Stephen Marlowe

 

A little piece about Stephen Marlowe for… Alternatives: Science Fiction Stories by Stephen Marlowe A 3 PLAY Book   Introduction     Stephen Marlowe—born as Milton Lesser on August 7, 1928, to Norman and Syliva Lesser in Brooklyn, New York—purportedly said: “At the age of eight, I wanted to be a writer and I never changed my mind.” And was he ever a writer. After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy from William & Mary in 1949, with a referral from science fiction writer Damon Knight, Marlowe took a job with the famous Scott Meredith Literary Agency. The same place writers like Ed McBain, Donald E. Westlake, Lester del Rey, and Lawrence Block, started their careers. He sold his first story, a science fiction novelette titled “All Heroes Are Hated!,” to Amazing Stories in 1950. Marlowe, after that first sale, concentrated almost exclusively on science fiction throughout the first half of the decade; publishing dozens of stories in pulps and digests like Imagination, Marvel Science Stories, Galaxy, and Fantastic. His first novel, Earthbound, as by Milton Lesser, was a speculative young adult job for the John C. Winston Company. Earthbound was released the same day Marlowe, 23-years-old at the time, reported for his Korean War service in 1952. According to a 2007 interview with Ed Gorman, Marlowe had forgotten about contracting for a second book with Winston: “I was at a winter training exercise at Camp Drum [Western New York], where I was temporarily attached to the 82nd Airborne. I got a frantic call from my agent: How [are] you coming on the second Winston novel? I’d forgotten all about it and it was due in a week. I spent a weekend telling myself it was impossible. Then on Monday the colonel I worked for, on hearing of my plight, said, ‘Son, how much are they paying you to write that book?’ I told him the advance was a thousand bucks. ‘Son,’ he told me, ‘even the U.S. Army can’t stand between you and that kind of money. Go home and write that book.’ ” Marlowe wrote the book, The Star Seekers, in less than a week, delivered it, but “never had the courage to read it.” The Star Seekers hit bookshelves in 1953 and has been seldom seen ever since. In the mid-1950s, Marlowe shifted his focus from science fiction—although he continued to write speculative tales into the early-1960s—to suspense. He contributed to mystery pulps like Manhunt, Hunted, and Accused, and wrote novels for the paperback original market. His first suspense novel was Catch the Brass Ring, which was one-half of an Ace Double published in 1954. A year later, Marlowe introduced the character that made him famous: Chester Drum. Drum was a Washington, D.C. private eye specializing in international cases. An original idea in the mid-20th Century since the hardboiled dicks of the era were set in large American cities like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. The international settings of Drum’s cases are vivid with an exotic realism that came from Marlowe’s real-life geography hopping. In an interview, Marlowe said, “[I’ve] lost count of how many places I’ve lived—surely more than a hundred in twenty-odd countries.” The series was a hit and Gold Medal, the premium paperback publisher of the day, sold millions of the books.  There were 20 Chester Drum novels between 1955, when The Second Longest Night appeared, and 1968 when Drum Beat—Marianne was published. The novels were accompanied by eight short stories published in Manhunt, Accused, Ed McBain’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. The New York Times mystery critic, Anthony Boucher, wrote: “few writers of the tough private-eye story can tell it more accurately than Mr. Marlowe, or with such taut understatement of violence and sex.” After Gold Medal dropped Marlowe’s Chester Drum series, he turned to more ambitious hardcover suspense novels. These big books—longer and more complex than his earlier novels—had similar exotic settings as the Drum stories. This, along with Marlowe’s ability to tighten suspense, scene-by-scene, and what Boucher had earlier called his understated sex and violence gave these books punch. The first of these, Come Over, Red Rover—if one discounts Marlowe’s 1966 hardcover, The Search for Bruno Heidler—appeared in 1968. Others of note are Summit (1970), The Cawthorn Journals (1975), and The Valkyrie Encounter, which Marlowe called, in that same Ed Gorman interview, his favorite of his own hardcover suspense novels.    The 1980s saw Marlowe pivot again into biographical novels, which the mystery author and critic Bill Pronzini called “brilliantly conceived [and] meticulously researched.” The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus appeared in 1987; The Lighthouse at the End of the World, about Edgar Allan Poe, in 1995; and The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes—which, according to Pronzini, Marlowe considered his best novel and Ed Gorman called “his masterpiece”—was published in 1996. Over his long career, Stephen Marlowe received the Prix Gutenberg du Livre, a French literary award, in 1988 for The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America in 1997. As we said earlier, Marlowe was born as Milton Lesser, but sometime in the late-1950s (after his Chester Drum novels had made a big splash) he legally changed his name to Stephen Marlowe. Shortly after graduating from William & Mary, Marlowe—then still known as Milton Lesser—married Leona Lang on June 2, 1950. Leona, who went by Leigh, was a trained psychologist. The couple had two daughters but divorced in the early-1960s. Marlowe then, in 1964, married Ann Humbert in Manhattan. The pair were married until Marlowe’s death from “myelodysplastic syndrome, a bone-marrow disorder” on February 22, 2008, in Williamsburg, Virginia. Alternatives: Science Fiction Stories features three of Marlowe’s best speculative tales—one novelette and two shorts. “Divvy Up,” Amazing Stories, 1960, is a dystopian treasure about one man’s survival in a world where death is a relief from a tortured and soulless world. Its dark themes would have made for a marvelous episode of the original The Twilight Zone. “Finders Keepers,” Fantastic Universe, 1953, is a light-hearted tale about time traveling historians and a search going all the way back to Adam and Eve. “The Passionate Pitchman,” Fantastic, 1956, is a slam-bang—read that as exciting—adventure novelette about gangsters, heists, and teleportation. Now on with the stories…   Cover by Karadraws.com

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"Heretic: Stories" by Philip José Farmer

Introduction to Heretic: Stories by Philip José Farmer   The critic Leslie Fiedler called Philip José Farmer “the greatest science fiction writer ever” and Isaac Asimov proclaimed him as “a far more skillful writer than I am.” Farmer is widely considered to have broken the genres’ taboo with sexuality. His first significant publication, the novella “The Lovers” (Startling Stories, Aug. 1961), used sexuality—specifically a sexual relationship between a human male and an extraterrestrial—as a central theme, which would have been a volatile topic in mid-century America. According to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, “[‘The Lovers’] concerned xenobiology, parasitism and sex, an explosive mixture, certainly for the SF genre of that era.” Farmer’s fiction was consistently critical of religion, too, which is where the title of this collection, Heretic, is derived. As a boy Farmer attended religious training in the Church of Christ, Scientist (Christian Science), but by 14 he had become an agnostic and later in life he described himself as an atheist. Farmer’s criticisms of religion, particularly how it segregates people by creating false differences, can be seen in much of his fiction, including the stories in this collection. He is best known for his Riverworld series—which features such luminaries as Richard Francis Burton and Mark Twain in a world where every person who has ever lived is resurrected into a world dominated by river valleys—and his World of Tiers series about parallel universes and the origins of humanity. Farmer’s science fiction won three Hugo Awards—Best New SF Author or Artist, 1953; Best Novella, 1968, for “Riders of the Purple Wage”; and Best Novel, 1972, for To Your Scattered Bodies Go. He was awarded the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award from Science Fiction Writers of America and the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement. Farmer’s birth name was Philip Josie Farmer. “Josie” was meant as an honor to his paternal grandmother, Josephine, but it he disliked it because of its feminine sound. As an adult Farmer legally changed his middle name to José, which he thought livened his rather bland and alliterative name: Philip Farmer. He was born in North Terre Haute, Indiana, on January 26, 1918, to George and Lucile Theodora Farmer (née Jackson). The Farmers moved frequently, at least six times, during the 1920s; living in Indiana, Missouri, and Illinois. In 1936, Farmer graduated from Peoria Central High School (Illinois) and enrolled at the University of Missouri, Columbia, where he studied journalism. He left school in 1937 to take a job with Illinois Power and Light—reportedly to help his father payoff a debt—and returned to school, Bradley Polytechnical Institute, in 1939 to study English literature. In 1941, he transferred back to the University of Missouri where his future wife, Elizabeth Virginia Andre, attended as a music student. He graduated with a B.A. in 1949 from Bradley in Peoria. Philip and Elizabeth were married on May 10, 1941. The couple had two children, a son and daughter. Farmer volunteered to become a pilot with the Army Air Corps in 1941, but he was discharged and took a job with the Keystone Steel & Wire Co. where he worked until becoming a fulltime writer in the early-1950s. During much of the 1950s and 1960s Farmer worked as a technical writer for defense contractors, including General Electric, Motorola, and McDonnell-Douglas. He became a fulltime fiction writer in 1969. Philip José Farmer died on February 25, 2009, in Peoria, Illinois. The three stories included in Heretic—a novelette and two shorts—are excellent examples of Farmer’s best work: thoughtful, critical of authority and religion, and downright fun to read. “The Celestial Blueprint” (Fantastic Journey, July 1954) is an entertaining and ironic journey into religious zealotry, distrust, and revenge. The central theme of “How Deep the Grooves” (Amazing Stories, February 1963) is free will and absolute predestination; a thinking person’s dilemma written as highspeed entertainment. The final story is the novelette, “Tongues of the Moon” (Amazing Stories, September 1961), which is a space opera-like adventure—hasty pacing, space blasters, and explosions—with a serious look at nationalism and religion. The cover was designed by www.karadraws.com   Click here to purchase the Kindle edition and here to purchase the trade paperback.

Philip José Farmer’s Heretic: Stories is the first volume in Vintage Lists’ 3 PLAY series, which is a line of high-quality books featuring three stories—every so often a bonus tale appears to keep things interesting—from authors both old and new. Each entry features stories from a single author with an emphasis on story quality. The books are short, anywhere between 95 and 120 pages and each is designed for readers with a discerning eye and a love of genre fiction—crime, mystery, horror, and science fiction—at its very best. Plus, and this is a big thing, the books are designed for easy reading—paperbacks have an easy-to-read font size—and affordability in both paperback and electronic editions.

 

Women Wrote the Future, Vol. 1: Tales from Galaxy

 

Women Wrote the Future, Vol. 1: Tales from Galaxy is an extravaganza of great science fiction written by women and published in Galaxy in the 1950s. It is available now at Amazon. Story notes, which include a little about the story’s author, accompany each tale. Keep reading for the book’s Introduction, written by the enigmatic J. LaRue. With a little luck a second volume will appear soon.

Women Wrote the Future, Vol. 1: Tales from Galaxy Edited by J. LaRue Vintage Lists, 2023   Introduction   A mythology in science fiction circles—academia and readership alike—claims women were excluded from the genre until the late-1960s and early-1970s, when writers like Joanna Russ, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Octavia E. Butler jumped the sexism barrier that had kept women out. While these writers are culturally important, both inside and outside the genre, it is nonsense to imagine they appeared on the science fiction scene without precedence. The first woman to publish a story in a science fiction magazine was Clare Winger Harris when her tale, “The Fate of Poseidonia” was published in the June 1927 issue of Amazing Stories. It was that same pulp, Amazing Stories, that created the entire modern science fiction genre when its first issue hit newsstands in April 1926. And those first few years, between 1926 and 1929, were a dark period for women and science fiction because only 17 stories by six known female authors were published. The next ten years (1930 – 1939) weren’t much better with 62 stories by 25 women published, but the 1940s saw a significant gain with 209 stories by 47 female writers, and in the 1950s women exploded on the scene with 634 tales, by 154 writers. While these numbers represent a slim ratio of the total number of science fiction stories published during this period, it was a beginning that ultimately led to the celebration of women as some of the best writers in the genre.* This anthology, which is intended as a tribute and to bring attention to these early female writers, is a survey of the fiction published by the most respected science fiction magazine of the 1950s: Galaxy. Galaxy’s first issue reached newsstands in October 1950. The list of contributors for that issue included many of the genres’ brightest stars: Theodore Sturgeon, Richard Matheson, Fritz Leiber, and Isaac Asimov. It also started a trend of publishing women writers by publishing Katherine MacLean’s brilliant novelette, “Contagion” (which, unfortunately, isn’t included in this collection). Although three other marvelous stories by MacLean—“Pictures Don’t Lie” (Aug. 1951), “The Snowball Effect” (Sep. 1952), and “Games” (Mar. 1953)—are scattered across its pages. Over the rest of the 1950s, Galaxy published 30 stories written by thirteen women. The tales ranged from imaginative adventures—Rosel George Brown’s “From an Unseen Censor” (Sep. 1958)—to cultural critique, “One Way” by Miriam Allen deFord (Mar. 1955), to homegrown silliness, with a feminist bent, like Ruth Laura Wainwright’s “Green Grew the Lasses” (July 1953). These stories, along with thirteen others written by women and published by Galaxy in the 1950s, are reprinted in Women Wrote the Future, Vol. 1: Tales from Galaxy. And frankly, they are some of the best tales to appear in Galaxy during its 30-year run. Included are gems by genre stars like Katherine MacLean, as mentioned above, and Betsy Curtis, and rising stars like Rosel George Brown. Each story and its author are briefly introduced and while some of the writers are little-known with only a few publishing credits, others had impressive careers both in and out of science fiction. Miriam Allen deFord—“One Way” (Mar. 1955) and “The Eel” (Apr. 1958)—was a suffragette, wrote for Nation, and won an Edgar Award for Best Crime Fact Book. Phyllis Sterling Smith—“What is POSAT” (Sep. 1951)—attended Stanford and Tufts, she worked for the Psychological Testing Corporation, and she was an energy consultant for the Environmental Protection Agency. Ann Warren Griffith—“Zeritsky’s Law” (Nov. 1951)—attended Barnard College, piloted as a WASP in WW2, and wrote for The New Yorker and The Atlantic. And those are only three of the 12 writers inside this anthology.   __________ *publishing statistics come from Partner in Wonder, by Eric Leif Davin [Lexington Books, 2006] Click here for the Kindle edition and here for the paperback at Amazon.

Table of Contents   “Games” – Katherine MacLean / “The Pilot and the Bushman” – Sylvia Jacobs / “One Way” – Miriam Allen deFord / “Rough Translation” – Jean M. Janis / “Pictures Don’t Lie” – Katherine MacLean / “The Vilbar Party” – Evelyn E. Smith / “What is POSAT?” – Phyllis Sterling Smith / “Green Grew the Lasses” – Ruth Laura Wainwright / “The Trap” – Betsy Curtis / “Know Thy Neighbor” – Elisabeth R. Lewis / “Tea Tray in the Sky” – Evelyn E. Smith / “Homesick” – Lyn Venable / “The Snowball Effect” – Katherine MacLean / “Zeritsky’s Law” – Ann Griffith / “From an Unseen Censor” – Rosel George Brown / “The Eel” – Miriam Allen deFord Click here for the Kindle edition and here for the paperback at Amazon.

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).

Story Tellers' Circle: "Jim Kjelgaard" (Short Stories, Nov. 10, 1945)

An interview, of a sort mostly about fishing and outdoor fun, with Jim Kjelgaard that appeared in the Nov. 10, 1945 issue of the pulp magazine Short Stories with Kjelgaard’s short-short, “Cheena”; a clever story about a Filipino accused of collaborating with the Japanese. 

The Story Tellers’ Circle

From Milwaukee come these words from Jim Kjelgaard. Jim has something to say on ‘‘Cheena” and a good deal more to talk about on northern pike and ducks:

“I really haven’t very much to say about ‘Cheena’ except that I met and talked with a Filipino, and he impressed me as being a great little guy. He told me one thing and another, and ‘Cheena’ grew out of the mass of information. That’s the way it is with stories, you hear something you just can’t forget and by and by—you write the yarn. I will say, though, that I wouldn’t want any Filipinos mad at me. The one I met was tough as whalebone and strong as an ox as well as being a great little guy. And he himself told me that he was just a blushing daisy compared to some of the other fellows he knew!

“ ‘Cheena’; except for that, is a wholly imaginative story and I used the character as is just because I thought he’d fit in better than any other. He’s strictly my own invention.”

So much for business. Now about pleasure—the fishin’ and huntin’ kind.

“The weather’s already turned cold out in this neck of the woods—on the 14^th of September a fire doesn’t feel bad and we’ve kept one for the past four days. But, from one angle, that’s exactly the right way to bring in this time of year. ‘There ain’t no gas rationin’ no mo’,’ and you can really get around to all the places that you thought you’d like to get around to while you couldn’t. Well, maybe not all of ’em. The old jaloppy distinctly is not what she used to be and maybe she never was. But she still rolls when you want her to, and next week I expect to start for one of the nicest places I ever saw.

“It’s a stretch of river, and probably there isn’t another one exactly like it in the whole world. I never measured it, but at a guess it’s three hundred feet wide. Cattails and rushes, a thick mat that you couldn’t even pole a skiff through, extend about forty feet out from the east bank. Then you run into weeds, all sorts of water weeds, everything from lily pads to those long, mossy streamers that catch on the oars and keep your speed down almost to nothing an hour. But there’s a knack to rowing through ’em, and after floundering around in the darn’ things for two hours one day a fourteen-year-old kid told me how to work the oars. You take a long stroke, stop your oars a second on the back stroke, and the weeds roll off. But the center of the river— Ah and double ah!

“Theres an open channel there about twenty feet wide, and the last time I was there I saw at least a hundred and fifty pounds of great northern pike and wall-eyes come out of that channel. Some of those fish weren’t any babies either. One fellow snagged a wall-eye on a four-ounce fly rod, and fought it around for forty-five minutes before he got it even close to the boat. Then he made a stab, missed with the gaff, and the fish went away from there as though nothing was holding him. Anyhow, the cold weather should inspire those pike to strike soon—and thus my remark about ideal weather. You do a lot of shivering, but you have a lot of fun. Some day some smart bird will invent a lure with which you can fish those weeds—and that day you’d better be along.

“Besides, its handy to have a shotgun when you go up there. Possibly there won’t be any flight ducks down, but a lot of natives nest around there. All this—and mallards too!”

 

Jim Kjelgaard

 

“Cheena” is included in the Jim Kjelgaard collection, The Spell of the White Sturgeon / Dusky & Other Tales.

 

Story Tellers Circle © 1945 Short Stories, Inc. / No renewal