Stellar Showboat

This is space noir with a difference. A traveling carnival vessel cruising the solar system sounds like escapist fun until Special Investigator Billy Neville boards it and finds blackmail, murder, and a crime ring stretching from Mercury to the outer planets. The showboat becomes a locked-room mystery in deep space, a glittering venue where the performers could be con artists, the audience could be marks, and anyone might be next to die. Jameson wrote this in 1941, when the world was teetering, and that anxious energy pulses beneath the optimistic Golden Age veneer. The plot moves with pulp efficiency through double-crosses and tough-guy dialogue, but what elevates it is the setting itself: the showboat is both paradise and trap, where identities shift and nothing is quite what it seems. For fans of hardboiled detective fiction transplanted among the stars.