity; in the novella, Margot states, “her father was half Chinese and half Indian—not American Indian — and her mother was Dutch.†The assembly in the office arrives in two contingents, with the Jeromes, Cherry, and Emil later joined by Cramer (Bill Smitrovich), Purley (R.D. Reid), and those picked up at the rendezvous: Saul (Conrad Dunn), Margot, and Al. Saul’s other errand had been to confirm that Kurt’s wastebasket was not emptied before Archie searched it, belying Margot’s claim that he tossed in the license-fragments.
ANALOG SF. June 1967. Editor: John W. Campbell. Cover art: John Schoenherr. Overall rating: **
HARRY HARRISON “The Men from P.I.G.†Novelette. Porcine Interstellar Guard, that is. Nothing more than the title suggests: rather poor Analog-type adventures on a colonial planet. (2)
CHRISTOPHER ANVIL “Compound Interest.†About 12 pages summarizing “Experts in the Field†(Analog, May 1967; reviewed here) plus [four more with] a new ending. (1)
JOHN T. PHILLIFENT “Aim for the Heel.†Novelette. Not SF. The “Man from CODE†this time, able to avenge the deaths of thousands by acting strictly within the law. (3)
E. G. VON WALD “Something Important.†The aliens’ message for help is ignored because of previously garbled transmissions. (2)
MACK REYNOLDS “Computer War.†Serial, part 2 of 2. See review to follow shortly.
LAWRENCE A. PERKINS “Bite.†An unpopular doctor is infected with rabies. (2)
Devoted to mystery and detective fiction — the books, the films, the authors, and those who read, watch, collect and make annotated lists of them. All uncredited posts are by me, Steve Lewis.
