Suspense from F Brown, H Ellison, B Pronzini, R Silverberg & R Bloch

This weekend I was looking at the books at a church sale and came upon 2001's A Century of Great Suspense Stories.  There were four stories in there by writers who are associated with SF and about whom I am interested, Robert Bloch, Harlan Ellison, Anthony Boucher and Fredric Brown, so I thought I'd track the stories down at the internet archive back home and see how great they really were.  Back at MPorcius Fiction Log's Mid-Atlantic HQ, I realized I'd already read Bloch's "Life in Our Time" and Boucher's "The Girl Who Married a Monster," leaving me with only Ellison's "Killing Bernstein" and Brown's "The Wench is Dead."  I didn't think two stories was really enough for a blog post, so I started hunting around the internet archive and soon discovered Great Tales of Mystery and Suspense, a 1985 edition of 1981's The Arbor House Treasury of Mystery and Suspense, edited by Bill Pronzini, Barry N. Malzberg and Martin H. Greenberg, and 1993's Blood Threat and Fears (oy, with the puns) edited by Cynthia Manson, the subtitle of which is Thirty-Three Great Tales of Psychological Suspense.  The Arbor House volume includes stories I've already read by Malzberg ("Agony Column") and Mickey Spillane ("I'll Die Tomorrow" AKA "Tomorrow I Die") but also stories new to me by Pronzini ("A Craving for Originality") and Robert Silverberg ("Many Mansions"), while the Manson book had one by Bloch ("See How They Run"), bringing us to five--count them, five--allegedly great suspense (and/or mystery?) stories.

"The Wench is Dead" by Fredric Brown (1953)

This one debuted in Manhunt, and in 1961 would reappear in Bloodhound, a British magazine that reprinted stories from Manhunt.  Brown expanded "The Wench is Dead" and it appeared as a novel with the same title in 1955.  I'm reading the 1953 Manhunt version.

A few months ago our narrator, Howie, who has a BA in Sociology, was sitting at a desk in his father's Chicago investment firm wearing a white shirt and a tie.  But then he became a drifter and today he's in L.A. washing dishes (TIL that slang for a dishwasher is "pearl-diver") and getting drunk every day.  And it gets better--he has also charmed a whore, Billie the Kid, who wears her "sleek" black hair in a "page-boy bob" and has breasts the "size and shape of half-grapefruits" so he can bang her for free!  He might even be in love with her!

Uh oh, things just got worse!  The overweight heroin-addicted whore upstairs was just murdered!  Who cares, you ask?  Well, Howie and Billie care!  Howie was the last person to see her before she got shivved, Billie having sent Howie upstairs to ask the lady of the night with all the tracks on her arms if she could spare some booze!  The milkman saw Howie go into the heroin-addict's apartment and he told the fuzz, making Howie suspect Number 1!  And Howie can't just tell the cops the truth because while Howie was at work Billie had to talk to the boys in blue and she lied to them about her and Howie's whereabouts at the time of the murder!

Howie goes on the lam with the idea that he will make his way back to Chicago and resume the life of a respectable office worker from a prominent family who only drinks socially.  A series of coincidences and chance occurrences ensue that end up with Howie figuring out who the murderer is and at the same time getting himself even deeper in trouble.  Finally we have a twist ending that gives us every reason to believe Howie is never going to return to responsible middle-class life, that he has found a way to live like a drunken bum the rest of his days, and all he has to do is abandon all sense of decency, all his inhibitions, any reluctance to commit the most heinous of sins!

This is a good, fun story about underworld scum whose lives revolve around drugs, booze, prostitution and petty crime, and the risk and opportunities that arise when by chance they get mixed up with serious big time criminals.  Is it a horror story about the dangers of hitting the sauce and associating with human trash, or a wish fulfillment fantasy for people sick of living within the straitjacket of bourgeois norms?  Brown's writing is economical, smooth, and fast-paced, but still atmospheric and full of psychological insight.  Thumbs up for "The Wench is Dead."

"Killing Bernstein" by Harlan Ellison (1976)

The last time we talked about Ellison I was explaining the many ways that his cover story for the November 1980 issue of F&SF was terrible.  But I'm not an Ellison hater on a jihad against this successful son of Ohio and his horde of worshipful fanboys--I always start these stories hoping I will like them, and maybe I'll like this June 1976 cover story for the first issue of the short-lived magazine Mystery Monthly, which I am reading in a scan of the 1978 collection Strange Wine, which has a great cover by the Dillons perhaps meant to entice fans of Lord of the Rings.  (Is there a story about an elf maiden in this collection?)

"Killing Bernstein" is OK, kind of slight.  The narrator is a big executive at a big toy company, and Ellison indulges in his love of lists and his love of famous names, listing off all the big toy company names, nine of them.  He also has a riff on Jaws, a theory of why a movie about sharks might be so successful at scaring people.

The narrator is having an affair with a beautiful woman executive, last name Bernstein, but her behavior towards him is erratic.  One night she'll have sex with him and say she loves him, then the next day she'll be cold, or even, at the big meeting, shoot down all his ideas for new toys, basing her blackball on the results of her test research.  (This meeting is the central scene of the story, and the longest, and, in the intro to "Killing Bernstein" in Strange Wine, Ellison claims the toys and the reasons they were rejected are all based on toys proposed and abandoned in real life.)  The narrator comes to think Bernstein is out to destroy his career (he compares her to a shark--this is where the Spielberg movie comes in.)  So he kills her in her apartment, but the next day she is back at work.  Is he going insane?  Did he just knock her out so that she could recover and return to the office to play mind games with him?  He kills her again, but she reappears at the office again!

Eventually the narrator figures out what is going on.  Bernstein has multiple clones, and different ones come into the office at different times.  One of the clones fell in love with him, but the others didn't, which explains why the narrator has been treated erratically.  Broken hearted, in a daze, the narrator abandons his career and stays in the research facility where the clones are hiding out, hoping one of them will fall in love with him like that one he murdered.

Acceptable.  One of the problems of the story is that the ending sort of requires you to think the narrator was really in love with Bernstein, but you get the impression throughout the story that he killed Bernstein not out of passion over his rejected love but because she was threatening his career; it is like Ellison wanted this story to not only be a tale of rage over rejection or unrequited love, but also an attack on middle-class money-grubbing careerists.  I also have to wonder if that whole Jaws-related passage about our racial memory going back to the time our ancestors were aquatic animals adds something worthwhile to the story or just pads the word count.  In an interview in the December 1981 issue of Twilight Zone magazine, Ellison seems to be suggesting he doesn't revise his work, that as a "professional" he can produce copy on a first go that is salable (or as he puts it, "not just readable...but...a hell of a story") but maybe "Killing Bernstein" would have benefited from some polishing so its disparate ideas--clones, selling toys, ancestral memories of sharks, rejection by a woman, and competition between executives--were more united into a coherent whole. 

"A Craving for Originality" by Bill Pronzini (1979)

The intro to this story in Great Tales of Mystery and Suspense warns us it is a satire about a hack writer.  Can a satire be suspenseful?  What is it with this false advertising?

Charlie Hackman churns out a dozen or so derivative and imitative novels every year, riding the coattails of trends and fads, making enough money to pay the mortgage on his suburban house and support his obese wife who doesn't like to have sex as well as his three pack a day cigarette habit.  After doing this for fifteen years, on his 40th birthday, he suddenly decides he is dissatisfied with his unoriginal writing and his unoriginal life, and wracks his brain trying to think of something original to write, and when this fails, something original to do.  This part of Pronzini's story is a little annoying, because it is so repetitive--a short paragraph describing Charlie's hopefully original idea, followed by a one-word rejection of it as "hackneyed" or "trite" or whatever, again and again.  The ideas are supposed to be funny, but they are not.

Hackman finally comes up with an original idea while in Manhattan and puts it into action, and Pronzini's story is entertaining for a page or two.  Charlie gets a hatchet and bursts into a bookstore and chops up his many pseudonymously written paperbacks, crying out stuff like "I'm doing hack work!"  Then he runs around town, pursued by a crowd and a cop, to be run over by an automobile, ending the story on another pun on "hack," the car that ends his sad suburban life being a taxi cab.

This story is neither suspenseful nor mysterious, and it is not great, either, but seeing as the chase in my old stomping grounds of Midtown Manhattan made me smile, I'll judge it acceptable.

"Craving for Originality" debuted in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, and would be included in Graveyard Plots: The Best Short Stories of Bill Pronzini.

"Many Mansions" by Robert Silverberg (1973)

"Many Mansions" first appeared in the third of Terry Carr's Universe anthologies, and has since reappeared in many Silverberg collections and several anthologies.

"Many Mansions" is a randy time travel joke story--I thought this book was called Great Tales of Mystery and Suspense, not Black Humor Cavalcade or Broken Marriages and Broken Minds.  Good grief.

This thing is like 24 pages and manifests itself as like sixty or seventy paragraphs with double spaces between them; each para represents the thoughts and/or narrates the actions of one of the three characters.  We've got Ted, who is sick of his wife, Alice, and day dreams of her getting killed in an accident so he can bang other chicks; when he despairs because that is unlikely, he daydreams of committing suicide.  We've got Alice, who dreams of Ted keeling over.  And we've got Martin, Ted's grandfather, who is over 80 and has sex fantasies about Alice; he gets so excited thinking about her and telephoning her so he can breathe heavily at her over the line that a medical robot has to administer drugs lest he have a heart attack.

This is the future, 2006, when the government controls the weather and Alice's cooking consists of pressing keys on a console.  (The government manages to screw up the weather and Alice still manages to screw up dinner sometimes--this is a joke story, after all.)  Time machines have been developed, and all three of our unsavory characters day dream of using a time machine to have sex with and/or murder one or both of the other two characters, and some of them even, I think, put their ideas into practice--I think the alleged mystery and alleged suspense of this allegedly great story have to do with whether individual little paragraphs are "reality" in this or that alternate time stream or just day dreams.  The little paragraphs get a little repetitive as we see alternate outcomes of the characters' little expeditions to the past.

"Many Mansions" isn't funny, and the story generates no human feeling not only because it is ridiculous but also since it portrays multiple realities, so nobody's death or love or fear or regret feels real--infinite possibilities means nothing matters.  I'm finding this story particularly disappointing because the whole point of today's exercise is to read suspense stories; if I wanted a sex-oriented comedy I would just read Henjo--Hen na Joshi Kousei Amaguri Senko again.  If Malzberg and Pronzini wanted to throw money at their buddy Silverbob I expect they could have found a more suspenseful story in his vast oeuvre than this.

Thumbs down!  

"See How They Run" by Robert Bloch (1973)

This story from the author of Psycho comes to us in the form of a journal that a comedy writer for TV is keeping at the urging of his shrink.  (More Hollywood, more shrinks.  Somehow, we read a lot of stories about Hollywood and psychiatrists/psychoanalysts here at MPorcius Fiction Log.)  Via the diary entries we learn about the writer's life--his father entertained his pals by telling them stuff the narrator as a child said, his mother had him drinking formula from a bottle for a peculiarly long time and was otherwise abusive, there was an episode in which as a kid the narrator killed a mouse with a kitchen knife, he has lost his TV writing job because he was giving the TV star material that was not family-friendly enough, his wife has become a successful singing star, and now he is hitting the sauce pretty hard--and the shrink's diagnosis of his neuroses and uncovering of the subconscious reasons for his various career decisions.  The [unreliable] narrator thinks psychology is a scam, but the text bears out the doctor's diagnosis.  The shock ending is that the narrator has a "hebephrenic schizoid" episode, in which he "revert[s] to childhood or infant behavior levels" and the final journal entry is written in the spelling and grammar of a child.  This child-like passage, somewhat obliquely, indicates that the narrator murdered his wife in much the same way he killed that mouse long ago.   

Rather weak...maybe barely acceptable.

"See How They Run" first appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, and would resurface in Bloch collections and an Alfred Hitchcock anthology.

**********

So, of our five stories, only one, Fredric Brown's, could conceivably be considered "great," and it is the only one that is truly suspenseful.  The Ellison and Pronzini stories have endings that are surprising, but the surprise was not preceded by the kind of curiosity and uncertainty and anxiety that I think constitutes suspense.  The Silverberg story instilled apathy (and annoyance) in this reader, and the Bloch story wasn't much more engaging (though it was considerably less annoying than the Silverberg.)

Even though today's best story was the most realistic and least speculative, the one that relies least on futuristic technology, abnormal psychology, or absurdist satire, expect the next batch of blog posts here at MPorcius Fiction Log to inhabit our customary milieu of the supernatural and the spacefaring future.