"Whittle Come Back" (1961)

Unlike some other unpublished Lafferty stories, “Whittle Come Back” does not work. Not because it is not a traditional murder mystery, but because it is an incompletely conceived screwball comedy. Lafferty does not seem to know what he wanted to write here. After the story, I will say more about what may have happened.

The story centers on Wilton Whittle, the wealthy inventor of Plasto. Whittle is an unemotive man, and he has a habit of leaving his affairs unfinished. Suspecting that his wife, Cornelia, and her lover, Doctor Geiger, are poisoning him for his fortune, Whittle confides his fears to Snowball. She is the tough young leader of a local delinquent gang called the Snowbirds. During a conversation at a local bar, The Fiddler’s Green, Whittle and Snowball make a pact: if either were to die with unsettled business, they simply do not go. Then he goes home and dies in his chair. Doctor Geiger arrives to certify the death and has the body sent to the Mobley Funeral Parlor. Post-death, Whittle seems to go out of his way to finish his bucket list: he calls on a local widow, and he goes to view a famous crystal collection.

The story is told so that the reader does not learn that Snowball is behind all the ghostly appearances until near the end, but it is Snowball who fulfills their pact. She and the Snowbirds burke Whittle from the funeral home and take his body on a tour around the city. They prop him up and parade him through the streets, carrying out Whittle’s final wishes. This includes taking him to the widow’s house, where the widow delicately faints, and taking him to view the wealthy man’s crystal collection. The gang also brings the corpse to Whittle’s tavern and tips it forward to simulate his trademark stiff nod when passing acquaintances on the street. Whittle was so rigid and expressionless while alive that several townspeople, including a police officer, greeted the corpse without realizing that he was dead.

At the end of the story, the group brings Whittle’s body back to his own front door. Doctor Geiger answers. Terrified by the sight of the back-from-the-grave Whittle, Geiger and Cornelia panic. They think he has somehow survived, leading them to blurt out an expoistion heavy confession:

"Cyrus! Cyrus! He isn't dead! We didn't kill him after all! Cyrus! Cyrus!" Cornelia cawed. Cyrus was Doctor Geiger. "W — we did too kill him. I know we killed him. He was d — d — dead. Wh — Whittle, go away. You're dead."

A nearby recorder captures their exact words, thanks to Snowball and the Snowbirds. Good job, kids. The police arrest Cornelia and the doctor for the poisoning, while also detaining the gang. At the police station, Snowball is reprimanded for what she has done. She does not care in the slightest and demands to be told what law she broke:

"Law! What law? There's a law says you can't take a corpse for a walk? You show me that law! You know there isn't any law says that. You get down that big book and show me where it says you can't take a corpse for a walk."

Andrew Ferguson has speculated that “Whittle Come Back” is the result of two story ideas being bolted together. That looks right, and the internal evidence supports it. I think Ferguson's best criticism of Lafferty is his short piece on "Hands of the Man," where he teaches readers how to think about Lafferty's revision process. He has a good nose for this kind of thing. Writing about "Whittle Come Back," Ferguson points to the large chunk of material dealing with Snowball’s backstory and the Snowbirds, which seems exogenous to the story’s setup. The narrative takes a significant detour into the gang's history, as seen in this passage:

There had been a time, barely gone by, when Snowball and her Snowbirds had cut a hair-raising swath through an ethnic group known as juveniles. You have heard of ball players' ball players and actors' actors. They were delinquents' delinquents. There is a whole group of young people complexed for life out of fear of that bunch. The Snow Trauma will not disappear till the last of them are dead, sixty or seventy years from now.

You can see how the rest of the story, with the haunting and the confession, comes from rubbing that Whittle stick against the other Snowball stick. In the story as we have it, the Snowball material provides the background for the hijinks at the end that trigger the confession, but it is stitched in without much smoothing. It raw composition.

As lopsided as the story is, with its patched-in middle, the strongest internal argument I see for Ferguson's mashed-together-but-not-completed theory comes from the beginning. We are told that the best thing Whittle ever did was marry Cornelia. Cornelia is, of course, a name associated with being an excellent wife. However, the first pages of the story give the reader a version of the character that reads as disconnected from her eventual role as a murderer:

“Wilton, are you daydreaming again?” Cornelia demanded of him. This was while he was still alive. “I do wish you would stop daydreaming and do something positive.” Cornelia was his wife, and marrying her was one of the few positive things he had ever done. It hadn't sold him on the idea.

At the end of the story, we learn that Cornelia has plotted Whittle’s murder all along! That suggests Lafferty had not yet fully conceived the plot when he wrote the first pages about Whittle. Unless Whittle wanted to end up in the funeral home, it was not a good idea to marry her. When one weighs the probability of verbal irony against compositional process, process wins out. My additional speculation is that, in an earlier version, Whittle was a ghost. The story reads that way until we know the facts, at which point Whittle becomes a rationalized ghost. That happens because the murder plot is pasted in to make room for Snowball.

There is amusing writing here, as there always is with Lafferty, and I enjoy the story’s screwball quality. For whatever reason, Lafferty muscled through with Snowball. One wishes Lafferty had brought it to a more finished state.

Whittle Come Back Notes.pdf

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