"Deliberately, Cleverly, and Diabolically Murdered"

"But the Patient Died."
By Lawrence G. Blochman (1900-75).
First appearance: Collier's, October 18, 1947.
Reprinted in The Saint Detective Magazine, June/July 1953; The Saint Detective Magazine (Australia), October 1954; The Saint Detective Magazine (UK), December 1954; and Mystery Digest, March 1958.
Collected in Diagnosis: Homicide (1950).
Short short story (7 pages).
Online at UNZ HERE (start) and HERE (finish; scroll down to page 104).
(Note: Poor illustrations, but the text is readable.)

"Her relatives were all terribly upset—but one of them was a murderer."

This is the first appearance of a character that this author would come back to often over the next quarter century:

Blochman's Dr. Coffee tale, "But the Patient Died" (1947), is a straightforward Dr. Thorndyke imitation. The first tale in the Dr. Coffee series, it furnishes a good summary of both the daily hospital work and routine of Dr. Coffee, and of his and his police friend Max Ritter's personalities. It makes for pleasant reading, although quite mechanical in its approach to mystery. The best touches in the story deal with politics in Coffee's hometown of Northbank. — Mike Grost, the GAD Wiki (HERE)

When a young woman mysteriously dies after a routine operation, Dr. Coffee's skills as a pathologist lead him to only one possible diagnosis: murder.

Main characters:
~ Dr. Daniel Webster Coffee, Chief Pathologist at Pasteur Hospital:
   "Lab tests showed Mrs. Baron in good physical shape this morning. Her blood clotted in the normal time of three minutes. A few hours later her blood just wouldn't clot at all, so that she bled to death despite a technically perfect operation. I've got to find out what happened to her in those few hours."
~ Doris Hudson, Coffee's lab assistant:
   "She was tall and slim and wore her white smock as though it had been custom-tailored."
~ Dr. Andrews, the surgeon:
   "It was a simple operation—an old appendix. I've done dozens and dozens, and never lost a patient before." 
~ Mrs. Harriet Baron, the victim:
   "'She was a beautiful thing, Dan.' Dr. Andrews seemed to be talking to himself reproach-fully. 'Young. Long golden hair. Married only a year. . .'"
~ Jerry Baron, the husband:
   "Mr. Baron and Miss Price drowned their sorrow for a while and then departed, with my boys right behind. The bereaved husband drove the sorrowing Miss Price to her home on the Heights. They went in and turned on a light. My boys say that after one minute and twenty seconds of the first round Miss Price broke the clinch, went to her own corner, and pulled down the shade."
~ Margery Grey, the sister:
   "Whatever she saw there seemed to frighten her. Her eyes widened. Then her lips closed again with some newfound strength. She was no longer plain-looking. She was suddenly mature, resolute, even beautiful; it was the beauty of character."
~ Steve Forest, the ex-boyfriend:
   "And if I were in Northbank tonight, instead of out here on the other side of the world, I'd like nothing better than killing you with my own hands. Yes, you and that hairless lap dog you say you love so much."
~ Diana Price, the friend:
   "'Something's wrong with her,' Dr. Coffee said. 'Did you notice the skin around her eyes? And her lips?'"
~ Miss Green, the head nurse:
   "Miss Price has always shown a great interest in her work."
~ Lieutenant Max Ritter:
   "There's nothing like a little high-class science to scare hell out of a wrong guy."
~ Dr. Thomas Vane, the Northbank County coroner:
   "'Just as I thought,' said the coroner. 'Surgical shock and internal hemorrhage.' He winked at Dr. Coffee. 'Nothing criminal here. Nobody to blame. I'll just sign the death certificate'."

Nice moments:

   "THE waiting room in the surgical wing of Pasteur Hospital was very much like a hundred other waiting rooms in a hundred other hospitals in the American Middle West. The last cheerless light of the setting sun filtered through the many windows to scatter shadows over the impersonal neatness of the wicker furniture and the potted rubber plants. The false casualness of visitors awaiting word of life or death made subdued voices as hollow as the fierce efforts at concentration of those who pretended to read."

   "The smartly dressed woman crossed her silken legs and opened her suede bag. The emerald-cut diamond on her right hand sketched an arc of cold fire as she raised a fragrant wisp of lace to dab at her dark eyes."

Resources:
- Wikipedia (HERE), the GAD Wiki (HERE), and the IMDb (HERE) have info about Lawrence G. Blochman and his output, while Only Detect discusses one of Blochman's novels (HERE).
- Dr. Daniel Webster Coffee appeared in just over two dozen shorter works between 1947 and 1974 (quite a few are available free online); here is the FictionMags list of his appearances ("ss" = short story; "nv" = novelette):

   (1) "But the Patient Died" (nv) Collier’s, October 18, 1947 [online HERE and HERE]
   (2) "Rum for Dinner" (ss) Collier’s, February 7, 1948 [online HERE and HERE]
   (3) "Sleepwalker" (ss) Collier’s, May 15, 1948; also as “Catfish Story” [online HERE and HERE]
   (4) "Deadly Backfire" (ss) Collier’s, January 22, 1949 [online HERE, HERE, and HERE]
   (5) "Brood of Evil" (ss) Collier’s, April 2, 1949 [online HERE, HERE, and HERE]
   (6) "Diagnosis Deferred" (ss) Collier’s, December 24, 1949 [online HERE and HERE]
   (7) "The Swami of Northbank" (ss) Collier’s, July 15, 1950 [online HERE and HERE]
   (8) "Kiss of Kandahar" (nv) Collier’s, February 17, 1951; also as “A Kiss for Belinda” [online HERE, HERE, and HERE]
   (9) "Calendar Girl" (nv) Collier’s, September 20, 1952 [online HERE]
   (10) "If You Want to Get Killed" (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, June 1955 [online HERE]
   (11) "Stacked Deck" (ss) Collier’s, June 8, 1956; also as “A Case of Poetic Justice” [online HERE]
   (12) "The Man Who Lost His Taste" (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, July 1958 [online HERE]
   (13) "Murder in a Motel" (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, April 1959
   (14) "The Wolf and the Wayward WAC" (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, May 1963
   (15) "Young Wife" (ss) This Week, November 17, 1963
   (16) "The Killer with No Fingerprints" (nv) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, June 1964
   (17) "Goodbye, Stranger" (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, October 1964 [online HERE]
   (18) "Death by Drowning?" (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, April 1965 [online HERE]
   (19) "Dr. Coffee and the Philanderer’s Brain" (nv) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, August 1966
   (20) "Missing: One Stage-Struck Hippie" (nv) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, September 1970
   (21) "Dr. Coffee and the Amateur Angel" (nv) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, October 1971
   (22) "Dr. Coffee and the Pardell Case" (nv) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, June 1972
   (23) "Dr. Coffee and the Whiz Kid" (nv) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, November 1972
   (24) "Dr. Coffee and the Other Twin" (nv) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, May 1973
   (25) "The Hate Collector" (ss) Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, March 1974.

- Dr. Coffee's first appearance on screen was in the Lux Video Theatre episode "Diagnosis: Homicide" (August 1957) (see the IMDb HERE).

- There was also a short-lived TV series featuring this character (July-September 1960; just 9 shows), with Patrick O'Neal (1927-94) as Dr. Coffee, Chester Morris (1901-70) as Max Ritter, and Phyllis Newman (born 1933) as Doris Hudson. According to Jimbo Berkey at his Free Classic TV Shows website (HERE), apparently only one episode still survives:

The Diagnosis: Unknown television show was the summer replacement for the Gary Moore Show and aired every Tuesday evening at 10 p.m. Dr. Coffee was a scientist that solved crimes using science to interpret clues. This was the first television show that brought the scientist into the crime field as the main protagonist. Unfortunately, I can only find one surviving episode, and it isn't in great shape, but it is a wonderful look at a brand-new genre of television crime show, long before C.S.I. and the shows we are familiar with today.

Also see Wikipedia HERE for more about the show, including an episode list; as the article makes plain, Diagnosis: Unknown can be regarded as a precursor to the Dick Van Dyke series Diagnosis: Murder.

The bottom line: "A doctor who lacks doubt is not a doctor. He's an executioner."
   — Hercule Poirot

"And Then I Remembered Everything"

"Brisk Money."
By Adam Christopher (born 1978).
First appearance: Tor.com, July 23, 2014.
Novelette (39 pages).
Online HERE.
(Parental caution: Strong language.)

"Raymond Chandler famously hated science fiction, saying 'They pay brisk money for this crap?' However, it has recently come to light that Chandler secretly wrote a series of stories and novels starring a robot detective. He then burnt all the manuscripts and went on writing his noir masterpieces. Unknown to Chandler, his housekeeper had managed to save some of these discarded manuscripts from the grate in his study, preserving the tales for future generations. The first of these stories was recently unearthed by author Adam Christopher. On the topic of how the manuscript made its way from Chandler’s study in California to Christopher’s home in England, Christopher is suspiciously quiet."

Your typical private eye is resilient, persistent, observant, and gifted with a good memory. Raymond, our central character, has all of those attributes but one; for him, life lasts for only a day: "Every twenty-four hours," he tells us, "I was born again." And with that "rebirth" go all of his memories . . . no, not quite all of them; there's this lingering fragmentary image of that night in the rain, of a nervous little man who couldn't stop talking, of a paper parcel full of money and a gun—and of the two men killed with it . . .

Principal characters:
~ Raymond of the Electromatic Detective Agency and our first-person narrator:
   "I don’t think you’ll find anybody as good at this job as me, Ada."
~ Ada:
   "Her voice was calm and measured and smoky, like it always was. She didn’t sound worried or afraid or angry, but maybe she couldn’t, even if she was."
~ The finger man:
   "'I work for a lot of people. Point out things, right? Give people a little push in the right direction.' At this, he put his hands out and mimed pushing somebody. Whether it was down the street or in front of a bus, I couldn’t tell."
~ Professor Thornton:
   "He looked happy to see me and worried at the same time. After all, he never expected to see me again and I never really expected to be here. He took the pipe out of his mouth but he didn’t say anything."

Nifty passages:

   "The man nodded towards the windshield, towards the rain and colored lights. Then he lifted the gun up and tapped it against my cheek twice. Don’t ask me why he did it, but after he did he smiled like he was pleased with himself and the dull metal-on-metal tapping sound his action made, then he nodded forward again."

   "I wasn’t sure that was right but he was the one with the gun so I wasn’t going to argue. I also wasn’t going to point out that the gun wouldn’t be much use against me, even point-blank. He seemed like a nice class of crook and I didn’t want to disappoint him."

   "The guy with the gun reached inside his jacket and pulled out a hip flask. It was silver and I got a good look, but there was nothing on it. No monogram. No initials. No name, address, phone number, social security number. Unlike me. I had some of those at least punched onto my chest plate. Next to the detective shield."

   "Clients seemed to want their private detectives to sit behind big desks, like they were ship captains behind the wheel. The desk in the outer office sure was big enough to sail away on."

   "See, that’s detective work. I didn’t get my detective shield in a cereal packet. Is that how it goes? I don’t know. I’ve never opened a cereal packet or eaten the contents."

   "Sometimes there was data left, stuck to the surface of my mind like burned grease stuck to a frying pan."

Resources:
- Adam Christopher, who has "penned" two tie-in novels to the Elementary TV series and one (so far) book featuring the Electromatic Detective Agency, has a webpage HERE, while his Amazon page is HERE.
- They're the usual places to find useful info: HERE (Wikipedia), HERE (the SFE), and HERE (the ISFDb).

The bottom line: "No one knows when a robot will approach human intelligence, but I sus-pect it will be late in the 21st century. Will they be dangerous? Possibly. So I suggest we put a chip in their brain to shut them off if they have murderous thoughts."
  — Michio Kaku

"What're You Trying to Do—Prove I'm a Murderer or Something?"

"Murderer's Luck."
By Ray Cummings (1887-1957).
First appearance: Hutchinson’s Adventure-Story Magazine, May 1927.
Reprinted in Detective Fiction Weekly, February 15, 1936 and The Phantom Detective, June 1937.
Short story (9 pages).
Online at UNZ HERE.

"Water Would Wash the One Bloodstain and the Sea Would Swallow the Victim of Canne's Flawless Crime"

Two men alone on the ocean, one contemplating a good catch, the other contemplating murder . . .

Main characters:
~ Bob Canne:
   "Being the ward of a rich man wasn't such a soft seat, when you were twenty-one, as when you were sixteen. Jenks had his own ideas—getting a job and earning your own living, for instance—and you couldn't budge him."
~ Peter Jenks:
   "If only Jenks would die . . . That would fix everything. But he wouldn't. He was only in his forties. Stunted, misshapen, almost grotesque little fellow. But he was hardy, there wasn't a thing wrong with his health. An accident would kill him. Thoughts are queer things."
~ Outerbridge:
   "Handle it easy! Don't get your fingerprints on it! Take it to the policeman."
~ Policeman:
   "Bring him down here—I want to show him this!"

Nice little bits of personification, always useful to set the scene and reflect back the characters' emotions:

   "The sun was a great dull-red ball, just sinking at the horizon. It laid a golden sheen on the blue of the water, the surface of which rose and fell with lazy ground swells as though it were the chest of some gigantic sleeping monster."

   "A night breeze had sprung up; out over the purple horizon of the sea a bank of sullen black clouds had appeared. The wind came now with occasional puffy gusts which rippled the surface like a school of fish being chased."

Resources:
- Ray Cummings could do it all as far as pulp writing was concerned; you might remember him from a previous ONTOS posting (HERE) about Dr. Feather, one of several series charac-ters Cummings concocted.

The bottom line:
   "Do you really believe in the perfect murder?"
   "Mmm, yes, absolutely. On paper, that is. And I think I could, uh, plan one better than most people; but I doubt if I could carry it out."
   "Oh? Why not?"
   "Well, because in stories things usually turn out the way the author wants them to; and in real life they don't ... always."
   "Hmm."
   "No, I'm afraid my murders would be something like my bridge: I'd make some stupid mistake and never realize it until I found everybody was looking at me."
   — 'Dial M for Murder'

"Those Two People Died of Cosmic Radiation!"

"The Veiled Woman."
By Mickey Spillane (Frank Morrison Spillane, 1918-2006).
First appearance: Fantastic, November-December 1952.
Novella (46 pages).
Online at SFFAudio HERE (PDF).
(Parental caution: Sexual situations, strong language, and extreme violence.)

"No modern-day writer is more widely cussed and discussed than Mickey Spillane. Critics regard him as most of us regard the atom bomb, leading magazines dissect him with unloving care. Why? Because the Spillane emphasis is on sex and sadism, his milieu the boudoir and the underworld, his men ruthless, his women svelte, passionate and immoral. That's why everyone hates Spillane — except his millions of readers and his banker! The editors of Fantastic take pride in presenting the first science-fiction story by Mr. Spillane."

. . . but, if some sources are to be believed, it's almost certain he didn't write it. The ISFDb credits Spillane with only three stories that could remotely qualify as SF/Fantasy; according to the SFE:

   "Spillane's one outright sf credit, the unremarkable novella 'The Veiled Woman' (Novem-ber/December 1952 Fantastic), was ghost-written by the magazine editor Howard Browne; he claimed that Spillane's own sf submission was unusable."

Wisely, it seems in retrospect, Spillane stuck with the genre he knew best, over-the-top, sex-and-violence-drenched crime fiction, and mercifully left fantasy and science fiction to the experts.

She had an interesting face, the kind that turned men's heads, attracted Russian spies like flies, and set off Geiger counters . . .

Principal characters:
~ Karl Terris (can you say "Mike Hammer"?):
   "The country's richest, handsomest, most eligible bachelor had returned from the dead! Only the bachelor part no longer applied . . ."
~ Lodi Terris:
   ". . . you had brought back as your bride the world's most beautiful woman."
~ "Sadie":
   "You may now turn around and lower your hands. Any more than that and I'll shoot you through the knee."
~ Granger:
   "You're making a serious mistake, Mr. Terris."
~ Eddie Treeglos:
   "If I never see a sweet innocent school-girl face again it'll be fine with me."
~ Senator McGill:
   "Karl, you young idiot, are you trying to ruin me?"
~ The lookout:
   "A thin flat-faced kid with horn-rimmed glasses and a mop of black hair was propped up on a backless kitchen chair outside a freight elevator, buried to the eyebrows in a battered copy of Marx's Das Kapital."
~ "Sam Parks":
   "I think you had better lift your hands quite high and turn around. Both of you. Slowly."
~ Luke Ritter:
   "You smell like a cop to me!"
~ Nekko:
   "You want I should rough him up some more, Luke?"
~ Millard Cavendish:
   "Possession of this secret, judging from what you say, would make America so powerful that no other nation, or coalition of nations, would dare launch a war."
~ Winston Blake:
   "Mr. Cavendish, will you order this woman to remove her veil?"

   "I tried to lift an arm. Somebody had tied an anvil to it. The City Hall was glued to my feet. The room clouded, wavered, then slowly dissolved. I fell face forward into the ruins."

Resources:
- Gallons of ink (and possibly blood, who knows?) have been spilled concerning the contro-versial Mickey Spillane, but we're not going to pursue that any further; instead, let us direct you to these bio/bibliographical sources: Wikipedia HERE, The Thrilling Detective HERE, the SFE HERE, and the ISFDb HERE.

The bottom line: "Nobody reads a mystery to get to the middle. They read it to get to the end. If it's a letdown, they won't buy anymore. The first page sells that book. The last page sells your next book."
   — Mickey Spillane

"There's No One Easier to Out-Fox Than the Human Fox"

"The Perfect Victim."
By J. Lane Linklater (Alexander William Watkins, 1892-1971).
First appearance: Detective Fiction Weekly, July 4, 1936.
Short story (12 pages).
Online at UNZ HERE.

"Paul C. Pitt, Modern Robin Hood and Inventor of Smart Methods, Comes to Grips with an Unscrupulous Banker—and Faces the Toughest Problem of His Mad, Perambulating Career"

Even in the smallest village there lurks evil. The moment he enters a little town out in the middle of nowhere Paul Pitt senses it, good people being oppressed by a petty tyrant:

   ". . . there's drama here, Dan—drama under the most placid surfaces. Drama — and misplaced wealth!"

Sure, Pitt is no angel (he is, in fact, a con man), but there are limits. Sizing up the situation, he evolves a clever plan to put things right. As he says:

   "There's no one easier to hoodwink than the legitimate crook. There's no one easier to take things away from than the man who wants everything for himself. And the desire for revenge endows such a man with all the attributes of a perfect victim!"

Main characters:
~ Paul C. Pitt, a horseless Lone Ranger:
   "You and your good people are in trouble. Perhaps I can help you. But I can do nothing unless you talk."
~ Dan, Pitt's limousine driver:
    ". . . geez, boss, I don't see how you're gonna make out. You give away most of your dough. You oughter take care of yourself, huh?"
~ The garrulous drug store clerk:
   "The free movement of information is one of the charms of a place like this. Everybody knows about everybody else. And there's no greater storehouse of information than the drug store."
~ Tom Lake, the reticent prospector:
   "I'd trust you anywhere, Mr. Pitt, although I know you're a much smarter man than I am. In fact, I think you're the smartest man I ever met."
~ Mrs. Lake, Tom's wife:
   "Mrs. Lake's lips seemed to tremble a little at the mention of the money. She was, apparent-ly, on the point of yielding. But the man standing in the room came forward, put his hand on his wife's shoulder."
~ Anna Lake, their daughter:
   "You're just another crook, Mr. Pitt!"
~ Mr. Kupp, president of the Bank of Buling:
   "Sitting at a desk, partially concealed by a partition, was a short, broad man whose thin lips were twisted in a never-wearying smile, but whose eyes were fixed and cold with the chill cunning of an ancient fox."
~ Clarence Kupp:
   "A young man wanted me to marry him. His name is Clarence Kupp, and his father is the banker here. But I don't even like him. I turned him down. His father blamed my father, so ever since he's hated dad."
~ Eggas, "pretty sure to be at the pool hall":
   ". . . furtive, dirty, dull-eyed . . ."

Resources:
- Other Depression era semi-honest characters in the Paul Pitt vein include The Patent Leather Kid (HERE) and Mr. Amos Clackworthy (HERE).
- Like many other pulpsters of the era J. Lane Linklater had several series characters appear-ing in the magazines at the same time (at those pay rates, they practically had to): Paul C. Pitt; Hugo Oakes, lawyer-detective (see Monte Herridges's Mystery*File article about Oakes HERE); Sergeant "Hardboiled" Karney; Sad Sam Salter; and Roy Quick (one story only, apparently). Here are the Paul C. Pitt stories, four of which are readily available online (information from FictionMags; "(ss)" signifies a short story):

   (1) "The Face of Excitement" (ss) Detective Fiction Weekly, May 30, 1936
   (2) "The Wager" (ss) Detective Fiction Weekly, June 27, 1936
   (3) "The Perfect Victim" (ss) Detective Fiction Weekly, July 4, 1936 [online HERE]
   (4) "A Message from Philly" (ss) Detective Fiction Weekly, July 11, 1936
   (5) "Something for the Sheriff" (ss) Detective Fiction Weekly, August 8, 1936 [online HERE]
   (6) "The Prescription" (ss) Detective Fiction Weekly, September 5, 1936 [online HERE]
   (7) "Hooded Heads" (ss) Detective Fiction Weekly, September 26, 1936
   (8) "Mr. Dillping to Mr. Skutter" (ss) Detective Fiction Weekly, October 3, 1936 [online HERE]
   (9) "A Hundred a Minute" (ss) Detective Fiction Weekly, December 12, 1936 [online HERE]
   (10) "Meet Me in Jail" (ss) Detective Fiction Weekly, December 26, 1936
   (11) "Missing Money" (ss) Detective Fiction Weekly, February 27, 1937
   (12) "The King Goes Mad" (ss) Detective Fiction Weekly, April 10, 1937
   (13) "One More Alias" (ss) Detective Fiction Weekly, October 9, 1937
   (14) "The Road to Hazard" (ss) Detective Fiction Weekly, April 26, 1941
   (15) "Golden Ghosts" (ss) Detective Fiction, August 20, 1941
   (16) "A Copper for Breakfast" (ss) Double Detective, March 1943.

The bottom line: "The petty thief is imprisoned but the big thief becomes a feudal lord."
— Zhuang Zhou

May's Top 5

For some reason, the most popular posts this past May involved science fiction tales, but we won't puzzle over it; instead we offer our thanks for your faithful readership.

May 2016

(1) OLD-TIME DETECTION, Spring 2016 - HERE
(2) "The Cat Must Know" - HERE
(3) Death in the Mirror - HERE
(4) "It Was Only a Matter of Time Until a Criminal, a Really Clever One, Saw Through the System—and Reverted" - HERE
(5) "If One of You Moves Toward the Medicine Cabinet, As God Is in Heaven, I'll Ray You Down" - HERE

May 2014

(1) "The Spectator Really Cares Very Little Whether A Was Murdered by B or by X, As Long As He Got Murdered by Somebody" - HERE
(2) Dr. Thorndyke Times Three - HERE
(3) "Murder Is an Amateur Crime in England" - HERE
(4) "Absolutely One of the Best Locked Rooms" - HERE
(5) "Literary Fads and Fashions Pass—The Detective Story Is a Constant" - HERE

May 2015

(1) OLD-TIME DETECTION, Spring 2015 - HERE
(2) The Erudite Flatfoot - HERE
(3) "A Diffusion of Darkness" - HERE
(4) "Sherlock Holmes Lives in a Peculiarly Definite Sense as Real as D'Artagnan or Cyrano" - HERE
(5) Feminist Thrillers by Vera Caspary - HERE

"They Even Gave Me a Medal"

"The Risk Profession."
By Donald E. Westlake (1933-2008).
First appearance: Amazing Stories, March 1961.
Collected in Tomorrow's Crimes (1989) (for sale HERE).
Novelette (27 pages).
Online at SFFAudio HERE and Project Gutenberg HERE.

"The men who did dangerous work had a special kind of insurance policy. But when somebody wanted to collect on that policy, the claims investigator suddenly became a member of ... the risk profession."

Insurance companies are never overjoyed when they have to pay up, so the death of Jafe McCann out among the asteroids triggers an investigation:

   "I'll tell you how it is. The company isn't accusing you of anything, but it has to be sure everything's on the up and up before it pays out any ten thousand credits. And your partner just happening to fill out that cash-return form just before he died—well, you've got to admit it is a funny kind of coincidence."

The circumstances might be kind of funny, but Ged Stanton, the insurance investigator on this case, isn't laughing:

   ". . . the string of coincidences were just too much. McCann just coincidentally happens to die right after he and his partner make their big strike. He happens to write out the cash-return form just before dying. And his body just happens to float away, so nobody can look at it . . ."

Given all that, Stanton would probably agree with a certain fictional supervillain: "Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times, it's enemy action." Proving it, however, is going to be what, for Sherlock Holmes, would be a three pipe problem:

   "So I just sat, thinking morosely about non-forged cash-return forms, and coincidences, and likely spots to hide a body in the Asteroid Belt."

Main characters:
~ Henderson of Tangiers Mutual Insurance Corporation:
   "What do you know about the Risk Profession Retirement Plan?"
~ Ged Stanton, the narrator, a roving claims investigator for Tangiers Mutual:
   "I knew right away this meant I was going to have to go off-Earth again. I'm a one-gee boy all the way. Gravity changes get me in the solar plexus. I get g-sick at the drop of an elevator."
~ Teaking, at the Mapping & Registry Office:
   "The manager—a man named Teaking—went well with the office. His face and hands were spare and lean, but his uniform was immaculate, covered with every curlicue the regulations allowed."
~ Jafe McCann:
   "Jafe McCann died just a bit too soon. He was sharp and cheap, but he was honest. If he'd lived, he would have repaid all his debts, I'm sure of it. And if this strike they made is as good as I hear, he would have been able to repay them with no trouble at all."
~ Ab Karpin:
   "Not as sharp as McCann when it came to money. That's why all the money stuff in the partnership was handled by McCann. But Karpin was one of the sharpest boys in the business when it came to mineralogy. He knew rocks you and I never heard of, and most times he knew them by sight. Almost all of the Belt boys are college grads—you've got to know what you're looking for out here and what it looks like when you've found it—but Karpin has practically all of them beat. He's sharp."

Catchy phraseology:

   [An asteroid] "Atronics City was about as depressing as a Turkish bath with all the lights on. It stood on a chunk of rock a couple of miles thick, and it looked like nothing more in this world than a welder's practice range."

   [Being inside an asteroid] "All of these levels have one thing in common. Square corners, painted olive drab. The total effect of the place is suffocating. You feel like you're stuck in the middle of a stack of packing crates."

   [Walking on an asteroid] "The suitcases weighed about half an ounce each out here, and I felt as though I weighed the same. Every time I raised a foot, I was sure I was about to go sailing into a wall. Local citizens eased by me, their feet occasionally touching the iron pavement as they soared along, and I gave them all dirty looks."

   [Sleeping on an asteroid] "Today, my stomach was very unhappy, and my head was on sympathy strike. Today, I was going to spend my time exclusively in bed, trying not to float up to the ceiling."

   [Asteroid miners] "Close-mouthed, anti-social, fiercely independent, incurably romantic, always convinced that the big strike is just a piece of rock away."  . . .  "Searching the asteroid chunks for rare and valuable metals is basically pretty lonely work, and it's inevita-ble that the prospectors will every once in a while get hungry for human company and decide to try a team operation. But, at the same time, work like this attracts people who don't get along very well with human company. So the partnerships come and go, and the hatreds flare and are forgotten, and the normal prospecting team lasts an average of three months."

"Asteroid Miner" (Artwork by James Gurney)

~~~

"The Spy in the Elevator."
By Donald E. Westlake (1933-2008).
First appearance: Galaxy, October 1961.
Collected in Tomorrow's Crimes (1989) (for sale HERE).
Short story (17 pages).
Online at SFFAudio HERE and Project Gutenberg HERE.

"He was dangerously insane. He threatened to destroy everything that was noble and decent—including my date with my girl!"

The war is over and the world is safe, but only a maniac with a gun wants to believe it . . .

Principal characters:
~ Edmund Rice, the naive narrator:
   "I was a gymnast instructor. The subjects I taught included wrestling, judo and karati—talents I would prefer to disclose to him in my own fashion, when the time came."
~ Linda, his girlfriend:
   "I don't mean that Linda's a perfectionist or a harridan or anything like that. Far from it. But she does have a fixation on that one subject of punctuality."  . . .  "I remember one time, shortly after we'd started dating, when I arrived at her place five minutes late and found her having hysterics. She thought I'd been killed. She couldn't visualize anything less than that keeping me from arriving at the designated moment. When I told her what actually had happened—I'd broken a shoe lace—she refused to speak to me for four days."
~ The receptionist from the Transit Staff:
   "'We're not supposed to give this information out, sir,' she said, her voice low, 'but I'm going to tell you, so you'll understand why we had to do it. I think it's perfectly awful that it had to ruin things for you this way. But the fact of the matter is—' she leaned even closer to the screen— 'there's a spy in the elevator'."
~ The spy:
   "He was rather short, perhaps three inches shorter than me, with a bony high-cheekboned face featuring deepset eyes and a thin-lipped mouth. He wore gray slacks and shirt, with brown slippers on his feet. He looked exactly like a spy ... which is to say that he didn't look like a spy, he looked overpoweringly ordinary. More than anything else, he reminded me of a rather taciturn milkman who used to make deliveries to my parents' apartment."

Typo: "caught be spy already"

Resources:
- In "The Risk Profession" our protagonist travels to an asteroid; for more about the minor planets in fact and fiction, go HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE. Space mining is also thoroughly covered on Winchell Chung's Atomic Rockets megasite HERE, while asteroid prospecting features heavily in one of our previously discussed stories HERE.
- Before he repudiated his involvement with the genre, Donald Westlake wrote some pretty good science fiction, which was to be expected, so good were his auctorial skills; see these references for more about his output: Wikipedia HERE, the GAD Wiki HERE, the SFE HERE, and the ISFDb HERE.
- A background article by Nick Jones about Westlake and his quarrel with science fiction is HERE; from there follow all subsequent links—but, as always, WATCH OUT FOR SPOILERS. Jones informs us that:

Indeed, it's decidedly not the case that he [Westlake] only wrote science fiction when he was just starting out as a writer, eagerly grasping any opportunity that came his way, irregardless [sic] of genre: he carried on penning SF right up until the late-1980s. Evidently, science fiction was something that continued to fascinate and inspire him, even when he no longer needed to write SF stories – or sleaze paperbacks, or any of the other things he wrote for a paycheck in those early days – just to make ends meet.

The bottom line: "I'm almost incapable of lying. I'd be a terrible spy."
   — Gary Oldman