Weird Tales, Mar 1940: M Jameson, T McClusky & A Derleth

Here we have the last issue of Weird Tales edited by Farnsworth Wright, an issue with a colorful Hannes Bok cover.  In the letters column, Ray Bradbury speaks at length on the greatness of Bok and brings to our attention Bok's relationship with Maxfield Parrish, a guy whose prints fill the antique stores my wife and I frequent.  I can't sign on to Robert W. Lowndes' letter with the enthusiasm I endorse Bradbury's, however; Lowndes writes in to praise P. Schuyler Miller's "Spawn," a story I gave a thumbs down to when I read it last year.

Let's read three more stories from this ish of the magazine of the bizarre and unusual (we've already read Manly Wade Wellman's contribution, "The Song of the Slaves"), those by Malcolm Jameson, Thorp McClusky and August Derleth.  

"Train for Flushing" by Malcolm Jameson

Nine years ago I read a science fiction story by Jameson and denounced it, though I admitted it may have been "so bad it is good."  Two years ago I was able to give a passing grade to the second science fiction story I read by the man.  But today Jameson's stock here at MPorcius Fiction Log is back in the toilet because "Train for Flushing" is a gimmicky filler story that feels incredibly long, a story in which the characters don't do anything but marvel at the bizarre events of which they are victims.

As the editor's intro alerts you, "Train for Flushing" relies for its effects on the reader being familiar with the story of the Flying Dutchman.  Like so many weird stories, the meat of "Train for Flushing" is a memoir written by a guy in the middle of a horrible experience which somehow gets into the hands of the authorities.  The memoir is that of a senior citizen who got on the New York subway and found, when he was one of only two passengers remaining, that his train was hijacked by the cursed ghost ship captain of the Flying Dutchman legend, who thought the train, bound for Flushing, Queens, would return him to his home town, Vlissingen, for which Flushing is named.  Like the Dutchman, the two passengers become ghosts and must ride a ghost train beneath the world's greatest city year after year, unable to interact with the real world, though somehow the narrator can keep a journal that people in the real world eventually find.  As the years go by, the passengers notice that they are growing young and the world they see through the windows of the ghost train is moving backwards in time--they can see people walking backwards, that the posters advertise  products that were current years ago, etc.  This goes on for decades, and when the ghost train reaches the period of time before the construction of the subway, the Dutchman and his two captives find themselves travelling on other vehicles, elsewhere in 19th-century America.  Eventually the two passengers become children and then babies, at which point the journal is no longer updated.

The reader quickly grasps what is going on, but Jameson keeps describing it anyway, page after tedious page, and he doesn't come up with anything for the characters to do--it seems the 20th-century passengers just sit there in the train car for decade after decade looking out the window and chit chatting with each other--the Dutchman barely notices they are there so they don't interact with him.  A total bore--thumbs down!

I'm here telling you that this story is a drag but Peter Haining reprinted it in his anthology of Flying Dutchman stories and Tony Goodstone included it in a book of representative material from the pulps,  so it seems opinions on "Train for Flushing" vary.

"Slaves of the Grey Mold" by Thorp McClusky

Thorp McClusky wrote five stories starring cops Ethredge and Peters, and we've already read three of them, 1937's "The Woman in Room 607" and 1938's "The Thing on the Floor" and "Monstrosity of Evolution."  Do I remember anything about these stories?  Of course I don't, but that is why I spend my time writing this blog instead of making money on Wall Street or fighting in Ukraine or whatever it is that productive people do--so I'll have a record on hand of all the crazy stories that I read about seductive female cult leaders who cheat death, obese hypnotists who sideline in torture, and mad scientists who become the slaves of the monsters they have created.

Having boned up at the above links on the careers of police commissioner Charles Ethredge, his better half Mary Ethredge nee Roberts, and detective Peters, whose first name doesn't seem to appear in these stories, let's tackle "Slaves of the Grey Mold," which I believe is the final published Ethredge/Peters adventure, though it takes place before Chuck and Mary got hitched.  

If my old blog posts are to be believed, the adventures of the Ethredges and their pal Peters mostly, maybe always, revolve around people being hypnotized.  Maybe these stories reflect the fears of modern man, who recognizes how psychology and market forces guide and restrict his actions, that free will is a myth.  Anyway, in "Slaves of the Grey Mold" McClusky is not breaking any new ground.  As the story (22 pages, oy) begins, Peters is taking a morning walk in town on his day off and sees a well-turned out professional lay his briefcase down on the sidewalk in front of a homeless man; the bum takes up the case and walks off, and Peters, smelling a rat, follows the wretch, who returns the briefcase to the businessman's office and receives a healthy reward.  Peters wonders how the derelict knew where to go, and when the bum looks at Peters the detective notices a mold around the bum's eyes and then falls into a stupor and when he wakes up an hour later finds he has walked home in a daze.

That afternoon, Peters' boss, Charles Ethredge, is at the track.  The commish observes as a shabbily-attired man bets hundreds of bucks on longshots and wins again and again!  It is the very same homeless person Peters followed!  (It's a small world.)  His incredible good fortune makes the bum an instant celebrity and a journalist tries to take his photo and mysteriously keels over dead!  We readers of course recognize that the alien mold in the bum's brain used hypnosis to whip those horses into prodigies of speed as well as to kill the nosy reporter.  (Why it slew the journalo and not Peters, who will be its nemesis, is a mystery.)  

The next day the now wealthy bum pays a visit to one of Mary Roberts' old boyfriends, a stock broker.  As the broker's Italian chef watches, the mold moves from the body of the filthy derelict into that of the well-appointed financier.  The bum drops dead; and the mold, in the body of the broker, for some reason calls the police instead of just hiding the body, and E and P come investigate.  The government doctors assume the bum died of a heart attack, and Ethredge doesn't take seriously Peters' theory that a hypnotic monster from outer space has taken over the broker's body.  In the same way that I couldn't find any evidence of what Peters' first name was by flipping through the pages of the story, I also couldn't find any evidence of what happened to the Italian chef, who actually saw the mold.  I guess he was killed and his body hidden.   

Weeks later, Mary calls off her engagement to Ethredge--the mold from space has hypnotized her into picking up her relationship with the broker whose body it is controlling.  Peters, when he hears the news, theorizes (in so many words) that the mold wants to reproduce by being in the broker's body while the broker has sex with Mary.  (These Ethredge and Peters stories all have an erotic undertone.)  E and P rush upstate to the broker's lodge in the country, where Ethredge confronts a Mary who has doll-like dead eyes and speaks in a monotone.  The monster hypnotizes Ethredge into giving up on the love of his life and leaving, but Peters knows the score and convinces Ethredge that they should go back to the lodge.  There occurs the final battle in the room where the alien mold has built a portal to its home dimension--our fellow humans triumph over the mold from beyond the stars because Peters had the sense to bring a rubber helmet and lead goggles that protect him from the mold's deadly hypnotic powers.             

"Slaves of the Grey Mold" is a weak filler story.  The style and structure are amateurish, there are what I am considering plot holes, and then there is the fact that there are too many scenes, too many sentences, and that individual sentences are too long, rendering the story slow--even the action scenes are slow and thus lack tension and excitement.  But the story is not that annoying, so I am not sure if I should judge it barely acceptable or let it fall into the abyss of "bad."   

This mediocrity has only ever been reprinted in the 1975 McClusky collection that reprints most of the Ethredge and Peters tales, Loot of the Vampire.

"Bramwell's Guardian" by August Derleth

Here we have a filler piece, but an acceptable one, more or less competent, though unremarkable.

Bramwell is an elderly but active English gentleman who likes to go to old houses and old caves and so forth.  He finds an ancient ring in an old hole on a lonely plain.  Immediately after finding the ring, which he carries around in a pocket, people start reacting oddly to him--his servants, waiters, the clerk at the ticket counter at the theatre, etc., think he has a friend with him, but he has no such companion.  Eventually he tells this story to an archaeologist at his club.  The archaeologist looks at the ring and puts two and two together and judges that the ring is a Druid magic item that it is protected by a guardian monster.  He advises Bramwell return the ring to the hole in which he found it tout suite.

Bramwell is a skeptic who does not believe in the supernatural and scoffs at this explanation and advice; when he starts seeing the guardian himself he dismisses it as mere figments of his imagination.  Then he decides to mail the ring to the archaeologist as a joke, forgetting that his crony told him that if he gave the ring away the monster would kill him.  Sure enough, the guardian monster tears Bramwell to pieces.  The archaeologist returns the ring to the hole.

Derleth does a shoddy job of explaining the "rules" governing the operations of the ring and the monster.  Why does the guardian kill Bramwell after he gives the ring to another person?  Why didn't the monster kill Bramwell when he took the ring from its resting place--isn't that what we would expect a guardian to do?  Otherwise the story is OK.  

"Bramwell's Guardian" would be reprinted in the 1941 Arkham House collection of Derleth stories Someone in the Dark, which contains sixteen stories, as well as a 2009 collection, August Derleth's Eerie Creatures, which reprints thirty stories.  Derleth, it seems, produced a vast quantity of forgettable and half-baked stories like "Bramwell's Guardian" in order to finance the risky business venture that was Arkham House.

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I'd like to say that the final issue of Weird Tales edited by Farnsworth Wright contains some memorable or important story, but as far as I can tell it is full of weak pieces that have all kinds of problems that a hands-on editor might have solved.  Well, at least we have the Bok cover, which is pulsating with color and personality.  And we can hope that new editor Dorothy McIlwraith will offer up some stellar work later in 1940.