Gerald Kersh: "Seed of Destruction," "Frozen Beauty," "Reflections in a Tablespoon," and "The Crewel Needle"

Squint or click to get a closer look at Powers' painting and to 
more comfortably read this encomium to Gerald Kersh

Back in 2021, I read the short story "River of Riches" by Gerald Kersh, a man whom Harlan Ellison has said was his favorite writer.  Recently, at the Second Story Books location in Rockville, MD, attracted by the Richard Powers cover, I picked up Ballantine Books 268, a 1958 paperback collection of Kersh stories entitled On an Odd Note. The yellow back cover is an essay about how awesome Kersh is; let's read the first four stories in the book and see if there is something to this essay and to Ellison's adulation or if that is all a lot of hogwash.

"Seed of Destruction" (1947)

"Seed of Destruction" appeared in Esquire the same year it was published in the British hardcover collection Sad Road to the Sea.  In 1959 British readers who had two shillings to rub together had another crack at it when it was reprinted in Suspense magazine.

This story is OK, no big deal.  A jeweler with a small shop full of odds and ends, knickknacks and geegaws, has a vivid imagination and makes up extravagant lies on the spot in order to make sales.  This broken inkpot was used by Shakespeare, this rusty spearpoint was used by Richard the Lion Heart, this pipe was smoked by Emile Zola, etc.  Showing to the narrator a signet ring with Arabic script on it, the shop keeper spins a yarn about the ring bearing a  powerful magic, the power of bringing to anyone who should steal it or receive it as a gift catastrophically bad luck--if you buy it you are safe.  The ring is purchased by some other individual, and the narrator later learns that its powers, made up on the spot by the fabulist shopkeeper, seem to have been coming true as the ring changed hands in Britain and then America over the years, until it finally returned to England, to the shopkeeper himself, who died when he was gifted the ring by his son.

Merely competent; it feels like a dry list of incidents lacking tension and interesting characters.

"Frozen Beauty" (1941)

This one first appeared in John Bull, a weekly magazine that it seems during this period sold its cover to advertisers rather than use that space to attract readers with a striking image.  In '53 the story was thawed out and reappeared in the collection The Brighton Monster and Other Stories, and it would go on to be reprinted in multiple Kersh collections and in Mike Ashley's The Best of British SF 1. 

"Frozen Beauty" is more like an idea than a complete story, as it doesn't have much of a plot and the characters don't go through any kind of growth or make any decisions or anything.  "Frozen Beauty" is also one of those stories that has multiple framing devices, so that the actual story is several layers away from the reader.  This is one of the traditional story-yelling devices of which I am skeptical.   

Our narrator meets a Russian doctor who fled from the Revolution., and this medico tells his story to the narrator.  In the course of his flight, Doc found himself in a hermit's hut in deepest Siberia.  In the hut is a beautiful dead woman; Doc can't place the ethnicity of the woman.  The hermit tells Doc the story of how he met this woman, whom he has treated as a daughter for sixteen years.  One day, far from his hut, after a fierce storm, the hermit found a hole in the ground that lead to a large frozen hut full of people and their animals, all of them flash frozen alive long ago.  The fire the hermit burnt for light down there, astonishingly, thawed a little girl and she returned to life!  The hermit brought her home and raised her, and recently she died of unknown causes.  And that's it.           

Remember Howard Wandrei's 1934 story about a frozen woman, "The Other"?  That story had its problems, but it also had a world-shattering climax and characters with personality who have motivation and make all kinds of decisions.  And then there was "Skyrock," Frank Belknap Long's 1935 story of finding a woman from ancient times encased in crystal.  The discovery of a person frozen in ancient times and physically intact today, pretty common genre literature theme, I guess.

For his treatment of this theme, "Frozen Beauty," Mr. Kersh is receiving a grade of merely acceptable from Professor MPorcius.

"Reflections in a Tablespoon" (1946)

It looks like this one first appeared in the collection Neither Man Nor Dog.  isfdb tells us the story is "non-genre."

The narrator is at a crappy restaurant, and recognizes the mark on a piece of silverware--this spoon once belonged to a good restaurant the narrator frequented before its owner, a jolly fat man, died over ten years ago.  He reminisces about the fat man, and about two other regular customers of his establishment, one, a somewhat deranged woman, purportedly an aristocrat fallen on hard times, the other an Eastern European scoundrel who was always cheating people and seducing and abandoning women.

Kersh cleverly and unexpectedly weaves together the tragic and dreadful biographies of these two troublemakers in a way that is entertaining, leading up to a satisfying surprise ending.  In some ways this story is structured like "Seed of Destruction," but "Reflections in a Tablespoon" includes characters that are interesting and I didn't find the twist ending so predictable.  

Thumbs up for "Reflections in a Tablespoon," a story that goes further in justifying the praise on the back of On an Odd Note and from Ellison than do our first two tales today.

"The Crewel Needle" (1953)

"The Crewel Needle" is a first person narrative, in which a retired police officer tells you how he was compelled to curtail his promising career early.  I guess it might be considered a locked-room mystery.

The narrator was first copper on the scene when a little orphan girl was heard crying out that the Aunt with whom she was living was dead.  Auntie's corpse and the little girl were in a locked room, and there was no sign of forced entry or a fight or stolen property or any clues like that--it is not even clear what killed the woman.  Besides being scared of everything--scared of men, scared of boys, scared of fires, scared of germs--the interesting thing about Auntie was that she made extra money by "crewel work," which we are told is "embroidering with silks on a canvas background," and closer examination indicates that she died when a crewel needle was driven straight through her skull and into her brain.  Because there is no evidence somebody got into the house to attack Auntie, an open verdict is declared.  The narrator, however, is sure that Auntie was murdered, and thinking that solving the case on his own will boost his career, he wracks his brain and then interviews the little girl on his own time, trying to figure out who committed the foul deed and how.

The narrator susses out that the little girl loved going to the cinema before her parents croaked, but Auntie always refused to let her go because the cinema is full of germs and is a fire hazard besides.  So, the child, using a sort of physics trick she learned in a kids' science book, assassinated Auntie with that crewel needle.  The girl confesses privately to the narrator, but professes innocence to the narrator's superiors; the child's perfidy blackens the narrator's reputation and he is forced to resign.              

I have little interest in the commonplace trappings of detective stories and locked room mysteries in particular--the clues and interrogations and red herrings and hard to swallow explanations of how the apparently impossible crime was accomplished and how the detective figured out whodunit--but I like how "The Crewel Needle" paints for us the picture of a world characterized by injustice and irrationality.  All the characters behave in ways that betray an unwillingness or inability to tell right from wrong and to accurately assess risk and weigh competing values.  (In a line that jumps out at the 2022 reader, we learn that Auntie wore "an influenza mask" whenever she left the house.)  Because Kersh has some good psychological/sociological character stuff going on here and not just the locked-room gimmick, I got into it and can give "The Crewel Needle" a moderate recommendation.

"The Crewel Needle" hit the newsstands in Britain in a 1953 issue of Lilliput and later the same year was presented to American readers in Esquire.  In addition to reappearing in a few Kersh collections, in 1959 the story, renamed "Open Verdict," would be reprinted in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.

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None of these stories is bad, so I can confidently tell you that we'll be reading four more stories from On an Odd Note in the near future, after we take a look at a 1970s SF magazine.