Calibre .50: a Stephen Dain mystery

by Robert Sheckley

In Calibre .50, master storyteller Robert Sheckley trades his signature science fiction for the razor-edged world of noir, delivering a lean, brutal, and irresistibly stylish mystery. This Stephen Dain adventure hurtles through a landscape of deception, greed, and double-crosses, where every smile hides a gun and every alliance comes with a price tag. When private investigator Dain takes what seems like a routine assignment, he soon finds himself caught between rival gangsters, corrupt officials, and a woman whose charm is as lethal as the weapon in the book's title.

Sheckley's prose crackles with cynical humor and clipped precision. Beneath the hardboiled action lies a mordant intelligence that dissects the moral decay of postwar America — a society where violence and irony walk hand in hand. With its breakneck pacing and existential cool, Calibre .50 stands alongside the best of Hammett and Spillane, yet carries Sheckley's own signature wit and satirical bite.

 More than a conventional detective story, Calibre .50 reveals the elasticity of Sheckley's genius — his ability to bend genre to his will, to find human absurdity even in blood and betrayal. This is pulp fiction at its tough, fast, and unforgettable. 

222 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 23, 2025

About the author

One of science fiction's great humorists, Sheckley was a prolific short story writer beginning in 1952 with titles including "Specialist", "Pilgrimage to Earth", "Warm", "The Prize of Peril", and "Seventh Victim", collected in volumes from Untouched by Human Hands (1954) to Is That What People Do? (1984) and a five-volume set of Collected Stories (1991). His first novel, Immortality, Inc. (1958), was followed by The Status Civilization (1960), Journey Beyond Tomorrow (1962), Mindswap (1966), and several others. Sheckley served as fiction editor for Omni magazine from January 1980 through September 1981, and was named Author Emeritus by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2001.