Publications: Reviews

THE BLACK GONDOLIER AND OTHER STORIES by Fritz Leiber
(Midnight House 306pp $40.00)

Fritz Leiber (1910-92) was one of the most versatile and highly-regarded writers of supernatural horror, heroic fantasy, and science fiction. Even in his lifetime, Leiber’s very versatility in all three genres (and certainly his mastery of two of them) was counterproductive. It diluted his impact, and often led to him being regarded as something of a lightweight and dilettante in each genre, especially by those who didn’t know of the breadth, range, and often considerable daring, of his whole work.

For some years, even before Leiber’s death, let alone since, much of his work, especially the dazzling short fiction, had been sliding into an undeserved obscurity. Hunting down secondhand copies of paperback originals, and the original issues of the magazines, became the only way of sampling the range of Fritz Leiber’s output of fiction below novel length.

The present volume seeks to put an end to this situation.

This most elegantly jacketed book (it would look superb in the library of the airship in Leiber's award-winning story “Catch That Zeppelin!”) is the first of two volumes. The Editors, John Pelan and Steve Savile, have aimed “to focus on those stories that most modern readers would have the most difficult time locating with a couple of familiar tales included.” Eighteen stories are presented here, showcasing the extent of Leiber’s wide-ranging talents (although rightly not seeing the need to include any of the perennially available Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories).

Originally published between the early 1940’s and mid-1980’s, these stories are indeed in the main obscure and not easily available these days unless you already have a good Leiber collection, or easy access to a specialist second-hand book dealer. And reading my way through the Editors’ selection makes it completely clear that such obscurity that there is in the contents of The Black Gondolier is not due to the actual quality of the work. (I can only recall ever reading one totally lousy Leiber story -- I won’t tell you what it is, and it’s not in here!)

The great strength of this collection is that it is full of characteristic Leiber, and does display his concerns and interests -- ones which remained surprisingly unchanged over the forty years or so between the earliest and latest stories represented.

Reading Fritz Leiber, we are effectively invited to consider (at least) some of the following. What makes someone human, and in which relationships? How does the “supernatural” as a concept and experience survive in a world of electricity, nuclear power, worldwide warfare, and constant advertising? Where does the boundary (if any) lie between the real and unreal, where various drugs are part of the way of life? How do people alienated from each other and their world actually cope? And especially with any or all of the above....

Questions indeed! And ones which Fritz Leiber never tired of posing, exploring, and providing idiosyncratic and personal responses to throughout a writing career that spanned half a century.   

Firstly, what are the “couple of familiar tales”? Taking the Editors at their word, I think that one of them is “The Black Gondolier” itself. (The second? You pays your money and takes your choice!) Fittingly “The Black Gondolier” is placed first in the collection, as it does contain most of the recurring characteristics that make Leiber’s fiction so fascinating and entertaining, as well as memorable, “The Black Gondolier” of the title is a figure in the recurring dreams of Daloway, who lives in a trailer in Venice, CA. The canals of this decaying Venice are either mostly dry, or lie just above the oil deposits that come to dominate Daloway’s waking and sleeping hours. As is the case in many Leiber pieces, the narrator has befriended the character to whom the events may or may not really be happening to. Loners find that it is the something other that has emerged into their lives that brings them together in relationship. In a leisurely fashion, the growing interaction between the real and unreal -- usually, as in “The Black Gondolier” itself, in a grittily and vividly realised real setting -- is explored with growing tension, leading to the climax. Leiber was one of the leading exponents of the narrative device usually attributed to Henry Kuttner (by Leiber himself) and used by his great influence H P Lovecraft. This consists of making the climax of the story a confirmation rather than a revelation. (HPL’s “The Thing on the Doorstep” is a classic, if lurid, example of this.) The Black Gondolier invades Daloway’s dreams more and more, leading him on fantastic voyages and in speculations. The ending is as inevitable as it is unsettling.

The two stories included from Leiber’s first collection, the classic Night’s Black Agents (1947) are also built around dreams. “The Dreams of Albert Moreland” combines another dream-menace with Leiber’s fascination with chess. “The Phantom Slayer” (as “The Inheritance”) has a film-noir atmosphere and very modern preoccupation with serial murder and the mind and motivations of the killer.

“Game for Motel Room” (1963) is a neat piece of sophisticated science fiction paranoia that shows that even a minor Leiber story (and there are a lot of them still out there) can be fun and pack a punch.

The 1964 anthology Taboo included “Lie Still, Snow White” in its line-up of what were promoted as taboo-breaking stories. The first-person narrator considers that he is a “man of very odd impulses” -- and this piece is something like Leiber’s equivalent of C M Eddy and H P Lovecraft's 1924 shocker “The Loved Dead.” However, unlike that story it has a genuine and weird eroticism that prefigures such sexually charged stories as “Dark Wings.”

“Mr Bauer and the Atoms” (1946) is a story that seems more familiar than its small number of previous appearances would at first suggest. Leiber shows the dark and personal side of the then dawning Atomic Age -- getting in on a great 1950’s theme a few years early. “The Man Who Made Friends With Electricity” explores much the same themes, and, like “The Black Gondolier” shows that a part of the modern scene that we take utterly for granted might not be as benevolent or simply there for us to use as we think...

“Spider Mansion” was written as a light-hearted exercise in seeing what Weird Tales would actually publish: “I composed a story out of what I took to be the magazine's favourite cliches: rich people, a family of southern aristocrats somewhat decayed, beauty in peril, a hero with a sword, a superstitious and scared comedy Negro, a mad scientist, and a giant spider...They bought it, too.” All this in one heady mix that is far better to read than it might sound. WT would’ve been a better magazine if more of its content had been as well written!

Thinking about it, the second “familiar tale” in this collection might well be “The Secret Songs”. A possibly somewhat autobiographical story about a middle-aged couple who regulate their lives by drugs, it is by turns frightening, pathetic, and very funny. Its place as a science fiction story (or not) seems irrelevant. It shows the side of Fritz Leiber’s work where the interaction between life and literary creation becomes an unmasking of what can lie beneath a relationship, and unconcernedly leave it to the reader to choose.

“Black Has Its Charms” is another monologue piece like “Lie Still, Snow White”. Genuinely harrowing, all the more so because of what must be autobiographical content, the story shows Leiber using the fictional form to get something off his chest. It was first published in Whispers during that period in the 1980’s when Leiber seemed to have moved further into his confessional and summing-up mode, in both fiction and non-fiction. “Black Has Its Charms” is probably the most concentrated story in the book, and does achieve a sort of resolution, until the next time.

“The Creature From Cleveland Depths” (not to be confused with Leiber’s Lovecraft homage “The Terror From the Depths”) is Leiber in his biting satire mode. Nothing is spared -- from the post-apocalypticism and paranoia of the Cold War, to the phobias of some about new technology and the lemming-like willingness of others to embrace it and be dominated by it, Leiber pillories those who abdicate their responsibilities as creators and consumers. Only the turning of the insanity against itself by an old-fashioned creative artist is able to save things.

As for the other stories -- check them out yourself!

The Black Gondolier is very well produced, with the feeling of the earlier Arkham House volumes about it. Unfortunately, as seems so often to be the case with small press publications, not enough attention has been paid to the presentation of the actual text. There are many irritating misprints and textual errors. No sources are given. It is a pity that the care and attention given to the selection of the stories and the production quality didn’t also extend to the proofreading.

However, these purely practical criticisms aside, The Black Gondolier shows once more that the work of Fritz Leiber should form an important part of the library of any serious reader of supernatural, fantastic, macabre, and bizarre fiction. The second volume is thus also much to be anticipated (as well as a mass-market edition of both).

In the stories in The Black Gondolier, and in all of his work, Fritz Leiber gave us a set of modern myths -- horror and the supernatural of and for the twentieth century -- and beyond.

A slightly different version of this review first appeared in Ghosts & Scholars 33, 2001

Copyright (c) 2001 John Howard