"BIRS"

"From the Desk of Jarrod Foster."
By Biren Shah.
First appearance: Nature/Futures, 20 July 2006.

Reprints page (HERE).
Short short short story (1 page; PDF).
Online at Nature (HERE).

     "Although potentially dangerous, off-label uses have clear appeal to 
diverse demographics."

As technology advances, lawyers are eternally grateful that people are constantly 
finding ways to misuse it that leave the innovators perpetually looking anxiously 
over their shoulders . . .

Resources:
- For more background, see the Wikipedia articles on brain implants (HERE) and human augmentation (HERE); not everyone is overjoyed at the prospect of poking around inside people's heads, however, as emphasized (HERE; Wikipedia).
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"Stabbed in Eleven Places!"

A BURLESQUE is "a literary, dramatic or musical work intended to cause laughter by caricaturing the manner or spirit of serious works, or by ludicrous treatment of their subjects" (Wikipedia; HERE).

Although it helps to be familiar with the work being burlesqued, in the following instance (transmuting a self-improvement book into a crime story) written by the man who gave us Winnie the Pooh (and, incidentally, just as funny as the man who gave us Jeeves), we think you'll agree that it isn't necessary to know anything at all about Eustace Miles and his serial Healthward Ho! to get a kick out of . . .

"A Didactic Novel: The Mystery of Gordon Square."
By A. A. Milne (1882-1956).
First appearance: Punch (date unknown).
Collected in Once a Week (1914).

Short short short story (3 pages as a PDF).
Online at Project Gutenberg (HERE) or, failing that, (HERE; scroll to TOC).
(Note: Gutenberg URLs are slippery; it might require several clicks to get there.)

     "Roger returns home quickly, and decides to practise breathing through the ears."

As usual with the best comic writers, we'll refrain from further comment and let the author work his charms.

Resources:

- A good starting place with Alan Alexander Milne is the Wikipedia entry (HERE). As 
for Eustace Miles (1868-1948)—yes, he was for real—FictionMags lists 18 articles by 
him prior to 1914 promoting a healthy lifestyle, with titles like "What to Eat to Keep 
Fit" (1900), "The Art of Exercise" (1902), "The ABC of Daily Physical Life" (1903), 
and so on.

- We've already featured The Red House Mystery (1922) several times (HERE), (HERE), 

and (HERE), and some of his other short works having criminous themes (HERE).

- Another surge of waggishness on Milne's part, also from Punch, is his three-act play 
The Double Mystery (1914), online at Wikisource (HERE).
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"The Smart Ones Are Easy Marks Because Their Imagination Does the Work for You"

"Trading in Futures."
By S. R. Algernon (Sean Green).
Illustration by JACEY.
First appearance: Nature/Futures, 27 June 2019.
Short short short story (1 page; PDF).
Online (HERE).

     "Naturally, if word of this were to get out, people would think we were crackpots, so we would appreciate it if you would keep this trade secret to yourselves."

All conjobs need credulous victims to succeed, and this supercon is no exception . . .

Resources:
- In the annals of crime, the "confidence trick" (Wikipedia; HERE) is almost as old as murder. Everybody has heard of Ponzi and his scheme (HERE); and, thanks to his being portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio in a movie, you might also have heard of Frank Abagnale (HERE).
- Previously we featured another S. R. Algernon micro-narrative, "VTE" (HERE).

The bottom line:
   "What I did in my youth is hundreds of times easier today. Technology breeds crime."
     — Frank Abagnale
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"Let Me Bring You an Aspirin, Sir"

"The Perfect Crime Revisited."
By Terry Black (?-?).
First appearance: Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, November 1982.

Short short short story (2 pages).
Online at The Luminist Archive (HERE; scroll down to magazine/PDF page 76).

     "It started out as an open and shut case. Trouble was, it was entirely too open!"

Just how credible is a dying message, anyway? "On the floor was a vital clue: a thin line of blood trailed from the dead man's outstretched finger, forming a wavering—but quite clear—indictment of his killer."

Characters:
~ Floyd Burbank:
  "Beside one of the tables was a portly, middle-aged man with a Sterling silver letter opener jutting from his back."
~ Detective Sergeant Barton Rimble:
  "Now you say we're dead in the water. What the hell's the problem?"
~ Detective Calvin Cupflutter:
  "You'd better see for yourself, sir. We have what you might call . . . a complication."

Resources:
- According to FictionMags, beginning in 1980 Terry Black's (HERE) first eight sales were to the Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, with today's story being the third; he's also had nine stories published in Alfred Hitchcock's, and well over a dozen of an SFF-nal nature (HERE), several of which feature his series character, Johnny Quantum.
- Other ONTOS articles about the perfect crime include "He Didn't Bother to Look Too Carefully When He Didn't See It" (HERE), "I Heard Him Scream, and I Spun Round, and 
He Was Squirming Across the Guard Rail" (HERE), and "Amateur Night for the Perfect 
Crime" (HERE).

The bottom line:

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"It Helped To Be a Librarian Who Liked Detective Stories"

THERE WERE TWO stories in Analog back in the '60s featuring an interesting character called the Librarian who, in the performance of his duties, is of necessity also a Cultural Ambassador. We're including the first story, which doesn't have a conventional criminous theme but does have the Librarian in hot water with the local authorities, because it intro-duces Quist and Bookworm, whose next and last adventure has them in deep danger up to their Dewey Decimals . . .

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   "Remember that as Librarians you carry with you a sacred trust, the future of the human mind."

"An Ounce of Dissension."
By Martin Loran (John Baxter, born 1939, and John Smith, 1936-87).
Illustration by [Frank] Kelly Freas (1922-2005; HERE).
First appearance: Analog, July 1966.

Reprints page (HERE).
Novelette (20 pages).
Online at The Luminist Archive (HERE; slow load; scroll down to magazine page 43).

     "A librarian seems an odd sort to raise general hallelujah and trouble—but the librarian was a little special, and his library a highly dynamic type. Very dynamic!"

The planet Rayer is "like a mad combination of Seventeenth and Twentieth Century London with the hygiene standards of the Fifteenth thrown in, well endowed with poverty but poor in intelligence" and inhabited by people who just don't seem to care, a state of affairs dictated and maintained by a totalitarian government that, for one thing, encourages book burning; aiming to do something about the situation, the Librarian finds himself plotting a course of action that he never imagined he would have to do when he first arrived on Rayer: "Excuse me, sir, but what's a . . . a rev-o-lution?"

Major characters:
~ Stephen Quist:
 "He had thrown things at the computer before and knew just where to aim."
~ Bookworm, Mark 18:
  "I've got everything they ever put into me. I'm the original junk yard."
~ The thin man:
  "Burn the lot."
~ Jonrad, the young man:
  "It doesn't do to take risks."
~ Cassill, the grim-faced man:
  "We live like animals; no, worse than animals, because our books are confiscated and burned, our movements watched all the time. We are slaves . . ."
~ The lieutenant:
  ". . . made a decision, the speed of which was a tribute to the fear the dictator inspired 
in his minions."

Typo: "one of the soliders".

Resources:
- Astronomical references in the story include Dubhe (Alpha Ursae Majoris), discussed in Wikipedia (HERE), and an "unnamed star NGC 5548, known locally as New Sol," which is totally wrong since the New General Catalog listing for number 5548 designates a galaxy, 
not an individual star, an error that the technophilic Analog editors should have caught; 
see Wikipedia (HERE).

~ ~ ~

   "Have you ever read any detective stories?"

"The Case of the Perjured Planet."
By Martin Loran (John Baxter, born 1939, and John Smith, 1936-87).
Illustrations by [Frank] Kelly Freas (1922-2005; HERE).
First appearance: Analog, November 1967.

Reprints page (HERE).
Novelette (41 pages).
Online at The Luminist Archive (HERE; slow load; scroll down to magazine page 66).

     "The real advantage of an education shows up when the guy you're working against doesn't have one and you do. Like the librarian, with his Bookworm Computer for memory—and a highly advanced education in Whodunits Down Through The Ages!"

It's a boring milk run, "another dreary visit" to the planet Napoleon 6, a "dead-end world," for Quist of the Librarian Service and his AI, Bookworm—that is, until somebody takes a shot at him: "Quist looked down incredulously at the blood staining the now tattered sleeve of his coat. Before he fainted, his mind had time to be grateful that the marksman had read detective stories, too. The first shot was always a warning. . . ."

Major characters:
~ Quist:
  "In the world of private eyes and beautiful blondes he felt more at home. At least there people did things."
~ Bookworm:
  "If a librarian couldn't trust his Bookworm, then who could he trust? Except perhaps his own intuition."
~ Addison:
  "Quist ran towards him but the bearded man was like a rabbit . . ."
~ Marcus Obolensky:
  ". . . had no more fear of death than has a tree."
~ The nervous little man:
  ". . . lay like a suppliant, face down before the cratered stone."
~ The girl:

  "Somebody knocked on the door. It sounded like the knock of a beautiful blonde, about 

five feet four, with a full figure, a seductive smile, and a twinkle in her eye."

~ The cop:
  "When the door opened, Quist knew what to expect. Policemen are much the same all 
over the universe."

Nice personification:

   ". . . lanes along which dark and crooked buildings leaned their heads together and 

spoke in shadows."

   "Squeezed between two other office blocks, it cowered in the shadows, poking one 

shy corner of its facade out into the slanting afternoon sun."

   "They were a jungle of vines and reeds that rioted across the paths, shouldering the 
marble slabs out of their way with slow arrogance."

Comment: With his ability to channel his inner Philip Marlowe, the Librarian had real potential of getting himself involved in further adventures, but these two stories seem 
to be the only ones featuring him.

Typos: "blond" instead of "blonde"; "but I have [?] idea".

Resources:
- Our "author," Martin Loran, was really two people, Australian John Martin Baxter (Wikipedia HERE; the SFE HERE; and the ISFDb HERE) and Ronald Loran Smith (the ISFDb HERE).
- "There were a thousand ways to die on Napoleon 6." Terraforming (since 1967, when our story was published, the term has lost its hyphen) is an event in search of some place to happen; see Wikipedia (HERE; "Terraforming") and (HERE; "Terraforming in popular culture"); Peter Ahrens's paper "The Terraformation of Worlds" (HERE; PDF); and Martyn J. Fogg's "The Terraforming Information Pages" (HERE), from which we quote:

   "Terraforming is a process of planetary engineering, specifically directed at enhancing the capacity of an extraterrestrial planetary environment to support life. The ultimate in terraforming would be to create an uncontained planetary biosphere emulating all the functions of the biosphere of the Earth—one that would be fully habitable for human beings."

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"I'd Hate to Have the Job of Finding Out How Anyone Escaped from This Room"

AFTER YOU'VE spent time solving locked-room problems with John Dickson Carr or his alter ego Carter Dickson, almost all other impossible crimes pale in comparison. Like a drug taken too often or too quickly, imbibing the fiendishly clever works of our favorite detective fiction author (his name, as you may have noticed, is embedded in our weblog's URL) could strongly influence your perceptions; so, when a Golden Age pulpster not named Carr or Dickson attempts an impossible crime in a sealed room and you've been constantly communing with JDC, you might judge the story rather stringently, perhaps a bit too rigorously. Bear that in mind as you read . . .

"Man Afraid to Die."
By Norman A. Daniels (Norman Arthur Danberg, 1905-95).
First appearance: Detective Novel Magazine, November 1946.

Reprinted in Detective Novel Magazine (Canada), November 1946.
Short story (15 pages).
Online at Archive.org (HERE).

     "The time is almost at hand. Get ready to die."

. . . and when death does come for the victim it's quick, according to the doctor, because after being stabbed in the heart "he didn't breathe more than twice"; but for the investigating detective the situation goes from zero to impossible with dizzying speed: "There wasn't a place for anyone to hide and one of us was close by the only door all the time." There is a bright spot in the case for him, however, a faint glimmer of light, the dawning of a revelation, that this crime is inextricably related to another, unresolved murder, and to solve one would mean solving the other . . .

Major characters:
~ David Stearns:
  "The man was dead. There was no doubt about that, but Keller worked furiously until the door opened. He dropped to one knee beside the man and felt for a pulse. There was none. The body wasn't just warm, with the normal heat of life. It was hot."
~ Dr. Blaney:
  "It's murder all right. The knife in the chest could be suicide, but not the wounds in the back. There are six of them. Looks to me as if the killer slipped up on Stearns, stabbed him half a dozen times and sent him sprawling to the floor. Then he delivered that wound through the heart."
~ Detective Jim Keller:
  "I happen to know you carry a gun. I felt it when I brushed against you. I carry one, too. Want to see who can draw the quickest . . .?"
~ Nick Parker:
  ". . . alone had an unbreakable alibi."
~ Paul McHale:
  ". . . might solve the whole fantastic problem . . ."
~ Richard Gray:
  "Come to think of it, the voice that called me was so high-pitched, I couldn't say whose it was."
~ Dr. Bixby:
  "Good gosh! Do you think I killed him?"

Comment: To his credit, our author spends more time examining motives and the mechanics of the impossible crime than usual; many pulpsters (in fact, many mystery authors) wouldn't even bother.

Resources:
- The latest story featured on ONTOS by ultra-uberpulpster Norman A. Daniels that we're pretty sure he actually wrote is "Satan Turns the Timetables" (HERE), not a locked-room problem.

The bottom line:

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"Brillo, Put Him Down"

LAST MONDAY we featured a satirical story about what might happen if robot police ever became the norm (HERE), which one could regard as a light-hearted version of today's tale. Now, many people incorrectly assume that satire must be humorous in some way ("The Perfect Cop" certainly has such moments), but this is a misapprehension that Wikipedia (HERE) is careful to disabuse us of:

"Laughter is not an essential component of satire; in fact there are types of satire that are not meant to be 'funny' at all. Conversely, not all humour, even on such topics as politics, religion or art is necessarily 'satirical', even when it uses the satirical tools of irony, parody, and burlesque."

Our next story also entertains the notion that robots might be employed as law enforcement officers; because at least half of it came from the typewriter of professional "troublemaker, malcontent, desperado" (his words) Harlan Ellison, however, you can be sure there won't be much humor in it. The fact that the story became the subject of a 1980 lawsuit by the authors gave it a short-lived notoriety; despite its checkered past, though, it remains worth at least one reading (and we apologize for the missing page, even though we didn't cause it).

"Brillo."

By Ben Bova (born 1932; HERE) and Harlan Ellison (1934-2018; HERE).

First appearance: Analog, August 1970.

Illustrations by [Frank] Kelly Freas (1922-2005; HERE).
Reprints page (HERE).

Novelette (31 pages; 2 illos).

Online at The Luminist Archive (HERE; slow load; to access the story, it will be necessary to download the magazine as a PDF, 

115 MB; then go down to magazine page 134; and be sure your anti-virus is up to date).

(Note: Most of page 153 is missing, but the story is still compre-hensible.)

     "We're trying to help the policeman, not get rid of him."

It's training day for Brillo, and there's nothing he doesn't know about the law; what he doesn't know about human beings, however, could be a cause for concern . . .

Major characters:
~ Brillo, Model X-44:
  "Buzzing softly—the sort of sound an electric watch makes—he stood inert in the center of the precinct station's bullpen, his bright blue-anodized metal a gleaming contrast to the paintless worn floorboards."
~ Frank Reardon:
  "Why do they all look so tired? And why do they seem to look wearier, more frightened, every time they look at the robot?"
~ Kenzie, "the whiz kid":
  ". . . had a storm window salesman's tone even when he was trying to be disarming."
~ Captain Summit:
  "They're still afraid of machines, you know."
~ Mike Polchik:
  "He's bright, he's on his toes, he maybe isn't Sherlock Holmes but he knows the feel of a neighborhood, the smell of it, the heat level."
~ The FBI man:
  "Too bad we couldn't use him."

Typo: "they run that stuff right into [?] skull".

Resources:
- More information about Benjamin William Bova is (HERE), Wikipedia; (HERE), the SFE; (HERE), the IMDb; and (HERE), his webpage; background about Harlan Jay Ellison, the more flamboyant member of our writing team, is (HERE), Wikipedia; (HERE), the SFE; (HERE), the IMDb; and (HERE), his webpage.

- An article at PoliceOne.com sees a bright future for robot cops:
   "Future generations of robots will eventually possess similar refined motor skills of manual manipulation. Unlike the current rudimentary bomb robots on tracks and wheels, these future robots could apprehend suspects, physically restrain subjects, and deploy less lethal ammunition to protect the public. Similar to other industries, robotics may become a viable augmentation to officers in the field, with a distant possibly of replacing human officers altogether to meet the future challenges of policing."
   — Gregory Mar, "Policing in 2025: How Robots Will Change SWAT, Patrol" (HERE)

- A story with a nearly identical theme but with a wildly divergent plotline is Harry Harrison's "Arm of the Law" (HERE).

The bottom line:
   "Let us remember that the automatic machine is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic consequences of slave labor."
   — Norbert Weiner
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