Playboy Suspense: W Tevis, F Brown and A Davidson

Readily available at the internet archive are scans of 1967's The Playboy Book of Crime and Suspense.  Let's read three stories from the book by people connected to the science fiction community.  Before we begin, let's note that I've already read two stories included in the anthology, Charles Beaumont's "The Hunger" and Richard Matheson's "The Distributor," and that while I will be consulting the issues of Playboy in which today's stories debuted, I am actually reading them in a scan of the 1968 soft cover edition of The Playboy Book of Crime and Suspense, the one with the desperate-looking green cover by Richard Tyler.

"The Hustler" by Walter Tevis (1957)

This story is, it seems, the foundation or germ of the famous novel that I have not read that became the famous film which I have not seen.  I'm not particularly interested in reading about pool or billiards or snooker or any of that, but the story is only like 16 pages here in The Playboy Book of Crime and Suspense so let's give it a shot.  After all, I read Tevis' "Far From Home" a while ago and I thought it "well-written."  

Sure enough, "The Hustler" is a well-written mainstream story.  I liked it, but it reminded me why I always read speculative fiction and exploitation fiction--there's nothing crazy going on in "The Hustler," nothing surprising, and there is no political or social agenda or metaphor about life that I could discover.  Reading the story is like reading about real life, but since I am already living in real life, the tale is not very compelling or enlightening.  (Similarly, I am willing to watch 1960s British horror films and 1970s Italian crime films but recoil from spending any time with mainstream 21st-century American films because I wasn't born in the '60s and was a child in the '70s and have always lived in the United States, so something like Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed or All the Colors of the Dark is going to indirectly as well as directly expose me to an alien world, and since I have lived as an adult for over 25 years in 21st-century America any movie made in 21st-century America is only going to tell me stuff I already know, shove in my face boring ideas I am sick of hearing about.)

Sam gets out of prison after serving six years for manslaughter.  He puts on a disguise and heads to Chicago.  He practices at pool tables for a little while, then succeeds in setting up high stakes games with a big fat guy.  We learn that Sam is well-known as the best practitioner in the USA of the particular type of pool he plays, so if he wants to make money shooting pool he has to trick other people into thinking he is somebody else.  Six or so years ago a guy recognized him and a fight erupted and Sam killed somebody.  While making over a thousand bucks off the fat guy today, another guy recognizes Sam, and the suspense of the story ramps up as we wonder if Sam is going to get into another fight--Sam will likely not win or even survive this fight, as the fat guy is known to have a whole gang of thugs to back him up.  As the story ends we don't quite know what is going to happen to Sam, but we have to assume that a catastrophe is going to occur to him.

Tevis does a creditable job generating suspense during the pool game in which Sam tries to win money without revealing he is a world-champion level player, even if you don't really understand pool scoring, and after Sam is exposed and we have every reason to believe he is going to be tortured and/or murdered.  So, thumbs up, but don't expect me to abandon genre fiction for mundane bestseller fiction.

"The Hustler" debuted in the issue of Playboy that included Ray Bradbury's love letter to Picasso, "In A Season of Calm Weather," which I liked even though I find Picasso pretty lame.  The story has reappeared in at least one Tevis collection, The King is Dead.  

"The Hobbyist" by Fredric Brown (1961)

The issue of Playboy in which "The Hobbyist" debuted has a fun light-hearted cover, about a million ads for and articles about men's clothing and accessories, and a healthy serving of photos of Swedish women in various states of undress.  Brown's story, one of his "short-shorts" or "vinnies," takes up less than half a page of the magazine, but two pages here in this anthology.  

There is a rumor in town that the local druggist will provide to would-be murderers an undetectable poison.  A guy who wants to kill his wife goes to the druggist, requests the poison.  Unhappy hubby discovers the unwelcome truth--the druggist poisons the people who come asking for the poison as a means of preventing murders.  And he isn't a killer himself--he sells to those he poisons the antidote.  The druggist has also figured out a way to make sure the aspiring assassins he disappoints don't kill him out of a desire for revenge.

Convoluted, unbelievable, and silly.  Thumbs down!    

"The Hobbyist," AKA "Hobbyist," has been reprinted in many Brown collections, as well as the anthology Stench of Kerosene and Other Short Short Stories, which I believe is a textbook meant to be inflicted on British schoolchildren.

Stench of Kerosene also presents to the laddies and lasses Robert Bloch's 
"Hobo," which we read in 2019

"No Fire Burns" by Avram Davidson (1959)

Having just enjoyed Davidson's "Amphora," of today's three stories this is the one I was most looking forward to.  

Oh, well, "No Fire Burns" is kind of disappointing, a little long and convoluted and tedious.  You might call it a conspiracy story, and a twist ending story in which minor characters from the beginning show up at the end and prove to be pivotal.  It is also a speculative story about the potential of the science of psychology.

Dr. Colles is a psychiatrist who runs a big for-profit research institution.  Mr. Melchior runs a major business conglomerate.  And we've got Mr. Taylor, Melchior's personnel director.  In early scenes, Melchior hires Colles to develop a test to determine who among his many employees is a psychopath, ostensibly to avoid having people on staff who will commit major crimes all of a sudden, like murdering a colleague with whom they are competing for a promotion.  Early scenes also suggest Colles is a psychopath himself--he expresses contempt for ordinary people, arguing that a smart educated person like himself has no ability to communicate with a Joe Six Pack kind of guy, and we learn Colles has been having sex with his secretary for years without ever considering marrying her and is thinking of letting her go because she is losing her looks; there is even a scene in which she complains he treats her like he'd treat a dog.  Davidson also introduces us to working class characters, employees of Melchior's enterprises, who are psychopathic, a man who borrows money from a fellow machinist and feels no pressure whatsoever to pay it back, for example.

The first twist is when Colles figures out that Melchior is using the test Colles developed not to weed out psychopathic job applicants or provide psychiatric treatment to psychopathic employees, but to figure out whom he can hire to perform assassinations.  Instead of calling the police or whatever, Colles goes into partnership with Melchior in the assassination business.  The second twist is that Taylor, Melchior and Colles all conspire to kill each other, directing minor characters to murder each other.

"No Fire Burns" is well-constructed, all the various elements from the start coming together in a neat little package by the end, but it isn't fun or exciting--it feels bland and colorless.  A possible exception is the exploration of the personality of one of the working-class psychopaths--this material is kind of depressing, though maybe this individual's responses to the questions on the test, like the questions, is meant to be amusing in a black humor kind of way.  My disappointment with "No Fire Burns" is perhaps a reaction to the fact that it is a relentless downer--"Amphora" has cynical elements, being full of evil, selfish and negligent characters, but a few of those characters are actually fun and seem to have redeeming qualities--all the characters in "No Fire Burns" are execrable.  Or so I took them to be.        

One of the noteworthy things about "No Fire Burns," which is reflected in its title, is Davidson's discussion (in the dialogue of his characters) of distinctions among the sorts of people who kill other people.  Melchior doesn't want to hire people who kill because they enjoy killing people, or people who kill because they lack self control and in a fit of passion may kill a guy who steals their girlfriend or insults their mother.  Melchior wants to hire people willing to kill coldly, rationally, after calculating that committing a murder is in their interest, not people who kill because some kind of fire is burning inside them.  (I wonder if the idea that psychopathic killers lack a fire inside themselves is also a sort of reference to the Stoic idea that each man's soul is a divine spark that connects him to the divine and to the universe--in Davidson's taxonomy in this story psychopaths lack this divine spark, this fire that is a fragment of a universal soul.)     

I often call stories "OK" and "acceptable" that are routine filler pieces.  I'm going to judge "No Fire Burns" as "OK," but it is not a half-assed derivative filler piece; the story is ambitious and Davidson put serious work into it and it reflects Davidson's consideration of the human condition, but I just didn't enjoy it very much.       

The issue of Hugh Hefner's magazine that first presented "No Fire Burns" to the world also includes a story by Charles Beaumont that I might get around to reading some day as well as a bunch of limericks about how challenging it is to have sex in a compact car.  Judith Merril was keen on "No Fire Burns," reprinting it in the fifth of her famous series of Year's Best anthologies.  Wow, that fifth Merril volume has been favored with some pretty awesome covers; I don't think I've ever seen this one in stores. 

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Today's stories are, I expect, good examples of what they are, stories that achieve their author's goals, but they aren't really what I personally look for in a story.  Maybe the 1950s stories we read in our next blog post will be more up my alley.