JOHN T. SLADEK – Mechasm. Ace SF Special 71435, paperback, July 1969. Cover art: Leo Dillon & Diane Dillon. Pocket, paperback, July 1980. Published originally in the UK as The Reproductive System (Gollancz, hardcover, May 1968).

   A satirical review of Life in the US in the guise of a standard SF story, and the humor is much too obvious to be mistaken about it. This, plus an uncanny use of coincidence, as characters and their relatives appear and reappear continually, helps to keep enjoyment from overflowing.

   The story; A doll factory in Utah, in a last ditch effort to keep from gong bankrupt, files for a government grant for research into the development of a self-reproducing robot. They pick the right man as the leader of the project in Dr. Smilax, for he has his own purposes in finding success: world control and Weltscherz. He has this think about pain. Can Potter, fresh from MIT (Miami Institute of Technocracy), finds that he is the only one who can stop the rapidly growing robot population. He finds love, too.

   Lots of paranoia, CIA agents, mentally defective military people, hippies protesting the end of the world, astronauts, all combine to form o one happy mess,

NOTE: Check into the Professor’s betting system, page 82.

Rating: ****½

MELODIE JOHNSON HOWE – The Mother Shadow. Claire Conrad & Maggie Hill #1. Viking, hardcover 1878. Penguin, paperback, 1990.

   I was looking forward to reading this one, mostly because of the Nero Wolfe-Archie Goodwin connection made on the back cover. I can see the connection, but sorry to say this is a book I’m going to have to think about twice before I can even tell you if I’n going to keep it or not.

   Maggie Hill plays Archie. She’s a secretary whose employer makes out a new will, gives her the only copy of the codicil, then goes upstairs to blow his brains out. Claire Conrad is the Pl who must be moved to start a case, and in this case what gets her going is the fact that she’s supposed to inherit the dead man’s four million dollar coin collection, but  the copy of the will that was given to Maggie has somehow disappeared.

   Blackmail is also involved, as well as the many disgruntled members of the dead man’s family, none of whom are likeable in the least. I couldn’t much follow the plot, to tell you the truth, but for the most part, that’s not really the point.

   What”s meant to happen, I think, is that you’re supposed to be instantly enthralled at the sight of sassy, impudent detectives at work, but I’m just guessing  — and obviously I wasn’t. (That they are both female has nothing to do with it. At least I can’t imagine that it does.) .

   Maggie is the kind of person who worries and frets and keeps asking herself questions, at least until she finds herself working for Claire Conrad, who quickly takes charge of her life, and in the process, yes,  does a almost perfect female impersonation of Nero Wolfe. This is obviously a tricky maneuver, and she overdoes it. She makes Wolfe’9 eccentricities seem like minor peculiarities, which is fine for a while, but be warned: a whole book that sparkles as loudly as this one does is also awfully hard on the eyes.

   If you were to pin me down, I’d have to admit there were places that were moderately amusing. The problem is, I’m convinced they were meant to be immensely amusing. Read this one at your own risk.

___

FOOTNOTE: Have I kept the book? In this case, so far, the answer ;s yes,  but it was close.(You’d know better than to ask, though, if you’d ever seen some of the other books I’ve ended up keeping, and this one’s a long way from the level of a good deal  of them.)

DONALD A. WOLLHEIM, Editor – A Quintet of Sixes. Ace 70000; paperback original, 1st printing, 1969.

Wollheim, in his introduction to the collection of pulp western stories, seems much too defensive in speaking of the violence inherent in the “Wild West” story. Westerns, to have lasted this long, must must had some other qualities to recommend them. And yet, it does not seem quite necessary to speak unwell of the very quality that has made them so popular all of these years. Readers know what they want. ***

ALLAN VAUGHAN ELSTON “The Trailsman.” First appeared in West September 29 1928, Reprinted in All Western Magazine February/March 1951. Les Larrabe, on the trail of cattle stolen from scattered Texas herds, is mistaken for a hired gunman. Though the girl’s father is killed, her trail to Taos is followed and the rescue made. A nice sense of decency is the hero’s, (3)

D. B. NEWTON “Born to the Brand,” First appeared in Lariat Story Magazine September 1946. A kid seeks revenge; in a strange way, with motivation provided by the author, not the through character, He’s mistaken, (2)

GILES A. LUTZ “Gun Search.” First appeared in The Rio Kid Western November 1952. A mystery story, with a see-through plot, solved by sheriff’s deputy Locke Mehrtens. Told with excitement, however, with steady terror being inflicted upon one rancher’s family. (4)

THOMAS THOMPSON “The Gunsmoke Kid Calls Quits,” Loudmouth Jones. First appeared in Zane Grey’s Western Magazine June 1951. A story of the generation gap in the West, between an old rancher and his daughter, who loves a lawyer for the railroad. A conflict also arises  between town and country, growth and freedom. Is progress inevitable? (4)

WAYNE D. OVERHOLSER “They Hanged Wild Bill Murphy.” First published in Fifteen Western Tales September 1947. Until Wild Bill, on the side of the nesters, is hanged, not a bad story, but it tails off into overdramatics, with a cliche ending. (2)

A. B. GUTHRIE, JR. – No Second Wind. Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, 1980. Bison Books, softcover, 2010.

   Best known for his skillful novels of the westward expansion — among them the Pulitzer Prize-winning Big Sky (1948), A. B. Guthrie, Jr., is also an accomplished crime novelist. His first book, Murders at Moon Dance (1943), is a western mystery: so are four others written in the l970s and 1980s, all featuring the likable detective team of Sheriff Chick Charleston and his young “Watson,” Deputy Jason Beard, of the small town of Midbury, Montana.

No Second Wind is perhaps the best of the    Charleston / Beard adventures. In the middle of a particularly icy winter, the town and its citizens are being heated up by a strip mining feud between local ranchers who don’t want their land destroyed and a large mining conglomerate and its transient workers. The conflict erupts into fisticuffs and then into murder at a local miner’s hangout called the Chicken Shack.

   But murder and strip mining aren’t the only things complicating the lives of Charleston and Beard; among others are what appears lo be the ritual slaughtering of local cattle, an apparent influx of wolves, Jason falling in love, and one of the oddest (and funniest) justice-of-the-peace cases on record.

   The sum of all these parts is a deceptively simple, easy-going, and satisfying mystery, populated by people instead of cardboard cutouts. If you like slam-bang action and plenty of blood and gore, this is not your book; but if you prefer characterization, unusual situations, and a vivid portrait of small-town western life, No Second Wind is definitely for you.

   The other novels featuring Charleston and Beard, all of which share the same attributes as this one, are Wild Pitch (1973), The Genuine Article (1977), and Playing Catch- Up ( 1985).

———

   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.

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION – February 1968. Editor: Frederik Pohl, Cover artist: Vaughn Bodé. Overall rating: ***

POUL ANDERSON “A Tragedy of Errors.” Novelette. What initially strikes the reader as another tale of derring-do in the Dark Ages of a space empire gradually becomes the description of the effects at rcommunication as it is rebuilt. Perhaps because of Anderson’s style, which is beginning to grate, the SFnal puzzle surrounding the planet of  castaways’ landing is boring, but their problem with changing language is interesting. Almost a happy ending. **

TERRY CARR & ALEXEI PANSHIN “The Planet Shammers.” The collectors get collected; written around the Bodé cpver. (1)

FRITZ LEIBER “Crazy Annaoj.” Anecdote of a successful woman. Purpose? (1)

ROBERT SHECKLEY “Street of Dreams, Feet of Clay.” Novelette. A perfect city, except for the presence of somebody telling you what you should do. Who? Exactly. (4)

ROBERT BLOCH “Sales of a Deathman.” Provides an opportunity for puns, and how can that be serious? (1)

BRIAN W. ALDISS “Total Environment.” Novelette. The dream of sociologists, sponsored by the Indian government under the observation s of the UN – a completely contained population project. Purpose: development of ESP or other survival traits in humans. With population pressure off, Dixit is sent inside to report on possible closure. An inconclusive ending that is known from the start. Is there more? (4)

R. A. LAFFERTY “How Thay Gave It Back.” Manhattan is sold back to the Indians. (3)

KEITH LAUMER “The Big Show.” Novelette. A wild and stupid starry of what to do with the banality of TV. Actor Lew Jentry is sent by the CIA to stop a plan to blanket all television. (2)

THE BRASHER DOUBLOON. 1947.  George Montgomery as PI Philip Marlowe, Nancy Guild, Conrad Janis, Florence Bates, Roy Roberts, Marvin Miller. Based on the novel The High Window by Raymond Chandler. Director: John Brahm.

   The novel, of course, that author Raymond Chandler originally told was The High Window, in which private eye Philip Marlowe is hired by a crabby old woman who wants him to find a coin missing from her late husband’s collection. Her secretary convinces Marlowe into accepting the case, even though he knows he is being lied to.

   Very nearly the perfect private eye movie, and I’d say it was if I understood the plot a little more. The atmosphere, the characters, the southern California winds, all just right. Nancy Guild has a naive, innocent allure that is also just exactly right.

FRANK GRUBER – The Buffalo Box. PI Simon Lash #2, Farrar & Rinehart, hardcover, 1941. Bantam #50, paperback, 1946.

   Gruber created three other major series characters (four. actually): book salesman Johnny Fletcher and his pal Sam Cragg, heroes of The French Key and The Hungry Dog (1941), The Mighty Blockhead (1942), The Scarlet Feather (1948), and ten other adventures; private eye Otis Beagle, who stars in a trio of undistinguished mysteries: and Pl Simon Lash, who likewise appears in three novels, The Buffalo Box being the second and best of them.

   Lash is Gruber’s most memorable sleuth. A bibliophile as well as a private detective, he teams with his friend and bodyguard Eddie Slocum to solve mysteries with at least some bookish element. Here, Lash is hired by an old prospector who has come riding his burro down Hollywood Boulevard and claims to be Lansford Hastings, author of The Emigrant’s Route to Oregon and California, an extremely rare personal account of the famous Donner Party tragedy.

   The prospector wants Lash to find the owner of a redwood box carved in an intricate buffalo design by a wealthy member of the Donner Party named Isaac Ekert, who died in that snowbound Sierra Nevada pass in 1846. All of which is fine, except that Lash, being an astute detective, smells a rat: He happens to know that the real Lansford Hastings died in 1870.

   Curiosity prods Lash into undertaking an investigation, and his interest is piqued even furthcr when he finds a legitimate descendant of Hastings, Elizabeth Dunlap, trying to peddle a copy of The Emigrant’s Route in Oscar Eisenschiml’s secondhand bookshop. Murder complicates matters even more. Lash’s investigation intensifies, leading him all over the L.A. area, to Emigrant Gap in the High Sierra, to the mountain town of Placerville. and finally back to Hollywood and both a killer and the secret of the buffalo box.

   Gruber’s knowledge of books and of pioneer history, and his breakneck pacing and outlandish cast of characters, make this an enjoyable book. The same is true of the other two Lash/Slocum novels— Simon Lash, Private Detective ( 1941), in which a rare Mormon pamphlet called The Latter Day Saints’ Emigrants’ Guide plays an important role; and Murder ’97. (1948), in which sinister doings revolve around a copy of an 1897 children’s book by Horatio Alger called Ralph Raymond’s Heir.

   ;Frank Gruber’s mysteries, despite their shortcomings, were quite popular in the Forties and early Fifties. as were his many western novels. Several of both types were filmed, some from his own screenplays. He also wrote the scripts for more than twenty other Hollywood B movies, among them The Mask of Dimitrios and the last of the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes films, Dressed to Kill (1946); and some 200 teleplays.

   Late in his life and career, he returned to the writing of novels, nearly all of them non-series suspense stories with exotic locales. The best of these are probably Twenty Plus Two (1961), which was made into a film with David Janssen; Bridge of Sand (1963); and The Etruscan Bull (1969). These novels have more depth and show more craft than his earlier series mysteries, yet none of them has the appeal of the Simon Lash books, or the Oliver Quade stories, or even of the flawed Johnny Fletcher/Sam Cragg titles.

———

   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.

CHARLIE JANE ANDERS “Palm Strike’s Last Case.” Novelet. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 2014. Reprinted in The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera, edited by David Afsharirad (Baen Books, June 1915).

   I don’t read much of what’s offered by current publishers in the way of science fiction or fantasy, practically none all. But Charlie Jane Anders is a new author, or least she counts as such to me. She’s been writing SF and (I think) fantasy for 20 years already, and has been nominated (and won) a ton of awards, including both the Hugo and Nebula over that same time period.

   It was the title that caught my eye with this one. Palm Strike is the alter ego of Luc Deverux, a food agriculturist on Earth, a man who wears  a mask and costume to fight a war of revenge against a mobster called the Dark Shard, blaming the latter for the death of his son. He has done so well in this regard he has been persuaded that he needs another frontier as a continued fight in a  new battleground.

   But he arrives on his new planetary home later than  he expected,  having failed to revive from his sleeping capsule perhaps 20 years too late. The colonists there are on the verge of being wiped out. Their crops have been failing more and more every year. Barely nothing will grow. After he finally has been woken, he is hailed as a hero. He doesn’t think so, but he is willing to take on the challenge, using the guise of his secret identity in a final thrust against   disastrous failure.

   Anders is a excellent writer.  She tells this particular story clearly and using many short asides for an added punch when needed. I’m not so sure all of the loose ends are tied up, but I decided at the end to make a pact with myself not go into details. So I won’t. Safe to say this one doesn’t have quite the status of her award-winning stories I mentioned earlier, but it’s still a very very good one..

GEORGE BAGBY – Murder Calling “50”. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1942.

   History books are fine, but they don’t tell the whole story. The same pieces of personal history may occur for millions of people everyday, events that affect their lives many times over, but if they make the history books (and almost none of them do), they’re squeezed into a short footnote (at best a small paragraph or two), so children a generation or so later hardly have a chance to know anything about it.

   Personal diaries and mystery stories, that’s the only way some important things will ever remembered. A case in point: this book (of course) about the air raid drills and blackouts that took place in New York City (and probably all up and down the East Coast; California was looking another direction).

   If you didn’t live through them, who remembers anything about them today? Even the title this book no longer has any significance to anyone any more. Air raid wardens and civil defense personnel had to spread the word when a drill (or actual attack) was coming, and they did it by phone and by code, each one called required to spread the word to three or four others. “50” is the code for “man your posts”. “52” is the code for “all clear”.

   Who knows this today? Who remembers the routine of blackout curtains, heading for designated apartments in a building until the all clear was sounded, or even buckets of sand placed on every floor?

   Or who would know, from a chapter in a history book, how uncertain and confusing the times were in those days? Even with CNN on the job today, rumors and speculation ran rampant during the Persian Gulf War. What must it have been like without?

   And of course, all this makes an ideal background for a murder mystery, one that takes place in Bagby’s building while his friend Inspector Schmidt (he of the always aching feet) is visiting. There is a dead man, of course; his wealthy patron; a young couple in love but not quite sure of each other; a Russian princess (and faithful milkman); a playgirl and a Broadway sharpster. All involved in a mass of stairs in the dark, dog leashes, strange noises, family jewels, elevator boys and the above-mentioned buckets of sand (handy for showing footprints in bathrooms, if nothing else).

   You probably know from this if this is the type of book for you, but if you like George Bagby / Aaron Marc Stein’s work (as I do), I should also tell you that I didn’t find it one of his better ones. For technical reasons, that is. The question not answered concerning the bombshell Schmitty reveals on p.257 is “When did he know, and how did he find out?” (I suspect it was the mysterious one-sided phone conversation he had on p.213, but I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure.)

   There were a couple of other questions left unanswered at story’s end. I won’t go into any of these — they’re relatively minor, and they have no particular effect on events, and then only before the murder, not afterward. It would have taken Bagby a couple of extra pages, perhaps, to fill us in, and  I realize that I’m a little late in saying that I wish he had.

ELLERY QUEEN’S MYSTERY MAGAZINE – January 1968. Overall rating: ***½.

JOE GORES “File #2: Stakeout on Page Street.” (Dan Kearney Associates) Involving a delinquent car,, narcotics, and racial prejudice in Hashbury. (4)

EDGAR WALLACE “The Father Christmas Job.” (Felix Jenks) First published in The Grand Magazine, January 1923, as “The Buoy That Did Not Light.” Ship’s steward sees behind on-board activities. (1)

STUART CLOATE “The Second Nail.” First published in 1966. An African witch doctor’s magic soothes a broken love affair. Quiet sophisticated evil. (5)

STEPHEN DENTINGER “First Offense.” A bank robbery fails to come off. Young bored kids with big ideas. [Dentiger is a pen name for Edward D. Hoch.] (3)

MICHAEL HARRISON “The Murder in the Rue Royale.” [C. Auguste Dupin] “Unpublished” Dupin pastiche, perhaps the first locked room murder. A complicated business.. (3)

EVE CHRISTMAS “The Burning of a Witch.” First story, Poorly told story of the mistress of a Nazi prison camp commander. (1)

MEL D. AMES”The Promise of His Coming.” First story. Infidelity revenged, Somehow too clever, (1)

ELLERY QUEEN “With the Compliments of Comus.” (Ellery Queen.) Novelette. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine , December 1948, as “The Dauphin’s Doll. A doll mysteriously disappears from a department store display at Christmas time. Of course the story’s ending must destroy the illusion. (4)

HUGH PENTECOST “No Witnesses on the Waterfront.” First published in Argosy, March 1960, as “The Ghost of Champagne Charlie.” Longshoremen on the waterfront stick together, this time on the side of the law. (5)

ALICE SCANLAN REACH “Father Crumlish Celebrates Christmas.” Father Crunlish saves a falsely accused man at Christmas time, Entertaining, but short on detection. (2)

JULIAN SYMONS “A Pearl Among Women.” (Francis Quarles.) First published in The Evening Standard, January 26, 1953. Quarles solves an uninteresting puzzle of stolen necklace without moving from his chair. (2)

LAEL J. LITTKE “A Feline Felony,” A mystery-fantasy of Jerome, who looked like a cat. (4)

JAMES YAFFEE “Mom Remembers,” Short novel. Mom Makes a parallel between the unhappy life of a Puerto Rican family in the streets of New York City today and the story of a Jewish family, and Mon’s own mother, in the lower East Side 45 years ago. Length gives added depth to both stories, depth which overcomes a slight weakness in the detection. Mom is a lovely person. (4)