The Specialty of the House Read online

  The Speciality of the House

  Stanley Ellin

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  To Otto Penzler,

  partner in crime

  Introduction

  Dear Reader,

  I must open with an introduction to the Introduction. It is rumored that the editor of this volume, a young man with innocent eyes and a mouth in which butter would never melt, once worked at the Bronx Zoo’s Reptile House where he had the most venomous inmates contentedly eating out of his bare hand.

  My doubts about that were resolved the day he and I were engaged in discussing the publication of this collection.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘you’ll do an introduction for it.’

  ‘Of course,’ said I, nonchalant as could be.

  After a few sleepless hours in bed that night, I clearly saw what I had gotten myself into. First thing next morning I reported back to headquarters and informed the editor that I had changed my mind about doing an introduction.

  ‘You can’t change your mind,’ he said in the mildest of tones. ‘You gave me your promise.’

  ‘Yes, but consider the problem. A proper introduction should be a rousing panegyric to the author’s dazzling talent. I can’t write anything like that about myself. I mean, I probably could, but I don’t think the reader would take it kindly.’

  ‘You’ve got a point there,’ said the editor. ‘All right, no panegyric.’

  ‘You see?’ I said, pleased that he was being reasonable about it. ‘And what does that leave? A solemn analysis of the stories themselves? A weighty explication of their subtleties?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because these are short stories, for God’s sake, not some great overblown kapok-stuffed novel. Look at them. Each one is a story and it’s short. It tells all without being laid out on the literary rack.’

  The editor nodded. ‘True,’ he said.

  ‘In that case—’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ said the editor, sliding a Florentine dagger from his sleeve and holding it up so that I could observe the play of light on its blade, ‘within one week you will have ready an introduction as promised.’

  Herewith, the Introduction.

  Facts are good to start with. Let us start with facts.

  All the stories in this collection except one deal with that streak of wickedness in human nature which makes human nature so deplorably fascinating. The one exception deals with a certain flea (Ctenocephalides canis) who is only too human in nature and disposition, and it stemmed from visits made in my youth to Hubert’s Flea Circus just off Times Square. Hubert’s is long gone now, which is too bad. Fleas of even low character would be a great improvement over much of the human traffic in the area nowadays.

  The public appearance of the stories in the collection encompassed thirty years, and the works themselves are presented in chronological order. The extent of the evolution our society has undergone in these thirty years will occasionally make itself felt in the earlier stories by references that, depending on your age, may strike you as either achingly nostalgic or grotesquely unbelievable. For example, along the way you will encounter a man who is ready to sell his soul for an assured income of fifty dollars a week, a comfortable amount in those days. I should also like to remark that in the early stories all male characters wear their hair short and all female characters wear their hair long, thus making it fairly easy to differentiate between the sexes even while observing them from the rear.

  The stories are not of equal merit. In view of this, it would seem convenient that I use some device like the clichéd Scale Of One To Ten to set down exact ratings for each piece so that you could, before reading it, adjust your own response to the proper wave length. However, I have learned over three rough decades that this would be folly. As its author, I tend to judge the merits of any piece by the degree to which it meets the expectations I have for it while it is yet barely conceived. Where expectations are met by the finished work I rejoice. Where expectations are not met I am downcast and hard to live with. But of course the reader, never having shared with me the process of conception and parturition, shares none of my expectations and time and again will frown at my triumphs and smile upon my failures. Eventually, like all writers when they enter their dotage, I came to the conclusion that there is no way of telling what the reader will be up to, and that the best way of dealing with him is to just hand him the goods and then quickly step back out of range.

  Now to broaden the canvas.

  Underlying this confessional is the assumption that you are a devotee of that peculiar narrative form, the short story, and here we are surely in the same happy company. I became a member of it very young. At age three, I was shipped off in my mother’s care to a boarding house in Lakewood, New Jersey, to recuperate from some lingering ailment. In my earliest days I was always recuperating from some lingering ailment or other, and this one must have been particularly interesting to have led to that hegira from Brooklyn to the remote wilderness of New Jersey where, as everyone in my family knew, the fresh air alone was life-restoring.

  I have some vivid memories of that bucolic episode, but most vivid is the memory of my father, on a weekend visit, sitting by my bed filling me with bliss as he read Peter Rabbit to me, patiently read it over and over on demand until I was letter perfect in it. He must have read other stories to me as well, but of them I have no recollection because they lacked the true magic. The true magic is what sticks in the mind.

  Then in my first or second year at school I met The Gingerbread Man and reeled under the encounter. Plainly, the ultimate in literature had been achieved. Homeric in theme, penetrating in characterization, The Gingerbread Man raised me to the heavens and drove my fond parents to distraction as, making a sort of Vedic chant of it, I would deliver it to them between mouthfuls at the dinner table. It may have been out of their desperation that I suddenly found myself the recipient of a subscription to the late-lamented, ever memorable St Nicholas Magazine for children.

  Here was my introduction to the wonderful world of magazines, and it didn’t take me long to realize that this was not the only subscription being delivered to my address. My father, it seemed, was hopelessly addicted to magazine fiction. That was a long time ago, the 1920’s, and it was indeed a Golden Age of the short story. Most Golden Ages, when you scratch them hard enough, turn out to have been largely brass, but this one was authentic: an era before long-distance automobile travel and television when a fast expanding and increasingly prosperous middle class put a good deal of its loose change into magazines principally devoted to fiction.

  Even so, I suspect that the variety of publications arriving on my doorestep was out of the ordinary, extending from the glittering weekly Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, and Liberty to the sobersided Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s. Following Lewis Carroll’s sagacious observation: ‘After all, what is the good of a book without pictures or conversation?’ I soon learned to sort out the fiction from the rest of the contents in any magazine and, however hard the struggle and small the reward ofttimes, wound my mesmerized way through it.

  So it was that even before adolescence I was deep into popular magazine writers who, forgiven their early indiscretions, now stand propped up as literary monuments on academia’s lawns. I read Hemingway, Faulkner, and Scott Fitzgerald hot off the press. Ring Lardner, who still eludes the monument-makers, I worshipped. Simultaneously, there was the exploration of the volumes in the family bookcase, among them collections of Mark Twain, Kipling, Poe, Stevenson, and de Maupassant. I must note that there was no precocity in this and that I was but one of many among my peers. Remember that this was before the simple-minded Dick and Jane had been invented. Those years,
when one entered high school he was expected to read with a certain fluency, and it was just a case of applying the fluency to suitable love objects. And of course I always read for pleasure alone, never having been misled into believing that one should read any fiction for the self-conscious improvement of his character or intellect.

  But I did find that pleasure has considerable shadings. Poe bred the blackest fancies in me. De Maupassant’s stories made me uneasy. I knew that something highly interesting was going on between the lines but couldn’t quite fathom what it was. I also knew intuitively, even in my extreme youth, that here was a writer who reduced stories to their absolute essence. And that the ending of each story, however unpredictable, was, when I thought of it, as inevitable as doom.

  The true magic again.

  In high school I expanded horizons considerably, discovering in the process the recently founded New Yorker and a wide range of detective story magazines, most notably Black Mask. The New Yorker became a pervasive influence, generally enlightening and brightening, although it sometimes bothered me that so many of its stories seemed to fix on nothing more than terribly sensitive people bound and determined to give themselves a hard time.

  There was no such problem with the more insensitive characters who inhabited Black Mask and its imitators, even when I began to take notice that their adventures were usually more of the same. What these pulps communicated to me was an exciting sense of immediacy. The clipped, flat, declarative style colored by dialogue with a frequently sardonic edge had the texture of the neighborhood I lived in. Today, with the absorption of that style into respected literature, one realizes the huge debt owed its creators and early masters, writers like James M. Cain and Dashiell Hammett. Indeed, Hemingway’s most effective story, ‘The Killers,’ is pure pulp in style. What raises it to the heights is an extraordinary narrowness of focus which makes the reader contribute as much to the narrative as the writer. The more things change, the more they remain the same. Pulp readers in my palmy days would never go for that degree of subtlety any more than television crime-show viewers would today, these crime-shows, some of which I dote on, being no more than gussied-up electronic pulp.

  It was late in my college years that I started to write stories, having been struck by the fancy that my vocation lay that way. Certainly in my childhood I had borne all the characteristics of the author-to-be. I had been an incorrigible daydreamer and prevaricator with an unbounded imagination and a handsomely contrived excuse for every occasion. Now I felt it was time to put the imagination to work for fun and profit, and so for the next ten years, between and around jobs as farmer, schoolteacher, ship-builder, ironworker, and infantryman, urged on by an insanely devoted and endlessly patient wife – the very same one who will be copy-reading these pages – I made sporadic attempts to join the ranks of the illustrious published.

  I wish at this point, since every fiction writer likes to draw on his reader’s tear ducts now and then, that I could describe my veritable martyrdom to the craft of writing during those ten years. A wholesome respect for hellfire forbids this, because, in fact, as the years rolled on my urge to write became fitful at best. Persistent failure did not kindle ever brighter in me the flame. Rather it led to the sensible conclusion that there were better ways of spending time away from my paid employment than in the harvesting of rejection slips.

  However, there was a rekindling when, an overripe thirty and just home from military service, I was urged by my helpmeet to give the game one glorious, full-time try before returning to gainful employment. It was during that period that I was struck by an idea for a story so outrageous that even as I was putting it down on paper I knew it was destined for oblivion. As if to confirm this foreboding it then bounced like a pinball from one editorial office to another until – the helpmeet stepping in again – it was directed to an editor who apparently had a taste for the outrageous, that half of Ellery Queen known as Frederic Dan-nay. And now, some thirty years after its maiden publication, it serves as the title piece of this collection.

  So here we are, and if this sketchy, lopsided, and self-serving autobiography demonstrates nothing else, it does show that I go back a long way into antiquity. Indeed, back to a time when horse-drawn fire engines still dramatically clattered through the streets in my part of Brooklyn, the lamplighter man mysteriously appeared at dusk each evening to bring a glow to the gas lamps along the block, and, thanks to the Volstead Act, your friendly neighborhood bootlegger did a thriving business in Scotch aged at least two hours in the bottle.

  I have pleasant memories of that era, but I can’t say that I’m moved by any profound nostalgia for it. We born and bred New Yorkers are like that. The action is so damn fast around these parts that if we feel any nostalgia at all, it is likely to be for the way things were last year. Or even last month.

  But I do mourn all those wondrous publications devoted in large part to fiction which have disappeared along the way or have now been converted into picture books or journals of alleged information or anything else that doesn’t make demands on a reader’s imagination. Because that is what all storytelling comes down to: the writer’s imagination beckoning to the reader’s. A joint venture, and as I’ve come to learn whichever half of it I am, one of the most intriguing of all.

  Here, too, having seen to the making of both short stories and novels, I am moved to confide that the short story is certainly the less self-indulgent and the one more likely to provide an immediate and interesting aftertaste, acid or alkali.

  Multum in parvo, sayeth the sage.

  I can only hope that you will find multum in all the parvo to follow.

  Stanley Ellin

  Brooklyn, New York

  August, 1979

  The Speciality

  of the House

  The Complete

  Mystery Tales, 1948–1978

  The Speciality of the House

  ‘And this,’ said Laffler, ‘is Sbirro’s.’ Costain saw a square brownstone facade identical with the others that extended from either side into the clammy darkness of the deserted street. From the barred windows of the basement at his feet, a glimmer of light showed behind heavy curtains.

  ‘Lord,’ he observed, ‘it’s a dismal hole, isn’t it?’

  ‘I beg you to understand,’ said Laffler stiffly, ‘that Sbirro’s is the restaurant without pretensions. Besieged by these ghastly, neurotic times, it has refused to compromise. It is perhaps the last important establishment in this city lit by gas jets. Here you will find the same honest furnishings, the same magnificent Sheffield service, and possibly, in a far corner, the very same spider webs that were remarked by the patrons of a half century ago!’

  ‘A doubtful recommendation,’ said Costain, ‘and hardly sanitary.’

  ‘When you enter,’ Laffler continued, ‘you leave the insanity of this year, this day, and this hour, and you find yourself for a brief span restored in spirit, not by opulence, but by dignity, which is the lost quality of our time.’

  Costain laughed uncomfortably. ‘You make it sound more like a cathedral than a restaurant,’ he said.

  In the pale reflection of the street lamp overhead, Laffler peered at his companion’s face. ‘I wonder,’ he said abruptly, ‘whether I have not made a mistake in extending this invitation to you.’

  Costain was hurt. Despite an impressive title and large salary, he was no more than a clerk to this pompous little man, but he was impelled to make some display of his feelings. ‘If you wish,’ he said coldly, ‘I can make other plans for my evening with no trouble.’

  With his large, cowlike eyes turned up to Costain, the mist drifting into the ruddy, full moon of his face, Laffler seemed strangely ill at ease. Then ‘No, no,’ he said at last, ‘absolutely not. It’s important that you dine at Sbirro’s with me.’ He grasped Costain’s arm firmly and led the way to the wroughtiron gate of the basement. ‘You see, you’re the sole person in my office who seems to know anything at all about good food. And on my part,
knowing about Sbirro’s but not having some appreciative friend to share it is like having a unique piece of art locked in a room where no one else can enjoy it.’

  Costain was considerably mollified by this. ‘I understand there are a great many people who relish that situation.’

  ‘I’m not one of that kind!’ Laffler said sharply. ‘And having the secret of Sbirro’s locked in myself for years has finally become unendurable.’ He fumbled at the side of the gate and from within could be heard the small, discordant jangle of an ancient pull-bell. An interior door opened with a groan, and Costain found himself peering into a dark face whose only discernible feature was a row of gleaming teeth.

  ‘Sair?’ said the face.

  ‘Mr Laffler and a guest.’

  ‘Sair,’ the face said again, this time in what was clearly an invitation. It moved aside and Costain stumbled down a single step behind his host. The door and gate creaked behind him, and he stood blinking in a small foyer. It took him a moment to realize that the figure he now stared at was his own reflection in a gigantic pier glass that extended from floor to ceiling. ‘Atmosphere,’ he said under his breath and chuckled as he followed his guide to a seat.

  He faced Laffler across a small table for two and peered curiously around the dining room. It was no size at all, but the half-dozen guttering gas jets which provided the only illumination threw such a deceptive light that the walls flickered and faded into uncertain distance.

  There were no more than eight or ten tables about, arranged to insure the maximum privacy. All were occupied, and the few waiters serving them moved with quiet efficiency. In the air were a soft clash and scrape of cutlery and a soothing murmur of talk. Costain nodded appreciatively.

  Laffler breathed an audible sigh of gratification. ‘I knew you would share my enthusiasm,’ he said. ‘Have you noticed, by the way, that there are no women present?’