Stories by J P Brennan, A Davidson and R Bloch from Alfred Hitchcock's Tales to Keep You Spellbound

Bloch and Davidson, you see,
 made the cover!

Maybe you accompanied the staff of MPoricus Fiction Log when we explored 1979's Whispers II, a hardcover anthology edited by Stuart Schiff.  In that volume of horror and fantasy stories, we read our first piece of fiction by Joseph Payne Brennan, a very brief story about a guy reuniting with a dead loved one at the beach.  Curious to sample more of Brennan's vast body of work, I looked around the internet archive, the indispensable source for those of us who seek to dig from the quarry of 20th-century popular culture, and found a few scans of anthologies with Brennan stories, among them 1976's Alfred Hitchcock's Tales to Keep You Spellbound, edited by Eleanor Sullivan.  I decided to read not only the included Brennan story, but one by Avram Davidson (who also had a memorable story in Whispers II) and one by Robert Bloch, who didn't have a story in Whispers II, but had a blurb on the cover!  Feel free to think of this blog post as "The Revenge of Whispers II."

All three of these stories first appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine; in her introduction to the anthology, Sullivan tells us that Alfred Hitchcock's Tales to Keep You Spellbound is being published in the year of that magazine's 20th anniversary.  Somewhat to my amazement, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine is still being published and has passed its 60th anniversary!

"Death of a Derelict" by Joseph Payne Brennan (1967)

"Death of a Derelict" is one of Brennan's stories about Lucius Leffing; according to The Thrilling Detective Website, Leffing is kind of like Sherlock Holmes but sometimes deals with psychic and occult phenomena.  The founder of The Thrilling Detective Website, Kevin Burton Smith, suggests that when Brennan was writing stories for Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine he went a little light on the supernatural elements, so maybe I shouldn't expect the dead derelict to be walking around haunting his still-living friends.  But let's see....

Oy, this story is so lame it made me laugh out loud--it is like something a kid would write!

Leffing is just like Sherlock Holmes and the narrator, whose name is Brennan, is just like Watson.  They are sitting around when a customer interested in engaging Leffing's services as a private eye drops by.  This guy, the obese "manager of entertainment concessions at Frolic Beach," an amusement park or seaside boardwalk kind of thing, is getting sued because a bum who hung around the place, Joel Karvey, was found dead at the base of the roller coaster, and some lawyer has convinced the bum's distant relative that the park is liable.  The fat guy wants Leffing to prove Karvey the bum did not in fact fall off the roller coaster but was murdered, so he is not legally or financially responsible for his demise.

Half or so of the story is Brennan and Leffing sitting around jawing about the case.  Then Brennan twice accompanies Leffing to Frolic Beach, the first time to ask questions of the park staff, and the second time with Leffing in disguise as a bum himself.  One of the park employees sees Leffing, thinks it is the ghost of the bum, and yells out "Karvey!  Get back!  You're dead, you crazy bum, I killed you!"

Then we get the explanation of why the employee murdered Karvey--this employee, a night watchman, to supplement his income, would retrieve coins from the gutter.  But when Karvey the bum moved into the area he presented the night watchman with some stiff competition!  Seeing his daily haul of coins drying up, the night watchman ambushed and assassinated Karvey, bashing in his cabeza with an old discarded piece of the railing that surrounds the roller coaster.

I'm not the audience for these mystery stories in which guys talk about clues and then trick the killer into revealing himself, and I am not a fan of "Death of a Derelict."  The next time I sample Joseph Payne Brennan's work I will make sure it is in what is incontrovertibly a horror anthology full of gore and monsters.

"Present for Lona" by Avram Davidson (1958)

A working class guy hasn't made any money since the road he was helping construct was finished weeks ago and things between him and the wife are getting rough!  So he takes a one-time job as a member of a firing squad and helps the state government execute a convicted murderer!  He takes his pay (twenty-five bucks) and buys a gift for his wife and a bottle of booze, but when he gets back to the trailer park the little wife refuses the present!  She doesn't want anything to do with the money he earned sending that killer to Hell, so he has taken on the heavy burden of guilt of killing a man for nothing.  This throws him into a rage, and, in his frenzy, he beats his wife to death with his bare hands.  In the story's final scene it is our protagonist who is facing a firing squad of men who will be paid $25.00!

Acceptable.  This story is reinforcing my suspicion that Avram Davidson is a man with a tragic view of life!

"A Home Away From Home" by Robert Bloch (1961)

"A Home Away From Home" has appeared in many Bloch collections and several anthologies, including multiple Alfred Hitchcock anthologies.  Maybe that indicates it is a real winner!

A young Australian woman's parents were killed in a car wreck, so she moves to England to live with her uncle, a psychiatrist whom she has never met who lives in the remote countryside.  The day she arrives everybody she meets is acting pretty funny, and as the story ends she realizes that her uncle's country house is an asylum and earlier that day the inmates rose up and massacred her uncle and his staff and these people pretending to be her uncle's colleagues and friends are the murderous mental patients and she is going to be their next victim.

Barely acceptable (not a real winner.)

**********

Criminy, three gimmicky filler stories.  Seeing as she selected them for Alfred Hitchcock's Tales to Keep You Spellbound, we have to assume that Eleanor Sullivan (editor in chief of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine from 1975 to 1981 and managing editor of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine from 1970 to 1982) thought them among the best stories to appear in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine over the course of two decades.  If these mediocre pieces are the best the magazine had to offer, what can the run-of-the-mill fare offered by the magazine be like?

Obviously, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine is not for me.  The next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log will see us returning to more traditional MPorcius territory as we read three stories from 1940s issues of Future Fantasy and Science Fiction.