Hard Case Keeps on Keepin’ On

“First Publication Anywhere” and “Six-Time Hugo Award Winner,” shout the promotional lines on the cover of Hard Case Crime’s new paperback release, The Dead Man’s Brother, by Roger Zelazny. If those lines seem weighted with pride, it’s amply justified. Turns out that science-fiction master Zelazny decided to try a crime novel in the 1970s, then put it on the shelf, where it sat until he died in 1995.

In a moving afterword written by his son Trent, Zelazny is remembered as a man who could pick locks (a skill the hero of this book uses early on), escape from a straitjacket while his children timed him, and read eight or nine books at the same time.

“It was a surprise when Kirby McCauley, his agent, called to say he had discovered the manuscript,” Trent recalls. “A surprise, but in no way a shock. Dean Koontz said of my father, ‘Roger Zelazny is a science-fiction writer, but he clearly could have written anything he chose to write.’”

The Dead Man’s Brother is a knockout, an international thriller about an art dealer (and former smuggler) named Ovid Wiley, who finds the body of his former partner on his gallery floor. The CIA offers to get him off the hook for the murder--if he’ll agree to fly off to Rome and there trace a priest who has stolen a ton of Vatican cash, and who has now fled with Wiley’s former lover.

This novel is great fun, though it carries a tinge of sadness, because Zelazny never wrote another thriller. Good for Hard Case publisher Charles Ardai for bringing this story (“The First New Zelazny Novel in 15 Years!”) to print. And the cover illustration by Chuck Pyle is a worthy addition to the Hard Case collection.