Ed Gorman - Dark Whispers & Other Stories

Introduction copyright 1992 by Ed Gorman.

Friends copyright 1990 by Ed Gorman. First appeared in New Crimes #2.

Dark Muse copyright 1989 by Ed Gorman. First appeared in Phantoms.

False Idols copyright 1983 by Ed Gorman. First appeared in The Record Spinner.

Dance Girl copyright 1990 by Ed Gorman. First appeared in New Frontiers.

Masque copyright 1981, revised 1989, by Ed Gorman. First appeared in Mummy Stories.

Gunslinger copyright 1988 by Ed Gorman. First appeared in The Californians.

Nightmare Child copyright 1987 by Daniel Ransom. First appeared in Nightmare Child.

Dreams of Darkness copyright 1992 by Ed Gorman.

The Man in the Long Black Sedan copyright 1990 by Ed Gorman. First appeared in Borderlands.

Killing Kate copyright 1981, revised 1991, by Ed Gorman. First appeared in Obsessions.

Dark Whispers copyright 1982, revised 1991, by Ed Gorman. First appeared in Cold Blood.

When I was five, my grandmother died, quite young, of heart disease. On that day, for the first and only time in my life, I saw my grandfather cry. This took a great and abiding toll on me. I have never forgotten how he looked, or sounded.

After the graveyard, and on the way back to an aunts house where hams and beef roasts and pies and cakes and cookies would be shared in a sort of communion, my father stopped at a drug store and took me inside and bought me a nickel fountain Coke and said I could have anything I wanted. He must have seen me watch my grandfather cry, and thus wanted to woo back laughter and shoo away a little boys pain and fear.

That day I bought my very first comic book. It was an issue of Superman. I know all this happened exactly as I recall it because, just before his own death, my father talked about that day. He said that rather than go into my aunts, I stayed in the car and read and reread the Superman. He was kind enough to bring me treats from inside. He said that he and my mother had been worried about me. Id borne my grandmothers death in commendable style probably I didnt have a clue as to what was going on but that when I saw my grandfather cry, I clung to my fathers trouser leg and began shaking and crying myself. I suppose, without quite understanding the process, I began to realize that even the strongest and most stoical among us is susceptible to loss and grief. (He was never the same again, my grandfather, and died, still a strapping man, not many years later, a pore lonesome wife-left feller in the way with which Nelson Algren chose to open A Walk On the Wild Side.)

My father said that for the next week I fixated on the Superman comic. It was all I wanted to do, read that comic book. I did not want new comic books. I just wanted this one, to read again and again and again. And when I was not reading it for myself, I asked my mother to come in and read it to me. Sweet woman that she is, she obliged me.

Early on, I learned that reading offered great distraction. Nothing has ever engrossed me more than a good piece of fiction. Powerful as film can be, it has never held me, or taught me, or solaced me, the way fiction can.

I say all this just after reading a rather shallow and pretentious article in one of the fanzines about the duty of genre fiction to become art. The writer even slips in a few Latin phrases to show us that hes indeed the erudite chap we suspected all along.

Im afraid I disagree with him. For me, the first duty of fiction is to entertain, to offer distraction from a world too tangled to ever be knowable or comforting in any ultimate sense. Puritans that we are, we seem to find something slightly sinful in taking pleasure so directly and without apology. I guess the professors would have us read only things laced with Latin phrases.

This isnt to say that entertainment shouldnt have resonance. Think of Dean Koontzs Watchers or Stephen Kings The Dead Zone. True and powerful and fine statements about mankind, and entertaining as hell, page after gorgeous page. I recently reread Chandlers THE LADY IN THE LAKE and Cains DOUBLE INDEMNITY and Brian Moores THE LONELY PASSION OF JUDITH HEARNE, and you know what? All the great artists without exception were first and foremost entertainers, from Homer through Balzac to the much-maligned John OHara.

My mother says that even when I was six or seven I would sleep with a stack of library novels right in bed with me. I wasnt a happy child and books were my ticket out.

Now here I am writing about stories of my own.

Except for the occasional sale to a minor literary or mens magazine, my writing career didnt begin in earnest until I was thirty-nine. Only then did I start writing to a regular schedule, and only then did I begin submitting stories in a systematic way. I also began, and promised myself Id finish, a suspense novel. Id had many false starts before.

But I also began writing stories with a passion that hinted at obsession or frenzy. I sent lots out, I got lots back, but I kept writing anyway and fairly quickly I began to sell to the mens field, which was surprisingly open as to what it would accept I sold mysteries, westerns, horror, fantasy, even a few science fiction stories. This was before mens magazines insisted on erotic content. That was a few years off.

A few of those early stories are in this collection, though the majority are of more recent vintage. I dont write as much as I did in those days but I think that all that writing was good for me. My heroes have always been big producers, from John D. MacDonald to Ed McBain to Max Brand to Georges Simenon. I think youll find that slow writers write just the same percentage of bad stories as fast writers. The only difference is that slow writers tend to get sanctimonious about their pace, as if being slow were inherently virtuous. (This is not to excuse hasty or sloppy writing. Im merely saying that each of us writes at his or her own pace, a pace, I think, that is largely preordained by a number of factors.)

I am blessed. I find that I take the same comfort from writing that I take from reading. Most mornings, I go happily to my writing office. On a few mornings, Ive even been known to bound down the stairs, genuinely excited about working on a particular scene or story. Fortunately, my wife Carol is also a writer and knows just what Im going through.

For all the editors who bought these stories, I thank you. And for all the readers who took pleasure from these stories, I thank you, too.

May these tales entertain you half as much as that long ago Superman story entertained me.

Ed Gorman

I've written two long stories and one long novel about Jack Walsh. I suppose, in most respects, hes really my father, albeit much happier than my father ever managed to be. Whoever he is, hes not me Im Jack Dwyer, my other series character, lots of anger and rancor and occasional embarrassing bursts of violence in that puppy. But the relatively gentle Walsh stories are fun to do because I truly never know where theyre going to end up. When I started this story, for example, I had no idea where it was headed. It ended not as I wanted it to. It ended as Jack Walsh, whoever he is, wanted it to.

I saw a small child twisted with cerebral palsy. I saw an even smaller child stomach-bloated with malnutrition, flies walking his face. And a man who had mined his life with cocaine. And a forlorn, whispery woman dying of AIDS.

I almost couldnt finish the late-night dinner Id brought back to my motel room from a nearby McDonalds.

I dont mean to be sarcastic. I felt all the things those television commercials begged me to feel guilt, sadness, rage at injustice, and utter helplessness. You know the commercials I mean and you know the time I mean late night TV in between commercials for Boxcar Willie and Slim Whitman albums and forthcoming professional wrestling matches.