Howard Wandrei: "The 15th Pocket," "For No Ransom," and "Don't Do It, Mister!"

Just days ago we read four gruesome and titillating crime stories by Howard Wandrei that featured science fiction or sorcerous elements.  Those stories debuted in the 1930s in the magazine Spicy Mystery, and we read them in the 1990s Wandrei collection Time Burial.  H. Wandrei produced a long list of stories for crime magazines and yesterday I scoured the internet archive for scans of old magazines offering stories published under the H. Wandrei pseudonym Robert Garron, and now let's check out three of the short ones.

"The 15th Pocket" (1936)    

"The 15th Pocket" debuted in Spicy Detective, and would be reprinted in a 1938 issue of Private Detective as "Death's Passenger" under a different penname, and then (again as "Death's Passenger") in 2 Book Mystery Magazine in 1946.

Lord's is a manufacturer and seller of high-end lingerie, and business is good--Lord's 50-something Vice-President Bannon is rich.  Was rich--he turns up dead in an abandoned cab, shot full of holes and covered in bruises from a ferocious fight.  He wasn't robbed--his pockets are full of expensive watches and money--or was he?  One pocket is empty!  The cops figure the key to the mystery is what was in that pocket.

Police Lieutenant Hanrahan investigates.  The driver of the cab is cleared--somebody beat him up and stole his cab.  Hanrahan heads to the Bannon mansion looking for Mrs. Bannon; on the way somebody shoots at him, but misses.  At the mansion, Hanrahan finds the missus isn't home and badgers the sexy maid into admitting Bannon was having an affair with his secretary and Mrs. Bannon was having an affair with some young rich idler and that she (the maid) was plotting to blackmail them both.  The maid tries to seduce Hanrahan but he brushes her aside.

Hanrahan pays a visit to the home of Mrs. Bannon's lover and finds the two of them there; he decides they are too drunk to have been involved in the murder.  So he proceeds to the residence of Bannon's secretary, a third floor apartment.  Hanrahan becomes certain she and an accomplice are behind her boss's untimely death, and searches her apartment while she tries to distract him with her body.  The accomplice tries to sneak up on Hanrahan but Hanrahan's partner shows up just in time to gun the murderer down.  Then Hanrahan finds the item the murderer took from that empty pocket--a pair of banknotes worth ten thousand bucks each, Bannon's bonus from the owner of Lord's, which the secretary must have known he had received and coveted for herself.

I don't really get this story's central gimmicks.  Is it so remarkable that a guy who has fifteen pockets has one empty pocket?  In the summer I have like four pockets and half of them are empty.  And then there is the elaborate way the banknotes were hidden by the secretary and the murderer--they folded them up to the size of postage stamps and put them inside an empty watch case and sealed it with candle wax and tied a fishing line to it and threw the watch into a pond in the courtyard of the secretary's apartment complex but left one end of the fishing line in her apartment so they could pull the treasure up through her window.  Wouldn't the super or the gardener blunder into the fishing line?  Couldn't someone on the first or second floors see the line hanging in front of his window?

The interesting thing about this bland story is perhaps its misogyny.  "Murders are like women; they’re all the same’’ says one cop, and all the women in the story are monsters:

There were three women in this case, and none of them reacted to Bannon’s murder with any grief. The maid was disappointed because the neat fabric of her blackmail scheme was blown sky-high. Mrs. Bannon responded with hysterical gratification. And this Haworth dame [the secretary] was strictly indifferent. Damn their scheming, selfish, hard little hearts!

This story is obviously not good, but, with its fast pace and a car crash, a shooting, somebody getting punched or slapped or showing off her legs every page or so, it is not boring or annoying, so I guess we'll call it barely acceptable.

"For No Ransom" (1940)

"For No Ransom" is the cover story of the issue of Spicy Detective in which is appears.  I'm not finding any evidence it was ever reprinted.  

Edith is a junior executive at a Manhattan department store who aspires to work in the fashion industry.  And a gorgeous babe!  (One of the characters considers her "yum-yum.")  Edith is more or less engaged to her boyfriend Phil, a sculptor who works in wood who was born into a wealthy family.  Their wedding is on hold because they disagree about her work--he wants her to quit and be a housewife and she wants to keep working.  

Otto the retired surgeon has seen the yum-yum Edith walking about town and hired an unscrupulous private investigator to uncover where she lives and works and so forth.  When he has a thick enough dossier on Edith, Otto moves into an apartment in the same building as Edith's and contrives a way to get into her apartment and then to get her into his--his methods reminded me of the way children are warned not to help strangers who say they have lost a puppy or whatever and came off as a little unbelievable.  Otto chloroforms Edith and then injects her with some kind of tranquilizer and drives off with her unconscious form in the passenger seat after instructing the PI to stay in the Big Apple to keep his private eye on Phil.  

It's a 1200 mile drive west to Orto's destination, and he enlivens the trip by playing with the inert Edith with one hand while driving with the other.  Cripes!  When she wakes up in a hospital bed, Otto tells Edith she has been in shock.  Phil dumped her, he explains, which triggered a catatonic event!  After recovering in the hospital she married Otto, one of her doctors.  But then she had a relapse and when she awoke she had forgotten all about her marriage to Otto.  Weeks go by, and Edith starts to believe Otto's crazy story.  Back in New York, Phil and the police try to find Edith, but get nowhere.

Three months after Edith's disappearance, a sad Phil is listening to a live radio broadcast of a famous orchestra performing at a club in the Midwest.  Somehow, the mic picks up chatter in the audience and Phil recognizes Edith's voice!  (This story is pretty ridiculous.)  Phil flies to the town with the club.  The PI follows him, but Phil is big and strong from carving iron-hard wood and has noticed this jerk following him and gets the jump on him and beats him up.  Then he does a little detective work, figuring out what is going on, finally confronts Otto and beats him up and reunites with Edith.

This story is rather half baked.  The individual plot elements are not only silly but often clunky (for example, minor characters who don't contribute much to the drama) and the way they are put together poor (there isn't a sense of mounting tension or much of a climax, for example.)  Edith, Phil and Otto have personalities that have little or no effect on the plot, or lack personality altogether so you don't care what happens to them.  In a good story of this sort the author would convey the overpowering lust of Otto, the paralyzing fear and then deadening despair and finally mind-numbing resignation of Edith, and the maddening frustration and then tremendous relief of Phil, but Wandrei doesn't do any of that here.

Gotta give this one a thumbs down.

"Don't Do It, Mister!" (1943)

 

This story does all the things I just told you "For No Ransom" didn't do but should have.  The characters have personality, exhibit emotions you can identify with, and the tension in the story grows as the story proceeds.  Thumbs up for "Don't Do It, Mister!"

Lewis likes beautiful things.  He likes stamps, and collects them.  He has a book of them, all the rare and lovely stamps he spends most of his income on--he hasn't bought a new suit or new shoes in two years--carefully arranged.

Or he had such a collection.  Lewis is married to a gorgeous brunette with a terrific body, Eleanor.  He thought he'd like to have such a beautiful creature around, but he didn't want a woman who would interfere with him, bother him, so he didn't just marry Eleanor for her looks--he married her because she was an ignorant dimwit.  

This decision today has bit Lewis in the ass.  While he was in his Manhattan office, Eleanor, back home in Brooklyn, decided she would go on a shopping spree, get an expensive dress.  I guess in the 1940s you could at some stores use uncancelled postage stamps like cash, just buy things with them as if they were money worth the value printed on them.  (What with the banknotes in "The 15th Pocket" Wandrei is giving me an education in Depression and World War II-era microeconomics.)  So Eleanor took a bunch of stamps out of Lewis's book, like 70 or whatever dollars worth face value, but worth thousands and thousands of dollars to a collector, to buy her dress.  Eleanor is not only a pea-brained ignoramus who has no idea the old stamps are worth more than the value printed on them and thinks Lewis can just get more at the post office any time, but also a resentful and bull-headed harpy who thinks his spending time every day looking at the book of stamps and using tweezers to add new stamps to it to be embarrassing childishness (we might charge this story with misogyny like we did "For No Ransom") and they have a fierce argument.

Wandrei's description of Lewis's shock and dismay, and the dialogue between him and Eleanor about the stamps and the dress, are totally convincing and very effective.  My heart sank along with Lewis's when he realized his wonderful rare valuable stamps were gone, and my blood temperature rose when Eleanor insisted he must be lying in telling her the stamps were worth more than what was printed on them.

Wandrei also does a good job with the murder scene and Lewis' psychological response to killing someone with his own hands, killing his own wife!  And the ending, which leaves us unsure whether Lewis has got away with the crime or not, but confident the sight of his wife's dead face will haunt him forever, is not bad.

"Don't Do It, Mister!" appeared in Super-Detective and as with "For No Ransom" I find no evidence it has ever been reprinted. 

**********   

"The 15th Pocket" and "For No Ransom" are just filler that are full of flaws, but "Don't Do It, Mister!" is a powerful crime story and psychological horror story about a man who makes terrible life choices but with whom we can sort of identify.  So this exploration into disreputable pulp detective magazines has paid off, even if we didn't find the mad scientists and evil wizards we met in the Spicy Mystery batch.   

Merril-approved '58 stories by C Smith, W Stanton & J Stopa

We're in no rush here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Stop and smell the flowers, we say!  So it has been like two months since we logged an installment of our tour of the speculative fiction of 1958 courtesy of Judith Merril, the critics' favorite anthologist.  But slow and steady wins the race, and today we again turn to the back pages of my copy of SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume to Merril's long list of honorable mentions and pick out three stories to read.  Our journey through 1958 is an alphabetical one, and we are still on the letter "S," and today we check out stories by Cordwainer Smith, Will Stanton and Jon Stopa.

"Western Science is So Wonderful!" by Cordwainer Smith  

Merril recommends two stories by Cordwainer Smith in SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume; we read "The Burning of the Brain" back in 2019.  I recognize the title "Western Science is So Wonderful!" and am a little surprised I haven't read it yet, but maybe I put off reading it because I thought the title was sarcastic and I was in no mood for yet another slagging of the Western world after a lifetime of hearing such slaggings from college professors, grad students (the college professor in its larval form), journalists and now rapping nepo-baby mayoral candidates.  Whatever the case, today we see what this story, which debuted in Damon Knight's If and has never been anthologized but has seen reprint in many Smith collections, is all about by reading it in a scan of the appropriate issue of If.

"Western Science is So Wonderful" in fact is not an attack on Western society; the main target of its satire is actually socialism in Russia and China.  But it is also a silly and repetitive joke story.  

An exiled Martian is on Earth during the Second World War, and hangs around in rural China.  It can read minds and change its shape and effortlessly fly and so forth--it likes to take the form of a tree and feel the wind in its branches, for example.  The Martian encounters a U. S. Army liaison with the Chinese Nationalist Army and shocks the Yank and his Chinese porters with his bizarre behavior, like taking the form of the American's mother and then of a stripping Red Cross nurse in an effort to put him at ease.  One of the jokes of this sequence is that the Martian is fascinated by the American's cigarette lighter.  (It is this device that prompts the utterance that serves as the story title.)  The Martian erases all memory of this encounter from the soldier and those who accompany him.

In 1955 a Soviet liaison to the Chinese Communist Party arrives in the same spot and the Martian interacts with him and the Chinese people accompanying him.  The alien makes many comical efforts to make friends with these commies, like appearing as Chairman Mao and then a sexy Russian WAC and asking to join the Chinese Communist Party, and the commies respond comically by, for example, saying he must be a supernatural entity and thus must not exist because, as militant atheists, they believe the supernatural does not exist.  Eventually the Soviet and the Chinese officers convince the Martian to go to the United States, where people are religious and will believe in him, and where much of the Western science he so admires comes from.  This plot-light shaggy dog story ends when the Martian teleports itself to night time Connecticut and decides to take the form of a milk delivery truck made of gold.

I like that the story is largely a spoof of communism, and the jokes aren't terrible, but "Western Science is So Wonderful!" is still a waste of time and, though it pains me because I have been impressed by a lot of Smith's work, I have to give this production of Smith's a marginal thumbs down.

"Over the River to What's-Her-Name's House" by Will Stanton

Stanton has eighteen story credits at isfdb, and wikipedia is telling me he published hundreds of humor stories and essays in mainstream outlets like Reader's Digest, The New Yorker and the Saturday Evening Post.  As I tell you every time I do one of these Merril-inspired posts, Merril was skeptical or even hostile to genre distinctions and loved to promote as SF stories by mainstream writers whether they appeared in dedicated SF venues or mainstream ones.  As it happens, "Over the River to What's-Her-Name's House" debuted in F&SF.  The only evidence of reprinting I can find is in the British edition of Venture, but I didn't put a lot of effort into searching for reprints because it turns out there are a lot of Will Stantons out there and I didn't feel like sifting through all the pages that came up that were obviously not applicable.

"Over the River to What's-Her-Name's House" is a sleep-inducing satire of suburban life in the mid-century, a slice of life story about the future when there are lots of labor saving devices and lots of collective institutions that take up people's time (for example, farcical versions of the Book-of-the-Month Club--the Trivet of the Month Club and the Sick Friend of the Month Club--and of women's charitable groups) and lots of self-help rituals to ease stress endorsed by Ivy League professors.  My eyes kept glazing over as I tried to read this sterile and vacuous ooze and maybe that is why I was unable to detect any plot--maybe the plot was about how the many mechanical and social systems designed to make life easier were in fact making life less satisfying and were breaking down anyway. 

Absolute waste of time--this hunk of junk makes the Cordwainer Smith story I just condemned as a waste of time look like a brilliant masterpiece fashioned by a hero.  Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger, all is forgiven!

"A Pair of Glasses" by Jon Stopa

Stopa has only four fiction credits at isfdb but was apparently an enthusiastic participant in fan activities--he and his wife won an award at a convention for their skimpy costumes (or was the award really for their slender bodies?)--and in the production of nonfiction books about SF--he is credited with the competent if not inspired covers for many books of essays about SF including Damon Knight's famous In Search of Wonder.

This is a tedious story in which two old guys living in a post-apocalyptic world smoke pipes and have boring philosophical arguments, referring to Sigmund Freud, David Hume, and Herman Hesse.  In "A Pair of Glasses" Stopa contrasts those who, seeing the world is full of danger and confusion, retreat from the workaday world like monks to contemplate the spiritual world or like college professors to study sterile minutia, with those who engage with the world, try to meet its challenges and make it a better place for mankind.  Stopa also includes descriptions of glass blowing and of the work of the optometrist and optician.

Ben, who is fat, and Roger, who is thin, were friends as kids.  Mankind had exhausted the resources of the Earth, the oil and coal and iron and all that.  Then a terrible war erupted.  Now there is almost no industry or technology, and the military consists of archers.  Ben retreated to a valley in California to found a colony of people who focused on getting in touch with nature and the infinite.  Roger, on Lake Michigan, started a glass blowing shop to help rebuild modern civilization.  Now they are old men, and Ben has walked to Roger's place in response to a letter from Rog in which Rog told him he could provide his old pal with a pair of spectacles.  Obviously this is a metaphor; Roger is trying to help Ben see physically as well as intellectually--Ben even exhibits reluctance to wear the glasses, as they are uncomfortable and all the detail is confusing, a parallel to the willful blindness that led him to hide from life and reality in California.

The men have their boring debates, Stopa wasting our time with descriptions of their drinking lemonade and looking out over the lake and filling their pipes with tobacco and so forth.  

The twist ending is that, while Ben was isolated in his California colony, people in the outside world developed their innate psychic abilities and can now teleport.  The scientific method and engagement with the broader world are vindicated and the monkish life shown to be a dead end.  Somehow, while walking from California through Colorado to Illinois or Wisconsin or wherever Roger's glass works is, Ben never noticed anybody teleporting.  A little hard to believe.

Gotta give this one a thumbs down.  I sympathize with its ideology, but "A Pair of Glasses" is boring and the twist ending is unacceptable.  I don't think this thing has ever been reprinted after debuting in John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Astounding.  

**********

Oy, three losers!  Judith Merril did us dirty this time around!  What can we salvage from the wreckage?  Well, each of these stories is a sort of time capsule of 1950s concerns; communism in Russia and China is a major theme of Smith's story and a minor theme of Stopa's, and Stanton's unreadable tub of goop is, I guess, a satire of life at the time it was written.  Stopa's story perhaps reflects the ideology and interests of the segment of the SF world which orbited around Campbell--pro-science, anti-religion, fascinated with psionic powers.  So, maybe these stories have value for the student of social and cultural history.  But entertainment value is very limited.    

We'll be back on the sex and violence beat next time here at MPorcius Fiction Log, folks!

Howard Wandrei: "Exit Willy Carney," "The Glass Coffin," "Master-the-Third," and "O Little Nightmare"

Let's read four stories from the Howard Wandrei collection Time Burial, stories that first appeared in the later 1930s not in respectable magazines like Astounding or Weird Tales but in the "shudder pulp" or "weird menace" magazine Spicy Mystery.  The appeal of this magazine is its depiction of women at risk of or actually suffering sexualized violence, and my flipping through the scans of Spicy Mystery I can find, and the assertions of Robert Kenneth Jones in his book The Shudder Pulps: A History of the Weird Menace Magazines of the 1930s, suggest this magazine had more illustrations than was usual for pulp magazines, and most of those illos featured scantily clad women in some terrible danger.  If you want to see drawings of young ladies in lingerie being tied up, slashed with knives, or thrown into bottomless pits or off of cliffs, Spicy Mystery is the periodical for you, but don't tell them I sent you.

This is far from the first expedition of the bold explorers of MPorcius Fiction Log into the salacious and sanguinary jungles of shudder pulp territory.  In 2021 we read, from the collection The Eerie Mr. Murphy, three other Howard Wandrei stories that debuted in Spicy Mystery, as well as a bunch of shudder pulp tales by E. Hoffman Price and one by Henry Kuttner  Prompted by a reading of Frederik Pohl's memoir, way back in 2018 we read five shudder pulp stories from 1940 by Ray Cummings.

(Nota bene:  I am reading all four stories from my copy of Time Burial, and an introductory note in the book indicates the texts are different from those printed in the 1930s issues of Spicy Mystery in which they debuted; we are told these texts are "much truer to the author's intent" and "appreciably more risqué.")      

"Exit Willy Carney" (1935)

This is a wild and crazy story full of sex and horrible criminal violence, with a surprise ending featuring one of my favorite SF tropes--the brain transplant!

Wandrei starts us with a sex scene.  Model Madge is having sex with organized crime figure Caldwell.  Caldwell is an expert lover!  But then an assassin shoots through the window of Caldwell's apartment--head shot!  Caldwell bites Madge's tongue as he dies, drawing her blood--gross!

Madge flees the scene, and we get a flashback to Madge's first days in New York, incidents of artists sexually harassing her and the start of her love affair with Caldwell.  Then, back in the present, we follow the cops as they pursue Caldwell's killer, professional hitman Willy Carney.  Carney is in his girlfriend's apartment, engaging in foreplay, when the cops arrive.  Carney sneaks out and his girlfriend tries to slow down the fuzz by offering them her body, but the flatfoots catch up to Carney regardless and a ferocious fight erupts in the apartment building's courtyard.  Carney is an expert fighter and triumphs over the forces of justice, killing multiple officers as he escapes.

Carney goes to a famous surgeon who does business with the underworld, hoping to get plastic surgery to hide his identity.  The surgeon has something else in mind, but they need to be patient, to wait for the ideal conditions in which to pull off a coup that pushes the envelope of medical science and of crime!

Madge shows up at the surgeon's, looking for an abortion--she was impregnated by Caldwell seconds before he died and this girlboss doesn't want a baby putting a crimp in her career!  Seeing how healthy Madge is, the surgeon sees that the time is ripe to put his innovative plan into action.  That annoying baby isn't the only clump of cells the doctor removes from Madge's perfect body--he also relieves her of her brain!  He puts the model's grey matter in Carney the killer's skull, and fills Madge's gorgeous brainpan with Carney's brain.

The surgeon releases Madge (in Carney's body) after a few months and when the cops catch "him" they consider him insane as he rants and raves about not actually being Carney.  Carney (in the body of sexalicious model Madge) learns how to walk in heels and to enjoy the feel of silky undergarments and so forth.  As the story ends it seems that somehow Madge's memories have been preserved in her body and her personality takes over Carney's implanted grey matter and he forgets he was ever a man and had brain transplant surgery and picks up Madge's life where she left off.

Wandrei's style here is a little crude, and there are elements of "Exit Willy Carney" that might be considered pornographic, gratuitously gory, and racist, and thus disturbing or offensive, but I found a lot of the story surprising and entertaining, and I can't deny I enjoyed it.

After appearing under a pseudonym in the September '35 ish of Spicy Mystery, "Exit Willy Carney" was reprinted in the March 1942 issue of Spicy Mystery under a different title, "Not Counting Death," and under a different pen name.  Tricky!

"The Glass Coffin" (1937)

Maxwell Heights is a well-to-do riverside neighborhood inhabited by wealthy fashionable people; lately young women of the district have been vanishing--fourteen of them, in fact!  We are introduced to beautiful Kathleen, her brother, painter Arnold, and Arnold's girlfriend, sexy Jeanne.  We learn all about these three people's good looks, especially the women's bodies, and witness Jeanne posing nude for Arnold and doing a sexy dance for him.

Kathleen becomes the fifteenth well-heeled young lady to disappear, and Arnold suspects Zuchet, the florist, a short fat guy, is to blame--the painter thinks Zuchet's evil eyes, his "sexual voice," and the way he looked at Kathleen one day, mark him as a pervert.  Jeanne dons her most revealing dress and goes to Zuchet's place of business to investigate--Zuchet knocks her out and takes her to a secret laboratory where he gropes her and then hooks her up to elaborate scientific machinery.

Arnold busts into the florist's when Jeanne doesn't return and punches Zuchet out (Wandrei describes people's bloody injuries in this story with as much gusto as he does women's breasts) and starts searching for the girls.  As luck would have it, as a youth he explored the beach below Zuchet's gardens, and knows there is a natural tunnel that leads inland to the basement of Zuchet's house.

In the lab, Arnold discovers the amazing, mind-shattering truth.  Zuchet is a genius, an expert in botany, biology, physics.  He has figured out a way to transfer the blood and the souls of people into orchids, thus creating orchids of unparalleled beauty that are sentient, mobile, immortal!  The orchid in which Jeanne's soul is entombed sends forth tendrils which caress Arnold--she recognizes him!  Zuchet appears, shoots Arnold full of holes with a revolver.  With his last breath, Arnold punches Zuchet and knocks the felonious florist out--while he is unconscious the tendrils of the flower that is Jeanne entangle him and suck his blood!  Zuchet awakes briefly before dying, long enough to know that his sixteenth victim is achieving her vengeance on him!

While not nearly as well written as something by Smith, the plot of "The Glass Coffin" reminds me of something Clark Ashton Smith would write, though set in some ancient or far future fantasy world.  A fun bit of exploitation insanity.

"The Glass Coffin" was reprinted under a different pseudonym and with a different title--"Murder for a Soul"--in a 1941 issue of Spicy Mystery.

"Master-the-Third" (1937)

 

This one is perhaps a little more ridiculous and less thrilling than "Exit Willy Carney" and "The Glass Coffin," and is also distinct from them in having a happy ending.  But the gore and sexualized violence are there, as well as a crazy science-fiction means of defying death.  While gruesome and full of people getting murdered, these stories all offer hope that humans can somehow achieve immortality through brain transplants, soul transfers, or, as in this one, being preserved for thousands of years via sorcery.  Of course, Wandrei's project may be to pour cold water on these hopes--in these stories brain transplants change your personality, soul transfers leave you a plant instead of a human, and sorcery may leave you a disembodied eye in a jar, slave to a renegade limey! 

Rawls is a detective, I guess in New York, investigating a mysterious suicide.  The dead man: a millionaire who just married the sexiest girl in town, Karen the world's most agile stripper.  Why would this rich guy who had the hottest chick in the world kill himself?  A little sleuthing turns up the fact that the millionaire recently made friends with a globe-trotting Englishman, Lamphier.  Lamphier is a student of the occult, in fact, he has been anointed "Master-the-Third" of the "Great White Lodge of the Himalayas."  Lamphier has a history of making rich friends and marrying rich women all over the world and then inheriting piles of money from them when they commit suicide. 

Rawls follows Karen, who is so good-looking he is falling in love with her, to Lamphier's apartment building.  Along the way he is ambushed and beaten up, but doesn't see who hit him--Wandrei makes it clear to readers that the detective was attacked either by an invisible man or a telekinetic force.  Through a rooftop skylight Rawls looks into Lamphier's huge studio apartment on the top floor, watches as Karen's clothes come off of her of their own accord and then Karen has ecstatic and acrobatic sex with an invisible man or, again some kind of projection of telekinetic force.  Now he's really in love with her!

Karen and Lamphier leave the building and Rawls sneaks into the Englishman's richly appointed apartment.  It's a trap!  Waiting in there is a gorgeous "golden-skinned" Asian woman who is an expert in hand-to-hand combat, and we get a sadistic and sexualized fight scene in which the woman's breasts are bared when her dress is ripped; she manages to overpower Rawls after kicking him in the balls and proceeds to torture him.

Lamphier returns and explains what is going on.  He has in a glass jar the thousands-year-old living eye of the king of Atlantis, a great wizard and the source of the Greek myth of Uranus.  The eye can perform all manner of magical feats, hypnotism and telekinesis and so forth, if you can order it around in Atlantean, as Lamphier through long study has learned how to do.  Wandrei provides a long gruesome description of the glass jar, its contents and the pictograms carved into it that is pretty cool.

It looks like Rawls is going to follow in the footsteps of the millionaire, committing suicide in an elaborate fashion thanks to Atlantean hypnotism, when an actual Atlantean busts into the apartment to save the day!  This sorcerer has been chasing Lamphier around the Earth, trying to get the eye of his king back.  It may have taken him a while to catch up to Lamphier, but this wizard is invincible.  The Asian karate girl tries to win his favor and gets humiliated in a disgusting sexualized way.  Lamphier's punishment is being blasted to pieces.  The Atlantean avenger spares innocent Rawls and Karen, even (it is suggested) uses his magic to make Karen fall in love with Rawls so Rawls can look forward to having sex with the world's foremost erotic athlete for the rest of his life.

After all this crazy wizardry, torture and sex, Wandrei's twist ending feels very mundane and anticlimactic.  When the police chief asks Rawls why he was so sure the millionaire had been murdered, even though all evidence clearly indicated suicide, Rawls explains that he and the millionaire were relatives and he knew his people were too tough to ever commit suicide.

It doesn't look like "Master-the-Third" was recycled by the editors of Spicy Mystery the way "Exit Willy Carney" and "The Glass Coffin" were.

"O Little Nightmare" (1939)

This is the best story we are talking about today, better written than those three other stories and with a better constructed plot; perhaps more importantly "O Little Nightmare" is a legitimately effective weird story and not just an exploitation story with weird elements tacked on.  And as a bonus for you feminists out there, the characters talk about our society's double standard, how the promiscuity and infidelity of men is tolerated while that of women is condemned.  

Rodney the successful Greenwich Village painter is married to Ursula, the gorgeous model.  These two hipster sophisticates drink too much and of course everybody knows artists of any talent are crazy and so when Rodney starts hearing weird noises in the apartment and glimpsing a little monster dashing through the bedroom neither Rodney, nor Ursula, nor we readers can be sure what to think.  Wandrei does a good job describing the sounds Rodney hears and the way Rodney reacts to them--solid horror story stuff.

Ursula has a buddy, a globe-trotting Englishwoman who is a big game hunter and Olympic athlete; this chick has great breasts, "one of those horsey English faces" and an apartment right across the street.  From horse-face's flat, Ursula, using horse-face's German binoculars, watches Rodney have sex with one of his other models.  When Ursula dismisses the idea of divorce, the Englishwoman talks about how, while on safari in Africa, two guys tried to rape her and she shot them down and the authorities listed the deaths as "hunting accidents" and suggests Ursula murder Rodney--she'd be rich after inheriting all the money Rod has made on his paintings and Ursula has several male friends who would love to marry her if she got lonely.

After the model leaves, Rodney sees the monster and it taunts him and he tries to destroy it, without success.  Again Wandrei, describing the creature and the fight, gives us superior horror story material.  Ursula comes home, changes and showers while Rodney watches, then goes to the cinema (Rodney has contempt for motion pictures.)  Soon after his wife's departure Rodney sees the rat-sized monster eat a roach.  Rodney is determined to destroy the monster, and this times fights with strategy as well as fanatical zeal.  When Ursula comes home she finds that her husband has gone totally insane and so she will have access to all his money without having to murder or divorce him, but she still shaken to the core by the sight of him eating some kind of little animal--we readers recognize he is following the example of the monster itself, eating the intruder the same way it ate the roach.

Thumbs up for "O Little Nightmare," a well-put-together weird tale with sexual exploitation elements tacked on to it.  In its action sequences and its family-life-is-hell theme it reminds me of Richard Matheson's famous "Prey."  I don't see any evidence "O Little Nightmare," though a gem, was reprinted before its reappearance in 1995 in Time Burial.

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I sometimes tell you a story is easy to admire but challenging to enjoy, but today I have to say the opposite about three of our stories, "Exit Willy Carney," "The Glass Coffin" and "Master-the-Third;" these shoddily written tales full of violence against women, torture and gore, racism and mad scientists, are hard to admire but easy to enjoy, I guess like junk food.  Luckily, I can recommend "O Little Nightmare" without reservation to fans of weird and horror stories--at least those that won't be offended by gratuitous descriptions of women's legs or breasts on every other page.

Well, we've had our fill of Spicy Mystery for a little while; next time we'll look at stories from somewhat more prestigious periodicals.

Strange Ports of Call: D H Keller, H Wandrei, and C A Smith

In 1948 Pellegrini and Cudahy published a 400-page hardcover anthology bearing the legend "20 Masterpieces of Science Fiction" on cover and spine alongside the title Strange Ports of Call.  Strange Ports of Call was edited by the tireless August Derleth, correspondent of H. P. Lovecraft and major figure in the effort to get weird material printed in book form, and this volume is full of stories by people we associate with Weird Tales.  Let's read three stories from Strange Ports of Call by weirdies today, those by David H. Keller, Howard Wandrei, and Clark Ashton Smith.  (We may read more from this book in the future, stories by people less closely associated with the weird.)

But before all that, let's list the seven stories reprinted in Strange Ports of Call that we have already read in other venues.

"The Crystal Bullet" by Donald Wandrei

"At the Mountains of Madness" by H. P. Lovecraft

"Call Him Demon" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore

"Far Centaurus" by A. E. van Vogt

"The Lost Street" by Clifford Simak and Carl Jacobi

"Thunder and Roses" by Theodore Sturgeon

"A Guest in the House" by Frank Belknap Long

(Nota Bene: I will be reading all of today's stories in a scan of Strange Ports of Call, though I may check original magazine versions, or other reprints, if there are confusing typos or printing errors.)

"The Worm" by David H. Keller (1929)

We start with a story that has been reprinted many times after its debut in Amazing, including in a Best of Amazing anthology in 1967 and in two different issues of Fantastic, one in 1965 and one in 1979.  The cover of the '79 issue promotes "The Worm" as "Probably the most intriguing tale you'll ever read anywhere."  Wow!

For centuries Thompson's Valley, Vermont, was a prosperous village, with productive farms and a busy mill, but today the place is deserted, only the miller remaining, the mill still turning, though there is no corn for it to grind.  The miller is a recluse, his only friends his books and his dog, and mechanically minded; he has hooked the mill mechanism up to generate electricity.  This practical engineering ability is put to the test when appears an uncanny threat to the building in which his family has lived and worked for generation after generation.

The monster plot of "The Worm" has some similarity to Ray Bradbury's 1951 "The Fog Horn."  The grinding of the mill has attracted a monstrous worm, a thing thirty feet thick, and it burrows up to the mill, thinking the sound of the mill is the sound of a worm of the opposite sex!  Slowly, over the course of days, the mega-sized worm chews through the foundation of the mill and then up through the building's multiple floors, all the while the miller essaying various means to stop or destroy the monster in his determination to preserve his ancestral home.  Who will win, man or beast? 

"The Worm" has something of the ethic or ideology we see in lots of early science fiction.  One man, alone, relies on his wits, sangfroid and knowledge of science and engineering as he struggles against a novel, alien, challenge.  Keller may be subverting the expectations of science lovers who see man as equal to the task of mastering the natural world, though, when he has the man fall before the monster; Keller even specifically has the miller gain confidence, in the event unfounded, from reflecting that as a man he has "brains" and the worm is just a "thing."

"The Worm" is well written, Keller producing sharp images and ably using the reactions of the dog to generate emotional content--suspense and fear--and I was actually a little surprised that the worm killed the miller instead of the other way round.  So thumbs up for "The Worm," a good science fiction horror story.

Stephen Fabian fans should check out the July '79 issue of 
Fantastic which features six pages of art by Fabian: knights, galleys, 
churning waves, a topless woman--some of your favorite things! 

"The God-Box" by Howard Wandrei (1934)

A few years ago I purchased the recent Howard Wandrei collections Time Burial: The Collected Fantasy Tales of Howard Wandrei (1995) and The Eerie Mr. Murphy: The Collected Fantasy Tales of Howard Wandrei: Volume II (2003) largely because I was captivated by H. Wandrei's grotesque drawings.  I did read some stories from these books, among them "For Murderers Only," "The Molester," "Danger: Quicksand" and "The African Trick," but have left many more unread.  "The God Box" (no hyphen) appears in my 2017 paperback edition of Time Burial, but I am reading it today in Strange Ports of Call, where, for whatever reason, the hyphen was introduced.  (There is no hyphen in the title where the story was first printed, under a pseudonym, in F. Orlin Tremaine's Astounding.)

Like Keller's "The Worm," H. Wandrei's "The God-Box" stars smart knowledgeable guys who employ their wits in dealing with an alien challenge, and perhaps reflecting the author's weird sensibilities, in the end they come up short and are overwhelmed--like Keller's, Wandrei's tale is not of the triumph of the man of science but a sort of horror story.

Pence is an Egyptologist who, by bizarre coincidence, discovers in New York City a box the size of a camera made of what looks like gold but is incredibly hard and astoundingly dense--the little box weighs a ton or more!  Elaborately carved with Egyptian motifs and characters, the box is studded with many little heads of pharaohs and of gods of the Egyptian pantheon.  Pence contacts an engineer with a good reputation in the scientific community and the two of them tinker with the box, begin unraveling the secrets of its mind-boggling powers.  After activating the box by charging it with electricity, they find that manipulation of the heads, which are like knobs, allows them to view as through a TV any spot in the universe!  They can even create portals through which they can instantaneously travel to those distant locales or just manipulate the matter there, moving things and people around, drawing them to New York, or destroying them.  The Egyptian box has conferred upon them god-like power!

One of the odd wrinkles of using the box is that it attracts cats from all over the city to the building in which Pence found it, and the felines become such a nuisance that the men have to use the box's powers to dispose of them by the thousands.

Pence and the engineer are clever men but not necessarily good men, and Pence in particular lets his newfound powers go to his head.  The box is used to commit many trespasses, some even worse than teleporting felines wholesale out of the greatest city in the world, and eventually the men scheme against each other and end up lost on a distant planet.

I didn't like the style of this one as much as that of Keller's, it being a little flippant and jokey rather than sharp and clear, but I'm still giving "The God-Box" a thumbs up.  The premise of Damon Knight's 1976 "I See You" bears some similarity to that of "The God-Box," and Carl Jacobi's 1954 "Made in Tanganyika," has not only a similar premise but a similar plot.  Were Jacobi and Knight influenced by Wandrei's story?

"Master of the Asteroid" by Clark Ashton Smith (1932)

I'm a little surprised I haven't read this one yet, I having read quite a volume of stories by Smith.  "Master of the Asteroid" debuted in Wonder Stories, as the cover story, in the same issue as Hazel Heald's collaboration with H. P. Lovecraft "Man of Stone," which we read in 2017.

The editor's intro to "Master of the Asteroid" in Wonder Stories tells us Smith's tale focuses on the psychological stress astronauts will face.  Sure enough, the protagonists of the story are three men who, as members of a scientific expedition on Mars consisting of fifteen men, go insane and steal one of the expedition's ships and try to fly through the asteroid belt to a moon of Jupiter without bringing enough supplies with them.  After a sort of preface or frame, we get to the meat of the story, the log discovered decades later aboard the stolen vessel where it lies wrecked on an asteroid; also found inside the ship was the skeleton of one of the three mutineers, while around the ship lay the remains of a bunch of grotesquely skinny insectoid aliens.

In brief, the narrator survives while the other two madmen expire during the trip.  The narrator goes catatonic but recovers when the vessel crashes into a large asteroid which actually has an atmosphere and a whole ecosystem of plants, animals and people who have a culture that, apparently, includes religion.  The ship is all bent so the narrator cannot open the airlock, and he lacks the weapons or tools to bust through the porthole or hull, so he is stuck in the ship, and learns all about life on the asteroid by watching through the porthole.  We get a description of that life, and the man's mental trials, then finally clues as to the uncanny cause of his death.

"Master of the Asteroid" is a very good horror story set in space.  The style is direct though not unadorned, and totally believable as the record of a man under terrible stress.  The behavior and psychologies of the three broken men are very convincing and striking, and the story is full of dreadful, even haunting, images and events.  Yet again Clark Ashton Smith proves he deserves his high reputation.

Recommended.

"Master of the Asteroid" has been reprinted quite a number of times over the years.  In 1964 it appeared in Arkham House's Smith collection Tales of Science and Sorcery, which our French friends retitled Morthylla and put out in translation in 1989 with an ooo la la cover.  (Those Frenchies know how to separate a man from his francs.)

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Three good stories, so kudos to the authors and to Derleth, who selected these pieces.  All three stories have the trappings of science fiction, but instead of celebrating the work of the scientist and engineer and vindicating the ability of man to solve problems and master his environment, these stories exhibit a weird sensibility.  The focus is on the horror of the alien, the danger presented by novel conditions, and the inability of humans, even those devoted to the scientific method, to survive the physical threats, solve the mysteries, and resist the temptations presented by alien beings, artifacts and conditions.  You can't handle the truth of the unknown, man--it will destroy you physically, shatter you psychologically, and tempt you into abandoning your morality!   

Weird Tales March 1941: D Wandrei, D Quick, A Derleth and T McClusky

Our aim is to read at least one story from each issue of Weird Tales published in the year 1941, and today we look at the second of the six 1941 issues, March.  This issue reprints a poem from a 1938 British fanzine by C. S. Youd, the man also known as John Christopher and responsible for the Tripods books and No Blade of Grass AKA The Death of Grass, which I blogged about ten years ago.  (Joachim Boaz blogged about No Blade of Grass in 2019.)  That is sort of interesting.  There is also an ad for the upcoming appearance of the posthumously published Lovecraft story The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, which I have read multiple times but not during the period of this blog's apocalyptic life.  Our focus today will be the stories in the issue by founders of Arkham House Donald Wandrei and August Derleth, by Thorp McClusky, who has made like a dozen appearances here at MPorcius Fiction Log, and by Dorothy Quick, a relative newcomer to these pages, we only having read two stories by her.

"The Crystal Bullet" by Donald Wandrei

I feel like we've read a stack of stories by Donald Wandrei from a variety of magazines including Astounding, of course Weird Tales, and even detective magazines.   OMG, it's links time.

"Raiders of the Universes"

"The Fire Vampires"

"Colossus"

"Something from Above"

"The Red Brain"

"The Painted Mirror"

"The Tree-Men of M'Bwa"

"The Lives of Alfred Kramer"

"Spawn of the Sea"

"The Destroying Horde"

"Infinity Zero"

"Black Fog"

"Earth Minus"

"Life Current"

"Dramatic Touch"

"Come Clean"

"The Man Who Never Lived"

"The Atom Smasher"

"The Blinding Shadows"

"The Whisperers"

"Colossus Eternal"

"Uneasy Lie the Drowned"

"The Lady in Gray"

"Giant-Plasm"

"The Crystal Bullet" starts with some romantic slosh about the beauty of the natural world in the spring, the birds and the squirrels and a farm with big strong horses and black loamy soil, etc.  In contrast to these images and themes of warmth and life and peace and quiet is the sound of some sort of airborne object flying overhead and crashing nearby, atop a hill; when a farmer goes to investigate he finds a two-foot long thing like a crystal torpedo that radiates cold and a green glow.  Though the cold is more severe than any he has experienced, as if hypnotized he grasps the fallen artifact and brings it to the yard outside his house.  At home he seems to regain his mind, decides that when he is done with the spring planting he'll write a letter to somebody at the university or in the government about the crystal from space.  His wife wants him to take the thing away, but he tells her maybe they can sell it for a lot of money.  That night, his wife leaves their bed and goes to the crystal and, I guess, is frozen to death by it.  The farmer takes the crystal away and hurls it into an artificial lake, a flooded quarry.  He has the impression that the crystal is a spacecraft, fashioned by aliens with feathers and eyes on stalks whose bodies are part-gas, to carry either passengers or advanced three-dimensional means of communication; it might have offered humanity invaluable secrets but immersion in water totally destroys the object and its passengers and/or cargo.  It seems his wife is doomed, though maybe if the farmer hadn't destroyed the crystal the people/knowledge it carried could have revived her, even transformed her into a superior being?

This story is written poetically; it is full of mind-numbingly long sentences and much of what goes on is kind of vague and mysterious, maybe in part because I am not inclined to pout in the effort to laboriously decipher those long sentences.  I'm not crazy about "The Crystal Bullet."  We'll be generous and call this sterile literary exercise and effort to achieve the famous "sense of wonder" "acceptable."  August Derleth was more generous still, reprinting "The Crystal Bullet" in an anthology of "Masterpieces of Science Fiction" entitled Strange Ports of Call.  You can also find it in two Donald Wandrei collections, The Eye and the Finger and Colossus: The Collected Science Fiction of Donald Wandrei.

"Edge of the Cliff" by Dorothy Quick

Here we have a two-page story that was reprinted in one of those Barnes and Noble anthologies, a story about assisted suicide.  

An attractive young woman (I don't think we learn her name), was in love with Bob but her family made her marry Jim, who had money.  She hated Jim, a "drunken beast" who beat her.  She cheated on Jim with Bob, who promised to take her away when he had enough money.  Jim caught them and killed Bob; "Jim got off--he was a wronged husband."  Tonight she is standing on the edge of a seaside cliff, rocks below, wanting to commit suicide but too scared to do so.

The ghost of Bob comes along and urges her, pleads with her, to kill herself so they can be together for "Eternity."  She jumps and that is our happy ending.

We might see this as a pro-suicide story, and/or as a feminist story about how society puts so much pressure on women that it drives them to destroy themselves--the decision to live or die is the only decision the patriarchy leaves to women!  It is certainly odd to see a man plead that the woman he loves kill herself so that she will be with him; everyone in this story acts very selfishly.  It is also sort of interesting that Quick asserts there is an afterlife, so "Edge of the Cliff" is more or less a religious story, but totally ignores the prohibition on suicide of those religions which have been dominant in the West for many centuries.

Acceptable.

"Come to Me!" by August Derleth

I don't find lawyers and court room dramas very interesting, so kind of groaned when the first paragraph of "Come to Me!" introduced us readers to Judge Hillier and the case of Elsa Laing over which he is presiding.  Derleth's story only gets more boring and stupid as it proceeds.  Thumbs down!

"Come to Me!" is a deus-ex-machina Christian wish-fulfillment fantasy of a very childish type.  You have heard me in the past praise speculative fiction stories for addressing or promoting Christian thinking, and of course two of the most exciting and talented SF writers, Gene Wolfe and R. A. Lafferty, are serious Christians.  But Derleth here produces a dreadful piece of junk that has me shaking my head.

Elsa Laing, a single woman responsible for her aged mother, is on trial for selling people valueless stocks and bonds through the mails.  She has just been convicted when a message comes to the court--a higher power is intervening and will take over the trial tomorrow!

The next day a charismatic figure arrives and takes Judge Hillier's place.  This figure explains that Elsa Laing was tricked by a fat (Derleth tells us he looks like a pig) banker and a rich guy who wears pince-nez, hat and gloves, into unknowingly defrauding people.  As part of their operations the fatso and the clotheshorse also blackmailed some other woman.  This substitute judge seems to know what everyone has done, what everyone thinks, and everybody feels compelled to obey him.  This super-judge specifies at tedious length how the obese banker and the fancy dresser are to recompense their many victims (the two women and all the people who bought worthless stocks and bonds) and of course rules that the two women are totally absolved of any wrongdoing.  The government attorney who prosecuted Elsa Laing is also to be investigated by the local authorities, while Judge Hillier is commended for doing his best.  Then the mysterious judge glows and vanishes.  The substitute judge was Jesus Christ!  

A strikingly silly and bad story, with no plot tension, no characters, an idiotic view of theology and of the legal system of the United States, and also a story that tries to exploit readers' disgust at obese people and envy of the wealthy.  If Jesus can come down and stop people from getting defrauded, why isn't he doing anything about German and Soviet imperialism and tyranny?  Jesus, look at the calendar, it's 1941, if you are going to intervene in Earthly affairs, you've got bigger fish to fry!  

Abysmal.           

This embarrassment was reprinted in the Derleth collections Dwellers in Darkness and That is Not Dead.   

"The Graveyard Horror" by Thorp McClusky

When we talked about the January 1941 issue of Weird Tales, I was mesmerized by a Hannes Bok illustration of a tall skinny woman and Bok delivers another such image for this story.  The female lead in Henry Kuttner's "Dragon Moon" was a sort of fish-woman, providing Bok a reason to depict an impossible slender woman, and "The Graveyard Horror" offers him a similar opportunity because the women in this story are having the life sucked out of them by vampires!  

Like Quick's "Edge of the Cliff," "The Graveyard Horror" is about suicide and people who welcome death, but this 16-page story takes a very different attitude towards self-destruction and religion than does Quick's brief tale.

Young Karl and Jorma were in love, but Jorma's father Sven opposed their marriage because Karl's family were a different Protestant sect than his own.  (This story argues that the Christian religion is true and that conflict between different Christian denominations is dangerously counterproductive.)  So Karl committed suicide by tying a weight to himself and jumping in a body of water.  Jorma wasted away within a month, dying though she suffered no apparent disease.  The local undertaker of this small town tells the local doctor, our narrator, in a sort of roundabout way, that he thinks Karl became a vampire because suicides can't go right to heaven and murdered Jorma.  Of course the doctor scoffs.  But when Jorma's sister Hildur begins wasting away and tells people she is looking forward to joining Jorma, the doctor, the mortician, and Hildur's husband spring into action!  The mortician deliberately takes a page from the book of the Roman Catholics and employs an arsenal of crucifixes to attack Karl and Jorma and to defend Hildur.

I don't like the way "The Graveyard Horror" is constructed.  The narrator and the mortician go to Karl's grave three times, the first two times deciding that their suspicions he is a vampire have not been confirmed and so not doing anything.  I find it boring and annoying in stories when people do the same thing again and again.  On the other hand, I like that the vampires in the story don't open their coffins, bust out of their vaults and dig through the dirt of their graves to stalk the night, but issue forth as gaseous or immaterial beings.  And I like that Karl and Jorma, decent sweet people when alive, are foully evil vampires when undead.    

We're going to rate this one marginally good; it is certainly the best of today's stories.  Quick's, which has the virtue of brevity, is second.  

German anthologists Kurt Singer and Manfred Kluge included "The Graveyard Horror" in volumes of ghost, horror and vampire stories.

It turns out I'm not going to get out of this blog post without a lot more copying and pasting of links to all the Thorp McClusky stories we have talked about here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Here they are:  

"The Crawling Horror"

"The Woman in Room 607"

"The Thing on the Floor"
"Kidnappers of Space"

"Monstrosity of Evolution"        

"Black Gold"

"Fothergill's Jug"

"Workshop of the Living Dead"

"The Red God Laughed"

"While Zombies Walked"

"The Considerate Hosts"

"Slaves of the Grey Mold"

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Looking on the bright side, none of these stories is rote uninspired filler; they all do something novel or tweak the formula or make some kind of counterintuitive argument.  Of course, the most entertaining one is the most traditional one, a reflection that stretching yourself and doing something off the beaten path is a risk.

We'll take a break from Weird Tales for our next episode, but the material we examine will likely be quite weird-adjacent.  So stay tuned!

Weird Tales, Jan 1941: H Kuttner, D H Keller, R Bloch and R M Farley

Last year we read Henry Kuttner's first three Elak stories, "Thunder in the Dawn," "Spawn of Dagon" and "Beyond the Phoenix."  Today we will read Kuttner's fourth and final story of Elak of Atlantis, "Dragon Moon," which appears in the January 1941 issue of Weird Tales.  (Adrian Cole, whose Dream Lords trilogy I read in 2016 and tarbandu started last year, took up the saga of Elak in our own 21st century.)  We'll also tackle the stories in this ish by David H. Keller, Robert Bloch and Ralph M. Finley.  Hopefully these stories will he better than those we read last time we cracked open an issue of the magazine of the bizarre and unusual.  At least thid go round we have a cover with a muscleman, a monster and a damsel in distress.

(I considered reading Nelson S. Bond's story from this issue, but it is advertised as a joke story so I am abstaining--I know you don't want to hear me yet again groan about how little I appreciate joke stories.)

"Dragon Moon" by Henry Kuttner

"Dragon Moon" has ten chapters, and each is preceded by an epigraph.  Most of these are from poems by G. K. Chesterton, Rudyard Kipling, or William Rose Benet--or the Bible, but Kuttner does quote his own 1936 poem "The Sunken Towers" before Chapter 6.  ("The Sunken Towers" appeared in the December 1936 issue of Donald Wollheim's zine The Phantagraph and was reprinted in 1967 in Operation Phantasy: The Best from The Phantagraph.  The poem is easy to find if you search around a bit.)  

Chapter 1 finds errant prince Elak and obese comic relief sidekick Lycon in a harborside tavern in southern Atlantis.  Elak gets into a fight over a wench and is about to be killed when the Druid from "Thunder in the Dawn" busts into the room and uses sorcery to save Elak's life.  In Chapter 2 the Druid delivers astonishing news--an alien entity known as Karkora is taking over the bodies of the monarchs of Atlantis!  When Elak's brother, Orander, king of the northern land of Cyrena, realized he was being possessed by a being from another universe, he killed himself!  The Druids want Elak to take the throne of Cyrena, but Elak refuses, thinking himself unfit!  

In Chapter 3, Elak has a dream in which he has a vision of Karkora the Pallid One and finds it so loathsome he decides to travel to Cyrena to seize control of the kingdom after all.  The Druid is nowhere to be found, so Elak and Lycon try to get passage on a ship, only to find it is captained by the guy Elak had that bar brawl with!  Elak and Lycon are chained at the oars among the galley slaves and help propel the ship northward with their own muscles.  In Chapter 4, Elak and Lycon lead a revolt of the galley slaves and take over the ship.  Kuttner includes lots of gruesome details in the fight that might appeal to gorehounds, but the sequence feels a little shoddy, with a metaphor used twice in as many pages and some confusion as to what is going on.  Chapter 4 would have benefited from some additional polishing and editing.

In Chapter 5 the Druid speaks to Elak in a dream--he must go to the red delta!  Whatever that is!  The next day is spotted a castle on an island in a delta; the sand here is red.  Ah!  Elak and Lycon bid farewell to the mutineers and disembark.  They meet a local potentate, Aynger, one of the last of a dispersed people, the Amenalk.  He tells Elak that within the castle lives a woman, Mayana, one of the few survivors of a pre-human race of sea people, a race of puissant wizards.  She was married to the human king of the nation just south of Cyrena, Kiriath, but left him when Karkora the Pallid One took over his body.  In Chapter 6, Elak, alone, ventures across a scary bridge, through a creepy tunnel, across a haunted underground lake, to the island under the island, where sits among a ruined city the temple under the castle, where he meets Mayana.  Mayana is incredibly tall and thin, and Hannes Bok provides an absorbing illustration of her kneeling before an idol of some kind of bird god. 

Chapter 7 is an expository chapter in which Mayana tells her own sad story and of the coming of Karkora the Pallid One.  You see, Mayana loved her human husband, king of Kiriath, and wanted to bear him a son, but as a nonhuman was unable.  A wizard in her husband's court offered to aid her with his sorcery, and she took him up on the offer, but the child she bore thereby was a stillborn misshapen mutant.  The wizard offered to revive it, and Mayana again accepted the sorcerer's aid; the wizard brought the baby back to feeble life and took it under his tutelage.  Eventually it was revealed that the sorcerer had summoned from another universe a horrible immaterial being to inhabit the embryo in Mayana's womb!  Having brought the deformed baby back to some semblance of life, along with the powerful alien spirit dwelling within it, the wizard put the child into what amounts to a sensory deprivation tank, denying it its natural five senses in order to strengthen an alien sixth sense!  This malformed human inhabited by an extradimensional spirit is now Karkora, and it seeks to conquer this world and others with the array of astounding powers this sixth sense confers upon him!

Mayana knows a talisman that can destroy Karkora, the monster whose earthly form came from her own womb, even if its alien soul did not, and Elak convinces her to provide it to him--she agrees to do so at the right moment.  Mayana even enchants Elak's blade, and gifts him some of her own magical strength, so he will be able to succeed in battle against Karkora and the Pallid One's unwitting human servants.  Kuttner doesn't say that impossibly tall, creepily skinny, shockingly pale and disturbingly scaly Mayana of the sea-folk has sex with Elak in order to give him this strength, but it is sort of metaphorically or euphemistically implied. 

"Stay with me for a moon--drinking the sea-power and Poseidon’s magic.”

“A moon—”

"Time will not exist. You will sleep, and while you sleep strength will pour into you."

(There's a lot of bestiality in the world of Lovecraftian and Lovecraftian-adjacent fiction.)

All the business with Mayana is good because it is about disturbing and heart-breaking human relationships and at the same time about the evil wizards, extradimensional aliens, lost races and lost cities, and undertone of perverse sex that we are looking for when we open up an issue of Weird Tales.

In Chapter 8, Elak makes his way to the capital of Cyrena and with the help of the Druid's magic wins the throne and raises an army.  In Chapter 9, Elak's army of Cyrena and Aynger's army of the reassembled Amenalk diaspora battle the army of Kiriath, led by Mayana's husband, who is controlled by her alien son.  Kuttner dwells on blood and wounds, on the writhing bodies of dying horses and men in the dirt and mud underfoot.  Elak kills the possessed king of Kiriath with the blade ensorcelled by the king's own wife, and then comes Chapter 10, the surreal psychic battle in a parallel dimension between Elak, supported by the Druid and Mayana, and the alien Karkora the Pallid One.  Stories by Kuttner and his wife C. L. Moore often feature these sorts of psychic battles as a climax (see Kuttner's "Where the World Is Quiet," and "The Time Axis," Moore's "The Tree of Life" and "Black God's Shadow," the Moore/Kuttner collab "Quest for the Starstone," and numerous others I am too lazy to link to.)  Uniting the two themes that make "Dragon Moon" noteworthy, the Mayana tragedy and the gore Kuttner fills the story with, our surprise ending is that the talisman Mayana gives to Elak at the moment he requires it is her own beating heart!  The heart, oozing blood, cast upon the hidden body of her son, makes the body disappear and sends the alien entity inhabiting it packing, saving the Earth.

While not as good as one of the better Conan, Elric, or Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories, "Dragon Moon" is a solid sword and sorcery caper, maybe the best Elak story, thanks primarily to the Mayana material, though Kuttner's use of the Aynger character, which I have not gone into in this already too long blog post, is also interesting.     

"Dragon Moon" has been reprinted in various Elak collections and, among other anthologies, L. Sprague de Camp's The Fantastic Swordsmen, an abridged version of which was published by our Teutonic pals as Science Fiction Stories 20 and then in full as Drachenmond.

"The Goddess of Zion" by David H. Keller

Let's see, in the history of MPorcius Fiction Log we've read eleven stories by Keller.  OMG it is links time.

"The Thing in the Cellar" 

"The Seeds of Death"

"The Dead Woman"

"The Golden Bough"

"The Typewriter"

"The Last Magician"

"Tiger Cat"

"Valley of Bones"

"Dust in the House"

"A Piece of Linoleum"

"Lords of the Ice"

Today with "The Goddess of Zion" we make it a round dozen!  Maybe this is a good one--Jacques Sadoul and Messrs. Greenberg, McSherry and Waugh thought it worthy of reprinting in anthologies, and it also appears in the first volume of the David H. Keller Memorial Library.

This is a pretty good one, actually, well-written and exhibiting a higher tone than much of the sex and violence exploitation stuff we often read, but the sex and violence are still there!  "The Goddess of Zion" also offers plenty for intellectual types interested in issues of race and gender to chew on.

Out narrator relates to us the uncanny experience he had while visiting Zion National Park back in 1938.  At a far corner of the park, where there are no other tourists, he comes upon a sort of white mountain, shaped a little like a throne, with a hole in its crest through which he could see the sky.  Then another man appears, a handsome blue-eyed blonde.  Blonde invites the narrator to accompany him in a hike up the white mountain.  The mountain looks unscalable, but Blue-Eyes knows a path.  Along the way they discover sophisticated wall paintings featuring a mammoth and a beautiful blonde woman.

At the summit Blonde tells his crazy story.  His soul is that of a Viking ancestor who explored America centuries ago--his soul has shifted from father to son over many generations.  He forgets many intervening events, but recalls perfectly his adventure here on the mountain.

He was the last survivor of his Viking band, which had marched far across the continent, fighting Indians and facing other hardships for years.  He was taken prisoner by a race of brown pygmies who lived around and on this white mountain.  These pygmies regularly captured Indians and sacrificed them to their gods--a wooly mammoth who lived with them on top of the mountain and a gorgeous blonde woman with blue eyes who was their queen.  The mammoth would lift the Indians in its trunk one at a time and hurl them down through that hole in the mountain.  When the blonde queen showed signs of losing her looks with age, a new blonde queen, a teenager, would then appear and the older queen would be thrown down the hole to her death.

The current queen and the Viking became lovers.  The mammoth was somehow affected by their love, and, when the new queen arrived because the current queen got sick, the mammoth flipped the script by throwing the teenager down the hole, casting pygmy society into disarray.  The queen, near death from her illness, told the Viking that after she died he would live for many centuries but eventually return here to follow her so they could be together forever.  Then at her request the Viking threw the queen down through the hole.  

The day after hearing this story, the narrator descends the mountain, leaving the reincarnated Viking on the mountain top; that night he watches from below as the man jumps down through the hole so he can rejoin his beloved.

I like it.

"House of the Hatchet" by Robert Bloch
 

Here we have one of Bloch's Hollywood writer stories that references the fact that California is full of freaks and conmen, but, unlike the totally lame "Wine of the Sabbat" that I told you sucks earlier this month, "House of the Hatchet" is a good one with real human feeling and real human personalities.  Our third good story in a row today, and our third story with a strange sexual relationship at its core.

(This story also has a good Hannes Bok illustration.  This is shaping up to be a superior issue of Weird Tales.) 

Our narrator has been married for three years to Daisy, a pretty girl who has a sadistic streak and loves reading horror and murder stories, following the crime news in the paper, and watching detective and monster movies.  (Bloch's work is full of evidence that he suspected the line of work he himself was in was somehow bad for individuals and/or society, or reflected deficiencies in its fans or society at large.)  Their marriage is rocky; the narrator has a crush on another woman and Daisy has detected it, and for quite a while now the narrator's expenses have been exceeding the proceeds he gets from selling scripts, leading Daisy to moan about their finances.  

On their third anniversary they drive up to the region where they spent their honeymoon after eloping.  On the way they come upon a tourist attraction that advertises itself as a haunted house.  Daisy loves this kind of thing and so they go in.  The owner, a guy like W. C. Fields (this story has quite a few Hollywood references), describes how a Russian emigre, a failed film director, owned the house and murdered his wife before disappearing, and how since then hoboes and burglars who have invaded the house have been found killed in the same way the director's wife was killed--with a hatchet on a Satanic altar--and how people have seen the wife's ghost. 

The writer and Daisy are shown to the room in which the murders took place, which is complete with hatchet and altar.  The room has a powerful effect on both the narrator and on his wife.  Will one of them kill the other, possessed by the ghost or perhaps with the alleged ghost merely providing an excuse?

Bloch does a good job imagining the thoughts of both a murderer and his victim, and the twist ending isn't bad--the narrator murders his wife and then the ghost of his wife starts killing people, blossoming into reality the bogus story cooked up by the owner of the macabre tourist trap.  One of Bloch's better efforts, he keeping the jokes and the Kal-if-OR-NIGH-AYYY local color to a manageable level and delivering a powerful dose of "look into the mind of a killer" and "explore the psychology of a vengeful ghost" material.  Thumbs up!  

Among the numerous Bloch collections in which "House of the Hatchet" has been reprinted are two different British collections for which it serves as title story and a French volume with a cool mummy cover. 

"Test Tube Twin" by Ralph Milne Farley  

Last year we read six stories by Farley, a soldier, lawyer, politician and writer who is said by some to have sometimes collaborated with his daughter.  Of the six stories, I liked "House of Ecstasy," "Liquid Life," and "Horror's Head," and thought "Time for Sale," "Mystery of the Missing Magnate" and "Stratosphere Menace" were OK.  As things go here at MPorcius Fiction Log, that is a pretty good record!  Hopefully Farley's run of luck here at MPFL will continue today as we read "Test Tube Twin," which it seems has never been reprinted.  (Uh oh.)

Happily, "Test Tube Twin" is a diverting crime/science fiction story about a ruthless murderous gangster who tries to use cloning techniques to get revenge on people and escape justice.  Public Enemy Number One is our main character, and Farley succeeds in making him sort of interesting, and pretty evil, equally willing to kill with his own hand those who have been loyal to him and those who have betrayed him, providing the reader plenty of shocking thrills.

To be brief, the mobster through bribes and threats gets a scientist to develop a means of cloning a person by taking samples of his tissue and growing a genetically identical twin of him in a test tube.  He also has the egghead come up with techniques to make the clone grow at a super fast rate--it will appear to be 30 years old when it is only six or seven months old.  When a clone of the mobster has been produced that looks just like him, as if it is his age (though its mind is that of a child), the gangster murders the clone.  Now the police will think he is dead and stop looking for him.  He plants the gun on a rival gangster so that guy will be tried for murder.  Then, to cover his tracks, he tries to kill a woman who loves him (a trained nurse, she worked with the scientist in raising the clone), his most loyal associate (a dim-witted thug), and the scientist.  Who will live?  Who will die?  Who will end up in prison?  Will the scientist prove to have an ace in the hole that will preserve his highly educated hide and dump the gangster in the clink for his various murders?

An entertaining crime story.  

**********

Four good stories?  Amazing!  Bravo to all involved, McIlwraith, Kuttner, Keller, Bloch, and Farley, and let's not forget Bok who has multiple fine illustrations in the issue.  Weird Tales lives up to its reputation today and gets 1941 off to a good start.