Mark Philips was the pseudonym used for SF collaborations between Randall Garrett and Laurence M. Janifer. As Mark Philips, they produced SF three novels featuring FBI agent Kenneth J. Malone. The stories originally appeared in shorter versions in Analog Science Fiction magazine, edited by John W. Campbell, in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Published in Analog as "That Sweet Little Old Lady," Brain Twister finds Malone charged with investigating leaks in a secret government program. For assistance, he recruits a powerful psi from a mental institution who believes she is Queen Elizabeth I of England. The problem is, she may be right. Brain Twister marries SF adventure with slapstick comedy for hilarious results. It was nominated for a Hugo Award in 1960, losing to Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers.
Author Biography
Randall Garrett (1927 - 1987) was an American science fiction and fantasy author. He was a prolific contributor to Astounding and other science fiction magazines of the 1950s and 1960s. He instructed Robert Silverberg in the techniques of selling large quantities of action-adventure science fiction and collaborated with him on two novels about Earth bringing civilization to an alien planet. Garrett is best known for the Lord Darcy books, the novel Too Many Magicians and two short story collections, set in an alternate world where a joint Anglo-French empire still led by a Plantagenet dynasty has survived into the twentieth century and where magic works and has been scientifically codified. The Darcy books are rich in jokes, puns and references (particularly to works of detective and spy fiction: Lord Darcy is himself partially modelled on Sherlock Holmes), elements that often appear in the shorter works about the detective. Garrett wrote under a variety of pseudonyms including: David Gordon, John Gordon, Darrel T. Langart (an anagram of his name), Alexander Blade, Richard Greer, Ivar Jorgensen, Clyde Mitchell, Leonard G. Spencer, S. M. Tenneshaw, Gerald Vance. He was also a founding member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, as "Randall of Hightower" (a pun on "garret"). The short novel Brain Twister, written by Garrett in conjunction with author Laurence Janifer (using the joint pseudonym Mark Phillips) was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1960.
