An incoherent phone call from a client wakes Yamamura from a troubled dream during a bad storm. He goes to the client's house where he finds the client dead. It looks like suicide but Yamamura deduces that it is disguised murder. Then it turns out that, at the time of the call, the client's phone was dead because of the storm...
So a dead man used a dead phone. Yamamura cannot remember what the caller said and now thinks that he dreamed the call which felt so real that he half woke and lifted the bedside phone to his ear.
The reader is in the privileged position of knowing exactly what the caller said. He asks Yamamura to come, says that it is very dark, that he had thought that afterward he would know everything or nothing but that instead he doesn't understand and is lonely. There is more, even eerier, that I will leave for others to remember, read or reread! No wonder Yamamura did not (want to?) remember.
He also completely forgets, and we might also unless we reread, what he felt while holding the receiver even before the caller spoke: whirl, seethe, click, "...a whistle that went on forever, and he had a moment to think that the noise was not like any in this world, it was as if he had a fever or as if nothing was at the other end of the line except the huntsman wind." (p. 93)
- so it is clear enough that the line was dead and that the call was not from this world. The story fits in a collection with the fantasy title, The Unicorn Trade.
9 comments:
Hi, Paul!
Yes, I agree, "Dead Phone" is a mystery with some elements of a ghost story. Quite different, in that respect, from the Yamamura novels, which do not have such elements.
I think it won't be too costly to buy copies of PERISH BY THE SWORD and MURDER BOUND (say about 20 dollars US), plus shipping and postage, of course. But MURDER IN BLACK LETTER is the rarest of the Yamamura books and correspondingly more expensive.
One thing which interests me about MURDER IN BLACK LETTER is how a criminal's resistance to revealing needed information was broken down by using sensory deprivation on him. I was reminded of how Dominic Flandry used precisely that method to get a captured Ardazirho officer to cooperate with being interrogated in WE CLAIM THESE STARS.
Sean
Unethical police procedure!
Hi, Paul!
I should not say too much about a book you have not yet read, but this use of sensory deprivation in MURDER IN BLACK LETTER was not done by a police officer.
Sean
Sean,
Good. Still wrong though.
Paul.
Hi, Paul!
How about a more "extreme" case? Would the use of sensory deprivation to make a captured enemy officer cooperate with being interrogated be wrong? Here I have the Ardazirho officer Flandry captured in WE CLAIM THESE STARS! in mind. Flandry himself believed the information he obtained this way necessary to helping prevent the Ardazirho/Syrax crisis from exploding into full scale war between the Empire and Merseia. The admittedly extreme discomfort one hostile officer was put thru seems a low price for obtaining necessary information.
Sean
Sean,
I don't know what to say about the morality of Flandry's treatment of that alien. Sensory deprivation is not physical pain. Maybe someone who could enter a meditative state could remain sane during sensory deprivation? - although most of us cannot meditate for very long.
I certainly would not want to torture any prisoner of war.
Paul.
Hi, Paul!
And I agree it would be immoral to TORTURE any one. The question is, is sensory deprivation torture? Esp. in the mimimal way Flandry used it? It was used only long enough to force or persuade the Ardazirho prisoner to cooperate with being interrogated, after all. It seems to me that real torture would be to CONTINUE the sensory deprivation after the prisoner finally agreed to cooperate.
Sean
Yes, as I say, I don't know what to think about the morality of sensory deprivation.
Hi, Paul!
It seems to me that the use of sensory deprivation as a method of interrogation falls into a grey or uncertain zone. That is, it might be ethically allowable when used as minimally as possible to attain serious and important ends.
This also seems to have been Poul Anderson's view. Besides WE CLAIM THESE STARS! and MURDER IN BLACK LETTER, sensory deprivation is mentioned in his posthumously published FOR LOVE AND GLORY. Here is what I found in Chapter XVI, when Captain Valen talked about an insolent and disrespectful crew member: "If he pushes me further, I just might give him twenty four hours of sensory deprivation, and hope to teach him some manners." And that did not shock Elissa Windholm, representing the owners of the ship.
Needless to say, the views and beliefs of an author's characters do not always represent those of the author. But, in this case, I do wonder if Poul Anderson thought sensory deprivation was allowable for grave causes and when strictly limited.
Sean
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