"Smart Sucker" (1957)

This story by Richard Wormser is laughably ridiculous and ends on a weak and unbelievable note, but it has its moments. I’m probably willing to forgive its miscues because it’s from my earliest exposures to horror literature. Wormser was a prolific genre writer but ISFDB discounts him because, presumably, most of it was detective fiction and Westerns. So I’m not sure why they list this story because it’s just a human cruelty caper, a conte cruel, in the form of a remorseless urban gang of 20somethings who hang out in an obscure bar in the bad part of town and waylay strangers. Our hero, an office supplies salesman, wanders in unaware to get out of the rain. He knew it was a sketchy situation, but no one could expect this. Probably because I’m quite certain nothing like it has ever happened. Ever. The gang in the bar is a bunch of psychotic beatnik thrill killers, more or less. The bartender appears to be part of it and closes up the joint when they head out on their extortion and robbery escapades. Why do they use such a complicated way of doing it? That’s hard to say. Maybe kicks. Because it doesn’t make much sense any other way and who knows what you can expect from a beatnik. It also makes no sense that they just let their victim go. I was fully aware at all times of how silly each separate incident is in this story. They’re strung like pearls on a choker. Wormser is a pretty good pulpy crime writer and there’s just enough cruelty to put it, maybe, in something like the class of George Hitchcock’s “Invitation to the Hunt.” Then I saw on ISFDB that “Smart Sucker” was translated into French in 1967 and it clicked. There is something Godardian about all this, like Alphaville, Pierrot le fou, Band of Outsiders, Breathless—something a little cerebral and French. Even the title phrase—“sucker,” specifically, is a key word in this story, stylized the way it is hit so hard and so often. This psycho gang looks forward to Charles Manson and all that, but the strains were already creeping into the pop culture youth scene in the ‘50s, with The Wild One and other images of juvenile delinquency, some sliding over into more psychotic precincts. That’s just how it was for nonconformists at the time to some people—if you’re psycho you gotta be French.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories My Mother Never Told Me, ed. Robert Arthur (out of print)
Story not available online.