The Bat by Mary Roberts Rinehart, Avery Hopwood and Stephen Vincent Benet

My copy of The Bat, Dell 652, cover by Walter Brooks 

As a little girl she had hesitated between wishing to be a locomotive engineer or a famous bandit--and when she had found, at seven, that the accident of sex would probably debar her from either occupation, she had resolved fiercely that some time before she died she would show the world in general and the Van Gorder clan in particular that a woman was quite as capable of dangerous exploits as a man.

Some time ago now I picked up Dell 652, The Bat, a 1950s paperback edition of a 1920s novel credited on its cover to one Mary Roberts Rinehart, a woman considered by some to be "The Queen of the Mystery Novel" and "The American Agatha Christie."  I bought it on a whim because Wonder Book in Frederick, MD, was having some kind of buy two get one free sale or something like that, I liked the cover, and I vaguely recalled my brother praising a Vincent Price film for which it served as source material and H. P. Lovecraft talking about it.  If I had a better memory I might not have bought it--today on page 80 of Essential Solitude: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth: 1926-1931, I see Lovecraft found the play upon which the novel was based to be very boring.

The Bat was apparently a huge success--the cover of one paperback edition insists it is "The bestselling spellbinder of all time!" and that it has sold over 10 million copies.  The novel, however, has a convoluted and tricky publishing history.  If I am understanding this right, in 1908 Rinehart published a mystery novel titled The Circular Staircase.  In 1920 she and Avery Hopwood came up with an adaptation of that novel for the stage that was retitled The Bat.  The play was a hit, and a novelization of the play was published under Rinehart and Hopwood's names in 1926, though it was in fact ghostwritten by Stephen Vincent Benet.  My Dell paperback is absolutely silent on all this business about a play and fails to mention Hopwood and Benet, and Dell was wise to keep mum, because if I had known any of that I would have passed on the book--a novelization of a play by a poet is like three red flags too many.  

Well, we're committed now, let's check out this 224-page caper written by the author of John Brown's Body based on a play that "wearied to yawning" H. P. Lovecraft with its "mechanical unconvincingness."

The American consciousness is dominated by a string of gruesome murders, brazen robberies, inexplicable burglaries!  At the site of each outrage is left a sign--the sign of the Bat!  As the newspapers print inch after inch about his black deeds, police officers, journalists, and underworld figures turn over every stone trying to answer the question on everyone's lips--who is the Bat?  One such seeker was Wentworth, a young detective of genius with a long career of crime-solving ahead of him--for his pains he turned up dead in a gutter, a bullet in his heart and a look of terror frozen on his face!  As our novel begins, Wentworth's friend Anderson, another young New York detective of promise, expresses his determination to bring the diabolical monster who murdered Wentworth to justice!

Mystery stories of this type need a large cast of characters to serve as potential victims and suspects, and in Chapter Two we meet a bunch more people.  We've got 65-year old spinster Cornelia Van Gorder, a rich woman who as a child had wished she could drive locomotives and/or lead bandits and who has an inexhaustible fund of youthful energy.  She has rented for the summer a country house recently vacated upon the death of its owner, bank president Courtleigh Fleming; her move to the house coincides with the shift in the location of the Bat's notorious crimes from Gotham to the suburbs!  Already resident in the house is a Japanese butler named Billy, and Cornelia brings with her her life-long maid, superstitious Irishwoman Lizzie Allen, and Cornelia's young niece, Dale.  Lizzie wants to return to NYC ASAP, because she keeps seeing odd figures in and around the house and keeps finding in the mailbox letters bearing such advice as "Go back to the city at once and save your life."  The stoical Billy in his broken English admits that the doors and windows of the large house do seem to have started opening and closing of their own accord.  

Cornelia, who craves adventure, is determined to stay, even though she is sure the threatening letters must be from the Bat, and in Chapter Three she studies the rented house with an eye to figuring out how to burglar-proof it and, in a comedic scene, for practice, fires off a revolver for the first time in her life.  More people join the cast; there's the young man who owns the house and lives at the local country club, Dick Fleming, nephew of the deceased banker; a new gardener, Brooks, a handsome young man with soft hands who admits under questioning to not being a gardener at all but a guy down on his luck; and the local sawbones, Dr. Wells, who arrives with gossip about how the Fleming bank has collapsed because somebody, assumed to be a cashier named Bailey, stole a bunch of bonds.  Rinehart, Hopwood and/or Benet make it clear we are supposed to think Brooks is really Bailey in disguise and that Bailey is Dale's secret boyfriend and that he is innocent.  For his part, the Doctor acts pretty suspiciously, doing things, like unlocking windows, that are witnessed by the omniscient narrator and us readers but not by any of the other characters.

The first chapter of The Bat is fun extravagant melodrama--like a comic book from the time before comic books were about angsty teenagers navigating their identity in a world blah blah blah--and makes it easy to fool yourself into thinking you are going to be reading a novel in which guys chase each other across rooftops and the cops bust into a barred basement with guns drawn and a damsel is hanging by one hand from a window ledge and our hero has to choose between grabbing her wrist or taking a shot at the receding figure of the man who murdered his friend.  But this novel was based on a play so Chapters Two through Twenty-One are all going to be set in a single location and involve a bunch of people running their yaps, and a significant proportion of those people are comic relief foreigners, the moaning Irish maid who is scared of ouija boards and the "Oriental" butler who knows ju-jitsu and speaks in clipped fragments.

After three or four chapters of comic relief my hopes for some action, some drive, maybe even some blood and guts, were flagging, but then revived a little with the arrival of Anderson at the house in Chapter Six.  The detective intends to spend the night awake in the house--solving the Fleming House case is the last job his boss has given him before setting him loose on the Bat.  Anderson opines that it must not be the Bat terrorizing Cornelia, because the Bat has never warned his victims ahead of time.

Despite its title, the bulk of this novel isn't about an evil mastermind who calls himself "The Bat" and pulls off all kinds of horrible crimes; the state of the text strongly suggests to me that, to construct their play, Rinehart and Hopwood just added some bat window dressing to the start and end of Rinehart's 1908 novel about embezzlement, The Circular Staircase.  Neither Anderson nor the Bat serve as main characters whose desires and decisions drive the narrative of the novel, which you might call an ensemble piece; instead, for the bulk of the book Cornelia does as much detecting as does Anderson and she serves as something like a protagonist, while it is the embezzlers who are the main villains, not the Bat.  Oy, I wouldn't have bought this book if the cover had shown an old woman--I bought it because of the bat!   

Bailey, the fake gardener and cashier on the lam, served in the World War with the architect who built the Fleming house and knows Courtleigh Fleming had a secret room built within it--Bailey and Dale figure C. Fleming stole the bonds himself and secreted them in the house and if they can find the money they can clear Bailey's name.  (The text says "bonds" at the beginning but later everyone just says "money," so maybe the thief cashed them or something?)  Dale calls up Dick Fleming this dark and stormy night to see if he has any blueprints and he comes right over.  D. Fleming, upon learning from Dale that their might be a pile of money in the house, decides he'd rather keep it for himself than return it to its rightful owners and so he and the girl fight over the blueprints, ripping them to bits; the scuffle ends when some unknown third person shoots D. Fleming dead.  Anderson investigates this crime, and Dale, to protect Bailey, tries to keep the whole business of blueprints and hidden rooms and the gardener's identity a secret from the gumshoe.  Another character enters the house, Beresford, the man who drove D. Fleming and was waiting in the car for him, and he joins the confusing arguments over who did what when and the searches of the house and the sightings of mysterious figures and all that.

We get standard detective story elements, like reenactments of the crime, the discovery of a stopped watch (the time it shows being considered significant), and people who possess clues and concoct theories and keep them to themselves instead of sharing them with others.  Maybe Rinehart herself pioneered some of these commonplaces in The Circular Staircase, I don't know.  The Bat is also a recursive story that comments on detective fiction while itself being a detective story, with Miss Cornelia doing things she has read about fictional detectives doing and comparing what is happening in the rented house to what happens in books she has read.  None of this is interesting or exciting, because there is no human emotion and people don't seem to act very rationally or believably--for example, everybody is supposed to be scared and to suspicious of others but characters will just lay the key to a locked door or a loaded firearm on a table and walk away from it or absent-mindedly turn their backs on other individuals so those individuals can sneak around the room hiding items or seizing items--the characters don't act like they are in danger so we readers can't take the danger seriously.  All the lame jokes involving Lizzie and to a lesser extent Billy (whom everybody calls "the Jap") further undermine any tension the text might generate.

In Chapter Fifteen (remember, the book has 21 chapters total) a new character appears, a disheveled man in a daze whom nobody recognizes who says he can't recall his own name or what happened to him, though the author(s) make clear he is shamming.  In the final pages of the novel this mystery man claims to be Anderson and alleges that the man we and the characters have known as Anderson for over 100 pages is the Bat.  There is a final showdown and Miss Cornelia the 65-year old spinster outwits the world's greatest criminal in an unconvincing way to save the day.  We never learn anything about The Bat's motives or personality and never see him do anything impressive, despite all the build up he has received earlier in the book and all the talk about who he might be.  (Somehow, the experience of being led to expect a bat was the main villain only to learn later that to blame was some boring money-manipulating doctor feels familiar.)

(If you care about the real plot and not the thin layer of bat action sprinkled atop it, Courtleigh Fleming and Dr. Wells worked together to fake C. Fleming's death and steal the money, which the characters find, clearing Bailey; they also find C. Fleming's body, he having been killed, I think, by the Bat.)        

The Bat is pretty bad--I am finding its apparent high reputation bewildering.  Maybe this is one of those "cozy" mysteries which isn't supposed to disturb or excite you and in which a seemingly innocuous woman solves the crime and everything turns out alright in the end?  Why all the talk on the covers about "terror" and "suspense" and "spellbinding"--and the cool bat art!--then?  Lies, all lies!

Don't you believe it

Odyssey, Spring '76: T N Scortia, R Bloch, F Pohl, J Pournelle & F Saberhagen

In May I visited an antique store in Carlisle, PA and among the SF-related things I saw--but was too cheap to buy--was the Spring 1976 issue of Roger Elwood's magazine Odyssey, a magazine which published a total of two issues (this being the first.)  Let's take a break from the 1930s and check out five (count them--five!) stories from Odyssey.  Our hero Barry N. Malzberg has a story in the issue, but we'll skip it and read it soon in its book appearance in The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady, which we've been reading on and off for a while.

"Someday I'll Find You" by Thomas N. Scortia

Here we have a banal twist ending story about how politics corrupts idealistic men.  Oy, if I wanted to read about a corrupt politician who, scared by his falling poll numbers, contrived to unjustly prosecute his rival in the upcoming election, I would just read the newspaper.

A guy has been chief executive of the planet for twelve years. This civilization has small scale nuclear reactors, hover cars, video phones, 3D TV...and a big problem.  In the last decade, due to radioactive contamination, the population of this world has declined from ten million to 150,000!  The Prime Executive's political party has been pouring all public resources into a desperate project--building a space ship that can reach the presumed home planet of a similar alien race whose space probe landed on this planet some years ago. This probe, we readers are made aware, is a NASA probe from Earth, but it must have been launched so long ago there is no telling if the human race is still even alive.

The rival political party thinks the space ship a waste of scarce resources and the idea that the planet from which came the probe fanciful; they propose devoting public effort to setting up a living place in subterranean caverns.  The big election is tomorrow, and it looks like the cavern faction is going to defeat the space ship faction.  So, the Prime Executive's top guy manufactures evidence that the cavern faction's candidate is a thief, and the Prime Exec meets the pro-cavern candidate secretly to try to blackmail him. But cavern boy wasn't born yesterday and records the Prime Executive threatening him and releases this recording to the media.  The cavern people win the election.

But the unscrupulous starship party isn't licked yet!  The ship is almost finished, so they decide to just steal it before inauguration day and blast off for the location the boffins have theorized is the probe's point of origin, taking with them all the engineers and technicians left in the world.  The lack of technical people will make the cavern project the voters supported impossible, but the pro-starship politicians just shrug that off--as we can see every day in real life, elected officials in general have contempt for the voters.  The Prime Executive's wife refuses to join him in this treacherous voyage so, demonstrating his abandonment of personal as well as political integrity he drugs her and drags her aboard.

Everybody on the ship goes into suspended animation, hoping to wake up in orbit around a healthy planet they can live on.  The twist ending is that the planet they just left is Earth--the culture that created the NASA probe fell so long ago it has been totally forgotten--those scientists who deduced the probe's point of origin as another system made a major miscalculation.

The plot outline isn't terrible, but it isn't great, and the style is a little tedious, with lots of superfluous description of how a 3D TV works and that sort of thing.  Barely acceptable.  "Someday I'll Find You" has not, it appears, ever been reprinted.

"ETFF" by Robert Bloch

This story is advertised as "ROBERT BLOCH'S FIRST S.F. WORK IN YEARS!" on Odyssey Vol. 1 No. 1's table of contents, and while it is sadly lacking in actual speculations or science, it is directly aimed at the market of committed SF fans, and in fact has almost no appeal to the casual reader who has only dabbled in SF or knows SF primarily from 2001: A Space Odyssey and old Flash Gordon material.

"ETFF" is a long and tedious inside joke story, lacking in plot and character and human emotion, basically a forest of puns rooted in a mountain of flattering references to SF personalities and perhaps less flattering satires of various SF fan demographics.  When Malzberg does this sort of thing (consider Dwellers of the Deep and Gather at the Hall of the Planets) he provides real human feeling and a sharp controversial edge, but Bloch's story here is absolutely frivolous fan service.

Aliens are studying the Earth, and one of them has made a particular study of SF and become a SF fan, and so dons human guise and attends a SF convention in Connecticut.  (Bloch was famous for being the life of the party at such conventions.)  One of the more memorable SF-centric puns comes when the alien, who can heal people just by touching them, is alerted that a hemophiliac girl requires medical help--he says “Take me to your bleeder.”  One of the more vulgar gags has the alien, wanting to thank everyone for being so accommodating, using his miraculous powers to create out of thin air a Hugo award for every attendee; as you know, these awards are shaped like rocket ships, and the alien's wording of the spell, that a Hugo appear “under everyone’s seat,” leads the hard metal objects to materialize, dildo-like, in each and every attendant's anal cavity.  (I guess I am reading this story in the appropriate month.)  

Less memorable are the bog standard jokes that we have heard a million times about how people like to drink booze and how readers and writers have disagreements with editors and publishers.

Of historical interest to us SF fans is the use of fannish slang like “egoboo” and “filk” and caricatures of, among others, Forrest Ackerman (Ackerman is such a film fan he passes up a chance to meet a real extraterrestrial in order to screen Metropolis for the hundredth time) and New Wavers (they are obsessed with sex.)  One of the gags of special interest for you students of gender studies is when the alien attends a feminist panel.  The speaker declares she deserves all the privileges enjoyed by men, and the alien is convinced she is right, and helpfully transforms her into a man.

Thumbs down. "ETFF" is of historical value only.  (Bloch seems like a good guy, and I don't begrudge him writing a love letter to the people and institutions which brought joy to his life, but I'm not going to pretend this is good fiction any more than I am going to pretend a child's crayon scrawls hanging on his loving parents' fridge are good drawings.) 

"ETFF" was reprinted in the 1989 Bloch collection Fear and Trembling, even though the cover blurbs promise terror, personality and plot, none of which are to be found in "ETFF."

"The Prisoner of New York Island" by Frederik Pohl

I lived in New York City during the Giuliani and Bloomberg periods, and when I go back, as I had to this weekend (though only to Brooklyn), things look and feel different in a way that is disinctly disappointing--most strikingly, the Manhattan skyline looks different than I remember, quite wrong, to my mind, unbalanced and undistinguished.  "The Prisoner of New York Island" has a little of this kind of energy.

It is the future, 2076!  The America of the Tricentennial looks very different than that of the Bicentennial!  "The Prisoner of New York Island" follows two people from Arizona, one male and one female, members of a group marriage, as they visit Manhattan, which is largely in ruins, in early July (Pohl has a pivotal scene take place on the Fourth--remember that in 1976 there was a lot of excitement over the Bicentennial of American independence; having been born in 1971, I vaguely recall some of this excitement.)  As the story proceeds we learn through dialogue and exposition about life in this strange future.  It seems that people left the cities because of a plague and because city life was conclusively proven to be causing mental illness.  The visitors from Arizona, Sim and Suley, live on a nudist commune (they wear cloaks that can be translucent or can go opaque to fend off the sun or offer privacy when they urinate in public) where horses and bicycles are the primary means of transport.  Arizona seems to be independent of any federal government and to have little or no government of its own.  Conversely, in the East people still practice monogamy and have government.  Middle-class people who work in New York live in places like New Jersey--Manhattan is the anarchic home of creepy weirdos and lower-class people.

The man who pilots the boat that brings Sim and Suley to NYC from the mainland warns them that the guides who will accost them prefer to be paid in drugs and will

"...bore you out of your mind with talk about what New York used to be, a hundred years ago or more.  They have a great sense of history, not much of what's real."

Sure enough, the guide they employ (they pay him with peyote) wears what I am taking to be pimp clothes or maybe just 1970s clothes ("a flat, broad brimmed hat...a red vest with green leather buttons, bellbottomed green slacks with red stripings") and talks a lot about the Empire State Building (you can walk to the top but it is a two-day trip) and tells tales of the New Yorkers of the 19th and 20th centuries.  Some of the stories don't seem to be creditable (for example, we are told Diamond Jim Brady hung out with "Lillian Held," which I guess is a misconstruing of "Lillian Russell" and/or "Lillian Hellman") and a long scene concerns an argument between this guide and a black kid (the Arizonans never see black people out West) about whether or not sharks live in the flooded Lincoln Tunnel.  The Arizonans give the kid some pot so he'll leave them alone.  (The Arizonans themselves use drugs all the time, shooting up hallucinogens as a pastime and, it appears, to enable them to perform feats of clairvoyance.)

Long distance travel across North America is conducted by solar-powered dirigible, and we learn halfway through the story what has been hinted at before, that the plot of "Prisoner of New York Island" concerns a guy named Charley Four Trees.  Charley had pledged to join Sim and Suley's group marriage, but right before the ceremony was killed aboard one of these "blow balloons" when it crashed over New York in a storm--all hands and passengers were lost.  Sim and Suley have come to find his remains, and they bribe the guide and the black kid and others with still more drugs, harder drugs, to get them to help find some of Charley's remains in hopes they can clone him.  A human interest subplot involves Sim being jealous over Charley.

Both these plot threads are suitably resolved.  The Arizonans and their drug-loving hirelings find the cloak Suley gave Charley as a betrothal present.  There isn't enough blood on it to clone Charley, but Sim is able to collect sufficient genetic material that he can use it in some fashion left to the reader's imagination while he and Suley have sex, so that nine months later a child is born to Suley who bears a resemblance to all three of them, Sim, Suley and Charley.  

A third plot thread, if we want to call it that, one perhaps inspired by the spike in interest in American history experienced in 1976, perhaps an ironic joke on the "bore you out of your mind with talk about what New York used to be" theme, is pretty annoying and pretty inconsequential.  I refer to the drug "trips" undertaken by Suley and the guide.  These "trips" consist of vague and semi-cryptic visions of New York through the centuries, which we readers experience as fragmentary images of fighting during the War of Independence, ticker tape parades, and on and on.  These images are like puzzles Pohl has constructed for us readers--is the man with "strangely ill-fitting teeth" George Washington?  Must be!  And what about the "curious spider-like structures at some of the corners, platforms on four long legs, and in little sheds on the platforms uniformed men pulling levers that moved semaphores"?  I'm afraid this is not ringing a bell, some kind of optical telegraph system?  I hate this sort of abstract, impressionistic, psychedelic, surreal, trippy, nonsense, and we get almost a page of it, and it has nothing to do with the plot that I can see.  

I guess I'll call "The Prisoner of New York Island" barely acceptable, and, as with Bloch's piece of junk, tell you it may be of historical interest as a snapshot of the SF world in 1976, what with all the references to urban blight and drugs and worries about energy conservation and the environment.

It looks like "The Prisoner of New York Island" has not appeared in any other venues.  I'm reading some rare stories today, kids! 

"Bind Your Sons to Exile" by Jerry Pournelle

Here we have a serious piece of hard science fiction about travelling through the solar system to work on an asteroid mine, a story that also addresses issues of race and class from a conservative perspective.  The story is also a piece of evangelism for the space program, arguing that the solution to such characteristic 1970s worries as pollution and natural resource scarcity or price inflation is to shift extraction and industry off the Earth and so the government should make a priority of space exploration.    

A guy who is half Native American grows up in a crime-ridden California housing project; intelligent and industrious, he manages to escape the local schools with their "timeserving teachers who cared only for quiet in the classrooms and a minimum of work" to attend a middle-class school across town.  From there he got into engineering programs and graduated with impressive marks.  As a credentialed minority he could get a cushy no-show job thanks to affirmative action and quotas, but he has disdain for such handouts--he wants to succeed by his own merits and his own efforts, to be rich but to have earned every penny.  So he signs up for one of the most dangerous jobs in the solar system--working on the first asteroid mine!  When he gets to the rock after a year-and-a-half-long trip, he finds he is the most qualified person there--most smart and educated people don't even consider applying to work in the asteroid belt because it is hellishly hazardous--when our hero arrives he notices many of the old hands are missing eyes, fingers, and/or limbs.    

Our guy is given the job of chief of staff and the task of making the asteroid's operations more efficient.  Lots of text is given over to how the asteroid operates, but a thread of the plot is about our hero learning to get along with other people and build relationships.  When the US government decides to stop supporting the asteroid mine, the mine's leadership figures out a way for the project to support itself, and the asteroid becomes an independent community, a real home to which the main character can truly belong, a community not based on race or ethnicity but on shared experiences, shared goals and shared sacrifice.

Pournelle does a good job with all the technical stuff, and I sympathize with his negative attitude about government workers and unions and all that, and his belief in the nobility of earning everything you have, building an individual identity--not one based on your genetic heritage--and striking out and building something new on the frontier.  As entertainment, however, "Bind Your Sons to Exile" falls short.  The style is merely OK, and the story lacks suspense, surprise, a real climax, and real human feeling--Pournelle's story like an opinionated science article.  Perhaps ironically, I suspect my agreement with the politics of "Bind Your Sons to Exile" is one of the things that makes it feel bland to me--I don't read SF to have my own beliefs validated, but to be entertained and to encounter stuff that is challenging or disturbing or surprising--sure, I denounce the commies, poke fun at the feminists, roll my eyes at the Freudians, and dismiss out of hand the supernatural claims of religious writers, but the alienness of those writers' ideas--if they are decent writers, at least--makes their work strange and engaging, and thus more entertaining, to me.   

Considering its aims, "Bind Your Sons to Exile" is more successful than Bloch's story, which aims to be funny and is not funny, and probably Pohl's, which includes a lot of annoying extraneous matter, but I can't call Pournelle's story good.  The verdict is acceptable but bland. 

Pournelle would include "Bind Your Sons to Exile" in his anthology of stories about living in space, The Endless Frontier.  You may recall we just read Katherine MacLean's 1975 story from that book, "The Gambling Hell and the Sinful Girl." 

"Beneath the Hills of Azlaroc" by Fred Saberhagen

Well, I just complained that Pournelle's hard SF story was not challenging, and here we have a contrast, a hard SF story which describes phenomena that are totally wild and hard to understand, at least at first.  

Azlaroc is a heavenly body settled upon by quite a few humans, a place where bizarre phenomena are the norm, phenomena Saberhagen describes in cryptic terms for much of the story, though we eventually get a more-or-less comprehensible explanation.  Azlaroc isn't really a planet or star, though it is of planetary size and shape.  Azlaroc is one component of a three-member system that includes a pulsar and a black hole--the weird energies of these bodies has an effect on atoms and radiation such that every year a layer of altered particles that the settlers call a "veil" falls on Azlaroc and clings to its surface and everything on the surface, including the settlers.  Each veil act as permeable but noticeable barrier between a person shrouded in it and matter which is not under that veil.  Two men who have the same number of veils on them look and sound normal to each other, but if you try to look at or talk to a man carrying around a significantly different number of veils than you do, he will appear blurred and his speech will be distorted.  Food and drink covered in more or fewer veils than are you will smell and taste different.  Once a veil has fallen on you, you cannot leave Azlaroc, but people settle on the place because the veils prolong life.

The reader doesn't grok most of the stuff in the previous paragraph until he is like halfway through the story.  The plot concerns an ambitious rich guy who wants to be the first person to escape Azlaroc, and most of the story is narrated by a guy who accompanies him on his daring quest.    

Somewhat to my surprise, because Saberhagen is not a writer I think about very much at all, I am finding "Beneath the Hills of Azlaroc" the most satisfying of the stories I have read in Odyssey's first issue today.  It is satisfying to get clues about Azlaroc's bizarre nature and then later learn what is going on, and the quest to escape the place is an actual adventure with suspense and an unpredictable ending that is satisfying when you get to it.

Good.  According to isfdb, "Beneath the Hills of Azlaroc" has not been reprinted, but when I flipped through Saberhagen's 1978 novel The Veils of Azlaroc I detected signs the text of this story formed a portion of that novel. 

**********

My view is that the more SF magazines the better, so it is sad that Odyssey only survived two issues, but it is not surprising--this magazine is not great.  Four of the five stories we've read today are not good, and there are additional issues.  Typos are a problem--Fred Pohl's name is actually misspelled on the title page of "Prisoners of New York Island."  The art itself is pretty good, but I guess in order to fill up space the exact same pictures are used multiple times--the full-page illustration for Bloch's story, a young woman in panties and a T-shirt with a Star Trek joke printed on it, appears in red on one page and blue on the page right next to it, and the illustration for Pohl's, a collage of the faces of four of the characters in front of a crumbling New York skyline, is printed three times in the space of five pages.

I don't regret reading these odd and rare stories, but I can only recommend one of them to ordinary readers, though I guess the others all may appeal to various niche audiences.

In our next episode we'll look at something that has had a broader appeal and greater influence than today's selections.

Weird Tales, April 1939: T McClusky, C L Moore, E Hamilton and R Bloch

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are working our way through Farnsworth Wright's famed magazine of the bizarre and unusual, Weird Tales.  We've already read at least one story from every issue published from 1930 to 1938, as the following links attest, and we are making progress on 1939--today we read four stories from the April 1939 issue, those by Thorp McClusky, C. L. Moore, Edmond Hamilton, and Robert Bloch.  (We've already read this issue's story by Moore's husband Henry Kuttner, "Hydra," and the included reprint, a 1929 collaboration between Zealia Bishop and H. P. Lovecraft, "The Curse of Yig.")

1930    1931   1932   1933    1934    1935    1936    1937    1938 

"The Red God Laughed" by Thorp McClusky 

The time: The final decade of the 21st century.  The place: New York City, home of skyscrapers 4,000 feet high.  But alas, no man, woman or child stirs, and all the machines are stilled, for a poison gas war started by an Asian power has exterminated almost all life on Earth!  Worms, fish and a few amphibians are the largest creatures to endure!

Reminding us of "Watcher of the Skies," a starship lands in this inert metropolis and its sole occupant emerges to investigate.  This tentacled invertebrate explorer is on a quest for a new home for his race, his planet being low on water, and water surprisingly rare throughout the galaxy.  We follow the visitor as he explores the bone strewn city, determines Earth is a perfect environment for his people, but suffers a terrible tragedy before he can bring the good news to his fellows--he finds an unexploded gas bomb on the roof of a skyscraper, and, not knowing what it is, tinkers with it, releasing its deadly payload and killing himself.  The red god who laughs is Mars, the god of war, who has claimed another victim and dashed the hopes of another civilization.

"The Red God Laughed" is pretty good; McClusky's style here is smooth making the story a comfortable read.  In 2001 the story would be reprinted in an anthology of stories with colors in their titles edited by Forrest J. Ackerman.  

"Hellsgarde" by C. L. Moore

Here we have one of Moore's stories of Jirel of Joiry, the sword swinging medieval french noblewoman who is always getting mixed up with wizards and taking trips to other dimensions.  This time around the plot is set in motion by Black Guy of Garlot, an evil wizard in an impregnable fortress.  Black Guy has captured twenty of Jirel's men-at-arms, and the ransom he demands is the fabled treasure kept in the haunted castle known as Hellsgarde, a long-abandoned ruin that sits in the middle of a marsh and can only be found at night!  What is the treasure it holds?  Nobody knows, but Black Guy is confident it must be awesome, so he wants it.

Jirel expects Hellsgarde to be vacant, but when she gets there she finds twenty fresh corpses before its gate, a gate which is opened by a servant to admit her.  The castle has been recently reoccupied by a lord, Alaric, and his court, all of whom Jirel finds have an odd cast to their countenances--they have the faces of people who are deformed, though their bodies are whole; Jirel is sure God stamped this look on their faces because their souls are twisted and evil.  (I guess we aren't supposed to believe this anymore, but it used to be common to believe that a person's face and body reflected his or her character.)

The sinister lord welcomes Jirel and Moore takes her time describing the red-headed beauty's vague and inconclusive, but very very tense, conversations with Alaric and the reactions of his courtiers.  We hear a lot about people meeting or failing to meet each other's eyes, Jirel shifting her cloak to show off her curvaceous mail-clad body, awkward silences, subtle frowns and faint smiles, that sort of thing.  Every word, every expression, seems to bear great significance, but what that significance is is not clear.

After an uncomfortable meal with the lord and courtiers, Jirel is led on a tour of the castle by Alaric.  Moore's stories often feature an undertone of aggressive, predatory, nonconsensual sex, and when a mysterious wind blows out all the torches, Jirel is grabbed by some super strong unknown being and kissed violently, "a more savagely violent, wetly intimate kiss than she had ever known before...."  She tries to push her assailant away, but there is no chest to push against in the dark--her molester seems to consist only of an arm and a mouth with big "wide-set" teeth.  When the fires are reignited, no assailant is in evidence and Alaric is too far from Jirel to have been the culprit--but just who, then, has "ravaged her bruised mouth"?  

Jirel comes to believe she was kissed by the ghost of Andred, the last man to rule the castle, a man whose enemies dismembered him 200 years ago and whose body parts were strewn throughout the swamp.  When Alaric realizes this he is thrilled--he and his entourage have been trying without success to contact Andred's ghost, he says because the ghost of Andred can lead them to the treasure.  Alaric's people seize Jirel and imprison her--they will use her as bait for the ghost.  Jirel escapes the dungeon and summons the horny ghost of Andred--she too wants the treasure, after all.  The ghost kisses her and carries her body to a tiny secret chamber full of bones and her soul to another dimension (of course) where one expects she will be lost forever...but Alaric and his weird courtiers are witches, and by doing a queer dance and playing eldritch music they summon Jirel's soul back to her body.  In the little chamber is the small fungus and rust covered metal-hinged leather box that contains the mysterious treasure.  Luckily for Jirel, Alaric and the witches don't really care about the treasure--that was a lie, what they really wanted was to feast on Andred--these creeps are addicted to the dark energy of the undead, the imbibing of which brings them an incomparable ecstasy.

The witches let Jirel leave with the treasure box, warning her not to open it.  As the story ends Jirel imagines that she will be able to ransom her men with the box and then Black Guy will open it and be killed by whatever horror it contains.

The plot of "Hellsgarde" is good, and I like the themes of predation and deformity, but I often complain that Moore in her Weird Tales work overwrites, making her stories too long and too repetitive, and she does that again here.  The rape-like kiss, the anxious conversation with Alaric and his circle, the disturbing music and dance, the twenty corpses impaled in front of the castle--these are all good fantasy/horror story things, but instead of describing them in a single striking paragraph Moore spends column after column describing them and Jirel's reactions to them, diluting the effect of these images and ideas instead of deepening or heightening them.  There is also a sameness to Moore's Weird Tales stories: Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry are both anti-heroes, bandit-types, and again and again they  find themselves faced with eerie psychic phenomena and end up in abstract battles of will and have to be rescued from them by some friend or ally.  

The readers of Weird Tales voted "Hellsgarde" the top story of the issue; I am willing to say it is marginally good.  

"Hellsgarde" has of course been reprinted in a stack of Moore collections, but you can also find it in L. Sprague de Camp's 1963 anthology Swords and Sorcery and a 1967 issue of The Man from UNCLE Magazine--I see that this issue of The Man From UNCLE includes an apparently uncollected story by Barry N. Malzberg, "No Grace Period."  Oy, am I going to have to spend $35 on a stupid magazine to read this story?  Are there at least pictures of girls in the magazine?

"Armies From the Past" by Edmond Hamilton 

This is a sequel to Hamilton's "Comrades of Time," which we read almost two years ago, and yet another Hamilton story in which a guy is transported to another milieu and there fights with a sword in the wars of some hot chick he has fallen in love with.  

Ethan Drew fell in love with a woman of the future in "Comrades of Time" and has been thinking about her ever since he returned to the 20th century.  As "Armies of the Past" begins he is transported to the future of two million years hence, summoned by his sweetheart's father, the time-machine building scientist.  This genius has also summoned the soldiers from across history we met in that earlier Drew story, a Puritan, a conquistador, a Viking, a crusader, etc.  Each of these guys has a characteristic one-note "voice" or "personality" but they all serve the same superfluous role in the plot, just fighting alongside Drew.

The world of circa 2,000,000 AD is a pretty dreadful one.  Skinny red-skinned aliens conquered the Earth circa 1,900,000 AD and enslaved the human race by spiking the drinking water with a drug that made the humans worship them.  Each Earth city today is inhabited by a small elite of these extraterrestrial "Masters" and mass throngs of worshipful humans.  Life was so easy for the Masters here on Earth that they long ago fell into decadence and have forgotten how to make space craft or just about any other modern device or system--their slave soldiers fight with swords and spears and ride horses around.  

The scientist and his hot daughter arrived in this period of history and set up a house for themselves in the wilderness but were attacked when discovered by the Masters and their slaves.  Instead of just moving to some other time in history themselves, they summoned Drew and their other friends from various periods of history to help them.  A flank attack by the Masters captures the scientist and his daughter while Drew and his comrades are fighting off human slaves, so Drew and company have to do the kind of thing people in adventure stories always do, namely don the clothes of the fallen enemy and sneak into the dungeons under the Masters' city and rescue their friends.  

The liberated scientist uses his time machine (which the Masters didn't sabotage, thank heavens) to summon an army of thousands drawn from different periods of history--he plucks from the past a Roman legion, a battalion of Napoleonic infantry, as well as units of Greek hoplites, mounted Sioux, crusaders, Arabs, etc.  For whatever reason, the scientist doesn't summon any fighting men who might have aircraft or ray guns or anything that would make the war easy.  

With this army our heroes take the city and exterminate the Masters and liberate the hypnotized humans.  The scientist offers to send everybody back to his appropriate time, but, amazingly, the thousands of soldiers decide they prefer this period and want to join a worldwide campaign to liberate all the Earth.  This makes sense for Drew because he is a modern man in love with the scientist's daughter, but many of the other thousands of guys presumably have friends and parents and siblings and wives and girlfriends back in their native times, not to mention the food and music and architecture and religion they grew up with; there are many elements to this story that can't bear analysis.

Barely acceptable.  Like the first Drew story and Hamilton's 1935 "The Six Sleepers," "Armies from the Past" distinguishes itself from Hamilton's other adventure stories with the gimmick of having half a dozen characters who each represent some noteworthy culture from history, but I don't find this gimmick particularly fun or interesting.  The additional five or six bland characters just clutter up the story and occupy column inches that in better stories Hamilton would fill with strange aliens or images of horror or speculations on alternate ways of organizing society or something else I would find entertaining.  To be fair, maybe other people find the dialogue of the time-travelling fighting men (e. g., the Egyptian swearing by Osiris and Bast, the coonskin cap-wearing trapper pronouncing "horses" as "hosses" and "learn" as "larn," and the Puritan wondering if a Christian should put on a pagan's clothes) amusing.  

"Armies of the Past" was been reprinted in small press books in 1977--in Robert Weinberg's anthology Lost Fantasies #6--and in 2021--in DMR Books' Hamilton collection The Avenger from Atlantis.

"The Red Swimmer" by Robert Bloch   

Lucas Treach is an Englishman, a womanizer, and a pirate!  He and his men have seized a Spanish galleon, disposed of its crew, disguised themselves as Spaniards, and sailed right into a port in the Spanish Caribbean to do the profitable business the now dead Spaniards would have done.  And Treach’s good luck just got better!  A Spanish aristocrat books passage back to Spain, and he is bringing with him all his considerable wealth. Also accompanying him is his daughter, the most beautiful woman Treach has ever seen!  Hubba hubba!

Having dinner aboard the ship with Treach, the aristocrat gets a little liquored up and lets slip some clues as to why he has to leave the Caribbean--it turns out this joker is a mad scientist/evil wizard driven out of the colonies by the persnickety local representatives of the Catholic Church!  He studied elemental magic with Moors in Spain!  In the Caribbean he conducted experiments on slaves in pursuit of means to revive the dead and achieve eternal life!  Treach, silently, dismisses this as the superstitious nonsense you expect from a Spaniard.

When he deems the ship far enough from shore, Treach reveals his true identity to the prisoners and proceeds to abuse, torture, murder, mutilate and throw them overboard.  But before they are silenced the aristocrat calls upon the spirits of the air and his beautiful daughter swallows a vial of liquid--she tells Treach it is an elixir of eternal life and promises to wreak a terrible vengeance on him.

Sure enough, a storm wrecks the ship the next day and only a handful of men, led by Treach, manage to scramble aboard a boat with some provisions and live to see the end of the tempest.  One of the survivors is a giant African, a "Krooman" with a "brutal negroid face" and "black ape-arms."  This African tries to steal all the food for himself and is killed by Treach.  This racist action scene seems a little superfluous, but it serves the plot role of limiting the amount of supplies available to the survivors and it does get a rise out of the reader. 

As the days pass the survivors, low on food and water and subjected to the fierce equatorial sun, grow more and more delirious, and men begin vanishing over the side; it becomes clear that a red form is pursuing the boat, a form which whispers to a man and then drags him under with red arms.  Undeniably, it is the Spanish girl, whom Treach blinded and then flayed alive before throwing her  overboard.  Treach is the last to survive, and eventually the mutilated girl climbs aboard the boat and inflicts upon Treach the tortures he inflicted upon her.

This is a good gory horror story, truly shocking, and not just because of the depiction of the African sailor.  Far more economical than Moore's "Hellsgarde," I beg to differ with the judgement of Weird Tales readers and prefer "The Red Swimmer" to her tale.

"The Red Swimmer" was reprinted in 1945 in England along with Hamilton's "The Man with the X-Ray Eyes" and H. O. Dickinson's "The Sex Serum" in an odd little pamphlet with a nude illustration on its cover.  In the 1980s, "The Red Swimmer" would reappear in two anthologies in which Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh had a hand, one collecting stories on the theme of curses, the other on the theme of pirates.  Aaar!

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Hamilton's story is questionable filler, but the rest of these stories are good; McClusky and Bloch offer strong direct shock stories and Moore a (perhaps characteristically) florid and overwritten piece that still delivers--the day after reading "Hellsgarde" I still remember the solid plot and compelling themes and images while my annoyance at the uneconomical prose fades.  A good issue of Weird Tales!       

Thorp McClusky: "Black Gold," "Fothergill's Jug" and "Workshop of the Living Dead"

Let the 1930s madness continue with three more stories by Thorp McClusky, two from Weird Tales and one from Strange Detective Mysteries.  In a letter to Willis Conover dated October 24, 1936, H. P. Lovecraft compared McClusky to Edmond Hamilton, suggesting both men were "gifted writers" (Lovecraft often praised Hamilton's "The Monster-God of Mamurth" in his correspondence, and seems to have liked McClusky's "The Crawling Horror") but that they "chose to be hacks."  Let's hope today's three stories serve as evidence for Lovecraft's belief McClusky had natural gifts and not for McClusky's alleged decision to embrace hackery. 

"Black Gold" (1937)

We've already read a stack of stories from the April 1937 issue of WT, Edmond Hamilton's "Fessenden's Worlds," Henry Kuttner's "We Are The Dead," and "The Mannikin" and "Fangs of Vengeance" by Robert Bloch.  Let's add McClusky's "Black Gold" to the pile.

The Wade family got rich back in the day in the slave trade.  Today the Wades' fortunes are at a low ebb due to reverses in the stock market.  But the last of the Wades, Henry Cabot Wade, has a risky plan to get rich again--among the reasons he has for rolling the dice is that he needs money to marry his girlfriend Evelyn.

One of Henry Cabot's sea captain ancestors marked a spot on a nautical chart with a note that he left "black gold" there.  Some people think that this Captain Wade of long ago threw a cargo of African slaves overboard there because he feared inspection by a frigate.  But Henry Cabot is positive "black gold" is a euphemism for something else, something valuable.  With the last of his money he has hired a ship and a diver and he and Evelyn have sailed to the spot to retrieve the hoped-for treasure.  

The spot is a shallow channel between two small islands.  The treasure hunters arrive at night, and plan to begin the search in the morning.  Henry Cabot and Evelyn are making out on the deck under the stars when Henry Cabot hears something, then sees something!  Things Evelyn can neither hear nor see!  As Evelyn watches her boyfriend seems to fight with an invisible opponent, falling back before an onslaught she cannot see, until he is thrown overboard!

The next day the diver finds Henry Cabot's body buried under an army of skeletons in rusted chains; one of the skeletons has its hands around HC's throat, and this skeleton bears the jewelry of an African witch doctor!

A solid horror story in just four pages, even though you know where it is going from the jump.  As a tale of black vengeance on a white man, "Black Gold" perhaps suits the current zeitgeist, but I don't know that I can recommend it to today's readers, seeing as Henry Cabot makes liberal use of the dreaded "n-word."

"Black Gold" would be reprinted in the many editions of Barnes and Nobles' 100 Ghastly Little Ghost Stories.

"Fothergill's Jug" (1938)

This is an oddly self-referential story that takes pains to make you think it takes place in "real life."  The narrator is Thorp McClusky himself, and he and the other characters talk about Weird Tales, express opinions about H. P. Lovecraft and Charles Fort, even refer to contemporary cultural phenomena like the famous children's book Ferdinand, actress Ethel Barrymore and race car driver Barney Oldfield.

The frame story consists of McClusky and wife taking a drive and dropping in on some friends in the country.  At his friend's place, McClusky meets a bachelor and medical doctor who reads Weird Tales regularly, and they get to talking about Lovecraft; McClusky bruits the idea that Lovecraft's stories of New England wizardry and monsters have a core of truth, that HPL based them on old documents.  This spurs McClusky's new acquaintance to tell his own story of weird goings on concerning an archaeologist, name of Fothergill, who was his neighbor back in the Twenties, a fellow bachelor whose house exploded in 1928.

Fothergill spent much of his time in the Near East, digging in the desert, uncovering the ruins of cities that were forgotten before the Pyramids were built.  Among the prehistoric artifacts he discovered was a simple clay jug with a thick sturdy wax seal over its wide mouth.  When the jug was heated (in an effort to soften the wax) the vessel moved as if something alive were in it, something rendered uncomfortable, even angry, by the heat.

Fothergill brought the jug back to America and showed it to the doctor, and they discussed whether the creature in the jug might be an extraterrestrial of some kind and/or the source of Arab stories about Jinn.  Stressed out by his responsibility for this perhaps dangerous artifact, Fothergill became a drunk.  The doctor kept telling him to bury the jug and forget about it.  It almost looked like Fothergill was going to take this advice--he even dug a hole--but then he changed his mind and put the jug into the fire.  The doctor was on the phone with Fothergill when there was a horrible noise and the line went dead--when he got to Fothergill's place the MD found the house totally flattened and Fothergill lying dead three hundred feet away, his neck wrung as if he were a chicken.  In Fothergill's garden was a footprint suggesting whatever was in the jug had expanded to 50 or 100 feet tall before vanishing.

This is a decent Lovecraftian story--McClusky even reads an old newspaper clipping, like so many Lovecraftian characters do.  "Fothergill's Jug" debuted in the same issue of Weird Tales as Robert Bloch's "The Hound of Pedro" and isfdb doesn't think it has ever been reprinted; however, the story is listed in the table of contents of a recent McClusky collection with a cover image lifted from Donald Wollheim's Avon Fantasy Reader No. 6 printed by Armchair Fiction and advertised at the sinistercinema.com website.  

"Workshop of the Living Dead" (1938)

This story appeared in Strange Detective Mysteries and stars a police detective and is full of police/crime material.  Banks and other places of business are struck by armed robbers.  The cops are taunted by an obese gangster whom all know is a serial murderer but who is so clever the DA can never pin anything on him.  One mob boss has another mob boss rubbed out.  The boys down at the lab figure stuff out by looking at fingerprints.

"Workshop of the Living Dead" has a powerful weird element as well.  The robberies and murders are carried out by men who never speak, wear slack expressions, and do not bleed when shot by security guards or fellow criminals.  When our female lead is kidnapped and stuffed into the back seat of a Cadillac next to one of these taciturn thus, she notices he smells of rotting flesh!  When the cops capture one of these speechless heavies who has been shot full of holes, the hospital staff find he has no heartbeat, his skin is room temperature, and he doesn't need to eat or sleep!  But after a few days in hospital he starts to decay!

Obviously, one of the organized crime bosses (the aforementioned fatso) has somehow acquired an army of zombies!  But these are not voodoo zombies risen from the grave--they are scientific zombies!  The obese mobster is working in concert with a mad scientist who injects people with a serum that slows down metabolic processes, rendering them impervious to pain and obviating any need for oxygen or food, and also turning them into obedient morons.  The scientist calls them "living robots" and explains to his captives (the main character is caught by an electrified trap when he sneaks into the fat mobster's rural hideout looking for his girlfriend) the draw back of his system: the serum severely inhibits the immune system, which is why the zombified thugs succumb to bacteria and rot away unless refrigerated.

The scientist hopes to conduct experiments aimed at solving this whole bacteria issue on the main character and his girlfriend but then one of the main character's colleagues busts into the hideout and a fight ensues in which the fat mobster is shot to death and the mad scientist commits suicide rather than be taken.

A trifling story, but not bad.  I can't find any evidence "Workshop of the Living Dead" has been reprinted.

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These stories range from acceptable to good, and "Black Gold" and "Fothergill's Jug" are certainly better than the four stories from Thrilling Mystery we read for our last blog post.  Hopefully McClusky can maintain this level of quality as we encounter more of his work in our continuing exploration of late 1930s issues of Weird Tales.

Thrilling Mystery, May 1936: E Hamilton, F B Long, R Cummings and C Jacobi

Advertising works!  While reading a story from the October 1936 issue of Thrilling Wonder I came upon a full page ad for Thrilling Mystery that promised me horror, terror and torture and backed this promise up with a great illustration featuring hooded tormentors and their bound victim.  I decided I needed to check out some of this HT&T action, and found at luminist.org an issue of Thrilling Mystery full of stories by people we know: Edmond Hamilton, Frank Belknap Long, Ray Cummings, and Carl Jacobi, the May 1936 ish.  Let's check out these four stories, rare specimens which would not be reprinted until the current horrible, terrible, and torturous 21st century.

"Beasts That Once Were Men" by Edmond Hamilton

Already in this blog post I am caught in a mistake--it looks like "Beasts That Once Were Men" was reprinted in 2000 in Haffner Press's The Vampire Master and Other Tales of Horror, and 2000 was still in the 20th century.  Oh, well.

Our story begins on the telephone.  Our hero Ned Felton receives a call from someone whose speech sounds like barks and howls.  Eventually Ned begins to comprehend the words the voice struggles to pronounce--the voice claims to be Francis Lester, brother of Ned's beautiful fiancé, Ruth!  Francis says he is going to commit suicide before the terrible thing that is happening to him gets even worse!

Ned rushes to pick up Ruth, who has black hair, an oval face, and a body "almost childlike" in its "smallness," but with the "sweet curves of ripening womanhood."  On the drive to the remote house where Francis has been staying with two scientists, Doctors Robine and Mattison, Ruth tells Ned what little she knows about the financial support and laboratory assistance her brother has been providing those two eggheads.  It was all Greek to her, but Ruth recalls the word "atavism" coming up, and Ned knows what that means--R & M are trying to reverse evolution!  No doubt poor Francis is now some kind of beast man!  

At the rural retreat Ned and Ruth discover what appear to be the remains of Francis--an ape in human clothes, lying dead on the floor with a bullet hole in his head.  Francis must have gone through with his plan to destroy himself!  Then Mattison, a sort of missing-link ape man, bursts into the room, knocks out Ned, and carries off Ruth.  Ned wakes up to meet Robine, who admits that his wacky experiments are the source of all this mayhem.  The men split up to search for Mattison and Ruth; the next time Ned sees Robine the scientist is laying stunned nearby where Mattison the ape man is stripping naked the unconscious Ruth--Hamilton tells us all about how her stockings and clothes have been torn and her white flesh has been scratched red by briars and brambles while being carried through the woods by her bestial abductor.

It's a ferocious fight, but Ned finally knocks Mattison out by braining him with a rock.  Robine comes yo his senses and helps tie up the ape man.  Ruth wakes up after being carried back to the house.  And then comes the soul crushing let down, I mean, amazing twist ending! 

Son of Ohio Edmond Hamilton often wrote about evolution in the 1930s, and his wife Leigh Brackett would later write a story in which vengeful Martians, bitter over Terran settler-colonialism, subjected humans to reverse evolution, 1948's "Beast-Jewel of Mars."  I don't have to tell you again that this view of evolution doesn't make much sense, but the appeal of a man transforming into an evil brainiac from the future (like in Thorp McClusky's "Monstrosity of Evolution") or the primordial ooze of a bazillion years ago (like in Donald Wandrei's "The Lives of Alfred Kramer") is undeniable and we see this stuff pretty regularly.

   

So, like a fool, I ignored all the clues that we had a hoax on our hands and really thought that Robine's radiation machine had turned Francis and Mattison into lower forms of life and was painfully disappointed when Ned exposed Robine's chicanery.  Robine murdered Francis because Robine is not a very good scientist or businessman and got absolutely nowhere with his radiation projector and couldn't pay Francis back.  He hid Francis's body and shot down an ape and dressed the simian in Francis's clothes--he also made that phone call pretending to be a beast-Francis.  As for Mattison, Robine fed him hormones and steroids that made him look and act like an ape.  What?  That is perhaps less believable, and certainly less fun, than an evolution reversing ray.  Ugh.

Exposed, Robine commits suicide via a ring with a spring-loaded poison injector, I guess a common device in 1930s genre fiction I(we just saw one in John Russell Fearn's "The Secret of the Ring.".  

"Beasts That Once Were Men" is OK up until the disappointing ending, but that ending pushes us down into unacceptable territory.  There's a tradition of these kinds of endings in which the supernatural or science fiction elements of a story turn out to be a criminal's hoax (the original Scooby-Doo cartoons are perhaps the most famous expression of this tradition, and we've read Henry Kuttner and Jack Williamson stories in this vein, like "The Graveyard Curse" and "The Mark of the Monster") so I guess I shouldn't be as surprised as I am.  Now I am worried that all four of today's stories are going to have the same deflating sort of conclusion.

"Harvest of Death" by Frank Belknap Long

"Harvest of Death" would be reprinted by Centipede Press in a 2010 volume of their Masters of the Weird Tale series with a price tag of $225; it also appears in a $60 Centipede Press production, released in 2022 complete with a cover photo of Long showing off an awesome suit and some terrific hair styling.  I have often questioned the choices Long makes in his fiction, but his fashion choices look to be unquestionable.

Young artist Willie Stuart has just left a party and is loitering in a doorway in New Orleans' French Quarter when a strange shape, much like an oversized bat, dashes by and around a corner.  The shadow seems to have come from a nearby building, and Stuart investigates with his flashlight--he finds lying on some stairs the dead body of surrealist Robert Craugh, a man famous for his paintings of macabre scenes.  Long describes the still-bleeding corpse in extravagant detail and at great length, milking the scene of every cubic centimeter of gore.  Lying next to the artist is the canvas he was carrying when somebody or something ripped out his throat and buried a knife in his chest--The Torturers, which depicts six gaunt men tormenting a slim young woman.

The police commissioner is Willie's uncle and Willie badgers him into deputizing him so he can work on the case of Robert Craugh.  The characters in these slapdash exploitation stories are often hard to credit--an artist who is habitually drunk is also an eager amateur detective?  A police commissioner who assigns his booze-swilling frivolous party-going nephew to investigate the murders of celebrities?  Good grief!

Willie's first step is to talk to a gallery owner named Bailey who has been exhibiting Craugh's work.  It is not long before Bailey, a wealthy connoisseur with a mania for decadent and surrealist art and a mansion full of books and vases, is taking credit for the crime.  The gallery owner claims that Craugh was a sadist who tortured his sister, and so he summoned a monster from outer space to wreak revenge on Craugh.  Willie is poked with a poisoned needle and falls unconscious; he wakes up in a dungeon which is also inhabited by a male corpse, the horrible torso wound of which Long describes in detail, and a beautiful half-naked woman whose limbs bear many small wounds.  The woman claims to be a cousin of Craugh and says Craugh was a saint and Bailey is insane.  The corpse is her brother--the monster from space tore brother's heart out!

Bailey and the four-foot-tall bat man come down to the dungeon to start scourging the beautiful girl, but then a detective who was following Willie arrives and shoots down both of the killers.  Then comes the denouement, in which we learn the demented Bailey was obsessed with ancient religions and human sacrifice and has tortured and murdered like a dozen people with the help of his "monster," a "microcephalic idiot" whom Bailey adopted from a "home for the feeble minded" and conditioned into cannibalism and trained as an assassin.  We also get our happy ending--it looks like Willie and the beautiful Miss Craugh will get married.  With their unique "meet cute" story, I guess marriage was inevitable.

Long does an entertaining job with the gore scenes, describing the oozing injuries and pools of blood and how Willie is always on the brink of vomiting and all that, but the plot is lame--it is just a wire-thin frame upon which to hang the gore scenes.  I never believed the little cannibal was an actual space monster, so that wasn't a source of disappointment, and, besides turning a pinheaded dwarf into a cannibal assassin and dressing him up like a bat is actually pretty fun.  So I guess we can call "Harvest of Death" acceptable.  (Why is this story titled "Harvest of Death" anyway?  It is not about farmers, but the art world, and Long makes sure to throw in the names of famous painters like Van Gogh and Dali, so something like "Exhibition of Execution" or "Gallery of Grue" or "Impression of Death" or "Red Period" would have been more appropriate.

"Halfway to Horror" by Ray Cummings

Way back in 2018 we read five exploitative horror stories by Cummings from 1940, a big pile of Cummings' adventurous science fiction short stories from '40 and '41, two adventure novels he published in the early '30s, and an irritating utopian novel published in the late 1920s. Let's get back in touch with Ray and his wild, diverse and perhaps a little crazy career with this story, which is set in the frozen north!

Our narrator, Seattle accountant George Halton, is one of a party of amateur climbers who have just descended Mount Sir Joseph and are on their way to Eagle Pass, led by their professional guide, Peter Trow.  In the party are: Halton's fiancé, a small woman with a "darkly Latin" beauty, Tina James; Tina's uncle, a good-natured 60-year old geology professor; uncle's grim and gaunt wife; and a 30-year-old professor, Lee Carrington. Family friend Carrington is also in love with Tina, but Tina has rejected him, even though aunt gaunt-face prefers Carrington, and Halton has been wondering if aunt or Carrington might welcome seeing him falling off a cliff to his death.  Well, the climb is over now and the danger is passed.

Not!  A blizzard strikes the party, and they can barely see fifty feet!  They decide to stop at Halfway House for the night instead of pressing on to Eagle Pass.  And then they come upon an armed man standing over the frozen corpse of a naked young woman, her beauty marred by hideously gory wounds suffered before she died!  Yikes!

The armed man says he is a French Canadian trapper and ranger, and he found this corpse and is burying it.  He warns the party that something "queer" is going on around here, and that staying at Halfway House is not safe, implying there is a monster about.  However, the blizzard is not letting up and Eagle Pass is like ten miles away (or as a Canadian of today might say, "sixteen kilometers, eh?") so they really have no choice but to hole up at HH.  

At Halfway House a series of scary and then horrendous events take place.  A figure dimly seen in the distance!  Bloody footprints in the snow!  Blood discovered in the pantry!  Members of the party going outside to collect snow to melt for cooking water fail to return!  Eventually, people start turning up dead, and then we have a series of desperate fights to the death between narrator Halton and a series of adversaries.  The climactic fight is followed by an explanation of what is going on from the dying French-Canadian ranger. 

The explanation, in brief, is that the French-Canadian's tall strong brother was insane due to a head injury and prone to flying into murderous rages and fits of lust.  So he hid his crazy brother at rarely-used Halfway House, thinking nobody would go there; unfortunately, when that nameless woman and then the Halton party arrived, crazy brother went into rape and murder mode.  Compounding Halton's troubles, the evil Carrington thought he could take advantage of the carnage, killing Halton and blaming the deed on whoever had killed Tina's uncle and aunt.  But neither Carrington, nor the maniac, proved a match for Halton in hand-to-hand combat.  Only Halton, Tina, and the professional guide, who left Halfway House (without telling Halton!) to get help from Eagle Pass, survive the story.

We'll call this thing barely acceptable filler.  In 2011, "Halfway to Horror" would be reprinted by Pulp Tales Press in their Ray Cummings collection Wings of Horror and Other Stories.    

  

"Death Rides the Plateau" by Carl Jacobi

The interior illustration to this one has the sorts of hooded and robed figures that inhabit the advertisement in Thrilling Wonder that reminded me of the existence of Thrilling Mystery, which seems like a good sign.  

Paul and Lucia are on their honeymoon!  A detour leads them to stumble into a remote rural community on a plateau with a mine and a few farms, a village where the deformed inhabitants don't like strangers!  At night, walking back from a scenic outlook, they are assaulted by six weirdos in robes and hoods, one of them wearing a skull mask!  The robed assailants are scared off by the lights of a passing truck, but at night the six creepos appear in the humble room reluctantly rented the newlyweds by the deformed inn keeper and Paul is carried off to a cavern where he witnesses a bizarre human sacrifice and barely escapes being sacrificed on the electrifying goat-man-shaped altar himself!  

Some among the villagers have gripes against "the Master" who runs the human sacrifice cult and try to help Paul and Lucia escape but they get killed for their pains.  Also in the mix is a gorgeous Russian woman with a skin tight dress and a perfect figure who tries to seduce Paul.  Lucia is captured and while trying to find her Paul is captured again.  Lucia is laid out naked to be sacrificed while a bound Paul watches.  Nearby hang the blackened bodies of the last ten people electrocuted on the mechanical altar, which, in the interest of drama and suspense, bends its clockwork arms forward to close the circuit to electrify its victims.  The "Master," the guy with the skull mask, explains to our apparently doomed narrator that the mine produces a rare mineral and he has developed this entire sham religion to scare the superstitious local hicks into keeping the mine a secret so he can corner the market on the mineral.  (If you are thinking that murdering a dozen people is not the kind of thing that helps you stay under the radar but rather attracts the attention of the government, I am with you.)  Paul manages to break his bonds, kill the Master, steal his revolver, shoot that Russian looker who is leading the ceremony that is to culminate in the electrocution of Lucia, and escape with his wife.  

Like Long's "Harvest of Death," the plot of this story is just an excuse to string together the cool gore and sex exploitation elements--the robed attackers, the skull-faced master, the electric-chair fashioned into a Satanic sacrificial altar, the hot Russian woman, all the many deformed people and horribly mutilated corpses, the naked young wife in bondage.  At least Jacobi has the sense to give us a hero who outfights everybody instead of having a brand new character show up to rescue Paul and Lucia.  Acceptable filler. 

In 2014, Centipede Press put out a volume of their Masters of the Weird Tale anthologies on Jacobi that included "Death Rides the Plateau" and sported a $350.00 price tag.  Perhaps a wise investment--ten years later a copy is listed on ebay for $1,400.

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None of these stories is actually good, so I can't recommend you track them down unless you are some kind of Hamilton/Long/Cummings/or Jacobi completist or pulp scholar or something.  Regardless, expect to see more 1930s insanity of approximately the same type in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.