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Ed Gorman

Dark Whispers & Other Stories

Finally, a book for my brother Dan.

Introduction

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 aunt’s 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 boy’s 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 aunt’s, 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. I’d borne my grandmother’s death in commendable style — probably I didn’t have a clue as to what was going on — but that when I saw my grandfather cry, I clung to my father’s 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 he’s indeed the erudite chap we suspected all along.

I’m 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 isn’t to say that entertainment shouldn’t have resonance. Think of Dean Koontz’s Watchers or Stephen King’s The Dead Zone. True and powerful and fine statements about mankind, and entertaining as hell, page after gorgeous page. I recently reread Chandler’s THE LADY IN THE LAKE and Cain’s DOUBLE INDEMNITY and Brian Moore’s 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 O’Hara.

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 wasn’t 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 men’s magazine, my writing career didn’t 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 I’d finish, a suspense novel. I’d 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 men’s 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 men’s 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 don’t 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 you’ll 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. I’m 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, I’ve 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 I’m 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

Friends

I've written two long stories and one long novel about Jack Walsh. I suppose, in most respects, he’s really my father, albeit much happier than my father ever managed to be. Whoever he is, he’s not me — I’m 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 they’re 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.