Murderous stories by Harlan Ellison, Donald Wandrei, and Howard Wandrei

To commemorate the current rising rates of violent crime, let's read stories by SF authors we care about here at MPorcius Fiction Log that appear in Robert Weinberg, Stefan Dziemianowicz, and Martin H. Greenberg's 1998 Barnes & Noble instant remainder book, 100 Menacing Little Murder Stories.  We recently read Frank Belknap Long's 1981 story from this anthology (it featured a squirrel who snitched to the cops on a dude who had killed his old lady,) and there are many more stories with means and motive by SF writers lurking within its 600 pages.  Today let's take the opportunity provided by the internet archive to see whether the pieces in 100 Menacing Little Murder Stories by fan favorite Harlan Ellison and H. P. Lovecraft cronies Donald and Howard Wandrei are "realistic" stories meant to cater to the gritty hard-boiled crowd or clue-loving Agatha Christie fans, or are full of speculative elements like Long's.

(I'm going to read the stories in the order they are printed in the book, which appears to be alphabetical order by title, which is odd, but I guess made clerical work easier on the editors and the pencil pushers at Barnes & Noble--keeping 100 stories in chronological order or somehow categorized by theme would be a pain, I expect.) 

"Blank..." by Harlan Ellison (1957; revision 1982)

This story first appeared in an issue of Infinity Science Fiction with an awesome cover by Emsh featuring a sexalicious babe, a guy with a ray gun who looks like a zombie or a mummy or a vegetarian or something, and a computer console adorned with the male and female symbols.  Emsh deserves an award for this one!  It seems the editor of Infinity had the gimmicky idea of commissioning from Isaac Asimov, Randall Garrett and Ellison stories all titled some variation of the word "Blank."  Isfdb informs us that Ellison later revised the story for inclusion in his 1982 collection Stalking the Nightmare.  A glance at scans of the appropriate issue of Infinty and of Stalking the Nightmare, both available for free at the internet archive, indicates that, as expected, the version in 100 Menacing Little Murder Stories is the revised version.  (I'm afraid the original version may be marginally better; the minor changes I noticed in a quick skim don't seem to me to be improvements.)

It is the future of hyperspace starships, aircar taxi cabs, police who can read your mind and blasters!  Rike Amadeus Akisimov (oh, brother) was the worst criminal the computer judge had ever processed, so it sentenced him to 1,000 years on Io!  Our story starts in medias res, with Akisimov fleeing through the city from the psychic police--we learn in a flashback how he got convicted and how he blasted some flower girl who got in his way.  He makes it to the union hall where the psychics who guide starships into hyperspace hang out, kidnaps a hot chick who is one of these "Drivers," and forces her to take him up in a ship.

One of the story's contrived gimmicks is that these Drivers use their psychic powers to guide a ship into hyperspace, but when the ship jumps into hyperspace the Driver does not--the Driver is left floating in ordinary space where the ship was, to be picked up by a shuttle that follows every star ship when it leaves the planetary surface.  Of course, there is no shuttle following the highjacked ship, which left off schedule, and Akisimov didn't give the Driver woman a chance to put on a spacesuit before take off, so, when he forces her to "snap" the ship into hyperspace (overcoming her objections by burning one of her arms off with his blaster) she is left to die in the vacuum of space!

Luckily, one of the police ships chasing the stolen vessel picks up the woman before she dies.  The final paragraphs of "Blank..." describe the fate of Akisimov: the Driver sent the ship into the heart of a star, where the ship and the murderer are burned.  Alright, makes sense, good ending, Harlan.  But then Ellison goes too far and gives us a contrived Sisyphus/Prometheus ending.  The Driver has somehow set things up so that, an instant before Akisimov dies, as he is still feeling the pain of being burned, the ship teleports out of the star, and then back in, so Akisimov can burn to near death again and again and again until the end of time.  How does this work, why doesn't he get finished off by being burned a second time after being burned almost to death?  Is he going back in time after every teleportation, or healed after every teleportation?  Incomprehensible.

   

Even though I have criticisms of the ending, and question whether it is really a story about a murder, and don't really think the theme of "blank" is well-integrated into the story, "Blank..." is entertaining and deserves a thumbs up--the pace is brisk, the maiming of the woman is surprising and disturbing, and all the different high tech devices and psychic powers in the story are interesting.           

"Come Clean" by Donald Wandrei (1938)

"Come Clean" first appeared in the famous detective magazine Black Mask, and is a well-told straight story about a race car driver who travels America racing all over the country but keeps an apartment in an old half-empty boarding house in the city in which this story takes place.  As the story unfolds we learn that a team of counterfeiters has set up shop above the hero, knowing he is usually out of town.  But he is home today, and gets mixed up in the murderous dispute between the counterfeiters above.  The driver almost gets killed, and almost gets framed for the killing of one of the counterfeiters and of a cop that comes to investigate, but in the end he triumphs over the murderous criminal.  Wandrei adds a note of humor to the story--the driver is filthy from a race, and has disrobed to take a shower when the action begins, and so ends up fighting for his life, climbing out a window, and being interrogated by the cops, all while half naked, half covered in dirt, and clad only in a bath robe.

Acceptable.  

"Dramatic Touch" by Donald Wandrei (1934)

       

"Dramatic Touch" was published in Clues, a magazine edited by Orlin F. Tremaine, who edited Astounding in the same period.  

"Dramatic Touch" is a locked room mystery.  Remember a billion years ago when we read a locked room mystery by Fredric Brown and the explanation of the mystery was that the villain used an armadillo to access the interior of the locked room?  Well, in this story the villain uses a monkey! 

Two of New York's Finest, detectives, go to a crappy basement apartment in a crummy neighborhood near the theatre district which we are told is inhabited by "Kids, dozens of them, and fat, greasy women."  If you enjoy that insensitive jibe about the second sex--what more sensitive types might label "sexism"--maybe you'll also enjoy the ethnic chauvinism Wandrei serves up soon after.  The two cops find that the drug dealer living in the basement apartment has been shot dead, but the only entrances to the place are locked from the inside.  Could he have committed suicide?  It seems unlikely--they can't find the gun.  

When the police ask the landlord, Jim Maravano, whom we are repeatedly told has a face like a weasel, the dead tenant's name, Maravano replies "Harry Jones" and one of the cops scoffs,

"Jones, nuts!  He's probably on record for peddling dope.  Real name's more likely Moscowitz or Polecki."  

The cops question Maravano, get info from the medical examiner, search the room and adjoining corridor for clues.  Some little hairs they find are the key clue that breaks the case.  A "three-a-day variety" actor with a trained monkey lives in the building; this guy has a second monkey, this one on his back--an addiction to "snow."  He shot "Harry Jones" so he could steal a big pile of  "snow" (that's cocaine, right?) and then had his pet monkey lock the door from the inside and come back out to him through the transom.

(This provides me a chance to brag that the house my wife and I purchased last year here in the rural mountains is old enough to have transoms.)

The detectives pay a visit to this monkey-corrupting druggie and there is a shootout.  The murderer is captured and put on death row.  The monkey is also brought in, but his future fate is uncertain; hopefully he won't be forced to leave show business.

An acceptable gritty police detective thing, dramatizing the menace presented by foreigners, show biz types, and poor people to decent citizens and hard-working monkeys alike.

"The Last Pin" by Howard Wandrei (1940)      

    

"The Last Pin" first appeared in Black Mask, and was later included by August Derleth in his 1947 anthology The Sleeping and the Dead; "The Last Pin" would go on to be reprinted in a 1964 British paperback entitled The Unquiet Grave that collected fifteen stories from The Sleeping and the Dead.  When Fedogan & Bremer published a collection of Howard Wandrei mystery stories in 1996 they chose "The Last Pin" as the title story.

This is an understated first-person narrative; it feels more like a literary story than a genre story.  The narrator relates a series of  events from his youth relating to a somewhat strange and sinister family in his neighborhood, the black-eyed brothers Emil and Ernie and their equally black-eyed sister Edna.  When he is a little kid, the narrator is bullied by Ernie, who is like a year older than he.  Emil is considerably older than his brother, and is sent to prison for life for murder when Ernie and the narrator are still in school; upon being convicted Emil vows to get revenge on everyone who has played a role in incarcerating him.

Sure enough, as the years go by, the lawyers and jurors involved in the Emil Strobel murder case die prematurely in one way or another.  Meanwhile, Ernie grows up to be a talented athlete, an expert gymnast.  At the gym, the narrator's friend notices that, bizarrely, Ernie has safety pins stuck into the inner thigh of one of his legs.  By the end of the story it becomes clear that Ernie has been assassinating the men who put his brother Emil in prison and putting a safety pin in his flesh for each kill.  He gets up to fifteen before the police catch up to him and are forced to kill him because he is so proficient a hand-to-hand fighter that it is impossible to capture him.

I guess this is essentially a straight non-SF story, but a passage about rumors that Emil is bragging to people in prison that his mind can leave his body at night to murder people and have sex with beautiful women gives it a nice weird vibe.

The style and tone are quite good, and I like the weird element.  Thumbs up for "The Last Pin."

"Ormond Always Pays His Bills" by Harlan Ellison (1957/revision 1975)      

"Ormond Always Pays His Bills" first appeared in the short-lived (two issues!) magazine Pursued, and then was revised and included in the 1975 collection No Doors, No Windows.  

Hervey Ormond is short and fat, "almost the caricature of a butterball."  (Well, we can't all be beauty contest winners like you, Harlan.)  He runs a construction company and has been cheating the government and the tax payers, building roads with substandard supplies and bribing politicians to help ward off investigations.  His secretary discovers this malfeasance and tries to blackmail him into giving her a raise and more time off, and he shoots her down right there in the office.  Hervey tries to hide the body by covering it in cement and throwing it in a lake, but his company uses substandard cement which comes apart so the corpse rises to the surface and the police quickly seize Hervey.

Acceptable filler.

"The Rod and the Staff" by Donald Wandrei (1937)    

Here's another story by Donald Wandrei that made its debut in Black Mask.  "The Rod and the Staff" is a good little story that feels very short--in fact, I was surprised when it ended, because the whole thing, up to the last page, feels like background and scene-setting.

Johnny is a guy who enjoys killing people, and makes his living as a hitman, and we learn all about him.  When the police finally capture him, it is because a cop with a shoulder holster outdraws him--Johnny heretofore has kept his pistol in his pocket.  So, when he escapes custody, Johnny acquires a shoulder holster.  The next time a police officer catches up with him Johnny is killed, because he reflexively reaches for his pocket instead of his new shoulder holster.  Doh!

All the character stuff and atmosphere stuff as well as the style are good, but the plot is slight--once I had got to know him, I wanted to see Johnny interact with other creeps, go on some kind of adventure or something, but he's been slain by the forces of law and order before you know it.  I'll give "The Rod and the Staff" a thumbs up; what is there is quite entertaining, I just wish there was more of it.

"Two Inches in Tomorrow's Column" by Harlan Ellison (1965)

Like "Ormond Always Pays His Bills," "Two Inches in Tomorrow's Column" was revised for inclusion in No Doors, No Windows.  It first appeared in Adam Bedside Reader.

This is a brief, mediocre filler type item set in Hollywood.  A PR man is having sex with an aging gossip columnist so she will put nice things in her column about his clients.  She is horny all the time, and he has to bang her frequently even though he finds her unattractive.

Finally, he dumps her, via a letter (!).  She gets her revenge by figuring out a clever way to make one of his clients angry at him; this client is a former hitman who now owns a restaurant.  When the gossip columnist tricks the hitman into thinking her column is a pan of his restaurant instead of a rave, he murders the PR man with a ".38 Police Special" equipped with a silencer (?).  

Not exactly bad, but certainly slight.  

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I think we actually have a pretty good variety here: a hyperspace and ray guns science fiction tale, a locked-room we-gotta-find-clues police detective story, a creepy revenge tale, a story about a regular guy who survives a brush with professional criminals, and stories about ne'er-do-wells who are forced to pay for their sins.  Most importantly, none of the stories is bad; in fact, most of them are fun and have compelling elements.

There are still more stories in 100 Menacing Little Murder Stories by SF writers and maybe we'll be reading some of them soon.