Free Front-Page McGuffin & The Greatest Story Never Told by Peter Crowther

 
    Introduction
     
     
     
    READING PETER CROWTHER’S “Front-Page McGuffin and the Greatest Story Never Told” left me blue.
    This is, of course, its intended effect. In one sense, the Land at the End of the Working Day is simply a walk-down, Manhattan gin-mill where friends come to meet and drink together. In another, larger sense, it is the place all of us are finally headed. It’s a good place, in Pete Crowther’s conception of it, this last stop on the human journey. A place where you can have a cold beer and a bit of good talk before you step outside the door and disappear from your own life. But like the jazz obscurities so frequently referenced within these tales, The Land at the End of the Working Day stories are full of sweet grief, and all happiness to be found herein is laced with mourning. They are, each of them, a glass raised in a toast to fully-lived lives: lives inevitably marked by struggles and losses, humbling defeats and a few essential, precious victories, lives punctuated by a happy romp or two in the sack, and the bitterest of heartbreaks.
    But that isn’t precisely the reason I finished reading “Front-Page McGuffin” in a state of low-grade melancholy. Or it’s one reason, but not the only —or even most important—reason.
    You see, the piece that follows this introduction is a study in simple, unpretentious, straight-forward storytelling. Which is to say there’s almost nothing ‘simple’ or ‘straight-forward about it’. Like great jazz, the simpler it seems, the harder it is to do. Those looking for post-modern irony or literary stunts have come to the wrong bar—they don’t have that on tap in The Land.
    A story like “Front-Page McGuffin” could easily have appeared alongside the fiction of Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov in the pulps of the fifties. If you came across it in a 1970s-era back issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction , in between entries by Sam Delaney and Spider Robinson, you would not have thought twice, Pete’s ‘Working Day’ tales are intended, quite consciously, as homage to Spider Robinson’s ‘Callahan’s Saloon’ stories, although they’re also rather more than that). But to find them in our own age is a modest sort of wonder.
    And so here’s why I was blue after finishing “Front-Page McGuffin and the Greatest Story Never Told”: I often think this kind of fiction is dying now. Like the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, or the Siberian Tiger, the free range fantasy narrative can hardly be found in the wild anymore, and may soon only exist in the arid, dismal zoos of academia (if there). To put it another way, I think stories of this sort have taken their seat on a stool in the Land at the End of the Working Day, or soon will. They have only one slim chance of survival. To be read and shared and loved.
    Raise your glass now. Here’s a toast to this story and all the others like it. Here’s another toast to you, for reading and caring.
    Now.
    Drink.
     
    —Joe Hill
     

 
    F RONT- P AGE M C G UFFIN &
    T HE G REATEST S TORY N EVER T OLD
     

    IT’S NOT ALWAYS AS EASY as you’d think to tell dead folks from those that are still alive, and certainly not by where you happen to find them. Or where they happen to find you .
    Take now, for instance.
    And here .
    It’s a Tuesday in The Land at the End of the Working Day, a Tuesday Happy Hour, that no-man’s land between afternoon and evening, when the drinks are half the regular price and the conversation is slow. But then the people who come in to the Working Day specifically for Happy Hour, no matter what day of the week it is, don’t come in to talk.
    The conversationalists of Manhattan (of whom there are many) don’t bother with the hard-to-find watering holes tucked into the street corners and tenement walk-downs; they concentrate instead on the gaudily-coloured window-painted bars on the main drags, the bars with the striped awnings and the piped music spilling out past the muscled