Fri 26 Mar 2010
A Review by Dan Stumpf: RICHARD MATHESON – Someone Is Bleeding.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[4] Comments
RICHARD MATHESON – Someone Is Bleeding. Lion #137, paperback original, 1953. Reprinted in Noir – Three Novels of Suspense: Someone Is Bleeding; Fury on Sunday; Ride the Nightmare: Forge, hardcover & trade ppbk, 2005. (Previous limited edition: G & G Books, hc, 1997.) Film: Fox-Lira, France, 1974, as Les Seins de Glace (Icy Breasts).
It’s pleasantly perverse and quickly readable, this thing, Richard Matheson’s first novel — a couple hours of passion, mystery and intrigue; no great shakes in the plotting department, but quirky enough that I found myself wishing Hitchcock had turned this into Vertigo instead of the Boileau-Narcejac book, reviewed here not too long ago.
And there are some interesting similarities: David, a callow young writer, meets cute and vulnerable Peggy, a withdrawn but passionate woman whose past seems to be riddled with blank spots and contradictions. Peggy quickly gets him reacquainted with Jerry, an old college buddy turned successful bent lawyer, and with Jerry’s murderous henchman, his neurotic brother, alcoholic wife and other sundry and colorful characters.
With a cast like this you can’t go far wrong, but you can go some-wrong. The problem is that David never seems to do very much; he spends the novel reacting or over-reacting to the other characters, easily swayed by whatever version of the truth he hears last, and generally getting in the way of whatever may be going on —
Which may actually be more realistic in terms of character, but hardly makes for compelling reading. What keeps the pages turning here are the lively characters, a great chase scene that seems to prefigure North by Northwest, and an ending I found really really chilling.
Editorial Comment: On the primary Mystery*File website is an interview that Ed Gorman did with Richard Matheson back in 2004. Ed introduces the interview with an overview of Richard’s career that’s as long as the interview. It’s worth the trip. (Follow the link.)
March 26th, 2010 at 10:46 pm
Dan
Yes.
And again, yes.
It’s Matheson, what more can we say.
What more need we say?
Noir is a great collection of his rarer thrillers. Anyone who hasn’t read them should. His writing was never flashy or showy, never complex or literary, just clean, literate, compact, and powerfully moving. Not many writers are equally good in short or long form in whatever genre or non-genre they choose to work in, but Matheson is.
I re-read WHAT DREAMS MAY COME after the death of my first wife. I make no claims one way or the other for its validity, but it offered something nothing else did at the time — comfort, and for some reason, hope. That alone, as anyone who has ever suffered profound grief will tell you, is an achievement worthy of only great works of literature.
And HELL HOUSE stands second only to Shirley Jackson’s THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE as one of the three best haunted house novels ever written (the third is Dorothy MacArdle’s THE UNIVITED aka DARK FREEHOLD).
March 27th, 2010 at 3:10 pm
I came across this one on a spinner rack in a drug store in Old Orchard Beach, Maine — in 1968! Fastest quarter I ever spent. How it got on that rack 15 years after being published remains a mystery.
About a dozen years later I picked up an old copy of one of the (very) lesser mystery mags that touted a complete novel by Richard Matheson on its cover. I forget the name of the magazine and the name they gave the story, but it turned out to be an abridged version of Someone Is Bleeding. SIB still remains one of my favorite Matheson books.
March 27th, 2010 at 4:07 pm
Jerry
Re the spinner rack. Sounds like a back room got cleaned out, or a warehouse somewhere. Your timing was probably terrific. Made your day, I’m sure.
It didn’t take too much hunting to track down the magazine version of SOMEONE IS BLEEDING. It was published as “The Frigid Flame” in JUSTICE, October 1955.
All credit here goes to James Reasoner who reviewed the book on his blog
http://jamesreasoner.blogspot.com/2007/09/someone-is-bleeding-richard-matheson.html
and Juri Nummelin, who also remembered the short version.
— Steve
March 16th, 2018 at 4:39 pm
Actually, “The Frigid Flame” (later included in the 1997 anthology American Pulp) is not the only abridgement. Another, entitled “The Untouchable Divorcee,” appeared in the May 1956 issue of Stag. Similarly, a shorter version of Fury on Sunday, “The Frenzied Weekend,” was published in For Men Only (June 1956). Conversely, Matheson expanded his story “Now Die in It” (Mystery Tales, December 1958; reprinted in Matheson Uncollected: Volume Two) into his novel Ride the Nightmare.