"Everything Considered, It Was a Remunerative As Well As Instructive Investment"

"The Kokod Warriors."
By Jack Vance (1916-2013).

Illustration by [Paul] Orban (1896-1974; HERE).
Magnus Ridolph No. 9.
First appearance: Thrilling Wonder Stories, October 1952.

Reprints page (HERE).
Novelette (22 pages).
Online at Archive.org (HERE).

     "Financial depletion is as good a weapon as any."

As usual, Magnus Ridolph's bank account is depleted, so when he's offered a chance to shut down a couple of war profiteers Ridolph sees the prospect of "a certain measure of subsidi-
ary profits"—not to mention the personal satisfaction of putting these sleazoids out of busi-
ness, because it just so happens they're the selfsame slimeballs who swindled him in a previous deal . . .

Major characters:
~ Martha Chickering:
  "'Are you acquainted with the world'—she spoke it as if it were a social disease—'Kokod?'"
~ Magnus Ridolph:
  "Your problem assumes form."
~ Bruce Holpers and Julius See:
  ". . . have ingeniously made use of the incessant wars as a means of diverting their guests. A sheet quotes odds on each day's battle—a pastime which arouses enthusiasm among sporting visitors."
~ Everley Clark:
  "Do you think I enjoy seeing these little creatures tearing each other apart?"
~ Mr. Pilby, Mrs. Chaim, and Mrs. Borgage, Shadow Valley Inn guests:
  "An old man with a nose like a raspberry,""a heavy woman scented with musk," and "a woman with the small head and robust contour of a peacock."
~ The hangarman:
  "I tell you that tube's good as gold."
~ Captain Bussey:
  "What in God's name happened to you?"
~ The Kokod Warriors:
  . . . remind us vaguely of a planetary culture from a badly mismanaged motion picture franchise. (Wikipedia HERE).

Resource:
- "The sun, Pi Sagittarius": Our author gets the Latin genitive case wrong. "Pi Sagittarii (π Sagittarii, abbreviated Pi Sgr, π Sgr) is a triple star system in the zodiac constellation of Sagittarius. It has an apparent visual magnitude of +2.89, bright enough to be readily seen with the naked eye. Based upon parallax measurements, it is roughly 510 light-years (160 parsecs) from the Sun." (Wikipedia HERE).

Typo: "He5d be crazy".

~ ~ ~

WE'VE EARNESTLY SEARCHED the Interblab for the tenth Magnus Ridolph novelette, "Coup de Grace" (a.k.a. "Worlds of Origin"; reprints page HERE), which first appeared in Super-Science Fiction, February 1958, but haven't had any success locating it. (That is, unless you can read Polish; see HERE).

If you are interested, we regret that you'll have to pay for the privilege, either in paperback (Spatterlight Press edition, 2017; HERE) or in a Kindle e-book collection (Spatterlight Press, 2012; HERE) at Amazon.com; or the paperback (HERE) or NOOK e-book (HERE) at Barnes & Noble. "Worlds of Origin" was reprinted in Tales from Super-Science Fiction (2011; HERE) and elsewhere.

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- Here are all of our previous postings about the Magnus Ridolph series:

   (1) "Hard Luck Diggings" (HERE)
   (2) "Sanatoris Short-Cut" (HERE)
   (3) "The Unspeakable McInch" (HERE)
   (4) "The Sub-Standard Sardines" (HERE)
   (5) "The Howling Bounders" (HERE)
   (6) "The King of Thieves" (HERE)
   (7) "The Spa of the Stars" (HERE)
   (8) "Cosmic Hotfoot" (HERE).
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"It Occurred to Him That This Was the First Time in His Two Years' Experience As Medical Examiner That He Had Beaten the Police to a Homicide"

"The Fourth Visitor."
By George Harmon Coxe (1901-84).
Illustration by Earl Cordrey (1902-77; HERE).

Paul Standish No. 1.
First appearance: Cosmopolitan, August 1942.

Reprinted in the one and only issue of Popular Detective Stories, January 1950.
Short story (7 pages).
Online at Archive.org starting (HERE) and finishing (HERE).

     "I didn't do it."

The sudden death of a man who "had a weakness for women, gambling and sharp practice" and owed a lot of money to ungentle people gets our M.E. in a bind as he tries to protect a young woman he's never met . . .

Principal characters:
~ Eddie Tyler:
  . . . is unpleasantly surprised.
~ Jay Arnold:
  . . . is unpleasantly dead.
~ Janet Payson:
  . . . is found hiding in a closet.
~ Paul Standish:
  . . . acts on a hunch.
~ Mary Hayward:
  . . . is Standish's Girl Friday.
~ Captain Cavanaugh:
  . . . isn't fond of our hero.
~ Lt. Ballard:
  . . . is an efficient cop.
~ Leahy:
  . . . is skeptical.
~ Our cast of suspects:
  . . . in addition to Janet includes Henry Ewing, Al Dumont, and Dean Forbes.

Resources:
- "a dollar-a-year man in Washington": They weren't what you'd call poor. (Encyclopedia.com HERE).
- FictionMags informs us that George Harmon Coxe's Paul Standish shorter adventures ran to nine stories and one novella:
   (1) "The Fourth Visitor," Cosmopolitan, August 1942 (above)
   (2) "The Doctor Makes It Murder," Cosmopolitan, September 1942 (a.k.a. "The Doctor Calls It Murder")
   (3) "The Painted Nail," Liberty, May 5, 1945 (a.k.a. "Murder Makes a Difference," featured HERE)
   (4) "The Canary Sang," Mystery Book Magazine, October 1945 (a.k.a. "Frightened Canary")
   (5) "Murder to Music," Liberty, September 7, 1946
   (6) "Post Mortem," Liberty, November 16, 1946
   (7) "Cause for Suspicion," Liberty, February 1, 1947
   (8) "Death Certificate," Liberty, December 1947 (collected in Four-&-Twenty Bloodhounds, 1950, reviewed HERE)

    (9) "Circumstantial Evidence," Liberty, September 1949
   (10) "Black Target," The American Magazine, March 1951 (a.k.a. "The Appearance of Truth").

- Also see Mike Grost's rundown of Coxe's other series characters (The GAD Wiki HERE) and James Reasoner's article (Mysterious Press HERE). Other books by Coxe, including a Paul Standish novel, are listed on the BookFrom.Net Archive (HERE).
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"I'm Up Against Something Fantastic"

"Cosmic Hotfoot."
(a.k.a. "To B or Not to C or to D").
By Jack Vance (1916-2013).

Magnus Ridolph No. 8.
First appearance: Startling Stories, September 1950.

Reprints page (HERE).

Short story (14 pages).
Online at Archive.org (HERE; some pages blurry but readable) and The Luminist Archives (HERE; much cleaner text; slow load; go to magazine page 82).

     "The Threat of Manual Labor Forces a Space Adventurer to Solve the Riddle of Jexjeka!"

Being an investigator does entail certain risks, particularly on a totally airless and deadly planet: "Magnus Ridolph had disappeared as completely as if Destiny had reached back 
in time and erased the fact of his birth . . ."

Major characters:
~ Howard Thifer:

  "First of all, I'll warn you that if you take on this job there's a good chance you'll be killed. 

In fact you'll certainly be killed unless you do better than the last twenty men."

~ Magnus Ridolph (on "the basis of my method"):
  "I examine every conceivable hypothesis. I make an outline, expanding the sub-headings 
as fully as possible. If I am sufficiently thorough, among these hypotheses will be actuality."

Nice phraseology:
  ". . . a forearm the size of a rolled-up welcome mat."

  "Tables, spires, crevasses the human eye had never been designed to see, the human 

brain to grasp."

  ". . . snorted his mastodonic snort."
  ". . . a fist like a small tub."

Typo: "expect [except] there's no air".

Resources:
- "Fan, Naos VI, Exigencia, Omicron Ceti III, Mallard 42, Rhodope, New Sudan, Formaferra, Julian Wolters IV, Alpheratz IX, Gengillee": The only two recognizably real stars in this list are Omicron Ceti (a.k.a. Mira; Wikipedia HERE and HERE) and Alpheratz (Wikipedia HERE and Universe Guide HERE). "the Gamma Scorpionis planets": Scorpius, a constellation not to be confused with the astrological sign Scorpio. "Scorpius is one of the 48 constellations identi-
fied by the Greek astronomer Ptolemy in the second century. It is an ancient constellation that pre-dated the Greeks. It lies between Libra to the west and Sagittarius to the east. It is 
a large constellation located in the southern hemisphere near the center of the Milky Way." (Wikipedia HERE and Universe Guide HERE). Noir, "the dark star" in the story, would proba-bly be classified as a brown dwarf today. (Wikipedia HERE).

- The latest Magnus Ridolph adventure was "The Spa of the Stars" (HERE).
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"What Made You Suspicious?"

OUR AUTHOR'S REPUTATION rests on his adeptness with wild and woolly science fiction-fantasy-Tarzanesque adventure narratives, so we weren't expecting to find a 
mundane detective story by him, but Roy Glashan did . . .

"An Eye for an Eye."
By Otis Adelbert Kline (1891-1946).

First appearance: Presumed to be The Australian Worker, 
29 September 1937.
Short short story (8 pages as a PDF).
Online at Roy Glashan's Library (RGL) (HERE; HTML).

     "Might have got away with it, but he was a leetle too clever."

Not a whodunit but an efficient five-minute how-we-catch-em in the Dr. Thorndyke/Columbo tradition . . .

Principal characters:
~ Charlie Whiteshirt:
  ". . . was bent on murder."
~ Rance Gordon:
  "Bareheaded, and clad in white polo shirt, and shorts, Gordon was walking straight towards the spot where Charley's boat was hidden, presenting an easy target."
~ Sheriff Abner Peters:
  "I'm going to cut me a ten-foot pole and poke around in the muck."
~ Jack Williams:
  "Why, he had no reason to take his own life! He was forging ahead in his profession, win-
ning a name for himself. Had plenty of money and plenty of leisure."

Resources:
- "Seminole Indian": A tribe that was never conquered by Europeans. "The word 'Seminole' is derived from the Muscogee word simanó-li, which may itself be derived from the Spanish word cimarrón, meaning 'runaway' or 'wild one'." (Wikipedia HERE).
- All of the reference material about Otis Adelbert Kline focuses on his SFF: Wikipedia (HERE), the SFE (HERE), and the ISFDb (HERE); Fadedpage has a collection of his works (HERE), as does Roy Glashan (HERE).
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"A Spatter of Blood Began To Fall Like Rain"

"The Spa of the Stars."
By Jack Vance (1916-2013).
Magnus Ridolph No. 7.

Illustration by Virgil Finlay (1914-71; HERE)
First appearance: Startling Stories, July 1950.

Reprints page (HERE).

Short story (13 pages).
Online at Archive.org (HERE).

     "Ten million munits sunk into the place and three paying guests!"

The flora on the resort planet of Kolama is lush, giving the place an undeniable charm; 
the fauna, on the other hand, are an entirely different proposition, as Magnus Ridolph unpleasantly discovers when he becomes the unwilling subject of an ill-considered experiment: "The dragon opened its maw, darted its head forward, snapped . . ."

Principal characters:
~ Joe Blaine:

  "We don't need a trouble-shooter. We need a dragon-shooter and a water-beetle shooter 

and a flying-snake shooter. Lots of 'em."

~ Mayla:
  "She was a creature of instinct, rather than intellect, and this suited Joe Blaine very well."
~ Lucky Woolrich:

  "I've got the man to help us out if anyone can. He's highly recommended. Magnus Ridolph. 

A well-known genius. Invented the musical kaleidoscope."

~ Magnus Ridolph:
  "Of course, if you wish to retain me as a consultant, I can outline a simple chemical 
process . . ."

Resources:
- "the white sun Eta Pisces": To the Babylonians it was basically a fish bucket. "Eta Piscium (η Piscium, abbreviated Eta Psc, η Psc) is a binary star and the brightest point of light in the constellation of Pisces with an apparent visual magnitude of +3.6. Based upon a measured annual parallax shift of 9.33 mas as seen from Earth, it is located roughly 350 light-years distant from the Sun in the thin disk population of the Milky Way." (Wikipedia HERE).

- Our previous Magnus Ridolph adventure was "The King of Thieves" (HERE).
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The Timely Dying Clue

"Time Will Tell."
By Robert Arthur (1909-69; Wikipedia HERE and FictionMags Index (HERE).

First appearance: Street & Smith's Detective Story Magazine, 
May 1940.

Short short story (9 pages).
Online at Archive.org (HERE).

     "It was a slim reed, but it was all he could give us to go on."

The murder and robbery of an elderly shop owner would seem to have had no witnesses to testify about it—but then there's the testimony of that electric clock, "humming busily on the counter" . . .

Principal characters:
~ Hans Wetzel:
  "The clocks ticked on, but Hans Wetzel lay where he had fallen—behind the curtain that separated the front and rear halves of the store, hands stretched out as if grasping at something that he had not been able to catch or hold."
~ Lucas Lane:
  ". . . stared down at the body and the dried line of blood, and the question mark was mirrored in his mind. Who?—it asked. Why?"
~ The assistant M.E.:
  "If only all these timepieces could tell you something of what happened last night."
~ The suspects:
  ". . . Wetzel's son, and the old German who says he left his jewelry with Wetzel. The lawyer, too. And the lad who claims he only stopped in to have Wetzel look at his watch."
~ Sergeant Jernegan:
  "We've found those four, and they all say they was here, and the times they admit to are close enough to the times as given us so that we think we've got 'em all. That don't prevent, of course, somebody we ain't learned about having been here."

Note: The assistant M.E.'s statement is a perfect example of foreshadowing.

Typo: "Lane agreed with, with".

Resources:
- "Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight": A slight misquotation of the poem "Rock Me to Sleep" (1859) by Elizabeth Akers Allen, enormously popular during the American Civil War. (Poetry Foundation HERE and Wikipedia HERE).

- "an El at each end of the block": They're still around. "A railway that operates on a raised structure in order to permit passage of vehicles or pedestrians beneath it, especially one 
that is part of an urban mass transit system." (The Free Dictionary HERE).

- "there was no hope of getting any of the value of it out of Germany under the present laws": At the time, remember, Germany was being ruled by Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist Party. (Wikipedia HERE).
- "He had a wide influence among German-Americans . . .": There was a small but persistent undercurrent of sympathy in America during the '30s for the National Socialist cause. (Wikipedia HERE).
- We've already visited with Robert Arthur, Jr. a couple of times: "Midnight Visit" (HERE) and "Too Dumb to Be Fooled" (HERE).

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"King of Thieves—King of Bloodsuckers—Extortioners—That's a Better Name for You!"

"The King of Thieves."
By Jack Vance (1916-2013).
Magnus Ridolph No. 6.
First appearance: Startling Stories, November 1949.

Illustration by Virgil Finlay (1914-71; HERE).
Reprints page (HERE).

Short story (11 pages).
Online at The Luminist Archives (HERE; go to page 98; it will be necessary to download the entire issue, 175 MB.)

     "Ridolph's in his element on Moritaba, where petty pilfery is the hall-
mark of citizenry and larceny reigns supreme!"

We've encountered other stories featuring societies where theft and even murder were acceptable, and sometimes actually required, social behavior; consequently, some of 
you may be mildly shocked by how easily Magnus Ridolph fits in with the social scene 
in Challa . . .

Principal characters:
~ Ellis B. Mellish:
  "You see, my friend, that's how I do things. I get what I go after."
~ Tomko:
  "Old Kanditter—that's the king—won't make any concessions whatever."
~ Kanditter, the King of Thieves:
  "He steal crown—he king. That is law of the Men-men."
~ The helicopter pilot:
  "Wouldn't ever have knowed you was a detective. You don't look the type."
~ Magnus Ridolph:
  "You owe me a hundred thousand munits for the telex you filched from my property. 
I'll take double or nothing."

Resources:
- "the hot yellow light of Pi Aquarii": It's actually blue. To the Chinese, this star is associated with the tomb, while to the Arabs it's a tent. "Pi Aquarii, Latinized from π Aquarii, is the Bayer designation for a binary star in the equatorial constellation of Aquarius. This system has an apparent visual magnitude of a mean apparent magnitude of +4.57. Based upon parallax measurements, it is located at a distance of roughly 780 light-years (240 parsecs) from Earth." (Wikipedia HERE; also see Universe Guide HERE).
- "somewhere in Argo": A classical constellation, you might say. "Argo Navis (the Ship Argo), or simply Argo, was a large constellation in the southern sky that has since been divided into the three constellations of Carina, Puppis and Vela. The genitive was 'Argus Navis,' abbrevi-ated 'Arg.' Flamsteed and other early modern astronomers called the constellation just Navis (the Ship), genitive 'Navis,' abbreviated 'Nav.' It was identified in Greek mythology with the Argo, the ship used by Jason and the Argonauts that sailed to Colchis in search of the Golden Fleece." (Wikipedia HERE).
- Our latest adventure with Magnus Ridolph was "The Howling Bounders" (HERE).

The bottom line:

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