The blog has been a tremendous source of pleasure to me over the years, and I’ve made a lot of friends here. A few weeks, a few months is about all I have left. Anderson today, and they suggested that I enter hospice care. Things could change, but I suspect this will be my final post on the blog. This week’s second sad occasion falls on Wednesday, December 5, which will mark one year since Crider-then 76 years old and suffering from a very aggressive prostate cancer- announced he was giving up blogging after an impressive decade-and-a-half-long run.

So I have substituted Renegades of Time, instead. However, after digging through the boxes in my basement to find said “authorized edition”-shown on the left (click for an enlargement)-I discovered it was a hardcover book, not a paperback. As a boy, I was a huge fan of the 1964-1968 Irwin Allen series on which Jones based that adventure yarn, and have managed to hold onto my copy of the book ever since. I had thought originally to highlight a different book front here today, from the only Jones work I know is in my possession: his 1965 TV tie-in novel, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (Whitman). That was the concluding installment in Crider’s own “PaperBack” series, which he’d debuted in his blog back in 2010-and which The Rap Sheet picked up, in his honor, just before the author’s death in February 2018. Jones’ 1977 novel, The River and the Dream (which, I just noticed, he misspelled The River and the Dread). First, it was exactly one year ago today-on December 3, 2017-that Texas mystery writer and longtime blogger Bill Crider posted the front and back covers from Raymond F. The change of pace is provoked by a couple of unfortunate anniversaries occurring this week. I can pretty much guarantee that you’re not the only one looking at this latest installment in The Rap Sheet’s “PaperBack” series and wondering, How in the heck did a science-fiction novel manage to worm its way into this mix? I thought the “PaperBack” choices were all from the crime, mystery, and thriller shelves. Part of a series honoring the late author and blogger Bill Crider.

Renegades of Time by Raymond F. Jones