No, that’s not a typo, it’s a deliberate misspelling. It’s a weisenheimer attempt at alliteration.
About a decade ago, give or take a year, I had a little extra money from summer teaching. So did I save the money or invest it wisely? No, I didn’t. I decided to try and obtain as many copies of Henry Kuttner stories that had never been reprinted at that time that I didn’t have, along with a few other unreprinted stories by people such as Eric Frank Russell. Except for some copies of Weird Tales which were out of my price range, I managed to get most everything I didn’t have copies of. Haffner Press has reprinted the Weird Tales material. When pursuing a project like this, eBay is not your bank account’s friend an invaluable tool.
Now some of you may be thinking that all the good stuff from the pulps has been reprinted. That’s not actually the case. I’ve not read all the stories I acquired that summer. Some of them were novel length (or what passed for novel length in the pulps). I tend to read my pulps when I have the house to myself. There’s too many interruptions that cause me to set what I’m reading down when other people are in the house. I’d rather not do that with my pulps. If I set them down, I want to be sure that nothing will happen before I come back.
But what I have read has been quite good. I would argue that “We Kill People” (Astounding, March 1946) is one of Kuttner’s best stories, one that can stand alongside “Mimsy Were the Borogoves”, “The Proud Robot”, “When the Bough Breaks”, “See You Later”, “A Gnome There Was”, or “The Twonky”.
But I digress. There are quite a few Kuttner stories, many of them of novella length, that I want to read. I’m not getting any younger. And after this year’s Hugo Awards debacle, I’m not as interested in reading new work as I was a few weeks ago. So I’m going to be diving into my pulps, as well as my old paperbacks, when I get a chance. I’ve already read the first two Kuttner stories in this series, and the posts should go up over the next day or two. The fantasy and stories with strong fantasy elements will be reviewed here. The pure science fiction I’ll look at on Futures Past and Present.
Haffner Press recently put this quote on their Facebook page;
“Time was running out on me . . . As a last desperate measure I gambled on Laurence D’Orsay and his agency-cum-writing-course, and it was the most fortunate thing I ever did. Henry Kuttner was reading for Laurence then, and he took a special interest in my limping efforts at sf and fantasy, writing me long and detailed criticisms on his own time. If it hadn’t been for Hank, I might never have made it; it would certainly have taken me much longer.”—Leigh Brackett.
Kuttner was a force. Not just his own output but what he encouraged and developed from others – particularly C. L. Moore but apparently Brackett as well and perhaps others I don’t know about – because i’m not overly schooled in Kuttner.
Like R E Howard, and HP Lovecraft, the world lost him far too soon.
Thanks for the quote. I’ve really got to look back into getting a Facebook page for the blog.
Ray Bradbury wrote in the introduction of THE BEST OF HENRY KUTTNER about how influential and encouraging Kuttner was when he was just starting out. Kuttner finished a story that Bradbury had gotten stuck on (“The Candle”) and didn’t claim coauthor credit when it was published.
You’re right that we lost him too early. I’m not sure how much more he would have written, though. The biographical sources I’ve seen say he was pretty burned out on writing by the mid-1950s and was focusing most of his energy on finishing his degree. I’ve seen some sources say that some of his mystery novels were ghost written. I hope that’s not the case.
While I was writing that last paragraph, I started putting together a list in my head of writers who died too young: C. M. Kornbluth, H. Beam Piper, Charles Beaummont, Tom Reamy. Then I stopped. It was getting too depressing.
There are couple of mysteries Kuttner wrote with Moore that are interesting – The Day He Died is really good. The Fairy Chessmen is excellent: some of the best true sci-fi ever.
Not to mention that the hints of a background dystopia in Robots Have No Tails add so much depth to some otherwise lighthearted stories.
Kuttner was a master in what he wrote – and when you add in his influence on Brackett and Bradbury, there is so much we take for granted in genre fiction that we would not have without him.
I haven’t read Kuttner’s mysteries. The paperbacks are hard to find and tend to be in pretty fragile condition. The few I have are about to fall apart, and I’ve been hesitant to read them for that reason. Fortunately Haffner Press is reprinting them in an omnibus edition. I’ve had a copy of The Fairy Chessmen for years and have never gotten around to reading it; not sure why. I plan to correct that oversight before the year is out.
You make a very good point about what so many genre readers take for granted. It’s a sore spot with me that younger readers aren’t familiar with the major works of the past. It’s almost as though some people are intentionally trying to erase the heritage of the field. That was part of what motivated me to write the post on women writers a few months ago. I guess I’m getting old and cranky, because it’s really grating when some book/movie/comic becomes suddenly popular and everyone treats it as if it were all original and I’m thinking “but Asimov/Kuttner/Heinlein/Bradbury/Williamson/Pohl/etc did it better.” I guess it’s just a case of everything old becoming new again.
You wont find Murder in Brass or The Day he Died in the Haffner stuff, unfortunately. Its by “Lewis Padgett” from the 1940’s.
http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?sts=t&tn=the+day+he+died
A lot of the Kuttner/Moore collections are spectacular too.
You’re right. I wasn’t thinking. Fortunately I have copies of both of them. Thanks for the link, though. It’s good to know there are copies still out there.
Have either of you read The Michael Gray Murder mysteries and are they any good?
Haffner Press Michael Gray omnibus edition
I haven’t. Those are the ones that I heard rumors of some perhaps having been ghost written. I don’t think I’ve even seen copies of some of them. I’m looking forward to Haffner’s omnibus. I’ve wanted to read them for years.
The Kuttner byline is usually a sign of at least a good read. I was disappointed recently to pick up The Dark World and find that it was basically Merritt’s Dwellers In the Mirage with the serial numbers filed off. This appeared in Startling Stories when some of their best work as appearing in Astounding. I don’t know if this was an older work that had been trying to find a buyer, just on off day, or just caught me in a bad mood.
I haven’t read The Dark World yet, but I’ve heard it’s pretty much as you describe. The Dark World, The Portal in the Picture, and Valley of the Flame were published in an omnibus entitled The Startling Worlds of Henry Kuttner back in the 80s. All three of the short novels were published in Startling Stories. I’ve got it in the queue for later in the year.
I read The Valley of the Flame when I was in high school (and you could but used pulps two-for-a-quarter). I enjoyed it then but don’t remember much about it. I seem to recall a few more Kuttner ‘novels’ in those old Startlings than just the three.
There were definitely more than the three I mentioned. I’ve read As You Were, which was published in Thrilling Wonder and mostly liked it not long after I bought all those pulps. There were a few places in it where the writing didn’t seemed to have been edited well. Much less polished wording than I was used to seeing from Kuttner at that time in his career and certainly less polished than in the rest of the story. I’ve got most of the “novels” from Thrilling Wonder and Startling, and I’m going to be working my way through them over the next year or so.