The Incomplete Enchanter

two stories were combined in a cloth-bound volume, Wall of Serpents. It was not possible to include them in the present volume, first because of considerations of space and second because of contractual complications.

For obvious reasons I cannot assess the virtues and faults of these works. I will say only that they were certainly heroic fantasy, or swordplay-and-sorcery fiction, long before these terms were invented. While Robert E. Howard is justly hailed as the major American pioneer in this subgenre, neither Pratt nor I, when we started the Shea stories, had even read a Conan story or ever heard enough about Howard to recognize his name.

Our method of collaboration was to meet in Pratt’s apartment and hammer out the plot by long discussions during which I took shorthand notes. Observing the utility of Pratt’s knowledge of shorthand from his journalistic days, I soon taught myself Gregg and have found it valuable ever since. I took the notes home and wrote a rough draft. Pratt then wrote the final draft, which I edited. In a few cases — our later stories of Gavagan’s Bar, for example — we reversed the procedure, Pratt doing the rough draft and I the second. This did not work out so well. In such collaborations, it is generally better for the junior member to do the rough draft, since the senior member, as a result of experience, is likely to have more skill at polishing and condensation.

A fan magazine once asserted that in the Harold Shea stories de Camp furnished the imaginative element and Pratt the controlling logic. Actually, it was the other way around. Pratt had a livelier and more creative imagination than I, but I had a keener sense of critical logic. In any case, I earned much of what I think I know about the writer’s craft in the course of these collaborations. Pratt’s influence on me in this matter was second only to Campbell’s.

In 1941, L. Ron Hubbard wrote one of his several hilarious fantasy novels for Unknown: The Case of the Friendly Corpse (August 1941). This tale had some of Hubbard’s funniest passages, but let the reader down badly at the end. The hero, Jules Riley, had swapped souls with an apprentice magician on another plane, who up to then has been a student at the College of the Unholy Names. Another student tells Jules (now on this other plane) that Harold Shea appeared before him, claiming to be a magician from another world. The student challenged Harold to a sporting contest: the student would turn his wand into a super-serpent, and Harold could summon up his own monster, and they would see which creature won. But. the snake just grew up and then grabbed him and ate him up before I could do anything about it.

Some fans were indignant at Hubbard’s so brusquely bumping off a colleague’s hero. Pratt and I thought of writing a story to rescue Harold from the serpent’s maw and turn the tables, but after some floundering we gave up. Another writer’s mise en scиne, we found, so severely cramps the imagination that fancy plods when it should soar. In the end, we ignored Hubbard and sent Harold on to other milieux.

During 1941-42, Pratt and I wrote two fantasy novels, The Land of Unreason and The Carnelian Cube. Pearl Harbor came just as I was finishing my part of The Carnelian Cube. I volunteered for the Naval Reserve, was commissioned, and spent the war navigating a desk at the Philadelphia Naval Base. I did engineering on naval aircraft along with Heinlein and Asimov.

Pratt, a strong patriot and nationalist, described himself as a political conservative — although, when one discussed actual current issues with him one found in him a surprisingly objective, pragmatic, almost liberal attitude. Kept out of the armed forces by his physical limitations and age, he wrote a war column for the New York Post. This ended when his editor forced him to guess on the outcome of the battle of the Coral Sea, and he guessed wrong. He also wrote a number of books on the war, especially the part played in it by the U.S. Navy.

Then Pratt became a naval war correspondent assigned to Latin America. An old Brazilophile who spoke fluent Portuguese, Pratt visited Brazil. He had long worn a moustache and, in the early 1930s for a while, a goatee. Now he grew a straggly full beard, greying reddish in colour and of Babylonian cut. He hated razors, and the Navy forbade him to use his electric shaver on shipboard in the Caribbean. This was long before the revival of beards in the 1950s and ‘60s. His small size, whiskers, thick, tinted glasses, and loud shirts made an ensemble not easily forgotten.

After the war, Pratt resumed living in New York, while my family and I stayed on in the suburbs of Philadelphia. We continued our collaborations with the two later Harold Shea novellas and the Gavagan’s Bar stories — a series of barroom tall tales, comparable to (though conceived independently of) Arthur C. Clarke’s Tales of the White Hart. Pratt also wrote two first-class heroic-fantasy novels of his own: The Well of the Unicorn and The Blue Star.

When he had finished The Blue Star, Pratt told his friends that he planned a third fantasy novel, about a modern woman who finds herself in the body of another woman of 1,800 years ago: With the approach of the Civil War centenary, however, Pratt became so busy with better-paying nonfiction that, during his last few years, he gave up fiction altogether. He had written over fifty books, including many science-fiction stories, books on Napoleon, biographies of Edwin M. Stanton and King Valdemar IV of Denmark, and a history of the U.S. Navy.

He and I had discussed possible future works of fiction, such as another Harold Shea story laid in the world of Persian myth, or a Gavagan’s Bar story about a vampire with a sweet tooth who attacked only diabetics. But they were never written. For, in 1956, when he was fifty-nine and had just begun to hit the best-seller lists, Pratt suddenly fell ill of cancer of the liver and soon died.

I have not tried to carry on any of our series alone, because I think that the combination of Pratt and de Camp produced a result visibly different from either of us alone. Besides. I have always had more ideas waiting to be actualized in writing than I could find time to get down. But some of those who have not read the tales of Harold Shea’s adventures may still, I trust, get some entertainment out of them.

— L. Sprague de Camp

June, 1975

BOOK ONE — THE ROARING TRUMPET

ONE

There were three men and a woman in the room. The men were commonplace as to face, and two of them were commonplace as to clothes. The third wore riding breeches, semi-field boots, and a suede jacket with a tartan lining. The extra-fuzzy polo coat and the sporty tan felt with the green feather which lay on a chair belonged to him also.

The owner of this theatrical outfit was neither a movie actor nor a rich young idler, He was a psychologist, and his name was Harold Shea. Dark; a trifle taller, a little thinner than the average, he would have been handsome if his nose were shorter and his eyes farther apart.

The woman — girl — was a tawny blonde. She was the chief nurse at the Garaden Hospital. She possessed — but did not rejoice in — the name of Gertrude Mugler.

The other two men were psychologists like Shea and members of the same group. The oldest, the director of the others’ activities, was bushy-haired, and named Reed Chalmers. He had just been asking Shea what the devil he meant by coming to work in such conspicuous garb.

Shea said, defensively: «I’m going to ride a horse when I leave this afternoon. Honest.»

«Ever ridden a horse?» asked the remaining member of the group, a large, sleepy-looking young man named Walter Bayard.

«No,» replied Shea, «but it’s about time I learned.»

Walter Bayard snorkled. «What you ought to say is that you’re going to ride a horse so as to have an excuse for looking like something out of Esquire. First there was that phony English accent you put on for a while. Then you took up fencing. Then Last winter you smeared the place with patent Norwegian ski-grease, and went skiing just twice.»

«So what?» demanded Shea.