to Blood on the Mink. The market for science fiction magazines had collapsed in the late 1950s, so he was writing other stuff. These stories are from 1959 to 1962, and Silverberg wrote and forgot ‘em until Hard Case Crime reprinted them.

Blood on the Mink's narrator is an undercover operative, Nick, called in to impersonate a mobster named Vic Lowney. Vic gets snatched by the Feds at the Chicago airport en route from Los Angeles to Philadelphia. Nick takes his place. His mission? Find the engraving plates for some high-quality counterfeit bills that have shown up in the City of Brotherly Love. Vic was going there to buy them for a LA gang.

But Vic’s gang isn’t the only one interested in buying the plates, and the representative of one knows Nick isn’t whom he claims.

Beautiful dames and double crosses follow as Nick sets three gangs against each other. Nick is a hard-bitten man. He doesn’t express much fear or concern over the collateral damage which includes the dead woman on the cover.

It was fun and diverting, but I have no idea how it stacks up to other crime novels.

I actually liked the shorter pieces in the book better.

Eddie’s involved in counterfeiting too. He’s a courier for plates from Chicago to LA. The rules for making the deliver are pretty cut: show up at a given rooming house and be there on a specified schedule to wait – alone-- for pick up. But a hot blonde shows up at the rooming house, the “Dangerous Doll” of the title. Poor Eddie. He’s not very bright, and he has no idea what she’s got planned for him. It’s my favorite story here.

Mike Keller isn’t a cop or a criminal, just a traveling salesman making his rounds through Central Wisconsin. But he finds himself, after being a good Samaritan and checking up on the cries of a woman in a nearby hotel room, caught up in “One Night of Violence”. That woman has been kidnapped by some Chicago mobsters to have their revenge on some competitors, and Keller is coerced into participating. ( )

A fast read and for the most part a fine story about an undercover cop busting up a forgery outfit. Everyone has their own agenda and is ready to double or triple cross everyone else.

Shorter than expected as there's an additional two short stories of related gangster's nature's. The first story has a nice twist, though it wasn't unexpected.

The second short story is a little dire and really is skip able. ( )

Blood on the Mink is a terrific pulp tale that fits well within the genre in the late fifties. It has gangsters and dames and shoot-outs and undercover agents. And, most importantly, it's a damn good story that is worth reading.

The story is about a Treasury agent whose job is to go undercover and infiltrate various criminal organizations that are out to counterfeit the U.S. currency. He goes from city to city pulling off this act and, as a consequence, has no home and no family for how could one maintain such in a career as this. Here, the agent goes undercover as Vic Lowney after agents grab him as his cross-country flight makes a stopover. The agent, dressed as Lowney, takes Lowney's seat on the plane and checks into the hotel under Lowney's reservation in Philadelphia. Of course, the one thought in every reader's mind is how can he get away with this without anyone being wiser. Apparently, most East Coast gangsters didn't know the West Coast gangsters and, without cell phones or the internet, all it took was an attitude and some street smarts, and "Vic" gets away with it. He is there to make a deal with the local hoods on moving some terrific forged currency on the West Coast. The Treasury Agent ("Vic") stalls while he tries to gather information on where the engraver and the presses are.

Silverberg does well in writing about mobsters and shoot-outs and femme fatales. This book, which also includes two shorter stories to fill out the book, is well worth reading.

The second selection in this volume is "Dangerous Dame" and it is a classic old style hard boiled gangster tale about a young hood out to the west coast to make a delivery. It is also a cautionary tale about women and wine.

The final selection in this volume is "One Night of Violence" and it too is an old school gangster tale about a traveling salesman who inadvertently gets caught in the middle of a gang war.
All three stories are good stuff. ( )

The author is my second favourite writer of SF and I read this one for the sake of completeness. Silverberg is not widely known for his crime novels but he knocked a few out in the last dying days of the pulp era when that market for Science Fiction had dried up. Pulp crime was not long in following but that wasn’t Silverberg’s fault. He is incapable of writing anything that is less than readable but this has the vices of its idiom in its lack of ornamentation, of its time in its casual sexism and of its place in an equally casual attitude to the use of guns.

Narrator Nick is a law enforcement agent whose speciality is in subduing his own identity and impersonating less major criminals in order to get to the main players. The plot involves the distributor of very good forgeries of five and ten dollars bills and the discovery and release from bondage of the engraver who made the plates for their manufacture. None of the characters lifts beyond the functional - or typical - but the plot is well-honed and provides the action its intended readership presumably craved.

The two accompanying short stories used to pad out this paperback are from the same era and in similar vein. Dangerous Doll riffs on the counterfeiting game and, as its title suggests, features a femme fatale, while One Night of Violence sees a travelling salesman get caught up in a gangland shootout. In this story I did wonder what on earth the “video set” in a late 1950s hotel lobby might have been. ( )

Delving into the Hard Case Crime archives I found this little gem originally published in 1962 by a pulp author who was primarily a Sci-Fi writer.

A Philadelphia set caper full of sex, violence, and triple crosses.

Nick aka Vic Lowney is a chameleonic federal agent whose job is to switch places and impersonate a California operative in order to take down a Philly outfit who specializes in forging money or ‘Queer’ (apparently is what it was called back in the day) Things quickly get out of control as other greedy hoods contact Nick to get their dirty paws on the forgery plates.

Crackling cool dialog, gun battles, and femme fatales, all neatly wrap in a short novel which includes an afterword and two short stories; ‘Dangerous Doll’ and ‘One Night of Violence’ all written by the author.

A fast paced entertaining read. With twist galore.
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