Playboy late 1957: Robert Bloch, Charles Beaumont and Gerald Kersh

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading genre stories from 1957 issues of genre-defining men's magazine Playboy.  Our last episode covered the first half of 1957, and today we look at the second half of that year.  Now, we've already blogged about Gerald Kersh's story from the July issue, "Mistress of Porcosito," having read it in the Kersh collection On an Odd Note, where it was titled "The Queen of Pig Island."  But we do have another Kersh story today, as well as offerings from Psycho scribe Robert Bloch and prolific Twilight Zone contributor Charles Beaumont.

"The Cure" by Robert Bloch (1957)

You'll definitely want to check out the October 1957 issue of Hugh Hefner's magazine, because it includes photos of Benny Goodman and Frank Sinatra receiving their medals for earning top spots in the 1957 Playboy Jazz Poll.  Wow!  But let's tear ourselves away from that color photo of Ol' Blue Eyes long enough to read the issue's story by Robert Bloch, a guy who has a big stack of awards of his own, multiple Hugos and Stokers among them, and who appears in a photo in the magazine himself, conning a boat. 

"The Cure" is a competent crime story, only noteworthy because of its eye-rollingly lame pun ending.  It is illustrated with a powerful color woodcut by Richard Tyler that all you fans of BDSM should check out, however.

Jeff, Mike and Marie are dangerous American criminals hiding out in a Brazilian jungle village.  Their lackey Luiz, an Indian, is very loyal to Jeff.  Luiz rescues Jeff when Marie goes insane one night and tries to murder Jeff with a machete.  Then Luiz and Mike tie the naked Marie down while Jeff tends to his injury.  

The crooks are waiting for some money to arrive--I guess some associate in Cuba is changing marked American bills they stole from an armored car into pesos.  It is decided that Jeff will stay in the village to recuperate and wait for the dinero while Mike and Luiz take insane Marie to a town to get treatment from a psychiatrist.  One of the weaknesses of the story is that the characters act like going to the psychiatrist to get your homicidal mania fixed is like going to the emergency room to get stiches because you cut yourself slicing a lemon for your iced tea.  When you build an entire story around a stupid pun sometimes you have to sacrifice plausibility.

The punchline of the story comes when Luiz returns alone to the village.  He tells Jeff that doublecrosser Mike got his hands on the money before Jeff could learn about its arrival and was even going to murder Luiz before absconding with the filthy lucre; in the ensuing fight Mike was slain and the money fell irretrievably into a river.  Luiz then followed Jeff's instructions to take Marie to a "headshrinker" literally; he hands the severed and shrunken head of Marie to Jeff.

Barely acceptable.  Among the Bloch collections in which "The Cure" would reappear is a German volume called Nacht der Schrecken.  The bulk of this book is actually the novelization by a Michael Avallone of Bloch's screenplay for the Barbara Stanwyck film The Night Walker.  I like Barbara Stanwyck and tried to watch The Night Walker after reading "The Cure" but it is pretty ridiculous, and worse, boring, and I gave up at the 47 minute mark.

"The Deadly Will to Win" by Charles Beaumont (1957)

November's Playboy has a photo of Beaumont at the wheel of a car, clad in goggles.  Appropriately enough, as "The Deadly Will to Win" is about Buck Larsen, bitter 47-year-old race car driver!  Buck's friends are all dead or retired, he hasn't had a woman in a while, his reflexes and nerves aren't what they used to be, and he doesn't have any money.  If he doesn't finish in the top three (of almost twenty drivers!) in the next race he won't have enough money for a hotel room or even for the gasoline he'll need to get to the next race!  Even though he hates racing and hates race fans, whom he thinks watch in hopes of seeing people like Buck get killed, he keeps on doing it, for some reason unwilling to settle down to the job of car mechanic.

In the minutes before the race, Buck meets one of his competitors, a young guy with a pretty girlfriend.  "You want to impress your girlfriend," Buck thinks, "I just want to go on eating."  Will Buck survive the race?  Will the young stud survive the race?  Will Buck finish among the top three so he can afford to continue his perilous career?

A very straightforward (no twist ending) but effective adventure story; we watch Buck prepare his car and his performance in the race, and it is entertaining.  "The Deadly Will to Win" has been reprinted in quite a few Beaumont collections.  

"Something on His Mind" by Gerald Kersh (1941)

The December issue of Playboy reprints a story by Gerald Kersh that was first published by British magazine Lilliput in October 1941; the original title, "Strong Greek Wine," was dropped by the editors of Playboy in favor of "Something on His Mind." 

A guy goes into an inn.  He looks like he's been through something terrible, and is in a terrible mood, complaining and cursing.  He pays for drinks for everybody in the place, angrily throwing one silver coin and then another at the innkeeper.  The surprise ending is that he had on him thirty silver coins when he came in and he is eager to be rid of the rest of them, throwing them to the floor, where patrons scurry to collect them.  Kersh doesn't come out and say it, but this must be Judas; clues suggest today was the day Jesus was crucified.  An appropriate story for the Yuletide issue of the magazine, I suppose.

Acceptable.

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For the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log we'll be turning back the clock twenty years and reading more short stories from a magazine.  Stay tuned!