Tramps, wino's, skid row gothics, lipstick street drinkers, etc
Gahan Wilson Joseph Payne Brennan - Slime
Anthony Vercoe - Flies
Robert Ferrers Broad - Dr. Fawcett’s Experiment
Richard Middleton – On The Brighton Road
John Metcalfe – The Funeral March Of A Marionette
Robert Bloch - Hobo
R. Chetwynd-Hayes - It Came To Dinner
Ramsey Campbell - Mackintosh Willie
"Gimme a buck! Gimme a buck 'r I'll put the cursa squirmy death on ya! .... Cursa squirmy death, cursa squirmy death! Whammy whammy presto fuck ya!" - Crazy bum in Richard Laymon's
Funland.
Don't know what started my hero worship of tramps but I'm guessing Vincent Price's groovy meths mob in
Theatre Of Blood had a hand in it, likewise a fondness for the painting on the sleeve of Jethro Tull's
Aqualung. Anyway, Tramps receive a raw deal from horror fiction where you can usually count on them getting devoured by slime or mutant beetles in the opening chapter, but every once in a while they get to turn the tables. Here's some random notes on my favourite gentlemen and women of the road.
East London's homeless population is reduced dramatically by homicidal cockroaches in the Richard Lewis classic (is there any other kind ?)
Night Killers (Hamlyn, 1983). Old Nettie, is among the first victims.
Jack Ramsay's
The Rage (Sphere, 1977) opens with a tramp being mauled by a rabid fox.
One of several grim vignettes in James Herbert's
The Rats (NEL, 1974) concerns Mary Kelly (not a name to inspire confidence at the best of times), a decent woman driven to madness and meths by the death of her husband-to-be, who dosses in the decrepit St. Mary's churchyard near Aldgate East station. Beaten unconscious by fellow alkies when she taunts them with a bottle of scotch, she is easy prey for the rats. But then, so are her comatose colleagues.
Richard Laymon's
Funland pitches lifeguard Tanya and her teenage gang 'Great Big Billy Goat Gruff' versus the down-and-outs who hang around the fairground at Boleta Bay. And a f**king massive giant spider.
"The tramp did not move when Maitland parted the bushes and stepped out into the open; he was intent on his cooking. Maitland had almost reached him before he looked up.
Maitland held out a hand placatingly. "Don't be afraid - I only want to ..."
There it was again. The look. Amazement and terror. In a moment the tramp would run. He was on his feet, backing away, not knowing and not caring, that one of his legs brushed the tripod of sticks and overturned it so that it fell into the fire and set up a shower of sparks." Living dead car-crash casualty Maitland causes a tramp to burn his sausage in Jack Oleck's novelisation of
Tales From The Crypt.
and some shorts;
Anthony Vercoe – Flies: A starving tramp (once of Oxford University) breaks into a vacant Elizabethan house in Holborn, and is transported back in time to the height of the Great Plague.
R. Chetwynd-Hayes - It Came To Dinner: East Anglian fenland. Herbert, a tramp, comes in a house in a state of disrepair and, thinking it deserted, decides to spend the night there. He is wrong in his assumption that the old place is empty, but Stafford Carruthers will not hear of it him leaving and instead invites him to spend the night there with Lady Carruthers, daughter Helen, and their butler, Marvin. Herbert soon notices that the Carruthers' enjoy their food - mostly meat dishes - to the point of gluttony, but he really starts feeling uneasy with the arrival at table - unannounced - of Sir Gore Carruthers ...
John Metcalfe – The Funeral March Of A Marionette: On a snowy, bitterly cold November 4th, budding entrepreneur Alf and little George drag a trolley along the Millbank, collecting a small fortune in coppers from admires of their uncannily lifelike Guy. Unfortunately, old Gus the tramp isn’t equip to handle the sub-zero temperatures ….
Robert Ferrers Broad - Dr. Fawcett’s Experiment: The disgraced biologist, ‘Nicholas Fawcett’, holes up in the country where he can conduct undisturbed his researches for the dubious benefit of mankind. A luckless, epileptic tramp chooses to take a doze in his garden and the kindly mad professor takes him under his wing, helping himself to the fellow’s brain and sundry internal organs while he’s about it. Fawcett raises a murderous culture – “an obscene thing that … swelled in my glass dish like a huge puffball” – which soon runs amok in a frenzy of throat-ripping.
Richard Middleton – On The Brighton Road: Middleton committed suicide and much of his work reflects the bitterness and despondency he presumably felt.
On The Brighton Road sees a tramp encounter a young waif, rootless like himself, who insists that he’s already died several times, only to revive and continue his aimless wandering.
Joseph Payne Brennan – Slime: (Weird Tales, March 1953): “A thing of slimy blackness, a thing which had no essential shape, no discernible earthly features. It was a shape of utter darkness, one second a great flopping hood, the next a black viscid pool of living ooze which flowed upon itself, sliding forward with incredible speed.” First victim of this amorphous, oily blob, need you ask, is wino Henry Hossing, quietly going about a drunk in the trees surrounding Wharton’s Swamp.