Donald E. Westlake 28 min read

On the very day he means to propose to Linda, everything goes wrong for our narrator, and then the elevator won't come, because a dangerously insane spy is loose in the building's shaft.

Donald E. Westlake's 1961 story is a wry, inventive dystopian and social-SF comedy. Clever, funny golden-age SF. Read it for a genial tale set in a claustrophobic tower-world where people never go outside, and one man's marriage proposal collides with a citywide panic, from a future master of comic crime.

In its time

Published in 1961, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

West