Robert Arthur: "The Believers," ""The Book and the Beast," and "Ring Once for Death"

Recently, one of my well-read commenters recommended the author Robert Arthur.  Not long after, I encountered at an antique mall a hard cover edition of the one Arthur collection listed at isfdb, Ghosts and More Ghosts, the one with an owl on the cover, not one of the editions with a ghost on the cover.  I didn't drop 20 bucks for this thing, being an inveterate cheapo, but I still felt its appearance in my life  was a sign I should read some of Arthur's stories.  While this early 1960s collection was marketed to young people, the stories were originally printed in places like Weird Tales and Argosy, so presumably suitable for a 54-year-old like myself, at least in their original forms.  So let's hie to the internet archive and read the magazine versions of three tales by Robert Arthur that were reprinted in Ghosts and More Ghosts, two from Weird Tales and one from Amazing.

(You can read the 1963 1st revised edition of Ghosts and More Ghosts at the internet archive here.  The headings of each section below will be a link to the internet archive scan of the appropriate issue of D. McIlwraith's WT or Howard Browne's Amazing.)  

"The Believers" (1941)

"The Believers" appears in Ghosts and More Ghosts under the title "Do You Believe in Ghosts?"  No, I do not, though I regularly meet people who claim they do.  "The Believers" debuted in an issue of Weird Tales that has a wild cover by Hannes Bok and stories we have already read by Ray Cummings ("The Robot God"), Clark Ashton Smith ("The Enchantress of Sylaire"), Ralph Milne Farley ("I Killed Hilter") and Manly Wade Wellman "It All Came True in the Woods.") 

You have probably heard about Orson Welles' 1938 broadcast of an adaptation of H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds that is said to have scared the rubes out in Hicksville.  Ever since, from the day it happened to this day, this event has served journalists, politicians and historians as a case in evidence supporting their contentions that [some segment of] the American people are dolts, [some segment of] the media is out of control and too powerful, or people in 1938 were quaking in their boots over Hitler.  Suffice to say that journalists, politicians and historians are always making mistakes and have innumerable career and ideological reasons to lie, and that the number of people who really were scared by Welles' broadcast, and the proportion of them who took concrete actions in response to their fear, is in dispute.  Anyway, Arthur may have been influenced by this famous event in crafting "The Believers."

Nick Deene is a writer who travels the world having adventures and then writing about them, exaggerating his experiences for effect, suggesting he was in far more danger than he really was.  Arthur stresses how fake Deene is--his tan is from a sun lamp, for example, no from time spent outdoors.  Deene relates and dramatizes some of these past events for broadcast on his regularly scheduled radio program.  His latest stunt is to broadcast live as he is handcuffed in an 18th-century house in the remote countryside, a house that has been abandoned for decades.  Deene and his broadcast team have spread rumors--rumors they themselves made up--that the house is haunted.

The techs and advertising men and print journalists who accompanied Deene into the bedroom of the dusty old ruin leave him once he is handcuffed to the ancient four-poster bed, a microphone set up close to his mouth.  The plan is for Deene to just make up a sighting of some creature, after spending plenty of time setting the stage and building atmosphere by describing the dark bedroom and the sounds he hears and all that.  Arthur tells us, multiple times, that thousands and thousands of radio listeners have tuned in and implicitly believe every phony thing the Deene says.  

Deene describes the sounds and smells of an approaching creature, employing special effects to simulate the former.  He then describes the fanciful monster as it enters the room and then retreats, apparently driven off by Deene's Bible and crucifix.  Then Arthur unleashes his gimmick on us, which unfortunately the editorial intro to "The Believers" has already spoiled for us.  The belief of hundred of thousands of credulous radio listeners has through collective psychic power brought to life the hideous monster Deene described!  After the broadcast ends, but before his fellow broadcasters have entered the house to unlock his handcuffs, this creature attacks Deene!  Will Deene survive?

Not a bad story at all, I'm saying marginally recommendable.

"The Believers" has been reprinted in multiple anthologies in Europe and America, including one edited by Richard Darby which has a preface by one of our favorite thespians, Christopher Lee. 

"The Book and the Beast" (1943)

This story was reprinted in Ghosts and More Ghosts under the title "Mr. Dexter's Dragon," which makes it sound more like a kid's story.  Well, let's see.  We're reading "The Book and the Beast" in an issue of Weird Tales we just looked at, one that includes stories we read by famous weirdies August Derleth, Henry Kuttner and Robert Bloch.  It doesn't look like "The Book and the Beast" has been anthologized.

Murchison is a short balding man whose hobby is collecting books and manuscripts about the occult.  (Of course it is.)  In a Manhattan second-hand shop he finds a very unusual book--a handwritten book of spells!  One of the spells is "To Bring Three Beautiful Females to Your Room After Dark."  Wow!  And you thought "Fireball" was a good spell, you nerd!  Curious, I looked at the version of the story in Ghosts and More Ghosts and found that not only had "Murchison" been changed to "Dexter," but that "To Bring Three Beautiful Females to Your Room After Dark" had been changed to "To Make a Demon Bring Three Bags of Gold."  Booooriiiiiinnnnng.  Well, I suppose with three bags of gold you could persuade three women to come to your room at night...but it's just not the same.

Anyway, back home on Long Island, Murchison looks over the book, finding a painting of a dragon on one page particularly interesting.  The dragon is skinny, as if starved.  Behind it is a pile of human bones including thirteen skulls.  Murchison writes to a fellow old book collector, a Muir, who lives in Brooklyn, about his terrific find.

When Muir comes over for a visit the next day, the police are at Murchison's place because Murchison's servants have reported that Murchison has vanished.  The unscrupulous Muir steals the spell book, which is right there on the missing man's desk.  Muir, we are told, enjoys the company of young blondes, and just such a delightful creature distracts him from the book when he gets back home, but he does have time to look over the painting of the dragon and find it is not all that skinny and that there are fourteen skulls behind it, not thirteen as reported by his friend.  (In the Ghosts and More Ghosts version of the story, the whole blonde angle is dropped.)  The next morning, Muir's servants report their own master has also disappeared.  They see the book, which has a picture of a fat dragon.

Some time later faulty wiring burns down Muir's house, and in the wreckage the authorities unexpectedly find the bones of sixteen people as well as those of some big prehistoric beast, leading to much speculation.

This is a pretty good story; thumbs up for "The Book and the Beast."  I find the black magic angle and the sex angle more engaging than the hokey gullible-radio-audience angle of "The Believers," and find it odd that anthologists preferred "The Believers" over this story.

"Ring Once for Death" (1954)

"Ring Once for Death" appeared in an issue of Amazing that includes a story we are already familiar with, Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s "Death of a Spaceman," a book version of which we read in 2020.  The version of "Ring Once for Death" that appears in Ghosts and More Ghosts was retitled "The Rose Crystal Bell" and it looks like it was this 1963 version that was anthologized in 1991 in Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh's Back from the Dead.  We of course are reading the 1954 magazine version.

Twenty years ago a honeymooning couple visited a shop run by an Asian man (an "Oriental") and purchased a necklace with a crystal pendant.  Today they are back at the shop, now run by the previous owner's son.  A curious crystal bell with no clapper catches wifey's eye--the young proprietor tells a crazy story about how his father separated the bell from its clapper because a weird religious sect claimed if the bell was rung it could bring a person back to life--but only by taking the life of some other person.  The wife recognizes that the pendant of her necklace must be the clapper, and back home she reunites the two pieces of the magic bell.

There follows a somewhat predictable series of tragic events in which people close to the wife get, apparently, killed and then turn out to be unexpectedly OK but at the same moment of the happy revelation somebody else keels over.  All the miraculous recoveries and mysterious deaths can be explained as bizarre coincidences, but of course the wife thinks the magic of the bell is responsible.  The bell is accidently destroyed so we'll never know, and the wife will ever after have to live with the possibility that she chose to preserve one of her loved ones and destroy another.

Acceptable.

On the left, a 1972 paperback edition of Ghosts and More Ghosts

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Despite the collection's title, none of the stories we read today that appear in Ghosts and More Ghosts, at least in their magazine versions, is really about a conventional ghost.  Which is fine by me, as I generally don't find the conventional idea of a ghost very compelling.  Taken as a group these stories are pretty good, so probably we'll be seeing more of Arthur in the future, whose work appeared in publications we are interested in here at MPorcius Fiction Log like Thrilling Wonder Stories and John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Unknown, as well as elsewhere, including a magazine Arthur himself edited, Mysterious Traveler, and a bunch of anthologies Arthur ghost edited for Alfred Hitchcock.