Think Yourself to Death

by Stephen Marlowe

The book has no illustrations or index. Purchasers are entitled to a free trial membership in the General Books Club where they can select from more than a million books without charge.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Science Fiction

18 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1957

About the author

Aka Milton S. Lesser, Adam Chase, Andrew Frazer, Jason Ridgway, C.H. Thames.

Stephen Marlowe (1928–2008) was the author of more than fifty novels, including nearly two dozen featuring globe-trotting private eye Chester Drum. Born Milton Lesser, Marlowe was raised in Brooklyn and attended the College of William and Mary. After several years writing science fiction under his given name, he legally adopted his pen name, and began focusing on Chester Drum, the Washington-based detective who first appeared in The Second Longest Night (1955).

Although a private detective akin to Raymond Chandler’s characters, Drum was distinguished by his jet-setting lifestyle, which carried him to various exotic locales from Mecca to South America. These espionage-tinged stories won Marlowe acclaim, and he produced more than one a year before ending the series in 1968. After spending the 1970s writing suspense novels like The Summit (1970) and The Cawthorn Journals (1975), Marlowe turned to scholarly historical fiction. He lived much of his life abroad, in Switzerland, Spain, and France, and died in Virginia in 2008.

Marlowe received the Shamus Award, "The Eye" (Lifetime achievment award) in 1997.

Reviews

[Phil Giunta · Rating 3 out of 5]

Johnny Mayhem is a man without a body, a soul who can only exist in corporeal form for 30 days at a time by possessing a recently deceased corpse or one properly frozen. He also happens to work as an investigator for the law enforcement agency known as the Galactic League. In this particular case, he is sent to the planet Ophiuchus IX to uncover why so many outworlders commit suicide shortly after arriving on the planet. His soul takes over the frozen corpse of a young indigenous person. He then goes to work for the Denebian Export company who are covertly smuggling something from a remote region of the planet.

[Rubin Carpenter · Rating 2 out of 5]

A product of its time to be certain in terms of storytelling
a nice story idea though of someone in the future who can change bodies,
is possibly immortal, and sent on an assignment to gather information for a government organization
a somewhat ordinary sci-fi read
originally published in Amazing stories magazine in the 1950s

[Susan Molloy · Rating 5 out of 5]

🖊 Johnny Mayhem, the galaxy’s only body-changer, in another science fiction adventure to save the universe from total nuclear annihilation! “When he reached Ophiuchus, Johnny Mayhem was wearing the body of an elderly Sirian gentleman. Nothing could have been more incongruous. The Sirian wore a pince-nez, a dignified two-piece jumper in a charcoal color, sedate two-tone boots and a black string-tie.” In this short story from 1957, Mayhem occupies a different type of body. Though I suspected which body was Mayhem, I enjoyed reading this short story from the Golden Age of Science Fiction.
📙 This book was published in Amazing Stories March 1957, volume 31, no. 3
🟢The e-book version can be found on Project Gutenberg.
🟣Kindle.
🚀●▬●💫 🪐 💫●▬●🚀

[Tim · Rating 2 out of 5]

Doesn't stand the test of time, not because it is old (1957) but because modern writing has just progressed and this is a product of the time. Light, fast story. Short. Little plot and paper-thin characters. Does have an interesting concept for a story. Not something that would get published today but I could see a wannabe writer ebooking it and putting it on Amazon, and then not finding any buyers. Only worth reading if you are making a study or love affair of 1950's SF. Maybe Hollywood could steal the concept, flesh it out, and turn it into a decent movie for SF fans.

[David Johnston · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oh. Were we supposed to be surprised by that plot twist? Oh come on even back then his issue with the body had to be easy enough to figure out.