Books Received: THE CLINGERMAN FILES by Mildred Clingerman; WIDOW'S MITE and WHO'S AFRAID? by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding

Greg Shepard's Stark House has added another two-novel volume to their valuable selection of reprints (full stop, but in this case specifically) of Elisabeth Sanxay Holding's suspense novels, this one replicating in primary content its Ace Double previous paperback edition. I hadn't realized till now, or had forgotten, that she died relatively young, even for her time, in 1955 at 65 or 66 years of age, and while the paperback boom was certainly well under way, she was a bit early to benefit from, at least, Fawcett Gold Medal at its height. Even her more modest novels (the only one I've reviewed so far on the blog, for example, Too Many Bottles or The Party Was the Payoff , depending on which edition one read) are worth the effort. her better ones drew the extended admiration of such contemporaries as Raymond Chandler and such successors as Ed Gorman and Sarah Weinman. Her author portrait on the back is rather reminiscent of Ayn Rand, a writer she in no other way resembles...Sanxay Holding having wit, grace and character (and characters rather than mouthpieces lecturing each other) in her writing...

 



Through the kindness of Scott Cupp, present as I was not at the World Fantasy Convention in San Antonio this year, I now have a copy of The Clingerman Files, edited by Mark Bradley and including apparently all Mildred Clingerman's completed short fiction, previously published or not, in the initial and perhaps only volume to come from Size 5 1/2 B Publishing (we gather from the logo it was probably Clingerman's shoe size), an outfit made up largely of her family. Clingerman was a productive (but not Hugely productive) and highly-regarded fantasy and sf writer of the 1950s and '60s; never wrote a novel, when that was (at least as much as now) the way to a sustained career in the field, and even with sales of two stories collected here, two stories to Collier's  and one to The Ladies Home Companion, didn't get much more than a supplementary income from her writing...her one previous collection, A Cupful of Space, was published by Ballantine in 1961, in the midst of a severe cash-crunch for that company, and as a result her daughter remembers an advance of merely $600...enough to buy a used car then, to be sure, but a far cry from what Ballantine had been able to offer its writers a half-dozen years before (or than either slick magazine would've paid for her short stories individually). Her first story to be published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, "Minister Without Portfolio", was agented, and the editors were amused to have her described as "a beautiful but unpublished writer", leading Anthony Boucher to jokingly wonder what her agent was trying to offer (Boucher and McComas note the phrase, if not their response, in the headnote of the story as published in F&SF for February 1952; the response can be read in The Eureka Years: Boucher and McComas's Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 1949-1954, edited by Annette Peltz McComas).  I shall be digging into both of these, and other kindly provided items by Scott, in the coming weeks.

 

FFB: TOO MANY BOTTLES (aka THE PARTY WAS THE PAYOFF) by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding

Simon & Schuster, 1951


A short, and relatively late, novel by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, and one which plays to her strengths without showcasing any of them in their best light, except perhaps her casual wit and the smoothly readable pacing she brought to most of her work I've read (a fraction of her work in the crime-fiction field). A 1951 "Inner Sanctum" mystery, it mixes elements of the psychological suspense story she and Cornell Woolrich and Robert Bloch and Daphne Du Maurier and others were developing in the 1940s with some of the conventions of the drawing room mystery and even a touch of the police procedural, while mostly being from the perspective of a freelance writer, James Brophy, who has let his life get beyond his control. At least, he's been drifting along enough so that his social-butterfly wife and her sister, an increasingly shrill and dependent presence in the household, go through gyrations that lead to several murders...while he attempts to get some work done on one or another short story or serialized novel or novella (particularly one in progress called "The Party Was the Payoff"), with hopes of placing This one in a slick magazine rather than a pulp. Another woman catches his resigned eye, and she plays a significant role as well, at one point trying to fix him up with a job with an early 1950s version of Open University, an offer he dodges with a shudder and several quietly offputting suggestions to the Ms. Vanderbilt (but not of Those Vanderbilts) who runs the multi-disciplinary arts "school" for adults.

At 123 pages in the Mercury edition, with a decent but unexceptional George Salter cover painting, it's just a bit rushed, particularly around Brophy's realization of his own role in events, and the prime mover of most of the chaos is rather easy to spot, but it's in turns a funny and grim, and very quick, read. If you pick up one of the out of print editions or the current Stark House two-fer, you probably won't wish you were reading something else (though I wouldn't judge Holding's work as a whole by this one). ESH's influence on writers following her, from Patricia Highsmith to (her recent champion) Ed Gorman and beyond, was great...

The Mercury Mystery edition (a Dannay title change? Or ESH's title restored?), Mercury Press 1952, and as a Mercury Mystery, in undated digest-sized magazine format (at the end of its run, after Mercury Press sold EQMM to the new Davis Publications, Mercury would become a full-fledged fiction magazine, with each issue featuring a novel and short essays and fiction).















for more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.




Stark House's currently in-print omnibus, somewhat misleadingly suggesting "Never before in paperback" (possibly true of the first novel of two):