book review: "Murder in the Gun Room" by H. Beam Piper

TRX
September 08, 2013
I just listened to an audiobook version (mp3) of H. Beam Piper's "Murder in the Gun Room." It was one of the public domain Librevox recordings. The guy who read it wasn't a professional, but he did a pretty good job.

The book was written in 1947. The storyline was that the owner of a somewhat troubled business died by accidentally shooting himself while cleaning a new acquisition for his collection of antique pistols. While the rest of the family was scrambling to divide the estate, the widow hired an acquaintance of her late husband's, a fellow collector who also owned a sizeable private detective agency, to come in and try to find out how her husband had died, while posing as an expert who was valuing the collection to sell off.

It's basically a classic locked-room murder, not that different from an Agatha Christie novel. Except that socially, it's more like the American antebellum south than 1947 Pennsylvania. Or maybe PA was like that in 1947, I don't know.

Anyway, *lots* of gun stuff, much of it central to the plotline. Lots of offhand references to things the reader was supposed to know; one of them was that a certain pistol had passed through a large gun shop described as "like Bannerman's in the 1820s." I was astonished that I caught the reference. And, just for kicks, the PI is a follower of "General Semantics", which was a popular subject in the 1940s.

The PI was described to be of the "hard boiled private eye" style, but he came across a lot more like Paul Drake from the old Perry Mason TV series.

It's way more in the "murder mystery" genre than the "detective" genre, and it takes place in an America so different from 2013 that it might as well have been one of the alternate universes Piper liked to play with in his science fiction stories. But, hey, there's not that much fiction out there written for harccore gun geeks...

I pulled this version off alt.binaries.ebooks a month or so ago, but I'm sure it's easy enough to find if you look.

TRX
September 09, 2013
In "Little Fuzzy", Jack Halloway takes a shot at a damnthing and misses. He reflects, "No aimed shot is ever wasted." Considering my marksmanship skills, I've adopted that as a personal motto...

TRX
September 09, 2013
Oh, yesss... and "The Venus Belt" and "The Nagasaki Vector" as well. I didn't even know about "Merwin & Hulbert" the first couple of times I read the Vector... I always buy copies when I find them in used book stores, and pass them on to unsuspecting victims, some of whom had never opened a book since they got out of school.

Too bad Smith's later stuff never measured up to the first three he wrote, though.

And, heck, since we've drifted off into SF writers in general, Keith Laumer's "The Last Command" from 1966, which I'd throw into the ring for "the best short story in the English language." It wasn't the first Bolo story he wrote, and Baen prostituted them out after Laumer died, but it's by far the best. It's in several of Laumer's collected short stories or novellas, but it's still under copyright and therefore not available like Piper's stuff.

Think "Gran Torino", except it's set several hundred years from now after an interstellar war, and the enemy is one of your own, horribly damaged, still trying to carry out orders issued half a century before...

Clifford D. Simak's "Good Night, Mr. James" is a hunter story; guns are only incidental. As far as I can tell it's in the public domain now, but nobody has OCR'd it and put it online. You can find that story in a number of collections as well.

TRX
September 10, 2013
With shipping both ways, you're at about the usual $3.99 cost of shipping a used copy online. Half.com, amazon, and abebooks are good places to look. Inter-Library Loan might be able to get some of them too.

Try some of these: (not all gunhead stuff, but guaranteed to have a plot, and a beginning, middle, and end, and make coherent sense all the way through, not all of which are common nowadays...)

L. Neil Smith: The Probability Broach, the Venus Belt, the Nakasaki Vector

H. Beam Piper: Lone Star Planet, Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen, Murder in the Gun Room

L. Sprague De Camp: A Gun for Dinosaur, Lest Darkness Fall

(I don't know what it is with the leading initial thing...)

Keith Laumer: Thunderhead, The Last Command, Galactic Odyssey, Planet Run

Eluki bes Shahar: Hellflower, Darktraders, Archangel Blues

Alfred Bester: The Stars My Destination, The Demolished Man

John Brunner: The Repairmen of Cyclops, The Shockwave Rider

Lee Correy: Star Driver

John De Chancie: Starrigger, Red Limit Freeway, Paradox Alley

George Alec Effinger: When Gravity Fails

Mick Farren: Necrom, Last Stand of the DNA Cowboys, Vickers, The Long Orbit

Jasper Fforde: Thursday Next, The Last Dragonslayer

Alan Dean Foster: Icerigger

Alexis A. Gilliland: The Revolution From Rosinante, Long Shot for Rosinante, The Pirates of Rosinante

Robert Cham Gilman: The Rebel of Rhada, The Starkhan of Rhada

Joe Haldeman: The Forever War

Harry Harrison: The Daleth Effect, Deathworld, The Technicolor Time Machine

Paul Anderson: Virgin Planet, Agent of the Terran Empire, Operation Chaos, The High Crusade

Frank Herbert: Whipping Star, The Santaroga Barrier

Philip E. High: The Time Mercenaries

Fred Hoyle: A For Andromeda, Andromeda Breakthrough

Colin Kapp: The Patterns of Chaos, The Survival Game, The Transfinite Man, The Unorthodox Engineers

Michael Kurland: The Whenabouts of Burr

Michael McCollum: A Greater Infinity

Richard C. Meredith: At The Narrow Passage, No Brother No Friend, Vestiges of Time

Richard K. Morgan: Altered Carbon, Thirteen

Larry Niven: The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton, Protector, A Gift From Earth

Andre Norton: Sargasso of Space, Daybreak 2250 AD, Galactic Derelict

Alastair Reynolds: Century Rain, Chasm City, The Prefect

William R. Burkett: Sleeping Planet

Spider Robinson: Mindkiller, Telempath

Eric Frank Russell: Sinister Barrier, The Space Willies, Wasp

John Scalzi: Old Man's War, The Android's Dream

James H. Schmitz: The Witches of Karres

Charles Sheffield: My Brother's Keeper, The Sight of Proteus

Clifford D. Simak: Way Station, The Werewolf Principle, They Walked Like Men

George H. Smith: Hellflower

George O. Smith: Venus Equilateral

Norman Spinrad: Bug Jack Barron

Brian M. Stableford: Journey to the Center, The Halcyon Drift

Christopher Stasheff: The Warlock in Spite of Himself

S.M. Stirling: Drakon, The Peshawar Lancers, In the Courts of the Crimson Kings

John Stith: Memory Blank, Redshift Rendezvous

Charles Stross: The Atrocity Archives, Halting State, Rule 34, Singularity Sky

S. Andrew Swann: Forests of the Night, Broken Crescent, Prophets

Jack Vance: Big Planet, To Live Forever, City of the Chasch

Joan D. Vinge: Outcasts of the Heaven Belt

Vernor Vinge: True Names, The Peace War, Grimm's World

Tom Holt: Grailblazers, Flying Dutch, Expectimg Someone Taller

Scott Westerfeld: Peeps

James White: Hospital Station

Walter Jon Williams: Hardwired, Voice of the Whirlwind, Aristoi

Roger Zelazny: Nine Princes in Amber, The Guns of Avalon, Doorways in the Sand, Roadmarks

these are not SF:

Nevil Shute: Trustee from the Toolroom

Donald Hamilton: Death of a Citizen, Assassins Have Starry Eyes, The Steel Mirror

Lou Cameron: Cybernia

George C. Chesbro: Shadow of a Broken Man, Bone

Colin Cotterill: The Coroner's Lunch, Killed at the Whim of a Hat

Robert Crais: Indigo Slam

Tim Dorsey: Florida Roadkill, Hammerhead Ranch Motel, When Elves Attack

Chris Ewan: The Good Thief's Guide to Amsterdam

Joe R. Lansdale: Savage Season, Mucho Mojo, The Two-Bear Mambo, Bad Chili

John Maxim: Haven

Joe Poyer: North Cape, Operation Malacca

Richard S. Prather: The Trojan Hearse, Always Leave 'Em Dying, The Cheim Manuscript