Continuing my look at the stories in 19-Infinity we come to the 1937 adventure No Good Deed Goes Unpunished, which came out some years back in Crimson Streets. A prequel to Where Angels Fear to Lunch, it tells how Al Soares, the Wandering Jew, went from bitter outcast to still-bitter private investigator and urban fantasy protagonist. This post will include some spoilers so feel free to bookmark it and come back after you’ve read the book (hint, hint).
The first element came from a freelance spy who popped up in DC in the 1980s, code-named the Bad Samaritan. My friend Ross made a passing comment which made me think of using the same name for a different villain, one who murders people for doing good deeds (“Just think of me as—a Bad Samaritan.”). I liked it but of course I had to come up with a reason someone would do that, other than “he’s crazy!”
One I seized on was the Jewish legend of the 36 Lame Wufniks. The myth is that 36 people in the world are chosen to live lives of goodness, charity and compassion, thereby reminding God of our potential. Because of this, he doesn’t lose it at the behavior of so many other people and rain down fire or flood on us. So what if someone started targeting the Wufniks, killing them so that God would lose his shit?
And if that were the concept, the protagonist would obviously be Al Soares, my Wandering Jew. In my first published short story this century, “Where Angels Fear to Lunch” (in Realms of Fantasy, my biggest market to date), I presented Al as a hardboiled PI, a cynic who nevertheless works to balance the scales of justice. He protects people he thinks got the shaft the way he did when he was cursed for mocking Jesus on the way to the crucifixion (“One lousy joke, that was all. I didn’t kick him, I didn’t fling cow patties like Simon the Zealot, so why me?”).
That still left me with the problem of what the villain’s end game would be? And how exactly would he achieve it? After all, the Wufniks aren’t immortal, thousands of them have died through the centuries, so why would these deaths be any different? Suffice to say I worked all that out and it’s woven into the story.
In so doing, the Bad Samaritan became a somewhat smaller part of things. Instead it became very much an origin for the Wandering Jew’s decision to start lighting a candle rather than cursing the darkness. The original ending was very consciously written to set that up; after my friend M. David Blake pointed that out (in the course of turning it down for a magazine he edited at the time) I rewrote it so while it was still a launching pad it was less obvious. And I shifted the character Al has his final conversation with, which for various reasons worked much better.
Al is considerably more Jewish here than in my first story about him. As a fictional character he’s awkward, a Jewish figure but in Christian folklore, most probably conceived to explain Jesus’ statement that people alive in his time would witness the second coming. I managed to make it work and went back and incorporated that aspect into Where Angels Fear to Lunch, later in this volume.
#SFWApro. Cover by Kemp Ward, all rights to image are mine.
