Today, April 7, is the birthday of Henry Kuttner (1915-1958). I encountered his work in the Science Fiction Book Club edition of The Best of Henry Kuttner when I was fourteen. That was the perfect age for imprinting.

Kuttner has been my favorite writer ever since.

Some years ago, someway, somehow, I managed to score a copy of Kuttner’s first short story collection, A Gnome There Was, published under his pen name Lewis Padgett. These are stories he wrote in collaboration with his wife, C. L. Moore. I don’t remember now how I obtained it. Legally, of course. Probably I found a copy online through ABE or somesuch site.

(The one I wish I had been able to buy was the copy of Robots Have No Tails that he inscribed to John W. Campbell, Jr. But the prpice was a grand, and that was over a quarter of a century ago. If I had had the money, I would have bought it. Alas, I didn’t have a spare thousand dollars sitting around. No telling what that book would go for today.)

But I digress.

It has been years since I read A Gnome There Was. It contains some of Kuttner’s best known and most reprinted stories, such as “Mimsy Were teh Borogorves”, “A Gnome There Was”,  “The Twonky”, “What You Need”, and two of the Hogben stories.

But it also contains some of the leasat reprinted stories, sotries that are just as good as the previously named. For this post, I’m going to look briefly at two of those stories, “The Cure” and “Rain Check”. Maybe I’ll look at some of the others in the future.

“The Cure” has been reprinted several times over the years. It was first published in the May 1946 issue of Astounding. It concerns a lawyer who keeps having hallucinations about waking up to the smell of dead flies with some sosrt of moveable device under his right hand.

His partner convinces him to go see a psychiatrist in their building. (The story is set in New York.) The doctor tells him when the hallucination strikes, and it does so at random, he should move the thing under his hand.

There have been enough variations on this one that the ending isn’t a great surprise. But it has the sardonic ending that Kuttner did so well.

The second story is “Raiin Check”. It originally appeared in the July 1946 issue of Astounding. This one is going to be a little harder to track down than “The Cure”. It has only been reprinted once since its appearance in A Gnome there Was. That was as a standalone ebook from a Canadian company. It doesn’t appear to be available in the States. (Both of these stories were reprinted in the British edition of Astoundiing some months later thant hey appeared in the US.)

I prefer “Rain Check” to “The Cure”.  It has a logical, though dark, ending but not one as obvious as the ending of “The Cure”.

A cartoonist buys a clear cube at an antique store. It has what appears to be a mandrake root in it. Only, it’s not a root. It’s a nonhuman being created by an extinct race in a failed attempt to survive the last ice age.

It’s not a genie, but it is the source of legends of genies in bottles, sybils, and other things like that. It doesn’t grant wishes, but it can tell you what to do in order to make your wishes come true.

Remember the old saying about be careful what you wish for?

Kuttner does an excellent job of not making the wishes turn around and bite the wisher like some authors do. I’m thinking of W. W. Jacobs’ “The Monkey’s Paw” and  similar stories. He’s much more subtle than that.

And the last sentence is a zinger.

Frankly, I don’t understand why this story (along with several others) haven’t been iincluded in some of Kuttner’s other collections. It’s as good as most of his best stories.Maybe someone will issue a collection of Kuttner’s work that contains his better but less known works.

I may see if I can get an inexpensive additional copy of A Gnome There Was for a reading copy.

So, in honor of Kuttner’s memory, I’m raising a glass  in his honor. It’s already poured, and I’ve been s ipping from it. Happy birthday, Hank. Thanks for all the great stories.