Dan T. Moore 29 min read

Built like a necktie rack, weighing slightly more than a used napkin, shy as the ante in a crooked game, yet within days every woman in the country melts at the thought of this nameless mystery man.

Dan T. Moore's 1954 story is a wry hard-SF and social-SF spy tale with a comic edge. Clever, funny golden-age SF. Read it for a genial story, told partly in coded letters home, of an unprepossessing secret agent whose sudden, inexplicable magnetism turns him into the most wanted man alive.

In its time

Published in 1954, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Sandy Kossin