And I must have received a thousand letters telling me I had no right to wash my hands of the human race; I had no right to say fuck’m and stop fighting for “the cause” (whatever the hell that is); I had no right to point the finger at them and exclude myself.
Clearly, my readers did not understand the message. As the old Midwestern saying goes, “When you point a finger at someone else, you point three at yourself.” I agree. I’m one of them, so are you. We’re all the villains, the Bad Guys, the fear-makers. That part in each of us, even the noblest and most self-sacrificing of us, that forgets or fears or avoids or rationalizes and permits evil to flourish. We are all Jekyll and Hyde. And I wrote that introduction to say that we are permitting Mr. Hyde to dominate us more and more each day. Just like cops. Just like preachers. Just like humanitarians and school kids and politicians. How can you fight the fight against that evil, except in yourself?
Yes, I have the right to become a misanthrope, to decide the human race doesn’t have the stuff to make it, that it won’t last one-thousandth the life-span of the great saurians, because seemingly the human race doesn’t give a damn. And one fights only as long as one has the fiber strong enough to fight; after which, one tries to simply get through the days. And no, I haven’t really given it all up, as the writing of this introduction shows, because I’ve never learned (like Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer) to “give it up and quit gracefully.”
But what is one to say in the face of a letter like the one from that cop? Can we possibly beat the Hyde in each of us and defeat the fear that gags us like an evil fog?
Perhaps. But probably not. We seem determined to go on this way till we either reduce ourselves to barbarians or make “civilized” existence so unbearable that crime and the suicide rate claim us before we taste the simplest joys.
I don’t have the answers for anyone but myself.
Perhaps you have some of the answers.
If so, apply them.
And then, perhaps, one day soon, guys like that cop will be able to sign their names to letters as potent and meaningful as the one you just read.
Religion won’t get it, dope won’t get it, letting Congress do it won’t get it, only caring and education will do it.
Or, as Louis Pasteur put it, “Chance favors the prepared mind.”
I’ve gone on too long. Conversation, the rap, still holds top spot in my catalogue of ways to have a good time. But I’ve rambled and digressed, and I’ve got to tell you a few things about how some of these stories came to be written, and then I’ll get my face out of your way and let you go on to read the entertainments. Excuse me if I lecture. I don’t mean to. It just comes over me sometimes.
In the main, most of these stories were written in the early and mid years of my writing career. I went through about 300,000 words of previously published (but never collected) stories to select these sixteen. I like each one of them, or they wouldn’t be here. But I’ve substantially rewritten all of them. The errors of style and grammar I made when I was learning my craft were so silly and awful, I couldn’t bear to let them stand. So in many ways these are new stories. Two were written for this book, just a few months before you bought the book.
Only one of these stories has ever appeared in a collection before, “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs.” I include it here, even though it’s available in the recently-published DEATHBIRD STORIES, because it is the most prominent of my suspense stories, and comes with the cachet of the MWA award I mentioned earlier in this introduction. Besides, it’s only 8000 words long, out of a total wordage in this book of almost 77,500. (This introduction is over 12,200 words long, a major chunk of work, as essay material intended for collections goes; or merely another example of The Mouth That Doth Run Off. Who knows …?) As a matter of fact, it occurs to me that some of you may be curious as to the way word-lengths are computed, and how a sufficiency of material is gathered together for a collection. Well, most paperbacks contain about 60,000 words, if they’re original novels of ordinary length, or collections of stories. So you’re getting quite a package for your money. Using typewriter margins set at 12 on the left and 73 on the right (good margins are necessary for the eyesight and sanity of editors, proofreaders, typesetters and even authors correcting dumb mistakes they made when they were in their twenties), using pica type — elite is too small — most writers average out between 250 to 300 words a typewritten page. I use 260 as a figure to even things out where there are stories with a lot of dialogue, which takes up less space. So that means a twelve-page story (typed, that is) will. run 3000 words. Sixteen pages is a 4000 worder. And so on. The accepted categories of story lengths are: short story — anything under 7500 words; novelette — at least 7500 but less than 17,500 words; novella — from 17,500 to 40,000; novel — anything of 40,000 words or higher. These are the generally accepted length and category judgments, as adhered to by, for instance, the Science Fiction Writers of America when classifying stories for the Nebula Awards.
To carry this helpful bit of public service data to its logical conclusion, for those budding authors among you who never had anyone lay such necessary but primitive information on you, as I discuss each story. I’ll insert its wordage in square brackets. Don’t thank me, just don’t send me your stories to read … I’ll only burn them.
“The Whimper of Whipped Dogs” [8000] is based on the murder of Kitty Genovese, about which I’ve nattered in books like THE DEADLY STREETS [Pyramid V3931]. The case is now so famous, it’s obsessed me for eleven years since it happened. Woman knifed to death in the streets of New York’s Kew Gardens section while thirty-eight people watched from their windows, heard her screams for help, did nothing, turned up their TV sets so the screams wouldn’t penetrate. It took the rapist-killer over half an hour to slice her up as she dragged herself around almost a full city block. They could have saved her. They didn’t I was never satisfied with the intellectual theories about why no one had aided her. It’s not the kind of dehumanized behavior that can be explained with phrases like “disinvolvement” or “alienation” or “inurement to the reality of violence from seeing so much death on nightly newscasts.” It was the kind of mythic situation that could only be explained in terms of magic realism, fantasy.
“Eddie, You’re My Friend” [1300] is a rarity. It’s an unsold story. I’ve written over 800 short stories and articles and essays and suchlike in my twenty years behind this machine, and with only one or two exceptions — dogs that embarrass me even to look at, which I’d fight to the death against letting appear in print — everything has sold to one magazine or another. But when I went through my files to put this book together, and read all those old stories, and picked only the best, I found “Eddie” and remembered it, and smiled and liked it. It’s not a particularly thoughtful story, just a little one-punch blowdart, but it worked, so I added it to the book. But when I went to locate the source of first publication, to enter it on the acknowledgment page where copyrights are listed, I couldn’t find any mention of its having been published. I consulted the exhaustive and elegant bibliography of my work assembled by Leslie Kay Swigart, but even she had no mention of the story. And I realized I’d assumed that story had been published, all these years. But it hadn’t. It was, in effect, a brand-new, unpublished yarn. And it appears here for the first time. (Unless, in the five and a half months between the time I write this page, and NO DOORS, NO WINDOWS is published, I manage to sell it to a magazine, in which case it will still be a new story as far as book publication is concerned.)