FFB: THRILLERS: 100 MUST READS edited by David Morrell and Hank Wagner (Oceanview Publishing 2010); Carolyn See, RIP

Carolyn See, RIP. 

The novelist and scholar and regular book reviewer for The Washington Post  in the years I lived in the DC area (and so much more interesting to read than Jonathan Yardley, whom IIRC the Post had retrieved from the ashes of The Washington Star, and ashen he remained) died on Wednesday, the LA Times reported, and in the fiction-magazine discussion list I'm often happy to be a part of, we were pointed to The Rumpus's not terribly well-proofread OCR scan of this article by See, posted in 2009 and not the worst unintended obituary anyone's ever written for themselves even though mostly a memoir of her father, who wrote a number of porn novels after some years of being (sometimes savagely) stymied in his literary among other ambitions, and her first great intellectual inspiration after him, academic scholar Helen Gardner. And, more offhandedly, her life-partner for the better part of three decades, John Espey. Lisa See is See's daughter, but if you know who Lisa See is, you probably know that. David Pringle suggested this was worth reading, and John Boston seconded...I agree, and you might as well even if you're not so very sure who either See or Helen Gardner have been.

By the time I finally got around to my copy of Golden Days, See's sf novel (published in one of the several New Fiction lines various publishers hoped to catch your attention with in the '80s, in this case it was a mass-market series from Ballantine/Fawcett; most were in "quality paperback" format which is now more likely the default for any bound paper publishing), it was time for one of my six or seven residence changes in my years in Northern Virginia, and it went into one box or another. Perhaps, or definitely, past time for it to come back out.

Thrillers is consciously in the mode of everyone else's "100 Best" books; editors Morrell (best known as the creator of Rambo, in the 1972 novel First Blood,  recommended here by Steve Berry's short essay) and Wagner explicitly cite the example of Stephen Jones and Kim Newman's Horror: The 100 Best Books, and that one has had a lot of company, both since and beforehand (though Morrell, a notable horror as well as suspense-fiction writer among other flavors of work, had an essay in the cited volume and I suspect it looms large in the memory...it's also one of the few to get a direct sequel). Like some, and unlike others, it draws on a range of writers to choose their favorite examples, and arranges them chronologically by date of subject's publication; in this case, the short-essay contributors are members of International Thriller Writers, for whose benefit the book has been published and which has been given the copyright.  Unlike many such books, however, the editors (and the aforementioned Steve Berry) contribute a couple/few several-page entries each, with the rest on a one recommendation per contributor basis (some such volumes give us only one choice from each contributor, others are completely written by one or two critics); also slightly unusual, two of the selections are short fiction amid the novels and occasional novella and one is Edgar Wallace's version of the script for King Kong, and three of the five Our Historical Antecedents cited works are epic poems (Homer's are given a double-header essay, along with Beowulf) while the other two are the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur (with a nod particularly toward Plutarch's recounting) and Macbeth; Katherine Ramsland chooses "The Most Dangerous Game" by Richard Connell, and Thomas Monteleone handles Cornell Woolrich's "Rear Window." Beyond that, the rather wide range of what can be classed a thriller is explored, most of them suspense novels, but also science fiction, horror, adventure fiction (historical and otherwise), at least one nearly straightforward mystery, and R. L. Stine opts for P. G. Wodehouse's Summer Lightning (in the interests of demonstrating, as Robert Bloch was wont to do in  dccades past, the kinship of humor and the frightening). At this point, if you've waited this long, you can begin arguing with what has been represented and what hasn't; Robert Bloch's work isn't cited, nor is Shirley Jackson's, which was brought home by the inclusion (as the only 1959 example) of Richard Condon's The Manchurian Candidate (which I still need to read, but '59 would've been a hell of a year with only Psycho and The Haunting of Hill House to its credit; certainly the cinema isn't complaining); Robert Levinson (co-creator of Columbo among much other work) does the honor there. 

Some of the contributors are matched with exactly the item you'd expect (Max Allan Collins with One Lonely Night, Raymond Benson with From Russia with Love), some are less unsurprising but not startling good choices (Joe R. Lansdale writes up The Postman Always Rings Twice and Bev Vincent opts for a Thomas Harris novel rather than a Stephen King). The 1970s-1990s are overrepresented in contrast to other decades (not terribly surprising, given the age of most of the contributors), and that only The Da Vinci Code is cited post-2000 likewise (the editors note that they wanted to wait and see on books published in this century). That last, and that only The Green Ripper is cited as an example  of John D. MacDonald's work, are among the more questionable choices, but this kind of book is meant to spark some arguments, pay back to great influences on the writers contributing and pay forward to the readers who might not yet have caught up with the items under discussion nor thought of them in quite the manner suggested...pretty much what we do with Friday Books, only with no concern whatsoever for citing the items not nearly Forgotten...the latter need to be included, in fact. Though that no one suggested an anthology, not even one of Robert Arthur's or Harold Q. Masur's Alfred Hitchcock Presents: volumes, is a crying shame. But you do go from Deliverance to The Bourne Identity and many likely stops between.

The far more reasonably prompt examples of our citations are toted up at Patti Abbott's blog (she, and her daughter, will be popping up in such projects as subjects sooner rather than later, I suspect).