Everyone is Mad in San Francisco
A Review of Michael Fessier's "Fully Dressed and in His Right Mind"
Well, friends, we once again return to Karl Edward Wagner’s 39 List. This time the entry comes from his Thirteen Best Non-Supernatural Horror Novels. The book, which falls at number nine, is an odd one. A slim and trim 134 pages, with chapters that often barely last more than a page, Michael Fessier’s Fully Dressed and in His Right Mind is a strange amalgam of urban fantasy, noir, and psychological thriller. There really is no book quite like it, and the late, lamented KEG was right to quantify this bizarre work as horrific.
Author Michael Fessier (1905-1988) lived by his pen, but his work was primarily done for screens, both big and small. A California native, Fessier got his start in the newspaper business at the tender age of twelve. From there, Fessier graduated from a printer’s devil in Bakersfield to an editor for the San Rafael Independent. The early 1930s saw Fessier published in the various pulp magazines of the day, and in 1935, the slick Esquire crowned him “the discovery of the month.” Fessier won an invitation to write screenplays for MGM. From this point until the release of a major flop called Red Garters (1954), Fessier wrote or co-wrote some 29 screenplays [1]. This did not end Fessier’s career, however. After he left Hollywood and its big picture productions, Fessier wrote teleplays for such hit television shows as Bonanza, Mister Ed, Gilligan’s Island, and Lost in Space.
Fully Dressed and in His Right Mind (1935) was Fessier’s first novel, and he would only write one more—1948’s Clovis. The book was a conundrum from the very beginning. Reviewers in 1935 couldn’t make heads or tails of it, and when Lion Books republished it in 1954, the cover tried to sell it as a sexy thriller, which it is not. Orson Welles liked it enough to develop a movie treatment for it, but the idea never came to fruition. Adding to the confusion is the title, which is a reference to the Bible, specifically Mark 5:15 and Luke 8:35. In case you’re godless, both Mark 5 and Luke 8 discuss Jesus’s exorcism of the man in Gerasene, where the unclean spirit famously claims that he and his lot are “legion.” So, given such a title, one should assume that Fessier’s book is either explicitly Christian or deals with demonological matters, right?
Not quite. But…maybe…yes?
Fully Dressed and in His Right Mind begins with a murder in broad daylight. Johnny Price sees a man shot in the head in front of the Herald building in San Francisco. Price is an unemployed lay-about thanks to an inheritance. He is alone in the world, and his lifestyle is pure noir—he drinks constantly, walks around the city with nowhere to go, and has a habit of bumping into interesting people. One of those interesting people is a nameless and nondescript old man who confesses right away to the murder.
“I did [it],” the old man says to Johnny with a cigar in his mouth. The old man is not gleeful nor excited over having killed Albert E. Bagley, the publisher of the Herald. The reason? None. The old man admits that he cared little for Bagley or his newspaper’s politics. In the same first meeting, the old man also admits to Johnny that he participated in a cannibal feast in Africa where a British colonial officer was killed and barbequed by a tribe. Johnny takes all of this talk as the ramblings of a drunk. Johnny escorts the old man to a nearby bar, where not only does the old man repeat his confession, but he also scares the bartender to death with a simple look. The old man has devilish green eyes that flicker, you see, and he spooks everybody with them.
After Bagley’s murder, the old man begins to stalk Johnny, even showing up unannounced at his apartment. In these scenes, the old man reiterates his misanthropy and his cold, calculated apathy towards violence. Johnny seeks relief from the old man in the country, but when his car breaks down, he has the misfortune of pulling into a gas station owned and operated by an artist who knows nothing about cars. That artist, Laurence Dorgan, becomes Johnny’s friend, and Dorgan eventually moves to San Francisco because he wants to paint a portrait of the mysterious old man.
In the midst of all this madness, Johnny stumbles upon a beautiful woman who swims naked every night at a city lake. The woman, who Johnny sees as a water-nymph, is fairy-like and deeply connected to nature. She dislikes and distrusts humans, for it is humans who mock her friends the seals, and it is humans who sexualize her nakedness. Johnny, who admits that the woman is nude like a child, not like a woman (and therefore he does not sexualize her), finds himself falling in love with the ethereal Trelia. When word gets back to Dorgan, he changes the subject of his next painting from the murderous old man to the naked water-nymph.
Johnny’s bliss with Trelia is interrupted by the old man, who is not only present at the death of the daughter of Johnny’s landlord but is also responsible for the later death of the landlord himself. The old man is not finished; he kills Johnny’s favorite bartender after invading his home and insulting his native country. In these scenes, the old man is accused of being a mafia hitman (by the Italian landlord) and an evil spirit by the Irish bartender. The latter seems more correct, as the old man maneuvers things so that Johnny is accused of murdering the bartender. The San Francisco cops beat and bludgeon both Johnny and Dorgan after an eyewitness accuses them of being near the scene of the crime. That eyewitness is none other than the old man. The real killer lets Johnny languish in jail, and when asked why, he merely says: “Perhaps it amuses me.”
Ultimately, Johnny is spared the electric chair by Trelia. One night, when the old man accosts Trelia during one of her nightly swims, the nude nymph reacts to his green, flickering eyes with anger rather than fear. She calls him names and presses him into the water. When she refuses to admit that she fears him, the little old man tries to grab her but fails. When she reiterates her position, the old man evaporates into thin air as if he had never existed in the first place.
Fully Dressed and in His Right Mind is weird, and not Lovecraftian weird. Its closest parallel would be the magical realism novels and stories that emerged in Latin America after World War II. Fessier’s short, taut novel bends reality well, with the absurd taking place in a known universe. While San Francisco may be a “city of fog and fish and shrimp and Chinamen,” it is not usually the kind of place where women swim naked and demonic old men engineer heinous crimes on a whim. And yet, in Fessier’s world, these unreal events do occur, and they end just as randomly. The only logical explanation is that the old man is Old Scratch himself, and like Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, his arrival in the modern world leads to fantastic and fatal events. As for Trelia, she too swims away from Johnny’s life after Dorgan’s painting of her is destroyed.
Fully Dressed and in His Right Mind is a solid 4.5/5 stars from me, and I would recommend this book to anyone who is a fan of Under the Silver Lake.
[1]: All biographical information comes from David Rachels’ introduction to Fully Dressed and in His Right Mind (Eureka, CA: Staccato Crime, 2022): 7-15.