Polly Charms, the Sleeping Woman

INTRODUCTION BY GENE WOLFE

This is, as you will already have guessed, Avram Davidson’s variation on the ever-popular sleeping beauty theme.

Ever popular because it is ever fertile, never more so than here. Nor will you, I think, find any variant quite so difficult to harvest as this. It is elfinfield, to be reaped only by the seventh son of a seventh son, wielding a silver sickle by moonlight. Don’t worry, I am here to help you.

But first let me recommend three more-recent variations on the same theme: Briar Rose, by Jane Yolen; “Summer Wind,” by Nancy Kress; and “Waking the Prince,” by Kathe Koja. You can read all three, I promise you, and this story as well, without ever reading the same story twice.

In the high and far off times before women warred upon men, the tale of the sleeping beauty was told at firesides so that young women might know they slept but might someday be awakened, and so that young men might know young women sleep, and that gallantry and chivalry are needed, not threats or force. Perhaps the best way to explain the sleeping beauty story is to say that it is the other side of the story about the frog who is kissed.

The frog story is about men, and so lapses only too readily into comedy. The sleeping beauty story is about women, and so flashes with new colors in each new hand; for men are always much the same, but every woman is a new woman with a new man.

You will not have to be told that in “Polly Charms, the Sleeping Woman” Davidson is burlesquing the detective story. He pokes so much broad fun at it that no one could miss that. Very possibly, however, you must be told that nothing could be more like Davidson than to burlesque the detective story in a real detective story, or to omit the scene in which Doctor Engelbert Eszterhazy collects Frow Grigou, Dougherty, Commissioner Lobats, and (one rather hopes) Ignats Louis and Explains Everything.

Davidson was never one to explain everything.

No more am I. But to his multitude of clues I will add two additional hints. The first is that the Ancients knew that it was possible to torture the dead by burning the hair of the corpse. The second is that the worst crime is not murder. And the third (Did you really expect me to tell you everything when I numbered them?) is that you may wish to consider the fifty daughters of Endymion and the Moon.