The Complete Ivy Frost

Product Description It may come as a surprise to some that Donald Wandrei wrote more mysteries than all his horror, fantasy, and science fiction tales combined. This volume collects all eighteen adventures of Wandrei's ratiocinative detective I.V. (or Ivy) Frost, who is ably assisted by his beautiful and tough female assistant, Jean Moray. A scientist and inventor, Frost has his own approach to solving mysteries. Rather than following the usual hard-drinking, trench-coated style of many of his contemporaries, Frost's strategy was to mix the logic of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes with the technology of Lester Dent's Doc Savage. In 2000, D.H. Olson edited a volume published by Fedogan and Bremer collecting the first eight of Frost's adventures. A second volume of the remaining 10 tales was promised but never materialized. Finally ALL 18 adventures of Ivy Frost are here for you in this volume. Review ...Wandrei was a prolific young fellow who earned his living through the Depression-era pulps by churning out SF, horror, mysteries, whatever the market would bear. In 1934, the detective fiction magazine CLUES, attempting to compete with the standard-bearer BLACK MASK, secured the services of Donald Wanderi to create a popular new crime fiction series. Wandrei responded with Advertise for Death, a novelette the editors eagerly purchased and then published as Frost. The new series protagonist was received by readers with considerable enthusiasm. Dr. I. V. (Ivy, to his friends) Frost was a techie criminologist, a Sherlockian brain of the new school, a man with little patience and no compulsion to bring the wrongdoers in alive if they misbehaved. Frost contains eight stories out of the 18 that will eventually be reprinted. In much the same overstated vein as Batman and Doc Savage, Frost s adventures are vivid pulp at its most colorful. Dr. Frost utilizes such then-cutting edge technology as helicopters and two-way interactive video communication. Whenever he gets overly wrapped up by how own complicated ratiocination, the show gets stolen by his assistant, the bright, charismatic, endlessly frustrated Jean Moray. Here's a case of a smart looker hired for perfectly practical reasons. Frost knows that sometimes a moment s distraction on the part of the bad guy may make all the difference in survival. And Jean's trained to distract. She's also perennially exasperated by her boss s apparent refusal to fall into the slightest degree of sexual attraction. This relationship dynamic is a continuing and convincing linchpin of the two primary characters. The story plots? They vary. Wandrei doesn't usually go for the obviously simplistic. One of my favorites concerns the Byzantine plot and technology involved in lofting human bodies frozen to absolute zero, and then dropping them like cryogenic bombs on a targeted estate, there to shatter into little bitty nastily thawing chunks. I, for one, quite enjoyed Frost... --Edward Bryant, LOCUS on FROST (2000)Donald Wandrei was one of the great pulp writers of the late 20's and early 30's. He's best known for his cosmic science fiction and his macabre horror stories, and indeed was a Weird Tales Magazine and Astounding Stories regular. The eight stories in this collection show that he could also write pulp detective fiction with the best of them. His investigator Professor I. V. -- Ivy -- Frost is a mix of super-sleuth, inventor, scientist, and master fighter all rolled into one. Deadly, logical, courageous, and stoic like the more famous denizen of Baker Street, he is also a man with a super gadget or two up his sleeve. In addition he just happens to have a beautiful, brainy, gutsy, blonde assistant named Jean Moray, who has her own advanced degrees AND a garter belt thigh holster complete with pearl handled .25. The slyly humorous romantic/sexual tension between Frost and Moray made the stories as far as I was concerned. The editors of Clues Magazine asked Wandrei to develop a