Ronald Weems has not quite enjoyed an uneventful life, having been raised by puritanical maiden aunts and having spent the years since their deaths working, somewhat improbably, in the women's intimate-wear section of a department store. He has a crush on a toy clerk named Amy, an incompetent, blustering bully manager in women's wear named Bickerstaff, and the responsibility of helping make a success of a lingerie show at the store, featuring a young and still rather obscure film starlet, services rented for the occasion, who works as Laura Lee. Through misadventure, Weems finds himself the owner of a children's chemical set, mostly to help Amy out of a jam, and, after the lingerie show goes badly and Weems is fired, he discovers that Amy has a man already in her life. Depressed, he considers suicide by mixing chemicals randomly in hopes of creating an effective poison...instead, he accidentally creates an elixir that temporarily gives him powers of levitation and telekinesis...though he has to be mildly drunk, as well. Further misadventure puts Weems and Laura Lee into each other's orbits in multiple ways over the next couple of days, facing one sort of threat after another, not least from local gangster Ace Diamond, who wants money from Lee and criminal aid from Weems. Beyond what they endure together, Lee and Weems manage to get along rather well, in the manner of one kind of romantic farce, and the ending suggests that perhaps some of the effects of Weems's compounding aren't so temporary.
Bloch by 1955 was an old hand at this kind of narrative, and is clearly having some fun all the way through this story, as bouyant as Weems is at full power, and seemingly enjoying let the narrative spin out as it more or less plausibly might, given Laura Lee is both good-natured and mildly bohemian, and willing to take on her brave if innocent, sheltered eventual swain as they scrape through one farcical, if usually also dangerous, twist after another. As with the Lefty Feep stories and others for Fantastic Adventures, and to some extent his other humorous fantasies for magazines such as Weird Tales and Unknown, the puns, the comedy of humors names for supporting characters, and generally good-natured play help keep this from being in any way profound, but also consistently engagingly readable. Aside from the criminal element being relatively quick-thinking and quick-talking, as well as more dangerous than might be expected in a farce, a couple of them engage in the kind of slightly convoluted patois that makes the debt to Runyon mentioned above fairly obvious...if you took Smith, Runyon and Robert Benchley together and convinced them to write a romantic caper-fantasy, this could well've been the result. The grimmer humor shot through, or added lightly to, much of his horror and crime fiction, and nearly all his more seriously-intended science fiction (he wrote sfnal farce, as well), is less in evidence here, but it's very much of a piece with those works, or the humorous tone of many of his critical essays and fannish-press writing...or his public speaking, as he had toyed at one time with the notion of becoming a stand-up comedian.
I'll be posting some reviews of some of Bloch's more serious and ambitious writing over the next week, as we run up to and past the 5 April 100th anniversary of his birth. For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog. And here's a bit of a Robert Bloch index post for Sweet Freedom...
It's funny but when I was buying IMAGINATION and IMAGINATIVE TALES off the newsstands I didn't think much of them. But now, all these years later, I sort of like them. Nostalgia I guess.
ReplyDeleteWell, perhaps. Their contents were reasonably well-written, usually, without being groundbreaking very often, so less uneven than such magazines as Lowndes's SCIENCE FICTION and FUTURE FICTION and its stablemates, or IF at times in the '50s, or certainly Howard Browne's FANTASTIC or AMAZING, or the magazines Ray Palmer was publishing, or even GALAXY could be as H. L. Gold was uncertain of how to best go forward in the latter '50s, and was distracted by health problems as Frederik Pohl increasingly had to step in. As with FANTASTIC UNIVERSE and SATELLITE, the Hamling magazines were reliably professional, and sometimes a bit better than that.
ReplyDeleteI have to disagree as far as GALAXY and IF in the 1950's. Back then I thought they were a lot better than IMAGINATION and IMAGINATIVE TALES. Looking at the magazines now I still think so. But I agree the Hamling magazines had nice covers, looked very professional and provided interesting fan related departments.
ReplyDeleteI draw your attention to the Paul Fairman first issues of IF, which verge on unreadable, and some of the less-wise story-choices by James Quinn and to a much lesser extent H.L. Gold...then again, so much of what John Campbell picked up for the latter '50s ASTOUNDING was only astoundingly pedestrian. While you were less likely to find howlers like Randall Garrett's "Queen Bee" in the Hamling magazines, or so my perhaps less comprehensive experience of them suggests...now. I didn't say they were better, just less uneven...the Lowndes magazines were better, but by no means with every story, and that was certainly true of GALAXY and the better issues of the '50s IF, as well.
ReplyDeleteWhen I look back on the fifties and think about magazines that were just about bottom of the barrel I have to nominate AMAZING and FANTASTIC. I'm not talking about the brief period when they published some quality fiction the early 1950's. By the late 1950's I gave up on them and stopped buying them at all. Which was a mistake since the magazines revived under Cele Goldsmith and Ted White. When I discovered this I went and bought the back issues.
ReplyDeleteThough, of course, it was the same Paul Fairman who drove A&F and DREAM WORLD through the floor who was the founding editor of IF...and it showed...of course, he learned how to edit poorly from Palmer and Browne, but unlike them he never did otherwise...and the 1950s COSMOS managed to be even worse, though even Lyle Kenyon Engel apparently couldn't plumb the depths reached by the John Spencer magazines in the UK...
ReplyDeleteIf the story's as entertaining as your review, Todd, I'm sold!
ReplyDeleteToo kind, Matt...the story rather better...I'm pretty sure Bloch was fully awake while composing it.
ReplyDeleteLove Bloch's IMAGINATIVE TALES stories! I might feature one of those on April 5.
ReplyDeleteWell, George, two Bloch novellas from IT left!
ReplyDeleteAnd, Walker, I meant to refer to SPACE SCIENCE FICTION with the Engel reference...but really had in mind VORTEX SF, so that might be why I landed on the COSMOS that Scott Meredith Literary Agency packaged...less impressively than they packaged MANHUNT and its stablemates...
Hello. I came across your blog and thought I would share something you might not be aware of. This story was serialized in the January and February 1973 issues of Gallery Magazine, a Playboy clone which debuted in 1972. It was titled "How Crime Flies" and unless one had read this back in the 50s or had access to a complete listing of Bloch's work, you would assume this was a new story in 1973. There was no copyright mentioned and I would guess that Bloch simply resold the story to the magazine. Lovely blog, by the way!
ReplyDeleteThanks for the pointer...the FictionMags Index does have a citation for that serialized version of "How Crime Flies"...but that it's a second serial rights version of "Weems" is apparently news there, too, as well as to me. (A lot of the latter '60s skin magazines did a lot of buying second serial/reprint rights to stories, though I'm not sure how often they advertised the reprint status clearly.) GALLERY also published a fair amount of new fiction in the '70s and probably into the '80s, and their publishers Montcalm also published TWILIGHT ZONE magazine (seemed a bit like the diversity sought by PENTHOUSE when they started publishing OMNI among others) and, more briefly, the horror fiction digest NIGHT CRY in the '80s.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your reply! You are right on the money about Gallery publishing new fiction in the 70s. I recently read a Davis Grubb vigilante story in a 75 Gallery which was an original for the magazine. I just got an issue of Coq Magazine 1974 which is best described as a Oui knock-off. This issue has an early Allen Dean Foster story and a Nelson Algren story that I can't find any mention of anywhere!
DeleteThanks again! I had been completely unaware of COQ (subtlety clearly not their strong suit)...I see that it flourished briefly (1974 only?) and clearly was indeed trying to be an echo of the likes of OUI and certainly PLAYBOY and PENTHOUSE...good chance the Algren story might've appeared elsewhere with another title...but not necessarily.
ReplyDeleteIf you feel up to it, scans or photocopies of the table of contents of the COQ issue and perhaps the first page or so of the Bloch serial and the Algren story would probably be very welcome at the FictionMags Index offices-of-sorts!
http://www.philsp.com/docs/fm_user.html#how_to_add
Which reads in part:
How to Add to the Index:
Fiction magazine table-of-contents lists may be submitted in any of the following formats, although #1 is preferred:
1. E-Mail: Send contents lists to wgcontento(at)gmail.com in the format described below.
2. Scan: E-mail a readable scan of the contents page to the above address.
3. Mail: Send a photocopy of the contents page to:
William G. Contento
802 Katrina St.
Livermore,
CA 94550,
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
--I suggest sending the scans/copies of the story fragments mostly for comparison to other texts of the Bloch and Algren pieces (if the Algren can be found in any other form easily or not so easily!)...it would be good to know if Bloch (or the GALLERY editors) fiddled with the WEEMS text for reprint. Of course, getting the issue together with the other texts would probably be a task for a very slow day...
And if you don't have time or energy for some part-time bibliography, thanks for the pointers already provided...and your other benisons.