Page:Weird Tales Volume 3 Number 3 (1923-03).djvu/20

 'This Story Will Seem Impossible To Anybody Except a Newspaper Man'

CAN'T see why some of these nuts who kill themselves, don't devise an original way," Harry Judson complained, as he puffed away at his pipe and began to lay out a sensational page for the Sunday supplement.

Judson was blonde and blue eyed, and as heavy as he was happy by natural disposition. He smoked an odoriferous brier which greatly disturbed the olfactory nerves of the rest of the staff, and his principal vice was the playing of harmless practical jokes. Yet every Sunday issue of the Times-Gazette was a keen disappointment to the genial editor. In his fertile imagination he could always find a more interesting way of doing things than the average mortal seemed able to perform in actual life. And, as a result, the thrillers his fancy conjured up were read from coast to coast.

Divorce suits were his meat—debutantes and their difficulties were his delight. Jewel robberies tickled his soul, and the elopement of the Mahrajah of Goopholee with a common kitchen mechanic, sent him into uncontrollable ecstasies. Usually the "news" stories he printed as fiction were conceived almost entirely from a longing for the bizarre rather than having any basis of fact. But Judson lived and growled in the fond and undying hope that, some day, someone would give him a real feature story.

It was a vain hope, perhaps, but one that persisted stubbornly. This in spite of the unvarying monotony of lovers' death pacts and the routine, sordid suicides of morbid Teutons during the dog days.

"Some day," he would muse in his lighter moments, "an inspired genius will actually live or die a real story for me—with all the trimmings that even a Poe could desire—and I won't have to fake a singe detail! In the meantime, the lack of romance in the daily crop of horrors almost drives me nutty. You'd at least think that a man who'd made up his mind to shuffle off this mortal coil would try to make his departure dramatic. A little intelligent thought might make such an exit unique—'distinctively individual,' as the snappy clothing ads say. I've been running the magazine section of this sheet for almost a dozen years, yet I can count on my fingers the stale and conventional methods of committing suicide. Let's see—there's gas, hanging, poison, pistols, artery severing, drowning, and the utterly unnecessary unpleasantness of leaping in front of trains. There are, of course, variations and occasional improvements on the stereotyped form of procedure—but I've never known a modern suicide to show real constructive genius. The ancients did it much better—Petronius, and then Cleopatra, for instance. That girl had a nose for news! If she'd lived today, she'd have been the highest paid feature writer in the whole darned newspaper game, and the scenario sharks would have gone insane bidding for her services. Some babe, I'll say—but they don't grow like that any more."

He sighed, and his assistant chuckled as he looked up from the proofs of a "murder-syndicate" serial.

"How about the chaps who make away with themselves and never leave a trace?" suggested little Sam Roberts. "Maybe they're more clever than you give 'em credit for."

"Yeh?" begrudged Judson. "Maybe so, but fellows like that furnish no stories. Damn it all, you can't expect me to go on inventing stunts all by myself indefinitely. If some bird would only come through with a real idea in real life once in a while, this job wouldn't be such a grind. They ought to give a Carnegie medal to the guy who can think out a really novel, bang-up, A-Number-One method of taking his own life. You can put me down for a ten spot toward a fund to build him a monument right now!

"Kind of look good, wouldn't it?" he went on, letting his fancy wander. "Big marble shaft, with a replica of the death, done in heroic size. Nice bronze tablet on the base, giving the details and the date. Then a scream-head cut in the stone, with this crowning tribute: 'HIS DEATH MADE A DAMN GOOD STORY!' Some epitaph, I'll say!"

"Why don't you try it yourself?" his assistant suggested, with a mischievous grin.

"Too busy!" growled the editor, and went back to his layout. "The thing has big possibilities, just the same. And one of these days, when I get tired of standing for your fool mistakes and all the bulls the composing room makes, I may take a shot at it."

But the assistant felt in a kidding mood, and he let him have some more.

"Why don't you invent a brand new idea—get it patented—and then, through the collection of royalties, gather in a fortune?"

"May do." Judson wagged his head, and his bright blue eyes twinkled. "Might start a mail order course, and advertise it in the foreign language and mail order papers. Wops would fall for it hard, and every bride and groom is a potential subscriber in the course of time. Matrimony's like mule-whiskey. You can stand a certain amount of it, and that's all."

With loving strokes, his blue pencil sketched an introduction for his opening announcement. "Why live and suffer," he wrote, "when you can earn everlasting fame and eternal peace by becoming a successful, sensational suicide?"

"That ought to knock 'em cold!" observed his assistant.

"Fair enough, I'll say," commented the art manager from his easel in the corner. "Get it going soon. I'll do the illustrations—and the Lord knows I need the money. The Ford needs new shoes and the baby's shy on dolly drakes."

"Be patient, my son," chuckled Judson. "Don't crowd me. True talent needs time to develop a knockout. But just as a nucleus of my superior suicide system—how does this little stunt strike you?"

"Shoot!" urged his assistant, "pinheads are pining for it!"

"Nix on the rough stuff!" Judson objected. "Everything must be decorous—mysterious—baffling, as the police say—and more melodramatic than a six reel serial atrocity. This little trick I have