Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, October 1981 did something special for Halloween. An issue devoted to monsters– well, criminals who appeared to be monsters anyway–in a full issue of Gothic fun for the trick-or-treating season. What a line-up too! Horror masters Joe R. Lansdale and Richard Laymon along with Mystery specialists Bill Pronzini and Talmage Powell.
“The Full Moon Means Murder” by Brett Halliday (written by James Reasoner) was the novella opener. It has Mike Shayne called to the house of a rich man, Talbott Barron, in Miami’s Bal Harbor. When he finds the house he is attacked by a mysterious man-creature. Going in, he meets Rebecca, the sister of his client. Talbott comes and he pulls Mike into his study. He admits that he may have been the one who attacked him because he is a werewolf.
When Mike learns that someone is trying to blackmail Talbott with photos of a woman he supposedly murdered, he gets suspicious. From Barron’s business manager, Jeremy Whitson, he learns Talbott has a history of mental issues. He is on the trail of the blackmailer when someone takes a shot at him. He chases the sniper but loses him when he gets a rifle butt in the head. (Like every good shamus, he gets knocked out a lot.)
Shayne interviews the couple that helps around the house, Kevin and Mildred Scott. Kevin is hostile and Mike thinks he has seen him before. A quick call to his friend at the cops and he identifies Kevin Scott as an ex-con who served time for extortion. If there was an inside man helping the blackmailer, Scott is the prime suspect.
Mike’s plan is simple. He will have Talbott Barron follow the instructions of dumping one hundred thousand dollars off a bridge in a cooler, only the money will be replaced with paper. When the blackmailer comes to gather the cooler, he will see who the fiend is. This plan gets sidetracked when Shayne goes for a drive out in a rustic area outside Miami.
He stops at a sleazy beer joint and finds the woman from the picture, Charlene. She and her man, Randy, run the diner/bar. Mike gets some information from her, that she staged the photos for an older man matching Whitson’s description for two hundred bucks. Randy takes a swing at him and Mike draws his gun. Charlene throws beer in Mike’s face and Randy punches him some more. Finally, Charlene ends the fight with a sawed off baseball bat.
When Mike awakens (knock out number two) he finds himself in a rural field, his gun gone and his tires slashed. He hitchhikes back to Miami but misses the midnight drop-off. Knowing that Whitson most likely retrieved the cooler, Mike goes to his workplace and finds him dead. His throat has been cut and he has been savaged in the struggle. He leaves and finds Talbott Barron after borrowing his secretary’s, Lucy Hamilton, car. Barron admits he kept the rendezvous but filled the cooler with cash. The two men rush out to the bar to find Charlene and Randy dead, also having slit throats.
Mike knows the killer is still there because of the squeaky floors. It proves to be Rebecca Barron. She tells how Whitson controlled her with drugs, getting her hooked on smack. She was the inside person who had been feeding Talbott hallucinogens to make him think he was a werewolf. The attacker on the first day was Whitson dressed in a werewolf mask. It had been Rebeccea who had shot at him with the rifle on Whitson’s orders. The detective has to calm down his client, promising him he will help Rebecca beat her drug addiction.
I have read a few Mike Shayne tales over the years and I had high hopes for this one because of its weird nature. The truth is it was pretty standard stuff with a few moments of strangeness thrown in. There is no real strong sense that werewolves are real. Only once does Shayne stop and ask himself could werewolves be real? The presence of blackmailers and gunmen keep the red-headed shamus from really believing it for long.
We will see this a few times in this issue of MSMM. Like the work of John Dickson Carr so many years earlier, the idea of something supernatural spices up what is still a mystery tale. If you are like me, you keep hoping the werewolf will be real. It won’t, but you keep hoping anyway. (I mean the guy’s name is Talbott, right? Larry Talbot, the Wolf Man!) Reasoner’s Mystery writing is good, fast paced but ultimately not supernatural.
I asked James about the editorial direction for this story he wrote forty-one years ago. I wondered if the editor, Charles E. Fritch, had planned or suggested a themed issue. Reasoner said:
“Chuck Fritch gave me very little editorial direction on the Shayne stories. As far as I recall, the only real suggestion he made was for me to come up with a recurring villainess, which is how the Black Lotus stories came about. So I’m fairly confident in saying that I came up with the idea for “The Full Moon Means Murder”, possibly with a little help from my wife Livia, who pitched in on the plotting quite often.”
This suggests that Charles Fritch had not gone about creating a special Halloween issue with a lot of planning, that it may have happened more organically than that. He may simply have saved a few stories with an October issue in mind.
“Coyote and Quarter Moon” by Bill Pronzini and Jeffrey Wallman stars Jill Quarter-Moon, an animal protection agent of Umatilla background, being a First Nation in Washington State. Pronzini makes some references to First Nations beliefs about Coyote fighting monsters but there is no supernatural elements in this story about drug dealers using dog pounds to distribute their product.
“The Soul Ghoul” by Joe R. Lansdale is the real deal. Rocky, an ex-boxer, goes to visit his friend, Gardner, a painter and retired psychiatrist. Gardner tells Rocky how he was drummed out of the shrink biz. His colleagues abandoned him when he took up the belief that magic might offer Science some avenues to explaining aberrant psychology. Gardner explains his theory that there is a spirit that feeds off of strong human emotion. He calls it the Soul Ghoul. Gardner shows him his occult room with a Ouiji board front and center. Using the board, Gardner attempts to contact the Soul Ghoul, not for the first time. The Ouiji board planchette flies off and shatters a window. Rocky leaves his friend, thinking he will abandon his strange ideas.
The second visit, a few weeks later, shows the slippery slope Gardner is on. The house is dark and the window hasn’t been repaired. His beloved black cat, Meko, is dead. Gardner killed the animal when the Soul Ghoul took control of him. Gardner says it is like Lovecraft, that terrible things really do lurk beyond the ken of humankind. Rocky calms him down, reminding him that the Soul Ghoul feeds on strong emotion. Rocky leaves him again, thinking that Gardner needs help. He feels guilty later when he admits he did not give that help.
The final visit comes after a young woman is found murdered, her head twisted like Meko the cat’s. Later two more people are killed. Rocky forces himself to go to Gardner’s. Suspecting the worse, Rocky breaks in, finding himself in Gardner’s studio. The paintings there tell a strange story. There is one piece that has Meko the cat and the three murder victims with broken necks. The rest of the paintings depict a monstrous like a whirlwind with a mouth filled with teeth. Rocky realizes who this image is supposed to depict.
In the hall, the ex-boxer finds Gardner. The man’s face is strange and filled with hate. He tries to brain Rocky with a fire poker. The two fight. The ex-boxer hits the slender Gardner with his best punches but little phases him. Rocky tries to run, and the two end up fighting beside Gardner’s massive fireplace. Rocky sees the insane hate disappear and become replaced by Gardner’s own face. There is a struggle going on inside the man.In the end, Gardner throws himself into the fire to stop the Soul Ghoul. Rocky sees his face at peace before he dies.
Rocky learns more about Gardner when he is arrested for the man’s death. Gardner was not only a psychiatrist, he had also been a mental patient. Others testify to Gardner’s strange behavior and Rocky is cleared. Rocky wonders about recent killings by the Yorkshire Ripper. The soul ghoul is alive and well in the world…
Lansdale is using a traditional Cthulhu Mythos/Weird Tales triptych plot here, the friend who visits a colleague, at least three times. In between the visits things get worse and worse for the friend until the final destruction. The beauty of this plot is that it allows for doubt. The narrator is usually a skeptic who doesn’t believe what he sees. (The reader is always smarter and able to read between the lines.) This deniability is perfect for the Mystery publisher because it means the supernatural elements are never proven, allowing the reader who doesn’t like real supernatural to say it was all auto-suggestion or hysteria. The readers who recognize the H. P. Lovecraft reference know otherwise…
Joe tells me about his tale: “I was already writing horror stories, and he [Fritch] just asked for one for that issue. My story was called BEYOND THE LIGHT, and I put back that title when it was reprinted. [A Fist Full of Stories (and Articles), 1996] I hated Soul Ghoul. I don’t remember if there were any suggestions or direction at this date, but I think not.” Again, it looks like Fritch created the issue with minimal planning.
“The Easter Gathering” by Ed Okonowicz has music student, Brenda Porcelli finding a rental that is too good to be true. The Gothic appearing Departe family gives her a lovely apartment in their old funeral home with its large organ. Brenda suffers nightmares where she is performing in a large room. This comes to pass when the Departes invite her to play at their Easter gathering. Too bad for Brenda, the assembled are all vampires. The author tells us in his bio that the story is based on real events, a friend who lived in a family-run funeral home.
“Night of the Goblin” by Talmage Powell is a non-supernatural tale of Halloween. The young Bobby steals razor blades from the store so he can frame Jet Simmons, his mom’s awful boyfriend. The boy puts the broken blades in a Karmel King bar that Jet gave him. The goblin in the title refers to Bobby’s Halloween costume. Powell is the oldest writer in the issue, having written Mystery stories since the time of the Pulps.
“Sleight of Hand” by Ron Montana is a Mystery story or is it? Randall Coleman, FBI agent, hires The Great Maitland to perform at his son’s birthday party. The divorced father has duel motives: a nice present for his son and a chance to confront Maitlland. At several of the magician’s bigger parties, valuable jewels and bonds have been stolen from safes, as if by magic.
The two men go for a drink at a pub that looks like a ship. Randy presses the magician to reveal how he pulled off the robberies, guessing there is an inside man. Maitland calls his theories “paperback”. The FBI man knows there is no point in putting the cuffs on his prisoner. Later we hear that Agent Coleman has disappeared. A life-size stuffed frog is found in the driver’s seat of his car. Like the best magic tricks, Montana doesn’t explain anything except to say, “It’s magic.”
“Spooked” by Richard Laymon is a non-supernatural horror tale that uses the classic idea of the thing-under-the-bed. Selene is trying to sleep but she keeps hearing noises from under her bed. Eventually she gets up enough courage to look. Something comes for here. The next morning her brother Alex comes to check the tape recorder he left there to frighten her into going out the window and fall on spikes. Selene jumps out from under the bed, madness filling her eyes. Short and nasty!
“Give Until It Stops Hurting” by C. Bruce Hunter is a wonderful conte cruel in which Professor Polk goes to the hospital with food poisoning. He sees one of his former students that he failed is the doctor there. Then others who suffered through his class. All the people working in the hospital are his former students. The doctor explains it isn’t food poisoning but digitalis that was added to his food. The symptoms are the same, he is told as they prep him for surgery. It’s a good thing he has filled in his organ donor card…
“The Stones of Merytaten” by Geoffrey Bush is a clever and creepy tale told to us by a guided tour recording. As we travel around the transplanted stones from Egypt, now in New York City, we learn the strange history of the stones and their possible occult meaning. We learn of the prophecy of how when the 5 meets the 82 it will signal that all will be turned to stone. The stones now lie at the metropolitan Museum of Art at the corner of 5th Avenue and 82nd Street. When the tape repeats what can we assume?
“Stiff Competition: Book Reviews” by John Ball is all Mystery material but it does includes a review of The Third Grave by David Case, a weird Mystery from Arkham House. In the review, Ball says:
An unusual book, and one that will appeal very strongly to lovers of the super exotic, is David Case’s new offering, The Third Grave. It is a quite remarkable mixture that includes a murder mystery, horror, supernatural phenomena, and Egyptology, with a good old mad scientist as a major personality. The writing style, despite all of this material, is a little slow and takes time to come to the point…A note needs to be added that in this day of shoddy manufacturing in the book trade, this volume is of exceptional quality: someone is still doing things right.
I suspect that Case’s writing was slower than most Mystery fiction to build atmosphere, an element that some mysteries don’t require. He was also surprised by the awesome production quality of Arkham House, something any Horror collector would have taken as a given. I suppose he wasn’t familiar with August Derleth’s Mystery line, Mycroft & Moran? The line was retired shortly after this issue of MSMM so we can suppose it wasn’t a strong contender in 1981.
Conclusion
I can’t prove any big plan on Charles Fritch’s part to create a “Halloween” this issue of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine but he did give us one all the same. Whether he asked specifically for such or simply saved them up for October I can’t be sure. It doesn’t really matter. The result is a wonderfully spooky issue of a magazine that once specialized in the “Let Me Spillane It to Yah” school of Mystery. There is enough clue chasing and criminals to make it worthy of Mike Shayne as well as plenty of chills to mark it as a tome of the ghostbreaker variety. (Mike Shayne was no stranger to weird mysteries. “Murder Plays Charades” from July 1959 showed even the red-head from Miami had a strange case or two.)
Special thanks to James Reasoner and Joe R. Lansdale for their information.
