“Legwork” was first published in Astounding Science Fiction, April 1956. You can read it on Archive.org. It is story #10 of 22 for The Best SF Stories of 1956 group read. “Legwork” was a finalist for the 1956 Hugo Award for novelette, but it was not collected into any of the best of the year anthologies even though I think it’s a four-star-plus story. It did get an honorable mention by Judith Merril.

“Legwork” was rarely anthologized, but Mike Ashley reprinted in Future Crimes in 2021 as part of his British Library Science Fiction Classics series. Here’s Ashley’s introduction for “Legwork.” It makes me want to read more Eric Frank Russell, but then I say that every time I review one of his stories. I need to do what I say.

Eric Frank Russell (1905–1978) was one of Britain’s leading sf writers in the 1950s, alongside Arthur C. Clarke and John Wyndham, but his reputation has faded since he more-or-less stopped writing in 1965. He honed his craft on reading American pulps in the 1930s and could muster a passable American idiom. He enjoyed pulp crime fiction. When he finalized his first novel, Sinister Barrier, which involves the investigation by a special government agent into a series of unusual and unexplained deaths, Russell modelled it on the American pulp G-Men. It clearly worked. John W. Campbell, Jr., bought it for the first issue of Unknown, and the novel, about aliens controlling humans, became instantly popular. Russell enjoyed creating strange mysteries investigated by the police in such early stories as “Shadow-Man” (1938) where the police try and find an invisible criminal, or “Seat of Oblivion” (1941) with the police trying to find a criminal who can possess other people. One of his last books, With a Strange Device (1964), issued in America as The Mindwarpers, was an expansion of a novella which first appeared in a detective pulp in 1956 and many critics argued it was not science fiction at all, but a Cold War thriller about the manipulation of scientists’ minds. I have no doubt Russell would have made a good crime-fiction writer had he put his mind to it. The following story, written and set in 1955, pits human ingenuity against alien ability.

Future Crimes: Mysteries and Detection Through Time and Space. British Library Publishing. Kindle Edition. 

“Legwork” introduces us to Harasha Vanash, an invader from Andromeda, who can control minds for a radius of one mile. This allows him to pass as anything his victims can imagine. For all intents and purposes, Vanash is a shapeshifter. “Legwork” begins with Vanash landing his spaceship out in the middle of nowhere, sending the spaceship back up into a parking orbit, hiding the ship’s remote controller in a hollow stump, and heading out to invade Earth alone. Vanash has invaded fifty worlds and is quite confident he will quickly take over our planet. Vanash makes himself seen as a human to the people who see him, hitches a ride to a nearby city, gets a room in a boarding house, and starts studying our ways. Here’s how Russell’s prose sounds:

Once settled and observing that money is essential to our way of life, Vanash sets out to get a steady supply. The story then cuts to Edward G. Rider, a genuine human who works at the United States Treasury. Rider is a big guy, weighing two hundred and fifty pounds. He’s recently married and is quite annoyed by his boss assigning him to an out-of-town job investigating a rather strange bank robbery.

Wikipedia has a fascinating article about the long history of shapeshifting in myth and fiction. It’s a theme that comes up in science fiction often. In myth and fantasy, magic causes shapeshifting, but in science fiction, the writer must come up with a good explanation for it.

“Who Goes There?” by John W. Campbell, Jr. is a famous 1938 science fiction shapeshifting story that might have inspired Russell. I especially wonder that after reading Ashley’s introduction. Campbell asks us to believe in “Who Goes There?” that an alien organism can restructure its body instantly, and the mystery is how to detect such an organism. In “Legwork” the shapeshifting is all illusion, and the humans don’t even know there is a shapeshifter. A good portion of the story is working out how mysterious bank robberies are taking place and coming up with a theory about a shapeshifting crook.

Eric Frank Russell’s “Legwork” could have been a great 1950s film noir movie because it’s about gritty routine detective work. Orson Welles was about the right size in 1956 to play Eddie Rider if you think about his 1958 film Touch of Evil. Russell does an excellent job of producing a police procedural in “Legwork.” In fact, it’s exactly the kind of police procedurals people saw in black and white movies of the 1950s. Imagine seeing The Asphalt Jungle, Odds Against Tomorrow and The Thing from Another World mixed into a slick film noir. I would love to see it. That’s how I imagined “Legwork” when I read it.

And thinking about shapeshifting science fiction and 1950s black and white films, I’m also reminded of Invasion of the Body Snatchers from 1956. It was a metaphorical take on shapeshifting, designed to make us think about communism. “Legwork” isn’t metaphorical, it’s straight-ahead science fictional alien invasion story. What’s weird is our short story reading group just read “Counterfeit” by Alan E. Nourse, another shapeshifting themed story, but not as good as “Legwork” because Nourse’s prose showed bad pulp fiction writing habits while Russell’s did a slick writing job with “Legwork.”

Russell has a light touch in this story, it’s not humorous like his two most famous SF stories, “Allamagoosa” and “… And Then There Were None,” but “Legwork” has just enough subtle sarcasm and faintly absurd situations that we know that Russell is making fun of Vanash’s overconfidence in conquering us humans. Russell also throws in some nice touches along the way. A teen who is an amateur astronomer with a home built 8″ reflector telescope discovers Vanash’s spaceship in orbit. Me and my buddies tried to grind an 8″ inch telescope mirror and failed when I was a teenager. There are two places where dogs start yelping and run off. That lets us know dogs that see what Vanash really looks like and it must be pretty damn scary.

“Exploration Team” by Murray Leinster won the novelette Hugo in 1956. I thought it a pretty good story, but until now in our group read 67, I thought “Brightside Crossing” by Alan E. Nourse should have gotten that Hugo. Now I’m thinking “Legwork” deserved the trophy. I wonder how many times I will change my mind when we read the next twelve stories?

My friend Mike also liked “Legwork” and sent me these comments:

“Legwork” is an interesting humans vs. aliens story, a well-worn science fiction trope that is skillfully manipulated by Eric Frank Russell.


Russell immediately introduces us to Harasha Vanash, an Andromedan thought-form whose “…natural power had been tested on fifty hostile worlds and found invincible.” Vanash is a menace to Earth when “…he’d discovered an especially juicy plum, a world deserving of eventual confiscation by the Andromedon horde.”


Russell’s genius is that he sets the stage for the impending confrontation by contrasting the Andromedon and human problem solving abilities.


The Andromedons depend upon “…flashes of inspiration that come spontaneously, of their own accord. They cannot be created to order no matter how great the need.”


Humans depend on hard work: “Variously it was called making the grade, slogging along, doing it the hard way, or just plain lousy legwork. Whoever heard of such a thing?”


As the story progresses, the humans work tirelessly to solve the problem of the mysterious bank robberies perpetrated by Vanash. Eddie Rider, a special investigator with the feel of a Sydney Greenstreet character, leads the investigation with aplomb.


The humans ultimately triumph and the alien is vanquished. Mankind is preserved. An entertaining and worthwhile story.

James Wallace Harris, 12/18/23