From there it was an easy jump to think about writing crime novels. During my time as a full-time science-fiction writer I had written half a dozen novels for Ace Books, edited by Donald A. Wollheim, and although Ace’s s-f line was still going strong, I thought of branching out and doing crime novels for Wollheim’s parallel line of mystery books. I proposed one for him, but he had plenty of good crime novelists in his stable and wanted me to stick to my established metier of science fiction.

During that time of professional uncertainty, though, I had begun writing for just about any market I could find, which included the booming men’s-magazine market, publications with names like Rogue and Venus and Mermaid. One of them, Exotic Adventures, I wrote practically single-handed, four or five stories an issue, and when its publisher decided to branch out into paperback books, I was invited to write some for their newly launched Chariot Books and Magnet Books, at a fee of a thousand dollars a book, quite handsome for those days, when a dollar bought as much as ten or fifteen of our modern ones do. And so, in the spring of 1960, I wrote The Hot Beat for Magnet Books, a tale of urban low-life very far from my science-fiction roots but not all that different from the crime stories I had been doing for Trapped and Guilty.

As it happened, my career in noir fiction was a short one—I wrote two or three others, and then started writing non-fiction books on archaeological subjects that met with considerable success, and by 1965, as the science-fiction market returned to life, I wrote a couple of s-f stories at the invitation of a friend who was now editing one of the magazines, and wrote a couple more, and by and by found myself back to my first love, a full-time science-fiction writer again, which I remained until, having reached the age of three score and ten and then some, I chose to rest on my laurels and retire as a writer.

Much to my surprise, the old books, one by one, are finding a new existence in this new century. Nearly everything I wrote sixty-odd years ago has come back into print, even unto the stories for Trapped and Guilty, and even unto my long-forgotten Magnet book of 1960, The Hot Beat, now entering a new incarnation here in a time I once regarded as the far future.

Robert Silverberg
August, 2021

The Hot Beat

THE HOT BEAT

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Just before midnight the thin December fog came slithering down from the hills to the city streets and spread a sickly haze over the ugliness of South Main Street. It left a film over the darkened store windows, and brought enough damp cold to make the tinny saloons which dotted the neighborhood look warm and cheerful.