No Doors, No Windows

Introduction: Blood / Thoughts

What are we to make of the mind of humanity? What are we to think of the purgatory in which dreams are born, from whence come the derangements that men call magic because they have no other names for smoke or fog or hysteria? What are we to dwell upon when we consider the forms and shadows that become stories? Must we dismiss them as fever dreams, as expressions of creativity, as purgatives? Or may we deal with them even as the naked ape dealt with them: as the only moments of truth a human calls throughout a life of endless lies.

Who will be the first to acknowledge that it was only a membrane, only a vapor, that separated a Robert Burns and his love from a Leopold Sacher-Masoch and his hate?

Is it too terrible to consider that a Dickens, who could drip treacle and God bless us one and all, through the mouth of a potboiler character called Tiny Tim, could also create the escaped convict Magwitch; the despoiler of children, Fagin; the murderous Sikes? Is it that great a step to consider that a woman surrounded by love and warmth and care of humanity as was Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, the greatest romantic poet western civilization has ever produced, could herself produce a work of such naked horror as Frankenstein? Can the mind equate the differences and similarities that allow both an Annabell Lee and a Masque of the Red Death to emerge from the same churning pit of thought-darkness?

Consider the dreamers: all of the dreamers: the glorious and the corrupt:

Aesop, Attilla; Benito Mussolini and Benvenuto Cellini; Chekhov and Chang Tao-ling; Democritus, Disraeli; Epicurus, Edison; Fauré and Fitzgerald; Goethe, Garibaldi; Huysmann and Hemingway, ibn-al-Farid and Ives; Jeanne d’Arc and Jesus of Nazareth; and on and on. All the dreamers. Those whose visions took form in blood and those which took form in music. Dreams fashioned of words, and nightmares molded of death and pain. Is it inconceivable to consider that Richard Speck — who slaughtered eight nurses in Chicago in 1966, who was sentenced to 1,200 years in prison — was a devout Church-going Christian, a boy who lived in the land of God, while Jean Genet — avowed thief, murderer, pederast, vagrant who spent the first thirty years of his life as an enemy of society, and in the jails of France where he was sentenced to life imprisonment — has written prose and poetry of such blazing splendor that Sartre has called him “saint”? Does the mind shy away from the truth that a Bosch could create hell-images so burning, so excruciating that no other artist has ever even attempted to copy his staggeringly brilliant style, while at the same time he produced works of such ecumenical purity as “L’Epiphanie”? All the dreamers. All the mad ones and the noble ones, all the seekers after alchemy and immortality, all those who dashed through endless midnights of gore-splattered horror and all those who strolled through sunshine springtimes of humanity. They are one and the same. They are all born of the same desire.

Speechless, we stand before Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” or one of those hell-images of Hieronymous Bosch, and we find our senses reeling; vanishing into a daydream mist of what must this man have been like, what must he have suffered? A passage from Dylan Thomas, about birds singing in the eaves of a lunatic asylum, draws us up short, steals the breath from our mouths; and the blood and thoughts stand still in our bodies as we are confronted with the absolute incredible achievement of what he has done. The impossibility of it. So imperfect, so faulty, so broken the links in communication between humans, that to pass along one corner of a vision we have had to another creature is an accomplishment that fills us with pride and wonder, touching us and them for a nanoinstant with magic. How staggering it is then, to see, to know what Van Gogh and Bosch and Thomas knew and saw. To live for that nanoinstant what they lived. To look out of their eyes and view the universe from a never before conquered height, from a dizzying, strange place.

This, then, is the temporary, fleeting, transient, incredibly valuable, priceless gift from the genius dreamer to those of us crawling forward moment after moment in time, with nothing to break our routine save death.

Mud-condemned, forced to deal as ribbon clerks with the boredoms and inanities of lives that may never touch — save by this voyeuristic means — a fragment of glory … our only hope, our only pleasure, is derived through the eyes of the genius dreamers; the genius madmen; the creators.

How amazed … how stopped like a broken clock we are, when we are in the presence of the creator. When we see what his singular talents — wrought out of torment — have proffered; what magnificence, or depravity, or beauty, perhaps in a spare moment, only half-trying; they have brought it forth nonetheless, for the rest of eternity and the world to treasure.

And how awed we are, when caught in the golden web of that true genius — so that finally, for the first time we know that all the rest of it was kitsch; it is made so terribly, crushingly obvious to us, just how mere, how petty, how mud-condemned we really are, and that the only grandeur we will ever know is that which we know second-hand from our damned geniuses. That the closest we will ever come to our “Heaven” while alive, is through our unfathomable geniuses, however imperfect or bizarre they may be.

And is this, then, why we treat them so shamefully, harm them, chivvy and harass them, drive them inexorably to their personal madhouses, kill them?

Who is it, we wonder, who really still the golden voices of the geniuses, who turn their visions to dust?

Who, the question asks itself unbidden, are the savages and who the princes?

Fortunately, the night comes quickly, their graves are obscured by darkness, and answers can be avoided till the next time; till the next marvelous singer of strange songs is stilled in the agony of his rhapsodies.

On all sides the painter wars with the photographer. The dramatist battles the television scenarist. The novelist is locked in combat with the reporter and the creator of the non-novel. On all sides the struggle to build dreams is beset by the forces of materialism, the purveyors of the instant, the dealers in tawdriness. The genius, the creator falls into disrepute. Of what good is he? Does he tell us useable gossip, does he explain our current situation, does he “tell it like it is”? No, he only preserves the past and points the way to the future. He only performs the holiest of chores. Thereby becoming a luxury, a second-class privilege to be considered only after the newscasters and the sex images and the “personalities.” The public entertainments, the safe and sensible entertainments, those that pass through the soul like beets through a baby’s backside … these are the hallowed, the revered.

And what of the mad dreams, the visions of evil and destruction? What becomes of them? In a world of Tiny Tim, there is little room for a Magwitch, though the former be saccharine and the latter be noble.

Who will speak out for the mad dreamers?

Who will insure with sword and shield and grants of monies that these most valuable will not be thrown into the lye pits of mediocrity, the meat grinders of safe reportage? Who will care that they suffer all their nights and days of delusion and desire for ends that will never be noticed? There is no foundation that will enfranchise them, no philanthropist who will risk his hoard in the hands of the mad ones.

And so they go their ways, walking all the plastic paths filled with noise and neon, their multifaceted bee-eyes seeing much more than the clattering groundlings will ever see, reporting back from within their torments that Nixons cannot save nor Wallaces uplift. Reporting back that the midnight of madness is upon us; that wolves who turn into men are stalking our babies; that trees will bleed and birds will speak in strange tongues. Reporting back that the grass will turn blood-red and the mountains soften and flow like butter; that the seas will congeal and harden for iceboats to skim across from the chalk cliffs of Dover to Calais.

The mad dreamers among us will tell us that if we take a woman (that most familiar of alien creatures that we delude ourselves into thinking we rule and understand to the core) and pull her inside-out we will have a wondrousness that looks like the cloth-of-gold gown in which Queen Ankhesenamun was interred. That if we inject the spinal fluid of the dolphin into the body of the dog, our pets will speak in the riddles of a Delphic Oracle. That if we smite the very rocks of the Earth with quicksilver staffs, they will split and show us where our ghosts have lived since before the winds traveled from pole to pole.

The geniuses, the mad dreamers, those who speak of debauchery in the spirit, they are the condemned of our times; they give everything, receive nothing, and expect in their silliness to be spared the gleaming axe of the executioner. How they will whistle as they die!

Let the shamans of Freud and Jung and Adler dissect the pus-sacs of society’s mind. Let the rancid evil of reality flow and surge and gather strength as it hurries to the sea, forming a river that girdles the globe, a new Styx, beyond which men and women will go and from whence never return. Let the rulers and the politicians and the financiers throttle the dreams of creativity. It doesn’t matter.

The mad ones win persist. In the face of certain destruction they will still speak of the unreal, the forbidden, all the seasons of the witch.

Consider it.

Please: consider.

Enough philosophy. The preceding, in different forms, was an essay I wrote in defense of the nightmare vision. Its title has changed from “Black / Thoughts” to “Dark / Thoughts” (for obvious contemporary reasons), to “Blood / Thoughts,” which I think will remain on the piece forever. I’ve rewritten it and used it as the opening of the introduction to this, my first collection of suspense stories, per se, because it speaks directly to the intent of the works in this book: to scare you, to keep you guessing, and to demonstrate how much fear can be generated in lives that have been bent and twisted so there are no exits.

It’s a special pleasure to have a book of suspense stories published, at last. Even though a large segment of my weirdo readership knows me as a “sci-fi writer” (and God how I hate that ghastly neologism! If you ever want to see my lips skin back over my teeth like those of a rabid timber wolf, just use that moron phrase in my presence), I was writing a good deal more detective and suspense fiction than fantasy when I began my career. But that was in the middle and late Fifties, when there was a hot truckload of magazines publishing that kind of fiction. Manhunt, The Saint Mystery Magazine, Mantrap, Pursued, Guilty, Suspect, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Trapped, Terror, Murder!, Hunted, Crime and Justice, boy the list just went on endlessly with one lousy imitator after another; and of course, in a class by itself, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine .

But that was twenty years ago, and with the exception of EQMM (still indisputably the fountainhead of significant mystery fiction throughout the civilized world), most of the magazines I listed above are dead. Crumbling yellow pulp relics in my files, dropping brittle little triangles from page corners.

After having been tagged a writer of sf for so many years — and having fought the categorization for the past ten or twelve — with the help of Pyramid Books I’m breaking out of the corner at last. And it feels good. Not only because I want to be judged on the merits of what I write, as opposed to being judged as a representative of a genre that means one thing to one reader and quite another thing to someone else, but because it permits the publication of a book like this. (The fight isn’t quite over yet, either. Nine chances out of ten, when you bought this book it was in among the giant cockroach and berserk vacuum cleaner books. It was in the “sf section,” right? And it isn’t even remotely a book of sf stories. Oh, there are four stories out of the sixteen that could be called fantasies, but I guarantee that nowhere in these pages will you find a spaceship, a robot, an android, a mad scientist, a death ray, a bug-eyed monster, an ecology parable, a malevolent computer, an alternate universe, an insect big enough to eat a city, a menace from interstellar space, a lost race of super-scientific villains or even a mention of the planet Mars. But there it was, right between a Philip K. Dick novel on one side, and a Philip José Farmer novel on the other. Now those are pretty heavyweight guys in whose company to languish, waiting for you to come along to buy me, but it’s a ripoff. They write sf, they say they write sf, if you buy one of their books with sf on the cover you’ll be getting sf of a high order, and no one will feel cheated. But think how annoyed all those dudes are gonna be who picked up this book, paid for it, got it home and are now reading what you’re reading. “What,” they’ll be saying, their fingers balling up into fists, “what the hell is this? Not sf? Not my nightly fix of extrapolation? No sci-fi to wile away the hours?” And they’ll read, oh, say, “Pride in the Profession,” which is a story about a little guy who always wanted to be a hangman, and they’ll finish the story and — even if they liked it — they’ll hurl this book against the wall. “I been robbed!” they’ll shriek. And I don’t blame them. If I go to a massage parlor for a massage, and some nice young woman suggests we perform acts of a personal nature one would have to really stretch the word “massage” to include, well, I’d be annoyed also. If I buy a can of pineapple, I don’t want to spill beets out into my plate. I am dead against false advertising. Yet there NO DOORS, NO WINDOWS was, right smack in the middle of the sf shelves. So. In the name of fair business practices, I urge you to buttonhole the management of the newsstand or bookstore where you purchased this nifty tome, and insist on the following: “Mr. Owner [you should say], the books of Harlan Ellison that are being published by the wonderful Pyramid Books cover the full spectrum of Mr. Ellison’s multifarious literary talents and virtually horizonless range of interests. Each one is numbered.” And then you point out to him or her — in which case it would be Ms. Owner — the big series number in the “O” of the name ELLISON on the front cover. “These books are not always speculative fiction [you will continue, I hope, dashedly cleverly avoiding that nasty phrase we agreed you’d never use again]. Some of them are contemporary novels; some are nostalgia fiction of the world as we knew it in the Fifties; some are autobiography; some are television essays; and this one I hold in my hand is a superb collection of crime and suspense fictions.” Then the Owner, not a bad sort, but sadly in need of guidance, will moan, “But I have to categorize everything, otherwise the assholes who never read anything but their specialty wont be able to find what they want. See, over here, ten thousand gothics. You can tell they’re gothics because there’s a scared lady in a nightgown running away from a dark house on a rainswept mountaintop, and there’s only one light lit in an upper storey of the mansion, see? And here … fourteen hundred nurse novels, all with apple-cheeked angels of mercy staring covertly at interns with naked lust in their clear blue eyes. And here … violence series novels: The Slaughterer, The Crusher, The Kung Fu Brigade, The Pillager, The Hardy Boys.” And he or she will take you on a tour of the westerns, the classics, the sexy historicals — all with titles like THE FALCON AND THE HYACINTH or THE PLUME AND THE SWORD or THE DIKE AND THE FINGER — the fact science books, the metaphysical books — where forty-two versions of the few lines Plato wrote about Atlantis have been rewritten and re-rewritten by shameless hack popularizers in direct steals of Ignatius Donnelly and that poor coocoo, Madame Blavatsky — the self-help books, the cookbooks, the stiffeners with their wonderfully exotic titles like SUCK MY BUTTONS and WHIP GIRL, the war novels, the detective books and, if it’s a fairly large stock, the movie star biography books cheek-by-jowl with all those handy reference works on how to shoot a movie in your spare time, by people like Jerry Lewis and Peter Bogdanovitch, at least one of whom [to borrow a phrase from John Simon] does not exist. And then you can release the poor Owner from this labyrinth of spatial immurement by saying, “But sir, or ma’am, you have merely fallen prey to the outmoded theory of commercial marketing distinctions. Mr. Ellison transcends such pitiful categories. His work is one with the ages; something for everyone; no home should be without a full set of all nineteen of his handsome Pyramid Books with their delicious Dillon covers; his work uplifts, it enthralls, it ennobles, it clears up acne and the heartbreak of psoriasis; babies cry for more! Why not start a Harlan Ellison section, right here in the very forefront of your shop, directly next to the cash register, whose charming tinkle win be heard ever more frequently with Ellison product chockablock beside the Dyna-Mints and TV Guide, where your unenlightened flock can grab a stack of meaty titles as they would a life preserver in a turbulent sea? Mr. Ellison is a category unto himself. Sui generis! Oh do, do, kind sir or madame! Make this a better world in which to live. Put Ellison where he belongs: all by himself.” And having said that, the Owner will, with tears in eyes, clasp your hand and thank you for the pristine lucidity of your thinking.

(And I won’t have to argue with Tom Snyder that when I do the Tomorrow Show he shouldn’t have a flash-card overprinted on my beaming image that says HARLAN ELLISON, SCI-FI GUY.)

Where was I? Oh, yeah. A book of suspense stories, and how nice it is to finally get noticed as a writer who’s written lots of other things than fantasy.

It began, I suppose, when the Mystery Writers of America awarded me the Edgar Allan Poe statuette last year for the Best Mystery Story. The funny thing is, the story isn’t even a mystery. Not in the terms usually associated with mysteries. The yarn is the lead-off piece in this book, “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs.” And for those of you who bought THE OTHER GLASS TEAT [Pyramid A3791] and who read a script I wrote for the now-defunct TV series, The Young Lawyers, a script with the same title, be advised they have no connection. I just liked the title, “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs.” The story is … well, I’ll hold off on that till I hit the section of this introduction where I tip you to the background or impetus that caused me to write the various pieces included here.

In any case, what I was getting at is that “Whimper” is a fantasy, not a mystery. In the usual sense. Though I guess there must have been a sufficiently weighty suspense element in the story to convince the judges of MWA that it belonged on the ballot. (One tiny horn-toot: I beat out a story by Joyce Carol Oates for the award. Hot diggity!)

So here we have twenty years’ of my writing, all across the board from western stories and mystery fiction to critical literary essays and occasional columns of contemporary events, and they keep labeling me a “science fiction writer.” Very frustrating, particularly when my compatriots in the literature of the fantastic keep pointing out, “Ellison isn’t a science fiction writer,” and they’re right; and there’s no reason why they should have to suffer denigration because they’re held responsible for the berserk stuff I write. Also, my books shouldn’t have to suffer the kind of dumb reviews from the hinterlands — such as the New York Times — that say, “Well, this was a good book, but it certainly isn’t sf,” not to mention the treatment anything labeled sf gets from “serious” reviewers who will wax ecstatic about the nine millionth nostalgic novel dealing with Jewish or Italian home life in the poorer sections of Brooklyn or tike Bronx, in the late Thirties, but who turn up their patrician noses at anything with fantasy in it. Unless it’s by an accepted “serious” writer. Like Ira Levin or Fred Mustard Stewart or one of the many other nameless (and frequently talentless) clowns who’ve just last week discovered such fresh and untapped themes as exorcism, cloning, diabolic possession or reincarnation. If I had a dime for every half-assed novel published in hardcover since 1967 when Levin stumbled across ROSEMARY’S BABY, that deals with a supernatural or fantasy theme in cornball terms that would get it rejected from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, I’d have a lotta dimes to make obscene phone calls to the know-nothing publishers who lay out fifty grand a whack to reprint them in paperback.

But then, I’m just an unhappy, bitter, sour grapes writer who resents the hell out of popularizers who get fat on worn-out themes sf / fantasy passed by twenty years ago, right?

So how come I ain’t pissed at John Fowles or John Barth or Vladimir Nabokov or Michael Crichton or Jorge Luis Borges or even Ira Levin? Answer: because they’re writers, dammit, and they bring freshness and talent even to tired ideas.

Thass why!

This has wandered rather far afield, I now realize. (If you want an eight-hour diatribe on the state of the market situation for a writer today, just drop in a slug, wind me up and aim me in the direction of The New York Literary Establishment.) Suffice to say, it ain’t all as terrific as it looks from the outside. Being labeled a science fiction writer today guarantees you a certain amount of readership, but it denies you an even larger group. For a writer who cares about what work comes out with his or her name on it, who fights to keep expanding his or her talent, and who wants freedom to experiment while making a decent living and providing entertaining books for as wide an audience as possible, having a category tag slapped on can be pure death.

So. A book of suspense stories. Filled with visions of murder, mayhem, deceit, fear, psychopathia, crime and rotten interpersonal relationships. Your basic light-time reading fare. Something to make you laugh at your own nasty life struggles. No matter how bad you’ve got it, believe me, you haven’t got it as tough as Beth O’Neill in “Whimper” or poor old Mr. Huggerson in “Status Quo at Troyden’s” or quick-tempered Hervey Ormond in “Ormond Always Pays His Bills.”

I’ve been talking a lot lately about the condition of fear by which many of us judge the value of our existences. In THE DEADLY STREETS (last month’s Pyramid paperback offering of the Ellison-of-the-Month Club) I did an introduction touching on the subject, and I’d like to share with you a letter I received yesterday that speaks to the same situation.

A word about my mail. There’s an ever-increasing amount of it these days, which is nice on the one hand because many people feel so comfortable in these books that they take the introductions and the comments as an invitation to chat; but it’s a drag on the other hand, because I’m averaging about 200 pieces a day, and even with two associates helping me out, just opening the mail has become a long, arduous chore each day. I tried sending out a long form letter for a while, but that was costing a fortune and it only encouraged the correspondents to write another letter. I read everything, but I’ve just simply decided to hell with it: I can’t reply to all that mail and still keep writing. And since it’s the stories and comments that make people want to write in the first place, that’s where my writing time should be spent, not in responding to questions about writing, my life, the correspondent’s life, how to write a teleplay, how to get an agent, where the Clarion Writers’ Workshop will be this year, why more of my books aren’t available in Kankakee or Billings, what my sexual proclivities might be, or why and how the letter-writer feels we are simpatico because the both of us hate a) Richard Nixon, b) Rod McKuen poetry, c) the military-industrial-CIA-FBI-IRS complex and / or d) movies starring Cybill Shepherd. I refuse to read stories submitted for my august opinion. For a lot of different reasons, but most prominently because I’m too deep into my own stuff to play teacher to amateurs. I used to send the following rejection note, but I don’t even do that any more:

So the point of this digression is to plead with you not to write to me unless you want to give me money. And since that eliminates 99% of you, all that remains is for me to express my gratitude for your wanting to write me, even if it was only to tell me what a bastard I am. But we’ll get along much better if we keep the communication a telepathic one. You just shoot the good vibes in my direction, I’ll pick up on them, it’ll spur me to more and better stories, and we’ll both come out happier and more productive. Please!

(God, I’m scatterbrained here. I keep going off into every little byway of thought that presents itself. Like one of my lectures. Very free-form. But let me wrench myself back to the topic of fear and lay that letter on you.)

I’m having it set by the typographer exactly as I received it. Hold it! Another digression, but to the point. I recently had a bum experience with a dude who sent me a letter in response to the dedication of one of my books. The book was dedicated to the memory of the Kent State students who were slaughtered, and one day a few months after the book first came out, in flew this letter, informing me those college students were Commies and they deserved to be shot. Well, last year I did another book; in the introduction to that one I reprinted the dedication from the first book and the guy’s letter. It wasn’t a nut-case letter, despite the content; it was well-written, grammatical, perfectly coherent; I said so in the introduction, but went on to comment how sad such brutal beliefs, in these perilous times, made me feel. Well, the tone of the letter was a mild one — the guy said he just wanted to straighten me out on how the world was really run — and it seemed to me to be one of those probably misguided but at least honest communiqués. Imagine my feelings of revulsion when, six months after publication of the book containing the letter, my publisher and my agent received a terse communication from this wonderful, patriotic American chap who “only wanted to straighten me out,” demanding “substantial remuneration” for the use of his letter. Apparently, he wasn’t quite as selfless and dedicated to his beliefs as the innocent letter seemed. He was clearly another one of those whiplash cases trying to make a few bucks from a nuisance suit. Well, at least, that’s how it looked to me; it also looked that way to my publisher, my agent, and my attorneys, who sent him a long, detailed legal brief explaining why he had no claim and could forget the whole attempt at the grab.

I mention this here, before running another unsolicited letter, just to let the author of the missive following know that he has no claim, either. Notably, because it’s an anonymous letter, and because I suppose I agree with it.

But, anyhow, on the subject of fear, here’s another face of the monster. I reproduce it in the form I received it, without grammatical corrections. It’s disturbing, to say the least.

Whew! Occasionally, gentle readers, the mail gets heavy in here. The letter from the nurse I quoted in PAINGOD [Pyramid V3646]. The suicide note from the woman who said one of my stories kept her going a few weeks longer than she would have hung on otherwise. The unsigned letter from the Viet Nam vet who confessed to all the people he’d shot up in free-fire zones. The crazed postcard from the Fundamentalist loonie who vowed he’d kill me because I was obviously the antichrist. My patriotic whiplash correspondent with the scoop on Kent State. And now this one.

Listen, friend, if you’re out there, and you’ve picked up this book, let me tell you I neither hate nor fear you. Even swathed in Blue, m’man, you come across filled with pain and concern. I would like to meet you some day. But only when you’re off-duty, when you’re not packing heat.

I know damned well there are cops like you. I’ve met a few; and they always wind up like Serpico, brokenhearted or bust-headed. Because police these days aren’t like police when I was a kid in Painesville, Ohio, in the Forties. Friend of mine, a lieutenant of homicide, got a trifle bombed one night, sitting around rapping with me, and he let slip one of the most scary things I’ve ever heard. He said, “Harlan, it used to be, when a cop said ‘them or us’ he meant us were the good people, the cops and the decent citizens and the responsible business community, anybody on the side of Law and Order, the way it used to be in those Frank Capra films. Them meant bank robbers, homicidal maniacs, rapists, guys who torched their own stores for the insurance, murderers, all the kooks. Things’ve changed so much, these days when we say ‘them or us’ we mean anybody with a badge is us … all the rest of you are them. ”

There are lines written by Maxwell Anderson in the Kurt Weill musical tragedy version of Alan Paton’s book CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY — the stage production is, of course, LOST IN THE STARS — in which the chorus sings of the condition of fear that existed (and exists) in South Africa, the fear of the whites for the blacks, the fear of the blacks for the whites, and the lines are, ‘It is fear! It is fear! It is fear! It is fear! / Who can enjoy the lovely land, / The seventy years, / The sun that pours down on the earth, / When there is fear in the heart? … Yes, we fear them. / For they are many and we are few! … Yes, we fear them, / Though we are many and they are few! … Men are not safe in the streets, / Not safe in their houses. / There are brutal murders, robberies. / Tonight again a man lies dead. / Yes, it is fear. / Fear of the few for the many, / Fear of the many for the few.”

That is the condition of existence under which we sustain ourselves in this country, tied umbilically to our police. I’m not fool enough to lay it entirely on the police, the crushing responsibility for this fog of uneasiness through which we feel our way, always on edge, always angry, more than a little mad. Police are just postal people, milkmen, sanitation workers. They are employees of city, state and federal government. Only a lunatic would shoot down a mailman. But they are something else. They are representatives of the System. They are the visible fist at the end of the long arm of government, the status quo, order, the establishment need to keep waves from being made. And in an era when big business, the corporate giants, the megalopolitan conglomerates serve their own ends much more ruthlessly than ever they served the needs of the people they no longer even think of as consumers (we are now only “economic purchasing units”), the police find themselves — reluctantly in many cases I’m sure — cast in the roles of thugs, strike breakers, assassins and harassers for the extruders of plastic, the smelters of ore, the manufacturers of aerosol sprays, the foreclosers and the short-sellers.

Police represent (and in many cases cannot seem to get straight in their heads) not justice, but retribution. Those who were in the dissent movement in the Sixties and early Seventies understand that terrifying fact. They still cling to the naive belief that they work for the Law and the Order, and here in Los Angeles the black-and-whites bear a colophon that reads, “To serve and protect,” yet they no longer assume responsibility (as beat cops used to do) for averting rancor between antagonistic neighbors, for helping drunks out of the gutters to “sleep it off” in a cell till they can be taken home tomorrow, for dealing sympathetically with a woman who has been raped, without asking, “Did you like it?” or “What did you do to encourage him?”

Yes, there are cops like the man who sent that letter you’ve just read, but dig the tone of submerged guilt and misery in that poor guy’s letter. He knows. And why should a man obviously sincerely dedicated to making the world just a tiny bit better, have to feel such pain? Why should he have such a hard time doing the job of easing the anguishes of everyday life for the people he meets? Why do we suddenly totemize and revere the snipers of the S.W.A.T. teams?

The complexity of the problem is staggering. In trying to do a television script for NBC on the uses of psychiatry in prisons, I found myself being drawn off into one convoluted area after another. It isn’t possible to just point the finger at the cops, or the CIA, or Nixon, or the Military-Industrial Complex and heave a sigh of relief. The fear is omnipresent. And it comes from a realization that we are the villains. And even that’s too easy a platitude. I wrote in the introduction to one of my books that they are the Bad Guys: the ones who throw Dr. Pepper cans in the bushes; the ones who get their back bumper tapped at a stop light and scream whiplash; the ones who hate all kids, or all adults, or all blacks, or all whites, or all rich, or all poor; the ones who won’t come to the aid of someone screaming in an alley; the ones who are “only doing their job” and can’t break or bend the pointless rules. They are the Bad Guys.

And I must have received a thousand letters telling me I had no right to wash my hands of the human race; I had no right to say fuck’m and stop fighting for “the cause” (whatever the hell that is); I had no right to point the finger at them and exclude myself.

Clearly, my readers did not understand the message. As the old Midwestern saying goes, “When you point a finger at someone else, you point three at yourself.” I agree. I’m one of them, so are you. We’re all the villains, the Bad Guys, the fear-makers. That part in each of us, even the noblest and most self-sacrificing of us, that forgets or fears or avoids or rationalizes and permits evil to flourish. We are all Jekyll and Hyde. And I wrote that introduction to say that we are permitting Mr. Hyde to dominate us more and more each day. Just like cops. Just like preachers. Just like humanitarians and school kids and politicians. How can you fight the fight against that evil, except in yourself?

Yes, I have the right to become a misanthrope, to decide the human race doesn’t have the stuff to make it, that it won’t last one-thousandth the life-span of the great saurians, because seemingly the human race doesn’t give a damn. And one fights only as long as one has the fiber strong enough to fight; after which, one tries to simply get through the days. And no, I haven’t really given it all up, as the writing of this introduction shows, because I’ve never learned (like Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer) to “give it up and quit gracefully.”

But what is one to say in the face of a letter like the one from that cop? Can we possibly beat the Hyde in each of us and defeat the fear that gags us like an evil fog?

Perhaps. But probably not. We seem determined to go on this way till we either reduce ourselves to barbarians or make “civilized” existence so unbearable that crime and the suicide rate claim us before we taste the simplest joys.

I don’t have the answers for anyone but myself.

Perhaps you have some of the answers.

If so, apply them.

And then, perhaps, one day soon, guys like that cop will be able to sign their names to letters as potent and meaningful as the one you just read.

Religion won’t get it, dope won’t get it, letting Congress do it won’t get it, only caring and education will do it.

Or, as Louis Pasteur put it, “Chance favors the prepared mind.”

I’ve gone on too long. Conversation, the rap, still holds top spot in my catalogue of ways to have a good time. But I’ve rambled and digressed, and I’ve got to tell you a few things about how some of these stories came to be written, and then I’ll get my face out of your way and let you go on to read the entertainments. Excuse me if I lecture. I don’t mean to. It just comes over me sometimes.

In the main, most of these stories were written in the early and mid years of my writing career. I went through about 300,000 words of previously published (but never collected) stories to select these sixteen. I like each one of them, or they wouldn’t be here. But I’ve substantially rewritten all of them. The errors of style and grammar I made when I was learning my craft were so silly and awful, I couldn’t bear to let them stand. So in many ways these are new stories. Two were written for this book, just a few months before you bought the book.

Only one of these stories has ever appeared in a collection before, “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs.” I include it here, even though it’s available in the recently-published DEATHBIRD STORIES, because it is the most prominent of my suspense stories, and comes with the cachet of the MWA award I mentioned earlier in this introduction. Besides, it’s only 8000 words long, out of a total wordage in this book of almost 77,500. (This introduction is over 12,200 words long, a major chunk of work, as essay material intended for collections goes; or merely another example of The Mouth That Doth Run Off. Who knows …?) As a matter of fact, it occurs to me that some of you may be curious as to the way word-lengths are computed, and how a sufficiency of material is gathered together for a collection. Well, most paperbacks contain about 60,000 words, if they’re original novels of ordinary length, or collections of stories. So you’re getting quite a package for your money. Using typewriter margins set at 12 on the left and 73 on the right (good margins are necessary for the eyesight and sanity of editors, proofreaders, typesetters and even authors correcting dumb mistakes they made when they were in their twenties), using pica type — elite is too small — most writers average out between 250 to 300 words a typewritten page. I use 260 as a figure to even things out where there are stories with a lot of dialogue, which takes up less space. So that means a twelve-page story (typed, that is) will. run 3000 words. Sixteen pages is a 4000 worder. And so on. The accepted categories of story lengths are: short story — anything under 7500 words; novelette — at least 7500 but less than 17,500 words; novella — from 17,500 to 40,000; novel — anything of 40,000 words or higher. These are the generally accepted length and category judgments, as adhered to by, for instance, the Science Fiction Writers of America when classifying stories for the Nebula Awards.

To carry this helpful bit of public service data to its logical conclusion, for those budding authors among you who never had anyone lay such necessary but primitive information on you, as I discuss each story. I’ll insert its wordage in square brackets. Don’t thank me, just don’t send me your stories to read … I’ll only burn them.

“The Whimper of Whipped Dogs” [8000] is based on the murder of Kitty Genovese, about which I’ve nattered in books like THE DEADLY STREETS [Pyramid V3931]. The case is now so famous, it’s obsessed me for eleven years since it happened. Woman knifed to death in the streets of New York’s Kew Gardens section while thirty-eight people watched from their windows, heard her screams for help, did nothing, turned up their TV sets so the screams wouldn’t penetrate. It took the rapist-killer over half an hour to slice her up as she dragged herself around almost a full city block. They could have saved her. They didn’t I was never satisfied with the intellectual theories about why no one had aided her. It’s not the kind of dehumanized behavior that can be explained with phrases like “disinvolvement” or “alienation” or “inurement to the reality of violence from seeing so much death on nightly newscasts.” It was the kind of mythic situation that could only be explained in terms of magic realism, fantasy.

“Eddie, You’re My Friend” [1300] is a rarity. It’s an unsold story. I’ve written over 800 short stories and articles and essays and suchlike in my twenty years behind this machine, and with only one or two exceptions — dogs that embarrass me even to look at, which I’d fight to the death against letting appear in print — everything has sold to one magazine or another. But when I went through my files to put this book together, and read all those old stories, and picked only the best, I found “Eddie” and remembered it, and smiled and liked it. It’s not a particularly thoughtful story, just a little one-punch blowdart, but it worked, so I added it to the book. But when I went to locate the source of first publication, to enter it on the acknowledgment page where copyrights are listed, I couldn’t find any mention of its having been published. I consulted the exhaustive and elegant bibliography of my work assembled by Leslie Kay Swigart, but even she had no mention of the story. And I realized I’d assumed that story had been published, all these years. But it hadn’t. It was, in effect, a brand-new, unpublished yarn. And it appears here for the first time. (Unless, in the five and a half months between the time I write this page, and NO DOORS, NO WINDOWS is published, I manage to sell it to a magazine, in which case it will still be a new story as far as book publication is concerned.)

There isn’t much to say about “Status Quo at Troyden’s” [4600]; it speaks for itself. Except to say that if there was one reason why I wanted a book of my suspense fiction to get between covers, it was to preserve for “posterity,” or whatever, this one story. I don’t know why I’ve always thought highly of it, but I like it enormously. I think it has a lot of heart, and it was an early indication of where my interests and writing abilities were going. So now Mr. Huggerson and Harry Troyden and Mr. Zeckhauser will have some extended life since they appeared in a long-gone mystery magazine in 1958.

“Nedra at f:5.6” [3100] is one of those cases of literary cross-pollination that people looking to misinterpret your actions could label plagiarism. I’ll head them off at the pass by copping to it in front. Back in the late Forties, 1949 to be exact, even before I’d “discovered” science fiction, I was intrigued by, and bought, a 25¢ paperback titled THE GIRL WITH THE HUNGRY EYES. (Yes, Virginia, in those days all paperbacks were 25¢ and it was such an accepted thing, that the book doesn’t even have a price on it; everybody just knew. ) That was a remarkable little paperback. Historically as well as personally for me. It was the very first original collection of sf / fantasy stories. That is, the contents was not made up of culls from magazines or other books, but were stories commissioned especially for that book. The publisher was Avon Books (#184), the editor was the indefatigable (and still going strong) Donald A. Wollheim, now a publisher himself with his line of DAW paperbacks; and it contained six excellent stories never-before-published by William Tenn, the late P. Schuyler Miller, Frank Belknap Long, Manly Wade Wellman, the late August Derleth writing under the name Stephen Grendon and, author of the title story, “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes,” the master of us all, Mr. Fritz Leiber.

Well, the story blew me away. I won’t tell you what it was about, you can find it reprinted in …

Holy Jesus! I just went and checked my four foot shelf of everything Fritz Leiber has ever written — no self-respecting writer in our time would dare to set pen to paper without having studied the master in toto — and I find “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” has never been reprinted in a Leiber collection in this country. I see it in an English edition called THE SECRET SONGS, but of the twenty or so Leiber collections that have gone on the racks of America’s newsstands, not one of them has included that superb fantasy. Yes, I know it was done on television on Night Gallery a few years ago, but that’s ephemeral, and they made mush of it, anyway. What I’m trying to say here is that even in the recently released Ballantine collection called THE BEST OF FRITZ LEIBER, that story isn’t available. Now that’s bloody disgraceful!

I pulled out my battered, mildewed (literally mildewed) copy of the Avon paperback, and the same thrill I got when I read Fritz’s chilling fantasy twenty-six years ago, I got a minute ago, holding that poor little battered Avon edition. In short, what I’m getting at, is that the story stayed with me, in tone and in general concept, until 1956, when I sat down and wrote a variation on the idea, and called it “The Hungry One” and added beneath the title, “An hommage to Fritz Leiber.” It was published in a slick men’s magazine in that year, sans the dedication to Fritz, and it’s been reprinted in lesser magazines maybe a dozen times since, but I’ve never had it in a book under the title it now has, nor has it ever managed to get into print with the respectful homage addressed to Fritz that was on it from the first. But I’ve rewritten it for this book, I’ve reinstated the credit line, and though I know it isn’t one one-millionth the story Fritz’s was, it is a way of saying thank you to a writer whose life’s writing has not only influenced mine, but has touched virtually every fantasist working in the genre today.

And if you hit the used paperback stores from time to time, keep your eyes open for that moth-eaten Avon paperback. Or maybe somebody will hip Peter Mayer at Avon to include it in his “Science Fiction Rediscovery” series.

“Opposites Attract” [4000], “Toe the Line” [4000], “Pride in the Profession” [4100], “The Children’s Hour” [2350], “Two Inches in Tomorrow’s Column” [2300] and “Ormond Always Pays His Bills” [1800] are simple, uncomplicated crime and / or suspense stories with a gimmick at the end. A snap in the tail. O. Henry time. They don’t need any frills. I wrote them for money, in the days when I was writing a lot of stories as fast as I could because (as today) I loved writing more than anything including sex, and I had (as today) more ideas than my two-finger typing (as today) could keep up with. “The Children’s Hour” is a kind of sf story, I suppose, but it’s just a variation on the Pied Piper idea. They were written to provide entertainment and I doubt very much that any of them will alter the course of Western Civilization. But I hope you like them.

“Down in the Dark” [4000] and “The Man on the Juice Wagon” [7500] are action-adventure stories with the emphasis on danger and suspense. They were written for men’s magazines and I found when I re-read them, and wanted to include them, that I had to change the ending to “Juice Wagon” completely to eradicate the stench of male chauvinist rancidness that I, and those magazines, subscribed to in them there unenlightened days. I suppose the men’s magazines still consider women toys to play with, but, like an Alcoholics Anonymous convert, I has seen de light, and I find that treating women as human beings, in my personal life as well as in my stories, makes for a better, richer, more intelligent life … and the same for the stories. Both “Dark” and “Juice Wagon” are based on experiences in my checkered past. To some small degree.

“White Trash Don’t Exist” [6000] has one element stolen from Steinbeck’s OF MICE AND MEN. You’ll spot it right off. That’s okay. It isn’t stealing, it’s, uh, er, research. (What was it Rodin was supposed to have said, quoting Michelangelo? Oh, yeah. “Where I steal an idea, I leave my knife.”) The interesting thing about “White Trash” is that when I first wrote it, for the Manhunt market of the mid-Fifties, a market that used tough, brutal crime stories without even a hint of traditional detective material in it, I called it “Niggers Don’t Exist” and I intended it as a statement about life for blacks in areas of the South I’d passed through. The editor loved the story, but wouldn’t buy it with blacks in it, so I rewrote it using “white trash.” I was hungrier to sell in those days. That was before I got hip to Bob Heinlein’s 5 rules for a writer, and before I added two of my own.

So when you read “White Trash,” you can replace whatever elements this introduction compels you to replace.

What’s that? Oh, I see. I’ve teased you with Heinlein’s and my rules, so the least I can do is digress again and give them to you. I’d be a rat not to do it, wouldn’t I?

Well, never let it be said that a sweetie like me made his readers angry. God knows I’ve never antagonized any of you. Okay, here they are:

“Promises of Laughter” [3600] happened to me. The lady called “Holdie Karp” is a reasonably well-known author these days. She really did that to me, what happens to the dude in the story. And how I wrote the yarn was this: when the events of that night went down, I got so pissed off I got into my Austin-Healey and drove like a lunatic across the twisting, accident-laden Mulholland Drive to my house, ran at the typewriter like a Rams linebacker, banged out the story (sexual pun intended) in about two hours, yanked the carbon off the desk, got back in the Healey, hit Mulholland again, made the course in about thirteen minutes batting sixty all the way through the night and the fog, slammed into her driveway, and started kicking on her front door.

She came to the window, in her nightgown, obviously having been asleep, saw it was wild-eyed li’l ole me, and damn near didn’t open the door because she was afraid I’d knife her or something. But when she let it slide open just a crack, I shoved the manuscript into her hand, got back in my car and raced away … having had (I thought) the last fucking word, damn her eyes!

It appeared in a magazine containing one of the articles referred to in the story. She was furious. Everyone now knew our personal lives. So several months later she wrote her view of that incident

It was a better story than mine.

We are friends to this day, “Holdie Karp” and I, and she writes for magazines and for one of New York’s biggest newspapers, and she taught me more about being a non-macho male than anyone I’ve ever met.

So the least I could do was to rewrite the story a little, to make it a fairer representation of her, uh, position on that fateful night.

I have no idea why people keep identifying me with the stuff in my stories.

Which brings me to the last story in the book, and the most recent one I’ve written. I wrote it for this book, and unless I sell it to a magazine in the next 5½ months … but we’ve been through that before. Anyhow. “Tired Old Man” [5000] was written in June of this year, 1975. It’s one of my most recent stories, so you can judge how I’m doing these days; but beyond that curious conceit, it is a story with a peculiar history, and one I’m inclined to tell you.

First, however, let me warn you. I am not the protagonist, Billy Landress, even though much of Billy’s career parallels mine and some of the things that happen to him in the story happened in a sorta kinda way, and some of the perceptions at which he arrives are ones I’ve lately come to hold as my own. Now I suppose all that disclaiming will convince those of you who believe in the “he protesteth too much” philosophy that I am Billy. Well, that only goes to show how little some of you understand about the art of creating fiction. A writer takes bits and pieces of himself — as Geoffrey Wolff put it in that quote leading off this introduction — he cannibalizes himself, and he applies a little meat here and a little meat there, and he comes up with a character that bears a resemblance to himself (because who do I know better than myself, for God’s sake), but who is a new person entirely. So don’t get all screwed up trying to fit me into Billy’s shoes.

Back to the story.

I was in New York on a visit about eight, ten, eleven years ago. I went to dinner with Bob Silverberg and Bobbie Silverberg, and after dinner we went to a gathering of the old Hydra Club. Willy Ley was there; it was shortly before that great and wonderful man died; it was good to see him again. And a bunch of other people, most of whom I didn’t know. And I wandered around and finally found myself sitting on the sofa next to a weary-looking old man in an easy chair. Marvelous conversationalist. We talked for almost an hour, until I got up and went to the kitchen where I found Bob with the late Hans Santesson, a dear friend and ex-editor of mine. I described the old man and asked who he was.

“That is Cornell Woolrich,” Hans said.

My mouth must have fallen open. I had been sitting next to one of the giants of mystery fiction, a man whose work I’d read and admired for twenty years, since I’d been a kid and discovered a copy of BLACK ALIBI after seeing the 1946 Val Lewton film, The Leopard Man. I was nine years old at the time, and the film made such an impression on me that I stayed on at the Lake Theater in Painesville, Ohio to see it three times on a Saturday. And it was the first time I ever really read those funny words that come at the beginning of the movie (I later learned those were the “credits”); the words that said “Screenplay by Ardel Wray, based on the novel Black Alibi by Cornell Woolrich.”

How I got hold of the novel, I don’t remember. But it was the first mystery fiction I’d ever read (excluding Poe, of course, all of whom I’d read by that time). Nine years old!

And in the years when I was voraciously devouring the works of every decent writer I could find, Woolrich (under his own name and his possibly even-more-famous pseudonym, “William Irish”) became a treasurehouse of twists and turns in plotting, elegant writing style, misdirection, mood, setting and suspense. God, the beautiful stories that man wrote. The “black book” series: THE BLACK ANGEL, THE BLACK CURTAIN, THE BLACK PATH OF FEAR, RENDEZVOUS IN BLACK, THE BRIDE WORE BLACK and, many more times, BLACK ALIBI. And DEADLINE AT DAWN, PHANTOM LADY, NIGHTMARE, STRANGLER’S SERENADE, WALTZ INTO DARKNESS. And all the short stories!

Cornell Woolrich!

Jeeeezus, if Hans had said I was sitting next to Ernest fucking Hemingway it couldn’t have collapsed me more thoroughly. Bertrand Russell, Bob Feller, Dick Bong, Walt Kelly … all my heroes … it wouldn’t have gotten to me half as much. Cornell goddam Woolrich! I damn near fainted.

“But I thought he’d died years ago,” I said.

They laughed at me. He was old, no doubt about that, but he was very much alive. He wasn’t writing any more; his mother — whom he’d lived with through all of his adult life, in a resident hotel in Manhattan — had recently died; and he was just getting out and around.

I was flabbergasted. I’d sat and talked with Cornell Woolrich, one of my earliest writing heroes, and hadn’t even known it. I wanted to find him in that crowded apartment and just be near him for a while longer.

They were bemused by my goshwow attitude, but they were also a little perplexed. Hans said, “I do not remember seeing him here. Where is he?”

And I led them back to the easy chair in the far rear corner of the room. And he was gone. And he was nowhere in the apartment. And no one else had talked to him. And I never saw him again. And be died soon after that night, I learned later.

To this day, I’ve felt there was something strange and pivotal in my meeting with Woolrich. He could not possibly have known who I was, nor could he have much cared. But we talked writing, and I was the only one who saw or talked to him that night. I’m sure of that. Don’t ask me how I know, I cannot give you a rational explanation; and I firmly do not believe in ghosts or astrology or UFO’s or much else of the nonsense gobbledygook that people substitute for the ability to handle reality. But from the time I left him in that easy chair till the moment I went back to find him, I was right in front of the only exit from that apartment and there was no way he could have gotten past me without my seeing him.

For years I thought about that night in New York.

And one afternoon I sat down and wrote the first two pages of a story titled “Tired Old Man,” in which I thought I would fictionalize that evening, and (as I had with Leiber) pay homage to a writer whose words had so deeply affected me.

But the two pages went into the idea file, unresolved. They stayed there for six years, until earlier this month, June 1975. I was in the process of writing an original story for this book, and had started on another idea I’d had a while back, and in looking for the note for that story (which will be included in SHATTERDAY, coming from Pyramid in three months), I chanced upon the two pages of “Tired Old Man.” And without my even knowing why, or realizing what I was doing, in a lunatic move that could only make this book late to my publisher and late to the printer and late to the on-sale date and late to your hands, I took up the writing of the story as if it had been six years earlier.

And as impossible as it had been for me to write it six years before, because I hadn’t known how to write it six years before, it was that easy for me to start with the very next sentence — as if I’d written the last word of the previous sentence only a moment earlier, not six years before — and go all the way through to the end in one sitting.

Marki Strasser in the story is Cornell Woolrich.

At least, in the impetus for the character. It isn’t supposed to be Woolrich in the story, it’s … well … that’s what the story is about, as you’ll see … but I wanted you to know how “Tired Old Man” came to be written; in answer to the people who always ask me, “Where do you get your ideas?”

And that brings me, at last, to the end of this introduction. I assure you when I started, some 42 typewritten pages earlier, I had no idea I’d run on like this.

But it’s nice getting together with you like this, if for no other reason than to keep out the darkness for just a few minutes longer. And in the course of writing these words, I went back and read the section of BLACK ALIBI in which the young girl, Teresa Delgado, is stalked and killed by the black panther as she screams for her mother to open the door and let her in. And it still conjures up the stark terror I first felt when I saw it in a Val Lewton film at the age of nine.

And for giving rebirth to that “tolerable terror” I thank you. We’ve got to get together again like this.

That is, if you get through the night.

HARLAN ELLISON

Los Angeles