We'll be reading the contents of Blood Runs Cold here at MPorcius Fiction Log over three blog posts. We've actually already read in other venues three of the stories that the collection reprints: "The Cure" (I said it was competent but marred by a pun ending) and "I Like Blondes" (I called it silly) in Playboy, and "Word of Honor" in The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy (I judged it "Acceptable.") That leaves fourteen tales from detective magazines, SF magazines, and men's magazines for us to investigate, and we will grapple with five of them today.
"The Show Must Go On" (1960)
"The Show Must Go On" made its debut in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, in an issue with a good cover with a bold composition and strong use of color.It is intermission! An actor goes to the bar by the theatre--a drink will help him prepare for the big role he is to play after intermission. A man confronts the actor, jabbing a gun into his stomach and claiming the actor impregnated his daughter! The angry father comes to think the actor is mentally ill, and decides not to pull the trigger. The actor hurries off to the theatre, and we get our groan-inducing trick ending--the actor is John Wilkes Booth and the tough role he is about to play is that of murderer of President Lincoln!
(Bloch of course is fascinated by famous murderers of the past, like Lizzie Borden--see "Lizzie Borden Took an Axe..."--and Jack the Ripper--see "The Hungry Eye.")
I was particularly disappointed by the gimmicky ending because Bloch did a good job with the confrontation with the angry father and with the portrayal of a love 'em and leave 'em cad of an actor--the enraged man's daughter is named "Livvie" and the callous Booth actually calls her "Lizzie," having banged so many chicks he can't even remember all of them, which I thought was pretty funny.
I'll call this acceptable filler. I don't know enough about Booth and the assassination of Lincoln to know how much of this story is based on the truth and how much Bloch just made up--did Booth really take a drink at a bar before the attack? Was there a real Livvie? Maybe people who have read Lincoln biographies would have known from early on what was going on, but I was surprised on the last page, as I didn't spot any clues as to time period or location or anything.
"Daybroke" (1958)
"Daybroke" made its debut in the one and only issue of Star Science Fiction, a magazine edited by Frederik Pohl and which was blessed to have as art director Richard Powers. I wrote a few lines about Star Science Fiction when we talked about one of its stories, Brian Aldiss's "Judas Dance." Pohl liked "Daybroke" enough that he included it in Star of Stars, the book showcasing the stories he felt best from the Star anthologies and this lone magazine issue, as well as in The Science Fiction Roll of Honor.“Dig That Crazy Grave!” is about jazz! We’ve read quite a few stories about jazz
recently, and they often include crazy metaphors and surreal images that struggle
to convey to readers how really good jazz makes you feel. Bloch steps up to the plate and takes swings
like this one:
…dreams, when the statues come alive and move, and the great hands from the sky reach down and pluck at your entrails like a bass….
We also get the suggestion from the story's main character, a college professor, that the face of the leader of the story's jazz band as he bangs the drums, a “face that was almost blank with inner concentration,”
bears the same expression he has seen on “the faces of women during ecstasy.” Bloch likens listening to good jazz to having sex, the band “playing the audience like an instrument,”
making the audience “moan the long moan of the cat on the oh-so-cool tin roof.”
This might make jazz sound awesome, but Bloch has come not to praise jazz, but to bury it! The college prof is writing a book on the sociological aspects of jazz—how jazz musicians and fans are a distinct self-selected subculture with their own lingo and so on—and he takes his girlfriend Dorothy on a date to see JoJo Jones and his band. Dorothy is a jazz skeptic—she sees that the jazz musicians are phonies, their outfits and slang just a sham to appeal to the public. But soon JoJo has won Dorothy over to the cause of jazz, and she is sitting on the stage every night as his band performs, “letting the crowd pour over onto” her. Dorothy herself becomes artificial and phony and sexually licentious, wearing tons of make up and a dress that reveals plenty of cleavage and growing her fingernails into long painted talons.
Dorothy also joins the band in smoking pot
(Bloch employs some slang for smoking marijuana that I haven’t heard before,
like “taking a charge.”) When the prof
now hears jazz he realizes it is “noise, an animal bleating, savage and
senseless,” a magic spell used by the sorcerer to control his worshipers, and sees the jazz musicians as being like vampires as they feed
on the energy of the audience. The musicians shoot Dorothy full of “H,” hoping to give her more energy upon which to feed,
but she can’t handle the drug and dies.
The prof finds Dorothy’s body and the jazzmen decide they have to
kill him as well to hide the disaster from the police.
I think “Dig That Crazy Grave!” is pretty good. The structure and pacing and all that are
good, and the idea of seductive weirdos stealing your girlfriend is an effective basis for a story. Bloch’s social criticism here—jazz and
drugs are low forms of entertainment that appeal to the basest parts of us and
are quite dangerous—may be out of tune with our times and a little hypocritical
coming from a writer who makes his money appealing to readers’ lust for sex and
blood, but Bloch actually illustrates and explores these ideas and integrates
them into a story in which characters have a narrative arc and change over time—he
doesn’t just give us a long laundry list of banal gripes like he does in “Funnel
of God” and “Daybroke.” I also have to
admit that I sympathize with Bloch’s hostility to artifice and phoniness—I myself
find cosmetics and long painted nails disgusting and depressing. Finally, let me note that while I often complain
about Bloch’s wordplay, in this story the puns and slang are put into the
mouths of the characters, mostly the villains, and add to the atmosphere and
buttress the themes of the tale instead of detracting from them.
"Dig That Crazy Grave!" debuted in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, where we see Bloch's name on the sexalicious woman-in-peril cover. I may have liked it, but it looks like its attacks on jazz, drugs, and cosmetics (which one might see as veiled attacks on the personalities and contributions to our culture of women and black people, though all the story's characters are white) didn’t appeal to editors; according to isfdb, “Dig That Crazy Grave!” has not appeared in any other Bloch collection and has never been anthologized.
**********
Five characteristic Bloch stories, two of which I liked. Not a stellar ratio, but if we measure by page count it looks a little better. We'll tackle more tales from Blood Runs Cold soon, but first, a SF novel from the 1950s.
No comments:
Post a Comment