The Chaser

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1940

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Alan Austen

In examples taken from folklore, the key to having supernatural power over someone is to know their “true name.” Collier recalls this legend upon revealing that the proprietor of the store knows Alan Austen’s name before the fact of it is mentioned. Though we enter the story imagining that Alan is the director of his fate, but by the end we understand that he is the puppet of forces beyond his imagination.

Alan is a victim of a tradition he knows nothing of, one designed to profit from his ignorance. The proprietor, and not Alan, is in control. Further development of Alan’s character, according to the story’s ruthless logic, can only happen when he mirrors the older man’s cynicism. At the end of his journey, he will be wiser, and wealthy enough to afford an expensive murder weapon, but no closer to the love he was seeking.

Victim though he is, Alan Austen is also the author of his own problems. With a modicum of practiced sociability and empathy, or the development of his imagination, he could see that the impulse to demand someone else’s love is tantamount to taking their life. Above all, the development of Alan Austen’s character is tied to his inability to see love as anything but an instrumental symptom of his own selfish desire. Though he is a victim, he is the proprietor’s moral equivalent.

The Proprietor

We know little about the proprietor of the store on Pell Street, even after the nature of his limited business is fully revealed. He says that his “stock in trade is not very large […] but such as it is, it is varied” (415). This, like much of what the proprietor says, is an understatement. As far as we can see, he sells exactly two items.

There are a few hints as to his habits. He is monomaniacally euphemistic in his descriptions of his items for sale, one of which he does not call a love potion, and the other of which he does not call a murder weapon. About other things, he is less careful. The interior of the shop and its furniture are slovenly and not well cared for. Later, when he points to the love potion, we see that the phial is also dirty. The proprietor has no interest in aesthetics or set dressing, and the enthusiasm he shows for the products he sells are those of an inventor for a particularly efficient machine. “Their effects are permanent, and extend far beyond the mere casual impulse. But they include it. Oh, yes they include it. Bountifully, insistently. Everlastingly,” declares the older man, when describing the purely sexual characteristics of his love potion (416). He sounds like he is describing a well-engineered car with a good ratio of gas-to-mileage.

Like Alan Austen, the older man suffers from a lack of imagination. In fact, the phrase “you will not have to use your imagination” (417) is a selling point for both men, who seek a solution to doing away with the embellishments that adorn a well-lived life, and want to cut right to the chase, receiving what they desire with a minimum of effort. Both men were made for each other.

Diana

The unseen character of Diana is soon to be the victim of a series of unmitigated horrors that will see her life and freedom vastly diminished by men she hardly knows. One man will help another enslave her emotions and then, when he is through, murder her with a method “quite imperceptible to any known method of autopsy” (415).

Collier, who wrote “The Chaser” sometime before the year 1951, gave Diana little selfhood or agency. His male characters are concerned exclusively with male freedom, loneliness, and authority. It’s possible that the proprietor understands that Diana’s preference for parties indicates a spark of vivaciousness and humanity, and her desire to know other people. However, this knowledge is compromised by his view that the true nature of female love, whether naturally or artificially produced, extinguishes interest in other people, curtails independence, and becomes a joyless and smothering chore to endure. Alan’s experience of this kind of love will transform him from an innocent young man to a wiser older man; perhaps he, too, will become learn to disguise his name and one day set up shop on Pell Street, empowering further victimization of women.