Black Gate

“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

(Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun)

My favorite Erle Stanley Gardner series is the one featuring Bertha Cool and Donald Lam. I’ve written three posts here at Black Gate about the series: they’re linked at the end of this article. Under the name A.A. Fair, Gardner wrote 30 novels about them from 1939 to 1970 (one of them was published long after his death).

In the series, Bertha took over her late husband’s detective business after he died. Donald, an ex-lawyer, is hired in the first book, and soon becomes so good at making money for the business, he pushes his way into a partnership. Bertha hates to spend a dollar. She loves accumulating money. Not so much for spending; just to have. Donald is smart and shifty. He’s also pint-sized and is no threat as a fighter.

Raymond Burr’s successful Perry Mason television series ran from 1957 to 1966, covering 271 episodes. Burr was so popular in the role, he continued appearing as Mason up to the year he died. The books, of course, are among the best-selling in the world, having sold over an estimated 300 million copies.

In 1958, with Perry Mason on the airwaves, Gardner authorized a pilot for a Cool and Lam series. He even taped an introduction, which was filmed on the Mason set. Unfortunately, the pilot didn’t get picked up and Cool and Lam on the screen was abandoned forever more.

The casting choices seemed…curious. Billie Pearson had a total of four screen credits in his career; which equaled the number of his marriages. The same year he filmed this pilot, he appeared in an episode of Perry Mason. Only 5’-2”, he was a jockey (one of his four credits was as a jockey). Having watched the pilot over a half-dozen times now, I can see him as Lam, though a couple more inches wouldn’t have hurt. But he certainly had zero star power.

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Ursula Pflug’s fiction demands to be savoured. Her new collection, Seeds And Other Stories, holds 26 short fictions ranging in length from flash fiction to short novelettes, each marked out by precise language and fantastic happenings seen edge-on. They’re not linked by plot but by threads of imagery: portals to other places; hallucinatory new drugs named for colours; gardening, and plants sprouting from the earth or human bodies. Each individual piece on its own carries a powerful emotional weight. Together it becomes difficult to read more than a few in a sitting, and that is no bad thing.

The stories in Seeds all can at least be read as having some element of the fantastic, though often it’s very slight. “Myrtle’s Marina,” for example, follows a man ambling about the run-down marina he owns and thinking back to moments that might have been magic. “A Shower of Fireflies” is an enigmatic two-page story about a mother reflecting on her life and her children. In the final story, “My Mother’s Skeleton,” a woman speaks to her daughter, remembers her mother, and meditates on art.

Most tales push reality further. “Mother Down the Well” opens the collection with a story about a woman in rural Ontario whose well holds a magical portal and her magic-touched mother. “Judy” is a short science-fictional tale with a post-apocalyptic feel, about a woman who loses a friend among a raging plague. “The Lonely Planet Guide to Other Dimensions” follows a writer who finds an alternate world in a mundane setting, and along with it a power to rewrite existence.

All these stories, and all the stories in Seeds, are intensely focused works. When not told in first person, they submerge themselves in a very tight and limited third-person point of view. Details of description are rarely given, only what matters to the character at any given moment. There’s an implied irony in this approach, insisting on the limitations of a character’s perspective, and it works. These are stories about absences, about things that once were and whether they may be regrown.

They’re also stories about emotionally intense subjects: family, lovers, visions (artistic, psychedelic, or both). Pflug illustrates these themes with an approach to the fantastic that borders on the surreal whether the fantastic or science-fictional elements are overt or not. There’s an allusiveness to them, and a willingness not to explain them. These are not comfortable knowable worlds with clearly-elaborated systems of magic or technology. These are worlds bigger and plainer than the characters we follow, who deal plainly with odd events: there’s little awe here, and where it does exist it’s often an awe of the natural world and not of magic.

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