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Action, War, Comedy, Culture, Spies and more, by Melchior!

What does a decorated war veteran do once they have been a member of counterintelligence for both England and the United States during WW II? Denmark native Ib Melchior, an author of 17 novels & nonfiction books; journalist; stage actor; filmmaker directing & working in movies & television, including creating Space Family Robinson/Lost in Space; collects military miniatures and historical documents.

His name may not instantly ring a bell, but Melchior has been a part of publishing and broadcasting for several years and made his way into almost every home in the free world in one manner or another whether you know it or not. If you want to get to know him better there is his biography, Ib Melchior: Man of Imagination. But if you’d like to read some of his interesting short stories, a lot of them based around events he witnessed during the war.

Melchior A La Carte is such a book, filled with 14 short stories and 8 short-short stories. “Nicole” is about a young girl who has to turn to prostitution during the war to survive; “Fraulein Hannelore” is a story about German spies; “Incident on an Iraqui Road” is an interesting tale based during more recent events, but with an unusual little ruse to help the people taken prisoner; “Sleeper Agent” is another interesting spy story that traverses continents; “The Case of the Gestapo Dog” is another clever story dealing with spies but using a dog and fear to get the answers needed. Probably one of the best war stories in the book.

Not all of the stories are based on war events. The opening story takes place in Africa and is entitled “The Soul of Balafa Malia.” Although Melchior feels the need to throw in a lot of words native to the region, as he also does in some of his war stories, then translate them into English, the main character, Balafa Malia has to take a journey from her village to the big city for medical reasons, but the culture shock may be too much for the young mother-to-be.

“A Christmas to Remember” is a funny, sexy ghost story that brings to mind a ghost that we wish Charles Dickens would’ve included in his spirits that visited Scrooge.

“The Winner and New-” is based around an event that happened on an old game show. Some of the incidents that happened on game shows back in the early days of TV are questionable and this one is no different.

Remember the violent, futuristic action flick Death Race 2000? Here’s the story it was based on - “The Racer.”

“The Story of a Loaf” is more of a fantasy/parable than anything. There’s also the story “Parable Without a Purpose” that reads very much like a Hans Christian Andersen tale, which Melchior is very familiar with as Andersen was a fellow countryman (way before Melchior’s time). Melchior has professionally translated Andersen’s fairy tales into English and recorded audio books in the past.

“Leif the Lucky” is Melchior’s envisioning of what life was like on a Viking ship when Leif Eriksson first discovered North America, nearly 500 years before Christopher Columbus.

“The Vidiot” is a term used to refer to the tech guys in the TV world. This is a story of how one techie learns something that could change the world forever, but is the world ready for it?

Finally, the short story “Here’s Sport Indeed” is a Shakespearian tongue-in-cheek story using various lines and stanzas from Shakespeare’s on (supposed) work to create several stanzas of poetry to prove a point. The last half of the book is a series of explanations describing the muse for each story in Melchior A La Carte. One of the most fascinating is for “Here’s Sport Indeed.” It has been proposed that Francis Bacon and/or several other authors wrote Shakespear’s plays. People have tried several times throughout the past couple of hundred years to prove this theory. It seems that Melchior may have found the proof (or part of it) using his cryptographic and code breaking skills that he learned and professionally utilized on a daily basis during WW II. The story of proving this theory is almost more interesting than any story in the book.

Without a doubt, Melchior has led an interesting and adventurous life, in a manner much different than Hemingway, but just as bold and manly. The stories contain either photos or drawings to enhance the mood, but Melchior’s writing is solid, sometimes spine-tingling and sometimes causing a belly rumble.

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