Five tales of murder by Robert Bloch from the 1960s

In our last episode we read six stories from Out of the Mouths of Graves, a late 1970s collection of stories by Robert Bloch.  Out of the Mouths of Graves presents sixteen pieces of fiction; today let's examine the five included stories from the 1960s, the decade of social upheaval which we are constantly hearing old people blab on and on about.

"A Matter of Life" (1960)

It was in Keyhole Mystery Magazine that "A Matter of Life" had its debut--in the same issue were stories by Avram Davidson and Theodore Sturgeon.  Only three years later "A Matter of Life" was included in the Bloch collection Bogey Men, which had a Schoenherr cover and included an essay on Bloch by SF historian Sam Moskowitz.  (You can read Moskowitz's spoiler-heavy profile of Bloch, which includes quite a bit about Bloch's relationship with H. P. Lovecraft, in a scan of its first appearance in Amazing.)  This story has never been anthologized, however.

A weird skinny guy visits three Chicago wives in succession: a vain and ugly woman of wealth who wants to divorce her husband but has no grounds to do so (remember, there was no no-fault divorce in 1960); a middle-class mother whose hospital-bound husband has a crippling injury and will never be able to support his family again; and a lower-class woman whose thuggish husband, a petty criminal, beats her.  The weirdo gives each woman a vial that he implies contains an untraceable poison, subtly suggesting that the women solve their problems by killing their husbands.  The twist at the end is that we learn that the guy, who gave the wives the poison for free, is going to make his money by selling the antidote to the women's husbands at an exorbitant price.

Does this story make sense?  If a stranger told you your wife was going to assassinate you by poisoning you, would you give him a pile of money, or just avoid your wife and/or call the police?  Maybe I am misunderstanding the story and the poison takes 24 hours or whatever to take effect and the thin creep is going to talk to the men after they have been poisoned?

This story is gimmicky and repetitive and mechanical, with its three similar interviews, and fanciful, with its protagonist who knows all about these people's lives, god knows how.  (When a woman asks how he knows her name, the poison pusher just says, "There are sources for such information."  I guess the guy's ability to know things is supposed to make him scary or give him "an air of mystery," but from my point of view it just weakens the story's credibility.)  Gotta give this one a thumbs down. 

"The Beautiful People" (1960)

This one was first printed in Bestseller Mystery Magazine, where it was called "Skin-Deep."  In 2005 Ellen Datlow saw fit to present "The Beautiful People" at Sci Fiction, the webzine published by the SyFy TV channel, so I guess this will have some speculative content and not just be about some jerk knocking off a guy who is threatening his marriage or career or whatever.

When she was a teen, Millicent, daughter of the wealthy Tavishes, was so ugly that the handsomest boy in town, Jimmie Hartnett, dubbed her "Millie the Mule."  While Jimmie was away at college and then serving in the Navy, banging a long series of chicks whose names and faces he doesn't remember, Millicent's parents were killed in an auto accident and Millicent used some of the riches she inherited to get plastic surgery.  So, when horndog glamour puss Jimmie returns to Highland Springs looking so smart in his uniform, Millicent is a knockout and the two beauties get married tout suite!

The marriage doesn't work out--Millicent likes to read and Jimmie likes to drive fast cars, and Jimmie is so good-looking, women are always flirting with him.  And Jimmie, if the light is right, if he's close enough, if Millicent is a little tired, in the beautiful face of Millicent he can still detect the homely face of Millie the Mule.

When Jimmie cheats on Millicent, his wife achieves a horrible and appropriate revenge.  It was Jimmie's beautiful face that ruined her life, Millicent believes, so she knocks her husband out, makes it look like thieves broke into the house and tortured him for the combination to the safe, and proceeds to burn off Jimmie's face with a gasoline powered blowtorch set to its lowest flame!

There is no SF in this story, but I guess Datlow didn't care and I don't care either, because it is a good story.  There are no dumb jokes and no stupid gimmicks, no insane maniacs or elaborate conspiracies, just two characters who are easy to identify with (we all want to have sex and to be loved, we all feel envy and temptation) but who go way too far and commit (and suffer) dreadful crimes.  Datlow was right to reprint the story, and I'm a little surprised it hasn't appeared in more places, in anthologies or other Bloch collections--maybe it is too "mainstream" to appeal to readers and editors who look to Bloch for over-the-top extreme psychological or supernatural jazz, or, heaven forfend, childish jokes.

"The Beautiful People" is my favorite story in Out of the Mouths of Graves so far, but of course I am always a sucker for stories about difficult or disastrous sexual relationships.

"Hobo" (1960)

In my early and middle teens in the 1980s I played a lot of Basic (1981 revision) and Advanced Dungeons and Dragons with my brother.  Our idea of D&D consisted of my brother's party going into some abandoned castle or underground labyrinth where they would find themselves constantly fighting for their lives against monsters--these were usually giant centipedes, kobolds, goblins and orcs, because casualties were so severe, and I was so stingy with the treasure, that very few of my brother's characters would ever live long enough to advance to second level.  Recently somebody, who may have been kidding, told me that nowadays people who play D&D spend most of their time acting out the life-affirming and environmentally-sensitive relationships of their nonbinarily-gender-defined characters, and they dismiss with disdain people who play D&D as my brother and I did as "murder hobos."  Like I said, this guy was probably joking, but I have to admit "murder hobo" is a funny neologism.

Robert Bloch's "Hobo" first appeared in Ed McBain's Mystery Book #2.  Ramsey Campbell included it in his anthology, The Gruesome Book, in 1983, the back cover of which warns that it should not be read by "the very young."

This is just a three-page filler story.  In an unnamed city a serial killer known as "The Knife" is murdering bums.  The protagonist of "Hobo," a drunken hobo, jumps on a moving train into a boxcar, eager to get out of town.  In the car is another hobo, whom the protagonist initially thinks is dead drunk--in fact he is literally dead, a victim of The Knife, and The Knife is lurking in the boxcar and eager to claim another victim!

Acceptable.  I wouldn't put it in an anthology myself, but maybe Campbell needed to fill a certain number of pages or thought Bloch's name would help sell the book or something.

"The Model Wife" (1961)

Here's another piece that was reprinted in Bogey Men; it first was published in Swank.  This one is just two pages!  It returned in 1992 in Sebastian Wolfe's The Little Book of Horrors: Tiny Tales of Terror.

This is the kind of story that would not fly today--the three characters are Haitians, one a "mulatto," one a "quadroon," one an "octaroon," and Bloch blithely correlates their levels of European blood with their level of civilization--the quadroon and octaroon are "civilized," and the mulatto a "savage."

The plot: The beautiful quadroon, a Christian, marries the mulatto, a guy who is into voodoo and works setting up the display windows in the top department store in Port-au-Prince.  The quadroon meets the octaroon, a rich man who lives in Paris and passes for white; he wants the gorgeous quadroon to divorce the mulatto and marry him and come with him to France--she agrees to do so.  While the newlyweds are on the cruise ship headed to Europe the mulatto sculpts his former wife out of soft wax and puts the figure in the department store window, where it melts.  On the cruise ship the quadroon dies screaming, her flesh and skin melting off her bones.

Like "Hobo," this is barely a story--it is just an anecdote.  Acceptable filler (if you can look beyond its racial politics.) 

"All in the Family" (1966)

Another three-page tale to finish up the 1960s portion of Out of the Mouths of Graves.  This one first appeared in The Saint Magazine.  Recently I saw an episode of The Saint with Roger Moore, while visiting somebody in the hospital.  I tried to explain to my wife who The Saint was, and realized I had no idea myself--was he a cop, a spy, a superhero?  It turns out he is a criminal who preys on criminals who are worse, which I found pretty lame, a gimmick that allows readers to simultaneously indulge their desires to be rebels and rule breakers who make money the easy way (by stealing) and their self righteous resentment of people who actually are rule breaking thieves. 

A mortician is sick of his unhealthy wife, whom he married to get his hands on the mortuary business her family owned, and plots to kill her.  The mortician fears that his religious brother, a real goody-two-shoes, will suspect him if somehow his wife suddenly disappears.  But then a stroke of good fortune--the pious brother's wife dies!  He'll be too distraught to suspect anything is up when the mortician tells him his wife has gone down to Arizona for her health!

The mortician embalms his sister-in-law, murders his wife, and, after the funeral and right before the burial, puts his own dead wife in the coffin with his brother's dead wife.  He thinks he is home free, that he can quickly sell the mortuary and disappear from town, telling everybody he is joining his wife in sunny Arizona.  But then the cops show up!  They have learned that his brother was fooling around with some woman in the church choir, and that he bought arsenic from a pharmacist right before his wife keeled over!  The cops are here to dig up the coffin to conduct tests on his sister-in-law's corpse!

Acceptable filler.

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The murder spree continues when we read the 1970s stories from Out of the Mouths of Graves in the next installment of MPorcius Fiction Log.