The Rule of the Pagbeasts (AKA The Fittest) by J T McIntosh

I am not exactly a fan of J. T. McIntosh, having denounced several of his productions here at this blog.  But when I saw Crest Book's 1956 paperback edition of 1955's The Fittest, retitled The Rule of the Pagbeasts, going for $1.25 at an antiques mall, I could not resist its fascinating cover with its wild female figure and its over-the-top come-on text ("impossible to put the book down"; "THE MOST STARTLING STORY YOU EVER READ.")  Alright, we'll give it a shot.

You'll notice there is no animal on the cover of the copy of this book I purchased, just a woman with long blonde hair, a narrow waist, an impressive torso and powerful limbs.  Pity about that skull-like physiognomy, which is mesmerizing in its own way.)  I thought blondie here with the deep set eyes was a pagbeast, some kind of android or alien or something.  But looking at other editions of the novel online I see they have images of dogs and mice on them and make it clear The Rule of the Pagbeasts is a story about quadrupeds challenging human rule of the Earth!  I would not have bought any of those editions; I am not interested in stories about canines and vermin taking over the Earth--I am interested in stories about hot chicks taking over the Earth!  But following the sunk cost fallacy, having bought the book and scanned the cover and looked up publication dates and so forth, we are going forward with reading it.

The Rule of the Pagbeasts comes to us in 24 chapters.  Chapter 1 is an exercise in misogyny and exploitative horror and also reminded me of hard-boiled detective fiction.  The narrator indicates that he found his wife dead and then, sadistically and/or masochistically, theorized about her last moments, the physical and psychological agony she suffered, and then he shares his detailed imaginings with us readers!

Gloria was an American-born beauty with a perfect body and great fashion sense, but she lacked "guts" and the healthy human instinct to desire children.  Left alone in a French farm house, she was attacked by an intelligent dog, intelligent mice and an intelligent cat, and her husband and McIntosh describe her frenzied fear and her physical wounds as the animals toyed with her and eventually drove her to jump out a window to her death.  (I've noticed exploitative violence, particularly against women, in McIntosh's work before.)  This chapter might be seen as kind of gross, but it is actually pretty well-written and effective in achieving its apparent goals--if you want to read about a vapid beautiful woman being tortured and killed, well, here is a good example of the genre.

Chapter 1 introduces us to, and succeeding chapters dole out in dribs and drabs the details about, the setting of the novel--a midcentury world sinking into postapocalypticism because an American scientist, Paget, increased the intelligence of dogs, cats, rats and mice to about the human level and these uplifted quadrupeds aren't using their smarts to listen to Tchaikovsky and read T. S. Eliot but to wage war and inflict torture on the human race:

They're animals whose brains have been forced a few million years further along the evolutionary highway....But they're animals, with animal motivations, savagery, tradition, and temperament.  As such they're automatically enemies of any other creatures which threaten their own survival, particularly men.

Our narrator identifies himself, and here we have the sole joke McIntosh offers in this blood-and-guts serious novel, as Don Page-Turner, and he tells us he is unsentimental, and then demonstrates his lack of sentimentality. Don leaves Gloria's body behind, unburied, and walks to the nearest village.  The village police arrest him on suspicion of murdering his wife, but a competent Englishwoman who needs his help gets him out of jail and steals one of the few cars still running (the rats and mice have been sabotaging automobiles and locomotives the world over as part of their war against us bipeds.)  This Englishwoman is an expert at jailbreaks and car theft but she can't drive--that is why she needs Page-Turner to help her get back to Albion.

All through the book, Page-Turner compares women to the dead Gloria, for example, stressing how his sister Mil and this new woman, Ginette, have guts and can get things done, unlike Gloria, who was a one in a million beauty but couldn't look after herself.  Though she is dead on the first page of this 185 or so page novel, she is actually one of the book's main characters.   And Exhibit A in the prosecution of the novel's central theme that certain people are the fittest to survive and certain people, should the shit hit the fan, are ngmi.     

Ginette is one prickly individual, very independent-minded and sarcastic, a woman who keeps saying she doesn't want to stay with Page-Turner and wants instead to be dropped off here or there.  This hard-to-get routine inspires in Page-Turner a desire to control her.  On the ferry to the green and pleasant land she vomits, either because of sea sickness or because of expository dialogue about the development of the pagbeasts, including the narrator's description of them swarming over a human victim.  Upon arriving in England, Ginette leaves Page-Turner and the car she stole and he immediately starts searching for her, fantasizing about using physical force to make her stay with him.  He soon finds her; she has been injured in a fight with a pagdog, giving our hero a chance to take off her bra and apply iodine to her wounds.  This book is full of women suffering indignities.

A tall man, Dave, formerly an editor at a newspaper, joins Don and Ginette as the third wheel of the crew of the stolen French car.  Our three heroes stay the night with a friend of Dave's in London; they find Londontown almost without electricity as well as automobiles.  The gas lines are also being cut by the pagmice and pagrats.  Page-Turner flirts with Ginette and when she comments that he doesn't seem to miss his wife, who died like two days ago, Page-Turner slaps her so hard it sounds like a "whipcrack" and makes the sarcastic bitch stagger.

Ginette again leaves behind the car and the two men, this time in the environs of Cambridge, despite Page-Turner's efforts to convince her to stay, which include grabbing her and kissing her.  McIntosh again and again reminds you of how the narrator can just manhandle Ginette if he chooses to.  Maybe this is a reminder that in society the law, customs, and norms, keep the strong from dominating the weak, and in a postapocalyptic situation those laws and norms go right out the window and the strong do what they will while the weak suffer what they must.  

Alone with him now, Dave says he thinks the narrator's real name is Paget and that he is connected to the Paget who created the monsters who are destroying society.  Our narrator tells his story.  He is the son of the scientist who created the pagbeasts and hails from Chicago, scion of a wealthy family.  Dad died coincidentally in a car wreck before the monsters he had created escaped and began their war on humanity.  When the scope of the pagbeast menace became apparent, mobs of disgruntled citizens came after Dan the narrator and his brother Stan and his sister Carol.  (Sister Mil was in England with her English husband, who is now dead.)  Carol was gangraped, but survived, but some weeks later Don witnessed Stanley shot dead by a mob which murdered Carol in a gruesome fashion that perhaps symbolizes the Pagets' elite status and their distinction from the common masses.  The police helped Don and Gloria sneak away to France, where the pagbeasts hadn't spread in volume yet, though soon enough the monsters had.

Halfway through the novel Don and Dave arrive at Mil's country estate.  Mil is a no-nonsense capable sort, and she has a sort of fortified manor house and a band of comrades who are able to defend themselves from the pagbeasts and in the short term from a local human menace, a multi-ethnic band of gypsies and circus performers, thieves and expert knife throwers.  This element of the story comes across as pretty racist, at least by today's standards.  Mil's crew is less than a dozen people, four attractive middle-class women and a bunch of dimwitted, unattractive, proletarian men, so the fifty gypsies could overwhelm Mil's estate if they were willing to suffer heavy losses.  (Mil's group has conventional low-intelligence dogs who help keep out the pagbeasts.)

A substantial part of the second half of the novel consists of Dan and Dave, who kind of take over management of Mil's operations, trying to recruit additional young and middle-aged people to join Mil's settlement, expanding the estate's agricultural output, and then dealing with the gypsies.  We get plenty of psychology-of-leadership material as Don decides who to recruit and how to manage them.  But we also get a large helping of sexual politics psychology as Don and Dave interact with the women of the settlement, deciding who to take as a wife and then convincing them to succumb.  Of course Ginette reappears and becomes Don's wife, but there is another woman, Eva, who is in love with Don and this causes complications--in true male wish-fulfillment fashion, Don decides Eva is the girl for him because Ginette is so difficult, and Don and Eva have sex right before the big battle with the gypsies, and then during the battle Eva's morale fails and she panics and gets herself captured by the enemy, tortured and murdered, so Don ends up with suitable wife Ginette after having sexually conquered and enjoyed the unsuitable Eva.  (All you pervs will be glad to hear that Don has his hands all over Eva's "beautiful supple body" in her last moments as he struggles to revive her via artificial respiration.)

Women cause all manner of trouble in this novel, as well as suffering the blackest fates imaginable.--one of the bourgeois women in Mil's group wants to try diplomacy with the gypsies even though Don and Mil have intelligence indicating the gypsies are planning an attack; this peacenik runs off by herself to try to treat with the gypsies but is attacked and eaten alive--reduced to a skeleton!--by a horde of rodents before she reaches the gypsy position.  And during the battle Don grapples with a "slim, lithe, young" gypsy girl before slaying her with his clasp knife.

Once the gypsies are wiped out, the community started by Mil grows and we learn that other such communities around England are similarly growing as men and women become expert at defeating the pagbeasts.  Human civilization will endure!  The last line of the novel even suggests the pagbeast catastrophe was good because it cut in half the human population, which was too large (we saw this attitude in McIntosh's The Million Cities many years ago.)

The plot and structure of The Fittest AKA The Rule of the Pagbeasts have the appeal of the zombie apocalypse fiction that is so popular nowadays, the inhuman menace that has people banding together to rebuild society while squabbling amongst themselves and the disgusting violence and gore.  McIntosh throws in a pile of other stuff: all the sex and gender business, of which there is plenty, plus some class and race/ethnicity material; we might also consider national culture material--is McIntosh, by setting the story in France and England but having the mad scientist and monsters originate in the USA, trying to say something about those three nations and their people?  A final thing we might consider is the novel's attitude about government--the American and British taxpayers in the 1950s were shelling out plenty of moolah for military and intelligence establishments to deal with the threat posed by international communism, and just ten years before had successfully engaged in a titanic struggle with Germany, Italy and Japan, so the US and UK governments had vast amounts of trained and experienced manpower and equipment at their disposal tailor-made for providing people protection and emergency medical care, but McIntosh never portrays those governments doing anything to kill pagbeasts or maintain order or provide succor to the people.         

The most remarkable thing about The Fittest AKA The Rule of the Pagbeasts is that the writing style and all the other elements--structure, pacing, characters, themes, images--are acceptably done or well done; so much of McIntosh's work which I have read is so bad that I was surprised that this thing was competently executed and before I opened it I had no expectation of telling you I can mildly recommend it.  But I am telling you just that.

Another SF novel I bought for its cover the next time I can tear myself away from the quest for money and from family obligations and produce a post of the quixotic enterprise we call MPorcius Fiction Log.

Strange Ports of Call: N S Bond, P S Miller, R A Heinlein and R Bradbury

We recently read stories from the 1948 anthology edited by August Derleth, Strange Ports of Call, that were written by three men I associate with Weird Tales, Clark Ashton Smith, David H. Keller, and Howard Wandrei.  Strange Ports of Call is billed as a book of "20 Science Fiction Masterpieces" and today let's read from it stories by four men I believe are thought of more as science fiction writers than weird or horror writers, Nelson S. Bond, P. Schuyler Miller, Robert A. Heinlein and Ray Bradbury.  I of course recognize that such distinctions are kind of bogus--one piece of evidence casting doubt on the validity of any divide between fantasy and science fiction is the fact that all four of the men we are reading today published at least one story in Weird Tales, and Bond and Bradbury published many.  We all insist on making this distinction anyway.  

"The Cunning of the Beast" by Nelson S. Bond (1942)

I've read four stories by Bond over the course of this blog's improbable life, "Magic City," "Prescience," "To People a New World," and "Pipeline to Paradise" and here comes number five, even though of those four I only really liked one.  

"To People a New World" debuted in an issue of the magazine Blue Book, and was a story of the founding of our civilization which offered a science fictional explanation for the stories of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel which we find in the Bible.  Holy crap, "The Cunning of the Beast" is also a story that debuted in Blue Book and provides a SF explanation for the Biblical story of Adam and Eve.  What the....

On planet Kios lives a high tech race of people who are like electrified gas or pure energy, fragile forms that die if exposed to water.  (I think Bond hopes to remind us of the pillar of fire that is a manifestation of God in the Bible.)  Kios has rainy weather that can kill these puny people in seconds, so they spend a lot of time in their "Domes" and when they go outside they ride around in bipedal metal machines I guess kind of like the mecha in so many manga and anime.  Our narrator is a scientist who is working on developing space ships that will, it is hoped, carry these fragile people to a more hospitable planet.

(This story already has me scratching my head--if these pathetic jokers can't even go outside naked how did they mine and refine the materials to create the Domes they need to shelter in and the mecha they need to wear when outside?  This is one of those chicken and egg problems, I guess.)

The narrator has a colleague, a scientist named Yawa.  (Oh, brother.)  Yawa has a bright idea--to develop via what we today might call genetic engineering and selective breeding a new race of people that can survive naked outside the Domes; these hardy creatures could be the servants of the weak energy people, go outside to do whatever work is necessary.  Inside his Dome, Yawa creates a beautiful garden, a paradise, and populates it with a bipedal person, a man.  The man says he is lonely, and so Yawa takes a piece out of him and creates with it a woman.  This first woman is sort of a bad influence on the man, so Yawa comes up with a second woman who manipulates the man into becoming a productive worker.  This second woman also makes it her goal to get into Yawa's locked lab and acquire the knowledge Yawa has forbidden the man and woman--in this breaking and entering she is aided by her little buddy the serpent.  With that knowledge, she builds mecha and she and the man then begin attacking the energy people, breaking open their Domes and exposing them to the deadly rain.

The energy people capture the man and woman and stick them and Yawa into the prototype space ship the narrator has just completed and blast them off to exile.  In case you didn't get it yet, on the nineteenth and final page of this story the narrator tells you the first man and second woman are named Adam and Eve.  Mind blown?      

This story is pretty well-written on a sentence by sentence basis; I like the descriptions of the planet and of Yawa's lab.  But there is no tension, no drama, no surprise or suspense, because we immediately recognize that it is a retelling of the Adam and Eve story that we are already very familiar with.  Reading the story is a big "meta" game, as we read it we wonder how Bond is going to fit in this or that Biblical element, strain to remember if Lilith is actually in the Bible, that sort of thing, we don't care about the characters or get "immersed" in the story.  Even worse, because we know what is going to happen the story feels very long and slow.  Thumbs down for "The Cunning of the Beast."

This lame gimmick story appeared in Blue Book under the title "Another World Begins" but it was reprinted as "The Cunning of the Beast" here in Strange Ports of Call and elsewhere, such as the Bond collection No Time Like the Future (which has an awesome Richard Powers cover that just might depict Eve or Lilith and one of the energy people in its metal body, with the domes and rocket in the background) and the anthology Other Worlds, Other Gods.  

Other Worlds, Other Gods reprints Damon Knight's "Shall the Dust Praise Thee?",
a short-short I read in 2014 and graded "F."

"Forgotten" by P. Schuyler Miller (1933)

Miller is closely associated with Astounding/Analog, writing the book review column for John W. Campbell, Jr.'s magazine for over 20 years.  I believe I have read three short stories by Miller, "As Never Was," "Spawn," and "Bird Walk," two of which I liked.

"Forgotten," which debuted in Wonder Stories as "The Forgotten Man of Space" (perhaps a reference to a phrase appropriated by FDR in 1932 and after that saw wide use in popular culture) and then was reprinted in Startling in 1948 as a "Hall of Fame Story" is a decent adventure story about a guy who goes native, which is nice, as we can say Miller has a 75% pass rate here at MPorcius Fiction Log and not a 50% which is what he would have if I disliked this piece.  I am always rooting for the authors here at MPorcius Fiction Log--I want to like everything.

The main character of "Forgotten" is the youngest member of a team of three Terran prospectors on Mars.  It takes them six years, but eventually they mine enough uranium to make themselves rich.  The two older prospectors are ruthless knaves, and maroon the main character in the deserts of the Red Planet, flying off without him so they can keep his share of the uranium.

The three men had subsisted on Martian water and vegetation they gathered from a cave some miles away--they ferried the water and food back to base camp in the rocket when necessary.  There is no closer food source on this dying world, so the protagonist strikes out for the cave on foot, even though it will be like a ten day march--can he survive ten days without food or drink?

Some heretofore undiscovered natives provide succor to the man when he has only made it halfway to the cave.  Not only do they feed him, they basically adopt him into their tribe.  These Martians are like intelligent rabbits, and their culture is not very sophisticated; they have agriculture but very little by way of tools and no books or art or anything like that.  Their language has few words.

The man abandoned by his own race lives among these natives for twenty years.  Finally, he is found by some Terran prospectors.  These guys are as greedy as the men who marooned him--even though he tries to explain that the Martians are people, the prospectors plan to use them as a food source as they mine a rich vein near the natives' current settlement, so the main character sabotages the prospector's ship while he is aboard, killing them and himself.        

I am mildly recommending "Forgotten."  The remarkable thing about it is not the going-native theme, which is pretty common, but Miller's style, which is verbose.  Miller includes lots of images and lots of descriptions of the main character's psychological state, describing at length stuff the main character sees, hears and feels, when he is lucid and when he is half-dead and hallucinatory from thirst; probably Miller overdoes it a little--the pace of the story is slow--but I thought these dense descriptions effective in conveying to the reader what the abandoned miner was going through.  Somewhat less compelling is the long description of the rabbit-like natives' agricultural system.     

As for the plot and characters, they are pretty good; everything that happens in "Forgotten" makes sense, all the people's actions are believable, follow naturally from their personalities and the circumstances they find themselves in.  The story works so deserves commendation if not love.

We read Edmond Hamilton's Outlaw World back in 2014

 

"The Green Hills of Earth" by Robert A. Heinlein (1947)

This is a very famous story that I think I must have read years ago, before I started this blog.  "The Green Hills of Earth" debuted in the mainstream magazine Saturday Evening Post and has appeared in quite a few anthologies, including one edited by Orson Welles and one titled My Best Science Fiction Story and is one of Heinlein's famous Future History stories collected in the massive volume The Past Through Tomorrow.

"The Green Hills of Earth" presents itself as a sort of revisionist history; a recurring theme of Heinlein's work, and of a lot of SF, is people living in ignorance and then learning some truth about the universe.  (Heinlein's generation ship story "Universe" is a canonical example.)  It is the fictional readers of this story, the people of a future in which space travel is routine, who have been fed a sanitized image of a hero of the early days of space travel, Rhysling, who get a more accurate picture of their universe and in particular of Rhysling; along the way we real life readers get a sort of history lesson about Heinlein's imagined setting of Terran expansion into the solar system, which is inhabited by various native cultures.

Rhysling is an irascible sort of character, a lovable rascal who works in engine rooms of rocket ships, a guy who takes risks for the thrill of it and doesn't necessarily take norms and customs seriously but at the same time is the backbone of society, a competent man who again and again sacrifices himself for others.  One of the tensions in Heinlein's work as a whole is how he has a strong libertarian individualist streak but at the same time is an elitist who tells you a captain's word aboard ship must be law--Heinlein is into the liberty of the individual but also into hierarchy, which can be a little baffling.  Rhysling, the rebellious man who it turns out will do anything to protect his fellow man, and has the superior skill needed to get other people out of the scrapes their incompetence has dropped them and others into, sort of embodies that tension.  The reader has to decide if Heinlein is cleverly saying something about how complicated people and societies are, how they are riven with conflicting impulses and contain multitudes, or is just having his cake and eating it to, constructing superheroes who have all the attributes we love about the self-motivated rebel and about the dutiful self-sacrificing martyr.

The plot of "The Green Hills of Earth" is the Rhysling life story.  The guy flies on rockets, gets blinded saving one space flight which is in trouble because some dolt did a bad job in the engine room, and so becomes a wandering troubadour, hitching rides hither and yon across the solar system, paying his way by singing the songs he has composed.  Rhysling isn't only a genius engineer and a self-sacrificing hero, he is a bestselling poet!  We are told that he only became famous after his death, when his safe-for-work songs were published--his naughty ditties languish in obscurity.

After a long period of being a sort of traveling minstrel Rhysling is in the engine room of a ship when its motor malfunctions; he fixes the machine, saving everybody else, but dies from the radiation released by the accident.

"The Green Hills of Earth" is well-written and well-paced, an enjoyable read; both the life story of Rhysling and the glimpses of Heinlein's future history components are compelling, and the latter element leaves you wanting to read more of the Future History stories.  The story is vulnerable to the superhero and have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too criticisms I have already voiced, and maybe some people won't be crazy about how the story is full of Rhysling's poetry.  Personally, I think the poetry actually works as a way of indirectly telling you about the future milieu Heinlein has created--one of the strengths of this story is that readers learn about its future world from the inside, from its inhabitants, as if they themselves are among its inhabitants, not from a remove.

So, thumbs up for this famous story by the Dean of Science Fiction--I'm not playing iconoclast today, I guess. 

I've read a bunch of stories that appear in My Best Science Fiction Story, including
Henry Kuttner's "Don't Look Now," 
Edmond Hamilton's "The Inn Outside the World"
John W. Campbell, Jr.'s "Blindness"
Robert Bloch's "Almost Human"
A. E. van Vogt's "Project Spaceship"
Clark Ashton Smith's "The Uncharted Isle"
Sam Merwin, Jr.'s "The Carriers"
Frank Belknap Long's "The House of Rising Winds"
Fredric Brown's "Nothing Sirius"
Murray Leinster's "The Lost Race" 
and Theodore Sturgeon's "Thunder and Roses"

"The Million Year Picnic" by Ray Bradbury (1946)

Here's another story I think I must have read ages ago, one of the stories that was reprinted in The Martian Chronicles as well as other Bradbury collections and numerous anthologies.  The central gimmick of the story, that a human colonist on Mars tells his kids he is going to show them Martians and then, in the end of the story, points at their reflection in the water and everyone realizes they are the Martians, was sharp in my mind when I started the story, but I had forgotten the more grim, sad, even cynical elements.

The father of the family is a politician and has used his influence to secure for his family the opportunity to be among the first families permitted to colonize Mars.  He did so because he predicted what happens over the course of the story--a cataclysmic war erupts on Earth which, it seems, kills everyone there, and spreads to kill people here on Mars, though our protagonists escape.  The family travels by boat down a canal, past one dead Martian city after another, another grim note.

At the same time we get these depressing and apocalyptic story elements, the father and Bradbury seem confident that the human race is going to rebuild itself on Mars.  While Bradbury suggests that the destruction of Earth is a result of science getting of hand, outgrowing mankind's ability to control it, he also points out how science in the form of terraforming has made Mars habitable by humans.  As in the end of Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury suggests that the human race's bellicosity and instinct for tyranny may cause a catastrophe, but that some wise and hardy segment of humanity will survive and continue the race, maybe even build a better civilization than that which preceded it.

A good story, though vulnerable to the charge that it is sappy and sentimental, a criticism that can be leveled at many Bradbury stories.

**********

The stories I read in June from Strange Ports of Call by men I think of as weirdies, Clark Ashton Smith, David H. Keller, and Howard Wandrei, are essentially horror stories in which men try to figure out the universe, to master it, and get defeated.  Today's stories from the same anthology, by people I think of as science fiction writers, Bond, Miller, Heinlein and Bradbury, have their share of trespass, tragedy and trouble, but are essentially about man's progress, his spreading out throughout the universe as a conqueror.  Miller and Heinlein present men who engage in self-sacrifice for their fellows, Bond focuses on (alien, it is true) scientists who produce universe-altering inventions, and while Bradbury's tale has apocalyptic images and content, it portrays the birth of a new human civilization as well as the extinction of one human civilization and the ruins of an alien civilization, and shows how science can foster life as well as destroy it.  The science fiction guys don't shy away from human evil and the tragic cost of progress, but are pretty confident people can master the universe, learn its secrets and bend it to their will, unlike the weirdies, who depict people totally overwhelmed by the complexity of the natural world.  This of course reminds us of the definition of science fiction that John W. Campbell, Jr. presented to Barry Malzberg, as reported in Malzberg's 1982 essay on Campbell*: a literature of "heroes," "a problem-solving medium" that deals with "success or the road to success" and argues that "man is a curious animal who wants to know how things work and given enough time can find out." 

*"John W. Campbell: June 8, 1910 to July 11, 1971," written in 1980, published in The Engines of the Night

We may read some more stories that appear in Strange Ports of Call in the future--I'm sure we'll read Fritz Leiber's "Mr. Bauer and the Atoms," but probably when we extend our Weird Tales project to 1946 (currently we are toiling in 1941.)  And until that time I'm sure we'll conduct many other explorations into the adjacent and overlapping realms of weird fantasy and science fiction here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

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!