Kendall Foster CrossenBesprekingen

Crossen’s book is a collection of science fiction short stories which have been grouped into Ages – The Atomic Age (1960 AD – 2100 AD), Galactic Age (2100 AD – 3000 AD), Stellar Age (3000 AD to 10,000 AD) and Delphic Age (10,000 AD – 1,000,000 AD). With the exception of the Delphic Age, each age has 4 stories grouped under its banner. The book was published in 1951 and the latest collected story has a publication date of 1951. As might be expected, given the passage of time, the stories are dated and some have not aged well. On the other hand, I think there are still enough gems to make a reading of the book worthwhile.

Atomic Age Stories:

Flying Dutchman – Ward Moore
There Will Come Soft Rains – Ray Bradbury
The Mute Question – Forrest J. Ackerman
The Portable Phonograph - Walter Van Tilburg Clark

All are post nuclear holocaust and all are very downbeat. Of the group I like Flying Dutchman the best – nothing like engineering a system with enough redundancy to guarantee trouble free functioning for a long period of time.

Galactic Age Stories:

Automaton – A.E. van Vogt
Restricted Clientele – Kendell Foster Crossen
Shambleau – C.L. Moore
Christmas on Ganymede – Isaac Asimov

Two of these stories, Automaton and Restricted Clientele, deal with human situations in the future while the other two deal with humans interacting with aliens. My preference in this group is Restricted Clientele – there is a point where guaranteed safety and prison become one and the same.

Stellar Age Stories

Memory – Theodore Sturgeon
Exiled From Earth – Sam Merwin, Jr.
Retreat to the Stars – Leigh Brackett
The Voice of the Lobster – Henry Kuttner

These stories have nothing in common save their grouping. They cover corporate intrigue, mistaken identity, escape from tyranny, and con artists in action…sort of. The story concerning corporate intrigue – Memory – is my favorite.

Delphic Age Stories

Evolution’s End – Robert Arthur
Transfer Point – Anthony Boucher
The Devil Was Sick – Bruce Elliott

I don't think this group has aged well. Basically we have the old reinvention of Adam and Eve, the devil dealing with people in the far future and vice versa, and a world where fiction writing interacts with the real world which interacts with the fiction writing....

Insurance investigator Brian Brett is assigned the Claassen jewellery case. A million dollar heist of high profile ice. Not the first big case but one that takes him to Johannesburg, South Africa to solve it.

The case starts out straight forward but then takes some wild and sharp turns. A ready candidate replies to the reward offered for information and recovery of the jewels, but a hitch develops when it is discovered that $90,000 worth of the jewellery is missing and no one seems to know where it is.

Add to this mix an exotic nightclub dancer that distracts Brett's mind, his penchant for dry martinis and Mrs. Claassen's provocative social-secretary to the mix and Brett becomes a very busy man!

Written in the style of Chandler, Hammett and the like and it turns out to be a Goodread.

An armored car is robbed and members of the heist crew begin turning up dead. Insurance investigator Milo March follows the survivors to Brazil where they still keep on dying. March is stuck with the task of finding the loot, spiriting it out of the country while a corrupt cop tries to grab a share and convincing the surviving thieves to return to America to face a death sentence. March is a largely forgotten PI who deserves to be brought back to readers' attention. M E Chaber weaves a tale that keeps the reader wondering how March is going to pull off his mission.

Forgiveness means that the power of love that holds us together is greater than the power of the offense that separates us

M.E. Chaber is but one of the pen names used by an author named Kendell Foster Crossen. Like many of the authors of the golden age of paper backs, he wrote under a variety of pseudonyms, mostly according to the genre and series for which he happened to be writing. From the 1950s to the 1970s he wrote dozens of novels and countless pieces of short fiction for multiple genres. He was most celebrated for his science fiction work, but he also created a super hero known as "The Green Lama" for pulps and comics, wrote scripts for multiple radio and television shows, and authored quite a few mystery stories. Probably his most long-lived creation (if not his best) was the Milo March series of detective novels. And as it so happens, the machinations of fate saw fit to guide one of these Milo March masterpieces into my hands, which I will now dissect and eviscerate for your reading pleasure—as I am wont to do.

The titular character of the series is a freelance insurance investigator named (what else?) Milo March. But don't let his profession fool you. He's not a pencil-necked, paper pushing insurance man solving insurance fraud through clever analysis of paper trails and phone records. True to the archetype, he's a hard-drinking (this one prefers martinis), womanizing smartass with a heart of gold. Sound familiar? Of course not! Well, besides all your other archetypal PIs that have come and gone over the years (Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, Mike Hammer, Rick Holman, Travis McGee, Mike Shayne, and countless other less-memorable names). The only thing of substance that changes most of the time seems be their poison of choice--and even that's not very much of substance. But that's why we like them, isn't it? We know what to expect, and even though the names and places change, we like it because the characters and the motives and the plots are familiar. It doesn't challenge and it always entertains. But as usual, I digress.

The Bonded Dead is one of the later installments of the Milo March series (there were 23 in total), and was published in 1971. The plot goes a little something like this: March is hired by one of his client insurance agencies to track down a pair of young (and predictably voluptuous) bank employees who recently blew town with several million dollars in bearer bonds. One of them turns up dead in the swamps outside Miami, and March is dispatched to track down the clues to her murder and the disappearance of the bonds. While there he sets up shop in a South Beach hotel, makes contact with some police cronies, locks horns with the local mafia thugs, and picks up a girlie or two for some extracurricular activities. After stirring up a hornet's nest of activity, he mostly sits around the bar drinking and waits for the answer to the mystery to fall in his lap. It does so in the form of a lonely gal at the bar who—after wining, dining, and screwing—he finds out is the second thieving dame he was sent to find in the first place. Things proceed predictably after that. He saves the girl (who was tricked into the duplicitous scheme, of course), foils the bad guys, and sets everything right.

Sounds like a decent enough plot, doesn't it? Other than the fact that it smacks a little too much of Travis McGee (the "finder of lost things" who heals damaged women with his sexual prowess). I'd be willing to forgive the plot's lack of imagination if it was executed well, but it's not. The dialogue is stilted, the imagery is bland, and the characters are about as deep as my cereal bowl. Milo is also constantly overstepping his bounds, ignoring police requests, and in general sticking his nose in places they don't belong. Typical P.I. behavior right? Well sure—but that's not what gets my goat. It's the police reaction to all that tomfoolery, which is to say, there isn't any. Milo's police buddy remains friendly, acquiesces to requests, absorbs all his lies good naturedly, and even lets Milo go off to confront the big bad by himself while the police arrive just in time to mop up all the blood.

With that being said, I have to get something off my chest. Is it all right if I take a moment real quick? Now seems as good a time as any, so here goes.

The one thing I hate more than anything in a crime/mystery novel is when the detective is all buddy-buddy with the police. Number one, it would never happen in reality. I mean really, you think a homicide detective is going to be friendly with some two bit P.I. stepping all over his territory, mishandling evidence, talking to witnesses, implying that said detective isn't that good at his job? Not all cops are shallow small-minded pricks, but having someone second-guessing them every step of the way and muddying up the evidence only makes their job harder, and no professional wants his job to be harder. But more than that, part of what makes hardboiled detective fiction so damn fun is the tension and conflict. The detective butts heads with just about everyone around him--the bad guys, the police, even his own client sometimes. But through sheer intellectual ability and force of will (and some times a little bit of skull-cracking or love-making, whichever the situation calls for) he overcomes these obstacles, solves the murder, and catches bad guys. By making him friendly with the police you take away part of the external conflict that is essential to maintaining the suspense of the story. If you do that then you have to replace it with some other sort of conflict like internal conflict or familial conflict or something equally sappy, and then it's not hard boiled, now is it? A little P.I./police cooperation can be O.K. if handled correctly and if the proper motivations are present, but when cooperation bleeds into cronyism the story is ruined for me.

So that's the story on The Bonded Dead. When I first found this book I allowed myself to think that perhaps I'd rediscovered an old classic of the mystery/crime genre, that I'd found a diamond in the rough which I could then present to the masses and laud as a long forgotten masterpiece. What I found was an anemic reproduction of what had come before. Joke's on me, I guess.

I'm not saying that the book was horrible or that it was unreadable. It just wasn't good. I can't speak to the earlier installments in the Milo March series either. Maybe they're a lot better, and Crossen was just phoning in the later installments for the sake of a paycheck. It's entirely possible, but I can't say for sure. All I can say is that The Bonded Dead deserves the place it's found in our collective literary memory. Sometimes the books forgotten by history deserve to be forgotten.

http://readabookonce.blogspot.com/2011/11/bonded-dead-by-m-e-chaber.html

Milo March investigates the mysterious disappearance of scientists who have developed some secret guidance system the size of a walnut. Some strange Swede has kidnapped the main scientist and wants to sell him (drugged) to the Russians. Lots of sexist dialogue, lots of drinking, a few dead bodies, an okay plot. Most interesting, really, as a glimpse into early 1960's cool. Enjoyable.

Year of Consent, Kendall Foster Crossen, Dell Publishing, 1954

America in 1990 is a land of 24-hour surveillance. Cameras are everywhere, recording everything. It all gets sent to a giant supercomputer, nicknamed Herbie, that takes up 10 floors of a Washington office building. Any dissent, or even individuality, leads to a visit by the Clinic Squad (the police) and mandated "treatment," usually involving a lobotomy.

The social engineers have taken over America. The vast majority of citizens, whose "job" is to be consumers, are guided by massive amounts of propaganda in all media. The entire Western Hemisphere has been annexed, so America now consists of 74 states. The social engineers put forward candidates for President who will appeal to the greatest number of voters. Candidates for US Senate are chosen by the state Party (there is now one political party). Members of the House are employees of major companies. The only problem with this is a small and secret resistance called the Uns, which stands for United Nations, now headquartered in Australia. A major propaganda campaign is planned to equate the Uns with communists, who have been pretty well eradicated from America.

Garrett Leeds is a middle-level employee in Security and Consent, the government "surveillance department." He is also a senior member of the Uns, whose hero is Henry David Thoreau. Any attempt to disrupt the propaganda campaign will result in his exposure as the enemy. How can he stay one step ahead of the government, while preparing for a big push by the Uns to bring down the whole social engineering system? What can anyone do about a supercomputer that knows a person better than they know themselves, and can very accurately predict their future actions?

This book is surprisingly good, and, if you can find a copy, very much worth reading. In these days of growing surveillance and already large amounts of propaganda in the media, this novel is also pretty prophetic.½

Adventure House: 2005