J. HARVEY BOND – Murder Isn’t Funny. Mike Lanson #3. Ace Double D-301, paperback original, 1959. Published back-to-back with The Deadly Combo, by John Farr (to be reviewed here on this blog soon).

   J. Harvey Bond was the pen name of Russ Winterbotham (1904-1971), who was probably better known as a writer of science fiction, both novels and short stories, starting as far back as 1935 and “The Star That Would Not Behave” as R. R. Winterbotham in the August issue of Astounding SF for that year.

   All of Winterbotham’s detective novels were written as by J. Harvey Bond, and all four were mysteries tackled by a newspaper reporter by the name of Mike Lanson. Murder Isn’t Funny is the second of the four.

   Thus were the opening three paragraphs of my review of Kill Me with Kindness , which was the third of the four. You can find it reviewed here. What follows is the original review I wrote for Murder Isn’t Funny.

   Newspaper reporter Mike Lanson gets involved with murder again – he was the hero of all four of Bond’s ,mystery novels — this time of the artist-creator of the “Dream Man” comic strip. It’s science fiction, high adventure stuff, and it sounds pretty bad.

   And so’s the book. But maybe it’s not all the author’s fault, What it reads like is like watching a movie edited for TV, with chunks cut out here and there to make it fit the time slot. When Lanson breaks the killer’s alibi, I didn’t even know he/she had one.