Barry N. Malzberg: "Line of Succession," "Reaction-Formation," "A Clone at Last," "Backing Up," and "Cheeseburger"

We find ourselves on page 130 of Barry Malzberg's 1980 collection The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady.  No need to be ambitious; let's advance to page 154 today.  That brief stretch, 24 pages, includes five stories, and we can skip one, "Indigestion," because I read it back in 2014 when we borrowed Bill Pronzini's 1986 anthology Tales of the Dead from the library.  That leaves us with four little pieces from the late Seventies--let's hope they are as good as "Indigestion," which I quite liked.

"Line of Succession" (1978)

The editor's page of the October 1978 issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine provides a window into the life of the genre fiction writer, succinctly telling us that the included story "Cheeseburger," credited to John Barry Williams, is in fact a collaboration among John Lutz, Barry Malzberg and Bill Pronzini, who wrote it together  while attending the Second International Conference of Crime Writers.  "Line of Succession" appears in this same issue of AHMM as "Cheeseburger;" seeing as this issue of AHMM is already open on the desktop of the MPorcius Fiction Log computer system, I'll read "Cheeseburger" as a special bonus at the end of this blog post. 

"Line of Succession" is, apparently, a spoof of public perceptions of crime and politics as well as the role the news media plays in people's lives.  The 1970s was a period of high crime, a development blamed by many on elite sympathy for perpetrators and the resultant lax enforcement of punitive laws and increased care to protect the legal rights of defendants, and Malzberg's story here dramatizes all these phenomena.  Our narrator, who calls himself Scoot, commits a bewildering volume and variety of crimes, from welfare fraud to burglary to speeding to drug pushing to mugging, and always escapes justice because of legal loopholes, police sloppiness, and judicial lenience.  Scoot's thievery, aggression, and dangerous flouting of the law make him famous and attract the hatred of the public.  It is suggested that mysterious forces are using Scoot to engage the attention of the public, to distract them from other issues, offer them a scapegoat for their problems, and give their sad lives meaning.  

Scoot profits from and sincerely enjoys his work, but finds he has gone too far.  His reign of terror has personalized the hatred of the public, focused it on himself as an individual, when the shadowy rulers of our society want him to inspire hatred of "the faceless" and "the multitude."  If Scoot is finally caught and imprisoned, and people are still unhappy, they might turn their hatred on the true masters of America, the true cause of their misery.  So Scoot is killed by his employers and a new Scoot takes his place.

Malzberg here is pushing the standard line of left-wingers that street crime isn't really that bad and ordinary people only worry about crime because of sensationalistic journalism and the use of the crime issue by right-wingers to distract the proletariat from the real crime, which is capitalism.  This contempt for the common run of people and excuse-making for or even romanticization of transgressors is common among the intellectual class of which Malzberg is a member and we see it in our fiction reading all the time, quite to my distaste.  Still, this story is short and moves at a brisk pace and is sort of amusing and is a useful piece of social history so we'll say "Line of Succession" is acceptable.

In the afterword to "Line of Succession," Barry lists what he thinks are the best American novels of each decade from the 1920s to the 1970s.  (He says Lolita is the best novel of the Fifties but doesn't count because Nabokov isn't really American.)  A magazine piece by the writer of The Franchiser, the best novel of the Seventies, is Stanley Elkin, Malzberg credits a piece from Esquire by Elkin as the inspiration for "Line of Succession."  (Barry calls the text in question "A Requiem for Bullies," but looking around online I think the actual title is "A Poetics for Bullies."  Who copyedited The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady?  Does this mistake also appear in the 2021 Stark House edition of The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady?)   

In this afterword our sad sack pal Barry seems a little despairing, saying he is a mere bug ("an aphid") compared to the luminous Elkin ("the morning light") and lamenting that he has tried to revolutionize genre fiction from within, and such revolutions are impossible, as suggested by how the leftists of the 1930s became the establishment.  Cheer up, Barry--we love you and revolutions are overrated.

"Reaction-Formation" (1979)

This is another that debuted in AHMM (where it bears the title "The Senator.")  It is similar to "Line of Succession" in that it presents urban elite attitudes but it is slighter--less provocative, less amusing, less elaborate.  "Reaction-Formation" is like Malzberg writing on autopilot, treading the same old ground again--the mentally ill narrator, the political assassination.

The narrator thinks the government is corrupt and, it appears, lives with a roommate who encourages his hostility to the establishment.  This roommate, who is perhaps an hallucination, is a man with a hick accent who chews tobacco and who was a federal senator for a few months and says the experience confirmed all his suspicions about the government.  The two men agree that the only way to change the country is by violence and so the narrator travels cross country to Washington, enters the Capital, and shoots down a senator.  As he is seized by security the narrator has visions of his roommate appearing and disowning him, which confirms his belief that all politicians are untrustworthy.

Routinely Malzbergian, with the present-tense first-person narration and the delusional assassin.  Merely acceptable.  In his afterword to the story, Malzberg suggests he and J. G. Ballard are two birds of a feather, both of them fascinated by political assassinations, and laments that this theme is no longer on the cutting edge.

"A Clone at Last" with Bill Pronzini (1978)

Compared to "Line of Succession" and "Reaction-Formation," which have not been anthologized, "A Clone at Last" is something of a hit.  After its initial 1978 appearance in F&SF, the story was included in Germany's SF Perry Rhodan Magazine, that collection of short-shorts with Isaac Asimov's name on the cover: Microcosmic Tales, and a German "Best of" F&SF collection, and was reprinted in F&SF's 2003 "Special Barry Malzberg Issue."

"A Clone at Last" is a weak joke story about sexual relationships, but very short so we'll call it acceptable.  Lapham is a rich genius of the year 2172 but he can't get women to have sex with him because he has pimples as well as some scars on his face, I guess from his adventures on Ceres or some other distant asteroid or planet.  So he has an altered clone of himself made--altered to be female!  He waits eighteen years for the clone to grow up so he can date what amounts to his twin sister, but she rejects him exactly as other women have.

I suppose the jokes are various beyond the "ironic" twist ending that mirrors the beginning.  Women are shallow and judge men based on their looks.  (Is this even true?  I think rich smart brave guys get women even if they are not so good-looking.)  Men are shallow and just want to spend time with a person exactly like them.  A somewhat more clever angle is the idea that Lapham hates himself, as symbolized by the way his clone rejects him--Lapham is inventing things and travelling around the galaxy and making tons of money to prove to himself that he is worthwhile--it is self-loathing that drives civilizational progress!

I complained that "Line of Succession" was tired left-wing boilerplate, but at least that story had meat on its bones into which to sink your teeth; these stories I call "slight" are worse because there are just the jokes and little or nothing else.  

In his afterword Malzberg says "A Clone at Last" is dedicated to Fredric Brown, master of the short-short or "vinnie."  (We have read a bunch of Brown's vinnies; e. g., "Too Far,"  "Blood," "Nasty," "Naturally," "Sentence," "Daisy," "Politeness," and "Abominable.")  I am a fan of much of Brown's longer work (e. g., "The Wench is Dead," "Little Apple Hard to Peel," and "Don't Look Behind You,") but I'm not crazy about the short-short format in general and usually pan Brown's vinnies, but it seems Brown's short shorts are widely beloved.  Striking a sad note as he so often does, Malzberg tells us that F&SF editor Edward Ferman removed the dedication to Brown from the magazine appearance of "A Clone at Last" and speculates that maybe it was because Ferman expected that, six years after his death, Brown had already been forgotten by the SF community.  Well, take heart, Barry--I am reading and writing about Brown in this crazy 21st century of ours, and I am not alone.

"Backing Up" (1978)

Yet another Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine story.  This one is more clever and amusing than the others we've looked at today, taking as its theme how everything has become shoddy and people no longer have any standards, no longer strive to do a good job but instead cut corners.  The narrator works for organized crime, for loan sharks, going around the town, threatening with a pistol various people who are late paying back their extortionate loans.  The narrator himself, we see, is an example of the decline he decries--he doesn't have the nerve to beat up, much less murder, the people he is threatening; he is terrible at his job, just like everybody else in the story, the builders, merchants, bartenders, his criminal masters, his wife.  

I can recommend this one, and of course on a visceral level I agree with its sentiments--so many things seem to be worse today than they were in my youth and before I was born (if you follow my twitter feed you know I spend my time in antique stores and art museums admiring things that are 50 or a hundred or a thousand or two thousand years old) though at the same time I intellectually recognize that so many things are better today than in the past (for one thing, the internet has provided me access to a vast body of film, music and literature I'd never have even known about otherwise.)  

In the afterword to "Backing Up," Malzberg suggests the story is a metaphor or allegory for the life of the writer who has to deal with editors and publishers and agents, and offers the theory that this is what most modern fiction is actually about.

**********

These stories aren't as good as the last batch from The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady, but they aren't actually bad, and provide some insight into Malzberg's worldview and the time in which they were penned, so no regrets.  And this blog post isn't even over yet!    

**********

"Cheeseburger" by John Lutz, Barry N. Malzberg and Bill Pronzini (1978)

As promised, let's look at "Cheeseburger," a collaboration of Malzberg's with Bill Pronzini, a friend of Malzberg's and a critically acclaimed detective novelist, and John Lutz, whom I never heard of but who was a very successful mystery writer.  Lutz was president of professional organizations for crime writers, and that movie I thought was sexy back in 1992, Single White Female, was based on something he wrote.  

This is an acceptable little crime story with a theme similar to that of "Backing Up": the irony of an evil person decrying the degradation of society.

Wiggins is at a diner which, apparently, has only one employee currently on shift.  A leather-clad motorcyclist comes in and Wiggins and he have a dispute about whether the lone waitress should cook Wiggin's' burger or make the biker's milkshake first.  When the biker gets physical Wiggins shoots him dead, cooks and eats his own burger, and then leaves to go to work.  The twist ending is that Wiggins is not just some ordinary middle-class guy who was pushed too far by our steadily declining society but a professional killer.

There is something in the story which isn't sitting right with me: we are told Wiggins "shot him [the biker] in the right ear."  Since Wiggins and the biker are facing each other, I thought at first that Wiggins had just grazed or shot off the biker's ear, but it seems the biker has been killed, shot through the brain.  The authors have Wiggins shoot the troublemaking punk through the ear because that is his M.O. as an assassin and sets up a parallel with the story's ending--in the end of the story Wiggins sneaks up on the man he is being paid to murder and shoots him "through the right ear, taking careful aim as always."  The authors should have had the biker look over nervously at the waitress or something, so getting killed by being shot in the ear would make more sense.

I wonder if this story was somehow inspired by the scene in Dirty Harry in which Clint Eastwood engages in a shoot out with criminals while eating a hot dog. 

I'm not finding any evidence that "Cheeseburger" has been reprinted since its debut in AHMM, but I'm finding it harder to look up the publishing history of mystery stories than it is the history of SF stories--isfdb has spoiled us SF fans!