Arthur Porges (1915-2006) was an author, essayist and poet whose published
career spanned over fifty years. Born in Chicago on August 20, 1915, Arthur Porges
attained a Masters Degree in Mathematics from the Illinois Institute of Technology. After
serving in the U.S. Army as a Maths instructor during the Second World War, Porges moved
to California and taught the subject in a number of educational institutions, including
Los Angeles City College. He sold his first short story, a fantasy called "Modeled in
Clay," to the magazine Man to Man in 1950. Building on this success, and
gaining confidence in the early years of his literary career, he wrote stories as a
sideline to his day job of teaching college students. This came to an end in 1957, when
Porges retired from teaching to take up freelance writing on a full-time basis. Always an
avid reader, with a lifelong interest in science, Porges found inspiration for his plots
from the diversity of knowledge and obscure facts he had learned from years of study and
reading for pleasure. By the early 1960s, he had become an accomplished writer of short
stories, gaining much esteem, particularly in the fields of mystery, detective, fantasy
and science fiction. Porges also sold a few mainstream short stories, here and there, as
well as a handful of stories for the juvenile market and yarns about wild animals, such as
"Eight Legged Monster" -- a story about a garden spider -- and "The Black
Tyrant." His animal stories certainly bear the influence of two of Porges' favorite
authors, Seton Thompson and Henry Williamson.
Porges never wrote a novel, much preferring the short story form. He was,
in his own words, "always a short-winded writer," and would often fire off one
of his short stories in just a few hours. Once he had the plot and background outlined,
Porges wrote his stories with a focus and intensity, his mind brimming with ideas. He once
remarked to me that his brain "moved faster than his fingers." The ultimate
result of this was a massive short story output, with Porges selling over two hundred
ingenious and idiosyncratic stories down the years, with his most prolific period being
the 1960s, during which decade his stories were published in numerous fiction magazines.
His work appeared frequently in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Fantastic,
Amazing Stories, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and Ellery
Queen's Mystery Magazine. Other stories were published in such periodicals as
Gent, Boys' Life, Man to Man, Escapade, Argosy, Mike
Shayne's Mystery Magazine, Fling, The New York Post, Cavalier,
and Galaxy.
Although noted for his many mystery, fantasy and science fiction stories,
the book The
Miracle of the Bread and Other Stories, published in 2008, collects some of
his lesser-known, non-genre work, as well the aforementioned nature tales and a series of
World War Two adventure yarns. The stories assembled in this book are drawn from across
Porges' published career, but there were many unpublished stories written long before he
sold his first story. A selection of these are available to read in the volume The
Calabash of Coral Island and Other Early Stories (2008), a fascinating book
that includes material dating back to the 1930s, when Porges was still at college.
His best known stories in the genre of imaginative fiction include
"The Ruum," "The Devil and Simon Flagg," "The Rescuer" and
"The Rats." All of Porges' weird and supernatural tales have now been collected
in book form. Twenty-eight of these were assembled in The Mirror and Other
Strange Reflections, which appeared in 2002, while the remainder can be found
in The
Devil and Simon Flagg and Other Fantastic Tales, published in 2009. Eight
interconnected science fiction stories by Arthur Porges have been gathered together in the
book Eight
Problems in Space, published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box in 2008. Of
his numerous mystery stories -- few of which have been collected in book form -- a good
number feature series characters, such as the sleuths Ulysses Price Middlebie, Dr. Joel
Hoffman and the wheelchair-bound criminologist Cyriack Skinner Grey. A complete collection
of the detective stories featuring Grey was published in 2009 in the book The Curious Cases
of Cyriack Skinner Grey. Porges would often work his knowledge of scientific
facts into the plots of his crime stories. He utilised this skill in creating countless
"locked room" mysteries. Some of the best of these are "No Killer Has
Wings," "Coffee Break," "A Talent to Burn" and "The
Scientist and the Two Thieves," to name just a few. Porges also wrote a number of
Sherlock Holmes parodies, all of which have been collected in the volume The
Adventures of Stately Homes and Sherman Horn, also published by The Battered
Silicon Dispatch Box in 2008.
Having lived for years on the Big Sur, Arthur Porges made a permanent move
to Pacific Grove, Monterey County, at the end of the 1960s. In the years that ensued, his
stories appeared less frequently, with most of the fiction magazines having ceased
publication. Short fiction was out of fashion; the markets had, for the most part, dried
up. However, in the late 1980s, Porges became a regular contributor to The Monterey
Herald, a local newspaper to which he sold over forty essays and numerous poems. A
superb collection of his poetry, Spring, 1836: Selected Poems,
was published in 2008. Given that his short stories had become few and far between, it was
to the great pleasure and surprise of his fans that Arthur Porges began to enjoy something
of a renaissance in the early 2000s, with a substantial number of new stories finding
their way into the pages of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Alfred
Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. With some
very clever mystery tales, a selection of fantasy vignettes and several Sherlock Holmes
spoofs to add to his already impressive oeuvre, Arthur Porges was still selling his quirky
and delightful short stories until shortly before he passed away, in May 2006, at the age
of 90.
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