"Virus H"

Conventional wisdom avows that John D MacDonald began his science fiction writing with the publication of a short story titled “Cosmetics,” which appeared in the February 1948 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. This occurred a full two years after his first-ever writing was published in 1946 and it began an ever increasing interest in sf by the writer that included two novels and 50 short stories and novellas, peaking in 1949 and pretty much ending in 1953.. In fact, you could look this up. Peter Nicholls, in his indispensable The Science Fiction Encyclopedia says as much, and who wants to argue with an encyclopedia?

But like most conventional wisdom, the facts tell a different story. If one looks outside the insular world of science fiction pulps and digests, the reader discovers that these kinds of tales -- science fiction and fantasy -- interested the author almost from the beginning of his writing career and continued along, albeit at a much slower pace, into the last few years of his life. The first such story, a humorous fantasy titled “Hole in None,”  was published in January 1947, not in a pulp but in a slick, Liberty magazine. His next two, a futuristic political tale and a straight up sf story, showed up in Doc Savage and Bluebook respectively. Only then did “Cosmetics” appear. In fact there may be others I am not currently aware of because I haven’t read all of the author’s short work.

After the great gush of sf ended in 1953 MacDonald continued to write these kinds of stories here and there. Everyone is aware of the two later-day tales, “The Legend of Joe Lee” and “The Annex” because they were anthologized in the author’s 1978 sf collection Other Times, Other Worlds. “The Straw Witch,” which was originally published in This Week in 1964, was included in JDM’s 1966 short story collection End of the Tiger and Other Stories. And even readers who are not conversant with MacDonald’s short story output know about the 1962 novel The Girl, The Gold Watch & Everything. But between 1953 and 1962 MacDonald wrote two sf-fantasy stories and both of them appeared in that pulp-turned-men’s-magazine Bluebook. The second was a story MacDonald called “Underwater Safari” but was published in 1961 as “A Dark People Thing.” The other was called “Virus H.”

It was published in the magazine’s June 1955 issue and, like much of MacDonald’s short work (but not his sf short work) it is virtually unknown today. It’s not like it was tickling the edges of what one normally defines as science fiction -- like “A Dark People Thing” -- for “Virus H” is straight up science fiction, as far from the reality of 1955 as one could get. But MacDonald had a reason for telling this tale, one beyond the mission of simply telling a good story. “Virus H” has a message, one near and dear to the author’s heart, and one that becomes obvious as the reader learns the dénouement. For this reason I’m going to reveal more of the story than I usually do here, so for those of you who would rather read it first, be forewarned. SPOILER ALERT.

It can't happen to us -- but, brother, it's going to. It has started. Walesville, Ohio, 30 miles from Portsmouth, was the first one. It will take a hell of a while because it's a thorough job. It might not get to you for years. But it's coming.

There were a little over 14 thousand people in Walesville. Plus, of course, those who were caught on their way through.

I've seen it. I don't know when we'll be printing pictures of it. But we probably will. And it will give you a hell of a jolt. I flew over Hiroshima back in September of '45. I covered the Bengal famine in '44 for AP. I once saw a pretty girl jump from a hotel window 23 stories above the concrete sidewalk. But I have seen Walesville. Compared to that, everything else I have ever seen has been like looking into the heart of a daffodil.

The story is told in the first person by an unnamed protagonist, a former newspaper reporter who now works for the federal government as a glorified public relations officer. Three weeks prior to the beginning of the story he was called to the Pentagon and met with an emergency committee called together by the President. It was headed by an Air Force Major General named Klippe and included a couple of brilliant scientists, a United States Senator, a senior CIA official and a Brigadier General whose expertise was strategy. After Klippe reminds everyone that they are all cleared for top secret he begins explaining why they were brought together.

"Briefly, gentlemen, here is the reason why this Emergency Committee has been brought together. A strange phenomenon has occured near Walesville, Ohio. Original reports were not believed. A tongue-in-the-cheek article appeared in the Walesville paper. One of the wire services picked it up, gave it limited coverage. An Air Force officer investigated. He reported to me the day before yesterday, in the evening . I was at the spot at dawn yesterday. I had an audience with the President early yesterday morning. Regulars have been flown there and the area is blocked off. Rigid censorship has been imposed. We all leave for the spot by plane in half an hour...

"I will not attempt to describe it. I will merely say, gentlemen, that it is an area where most of the fundamental laws of nature, as we know them, seem to be suspended and altered in random, unpredictable fashion."

When the committee arrives they witness the phenomenon first hand. In an area of about 2,000 square yards and 50 yards high, there was a subtle distortion, an "odd sheen to the air" in that expanse. Rocks were floating, some of them huge, as was nearly everything else, including leaves, twigs and a dead soldier who had somehow managed to get inside the area. Occasionally the floating matter would fall abruptly, only to gradually be lifted again, like slow-motion peas in boiling water. When attempts had been made to retrieve the floating soldier, the pole that had been inserted into the area came out bent at a 20 degree angle.

After some time of observation the members of the committee revert to form. The Army general assumes it's some kind of weapon and wants to perform all kinds of destructive tests on it, like blasting it with 20-millimeter tracers and sending a tank into it. The scientists are agast and want to spend time performing all sorts of measurements and sample-takings. The reporter even jokes that this was almost like something out of a fifties science fiction movie.

Traditionally we should have had national and international hysteria, scare headlines, and, of course, three practically essential people. You know those people well. The old professor, his beautiful daughter, and the young engineer who has a really wild idea of what to do about things. The idea works, always. Man triumphs.

But that doesn't happen, and our protagonist reveals the truth about the phenomenon, something no one had known at the time.

Not one of us had guessed what it was. We were too used to thinking in terms of tough metallic shells, and big ports that unscrewed soundlessly to permit tentacled you-name-its to emerge.

It was a space ship.

And on their sixth day there it moved. In doing so, it obliterated the highway and the entire city of Walesville, including its 14,000 inhabitants. Everything was reduced to bits no bigger than grains of sand. Realizing that there was some kind of intelligence at work, Klippe and his group resolve to attempt to communicate with it when it appears again, wherever it appears again. And soon enough it does, this time 40 miles outside of Columbus. Communication experts are brought in but their attempts are laughable. "They could just as well have been trying to get an answer from the moon, or a dead tree." Then, after countless attempts spread over many days, the movement inside the area stopped and it became opaque. And a door appeared on one of its sides.

Had I guessed for some wild reason that it would grow a door, I would have thought it in terms of the fantastic -- a door 90 feet high and made of gold or something... But this was just a door. A nice white front door with the usual three-pane window and a brass knob. It even had a mail slot. All that was missing was a house number and a mat saying welcome. It was about three inches ajar. The inference was just too plain. Come on in.

Naturally Klippe wastes no time in walking up and entering the phenomenon. After spending a little over six minutes inside he emerges, marches directly to his tent and blows his brains out. One by one the members of the committee enter and come out either howling mad, weeping like children or, in one case, so indignantly purple that he has an instant heart attack. Then it is the reporter's turn and he (and we) finally learn the true purpose of these aliens' mission.

The title of this science fiction story -- MacDonald’s own, for once -- should, with a little thought, give the game away. The author’s environmentalism began soon after he moved to Florida and began witnessing the rapid despoliation of the local ecology, from the mushrooming of high rise condominiums to attempts to fill in bodies of water, to the air pollution produced by the local orange juice industry. His summer home in upstate New York was as remote as it could possibly be, a cabin in a deeply wooded section of the Adirondacks on the shores of a secluded lake. MacDonald began taking a more activist role in 1960 with the publication of a pseudonymous newspaper column that dealt mainly with what he believed was the ruination of the local environment. He wrote once “Every zoning-buster, anti-planner, and bay-filler is degrading us for the sake of his own pocketbook, be he individual or huge corporation, citing the holy name of progress on his terms. So it should come as no surprise that in 1956 he would write a science fiction story with mankind as the ultimate pathogen.

Despite one’s views on the subject “Virus X” remains a readable cautionary tale, with all of the author’s customary abilities of storytelling and characterization on fine display. The fact that it was not included in Other Times, Other Worlds is unfortunate, but was probably due less to the fact that it was unworthy than to its publication in a non-sf magazine, which may have caused it to slip by the otherwise unwavering vision of editor Martin H. Greenberg. And as far as I can tell, it has never been anthologized or reprinted, which is unfortunate, but par for the course when it comes to most of JDM’s short story output.

"A Dark People Thing"

In the first three or four entries I posted to this blog, over a year and a half ago, I went into the background of how I was introduced to the works of John D MacDonald. I wrote about how I sold his books when working in a department store, how I became a subscriber to the JDM Bibliophile, and ultimately how I became involved in the work of compiling a complete bibliography of the author's many published works. Although I came late to the party and operated on the extreme periphery of the real action, I was able to supply information that had not yet been obtained by MacDonald's many bibliographers. It was a minor blip in the history of JDM but a huge formative experience in my own life and it introduced me to the world of bibliographic research, a hobby I have loved ever since. It also introduced me to the vast wonderland of John D MacDonald's short fiction, an incredibly rich body of work that seemed to me to be a kind of Rosetta Stone that explained the singular skills he later possessed as a novelist. That experience is detailed in my third post.

I had answered a call for help from Walter Shine, a JDM fan and bibliographer who, along with his wife Jean, wrote a column in the Bibliophile. The couple had just published their first book, the most complete listing of all of MacDonald's writings to date, titled A Bibliography of the Published Works of John D MacDonald with Selected Biographical Materials and Critical Essays, a major event in the JDM world at the time. It was a huge expansion and continuation of Len and June Moffatt's JDM Master Checklist, which first appeared in 1969, and it remains to this day the single most authoritative source of information on the writings of MacDonald. Yet like any such work, it was imperfect and, more important, incomplete. There were a few errors that slipped through and numerous omissions, understandable when trying to track down the voluminous work of such a prolific writer. Specifically, there were ten short pieces -- nine of them works of fiction -- that MacDonald had sold, received payment for but whose actual publication could not be verified. The Shines hoped to publish a second edition of the Bibliography with these ten stories located.

It was -- and is, I suppose -- normal practice for the publisher of periodicals to supply tear sheets to the authors of works that had been published in their magazines. By definition, this happened after the magazine was actually published, when said sheets could be removed from the magazine and sent to the author as proof that the work had appeared. In the quaint old days before computers and the Internet, these tear sheets served several purposes, mainly as a way a writer could market him or herself when attempting to sell subsequent stories. MacDonald, a meticulously organized man, kept his tear sheets in a separate file, along with a "carbon" (photocopy, for those of you too young to understand that term) of the original manuscript, copyright information and any correspondence sent or received from the publisher or his agent regarding the specific piece. And while most magazines -- even the lowly pulps --followed the practice of sending these pages, occasionally they didn't, and for a writer as busy as MacDonald was in his short story days, I suppose it was easy to let something like that slide, as long as he received his check.

The finding guide for the JDM Collection at the University of Florida reveals that most publishers sent MacDonald tear sheets, but some were sloppy about it. This Week, for example, did not supply tear sheets for nine of the twenty-six JDM stories they published over the years. To a bibliographer, finding proof of publication for a story published in one of the largest circulation magazines in the world would not be hard work, even thirty years after the fact. But when a story was sold to a pulp publisher like Popular or Columbia Publications, the work of locating it could involve hundreds of man hours fingering through brittle old pulps, scanning tables of contents and even reading portions of each story. That is what was required of me back in 1981 and I jumped at the chance.

The list of the "missing ten" consisted of five sports stories, two or three mysteries, a mainstream work, a non-fiction work for the Author's Guild Newsletter, and the story I'll be talking about here. The sports stories were easy to look for, since Shine knew which publisher purchased each piece, thereby narrowing the list of possible venues to the sports pulps that particular publisher produced. The mysteries were almost as easy and the piece for the Author's Guild I wasn't going to look for. The last item on the list was known to have been sold to Bluebook, that venerable old fiction pulp that had been in business since 1905 and who had already published twelve MacDonald works of fiction. In 1960 they had purchased a JDM short story titled "Underwater Safari," but Moffat, Shine and the half-dozen other bibliographers who had worked on the Master Checklist had been unable to locate the issue featuring this story.

What these bibliographers apparently didn't know was that Bluebook stopped publishing in 1956. Four years later it was revived, not as a men's fiction magazine but as a men's action/adventure magazine, attempting to take its place among other successful ventures such as Men, True Men, Man's Life, Men in Adventure, Action for Men.... I think you get the picture. Fiction in general was gradually fading from all magazines and what was replacing it was non-fiction articles (in the general circulation magazines) and phony "true" stories that appeared in these rather tawdry men's mags. (Some were true, many were obviously not.) Bluebook for Men began publication in October 1960 and lasted until 1975, retaining its focus on fiction until it inevitably drifted into the sensationalistic "true" accounts of "Lust Orgies of Frustrated Wives" and "Bazooka Train-Buster!" In 1964 Bluebook for Men changed its title to simply Bluebook, and was still appearing on newsstands under that title when work on the JDM Master Checklist began. This may have been one of the reasons it took so long to identify the publication of this "missing" short story.

Walter Shine's plan for locating the "missing ten" was to go through the pulp magazines held in the Library of Congress, which  was (and, I suppose, still is) one of the great repositories of these crumbling, fading fiction magazines. And while the Shines had lived in Washington, D.C. for much of Walter's working career, in the late 1970's he retired and the couple moved to Florida. They didn't have the time or money to zip back up to DC to spend a few days combing the stacks. Walter and Jean issued a request through their column for anyone with easy access to the Library of Congress and with a willingness to work on a great cause to apply.

I was born in Washington D.C. and lived most of my life in its nearby suburbs, so I certainly had access. I had a passion for the fiction of MacDonald and would certainly be willing to spend some of my free time in the effort of helping the cause. I wrote Shine that I would be willing to do the grunt work and he responded with enthusiasm. He did all of the interfacing with the drones at the LOC (as a former council at the Labor Relations Board, I imagine Walter still had some pull in DC), so all I had to do was show up on an appointed day and begin going through the pulps.

Boxes of them. Oh, my God, I couldn't believe the amount of work I had ahead of me. Year after year of titles such as Sports Novels, Fifteen Sports Stories, New Sports Magazine and Sports Fiction. Two years of Argosy. Eight years of Detective Tales. And, the last seven years of Bluebook from its original run, up to 1956. I had a list of the stories with JDM's original titles, the date sold, a list of known pseudonyms ("house names") and the first sentence from each story.

It took me two full days, from nine in the morning to closing at five or six, working straight through with no lunch break. Unfortunately I was unable to locate a single missing story. I wrote a six page letter to the Shines, outlining my efforts and listing each and every issue I researched. They passed the letter on to MacDonald, who responded (to Walter), "Thanks for sending me that extraordinary letter from Steve Scott. That is a lot of time to spend in the stacks. As I read it I kept hoping he would come up with something that is still missing." Needless to say, MacDonald's comments on my efforts went a long way to assuage my disappointment over being unsuccessful. Walter, ever the encouraging one, told me I had been quite successful, as he now knew where not to look.

Over the next couple of years a few of the missing titles surfaced. A mystery story titled "Devil-Head" and sold to Popular Publications turned out to have already been identified and listed under the title "Three Strikes -- You're Dead!" which appeared in the June 1949 issue of All-Story Detective. "A Good Judge of Men," which was supposedly sold to Argosy, was in fact sold to Cavalier. Then, in 1984, a librarian at the University of Florida named Carmen Russell was reading a listing from a Santa Barbara book dealer and spotted a 1961 issue of Bluebook for Men which purported to include a John D MacDonald story featuring the unfamiliar title "A Dark People Thing." She reported this finding to Walter, who was equally confused. He knew there was only one missing story that was sold to Bluebook, so he pulled out his copy of the original manuscript and, toward the end, read these sentences, spoken by a French ex-patriot:

"In some places of the worl' is called gris-gris. Some is voodoo. Some is hex. A dark pipple t'ing."

"Underwater Safari" had been found, and Walter wrote about it excitedly in his JDM Bibliophile column. Yet when he attempted to locate a copy of the magazine he was unsuccessful. He tried the bookseller but the issue had been sold. He tried several others, but Bluebook for Men was not a big collector's item at the time. He even wrote a plea in a subsequent column asking anyone who had a copy to sell it to him. To my knowledge he never did see the issue.

And neither did I, until recently, when I found an online merchant offering a copy of the issue for sale. I grabbed it and was happy to add it to my collection of old magazines featuring the work of JDM. Another one down.

So how is it? "A Dark People Thing" is a very readable, enjoyable story, a late period MacDonald tale that harkens back to his earlier work with a distinct flavor of the old pulps. It's told in the first person by a man named Joe Connolly, a Unit Manager for a television production company, and while Joe is not exactly a peripheral character, the focus of the narrative is on another person and Joe is the observer. Plus, "A Dark People Thing" contains an element of the supernatural that, while somewhat ambiguous, is definitely strong enough to place this story among MacDonald's other works of speculative fiction. The tale would be comfortably at home in an issue of Weird Tales.

The story is told in flashback, as Joe recalls how his employer, El-Bar Productions, began work on a television series to be titled Safari. Shot on location in the Belgian Congo it was to have starred Kirk Morgan, the popular, handsome and dashing star of Gunner's Mate, a series he had ended to begin work on Safari.  Forty half-hour episodes were shot but never saw the light of day, because Morgan died while shooting the last episode, and El-Bar went bankrupt. The viewing public mourned and the newspapers wrote about how heroically Morgan died, but Joe is telling his story in order to set the record straight, before the "tub-thumpers" make Morgan into some sort of folk hero. For while the public loved the man, off screen he was a decidedly different person.

"I don't want to malign the deceased. But you can't get the whole picture unless you understand I despised him. In that I do not stand alone. I stand shoulder to shoulder with everybody in the movie and television industry who ever had to work with him. Also in this group you can find a couple of hundred of beautiful women who got too close to him."

As Unit Manager Joe heads to Leopoldville along with most of the crew to begin setting things up. He enlists the aid of a local Frenchman named Rene du Palais to help him deal with the locals, and things go smoothly while they await the arrival of the actors. Along with Morgan, there's Nancy Rome, the love interest who is a "shrewd, tough, talented broad" and who has already spurned Morgan's predictable advances. There's the comedy relief, Sam Corren, "a fat whiner who is scared of germs and heart trouble," and there's the actress playing The Other Woman, Luara ("no typo") who is slinky and sexy but who is also a "devout reader of the scriptures."

Morgan immediately begins wooing the clueless Luara, but when he makes his move she slugs him with a heavy historical novel and "told him to watch his language when in the company of ladies." So early in the shooting Joe knows there is going to be trouble, because tomcat Morgan "needs a conquest to mend his self-esteem." He doesn't think there will be much trouble finding some local talent for him, but he doesn't anticipate what happens next. Rene du Palais shows up on location with his 19-year old daughter. Her name was Therese, she had been educated in a convent and was engaged to be married. Her mother was was a woman of "complex racial mixtures" and the union of her parents had given Therese an ethereal beauty that MacDonald conveys masterfully:

"Therese was slender, shy, innocent, with smoky hair, huge gray eyes, skin of velvet, ivory and gold. The agents of kings used to search for just such women."

Morgan's reaction was "as predictable as tossing a fat grubworm into a hen yard." Joe reminds the reader that, despite his comic ending with Luara, Morgan was an expert seducer, and he goes into overdrive. Rene, who he had previously ordered around like a house servant, now became a personal guest of the great star, and though he had shown absolutely no interest in Equatorial Africa before, he "suddenly  became a tourist in need of a guide." Therese was chaperoned by an elderly female relative, but that didn't matter in the beginning, during the set-up. Joe and others on the crew could see what was happening, but their warnings to Rene were dismissed. Therese was a "good girl" and Mr. Morgan was being very kind to her.

When a piece of film equipment breaks down and requires a three day halt in production, Morgan makes his move. He and Therese manage to ditch the chaperone and they vanish. When a frantic Rene comes to Joe in order to ask Morgan about his daughter's whereabouts, he is told Morgan is missing as well. He leaves, looking "sick, tired and old." Then three days later, Morgan reappears, casually walking into Joe's room without knocking. When asked where he has been for three days, he informs him that he has been in Goma, at the Hotel du Grand Lac. When asked about Therese, he responds, "Tasty. Very tasty. But three days does it, men. A dull child at heart, you know. Once the bloom is off the blossom, they tend to get emotional." He informs him that he left the girl at her garden gate, "blubbering and snuffling." He yawns and leaves the room.

The next morning Rene appeared at the hotel to offer his resignation. He brought with him a replacement, another Frenchman named Jules Boudreau. Joe tells him how sorry he is and Rene blames himself for not heeding Joe's warnings. Yet when he leaves he refuses to shake Joe's hand.

A few weeks later Therese put on "the wedding gown she would never wear," slipped out of her house before dawn, got on her bicycle and rode down to the quays along the Congo River and jumped in. It took rescuers a half an hour to recover her body. When Morgan is told, he looks "mildly astonished."

"He licked his manly lips, fingered his sculptured throat, swallowed hard and said, 'A hell of a silly thing to do. The kid mist have been missing some marbles. She wasn't what you call real bright.'"

Surprisingly, the film company isn't attacked by the locals or kicked out of the country by local officials. Taping of the show continued, and it wasn't until they were on episode 20 that one of the actors remarked about Morgan's "strange... subdued and remote" acting. The director complains to Joe that Morgan is "going dead on me," and a producer observes that "...I get the feeling  he's sort of fading away. You know what he does when he isn't working, eating or sleeping? He sits and stares at the wall, hour after hour." And later after a few drinks together, the same producer wags his finger drunkenly at Joe and slurrs, "It's a hex. Deepest Africa. Witch doctor stuff. Revenge, Joey. For the dead girl. For Therese..."

"A Dark People Thing" works well within the context of the magazine it appeared in, and it's a good, enjoyable read. After all those years of searching for it, It's nice to know that it was worth the effort, even if it isn't a lost JDM classic. The author's ability to maintain narrative and establish character with as few words as possible is evident throughout, as well it should be at this point in his career. The supernatural element was a bit of a surprise, especially coming at a time when MacDonald had long given up on science fiction (and he never did much horror), but it is handled in a way that ... well, I don't want to give away the ending, in case anyone wants to embark on their own search for "Underwater Safari."

Incidentally, this particular issue of Bluebook for Men doesn't look all that different from the earlier versions of Bluebook that appeared in the 1950's. It hadn't yet morphed into a real sweat magazine yet, featuring torturing Nazis and bikini-clad machine gun-toting babes. That would certainly come later, but in 1961 the new incarnation looked pretty much like the old. The interior is, for the most part, black and white, and what little color is employed is their characteristic use of various shades of blue, from arresting bright tones to a nearly slate gray. The artwork is uneven, to say the least, but given the budget Bluebook worked under, it's pretty good, even if it doesn't come near to Cosmopolitan of Collier's standards. The illustration for "A Dark People Thing," by Jim Infantino, for example, isn't much to get excited about, but turn one page and -- if you're a lover of magazine art like I am -- I think it's safe to say that your breath will be taken away. "Ordeal in Paradise"  by Tom Bailey is a "true" story, complete with a affidavit labeled "Verified Authentic" and signed by the subjects of the story. It's the tale of a South Pacific shipwreck where only a man and a young girl survive, and after floating on wreckage in shark-infested water for over a week, end up on a desert island, where they are eventually... shot at by a Japanese soldier left over from World War II! True or not, it's an interesting and well-written piece with a somewhat predictable ending, but what I'm sure led many a reader in 1961 to bother with it at all is its incredible illustration by Ted Lewin. Done in the usual Bluebook two-tone, it is a work of art that seems to belong in another magazine. Its composition, it's limited use of light, and its astounding lifelike depiction of the female form all make it worth reproducing here, even if it has nothing at all to do with John D MacDonald.

"Nicky and the Tin Finger"

"Nicky and the Tin Finger" is a 5,000-word John D MacDonald short story that was originally published in the September 1948 issue of Bluebook. That particular month MacDonald set a record for himself by getting twelve of his short stories published in a variety of pulp fiction magazines, including three science fictions, two sports, and seven mystery/crime stories. One of the entries -- "Deep Death" -- was a 30,000-word novella. The machine was humming.
 

A whimsical and humorous bit of science fiction, "Nicky and the Tin Finger" combines a mystery story with an unusual robot called Moe, the invention of an inveterate tinkerer named Nicky Lugan. Nicky is a small, round middle-aged man who makes his income by leasing and maintaining vending machines throughout the 15,000-person town of Udella. This enables him to spend most of his time inventing things in his apartment/lab above Venerick's Garage. His proudest invention is Moe, a walking-talking robot made of tin, a machine that is able to perform a variety of tasks depending on which little black box Nicky has affixed to Moe's neck.

The story's narrator is a newspaper reporter named Barney, who is sent over by his editor to interview Nicky. There has been a murder in town. Local crime boss and rival vending machine operator Big George Loke has been killed, and not in a normal way. His car was rigged with a sophisticated device that was designed to blow off one of the car's wheels, but only when it was travelling at a high rate of speed. Given his rival business and his mechanical expertise, Nicky is the obvious suspect. Plus, one other reason:

"People think you're a little crazy, staying up here all the time and making improvements on Moe, and then taking him down to the tavern once a week."

While Barney visits, Nicky has Moe fix them a couple of drinks. Moe enjoys a shot of machine oil. Barney, who is evidently also a friend of Nicky, warns him that the cops will try to pin the crime on him. Big George passed out a lot of favors around town and greased all of the right skids. People are mad and want justice. Barney informs Nicky that if they can't pin the crime on him, they will have him committed to a padded room. He and Moe aren't exactly the most admired pair in town:

"Moe is a nice gu- a nice robot, Nicky; but he's made you a few enemies, you know. Remember when he walked up in the dark and tapped Mrs. Berril on the shoulder? She turned and slugged him, and had to have three stitches taken in her hand. And remember the day he went into the school by mistake. Eleven cases of hysterics in the third grade alone. No, Nicky. I think they could do it to you, and I think a lot of people would be darn' well pleased over it."

Nicky is glum but invites Barney to dinner anyway, changing Moe's little black box from SOCIAL to COOKING.

"Dinner was an unhappy meal. Nicky kept sighing, and he didn't eat much. I could swear that Moe kept giving him worried looks. Moe slipped up when he lit my cigar. He tried to hold the match under my chin. Nicky was very embarrassed about the whole thing. 'Just a minor adjustment,' he said. 'Something came loose, I guess.'"

When Nicky asks Barney what he would do if he were in his place, Barney responds that he would try and find out who really did kill Big George. "Start where the cops start. Only be a little smarter than the cops." And when Nicky asks Barney "What does a good detective do?" Barney responds:

"A good detective is very observant. He has good eyes and he sees everything and remembers everything. He tries to find the motive for a killing, and then he finds the opportunity. With everything sewed up, he puts the finger on the criminal."

So naturally Nicky gets the idea to program Moe with all of these attributes and begins his own investigation. After a wild, comic ride using telescopic eyes and a truly-photographic memory, Moe solves the case -- literally.

"Nicky and the Tin Finger" is a moderately engaging story and one of MacDonald's early attempts at humor, which was an area he did not excel at. It succeeds at what it tries to do, which is to to tell a simple story in a light tone. The robot is funny (there's a drunk scene), the gangsters are comic-tough (the main bad guy is named McGee!) and the ending is pure slapstick. And although the character of Moe would obviously cause this tale to be classified as science fiction, it was not included in the Bibliography of MacDonald's Other Times, Other Worlds, where all of the author's s-f stories were supposedly listed.

Looking through the September 1948 issue of Bluebook is awe-inspiring, at least to me and, I would assume, any other lover of fiction. For only two bits the reader could -- every month -- own a magazine containing one "complete book-length novel," one novella (okay, they called it a novelette), nine short stories, four "stories of fact and experience," five "special features," and story art on virtually every page. Not to mention, the glorious wraparound cover below. Man, those were the days!

As far as I can tell, "Nicky and the Tin Finger" has never been anthologized or reprinted.

"Underwater Safari"

In my third posting to this blog I related how I came to work for the Shines, doing research for them at the Library of Congress. I was looking for ten short stories that John D MacDonald had written, sold and received payment for, but that had never been located in an actual publication. I was given the titles, the publisher and, in case the story's title had been changed, the first paragraph of text. I spent a lot of time looking through hundreds of old, brittle pulp magazines but came away with nothing.

The most recent of those stories was something called "Underwater Safari," sold to Bluebook magazine, known after 1960 as Bluebook for Men. I was unable to find any copies of Bluebook for Men, let alone "Underwater Safari." But in 1984 a JDM "hunter" named Carmen Russell did find it, and Walter Shine wrote about it in JDM Bibliophile # 34:

"Bibliographers can't abide those few missing items seemingly lost in the misty past of the author's early days. We found ourselves throwing in the towel on 10 of JDM's stories... But still we searched. Then we realized that one of them, 'Devil Head' was already identified, it being another title for 'Three Strikes -- You're Dead'... [June 1949, All-Story Detective] So there were nine. But then we found another missing one, called 'Animal Cage' sold to Esquire Magazine long ago, and seemingly not published. And so there were ten again. Now, because of our devoted colleague, Carmen Russell, at the University of Florida, another has been tracked down. Carmen is an inveterate reader of rare books catalogs. She came across a Santa Barbara bookdealer's listing of a totally unrecognizable JDM title, 'A Dark People Thing', in the February 1961 issue of Bluebook Magazine. Since the only Bluebook story date unknown to us was 'Underwater Safari' we turned to it and there in dialect (at least to JDM's ears) was the sentence 'A dark pipple t'ing.' And so it was published under that revised title! An editor's nonsensical idea of a more 'catchy" title.'"
 

This entry is missing from most JDM short stories lists found on the Internet. I don't own a copy, but if I ever locate it I will title my blog posting under its published title. I found the cover image at this great site.

"The Innocent Victims"

Bluebook magazine was one of the longest running of the nearly ubiquitous fiction periodicals that were published in the fist half of the last century. Beginning in 1905, Bluebook lasted, with one four-year interruption, until 1975, and John D MacDonald published at least 12, possibly 13 stories there. "The Innocent Victims," printed in the November 1953 issue, remained unread and unknown by anyone who hadn't read it in that publication until 1999, when it was included in an anthology titled Pure Pulp, edited by Ed Gorman, Martin H. Greenberg and Bill Pronzini. Greenberg, whose name seems to appear on nearly every anthology of popular fiction printed in this country, also edited MacDonald's Other Time, Other Worlds and the two Good Old Stuff anthologies.

Running a brief 4,000 words, "The Innocent Victims" is nothing special; just a typically well-written, absorbing tale of crime, told with MacDonald's characteristic economy and narrative strength. Like "The Homesick Buick," which MacDonald wrote three years earlier, the plot hinges on a unique method of detection that ultimately brings down the bad guy, arrived at after all the standard criminal-catching methods have been exhausted. "Victims, " however, relies more on character, psychology and motivation, and is built around a main character rather than a dramatic event. The suspense of the story is created in waiting to see how a certain person reacts to life-changing information. The editors of Pure Pulp rate the story as "among [MacDonald's] most satisfying" and call it "undeservedly overlooked."

A forgotten carton of cigarettes brings Sergeant Dan Tate back to his police precinct office one night after he had already left for home and his family. A bruised, disheveled teenage girl enters the station. Seemingly catatonic, it's obvious to Tate that she's the victim of a rapist, one who has attacked several young women in a big, downtown city park over the past several months. After getting her to a hospital and informing her parents, he eventually gets her to talk and learns that she was able to scratch the face of her attacker, deeply enough to have tissue samples under her fingernails, and deeply enough to leave obvious marks that would take several weeks to heal. Unable to see the man, the girl remembers that he smelled "clean... like soap, and pine trees and talcum powder."

With the help of a friendly newspaper reporter, Tate manages to publicize the crime and asks for the public's assistance in reporting anyone with recent scratch marks on his face. Using the girl's recollection of the rapist's smell, he deduces the man is not a bum or criminal, but a middle-class citizen of the city, who must be wary of the marks she left on him. Yet, after a week of tracking down lead after lead, Tate is nowhere. Then, while picnicking with his family, he has a "eureka!" moment and rushes back to the station.

The story is too short to reveal any more without ruining it. A character is brought in who Tate must interact with, and it is that scene that contains the story's best, most wonderfully crafted writing. I'd love to quote some of it, but even that would reveal too much.

The brief few paragraphs where Tate visits and informs the girls parents are a model of how economy can speak volumes. His brief argument with the father reveals an entire world of lower-class inner-city life in the Fifties. A brief description of the younger siblings of the girl, up late watching television, contrasts nicely with the glimpse we are given of Tate's own family life. And the disintegration of inner-city life and the call of the seemingly-bucolic suburbs are beautifully painted in a few sentences between Tate and a colleague.

MacDonald always claimed that the best lesson he ever learned as a writer was economy, how to tell more with less, how not to describe but to show, and how two hard carriage returns between paragraphs could say more than a mountain of words. "The Innocent Victims" is a textbook example of that.