Avram Davidson - The Avram Davidson Treasury - a tribute collection

“You come ’ome with me,” the Gaffer said, pushing his nobby old hands against the table top and making to rise. “You come ’ome with me. The cuttin’s are in my old trunk and you ask my missus — for she keeps the keys — you just ask my missus.”

“What!” cried Tom. “Me ask your missus for anything? Why, I’d as soon ask a lion or a tiger at Whipsnade Zoo for a bit o’ their meat, as ask your missus for anything. She’s a Tartar, she is!”

The Gaffer’s mind had evidently dropped the burden of the conversation. He began to nod and smile as if Tom had paid him a very acceptable compliment. But he seemed to recall the object of Tom’s remarks, rather than their tone.

“Oh, she was a lovely creature,” he said softly. “Most beautiful girl you ever saw. And it was me that she married, after all, y’see. Not either of them two others, but me , that they called the Mouse!” And he chuckled. It was not a nice chuckle, and as I looked up, sharply, I caught his eye, and there was something sly and very ugly in it.

I went cold. In one second I was all but certain of two things. “Gaffer,” I said, trying to sound casual. “What was your wife’s maiden name?”

The Gaffer seemed deep in thought, but he answered, as casually as I’d asked, “Her name? Her name was Leah De Silva. Part British, part Portugee, and part — but who cares about that? Not I. I married her in church, I did.”

“And how,” I asked, “do you pronounce D-e-v-o-r-e?”

The dim eyes wavered. “Worked in the West India Docks, was why we called him the Docker,” said the old man. “But his Christian name, it was Dan’l Deever.”

“Yes,” I said. “Of course it was. And it wasn’t Harry Owen who peached about the whiskey bottle in Dan’l’s gear, so as to get him in the guardhouse — and it wasn’t Harry Owen who sent the note to the wrong young lady — was it? It was someone who knew what Harry would do if he had the chance. Someone who knew that the Docker would certainly kill Harry, if told the right set of lies. And he did, didn’t he? And then the way was all clear and open for you, wasn’t it?”

For just a second there was fear in Gaffer Graham’s face. And there was defiance, too. And triumph. Then, swiftly, all were gone, and only the muddled memories of old age were left.

“It was cold,” he whimpered. “It was bitter cold when they hanged Danny Deever in the morning. There was that young chap from the newspaper, that wrote about it. Funny name ’e ’ad — somethin’ like Kipling — Ruddy Kipling, ’twas.”

“Yes,” I said, “something like that.”

You may not be surprised to hear that, after rising to the bait Avram left for the “insatiably curious,” I failed to find any sources that mention a historic referent for Kipling’s poem “Danny Deever.” Rudyard Kipling, of course, lived in Lahore as a young man and, as the story implies, wrote for the Civil and Military Gazette: the scenario proposed in the story would not have been impossible. The poem was first published in The Scots Observer in 1890. It consists of four stanzas in drumroll cadences, a series of questions and responses between a sergeant and enlisted men who have been called out in files to witness a hanging .

Each stanza ends with four lines in Cockney dialect that describe the effect of the hanging on the young recruits, and closes with a phrase (slightly different for each stanza) about “hangin’ Danny Deever in the mornin’.” The focus is entirely on the reactions of the men to witnessing a fellow-soldier being hanged, and we never find out anything about Danny Deever himself, other than he was convicted of shooting a sleeping comrade.

Reading “Danny Deever” again after reading “The Affair at Lahore Cantonment” adds an additional ironic patina to the poem that I think Kipling himself would have relished. It’s in Barrack-Room Ballads; you’ll just have to look it up.

When “Revolver” was first published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 1962, editor Frederic Dannay blurbed it in part as “a kind of roundelay in prose, and a bitter, ironic slice of life — in the raw.” A perfectly apt description as far as it goes. But it neglects to mention another vital element of the story: its understated and mordant wit.

Humor plays a role in all of Avram’s crime fiction, just as it does in his science fiction and fantasy tales; it was a central facet of his mind-set and his prose style. In some stories the humor is broad, farcical, laugh-out-loud funny. In others, such as “Revolver,” it is subtle, and because of its subtlety, even more caustic. Read carefully his descriptions of Mr. Edward Mason, slumlord; of the tenants who inhabit Mason’s old brownstone houses; of the other denizens of the inner-city neighborhood in which the brownstones stand a-moldering. The descriptions won’t generate laughter, but they will produce wry smiles — and at the same time make you feel just a little uncomfortable. This kind of humor was an Avram specialty, the quiet kind with an edge and an attitude.

“Revolver” is one of several stories in the Avram oeuvre, both mysteries and fantasies, that remind me of another writer whose work I admire: Gerald Kersh. Each was his own person and his own writer, but it seems to me they shared a similar, slightly skewed worldview, a similar passion for oddball characters and situations; and that the humor which infuses their work is similarly acidulous and knife-edged. I wonder if Avram knew Kersh. If he did, I think they must have enjoyed each other’s company. I wonder, too, what a Davidson-Kersh collaboration might have been like. Something pretty wonderful, to be sure. Something to create both a smile and a faint but pervasive unease, and to linger long in the memory. Something like “Revolver,” perhaps …

THERE WAS A MR. Edward Mason who dealt in real estate. His kind of real estate consisted mainly of old brownstone houses into which Mr. Mason crammed a maximum number of tenants by turning each room into a single apartment. Legally this constituted “increasing available residence space” or some similar phrase. As a result of this deed of civic good, Mr. Mason was enabled to get tax rebates, rent increases which were geometrically rather than arithmetically calculated, and a warm glow around his heart.

Mr. Mason’s tenants were a select group, hand-picked; one might say — to use a phrase favored in other facets of the real estate profession — that his holdings were “restricted.” He didn’t care for tenants who had steady employment. You might think this was odd of him, but that would be because you didn’t know the philanthropic cast of Mr. Mason’s mind. He favored the lame, the halt, and the blind; he preferred the old and the feeble; he had no scruples, far from it, against mothers without marriage licenses.

And his kindheartedness was rewarded. For, after all, employment, no matter how steady, can sometimes be terminated. And then rent cannot be paid. A landlord who can’t collect rent is a landlord who can’t meet his own expenses — in short, a landlord who is bound to go out of business. In which case it follows that he is a landlord who can no longer practice philanthropy.

Therefore, Mr. Mason would be obliged to evict such a tenant in order to protect his other tenants.

But, owing to his care, foresight, and selectivity, he had no such tenants. Not any more. No, sir. All his tenants at the time our account begins were in receipt of a steady income not derived from employment. Welfare checks come in regularly, and so do old-age assistance checks, state aid checks, and several other variety of checks more or less unknown to the average citizen (and may he never have to know of them from the recipients’ point of view — that is our prayer for him), the average citizen whose tax dollar supplies said checks.