10 stories, one of them a reprint (which I read in 2021 in another book as luck will have it) plus the usual non-fiction.

Clark Howard opens the issue with Top Con with a story set inside of a prison where you should really be very careful about who you trust. The author managed to surprise me - it was obvious that there will be a twist somewhere but I did not expect it to go that way.

In Jack Ritchie's Win Some, Lose Some, Detective Sergeant Henry H. Turnbuckle is called at the scene of what looks like a suspicious death - a woman got locked into a safe and died before anyone found her. It is a nice story of reasoning and detection, with a minimal cast of suspects and with enough details to make it enjoyable.

In A Woman Waits for Me by William Bankier a plastic surgeon in the middle of a middle-life crisis is trying to find a new life in Britain - and then meets two women - one older and plain and the other young and beautiful and more importantly, part of a theatrical group. You see, our protagonist always wanted to be an actor so he sees that a chance. Complications follow. While it was almost clear from the start where the story is going, the path to the end was entertaining enough not to become boring.

In Reg Bretnor's Wonder Cure a somewhat crazy criminal (a psychopath with family connections) is frozen so that one day when the doctors find cure for his condition, he can be cured and allowed to live a normal life. It was supposed to be a perfect plan and it worked - at least the part of defrosted anyway. The reality he ended up it may not have been exactly what he had in mind though. It is a very short story and that makes it compact enough for the story to work.

In A Matter of Conscience by Gary Alexander, a public defender refuses to toe the company line and just condemn a teenager for the murder of his whole family which left the boy, at 15, as the sole heir of a vast fortune. David Clay decides to find out what really happened even if noone else cared - and before long a tragic tale of domestic mental abuse and neglect emerges. By the end you almost do not care about who murdered the family - the tragedy of the living overshadows the ones of the dead (although we do get a resolution to that as well). The tale of obsession with money and status at the expense of one's real life connections is as old the world - and it is always a hard one to read.

A Harmless Vanity by Theda O. Henle starts with a triangle - a wife, a husband, a younger woman. You will ask yourself why this story is in a mystery and crime magazine until the very last paragraph which not only answers that but also makes you look back at what you just read and finally understand what happened (unless you were paying more attention to the details than I did apparently - the clues are in the story but it lulls you into missing them because at the time, it appears to be a different type of story altogether).

The Shanghai Gold Bars by Ta Huang Chi, the 575th first story, introduces us to Feng Da-wei, born in 1900, in the middle of the Boxers Rebellion in China and left to die when his village was exterminated. A missionary couple found him and fled with him, planning to leave him in an orphanage and ended up giving him a home. Now, 20+ years later (the actual story is not dated precisely), he is back in Shanghai, helping with the communication between the locals and the English speakers and working as a detective (among other things). When a deal goes south and money disappear he is asked to help - and he uses his knowledge of both his cultures to find out what really happened. The story is full of details of Shanghai and Chinese culture and superstitions and ended up one of my favorite stories in this issue.

The reprint by Erle Stanley Gardner is the Jerry Bane story The Affair of the Reluctant Witness from the Argosy April 1949 issue. Jerry Bane is a young man, an ex prisoner of war, who is dependent on his uncle's good will despite having a trust - the uncle makes all decisions about the money. Jerry is not exactly ready to go to work so he comes up with all kinds of weird schemes, assisted by his valet Mugs, an ex-cop with photographic memory and a missing arm. And this time it leads him to a pair of crooks, a young woman and maybe a way to get his uncle on his side (or at least off his back). I liked the story the first time I read it, I liked it this time as well - even though I recognized it from the start, it works on a reread and I enjoyed the barbs Jerry was throwing at his uncle even more this time around.

Christianna Brand's The Hand of God is a new spin on a revenge tale - a man who everyone knows killed a young woman and her baby by driving too fast is not charged because the father of the woman who saw the whole scene claimed that the driver was not at fault. As the witness was a cop, he was believed. It was always clear where this story leads but being predictable does not make it a bad one.

Edward D. Hoch, well into his unbroken stretch of having a story in every single issue of the magazine at this point, gets to close the issue with a Rand spy story The Spy and the Walrus Cipher. A Russian spy defects and will only talk to the now retired Rand. Before they manage to talk, the man dies but not before making sure that Rand knows that there is a traitor in the house. The bulk of the story is deciphering a message which is found on the dead man's body. Figuring out what the message was required knowledge of typing machines of a certain type... unless one managed to think outside of the box (it can be solved without it).

On the non-fiction side, Chris Steinbrunner talks about Little Orphan Annie's revivals in the other medias section, R. E. Porter talks about new bookstores and new clubs and zines (and one which folded before it even came out - but after the text for it was added higher on the page so the note is inserted at the bottom, under the columns), a second part of an interview with Hugh Pentecost (I seem to be always reading the second parts of these before the first ones) and Jon L. Breen adds "The Jury Box" mentioning books I mostly had never heard of. ( )