The Story About the Story...
...is arguably better than the story itself. Here’s an introduction I wrote to accompany “Part of the Job” when it appeared — finally! — in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine:
In May of 2011 I was in Orange, California, signing copies of A Drop of the Hard Stuff at Book Carnival. Lynn Munroe, the dealer/collector with a vast knowledge of mid-century genre fiction and erotica, turned up with a couple of rarities for me to sign. And he showed me a copy of the December 1967 issue of a magazine called Dapper. “There’s a story of yours in here,” he said.
Oh?
I looked at the story, and it had my name on it. I didn’t recognize the title, and I knew I’d never had a story in Dapper. Far as I could remember, I’d never even laid eyes on a copy of the magazine.
I gave “Part of the Job” a very quick scanning, and it didn’t ring any kind of a bell. At the same time, I didn’t spot any sentences that I could swear I hadn’t written. (Sometimes, you know, you can tell. Back in the early 1960s, I wrote pseudonymous erotic novels for publishers like Midwood and Nightstand under names like Sheldon Lord and Andrew Shaw, and I also licensed those pen names to ghostwriters. I’ve lately been reissuing some of those works as eBooks — for as surely as rock breaks scissors and paper covers rock, so does avarice trump almost everything. But I’ll only bring out those books I wrote myself, and I rarely have to look at more than a page or two to see my own hand at work, or be certain of its absence.)
“Well, it could be mine,” I told Lynn. “I have absolutely no recollection of it, but at the same time I can’t rule it out.”
“I bought two copies,” he said magnanimously, “and one’s for you. I figured you didn’t have the magazine, or you would have included the story in One Night Stands & Lost Weekends.”
That was a collection of my earliest work, and “Part of the Job” would have fit in perfectly — if it was mine and if I’d had a clue it existed.
I read the story that night in my hotel room. By the time I’d finished, I was willing to acknowledge the story as my own work. There was not a line in it I couldn’t have written, and there were phrases and sentences that sounded to me like my own voice. Moreover, I saw the ending coming — in a way that suggested I had had a hand in devising it.
But how could I have so utterly forgotten it?
I know when I must have written the story. It would have been in late 1962 or early 1963, when I was living on Ebling Avenue in Tonawanda. I’d been writing stories for the crime magazines since 1957, when I’d made my first sale (“You Can’t Lose”) to Manhunt. Sometime in ’62 I managed to sell a story to AHMM, and that encouraged me to write several more with that market in mind. Some of them sold. One that did not, I’m reasonably certain, was “Part of the Job.”
It is, as you’ll see, not a terribly complicated story. I’m sure the basic idea occurred to me, and once it did I sat down and wrote it. Since then I’ve learned to live with an idea for a little while, giving the subconscious a chance to develop it, but back then I would take the idea straight to the typewriter and stand up an hour or two later with a finished manuscript. Short stories were done of an evening; the daytime hours were devoted to the production of twenty or more pages of a novel.
So the story wasn’t on my mind for very long before it was in the mail to my agent. It would have gone to AHMM — I believe the magazine was edited in Florida back then — and I wouldn’t have necessarily been notified that it failed to sell, but after that happened my agent would have sent it somewhere else.
And so on.
And then, in late ’63 or early ’64, my agent and I split the blanket. I represented myself for a few months, and then got another agent, and moved to Wisconsin to take an editorial job with Western Printing. I was there for a year and a half, wrote some books nights and weekends, and returned to the New York area to resume writing full-time with a new agent.
So what happened to “Part of the Job”? I can only guess that it was on some editor’s desk when that first agent returned my unsold manuscripts to me, and that it kept getting sent out even though I was no longer a client. (That particular agent wasn’t overly scrupulous about that sort of thing.) And somewhere down the line it went to Dapper, which would have been a market of last resort, and someone there bought it. And paid $50 for it, I would guess, which never found its way to me. (The agent in question wasn’t overly scrupulous about that, either.) I never learned of the sale, I never got paid for the sale, and but for Lynn Munroe’s good work, you wouldn’t be reading it today.
It’s not much of a story, and I have to say the story about it is better than the story itself. But here’s the part I really like: It’s appearing now, at long last, in the magazine for which it was originally written. And here’s the part I like even better: I’m getting paid for it!
Scenarios
The road veered a few degrees as it reached the outskirts of the city, just enough to move the setting sun into his rearview mirror. It was almost dusk, its bottom rim already touching the horizon, and would have been somewhere between gold and orange if he’d turned to look at it. In his mirror, some accident of optics turned it the color of blood.
There will be blood, he thought. He’d seen the film with that for a title, drawn into the theater by the four uncompromising words. He couldn’t remember the town, or if it had been weeks or months ago, but he could summon up the smell of the movie house, popcorn and musty seats and hairspray, could recall the way his seat felt, and its distance from the screen. His memory was quirky that way, and what did it matter, really, when or where he’d seen the film? What did it matter if he’d seen it at all?
Blood? There was greed, he thought, and bitterness, and raw emotion. There was a performance which never let you forget for a moment that you were watching a brilliant actor hard at work. And there was blood, but not all that much of it.
The sun burned blood-red in his rear-view, and he bared his teeth and grinned at it. He could feel the energy in his body, the tingling sensation in his hands and feet, a palpable electrical current surging within him. The sun was setting and the night was coming and there would be a moon, and it would be a hunter’s moon.
His moon.
There would be a woman. Oh, yes, there would be a woman. And there would be pleasure — his — and there would be pain — hers. There would be both those things, growing ever more intense, rushing side by side to an ending.
There would be death, he thought, and felt the blood surging in his veins, felt a throbbing in his loins. Oh, yes, by all means, there would be death.
There might even be blood. There usually was.
Yes. This was the place.
It was the third bar he’d walked into, and he stepped up to the rail and ordered his third double vodka of the evening, Absolut, straight up.
As far as he could tell, all vodka was the same. He ordered Absolut because he liked the way it sounded. Once in a liquor store window he saw a vodka that called itself Black Death, and he’d tried ordering that for a while, but nobody ever had it. He didn’t suppose it would taste any different.
The bartender was a short-haired blonde with hard blue eyes that took his measure as she poured his drink. She didn’t like what she saw, he could tell that much, and under the right circumstances he’d enjoy setting her straight. She had an inch-long scar on her sharp chin, and he let himself imagine giving her some new scars. Breaking some bones. Driving the heel of his hand into her temple, right next to the eye socket. If you did it just right, you got the eye to pop out. If you did it wrong, well, there was nothing to stop you from trying again, was there?