Friday, April 20, 2018

"He Said He Was Sure Glad His Kid Wasn't a Detective-story Fan"

"Lone Bandit."
By Dennis Wiegand (?-?).
First appearance: Astounding Science Fiction, June 1954.
Short short story (8 pages).
Online at Archive.org (HERE).

"The autopsy report shows the guy was so full of lead it must have taken four men to carry him on a stretcher out of his shack."
Is a man or a Martian responsible for these crimes? While somebody, referred to in the
press as the Lone Bandit, is knocking over banks with the greatest of ease, a large cast
of characters struggles to cope with that mind-boggling, whiz-bang piece of technology
the Bandit is using to make his "withdrawals"; in the final analysis, it's the kind of
conundrum only a kid addicted to TV space operas could solve . . .
Resources:
- FictionMags credits Dennis Wiegand with only three SFF stories, the remainder being almost entirely detective fiction.


The bottom line:
   "Maximum setting. If you had fired, you'd have vaporized me."
   "It's my first ray gun."
   — Somewhere on the Final Frontier

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