Category Archives: Short Story

Servant of the Beast – L. Patrick Greene

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pulpfiction01Kopjies, basilisks and klipspringers — oh my! Despite the presence of this impenetrable vocabulary on just the first page, this one goes down easy even being the longest story in the collection so far.

It is told in the same stripped-down style as the adventure stories of Arthur Conan Doyle or Edgar Rice Burroughs which were written less than 20 years earlier.  White explorers, black natives, dubious tale of a lost treasure; really, all that is missing is the old solar eclipse gag.

A hunter has his site trained on an antelope by the river.  His attention is diverted by another animal — a man — who approaches the river for a drink.  With Oswaldian efficiency, he puts a bullet in the antelope; then, before the man can take cover, he gets off another shot which fells the man whose body is then carried off by the river.

The hunter, Burgess, strolls back to camp, “whistling a cheerful tune” with the antelope slung over his shoulder.  The sickly Professor Compton and his hot daughter Dorothy are happy to have some food to speed his recovery.

The party is in Africa seeking a lost valley said to be teeming with riches.  Most of their native carriers have fled taking their provisions with them.  Only the giant Jan has remained.  Rounding out the group is the absent Dick Harding who is vying with Burgess for Dorothy’s affections.  Say, you don’t think . . .

It is noted that Burgess, the backer of this expedition, is rich.  This pleases her father who is worried for her security.  On the other hand, his competition is named Dick Harding, which pleases Dorothy.

When he does not return, Dorothy says, “I’m anxious abut Dick.”  She and Jan go searching for him.  Down by the river, Jan determines from his spoor that he entered the river but did not make it to the other side.  He must have been washed away with the current and drowned.

They discover Harding’s pith helmet with 2 bullet holes — wow, Burgess is Oswaldian. Because Dorothy heard two shots and Burgess slyly claimed he did not miss, she accuses him of killing Harding.

Like Pete Meadows in Satan Drives the Bus, Burgess illustrates why your first call should always be to a lawyer.  He says, “Yes, I shot him and now there’s nothing stands between us.  You can’t prove anything.”  Well, the two witnesses you just confessed to might disagree.

Jan is ready to toss him off a cliff, but Dorothy convinces him to just tie Burgess up instead.  Just as Burgess is restrained, Harding reappears, the bullet having only grazed his noggin.  Fortuitously, after he was almost killed, he was washed downstream where he found a Shangri-la-esque tunnel leading to the fabled valley.

All members of the group are soon abducted and split up.  Harding and Burgess end up together in a cavern.  They are able to put that petty MURDER attempt behind them and work together.  They are soon reunited with Dorothy and Professor Compton.  Although alive, none have made out as well as Jan who has been made king of the tribe and given quite the fly ensemble with ostrich feathers, a kilt and a gold headband.

With Jan as their protector, the group is fine until Jan and Harding save a native girl from being sacrificed to a leopard.  Burgess allies with the Sherry Palmer of the tribe, but things don’t work out for them.

All the others come out winners.  Harding gets Dorothy, Dorothy gets Dick, and the happy couple & Professor Compton get the diamonds and will wallow in fabulous wealth for the rest of their lives.  Jan remains as king of the tribe to live in a mud hut and sleep on the dirt.

Post-Post:

  • First published in Action Novels, April 1930
  • Also that month: Hostess Twinkies invented.  Yada yada . . . still edible.
  • The word spoor is used 20 times in this story.  As I had originally confused this word with scat, I was baffled why everyone was leaving a trail of shit.
  • Jan calls all the white folks Baas which I assume is meant to be boss.  But why the strange spelling?  Surely it is not his native tongue.  Is it dialect?  It really looks pretty much like it would be pronounced just like boss.

Satan Drives the Bus – Wyatt Blassingame

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pulpfiction01Allen Sargent is taking a bus trip.  He is killing time by profiling the other passengers. There is the short bald guy with the cigar who must be a salesman; the poorly-dressed country woman who had probably been working in the fields since she was six; the hard-faced blonde lush who had called the driver “baby”; the hard-boiled gangster with the scar who seemed scared; and “on the back seat, a negro sat alone.”

Well, ya can’t accuse him of racial profiling. Sargent doesn’t even bother to come up with a story for him. He’s like Franklin in Peanuts — just the black guy.

There is also a priest, an old shaggy-haired hobo type, the driver and Sandra Bullock.  OK, just a pretty girl — which I gotta think is a rarity for bus travel — but I re-watched Speed just before reading this.  Sargent thinks, “With her to look at, this trip might not be so bad.”

As he is drooling over Sandra, the old man jumps up in the aisle and proclaims, “It’s death!  Death and sin!  They are riding with us, and they shall strike; they shall kill us all because someone here has sinned against man and God!”  Sargent sits him down and gallantly inserts himself in the seat beside Sandra.

The guy might have been crazy, but he was right — minutes later, the salesman lets out a scream and keels over dead.  The driver says he will stop in Perry Corners and alert the police.

The “negro” stands and flashes a gun.  He says, “I’m Pete Meadows.  They’re looking for me in Minneapolis for a couple of bank robberies.”  He clearly wants to avoid the cops, but he doesn’t seem to get the concept of laying low.  He might as well have shouted out his home address and Social Security Number while he was at it.

The old man shouts about sin and death again, and this time the country woman drops dead.

The driver begins going too fast.  When Meadows complains, the driver lets out a maniacal, “laughter from hell!”  When he turns, he is sporting the face of a cartoon devil — triangular face, V-shaped eyebrows, pointed ears — signifying true evil, the pit of Hell, vile pestilence; or deviled ham.

Meadows tries to shoot the driver, but he is the next to drop dead, clawing at his throat, tearing bloody flesh from his neck.  The driver next turns his attention to the hard-faced blonde. She begs for time to make a confession to the priest, and the driver generously gives her 2 minutes.  This guy must have had the buses running on time because he kills her 2 minutes later.  And then the scar-faced man.

But there is a nice twist, and the things turn out to have not been so supernatural after all.  A pretty good yarn.

I look forward to the sequel, Satan Pulls the Train.

Post-Post:

  • First published in Ace Detective Magazine, October 1936.
  • Also that month: First commercial flight from US to Hawaii.
  • Pointless Duplication:  The bank robber was named Pete Meadows.  And the guy pretending to be a priest was also named Pete?  Why?

The Scalpel of Doom – Ray Cummings

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pulpscalpelofdoom01After Death Flight and this one, I feel like maybe I’m not getting my $.99/25 worth out of some of these stories.  But I always seem to lose interest in the last few short stories in a collection. I’ve never known whether it was my short attention span or if the good stuff is skewed to the front [1].

Dr. Bates is resting in the office of his medical practice which occupies the bottom floor. He had a rough day with performing two operations and taking patients until 11:30 PM. Meanwhile, I sat for 3 goddamn hours at the urgent care clinic last Monday and only got as far as a nurse practitioner.  But I digress.

Dr. Bates gets a visitor at midnight.  18 year old Jenny Dolan needs him to attend to her twin brother Tom who is injured in the woods.  She drives Bates out to the spot as far as they can by road then they go on foot to a shack in the woods.

Bates diagnoses by the wound that Tom has been stabbed.  He diagnoses by his prison-issued clothes that he just busted out of the joint.  Tom starts waving a gun around, but Bates is able to grab it away.

Turns out Tom is serving time for a murder committed by Jenny’s hoodlum husband Jim during a robbery they pulled together. Tom was not injured in the escape, but was stabbed by Jim when Tom confronted him about abusing his wife.  Rather than seeing the error of his ways or being grateful for Tom taking the murder rap, he is more interested in where the loot is hidden.

Jim shows up at the cabin looking for the loot.  Jenny thought she had seen him lurking around her house.  So did he follow her to the cabin when Jenny brought Tom to the cabin?  Why not confront Tom at the house while she was out stealing a car?

OK, maybe he was afraid of being spotted by the neighbors.  So he hung around the neighborhood for however long not knowing if or when they would relocate?

He tailed them to the shack, then did not confront them immediately, or confront Tom alone while Jenny had gone to get the doctor.

But he does show when Tom is there with two allies and witnesses.  He pulls out a gun demanding again to know where the loot is.  He gets off a couple of shots but only manages to hit the doctor in the arm.  The doctor manages to take a scalpel to his throat.

The doctor drives Tom and Jenny to the hospital.  Although, as she is the only one not shot or stabbed, it seems like Her Majesty could have volunteered for the driving duties.

I guess, free of Jim’s terror, these two crazy kids will live happily ever after.  Except, Tom is still an escaped prisoner who was involved in the original crime that left a man dead, and Jenny is now a car thief.

[1] I’ve come to the realization that I have the attention span of a hummingbird; which is part of the reason for this blog.  Just in Stephen King’s collections:

  • Night Shift (1978) — Skipped the last 4 stories.
  • Different Seasons (1982) — Skipped the last story, The Breathing Method.
  • Skeleton Crew (1985) — I think I actually finished this one.
  • Four Past Midnight (1990) — On a roll, I think I finished this one too.
  • Nightmares & Dreamscapes (1993) — Skipped the last 7 stories.
  • Everything’s Eventual (2002) — Stephen King says in the intro that the stories were ordered randomly based on a deck of cards.  I have no memory of the last 2, but am also spotty on a few others.
  • Skipped Just after Sunset (2008) and Full Dark, No Stars (2010) altogether.

On the other hand, I did finish Joe Hill’s 20th Century Ghosts (2005) and look forward to another collection.

Post-Post:

  • First published in Ten Detective Aces, February 1947.
  • Also that month:  Really nothing exciting.  I guess people were still sleeping-in after WWII.

Ray Bradbury Theater – Mars is Heaven (S4E1)

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rbtmarsisheaven01Hal Linden (Barney Miller), or is it Barney Miller (Hal Linden)? No, it’s Hal Linden (Barney Miller), is the captain of a ship heading to Mars.

Linden, playing Captain Black, disembarks along with crew-members Henley and Larson to explore Mars.  After a few seconds, they determine that the atmosphere is “thin for breathing, but there’s enough oxygen.”  Showing the same scientific acumen as the crew of Prometheus, they take off their helmets.

Mars isn’t quite what they expect.  Their landing area is the expected barren red landscape, but then they hear a rooster crowing.  They hear birds.  After a short walk, they see trees, grass, tennis courts.  They’re in Club Red; except without the red.

rbtmarsisheaven02One of the men suggests they somehow landed back on earth.  Captain Black assures him, “we traveled 300 million miles, tracked by telemetry every inch of the way.”  As usual, no one could be troubled to pick up an almanac when this story was filmed.  When Mars is on the other side of the sun, it is still never 300 million miles away.  Even the original short story didn’t use this stat.

One man finds his old tennis racket, one sees his grandfather.  Black sees his younger brother and goes with him back to his parent’s house.  He is reunited with his dead mother and dead father.  It is revealed that the house he has come back to actually burned to the ground years ago, killing his brother.

In the short story, one woman — whatever the Martian equivalent of a blonde is, maybe a redhead — almost gives away the game when she threatens to have her husband come outside and “beat them with all his fists.”  Although, really, she could have meant all two of them.

That night, Linden finally begins to question what they have found on Mars.  He wonders if maybe the Martians knew they were coming.  That they may have used their minds to create this world for the humans.  To put them off-guard, to separate them so they could be picked off by people they trusted.

rbtmarsisheaven03

For some reason, the astronauts wear ASA patches instead of NASA.

As Black leaves the room, an alien hand clasps his shoulder.  We then cut to caskets resting on the barren red Martian soil, 3 helmets atop them.

The idea of finding a replica on earth is old hat now, also having appeared on The Twilight Zone.  When it was published 1948, maybe it was new hat.  I guess the title Mars is Heaven isn’t really a spoiler since it is revealed to not be heaven.

In the story, the Martians inexplicably retain their human form even after the astronauts are dead, and give them a proper burial.  Equally inexplicably, in the episode, we see the coffins but they fade from the shot and disappear completely.

Post-Post:

  • Pointless Duplication:  In the story, Black’s brother died 26 years ago.  He is now 26 years old.  The townspeople say the year is 1926.
  • The short story Mars is Heaven was included in The Martian Chronicles as The Third Expedition.
  • Coincidentally, director John Laing is also credited on an episode of The Hitchhiker which I just watched.  The first disk of that series was so awful, I couldn’t bring myself to write about it.  His episode was probably one of the better ones, though.
  • For some reason, Bradbury alone among sci-fi writers is given license to have breathable air on Mars and other basic scientific inaccuracies.

Death Flight – Robert Wallace

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pulpdeathflightWhat kind of pulp story is this?  No ape-men, no evil dwarfs, no scantily clad women in chains or hunted for sport.

Pilot Lucky James is approaching after a non-stop flight from Cairo to New York which will earn him $50,000; or slightly more than a last-minute ticket to see my parents for Thanksgiving.

The crowd roars as he lands his monoplane (or as we say now, plane).  He opens the cockpit door and humbly says, “Hello fellows, looks like I’ve made me fifty thousand bucks.”

Then THUCK! which is apparently the sound bullets made in 1935.  Lucky James is shot just seconds after emerging from the cockpit.  It would have been better had they opened the door to find him already shot.  At least one pulp theme would have been used — the locked-fuselage murder.

The rest of the story is a fine straight short story, but has none of the standard pulp tropes.

Post-Post:

  • First published in Phantom Detective Magazine, June 1935.
  • Also that month:  Babe Ruth announces his retirement.
  • Lucky James’ $50k prize would be $869k in 2014 dollars.
  • This story was published 8 years after Lucky Lindy made his flight for a $25,000 prize.