February 1942. Quisling takes power in Norway. In Asia, a run of victorious battles makes the Japanese seem almost unstoppable. But who cares about all this, eh? We have a new issue of Unknown to read! And in a charming moss-green hue, to boot.

The cover lists the big story “The Undesired Princess” by L. Sprague de Camp, plus Henry Kuttner’s novelette “Design for Dreaming”, and the short stories “Etaoin Shrdlu” by Fredric Brown and “He Didn’t Like Cats” by L. Ron Hubbard.

A full-page ad talks about “America’s two armies”, these being the actual Army per se and the army of skilled workers the economy needs to keep things going. Otherwise, there’s not much sign of creeping militarism in the adverts yet. Am I avoiding talking about the editorial? There’s a simple reason – there is no editorial this issue. There’s a one-panel announcement, at the end of the final story, of a Cleve Cartmill story heading up the next issue, but there’s no actual editorial this time. Maybe Campbell has sobered up and is no longer seeing leprechauns? Who can tell?

Another innovation – sort of – is that this is the first issue of Unknown to feature no new contributors; every author here has graced (or disgraced) its pages before. It’s gone on for twenty-nine issues now, and this is the first time this has happened. To be honest, I think that’s a pretty good track record, and it’s one of the successful things about Unknown – people wanted to be published in it, and I don’t think it was just because Street & Smith paid writers promptly. Unknown seems to have carried definite prestige among the fantasy writing community. I’m not so sure how well that translated into sales, though.

On to our main event, “The Undesired Princess” by L. Sprague de Camp. This is billed as a novel, and even described as such on ISFDB – it might actually be a novel by the standards of the times, where a novel was “40,000 words or more” and not, as it is today, “a tome of such magnitude that the sound of George R.R. Martin sitting down at his writing desk sends shudders of fear running through old-growth forests worldwide.” Anyway. We are introduced to our protagonist, uptight engineer Rollin Hobart, as he is introduced to the mysterious Hoimon, an “ascetic” with mysterious powers. Hoimon promptly uses those powers to haul Hobart off to the world of Logaia, where everything is either one thing or another; Hobart is needed to solve the riddles of the androsphinx, which otherwise will eat the fair (well, red-headed) princess Argimanda. The androsphinx’s riddles prove no match for Hobart’s high school philosophy class; Hobart is rewarded with half the local kingdom and the love of the princess, because in this world princesses always fall in love with their rescuers. Hobart, however, does not reciprocate. He wants to find a way home….

A way home is not immediately available. Instead, Hobart gets embroiled in an attempted coup, led by the wizard Naus and a trusted counselor who turns out to be a barbarian spy. The plot fails, but Naus escapes and carries off Argimanda. Hoping for some boon, preferably shaped like directions back to New York, Hobart sets out to rescue the princess again. In the process, he travels to a barbarian land and – more by luck than judgement – manages to become its ruler; he releases Argimanda and rejects her again; he tracks down this world’s god, solves his riddles – which are Zeno’s well-known paradoxes of motion, so that high school philosophy class pays off again – and gets to take the god’s place by way of reward. This isn’t, at first sight, as good a deal as it seems, because abandoning the role makes the whole world start to collapse, and unleashes cave-dwelling horrors that block Hobart’s way out. Fortunately, Hobart is able to co-opt a replacement to take his place in the divine hot seat, and he eventually finds his way back home – and discovers that Argimanda has travelled there too, and has even got herself a job already. The story concludes with Hobart deciding, effectively, that he could do a lot worse than a sexy redhead with her own income….

I’m normally quite a fan of de Camp, but this one left me rather underwhelmed. It’s another one where an ordinary Earth guy is transported to a world with different rules; we’ve seen de Camp do this four times in Fletcher Pratt’s company, and twice on his own (“Lest Darkness Fall” and “The Wheels of If”). In this case, the world of Logaia runs on Aristotelian logic, where things are one thing or another and never anything in between – Hobart’s brown suit is criticized for being a colour that doesn’t exist; a prince of the royal house is a child in one scene, then has a birthday and becomes an adolescent overnight; the wizard’s house is protected against wind from the north, south, east and west, because those are the only directions wind blows in… and so on and so forth. Hobart, with a more flexible mind derived from dealing with the real world, is able to run rings around his opposition…. It’s here that I think de Camp starts letting himself down; other protagonists like Martin Padway in “Lest Darkness Fall” faced genuine challenges to their skills, but Hobart gets things his own way rather too easily. It doesn’t help that he’s really not a nice guy, either – it becomes very clear, when he accidentally achieves godhood, that he is quite OK with the world of Logaia collapsing and killing everybody in it; it’s only when his own goals are thwarted that he seeks out a less genocidal solution. The story is full of jokes – obviously, it’s a de Camp story – but they, too, seem a bit tired, often depending on a rather strained literalism (the wizard Naus lives on a street that’s been built on top of the city wall, and he is therefore the Wizard of Wall Street, ho ho ho.) All in all, I don’t think this one’s a success.

Never mind! On to a well-remembered Fredric Brown short story, “Etaoin Shrdlu”. A strange little man has a special job for linotype operator George Ronson; the job gets done, the little man goes away happy… and Ronson’s linotype machine starts to behave strangely. Ronson realizes that it sets its own type, automatically, given the copy to work from; it’s an enormous saving in time and effort – but the machine grows stranger and stranger. When he prints off some left-wing material for a union, the machine starts issuing demands to be paid for its labour; Ronson calls for help from his friend Walter Merold when he prints a run of romance novels and the machine starts asking for another linotype…. Merold has a bright idea, and gets Ronson to print out some texts on Zen Buddhism, and when the machine goes into a state of rapt meditation, the two men can sneak up on it and dismantle it.

Fredric Brown was a typesetter by trade, and “Etaoin Shrdlu” is loaded, from the title on down, with authentic technical detail – possibly a little too much, for those of us who aren’t typesetters ourselves, but the story comes through the technical jargon clearly enough, and it’s a solid Brown story and a solid Unknown story – weird and funny, with a clever ending. In fact, it is so well-regarded, it figured in the 1943 Retro Hugos, and was therefore reviewed by yours truly in an earlier post, here. (I spent ages looking for that review on my old LJ account, only to remember, in the end, that 2018 is after the point when I started doing reviews on this blog. We have now officially reached the point where my blog is eating itself. I find that obscurely worrying.)

Robert Bloch returns with the short story “The Shoes”, which, like “Etaoin Shrdlu”, features a guy who’s only known as “the little man”. In this case, the little man is the protagonist, and the story starts with him making a deal with the devil. There’s some wrangling over technicalities, but the final deal is, the little man gets a pair of shoes, and while he’s wearing them, he can’t be killed – or, rather, he can, but he is immediately resurrected, in perfect and identical condition, somewhere nearby. The little man is happy, because, if he’s coming back in perfect condition every time, his shoes will never wear out, and he will never die….

The little man loses no time trying out his ability, slitting his own throat in a hotel room, then taunting his boss into killing him, and – while the boss is desperately trying to dispose of the body – stealing enough negotiable bonds to set himself up in comfort. As he takes the train to warmer climes, though, he is spotted by a detective from the hotel, who recognizes the putative suicide. No problem, thinks the little man, he’ll just kill himself again and then catch another train. Only… earlier, he sent his shoes out for a shoe-shine, and the shoe-shine boy got the pairs mixed up….

Well, Bloch is slick and readable as usual, and it sticks to the “deal with the devil” rules (our protagonist is not a nice guy, so the techicalities work against him), but I’m not at all sure I buy this one. First off, when the little man lists all the things he can’t be killed by, he neglects to mention “old age”, which gets us all in the end (I gather it’s got me booked for next Tuesday.) Second, if your life literally depended on your shoes, well, you would check, wouldn’t you? I mean, I check I’ve locked the front door when I go out, and that’s a lot less risky than cutting my own throat…. So, well, the story’s technically proficient, but I can’t get past the credibility gaps, there.

Where would we be without L. Ron Hubbard? His short story “He Didn’t Like Cats” is next on the menu – the word “Like” is underlined in the title, so perhaps it’s mean to be emphasized, but it doesn’t appear that way on the front page or the contents page (or on ISFDB for that matter.) Anyway, the guy who doesn’t like cats is a minor civil servant called Jacob Findley, and his dislike is strong enough that he kicks a stray that ventures into his path – kicks it into the road, in fact, where it is promptly run over. After this, he goes on to a church social, where two women, Bessy Green and Doris Hanson, compete for his affections (their regular beau having departed for military service – the war is creeping in). For some reason, this develops into an argument over metaphysics, where Doris turns out to be a stern rationalist while Bessy believes in Higher Powers…. After all this, Findley falls asleep and has a nightmare, in which the dead cat comes back, and he himself takes the form of a mouse. He wakes up when the cat tires of toying with him… but, he reflects, the cat can only die once, but he can dream every night….

It’s a short story that could usefully have been even shorter – the nightmare sequence is actually not bad, but the story starts off slow and laboured, and the argument between Bessy and Doris is entirely pointless (though I suppose it prefigures some of Hubbard’s later obsessions.) Campbell had a huge reputation as an editor; he evidently didn’t gain it from editing Hubbard….

On to Frank Belknap Long and his short story “The Refugees”, which opens with a prologue in italics that, frankly, rather spoils the story in advance. Roger Prindle is determined to get his fiancée, Helen Kelly, to move with him to a more congenial home; when he calls at her place, though, she’s out… and her refugees are in. The refugees are magical little people from “the old country”, and they give Roger a pretty hard time with some illusions and spells – but it turns out that Roger has some Irish blood in him after all, enough to come to an accord with the fairies, and everything turns out well in the end.

Well, it’s short and sweet. Not the first Unknown story to deal in fairy refugees heading for America (these ones are fleeing “the terrible bombing”, so presumably are Northern Irish fairies, the neutral Irish Republic never being deliberately targeted by German forces, though a few Luftwaffe bombers did stray south of the border at times.) Also not the first Unknown story to insist that the Irish have a special gift for seeing the Little People, not to mention a fondness for drink. (I’m one-eighth Irish by descent myself, and am relatively sober, and have never seen a leprechaun even on those occasions when I wasn’t relatively sober.)

On to other and (in my opinion) better things, specifically Fritz Leiber’s latest “Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser” short story, “The Sunken Land”. It keeps up the good old Unknown tradition of having rotten pictures of our heroes – Fafhrd, in the title illustration by Edd Cartier, looks disturbingly like Burt Kwouk – but the story itself is a good one. Fafhrd and the Mouser are still making their way back to Lankhmar, as mentioned in “The Howling Tower”; as we open, they’re in a small boat at sea, and Fafhrd has just caught a fish that’s swallowed a golden ring – a ring that clearly also serves as a key. The decoration on the ring recalls old stories, about the sunken continent of Simorgya…. A near collision leaves Fafhrd stuck aboard the galley of the insane Lavas Laerk, who keeps his crew continually drunk and has sworn to raid Simorgya, apparently unperturbed by the whole “sunken continent” thing. And, indeed, Laerk’s galley soon fetches up on the coast of Simorgya, which has risen out of the depths for the occasion… and, as Laerk explores the ruined cities and closes in on a particular locked door, Fafhrd realises that the whole situation, from his lucky catch onwards, has been orchestrated by some power that wants the door opened. Fafhrd runs away rather than stick around for the final movement, and is rescued by the Mouser, who caught a disturbing glimpse of what finally became of Laerk and his crew….

This is a fine spooky tale, which invents more background detail for Leiber’s secondary world, and then puts it to work for the story. This is the first one that’s focused more on Fafhrd than the Mouser, and it does show the big guy is no mere dumb bruiser, but at least as sharp as his smaller colleague. And the finale, with the Mouser seeing just enough of the dénouement for the reader to learn everything they need to know (and more than they might want to know) about Lavas Laerk’s fate, is well judged indeed. Top notch stuff, this one. It too was noticed in the Retro Hugos, a couple of years back (and duly reviewed here.)

Malcolm Jameson’s short story “In His Image” is the second one, this issue, to feature a protagonist with no name. In this case, the nameless one is the captain of the Lapuu, a tramp freighter in the Pacific. and the story opens with him bringing a weird statue to a dealer – he doesn’t want to sell it, though, he wants a bigger and better one made to the same design. The idea is to trade the upgraded version to the original owners for pearls… but, aboard the Lapuu, the idol begins to exercise a sinister power over the minds of the crew. It demands sacrifices – bigger and better sacrifices. The story ends with the ship’s first mate waiting for the captain, knife in hand…. Well, it’s a standard enough colonialist-hubris story, with plenty of ghoulish detail as the idol works its awful will, but the characters are such thin sketches – not even named, for goodness’s sake – that I can’t say I really care about them.

We have a book review! By an unfamiliar name, J. Wellington Wells, but it’s just L. Sprague de Camp in a cunning literary disguise. The book being reviewed is The Other Worlds, a spec-fic anthology edited by Phil “My dog is called Thurber” Stong, whom I’ve mentioned before. De Camp mostly approves of the anthology, though he takes Stong to task, a little bit, for speaking slightingly of “interplanetary” tales (though Stong isn’t saying anything that other SF writers haven’t said as well), and for not mentioning Unknown as the source of two of the stories. (Which would be why I’ve mentioned Stong before, of course. Stong was mostly a writer in the Western/American pastoral vein; his best-known work is State Fair, which was adapted for film, TV and as a musical, and is not remotely genre-related. Editing a speculative fiction anthology, then, was some way out of his normal range, but he seems to have stepped up to the job effectively enough. The two stories from Unknown are Sturgeon’s “A God in a Garden” and del Rey’s “The Pipes of Pan”, if you were wondering.)

The final entry is Henry Kuttner’s novelette “Design for Dreaming”. Hollywood scriptwriter Tim Macklin is suffering from overwork and burnout; his girlfriend Betsi Gardner advises him to go and see a sorcerer about it, since Hollywood was no more sensible in the 1940s than it is today. So Macklin goes off to see magician to the stars Jerome Dunn, who has just the thing – a quick rest cure in the Elysian Fields, courtesy of an inter-dimensional travel spell. Unfortunately, Dunn is an error-prone sort of magician, and the spell deposits Macklin, not in ancient Greek paradise, but in the supernatural world most related to his talents: the office where dreams are scripted….

Fortunately, our man is not just a scriptwriter, but a Hollywood scriptwriter. Which means he can turn out award-winning dreams, while also nosing around the local power structure, identifying key players, and ferretting out important information. While things don’t always go to plan – getting drunk and insulting your boss is a bad move, whatever sort of world you’re in – Macklin is soon able to get an irate customer-complaint dream to Dunn, and, when the magician proves reluctant to correct his mistake, Macklin manages to trick him into swapping places with him. So he goes back to Earth, to enjoy the company of the delightful Betsi, his only worry being the odd complaining dream coming his way. It’s an entertaining piece of hokum, certainly; I think we would delve in vain for any deeper meaning in it.

There is no lettercol; all that remains in this issue (besides the ads) is a smallish splash panel announcing Cleve Cartmill’s upcoming novella “Prelude to Armageddon”. Sounds cheerful. So… that’s it for an issue of Unknown that I wish I could rate more highly; the presence of two Retro nominees means that it’s not an absolute waste of a quarter, but the rest of the content is routine at best, I fear. A clunker from Hubbard is par for the course; a clunker from de Camp, though, is a new and troubling development. Never mind! We still have fresh Unknowns to conquer.

December 1941, and all America is buzzing with news of one epochal event. Also, Pearl Harbor happened. But first, Unknown‘s new issue. In a pleasant yellow.

Layout has changed a little, with the big story coming at the top – in this case, Cleve Cartmill’s novella “Bit of Tapestry”. Other featured stories are Jane Rice’s “The House”, Anthony Boucher’s “Snulbug”, and Theodore Sturgeon’s “Brat”. The interior is structured the same way as last issue – I think the three-column format for the last story in the issue is a cunning ruse by Campbell to squeeze in more classified ads. (The ads remain, mostly, Manly and Aspirational as ever. I’m growing rather fond of the frightfully dramatic full-pagers that run just after the contents page. “The Jaws of Death Clamped Down on Me!” in this issue, it’s typical of the breed. It’s for EverReady Batteries, if you were wondering. [If you have them in your flashlight, you can signal for help if you are ever caught in a bear trap.])

Campbell has lost the plot again in the editorial. He throws out a bunch of Unknown-style story ideas, possibly in the hope that some aspiring writer will work up a plot around one and submit it. Can you photograph a werewolf, given that photographic emulsions are based on silver compounds? What are the potential uses of phonographs in demon summoning? How do you fill a vampire’s teeth? What is coming up in the next issue? – that last one is my question, not Campbell’s. It, along with all the others, has no answer.

On to the stories, starting with Cleve Cartmill and “Bit of Tapestry”. This opens with a section in italics, apparently a conversation between some supernatural entities who control human destiny, or at least are trying to – they have competition, it seems, from the “Three Sisters” or “The Fates”, whom they claim to have replaced. Oho, says I to myself, having a basic grounding in classical mythology. Anyway, the “Planners”, the “Predestinators” and the “Monitor” have a plot in hand, involving two suicides, an accidental death, and the transfer of the contents of a briefcase…. Cut to standard font, the real world, and events playing out. Our hero is Webb Curtain, a young man in a small town, whose parents have just committed suicide; ugly rumours are circulating about Webb’s mental health, and he’s finding it hard to get a job. He has some friends left – newspaper editor Pat Cain, dangerous driver Larry, childhood sweetheart Kay, and, most importantly, the Parker sisters, three elderly spinsters who offer Webb a place to live. It’s an apparently random intervention on their part which saves Webb from an accident – and leaves him in possession of a briefcase, the contents of which are unknown, but seem significant.

And things develop from there. It’s clear enough that the Parker sisters are the Parcae of old – one of them weaves a tapestry with lots of Significant Plot Details on it, another gives Webb a ring with a symbol of scissors – and their opposition is represented by the quietly sinister Mr. Potter with his “buttermilk-coloured” eyes. Mr. Potter wants the contents of the briefcase, and he wants Webb to leave town – whethere tempted out by a desirable job elsewhere, or forced out by a lynch mob, it’s all one to him. It’s all rather more ambitious than I would have expected from Cleve Cartmill, but I’m not sure it entirely comes off. It reaches a conclusion, fair enough – the Fates win, basically – and it has some fairly pointed things to say about small-town mob mentality, but it leaves a lot of plot threads sort of… dangling. As if the title “Bit of Tapestry” is entirely appropriate, and there are other bits somewhere else that explain things. A beautiful woman called Millicent Lake, who is mentioned several times in the italicised prologue, wanders in to the plot at one point, almost has a relationship with Webb, and then wanders back out. We never do get a look at the contents of the briefcase, it gets destroyed when reckless Larry has his inevitable car crash. And the underlying conflict, between the Fates and whoever’s trying to replace them, never really comes into focus. It’s interesting in its way, and, as I said, a lot more ambitious than I’d have thought, coming from Cartmill (and I respect ambition, and applaud writers who stretch themselves and try out something new.) But, ultimately, I don’t think it quite works for me.

The War intrudes in “Occupation: Demigod”, a short story by Nelson S. Bond. A dull day at the draft board is enlivened when musician Theritas “Teddy” Ayres tries to register: he’s keen to do his civic duty, but he lists his occupation as “demigod”, his residence as “Olympus”, and his next of kin as “Amaltheia”, which is enough to raise some questions. Teddy explains by telling a story about finding an old horn in an antique shop, and finding himself pursued by a satyr and a woman in ancient Greek dress; the horn, too, has peculiar magical effects when he blows it. The horn is actually the Cornucopia, or Horn of Plenty, and the Greek gods want it back, because the Roman gods have made common cause with the “cold gods of the north” to wage war on Olympus. (Yes, this is explicitly an allegory of the Axis invasion of Greece.) Teddy, it turns out, has something of an affinity with the Cornucopia – he never knew his father, and, in a twist that will shock anyone who’s ignorant of etymology, Daddy turns out to have been the war god Ares. So, Teddy drops off to register for the draft while making his way to Olympus. It’s a lightweight supernatural squib, amusing enough, nothing particularly special.

Talking of Teddy, Theodore Sturgeon is up next with the short story “Brat”. Shorty and Mike – properly, Horace and Michaele, so you can understand why they go by the nicknames – are a young married couple who have a shot at a comfortable home and a nice legacy, if they can convince Shorty’s old-fashioned Aunt Jonquil that they are responsible people – by looking after a baby for a month. But who’s going to trust them with a child? Fortunately, a solution drops into their lap, in the form of the Brat. The Brat is a “pro tem changeling”, a fairy child at a loose end, and he’s perfectly happy to help the young couple out, in exchange for some simple considerations – he likes his steaks done rare, for instance. Shorty and Mike can have their dream home, if they can fool Aunt Jonquil that the Brat is a human child….

It’s lightweight supernatural comedy, but it’s well done – there’s a nice little twist, in that the couple pull it all off rather too successfully: the Brat starts to turn into a real human child, under the influence of Aunt Jonquil’s doting. By now, Sturgeon is reliably good at writing stories in the Unknown style, which is good for Campbell (who can use reliable contributors [who aren’t L. Ron Hubbard]) and good for the readers, because even at this (still) relatively early stage in his career, Sturgeon is a fine writer.

Anthony Boucher, after acting as Nostradamus’s press agent last issue, comes up with some honest fiction in this one, with his short story “Snulbug”. Bill Hitchens is a scientist, working on a cure for embolisms, and he needs funds; rather than applying for grants or any tedious stuff like that, he decides to summon up a demon to help him. He gets Snulbug, a very small and very inferior sort of demon, who keeps assuring him that his schemes are doomed to failure. But Bill is an optimist, who believes firmly in the indomitability of the human spirit and the invincibility of human ingenuity. Things don’t quite go according to plan at first, though, when he gets Snulbug to fetch him a copy of the next day’s paper, in order to profit from the information in it. Anything he does which might change the information in the paper merely triggers a short-term time loop, until he stops trying; saving the life of a politician doesn’t work, and even placing a bet on an outsider at the racetrack triggers off the time loop (because putting a couple of hundred dollars on the nose shifts the odds for the bookies.) Nothing daunted, Bill triumphs – sort of – in the end, by selling the newspaper on to someone who doesn’t realize its disadvantages. Silly and entertaining. More like this, please, Mr. Boucher, less of the Nostradamus, that’s what I’d like to see.

Jane Rice is back with the novelette “The House”. The eponymous house is the Trelawney House, the family home of the Trelawneys until they fell on hard times, and it was sold to the Stones. As the story opens, old Abigail Stone is burying her brother, who was killed by a freak fall of ceiling plaster in the house – and he’s not the first Stone to die there. In fact, Abigail is the last of the family, and she’s decided she’s going to demolish the house – in self defence; she has to kill it, before it kills her….

It’s a decent ghost story with lots of atmosphere – it goes on a bit, and it’s somewhat uncertain in its point of view, with the action being observed by multiple side characters as well as the main players (Abigail and her lawyer.) It ends in full-on grand guignol style, though, with Abigail assailed by the ghosts of Trelawneys and Stones alike as she surveys the wreckage of the house. (First story this issue not to have a reasonably cheerful ending, in fact. Perhaps Campbell is listening to his readers on the doom and gloom thing?)

“With a Blunt Instrument” (the quote marks, here, are part of the title itself) is a short story by Eric Frank Russell. It opens with a Mrs. Banstead, who is consulting with a certain Digger Kelly about how much better off she might be if she became the Widow Banstead. Cut to insurance investigator Dan Fletcher, who is bothered about no fewer than sixteen life insurance policies that have defied the statistical averages. Patiently working through the connections between the sixteen beneficiaries leads Fletcher to the Bansteads, and a violent confrontation as Digger Kelly turns up, too, accompanied by his sinister black dwarfish henchman….

Um. Not one of Russell’s finest, this. An awful lot of running time is taken up by Fletcher prating about statistics and tracing down contacts; I’m sure it’s all very realistic detective work, but I’m not sure we actually need to watch it happen. Digger Kelly’s sinister plot involves the dwarfish black henchman, Charlie Murra, who is actually an Australian native sorcerer (a “semicivilized Myall priest”) who can make people die, tracelessly, by pointing a magic bone at them. He gets shot sometime during the proceedings, so that’s it for him. It’s not exactly brimming over with cultural sensitivity by today’s standards (we won’t talk about what illustrator Edd Cartier thinks Murra looks like), and I have to say it’s not an awfully convincing gimmick even by 1941’s. And I have no idea where the “blunt instrument” comes in. A magic spell isn’t a blunt instrument, is it?

“Hereafter, Inc.” is a short story by Lester del Rey, featuring one Phineas Theophilus Potts, who joins Webb Curtain, Theritas Ayres and Horace and Michaele in this issue’s Daft Names department. Phineas is a hard-working draftsman and a very devout man. He wakes up in his familiar room one morning – but his familiar room seems to be in a different building, and his job has moved, too. Everything seems fine, his boss is in a good mood, the work is going well, but Phineas is perturbed, nonetheless. Eventually, his boss explains the situation to him; both of them are dead, killed in a traffic accident. But Phineas has always been devout and clean-living – shouldn’t he be in heaven? He goes to an administration office to get advice, and receives some perplexing news; he’s so settled into his mundane routine that, for him, this is heaven.

Well, it’s one take on the afterlife, I guess – actually, bureaucratic heavens and hells have featured before in Unknown, as recently as two issues ago, in fact. I suppose we’re not reading this magazine for serious theology in any case – more for light entertainment, and del Rey is lightly entertaining as per usual. Phineas is a bit too uptight to be entirely sympathetic as a protagonist, but the weirdnesses that lead him to discover his situation are quite well handled.

“Czech Interlude” is a short – indeed, very short – story by Vic Phillips, about who I know next to nothing. Ten short fiction credits on ISFDB, three of them in collaboration with one Scott Roberts, and I am never going to get anything sensible, searching for names as generically Anglophone-American as that. Maybe he’s another Howard Wandrei pseudonym. We haven’t heard from Howard in a while now, I hope he’s keeping well. Anyway. Lieutenant Untmeyer is a member of the German occupying forces in Czechoslovakia (as it was then), and he’s patrolling the streets of Prague and worrying about Czech insurgents. He feels a blow on his back, turns round, and sees a German officer behind him, in old-fashioned uniform. And this guy introduces him to another German officer, in very old-fashioned uniform, like plate armour. They’re ghosts, members of earlier German occupying forces in Prague, killed by Czech insurgents. And Untmeyer can see them because he’s a ghost, now – that blow on his back was a bullet. They’re efficient, those Czech insurgents. And that’s it. As a brief unsolicited testimonial for the Czech resistance, well, it’s OK, I guess.

The Manly and Aspirational ads always include a lot of correspondence courses, and I suppose it’s only natural that those should furnish the basis for a story, in this case L. Sprague de Camp’s novelette “Mr. Arson”. Clem Buckminster, a salesman for correspondence courses, goes to see dissatisfied customer Carl Grinnig, who keeps ordering one course after another, refusing to settle on any one of them. However, Grinnig’s problem is not with the course, but with the random series of small fires that’s broken out after he tried something from his latest Lesson One. Grinnig’s current course, you see, is in “Nigromancy”, and he has managed to evoke a small but uncontrolled salamander, or fire elemental. This would be quite a worry in itself, but the salamander was a pet, in another dimension populated by fire creatures, and its owner hs followed it to this world. The owner is a Rolomander, a man-shaped creature made of fire, and he is anxious to secure his access to this world – mostly so that he can set everything on fire….

What follows is a fairly typical de Camp fast-paced romp, as “Mr. Arson” (as the Rolomander is dubbed) forces Buckminster and Grinnig to help him track down and destroy all copies of the correspondence course, especially the all-important lesson in dismissing elementals – while Buckminster and Grinnig, naturally enough, try desperately to get free and get help, the latter from the course’s author, Professor Julian Thurtle. And it’s Thurtle, in the end, who finds a solution – not a particularly elegant solution, I grant you (he dumps a load of thermite on top of the fire elemental’s head), but hey, it works. Buckminster tries to sell Grinnig another correspondence course, Grinnig responds with contumely, the end. It’s well up to de Camp’s standards, although I have to dock him a few points for giving Buckminster a phonetically rendered comedy Noo Yoik accent.

There is no lettercol this issue, but there is a brief book review, squeezed into a two-column box at the end of the de Camp story like a quick fill-in replacement for some want ads. It’s a review of a one-volume edition of the works of Charles Fort, and signed off with the impenetrable initials “J.W.C. Jr.” Who can this possibly be…? Anyway. With only a short space to work in, Campbell acknowledges Fort’s ability in collecting bizarre facts, but takes him to task, a bit, for failing to offer any sort of theory or conjecture to explain these oddities. So, rather more balanced, as a review, than Orval Graves’s reverential treatment of “Abramelin the Mage” last issue.

So that’s it, for a mostly harmless issue of Unknown – much less dark, overall, than the last one, at least. Of course, the interesting thing now is going to be watching what happens to the magazine now that America is in the war… considering wartime paper shortages are ostensibly what did Unknown in, Campbell has clearly picked the wrong moment to move to a larger format. We’ve seen some contemporary war-based stories already, and I expect it to be a source of further inspiration as the issues go by. And I will certainly be keeping a weather eye on the adverts, too, to see how the war effort creeps in to those. Given the fairly long lead time in assembling the pulp magazines, I don’t expect the changes to be immediate… but change is coming, I’m pretty sure of that.

New larger format! The cover for the more voluminous Unknown October 1941 edition is a military olive-drab. The granitic bar under the “Unknown” has been trimmed down a bit, and “Worlds” has been added, all in italics and curlicues. (The “Fantasy Fiction” survives, shifted a little to the left of the page.)

Cover slots are occupied by Anthony Boucher’s essay “On a Limb”, Fritz Leiber’s “Smoke Ghost”, Silaki Ali Hassan’s “The Dolphin’s Doubloons”, and the long story “The Land of Unreason” by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt. I might add that the internal layout has changed slightly – we’re back to double columns for the lead story, and (innovatively) three columns per page for the last story. I don’t know why.

The editorial is something of a renewed mission statement, with Campbell promising new and up-to-date takes on traditional fantasy themes, and plenty of amusement along the way. And he’s given up Irish mythology and is, instead, forewarning us of an upcoming Cleve Cartmill story. In short, the editorial has made a welcome return to normality.

On to the main event, L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt’s novella “The Land of Unreason”. This collaborative team has given us three “Incompleat Enchanter” stories to date, but is now branching out in another (though equally whimsical) direction. American diplomat Fred Barber is convalescing in Yorkshire after being injured by a bomb splinter; there’s a new baby in his hosts’ house, and he notices the lady of the house leaving out a saucer of milk. On an impulse, he drinks the milk himself and replaces it with Scotch, musing on the old custom of leaving milk out for the fairies, lest they replace the baby with a changeling…. Guess what? A fairy does indeed turn up, only (possibly under the influence of the Scotch) it doesn’t spirit away the infant, but takes Barber instead….

Barber finds he has been taken by Titania, queen of the fairies, to be used in a sort of prisoner exchange with her husband Oberon. Oberon, it turns out, has a job for a diplomat – the kobolds, the only fairies who can handle iron, are making warlike noises, so he wants Barber to visit them and straighten things out. It seems all is not well in fairyland generally; disruptive magic is on the increase, and there is a prophecy of a red-bearded one who will come to set things to rights. Equipped with a wand from Titania, Barber sets out on his quest…. Events follow in a sort of dream-logic of their own from then on; Barber loses the wand in a dispute with tree spirits and starts to turn into a frog; he regains the wand and his human form (though he seems to be growing wings); his embassy to the kobolds does not go according to plan; he spends some time with a fellow American who seems to have been running a small farm in fairyland since the early 1800s; he discovers more about the prophecy and the three places he has to go to fulfill it; he grows a red beard and a pair of impressive bat wings…. Eventually, he reaches the last of his three goals and discovers his true identity – he is not Fred Barber, he is the reincarnation of Frederick Barbarossa! And from then on, he leads the forces of fairyland in a never-ending battle against evil….

It’s all very strange. Readable, certainly, though the cod-Shakespearean dialect of the fairies takes a bit of getting used to. (We won’t talk about the first part of the story, where de Camp and Pratt attempt their idea of a Yorkshire accent.) But there is a lot going on, and the story takes its own title seriously – as I said, it proceeds by dream logic and not the reason of the waking world. The de Camp/Pratt team is good enough to pull this off, or at least to make it all hang together long enough to reach a conclusion; it’s entertaining if you like that kind of thing… I’m not a hundred per cent sure that I do, mind.

On to “No News Today”, a short story by Cleve Cartmill. It’s a story, apparently filling out the whole of one issue of a local newspaper, told by the editor, Buck. Buck is keen to assure his readers that local dignitary Dr. Evan Scot is not a son of Satan, and that the ancient grimoire that his typesetter has been reading is not a reliable source for information like this. Buck has had the situation patiently explained to him by Satan’s own PR executive, and is happy to set the record straight. Dr. Scot is not a demon and the grimoire called the Sabbaticon is not to be trusted. Remember this, and the newspaper’s readers can avoid the fate of Buck and his typesetter, confined in the newspaper offices by a barrier which, once crossed, will deliver them straight to Hell….

Well, it’s short, direct, and more than a little downbeat, with some pointed social commentary – Dr. Scot and his fellow sons of Satan pose as successful self-made men and pillars of the community, indicating that the system works, people earn their successes on their own merits, and reform of society is strictly not needed. Still, the actual end is definitely a downer, with Buck trapped inside the newspaper offices – he can’t possibly stay there indefinitely, but once he leaves, Hell awaits. It’s a bit of a raw deal for the poor guy, you have to admit.

On to something more cheerful, Robert Bloch’s short story “A Good Knight’s Work”. Butch, an ex-gangster turned farmer, is driving along the road when he is perturbed to run into a mounted knight in armour. This is Sir Pallagyn, who is equally perturbed to run into modern things like Butch’s truck…. The knight has been sent forward in time by Merlin, to retrieve the Cappadocian Tabouret, on which the Holy Grail will stand once that’s been found. As you might expect, complications ensue, but our mismatched heroes are equal to them – the noble knight comes in very handy against the guy who is shaking Butch down for protection money, while Butch’s skills prove invaluable in extracting the vital Tabouret from a local museum.

It’s a short – and effective – comic piece. And it’s all written in the present tense, from the viewpoint of a New York low-life – yes, it’s pretty clearly a Damon Runyon pastiche, and not a bad one. Not a perfect one – Runyon’s style has one very obvious quirk and several minor ones, which makes it easy to imitate but hard to imitate exactly. (Bloch, like many others, doesn’t fully appreciate just how far Runyon would go to keep the present indicative thing going – so he has, for example, a line that goes “That,” I tell him, “is my new hired man. So if I was you, I wouldn’t plant any pineapples on my farm, because he is allergic to fruit.”, where a full-on Runyon would run more like So I tell him that is my new hired man, and if I am Thin Tommy, I am not planting any pineapples on my farm, because he is allergic to fruit. And yes, I have spent far too much of my time studying Damon Runyon.) So, yeah, not perfect Runyonese. But a good pastiche, and a lively, fast-moving, entertaining story in its own right.

“Prescience” is a short story by Nelson S. Bond. Psychiatrist Dr. Barton is getting fed up with his patients, and is notably short with Mrs. Williams, who claims to have prophetic dreams – that is, when something happens, she remembers having dreamt about it, in detail, some time previously. Dr. Barton explains the mechanics of this sort of false memory… but then, on an impulse, decides to have a bit of (not exactly ethical) fun. So he hypnotizes Mrs. Williams and encourages her to believe she’s asleep and having a prophetic dream. In this dream, she is escaping from a burning building; Dr. Barton persuades her, in the dream, to go back into it. After which, Mrs. Williams starts talking about strange, evil things…. Dr. Barton wakes her up and thinks no more about it – until the news report, of a house fire, and Mrs. Williams almost escaping until, inexplicably, she went back inside the building….

Well, it’s a neatly told tale, with a touch of the M. Valdemar about it – definitely on the grim side, though; not only does Mrs. Williams come to an awful end, the realization of what he’s done – and that Mrs. Williams was spilling unspeakable secrets of the afterlife – is enough to loosen a few screws in Dr. Barton’s mind, too. I suppose it serves him right.

The short story “Finger! Finger!” appears to be the only genre fiction credit for Margaret Ronan, a long-lived writer who also had a stint, in the late seventies and early eighties, of writing some “True-life Unexplained Mysteries” style non-fiction books. (Well, I say non-fiction….) Sixteen year old Carlota has just been engaged as a maid for Miss Amanda, an elderly, bedridden invalid, paralysed since her youth. Miss Amanda has trouble keeping maids – they keep putting on airs, after a while, talking like Miss Amanda and imitating her mannerisms, like the way she keeps her little finger sticking out…. Carlota finds out why, when Miss Amanda succeeds, by psychic means, in swapping her mind into Carlota’s body, leaving Carlota herself trapped inside Miss Amanda’s immobile form….

It’s an effective, not to mention effectively nasty, little piece – Miss Amanda is a thoroughly hissable villain, and one’s heart bleeds for the luckless Carlota. I suppose it would be nice if it had been longer, and maybe developed towards a better ending – as it is, Carlota manages to summon up enough strength to strangle her own stolen body (with one significant finger sticking out), leaving her nothing to worry about except being a paralyzed, morbidly obese septuagenarian who’s about to be charged with her own murder. Not what you’d call a happy ending… but it’s well enough written, and I wonder why Ronan didn’t do more in this line. She does, I suppose, admit that sex exists (Carlota has a boyfriend called Donald, and Miss Amanda is very keen to get to know him), and that may be enough to make sure she wasn’t invited back to Unknown.

Next up is “Borrowed Glory”, a short story by L. Ron Hubbard. I’ll try to control my enthusiasm. The genie Tuffaron and angel Georgette are having a discussion, in whatever place supernatural beings of this kind hang out. Tuffaron is cynically convinced that human beings are addicted to suffering, and Georgette bets him that she can, with her supernatural powers, leave some lasting happiness in the world. Georgette can make any wish come true, but only for forty-eight hours, after which time things revert to their original state. So she calls on Meredith Smith, an elderly woman living alone and in poverty, and explains the situation. Meredith wishes for all the things one might expect – youth, beauty, and so on – and she sets out to have a good time. She meets a handsome young man called Thomas Crandall, and finds herself on a whirlwind romance with him – but she knows it has to end, in less than two days. So she sneaks away to put an end to herself, before the truth comes out… but fate has reserved one final twist.

Well, I have to admit, this is a novel experience. A short story by Hubbard which isn’t, actually, actively bad. It’s not terribly good either, mind, but it’s OK – possibly because it is allowed to be a short story, and not padded out into a novella so Hubbard can pay for his boat repairs. So the prose is clunky and the characters are cardboard, but at least the thing proceeds to its conclusion at a reasonable pace. A downer of a conclusion, though – the twist is that Thomas is also enjoying a temporary burst of youth, health and affluence thanks to Georgette’s intervention, and I can’t help thinking that if either one of them had just admitted this, they could have lived out the rest of their lives, if not happily ever after, but at least with each others’ companionship – a bit of a sentimental ending, but not a bad one. But it isn’t to be – Meredith gets herself buried (briefly) alive, Thomas digs her up and weeps over her corpse, and the cynical genie wins the bet. Bad news all round, in fact.

The new larger format Unknown is branching out into non-fiction again, with “On a Limb”, an essay on Nostradamus by Anthony Boucher. Boucher (the pen name of William Anthony Parker White) was a literary character of formidable reputation – author of no few well-loved short stories, essayist, reviewer, anthologist, a founding editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction – so it’s with no great pleasure that I have to say that this particular specimen of his work is a load of claptrap. It starts out with some bold predictions about World War II, ostensibly derived from Nostradamus (they fall into two categories, a. easily guessable from the current state of affairs, or b. wrong), and proceeds to extol the French sage’s alleged abilities in the usual way such things are done, with lots of cherry-picking and selective interpretation to support Boucher’s already chosen conclusions. You can extract pretty much anything you want to out of Nostradamus’s word salad quatrains…. Two successive footnotes demonstrate the sort of thinking we’re dealing with here; in one, Nostradamus uses the word duc, and Boucher points out that this derives from the Latin dux and can mean any sort of leader; in the next, Nostradamus has used the word prince (which of course derives from the Latin princeps and can mean any sort of leader) and Boucher, who has a specific Prince in mind for his interpretation, praises Nostradamus for the uncanny precision of his foretelling. And then we get on to the use of anagrams, and how you’re allowed to change one letter in a Nostradamus anagram (so Hister obviously means Hitler), and really, there is nothing for any thinking person to do at this stage but throw the wretched article at the nearest wall. Do I sound cross? Well, I am. I have no time for this sort of hokum, and I expected better from Boucher.

On to some honest fiction, and Fritz Leiber’s short story “Smoke Ghost”. Miss Millick is concerned about work colleague Catesby Wran, who is talking oddly about how ghosts in the modern world would be made of smoke and dust and grime, and who seems preoccupied with something. And, indeed, he is – Wran is being haunted by exactly such a ghost as he describes. He goes to see a psychiatrist about it, but no amount of talking about his childhood can distract him from the fact that a hideous thing with a soot-masked face is pursuing him. When the thing catches up with him and possesses Miss Millick, Wran gives way and positively abases himself in front of it, promising it his worship – and that seems to satisfy it, and it goes away. For the moment….

Leiber’s done three Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories for Unknown so far, but this is a move in a different direction – it’s a contemporary ghost story, and it is quite superbly creepy; the image of the thing peering around chimneys and pawing at Wran’s windows is wonderfully unnerving; up there with M.R. James, in my opinion. The ghost is never really explained, although something is made of Wran’s sort-of psychic abilities – he can see through walls, a bit, and his mother tried to make him into a psychic medium, but that didn’t work. (Of course, we knew his mother wasn’t on his side when she called him Catesby, but never mind.) Although the ending – with Wran knowing he’s only achieved a temporary respite from his haunting – makes it yet another downer….

“A Gnome There Was” is a novelette by Henry Kuttner and an uncredited C.L. Moore. Or so says ISFDB, and would they lie to me? Tim Crockett, a would-be labour organizer, is rooting around a mine trying to find left-wing sympathizers; he gets caught in an explosion, and suddenly – he’s a gnome. It’s a magical rule, apparently, that a proportion of people lost underground become gnomes. Crockett quickly comes to the conclusion that being a gnome sucks – the gnomes work twenty hours a day under the rule of their not very beneficent emperor Podrang, and their only recreation is fighting (although Crockett falls in with one Brockle Buhn, a gnome who might have some feminine qualities, and is certainly interested in finding out about kissing.) In such a situation, what’s a labour organizer to do? Organize a general gnome strike, that’s what!

It doesn’t go according to plan – Podrang gets cross, and he has an endless supply of “cockatrice eggs”, magical crystals that go off like grenades and turn any gnome in the blast radius into something horrible. But Crockett has been told that red cockatrice eggs turn gnomes into humans (gnomes consider humans horrible to look at), and, when the riots break out and Podrang is hurling his eggs with gay abandon, Crockett snaffles a red one and makes a break for the surface. But, when he emerges into daylight, the first person who sees him flees in terror. And when Crockett looks down at his body, he screams, because –

Well, we don’t exactly know why. It’s the same sort of open ending that Kuttner’s last offering (“The Devil We Know”, in the last issue) had, only this time the reader has enough information to imagine, well, whatever magical mishap takes their fancy. Perhaps it’s the unsung influence of C.L. Moore that makes the difference? Anyway, before the (rather grim) ending, it’s a madcap supernatural romp with some very silly ideas and a hopeless but not unsympathetic protagonist; enjoyable enough, certainly.

For one page, we’re back to non-fiction, with a book review by “Le Comte de L’Avro”, who also signs himself “Orval Graves” at the bottom of the page. I don’t have a lot on Orval Graves, or at least not this Orval Graves (there’s more than one, although not in the same time frame.) Apparently he was a Rosicrucian. Takes all sorts. In any case, he starts out “On Books of Magic: The Book of Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage” with a general paragraph on why books of magic aren’t widely available. “It is because of numerous small editions, private publications, and the binding oaths of secrecy taken by magicians,” he explains, although some of us might add “and the damn things are so turgidly written as to be unreadable anyway.” Well, at least, that’s been my experience, for the most part. (Dion Fortune turned out to be an honourable exception, although that applies strictly to her non-fiction writing – if anyone ever offers you some of her fiction to read, run away as fast as possible, that’s my advice.) The rest of the article is a reasonable enough outline of S.L. McGregor Mathers’s translation of The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage; no, I don’t know why the second “the” is missing from the article’s sub-head. Unless you are actually planning to follow the rituals and invoke your Guardian Angel, the outline tells you all you need to know about The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, and you will not have to read the actual book itself. This is a good thing. Trust me on this, I know what I’m talking about. It’s safe to say that Graves is more impressed with McGregor Mathers’s translation than I am. Like I said, it takes all sorts.

There is no lettercol this issue, so the final entry is, I’m delighted to say, a new short story from Silaki Ali Hassan, or Ulysses George Mihalakis, or Agis Ilaki Mihalakis, or “please stop hurting me” if you are in a wrestling ring with him. “The Dolphin’s Doubloons” is not set in the ancient Arabian valley of Yafri, but is a contemporary tale, starting with rough and ready seaman Cork selling a gold doubloon to shady pawnbroker Leer. Cork has a plentiful supply of doubloons, from an unusual source; he has befriended a dolphin, whom he calls Davey; he helped Davey get free from a tidal pool one day, and in gratitude the dolphin swallowed a quantity of gold from a wrecked ship, and vomited it up at Cork’s feet. Leer is keen to find out the source of Cork’s gold, and when the seaman falls ill with pneumonia, Leer kidnaps him with a view to tracking down the doubloons. Amazingly, Leer does not believe the story about the friendly dolphin; he sets a course for a likely island, but Cork, delirious and exhausted, staves in the bottom of his boat with an anchor. Both men drown. Davey the dolphin continues, fairly uselessly, to puke up gold doubloons over Cork’s corpse….

It might be more hard-boiled noir than Arabian fable, but it’s got Silaki Ali Hassan’s overwrought, over-the-top style nonetheless… which, as I’ve said before, I find something of a guilty pleasure; it’s not fine writing, true, but it’s very enthusiastic writing, and I can’t help finding that enthusiasm contagious. The whole situation is utterly ludicrous, but the zest of the story carries you through the dodgy bits. At least until we get to the downer ending….

Fannish eminence Russ Chauvenet wrote in to Unknown‘s last issue, complaining that the magazine had too many gloomy stories. At a guess, he’s not going to be happy about this issue either. True, the main story doesn’t actually have an unhappy ending, although I suspect that when Fred Barber interviewed for his job at the State Department, and they asked him that standard question about “where do you see yourself in five years’ time?”, he did not answer “As a bat-winged Frederick Barbarossa leading an unending war against evil fairies.” (Though if you ever want to end a job interview early, that line would probably work.) As for the protagonists of the rest of the stories, we have: trapped in Hell; going mad after accidentally killing someone; bedridden, senile and about to be tried for her own murder; dead; hag-ridden by a smutty horror; hideously transformed; dead and covered in dolphin puke. The only protagonist who makes it out unscathed is Butch from the Robert Bloch story. Let that sink in. The most cheerful story in this issue was written by the author of Psycho.

Campbell talks about Unknown running “amusing fantasy” in the editorial, but the humour in this issue is black and bleak indeed. Well, Campbell has listened to the complaints of his readership before, back when the lettercol rose up under Isaac Asimov and objected to stories with no proper endings. Will he listen to the readers again? Time, no doubt, will tell.

We’re back to blue for August 1941’s boring cover.

The cover stories are: “The Devil We Know” by Henry Kuttner, “Even the Angels” by Malcolm Jameson, “Mr. Jinx” by Robert Arthur, and the main event, “The Case of the Friendly Corpse” by L. Ron Hubbard.

Editorial time, and my word, there is news. After two issues of pointless waffle about the Little People of the Emerald Isle, Campbell has solid information about a major change to the mag, this time. From the next issue onwards, Unknown Fantasy Fiction will become Unknown Worlds, and, more importantly, will be in the larger “bedsheet” format, rather than the traditional pulp. Of course, all this means the price is going up, to a full 25 cents an issue – but it also means more content in each issue. Good news!

On to the bad news. We did have a couple of issues free from L. Ron Hubbard, while he was off drying his socks after his misadventures in Alaska, but now he’s back, and he’s bad. “The Case of the Friendly Corpse” features one Jules Riley, who, as we meet him, is chafing at the prospect of receiving his doctorate and beginning a long and event-free career in academia. We get a lot of background detail about Jules and his relationship with his family, all of which will prove to be irrelevant, when, in a flash, Jules is whisked away from conventional reality and finds himself attending a different sort of graduation entirely. Sorcerer Achmed el Abd Mahmud, you see, was just about to collect his doctorate in magic from the University of Unholy Names, and – for reasons which will become apparent – reckoned that an event-free career teaching ancient languages might be rather a better idea, so he cast a spell, and now his consciousness inhabits Jules’s body, while Jules is in his body, in his world, about to sign his formal deal with the devil for magical powers….

It’s not all bad news for Jules – he gets power and prestige, a magical familiar which will bring him things like spell books on command, and a hot redhead with some romantic complications which ensure she won’t be fully available until the end of the story. However, he has to pass an entrance examination for the post-graduate professional association the Diabolical Extradimensional and Mysterious Order of Necromancers and Sorcerers, and, thanks to the intervention of a deadly rival, has to do it without any magic…. It’s at this point that I detect an influence on Hubbard’s style here; one of Jules’s fellow examinees talks about meeting a strange man who claimed to be a traveller from another dimension, called something like “Harold Shay” (who got promptly eaten by a monster), and Jules attempts to get through the examination with a bit of science-based improvisation… the outcome, whereby he makes iron carbonyl and (by the laws of magic) it turns into a feverish cow, seems more than a little contrived to me, but it’s a vague stab at de Camp/Pratt style inventiveness, at least.

Jules passes his examination and is soon set up in practice as a magician – however, he is swiftly plunged into more trouble, as the D.E.M.O.N.S. forbids its members from dabbling in politics, and virtually the first case he gets involves him either dabbling in politics or expiring horribly from poison. He is required to resurrect the murdered Sultan Slary, the local ruler (being nearer to hell than our world, and infested with magic, this world naturally has a vaguely Moorish social structure. I don’t think it’s a deliberate slur on Islamic culture, I think it’s just another excuse for Hubbard to drag out the Arabian Nights props once again.) In another case of arbitrary contrivance, Jules winds up trying a combination spell which both resurrects the Sultan and makes everyone like him… unfortunately, it only half works, meaning the Sultan is a very obvious reanimated corpse – but a corpse who is a faithful friend to Jules, the “Friendly Corpse” of the title. (Edd Cartier’s idea of what this looks like is enough to give you sleepless nights.) Jules has a little temporary security, but bits are falling off the Sultan, his sorcerous rival has blown up his lab, the D.E.M.O.N.S. enforcers are on their way to remonstrate with him about the politics thing…. Jules eventually declares his love for the hot redhead, renounces the Devil and all his works, and prepares to die heroically, and this is enough to attract the cosmic forces of Good, who turn up, led by King Arthur in person, to bail him out. As deus ex machina endings go, it’s… one of those, then.

Oh dear. There have been signs that Hubbard is trying to break out of the pulp-hack category (“Fear”, “Death’s Deputy”, “Typewriter in the Sky”), but this one is reverting to his normal form and no mistake – contrived, hackneyed, implausible, padded to within an inch of its life, and, in the end, very tiresome.

On to other things, starting with “The Road Beyond”, a short story by Norman A. Daniels. Daniels (real name Danberg) is a newcomer to Unknown, and another pulp writer with a long career writing detective series characters – he worked on the long-running “Phantom Detective” under the house name Robert Wallace, he was the creator of the “Black Bat” (a character with at least superficial similarities to the more famous Batman), and in the late sixties he would write a couple of tie-in novels for “The Avengers” (the Steed and Peel ones, not the Marvel comics ones). “The Road Beyond” isn’t any of that sort of thing, though. Paul Chivers is a disappointment to his family; his father is in the House of Lords, his brother Bertie is in the RAF, but Paul is more concerned with unmanly, unBritish things like designing an air raid shelter that will be totally proof against German bombs. Caught in an air raid nonetheless, Paul falls in with a little orphan girl named Jessica, and both of them are knocked out by a nearby explosion – and wake up on a road, where lots of people are walking towards an unspecified destination. It’s a lot easier to follow the crowd, but Paul and Jessica make the effort to go in the opposite direction – a journey that becomes harder and harder, until Paul spends the last of his strength helping Jessica over the final step….

… and she wakes up in hospital, next to the bed in which Paul has just died. Yes, it’s another Unknown guy-doesn’t-know-he’s-dead story, part of what’s by now a fine old tradition. Even someone who’s not familiar with that tradition, though, will probably cotton on long before the actual denouement, because – although it’s not badly written – this is a nakedly sentimental and completely unashamed tear-jerker with about as much subtlety as the Eurovision Song Contest. It’s OK, if you like that kind of thing, or at least don’t mind that kind of thing.

Henry Kuttner returns (according to ISFDB, in a solo effort) with the novelette “The Devil We Know”. Gerald Carnevan is an amoral advertising executive with a trophy wife in view and an awkward mistress on the side; he receives a strange psychic summons, and makes contact with the demon Azazel. Azazel proposes a standard sell-your-soul-for-power deal, which is fine with Carnevan, since he doesn’t believe in souls anyway. (I, personally, raise my eyebrow at this one, as Carnevan is, at this point, face to face with a literal demon, which would surely make even the most hard-line sceptic reconsider their views. It’s like saying you don’t believe in pigs to a man eating a bacon sandwich.) So, the deal is sealed, and Carnevan has lots of mean-spirited fun with it, driving his inconvenient mistress insane and giving his senior partner in the ad agency fatal meningitis. But he starts seeing something odd, a vague, spindle-shaped black blur…. Azazel, it turns out, is not interested in Carnevan’s soul; the demon is being pursued by something that’s as supernatural to him as he is to Carnevan – and his plan is to lure his pursuer in to Carnevan’s world and let it chase Carnevan instead. The story ends with Carnevan getting a clear look at the thing –

– and it ends, I’m afraid, in a rather unsatisfying way. The rules of the deal-with-the-devil story pretty much require it to end badly (for the devil if the protagonist is reasonably innocent, for the protagonist if otherwise, and Carnevan is very much otherwise), but all we know in the end is that Carnevan doesn’t go mad at the sight. So what does happen? Does he die? Go blind? Take a vow of chastity? Inquiring minds want to know, Mr. Kuttner. I suppose, really, this sort of ambiguous ending can be satisfactory, but I don’t think Kuttner provides enough background detail for the reader to be happy making up their own conclusion – we really don’t learn very much at all about the spindle-shaped blur creature. In the absence of other evidence, I have decided that it is actually Taz the Tasmanian Devil, and it turns Carnevan into Porky Pig. Prove me wrong, I dare you.

“Mr. Jinx” is a short story by Robert Arthur, set in the seedy world of New York fight promoters, where fiery redhead Millie Duane is at odds with promoter Roscoe Wentworth over her boyfriend’s contract. They are interrupted in their discussions by the arrival of the mystic Prince Agah Shan y Pasha Rehab Neroc d’Ghengs. No, I don’t know where he comes from. He calls himself Mr. Jinx for short, and he has a business proposition – he has mystic powers, to cause accidents or banish people forever into Limbo, and he will refrain from using those powers for a small financial consideration. Roscoe Wentworth is sceptical at first, but after Jinx demonstrates his abilities, Wentworth feels he has no alternative but to pay the magician the fifty thousand dollars he’s asking for. Millie Duane, though, has her eye on those fifty thousand dollars, and comes up with a plan to settle Mr. Jinx’s hash.

Well, it’s a bit of fun – the self-conscious hard-boiled style is a little grating, but the story is short enough not to outstay its welcome, and the resolution is handled well enough, with Millie Duane using some swift photography to get Mr. Jinx hoist with his own petard. Enjoyable enough, I think.

It’s volume 5 of Unknown, and we’re only now seeing a Fredric Brown story? Well, yes – though he’d been writing detective stories for a few years now, it wasn’t until 1941 that the king of the short-short gimmick story moved into the spec-fic field. We will be seeing more of him, because Unknown and Brown’s style are a match made in Heaven. His debut short story is “Armageddon”, which features young Herbie Westerman, a kid who is anxious to get up on stage with magician Gerber the Great and see how the trick is done. However, as the performance progresses, somewhere in Tibet a very specific prayer wheel stops revolving… and Gerber the Great reveals himself as something rather more than a stage magician. He announces that this performance, and all performances, are ended, and begins to burn with eldritch fire. And young Herbie, luckily enough, pulls out his water pistol and douses Gerber the Great thoroughly. And, even more luckily, it seems he has filled the water pistol with holy water from his local church’s font.

Fredric Brown really made a name for himself with short, snappy stories, and this is a sound enough example – the end of the world, invisibly and accidentally postponed by an unsung hero! It’s a daft idea well executed, which is the sort of thing where Brown really shines. Short, sweet, goes down a treat.

Nelson S. Bond’s short story “Take my Drum to England” is the second one this issue to feature World War II, in this case the Dunkirk evacuation. Soldier Thompson (if he has a rank or a first name, I didn’t catch it) is, along with the rest of the British Expeditionary Force, fleeing in as orderly a fashion as possible towards the English Channel. He and a companion, Owens, are picked up by a strange, rather old-fashioned craft…. At the end of the story, Thompson is discovered on the English coast, apparently having clung overnight to the hull of a capsized boat – but Thompson knows different; he remembers hearing reassuring words from that old hero of English mariners, Sir Francis Drake himself.

Bond seems to be trying to do what Arthur Machen once did with his “Angels of Mons”… the Dunkirk evacuation rather lends itself to that sort of thing; even at the time, it was widely mythologized, and became a bizarre sort of inspiration during the early phases of the war, a symbol of British pluck and ingenuity in the face of overwhelming odds. So it dovetails quite nicely with another bit of British folklore, about Drake coming back in England’s hour of need*. As a story, it’s not actually that much – Thompson spends most of the time semi-conscious and quoting poetry; there’s a lot of background detail about Dunkerque (as Bond correctly spells it) which all feels like the “I have done the research, reader, and now it is your turn to suffer” school of writing to me. But it’s a sound upstanding piece of patriotic flim-flam which will make you want to knock the beastly Hun for six, so that’s all right then. I think.

On to Theodore Sturgeon, and his novelette “The Golden Egg”. The egg of the title is a being of pure intellect, the creation of a civilization, billions of years ago, which went down the “evolve into beings of pure intellect” route. Craving sensation and excitement, the egg travels across eons of time and vast stretches of space, and winds up in our world. Here, it decides to plumb the greatest mystery of all: the female mind! And so it incarnates itself as a human male, and sets out to become the ideal man in the perfect relationship….

I think it’s safe to say the gender politics are, err, of their time, here. There are some entertaining touches; Sturgeon’s idea of the perfect man calls himself “Elron” (there’s an item in the lettercol, too, which suggests Sturgeon had a quite reverential attitude to my least favourite hack writer); initially, the egg thinks that the small humans with the brightly coloured displays are the males, and the large drab ones are the females; the egg copies human language from the brains of its interlocutors, and for a while, as a large handsome man, talks like a fashionable young lady, calling people “darling” and going on about clothing styles… which may be the closest Unknown has yet come to acknowledging the existence of homosexuals. Of course, the magazine’s resolute prudishness means it only admits heterosexuality exists if you put a gun to its head, so the gays never stood much of a chance anyway…. Ultimately, the alien superintelligence gets bored with the whole project, disliking the way it apparently has to act stupid once in a while to keep its relationship on track… so it grants its “Elron” shell an independent existence, gives it a few words of wisdom, and zooms off back to the wider cosmos. It’s very much stuck in traditional 1940s views of gender roles, but it’s an OK piece of writing… I guess… though, at novelette length, it does go on a bit.

The lettercol seems to have grown a pair and shouldered its way out of its traditional slot right at the back of the mag. We start off with a letter thanking Mr. Gilbert, in last issue’s column, for his kind opinions, and expressing positive views of Theodore Sturgeon and L. Ron Hubbard. It’s signed “E. Hunter Waldo Hunter”. You are not fooling anyone, Sturgeon. Otherwise, fannish eminence Russ Chauvenet writes to say the last issue was too full of doom and gloom. Mary Evelyn Rogers of Lawton, Oklahoma confesses herself captivated by fantasy, less captivated by the bimonthly schedule. R.B. Kimball of Parkchester Road, New York is breaking out into verse again; I do wish he wouldn’t do that. And Ronald Harmer of Galt, Ontario devotes some space and effort to categorizing the sorts of stories that come up in Unknown, and criticizing some of them in detail. Honestly, what sort of obsessive nitwit would spend precious hours of the only life they’ll ever have subjecting Unknown to that sort of scrutiny? I ask you.

Finally, we have Malcolm Jameson’s short story “Even the Angels”, about a clerical error in Heaven. It’s told in epistolary format, with lots of formal inter-departmental memos and rather less formal follow-up notes. Herbert McQuigley, a faithful follower of a dour Christian sect, dies and is, through a mix-up in the records department of Heaven, condemned to Hell. After a short time (by celestial standards – some two hundred and thirty-seven years) the error is detected and McQuigley is fished out of the lake of fire and issued with a fresh set of non-singed robes and wings. But this isn’t enough for McQuigley – he demands compensation! And he will settle for nothing less than a free pass to go back to Earth and commit the sins he was wrongly punished for….

Skits on bureaucracy always seem to play well in the Campbell mags, and Jameson has form in this department; it bumbles along amiably enough, up to the point where McQuigley (a devotee of one of those denominations that’s perfectly happy with other people going to Hell) starts bragging about his get-out-of-sin-free card, and manages to promote (or demote) himself to the status of “unrepentant sinner” thereby. The inept angels skate out of any serious consequences, and God Himself is mildly amused… so it all ends well, except for McQuigley, who is left burning in hellfire for all eternity. Which is a bit of a downer ending for him, you have to admit.

And that wraps up another issue of Unknown – a fair-to-middling one, I suppose, with a lively short or two to counterbalance the dead weight of another Hubbard hack job. But what treats await us in the next issue, in the new-look larger format? At least it will be easier to find, I guess.

*It gets complicated. Drake was English but not British, Britain as a nation not existing in his time, but he gets adopted as a British hero once Britain happens. (Pretty safe bet that, if the Scots get independence again, they will happily hand him back.) One might add that any relationship between the national hero Sir Francis Drake and the actual historical figure Sir Francis Drake is tenuous at best. But, what the heck, it makes for a good patriotic legend, and we can all feel superior to the Spanish. Or the Germans. Some lot of bally foreigners, anyway.