"There Weren't Any Fingerprints on Atoms"

"Round About Rigel."
By J. Harvey Haggard (1912-2001).
First appearance: Thrilling Wonder Stories, August 1937.
Short short story (5 pages).
Online at The Luminist Archives (HERE).

"Raiders Meet Grim Starlight Justice in the Interstellar Void"

There's an old expression about going to the well once too often; in this instance, going to the same planet once too often can be just as risky . . .

Characters:
~ Lieutenant Eon Hermer of the Space Guard:
   ". . .  don’t get me wrong. I’ve never heard of you, and I’d never have been on Vaporia 
if I hadn’t been shoved off, very much against my will."
~ Jewel Collahan:
   "Shoved off! You were marooned! And I’ve been waiting for two years to get off this biological madhouse."
~ Alf and Mope, the Mason brothers:
   "Two grotesque figures, clad in transparent bell-like helmets with shoulder tanks, came cautiously out of a low airlock, each with dissembler at hip."

Typo: "a small dissembler revolver" ("disassembler" is probably meant).

~ ~ ~

"The Atombomb Clue."
By J. Harvey Haggard (1912-2001).
First appearance: 10-Story Detective Magazine, November 1946.
Short short short story (2 pages).

Online at The Pulpgen Archive (HERE).

"Professor Cadler aimed to make a getaway with an atombomb sample. But though he’d figured on homicide and grand larceny to help him, Cadler forgot to make the payoff to a little atomic tattletale."

You'd think a guy as brainy as our murderer would know better, but ego has a way of short circuiting clear thinking.

Characters:
~ Professor Nelton:
   ". . . the little scientist was nothing to look at. Only his bald head, with corrugated lines that encased a powerful brain, gave a suggestion at being stupendous. Very few knew that Professor Nelton was on the verge of creating a new atomic bomb out of radium."
~ Professor Cadler:
   ". . . he let the grey cells of Professor Nelton’s brain ooze gently into outer air through a bullethole that neatly intersected the frontal bone and the superciliary arch."
~ Wade Norrister:
   "Where did I get this?"
~ Fields, the police photographer:
   "Mind if I mug the guys, Sarge?"
~ Sergeant Brade Wesley:
   "Funny thing. Fields is a good photographer. All the other pictures came out fine. Except yours."

Typo: "to put a ballet through"

Resources:
- J. Harvey Haggard produced pulpy SF and crime fiction throughout the '30s and '40s; for more about Haggard see these Web sources (HERE), (HERE), (HERE), and (HERE).
- The star Rigel has been popular with science fictioneers for years; see more about it in fact (HERE) and fiction (HERE).

The bottom line: "The 20th century was a test bed for big ideas — fascism, communism, the atomic bomb."
   — P. J. O'Rourke

"The Murderer Was Well Acquainted with Her Intimate Habits"

"A Kiss for Belinda."
By Lawrence G. Blochman (1900-75).
First appearance: Collier's Weekly, February 17, 1951 (as "Kiss of Kandahar").
Reprinted in The Saint Mystery Magazine, September 1959; EQMM (Australia), February 1960; EQMM (U.K.), February 1960; and Keyhole Mystery Magazine, June 1960.
Short story (16 pages).
Online at SFFAudio (HERE) (PDF) and UNZ (start HERE) and (end HERE; scroll down to page 67).
(Note: The UNZ Collier's version is poorly reproduced but still readable.)

"Belinda was blonde and beautiful and kissable, too. But unfortunately someone gave her a kiss—of death!"

It's an election year, and Northfield's Coroner is even more useless than usual after the life-less body of an attractive woman is found in her bathtub; in Lieutenant Ritter's experience, the Coroner is "prone to regard all unexplained deaths as due to heart failure, apoplexy, or accident—unless of course the head was missing or a knife protruded from the back." Obviously the victim is this case hasn't been decapitated or stabbed and definitely not shot, but Ritter's policeman's instincts tell him it was no accident, either; moreover, since just about every person involved in this imbroglio doesn't seem to feel it necessary to adhere strictly to the truth, it's lucky for the Lieutenant that he has a clear-thinking man of science, Dr. Coffee, to help sort it all out . . .

Principal characters:
~ Belinda Holliday:
   "The woman in Suite 232 of the Southside Apartment Hotel was certainly young, probably on the exuberant side of twenty-five."
~ Detective Lieutenant Max Ritter:
   "Slim, dark, sad-eyed Lieutenant Ritter made his way to Suite 232 without a word. When he entered the bathroom, and instinctively took off his soft felt hat, his big ears gave him the silhouette of a pogo stick."
~ Dr. Daniel Webster Coffee:
   "Ritter telephoned his friend, pathologist at Northbank's Pasteur Hospital, who had a great and useful scientific curiosity."
~ Roy Manson:
   "Somehow his big, well-muscled hands seemed to call for blue denims and precision tools, instead of the green wax-paper cornucopia of flowers they were holding awkwardly."
~ Anne Devoto:
   "She was a dark, demure little woman, past the first bloom of youth but attractive in a virginal, wholesome way. Her eyes were alive, positive, passionate . . . ."
~ Warren Holliday:
   "He had tired gray eyes and a hesitant smile. His walk was slow and lumbering, but his handclasp was firm."
~ Dr. Motilal Mookerji:
   "Not only was the little Hindu broad of beam, but his fore-and-aft dimensions precluded side-slipping through the narrow channels that separated the autoclave, centrifuge, and 
other pieces of standing gear which cluttered the laboratory."

Resources:
- Keyhole Mystery had a very good start but quickly went downhill during the great fiction digests implosion of the late '50s-early '60s; William G. Contento (and/or Phil Stephensen-Payne) at FictionMags explains:

"Initially Keyhole Mystery Magazine presented a good array of the more stand-ard mystery and detective short stories by many of the better-known mystery fiction authors, but was unable to sustain sales and folded after only three issues. It was relaunched over a year later, by a different publisher, under the title Keyhole Detective Story Magazine, with an emphasis on a more violent, fast-action clip, heavily laced with tough and coarse characters and, above all, sex."

- It was just the other day that we met with Lawrence G. Blochman in one of his stand-alone mysteries (HERE) without Dr. Coffee.

The bottom line: "An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it makes a better soup."
   — H. L. Mencken

"In the Midst of All This, the Cause and Purpose of It All, Sat the Legendary Eel"

"The Eel."
By Miriam Allen deFord (1888-1975).
First appearance: Galaxy, April 1958.
Reprinted several times (HERE).
Short story (10 pages).
Online at Project Gutenberg (HERE).

"The punishment had to fit more than just the crime—it had to suit every world in the Galaxy!"

Some people are really good at what they do, even if what they do isn't really good:

HE was intimately and unfavorably known everywhere in the Galaxy, but with special virulence on eight planets in three different solar systems. He was eagerly sought on each; they all wanted to try him and punish him—in each case, by their own laws and customs. This had been going on for 26 terrestrial years, which means from minus ten to plus 280 in some of the others. The only place that didn't want him was Earth, his native planet, where he was too smart to operate—but, of course, the Galactic Police were looking for him there too, to deliver him to the authorities of the other planets in accordance with the Inter-planetary Constitution.

FOR all of those years, The Eel (which was his Earth monicker; elsewhere, he was known by names indicating equally squirmy and slimy life-forms) had been gayly going his way, known under a dozen different aliases, turning up sudden-ly here, there, everywhere, committing his gigantic depredations, and disappear-ing as quickly and silently when his latest enterprise had succeeded. He special-ized in enormous, unprecedented thefts. It was said that he despised stealing anything under the value of 100 million terrestrial units, and most of his thefts were much larger than that.

HE had no recognizable modus operandi, changing his methods with each new crime. He never left a clue. But, in bravado, he signed his name to every job: his monicker flattered him, and after each malefaction the victim—usually a govern-ment agency, a giant corporation, or one of the clan enterprises of the smaller planets—would receive a message consisting merely of the impudent depiction of a large wriggling eel.

THEY got him at last, of course . . .

But that's not the end of the story, not by a long shot . . .

Comment: A satire on bureaucracy, with special relevance to law and order.

Resources:
- Background info on our author is online at Wikipedia (HERE), the Internet Science Fiction Database (HERE), and the Science Fiction Encyclopedia (HERE).
- The theme of criminality and what to do about it has preoccupied science fiction/fantasy writers for a long time; you'll see how much when you consult these SFE entries: "Crime and Punishment" (HERE), "Prisons" (HERE), "Memory Edit" (HERE), and "Psychology" (HERE).
- In the story, the Agskians let political considerations influence their criminal justice system; depending (probably too much) on Earth history, SF writers have dreamed BIG when it comes to galactic government—go to the SFE (HERE) and Atomic Rockets (HERE) to see just how big.
- The author mentions the Guanches, an extinct Earth society; see Wikipedia (HERE).

The bottom line: "It is a question whether, when we break a murderer on the wheel, we do not fall into the error a child makes when it hits the chair it has bumped into."
   — Georg C. Lichtenberg

"Gazette Reporter Cracks N.Y. Mystery: Writer Captures Model's Killer Singlehanded"

"The Girl with the Burgundy Lips."
By Lawrence G. Blochman (1900-75).
First appearance: Collier's Weekly, December 27, 1952.
Reprinted in EQMM, August 1953 and EQMM (U.K.), August 1953.
Short short story (5 pages).
Online at UNZ (HERE).

"Two models lived in the tiny apartment. One had sleek, dark hair; the other was blonde. One was simple and severe; the other wore ruffles. And one was dead"

. . . and one was missing . . . undetectable . . . indiscernible . . . inconspicuous, imperceptible, unseen, unnoticed, unobserved, hidden, veiled, obscured, out of sight—which, you'd think, would absolutely be the last thing an artist's model would want. The police have drawn a similar inference and, you guessed it, believe the missing girl murdered her flatmate and hurriedly decamped.

Newspaper reporter and mystery novelist Marshall T. Custer, a man who is not above taking mucho dinero for his sleuthing, will eventually turn up the significance of traces of wine, cucumber, and raspberry seeds in the victim's stomach contents, a toothbrush, a silk slip, and a striking resemblance—if, that is, he can manage to stay out of jail (two trips to the hoosegow, courtesy of Detective Kilkenny, are more than enough).

The Custer Method (explication by Custer himself):
   "The Custer Method involves the study of live characters, not dead ones. Why, it just
stands to reason. Pure logic and deduction. Given the set of circumstances and character relationships, it couldn't possibly be anybody else."

Comment: Blochman tries his hand at the epistolary form as applied to the detective tale, and does so without noticeably retarding the story's pace.

Main characters:
~ Marshall T. Custer:
   "My blonde amanuensis ran away to be a bareback rider in the circus. I now rely exclusively on my faithful hip flask and my little gray cells."
~ Olivia Brenn:
   "As all the world knows by now, Olivia was an artist's model. She was small, slim and shapely. She wore her sleek dark hair boyishly short. She posed in the nude. About two months ago when the posing season was slack and the pickings slimmer than a nine-day diet, she took in Ruby to share the rent."
~ Ruby Loring:
   "Ruby modeled, too, but not in the nude. She was about the same size as Olivia, except she had more chest expansion. She also had long blonde hair. And whereas Olivia wore severe suits and blouses, Ruby went in for girly-girly fluffs and flounces. She was fine for modeling big picture hats and full sleeves and filmy furbelows."
~ Henry Pallett:
   "I'll make the break someday."
~ Pierre Duval:
   "I am an oenologist, sir. An oenologist."
~ Franz Ziegler:
   "I was crazy about her. I still am. We're going to be married as soon as her divorce is final."
~ Jeanne Woods:
   "I didn't even try to get through Jeanne Woods's painted war mask and supplementary hostile grimaces. For my money, her Nile-green hostess pajamas could have been made of cast iron."
~ Kenneth Kilkenny, detective first grade, Homicide Squad:
   "Look. Why don't you go write another book? You're not invited to this murder."

Resources:
- As far as we can determine, Lawrence G. Blochman used the Custer character in only two stories:
   (1) "The Girl with the Burgundy Lips," Collier’s, December 27, 1952 (above)
   (2) "The Man with the Blue Ears," EQMM, November 1954 [reprints: EQMM (U.K.), November 1954 and EQMM (Australia), January 1955] (online HERE; go to text page 108).
- Blochman is best known for his Dr. Daniel Webster Coffee series; see ONTOS (HERE) for more.

The bottom line: "Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only."
— Samuel Butler

"Murder Was Not Popular, These Days"

"Bircher."
By A. A. Walde (?-?).
First appearance: Worlds of IF, July 1966.
Reprinted several times (HERE).
Novelette (30 pages).
Online at Archive.org (HERE).

"The police methods of tomorrow always work — except this time, when the victim did not exist!"

In a world not far removed from the one anticipated by Orwell, where everyone's activities are monitored infinitely more closely than they are today, how do you commit a murder and hope to get away with it? The answer, obviously, is you don't . . . but, as if in defiance of such a tightly regulated society, a confused robot finds a corpse lying in an alley, fresh as 
a daisy . . .

Principal characters:
~ The police commissioner (our unnamed narrator):
   "There were very few of us, at least those of us who had jobs worth having, who went to their work instead of having it come to them. I had to put up with it, though. A policeman's lot was not a happy one."
~ Betty, the commissioner's secretary:
   "She was smart, reliable, flexible and even quite attractive. Luckily, she never found out how to make the most of her good points. Homicide department was no place for happily married people. Homicide department was no place for happy people. At least, we never 
had any."
~ The victim:
   ". . . was male, I guessed his age at seventeen, possibly nineteen. He was either nude or naked, depending on whether he wanted to be that way. One of his arms was under him, the other thrown back with the elbow bent in a way unbroken bones could not manage. He was heavily bruised, and his face was bloody."
~ M'Pher, the former police commissioner:
   "He recoiled slightly, then examined it closely, but without touching it. He was mesmer-ized, like the mythical bird hypnotized by a serpent."
~ O'Moore, the high mayor:
   "The mayor spoke again. 'But there are still stilyegi?' He was shocked just as I had been."

Typos: "when he shaw the body"; "didn't realize than anyone"; sloppy punctuation.

The bottom line: "If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination."
   — Thomas de Quincey

The Top 5 in October

Here are ONTOS's most popular postings for the past four Octobers. As usual we offer this caveat first: Since the most ephemeral things mankind has devised are whatever we place on the Internet, don't be surprised if pictures evaporate and links die unremarked. That, more than anything else we can think of, signals the superiority of the old-fashioned book; only with the printed page do we have unlimited access to information without the intervention and, worse, the interference of third parties; i.e., when you read, there are only the author's words and you.

~ October 2016 ~

(1) "It Killed Him Like That—Squeezed the Life Out of Him in No Time" - (HERE)

(2) Norman A. Daniels—Nearly Forgotten Uberpulpster - (HERE)

(3) The Top 5 in September - (HERE)

(4) "GENUINE—PASSED AS COUNTERFEIT" - (HERE)

(5) "We Need Your Planet" - (HERE)

~ October 2013 ~

(1) The Correspondence School Detective - (HERE)

(2) Why Aren't There More—and Better—Science Fiction Mysteries? - (HERE)

(3) "A Cleverly Disguised Homage" - (HERE)

(4) Clay-footed Gumshoes - (HERE)

(5) Criminal Scholarship - (HERE)

~ October 2014 ~

(1) OLD-TIME DETECTION, Summer 2014 - (HERE)

(2) Who Was Dexter Drake? - (HERE)

(3) "You Fancy Yourself Quite a Toff But I'll Show You I'm Toffer Than You Are" - (HERE)

(4) "There Are Murders, There's a Detective, and Sleuthing of a Sort, but the Solution Is in the Stratosphere" - (HERE)

(5) "The Story Is Not Badly Done" - (HERE)

~ October 2015 ~

(1) "A Master of the Psychology of Fear, of the Torments of the Crime-Burdened Conscience" - (HERE)

(2) "Something Had, Obviously, Gone Wrong" - (HERE)

(3) "It Is a Difficult Thing, However, to Hush Up As Serious a Matter As Murder, Particularly on Shipboard" - (HERE)

(4) Four More for EQ and One That Didn't Make It - (HERE)

(5) "There Wasn't a Chance Any Life Remained in That Torn Flesh, in Those Broken Bones" - (HERE)

"Oh, Prophetic Soul! The Rubies Were Gone, and the Box Was Empty!"

GRANT ALLEN is known primarily to mystery aficionados because of his widely reprinted "African Millionaire" story series featuring roguish Colonel Clay, but Allen also produced other crime fiction like "A Deadly Dilemma" (below), which saw publication in the very first issue of George Newnes's magazine, The Strand, soon to be famous for stories featuring the world's first, and only, consulting detective.

"A Deadly Dilemma."
By Grant Allen (1848-99).
First appearance: The Strand, January 1891.
Short story (8 pages, with 8 illos).
Online at Archive.org (HERE).

"For another indivisible second of time Ughtred Carnegie's soul was the theatre of a terrible and appalling struggle. What on earth was he to do? Which of the two was he to sacrifice? Should it be murder or treachery?"

A lovers' spat unexpectedly leads to a life-and-death situation for both of them.

Main characters:
~ Netta Mayne:
   "The ways of women are wonderful; no mere man can fathom them."
~ Ughtred Carnegie:
   "She wouldn't allow him to see her home, to be sure, and that being so, he was too much of a gentleman to force himself upon her. But he was too much a man, too, to let her find her way back so late entirely by herself. Unseen himself, he must still watch over her. Against her will, he must still protect her."

~ ~ ~

"The Great Ruby Robbery: A Detective Story."
By Grant Allen (1848-99).
First appearance: The Strand, October 1892.
Short story (12 pages, with 7 illos).
Online at Archive.org (HERE).

"I told you the very last person you'd dream of suspecting was sure to be the one that actually did it."

To her very great annoyance, Persis will discover what magicians have known for centuries: The hand is quicker than the eye.

Principal characters:
~ Persis Remanet, an American heiress:
   ". . . [who] as a free-born American citizen, was quite as well able to take care of herself, the wide world over, as any three ordinary married Englishwomen."
~ Sir Justin O'Byrne, an acquaintance:
   "Sir Justin was one of those charming, ineffective, elusive Irishmen whom everybody likes and everybody disapproves of. He had been everywhere, and done everything—except to earn an honest livelihood."
~ Lady Maclure, a gracious hostess:
   "All the diamond-cutters in the world are concentrated in Amsterdam; and the first thing a thief does when he steals big jewels is to send them across, and have them cut in new shapes so that they can't be identified."
~ Bertha, a lady's maid:
   "Such a nice, noiseless girl; moves about the room like a cat on tiptoe; knows her proper place, and never dreams of speaking unless she's spoken to."
~ Harry, the postman:
   "There was a minute's pause, inarticulately filled up by sounds unrepresentable through the art of the type-founder. Then Harry spoke again. 'It's an awful lot of money!' he said, musing. 'A regular fortune!'"
~ Officer Gregory, a police detective:
   "Nobody was safe from his cultivated and highly-trained suspicion—not Sir Everard in his studio, nor Lady Maclure in her boudoir, nor the butler in his pantry, nor Sir Justin O'Byrne in his rooms in St. James's. Mr. Gregory kept an open mind against everybody and every-thing. He even doubted the parrot, and had views as to the intervention of rats and terriers."

Resources:
- There is a Wikipedia article about Grant Allen (HERE) and a website dedicated to him (HERE); also see Mike Grost's page on Allen (HERE).
- You can find Allen's An African Millionaire (1897) at Project Gutenberg Australia (HERE) and Project Gutenberg (HERE).
- Allen also wrote a dozen stories for The Strand featuring Miss Lois Cayley, which were collected in book form in 1899; go to Project Gutenberg Australia (HERE) for those. Mike Grost (HERE) writes about the Miss Cayley stories:

"The tales form a story sequence, with each story building on characters and plot developments that have been introduced in previous ones. Most of the stories are not detective tales, in any sense of the word. Some are romances, some social comedies, others adventure tales. . . Eventually, this story sequence turns into something of a novel. The last stories in the book all deal with one common mystery case, whose unraveling carries over from story to story. The individual tales become episodes in the working out of this mystery. I cannot think of any other Victorian or Edwardian sequences that work this way — most of them have a self contained mystery in each short. Each story does have its own subject matter — one deals with a courtroom drama, another with a suspenseful chase — and its own tone. The whole thing produces a mosaic effect. . . Because of its unity of plot, readers should probably read all of Miss Cayley's Adventures, and in order, to get the book's full effect. This does not mean all chapters are equally good, far from it . . . ."

The bottom line: "Whatever hysteria exists is inflamed by mystery, suspicion and secrecy. Hard and exact facts will cool it."
— Elia Kazan