This post is brought to you by The Devil’s Defile: Weird Tales From Devil’ Gulch, a shared world anthology edited by G. W. Thomas. The Old Weird West holds many terrors, including the undead, in these four novellas by M. D. Jackson, T. Neil Thomas, Jack Mackenzie and G. W. Thomas. And to make it all more fun, the milieu is shared by the four authors, creating a strange town in the frontier days filled with hidden monsters and terrible secrets. Each story is illustrated by M. D. Jackson like our Swords of Fire books. Devil’s Gulch should be out early in November.
What would we write about for Halloween except the undead? And who better to supply it than Robert Bloch? The story in question was a lead novella for Fantastic Adventures, July 1951. “The Dead Don’t Die!” is longer than most non-novels by Bloch and you won’t find it in the many story collections he produced. (At this time, Bloch still lived in Milwaukee and had published only one novel, The Scarf (1947). Most of his output was still for Weird Tales and other Pulps though these magazines are living on borrowed time. Most, like Fantastic Adventures, will be gone in three years.
FA (as the magazine is sometimes shortened) was edited by Howard C. Browne. This is important because Browne was a Mystery writer himself, author of the Paul Pine detective novels. The Mystery style narrative would be a winner for Browne. Fantastic Adventures, as created by the first editor, Ray A. Palmer, was an adventure Science Fiction Pulp with an Edgar Rice Burroughs flavor. Both Browne and Palmer wrote pseudo-Burroughs for the mag in the 1940s. But after Palmer left in 1948, Browne became editor, and his love of Mystery fiction was more evident than his desire to pen more Tharn novels. As Bloch writes in his bio in the July 1951 issue: “…The first thing I want to explain is that I didn’t choose the title. Your editor chose the title and sent it to me, together with a letter suggesting I write a story around said title and have it in his hands within four weeks–or else. Or else what, he didn’t say. I wired him “Yes” and went to work.” He goes on to suggest how the writing of the tale was a hard job: “…I was dead, dead on my feet and dead on whatever I used for support while writing. And I was not only dead, but constantly dying.” Bloch’s sense of humor is ever-present.
This humorous tone is really a continuation from the story itself, for the hero of “The Dead Don’t Die!” is Robert Bloch, or at least a Horror writer named Bob. In the second illustration by the wonderful Virgil Finlay, you can clearly see the man being attacked is Robert Bloch. Finlay must have had a photograph to work form. Equally important is the setting of this novella, which is Chicago. You can tell from Bloch’s description of the place as his hero takes up a cheap hotel that the author knows this place. It was where Bloch was born in 1917 before moving to Milwaukee in 1929. Chicago was also the location of the editorial offices of the publisher, and as such, even under Ray A. Palmer, was often the location of stories rather than New York City.
The plot of “The Dead Don’t Die!” has Bob working on Death Row as a guard. He is friendly with Cono Colluri, who faces the electric chair at dawn. Cono claims he is innocent of killing his wife, Flo. Someone framed him, knocking him out with a mickey, then strangling the woman. Cono is a strongman in a circus. The jury quickly convicted him. Cono goes to his death but first gives Bob a letter for the sideshow fortune teller The Great Ahmed. Ahmed has eight thousand dollars of Cono and Flo’s that Bob can claim as Cono’s only friend. The strongman asks the writer to clear his name after he is dead.
So begins Bob’s quest to find Ahmed. He doesn’t have to find the real killer because the day after the execution, Louie the Contortionist admits to the real killing. Still, Bob goes in search of the eight grand. This leads him to Chicago, where he gets a room at a dingy hotel. There he meets a woman with a diamond choker. She wants to take him to meet somebody. The writer resists her, ending up in a bar filled with circus freaks. (Virgil Finlay’s second illustration. He is attacked and ends up smashing a bottle over the bartender’s head to escape.
It is all for nought, for Bob wakes up in a funeral parlor with the woman rubbing his forehead. Her name is Vera LaValle. She wants Bob to meet someone still. That someone turns out to be Cono Colluri. The dead man talks to him briefly before taking him into another room where the dead bar tender is sitting in a coffin. This dead man rises and introduced himself as Varek, who is using the body as a vessel. He wants Bob to join him in an enterprise. Varek has cured death and has placed many dead among the living. He wants Bob to become his front man as they sell immortality on the sly to rich buyers. Bob asks what will happen if he refuses? Varek will send the cops to arrest him for the murder of the bar tender.
The writer refuses, flees and goes in search of The Great Ahmed and the eight grand. He finds the man in a house in Chicago. Bob gives him the money if he will help him get free of Varek. The writer is exhausted and sleeps while Richards, Ahmed’s real name, goes to follow Cono to Varek’s lair. When Bob awakes he find Vera LaValle waiting for him. The two have an honest conversation while Varek’s powers are focused elsewhere. She admits she was killed during the Great Terror in Paris in 1794. Varek is even older. She removes the diamond choker to show Bob the scar where the guillotine cut off her head. Varek’s power returns and Vera is helpless to stop his revenge for betrayal. Her body melts as a wax doll of her is burned.
Bob figures Ahmed has betrayed him since Vera had found him without difficulty. He falls into a desperate plan, allowing himself to be captured and taken to Varek’s lair. He discovers that the Great Ahmed is really Varek. Bob listens to Varek rattle on about how his zombie science works (This is sort of a Science Fiction magazine, of course) and sees that he plans to resurrect Flo, Cono’s dead wife. Varek also sent Louie the Contortionist to admit to the killing. Bob tells Cono, who kills Varek in a fit of rage. Bob wins free but is haunted by the knowledge that many of the normal people around him are actually Varek’s zombies.
In the end, “The Dead Don’t Die!” is another mad scientist story familiar from decades of Science Fiction magazines. The zombie elements are more typical of Weird Tales and not Palmer’s Burroughsian Fantastic Adventures. The first person narrative is good practice for much of the Mystery fiction Bloch will write, though he has been using this tongue-in-cheek style for many years now. He has been writing Science Fiction since 1938 and developed him humorous approach with the Lefty Feep tales in Fantastic Adventures since 1942. For long-time readers of FA, this is not new.
For me personally, the best part of the whole thing is when we get a history lesson from Varek about how he was the man who guided such famous occultists as Cagliostro. Bloch does a nice job of wedging Varek into real history as he did with Vera’s tale of Paris in 1794. He never tries to place any Cthulhu Mythos references into the story but these fleeting historical bits are almost as good. They give what is a rather pedestrian mad scientist story some kind of depth.
Now this could be the end of a Halloween treat published in July, but there is more. In the 1960s, Bloch moved to California and began writing for television. By the early 1970s, he was well established and producers like Dan Curtis were doing Horror for TV movies. 1975 saw Douglas S. Cramer getting in on the Horror Renaissance with The Dead Don’t Die (1975) written by Bloch from his own novella and starring George Hamilton, Linda Cristal and Ray Milland. The story is set in 1934. George Hamilton is Don Drake and the man being put into “Old Sparky” is his brother, Fred. The plot is pretty much the same except the circus is replaced with the Loveland Ballroom, owned by Jim Moss (Ray Milland replacing the Great Ahmed character). The best scenes in the entire production are the dead bartender rising from his coffin like a vampire and Vera LaValle exploding into fire. The rest is a pretty dull but faithful plot.
Response for the show was what you might expect. George Hamilton is along for the ride but never feels like a hero. Milland is equally lackluster. Bloch wrote of it in Once Around the Bloch (1993): “Two years later we teamed up again for another TV movie, this one based on my story “The Dead Don’t Die.” Maybe they don’t, but the show did.” For a full review, go here.
Conclusion
By 1951, Robert Bloch was busy establishing himself in the Mystery and SF genres, working further away from his Lovecraftian reputation. He still wrote the occasional Cthulhu Mythos piece. 1951 produced one of my favorites, “Notebook Found in a Deserted House” (Weird Tales, May 1951). He also wrote the classic Horror tale “The Hungry House” for Imagination, April 1951. “The Dead Don’t Die!” is not in the same league as these two tales but being longer it probably paid more.
That title originally made me wonder if Bloch had written it, sort of based on Lovecraft’s famous “That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange eons even death may die.” But we know this is not the case, as Browne came up with it. (Bloch would use the “Strange Eons” from that quote for his 1978 Cthulhu Mythos novel, Strange Eons.) Bloch mentioned writing stories from covers for tales like “Terror From Cut-Throat Cove” (Fantastic, June 1958) for Paul Fairman. I think “The Dead Don’t Die!” was also done this way since the cover shows a woman being attacked by a skeleton monster, not a goofy-looking Horror writer.
Mythos Horror & Ghostbreakers at RAGE m a c h i n e
