Laurence M. Janifer: "A Gun with a Heart," "Liana," and "El Rey"

You gotta have faith!  Did I like any of the three stories by Laurence M. Janifer, published in the early 1950s under pen names in a science fiction magazine Janifer himself ghost-edited, that I read in our last exciting episode?  No, I did not.  Does that mean I am going to stop reading Janifer or 1950s magazines?  Not on your life!  I dug around the internet archive and philsp.com and luminist.org and found three stories by Janifer published in 1950s mystery/detective magazines, all appearing under pseudonyms, and today we read them (in the order I found them, not chronological order.)  If you care to, read these stories yourself at these links:

"A Gun with a Heart"       "Liana"      "El Rey"

"A Gun with a Heart" (1958)

This one debuted in a 1958 issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, but I'll be reading it in a scan of the British 1984 printing of the anthology Alfred Hitchcock Presents: 16 Skeletons from my Closet.  This book also reprints a 1957 Robert Bloch story, "Man With a Hobby," that I read back in 2019 and about which I had nice things to say.

Compared to the fantastical stories by Janifer we read last time, "A Gun with a Heart" is very professional, smooth and easy to understand, all the characters acting in a way that makes sense.

George is a hitman working for the "organization."  Years ago, he got his cousin Fred, a guy he was very close to, practically a brother, a job in the organization.  Fred was a smart guy, moved up in the organization, knows all about its operations.  But now Fred wants to go straight!  He has turned his back on the organization!  So George has to go to New York, find Fred, and murder him.

George faces many obstacles--George's wife doesn't want him to kill Fred, for example, and when George finds his cousin there's a third person present who is willing to defend Fred, and of course George has his own doubts about killing his own flesh and blood.  Janifer focuses more George's psychology than the chase or the fight, and we are privy to George's thoughts as keeps going over why he has to kill Fred, why he has no choice but to do so.

I can mildly recommend "A Gun with a Heart."  I wasn't sure what would happen in the end, maybe because I don't read as many crime stories as SF stories, which helped to keep me interested.

"Liana" (1956)

"Liana" covers some of the same territory as "A Gun with a Heart": we've got the question of whether you can go straight after having spent time in organized crime, and we've a guy going over in his mind, gun in his shoulder holster or right there in his hand, the decision to kill or not kill somebody with whom he has an emotional attachment, weighing the risks of failing to kill the person he is being paid to kill.

Our narrator is a professional killer, and this time he's been hired to kill his ex-wife!  When he is in her apartment with her, he realizes he still loves her!  She is remarried, and resists his advances at first, but pretty soon she is admitting she still loves him!  Can the narrator leave the rackets and reunite with his wife?    

A pretty good crime story.  The sexual component, the themes of obsession and addiction (the narrator needs his fee for killing his ex-wife because he wastes money at the race track, and then there are his obsessive thoughts of his ex-wife) and the portrayal of how inconstant dames are, make "Liana" more edgy and powerful than "A Gun with a Heart."  "Liana" appeared in Pursuit, alongside a Solar Pons story by August Derleth.  I'm not seeing any evidence this three-page story has been reprinted. 

"El Rey" (1955)

Like "A Gun with a Heart" and "Liana," "El Rey" is a story about the decision to kill someone close to you--what do you want enough or fear enough for it to make you decide to kill a person you have shared much of your life with?  This one is also about obsession.

Garrison and Hart grew up in the same little town and as childhood friends shared a fascination with a famous mountain climber, Mallory, I guess a fictionalized version of Sir Edmund Hilary.  One of these guys, as an adult working for a seller of rare books, finds in an old volume evidence of the existence of a remote and forgotten mountain, the world's tallest!  The two men decide to be the first to scale this super-mountain, even though all they know about mountain climbing they learned in books.  It takes them 15 years to get the money together to finance this risky climb, and when they begin the ascent they are in their 40s!  With no practical mountain climbing experience!

Somehow, amazingly, these two goofballs make it to the top of El Rey, world's tallest mountain, stand  higher than any man has ever stood before.  They are excited to become famous.  But stupidly they forgot to bring a marker.  They need to leave something on the mountain peak to prove to others, to those who follow them, that they were the first.  They can't leave any equipment or supplies--they need that stuff to survive the descent!  And they can't go back down, get something, and then climb again, as they only just barely made it this time, another attempt would kill them.  One of them decides to kill the other--the corpse will prove they made it up there!

A decent filler story.

"El Rey" appeared in Manhunt alongside a novel by Bruno Fischer; we read Fischer's disappointing novel The Lustful Ape and three short stories by him that I considered "shoddy exploitation junk."  A quick look around online isn't turning up any reason to believe "El Rey" has ever been reprinted.

**********

These stories aren't bad, but they are mere trifles, filler.  Probably I should read stories from Janifer's 1968 collection Impossible?, a copy of which I own, if I want to get a look at the man's more serious or significant work.

SPECIAL BONUS CONTENT  

During my search at philsp.com I was excited to see content by Janifer in the famous magazine Manhunt.  I read one such item from 1955, "The Alligator Man," only realizing it was not fiction at all as I was reading it.  Having already done the scut work for its inclusion in the blog post, like downloading the issue's cover image and investigating other items in the issue and taking notes about them, I was loathe to let that material go to waste and so I append it here as a sort of bonus non-fiction component of this Janifer blog post. 

"The Alligator Man"

"The Alligator Man" (1955)

"The Alligator Man" appeared in Manhunt.  This issue has a good blondetastic cover and stories by Richard Marsten, also known as Evan Hunter and Ed McBain, a famous mainstream and detective writer who also has a few SF stories under his belt, and Sam Merwin, Jr., who wrote quite a bit of science fiction--in January of 2025 we read four Merwin SF stories and I thought they were not bad.

This brief piece, like two pages, is not fiction at all, but a summary of questionable veracity of the career of real life Texas restaurant owner and World War I veteran Joe Ball, a man who is purported to, in the 1930s, have murdered young women and fed their bodies to his alligators before committing suicide upon the cops catchging up to him.  I really thought "The Alligator Man" was fiction when I started it; there is very little to outwardly distinguish it from the fiction in Manhunt, and even the style in which it is written is jocular, chatty and ironic, like you might expect of a short story.  I guess I shouldn't have let my 55-year-old glazzies slide uncomprehendingly over that parenthetical notation ("ar" for "article") at philsp.com or over the heading on the Manhunt Table of Contents ("Features") under which "The Alligator Man" is listed.  My bad.