Forgotten Books: Bill Pronzini/Marcia Muller Day

For Bill Pronzini/Marcia Muller day, I wanted to write about something a little different, so I wound up reading two novellas written by Pronzini and Jeff Wallmann when they were living in Europe in the early 1970s, writing erotic novels for Liverpool Library Press and house-name novellas for various digest magazines published by Leo Margulies' Renown Publications.

We'll start with Pronzini and Wallmann's only entry in the Mike Shayne series, "Danger—Michael Shayne at Work!", from the April 1972 issue of MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE. This is a classic mystery set-up: a group of people trapped in an isolated hunting lodge by a hurricane. In this case, the hunting lodge is in the Florida Panhandle, and Mike Shayne has driven up there to deliver a report to his client, a politician who suspects his assistant of being involved in a crooked bid-rigging deal with a construction company. Also on hand are the politician's girlfriend; his ex-wife and her husband; his daughter and her boyfriend; the lodge's caretaker; and the assistant who's mixed up in the corruption and graft. As you'd expect, one of them winds up dead, leaving Shayne trapped with plenty of suspects and an unknown killer who's soon after him, too.

This story has quite a bit going for it. The action takes place in a short period of time, which I always like. The plot is suitably complex, and Pronzini and Wallmann play fair with the clues, so when Shayne finally gathers the suspects and names the killer, everything makes sense. There are some nice hardboiled scenes along the way.

Where it suffers is in the authors' characterization of Mike Shayne. Shayne has been referred to (erroneously, in my opinion) as the generic private eye, and unfortunately that's true in this case. Other than the fact that he has red hair and tugs on his earlobe occasionally when he's thinking, there's little to distinguish Shayne from dozens of other private eyes. With the story not being set in Miami and without a single mention of any of the regular supporting cast, Shayne just doesn't seem like Shayne. It's true that Davis Dresser sometimes took Shayne out of his usual setting, in novels such as MURDER IS MY BUSINESS, STRANGER IN TOWN, and SHE WOKE TO DARKNESS, but more of his personality survived intact. However, as I mentioned this is the only Shayne story Pronzini and Wallmann wrote, so they probably would have done a better job of that had they continued. As it is, "Danger—Michael Shayne at Work!" is an enjoyable if minor yarn.

This issue of MSMM also contains a Pronzini short story, "The Duel", under his Jack Foxx pseudonym. It's a well-written little tale about two men fighting over a woman, with a twist ending that could have gone two different ways. I didn't pick the right one.

The final novella Pronzini and Wallmann wrote for Renown is "The Pawns of Death", originally published in the final issue of CHARLIE CHAN MYSTERY MAGAZINE (August 1974). There's an old saying among long-time mystery fans: Never go to the opera with Ellery Queen. The same warning holds true for going to a chess tournament with Charlie Chan. The Honolulu detective is actually in Paris this time around, to attend the championship matches of an international chess competition. The reigning champion is a very stiff-upper-lip Britisher; the challenger is a brash, arrogant young American. Each man has an entourage of friends and family with him, and there are a lot of reporters on hand as well. Pronzini and Wallmann do a good job of introducing us to all the characters, and if it's pretty obvious that at least one of them will wind up as a murder victim and the rest will be suspects.

Using that set-up, the authors do a good job of spinning an entertaining yarn featuring not one but two locked room murders, a dying message, romantic triangles, a bizarre murder weapon, and a satisfactory solution. Packing all that into 30,000 words isn't easy, but Pronzini and Wallmann pull it off.

Best of all, though, is their portrayal of Charlie Chan. He's probably a little closer to the movie versions of Chan, rather than the character from Earl Derr Biggers' original novels, but he's still smart, funny, and very likable. His friendship with the French police prefect in charge of the case is handled quite well. I read this in an e-book version available on Amazon, and it includes a good introduction by Pronzini that mentions the editor of the magazine cut out some of the typical Chan sayings, but there are plenty left to make the character ring true to what we expect. Typical of most writers, Pronzini doesn't seem to think much of this early effort (I feel the same way about some of my stuff), but I found it to be very entertaining and thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

Even though they were always digests, the magazines from Renown Publications were really the last gasps of the pulp era, with their lead novels under house names, backed up by an assortment of novelettes and short stories, many of them by authors who wrote for the actual pulps earlier in their careers. Editors such as Sam Merwin Jr. and Frank Belknap Long also had long associations with the pulps. I don't know if Pronzini and Wallmann feel this way, but I've always been very glad I got the chance to be a part of that.

I didn't want to completely neglect Marcia Muller in this post, so I reread her story "The Time of the Wolves" from the iconic Western anthology WESTERYEAR. This is a tale of two pioneer women trapped in an isolated cabin in Kansas by a blizzard and a pack of hungry wolves, and one of the women may just be going mad . . . It's a great story, full of suspense, and as good as I remembered it from the last time I read it, years ago. I give it a high recommendation, along with the book it's in. WESTERYEAR is one of the all-time best Western anthologies (and it has my all-time favorite Bill Crider story in it). Hard to believe it's been almost thirty years since it was published.

Forgotten Books: Private Eye Action As You Like It - Joe R. Lansdale and Lewis Shiner

When Joe Lansdale mentioned on Facebook that an e-book edition of this collection was available, I knew I had to get it. My copy of the original edition is gone, and I wanted to read the introductions by Joe and Lew Shiner again. They're the best part of this book for me.

Not that the stories themselves aren't very good. They are. Some of my favorites, in fact. PRIVATE EYE ACTION AS YOU LIKE IT features three Ray Slater stories by Lansdale (including the first story he ever sold), three Dan Sloane stories by Shiner, and three John Talbot stories by both of them in collaboration. All of them except one were published originally in MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE—often in the same issues where I had stories appear.

That's what makes this book so great. It's a window back into another time, an era that in most ways is closer to the pulp days than it is to today, and not just time-wise. An era when stories were pecked out on manual typewriters, stuck in manila envelopes, and sent off through the mail to irascible old editors who'd been in the business for forty years, all in hopes of getting an acceptance and a check at the princely, pulp-like rate of a penny a word.

In his introduction, Joe writes about getting a rejection from Sam Merwin, Jr., the editor of MSMM, for a story that Joe had revised and submitted several times. When I read, "I get sicker of this story the more I see it. Try something new", I nodded and thought, yeah, that sounds exactly like Sam. What Joe doesn't mention is that the rejection was probably scrawled on a scrap of paper torn off of something else. I don't think I ever got any correspondence from Sam, rejection or acceptance, on anything resembling a letterhead. That was just the sort of hardscrabble magazine MSMM was.

But those of us who wrote for it formed a sort of fraternity, as Lew talks about in his introduction. We had half a dozen letters to other writers out in the mail all the time, an endless (or so it seemed then) circle of gossip, bitching, and encouragement. The lift in spirits that came whenever I opened the mailbox and found a letter from Nacogdoches or Austin or Brownwood or Durango was a tangible part of what kept me going through those days of pounding out stories and collecting rejection slips or the occasional check for $15 or $25 or even, happy day!, $40 or $50. Groceries this week, baby!

As I've said before about other things, man, I wouldn't go back to those days...but I'm awfully glad I lived through them.

So, I haven't said much about the actual book. It's great. The stories are wonderfully entertaining, classic private eye yarns that were like nothing else being published at that time, and you can see the genesis of both writers in them. I can't read them now without visualizing the covers of those issues of MSMM where they first appeared. I love 'em, simple as that. And PRIVATE EYE ACTION AS YOU LIKE IT is one of the best time machines you'll ever find. If you've never read it, do yourself a favor and grab a copy right away.

Now Available: War Games (A Markham PI Novella) - James Reasoner

Here's another of my Markham stories from the early days of writing for MSMM. At more than 15,000 words, "War Games" is the longest of the Markham stories and is now available for the Kindle. The other e-formats will be coming along shortly. I'm glad to get these stories back out there, and readers seem to be responding positively to them. They're historical pieces now, but still pretty entertaining, I think. (It's odd to think that a story like this is just as old now as those pulp stories I read in Goulart's THE HARDBOILED DICKS were in 1967.)

Now Available: Death and the Dancing Shadows - James Reasoner

Retired cowboy movie star Eliot "Lucky" Tremaine has a problem: he's being blackmailed. Markham seems to be the only one who can help him, but when blackmail explodes into murder, it's Markham's life on the line!

"Death and the Dancing Shadows" is another classic tale of California private eye Markham from the pages of MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE and the imagination of bestselling author James Reasoner. This 9,000 word novella was originally published in the March 1980 issue of MSMM and later reprinted in THE BLACK LIZARD ANTHOLOGY OF CRIME FICTION.

I've always been fond of this one. I think it's particularly well-plotted, if I do say so myself. The Amazon link is below, and it's also available on Smashwords and for the Nook. Like all the Markham stories, it's a stand-alone, so if you haven't read the others you can start here with no problem. The excellent cover is by Livia, as always.

Now Available: The Man in the Moon: A Markham, P.I. Novella - James Reasoner

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Back in the prehistoric days of my career, I wrote several stories about a private detective named Markham. "The Man in the Moon" is a 10,000 word novella that appeared in the April 1980 issue of MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE, and it's been out of print ever since. The Kindle version of it has just gone live on Amazon, appropriately enough for Father's Day since two fathers figure prominently in the plot. A Nook version is in the works as well. If you've read and enjoyed my Cody stories, you should like the Markham yarns as well. The other stories in the series will be available in the relatively near future.

Forgotten Books: Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, May 1968

I think I can fudge enough to call a digest magazine a book. It's approximately 50,000 words of fiction, after all. And while I was looking for something else the other day, I came across a stack of old issues of MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE that a friend sent to me. The urge to read some of them hit me, so here are my comments on the first one I got to.

As usual, the May 1968 issue of MSMM leads off with a "short novel" featuring Miami private eye Mike Shayne. This is actually a 20,000 word novella (although I think this one might be closer to 25K). "The Baby Doll Murder", which is a good title, by the way, is almost certainly by Dennis Lynds writing under the house-name Brett Halliday. Lynds wrote nearly all the Shayne novellas from 1963 to 1970, making him the most prolific "Brett Halliday" of all time. Coming up with that many mystery plots, month after month, year after year, is an amazing achievement. I had a pretty good continuous run as Brett Halliday, too, but only for two and a half years, and by the end of that stretch my brain was running on fumes, let me tell you. (Of course, I've written 76 full-length novels in the past 60 months, which will also wear out your brain, but at least I've switching back and forth between a lot of different Western series, not to mention some thrillers and mysteries, too.)

Anyway, "The Baby Doll Murder" finds Shayne investigating a murder that took place a year earlier. A beautiful blond model who was famous for a series of ads for baby doll pajamas was found bludgeoned to death with a candlestick, and the police never solved the crime. But then a young man comes forward out of the blue to confess to the killing, and his father, believing that confession to be false, hires Shayne to find the real killer. Shayne doesn't know at first whether the kid is lying, but an attempt on his life when he starts poking around in the case convinces him that somebody is trying to hide something.

And of course that's true, as Lynds twists the plot this way and that with his usual skill. Shayne's secretary Lucy Hamilton, his reporter buddy Tim Rourke, and Miami chief of police Will Gentry don't have much to do in this one, but Shayne gets in some nice sparring with his old nemesis, Miami Beach chief of detectives Peter Painter. Eventually Shayne uncovers the truth, but not before wading through a number of nicely done red herrings. The actual solution is a little weak, but it's a product of its era.

The back-up stories in MSMM were usually pretty good. The first one in this issue, "Tell Tale" by George Bellefontaine, is a little bit of an odd fit for a hardboiled crime digest since it's a domestic drama about the trouble a woman gets into by gossiping, but it's well-written and fairly effective.

"Arizona 'Ma' Barker – The Devil's Daughter" is one of a series of true crime yarns by David Mazroff that ran in MSMM for quite a while. It's pretty long, probably 10,000 words, a well-researched tale of Depression-era crime that's lightly but luridly fictionalized, as Mazroff comes up with thoughts and dialogue for the historical characters he's writing about. It works well, and the story is very entertaining. I'm looking forward to reading more of these.

Next up is a relatively early novelette by Bill Pronzini, "The Bomb Expert", which is about a hired killer who goes beyond his assignment. It's cleverly plotted and well-written, as you'd expect.

"The Obvious Way Out" by Richard O. Lewis is about a tyrannical college professor and an unexpected confrontation with some students. This one is okay, but that's as far as I'd go.

"The Stubble of Beard" by Dan Ross is one of a series about Mei Wong a Chinese art dealer in Bombay who serves as an amateur sleuth, helping out his friend Inspector Bannerjee. The Mr. Wong series ran for nearly twenty years in various mystery digests. I've read a number of them. They're mild little puzzle stories, usually entertaining, as this one is. Ross is an interesting author. A Canadian, he started out as an actor and playwright and wound up writing more than 300 books, most of them Gothics and historical romances under the names Marilyn Ross, Clarissa Ross, and a few other pseudonyms. He also wrote the long-running series of paperback tie-in novels based on the TV show DARK SHADOWS. He didn't follow the show's continuity, however, deciding instead to go off on his own storylines with the characters, creating a sort of alternate universe DARK SHADOWS. I can't imagine a tie-in author being allowed to get away with that today. I read some of the DARK SHADOWS novels back when I was in high school, when the show was still on the air in its original run, and I remember thinking they were pretty good.

The issue wraps up with "Peabody's Obsession", a tale about an art theft by Hal Ellson, an author I usually like. I didn't think much of this story, though.

MSMM was probably past its prime in 1968, although it ran for a long time after that (and I'd like to think it was pretty good during the era I wrote for it). I think the magazine peaked in the stretch from 1960 to '65, when nearly every issue was full of good hardboiled private eye action. But it was still a solidly entertaining magazine in '68, and this issue is a good example of that. Actually, almost any issue from the Fifties and Sixties is well worth reading, if you're lucky enough to come across any. (By the way, the scan accompanying this post is of the actual copy I read. The cover's a little grimy, but hey, that just gives it character.)

Charles E. Fritch, RIP

I heard the sad news today that writer and editor Charles E. Fritch passed away back in October. His obituary is here. Chuck was the assistant editor at MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE when Sam Merwin Jr. was the editor and I assume during Larry Shaw's one or two issue tenure as editor as well, then took over the magazine and ran it for the remaining four or five years of its existence. He was the editor who asked me to write all the Mike Shayne stories, which I did for about two and a half years. That was my first regular writing job, and coming up with that 20,000 words month in and month out was great training for me. Chuck was a movie lover and had an oddball sense of humor, and both of those things showed up in his editing of MSMM. He was also a fine writer himself in the mystery and science fiction fields, although he was never very prolific. After the magazine folded we were out of touch for quite a while, but in recent years we traded the occasional emails. He was a good man and a top-notch pro, and I'm sorry he's gone. Rest in peace, Chuck.

Three Mike Shayne Stories

Over on his blog today, Win Scott Eckert mentions three Mike Shayne stories that I wrote for MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE: "Black Lotus" (January 1981), "Death From the Sky" (July 1981), and "Doomsday Island" (February 1982). If you want to know why Win's interested in them, you'll have to check out his blog, but I thought I'd post the covers here to stir up some nostalgia, as well as express my disbelief that I wrote these stories more than THIRTY FRICKIN' YEARS AGO! That's hard to believe. It seems like either last week or a millennium ago.

Bruce Grossman on MSMM

Over at Bookgasm, Bruce Grossman's always entertaining column "Bullets, Broads, Blackmail & Bombs" takes a look at three issues of MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE this week. I remember quite clearly buying two of those issues (the ones from 1978) brand-new off the shelves at Readers World in River Oaks, Texas. Readers World was a nice little store where I bought a lot of paperbacks, comics, and mystery and SF digests during the Seventies. Livia and I used to go there at least once a week. It was owned by Gene and Linda Sanders (I hope I'm remembering the names right), who later moved the store and expanded it, renaming it G. Sanders Books. The new store was in a different part of town and I didn't make it over there very often, but I'll always have very fond memories of the original Readers World. (I sort of wandered off from the original topic of this post, didn't I? Go on over to Bookgasm and read what Bruce has to say, if you haven't already.)

30 Years Ago

I almost let this anniversary slip by, but then it occurred to me that thirty years ago this month, you could go down to your friendly neighborhood newsstand (you do remember newsstands, don’t you?) and buy the December 1978 issue of MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE, featuring my first Mike Shayne story, “Death in Xanadu”. I was reminded of this the other day when a friend emailed me with some comments on my Shayne story “Midnight Wind” (from the August ’81 issue of MSMM), which he had just read. It’s hard to believe that thirty years have gone by since I wrote that first Shayne story. Seems like yesterday in some ways, more like a hundred years ago in others. But I’m still proud of it and still remember what it felt like when I first saw the cover and picked up the issue. Luckily, that feeling has never gone away. I still experience it the first time I see a new book of mine in Wal-Mart. Of course, one other thing that hasn’t changed is that, just like that Mike Shayne story, my name’s nowhere on the new books, either. But I know I wrote ‘em, and by golly, I think they’re pretty good.

My Private Eye Stories

My post the other day about the Markham stories has prompted several people to ask me about my other private eye stories, so I got my records out and put together the following list of all my PI stories, not just the ones that appeared in MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE (and not including the Mike Shayne stories I wrote for that magazine). The name in parentheses is the private eye who appeared in the story. I’ll expand on some of them following the list.

“Three Birds”, MSMM, January 1979 (Delaney)
“The $100,000 Collar”, MSMM, March 1979 (Delaney)
“All the Way Home”, MSMM, April 1979 (Markham)
“Death and the Dancing Shadows”, MSMM, March 1980 (Markham)
“The Man in the Moon”, MSMM, April 1980 (Markham)
“The Golden Bear”, SKULLDUGGERY, May 1980 (Delaney)
“Outback”, MSMM, April 1981 (Allen Garver)
“The Double Edge”, SKULLDUGGERY, Summer 1981 (Delaney? Markham?)
“War Games”, MSMM, April 1982 (Markham)
“Dead in Friday”, SPIDERWEB, Summer 1982 (Cody)
“Kemidov’s Treasures”, MSMM, September 1982 (Nicholas Lake)
“The Elephant’s Graveyard”, MSMM, January 1985 (Cody)
“The Spanish Blade”, HARDBOILED, Spring 1987 (Cody)
“The Safest Place in the World”, AN EYE FOR JUSTICE – PWA Anthology, 1988 (Cody)
“In the Blood”, A MATTER OF CRIME #3, 1988 (Cody)
“Terran Girls Make Wonderful Wives”, GRYPHON DOUBLE #8, 1995 (Wes Holman)
“Woollies”, TIN STAR – Western anthology, 2000 (Dan Boyd)
“The East Wind Caper”, A DATE WHICH WILL LIVE IN INFAMY – alternate history anthology, 2001 (Nicholas Lake)

I just don’t remember whether the story “The Double Edge” features Markham or Delaney, can’t find a copy of the magazine with the story in it, and the manuscript is God knows where. And I don’t remember a blessed thing about the story itself. Pathetic, I know.

SKULLDUGGERY was a nice little small-press magazine that eventually renamed itself SPIDERWEB. Author and pulp fiction expert Will Murray was the editor, at least part of the time. HARDBOILED was an excellent, fondly remembered magazine published and edited by my friend Wayne Dundee, a fine writer himself. A MATTER OF CRIME was a trade paperback anthology series that started out calling itself THE NEW BLACK MASK. That was still the title when I sold a story to it, and I was excited about having a story I wrote in something with BLACK MASK on the cover. But the title changed before the story came out.

The Delaney stories were low-key, private eye procedural tales. Delaney was even more dour and world-weary than Markham and Cody. Allen Garver, who appeared in only one story, was another attempt at a more realistic PI. Nicholas Lake was just the opposite, a modern-day PI who modeled himself more on the private eye myth. Without going back to reread the story I seem to remember that he wore a white suit and a fedora. The first story in which he appeared, “Kemidov’s Treasures”, used the old “The Maltese Falcon was real!” plot. Nearly twenty years later I brought him back, transplanted him to Honolulu in December 1941, and used him for a yarn in an anthology of “alternate history” Pearl Harbor stories. I gave him a Hawaiian stand-up comic for a sidekick/assistant and had a great time with the whole thing. “Terran Girls Make Wonderful Wives” was one of my few forays into science-fiction and took place in a colony on the Moon. Gary Lovisi published it as half of one of his Gryphon Doubles series, with a Richard A. Lupoff story on the other side (I think). “Woollies” is a cross-genre story, too, a Western about a railroad detective named Dan Boyd, who has appeared as a supporting character in several of my Western novels as well.

I believe that’s all of my private eye stories, eighteen in all. I would have guessed that there were more than that. Of course, if you include the novel TEXAS WIND and the 36 Mike Shayne stories I wrote, the total is a little more impressive. Sometime in the mid-Eighties I started a second Cody novel but didn’t get very far with it before setting it aside to do something else. I never got back to it and have no idea where the manuscript is now.

The Markham Stories, and Other MSMM Memories

Yesterday on his blog Ed Gorman had some nice things to say concerning a story I wrote, oh, about a thousand years ago. It feels that long ago, anyway. “The Man in the Moon” appeared in MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE and was the third of four stories I wrote for MSMM that featured a private investigator named Markham. Reading Ed’s comments prompted a fit of reminiscing, so I hope you’ll bear with me.

The four Markham stories are:

“All the Way Home”, MSMM, April 1979
“Death and the Dancing Shadows”, MSMM, March 1980
“The Man in the Moon”, MSMM, April 1980
“War Games”, MSMM, April 1982

At first Markham was sort of a dry run for my private eye character Cody, who appeared in the novel TEXAS WIND and several short stories of his own. “All the Way Home” was written in June 1978, four or five months before I started writing TEXAS WIND. Like Cody, Markham has only one name and is the same sort of world-weary, cynical, tough but sentimental slob that Cody turned out to be (along with a lot of other PIs created by other authors; I wasn’t exactly breaking any new ground here). Markham’s first case finds him trying to find a mobster’s runaway daughter. Yep, it was a wandering daughter job. I still like the opening.

I put the gun against Jack Parker’s forehead as soon as he opened the door and said: “You yell and I won’t have one damn reason for keeping you alive.”

I’d probably rewrite that a little now, but it’s not bad.

That April ’79 MSMM is a pretty good issue overall, by the way. The Mike Shayne novella, “The Scent of Death”, is by pulp veteran Sam Merwin Jr., who was the magazine’s editor at the time. It also includes the first appearance of one of Joe R. Lansdale’s Ray Slater stories, “One Blonde, Well Dead” (great title), and stories by Edward D. Hoch and Richard Moore.

“Death and the Dancing Shadows” is probably the best-known of the Markham stories because it was anthologized once, in THE BLACK LIZARD ANTHOLOGY OF CRIME FICTION. When I wrote the story it was just called “Dancing Shadows”. Charles E. Fritch, who had taken over the editorship of MSMM by the time it appeared, added the “Death and the” part. The plot revolves around an old cowboy actor. Western B-movies are an abiding interest of mine. I wrote the Shayne story in that issue, “Payoff in Blood”, and there are also stories by Edward D. Hoch, again, Gary Brandner, and horror author Richard Laymon. Chuck Fritch made a habit of buying crime stories from writers better known for their horror fiction, which gave his editorial run on the magazine a distinctive and offbeat flavor.

“The Man in the Moon” is probably the most Ross Macdonald-influenced entry in the Markham series, since it’s about the damage that different generations of a family inflict on each other. I don’t recall it being deliberate, but the Markham stories seem to get more bleak as they go along. That issue of MSMM also features a Major Lansing story by W.L. Fieldhouse. Bill Fieldhouse was a regular in MSMM at the same time I was, and his stories about Major Lansing, an Army CID investigator in Europe, are outstanding. Fieldhouse was a fine writer and had a good career for a number of years as a novelist in the men’s adventure genre, and also wrote some pretty good Westerns. The last I heard of him, though, he had retired from writing. That issue also includes stories by Edward D. Hoch (man, was he in every issue or something?), William F. Nolan, and a collaboration between Joe R. Lansdale and Robert Fester. I don’t recall who Fester was, probably a friend of Joe’s.

The Markham stories also got longer with each one. The final Markham, “War Games”, is about 15,000 words. I don’t remember much about it except that it’s set at an exclusive military academy/boarding school and ends with a fairly tense sniper situation. I recall that Chuck Fritch liked it a lot but because of its length had a hard time finding space to run it. It was written in 1979 but not published until more than two years later. I wrote the Shayne story in the same issue, “Deadly Queen”, about a teen-age chess prodigy, and it’s actually shorter than “War Games”. No Edward D. Hoch in that issue, but there are stories by Michael Avallone and Mort Castle, another of those horror authors Chuck liked.

That was the end of the line for Markham. He was the second private eye character I created for MSMM. The first was called Delaney (what is it with these guys and their single names?), who appeared in a handful of short, very minor stories. Cody came along after Markham and I used both of them in stories for a while, but Cody last appeared in 1988, nearly twenty years ago. I’ve thought at times that a volume collecting all the Cody, Markham, and Delaney stories would make a nice little book. Maybe one of these days.