"Our Skillful Technique, Acquired in the Course of Fifteen Years of Uninterrupted Success (We Received More Than 2000 Visitors Last Year), Permits Us To Guarantee a Minute Dose and Immediate Results"

"Suicide Hotel."

By André Maurois (Émile Herzog, 1885-1967; Wikipedia HERE; the ISFDb HERE; the SFE HERE; and the IMDb HERE).

First appearance: Candide, December 16, 1937.

English reprint: Coronet, August 1938 (today's text).

Reprinted in EQMM, February 1952 (go to text page 3 HERE).

Reprints page (ISFDb HERE).

Filmed for The Alfred Hitchcock Hour as "Thanatos Palace Hotel"; first air date: February 1, 1965 (IMDb HERE). (Also filmed in Germany, France, Mexico, Russia, and Australia.)

Short short story (5 pages).

Online at Archive.org (HERE).

   "Suicide is an art that does not permit mediocrity nor amateurism, and which, moreover, by its very nature does not allow the acquisition of experience."

MOST OF US would probably agree with George Carlin: "I couldn't commit suicide if my life depended on it." But sometimes life throws us hard balls and we can't get out of the way fast enough. When that happens, in the grip of despair, dark thoughts cloud the mind. In our story, one such despairing individual loses his fortune and his marriage and decides to end it all, and wouldn't you know it, there just happens to be an organization that's very willing to help him do it—for a price, of course . . .

Principal characters:

~ Jean Monnier ("Huddled in an arm chair, his head in his hands, he seemed crushed"), Gertrude Miller ("he’s gambled his shirt. Fanny told me so. She’s going to leave him tonight"), Harry Cooper ("Tough luck for him"), Henry Boerstecher ("Cruel? On the contrary it is in that that the humanity of our method lies"), Claire Kerby-Shaw ("Why the devil did such a charming being want to die?"), and Sarconi ("You asked for me, Signor Manager?").

References:

- "Suicide":

  "SUICIDE (from Latin sui, "of oneself," and cidium, from caedere, "to kill"), the act of intentionally destroying one's own life. The phenomenon of suicide has at all times attracted a large amount of attention from moralists and social investigators. Its existence is looked upon, in Western civilization, as a sign of the presence of maladies in the body politic which, whether remediable or not, deserve careful examination." (Wikisource HERE).

- "Thanatos":

  "In Greek mythology, Thanatos ('(I) die, am dying') was the personification of death." (Wikipedia HERE.)

- Sarconi's name seems to hint at his function:

  "combining form from Greek sark-, sárx 'flesh, piece of meat'." (Merriam-Webster HERE).

Resource:

- An excellent, very detailed, and thorough compare-and-contrast summary by Jack Seabrook of both the Maurois and Hitchcock versions of the story is on bare-bones e-zine (WARNING! SPOILERS! HERE).

The bottom line:

Unless otherwise noted, all bibliographical data are derived from The FictionMags Index created by William G. Contento & edited by Phil Stephensen-Payne.

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"The Opinion of That Portion of the Detective Police Who Have Looked into Some Circumstances Connected with the Case, Points Strongly to the Conclusion That a Deed of Violence Has Been Committed"

From The Illustrated London News, September 7, 1844, online (HERE).

"A Muscle Was Twitching in the Gunman's Neck; His Finger Began To Tighten on the Trigger"

HERE we have a science fiction writer adroitly crossing over into crime fiction, where he demonstrates the superiority of . . .

"Mind Over Mayhem."

By Mack Reynolds (1917-83; Wikipedia HERE; the ISFDb HERE; the SFE HERE; and e-fanzines HERE).

Illustrator unknown.

First appearance: New Detective Magazine, November 1950.

Reprinted in New Detective (U.K.) #2, 1951 and 100 Crooked Little Crime Stories, 1994.

Short short short story (3 pages).

Online at SFFAudio (HERE).

   "I noticed that he still crooked his little finger."

BODY LANGUAGE, we're told, is often more eloquent than the spoken word. Fair enough, but if someone with a gun claims he can read people that way then he'd better be really good at it; otherwise, it could mean a one-way trip to the slammer . . .

Main characters:

~ Jerry ("Haven't got a home, Sam; just a hotel room with four walls and a bed and a chair or two and a couple hundred pocket books"), Sam ("In your hat"), and the stranger ("You can size a person up in just a few minutes by the way they walk and talk and by their gestures").

Resources:

- Mack Reynolds normally grazed in the SFF pulps, to wit: "He Took It with Him" (HERE), "Dark Interlude" (with Fredric Brown HERE), "The Adventure of the Snitch in Time" (with August Derleth ) and "The Adventure of the Ball of Nostradamus" (with August Derleth, both HERE), "Gun for Hire" (HERE), "The Adventure of the Extraterrestrial" (with August Derleth HERE), and "My Best Friends Are Martians" (HERE).

The bottom line:

Unless otherwise noted, all bibliographical data are derived from The FictionMags Index created by William G. Contento & edited by Phil Stephensen-Payne.

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The Hitch-Hiker's Gripe to the Galaxy

THE LATE Douglas Adams evidently thought that a universe devoid of any meaning could be consistently hilarious, but when author and critic Brian Stableford decided to look into the matter, he had some reservations . . .

The Subject:

Douglas Adams (1952-2001; Wikipedia HERE; the ISFDb HERE; the SFE HERE; and the IMDb HERE).

The Critic:

Brian Stableford (1948-2024; Wikipedia HERE; the ISFDb HERE; the SFE HERE; and the IMDb HERE).

The Focal Character:

Dirk Gently (WARNING! SPOILERS! Wikipedia HERE).

The Books:

(1) Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987) (WARNING! SPOILERS! Wikipedia HERE).

(2) The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988) (WARNING! SPOILERS! Wikipedia HERE).

(3) Adams made a third attempt at another Dirk Gently novel, The Salmon of Doubt (2002), but died before completing it (WARNING! SPOILERS! Wikipedia HERE).

The Article:

"The Big Sellers, 1 - Douglas Adams."

By Brian Stableford.

First appearance: Interzone, July-August 1989.

Critical review (4 pages).

Online at Archive.org (HERE).

   "The Gently books are not really exercises in the detective genre because they are far too subversive of its parameters. Gently will have nothing of the Holmesian dictum that when you have eliminated the impossible whatever remains, however improbable, must be true."

WHEN today's article was published, Douglas Adams was just breaking away from novelizing adaptations of THE HITCH-HIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY radio and TV programs, making it . . .

  ". . . necessary to come up with something new, which would not need to live on borrowed charm, and what Adams came up with was Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (1987), whose spectacular success was quickly followed up by a sequel, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988). Although they have not received universal critical acclaim — publication of the second volume of Dirk Gently’s exploits called forth a particularly ruthless demolition job by a Sunday Times reviewer — these books do serve to demonstrate that Adams’ career was by no means a flash in the pan, and that his humour is flexible enough to fit more than one literary template."

  ". . . [and so we have] Douglas Adams, who — at the ripe young age of 36 — must contemplate the prospect of spending half a lifetime being consistently funny. One can count on the fingers of one hand the number of writers who have actually managed that, and there would be at least a couple of fingers to spare."

  "Comedy is fun; explanations of why jokes work are anything but funny. It is only natural that people who laugh at jokes should feel that investigation of why they have laughed is at best utterly irrelevant and at worst threatening — because once we become fully conscious of how and why we find things funny we might be prevented thereby from finding them funny in future."

  "If there is anything which is ruthlessly and repeatedly asserted by Adams’ anecdotes and vignettes it is that when you try to figure out what it all means, all you get is a poke in the ego."

  "It hardly needs to be observed that underneath the jokiness this is really a rather bleak view of things."

  "Given that the world-view of modern science provides such convincing back-up for Adams’ assertions regarding our utter triviality it is perhaps surprising that sf in general (whose supposed mission is, after all, to explore what lies at and beyond the horizons of the scientific imagination) usually goes in the opposite direction."

  "The main problem with bathetic humour is that every time you move from the sublime to the ridiculous it gets harder to scale the heights of sublimity again. There comes a time when you have shot the last sacred cow in the herd, and there is nothing sufficiently grandiose left to be worth dissolving in the acid-bath of callous banality."

  "The world-view of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is a much more cheerful one than the world-view of the Hitch-Hiker books, and despite his chaotic lifestyle Dirk Gently is here essentially a winner . . . but The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul . . . is much closer in tone to the later Hitch-Hiker books."

  "The anarchic comedians of today have found no order to assault which is anywhere near as resilient; nowadays subversion is usually too effective for its own good."

  "It is in intricate and intriguing patterns of connection rather than continually crushing revelations of meaninglessness that the prospects of future delight will lie."

References:

- "not dissimilar in spirit to the Anthropic principle":

  "The principle was formulated as a response to a series of observations that the laws of nature and parameters of the universe have values that are consistent with conditions for life as it is known rather than values that would not be consistent with life on Earth. The anthropic principle states that this is an a posteriori necessity, because if life were impossible, no living entity would be there to observe it, and thus it would not be known. That is, it must be possible to observe some universe, and hence, the laws and constants of any such universe must accommodate that possibility." (Wikipedia HERE.)

- "the Apocalypse" (Wikipedia HERE).

- "the Age of Reason" (Wikipedia HERE).

- "Heideggerian" (Wikipedia HERE) and "Jean-Paul Sartre" (Wikipedia HERE).

- "Asgard" (Wikipedia HERE) and "Odin" (Wikipedia HERE).

- "Raymond Chandler" (Wikipedia HERE) and "Philip Marlowe" (Wikipedia HERE).

- "P. G. Wodehouse" (Wikipedia HERE).

The bottom line:

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UPDATE: H. Bedford-Jones's "Clancy, Detective"

Added an Archive.org link and minor text corrections (HERE).

"The Formula Crime-Puzzle-Solution Is Becoming Obsolete"

WHEN this article was printed in 1929, it was largely thanks to Philo Vance that detective fiction was enjoying a resurgence of public interest in the wake of Sherlock's final disappearance in 1927. Advice for would-be inheritors of the Holmes canon was plentiful, such as the following aimed at authors, denoting "a marked leaning toward action" in current tecfic magazines:

"Pitfalls of the Mystery Story," August Lenniger, The Editor, October 26, 1929. Online at Google Books (HERE).

"Personally, I Regard Detective Stories As Distinctly Useful"

WAY BACK in 1906, the President of the Public Library Commission of Indiana put forth his opinion of detective fiction and whether or not it might be beneficial to the public:

From The Library Occurrent (1906-08), online at Google Books (HERE).

A substantial article about Jacob Piatt Dunn (1855-1924) is on Wikipedia (HERE):

  "He also served two terms as the state librarian (1889 to 1893) and was appointed to the Indiana Public Library Commission, serving from 1899 to 1919 (and as its first president from 1899 to 1914)."