NORMAN DANIELS “The Great Ego.” Novella. First appeared in Startling Stories, Spring 1944. Never reprinted.

   The first story by Norman Daniels I ever read was one of his John Keith, Man from A.P.E. spy stories from Pyramid. I didn’t know who Daniels was at the time and knew nothing of his pulp connection, but I knew I liked the book enough to look for more by him, which proved fairly easy to do as he was an extremely prolific writer for most of his entire career, from his early days in the pulps to the Gothic romances written with his wife as Dorothy Daniels. The only trick with his work was discovering which pseudonyms he was writing under other than his own name, and which genre he was writing in.

   But I confess I never really thought of him much in terms of the Science Fiction genre, which is why I was a bit surprised to see his name on the cover of Startling Stories with the lead novella illustrated by no less than the great Virgil Finlay, the work in question, “The Great Ego.”

   The story, as you might expect from Daniels and Startling, opens with a hook designed to keep you turning pages. The extremely meek and retiring Mr. Rodney St. George (…in manner of dress he might be almost dainty) is a clerk at a bank, and his superior, young and handsome Jim Downing, has asked Miss Pam Brooke, an attractive clerk at a rare book store, to identify St. George as a man who buys rare volumes at her store.

   Two marked notes, part of a large sum embezzled by a recently caught clerk named Foster, one who definitely would not be found in a rare book store, showed up at her store. To make things even more mysterious, it turns out the meek Mr. St. George has spent some $8,000 on rare books in recent months. This is certainly not a sum he earned at the bank no matter how carefully he lived.

   Like any pulp hero worth his name, Jim Downing is determined to investigate more deeply, something he soon finds he wishes he kept his nose out of. But before he can follow up, Mr. St. George foils a bank robbery, apparently by accident. Asked to identify the captured bank robber, St. George visits his cell, where magically a cute kitten appears just as the bank robber who had pleaded with St. George to free him drops dead, much the same way the embezzling clerk Foster did, from no apparent cause.

   There is much more to Mr. St. George than meets the eye, and he is ready for Jim Downing’s nosing around.

   Meanwhile Pam Brooke has been doing a little detective work on her own. She has discovered St. George has spent thousands of dollars in rare bookstores around the city. So when Downing goes to visit St. George he suspects there is more to the story than he’s been told and willing to confront the man. At which point St. George turns him into a kitten and himself into a large black cat.

   Of course Daniels manages to give the whole thing a thin patina of science since this was Startling Stories and not Weird Tales, but basically this is the sort of thing you would find in John Campbell’s Unknown, though told here with a straighter face and without the more literary efforts of a Heinlein, Leiber, De Camp, or Williamson.

   St. George can turn anyone into any animal, but he prefers cats, and his house full of cats, all former humans (including Foster and the bank robber), but he needs Downing because it turns out St. George isn’t the only one with this power. He has a rival, a deadly one, Dr. Michael Jamison.

   Downing manages to become human and escape, but no one will believe him but Pam, so he tries to enlist Jamison only to find himself ironically allied with St. George against an even madder scientist/sorcerer, the two men vying for an ancient scroll that will make one of them a virtual god.

   This fast-moving tale has a momentum of its own, despite the absurdities and proves to be a fun story as Downing and Pam find they are mankind’s last hope as the two self proclaimed gods feud with man’s fate in the balance.

   Daniels manages a nice bit of jiggery-pokery here, keeping the tale moving despite the built-in absurdity, and even allowing the hero to outwit the two madmen with a clever bit of observation about the nature of their abilities, bringing the thing to a fine apocalyptic head.

   â€œThe Great Ego” is a well-written and playful tale, one that doesn’t take itself too seriously, but still seriously enough to involve the reader in the fate of the attractive hero and heroine, if you are willing to give into the spirit of the thing.

   Startling may not have been in a class with Astounding, but over the years it was the home to some of the more gifted writers in the field, including Leigh Brackett, Stanley Weinbaum, Manly Wade Wellman, Ray Bradbury, Edmund Hamilton, Henry Kuttner, (Captain Future, too) and other major names, and in “The Great Ego” an unquestioned pulp — if not SF — master pulls off an entertaining tale as wild and furry as the cats that populate it.

ELLERY QUEEN – The Dutch Shoe Mystery. Ellery Queen #4. Stokes, hardcover, 1931. Paperback reprints include Pocket #202; 1st printing, December 1942.

   Subtitled “A Problem in Deduction” (*) and that is exactly correct. The wealthy benefactress of a New York City hospital is murdered just before undergoing an emergency operation on the same building, and the only clue is a pair of shoes with a mended shoelace.

   No one should read an Ellery Queen novel of this vintage for a study of the characters involved, but for the most part the prose is clean and uncluttered. The only exception being a tendency toward flowery language at the beginning of every section. The rest of the story is punctuated only occasionally by the presence of yet another footnote. The lack of action is made up for by a plot that, when unraveled, has no flaws, so far as I can see.

   (*) There is a ‘Challenge to the Reader’ on page 241 of the Pocket edition, and as usual, I flubbed it up. And yet, if I’d followed through on the thought that occurred to me on page 32, I’d have nailed the culprit in no tie flat. I kid you not.

THE ROOKIE COP. RKO Radio Pictures, 1939. Tim Holt, Virginia Weidler, Janet Shaw, Frank M. Thomas, Ralf Harolde, Muriel Evans, Ace the Wonder Dog. Director: David Howard.

   Tim Holt, who came up for discussion as a B-western movie star following my review of Sagebrush Law a while back, was only 20 years old when he made this film, and as a rookie cop Clem Maitland, he’s really perfect for the part, since he’s young and eager and as wet behind the ears as they come.

   Although he’s billed first, this film is really built as a showcase for all the clever things Maitland’s dog Ace can do, which I didn’t find all that interesting, but back in 1939, audiences may have enjoyed his tricks a whole lot more. As for me, I was more impressed with the performance of even younger Virginia Weidler, 12 at the time playing a 9-year-old tomboy named Nicey who wants to become a cop herself, when she grows up — and she can hardly wait.

   It’s too bad that with all the screen time Nicey gets, they really didn’t have a lot for her to do. Part of the story has to do with Clem convincing the police chief that dogs can be of great help to a police force, but even though the police chief is the father of his girl friend, he stubbornly can’t see it Clem’s way.

   The other half of the story is nabbing a gang of crooks, which is a whole lot easier than convincing a stubborn police chief to see the light. The end result is competently done, but it’s certainly nothing special.

  DONALD WOLLHEIM, Editor, with Arthur W. Saha – The 1989 Annual World’s Best SF. Daw #783, paperback original; 1st printing, June 1989. Cover art by Jim Burns.

#2. STEVEN GOULD “Peaches for Mad Molly.” Novelette. First published in Analog SF, February 1988. Nominated for both the Hugo (2nd) and Nebula Awards.

   Another author whose work this is the first time I’ve read. Looking ahead at the rest of the Wollheim anthology, that is going to be a very common thread connecting these stories. Gould is best known for his popular series of “Jumper” novels, books for Young Adults about a teenager who is able to teleport from one place to another.

   As for this story, some time in the Earth’s future, it is presumed, many (if not most) of the planet’s inhabitants live in apartment buildings two kilometers tall. Some who do not, and there are a few, live on the outside of the buildings, much like the homeless people of today live on sidewalks under bridges.

   Some do so by choice, however, either for a sense of independence or the thrill of adventure. Such a one is the unnamed narrator of this story, a man who climbs up and down the outside of the building using ropes and grapples and with a whole lot of flair. On the occasion of Mad Molly’s birthday, he decides to surprise her by going down and fetching her some fresh peaches. It means, however, crossing the floor 520 to 530, claimed by the Howlers as their territory.

   This is a very picturesque tale, and it has a huge amount of visual appeal, but when it comes down to it, our hero is the same person at the end as he was the beginning. One new friend, perhaps, and a lot of dead enemies, both of which I concede are all to the good.

   But what, if I dare ask, is the difference between this story and a western in which the hero must cross a territory claimed by the Comanches to find a store on the other side that carries and sells peaches. Peaches wanted by a dear old lady who would like to be surprised by some?

          —-

Previously from the Wollheim anthology:   DAVID BRIN “The Giving Plague.”

A live performance of “It Must Have Been Years” by Gary Numan in 2008. The song was first recorded on the album Replicas released in 1979, with Numan as the lead singer for the English new wave band Tubeway Army.

   Two weeks or so after this column is posted I’ll be traveling by Amtrak to the east coast, where on the evening of March 29 I’m giving a talk in New York City at Columbia University’s second annual Dr. Saul and Dorothy Kit Film Noir Festival. Anyone who wants to learn more about this festival should visit its website. (Follow the link.)

   Why was I asked to take part in the program? Because this year the theme is Cornell Woolrich, and in certain quarters I’m rumored to know a bit about that haunted recluse. Just before my talk there will be a screening of BLACK ANGEL (Universal, 1946), which was based on Woolrich’s novel of the same name, and I expect to be concentrating on the relation between the novel and the movie. For the benefit of readers who won’t be able to attend the festival, I’ll cover the same subject here.

   THE BLACK ANGEL (1943) is one of the strongest, strangest and most wrenching of all Woolrich’s novels and the only one narrated throughout in first person by a woman. Superficially it’s a conventional Woman Menaced suspenser but once we crack its thin surface we’re in the jolting nightworld that is Woolrich’s private domain, and locked inside the mind and heart of one of his most twisted people.

   Like most Woolrich novels, it reminds us of other novels of his. It shares with PHANTOM LADY (1942) the race against the clock to save an innocent man convicted of murder, but this time it’s the man’s girlfriend not his wife who’s been killed, and it’s his wife who risks everything to save him from the chair.

   Like THE BRIDE WORE BLACK (1940) it consists of a series of disconnected episodes with a tormented psychotic woman entering the lives of various men and devastating each in a different way. The angel of the title is Alberta French Murray, whose husband Kirk has taken up with nightclub entertainer Mia Mercer. Finding Kirk’s packed suitcase hidden in a closet, and knowing what until now she had only feared, she forces herself to go to Mia’s lavish Sutton Place apartment and beg for her man back.

   She finds the entrance door unlocked and Mia on the bedroom floor, smothered to death with a pillow. At that moment Mia’s phone rings. Alberta in a panic lifts the receiver to shut off the sound, hears Kirk’s voice on the other end, and hangs up without a word. Convinced that Kirk is innocent and frantic to protect him, Alberta steals Mia’s address book from the apartment. On the way out she notices and also takes with her a match folder, monogrammed with the letter M, which she finds wedged in the seam of the entrance door, apparently by the real murderer, who visited Mia openly once and then sneaked back to kill her.

   Alberta doesn’t report the murder to the police and doesn’t even think to call Kirk at his office and tell him Mia’s dead until it’s too late and he’s on his way to her place. The next time she sees her husband he’s handcuffed to a cynical cop named Flood and under arrest for Mia’s murder.

   A few pages later, thanks to the legally challenged Woolrich having wisely spared us a trial scene, he’s awaiting execution. While he’s sitting in the death house, she goes through his belongings, which the police have returned to her, and discovers that the monogrammed match folder she took from Mia’s apartment doesn’t belong to Mia herself. Therefore she concludes at once — and the intensity of Woolrich’s prose makes it easy for us to forget that her reasoning is ridiculous — that the real murderer must be one of the four names on the M page of Mia’s address book.

   She goes to Flood, who doesn’t send out underlings to check whether any of the four M’s uses monogrammed match folders but agrees to backstop Alberta’s crazy and time-intensive plan: to enter the life of each M in turn and try to pin the murder on him.

   For the rest of the novel we are with her and inside her as she carries out her mission. The first M is Martin Blair, a hopeless alcoholic into whose wretched life she insinuates herself until he commits suicide. Does she blame herself? “No, I was kind to him. I gave him something to die for…. It is better to die for something than to live for nothing.”

   The second M is Mordaunt, a foul-smelling doctor with a sideline of pushing narcotics, who soon takes her into his operation as a delivery person. This episode is full of suspense and anguish but Mordaunt never rises above the pulp monster level.

   Alberta emerges from the nightmare intact and with proof that the doctor isn’t the man she’s after. M3 is wealthy bon vivant Ladd Mason, whom Alberta entices into a relationship, then has Flood set up a hidden dictaphone device in her apartment to preserve any damning admission Mason might let slip. Eventually he admits that he’d visited Mia on the day of her death and found her body on the floor.

   She leaves him asleep in her apartment and goes on to her fourth quest, a man named McKee, a gambler-gangster-nightclub owner of a sort familiar from many pulp stories by Woolrich and countless others.

   Auditioning for and landing a spot in his club’s chorus line, she is soon installed in his Central Park West penthouse. She induces him to give her the combination to his safe and, at the earliest opportunity, opens it to hunt for evidence of his connection with Mia Mercer, but is caught by his goons and taken out to be executed.

   There’s no need to describe the rest of the novel, which ends with our black angel torn by love for one who is dead, shattered inside as she had shattered others, executioner and victim in one flesh.

   Fred Dannay once said of Woolrich that his “driving narrative power…carries readers on the crest of a tidal wave, and they are equally oblivious of the long arm of coincidence and the long arm of incredibility” when immersed in his fiction even though there “might be a hole in the plot structure that would destroy an ordinary story.”

   That is an inspired description of the raw material that the makers of the movie BLACK ANGEL (Universal, 1946) had to contend with: a wrenching, bizarre episodic novel whose protagonist’s obsessions grow to madness as she ruins others and herself to save her man from Mister Death.

   The film was directed and co-produced by British-born Roy William Neill (1886-1946), an industry old-timer fondly remembered for his Sherlock Holmes series with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. He and screenwriter Roy Chanslor took on the jobs of tightening the novel’s structure, reducing the number of male characters, making the female lead more sympathetic, and at the same time preserving the Woolrich qualities of suspense and emotional anguish. A tall order!

   June Vincent starred as Catherine Bennett and Dan Duryea as the alcoholic pianist Martin Blair, who is an amalgam of Woolrich’s Martin Blair and his haunted socialite Ladd Mason. The Dr. Mordaunt episode was scrapped, and in the movie the M-monogrammed matchbook leads the black angel not to several men as in the book but only one, nightclub owner Marko (Peter Lorre), who more or less corresponds to Woolrich’s love-struck gambler McKee.

   Vincent’s Catherine Bennett doesn’t carry out her quest alone as Woolrich’s black angel did but is joined by Duryea’s Marty Blair character. Although Woolrich’s Marty kills himself after his brief encounter with the angel, Duryea not only lives through the movie but is recovering from his alcoholism by the fadeout. Duryea falls in love with Vincent somewhat as Ladd Mason had with Woolrich’s protagonist but in the movie she doesn’t return his love but stays loyal to her convicted and unfaithful husband.

   Yet despite these changes and many more, every frame of this fine film noir is permeated with the Woolrich spirit, Neill and his cinematographer Paul Ivano investing every shot with a visual style that translates the novel into film with total fidelity to its soul and precious little to its literal text. It was Roy William Neill’s finest film, and his last.

   In November 1965, less than two years before his own death, Basil Rathbone in a talk before a group of Sherlock Holmes fans described how the director of so many Holmes movies and of BLACK ANGEL had died. Late in 1946, Rathbone said, he was appearing on Broadway in a production of THE HEIRESS.

   â€œOne night to the theatre came dear little Roy Neill. We loved him. We called him Mousie. He was a little guy and as sweet as they come, though a damn good disciplinarian….[W]e didn’t disobey orders and we were always on time and we always knew our lines….There came to my dressing room, in a gray flannel suit and a white carnation, little Roy Neill. And he was going home, which was Maidenhead on the Thames, in England, for the first time in…something like fifteen-odd years….[He] took the keys out of his pocket, and he showed me one and said to me: ‘….That opens the door to my home at Maidenhead on the Thames.’ And he had had a housekeeper stay there for all this time, waiting for this wonderful moment when, after making substantial money, he was able now to go home and enjoy his life on the river Thames. And he boarded the ship, and—I only learned this later—and he arrived, and he went to Maidenhead, and he put the key into the front door, he turned it, and walked into the hall of his home, and dropped dead.”

   According to the brief New York Times obituary on Neill, the 59-year-old director had died of a heart attack in the London home of a nephew. But if Rathbone wasn’t embellishing the facts for the sake of a good anecdote, what a Woolrich-like death for the man who had just made what up to that time was the finest Woolrich-based film!

   Woolrich himself thought the picture a disaster. Early in 1947 he received a letter in which the poet and scholar Mark Van Doren, who had been one of his professors when he was an undergraduate at Columbia, mentioned having recently seen the movie.

   Woolrich then went to see the picture at a neighborhood theater. “I was so ashamed when I came out of there,” he wrote Van Doren on February 2. “All I could keep thinking of in the dark was: Is that what I wasted my whole life at?”

   Keeping in mind how radically the movie altered his novel, one can understand Woolrich’s point of view. Perhaps those who are there for the screening and my comments later this month will understand too.

   But that doesn’t mean he was right. For my money, if a single theatrical feature based on a Woolrich novel (as opposed to the features based on shorter work like Hitchcock’s REAR WINDOW) could be preserved for future generations and all the rest had to be destroyed, BLACK ANGEL is the one I would opt to keep.

Written and first performed by Ian & Sylvia, but I like this version too: