The Investigations of Avram Davidson (2 page)

“What happened to you?” she cried.

“Well, I was reading this really, really good book,” I explained.…

At about this time Avram began a tour of duty as editor at
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
(1962–64). He impressed his distinctive personality on the magazine during his tenure, and issues from this era are fondly remembered, but he gladly returned to full-time writing. He did, nonetheless, edit three more-than-worthwhile anthologies of material from the magazine. A fourth anthology,
Magic for Sale
(1983), is even more noteworthy, both for its fine selection of stories and for Avram's extensive editorial notes.

It was in this era of the early 1960s that I also met Avram for the first time. I must say that you would not take him for a veteran of the Okinawa campaign and the Israeli war of independence, nor for a rough-hewn sheep rancher. He was, in fact, a rotund fellow, slightly shorter than average. He had large, dark eyes that could switch from a piercing intensity to a jolly twinkle in an instant. His hair was curly and black, with increasing suggestions of gray as the years passed. He wore a distinctive spade-shaped beard that expanded over time to cover more and more of his face.

He had a comfortable air about him, and was popular in New York literary circles (at least those to which the then so-young Dick Lupoff was able to gain entree). The pleasant sight of Avram on a Sunday morning, strolling benignly down a hotel corridor and cheerfully handing out fresh bagels, must remain in many a store of fond recollections.

Avram was fond of good food, generally of a plain and hearty nature, as many of his stories indicate. He was not a heavy drinker, but he took an occasional glass of schnapps with considerable pleasure, especially if it was of superior quality.

He was not unappreciated as a writer. His short story “The Necessity of His Condition” won the Ellery Queen Award for 1957. “Or All the Seas with Oysters” won a Hugo Award in 1958. “The Affair at the Lahore Cantonment” won an Edgar Award in 1962. His story-cycle
The Enquiries of Dr. Eszterhazy
won the World Fantasy Award in 1976. “Crazy Old Lady” was a 1977 Edgar nominee.
The Redward Edward Papers
was nominated for a World Fantasy Award in 1979. “Naples” won the World Fantasy Award in 1979. And the World Fantasy Convention presented him with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1986.

Honors aplenty!

His stories appeared in nearly fifty “best of” anthologies. These included both mystery and science fiction volumes, not unexpectedly, but also others ranging from
Year's Best Fantasy Stories
to
Best Horror Stories
—thereby confounding categorization once again.

Several of his mystery stories were adapted for the small screen. Particularly notable was “Thou Still Unravished Bride,” featured on
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
in 1965. It was directed by David Friedkin from a script by Friedkin and Morton Fine; the cast included Sally Kellerman and David Carradine.

And Avram was an essayist and critic of no mean talent as well as a writer of fiction.

But like many talented authors, he was perhaps too good for his own good. His works were often a trifle (all right, more than a trifle) esoteric. And he kept doing different things. One Avram Davidson story would be a dark and cleverly constructed tale of crime; the next, a gossamer fantasy. In his novels he tried space opera (with little success), barbarian adventure (less), and finally a more textured variety of historical fantasy, redolent almost of the spirit of Thomas Burnett Swann (and this with far better results).

He was recognized by the academic world with a series of appointments under such titles as “visiting lecturer,” “writer in residence,” or “visiting distinguished writer” at such institutions as the University of California at Irvine, the College of William and Mary, the University of Texas at El Paso, the University of Washington, and the University of Michigan.

Respected and appreciated by critics, academics, and above all by his colleagues—the appellation “writer's writer” comes unavoidably to mind—he somehow failed to achieve the mass acceptance and consequent financial rewards of countless other writers, many of them, as the expression would have it, not fit to sharpen his pencils. The frustration which he must have felt comes out in his almost painfully hilarious—and accurate—story, “The Captain M. Caper” (1970).

He published at least fifteen novels in his lifetime, not counting the “Ellery Queen” books, and no fewer than an astonishing 218 short stories. Selections of these latter have been in and out of print in countless anthologies, as well as a dozen single-author collections.

A man of widely ranging tastes, and fascinated by history and myth, Avram wrote numerous essays on the ancient world and its more mysterious aspects. They were collected in the volume,
Adventures in Unhistory: Conjectures on the Factual Foundations of Several Ancient Legends
(1993). Rambling, erudite, and discursive, the essays are not to every taste, but to me each of them is like a delightful visit with the shade of Avram Davidson, from the reading of which I emerge buoyed, stimulated, and enlightened. This book, issued by Owlswick Press, was the last volume of Avram's work to appear in his lifetime.

Every admirer of Avram has his own favorite piece, and I will not attempt to “prove” that this work or that is superior to that work or this. I will merely state that my personal favorite, or at least my “most favorite of favorites,” is
The Adventures of Doctor Eszterhazy.
Originally published as
The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazy
in an easily overlooked and undistinguished-looking paperback (which nonetheless won the World Fantasy Award in 1976), this splendid book has since been reissued in a handsome hardbound edition. This “new”
Eszterhazy,
still available from Owlswick, contains several stories written after the original edition was published.

Engelbert Eszterhazy, Doctor of Medicine, Jurisprudence, Philosophy, Science, and Literature, is a droll and magnificent
mitteleuropean
Sherlock Holmes whose base of operations is Number 33 Turkling Street in the city of Bella, capital of Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania. The years of Eszterhazy's flourishing are not specified, but clearly his best work in unraveling mysteries was done before the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo, that bloody act which, in the opinions of some historians, at least sparked if it did not fuel the cataclysmic Great War and the century of tragedies that followed.

But to anybody who would prefer “The Necessity of His Condition,” or “The Cobblestones of Saratoga Street,” or “The Importance of Trifles,” or any other of Avram's ten-score-and-more stories, or any of his novels, or his nonfiction, I will simply say,
No debate. No argument. In this embarrassment of riches there lie pleasures aplenty for all who would seek them out.

Of Avram's own reading habits a fair amount is known. For obvious reasons we know that he was familiar with the works of Ellery Queen. It is also clear from references in his works and from conversations or correspondence with him, that he was thoroughly conversant with such pop-culture icons as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and that doyen of eldritch horror tales, Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

Perhaps less obvious is Avram's interest in the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs. At the time of our first acquaintanceship I was working as an editor at Canaveral Press in New York, busily guiding the newly released, hitherto unpublished manuscripts of Burroughs into print. Avram wrote to me, inquiring about the possibility of his adding new works to Burroughs's “John Carter of Mars” saga. Nothing came of this plan, alas, and one can only speculate on what a Barsoomian yarn by Avram Davidson would have been like.

After Avram's death, Grania Davis recovered much of his personal library from the tiny apartment where he had been living. Avram's books are for the most part well read, his library clearly intended for use, not exhibition.

There are very few volumes of literary fiction among his books, these few including
Crome Yellow
by Aldous Huxley and
Canal Town
by Samuel Hopkins Adams. Further, Avram reserved places of honor for the works of his many writer friends.

Most of his library consisted of reference books on history, geography, and the esoteric, and of classics. He owned a complete annotated set of the works of Pliny the Elder. He owned a copy of
Ships and Seamanship in the Ancient World.
He owned
The Golden Game: Alchemical Engravings of the Seventeenth Century,
by Stanislas Klossowski de Rola. He owned Ovid's
Metamorphoses,
Samuel Pepys's diary, the biography of Helen of Troy,
The Song of Roland, Arcana Mundi: Magic and the Occult in the Greek and Roman Worlds, The Catalan Chronicles
of Francisco de Moncada,
Italian Towns
by Henry James, Boswell's
Life of Johnson,
and
The Golden Ass
as translated by Robert Graves.

According to Grania Davis he owned “a mountain of books on Africa,” which he planned to use as research materials for a work based on the African legend of the Pygmies and the Cranes.

He never stopped working, even after a series of strokes left him disabled and partially paralyzed.

Still, at the end, he was forced to rely on his veteran's benefits to eke out a meager existence. He died on May 8, 1993. He gave us a great deal, and deserved better in return than he received.

R
EASSESSMENT
T
IME

T
HE LATE
L
IN
Carter, himself one of the more talented—albeit quirky and underachieving—writers of my generation (and Avram's), developed an intriguing theory about the lives—or afterlives—of authors. If an author is sufficiently noteworthy during his career, Carter opined, an increase in interest will follow the author's death. After a while, as the demands of curious readers are met, and as literary historians, biographers, and critics have had their say and exhausted their store of comment, interest flags and the author's books lapse from print once again.

Then—and this, I believe, was Carter's key idea—after the passage of some years, the author is rediscovered. Some if not all of his works are reprinted, the academics and critics murmur their magical spells, and the author is either crowned with the laurels of at least conditional and temporary immortality (for ultimately, only God is truly immortal) … or he is tossed onto the trash heap of literary history, and his works with him.

Carter unburdened himself of this theory a good many years ago, late at night while a winter log crackled in the fireplace and after many delicious libations had been consumed, so my recollection of the event is somewhat fuzzy-edged; but I do believe that Lin suggested a considerable lapse of time, possibly as long as a century, before that final reassessment took place.

In Avram's case, the time is drastically shortened. He died in 1993, aged just over seventy. Tragically neglected and justly embittered in his last years, Avram lives through his works. Even now a renaissance is under way with the recent publication of
The Avram Davidson Treasury
and
The Boss in the Wall: A Treatise on the House Devil.

The former volume, issued by Tor Books, is a huge collection of Avram's stories, primarily of his science fiction and fantasy but including several criminous tales as well. His unique talent yielded many works which can be listed under the rubrics of several categories. More appropriately, I should say that they are uncategorizable, but at least some taxonomy, the practice of sorting and labeling, is often useful. So I will speak of Avram's mystery fiction, his science fiction, his fantasies, as in fact I have already done in this modest essay.

There are several stories in the
Treasury
that Grania Davis, who co-edited both collections, would have liked to include in
The Investigations
as well. I especially call to your attention “The Affair at the Lahore Cantonment,” which won the 1962 Edgar Award for short story, and “Crazy Old Lady,” which was a 1977 Edgar nominee. I suggest that once you have finished reading
The Investigations of Avram Davidson,
you proceed to the
Treasury.

The Boss in the Wall
is another matter. Carved out of a sprawling unpublished Davidson manuscript, it appears under the joint byline of Avram Davidson and Grania Davis. It was Grania who rescued the huge manuscript from oblivion and prepared
The Boss in the Wall
for publication. The longer manuscript may someday be published. The shorter version was issued by Tachyon Publications of San Francisco, and I commend it to your attention.

We may be jumping the gun, in terms of Lin Carter's reassessment theory, but it is my confident belief that the issuance of these three books will remind many thousands of Avram Davidson's old readers of what a gem of a writer he was, and will bring him to the attention of even more thousands of readers.

Avram was, in his unique way, a throwback to the old school of tale-spinners. He could tailor his style to the setting and theme of a story. He was the master of the
mot juste,
the “right word.” With a mere handful of syllables he could transport a reader to the deck of an ancient sailing vessel as it plied the waves of the sun-dappled Mediterranean, to a musty and mysterious little shop in a shadowy byway of Victorian London, to the spartan executive offices or the clattering production line of a modern corporation.

From time to time he lapsed into the naturalistic prose that is the hallmark of the modern short story, but more often his own voice was clearly audible, and rather than being an intrusion upon the story he was telling, his presence remained (and remains) a welcome and reassuring constant.