I finished two books during this week.
Books
- Captain Future and the Space Emperor, by Edmond Hamilton. Captain Future got his start in 1940 in a pulp magazine of the same name, which ran for 17 issues through early 1944. The title character, whose real name is Curt Newton, is a man trained from childhood to excel, in the vein of Doc Savage, but in a science fiction setting. Aided by his three tutors and later aides, Grag the robot (whose strength is immense), Otho the android (whose rubbery skin allows him to be a master of disguise), and Simon Wright, the brain in a box (a great scientist who had worked with Newton’s father), Captain Future battles villains throughout the solar system. Captain Future and the Space Emperor was the complete novel in the debut issue, but I read it in a paperback reprint (pictured above). Hamilton keeps the action moving, as Captain Future and his team investigate a disease that is causing people on Jupiter to regress along the evolutionary scale. The plague is wielded as a weapon by the self-styled Space Emperor, who hopes to unite the native Jovians to drive out or conquer the off-world colonists and then use the giant planet as a springboard to conquer the whole solar system. Hamilton keeps the action moving, and he provides a reasonable number of potential villains so that the mystery works as well. Lots of fun! Recommended.
- The Body Lovers, by Mickey Spillane. A screaming child leads Mike Hammer to a young woman’s mutilated corpse in the grim opening of this 1967 novel, the tenth in the long-running hard-boiled series. And though Mike tries to stay out of the case, a request from a convict to find his missing sister and the murder of a newspaper columnist friend soon have him tangled up with a photographer, a fashion magazine editor, a merchant mariner, and foreign diplomats, among others. Perhaps more thriller than mystery, though not all the criminals may be obvious. As usual, Spillane delivers a satisfying ending with justice served. Recommended.