I’m going with The Best of Randall Garrett: 43 Novels and Short Stories (Unexpurgated Edition) (Halcyon Classics), despite the fact that it’s only available on the Kindle, for one basic reason: Randall Garrett is quite possibly the most under-appreciated and overlooked science fiction writer of the 20th Century, and you will not regret reading him. If you only know him from the Lord Darcy series then it’s not so bad, but the man had an effortless way of writing that makes it fairly incomprehensible to me why he wasn’t more commercially successful. (Shrug) It happens.
And so, farewell to Marque and Reprisal. Fun series.
Only know him from Lord D’arcy but even then I miss him still there was so much minutiae in his stories you miss half of it.
Odd … A couple of the short stories listed there weren’t by Garrett but by someone named Walter Bupp. When they were published there was speculation that Bupp was one of Garrett’s pen names, but he was a whole ‘nother guy entirely. I knew someone who asked Garrett about this, back in the day, and he confirmed that they weren’t his.
I wonder how they were included in the collection … Has copyright lapsed on them? Or does the Garrett estate think that he wrote them?
Too bad they left out “The Hunting Lodge”; it’s a personal favorite of mine and I think it may have been the first story of his I ever read. Nice little tale of political assassination and robots, but not the way you might think.