LESTER del REY, Editor – Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year: Second Annual Edition. E. P. Dutton, hardcover. 1973. Ace, paperback, December 1975.

   #1. LARRY NIVEN “Cloak of Anarchy.” First published in Analog SF, March 1972. First collected in Tales of Known Space: The Universe of Larry Niven (Ballantine, paperback, 1975).

   Some time in the near future, when “modern transportation systems” have made automobiles obsolete, the question is, what should be done with all of the roads in the United States that are no longer needed?

   The answer, as far as Los Angeles and the 405 (the San Diego Freeway) is concerned, is to cover it over with dirt and grass and make a people’s park of it. Anyone can do do anything there, except for one rule: no violence is allowed. This rule is monitored and enforced by a large number of basketball-sized “copseyes” floating in the air above the park.

   What happens, though, when the monitoring system breaks down? It isn’t instantaneous, but you can imagine it yourself, and it isn’t pretty. Niven’s touch is largely light-hearted, though, up to a certain point, and the story is filled with all kinds of well-defined characters, even if most of them do not have much screen time.

   The basic theme: Anarchy isn’t stable. Or, absolute freedom is highly overrated. The story itself is chock full of ideas, bouncing all over each other and all over the place, and all of them are interesting. Example: What was it the replaced the automobile? Who is the beautiful girl with the fifteen feet of flowing cloak?

        —

NOTE:   Over the next few weeks, I plan to continue working my way through this Best of the Year anthology and reporting on each of the stories in it. I think the era of the early 1970s was a good one for the kind of SF I like to read. As I go forward, let’s see how true that statement is and whether or not you agree.

  FREDERICK C. DAVIS “Death to the Witness.” Show-Me McGee #6. Novelette. First published in Detective Fiction Weekly, 24 February 1934. Advertised as “The Hand of Doom” on the front cover. Published separately in the UK in paperback by Sharman Ellis Ltd., sometime in the 1930s.

   Almost without fail a series character in the old pulp magazines had to have a gimmick — something that made him different from all of the others, something that made him stand out in the reader’s mind so that they’d recognize him when they came across the next of his adventures.

   Some of these gimmicks were awfully minor ones, though. Show-Me McGee’s was exactly that. Hailing from the “Show Me” state of Missouri, Detective Lieutenant John McGee was one of those policemen who had to see the evidence and be convinced of what it told him before he ever went into action.

   As gimmicks so, this is a mere trifle. I have an idea that by the time this one came out, the sixth in the series, even the author had gotten tired of it or he’d run out of ways to build it into the stories he was writing. There’s only one paragraph in this one that it’s really brought up.

   And speaking of the story, this one’s about a cleaning lady in a large office building who witnesses a murder, one committed by a mysterious criminal mastermind, and she is the only one who can identify him. Trouble is, she’s in a coma in a hospital bed, and the killer has ordered all the members of his gang to get in and bump her off.

   The title on the cover, “The Hand of Doom,” is actually the more appropriate one, and in a way, in 1934, it may have been science fictional. Show Me McGee manages to save the day by the judicious use of liquid oxygen, freezing the killer’s hand so that it breaks off just before he is able to detonate several sticks of dynamite.

   Well, howdy. As perhaps you can tell, this is a story that’s filled with action from beginning to end. Even if this happens to be a mug of your favorite brew, it’s deeply flawed, though. Why, you might ask, even at the time, didn’t the killer knock off the cleaning lady as soon as he saw that she had seen him? He slugs her on the head instead, and dumps her into a nearby closet. To his regret later on — for the rest of the story, in fact.

       The Show-Me McGee series —

Hell on Wheels (nv) Detective Fiction Weekly Sep 30 1933
Murder Without Motive (nv) Detective Fiction Weekly Oct 7 1933 (*)
The Killer in the Tower (ss) Detective Fiction Weekly Nov 18 1933
The Devil’s Dozen (nv) Detective Fiction Weekly Dec 2 1933 (*)
The Three Doctor Jekylls (nv) Detective Fiction Weekly Dec 30 1933
Death to the Witness (nv) Detective Fiction Weekly Feb 24 1934 (*)
Stone Dead (nv) Detective Fiction Weekly Jun 9 1934
The Eye in the Wall (nv) Detective Fiction Weekly Jul 21 1934

   (*) Reprinted by Sharman Ellis Ltd. in the UK, probably all as 64 page paperbacks. Fellow blogger Morgan Wallace has recently posted a long review of The Devil’s Dozen, which also includes a photo image of the cover. Follow the link.

ROALD DAHL “Man from the South.” Orinally published in the September 4, 1948 issue of Colliers (as “Collector’s Item”). First collected in Someone Like You (1953). Reprinted many times, including A Shocking Thing, edited by Damon Knight (Pocket, 1974). TV versions: (1) Cameo Theatre, August 7, 1955. (2) Alfred Hitchcock Presents, January 3, 1960 (with Steve McQueen, Peter Lorre). (3) Tales of the Unexpected, March 24, 1979, (with José Ferrer). (4) Alfred Hitchcock Presents, one segment of “Pilot,” May 5, 1985 (with John Huston, Steven Bauer). (5) Suspense, February 12, 2016.

   Even though you may not recognize it from its title, most readers of this blog may easily have read or watched at least one version of this story. In case not, this is the tale of a daring young man who bets the loss of the little finger on his left hand against a brand new Cadillac that his lighter will light successfully ten times in a row.

   Somewhat surprisingly, the story that Dahl is not nearly as suspenseful as the versions I’ve seen on TV, namely (2) and (3). The snapping of the lighter by the boy whose other hand is tied to the table is almost perfunctory. Not nearly so as when drawn out for dramatic effect in either TV version.

   Even so, there is no denying that Roald Dahl’s story, only 12 pages long, is as bizarrely evil as anything I’ve ever read, with a twist as good as any ever written.

ROBERT E. HOWARD “The Horror from the Mound.” Short story. Non-series. First published in Weird Tales, May 1932. Collected in Skull-Face and Others (Arkham House, hardcover, 1946) and Wolfshead (Lancer, paperback, 1968). Reprinted elsewhere many more times, including Trails in Darkness (Baen, paperback, 1996).

   A short tale — only 23 pages long in the Baen edition — but still one of the most effective vampire stories I’ve ever read. Not that anyone except a poor Mexican laborer knows ahead of time who or what lies inside the ancient burial mound on Steve Brill’s land, somewhere in the American southwest, and he makes a great point of avoiding the area whenever he trudges back to his hovel of a home after a hard day’s work.

   What Brill does — in spite of all the alarms that go off in the minds of every single reader of this tale, every single one — his curiosity completely out of control, is to start digging into the mound on his own and far into the night.

   What emerges is something he does not expect, not in today’s day and age (or 1932, to be precise, which is when the story was first published). This is the kind of story in which the suspense builds and builds, whether you’re a believer of the supernatural or not. It’s not a story to be put down easily, I can assure you.

GORDON E. WARNKE “Whispering Monk.” The Whispering Monk #1. Short story. Published in All Detective Magazine, June 1934. Never reprinted.

   This is the first appearance of The Whispering Monk as a hero pulp character, and the last. In fact it is the only [crime fiction] story that the author, Gordon E. Warnke, ever had published, and the only way you’re going to be able to read it is by finding a copy of the right issue of All Detective Magazine, which is as usual with these old magazines, is not going to be an easy job to do. (See also comment #3.)

   The Whispering Monk, a terrifying nemesis to hoodlums and gangsters alike, is in reality Dick Steele, a former police detective whose father, also a detective, was murdered by a criminal gang that Steele believes is operating with police protection. He takes on the guise of the hooded Whispering Monk to bring the gang down by means of his own vigilante justice.

   As it turns out, however, by means of clever disguising techniques, for most of the story he takes on the identity of Johnny the Dip, a barfly who is able to overhear the conversations of gang members in bars as he sprawls drunkenly at nearby tables.

   Only one person, William Dugan, a captain of detectives, knows about Steele’s alter egos, and is the only man he trusts with that information. The story is short — it’s only nine pages long — so to do what he has to do with so little room to work, Steele’s only resource is to get the gang members fighting against each other.

   You may be surprised to hear me say that the story is not badly written — there’s simply just not enough of it — and the setup shows some imagination, at least. This overlooks the unfortunate fact, however, that The Whispering Monk appears in person in only a few paragraphs on the last page. More of him in action, instead as Johnny the Dip, would seem to be a reasonable request, and why that particular moniker, anyway?

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER – The Face Lifter. Kayo Macray #1 (?). “Complete novel.” All Detective Magazine, June 1934. Collected in Silent Death (Pulpville Press, trade paperback, March 2013).

   I have discovered no evidence that personal body trainer Kayo Macray ever appeared in any other story but this one. This is so even though there is a hint of a case of services rendered to someone in need, one with a happy ending, that occurred before this one. When he’s asked by a current client who’s worried about what kind of jam her daughter’s gotten herself into, he gladly agrees to do what he can to help.

   This is a situation that could easily be the beginning of a Perry Mason novel. The daughter, when he meets her, tells Kayo that she’s being blackmailed, and of course it is nothing she could tell her mother about. Kayo goes into immediate action. But unlike the Perry Mason, the rest of the story is nothing but action.

   Well, no, I’ll take that back. [Plot Alert!] As he discovers by accident, after obtaining the indiscreet material the girl needed him to retrieve, Kayo learns that she was an imposter. This is kind of a neat twist, but Kayo recovers quickly and saves the day. Lots of fisticuffs, gunplay, and a frantic car chase follow.

   The title of the story comes from the fact that in the process of rescuing the damsel in distress, Kayo is very good with his fists, and messes up the face of one of the hoodlums he tracks down in very fine fashion.

   Overall, this is a mediocre story in a third rate pulp magazine, but you can always tell Gardner’s prose style from anyone else’s, no matter how early in his career he may have been writing. And just between you and me, calling “The Face Lifter” a “complete novel” is stretching the truth quite a bit. In the standard pulp magazine format, it’s only 23 pages long.

ERNEST HAYCOX “Dolorosa, Here I Come.” Collier’s, 28 February 1931. Collected in The Last Rodeo (Little, Brown & Co., hardcover, 1949; Pocket, paperback, 1956).

   Danny Dale is the young trail boss of an outfit out of Texas, hard young men worn with the deprivations of the trail and anxious to let off some steam, and Dolorosa, like a fat hungry spider, sits before them offering shallow glitter, and cheap whiskey. Not surprisingly things go bad, when Bill, one of Dale’s boys, kills a crooked roulette dealer and in turn is killed by the local lawman, Lingersen (“The man is a remorseless killer. He has been here only a year but in that time he has been like the terror. He has bullied and beaten and destroyed. Everybody hates him; nobody dares cross him.”).

   But Danny sees it as a fair exchange, a life for a life and returns only to bury his friend and settle up any debts, and it is then he meets Gracie an independent young woman, who owns a small restaurant and hates what Dolorosa is.

   â€œDolorosa. Here I Come” first appeared in Collier’s in 1931, one of slicks (the high paying magazines printed on slick paper which most pulp writers aspired to crack) which Haycox cracked long before the story that made him one of the most admired Western writers of his age, “The Last Stage to Lordsburg,” famously a retelling of Guy de Maupassant’s “Boule de Souf”, that John Ford made into the film that gave birth to the modern adult Western, Stagecoach.

   In any Haycox Western the power and control of the writing is hard to miss. There is a lyricism to his words that captures not only the mythic and larger than life qualities of the West, but also the simplicity and purity of the classic form. It is little wonder that Haycox went on to be far more than a popular Western writer penning not only Westerns, but a handful of bestselling historical novels of the West like The Adventurers and Canyon Passage that were offered by major book clubs and optioned by Hollywood.

   Of the period he wrote in, Haycox was both one of the most popular and most respected writers to take up the Western, a rarity, in that he was recognized far beyond the confines of the pulps with probably only Luke Short (Fred Glidden) running him a close race in the high paying slicks of the era, yet he was also recognized as a master of action and drama.

   True to heavies from time immemorial Lingersen can’t leave good enough alone and braces Danny on his return to bury his friend:

   Okay, I’ll grant you there are more dropped ‘g’s’ in this tale than all of Philo Vance and Peter Wimsey, but still it sounds and feels authentic and at the same time mythic, and that combination of the dusty sweaty hard real West with the mythic Technicolor wide-screen West of the big screen is one of the keys to why Haycox is remembered and still read.

   Haycox is too good a writer to spare us the promised showdown, and much too good to offer us a story in which that is all there is, the twist at the end an almost O Henryesque moment. Without giving it away, I’ll only say Haycox isn’t offering us simple villains and heroes and doesn’t pretend that any duel to the death is without its ironies.

   This last is just a scene as the boys ride out of town. You have read or seen it’s like in a thousand films and Western novels and stories, but listen to the simple lyric description of the following passage. “Dolorosa, Here I Come,” is a slight example of Haycox talent, but more a vivid reminder of why his name was legend in the genre and why he was envied by so many of his fellow writers of the purple sage:

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER “Carved in Sand.” Whispering Sands #15. Novelette. Argosy Weekly, June 17, 1933. First collected in Whispering Sands: Stories of Gold Fever and the Western Desert (William Morrow, hardcover, 1981).

   The online FictionMags Index lists 17 “Whispering Sands” stories that Gardner did for the pulp magazine Argosy from 1930 to 1934, of which “Carved in Sand” is the 15th. I do not know whether or not Bob Zane is in all of them, but I believe he is in most. (Corrections welcome!)

   It is not clear from reading just this one story what it is that Bob Zane does for a living. He is an older man, not yet grizzled, but perhaps a prospector with an inherent love for the desert, with an inquisitive mind and an aptitude for solving mysteries. The setting is not stated in any precise fashion, but it is probably the Southwest US, circa the early 1930s, about the time the story itself was written. (Both automobiles and airplanes are used as modes of transportation.)

   In this tale Zane and young Pete Ayers, his companion at the time, come to the rescue of a young girl whose father has been accused of killing another prospector. She has helped him escape, if only temporarily. He’s back in jail now, even though the evidence against him is only circumstantial and sketchy at that.

   Zane disrupts the man’s trial with Gardner’s usual zeal in such matters with some evidence based on a single fact that (disappointingly) only longtime denizens of the desert would be aware of, otherwise this is a solid, enjoyable piece of work.

   I’m only guessing, but Gardner seems to have two great passions in life: the law and how it can be manipulated to one’s advantage, and the desert and its ever “whispering sands.” The latter has two aspects to it, according to Gardner: first its inherent cruelty, but secondly, and more importantly, its kinder side, the one that can not only lull even the rawest tenderfoot to sleep, but can also hold the evidence of everything that happens there, waiting only for someone who knows where to look.

   These stories were among Gardner’ more poetic creations. In attitude and presentation, there’s quite a bit of difference between these and the straight-forward detective mysteries he’s much more well known for.

         

  ALFRED COPPEL “The Last Two Alive!” Short novel. First published in Planet Stories, November 1950. Reprinted with Out of Time’s Abyss, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, as half of Armchair Fiction Double Novel #D-169, paperback, 2015.

   If you all you want is a whopping good old-fashioned space opera story without a lot of either depth or characterization, this may be the story for you. Aram Jerrold is accused and convicted of conspiring against the ruling Tetarchy of the Thirty Suns, based on the testimony of Deve Jennet, a girl Aram thought he had a future with.

   But once sent to the prison planet Atmion IV for execution, Aram is pleasantly surprised (to say the least) to find that Deve is a member of group of rebels against both the Tetarchy and Satane, the despot ruler of the Kaidor planetary system. Planning to revolt and take over the Tetarchy, the latter has developed a biological weapon that wipes out the memories of its victims and turns them into howling beasts.

   Well, sir, what can a band of only a handful of rebels do — the one Aram is now a member of? They do their best, and realistically, the outcome is all but inevitable. The story is told in picturesque fashion, however, and it doesn’t slow down for a minute, exactly how you’d expect from a tale first published in a magazine called Planet Stories.

   [WARNING: PLOT ALERT AHEAD] As it so happens, this is one of those big-scale stories in which humanity completely wipes itself out, leaving only two survivors. Aram [Jerrold] and Deve [Jennet] become the progenitors of a new human race, and over the years, their names become corrupted to … can you guess?

M. McDONNELL BODKIN “The Hidden Violin.” Short story. PI Dora Myrl. First appeared in Dora Myrl, the Lady Detective (Chatto, UK, hardcover, 1900). Reprinted in The Big Book of Female Detectives, edited by Otto Penzler (Black Lizard, US, 2018).

   This very short story was probably not the lead one in the collection it first appeared in (see above), since it gets right down to business with no discussion at all as to how Dora Myrl got started as a professional detective way back in the year 1900.

   And the business at hand is an “impossible” crime: how it is that a stolen Stradivarius violin can be heard being played in a locked room, but when anyone knocks and is invited in, there is no violin to be found, no matter how diligent the search.

   The solution is simple but nonetheless rather clever, and what’s more, clues for readers to solve the case on their own are all there to be discovered. Nicely done!

Bio-Bibliographic notes:   The author, Matthias McDonnell Bodkin (1850-1933), was an Irish nationalist politician as well as a noted author, journalist and newspaper editor, and barrister. (Follow the link above to his Wikipedia page.)

   Besides the collection of a dozen stories that “The Hidden Violin” appears in, Dora Myrl also shared top billing in the novel The Capture of Paul Beck (Unwin, 1909) and makes a cameo appearance in the collection Young Beck (Unwin, 1911).

   What is most assuredly a first, if indeed not unique in the annals of PI fiction, when Dora finds herself in competition with another detective by the name of Paul Beck in solving the case they are both working on. The book was the aforementioned The Capture of Paul Beck, and in it they end up falling in love and getting married.