After today I will have read at least one story (in fact it looks like I will have read at least three stories) from each of the six issues of
Weird Tales with a 1943 cover date. We are making progress in our grand quest to have read something from each issue of
Weird Tales, a periodical the life of which spans from 1923 to 2025. And today may be a red letter day, with stories by blockbuster writer Ray Bradbury, fan fave Manly Wade Wellman, MPorcius fave Edmond Hamilton, and Lovecraft correspondent and Arkham House founder August Derleth. This might be the best issue of
Weird Tales from 1943! You can read along at the internet archive
here and find out how this ish of the unique magazine of the bizarre and unusual stacks up in real time!
"The Valley of the Assassins" by Edmond Hamilton
Mark Stanton and Bill Bradley are American engineers working to maintain the railway in mountainous northern Iran over which the Western Allies are shipping vital supplies to the Soviet Union so the diabolical Reds can enslave Eastern Europe I mean so Mother Russia can defeat Nazi Germany. A landslide has blocked the railway, but Stanton and Bradley's hundred-plus Persian laborers have thrown down their tools because they have gotten a sign from The Sons of Murder! That sign is a peacock tied to a rock. No doubt the Order of the Assassins, founded ten thousand years ago by a wizard and still active to this day, don't want this railway to operate. Or so the locals think. Stanton figures German agents put the bird there.
Stanton uses his automatic to get the Iranian workers back to clearing the railway and Bradley rides off to follow the trail of whoever left that peacock there. When Bradley returns he has a glazed look on his face and he tries to murder Stanton and the other white person at the worksite! The young man goes berserk when captured and bound and there is no sign he recognizes his friends. Is Bradley delirious from some accident or fatigue, as Stanton hopes? The victim of the some drug-wielding Nazi psychologist, as Stanton fears? Or have the Assassins stolen the young engineer's soul with their black magic and turned him into a mindless killer, as all the Persians believe?
Their superstitious dread overwhelming them, all but one of the Iranians flees. Stanton sends the third white man back to Tehran for help, and he and the lone Persian brave enough to remain at his side go out to find whoever warped poor Bradley's mind. Bradley feels a compulsion to return to his insidious masters, and serves as a guide to them. The ensorcelled Bradley leads Stanton and his Persian companion into a trap high in the mountains and they are captured by a party of men--some Iranian, some Arab, Turk or Syrian--who do not speak and who bear the same mindless stare and exhibit the same grim determination as the enslaved Bradley.
The zombie-like Assassins take Stanton and friend to a monumental black castle behind which lies a narrow valley of stupendous beauty, full of flowers, glazed-eyed women and screaming peacocks. In the castle they are dragged before Hasan Sabah, world's foremost expert in the science of the mind! He has survived many centuries, battled Crusaders, met Marco Polo, tangled with Genghis Khan and Napoleon! Hasan Sabah hypnotizes Stanton's Persian comrade, making him the latest of his servants, and then announces his plan to transfer his soul from his current old wrinkled body to Stanton's healthy young form! This is how Hasan Sabah has survived for some many lifetimes! In Stanton's body he can make sure the Axis powers win the war, which will throw the Middle East into chaos so that he, Hasan Sabah, can take over the Middle East.
In science fiction fashion, Stanton uses quick thinking, trickery, and his knowledge of science to foil Hasan Sabah and save himself, his friends, and the Anglo-American lifeline to Uncle Joe Stalin.
The ending of "The Valley of the Assassins" is a little weak--the villain, who is a genius thousands of years old, shouldn't have fallen for the trick Hamilton came up with--but not terrible. Otherwise, "The Valley of the Assassins" is quite good, a fun melodrama. Hamilton knows just the right amount of detail and description he needs to paint a picture and elicit emotion in the reader without going overboard and becoming boring or confusing, and the action scenes similarly are just long enough and detailed enough to be exciting and get across what is happening to the reader. (Just recently I was complaining that some of Ted Sturgeon's action scenes, and at times his writing in general, include too much detail and get tangled up in themselves.) Thumbs up for "The Valley of the Assassins."
Kurt Singer included "The Valley of the Assassins" in his 1972 anthology Ghouls and Ghosts and Helen Hoke eight years later reprinted it in Fear! Fear! Fear! Our paisans over in Italy had a chance to read Hamilton's story of the fall of Hasan Sabah in the language of Dante in 1987 when "The Valley of the Assassins" served as the title story of an Italian anthology of stories from Weird Tales.
"The Third Cry to Legba" by Manly Wade Wellman
The cover of this issue of
Weird Tales advertises "A new mystery series by Manly Wade Wellman" and "The Third Cry to Legba" is the first installment of that series, which isfdb calls the John Thunstone series and lists over a dozen component stories.
Thunstone is a huge strong man who has studied the occult. We see many such students here at MPorcius Fiction Log; I guess "the occult" is a crowded field, though I never met any such students myself as an undergrad in New Jersey or as a grad student in New York City. Thunstone is out at a Manhattan night club with a former flame, the blonde and blue-eyed Countess Monteseco. (Come to think of it, we meet a lot of these blue-eyed blondes here at MPFL as well, don't we?) When they first met, some years ago, she was just Sharon.
The act at the club tonight is a reproduction of a voodoo ceremony, a call to the furry god Legba, a dance that climaxes with the scantily clad dancer breaking the neck of a chicken. Thunstone, a writer who can get into places by saying he is a journalist, talks to the dancer backstage while another big strong man, Thorne, chats up Sharon--Thorne is also a student of the occult, a man who has spent plenty of time in Haiti, which Conan O'Brien tells me is a real beauty spot, but Mike DeWine tells me is literally hell. Well, opinions will differ.
Thunstone's and Thorne's opinions certainly differ--our guy Thunstone is a crusader against the forces of darkness, while Thorne is a devotee of black magic who hopes to get his mitts on Sharon, Countess Monteseco's inherited wealth to finance some kind of diabolical large-scale project. (Today's secret word is..."diabolical.") Thunstone has some powerful friends, and calls in their aid. He gets the police to close the night club over a fire safety code violation. In Harlem he consults a black preacher who gives him more info on Legba, citing, among other volumes, Zora Neal Hurston's Tell My Horse; Thunstone and this man of the cloth conclude that the next performance of the call to Legba at the club, the third, might have catastrophic consequences. And in Midtown he gets from a jeweler an old brooch that he hopes will provide protection from the forces of darkness--he gifts the brooch to Sharon the Countess.
We get a good detective scene in which Thunstone figures out where Thorne lives and busts into his place to look for clues. Then a decent climactic action scene in which Thunstone interrupts a private performance of the crucial third chicken-sacrificing dance ceremony.
This is a pretty fun story--thumbs up! I often find detective stuff, following clues and all that, to be a drag, but enjoyed the detection business in "The Third Cry to Legba." Hopefully the succeeding tales of Thunstone, which I will be reading as they come up in Weird Tales, are as entertaining. I wonder if Sharon and Thorne will be back.
"The Third Cry to Legba" has been reprinted in Thunstone-centric Wellman collections.
"The Ducker" by Ray Bradbury
Here we have a rare Bradbury that was not reprinted in an English-language Bradbury collection until our own bizarre and unusual 21st century. "The Ducker" did pop its head up in a Japanese 1972 collection, a British 1977 anthology edited by Mike Ashley, and a 1989 Italian anthology of pieces from
Weird Tales, however.
"The Ducker" is a somewhat silly story, the gimmicks of which remind me a little of that Roberto Benigni movie
Life is Beautiful and of that
Stephen Spielberg TV episode in which an artist magically drew the landing gear on a stricken B-17 to save himself, stories that inject a little magic and whimsy and child-like wonder into the serious business of the Second World War in the European theater in a way that some might find moving (women were sobbing in the theatre lobby where I saw
Life is Beautiful) and others ridiculous or even offensive. "The Ducker" is a pretty weak story by Bradbury standards, and the use of the gag gets repetitive, so I'm judging "The Ducker" merely acceptable.
Johnny Choir is an 18-year-old who hasn't really grown up--he still has the interests and mentality of an eleven-year-old. He used to run around with a bunch of kids, playing at war and at being cowboys, an endless series of arguments of the "Bang, you're dead!" "No, you missed! Bang, you're dead!" type and somehow basic training as an infantryman in the United States Army has not stopped him from continuing to think of warfare in this childish way. Johnny gets shipped off to fight in North Africa and when German aircraft strafe his unit, he is among the bursting shells of an artillery barrage, or German machine gunners are trying to hose him down, he is immune because he treats it all like a game, saying "Missed me!" and "I ducked!" and so forth. To kill German infantrymen he just has to say "Bang! Bang!" and Hans and Fritz just fall over. It is kind of ludicrous, and Bradbury doesn't just do this stuff once, as a climax or a punch line, but runs these gags multiple times over multiple pages. In the end, after Johnny has taken a German position single-handed, one of his comrades, Private Smith, says some goop about how God protects children and Johnny still has that protection because he never grew up, and so Smith will endeavor to make sure Johnny never grows up and thus remains safe. This is a little hard to take, seeing how criminals abuse and murder children all the time and children regularly get killed by bombs during modern warfare.
Ray of course is good at putting sentences together and slinging the similes and metaphors, so reading "The Ducker" isn't painful, but it is not one of finest moments of Waukegan's gift to literature.
"A Thin Gentleman with Gloves" by August Derleth
Of the four authors we are reading today, I probably like Derleth the least; he certainly seems to be the most likely to deliver a half-assed clunker to the editor and get it published. But maybe today he will put in a stellar performance.
Bellaman is a London barrister almost all of whose clients are dangerous criminals. But he has one decent client, Potter, and when this honest man dies, Bellaman handles his estate. The deceased Potter, a student of the occult (of course), left all his money, a considerable sum, to an old girlfriend who hadn't heard from Potter in ages. Bellaman thinks he can steal some of the inheritance from this woman--diabolical!--but as he goes about this crime, he keeps seeing a strange figure that gives him the creeps. The man who seems to be following him whenever he misappropriates some of Potter's estate is a very skinny man in gloves, his face somehow always obscured--Bellaman recalls that a similar man always accompanied Potter on the rare occasions when Potter left his abode, a tall thin man who never spoke, whose face nobody can remember.
Bellaman's investigation indicates to us readers something Bellaman himself refuses to believe--Potter, a wizard, raised a former enemy from the dead and bound the corpse to be his familiar. The living dead slave will be released form servitude and able to rest when Potter's estate is properly disposed of, and so the monster is endeavoring to make sure Bellaman doesn't abuse his office of executor. The climactic ending in which the monster slays Bellaman and the denouement in which the police find the unusual state of the two bodies, barrister and skeletal corpse, are pretty effective.
"A Thin Gentleman with Gloves" is an obvious, straightforward, traditional horror story, but Derleth does a good job with it, and there are no annoying mistakes (true, there are typos in this WT printing of it, but I can't blame Derleth for that.) Derleth wrote quite a few of these stories in which a character you are expected not to like suffers a terrible rough justice at the hands of a supernatural entity or phenomena, and sometimes Derleth just seems to think the person should die because he or she is rich or vain or fat or has low intelligence or something, and to me such stories feel vindictive and exploitative. The guy who gets killed in this story is actually a thief who is robbing a woman and a fraud who is failing to meet his obligations to a client, so I was able to cheer on his destruction.
I can mildly recommend "A Thin Gentleman with Gloves." The adventure of Bellaman the fraudulent attorney was included in the Derleth collection Something Near, an anthology Derleth edited, When Evil Wakes, and an anthology edited by Mary Danby, Realms of Darkness, that has an introduction by beloved thespian Christopher Lee. Followers of my sadly defunct Twitter feed may recall that I recently purchased at an antiques mall the NECA Christopher Lee as Dracula action figure.
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Let's pretend we are good at math and score the six 1943 issues of
Weird Tales based on what I felt about the three or four stories I read from each. The January ish had two stories I liked (+2), one I thought acceptable (0), and one I didn't like (-1), so January has 1 point. Grading the rest similarly, we get this list:
Jan: 1
Mar: 1
May: 0
July: 2
Sep: 0
Nov: 3
So, my hopes that this November issue of Weird Tales was the best 1943 issue have been fulfilled! Good news for once! We've wrapped up this stage in our weird journey from 1923 to 2025 with a bang.
More Weird Tales next time here at MPorcius Fiction Log--cross your fingers in hopes the next batch of stories we read will be as good as today's collection.
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