His hands flew up, dropping the pistol on the floor. The pistol made a clanking sound, attracting his attention, and he looked down at it, recognizing it as a pistol and wondering who would drop a pistol.
A pistol on a store floor. It was funny and he began to giggle, thinking, a pistol on a store floor, and then he began to laugh, louder and louder and harder, abruptly stopping at sight of the long pink and white sticks of peppermint candy behind the showcase.
They looked huge and desirable and delicious beyond expression and he would have died for one; and then he was eating one, and then two, raveling in the sweetish mint taste like a hog in slop, and then he was eating three, and then four, and then he was gorged and the deliciousness was gone and the taste in his mouth was bitter and brackish and sickening. He spat it out. He felt like vomiting.
In bending over to vomit he saw the body of an old man lying in a puddle of blood and it so shocked him that he jumped up and ran out of the store and down the street.
He was still running when the police caught him but by that time he did not know what he was running for.
Norbert Davis
(1909–1949)
Although a relatively prolific contributor to the pulps of the 1930s and 1940s, Norbert Harrison Davis was cursed with a sense of humor, the fatal flaw that some believed was ultimately responsible for keeping him from being published more regularly. His friend and collaborator W. T. Ballard explained that Davis could write “the best ‘writer to editor’ letter of anyone in the business,” but his main work was simply “too whimsical to fit well into the action pattern.” For this reason, Davis managed to squeeze only six stories past Joseph T. Shaw during his editorship at Black Mask. It seems that Shaw’s enthusiasm for Davis’s work was qualified, even though he did include Davis’s story “Red Goose” (1934) in his seminal Hard-Boiled Omnibus (1946). It appears that most of the stories by Davis that Shaw did publish were thoroughly worked over with the editor’s blue pencil.
Davis sold his first stories to Argosy and Black Mask while studying law at Stanford University. He never practiced law, but became a professional fiction writer instead, selling mainly detective and mystery stories as well as Westerns, adventure yarns, and the odd terror tale. The blurb for his “Idiot’s Coffin Keepsake,” which he sold to Strange Detective Mysteries in 1937, reads: “Trapped in that horror mansion, Wade fought for a tortured child and a woman’s sanity — his only ally a hacked-off dead man’s hand, the jealous prize of a hopeless fool!” When one reads the story itself, it is difficult to believe that Davis’s tongue was anywhere but planted firmly in his cheek as he hammered away at his typewriter.
Probably his best and funniest characters are Doan and Carstairs, the latter a Great Dane that Doan won in a poker game and cannot, try as he might, get rid of. These two appear in Davis’s only solo novels, The Mouse in the Mountains (1943), Sally’s in the Alley (1943), and Oh Murderer Mine (1946), the second a glorious comic classic with a clever and workable plot — a real feat, considering that many of Davis’s plots became so entangled that even he lost track. Other fine creations include Max Latin, who operates out of a restaurant where the chef hates and insults his customers, and William “Bail-Bond” Dodd, who appears here, in a typically screwball story with a typically screwball title: “Who Said I Was Dead?”
Davis seems to have enjoyed his work; he found a good deal of success in his chosen markets and was well paid for his efforts. His stories appeared regularly in the Saturday Evening Post, whose payment for just one story would probably have kept an Okie family in clover for six months. But it appears that Davis’s private life was a bit less charmed, and at a certain point, things took a turn for the worse. Editors began to turn him down. In the end, Davis took his own life; as in most tragedies of this sort, no one was ever able to produce a satisfactory explanation.
J. A.
Who Said I Was Dead?
(1942)
It was a very nice casket — all shiny black with bronze handles — and it sat on a bier at the end of the chapel under the long somber sweep of dark blue drapes that hung from the arched ceiling. There were flowers banked around it with loving care, blended artistically for shading, and their scent was cloying in the still, heavy air.
Dodd felt very bad about it all. He sat at the back of the chapel and blinked gloomily in the softly shaded light that came through one of the colored glass window panels. He was a tall man with a long, homely face that normally carried an expression of cynical and wary belligerence. He usually looked like he expected the worst. Now he looked like it had happened. He wore a pair of horn-rimmed glasses that had been patched across the bridge with a piece of adhesive tape.
He was all alone in the chapel except for Mr. Miltgreen, and Mr. Miltgreen didn’t count as a mourner because he was there for business and not for sorrow, unless you could say that sorrow was his business. He was the representative of the Valley Vale Cemetery. He was a stooped, cadaverous man with black hair slicked in scanty parallel lines across the top of his bald skull. He had a sadly benign, a patient, long suffering smile.
A concealed pipe organ played notes that lingered and sobbed softly, and now a liquid tenor voice picked up the thread of melody and sang it with beautiful, modulated feeling.
Dodd turned around and beckoned to Mr. Miltgreen.
Mr. Miltgreen tiptoed noiselessly forward. “Yes?”
“Who’s that singing?” Dodd asked.
“That’s our Mr. Pillsbury. He’s part of the service.”
“Oh,” said Dodd.
He listened until the song was ended and the music faded to a humming monotone.
Mr. Miltgreen leaned over him. “That’s the end of the chapel service, Mr. Dodd.”
“What?” said Dodd. “Oh. All right.”
He got up and followed Mr. Miltgreen down the thickly carpeted aisle and out through the wide front doors. The sunlight was so bright after the dimness inside the chapel that it hurt his eyes.
“You’re sure you don’t want to see the interment?” Mr. Miltgreen inquired sympathetically.
“No,” said Dodd.
“Perhaps it is better,” Mr. Miltgreen soothed. “It is sometimes distressing.”
“How much?” Dodd asked.
Mr. Miltgreen stared at him. “I beg your pardon?”
“How much do I owe you?”
“Oh,” said Mr. Miltgreen. “Well, it’s very difficult for us to keep within the limitations of an exact figure such as you set, Mr. Dodd. I’m sorry, but in this case it ran sixteen dollars and some odd cents over. There are certain charges and fees that vary...”
“That’s O.K.,” Dodd said glumly. “Who do I pay?”
“If you’ll step this way, I’ll take care of the matter.”
They went the length of the stone-paved chapel porch and down stone steps. Lawns swept away from them in beautiful undulating waves, and the grass was so green and smooth it was incredible. A sprinkler threw water in a glistening circle. A bird sang in a subdued way.