F&SF July '53: A Derleth & M Reynolds, L Sprague de Camp & F Pratt, J Ciardi, and M St. Clair

In our last episode, we read a stack of stories from an issue of F&SF because the ish included a work of fiction by John Ciardi, famous American man of letters, and today we are doing the same thing.  The Ciardi story we read last time was about a robot who was tired of "living" and so committed suicide, but today's Ciardi story, if the cover illustration for it by Emsh is anything to go by, is going to be life affirming, or at least low key sexalicious!  Let's check out Ciardi's pseudonymous "The Hypnoglyph" along with three other stories from this issue of F&SF edited by Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas, one penned by Margaret St. Clair, whose "Change the Sky" we trashed in that last blog post, and two collabs, one by the team of August Derleth and Mack Reynolds and one the team of L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt.

"The Adventure of the Snitch in Time" by August Derleth and Mack Reynolds

This is a Solar Pons story.  Solar Pons is a pastiche of Sherlock Holmes concocted by that one-man mass production fiction machine August Derleth, the subject of a vast catalog of stories produced not only by Derleth but an array of other Holmes-loving scribblers.  Personally, I don't really like Sherlock Holmes, but I find Derleth a likable individual and his career curious, and I find even more bewildering the career of the coauthor of "The Adventure of the Snitch in Time," Mack Reynolds, so decided to read this story even if I don't expect to enjoy it.

isfdb lists Lovecraft-correspondent Derleth as first author of "The Adventure of the Snitch in Time" while F&SF lists former teenaged-Socialist-Labor-Party demagogue and expert on beer-drinking Reynolds as first author.  The intro to the story in the Derleth collection A Praed Street Dossier indicates that Reynolds came up with the plot and submitted to F&SF a story based on his idea, but Boucher and McComas felt Reynolds' manuscript didn't feel very Holmesian, so Derleth was enlisted to punch the thing up.  The thing was a big enough success that Reynolds and Derleth collaborated on further Solar Pons stories with a science fiction angle.

I find "The Adventure of the Snitch in Time" to be a silly joke story full shopworn SF concepts and meta-jokes about genre literature.  Reynolds is renowned as one of the few SF writers to take as one of his main topics political economy, and this is reflected in the fact that the plot of "The Adventure of the Snitch in Time" is resolved by tariff legislation.  

A guy in wacky clothes from the 26th century comes to visit Solar Pons and our narrator, Doctor Parker.  He turns out to be a cop from another dimension, and a lot of the story's limp wit relies on the contrast between Pons' acceptance of the man's increasingly incredible assertions and the doctor's bullheaded incredulity.

Future Cop explains that there are an infinite number of universes so everything that could happen has or will happen.  The Moriarty of his dimension has taken to travelling between universes and stealing art treasures, among them Pogo strips.  (Pogo, like Sherlock Holmes, is one of those cultural artifacts that is widely beloved but which leaves me cold.)  So, this cop has come to this dimension to consult with Solar Pons, who in the cop's dimension is merely a fictional character, in hopes that Pons can produce a solution to the problem of inter-dimensional theft.  Pons asks the traveller if there are taxes in his universe, and is told that yes, there are, and the tax laws are punctiliously followed by everybody, even criminals like Moriarty.  So Solar Pons suggests that prohibitive tariffs be levied that will discourage all inter-dimensional commerce.

Additional jokes involve Moriarty and this cop enlisting fictional attorneys like Perry Mason to champion their causes in court and references to whether Solar Pons knows Parker is writing up Pons' adventures or whether Parker has actually begun doing so yet.

To me, this story is a waste of time, but it wasn't painful and I can see that, for what it is, it is competently produced, so that people who love Sherlock Holmes and want to see him and Dr. Watson in outré situations like fighting Count Dracula or Jack the Ripper will enjoy "The Adventure of the Snitch in Time;" the dialogue and atmosphere and all that feels like the Sherlock Holmes stories I read so long ago, and those seeking such an experience will find it here, and I guess in all the Solar Pons stories.

This story that to me seems tolerable and forgettable has been quite successful, appearing in at least three anthologies as well as Derleth and Reynolds collections. 

"The Hypnoglyph" by John Ciardi (as by John Anthony)

Anthologists like August Derleth, Robert P. Mills and Tom Boardman have seen fit to reprint "The Hypnoglyph," and, having read it myself, I agree with their decisions to do so; "The Hypnoglyph" is full of cool SF and horror ideas and I strongly recommend it.

A veteran spaceman invites a younger man to see his collection of valuables brought back from his adventures in deep space.  The most fascinating specimen in the collection is a little item wrought from a wood-like substance; the item features a depression into which fits comfortably the younger man's thumb.  He finds stroking the little item with his thumb pleasurable, even addictive, and the adventurer talks to him about "tropism" and theories about how certain parts of the body enjoy certain types of stimuli and can, in effect, be hypnotized into behaving in certain ways by such stimulation.

The spaceman describes one of his greatest adventures, in which he discovered a quite human-like race, a matriarchy in which women use hypnotic powers, including the "tropism" techniques the spaceman has just hinted at, to dominate their men folk.  Ciardi does a good job of titillating the (male) reader's desire for and fear of women by suggesting these alien women have extreme control over their bodies that makes them capable of providing men with terrific sexual pleasure and our eager to have sex with human men but at the same time indicating that these women are obese, hairless, lazy, callous and cruel manipulators who treat the native men like disposable slaves--in fact, these alien women are champing at the bit to breed with human males because their ill treatment of the men of their own race has sapped those men's will to live and resulted in a radical numerical imbalance between the sexes.

The veteran space man and the younger man engage in a sort of psychological duel; will the younger man be able to blackmail the wealthy older man because the adventurer has broken laws that require the discovery of alien civilizations be reported to the authorities?, or will the older man, who it turns out has gone native, trick the young man into becoming a sexual slave of the obese and hairless alien matriarchs?

A great story that, with its mix of sexual fascination with the exotic and fear of the special powers and monstrous practices attributed to natives sort of reminds you of stories of European sailors interacting with tribes of primitive islanders who may be beautiful and sexually open but also might be engaged in voodoo, human sacrifice, head hunting, cannibalism, and God knows what.  "The Hypnoglyph" is a success that makes you wish Ciardi had written more SF and horror stories.

"The Untimely Toper" by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt

Way back in 2014 we read a Gavagan's Bar story, of which there are like 29 or 30, and today we read a second Gavagan's Bar story.  At this rate we'll finish up with the Gavagan's Bar series during our rice break in the Chinese Communist Party labor camp orbiting Ganymede.

"The Untimely Toper" is a tedious and silly joke story that is a little confusing.  It seems an obnoxious guy, Pearce, comes to Gavagan's but rarely, when he has pissed off the people at his regular hang out.  Pearce is at Gavagan's one night when a bat appears inside the establishment; Pearce kills the bat.  Another habitue of the bar, maybe a vampire or a wizard or something, is offended by the killing of the bat, perhaps his pet or friend or something, and afflicts Pearce with a ridiculous curse the workings of which I didn't quite understand.  When Pearce goes into the men's room, he goes to another dimension or is trapped in time or something; other people go in and out of the men's room and do not see Pearce in there, but hours or days later Pearce emerges from the rest room thinking only a few minutes have passed.  The bartender figures out that the duration of Pearce's disappearances is correlated with his level of intoxication, and so tricks the man into drinking a hangover cure, which sobers him and, I guess, keeps him from returning to Gavagan's from wherever it is he goes after he goes to the bathroom to vomit.

I don't get it, and I don't want it; the jokes are not funny, the characters' motivations are mysterious, and the mechanics of the magic don't make sense to me.  Thumbs down!

As with the Derleth Solar Pons stories, I suspect the appeal of the Gavagan's Bar stories for their fans is the style and atmosphere.  Such fans are numerous enough that Gavagan's Bar collections have been published in multiple editions, and "The Untimely Toper" is a good enough example of the species that Boucher and McComas included it in a Best from F&SF volume.

"Judgment Planet" by Margaret St. Clair (as by Idris Seabright)

This is a far better story than the last St. Clair thing we read, the annoying and pointless "Change the Sky."  The images to be found in "Judgment Planet" constitute a contribution to the story rather than a distraction, the pace is quick, the psychology is believable and the travails of the character have some emotional effect on the reader.  As for the plot, it is just OK--"Judgment Planet" is one of those stories like Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" or William Golding's Pincher Martin in which a dying man hallucinates salvation as well as yet another story in which goody goody aliens make us humans look bad by contrast.

You know those guys who fall in love with some foreign culture or society, Japan or Ancient Rome or the Soviet Union or whatever, and don't want to hear criticism of or think about apparent misdeeds of their beloved, like the Rape of Nanking or the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact or whatever?  (I knew a multitude of these guys in grad school--hell, I maybe was one of these guys.)  The protagonist of "Judgment Planet" is one of those guys.  He is a scholar of the future of interstellar human civilization, and St. Clair hints that this civilization punishes dissent.  Before the rise of Earth's space empire, another race colonized multiple planets, the Elea; Elean civilization collapsed long ago, but left behind artifacts of great beauty that suggest the Elea were a people who loved freedom.

As the story begins, our hero is all alone on a pretty desolate planet far from his ship and has just been injured and dropped his food supplies down an unscalable cliff.  Oops.  Why is he in this sticky situation?  Some other scholar has claimed that this here planet was the planet where the Elea exiled their dissenters, suggesting the Elea are not the goody goodies our guy thinks they were, so he came to explode this theory.  Unfortunately, it kind of looks like that theory was accurate.

Our guy suddenly finds a door into an underground complex where he discovers preserved food and evidence that this planet was not a place of exile for dissenters but actually a comfortable quarantine for individuals afflicted with a plague.  The Elea were as good as he had hoped!  He spends weeks exploring the place, but then comes our twist ending.  The complex is just a dream, but the Elea really were goody goodies--this planet has a powerful hypno apparatus that detects when you are going to die and fills your brain with dreams that ease the pain of your last moments, dreams that validate your life and beliefs.  The scholar can die knowing that the people he worships are beyond reproach and worthy of that worship--only the best sort of people would ease the pain of the dying in this way.

The plot sounds a little lame, like childish wish fulfillment goop (is this story supposed to hearten F&SF's leftist readership by implying that all the crummy things people say about the USSR aren't true?) when you just describe it baldly as I have, but the style and pacing and all that are good, with real suspense and a believable psychology at the center of the story, so I enjoyed it.        
 

Seeing as "Judgment Planet" is legitimately effective, it is odd to learn it has never appeared in an actual book, just been reprinted in various foreign editions of F&SF, especially when you know an aggravating bore like "Change the Sky" was the title story of a St. Clair collection.  Again we see I'm not on the same wavelength as the people who edit SF books.    

Left: UK     Right: Australia

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The Derleth and Reynolds collaboration, and the de Camp and Pratt as well, don't scratch any itch I happen to have, but their authors have probably succeeded in their goals and pleased their fans.  I was much more impressed with the Ciardi and the St. Clair, which, instead of showcasing lame jokes, use interesting science fiction concepts, generate suspense, and portray real human emotions.

More 1950s magazine stories when next we meet!

Three ghoulish stories by science-fiction writers: Malzberg, Brown, and de Camp & Pratt

The final third of Bill Pronzini's Tales of the Dead, also published as The Arbor House Necropolis, is entitled "Ghoul!"  I don't think "Ghoul!" was ever published as a book on its own, as Voodoo! and Mummy! were.

When I was playing 1st edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons the ghoul was always one of the scariest monsters, because it could paralyze you and quickly massacre your entire party.  In fact, if memory serves, in the example of play in the Dungeon Master's Guide a gnome gets sneak attacked by ghouls, and the DM doesn't even bother to roll any dice, just assumes the gnome is torn to bits.  In Pronzini's intro to "Ghoul!" he claims that in the superstitions of Eastern Europe the ghoul is more feared than the werewolf or vampire.  Gary Gygax and I can believe it!

"Indigestion" by Barry Malzberg (1977)

Malzberg got his name on the cover of Fantastic with this one.

Those familiar with Malzberg's work will not be surprised to learn that in "Indigestion" we are confronted with a first-person narrator who is suffering from vivid delusions.  Henry is a lonely man living in New York City.  Perhaps inspired by the misguided theory that planaria gain the knowledge of planaria they eat, Henry believes that the souls of dead people whose flesh he eats become housed in his own body.  (This also reminded me of the alzabo from Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, published in the 1980s.)  Henry claims that he is the minister of a congregation of hundreds which he carries inside himself, so that he is never alone.  A side benefit is that raw human flesh is very tasty!

Henry's conscience manifests itself as a green scaly space alien who tries to convince Henry to stop robbing graves and eating from corpses.  At the end of this brief tale Henry realizes what a disaster he has made of his life, and leaps out a window to his death.

I thought this story was effective; beyond the "gross out" elements we have the image of a man who is lonely and feels he has screwed up his life, something many of us can identify with.

"The Spherical Ghoul" by Fredric Brown (1942)

Brown is famous for his novel What Mad Universe and his short story "Arena," both of which I think are worthwhile.  According to Wikipedia, best-selling authors Ayn Rand, Mickey Spillane and Robert Heinlein all were crazy about Brown, which is pretty impressive.

"The Spherical Ghoul" first appeared in Thrilling Mystery, which Pronzini calls a "shudder pulp."  Brown's story is advertised on the cover, but I had trouble finding a decent reproduction online; the picture I did find can be viewed here.

This story stars Jerry, a grad student who works as a night watchman at the morgue of the little college town of Springdale.  He's an anthropology student; yesterday Roger Zelazny reminded me that I know approximately zero about Havelock Ellis, Rainer Maria Rilke and W. H. Auden, and today by mentioning The Golden Bough again and again, Brown reminded me that I know almost nothing about James George Frazer.  I also learned that I don't know much about armadillos; I thought armadillos were herbivores.

The story is constructed as a mystery.  Jerry studies for hours, sitting in front of the only door to the windowless room where the bodies are kept in refrigeration.  When he has occasion to go into the room with the fridges, he is shocked and appalled to find that one of the corpses stored in there has had its face eaten away!  Yuck! How could this have happened while Jerry sat in front of the only door to the room?

There's a lot of jazz with the police, witnesses, using temperature to estimate the time of the crime, all that mystery fiction stuff.  In the end it turns out that one of the characters had access to an armadillo, and lowered the beast through a ventilation hole so it would devour the corpse's face.  This was to hide the cadaver's identity; the armadillo employer murdered the guy because the guy was blackmailing him for embezzling funds, and so on and so forth.  I find it hard to get excited about these mystery plots in which different jerk offs are trying to screw over each other.  When Jerry tells the embezzler/murderer that he has figured out his armadillo scheme, armadillo guy commits suicide before the cops can bring him in.  I guess this spares the armadillo the indignity of being entered into evidence at a trial. 

I don't think Brown tells us what becomes of the armadillo.  It must be hard going back to eating bugs after tasting raw human flesh, which, I have on good authority (that of Henry of Barry Malzberg's "Indigestion"), is delicious.  Maybe somebody should write a sequel to "The Spherical Ghoul," about how a man-eating armadillo terrorizes Springdale, bursting in on the coeds while they are showering and all that.

This story was OK.  I guess I was hoping there would be some kind of supernatural or science-fiction resolution to the mystery, like a guy who could detach his head or something like that.  I'll never laugh at the armadillos in Browning's Dracula again, though.

"Corpus Delectable" by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt (1953)

I get the impression that L. Sprague de Camp is a controversial figure in science fiction and fantasy circles, and that as the years have gone by his detractors have begun to seriously outnumber his supporters.  Fans of Robert Howard and H. P. Lovecraft are angry about de Camp's biographies of those Weird Tales luminaries, and with de Camp's editing and rewriting of some of Howard's work.  I read a bunch of de Camp's Viagens novels years ago and found them mediocre and forgettable, so I guess I'm not exactly in de Camp's camp myself.  Still, I'm willing to give him another chance; De Camp was a prolific writer who devoted his career to science fiction and fantasy, so he probably deserves a measure of respect for that.

"Corpus Delectable," Pronzini tells us in his intro to the story, is one of a series of stories about the habitues of Gavagan's Bar.  I guess these stories are supposed to be funny; the bar serves as a framing device for humorous anecdotes from various wacky characters.  This isn't my thing, but I'll try to be fair....

To be honest, I feel like old Bill Pronzini pulled a fast one on me with this one. This isn’t a bad story, but it has no supernatural, cannibalistic, or grave robbing content; there isn’t even a man-eating armadillo!

A car salesman comes to the bar and tells his sad story. He made friends with an undertaker, and over the course of time found that his new buddy was taking to staring at him. It turns out that the car salesman has a perfectly photogenic face for use in mortuary advertising - he looks like an expertly prepared cadaver! After his friend surreptitiously takes his picture, and it appears in an ad in a trade publication, the car salesman can’t go anywhere without being stared at or even accosted by people in the mortuary business who want to use him in their advertising. The car salesman is not interested in providing his photo, but then he is spotted by a former Chicago gangster who has gotten into the mortician game after going straight. This thug is not used to taking “no” for an answer, and the punchline of the story is that the gangster catches up to the car salesman right there in Gavagan's Bar!

As I said, this story isn’t bad, but I’m scratching my head wondering why it is in this book.

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Malzberg delivered the goods with his bleak tale of a mental case who robs graves and eats the recently buried dead. But the stories by Brown and the team of de Camp and Pratt, while competent, don’t really fit the bill. Maybe before I return Tales of the Dead to be interred on the shelves of the library I will give “Ghouls!” one last look.