The Brain-Stealers by Murray Leinster

He had the spiral big enough.  Fifteen--twenty yards of wire were coiled into an untidy disk some twelves inches across.  Then came a soundless thought in his mind.

"Not nice....Not nice to hate the Little Fellas...Little Fellas are nice....It is not nice to judge them....It is wrong to think of hating them without seeing one to know what he is like...."

A week or so ago I drove to Gaithersburg, MD to buy bruschetta and chocolate cereal at Trader Joe's, and stopped in at the Wonder Books there and picked up four paperbacks.  Among them was Murray Leinster's The Brain-Stealers, an edition put out in the late 1970s as part of Ace's Science Fiction from the Great Years series; it has a great Stephen Hickman cover with a symmetrical composition and three exciting nudes that seem to be celebrating the ability of the human race to transcend all obstacles and boundaries.  The Brain-Stealers was first published in book form in 1954 as part of an Ace Double, and is an expansion of a story of Leinster's that debuted in a 1947 issue of Startling, "The Man in the Iron Cap." 

The Brain-Stealers has a lot in common with many other Golden Age and pre-Golden Age SF stories.  The hero is a scientist who resolves the plot through his wits, ultimately by building a machine.  The story glorifies the search for knowledge and the development of new technology and denounces those who would stifle Man's scientific and technological progress.  Our hero must defeat a tyrannical government and an alien invasion.  His efforts are rewarded with a paradigm shift and a sense-of-wonder ending; we readers are invited to marvel at the limitless opportunities for learning and adventure offered by the universe beyond the Earth's orbit, and reminded that the human race has the capacity to overcome all obstacles and seize those opportunities and make the most of them. 

It is the future, the 1970s!  A few decades ago, fear of nuclear war lead to the creation of a world government run by a bunch of scientists who forbid all research into and development of nuclear power and had at their bidding an air fleet of zeppelins and helicopters to enforce their prohibitions.  Once firmly in power, these scientists expanded their remit to cover all sorts of scientific research--perceiving that some level of risk is inherent in all scientific experiments and all new technological developments, they eventually severely curtailed most scientific work and closely monitored the rest.  With scientific progress almost halted, society fell into stagnation.

James Hunt was one scientist who bucked the system, a man committed to pursuing research into thought, in particular how thoughts might be transmitted and received by other brains.  (There's a fair portion of technical talk and jargon in The Brain-Stealers that I really didn't understand and has no effect on the plot, talk about fields and waves and all that.)  Hunt was forbidden to conduct such experiments, but continued to do so in secret, anyway.  He was surprised when he was arrested and sentenced to life in prison; how had the government detected his work?  The world government's agents claimed they could detect his continued experiments, which Hunt found unlikely, due to all the precautions he had taken.

As the story begins, Hunt escapes from the dirigible carrying him to his place of custody, parachuting down into a mountainous rural district.  In this out of the way region he senses thought transmissions!  It must have been these transmissions the world government detected and attributed to Hunt and his supposed confederates!  But Hunt worked alone, and these transmissions are from an inhuman source, tiny vampiric space aliens!

These aliens are less than a foot long, small and weak, but they can put thoughts into your head that you think are your own and thus make you their slave!  These rapacious extraterrestrials have taken over the isolated farms in this area, sucking the blood of their slaves and expanding their hold into nearby towns.  You see, when one of these disgusting little alien bastards (Hunt calls them "Things," but they self-identify as "Little Fellas") has drunk enough blood, it reproduces by a mitosis-like process of splitting in half, producing an exact clone of itself, complete with the original's memories.  Each individual little monster thus has memories that stretch back to the beginning of their race.  When a new Little Fella splits off from its parent, it is carried by a slave to a new human family which it swiftly enslaves.  Unambitious and simple-minded, the aliens care only for the comforts of a warm nest and plenty of blood to drink, and those here on Earth spend all their time lazing in a box full of straw or some similar nest, set cozily next to a warm chimney in an attic or down in the basement next to the boiler, controlling their slaves via thought, when hungry calling somebody over to suck his or her blood.  The aliens are gluttonous and poor stewards of their slaves, and most of the people Hunt sees look anemic and stagger around weakly. 

(This group of Little Fellas got to Earth on a spaceship crewed by slaves who are now dead, members of a spacefaring race who had the misfortune to land on a planet already controlled by the Little Fellas.)

These vampiric aliens are a sort of parallel or mirror image of the world government.  They themselves have no ambition, and by introducing thoughts of contentment into the heads of their slaves turn them docile and cause their civilizations to stagnate.      

Hunt, the world expert on thought transmission, recognizes that these new thoughts in his head are from an external source before they can lull him into servitude.  He quickly makes a cap out of iron wire that will protect him from the alien thought transmissions, and sets about foiling the invasion.  Most of the novel follows him as he moves about the countryside and then into a town, running for his life, putting on disguises, learning about the Little Fellas, trying to alert those human authorities still beyond control of the Things of the alien danger, then finally building a machine capable of jamming the transmissions.  He runs into a man resistant to the alien transmissions because he has a metal plate in his head, and this guy, a prominent businessman, helps out our hero.  After various twists and turns and no small measure of good luck, the device is finished and the aliens are defeated.  The world government sees the error of its ways, ceases to stifle scientific research and puts Hunt in charge of exploiting the spaceship--with this new alien technology mankind will explore the universe and lead a crusade against the Little Fellas, liberating and befriending those civilizations which the diabolical Little Fellas have held in slavery.

I like Leinster's theme that it is not only decadent parasitic murderers who can rob you of your freedom and make your society stagnate, but sophisticated people who, for your own good, of course!, seek to limit your risk in the name of safety and stability.  And Leinster's plot is not bad.  But Leinster's writing style is kind of weak; he tries to convey emotion, expending quite a bit of ink describing Hunt's anger and fear and so forth, but it doesn't quite work.  Leinster's writing also seems a little repetitive, with some passages feeling redundant, going over material we've already heard.  There are also some issues with my copy that I think have to be blamed on the publisher, typos and things--also, the title, while cool, doesn't suit the story all that well; "The Man in the Iron Cap" is a much more appropriate title.

So we'll say The Brain Stealers is OK.

Amazing, March 1977: B Malzberg, J Pumilia & S Utley, R Lupoff, G Cook, R Brown, J Haldeman and V Haldeman

In a recent perambulation around the internet archive, world's greatest website, it came to my attention that the issue of Amazing dated March 1977 includes a story by Barry N. Malzberg which has never been printed elsewhere.  I was moved to read this fugitive piece of Malzbergiana.  I don't build entire blog posts out of single short stories anymore, so, I decided to check out the entire issue.

The departments of this issue of Amazing are pretty lively.  Editor Ted White devotes his editorial to complaining about the 1976 World Science Fiction Convention, held in Kansas City, a city Ted considers quite overrated.  The centerpiece of his litany of gripes is the speech by Guest of Honor Robert A. Heinlein.  It seems Heinlein was ostentatiously unprepared, and delivered an oration that, in addition to featuring content that offended White's left wing sensibilities, was disjointed and rambling.  White suggests Heinlein may be senile, and that his wife has been a malign influence on him.

Ted's complaints do not end with this subpar performance from the inaugural SFWA Grand Master--far from it!  The play ("Sails of Moonlight, Eyes of Dusk") was bad.  One of the five belly dancers was an incompetent amateur.  The panels had too many participants, six or even eight, when the latest developments in panel organizing indicate that a good panel can include as few as two people.  And there was no celebration at the Convention of the fact that 1976 was Amazing's 50th anniversary!  

In the letters column a guy from Chicago writes in to attack the September 1976 issue and to complain that there is too much homosexuality in SF (or "stf," as everybody writing in Amazing styles it.)  A radio technician serving in the Army writes in to point out errors in Gregory Benford's column in that Sept. '76 issue.  But a British correspondent heaps praise on Amazing, telling Ted to ignore such critics, as Ted is doing everything right and Amazing shows unique "courage, freshness of approach, and, above all, imagination"!

The column on fanzines by Rich Brown (I think Susan Wood's name on the heading is a printing error) turned me on to fanzines I'd never heard of, like British fanzine Maya (at the link find Maya 12&13, in which Christopher Priest ferociously attacks David Kyle's Pictorial History of Science Fiction (a book I recently purchased) asserts that 1930s SF illustration is garbage (gotta disagree here) and expresses his detestation of the middle classes (again, I object!)) and Nickelodeon, the first issue of which had a Richard Corben cover and apparently included a nude centerfold (I couldn't find any scans of this zine, just the cover, but Nickelodeon's predecessor, Trumpet, some issues of which are available online, certainly features its share of topless men and women.)  Darrell Schweitzer's interview of Hal Clement has interesting things in it: Clement admits he doesn't put much work into the characters of his stories, focusing instead on the science; describes his relationship with John W. Campbell, Jr.; and reveals that he has sold astronomical paintings under the pen name George Richard.       

Here's a George Richard I found online, Roche Limit

Alright, so the non-fiction sections of this copy of Amazing were a really profitable and entertaining read.  I can also recommend the issue's ads for wargames, both of Stephen Fabian's illustrations, and one of Tony Gleeson's. 

Now we attack the fiction.  I am skipping the biggest piece of fiction, Robert F. Young's Alec's Anabasis, as I haven't actually read Xenophon and assume I will miss all the references, but I am going to give everything else--seven pieces!--a try.  Most bloated blog post ever!

"Shibboleth" by Barry N. Malzberg   

This is what dun brought us here, a Malzberg available to the faithful in no other venue!

"Shibboleth" has a bit in common with 1974's "Closing the Deal," which, when I read it, I found to be a better than average Malzberg, more clear and with more identifiable, more "normal" characters.  (Malzberg's characters tend to be insane.)  In "Closing the Deal," a man with a daughter who has psychic abilities negotiates with an agent, trying to get the girl a job for which she can use her mental powers.  Here in "Shibboleth," a man with a telepathic son negotiates with a show biz agent, trying to get him to manage his son.  In the universe of the 1974 story, psychic powers are relatively common, and the little girl is sort of a third-string talent, but here in "Shibboleth" the mind-reading boy is a one-of-a-kind freak.  The boy's powers stir up trouble in school, and Dad is desperate for help, but doesn't want to sonny boy to a medical professional because he is sure the kid will then end up in the hands of the government and be weaponized for use in the cold war.  Dad thinks being in show biz will somehow help protect the kid, that everybody will assume evidence of his powers is a trick.  But Dad has made a mistake--the entertainment agent immediately calls the Feds, who collect father and son.  Father frets that "the enemy" will soon learn of the existence of the boy and launch a "first strike" and this will start a nuclear war and destroy the world.

This is an acceptable story, but not as good, not as nuanced or surprising or sophisticated, as "Closing the Deal."

"Our Vanishing Triceratops" by Joe Pumilia and Steven Utley

We read a collaboration between Pumilia and Utley back in 2016, "Hung Like an Elephant," the tale of a man who wakes up one morning to find his penis has been replaced by a small elephant's head.  The same year we read a solo story by Utley in which a gynecologist looks between a woman's legs and finds a portal to outer space, "Womb With a View."  In 2017 we read a solo Pumilia tale, "The Porter of Hell-Gate," a mediocre production about evil energy creatures invading from another universe.

"Our Vanishing Triceratops" has never been printed again, which is not a good sign, but I love dinosaurs, so maybe I'll like it?

Dow, Daniel, and Jhiminex are from the future, when pollution has killed off most species and radically lowered human life expectancy.  D, D & J have been sent back in time to collect specimens for the purpose of cloning and repopulating the Earth.  Dow is a big good-looking responsible guy.  Daniel is sort of a nerd, imaginative, maybe rebellious.  Daniel envies Dow because his wife left him for Dow (well, not exactly; as in a lot of SF, people of the future of "Our Vanishing Triceratops" engage each other in short term contractual sexual relationships it is more fair to say she cancelled her contract Danny boy early and started a new contract with hunky Dow.)  Jhiminex is a slug-like fetus creature, a clone of Daniel extensively modified so it can control the esoteric energies that power the time machine (in a sense, he is the time machine) and communicate telepathically with D & D.  Daniel and Dow fly around the Paleoscene with their jet packs, scraping samples off trees and whatever to carry back to the  barren Earth of the future.

All that stuff I just told you above we learn in fits and starts in a different order as the story proceeds.

The plot of the story concerns how they find dinosaur tracks--a small number of Triceratops must have survived into the early Paleoscene--and Daniel becomes obsessed with tracking the ceratopsian down to collect a sample from it.  Dow and Jhiminex tell him there is no time, they can only stay in this period of history for a certain number of minutes before surplus time energy residue or whatever accumulates and they will have to leave.  Because the same person can't go back to the same time period a second time, Daniel won't be able to search for dinosaurs again, and insists on searching for the triceratops in a concealing woods.  (Time travel stories often have rules that feel arbitrary and seem to have been tailored to facilitate the drama the author wants to create--not all SF authors prioritize the science the way Hal Clement does.)  When Dow tries to stop Daniel, Daniel stabs him.  Dow hurries back to the time machine to staunch his wound.  Jhiminex can't hold back the time machine any longer and he and Dow leave without Daniel, who has found the triceratops; the beast is old, cancerous, the last of its kind, and it dies seconds after Daniel sees it.  Daniel, it is implied, commits suicide next to the giant reptile's corpse.

OK, but no big deal.  

"The Bentfin Boomer Girl Comes Thru" by Richard A. Lupoff

In 2014 I read Lupoff's Sandworld  and said of it "I am forced to consider that it may be: a rush job done for money that Lupoff padded out with his banal political views; a half-hearted debunking or satire of pulp adventures that fails to be insightful or amusing; or, a sincere attack on criminal justice in America that Lupoff made salable to Berkley by setting it on another planet.  Or some combination of these."  In 2015 I read his Crack in the Sky and wrote that it "is not very good. We've all seen domed cities, pollution, overpopulation, group marriages, planned economies, etc. before, and Lupoff doesn't add anything new that I can see to these well-worn widgets and doodads from the SF toolbox."  And in 2017 I read "With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama" and said of it "It is easy to see why critics like this story: there are the anti-racist and anti-war messages and the caricature of Southerners, and Lupoff's ambitious, extravagant and experimental wordplay in the New Alabaman chapters in which he mines every possible pun, phonetic spelling and form of punctuation for potential laughs.  But I found reading the story a chore."

And yet here I am in 2022 reading another long piece by Lupoff, a sequel to "With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama" called "The Bentfin Boomer Girl Comes Thru."  (These two stories, and other material set in the same milieu, formed the basis for the 1978 novel Space War Blues.)  Well, I guess I can make my way through 18 pages of puns, phonetic spelling and parody.

'Nifykin look outha porole sreely pretty, sreely pretty, lookna Port Upatoi swinging roun thole mudball, thole goodole place, it's maybe not the prettiest place na whole universe but nobody ever said it was, it was home though m that counted frole lot that swat Leander Laptip saw outha portole:

Oy.

I have the exact same praise and criticism for "The Bentfin Boomer Girl Comes Thru" that I had five years ago for "With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama." While I attacked Sandworld and Crack in the Sky for being shoddy and rushed and lazy, Lupoff obviously put a lot of effort into these Space War Blues stories, carefully crafting all the puns and phonetic spellings and novel forms of punctuation that make up the dialect of N'Alabama.  Of course, it takes a lot of effort to read this idiosyncratic text, and the question is whether the reward is worthy of that effort.  Well, on the red side of the ledger, many of the jokes are obvious and many of the scenes feel long and slow, being overly detailed (it takes half a page for somebody to undress, for example.)  But in the black column are some of the SF elements, like the space station and the medical technology and the rehab regime the characters go through, which are good; as for the plot and themes, they are OK, though the characters' goals and the obstacles they face get less interesting as the story proceeds instead of more interesting.

The plot:  We've got three chapters.  In the first, a man, Leander Laptip, and a woman, Mizzy Lizzy Cadbell, both service members of the space navy of the redneck planet of New Alabama, arrive at a space station orbiting N'Alabama, severely injured in the war with the blacks of planet New Haiti (whom we don't actually see in this story, unlike in "With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama," which was like 90 pages long and featured numerous chapters set on N'Haiti.)  They glimpse each other's broken bodies briefly, and then are separated as they go through the lengthy process of rehabilitation, therapy, and installation of protheses for many lost body parts.  In the second chapter, all healed up, Leander and Mizzy Lizzy formally meet and become friends.  They are mustered out of the service and given a hero's welcome on the surface.  They look for work, but for some reason all their job offers involve being prostitutes or actors in porn films (strip clubs, pornography, and prostitution play a large role in these Space War Blues stories, or at least the two I have read.)  In chapter three Leander and Mizzy Lizzy begin work as porn actors, and become a worldwide sensation and get rich.  But their sex life is not exactly satisfying, as their genitals are artificial and require conscious effort to operate--for example, Leander doesn't spontaneously get an erection when he sees Mizzy Lizzy disrobe, he has to will an erection to occur.  Maybe this story is in part about how technology ruins our relationships, separates us from the natural world, including from our own bodies! 

Like its predecessor, "The Bentfin Boomer Girl Comes Thru" is a borderline case, admirable but not necessarily enjoyable, a product of ambition and industry that perhaps lacks appeal.  

"The Recruiter" by Glen Cook

This is an effective story, a cynical look at the grim dark future of interstellar travel and brain transplants!  Earth has fallen into total ruin over the centuries; all the smart and brave people having left, only wretched scavengers willing to live on the meager government dole remain, billions of them.  Earth's government is in deep debt to the more vital colony worlds, and so they allow recruiters from the colonies to just shanghai any Earth people they can find into the space navies that wage war on the frontiers of human occupied space.  

Our narrator was born on Earth, joined the space marines to get off the planet-sized slum, and was killed while serving, but his brain was intact and he was reborn in a robot body.  In that armed and armored metal shell he acts as a one-man press gang among the crumbling ruins of Earth cities, stunning people and bringing them to HQ to be drafted into a space navy...or cut to pieces, their brains used as computer components, their organs as spare parts for more productive people!  When the narrator has brought in enough "recruits" he will be rewarded by having his brain installed into a fresh beautiful human body being grown in a vat!  Then he can go to some frontier world and live a peaceful independent life.

The background above is basically the whole story; the plot concerns the narrator capturing some kids and then having an attack of conscience, but, reminded that he only has to catch one or two more recruits before he gets that fresh new healthy body, silencing his qualms about consigning poor people to being carved up for use as spare parts.       

I like it.  Cook is a capable writer of this kind of material.  In the period before this blog escaped from the laboratory to roam the countryside and express its bitterness, I read Cook's ten grim dark Black Company books and, though they got less interesting as I made my way through them, on the whole I enjoyed them and can recommend the first four.  (I actually wrote a little about the Black Company series in the early days of this blog when I opined about a list somebody put together of the top 100 SF books.)  

"The Recruiter" would be reprinted in 2012 in the Cook collection Winter's Dreams.

"Two of a Kind" by Richard W. Brown

This is a pornographic story about racist violence in the grim dark future.  America has suffered "the Breakup," whatever that is, and rural people are resorting to cannibalism during a race war in which "Feds" scour the countryside, exterminating black people.

Our narrator is out hunting when he is captured by two Feds--he is technically poaching so the Feds can summarily execute him, but he convinces them that he knows where a black couple and their children are hiding out, and they spare him--for now!--so he can lead them to their shack.  The Feds plan to rape the woman before killing her, and discuss all kinds of crazy sexual abuse they have committed in the past and will commit on this woman, like making her eat their excrement, raping her while her husband watches, etc.  When they get to the shack, Brown describes in detail how they use their laser pistols, set on low, to torture her, compel her to service the narrator with her mouth, and much much more.  To rape her they have to turn off their force fields, and, as we readers have been expecting, the narrator is revealed to be the woman's husband, and once the Feds' energy screens are down he kills them.  As the story ends the narrator looks forward to eating the Feds.

This is real exploitation stuff, and I am a little surprised to see it in Amazing, though I cannot deny that "Two of a Kind" is a competently-crafted action story.  

Unsurprisingly, "Two of a Kind" has never been reprinted.  Richard W. Brown, who apparently preferred to be known as "rich brown" with small initials, has 13 short fiction credits at isfdb and was apparently a very active contributor to fanzines (he wrote the Amazing column on fanzines in this issue and two others.)

"Those Thrilling Days of Yesteryear" by Jack C. Haldeman II 

Jack is the brother of the Joe Haldeman who wrote the famous Forever War and the three Worlds novels I read in 2020.  In 2016 I read Jack's "Sand Castles" and wrote of it "This story is a pointless waste of time, and it is 17 pages long!"  In 2018 I read his "What I Did On My Summer Vacation" and wrote of it, "I think we can see 'What I Did on My Summer Vacation' as an example of literary or New Wave SF that fails utterly, abandoning plot but not replacing plot with human feeling or adept writing or good images, just self indulgent rambling."  

"Those Thrilling Days of Yesteryear" is a gimmicky story that doesn't really work.  An archaeologist gives us a little autobiography, starting with how as a kid he became fascinated with Indian artifacts and then with old coins.  In grad school he learns the impossible truth--there is no physical evidence of ancient and prehistoric times, all those Indian arrowheads and dinosaur bones are fakes made in the 20th century by scientists, who then bury them to preserve their own jobs finding them.  

Barely acceptable.  Nobody saw fit to print this one again.

"An Animal Crime of Passion" by Vol Haldeman   

Vol is Jack's wife.  She has four credits at isfdb, including a collaboration with her husband and Andrew Offut on the eleventh volume of the Spaceways series of erotic space adventure novels.  "An Animal Crime of Passion" has never been reprinted.

"An Animal Crime of Passion" is a light-hearted detective story about a planet in an interstellar civilization upon which live a variety of peaceful herbivorous intelligent species, among whom there is almost zero violent crime.  "An Animal Crime of Passion" is also a joke story about rape.  Wow, this issue of Amazing is really something.

Stuck on the planet is a cop of a carnivorous race, and he is enlisted to help the investigation when one of the native quadrupeds is assaulted and raped.  Because the people who live on this planet are all pacific, the local cops have no experience investigating violent crime and need the help.  The victim can't give much of a description of her attacker, as she was so fixated on his huge penis she noticed little else about him.  

There is a bunch of detective stuff, you know, looking for clues and questioning witnesses and all that, and then finally the culprit is brought in.  It is a human, and he raped the quadruped native thinking she was not a person, but merely an animal, namely a dog.  The joke, I guess, is that back home on Earth this guy fucks dogs on the regular.

The writing style of this story is smooth and jaunty, and up to the last page I expected to give "An Animal Crime of Passion" a passing grade, but the ending is so lame I think I have to give it a thumbs down.  Missed it by that much!

**********

Wow, these are some pessimistic stories!  The Earth is a total wreck!  The authorities are corrupt and abusive!  Everywhere you look there are violent perverts!  Circumstances drive people to degrade themselves and violate others!  Damn!  Well, our next blog post will be about a 1950s SF novel, and maybe it will bring us out of this Seventies malaise. 

Gerald Kersh: "Seed of Destruction," "Frozen Beauty," "Reflections in a Tablespoon," and "The Crewel Needle"

Squint or click to get a closer look at Powers' painting and to 
more comfortably read this encomium to Gerald Kersh

Back in 2021, I read the short story "River of Riches" by Gerald Kersh, a man whom Harlan Ellison has said was his favorite writer.  Recently, at the Second Story Books location in Rockville, MD, attracted by the Richard Powers cover, I picked up Ballantine Books 268, a 1958 paperback collection of Kersh stories entitled On an Odd Note. The yellow back cover is an essay about how awesome Kersh is; let's read the first four stories in the book and see if there is something to this essay and to Ellison's adulation or if that is all a lot of hogwash.

"Seed of Destruction" (1947)

"Seed of Destruction" appeared in Esquire the same year it was published in the British hardcover collection Sad Road to the Sea.  In 1959 British readers who had two shillings to rub together had another crack at it when it was reprinted in Suspense magazine.

This story is OK, no big deal.  A jeweler with a small shop full of odds and ends, knickknacks and geegaws, has a vivid imagination and makes up extravagant lies on the spot in order to make sales.  This broken inkpot was used by Shakespeare, this rusty spearpoint was used by Richard the Lion Heart, this pipe was smoked by Emile Zola, etc.  Showing to the narrator a signet ring with Arabic script on it, the shop keeper spins a yarn about the ring bearing a  powerful magic, the power of bringing to anyone who should steal it or receive it as a gift catastrophically bad luck--if you buy it you are safe.  The ring is purchased by some other individual, and the narrator later learns that its powers, made up on the spot by the fabulist shopkeeper, seem to have been coming true as the ring changed hands in Britain and then America over the years, until it finally returned to England, to the shopkeeper himself, who died when he was gifted the ring by his son.

Merely competent; it feels like a dry list of incidents lacking tension and interesting characters.

"Frozen Beauty" (1941)

This one first appeared in John Bull, a weekly magazine that it seems during this period sold its cover to advertisers rather than use that space to attract readers with a striking image.  In '53 the story was thawed out and reappeared in the collection The Brighton Monster and Other Stories, and it would go on to be reprinted in multiple Kersh collections and in Mike Ashley's The Best of British SF 1. 

"Frozen Beauty" is more like an idea than a complete story, as it doesn't have much of a plot and the characters don't go through any kind of growth or make any decisions or anything.  "Frozen Beauty" is also one of those stories that has multiple framing devices, so that the actual story is several layers away from the reader.  This is one of the traditional story-yelling devices of which I am skeptical.   

Our narrator meets a Russian doctor who fled from the Revolution., and this medico tells his story to the narrator.  In the course of his flight, Doc found himself in a hermit's hut in deepest Siberia.  In the hut is a beautiful dead woman; Doc can't place the ethnicity of the woman.  The hermit tells Doc the story of how he met this woman, whom he has treated as a daughter for sixteen years.  One day, far from his hut, after a fierce storm, the hermit found a hole in the ground that lead to a large frozen hut full of people and their animals, all of them flash frozen alive long ago.  The fire the hermit burnt for light down there, astonishingly, thawed a little girl and she returned to life!  The hermit brought her home and raised her, and recently she died of unknown causes.  And that's it.           

Remember Howard Wandrei's 1934 story about a frozen woman, "The Other"?  That story had its problems, but it also had a world-shattering climax and characters with personality who have motivation and make all kinds of decisions.  And then there was "Skyrock," Frank Belknap Long's 1935 story of finding a woman from ancient times encased in crystal.  The discovery of a person frozen in ancient times and physically intact today, pretty common genre literature theme, I guess.

For his treatment of this theme, "Frozen Beauty," Mr. Kersh is receiving a grade of merely acceptable from Professor MPorcius.

"Reflections in a Tablespoon" (1946)

It looks like this one first appeared in the collection Neither Man Nor Dog.  isfdb tells us the story is "non-genre."

The narrator is at a crappy restaurant, and recognizes the mark on a piece of silverware--this spoon once belonged to a good restaurant the narrator frequented before its owner, a jolly fat man, died over ten years ago.  He reminisces about the fat man, and about two other regular customers of his establishment, one, a somewhat deranged woman, purportedly an aristocrat fallen on hard times, the other an Eastern European scoundrel who was always cheating people and seducing and abandoning women.

Kersh cleverly and unexpectedly weaves together the tragic and dreadful biographies of these two troublemakers in a way that is entertaining, leading up to a satisfying surprise ending.  In some ways this story is structured like "Seed of Destruction," but "Reflections in a Tablespoon" includes characters that are interesting and I didn't find the twist ending so predictable.  

Thumbs up for "Reflections in a Tablespoon," a story that goes further in justifying the praise on the back of On an Odd Note and from Ellison than do our first two tales today.

"The Crewel Needle" (1953)

"The Crewel Needle" is a first person narrative, in which a retired police officer tells you how he was compelled to curtail his promising career early.  I guess it might be considered a locked-room mystery.

The narrator was first copper on the scene when a little orphan girl was heard crying out that the Aunt with whom she was living was dead.  Auntie's corpse and the little girl were in a locked room, and there was no sign of forced entry or a fight or stolen property or any clues like that--it is not even clear what killed the woman.  Besides being scared of everything--scared of men, scared of boys, scared of fires, scared of germs--the interesting thing about Auntie was that she made extra money by "crewel work," which we are told is "embroidering with silks on a canvas background," and closer examination indicates that she died when a crewel needle was driven straight through her skull and into her brain.  Because there is no evidence somebody got into the house to attack Auntie, an open verdict is declared.  The narrator, however, is sure that Auntie was murdered, and thinking that solving the case on his own will boost his career, he wracks his brain and then interviews the little girl on his own time, trying to figure out who committed the foul deed and how.

The narrator susses out that the little girl loved going to the cinema before her parents croaked, but Auntie always refused to let her go because the cinema is full of germs and is a fire hazard besides.  So, the child, using a sort of physics trick she learned in a kids' science book, assassinated Auntie with that crewel needle.  The girl confesses privately to the narrator, but professes innocence to the narrator's superiors; the child's perfidy blackens the narrator's reputation and he is forced to resign.              

I have little interest in the commonplace trappings of detective stories and locked room mysteries in particular--the clues and interrogations and red herrings and hard to swallow explanations of how the apparently impossible crime was accomplished and how the detective figured out whodunit--but I like how "The Crewel Needle" paints for us the picture of a world characterized by injustice and irrationality.  All the characters behave in ways that betray an unwillingness or inability to tell right from wrong and to accurately assess risk and weigh competing values.  (In a line that jumps out at the 2022 reader, we learn that Auntie wore "an influenza mask" whenever she left the house.)  Because Kersh has some good psychological/sociological character stuff going on here and not just the locked-room gimmick, I got into it and can give "The Crewel Needle" a moderate recommendation.

"The Crewel Needle" hit the newsstands in Britain in a 1953 issue of Lilliput and later the same year was presented to American readers in Esquire.  In addition to reappearing in a few Kersh collections, in 1959 the story, renamed "Open Verdict," would be reprinted in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.

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None of these stories is bad, so I can confidently tell you that we'll be reading four more stories from On an Odd Note in the near future, after we take a look at a 1970s SF magazine.

Harlan Ellison: "May We Also Speak?", "Someone is Hungrier," "Memory of a Muted Trumpet" and "Final Shtick"

Squint or click to read effusive praise of Harlan Ellison

It is time to read four more stories from my copy of the 1961 printing of Harlan Ellison's collection Gentleman Junkie and Other Stories of the Hung-Up Generation.  My copy's first page offers testimonials to the "determination," "talent," "sensitivity" and "guts" of Ellison from comedian and reputed rock and roll hater Steve Allen, writer Charles Beaumont and Leslie Charteris of The Saint fame.  My favorite bit from the page is when Beaumont says Ellison "doesn't write, he screams."  So true, so true.  

Today's four stories, like the last batch, all debuted in Rogue, one of Playboy's competitors in the pretentious skin rag game.  But, as we'll see, in these stories Ellison isn't exactly endorsing the roguish sexual license and devotion to partying we might associate with the playboy lifestyle!     

"May We Also Speak?" (1959)

The subtitle of this "story" is "Four Statements From The Hung-Up Generation" (every generation seems to have in its ranks a vocal cohort of self-appointed representatives who are  quick to proclaim that their generation has it particularly hard, even uniquely hard.)  For some reason, isfdb categorizes "May We Also Speak?" as an essay, but this is a mistake; in fact, "May We Also Speak?" is a collection of four tiny stories of like two pages each; the title of each is preceded by a number, so I guess they really are supposed to be connected in some way, a connection I personally thought somewhat vague.

I guess these little pieces are the basis of the claim on the cover of the 1975 printing of Gentleman Junkie that the book contains 25 stories (AKA "mind-blasts"); my 1961 edition modestly credits itself with only 22.

1. "Now You're in the Box!"

Hank is a writer in an urban multicultural milieu--the smell of sauerkraut cooking in the next apartment annoys him.  He has had writer's block for a month--he has a title for a story ("Now You're in the Box!") but no idea what the title means or how to build a story around it.  He has smoked 40 cigarettes today and is now out--he goes downstairs to a "one-armed grocery" to buy more; the grocer is cutting meat at the meat counter.  A young black man ("Negro") tries to stick up the place, but the grocer realizes the would-be robber is wielding a toy pistol and snatches it from him.  The black criminal flees, and the grocer chases him with his own very real revolver.  Hank joins the chase, and witnesses the stick-up man being shot dead.  It is implied that this adventure is going to cure Hank's writer's block, that now he knows what "Now You're in the Box!" means.  I guess "the box" is a coffin, but maybe we are to understand that the grocer's statement "I worked twelve years in that store" suggests that he is also "in a box," and maybe Hank's writer's block is also like a box.  Maybe Ellison is suggesting that we are all in a box, because life or our society or whatever is a box!

2.  "The Rocks of Gogroth"

I guess Ellison here is using "throwing rocks" as a euphemism or metaphor for "ferociously expressing and acting upon displeasure" or something like that.

Spence is an ad exec with a wife who loves money and is always threatening to leave him.  F. J. Gogroth is the head of a brewery.  Gogroth hired the firm where Spence works to come up with an ad campaign, the slogans and parameters of which Gogroth concocted himself.  Spence knows the campaign is bad and will lose Gogroth many customers.  But if he tells that to Gogroth today at the scheduled presentation, Gogroth will no doubt get Spence fired.  But in a few months when it is clear the campaign has tanked sales, Gogroth will no doubt get Spence fired over that.  Spence has to decide whether to just accept that his job is doomed, or, to take the chance he has today to tell Gogroth that one of Spence's colleagues, a guy who has a kid with cancer, deserves full credit for the campaign--in that way, in a few months cancer Dad will get fired and not Spence.

3. "Payment Returned, Unopened"

Claude Hammel is an anti-Semite.  Hammel's attitude towards Jews doesn't really figure in the story, but it is a way for Ellison in the first ten lines of the story (total number of lines: 87) to signal to us that he is a bad guy.  In my opinion, this is a mistake--instead of telling us at the start that Hammel is a villain, it would be more exciting to demonstrate that Hammel is no good over the course of the story, or to spring it on us at the end as a surprise that overturns our expectations.

Hammel recently seduced a young woman with a hare-lip; she naively found their coupling meaningful, while to him it was just a one-night stand.  Today he learned she is pregnant.  Hammel doesn't want to marry her, because of the hare-lip, and because he doesn't have much money and doesn't want to jeopardize his education (he is a first-year dental student.)  He goes to get advice from a fortune teller.  Her cryptic aphoristic reading gives Hammel the idea to get the young woman blind drunk and then have ten other guys have sex with her one after the other.  It is not spelled out in the text, but I suppose the point of this is to make it difficult for the young woman to convince people that Hammel must be the father of the child she is carrying.

Of the four little pieces that make up "May We Also Speak?", this one is the least well put together. 

4. "The Truth"

The first three components of "May We Also Speak" are not statements at all, but vignettes written in the third person about how people misbehave when under pressure, overreacting to problems in ways that hurt others and/or taking advantage of others in order to get themselves out of a jam.  This final short short is in the first person and thus qualifies as a statement, but like its predecessors presents a dim view of humanity.

The narrator is the leader of a jazz band, and his trumpet player has been arrested for possessing drugs and so he is looking for a replacement.  He finds a kid whose eyes remind the narrator of those of Jesus in a painting.  The kid auditions, and he is phenomenal, as good a musician as Thelonius Monk or Louis Armstrong!  As in "Have Coolth," Ellison strives to convey in words the feeling very good jazz gives the educated listener, and comes up with the idea that "The kid was blowing the truth."  

The narrator passes on hiring the kid, because "Nobody likes to hear the truth."  Having such a genius around would humiliate the rest of the band!

The first three vignettes are acceptable filler, but "The Truth" is actually good; its ending actually is sort of surprising and it is less "over the top" than the others, rings truer than the others, to my ears at least.  

"Someone is Hungrier" (1960)

I guess because he had a second story in the issue, "Someone is Hungrier" appeared in Rogue under the pseudonym Pat Roeder.  Like most of the stories we read in our first foray into Gentleman Junkie, this is a crime story, but I think it is better than those 1959 tales.

Rachel Dowsznski was a kept woman!  But then she decided to steal documents from the businessman whose mistress she was, Marshall Ringler, docs proving he is a tax cheat, and sell them.  She fled the comfortable Chicago apartment Ringler had been providing her to hide out in an English basement in the north of the Windy City.  (My wife and I lived in this sort of apartment in Queens for a little while, but I don't recall anybody calling it "an English basement;" everybody in New York called it a "garden apartment.")

In the dingy basement apartment Rachel (who has been calling herself Ricky Darwin) reflects on how her ambition--her hunger--had lead her to leave the small town of her birth and make risky and morally questionable decisions and had finally deposited her in this uncomfortable situation, where she waits to hear Ringler has been arrested and so she is safe, or for Ringler's thugs, who she figures will torture her with acid, have caught up with her.

In a clever bit, Ellison tells us that one of the ways Rachel expresses her success, one of the ways the money she has acquired from Ringler allows her to live out her dream of being rich, is to never carry change, to pay with bills and always say "keep the change."  In the end of the story, when Ringler's thugs are after her and she jumps into a phone booth to call the police, she realizes she can't because she doesn't have any change!

A good crime story; all the images and character motivation stuff is good.  Thumbs up for "Someone is Hungrier." 

"Memory of a Muted Trumpet" (1960)

"Memory of a Muted Trumpet" appeared in the same issue of Rogue as "Someone is Hungrier."  Like "No Game for Children," which we talked about in our last Ellison excursion, "Memory of a Muted Trumpet" was reprinted in the collection The Juvies (AKA Children of the Streets) as well as here in Gentleman Junkie.

This story of six pages is pretty tedious, consisting mostly of long descriptions of parties in an apartment in a condemned building in lower Manhattan; we learn all about the many weirdos attending the party--their silly nicknames, their strategies for getting laid, and so on.  The actual plot is confined mostly to pages four and five.  Spoof, a writer of genius too lazy to accomplish anything, spots a girl he dubs "Irish" and seduces her.  (As in "Someone is Hungrier," the taking of a new name in this story seems to symbolize the destruction of the authentic self and to mark the start of a descent into catastrophic risk-taking.)  Spoof has sex with Irish several times over the course of the next few months, but otherwise Spoof has no interest in the woman and when she tells him she is pregnant he just laughs.  Irish leaves the baby to die in the park.  Then come tedious scenes from another party, and the reappearance of Irish, whose life and character have been ruined by Spoof and the "scene" of all these promiscuous people who are wasting their lives.

A condemnation of the sex and drugs lifestyle, in particular of the way men say anything to women to get those gullible and delicate creatures to surrender their bodies and then abandon them, breaking their hearts.  The story also suggests that a lifestyle based on selfish sensual pleasure can prevent intelligent people from meeting their potential.  These are interesting arguments, but this story doesn't present them in very entertaining ways, with too much of the word count devoted to the flabby and mind-numbing descriptions of the party-goers.  Gotta give a thumbs down to "Memory of a Muted Trumpet."

"Final Shtick" (1960)

I found a photo of the contents page of the August 1960 issue of Rogue, in which "Final Shtick" made its debut appearance, and the magazine was full of content by famous SF writers: a well-received story by Damon Knight, "The Handler;" humor by Robert Bloch; two non-fiction articles by Mack Reynolds; an article about Dean Martin by William F. Nolan; a column by Alfred Bester; and an article by Robert Silverberg.

"Final Shtick" has as an epigraph a definition of the word "shtick."  I already knew what the word meant, and wish instead somewhere in this book Ellison had offered a definition of what he means by "hung-up generation."  "Hung-Up Generation" isn't a widely-used cliché like "Lost Generation" or "Greatest Generation" or "Generation X" or "Silent Generation," so I am not quite sure exactly what Ellison is getting at--I'm going to assume he doesn't mean that the problem of the generation in question is sexual inhibition, as the people in these stories seem to get into trouble because they are too eager to have sex.  Well, maybe I am speaking too soon, as I haven't read Ellison's preface or Frank M. Robinson's intro yet, for fear they are full of spoilers, and maybe somewhere in there lies the answer to my question.

Marty Field is a world famous comedian, "king of the sick comics!"  He is flying back to Ohio, where he grew up in a small town, to be feted as the favorite son of that little rural burg.  

Immediately we learn that Marty is also a fake, a phony!  He puts on fake smiles for the stewardess, he sneers at his reflection in the window because he had plastic surgery on his once-oversized nose.  And he was born Morrie Feldman!  (Remember what we just said about name changes in these stories!)

Marty reminisces about his youth as a skinny little Jew in small town Ohio, how the big dumb Gentiles beat him up and put a burning cross on his lawn, how he caught his girlfriend performing sex acts on other boys, acts she had refused to perform on him!  Marty became a sick comic because he couldn't defeat those goyim with his fists, but he could tear them to ribbons with his sharp tongue! 

Marty attends the big event honoring him in the tiny town of his birth, where he is given a plaque and then is expected to give a thank-you speech.  He wants to give a speech denouncing the town, reminding everybody how they abused him because he was Jewish, but Marty just thanks the crowds and leaves; he cries in the car on the way back to the airport, back to his life hobnobbing with Ed Sullivan and Frank Sinatra.

Ellison himself was born in Ohio and according to wikipedia claimed on the Tom Snyder show that he suffered discrimination from other high school students, so maybe there is an element of autobiography in "Final Shtick."  Otherwise, it is a pretty pedestrian story; competent, but no big deal.  It would, however, be included in the 1968 collection Love Ain't Nothing But Sex Misspelled and the various editions of The Essential Ellison.

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Eight down, fourteen to go!  It won't be long before we are opening up Gentleman Junkie and Other Stories of the Hung-Up Generation again, but first we'll read some short stories by an author Ellison considered one of his favorites.  

Woman from Another Planet by Frank Belknap Long

"There is one supreme glory in life which men do not hold lightly.  That glory is unknown to you.  You will never understand it.  It turns night into day for us and transforms every aspect of reality.  If men and women could not love, they would be as crippled as Martians in body and mind, for what you call love is a hollow mockery."

On a recent trip to Washington D.C., the belly of the beast, I stopped at Second Story Books and among my purchases there was a copy of the 1960 Chariot paperback printing of Frank Belknap Long's Woman From Another Planet.  This book is a total wreck, many pages being torn and the spine coming undone, but the text is all there, and the fun cover, depicting a woman in some distress and a monster with a big thick head and long skinny limbs, is intact.  That cover is the work of Basil Gogos, well known for all those covers of Forrest J. Ackerman's Famous Monsters of Filmland.  (If you are at all interested in Universal horror pictures, old men's magazines, or Hammer Horror, you should take a few minutes to flip through Famous Monster Movie Art of Basil Gogos by Kerry Gammill and J. David Spurlock, which you can do at the world's greatest website, the internet archive.)   

In his long career, Frank Belknap Long produced some fiction so bad it has boggled my mind, but some pretty good things, too.  Let's see where on the spectrum Woman From Another Planet falls.

David Loring is living the good life!  A painter, he resides in Greenwich Village and just sold a painting and so has enough money to marry his hot girlfriend Janice Reece!  But this morning there is trouble in paradise!  Janice comes over and she is pretty shaken up.  Last night, some guy came into her apartment, saying he'd blundered into the wrong room because he'd been drinking at a party; this transgressor kissed her on the forehead and then left, leaving Janice shaken because this guy was the handsomest man she'd ever seen!  She was further shaken when, after he had left, she had a kind of hallucination of feeling his arms around her!  Then, when she went out for a walk to calm her nerves, in the corridor she had another uncanny experience, a vision of a hideous semi-human figure with a flat face and a bulbous nose and little horns!

Janice tells this crazy story in bits and pieces between having sex with David and having breakfast with him at a restaurant.  When he is finally in possession of the entire picture, David figures his fiancé is the victim of some practical joker--the Village is full of artists and writers who play all sort of elaborate gags on people--and he vows to find this jerk and punch his lights out!  He heads to Janice's apartment to look for clues, leaving her in the safety of his own flat, and when he arrives at the scene of the crime he is confronted by the most beautiful woman he has ever seen!

Long leaves us on this cliffhanger and the scene switches to a Martian saucer flying over the countryside.  The vessel's commander, Tragor, is in command of the Martian campaign to conquer the Earth, but he is taking a little break from his primary mission to raid rural America for women!  Long is long-winded, and he describes in tedious detail an attack on some hikers and Tragor's feelings as he observes his subordinates, hairy brutes of the Martian warrior caste, shoot down the male hikers and seize the female hikers.  Woman From Another Planet is a sex novel, and there is a lot of talk of Tragor's powerful desire for one of the captives, his fear that he won't be able to perform once this woman is in his clutches, and his jealousy when one of the warriors gropes and kisses her as she impotently struggles.  Tragor shoots down this handsy warrior in a fit of rage, but he himself has no better luck enjoying the Earth beauty's favors--his worst fears are realized when he tries to woo her and finds she is disgusted by his alien body and abhors him for killing her husband and friends.  She tells him she would rather die than submit to his Martian caresses!  Tragor isn't interested in raping women--he wants an enthusiastic lover and finds himself broken hearted because he has fallen head over heels for this Earthwoman whose name he doesn't ever bother to learn!

After an unnecessarily long scene in which Tragor orders a speedboat and its six passengers destroyed with a ray cannon because they have spotted the saucer (I guess as a joke, while four of the people on the boat marvel at the saucer, one couple is so enjoying having sex they decide to ignore the UFO and continue fucking) we return to David, whose every move is being observed by the Martians.  Long spends page after page describing how hot the strange girl is, and how the sight of her affects David.  David grabs her and carries her to the bed...but then loses his ardor when he feels a piece of metal attached to her leg.  She admits that she is an artificial woman sent to Earth to test how easily seduced human men are; the Martians plan to send 1000 android women like her to Earth to seduce politicians, industrialists, soldiers, etc., to facilitate Mars's conquest of this big blue marble you and I call home.  (Janice's adventure of this morning was the Martians' test of the prototype of the male model intended to seduce 1000 important Earth women on the eve of invasion.)  Having failed, the female prototype is remotely crippled and shuffles pathetically away--a Martian soldier appears and captures David.

The failure of the androids to seduce David and Janice is a problem for Tragor, architect of this seduction scheme; Martian society is an authoritarian one in which government officials who bungle their assignments are regularly executed, and Tragor's second in command, Sull, is angling for Tragor's job.  Called before the chief executive of all Mars, Tragor manages to convince this potentate to spare his life and permit him to retain his command--his next move will be to conduct experiments on David and Janice on Mars.

But before we get to D and J, Long inflicts on us a scene with much in common with the superfluous speedboat scene, a sex and violence interlude that adds nothing to the plot and features characters we have not yet met and will never see again.  Two androids, close copies of an Earth married couple captured by the Martians some times ago and then returned to Earth with their memories , wake up in a sort of arena with energy pistols and a caged monster.  The monster is released, and the man kills it.  After the fight, the androids (who think themselves the people from whom they were copied) have sex--Tragor and Sull, watching, feel this experiment proves Tragor's theory that deadly danger is an aphrodisiac.  Tragor feels he can take advantage of this fact to salvage his seduction plan. 

D & J wake up in a room in a skyscraper in a Martian city, a city bigger than any Earth city made up of towers taller than any Earth building.  This metropolis, vaster than New York or London, appears to have been built not piecemeal over time, but constructed all at once to a unified plan--in fact, the city buildings form a sort of three-dimensional sculpture of the body of a woman on her back with her legs open.      

The Earth couple find the window of their prison is unlocked, and flee down a long of exterior steps to another level of the city, where a huge insect starts pursuing them.  At the same time the giant bug is chasing them, the Martians are transmitting into their brains dispiriting and distracting thoughts.  In the middle of the chase David and Janice stop to have sex--Janice wants to make sure she is carrying David's child, so she'll have someone to love should David be killed and she survive.  The giant insect doesn't pounce on them because, I guess, the Martians are not actually keen on killing them--it's all an experiment, after all.  The chase resumes, and when the insect finally catches up to them in a building full of fossils of Brobdingnagian monsters from Mars's prehistoric past, it goes through the motions of trying to kill Janice so that David can save her by killing the giant bug in a very unlikely and very unsatisfying way.  

After this preliminary experiment, David and Janice are put to sleep and wake up in a sort of Eden with a bunch of super gorgeous androids; the androids try to seduce D & J but the Earthlings again resist.  Seeing Tragor fail again, the ruler of Mars offers Tragor a pistol with which to commit suicide.  But Tragor is not as tradition-conscious and honor-bound as are most Martians--he snatches the gun and uses it to murder the chief executive!  But minutes later, as he is making his getaway, Tragor by chance encounters the human woman he fell in love with--she has escaped and acquired a pistol of her own and avenges her husband by gunning down Tragor.

Martian society apparently doesn't have a well-developed succession mechanism, because the government collapses into chaos and there follows famine and other crises.  Among the disasters, a squadron of saucers foolishly reveals itself to a USAF base.  Even though the book only has like 15 pages to go, Long introduces us to a new character, an Air Force colonel, and we learn all about his relationship with his wife and his war service.  In the same way that Long says the saucers are shot down in a "World War II-type bombing attack," he tells us this guy's early service was on a "twice almost-bombed out Flat Top;" one suspects that Long knew nothing about military matters and was just talking out of his ass and his editors didn't care enough about the product they were selling to revise these distracting passages.  

Back on Mars, Sull has become the ruler of the Red Planet, and the capture of these saucers and their surviving crew convinces him to call off the conquest of Earth.  He summons David and Janice and tells them he is sending them back to Earth as part of a prisoner exchange, and David gives a speech about how Earth people truly know love, giving us an advantage over the Martians, who only know lust.  (I'm not sure, but think we are supposed to consider that Tragor was a one-in-a-million Martian who defies such stereotypes.)

Earlier I called Woman From Another Planet a sex novel, but I suppose Long thought of it as a novel about love, and in the book he lays out some theories or beliefs about love and relations between the sexes.  I guess Long's central idea is that love is the center of life, and, without love, life is not worth living.  The nameless woman Tragor is in love with loses all desire to go on living after her husband is murdered by the Martians, and Janice echoes that woman's sentiments: when David strongly suggests she stay behind while he explores the Martian city, she insists on accompanying him, explaining "If anything happens to you I wouldn't want to go on living."  It is suggested that Earth may be a tough nut for the Martians to crack because Erth men will fight strenuously to protect their women.  Tragor demonstrates how he cares more about love than his career or Mars's military objectives, allowing his obsessive love for the human woman who detests him to distract him from his work.  

The issue of love looms large in Long's body of work.  His 1930s stories from Astounding which I liked, such as "The Last Men" and "Green Glory" were about men's love of women in dangerous circumstances, and his 1963 novel It Was the Day of the Robot is all about love and sex.  Long wrote a stack of "gothics" under his own name and the pen name "Lyda Belknap Long" and while I have not read any such books, it is my impression that dangerously obsessive love figures in them.       

Whatever Long's objectives, Woman from Another Planet is quite bad.  Long's apparent arguments are not very well presented (for example, David seems to resist the charms of the androids because he is distracted by some fortuitous exogenous factor, not because he is trying so hard to stay loyal to Janice.)  If Woman from Another Planet is intended to be an exploitation novel focused on sex and gore or an adventure novel focused on action and danger, it fails there as well, as the sex scenes and action scenes are long and slow and generate no excitement.  The action scenes in particular contain long conversations between characters on extraneous subjects that undermine the reader's belief that the characters are in any danger--instead of panicking or acting with urgency to escape or meet the threat facing them, the characters engage in long tedious discussions or actually have sex while the alien menace in close proximity.  Long's dialogue in the novel feels very unnatural and inauthentic, which might be OK for the Martians, who are aliens, but the human dialogue is, if anything, worse, rambling digressions and pointless debates.  (I saw these same problems in other bad Long novels--is long just trying to meet a page count, or does he think these discussions are actually interesting?)

In outline, the plot is good, but Long handles the narrative quite poorly.  Instead of focusing on the three potentially interesting characters--Tragor, the Martian who is different from other Martians, is broken-hearted over his rejection by an Earthwoman, and who deals with his subordinates tyrannically and in turn fears the arbitrary rule of his superiors; and David and Janice, a couple who are fiercely devoted to each other and have their fidelity tested by androids and psychic tampering--there are many chapters in which none of them figure, chapters that instead star people who appear in that chapter and are never seen again once the chapter is ended.  (It is easy to imagine our hero Barry N. Malzberg writing a hilarious short story based on Tragor's story arc--sexual dysfunction, difficult interviews between managers and their subordinates and organizations utterly failing to achieve their ostensible goals are Barry's bread and butter!)  

Not all of the problems with the book can be blamed on Long--the text is rife with irritating typos.  Shame on you, Chariot!    

Because this book is so weak, it is astounding to see that the only time it was reprinted was in 2013 in a "double novel" format, yoked with a novel by critical darling Judith Merril!  I have to assume Merril's fans already hate Long and would never think of reading Woman from Another Planet, and those who maybe had never heard of him and were not put off by the implied eroticism of the cover illo and title, would be outraged by the novel's style and content.  Hilarious!

While not as bad as Survival World or Monster from Out of Time, I gotta give this Frank Belknap Long production a thumbs down.  But I do it more in sorrow than in anger.  I'm still on your side, Frank, and hope to enjoy some more of your short stories when I get back to a steady diet of 1930s magazines.

Fredric Brown: "The Ghost Breakers," "Homicide Sanitarium," and "The Gibbering Night"

I was impressed by Fredric Brown's 1947 "Don't Look Behind You", which I read last month, so let's check out three more 1940s crime stories by Brown that are easy to find at the internet archive.  All three of today's stories appeared in detective magazines in 1944, but I am reading them in scans of 1950s magazines in which they were reprinted.  In the 1980s and 1990s Brown's stories from the detective pulps were collected and published in nineteen volumes by Dennis McMillan, and two of those volumes have as title stories tales we are reading today, so maybe they are particularly good, or particularly representative, specimens of Brown's huge body of work in the crime field. 

(For still more MPorcius Fiction Log coverage of Fredric Brown crime fiction, I direct you to posts I did on his novels The Far Cry and The Five-Day Nightmare and a post on four short stories from the period 1943-49.)

"The Ghost Breakers" 

"The Ghost Breakers" debuted as a cover story of the July '44 issue of Thrilling Detective, an issue which also includes a story by our pal Leigh Brackett, another SF author whose crime stories and novels we have sampled.  I am reading "The Ghost Breakers" in the Summer '52 issue of 5 Detective Novels. 

Our narrator George Rice is a private detective.  Rice's friend Jan is a man of means who writes books on the occult for fun.  Jan has hooked George up with the Psychic Research Society, a dozen rich men who want to debunk charlatans and bogus supernatural phenomena.  As our story begins, Georgie boy is spending the night in an abandoned house near the train tracks that some people claim is haunted.  George hears a noise, and with his flashlight (this dump naturally has no electricity) he sees a hobo has fallen down the stairs--he checks and it seems this wretch has died.  George goes to call the cops, but when he gets back to the house the cops are already there and tell him there is no body to be found!  Presumably the bum wasn't dead after all, just knocked out and woke up after our hero left, but George is positive the body he found was dead.  Is something strange and sinister going on?

There follows page after page of George searching the house and its environs, including the nearby railway, and talking to bums and police officers and Jan and members of the Psychic Research Society.  This stuff is kind of boring, as Brown doesn't give us any reason to care what happens to any of these characters, and nothing potentially funny or exciting happens in any event.  One of the members of the PRS is a guy who is an expert magician and has taken to employing his skills to demonstrate how supernatural stuff is all a load of crap.  He demonstrates to George how his experience of witnessing a hobo fall down the stairs to his death could have been faked with special effects like a dummy and a phonograph.  Then he puts on a séance for the benefit of PRS members and George and Jan, to demonstrate how séances are bogus.  Seances, as you know, are conducted in the dark, and when the lights come back on, the magician is dead, strangled by one of the PRS members under cover of darkness!

George and Jan figure one member of the PRS is trying to trick another member out of money in a convoluted and confusing way that is too boring for me to describe here and involves a character who never appears on screen.  They set up a trap for their suspect that involves everybody trooping over to the haunted house and yet another episode in which a hobo appears to fall down the stairs; the appearance of yet another tramp falls to his doom shocks the murderer into confessing.

"The Ghost Breakers" is lame filler with no human feeling or tension; neither the villains nor the victims have any personality and they almost never appear on the stage so we don't care what happens to them.  I guess this sort of story is supposed to engross you in the mechanisms of the plot--the plans of the crooks, how the detectives figure out whodunit and how they trap the perps--but it wasn't really clear to me how the villains' scheme was supposed to work or how George and Jan figured out who the villains were.  Gotta give this one a thumbs down.  I like the skeleton archer on the '40s mag and the blonde on the cover of the '50s one, though.     

"Homicide Sanitarium"

"Homicide Sanitarium," from the first page, is far more compelling and entertaining than "The Ghost Breakers," which was a relief.  The characters are fun and their dialogue is pleasantly witty, and the plot sets high stakes and grabs your attention and, though kind of wild, is both comprehensible and sensical.

Our narrator is Eddie Anderson (!), private detective and newlywed.  A rich murderer, Paul Verne, is on the loose, and has been for three years, and there is a huge reward for catching him, a reward Eddie would certainly like to have.  He thinks Verne is hiding in a newly opened sanitarium for the idle rich as one of the patients, so Eddie contrives to get a job there.  The position he fills is an unusual one, but one that suits his needs perfectly.  The director of the sanitarium, you see, is the kind of head shrinker who thinks outside the box, and he hires Eddie to pretend to be a patient so he can observe and report back to him how the real patients behave when there are no doctors around.  

Brown's story moves at a quick pace and is full of fun surprises.  I liked how the plot was resolved, which inhabitant of the funny farm turned out to be the killer Verne in disguise, and I also thought the twist ending was fun.  So, thumbs up for "Homicide Sanitarium."  Brown has a high reputation for his mystery writing and, unlike "The Ghost Breakers," this story makes that reputation seem deserved.

Like "The Ghost Breakers," "Homicide Sanitarium" appeared first in Thrilling Detective in 1944 and was reprinted in 5 Detective Novels in the early Fifties, which is where I read it.  The cover of said ish of Thrilling Detective continues today's theme from "The Ghost Breakers" of magicians in peril.

"The Gibbering Night" 

The word "gibbering" always brings to mind those days when 1st edition AD&D was at the center of my life and I would spend hours reading those beautiful hardcover rulebooks; the Gibberlings from the Fiend Folio and the Gibbering Mouther from Monster Manual II were among my favorite entries to read again and again, and both had quite memorable illustrations.

Anyway, "The Gibbering Night" first appeared in July '44's Detective Tales and was reprinted in several publications, among them the 1952 issue of New Detective, where I am reading it, and a 1960 British magazine which also reprinted Ray Bradbury's famous "The Small Assassin."   

"The Gibbering Night" is a pleasant entertainment about how journalists suppress stories their readers would probably like to read at the behest of the government or to protect their friends.  It is also about how small town people look out for each other and how we all have a duty to serve in the war against crime!

Our narrator Pops is in his late forties and runs the weekly newspaper in Charlotteville, a little burg of 3000 souls.  As the story begins it is Thursday evening and he is complaining that the paper they will print tonight to ship tomorrow has no real news in it because nothing ever happens in Charlotteville.  But then he spends the night participating in adventures that would make awesome stories for the paper!

A man is found laying in a pool of his own blood, presumably dead!  Pops spots someone breaking into the bank and knocks the intruder out cold with a makeshift club!  Somebody escapes from the insane asylum and a party searches the countryside for the fugitive!  Pops spots a wanted gangster driving through town--this mobster kidnaps Pops and Pops' right-hand man at the paper and plans to kill the journalists on a lonely mountain road, but they escape and then, using the knowledge of the countryside they gained from hunting these hills, they ambush and slay the crooks!  

All these adventures would make thrilling copy, but Pops can't print any of them as stories!  The guy found in a pool of blood was just unconscious from an accident and asks Pops not to publicize the accident, as it might upset his relatives!  The alleged bank robber was the banker's son, secretly withdrawing money he had deposited in Dad's bank so he could run away from home to join the army--the banker asks Pops not to publicize the incident, as it is embarrassing.  The person who escaped from the asylum was a nice old lady, totally harmless--could Pops keep this out of the paper so as not to upset her relatives?  The Feds ask Pops not to print the story about the death of the mobster, because on his corpse was found a clue that will lead to the capture of other criminal masterminds, and if the death of the gangster becomes public knowledge the big fish up in Chi-town will go to ground and the G-men won't be able to spring their trap.

Sort of trifling, but a competently put together diversion.  I guess you might call "The Gibbering Night" a joke story, and I am generally allergic to joke stories, but the humor here is based on a plot that makes sense and not on absurdist nonsense, broad satire or lame puns, so it is inoffensive.

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Two out of three isn't bad.  No doubt we'll read more stories from Fredric Brown in the future.  But first, a 1960 novel billed as a work about relations between the sexes and between planets!