ALAN DEAN FOSTER “At Sea.” First appeared in Warrior Fantastic, edited by Martin H. Greenberg & John Helfer (Daw, paperback original; 1st printing, 2000. Collected in Exceptions to Reality (Del Rey, paperback original, 2008).

   The entire story takes place on a commercial fisherman’s boat, which is, as the title says, at sea. There is a captain, his son, the regular crew, and a few extras who it is soon clear are effectively in charge. A mobster, we shall call him, and a few members of his gang. A transfer of goods is soon to take place, not a legal one by any means.

   Suddenly five horses appear. From where, no one seems to know. Then with the horses are five women, tall and beautiful Four are blonde; one is a redhead. They have names such as Herfjötur amd Skeggjöld. A scuffle breaks out. A brief scuffle. The ladies take their leave. End of tale.

   This is a very entertaining story, but it has one big flaw. It’s too short, If you don’t now how this story is going to turn out, you should be ashamed of yourself. But what you also count on is that it’s well written. There’s no doubt about that. Alan Dean Foster could write stories such as this all day long, and I’d read them all.

JAMES WHITE – All Judgment Fled. Serialized in If SF, December 1967 through February 1968. Walker, US, hardcover, 1969. Ballantine, US, paperback, 1969. Reprinted several times thereafter.

   An alien ship comes to a stop within the solar system without a sign of life, and a crew of six on two P-ships is sent to investigate, All kinds of problems arise, die to close confinement, added to by the pressures of an eavesdropping audience (all of Earth), and of course the uncertain status of the ship, which refuses to answer any form of attempted communication.

   Things are a mess inside the alien ship as well. A part of the cargo, specimens of some kind, have escaped and taken over the ship. But that is just a theory. Are the creatures intelligent? If so, how can they be contacted?

   Unbelievable behavior that is hard to justify ensues, but perhaps that is the point. Men are, or can be, incredibly stupid. And is the cargo animals were so hostile [PLOT WARNING] why should they even be tested for space survival? Terrible.

Rating: *

RINGS ON HER FINGERS. 20th Century Fox, 1942. Henry Fonda, Gene Tierney, Laird Cregar. Director: Rouben Mamoulian.

   A department store clerk who is persuaded to work for a pair of society crooks as a lure for young men with more money than brains falls in love with one particular catch instead. The question is, how in the world is she going to wiggle free?

   Did I mention that this is a comedy? Gene Tierney, one of the most beautiful movie star ever, shows she has talent for physical humor as well. As for Henry Fonda, his role is as a pleasantly non-intellectual here – just like the movie – which goes to show I could watch him in absolutely everything.

VLADIMIR NABOKOV – Lolita. The novel was written in English, but fear of censorship in the U.S. (where Nabokov lived) and Britain led to its being first published in Paris, France, in 1955 by Olympia Press. [Source: Wikipedia.] Reprinted many times.

   Could be called: ‘The Pedophile with the Broken Heart’.

   Humbert Humbert, our antihero (i think that’s what you call it when you’re embarrassed to call the lead character the protagonist), is a pedophile. He blames it on the fact that when he was 13, he fell in love with 12 year old Annabel. They unsuccessfully attempted to consummate their love on the beach by his father’s hotel. Then she was gone forever.

   Ever since, he’s been obsessed with nymphettes. Nymphettes being girls between the ages of 9-14, still children, but with an awakening sense of their emerging sexual power. Humbert Humbert informs us that not all 9-14 year old girls are nymphettes. Only a select few, but for the connoisseur, they are a coveted delicacy. Readily apparent to the aesthete’s gaze. More to lust at for one’s private emissions, than to physically engage — given our repressive laws.

   Humbert Humbert has a small inherited income, and fancies himself some sort of freelance academic, with credentials enough to pretend he’s working on some major work while employed, at his leisure, at some private all girls school. Ogling away.

   Humbert becomes a lodger at Lolita’s mother’s home. He’s a handsome man, think a mid-30 year old Cary Grant, dressed meticulously, fastidiously mannered.

   He marries Lolita’s mother, solely for access to her daughter. The mother soon dies (luck of luck) and he inherits care of the flirtatious 12 year old Lolita.

   Humbert and Lolita immediately embark on a 3 year road trip across the USA and back, staying at motels speckling the highways while satisfying his every lust.

   Near her 15th birthday, Lolita escapes Humbert’s clutches, absconding with another pervert, the playwright Clare Quilty.

   Humbert Humbert’s life is ruined. All his joy flushed down the old commode.

   All that is left is to hunt and kill Clare Quilty.

         —-

   Nabokov’s prose is incredible:

   “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.”

   Humbert Humbert is a bad man. And he ruins poor Lolita. His love for Lolita is one sided. And she and her mother are destroyed.

   I can’t say I enjoyed the thing. But there’s no doubting this Nabokov guy can write. Born writer.

   Morally terrible. But a great wordsmith!

   So there!

DONALD HAMILTON – Death of a Citizen. Matt Helm #1. Fawcett Gold Medal, paperback original, 1960. Reprinted a number of times.

   Donald Hamilton has been a full-time writer and photojournalist since 1946. His first three novels were published in hardcover by Rinehart; all subsequent ones have appeared as paperback originals. In 1953 he turned from suspense and spy fiction to westerns, and over the next several years published five superior books in this field before returning permanently to the espionage novels that form the bulk of his output.

   Death of a Citizen was the first of a long-running series featuring the tough and tough-minded counterspy Matt Helm, who operates under the code name “Eric.” While in the army in World War II, Helm was recruited into a super-secret counterintelligence group whose very existence is not acknowledged by other arms of the government. “What we were, never was. What we did, never happened,” Helm/Eric is told by Mac, the group’s chief, at the end of the war.

   Fifteen years pass, during which Helm acquires a family, a four-bedroom home in Santa Fe, and a profession as a photojournalist and writer of western stories. Then the girl with the code name “Tina” walks back into his life. Behind the fashionable clothes and sophisticated manner, Helm has no trouble recognizing the “fierce, bloodthirsty, shabby little waif’ with whom he shared a dangerous mission in Europe and an amorous week in London afterward.

   She gives him the group’s old recognition signal but says that without Mac’s permission she cannot tell him the details of her mission. After the disposal of a body inconveniently left in Helm’s bathtub, Helm and Tina flee in his truck with a varying cast of characters in pursuit. Matters come to a head in San Antonio when Mac re-enters the picture and Helm begins to find out what has really been going on.

   There is the usual amount of things-are not-as-they-seem and double-dealing to keep the reader alert, but the main point of interest in this first book of the series is not the plot details; rather, it is the event referred to in the title-the death of law-abiding citizen Matthew Helm and the rebirth of the trained and deadly agent named Eric.

   The conversion is rapid, but convincingly done. The cool, crisp, slightly sardonic tone of the first-person narrative is perfect for the book, and remains a continuing pleasure of this series. Later books add more-complex plots, additional glimpses of Mac’s agency, foreign locales, and some excellent action sequences. Assessing the Helm series in the New York Times, Anthony Boucher wrote: “Donald Hamilton has brought to the spy novel the authentic hard realism of Hammett; his stories arc as compelling, and probably as close to the sordid truth of espionage, as any now being told.” Number twenty-one in the series, The Infiltrators, was published in 1984.

   Of Hamilton’s non-series novels, Date with Darkness (his first book, published in 1947) and Line of Fire (1955) are particularly good. The Mona Intercept (1980), a “big” novel of seagoing crime, received mixed reviews. As for the four Matt Helm films starring Dean Martin, they arc largely James Bond parodies and do not in any way reflect the essence of Hamilton’s series.

         ———

   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.

D. H. REDDALL “Dark Matter.” PI Charles Stubblefield. Published in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, November 2004. Not known to have been either reprinted or collected.

   Only the most dedicated reader of AHMM will recognize the author’s name. He (or she) wrote a couple dozen stories for the magazine, at least five others of which feature the adventures of a young PI by the name of Charles Stubblefield. There may be more. Using the online Crime Fiction Index as a guide, this is not (yet) known to be one of them.

   At least he sounds young as he tells the story at  hand himself. He is a fellow who doesn’t reveal a whole lot about himself, or even much about  the town he lives and works in.( I may have missed details like that, the first time through.) The nursing home where his client is staying is four miles from the ocean, if that helps.

   The man needs a PI  to look into he death of his half-brother, whose body found in the ashes of a building that has recently burned to the ground. While looking into the facts of the case, Stubblefield quickly learns a second body has been found, presumably the janitor for the building. Which spreads the motive for the crime a but more thinly. Money, he thinks, with the deaths only incidental.

   This is a quiet but never sedate sort of case. Asking questions and interpreting the replies is the way to go, and the author is quite good at dialogue. One line toward to beginning had me hoping for better things in that regard, but it wasn’t followed up upon in any meaningful way. Describing the manager of the nursing home, it is said of him that he had a voice like “oil poured over waxed paper.”

IF SCIENCE FICTION February 1968. Editor: Frederik Pohl. Cover art by Vaughn Bodé. Overall rating: ***

LARRY NIVEN “Slowboat Cargo.” Serial, part 1 of 3. Full review forthcoming.

ROBERT SHECKLEY “The Petrified World.” Conflict between dream and reality, with the expected result. The title is clever, (3)

B. K. FILER “Star Bike” Minor entertainment concerning an alien motor oil, (3)

ROBERT LORY “The Courteous of Ghoor.” A man trained to move planets falls into a trap. (3)

LAWRENCE YEP “The Selchey Kids.” First story; novelette. A strong (buy confusing) story of the California earthquake and of dolphin relatives, through biological experimentation. Similes and metaphors galore, making for picturesque (and difficult) reading. Definitely a find. (4)

JAMES WHITE “All Judgment Fled.” Serial, part 3. A full review will be posted here soon.

PETE HAMILL – Dirty Laundry. Bantam,paperback original, 1978.

   It has taken free-lance reporter Sam Briscoe all of six years to get over (if not forget) Anne Fletcher. Then one snowy night in New York she telephones to say she is in trouble. Sam, against his better judgment, agrees to meet her. But, sure enough, she must have been in trouble, because she is killed before she can keep the appointment.

   The story is a shadowy one, but as Briscoe pieces it together, it seems to go something like this: Anne Fletcher left a rich and powerful Mexican boy friend named Pepe. She moved from her apartment and got a job with a bank. Pepe found her and apparently bought the bank to re-establish contact with her. But Anne had incriminating papers she wanted to show Briscoe, papers alleging bank fraud. or Pepe fraud, or something of the sort. But, of course, Anne never reached Briscoe, nor did the papers. Even more puzzling is the fact that Pepe himself apparently was killed in a plane crash a few days earlier.

   One thing is certain: The trail seems to lead to Mexico and to Pepe’s banking connections (and this is the basis for the title, as it is discovered that a Pepe-controlled bank launders money). So it is to Mexico that Briscoe travels, and it is in Mexico that the action reaches a fever pitch.

   Briscoe is shot at several times, slugged, raped(!), and has a dead redhead dumped into his bathtub. Briscoe, in tum, shoots several people, slugs several more, and pursues $200 million and three culprits onto a stormy ocean.

   Pete Hamill is, of course, the well-known New York newspaper columnist; he is also a talented and versatile writer, and it is a bit of a disappointment to see him employ the standard tough-guy, semi-smartass, semi-sentimental-slob narrative voice used in hundreds of such novels. Still, he does a good job of it and can certainly hold his own with anyone in the genre. Most readers of hard-boiled fiction will eagerly follow the action to an almost James Bond-like climax.

   Sam Briscoe also appears in The Deadly Piece (1979),

         ———

   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.

EDWARD D. HOCH “Day of the Wizard.” Simon Ark. First appeared in The Saint Mystery Magazine (UK), August 1963. Reprinted in Chase, September 1964; and Locked Room Puzzles, edited by Martin H. Greenberg & Bill Pronzini (Academy Chicago, 1986). Also included in the collections The Judges of Hades and Other Simon Ark Stories and Funeral in the Fog (2020).

   Simon Ark is the quirkiest of Ed Hoch’s many recurring series characters. A review of one of the aforementioned collections in another blog  described him this way: “Simon Ark is not your typical detective. He scours the Earth searching for the Devil, either the actual Devil him/herself or his agents, and has been doing so for nearly 2000 years since he was a Coptic Priest in Ancient Egypt. Allegedly.”

   I have read several of his adventures but far from all of them. I believe that most (all?) of them Mr. Hoch wrote toward the beginning of his writing career. That may be the reason I found the opening pages a bit more sprightly — if perhaps even quite sparkling — than the slower but still very solid tales he wrote as time went on.

   This one begins at the end of World War II, as a military plane containing a merry crew and a special cargo crashes near the shore of east Africa. Seventeen years later a hunt for the plane finally begins, starting with a hunt for Simon Ark. In the process of luring him away from whatever activity he may be doing, the wiles of a street magician in Cairo are used. An empty box, large enough for a person to stand in, is locked under the gaze of many reporters, who are asked to return the next day.

   At which time they find, of course, the body of a girl. Drugged but not dead, but she has no idea how she managed her way into the locked and sealed empty box. For me, this was the crux of the story, and it’s a good one. The solution is simple, buy only once you know. What I found interesting is that the contents of the plane are very cleverly not revealed. I has to read the end of the story a second time, and I am relatively sure I didn’t miss anything.

   I’m not not sure if what goes on in what takes lace in the desert once the plane is found hold up all that well, but the one with thr girl in the box does. It’s a zinger!

ROSS MACDONALD – The Drowning Pool. Lew Archer #2. Knopf, hardcover, 1950. Reprinted many times, in both hardcover and paperback. Film: Warner Bros., 1975, starring Paul Newman.

   PI Lew Archer is hired to investigate an anonymous note sent to Maude Slocum’s husband 9accusing her of adultery], intercepted before he could read it, but one that could ruin a marriage. Yet it’s also one hardly worth saving, as James Slocum’s daughter has her own dark secrets .

   Then the grandmother is pushed into a pool, and Archer refuses to be pushed out of the case, More murder — and a suicide — occur before the ends are finally tied up, including verification of the real murderer, Smartly done, an early work of a craftsman.

   I liked the line, after Archer overhears some particularly nasty conversation: “I felt as if I’d been listening in on a microphone built into the walls of the hall.”

Rating: ****