Review: "Is Betsey Blake Still Alive?" by Robert Bloch

 

“Is Betsey Blake Still Alive?”
by Robert Bloch
Ivy Books, 1987

 

A couple things I like: 1) stories written by Robert Bloch; and 2) stories about Hollywood. So it was inevitable I’d love Bloch’s “Is Betsey Blake Still Alive?”—which was originally published in the April 1958 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine—since it satisfies both criteria nicely. Steve is a struggling Hollywood writer with a handful of production credits, but without a steady gig or paycheck. His life is tough, but as the third-person narrator says:

“Then he met Jimmy Powers, and things got worse.”

Jimmy, at 23 years-old, is just a kid but he drives a late-model Buick, wears silk suits, and has a regular job as a studio public relations hack pulling down two bills a week. The death of an aging starlet in a boating accident, the titular Betsey Blake, puts a major Hollywood studio in a bind. Betsey’s next picture is set for a November release, but without the starlet around to push the film, they’re afraid it will flop. This potential disaster for the studio provides Steve—through his new pal and neighbor Jimmy—a big opportunity to save the film with some slight-of-hand and outright dishonest P.R. stunts like creating a sensation about Blake’s private life and even questioning whether she is dead. Well, it plays out as one would expect, until it doesn’t…
     “Is Betsey Blake Still Alive?” is a sharp tale with a nice twist. The narrative is crisp with Bloch’s shiny prose and the characters, both Jimmy and Steve, are expertly sketched into what I think of as post-WW2 sunshine boys—bright and ambitious in a world ripe for harvest—with a grimy corruption about them. “Is Betsey Blake Still Alive?” is a solid piece of mid-century crime that, almost seventy years after it was written, had the audacity to surprise this 21^st century reader.

“Is Betsey Blake Still Alive?” appeared in the excellent 1987 anthology, Suspicious Characters, edited by Bill Pronzini and Martin H. Greenberg, along with 12 other crime stories written by the likes of John D. MacDonald, Sara Paretsky, Ed McBain, John Lutz, and Brian Garfield.
     According to the official Robert Bloch website, “Is Betsey Blake Still Alive,” has also been published with the title, “Betsy Blake Will Live Forever” in volume two of the Selected Stories of Robert Bloch.

Tales of the Macabre by Jim Kjelgaard & Robert Bloch

 

Introduction to Tales of the Macabre by Jim Kjelgaard

[now available from Vintage Lists in the Tales of the Macabre / The Black Fawn collection]

 Jim Kjelgaard was a regular contributor of short stories to pulp magazines in the late-1930s and throughout the 1940s. His first known published fictional tale, “River Man,” appeared in the November 5, 1938 issue of Argosy, and his byline regularly popped-up in diverse magazines like Street & Smith’s Western Story Magazine, Black Mask, 10 Story Western, The Phantom Detective, Thrilling Adventure, Argosy, Adventure, and others. It wasn’t unusual for 20 or more of Kjelgaard’s stories to reach print each year; his best annual output was in 1946, which saw an astonishing 36 of his tales hit newsstands across the country.
     While the genre Kjelgaard was writing for changed—Western, romance, mystery, adventure—his stories were charmingly consistent and familiar to his regular readers. They often featured animals and thoughtful protagonists living in wild places. A genre Kjelgaard rarely visited was horror, but that changed when a tale of the supernatural, “The Thing from the Barrens,” appeared in the September 1945 issue of Weird Tales. This story, and the three others published by Weird Tales over the next ten months—“The Fangs of Tsan-Lo” (Nov. 1945), “Chanu” (Mar. 1946), and “The Man Who Told the Truth” (July 1946) —had Kjelgaard’s traditional hallmarks, but were also dependent on their supernatural elements: a stalking creature from the wastelands of the Arctic, an ancient dog, a sinister hybrid ape-man, and…
     While the stories all appeared under Jim Kjelgaard’s name, a young Robert Bloch—the writer that gave us Psycho (1963)—revised the stories for publication. Both Bloch and Kjelgaard belonged to a writing group, the Milwaukee Fictioneers, which included the Western writer Lawrence A. Keating, the golden age science fiction writer, Ralph Milne Farley, and the cult-favorite science fiction writer Stanley G. Weinbaum. In Bloch’s 1994 autobiography, Once Around the Bloch, he mentioned his work with Kjelgaard and another of the group’s members: “I rewrote and sold stories which appeared under the bylines of Ralph Milne Farley and another member, Jim Kjelgaard.”
     Robert Bloch was a supernatural horror specialist and his participation in the stories can be seen from the eerie descriptions— “I seemed to hear the rustle of leaves, to see snarling, man-beast faces” —but the concepts and plotting are in the classical vein of Jim Kjelgaard. Things changed a bit for the fourth tale, “The Man Who Told the Truth,” which is less Kjelgaard and more Robert Bloch. In fact, this story was included in Bloch’s posthumous collection, Flowers from the Moon and Other Lunacies (1998). These collaborations often appeared alongside stories under Bloch’s own name. “The Thing from the Barrens” appeared with Bloch’s “The Skull of the Marquis de Sade”; “The Fangs of Tsan-Lo” with “Soul Proprietor”; and “Chanu” with “Bogy Man Will Get You.”
     For the first time in more than 70 years, Jim Kjelgaard’s first three tales of the macabre are back in print. And we’re betting you’ll enjoy them as much today as their original readers did so long ago.

Got to Amazon for the paperback version (here) or Kindle version (here).

"The Double Whammy" by Robert Bloch

Rod has been a pitchman for a carnival sideshow—“a lousy mud-show that never played anywhere north of Tennessee”—for three seasons and he’s good at the spiel, convincing marks to split with their money for a chance to see the geek bite off a chicken’s head. Rod’s never been bothered by the show before. It’s “just a lousy chicken.” 

But lately, Rod’s had a problem.

“[S]omething was spooking him. No use kidding himself, he had to face it.

“Rod was afraid of the geek.”

The trouble is, the geek isn’t a monster. His name’s Mike, and Mike is the same as all the other geeks. A wino with an addiction and luck bad enough for him to play the geek, raving and biting chickens for a few dollars and a bed.

“The Double Whammy” is classic Robert Bloch; atmospheric, frightening, and clever. Rod, the tale’s narrator, is a touch unreliable and there is more happening than the reader knows (maybe). But what the reader knows is enough, and what the reader doesn’t know. Well, that makes the story that much better. And I enjoyed its every word.

* * *

“The Double Whammy” was published in Fantastic (February 1970) and I read it in the uneven, but enjoyable, anthology, The Wickedest Show on Earth, edited by Marcia Muller & Bill Pronzini (Morrow, 1985).

"It Happened Tomorrow" by Robert Bloch

I’m a sucker for two things: 1) apocalyptic stories; and 2) Robert Bloch. When I find something that marries both, a Robert Bloch written apocalyptic story, I drop everything and read it immediately. A situation I found earlier this week when I turned to the table of contents of an old anthology, Futures Unlimited, edited by Alden Norton, and saw the Robert Bloch novelette, “It Happened Tomorrow”.

Dick Sheldon’s morning started in the usual way. Daylight. His alarm’s tattooing brutality. But then things go bad. The alarm won’t stop its ringing until he smashes it to pieces. The lights in his apartment won’t turn off. His bathroom water tap is stuck on. The street car door won’t open, and then the entire car refuses to stop. As does the elevator in his office building. The world’s machines have gone mad. Everything is running, out-of-control, and their human creators are scared, looking for somewhere to hide.

“It Happened Tomorrow” is vintage science fiction. It has big ideas presented in a simple, entertaining package. Originally published in Super Science Stories in June 1951, it is as prescient today—think about the recent talk of artificial intelligence’s peril to humanity from such luminaries as Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk—as when it first appeared. It’s as entertaining today, as it must have been seventy years ago, too. 

A small story about a big subject. It follows the human world’s destruction as it happens from the viewpoint of Dick Sheldon, in a single city over a short period of time. A top-notch example of both classic science fiction and Robert Bloch. A writer who is unjustly forgotten and whose work seems ripe for a revival.

Futures Unlimited was published by Pyramid books as a mass market paperback in June 1969. It features an impressive list of contributors, including A. Merrit, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Arthur Conan Doyle and others.

"Nina" by Robert Bloch

Robert Bloch is a legend. He is popularly known as a horror writer, but his production was wide and impressive. He wrote extensively in the crime, science fiction and horror genres. He had a particular skill at taking the style of one genre—hardboiled crime—and mixing it with the theme and expectations of another genre—horror. Think Psycho.

I recently read his short story “Nina” and I was impressed (to say the least). Nolan is an American running a plantation in the wild country of Brazil. The closest city: Manaus. The plantation’s only access is by boat, and Nolan isn’t completely comfortable with the workers. It’s not that they don’t work well, but rather it is their ceaseless drumming during the night. Add the heat. The humidity. The mosquitoes. And Nolan is a miserable man.

His life on the plantation changes when a woman appears. She is unknown to the local workers, and Nolan’s translator, Moises, calls her an “Indio” and “savage.” She soon becomes Nolan’s bedmate, and when his wife and child arrive to visit, Nolan’s world is shaken on its head.

“Nina” has all of the elements of a terrific horror story: a foreign and exotic location; a creepy and dark fabric; mysticism; outright strangeness; and a violent, and very peculiar, loss. It is very much horror, but it is brilliantly delivered with hardboiled prose, which provides a raw power—not to mention forward momentum—many horror stories lack:

“After the lovemaking Nolan needed another drink.

“He fumbled for the bottle beside the bed, gripping it with a sweaty hand. His entire body was wet and clammy, and his fingers shook as they unscrewed the cap. For a moment Nolan wondered if he was coming down with another bout of fever. Then, as the harsh heat of the sun scalded his stomach, he realized the truth.”

“Nina” is one of the better genre stories I have read. Its power is heady and visceral with a shadow-like quality; the narrative creates a shifting, soft focus, of the events. The characters feel real and the narrative is perfect. It captures the essence of the story and delivers it with an impressive blend of force and jaded subtlety most writers never achieve.

“Nina” originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1977. I read it in the anthology The Best Horror Stories Volume 1 edited by Edward L. Ferman and Anne Jordan. It was published by St Martin’s Press in 1988.

This was originally posted February 6, 2009, but since I have read a few Robert Bloch short stories recently, and reviewed his fantastic “The Hell-Bound Train” I thought it would be interesting to find some of my prior writings about Mr Bloch’s work. I also reviewed his stories “The Real Bad Friend” and “Lucy Comesto Town” in 2014.

"That Hell-Bound Train" by Robert Bloch

Robert Bloch, at least to the small but select audience of this blog, needs no introduction. He is one of the great writers to graduate from the mid-Twentieth Century pulp racket, and—like all true pulp writers—if it sold, he wrote it. He worked several genres including crime, horror, science fiction and fantasy. He is best known for his fine novel Psycho—later transformed into its faithful film adaptation Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho—but his work has a depth and quality rarely seen. If Mr Bloch wrote it, it is likely pretty great.

On the far side of great is his 1958 story “That Hell-Bound Train”. It won the 1959 Hugo Award, and it is the best science fiction story—short or otherwise—I have read in a long time. It features a young bindlestiff called Martin. His father “walked the tracks for the CB&Q” until he met with a drunken accident and his mother ran off with a traveling salesman. He skipped the orphanage and drifted with the rails. He tried his hand at crime, and on a cold and lonely November midnight he determined to go straight—

“No sir, he just wasn’t cut out for petty larceny. It was worse than a sin—it was unprofitable, too. Bad enough to do the Devil’s work, but then get such miserable pay on top of it!”

Martin’s dream of a straight life is interrupted by the unexpected appearance of an unfamiliar running train. The windows dark. Its whistle “screaming like a lost soul.” The conductor who steps from its forward car is off—the way he drags a foot when he walks, and his nonstandard technique of lighting his lantern with his breath. It takes only a moment for an offer of a ride to be tendered, but Martin negotiates a deal. He will gladly ride for a single wish in exchange. He wants, at his own choosing in a moment of happy contentment, to stop time. The conductor accepts the bargain, and Martin is certain he fooled the devil. He finds a job in the nearest town and plots his own happiness, looking for that moment where he wants to spend forever.

“That Hell-Bound Train” is brilliantly executed. Its narrative is seemingly simple, but the simplicity is misleading. A study of misdirection, really. It shows the reader enough to make a conclusion (incorrectly) about where the story will finish, fulfilling that expectation in a way, and then taking it further. And that final step takes the story from pretty good to great. It is very much like the best of The Twilight Zone, and a shame it was never treated in an episode.

“That Hell-Bound Train” was originally published in the September 1958 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. I read it in the anthology The Hugo Winners, Volume 1 edited by Isaac Asimov and published by Fawcett Crest in 1973.                   

"The Real Bad Friend" and "Lucy Comes to Town" by Robert Bloch

This 1978 collection included "The Real Bad Friend"

When I think of Robert Bloch, I think of his novel Psycho, which isn’t completely fair because Mr Bloch wrote a number of excellent stories—both novels and shorts. But Psycho is special in his cannon simply because it, due to Alfred Hitchcock’s film, has become a cultural icon. It is something of an originator of the modern serial killer novel (but so much better than most of the modern fare), and it really is a classic of both suspense and horror.

Something I didn’t know, until very recently, is the novel is preceded by two short stories that share a theme—psychotic multi-personality antagonists—which act as something close to building blocks for the novel. The stories are, “The Real Bad Friend” and “Lucy Comes to Town,” published in 1957 and 1952 respectively.  

“The Real Bad Friend” is, of the two stories, the easiest to trace directly back from Psycho. The protagonist is one George Foster Pendleton. George is a dull, unimaginative vacuum salesman with a mother fetish—he married his wife Ella because she reminded him of his mother and he wanted a woman to care for him—and a solitary friend named Roderick. Roderick is something of a mystery. He comes and goes at odd times, and while he and George often travel together Roderick has never met Ella. In fact, Ella knows nothing about George’s friend Roderick.

The catalyst of the story is Ella’s inheritance of $85,000, which gives Roderick an idea, which germinates into a plan. A plan George is something of a passive, almost unwitting, accomplice.

“George Foster Pendleton would never have thought of it. He couldn’t have; he was much to dull and respectable. George Foster Pendleton, vacuum salesman, aged forty-three, just wasn’t the type. He had been married to the same wife for fourteen years, lived in the same white house for an equal length of time, wore glasses when he wrote up orders, and was completely complacent about his receding hairline and advancing waistline.”

“The Real Bad Friend” is a full-bodied psychological dark suspense story. It is written in third person in a pedestrian and unadorned style. The prose is the physical embodiment of George’s personality (and lifestyle); dull, dry, reliable. But the prose is key to the success of the story. It is hiding a psychotic rottenness with an ordinary complacency. It shares a commonality with both “Lucy Comes to Town” and Psycho; a primary character who is much more than he (or she) appears.

“Lucy Comes to Town” is a simpler story than “Friend,” but it is no less interesting. It is written in first person by an alcoholic woman named Vi. Vi is both confused and scared, and her friend Lucy makes matters worse. Lucy convinces Vi that her husband is holding her hostage in their home. He is intentionally keeping Vi’s friends away, and the nurse he hired to help Vi rehab is actually nothing more than a guard.

Lucy helps Vi escape from the house, and the bulk of the story takes place in a dingy motel room as conversation between the two women. Lucy leading Vi back to the bottle and in the process into a dark ranting paranoia.

“I lay down on the bed and then I was sleeping, really sleeping for the first time in weeks, sleeping so the scissors wouldn’t hurt my eyes, the way George hurt me inside when he wanted to shut me up in the asylum so he and Miss Higgins could make love on my bed and laugh at me the way they all laughed at me except Lucy and she would take care of me she knew what to do now I could trust her when George came and I must sleep and sleep and nobody can blame you for what you think in your sleep or do in your sleep…”

The relationship between “Lucy,” “Friend,” and Psycho is obvious as one reads the stories. All three feature a primary character with multiple personalities, but more importantly are the stylistic and thematic relationships. Each has the feel of a generic crime story that Mr Bloch handily transforms into something darker, developing a psychological element and a disturbing realism. A dark realism that not only envelopes the characters, but also is relevant (the realism part) to the reader who, very likely, fears the possibility of insanity.         

I read both “The Real Bad Friend,” and “Lucy Comes to Town” in the anthology Murder in the First Reel, edited by Bill Pronzini, Charles G. Waugh, and Martin H. Greenberg and published by Avon Books in 1985.

Film Festival Episode One: "Annabel"

The Internet is an amazing place. It is a spider web of interesting (and uninteresting) information and cool stuff. It is especially brilliant when it comes to entertainment. I discovered the old television series The Alfred Hitchcock Hour a few weeks ago when I went on a hunt for Richard Matheson films--Matheson wrote two episodes and both are online!

Which got me thinking about all the fabulous writers of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s--a period when writers could seemingly mix-and-match a career of both film and fiction. I went on a hunt and I was impressed with what I found. I also decided I would share some of the better episodes and films here at Gravetapping.

A sort of online film festival of television and film written-by, or based on the work, of popular paperback writers of this era. A few of the writers on the horizon: John D. MacDonald, Richard Matheson, Henry Slesar, Charles Beaumont, William F. Nolan, Cornell Woolrich, David Goodis, Leigh Brackett and many, many more.

The first installment is from The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. It is an episode written by Robert Bloch and based on a Patricia Highsmith novel. The title: "Annabel". It is the seventh episode of season one, and it originally aired November 1, 1962. It stars an amazingly young Dean Stockwell and it was directed by Paul Henreid--a television director who actively worked from the 1950s to the 1970s.

Enjoy, and let me know what you think if you are so included.

A technical note: There are five commercials, four that you must watch; the fifth is at the end, well after all the action is over. A few of the commercials are placed a little awkwardly. To watch the episode full-screen hover the cursor over the screen and click the small rectangular box in the top-right corner.

ACE Covers of Robert Bloch

There is a terrific little bookstore in the closest major metropolis--I live in a town of about 27,000 people, and love it!--that has a pretty decent selection of old paperbacks, including a bunch of ACE Double mysteries.

Anyway, it's gotten me excited about the old ACE line, particularly the mysteries. So in my enthusiasm here are the cover scans of the Robert Bloch novels--two novels and one short story collection actually--published by ACE.

It's worth noting that many are of the opinion that the ACE crime line is inferior to many of its contemporaries, which is probably true, but if Robert Bloch's name is on the book; buy it!

Spiderweb was published in 1954


Shooting Star was published in 1958.


Terror in the Night was the second book published with Shooting Star in 1958.


Robert Bloch is best known as a horror writer, but in his early career he wrote some terrific crime novels, including the titles above. His work is tight, thrilling, vivid, and very fun. Hard Case Crime republished Spiderweb and Shooting Star in a double format a few years ago--pick it up, it's very much worth the $7.99. Now if HCC would republish Terror in the Night with, say, a collection of David Goodis short stories; or maybe John D. shorts.

Hard Case Crime Double

Cool news from Hard Case Crime: They have just released the artwork and titles for their much anticipated—by me, at least—“Double.” This style goes back to the old ACE Doubles, which featured two short novels back-to-back with a separate cover for each story. ACE published mysteries, westerns and science fiction; their science fiction line was the most popular, and today is the easiest to come by, with westerns a close second, and mysteries a very distant third.

The titles for the new HCC Double are both Robert Bloch novels—it would be cooler if they had two different writers, but still Bloch is a pretty kick ass choice—and the artwork is, as usual, top-notch.

The titles: Shooting Star and Spiderweb.

The cover artists: Arthur Saydum and Larry Schwinger .

HCC says the titles have been out-of-print for fifty years—who am I to argue—and the descriptions on their website make the novels sound pretty cool.

Unfortunately we have to wait until April 2008 for its release.

Click Here to go to the Hard Case Crime promotion page for a description and a sample chapter their first Double novel.