ROBERT A. HEINLEIN “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag.” First published in Unknown Worlds, October 1942, as by John Riverside. Reprinted many times, most notably in the Gnome Press collection having the same title (1959).

   The impact of the hard-boiled school of writing can be seen today in many literary voices, but not surprisingly, it first made itself felt in genre fiction, and not just in the mystery genre. In the 1930’s the voice began to appear in the Western, in Hollywood films, and in science fiction, particularly in that branch of science fiction known as Campbellian after editor and writer John W. Campbell Jr. It was only natural then that as the lines blurred the genres would blend together somewhat, and by the 1940’s, it was well established in most genre fiction.

   Unknown (later Unknown Worlds) the companion to Campbell’s science fiction pulp Astounding Science Fiction, published a great deal of fantasy and horror, but all along the Campbellian ideal of well worked out logical fiction, many of the works appearing there the best of the writers’ careers and among the best and most loved stories of its age.

   Most of the major writers from Astounding contributed to Unknown as well, L. Sprague de Camp, L. Ron Hubbard, Isaac Asimov, A. E. Van Vogt, and some earlier writers like Jack Williamson and Henry Kuttner. Humor, horror, adventure, and high fantasy went hand in hand. De Camp and Pratt’s “Incomplete Enchanter,” Hubbard’s “Fear,” “Death’s Deputy,” and “Typewriter in the Sky,” Williamson’s “Darker than You Think,” Eric Frank Russell’s “Sinister Barrier,” and many other classics first saw light there. Among those who wrote for the new market was Robert A. Heinlein, dean of the Campbellian science fiction movement, who wrote this little novelette under the name John Riverside.

   In it Teddy Randall and his wife Cynthia (Cyn) are private investigators approached by Mr. Jonathan Hoag, a prim and somehow unsettling individual they both take an instant dislike to, but his money is good and the case seems simple enough if a bit whacky. Mr. Hoag, it seems, has a memory problem.

   No, not amnesia, at least not exactly. Mr. Hoag doesn’t know what he does during his days. They are a complete blank, so when he finds what he fears is blood under his fastidious finger nails he hires the Randalls to follow him. Whacky, as I said, but the the Randalls aren’t the scrupulous type, and money is money. They take the case. So what if their client doesn’t appear to have any fingerprints.

   The Randalls work together, a well oiled and capable little investigative team, and part of the enjoyment is watching the duo think and work. They are a sort of sexy slightly larcenous Nick and Nora or Pam and Jerry North, an attractive addition to the subgenre of married sophisticated sleuths that delighted mystery fans in the years following the debut of Hammett’s Nick and Nora.

   And follow Mr. Hoag they do, until Randall discovers the address and the office in the Acme Building he followed Hoag to on the first day doesn’t exist and even the floor of the building he was on isn’t there. At first they suspect he was drugged by Hoag, or that worse, he was hypnotized when Hoag stopped and spoke to him, but Hoag genuinely doesn’t appear to remember the encounter or anything else Randall saw that day.

   Things get even more weird when Randall meets a threatening Mr. Stoles:

   Stoles than recounts a simply horrifying and ridiculous story, something about the Sons of the Bird, and Randall wakes up in his bed from the nightmare. He tries to shake it off, but things are getting weirder by the minute what with Hoag now telling them that he is being watched — from inside the mirror. Hoag even seems to attack Cyn the next time she follows him, and she can’t even defend herself despite having a gun. Then there’s the note neither of them wrote:

   When they go to Hoag’s doctor things get even stranger.

   And things are about to get stranger yet, when the Randalls discover a new full length mirror has been installed in their bedroom.

   Perhaps the best thing about “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag” is that it doesn’t let the reader down. Heinlein pays off in a finale that is both disturbing and a bit funny, but also profoundly disturbing. Don’t blame me if after you read it you remove the mirror from your bedroom and handcuff yourself to your loved one every night at bedtime like the Randalls.

   Blame Heinlein, and Jonathan Hoag. While it isn’t horror, and you could even call it a satirical masterpiece, the story will leave you with more than a frisson in its profoundly disturbing implications. Like Fritz Leiber’s “Conjure Wife” and Jack Williamson’s “Darker Than You Think” from the same magazine the frights here lie in the implication more than the instrumentation.

   It rivals Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in that, as was written of that book, it is the rare mystery where the solution to the crime is more terrifying than the crime itself.

H. P. LOVECRAFT “The Terrible Old Man.” Written January 28, 1920, and first published in the Tryout, an amateur press publication, July 1921. Appeared in Weird Tales, August 1926. Reprinted many times.

   Although there really isn’t that much literary value in the story, H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Terrible Old Man” could certainly be built upon and skillfully adapted into a truly captivating Gothic horror film. Originally published in the amateur journal Tryout (1921) and subsequently reprinted many times, including Pirate Ghosts of the American Coast (1988), the very brief story is notable for its New England coastline setting, one that Lovecraft would return to time and again in his more sophisticated writings.

   The plot is simple, but loaded with noticeable xenophobic undertones that make this little known story even less valuable than it otherwise would have been in light of Lovecraft’s far more historically significant later works. While the titular character, the Terrible Old Man, is never given an identifying name, the men who plot to steal from the old mysterious pirate are most explicitly marked by their “ethnic” sounding names: Angelo Ricci, Joe Czanek, and Manuel Silva.

   Not only am I guessing Italian, Polish, and Portuguese, but that these three aforementioned nationalities were among Lovecraft’s least favorite immigrant groups in his home town of Providence, Rhode Island. For it is this gang of three men – three “foreigners” in Protestant New England – who seek to rob the story’s old man – a former sea captain – of his treasure.

   Yet, it is the sea captain who has the last laugh. For he is terrible indeed! Although the supernatural elements in the story are relatively attenuated, at least for an H.P. Lovecraft story, the reader learns that the three would be robbers are found murdered. The old man, clearly the responsible party, is said to have yellow eyes. Is he a ghost or a zombie? We never learn, which allows our imaginations to run wild.

   As I said at the outset, this is hardly a commendable work of literary fiction; in many ways, it is amateurish in the extreme. But there’s something there, some genuine imaginary terror lurking behind the terrible old man’s eyes. It’s a chilling little tale, one that I thought I’d soon forget after reading it, but oddly enough one that has stuck in my mind for a while.

GORDON YOUNG “Born to Be Hanged, But…” Adventure, 03 December 1919.

   So speaks young Don Everhard, the hero of Gordon Young’s tough novelette that headlined the December 3, 1919, edition of the great pulp Adventure. It was a pretty good issue too, Harold Lamb’s “Said Afzel’s Elephant”, and stories by J. Allan Dunn, and Arthur O. Friel, but it’s the Young novelette and Don Everhard the character that are of interest here.

   The story is pretty straight forward. Young Don Everhard, actually Don Richmond of a respectable San Francisco family, is a professional gambler with a fast and deadly gun in contemporary San Francisco. During an election year he comes upon an incriminating letter that would embarrass reform candidate Congressman Bryan and beautiful Helen Curwen and favor James H. Thorpe, a lumberman and Bryan’s opponent for the governor’s race. Everhard has a history with Thorpe and roundly hates him. (“If he was a Republican I would vote Democrat, and if he was a Democrat I would vote Republican”).

   In knightly style Everhard returns the letter unread to Mrs. Curwen, but when word gets out he had the letter he is approached by two men to buy it; one the mysterious Ellis, and the other an agent of Thorpe. Everhard isn’t having any of it, but when Thorpe tries to set him up in a poker game with a professional gunman, he kills the man and has to go to ground, which he does hiding out as a crew member on a ship, until the truth comes out.

   When he is cleared Mrs. Curwen approaches him. She is meeting with Thorpe to try and beard the lion over the letter, but when the meeting ends in a blaze of gunfire … well, as Everhard opens the story:

   Of course he gets out of it and retains his honor and the ladies, but the really interesting part of this story is in the telling, because years before Carroll John Daly or Dashiell Hammett, the only thing distinguishing Don Everhard from the hard boiled private eye of a thousand pulp stories is that he’s a gambler and not a detective. The language is the same, all-American unsentimental (but actually very sentimental) voice of Twain and London, out of Bret Harte and the Dime Novel. Young is a better writer than Daly, but if Daly didn’t read these and Race Williams and wasn’t influenced by the diamond-hard fast-shooting gambler I would be greatly surprised.

   A “witch’s mirror of blood.” If that isn’t the hardboiled voice of Black Mask, I never heard it.

   Robert Sampson wrote more about Gordon Young and Don Everhard in Yesterday’s Faces, his massive work on the early pulps. Today Young is best remembered for his South Seas adventure tales about Hurricane Williams, with only one expensive edition of Everhard stories reprinted, but if Young and Don Everhard are not quite the hardboiled private eye that soon followed they are so close that the difference is difficult to measure.

   Like his private eye pulp descendants Everhard is a tough, no nonsense, cynical, fast-thinking, fast-shooting hardboiled egg with a soft center, an errant knight on the edge between respectable society and the underworld, a man with his own code and his own rules navigating a twisting course between the innocent and not so innocent and the truly guilty, brutal, corrupt, and dangerous.

   The voice and the idea may not be quite there yet, but like the last half of Conan Doyle’s Valley of Fear, we are so close to the hardboiled private eye we can feel his breath on the back of our neck. I would argue that with this story alone Young was already ahead of Daly’s “Knights of the Open Palm” or Three Gun Terry Mack by a mile.

REX STOUT “Man Alive.” First published in The American Magazine, December 1947. Included in the collection Three Doors to Death (Viking, 1950; Dell #626, 1952; Bantam, 1966).

   It’s been too long, far too long, since I’ve read one of Rex Stout’s tales of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin on a case together, and if I can, I’m going to make a point of going back and re-reading as many of them this summer as I’m able to, with a special point of emphasis on the few that I’ve never gotten around to read. Shame on me.

   It is difficult to say exactly why it is so, but the stories are very much timeless. I had no difficulty at all in slipping back in a time bubble to the insular world of a Manhattan brownstone office and home, picking up when I left off, with another case at Wolfe’s door. It is difficult to believe that this story was written in 1947. The few references to the outside world are Archie’s new Cadillac and the fashion show that Archie attends in hopes of spotting the father of their new client, female and the about to become the new owner of the firm.

   Why, you may ask. It so happens that the girl’s father is dead, having committed suicide by jumping naked into a geyser at Yellowstone Park. This being a Nero Wolfe mystery, of course he is not dead, and although he was in disguise, the girl knows she saw him at a previous show.

   Also, because this is a Nero Wolfe mystery, it is no surprise to the reader when her father turns up dead for real, and Wolfe’s client is suspected of the murder. This is also one of those affairs in which Wolfe gathers all of the possible suspects in his office, police in presence, to determine the real killer.

   He is flummoxed, though, when all of the suspects alibi each other. None of them could have done it, save perhaps his client. Although taken aback, Wolfe probes further, digs deeper, and after some pursing of his lips, is able to steer the conversation around to the only solution there could be to the crime.

   It’s a very good detective story, but even better was the company and familiar surroundings.

STANLEY ELLIN “The Day of the Bullet.” First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, October 1959. Reprinted in The Blessington Method (Random House, 1974) and The Specialty of the House (Mysterious Press, 1980). Also included in Brooklyn Noir 2: The Classics (Akashic Books, Tim McLoughlin ed., 2005). Adapted for television: Alfred Hitchcock Presents, 14 February 1960 (Season 5, Episode 20); teleplay: Bill S. Ballinger. Nominated for an MWA Edgar, Best Short Story, 1960.

   That’s a long list of bibliographic data, one nearly as long as my comments are going to be. The story that won the Edgar that year was “The Landlady” by Roald Dahl, which I do not remember reading, so I can only conjecture, but Dahl’s story must have been a doozy to beat out this one.

   Stanley Ellin wrote a number of novels, but if he’s remembered today, it will be for his short stories, which he wrote at a rate of once a year. Inevitably they were gems of story-telling as polished as they could be, including this one.

   It’s the story of two 12-year-olds growing up in Brooklyn until they were separated when parents of the narrator of the tale moved to Brooklyn in 1923. They never saw each other again, but the teller of story recognizes his former friend when his bloody photos is published in the newspaper, some 35 years later.

   It turns out their last adventure together was a trip to a nearby golf course fishing for lost balls, when they witness a guy being beaten up by a pair of gangsters. Iggy, the friend, wants to tell the police, and so they both do, but what happens from that point on was the turning point in Iggy’s life.

   This deeply noirish tale is also a story of growing up, of making the wrong decision in life, but one you don’t realize at the time. It’s a warning story, of sorts, not really a sad one, as it’s told at a solid distance away, chronologically, but it could be if you think about it for a while.

BILL PRONZINI “La bellezza delle bellezze.” First published in Invitation to Murder, edited by Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg (Dark Harvest, hardcover, 1991; Diamond, paperback, February 1993). Reprinted in Scenarios (Five Star, hardcover, 2003).

   The idea behind the anthology Invitation to Murder is to present the reader with a wide variety of stories all based on a single idea: the body of a young girl is found in her apartment. Besides Bill Pronzini’s inclusion, among other authors whose tales are inside are Loren D. Esteman, Joan Hess, Judith Kelman, Nancy Pickard and Andrew Vachss. (Here I’m mentioning only those listed on the front cover of the paperback edition, ones I imagine the publisher assumed would catch a would-be buyer’s eye.)

   Besides settings, genres, moods and presentation, of course as in most collections, the quality of the stories vary widely as well. The detective puzzle stories fare the worst, I’m sorry to say. Joan Hess’s attempt at a locked room mystery, “Dead on Arrival. for example, should have been cleared up in seconds, then a minute more to catch the killer. Well, maybe two minutes.

   The solution to a “dying message” mystery by William J. Reynolds is contrived, and the whole incident would have no chance in the world of ever happening that way. Better are a ghost story “The Life and Deaths of Rachel Long,” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, hauntingly told without quite gelling, and “Darke Street,” by Gary Brandner, a story about an aging cop almost ready for retirement who comes across a strange musty shop on a mostly deserted city street. This is one that could easily have appeared in the pages of the old Weird Tales pulp magazine.

   I especially enjoyed “Invitation to Murder” by Richard Laymon, in which An author with a deadline to write a story for this very same book finds the next door neighbor playing loud music very distracting. The multitude of ideas this writer comes up with before discarding them are better than some of the stories in this book, assuming you can accept the existence of zombies, for example. This one’s a small gem of a tale. I’m not surprised it was used as the title story of the anthology.

   I may have liked Bill Pronzini’s contribution, “La bellezza delle belleza,” even better, however. (Yes, I’m finally getting to it.) Translating the title from the Italian gives us “the beauty of beauties.” This might refer to the granddaughter of an elderly Italian friend of a friend who asks the author’s nameless PI to investigate a money problem she is having with the landlord, but in reality the phrase may apply even more to the changes happening to the city of San Francisco, and the death of the old days in particular. Evocatively done, in terms of both the city and the people in it, and the transition both are forced to undergo.

Added Later:   For what’s worth, the names on the cover of the hardcover edition are Nancy Pickard, Bill Pronzini, John Lutz, and Carolyn G. Hart, authors of the first four stories.

BRAM STOKER “The Burial of the Rats.” First published in the UK in the January 26, 1896 and February 2, 1896 issues of Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper. First published in the US in the January 26, 1896 and February 2, 1896 issues of The Boston Herald. It also appeared in the September 1928 issue of Weird Tales (cover shown). First published in book form in Dracula’s Guest And Other Weird Stories, George Routledge & Sons (1914). Available online here.

   Although Bram Stoker’s short story, “The Burial of the Rats” isn’t a particularly literary work of horror fiction, it’s nevertheless a highly atmospheric one. In many ways, it’s more a work of adventure fiction than weird fiction, more Conrad than Blackwood.

   Indeed, Stoker, despite his fame for creating the template for the modern vampire myth in Dracula (1897), wasn’t nearly the wordsmith as was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who helped invent the modern detective story. Stoker, however, was more than able to create highly effective scenes that, when fully absorbed, clench the reader by the throat.

   Such is the case in “The Burial of the Rats,” a story of admittedly dubious literary merit, but one that leaves an indelible impression on the reader’s psyche. Written from the first-person perspective of an Englishman on a Continental sojourn, the tale follows the narrator as he explores the dangerous and dirty shantytowns outside of Paris.

   Specifically, he decides to visit the area where rag-pickers make their homes in decrepit structures. There, he encounters an old woman in a ramshackle dwelling infested with not only rats, but also rat-like humans, dirty men capable of horrific violence against their fellow man. The story follows our intrepid narrator as he tries to escape certain death at the hands of his gruesome would be captors.

   â€œThe Burial of the Rats” doesn’t have much in the way of dramatic, literary tropes, ones that often appear in truly exceptional works of weird fiction. Aside from the notions that romantic love can propel a man forward in the face of certain death and that certain human behaviors are animalistic, Stoker’s tale doesn’t delve particularly deep into any moral or philosophical questions. But it does provide the reader with a bit of excitement and an unforgettable chase scene in which the narrator escapes with his life.

W. H. HODGSON “The Thing Invisible.” First published in The New Magazine, January 1912. Reprinted in Carnacki, The Ghost Finder (Eveleigh Nash, UK, hardcover, 1913; Mycroft & Moran, US, hardcover, 1947).

   W. H. Hodgson’s Edwardian occult detective story, “The Thing Invisible” may well be considered, at least by contemporary aesthetic and literary standards, a rather quaint foray into the realm of supernatural investigations.

   Written in an engaging narrative style, this story is one of Hodgson’s Carnacki detective tales featuring the eponymous sleuth tasked with investigating the arcane and the bizarre. Carnacki, as a investigator of the paranormal, is all too human and more than willing to admit that he’s far from a fearless protagonist. Indeed, what makes Carnacki such an engaging personality is that he’s more than willing to admit that the unknown is capable of frightening him.

   In “The Thing Invisible,” Carnacki recounts a case in which he faced down a mysterious dagger that seemed to act on its own accord, a death tool that nearly murdered a family’s butler. As a method of sleuthing, Carnacki makes use of early photography, going so far as to take surreptitious photos which he then uses to solve the puzzle of how a dagger could seemingly float mid-air and attack a man.

   Although Hodgson’s writing doesn’t invoke the cosmic dread quite to the same degree that Algernon Blackwood’s work does so effectively, it nevertheless does impress upon the reader a sense of creeping otherworldliness and subtle terror. Even more so, given that in this story at least [SPOILER ALERT], the seemingly impossible events have a mechanical, rational explanation.

ALGERNON BLACKWOOD “The Camp of the Dog.” Reprinted in The Complete John Silence Stories, edited by S. T. Joshi (Dover, 1997). First published in John Silence, Physician Extraordinary (Nash, UK, 1908). Available online here.

   I’ve never been a big fan of occult detective fiction. It’s always seemed to be a contradiction in terms to me. But from the little in the field I’ve read, this one I think is one of the better ones.

   I know little about John Silence, except by reputation as the “Psychic Doctor,” and his name, which is an absolutely perfect one for someone in his profession. He doesn’t show up until somewhere around the halfway point in “The Camp of the Dog,” a novella nearly 60 pages long, but at the beginning he serves full notice to Hubbard, his personal secretary and often companion in his adventures into the world of the supernatural, that he will be available on a moment’s notice, if needed.

   Hubbard’s destination: a deserted island in the Baltic, together with a married couple, their daughter, and Peter Sangree, a young man who is the other man’s pupil and who is infatuated with the daughter, but only at a distance. At first all is well, but by a clever means and ability with words I do not yet understand, Blackwood gradually makes the reader know that something is amiss in this otherwise idyllic paradise.

   Something sinister is growing and about to happen. There is no animal life on the islands, but then howling in the night is heard, then footprints around their tents at night, then abortive attacks again at night from something that seems to be a large ferocious dog. When Silence is at last called upon, he is able to be there the next day.

   And of course Silence knows what is going on immediately. There is no detective work involved on the part of anyone, but the first half of the story — a long, slow evocative buildup to the eventual revelation to the horror that awaits — is both creepy and chilling. The vacationers are not trapped on the island, but the isolation it does provide adds immensely to the sense of dread that Blackwood is able to produce.

   I think readers today would be impatient with the pace, and would want the events on the island to happen more quickly and be a lot more gruesome. I don’t think the second half of the story is as effective as the first, as Silence immediately puts into action a plan to stop the menace without causing either physical or psychic harm to anyone on the island.

WILLIAM SAMBROT “Island of Fear.” Originally published in The Saturday Evening Post, 18 January 1958. Reprinted in Island of Fear and Other Science Fiction Stories (Pocket, paperback, May 1963).

   William Sambrot (1920-2007) wrote and published over 50 science fiction stories. Many of them first appeared in the pages of The Saturday Evening Post, not the most traditional market for speculative fiction, but the place where he found a home. He also wrote for such publications as Playboy and Blue Book Magazine. Fourteen of his short stories were reprinted in Island of Fear and Other Science Fiction Stories.

   The short story “Island of Fear,” is a suspenseful yarn about a man obsessed with a wall built on a Greek isle. He wants – no, he needs to know who built this wall and why. This is especially so given the fact that on the other side of this wall there appears to be a beautiful sculpture, one that has escaped the attention of the art books.

   As a tale that is both atmospheric and suspenseful, “Island of Fear” isn’t so much a science fiction story as it is a horror story. It’s actually a pretty good read, yet because it’s a rather short, I’d be giving away too much if I tried to tell you too much more about the plot. Let’s just say the Greek setting is what propels the story forward, with rising tension, toward a horrific climax.

   So as I ask you as readers of speculative fiction: have you ever read Sambrot’s work? Do you remember it when his fiction was first published in The Saturday Evening Post? Do you have a favorite story of his? If so, leave a comment below and let me know what you think.