The Unexpected: M St. Clair, M E Counselman & F Leiber

The Unexpected is an anthology edited by Leo Margulies and published by Pyramid in 1961 and then again in 1962 with an inferior cover and a higher price.  The book's eleven stories are advertised as "hair-raising" and "uncanny," which sounds like what we are looking for, life being so boring and easy nowadays.  We've already read some of the contents of The Unexpected in other publications: it feels like just 24 hours ago I endured Robert Bloch's joke story/feeble satire of comic books "The Strange Island of Dr. Nork;" in July of last year we read Manly Wade Wellman's Civil War fantasy "The Valley Was Still;" and in 2019 we read Ray Bradbury's cynical and gruesome "The Handler" and Theodore Sturgeon's very effective "The Professor's Teddy Bear."  Let's sample more of what The Unexpected has to offer today, three pieces that include stories by women contributors to Weird Tales, Margaret St. Clair and Mary Elizabeth Counselman, and a famous story by the creator of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Fritz Leiber.

"Mrs. Hawk" by Margaret St. Clair (1950)

We just read St. Clair's science fiction story about how terrible men are, "Squee," and that was pretty well put together, so we can hope this one will be good.  "Mrs. Hawk," like all of today's stories, debuted in Weird Tales during the editorship of Dorothy Stevens McIlwraith.  (I'll note here that I do not own a copy of The Unexpected so today we are reading from scans of the original issues of Weird Tales in which these stories debuted.)  "Mrs. Hawk" does not appear to have soared--if isfdb is to be believed, Margulies was the only person to have reprinted it.  

"Mrs. Hawk" seems to be largely based on the exploits of a real female serial killer, Belle Gunness, whom St. Clair mentions by name in the first paragraph of this story and apparently assumes you already know all about.  I've lived a sheltered life and had a mediocre education at government schools so Belle Gunness is one of many prominent figures of whom I know nothing.  Luckily my education was not so poor that I don't know about The Odyssey, the other source material for St. Clair's story.

In brief, a beautiful woman named Hawk owns a farm.  She advertises in the personals, hoping to find a husband thereby.  The men who answer the ad tend to vanish, and the local sheriff goes to investigate.  There is a dearth of clues to be found at the very well-run, very organized Hawk farm; the only unusual thing about the farm is the character of the pigs, which seem to have more personality than typical pigs.  By a lucky coincidence, the sheriff's kid is writing a paper on Greek mythology and that night the sheriff learns how Circe the witch turned Odysseus' men into pigs.  So he returns to the Hawk farm the next day and we readers have no idea who will triumph and who will suffer a black fate when sheriff and ancient witch meet for round 2.

An acceptable filler piece.  

"The Unwanted" by Mary Elizabeth Counselman (1951)

Last year I read four stories by Counselman and deemed them "hacky," but here we are, giving her another chance.  Marvel at my generosity!  "The Unwanted" has been reprinted in two different gynocentric anthologies, Seon Manley and Gogo Lewis' Ladies of Fantasy and Mike Ashley's Queens of the Abyss.  The story can also be found in the Counselman collection Half in Shadow.

"The Unwanted" is a long and slow story about mother's love.  Our narrator is a mother of one six-year-old child who has taken a job as a census taker and is climbing the hills of Alabama to interview impoverished hillbillies, most of whom are on the dole.  She meets one proud man in his sixties who lost his arm in the war but refuses to accept any government aid.  He has a wife in her forties whom he believes is mentally ill because she thinks she has eleven children when in fact she has none.  Eventually we readers realize that the wife so desired children, was so full of love, that God or some other supernatural force directed to magically appear to her the children of mothers who didn't want kids, including a Jewish boy and an African-American girl.  The husband can't see these kids, but they are indubitably real--they interact with material objects, wearing hand me downs and chopping wood and gathering berries and completing other farm chores, contributing to the success of the farm.  Because she too is a mother, the census taker can see this multi-ethnic crew of happy kids, see how happy they are to be loved.

"The Unwanted" drags on and on, Counselman taking forever to get to the point.  The style is bland and boring, and if nobody can see them how will these kids grow up and live normal lives with relationships beyond those with Mom?  This one could have stood undergoing another draft to tighten it up, at the very least.  A just barely acceptable filler piece the tone of which is sappy and sentimental rather than scary or thrilling, as we sort of expect from Weird Tales.  Maybe I can say that "The Unwanted" is valuable as a rare SF story that romanticizes the love of a mother for children outside the context of some kind of satire (feminist critics might argue Counselman here is trafficking in traditional gender stereotypes), and as an example of anti-racist/anti-bigotry fantasy fiction.  

"The Automatic Pistol" by Fritz Leiber (1940)

This is a quite famous story which for whatever reason I have never gotten around to reading.

"The Automatic Pistol" is set in my old stomping grounds, Northern New Jersey and New York City, the center of the universe!  It is Prohibition, and our narrator, No Nose, is a bootlegger, smuggling booze in the company of people with names like Glasses and Inky, all of them hirelings of a relatively small-time operator.  Inky has a .45, and he is always touching it, fiddling with it, caressing it, like he is in love with it, which draws sarcastic comments from some of the other crooks.

When Prohibition ends and the criminal enterprise is wrapping up, Inky, an immigrant from Eastern or Southern Europe or some such place, plans to return to the old country with his ill-gotten money, which he has saved rather than squandered like the other bootleggers have.  Inky gives his beloved .45 to the boss, but before he can leave this land of liberty he gets murdered by vengeful members of a rival gang--or at least that is what the boss tells No Nose and Glasses!  The boss claims he is afraid that rival gang is also after him, so he has No Nose and Glasses hole up with him in a dockside hideout.

In the hideout odd things happen with the .45, and Glasses, the most educated of the crooks, theorizes that Inky was some kind of witch or wizard, and the pistol his familiar, a living thing granted to Inky by the Devil to guide and protect him.  It comes to light that the boss himself murdered Inky and gathered Glasses and Non Nose to help him find Inky's stash of hoarded cash, and explosive events bear out Glasses' supernatural theory of the .45, which exacts vengeance on the boss.

A pretty good crime/black magic story.  "The Automatic Pistol" has been reprinted in many Leiber collections and a few anthologies, including one of those Asimov/Greenberg year by year things.    

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As longtime readers of MPorcius Fiction Log are all too aware, Weird Tales is close to my two-sizes-too-small heart, and so it feels good to get some more WT  content under my belt, even if the St. Clair and Counselman material is mediocre or weak filler.  The Leiber is superior, at least.

More McIlwraith-era Weird Tales stories next time we meet, oh my brothers!