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A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review by George Kelley & Marcia Muller ADAM HALL – The Quiller Memorandum. Simon & Schuster, US, hardcover, 1965. Reprinted many times. Originally titled The Berlin Memorandum in the British first edition, The Quiller Memorandum [Collins, 1965] introduces “shadow executive” Quiller, who works for an a
BLACK MASK – June 1940. Editor: K. S. White. Cover artist: Rafael DeSoto. Overall rating: **½. ERLE STANLEY GARDNER “Tong Trouble” Ed Jenkins. Novelette. Ed Jenkins, the Phantom Crook, applies his talents on behalf of Chinese friends, and a tong war, threatened by an unsolved murder, is averted, Told in the obvious Gar
BILL PRONZINI “Hooch,” First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, June 2014. Quite possibly collected but the whereabouts at present are not known. Time: Prohibition Era in the US. Place: Somewhere along the Northern California coastline. Players: Three hoodlums in one truck are helping bring in a shipment of
DESTINATION BIG HOUSE. Republic Pictures, 1950. Dorothy Patrick, Robert Rockwell, Jimmy Lydon, Robert Armstrong. Director: George Blair. A schoolteacher alone in a mountain cottage helps a wounded man, not knowing he’s a racketeer on the run from the gang he’s double-crossed. When he dies, he leaves her his fortune of
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 […]
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 rcommunicat
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 fic
A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review by Bill Pronzini FRANK GRUBER – Brass Knuckles. Sherbourne, gardcover, 1966. Frank Gruber’s first novel, The French Key (1940), so moved critic William Lyon Phelps that he rhapsodized: “[It] is the best of 8,000 murder stories I have read.” One wonders (a) what sort of godawful mysteries Phelps
A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review by Ellen Nehr ADAM HALL – Knight Sinister. Pyramid, US, paperback, 1971. Harper, US, paperback, 1990. First published in the UK in 1951, written by Elleston Trevor under the pseudonym Simon Rattray. Before he became famous as Adam Hall with the publication of The Quiller Memorandum, Elleston Tre
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 […
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 othe
A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review by Bill Pronzini 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.
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