Zelazny Mystery

The Dead Man’s Brother, Roger Zelazny (Hard Case Crime 978-08439-6115-7, $6.99, 256pp, pb) January 2009.

Roger Zelazny was one of the brilliant stars to emerge into the science fiction universe in the mid-1960s. He was a prolific and versatile writer who spanned the science fiction and fantasy fields as well as writing poetry and devising computer games. His earliest works, emotionally powerful, dreamily imagistic and often experimental, received great critical acclaim including multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards. Later in his life he tended toward less challenging but nonetheless entertaining and hugely popular adventure fantasies.

A soft-spoken, gentle-natured person, he was also seriously addicted to nicotine. It is hard to remember Roger without a cigarette in his mouth. This addiction surely contributed to, if it did not actually cause, his death at age 58 from cancer.

The impending publication of The Dead Man’s Brother early in 2009 came as a happy surprise to Roger’s myriad admirers. Allegedly written in 1970 or ’71, this novel was discovered by Roger’s agent, Kirby McCauley. Why it took nearly 40 years for the manuscript to emerge is itself a mystery.

The Dead Man’s Brother is dramatically different from any other Zelazny work. The book starts in the fashion of a classic hardboiled mystery. The protagonist, Ovid Wiley, proprietor of a Manhattan art gallery, arrives one morning to find a corpse awaiting him. We learn that Wiley is a reformed art thief. The body is that of his quondam partner in crime, Carl Bernini.

Wiley, now a solid citizen, calls the police, who take him into custody. Before long he realizes that he is going to be prosecuted for Bernini’s murder, but before things can progress very far he is “rescued” by CIA operatives who recruit him as an agent. He winds up in Rome, trying to track down $3,000,000 of stolen Vatican funds.

Things get incredibly tangled as Wiley becomes involved with a beautiful, hot-blooded Italian woman, travels briefly to Portugal, and thence to Brazil. Here he is once more entangled in a murder investigation. He winds up trekking through the Matto Grosso, dealing with a regional separatist movement, captured, tortured, escaping, dodging bullets, and – did I mention this before – smoking?

Roger was addicted to cigarettes. Oh, I said that already. Yes. So, obviously, is Ovid Wiley, whom I take to be a kind of fantasy alter-ego for the author. Wiley smokes before, during, and after virtually every scene in the book. He smokes when he wakes up in the morning. He smokes with his meals. He smokes while he waits for things to happen. He smokes whenever the author wants to pause the action. In the music world I believe the term for this is, vamp till ready.

After a while it becomes a kind of contest between reader and author, to see how long Roger – er, Ovid – can go without lighting a cigarette. He seldom goes longer than page without a ciggie, sometimes several on one page, and when Ovid isn’t smoking he’s being offered a smoke, offering a smoke, lighting a smoke for someone else, or watching somebody else smoke.

I had to take a shampoo to get the stink out of my hair when I finished reading this book.

My recommendation: Read Lord of Light. If you’ve already read it, read it again. It’s a masterpiece. Even if Roger couldn’t help having Buddha smoke a cigarette.

–Richard A. Lupoff

Editor’s note: This review, from the May 2009 issue, generated several letters of comment, which are reproduced as the first four comments below.

17 thoughts on “Zelazny Mystery

  • May 22, 2009 at 7:49 pm
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    Richard Lupoff declared uncertainty about when The Dead Man’s Brother was “allegedly written” and declared it “a mystery” as to why it took nearly 40 years to emerge. No uncertainty, no mystery. Roger Zelazny wrote The Dead Man’s Brother (working title: Apostate’s Gold) under contract to Berkley as the first of three mystery/thriller novels. He finished it on June 30, 1971 and sent it to his Agent Henry Morrison that day. He’d already conceived the second novel — Albatross! — and planned to dedicate it to Philip Farmer. But Berkley canceled the book's publication because their mystery list was faltering while Editor George Ernsberger worried that Zelazny's name was unknown to the mystery/thriller readership. The manuscript then went to all the major publishers over the next two years (Doubleday, Bobbs Merrill, Harper & Row, Random House, William Morrow, Simon and Schuster, etc.) but each rejected it for similar reasons. Zelazny was quite discouraged by this and resisted his agent's suggestions to revise the novel. He intentionally shelved the manuscript and never wrote the second novel. When Zelazny quit Morrison and later took on Kirby McCauley as his agent, the manuscript eventually ended up in McCauley's possession amongst other old papers. These and other details of the history of this manuscript (gleaned from Zelazny's archived correspondence) are related in part 3 of the biography "…And Call Me Roger" which is in press as part of This Mortal Mountain: Volume 3: The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny, due out from NESFA Press in July 2009.

    Christopher Kovacs

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  • May 22, 2009 at 7:49 pm
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    The protagonist of The Dead Man’s Brother, Roger Zelazny’s long-lost mystery novel recently published by Hard Case Crime, smokes cigarettes.

    In that he is not unlike the protagonists of many other hard-boiled mysteries, the genre in which Roger was working with this book. I can only assume that your reviewer, Richard A. Lupoff, has seldom read a mystery, since he seems to find the fact of Ovid Wiley’s smoking so shocking and offensive that his purported review of Roger’s novel is little more than a long screed against cigarettes.

    You would think that Mr. Lupoff, a writer himself, would be able to distinguish between the behavior of a fictional character and the author who created him, but that does not seem to be the case. Ovid Wiley is not Roger, and Roger was not Ovid.

    Mr. Lupoff writes, “A soft-spoken, gentle-natured person, [Roger] was also seriously addicted to nicotine. It is hard to remember Roger without a cigarette in his mouth.”

    I first met Roger at various conventions and workshops in the 1970s. In 1979, I moved to Santa Fe, and we became neighbors and friends. I saw a lot of him in the decade and a half that followed. He came to parties at my house, and I went to parties at his place. We sat in hot tubs together, talking about books. We went to movies together, we went to dinner together, we attended many of the same conventions, we did joint signings at local bookstores, we worked together on the Wild Cards anthologies. We even gamed together. And in all that time, I don’t remember ever seeing him with a cigarette in his mouth. Not once.

    Roger smoked during much of that period, yes. He smoked a pipe. In that he had more in common with Sherlock Holmes than with Mike Hammer… or Ovid Wiley. He owned a collection of pipes, and was fond of various exotic aromatic blends that he bought from a local tobacconist. I can’t speak with any authority about how many bowls he smoked a day, but he was a long way from a chain smoker… and while I’m told he might bum a cigarette on rare occasions when, for some reason, his pipe was not permitted or available, I never saw him buy a pack or carry one. He kept his pipe and tobacco in a pouch on his belt.

    Mr. Lupoff also writes, “This addiction surely contributed to, if it did not actually cause, his death at age 58 from cancer.”

    He’s wrong about that as well. Roger died from colon cancer. Not lung cancer, emphysema, cancer of the lip or tongue, esophageal cancer, or any of the other cancers that have been linked to pipe smoking. Colon cancer..

    And for what it’s worth, Roger Zelazny gave up his beloved pipes and quit all forms of smoking entirely six full years before his death in June, 1995.

    “I had to take a shampoo to get the stink out of my hair when I finished reading this book,” Mr. Lupoff concludes. Right. The imaginary stink from fictional cigarettes, how it lingers. I hope that he never reads a book where the protagonist gets shot. He might feel the need to run off to the emergency room to have the imaginary bullet removed.

    If Mr. Lupoff wants to wants to write cautionary tales about smokers who died too young because of cigarettes, there are plenty of real cases he could cite. But to publish this distorted diatribe against smoking in the guise of a review of Roger’s novel was both unprofessional and offensive.

    George R.R. Martin

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  • May 22, 2009 at 7:49 pm
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    Clearly, George Martin knew Roger Zelazny in Roger’s later years. I knew him more in the 1960s and ’70s. I will stand by my statement that I hardly remember seeing Roger without a cigarette in his mouth during that era, first in New York and later in California. In Roger’s last years we maintained a relationship by telephone and paper mail — this was in pre-email days. My last contact with Roger involved two anthologies which he edited. I wrote stories for both. My last attempted contact with Roger concerned those anthologies. I telephoned his home only to learn that he had been hospitalized. By then he was, alas, terminal.

    I do not hold a medical degree and I don’t believe that George Martin does either, so it would be silly for us to engage in a debate over smoking and cancer. Millions of dollars and thousands of hours of scientific research have been devoted to the subject, and the results are readily available to anyone who cares to look for them.

    As for my credentials as a mystery writer, I don’t want to turn this into a bragging contest but since George raises the issue, I will mention that my publishing credits in the mystery field include at least seven novels (plus a couple of other cross-genre novels) and two volumes of short stories, with more of both in the pipeline. And of course I’m familiar with Robert Bloch’s famous line about Agatha Christie having made a career of literary mayhem and murder, but never having stabbed, shot, or poisoned anyone in real life.

    But Roger’s obsession with smoking was manifest in his personal life during the years that I knew him. And the Agatha Christie principle notwithstanding, the obsession of Roger’s fictional characters with smoking (not just in The Dead Man’s Brother) clearly reflects the reality of the author’s addiction. I will accept George Martin’s statement that Roger gave up smoking several years before his death. In a sense, this only adds to the tragedy, as some processes, once initiated, cannot be undone.

    It’s all very sad, and the publication of The Dead Man’s Brother does nothing to add to the lustre of Roger’s literary heritage. Fortunately, as Orson Scott Card has remarked, “In this profession only your best shots count,” and The Dead Man’s Brother won’t destroy Roger’s heritage either.

    Richard A. Lupoff

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  • May 22, 2009 at 7:50 pm
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    I knew Roger quite well in the ’60s and ’70s when the book was written. Indeed, he was a fairly heavy cigarette smoker (so was I). The book is pretty much an early draft where Roger never rewrote. The Roger of the early ’70s was cranking out fiction as fast as possible, and it shows in most of his paperback originals and some hardcovers from 1970-1975.

    Charles N. Brown

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  • May 29, 2009 at 7:32 am
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    I can’t find the reference now, but I know that I read a comment from Roger years ago—maybe in Dick Geis’s magazine? or in a header note?—that every time he’d stop to light a cigarette, he’d have his protagonist do so also.

    Funny how that one feature of the story dates it so much. I recently saw the late-’80s film HEATHERS again and it was striking to see teachers casually smoking. Personally, I think it’s great that Hollywood made a real effort to stop making such an unhealthy look cool.

    —Gordon V.G.

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  • May 29, 2009 at 7:33 am
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    James Blish noted long ago that smoking is a bad habit in literature as well as in life, with writers having their characters handle cigarettes when they can’t think of anything else for them to do.

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  • May 29, 2009 at 7:33 am
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    Roger Zelazny was, in my opinion as a mere reader, the best writer ever. He’s be measure by which I judge other writers. I could care less about how much he smoked. I only regret he passed so soon.

    Steven Moss

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  • May 29, 2009 at 7:33 am
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    I had the privilege of meeting Mr. Zelazny once at a convention in Edmonton twenty years ago. It was a great delight to hear of a new Zelazny novel, in any genre, and I picked up an ARC in February. Sure, it wasn’t ‘Lord of Light’ but it was inelectably his voice and I enjoyed the novel for what it was.

    I must add that the Zelazny Project’s first two volumes are wicked brilliant and a great tribute to a wonderful writer. Can’t wait for the next two!

    Bruce Chrumka
    Calgary, Canada

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  • May 29, 2009 at 7:39 am
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    Maybe George is right – it was not unusual to have the protagonist of a 60s hard-boiled crime novel be a heavy smoker.

    Fortunately it’s no longer the 60s, and to be honest, I’d find a book with this level of adoration of smoking a little nauseating (and quite likely unreadable).

    I realize George may be trying to defend Roger’s memory a bit here, but I wonder if he’s missing the point of Richard’s review. This book doesn’t work for a modern audience. Certainly it wouldn’t work for me, and Richard’s clear-headed assessment of that serves me well as a modern reader.

    – John

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  • May 29, 2009 at 7:39 am
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    “Cranking out fiction as fast as possible”? I don’t know, I think he was writing about two novels a year, which doesn’t seem excessive. But Charles is right that his first draft was usually his final draft.

    He did not enjoy writing The Dead Man’s Brother, and wasn’t sorry that he didn’t have to write others like it. Having the ending in place and having to hit all the beats on the way to it was not the way he wrote his sf, and he told me he did not like writing that way.

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  • May 29, 2009 at 7:39 am
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    For what it’s worth: Zelazny died of colorectal cancer. Smoking has, I believe, been linked to about 10% of male deaths from this disease. Survival in this and many other cancers is closely linked to early detection. I’m afraid it was bad luck more than anything else that caused that very sad death.

    Rick Bowes

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  • June 1, 2009 at 4:19 am
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    I would just like to add that I didn't notice the extreme smoking when I read it. I just started flipping through it again and I noticed more drinking than smoking. I certainly didn't think it was Zelazny's best work but I was happy to have another book of his to read. If I had simply picked it up in the Mystery section without knowing anything more about him, I think I would have thought it a fairly good mystery that gave me a couple hours of enjoyment.

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  • June 1, 2009 at 4:19 am
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    Aren’t both Lupoff and Martin being a little disingenuous here? If Lupoff is prepared to dismiss the subject of whether Zelazny’s smoking was related to his death with “I do not hold a medical degree … so it would be silly for us to engage in a debate over smoking and cancer,” then he shouldn’t have brought up the question in the first place. It would have been quite possible for him to have said all he needed to about smoking in the book without dragging in the author’s demise.

    Martin’s quip, that Lupoff is so tender that if he so dislikes smoking in fiction he must really be hurt if a protagonist gets shot, is equally pointless. It’s perfectly clear that what Lupoff is objecting to is the sheer quantity and pervasiveness of the smoking. If a protagonist were shot as often as this one smokes, I think most readers would find the book pretty intolerable.

    I can’t belief that either Lupoff or Martin is so dense as not to realize what the other is saying, but if they’re feigning ignorance to make a point at the other’s expense, they should stop.

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  • June 2, 2009 at 5:05 pm
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    Thrown out your Lord of the Rings, John? There’s a pretty sickening amount of smoking adoration in that one. 😉

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  • June 3, 2009 at 5:00 pm
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    >Thrown out your Lord of the Rings, John? There's a
    >pretty sickening amount of smoking adoration in
    >that one. 😉

    Hey Blue!

    You'll pry my copy of Lord of the Rings from my cold, dead hands. 🙂

    See your point though. Pipe smoking never bothered me as much as cigarette smoking. Perhaps I just never saw it as the addictive killer that cigarettes are.

    Funny you should mention it though – when Interplay's first LotR computer game came out last decade (one of the first games on CD Rom, incidentally), they included the following Designer's Disclaimer in the manual:

    "J.R.R. Tolkien wrote the Lord of the Rings trilogy between 1938 and 1949. The world was a different place then, and the attitude of society toward certain elements of the world were [sic] different than they are today, most notably tobacco and wolves… Pipeweed smoking is a pleasant recreation, not the deadly addiction that we know it to be."

    I believe the disclaimer was removed in later editions of the game, but I'd have to check.

    – John

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  • July 4, 2009 at 1:07 pm
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    "Funny how that one feature of the story dates it so much. I recently saw the late-'80s film HEATHERS again and it was striking to see teachers casually smoking."

    And the little-known sf connection of Heathers is that it was edited by onetime NYC fan Norman Hollyn (formerly "Hochberg"), who used to be a Fanoclast and in apas, and do fanzines, back in the Seventies (when various of us were friends).

    "Pipe smoking never bothered me as much as cigarette smoking. Perhaps I just never saw it as the addictive killer that cigarettes are."

    I could be wrong, but I don't believe the Surgeon General of Middle-Earth (one of the Istari?) ever issued a report on the carcinogenic aspects of pipeweed.

    It could certainly yet be coming up in a compilation by Christopher Tolkien, to be sure.

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  • August 23, 2009 at 9:35 am
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    Hey. This is sort of extremely emotional review.
    (If we follow the logic of the reviewer, we should ban Remarque's "Three Comrades" – they are drinking all the time. Amoral! But on other hand, cheep way get buzzed – read a book, and you are high) .
    Well, but everybody is entitled to their own opinion and there doesn't exist the only, correct point of view.

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