Weird Tales, Jan 1941: H Kuttner, D H Keller, R Bloch and R M Farley

Last year we read Henry Kuttner's first three Elak stories, "Thunder in the Dawn," "Spawn of Dagon" and "Beyond the Phoenix."  Today we will read Kuttner's fourth and final story of Elak of Atlantis, "Dragon Moon," which appears in the January 1941 issue of Weird Tales.  (Adrian Cole, whose Dream Lords trilogy I read in 2016 and tarbandu started last year, took up the saga of Elak in our own 21st century.)  We'll also tackle the stories in this ish by David H. Keller, Robert Bloch and Ralph M. Finley.  Hopefully these stories will he better than those we read last time we cracked open an issue of the magazine of the bizarre and unusual.  At least thid go round we have a cover with a muscleman, a monster and a damsel in distress.

(I considered reading Nelson S. Bond's story from this issue, but it is advertised as a joke story so I am abstaining--I know you don't want to hear me yet again groan about how little I appreciate joke stories.)

"Dragon Moon" by Henry Kuttner

"Dragon Moon" has ten chapters, and each is preceded by an epigraph.  Most of these are from poems by G. K. Chesterton, Rudyard Kipling, or William Rose Benet--or the Bible, but Kuttner does quote his own 1936 poem "The Sunken Towers" before Chapter 6.  ("The Sunken Towers" appeared in the December 1936 issue of Donald Wollheim's zine The Phantagraph and was reprinted in 1967 in Operation Phantasy: The Best from The Phantagraph.  The poem is easy to find if you search around a bit.)  

Chapter 1 finds errant prince Elak and obese comic relief sidekick Lycon in a harborside tavern in southern Atlantis.  Elak gets into a fight over a wench and is about to be killed when the Druid from "Thunder in the Dawn" busts into the room and uses sorcery to save Elak's life.  In Chapter 2 the Druid delivers astonishing news--an alien entity known as Karkora is taking over the bodies of the monarchs of Atlantis!  When Elak's brother, Orander, king of the northern land of Cyrena, realized he was being possessed by a being from another universe, he killed himself!  The Druids want Elak to take the throne of Cyrena, but Elak refuses, thinking himself unfit!  

In Chapter 3, Elak has a dream in which he has a vision of Karkora the Pallid One and finds it so loathsome he decides to travel to Cyrena to seize control of the kingdom after all.  The Druid is nowhere to be found, so Elak and Lycon try to get passage on a ship, only to find it is captained by the guy Elak had that bar brawl with!  Elak and Lycon are chained at the oars among the galley slaves and help propel the ship northward with their own muscles.  In Chapter 4, Elak and Lycon lead a revolt of the galley slaves and take over the ship.  Kuttner includes lots of gruesome details in the fight that might appeal to gorehounds, but the sequence feels a little shoddy, with a metaphor used twice in as many pages and some confusion as to what is going on.  Chapter 4 would have benefited from some additional polishing and editing.

In Chapter 5 the Druid speaks to Elak in a dream--he must go to the red delta!  Whatever that is!  The next day is spotted a castle on an island in a delta; the sand here is red.  Ah!  Elak and Lycon bid farewell to the mutineers and disembark.  They meet a local potentate, Aynger, one of the last of a dispersed people, the Amenalk.  He tells Elak that within the castle lives a woman, Mayana, one of the few survivors of a pre-human race of sea people, a race of puissant wizards.  She was married to the human king of the nation just south of Cyrena, Kiriath, but left him when Karkora the Pallid One took over his body.  In Chapter 6, Elak, alone, ventures across a scary bridge, through a creepy tunnel, across a haunted underground lake, to the island under the island, where sits among a ruined city the temple under the castle, where he meets Mayana.  Mayana is incredibly tall and thin, and Hannes Bok provides an absorbing illustration of her kneeling before an idol of some kind of bird god. 

Chapter 7 is an expository chapter in which Mayana tells her own sad story and of the coming of Karkora the Pallid One.  You see, Mayana loved her human husband, king of Kiriath, and wanted to bear him a son, but as a nonhuman was unable.  A wizard in her husband's court offered to aid her with his sorcery, and she took him up on the offer, but the child she bore thereby was a stillborn misshapen mutant.  The wizard offered to revive it, and Mayana again accepted the sorcerer's aid; the wizard brought the baby back to feeble life and took it under his tutelage.  Eventually it was revealed that the sorcerer had summoned from another universe a horrible immaterial being to inhabit the embryo in Mayana's womb!  Having brought the deformed baby back to some semblance of life, along with the powerful alien spirit dwelling within it, the wizard put the child into what amounts to a sensory deprivation tank, denying it its natural five senses in order to strengthen an alien sixth sense!  This malformed human inhabited by an extradimensional spirit is now Karkora, and it seeks to conquer this world and others with the array of astounding powers this sixth sense confers upon him!

Mayana knows a talisman that can destroy Karkora, the monster whose earthly form came from her own womb, even if its alien soul did not, and Elak convinces her to provide it to him--she agrees to do so at the right moment.  Mayana even enchants Elak's blade, and gifts him some of her own magical strength, so he will be able to succeed in battle against Karkora and the Pallid One's unwitting human servants.  Kuttner doesn't say that impossibly tall, creepily skinny, shockingly pale and disturbingly scaly Mayana of the sea-folk has sex with Elak in order to give him this strength, but it is sort of metaphorically or euphemistically implied. 

"Stay with me for a moon--drinking the sea-power and Poseidon’s magic.”

“A moon—”

"Time will not exist. You will sleep, and while you sleep strength will pour into you."

(There's a lot of bestiality in the world of Lovecraftian and Lovecraftian-adjacent fiction.)

All the business with Mayana is good because it is about disturbing and heart-breaking human relationships and at the same time about the evil wizards, extradimensional aliens, lost races and lost cities, and undertone of perverse sex that we are looking for when we open up an issue of Weird Tales.

In Chapter 8, Elak makes his way to the capital of Cyrena and with the help of the Druid's magic wins the throne and raises an army.  In Chapter 9, Elak's army of Cyrena and Aynger's army of the reassembled Amenalk diaspora battle the army of Kiriath, led by Mayana's husband, who is controlled by her alien son.  Kuttner dwells on blood and wounds, on the writhing bodies of dying horses and men in the dirt and mud underfoot.  Elak kills the possessed king of Kiriath with the blade ensorcelled by the king's own wife, and then comes Chapter 10, the surreal psychic battle in a parallel dimension between Elak, supported by the Druid and Mayana, and the alien Karkora the Pallid One.  Stories by Kuttner and his wife C. L. Moore often feature these sorts of psychic battles as a climax (see Kuttner's "Where the World Is Quiet," and "The Time Axis," Moore's "The Tree of Life" and "Black God's Shadow," the Moore/Kuttner collab "Quest for the Starstone," and numerous others I am too lazy to link to.)  Uniting the two themes that make "Dragon Moon" noteworthy, the Mayana tragedy and the gore Kuttner fills the story with, our surprise ending is that the talisman Mayana gives to Elak at the moment he requires it is her own beating heart!  The heart, oozing blood, cast upon the hidden body of her son, makes the body disappear and sends the alien entity inhabiting it packing, saving the Earth.

While not as good as one of the better Conan, Elric, or Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories, "Dragon Moon" is a solid sword and sorcery caper, maybe the best Elak story, thanks primarily to the Mayana material, though Kuttner's use of the Aynger character, which I have not gone into in this already too long blog post, is also interesting.     

"Dragon Moon" has been reprinted in various Elak collections and, among other anthologies, L. Sprague de Camp's The Fantastic Swordsmen, an abridged version of which was published by our Teutonic pals as Science Fiction Stories 20 and then in full as Drachenmond.

"The Goddess of Zion" by David H. Keller

Let's see, in the history of MPorcius Fiction Log we've read eleven stories by Keller.  OMG it is links time.

"The Thing in the Cellar" 

"The Seeds of Death"

"The Dead Woman"

"The Golden Bough"

"The Typewriter"

"The Last Magician"

"Tiger Cat"

"Valley of Bones"

"Dust in the House"

"A Piece of Linoleum"

"Lords of the Ice"

Today with "The Goddess of Zion" we make it a round dozen!  Maybe this is a good one--Jacques Sadoul and Messrs. Greenberg, McSherry and Waugh thought it worthy of reprinting in anthologies, and it also appears in the first volume of the David H. Keller Memorial Library.

This is a pretty good one, actually, well-written and exhibiting a higher tone than much of the sex and violence exploitation stuff we often read, but the sex and violence are still there!  "The Goddess of Zion" also offers plenty for intellectual types interested in issues of race and gender to chew on.

Out narrator relates to us the uncanny experience he had while visiting Zion National Park back in 1938.  At a far corner of the park, where there are no other tourists, he comes upon a sort of white mountain, shaped a little like a throne, with a hole in its crest through which he could see the sky.  Then another man appears, a handsome blue-eyed blonde.  Blonde invites the narrator to accompany him in a hike up the white mountain.  The mountain looks unscalable, but Blue-Eyes knows a path.  Along the way they discover sophisticated wall paintings featuring a mammoth and a beautiful blonde woman.

At the summit Blonde tells his crazy story.  His soul is that of a Viking ancestor who explored America centuries ago--his soul has shifted from father to son over many generations.  He forgets many intervening events, but recalls perfectly his adventure here on the mountain.

He was the last survivor of his Viking band, which had marched far across the continent, fighting Indians and facing other hardships for years.  He was taken prisoner by a race of brown pygmies who lived around and on this white mountain.  These pygmies regularly captured Indians and sacrificed them to their gods--a wooly mammoth who lived with them on top of the mountain and a gorgeous blonde woman with blue eyes who was their queen.  The mammoth would lift the Indians in its trunk one at a time and hurl them down through that hole in the mountain.  When the blonde queen showed signs of losing her looks with age, a new blonde queen, a teenager, would then appear and the older queen would be thrown down the hole to her death.

The current queen and the Viking became lovers.  The mammoth was somehow affected by their love, and, when the new queen arrived because the current queen got sick, the mammoth flipped the script by throwing the teenager down the hole, casting pygmy society into disarray.  The queen, near death from her illness, told the Viking that after she died he would live for many centuries but eventually return here to follow her so they could be together forever.  Then at her request the Viking threw the queen down through the hole.  

The day after hearing this story, the narrator descends the mountain, leaving the reincarnated Viking on the mountain top; that night he watches from below as the man jumps down through the hole so he can rejoin his beloved.

I like it.

"House of the Hatchet" by Robert Bloch
 

Here we have one of Bloch's Hollywood writer stories that references the fact that California is full of freaks and conmen, but, unlike the totally lame "Wine of the Sabbat" that I told you sucks earlier this month, "House of the Hatchet" is a good one with real human feeling and real human personalities.  Our third good story in a row today, and our third story with a strange sexual relationship at its core.

(This story also has a good Hannes Bok illustration.  This is shaping up to be a superior issue of Weird Tales.) 

Our narrator has been married for three years to Daisy, a pretty girl who has a sadistic streak and loves reading horror and murder stories, following the crime news in the paper, and watching detective and monster movies.  (Bloch's work is full of evidence that he suspected the line of work he himself was in was somehow bad for individuals and/or society, or reflected deficiencies in its fans or society at large.)  Their marriage is rocky; the narrator has a crush on another woman and Daisy has detected it, and for quite a while now the narrator's expenses have been exceeding the proceeds he gets from selling scripts, leading Daisy to moan about their finances.  

On their third anniversary they drive up to the region where they spent their honeymoon after eloping.  On the way they come upon a tourist attraction that advertises itself as a haunted house.  Daisy loves this kind of thing and so they go in.  The owner, a guy like W. C. Fields (this story has quite a few Hollywood references), describes how a Russian emigre, a failed film director, owned the house and murdered his wife before disappearing, and how since then hoboes and burglars who have invaded the house have been found killed in the same way the director's wife was killed--with a hatchet on a Satanic altar--and how people have seen the wife's ghost. 

The writer and Daisy are shown to the room in which the murders took place, which is complete with hatchet and altar.  The room has a powerful effect on both the narrator and on his wife.  Will one of them kill the other, possessed by the ghost or perhaps with the alleged ghost merely providing an excuse?

Bloch does a good job imagining the thoughts of both a murderer and his victim, and the twist ending isn't bad--the narrator murders his wife and then the ghost of his wife starts killing people, blossoming into reality the bogus story cooked up by the owner of the macabre tourist trap.  One of Bloch's better efforts, he keeping the jokes and the Kal-if-OR-NIGH-AYYY local color to a manageable level and delivering a powerful dose of "look into the mind of a killer" and "explore the psychology of a vengeful ghost" material.  Thumbs up!  

Among the numerous Bloch collections in which "House of the Hatchet" has been reprinted are two different British collections for which it serves as title story and a French volume with a cool mummy cover. 

"Test Tube Twin" by Ralph Milne Farley  

Last year we read six stories by Farley, a soldier, lawyer, politician and writer who is said by some to have sometimes collaborated with his daughter.  Of the six stories, I liked "House of Ecstasy," "Liquid Life," and "Horror's Head," and thought "Time for Sale," "Mystery of the Missing Magnate" and "Stratosphere Menace" were OK.  As things go here at MPorcius Fiction Log, that is a pretty good record!  Hopefully Farley's run of luck here at MPFL will continue today as we read "Test Tube Twin," which it seems has never been reprinted.  (Uh oh.)

Happily, "Test Tube Twin" is a diverting crime/science fiction story about a ruthless murderous gangster who tries to use cloning techniques to get revenge on people and escape justice.  Public Enemy Number One is our main character, and Farley succeeds in making him sort of interesting, and pretty evil, equally willing to kill with his own hand those who have been loyal to him and those who have betrayed him, providing the reader plenty of shocking thrills.

To be brief, the mobster through bribes and threats gets a scientist to develop a means of cloning a person by taking samples of his tissue and growing a genetically identical twin of him in a test tube.  He also has the egghead come up with techniques to make the clone grow at a super fast rate--it will appear to be 30 years old when it is only six or seven months old.  When a clone of the mobster has been produced that looks just like him, as if it is his age (though its mind is that of a child), the gangster murders the clone.  Now the police will think he is dead and stop looking for him.  He plants the gun on a rival gangster so that guy will be tried for murder.  Then, to cover his tracks, he tries to kill a woman who loves him (a trained nurse, she worked with the scientist in raising the clone), his most loyal associate (a dim-witted thug), and the scientist.  Who will live?  Who will die?  Who will end up in prison?  Will the scientist prove to have an ace in the hole that will preserve his highly educated hide and dump the gangster in the clink for his various murders?

An entertaining crime story.  

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Four good stories?  Amazing!  Bravo to all involved, McIlwraith, Kuttner, Keller, Bloch, and Farley, and let's not forget Bok who has multiple fine illustrations in the issue.  Weird Tales lives up to its reputation today and gets 1941 off to a good start.

Fantastic Universe, May '54: J Williamson, F B Long, C Jacobi, & H Kuttner

Our last exciting venture into 1950s speculative fiction included reading a story I didn't care for by Richard Matheson that appeared in the May 1954 issue of Leo Margulies' Fantastic Universe.  We noted then that this issue was full of stories by big names and by medium names we care about here at MPorcius Fiction Log, and today we're going to read some of them.  (Note that we read the Robert Bloch story in this issue of Fantastic Universe, "Goddess of Wisdom," when we were reading the stories in the Bloch collection Fear Today, Gone Tomorrow.)  Allow me to point out that I am reading these stories from the 1954 magazine, not later and perhaps revised printings in books.    

"The Hitch-Hiker's Package" by Jack Williamson

Yeah, yeah, the title of this one sounds like it belongs on a porn story, ha ha, always with the jokes, you guys.  "The Hitch-Hiker's Package" does not seem to have been a big hit for Jack Williamson--it was not reprinted until our own pornified 21st century, in the seventh volume of Haffner Press' Collected Stories of Jack Williamson.  (If I was rich, I would buy all eight volumes of this series, but of course if I was rich I would be living in Manhattan, spending my time exploring the world's greatest city, not sitting at home reading stories from old magazines, so I guess if I was rich I wouldn't buy all the books in that series after all.  Hmm.)  

"The Hitch-Hiker's Package" is an acceptable filler piece that would fit in just fine in Weird Tales, which published a bunch of Williamson stories back in the day, among them "The Mark of the Monster," "Wizard's Isle," and "The Plutonian Terror." 

Jason has picked up a pathetic skinny hitchhiker clad in worn-out clothes and gripping a package wrapped up in newspaper.  Another car recklessly gets in Jason's way and an accident is narrowly avoided.  When Jason looks over at the passenger seat he finds the hitchhiker is gone, but the package is there on the seat.

Jason begins to drive automatically, in a sort of daze, off the highway, to a small depressed town.  Jason has has never seen this place before, but every street and building of it feels oddly familiar, in particular the local bank, which is shuttered.  He drives up to an old house and goes inside to be ecstatically greeted by a black servant ("a negress") and by a skinny old woman who thinks he is her son.  Jason automatically opens the package--it is a stack of cash and a bunch of bonds.  He hears himself apologizing for robbing the bank years ago, driving it out of business and his father to suicide.

Then Jason wakes up to find people helping him--he has been injured in a car accident, and the hitchhiker is laying dead beside him; the package is absent.

An unobjectionable but forgettable Twilight Zone sort of thing, a supernatural story the mechanics of which can't bear much scrutiny but which is competently written and somewhat entertaining.    

"The Calm Man" by Frank Belknap Long  

Here's another story by a Weird Tales alum that would languish unreprinted until this wild 21st century of ours.

We just read a story by Richard Matheson in which an Earthwoman was impregnated by a Martian, and here we have a story by Frank Belknap Long on the very same theme.  Maybe try keeping it in your pants, you damned dirty Martians.  (Of course all you Martian sympathizers are going to say this is just legit payback for John Carter getting his Earth mitts on that dish Dejah Thoris, aren't you?)  

Sally is a shy young woman but also eager to get married, and so she agrees to marry a guy she meets at a party after only have known him for like 20 minutes.  This dude, James Rand, has a good job in the city and sets them up with a nice cottage in the country and pretty soon Sally is mother to a healthy baby boy, Tommy.  But is Sally happy?  No!  In fact she is miserable!  James is totally dispassionate, distant, cool; he even assesses his son the first time he sees him with less human feeling than a doctor might--there is no pride, no joy in the man's response to the sight of his son, and no joy in their marriage!  

The drab lonely marriage grinds on, year after year.  James is not cruel, but he is terribly distant, unaffectionate, disinterested.  Sally's only comfort is Tommy, but sometimes Sally gets hints that Tommy is much like his father, distant and aloof.

Tommy is eight when Sally gets a phone call from James' office--it is James, imploring her to rush to him!  James has always discouraged her from coming into the city to his office, and so Sally has never even seen the building his office is in.  Today when she enters James' office for the first time she finds  a dead body, unmarked by injury!  The body looks superficially like her husband, but on close inspection details like birthmarks and the volume of hair on the hands and the texture of the skin are all wrong--this is not James!

Sally hurries back home, in time to hear her husband and son talking through a door, and she learns the astonishing truth.  James is a Martian!  His ship crashed on Earth like nine years ago and he has been spending his time repairing it--in order to make money and to keep his true identity and activities a secret, he has been sending an android into the office every day.  James tells Tommy that the ship is now repaired, and the two of them can fly to Mars and live lives of adventure.  Martians, James explains, are eagles, while Earthers are mere sparrows, and the two of them can't be tied down to this lame planet and its lame inhabitants, not even by Tommy's mother and his own wife!  As a hidden Sally watches, her husband and her son blast off in a rocket ship, leaving her forever.

"The Calm Man" is better written and has more human feeling than many of Long's often shoddy productions, but there are problems.  James tells Tommy a Martian needs a son or he will wither and die, and that Mars is a world of adventure that has a "fire" and a "glow."  But if that is the case, why has James been so cold towards Tommy for eight years, and why has James in general always been so dispassionate and boring?  If Martians are "eagles" who love adventure and have a "fire" and a "glow" about them, why is James such a cold fish?  Long could have handled this aspect of the story a little better, perhaps making a point of how James was cold towards Sally but excited about his son and about some esoteric hobby, like astronomy or electronics or something like that that would foreshadow his eventual return to Mars in a space ship he patched up with his own two hands.  Oh, well.

An element of "The Calm Man" that jumped out at me has to do with Sally's trip to the city on which she unexpectedly discovers the devitalized android.  Those who have read H. P. Lovecraft's letters are aware that Long saw himself as an artist and had contempt for work done for money and that, for a while at least, Long was a communist and a supporter of the Soviet Union.*  I was reminded of this when reading about Sally's feelings as she rode into town and then walked through the office building where she believed her husband worked.

The ride to the office was a nightmare...Tall buildings swept past, facades of granite as gray as the leaden skies of mid-winter, beehives of commerce where men and women brushed shoulders without touching hands. 

 ....

How horrible it must be to go to business every day, she thought wildly. To sit in an office, to thumb through papers, to bark orders, to be a machine. 

These ideas come out of nowhere in the context of this story, but ring true as the authentic voice of the sensitive, alienated, and self-important young anti-capitalist poet!

I'm going to give "The Calm Man" a mild recommendation--I certainly recommend it to people interested in Long's career and personality.

*See H. P. Lovecraft's October 11, 1926 letter to August Derleth, June 19, 1936 letter to C. L. Moore, Nov 26, 1932 letter to Derleth, and early December 1932 letter to Derleth; also Robert E. Howard's Jan-Feb 1935 letter to Lovecraft.

"Made in Tanganyika" by Carl Jacobi

"Made in Tanganyika," yet another story by a guy I associate with Weird Tales, wasn't anthologized until 2016, but it was reprinted in 1964 in Arkham House's Jacobi collection Portraits in Moonlight.

I kind of like the tone and ideas of this story, and the motivations and behavior of the characters are good, but the plot doesn't quite add up, relying on multiple unlikely coincidences and operating under a surreal dream logic in which anything can happen; as a result, the story is a little hard to take seriously and is not quite satisfying.

It is the future of self-driving electric cars, of government experiments that hint that travel across time may be possible, of scientists claiming that "secondary worlds" may "impinge" upon our own.  Forty-year-old bachelor and sea shell collector Martin Sutter buys a new automobile and takes it for a spin.  He comes upon a strange sight--a roadside stand selling television sets.  An odd way to sell TVs, but Martin needs a new TV himself so he stops and buys one.  The thing he brings back to his apartment certainly looks strange, perhaps a new-fangled model, and he has trouble getting it working.  On its back it says it was made in the Empire of Tanganyika, which is odd, because Tanganyika is a colony of another power, not some kind of empire.

A guy comes to Martin's apartment--he is Lucien Travail, a fellow shell collector who is looking for lodging.  Would Martin accept a roommate?  Thinking it may be fun to live with a fellow shell fanatic, Martin agrees.  Lucien thinks he can fix the TV, and sure enough, after he fiddles with it, it begins to show a picture--of a beach littered with shells!  And not any shells Martin the shell expert is familiar with, but shells presumably from another planet or from one of those parallel dimensions Martin has been hearing about!

Martin returns to where he bought the TV, but the stand is gone.  He finds that this plot of land is some kind of state memorial park--it was here many years ago that the first hydrogen bomb was detonated!  (There is a sort of understated humor to this story that I like.)  Martin experiences strange phenomena in this park--at certain times of day this portion of his universe seems to intersect with a portion of another universe, that beach he saw on his queer new TV, the beach with the alien shells!  Martin fills a basket with the exotic shells and brings them home.

Parallel to the interdimensional communication and travel plot we've got a plot involving what appears to be the attempt of Lucien to steal some or all of Martin's shells.  Martin has amassed a large and very valuable collection and museums sometimes send him letters offering to buy it, offers Martin always rejects.  It seems like Lucien is not necessarily a lover of shells himself, but a man on the make just hoping to get rich quick in the shell game, perhaps simply by stealing Martin's shells and selling them.

Martin saws open one of the alien shells with a special tool, and upon close examination it looks like the interior of the shell consists of furnished rooms for tiny people!  A ray comes out of the Tanganyikan TV and Martin is shrunk and installed in the tiny rooms!  He manages to escape and return to normal size, and then hatches his own scheme: trying to get the increasingly obnoxious Lucien transported into the shell.  But Martin's plan goes awry, and he ends up trapped in the shell with Lucien, with no way for either of them to get out.

I think as with Long's "The Calm Man," I am going to give Jacobi's flawed "Made in Tanganyika" a mild recommendation because I enjoy the style and characters as well as the general atmosphere and spirit of the thing.

"Where the World is Quiet" by Henry Kuttner

This story appears under the pen name C. H. Liddell, and is another example of a story from this issue of Fantastic Universe that had to wait until the turn of the century before it was reprinted.  "Where the World is Quiet" is a traditional sort of weird adventure story, incorporating many elements we see in  the Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry stories of Kuttner's wife, C. L. Moore--in another dimension our hero encounters a seductive alien with psychic powers who tries to prey on humans; the alien is killed by gunfire after losing a psychic struggle.   

Our narrator, Dr. White, is an anthropologist working in Peru near the Andes.  The local priest, a cripple, tells him that seven young Indian girls have disappeared since the earthquake three months ago, apparently having walked one by one up into the foggy mountains.  The uneducated Indians believe these virgins have been summoned by some recently awoken demon or ancient Incan god, and they are too scared to go looking for the girls, and of course the crippled priest can't go.  So White, with his Ph.D. and working limbs privilege, goes looking for them.

Beyond snow and fog, at the top of a mountain, White comes to an unnaturally warm valley where he discovers alien ruins and alien plants.  He finds the Indian girls, but they are like zombies, more or less physically intact but practically mindless.  He also meets a friendly alien, a sort of five-foot-tall white flower that exudes femininity, can walk and communicate telepathically, and is accompanied by a servant robot, a sphere with three tentacular legs.  The flower explains that a space-time quake deposited this chunk of land from the far future, her and her robot from the distant past, and an evil monster from who knows when, here on the mountain top.  She will soon die because she subsisted in her naive epoch on cosmic rays that nowadays are too weak to sustain her.  White gives her some of his blood to help her last a bit longer.  The flower explains that the monster who was also stranded here by the space-time quake can survive by devouring the life force of human beings--it can use its mental powers to summon people and then suck them dry and, if it so chooses, inhabit and operate their bodies.  This monster must be slain or it will eventually conquer the Earth.  First, the Indian girls' bodies must be destroyed, so the monster has no refuge--it can only be truly be killed while it is in its own body.  Then the flower person gives White the lion's share of her own life energy so he will be strong enough to win the psychic battle with the monster; after the mental struggle, White shoots the monster dead with his pistol.  With the monster's demise, this warm valley starts getting cold, and our guy White bids farewell to the dying flower and the immortal robot who will stay up n this valley alone forever and returns to the base of the mountain.

An acceptable weird science fiction tale.  Like the C. L. Moore stories I mentioned, "Where the World is Quiet" is a worthy subject of all kinds of sex, gender, race and class analysis.  Get to it, grad students!  

With no money to hire an artist to depict the monster, the flower woman, or the spherical robot, the small presses which have published "Where the World is Quiet" in chapbook form resorted to mundane and presumably free images that reflect the story's Latin American setting

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While none of these stories is spectacular, each is creditable and neither editor Margolies nor any of the authors need have any regrets about the stories we've read today--I found reading them to be a pleasant diversion.  

More 1950s genre fiction in our next episode--stay tuned!

SF Classics selected by T Carr: Rocklynne, Brackett, Kuttner & Moore, and Wollheim

When last we met, we noted that Terry Carr (remember when we read his novel Cirque?) included Lester del Rey's odd story "The Smallest God" in his 1978 anthology Classic Science Fiction: The First Golden Age.  Let's check out some other stories Carr reprinted in that book, after of course pointing out that we have already blogged about some of his selections: A. E. van Vogt's "The Vault of the Beast,"  Eric Frank Russell and Maurice G. Hugi's "The Mechanical Mice," and Robert A. Heinlein's "--And He Built a Crooked House--."  (And that, before this blog was conjured up from the black labyrinth of my mind and began to lurk the intertubes, I read still more of them, like Theodore Sturgeon's "Microcosmic God" and Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps.")

"Into Darkness" by Ross Rocklynne (1940)

I have a poor memory, and so I wasn't sure if I had read "Into Darkness" before or not, so I dug through the archives to make certain and uncovered sobering evidence of how bad my memory really is--in 2018 I read and blogged about Rocklynne's story "Quietus," and then in 2023 I read and blogged about "Quietus" again, having totally forgotten I'd read it five years earlier.  Embarrassing!  (Is Nancy Pelosi going to engineer a campaign to have me deposed as head of this blog?)

Well, I'm pretty confident I haven't read Rocklynne's "Into Darkness" before (no, really), even though I own it in the collection Sun Destroyers (which is the other half of the Ace Double that reprinted Edmond Hamilton's A Yank at Valhalla), so let's have at it.  "Into Darkness" first saw print in Astonishing, edited by Fred Pohl.  I am reading the story, like all of today's stories, in the internet archive's scan of Classic Science Fiction: The First Golden Age, though of course I took a quick look at the magazine to see the (below average for him) Hannes Bok illo for "Into Darkness."

In his intro to the story, Carr suggests "Into Darkness" is "far out," and it definitely is an effort to blow your mind and inspire the famous "sense of wonder."  The universe is inhabited by creatures of pure energy, creatures millions of miles across, creatures that live for billions of years, creatures that absorb energy from stars, move planets about for fun, and can shift between any of the forty-seven different levels of hyperspace, each of which obeys different laws of physics.  Rocklynne's story is a sort of biography of one such creature, and we witness its early millennia, its adolescence and its growth to maturity.  Named "Darkness" by its mother, Sparkle, our main character is different than its fellows--smarter, more inquisitive, abandoning childish play earlier than others in its cohort and seeking to fulfill some purpose in its life.  (Presumably the kinds of smart kids who are thought to be the audience for science fiction, kids who love science and want to learn about the world around them and to accomplish something with their lives, are expected to identify with Darkness.)  Darkness yearns to resolve the riddle of what constitutes the meaning of life, to learn what is beyond the edge of the universe, and is not discouraged when one of the oldest of the energy beings, known as Oldster, warns such investigations lead to sadness and death! 

Darkness was named by Sparkle after the darkness at the edge of the universe, and insists on living up to its name and exploring that mysterious void.  Darkness devours a star bigger than any star it has ever seen, and with that energy breaches the edge of the universe and travels through the emptiness for millions of years.  Finally, Darkness comes to another universe much like the one it left.  There it meets another energy creature, but whereas Darkness has a purple core, this being has a green core.  Darkness falls in love, and proposes passing a life of exploration with its new acquaintance, but this creature would rather lead Darkness to a forty-eighth level of hyperspace Darkness has never heard about before and there take possession of our hero's purple core.  Darkness learns that the purpose of life is to create more life, which green-core energy creatures do by accepting into themselves purple cores...of course, without their cores, purple-core energy creatures wither and die.  (Woah, is this a story about how women will steal your life force and you should avoid having sex with them?)  Before it expires, Darkness creates a planet and seeds it with life-giving protoplasm, which I guess we are supposed to think is Earth.

I sort of expected Darkness to create the human race, but the revelation that these energy creatures reproduce sexually and that the male can only do the deed once--and that it is fatal!--was a surprise.  I'm not sure it is a good surprise, though, as the fact that they reproduce through sex makes the aliens in this story less alien and thus less mind-blowing.

"Into Darkness" is just alright; besides the somewhat disappointing ending, it feels a little long and repetitive, as we hear again and again that Darkness lives for millions of years and is millions of miles across and travels millions of miles and so on--stuff that is supposed to fill you with wonder ceases to be mind blowing with familiarity.  More conventional sense-of-wonder stories start out more or less mundane and then grow steadily more strange until the final page tries to blow you away with the idea that the universe is open to exploration and contains infinite adventure; "Into Darkness" starts out strange and by depicting life on an epic scale and actually becomes more mundane at the end (just like so many ordinary guys. the alien creature loses his heart to a girl.) 

"Into Darkness" has been reprinted in a few anthologies besides Carr's here, and was followed by three sequels, all of which can be found in that Ace Double collection I mentioned, The Sun Destroyers.

"Child of the Green Light" by Leigh Brackett (1942)

We've read a lot of science fiction and crime fiction by Leigh Brackett, wife of Edmond Hamilton and crony of Bogie and The Duke, but I don't think we've read this one before.  "Child of the Green Light" made its debut in Super Science Stories (this issue also has illustrations by Bok, images more characteristic of his work that are worth checking out) and was reprinted in a 1951 ish of Super Science and in a book I have owned since 2013, Martian Quest.  (Why do you buy these books if you don't read them?, asks my financial advisor.)   

"Child of the Green Light" is a somewhat confusing story as it depicts a crazy scenario that Brackett sketches out in a pithy style and doesn't really explain until the end, leaving me struggling at times to visualize what is going on.  Of course, the real meat of the story isn't its questionable science but themes of loyalty and sacrifice and one's relationship to his people--do you owe something to people you haven't met just because you share their blood or culture?  

A young man, naked, is living in or on a conglomeration of wrecked space ships (in Warhammer 40,000 we'd call this a "space hulk"), somehow surviving in the vacuum of space!  The space hulk is in the form of a disk or wheel, with a green light at its center.  The young man, who goes by the name of Son, is in communication telepathically with a being he calls Aona, who lives on the other side of a "Veil" with a capital "V," which is growing thinner all the time; I guess the Veil and the light are one and the same or closely related.  Aona is a female being whom he loves; though she calls him "Son" and could be said to have raised him, I guess their relationship has an erotic character or erotic potential, and they look forward to the time the Veil falls and they can be together.

Another ship appears and lands on the hulk, and from it emerges a multicultural expedition of men in space suits; some of them are Earth humans, other hail from Mars or one of the moons of Saturn. Through their dialogue we learn that that green light passed through the Solar System, attracting to it and carrying off space ships as it went and finally settling here near Mercury.  The green light is bathing the System in radiation that is radically accelerating the aging process in humans--soon civilization will collapse because nobody lives long enough to learn the science and engineering required to maintain a modern high-tech society.  This team, among whom is the last living physicist, constitutes humanity's last hope of destroying the green light before it is too late.

Son and Aona want to preserve the light, so Son stops the physicist from approaching it, killing the man in the process.  The ray guns of the humans have no effect on Son, but they are able to tie him up, however.  Through more dialogue we learn that Son is the only survivor among the passengers and crew of all the many ships brought here by the green light; he has an adult body now, but he was just a baby when his parents' ship was captured and his parents were killed five years ago.

Aona then explains more of what is going on.  She is native to another universe, where people are immortal.  Her universe suffered a cosmic cataclysm, and the resultant explosion destroyed most of her universe and threw a tiny surviving sliver of it (a sliver still big enough to include multiple planets) through the dark barrier between universes so it intersected with our universe.  Son has become a superman because his atoms are changing, starting to vibrate at the frequency of Aona's universe--currently, a fraction of his atoms are still in our dimension, while most are vibrating at the frequency of Aona's dimension.  Eventually he will join Aona's universe, I guess when all his atoms are vibrating on Aona's frequency, or maybe because the Veil has finally eroded.  This story is a bit confusing, as I said; sometimes I think we are meant to visualize universes are physically distinct with dark empty space--the "Between" with a capital "B"--separating them, like they are raisins in a cake, but other times it is suggested the different universe are parallel, inhabiting the same space but at different vibrations.

To save human civilization, the green light must be destroyed, which will separate the two universes.  The only way to destroy the green light is for Son to enter the light before he has fully transformed; the presence of alien atoms will cause the green light to expire and the universes to be separated; Son will, however, fall into the Between, forever barred from entering either our or Aona's universes.  Son, only now realizing that other living things beside he and Aona exist, and that he is the product (the "son") of a race and civilization distinct from Aona's, has to decide if he is going to destroy himself to save his people (about whom he knows almost nothing), or allow his people to expire so he can live in eternal bliss with Aona.

There is also a subplot about how a member of the expedition tries to murder all his comrades, become a superman, destroy the green light, and then become dictator of the Solar System.

"Child of the Green Light" features many themes we've seen before in Brackett's work and that of her husband--many Hamilton stories are about a planet or star whose people suffered a cosmic catastrophe and so they are moving their heavenly body into some other system, and many Hamilton stories depict radiation changing people, and I think that Brackett's novel The Big Jump, which I read before founding this blog, involved a guy stabbing people on his expedition in the back so he could bathe himself in radiation and become a superman.

This story is not bad, but I found it a little challenging to follow--Brackett provides a minimum of information, so I had to really pay attention to get what was going on, and I still am not sure it all makes sense.

"The Twonky" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore (1942/1975)

I've read stacks of stuff by married couple Kuttner and Moore, things they produced individually as well as collaborations, but I haven't read this one; I kind of think I have been avoiding it because its title makes it sound like a joke story, and Kuttner's (many) humor pieces generally fall flat with me (sample MPorcius pans of Kuttner humor pieces: "Or Else," "The Ego Machine," and "See You Later.")  But let's give "The Twonky" a shot today.  

The publication history of "The Twonky," at least as described by Carr in his intro to the story here and by isfdb, presents a few mysteries.  Carr says "The Twonky" has always been attributed to Kuttner, but isfdb credits both Kuttner and Moore.  Carr points out that here in his book a line obliquely referring to World War II that has been left out of reprintings of the story in Kuttner collections has been restored, but isfdb lists the version here as a 1975 version first seen in the American book The Best of Henry Kuttner.  (The British book The Best of Kuttner 2, according to isfdb, reprints the 1942 version.)  I'm just going to read the version here in Classic Science Fiction: The First Golden Age and leave these mysteries to other investigators.

People in Kuttner and Moore stories are always popping in and out of different times and universes, and the first section of "The Twonky" finds us at a factory in our world that manufactures "console radio-phonograph combinations" and introduces us to a factory worker from the future who has somehow been transported to it.  Disoriented and suffering from amnesia, the man goes to a workbench and, using advanced techniques he knows instinctively, he builds a device from his native time, "The Twonky," but camouflages it so it looks exactly like the other radio-phonographs being pumped out of this mid-20th century factory.  When his mind is fully clear and he realizes how he got here, the workman travels back to the future.

A lot of Kuttner and Moore stories depict people interacting with the technology of a more advanced civilization (e. g., "Juke-Box," and "Shock,") and the second part of "The Twonky" is about a college professor who has just had a new radio-record player console delivered and is alone with it because his wife is off visiting relatives.  The console is a robot that, after scanning the prof and assessing his psychology, performs as a perfect servant, walking around the house washing dishes and lighting the prof's cigarettes and so forth.  But Carr in his intro told us that "The Twonky" is a warning about dictatorship, and, as those of us who follow the Cato Institute on Twitter are aware, a powerful entity which seems eager to help you can quickly become a tyrannical master, and the robot uses physical force to forbid the prof from listening to music or reading books or consuming food and drink of which it does not approve--the Twonky is the embodiment of the Nanny State!  And worse--it begins tinkering with people's minds so that they behave, and, if they try to dismantle it, killing them with a death ray!  

Thumbs up for "The Twonky."  The murders at the climax are a chilling surprise--because most of the story comes off as light-hearted and the characters are all likable, you don't expect them to be massacred but to have the plot resolved for them peacefully.  A good horror story.

When it first appeared in Astounding, "The Twonky" was printed under the penname often used by Kuttner and Moore, Lewis Padgett, and among the many collections and anthologies in which it has been reprinted is the 1954 Padgett collection Line to Tomorrow, which has a great Mitchell Hooks cover.

"Storm Warning" by Donald A. Wollheim (1942)

"Storm Warning," by major SF editor Donald A. Wollheim (who made a recent appearance on my twitter feed), made its first appearance in Future Fantasy and Science Fiction, where it was illustrated by another important SF editor, Damon Knight.  Editors seem to have liked the story--Groff Conklin and Robert Silverberg both included it in invasion-themed anthologies.

Today I am not on board with all these editors; "Storm Warning" is a kind of boring story full of descriptions of air movements and the movements of clouds and odd smells and temperatures.  Have to give this one a thumbs down.

Our narrator is a meteorologist living in Wyoming.  A meteor is seen landing a few miles away in the desert.  He and a fellow weatherman ride horses into the desert to see if they can find the meteorites.  The temperatures they encounter and the smells they experience feel a little off.  Also, an unusual storm seems to be brewing.  They find some hollow crystalline spheres taller than a man; no doubt that are the meteorites, and they are cracked open.  The storm hits, and the men witness what appears to be bodies of air pressing violently against each other, as if they were alive and fighting.  The meteorologists surmise that in Earth's atmosphere live invisible creatures whose bodies are akin to water vapor, and that somewhat similar alien creatures arrived on Earth in the glass globes, and that the native air creatures are fighting the invaders, who seek to remake our home planet's atmosphere in their own image.

I've told you many times that I don't like stories in which the characters are spectators instead of participants, and today I am telling you that I am not interested in descriptions of weather, either.  Another knock against "Storm Warning" is that it is repetitive--we hear about the smells and get descriptions of clouds again and again.  A weak choice from Carr; though Conklin and Silverberg disagree with me.

**********

The Kuttner and Moore story is the stand out, with Brackett in second place; these stories are about human beings and human relationships and the life choices we have to make, the way we have to balance our desires with our responsibilities.  Rocklynne's story is OK, but Wollheim's is like a filler story that lacks the sex and violence or twist ending that might make a filler story entertaining.  

Classic Science Fiction: The First Golden Age seems like a pretty good book.  Each story is preceded by an introduction of five or six pages which includes a list of references and not only covers biographical info on the author of the following story but tries to put his or her work in some kind of historical context and includes anecdotes about important SF people whose stories are not reproduced here, like John W. Campbell, Jr. and Hugo Gernsback; taken together these intros are like a history of SF in the period covered.  Pretty cool.

Henry Kuttner: "Spawn of Dagon" and "Beyond the Phoenix"

On March 25 we read Henry Kuttner's longish first story about Elak, sword-swinging Atlantean prince and wandering adventurer.  Let's read the second and third Elak tales, which are pretty short and appeared in the July and October issues of Weird Tales in 1938.  I am reading them in scans of those 85-year-old magazines, but you can find all of Kuttner's Elak stories in book form, for example, in a 1985 book entitleed Elak of Atlantis, illustrated by Brad Foster, and a 2007 book bearing the same title with an introduction by Joe R. Lansdale.

"Spawn of Dagon" 

"Spawn of Dagon" is the cover story of an issue of Weird Tales from which we have already read numerous stories: "He That Hath Wings" by Edmond Hamilton, "Return to the Sabbath" by Robert Bloch, "Dust in the House" by David H. Keller, "Mother of Toads" by Clark Ashton Smith, and "Saladin's Throne Rug" by E. Hoffman Price.  This is an issue perfectly tuned to appeal to the MPorcius staff!  Well, except maybe for the mediocre cover.

The "extremely slender" Elak and the "remarkably simian" Lycon are drunk and placing bets on which of two trails of blood oozing from the guy they just killed will reach a crack between floorboards as the story begins.  The Elak stories are supposed to be funny, you see.  

The bet resolved (comic relief sidekick Lycon cheats), our heroes flee the city guards, and are directed to safety by a mysterious figure.  This weirdo then offers them a pile of money if they will murder a sinister wizard and shatter the wizard's red globe, purportedly the source of his power.  Lycon is too drunk to go on this mission, but Elak volunteers and is guided through a secret tunnel and sneaks into the wizard's tower.

The absence of Lycon means there is a lot less comic relief in the meaty middle section of the story, to the story's benefit.  Besides the dwarfish wizard, within the tower Elak encounters the animated corpse of a huge executed criminal who is serving the wizard and the beautiful woman the wizard plans to separate from her soul as part of the process of communicating with magicians in another star system.  Elak neutralizes the red globe, and finds the weirdo has double crossed him--Elak's client is a monstrous gelatinous tentacled creature, a worshipper of Dagon, and he and an army of his fellows burst into the tower.  It turns out the diminutive wizard's red globe was the only thing keeping the Dagon worshippers from taking over and then sinking Atlantis!  Elak and the wizard have to join forces to save Atlantis; in the end Lycon arrives and saves the day.  Elak ends up with the girl.

This is a pretty good sword and sorcery story, though maybe it could have benefited from another round of polishing--most glaringly, the disguised agent of Dagon gives Elak some kind of super weapon to use on the wizard, but Kuttner seems to forget about it, and it never plays any role in the plot that I can remember.  Still, thumbs up!

"Spawn of Dagon" has been anthologized numerous times, in books of sword and sorcery stories, horror stories and stories centered around Atlantis.

"Beyond the Phoenix"

"Beyond the Phoenix" was also a Weird Tales cover story, and this cover is even more boring--is that Lycon?  Isn't he supposed to look like a fat monkey and not like Elak's equally hunkalicious brother?  This third Elak adventure hasn't been as widely anthologized as "Spawn of Dagon,"  though it does appear in Peter Haining's 1976 anthology of stories from Weird Tales, which has gone through several editions, as well as an elaborate 2023 German boxed set of five hardcover anthologies of material from Weird Tales which looks pretty awesome.  Uber alles indeed.

Elak and Lycon are serving as soldiers in the royal guard of a remote Atlantean nation.  The kingdom's high priest, Xander, a huge muscular hunchback, leads faithless members of the guard in a coup attempt; Elak, Lycon and the Princess Esarra manage to outfight the traitors, but the king has been mortally wounded, and Xander escapes.

As he dies, the king explains that Xander has summoned the evil god of dark lust, Baal-Yagoth, to the Earth, and this god now inhabits Xander's twisted body.  The only way to defeat Baal-Yagoth is to visit the land of the gods and enlist the aid of the god Assurah, also known as the Phoenix.  Traditionally, the dead monarchs of this kingdom have been put on a barge and sent to the land of the gods via an underground river, so Elak, Lycon and the princess take the king's corpse with them on the waiting barge and head to the land of the gods.

The trip to the subterranean country of the gods, whose inhabitants call it "Nyrvana," includes some needlessly dreamy sequences.  Nyrvana is ruled by two beings, a man, Ithron, who is striving to obey the instructions left by the long dormant Assurah the Phoenix, and a woman, Tyrala, who is revealed to be in cahoots with Xander and the evil god Assurah imprisoned so long ago, Baal-Yagoth!  Tyrala is bored with Nyrvana, where the men are soft--she wants to rule Atlantis, which is full of real men, men  like Elak!  Ithron saves Elak from being seduced by Tyrala, who has a chalice she carries around with her--men who drink from the chalice become her slaves and she them vampirically absorbs their life energy.  

Ithron summons Assurah to deal with Baal-Yagoth, but before the Phoenix is aroused Tyrala has launched a coup of her own and (off screen) Ithron somehow falls prey to her chalice and (on screen) has his life force drawn from his body to augment the witch's own power.  Not that she is able to enjoy her triumph for very long.  Assurah inhabits Elak's body so that our hero can fly and wield a flaming sword that shoots lightning, and quick work is made of Tyrala in Nyrvana and then of Xander up on the surface.  Princess Esarra is installed on the throne and I guess we are expected to think she and Elak will, temporarily, become an item.  

(The WT printing of "Beyond the Phoenix" includes a pretty good Art Deco type illustration by future DC comics artist, and personal friend of Henry Kuttner, Jim Mooney depicting Tyrala and the ensorcelled Ithron dancing nude to the music of batrachian flutists in their last moments.)

"Beyond the Phoenix" feels underdeveloped--it is almost like an outline, or a condensation, of a novel.  Kuttner crams too many characters and too much back story into the space he has to work with, so he doesn't have any room to build excitement or suspense, to make us interested in the characters, or even to give Elak much to do.  The deformed priest who likes to torture women and wants to get his hands on Princess Esarra and the immortal witch who seeks power and manly men to seduce are potentially compelling villains, but we don't spend enough time with them.  As for Elak, he does what the king told him to do, then what Ithron tells him to do, and then what Assurah the Phoenix tells him to do.  

Merely acceptable.

**********

So now we have read all three Elak stories published in 1938.  "Spawn of Dagon" is the best of these, it having by far the best realized villains--the disguised Dagon worshipper, the evil wizard who it turns out is instrumental in keeping Atlantis above the waves, and the hulking undead criminal--and by far the most entertaining plot twists, as well as the best fights and magic; Kuttner also correctly paced "Spawn of Dagon," giving us just the right amount of material to comfortably inhabit its page count.

A fourth Elak story was published in Weird Tales in 1941, and I expect we'll read it someday, but we will probably explore a lot of other Weird Tales content before we get to it.

The Murder of Eleanor Pope by Henry Kuttner

"I'm no detective.  I'm a psychoanalyst.  But this whole case depends on psychological patterns.  If they can be figured out we may know the right answer."  

In the last thrilling episode of MPorcius Fiction Log, I read a sword and sorcery novella by Henry Kuttner and pointed out a lot of things about it that I didn't like.  After like 20 posts in a row about SF from magazines, I'm going to mix things up today and read a detective novel by Kuttner and point out a lot of things about it that I don't like.

The Murder of Eleanor Pope was published in 1956, and is the first of four detective novels starring San Francisco habitue Michael Gray.  You can get a copy for like 15 bucks online, or if you are a cheapo like me you can read an electronic copy via the hoopla system available through many public libraries.  I am still signed up to hoopla through a library I patronized in Columbus, Ohio some years ago.    

I've told you a hundred times that Kuttner was very interested in psychology, so you won't be too surprised to learn that Michael Gray is a psychoanalyst and this novel is practically a pro-psychoanalysis propaganda piece.  Kuttner in this novel teaches us all about the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, presenting this material as if it is all undisputed fact.  Sentences like "only in the psychoanalyst's office could Dunne find strength enough to find and understand his own deepest terrors" and descriptions of the selflessness and generosity of psychoanalysts promote the message that psychoanalysis is not only awesome but essential to our society.  Allied to this is the idea, presented directly and indirectly, that we shouldn't be so quick to punish criminals--the people we consider criminals are just ill, and psychoanalysts can cure them, and throwing them in the clink so they can't get their mitts on decent people and decent people's property will just make them worse.  Alas, despite how self-evidently wonderful psychoanalysis is, "there still weren't enough therapists to go around."  Did Kuttner hope to inspire readers to study psychoanalysis?  (One of the odd little wrinkles of The Murder of Eleanor Pope is that Gray is not a doctor, but a "lay analyst."  Wikipedia is telling me Freud wrote a whole book defending the idea of people practicing psychoanalysis without any kind of medical degree.)      

It is normal for fiction to advance some agenda, or to depict characters who are spokesmen for some philosophy or theory, but satisfying arguments require evidence, and compelling fiction requires conflict, and instead of coming up with evidence for the value of psychoanalysis, or examining psychoanalysis from various angles by having different characters offer conflicting opinions, Kuttner just takes it for granted that psychoanalysis works and its foundational concepts are the truth and  presents the topic to the reader in a simplistic, credulous way that is sort of annoying; at times reading The Murder of Eleanor Pope feels like reading a textbook for children or a pamphlet given out by a therapist to a new patient.  Now, maybe I should cut Kuttner some slack, because by 2024 we've all experienced a mountain of genre fiction and popular nonfiction that exploits or explains psychological concepts, and perhaps in 1956 ordinary people who read paperback detective novels with a pretty girl's face on the cover hadn't been exposed to much of this stuff yet. 

The Murder of Eleanor Pope consists of 28 short chapters.  The first depicts the title character getting murdered on a foggy street near a park by an unidentified assailant.  Then we meet Michael Gray, self-sacrificing shrink, and his latest patient, Howard Dunne, and over the course of like a dozen chapters follow the progress of Dunne's treatment.  We get all the scenes we expect--Gray asking about Dunne's feelings, lots of talk about Dunne's dreams, Dunne having a tearful breakthrough after digging up the suppressed memory of the thing he did in the past he feels guilty over, repeated assertions that psychotherapy is just like real medicine like setting a broken bone or sterilizing a wound.

Dunne is a womanizing advertising guy, an Army Air Force veteran of World War II.  He's a passionate man who needs to "blow off steam" regularly, a man for whom one woman isn't enough.  In the service Dunne met a dude older than himself, Sam Pope, and they became fast friends.  Dunne doesn't have much family, and his mother died while he was off fighting the Hun, so Dunne moved to Pope's home town of San Fransicko when he got out of the Air Force; Pope owns a chain of restaurants and became one of Dunne's biggest clients when he went into the advertising game.  Pope married some chick much younger than himself, Eleanor, and Eleanor made it her practice to cheat on Sam.  Dunne married Sam Pope's sister, Mary, who is Dunne's age.  Mary and Howard Dunne are also always cheating on each other, Mary currently with some slacker guy Arnold Farragut.  

All this soap opera jazz is connected to the crime at the center of the story, the murder of Eleanor Pope five months ago.  Gray has a buddy who is a cop, Captain Zucker, and in his role as psychoanalyst he summons to his office or visits the homes and offices of people like Mary Dunne, Sam Pope, Arnold Farragut, and Pope's business manager Maurice Hoyle to ask them to help him with Dunne's therapy--it takes a village to cure a neurotic, I guess.  Talking to all these people allows Gray to learn all sorts of details about the murder of Mrs. Pope and those suspected of bashing her cabeza in with that rock.

The police consider Farragut a suspect, as well as casino owner Carol Webster and the organized crime thug who hangs out at her casino all the time, either working for her or manipulating her, Bruce Oliver; Eleanor Pope was killed right after she left the casino, and Farragut, Webster and Oliver were all at the casino that night.  We readers of course consider Pope and Dunne suspects as well, and Dunne does feel guilty over Eleanor Pope's death--he was supposed to take her out that fateful night (he was banging her, of course) but he had had to work, so she went to the casino alone and was walking the mean streets of SF all by herself after she left.

It is with some relief that halfway through the novel we find Captain Zucker calling Gray up to tell the shrink that Dunne is dead.  No more chapters detailing Dunne's therapy!  Dunne died of cyanide poisoning, and the question is who put the poison in his drink--did he commit suicide, or was he murdered?  Maybe Sam Pope is the killer?  But three days later Pope dies of cyanide poisoning himself, and the cops begin to think the killer of all three was Mary Dunne.  But Michael Gray begs to differ!  He figures Mary Dunne is innocent, and becomes determined to get her out of jail--to do that he has to find the killer himself!

So in Chapters 19 and most of those following, Gray does the stuff we expect the main character in a detective story to do, going from place to place in the town, talking to people, looking for clues, being threatened by people (in Gray's case Carol Webster and Bruce Oliver) who want him to stop pursuing the case, and so forth.  Gray psychoanalyzes people, including dead people based on others' descriptions of them, figuring out why they did everything they did--it was subconscious reasons, of course, often guilt that generated a desire to be punished.  For example, Sam Hope treated people the way he did because he felt a subconscious need to excel and then actually "become" his father, and Eleanor Hope was a rule-breaking slut and a compulsive gambler because she was raised by strict religious parents.  Kuttner gives us the idea that the human mind is so well-understood that a shrink can figure out the behavior of a person he never met by just consulting one or two secondary sources.

Feelings of responsibility and guilt are a major theme of The Murder of Eleanor Pope.  Howard Dunne feels responsible for the death of his sister-in-law Eleanor Pope and for that of others--he even calls himself "a proximity fuse," his metaphor for how everyone he gets close to finds themselves in trouble.  Mary Dunne feels responsible for her husband's and her brother's deaths.  These feelings of guilt are generally portrayed as irrational and unhealthy, something to be cured by the psychoanalyst.  Gray himself is far from exempt from these feelings--he feels responsible for the death of his wife during the war, even though she was in the European theatre and he was in the Pacific, and this is what makes him  feel a heavy responsibility for his patients and even his patients' relatives and associates, what is driving him to work to get the innocent Mary Dunne out of jail.  And when she is released because the cops now think Maurice Hoyle is the killer, Gray works to get him sprung because his analysis of Hoyle indicates to him that Hoyle too is innocent.

Gray's greatest feat of posthumous psychoanalysis is when he discovers that Howard Dunne was a homosexual who didn't realize he was a homosexual!  Dunne was banging all those chicks in an effort to prove to himself the masculinity that he subconsciously doubted!  Gray knows that it must have been Dunne who murdered Eleanor, Sam Pope, and himself, but he doesn't have the kind of hard evidence the DA likes, just the evidence of psychoanalysis!  Gray puts on his thinking cap, psychoanalyses himself and then does his damnedest to get into the head of Howard Dunne, and realizes where Dunne must have hidden his confession letter.  With the letter the cops are convinced, and Maurice Hoyle is off the hook.

(Nothing comes of the spectres of Carol Webster and Bruce Oliver.)  

When Dunne died I thought we might get some suspense scenes and I'd be able to grade this novel "acceptable," but instead we got even more outlandish psychoanalysis--second hand psychoanalysis of people already dead.  So I'm going to have to give The Murder of Eleanor Pope a thumbs down.

One of the problems of The Murder of Eleanor Pope is the pervasive idea that people do things because of subconscious forces that they themselves are not even aware of, and pursue things they, consciously, seek to avoid, like punishment and even death.  Now, maybe this is actually the way real life works, maybe we are all like pinballs or billiard balls, bounced around by the flippers and cues that are our subconscious fears and desires.  But characters who act this way don't make for good fiction--in compelling fiction the characters pursue goals with determination and try to overcome obstacles by making decisions and taking advantage of their resources and abilities.  And a world in which nobody has any real responsibility for what they do and in which punishment is pointless is a world in which morality makes no sense and there is no opportunity for the reader to enjoy any sense of relief or triumph when the killer is revealed, foiled or punished, and Kuttner in this novel stays true to this theory, short circuiting any chance for the authorities or the protagonist to rescue a potential murder victim or punish a malefactor by having the murderer commit suicide before he is even a suspect.  Gray's successful efforts to clear adulterous wife Mary Dunne and bland milquetoast Maurice Hoyle are weak sauce and do not offer the reader the catharsis he seeks in genre fiction because these characters have had little screen time and are not particularly likable or interesting.

In theory, a novel with a weak plot and boring characters and a poorly handled theme might be saved by fancy writing or laugh-out-loud jokes, like if maybe Jack Vance or P. G. Wodehouse or Tanith Lee was writing it, but Kuttner's style is merely adequate and there are no jokes.  

I didn't enjoy it, but if you have an interest in the career and thought of Henry Kuttner and his wife C. L. Moore, or in depictions of psychoanalysis and/or homosexuality in post-war American popular fiction, maybe reading The Murder of Eleanor Pope will be worth your time.