I’m still reading The Man Who Did Too Much, a comedic mystery about two very-unlike-each-other characters who get sucked into the danger of international intrigue. I finally got some serious, quality time to spend with this novel, and found that I can’t put it down. I found myself laughing out loud at Karla Marquette and some of the bizzarre she gets herself into— George Starling is the straight man in this pair. And yes, I too searched Google for “flamingo yo-yo fantasia.”

But that’s not today’s book. Still on the theme of mysteries that need to be solved, today I’m posting a snippet from a classic SF-mystery favorite, because I recently realized that I don’t read enough SF anymore— and there seems to be so little good SF to read.

The Investigation, by Stanislaw Lem, one of my all-time favorite SF authors: This is a story of increasingly strange occurrences. In a plot worthy of the best of The X-Files, detective Lieutenant Gregory of Scotland Yard investigates a series of incidents in which corpses have been moved (or have moved by themselves). Initially dismissed as practical jokes in poor taste, eyewitness testimony eventually suggests a paranormal explanation… But we don’t believe that, right?

Gregory uncovers a series of possible explanations, each successively more weird than the last, some of which require mind-bending alterations in worldview to understand. Love it!

Today’s teaser, from page 8 (chosen randomly by Amazon.com) of the 1986 paperback edition of The Investigation (which is the edition that I have in my library):