Rocket to the Morgue Read online

  ROCKET TO

  THE MORGUE

  ANTHONY BOUCHER

  Introduction by

  F. PAUL WILSON

  AMERICAN

  MYSTERY

  CLASSICS

  Penzler Publishers

  New York

  OTTO PENZLER PRESENTS

  AMERICAN MYSTERY CLASSICS

  ROCKET TO

  THE MORGUE

  ANTHONY BOUCHER (1911-1968) was an American author, editor, and critic, perhaps best known today as the namesake of the Bouchercon convention, an annual meeting of mystery writers, fans, critics, and publishers.

  Born William Anthony Parker White, he wrote with various pseudonyms including H. H. Holmes, the moniker, borrowed from America’s most notorious serial killer, under which Rocket to the Morgue was originally published. Boucher also worked in a number of genres outside of mystery, including fantasy and science fiction. He served as the mystery fiction reviewer for the New York Times for over twenty years, writing a total of 862 columns for the paper.

  F. PAUL WILSON is an American author primarily working in the science fiction and horror genres. He has written twenty-three novels and numerous short stories in the Repairman Jack saga, his longest running series. He lives in New Jersey.

  For

  The Mañana Literary Society

  and in particular for

  ROBERT HEINLEIN

  and

  CLEVE CARTMILL

  INTRODUCTION

  FOR THE longest time I thought it was “Boo-SHAY.” I’d seen the name “Anthony Boucher” a lot: On the masthead of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, for instance, and I’d read his Far and Away and The Compleat Werewolf collections of SF and fantasy fiction. I was studying French in school, so it seemed natural to use the French pronunciation. Only when I attended my first Bouchercon did I learn to pronounce it “BOW-chur.”

  Bouchercon is an annual gathering of mystery readers, writers, and collectors, and I was confused as to why they’d name it after a sci-fi guy. But to these folks, Anthony Boucher was a mystery guy—he not only wrote mysteries, he reviewed them for the San Francisco Chronicle, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and the New York Times. Oh, and he helped found the Mystery Writers of America. So, yeah, he was a mystery guy too.

  Rocket to the Morgue combines both these passions.

  When Otto Penzler, the esteemed publisher of this line of classic mystery novels, emailed me saying he thought I’d be “a great choice” to write an introduction to Rocket to the Morgue, I wondered why. I’d never heard of the novel and I’m not known as a mystery writer. I started in science fiction, moved into horror fiction, and for the last quarter century or so I’ve busied myself with weird thrillers. But it was Otto, and it was Boucher, and the novel had “rocket” and “morgue” in the title, so I said I’d give it a read.

  Am I ever glad I did.

  A little background: the man born William Anthony Parker White did most of his writing under the name Anthony Boucher; in the early 1940s his Boucher pen name adopted the pseudonym “H. H. Holmes” (which is, in turn, the pseudonym of a late 19th century serial killer) to write mysteries, including Rocket to the Morgue. (Confused? Wait . . .)

  Rocket is set in 1941 Los Angeles, less than a year before the USA entered World War Two. It can be categorized as a locked-room mystery, but it’s so much more than that. It’s a firsthand peek into the innards of what came to be known as the Golden Age of Science Fiction, written by a man who hung out with the writers who forged that age and became household names within the genre. Not only did he know those writers, he peopled the novel with thinly disguised versions of them.

  But I knew none of this when I opened the copy Otto sent me.

  Chapter one is a commonplace domestic scene that introduces the detective protagonist, Lt. Terence Marshall. He’s soon faced with a locked-room stabbing that defies explanation. He turns to an unorthodox consultant,

  But chapter two drops us, in medias res, into a clichéd space opera starring Captain Comet and his robot companion Adam Fink—

  Hold on. Captain Comet sounded an awful lot like Edmond Hamilton’s Captain Future from that period, and I remembered a whole series of stories by the Binder brothers about a robot named Adam Link.

  Turns out Boucher has us watching over the shoulder of pulp writer Joe Henderson as he types out his latest novel while talking to his agent, M. Halstead Phyn, specialist in SF and fantasy.

  Interesting . . . was this a tip of the hat by Boucher?

  Then, in a progression of vignettes, we meet various pulp writers who all have a reason to hate a certain Hilary Foulkes, ruthless executor of his father’s huge literary estate. All typical mystery fare until Boucher drops a bombshell:

  It happens during the opening of the novel’s second day when a character drops the name “Don Stuart,” editor of two magazines, Surprising Stories and The Worlds Beyond.

  I almost drop the book.

  Don A. Stuart was the pseudonym of John W. Campbell, under which he wrote the timeless Who Goes There? (adapted into The Thing from Another World and John Carpenter’s The Thing). In 1941, under his real name, he was editor of not one but two magazines: Astounding Stories and Unknown Worlds.

  No question: He was talking about John W. Campbell—my mentor.

  Decades later, when I was trying to break in, Campbell was also the only editor who told me why he was rejecting my stories. His rejections became my only writing course. I made my very first sale to him in 1970.

  Imagine my shock to see Boucher’s characters talking about this Don Stuart fellow—knowingly and with respect as the editor who was forcing science fiction to grow up. Which is exactly what Campbell did, starting in 1937, as editor of Astounding.

  From that point on I started putting the characters under a microscope. Half the fun of the novel (at least for me) was sussing out who was who.

  No question that one of the early major suspects, Austin Carter, is Robert A. Heinlein, known as “the dean of science fiction.” The detective interviews him in Carter’s office where the writer has a wall chart to keep track of all the interrelated stories he pens under his own name. Fact: In 1941 Astounding published a chart delineating the course of Heinlein’s “Future History” stories.

  The scene also gives insight into how the pulp writers played the game. The average pay rate was a penny a word, with an occasional bonus of a quarter of a cent to half a cent per word. Austin Carter explains his use of multiple pseudonyms:

  “So whatever’s outside the series is by Robert Hadley—that is, in a one-cent market or better. I don’t like to hurt the commercial value of those names, so whenever I sell a reject for under a cent, it’s by Clyde Summers.”

  Fact: Heinlein did just this with his pseudonyms “Anson MacDonald” and “Lyle Monroe.” In fact, these pseudonyms have cameos in the novel.

  Elsewhere, in conversation with the character named Joe Henderson—seen earlier writing Captain Comet space operas—someone mentions “annihilating galaxies left and right.” Well, the writer who penned the deliberately juvenile Captain Future novels was Edmund Hamilton—or rather, Edmund “World Wrecker” Hamilton, as he was known.

  As for agent M. Halstead Phyn, specialist in SF and fantasy, he might be Julius Schwartz, but I’m going with Forrest J. Ackerman, an agent and a fixture around the LA science fiction community at that time.

  The only writer character I had no feel for was Matt Duncan. He may well represent a real person, but I know too little about him to make a guess.

  So, Boucher has Heinlein, Hamilton, and Forry Ackerman on stage, with John W. Campbell in the prompt box.

  But who does writer “D. Vance Wimpole” represent? He’s got crimso
n hair and blue eyes and can dash off a thirty-thousand word novella like most people scratch out a shopping list. He’s also a cad, a conniver, and a pathological liar.

  There’s only one answer: L. Ron Hubbard. Before he invented Dianetics and Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard was a redheaded, prodigiously prolific writer, known for the speed at which he could compose, who sold to a wide array of SF, fantasy, adventure, and western pulps. His reputation was that of a chronically broke womanizer who wouldn’t know the truth if it bit him on the nose.

  An amazing cast. Rocket to the Morgue made me very happy. In fact, it made me want to run up to every science fiction fan I know and shove a copy at them, shouting, “You have got to read this!”

  The mystery element made me happy too. I’m usually pretty good at sussing out the perp, and I thought I’d solved the second murder (yes, there are two), but I was wrong. I like when a book fools me.

  If you’re not into science fiction, or if you think science fiction began with Star Trek or Star Wars, ignore all my backgrounding and simply enjoy Rocket to the Morgue as the murder mystery Anthony Boucher intended it to be. But if you’re a well-read fan, or simply interested in the history of the genre, a double treat awaits.

  F. PAUL WILSON

  The Jersey Shore

  Summer 2018

  FOULKES, Fowler (Harvey), author; b. San Francisco, Calif., Jan. 15, 1871; s. Roger Clinton and Catharine (Livingstone) F.; A.B., Stanford, 1890; A.M., King’s College, Cambridge, 1892; m. Mary Margaret O’Donnell, of San Francisco, June 3, 1893; i son, Roger O’Donnell (deceased); m. 2d., the Hon. Patricia St. John of London, England, May 10, 1903; i son, Hilary St. John. Teaching asst. in physics, Leland Stanford Univ., 1892-95; freelance newspaper work in San Francisco, 1895-1900; govt. propaganda bureau, 1917-19. Mem. Authors’ League of America, Phi Beta Kappa. Republican. Episcopalian. Author: The Lilting Lark, 1897. Legends of ’49, 1898. The Last Coast, 1898. Beneath the Abyss, 1899. The Researches of Dr. Derringer, 1900. The Purple Light, 1901. Dr. Derringer Returns, 1903. The Intriguers (play), 1904. The Mission of Sorrow. 1906. The Missions in Twilight, 1908. The Further Researches of Dr. Derringer, 1909. Gold at the Mill, 1912. The Only Mrs. Foxley (play), 1913. Union Pacific, 1916. Derringer, 1917. Derringer at War, 1919. And the Earth Shook, 1923. The Unchallenged Theory, 1924. The Crimson Prism, 1926. The Last Researches of Dr. Derringer, 1927. Life and Dr. Derringer: an Autobiography, 1928. Contbr. to mags. Address: care of Hornby and Fraser, 386 Fourth Ave., New York, N. Y.

  —From Who’s What in the U. S. A., 1928-1929.

  The essence of Fowler was that he was unique. There was a trick of contortion with which he used to amuse us in his rare but ever charming lighter moments; doctors who heard it described would pronounce it impossible until they saw it. Just so the man from Mars might say that it was impossible to create a character so real and vivid that he would become part of the consciousness of all mankind, from Peoria to Timbuctoo. But we who have read the glorious exploits of Dr. Derringer know that no proven fact could ever surpass in reality this magnificent creation of Fowler’s.

  —From Foulkes the Man, by Darrell Wimpole. New York, Hornby, 1931.

  Eliminate the impossible. Then if nothing remains, some part of the “impossible” must be possible.

  —From The Researches of Dr. Derringer by Fowler Foulkes. New York, Hornby, 1900. (And passim in other of the Dr. Derringer stories.)

  THE FIRST DAY:

  Thursday, October 30, 1941

  LEONA MARSHALL stretched her long legs out on the bed and clasped her hands comfortably behind her red head. “Isn’t it nice I couldn’t nurse her?” she murmured. “Think how awkward it would be for you to take over a feeding.”

  Her husband took the bottle from the electric warmer and tested the milk on the inside of his wrist. “Handy-like,” he agreed. He seemed satisfied with the milk and wrapped the bottle in a cloth. Then he lifted his three-month-old daughter from her bassinet and held her up high. The two beamed fatuously and gloriously at each other.

  “No games,” Leona warned him. “She has to learn that meal times are strictly business.”

  “We aren’t playing games,” Terence Marshall protested unconvincingly, settling his daughter into the crook of his arm and tenderly poking her plump stomach.

  “No?” Leona’s voice was suspicious.

  “No. You know what, Leona; this is a fat little wench you’ve got here. Think she’ll ever grow up to have her mother’s figure?”

  “Such as it is now . . .” Leona surveyed herself ruefully.

  “It’ll do. Come on, darling, open your mouth. This is milk. Nice milk. You remember.” The pink little lips parted reluctantly, then clasped avidly on the rubber nipple.

  “Anything interesting happen today?” Leona wondered.

  The baby released the nipple and turned her head vaguely toward the voice. Her father said, “Damn it, Leona, if I’m going to take feedings you might at least let me give them in peace.”

  “But did anything?”

  “Here, darling. Nice nipple . . . Oh, nothing special. Just a murder. No,” he cut his wife off hastily before she could speak. “Nothing up your alley. And why a lieutenant on Homicide should be cursed with a wife who loves mystery novels is one example of the ways of God to man that Milton forgot to justify. Nothing at all pretty about this one. No locked room, no mysterious weapons, no unbreakable alibis—the last mainly because we haven’t even got a suspect yet.”

  “Still . . .” said Leona.

  “All right—if you’ll stay hushed, I’ll tell you about it. She doesn’t mind my talking. See: it kind of lulls her. No, this was just a bum in a Main Street rooming house. A floater. Name, according to the register, Jonathan Tarbell. Nothing on him to check that one way or the other. Been there a fortnight, according to the clerk. Just slept there, never around in the daytime. One visitor who called a couple of times—description too vague to help.

  “Shot through the heart at close range. Thirty-five automatic. Weapon smartly, if extravagantly, left right beside the body. No prints, which together with the man’s bare hands rules out suicide. Somebody, presumably the murderer, had searched the room, but hadn’t bothered to take over three hundred dollars in cash.

  “So it shapes up like this: Tarbell’s clothes were new and fairly good, and he had plenty of cash—far too much for a man living in the lower depths. The murderer wanted something in the room, but not money. So in all likelihood Tarbell was tied up with some kind of a racket (blackmail, at a guess), pushed it too far, and got taken care of.

  “That much is clear, and the obvious next step—”

  “Aren’t you ever going to burp her?” Leona asked.

  “Now look. If I don’t tell you about what I’m doing, you plague us with questions. If I do try to tell you, you start interrupting me and—”

  “Go ahead and burp her.”

  “All right.”

  “And don’t forget the burp cloth. We can’t go having your suit cleaned every day.”

  “All right. And anyway I hadn’t forgotten it.” Lieutenant Marshall spread a diaper over his shoulder and hoisted his daughter up. “The trouble with you, madam,” he went on, patting the infant’s rump, “is that you haven’t any real interest in crime itself. All you care about is the fancy frills and furbelows of romanticism that the whodunit writers trick it out in. Crime itself is essentially flat, dull, drab, and infinitely important.” He spoke in the grave orotund tone into which his usual colloquialism occasionally lapsed, and his daughter answered him with a burp equally grave and even more orotund.

  “I know,” Leona chortled. “She’s going to grow up to be a critic.”

  Marshall grinned at the baby. “Let’s throw your mother a bone, huh?” With his free hand he fished out of his pocket a string of beads and a scrap of paper and tossed them over to the bed. “See what you make of those while we finish our dinner.”

  “Clews!” Leona cried gleefully.

  “No, Ursu
la.” Marshall resolutely turned his daughter’s face away from her mother. “You can play with clews when you’re a big girl. Right now you drink your milk.”

  “She took the whole bottle,” he announced proudly ten minutes later. “Now you can talk.”

  “Where did you find these? Is she wet?”

  “To the second question, what do you think? To the first, that bit of paper was in among the unstolen currency. The rosary had slipped down through a hole in the lining of his pocket. Indicates the body was searched by an amateur—always beware torn linings. And those two items are the sole damned leads we’ve got to go on.”

  Leona looked at the two letters and five figures scrawled on the paper. “A phone number and a rosary . . . I suppose you’ve checked the number?”

  “It’s an apartment hotel out on Rossmore near Wilshire. Veddy veddy swank. Not what you’d expect to be in communication with a corpse on Skid Row. Some twenty-odd apartments, though. It’s going to be a job checking ’em all.” He folded back Ursula’s nightgown and began taking out safety pins.

  “And a rosary . . . Just what does that prove? Supposing a blackmailer does have his religious moments—how does that give you a lead?”

  Marshall stuck the pins in a cake of soap and went to work deftly on the diaper problem. Ursula decided she was being tickled and liked it. “Look at the rosary closer.”

  “It’s nicely carved, probably quite an expensive one. Hand work, and good. Aside from that . . .”

  “A zero on today’s recitation, my sweet. You’re the clew-addict, but on this you flop badly. How many sets of beads are there?”

  “One . . . two . . . Seven.”

  “Exactly. And that’s all wrong. I’ve noticed the rosaries that the nuns carry. There should be five sets. So there’s something strange about this one, and I’ve got to check up on it.” He finished pinning the extra diaper for night wear, pulled the baby’s gown down, and fastened the drawstring.

  “With Sister Ursula?”