C. M. Eddy, Jr.: "With Weapons of Stone," "Arhl-a of the Caves" and "The Better Choice"

During a period in 1924 and 1925, many stories in Weird Tales bore a heading
that tightly integrated title and illustration in a rectangle as here

Back in 2020 we read four stories H. P. Lovecraft produced in collaboration with C. M. Eddy, Jr.  Today let's read three stories published under Eddy's name in Weird Tales that deal with themes far removed from those we associate with HPL.  Read along with us at these links three:  ONE  TWO  THREE  

"With Weapons of Stone" (1924)

"With Weapons of Stone" debuted in the same December 1924 issue of Weird Tales we were just looking at because we were reading Galen C. Colin's story of a man on a quest to reunite with a love from which he had been parted during the days of the Pharaohs, "The Song Eternal."  (The same issue also prints Frank Belknap Long's story of a guy trying to avoid being overcome by a slithering swarm of cold-blooded creatures, "Death-Waters.") 

"With Weapons of Stone" is a straightforward adventure drama set among a tribe of cave people.  It is time for a young cavewoman, Zo-na, to mate.  This tribe has "progressed from the days when the male, by sheer brute force, took the female of his choice to his cave" and so she can select her own mate, though that choice has to be approved by the tribal elders.  Two men have caught her eye; one is Gra, the son of the chief, and the other is Ra-nor, whom she really does prefer.  Who to choose?  Zo-na comes up with what to me seems a crazy scheme, but the assembled cave men love it--Zo-na announces that she will mate with whichever of these two guys slays the saber-toothed tiger that has been bedeviling the tribe. 

As we might expect of the son of a politician, Gra is pretty corrupt, and, on the day Ra-nor sets out early into the jungle to look for the saber-tooth, Gra, reputedly a great hunter, is just bidin' his time, having breakfast with his dad, the big guy, and carefully looking over his flint and stone equipment.  Then he follows Ra-nor, who has tracked the cat, with the idea of letting Ra-nor fight the monster, said to have the strength of ten men, and then finishing off whichever of the exhausted combatants has survived the struggle.  While Ra-nor lies in ambush for the saber-tooth, nearby Gra himself watches Ra-nor and waits.

Sure enough, when Ra-nor, after suffering some serious wounds, has killed the great cat, Gra sneaks up behind him and reaches back his arm to throw a stone dagger at Ra-nor.  But love wins!  Zo-na, having realized how much she loves Ra-nor, has followed Ra-nor's trail herself, and sees Gra about murder her man, the true victor of the contest!  Zo-na throws her own dagger at Gra, scoring a direct hit on his black heart and killing him instantly!  

"With Weapons of Stone" is an acceptable entertainment, like a chapter out of a Burroughs novel.  It has reappeared a number of times in small press publications, including a 2008 Eddy collection, The Loved Dead and Other Tales, edited by Eddy's grandson Jim Dyer (wow, we encounter filial devotion in real life!) and a 2021 anthology, Prehistoric Adventures, edited by D. M. Ritzlin for his DMR Books.

"Arhl-a of the Caves" (1925)

A footnote at the end of "With Weapons of Stone" promises "another story of prehistoric men by C. M. Eddy, Jr., will appear in the next issue of Weird Tales" and Farnsworth Wright was as good as his word, printing Eddy's "Arhl-a of the Caves" in the January '25 issue.  "Arhl-a of the Caves" reappeared in all the same places "With Weapons of Stone" did, including a 1976 Xeroxed pamphlet that collected Eddy stories, Terror Out of Time.    

Like our previous cave man adventure, "Arhl-a of the Caves" revolves around a love triangle.  It is a tale as old as time, after all.  Arhl-a is a cave woman, and in love with handsome Wagh, but ugly Zurd also desires her, and Zurd has tied her up and carried her off.  Eddy doesn't stint when it comes to describing how Arhl-a's wrists bleed as she tries to escape her bonds or how this prehistoric Lucretia is more than ready to bury her dagger in her own chest before enduring defilement at Zurd's hands--something for all you violence against women fans.  Later, Eddy dwells on Arhl-a taking a bath naked in the ocean and then laying nude on the beach.  All this would be more compelling in a movie than on the page, but I guess in 1925 (and maybe in 2026 if you are 12) it was sort of titillating. 

Arhl-a manages to get out of her bonds when Zurd isn't looking and she kills Zurd with her dagger when he comes for her, animated by lust--somehow Zurd forgot to search Arhl-a at some point between capturing her yesterday and finally deciding to rape her today.  This means that when Wagh follows Zurd's trail to the kidnapper's hideout, he doesn't find Arhl-a, just Zurd's corpse.  So then he has to follow Arhl-a's trail.  Wagh catches up to Arhl-a just as she is attacked by a huge ape; he kills the ape and the lovers are reunited.

"Arhl-a of the Caves" is well-written enough on a line-by-line basis; all the descriptions of tracking and cooking food and all that as well as the fear and anger of the three characters are conveyed in an entertaining manner, but the plot is so very basic that the story is like a fragment of a longer work.  It's like the pre-credit sequence of a James Bond movie.  We're calling this one barely acceptable.    

"The Better Choice" (1925)

"The Better Choice" is a more serious and ambitious story than the previous two cave men stories, but it is not very satisfying as it doesn't really hold together logically and what it is trying to accomplish is elusive.  

Scientist John Castle has invented a means of reviving the dead.  He has tested his technique on scores of animals.  Now comes the ultimate test--on a human being!  Who will be the scientist's guinea pig?  Castle himself!

Castle has all ready a drug of his own devising that will kill him while leaving no evidence he committed suicide--this is so his wife will get his life insurance, should the technique fail on a human.  And he has prepared his life-reviving gas in its machine, the operation of which involves pumping the gas into the dead animal or person's nostrils and mouth.  Castle has left a note for his lifelong friend, businessman Montague White, explaining how to revive Castle when White finds his pal's dead body.  I didn't really understand why Castle didn't brief White in person, why he insisted on keeping his experiments a secret even from the man he expected to put his new technique into operation for the first time on a human being.  As for the note, won't it be solid evidence that Castle committed suicide?  I guess White will be expected to destroy the note if the revival technique fails.

Castle takes the pill and dies.  In his astral body he flies around, through walls and so forth, looking down at his beloved wife and adorable kids asleep in their rooms.  Then an astral being appears, to guide Castle to the afterlife.  (Eddy avoids terms a religious person might use, like "God" or "soul" or "angel" or "Heaven.")  Castle speculates about what he will tell people about his astral experiences when he is alive again soon, but the guiding entity gently scoffs at the scientist's expectations, implying that other scientists before Castle have tried just such a stunt--reviving the dead--and failed and he is just the latest.  The thought of missing out on life with his wife and kids leads Castle to beg the being for another twenty years of life.  It is sort of implied that "the great All-Power that ruled the universe" has decided that Castle is to die on this day, but the guide entity gives Castle a chance to see what the next twenty years will be like if he in fact does return to life.

Castle wakes up, the poison having apparently failed to kill him.  He remembers all that jazz about astral flight and a guide spirit but thinks it was a dream.  He abandons all scientific work, keeping his revival experiments a secret, and goes into business with his best friend, White.  But he and White soon  quarrel and become rivals.  Castle becomes a very successful businessman by being ruthless and crushing all sorts of people.  But then his business goes sour, and, twenty years after he abandoned science, he is financially ruined.  He blames White, who is apparently behind the businesses that are putting Castle out of business.  Eddy leaves all this business stuff absolutely opaque, offering no clue what Castle and White argued over or what business they are in or anything like that, presenting us a view of the business world that is like a caricature of what commies think private enterprise is all about:

...for every dollar he made an enemy.  Merciless, showing no quarter, he crushed his victims with as little compunction as a thoughtless boy smashes a tiny ant....Now the tables were turned.  Now he was the fly, his enemies the spiders.... 

Driven insane by his impending financial defeat, Castle goes to White's office and shoots his old chum dead.  Eddy puts a lot of effort into describing Castle, his wits recovered, in prison, moaning over how he has ruined the lives of his wife and kids by murdering White, wishing he had died twenty years ago, etc., and then being convicted in a court of law and hanged.  

After the hanging, Castle is back in outer space with the guiding spirit.  But only briefly.  He is sucked back into to his dead body, which is surrounded by wife and kids, the family doctor (wait, so this guy and Castle's wife must know about the note), and White, who has put the tubes in Castle's dead nose and dead mouth and is about to pump the life-giving gas into him.  Even though he is dead, now that Castle is back in his body he is able to reach up and pull on the tubes that are in his face hard enough to destroy the machine and prevent his revival, as all these people watch.  So, he's committing suicide in front of everybody?  The story ends there, but I guess we have to assume Castle's astral form leaves his body again and goes to the afterlife.  Eddy does not speculate on the reaction of Castle's family and best friend to these incredible events.

This whole thing is ridiculous.  Among many other incongruities, Eddy fails to provide any reason why Castle and White become monsters who hate each other after being nice guys and best pals for decades.  And what is the point of the story, the ideology of the story?  That death is good?  Castle is discouraged from reviving the dead, and encouraged to choose death over life.  Maybe the theme is that you shouldn't defy the decree of fate, but Castle isn't punished for doing so, so the story has no bite and offers no real reason to not defy fate.

Thumbs down for "The Better Choice."  This mess has been reprinted in the aforementioned small press publications Terror Out of Time and The Loved Dead and Other Tales.

Illustrator Andrew Brosnatch seems to have ignored Eddy's
assertion that the guiding spirit is a voice lacking any visible form

**********

Eddy's cave man stories achieve their modest goals and are passable entertainments that, perhaps interestingly, portray women taking the initiative and fighting for the futures and relationships that they want--again we see the stereotype that women in old speculative fiction stories are mere damsels in distress exploded.  Eddy's afterlife story, on the other hand, is a total failure.

More 1920s Weird Tales in our next episode.  Try to keep body and soul together until then, friends!

Galen C. Colin: "Snake," "Eyes," and "The Song Eternal"

Galen C. Colin has four fiction credits at isfdb, three of them for stories that appeared in Weird Tales in the year 1924.  At the Tellers of Weird Tales website, you can find a biographical article on Colin by Terence E. Hanley; Colin was a big player in the world of printing and journalism in his home state of Kansas and author of many Western short stories and novels.  As part of our effort to read at least one story from each of the seven issues of WT with 1924 cover dates, let's check out those three stories, "Snake," "Eyes," and "The Song Eternal."  Read along by clicking the links in the previous sentence that will whisk you away, as if through a magic pool (see below), to the very scans of the magazines that I will be reading.

"Snake" 

The January 1924 issue of Weird Tales, edited by Edwin Baird, includes reprints of H. P. Lovecraft's "The Picture in the House;" a poem by Clark Ashton Smith, "Solution," that I guess is about a guy walking through a herp-infested swamp (maybe it is all a metaphor for getting drunk or committing suicide?); and Edgar Allen Poe's "The Black Cat," the ostensible source material of one of my very favorite gialli.   There is also a bunch of grotesque news stories (e.g., "Voodoo Doctor Admits Brutal Murder," "Child Dies From Candy Lodged in Throat" and "Swallowed Diamonds Assessed by Ex-Ray.")  But we today are focusing on Galen Colin's "Snake," which is advertised as "An Unusual Storiette" and takes up like a page and a half.

"Snake" is the nickname of an ugly and cruel man living on the margins of a sort of Wild West community, a man rumored to beat his wife and to make his living as what we today might call a "coyote," a guy who smuggles illegal immigrants into the country.  Everybody hates him, they all having witnessed him kick a puppy and being fond of his pathetic wife, who perennially bears the bruises of Snake's ill treatment.

Snake one day throws a fit and kills his wife, then hurries to his hideout, a cabin with a secret cellar.  He is hiding in the cellar when the posse that is after him searches the cabin, then, it being late, beds down in the cabin above Snake.  In the dim light that filters into the cellar, Snake thinks he sees a snake!  We readers know it is just a coil of rope, but Snake's fear of the reptile leads to a heart attack or some such medical calamity that ends his evil life.

This is actually a fun little melodramatic anecdote, despite or because of its exploitative reveling in cruelty and agony; thumbs up.

"Eyes" 

"Eyes" appeared in the famous anniversary issue of Weird Tales which printed Lovecraft's ghost-written story for Harry Houdini, "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs," and Lovecraft's collaboration with C. M. Eddy, Jr., "The Loved Dead."  Like "Snake," this story is only a little longer than a single page.

The people in "Snake" acted oddly--a wife loved her husband even though he was constantly beating her, a guy was so full of hate he irrationally assaulted animals and his own wife--but somehow it seemed believable; sadly, this is how people act in real life.  The behavior of the people in "Eyes" is somewhat less credible.  Our narrator is a medical student who has rigged up his own elaborate doorbell system--when you push his doorbell, a skull with an electric motor and light bulbs installed within it chatters and its eyes light up.  His best friend, a fellow medical student, comes over, looking haggard.  Best friend tells a crazy story.  This guy hasn't much money, so when he developed an obsession with owning a skeleton with which to decorate his quarters, he had no legitimate way of acquiring one.  So he decided to rob a grave.  But when he dug up a grave he was almost driven insane when he saw that the skeleton, though all the flesh had decayed, still had staring blue eyes.  The punchline is that he chose the grave of a blind man buried with glass eyes intact.

Colin's description of going to the cemetery and digging up the grave is good, but I found the otherwise exemplary student's obsession with owning a skeleton hard to understand and the bit with the skull doorbell silly and disconnected from the plot.  Do people act this way in real life?  I guess we are supposed to chalk it up to the stress of medical school and the commonplace belief that college students are always up to ludicrous stunts, eating goldfish and cramming into telephone booths and putting people's automobiles on rooves and the like.  We'll call this one acceptable.

"The Song Eternal" 

A text that debuted in the December 1924 issue of Weird Tales, the second edited by Farnsworth Wright, has already been subjected to the MPorcius treatment: "Death-Waters" by MPorcius regular Frank Belknap Long, the 1933 printing of which we read back in 2018.  There's also a C. M. Eddy story in this December issue, which we may read soon.

"The Song Eternal" is subtitled "A Mystic Tale."  We get a brief frame story, in which the narrator, "a sea dog," says he met an odd-looking fellow in a port on the west coast of Africa and this stranger related to him the tale that makes up most of "The Song Eternal"'s eight pages, the story of a love affair that spans forty centuries!  

Ever since he was a child this adventurer could, when alone, hear faintly a sort of sad melody, the words of which he could not make out.  This song was a source of endless fascination, and so he avoided the company of others.  Until his father forced him to go to college, where he met Dick, a student of the occult.  A few years after they graduate, Dick has become a powerful enough wizard to transmit the adventurer's soul through a magic pool to other times, other places, in search of the source of the song that has dominated his thoughts all his young life.  He inhabits the body of an ancient raider, a soldier in an army that preyed upon the Egyptians, a citizen of a metropolis that traded with far China.  He falls in love with Eldres, virgin high priestess of the sun god and singer of the song that has haunted the adventurer, and she returns his love.  Such love is forbidden, and the priests burn the lovers to death under a giant magnifying glass.  But the sun god sympathizes with their love!  Their souls shall return to human bodies in four thousand years and he shall hear that song again!

Clues seen through Dick's pool suggest the modern Eldres lives as a priestess among primitive blacks, and so the unnamed adventurer has been searching Africa for her.  As the story ends we don't know if he will succeed in his quest.

The content of "The Song Eternal" feels like filler material we've seen before, but Colin writes it pretty well and I enjoyed the story.  So, thumbs up for "The Song Eternal."

**********

These stories are actually not bad, not bad at all, but as far as I can tell, they were never reprinted.  Colin apparently left the weird market to write for Western magazines because there were so many more Western magazines printed than weird ones, and I have to suspect his Western stories were good.  We'll definitely read his final weird story, which was published in 1926, when we get to that phase of our own eternal quest, the unholy drive to read at least one story from each issue of Weird Tales.  

Weird Tales Project: 1943

Robert Bloch.  August Derleth.  Henry Kuttner.  Ray Bradbury.  David H. Keller.  Hannes Bok.  Edmond Hamilton.  These are the names we associate with the McIlwraith era of Weird Tales, and these are names that dominate the 1943 issues of WT I have just finished exploring.  As you perhaps know, I have sworn a vow to unnamable powers to read at least one story from every issue of Weird Tales, and have been putting up a post for each complete year for which I have made good on this inexplicable obligation.  So, before a list of links to each of my blog posts about a 1943 Weird Tales story, please find links to posts cataloging my readings for earlier years.  Thank you, and on to 1944!

1923   1930    1931   1932   1933    1934    1935    1936    1937    1938    1939    1940   1941  1942

January

David H. Keller:                     "Bindings Deluxe"

Robert Bloch:                         "The Eager Dragon"

August Derleth:                      "McElwin's Glass"

Mary Elizabeth Counselman: "Seventh Sister"    

March

Ray Bradbury:   "The Wind"

August Derleth: "No Light for Uncle Henry"

Henry Kuttner:  "Under Your Spell"

Robert Bloch:    "A Bottle of Gin" 

Robert Arthur:   "The Book and the Beast" 

May

J. Schuyler Miller: "John Cawder's Wife"

August Derleth:     "A Wig for Miss DeVore"

Stanton Coblenz:   "The Labyrinth of Glass"

Ray Bradbury:       "The Crowd"  

July

Ray Bradbury:                                                    "The Scythe"

Robert Bloch:                                                     "Yours, Truly--Jack the Ripper"

Otis Adelbert Kline and Frank Belknap Long:  "Return of the Undead" 

September

Fredric Brown:          "The Geezenstacks"

Robert Bloch:            "The Black Barter"

August Derleth:         "Baynter's Imp"

Ralph Milne Farley:  "Wings of Death" 

November

Edmond Hamilton:        "The Valley of the Assassins"

Manly Wade Wellman:  "The Third Cry of Legba"

Ray Bradbury:               "The Ducker"

August Derleth:             "A Thin Gentleman with Gloves"   

Weird Tales, Nov 1943: E Hamilton, M W Wellman, R Bradbury & A Derleth

After today I will have read at least one story (in fact it looks like I will have read at least three stories) from each of the six issues of Weird Tales with a 1943 cover date.  We are making progress in our grand quest to have read something from each issue of Weird Tales, a periodical the life of which spans from 1923 to 2025.  And today may be a red letter day, with stories by blockbuster writer Ray Bradbury, fan fave Manly Wade Wellman, MPorcius fave Edmond Hamilton, and Lovecraft correspondent and Arkham House founder August Derleth.  This might be the best issue of Weird Tales from 1943!  You can read along at the internet archive here and find out how this ish of the unique magazine of the bizarre and unusual stacks up in real time!

"The Valley of the Assassins" by Edmond Hamilton 

Mark Stanton and Bill Bradley are American engineers working to maintain the railway in mountainous northern Iran over which the Western Allies are shipping vital supplies to the Soviet Union so the diabolical Reds can enslave Eastern Europe I mean so Mother Russia can defeat Nazi Germany.  A landslide has blocked the railway, but Stanton and Bradley's hundred-plus Persian laborers have thrown down their tools because they have gotten a sign from The Sons of Murder!  That sign is a peacock tied to a rock.  No doubt the Order of the Assassins, founded ten thousand years ago by a wizard and still active to this day, don't want this railway to operate.  Or so the locals think.  Stanton figures German agents put the bird there.

Stanton uses his automatic to get the Iranian workers back to clearing the railway and Bradley rides off to follow the trail of whoever left that peacock there.  When Bradley returns he has a glazed look on his face and he tries to murder Stanton and the other white person at the worksite!  The young man goes berserk when captured and bound and there is no sign he recognizes his friends.  Is Bradley delirious from some accident or fatigue, as Stanton hopes?  The victim of the some drug-wielding Nazi psychologist, as Stanton fears?  Or have the Assassins stolen the young engineer's soul with their black magic and turned him into a mindless killer, as all the Persians believe?

Their superstitious dread overwhelming them, all but one of the Iranians flees.  Stanton sends the third white man back to Tehran for help, and he and the lone Persian brave enough to remain at his side go out to find whoever warped poor Bradley's mind.  Bradley feels a compulsion to return to his insidious masters, and serves as a guide to them.  The ensorcelled Bradley leads Stanton and his Persian companion into a trap high in the mountains and they are captured by a party of men--some Iranian, some Arab, Turk or Syrian--who do not speak and who bear the same mindless stare and exhibit the same grim determination as the enslaved Bradley.

The zombie-like Assassins take Stanton and friend to a monumental black castle behind which lies a narrow valley of stupendous beauty, full of flowers, glazed-eyed women and screaming peacocks.  In the castle they are dragged before Hasan Sabah, world's foremost expert in the science of the mind!  He has survived many centuries, battled Crusaders, met Marco Polo, tangled with Genghis Khan and Napoleon!  Hasan Sabah hypnotizes Stanton's Persian comrade, making him the latest of his servants, and then announces his plan to transfer his soul from his current old wrinkled body to Stanton's healthy young form!  This is how Hasan Sabah has survived for some many lifetimes!  In Stanton's body he can make sure the Axis powers win the war, which will throw the Middle East into chaos so that he, Hasan Sabah, can take over the Middle East.

In science fiction fashion, Stanton uses quick thinking, trickery, and his knowledge of science to foil Hasan Sabah and save himself, his friends, and the Anglo-American lifeline to Uncle Joe Stalin.  

The ending of "The Valley of the Assassins" is a little weak--the villain, who is a genius thousands of years old, shouldn't have fallen for the trick Hamilton came up with--but not terrible.  Otherwise, "The Valley of the Assassins" is quite good, a fun melodrama.  Hamilton knows just the right amount of detail and description he needs to paint a picture and elicit emotion in the reader without going overboard and becoming boring or confusing, and the action scenes similarly are just long enough and detailed enough to be exciting and get across what is happening to the reader.  (Just recently I was complaining that some of Ted Sturgeon's action scenes, and at times his writing in general, include too much detail and get tangled up in themselves.)  Thumbs up for "The Valley of the Assassins."

Kurt Singer included "The Valley of the Assassins" in his 1972 anthology Ghouls and Ghosts and Helen Hoke eight years later reprinted it in Fear! Fear! Fear!  Our paisans over in Italy had a chance to read Hamilton's story of the fall of Hasan Sabah in the language of Dante in 1987 when "The Valley of the Assassins" served as the title story of an Italian anthology of stories from Weird Tales.

"The Third Cry to Legba" by Manly Wade Wellman

The cover of this issue of Weird Tales advertises "A new mystery series by Manly Wade Wellman" and "The Third Cry to Legba" is the first installment of that series, which isfdb calls the John Thunstone series and lists over a dozen component stories.

Thunstone is a huge strong man who has studied the occult.  We see many such students here at MPorcius Fiction Log; I guess "the occult" is a crowded field, though I never met any such students myself as an undergrad in New Jersey or as a grad student in New York City.  Thunstone is out at a Manhattan night club with a former flame, the blonde and blue-eyed Countess Monteseco.  (Come to think of it, we meet a lot of these blue-eyed blondes here at MPFL as well, don't we?)  When they first met, some years ago, she was just Sharon.  

The act at the club tonight is a reproduction of a voodoo ceremony, a call to the furry god Legba, a dance that climaxes with the scantily clad dancer breaking the neck of a chicken.  Thunstone, a writer who can get into places by saying he is a journalist, talks to the dancer backstage while another big strong man, Thorne, chats up Sharon--Thorne is also a student of the occult, a man who has spent plenty of time in Haiti, which Conan O'Brien tells me is a real beauty spot, but Mike DeWine tells me is literally hell.  Well, opinions will differ.

Thunstone's and Thorne's opinions certainly differ--our guy Thunstone is a crusader against the forces of darkness, while Thorne is a devotee of black magic who hopes to get his mitts on Sharon, Countess Monteseco's inherited wealth to finance some kind of diabolical large-scale project.  (Today's secret word is..."diabolical.")  Thunstone has some powerful friends, and calls in their aid.  He gets the police to close the night club over a fire safety code violation.  In Harlem he consults a black preacher who gives him more info on Legba, citing, among other volumes, Zora Neal Hurston's Tell My Horse; Thunstone and this man of the cloth conclude that the next performance of the call to Legba at the club, the third, might have catastrophic consequences.  And in Midtown he gets from a jeweler an old brooch that he hopes will provide protection from the forces of darkness--he gifts the brooch to Sharon the Countess.

We get a good detective scene in which Thunstone figures out where Thorne lives and busts into his place to look for clues.  Then a decent climactic action scene in which Thunstone interrupts a private performance of the crucial third chicken-sacrificing dance ceremony.

This is a pretty fun story--thumbs up!  I often find detective stuff, following clues and all that, to be a drag, but enjoyed the detection business in "The Third Cry to Legba."  Hopefully the succeeding tales of Thunstone, which I will be reading as they come up in Weird Tales, are as entertaining.  I wonder if Sharon and Thorne will be back.

"The Third Cry to Legba" has been reprinted in Thunstone-centric Wellman collections. 

"The Ducker" by Ray Bradbury

Here we have a rare Bradbury that was not reprinted in an English-language Bradbury collection until our own bizarre and unusual 21st century.  "The Ducker" did pop its head up in a Japanese 1972 collection, a British 1977 anthology edited by Mike Ashley, and a 1989 Italian anthology of pieces from Weird Tales, however.

"The Ducker" is a somewhat silly story, the gimmicks of which remind me a little of that Roberto Benigni movie Life is Beautiful and of that Stephen Spielberg TV episode in which an artist magically drew the landing gear on a stricken B-17 to save himself, stories that inject a little magic and whimsy and child-like wonder into the serious business of the Second World War in the European theater in a way that some might find moving (women were sobbing in the theatre lobby where I saw Life is Beautiful) and others ridiculous or even offensive.  "The Ducker" is a pretty weak story by Bradbury standards, and the use of the gag gets repetitive, so I'm judging "The Ducker" merely acceptable.

Johnny Choir is an 18-year-old who hasn't really grown up--he still has the interests and mentality of an eleven-year-old.  He used to run around with a bunch of kids, playing at war and at being cowboys, an endless series of arguments of the "Bang, you're dead!"  "No, you missed!  Bang, you're dead!" type and somehow basic training as an infantryman in the United States Army has not stopped him from continuing to think of warfare in this childish way.  Johnny gets shipped off to fight in North Africa and when German aircraft strafe his unit, he is among the bursting shells of an artillery barrage, or German machine gunners are trying to hose him down, he is immune because he treats it all like a game, saying "Missed me!" and "I ducked!" and so forth.  To kill German infantrymen he just has to say "Bang! Bang!" and Hans and Fritz just fall over.  It is kind of ludicrous, and Bradbury doesn't just do this stuff once, as a climax or a punch line, but runs these gags multiple times over multiple pages.  In the end, after Johnny has taken a German position single-handed, one of his comrades, Private Smith, says some goop about how God protects children and Johnny still has that protection because he never grew up, and so Smith will endeavor to make sure Johnny never grows up and thus remains safe.  This is a little hard to take, seeing how criminals abuse and murder children all the time and children regularly get killed by bombs during modern warfare.

Ray of course is good at putting sentences together and slinging the similes and metaphors, so reading "The Ducker" isn't painful, but it is not one of finest moments of Waukegan's gift to literature.

"A Thin Gentleman with Gloves" by August Derleth

Of the four authors we are reading today, I probably like Derleth the least; he certainly seems to be the most likely to deliver a half-assed clunker to the editor and get it published.  But maybe today he will put in a stellar performance.  

     

Bellaman is a London barrister almost all of whose clients are dangerous criminals.  But he has one decent client, Potter, and when this honest man dies, Bellaman handles his estate.  The deceased Potter, a student of the occult (of course), left all his money, a considerable sum, to an old girlfriend who hadn't heard from Potter in ages.  Bellaman thinks he can steal some of the inheritance from this woman--diabolical!--but as he goes about this crime, he keeps seeing a strange figure that gives him the creeps.  The man who seems to be following him whenever he misappropriates some of Potter's estate is a very skinny man in gloves, his face somehow always obscured--Bellaman recalls that a similar man always accompanied Potter on the rare occasions when Potter left his abode, a tall thin man who never spoke, whose face nobody can remember.

Bellaman's investigation indicates to us readers something Bellaman himself refuses to believe--Potter, a wizard, raised a former enemy from the dead and bound the corpse to be his familiar.  The living dead slave will be released form servitude and able to rest when Potter's estate is properly disposed of, and so the monster is endeavoring to make sure Bellaman doesn't abuse his office of executor.  The climactic ending in which the monster slays Bellaman and the denouement in which the police find the unusual state of the two bodies, barrister and skeletal corpse, are pretty effective.

"A Thin Gentleman with Gloves" is an obvious, straightforward, traditional horror story, but Derleth does a good job with it, and there are no annoying mistakes (true, there are typos in this WT printing of it, but I can't blame Derleth for that.)  Derleth wrote quite a few of these stories in which a character you are expected not to like suffers a terrible rough justice at the hands of a supernatural entity or phenomena, and sometimes Derleth just seems to think the person should die because he or she is rich or vain or fat or has low intelligence or something, and to me such stories feel vindictive and exploitative.  The guy who gets killed in this story is actually a thief who is robbing a woman and a fraud who is failing to meet his obligations to a client, so I was able to cheer on his destruction.    

I can mildly recommend "A Thin Gentleman with Gloves."  The adventure of Bellaman the fraudulent attorney was included in the Derleth collection Something Near, an anthology Derleth edited, When Evil Wakes, and an anthology edited by Mary Danby, Realms of Darkness, that has an introduction by beloved thespian Christopher Lee.  Followers of my sadly defunct Twitter feed may recall that I recently purchased at an antiques mall the NECA Christopher Lee as Dracula action figure.

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Let's pretend we are good at math and score the six 1943 issues of Weird Tales based on what I felt about the three or four stories I read from each.  The January ish had two stories I liked (+2), one I thought acceptable (0), and one I didn't like (-1), so January has 1 point.  Grading the rest similarly, we get this list:

Jan:   1

Mar:  1

May: 0

July:  2

Sep:   0

Nov:  3

So, my hopes that this November issue of Weird Tales was the best 1943 issue have been fulfilled!  Good news for once!  We've wrapped up this stage in our weird journey from 1923 to 2025 with a bang.

More Weird Tales next time here at MPorcius Fiction Log--cross your fingers in hopes the next batch of stories we read will be as good as today's collection.

Weird Tales, Sept '43: R Bloch, A Derleth and R M Farley

It's time for another trip to the dark and dangerous world that is Weird Tales, the essential pulp magazine, edited, from 1940 to 1954, by Dorothy McIlwraith.  Today, the September 1943 issue.  We've looked into this issue already to admire "Fredric Brown's story "The Geezenstacks" and a Hannes Bok illustration.  But it is stories by Robert Bloch, August Derleth, and Ralph Milne Farley that bring us to WT's pages today.  Feel free to read along at the scan of the World War II-era magazine that I will be reading, which you can find at this link. 

"Black Barter" by Robert Bloch

"Black Barter" is a sequel to November of 1942's "Nursemaid to Nightmares," a story I called "an absolute waste of time."  I counted, and saw that "Black Barter" filled 20 pages of Ms. McIlwraith's magazine.  Then I gritted my teeth and forged ahead.  "Unto the breach once more, dear friends...."

Our narrator, in the earlier story, was hired by an eccentric hobbyist to look after his collection of mythical and supernatural individuals--a vampire, a werewolf, a mermaid, and the rest.  Then the eccentric collected a Medusa and it turned everybody to stone (except the narrator.)  As "Black Barter" begins, the narrator is missing his charges and his employer and hopes to someday figure out how to get them reanimated.  A witch, an old friend of the collector, comes to visit.  We get lots of lame jokes and silly interplay as the narrator tries to convince the witch to summon a demon to reanimate his friends.  Part of his strategy is to get the witch drunk, but when she performs the black mass to summon the demon she botches it and gets a substandard demon.  The narrator cuts a deal with the demon, and he reanimates the statues, but puts the wrong soul in each body--the mermaid's body is animated by the centaur's soul, etc.  These are the kind of jokes you get on Gilligan's Island and The Flintstones, but we like those shows because we already like the actors and/or characters and so care what happens to them--of course the characters in this story are interchangeable and forgettable.  Somehow the mermaid's soul gets stuck in a wax dummy the witch is using as a 1:1 scale voodoo doll.  Here I provide an example of the wordplay that Bloch engages in on almost every line.

“Nevertheless, the window dummy is mine. It’s my poppet, and I shall pop off with it.”

“Go fly your broomstick,” shrilled Trina the mermaid. “And don’t call me a dummy, you Halloween hag!”

Five or ten pages of this would be a waste of time, and here we have twenty.  And yet, "Black Barter," while bad, is better than "Nursemaid to Nightmares," because whereas its predecessor was an almost plot-free series of gags, "Black Barter" has a conventional narrative structure in which the protagonist pursues a goal.  The narrator takes the witch on a date, including a harrowing broomstick ride, hoping to seduce her into summoning another demon to rearrange his friends' souls; hijinks ensue when the jealous mermaid and all the other monsters try to chaperone the date, and everybody ends up in front of a judge at night court, rehashing the plot to the incredulous magistrate (this kind of thing also happens in The Flintstones) who orders the witch to summon the demon to put everybody back in the correct body--the wily sorceress double crosses our cast, leaving all the weirdos once again inanimate statues and the narrator all alone (as in an episode of Gilligan's Island, at the end of the story the characters are all back at square one.)   

A step up, but still way down in the basement.  Thumbs down.

"Nursemaid to Nightmares" and "Black Barter" were reprinted together in a 1955 issue of the magazine Imaginative Tales and in the Bloch collection Dragons and Nightmares; Dragons and Nightmares also reprints "The Eager Dragon," another Bloch joke story I have denounced here at MPorcius Bitch Blog, and "A Good Knight's Work," a 1941 story that debuted in John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Unknown which I expect I will be grousing about here some day.

This is how you sell garbage stories, in America, in Germany, and beyond

"Baynter's Imp" by August Derleth

Cyril Baynter is a fat, vain, lazy rich man whose wealth was inherited from his grandfather, a lumber baron who made a pile  devastating the environment.  Baynter is "a great hand with the ladies," thanks to his wealth, but one woman, the beautiful Belle Fassett, has given him the cold shoulder; she is instead interested in Bert Trayle.  By chance, Baynter acquires an old vessel, a sealed carafe, with warnings in Greek and Latin inscribed upon it; after he opens it, it becomes evident a supernatural entity has been released.  This imp reads Baynter's mind, sees his desires, and has Trayle killed in an accident and then Belle Fasset's father similarly killed, clearing a path for Baynter to marry Miss Fassett.  But Baynter worries about the imp--if he marries Belle and Belle finds out about the imp she will leave him or figure out what happened to her father and previous beau or something like that.  So Baynter tries to seal the imp back up in the bottle, but the imp reads his mind and turns the tables on him--Baynter is entombed in the bottle more or less forever, and the imp takes his form and marries Belle Fassett and lives happily ever after.

This is an acceptable filler piece, written in a somewhat but not quite obnoxiously sarcastic style; no big deal, but better than some of the junk Derleth banged out on the old typewriter (according to David Drake, a huge Olivetti) to help fill up the pages of Weird Tales.  "Baynter's Imp" would go on to be included not only in Derleth collections but the anthologies Alone By Night (1962) and 100 Creepy Little Creature Stories (1994).

"Wings of Death" by Ralph Milne Farley

Remember when I defended Farley from a scurrilous attack by one Isaac Asimov?  I was contending with giants in those days!  I would go on to praise Farley's story about a gangster who integrates cloning into his criminal enterprises.  I even gave a mildly positive review to Farley's story about a guy being sent back in time by a Hindu swami to strangle a young Hitler!  Let's hope I can champion Farley today; at least "Wings of Death" is a good title.  (Remember how much I loved H. P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald's "Winged Death"?  I was consorting with giants in those days!)  Plus, here in Weird Tales "Wings of Death" is accompanied by a decent illustration by Weird Tales veteran Margaret Brundage.

"Wings of Death" is a little long and a little convoluted, with too many twists and turns that I feel don't really accomplish anything and plot elements that are not quite believable, but not bad.  We're judging it acceptable.

Our narrator is a reporter, who is interviewing Ames, a New England business guy who inherited a fleet of ships, as he lounges poolside with his wife, both of them in skimpy swimwear.  Mrs. Ames suggests her husband tell the journalo the story of the sacred flies of Malea, and most of the text is a third-person account of Ames' wild adventure in the South Pacific.

Ames' father had a lot of business in the Pacific, and when Ames was a kid took him to an uncharted island only he knew about, Malea.  Ames senior was pals with the head of the tribe on the island, but not the priest, a skeletal old guy.  Ames junior made friends with the chief's son, Tamu.  These two kids realized that the tribe's religion was a load of crap.  The island of  Malea is infested with big flies, flies as big or bigger than wasps, which the tribesmen considered gods.  The flies emerge from a slimy pool that writhes with maggots.  According to the local religion, this is the pool of life, and if it were to expire, all life on Earth would die.  So, the tribespeople toss food--including human sacrifices--in the maggot pool all the time, and it is forbidden to kill any of the flies, even though they bite people.

Young Ames is hanging with Tamu one day when a fly bites him and he kills it by reflex.  When Tamu sees his white friend isn't immediately struck dead, he realizes his religion is a sham--no biggie, Tamu didn't like the sinister head priest, anyway.  The boys agree to, one day, maybe when Tamu is chief, to destroy the fake religion.

Ames didn't return to Malea until he was an adult, after his dad died.  He and Tamu have kept up a correspondence over the years, and get along well, and Tamu's sister has grown up to be very attractive.  When Ames talks about how hot this girl is, the reporter is a little surprised to see the businessman saying this stuff around his wife, whom the narrator takes to be a typical Bostonian.  Anyway, there is a whole complicated thing with a member of the ship's crew killing a fly and the priest witnessing it and sentencing the sailor to death and Ames coming up with a crazy plan to save the man and destroy the pool, a plan that miscarries at first.  At the same time, the annual Mating Dance comes up, a ceremony that imitates the mating practices of the flies.  The marriageable women dance around a fire, and pick men out of the crowd to dance with them--if nobody objects, they become man and wife.  But men in the audience are permitted to object, and then the two men fight.  Tamu has to fight some guy to get his girl, and Ames similarly fights to get Tamu's sister.  Tamu's sister is then instrumental in conceiving and accomplishing a back up plan to save the sailor and Ames and to discredit the local religion.  As we see quite often in these old genre stories, a woman takes initiative and puts herself at risk to resolve the plot, making me think "Wings of Death" has feminist elements, but since she performs this heroic deed to save her man and because the story fails the Bosporus test, I doubt academic feminists would appreciate the feminist aspects of the story.         

The twist at the end of the story is that Ames's wife is Tamu's sister.  I found it a little hard to believe that the reporter would have a conversation with a South Sea Islander in a swimsuit who learned English as an adult and mistake her for a "typically Bostonian wife."  This and some other needless complications and hard-to-swallow elements mean I can't really say "Wings of Death" is good, but it certainly falls in the acceptable range.

It looks like "Wings of Death" has never been reprinted, so I am one of the relatively few people to have read it--I guess you are one of the rather small number of people to have ever heard of it.  We dig deep here at MPorcius Fiction Log!

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Probably the high point of this issue of Weird Tales is "The Geezenstacks," but Derleth's and Farley's contributions are not shameful.  As for the Bloch, we'll sweep that one under the magic carpet.  Maybe the next issue, which features Edmond Hamilton, Manly Wade Wellman, and Ray Bradbury, will be a little better.  Fingers crossed!  

 

Theodore Sturgeon: "The Music," "Scars," and "Die, Maestro, Die!"

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading a 1965 edition of the 1953 collection E Pluribus Unicorn by Theodore Sturgeon, the man who brought you such bizarre utopian visions as "If All Men Were Brothers Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?", "The Skills of Xanadu," and "...And Now the News,"  as well as those wacky tales of alien invasion, "Make Room for Me" and "The Incubi of Parallel X."  Yesterday we read three stories from E Pluribus Unicorn, one about two virgins, one good, one evil; one about a superior race of sexless women; and one about two unattractive people finding love against the odds thanks to the intervention of a flying saucer.  Who can guess what Ted has in store for us today in "The Music," "Scars," and "Die, Maestro, Die!"?  You can read along at a scan of a copy of the very edition I am reading at this link.

"The Music" (1953)

This little thing, one and a half pages, seems to have made its debut in E Pluribus Unicorn.  It is a sort of literary exercise and a slightly oblique horror story.  A guy is stuck in a hospital, maybe a mad house.  He likes to escape the stifling atmosphere of the institution to a balcony or to a loading dock or something, a place where he can lean on a rail and smoke and look out into the night, see the mist and garbage cans and a cat chase and kill a rat.  A recurring motif of the story is this guy's music--I guess music he hears in his head.  As the story ends it is implied that he imitates the cat and chases down and kills a fat nurse leaving the hospital to head home, maybe even eats her.

Acceptable.  

"The Music" has only ever appeared in Sturgeon collections.

"Scars" (1949)

Well, here's a change of pace.  "Scars" debuted in Zane Grey's Western Magazine; Sturgeon wrote enough Western stories, some in collaboration with Don Ward, to fill a collection.  Well, let's sample Ted's body of work about the Wild West.

"Scars" is a well-written cynical twist-ending story; the style is evocative and economical and the surprise ending works.  Thumbs up, cowpokes!

Two cowboys are working together, day after day, night after night, far from any other people, putting up a barbed wire fence or something in what amounts to the wilderness.  They rarely talk, but sometimes, Sturgeon tells us, a man has to get something off his chest.  One time the elder cowboy tells the story of how he lost part of an ear when he was fighting with a slick Easterner over a woman and the woman in question hit him in the head with a frying pan.  Another time, he describes how he was shot in the belly but survived a long hospital stay.

The younger cowboy one night is complaining about women, saying they all want a gentleman but their definition of gentleman is unattainable.  The old man says that he is a gentleman, and explains how he merits this appellation.  One day he was riding in some remote area and saw a woman bathing in the nude, the region being so thinly populated she was sure nobody would be around.  Startled, she fell in the water and hit her head and fell unconscious.  The cowboy rescued her and spent several days nursing the young widow back to health as she suffered blood loss, a fever, delusions our hero was her dead husband, etc.  While she was laid up he did work on her farm, repairing a door and pulling weeds and so forth.  Sturgeon, who in his stories often depicts touching human relationships, leads you to believe this is some kind of wonderful selfless love the cowboy is expressing, forgoing one opportunity after another to take advantage of this woman.  When the woman is recovered and it is time for the cowboy to leave, the widow tells him he is a gentleman, and there is even the suggestion she has perhaps fallen in love with him--she watches him until he disappears beyond the horizon.

When the young cowpuncher asks why the oldster never took advantage of the widow, the old guy makes clear it was because his bullet wound, which left his "plumbin'" "all mixed up and cross-connected," rendered him impotent.

When the issue of Zane Grey's Western Magazine that included "Scars" was reprinted in the UK, our British friends gave it a different, perhaps more exciting, cover.

"Die, Maestro, Die!" (1949)

It seems our mates across the pond couldn't top the US cover of the issue of Dime Detective in which "Die, Maestro, Die!" debuted and so used the same cover for the British edition of the magazine.  Understandable--the cover is pretty awesome.

Like the narrator of (spoiler alert) "Saucer of Loneliness," whom we met in our last blog post, the narrator of "Die, Maestro, Die!" has a birth defect, a tiny little mouth with sharp pointy teeth that renders his mug among the ugliest anyone has ever seen.  This guy, Fluke, also has an unusual voice, and so has a job with Lutch's hip and happenin' band.  While Lutch the clarinetist and bandleader and beautiful girl piano player Fawn and drummer Crispin and the rest of the band are doing their thing, Fluke, hidden in the dark, speaks cool patter into the microphone.  "Lutch is here, Lutch is gone, man, gone....Top of the morn from the top of the heap, Kizd."  This story is full of hip slang:

She pulled Lutch's swallow-tail between numbers, dropped it like it was hot, and stood there blushing like a radish....The music business is full of roundheels and thrushes who feed on seed; this kid was from fresh air.

Anyway, "Die, Maestro, Die!" is the story of how Fluke keeps trying to murder Lutch, whom he envies  because of his talent and Fawn's love of Lutch and whom he resents because it is to Lutch that Fluke owes his success.  One of the grim realities we experience in life that that we are all too reluctant to acknowledge, one that molds our relationships and has painful ramifications for society, is the fact that often it is not gratitude but resentment and contempt that beneficiaries feel towards benefactors; if you loan or give money to a relative, he won't necessarily be thankful, but instead hate you for humiliating him, for making your superiority undeniable, for making him feel he owes you, even if you deny that he owes you anything.  And don't get me started on how people who "work" for the government or who are on the dole feel about the taxpayers who are keeping them housed and fed.  Anyway, Sturgeon in this story offers some sad but all-too-accurate psychological insight--the more Lutch and the other band members are nice to Fluke, the more they try to help him, the more he resents them and tries to destroy them.

One of Sturgeon's themes throughout his career, and one he cleverly illustrates in "Die, Maestro, Die!" is his skepticism of individualism and his romantic view of collectivism.  In his SF work this often manifests itself as telepathy and collective consciousness and similar fantastical elements , but in this mainstream crime story it manifests itself in the orchestra.  All the members of Lutch Crawford and his  Gone Geese work together, get on the same wavelength, and produce great art.  Even when Lutch disappears after Fluke drowns him in a sink and throws him in a river, the band, from long intimate familiarity with Lutch, are able to produce the kind of work Lutch would have produced--having successfully built relationships, having sacrificed himself for the collective, Lutch lives on after death, his band creating and performing just the kind of music he produced and would have gone on producing.  And our villain, Fluke, because he wants to succeed on his own, without help, because he is an individualist, is a monster who keeps trying to kill Lutch, even the immortal Lutch that is the band, by sabotaging the band's performances.

In the end, Fluke is found out, but even then the band members, inspired by the example of Lutch, treat Fluke far better than he deserves.  Fluke is punished, however, if only by his own inner demons. 

Personally, I find collectivism detestable and think of myself as  radical individualist, but I can't deny that Sturgeon here makes his case skillfully.  The characters and their relationships are also well rendered, even if Lutch and the band members sometimes seem impossibly goody goody.  And I have to say that Sturgeon here does a better job of describing what the experience of performing and hearing good music is like than do a lot of people that strain their brains and their typewriters piling on surreal  metaphors trying to do so, like Charles Beaumont in "Night Ride" or Robert Bloch in "Dig That Crazy Grave!"  So, thumbs up for "Die, Maestro, Die!"   

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More than once on this blog I have suggested that I might enjoy Barry Malzberg's mainstream work more than his SF work.  Today's three stories by Theodore Sturgeon make me wonder if I might say the same thing about old Ted.  These stories are more economical and have more believable characters than a lot of Sturgeon's SF work, and "Scars" and "Die, Maestro, Die!" effectively address Sturgeon's typical themes without resorting to psychic powers or space aliens and without expressing contempt for the mundanes.

I think the remaining stories in E Pluribus Unicorn first appeared in Weird Tales, and so we will get to them in the course of our exploration of the Unique Magazine of the Bizarre and Unusual, assuming the Grim Reaper doesn't catch up with me first--I still have a lot of issues of Weird Tales to get through.