Fergus O'Brien, and the werewolf who was fighting the Nazis
From the April 1942 issue of UNKNOWN WORLDS, this is one of the Fergus O'Breen yarns by Anthony Boucher. Like most of the O'Breen stories, it's a light breezy mystery with the added touch of the supernatural... here, an heroic werewolf. Now, Fergus O'Breen is a redheaded green-eyed hard-drinking smooth-talking private detective with flashy clothes.. You might gather from this that he's Irish and in fact he does call himself "the O'Breen". But he's not the main character in this story and actually isn't onstage all that much.
"The Compleat Werewolf" is the story of Professor Wolfe Wolf, an expert on German philology. Aside from the subtle name, Wolf has eyebrows that meet, hairy palms and an index finger as long as the middle finger. With all that going, it's no surprise to find out that he has a touch of the old lycanthrope in his makeup and a gin-swigging wizard named Ozymandias the Great realizes this and promptly enlightens the shapeshifter.
As it happens, Wolf can transmogrify by saying the word "Absarka" and turn into a big handsome wolf with full human intelligence. Unfortunately, he can't speak while wolfed up and has to rely on Ozzy to help him or trick people into saying the word by leaving it written for them to discover... but when he manages this, although he does change back, his clothes are still back where he left them.
Well. One complication follows another in a very tightly plotted and brisk little story. Wolf tries to impress a movie star he has an infatuation with by auditioning as a stunt dog for a movie she's making (not that kind of movie, this was 1942), Nazi spies get tangled up in the situation, Fergus gets an uneasy suspicion about the Wolf wolf, and in general there's a good deal of slapstick going on that ends with a dramatic rescue of Wolf's secretary from those Boche swine (bullets can't kill the werewolf but they're not feather tickles, either).
Anthony Boucher (actually William Anthony Parker White) is probably best remembered as editor of THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, although he also wrote some excellent fantasy stories and detective books. Like John Campbell before him, he promoted a new style in science fiction... in Boucher's case, it was a more literate, sardonic fantasy-oriented story. Sometimes it seems a bit too clever and precious for its own good (when a man is robbed, he's described as "ashen and aspen" and "the two men looked at each other with a wild surmise -silent, beside a bar in Berkeley"). But that was the trend in postwar pop culture, from noir thrillers to comedy... a little tense, a bit brittle, a little opaque. Personally, I like the full-blooded unembarassed over-the-top stuff of the 1930s and 1940s but postwar sci-fi is great in its own way.