Robert Arthur: "The Believers," ""The Book and the Beast," and "Ring Once for Death"

Recently, one of my well-read commenters recommended the author Robert Arthur.  Not long after, I encountered at an antique mall a hard cover edition of the one Arthur collection listed at isfdb, Ghosts and More Ghosts, the one with an owl on the cover, not one of the editions with a ghost on the cover.  I didn't drop 20 bucks for this thing, being an inveterate cheapo, but I still felt its appearance in my life  was a sign I should read some of Arthur's stories.  While this early 1960s collection was marketed to young people, the stories were originally printed in places like Weird Tales and Argosy, so presumably suitable for a 54-year-old like myself, at least in their original forms.  So let's hie to the internet archive and read the magazine versions of three tales by Robert Arthur that were reprinted in Ghosts and More Ghosts, two from Weird Tales and one from Amazing.

(You can read the 1963 1st revised edition of Ghosts and More Ghosts at the internet archive here.  The headings of each section below will be a link to the internet archive scan of the appropriate issue of D. McIlwraith's WT or Howard Browne's Amazing.)  

"The Believers" (1941)

"The Believers" appears in Ghosts and More Ghosts under the title "Do You Believe in Ghosts?"  No, I do not, though I regularly meet people who claim they do.  "The Believers" debuted in an issue of Weird Tales that has a wild cover by Hannes Bok and stories we have already read by Ray Cummings ("The Robot God"), Clark Ashton Smith ("The Enchantress of Sylaire"), Ralph Milne Farley ("I Killed Hilter") and Manly Wade Wellman "It All Came True in the Woods.") 

You have probably heard about Orson Welles' 1938 broadcast of an adaptation of H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds that is said to have scared the rubes out in Hicksville.  Ever since, from the day it happened to this day, this event has served journalists, politicians and historians as a case in evidence supporting their contentions that [some segment of] the American people are dolts, [some segment of] the media is out of control and too powerful, or people in 1938 were quaking in their boots over Hitler.  Suffice to say that journalists, politicians and historians are always making mistakes and have innumerable career and ideological reasons to lie, and that the number of people who really were scared by Welles' broadcast, and the proportion of them who took concrete actions in response to their fear, is in dispute.  Anyway, Arthur may have been influenced by this famous event in crafting "The Believers."

Nick Deene is a writer who travels the world having adventures and then writing about them, exaggerating his experiences for effect, suggesting he was in far more danger than he really was.  Arthur stresses how fake Deene is--his tan is from a sun lamp, for example, no from time spent outdoors.  Deene relates and dramatizes some of these past events for broadcast on his regularly scheduled radio program.  His latest stunt is to broadcast live as he is handcuffed in an 18th-century house in the remote countryside, a house that has been abandoned for decades.  Deene and his broadcast team have spread rumors--rumors they themselves made up--that the house is haunted.

The techs and advertising men and print journalists who accompanied Deene into the bedroom of the dusty old ruin leave him once he is handcuffed to the ancient four-poster bed, a microphone set up close to his mouth.  The plan is for Deene to just make up a sighting of some creature, after spending plenty of time setting the stage and building atmosphere by describing the dark bedroom and the sounds he hears and all that.  Arthur tells us, multiple times, that thousands and thousands of radio listeners have tuned in and implicitly believe every phony thing the Deene says.  

Deene describes the sounds and smells of an approaching creature, employing special effects to simulate the former.  He then describes the fanciful monster as it enters the room and then retreats, apparently driven off by Deene's Bible and crucifix.  Then Arthur unleashes his gimmick on us, which unfortunately the editorial intro to "The Believers" has already spoiled for us.  The belief of hundred of thousands of credulous radio listeners has through collective psychic power brought to life the hideous monster Deene described!  After the broadcast ends, but before his fellow broadcasters have entered the house to unlock his handcuffs, this creature attacks Deene!  Will Deene survive?

Not a bad story at all, I'm saying marginally recommendable.

"The Believers" has been reprinted in multiple anthologies in Europe and America, including one edited by Richard Darby which has a preface by one of our favorite thespians, Christopher Lee. 

"The Book and the Beast" (1943)

This story was reprinted in Ghosts and More Ghosts under the title "Mr. Dexter's Dragon," which makes it sound more like a kid's story.  Well, let's see.  We're reading "The Book and the Beast" in an issue of Weird Tales we just looked at, one that includes stories we read by famous weirdies August Derleth, Henry Kuttner and Robert Bloch.  It doesn't look like "The Book and the Beast" has been anthologized.

Murchison is a short balding man whose hobby is collecting books and manuscripts about the occult.  (Of course it is.)  In a Manhattan second-hand shop he finds a very unusual book--a handwritten book of spells!  One of the spells is "To Bring Three Beautiful Females to Your Room After Dark."  Wow!  And you thought "Fireball" was a good spell, you nerd!  Curious, I looked at the version of the story in Ghosts and More Ghosts and found that not only had "Murchison" been changed to "Dexter," but that "To Bring Three Beautiful Females to Your Room After Dark" had been changed to "To Make a Demon Bring Three Bags of Gold."  Booooriiiiiinnnnng.  Well, I suppose with three bags of gold you could persuade three women to come to your room at night...but it's just not the same.

Anyway, back home on Long Island, Murchison looks over the book, finding a painting of a dragon on one page particularly interesting.  The dragon is skinny, as if starved.  Behind it is a pile of human bones including thirteen skulls.  Murchison writes to a fellow old book collector, a Muir, who lives in Brooklyn, about his terrific find.

When Muir comes over for a visit the next day, the police are at Murchison's place because Murchison's servants have reported that Murchison has vanished.  The unscrupulous Muir steals the spell book, which is right there on the missing man's desk.  Muir, we are told, enjoys the company of young blondes, and just such a delightful creature distracts him from the book when he gets back home, but he does have time to look over the painting of the dragon and find it is not all that skinny and that there are fourteen skulls behind it, not thirteen as reported by his friend.  (In the Ghosts and More Ghosts version of the story, the whole blonde angle is dropped.)  The next morning, Muir's servants report their own master has also disappeared.  They see the book, which has a picture of a fat dragon.

Some time later faulty wiring burns down Muir's house, and in the wreckage the authorities unexpectedly find the bones of sixteen people as well as those of some big prehistoric beast, leading to much speculation.

This is a pretty good story; thumbs up for "The Book and the Beast."  I find the black magic angle and the sex angle more engaging than the hokey gullible-radio-audience angle of "The Believers," and find it odd that anthologists preferred "The Believers" over this story.

"Ring Once for Death" (1954)

"Ring Once for Death" appeared in an issue of Amazing that includes a story we are already familiar with, Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s "Death of a Spaceman," a book version of which we read in 2020.  The version of "Ring Once for Death" that appears in Ghosts and More Ghosts was retitled "The Rose Crystal Bell" and it looks like it was this 1963 version that was anthologized in 1991 in Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh's Back from the Dead.  We of course are reading the 1954 magazine version.

Twenty years ago a honeymooning couple visited a shop run by an Asian man (an "Oriental") and purchased a necklace with a crystal pendant.  Today they are back at the shop, now run by the previous owner's son.  A curious crystal bell with no clapper catches wifey's eye--the young proprietor tells a crazy story about how his father separated the bell from its clapper because a weird religious sect claimed if the bell was rung it could bring a person back to life--but only by taking the life of some other person.  The wife recognizes that the pendant of her necklace must be the clapper, and back home she reunites the two pieces of the magic bell.

There follows a somewhat predictable series of tragic events in which people close to the wife get, apparently, killed and then turn out to be unexpectedly OK but at the same moment of the happy revelation somebody else keels over.  All the miraculous recoveries and mysterious deaths can be explained as bizarre coincidences, but of course the wife thinks the magic of the bell is responsible.  The bell is accidently destroyed so we'll never know, and the wife will ever after have to live with the possibility that she chose to preserve one of her loved ones and destroy another.

Acceptable.

On the left, a 1972 paperback edition of Ghosts and More Ghosts

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Despite the collection's title, none of the stories we read today that appear in Ghosts and More Ghosts, at least in their magazine versions, is really about a conventional ghost.  Which is fine by me, as I generally don't find the conventional idea of a ghost very compelling.  Taken as a group these stories are pretty good, so probably we'll be seeing more of Arthur in the future, whose work appeared in publications we are interested in here at MPorcius Fiction Log like Thrilling Wonder Stories and John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Unknown, as well as elsewhere, including a magazine Arthur himself edited, Mysterious Traveler, and a bunch of anthologies Arthur ghost edited for Alfred Hitchcock.

Fugitive of the Stars by Edmond Hamilton

"In the Federation, human and non-human have managed to work together pretty well.  The day may come when your world will want to join them."

Someplace in the Middle West, I forgot to record where, I recently bought a copy of the 1965 Ace Double of Edmond Hamilton's Fugitive of the Stars and Ken Bulmer's Land Beyond the Map, a two dollar souvenir of my visit to one of many antique malls.  We here at MPorcius Fiction Log are big fans of child prodigy, Superman and Batman script writer, and Weird Tales alum Hamilton, who at one point was Isaac Asimov's favorite writer,* so let's read Fugitive of the Stars today.  (If you can't find a two dollar copy yourself, maybe try the scan at the internet archive here, or spend like eleven smackers shopping unlocal at ebay.)

*See page 16 of the hardcover edition of Asimov's Before the Golden Age.

It doesn't actually mention this in my 1965 Ace Double, but Fugitive of the Stars began life in 1957 as a novella in Imagination.  The cover illustration of that magazine, by Malcolm Smith, recreates with exactitude a scene from the novel.  (As of today, you can read this issue of Imagination at the internet archive here.)  Jack Gaughan's cover for the Ace Double publication of the expanded and revised novel is correct thematically, showing how much more powerful the non-human aliens are than the Terran and Skereth-type humans, but in Gaughan's picture they are two or three times as tall as humans--in the book they are just 50% or so taller.  Gaughan also provides an interior illo for the novel of one of the non-human heroes of the book.  Looking inside the volume, we can also see some sloppy editing--the page headings read "FUGITIVES OF THE STARS," rendering the novel title, incorrectly, plural.  Tsk, tsk.

Fugitive of the Stars would be reprinted in an Italian magazine in 1969, a German magazine in 1972, the cover illustration of which reflects the pervasive hand-to-hand fighting and up close and personal physical abuse that characterizes the novel, and again in Italy in 2006 in a Hamilton collection.  (I hope Ed and Leigh got plenty of lire and marks out of these deals.)

Fugitive of the Stars is a decent adventure story of 110 pages about a guy who is cruelly tricked by evil almost-human aliens and failed by the Terran-human establishment and so goes on a star-hopping campaign in search of revenge and redemption that is marked by violence and culminates in him saving interstellar civilization.  We might see hard boiled or noir elements in the story--remember that Hamilton's wife, Leigh Brackett, was a writer of tough guy detective stories.  Barry Malzberg has pointed out how much the first Star Wars movie resembled Hamilton's space operas, and Fugitive of the Stars is sort of like Star Wars in that it is an action adventure tale set in an interstellar civilization full of weird aliens, a story that has a veneer of politics to set the stage for all its action but largely lacks the science and speculations about how technology will change our lives that gives substance to the claim that science fiction is the literature of ideas and a sense of wonder.  (Though Hamilton here makes token gestures towards talking about whether a powerful enough computer will achieve consciousness and/or ruin our lives.)

The Federation spans many solar systems and counts as members various human, human-like and radically nonhuman races.  On the edge of the Federation is the Fringe, systems not yet in the Federation, but that trade and have diplomatic relations with the Federation.  Rumors abound that the Fringe is currently plagued by slavers, but the Federation space navy can't patrol the Fringe because space ports with the facilities to maintain space warships are too far away.  If any of the Fringe worlds join the Federation, the Feds will be able to solve the slaver problem.

Jim Horne is pilot of a Federation packet, Vega Queen.  After dropping off a Federation diplomat named Denman on a Fringe planet of primitives who are said to be victims of the slavers, with the mission of learning more about the slavers, Vega Queen lands on another Fringe planet, Skereth.  The dominant race on Skereth are people who are almost human (Terran-type humans can have sex with them, which is close enough for Horne and every other horny spaceman) and the Skereth have an advanced civilization with starships and ray guns and the rest of it.  Skereth is currently riven by political turmoil.  Half the people want to join the Federation, while half are opposed.  An unfortunate series of events involving fist fights results in Horne's assistant pilot being incapacitated so that a Skereth pilot, Ardric, is hired on to replace him.  Ardric claims to be of the pro-Federation faction, but, while ferrying the pro-Federation diplomat Morivenn somewhere, Vega Queen is destroyed when it flies right into a well-mapped meteor swarm.  Like a hundred people, most of the crew and passengers, Morivenn among them, are killed.  Horne was out cold during the disaster, and survived because somebody dragged him onto a lifeboat.  Horne thinks Ardric was an anti-Federation terrorist in disguise and drugged him and intentionally flew the ship into the meteors to kill Morivenn and then escaped unnoticed on a different lifeboat, but everybody on Horne's lifeboat thinks Horne is a drunk and responsible for the disaster--the diabolical Ardric left clues to lead the gullible Federation authorities to this conclusion.  Horne finds himself in jail and on trial.  Thanks to his wits and his ability to fist fight, he is able to escape jail and make his way back to Skereth where he hopes to find Ardric and clear his name.

On Skereth, Horne steals a surface boat and travels across an ocean teeming with sea monsters and then marches across a wilderness, his intended destination the city where he expects Ardric lives; there is a scene with a sea blob monster that reminded me of a memorable scene from Jack Williamson's classic space opera Legion of Space.  Hamilton distinguishes his hero from Tarzan or Conan or John Carter or whoever by talking about Horne's psychological trauma, how his adventure has corrupted and damaged him--he steals when he never would have stolen before, he has the shakes, he suffers "black depression" and "black despair," considers suicide or abandoning his quest, but then his anger at being framed, at being blamed for the deaths of over 100 people, drives him onwards.

Before reaching the city, Horne hooks up with members of the pro-Federation resistance (he has to fist fight them first) who clue him in to Skereth politics.  The anti-Federation party, the Vellae, control most of the business and politics on Skereth and are probably behind all the slave-taking on the Fringe, and maybe something bigger, something galaxy-shaking.  Among these resistance people is a beautiful blonde, the daughter of Morivenn, Yso.  Yso is no damsel in distress; when there is a dogfight between pro-Fed and Vellae aircraft, she is the gunner on one and kills plenty of people.  We even get a feminist exchange, Yso saying "What's the matter, haven't you ever seen a woman fight before?" and Horne replying that when he was an officer in the Federation space navy some of his fightingest subordinates were women.  We also get a fist fight aboard the aircraft between Horne and a resistance stalwart because Horne wants to fight on against impossible odds and Yso's colleague wants to try to escape.

Our heroes have to crash land in the wilderness, and there we get more scenes to warm your diversity-celebrating heart.  Two dozen non-human aliens of many different species--tentacle people and spider people and elf/vampire people, etc.--rescue the main characters from starvation; the members of this multicultural party are all escaped slaves of the Vellae.  There is a dispute among the escaped slaves over what to do with our heroes, and in keeping with the anti-religious nature of classic science fiction, the leader of the splinter group hostile to Horne and Yso is a priestess whom the other escaped slaves, save her two worshippers, all think is a charlatan.  In keeping with Fugitive of the Stars' practice of periodically including some fisticuffs, the three religious people get manhandled after losing the debate.  (I'll note here that, despite the novel's feminist elements, Hamilton comes up with reasons that both Yso and this priestess, who looks like a human with pointy ears and "over-prominent teeth," have to take off their tops in public--the women object to being stripped but are overruled--getting Skereth into the Federation is more important than your modesty, ladies!)

The religious aliens stay behind, but the other twenty or so escaped slaves join the clandestine march to the city.  As slaves, they toiled in tunnels, part of some secret "Project" so evil the Vellae felt they couldn't use native labor--that is why they were enslaving aliens to do the work.  Horne punches out a Vellae guard and the aliens torture him into giving up info on Ardric and the Project.  The diabolically evil Project is the construction of a subterranean computer the size of a city they call a "brain!"  The Federation outlaws the construction of a computer this powerful, one big reason the Vellae are so adamant about resisting integration into the Federation.  The Feds fear a super computer will drink all the water in the galaxy and win all the short story contests held by magazines nobody reads--oh no, wait, that is why we are scared of super computers in real life.  In Hamilton's book, super computers are anathema because the Federation fears some bad actors will use their computing power to develop invincible weapons, unbeatable military strategies and irresistible propaganda.  I'm sure glad we don't have to worry about anything like that!

The multicultural group busts into the brain control room and captures Ardric (after Horne fist fights him into submission) and triggers a slave uprising.  The slaves capture the underground brain city, and try to hold off the Vellae counterattack on brain city while the leaders of the revolt try to figure out how to destroy the brain once and for all (squeezing info out of prisoners via threats.)  Our multi-species heroes maintain the upper tentacle, burning up the entire subterranean brain complex which is then crushed under an avalanche.

In the last chapter we learn that the Vellae have been largely killed and their cause discredited and Skereth has joined the Federation.  Ardric's treachery is recognized by the authorities and Horne's name cleared--he will get his job as a space pilot back and will be able to marry Yso.

I like Fugitive of the Stars and mildly recommend it to adventure fans.  But I do have some criticisms.  Hamilton should have mentioned Horne's naval career and service in a space war early in the book, not in the middle, just to buttress boilerplate feminist virtue-signaling.  This would have given us insight into his character and helped make his leadership and fighting skills all the more believable to the reader.  Also, we should have been told that the Federation was scared about super computers earlier, instead of at the very end of the book.  Hamilton tells us that ne'er-do-wells three times in the past have tried to build a super computer and been squelched by the Federation, so it should be a thing well known to a naval officer like Horne--it was a mistake for it all to come as a surprise to him.  Finally, Hamilton talks enough about diplomat Denman and the charlatan priestess that I expected to hear about them again, for them to affect the plot or at least to have their fates explained, but they don't show up again and there is no indication if they lived to see the slaves liberated and Skereth made a member of the Federation.  Maybe Ace editor Donald Wollheim gave Hamilton a strict page limit or something.

I got my two dollars worth this time, without even reading the Bulmer half of this Ace Double.  All you Ace Doubles collectors should feel free to weigh in down in the comments on whether Bulmer's Land Beyond the Map is worth reading, and whether the cover of Land Beyond the Map is by Jerome Podwil or John Schoenherr, a fact apparently in dispute.

Next time we'll probably be back in weird territory; until then, keep an eye on those thirsty super computers, my fellow flesh creatures.  

Weird Tales, March '43: Derleth, Kuttner, & Bloch

We continue to creep through Weird Tales!  Last time we read four stories from the January 1943 issue, and today we've got three tales from the issue dated March 1943, the second of the six issues of the Unique Magazine published that year.  Big names today: Arkham House co-founder August Derleth; fixture at Astounding as well as Weird Tales, Henry Kuttner; and script writer for Joan Crawford's Strait-Jacket, Robert Bloch.  A still bigger name, Ray "Martian Chronicles" Bradbury, has a story in this issue we read a few years ago, "The Wind."

"No Light for Uncle Henry" by August Derleth

This is a decent ghost/revenge story with no dumb mistakes.  Mild recommendation for "No Light for Uncle Henry."

Edward is a young man who runs into financial trouble and has to move in with his Uncle Herbert, in the house Herb once shared with his brother Henry, who died a year or so ago.  Derleth stresses that Edward is a "prosaic," boring, staid, square.  Edward doesn't chase women or hang around with friends or get drunk or read popular fiction, as soon as he finds a new job he just goes to work and in the evenings works in the garden on his Uncle's property.

Uncle Herbert warns Edward not to go into dead Uncle Henry's room, and by no means should he shed any light in there.  But one day while gardening Edward looks up into the window of Henry's room and thinks he sees somebody or something.  He goes inside to investigate the dark room, and lights a match to get a better look.  On the wall he sees a shadow--not of himself, but of a seated man, a very fat man!  Hey, wasn't Uncle Henry a big fatso?

The ghost of Uncle Henry starts communicating with Edward in his dreams, but Edward is not the kind of man to believe his dreams and follow the orders of a dead relative who appears in those dreams.  So Henry has to exert direct influence over Edward.  Edward becomes more assertive, less square--he talks back to the boss at the office, he starts reading detective novels, he brings some booze home.  Edward, under supernatural and alcoholic influence, facilitates Uncle Henry's vengeance on his greedy and murderous brother and we readers and Edward learn what foul deeds Herbert committed to earn the hatred of his obese brother Henry.

"No Light for Uncle Henry" was reprinted in the Derleth collections Something Near (1945), that book's 1951 Argentinian edition, and in The Sleepers and Other Wakeful Things: The Ghost Stories of August Derleth (2009).

"Under Your Spell" by Henry Kuttner

Here we have a long joke story.  Forty-something Tinney owns a shop in New York City that sells magic supplies and practical jokes (like itching powder) and that sort of thing.  He advertises for an assistant, and a preternaturally good-looking man, blond curls and blue eyes and a sort of nasty smile, shows up whom we quickly realize is Hermes/Mercury; this god, who uses the pseudonym Quinten Silver, is on vacation from Mount Olympus, a place, we learn, that is pretty boring.  When another man arrives hoping to take the position, Mercury reduces this poor bastard to ashes with a lightning bolt.  Mercury then uses his magic to bilk a customer and to drive off an annoying woman.  Then he drives off Tinney himself, from his own store, when Tinney, despite all the evidence, refuses to admit his new employee is truly a god.  When Tinney tries to enlist aid from the police or friends in the task of ejecting Mercury from his establishment, wacky hijinks triggered by mercury's magic ensure that nobody will help Tinney.

If you can't beat them, join them.  Tinney starts coming up with ways to profit from working arm in arm with a god.  He is sick of running a store, and doesn't like his landlord, but has already paid for a four-year lease on the shop, and convinces Mercury to destroy the shop with a meteor.  This liberates Tinney from the lease (insurance covers all that lost itching powder), but Tinney is injured in the meteor strike and hospitalized, and the meteor contained diamonds, so the landlord whom Tinney resented is richer than before.  (This portion of "Under Your Spell" is in the tradition of stories about people who get three wishes or make a deal with the devil and suffer because they didn't word their request perfectly clearly, and a minor character who witnesses the god's magic at work does mistake Mercury for Satan.)

Mercury gives the money hungry Tinney an "inexhaustible purse;" whenever Tinney opens it, there is 200 bucks inside.  The money is not created, but teleported from some other person's property into the purse--magic, and his greed, have made Tinney a thief.

All financial worries behind him, Tinney wants to retire, but Mercury wants to see the world and so begins preparations and launches publicity stunts for a Tinney the Great worldwide stage tour.  The god promises the tour will only last two years and he will do all the real work--Tinney just has to memorize lines and gestures, all the spectacle will be produced by Mercury with trivial ease.  Tinney, scared of the ruthless and amoral deity, has to agree to this onerous program, but he schemes behind Mercury's back with another magician, a stage performer who is far from eager to compete with the act Mercury can put on.  (I guess Kuttner has dropped the whole idea that Mercury isn't letting Tinney tell people about Mercury's identity.)  

The moment of crisis comes during Tinney the Great's debut performance at a big Manhattan theatre.  Right there on stage, where Mercury has been conjuring mermaids, centaurs, a harpy, a dragon, and still more mythological creatures, Tinney's accomplice tries to trick the god into a death trap.  As it turns out, all of these selfish characters suffer disaster when their shenanigans draw the attention of Circe the witch, whose brunette beauty Kuttner compares to that of Theda Bara.

I like the theme that power is corrupting and all that, but "Under Your Spell" is mostly a joke story and I am no fan of joke stories as you know and the narrative doesn't really hold together all that well, doesn't really flow smoothly.  The fact that Mercury murders an innocent stranger right at the start of the story diminishes the drama of the piece--corruption in a story should escalate, and the fact that association with Mercury turns Tinney into a thief in the middle of the story and then an attempted murderer near the end is no big deal because he has already seen Mercury kill a man immediately upon meeting him and didn't do a thing about it.  Why Kuttner has the rival applicant get killed instead of just teleported away (that is what Mercury does to the rival magician who tried to murder him on stage) I am not quite sure.  To establish that the gods are amoral, I guess.  But then why not also slay the rival magician?  Another problem is that the debut performance should be the big climax, the plot she be resolved there and the story should end there.  But the entire Circe business comes after the stage show and feels tacked on, less exciting and dangerous than the actual show.

One interesting aspect of the story I will point out is that Kuttner assumes readers are familiar with the Odyssey and know what Circe is all about.

Barely acceptable filler.  "Under Your Spell" has only been reprinted in a small press Kuttner collection in 1991 that I suspect is just photocopies from old magazines.

"A Bottle of Gin" by Robert Bloch

Another jocular story.  Collins, a young guy, short, who loves booze, works at the museum.  His boss, who has a huge collection of valuable art objects and artifacts, sends Collins to an antique store to buy a rare Korean vase.  While Collins is there, robbers appear and murder the store owner and Collins flees with the vase.  For three days the three thieves pursue Collins, the four of them zig zagging back and forth, jumping on and off subway cars.  We don't learn it until close to the end of the story, but Collins undertook this mission with such vigor because his boss promised a raise if he succeeded and Collins needs moolah to marry his sweetheart.  

When Collins finally gets to the museum, to his boss' office, which is stuffed full of books and valuable items, Collins is dying for a drink.  When he asks what is in all these bottles, he thinks his boss says "gin" when in fact he said "djinn," and so Collins ends up with a genie in his stomach.

Having the djinn in his stomach helps Collins deal with the three thugs when they catch up to him, but is very uncomfortable and Collins struggles to figure out how to get rid of the djinn.  Back home, the three criminals a bloody mess behind him, Collins drinks from a bottle of his own gin and gets the djinni drunk.  Then, after abandoning a plan to commit suicide, he tricks the djinn into getting trapped in the bottle of gin.  Then the girl appears and they plan to marry and live happily ever after.

I'm going to say this filler falls below the acceptable mark and deserves a thumbs down.  The rules governing how the djinn operates don't seem consistent, and neither does Collins' personality and motivations, or at least that stuff is not explained well.  And I am bored from a lifetime of exposure to fiction about verbally crafting wishes and deals with the devil and the djinn or Satan outsmarting mortals or being outsmarted by grammatical legalisms or whatever, and there is a lot of that business in this repetitive story, though it doesn't really go anywhere.

"A Bottle of Gin" was stoppered up in the 1998 Bloch collection Flowers from the Moon and Other Lunacies, which was translated into Italian in 2000. 

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An underwhelming leg in our long trek through the pages of Weird Tales.  The Kuttner and Bloch stories left very little impression on me, even as I was reading them.  There was quite little in these tales that grabbed me emotionally or intellectually, a dearth of arresting images, and I kept wondering why the characters were doing what they were doing.  Of course I think it is because these stories lack any weight because they are meant to make the reader laugh and not think or feel, but could it be that I am suffering weird fatigue?  Is it time to read about spacemen and energy weapons, about speculations on what life in the future or in some other solar system might be like?  Could be. 

Weird Tales, Jan 1943: Keller, Bloch, Derleth, Counselman

Here comes a new dawn!  Here comes a new day!  Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are trying to read at least one story from each issue of influential speculative fiction magazine Weird Tales and today we begin chipping away at issues with a cover date of 1943.  We've already got over a dozen years under our belts, 1923, 1930, 1931, 1932, 1933, 1934, 1935, 1936, 1937, 1938, 1939, 1940, 1941, and 1942, so prospects we can handle 1943, the year of the Battles of Kursk and Kasserine Pass, of the Zoot Suit riots and the Aqua-Lung, of the births of Christopher Walken and Dennis Etchison, are good!

We're tackling four stories from this ish, the illustration of which is I'm afraid below average.  On the docket today are Dr. David H. Keller; Robert "Psycho" Bloch; August Derleth, whom I have heard won a Guggenheim Fellowship and told the Guggenheim people he was going to use the money to travel but instead used it to finance binding his comic book collection; and cat-loving Alabaman Mary Elizabeth Counselman.  Note that I am reading the 1943 versions of these stories, not later book versions--as we shall see, later versions are sometimes revised, and not necessarily for the better!

"Bindings Deluxe" by David H. Keller 

The first line of this story by the controversial David H. Keller is "I don't like women!"  Way to lean in to the controversy, my guy!  Two men meet at the Turkish baths, our narrator, a medical doctor (Keller himself was a doctor) who binds books as a hobby, and a fat older guy who talks at length about how terrible women are.  The fat guy also binds books, as a pro, and he has a curious mark on his back which Keller doesn't disclose at first, though we know what it is because the illustrator of "Bindings Deluxe," John Giunta (future associate of Frank Frazetta), reveals it in his BDSM-friendly illo for the story.  

Some time later the men meet for a second time, at the pro's digs in Boston.  The overweight Beantowner is wealthy, and has a Chinese servant, and tells the sawbones that he likes the Chinese--because their culture is misogynistic.  I find this kind of humor, about a strange character with an obsessive fixation, more amusing than the puns and absurd hijinks that Robert Bloch passes off as humor.  Anyway, the professional bookbinder tells his story of horror to our narrator.  

Decades ago the binder was a founding member of an international association of bookbinders who met once a year, London, Paris, Chicago, San Fran, etc.  There were dozens of them, and they really enjoyed each others' company.  But then one year a woman joined, a woman beautiful and earnest despite the best efforts of the misogynist to prevent this invasion of a male space.  She presented a paper at one meeting and revealed she was merely competent, not deeply versed in the profession, and had a lot of goofy ideas about bookbinding.  She admitted, proudly, of basing her paper not on specialist texts on the art of bookbinding, but on the Encyclopedia Britannica!  The men laughed at her, and then she wreaked a terrible revenge on them!

Over a course of years, one by one, she seduced each of the men who had laughed at her, first the youngest, working her way up to the fat guy, the eldest.  She murdered each man and bound a volume of her copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica with his skin!  The fat man was to be the last victim, his hide to adorn the final volume, and she got as far as tattooing the title of the volume on his back, but he got lucky and turned the tables on her, killed her and bound the final volume with her skin!  The encyclopedia, bound with the skin of his friends and their female nemesis, now resides in his Boston domicile!

If we can look past the wacky coincidence that the encyclopedia has the same number of volumes as the association had members, and the misogyny of the whole thing, this story is pretty good--the frame story is as entertaining as the main story, there is sex and gore, foreshadowing, economical pacing, etc.  I like it.           

"Bindings Deluxe" has not been anthologized, but has appeared in two Keller anthologies, 1978's The Last Magician and 2010's Keller Memento. 

"The Eager Dragon" by Robert Bloch

Brace yourselves, it's another Bloch story I suspect is a joke.  Why do I indulge in such suspicions?  Because "The Eager Dragon" has only ever been reprinted in the various editions of Dragons and Nightmares, the 1969 collection which entombs the long version of "Nursemaid to Nightmares," the Bloch humor piece I have been moaning about ever since I read it a few days ago.

I can grok jokes about how women are terrible because I deal with women in real life.  But like Grand Master of Science Fiction Harlan Ellison and President of the United States Donald John Trump, I don't drink, so jokes about the taste of booze and being drunk are abstract and theoretical to me.  I bring this up because "The Eager Dragon" starts off with a barrage of just such jokes, calling cheap whiskey "anti-freeze," talking bout how a guy steps into a cuspidor and walks around with it on his foot for a while.  Hardy har har har.

Our narrator, who I guess is a former gangster and maybe an immigrant--his narration is in present tense like a cartoon depiction of an ESL speaker--moved to the country some time ago to raise chickens.  He is at the local bar, getting drunk, and is accosted by two travelling salesmen.  He tells the men the story of how Merlin and various Knights of the Table Round travelled through time here to this hick farm town and enlisted the narrator's help in retrieving from the local museum a valuable artifact.  The salesmen don't believe him, so he invites them to his farm so he can show them the warhorse one of the knights left behind.

The warhorse is missing when they get there, but there is a note from Merlin and a gift--a three-foot-long egg.  Soon the egg hatches and the baby dragon, like eight feet long, emerges.  The jokes about alcohol keep on coming because all the narrator has on hand to feed the baby monster is beer.

More interesting than the tired jokes are the topical references that tie the story to the WW2 era in which it was written.  Among these are mentions of Betty Grable, Dorothy Lamour, Hitler, Boy's Town, and La Guardia (whom we are told looks like a gorilla.)  The dragon's crying is said to sound like a dive-bomber, its hiccups like anti-aircraft fire or Louis Armstrong on the trumpet.  There is what I think is a reference to derogatory propaganda about the Japanese, who during the war were often depicted in cartoons as having huge toothy smiles:

And the dragon lets go with another smile, this time showing enough teeth to supply the entire Japanese army.

I looked quickly at a book version of "The Eager Dragon," and many of these references are missing--gee whiz, Bob, your reminders of how sexy men thought Betty Grable was and how ugly Fiorello La Guardia was and how bitter Americans were over Pearl Harbor were the most valuable components of this lame story!

Anyway, the narrator and the dragon interact with a runaway kid (the son of a circus owner), and with the local gangster (a fat guy), and the dragon grows to tremendous size by eating the wooden floor of the barn as well as metal farm tools, and when the gangster kidnaps the kid a fight erupts between dragon and gangster and both are destroyed in an explosion.  The dragon has already laid an egg (just like this story!  Ha ha!) so the circus owner and the narrator may still be able to achieve their dream of getting rich by selling tickets to the only show on Earth with a real fire-breathing dragon.

"The Eager Dragon" is bad and I am giving it a thumbs down but it is better than the egregious "Nursemaid to Nightmares" because it has a little more going for it in the plot department and the jokes are marginally less terrible and thanks to the fact that all the timely references--and the fact they were excised for book publication in the late '60s--gives the story historical interest.  You should probably read "The Eager Dragon" if you are working on a dissertation entitled "World War Weird: The influence of the Second World War on American fantasy fiction from Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki." 

"McElwin's Glass" by August Derleth

I'm always learning, I am.  The title character of "McElwin's Glass" was born with a "caul," and his mother regarded this as some kind of omen that foretold great success for her child.  I had no idea what they were talking about, but wikipedia soon enlightened me.

Anyway, McElwin, a short and fat and ugly man (I feel like fat men have really been getting it in the neck lately here at MPorcius Fiction Log) becomes a stage magician of moderate success.  Then he finds a telescope at an antique store and discovers it can look into the future and the past.  He starts a new, more lucrative, career as a fortune teller, even though the performance of the telescope is very unreliable and McElwin ends up winging it much of the time, just lying to his customers.

An old geezer shows up, claiming the telescope was stolen from him; his name is also McElwin--they are distant cousins.  Old timer explains that the device only reveals to the viewer events somehow related to himself, stuff that has happened or will happen to him or to ancestors or descendants or colleagues or the like.

Fat McElwin refuses to sell the telescope to old McElwin.  Fatso describes things he has seen in the device to the old geezer, and it is implied that the old geezer figures out these visions predict fat McElwin will die an early death.  So the old man asks his young cousin to leave him the telescope in his will.

Fat McElwin marries a rich woman, one of the few people whose futures his telescope has offered insights into.  This woman seemed sweet when they were dating, but once they are married she is intolerably tyrannical, always nagging and complaining, One thing leads to another, and fat McElwin, in an impulsive moment, shoots her dead.  He flees Chicago, pursued by one of the other people whose life he has been afforded glimpses of in his telescope--a police detective!

I want to like "McElwin's Glass" because I like the theme of the disastrous marriage, and I think Derleth does a good job of describing the phenomenon of a man being viciously berated by his "significant other" for something innocuous and trivial he did long ago and doesn't even remember doing.  I also like the way the vague suggestive visions in the telescope foreshadow events, but in a way that can be misinterpreted.  But the story has problems--like so many Derleth stories, it would benefit from revision and editing.  For example, the caul business and the fact McElwin is a magician don't seem to have any impact on the actual plot of the story.  

I guess we're going to grade this one acceptable.     

"Seventh Sister" by Mary Elizabeth Counselman

Here we have a pretty well-thought-of story; "Seventh Sister" was reprinted by August Derleth, Bill Pronzini and Martin H. Greenberg in anthologies, as well as in two different Counselman collections. 

Counselman's tale takes place at a semi-abandoned plantation on the Alabama-Georgia state line.  It is the 1930s, and an African-American family lives in semi-decrepit slave quarters on the estate, growing yams and growing in population as the matriarch has a new "pickaninny" each year.  The seventh child is born two months premature on a night of omens and portents (lightning, dogs barking, owls hooting, etc.) and Mom dies in childbirth.  Named "Seven Sisters," the new baby is albino--paper-white skin and hair, and pink eyes--and the father fears the baby is a "woods colt" while an aunt suggests such a baby, the seventh of seven girls, must have "de Power."  

The father is inclined to neglect the baby, but the owner of the estate, a doctor whose family uses the planation house as a vacation home and allows the blacks to live on the grounds rent-free, comes by and explains that the baby really is his offspring and threatens to evict him if he doesn't properly tend to the child.  Seven Sisters exhibits strange abilities as she grows older, and the local African-American community comes to believe she is a powerful "conjure 'oman;" people pay her father and aunt so Seven Sisters will prepare charms for them and cast spells for them.        

Counselman puts a lot of effort into developing atmosphere and drawing characters in "Seven Sisters," though the way she does it may cause the head of anybody born after September 11 to explode.

Light from the sooty lamp threw stunted shadows. The reek of its kerosene and the smell of negro bodies blended with the pungent odor of peaches hung in a string to dry beside the window.

She hummed tuneless little chants, in the eerie rhythm of all darkies.

Or maybe anybody born after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Anyway, as Seven Sisters gets older she has a tough time as all her fellow blacks are scared of her or exploit her--they don't even go to the trouble of baptizing her.  The doctor who lets all of these black people live on his land and is always helping them out is the only person who treats her decently.  Then comes a crisis.  The doctor's mother-in-law moves in and starts pushing the doctor around.  She insists he sell the old wrecked plantation--this will leave Seven Sisters' family with no place to live (her father of course is too lazy and irascible to get a job and buy or rent any kind of home for his family.)  Seven Sisters tries to use her black magic powers to resolve the crisis, but commits a blunder and a terrible tragedy results and everyone in the story suffers terribly.

A pretty good story, even if we can't publicly endorse its message that dealing with black people is inherently dangerous and even doing them a favor is putting yourself into terrible jeopardy.  A close contender for today's best story.

  

**********

With the possible exception of the Derleth, today's four stories from Weird Tales serve as a kind of time machine that exposes us to the mental milieu of the early 1940s in America.  The past is a foreign country, the cliche goes, and Keller, Bloch and Counselman demonstrate to us what was on the minds of 1940s people who produced and consumed popular fiction, and a lot of that stuff is stuff people in 2026 wouldn't write or say, or maybe even think, if they wanted to function in middle-class society.  Beyond that, Keller's is a pretty good edgy crime story, Counselman's a quite good black magic tale whose bleak ending took me by surprise (I naively thought the doctor's family might adopt the albino), and Derleth's has entertaining elements.  As for the Bloch, it stinks, but every production by such a major figure in popular culture is worth reading, right?   

Weird Tales Project: 1923

Nineteen-Twenty-Three was the first year in which Weird Tales was published, Edwin Baird serving as editor.  Eight issues were published that year, and today I can report that I have read a story from each issue--the links below will take you to my absolutely scientific, unbiased, and incontrovertible assessments of each story.  We've already done this for quite a few of the unique magazine's later years--find immediately below links to index post covering each of those years.

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

March 

Farnsworth Wright:  "The Closing Hand"

Otis Adelbert Kline: "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes"

April

Farnsworth Wright:   "The Snake Fiend"

May

Kenneth Duane Whipple:   "The Secret Fear"

Vincent Starrett:                  "Penelope"

E. Thayles Emmons:           "Two Hours of Death"

Mollie Frank Ellis:              "Case No. 27"

June

Otis Adelbert Kline: "The Phantom Wolfhound"

Loual B. Sugarman: "The Gray Death"

Henry Leverage:      "The Voice in the Fog" 

Helen Rowe Henze: "The Escape"

July-August

Otis Adelbert Kline:  "The Corpse on the Third Slab"

September

Farnsworth Wright:   "The Teak-Wood Shrine"

Otis Adelbert Kline: "The Cup of Blood"

October

Farnsworth Wright: "An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension"

November

Farnsworth Wright: "Poisoned"

Farnsworth Wright: "An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension," "Poisoned," and "The Great Panjandrum"

A few weeks ago we read three 1920s stories by Farnsworth Wright, famous editor of Weird Tales.  Let's go back, Jack, and do it again!  Two of today's stories were printed in Weird Tales in 1923, when the magazine was edited by Edwin Baird; the third appeared in the first issue Wright edited, the November 1924 number.

"An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension" (1923)

In 1997 there appeared an anthology edited by Marvin Kaye and John Gregory Betancourt and graced with a great Stephen Fabian cover entitled The Best of Weird Tales: 1923, and "An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension" was among its contents.  So I guess we have a treat ahead of us!

Or not!  This is a wacky joke story, a sort of filler piece.  It isn't good, but it isn't particularly annoying, so we'll call it barely acceptable.  

The narrator of "An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension" is a goofy sort of character who addresses us chummily and colloquially.  I guess we are supposed to both like him and look down on him as a dope, sort of like how we look at a Wodehouse narrator.  He relates to us a ridiculous tale in which a space ship from Jupiter lands right next to him in Chicago.  Hundreds or thousands of Jupiterians emerge form the ship; the aliens are hard to visualize because the narrator describes them in a way that is totally absurd, and their behavior is almost as ridiculous.  A college professor of the narrator's acquaintance s on hand and he explains that the Jupiterians are from or encompass a fourth-dimension, so can fold themselves inside out, change their size, pass though walls, etc.   As we expect of a college professor, he prefers the aliens to his own race, calling them superior, the only true intellectuals, etc.

The leader of the expedition from Jupiter gets drunk on the narrator's whisky, and loses some of his fourth-dimension powers and so is trapped here in Earth.  His fellows try to rescue him and in a way I won't describe this leads to an explosion that kills all the aliens...and wakes up the narrator, who was having a nightmare after trying to read a book by Einstein.

The somewhat understated style of humor in "An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension" is easier to swallow than the style of humor employed by Robert Bloch in the story we read by the Psycho scribe for our last blog post, this story is mercifully brief, and I appreciated the satire of college professors, so I'm not being as hard on Wright's filler piece here as I am on so many other joke stories.  Still, I find it confounding that Kaye and Betancourt considered "An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension" one of the best stories from Weird Tales' first year, and that in 1927 it was included in the anthology The Moon Terror, like four years after its debut in the October 1923 ish of WT.  Don't people open up Weird Tales for the blood and guts, the sex and violence, the terror and despair?  Are people really looking to Weird Tales for laughs?

"Poisoned" (1923)

"Poisoned" feels like a mainstream story about scandal and broken friendships and blackmail and all that sort of thing--it has no weird or science fiction elements.  It is also boring.  Thumbs down!

Two middle-class guys, an apothecary and a lawyer, are best buddies.  They do everything together!  They both bear the first name Aubrey.  They got the flu together and recovered together, both tended to by the same nurse.  One of them fell in love with the nurse, and he and the nurse are engaged to be married.

These jokers play cards together every day, and every day get into stupid arguments because one of them plays carelessly, throwing down a card that only a dolt would play, and then saying he'd made a mistake and should be able to take the card back and put down a more appropriate one.  One day their argument gets very heated and one of the men storms off and the men stop seeing each other.

The plot gets kind of convoluted and the Aubrey who is not engaged tries to get his mitts on the nurse to which his former pal is engaged and as part of his strategy reveals to her that the other Audrey, her fiancé, has an illegitimate child with some other woman.  The marriage is called off and the nurse marries some third guy.  

Both Aubreys are miserable, each lacking the woman he desired and lacking his only real friend.  The lawyer contemplates suicide and buys poison--the apothecary hears through the apothecary grapevine about the purchase of the poison and looks forward to hearing of the other Audrey's demise, but the attorney decides not to kill himself after all.  The apothecary goes to visit the lawyer to see how unhappy he is and there is a complicated scene involving wine with poison in it and some uncertainty about whether one guy wants to commit suicide in front of the other guy and/or murder the other guy blah blah blah and both of them end up drinking poison and keeling over.

Waste of time.  In general I like disastrous sexual relationships and men acting stupidly over a woman and people committing suicide in my fiction, but Wright absolutely fails to make these characters interesting and the business with the cards and with the glasses of wine is a little hard to follow even though Wright spends too many words explaining it all.  A failure.

"Poisoned" has never been reprinted.

"The Great Panjandrum" (1924)

This story, appearing a year after "Poisoned," was printed under a pseudonym in an issue of the magazine Wright himself edited.  The identity of the author of the piece would have been no mystery to veteran readers of the magazine, as under the bogus name we see "Author of 'The Teakwood Shrine,'" a tale which appeared under Wright's real name in the September 1923 issue.  A little joke, I guess.

Jokes abound on the ten pages which "The Great Panjandrum" occupies.  Wright immediately gets on my bad side by employing one of my least favorite literary devices--using phonetic spelling to represent an accent.     

‘‘Why yo’ all didn’t go an’ ’list in de ahmy an’ come back f’um France a hero, like Mandy Johnson’s man, so’s I could be proud ob yo’? I’se plumb tired ob scein’ de same ol’ face, day aftah day, day aftah day. Ah sho wishes yo’ had gone an’ ’listed.’’

Maybe this would be amusing to hear an actor say, but reading it is kind of a chore.

The protagonist of "The Great Panjandrum" is George Washington, an African-American gentleman of leisure who lives on the South Side of Chicago with his wife Martha.  Martha, quoted above, regrets that her husband didn't join the army, but how could our hero have joined the colors and fought the Hun when he suffers from rheumatism?

Out delivering a load of laundry Martha has washed, George crosses paths with the man he considers the wisest among the inhabitants of the South Side.  Eavesdropping, George realizes that this savant is in cahoots with a voodoo master, the Great Panjandrum, who is going to launch a race war in hopes of establishing an independent black nation right there in Chicago.

George hurries to the police station to report the coming revolution, but the Irish sergeant on duty there just insults George, dismissing his valuable intelligence on the coming revolt--scheduled for this very afternoon!--as the delusions of a drunk.  So George takes matters into his own hands!  He makes his way to the Great Panjandrum's HQ and fast talks his way past the various voodoo-adherents into the lair of the voodoo master himself!  The diabolical sorcerer has just sacrificed a goat and its heart sits in a bowl of blood!  George's entreaties that the uprising will only cause pointless death on a large scale among the "colored" population of the Windy City fall on deaf ears, and a comic fight ensues that sees George, the high priest of darkness, and several other "negroes" fall down into a pit under a trap door.  In the fracas, George's hat is dislodged, and some of the blood of the poor goat who is the real victim of all this stains it.  Somebody has corroborated George's report and so the police arrive, and find the blood-stained hat before they find George.  The authorities report to Martha that her husband has been slain, and Mrs. Washington makes a dramatic show of being hysterical over her hero husband's untimely demise in the course of sparing the South Side a catastrophic race war.  But when George shows up, having finally been rescued by the police, she sets him to work helping her with the washing and points out that in the excitement he seems to have forgotten he has "de rheumatiz."

In depicting black people as ridiculous schemers and deceivers, and in its liberal use of the "n-word," "The Great Panjandrum" is very racist by today's standards.  The jokes are weak and the plot is just a rickety frame upon which to hang the jokes.  Thumbs down for this one, which has never been reprinted as far as I can tell.

**********

Not good, Mr. Wright, not good.  Three stories full of banal material ("It was all a dream!" "Blacks are lazy!" "Did he switch the glasses while I was in the other room?"), two of them silly joke stories, none of them with any legit weird elements.  It is unlikely we will read any additional stories by Farnsworth Wright, though two more lurk in 1930s issues of WT.

Hopefully we'll encounter some more impressive material the next time we crack open a copy of the magazine of the bizarre and unusual.