The Investigations of Avram Davidson

by Avram Davidson

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Foreword: AVRAM DAVIDSON, MY FRIEND, THIS STRANGER by Richard A. Lupoff

  STORIES

  Introductions by Grania Davis, Richard A. Lupoff, and additional lolligags by Michael Kurland

  THE NECESSITY OF HIS CONDITION

  THOU STILL UNRAVISHED BRIDE

  THE COST OF KENT CASTWELL

  THE IKON OF ELIJAH

  THE COBBLESTONES OF SARATOGA STREET

  CAPTAIN PASHAROONEY

  THE THIRD SACRED WELL OF THE TEMPLE

  THE LORD OF CENTRAL PARK

  MURDER IS MURDER

  THE DEED OF THE DEFT-FOOTED DRAGON

  A QUIET ROOM WITH A VIEW

  MR. FOLSOM FEELS FINE

  THE IMPORTANCE OF TRIFLES

  Other Books by Avram Davidson

  About the Authors

  Copyright Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  TO ANTHONY BOUCHER

  (A.K.A. HERMAN W. MUDGETT),

  FREDERIC DANNAY AND MANFRED B. LEE

  (A.K.A. ELLERY QUEEN),

  AND SR. RICHARD GIBBONS.

  AVRAM DAVIDSON, MY FRIEND, THIS STRANGER

  RICHARD A. LUPOFF

  THE OTHER AVRAM DAVIDSON

  IT IS ALMOST—well, almost as if you discovered that your favorite down-and-dirty, gin-swilling, stogie-smoking, barrelhouse piano player, who performed nightly in assorted saloons and whorehouses, grinding out bawdy jingles on a variety of battered, out-of-tune uprights, each Sunday morning rose and shaved and donned a set of elegant togs and made his way to a great cathedral and there performed sacred songs in praise of God on a magnificent pipe organ.

  Or as if you discovered that your favorite poet, a spinner of the most delicate, frangible imagery with a shimmering, subtle technique, had a secret passion for writing smutty limericks.

  Odder still, as if there was a whole population who knew the musician only for his sacred performances, or the rhymester only for her ribald rhymes—and these persons were as astonished to learn that the musician played piano in honky-tonks or that the wordsmith wrote high-tone verse as you were to discover their “other,” secret careers.

  So it was with the late Avram Davidson, whom I was proud to call my friend, and whose works continue to astonish and delight me years after his death. So it may be with you.

  Avram was acclaimed in the science fiction community (although in fact more of his works are properly classified as fantasies) as a quirky, brilliant, utterly individual talent. A talent who sprang unannounced on an unsuspecting readership with a series of fancies molded in shapes that no one had ever imagined before and painted in colors that no one had ever seen or even suspected to exist.

  He is fondly remembered for those stories and novels, but I would venture that not one in three grateful readers of Avram’s science fiction is aware that he was a mystery writer as well. Not only that: Avram was a terrific mystery writer.

  Many writers who build their careers in one field of literature make occasional forays into other realms; these feints are generally followed by quick retreats to familiar territory.

  But Avram appeared over and over in the leading periodicals of the field, more than forty times in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine alone, and as many more in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, The Saint Mystery Magazine, Manhunt, Bestseller Mystery Magazine, Shock, Bizarre Mystery Magazine, Keyhole Mystery Magazine, and Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, as well as such out-of-category periodicals as Collier’s, Midstream, Harlequin, Knight, and Playboy. His stories were frequently anthologized, and he won prestigious awards as a mystery writer.

  He never published any mystery novels under his own name, which is perhaps why he remains unlisted in major reference books on crime fiction. By contrast, he receives extensive coverage in the standard reference volumes on science fiction. In both cases, Avram was better known for his short stories than for his novels. His short stories were brightly polished and hard surfaced.

  But even this point is more clouded and ambiguous than it seems. It is an open secret in the literary community that several writers ghosted for “Ellery Queen” in the latter days of Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, the ever-squabbling cousins who invented Queen and wrote under the Queen by-line for many years. Among the Queens’ ghosts was Avram Davidson, who penned two somewhat quirky “Queen” novels, And on the Eighth Day (1964) and The Fourth Side of the Triangle (1965).

  It should be noted that Dannay and Lee had an unusual way of developing their novels. Starting with a rather minimal sketch, they would fill in more and more details until they reached their “final outline,” a lengthy document that resembled a kind of condensed novel more closely than it did a conventional outline. From this, in the days when they wrote their own books, they would proceed to flesh out the text.

  In the days when they used ghosts, the “Queens” still carried out the process from rough sketch to “condensed novel,” with the ghost then providing the flesh. Come to think of it, to be quite fair and accurate, these books might better be called covert collaborations than outright ghost jobs.

  A LITTLE BIT OF BIOGRAPHY

  BORN IN YONKERS, New York, on April 23, 1923, Avram Davidson received a conventional education and was attending New York University when he left civilian life to serve in the Second World War. There has been some confusion over the branch in which he served. In fact, he was a hospital corpsman in the United States Navy. In this capacity he was assigned to the Fifth Marine Division in Okinawa, site of one of the bloodiest and most terrible campaigns of the war. He was then detailed to serve in mainland China, and was in Beijing (then Peking) at the time of the Japanese surrender in 1945.

  Avram’s very first novel, The Corpsmen, was based on his experiences in the Second World War. It has never been published in full. The manuscript was rescued from oblivion in the stacks of Texas A&M University by Avram’s tireless bibliographer, Henry Wessells. Grania Davis, Avram’s onetime wife, lifetime friend, and literary executor, then placed an excerpt (titled “Blunt”) with The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The full text may yet appear.

  After leaving the navy and living in the United States for some time, Avram emigrated to Israel and served in the Israeli Army during that nation’s war of independence, 1948–49.

  He returned to the United States and attended Pierce College in southern California, where he studied the care and breeding of sheep. He traveled to Israel again, hoping to apply what he had learned at Pierce, but his ideas were not warmly received; he returned once more to the United States and shortly commenced his literary career.

  He made his publishing debut, as far as is known, with several stories and verse in Jewish Life between 1947 and 1949. He also placed stories with Commentary magazine, where they appeared in 1952. These writings were Judaic in nature. (For this information and much more I am indebted to Henry Wessells.)

  Avram turned to the world of popular fiction with “My Boy Friend’s Name is Jello,” a short story that appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for July 1954. His first published mystery story was “The Ikon of Elijah,” in the December 1956 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Even at this early stage of his career, he wrote with remarkable skill, subtlety, and complexity of ch
aracter. In their story blurb the editors of Ellery Queen said, “Watch Mr. Davidson: he has the gift—the precious gift of words and insight.” The story is told primarily by what the author omits rather than what he reveals—a notable achievement for any spinner-of-tales, no less for one at the outset of his career.

  Although I read many of Avram’s early stories, it was his first published novel, Joyleg, written in collaboration with Ward Moore, that initially made a strong impression on me. If you will pardon a brief autobiographical note, I will tell you how.

  The year was 1962. My home at the time was on East Seventy-third Street in Manhattan. My place of employment was a somewhat decrepit office building downtown at Twenty-third Street and what was then known as Fourth Avenue (now Park Avenue South). I had bought a little paperback edition of Joyleg and started reading it one evening as I rode home on the Lexington Avenue IRT.

  The book so gripped me that I forgot where I was. Totally engrossed, I finally looked up only to realize that I had ridden past my stop. I left the subway at the next station, walked over to Second Avenue and boarded a downtown bus.

  Captivated again by the book, I rode past my stop.

  I climbed from the bus and, vowing to avoid further humiliation, set out on foot, paperback book clutched in hand, happily reading Joyleg. And after a few minutes, for the third time engrossed in the book, I felt a terrific wallop. The impact sent a shuddering shock through my body. I staggered back, literally seeing stars, dizzy and disoriented, my ears ringing.

  Had I been mugged?

  Had a taxi jumped the curb and plowed into a mass of pedestrians?

  Alas, I had become so absorbed by the book that I forgot to watch where I was going and had stridden headlong into an iron stanchion.

  When at last I found my apartment and stumbled into the vestibule my darling wife screamed in alarm. Here was her husband, home from work more than an hour late, dirty, disheveled, far from steady on his feet, and with an ugly blue bruise rising on his forehead.

  “What happened to you?” she cried.

  “Well, I was reading this really, really good book,” I explained.…

  At about this time Avram began a tour of duty as editor at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (1962–64). He impressed his distinctive personality on the magazine during his tenure, and issues from this era are fondly remembered, but he gladly returned to full-time writing. He did, nonetheless, edit three more-than-worthwhile anthologies of material from the magazine. A fourth anthology, Magic for Sale (1983), is even more noteworthy, both for its fine selection of stories and for Avram’s extensive editorial notes.

  It was in this era of the early 1960s that I also met Avram for the first time. I must say that you would not take him for a veteran of the Okinawa campaign and the Israeli war of independence, nor for a rough-hewn sheep rancher. He was, in fact, a rotund fellow, slightly shorter than average. He had large, dark eyes that could switch from a piercing intensity to a jolly twinkle in an instant. His hair was curly and black, with increasing suggestions of gray as the years passed. He wore a distinctive spade-shaped beard that expanded over time to cover more and more of his face.

  He had a comfortable air about him, and was popular in New York literary circles (at least those to which the then so-young Dick Lupoff was able to gain entree). The pleasant sight of Avram on a Sunday morning, strolling benignly down a hotel corridor and cheerfully handing out fresh bagels, must remain in many a store of fond recollections.

  Avram was fond of good food, generally of a plain and hearty nature, as many of his stories indicate. He was not a heavy drinker, but he took an occasional glass of schnapps with considerable pleasure, especially if it was of superior quality.

  He was not unappreciated as a writer. His short story “The Necessity of His Condition” won the Ellery Queen Award for 1957. “Or All the Seas with Oysters” won a Hugo Award in 1958. “The Affair at the Lahore Cantonment” won an Edgar Award in 1962. His story-cycle The Enquiries of Dr. Eszterhazy won the World Fantasy Award in 1976. “Crazy Old Lady” was a 1977 Edgar nominee. The Redward Edward Papers was nominated for a World Fantasy Award in 1979. “Naples” won the World Fantasy Award in 1979. And the World Fantasy Convention presented him with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1986.

  Honors aplenty!

  His stories appeared in nearly fifty “best of” anthologies. These included both mystery and science fiction volumes, not unexpectedly, but also others ranging from Year’s Best Fantasy Stories to Best Horror Stories—thereby confounding categorization once again.

  Several of his mystery stories were adapted for the small screen. Particularly notable was “Thou Still Unravished Bride,” featured on Alfred Hitchcock Presents in 1965. It was directed by David Friedkin from a script by Friedkin and Morton Fine; the cast included Sally Kellerman and David Carradine.

  And Avram was an essayist and critic of no mean talent as well as a writer of fiction.

  But like many talented authors, he was perhaps too good for his own good. His works were often a trifle (all right, more than a trifle) esoteric. And he kept doing different things. One Avram Davidson story would be a dark and cleverly constructed tale of crime; the next, a gossamer fantasy. In his novels he tried space opera (with little success), barbarian adventure (less), and finally a more textured variety of historical fantasy, redolent almost of the spirit of Thomas Burnett Swann (and this with far better results).

  He was recognized by the academic world with a series of appointments under such titles as “visiting lecturer,” “writer in residence,” or “visiting distinguished writer” at such institutions as the University of California at Irvine, the College of William and Mary, the University of Texas at El Paso, the University of Washington, and the University of Michigan.

  Respected and appreciated by critics, academics, and above all by his colleagues—the appellation “writer’s writer” comes unavoidably to mind—he somehow failed to achieve the mass acceptance and consequent financial rewards of countless other writers, many of them, as the expression would have it, not fit to sharpen his pencils. The frustration which he must have felt comes out in his almost painfully hilarious—and accurate—story, “The Captain M. Caper” (1970).

  He published at least fifteen novels in his lifetime, not counting the “Ellery Queen” books, and no fewer than an astonishing 218 short stories. Selections of these latter have been in and out of print in countless anthologies, as well as a dozen single-author collections.

  A man of widely ranging tastes, and fascinated by history and myth, Avram wrote numerous essays on the ancient world and its more mysterious aspects. They were collected in the volume, Adventures in Unhistory: Conjectures on the Factual Foundations of Several Ancient Legends (1993). Rambling, erudite, and discursive, the essays are not to every taste, but to me each of them is like a delightful visit with the shade of Avram Davidson, from the reading of which I emerge buoyed, stimulated, and enlightened. This book, issued by Owlswick Press, was the last volume of Avram’s work to appear in his lifetime.

  Every admirer of Avram has his own favorite piece, and I will not attempt to “prove” that this work or that is superior to that work or this. I will merely state that my personal favorite, or at least my “most favorite of favorites,” is The Adventures of Doctor Eszterhazy. Originally published as The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazy in an easily overlooked and undistinguished-looking paperback (which nonetheless won the World Fantasy Award in 1976), this splendid book has since been reissued in a handsome hardbound edition. This “new” Eszterhazy, still available from Owlswick, contains several stories written after the original edition was published.

  Engelbert Eszterhazy, Doctor of Medicine, Jurisprudence, Philosophy, Science, and Literature, is a droll and magnificent mitteleuropean Sherlock Holmes whose base of operations is Number 33 Turkling Street in the city of Bella, capital of Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania. The years of Eszterhazy’s flourishing are not specified, but clearly his best work
in unraveling mysteries was done before the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo, that bloody act which, in the opinions of some historians, at least sparked if it did not fuel the cataclysmic Great War and the century of tragedies that followed.

  But to anybody who would prefer “The Necessity of His Condition,” or “The Cobblestones of Saratoga Street,” or “The Importance of Trifles,” or any other of Avram’s ten-score-and-more stories, or any of his novels, or his nonfiction, I will simply say, No debate. No argument. In this embarrassment of riches there lie pleasures aplenty for all who would seek them out.

  Of Avram’s own reading habits a fair amount is known. For obvious reasons we know that he was familiar with the works of Ellery Queen. It is also clear from references in his works and from conversations or correspondence with him, that he was thoroughly conversant with such pop-culture icons as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and that doyen of eldritch horror tales, Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

  Perhaps less obvious is Avram’s interest in the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs. At the time of our first acquaintanceship I was working as an editor at Canaveral Press in New York, busily guiding the newly released, hitherto unpublished manuscripts of Burroughs into print. Avram wrote to me, inquiring about the possibility of his adding new works to Burroughs’s “John Carter of Mars” saga. Nothing came of this plan, alas, and one can only speculate on what a Barsoomian yarn by Avram Davidson would have been like.

  After Avram’s death, Grania Davis recovered much of his personal library from the tiny apartment where he had been living. Avram’s books are for the most part well read, his library clearly intended for use, not exhibition.

  There are very few volumes of literary fiction among his books, these few including Crome Yellow by Aldous Huxley and Canal Town by Samuel Hopkins Adams. Further, Avram reserved places of honor for the works of his many writer friends.

  Most of his library consisted of reference books on history, geography, and the esoteric, and of classics. He owned a complete annotated set of the works of Pliny the Elder. He owned a copy of Ships and Seamanship in the Ancient World. He owned The Golden Game: Alchemical Engravings of the Seventeenth Century, by Stanislas Klossowski de Rola. He owned Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Samuel Pepys’s diary, the biography of Helen of Troy, The Song of Roland, Arcana Mundi: Magic and the Occult in the Greek and Roman Worlds, The Catalan Chronicles of Francisco de Moncada, Italian Towns by Henry James, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, and The Golden Ass as translated by Robert Graves.