Stories by J P Brennan, A Davidson and R Bloch from Alfred Hitchcock's Tales to Keep You Spellbound

Bloch and Davidson, you see,
 made the cover!

Maybe you accompanied the staff of MPoricus Fiction Log when we explored 1979's Whispers II, a hardcover anthology edited by Stuart Schiff.  In that volume of horror and fantasy stories, we read our first piece of fiction by Joseph Payne Brennan, a very brief story about a guy reuniting with a dead loved one at the beach.  Curious to sample more of Brennan's vast body of work, I looked around the internet archive, the indispensable source for those of us who seek to dig from the quarry of 20th-century popular culture, and found a few scans of anthologies with Brennan stories, among them 1976's Alfred Hitchcock's Tales to Keep You Spellbound, edited by Eleanor Sullivan.  I decided to read not only the included Brennan story, but one by Avram Davidson (who also had a memorable story in Whispers II) and one by Robert Bloch, who didn't have a story in Whispers II, but had a blurb on the cover!  Feel free to think of this blog post as "The Revenge of Whispers II."

All three of these stories first appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine; in her introduction to the anthology, Sullivan tells us that Alfred Hitchcock's Tales to Keep You Spellbound is being published in the year of that magazine's 20th anniversary.  Somewhat to my amazement, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine is still being published and has passed its 60th anniversary!

"Death of a Derelict" by Joseph Payne Brennan (1967)

"Death of a Derelict" is one of Brennan's stories about Lucius Leffing; according to The Thrilling Detective Website, Leffing is kind of like Sherlock Holmes but sometimes deals with psychic and occult phenomena.  The founder of The Thrilling Detective Website, Kevin Burton Smith, suggests that when Brennan was writing stories for Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine he went a little light on the supernatural elements, so maybe I shouldn't expect the dead derelict to be walking around haunting his still-living friends.  But let's see....

Oy, this story is so lame it made me laugh out loud--it is like something a kid would write!

Leffing is just like Sherlock Holmes and the narrator, whose name is Brennan, is just like Watson.  They are sitting around when a customer interested in engaging Leffing's services as a private eye drops by.  This guy, the obese "manager of entertainment concessions at Frolic Beach," an amusement park or seaside boardwalk kind of thing, is getting sued because a bum who hung around the place, Joel Karvey, was found dead at the base of the roller coaster, and some lawyer has convinced the bum's distant relative that the park is liable.  The fat guy wants Leffing to prove Karvey the bum did not in fact fall off the roller coaster but was murdered, so he is not legally or financially responsible for his demise.

Half or so of the story is Brennan and Leffing sitting around jawing about the case.  Then Brennan twice accompanies Leffing to Frolic Beach, the first time to ask questions of the park staff, and the second time with Leffing in disguise as a bum himself.  One of the park employees sees Leffing, thinks it is the ghost of the bum, and yells out "Karvey!  Get back!  You're dead, you crazy bum, I killed you!"

Then we get the explanation of why the employee murdered Karvey--this employee, a night watchman, to supplement his income, would retrieve coins from the gutter.  But when Karvey the bum moved into the area he presented the night watchman with some stiff competition!  Seeing his daily haul of coins drying up, the night watchman ambushed and assassinated Karvey, bashing in his cabeza with an old discarded piece of the railing that surrounds the roller coaster.

I'm not the audience for these mystery stories in which guys talk about clues and then trick the killer into revealing himself, and I am not a fan of "Death of a Derelict."  The next time I sample Joseph Payne Brennan's work I will make sure it is in what is incontrovertibly a horror anthology full of gore and monsters.

"Present for Lona" by Avram Davidson (1958)

A working class guy hasn't made any money since the road he was helping construct was finished weeks ago and things between him and the wife are getting rough!  So he takes a one-time job as a member of a firing squad and helps the state government execute a convicted murderer!  He takes his pay (twenty-five bucks) and buys a gift for his wife and a bottle of booze, but when he gets back to the trailer park the little wife refuses the present!  She doesn't want anything to do with the money he earned sending that killer to Hell, so he has taken on the heavy burden of guilt of killing a man for nothing.  This throws him into a rage, and, in his frenzy, he beats his wife to death with his bare hands.  In the story's final scene it is our protagonist who is facing a firing squad of men who will be paid $25.00!

Acceptable.  This story is reinforcing my suspicion that Avram Davidson is a man with a tragic view of life!

"A Home Away From Home" by Robert Bloch (1961)

"A Home Away From Home" has appeared in many Bloch collections and several anthologies, including multiple Alfred Hitchcock anthologies.  Maybe that indicates it is a real winner!

A young Australian woman's parents were killed in a car wreck, so she moves to England to live with her uncle, a psychiatrist whom she has never met who lives in the remote countryside.  The day she arrives everybody she meets is acting pretty funny, and as the story ends she realizes that her uncle's country house is an asylum and earlier that day the inmates rose up and massacred her uncle and his staff and these people pretending to be her uncle's colleagues and friends are the murderous mental patients and she is going to be their next victim.

Barely acceptable (not a real winner.)

**********

Criminy, three gimmicky filler stories.  Seeing as she selected them for Alfred Hitchcock's Tales to Keep You Spellbound, we have to assume that Eleanor Sullivan (editor in chief of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine from 1975 to 1981 and managing editor of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine from 1970 to 1982) thought them among the best stories to appear in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine over the course of two decades.  If these mediocre pieces are the best the magazine had to offer, what can the run-of-the-mill fare offered by the magazine be like?

Obviously, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine is not for me.  The next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log will see us returning to more traditional MPorcius territory as we read three stories from 1940s issues of Future Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Whispers II: Brennan, Grant, Russell, Jacobi and Weinstein

Let's tackle five more stories from Stuart Schiff's 1979 anthology Whispers II.  Can anyone challenge the hold of R. A. Lafferty's "Berryhill" on the title of "Best Story in Whispers II?"

Patty cake, patty cake...

"Marianne" by Joseph Payne Brennan (1975)

Tuna, rubber, little blubber in my igloo...

I've never read anything by Brennan, but the Wikipedia article on him makes him sound like a fascinating guy with an interesting career: working at the Yale Library, publishing scores of stories and hundreds of poems, managing his own horror magazine and his own poetry magazine.  Let's get a taste of what this guy is all about!

"Marianne," which is like a page and a half long, describes a lonely tourist beach in chill October, the wind making padlocks clank and the grey waves and the cries of gulls and all that.  A guy goes to the water's edge and cries out the name of his girlfriend (or wife?) who drowned there.  Her corpse rises up and claims him for the sea!

This is fine for what it is, I suppose...it kind of feels like part of a larger work, like the end of a story of a disastrous relationship or the prologue of a story about aquatic zombies.  Acceptable.

"Marianne" first appeared in Whispers #6-7 and would be reprinted in the Brennan collection The Borders Just Beyond.

"The Fourth Musketeer" by Charles L. Grant (1979)

I've read a few Grant stories over the years.  There was that piano-playing witch, the sarcophagus found in a secret room in a Connecticut house, and those stories about robots and tyrannical governments and creepy New Jersey women.  "The Fourth Musketeer" was original to Whispers II and I don't think it ever appeared anywhere else.

"The Fourth Musketeer" is about mid-life crisis, and I guess about masculinity and gender roles.  Everett Templar is forty, and has quit his job and left his wife, and ridden a bus to the neighborhood of his childhood.  There is a lot of description of his aches and pains and his failing memory (the title of the story refers to the fact that he can't remember the names of all of Dumas's Musketeers) as well as of the landscape of his youthful haunts.  In flashbacks we see he quit his job because his superiors at the office thought he should act his age, that with his long hair and loud music he was starting to appear like a hippie and that might drive away clients; it is also hinted that his wife was a nag who complained about his toy trains.

Having been away from home for some months (he can't remember if it was two months or six months or something in between) he decides to telephone his wife and gloat (and maybe negotiate a reconciliation?)  But when Templar speaks into the phone his wife can't hear him, and we readers are given reason to believe that Templar is not really alive, that he is a ghost, or something--it's not really clear, at least not to me.  Maybe his inability to be heard, his lack of a voice, is symbolism for alienation and marginalization?

This is an OK mainstream story about a guy unhappy with his family and job with a little supernatural stuff tossed in.

"Ghost of a Chance" by Ray Russell (1978)

Oh no, it is Ray Russell, the guy who worked at Playboy and wrote lots of short-short stories that I think are a waste of time.  Let's see how Russell uses the two pages he usually limits himself to this time.

"Ghost of a Chance" is like a story written by a child.  (If you were paying me to sell the story I would say, "It's a whimsical flight of fancy into the macabre!")  One dude says there are no ghosts, that no proof of the existence of ghosts has ever been produced.  A second dude says he will prove to dude #1 that ghosts exist by committing suicide in front of dude #1 and then haunting him.  Bang goes the revolver!  After the police have left, sure enough, dude #1 sees a glowing form with the face of dude #2.  But dude #1 just figures it is a guilt-induced hallucination, and dude #2 laments that he killed himself for nothing.  It's like a skit from The Carol Burnett Show or something (you know you can see Tim Conway shooting himself in the head and then going "Wooooooooo...Harvey Korman...I am haunting you....")

A waste of everybody's time. "Ghost of a Chance" first appeared in Whispers #11-12 and would later appear in the Russell collection The Devil's Mirror.   

"The Elcar Special" by Carl Jacobi (1979)

Oh no, it is Carl Jacobi, the guy who wrote a story that was so bad it made me angry.  I feel like that fit of dismay and rage occurred just a week ago, but here I am giving Carl Jacobi another chance!  Don't believe what the beggars that hang around Dupont Circle say--I am a generous man!

The narrator of "The Elcar Special" is a loser, a 32-year-old who lives with his mother and keeps getting sacked from poorly paid jobs due to incompetence and negligence.  He gets a job helping to maintain the fleet of pre-World War II cars owned by a collector.  The prize possession of this collector is an Elcar used by Lillian Boyer the woman daredevil in her act, which consisted in part of climbing out of a moving car and onto an airborne airplane.  (I have to admit that I was a little surprised to find that Elcar and Boyer were real.)  Associated with the car is an unsubstantiated tale about the psychiatrist who bought it from wing walker Boyer, my new feminist hero.  This headshrinker married a Caribbean woman, a woman who practiced obeah.  When their marriage started falling apart the shrink killed the woman by running her over with the Elcar.

After setting the scene and presenting the characters, Jacobi bangs out a mediocre but not quite irritating supernatural story about the narrator driving the car, feeling a presence, thinking he has been transported from the roads of America to the roads of Martinique, picking up a sinister man and then running over a dark-skinned woman, only to wake up in the hospital, having crashed the Elcar.  The cops wonder why a shred of a woman's dress is stuck to the bumper of the wrecked Elcar.  Dun dun dun!

This is an unremarkable, standard issue horror story, which is an improvement over the half-baked abortion of a Jacobi story I had to endure a week ago.

"The Elcar Special" first appeared in Whispers II, and was included in the 1994 Jacobi collection, Smoke of the Snake.     

"The Box" by Lee Weinstein (1976)

Weinstein has four fiction credits at isfdb, and this is the first.  Its initial appearance was in Whispers #9, and Schiff also included it in his Mad Scientist anthology.

"The Box" is actually a good story, which is refreshing after reading so many poor and mediocre stories in a row.

The story takes place in a medical museum, which Weinstein describes in detail, all the skeletons, model eyes, jars containing diseased organs and deformed fetuses.  Every week for years a guy has come to the museum; today he comes in carrying a package--he's never brought a package before.  He picks the lock on a glass cabinet containing malformed fetuses, begins shifting a jar containing a baby with one eye.  He makes enough noise to alert the guards, who come to stop him, and we learn that the cyclops is his own son, and today would have been his 21st birthday--in the package is a wreath.

This is a sad and surprising story, and quite well-written, the second or third best tale in the anthology so far, a story which relies for its effects on universal human feelings for one's own flesh and blood and not supernatural nonsense or extravagant gore.  Thumbs up! 

**********

Five stories and only one you can consider a noteworthy success in the lot?  Sad!  Well, we'll be reading four more stories from Whispers II in our next blog post, and maybe we can dig up another story or two that is in the same league as those of Lafferty, Davidson and Weinstein.