Richard Matheson: "SRL Ad," 'Dear Diary," "To Fit the Crime," and "Shipshape Home"

I recently purchased a 1970 paperback edition of Richard Matheson's Third From the Sun because of the eye-popping Gene Szafran cover, so let's take a break from the Jazz Age and read some 1950s stories by the man famous for penning Steven Spielberg's and Vincent Price's best movies. I think there is a scan of this edition at the internet archive here, and an earlier edition here, so you can read along free of charge.

"SRL Ad" (1952) 

I chose today's four stories essentially at random, but maybe I should have done some research first because the fact that "SRL Ad" was first reprinted (after its debut in F&SF) in an anthology edited by Fredric Brown and Mack Reynolds titled Science-Fiction Carnival, with the subtitle "Fun in Science-Fiction," no less, makes me fear it is a joke story.  Today at MPorcius Fiction Log, and every day, we are looking for sincerity, we are looking for blood and guts, we are looking for sex and violence!  We are not looking for joke stories!  Well, let's give "SRL Ad" a chance anyway.

Alright, this story is a total waste of time.  It comes to us as a series of letters and other correspondence.  Somehow, a female creature on Venus puts a personals ad in an Earth weekly magazine, looking for a boyfriend or husband among Earthmen.  An astronomy student in the Midwest replies as a joke.  Then he receives a box of rocks and things and a letter from the Venus girl that includes all kinds of statistical data on Venus of value to Earth astronomers.  This proves the student's correspondent really is from Venus.  The Venus girl arrives in a space ship and uses her flight belt to fly personally into the student's room, thinking they will fly back to Venus to get married and she will bear him dozens of children.  But the envelope of Venus air she carries with her makes the Terran very ill--she realizes their love is not to be and leaves.  The punchlines are that the student, initially scared of an encounter with an alien, now wishes she would return because she was good-looking, while the Venusian girl, now aware that Earthmen can't handle a Venusian girl, is placing ads in periodicals on Mars.

Annoying to read because the Earther uses lots of slang and jocular spellings and the Venusian has ESL English, plus not funny, so thumbs down.

"Dear Diary" (1954)

It looks like "Dear Diary" was original to the collection from which Third from the Sun's thirteen stories are drawn, Born of Man and Woman.   

Another lame joke story.  The first half is a diary entry penned by a young woman living in New York in 1954, bitching that the subway is crowded and NYC is dirty and there's a drunk across the hall who makes passes at her and the only guy who dates her is fat, etc.  She wishes she lived in the future with rocket ships and free love and no work and meals consisting of pills.

The second part is a diary entry from the year 3954.  This young woman has essentially the same complaints as her 20th-century predecessor; her commute on a space ship is uncomfortable, for example.  

Luckily, this childishly obvious story is only three pages long.  Still, thumbs down.

"To Fit the Crime" (1952)

This one debuted in the same issue of Fantastic as Chad Oliver's "Final Exam," which we read in 2018, and fiction by Mickey Spillane and Cornell Woolrich that maybe I'll read some day.  In 1969, "To Fit the Crime" was reprinted in Fantastic alongside reprints of stories by Robert Bloch and Anthony Boucher and new fiction by Jack Vance and Alexei Panshin.

This is a Twilight-Zone-style twist ending gimmick story.  It's not terrible; we'll judge it barely acceptable.

Iverson Lord is an 89-year-old poet, on his deathbed.  Bitter and angry, an arrogant jerk, he accuses his doctor and family of murdering him.  He berates his son, a man in his fifties, for becoming a businessman instead of some kind of artist.  He calls his daughter ugly, his wife stupid.  He is disgusted that they are Christians.

When the poet dies he finds himself in the afterlife.  There are plenty of people down there, and they all speak only in cliches and empty commonplaces, saying stuff like "Gee Whiz!" and "Nice weather we've been having," and "That's the way it goes."  This man who spent his life trying to use words with precision and creativity is doomed to hear speech that is banal and devoid of meaning for all eternity.

Matheson put a lot of work into "SRL Ad" making the college student's letter full of slang and jokes and the Venus girl's letter full of broken English, and he similarly here in "To Fit the Crime" has the inhabitants of Hell use a long string of cliches and the poet Lord speak in pretentious "poetical" phrases, like "Christianity!  Outmoded bag of long-suffering beans!" and "My wife's capacity of intelligible discourse is about that of primordial gelatine" and "Ah!  That I should have created the barren flesh about this bed of pain."  Maybe some people find this amusing, but I mostly found it annoying.

"Shipshape Home" (1952)

"Shipshape Home" was a big success, appearing in anthologies edited by Groff Conklin and Donald Wollheim and Terry Carr and in a "Best of" Matheson collection after making its debut in Galaxy.  Maybe we can finish off this thus far underwhelming exploration of early '50s SF on a high note?

We are in luck--this is a good story, even though the title gives the game away.  It was a relief to read "Shipshape Home" and have on hand evidence that Matheson deserves his high reputation.

Our narrator is a writer.  He and his wife recently moved into an apartment that is pretty nice and was going for much lower rent than the market standard.  But wife is starting to have misgivings.  The janitor is creepy, she says.  The narrator suspects all the "fantasy pulps" and "science-fiction magazines" she reads are making her suspicious.  But as the story proceeds, wife conducts detective work and convinces her husband that aliens control the building, which evidence suggests is a spaceship!  Are they going to be kidnapped and carried to the stars to be experimented upon?

A solid entertainment, thumbs up.  The style is unobtrusive (not showoffy like the rest of our stories today), the pacing is good, as are the images, there is genuine suspense, and the characters act like real people.  Kudos.  

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It took us a while, but we got a good story today.  All's well that ends well, I suppose.  More 1950s next time here at MPorcius Fiction Log.