Blog-o-ween 2023: "The Black Gondolier" by Fritz Leiber

I’ve lived in Los Angeles, CA, now for about six years. I still get a kick out of stumbling upon shooting locations from various television shows and movies in the city and the outlying towns. I’m the person who will turn to a traveling companion and ask, “Do you recognize this corner? Huh? Do ya? Huh?” When my friend admits that, no, in fact, they do not recognize where we are, I’ll painstakingly list all the shows that used that corner as second unit background material. You know, shows like The Rockford Files, Murder, She Wrote, Tucker’s Witch, Baywatch, and Stingray.

...well, that was until Stephen J. Cannell was talked into moving Stingray to Toronto, Canada, after the 8-episode first season because of the favorable exchange rate between the U.S. and Canadian dollars...but then, of course, so many productions were shooting in Toronto at that time, that they ended up moving west and shooting the 15-episode second season in Calgary and Vancouver, and...

Yeah, I’m a joy to be around.

Anyway, I’m a sucker for being able to walk the same streets as the characters in my favorite tv shows and films. The same goes for my favorite short stories and novels. Today’s short story by noted fantasy, horror, and science fiction writer Fritz Leiber takes place in Venice, CA, during the oil boom years of the mid-twentieth century. Leiber’s characters traverse the seaside town’s many canals.

...in fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the canals Leiber describes was later used as the site of the home of Mitch Buchannon and his son Hobie in the first season of Baywatch, and later...

I digress...let’s instead talk about Fritz Leiber’s 1964 short story “The Black Gondolier.”

“Daloway lived alone in a broken-down trailer beside an oil well on the bank of a canal in Venice near the café La Gondola Negra on the Grand Canal not five blocks from St. Mark’s Plaza.

“I mean, he lived there until after the fashion of intellectual lone wolves he got the wander-urge and took himself off, abruptly and irresponsibly, to parts unknown. That is the theory of the police, who refuse to take seriously my story of Daloway’s strange dreads and my hints at the weird world-spanning power which was menacing him...”

So begins the tale of Daloway, spun by an unnamed narrator. As the story unfolds, the narrator recounts his time spent with Daloway in the weeks leading up to his disappearance. Daloway gives the narrator, as well as the reader, a lengthy history lesson of not only the city of Venice, CA, but of the dark, eldritch power residing beneath it:

“Daloway’s theory, based on his wide readings in world history, geology, and the occult, was that crude oil — petroleum — was more than figuratively the life-blood of industry and the modern world and modern lightning-war, that it truly had a dim life and will of its own, an inorganic consciousness or sub-consciousness, that we were all its puppets or creatures, and that its chemical mind had guided and even enforced the development of modern technological civilization...In brief, Daloways’s theory was that man hadn’t discovered oil, but that oil had found man. Venice hadn’t struck oil; oil had thrust up its vicious feelers like some vast blind monster, and finally made contact with Venice.”

Ridiculous, of course! Oil, a sentient creature, hellbent on using humanity for its own nefarious purposes? Pish-posh!

And yet...how to account for the strange occurrence that the narrator claims to have experienced on the night of Daloway’s disappearance? What to make of the sight of a gondola making its way up the Grand Canal piloted by a man in black with a passenger by his side? And what of the footprints leading away from Daloway’s trailer, “long narrow sharply pointed footprints, marked in blackest, thickest oil?”

Fritz Leiber, Jr., was born in 1910 to the actors Fritz Leiber, Sr. (natch), and Virginia Bronson Leiber. For a while, it seemed that Junior was destined to follow in his parents’ footsteps, but during the 1930s Leiber took up writing science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories in the vein (pun intended!) of H.P. Lovecraft. Indeed, thanks to the intervention of Leiber’s then wife, Jonquil Stephens, Leiber exchanged many letters with the New England fantasist the year before Lovecraft’s death in 1937. Lovecraft guided the young Leiber in his burgeoning writing career, helping him put together the material for his first professional sale, the story “Two Sought Adventure,” which introduced Leiber’s most famous creations to the world, the barbarian Fafhrd and the thief The Gray Mouser.

Leiber would later write novels such as Conjure Wife (about a college professor whose wife protects him from the dangers of office politics through the use of witchcraft) and Our Lady of Darkness (which introduced the occult science of “Megapolisomancy,” or the black magic of giant cities). Five years after his death in 1992, The Dealings of Daniel Kesserich, a lost Lovecraft-influenced short novel from the 1930s, would be discovered and published, causing Leiber friend and fan Harlan Ellison to exclaim, “For anyone who loves great literature, Fritz Leiber walked on water.”

“The Black Gondolier” was originally published in 1964 by Arkham House in an anthology edited by August Derleth called Over the Edge: New Stories of the Macabre. Later, the story would make it into Leiber’s own collections Night Monsters (1969) and The Black Gondolier and Other Stories (2000).

That’s all for today, kiddies. Be sure to come back tomorrow for another stop along the eldritch journey that is Blog-o-ween 2023. Meanwhile, don’t worry about those strange sounds you hear bubbling up from the ground or those eerie voices in your head telling you to go outside and dig a hole in the earth. It’s probably nothing. Just go to sleep and have...pleasant dreams...hmmm? Heh-heh-heh!