Fri 15 Apr 2016
ROBERT COLBY – In a Vanishing Room. Ace Double D-505; paperback original; 1st printing, 1961. Published back-to-back with The Surfside Caper, by Louis Trimble.
Put an ordinary guy in a decidedly non-ordinary and dangerous situation and see how he does. That’s the basic premise, and while I’d have to tell you that the book itself is quite forgettable, an out-of-work advertising account executive named Paul Norris does all right for himself, mostly by finally getting himself out of the funk he’s been in for several months.
There is a MacGuffin involved, a shipping crate filled with something valuable, but what exactly, no one will tell him. In the process of tracking it down, making his way from Miami to New York City to San Diego, he finds caught up in an adventure filled with multiple shady characters, beautiful women and double crosses galore. Who’s on who’s side? You’d need a scorecard to know for sure.
It’s a minor story with no frills in the telling, and short, at only 127 pages long, but its action-packed content zooms right along with the speed of how fast the reader can turn the pages. One good gimmick is a room in a basement in which Norris and a female companion have a deadly encounter with a killer. When they go back with the police the next day, not only is there is not a room in the basement, there is not even a basement.
Try that one on for size the next time you want to go adventuring.
April 15th, 2016 at 9:19 pm
This sounds like a good book!
The only Colby I’ve read is a short story “Paint the Town Green” (1977). It was pretty good.
April 15th, 2016 at 9:59 pm
These fairly disposable but competent and even entertaining kinds of books used to be a staple in the genre and I always thought the backbone of this, the science fiction, and the Western genres. Without having to be all that discerning you could by sheer luck pick up a pretty good read that might not be all that memorable, but which did exactly what you wanted it to do for a remarkably low price.
I still think the loss of the simplicity of that reading experience is a big part of what is wrong with the reading today for too many people. I don’t suggest it could be duplicated any more than the pulps could come back or dime novels before them, but something valuable was lost with their passing.
April 15th, 2016 at 11:02 pm
David:
Excellent point. Writers and readers alike are the poorer for the passing of the simpler types of genre novels.
April 16th, 2016 at 7:30 am
The Ace Doubles were a variable lot: at their best they were quite as good as the Gold Medals, generally, they were forgettable time-fillers, and at their worst a waste of two bits.
But always an attractive package!
April 16th, 2016 at 7:54 am
A very small quibble. The Ace Doubles were never a quarter. They started at 35 cents with D-1 in 1952 and continued at that price until 1961 with D-517. With a small overlap chronologically, they went up to 40 cents with F-101 (a pair of nurse novels) in 1960.
There’s a complete bibliography at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ace_double_novels
Looking through that list just now, my guess is that I started buying them on the newsstand in 1954 or 1955 — the science fiction titles. I didn’t notice the mystery ones until quite bit later.
What I find them useful for now goes along with what everyone has said. While I can read one of the two halves in one or two evenings before going to bed. Gold Medal’s are usually longer, and take me three nights.
Even though both Ace novels and the Gold Medal’s vary considerably in quality, more so with the Ace’s, as Dan says, I find that I enjoy books from either publisher quite a bit. David’s point that the paperback originals of this era are but an extension of the Dime novels, then the pulps, is well taken
Sadly, as Bill says, there’s nothing that I can see that’s the equivalent now.
April 16th, 2016 at 8:02 am
Getting back to Mike’s comment #1, I reviewed SECRET OF THE SECOND DOOR, one of the books Colby did for Gold Medal, a short while ago:
https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=35933
I talked a little about his writing career in the first paragraph. Reading what I had to say about the book itself, I’d have to say that I enjoyed this one more than I did the Gold Medal.