-Poul Anderson, Mirkheim IN Anderson, Rise Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, 2011), pp. 1-291 AT p. 46.
The trader team has appeared only four times before. Only once have we seen them on a typical trade pioneer crew mission, their first. In the remaining three installments, they instead responded to particular crises as they do again here but this time the team has had to be specially reconvened long after its disbandment. However, we know that they did conduct many lucrative missions both before and after being joined by van Rijn's granddaughter, Coya Conyon, who married David Falkayn.
There were many installments of Poirot and Hastings. Hastings, old, joins Poirot, not only old but at death's door, on a holiday at Styles and is disgusted when Poirot tells him to look not back but forward:
"'What is there to look forward to?'"
-Agatha Christie, Curtain: Poirot's Last Case (Glasgow, 1980), CHAPTER TWO, p. 16.
To his astonishment, they are there "'...to hunt down a murderer.'" (ibid.)
One last time...
2 comments:
Paul:
Ten years after Isaac Asimov's death, a final collection of his "Black Widowers" short mysteries was compiled, The Return of the Black Widowers. It included six of the tales that had never been published in a book with re-issues of ten the editor, Charles Ardai, considered "best" ... and two original stories, one by William Brittain and the other by Ardai.
Ardai's story, which to my mind did a pretty good job of capturing the personalities of Asimov's characters, was in fact titled "The Last Story" (and of course, it came last in the book). The mystery here was seeking a lost science fiction short story written by ... Isaac Asimov. Only Asimov and the editor to whom he handed that missing story had ever seen it; now a character from an earlier "Black Widowers" account was trying to find it. An introductory heading spoke of how "Charles Ardai brought the members of the club back together for one last dinner..."
Your use of "one last time" brought that unavoidably to my mind.
Kaor, DAVID!
And one "last story" which I thought of was Avram David'so concluding story about Dr. Engelbert Eszterhazy, the multiply learned scholar we see in Davidson's stories set in the Triune Monarchy of Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania: "The King's Shadow Has No Limits." Readers soon discover that was meant to be the last Dr. Eszterhazy story and should note the increasingly plain atmosphere of foreboding, of a doom the Triune Monarchy could not hope to postpone much longer.
I've read my share of Asimov's Black Widowers stories, with fairly moderate pleasure and interest. But, truthfully, I did not think them all that great. Too much talk and not enough SEEING and DOING. But I found that easier to tolerate in Asimov's short stories than in his novels.
When it comes to club stories, I far preferred Sterling Lanier's tales of Brigadier Donald Ffellowes, collected in THE PECULIAR EXPLOITS OF BRIGADIER FFELLOWES and THE CURIOUS QUESTS OF BRIGADIER FFELLOWES. These stories BEGIN in the comfortable setting of an old fashioned gentlemen's club with the Brigadier beginning to narrate one of his curious exploits. But, Lanier does not give us a bald here and now report, rather he takes us away to the places the Brigadier began to talk about, and presents these stories to us as tho we were THERE.
If Anderson had written more stories set and arranged like "The Master Key," they would have been somewhat like the Davidson and Lanier stories I've discussed here.
Sean
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