STEVE FRAZEE – The Sky Block. Rinehart & Co., hardcover, 1953. Lion, paperback, 1954. Pyramid, paperback, 1958.

   While fishing his old vacation stream high in the Colorado Rockies, Platt Vencel is pressed into urgent service by both the U.S. Army (in the person of Colonel Julius Catron) and the FBI (agent Clement Raven).

   Something has gone wrong with the weather throughout the country: an unprecedented state of drought that has gone on for some months. The authorities are convinced that the cause is a hidden meteorological “doomsday device” built by an unspecified foreign power. Vencel, because of his intimate knowledge of the wilderness area, soon finds himself at the forefront of a desperate and deadly hunt for the location of the “Weather-Wrecker” and the identity of the men behind it.

   Despite the novel’s fantastic premise and its overtones of the anti-Communist extremism of the McCarthy era, Frazee’s handling of the theme minimizes the melodramatic aspects and makes this an exciting and suspenseful chase/adventure story in the mode of Geoffrey Household and John Buchan.

   Its strong points are several: deft characterization, nicely choreographed action scenes, and superb evocation of the rugged mountain terrain. Frazee’s prose style is also a plus; always terse and smoothly crafted, it takes on at times a kind of dark, rough-edged lyricism that gives the story a sense of stark reality.

   Frazee was primarily a writer of first-rate western fiction. His only other criminous novels are Running Target, expanded from the distinguished short story “My Brother Down There,” which won first prize in Ellery Queen’s annual contest for 1953, and Flight 409 (1969), a tale of survival and adventure about the search for the survivors of a plane crash in which three members of the president’s cabinet were killed.

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   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.