Snowman in Flames by Clark DarltonMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I grew up in a small, rural town on the Mississippi River. Our town of 1200 had a small, one-room public library, and I tended to read a lot. I quickly ran out of books there. My parents would take me to the city library about a half hour away to get additional books. The closest library also invested in a different sort of book than was available locally. One example was Perry Rhodan books. Rhodan is a German pulp science fiction character with many episodes in Germany, and 50 years ago they started releasing American versions of the stories in mass market paperback. I would get five at a time and read them, sharing them with my cousin. We must have read dozens back then.
Now, with new free time available, I thought I would try reading some of these again, about 50 years after I began. I found a few at a bookstore in Columbia, Missouri and #25, Snowman in Flames, is the first I’ve read in at least 45 years. I may have read it when in Elementary school, I don’t remember. The story was pretty much what I generically remembered about the series. There were interesting characters and the authors dived into these characters in places. There was a lot of action. There was a lot of discussing what had happened in earlier episodes. It was very sexist in a 60s way – the women were portrayed as scared and as girlfriends of the other characters, despite being research scientists. It ended abruptly, without the final battle described, as if the author had hit his word count goal for the book and called it done. It was poorly edited, or at least poorly typeset, with lots of incorrect words. And I enjoyed it quite a bit as a reminder of my pre-teen days.
I had forgotten that the books in these series had the main story, but also some additional sci-fi stories, movie reviews, letters, and artwork. I also forgot the staple of these mass market paperbacks, a bound in advertisement for True cigarettes. Quite a time machine.
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