reading

Cthulhu's Big Sleep

I suppose it can be said to have begun with Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe tale, “The King in Yellow.” My eyes widened when I caught sight of that title on the table of contents. What on earth?

Well, it turned out to be no more—but also no less—than a wink to the reader “in the know.” Marlowe saw the sprawled out corpse of trumpeter King Leopardi swathed in his lemon silk pajamas and quipped that it reminded him of a book he’d once read, and we know which one he meant. (Suppose he’d lived in a later decade and the corpse reminded him of a particular rock band. The story could have been titled, “Ded Leppard.”) Oh yes. What is it that began with Chandler? The hybridization of hard-boiled detective fiction with the Cthulhu Mythos. I specify “hard-boiled” (or Noir) detective fiction because Lovecraft himself had earlier utilized detective protagonists in “The Lurking Fear” and “The Horror at Red Hook” which I once unthinkingly recommended to an Italian friend as his introduction to HPL! Thomas Malone was indeed a hardened detective who had, he supposed, seen it all, but he hadn’t seen nuthin yet! And there was no tough-as-nails, world-weary, jaded interior monologue narration, the essential feature, as I view it, of hard-boiled detective fiction.

The first Lovecraftian Noir fiction I remember reading was C.J. Henderson’s “You Can’t Take it with You,” which I believe premiered in Eldritch Tales. I reprinted it in my Chaosium collection, The Innsmouth Cycle. I found it very impressive and consider myself quite lucky to have belonged to the vanguard of Chris Henderson fandom. He was, as you know, a master of the genre. He wrote both horror fiction and detective stories (among others) and then combined them seamlessly. And of course there have been other equally adept practitioners. Joseph S. Pulver’s first novel, Nightmare’s Disciple, was a classic. And there are more—like Glynn Barrass and Ron Shiflet, whose work you are getting ready to read right now!

At first glance, the two genres combined in these stories may seem very different; so different, that to combine them would seem inevitably to produce parody, like Steve Allen sonorously reciting the lyrics to Donna Summers’s song Hot Stuff. But that expectation would be mistaken. How can they fit together so well? I think it is because the logic of the Lovecraftian tale is that of an intrepid investigator on the trail of a mystery. The difference is that the “detective” is a scholar researching a fascinating enigma, one which looks increasingly dangerous the closer he gets to solving it. And yet that does not deter our protagonist, for he is by that point a moth headed for the flame. It is downright Faustian! Knowledge loved better than life itself—or at least better than peace of mind.

And here is another difference: Lovecraft’s protagonists begin with a fairly rosy worldview, then become disillusioned to the point of nihilism or even planned suicide. The unlikely heroes in the hardboiled detective stories (especially Barrass’s and Shiflet’s), are well past that point going in! When they encounter the supernatural horror, it may be disgusting and daunting, but it is pretty much just a new take on an old type of crime. While nowhere near as extreme as the pulps’ blind, hemophiliac or otherwise cripple ‘Defective Detectives’, many Chandlerian protagonist-narrators have obstacles they must struggle against within as well as without. Towers and Barnes are both former prizefighters, neither a stranger to killing men, indulging in the occasional torture-interrogation. They even confess themselves surprised to discover they possess a rudimentary moral sense, and this only when compared to the incredibly vile bad guys they are fighting. Shocking revelations cause HPL’s characters to faint dead away, but these guys fight themselves to cope with booze and floozies.

As a result, these guys have hangovers, stupors, and crippling gunshot wounds to fight before they can even get to fighting the villains and crooks. The torments they have undergone serve to harden them, to reinforce their iron mettle.

However, the balance struck by Barrass and Shiflet between the hard-boiled private eye and the three-lobed burning eye is not what one might expect: the detective genre conventions are not merely employed as a frame for Lovecraftian goings on. Rather, the Mythos elements have become strictly secondary, though still crucial. These are crime stories, more of the underworld than of the netherworld. In these stories, important Lovecraft characters like Herbert West and Wilbur Whateley take the roles of mob doctors and thuggish enforcers. Resurrected Zombies become hit men who keep on coming no matter how many times you kill them. Contraband stocks of bootleg whiskey are replaced by canisters of West’s reagent. And it all works!

So work up your courage and knock on the pebble glass window of the office of Shiflet & Barrass Detective Agency. If you don’t have an eldritch case on your hands when you walk in, believe me, you will when you walk back out!

Robert M. Price

April 18, 2016