Friday's "Forgotten" Books and more: the links to the reviews and more

This week's books, unfairly (or sometimes fairly) neglected, or simply those the reviewers below think you might find of some interest (or, infrequently, to be warned away from)--certainly, this week we have no shortage of not at all forgotten titles. Patti Abbott will host again next week.

Rest in Glory: Ursula K. Le Guin, Julius Lester, Dallas Mayr.

Walter Albert: The Alienist by Caleb Carr

Yvette Banek: The Ponson Case by Freeman Wills Croft

Bernadette: Fierce Kingdom by Gin Phillips

Les Blatt: The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie; The Sunken Sailor by Patricia Moyes

John Boston: Amazing: Fact and Science Fiction Stories, February 1963, edited by Cele Goldsmith

Brian Busby: The Heiress of Castle Cliffe by May Agnes Fleming 

Bill Crider: The Winter is Past by Harry Whittington

Martin Edwards: The Deadly Dove by Rufus King

Peter Enfantino, Jack Seabrook and Jose Cruz: EC Comics, September 1954

Barry Ergang (hosted by Kevin Tipple): The Case of the Sleepwalker's Niece by Erle Stanley Gardner

Will Errickson: The Tribe by Bari Wood (among her other work); Dallas Mayr (aka Jack Ketchum)

Curtis Evans: The White Cockatoo by Mignon G. Eberhart

Elisabeth Grace Foley: The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk 

Paul Fraser: Astounding Stories, February 1938, edited by John W. Campbell, Jr.

Barry Gardner: Night Prey by "John Sandford" (John Camp) 

John Grant: Malice by Keigo Hagashino (translated by Alexander O. Smith); Beware the Young Stranger by "Ellery Queen" (in this case, Talmage Powell)

Rich Horton: Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin; Rainbow's End by Vivian Radcliffe; Planet of No Return by Poul Anderson; Star Guard by Andre Norton; Rocannon's World by Ursula K. Le Guin; The Kar-Chee Reign by Avram Davidson

Jerry House: An Earth Gone Mad by Roger Dee [Aycock] 

TracyK: Death Wears Pink Shoes by Robert James

Colman Keane: Crime Syndicate, January 2016, edited by Michael Pool and Eric Beetner

George Kelley: The Great SF Stories (1964) edited by Robert Silverberg and Martin Harry Greenberg

Joe Kenney: Logan's World by William F. Nolan

Margot Kinberg; Killer Instinct by Zoë Sharp

Rob Kitchin: Blood Curse by Maurizio de Giovanni

B. V. Lawson:  Mrs. Knox's Profession by Jessica Mann

Ursula K. Le Guin: early writing 

Evan Lewis: The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara

Steve Lewis: "Dyed to Death" by K. G. McAbee; The Blind Side by Patricia Wentworth

Brian Lindenmuth: Iron Men and Silver Stars edited by Donald Hamilton 

Gideon Marcus: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 1963, edited by Avram Davidson

Todd Mason: The Dark Side edited by Damon Knight (et al.); SF Horizons edited by Harry Harrison and Brian W. Aldiss

Steven Nester: Hollywood and LeVine by Andrew Bergman 

James Nicoll: Hammer's Slammers by David Drake

John F. Norris:  The Other Passenger by John Kier Cross

John O'Neill: The Machine in Shaft Ten by M. John Harrison

Matt Paust: Present Danger by Stella Rimington

James Reasoner: "Ki-Gor--And the Temple of the Moon-God" by "John Peter Drummond"

Jack Seabrook and Peter Enfantino: DC War Comics 1971 

John Self: The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas (translated by Elizabeth Rokkan)

Steven Silver: "Lost Paradise" by Catherine L. Moore 

Victoria Silverwolf: Fantastic: Stories of Imagination, February 1963, edited by Cele Goldsmith (featuring Le Guin's "second story")

Kerrie Smith: The Murder at Sissingham Hall by Clara Benson

Kevin Tipple: Mexico Fever by George Kier

"TomKat": The Vampire Tree by Paul Halter (translated by John Pugmire)

Prashant Trikannad: Merrick by Ben Boulden

Richard Moore on Bill Crider and his Truman Smith novels and crime-fiction fandom

On Bill Crider:

Richard Moore, James Reasoner, Bill Crider

I first got to know Bill Crider in an Amateur Press Association (APA) for mystery fans called Elementary My Dear APA or DAPA-EM. Long before the internet and blogs, groups of fans would do individual “zines” and mail their pages to the Official Editor who would bind them together and send them back out to the members. We were limited to 35 members and the mailings were every other month. As every member would usually comment on each zine, it became 35 individual conversations with weeks of lagtime. We were in DAPA-EM for more than three decades and Bill and I are still in a western APA, Owlhoot.

Decades of mailings become incredibly bulky. Bill has sent all of his to Texas A&M and as a running record of mystery fandom, they certainly have value. Bill began as a fan—when we met, he had one Nick Carter novel credit before finding his voice in mystery, western, horror and other fiction. And Bill does have a distinctive voice—all the great writers do.

It was at conventions that we met in person and over three and a half decades at Bouchercons and regional mystery conventions as well as a few science fiction cons such as ArmadilloCon in Austin. we’d attend panels, roam the dealer’s rooms, stand in line to get favorites to sign books, explore the cities and meet at night to share stories. Bill has one of the great book and paperback collections. I remember standing with him in line at a Bourchercon to get Evan Hunter to sign a few books. He groaned when he saw I had Hunter’s elusive first novel The Evil Sleep (Falcon Books 1952). It was one of the few he didn’t have (he later found a copy).

Bill loved the old paperback original writers such as Harry Whittington, Marv Albert, Peter Rabe. Bill and I always attended the occasional convention appearances of old pulp writers and editors such as Stephen Marlowe (Milton Lesser), Howard Browne, William Campbell Gault and Dwight V. Swain. If I have favorite memories from the dozens of conventions where we gathered they would be the trips to Austin, Texas where Bill and Judy would lead us to some great Tex-Mex food, and then going booking with Crider and Joe Lansdale.

I don’t know about this heaven thing but if I could draw one up it would include a convention with a stocked dealer’s room and a roomy suite with all the old departed gang present: including Barry Gardner, Graeme Flanagan, Bob Briney, Noreen Shaw, Hal Rice, Stan Burns, and with dear Ellen Nehr bellowing at me in a tone worthy of a Wodehouse aunt.

On his Truman Smith novels:

Bill Crider in an afterword to one of his Truman Smith novels wrote: “When I was a child, I thought Galveston was one of the most romantic places in Texas. Many years later, I still do.” That nostalgic atmosphere and love of place runs throughout the series, which was launched in 1991 with Dead on the Island. In that time the glory that was Galveston had faded from the days when it was a wide-open town with gambling, brothels, and nightclubs attracting major acts.

A crusading DA in the late 1950s led a crackdown that closed the dens of iniquity and dumped all the slot machines into the bay. After long decay, some renovations are underway in the historic district during the time in which these novels are set. Today the old Hotel Galvez, built in 1911, has been modernized into a showplace and they still have the Dickens festival in December with various Tiny Tims and Scrooges parading along the Strand.

Truman Smith was a star running back for his Galveston high school and his friend Dino was a linebacker on the same team. Truman ended up at the University of Texas and in his sophomore year blossomed into a major threat. Dino went to Texas Tech was a defensive star.  When the two teams met, a blindside tackle by Dino ended Truman’s football career.

Truman ends up as a private investigator in Dallas but is drawn back to the island to search for his sister who has disappeared.  Despite all his exhaustive work trying to locate her or learn her fate, he fails.   His old friend Dino provides an old house to live in and he scratches out a living taking house painting jobs.  In the opening novel, Dino asks him to locate a different missing girl.  Very reluctantly, Truman takes the case.  

Through the course of this novel (and others in the series), he has to dig through a lot of family histories and Galveston’s past.  In rereading the series, I was reminded of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer novels where so many stories involve hidden family secrets.  

Perhaps influenced by Bill's life-long love of private eye novels, Truman Smith is a more robust figure than Sheriff Rhodes, Carl Burns or other Crider mystery heroes. Although still hampered by his balky knee, Truman can hold his own in a barroom brawl and he has a pistol and will shoot someone if he has to. I like the cast of secondary characters such as Miss Sally, the ancient old lady who sips Mogen David wine and knows all the gossip past and present in Galveston. I just plain love this series and all five novels are available in Kindle editions.

Text copyright 2017 by Richard Moore. For more considerations of Bill and his work, please see Patti Abbott's blog...

FFB: 100 Best Books books (and lists and such)

The other day, FFB founder and usual gatherer Patti Abbott was asking her social-media correspondents what she should look into for key works of fantasy fiction, since she felt that she hadn't done enough reading in that area. She received a lot of mostly good suggestions, in the way such things go, and I was reminded of all the works that exist, as books of recommendations and online lists of varying degrees of institutional and demotic weight, that try to scratch the same itch...and the books, certainly, are there to make a few bucks while serving their argumentation and illumination purposes as well.

I'm also surprised, given that I'm a sucker for such volumes, that I've only "formally" addressed two of the (primarily) crime fiction volumes of this sort in FFB entries, H.R. F. Keating's Crime & Mystery: The 100 Best Books and David Morrell and Hank Wagner 's anthology Thrillers: 100 Must Reads, while mentioning others from time to time, such as Anthony Burgess's Ninety-Nine Novels and particularly Stephen Jones and Kim Newman's Horror: 100 Best Books, which, like the Morrell & Wagner is one of those which taps a hundred or so other writers to chose a single volume they'd like to highlight as one of a hundred that deserve inclusion. Sentiment plays a role at times, as does a certain desire on the part of some contributors to challenge the assumptions of the reader (Robert Bloch, for example, cited a now rather obscure book by a now rather overlooked writer, Alexander Laing's 1935 novel The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck; Robert McCammon brings in Walter Van Tilburg Clark's brilliant and harrowing western The Track of the Cat). The Newman and Jones book was eventually followed by Horror: Another 100 Best

Books, which as a second bite is if anything more interesting than the first, as most of the low-hanging classics were already dealt with in the first volume...allowing for the argument, in all senses, to move onto not only those inexcusably missing from the first volume but also more works that are more usually thought of as Not Horror, but fantasy, suspense fiction, science fiction, absurdist fiction and the like to be proposed in the horror context. 

Seemingly, Michael Moorcock and James Cawthorn's Fantasy: The 100 Best Books would be the title we all should collectively have handed to Patti, along with the more narrowly-focused David Pringle volume, Modern Fantasy: The 100 Best Novels. The Moorcock and Cawthorn is a better selection of titles, in part due to the wider range of dates and not restricting itself to novels (though it does overrepresent novels), and including fewer items (while still including some) that are more historically important or interesting (and usually both) than remotely good by any stretch of critical consideration: several relatively minor writers get two selections in the Moorcock/Cawthorn while others are missing altogether, while Pringle, while including such worthies as R. A. Lafferty and William Kotzwinkle (and more Angela Carter than the other guys did), also finds room for the execrable work of  Stephen Donaldson and Robert Heinlein's at best half-assed Glory Road. M&C inexcusably leave out Borges; neither book includes any Italo Calvino or Jane Yolen or...

But since these are all matters of taste, tempered by genuine desire (usually, at very least) to soberly assess the quality of the given work, and none can be considered a True Writ From On High except by the dullest among us (and, yet, sadly, too often they are treated thus, by the most institutional among us), as is clear when one also considers the similarly intended Modern Library rankings, between their editorial panel's choices of the 100 best fiction books  (with mostly selections that are hard to argue with, except in the rankings, and a few that are ludicrous or nearly so) and the popularity poll the Modern Library gathered votes for at the same time (many ludicrous choices, and some merely obviously the result of fannish enthusiasm game-rigging the votes, and a few choices that are notable for being rather better than some on the panel's list).  Flannery O'Connor and Thomas Pynchon made the Vox Pop list, along with trash from Rand, Hubbard and Bach, but didn't make the Expert List, which instead assures us that Winesburg, Ohio (interesting, but more groundbreaking than immortal) and Tropic of Cancer were more worthy than anything by any number of other, better writers, including O'Connor and Pynchon. Larry McCaffery and Radcliffe students were among those who came up with widely-circulated lists in response...McCaffery's was (mostly) better than the Expert list, the Radcliffe list slightly better on women writers but worse overall. 

And, always, this is an ongoing discussion...and all cited are valuable reminders that one needs to know of, at least, all the items in each collection to have a true grounding in each field. For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog. Next week, I'll be hosting, while Patti and Megan Abbott wonder if they'll be walking away with with odd little Edgar Allan Poe busts, from the Mystery Writers of America annual convention. 

FFS: Small-Town Law Week: Bill Pronzini: "The Hanging Man"; Howard Rigsby: "Dead Man's Story"; James Shaffer, "The Long Arm of the Law"

Howard Rigsby: "Dead Man’s Story", (ss) Argosy Aug 27 1938, as “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead”; The Mysterious Traveler Magazine Nov 1951

James Shaffer: "The Long Arm of the Law" [probably] New Western Magazine [v12 #1, August 1946]; Pocket Reader Series [#124, Western Stories, 1950] UK

Bill Pronzini: "The Hanging Man", (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Aug 12 1981

Patti Abbott wanted a special emphasis this week on small-town sheriffs and police, which I suspect is going to lean heavily toward Bill Crider fiction, and well it might. I might just add a fourth story to this post of just that sort myself, but until that time, I took a bit of a different tack, and picked out three stories, one I'd loved when I first read it forty years ago, one which I'd not yet read by one of my favorite crime and western fiction writers, and one which was as new to me as its author. And none is precisely about either a sheriff or a police officer, though all of them involve one degree or another of men of those professions; no women in the jobs, since one is a contemporary story (for the time it was written and published) set in Florida in the 1930s, one is a California historical set in the time of the fading of the "traditional" west, in the first decade of the 1900s, and one is apparently set in what was still Wyoming Territory, sometime I'd guess in the 1880s. 

"Dead Man's Story" (apparently Rigsby's preferred title) is an utterly engaging dialect story, told from the point of view of Panama City, Florida-area Game Warden Joe Root, a native of the area and a tough man with a strong sense of duty, who knows and loves his job. In fact, his sense of duty is so strong that when he finds a wealthy tourist from Up North poaching deer out of season, neither bribery nor being shot multiple times will deter him from getting his man, eventually with an assist from another Warden and the County Sheriff of both their acquaintance. It's a borderline horror story that Manly Wade Wellman could've written about as well, but probably not much better, either. Robert Arthur reprinted it in his The Mysterious Traveler Magazine (a literary spin-off from his Mutual Radio anthology series) and later in Alfred Hitchcock Presents: A Month of Mystery (Random House, 1969), which has the slightly macabre distinction in relation to the story of being the last AHP: volume Arthur would edit before his death. I first read it in '76 or '77 in my new copy of the Dell second edition, published in '76 as AHP: Dates with Death...it seems a bit odd to be able to page through this paperback, in reasonably good shape, that has traveled with me for forty years. 

James Shaffer was a very prolific writer of western fiction in the 1940s, with a thick population of stories cited in the FictionMags Index from 1942-52, whose work I've not read before, as far as I know (he shouldn't be confused with the author of Shane, Jack Schaeffer).  I know nothing more about him, but he wrote at least this rather clever story, involving one Johnny Mason (not the reason I selected this one, but mildly amusing to me), a somewhat reluctant 27yo retiree from being a range detective for the quasi-private Western Cattlemen's Protective Association's Cheyenne office; he's also an extremely skilled and/or fortunate gambler, who's won enough recently at poker to allow him to put in his notice, but his old boss manages to rope him into taking a new assignment, by letting him know that the game's afoot out along one of the rail lines, where a rancher has died...possibly by accident, at least apparently so...and yet the beneficiary of his sizable insurance policy has refused to accept the check, and two letters had been sent

to the Association's office, apparently written by the decedent: one on the day before his death, asking for assistance with criminal activity against him, and one reversing that request...sent the day after his death. Mason comes to town and investigates, brushing up against the kind of corruption you might expect in a railroad cattle town in the 1880s, with a fixed trial among other adventures awaiting several of the characters, including Mason; Elmore Leonard could've written this one better, and did in various ways (notably in the source story for the television series Justified), but Shaffer's work here is fine and almost completely fair-play detection (he withholds one crucial fact till he's ready to have Mason lay it out). There's a very good chance this one first appeared in the Popular Publications/ Fictioneers pulp New Western for August 1946, but the FMI folks haven't been able to confirm that; the story is in the index by name because of its reprint  in a British magazine that ran various sorts of theme issues, and apparently was no more explicit in citing its source than the book I've read this in, Damon Knight's Westerns of the '40s: Classics from the Great Pulps, published by Bobbs-Merrill in 1977, an anthology comprised of stories Knight remembered fondly from his years of working on Fictioneers pulps as one of the staff editors. 

Bill Pronzini's story is typically understated, and deals (as will surprise none of his readers) with a mysterious murder in a small Northern California town, Tule River, at the turn of the 20th century when the community hasn't yet gained its first automobile. For a police force Tule River has two volunteer sheriff's deputies in Carl Miller and Ed Bozeman, who theoretically work under the anti-professional riding sheriff, a fellow who drops in occasionally from the county seat to have the era-appropriate version of too many donuts at the local eatery. A drifter, who it turns out had been soliciting work around town, is found hanged early one morning. Carl and Ed cautiously put matters together, and find things are a bit more disturbing than they feared. Had Bill Pronzini started his career a decade or so earlier, the Gunsmoke producers, at least for the radio series if not for the tv version as well, would've been wise to have him on staff.  I read this one in the unabridged 1989 Reader's Digest Association reprint of The Arbor House Treasury of Great Western Stories (1982), edited by Pronzini and Martin Harry Greenberg, who was known to insist that his writer co-editors include one of their own works. Unlike most instant remainders, which (as a remainder, rather than though possibly from a library sale) I suspect is how I acquired this one, the RD folks published theirs on acid-free paper...I'm noting how my copy of a more typical instant remainder, published in its only edition, I believe, by Random House subsidiary Gramercy in 1995, John Tuska's fat best-of-the-magazine anthology Star Western, is showing clear signs of not being able to last forty years as anything but a pile of acidic dust.  Ah, the life of books...off to look at everyone else's choices for this week. 

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.