Blogger has been "interesting" again today. I've tried posting once, and the post disappeared. Then I couldn't get back on blogger. So we'll see what happens this time.
One of my eBay purchases is a copy of DOUBLE-ACTION DETECTIVE, issue #6, from July 1957. It's a Columbia Publication, edited by Robert A. W. Lowndes, so it looks a lot like the SF digests I have from the same publisher. And Lowndes has some of his usual writers here: Robert Silverberg, Margaret St. Clair, and Sam Merwin, Jr.
St. Clair's story is another one of those "this is the solution to the Jack the Ripper case" tales. It's OK, but it doesn't offer a real historical personage as the Ripper. He's "The Courier" of the title. The hook is that he's working for Eleanor Marx, daughter of Karl, and a member of the party. Except that he's working both sides. An OK story, nothing more.
And then there's Silverberg. His story is a competent police procedural in the DRAGNET vein. I know he was writing whole issues of some of the SF digests around the time of this issue's publication (sometimes in collaboration with Randall Garrett), but he was apparently also writing mysteries, sports stories, book reviews, and the occasional nonfiction article. He must have been writing 18 hours a day. I'm in awe of him.
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