Howard Wandrei: "For Murderers Only," "The Molester," and "The Eyes of the Tiger"

As the hearty band of digital dead-enders who follow my anemic Twitter feed are aware, I became interested enough in the writing and art of Howard Wandrei to purchase a copy of The Eerie Mr. Murphy, a hardcover collection of Wandrei's work printed in 2003 by the good people at Fedogan & Bremer.  Today let's read three stories from this baby that first appeared in Spicy Mystery Stories under the pen name Robert A. Garron.

"For Murderers Only" (1936)

This is a story about a supernatural pen!  Wandrei calls it a "shank pen," and I don't quite know what that means, but I guess it is the kind of pen you have to dip into an inkwell to use.  The pen's barrel or shaft is made of amber and suspended inside the amber are six little spots that look like drops of blood.

Whippley is a painter who lives and works in a basement apartment.  The apartment was cheap to rent because the last six tenants were all dragged away and charged with murder.  The pen was owned by an earlier tenant, apparently, who left it laying around the apartment when he was carted off to the big house.  Stressed out from overwork on his current commission, a painting of a slender nude girl, Whippley has been drinking heavily.  He should finish the painting soon, though, and have a chance to relax and enjoy the pile of money he will get upon delivery of the canvas.

Today is the last day he will require the services of model Leatrice George.  George comes in and strips--Wandrei tells us all about her boyish hips and small breasts and all that.  Whippley always gives his models their checks before they start working, but he can't find his fountain pen.  So, to write out George's check he uses that strange amber pen.

Almost immediately Whippley starts acting unprofessionally, coming up with an excuse to touch the naked model.  George doesn't mind, as she knows Whippley is about to come into some money and she wants him to take her on a trip to the Caribbean.  They start horsing around, she pretending to flee his caresses, he chasing her, but disaster strikes--she knocks over the nearly-completed painting and falls over herself, damaging the canvas and suffering a bloody cut from the sharp edge of the broken wooden easel.  Enraged, Whippley strikes her, and she hits her head on a brick wall and dies.

Wandrei, appealing to yet another fetish, describes in detail how Whippley ties up the dead body, puts it in a burlap sack, weighs the sack down with little Buddha statues he owns, steals a delivery cart, puts the body in the cart with sacks of junk, etc.  While he is outside on the night streets, rummaging for junk and putting George's body in the cart, a couple walks by, thinking him a wretched beggar, tosses him a half dollar, and then leans against the wall in the doorway next door to Whippley's building to have sex.  Whippley pushes the cart past the lovers to a long pier and then into the river.  He stays away from the basement apartment for a few days.

When he returns to the apartment Whippley takes the amber pen and sits down to write a note to the landlord telling him he is leaving and asking him to pack and ship his belongings.  There are now seven spots suspended in the pen's amber barrel!  And when the painter sees the note he has written, he is horrified to find he was written a confession to the murder of Leatrice George!

Suddenly, Leatrice George's friend and fellow model--another woman Whippley has worked with, Connie Bellis--appears.  Bellis knows her friend was working with Whippley and has been keeping an eye on the basement apartment since George's disappearance.  She accuses the painter of murder and a fight ensues.  In contrast with the slender boyish George, Bellis is voluptuous, with big breasts and powerful thighs.  During the struggle most of her clothes come off.  She manages to render Whippley unconscious and calls the cops.  Whippley is in the soup...and so, we presume, is the next tenant of the apartment, who will presumably find the pen there.

"The Molester" (1937)

This is a story about an invisible space alien who comes to Earth to rape women and play practical jokes on men!

The main character of "The Molester" is a ruthless lawyer and womanizer, Edmond Scott.  A young woman comes to him with the story of how she had been on a date with her boyfriend, was suddenly knocked out, and woke up covered in bruises, having been raped.  She thinks her boyfriend must have done it, hitting her in the head from behind, though he denies it and claims he too had been knocked out, and he does have some bloody injuries.  Clues in her story tell us readers that an invisible man must have attacked her and her beau and then raped her, but Scott is only barely listening to the girl--he's studying her chest and her legs!  He is a smooth and persuasive character, and he convinces the young woman to take off her top so he can examine her bruises--this examination includes some pretty intimate touching!

Scott takes the rape victim to dinner and then a hotel, seducing her and having sex with her.  At dinner and at the hotel, odd things happen to him, like glasses tipping over, windows mysteriously opening, etc.  We readers know this is an invisible man playing pranks on Scott.  Strangest of all, while Scott and the girl are making out, they hear a weird song, the most beautiful song they have ever heard, that creates images in Scott's mind of a powerful empire of red cities, whose people are arrogant geniuses whom no one can successfully oppose.

After banging the girl Scott returns to his home in the suburbs where his wife awaits.  Scott's wife is the most beautiful of all the many women Scott has seduced, but he cheats on her because he craves novelty.  The invisible man, whom we now know is an alien, has followed Scott home and he stuns Scott with an electrical discharge and Scott has to lay there and watch the invisible alien rape his wife.

The alien leaves, and there is a flash outside.  The next morning Scott investigates the location of the flash and finds a mound of buzzing flies and squirming maggots--the invisible alien got killed climbing over the wall that surrounds Scott's estate, Scott having installed an electrified wire across the wall's top.

Scott, now realizing the pain his serial adultery has been causing everybody, decides to reform, to quit cheating on his wife and become worthy of her love.  

"The Eyes of the Tiger" (1937)

Genius chemist Evans Del Plaine is married to a beautiful 23-year old, Madeline, a woman twelve years younger than he.  Madeline is a real piece of work who has driven away his friends, ruined his reputation among his colleagues at the university, and is apt to fly into violent rages--in one such frenzy she destroyed his laboratory, smashing expensive equipment and tearing apart valuable books.  Luckily they are rich because Del Plaine has developed some lucrative drugs.

Del Plaine worries that his wife is unfaithful.  As chance would have it, when Madeline tore apart an old book of his she unwittingly revealed some hand-scrawled notes, hidden within the boards of the cover.  These notes, Del Plaine discovers, are from some forgotten chemist, recording the formula for a truth serum!  So, as our story begins, Del Plaine is sneaking into the wife's bedroom with a hypodermic needle to administer the drug to her as she sleeps and ask her questions.  The drug also includes ingredients that will ensure that she doesn't remember being awoken and interrogated, and before putting the questions to her Del Plaine takes an opportunity to grope her.  

The interrogation produces just the results Del Plaine feared--Madeline hates him, finds his touches disgusting, and only married him because she knew he was a genius who would become rich.  All their bank accounts and contracts with drug companies are in her name, and later today she is going to run away with her lover, one of his students.

Del Plaine is so shocked he collapses, paralyzed.  Or is he paralyzed because he has been hypnotized by Madeline's strange green eyes?  Madeline takes a telephone call from her lover, and then torments the paralyzed Del Plaine, rubbing her breasts in his face and taunting him for being unable to respond ("Aren't they good enough for you?" she jeered, with her green eyes ablaze") and then biting his neck, drawing blood.

Del Plaine loses consciousness and, amazingly, in dreams he experiences life as two of his ancestors (or maybe his past lives?), one in Renaissance England, another in Ancient Rome; the former has a wife much like Madeline, and the latter a slave girl like her--both girls cheat on him and murder him.  Then comes a third and final dream, in which he is a cave man and is attacked by a tiger with green eyes like Madeline's and is killed.

(Oy, I can barely believe I have run into another of the past lives stories I was just talking about in my recent Clark Ashton Smith in 1935 blog post!)

Del Plaine has died in real life as well as in his dream.  When Madeline's lover comes to pick her up he tastes blood in her kiss and sees Del Plaine, realizes she has murdered her husband by severing his jugular vein with her teeth!  Her robe falls open and the lover sees tiger stripes on Madeline's body!  He flees.

**********

"For Murderers Only" and "The Molester" are vulgar, politically incorrect, and appeal to various fetishes in an exploitative manner, but I found them entertaining.  "The Eyes of the Tiger" is similarly vulgar, potentially offensive to 2021 values, and exploitative, but quite bad.

"For Murderers Only" and "The Molester" may be crazy stories, but they are written to an acceptable standard, with sentences that are individually good, competent pacing and narrative structure, and plots that feature some novelty and hold the reader's interest.  But "The Eyes of the Tiger" is a total mess.  Many of the sentences are clumsy and multiple times words are used in distractingly unconventional ways.  The plot has three speculative fiction elements--the esoteric truth drug, the racial memory/past lives business, and the fact that Madeline somehow was or became a hypnotic tiger woman--that are each used in a lame half-assed fashion and none of which is well integrated with either of the others.  

There are a lot more Howard Wandrei Spicy Mystery Stories for us to read, but I promise that next time we see Wandrei we'll read stories from a more reputable publication, like Astounding, Weird Tales or Unknown.