84. Seven Story Dream
One of Lafferty’s better-known mystery stories, thanks to its inclusion in Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add?—actually, the only one of his mysteries to feature in any of his major-press collections. It’s a mordant tale of striking confidence; one can see why a platform as big as Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine went for it. And yet, without the efforts of Virginia Kidd, it probably would’ve been just another unpublished manuscript in the Lafferty archives.
Lafferty submitted the story to A.L. Fierst soon after writing it, in November 1961; the agent apparently didn’t reject it, as he did many of Ray’s SF stories, but he did not succeed in selling it—and likely did not try to. Unlike several other of the mystery stories which Fierst failed to sell, such as “Enfants Terribles” or “Almost Perfect,” Lafferty did not continue to shop this one on his own; instead, it would sit in his file boxes for almost a decade, when Virginia Kidd asked him which of his older stories might be worth a look.
It might not be quite the coup of “Enfants Terribles,” which Kidd succeeded in selling to the undisputed top-tier mystery mag, Ellery Queen’s, despite Lafferty trying that same market and many others years before, but landing an abandoned story in the market’s #2 magazine is no mean feat. Hitchcock Mystery had started back in the ’50s, piggybacking on the success of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV anthology series. The magazine kept their namesake’s famous silhouette and predilection for suspenseful tales, but otherwise operated completely independently—although on occasion the show would adapt stories from the print outlet; it’s sort of a shame that Presents was no longer running when Lafferty’s story did, as it would have made a fine episode.
Kidd’s other intervention with the story was a little more understated. It wasn’t her practice (with Lafferty, anyway, or with any of her other clients I’ve researched) to make changes directly to manuscripts; instead she would make the case that the material needed changes, and leave the author to provide them, or not. But in this one case, Kidd—who, though best known for her efforts representing SF/F writers, had a fondness for mysteries and a very keen eye for plotting and characterization—did the touch-up work herself, and only then mailed Lafferty for his approval. Sadly, the letter in which she initially proposed the change seems to have been lost (as opposed to the one where she acknowledged his acceptance), but we can recover the shifts by comparing his manuscript draft with the version as published:
Manuscript: The machine played now in the compelling voice of Gilford Gadberry, as it had often played to George Handle in his sleep till he had learned it: “I killed Minnie Jo Merry. I killed Minnie Jo Merry. Strangled her and threw her out the window. I killed—”
Published story: The machine played now in the compelling voice of Gilford Gadberry, as it had night after night played to George Handle, in his sleep, till he had learned to answer on cue; and the cue, of course, was the question: “Who killed Minnie Jo Merry?” “Pretty uninspired,” Gadberry had to admit, “but I had to assume uninspired questioners, to whom the cliché would come naturally.”
(As a side note here, what is Lafferty playing at by calling a character George Handle? I can’t find any connection to the composer, but it tantalizes nonetheless.)
There’s actually quite a few red herrings in the story, not so much at the basic level of whodunit—the identity of the real killer is never in any serious doubt—as it is about why he did it, and how he set up someone else to take the fall. As ever with Lafferty, these elements reflect on the meta level of the story’s composition.
Much of the story seems to revolve around sleep-learning, or hypnopedia. To educate himself, Handle listens to recordings, some of which he paid Gadberry to make, while he sleeps; Gadberry takes the opportunity to have Handle hypnotize himself into admitting he was the killer. In pondering where Lafferty would’ve encountered this practice, we could turn to his self-education in science fiction, where it’s been a favorite trope since Hugo Gernsback himself put it into Ralph 124C41+, and Aldous Huxley put it at the heart of his Brave New World. But there’s a more immediate reason it might’ve been on Lafferty’s mind on or just before November 25, 1961, the day he finished the story: on November 16, an episode of popular sitcom My Three Sons revolved around sleep-learning—in this case, learning Spanish, which lifelong language-learner Lafferty might’ve taken particular interest in. Furthermore, the plot of the show involves the recordings being changed out surreptitiously, though for the purpose of a moral to be learned, rather than a murder to be covered up.
In the show they use a home record player; I went down a rabbit-hole trying to figure out exactly what sort of audio equipment Lafferty would’ve had in mind here; thanks to his engineering training and his job selling electronics parts, he was fascinated by consumer electronics and media technology generally, but he’s maddeningly imprecise in his descriptions here, with mention made of “the tapes, the wires, the records” crowding Handle’s apartment. In 1973, when the story was published, it clearly would’ve been standard-issue cassette tapes, which had been available for a decade. But in 1961, when he was writing this, cassette systems were much larger, and the bulk as well as the cost scared many consumers away from getting what seemed then like a novelty.
Ultimately it doesn’t much matter (he said, setting aside huge amounts of media theory dealing with modernism, hypnotism, sound reproduction, and death)—what matters is that the murder itself is getting displaced by a question of technology. As we discover, the reason for that murder is primarily aesthetic: the murdered woman was more aesthetically pleasing dead than alive. But this is the basis for essentially every murder mystery, nearly all of which require at least one corpse to fulfill their own aesthetic—something which Northrop Frye identified in assigning the genre not to the realm of moralism or any romantic restoration of society, but to the realm of sadism and ironic comedy. The exact identity of the character who made the corpse is ultimately irrelevant; it might be the person repeating “I killed Minnie Jo Merry. I killed Minnie Jo Merry…” or they might be ventriloquizing those words at the impetus of another, but in the end it’s the author who’s responsible: theirs is the aesthetic judgment that necessitated the killing. In making a mostly aesthetic decision to carry out a murder, Gadberry reflects also on the morality of the author as artist, even to the point of staging the opening scene for maximum sensory effect (in the process “savagely striking down” a lone white flower—again, subtlety not really the point of this piece). He cites as his motives “jealousy, frustration, curiosity,” but the first two are clearly deprecated to the third, which he shares with any author who creates a character for the sole purpose of killing them off.
This is a grim promontory on which to find oneself, philosophically speaking, and I wonder if it isn’t that which led Lafferty to shelve the tale for so long. There’s a further inquiry to be had over the degree to which this tale deviates from the spirit of oft-cited inspiration G.K. Chesterton, whose Father Brown treats murder less as a crime against morality than as one against rationality: there is evil in the world, and no amount of detection will make that wholly right again, but so long as such crimes can be made comprehensible within the wider moral universe then the logical coherence of that universe remains unshaken. By contrast, Lafferty’s Gadberry acts according to his own morality, in which the aesthetic is prime above all—a true Decadent.
Curiously, it’s Kidd’s edit that steers things back toward a more Chestertonian morality, by bringing in the notion of the cliché. In the original version of the ending, Gadberry’s deception is solely for the purpose of maximizing the aesthetic purity of his world, in which murdering a woman and framing another man is perfectly justifiable in the quest for artistic experience. The idea, however, that he is phrasing his hypnotic direction in such a way that it would be triggered by “uninspired questioners” shows that he is aware of the competing moral framework; moreover, that he is perfectly willing to betray his own artistic vision when doing so more effectively panders to the anaesthetic or the artless, thus undercutting any claim his competing moral universe might have to internal coherency. By pulling the story back from the madness of decadence, Kidd made it into a serviceable detective tale—one that critiques the genre and its clichés, without consigning the whole thing to oblivion on the basis of a single core flaw.
Completed November 1961. Published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, ed. Ernest M. Hutter, July 1973. Collected in Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add?, New York: Scribners, 1974.
Next entry: three centuries of history in a single afternoon, in “Among the Hairy Earthmen”