"There is a world within the cool shadows." The Thirty-First of February

Earlier I looked back at sci-fi/fantasy author Nelson S. Bond's Mr. Mergenthwirker's Lobblies and the Far Side of Nowhere. Completing my look at Bond (for now), I recently finished reading his second short story collection, the Thirty-First of February (1949), published in softcover by Gnome Press; the stories collected date from 1938-1946.

Cover obtained via ISFDB

As before, these stories usually have a humourous bend and delve into light fantasy; it's gentle fiction and quite enjoyable.

"The Sportsman": I don't think this story can truly be called fantasy - it concerns a crippled hunter who befriends the able-bodied hunters at his club and how his presence enriches their lives. It's a sedate, sentimental story.

"The Mask of Medusa": I first heard this tale adapted on the radio program Mystery in the Air with Peter Lorre (go hear it at archive.org via this link). This story concerns a waxworks whose owner turns real people into displays. How does he do it? Say, have you ever seen the Medusa's head before...? It's interesting to discover the original text is quite brief - the radio version padded it out considerably, but both are good stories.

"My Nephew Norvell": An average mechanic meets his great-grandnephew from the future who's come back to get first-hand information for a biography he's writing. And yet, the mechanic couldn't possibly create the inventions his "nephew" credits him with, so he attempts to fashion by a paradox by suggesting his nephew simply give him the schematics!

"The Ring": A mystical ring grants its bearer dominion over others but carries with it a terrible doom; it's been worn by many men over the ages and as this story is set in Weimar Republic Germany... you can guess who it's owner turns out to be.

"The Gripes of Wraith": Beyond the very cute title lies a cute story about a drinker whose new drinking buddy is a ghost; he concocts a plan to get his good buddy out of eternal purgatory.

"The Cunning of the Beast": A dull story which tells the story of the Garden of Eden through the lens of science fiction. The parallels are so instantly obvious and it goes on for so long that, no, you can't redeem your story by revealing the "beasts" were named Adam & Eve - you have to either do a better job of distracting the reader from recognizing the parallels or insert a very clever dodge from the reader's expectations.

"The Five Lives of Robert Jordan": A somewhat Rod Serling-ish tale; Robert Jordan purchases a most unusual timepiece and finds his life jetting off into five different directions as he becomes different men, but pretty soon the five of us are... er, five of them are dying.

"Take My Drum to England...": During the retreat of Dunkirk, Sir Francis Drake helps spare the crew of a boat; sorry to ruin the twist ending for you, but it ain't one of Bond's best.

"Saint Mulligan": A humourous story about a police officer who helps out an angel; the angel insists on rewarding Mulligan and upon learning the cop wants a promotion, misunderstands this and turns Mulligan into an angel. Many complications insist, not the least of which is a fellow who goes by either "Abe Addon" or "B.L. Zeebub."

"The Monster From Nowhere": Here's an interesting curve - true horror story, quite unlike the other tales, although it does delve into the fourth dimension, one of Bond's favourite subjects. An explorer in Peru capture a 4-dimensional creature - or at least, part of the creature. Problems ensue when he decides to introduce the scientific community to the monster. The story notably invokes Ambrose Bierce's "the Damned Thing" and is definitely more in Bierce's line than Bond's usual fare.

"The Man Who Walked Through Glass": Speaking of the fourth dimension, here we have a man who discovers he can travel through glass, provided he's naked. It starts out seeming very whimsical, but it seems the sensation of traveling through glass is a little too addictive to the man...

"The Enchanted Pencil": A fun story about a pulp author whose pencil can write terrific stories, but without it he's as hopeless as, well, me. There is a clever solution to the problem of how he can continue being a writer after the pencil is used up: go work for Hollywood!

"Pilgrimage": This tale features Meg & Daiv, characters of Bond's I first encountered in "the Magic City" (the Far Side of Nowhere), but this is the first of his Meg & Daiv tales, telling of a post-apocalyptic world where the history of humanity has been corrupted by time and legend. Meg is introduced here as a very fine protagonist, easily the best female character of Bond's I've read - although the story's implication that Meg's matriarchy is inferior to Daiv's patriarchy raises other problems. Still, a good story - I'd like to read the other Meg & Daiv tales.

Once again, I'm very pleased to have explored Bond's writing more closely. Perhaps I'll unearth more of his anthologies in the future.

Shedding some light on "Snake Doctor"

One of my favourite episodes of the old-time radio series Escape is "Snake Doctor," a fine tale from a very fine program. Written by Irvin S. Cobb, it's a very tight drama about a murderous hunter who believes the local legend about the "Snake Doctor" possessing a horde of hidden riches; the hunter coolly plots to murder "Snake Doctor" and take his money.

You can hear the episode from archive.org here. As I began looking up my favourite episodes of Escape in their original print form, "Snake Doctor" is one I only recently obtained, via the 1923 hardcover Snake Doctor and Other Stories. It's interesting to note that while the radio program gives the hunter a son, there's no such character in the original tale - it certainly suits radio for him to have someone else to speak with and fits seamlessly with the rest of Cobb's tale.

Something I realized while reading Cobb's original text is that the Snake Doctor was a Caucasian man; not that he was portrayed as African-American in the radio version, but somehow it made to sense to me to assume that an unspoken reason for the hunter's intense hatred for Snake Doctor was simple racism; reading the text, however, it's clear that Snake Doctor was supposed to be white. In Cobb's other stories, it's also extremely clear which characters are black (there are instances of the n-word-I'm-too-ashamed-to-type).

I had also hoped Snake Doctor and Other Stories would open me up to more of Cobb's work, considering how much I think of the titular story (it also won the 1922 O. Henry Prize). However, said Other Stories don't possess the tense thrills of "Snake Doctor." They possess some simple humour and charm (plus some unfortunately-expected racism) and a certain longing for one's old Kentucky home, far, far, away. Cobb was an immensely popular US author in his day, but he's virtually forgotten today; we OTR fans who enjoy the Escape adaptation of "Snake Doctor" are probably doing more than anyone else at keeping his name remembered.

Across the Gap with a Neanderthal

Recently I listened again to an episode of Arch Oboler's Lights Out, but this time had some new thoughts on the program which I don't believe others have considered.

The episode in question was first broadcast in 1936 during Oboler's first year as writer/producer of Lights Out; then, it was dubbed "Across the Gap." We don't seem to have a surviving copy of this broadcast, but the 1942 version (usually called "Neanderthal") is with us and can be downloaded from archive.org here.

In this play, a Frenchman, American man and British lady are traveling together via motor car. The Frenchman believes in solving problems with his bare hands, holding a very pragmatic outlook; the American is a diplomat who thinks reason will solve mankind's problems; the British lady doesn't seem to hold any opinions - we might (charitably) consider her as being undecided.

Being an Oboler play where people who openly voice their philosophies must then face them in grim, stark reality, they crash their car and travel back in time (just roll with it). They encounter a Neanderthal man and the American attempts to reason with it, but eventually must concede that for the sake of survival, he must kill the Neanderthal.

In 1936, Oboler meant the play to comment upon the situation in Europe, the rise of fascism and looming threat of Nazi Germany. Strangely though, the allegory he created doesn't quite fit. Prior to World War II, the British were the ones who thought reason & diplomacy could solve the problem while the Americans were neutral. Surely the perfect allegory would have been a British diplomat accompanied by a weak-willed American woman (Oboler's stereotype, not mine)? Surely by 1942 it would have been obvious to Oboler that the British in his story were a little miscast.

Truly, the British lady is a distraction - Oboler surely meant the diplomacy-speaking American to represent his isolationist brethren who had to learn an important lesson about standing up against aggressors; that part of the allegory works and - fortunately for Oboler - history has justified his position.

Er, that's it - that's what I thought. Thanks for indulging me.

An OTR Easter

We old-time radio fans certainly enjoy the holidays; why, come Christmas time you're liable to find us listening to something related to the season - perhaps Jack Benny bargain hunting for a pair of shoelaces for Don Wilson, or one of Lionel Barrymore's turns at the role of Ebenezer Scrooge, possibly even the Christmas where the Great Gildersleeve must give up his foundling baby to the child's true father.

Yet, we come to Easter and... the pickings are notably slimmer. Perhaps the best Easter drama surviving is an episode of Quiet Please entitled "Shadow of the Wings" from April 17, 1949; you can download it from archive.org here.

Quiet Please is sometimes called a radio horror program; while there are a few episodes which delve headfirst into horror, it would be more proper to dub it a fantasy series; it ranges from gentle, light fantasy to terrifying, dark fantasy. This particular episode definitely falls on the "light" side - series star Ernest Chappell portrays here the Angel of Death itself, sent to collect the life of a little girl.

Of couse, if the prospect of a mother confronting an angel to preserve her daughter's life sounds a little heavy, I offer you this April 17, 1949 episode of the Jack Benny Program where Jack and Mary go walking in the Easter Parade: you may download it from archive.org here.

Happy Easter!

"Nowhere is that tiny spot of space between now and here." The Far Side of Nowhere review

Having previously spoken to you about Nelson S. Bond's great book Mr. Mergenthwirker's Lobblies, I felt I might as well continue with a look at another of Bond's short story anthologies - this one from late in his life: the Far Side of Nowhere, published in 2002 by Arkham House and featuring short introductions from Bond himself.

Image from ISFDB

Many of the stories in the Far Side of Nowhere were first published in magazines during World War II, although the book's contents include stories from the 1950s and even 1990s. I would say this book belongs to the hardcore fans of Nelson S. Bond - the completists. I don't think the Far Side of Nowhere is as good as Mr. Mergenthwirker's Lobblies, but the stories are very similar; therein lies the problem: Bond's stories involve so many familiar ideas and approaches, especially where time travel is involved. For this reason, I won't bother going through the stories one at a time; instead, here are my arbitrarily-chosen most interesting stories from the Far Side of Nowhere:

• "Command Performance" Perhaps the most interesting thing about this story of an analyst attempting to uncover the meaning behind a man's nightmares is that he employs Dianetics to do so. I experienced a very brief panic as I wondered whether Bond converted to Hubbardology, but this story seems to be Bond's only foray into it.
• "Time Exposure" Like the previous book's "Johnny Cartwright's Camera," this concerns a camera with temporal powers - it can take pictures of the past or the future, but pictures of the future can't be developed until the moment reaches the present.
• "Private Line to Tomorrow" Concerns a man who accidentally "fixes" his telephone so that it receives calls 24 hours in advance; it takes him a while to catch on to what's happened and even then, it's difficult to sort out your personal life when all of your messages arrive 24 hours after you send them.
• "The Battle of Blue Trout Basin" is a brief, odd story about a fisherman who finds a place where the fish are so eager to die they crowd up for the opportunity!
• "The Unusual Romance of Ferdinand Pratt" features a shabby, wanna-be djinn who offers to make Ferdinand's typist fall in love with him via magic; instead, he makes Ferdinand's typewriter fall in love with him. It only gets worse when the typewriter becomes jealous!
• "Herman and the Mermaid" tells the story of a man who falls in love with a mermaid and convinces her people to enter the War on behalf of the Allies to sink German submarines. For a moment, it's like reading a wartime Sub-Mariner comic book!
• "Double, Double, Toil and Trouble" features Nelson S. Bond himself - twice over! Due to an unfortunate experiment, there are two Nelson S. Bonds, which gets to be very irritating to editor John W. Campbell as both Bonds are trying to sell him the same stories!
• "Magic City" The protagonist of this story, Meg, has appeared in other Bond stories which I've yet to read. It's a post-apocalyptic world where a new matriarchal society has arisen with only dim memories of what had been; it's pretty well-told and often very subtle, leaving it to the audience to decipher the scrambled-up elements of contemporary times for themselves.
• "The Masked Marvel" A sequel to the earlier "Bacular Clock." Pat Pending is back, his dialogue more wonderiferous than before. Sample: "My inventulation is stupendically importulant. One of the greatest things ever discoverized by man. It hasn't even been patentated yet." This time, Pat's built a robot golfer and sends it out to win big at a tournament, but an unfortunate downpour throws the robot off its game.
• "The Scientific Pioneer Returns" brings back Horse-Sense Hank from "Socrates of the South Forty," but this time it's as a crossover with Bond's other character Lancelot Biggs and after a pretty good set-up, it becomes a lot of goofy technobabble.
• "Miracles Made Easy" The Lobblies themselves are back!!! However, this story is a fairly typical Bondian time travel story; men try to use the Lobblies' knowledge of the future so they can bet on a football game. It has a neat enough solution, but it's not as special as the original Lobblies story.
• "The Amazing Invention of Wilberforce Weems" Wilberforce invents a chemical which can impart all the knowledge of a book to one's mind by simply tapping the book against your head. This works well in giving Wilberforce the confidence and data he needs for work, but unfortunately his sister has absorbed a text on nudism, his brother-in-law absorbed "Mein Kampf" and his little nephew struck his head on a ribald men's magazine.
• "The Man Who Weighed Minus Twelve" features exactly what the title says; a horse owner realizes that with a man who weighs -12, you could have a second jockey on your racehorse and still come in under weight. Sounds like a good plan...
• "Occupation: Demigod" Finally, this is a charming story of a jazz musician who picks up an ancient horn which connects him to the Greek pantheon, causing some question as to whether or not they'll admit him into their ranks as a demigod.

The Sea Hawk versus the Sea Hawk

Last year I began reading the novels of Rafael Sabatini - a near-forgotten author now, but he enjoyed quite a bit of fame about 100 years ago; if he's remembered at all, it's probably because his novel Captain Blood became an extremely entertaining 1935 film starring Errol Flynn.

Knowing that Sabatini had also written a novel called the Sea Hawk, I assumed the 1940 film of the same name (and like Captain Blood was directed by Michael Curtiz, featured an original score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold and starred Errol Flynn; the same trio also created the Adventures of Robin Hood in 1938) was an adaptation of the novel. Considering Flynn's great success with Captain Blood, it would have made sense for his patrons at Warner Bros. to find him another vehicle from the same author.

Curtiz & Flynn's Sea Hawk notably contains a very obvious depiction of Spanish forces standing in for Hitler's Germany; that element had obviously been invented by the studio, but how much of the film truly did come Sabatini's 1915 novel? As it turns out: the name. That's it. Warner Bros. used the name because Sabatini & Flynn had been linked before by Captain Blood, but the story was an original piece called "Beggars of the Sea." They could have titled the film after Sabatini's Fortune's Fool and it would have been almost as accurate.

Therefore, if the novel the Sea Hawk is not the story of an English privateer defending his native land from a Spanish conspiracy, what precisely is it?

The Sea Hawk tells of one Sir Oliver Tressilian, betrothed to Rosamund Godolphin but unable to get along with her brother Peter. When Oliver's brother Lionel kills Peter in a duel, suspicion of the deed falls upon Oliver, but Oliver is unwilling to incriminate Lionel; however, Lionel doesn't trust Oliver to remain silent and sells him into slavery; Oliver is presumed dead, enabling Lionel to seize control of the estate and romance Rosamund. Some time later, Oliver returns from slavery as Sakr-el-Bahr ("Hawk of the Sea"), having risen from slave to sailor to captain and converting to Islam. Sakr-el-Bahr sets out for revenge on Lionel & Rosamund.

The Tressilians & Godolphins are certainly a tangled-up family, fit for any soap opera: Peter is a gullible fool, Lionel is a crafty liar, Rosamund consistently thinks the worst of Oliver. At the point where Sakr-el-Bahr kidnaps Lionel and Rosamund, bringing them to Algiers so he can finally prove how Peter truly died, Rosamund continues to despise Oliver despite his story of woe and betrayal. If the family appeared on a daytime talk show, you could sum them up thusly:

• Peter: Killed by Lionel.
• Oliver: Solid into slavery by Lionel.
• Lionel: Framed Oliver for his deeds.
• Rosamund: Feels she is the victim here.

Rosamund is a terribly infuriating love interest who keeps finding excuses to hate Oliver (even when she's convinced of Lionel's misdeeds she doesn't appear that annoyed with him) but she does eventually come around and helps Sakr-el-Bahr evade the hangman's rope. Interestingly, although Oliver is ultimately cleared of his supposed crimes and his return to England enabled, he doesn't convert back to Christianity by story's end - in fact, he refuses to convert back when it's suggested. By the end of the book he's persona non grata in Algiers, but one imagines he wouldn't be too welcome in 16th century England either.

The Sea Hawk is much like Captain Blood (both were adapted into films in the year of 1924) as its hero is a falsely-condemned man who becomes a slave, then a captain who must engage in a constant war of wits against his own supposed allies and eventually overcome empires to win his one true love. If you've already read Captain Blood and you hunger for more, you could do worse than try the Sea Hawk. The novel is currently in the public domain.

"There are times, I confess, when the reader will shudder over the style rather than the content of these stories." - The Opener of the Way

During my recent review of Weird Tales issues, the stories of Robert Bloch I found reminded me how much I'd enjoyed his work in the past and had been meaning to find a copy of his first collection of short stories, the Opener of the Way. So I did.

This book first saw publication in 1945 by Arkham House and many of the stories came from Weird Tales; the copy I obtained is a (much more affordable) 1976 paperback reprint by Panther. I feel sorry for anyone who chased the 1945 original - they're missing out on this fantastic back cover blurb:

Although Bloch kept writing horror to the end of his career, the latter-day stories I've read veered away from the supernatural; here, near the start of his career, we have quite a bit of supernatural terror. Let's delve in!

• "The Opener of the Way" The titular story (which inspired the cover above) involves a father and son unearthing one of those (uh-oh) lost Egyptian tombs; the dad has been acting strangely and when he starts talking about projecting his consciousness into a statue you just know it won't end well...
• "The Cloak" This was (loosely) adapted into the Amicus film the House That Dripped Blood - in fact, this is so different that if you've seen the film, you might still be surprised by the original version. This involves a man seeking out a Halloween costume, asking the costumer to give him "the real thing." The vampire cape the costumer provides seems to be precisely that - it turns the wearer into a vampire!
• "Beetles" More fiddling around with Egyptian tombs (uh-oh). A man who unearths a mummy fears flesh-eating scarab beetles are after him for vengeance; he's right, but he didn't foresee how the beetles would get into his home...
• "The Fiddler's Fee" What is it with the Devil and violins, anyway? Here we have a violinist who sells his soul to become a virtuoso, but being the world's greatest violinist doesn't guarantee people will find you likeable - or loveable.
• "The Mannikin" A man deformed by a tumor so that he appears to be a hunchback seems to hold an unhealthy interest in the occult; wait, did I say tumor? To quote the great philosopher, "It's not a tumor!"
• "The Strange Flight of Richard Clayton" An interesting science fiction/horror blend; a lone pilot sets off to Mars on a ship which will take 10 years to find Mars, then 10 years to return. Within the ship, the throbbing of the vessel begins to wear upon the lone occupant and he begins to lose his mind. How can he possibly survive 20 years in such an environment?
• "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper" This is one of Bloch's better-known tales and I'd seen it dramatized (faithfully, as it happens) on Boris Karloff's Thriller (it was also adapted into comics format by Gil Kane). If you aren't familiar with it, it's the story of one man's dogged pursuit of Jack the Ripper, believing the killer still walks the Earth by having made occult sacrifices for eternal youth. Despite the subject, it's fairly lighthearted - until the climax.
• "The Seal of the Satyr" A tourist in Greece hears legends about how mortals could be transformed into beings such as centaurs and satyrs through human sacrifice; naturally, it's all true, but he's a little slow to discern just how true.
• "The Dark Demon" A very Lovecraftian piece (where Lovecraft himself and several related creatures are name dropped) about a horror author whose ideas come to him in his dreams; unfortunately, his most recent dreams involve him bringing about the incarnation of Asmodeus; that doesn't sound good.
• "The Faceless God" Yet more gamboling around in Egyptian tombs (uh-oh). This one is pretty sedate and way too-familiar but it involves the Lovecraftian being Nyarlathotep, so I'm sure someone likes it.

Bloch is my favourite of the Weird Tales-type authors because he not only has fiendish ideas of terrible things to inflict on his characters, but also a gift for dialogue and descriptive imagery and a twisted (yet often pleasing) sense of humour. I've said before that I don't have much time for Lovecraft - but Bloch? Oh my, yes.