Other reviews:
Robert Weinberg, The Weird Tales Story1
_____________________
Editor, Dorothy McIlwraith; Associate Editor, Lamont Buchanan
Fiction:
His Last Appearance • novelette by H. Bedford-Jones ∗∗+
The Street of Faces • short story by Frank Owen ∗∗
The Unfriendly World • novelette by Allison V. Harding –
Lost • short story by Alice-Mary Schnirring ∗
The Scythe • short story by Ray Bradbury ∗∗∗+
Return of the Undead • novelette by Otis Adelbert Kline & Frank Belknap Long ∗∗
Legacy in Crystal • short story by James Causey ∗
Yours Truly — Jack the Ripper • short story by Robert Bloch ∗∗∗
Tamara, the Georgian Queen • short story by Harold Lawlor –
Non-fiction:
Cover • by E. Franklin Wittmack
Interior artwork • by Boris Dolgov (x3), A. R. Tilburne (x2), Fred Humiston (x2), Hannes Bok, Irwin J. Weill, John Giunta, uncredited
The Shape of Thrills to Come
Strange Music • poem by Dorothy Quick
Desert Dweller • poem by Clark Ashton Smith
Superstitions and Taboos • essay by Irwin J. Weill
The Eyrie • essay by The Editor
Weird Tales Club • letters
_____________________
His Last Appearance by H. Bedford-Jones is labelled as a “Special Feature” and leads off the fiction in this issue. The story takes place in the near future, after the end of WWII, and opens with a man called Gordon, a tourist/passenger on a clipper that is refuelling at a coral island in the Pacific, talking to one of the ship’s officers. The latter mentions that the two gravestones Gordon is looking at belong to the pilots of a B-29 Flying Fortress that crash-landed during the war. He also mentions that their ghosts have been seen, information that Gordon receives with some incredulity. Later though, after the ship’s officer has departed, a man in flying uniform arrives and starts talking: it soon becomes obvious that the man is the ghost of one of the dead pilots. Gordon finds himself merging with the man, Magruder, and he goes back in time to relive the dead man’s final days on the island.
The tale then becomes essentially a war story covering the crew’s crash-landing and the subsequent fight with the Japanese on the island: after the crew have fought and killed the occupiers, and only Magruder and the other pilot Cox are left, they settle in and prepare the island’s meagre defences in case more Japanese attack before they are rescued. There then follows a middle section where the two pilots get on each other’s nerves, in between Cox musing about the island becoming US territory, and whether the ghosts of their comarades will haunt it.
The final section (spoiler) has them shoot down a Japanese spotter plane before sighting a distant battleship and freighter. When the battleship comes closer they open fire and manage to sink it. They die during a beach landing mounted by the troops on the freighter.
The coda has Gordon arranging to have a ton of Oregon soil taken to the island to cover their graves.
Overall, the story is fairly routine and has a perfunctory fantasy set-up, but it is a readable piece, and the last part (related to the part of the story about the island being part of the USA) gives it a bit of a lift.
This wartime vibe continues in The Street of Faces by Frank Owen, which is about a cruel Japanese general who goes to a Chinese doctor for an operation to improve facial disfigurements caused by shrapnel wounds. The doctor, unknown to the general, has been killing “Japs” on the side, and sees an opportunity to do the same to the general when he operates. However, that night the ghosts of his healer ancestors appear and forbid him to do so.
The next day the doctor operates and, days later, after the General has recovered and the bandages have been removed, he looks into a mirror and sees he has been given a Chinese face. When asked to name the price for the operation, the doctor says he wants all the paper in the General’s pockets. The General initially refuses as some of it is classified material, so they compromise and agree to burn it.
When the general then returns to his camp (spoiler) he is not recognised because of his Chinese features (even though he is wearing his uniform), and the guards and their officer bayonet him to death as he cannot prove his identity.
This has a rather slow beginning but a clever and ironic ending in tune with the times.
The Unfriendly World by Allison V. Harding has a psychologist called Dr Manning become involved in a hospital case that involves George Torey, a man who refuses to sleep without drugs. After a couple of pages of padding we finally get to the heart of the matter:
“No, Doctor, I am not troubled with claustrophobia. It’s something else. Something that seems, seems quite incredible. [. . . ] I’m afraid to go to sleep because, because of something that happens to me when I go to sleep. I—I can’t make anybody believe me—but if there is a Hell, I’ve been there—I’ve seen people there with harpoons—” He stopped abruptly. I said nothing. p. 30
After being told this by the patient, Dr Manning and the hospital’s Dr Cobb then demonstrate their appalling bedside manner while later events unfold (the patient is variously ridiculed, told to “pull himself together,” and called a “drug fiend,” etc.).
One night, while Manning is sleeping beside Torey’s bed, he awakes to see him thrashing about on his bed, and goes for help:
I looked back once over my shoulder at Torey as I started to leave. I didn’t want my patient to strangle himself in the bedclothes. In the dimness of the room Torey was waving both arms now. Then he jerked several times, screwed himself up into a tight ball, his head and arms disappearing underneath the bedding.
And at this moment Torey screamed. At the same time I thought I caught the shadow of a black something over the bed, over Torey. I recalled this later, in the light of what happened, although at the time I dismissed it as preposterous and a figment of my imagination. But I caught a glimpse of a black shaft, a greater blackness against the semi-blackness of the room, shaped almost like . . . a spear! p. 36
Manning then notices a ragged cut on Torey’s arm and summons help. That night Torey receives a sedative—but after that it’s back to the old regime, with the inevitable consequences (spoiler: the next time Torey sleeps he doesn’t wake up again due to a huge jagged hole through the bed and him).
There is some back story about Torey’s uncle, who is a psychical researcher, but most of the story is about the doctors acting like idiots while the supernatural events unfold. Oh yes: the medical and psychological terminology used in the story has all the verisimilitude available to a writer who has never had a day’s illness.
Lost by Alice-Mary Schnirring is a two page squib about a woman who finds a lost girl called Moira in the marshes and takes her home. The child asks for her friends, and specifically a boy called Tommy. The next day the child has vanished and the woman goes to town for help, only to find a mass of people on the pier (spoiler) looking at a lifeboat with the corpses of four children including Moira.
This is an idea, not a story.
The first of two notable stories in this issue is The Scythe by Ray Bradbury.2 This tells of a destitute family that arrive at an apparently deserted farmhouse. When the father goes to ask for food he finds the owner dead:
He was an old man, lying out on a clean white bed. He hadn’t been dead long; not long enough to lose the last quiet look of peace. He must have known he was going to die, because he wore his grave clothes—an old black suit, brushed and neat, and a clean white shirt and a black tie.
A scythe leaned against the wall beside the bed. Between the old man’s hands there was a blade of wheat, still fresh. A ripe blade, golden and heavy in the tassel.
Joerg went into the bedroom, walking soft. There was a coldness on him. He took off his broken, dusty hat and stood by the bed, looking down.
The paper lay open on the pillow beside the old man’s head. It was meant to be read. Maybe a request for burial, or to call a relative. Joerg scowled over the words, moving his pale, dry lips.
“To him who stands beside me at my death bed: Being of sound mind, and alone in the world as it has been decreed, I, John Buhr, do give and bequeath this farm, with all pertaining to it, to the man who is to come. Whatever his name or origin shall be, it will not matter. The farm is his, and the wheat; the scythe, and the task ordained thereto. Let him take them, freely, and without question—and remember that I, John Buhr, am only the giver, not the ordainer. To which I set my hand and seal this third day of April, 1939.
(Signed)
John Buhr. Kyrie eleison” p. 47-48
The family settle into the house and Tom Joerg starts cutting the wheat in the field—he feels compelled to cut it—but finds it is no ordinary crop:
Joerg roused himself at first gray smell of dawn and was out reaping grain each morn, forgetting to point out to Molly how unusual the field was. How it was too big for one man to tend, and yet one man had tended it. How it ripened only in separate clusters, each set off far from others. And, most important how when he cut the wheat it rotted within a few hours, and the next day dug in and come up with roots with green sprouts, born again.
Joerg rubbed his stubbled chin, worried a little, wondered what and why and how it acted that way. A couple of times he walked up to the grave on the far hill just to be sure the old man was there, maybe with some notion he might get an idea there about the field. But the grave was in the sun and wind and silence. The old man said nothing; there were a lot of stones and dirt in his face, now. So that didn’t solve anything. So Joerg went back to reaping, enjoying it because it seemed important. Very important. He didn’t know why, but it was. Very, very important. p. 48
At one point he tries to give up but is compelled to continue:
He found the cow, milked it, but thought about other things. The wheat. The scythe.
The sun got in his head, wouldn’t leave.
It burned there, with a hot, blinding pain.
His appetite vanished. He sweated. Under his arms, down his back, splotches of perspiration soaked through his denim shirt.
His fingers itched. He couldn’t sit still. His head ached. His eyes stung. His stomach was sick. He couldn’t sit still. . . .
At one o’clock he was a caged animal, pacing in and out of the house, concentrating momentarily on digging an irrigation ditch but all the time thinking about—the scythe—the wheat.
“Damn!” He strode in to the bedroom, took the scythe down from its wall-pegs. His stomach steadied itself. His headache ran away. He felt cool, calm, his fingers didn’t itch.
It was instinct. Pure, illogical instinct. Each day the grain must be cut. It HAD to be cut. It had to be. Why? Well, it just DID, that’s all. Madness. Insanity. Heck, it was just an ordinary wheat-field.
Like hell! p. 49
Later on in the story he cuts one particular patch and (spoiler) realises his mother has just died, and it then becomes apparent to him that the wheat represents the people of the world. When he cuts it he is reaping their lives.
The rest of the story tells of his unsuccessful efforts to leave the farm and job behind. Then one day he comes upon the ripened stalks of wheat that are his wife and two children. . . .
This story has a good idea that is well-developed, although you get a niggling feeling that Bradbury would have made a more polished piece of it in his prime.
Return of the Undead by Otis Adelbert Kline and Frank Belknap Long gets off to a pretty good, if ghoulish, start with four medical students digging up a body to prank a freshman called Freddy. They think that Freddy needs his spine stiffened, and coming home after a date to find a corpse in his bed will do the trick. After the foursome finish exhuming the body, they go back to the college and set it up in Freddy’s bed, and wait. In due course they hear a scream and a tearing sound, which summons one of the masters. The four follow the master on his investigation until they reach Freddy’s room. The corpse has vanished—and Freddy is lying on the bed with bites on his throat.
The rest of the story doesn’t really live up to its beginning but you get the sense that the writers are trying to have some fun with this old trope, and we get an early sense of that when they go back to the grave after finding Freddy injured in his room. There they find the vampire back in his coffin and decide to rebury the body. This starts a bit of a running gag in the story, as they shortly return to dig him up again after a second attack at the college, this time so they can stake the body, but are caught by an uncompromising sexton halfway through their second disinterral. The uncompromising churchman waves his sawn-off shotgun at them and makes the group fill in the grave again, to much grumbling.
Also involved in the story are two girlfriends, Nancy and Sally, the latter (spoiler) dispatching the monster when she arrives at Nancy’s room while the vampire is attacking. Fortunately Sally was in the process of returning a bow and arrow!
If you can put up with the semi-tongue-in-cheek plot and the unlikely ending, there is some amusement here.
Legacy in Crystal by James Causey starts with a man lying on his deathbed; he gives an old ring to a cousin, a greedy woman who can’t wait to inherit his estate. Shortly after his death the woman tours the house, insensitively telling her hen-pecked husband about the remodelling she will do. He, meanwhile, finds a book in the study about demonology, before a strange man (Satan) turns up at the door, saying the ring, the house, and everything else needs to be returned.
A short while later the house burns down, and the inherited money vanishes from the bank, etc.
Despite her husband’s warnings about what the woman has now found is a wish-granting ring, she eventually gets her comeuppance.
The stereotypical characters and hoary plot make this a weak and woefully unoriginal piece.
Yours Truly — Jack the Ripper by Robert Bloch is, apart from the Bradbury, the other highlight of the issue. This is an entertaining story of an Englishman, Sir Guy Hollis, who goes to America in search of Jack the Ripper, who the Englishman believes is immortal. Hollis’s theory is that the London murders, as well as others he suspects the killer has committed abroad, are sacrifices to a dark power in exchange for extended life (all the murders occur on significant astrological dates). Sir Guy tells all this to a local psychiatrist called John Carmody, and he asks for an introduction to his Bohemian friends—Hollis has deduced that is the kind of company among which Jack would hide.
Hollis later meets Carmody’s friends, but this yields nothing, and the pair later search one of the seedier parts of Chicago.
The ending is (spoiler) probably both predictable and unlikely (how convenient that the psychiatrist he approaches turns out to be the Ripper!) but it is an entertaining and atmospheric journey to get to that point:
I met Sir Guy the following evening as we agreed, on the corner of 29th and South Halsted.
After what had happened the night before, I was prepared for almost anything. But Sir Guy seemed matter-of-fact enough as he stood huddled against a grimy doorway and waited for me to appear.
“Boo!” I said, jumping out suddenly.
He smiled. Only the betraying gesture of his left hand indicated that he’d instinctively reached for his gun when I startled him.
“All ready for our wild goose chase?” I asked.
“Yes.” He nodded. “I’m glad that you agreed to meet me without asking questions,” he told me. “It shows you trust my judgment.” He took my arm and edged me along the street slowly.
“It’s foggy tonight, John,” said Sir Guy Hollis. “Like London.”
I nodded.
“Cold, too, for November.”
I nodded again and half-shivered my agreement.
“Curious,” mused Sir Guy. “London fog and November. The place and the time of the Ripper murders.”
I grinned through darkness. “Let me remind you, Sir Guy, that this isn’t London, but Chicago. And it isn’t November, 1888. It’s over fifty years later.”
Sir Guy returned my grin, but without mirth. “I’m not so sure, at that,” he murmured. “Look about you. These tangled alleys and twisted streets. They’re like the East End. Mitre Square. And surely they are as ancient as fifty years, at least.”
“You’re in the colored neighborhood off South Clark Street,” I said, shortly. “And why you dragged me down here I still don’t know.”
“It’s a hunch,” Sir Guy admitted. “Just a hunch on my part, John. I want to wander around down here. There’s the same geographical conformation in these streets as in those courts where the Ripper roamed and slew. That’s where we’ll find him, John. Not in the bright lights of the Bohemian neighborhood, but down here in the darkness. The darkness where he waits and crouches.” p. 92
Tamara, the Georgian Queen by Harold Lawlor3 has a successful writer’s wife attend a séance with Madame Salhov, where she discovers she is the reincarnation of Tamara, a Georgian queen who had a different lover every night and who, in the morning, threw them off the castle parapet to their death. Cue a couple of later jumping suicides from the couple’s tower block. After the second suicide, the writer finds a missing button from the second man’s coat in the couple’s apartment, and later disposes of it beside the body after the police ask him downstairs to help identify the corpse. The writer also notes a change in his wife:
Presently Eve was at my side. “Thorne?”
I turned. Her face was washed in the moon’s radiance. Her red lips were parted, smiling, alluring. I caught her to me, and bent to press my mouth to hers. This wasn’t the comfortable love of eight years. This was something new and strange and exciting. We pressed close.
And then the shuttered eyes before mine opened narrowly. Their greenness was a lambent flame. I was looking deep into the eyes of someone—not Eve!
I pushed her away, and at my startled instinctive action her eyes grew strange and smoky, and a half-smile—inexpressibly evil!—played about her lips.
I turned away and covered my face with my shaking hands, as if to press from my vision the fantasies that my sickened thoughts were conjuring. p. 102
The writer later tries to find Salhov, but fails. When he almost takes a header off the building himself during a scuffle with his wife, he consults a psychiatrist, and when this proves fruitless does some library research.
This is pretty poor stuff, but it is amusing how the psychologist breezily dismisses the wife’s two probable and one attempted murders:
Dr. Hadley shook his head. “It’s perfectly obvious what has happened. Madame Salkov planted a thought-suggestion in your wife’s subconscious mind. Your wife is evidently a woman of a highly impressionable type. The Tamara fixation built itself up until—”
“But why should Madame Salhov tell her such a thing!” I cried.
Again the doctor smiled. “It’s a fortune teller’s stock in trade to give her clients a thrill, you know. The woman, I think, never realized what mischief she was stirring up.”
I wasn’t quite satisfied. “Those two young men—”
The doctor spread his hands. “Coincidence. Purely coincidence, Mr. Wallace. If the truth could be known, you’d find the deaths of those young men had absolutely no connection with your wife.”
“But the button! The button from Perry Waite’s coat.”
Dr. Hadley looked a little annoyed. “You told me you threw it away without looking at it. Could you swear the button came from that particular coat? Of course not. You’ve had friends visiting you on your terrace who wear coats of that type, no doubt. You probably own a couple yourself. The button may have been there for days, weeks.” p. 104
This one is pretty awful.
The rather lacklustre Cover for this issue is by E. Franklin Wittmack (his one for the March issue is better). This was his second and last cover for the magazine.
The best of the Interior artwork is, again, by Boris Dolgov, in particular his piece for Robert Bloch’s story. There is also a Hannes Bok illustration, and passable work by John Giunta. Some of the rest is rather amateurish looking (A. R. Tilburne and Fred Humiston’s) or comic book-ish (the uncredited piece for Tamara).
The Shape of Thrills to Come is a page of art which advertises next month’s stories.
Strange Music is another slight, rhyming poem by Dorothy Quick; Desert Dweller by Clark Ashton Smith is a more substantial piece:
Superstitions and Taboos by Irwin J. Weill dishes up more superstitious (although well illustrated) nonsense:
The Eyrie has some autobiographical information from Mr Lawlor:
It was during the depression that I once again felt the desire to write. Escape, probably—increasing deafness made jobs hard for me to get. And then, too, writing seemed such an easy way to make some money. (Ah, Youth and its lost illusions!) I didn’t learn any better until I’d written many love stories and confessions, igniting no rivers the while. When I’d been thoroughly humbled I went to work as secretary to Don Wilcox, one of the well-known writers of science and fantasy fiction.
He had faith, when I had little myself, in my future as a writer. It was at his suggestion that I tried a fantasy, and I sold the first one I wrote. Proof perhaps that those midnight hours spent with Weird Tales and Poe and Sax Rohmer, instead of homework, weren’t wasted after all. There have been other sales since then, and I hope some not too distant day to be as good as the top-notchers in the field. p. 107-108
After the Editor mentions that Robert Bloch’s story in the next issue is a sequel to his Nursemaid to Nightmares in the November issue, they publish a letter from an early contributor to the magazine:
From Phoenix, Arizona, Mr. Richard Tooker, who had a story of his own in one of the first issues of Weird Tales, writes:
I have been a reader of Weird Tales over a period of many years. . . . Personally, I am not a weird story writer, which may be the reason why I like weird stories so well. Anyone who can make the supernatural sound real to me is worth reading.
But I must put in a complaint against the numbers of “humorous” weird stories appearing in Weird Tales. Humor does not belong in a weird story, nor extravaganza, nor the usual brand of satire. . . .
We want the real, unadulterated article in Weird Tales. Let the boys do their playing around in the fantasy magazines; make them give us plenty of blood and mystery and inexplicability in our weird stories on the principle that the supernatural can never be fully explained by mortals. p. 109
I can’t say I agree: the more of a mix of material there is in the magazine the better.
The Weird Tales Club is somewhat truncated this issue, and there is an apology about not including all new members—pity they didn’t leave out the letter from the writer, V. Edward, which flogs his new book on Egyptology.
An issue worth checking out for the Ray Bradbury and Robert Bloch stories. ●
_____________________
1. In Weinberg’s comments for 1943 (The Weird Tales Story, p. 45) he mentions Ray Bradbury’s The Wind from the January issue (“a stirring piece of fantasy fiction”) and The Crowd in the May (which is apparently similar to Poe’s The Man in the Crowd), but says nothing of The Scythe.
Bloch’s story is “a classic of horror fiction and one of [his] all-time best stories,” and Weinberg notes it was soon adapted to radio when the writer started scripting such shows.
There is mention elsewhere about Allison V. Harding contributing “a long list of stories to Weird Tales in the 1940s, most of them undistinguished works that filled up space and were soon forgotten.”
Weinberg also states that “one of Dolgov’s most successful drawings was his splendid evocation of Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper.” Elsewhere he says that Dolgov was one of the best artists to work for Weird Tales, and points to his late 1940’s work in particular.
2. Bradbury’s story presumably inspired this lovely painting by Josh Kirby:
3. According to Tellers of Weird Tales this was the second of over two dozen stories that Lawlor wrote for the magazine. I hope they improve. ●
