Weird Tales, July 1927: B Morgan, D R Catlin, & R G Stott

As you know, I am in a race with the Grim Reaper, trying to read at least one story from each issue of Weird Tales before I shuffle off this mortal coil.  My diet today consisted of peanut butter cups and corn chips, so probably today the Reaper is gaining on me, but I promise to eat yogurt and broccoli tomorrow.

Most of the time, when I look at the table of contents of an issue of Farnsworth Wright's essential contribution to the history of speculative fiction, I see familiar names and can read stories by men and women with whom I am already chummy, or who are at least passing acquaintances.  But opening up the July 1927 issue to the table of contents pages is like walking into a room of strangers!  Who are these people?  Well, I'll just consult the little spoily descriptions of the stories on the TOC and pick out three that seem promising and read them, I guess.

"Gray Ghouls" by Bassett Morgan

Giant apes and startling surgery sound good.  The illustration for "Gray Ghouls" shows a big gorilla cradling a shapely young lady while a man with a firearm draws a bead on said gorilla.  "Bassett Morgan" is a pen name for a woman, Grace Ethel Jones, who has over a dozen short stories listed at isfdb, so there is a chance we will read her again if "Gray Ghouls" is good.  According to a website maintained by Douglas A. Anderson, Lesser-Known Writers, Jones published quite a lot of mainstream work in magazines like Argosy, The Smart Set and Woman's Journal.  These are all good signs.

Unfortunately, I don't like Jones' style.  There are too many wacky metaphors, and the sentences are too long and clumsy and made up of disparate elements.  Metaphors should make an idea easier to understand, but Jones' metaphors are actually puzzling and obscure her points, and a sentence should convey a single idea or related ideas, not just include random unrelated junk that has been nonsensically thrown together, as Jones' sentences do.  Some examples:

He had been a man of character and personality, a brainy intelligence, sensual mouthed, and his good looks spoiled by a flattened nose and indulgence which over-hampered his body.

The air was hot and moist, perfumed by flowers, thick with the stench of rotting river swamp, pungent with sea tang, the mingled scents of Papua’s breasts teeming with desire, unforgettable as the hells it transcended.

Beneath were sea-gardens indescribably beautiful and menacing, tinted coral, waving fern weeds, wide-open flanges of tridacnas that can take off a man’s foot if he steps into one, pretty little fish clustering and scattering like particles of an exploding glass ball. 

It is too bad Jones' writing is poor, because her plot is admirably crazed, full of shockingly twisted sex and violence.  

The white authorities of Papua are dismayed to discover evidence that white tourists are purchasing shrunken heads from the natives, a bunch of cannibalistic headhunters.  One shrunken head they recover has red hair!  Good grief, are white people being murdered so their heads can be sold?  The authorities send their bravest man, Mansey, to investigate.  Mansey uncovers a horror that is beyond belief.

A red-headed Scotsman, Keith, years ago took up residence with some of the natives (whom Jones calls "blacks") and had children with some of the women.  Another white man, London surgeon Mullet, is currently living among the tribe as their chief, Keith having since died.  Mansey learns that Mullet left London in disgrace because of his experiments in brain transplantation, and here among the headhunters married one of Keith's biracial red-headed daughters, Sheba.  Driven a little insane by life in the tropics as a lone white man surrounded by savages, and further disordered by drink, after Sheba was mauled by an ape and nearly dead, Mullet did the unthinkable--he preserved Sheba's brain by putting it in the skull of a living orangutan!  He had been practicing on the natives, putting the brains of several "blacks" into the bodies of orangutans.  Mullet today is in a real pickle.  He wants to marry a beautiful native girl, Cleo, but Sheba is violently jealous.  Mullet can't just gun down Sheba, because she, being part-white, is the leader of the orangutans with human brains, and he'd have to shoot them all, a challenging prospect.  Besides, these orangutans with human brains serves as his bodyguard, allowing him to push around the murderous headhunters of whom he is chief, savages who resent him and would otherwise kill him.  Jones gives us scene after scene of Sheba, an orangutan, expressing love and desire for and jealousy of Mullet, while Mullet yells at her and threatens her in an attempt to keep her under control so he can have a relationship Cleo, the hottest girl Mansey has ever seen, who of course walks around topless.  Hilariously, one of Mullet's threats against Sheba is that if she doesn't behave he'll move her brain intto the body of a crocodile. 

Things come to a head when another tribe of head hunters attacks the tribe of which Mullet is uneasy chief.  During the confusion of the fighting, Mullet and Mansey try to escape with sexalicious Cleo.  But Sheba catches up to them.  Sheba grabs Cleo and tears her to pieces--so she won't suffer, Mullet shoots Cleo dead before she is dismembered.  The white men shoot Sheba repeatedly, but they just have pistols, not rifles, and so before Sheba dies the jealous girl in a primate body has the strength to grab Mullet, to embrace the man she loves as she sinks into the lagoon, where a giant clam ("tridacna") seizes her foot so she and her captive lover won't float to the surface when she expires.

"Gray Ghouls" is so annoying to read that I have to give it a thumbs down, even though I want to enjoy the outrageous plot.  Farnsworth Wright included the story in the September 1939 issue of Weird Tales as the Weird Story Reprint and in 1951 Donald Wollheim reprinted it in The Avon Fantasy Reader.  In 2025 was published a Bassett Morgan collection edited by S. T. Joshi appeared, and "Gray Ghouls" was among its contents.  I guess a lot of people are better able to overlook Jones' style than I am.

"The Impossible" by Don Robert Catlin 

"Black Magic," in caps, sounds good, and "malignant Chinaman" sounds like something I'm not supposed to say, but also sounds good.  Don Robert Catlin only has four stories listed at isfdb, all from 1927, and it looks like none were ever reprinted.  Still, we are going to investigate this one.

Travis has not attended a meeting of the Wanderlust Club for four years.  Today he returns to give a speech and a series of demonstrations.  Travis declares that he has been studying Black Magic, capitalized, in Haiti, India, Egypt and China with the goal of debunking magic and freeing mankind from fear!  For it is fear that gives the magician power!  Travis performs feats of magic, amazing the assembled club, his aim to explain the techniques behind these tricks and liberate his colleagues from fear, which is the product of ignorance.  One of Travis' (and Catlin's) rhetorical tricks is to say that when people see magic tricks they think they are seeing the impossible, but in fact they are not, because the impossible is impossible, does not exist.

A voice cries out--it is that of a "withered, ancient-looking old Chinaman," and he accuses Travis of lying.  The impossible is possible says the old Chinese!  This old geezer has followed Travis over thousands of miles to retrieve an ancient book Travis stole from him, a book that explains how magic tricks work.  Travis hopes to teach the world these secrets and thus debunk the supernatural and defang all magicians.  One of the odd conceits of this story is that a real problem facing the world is that magicians are oppressing people; I don't know, maybe that is true in the Third World?

"...down through the ages, the peoples of the earth have been as dust beneath the feet of the sorcerers, bound to them by a chain of fear hitherto unbreakable. It is my purpose to break that chain!"

Another odd conceit of "The Impossible" is that telepathy and other psychic abilities are real, and are among the techniques used by magicians to fool people into thinking magic is real.  Travis and the Chinese guy have a psychic battle.  Also real is pyrokinesis--the Chinese man uses his mind to burn up the ancient book, so Travis can't publish its secrets.  Then Travis pulls a gun and shoots the Chinese guy three times in the chest.  But before he dies, the old man draws a dagger and slashes Travis to death.  Both men, both experts in "magic," which is fake, and psychic powers, which are real, die.  The end.

I have to give "The Impossible" a thumbs down.  Catlin's story is short but it feels long because much of its length is repetitive speeches from Travis, speeches full of nonsense about how we are all victims of magicians and how the impossible is impossible.  The writing style is weak.  And the whole idea of the story is ridiculous.  What is the practical difference between magic and psychic powers?  The world is living in fear of magicians because they can read your mind and set you on fire, but people will stop being afraid if they learn that mind-reading and pyromancy are not properly called "magic" but "psionics?"  Whatever I call the powers that steal my privacy and set me on fire, I'm just as abused and just as burned up!         

"The Unchained Devil" by Roscoe Gilmore Scott

Stott was, it appears, a college professor who edited a volume of Edgar Allen Poe and wrote what look like self-help books, advice books for teachers, and hymns.  He only has one fiction credit at isfdb, this one.  I sort of chose "The Unchained Devil" because it was short, and because I have already read so many music-related horror stories and I guess I was curious about another one.

Well, "The Unchained Devil" is kind of clunky, but it isn't terrible.  And it maybe is an interesting historical document for its depiction of European immigrants to America and its attitude about Germany less than a decade after World War One.  Acceptable, but barely.

Our narrator was born in Germany, a musical prodigy, a genius at the violin!  But today he is in his early forties, sick and dying, barely making a living playing the "bass viol" in an orchestra here in the USA.  What happened?  Well, he wants to tell us before he dies, though he doubts we will believe, and he is so sick he can barely write!

Evil royals stole the narrator's father's plans for new toys, and the Prussian army threatened to conscript the narrator and abort his destiny as one of the world's great violinists, and so the narrator's family emigrated to America.  The narrator's grandfather, a mysterious guy, came with them; Grandpa turns out to have wealth of which the narrator and his parents were not aware.  (How is it that the narrator's parents are ignorant of the wealth of one of their own parents?  This story has some odd problems.  The author should have made this dude an uncle or something.)  Grandpa brought with him to America a big box like a coffin.  In Massachusetts, Grandpa buys a small estate and puts up what was in the coffin-like crate--a big statue of Otto von Bismarck, his hero.  Grandpa declares that this statue will be their inspiration.  Anyway, Dad dies before getting any traction in the toy biz and Grandpa turns out to be a spy and also dies before his charts of US ports can help Germany in the Great War.  

Secret agent Gramps comes to the narrator in a dream, tells him to consult the statue of Bismarck.  When the narrator does so, the face of Bismarck turns into that of the Devil!  The rest of the story is about how the Devil offers to make the narrator the world's greatest violinist if he goes along with Satan's plans and threatens the narrator with humiliation and death if he goes against Satan (I think.)  The plot is resolved in the current day, as the writer is sick and dying, I guess as punishment from Satan, or as payment to Satan for briefly giving him success; somehow the narrator's business relationship with Satan was hard for me to figure out.  Inexplicably, a girl in her twenties, an attractive woman and a talented sculptress, falls in love with the narrator, even though he is all broken down, practically a hunchback.  She recarves the statue of Bismarck into something nice, and helps cure the narrator, who recovers and is able to put aside the bass viol and take up the more prestigious violin again.

This story is kind of confusing and/or subtle, and would benefit, in my opinion, if it was more clear and explicit.  The narrator never wholeheartedly embraces the Devil or Jesus, at least he doesn't tell us that he does; it seems like Satan sort of hypnotizes him and then the girl sort of interposes herself between Satan and the narrator, without the narrator himself ever making any sort of decision.

What surrender I ever made will always be a mystery to me. I can not name an hour when I ever said to imp or god that I would do thus or so. 

A story in which the main character lacks agency and doesn't have clear passions or goals is rarely a compelling or entertaining story.  Also, because the narrator never explicitly aligns with or against the Devil, it is not clear why bad things are happening to him, why he gets sick after his initial success.  I also didn't quite understand what Grandpa wanted the narrator to do; Grandpa's ghost says "We have our work to do — you and I" and apparently Grandpop's work was to help Germany conquer the world, but what is the narrator's work that Gramps wants the narrator to do?  The narrator never does anything to undermine the United States or Germany's other rivals.  And what did the Devil want the narrator to do?  Maybe I'm a dummy, but I also found confusing how the narrative switched back and forth between the narrator's youth, when he had those visions of Gramps and Satan, to today, when he is a twisted wreck at death's door with whom some beautiful genius falls in love.

Like I said, barely acceptable.  This material is a good framework for a story, and if all the characters' motivations and goals were out in the open and we got to observe all of them making bold decisions in pursuit of those goals, I probably would have liked it.

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This has got to be one of the worst experiences I have ever had reading Weird Tales.  Maybe I should have chosen some other stories from this issue.  Hopefully the rest of 1927 will be better.

Weird Tales, Jan '44: M W Wellman, H Bok, N S Bond & R Bradbury

There's nothing wrong with skipping around a little bit while we pursue our eldritch endeavor of trying to read at least one story from every issue of Weird Tales.  So let's take a little break from 1927 and look at the January 1944 issue of the unique magazine of the bizarre and unusual.  The cover of this issue was reused for the July 1954 issue, and I'm pretty sure I also saw it on some recent vampire anthology, but I can't recall the title of that recent volume.  In the letters column we have jocular biographical sketches from Nelson S. Bond (useless banal and juvenile jokes) and Frank Belknap Long (Long takes the task seriously and tells us tidbits about his ancestors, early life, and his evolving writing career.)  Bond and Long have stories in this issue--we read Long's story like two years ago, but we'll be reading Bond's today, plus the contributions of Southerner Manly Wade Wellman, beloved draughtsman Hannes Bok, and one of the mainstream's favorite speculative fiction writers, Ray Bradbury.  

(If, like me, you suffer from a congenital distrust of secondary sources, don't listen to what I have to say about these stories and instead read them yourself at this link.)

"The Golden Goblins" by Manly Wade Wellman 

This is the second John Thunstone story; we read the first, "The Third Cry of Legba," back in August.  

A successful college man, an honor student and captain of the basketball team, comes to visit John Thunstone.  Long Spear is this paragon's name, and he is a Native American, and though he wears a fashionable business suit and is a fraternity man he still worships the gods of his ancestors.   Long Spear asks Thunstone to keep for him an ancient artifact, a mysterious something given to his tribe (Long Spear is current chief) ages ago by the gods.  Even Long Spear doesn't know what the thing, bound up inside many layer of rawhide coverings, is, but it is his sacred duty to protect it, and somebody is after it!  This artifact, whatever it is, keeps Long Spear's tribe united, and if the white man gets it, his tribe will be more easily abused by the pale faces.  Long Spear even knows which white man is after the mystery object--Barton Siddons, a man who has the ear of Congressmen and is trying to get Long Spear's tribe's worship forbidden.  

Siddons approaches Thunstone that very day, at a restaurant.  These two men talk about Long Spear's tribe.  Siddons accuses the tribe of human sacrifice, and Thunstone counters that it has been like 100 years since they sacrificed anybody.  Thunstone can tell that Siddons doesn't really care about stopping human sacrifice or anything like that--Siddons wants to steal the mineral wealth that lies under the tribe's reservation!

Later, after Long Spear and Thunstone conduct a ceremony with the mystery object (Long Spear isn't just chief of his tribe, but also medicine man) and Long Spear gets a premonition of danger, Siddons, having crept into Thunstone's flat, knocks Thunstone out and ties him up.  As Thunstone watches, Siddons unwraps the bundle containing the artifact, peeling off layer after layer, including a layer that consists of a white person's scalp!  Further down, beyond all the hides, is a sort of brick or clay box, and inside the box a little clay vase.  And in the vase--a little gold figure of a warrior.  And another, and another.  An entire army of little fighting men armed with spears, clad in feather headdresses, more than can physically fit in the tiny vase, which must be a portal to another universe or something like that.  The little models come to life, kill Siddons, free Thunstone, and return to the vase.

"The Golden Goblins" is a lot like Raiders of the Lost Ark, and, somewhat amazingly, Long Spear actually mentions The Ark of the Covenant at one point in the story.  In Raiders of the Lost Ark, the hero does surprisingly little substantive in regards to the plot, and in the climax doesn't defeat the enemies or solve a problem or whatever, but just observes a supernatural phenomena, and Thunstone performs the same function here.  In the Spielberg film, we learn that the God of the Jews is real and will smite those who oppress God's chosen people.  In "The Golden Goblins," we learn that the gods of a Native American tribe are real and will smite those who seek to oppress the Indians.

It is sort of interesting to see such a pro-Indian story--Thunstone even says that Native American religion is as good as Christianity.  Compare this to Cornell Woolrich's "The Moon of Montezuma," which we just read, in which the religion of the Native Americans is explicitly compared to Christianity and found to be wanting, to be no more than murder and human sacrifice.  Whether today's diversity celebrators would like "The Golden Goblins," I don't know, they may find the story patronizing--Thunstome even calls Long Spear "a credit to any race."

"The Golden Goblins" is pretty well-written and the supernatural element is good, but I'm grading it just acceptable.  The cardboard archetype characters--the Indian who beats the white man at the white man's game but is also 100% committed to his own vibrant authentic nonwhite traditions; the white man whose virtue and role in the story consist solely of validating everything about the nonwhite exemplar; and the rapacious white racist--don't do much of anything, just stand there exuding their virtue or their evil.

"The Golden Goblins" has reappeared in Wellman collections and, like all four of today's stories, in the May 1944 Canadian edition of Weird Tales.

"Dimensional Doors" by Hannes Bok

Bok's name appears on the cover of that Canadian edition of Weird Tales, but it doesn't seem that "Dimensional Doors" was ever printed in a book.  Well, let's see what it is all about.  In the American magazine we are reading, "Dimensional Doors" is accompanied by a full page drawing by Bok of a young man with nice hair hanging out with a strange long-necked monster.

Danny is at a crowded bar when he is approached by a "husky" young man with a big ring with a glimmering red jewel in it.  Will Danny help him?  Will Danny take the ring?  The guy is obviously scared, says he is being followed.  Danny isn't that interested in taking the ring, but offers to hear the man's story, and the nervous man, so nervous he is shaking, tells his tale, which Bok relates in the third person. 

Eddie dropped out of school and left home and found himself, after an illness, out of work and with no place to stay.  He hasn't eaten in three days when a strange guy, six feet eight inches tall with an alien accent and a face that reminds Eddie of a cat, approaches him.  Aslanvik offers Eddie a place to sleep and hopes for a job, takes him to an apartment in a former industrial building, an apartment with elaborate weird decor, like the decor of an alien world where the animals are different than here, where even the people are different!  

Aslanvik feeds Eddie, then tells him the job he has to offer him entails adventure, even danger.  He takes Eddie to a room full of elaborately carved canvases (one such appears in Bok's illustration for his story) that turn out to be portals to other worlds, each activated by a jewel in a ring.  Aslanvik wants Eddie to do a little housework in this place, and, more importantly, to lock the portals after he has passed through them and unlock them at a set time so he can return.  If the portals are left open, alien monsters might come to Earth, and nobody wants that!  Aslanvik is some kind of merchant or bandit, brings valuable items from other worlds here to Earth to sell.

The rest of the story follows Eddie's new life and his efforts to escape it, to sneak or brazen his way past such obstacles as Aslanvik's scrutiny and his alien watch-monsters.  Will Eddie escape?  Or die in the attempt? Or remain Aslanvik's slave forever?  Knowing Bok was gay, one wonders if this story maybe symbolizes some kind of abusive or predatory homosexual relationship--two men living together in an old elaborately furnished business building that smells of incense, one keeping house and the other engaged in a strange business involving art and interior design, keeping the subordinate member of the couple under his thumb with all-too-believable threats.

"Dimensional Doors" is well-written and I like the plot--thumbs up!  It is too bad this story never got into an anthology and so is not that widely available.  Further proof that reading these old magazines is worthwhile, though no such proof is necessary--I consider it self-evident that reading these magazines is worthwhile.   

"The Master of Cotswold" by Nelson S. Bond 

I guess people liked Nelson S. Bond, because his name is emblazoned on the very top of this issue of Dorothy McIlwraith's magazine.  Do I like Nelson S. Bond?  Survey says....

"Magic City"                          "marginally positive"

"Prescience"                           "pretty good"

"To People a New World"      "Lame twist ending...little plot...thumbs down"

"Pipeline to Paradise"            "acceptable filler"

"The Cunning of the Beast"   "thumbs down"

It looks like Nelson S. Bond's score here at MPorcius Fiction Log is teetering on a knife edge, with two pluses, two minuses and a zero.  It looks like "The Master of the Cotswold" may be the deciding factor in this man's fate as he sits before the merciless court of MPFL. 

When I was working at a research center at a public university, my boss, the director of the center, who used the research grants for her personal expenses and so was rolling in the moolah, used to brag about her fancy ass vacations, and would tell us "Oh, how I love The Cotswolds" and shit like that.  One of my jobs as a "research assistant" was to help the boss plan her vacations, and I would have to call hotels and theatres and so forth to get reservations and all that.  You'll be happy to hear I did a shit job as a travel agent.  I also did a shit job trying to get her granddaughter's poetry bragging about these vacations into The New Yorker.  I did a good job taking long lunches with the pinko girls working in the office, though.  That is where I shone, hanging out in Midtown restaurants for hours, trying to convince these young women that the Fulan Gong were the innocent victims of the Chinese Communist Party and not the reverse as they believed.

Anyway, the American narrator of Bond's story, like my corrupt boss of twenty-odd years ago, goes on vacation from New York to the Cotswolds.  "The Master of Cotswold" is a series of his diary entries penned by this guy, a novelist.  He rents a dilapidated manor house in the Cotswolds which has an abandoned limestone quarry on its grounds.  He has the place repaired, furnishes it, hires a London family to be his servants, etc.  The locals warn him not to be too "inquisitive," and object when he has an old well uncovered.  After taking all the rocks and the metal slab off the ancient well, our narrator starts hearing pipe music at night, music that disturbs his sleep, even seems to affect his psychology.  Mysterious creatures start tearing up the lawn, and one of the servants turns up dead.  The pipes get louder and louder and more upsetting every night.  More people die as they try to seal up the well, and then comes the reveal and the climax--it is Pan who came out of the well, a god who can control animals and plants and offer men one night of blissful union with nature, a night of hedonistic joy that is paid for with a horrible death.

Everything that happens in "The Master of Cotswold" is predictable and obvious, but Bond does a professional job in writing the story.  He throws around architectural terms and references to 18th-century English luminaries like Hogarth, Goldsmith, and Sterne, guys I read and read about years ago when I was laboring under the fantasy that I might someday become a college professor, and this adds a little something to Bond's tale.  I can moderately recommend "The Master of Cotswold."

"The Master of Cotswold" is included in the Bond collection Mr. Mergenthwirker's Lobblies and Other Fantastic Tales and in the 60th anniversary Arkham House anthology, Arkham's Masters of Horror.

"The Sea Shell" by Ray Bradbury

So, today we've had a story about a white racist who gets killed by Native American gods, a story about a man down on his luck who is enslaved by some kind of interdimensional desperado, and a story about an American who foolishly summons a cruel god and gets himself and at least four innocent English people killed.  And what does Ray Bradbury bring us?  A sappy story about how you should enjoy yourself when you are young.

Johnny is a Midwestern boy, age eleven.  He is sick, and has to stay in bed.  Impatiently, he watches through his window at the neighborhood kids out there, who play all day.  The doctor gives him a sea shell, and he holds it to his ear and hears the ocean.  Never having seen the ocean, he becomes obsessed with seeing the sea, wants to go to the shore, which is like two days drive away.  He wants to go to the ocean now, but of course Dad won't be able to take off from work for a while.  Mom talks about impatience, about how impatient children are, how part of becoming an adult is learning patience.  But she also urges Johnny to enjoy himself while he is young, recognizing that adults lose some capacity to enjoy themselves.  

Johnny begins hearing voices through the shell, beckoning him.  Eventually he is transported to the sea by the shell, and when Mom comes to his room, she finds his bed empty, except for the shell.  When she holds the shell to her ear, she can hear her son playing in the surf.

"The Sea Shell" is well-written, but it feels like filler, sentimental "nice" filler instead of blood and guts horror filler, though I suppose Bradbury's story is "bittersweet," as it recognizes the inevitable tragedy of having to grow up, and maybe we are supposed to think of how scared Mom and Dad are going to be that their kid disappeared and nobody will believe that he is now in (I guess) California, 1500 miles away.  Will they ever see him again?  We're grading "The Sea Shell" acceptable.

Peter Haining and some continental European and Japanese editors included "The Sea Shell" in anthologies in the 20th century, but it doesn't look like the story was included in any Bradbury collections until the 21st century.

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A good issue!  Our weird journey through 1944 will be a smooth and comfortable one if every issue is as good as this January one!

Fantastic, Nov '52: M Spillane, C Woolrich & P W Fairman

The cover of the third issue of Fantastic is a wraparound which depicts a scantily-clad woman about to be murdered by goblins, which I think we have to admit is pretty crazy.  We've read two stories that debuted in this issue of Howard Browne's magazine, "Final Exam" by Chad Oliver and "To Fit the Crime" by Richard Matheson.  Today we'll read a story in the issue printed under Mickey Spillane's byline (though isfdb tells us Browne deserves a co-writing credit on this thing) and one by Cornell Woolrich, and, to round things out, a story appearing under the pen name Ivar Jorgensen but apparently written by Paul W. Fairman.  You can scrutinize the horrifying cover and sexually suggestive interior illos as well as join me in reading these three stories at this link to the very scan of the November 1952 issue of Fantastic that I will be reading. 

"The Veiled Woman" by Mickey Spillane and Howard Browne 

The editor's intro to "The Veiled Woman" acknowledges the hostility of critics to Spillane, crediting it, and Spillane's financial success, to Spillane's "emphasis" on "sex and sadism," and promotes "The Veiled Woman" as Spillane's "first science-fiction story."

Having read "The Veiled Woman," I can tell you it is very pulpy and melodramatic, written with gusto, full of crazy elements, and I found it a lot of fun.  Spillane and Brown, by including so many superlatives in the story, like in a superhero comic book, and by making the bad guys self-professed communists and the women sex objects, seem to be challenging the critics to attack the story, but "The Veiled Woman" is irresistibly entertaining.

A few years ago, the handsomest and wealthiest of New York bachelors vanished in Africa while looking for a new source of uranium.  He's our narrator.  Two months ago he reappeared with a new wife--she is reputedly the most beautiful woman in the world, but she wears a veil so nobody can see her face!  They lived shut away from the outside world in a Manhattan penthouse but then moved after a house invasion in which our narrator killed two burglars with his bare hands!  As the story begins, Karl and Lodi Terris are living in a remote cabin in upstate New York, but the world won't leave them alone!  A beautiful woman, a blonde daughter of privilege from Westchester who has betrayed her country and become a foreign agent dedicated to revolutionary socialism, and her gang of thugs bust into Karl and Lodi's love nest!  They think Karl has a device that exploits cosmic rays as an energy source and want to use it to make the USSR ruler of the world!  They don't find any such device, but take Lodi away with them, presumably to pressure Karl into giving up to them the machine Karl says does not exist.

The US government also thinks Karl has a super energy machine and, while he is looking for Lodi, Karl has to evade efforts of the feds to drag him before Congress.  As a rich guy, Karl has a legion of smart employees and they help him do the detective work that involves looking through documents and calling people on the phone to figure out who that blonde commie is.  Karl handles the detective work that involves going to crummy neighborhoods and beating people up all by himself.  He ends up getting captured by the Soviet agents but turns the tables on them and gets the info he needs through torture of a pretty boy sadist.  Then he rescues Lodi, killing many creeps in the process.

The FBI finally catches up to Karl and he and Lodi must testify before Congress.  Karl tells the assembled legislators and political appointees a crazy story.  In Africa, his plane crashed and he was injured and nursed back to health by member of a lost race!  He fell in love with their princess and married her!  Karl relates the history of these kind and generous people.  They lived in luxurious cities back when your ancestors and mine were just cave men!  But then an evil race bombed those fine cities into ruin, and the survivors of this gentle people took refuge underground.  These people have the secret of longevity, and know how to use cosmic rays as a source of power, so their lives are peaceful and easy.  The climax of the story is the revelation that Lodi's people are colonists from Mars, their enemies raiders from Venus, and, to prove it, Karl strips off Lodi's clothes, revealing that the skin of her gorgeous body and beautiful face are green!

(The reason the Feds and the Reds think Karl has some kind of cosmic ray exploitation device is that Lodi temporarily was radioactive and left traces of this radioactivity on the ship she and Karl took home to New York.  This is a weakest and least satisfying part of the whole story.)   

Karl and Lodi return home, only to be ambushed by a top male communist agent and that blonde Westchester girl.  The man, vengeful, murders Lodi right there in front of Karl, and then the Westchester girl kills the foreigner and declares her love for Karl!  She has had an unquenchable desire for Karl ever since she saw him naked the night she busted into this house (the first time.)  She insists they have sex right there, and Karl obliges, banging her in the same house where his green wife lies dead with three bullet holes in her chest!  When he is done enjoying the Westchester traitor's body he shoots her twice in the stomach, killing her.

"The Veiled Woman" is the wild male wish-fulfillment fantasy, the dream of being a rich guy who says fuck you to the government, outfights low-life thugs and effeminate commies, and effortlessly seduces gorgeous young women, has sex with them, and then abandons them to enjoy the next girl in line.  The scenes of violence are pretty exciting, the sexual content is vulgar but has a striking and memorable vitality, and even the detective stuff is not bad.  The science fiction content is goofy, but not terrible, and is a sort of MacGuffin afterthought, anyway.  Everything is over-the-top, but in an exhilarating rather than an exhausting way.  At least in my opinion; if Mao is your hero and violence against women turns your stomach, "The Veiled Woman" is not for you.

"The Veiled Woman" would reappear in a 1979 anthology of science fiction stories by mystery writers, Mysterious Visions--the cover illustration of the Dutch edition of this volume is a still from the 1958 film Colossus of New York.  In 2018, Armchair Press paired "The Veiled Woman" with Edgar Rice Burroughs' second Pellucidar book in one of their series of "Double Novels," giving it a cover that gives away Lodi's skin color.

"The Moon of Montezuma" by Cornell Woolrich

Here's a mystery writer the critics have been kinder to than to Spillane. I also have a sense that while Spillane enjoyed himself with his fame and fortune, Woolrich was a sad sack who lived in squalor even after making a pile of dough.  A study in contrasts, there two guys.

"The Moon of Montezuma" is a real change of pace after "The Veiled Woman," Woolrich's pace is very slow, with lots of descriptions of everything and everybody.  For example, we hear all about the architecture of a house in Mexico and its decor and how the inhabitants have a subtle cruel look to their Aztec faces.  And there is a lot of jazz with the moon and shadows and moonlight.  This is a far more literary story than Spillane's, but like "The Veiled Woman," "The Moon of Montezuma" is about how dangerous women and foreigners are, and Woolrich's story, like Spillane's, is full of sex and of violence against women.

A blonde-haired and blue-eyed American woman uses up all her money chasing her husband down to Mexico, bringing with her their month-old baby, whom Dad has never seen. She ends up at a remote house where live some of the aforementioned cruel-looking women:

There was about her whole beauty, and she was beautiful, a tinge of cruelty, of barbarism. That same mask-like Aztec cast of expression, of age-old racial inheritance.

These women claim they have no idea where the blonde's husband is, but usher blondie in anyway.  Woolrich generates a real sense of menace, describing how these Mexican women look at the little blonde baby in a way that is "mechanical" and "cold."  Is Woolrich exploiting Anglo racism to make his story more effective?  Maybe.

Blondie stumbles upon a clue that suggests her husband has been here--even fathered a child among these Mexican women!  A child who recently died.  We readers wonder if this other child's death foreshadows the death of blondie's child, or if the Mexicans will seize the American baby as a replacement.  Sure enough, at night, the young beautiful Mexican woman, Woolrich reminding us that in her veins flows the blood of the Aztecs, those masters of human sacrifice, whose religion was not the religion of turning the other cheek but the religion of mass murder and the shedding of oceans of blood, creeps towards where the American woman and her baby sleep, moving like a panther, a knife in her teeth. 

The next day the American woman is in a shallow grave near a well and the Mexican woman has a new blonde baby to replace the old.  Weeks later the police arrive.  The killer has sex with the police detective as a means of dampening his enthusiasm for investigating the case of the missing gringa.  Eventually, the father of the ill-fated children, both the American blonde's and her Indian killer's, returns from prospecting far away.  Woolrich suggests that maybe he treats women shabbily because he learned during combat in World War II that life is meaningless.  "The Moon of Montezuma" is a downer!  This guy (also blonde and blue-eyed) has no idea the blonde baby is from his Yankee wife and not his Mexican wife.  

Months go by.  A rose the blonde wore on her lapel gives birth to a rose bush that rises from her secret grave.  To the rage of the Mexican wife, the white man spends a lot of time and energy cultivating and admiring this new rose bush, a rose of a breed not resident of this region.  One night the jealous Indian wife sneaks out to uproot and destroy the rose bush, but slips and falls in the nearby well, her shawl ("reboso") catching in the rose bush so she is hanged to death.

Thumbs up for this pretty disturbing story of a bunch of evil people and the foolish woman who is their victim.  "The Moon of Montezuma"'s racial and sexual politics will blow the minds of today's readers (Mexicans of all colors are cruel, callous and corrupt; women's primary concern is keeping a man; men shouldn't invest too much feeling in women but instead invest in their sons, through whom they will live on) but Woolrich sells these now-declasse philosophies with skill and in the context of the story (and maybe in the context of your life, hey, I don't know) they absolutely ring true.

"The Moon of Montezuma" was reprinted in the Woolrich collections Beyond the Night (1959) and The Fantastic Stories of Cornell Woolrich (1981) and the 1987 anthology House Shudders.

"The Missing Symbol" by Paul W. Fairman

This story is about the first trip to the moon, the psychologies of the men on that first trip.  As they wait for blast off, one guy is romantic, thinking about how this is the culmination of man's quest for knowledge, one guy wonders how long his wife will wait to find another man if he dies, one guy is scared and keeps telling himself he's not a coward, another guy is proud as punch, giddy with joy.  We hear these men's thoughts in italicized text.

The trip to Luna will take a week, and on the second day the crew goes insane.  I have to admit, considering that for centuries men went away from Europe on sea voyages of months' and years' duration few of them went totally insane, and the similar lack of debilitating insanity aboard innumerable ships and submarines from many nations during the World Wars, the idea that five specially trained guys couldn't keep it together for 48 hours in a space ship in peacetime is a little hard to credit.  Anyway, on day two one guy is paranoid and hides in his cabin and another guy picks a fight with the captain and knocks him over with a punch and has to be restrained and soon all the men are full of hate for each other and only grudgingly do their jobs so the ship doesn't fail.  We hear their outrageous hatred for each other in their thoughts in italicized text and hear about they fight each other in the corridors should they meet.

The five men get to Luna, and on the moon's surface their psychologies return to normal and they celebrate their success.  I guess we are supposed to think something about being in space makes you insane, and after landing on the moon, even though there is no atmosphere and the gravity is low, that something, whatever it is, is no longer in effect.  The zing ending is that the men know they will go insane on the way home, and who knows if they will all survive on the way back, seeing as some of them almost got killed on the way here.

I'm giving "The Missing Symbol" a thumbs down.  The gimmick does not work--if cosmic rays or distance from Earth or fear of the danger of vacuum or disorientation from lack of gravity makes you crazy, you would also be crazy on Luna.  And there is no real plot; the characters don't solve the problem--they don't even tackle the problem!--and there is no resolution.  "The Missing symbol" is an idea more than a story, a kernel the author didn't bother to build a story around.

I think "The Missing Symbol" is a pointless failure, but Hal Clement, perhaps the platonic ideal of a hard science fiction author, included it in his anthology First Flights to the Moon, so I guess you shouldn't take my word for it.

    

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Two solid thrillers (with little SF content) by famous and important writers and a limp misfire by a minor writer that should never have been published in this form.  Two out of three isn't bad, especially since the good stories are long and the abortion is brief.  

I really enjoyed today's Spillane and Woolrich stories, but I won't be reading anything by these gentlemen again soon--I have a feeling these guys bang away at the same themes again and again, and the effect of their prose will dull with repetition.  Maybe in a few months or years?

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.

"The Bride of Osiris" by Otis Adelbert Kline

As you know, we here at MPorcius Fiction Log are reading stories from 1927 issues of Weird Tales.  The cover of the August 1927 issue of the unique magazine promotes a three-part serial by Otis Adelbert Kline, "The Bride of Osiris," and today it is the subject of our examination.  This novella would resurface in 1975 in a 96-page collection of Kline stories put out by Robert Weinberg, first of his Lost Fantasies series, and in 2018 in a 240-page(?) hardcover edition by Fiction House.  Over three numbers of Weird Tales, I think "The Bride of Osiris" takes up like 60 pages.    

All three of the Weird Tales stories we read last time dealt with nonconsensual sexual relationships, and maybe this is more of the same.  Just look at the cover and title!  Well, let's see what our latest excavation of the 99-year-old treasure trove that is WT'27 turns up.  Join the dig here, here and here.

Somewhat to my surprise, "The Bride of Osiris" is not a supernatural story with evil wizards and animated mummies and that sort of thing, but a science fiction story about a high tech city hidden underneath Chicago.  Kline talks quite a bit about the mechanics of such a city--its ventilation and drainage, its architecture, its rulers' eugenic breeding of a race of super strong men and women as tall as seven feet tall, and so forth.  One way the city thrives is by tricking gullible wealthy people (people we today might think of as "New Age" types) into joining their cult, which is based on the religion of ancient Egypt.  Another way is working with the organized crime for which Chicago is known worldwide to direct into the subterranean city both stolen material wealth and kidnapped beautiful women.  The plot of "The Bride of Osiris" consists of conventional detective and action adventure elements, you know, people getting captured again and again and escaping again and again, people listening in on the meetings of the crooks, people being scheduled for sacrifice, women forced to marry some creep, a huge explosion at the end.  There are quite a few gory injuries--even the female leads get whipped or stabbed until they bleed.  Kline does tend to describe architecture at some length, but in general the pace is fast, and the story is kind of fun.  I can mildly recommend "The Bride of Osiris" as boilerplate entertainment.  If you want a plot breakdown and a little more analysis, read on below.

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Our tale begins in Chicago with Alan Buell, son of a wealthy importer, and his fiancé Doris, daughter of a college professor.  For months a big strong man who looks like a retired military officer has been staring at Doris at the symphony and tonight he is staring at her as she dance with her betrothed at a night club.  While Alan is getting his top hat at the coat check, somebody seizes Doris and throws her into a limo.  Alan jumps on the limo's running board and fights the kidnappers through the window, but is thrown off into the street.

The cops and a medic show up to interview and patch up Alan.  Clenched in Alan's bloody fist is a little piece of jewelry with Egyptian symbols on it--Alan must have torn it off a kidnapper's garb during the fight.  Despite his lack of experience in law enforcement, Alan convinces the Chicago police chief to hire him on as a detective and put him on the Doris Lee case.  He is partnered with a short muscular Irishman who loves to wrassle, Dan Rafferty.  ("The Bride of Osiris" is kind of like a comic book with its silly plot devices and stock characters.)  Alan and the Irishman, while going all over Chi-town talking to jewelers and pawn shop owners about the piece of Egyptian jewelry, spot a car backing out of a garage--it is the limousine that carried off poor Doris!  When they investigate the garage they get ambushed and captured.  His first day on the job and already he's been outwitted by the underworld! 

Kline shifts the scene backwards to Doris, the day she was seized, and we hear about how she is bound and gagged and blindfolded and driven a long distance, then led by a series of guides down many flights of stairs and elevators to a subterranean lair where Doris is attended to by pretty girls and an Amazonian woman clad in mail and armed with scimitar and spear.  Everybody calls Doris "glorious one" and it becomes clear she is destined to marry Osiris, Lord Karneter, and take the name of Isis!

The scene switches back to Buell and his Irish-American colleague.  Our boys are taken by truck to some distant house, but overpower their captors and tie them up.  They search the house, spy on the contentious private meeting of two criminal masterminds.  When these gangsters can't come to terms, the host presses a button on his table's leg and a huge "negro" with a scimitar emerges silently from a secret door and kills the visitor with one blow.  The detectives explore further, travelling down many stairs, and eventually fall into a trap that drugs them so they experience queer hallucinations.  Recaptured, Alan and Dan come to under the guard of men in the attire of ancient Egyptian soldiers and brought to a sinister court, where the head cultists, clad in wacky costumes including animal masks so that they take on the personae of Egyptian deities like Horus the Hawk and Anubis the Jackal, judge lesser cultists who have committed infractions as well as outsiders like Alan and Dan.  One guy gets thrown to Sebek the sacred crocodile and is devoured.  Alan recognizes that the head of the court-- Osiris, Lord Karneter--as the military man who has been eying Doris for months.  Doris is to be wed to this man,  and Alan is sentenced to death--he will play the role of Osiris N in the elaborate marriage ritual in the Temple of Re in which Osiris N is killed to make way for the reborn Osiris who marries Isis. 

The Irish cop is not to be executed, but put to work as a slave, and, in the September installment of "The Bride of Osiris," Dan takes center stage and we watch as he is guided to his quarters in the middle of what appears to be a full-sized Arabian town, full of haggling merchants, half-naked children playing in the streets and veiled women looking down from the upper story windows.  Is there a whole Near Eastern city hidden beneath the streets of Chicago?  Sure enough, the detective learns that this city of Karneter was founded like a century ago, complete with a quite convincing artificial sky with mechanical simulacra of the stars and artificial lighting that fosters the growth of luxurious gardens.  The city thrives through attracting wealthy converts from all over the world, theft from the surface world, and the kidnapping of attractive women from Chicago.  Even though he is an invader and an agent of the surface world government, Dan is given the job of electrician and tasked with working on the light switches at the Temple of Re.  While working, he gathers clues about poor Doris.

Meanwhile, Alan also learns about this astounding subterranean city as part of his training for his role in the marriage ritual.  The lax security devoted to keeping an eye on the two detectives is a little hard to credit.  I certainly hope when the FBI catches an ISIS-linked terrorist or a CCP spy they don't immediately put him in charge of maintaining the electricity at the Pentagon or Fort Dix.  The Irishman, doing electrical work in the dungeons, sneaks off with ease to talk to a prisoner, a former high priest who was the victim of a conspiracy and is now a rebel, willing to help the surface dwellers.  Dan also meets an Irishwoman, Mary Mahoney, a newly captured slave, and the two of them fall in love when our guy beats up a guard who is sexually harassing her.  As for Alan Buell, upon seeing Doris dressed up as Isis, he briefly escapes with his fiancé, only to be captured again.  Alan and Doris are not punished for their escape attempt, and the end of this second installment of the serial depicts the beginning of the marriage ritual in which Alan will be slain and Doris married to Lord Karneter.  

In the final installment in the October issue, Dan and that defrocked priest work together to sneak into the backstage at the Temple of Re.  When Alan is to be killed, they ensure it is Lord Karneter who is killed and that Alan can impersonate Karneter.  (Everybody in the ritual wears some crazy mask.)  Thinking she is about to be married to Lord Karneter, Doris tries to commit suicide with a dagger, but doesn't drive the blade deep enough.  All of our cast--Alan, Doris, Dan, Mary, and the renegade priest, fight their way out of the Temple of Re to a secret passage.  At the end of the passage is a secret getaway submarine that will take them to Lake Michigan.  The defrocked priest has no interest in the surface world, only in revenge, and stays behind to blow up the entire underground city using the secret self-destruct mechanism.  The tremendous explosion and the burying of the secret city of Karneter and its many thousands of inhabitants does not in the least affect Chicago and its bizarre version of pizza, thank goodness.

The 1975 collection's cover illo depicts Doris' failed suicide attempt

Weird Tales, June 1927: H S Whitehead, E B Seward, and I Turgenev

We're reading our way through the 1927 issues of Weird Tales, that aristocrat of the pulps.  Today, the June number is under review.  Our familiar friends like Edmond Hamilton and Robert E. Howard, August Derleth and E. Hoffmann Price, are not in attendance this time out, so we are digging a little deeper today.  

Robert Howard does show up in the letters column, praising Ray Cummings' "Explorers into Infinity," which I guess the creator of Conan liked more than I did.  And Frank Belknap Long makes an appearance, offering the poem "Advice," an eight-line rhyme that suggests you should hang out with goblins and kobolds instead of fat old people.  At least I think that is what Frank is getting at; poetry is always up for interpretation. 

After that glance at the ancillary matter, time to hit the fiction.  Hit the ground running with us at this link, and maybe come up with your own interpretation of Frank's versification.  

"The Left Eye" by Henry S. Whitehead (1927)

Like Hugh B. Cave, Whitehead actually lived in the West Indies, so maybe this story will offer us some serious legit local color.  "The Left Eye" was anthologized in 1947 in Terror at Night and can be found in various Whitehead collections.

Beautiful and elegant, blue-eyed, copper-haired Kathleen was inexplicably born into a family of hideous degenerate white trash in upstate New York.  "The Left Eye" talks about poor rural whites the way we expect these old stories to talk about poor blacks:

Shiftless, furtive, meansouled, he [Kathleen's father] eked out an existence on his few barren acres of poor land which was endurable only because there was neither in his heredity nor his experience any better standard by which he could realize to the full the utter meanness of everything that conspired to make up his life’s record.

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The rest of the brood [i.e., Kathleen's siblings] were different from each other only in the varying ugliness of their budding dispositions and the equally variant qualities of their general detestability of appearance and habit.

Damn!

At age 17, Kathleen flees her home when Dad tries to marry her off to a fellow bootlegger, a real thug, this brute having offered Dad 200 bucks for her.  Enraged, Dad pursues her and, in a church rectory, murders his daughter and a kindly priest with metal pipe!  I was amazed at this turn of events because I kept thinking Kathleen was going to go to the West Indies and have some kind of voodoo adventure.  After all, among the Whitehead collections in which this story is reprinted is one book called West India Nights and another titled Voodoo Tales.  Anyway, this story never gets far from the Canadian border.  We hear about the killer's flight and the police pursuit.  Dad paddles his way in a stolen skiff to a little island called "Left Eye" because it is one of a group of islands that, on a map, look kind of like the features of a face.  On this island he finds himself in a huge mess of spider webs and eventually is wrapped up by spiders bigger than your hand.  We then get a third section of the story in which some boy scouts find the murderer's body, all drained of fluid and wrapped up in spider silk.

The three component parts of the story--the tragedy of Kathleen, the flight of the killer, the discovery of the body--are well-written and well-paced and all that, but do they make a satisfying whole?  What does a giant spider have to do with an innocent teenaged girl?  We see the killer get killed at the end of the second part, so what is the point of the third part, in which his body is discovered?  It is like we have three separate stories here, each with its own main character and climax, each competently produced, but each not quite satisfying.

An odd story.  We'll call "The Left Eye" acceptable.

"The Land of Creeping Death" by Edna Bell Seward (1927)

In our last episode I tried to get credit for promoting diversity by reading a story by a woman and a story by an author I'd never read before.  And I'm doing it again today!  I assume Seward is a woman, I mean, it's not like a lot of men are running around with the name "Edna," and I have certainly never read anything by her before--she only has this one fiction credit at isfdb.  (She also has listed a poem, "The Murderer," that appeared in the letters column of the March 1924 issue of Weird Tales.)  Well, let's see if Seward is what we might call a "one-hit wonder."

Two Englishmen, one our narrator, and their loyal native servant, after working on building bridges on the subcontinent for the British government, decide to take a three-month vacation, exploring a Burmese river.  In the tiger-haunted wilderness, they come upon a beautiful grey-eyed Englishwoman in distress.  She has been accompanying her widowed father, a scientist here to study a local lizard, but today Dad is missing.  Our guys hang out at her camp, trying to comfort and protect her--these old jungle hands figure Dad is drowned in the river, they having seen a sun helmet floating by earlier today, but don't want to tell her.

At night the camp is attacked by head hunters, black-skinned savages with machetes.  The men fight with rifles, their servant with a knife, the woman with a revolver.  Many of the blacks are killed, but the whites and their loyal brown are overwhelmed.  Knowing the horrible things these savages will do to the woman, the men try to kill her cleanly, but they are felled before they can do so.

In the skull-adorned village of the head-hunters the native servant is killed, the men are scheduled to be sacrificed, and the woman prepared for a fate worse than death at the hands of the fat king of these savages.  At the very last moment, an airplane appears overhead, scaring the head hunters into hiding.  The plane lands and the three people are rescued--the air crew promise to bomb this fortified village at their next opportunity.  It is made clear that the narrator and grey-eyes are an item.

I was disappointed in the deus ex machina resolution of the plot, but otherwise this is a decent adventure story (there isn't much weird about it) with creepy fetishistic sex elements, like the many sentences devoted to the narrator trying to figure out ways to kill the woman he loves so she won't be abused by the natives.  I can mildly recommend "The Land of Creeping Death" as pretty good filler, and tell you if I ever saw Edna Bell Seward's name above another story, I would read it.

"The Song of Triumphant Love" by Ivan Turgenev (1881)

In our last episode I told you I was classing up this joint by reading a "classic" writer, and today I can make that claim again!  Last episode's Weird Story Reprint was by Scotsman Robert Louis Stevenson, and today's is by Russian Ivan Turgenev!  According to isfdb, this translation here in Weird Tales is likely that of Constance Garnett, first published in 1897.  Many translations of "The Song of Triumphant Love" are available at the internet archive, but we're trying to inhabit the 1927 weirdie experience here, and so are reading from the magazine. 

This is a pretty good black magic story about Westerners confronted by the sorcery of the mysterious East.  The tale purports to be a translation of an Italian manuscript and describes a weird adventure in an Italian town in the time of the Borgias, Ariosto and Leonardo.  Two young men are the best of friends, fair Fabio the painter and dark musician Muzzio.  They both fall in love with the most beautiful woman in town, pale Valeria, and compete for her hand like gentlemen.  The loser, Muzzio, graciously accepts defeat and leaves on a four-year trip to Persia, Arabia, India, the borders of China and Tibet.  In the absence of Muzzio, Fabio and his wife lead a happy life, and Fabio becomes a brilliant painter.  Their one sadness is that they cannot seem to produce a child.

Muzzio returns and his friendship with Fabio is renewed.  But Muzzio has been changed by his experiences among Persians, Arabs, Indians.  He smells different, even, plays strange alien songs and shares with his friends strange foreign wines.  Perhaps strangest of all is Muzzio's Malay servant, who is speechless, having had his tongue cut out.  The silent man seems very clever, and Muzzio hints that this mysterious Oriental sacrificed his tongue in return for unspecified powers.

To make a long story short, Valeria becomes tired and weak, distracted and depressed, has bad dreams, and it becomes clear to the reader that she is leaving her bed at night to meet Muzzio.  What is not clear is to what extent Muzzio is using black magic to seduce an unwilling Valeria, and to what extent the mysterious Malay is manipulating both Muzzio and Valeria.  Fabio and Valeria try various means to cure Valeria's afflictions, which they realize emanate from Muzzio, and a crisis comes when, in a passion, Fabio stabs Muzzio.  Muzzio flees, and Fabio assumes he has slain his friend.  Butt sneaking over to Muzzio's rooms, he finds the Malay has employed diabolical magic to animate Muzzio's corpse!  Muzzio and the Malay leave, Muzzio's body moving like a terribly sick man.

Fabio and Valeria resume their happy life now that the specter of Oriental sorcery has left their household.  They never hear of Muzzio or the Malazy wizard again.  However, the last lines of the story hint that Valeria is finally pregnant, but that the child is not Fabio's.  We readers are left to speculate if this child will be fair like Fabio and Valeria and pass as Fabio's, or if the baby will be dark and cause marital strife, even wonder if perhaps the baby will be heir to diabolical powers.

Quite good, thumbs up for the kind of writer a college professor might tell you to read.  With its warnings about foreigners and subtle disturbing sexual content, "The Song of Triumphant Love" is fully in the Weird Tales tradition.  College professors aren't always wrong.

French SF anthologies that include "The Song of Triumphant Love"

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A respectable crop of mayhem, with lots of women at risk of abuse and plenty of foully mistreated dead bodies.  Please steer clear of foreigners, white trash and spiders so that you will be healthy enough and sane enough to enjoy the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log, where we continue our weird journey through 1927.