In his informative Introduction, Robert Silverberg tells how he and Randall Garrett became writing partners. “We worked and reworked each other’s manuscripts until they blended invisibly into a single style. Randall and I were, I suppose, science fiction’s odd couple, but we did get the work done, plenty of it, and I remain forever grateful to him for the way he accelerated my incipient carer. When we set up shop toghteter in the summer of 1955, I was a college student who had sold four or five stories and was struggling to get a start as a science-fiction writer. Thrieetn months later, thanks to his tutelage, I had dozens and dozens of stories in print and was voted the 1956 Hugo award as that year’s most promising new author.” (p. 13)

My favorite story in this Crippen and Landru collection from 2008 is the title story, “A Little Intelligence.” In the future, humans and an alien species are at war. A negotiation session is arranged to help stop the war. A group of aliens come to a religious site when Sister Mary Magdalene gets involved in the investigation when one of the aliens is murdered. Did a human commit the crime…or one of the other aliens. I enjoyed the mix of science fiction and crime detection.

Three of the stories in A Little Intelligence are pure detective stories taking place in the future and/or on other planets: “Deadly Decoy,” “The Slow and the Dead” and “A Little Intelligence.” The other stories mix SF elements with occasional crime elements. I wish Silverberg and Garrett had written more stories like these. GRADE: B+

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

INTRODUCTION by Robert Silverberg –7

Catch a thief — 15

Deadly decoy — 31

The slow and the dead — 47

The mummy takes a wife — 75

No future in this — 105

Deus ex machina — 127

A little intelligence — 151

Sources — 175