Just before bedtime one night I stumbled across an audiobook of Nelson S. Bond’s stories about “Horse-Sense Hank.” Hank is an illiterate turnip farmer who is a inuitive scientific genius. Show Hank part of something and he’ll figure the rest out. Laughed in a few places. Dozed a little so I looked the stories up on Project Guttenberg. Read that first one: “The Scientific Pioneer,” from 1940.
Read “Horsesense Hank Does His Bit,” a wartime (1942) tale where Hank and Jim (our narrator) come up against Nazi saboteues.
Read “The Scientific Pioneer Returns,” also from 1940 where Bond’s inept space engineer from the future, Lancelot Biggs, pops Hank (and a few other people!) to the 23rd century to help him solve a problem.
And read “Horsesense Hank In the Parallel Worlds,” (1942) where Hank builds a time machine of his own which doesn’t quite work the way it’s supposed to.
As I said, I laughed a few places in these 80+ year old stories, like when Jim refers to Midland U. as “this football-team-with-a-campus.”
Or the now unintentionally funny bit where Jim suggests calling a detective and says “..if you want to know what happened…why don’t you get a dick?”
Bond was prolific in the 30s thru the 50s and could be light and whimsical or fantastic and aweing or even scary as the mood requires. Here the mood requires a bit of the feel of Damon Runyon.
Finished Beta-Reading a novel by J. Scott Coatsworth that is such a page-turner I want to read the book it’s a sequel to! (400+ pages! Yikes!)
Read Murray Leinster’s short-story “Sam, This Is You.” A funny sci-fi screwball comedy with a touch of Damon Runyon. Takes me back to the world of landlines and phone poles.
Read “The Ex-Magician From The Minhota Tavern” by Murilo Rubiato.
Read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ story “The Last Voyage Of the Ghost Ship.”
Read “The Circular Ruins,” by Jorge Luis Borges. (Nice double meaning in the title!) These three stories in the anthology “A Hammock Beneath The Mangoes,” edited by Thomas Colchie.
Read “Spell, Book And Candle” by Catherine Lundoff from her collection “Out Of This World.” A collection I THOUGHT I had, but didn’t so I ordered the paperback. Worth it. (My earlier copy is in my jammed-up Kindle, but I like physical books.)
Read the not-to-be-missed weekly stories by Kaje Harper on her site https://www.facebook.com/groups/208207893795147
Read some of Mark McCormick’s book of articles “Kansas Matters: America’s Social Faultlines.” Saw him speak (at Left On Read) and got it signed afterwards.
Got a copy of “The Further Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes,” a collection of pastiches edited by Richard Lancelyn Green. Read “The Adventure Of the Marked Man” by Stuart Palmer. A twisty tale, and as I was reading it I forgot it was not by Doyle! Palmer is another favorite author and he emulated his friend Craig Rice for their collaboration of Withers and Malone stories.
(Which I’ll have to finish reading someday!)
—-jeff baker, September 20, 2026.
authorjeffbaker 