Avram Davidson: "The Patient Cup," "Body Man" and "The Deed of the Deft-Footed Dragon"

At a West Virginia antique mall I recently picked up for one dollar an issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, purportedly "The World's Leading Mystery Magazine."  Apparently this thing is still a going concern!  The issue I purchased is the July 1986 number, and I bought it because it contains "The Patient Cup," a story by Avram Davidson that, according to the Avram Davidson Website, has never been published elsewhere!  Let's check out this story and two other stories Davidson published in magazines in 1986, "Body Man" and "The Deed of the Deft-Footed Dragon."

"The Patient Cup"

Back in March we read a story by Davidson that suggested that the government and other establishment institutions of Mexico are less than exemplary.  "The Patient Cup" similarly takes a swipe at our neighbors to the south.  You see, a gringo gigolo living down there during the postwar era has found that relieving American and European women he has seduced of their moolah sometimes necessitates his sending them to an early grave, and his customary method of disposing of these wealthy ladies has been to poison them with arsenic.  Conveniently for our lethal Lothario, the Mexican police don't bother to test ex-pats who keel over for arsenic poisoning, instead just marking the cause of death down as "dysentery" or "heart failure" or some such thing for which nobody can be blamed.

"The Patient Cup" is written in a humorous style, with the murderous gigolo as the protagonist, and the reader has to wonder if we are perhaps meant to like the killer.  The plot revolves around the seduction and murder of a poor confused woman and the complication that arises after her burial under the cellar of a house--the killer can't find the money that recently fell into his victim's hands!  Oops!  Later it comes to his attention that the woman's wealth, converted into jewels, must be on her body.  Luckily, the house is owned by a single woman and the gigolo figures he need only seduce her to get to the corpse and the treasure.  He manages to insinuate himself into her household but he can't find the time alone to dig up that body--this chick won't leave him alone!  So he starts poisoning her, but things don't work out for him and he ends up doing hard labor in the hot sun at a prison camp--Davidson has stressed throughout the story that the gigolo hates the sun and hates manual labor.  The story's second punchline is that the second woman wasn't felled by the arsenic because her Mexican doctor has been giving her arsenic as a medicine for years and she has built up a tolerance for it.

A slight but entertaining story that I can mildly recommend, the style being smooth and pleasant and the plot and characters sort of fun and Davidson getting a lot of mileage out of the period and setting.

"Body Man"

This story debuted in Asimov's and was reprinted in the 1993 anthology of humor stories Isaac Asimov's SF-Lite, so I guess we have another meant-to-be-funny story on our hands.     

"Body Man" is very short, a joke story about Jewish small businessmen and craftsmen and their relationships with customers and with women.  The manner of speech of all the characters certainly reminds you of Jewish-American comedians and actors you've seen on TV or heard on the radio.  The story works, but it is slight.

It is the future, and, it seems, people of means can put on new bodies; these bodies are made by salt-of-the-earth men who own small shops--I guess we are supposed to be reminded of tailors.  A customer complains to the shop owner who is our protagonist that his new body has warts when he specifically requested no warts.  The shop owner upbraids the "dumb kid assistant" who made up that body, and this kid insists he is an artist and he puts the warts on where they belong artistically.  The kid also complains about his girlfriend, who, apparently, thinks the kid only likes her for her body.  The punchline of the story comes when the girlfriend appears at the shop boiling mad--it is implied that the young "artist" put unwanted warts (in some out of view place) on the (outwardly flawless) body she is currently inhabiting.

Acceptable.

"Body Man" also appeared in 1987 in the Croat magazine Sirius.  I wonder how they translated the characteristically Jewish-American flavor of the dialogue; maybe Yugoslavian Jews had distinctive mannerisms and turns of phrase?

"The Deed of the Deft-Footed Dragon"

All three of today's stories have a strong foundation in geography and/or ethnicity.  We've had Mexicans dealing with Anglos who live in Mexico.  We just did the Jewish tailor bit.  And now we've got a 19th-century Chinese laundry guy living far from his hometown, where he was some kind of fighting man, in a European quarter among white people, whom he considers savages with ugly blue eyes who fail to bind women's feet like civilized people do.  This story doesn't exactly portray Chinese people in the best possible light.

The laundry guy had a daughter, called by the whites Lily, who helped him in the shop by folding the shirts.  Lily weekly attended Sunday school at a Christian church, and when she got sick one of the white teachers started coming over to the shop to minister to Lily and get her a white doctor and so forth.  This generosity is to no avail; Lily died.

The story ends with the laundry man, driven insane by grief and the heat or maybe having died of fever himself and become some kind of avenging ghost, creeping into the house where the white teacher lives--his mission, to assassinate the teacher's evil stepmother who is trying to manipulate the teacher's aged father into disinheriting the teacher and leaving her in penury in a foreign land.

(Didn't we just have an evil stepmother only yesterday?)

Like the other two stories we are talking about today, "The Deed of the Deft-Footed Dragon" feels minor but it is well put together.  I guess marginally good.

"The Deed of the Deft-Footed Dragon" has been reprinted in Davidson collections.

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These three stories are entertaining, more for their milieus and characters than their plots; Davidson seems to expend more energy on setting and personality than what the characters actually do.  "Body Man" is the least impressive, its setting being sort of familiar and its plot the slightest, and "The Patient Cup" probably my favorite, it having the most fully realized plot in which the fates of the characters are most closely aligned with their actions and personalities.  I have a simple and conventional mind that likes to see all the puzzle pieces smoothly and securely fit into place and finds untidy loose ends and red herrings irritating.

Next time, more stories from the year I had my fifteenth birthday--1986!