Grania Davis, RIP: FFB: THE INVESTIGATIONS OF AVRAM DAVIDSON: Collected Mysteries, edited by Grania Davis and Richard A. Lupoff (St Martin's Press, 1999)

I've had the good fortune to correspond with Grania Davis over the last year

or so, mostly over FaceBook but also directly, and (as most people who've had an opportunity to correspond or speak with her will also tell you) she was an utterly graceful and kind person to have conversation with. I started reading her work in 1978, with a fine short story called "David's Friend, the Hole" in the first new issue of Fantastic I bought and read, dated July 1978, and the first novel of hers I've read, noted in the review below, was her collaboration with her ex-hustand Avram Davidson (they were married 1962-64), the last novel he would see published in his lifetime, the fine Marco Polo and the Sleeping Beauty (Baen, 1988), which I'd hoped to reread for review today, but circumstances haven't allowed for that...I also have several of Davis's solo volumes at hand, including her recent retrospective collection of short stories, Tree of Life, Book of Death, too on the nose a title at the moment, published in 2013 by Richard Lupoff's imprint Surinam Turtle Press. I also have copies of her novels The Great Perpendicular Path, The Rainbow Annals and Moonbird in my vast To Be Read stacks, though I certainly meant to get to the collection first, and read the half or so of the book that will be still new to me. Perhaps sooner than I would've eventually gotten to that, now. 

• 9 • Introduction: Fleeting, Floating Memeries • (2013) • essay by Grania Davis
• 41 • Young Love • (1974) • novelette by Grania Davis
• 63 • To Whom It May Concern • (1975) • short fiction by Grania Davis
• 75 • Last One in Is a Rotten Egg • (1978) • short story by Grania Davis
• 83 • Jumping the Line • (1979) • short story by Grania Davis
• 101 • The Nun and the Demon • (1983) • short story by Grania Davis
• 115 • The Word-Woman of Dza • (1986) • short story by Grania Davis
• 127 • The Hills Behind Hollywood High • (1983) • novelette by Avram Davidson and Grania Davis
• 151 • The New Zombies • (1980) • short story by Avram Davidson and Grania Davis
• 165 • Addrict • (1987) • short story by Grania Davis and Avram Davidson
• 175 • Doctor Sunspot • (1990) • short story by Grania Davis
• 187 • Chroncorp • (1993) • short fiction by Grania Davis (variant of ChronCorp)
• 199 • The Songs the Anemone Sing • (1990) • short story by Grania Davis
• 213 • The Blessed/Damned Thornston Emerald • (1991) • short story by Grania Davis
• 235 • Father Juniper's Journey to the North • (1998) • short story by Grania Davis
• 255 • Tree of Life, Book of Death • (1992) • novelette by Grania Davis

Kind of a pity "David's Friend, the Hole" didn't make the cut...it's a disturbing but quiet fantasy story about a bright young kid in deprived circumstances, less obviously anguished than the older teens of Kathe Koja's first novel The Funhole, always published as The Cipher...and David's hole is less communicable. The two stories aren't too similar other than in spirit and in the central metaphor, but I wouldn't be terribly surprised if reading Davis's story didn't plant a seed, or vacuole, that grew in Koja's imagination. Koja did recently tweet that the current edition of her book would make a lovely Mother's Day gift, for that special someone...yes, and throw in a copy of Davis's... In the penultimate comment reprinted below, Ethan Davidson, the son of Grania and Avram Davidson, notes they were about to publish the collection of father-son collaborations, and that's out now, too...I was one of several passing along copies of the more obscurely-published Avram Davidson stories as I found them to Grania, for a sequel to this and her other volumes collecting Davidson's short stories, and I hope her sons do manage to finish that collection or those collections as well.

When I was a senior (Class of '82) at Honolulu's Punahou Academy, I made mention in my quarter-page of the yearbook that year of AD, and a frosh girl of my acquaintance, Katie Swift, asked if I was referring referring to the writer Avram Davidson, who along with Grania Davis, at that time resident in Kaneohe with her husband Stephen Davis and their son Seth and, I believe, her and AD's son Ethan, were all family friends of Katie and her parents. When I struck up acquaintance with Grania (at last) through FB, I had my first bulletin about the apparently happily thriving Katie in decades.

One of the happier moments of patron advice I was able to achieve when clerking at a Crown Books, in Fairfax, VA, between taking my BA and going onto  a short stint in grad school, was putting a copy of Marco Polo... in the hands of a couple of young women looking for recommendations, when the book was new...they were pleased enough to come back  for more, but apparently my second recommendation, Robert Coover's You Must Remember This, didn't send them...

Perhaps I should've opted for some Jane Yolen or Kate Wilhelm. Alas, Davis's completion of the late Davidson's novella The Boss in the Wall wouldn't be published for a decade, and no other Davis books were in print at that time, unless perhaps her first two picture books, for beginning readers, still were, but not her first novel, Doctor Grass, nor her other novels all from a few years earlier, and her anthology of Japanese sf and fantasy in translation Speculative Japan a couple of decades away. And a decade before the lovely string of impressive Avram Davidson collections she co-edited would emerge, this one below the second to appear. 

She died suddenly last week, while watching a televised opera in a local, northern California  cinema. At last report, her sons are still trying to place Grania's cat, Kiwi, in a new home.   

Friday, March 4, 2016

FFB: THE INVESTIGATIONS OF AVRAM DAVIDSON: Collected Mysteries, edited by Grania Davis and Richard A. Lupoff (St Martin's Press, 1999)

My default choice for my favorite writer, and yet I've only done up a few of his books so far, even given the excellence of the knot of Davidson collections his old friend and collaborator (in life as ex-wife as well as in literature) Grania Davis was responsible for, often in partnership with another admirer of Davidson and his work, at the turn of the last century. So, let's start to remedy that...

Davidson was a brilliant fantasist and a brilliant writer in nearly any field he turned his hand to, and crime fiction seems to have been at worst his second love among literary modes, whether it was in the sleek, pointedly effective historical fiction "The Necessity of His Condition" (where the rationalizations for chattel slavery catch up with a slaveholder), or the discursive, just this side of surreal contemporary fiction "The Lord of Central Park" (about the conduct of river pirates in modern-day Manhattan, and much else); "'Thou Still Unravished Bride'" is anticipatory of the likes of Gone Girl in its short focus, while also drawing in poetic allusion to a deft procedural approach--this was one of two stories by Davidson adapted for episodes of Alfred Hitchcock's television series; the other (and Davidson's first story in a crime-fiction magazine) "The Ikon of Elijah" had also previously been the source of an episode of the CBC-TV anthology The Unforeseen. This book is by no means a comprehensive collection of Davidson's best crime fiction (perhaps more's the pity) so much as a nice sampling of the range of what he wrote in the criminous field...most of the stories from Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, where he was one of Frederic Dannay's great favorites (and, as a result, eventually ghost-writer of two "Ellery Queen" novels), augmented by one each from Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, The Saint Mystery Magazine and the 1980s horror-fiction digest Night Cry, all among the many receptive markets for Davidson's work; he is one of the few to

"Ellery Queen" novels by Davidson
from Dannay outlines.

 have received the Hugo Award (from the World SF Convention), the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award and also the soon to be renamed Howard Award from the World Fantasy Convention, among other honors. It's difficult for me not to simply rattle off a string of superlatives when considering Davidson's short fiction, which almost always has an energy to match the imagination and erudition, the elegance and wit on display that his novels, usually written under less than the best financial circumstances, can lack; as ambitious as the short work can be, as well, it also has a certain completeness that the same insecure circumstances denied some of his best work in novel form (where sequels that were clearly planned were either never written or didn't quite reach finished form by the time of Davidson's death); such books as Masters of the Maze, Marco Polo and the Sleeping Beauty (in collaboration with Davis), or 
Joyleg (with Ward Moore) are everything they should be, and wonderful, while others, such as The Phoenix and the Mirror, are perhaps even more impressive in their ambition, and not quite as thoroughly realized.  Davis and collaborators are readying another knot of collections and completed works for publication now, and you should watch out for them, and you could do worse than to dip into this, with its excellent introduction by Dick Lupoff and good story-note introductions by Lupoff and Davis, or the broad-spectrum The Avram Davidson Treasury, the collection of his stories published in the Jewish press, his explorations of myth and historical legend in "unhistory", or the collections devoted to such recurrent characters as Doctor Eszterhazy (my own favorites among his work) and Jack Limekiller, or others while waiting for the new books to appear; an e-book edition of this volume was published by Minotaur in 2015.

The contents, courtesy ISFDB:

• 1 • Foreword: Avram Davidson, My Friend, This Stranger • essay by Richard A. Lupoff
• 13 • The Necessity of His Condition • (1957) • shortstory by Avram Davidson
• 27 • "Thou Still Unravished Bride" • (1958) • shortstory by Avram Davidson
• 43 • The Cost of Kent Castwell • (1961) • shortstory by Avram Davidson
• 55 • The Ikon of Elijah • (1956) • shortstory by Avram Davidson
• 71 • The Cobblestones of Saratoga Street • (1964) • shortstory by Avram Davidson
• 83 • Captain Pasharooney • (1967) • shortstory by Avram Davidson
• 97 • The Third Sacred Well of the Temple • (1965) • shortstory by Avram Davidson
• 117 • The Lord of Central Park • (1970) • novelette by Avram Davidson
• 159 • Murder Is Murder • (1973) • shortstory by Avram Davidson
• 165 • The Deed of the Deft-Footed Dragon • (1986) • shortstory by Avram Davidson
• 173 • A Quiet Room with a View • (1964) • shortstory by Avram Davidson
• 189 • Mr. Folsom Feels Fine • (1986) • shortstory by Avram Davidson
• 199 • The Importance of Trifles • (1969) • novella by Avram Davidson

For more of today's books, with a special emphasis on Ruth Rendell this week, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

FFB: COLLECTED FANTASIES by Avram Davidson (edited and with an introduction by John Silbersack) Berkley Books 1982

This is a funny book, in at least two senses. Following as it did a small spate of Davidson collections and reprints of collections in the late '70s and early '80s, including the improbably brief The Best of Avram Davidson (as selected by Michael Kurland, foreworded by Peter Beagle), this Silbersack collection seeks to gather what the editor refers to as some of Davidson's trickiest stories, rather than a selection of what we usually mean by "fantasies"...and even as such, it's not a complete success, but as an introduction to Davidson's work, or supplement to the casual reader of Davidson, it's clever and eccentric enough to be both a good start and a useful survey of some of his range. Nowadays, the only reason one might hand this book to the new or casual reader rather than The Avram Davidson Treasury, or the more specialized collections Grania Davis and company have released since, is the utter compactness of this eclectic display of the (typical for Davidson) intelligence and wit applied in all the stories within, some of which mark high points for his work in various modes.

It's not a (titling) success in that not all these stories are fantasies, though all are arguably fantasia; perhaps the book is an example of early deceptive marketing in this wise, in hoping to rope in post-Tolkien boom fantasy readers into a wide-ranging selection of Davidson's work (after a number of years where publishers would willfully misidentify some fantasy as science fiction). Also, as a selection in a commercial sense for the confirmed Davidson reader, it offered a slightly odd duplication of three stories from the 1981 collection Strange Seas and Shores, released less than a year beforehand (including the major story "The Sources of the Nile"). Nonetheless, "The Lord of Central Park" (from Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine) is almost absurdist enough to qualify for the book's stated remit, but still remains brilliantly within the boundaries of something which might've happened, could have been happening at the time of composition; "Dragon Skin Drum" (first in The Kenyon Review) is a means to allow for a late 1940s discussion of the state of China between two Chinese men, one a eunuch retainer of the last Imperial Court and the other an enthusiastic if somewhat bet-hedging supporter of the essentially fascist Kuomintang, at the time of the story losing ground to the Communist revolutionaries, and two US Marines, one a Christian fundamentalist and earnest seeker of the soul of China, the other a rather more pragmatic, if also rude and bibulous, slightly dissipated not quite old  China hand, more interested in how the end of his tour will result. 

The book's also not a success as a representative sample of Davidson's work in that some of the most rococo fantasies are left out (no Dr. Eszterhazy story, for example, nor "Hark! Was That the Squeal of an Angry Thoat?"), as are most of the other more realistic while baroque examples of his fiction, though "Dragon Skin Drum" has much of the density of his best work in this mode, and the more distantly historical non-fantasy "The Man Who Saw the Elephant" (from Yankee magazine), an example of the graceful, lighter touch he could employ (and also indicative of his interest in accurately representing life in various subcultures, in this case the "Quaker" Friends of New England in the mid 1800s). The grim, straightforward science fiction of "The Certificate" (while at least as much Kafkaesque as Orwellian) is in the mode of "Now Let Us Sleep" but far less well-remembered. While such all but inarguable classics of science fantasy as "The Golem" and "Or All the Seas with Oysters" are definitely among his most antic stories, the first a very high grade of sitcom dealing in part with a variety of homunculus creation stories, the latter a brilliant extrapolation as to how aliens might be disguising themselves as living versions of quotidian, easily-lost tools such as coat-hangers; "Help! I am Dr. Morris Goldpepper!" is another of his best and most straightforward farcical sf stories, one which tends to stick with readers, even those who find Davidson's more complex work less to their taste. 

There isn't a story here that doesn't reward reading or rereading, from the leisurely build of "Manatee Gal...", the second-published Jack Limekiller story, set in the British Hidalgo that stands in for the actual Belize, formerly British Honduras (as Denny Lien notes in comments with perhaps excessive asperity), where Davidson, Davis and their son Ethan once lived, to the brief and deftly frantic "Sacheverell" with its poignant last line. One could pick up an inexpensive copy of this for the feel of these stories so grouped, and Silbersack's introduction, and use it as a loaner or a gift for those who still need to know Davidson's work; or simply as a means to dip back in at odd moments. And "The Certificate" hasn't been recollected in a Davidson volume since, though it's alone in this.

from the Homeville Index:

Collected Fantasies Avram Davidson (Berkley, Jun ’82, pb)
Edited by John W. Silbersack.
• Introduction · John W. Silbersack · in
• Sacheverell · ss F&SF Mar 1964
• Help! I Am Dr. Morris Goldpepper [Dr. Morris Goldpepper] · nv Galaxy Jul 1957
• Dragon Skin Drum · ss The Kenyon Review Jan 1961
• The Lord of Central Park · nv Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Oct 1970, as “Manhattan Nights’ Entertainment”
• Or All the Seas with Oysters · ss Galaxy May 1958
• The Man Who Saw the Elephant · ss Yankee Oct 1971, as “What More Is There to See?”
• Manatee Gal Won’t You Come Out Tonight [Jack Limekiller] · nv F&SF Apr 1977, as “Manatee Gal Ain’t You Coming Out Tonight”
• The Sources of the Nile · nv F&SF Jan 1961
• The Certificate · ss F&SF Mar 1959
• The Golem · ss F&SF Mar 1955
• The Cobblestones of Saratoga Street · ss Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Apr 1964
• Faed-out · ss F&SF Oct 1963

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

FFB: THE INVESTIGATIONS OF AVRAM DAVIDSON: Collected Mysteries, edited by Grania Davis and Richard A. Lupoff (St Martin's Press, 1999)

My default choice for my favorite writer, and yet I've only done up a few of his books so far, even given the excellence of the knot of Davidson collections his old friend and collaborator (in life as ex-wife as well as in literature) Grania Davis was responsible for, often in partnership with another admirer of Davidson and his work, at the turn of the last century. So, let's start to remedy that...

Davidson was a brilliant fantasist and a brilliant writer in nearly any field he turned his hand to, and crime fiction seems to have been at worst his second love among literary modes, whether it was in the sleek, pointedly effective historical fiction "The Necessity of His Condition" (where the rationalizations for chattel slavery catch up with a slaveholder), or the discursive, just this side of surreal contemporary fiction "The Lord of Central Park" (about the conduct of river pirates in modern-day Manhattan, and much else); "'Thou Still Unravished Bride'" is anticipatory of the likes of Gone Girl in its short focus, while also drawing in poetic allusion to a deft procedural approach--this was one of two stories by Davidson adapted for episodes of Alfred Hitchcock's television series; the other (and Davidson's first story in a crime-fiction magazine) "The Ikon of Elijah" had also previously been the source of an episode of the CBC-TV anthology The Unforeseen. This book is by no means a comprehensive collection of Davidson's best crime fiction (perhaps more's the pity) so much as a nice sampling of the range of what he wrote in the criminous field...most of the stories from Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, where he was one of Frederic Dannay's great favorites (and, as a result, eventually ghost-writer of two "Ellery Queen" novels), augmented by one each from Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, The Saint Mystery Magazine and the 1980s horror-fiction digest Night Cry, all among the many receptive markets for Davidson's work; he is one of the few to

"Ellery Queen" novels by Davidson
from Dannay outlines.

have received the Hugo Award (from the World SF Convention), the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award and also the soon to be renamed Howard Award from the World Fantasy Convention, among other honors. It's difficult for me not to simply rattle off a string of superlatives when considering Davidson's short fiction, which almost always has an energy to match the imagination and erudition, the elegance and wit on display that his novels, usually written under less than the best financial circumstances, can lack; as ambitious as the short work can be, as well, it also has a certain completeness that the same insecure circumstances denied some of his best work in novel form (where sequels that were clearly planned were either never written or didn't quite reach finished form by the time of Davidson's death); such books as Masters of the Maze, Marco Polo and the Sleeping Beauty (in collaboration with Davis), or 
Joyleg (with Ward Moore) are everything they should be, and wonderful, while others, such as The Phoenix and the Mirror, are perhaps even more impressive in their ambition, and not quite as thoroughly realized.  Davis and collaborators are readying another knot of collections and completed works for publication now, and you should watch out for them, and you could do worse than to dip into this, with its excellent introduction by Dick Lupoff and good story-note introductions by Lupoff and Davis, or the broad-spectrum The Avram Davidson Treasury, the collection of his stories published in the Jewish press, his explorations of myth and historical legend in "unhistory", or the collections devoted to such recurrent characters as Doctor Eszterhazy (my own favorites among his work) and Jack Limekiller, or others while waiting for the new books to appear; an e-book edition of this volume was published by Minotaur in 2015.

The contents, courtesy ISFDB:

• 1 • Foreword: Avram Davidson, My Friend, This Stranger • essay by Richard A. Lupoff
• 13 • The Necessity of His Condition • (1957) • shortstory by Avram Davidson
• 27 • "Thou Still Unravished Bride" • (1958) • shortstory by Avram Davidson
• 43 • The Cost of Kent Castwell • (1961) • shortstory by Avram Davidson
• 55 • The Ikon of Elijah • (1956) • shortstory by Avram Davidson
• 71 • The Cobblestones of Saratoga Street • (1964) • shortstory by Avram Davidson
• 83 • Captain Pasharooney • (1967) • shortstory by Avram Davidson
• 97 • The Third Sacred Well of the Temple • (1965) • shortstory by Avram Davidson
• 117 • The Lord of Central Park • (1970) • novelette by Avram Davidson
• 159 • Murder Is Murder • (1973) • shortstory by Avram Davidson
• 165 • The Deed of the Deft-Footed Dragon • (1986) • shortstory by Avram Davidson
• 173 • A Quiet Room with a View • (1964) • shortstory by Avram Davidson
• 189 • Mr. Folsom Feels Fine • (1986) • shortstory by Avram Davidson
• 199 • The Importance of Trifles • (1969) • novella by Avram Davidson

For more of today's books, with a special emphasis on Ruth Rendell this week, please see Patti Abbott's blog.