"The Man Who Looked Like Napoleon" (1961)
"The Man Who Looked Like Napoleon" was first printed in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, which has been in business for like 78 years, and three years later was reprinted in Chase, which was in business for less than one year. The magazine racket is a tough one!
This is a silly gimmicky joke story. A guy, Mr. Throng, starts thinking he is the reincarnated or risen Napoleon Bonaparte after he hits his head in a car wreck. (He also seems to be conflating Jesus Christ with Bonaparte in his mind.) His wife, Josephine, sends him to a shrink, but his condition does not improve--in fact, it gets worse. Throng murders his wife, and then tries to murder his therapist, who is named Rand and whom he thinks is a reincarnated Tallyrand. The big payoff joke is that the cop who ends Throng's murder spree is named Wellington.
Lame filler.
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| What? Where are the sexy girls? Where is the gushing blood? Where are the glittering knives and thundering revolvers? These look like covers to The International Journal of Labor Statistics or The Bluestocking Institute Review of Gender and Consumer Ethics. Boring! |
"His and Hearse" is another satire or "meta" piece about show biz and mystery fiction. Muscular blond hunk Randy Douglas is an aspiring actor who lives in Hollywood--but he sucks at acting! He can't get a real acting job, and balks at taking such jobs as being an Indian who gets shot whose only line is "Ugh!" Randy uses his good looks to marry a Broadway has-been twenty years older than he is, Elaine Ames, hoping to use her money and connections to jump start his own career, but it turns out she has no liquid assets and her friends, like producer Cedric Schlokmeister, are also has-beens who have no jobs to offer Elaine's boy toy--Schlokmeister himself cannot find work and visits Elaine on the way to the unemployment office!
With no work, and Elaine spending most of her day primping, Randy kills time by reading mystery novels lent to him by the maid. These books gives him the idea of murdering Elaine. This accomplished, he marries a society woman his own age who has old money, Constance Maitland, but he isn't any happier with her--he hates the fake gentility of society life which allows little time to relax and be yourself, and Constance is not only a penny pincher, but an exercise nut who runs Randy ragged with all the jogging and tennis and yoga. So he murders Constance, and marries the singer of the rock band Iron Marshmallow, Penny Nichols. He thinks he'll like being married to somebody with the outgoing, open-minded, free love attitude of today's youth, but he quickly finds rock music annoying and realizes that Penny isn't going to stop having group sex sessions with the members of Iron Marshmallow (Tom, Dick, Harry, and Irving) just because she is married. So he murders her as well.
Finally, Randy marries his one steady friend through all these career and marriage ups and downs, Susan a plain and old-fashioned girl named Susan (symbolizing how plain she is, Randy doesn't remember her last name), a receptionist. But reading all those murder mysteries, and committing three perfect crimes, has got Randy hooked, so he goes to see a shrink in hopes of being cured of his addiction to murder! Will the therapy work, or is Randy too far gone? Is Susan doomed...or will we get a twist ending in which it is revealed that Susan has been manipulating Randy the whole time and is planning to murder him?
I liked the first half or two-thirds of "His and Hearse," the stuff about Randy's acting career and his relationship with Elaine Ames, which was almost realistic, but the story gets more and more silly and repetitive and gimmicky as it goes on, and the ending was disappointing. There is a problem with Susan's character--on the one hand she is described as being old-fashioned and innocent and all that, but there are also instances of her being a cynical operator; I know the innocent act is a fake, but the way Bloch presents her it doesn't feel like she's a slippery character putting on an imperfect act, but rather like the author is presenting us a jumbled and discordant portrait that the reader experiences as confusing. Oh, well.
Large portions of "His and Hearse" are better than average for this collection, but the story also has some problems, so I guess I'm calling it acceptable, but it isn't bland and flat and mediocre like so many stories I judge "acceptable," rather, it is a story with real potential that failed to achieve what it might have.
"A Most Unusual Murder" (1976)
Well, tarbandu is wrong, this story is worse than dull, it is bad, a conglomeration of ill-suited components. The story tries to string together these different elements with lame coincidences and manipulations that are not very convincing.
Kane is a guy who walks all around London all the time and so is intimately familiar with all the streets and shops and so forth. He is walking with his friend Woods when he spots a shop that wasn't there before, an antiques shop. Inside they meet the weirdo who runs the shop. Said weirdo has on display a 19th-century medical bag. It is on display, not for sale, but Kane insists on buying it because of the name on the bag. You see, Kane is one of those guys who is obsessed with Jack the Ripper and has spent years and years going through Victorian documents figuring out the real identity of the Whitechapel Murderer and this medical bag has on it the name of the guy Kane is sure is the real Jack!
Back at Kane's place, Kane, over the course of four pages, lists off all the suspects in the Ripper case and the reasons why he thinks each is innocent of the Whitechapel crimes, and why he thinks the doctor he has fingered is guilty. I am not interested in the Jack the Ripper story (there are thousands of murders every year in the English-speaking world, and I have never been convinced that these five murders are more fascinating than any of the hundreds of thousands of others I don't care about) so to me this part of the story is like white noise. Kane is about to break open the lock on the bag when Woods suggests they go back to the shop to ask the owner if he has the key. They find an empty lot where the shop was.
For some reason, Kane, who was going to force open the lock on the bag in the comfort of his own home, decides he now wants to open it in the apartment where the doctor he thinks was Jack the Ripper lived 80 or 90 or whatever years ago. At this place (the sink and carpet and bed from 1888 have not been replaced and Kane says stuff to Woods like "...you may be looking at the very sink where the Ripper washed away the traces of his butchery..."), Kane and Woods open the bag and find a scalpel, among other medical implements. They are suddenly accosted by the weirdo from the antique store. He explains that he is a time traveler who collects murder weapons and he wants the bag and scalpel back. Not because they belonged to Jack the Ripper--according to the time traveler, Kane is all wrong, that doctor was innocent; the scalpel was used in a different murder...or will be used! The time traveler grabs the bag, Kane grabs the scalpel and slashes at the time traveler, and Woods, trying to break up the fracas, gets in the way of the blade and is killed. The weirdo grabs the bag and the scalpel and teleports away, leaving Woods to die and Kane to be put on trial for murdering his friend.
This entire story feels ridiculous. The characters' motives and actions are hard to swallow, and many of the story's elements just don't ring true or feel like cumbersome red herrings. The while thing is a waste of time. Thumbs down!
"The Warm Farewell" (1976)
"The Warm Farewell" first appeared in Frights, an anthology of "new stories of suspense and supernatural terror" edited by Kirby McCauley.
"The Warm Farewell" is a story about the civil rights movement and the Ku Klux Klan, though the stupid violent white men in white robes and white hoods in this story are called "The White Hopes." The Endicott family came down to Georgia from the North so bespectacled Mr. Endicott could edit and publish an anti-racism newspaper--one of his writers is another Northerner who comes down, a black man named Scotty. As the story begins the paper has folded and the Endicotts have sold their house and are minutes away from driving back north, the terrorism of the White Hopes and their influence over local institutions (like banks and schools) having made doing business and living a peaceful life in Georgia impossible. Over a dozen of the White Hopes, clad in their hoods and robes (Mr. Endicott is able to identify many of them because, while they may wear white gloves when in disguise, they can't afford a second pair of shoes and I guess Mr. Endicott has a good memory for shoes), drive up to terrorize the Endicotts one more time and to get information out of them--Scotty has disappeared, and they want to know where he is so they can--presumably--murder him.
One of the White Hopes, the regional head from Atlanta, takes the Endicott's teen-aged daughter Rena into another room to rape her and force Scotty's whereabouts out of her. The noise her parents hear from the room chills them, but, in fact, she is not being raped. Scotty has been watching from outside, and he sneaks in the window to knock the would-be rapist unconscious and then dress up in his white robe, hood and gloves. (Do real KKK members wear white gloves as part of their uniform? I suspect Bloch just added the gloves to make Scotty's deception more believable.) Scotty, in disguise as their leader, then leads the White Hopes on a wild goose chase to an abandoned building where he tells them Scotty is in hiding--we are assured that in the confusion of burning down the building Scotty will make his getaway.
The racists having driven off, the Endicotts pile into their car. Rena goes back to the house, saying she forgot her purse--in reality she is setting their former home on fire to murder the bound and gagged racist leader. As the Endicotts drive away Rena laughs hysterically--her ordeal has mentally unbalanced her. Her father tells her that the important thing is not to let what has happened to her make her so bitter that she herself becomes violent and hateful like the White Hopes--but it is too late, she is already a murderer.
There is plenty of fiction (I'm mostly thinking about movies and TV here) out there about anti-racist crusaders who go to the South and are terrorized by local racists, and one of the elements we see in many of them is how one character, our hero, is gung-ho about fighting the good fight while his or her spouse moans that doing the right thing is putting their lives and the lives of their kids in danger. Does the protagonist care more about black people and abstract principles than his or her own children? Bloch does the same thing here in "The Warm Farewell;" at the start of the story Mrs. Endicott laments that her husband wrote those anti-segregation editorials that have led to them losing their home, and at the end of the story, when Rena's parents learn that the White Hopes' leader is about to be burned alive, Mr. Endicott wants to turn around to rescue him, because it is the right thing to do, but Mrs. Endicott insists that it is safer to just keep on driving and let the White Hopes take the blame.
With fewer jokes and a little more intellectual heft--not so much the conventional anti-racism but the idea that fighting evil people with their evil means, or seeking revenge on them, risks making you evil or damaging your psyche or just prolonging the conflict--"The Warm Farewell" is better than the average story in Out of the Mouths of Graves, and probably the most legitimately scary or disturbing of these mostly silly stories.
"The Closer of the Way" (1977)
"The Closer of the Way," which has a sort of Lovecraftian title, first appeared in Stuart David Schiff's Whispers. (Just this year we read Schiff's Whispers II.)
As in many Lovecraftian stories, this is a memoir of a guy who was in an asylum, but there the Lovecraftian elements end; this story is 100% Robert Bloch--in fact, the narrator is none other than Robert Bloch, author of Psycho! "The Closer of the Way" consists mostly of conversations between the narrator and a psychiatrist, in which the shrink uses examples from Bloch's stories and novels to try to delve into the writer's psyche, and Bloch is at pains to explain that he himself is not fixated on his mother, is not a homosexual, does not hate children or psychiatrists or people in general; to this end Bloch enumerates where he got the ideas for much of his fiction. Many individual stories are named, their plots and gimmicks and tricks revealed. (Bloch himself uses the words "gimmick" and "trick.") As for the brief plot of the story, the shrink uncovers a terrible secret from Bloch's childhood and Bloch murders him and escapes the sanitarium.
This story is, I guess, interesting for anybody who wants to know about Bloch's life and work, as the bulk of it is a pithy summation of his career, listing recurring themes and pointing out what works they appear in (if you want to read every Bloch story in which somebody gets decapitated, "The Closer of the Way" includes a handy list to get you started!), but it is not actually good fiction. At best it is an in-joke for Bloch's fans. I have to say that, as fiction, this one gets a negative vote.
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And so we bid farewell to Out of the Mouth of Graves. Obviously, it was worth my time to become better acquainted with the work of a man who was close to H. P. Lovecraft and who has stories in so many SF magazines. But it must be said that, in my opinion at least, this collection as a whole is quite middling. Of sixteen stories, I have marked six positively, judged five to fall within the acceptable range, and condemned five. I am probably not being fair to Bloch by reading somewhat peripheral collections like Out of the Mouth of Graves instead of something like 1977's The Best of Robert Bloch. Well, maybe next time I explore Bloch's body of work I will pick stories out of that volume.
That's enough Robert Bloch for a while, however. But you can look forward to more horror stories from the 1970s written by members of the SF community in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log!
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