Pulp Review: The Bronze Door

Oil-executive-turned-mystery-writer Raymond Chandler was a master of characterization and prose, and his cynical gumshoe Philip Marlowe stands in the rarefied air of outstanding fictional detective characters alongside Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. He is easily one of my favorite authors.

Coming onto the Detective pulp scene in 1933 with a string of stories for Black Mask and similar publications, he would switch gears to novels in 1939 with his breakout The Big Sleep, but right before that he published a short story in the ninth issue of John W. Campbell's nascent fantasy magazine Unknown. Published in November of the very same year as The Big Sleep, The Bronze Door is a marked departure from Chandler's murky California streets in that its a piece of fantasy (close in tone to a Weird Tales story) set in foggy ol' London.

I became aware of this story about a year ago thanks to Nathan over at The Pulp Archivist who digs up all kinds of interesting pulp-era information and analysis.

We open with the unhappy marriage of James and Louella Sutton-Cornish. James is something of a run-down aristocrat who likes to drink while his wife is an unpleasant battleaxe with a spiteful Pomeranian named Teddy, who torments Mr. Sutton-Cornish whenever he can.

After an argument that causes Mrs. Sutton-Cornish to storm out of the house, James goes out into the night and takes an outdated style of horse-drawn cab to Soho, where he finds an auction house and a mysterious bronze door that he supposes belonged to a harem thanks to the Arabic writing on it.

By chance he discovers that things that pass through the doorway simply disappear without any fuss or muss. Discussing the door with the auctioneer, the little man hops through and vanishes like everything else.

Now the proud owner of a magical bronze door that can apparently disintegrate anything that passes through it, he has it delivered to his home, and then the wife returns, demanding a divorce...

From there the crime story elements rise to the surface since several people have simply disappeared and the police are beginning to take notice. The prose is of Chandler's usual top quality, with the mood and setting well-established. The little dog Teddy is wonderfully realized as a hateful little bastard, but then he becomes sympathetic when Mr. Sutton-Cornish chases him around the room trying to goad him into the door. That's a hard switch to pull, and Chandler does it excellently.

The Sutton-Cornishes are both terrible people, and a there's really nobody in the story to root for aside from Detective-sergeant Thomas Lloyd, who's really only in two scenes and isn't given a whole lot of spotlight, so that's a flaw.

The horse-drawn cab that is seemingly from another time/place? That's never developed. Its just a weird moment for its own sake. Its a shame too, since its a neat little scene.

The centerpiece of the story is the door itself, which manages to be sinister and corrupting while still being an inanimate object. The manner in which it disappears things is great, too. No fancy special effects, no messy piles of ash, no noisy sounds. Just...nothing, which is even more unsettling.

The Bronze Door is a curio of a story. Something to read once for the novelty of Raymond Chandler stretching his wings into unfamiliar territory. You read it, go “huh, that was interesting,” and then largely forget about it, except you steal the idea of the bronze door itself for your D&D campaign because you want to troll the hell out of your players.

It would be interesting to see more Chandler fantasy stories, but with the success of his Marlowe books, I can't blame him for following the money.