The Case of the Invisible Circle by Erle Stanley Gardner, 1956

Friday’s Forgotten Books at Patti Abbott’s blog Pattinase.

Any veteran investigator will tell you that it's very easy to overlook the most significant clue in a murder case. 

Erle Stanley Gardner wrote The Case of the Invisible Circle for the July 1956 issue of Mercury Mystery Book-Magazine. It is one of dozens of short stories and novelettes he published over more than four decades. These do not include the series of novels and stories based on his principal character, Perry Mason, and lesser-known protagonists like Cool and Lam, Doug Selby, Terry Clane, and Gramps Wiggins.

The Case of the Invisible Circle differs from his trademark mysteries in that there is a crime that is so perplexing as to baffle the police and pathologists.

The first-person narrator of the story, who I assume is the writer himself, is sent by the city editor of the Denver Post to the capital of Colorado — to investigate and report on the brutal rape and murder of a beautiful college girl, whose body is discovered at the bottom of a snow-covered ravine. He is accompanied by Dr. LeMoyne Snyder, a famous medico-legal specialist and author with a keen eye for homicide cases.

District attorney Hatfield Chilson, who is described as “a shrewd lawyer, a competent investigator and, above all, a fair man,” is in charge of the case. Our storyteller and Dr. Snyder assist him in getting to the bottom of the sex crime that has eluded police officers, forensics experts, and pathologists.

The challenging mystery is eventually solved after the men discover a vital clue in one of the photographs — a circle on the naked right hip of the girl — that everyone had missed the first time.

There is not a single dialogue in the story. The narrative is plain but engaging. I think Gardner deliberately wrote it that way. Instead, he offers the reader a structured investigation and police procedural that helps to nail the murderer in the end.

Interestingly, the author makes a strong case for the high character of district attorneys and lawyers in the country. He wants the public to know what these people are capable of and how they measure up to their responsibilities while investigating homicide cases.

If you are a fan of Erle Stanley Gardner, you will enjoy this story.

First Offense by Evan Hunter, 1955

I offer this review for Friday’s Forgotten Books at Patti Abbott’s blog Pattinase.

A replica of my edition of the book.

Do you know what can make a gritty police procedural a good story? An element of humour. Evan Hunter (alias Ed McBain) provides a fair bit of it in First Offense, the first short story in The McBain Brief, a collection of twenty non-87th Precinct stories published in 1982. 

Of course, it’s all unintended and incongruous in this realistic story about first-time felon Stevie, a 17-year-old cocky and defiant boy who thinks he knows more than the Chief of Detectives and the other hardened felons, including one veteran called Skinner who sizes up our protagonist for what he is, a punk, and advises him to keep his mouth shut.

Stevie is one of many felons who is brought to Centre Street Headquarters in Manhattan for a line-up before every detective squad in the city, “so they will remember him the next time.” Stevie’s crime: he assaulted a candy store owner for a lousy twelve dollars.

The gravity of his offence—stabbing the old man in the chest and abdomen—is lost on Stevie who behaves like a bum at a party, only to find there is no escape from this one.

First Offense is cold and atmospheric. The narrative transforms the reader into a silent witness at the police inquisition. I liked the matter-of-fact questioning of felons (a McBain trademark), including Stevie, by the Chief of Detectives. It was all a bit unsettling. You don’t want to be inside a police station for whatever reason and you certainly don’t want to be in a line-up, prior to arraignment, where you are not innocent till proven guilty.

“Tell us the story, Stevie.”

“Whatya makin’ a big federal case out of a lousy stick-up for? Ain’t you got nothing better to do with your time?”

“We've got plenty of time, Steve.”

“Well, I’m in a hurry.”

“You’re not going any place. Kid. Tell us about it.”

This story takes a hard look at delinquent crime and sociopathic behaviour of young people in the backdrop of some terrific police procedure. I think, this is an early instance of police procedural that Hunter/McBain became so notoriously famous for.

The McBain Brief is a collection of crime stories dating from as early as 1944. In ‘A Brief Introduction,’ Ed McBain ponders the question of why most of these twenty stories were first published under his pseudonyms like Hunt Collins and Richard Marsten. 'First Offense' was first published in Manhunt, December 1955, and was selected as one of the Best Detective Stories that year. McBain has said that he did not write the screenplay for this story on Alfred Hitchcock Presents, though the two masters of suspense met after he wrote 'First Offense.'

Recommended.


Further Reading

MysteryNet has an interview with Ed McBain on their website.

My blog friend Todd Mason had this to say about the story on his blog Sweet Freedom: “First Offense is a not-bad but utterly unsurprising story which reads for all the world like a rendering in prose of a typical script from the CBS Radio series The Lineup.

Harvest of War by Charles Gramlich, 2012

"Across a snowfield that lies red with dawn, the Orc charge comes. And is met." — opening line

© Razored Zen Press

I'm not very familiar with fantasy fiction or science fiction and it takes me some time to understand stories in the two intricate styles. I often find the plot and the narrative complex. Still, I enjoy reading fantasy and sf stories a lot and I read them regardless of my incomprehension.

But every so often comes along a story that makes reading fantasy or sf a satisfying and delightful experience. Such as Harvest of War, a fantasy short story by noted author Charles Gramlich.

In this story Charles blends rich prose and poetry to narrate a riveting tale of creatures and beasts who clash in the land of startling imagination that is both fascinating and terrifying.

It begins with a gory war between the vicious Orcs and their Human foes, a fight to the death where only one race may survive, or maybe none.

But there is a victor. The Human cavalry led by their leader, Lord Aaron, manages to slay the Orc army. Except for one of their kind who is taken captive and caged and treated so horribly, that his fate in the human settlement is probably worse than in hell.

"Victory rewards the most brutal."

In spite of being grievously wounded and tormented by his oppressors, Khales, the captured Orc, knows no pain or fear. He is a proud warrior of his humanoid race.

As time passes and the Orc begins to accept his barbaric fate, he receives compassion from an unexpected quarter—a small human girl with "red hair and grayish-blue eyes." She is Ehma, daughter of Lord Aaron, who rises above her father's blood-thirsty and vengeful tribe to befriend one of their worst enemies and treat him with kindness. She helps the Orc escape but not before arousing something inside him.

There is hope and redemption in each bloody war, every brutal conflict. The Orc gets a chance to redeem himself, and his own villainous race, when in the absence of the human soldiers, he returns to defend his little friend and her colony against the mighty underground beasts called Reapers, foe to both the Orcs and the Humans.

I may sound clichéd when I say this but, Charles Gramlich, author of several fantasy, horror, and sf novels and short stories, has written a cracker of a fantasy story. It is lucid in style and relentless in pace and action. I liked it very much, partly because I understood the story. I only wish the poetic-prose narrative of Harvest of War was longer than the twenty-odd pages of my Kindle edition. I thank Charles for a free copy of the short story available for $0.99 at Amazon.

Highly recommended.


Notes:  Previously, I reviewed Charles' Killing Trail and also interviewed him. You can learn more about the author and his work on his blog Razored Zen and his Amazon page.

The Spider by Hanns Heinz Ewers, 1915

Review of a short horror story by the German actor, poet, philosopher, and writer for Friday’s Forgotten Books over at Patti Abbott’s blog Pattinase.

When the student of medicine, Richard Bracquemont, decided to move into room #7 of the small Hotel Stevens, Rue Alfred Stevens (Paris 6), three persons had already hanged themselves from the cross-bar of the window in that room on three successive Fridays.

I read The Spider by Hanns Heinz Ewers as part of my self-styled challenge to read thirty-one short stories in May and I’m about half way there. I’d be happy if I read even twenty stories this month.

The Spider is an unusual story, illusional and spooky and surreal as a dream, or a nightmare. Three men—a Swiss travelling salesman, a high wire cyclist, and a police officer—are found dead in the hotel room on consecutive Fridays, hanging by the cross-bar of the window and their legs dragging on the floor. A large black spider crawls from each dead man’s mouth.

A hotel porter flicked it away, exclaiming, “Ugh, another of those damned creatures.”

Fearing for the consequences to her business, Madame Dubonnet, the owner of the cheap guesthouse, summons the police inspector of the ninth precinct who reluctantly allows Richard Bracquemont, a student of medicine, to hole up in Room No.7 till he gets to the bottom of the mysterious deaths, or suicides.

© www.barnesandnoble.com

The days and weeks pass without incident until, one day, Bracquemont notices the young woman in the small dark flat across the narrow street. Clarimonda, as the student believes her name to be, is sitting by a window and spinning on an old-fashioned spindle. Bracquemont finds her irresistible.

What does Clarimonda look like? I'm not quite sure. Her hair is black and wavy; her face pale. Her nose is short and finely shaped with delicate nostrils that seem to quiver. Her lips, too, are pale: and when she smiles, it seems that her small teeth are as keen as those of some beast of prey.

From across the street, Clarimonda begins to draw Bracquemont towards him, like a moth to a flame, like a fly into a spider’s web. But is Clarimonda real? And does Bracquemont solve the three mystery deaths?

Clarimonda is a metaphor for the spider in the story which reads like a mild tale of horror. Although The Spider is well-written, the length could've been cut short. It drags a bit halfway when Bracquemont and Clarimonda communicate with each other through smiles, signs, and gestures. This story might not be to everyone’s liking but you might want to read it if you’re a fan of strange fiction.

The Fog Horn by Ray Bradbury, 1951

Todd Mason is assembling the links for Friday’s Forgotten Books at his blog Sweet Freedom, in the absence of Patti Abbott who usually does the honours at Pattinase.

Ray Bradbury writes like a poet, which is not surprising as he has admitted to being influenced by his favourite poets and reading poetry every day of his life. The Fog Horn, a science fiction story he wrote in 1951, is a good example of his lyrical prose. Consider this passage.

“Sounds like an animal, don’t it?” McDunn nodded to himself. “A big lonely animal crying in the night. Sitting here on the edge of ten billion years calling out to the Deeps, I’m here, I’m here, I’m here. And the Deeps do answer, yes, they do.”

The “lonely animal” is a sea monster which is attracted to the “deep cry” of a foghorn in a remote lighthouse. The mysterious giant—a Loch Ness or a Godzilla or a dinosaur of some sort—comes out of the deep sea on the same night once a year to visit the lighthouse and cry out in unison with the foghorn.

But things don’t go as planned on that fateful night, three years later, when McDunn, the veteran, and Johnny, his junior and narrator of this story, lie in wait in the high tower. When the monster comes out of the sea, in the dark and stormy night, and hears the foghorn blow, it answers back. Here, Bradbury’s description is again poetic.

“A cry came across a million years of water and mist. A cry so anguished and alone that it shuddered in my head and my body. The monster cried out at the tower. The Fog Horn blew. The monster roared again. The Fog Horn blew. The monster opened its great toothed mouth and the sound that came out from it was the sound of the Fog Horn itself. Lonely and vast and far away. The sound of isolation, a viewless sea, a cold night, apartness. That was the sound.”

Ray Bradbury's own James Bingham painting
for ‘The Fog Horn.’© www.natedsanders.com

The sound of the foghorn comes and goes and over time it arouses feelings in the monster living under the icy depths of the sea, because their cries sound exactly the same. The monster thinks it has found one of its own kind but the lighthouse doesn’t respond to its romantic wailing. The monster, as you might have guessed from the picture, doesn’t take the betrayal too kindly.

Ray Bradbury has written this allegorical story so incredibly well that you can picture yourself in the shoes of McDunn and Johnny and reliving their experience of the terrifying and lonesome monster and its tragic attachment to the tower. I get carried away with beautiful writing and intend to reread the story in future. I’d recommend it even to those who don’t usually read sf and fantasy.

The Fog Horn appears to enjoy a cult status among Bradbury's many stories. It is the first one in his collection The Golden Apples of the Sun. It was made into a film called The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, 1953, which incidentally was the original title till the author changed it. It is said to have been originally published in The Saturday Evening Post, 1951, though at least one site attributed its first appearance in Argosy the same year. The story has been adapted for plays, comics, and an animated series, and it even influenced a Star Trek episode. 

The Blood of the Fallen by James Reasoner, 2002

© Rough Edges Press

There are some stories that you can’t review without spoilers. The Blood of the Fallen: The history that never happened by prolific American author James Reasoner is one of them. 

The 18-page story is narrated by Stark, the captain of the military guard assigned to protect President Abraham Lincoln. I’m not sure if the detail actually existed but it seemed to have preceded the Secret Service formed in July 1865 under the Department of the Treasury. Apparently, the legislation creating the agency was on Lincoln's desk the very night he was assassinated.

But that’s not really the story.

The Blood of the Fallen refers to President Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg speech in November 1863 dedicating a new cemetery to the soldiers whose Union army defeated the Confederates in the Battle of Gettysburg. Just before his speech, Lincoln learns from Stark that his youngest son, Thomas ‘Tad’ Lincoln, had succumbed to a fever and that his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, overcome with grief, had hanged herself. The double tragedy comes not long after the death from illness of his elder son William ‘Willie’ Lincoln. In real life, however, Mary outlived her husband and three of her four sons; Tad Lincoln died in 1871 of heart failure and not fever. 

An 1864 photo of President Lincoln 

with his youngest son, Tad.

© Wikipedia

Remember, this is history that never happened.

In spite of his great sorrow, Lincoln delivers his landmark address beginning with “Four score and seven years ago…” and ending with “…government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish…” as we have known it for more than a century.

But something snaps inside the president. Haunted by the deaths of his wife and sons, Lincoln reveals a side to him that you’d scarcely think of. Delineating from his prepared speech, the president, “his face dark with anger and hatred,” swears vengeance on the Confederacy, the southern states that ceded from the United States in 1861 leading to the Civil War.

Lincoln’s extempore remarks changes the course of the war, in a way that left me speechless and at the same time marvelling at James Reasoner’s imaginative telling of the story. I was quite unprepared for it, I admit.

I very much enjoyed reading this tale of alternate history by the author of the Civil War Battles series and hundreds of other books. It made me think how different history might have been if we looked at other epoch-making events of the world in a similar manner. For instance, what would have happened if Mahatma Gandhi hadn't been thrown out of a first-class coach of a train at Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, one of many humiliations he suffered and which provoked him into returning to India and fight for independence from the British?

The Blood of the Fallen, which originally appeared in the anthology Alternate Gettysburgs, is available at Amazon. Highly recommended.

Note: Previous reviews of short stories by James Reasoner: The Red Reef and The Man in the Moon.

Branham’s Due by Richard Prosch, 2012

© www.richardprosch.com

In Branham’s Due, American writer Richard Prosch introduces the reader to Whit Branham, the bold and fearless deputy sheriff of Holt County, Nebraska, who sets out to bring in Johann Kramer, a notorious horse-thief and killer of Dakota Territory. The wanted man is holed up in old Iron Creek. Armed with his trusted shotgun, Branham approaches the “sod hovel” on foot and takes Kramer by surprise. The outlaw, a few years older than the lawman’s thirty-two, attempts a trick or two in a vain effort to overcome his captor. Branham helps Kramer get on his horse, Lubber, and the two men start back for O’Neill City.

As many western stories will tell you, bringing in a dangerous outlaw is never easy and Branham finds out the hard way when he is “ambushed” on the trail by “a big block of a woman” with a “big pumpkin face.” Her name is Darla and she is Kramer’s girlfriend. Years before, she and Whit grew up together. She was also his Sunday school teacher.

The twist in this 3,000-word story is in what happens next. Branham uses a ploy that could have cost him his life but he lives to take us on another adventure, in Holt County Law, a novella released in 2013.

Richard Prosch is not handicapped by the length of Branham’s Due. Within the confines of his short and crisp narrative, we are also told about the novelty of barbed wire fences and the lay of the land in Nebraska, where he was raised; Branham’s thoughtfulness in shielding Barney Kearns, his boss and Holt County sheriff, and setting out alone to hunt down the outlaw; and the pleasant conversation between old friends Branham and Darla in the middle of the ambush. These may seem like insignificant elements in the plot but they enrich the story and make it more interesting. Whit Branham is a strong protagonist even though his character begs adequate description. His is the sort of character that develops in your head as you read this fine western story.

I enjoyed Branham’s Due a lot and I’ll be reading Holt County Law soon. You can read more about Richard Prosch and his work at his website here.

Recommended

Death at the Excelsior and Other Stories by P.G. Wodehouse

My good friend Sergio is doing the FFB honours today, instead of Patti Abbot, over at his excellent blog Tipping My Fedora.

Flat on his back, with his hands tightly clenched and one leg twisted oddly under him and with his teeth gleaming through his grey beard in a horrible grin, Captain John Gunner stared up at the ceiling with eyes that saw nothing.

© www.barnesandnoble.com

Did you know that P.G. Wodehouse had written a locked room murder mystery? I, for one, did not.

There is plenty of adventure, spirit of enterprise, and even an element of mystery in his novels but I don’t remember ever reading about murder in his delightful stories. So I was pleasantly surprised to find a dead body in Death at the Excelsior (1914), the first in the namesake collection of seven stories that includes a couple of Jeeves yarns.

Mrs. Pickett, the matronly owner of the respectable Excelsior Boarding-House, finds Captain John Gunner dead in his room, in the manner described above. She summons Constable Grogan who is, we are told, “a genial giant, a terror to the riotous element of the waterfront, but obviously ill at ease in the presence of death.” I liked that description.

Grogan and the sailors on the waterfront are wary of the formidable Mrs. Pickett who is tormented by the incident, the first such calamity to strike her boarding house. She is not worried about the loss of money as much as the loss of reputation of the Excelsior. She hires Paul Snyder who runs a detective agency in New Oxford Street to investigate the murder. The private eye, in turn, deliberately hands over the case to Elliot Oakes, a newbie on his team looking to challenge his boss and revolutionise the agency’s methods. 

© www.tower.com

Oakes solves the case in no time and announces that Captain Gunner was killed from the bite of a poisonous snake imported from India. His boss, Snyder, who set out to teach the upstart a lesson, doubts his theory but is impressed.

Has the pompous Oakes actually cracked the murder case? Not really. Reenter Mother Pickett, who teaches both of them a thing or two about sleuthing.

In Death at the Excelsior, Wodehouse has shown us that he could write in other genres too, like detective fiction, and he does so without giving us an investigation and only a locked room and the power of logical thinking to crack open the case. There is humour in the story but not the wit and hilarity that you'd find in, say, a Blandings or a Jeeves story. Even the writing, while clear and unique, is different from the Wodehousian style you might be used to.

Had the story come to me without the name of the author, I’d have never guessed P.G. Wodehouse had written it. Nonetheless, fans of the English humourist will love the story. You can read it at Gutenberg.

Cages by Ed Gorman, 1994

‘Cages’ just happened. I’m not sure why or how. I’m not even exactly sure what it’s about. But I do know that it’s a metaphor for how I've felt most of my life.
— Ed Gorman, Author's Note

© Cemetery Dance
Publications

Sunday morning, I woke up to a pitiful sight. A shabbily dressed man beat his dishevelled wife in front of their half-naked kid and a few roadside spectators. The man was consumed by rage and was probably high on booze or drugs as he abused, slapped, punched, and kicked his wife. He wanted her to go back and when she refused he dragged her by the hair and slapped her again. She clung to his legs. He punched her some more and tried to chase her away. The kid sucked on his little dirty fingers and quietly watched his father beat his mother who was silent and submissive throughout her ordeal. It didn’t last long. They disappeared somewhere.

I thought of this disturbing scene in context of the opening scene in Cages, a short story by well-known American author Ed Gorman. A small freakish boy with only one arm suffers the mental agony of listening to his parents fight over money, to his “dreamdusted” father slamming his mother into the wall and hitting her, to his mother shrieking and screaming and abusing as his father forces himself on her, till all is quiet again.

The boy is seething with anger. He wants to kill the man who created dreamdust which has destroyed his family, even his dream of a happy family. He knows that money, or the lack of it, is the reason why his father and mother fight every night. He decides to do something about it. He sets out with a sack filled with something unimaginable, along the way braving abuse and harassment by street bullies who call him “faggot” and “mutant.”

Cages is a dark, disturbing, and depressing tale. Some might read it as a horror story. It is set in a futuristic society addicted to a strange drug and distorted by mutants and androids. The mere idea that a society such as the one drawn by Gorman could exist someday is terrifying. Yet, in a way it already does. Shades of it are visible, for instance, in Indian society, especially in the lower echelons, where wife beating, sexual molestation, and rapes are common; where female foeticide and infanticide, though long outlawed, are still prevalent; where female foetuses and newborn girls are found dumped in garbage bins. ‘Cages’ would be an apt title to describe the sad plight of many a woman and girl child in India.

Well, this is just my take on the story which could be interpreted in so many dystopian ways.

Ed Gorman brings a unique style to Cages, one that I don’t read often. His writing is bare, he fires from the hip, there is almost no punctuation, and profanities are galore, none of which diminishes the value of this 21-page narrative. Cages makes for a chilling bedtime story. Or you could read it during the day and still shudder.

I believe Cages was part of a collection of stories published in 1995, the year it was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award for Best Fiction Collection. In 2009, Cemetery Dance Publications came out with an electronic edition of this gritty tale. You can pick up your copy at Amazon.

Recommended

The Secret Sense by Isaac Asimov, 1941

Review of a nice science fiction story for Friday’s Forgotten Books at Patti Abbott’s blog Pattinase.

The Martians couldn't taste and their hearing was bad, but they had a secret sense all of their own.

In The Secret Sense, renowned sf writer Isaac Asimov narrates the story of an interplanetary friendship between Earthman Lincoln Fields and Martian Garth Jan.

Fields, who hails from New York, is living with Jan in an underground city on the Red Planet. The two unlikely friends are close enough to debate over sensitive issues without ill-feeling. So when Fields boasts about the superiority of the five senses possessed by earthlings, as opposed to the apparent lack of any by Martians, Jan is visibly amused.

Unfortunately for the Martian, he lets slip about a secret sense that his highly developed and cultured race possesses and which is far superior than the single or collective sense of sound, touch, sight, taste, and smell experienced by earthmen.

Fields doesn’t believe it but he is so overcome by curiosity that he misuses a Martian law to force his friend into revealing the secret sense to him. Garth Jan does so most reluctantly but warns Fields that he’ll be able to experience it only for five minutes after which the secret sense will be lost to him forever. 

Done Vol, a Martian physician injects Fields with a hormone that activates the secret sense and when it does, after a ten-minute interval, the snickering and unsuspecting New Yorker is exposed to the most amazing and profound experience that neither he nor any earthman has ever experienced. When the five minutes are up, he wakes up dazed and bewildered, pleading with Garth Jan not to take it away from him and to let it go on forever.

Excerpt — Garth Jan was smiling—a smile of dreadful malice, "I had pitied you just a moment ago, Lincoln, but now I'm glad—glad! You forced this out of me—you made me do this. I hope you're satisfied, because I certainly am. For the rest of your life," his voice sank to a sibilant whisper, "you'll remember these five minutes and know what it is you're missing—what it is you can never have again. You are blind, Lincoln, blind!"

It takes great imagination to conceive of a story like The Secret Sense and even greater imagination to put it down lucidly on paper. Asimov was a past master at this. The Secret Sense appeared in Cosmic Stories, March 1941, and was reprinted in The Early Asimov collection, 1972.

If you’re an sf reader, you will enjoy this story. You can read it at Archive.

Hot Goods by Ray Cummings, 1933

I think our good friend Todd Mason is compiling the links for Friday’s Forgotten Books, today, as Patti Abbott is on a well-deserved holiday.

It was crook against crook when Pete Leroy met Basker — with the devil after both of them.

Hot Goods is one of many short stories written by American sf author Ray Cummings (1887-1957) except this one isn't a tale of science fiction. It’s a straightforward crime story involving, as the above line tells you, two crooks who try to swindle one another and fall prey to a cop who promptly hauls them to the police station.

Much of the action takes place inside a train compartment where Basker is pleading with Pete to buy his diamond ring for $450. He desperately needs the money to bail out his kid brother. Basker had seen Pete with a wad of cash and decides to relieve him of it. Pete, supposedly younger and smarter of the two, sizes up Basker as a sham and decides to turn the tables on him. He ropes in his partner George Snell in his little caper.

But something goes wrong. The old woman from whom Basker stole the diamond ring and $650 raises an alarm and soon cops are pounding on the door of their compartment. The armed trio escapes through the window of the stationery train. They run across the tracks and bundle into the front seat of a parked sedan whose backseat occupant turns out to be an off-duty cop taking a nap—and off he marches them to the police station. They had stolen a police car!

I like the sheer atmosphere in such stories and there is a good deal of it in Hot Goods, which appeared in Argosy Weekly, September 9, 1933. The three characters are drawn well in spite of little or no description. I especially liked the opening line—“Pete Leroy had the theory that crooks were the easiest suckers of all to swindle. And it gave him a thrill when this fellow Basker tackled him”—which suggested humour. An easy and entertaining tale you can clearly picture in your mind.

© www.ebooks-library.com

Author Ray Cummings has been described as one of the “founding fathers of the science fiction pulp genre” and I'm looking forward to reading some of his sf including his major work The Girl in the Golden Atom published in 1922. Among his other occupations, Cummings worked with Thomas Edison and wrote stories for Timely Comics, which we now know as Marvel Comics. His own quote, “Time…is what keeps everything from happening at once,” has been immortalised by both science and science fiction.

Rendezvous by Nelson DeMille, 2012

“I saw her in my field glasses. It was a woman.” I added, “They make good snipers.”

Remember the alien that haunted and hunted a US special forces team in the jungles of Central America in Predator, where only the head of the commando unit survives in the end? Cut back to the Vietnam War and imagine a sniper eliminating an elite reconnaissance patrol, where again only the leader of the detachment lives to tell the tale. Except, in Nelson DeMille’s Rendezvous, the sniper is neither man nor alien. It’s a young woman who is as deadly with a long-range Russian-make Draganov rifle as she is sensuous bathing naked under a waterfall, in full view of the lieutenant whose men she is taking down one by one.

The female sniper, clad in black silk pajamas, plays mind games with the ten-man recon patrol which, in spite of being entrenched in the dark and treacherous jungles of Vietnam, has nowhere to run or hide. They are lost and confused and are sitting ducks for the “bitch,” and DeMille shows them no mercy in this crisply written story.

The sniper torments the nameless lieutenant by killing all his men and then mocks him by sparing his life, so that he can go back and tell everyone about her, and thus create the legend of the female sniper. Her trophies should not go in vain.

Rendezvous is entertaining with an element of unintended humour, and it moves at a brisk pace. I don’t know if there were female snipers in the Viet Cong that fought the carpet-bombing Americans, but there were highly-trained insurgents whose guerrilla tactics often won the battle against the enemy.

Rendezvous is the second of Nelson DeMille's Kindle Single; his first was The Book Case (2012), a delightful story about a murder in a bookstore, which I reviewed a couple of years ago. I recommend both the novellas.

The Red Reef by James Reasoner, 2008

In The Red Reef, a 23-page sea adventure, Captain Thomas Larkin is racked by guilt even though he committed no crime. The master of ‘The Red Reef’ is distraught with grief ever since a gale sank his ship. The shipwreck costs lives and sends Larkin, one of the survivors, into gloom. Although he can still command a ship, if he wants to, he decides to sail as an ordinary seaman, “sweating out his guilt in the blistering sun on deck” and trying to forget his past. 

But his past catches up with him. One day, as Larkin is drowning his sorrow in liquor at a port-side tavern, Giselle Beauchene, a young and sensual woman, walks up to him and asks him to take her to the spot where the ship sank. She wants to pay tribute to her father, Charles Beauchene, who was a passenger on ‘The Red Reef.’ 

Although the deep-sea journey will not bring her old man back from the dead, Larkin reluctantly agrees to take Giselle because it will in some way enable him to overcome his guilt. Giselle hires a schooner called the ‘Gallister’ captained by a dubious-looking Scotsman named MacGreevey and the trio and crew waste no time in setting sail for the Navabutu Straits.

However, once the ‘Gallister’ reaches the graveyard at sea, Giselle reveals her true colours and her hidden motive. The morning after a night of lovemaking with Larkin, she turns on the tormented captain with a gun and tells him what she has in mind. The journey of redemption soon turns into a nightmare for Thomas Larkin.

Seasoned author James Reasoner tells a classic pulp story without much fuss. There is little description of people and places. The characters of Larkin and Giselle are well drawn. It’s short and gritty, and it has some good action and an unexpected twist in the end. I liked The Red Reef as much as I liked Reasoner’s The Man on the Moon which I reviewed on October 6. Both stories are crisp and very entertaining to read.

The Red Reef was originally published in Hardluck Stories, June 2008, but you can pick up the Kindle edition at Amazon.

Hemingway in Space by Kingsley Amis, 1960

Friday’s Forgotten Books at Patti Abbott’s blog Pattinase.

© Creative Commons

The absence of humour in science fiction, apart from his liking for the genre, appears to have prompted Kingsley Amis to write Hemingway in Space in the December 21, 1960, edition of Punch. The story was published in the satirical magazine as part of a series of parodies.

This is the impression one gets after reading American-Canadian sf writer Judith Merril’s introduction to Hemingway in Space which she included in her anthology 6th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F a year later.

“One of Mr. Amis's sharpest criticisms of science fantasy in general was the lack of good humorous writing in the field. From the examples he cited, and those he did not, I suspect we do not always laugh at the same jokes. Not always; at least one exception (and probably several more) appeared in the series of parodies published in Punch last year,” Merril noted in her 1961 Dell anthology.

I'm relatively new to sf and especially humour in sf. I didn’t see it either in the title, Hemingway in Space, however amusing it sounds, or in the story which reads like any other sf tale.

The story is set around Mars. Philip Hardacre, the main character, a young man and his annoying wife Martha, and Ghlmu, an old, grizzled two-headed Martian, are hunting for a space monster with their Wyndham-Clarke blasters. The monster is xeeb, a large and ferocious creature prowling that part of the galaxy. After spotting the phosphorescent creature, Philip insists on stepping out into space without his Martian friend. He takes the young man along with him. In the end, however, Ghlmu is killed while saving Philip and the young man.

Other readers might see humour in the story where I didn’t; perhaps, in the dialogue between Martha, “the boring, senseless bitch,” and Philip and Ghlmu, whom she and her husband hired to take on the monster. Philip Hardacre can’t stand her and would gladly get rid of her and xeeb together. In the story Earthmen and Martians seem to be friends and Venus is inhabited. In short, it’s a decent sf story.

The 6th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F contains more than thirty short stories. Other writers include Ray Bradbury, Fredric Brown, Arthur C. Clarke, Howard Fast, Anthony Boucher, Isaac Asimov, Henry Sleser, and Brian W. Aldiss, among others. It also includes an essay ‘How to Think a Science Fiction Story’ by G. Harry Stine, ‘The Year in S-F’ by Judith Merril, and ‘S-F Books — 1960’ by Anthony Boucher.

If you’d like to read just this story, you can click here.

In his biography The Life of Kingsley Amis (2006), writer and academician Zachary Leader has described Amis as “the finest English comic novelist of the second half of the twentieth century.” Amis has parodied sf on more than one occasion, including in New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction (1960) where he looks at the genre in a lighter vein as well as in Something Strange, a short story that first appeared in Spectator (1960) and later in his first collection of stories My Enemy's Enemy (1962). Clearly, I need to read more sf humour by Kingsley Amis.

The Day Time Stopped Moving by Bradner Buckner, 1940

Another sf entry for Friday's Forgotten Books at Patti Abbott's blog Pattinase which is being hosted by Todd Mason at Sweet Freedom today.

All Dave Miller wanted to do was commit suicide in peace. He tried, but the things that happened after he'd pulled the trigger were all wrong. Like everyone standing around like statues. No St. Peter, no pearly gate, no pitchforks or halos. He might just as well have saved the bullet!

Dave Miller pushed with all 

his strength, but the girl was an 

unmovable as Gibraltar.

Imagine a scenario where everyone and everything has come to a standstill, where nothing is moving, where there is no trace of motion or emotion.

Imagine a place where people are in suspended animation, where fires burn without smoke, where doors don’t open, where liquids have turned solid, where pebbles can’t be kicked, where a blade of grass supports your weight.

Imagine a world where all life, animate and inanimate, is frozen like a statue.

Now imagine yourself in just such a place where you are the only living soul and yet you know you are not alone.

It is in this surreal and terrifying world that drugstore owner Dave Miller finds himself after he “commits” suicide to teach his wife, Helen, a lesson. 

October 1940

This short story by sf writer Bradner Buckner reminded me of a silly game we used to play as kids, where you pointed to a friend and blurted out, “Statue!,” and the friend would freeze where he was until you said “pass” and allowed him to get on with his life. After a while it got on everyone’s nerve.

Dave can’t say “pass” and bring the human statues back to life. Instead, his only hope is fellow survivor John Erickson, an elderly, half-bald, eccentric scientist whose experiment with a time machine has gone horribly wrong, and a friendly police dog called Major.

Like Greylorn by Keith Laumer, which I read and reviewed last week, this story was an easy read although Buckner offers a scientific explanation for the immobilised world as well as the working of the time machine known as impulsor. It all went over my head.

Erickson pursed his lips. We are somewhere partway across the space between present and past. We are living in an instant that can move neither forward nor back. You and I, Dave, and Major—and the Lord knows how many others the world over—have been thrust by my time impulsor onto a timeless beach of eternity. We have been caught in time's backwash. Castaways, you might say.”

The 1956 issue

The premise of the story, where time stands still, has been done before, in books, films, and television including, I believe, The Twilight Zone series.

The Day Time Stopped Moving can be described as science fiction, horror, and supernatural rolled into one. It’s a nice little story although I have no idea who Bradner Buckner is. I didn’t find anything on him online. The name could be a pseudonym for a famous sf writer. I leave it to you to enlighten me. The story appeared in Amazing Stories but there is some confusion over the year of publication, 1940 or 1956, so I have reproduced both the covers.

Illustration source: Project Gutenberg

Greylorn by Keith Laumer, 1968

A very readable and enjoyable sf novella for Friday’s Forgotten Books at Patti Abbott’s blog Pattinase.

“Giving me your opinions is one thing, Kramer,” I said. “Mutiny is another.”

My search for a variety of ebooks in the public domain often throws up delightful surprises. Greylorn (1968), an sf novella by prolific science fiction author Keith Laumer, is one of them. It is also the best sf tale I have read so far this year.

The title of the story refers to Lieutenant Commander Frederick Greylorn, a courageous and enterprising military officer in the World Government on earth.

The planet is crawling with a plague, called the Red Tide, which has devoured most of the landmass except North America and a strip of Western Europe, and all of the sea. The alien organism has developed resistance to chemical and biological weapons and is evolving rapidly and is increasingly making earth a toxic dump.

As humans face extinction, Greylorn convinces the governing council to allow him to set out on a space expedition to seek help from a distant colony known as Omega World. With no assistance coming from the other established colonies, contacting Omega is the only option left. There is just one problem: it has never been explored before.

Into this alien and uncharted space, Captain Greylorn commands his mighty armed spaceship, Galahad.

Greylorn knows the voyage is fraught with high risk. What he does not know is the impending mutiny on board, which tests all his skills and resources to the limit and reveals the strength of his character in the face of adversity.

The rest of the story tells us how the brave officer overcomes the mutiny almost single handedly, successfully deals with a hostile alien vessel, and returns to earth with his mission accomplished.

I liked Greylorn because it was easy to follow. There is very little technical jargon though the author shows his superior knowledge in that area, probably the result of his tenure in the USAF. The all-male story is packed with action as Greylorn and the mutineers move rapidly from one time zone to another, one scene of action to another. The narrative is taut and the writing is clear. 

Keith Laumer (1925-1993)
© Wikimedia Commons

ManyBooks, from where I downloaded this ebook, says, “In this story (Keith Laumer) displays the finesse, artistry and imagination of an old pro. Here is one of the tightest, tautest stories of interplanetary adventure in a long while.” I agree with this assessment.

American author Keith Laumer has been described as “one of the best hardcore science fiction writers of all time, the master of time travel and alternate worlds” on the website dedicated to his memory. He is known for his Bolo and Retief series as well as time and space travel and alternate-world adventures like The Other Side of Time, A Trace of Memory, The Time Bender, The Long Twilight, Time Trap, Dinosaur Beach, and The Infinite Cage.

You can read more about the author here.

The Wreck of the Golden Mary by Charles Dickens, 1856

A review of a poignant story by the famous storyteller for Friday’s Forgotten Books at Patti Abbott’s blog Pattinase.

In 1898, American writer Morgan Robertson wrote Futility or The Wreck of the Titan which bore a close and uncanny resemblance to the sinking of the ‘RMS Titanic’ fourteen years later, in 1912. 

Both the fictional steamship ‘Titan’ and the real-life passenger liner ‘Titanic’ set sail from England and were cruising toward New York when they collided with an iceberg in the North Atlantic Ocean and sank.

When Robertson wrote his novella, scarcely would he have imagined that the fate of his ‘Titan’ would prove to be a premonition for the ‘RMS Titanic.’

What Robertson, the son of a ship captain, may or may not have known is that a very famous novelist of the Victorian era had written a somewhat similar story nearly fifty years before he did.

The basic plot of The Wreck of the Golden Mary by Charles Dickens is the same as The Wreck of the Titan.

The ‘Golden Mary,’ a majestic ship with a barque of three hundred tons and carrying more than forty passengers and crew, hits an iceberg and sinks off the coast of Latin America in the South Atlantic Ocean. The ship, commanded by the middle-aged Captain William George Ravender—the best and the bravest of seafarers—had left the shores of England and was on its way to California to trade cargo for gold nuggets. 

The California Gold Rush is incidental to the story. However, it was interesting to see Dickens weave a story around a momentous period in America’s history that saw diggers and emigrants from across the world, especially Europe, rush to the US west coast for a share of the yellow metal.

Dickens focuses on the sad fate of the shipwrecked passengers and crew of the ‘Golden Mary,’ particularly Captain Ravender, a great believer in duty before self; John Steadiman, his chief mate and trusted friend; Mrs. Atherton, a bright-eyed young woman sailing to join her husband in California, along with their little daughter, Lucy; Miss Coleshaw, a sedate young woman in black; and Mr. Rarx, an old and unpleasant gentleman obsessed with the gold discovery.

The captain and his passengers and crew spend nearly a month in their lifeboats—a long boat and a surf boat—wet, cold, and hungry, and drifting aimlessly somewhere in the South Atlantic, often at the mercy of stormy seas and hostile weather conditions. Through it all, Dickens brings out the innate strengths of his characters, particularly Captain Ravender and John Steadiman, who forget their own mental and physical distress to keep alive the hopes and spirits of those under their charge.

More than anything else, The Wreck of the Golden Mary is a metaphor for the tragic fate of Golden Lucy, the three-year old girl with golden curls who endears herself to everyone first aboard the ill-fated ship and then on the lifeboats. Both Mary and Lucy are buried at sea.

There are many affecting scenes in this beautiful story which Charles Dickens narrates through the gentle voice of the captain and his chief mate.

I liked several passages in this novella including the one I reproduce below.

As the child had a quantity of shining fair hair, clustering in curls all about her face, and as her name was Lucy, Steadiman gave her the name of the Golden Lucy. So, we had the Golden Lucy and the Golden Mary; and John kept up the idea to that extent as he and the child went playing about the decks, that I believe she used to think the ship was alive somehow—a sister or companion, going to the same place as herself. She liked to be by the wheel, and in fine weather, I have often stood by the man whose trick it was at the wheel, only to hear her, sitting near my feet, talking to the ship. Never had a child such a doll before, I suppose; but she made a doll of the Golden Mary, and used to dress her up by tying ribbons and little bits of finery to the belaying-pins; and nobody ever moved them, unless it was to save them from being blown away.

Q3 review: books I read in the monsoon months

I’m beginning to hate these quarterly reviews of books and short stories I read and occasionally review because they tell me, and you, just how little I’m reading these days. 

© Candied Crime

As I noted at the end of the first quarter and second quarter, I hope to catch up in the next quarter, which is October-December, and reach a respectable figure of fifty books and short stories each for the whole of 2014. More than fifty would be a bonus for now and an incentive for the future.

But I have doubts as I plan to renew my interest in drawing and painting, my second favourite hobby after reading and writing. Both run on either side of the family and every creative gene must be explored. I also intend to devote some time to philately which I have neglected since graduation. Sitting with one’s stamps collection is time well spent—you learn about places and events. 

© The Book Place

I’ll let you know how all of that goes in the first week of January 2015, perhaps, with a scan or two of my intended paintings.

Although I’m not happy with the number of books and short fiction I read in the third quarter, July through September, I’m satisfied with the quality of fiction.

I read some very good stories by three of my blog friends, all very seasoned writers—The Man in the Moon, a crime mystery by James Reasoner; Green Acres and Ding Dong Bell The Kitten in the Well, two cosy mysteries by Dorte Hummelshøj Jakobsen; and The Education of a Pulp Writer & Other Stories, noir at its best by David Cranmer. The three covers tell their own story. While there is nothing common in any of them, every one of the stories is a standout. Check them out. 

© Beat to a Pulp

Among the other modern books I read in Q3, I strongly recommend Defending Jacob by William Landay, reviewed, and The Button Man by Mark Pryor, to be reviewed soon.

This is the full list of books and short stories I read, July-September, in no particular order.

Novels and Novellas

The Dark Side of the Island by Jack Higgins, 1963

Defending Jacob by William Landay, 2012

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, 1960 — reread

The Man in the Moon by James Reasoner, 1980

The Dunwich Horror by H.P. Lovecraft, 1928

Buck Hawk, Detective by Edward L. Wheeler, 1888

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner by Alan Sillitoe, 1959

The Button Man by Mark Pryor, 2014

Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser, 1900

The Power of Your Subconscious Mind by Joseph Murphy, 1963 — nonfiction

Short Stories

Comrades by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, 1911

A Woman on a Roof by Doris Lessing, 1963

The Education of a Pulp Writer & Other Stories by David Cranmer, 2008-2014

The White Fruit of Banaldar by John D. MacDonald, 1951

Green Acres, 2012, and Ding Dong Bell The Kitten in the Well, 2014, by Dorte Hummelshøj Jakobsen

The Adventure of the Dying Detective by Arthur Conan Doyle, 1913

Who Murdered the Vets? by Ernest Hemingway, 1935, and The Suppressed Poems of Ernest Hemingway, 1922-1929

You’ll see that I have reviewed more shorts than novels—they are quicker and less time consuming. And besides, I genuinely enjoy reading short stories and short fiction.

The Man in the Moon by James Reasoner, 1980

"Are you sure you're not the man in the moon?" Cindy asked.

© www.amazon.com

Children often look elsewhere for familial warmth when their own mom and dad start behaving like monsters. Jackie and his kid sister Cindy, abused by their warring parents, briefly find a father figure in Markham, a private detective from Southern California, who "rescues" them on a deserted state highway in Arizona one night.

The kids had escaped from their father, John Wheeler, who had whisked them away from their mother, Elaine, who has custody. They live in a trailer in Dunes.

Markham takes the children back to their mother in the trailer park where he meets Sheriff Cartwright. Before leaving, the detective gives the kids milk and puts them to bed, exchanges pleasantries with their mother, and a word with the county sheriff.

However, instead of heading back to LA, Markham decides to stay back and investigate. Something about the kids troubles him. Jackie has bruises on his arms, a burn mark on the back of his hand, and a black eye. He doesn't see any marks on Cindy. But he knows she is as traumatised as her brother, just under ten and rebellious. 

© www.philsp.com

While Markham has dealt with conmen and blackmailers, and even unfaithful spouses, he has never handled battered kids. His investigation eventually leads him to a sordid trail littered with forgery, burglary, blackmail, adultery, hate, and murder, involving the kids' father John Wheeler and his father-in-law, Ralph Barrett, a powerful businessman who wants to deal with John on his terms.

If nothing prepared Markham for this case, nothing quite prepared me for the end.

In The Man in the Moon, veteran author James Reasoner handles the subject of abused kids with adroitness and sensitivity. While there is no graphic description, the 10,000-word novella does not lack in suspense and intensity. The story moves at a pace that is both leisurely and feverish. Reasoner doesn't waste his words as evident from the clear plot points and a simple and engaging style. He puts you at ease in spite of the gravity of his story.

What I liked most about The Man in the Moon is Markham staying back because he thinks he has a personal stake in the children's welfare. PIs are often like that when it comes to women and kids who are vulnerable and at the receiving end.

The novella first appeared in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine of April 1980 and is one of many stories about Markham that I hope to read. I don't know if the private eye has a first, or second, name. It was reprinted in 2013. I acquired my Kindle edition from Amazon.

Recommended.