It was last Tuesday night, just an ordinary night. The parking lot was well lit, but the night itself was dark and cloudy. Jon and I were walking back to our car, The way was downhill, not steeply, but you could tell it was trending down rather than up.

   We were, I think, within an arm’s length from the car when I suddenly realized I was lying down, face on the pavement. There was no in between that I can recall. I was walking, then I was down. I scrambled up, brushing myself off when I heard Jon say, “Dad, your face is bleeding.” And so it was.

   We rushed to the Emergency Room, where we ending up staying the night while they did all sorts of pokes and prods, and asking all sorts of questions. I didn’t have many answers, but they suggested I stay over anyway.

   And they allowed me to leave by five in the afternoon. Complete with 20 pages of discharge information, and a lengthy list of instruction and appointments to tend to, starting Monday, two days hence. I have been sleeping a lot in the meantime.

   I would post a photo, but I don’t believe the ICC allows such horrendous auxiliary material to be posted on blogs. I could be wrong about that. In any case, in the photos I’ve had taken of me the past few days, I looked ten times worse than I actually felt at the time. I do look as though I had a hand-to-hand fist fight with a fifteen foot wall. And lost.

   It will be a while before I recover from all this. I can’t imagine otherwise, and there are too many appointments to follow up with, starting next Monday. Don’t go anywhere, if you can help it. I’ll be back with the blog as soon as I can.

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strong>JAMES GRADY – Six Days of the Condor. W.W.Norton & Co., hardcover, 1974. Dell, paperback, 1975. Also published as Three Days of the Condor (Dell, paperback, date?). Film: Also as Three Days of the Condor  (1975; directed by Sydney Pollack and starring Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway, Cliff Robertson, and Max von Sydow).

   Six Days of the Condor is a riveting book that subsequently became a riveting movie starring Robert Redford with the “Six” of the title halved to “Three.” The story’s central character is a young man named Ronald Malcolm (code name: Condor), a book-reading specialist for the CIA. He works with a small group of people in an unobtrusive building in Washington, D.C., doing just that — reading books, particularly mysteries, and passing along information (field tips, authors who seem to know too much, etc.) to CIA headquarters.

   Then one day the unthinkable happens. It is Malcolm’s tum to pick up lunch, and when he returns to the building he finds every one of his fellow workers massacred.

   Frightening enough, certainly, but then the real terror begins. He phones CIA headquarters to report the killings and is instructed to meet a couple of agents at a specific location in the city. When he shows up, an attempt is made on his life, which tells him that either the CIA itself or an element within the agency ordered the killings and they are now trying to make it a clean sweep.

   The terror, of course, involves not knowing-not knowing why the killings took place or whom he can trust. He becomes a man truly alone, with every suspicious face in the crowd a potential threat

   This is a harrowing novel, with unsettling and far-reaching implications. No one who reads it can fail to be disturbed in one way or another.

   James Grady’s other novels include a sequel chronicling the further adventures of Ronald Malcolm, Shadow of the Condor (1975). More recent titles are Runner in the Street (1984) and Razor Game (]985).

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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.

DOUG ALLYN “The Hate Tapes.” Published in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, March 2010. Not known to have been collected or reprinted.

   Murph, the leading protagonist in this all-too-short short story, is the guitarist and lead singer for a rock band named the Kurves. You may not have known about them before, but at one time they were one of the hottest bands in the country. Time has passed, as it always does, and the Kurves are playing in much smaller venues now, but the crowds who come are still rocking.

   But one concert, this one in Detroit before bussing off to Cincinnati, has an extra. A dead man, and no one is surprised more than Murph when he discovers that he knows him – a nondescript fellow who follows the band avidly whenever they hit the Motor City. None of the members of the band are suspects – they were all on stage when the killing happened – but the police sergeant in charge of the investigation – a feisty young woman named Rose Morales — decides Murph will be useful in connecting with the people who may be involved, and the ins and out of the music business.

   It takes a while, but they’re soon working like a team who’s been at it together for a while. The case involves music tapes, and names like Jimi Hendrix an Janis Joplin come up. The story’s too short for there to be a lot of clues, but what there is is choice. Allyn knows his way around the rock business, and with that in his background, it makes this one a lot of fun to read.

ANNE McCAFFREY – Dragonrider. Serialized in Analog SF, December 1967 – January 1969. Novella. Nebula winner. Reprinted in Nebula Award Stories Four, edited by Poul Anderson (Doubleday, hardcover, December 1969; Pocket, paperback, January 1969).

   This is the sequel demanded by the story “Weyr Search” that appeared in the October 1967 issue of Analog. Once again there seems to be the feeling of watching an alien culture from the outside, as the deadly Threads begin falling from the Red Star. A synopsis of the previous story would have been useful but is not given. It is only gradually the threads of the earlier tale are woven back into place.

   There is only one weyr of dragons and riders remaining to fight the Threads. All of the others have been mysteriously vacated soon after the previous threat was over, 400 Turns before. But Weyrwoman Lessa’s discovery that the dragons can travel between times as well as place makes a solution become clear at once. That the story then falls precisely into place helps the reader relate more to the unfamiliarly named characters and their problems.

   Not Analog’s usual fare by a long way.A refreshing change, but I probably won’t be getting this in book form, when it comes along.

Rating: ****½

DAY KEENE – The Brimstone Bed. Avon T-459, paperback original; 1st printing, 1960. Macfadden, paperback, 1968.

   Disbarred lawyer Bill Bailey picks a bad time to find his former assistant Joey Montana – it’s the same day somebody decides to shoot him full of holes, and the three years in prison Bailey blames on Joey for a crime he didn’t commit gives him a pretty good motive for the job.

   Only a blonde he knows can save his skin, but her husband is, in a word, is jealous. It’s no wonder Day Keene is one of my favorite writers. The plot continues to bubble and boil, and the small town Floridian atmosphere oozes off the page. (The cover is nice, too.)

ANALOG SF – January 1968, Editor: John W. Campbell. Cover art credited to NASA. Overall rating: ***½.

R. C. FITZPATRICK & LEIGH RICHMOND. “There Is a Tide.” Novelette. The continuing story of Sr, Stephen Jansen and his experiments with brain transplants, This time threats come from outside, with underlying hints about the pressures for immortality that may follow. (3)

BRUCE DANIELS “…And Cauldron Bubble.” Artifacts, in the form of letters and memos, of bureaucracy. A point, but why read it here? (1)

STERLING E. LANIER “Snch Stuff As Dreams,” Novelette. An entrance exam for the Survey and Contact division depends, obviously enough, on a man’s capability for fighting his own innermost fears. Obviously. (3)

ANNE McCAFFREY “Dragonrider. Serial, part 2 of 2. A separate review will follow.

RON GOULART – Ghosting. Raven House, paperback original, 1988.

   A writer of very funny mysteries and science fiction, Goulart has said he likes to mix “murder, bug-eyed monsters, and satire.” Ghosting contains no BEM’s, but there is plenty of murder and satire. The hero, Barney Kains, is “a defrocked commercial illustrator who got dragooned into the comic book business” as a ghost writer for the comic strip “Poor Little Pearl.”

   It seems Archie Judd, the creator of the strip, is down with the flu for the moment. And since Archie’s granddaughter, Beth, is the first woman who’s been able to get Barney’s mind off his ex-wife, a top model whose picture is everywhere, the job is all the more enticing.

   But Barney begins to have his doubts about Beth when he learns that Archie’s tirades from his sickroom are on tape: There’s no one in Archie’s bed. What’s happened to the artist? Barney has no choice but to poke around and find out.

   This is a delightful piece of fluff with lots of laughs and good material about the comics biz.

   Another good Goulart mystery with a comics background is A Graveyard of My Own ( 1985) which introduces Bert and Jan Kurrie, a husband-and-wife team of amateur sleuths. Goulart’s other whimsical crime novels include the futuristic Hawkshaw (1972) and four books in the John Easy private-eye series, the best of which is One Grave Too Many (1974).

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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.

DICK STODGHILL “Deadtown.” Appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, November 2009. Never reprinted or collected, as far as I’ve discovered so far.

   The year Is 1940, and a man drives into the gritty out-of-the-way town named Dealtown with an empty tank and forty-seven cents in his pocket, and as chance would have it, he decides to stay for a while. He’s the kind of guy who’s offered a job as soon as the man who owns the roadhouse just outside of town sees him. (He takes it.) He also meets the girl who works behind the registration counter at the local hotel where he’s advised to spend the night.

   Both of these two people come with stories this story is about, and thereby hangs the tale. It’s a story that might have appeared in a detective pulp magazine of the same vintage, and  it’s one I can recommend on that basis only … but with a caveat,

   It’s not as easy to explain as I thought it was going to be when I started writing this review, but I’ll give it a try anyway.

   Dick Stodghill, about whom I’ll say more shortly, was too good a writer to make us believe he is really writing a story of crime and romance taking place in a small but deadly town in 1940. Writers in a day know exactly what they were wring about, those whose stories were accepted on a daily basis in hundreds of pulp magazines aficionados buy fervently today, and at collectors’ prices. They lived the life, albeit not directly, more than likely, but they did not, in general, have the ability to put into words as smoothly and efficiently the grittiness they were writing about. (Some did.) And yet, at the time, the effect was more real and more immediate. The time is a couple of generation away now, I’m afraid.

   Dick Stodghill was a former newspaper reporter as well as a mystery writer, and he was a good one. Not a famous one. He doesn’t have his own Wikipedia page, for example. nor did he have many mystery novels to his credit, if any. But he did wrote several dozen short stories for AHMM and Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine between 1979 and 2009, when he died. This one is the last one of those, and in spite of all my nattering above, it’s a good one.

THE GANG’S ALL HERE. Monogram Pictures, 1941. Frankie Darro, Marcia Mae Jones, Jackie Moran, Keye Luke, Mantan Moreland. Director: Jean Yarbrough.

   Frankie Darro and his pal Jeff (Mantan Moreland0 land jobs with a trucking company that, unknown to them, is having a problem with hijackers. What’s worse, even though the boss and his daughter are fine people, the problem is an inside one.

   The budget restrictions were painfully obvious, but this is my kind of movie. It has everything: action, comedy, romance, mystery. Frankie Darro is short, with a fuse to match. Moreland was, simply put, a super super comedian.Who could ask for anything more?

JULIE SMITH – Tourist Trap. Rebecca Schwartz #3. Mysterious Press, hardcover, 1986; paperback, August 1987. Fawcett, paperback, 1992.

   Rebecca Schwartz is an outspoken Jewish feminist lawyer who lives in San Francisco, and I wish I liked the mysteries she gets involved in more than I do. In this one, a madman disrupts the local tourist trade by committing a series of more or less random killings.

   And in the process frames Rebecca’s latest client for the deeds. Totally incompetent police work keeps the case open, even after the real culprit has been identified, halfway through the book. From that point on, there is little more to the story but wheel spinning.

      The Rebecca Schwartz series —

1. Death Turns a Trick (1982)
2. The Sourdough Wars (1984)
3. Tourist Trap (1986)
4. Dead in the Water (1991)
5. Other People’s Skeletons (1993)
Blood types (2014)
Cul-de-Sac (2014)