CLAIRVOYANCE IN WOMEN by Robert Tralins

"A new casebook of psychic phenomena?" Sign us up! Unfortunately, author Robert Tralins gives the game away in his preface: he says he's randomly chosen 50 examples of womanly ESP out of the staggering 3,668 case histories and reports in his files, all never before published, all deliberately written down in a casual style for ease of the reader, and all stripped of any confusing jargon or scientific distractions. Hmmm ...

This is, in fact, another story collection a la Steiger and Smith, with zero evidentiary or archival value. Since these are all "never before published," we don't even get any reused stories from Fate or the Society for Psychical Research! Note Tralins' cheeky admission that he's changed some of the names in a few of the cases ... more like, he's made it all up whole cloth! The clumsy and obvious stories that follow the preface make it obvious that Tralins is pulling our chain. 

His prose is sub-Steiger. Consider the very first story about the "death bobbins" - not content to give Mrs. Chun a vision of a miniaturized grim reaper cutting yarn, Tralins also throws in that, oh yeah, her mother told her about this very phenomenon as a child, but somehow Chun "can't say how [she] knew" what the vision meant! Make it make sense, Bob!

Author Robert Tralins (1926-2010)

Tralins was a prolific working writer who put out a handful of paranormal titles, so we can't judge him too hard for phoning in this one. It must have sold decently enough, because Lancer Books reprinted it a few years later:

Lancer Books, 1973 edition

The rest of the stories follow a type: people rush home just in time, or pick up the phone at just the right moment, or follow some sign to a date with destiny. The just-so sameness drags on, as does Tralins' seeming lack of care. Consider the chapter about a white tiger. Judith Satterlee has a vision of the beast while on safari ... in Africa. Now, maybe spectral felines aren't exactly bound by time and space, but it seems to me that Tralins didn't do his homework, as tigers aren't native to Africa! The actual ESP portion of this chapter is lackluster as well, with Mrs. Satterlee knowing her father has died because she dreamed of the tiger eating him.

"A tiger? In Africa?"

Just about the only chapter with any real verve to it is "Mrs. Henry's Dead Dog," a predictable but well done short about a sick woman's dead dog visiting her in hospital. This chapter works well enough to be on par with John Macklin, even! 

Meanwhile, a chapter on "Armagh Armageddon" shares Macklin's train fixation but falls flat, as Mrs. Lucy McHugh warns her uncle and brother not to take the train. They don't listen to Lucy, and so it's bye bye uncle and brother as they ride straight into the Armagh rail disaster of 1889! A list of the dead doesn't feature any McHughs, and this would be an odd one for Tralins to have changed names of real people for (if for the sake of humor we take him at his word), so here Tralins is making up fake victims of a real life tragedy. He also seems to have picked the Armagh disaster at random, because there's no details about the actual crash in his chapter and nothing about it is especially relevant to the story he came up with. A large number of the real life victims were schoolchildren on an excursion, which feels like it may have made for a more dramatic chapter, but as Tralins has written it, a couple guys took the train, it crashed, and they died. No moral!

That's sort of the problem with the whole text, really. After the preface, Tralins never actually engages with the idea of clairvoyance in women and what it could all mean. It's just story after story, until the very last chapter, and then: the end.

 

Lancer gives us just three measly ads in the back for more paranormal thrills, including another Tralins title and our pal Steiger promoting psychic Dorothy Spence Lauer.

After all is said and done, Tralins' Clairvoyance in Women sits alongside Steiger's Possession as a maybe-fiction meatloaf and shelf filler. This title is available to read and download at archive dot org ... if you dare.

Lancer Books, 1970

ARCHIVAL UPDATES: STRANGE POWERS OF THE MIND & STRANGE POWERS OF E.S.P.

It's a double dose of psychic flimflam from the gruesome twosome of Warren Smith and Brad Steiger! Both Strange Powers of the Mind and Strange Powers of E.S.P. are now available to read and download at archive dot org. This marks the digital debut for both titles, chock full of midcentury parapsychology, psychic predictions, and that old reliable maybe-fiction:

Original reviews are here and here, from way back in 2022.

 

THE FINAL FIRE by Dennis Smith

I have no time to watch TV

Yours is the face that interests me 

I loved you when you lost your raincoat 

I'll love you when you lose your fear 

Fire girl, say you will

HUMAN FUEL! New York City, 1975 ... a powder keg in more ways than one. Ripe for the firebugs, for the insurance fraudsters, and for the decades of deferred maintenance and subpar construction. Just waiting for a spark, a short circuit, somewhere, anywhere: in the ghettos, uptown, on Broadway ... just one little spark, and it will all go up in flames ...

Firefighter and man of letters Dennis Smith had previously written a nonfiction book about firefighters in the South Bronx, and here he turns his not-insubstantial skill at drawing out real life drama to even greater heights of fiction. You are there! As brothers Tom and Jerry battle flames and human foibles, as Smith drags us through the gritty NYC infrastructure, and as we learn, in the best disaster genre tradition, of just how badly things are about to go wrong. This is the NYC of Serpico ... and of the Wolfen, where fact and fiction spring forth from the polluted asphalt loam. This is the same lousy, stinking town of Cravens and Marr's The Black Death, where millions of souls are held for ransom by institutional ignorance and the vagaries of fate. Today, it's a dead baby in a smoked out tenement ... tomorrow, it might be Manhattan.

Around the same time he wrote The Final Fire, Smith also founded Firehouse magazine, which is still running to this day. Here, he offers a free issue and an attractive discount price for a year's subscription. Readers left slavering over his destructive prowess may want to educate themselves further on the real life issues:

Signet offers some back page ads, including David Lippincott's disaster dud Tremor Violet. No thanks, Jack! Believe the hype: The Final Fire is a 4 alarm inferno! See for yourself, because it's available to read and download at archive dot org.

Signet Books, 1976 (original pub. 1975)

FOREST FIRE by David James

About a block from the depot, a horse pulling an empty buggy flashed by him towards the center of town. The horse would die in the fire, O'Rourke thought as he turned the corner by the burned-out feed store. It could not be helped. He did not have time to chase it.

David Hagberg returns to the disaster scene under his David James pseudonym, this time with an ambitious period piece about the Cloquet Fire of 1918, which killed almost 500 people as it swept through the isolated communities of Northeastern Minnesota. Says the Minnesota Historical Society:

What is often called simply the Cloquet Fire was really a host of fires, fifty or more, that combined in a single event. It had two major theaters, one called the Cloquet–Duluth Fire and the other the Moose Lake Fire.

Conditions for both had been building for months. Lumbering, the region’s main industry, created giant depots of cut, dry lumber and left the countryside littered with wood waste. Farmers routinely burned fields and brush. Locomotives, contrary to law, spewed sparks and embers. The summer and fall of 1918 had been extremely dry.

Hagberg focuses heavily on the locomotive factor, and on locals' disbelieving mindsets: a fire would be too terrible, unthinkable even, so it can't possibly happen. One man who's all too ready to accept the awful truth is Chief O'Rourke. His life is currently falling apart, what with a pregnant mistress and political machinations against his office (we first meet him as he stops a white-on-white lynching, earning the ire of a local big shot), and even if he sounds the alarm it may be too little, too late. Those duplicitous trains, spewing hot embers, are nonetheless the lifeblood and lifelines of the north country, and O'Rourke will need to move fast to organize Cloquet's evacuation via rail. The few citizens who own automobiles can choose to ride off down the road, at the risk of driving right into the inferno.

Writing in that far off, futuristic year of 1975, with its satellites and phone lines and computerized whats-its, Hagberg makes it starkly clear for readers how limited the toolsets were in 1918: telegraph and couriers. A distance of 20 miles becomes an insurmountable hurdle, and the search for a missing child across town becomes a Herculean task. Poor form from Belmont Tower, by the way, spoiling the fate of O'Rourke's mistress on the back cover and letting us know that there's a "miracle of Cass Lake."

Besides Belmont Tower's spoilers, there's a certain stiffness to the narrative, maybe owing to its period setting. Whether or not we're experts on the Cloquet Fire of 1918, or had never heard of it before this book (raises hand), we know Hagberg is working with somebody else's script, as it were. Per usual, his writing is strong, but we're just missing that spark (ha!) that's present in his other 1975 disasterpieces Blizzard and Twister. We almost get there, with the firestorm proving a crucible for characters like reporter Sullivan, nursing shame from a cowardly episode on the Western Front, and poor, doomed mistress Mindy, but ... alas.

Forest Fire must have taken the most research out of the three 1975 titles, so it's disappointing that it's not quite as good. Not bad by any means, but still not as good as we know Hagberg can be.

Belmont Tower give us a nice spread of ads in the back pages, fiction and nonfiction, including the YA classic Walkabout and a story about the "confused, tortured world of the homosexual" title Boychick.

One final, humorous note: the anachronistic whirlybird almost hiding behind the title text on the cover art. Carelessness from Belmont Tower, or a deliberate attempt to hide the period setting from would-be buyers? When the smoke clears, Hagberg's Forest Fire earns a respectable 3/4 rating and sits comfortably enough alongside his other disaster work. Y'know, there's as much distance between now and 1975 as there was between Hagberg and his 1918 setting? Far out ...

Belmont Tower Books, 1975

ARCHIVAL UPDATES: THE U.F.O. REPORT & WHY ARE THEY WATCHING US?

Two vintage UFO texts from 1967 by Irving A. Greenfield are now available to read and download: The U.F.O. Report and Why Are They Watching Us? (as Allen Louis Erskine) from Lancer Books and Tower Books, respectively. In both texts Greenfield is hot for the Northeast Blackout of '65 being down to UFO shenanigans.

Original reviews are here and here.