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    Blood on the Mink
    Blood on the Mink
    Blood on the Mink
    Ebook213 pages3 hours

    Blood on the Mink

    By Robert Silverberg

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Somewhere in Philadelphia, a master engraver is turning out brilliant forgeries of U.S. currency plates for an organized crime gang - and the government wants to put a stop to it. But how can they get close enough to bring down the criminal enterprise from the inside? 

    By snatching a west coast crime boss' right-hand man and sending a federal agent undercover in the man's place. His assignment: pose as a buyer of counterfeit bills and try to get the engraver out. Which works fine - until he crosses paths with someone who knows the man he replaced... 

    A lost masterpiece from science fiction Grandmaster Robert Silverberg, published as a complete novel for the very first time!
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHard Case Crime
    Release dateApr 3, 2012
    ISBN9780857687692
    Blood on the Mink
    Author

    Robert Silverberg

    Robert Silverberg (b. 1935) sold his first science fiction stories to the lower-grade pulps in the mid-fifties, moved swiftly to the three prestigious magazines (Astounding, Galaxy and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction) and as his style deepened and themes expanded in through the next reached the first rank of science fiction writers. He is regarded as the greatest living writer of science fiction, an SFWA Grandmaster, ex-President (in the 1960’s) of that organization, winner of five Nebulas, four Hugos and many other domestic and foreign awards. Among his famous novels are Dying Inside, The Book of Skulls, Downward to the Earth, A Time of Changes; his novella Born with the Dead (1974) is perhaps the finest work of that length published within the genre. Shifting to a predominating fantasy in the late 1970’s (Lord Valentine’s Castle and the attendant Majipoor Series), Silverberg continued to write science fiction and won a Nebula in 1986 for the novella Sailing to Byzantium, and Hugos for the novelettes Gilgamesh in the Outback and Enter a Soldier: Later, Enter Another. He was editor of the long-running original anthology series New Dimensions and of important reprint anthologies such as The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Alpha, and The Arbor House Treasury of Modern Science Fiction. 

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    Reviews for Blood on the Mink

    3.5/5

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    • 4/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      A fun 'lost' crime novella (and pair of stories) by an author known for his SF. The novella itself is a decent pulp piece, but Silverberg notes in his afterword that he had been commissioned to write more stories featuring the main character, Nick, an agent who would assume a new undercover identity every story. The magazine that had commissioned the work went under, and thus the stories were never written.

      The two stories accompanying the novella are also fine. The first story covers some of the same territory as the novella (both involve counterfeit money; I like the detail of making counterfeit 10s, because 1s and 5s wouldn't be worth the effort but bigger bills would be more likely to get noticed), and the second one has a nice twist at the end.

    Book preview

    Blood on the Mink - Robert Silverberg

    Raves for the Work of

    ROBERT SILVERBERG!

    When Silverberg is at his best, no one is better.

    —George R.R. Martin

    One of the great storytellers of the century.

    —Roger Zelazny

    Ferocious... brilliance comes burning through... Silverberg’s only hallmark is quality.

    —Jonthan Lethem

    A major work... tight and thought-provoking.

    —Locus

    Robert Silverberg’s versatile, skeptical intelligence controls a lavish and splendid imagination.

    —Ursula K. LeGuin

    Grandly sweeping and imaginative... the sure hand of an old master.

    —Publishers Weekly

    A masterpiece when I first read it, and remains a masterpiece to this day.

    —Greg Bear

    Silverberg is a master writer in any genre—and now you’re going to find out why they call them ‘thrillers.’

    —John Shirley

    She was lying on her side, in a twisted position, and the blood was soaking right through the mink and forming a little puddle on the sidewalk. I knelt by her side. Her eyes were glazing fast, and her face, drained of blood, looked ghostly. She looked up at me, her head lolling, and tried to say something. Vic....

    She sank back. I threw open her coat and saw that there wasn’t much use calling an ambulance. One shot had been enough. He had used a .45, and the big slug had entered right between her shoulder blades, bored through her body at tremendous force, and had emerged smack between her lovely breasts, half an inch to the right of the sternum.

    There was a hole in her blouse with the diameter of a half dollar, and that hole went right through her body, heart and all. She had stayed alive for thirty seconds after the shot on sheer willpower, nothing more.

    The key, I thought.

    As I half expected, she was clutching it in her hand. The fingers hadn’t started to get stiff yet, of course, but her grip was tight. I pried the key loose and slipped it into my pocket, and not a moment too soon, either, because the next minute the place was full of cops...

    SOME OTHER HARD CASE CRIME BOOKS YOU WILL ENJOY:

    FIFTY-TO-ONE by Charles Ardai

    KILLING CASTRO by Lawrence Block

    THE DEAD MAN’S BROTHER by Roger Zelazny

    THE CUTIE by Donald E. Westlake

    HOUSE DICK by E. Howard Hunt

    CASINO MOON by Peter Blauner

    FAKE I.D. by Jason Starr

    PASSPORT TO PERIL by Robert B. Parker

    STOP THIS MAN! by Peter Rabe

    LOSERS LIVE LONGER by Russell Atwood

    HONEY IN HIS MOUTH by Lester Dent

    THE CORPSE WORE PASTIES by Jonny Porkpie

    THE VALLEY OF FEAR by A.C. Doyle

    MEMORY by Donald E. Westlake

    NOBODY’S ANGEL by Jack Clark

    MURDER IS MY BUSINESS by Brett Halliday

    GETTING OFF by Lawrence Block

    QUARRY’S EX by Max Allan Collins

    THE CONSUMMATA

    by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins

    CHOKE HOLD by Christa Faust

    THE COMEDY IS FINISHED by Donald E. Westlake

    BLOOD on

    the MINK

    by Robert Silverberg

    A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK

    (HCC-106)

    First Hard Case Crime edition: April 2012

    Published by

    Titan Books

    A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

    144 Southwark Street

    London

    SE1 0UP

    in collaboration with Winterfall LLC

    Blood On the Mink copyright © 1962, 1990 by Agberg, Ltd.;

    Dangerous Doll copyright © 1960, 1988 by Agberg, Ltd.;

    One Night of Violence copyright © 1959, 1987 by Agberg, Ltd.;

    Afterword copyright © 2012 by Agberg, Ltd.

    Cover painting copyright © 2012 by Michael Koelsch

    All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

    This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

    Print edition ISBN 978-0-85768-768-5

    E-book ISBN 978-0-85768-769-2

    Design direction by Max Phillips

    www.maxphillips.net

    Typeset by Swordsmith Productions

    The name Hard Case Crime and the Hard Case Crime logo are trademarks of Winterfall LLC. Hard Case Crime books are selected and edited by Charles Ardai.

    Printed in the United States of America

    Visit us on the web at www.HardCaseCrime.com

    FOR W. W. SCOTT, BUT FOR WHOM THERE’D HAVE BEEN NO BLOOD ON THE MINK

    CONTENTS

    Chapter One

    Chapter Two

    Chapter Three

    Chapter Four

    Chapter Five

    Chapter Six

    Chapter Seven

    Chapter Eight

    Chapter Nine

    Chapter Ten

    Chapter Eleven

    Chapter Twelve

    Chapter Thirteen

    Chapter Fourteen

    Chapter Fifteen

    Chapter Sixteen

    Chapter Seventeen

    Afterword

    ONE

    It was cold out at Chicago International Airport. A chill, nasty wind was rolling in off the lake. I puffed on a butt and watched the big DC-8 come taxiing in. The three Chicago detectives grew tense.

    There she is, one of them murmured. Flight 180, out of L.A. With Vic Lowney on board.

    Not for long, another chuckled.

    I didn’t say anything. It wasn’t my place to make small talk. Leave that for the locals. I had a job to do, and the job began with my getting on that plane wearing Vic Lowney’s name and Vic Lowney’s identity. I only hoped the three locals didn’t mess things up getting Lowney off the plane. One fumble, one bit of gunplay, and the whole job would be bollixed.

    The DC-8 was slowing to a halt now. The ground crew went bustling out. They shoved the ramp up under the plane’s door, and a moment later the passengers started getting off. A stewardess was reminding everybody, Back in your seats in twenty minutes, please. This is only a brief stopover.

    Two by two they came out. Los Angeles to Philly, via Chicago. I clicked off each face as it appeared. The twelfth man out of the plane was our man.

    Lowney had a Los Angeles look about him. He was tall and broad and heavily tanned, and he stepped off the plane with a kind of a swagger. His thick black hair was shiny with pomade. He wore a bright yellow shirt, a string tie, pegged pants, suede shoes, and—though it was a gloomy afternoon in Chi—dark sunglasses.

    If he could have seen me, lounging against the wall just inside the departure shed, he would have had a shock. The faces weren’t the same, but everything else was. String tie, yellow shirt, sunglasses and all. I even had my cigarette drooping at the same angle. The tan had taken me four days under the U-V lamp.

    I’m sort of a chameleon that way. It’s what I get paid for. Right now I was busy convincing myself that I was Vic Lowney, number three man of the Southern Cal crime syndicate. Inside of five minutes, I was going to have to convince the rest of the world that I was Lowney, too. And my life depended on making it come off.

    The three Chi detectives flashed their badges at the airline man and moved out onto the field just as Lowney came sauntering across. He had long legs, and he wanted to stretch them a little before resuming his flight to Philadelphia. The Chi boys might have been ad men right off Wacker Avenue, with their flannels and their attaché cases. Lowney didn’t suspect a thing right up until the moment they quietly surrounded him.

    The whole thing took maybe fifteen seconds. They whispered to Lowney and one of them showed identification. I saw Lowney’s face go icy. His lips moved in brief and probably impolite phrases. The Chi men murmured back, and one of them gently took hold of Lowney’s elbow. He jerked free, and I thought there was going to be action, but the detective took the elbow again. They escorted him off the field, taking the next door down. I didn’t budge. I stubbed out my cigarette and lit another.

    Ten minutes went by, and then one of the detectives reappeared, smiling like a little boy with a report card full of A’s. He wanted me to stick a gold star on his cheek, I guess. He said, He’s in custody.

    So?

    Everything went smooth, no?

    The plane’s going to leave soon, I said. I’m not paid to hand out compliments to the locals. You got anything for me?

    Sure. Sure, right here.

    He slipped me a little blue folder. Lowney’s plane tickets and baggage checks. When you get settled in Philly, go through his bags. Anything you don’t need, turn over to the police. They’ll ship it back here.

    I scowled at him. I could figure out that much of the deal for myself. Slipping the folder into my pocket, I nodded quickly and slouched back against the wall. I didn’t want to talk to him anymore.

    From here on in, I was Vic Lowney.

    I waited five minutes, and just before the other passengers started coming back on board I got in line with the people getting on in Chi, and passed through. I sauntered aboard the way Vic Lowney would. The stewardess gave me a pretty smile and welcomed me on board. I reminded her that I was a through passenger from L.A. That shook her up a little. The nose and the lips were all wrong, but the glasses hid the eyes, and the clothes were pretty much the same. I went to my seat. Lowney had reserved one in advance, and the stub was attached to his ticket.

    The plane filled up fast. One by one, the engines started up. We moved out onto the runway.

    Lowney had left an Angeleno newspaper on his seat. I picked it up and started reading about the Dodgers. A minute later, we were in the air.

    I kept the paper open in front of me, but I wasn’t really interested in the doings of Sherry and Snider and Gilliam. I was going over and over Vic Lowney’s dossier in my mind, letting it seep into my brain until it became my own biography.

    Your name is Victor Emanuel Lowney. Born 12 October 1927, Encino, California. Mother an Italian nightclub singer, Maria Buonsignore, died 1944, age 40. Father a movie bit player, Ernest Lowney, died 1932, drowning, age 30. You grew up in Pasadena, went to high school there, left in 1944 after three years. 1944-48, small-time crime. Car thefts, smuggling out of Tijuana, mostly girls. Met Charley Hammell October 1948. Originally hired as muscle, but quickly rose in the Hammell organization. For the last six years you’ve been his left-hand man. You have no police record, so he sends you all over the country as his personal representative. Like this trip to Philly.

    You’re a bachelor, and you’ve got a big house in Pacific Palisades. You hate filter-tip cigarettes, drink vodka martinis above anything else, and you’ve got a good eye for women. You eat steak for breakfast. You’re hot-tempered but shrewd. You’ve made half a dozen kills, but nothing proven. You were rejected by the army in 1950 on account of heart palpitations, thanks to the special injection Charley Hammell’s doctor gave you before your physical. In general, Vic Lowney, you’re a cold-blooded louse.

    I was used to being a louse. In my line of work you don’t get to impersonate nice people.

    You get word in Omaha or Fond du Lac or Jersey City that they need you, and next thing you know you’re busy studying somebody and becoming him. Or maybe creating somebody out of whole cloth. It isn’t pretty work, posing as a criminal. You swim through an ocean of filth before your job is done, and a lot of that filth gets swallowed.

    But the job has to be done. Somebody has to do it.

    I guess I’m the lucky one.

    This time it was counterfeiting. For the past five or six months there had been a deluge of very classy queer stuff on the East Coast. Nothing but fives and tens, of course—it doesn’t pay to make queer singles, while big bills attract too much attention. These fives and tens were pretty special. The engraving was downright flawless, and only the paper didn’t quite measure up to Uncle Sam’s own standard.

    It was a close enough match, though, to fool anybody but an expert. Uncle Sam has a hard enough time keeping the budget balanced without competition from free enterprise. So the treasury men started tightening a net. It took three months to center the operation on Philadelphia. It took another two months to pick up the clue that Mr. Big of the queer-pushers was one Henry Klaus of Philadephia, a man well known by the Philly authorities but thus far able to stay on the outside of a cell.

    Picking up Klaus wouldn’t help much. The way to smash the ring was to nab the engraver, who was obviously a man of great talent. Only Klaus kept him well hidden, evidently. Nobody had a lead.

    At this point I got alerted to move into the case. The reasoning was that only an inside operator could get hold of that engraver. I was still trying to dream up a point of entry when we picked up word that Vic Lowney of L.A. was on his way East for a powwow with Klaus. The police had their own system of underworld intelligence—otherwise they’d never do better than parking tickets. They got the word. Lowney was being sent by Charley Hammell to line up a West Coast outlet for the queer stuff.

    We got the wheels in motion. A West Coast man briefed me on Lowney. I roasted under a sunlamp to give myself an Angeleno tan. We plucked Lowney off his plane midway to Philly.

    And here I was, twenty thousand feet in the air, wearing padded shoulders and a brand-new suntan and the identity of a louse.

    It was getting close to five, Philadelphia time, when the plane started to dip low over the City of Brotherly Love. I fastened my seatbelt and waited for the landing.

    It was October, and winter was closing in fast on Pennsylvania. The sky had a dull gray look, and the temperature was in the low fifties.

    I strolled off the plane and into the terminal. This was the rough point, right at the beginning. The dossier said Lowney had never been to Philadelphia and knew none of Klaus’ men personally. So far as we knew, no photo had been sent. The letter we intercepted mentioned only that Lowney could be recognized by the yellow shirt, string tie, and sunglasses. But if a photo had been sent—

    I stood near the baggage counter and lit up. Two or three minutes went by. Then I saw two guys edging up. One was six-three high, and about the same wide. The other was small and ratty-looking. They both wore heavy slouchy-looking winter clothing. I ignored them.

    The big one rumbled, Uh—Lowney?

    I looked them over. "Mister Lowney," I said coldly.

    Yeah. We’re from Klaus.

    "Mister Lowney."

    They looked at each other. I stared right through them. The ratty one said, "Klaus sent us, Mister Lowney. We’ve got a car waiting outside."

    I made no comment on that. Where’s the john in this place? I asked.

    There’s one right around that bend, the big one said.

    "Are you going to call me Mister Lowney or

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