Retro Review: "The Martian and the Milkmaid" by Frances M. Deegan

I keep finding more stories by obscure and forgotten women authors of the golden age, so enjoy this review of  "The Martian and the Milkmaid", a science fiction short story by Frances M. Deegan, that was published in the October 1944 issue of Fantastic Adventures and would have been eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugo Award. The story may be read online here.

Warning: Spoilers beyond this point.

"The Martian and the Milkmaid" opens with the narrator in his car, complaining about the state of the roads in North Dakota in 1944. We learn that his name is Howard Clement and that he is a geologist chasing meteorites, looking for deposits of diatomaceous earth. Too bad that that meteorites have the diabolical tendency to select the most inaccessible places to land.

Howard's destination is the rundown farm of Bill and Margie Henshaw, where a meteorite came down in 1901. The Henshaws are friendly enough and welcome Howard with breakfast and freshly brewed coffee. Though Bill warns Howard that his scientific equipment will draw the attention of the Gook, a mentally disabled man who lives on the farm and likes tinkering with things. Sometimes, he's remarkably successful – for example, he built an incubator for the Henshaws, allowing them to raise and sell chickens. Oh yes, and the Gook just showed up on the farm at the same time the meteorite came down. Bill Henshaw found him wandering alone in the storm, naked and full of bruises.

As is the habit with friendly midwestern farmers who come across aliens and meteorites in their fields (just remember the origin of Superman), the Henshaws took the Gook in and nursed him back to health. From the bruises on his body, the Henshaws assumed that the Gook had been held captive and escaped. Since the Gook couldn't speak in any language the Henshaws could understand, they also assumed he was mentally disabled, though the story uses far less polite terms. "Gook" was about the only word the stranger could utter, so that became his name.

Howard finally meets the Gook, when he comes into the kitchen and sits down at the table. We learn that the Gook is tall, slender and dark-skinned, that he has pointed ears, wears black glasses, that his dark hair has a purple tint and that his skin has an olive green tinge. When the Gook finally takes his black glasses off, his eyes are yellow. He also takes his coffee with Margie Henshaw's homemade chili sauce.

The Henshaws asks Howard about his mission, so Howard gets to infodump about the benefits and applications of diatomaceous earth. There's even a helpful footnote with further explanations. The science is correct, too – which is more than you can say for some of the stories in Astounding – with two exceptions. Diatomaceous earth is not linked to meteorites and there never was a deposit in North Dakota. Instead, the world's biggest deposits were in the Lüneburg Heath some 130 kilometres from where I live. This also explains why the US would be so eager to located alternative deposits of diatomaceous earth, since the ones in the Lüneburg Heath were inaccessible to them due to World War II.

Later that evening, when Howard is checking his equipment, the Gook comes to his room, watches him and finally asks Howard if he is intelligent. Outraged, Howard replies that he is of course intelligent, but the Gook is not convinced. After all, he muses, nothing is less certain on this haphazard planet than intelligence.

The Gook now tells Howard that he comes from Mars and is more than four hundred years old. He also tells Howard that he will find no fallen meteorite on the farm, because the meteorite was the Gook's ship. As for all the other meteorites Howard was investigating, well, they were Martian spaceships as well. For Mars is dying and the Martian people are nearly sterile. However, Earth is green and abundant and humans have no problems reproducing. The Martians want to find out why and maybe import some earthly germs and seeds to make Mars green again. However, the Gook finds Earth incredibly primitive and backwards, even though he learned English from some old schoolbooks, mail order catalogues and a dictionary the Henshaws had in their house. And since the Gook is extremely long-lived, he's biding his time and waiting for technology to become advanced enough to establish communications with Mars. Oh yes, and his name really is Gook.

Howard tells Gook that it's no surprise that he finds rural North Dakota backwards, but New York City is a completely different matter. Gook decides to take this as an invitation and travels back to New York City with Howard. The Henshaws aren't even sad to see him go; they believe it will do Gook a lot of good to see more of the world than just the farm.

In Chicago, while waiting for the flight back to New York City, Howard gets some suits for Gook, because his farmer's garb won't fly in the big city. He also introduces Gook to whisky, which Gook likes, and tells him that putting ketchup and chili sauce on everything is absolutely not acceptable in polite society. And since Howard can hardly introduce Gook as a stray Martian who followed him home, they instead hash out a convincing backstory for Gook.

There is only one problem. Gook is too dark-skinned to pass as a white man – and that's exactly how Deegan puts it. So Howard decides to pass Gook off as an East Indian man of mixed parentage named George Guk. This George Guk is a highly educated refugee who does not wish to speak about his traumatic past, which also avoids uncomfortable questions. It is very telling that a mixed race Indian refugee was considered more acceptable in the 1940s than an American-born black man.

Howard also announces that he does not intend to support Gook indefinitely, but that Gook will have to get a job to support himself, whereupon Gook informs Howard that the capitalist system is absurd and a symptom of the barbaric confusion of human existence and that humans should just abolish it. Gook also criticises consumerism and declares that WWII is a barbaric waste of resources, but that humans apparently have so many resources they can't help but start wars to destroy them. When Howard points out that most humans wish for peace, Gook counters that humans fight from birth on.

So in short, Gook is a dark-skinned pacifist Socialist from Mars, who criticises American consumerism. He also utterly fails to be impressed by all the technological miracles Howard introduces him to – radio, telephones, electricity, indoor plumbing – because too many devices are faulty.

Back in New York City, Howard pulls some strings and gets Gook forged papers as well as a job with the company where he works. Gook also moves into Howard's apartment. And that's where he meets Hebe, Howard's lover and the titular milkmaid.

According to Howard, Hebe – though she went by a different name back then – won a milking contest at a county fair in Pennsylvania and was sent to the New York World Fair of 1939 to give milking demonstrations dressed up as Hebe, goddess of dairy. Of course, Hebe isn't the goddess of dairy, but the goddess of youth and cupbearer to the gods of antiquity, but apparently 1930s dairy promoters had only a very vague grasp of Greek mythology.

Once in New York, Hebe got the taste for big city life and just stayed on, becoming a Broadway starlet. She also married a past-his-prime boxer and had a string of babies with him, four in five years. Hebe's husband is always on the road, looking for opportunities to make his comeback (even though – as Howard remarks – he never had a career in the first place), so Hebe is alone a lot. That's why she started an extramarital affair with Howard. However, once blonde and well-endowed Hebe sets eyes on Gook, she forgets all about Howard and embarks on an affair with Gook.

But Howard is far more irritated that Gook has been given a job in the company's experimental lab, where he is apparently doing invaluable research on some kind of top secret project. Howard is even more irritated that Gook earns three times what Howard earns, even though Gook has no interest in money and deposits his entire paycheck with Howard.

A few months later, Howard finally learns what Gook has been working on. For Gook has been developing an extremely light and extremely strong plastic, which has immediately been put to use to build an experimental bomber, powered by high octane fuel. And who will be the test pilot of this miraculous plane? No other than Gook himself.

However, the plane disappears during its trial flight, along with Gook. Hebe disappears around the same time during a visit to Hebe's family in Pennsylvania. A mysterious plane was spotted in the area where Hebe was last seen.

Both Hebe and Gook are presumed dead. But Howard is not convinced and wonders whether they took off to Mars together to repopulate the planet.

In the course of the Retro Reviews project, I have unearthed a lot of forgotten gems. "The Martian and the Milkmaid" is not one of them, however. The prose is clunky and there are several strange phrasings and homonym errors, e.g. Margie Henshaw "bides her tongue" at one point. The plot is also predictable and it's always clear where the story is going. The fact that the title basically spoils the story doesn't help either.

Nonetheless, "The Martian and the Milkmaid" is an interesting story, because of what it reveals about the attitudes of the time during which it was written. One thing to note is that the narrator Howard Clement is an idiot and a jerk besides. Now narrators who are idiots and jerks are not exactly rare during the golden age, though I'm often not convinced that the author knows that their narrator is a jerk and an idiot. However, I'm pretty sure that Frances M. Deegan knows only too well that Howard is an idiot and a jerk.

For starters, Howard is wrong about almost everything in this story. He is wrong about the meteorites. He is dismissive of the Henshaws. He mistakes Gook for mentally disabled (to be fair, so do the Henshaws, but they at least have a reason, since they do find him wandering around naked in a storm, unable to speak English) and even once he realises the error of his ways, he does not really grasp that Gook is vastly more intelligent than Howard will ever be, as evidenced by the delightful moment when Gook presents Howard with his paycheck, which is thrice what Howard earns.

But Howard isn't just an idiot, he's also a jerk and unpleasant. Because from the first line on, Howard does nothing but whine. He whines about bumpy roads and meteorite landings in difficult to access locations and that he has to drive through rural North Dakota on what he assumes is a wild goose chase. He also whines about being stuck with Gook and about Gook getting recognition and earning more than Howard. Finally, Howard basically threatens to sue the Henshaws, should they or Gook as much as touch his equipment.

Finally, Howard treats Hebe like a living sex doll and doesn't seem to realise that Hebe has ideas and ambitions of her own. Instead, Howard thinks that Hebe is stupid. At one point, Howard even remarks that Hebe should have stayed on the farm or gone back there to become the wife and mother she was meant to be rather than a Broadway starlet. Howard also takes Hebe for granted and doesn't even realise what is happening when she dumps him for Gook. Instead, he seems to assume that Hebe sleeps with anybody and that she will come back to him.

Talking of Hebe, she doesn't appear on the page and we only see her through Howard's eyes (and Howard is an idiot, as we have established), but nonetheless she is very unusual woman character by 1940s standards. For starters, Hebe is very much a woman who knows what she wants and goes out and gets it. And if that means posing as a milkmaid at the 1939 World Fair, then so be it. Hebe also has an ongoing extramarital affair and eventually runs off with another lover, leaving her husband and children behind, and absolutely no one seems to think that this is anything out of the ordinary, let alone that there is anything wrong with her behaviour. Considering how vilified women who have extramarital affairs and/or who abandon their children are to this day, this is really quite remarkable. Finally, Hebe – who is explicitly described as white, plump and blonde – is engaged in an interracial (and interspecies) relationship and again no one seems to think anything about this, twenty-three years before interracial marriage was legalised in all of the US in the landmark Loving vs. Virginia case.

Talking of Gook, he is not only explicitly described as a man of colour, he is also the smartest person in the story by far. Unlike Hebe's behaviour, Gook's skin colour does become a plot point, when Howard is forced to concoct a backstory for Gook that will be more acceptable in a deeply racist society than a mere, "He's black, deal with it." I also find it interesting that a mixed race refugee of East Indian origin was considered more acceptable than an American born black or mixed race man. And how much do you want to bet that Howard passed off Gook as the son of an Indian maharaja or something?

Though again it's interesting that except for Howard (whom we know to be a jerk), no one seems to bat an eyelash at the fact that Gook is not white. The Henshaws, a farming couple from North Dakota, a state which is still more than eighty percent white today, take him in, George's employer gives him a well paid job working on a top secret project during wartime and Hebe has no issues embarking on a relationship with him. Indeed, the only person for whom Gook's skin colour is an issue is Howard.

Though I do find it strange that Gook was content to just spend forty-three years on the Henshaw farm rather than try to get his hands on more advanced technology. Yes, North Dakota may be remote and rural, but it did have universities in 1901 and even more by 1944. North Dakota also had railroads, so Gook could have left at any time. And since he had access to mail order catalogues and a dictionary and very likely the radio, he must have realised that there is more to Earth than rural North Dakota.

The science in the story is dated, but no worse than what you find in other magazines of the pulp era. Gook's homeworld is the dry and dying Mars of the pulp science fiction shared solar system. The fact that Gook is humanoid and can interbreed with humans is nothing out of the ordinary for the period either. And the infodump about diatomaceous earth is actually correct, which is more than you can say for many of the infodumps in Astounding, several of which were pure nonsense ("Far Centaurus", anyone?).

Another thing I noticed is how many food descriptions there are in "The Martian and the Milkmaid", which is remarkable, considering that food almost never features in golden age speculative fiction. Sometimes, there are cocktails, but otherwise the only food that is mentioned are the ubiquitous food pills. "The Martian and the Milkmaid", on the other hand, offers a rich farm breakfast consisting of coffee, ham and fried potatoes, thick slices of home-made bread and rich, yellow butter. Considering that this story was published in the middle of WWII, when most of these foodstuffs were rationed, it's a luxurious breakfast indeed. Furthermore, there also is Margie Henshaw's homemade chili sauce (which sounds delicious) and ketchup – here spelled "catsup" – which Gook has with everything.

So who was Frances M. Deegan, the author of "The Martian and the Milkmaid"? Frances M. Deegan is another of those enigmatic women writers of the golden age about whom we know next to nothing. She published seventeen SFF stories between 1944 and 1952, all in Fantastic Adventures and Amazing Stories. Some people believe that Frances M. Deegan was a house name and that the person behind the name was William L. Hamling, editor at Ziff-Davis Publishing, publisher of both Fantastic Adventures and Amazing Stories. Hamling happened to be married to a fellow writer named Frances Yerxa (widow of SFF writer Leroy Yerxa), whose maiden name may have been Deegan, which would support that theory. Though stories by Frances M. Deegan continued to appear in Ziff-Davis magazines, well after Hamling left the company. And considering the case of Allison V. Harding, I have to wonder why it's inevitably women authors who are believed to be house names, while obscure male authors are nonetheless assumed to be actual people, unless proven otherwise.

However, the name Frances M. Deegan also appears around the same time in crime fiction magazines like Detective Story Magazine and Mammoth Detective. The latter was a Ziff-Davis magazine, but Detective Story Magazine was published by Street and Smith. US census records also show that there was a Frances Marie Deegan, who was born 1901 in Iowa and died 1975 in Los Angeles. Interestingly, 1901 is also the year in which Gook crashlands on the Henshaw's farm.

The January 1946 issue of Mammoth Detective, which contains Frances M. Deegan's autobiographical essay.

Eric Leif Davin also dug up a brief autobiographical article that accompanied one of Frances M. Deegan's stories in Mammoth Detective. According to this article, Deegan was born in Iowa and never married, because no one ever asked her. After a stint as an office worker, she went to Chicago in the 1920s to become an actress and nightclub singer and later moved to New York and St. Louis. Note the parallels to her character Hebe, another country girl trying to make it in show business in the big city. Frances M. Deegan hung out with gangsters, was shot at and beaten up and did PR work for an anti-Prohibition organisation. However, Frances M. Deegan always wanted to write and not just anti-Prohibition leaflets either. One day, she met Raymond A. Palmer, editor at Ziff-Davis, and asked him if she might submit something to him. Palmer told her to go ahead and thus began the SFF and crime writing career of Frances M. Deegan. "The Martian and the Milkmaid" seems to have been her first published story.

So there really appears to have been a writer named Frances M. Deegan and the name similarity to William L. Hamling's wife was just a coincidence. If the autobiographical article she wrote for Mammoth Detective is even remotely correct, Frances M. Deegan also seems to have had a fascinating life. Once again, I wish we knew more about her.

"The Martian and the Milkmaid" is never going to be a classic. Instead, it's a typical example of the bread and butter stories (quite literally in this case) that filled the pages of the science fiction pulps of the golden age. But even if the story is no classic, it's nonetheless interesting and far from the worst story I have reviewed for this project.

Retro Review: "Gambler's Asteroid" by Manly Wade Wellman

There are no space walrusses in "Gambler's Asteroid" either, though there are frog aliens.

"Gambler's Asteroid" is a space opera short story by Manly Wade Wellman, that was published in the Spring 1944 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories and would have been eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugo Award. The story may be read online here.

Warning: Spoilers beyond this point.

The titular gambler's asteroid is 624 Hektor (spelled "Hector" in this story), which in this story's version of the pulp science fiction shared solar system has been encased in a bubble of glassite and had its spin sped up by atomic engines to create artificial gravity (Hector is too small to have much in the way of natural gravity) on the inside of the glassite bubble. So all of the characters in this story are walking around on a glass floor with the stars below them. An enterprising Venusian then turned Hector into a sort of interplanetary Las Vegas or rather Atlantic City, considering that the Las Vegas we know today is largely a postwar phenomenon.

Our protagonist is Patch Merrick, a not very successful gambler, who has just bet his last value-units on a card game named Indemnity. The game is fictional, but Wellman explains how it works in a quick paragraph. Not that it matters much, because Merrick loses in the second round anyway.

Wellman now gives us some backstory about Merrick and his tentacled and telepathic Martian pal Zaarrgon. Turns out that Merrick and Zaarrgon are fugitives on the run. Zaarrgon is another of those social justice warriors that certain quarters still claim did not exist in golden age science fiction. He stole water to help his fellow Martians who were dying of thirst and thus attracted the attention of the Martio-Terrestrial League. I can't help but wonder whether this organisation is a rebrand of Leigh Brackett's Terran Exploitation Company. "Hey, we're still an evil bloodsucking company, but at least out new name is a little less blatant about it."

Zaarrgon ended up in prison, facing execution, and Merrick, who refers to himself as "guilty of sentimentality", broke him out. As a result, Merrick lost his promising career and his fiancée Morgana Conti, daughter of the wealthy Coburn Conti, and was forced to flee with Zaarrgon to the lawless asteroid belt. They stopped on Hector, hoping to win enough money – pardon, value-units – to buy supplies for their space cruiser and continue their escape. However, Martians are banned from gambling on Hector due to being telepathic and Merrick turns out to be really crap at gambling, so they're soon out of money and supplies.

The game that Merrick was playing normally ends with all players, including those who dropped out, comparing their totals. The highest total wins. Merrick had good cards. However, he and Zaarrgon are broke and the stakes are too high for them, so Merrick wagers their space cruiser instead. There is obviously no way this can go wrong.

However this time, Merrick gets lucky and beats not just a fellow human player named Mr. Alabaster, but also the house. Now he and Zaarrgon have more than enough to resupply their ship.

Mr. Alabaster, on the other hand, is not happy at all, because he was on Hector to do a job and the money he just gambled away was expense money. Turns out he is a bounter hunter, albeit a very inept one, who is supposed to hunt down Merrick and Zaarrgon on behalf of Morgana Conti and her father. Zaarrgon is still scheduled for execution. As for Merrick, his fate will be worse, at least according to Alabaster, because Morgana Conti still wants to marry him. As for Alabaster, he wound up with the bounty hunting job, because he's a friend of the Conti family and Morgana hired him. However, she did not consider supplying Alabaster with photos of Merrick and Zaarrgon, which seems like an odd oversight.

Zaarrgon gives the luckless Alabaster his money back and tells him that the fugitives are headed for the moons of Jupiter to throw him off their scent. Not that it helps much, because Zaarrgon and Merrick are arrested anyway by casino security guards who overheard their conversation with Alabaster.

And so Zaarrgon and Merrick end up in prison, while the casino security chief, a froglike Venusian named Lirog, immediately calls Morgana Conti and asks if the prisoners are the fugitives she seeks. Morgana confirms this, doubles the reward and declares that she will pick up the prisoners herself. Alabaster shows up again as well to gloat, because Morgana will pay him a handsome reward as well.

While Merrick and Alabaster are arguing, Zaarrgon uses one of his tentacles to steal a guard's handy rust raygun and uses it to reduce the lock of their cell to rust. Merrick knocks out a guard and the two fugitives are on the run once more.

On their way back to their space cruiser, they steal some of the atomic fuel for the engines which keep Hector spinning. There is some brief technobabble that Hector was once the centre of a planet that broke apart to form the asteroid belt, which is why powerful atomic fuel can be found there. Fuel powerful enough to take Zaarrgon's and Merrick's space cruiser beyond the solar system, though what they plan to do there is anybody's guess.

They reach the docking bay of their cruiser, Merrick knocks out two more guards and Zaarrgon, who's clearly the brains of this outfit, uses the rust ray he borrowed to weaken the frames of the glassite sheets and blow a hole into the bubble that envelops Hector, which will both allow the space cruiser to escape and keep everybody on the asteroid so busy with repairing the breach that they won't have time to follow the fugitives.

The plan works, too. Merrick and Zaarrgon escape and head for another asteroid to purchase supplies, since luckily no one thought to relieve them of their winnings before throwing them into prison.

However, as Merrick and Zaarrgon make their escape aboard their space cruiser, they receive a call from none other than Morgana, who informs them that her plan worked.

When Merrick points out that her plan didn't work, because he and Zaarrgon escaped, Morgana reveals that she wanted them to escape and made sure they would. She sent Alabaster after them, because he is the stupidest man she knows and a compulsive gambler besides. Then she bribed the card dealer to make sure that Alabaster lost all his expense money to Merrick, allowing Morgana to secretly finance Merrick's escape.

However, the card dealer informed Ligon, the casino security chief, who then decided to arrest Merrick and Zaargon to get the reward himself. Merrick once more tries to reassert his independence by telling Morgana that he and Zaargon broke out on their own.

"That's what you think", Morgana says and reveals that she paid Alabaster to smuggle the rust gun into the prison, allowing Merrick and Zaargon to escape. Merrick is dumbfounded and Morgana tells him that he can't come home now anyway, because he's still a wanted man and because there are still many things that Morgana has to fix. And besides, she knows that Merrick isn't ready to settle down just yet, but once he's had enough of adventure, he'll come back to her.

The story ends with Merrick moping and Zaarrgon babbling about asteroids and the creation of the asteroid belt and wondering why Merrick is moping. I take it back. Zaarrgon is not the brains of the outfit, he and Merrick are both idiots in their own way. Morgana, on the other hand, is awesome.

I have to admit, I only read this story, because I flipped forward through the Spring 1944 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories after reading "Unsung Hero" by Ruth Washburn and came across this story – after two pages of "incredible but true Scientifacts". The interior art – showing an anthropomorphic frog and a man in a cage ogling an attractive woman – looked intriguing enough and besides, I like Manly Wade Wellman's writing, so I decided to read it. I'm glad that I did, because this is a fun space opera adventure that manages to pack a lot of plot into only six pages.

If I have one complaint about "Gambler's Asteroid" it's that it's too short. With the amount of plot and backstory there is, this could easily have been a novella, if not a novel. The glassite encased asteroid Hector is a fascinating setting, which I would have loved to explore more. I also would have loved to see Merrick break Zaarrgon out of prison and learn more about Merrick's relationship with Morgana and her father and just what his life and promising career were like, before he decided to free Zaarrgon. And of course, I would have loved to see more of Morgana than two brief videocalls, because Morgana is awesome.

Intergalactic gambling dens are a space opera staple these days, whether it's Canto Bight and Bespin of Star Wars fame (okay, we never actually see any gambling on Bespin, but you know it's going on somewhere, considering who runs the place), Stardust City in a recent Star Trek: Picard episode as well as a lots of other intergalactic gambling dens in pretty much every Star Trek series to date, the casino planet Carillon in the original Battlestar Galactica or The Scuttling Cockroach, where Mikhail and Anjali rescue Pietro Garibaldi and get themselves into trouble in my own Freedom's Horizon. However, Hector is the granddaddy of all of those intergalactic gambling dens. I'm not sure if this is the first intergalactic gambling den to ever feature in science fiction – most likely it's not. But it's definitely a very early example.

These days, Manly Wade Wellman is mainly remembered for his (very good) occult detective and folk horror stories – indeed, I reviewed one of them. But like most authors of the pulp era, Wellman was a man(ly) of any talents, who also wrote science fiction, mystery and crime fiction, comic books (a Spirit comic he wrote was nominated for the Retro Hugo this year) and historical non-fiction and who was even nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and won the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Award over William Faulkner. However, Wellman's science fiction stories, particularly his space opera tales from the 1930s and 1940s, are less well known than his fantasy and horror stories. At least based on "Gambler's Asteroid", I think that's a pity.

Wellman's skills as a writer are clearly evident in this very short story. In a few lines and paragraphs, he manages to sketch a fascinating setting by sprinkling in details like "Venusian chirp-water music", a "Martian joy-lamp shedding stimulus rays overhead" or the popular Martian genre of "formalised comi-tragedy", all of which are attractions on offer on the glassite floors of Hector. Wellman also had a dry humour that sets his work apart from other pulpy space opera tales of the era.

Like too many of the stories I have reviewed here at Retro Reviews, "Gambler's Asteroid" has never been reprinted. I sincerely wonder why, because there is a lot to like about this fun space opera caper.

Retro Review: "Unsung Hero" by Ruth Washburn

Lester Brant encounters neither murderous space walrusses nor women in brass bikinis in this story.

"Unsung Hero" is a humorous science fiction short story by Ruth Washburn, that was published in the Spring 1944 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories and would have been eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugo Award. The story may be read online here.

Warning: Spoilers beyond this point.

When I embarked on the Retro Review project, one of my goals was to spotlight the works of the forgotten women SFF authors of the golden age. And so I reviewed not just stories by the big name female authors of the era such as Leigh Brackett and C.L. Moore, but also by lesser known and largely forgotten women such as Allison V. Harding, Dorothy Quick, Alice-Mary Schnirring and E. Mayne Hull. However, there was one woman publishing science fiction in 1944 who is so obscure that even I, who was explicitly looking for women authors of the time, overlooked her, namely Ruth Washburn.

During the early forties, Thrilling Wonder Stories ran an amateur story contest and published the winning story in their magazine. Ruth Washburn was the winner of the story contest for the Spring 1944 issue. Almost nothing is known about Ruth Washburn except what she herself wrote in the short biographical blurb that ran alongside her story (and the child psychologist Ruth Wendell Washburn who comes up on Google is definitely not the same person as the author of "Unsung Hero").

According to the brief biography she provided, Ruth Washburn was born between 1901 and 1909, i.e. during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, in Vermilion, South Dakota. She seems to have been a rebellious youngster who repeatedly ran away from home and amassed a remarkable resume of odd jobs ranging from farmworker, factory worker and cook to cosmetics saleswoman and carnival worker. By the time she wrote "Unsung Hero", Ruth Washburn was living in Chicago with her husband and working as a dressmaker, even though she always dreamed of being a writer.

I really wish we knew more about Ruth Washburn, since she seems to have had a fascinating life. "Unsung Hero" is her only published science fiction story, at least under that name. I did come across a 1932 cookbook for Old-fashioned Molasses Goodies by one Ruth Washburn Jordan who may have been the same person. At any rate, our Ruth Washburn worked in the food industry and molasses are briefly mentioned in the story.

"Unsung Hero" opens in a newspaper office Washburn's hometown Chicago during WWII. In addition to "war on a dozen fronts", as a journalist character puts it, Chicago is experiencing a homegrown crisis, for an invisible barrier is blocking the Chicago River and impeding the war effort.

The news also reaches a would-be inventor named Lester Brant in his private basement laboratory. Lester is trapped in an unhappy marriage with Matilda who places no trust in his abilities as an inventor and would rather that Lester keep earning money as a lensmaker. I wonder whether this is a gender reversed commentary on Washburn's own position as a woman who wanted to write, but had to work as a dressmaker to support the family. Was Ruth Washburn's husband as unsupportive of her writerly ambitions as Matilda is of Lester's inventor spirit?

Lester theorises that the unseen barrier is due to a parallel world colliding with ours. And so he grabs one of his apparatuses, which allows him to look into other dimensions – at least in theory. But before he can take off for the Chicago River to test his theory, Lester is interrupted by Matilda banging on the door of his lab. Determined not to let Matilda stop him now, Lester switches on his device and promptly sinks through the floor in front of the eyes of a stunned Matilda.

Lester finds himself in an alien world, where he meets beings with large saucer-like eyes, which look like cartoon ghosts and can project random tentacles from their bodies. The beings, called Tnn and Mmmm, are telepathic and Lester begins to communicate with them. However, he has problems making Tnn and Mmmm understand his plight, while the two aliens are incredibly fascinated by Lester's clothes and proceed to strip him to his underwear.

Eventually, Tnn and Mmmm teleport Lester to see their leader, one Ool. Ool, it turns out, is having problems, for he is trying to create a force dome by combining the mental powers of a large group of aliens. However, the alien minds generate too much power and so the force dome won't close, but the power just projects outwards, eventually piercing the dimensional barrier and blocking off the Chicago River.

Lester decides to test his theory by turning his device off and promptly materialises – in striped boxers – on a bridge across the Chicago River near the barrier. Lester's suddenly appearance startles the onlookers and attracts the attention of a young female news photographer in a scene which is also charmingly illustrated in the interior artwork by M. Marchioni.

Lester quickly turns his device on again and returns to Tnn and Mmmm, who are in the process of dissecting (quite literally) Lester's clothes. Lester gets angry, accidentally telepathically blasts Tnn and Mmmm's house and then returns to Ool to explain that he must switch off the force wall, because it is causing problems and impeding the war effort in Lester's home dimension. Ool certainly has sympathy for Lester's problem, but points out that his people need the wall to shield themselves from stray thoughts in order to solve complicated problems.

The situation is unknowingly resolved by Tnn, who is trying on Lester's hat and finds that it blocks out all stray telepathic thoughts. This gives Lester an idea. If felt and leather, unknown to Tnn's people, can block out stray thoughts, then there is a solution to Ool's problem that doesn't involve invisible force walls blocking off the Chicago River.

Lester asks Ool how many people there are in his colony and then returns to his own dimension, only to promptly be arrested, because men in underwear suddenly appearing out of thin air is frowned upon in Chicago. And as if getting arrested for disturbing the peace wasn't bad enough, Matilda also appears waving a newspaper with Lester's portrait – in striped boxers – on the front page.

Lester and Matilda are taken to the police station, where Lester tries to make everybody understand that he alone knows how to solve the problem of the invisible barrier blocking the Chicago River. But of course no one believes him. And so Lester is about to be thrown into jail with bail set at fifty dollars, which must have been a significant sum indeed in 1944.

Matilda has no intention to bail him out, but Lester, who has finally found his courage, threatens her with divorce and tells her to hand over the money, since he knows that she has quietly embezzled money from him. Grudgingly, Matilda does so.

Lester once more tries to explain that his device allows him to travel to other dimensions and once more no one believes him. The police sergeant wants to try out the device. Lester lets him and the police sergeant promptly vanishes, only to reappear a few seconds later, now convinced that Lester is telling the truth.

All of a sudden, the police are a lot more helpful. They escort Lester to a sporting goods store, where he buys football helmets for all the beings in Ool's colony. Lester returns to Ool's dimension to drop off the football helmets, whereupon Ool switches off the force field and the Chicago River is free again.

Lester is now the hero of the hour and even Matilda grudgingly promises to make him pork chops, when Lester threatens that next time he'll disappear for good. So Lester gets his happy ending. Not only is Matilda a lot nicer to him, he also has a limitless number of strange worlds to explore.

Okay, so it's not SFF and it may not even be the same author, but it is a cute cover and the recipes apparently are good as well.

This is a charming little story reminiscent of Henry Kuttner's humour pieces such as "A God Named Kroo" and the Gallegher stories. In many way, "Unsung Hero" is a science fiction screwball comedy.

The henpecked husband and overbearing wife dynamic between Lester and Matilda grates a little, because it's very much a cliché by now. Not to mention that I wonder why the threat of leaving or divorcing her works on Matilda. She clearly has no respect for Lester, so why would it bother her, if he left her? It's briefly mentioned that Matilda primarily views Lester as a meal ticket, but I don't think a woman would have had problems finding a job in Chicago in 1944. For that matter, why doesn't Lester leave Matilda? Surely, he could find someone to make him pork chops who doesn't steal from him and is a lot easier to get along with.

Honestly, the gender dynamics in this story are not great, especially for a story written by a woman. Though it is notable that the random news photographer who gets a snapshot of Lester in his underwear is a woman.

Even though this was Ruth Washburn's first and only published story, she clearly had talent. It doesn't feel like a debut story and I have certainly read far worse SFF stories published in 1944.

Stylistically, "Unsung Hero" is closer to what was published in Astounding Science Fiction than the grab bag of adventure focussed pulp science fiction that was found in the likes of Thrilling Wonder Stories and its sister magazine Startling Stories. Did Washburn originally submit this story to John W. Campbell at Astounding, only to have it rejected? Or was she a reader of Astounding and unconsciously mimicked the style of the stories therein, but it never occurred to her to try to submit to Campbell?

At any rate, I wonder how Ruth Washburn's writing career would have gone, if she had sold "Unsung Hero" to Campbell at Astounding rather than to Oscar J. Friend at Thrilling Wonder Stories. After all, we know that Campbell for all his flaws did nurture the careers of new writers, including some women.

But unlike Lester Brant, we cannot peer into the alternate universe where Ruth Washburn became a popular science fiction author of the golden and silver age with a lengthy career. And in our universe, this is the only story of hers that we have. I for one find that a pity, because based on "Unsung Hero", I wouldn't have minded reading more of Ruth Washburn's work.

Guest Review: "The Delicate Ape" by Dorothy B. Hughes, reviewed by Don Briago

Today, I'm happy to bring you another guest review. This time around, the subject is a potential left-field finalist, the near future novel The Delicate Ape by Dorothy B. Hughes. So I hand over to Don Briago to share his thoughts on The Delicate Ape.

***

If the Retro Reviews have taught us one thing, it's that the pulp pioneers of the Forties didn't give a hoot about what we now call "genre boundaries." They promiscuously jumbled mad scientists, wizards, hard-boiled detectives, robots, vampires, astronauts and cowboys, and stirred them all together into one glorious pop-culture stew. So when a celebrated crime writer like Dorothy B.Hughes decides to add her fiction to the melting pot, the SFF community should welcome her, not denounce her as an interloper. However, we still need to ask, is The Delicate Ape science fiction?

It is a novel published in 1944 that is set in 1957 (or thereabouts - Hughes never tells us the date, only that the story takes place twelve years after the end of the war. By 1944, after the Battle of Stalingrad, most Americans felt that the Nazis were toast but feared that the war with Japan would drag on for years. Presumably Hughes didn't want to jinx the outcome by naming a specific day of surrender.) Technically it's about "the future", but otherwise it's a purely mainstream, naturalistic thriller with none of the pulp trappings of vintage SF. Hughes has no interest in delving into possible technological  or sociological changes. There are no jet packs. (Seriously, where are our jet packs? It's 2020!) There are no other futuristic gadgets (such as TV sets, which were already a reality) or any dystopian tropes. 

So is it SF or not? My head says "Yes" because Ape is set in an imaginary future. My heart says "No" because Ape doesn't feel like SF... And my head wins, because it enjoys writing posts for Retro Reviews. Case closed. 

Having delivered that totally disinterested and non-arbitrary verdict, we can now ask if Ape is any good. It won’t be easy, but I’m going to resist the temptation to point out the many ways Ape’s 1957 differs from our consensus-reality 1957, and laugh at all the things Hughes got wrong. A work of fiction can never be "wrong." As I decreed, Ape is inarguably SF, so I’ll treat it as if it were an example of the alternative history subgenre. 

In this alternate 1957, there is no Cold War. The Soviets aren't even mentioned, and the defeated Germany is not split into Communist East and Capitalist West. Instead it's occupied by a benign if implausible new branch of the American government called the Peace Department. For twelve years since the German surrender the Peace Department has monitored the Germans to prevent them from stockpiling arms and developing an air force as they did between the world wars. Since the Germans have been behaving themselves lately, why don't the occupiers withdraw and let the Germans self-rule?

No way, says Secretary of Peace Samuel Anstruther, the Germans cannot be trusted yet. He compiles a dossier on German crimes and writes a short speech of such stunning, superhuman eloquence that any diplomat who listens to it will instantly be converted to the anti-German crusade. (When we finally hear it in the last chapter, it's an unintentionally hilarious dud.) Unfortunately Anstruther is bumped off on an airplane (too bad he didn't have a jet pack) before he can deliver the papers at the Peace Conclave in New York City, Hughes's forerunner to the UN. Piers Hunt, his deputy and the hero of the novel, keeps Anstruther’s death secret while planning to foil those uppity Germans. 

Hughes is clearly in her element when Piers walks the New York streets, and Hughes evokes the urban atmosphere. The rest of the novel comes across as a laborious effort by the author to make a Grand Statement while stretching herself and failing miserably. It's dull and predictable, from the routine double-crosses, to the three cartoon German villains (Brecklein, Schern, and von Eyna), to the obseqious portrait of the U.S. President. I just can't bring myself to summarize the rest of the idiotic plot and forgettable characters. 

I never expected such earnest, lifeless propaganda from Hughes. It's not just that she writes as if she's never met a diplomat or a German, it's as if she's never met a human being. Whenever the story builds up a little momentum, Piers interrupts to remind us how preferable peace is to war, and how noble the American cause is. The lurid prose often set my teeth on edge, and the scenes with the femme fatale Morgen are cheesy beyond belief. In a nutshell, Ape is a dumb political thriller that's transformed into a total slog by windy rhetoric about War and Peace and Brotherhood. 

Hughes received a fair amount of acclaim during her lifetime, and some now regard her crime novels as among the best ever written. I haven't read enough crime fiction to judge. Sarah Weinman, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of the genre, has named Hughes her favorite crime writer. Yet even Weinman doesn't care for Ape, which she considers a disappointing regression from the qualityof Hughes's previous novels. As with many artists at the time, the war made Hughes temporarily lose her mind, along with her talent. 

I'd love to disagree with Weinman and say that Ape is an overlooked science-fictional gem, but it's only a mildly interesting curiosity about the near future by someone who was understandably anxious about the brave new world being formed during a global cataclysm. It was probably something that Hughes had to get out of her system before she could roll up her sleeves and get to work on masterpieces like In a Lonely Place and Dread Journey. Ape is too overtly didactic to be convincing or entertaining as fiction. History buffs could perhaps use The Delicate Ape as a springboard for a discussion about contemporary attitudes towards post-war politics. That's something, but it’s not enough to deserve a Retro Hugo.

***

Thank you, Don, for this great review of The Delicate Ape, even if the novel itself was diappointing.

Retro Review: "The Free-Lance of Space" by Edmond Hamilton

"The Free-Lance of Space" by Edmond Hamilton is a space opera short story, which appeared in the May 1944 issue of Amazing Stories and is therefore eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugos. The story may be found here.

Warning: There will be spoilers in the following!

Like so many space operas and noir stories, "The Free-Lance of Space" starts out in a disreputable bar cum cosmic opium den near the Uranus spaceport. In a private room, two men are meeting, the Saturnian agent Brun Abo and the Earthman Rake Allan, the notorious Free-Lance, a broker and fixer who owes no allegiance to Earth or any other world, after he was kicked out of the Earth diplomatic corps, disgraced and outlawed.

Brun Abo has a job for Rake Allan. For it turns out that a Martian biologist named Doctor Su has discovered a drug that can revive people who have died of "spaceshock", i.e. the sudden exposure to the vacuum of space. Such a drug is invaluable to any power who possesses it and therefore Brun Abo wants to acquire the formula for the Saturnian space navy, because it would give them the edge in case of an interplanetary war. The Saturnians aren't the only ones interested in the formula, other worlds have made Su an offer as well. However, Doctor Su refused all of them and intends to return to Mars that very night. Abo now offers Rake Allan half a million Earth dollars, if he procures the formula for the Saturnians.

Allan listens to Abo's story with interest, but he has no intention of selling the formula to the Saturnians. Instead, he'll sell it to the highest bidder, whoever that might be. And so he overpowers Abo and leaves him in the intergalactic opium parlour, drugged out of his mind. Then Allan heads for the spaceport to catch the Draco, the spaceship that will take Doctor Su back to Mars. He gets lucky, too, for the Draco has been delayed, because half her crew got drunk on Uranus and had to be replaced.

Allan boards the Draco under an assumed name and secures a cabin for himself. Unfortunately, the cabin right next to Doctor Su's is already taken by a young Earthwoman, so Allan has to improvise. He tries to sneak into the woman's cabin and when he finds it already occupied, he sprays narcotic gas through the keyhole to knock the woman out.

However, Allan is in for a surprise, because the young woman in the cabin next to Doctor Su's is also onboard under an assumed name. In truth she is Jean King of the Earth diplomatic service, Allan's former co-worker and ex-lover. And she's aboard the Draco for the same reason as Allan.

When Jean comes to again, she tells Allan that she isn't looking to secure Doctor Su's formula for Earth. Instead, she wants to keep the agents of other planets from stealing the formula, because Doctor Su is a true humanitarian (Martianitarian?) and wants to give the formula to the entire solar system rather than any one power.

Allan, however, is much more sceptical about the alleged noble motives of Jean and the Earth diplomatic corps. After all, the corps disowned him and left him to rot in a Venusian prison for two years, after a mission went south. Jean begs Allan to reconsider his decision, but he's not listening. Instead, he gags Jean and continues with his mission.

He drugs Doctor Su with the same narcotic gas he used on Jean earlier and breaks into his cabin. He quickly find a sample of the elixir, but he can't find the formula. So Allan has to wait for Doctor Su to wake up. He threatens Su with his blaster, even though the Free-Lance does not kill, and tricks him into revealing the whereabouts of the formula. Su begs Allan not to take the formula, because he can never reproduce it from memory. And besides, he really wants to give it to the whole solar system.

"Why didn't you already publish it already then?" Allan asks, "Why wait?"

Su declares that he doesn't want to publish the formula until it has been tested on a human being. That's why he is returning to Mars, because he wants to test the formula. And Su's chosen test subject is none other than his own son who died in a spaceship accident two years before and whose body being kept refrigerated on  Mars. Su also begs Allan to leave him as much of the elixir as Su needs to revive his son and take the rest, if he must.

Su's plight touches what remains of Allan's conscience where Jean's could not. He releases Jean and Su. "You win," he tells them and advises Su to publish the formula as soon as he has tested it, because there will be other agents after it.

And indeed one of those other agents, a Jovian named Stakan Awl, attacks as soon as Allan has made his decision. Turns out that the Jovian secret service got the crew of the Draco drunk on Uranus to replace them with their own agents. Once safely in space, those agents take over the ship and proceed to procure the formula. However, Stakan Awl wants to test the formula first. And the test subject he picks is none other than Rake Allan.

As Allan is on his way to the nearest airlock (though Hamilton calls them "space-doors"), he manages to trick his guards and escape. He makes his way to the bridge and barricades himself in, intending to turn the Draco around and alert the Uranian space patrol. However, Stakan Awl has disabled the engines. Worse, the Jovians are about to cut their way onto the bridge. Allan cannot deal with them all. And if he is recaptured, the Jovians will kill not only him, but everybody aboard the Draco, because Jovians never leave witnesses.

So Allan decides on a risky gamble. The controls for the airlocks and life support system are on the bridge. So are spacesuits for emergencies. Allan put on one of those spacesuits and opens the airlocks all over the ship, just as the Jovians break down the door. Within seconds, Allan is the only person left alive aboard the Draco.

He closes the airlocks and starts up the life support system again. Then he races back to Doctor Su's cabin to retrieve the elixir. He revives first Jean and then Doctor Su. Allan informs the stunned Doctor that his elixir works and has been tested on humans and that there are plenty more people to revive, the passengers and non-treacherous crew of the Draco and the Jovian agents, too, once they have been bound and disarmed.

So Doctor Su takes off to revive the rest of the passengers and crew, while Jean and Allan enjoy their reunion and revival some more. Jean asks Allan to return to Earth with her, for surely the diplomatic corps will forgive all his past transgressions after the great service he did to Earth and the entire solar system. Rake Allan confesses that he never forgot Jean and asks her to marry him. Jean accepts and Rake muses that they will probably get wedding presents from police forces of all nine planets now that the Free-Lance is settling down.

"The Free-Lance of Space" is a neat action-packed spy thriller from one of the pioneers of the space opera subgenre as we know it. I've never warmed to E.E. Smith, even though his works are hugely important to the development of the science fiction genre. However, I've always liked the works of Edmond Hamilton who started writing space opera only a few years after Smith and whose Interstellar Patrol series is one of the founding texts of the space opera subgenre. But Edmond Hamilton's work is also important to me personally, because the 1979 anime series based on Hamilton's Captain Future series (which is eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugo for Best Series – hint, hint) was one of works which made me fall in love with science fiction, along with Star Wars, the original Star Trek, Time Tunnel and Raumpatrouille Orion.

"The Free-Lance of Space" is a fairly obscure Edmond Hamilton story and has been reprinted only once in 1974. Nonetheless, it has all the elements that make for a cracking good space adventure. The science is complete nonsense, of course. For starters, it makes no sense that Allan never even considers using the Draco's communication system to call for help. And opening the airlocks would have sucked everybody aboard the Draco into space. Furthermore, knowledge of how the vacuum of space works and how it affects the human body was purely theoretical at the time this story was written, though over in Nazi Germany Dr. Hubertus Strughold was putting those theories into practice via experiments carried out on concentration camp inmates, which did not stop NASA from recruiting him for the US space program.

In my review of "Highwayman of the Void" by Dirk Wylie a.k.a. Frederik Pohl, I noted that many science fiction stories of the golden age seem to be set in the same consensus version of the solar system, a solar system that has very little to do with the one we actually live in, but still influences science fiction to this day. "The Free-Lance of Space" is another story that is set in this pulp science fiction shared universe. However, "The Free-Lance of Space" is more than that. It very much feels like Edmond Hamilton was trying to write a Leigh Brackett story. And no, Brackett did not write this one and publish it under Hamilton's name – the writing style is different.

Leigh Brackett and Edmond Hamilton would marry two and a half years after this story was published. Unlike the other science fiction power couple of the golden age Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore, Brackett and Hamilton collaborated only once on "Stark and the Star Kings", a story intended for Harlan Ellison's The Last Dangerous Visions. But even though Brackett and Hamilton may not have collaborated very much, they did influence each other.

I first noticed this last year when I reviewed the 1949 Eric John Stark novella "Queen of the Martian Catacombs" a.k.a. The Secret of Sinharat shortly after I had reviewed Edmond Hamilton's 1948 novel The Valley of Creation for Galactic Journey and realised that even though the settings of both stories were completely different, Himalaya in the late 1940s versus Mars in the far future, there were certain similarities with regard to characters, plot and theme. Reading "The Free-Lance of Space" shortly after reviewing several Leigh Brackett stories from the same year reveals yet more similarities.

Like so many Leigh Brackett protagonists, Rake Allan is an outlaw, a man alienated from his homeworld and embittered because Earth betrayed him. Like Leigh Brackett's outlaw heroes, Rake Allan does have a personal code. "The Free-Lance does not kill," he says at one point, ironically while threatening Doctor Su with a gun. And though some of the Jovian agents die in a shootout, Allan later insists that Su revive the Jovians killed when Allan opened the airlocks. Allan is also quickly overcome by his conscience, once he learns why Su developed the elixir. And like Rick Urquart from Leigh Brackett's Shadow Over Mars and many other Leigh Brackett heroes over the years, Rake Allan realises at the end that love is more important than money and power.

We don't get many physical descriptions of Rake Allan. We mainly learn that he is tall and rangy, another thing he shares with many Brackett heroes. Another thing we learn about Rake Allan is that he has brown skin. So we have another potential protagonist of colour. And this time around, he even looks dark-skinned in the interior art by Julian S. Krupa. Meanwhile, Jean King is clearly described as blonde, blue-eyed and white, so we likely have an interracial relationship as well.

Edmond Hamilton generally wrote strong female characters and Jean King, diplomat and secret agent, is no exception. In practice, she doesn't get a whole lot to do and spends most of the story either tied up or frozen to death, but she has potential. The relationship between Rake Allan and Jean King also feels less rushed than some of Leigh Brackett's romantic couples, but then Hamilton circumvents the insta-love problem by giving Rake and Jean a past romantic history.

Meanwhile, the spaceship with everybody aboard except for the protagonist unconscious and seemingly dead is reminiscent of Leigh Brackett's novelette "The Veil of Astellar" where the protagonist finds himself in a similar situation, though for a very different reason.

"The Free-Lance of Space" is a highly enjoyable spy thriller in space. It's a minor Hamilton, but nonetheless a story that deserves to be remembered more than it is.

Retro Review: "Iron Mask" by Robert Bloch

This cover by Margaret Brundage is actually an accurate depiction of a scene in the story.

"Iron Mask" is a novelette by Robert Bloch, which was first published in the May 1944 issue of Weird Tales and is therefore eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugos. The story may be found online here.

Warning: There will be spoilers in the following.

"Iron Mask" starts out at the headquarters of the local Resistance movement in the French town of Dubonne. American Eric Drake, an AP correspondent who got stuck in France after the beginning of WWII, confronts Pierre Charmand, the former mayor of Dubonne and now head of the Resistance. Eric is furious because Charmand has sent his girlfriend, Charmand's daughter Roselle, to the ruined Chateau D'Ivers to retrieve some important papers Charmand has hidden there. For not only is the Chateau supposedly haunted, the local top Nazi Gauleiter Hassman is also heading there with a squad of soldiers, presumably to look for the same papers as Roselle.

Charmand is a lot more sanguine than Eric. He assures Eric that the Chateau is definitely not haunted (famous last words that). As for why he sent Roselle rather than one of the male members of the Resistance, a woman is less likely to arouse suspicion. But when dusk falls and Roselle still hasn't returned, a determined Eric goes after her, Nazi patrols be damned.

Braving patrols and bats, Eric makes his way to the Chateau. Once inside, he hears Roselle scream. He follows the scream and finds Roselle unconscious on the floor, a sinister cloaked figure bending over her, clutching the papers. As Eric approaches, the figure vanishes.

Once Roselle comes to again, she insists that she was attacked by a thing wearing an iron mask. And this thing was not a ghost, but real. Eric agrees that the attacker was real enough, because ghosts don't steal important papers and they don't leave footprints.

Eric tells Roselle to return to her father. Meanwhile, he will go after the attacker and get the papers back. Roselle, on the other hand, doesn't want Eric to go alone. For Roselle shot her attacker in the head, which didn't even slow him down. "He's a monster," she insists. Eric, on the other hand, points out that Roselle's bullet must have hit the iron mask, which is why the attacker was not injured or killed.

So Eric follows the footprints of the attacker deeper into the ruined castle. When they lead to seemingly dead end, Eric finds a secret passage through which the attacker escaped outside. He chases the attacker down a hill, only for both of them to run into a squad of Nazi soldiers coming up the hill. Soon, Eric finds himself fighting side by side with the masked stranger against the Nazis. Eric uses his gun, while the masked stranger hurls rocks at the Nazis with superhuman strength.
Once the fight is over, Eric demands that the masked stranger – whose mask is not made from iron but velvet – hand over the papers. Turns out that the stranger is working for the Resistance as well and also planned to procure the papers, before they could fall into the hands of the Nazis. As for why he wears a mask, the stranger tell Eric that he was a French soldier whose face and hands were burned by flamethrowers. The doctors attempted to save his life, but left him disfigured. So the stranger donned a mask and started his solo crusade against the Nazis.

Eric wants to take the stranger to the Resistance meeting (he is rather trusting – after all, the stranger could be anyone, even a Nazi in disguise), but the stranger doesn't want to come. Eric assures him that his damaged face doesn't matter. "You don't understand," the stranger says, "I have no face." Then he takes off his velvet mask to reveal an iron mask where his face should be. So Roselle had been right after all.

Eric nonetheless takes the stranger and the papers to Charmand, who also accepts him a lot more readily than I would in his position. Only Roselle remains sceptical. Charmand also tells the stranger that there is an important Resistance meeting taking place at midnight (when else?), where the Resistance will plan their campaign against Gauleiter Hassman's attempt to conscript French men as forced labourers. However, Charmand is still missing an important report, because two of his men have not returned yet. The masked stranger offers to procure the report, though he won't say how he plans to do that with only an hour left until midnight. "I have developed a certain – technique – in such matters," he declares.

Indeed, the stranger returns with the report just in time for the Resistance meeting. But almost as soon as he has handed it over, the Nazis storm the Resistance headquarters, led by Gauleiter Hassman himself. By this point, this reader at least became even more suspicious, because the Nazis' timing is mightily convenient.

In the ensuing battle, Charmand is killed. Eric escapes with Roselle, the papers and the masked stranger who is seemingly impervious to bullets. Not knowing where else to go, they retreat to the Chateau, where Eric demands to know just how the stranger could survive being hit by at least fifty bullets. Now, the stranger finally admits that he is no flamethrower burned French soldier. Instead, he is the legendary Man in the Iron Mask. Oh yes, and he is immortal, too.

Iron Mask tells his story. He is the grandson of Nostradamus and was supposed to continue the family trade of alchemy and prophecy in Paris, advising the aristocracy. Over time, the future Man in the Iron Mask became extremely influential, until he was the de facto ruler of France. Alas, King Louis XIV suspected him of having an affair with his secret wife Madame de Maintenon and therefore ordered him arrested, imprisoned and locked into an iron mask for the rest of his days. However, neither the King nor the Man in the Iron Mask realised how long this life sentence would last. For just before he embarked for Paris, Iron Mask had been given a potion by his alchemist father that grants eternal life.

After thirty-four years of imprisonment, the Man in the Iron Mask finally managed to escape by passing off the body of a recently deceased prisoner in the Bastille for his own. The entries in the prison records of the Bastille containing his true identity vanished at around the same time. But even though Iron Mask was immortal, his face still aged, so he continued to hide it beneath his mask. Ever since then, he has reappeared to aid France in her hour of need. And so he joined the Resistance.

Alas, the Resistance in Dubonne has been all but wiped out – only Eric, Roselle and the Man in the Iron Mask are left. Their headquarters has been discovered as well. Luckily, Iron Mask knows of an alternative: The sewers under the old townhall, now the Gauleiter's headquarters and the last place where the Nazis would think to look.

So the three of them retreat to the sewers, where Eric informs the others that he has an important meeting with a representative of the Paris Resistance. He plans to hand over the papers they rescued to this representative and receive his instructions what to do, when the Allies land in France (it's notable that the Normandy landings did not take place until June 1944, i.e. a month after this story was published). However, the Nazis are on the warpath and have patrols everywhere, so Eric has little chance of reaching the representative. Luckily, he has a plan.

He sends out Roselle to check if the Resistance representative is at the meeting point. Meanwhile, Iron Mask will keep the Nazi patrols busy and draw them away. Since he is immortal, their bullets can't hurt him. Once Roselle gives the all clear, Eric will head to the meeting. However, as soon as Roselle and Iron Mask have left, Eric opens the cask with the papers, finds one that is of interest and sneaks into the Nazi headquarters instead.

Roselle and Iron Mask return just in time to see Eric returning from his spying expedition, the Nazis hot on his heels. The three escape through the sewers, the Nazis in pursuit. During the ensuing fight, a pipe bursts and drowns the Nazis. Once again, only Eric, Roselle and Iron Mask escape.

Iron Mask demands that Eric turn over the papers to him and he's not asking nicely. Eric, however, wants to give them to the Resistance representative. He draws his gun and when that doesn't stop the Man in the Iron Mask – well, he is immortal, after all – Eric fires.

The bullet does not hurt Iron Mask, but it tears a hole into his cloak, revealing metal underneath. The stranger isn't just wearing an iron mask, his entire body is made from iron. He's a robot and a rampaging one, too.

Eric and the robot fight. Eric finally gets lucky and hits the robot with the butt of his gun, splitting its iron skull. And that's the end of Iron Mask.

Eric now reveals that he had his suspicions about Iron Mask from the beginning. If he had really been a burned soldier, there was no way bullets wouldn't have hurt him, iron mask or not. And while Iron Mask was clearly immortal, he was no saviour and protector of France, but instead her mortal enemy.

Iron Mask was created in the thirteenth century by Roger Bacon, when Bacon was imprisoned in the Bastille. Indeed, Iron Mask was the fortune-telling Brazen Head that legend attributes to Bacon. And because Bacon was furious at the French for imprisoning him, he programmed his immortal robot to take revenge and destroy France, which the robot proceeded to do in the centuries that followed.

Iron Mask was an adviser to kings, true, but he inevitably gave bad advice. He whispered the policies that would eventually lead to the French revolution into the ears of the respective monarchs, he set Napoleon Bonaparte on his way to become a tyrant, he advised Bismarck in the Franco-Prussian War (maybe that is the reason Otto von Bismarck was known as the Iron Chancellor) and he made a deal with Hitler, allowing the Nazis to conquer France. In fact, Gauleiter Hassman was taking orders from the robot, while Iron Mask set about to destroy the Resistance. As for why he was so keen to get his hands on those papers, among the papers were the vanished prison records of the Bastille which would have revealed Iron Mask's secret, so the robot had to procure and destroy them. Conveniently, those papers also revealed that Bacon had built a weakness into the robot, a weakness Eric exploited to destroy Iron Mask.

I'm not sure what I had expected when I decided to read and review "Iron Mask", but it certainly wasn't a gonzo WWII spy adventure cum Tim Powers-esque secret history starring a malevolent medieval robot with a pathological hatred of French people. Because honestly, there is no way you could expect a story like that. As a matter of fact, "Iron Mask" is an excellent example of how very strange the pulps could be at times. With a few tweaks, this story could be one of the more offbeat adventures of Captain America, Peggy Carter and/or the Howling Commandos.

"Iron Mask" is an action-packed tale and follows the pulp school of plotting with frequent twists, turns and reveals. In fact, I am pretty sure that the major reveals map onto Lester Dent's pulp fiction master plot, even though "Iron Mask" is a long novelette rather than a six thousand word short story. But unlike with e.g. A.E. Van Vogt, whose random plot twists often don't make sense, the plot twists and reveals in "Iron Mask" all fit naturally into the story.

"Iron Mask" is very well written. The action scenes – and there are many of them – are  thrilling and visceral. The descriptive moments, whether it's Eric disturbing some bats in the ruined chateau or a fire fight with Nazi soldiers in the cellar of a disused brewery, are suitably atmospheric. Bloch was only twenty-seven, when "Iron Mask" was published, but then he was something of a prodigy and had been writing professionally for more than ten years at this point. Bloch's first story "Lilies" appeared in Marvel Tales in 1934.

Nowadays, Robert Bloch is mostly remembered for Psycho and his contributions to the original Star Trek, but his range was much greater. He wrote Cthulhu mythos stories, while still in his teens, he was responsible for the mid-century Jack the Ripper renaissance (via the 1944 Retro Hugo finalist "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper") and also for our modern obsession with serial killers in general. And at least based on "Iron Mask", I'd also say that Robert Bloch originated the secret history subgenre, eight years before Tim Powers, the SFF author most associated with secret history fiction, was even born.

Because "Iron Mask" is certainly a secret history. Bloch uses historical facts – the legend of the mysterious man in the iron mask, the fact that records regarding the man's identity went missing from the Bastille (they were eventually recovered in 2015 and didn't reveal the identity of the man in the iron mask, though they did reveal that his jailer was a greedy jerk), Roger Bacon's stay in Paris (though he was never incarcerated in the Bastille, because it was built almost a century after Bacon was in Paris), the rumours that Bacon had a metal head which could foretell the future, the various points in French history where things went disastrously wrong – to create a wholly fictional narrative of a villainous robot manipulating French history through the centuries. The secret history subgenre sits on the borderline between SFF and thriller and "Iron Mask" is no exception. There even if a classic MacGuffin in the form of the secret papers that the Nazis, the Resistance and Iron Mask are after. The story certainly is thrilling stuff, even though I find it a little hard to swallow that kings, generals and political leaders all took the (highly questionable) advice of a masked man with a metal head. I mean, I could almost see Hitler making a deal with a malevolent robot, but Bismarck? Sorry, but the old Iron Chancellor strikes me as way too practical for that.

While we're on the subject of history, I have some minor nitpicks regarding the accuracy of the story. And yes, I know it's strange to say that about a story starring an immortal francophobic robot collaborating with the Nazis. That said, Gauleiters were a kind of provincial governor during the Nazi era in Germany, Austria, occupied Czechia and occupied Poland, i.e. what the Nazis considered their Reich. However, there were no Gauleiters in occupied France with the exception of Alsace, which was (and still is in part) largely German speaking, was part of Germany from 1871 to 1918 and was still considered part of Germany by the Nazis. From 1940 on, it was part of the Gau Baden-Alsace, ruled over by a particularly nasty piece of work named Robert Wagner. However, Dubonne is clearly not in Alsace, because the naming pattern is wrong for the region (speaking as someone with Alsatian ancestry) and therefore wouldn't have had a Gauleiter. Furthermore, Gauleiter resided in major cities, not provincial small towns. So Bloch used the wrong title for his Nazi official, but then internal Nazi hierarchy is rather opaque. Also, the various Nazi patrols wouldn't have been Gestapo men, but regular Wehrmacht soldiers. Not that any of this matters much, because Gauleiter Hassman's role is mainly "generic evil Nazi" in this story. And I have to applaud Robert Bloch for giving his evil Nazi official the name Hassman, which literally means "hate man" in German. But then, Bloch was the son of German Jewish immigrants, so it's likely that he spoke at least a little German.

Compared to the positively lurid villain (Iron Mask, not the mistitled Gauleiter Hassman), protagonist Eric Drake remains a tad bland. He's your typical two-fisted pulp hero, quick with his gun, his wits and his fists, dedicated and heroic, but with few characteristics that set him apart from a dozen other pulp heroes. Before the war, Eric was a foreign correspondent for Associated Press, making him the third reporter hero I came across in the course of the Retro Reviews project. But then, journalist and reporter was a popular occupation for heroic characters in the first half of the twentieth century. Note how many superheroes work as journalists in their civilian identity and how many superheroes have journalists as their significant other. The heroic journalist, once such a common figure in popular culture, has sadly almost died out and journalist protagonists are thin on the ground in the twenty-first century, reflecting increased distrust of and disenchantment with the news media.

Roselle Charmand, female Resistance fighter, theoretically sounds like an awesome character, but in practice she remains bland as well and is given little to do aside from screaming and running. Though I did like the fact that Bloch casually mentions that many of the Resistance members are female, including seemingly harmless and pious looking housewives.

In spite of the stunningly gothic (and accurate for once) cover art, courtesy of Margaret Brundage (who is eligible for the Retro Hugo for Best Professional Artist again this year and who I really hope will win one day), "Iron Mask" is another contemporary tale, albeit one with gothic trappings. In fact, all of the Weird Tales stories I have reviewed for this project so far were contemporary tales. "Iron Mask" is also one of only two stories I reviewed for the Retro Reviews project that directly mentions World War II (the other is "Undersea Guardians" by Ray Bradbury), though several other stories address the war indirectly.

"Iron Mask" is also one of several robot stories I have reviewed for this project. Robots were certainly having a pop cultural moment in the 1940s, just as they are having a pop cultural moment now. And as Isaac Asimov said in the introduction to The Complete Robot, robots came in three flavours during the golden age, robot as menace "Iron Mask", "The Jewel of Bas" by Leigh Brackett), robot as pathos ("No Woman Born" by C.L. Moore, even though Deirdre is theoretically a cyborg, and Jenkins from the "City" stories by Clifford D. Simak) and robot as a machine ("Catch That Rabbit" and pretty much any golden age robot story by Isaac Asimov). Bloch also reminds us that robot-like figures have been appearing in myth, legend and popular culture for centuries, even though the term "robot" only goes back to Karel Capek's 1921 play R.U.R.

"Iron Mask" is a highly entertaining spy thriller cum secret history that will keep you on the edge of your seat. It's also a fine example of how strange the pulps could occasionally be and how little they cared about genre boundaries.