Frank Belknap Long: "The Pearl Robber," "Medicine for Three," and "Woodland Burial"

I typed "Frank Belknap Long" into the internet archive and a bunch of different things came up; let's check out three such items, stories that, I suspect, have little or no speculative fiction content.

"The Pearl Robber" (1931)

Farnsworth Wright, remembered for helming Weird Tales, also edited the magazine Oriental Stories, which only survived for nine issues that appeared from 1930 to 1932.  Long's "The Pearl Robber," a piece of four and a half pages, appeared in the fourth issue.  

Johnny is a "Kanaka," a Pacific Islander in the employ of white people.  (Don't say "Kanaka" out loud, as it seems this is now considered a slur.  I guess you're not supposed to say "Oriental," either.  Well, don't tell anybody about this story then--it can be our little secret!)  Johnny's job is to dive for pearls for the owner of a lagoon--with a rock tied to him, he descends to the bottom, where he fills a basket with oysters to be opened on the surface and then he and the basket are hauled back up.  Johnny, entranced by their beauty, loves pearls himself, and steals when he can from his employer by opening the most promising oysters in the few seconds left after he has filled the basket and before he is hauled up.  Any pearls he finds he swallows when nobody is looking.

But today there is a mishap--a giant clam seizes Johnny's hand with a stolen pearl within it.  (When I was a kid giant clams would commonly grab people in fiction and put them at risk of drowning, but according to wikipedia this doesn't actually happen.  I could tell you the same disappointing thing about quicksand.)

Johnny loses consciousness, but his employer dives down to rescue him.  Seeing a pearl in his hand, Johnny's boss knows Johnny is a thief, so he has Johnny taken to a hospital to be x-rayed, to see if Johnny has swallowed any pearls recently.  Johnny doesn't know anything about modern technology, and his boss is so angry that he fears the doctors are torturers and the X-ray machine a torture device, and dies of fright.

An acceptable little story that you could analyze as an expose by Long of the racism of Westerners and their exploitation of the global south, and also perhaps as a reflection or example of racism in genre fiction: Long seems to sympathize with Johnny, but his portrayal of Johnny as a child-like noble savage who is in touch with the beauty of nature and put upon by money-loving whites, but is also mischievous, ignorant and weak-willed, is the kind of condescending thing some might consider as racist as if Long had portrayed him as a bloodthirsty headhunter or whatever.

It doesn't seem like "The Pearl Robber" has ever been reprinted.  

"Medicine for Three" (1934)

"Medicine for Three" doesn't appear to have been reprinted after its initial appearance in Street & Smith's Detective Story Magazine.  This magazine, wikipedia and philsp.com are telling me, endured for over 1000 issues, with a name change in the middle of its run from Detective Story Magazine to Street & Smith's...etc.  According to wikipedia, Wittgenstein read this magazine.      

"Medicine for Three" is a gimmicky murder mystery of like eight and a half pages.  I have to admit I don't really understand the story; maybe I'm dense (nobody ever mistook me for a Wittgenstein), or maybe Long's story doesn't make any sense.

Mrs. Simpson runs a rooming house.  Two of her tenants, a married couple, the Perkins, are always loudly quarrelling, which she can hear clearly from her own living space; she can also hear their radio.  One day, Mrs. Perkins comes to Mrs. Simpson's door to say she has to go out, and asks the landlady to remind her husband in half an hour to take his medicine.

The Perkins radio starts up, a banjo performance.  When the half hour has elapsed, Simpson taps on the Perkins's door; the radio is shut off, but Mr. Perkins doesn't come to the door.  Simpson opens the door to find Perkins dead on the floor, oozing blood.  Who killed Perkins?  And who turned off the radio?  

The cops find that Perkins was shot three times at close range.  The window of the apartment was locked from the inside, so the killer must not have escaped that way after blasting Perkins, and Perkins sat out of sight of the window, so the killer didn't fire upon him through the window--besides, there is no hole in the window, though there is a crack.  

The detective investigating the murder tells his son about it, and his son identifies something fishy about the whole story: he listens to the station the Perkins set was tuned to at the time of the murder, and there was a drama broadcast at that time, not a banjo player!  The detective, by questioning Mrs. Simpson and calling people on the phone and then by playing a psychological trick on Mrs. Perkins figures out who committed the crime and how.  Mrs. Perkins knows a vaudevillian, a "human banjo" who can imitate the sound of a banjo with his voice.  The human banjo and Mrs. Perkins worked together to kill Mr. Perkins, and after the dastardly deed was accomplished, Mrs. Perkins left, making sure Mrs. Simpson knew she had left and making sure Simpson would discover the corpse.  Then the human banjo, standing on the fire escape outside the window (locked by Mrs. Perkins) and armed with a megaphone, imitated a radio broadcast for Mrs. Simpson's benefit, until she tapped on the door.  

The things I don't understand are:

1) If Mrs. Simpson can hear quarrelling and radios in the Perkins room from her place, how is it she didn't hear three gun shots?

2) How does the human banjo, making his banjo noises with his mouth, on the other side of a glass window, hear Mrs. Simpson's tapping?

3) What is the point of this whole imitate-a-radio gag?  Why do Mrs. Perkins and the human banjo think this will make it less likely they will be accused of the murder?  Doesn't the prominence of banjo music in the narrative of the crime make it more likely a dude known for imitating a banjo will be implicated?

The style and pacing and all that of "Medicine for Three" are good enough, but the actual plot is full of holes, or, was not explained well enough for a reader of (approximately) average intelligence and education like myself to comprehend.  Gotta give this one a thumbs down. 

As an aside, allow me to say that "Medicine for Three" provides a good example of why I rarely read clue-heavy detective stories.  Part of the pleasure offered by such stories, I am told, is the opportunity to use your wits to try to figure out the mystery.  But in a story like "Medicine for Three," figuring out the mystery yourself is impossible, and if you expended brain power trying to figure it out, you'd have wasted your precious bodily energy.  I gotta conserve that energy!

"Woodland Burial" (1981)

Fifty years after "Pearl Robber" was printed, Long got this tale published in Whispers III, an anthology edited by Stuart David Schiff.  We've already read two stories that appeared in Whispers III, Sam Sneyd's "A Fly One," and Dennis Etchison's "A Dead Line,"  and the volume has stories by other writers I find worth reading, like Fritz Leiber and David Drake, as well as a cool illustration by Stephen Fabian and a shocking illo by Lee Brown Coye of a man cooking a baby.  Holy crap!

"Woodland Burial" would be republished in 1998 in one of those Barnes and Noble anthologies of short shorts edited by Stefan Dziemianowicz, Martin H. Greenberg, and Robert Weinberg, 100 Menacing Little Murder Stories, and in 2010 in the colossal 1,100 page volume from Centipede Press's  Masters of the Weird Tale devoted to Long.

My guess that these stories would have no supernatural elements was wrong, as this one is full of supernatural elements.  

Gage is a middle-aged guy who lives out in the country.  After they got married, his wife got all skinny and unattractive, and they quarreled all the time.  Eight weeks ago he murdered her and buried her in the woods.  Now he is having an affair with another woman, Molly, and he is really enjoying himself, as Molly has a fantastic body and is an expert at having sex.  But his dead wife wreaks a terrible revenge on both Gage and the sexalicious Molly!  After a night of terrific sex, Gage wakes up to find Molly dead beside him, strangled to death by a rope made of hair just like his wife's!  Gage dashes to his wife's grave, where he is met by the local sheriff--the sheriff was lead to the grave by a squirrel, a squirrel that dropped at his feet the severed finger, complete with wedding ring, of Gage's murdered wife!

This story is more impressive than my little synopsis suggests, because Long doesn't tell it in that exact order--we learn that Gage murdered his wife early on, but learn the details of why later, and the business of the squirrel being a vehicle for Mrs. Gage's soul is foreshadowed and doesn't feel like it came out of nowhere.  Long also does an interesting unreliable narrator thing, with Gage thinking of himself as a sensitive generous peaceful guy, while his actions and other clues suggest the opposite. 

Another interesting component of this story is Gage's (and Long's) invocation of late-Seventies/early-Eighties anxieties about rising crime rates and the possibility of nuclear war, to which Gage (and Long, perhaps) link to an increase in public acceptance of corruption.  Fears of sudden death have loosened ties to the community, the story suggests, making people less concerned over whether or not their neighbors and elected officials conform to traditional standards of morality. 

The problem with "Woodland burial" is the question of who killed Molly.  It would make sense for Gage's murdered wife to rise from her grave to strangle Molly as she lies next to Gage, or to hang her in the woods and then lay her body in bed with her murderous husband, using a hank of her hair as garrote or noose, and I like that the hair was used to slay Molly--even after she got skinny, Gage found his wife's hair very beautiful, so making the hair the murder weapon is a clever expression of female jealousy and one-upmanship.  But the fact that Mrs. Gage's soul inhabits the squirrel muddies the issue--can your soul animate two bodies at a time?--and when Gage gets to the grave site, his wife's corpse is still buried.  I guess we have to conclude that the squirrel somehow strangled Molly, but a squirrel is really too small to outfight an adult human.  As with "Medicine for Three," there is a problem with the central gimmick of this story, or I am just too dim to get what Long is going for. 

Despite this confusion, I still like this story and am willing to give it a thumbs up.  Unlike a realistic detective story full of clues, this type of story doesn't rely on logic for its effects, but on emotional impact and compelling themes and images, and Long delivers on those components.          

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Another exciting foray into the world of the weird, courtesy of the internet archive, website of the year this year and every year.  It is usually worth your time to go to the internet archive and just type in some person's name and see what turns up--I highly recommend it.  Stay tuned for more such explorations here at MPorcius Fiction Log.