Robert Moore Williams 25 min read

'Hold it, buddy,' the man says, coming along the bar, expensive rumpled clothes, a whining voice, and a telltale bulge under his left armpit. 'You're Luke Shaw, ain't you?'

Robert Moore Williams's 1957 story is a fast, hard-boiled hard-SF and social-SF mystery. Punchy, engaging golden-age SF. Read it for a story that opens like noir crime fiction and opens out onto a stranger secret, the truth hidden, as the title promises, inside a painting.

In its time

Published in 1957, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

25 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).

Illustrated by

W. E. Terry