Double Jeopardy

by Fletcher Pratt

Fixup novel merging two novellas, "Double Jeopardy" and "The Square-Cube Law" from ''Thrilling Wonder Stories'' 04/52 and 06/52 respectively.

The story features Pratt's detective hero George Helmfleety Jones in two adventures dealing with the ramifications of a newly discovered matter-duplication process. The first concerns a case of industrial espionage involving the bootlegging of duplicated drugs, and includes Jones's marriage to a duplicated woman. The second is a locked-room mystery in which a fortune is somehow stolen from a sealed, pilotless cargo plane.

Genres: Science Fiction

214 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1952

About the author

Murray Fletcher Pratt (1897–1956) was a science fiction and fantasy writer; he was also well-known as a writer on naval history and on the American Civil War.

Pratt attended Hobart College for one year. During the 1920s he worked for the Buffalo Courier-Express and on a Staten Island newspaper. In the late 1920s he began selling stories to pulp magazines. When a fire gutted his apartment in the 1930s he used the insurance money to study at the Sorbonne for a year. After that he began writing histories.

Wargamers know Pratt as the inventor of a set of rules for civilian naval wargaming before the Second World War. This was known as the "Naval War Game" and was based on a wargame developed by Fred T. Jane involving dozens of tiny wooden ships, built on a scale of one inch to 50 feet. These were spread over the floor of Pratt's apartment and their maneuvers were calculated via a complex mathematical formula. Noted author and artist Jack Coggins was a frequent participant in Pratt's Navy Game, and L. Sprague de Camp met him through his wargaming group.

Pratt established the literary dining club known as the Trap Door Spiders in 1944. The name is a reference to the exclusive habits of the trapdoor spider, which when it enters its burrow pulls the hatch shut behind it. The club was later fictionalized as the Black Widowers in a series of mystery stories by Isaac Asimov. Pratt himself was fictionalized in one story, "To the Barest", as the Widowers’ founder, Ralph Ottur.

Pratt is best known for his fantasy collaborations with de Camp, the most famous of which is the humorous Harold Shea series, was eventually published in full as The Complete Compleat Enchanter. His solo fantasy novels Well of the Unicorn and The Blue Star are also highly regarded.

Pratt wrote in a markedly identifiable prose style, reminiscent of the style of Bernard DeVoto. One of his books is dedicated "To Benny DeVoto, who taught me to write."

Reviews

[Eden Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Visit JetBlackDragonfly (The Man Who Read Too Much) at www.edenthompson.ca/blog

Double Jeopardy was a real find! This has the theme of a near-future mind altering drug, and does a fantastic job with it! It's actually two stories combined written by Fletcher Pratt, an American writer of more than sixty books, many on civil war and naval history, who co-wrote several fantasy books with L. Sprague de Camp. This had the feeling of the great science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, and Ray Bradbury (especially Fahrenheit 451).

Federal Agent George Helmfeet Jones is assigned to locate the illegal reproduction of Perizone, a closely controlled drug that has cured every type of blood disease, but has the effect of rendering the person a susceptible blank slate for a time. His trail leads him to the reclusive Braunholzer Institute in upstate New York where they are secretly studying the replication of living matter. Two of the leaders are his his old college friend, and Betty-Marie Taliaferro, who is both gorgeous and very highly intelligent. One of the other scientists he investigates accidentally leads him to an old farmhouse where he is greeted warmly by a naive young woman who looks very much like Betty-Marie. Hmmm. All of this information is fed into the Integrator, which compiles random data into a cohesive solution, but only to a point - human ingenuity still plays a large part. Can you tell what's going on from those clues?

The Perizone mystery is more or less sorted by the halfway mark, when events lead Jones into his next case - a quantity of 'raw humanoid material' meant for the Braunholzer Reproducer has disappeared, and, the theft of three million dollars from an automatically controlled, sealed rocket flying at 8g from New York to San Francisco! I love a 'locked-room' mystery. If someone stole the Reproducer material to create a living being, it still couldn't stand the G force of the rocket. It was secure and sealed in NY and opened empty in SF - how was it done? Jones begins investigating the bankers, the security system and the other packages aboard - concluding with - I must say - a strange and twisted solution you will never be able to figure out, and still might not believe when you hear it!
Still, it's a fun and mysterious trip getting there.

It has the mood of the great Truffaut film of Fahrenheit 451. A slightly futuristic feel, but still of this world and time. Like most people, Jones flies around in a personal "heli", carries a needle gun for protection and uses visi-panels for video chats. The basic story is old school noir detective, but perfectly jazzed up for sci-fi. I loved the mood of it, just the right tone.

I found a first edition 1952 Doubleday Science Fiction hardcover copy by chance.
If you are lucky to come across this title, I recommend it! Excellent.

[KHLOARIS · Rating 2 out of 5]

50s crime genre (involving bits of sci-fi tech) about a government stiff named George Jones who solves two separate crimes in this book. Both crimes involve the illegal use of a matter-duplicator machine and for both assignments George consults the “integrator”, a probability database for identifying key suspects via helpful dataset connections.

In the first story, George is sent upstate NY to investigate a pharmaceutical lab suspected of duplicating a drug called perizone thereby upsetting the medical drug market. Turns out they’re also duplicating museum art to smuggle their drugs. This book is pure cardboard pulp so don’t expect any heady detours like in P.K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1961).

What Jones uncovers is much worse than a cloned Brancusi, they’re cloning humans!! Worst of all , they’ve cloned George’s new crush, Betty-Marie Taliaferro, a genius chemical engineer who just so happens to be a smoking hot babe. (Didn’t The Firesign Theater do a bit with a character who had this name?) Sadly for George, Betty-Marie Taliaferro is not exactly into guys.

The tell-tale reveal for all these duplicates is they’re flipped left to right. The profile on a duped silver dollar can be seen facing the wrong way. Next we find out that duplicating a right-handed human results in a left-handed clone (don’t try thinking too much about it). Also, a duplicate human clone won’t acquire the emotional moral attitudes of the original… so while Betty-Marie Taliaferro may have enough ethical sense to refuse cooperation with a sinister plan to manufacture forgeries, her dupe doesn’t.

This book is a fix-up combining two previously published short stories, and typically fix-ups get padded with extra material to smooth out the plot. By chapter 10, George has completely solved the laboratory case and immediately returns to Washington DC for his next assignment. While in Washington he also marries his new love, Angela, the clone of Bette-Marie Taliaferro. (Wouldn’t you?!) It’s here where some of the extra padding between the stories goes a little woo-woo:

SAMPLE:
"Betty-Marie Taliaferro is one of the most beautiful things that ever walked across a room, but she's about as much interested in men as a bar of soap. So [he] assumed that Angela would be the same way […] But he forgot that Angela had only Betty-Marie's capabilities, not the ideas she developed through background and years of education. So when George came along, Angela was as simple and natural as a child about it. She liked him and thought she wanted him, so she said so."
Angela nodded, started to say something, and then blushed instead.

Its disappointing to hear lesbians couldn’t be duplicated.

The second case involves some stolen airplane cargo and it is titled “The Square Cube Law”. This is a physics principle IRL regarding how size scaling works - useful for explaining why a small ant can lift such heavy things. Honestly, this story was a real slog to read and I have no regrets revealing spoilers. To make a long story short [;)], George figures out that the bad guys had tweaked the duplicator machine to modify human size, thereby creating mini-clones with super strength and endurance. Yes you guessed it, the book ends with a trio of midget wrestlers all named Jesus:

SAMPLE:
“…the whole side of the box cracked open; something about the size of a terrier emerged, poised, and [then] launched itself at Swigart's head. Swigart fired and missed it in midair. [It] seemed to be a midget clinging with its legs to Swigart's neck and striking at him with a blackjack. The two went down across a chair with a crash. The midget was unbelievably strong; [so] O'Neill got his gun against its head and pulled the trigger. Swigart sat on the floor, one hand to his head, [now] bent over the creature the latter had killed. About two feet high, dressed in something loosely belted around its middle, but with arms bare, it had the muscles of a vest-pocket Hercules and the features of a man of about thirty. - - "What is that little horror?" asked Howard. - - "That," said Jones, "is one of the duplicates of Jesus Perez.

[Simon Mcleish · Rating 3 out of 5]

Coming from having read several of Fletcher Pratt's fantasy novels (with and without L. Sprague de Camp), I was disappointed by Double Jeopardy. Although the mind altering drug plot was interesting, the story felt more Man From UNCLE standard than I wanted from an author of his talent.