The five tales in Malum in Se share the theme of evil--sometimes the evil of deliberation and action, some-times the evildoer is only vaguely aware of his or her moral misprision; but more often fully aware and pur-poseful. Even so, there is humor in evil. Murder is perhaps the greatest evil, but in the largest sense, it is ridiculous, solving nothing.
Immediately after the story "Legacy" was writ-ten, a larger version of the piece appeared to the author. This was Fortune Island, the novel subse-quently pub-lished by Cherokee McGhee. Malum in Se offers the reader this earlier, shorter, and somewhat different version of the story. In "Manslaughter" a careless and aging party-girl mother inadvertently causes doom while seeking fun. "A Man of Con-science" seeks world revenge and realizes that he has become the evildoer. In a pulp fiction pastiche sug-gested by the New York Journal-American columnist Jack O'Brian, "Haydn's Head," two gamblers solve a mystery of inter-national espionage while pursued by a mobster who wants his losses back. In this story evil smiles.
In the final story, a man and woman attempt escape from a statistical, fascist world of the future to "The Devil's Tavern."
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