Reviewed by TONY BAER:     WILLIAM STUART – Night Cry. Dial Press, hardcover, 1948. Avon, paperback, 1949. Avon #597, paperback, 1954. Basis for the film noir Where the Sidewalk Ends, directed by Otto Preminger from a script by Ben Hecht and starring Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney. Adapted for TV: Kraft [Mystery] Theatre, NBC, 13 August 1958. starring Peter Falk and Jack Klugman.    Ken Paine just came back from WWII, a war hero, and now he’s adrift. He’s drinking and gambling and generally making an ass of himself. He gets in a fistfight with some jerk at the gam ..read more

ANALOG SCIENCE FICTION. August 1967. Editor: John W. Campbell. Cover art by Chesley Bonestell. Overall rating: 2½ stars. POUL ANDERSON “Starfog.” Short novel. Ranger Daven Laure is assigned the task of returning a lost spaceship and its crew to their home planet. Complications arise since they have some from a strange region of space, a globular cluster, where abundance of stellar matter and sheer closeness of stars make ordinary navigation impossible. Lots of meat for the astrophysicist, but the story fails to inspire the ordinary reader, Quite boring. ** CHRISTOPER ANVIL “Babel II.” The nex ..read more

REVIEWED BY DAN STUMPF:     JACK EHRLICH – Revenge. Dell #A168, paperback original, 1958.    A mention  in Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Blog led me back to Revenge, and I thought I’d dig it off the shelf and have another look at it.    I still remember buying this in 1970 at a used-paperback joint in Cleveland, back when a dime (or three-for-a quarter) would buy gaudy-covered tomes by Woolrich, Hammett, Jim Thompson or any number of then-forgotten authors whose works are now fashionable and high-priced. In fact, Bill compared Revenge to Jim Thomp ..read more

Reviewed by TONY BAER:     H. P. LOVECRAFT – 3 Tales of Horror. Arkham House, hardcover, 1967.    So I’ve had this really cool edition of Lovecraft from August Derleth’s Arkham House, with ominous illustrations by Lee Brown Coye. Take a look here, using the link below, and you’ll get the general idea: https://dangerousminds.net/comments/the_dark_art_of_h.p._lovecraft_illustrator_lee_brown_coye.    But for whatever reason I’d never read it. Nor any Lovecraft. Now back in my D&D’ing days of yore (Dungeons and Dragons, for the uninitiated), I beca ..read more

HAROLD Q. MASUR – The Legacy Lenders.  Scott Jordan #11. Random House, hardcover, 1967. Bantam, paperback, 1st printing thus, April 1968.    While representing a friend whose wife had been killed in a traffic accident, lawyer Scott Jordan us involved in another death, a murder which is neatly and carefully tied into the plot as it develops, The driver of the other car had transferred rights in a future inheritance for a fractional value in cash, but not without involving a number of other people in a fraud necessary to obtain the required insurance on his own life, It is t ..read more

A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review by Bill Pronzini     RON FAUST – Tombs of Blue Ice. Bobbs-Merrill, hardcover, 1974. No paperback edition.    During a mountain-climbing expedition in the French Alps, a sudden storm breaks and one of the two companions of American Robert Holmes is killed by a bolt of lightning; the other climber, a German named Dieter Streicher, is seriously injured. Unable to move Streicher, Holmes returns to the village of Chamonix to report the incident and request immediate help for the wounded man.    A search party is sent out to the h ..read more

Reviewed by TONY BAER:     BASIL HEATTER – The Dim View. Farrar Straus & Co., hardcover, 1946. Signet #668, paperback, 1948. Popular Library #602, paperback, 1954.    Jim Masters (like Basil Heatter), is skipper of a PT boat in New Guinea in WWII. He gets blown up, ass over tit, and wakes up recuperating in Australia.    A young, pretty barmaid falls in love with him, and he with her, as much as he can after what he’s been thru. He’s been thru enough and served long enough, he can get discharged if he wants.    He talks it over w ..read more

Nero Wolfe on Page and (Small U.S.) Screen: “Eeny Meeny Murder Mo” by Matthew R. Bradley< <       Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novel The Final Deduction (1961) sees the return of Ben Dykes, head of the Westchester County detectives in the Zeck trilogy, and introduces their D.A. du jour, Clark Hobart, and Captain Saunders of the State Police; Ben earns a “Competent and admirable” from Wolfe, whose weight is given as 285 pounds. Stout is inconsistent about Archie’s weekly poker game with Lon and the ’teers, now held on Wednesday, not Saturday as in “The Next Witnes ..read more

JOHN D. MacDONALD – The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything. Gold Medal s1259, paperback original, 1962. Reprinted several times. Made-for-TV movie with Robert Hays and Pam Dawber, 1980.    Kirby Winter’s uncles had died and instead of the millions Kirby expected to inherit, he received only a gold watch as a keepsake. But he finds that there are others, quite unscrupulous, who believe that he must at least have received the secret of his uncle’s success. And in fact he has; the owner of the watch has the ability to stop normal time and t o exist in that stopped world for up ..read more

A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review by Marcia Muller     WILLIAM FAULKNER – Knight’s Gambit. Random House, hardcover, 1949. Story collection. Reprinted many times since, including Signet #825, paperback, 1950.    Nobel Prize-winner William Faulkner wrote six criminous short stories featuring Southern lawyer Gavin Stevens and narrated by Stevens’s nephew and youthful Watson, Chick Mallison. Set in legendary Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, these tales are in classic Faulkner style and are peopled with characters reminiscent of his other work:    Southerners w ..read more