Wednesday, November 20, 2024

SSW/FFB: some August 1968 magazines, including memorials (intentional and indirect) for Anthony Boucher:

















William Anthony Parker White, aka Anthony Boucher, among other pennames. But most of his associates called him "Tony"...August 21, 1911 – April 29, 1968...a lot done in 56 years and change.

review of his last volume (of six) in this annual series:  BEST DETECTIVE STORIES OF THE YEAR: 23rd Annual Collection, edited by Anthony Boucher (Dutton, 1968); and a book detailing the origins and editorial correspondence around (as well as anthologizing from) The Magazine of Fantasy (and Science Fiction, as it's title was extended with the second issue), THE EUREKA YEARS: Boucher and McComas's Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 1949-1954, edited by Annette Pelz McComas reviewed here; Boucher generally on the blog.

And for what made these magazines relevant to him and his career when they didn't include explicit tribute to him...well, White/Boucher was the first (as far as I've been able to ascertain) to place an English translation of Borges fiction anywhere, in this case "The Garden of the Forking Paths", in EQMM in 1948, indicative of his continuing interest in international literature, particularly from Spanish...and he drew fiction from all the cited magazines for one project or another over his years (including for his radio and television work)...I really should double-check to find the ghost(?) memory of his reprinting or long-listing/recommending fiction from The Paris Review. 

With the mild exception of  the UK magazine Argosy and a typically striking, if simple, cover on The Paris Review, not a great month for cover design on our samples below, even if the F&SF Gahan Wilson is distinctive and the AHMM has a better cover than usual for that often-dowdy magazine (the cover of the July issue was particularly amateurish, as their July 4th-related red and white-striped covers tended to be during the first publisher's run):


This issue can be read here.

This issue can be read here.

This issue can be read here.

 
TriQuarterly 13-14, Fall-Winter 1968-69; edited by Charles Newman; Jose Donoso, guest co-editor of this issue. Published by Northwestern University, usually in Fall, Winter and Spring. "Contemporary Latin American Literature" issue. 506pp (excluding "contributors" credit text beginning on back cover) + ii pages

ii * Editor's Note * Charles Newman * ed
6 * Commentary
6 * A Literature of Foundations * Octavio Paz * es translated by Lysander Kemp; illustration: etching by Sergio Gonzalez-Tornero
more to come...

This issue can be read here...or could, but this file apparently still as of today hobbled by Archive.org's hacker attack and aftermath.

    • Cover * Bill Huehnergarth * il
    • 3 * From the Editor * William A. Emerson, Jr. * ed
    • 4 * Humphrey for President? * unsigned (Otto Friedrich?) * ed
    • 4 * Watch Out for Wallace * unsigned * ed
    • 12 * Speaking Out!: Uncle Tom Is Dead · Dick Gregory · ex Write Me In!, Bantam Books, 1968
    • 16 * Points West: On Becoming a Cop Hater · Joan Didion · column
    • 21 * Hubert Horatio Humphrey · Stewart Alsop · ar (illus. Stan Mack)
    • 26 * Mayor Daley: Can the Ringmaster Keep the Show Going · Milton Viorst · ar
    • 28 * Cockfight · Peter S. Beagle · essay
    • 30 * Will This Man Conquer Cancer? · Richard Armstrong · bi/profile (photo by Fred J. Maroon; of Dr. Robert Huebner)
    • 33 * Fighting Cancer: Where We Stand Now * Steven Spencer * ar
    • 34 * The Stomach, Heart and Spirit of the House · James Beard · ar (photos by Michael Bry)
    • 39 * The Man Who Fooled the World · Warner Law · nv (illus. Erik Blegvad)
    • 52 * Is John Kenneth Galbraith Really That Good? * John Skow * bi/profile 
    • 57 * Would You Buy a Used Car from This Man? · Lawrence Dietz · bi/profile of Ralph Williams (photos Bill Bridges)
    • 60 * Best Wishes to a Former Mistress and Carl Sandburg and a Dead Armenian and Other People I Lost Track Of · William Saroyan · ex from Letters from 74 Rue Taitbout or Don't Go But If You Must Say Hello To Everybody (World Publishing Co., 1969) illus. Lou Glanzman  
    • 70 * My Kind of People * Charles Barsotti * cartoons
    • 73 * cartoon * Russell Myers * ct
    • 74 * cartoon * Jack Tippit * ct
    • 76 * cartoon * uncredited * ct
    • 80 * cartoon * Jack Tippit * ct
    • 82 * cartoon * Charles Barsotti * ct
    • 84 * America, America * Mischa Richter * ct
    • 86 * Hazel * Ted Key * ct
    • 88 * PostScripts * 3 cartoons, by Orlando Busino, Edward Koren & Don Orehek * ct

Links below to opening page of prose works cited (subscription for complete text). Fall 1968:

TABLE OF CONTENTS



For more of today's short fiction reviews, and more, 

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Thursday, November 14, 2024

Jorge Luis Borges, Karen Joy Fowler, Clarice Lispector, Thom Jones: Short Story Wednesday (one might be a memoir) on Thursday (just my speed)

Outsiders

"Doctor Brodie's Report" by Jorge Luis Borges (as translated by Norman Thomas DiGiovanni and Borges, originally <<El informe de Brodie>>),  The Atlantic Monthly, January 1971, edited by Robert Manning; perhaps more easily read in the collection Doctor Brodie's Report, the Bantam paperback edition, posted for student use

"The Hen" and "The Smallest Woman in the World" by Clarice Lispector (as translated by Elizabeth Bishop), as first published, with "Marmosets" in Kenyon Review, Summer 1964, edited by Robie Macauley (and all three can be read at the KR site with a free registration, or paid subscription)

"The Last Worders" by Karen Joy Fowler, Lady Churchill's Rosebud  Wristlet, June 2007 (issue 20), edited by Gavin Grant and Kelly Link; also can be read in the June 2019 issue of Lightspeed, edited by John Joseph Adams (and in Rich Horton's and also in Ellen Datlow and Grant and Link's best fantasy-fiction of the year annuals for 2008)

"Cannonball: Love Sinks" by Thom Jones, The Washington Post Magazine, 11 July 2004, edited by Leonard Downie, Jr.

Writers do tend to be outsiders to at least some degree, of course, observers of the lives of others and themselves, sometimes even accurately. I read this essay from Vulture recently, Lili Anolik's take on her relation to Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, whom she wrote a book about, and Donna Tartt and her fellow students in the Class of '86 at Bennington College, most famously Jonathan Lethem and B. E. Ellis, whom she'd produced a podcast series about (an extension of this long essay in Eaquire). As usual with Vulture, a mix of gossipy biographical details and useful insights on how all these women she admires have made their way through the world. Anolik seeks, she notes, to get at the truth about these folks even if her subjects aren't so fond of what she discusses. Also, that sells.


So it can go with fiction-writers as well...Jorge Luis Borges was raised in relatively comfortable circumstances in and around Buenos Aires, Argentina, with his major life challenge running to his eyesight beginning to fail him at an early age...a grim fate for such a lover of the written word. Clarice Lispector was born in a Ukrainian shtetl, and her parents moved the family to Brazil to escape the Soviet pogroms; she would eventually marry a diplomat, and be posted with him in the U.S. and elsewhere, but got no joy out of being a diplo-spouse, and moved back to Brazil with the kids. They both were highly regarded at home and abroad for their work, but life at home wasn't always so easy (dictatorships tend to do that). I know (even) less about Karen Joy Fowler's personal life, though it's interesting that despite most of her work being fantastica, the novel she's best known for is The Jane Austen Book Club, a contemporary mimetic best-seller. And Thom Jones is best remembered for his collection The Pugilist at Rest, which was his best-selling book...his period of literary celebrity being sadly short. As with Robert F. Young, a published writer whose day-job for some time was as a janitor...not the happiest of conditions; his account, from the Washington Post Magazine, might actually be a straightforward memoir...however much shaped by time and reflection.

*a variant title for this issue
Both "Doctor Brodie's Report" and "The Smallest Woman in the World" double-down on outsidership, and I wonder if Borges was sparked by Lispector, in part or altogether, to conceive of his story, though they are by no means carbon-copies...both involve Westerners making their way and mark elsewhere, in the Borges a missionary, in the Lispector an explorer, investigating among outposts African (Lispector) or Brazilian (Borges--and another reason I suspect a nod to the younger writer and her slightly earlier work...along with a nod to Swift, as the nation Brodie is investigating is dubbed the Yahoos) of isolated hunter/gatherer societies of exotic custom and alternate approaches to language, under threat from somewhat more fierce neighbors. (Another reason to consider reading the Borges at the collection link, if it's still available, or seeking out the book otherwise, aside from not having a footnote blurb interpolated into the text as it is at The Atlantic link, is for Borges and DiGiovanni's notes on the texts...and the other stories.)

Lispector's "Marmoset" (available only at the Ploughshares site online, I believe) also echoes much of the shape of her anthropology story, only involving the title monkey in a somewhat similar role, even as a pet vs. a human "discovery"...while "The Hen" deals with a similar mix of tragedy and comedy, as a hen meant by the household for a meal is "rescued" by semi-irrelevant circumstance. Lispector's "tragic sense of life" (to cop from Unamuno) is, if anything, even more omnipresent in her examples of fiction here than is Borges's similar somewhat satirical stance. By contrast, Karen Joy Fowler is more willing to indulge in a sort of small-scale version of cosmic laughter, as she unwinds her account of nearly dauntless twin sisters making their way though the enigmatic small Latin American city-state of San Margais, essentially in search of a lost chance at love, and what they find there. 

And Thom Jones's account of his summer as a corn-country public swimming pool lifeguard, and the not quite love he finds through that  task and what it all shows him, as he feels his way through his young life in a town lost in a sea of tall corn, with a polluted river running through it, and not much else to do there but eventually escape.

So, short accounts of varying degrees of alienation and yearning, all deftly told, all funny in part but sobering.

You can do worse.


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Monday, November 11, 2024

Guest Post: Kate Jackson: "Top Ten Tips for Private Eyes"

Ms. Jackson's informed and engaging blog, Cross-Examining Crime, is a regular stop for me, and she is having a bit of blog tour in support of her latest book, How to Survive a Classic Crime Novel (The British Library, 2023):


Top Ten Tips for Private Eyes

Perhaps Raymond Chandler is one of your favourite authors. Or maybe you are able to quote all the best lines from the 1941 film adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. You might even know the difference between a rye and a bourbon and can reel off all manner of private eye slang at the drop of a hat. But if you woke up one morning and found yourself inside a classic crime mystery, signed up to work as a private eye, how well would you fare? Would you just survive? Or would you thrive? Well, here are some top tips to help you out. They are by no means exhaustive, but they may increase your awareness of the difficulties private detectives can face and help to put some more titles on your to-be-read pile.

1. Does your partner or sleuthing assistant badger you when you have too much alcohol (a tendency quite a few classic crime private eyes exhibited*)? Are they trying to limit how many drinks you can have? If so, then Norbert Davis’ private detective character, Doan, knows how you feel and has his own tip for dodging such prescriptive rules. His sleuthing assistant, an enormous Great Dane named Carstairs, only allows Doan to have one drink before meals, a restriction Carstairs can easily enforce due to his physical strength. Yet, Doan is able to circumvent this rule in Sally’s in the Alley (1943) by asking the bartender for four shots to be put into one glass.

2. It is best to keep your car boot locked to avoid any unwanted corpses being deposited there, a piece of advice which Doan overlooked in Sally’s in the Alley. The same goes for offices, which it is a good idea to leave under the watchful eye of a trusted assistant. Steve Conacher failed to do this and discovered a dead body in his office at the start of Adam Knight’s mystery Stone Cold Blonde (1951).

3. It is not just corpses being added to your office which you need to worry about, as important items can also be removed from your place of business, if you’re not careful. Naturally, you might keep your money and keys in a safe place, but what about your tax return form and accompanying paperwork? This is the horror Mike Magoon faces in Ellery Queen’s ‘The Ides of Magoon’ (1947), when he finds the day before the deadline for submitting his tax return that his form and the paperwork he needed to complete it, have all been stolen. No one needs that level of drama and stress in their lives, let alone the murder and blackmail which subsequently ensue once Ellery Queen begins to investigate.

4. Private eyes, if classic crime fiction is anything to go by, have to deal with some pretty tough characters and can all too easily find themselves being physically assaulted. It is not uncommon for such a sleuth to be coshed on the head, which can render them unconscious and leave them bleeding and bruised. For instance, Steve Conacher gets hit on the head four times in I’ll Kill You Next (1956). Getting clonked on the skull had become so intrinsically linked with the life of being a private detective that it is even commented on in Christopher Bush’s The Case of the Flowery Corpse (1956). Bush’s series sleuth, Ludovic Travers says to his friend: “No longer am I the incomplete detective. This case has made me, Henry. You’ve read plenty of detective novels. Novels about British and American private eyes. You know what’s expected of them and what you always get: the real top-notchers, that is. They drink whisky by the quart, their morals areas lax as the clients are beautiful, and they’re constantly getting slugged over the head. Well, now I’m in their class. It’s taken twenty years to do it, Henry, but I’ve received the accolade. I too have been slugged.”

If this is an accolade you are not in any rush to receive, then I recommend investing in some dependable protective head gear.

5. Whilst it is advisable to not offend the official police too much (as they can all too easily find ways of making your life difficult as Mike Shayne learns in Brett Halliday’s Blood on the Stars (1948)) it is still possible to have some fun at their expense, as MacNab does in Death of Mr Dodsley (1937) by John Ferguson. For example, the police get annoyed when MacNab is cryptic about searching the bookshop floor, hoping to not find anything: ‘Crabb half turned away, his disdain reviving. This was the sort of thing one would expect from a private detective – words that looked more astute but really meant nothing […] A little rift of irritation seemed about to develop. Mallet’s professional dignity had no doubt been wounded on seeing the other man go down to look over a floor he himself had already examined […]."

6. Don’t let your boss hear you grumbling that your cases are too easy, which is an error Elliot Oakes makes in P. G. Wodehouse’s ‘Death at the Excelsior’ (1914). He works for the Paul Snyder Detective Agency and his employer decides to cut his ego down to size after Elliot criticises the methods of the agency and ‘complain[s] of the infantile nature and unworthiness of the last two cases to which he had been assigned.’ To do this Paul assigns him a baffling, locked room murder in a boarding house, which involves a victim bitten by a snake. Naturally Elliot heads towards an embarrassing failure, perpetuated by his own arrogant nature. Conversely if you are the boss of a private eye firm and you have an annoying employee then you might consider copying what Paul Snyder does with Elliot. Paul can certainly recommend it, as he thoroughly enjoyed reading Elliot Oakes’ report:

‘He liked the substance of it, and above all, he was tickled by the bitter tone of frustration that characterised it. Oakes was baffled, and his knowledge of Oakes told him that the sensation of being baffled was gall and wormwood to that high-spirited young man.’

7. Whilst many of your cases, as a private detective, will be routine work, involving missing persons, cheating spouses and stolen property, always be prepared for the unexpected, particularly if you find yourself working within a science fiction styled private detective novel. After all, in such a story, you could be expected to investigate a killer aardvark which instills suicidal depression in its victims, a situation Davis faces in Arthur Bryan Cover’s ‘The Aardvark of Despair’, which is published in the collection: The Platypus of Doom and Other Nihilists (1976).

8. Make sure you pick a sleuthing assistant who can pull their weight when it comes tothe detective work. I would argue that Frances Crane’s Pat Abbott fails to do this, as Jean (who he eventually marries) is reluctant to follow up leads and even refuses to search a suspect’s room in The Golden Box (1942), due to its untidiness and scuffed furnishings.

9. It is important to get paid first (either in full or a retainer) as in classic crime fiction there is always the chance of your client being bumped off before the case has been concluded. No client, no fee. John J. Malone encounters this problem in ‘His Heart Could Break’ (1943) by Craig Rice. In addition, I would suggest that clients who refuse to tell you all the key details straight away (and usually insist on you meeting them in person later on to hear more) are more likely to have an early demise, as evidenced in Roman McDougald’s The Deaths of Lora Karen (1944).

10. Remember as a private detective you are never off the clock. New clients and cases do not confine themselves to working hours and have the annoying habit of popping up during your social hours. John J. Malone certainly discovers that they can ruin your date night in ‘Shot in the Dark’ (1955) by Craig Rice. There’s nothing more romantic than a distraught man nearly collapsing on the front of your date’s car yelling: “Violet! She’s dead! He killed her!”

* Not every private eye in fiction struggles with alcohol dependency. For example, Humphrey Campbell in Geoffrey Holmes’ And Then There Were Three (1938), drinks nothing stronger than milk. Moreover, Mike Magoon in ‘The Ides of Michael Magoon’ (1947) by Ellery Queen ‘neither smoked nor drank – asthma barred the one and, as for the other, his good wife had the nasal infallibility of a beagle.’

(Copyright 2024 by Kate Jackson)

Kate Jackson blogs at www.crossexaminingcrime.com and she is a member of the Crime Writer’s Association. Kate is compiler of the puzzles in The Pocket Detective (2018) and The Pocket Detective 2 (2019). She also contributed to the publication: The 100 Greatest Literary Detectives (2018), edited by Eric Sandberg, writing on Juanita Sheridan’s Lily Wu. Her latest publication with the British Library is How to Survive a Classic Crime Novel (2023). This work was shortlisted for the H. R. F. Keating award for Best 2023 Biographical or critical book related to crime fiction.

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