We’ve come to the final story in 19-Infinity. Like A Famine Where Abundance Lies, The Schloss and the Switchblade started as a contemporary story. It didn’t sell — I had one editor tell me he loved it a lot but he only had so much room in his anthology (so yay! and sigh) — and as the protagonist, Ward Hanover, broke into movies in the late 1950s, that meant every year that passed without a sale made him more and more withered.
Another problem is that it deals with Nazis. I finished it in 2015; after Charlottesville’s Unite the Right rally in 2016 Ward wouldn’t be thinking of Nazis as a relic of the past. And as Trump continued dragging us further and further toward fascism, I kept rewriting again and again … so I finally decided to set it back during the Obama years. Pushing it back to 1999 wasn’t that big a jump.
Like Where Angels Fear to Lunch, the seed of this story was the title. The Cross and the Switchblade was a 1963 autobiography about a heroic preacher leading street punks to Jesus; it went on to become a movie in 1970 (there was also a comic-book adaptation). I’ve no idea what led me to come up with a pun on the title but as soon as I did, I knew I wanted a story to go with it.
The idea that the story involved an awful low-budget movie hit me almost at once. The movie was The Juvenile Delinquents Meet the Nazis, part of the infamous Juvenile Delinquent series. The film series was a knockoff of the long-running Bowery Boys films (the title is a riff on The Bowery Boys Meet the Monsters), but so crappy it made them look like high art. This particular entry in the series involved Nazis, a resurrected Adolf Hitler and a monster, or so I recall.
My first draft, however, was little more than two people watching the movie on video, then an ending twist (whatever the twist was, it didn’t work). Sure, parodying low-budget movies made me laugh — the first draft was very much keyed to my sense of humor — but I had to make other people laugh too. And I needed a story that would justify all the time spent watching the movie because by itself the parody just didn’t work. I tried writing it as a review, which worked with Uneasy Lies the Head That Wears the Clown (available in Atlas Shagged as both ebook and paperback) but flopped with this story.
Finally I hit on a plot that worked. Ward is the guest of honor at the science fiction convention Nevercon. To his surprise, the “classic Ward Hanover film” they’re screening isn’t one of his hits such as The Unforgiving Minute but his first film, lost when the studio burned in a fire, probably arson for insurance. The thought of seeing his younger, inexperienced self struggle with the terrible script and no-budget effects makes Ward cringe but he can’t see any alternative but to be a good sport about it.
In the film it turns out Hitler survived the Fall of the Third Reich and is now about to unleash a monstrous demon on the world, killing anyone who isn’t pure Aryan blood. He’s backed by a powerful American millionaire which has the government’s hands tied. They need agents who can’t be linked to the federal government, someone willing to fight for their own freedom and safety if nothing else. They need … the Juvenile Delinquents!
The movie starts out as bad as Ward remembered. But as it runs, some things seem … different. Sure, it’s been forty years but there are way too many extras in Nazi uniforms for a film this cheap. And the demon is way, way more realistic than the F/x budget would have allowed for. And why are so many people in the audience wearing Adolf Hitler masks?
I had a lot of fun with this one. Hopefully you’ll have fun reading it.
#SFWApro. Cover by Kemp Ward rights to images remain with current holders. 19-Infinity is available on Amazon in paperback and ebook and also available as an ebook on other websites.
