A Conversation with
Robert Bloch
by David J. Schow
Robert Bloch
by David J. Schow
The following excerpts are drawn from an hour-long talk I conducted onstage during the first World Horror Convention in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1991. Apropos of the remarks about awards, it was at this event that Bob received the first Grand Master trophy.
Beyond minimizing my own interjections, I tried to divert the open questions from the usual chestnuts Bob had answered a trillion times before, because I didn’t want the talk to slide unnecessarily into a series of rote responses. I needn’t have worried; Bob was always an anecdotal storyteller, and in one case—the dully predictable question about Ed Gein and Psycho—his response was particularly definitive.
DJS: What were you doing going from one place to another in a rumble seat of a car…that was closed?
BOB: I was going from Milwaukee to Chicago, during the Depression, with a couple who were driving in a two-seater. I said I’d like to go and they said, well, we’ve got no room for you. I said, “Strap me on the outside; I’ll put a blanket over my head and everyone will think I’m some form of camping equipment!” They wouldn’t do that, but they said: “Get in the rumble seat, and we’ll put a clothespin in there to make sure you have air.” As we were getting ready to leave the driver came running back around and said, “I’ve got a suggestion—hang on to the end of the clothespin!” And that’s the way you traveled in the early 1930s. I arrived in pretty fair condition.
DJS: How long have you been going to these things, Bob?
BOB: 1946 was the first year; and I arrived after Ackerman left. That was the PacifiCon, held in Los Angeles—kicking and screaming—and it had a small attendance, as I recall, but that attendance included A.E. Van Vogt, Leigh Brackett, Ray Bradbury, and others too humorous to mention.
FORREST J ACKERMAN (from audience): Remember the story you told, Bob, about the “three great sales” that made it possible for you to come to the convention?
BOB: Oh, yes—my typewriter, my hat, and my overcoat. That was also the first convention I traveled to, and from then on, I was hooked. I discovered it was a very practical thing to go from convention to convention, because it’s difficult to hit a moving target. I hesitate to count the number I’ve attended; I wouldn’t hesitate so much if not for the fact that Forry’s in the audience, because I can only number my convention attendance in the hundreds and his goes into the thousands.
DJS: Any bad convention experiences?
BOB: Never. That’s strange. There’s never been a convention where I felt ill at ease, or disappointed in the least. Sometimes the accommodations were better than other times, but the purpose of going to a convention is to talk to people, to see people, find out who your readers are, if any. Speak to artists and editors and publishers, and sometimes, in desperation, even to you fellow writers.
DJS: Cons used to be almost underground, for a select few people. Now it’s exploded; there’s practically a convention every weekend. Has anything else changed, besides the number of these events, for you?
BOB: Yes. Today, the fans have more money than the writers. If you don’t believe me, go down to the dealer’s room. And that has not always been true, because I remember the days when the writers were certainly more prosperous than the average fan, because the writers would sometimes sleep in single rooms…alone, even! While the fans were stacked up like cordwood, six or eight or ten or twelve to a room, surreptitiously smuggled in. The very first convention, I am told—and Forry would know—the attendance was--
ACKERMAN: One eighty-five.
BOB: --and only a very small percentage of those people could afford to go to the banquet.
JULIUS SCHWARTZ (from audience): Twenty-nine.
DJS: How expensive was the banquet?
SCHWARTZ: The price was one dollar.
BOB: Julie oughta know, because he catered it.
SCHWARTZ: I went around and collected tips. Explain why you weren’t there, Bob.
BOB: I couldn’t afford to come East. I wanted to attend, but these people I was to come East with wouldn’t even give me another clothespin! When I finally did attend, I stayed at the YMCA. I had a whole drag outfit prepared just in case I could only stay at the YWCA. In those days, people sought low-priced accommodations, and the YMCA was 50 cents or 70 cents…and worth it!
DJS: And as soon as there were conventions, there were awards at them. Bob and I actually tied for one of the rarest awards in the field—the 1985 Dimension Award, given only once by Twilight Zone Magazine, based on a reader poll. Bob and I tied for Best Short Story. The trophies were swell; the only trophies that would increase your electric bill—because they came with a light built into the bottom that shined up into a piece of etched glass. As a trophy, it was kind of elegant; as a weapon, it was practical, but when you turned on the light in the base, the glass would heat up, and the heat would cause the glass, which was heavier than the base, to disengage from the glue that held it there. So, if you had it over your bed, you might wake up in the middle of the night just in time to see your prize for literary excellence plummeting down to crush your skull. I brought Bob’s back for him, and he wisely put it in his Trophy Room. His fell apart, too, and it’s leaning up against a bookcase at your house, right this minute.
Bob knows well about awards, because he has a room full of them. How do you feel about trophies in general?
BOB: It’s the spirit and intention behind them. There’s an underground industry in the acquisition and accumulation of trophies, it seems to me. In recent years, I think that for a time—long ago—the Nebulas were stigmatized as being political awards for people who actively campaigned for them, just as they do now for the Academy Awards. Then I think a trophy becomes meaningless, and loses its value. But if it is something given spontaneously and without any premeditation on the recipient’s part, then I think it’s a wonderful thing. In many cases it’s the most satisfying and lasting reward one can acquire, because of the memories associated with a convention and the people that gave it to you. (Eyeing the tape recorder) If that sounds sentimental, I hope this is not being recorded!
DJS: My favorite award in Bob’s Trophy Room is the Grey Mouser Award…
BOB: That’s a visual pun on Fritz Leiber’s Fahfrd and Grey Mouser stories, only this Mouser is Mauser, a replica of the well-known household weapon, framed, and very impressive. I think I came by that at some pawnshop near Harlan’s house…
DJS: Do you read as prodigiously now as you used to?
BOB: David, I’m lucky nowadays if during the course of a day I can just get through my hate mail.
DJS: We were talking about dreading stacks of mail. Forry can relate to this. Gigantic piles of mail which can accumulate in your absence without your help…
BOB: They’re called “bills.”
DJS: Do you correspond? Do you write a lot of letters?
BOB: I don’t have the time for letters. I write a lot of postcards. Correspondence is too demanding, and answering those insulting questions is very difficult! There was a time when I was able to do quite a bit of correspondence, but it’s out of control now. The problem is if you are not selective, you’ll never get your own work done, and if you’re too selective you’re unwittingly offending a lot of people who feel they should be answered…and they should be.
DJS: If not while reading, is your vision a problem when working? (Bob had several cataract surgeries and corneal procedures which increasingly hampered his vision, to the point where he could no longer drive his car. He would generally come at you from an angle, favoring whichever eye was working better).
BOB: Writing as long as I’ve written, and as many things as I’ve written, it becomes very boring after a while, particularly when I’m doing a mystery or a psychological suspense piece. So, in order to avoid boredom, I type with my eyes closed so I won’t know what the storyline is, or how it’s going to come out.
(An audience member asks about Bob’s collaboration with Andre Norton on The Jekyll Legacy [1990].)
BOB: How did my collaboration with Andre Norton come about? I was at a convention, minding my own business, and I met this very nice lady who told me she was doing an anthology of stories based on her Witch World theme—about which world, I knew nothing; I hadn’t tackled anything of that sort. I said yes to see if I could do it. I asked her to show me something, so she sent a copy of the story she was doing for this anthology. I said, “Tell you what I’ll do—I’ll take your story and rewrite it.” She’d told it from the standpoint of the heroine. I told the same story from the standpoint of her villainess.
Subsequently we met at another convention in Florida, where she said, “You know, it might be fun if we collaborated on a book.” I stopped and thought about that, and said I’d see if I could come up with something that might interest both of us. After I went home, I thought of what I had read of Andre’s work up to that point, that certainly she wasn’t writing my kind of thing and I wasn’t writing her kind of thing, but she was very much into Victoriana, and had done a tremendous amount of research for her own interest and pleasure. So I thought, it’s got to be a Victorian background.
Then there was the “style” thing. I had this wonderful, polished, eloquent style, and she had this…sloppy…(laughter)
I thought, what about Robert Louis Stevenson and Jekyll and Hyde? If we were to do a Victorian piece, she would do all the research, Stevenson would supply the style, and all I would have to do, y’know, would be a little polishing and tinkering. So I sent her the outline of a sequel to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
She said, “fine,” and the publisher, in a weak moment, said “fine.” I would write one chapter and send it to her; she would make any changes and corrections she deemed necessary, write the next chapter, and send it to me and I would do likewise. Sometimes we slopped over into each other’s chapters, but it worked out very, very, easily. And I can tell you that my admiration for that lady continued to grow, because she is a fine talent, and a wonderful researcher.
For example, I decided that it might be interesting to use the early history of the Salvation Army, because I remembered they were just getting started in those days, in England. I wrote to Andre and asked if she happened to have anything on the background of the Salvation Army during that period. She sent me a six-volume history of the Salvation Army. And a tambourine. That’s the kind of a thorough, conscientious, painstaking researcher Andre is, and I don’t have to tell you what a fine writer she is. So I lucked out. I think that sometime in the future we might do another collaboration.
DJS: What about books? Classics that endure?
BOB: I like Arthur Machen’s writing very much. I couldn’t say that Lovecraft was an author of “books,” per se, being largely confined to short stories with a few novel-length things. But I wasn’t much into books; there are few that I was lastingly impressed with. I didn’t read much horror fiction, and I still don’t. I’ve always been partial to nonfiction, both for research and entertainment purposes. I find nonfiction infinitely more horrifying, actually. Nothing to me is more horrifying than history, because I see the same horrors and mistakes repeated and perpetrated. Don’t forget, I’ve lived through five major wars in my lifetime. And two marriages.
DJS: Night of the Ripper (1984) kind of illustrates what he’s talking about, even though he wrote it with his eyes closed--
BOB: I read it afterward. I swiped a copy from the library.
DJS: Each chapter of Night of the Ripper illustrates that we have always been this bad, and we will continue to be this bad. We were just on a (local) radio show, taking calls. The first caller was a wonderful lady named Flo who was convinced that we—all of us here, basically—were devoted to the destruction of her children. She was genuinely upset, and the fact that she was upset was honestly motivated; I just think that her reasons for being upset were a little misdirected. How do you feel when people say you are a bad thing, or you’re causing bad things to happen?
BOB: I mentioned yesterday on a panel that my short story, “Enoch,” which is in the program book, has just been barred in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It was written in 1946, and it was in the high school curriculum. Somebody spotted it and pulled it out as being far too horrible. But as I can recall, I’ve received less than half a dozen letters which question the validity or intent of my writing. And very few people have come up to me and even admitted that they read anything of mine. I’ve never really had that as a problem.
DJS: Do you think art can be instructive? That seeing these movies and reading these books might actually cause people to do stuff? How would you respond to that argument if that was said to you?
BOB: That has been said to me, in a general sense: That this sort of thing should go into a How-To-Do-It manual--Popular Mechanix, or something. But I don’t believe it, because the types of crimes and acts that are described are part, again, of history, and have always been. There’s very little I’ve run across or heard about in books or films that hasn’t occurred in reality many, many times before there was such a genre as horror. I’ve never been able to accept this. I keep asking people what book it was that John Wilkes Booth read before he assassinated Lincoln. In Night of the Ripper I referred to something that was quite true: In 1888, at the time of the Jack the Ripper slaying, an American producer and actor named Richard Mansfield staged the first theatrical production of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He played the lead and it was a great success. After a month or two, Mansfield closed the play, took it off the boards, because people had suggested, I think in the London Times, that this might have inspired the Jack the Ripper murders. Now that was 103 years ago. Since that time, maybe a thousand books have been done—that’s a conservative estimate—concerning Jack the Ripper either whole or in part (I’m talking about him, not his victims!). Never once, amidst all this frantic research on the part of Ripperologists world-wide, has anybody ever uncovered a single shred of evidence that would link Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with the activities of Jack the Ripper…but this kind of far-fetched claim is made constantly. Every once in a while, somebody who’s indicted for murder or some type of criminal activity, and doesn’t have a defense (not even an actor father), will find himself standing on the dock, saying, “Well, I saw such-and-such a film, or I watched something on television, or I read such-and-such a book…and that’s why I did it!” And I don’t believe a word of it.
DJS: If you were asked to do a true-crime book, is there a topic you’d pick?
BOB: No, and I think I would avoid doing such a book, actually, because I believe that the subject would have to be dealt with in detail, and couldn’t be fictionalized or glossed over as I’ve tried to do in my novels. With Holmes, I reinvented the character so he would suit my particular story. The character is based on Holmes; it certainly is not the real-life Holmes.
DJS: Apart from American Gothic and Psycho, were there any other characters or books based on similar research or similar people who actually existed?
BOB: Just Night of the Ripper, that’s all. I have no predilection for that sort of things; I’d rather invent my own monsters and refresh my memory concerning them by recalling my days in advertising.
(Audience question regarding the aspects of the Ed Gein murder case as they have supposedly, “historically” applied to Psycho. This otherwise cliched question rates inclusion here because of the breadth of Bob’s definitive answer.)
BOB: First of all, I didn’t know anything about those aspects when I wrote Psycho. I did not use Ed Gein as a basis for Norman Bates at all; I used the circumstances, which were: somebody could live in a small town, where everybody knows everybody else’s business, and conduct a series of murders without anyone suspecting. But people don’t like this. They like to believe the legend. When you get right down to it, Ed Gein did not run a motel. He killed nobody in the shower. He did not preserve the body of his mother. None of those things were part of Mr. Gein’s background. I invented a character at the time which, not having read the details, which were not being printed initially or immediately, because they were very prudish in most cases. Life magazine and a few other publications later came out with a great deal of stuff, but I would not have used it even if it had been available, because it didn’t meet with my particular plot requirements.
But the legend persists, and will continue to persist. A little over two weeks ago, I think, a network show called Hard Copy asked if they could interview me regarding Psycho. I said I did not want to be interviewed; I didn’t want to go down to a studio. They said, “We’ll send a crew out.” I said to myself, well, if it’s good enough for Ackerman, it’s good enough for me…
They came, and throughout this interview they kept asking, “Didn’t you think of Norman Bates because of Ed Gein?” Didn’t Ed Gein inspire the characterization, and blah-blah-blah. I kept telling them what I just told you, and the interviewer and crew kept looking sadder. And sadder. I said to myself this isn’t going to happen.
Sure enough, the show came on, and they’d gone to Plainfield, which had been Gein’s home town, and they did a very nice broadcast regarding the case, and they used some dramatization footage which I swear was probably part of a documentary that had been made at the time, because it was in black and white instead of color, and was not aired because it was undoubtedly too strong for audiences then. They salvaged that and put together this program. And I was a non-person. I didn’t exist. My name wasn’t mentioned, and I certainly did not appear onscreen. Obviously, if I had, they would not have had a program, because their title was The Inside Story: The Truth About the Ed Gein Murders! And my denials were the exact antithesis.
This is a horrible lesson in how easy it is for media, today, to distort by omission, or by any kind of editing, what actually happened, what occurred. What I’m citing is trivial; it doesn’t mean anything one way or the other. But think of the implications—how this sort of censorship and willful distortion affects so called “news” reporting, and so-called documentaries, on various topics that are of social or historical importance to an audience. And that’s something that scares me far more than the activities of Mr. Gein.
-END-
This interview first appeared in Cemetery Dance magazine, #31, 1999 and appears here with the kind permission of the author.
Beyond minimizing my own interjections, I tried to divert the open questions from the usual chestnuts Bob had answered a trillion times before, because I didn’t want the talk to slide unnecessarily into a series of rote responses. I needn’t have worried; Bob was always an anecdotal storyteller, and in one case—the dully predictable question about Ed Gein and Psycho—his response was particularly definitive.
DJS: What were you doing going from one place to another in a rumble seat of a car…that was closed?
BOB: I was going from Milwaukee to Chicago, during the Depression, with a couple who were driving in a two-seater. I said I’d like to go and they said, well, we’ve got no room for you. I said, “Strap me on the outside; I’ll put a blanket over my head and everyone will think I’m some form of camping equipment!” They wouldn’t do that, but they said: “Get in the rumble seat, and we’ll put a clothespin in there to make sure you have air.” As we were getting ready to leave the driver came running back around and said, “I’ve got a suggestion—hang on to the end of the clothespin!” And that’s the way you traveled in the early 1930s. I arrived in pretty fair condition.
DJS: How long have you been going to these things, Bob?
BOB: 1946 was the first year; and I arrived after Ackerman left. That was the PacifiCon, held in Los Angeles—kicking and screaming—and it had a small attendance, as I recall, but that attendance included A.E. Van Vogt, Leigh Brackett, Ray Bradbury, and others too humorous to mention.
FORREST J ACKERMAN (from audience): Remember the story you told, Bob, about the “three great sales” that made it possible for you to come to the convention?
BOB: Oh, yes—my typewriter, my hat, and my overcoat. That was also the first convention I traveled to, and from then on, I was hooked. I discovered it was a very practical thing to go from convention to convention, because it’s difficult to hit a moving target. I hesitate to count the number I’ve attended; I wouldn’t hesitate so much if not for the fact that Forry’s in the audience, because I can only number my convention attendance in the hundreds and his goes into the thousands.
DJS: Any bad convention experiences?
BOB: Never. That’s strange. There’s never been a convention where I felt ill at ease, or disappointed in the least. Sometimes the accommodations were better than other times, but the purpose of going to a convention is to talk to people, to see people, find out who your readers are, if any. Speak to artists and editors and publishers, and sometimes, in desperation, even to you fellow writers.
DJS: Cons used to be almost underground, for a select few people. Now it’s exploded; there’s practically a convention every weekend. Has anything else changed, besides the number of these events, for you?
BOB: Yes. Today, the fans have more money than the writers. If you don’t believe me, go down to the dealer’s room. And that has not always been true, because I remember the days when the writers were certainly more prosperous than the average fan, because the writers would sometimes sleep in single rooms…alone, even! While the fans were stacked up like cordwood, six or eight or ten or twelve to a room, surreptitiously smuggled in. The very first convention, I am told—and Forry would know—the attendance was--
ACKERMAN: One eighty-five.
BOB: --and only a very small percentage of those people could afford to go to the banquet.
JULIUS SCHWARTZ (from audience): Twenty-nine.
DJS: How expensive was the banquet?
SCHWARTZ: The price was one dollar.
BOB: Julie oughta know, because he catered it.
SCHWARTZ: I went around and collected tips. Explain why you weren’t there, Bob.
BOB: I couldn’t afford to come East. I wanted to attend, but these people I was to come East with wouldn’t even give me another clothespin! When I finally did attend, I stayed at the YMCA. I had a whole drag outfit prepared just in case I could only stay at the YWCA. In those days, people sought low-priced accommodations, and the YMCA was 50 cents or 70 cents…and worth it!
DJS: And as soon as there were conventions, there were awards at them. Bob and I actually tied for one of the rarest awards in the field—the 1985 Dimension Award, given only once by Twilight Zone Magazine, based on a reader poll. Bob and I tied for Best Short Story. The trophies were swell; the only trophies that would increase your electric bill—because they came with a light built into the bottom that shined up into a piece of etched glass. As a trophy, it was kind of elegant; as a weapon, it was practical, but when you turned on the light in the base, the glass would heat up, and the heat would cause the glass, which was heavier than the base, to disengage from the glue that held it there. So, if you had it over your bed, you might wake up in the middle of the night just in time to see your prize for literary excellence plummeting down to crush your skull. I brought Bob’s back for him, and he wisely put it in his Trophy Room. His fell apart, too, and it’s leaning up against a bookcase at your house, right this minute.
Bob knows well about awards, because he has a room full of them. How do you feel about trophies in general?
BOB: It’s the spirit and intention behind them. There’s an underground industry in the acquisition and accumulation of trophies, it seems to me. In recent years, I think that for a time—long ago—the Nebulas were stigmatized as being political awards for people who actively campaigned for them, just as they do now for the Academy Awards. Then I think a trophy becomes meaningless, and loses its value. But if it is something given spontaneously and without any premeditation on the recipient’s part, then I think it’s a wonderful thing. In many cases it’s the most satisfying and lasting reward one can acquire, because of the memories associated with a convention and the people that gave it to you. (Eyeing the tape recorder) If that sounds sentimental, I hope this is not being recorded!
DJS: My favorite award in Bob’s Trophy Room is the Grey Mouser Award…
BOB: That’s a visual pun on Fritz Leiber’s Fahfrd and Grey Mouser stories, only this Mouser is Mauser, a replica of the well-known household weapon, framed, and very impressive. I think I came by that at some pawnshop near Harlan’s house…
DJS: Do you read as prodigiously now as you used to?
BOB: David, I’m lucky nowadays if during the course of a day I can just get through my hate mail.
DJS: We were talking about dreading stacks of mail. Forry can relate to this. Gigantic piles of mail which can accumulate in your absence without your help…
BOB: They’re called “bills.”
DJS: Do you correspond? Do you write a lot of letters?
BOB: I don’t have the time for letters. I write a lot of postcards. Correspondence is too demanding, and answering those insulting questions is very difficult! There was a time when I was able to do quite a bit of correspondence, but it’s out of control now. The problem is if you are not selective, you’ll never get your own work done, and if you’re too selective you’re unwittingly offending a lot of people who feel they should be answered…and they should be.
DJS: If not while reading, is your vision a problem when working? (Bob had several cataract surgeries and corneal procedures which increasingly hampered his vision, to the point where he could no longer drive his car. He would generally come at you from an angle, favoring whichever eye was working better).
BOB: Writing as long as I’ve written, and as many things as I’ve written, it becomes very boring after a while, particularly when I’m doing a mystery or a psychological suspense piece. So, in order to avoid boredom, I type with my eyes closed so I won’t know what the storyline is, or how it’s going to come out.
(An audience member asks about Bob’s collaboration with Andre Norton on The Jekyll Legacy [1990].)
BOB: How did my collaboration with Andre Norton come about? I was at a convention, minding my own business, and I met this very nice lady who told me she was doing an anthology of stories based on her Witch World theme—about which world, I knew nothing; I hadn’t tackled anything of that sort. I said yes to see if I could do it. I asked her to show me something, so she sent a copy of the story she was doing for this anthology. I said, “Tell you what I’ll do—I’ll take your story and rewrite it.” She’d told it from the standpoint of the heroine. I told the same story from the standpoint of her villainess.
Subsequently we met at another convention in Florida, where she said, “You know, it might be fun if we collaborated on a book.” I stopped and thought about that, and said I’d see if I could come up with something that might interest both of us. After I went home, I thought of what I had read of Andre’s work up to that point, that certainly she wasn’t writing my kind of thing and I wasn’t writing her kind of thing, but she was very much into Victoriana, and had done a tremendous amount of research for her own interest and pleasure. So I thought, it’s got to be a Victorian background.
Then there was the “style” thing. I had this wonderful, polished, eloquent style, and she had this…sloppy…(laughter)
I thought, what about Robert Louis Stevenson and Jekyll and Hyde? If we were to do a Victorian piece, she would do all the research, Stevenson would supply the style, and all I would have to do, y’know, would be a little polishing and tinkering. So I sent her the outline of a sequel to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
She said, “fine,” and the publisher, in a weak moment, said “fine.” I would write one chapter and send it to her; she would make any changes and corrections she deemed necessary, write the next chapter, and send it to me and I would do likewise. Sometimes we slopped over into each other’s chapters, but it worked out very, very, easily. And I can tell you that my admiration for that lady continued to grow, because she is a fine talent, and a wonderful researcher.
For example, I decided that it might be interesting to use the early history of the Salvation Army, because I remembered they were just getting started in those days, in England. I wrote to Andre and asked if she happened to have anything on the background of the Salvation Army during that period. She sent me a six-volume history of the Salvation Army. And a tambourine. That’s the kind of a thorough, conscientious, painstaking researcher Andre is, and I don’t have to tell you what a fine writer she is. So I lucked out. I think that sometime in the future we might do another collaboration.
DJS: What about books? Classics that endure?
BOB: I like Arthur Machen’s writing very much. I couldn’t say that Lovecraft was an author of “books,” per se, being largely confined to short stories with a few novel-length things. But I wasn’t much into books; there are few that I was lastingly impressed with. I didn’t read much horror fiction, and I still don’t. I’ve always been partial to nonfiction, both for research and entertainment purposes. I find nonfiction infinitely more horrifying, actually. Nothing to me is more horrifying than history, because I see the same horrors and mistakes repeated and perpetrated. Don’t forget, I’ve lived through five major wars in my lifetime. And two marriages.
DJS: Night of the Ripper (1984) kind of illustrates what he’s talking about, even though he wrote it with his eyes closed--
BOB: I read it afterward. I swiped a copy from the library.
DJS: Each chapter of Night of the Ripper illustrates that we have always been this bad, and we will continue to be this bad. We were just on a (local) radio show, taking calls. The first caller was a wonderful lady named Flo who was convinced that we—all of us here, basically—were devoted to the destruction of her children. She was genuinely upset, and the fact that she was upset was honestly motivated; I just think that her reasons for being upset were a little misdirected. How do you feel when people say you are a bad thing, or you’re causing bad things to happen?
BOB: I mentioned yesterday on a panel that my short story, “Enoch,” which is in the program book, has just been barred in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It was written in 1946, and it was in the high school curriculum. Somebody spotted it and pulled it out as being far too horrible. But as I can recall, I’ve received less than half a dozen letters which question the validity or intent of my writing. And very few people have come up to me and even admitted that they read anything of mine. I’ve never really had that as a problem.
DJS: Do you think art can be instructive? That seeing these movies and reading these books might actually cause people to do stuff? How would you respond to that argument if that was said to you?
BOB: That has been said to me, in a general sense: That this sort of thing should go into a How-To-Do-It manual--Popular Mechanix, or something. But I don’t believe it, because the types of crimes and acts that are described are part, again, of history, and have always been. There’s very little I’ve run across or heard about in books or films that hasn’t occurred in reality many, many times before there was such a genre as horror. I’ve never been able to accept this. I keep asking people what book it was that John Wilkes Booth read before he assassinated Lincoln. In Night of the Ripper I referred to something that was quite true: In 1888, at the time of the Jack the Ripper slaying, an American producer and actor named Richard Mansfield staged the first theatrical production of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He played the lead and it was a great success. After a month or two, Mansfield closed the play, took it off the boards, because people had suggested, I think in the London Times, that this might have inspired the Jack the Ripper murders. Now that was 103 years ago. Since that time, maybe a thousand books have been done—that’s a conservative estimate—concerning Jack the Ripper either whole or in part (I’m talking about him, not his victims!). Never once, amidst all this frantic research on the part of Ripperologists world-wide, has anybody ever uncovered a single shred of evidence that would link Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with the activities of Jack the Ripper…but this kind of far-fetched claim is made constantly. Every once in a while, somebody who’s indicted for murder or some type of criminal activity, and doesn’t have a defense (not even an actor father), will find himself standing on the dock, saying, “Well, I saw such-and-such a film, or I watched something on television, or I read such-and-such a book…and that’s why I did it!” And I don’t believe a word of it.
DJS: If you were asked to do a true-crime book, is there a topic you’d pick?
BOB: No, and I think I would avoid doing such a book, actually, because I believe that the subject would have to be dealt with in detail, and couldn’t be fictionalized or glossed over as I’ve tried to do in my novels. With Holmes, I reinvented the character so he would suit my particular story. The character is based on Holmes; it certainly is not the real-life Holmes.
DJS: Apart from American Gothic and Psycho, were there any other characters or books based on similar research or similar people who actually existed?
BOB: Just Night of the Ripper, that’s all. I have no predilection for that sort of things; I’d rather invent my own monsters and refresh my memory concerning them by recalling my days in advertising.
(Audience question regarding the aspects of the Ed Gein murder case as they have supposedly, “historically” applied to Psycho. This otherwise cliched question rates inclusion here because of the breadth of Bob’s definitive answer.)
BOB: First of all, I didn’t know anything about those aspects when I wrote Psycho. I did not use Ed Gein as a basis for Norman Bates at all; I used the circumstances, which were: somebody could live in a small town, where everybody knows everybody else’s business, and conduct a series of murders without anyone suspecting. But people don’t like this. They like to believe the legend. When you get right down to it, Ed Gein did not run a motel. He killed nobody in the shower. He did not preserve the body of his mother. None of those things were part of Mr. Gein’s background. I invented a character at the time which, not having read the details, which were not being printed initially or immediately, because they were very prudish in most cases. Life magazine and a few other publications later came out with a great deal of stuff, but I would not have used it even if it had been available, because it didn’t meet with my particular plot requirements.
But the legend persists, and will continue to persist. A little over two weeks ago, I think, a network show called Hard Copy asked if they could interview me regarding Psycho. I said I did not want to be interviewed; I didn’t want to go down to a studio. They said, “We’ll send a crew out.” I said to myself, well, if it’s good enough for Ackerman, it’s good enough for me…
They came, and throughout this interview they kept asking, “Didn’t you think of Norman Bates because of Ed Gein?” Didn’t Ed Gein inspire the characterization, and blah-blah-blah. I kept telling them what I just told you, and the interviewer and crew kept looking sadder. And sadder. I said to myself this isn’t going to happen.
Sure enough, the show came on, and they’d gone to Plainfield, which had been Gein’s home town, and they did a very nice broadcast regarding the case, and they used some dramatization footage which I swear was probably part of a documentary that had been made at the time, because it was in black and white instead of color, and was not aired because it was undoubtedly too strong for audiences then. They salvaged that and put together this program. And I was a non-person. I didn’t exist. My name wasn’t mentioned, and I certainly did not appear onscreen. Obviously, if I had, they would not have had a program, because their title was The Inside Story: The Truth About the Ed Gein Murders! And my denials were the exact antithesis.
This is a horrible lesson in how easy it is for media, today, to distort by omission, or by any kind of editing, what actually happened, what occurred. What I’m citing is trivial; it doesn’t mean anything one way or the other. But think of the implications—how this sort of censorship and willful distortion affects so called “news” reporting, and so-called documentaries, on various topics that are of social or historical importance to an audience. And that’s something that scares me far more than the activities of Mr. Gein.
-END-
This interview first appeared in Cemetery Dance magazine, #31, 1999 and appears here with the kind permission of the author.