Showing posts with label Donald Westlake. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Donald Westlake. Show all posts

Friday, August 23, 2013

FFB: edited by Avram Davidson: THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION January 1964


Donald Westlake, Mack Reynolds, Damon Knight, Edward Wellen, Allen Kim Lang's possibly best story, part of Fritz Leiber and Avram Davidson's longterm argument about the merits of H.P. Lovecraft's work...alongside Davidson and MZ Bradley reviewing some important and some  underappreciated (or even Forgotten) texts of fantastic fiction...so, what was so special about this issue?
 
from ISFDB:

The January 1964 issue of F&SF gets to be significant to, well, particularly me from the confluence of several notable contributions within (as well as having the cover date kicking off what would be Avram Davidson's last year of editorship, his being the best set of issues the magazine would see so far, the best from the magazine that has averaged the best among the long-running fantastic fiction magazines in English even in the face of strong competition for that plaudit)(and several of the best magazines in other languages were either launched as their national/language editions of F&SF or affiliated with the Yank magazine early on, notably the French Fiction and important Swedish, Japanese and Spanish magazines).

I've written previously about Mack Reynolds's cover story "Pacifist" being one of the stories that has helped shape my thinking about the world, posing the basic questions at the heart of utilitarianism as well as pacifism, rather neatly and with force and wit. At 13, bracing stuff. James Sallis thought so, too, when he, a bit older than I was at first reading, put together his fine first anthology, The War Book (1969), and it's one of the two Reynolds stories that newbie anthologist Martin Harry Greenberg and his collaborators used to bookend the contents of their Political Science Fiction (1974), not the last time Greenberg would reprint the story.

 Donald Westlake's "Nackles" is a Christmas horror story, about an anti-Santa rather more dire than Krampus, published not long after Westlake's denunciation of the sf and fantasy publishing scene, hence the use of his little joke of a pseudonym, Curt Clark (Westlake would never be able to divorce himself from fantastic fiction, however frustrating he found the commercial realities there early on, as such late work as Humans demonstrates).  Another story with a kind of sneaking influence in the culture...CBS's refusal to film an adaptation for the revived The Twilight Zone led to Harlan Ellison's resignation from that series.

Allen Kim Lang has had what critic John Boston has termed a "stealth" career in sf and fantasy, most of his publications in the 1950s and '60s (Lang is still alive, but apparently hasn't published in quite some time); Algis Budrys praised his work, and the unflashy nature of it, particularly in his one published novel, Wild and Outside. Though "Thaw and Serve" is decidedly flashy, and in tone reminiscent of the nearly contemporaneous Anthony Burgess novel A Clockwork Orange and certainly anticipatory of the rather goofier film Demolition Man in its depiction of a thug awakened from cryogenic storage in a nearly utopian future. One of the many proto-New Wavish (or, as Boston has joked, in this case rather more punkish instead) stories that Davidson, like Cele Goldsmtih/Lalli, published in their magazines in the early '60s, it would not only have fit comfortably in Harlan Ellison's anthology Dangerous Visions a few years later but might even have had some influence on Ellison's "A Boy and His Dog"...this is another story that has stuck with me from early reading, as have the Westlake and the Reynolds.

 The other stories have not been as memorable to me, and I should revisit them.  Though Damon Knight would not write a fully satisfying novel till his rather late CV, despite his brilliance in all shorter forms, there was always something interesting about the earlier attempts. Edward Wellen, like Davidson, Westlake and to some extent Reynolds (and a lesser extent yet Wenzell Brown) an amphibian between crime fiction and fantastic fiction, and fond of doing work that sat firmly on the boderlines between both, has been reviewed here previously (a later contribution to the magazine, in fact); Robert Lory would be particularly productive in writing sequels of sorts to Dracula and other horror work, in novel series and otherwise, in the 1970s. Valentina Zhuravlyova not only wrote sf on her own but also, to get around the anti-Jewish bigotry of some aspects of the Soviet publishing sector, lent her name to her husband's fiction for publication (at least at home)...G.S. Altschuller is better remembered now for his formulation of the metatechnological observations known as TRIZ , or TIPS.

And the wittily, even offhandedly erudite book reviews by editor Davidson are supplemented in this issue by those of Marion Zimmer Bradley, not yet quite the institution she would become, and Fritz Leiber, in part engaging in a casual but heartfelt debate with Davidson over the merits of not just the interests H. P. Lovecraft pursued in his fiction, but in the qualities of the fiction itself (Davidson remained unconvinced...both Davidson and Leiber are vastly better and more profound writers than HPL was able to be, despite Lovecraft's extraordinarily important work in exploring existential horror, and his direct mentoring of the young Robert Bloch and, much more briefly but tellingly, Fritz Leiber as well in the latter's fledgling career as a writer).  And, of course, Asimov's science essay, of which he published, all told, 399 in consecutive issues of F&SF, and which column he credited as being the bedrock of his pop-science (and extensions) nonfiction-writing career (though Asimov and Davidson had a somewhat cool relation; Davidson's humanistic Orthodoxy and Asimov's utter atheism while being of Jewish ancestry was one source of occasional tension).

And, to add to the personal if not so much the intrinsic value of this rather impressive issue, it would've been the one on the newsstands at about the time I was being conceived. 

That noted, please see Patti Abbott's blog for more of today's books (and possibly a few more magazine issues or other not-quite-books)...this week's entry by Jerry House is a review of The Eureka Years:  Boucher and McComas's Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 1949-1954, edited by Annette Peltz McComas, about the origins of the magazine and its first five years of publication (and collecting some impressive stories published in those issues, among much else).
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Friday, February 17, 2012

Donald Westlake Week: FFB/Overlooked Films: ENOUGH (Evans, 1977): ORDO (the film, 2004) among other Westlake films


Donald Westlake is one of those writers I've been reading all my literate life...my first experience of his work was almost certainly in reading "The Winner," his heavily metaphorical sf story (first published in Harry Harrison's anthology of new science fiction, Nova 1 [Delacorte, 1970]), in which a dissident poet named Revell refuses to knuckle under to his imprisonment, to the mild befuddlement of his prison warden, Wordman. (Even at a young age, I noted that Westlake could get a bit cute with character names.) It's the kind of story that has a wide appeal, and it's well-done, and it kept popping up in odd places, including classroom-use magazines, over the next decade. I'd find Westlake stories in Alfred Hitchcock Presents: anthologies, in the old back issues of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and newer issues of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and I'd come across the likes of "Curt Clark"'s "Nackles" (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, January 1964) a story about an anti-Santa Clause who is not quite but not dissimilar to Krampus, in anthologies such as Terry Carr's New Worlds of Fantasy..."Curt Clark," as in "rude clerk" (perhaps one who'd Prefer Not To) being the name Westlake signed to some of his sf and fantasy after making a big noisy deal about quitting the fantastic-fiction field, in favor of crime fiction, in the early '60s. Of course, he did no such thing, but did publish his worst work I've read, by far, in Anarchaos (1967) as by Clark, a rather routine sf adventure novel that takes as its premise that a bunch of cutthroats supposedly inspired by a range of anarchists and not quite anarchists including among unlikely others Pyotr Kropotkin, the pacifist (very influential on Gandhi and MLK, Jr.) and biologist who was among the first to trace the importance of symbiosis and mutual aid in human and non-human matters, and who died under house arrest under Lenin, have set up a society on a planet they've dubbed Anarchaos, and engage in behaviors the most berserk of Ayn Rand's followers might find a bit sociopathic. Westlake could be snotty.

But he was also, almost invariably, acute and clever and inventive. In 1989, having just read in quick succession Elmore Leonard's Freaky Deaky, Westlake's Trust Me on This, and an Algis Budrys critique which in passing noted that Leonard's fiction was a bit less cartoonish than Westlake's, this last struck me on the fresh evidence to be exactly reversed (though Leonard's work was as charming and engaging), that Westlake's work could incorporate satiric elements without having to employ so "colorful" a cast of characters as Leonard seemed to prefer at all times; Westlake's work could offer more nuanced characterization, but perhaps was less consistently popular than Leonard's and some other writers of similar industry and talent because relatively few of Westlake's characters were sympathetically-drawn in the usual manner...they tended to be coolly-observed and deeply flawed, self-centered or -deluded, corruptible. And without much if any redemption from these flaws by the end of their stories, and sometimes without comeuppance, and frequently without becoming cartoons of evil ("Hello, Clarice"). This not the usual means of entering the bestseller lists.

By the '70s, though, Westlake was actively engaged in film work, with several adaptations of his novels by others already released and his own film work proceeding apace, and sometimes a treatment still being shopped or a script in turnaround would apparently find its way, transmogrified, into prose fiction, as apparently was his "Call Me a Cab," and "Ordo," the shorter of the two fictions in the 1977 book I've read for this week's FFB, Enough (M. Evans, paperbacked as above by Fawcett). "Ordo" the novella (83pp), along with A Travesty the short novel (184pp) collected in this volume, both deal with the periphery of the film industry: A Travesty, more of a conventional if "open" mystery than Westlake usually wrote, involves a self-centered, but not altogether unlikable, film reviewer who accidentally kills one of his girlfriends just before page one, and spends the rest of the novel dancing as fast as he can (and not always in self-preserving ways) to avoid, once cleared in the early going, becoming the obvious suspect again, in part through buddying up with one of the investigating detectives and helping him and his partner with several other murder cases, as a vaguely Holmesian consultant (albeit at least one of the critic's observations in that regard will almost certainly occur to most readers, and should've to any competent detective). In the course of this, critic Thorpe has plenty of time to share acidic observation not only of film culture but of our lives generally, engage in a bit of Dortmundering, and to anticipate such later Westlake sociopaths as those who inhabit The Ax or The Hook or such brilliant screenplays as the original of The Stepfather; the novel might eventually put you in mind of the O. J. Simpson/Brown and Goldberg matter, as well, some years before those ridiculously horrible events, the LAPD's actions as well as Simpson's.

"Ordo" is a somewhat more subdued effort, involving a Greek-named poly-ethnic American sailor, Ordo Tupikos, who learns from his shipmates that the teen bride he knew as a very young groom, their several-months marriage successfully annulled through the eventual intercession of his mother-in-law because the runaway girl was not yet at age of consent (she had lied to Ordo and the authorities), has now become, under another name and looking much different in full adulthood, a major Hollywood actress. Ordo has some difficulty reconciling the latter-day sex-symbol with his doting, insecure wife of sixteen years previously, as he's had no contact with her since the annulment (and shipping out to avoid legal complications) and decides to take leave and see if his ex will meet with him for a reunion. As it turns out, she will, but Ordo, a rather uncomplicated man, finds unsurprisingly that although they are, if anything, more sexually compatible (and, obviously, more experienced) than they were during their marriage, they are not as suited to each other...much is made of how little Ordo has changed, and how much Estelle Anlic has sought to reinvent herself, from bullied and insecure teen who found a refuge from her unpleasant family life with Ordo, only to have that taken from her, and then to make her current life for herself. After an utterly unpleasant reunion with Mother Anlic which takes its toll particularly on his ex-wife, Ordo realizes that their interrupted life together is now a thing of the past, even as the former Estelle realizes that she is still not over the early damage, and her new persona is too fragile for Ordo to be her mate again.

That this was a story aimed at filming is all but proven by the extremely faithful film adaptation, released in 2004, of Ordo, only (since it is a Canadian/French/Portuguese co-production) with the story relocated to France, and Estelle Anlic now a star of Francophone cinema, Ordo a French marine rather than a US sailor (the ethnicity of various characters adjusted to close analogs, accordingly). Ordo in the film (Roschdy Zem) is a bit more dense and impulsive than Ordo in the story, but only very slightly so; Marie-Josée Croze is excellent as the affectionate but brittle and moody Estelle/now "Louise Sandoli" (in the novella, "Dawn Devayne"). The script was adapted by (Ms.) Laurence Ferreira Barbosa and Nathalie Najem (I suspect Westlake provided a treatment or a draft, or could've, along with the novella), the film directed by Barbosa, and the home video release is from the Canadian titan Alliance Atlantis (CSI, etc.)...and yet this remains an even more overlooked film than I realized, with almost no theatrical arthouse play in the US and that dvd apparently out of print and with highish to ridiculous asking prices on Amazon (at least), and only one review on IMDb, where one Brit? "rowmorg" seems ready to go out of his? way to dismiss this film, noting it "suffers from having a phony story contrived from a Yankee pulp novel" (thus making, to paraphrase James Blish, four major errors in twelve words, and only two of those matters of subjectivity), but, then, he? also cleverly notes "There's plenty of Marie Josee Croze in the buff, if you like chilly 30-something blondes, swimming around her millionaire swim-pool and making out with hunky Ordo for old times' sake." Heaven forfend, that a 30-something should be engaging in such behavior, so old and all...and the Canadian Croze, lost to shame, going on to swim nude yet again in Tell No One. All in all, a film that is quiet and engaging, and worth the effort to see it, if not Too strenuous.

As noted, Westlake has been responsible for a number of excellent scripts during his career, most famously the adaptation of Jim Thompson's The Grifters, but his original script for The Stepfather, very deftly filmed and very poorly sequeled and remade with no input from Westlake, was even better yet. Another film, reviewed by Paul Brazill some time back for the weekly Overlooked Films exercise many FFBers also do, Grace of My Heart, the engaging fictionalized biopic not quite about the life and career of Carole King, carries a Thanks credit to Westlake...whether because he provided script assistance or advice or production funds or some combination is not spelled out. But an unexpected grace note to pop up after finally seeing that film in its entirety the other month.

For more of this week's Westlake and other books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
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Friday, February 10, 2012

FFB: STORYTELLER by Kate Wilhelm (2005); CREATING SHORT FICTION by Damon Knight; (1981/1985/1997); callback to Donald Westlake and Jody Scott rarities



Next week, The Donald Westlake Symposium among the FFB crowd...here's my review from some ways back (almost three years...goodness) of two all-too-forgotten works, novellas by (Mr.) Donald Westlake ("Call Me a Cab") and (Ms.) Jody Scott ("Down Will Come Baby") that were never reprinted from their initial magazine appearances, his in Redbook when that magazine still published ficiton, hers in Escapade in its last issues as a rather sophisticated Playboy imitator, while Barry Malzberg was editing there (a short tenure, just before his much less well-paid short tenure as editor of Fantastic and Amazing).

I didn't finish the book I was likely to write up this week, so instead I'll briefly cite two which are definitely in print, from a rather less coincidental gender-pairing, Kate Wilhelm and the late Damon Knight, married for decades and also partners in creation of the Clarion Writers' Workshops, now a multi-site annual tradition and the most sustained program within, but not restricted to, fantastic-fiction writing instruction. Much of Knight's primarily instructional Creating Short Fiction and Wilhelm's mix of instruction and memoir (favoring the former) Storyteller comes out of their experiences with Clarion, as well as their larger working lives as highly analytical fiction-writers, and to some degree (Knight vastly moreso over the years than Wilhelm) editors (though Wilhelm has been in her turn a much more prolific fiction-writer than Knight was, after his most productive years in the 1950s and early '60s).

Knight is clear and concise and witty as he lays out the various approaches to and strictures of short-fiction writing, and the highlight of the book, for me is the way in which he presents his fine novelet "Four-in-One" and breaks down what he was doing with it, and how, at every step of its conception and writing. Wilhelm is more meditative, if no less witty, as she deals with basic questions of both literature and writing instruction specifically (excerpts of her book have been posted, with permission, thus: "Can Writing Be Taught?"; "Trivia vs. Writing Real Stories"; and "My Silent Partner". They are, together, an excellent distillation of what the two have taken away from their instructional experiences, and useful and a pleasure to read in a way that the best criticism tends to be, as well...illuminating and genuine fun.

For more of this week's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
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Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Overlooked Films and A/V: CRACKERS (1984) and...


Crackers (1984) is a decidedly odd film, less for its intrinsic content, a not completely humorous heist film, as for its obvious relation to the fiction of the late Donald Westlake, particularly the Dortmunder stories, the relatively lighthearted series Westlake spun off from the relentlessly grim Parker series, when a Parker plot he was developing kept wanting to be written about reasonably sensible, professional crooks who kept being foiled by circumstance, rather than ruthlessly and efficiently succeeding (as Parker does in his stories). The novel that introduced Dortmunder and his crew, The Hot Rock, was famously filmed featuring Robert Redford as Dortmunder.

Crackers, written by Jeffrey Alan Fiskin and directed by the hardly obscure Louis Malle, features the even less obscure Donald Sutherland as the Dortmunder-like character who can't seem to catch a break, named, cheekily, "Westlake." The crew of safecrackers and supporting staff is masterminded by "Westlake," who has a Dortmunderesquely complicated plan to steal a thug's safe with some inside help. Nothing goes completely right.

The film has a pretty impressive cast, many of whom had and/or would again work with Malle, such as Sean Penn (not good, but not the hambone he has since become), Jack Warren, Wallace Shawn, and Christine Baranski, and introduced Tasia Valenza, who has mostly done animation voice-actor work in the last couple of decades (though a lot of it), and was an early credit for Trinidad Silva, who would make more of name for himself with his recurring role on Hill Street Blues. As a semi-comedic heist film, it almost succeeds, with a lot of failed jokes mixed in with decent ones, and some dramatic gambits which simply don't pay off (such as the young woman who wants to become a prostitute persuaded not to by the goodnatured pimp, koff, who has grown fond of her).

But what's strange is just how much this film echoes an already-established literary and to some extent cinematic franchise, with a wink and a nod and no claims of parody, just attempts at pastiche. As one writer put it, having heard the description of the film, "sounds actionable."

This film is not currently available on dvd, and I don't think it was ever issued on disc, though a VHS release some time back was available. Amazon and perhaps others will stream it for you...Hulu was offering it for free at one time, but no longer. I caught it, rather randomly, on a pay movie channel some months ago.
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