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.

**********

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.