On a huge crime anthology (and a short story that didn’t “inspire” Hitchcock’s Psycho, but weirdly anticipated it)

Around two years ago, about the time I did a short series about crime fiction for Scroll, I bought some massive Black Lizard anthologies edited by Otto Penzler. Among them: The Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries, which became an absolute favourite (a related post here), and The Big Book of Pulps, which more than lives up to its title. You’ll realise just how big these books are only when you sit down with one of them. Most of them are in the 1100-1200-page range, and these are large pages and small font (a novella-length story like Ellery Queen’s ‘The Lamp of God’ takes up barely 40 pages in this format) — which is one reason why each page is divided into two columns, the way old pulp magazines used to be. Some readers might find this unsettling at first.

Anyway, here’s the latest purchase: The Big Book of Reel Murders: Stories That Inspired Great Crime Films. Around 60 stories by top-notch writers like Cornell Woolrich (the book’s first section is packed with his work), Stanley Ellin, Daphne du Maurier, GK Chesterton, Dennis Lehane, Robert Louis Stevenson, and many others.

And then there is Robert Bloch’s 1957 story ‘The Real Bad Friend’, which the anthology’s back-cover describes as “the shocking tale that inspired Hitchcock’s iconic Psycho”.

When I saw this claim, I immediately knew it was misleading; I hadn’t spent half my dark adolescence reading Psycho-related literature, looking up everything about the film, just so I could reach my forties and have Otto Penzler pull a fast one on me.

Though I hadn’t yet read ‘The Real Bad Friend’, I knew it was published BEFORE the Ed Gein serial killings came to light (the Gein murders inspired Bloch’s novel Psycho), so I didn’t see how the story could be connected with Hitchcock’s film. For a while I was convinced that this was another of those blunders that Penzler sometimes makes during the admittedly arduous process of selecting and anthologising hundreds of old stories. (More another time on a couple of embarrassing mistakes/inconsistencies I have found in Penzler’s Introductions.)

I was in for a surprise though. It’s true that the plot of ‘The Real Bad Friend’ has nothing to do with Psycho. Briefly, the story (no spoilers here) is about a meek salesman named George, whose wife Ella comes into a small fortune; following this, George’s friend Roderick tries to convince him to drive her insane so that they can lead a hedonistic life with the money — move to the Caribbean, have fun with the slave-girls who reside therein etc. The story was engrossing enough that I was content to enjoy it on its own terms without thinking about Psycho-connections. It was only in the final stretch that I realised what the connection was, and why it made a weird sort of sense for Penzler to include it in this book.

Can’t discuss details without spoiling it, but it’s interesting to consider the synergistic link between 1) this story, 2) the real-life Gein killings, 3) Bloch’s novel Psycho, and 4) Hitchcock’s film, which is a product of many sources but in many ways transcends them all. One thing is clear: when Bloch wrote his novel about the shy motel-keeper who lives off the main road with his mother, he incorporated elements and ideas explored in his earlier work, including ‘The Real Bad Friend’.

And now, a kind of Spoiler (or a hint) — DON’T READ FURTHER if you want to discover the Bloch story for yourself:

From the end of Psycho the film: “He was always bad, and in the end he intended to tell them I killed those girls and that man, as if I could do anything except just sit and stare […] They're probably watching me. Well, let them. Let them see what kind of a person I am.”

From the end of ‘The Real Bad Friend’: “Roderick was the one to blame. Roderick was the crazy one. They had to understand that […] Roderick comes quite often these days, moving in that quiet way of his and sneaking in when nobody’s around to see him.”