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Claremont Tales: Slipcased
Offers twelve short fantasy and mystery stories including tales within the Cthulhu Mythos, Sherlock Holmes-style mysteries, and alternate universes.
290 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2001
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About the author
Richard A. Lupoff
219 books39 followersRichard Allen "Dick" Lupoff (born February 21, 1935 in Brooklyn, New York) is an American science fiction and mystery author, who has also written humor, satire, non-fiction and reviews. In addition to his two dozen novels and more than 40 short stories, he has also edited science-fantasy anthologies. He is an expert on the writing of Edgar Rice Burroughs and has an equally strong interest in H. P. Lovecraft. Before becoming a full-time writer in 1970 he worked in the computer industry.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 24, 2020
I got this volume in order to read "Documents in the Case of Elizabeth Akeley," which was a continuation of Lovecraft's The Whisperer in Darkness featuring the granddaughter of the vanished New Hampshire hermit. She has inherited her father's odd little Spiritual Light Brotherhood Church in San Diego and is their prophetess. Otherwise she leads a fairly normal young-SoCal-gal life with job and boyfriend until she begins to receive strange messages. A pretty solid Mythos story.
Since I had the book, I read some of the other stories as well.
"Vega's Taqueria," which had local interest to me. The setting is based on the Mexicali Rose in Oakland, which made the news in my childhood when the popular bartender was murdered. There's a sad note from the author mentioning that this death occurred between acceptance and publication of the story; he was going to give Rudy a copy as a surprise. It's an interesting thought piece about timeline slippage.
"I Don't Tell Lies" is a short conversation between strangers one offering [no, spoiler] and the other accepting.
"The Second Drug" is, unless I'm missing something, basically a Sherlock Holmes knock-off mystery, with the doctor female and more assertive. The police think for very meager cause that the murderer was a vampire, and there are some decorative details suggesting an alt-world, but it doesn't seem to be one in which vampires et al supernatural creatures are known to exist so I was confused as to why the police would leap to this solution. Anyway, so-so locked room mystery, meh.
"Mr Greene and the Monster" and "The Monster and Mr Greene" were published 49 years apart. Like many of Lupak's shorter tales they are more what-if thought pieces than plots. How might Mr. Green's life have gone differently if he had published a short story in his youth?
I started but didn't finish the remaining stories. Lupoff's sci-fi seems to be the sort that's heavy on verbiage. Not just wordy, but you know, when the author starts off with lots of unfamiliar made-up words and concepts and pseudo-science? I'm okay with this in a novel, but not interested in making the effort for a 20-page story where it takes me 2/3 of the way to figure out what's going on.
Additional stories in this volume:
"Black Mist" A menial worker on a station on Phobos finds a body. I was interested in knowing what was going on but it immediately bogged down in extraneous-seeming details.
"Lux was Dead Right"
"The Child's Story"
"Tootsie Roll Factor"
"Adventures of Mr. Tindle"
"Discovery of the Ghooric Zone" (I tried this one 2nd because this should also be Lovecraftian, but it was way future-history-info-dump.)
Since I had the book, I read some of the other stories as well.
"Vega's Taqueria," which had local interest to me. The setting is based on the Mexicali Rose in Oakland, which made the news in my childhood when the popular bartender was murdered. There's a sad note from the author mentioning that this death occurred between acceptance and publication of the story; he was going to give Rudy a copy as a surprise. It's an interesting thought piece about timeline slippage.
"I Don't Tell Lies" is a short conversation between strangers one offering [no, spoiler] and the other accepting.
"The Second Drug" is, unless I'm missing something, basically a Sherlock Holmes knock-off mystery, with the doctor female and more assertive. The police think for very meager cause that the murderer was a vampire, and there are some decorative details suggesting an alt-world, but it doesn't seem to be one in which vampires et al supernatural creatures are known to exist so I was confused as to why the police would leap to this solution. Anyway, so-so locked room mystery, meh.
"Mr Greene and the Monster" and "The Monster and Mr Greene" were published 49 years apart. Like many of Lupak's shorter tales they are more what-if thought pieces than plots. How might Mr. Green's life have gone differently if he had published a short story in his youth?
I started but didn't finish the remaining stories. Lupoff's sci-fi seems to be the sort that's heavy on verbiage. Not just wordy, but you know, when the author starts off with lots of unfamiliar made-up words and concepts and pseudo-science? I'm okay with this in a novel, but not interested in making the effort for a 20-page story where it takes me 2/3 of the way to figure out what's going on.
Additional stories in this volume:
"Black Mist" A menial worker on a station on Phobos finds a body. I was interested in knowing what was going on but it immediately bogged down in extraneous-seeming details.
"Lux was Dead Right"
"The Child's Story"
"Tootsie Roll Factor"
"Adventures of Mr. Tindle"
"Discovery of the Ghooric Zone" (I tried this one 2nd because this should also be Lovecraftian, but it was way future-history-info-dump.)
September 21, 2023
I just had to have this book for two reasons.
The first is the last story in the book, which I had owned, many years ago, in an anthology called _Chrysalis 1_, in which I had collected the autographs of all the writers who had contributed to that book except for Thomas Monteleone, but anyway, the book disappeared somewhere, in one of my moves. Anyway, I had really liked that story, and wanted to read it again.
The second is the physical book itself. It's a beautiful object from Golden Gryphon Press, with illustrations and a wrap-around cover by Nicholas Jainschigg (of whom I had never heard before), printed on acid-free paper, and served up on a sturdy box. As a semi-serious collector of all things Lupoff, I coveted that book, I did, so when a copy at a reasonable price became came available to me, I grabbed it -- and was delighted that it also had a tipped-in page with autographs by both Lupoff and Jainschigg.
And then there are the contents.
After a brief introduction, describing some alternate Lupoffs and the genesis of the book, we are offered either twelve or thirteen stories, depending on how you count the next-to-last item in the table of contents; and there is not a stinker in the lot.
"Black Mist" is an _Analog_-style SF story, set on a Japanese colony on Phobos. A woman is murdered, and, after a single sighting, the body disappears. It is up to Mr Hajimi Ino to come up from the Martian surface and solve the crime.
"The Second Drug" is also a murder mystery, but not at all science-fictional: it is set in San Francisco (and, briefly, environs) in the '30s. Though Akhenaton Beelzebub Chase is not himself a policeman (he's a wealthy dilettante), the story is very much a procedural, in which going through the steps and following down the available information solves the mystery.
"At Vega's Taqueria" is possibly the strangest thing by Lupoff I have ever read -- and that's going some. It's about a man who sees something in a mural, which he has seen many times, that he never noticed before. As he tries to understand how this has happened, things get strange, and then much stranger. It's a story that would have been happy in the old _Weird Tales_ or John Campbell's _Unknown_.
But "I Don't Tell Lies" actually _did_ appear in (a modern incarnation of) _Weird Tales_, fulfilling one of Lupoff's childhood dreams. It's about a mysterious woman in a bar, who offers a middle-aged man something rather improbable.
"Mr Greene and the Monster" is the first story Lupoff ever published, in a hectographed fanzine. It's about a kid making his first sale to ... but that would be telling. At any rate, it is definitely the work of an inexperienced writer: but it _does_ have its fun points.
"The Monster and Mr. Greene" is about the same kid, many years later, thanking the man who made him what he has become (the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, no less). And it's _much_ better written.
"Lux Was Dead Right" is a gonzo story about really weird aliens, and that's all I will say about _that_.
"The Child's Story" was written for _Two Million A.D._, an anthology Fred Pohl set out to publish, and then didn't, because he felt that only one writer (Lupoff) had come close to the level of alienation from the present he was looking for. It's about some Earth-descended people visiting the old planet one last time. And it really _is_ the last time, but not for the reason you're probably thinking.
"The Tootsie Roll Factor" is a portrait of a gambling addict who has run up too much of a debt, and how Lady Luck comes to his aid.
"Documents in the Case of Elizabeth Akeley" is a tale of Lovecraftian horror (in fact, it is a sequel to one of HPL's original stories), set in the modern day. It conveys much of the good part of HPL without most of his bad parts -- like, you know, racism, misogyny, and purple writing. Lupoff puts in the occasional purplish word just to be in the spirit of the thing, but never overdoes it.
"The Adventures of Mr. Tindle" is the one that messes up the count. There are two stories here, "Mr. Tindle Departs" and "Mr. Tindle Returns," written some years apart (though nowhere near as many years apart as the two Mr. Greene stories), but only one entry in the Table of Contents. In the first one, nebbishy Mr. Tindle discovers the joys of computers (this is set in the late 1980s, mind you). In the second, he returns from wherever he went in the first one, a changed man.
Finally, the story I kind of bought the book for: "The Discovery of the Ghooric Zone." This is another Lovecraftian, set in the 24th Century, in which three intrepid posthuman (not that _that_ word was a thing yet in the late 1970s) explorers are dispatched to the tenth planet (in the late '70s, Pluto was still planet 9). They find Yuggoth. Things do not end well for them. And the Suck Fairy had not worked her grisly magic on the story, I am happy to say.
Overall, this collection does a good job of displaying at least some of Dick Lupoff's range, both in style and in matter. As he observes in the introduction, if he'd stuck with one style, he would probably have been more commercially successful (and, indeed, he was more commercially successful when, after a career hiatus, he returned with a series of straight-ish murder mysteries), but he would not have been as happy.
The first is the last story in the book, which I had owned, many years ago, in an anthology called _Chrysalis 1_, in which I had collected the autographs of all the writers who had contributed to that book except for Thomas Monteleone, but anyway, the book disappeared somewhere, in one of my moves. Anyway, I had really liked that story, and wanted to read it again.
The second is the physical book itself. It's a beautiful object from Golden Gryphon Press, with illustrations and a wrap-around cover by Nicholas Jainschigg (of whom I had never heard before), printed on acid-free paper, and served up on a sturdy box. As a semi-serious collector of all things Lupoff, I coveted that book, I did, so when a copy at a reasonable price became came available to me, I grabbed it -- and was delighted that it also had a tipped-in page with autographs by both Lupoff and Jainschigg.
And then there are the contents.
After a brief introduction, describing some alternate Lupoffs and the genesis of the book, we are offered either twelve or thirteen stories, depending on how you count the next-to-last item in the table of contents; and there is not a stinker in the lot.
"Black Mist" is an _Analog_-style SF story, set on a Japanese colony on Phobos. A woman is murdered, and, after a single sighting, the body disappears. It is up to Mr Hajimi Ino to come up from the Martian surface and solve the crime.
"The Second Drug" is also a murder mystery, but not at all science-fictional: it is set in San Francisco (and, briefly, environs) in the '30s. Though Akhenaton Beelzebub Chase is not himself a policeman (he's a wealthy dilettante), the story is very much a procedural, in which going through the steps and following down the available information solves the mystery.
"At Vega's Taqueria" is possibly the strangest thing by Lupoff I have ever read -- and that's going some. It's about a man who sees something in a mural, which he has seen many times, that he never noticed before. As he tries to understand how this has happened, things get strange, and then much stranger. It's a story that would have been happy in the old _Weird Tales_ or John Campbell's _Unknown_.
But "I Don't Tell Lies" actually _did_ appear in (a modern incarnation of) _Weird Tales_, fulfilling one of Lupoff's childhood dreams. It's about a mysterious woman in a bar, who offers a middle-aged man something rather improbable.
"Mr Greene and the Monster" is the first story Lupoff ever published, in a hectographed fanzine. It's about a kid making his first sale to ... but that would be telling. At any rate, it is definitely the work of an inexperienced writer: but it _does_ have its fun points.
"The Monster and Mr. Greene" is about the same kid, many years later, thanking the man who made him what he has become (the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, no less). And it's _much_ better written.
"Lux Was Dead Right" is a gonzo story about really weird aliens, and that's all I will say about _that_.
"The Child's Story" was written for _Two Million A.D._, an anthology Fred Pohl set out to publish, and then didn't, because he felt that only one writer (Lupoff) had come close to the level of alienation from the present he was looking for. It's about some Earth-descended people visiting the old planet one last time. And it really _is_ the last time, but not for the reason you're probably thinking.
"The Tootsie Roll Factor" is a portrait of a gambling addict who has run up too much of a debt, and how Lady Luck comes to his aid.
"Documents in the Case of Elizabeth Akeley" is a tale of Lovecraftian horror (in fact, it is a sequel to one of HPL's original stories), set in the modern day. It conveys much of the good part of HPL without most of his bad parts -- like, you know, racism, misogyny, and purple writing. Lupoff puts in the occasional purplish word just to be in the spirit of the thing, but never overdoes it.
"The Adventures of Mr. Tindle" is the one that messes up the count. There are two stories here, "Mr. Tindle Departs" and "Mr. Tindle Returns," written some years apart (though nowhere near as many years apart as the two Mr. Greene stories), but only one entry in the Table of Contents. In the first one, nebbishy Mr. Tindle discovers the joys of computers (this is set in the late 1980s, mind you). In the second, he returns from wherever he went in the first one, a changed man.
Finally, the story I kind of bought the book for: "The Discovery of the Ghooric Zone." This is another Lovecraftian, set in the 24th Century, in which three intrepid posthuman (not that _that_ word was a thing yet in the late 1970s) explorers are dispatched to the tenth planet (in the late '70s, Pluto was still planet 9). They find Yuggoth. Things do not end well for them. And the Suck Fairy had not worked her grisly magic on the story, I am happy to say.
Overall, this collection does a good job of displaying at least some of Dick Lupoff's range, both in style and in matter. As he observes in the introduction, if he'd stuck with one style, he would probably have been more commercially successful (and, indeed, he was more commercially successful when, after a career hiatus, he returned with a series of straight-ish murder mysteries), but he would not have been as happy.
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January 7, 2024Jubilee
the bird come to home
to roman one
where the vestival ring the bill
the news same
even over the time
caeser died caeser live
but its same
ring the space
doge mom love
caeser live caeser died
the gold paint over nighaphor
the art sky
same fait
same love
same cover
the bird come to home
to roman one
where the vestival ring the bill
the news same
even over the time
caeser died caeser live
but its same
ring the space
doge mom love
caeser live caeser died
the gold paint over nighaphor
the art sky
same fait
same love
same cover
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews