Friday's "Forgotten" Books: NELSON ALGREN'S OWN BOOK OF LONESOME MONSTERS (also published as 13 MASTERPIECES OF BLACK HUMOR)

From the Contento Index:

Nelson Algren’s Own Book of Lonesome Monsters ed. Nelson Algren (Lancer 73-409, 1962, 60¢, 192pp, pb)

7 · Preface · Nelson Algren · pr
11 · A World Full of Great Cities · Joseph Heller · ss Great Tales of City Dwellers, ed. Alex Austin, Lion Library Editions, 1955
24 · Talk to Me, Talk to Me · Joan Kerckhoff · ss, 1962
34 · Show Biz Connections · Bruce Jay Friedman · ss, 1962
44 · Hundred Dollar Eyes · Bernard Farbar · ss, 1962
54 · The Man Who Knew What Ethopia Should Do About Her Water Table · H. E. F. Donohue · ss The Carleton Miscellany, 1961
68 · Among the Dangs · George P. Elliott · nv Esquire Jun ’58
95 · Peacetime · Brock Brower · ss, 1961
111 · The Shores of Schizophrenia · Hughes Rudd · ss, 1961
120 · Day of the Alligator · James Blake · ss The Paris Review #17 ’57
136 · Address of Gooley MacDowell to the Hasbeens Club of Chicago · Saul Bellow · ss The Hudson Review, 1951
143 · The Closing of This Door Must Be Oh, So Gentle · Chandler Brossard · ss The Dial, 1962
157 · Entropy · Thomas Pynchon · ss The Kenyon Review Spr ’60
173 · The House of the Hundred Grassfires · Nelson Algren · ss, 1956

So, you want to talk noir...if there's a concept in "darkness" that can be as argued about and misconstrued as noir, it's probably "black humor." Grotesquerie, biting satire, modest proposals. This book is a handsome sample of what was available in 1962, assembled by the writer best remembered for The Man with the Golden Arm, but who should be remembered for a much wider range of work, including the story that he immodestly caps this anthology with. As with Joe David Bellamy's SuperFiction from a decade later or Dwight Macdonald's fat Parodies from a couple of years before, this has been a widely-distributed anthology touching on the fantastic and the grimly realistic, surfiction and some stuff that at least verges on metafiction. Saul Bellow, not usually thought of as a comic writer (though his wit was just one of his many facets) delivers what might be the slightest and lightest piece here; Hughes Rudd, in the 1970s the acerbic anchor of the CBS Morning News (which was actually more or less a news program, imagine) gives him a run for that laurel (any joking aside, CBS News had several fictioneers on staff in those years, including Reid Collins on the radio side). George Elliott's "Among the Dangs" is straight-up science fiction enough to have been reprinted in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction before its appearance here, and Pynchon's "Entropy" might've been squeezed in without too much forcing the issue. The Heller is from a fine, pioneering Lion Books all-originals paperback anthology, and Joan Kerchoff probably shouldn't be the only woman to be represented in the book (how many Dororthy Parkers did he pass by? No Mary McCarthy?), but it's a solid, grimly funny read (and not only grimly funny) under either of the titles Lancer Books, that ultimately doomed publisher, chose to reissue it (Bernard Geis Associates did the hardcover, which I've never seen). Somebody else should; it's been gone too long.

Please Patti Abbott's blog for more "Forgotten" books for this Friday.

Tony Baer: Recent Reads (a guest post): Anna Kavan, Ted Lewis, W.L. Heath, John Allen, Nat Turner, John Rechy, Eugene O'Neill, Carl Panzram, Agnes Smedley, Nelson Algren, Carlos Bulosan, Ralph Ellison

Ice, Anna Kavan.  A waifish, opiate-addled writer’s last breath:  a translucent bone thin blond heroine.  An obsessive pursuer, racing through a glacial earth, hallucinations and reality colliding like icebergs in a continental drift.  Sparse, terse prose, reporting a world to come.  Catch her if you can. 

GBH, Ted Lewis.  A drunken, booze guzzled writer’s last belch:  an alcoholic paranoid underworld kingpin, some underling in his outfit is screwing him.  How many kills and how much isolation til he peels down to the ugly core, exposing the rotting seed within. 
Only bummer is that unlike Kavan, Lewis lacks the courage of his convictions, going 3rd person omniscient after the kaleidoscopic downfall—just to make sure you got it, dear reader.  Wouldn’t want you left feeling as confused and wasted as your protagonist, would we?

Violent Saturday, W.L. Heath. So you’re reading Appointment in Samarra, or Tender is the Night, or maybe Revolutionary Road, and in the middle of it, and while the upper crust handsome couples self-immolate in wanton lust and plastered parties, some bank robbers come to town and blow everything to smithereens.  
I dug it.

Narrative of the Life of John Allen, alias Jonas Pierce, alias James H. York, alias Burley Grove, the Highwayman, Being His Death-bed Confession to the Warden of the Massachusetts State Prison (1837).  Short, surprisingly readable, unapologetic, plain language life story of a burglar.  It's surprising to see that people were actually able to write in fairly modern American English in 1837.  Mainly a series of stories recounting various crimes and time in prison.  Unfortunately, he died about 2/3 of the way through the story, so the end of the book is written in the 3rd person by the warden.  According to Wikipedia, and probably more interesting than any content in the book, is this factoid:  "The book is most often associated with the copy in the collection of the Boston Athenaeum. This copy was bound in the author's own skin, tradition holding that Allen requested that a copy of his confession be bound in his skin and given to John A. Fenno, who had earlier resisted Allen's attempt to rob him."

Confessions of Nat Turner (the 1831 version--not the Styron novel).  Again, fairly plain English, which is nice.  I was shocked how violent Nat Turner's Confession was.  God told him to start killing slaveholders, so he and his buddies started doing it--Manson style.  They axe-murdered entire families, men, women, children, even infants.  Not at all apologetic, and not particularly abolitionist.  Nat Turner says his own master and family were fairly kind to him--so it wasn't retribution.  Nat Turner was a very religious man, memorized large chunks of the Bible, never took a drink, never gambled, never cursed, never engaged in sexual improprieties, and was revered by the other slaves who knew him as a kind of a prophet who thought he was on some apocalyptic mission from God.

City of Night, John Rechy (1963).  Semi-autobiographical story of a hustler, raised (razed) in El Paso, then onto New York, LA, Hollywood, San Fran, Chicago and finally to Mardi Gras in New Orleans.  Definitely gives you the feeling for the life of a hustler in mid-century America, and all of the strange encounters of street life.  Has the ring of truth.

Long Day's Journey Into Night, Eugene O'Neill.  You know what's odd is the passive-aggressiveness of the upper class when compared to the pure violence of the lower depths in the prior 3 books mentioned above.  Yes, the characters are all tearing each other apart.  But if you translated it in into another language, I bet the violence wouldn't register with the reader at all.  They're all drinking and syringing themselves to death, yes, but the proximate cause of all the pain is the guilt they thrust at each other like rapiers to the gut.

Panzram Papers by Carl Panzram:  The short memoir of a serial killer written right before execution in 1930.  Remarkable document.  Clean, simple, hardboiled prose.  Events flatly described without remorse and without pride.  No desire for either reprieve or profit.  No belief in redemption in this world or the next.  He made a gift of the memoir to a death-row guard he'd grown to like.  The guard, trying to find a publisher for years, finally got it published in 1970.  Read on Kindle:  $2.99 on Amazon

Daughter of Earth, Agnes Smedley.  1929, semi-autobiographical novel of a poor Missouri farmer's daughter.  But this daughter is a freaking firebrand.  She is not going to accept a mediocre life if she can help it.  And she ain't gonna be dominated by shit.  This is the story of a born rebel who tries to bull her way through all the world's oppressive forces to become free.  No prison can cage her spirit.   Her only novel.  And pouring your soul into something like this, you doubt she had anything much left to say on the subject of her life.  [TM: she did write some short fiction, and nonfiction for The Masses and elsewhere]

Somebody in Boots, Nelson Algren.  1935.  Semi-autobiography of a road kid, part time hobo, part time pimp, small time criminal, full time loser, wandering around aimlessly across America after his father murders the guy that took his job and his sister converts the family home to her personal brothel.  After the book failed to sell, Algren tried to gas himself.  When that failed, he reinvented himself with the much less convincing (IMHO) but much better loved Never Come Morning.  Algren rewrote the book in the '60s using '60s hipster prose as Walk on the Wild Side, from which Lou Reed made a song (with some Warholian Factory flourishes).    

America is in the Heart, Carlos Bulosan.  1946.  Semi-autobiographical novel about a poor Philippine farmer's kid chasing after the American dream, travelling across the sea, finally to arrive at Alaskan canneries and migrant labor camps.  Trying to avoid the life of crime of his brother, a cheap crook, he shifts back and forth between shiftlessness and decency.  Inspired by his buddy John Fante, he writes down the story of his life.  

Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison. 1952. Despite a long life, Ellison only finished this one novel--another semi-autobiographical one.  And reading it, it's pretty easy to see that he, like Smedley, probably said all he had to say.  He grew up believing all the bullshit.  That if he'd be a good boy he could pull himself up by his bootstraps and make something of himself.  He was a really good orator.  He was recognized in high school for it.  And was to be given a medal and scholarship by the mayor at a town hall.  So he showed up to give his speech about being a good boy and lifting yourself by your bootstraps.  But the mayor said 'Oh, first things first, boy--first you gotta have a boxing match with 5 other black boys'.  So the white drunken crowd threw them all but naked into the ring and wanted the black boys tear each other to pieces, which they did, the winner getting a $10 bill.  Afterwards, he gives his speech on black and white unity to which no one listens.  He then goes to Howard University, where he works really hard to be a good boy.  He's so good that the chancellor chooses him to chauffeur around a big fat old white donor.  The donor orders him around.  He wants to see the real townfolk.  So on the white dude's orders they stop by the house of the town pariah who tells the donor his story of how he mistakenly impregnated his daughter one drunken evening.  The donor is equal parts appalled and titillated and really needs a drink.  So demands to be driven to the closest watering hole which happens to be the town whorehouse.  For showing the donor the reality of the town, he's expelled by the chancellor.  He heads to NYC, where the Commies pretend to befriend him in order use his oratory to cause Harlem riots, which they think might spearhead a revolution.  Now everyone hates him.  The Commies, the Black community, his family, the university.  He is nothing.  He is an invisible man.  

Reprinted from the Rara-Avis discussion with Tony's kind permission...

FFB: TABOO and TABOO 2, edited by Paul Neimark (New Classics House 1964, 1965)

For fairly obvious reasons, there has been an interplay between First Amendment advocacy, bohemian writers, sexually explicit fiction and other publications, and the occasional publication of fairly serious work by houses that are better known for what was intentionally disposable literature, at best. Usually, whether we refer to such magazines as Evergreen Review or Playboy or Rogue or Eros, or to such publishers as Grove Press or Olympia Press, there was often some desire to package and present sophisticated material in every sense, even if the sophistication of some of that material was solely in the adult themes addressed by it. Thus, the Chicago-based New Classics House, which published such work as Kerry Thornley's assassination account Oswald, Albert Ellis's collection of essays Suppressed, and, in two volumes published in 1964 and '65, Paul Neimark's anthologies Taboo and Taboo 2. Not quite Harlan Ellison's anthology Dangerous Visions (1967), nor DV's first form, the abortive Judith Merril anthology for Regency Books that Ellison had commissioned during his brief editorship at that paperback line (which was a corporate cousin to the more erotic Greenleaf Classics and other imprints), the Taboo volumes nonetheless managed to publish some work by notable writers, some of which remains otherwise unavailable...I'm not sure, but it's possible one or more of the stories in Taboo, at least, had been written with the Merril project in mind. (See Matthew Davis's comments, below.)

(and this, from Richard Geis's Science Fiction Review, November/December 1978:

"9-7-78 The speculation/charge that Harlan Ellison may have "stolen" the idea of DANGEROUS VISIONS from a pocketbook series titled TABOO from the early Sixties [in Scott Edelman's letter in SFR #27] has been refuted and demolished by information not-to-be-doubted received today.

"Briefly, Harlan originated the TABOO anthology idea in 1960 or so, tried to sell it to Regency, and then turned to project over to Paul Niemark in 1961. Several stories had been submitted and two of the authors went along with the change in editorship. Volume One of TABOO was published in 1964.

"It would be nice if nasty speculations and junped conclusions could be avoided in the future." 

The issue can be read here [Archive.org] and here [Fanac.org].)

Taboo, for all the hype inherent in the subtitle "seven short stories that no publisher would touch from seven leading writers", reprints two of its stories from books published by mainline publishers, Charles Beaumont's "The Neighbors" (first in his 1960 Bantam Books collection Night Ride and Other Journeys) and Ray Russell's "Take a Deep Breath" (originally in a 1956 issue of George Fox's Chicago-based Playboy imitator Tiger, probably there as a salvage market since Russell was already an editor at Playboy by that time, but perhaps Hefner or A. C. Spectorsky didn't much care for the story; Russell apparently revised it for inclusion in his 1961 Ballantine collection Sardonicus and Other Stories and here). I believe all the other stories were first published in this volume (index courtesy ISFDB) of 127pp.:

• 9 • Second Coming • short story by Robert Bloch
• 17 • The Neighbors • (1960) • short story by Charles Beaumont
• 31 • The Daddy of Them All • novelette by Nelson Algren
• 61 • Battle Without Banners • short story by Harlan Ellison
• 81 • Take a Deep Breath • (1956) • short story by Ray Russell
• 93 • Lie Still, Snow White • short story by Fritz Leiber
• 115 • The Lovers • short story by Paul Neimark [typo'd as by Paul Niemark]

As far as I've found so far, the Bloch and Neimark stories have not been reprinted anywhere, nor the Algren at least under that title (though at least one study suggests that it's a rather different, more sardonic recasting of an incident in Algren's novel A Walk on the Wild Side). As the links above will demonstrate, the other stories original to the volume have since been reprinted in at least one collection of the authors' works. Neimark was a fairly prolific writer, perhaps best-known in his time as the as-told-to collaborator with Jesse Owens on several memoirs and related books by the Olympic athlete, and the author of the novel She Lives! (1972), which was adapted as one of the more popular US telefilms of the early 1970s. It's notable that all the writers involved had some strong ties to Chicago, and most had at least occasionally published in the men's magazines based in the city. Leiber's story includes an incident of incestuous necrophilia, so the tagline was perhaps not so very misleading as to the nature of the stories, if not the facts of their publication history. 

Taboo 2 has a less stellar, if still good, lineup of writers, and, presumably as a result, is far easier to procure on the secondhand book market; the second volume includes four stories, one each by James T. Farrell, true crime writer Jay Nash, fellow prolific novelist Con Sellers (who, like Neimark, would make his biggest commercial splash in later years, with his novels set in and dealing with the run up to World War 2), and Neimark himself again--from the Miscellaneous Anthologies Index:

Taboo 2 ed. Anon. (New Classics House 7N760, 1965, 75¢, 91pp, pb)
• 7 · The Day They Cancelled Christmas · James T. Farrell · nt
• 33 · The Conversion · Paul G. Neimark · nt
• 45 · Two Triumphs · Jay Nash · nt
• 68 · Like the Best Wine · Con Sellers · nt

At least this one is held in local libraries nearby for me (interlibrary loan from mostly Chicagoland holdings for the first volume might be problematic, at best). Niemark published at least one other, nonfiction anthology with New Classics, 1964's Crisis, which includes essays from Farrell and Algren mixed with considerations of the state of the world from L. Sprague de Camp, G. Harry Stine and L. G. Alexander, along with some verse from Carl Sandburg. 

Given the importance of the contributors and the relative interest both the content and the writers in question might generate, I'm mildly surprised these two anthologies haven't been scanned and posted in such online resources as Open Library, but at least the physical copies are held by some libraries, and the books, like most published in any quantity, are available, if, again, it's far more likely one can buy a copy of 2 than the original. I would like to know what was so taboo about the Bloch story, and why it's not been included in any of his collections over the decades. 

For more first-hand accounts of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog. 

FRIDAY'S "FORGOTTEN" BOOKS AND MORE: the links to reviews, texts, etc. 31 December 2021

The latter fortnight's cycle of books and more, unfairly (or sometimes fairly) neglected, or simply those the reviewers below think you might find of some interest (or, infrequently, you should be warned away from); certainly, most weeks we have a few not at all forgotten titles...if I've missed your review or someone else's, please let me know in comments. Apologies for the delays this weekend--a computer that won't cooperate with Blogspot can manage to dump a Lot of data...

Patricia Abbott: "I'll Be Waiting" by Raymond Chandler, The Saturday Evening Post 14 October 1939 (as posted on the Library of America Story a Day site); "Dr. H. A. Moynihan" (from A Manual for Cleaning Women) by Lucia Berlin; "The Babysitter's Code" by Laura Lippman, Plots with Guns: A Noir Anthology edited by Anthony Neil Smith; Stephen Sondheim: A Life by Meryle Secrest

Bob Adey: A Woman Named Anne by Henry Cecil

Bonnie Armstrong: Florida by Lauren Groff

Tony Baer: novels by Dorothy B. Hughes, Barry N. Malzberg and others; books by Anna Kavan, John Rechy, Nat Turner, Nelson Algren, Agnes Smedley, Ralph Ellison and others; Eugene O'Neill; The Wrong Venus by Charles Williams; Edith's Diary by Patricia Highsmith; The Girl, the Gold Watch, and Everything by John D. MacDonald

Frank Babics: Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine March/April 2021, edited by Linda Landrigan; "The Phantom Coach" by Amelia B. Edwards, All the Year 'Round, Christmas 1864; "To Be Taken with a Grain of Salt" by Charles Dickens, All the Year 'Round, Christmas 1865

Brad Bigelow: Women in a Village by Louise Rayner; The Story of a Life, Volume 6: The Restless Years, by Konstantin Paustovsky  (translated by Kyril FitzLyon)

Elgin Bleecker: "The Christmas Party Murder" by Rex Stout, Collier's 4 January 1957

Joachim Boaz: Dawn by Octavia Butler; Where the Time Winds Blow by Robert Holdstock; Brave Old World by Philippe Curval (translated by Steve Cox)

John Boston: Amazing Stories, December 1966, edited by Joseph "Ross" 

Ben Boulden: A Stir of Echoes by Richard Matheson

John R. Breitlow: The Deep Blue Goodbye and Nightmare in Pink by John D. MacDonald

Brian Busby: best reads of 2021: Brian Moore, Ted Allan, Grant Allen, Douglas Sanderson, and others; The Drift of Pinions by Marjorie Pickthall; The Tenants were Corrie and Tennie by Kent Thompson

Jason Cavallaro: Ten Best Horror Novels Read This Year

Marvell Cleary: Fast Company by Marco Page

Douglas Cohen: Realms of Fantasy August 1997, edited by Shawna McCarthy

Bill Crider: Flight to Darkness by Gil Brewer (original post)

Liz Dexter: best books of 2021: Anne Tyler, Alex Haley et al.; Sally on the Rocks by Winifred Boggs; A Song Flung Up to Heaven by Maya Angelou

Susan Dunlap: In the Last Analysis by "Amanda Cross" (Carolyn Heilbrun)

Scott Edelman: José Pablo Iriarte

Martin Edwards: Scandalize My Name by Fiona Sinclair; The Marble Forest by "Anthony Boucher" (William White) and 11 others (of the Northern California MWA); The Second Shot by Anthony Berkeley

Peter Enfantino and Jack Seabrook: Batman comics, July 1983; June 1983; Warren comics, May 1976

Barry Ergang: Mr. Monk and the Two Assistants by Lee Goldberg

Will Errickson: 2021 in review; Living in Fear: A History of Horror in Mass Media by, and including fiction selected by, Les Daniels; Year in Review

José Ignacio Escribano: Year in Review; Campion at Christmas by Margery Allingham; Sébastien Japrisot; Helen McCloy

Curtis Evans: Blind Date with Death and Walls That Hear You by Cornell Woolrich 

"Olman Feelyus": Where the Money Was by Willie Sutton; The Thanatos Syndrome by Walker Percy

Paul Fraser: To Follow a Star: Nine SF Stories about Christmas edited by Terry Carr; Science Fantasy August 1963, edited by John Carnell; "Fasterpiece" by Ian Creasey Asimov's Science Fiction January-February 2022; "The Santa Claus Planet" by Frank M. Robinson, originally published in The Best Science-Fiction Stories, 1951 edited by E. F. Bleiler and Ted Dikty; "Christmas on Mars" by "William Morrison" (Joseph Samachson) Thrilling Wonder Stories December 1941; "Happy Birthday, Dear Jesus" by Frederik Pohl, first published in his collection Alternating Currents (Ballantine 1956); "Winter Solstice" by Mike Resnick, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction October-November 1991; "Kitemaster" by Keith Roberts, Interzone Spring 1982; "Miracle" by Connie Willis, Asimov's Science Fiction December 1991; from Analog Science Fact/Science Fiction, January/February 2022: "The Bumblebee and the Berry" by M. Bennardo; "Charioteer" by Ted Rabinowitz; "Track of a Legend" by Cynthia Felice, Omni, December 1983; from Analog: Science Fiction and Fact January/February 2022: "Splitting a Dollar" by Meghan Hyland and "Charioteer" by Ted Rabinowitz

Cullen Gallagher: The Girl with No Place to Hide by "Nick Quarry" (Marvin Albert)

Barry Gardner: The Dark Root by Archer Mayor

Ed Gorman: Fake I.D. by Jason Starr (original post)

Dana Gould: Katherine Coldiron on Plan Nine from Outer Space: A Monograph; Who Goes There? by "Don A. Stuart"/John W. Campbell, Jr.

Sue Granquist: "The Wish" by Ray Bradbury. Women's Day December 1973 (and published as a chapbook in the 2000s)

Aubrey Hamilton: The Dishonest Murderer by Frances and Richard Lockridge; Crime for Christmas by Lesley Egan; The Murder of Cecily Thane by Harriette Ashbrook; Primary Storm by Brendan Dubois; Cold Florida by Phillip DePoy 

Bev Hankins: A Surprise for Christmas edited by Martin Edwards; "The Incredible Theft" by Agatha Christie (expanded form of the serial "The Submarine Plans", from the Daily Express, April 1937); Appointment with Death by Agatha Christie; The Death at Yew Corner by Richard Forrest; Spare Time for Murder by John Gale; Murder in the French Room by Helen Joan Hultman; The Pig on the Hill by John Kelly

James Harris: stories collected in The Big Book of Science Fiction, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer: "Wives" by Lisa Tuttle, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF), December 1979; "Sandkings" by George R. R. Martin, Omni August 1979; "Sporting with the Chid" by Barrington J. Bayley, from his collection The Seed of Evil; "The House of Compassionate Sharers" by Michael Bishop, Cosmos Science Fiction and Fantasy May 1977

Don Herron: E. R. Burroughs in newspaper syndication, among many

Rich Horton: Beer! Beer! Beer! by Avram Davidson (a recovered "lost" novel); Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho; 2021 in retrospect/posts elsewhere

Jerry House: "Mr. Wray's Cash Box, or The Mask and the Mystery" by Wilkie Collins (a "lost" novella); "The Other Woman" by "Ellen Hogue" (Eleanor Hogue Kerkhof nee Stinchclomb), All-Story Love Stories 19 and 26 January 1935 (a novelet as two-part serial); The Arkham Sampler Winter 1948, edited by August Derleth; "The Mystery of the Man Who Evaporated" by Robert Arthur, from his collection Alfred Hitchcock's Solve-Them-Yourself Mysteries Random House, 1963; "The Menace of Mastodon Valley" by Kenneth Gilbert, Action Stories September 1926; Aylmer Vance: Ghost-Seer by Alice and Claude Askew; "The Striding Place" by Gertrude Atherton, The Speaker 20 June 1896; the John Hanson stories by Sewell Peaslee Wright, Astounding Stories, 1930-33; Of Worlds Beyond: The "Science" of Science Fiction Writing, A Symposium edited by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach; "The Firefly" comics stories by Harry Shorten and Bob Wood, from Top-Notch Comics 1940-42; The True Story of Moonshine

Kate Jackson: A Case for Solomon by Bruce Graeme; Murder in Blue by Clifford Witting; Plots and Gunpowder: A Personal Biography of Thriller Writer Gerald Verner by Chris Verner; Reprints of the Year polling; Murder After Christmas by Rupert Latimer

Randy Johnson: Black is the Color by John Brunner (original post)

Tracy K: Rules of Civility by Amor Towles; American Christmas Stories edited by Connie Willis; The Last Noel by Michael Malone; Maigret's Christmas by Georges Simenon (translated by David Howard); Six Degrees of Literary Separation

Jackie Kashian: Tess Rafferty (audio only); video; Ophira Eisenberg on crime fiction and drama

Colman Keane: Kolkata Noir by Tom Vater; Love and Bullets: Megabomb Edition by Nick Kolakowski; Many Deadly Returns edited by Martin Edwards

George Kelley: Galactic Empires edited by Brian Aldiss; Dangerous Visions and New Worlds edited by Andrew Nette and Iain MacIntyre; Great Detectives: A Century of the Best Mysteries from England and America edited by David Willis McCullough; The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: Twelfth Series edited by Avram Davidson; JLA by Grant Morrison Omnibus by Morrison and divers hands

Joe Kenney: Sea Scrape by "James Dark" (J. E. MacDonnell); Total Recall by Piers Anthony (distantly inspired by "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" by Philip K. Dick); The Chinese Paymaster by "Nick Carter" (in this case, Nicholas Browne); The Destroyer #17: Last War Dance by Richard Sapir and Warren Murphy

Rob Kitchin: On the Java Ridge by Jock Serong

K. A. Laity: Muriel Spark 

Karen Langley: 2021 in review

B. V. Lawson: A Gentleman Called by Dorothy Salisbury Davis; The Mystery of Mary by Grace Livingston Hill

Xavier Lechard: The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle; Victorian and Other Novels: Complexity vs. Volume; Ten Books Read This Year: The Diehard by Jean Potts and Nine Others

David Levinson: Worlds of If, January 1967, edited by Frederik Pohl

D. F./Des Lewis: Vasterien: A Literary Journal Fall 2021, edited by Jon Padgett; By Elizabeth Bowen: Eva Trout; The Hotel; The Heat of the Day; To the North; The Death of the Heart; A World of Love. Best British Short Stories, Volumes 2011-2021 edited by Nicholas Royle

Evan Lewis: "A Scandal in Bohemia": a play by Christopher Morley adapting the Arthur Conan Doyle story, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine January 1944; Disney's The Legend of Davy Crockett newspaper comic strip; Bat Masterton newspaper strip by Howard Nostrand and Ed Herron; The Kid I Killed Last Night by "Day Keene" (Gunard Hjerstedt), collection edited by David Laurence Wilson; Anonymous: Davy Crockett and the Shawnee War Party

Steve Lewis: "You'll Always Remember Me" by Steve Fisher, Black Mask March 1938; Deep Lay the Dead by Frederick C. Davis; "Diamonds of Death" by Robert Leslie Bellem, Spicy Detective Stories July 1934; "Hell's Pay Check" by Frederick Nebel, Dime Detective December 1931; "Not My Corpse" by Carroll John Daly, Thrilling Detective June 1948; Mom Meets Her Maker by James Yaffee; Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany

Sara Light-Waller: The Harp and the Blade by John Myers Myers, Argosy Weekly 22 June-3 August 1940 (7 issues) 

S. E. Lindberg: Conan pastiches by John C. Hocking

Leonard Lopate: Stephen King on The Best American Short Stories 2007

Robert Lopresti:"The Search for Eric Garcia" by E. A. Aymar, Midnight Hour edited by Abby L. Vandiver; "Born a Ramblin' Man" by Michel Lee Garrett, Trouble No More edited by Mark Westmoreland

Jim McCahery: Through a Glass, Darkly by Helen McCloy

Neil McRobert: Something More than Night, et al.: Kim Newman

Barry N. Malzberg: Anatomy of a Killer by Peter Rabe

Todd Mason: The Supernatural Reader edited by Lucy and Groff Conklin; Rod Serling's Devils and Demons edited by Gordon R. Dickson; "It Could Be You" by Frank Roberts, The Reporter 3 March 1962 and reprinted widely; Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Stories My Mother Never Told Me edited by Robert Arthur; The 1965 annuals of fiction and drama, in English; The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, Fifth Series edited by "Anthony Boucher" (William White); The Best Detective Stories of the Year, 1971 edited by Allen J. Hubin; Prize Stories 1962: The O. Henry Awards edited by Richard Poirier

Marcia Muller: Bloodwater by "John Crowe" (Dennis Lynds)

Neeru: In Andamans: An Indian Bastille by Bejoy Kumar Sinha; 13 books to read; Eagles of the Reich by Will Berthold (translated by F. Taylor)

John F. Norris: False Witness by Helen Nielsen; Sing Me a Murder by Helen Nielsen; The Wintringham Mystery by Anthony Berkeley (Cox)

Jim Noy: John Thorndyke's Cases by R. Austin Freeman

Juri Nummelin: Born of Battle by "Robert Crane" (Con Sellers)

John O'Neill: Galactic Empires edited by Brian Aldiss; Modern Classics of Science Fiction edited by Gardner Dozois

On The Media: Elizabeth Hand, Max Allan Collins, Alan Dean Foster, Lee Goldberg et al. on film and other novelizations

Paperback Warrior: Rambo: FIrst Blood Part 2 by David Morrell

Mildred Perkins: Satan’s Circus: Murder, Vice, Police  Corruption and New York’s Trial of the Century by Mike Dash

J. Kingston Pierce: Shadow Boxer by Eddie Muller

James Reasoner: "No Pockets in a Shroud" by Richard Deming, Black Mask January 1949; West September 1943; Amazing Stories December 1944, edited by Ray Palmer; William G. Contento, RIP; Terror Tales by John H. Knox; Western Trails May 1936, edited by A. A. Wyn(?); Detective Novels Magazine June 1944, edited by Harvey Burns; The Gunsmith: The Jingle Bell Trail by "J. R. Roberts" (Robert Randisi); Rangeland Romances January 1952; some unsold stories; The Price of a Dime: The Complete Black Mask Cases of Ben Shaley by Norbert Davis; 2021: the Wrap Up

Richard Robinson: Renegade Swords edited by D. M. Ritalin; The Thinking Machine: Fifty Novelettes and Short Stories by Jacques Futrelle; The Best Science Fiction of E. C. Tubb; Death Threats and Other Stories by Georges Simenon (translated by Ros Schwartz); Death at Sea: Montalbano's Early Cases by Andrea Camilleri (translated by Stephen Sartarelli); The Animal-Lovers Book of Beastly Murder by Patricia Highsmith

Janet Rudolph: Winter Solstice Crime Fiction; New Year's Crime Fiction

Gerard Saylor: Brodie's Ghost by Mark Crilley; Eddie and Sunny by Stacy Cochran

Jack Seabrook: The Hours Before Dawn by Celia Fremlin; "What Frightened You, Fred?" by Jack Ritchie, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine May 1958

Victoria Silverwolf: The Nevermore Affair by Kate Wilhelm; The Monitors by Keith Laumer; Fantastic Stories, January 1967, edited by Joseph "Ross" 

Kerrie Smith: Mr. Bowling Buys a Newspaper by Donald Henderson; The Blood Daughter by "Barbara Vine" (Ruth Rendell); Today A Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket by Hilda Wolitzer; Bells on Her Toes by Diana J. Febry

Marina Sofia: Best of the Year: Modern Classics; Omon Ra by Victor Pelevin (translated by Andrew Bromfield); Best of the Year: New Releases; BotY: New Discoveries; Fathers and Children by Ivan Turgenev (translated by Michael Pursglove); BotY: Delving Deeper into Interesting Writers; BotY: Sheer Entertainment 

Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe:  Sheree Renée Thomas

Kevin Tipple: Shot to Death by Stephen D. Rogers; Spirit of Steamboat by Craig Johnson; Arrowmoon by George Wier; Mysterical-E December 2021 edited by J. DeMarco; Guilty Crime Story Magazine Summer 2021, edited by Brandon Barrows

"TomKat": Sable Messenger by Frances Vivian; A Tough One to Lose by Tony Kenrick; The Best and Worst of 2021; The Finishing Stroke by "Ellery Queen" (Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee); Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie; The Wintringham Mystery by Anthony Berkeley (Cox)

David Vineyard: Run for Cover by John Welcome

Bill Wallace: Cunning Folk by Adam Nevill

Mark Yon: sf Impulse January 1967, edited by Harry Harrison and Keith Roberts; New Worlds SF January 1967, edited by Michael Moorcock 

FFB: THE STORY OF STORY MAGAZINE by Martha Foley (assembled and notes added in part by Jay Neugeboren), W.W. Norton 1980

Jay Neugeboren, in his introduction to the published form of Foley's memoirs in progress at the time of her death, notes the dire state she found herself in, barely getting by on her royalties from editing Best American Short Stories (after four decades at that desk, she had taken over from the founding editor, her friend, after he was killed in England by Nazi bombing from the air), mourning the death of her son (who had been a drug addict, apparently a heroin junkie), isolated and ailing. Which seems very strange indeed, given the breadth of her early career, before and during founding and editing Story (or, as she always refers to it, STORY...all caps and in italics), and leaving Story to take on the BASS position and divorcing Whit Burnett, who kept the magazine they had co-founded (and ran it into the ground, though also saw it revived fleetingly twice before his death and the eventual revival of the title for a decade by the Writer's Digest people).

Incomplete as the account is, Foley had packed a lot of living into her first decades, beginning her memoirs with a reminiscence of lonely and abused childhood after her parents became seriously ill and had to place Foley and siblings with resentful relatives (or other surrogates), but loving the legacy of the library her parents had assembled, which traveled with the younger Foleys. Not long after high school, Alice Paul finds Foley doing some small tasks at the Socialist Party hq in New York, when coming over with other Women's Party activists looking for reinforcements to protest that antifeminist crusader, Woodrow Wilson, returning from Europe (particularly amusing when we consider how famously his wife would be the voice of the, and probably the acting, President in his ill last years (he is easily among our most overrated Presidents); Foley, Paul and the other protestors were jailed but not processed, and Foley's firsthand career investigating the corruption of the larger society had begun. She would be drawn into journalism, working with Cornelius Vanderbilt in Los Angeles (and serving as one of the key editors on CV's paper there), meeting Whit Burnett and moving with him to New York and then onto foreign correspondence for major papers in Paris and Vienna, and beginning to publish Story in the face of the early 1930s narrowing of the short-fiction markets, particularly among the more intellectual and arty generalist magazines (Mencken and Nathan's move from the fiction-heavy The Smart Set to the essay-oriented The American Mercury being a key impetus, another being the closure of the key experimental little magazine transition to fiction, rather than poetry, just before Foley and Burnett took the plunge). Meanwhile, Story would publish the first stories, and later work, of folks ranging from John D. MacDonald to J. D. Salinger, Zora Neale Hurston to William Saroyan, (almost) Ernest Hemingway and his inspiration, Gertrude Stein (neither of whom Foley was ever terribly impressed with as people) to (definitely) Nelson Algren (whom she liked enormously till his public rudeness about his affair with Simone de Beauvoir), Carson McCullers to John Cheever, Kay Boyle to Erskine Caldwell, Peter de Vries to Norman Mailer. While building this legacy, she developed long friendships the likes of fellow reporter and historian William Shirer and a banker turned writer/publisher who was going by Rex Stout (and introduced him to the model

note Foley credits her son with co-editing

for Nero Wolfe...Foley suspects Stout modeled Archie Goodwin on himself). 

And as incomplete as this review is under the current circumstances, most of this book is written in great good humor (with the necessary seriousness brought to many issues of the times, and nostalgia never allowed to go unchecked) and touches on the careers and Foley's interactions with many more folks than I cite here (hell, Neugeboren, in going through the notes and the completed majority of the manuscript, finds himself wondering what happened to such Foley discoveries as A. I. Bezzerides--apparently no film buff, Jay). Eminently rewarding, as well as sobering as one considers how Foley's late life was spent. 

Please see B. V. Lawson's Friday review and the list of other reviews for this week.

FFB: THE LOVED ONE by Evelyn Waugh and some other Funny Books...

The contemporary Dell paperback (the
 edition I read) w/Chas. Addams cover.

I've been reading about humor and satire recently, sometimes a dull and infrequently a dangerous thing, and it occurred to me how many genuinely or reasonably good and how many rather tired or otherwise not so good humorous novels I've read over the decades...among those aimed at adults, the most thoroughly successful I remember off the top would be the novella The Loved One, Evelyn Waugh's jaundiced look at Los Angeles and the primary industry in the city, also the funeral industry (and its offshoots) and the British expatriate colony that clustered around the entertainment establishment in a vaguely marking-time way at the turn of the '60s. I've yet to see the entirety of the film version, but the novella was more than sufficient for anyone's purposes, right up to the biggest laugh-line in the book, a grim little joke to cap the rest assembled here. Brevity, soul of wit, and all, though certainly there is no lack of long, funny novels...it's simply easier to sustain a consistent tone, particularly of black comedy much as with its cousins horror and suspense fiction, in the shorter lengths (and this novella can remind one, particularly in retrospect, of another contemporary short novel with ultraviolet humor and even a certain amount of similar undertaking within, Robert Bloch's Psycho). A light touch never hurts...Waugh wouldn't dream of making matters any more blatant than he needs to, though of course the grotesquery of much of what he's dealing with here takes care of that for him...which is part of why I enjoyed this novella so much and found very little to stir enthusiasm in, for example, the blatant and unsubtle pity-success, A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, which novel was never content to simply squirt water from a plastic lapel flower if it could hit you with an oversized powder puff as well. The residue was palpable. 

Likewise, as I recall some of the less successful humorous novels of the past decades, sometimes the invention or motivation simply flags, and one is left with the mildly amusing (Art Buchwald's Irving's Delight was meant to be as scathing of the advertising and, in another odd kinship with the Waugh, the pet food industries and related matters as the Waugh was in its compass, but Buchwald was rarely too prone to go for the jugular, hence probably both the popularity of his column and the obscurity most of his work, very much including this novel, has fallen into since his death; Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth had far less restraint, and so their The Space Merchants has at least a good-sized if infrequently-heard-from cult following, and such similar work from them as Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons" can be utterly plagiarized for other cult-followed items as the Mike Judge film Idiocracy). It's not as if the models for the likes of Buchwald or Erma Bombeck weren't at times at least as outraged or at least as amused as Waugh...think of Jean Kerr's parody of Mike Hammer (and of the Dramatic Reading) collected in her breakthrough volume Please Don't Eat the Daisies (though, sadly, her corrosive mockery there isn't what she's remembered for), or Robert Benchley at his most enervated. 

Ah, well. I'll have more (and probably better) to say about a number of these and perhaps some more over the next several weeks (I really should be talking about Bruce Jay Friedman here, if not also the Angry Young Men and Heller and Thurber and Ms. Parker and Twain...). And I see Bill Crider was inspired by an old review of mine to look up Nelson Algren's anthology...I'm honored. Better essays and reviews by Bill and others are linkable at Patti Abbott's blog today...

The Library of America version.