The cover of the third issue of Fantastic is a wraparound which depicts a scantily-clad woman about to be murdered by goblins, which I think we have to admit is pretty crazy. We've read two stories that debuted in this issue of Howard Browne's magazine, "Final Exam" by Chad Oliver and "To Fit the Crime" by Richard Matheson. Today we'll read a story in the issue printed under Mickey Spillane's byline (though isfdb tells us Browne deserves a co-writing credit on this thing) and one by Cornell Woolrich, and, to round things out, a story appearing under the pen name Ivar Jorgensen but apparently written by Paul W. Fairman. You can scrutinize the horrifying cover and sexually suggestive interior illos as well as join me in reading these three stories at this link to the very scan of the November 1952 issue of Fantastic that I will be reading.
"The Veiled Woman" by Mickey Spillane and Howard Browne
Having read "The Veiled Woman," I can tell you it is very pulpy and melodramatic, written with gusto, full of crazy elements, and I found it a lot of fun. Spillane and Brown, by including so many superlatives in the story, like in a superhero comic book, and by making the bad guys self-professed communists and the women sex objects, seem to be challenging the critics to attack the story, but "The Veiled Woman" is irresistibly entertaining.
A few years ago, the handsomest and wealthiest of New York bachelors vanished in Africa while looking for a new source of uranium. He's our narrator. Two months ago he reappeared with a new wife--she is reputedly the most beautiful woman in the world, but she wears a veil so nobody can see her face! They lived shut away from the outside world in a Manhattan penthouse but then moved after a house invasion in which our narrator killed two burglars with his bare hands! As the story begins, Karl and Lodi Terris are living in a remote cabin in upstate New York, but the world won't leave them alone! A beautiful woman, a blonde daughter of privilege from Westchester who has betrayed her country and become a foreign agent dedicated to revolutionary socialism, and her gang of thugs bust into Karl and Lodi's love nest! They think Karl has a device that exploits cosmic rays as an energy source and want to use it to make the USSR ruler of the world! They don't find any such device, but take Lodi away with them, presumably to pressure Karl into giving up to them the machine Karl says does not exist.
The US government also thinks Karl has a super energy machine and, while he is looking for Lodi, Karl has to evade efforts of the feds to drag him before Congress. As a rich guy, Karl has a legion of smart employees and they help him do the detective work that involves looking through documents and calling people on the phone to figure out who that blonde commie is. Karl handles the detective work that involves going to crummy neighborhoods and beating people up all by himself. He ends up getting captured by the Soviet agents but turns the tables on them and gets the info he needs through torture of a pretty boy sadist. Then he rescues Lodi, killing many creeps in the process.
The FBI finally catches up to Karl and he and Lodi must testify before Congress. Karl tells the assembled legislators and political appointees a crazy story. In Africa, his plane crashed and he was injured and nursed back to health by member of a lost race! He fell in love with their princess and married her! Karl relates the history of these kind and generous people. They lived in luxurious cities back when your ancestors and mine were just cave men! But then an evil race bombed those fine cities into ruin, and the survivors of this gentle people took refuge underground. These people have the secret of longevity, and know how to use cosmic rays as a source of power, so their lives are peaceful and easy. The climax of the story is the revelation that Lodi's people are colonists from Mars, their enemies raiders from Venus, and, to prove it, Karl strips off Lodi's clothes, revealing that the skin of her gorgeous body and beautiful face are green!
(The reason the Feds and the Reds think Karl has some kind of cosmic ray exploitation device is that Lodi temporarily was radioactive and left traces of this radioactivity on the ship she and Karl took home to New York. This is a weakest and least satisfying part of the whole story.)
Karl and Lodi return home, only to be ambushed by a top male communist agent and that blonde Westchester girl. The man, vengeful, murders Lodi right there in front of Karl, and then the Westchester girl kills the foreigner and declares her love for Karl! She has had an unquenchable desire for Karl ever since she saw him naked the night she busted into this house (the first time.) She insists they have sex right there, and Karl obliges, banging her in the same house where his green wife lies dead with three bullet holes in her chest! When he is done enjoying the Westchester traitor's body he shoots her twice in the stomach, killing her.
"The Veiled Woman" is the wild male wish-fulfillment fantasy, the dream of being a rich guy who says fuck you to the government, outfights low-life thugs and effeminate commies, and effortlessly seduces gorgeous young women, has sex with them, and then abandons them to enjoy the next girl in line. The scenes of violence are pretty exciting, the sexual content is vulgar but has a striking and memorable vitality, and even the detective stuff is not bad. The science fiction content is goofy, but not terrible, and is a sort of MacGuffin afterthought, anyway. Everything is over-the-top, but in an exhilarating rather than an exhausting way. At least in my opinion; if Mao is your hero and violence against women turns your stomach, "The Veiled Woman" is not for you.
"The Veiled Woman" would reappear in a 1979 anthology of science fiction stories by mystery writers, Mysterious Visions--the cover illustration of the Dutch edition of this volume is a still from the 1958 film Colossus of New York. In 2018, Armchair Press paired "The Veiled Woman" with Edgar Rice Burroughs' second Pellucidar book in one of their series of "Double Novels," giving it a cover that gives away Lodi's skin color.
"The Moon of Montezuma" is a real change of pace after "The Veiled Woman," Woolrich's pace is very slow, with lots of descriptions of everything and everybody. For example, we hear all about the architecture of a house in Mexico and its decor and how the inhabitants have a subtle cruel look to their Aztec faces. And there is a lot of jazz with the moon and shadows and moonlight. This is a far more literary story than Spillane's, but like "The Veiled Woman," "The Moon of Montezuma" is about how dangerous women and foreigners are, and Woolrich's story, like Spillane's, is full of sex and of violence against women.
A blonde-haired and blue-eyed American woman uses up all her money chasing her husband down to Mexico, bringing with her their month-old baby, whom Dad has never seen. She ends up at a remote house where live some of the aforementioned cruel-looking women:
There was about her whole beauty, and she was beautiful, a tinge of cruelty, of barbarism. That same mask-like Aztec cast of expression, of age-old racial inheritance.
These women claim they have no idea where the blonde's husband is, but usher blondie in anyway. Woolrich generates a real sense of menace, describing how these Mexican women look at the little blonde baby in a way that is "mechanical" and "cold." Is Woolrich exploiting Anglo racism to make his story more effective? Maybe.
Blondie stumbles upon a clue that suggests her husband has been here--even fathered a child among these Mexican women! A child who recently died. We readers wonder if this other child's death foreshadows the death of blondie's child, or if the Mexicans will seize the American baby as a replacement. Sure enough, at night, the young beautiful Mexican woman, Woolrich reminding us that in her veins flows the blood of the Aztecs, those masters of human sacrifice, whose religion was not the religion of turning the other cheek but the religion of mass murder and the shedding of oceans of blood, creeps towards where the American woman and her baby sleep, moving like a panther, a knife in her teeth.
The next day the American woman is in a shallow grave near a well and the Mexican woman has a new blonde baby to replace the old. Weeks later the police arrive. The killer has sex with the police detective as a means of dampening his enthusiasm for investigating the case of the missing gringa. Eventually, the father of the ill-fated children, both the American blonde's and her Indian killer's, returns from prospecting far away. Woolrich suggests that maybe he treats women shabbily because he learned during combat in World War II that life is meaningless. "The Moon of Montezuma" is a downer! This guy (also blonde and blue-eyed) has no idea the blonde baby is from his Yankee wife and not his Mexican wife.
Months go by. A rose the blonde wore on her lapel gives birth to a rose bush that rises from her secret grave. To the rage of the Mexican wife, the white man spends a lot of time and energy cultivating and admiring this new rose bush, a rose of a breed not resident of this region. One night the jealous Indian wife sneaks out to uproot and destroy the rose bush, but slips and falls in the nearby well, her shawl ("reboso") catching in the rose bush so she is hanged to death.
Thumbs up for this pretty disturbing story of a bunch of evil people and the foolish woman who is their victim. "The Moon of Montezuma"'s racial and sexual politics will blow the minds of today's readers (Mexicans of all colors are cruel, callous and corrupt; women's primary concern is keeping a man; men shouldn't invest too much feeling in women but instead invest in their sons, through whom they will live on) but Woolrich sells these now-declasse philosophies with skill and in the context of the story (and maybe in the context of your life, hey, I don't know) they absolutely ring true.
"The Moon of Montezuma" was reprinted in the Woolrich collections Beyond the Night (1959) and The Fantastic Stories of Cornell Woolrich (1981) and the 1987 anthology House Shudders.
"The Missing Symbol" by Paul W. Fairman
This story is about the first trip to the moon, the psychologies of the men on that first trip. As they wait for blast off, one guy is romantic, thinking about how this is the culmination of man's quest for knowledge, one guy wonders how long his wife will wait to find another man if he dies, one guy is scared and keeps telling himself he's not a coward, another guy is proud as punch, giddy with joy. We hear these men's thoughts in italicized text.
The trip to Luna will take a week, and on the second day the crew goes insane. I have to admit, considering that for centuries men went away from Europe on sea voyages of months' and years' duration few of them went totally insane, and the similar lack of debilitating insanity aboard innumerable ships and submarines from many nations during the World Wars, the idea that five specially trained guys couldn't keep it together for 48 hours in a space ship in peacetime is a little hard to credit. Anyway, on day two one guy is paranoid and hides in his cabin and another guy picks a fight with the captain and knocks him over with a punch and has to be restrained and soon all the men are full of hate for each other and only grudgingly do their jobs so the ship doesn't fail. We hear their outrageous hatred for each other in their thoughts in italicized text and hear about they fight each other in the corridors should they meet.
The five men get to Luna, and on the moon's surface their psychologies return to normal and they celebrate their success. I guess we are supposed to think something about being in space makes you insane, and after landing on the moon, even though there is no atmosphere and the gravity is low, that something, whatever it is, is no longer in effect. The zing ending is that the men know they will go insane on the way home, and who knows if they will all survive on the way back, seeing as some of them almost got killed on the way here.
I'm giving "The Missing Symbol" a thumbs down. The gimmick does not work--if cosmic rays or distance from Earth or fear of the danger of vacuum or disorientation from lack of gravity makes you crazy, you would also be crazy on Luna. And there is no real plot; the characters don't solve the problem--they don't even tackle the problem!--and there is no resolution. "The Missing symbol" is an idea more than a story, a kernel the author didn't bother to build a story around.
I think "The Missing Symbol" is a pointless failure, but Hal Clement, perhaps the platonic ideal of a hard science fiction author, included it in his anthology First Flights to the Moon, so I guess you shouldn't take my word for it.
The trip to Luna will take a week, and on the second day the crew goes insane. I have to admit, considering that for centuries men went away from Europe on sea voyages of months' and years' duration few of them went totally insane, and the similar lack of debilitating insanity aboard innumerable ships and submarines from many nations during the World Wars, the idea that five specially trained guys couldn't keep it together for 48 hours in a space ship in peacetime is a little hard to credit. Anyway, on day two one guy is paranoid and hides in his cabin and another guy picks a fight with the captain and knocks him over with a punch and has to be restrained and soon all the men are full of hate for each other and only grudgingly do their jobs so the ship doesn't fail. We hear their outrageous hatred for each other in their thoughts in italicized text and hear about they fight each other in the corridors should they meet.
The five men get to Luna, and on the moon's surface their psychologies return to normal and they celebrate their success. I guess we are supposed to think something about being in space makes you insane, and after landing on the moon, even though there is no atmosphere and the gravity is low, that something, whatever it is, is no longer in effect. The zing ending is that the men know they will go insane on the way home, and who knows if they will all survive on the way back, seeing as some of them almost got killed on the way here.
I'm giving "The Missing Symbol" a thumbs down. The gimmick does not work--if cosmic rays or distance from Earth or fear of the danger of vacuum or disorientation from lack of gravity makes you crazy, you would also be crazy on Luna. And there is no real plot; the characters don't solve the problem--they don't even tackle the problem!--and there is no resolution. "The Missing symbol" is an idea more than a story, a kernel the author didn't bother to build a story around.
I think "The Missing Symbol" is a pointless failure, but Hal Clement, perhaps the platonic ideal of a hard science fiction author, included it in his anthology First Flights to the Moon, so I guess you shouldn't take my word for it.
**********
Two solid thrillers (with little SF content) by famous and important writers and a limp misfire by a minor writer that should never have been published in this form. Two out of three isn't bad, especially since the good stories are long and the abortion is brief.
I really enjoyed today's Spillane and Woolrich stories, but I won't be reading anything by these gentlemen again soon--I have a feeling these guys bang away at the same themes again and again, and the effect of their prose will dull with repetition. Maybe in a few months or years?
