Showing posts with label William Campbell Gault. Show all posts
Showing posts with label William Campbell Gault. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 25, 2021

William Campbell Gault; Jack Ritchie; Talmage Powell: football fiction from PLAYERS' CHOICE, (nominally) edited by Gale Sayers, Dave Robinson, Howard Mudd and Charley Gogolak (Whitman/Western Publishing 1969) Short Story Wednesday

selected by Dave Robinson, Howard Mudd, Gale Sayers, and Charley Gogolak; illustrated by Ken Shields
Contents:
All-American Washout  (originally published as "Tinsel Tailback")/ William Campbell Gault --
Dark, Dank, and Dismal / Wade H. Mosby Boys’ Life v51 #10, October 1961--
That's My Boy / Jerome Brondfield Liberty v23 #47, November 23, 1946--
The Fullback from Liechtenstein / Jack Ritchie --
A Time for Triumph / Talmage Powell --
Dirtiest Game of the Year / Booton Herndon The Saturday Evening Post v225 #16, October 18, 1952.


Three stories, for three widely divergent markets, by three writers who eventually became, at least, far better known for their crime fiction than their sports fiction. For William Campbell Gault, that might not've been his first choice for career path, as he was one of the most widely-respected of sports fiction writers at mid-century...his story in this book was taken from the September 1950 issue of the pulp magazine Fifteen Sports Stories...as the sports pulps dwindled (with this issue, the magazine began running a reprinted piece or several in each number), no digest or other sports-fiction magazines came in to take up their markets, and the presence of sports fiction became somewhat less frequent in the men's and general-interest magazines, Gault began writing, voluminously, sports novels for the burgeoning Baby Boom YA market...while also keeping a hand in with crime fiction, one of his most popular series characters being an ex-pro football player, Brock Callahan. 

In recent decades, there have been several little magazines devoted to sports fiction, particularly to baseball fiction and poetry, albeit a few eclectic ones as well, and ESPN Magazine has had at least one fiction issue. Very very sporadically, Sports Illustrated has run some fiction over the last half-century (not counting photo-retouching).

Talmage Powell's story was published in a 1952 issue of the US Roman Catholic missionary-support magazine Extension, which is still published but with no fiction content so-labelled; the story deals perhaps a bit heavy-handedly with ethical concerns, both for a football-star college student and those who do his schoolwork for him, and the faculty the star player interacts with, as they collectively wrestle with pressures to cheat and/or knuckle under, not least to a once golden-boy graduate and overbearing benefactor to the college in question, whom Powell is clearly happy to have eventually referred to as Dick Manley. 

While Jack Ritchie's story was rather obviously tailored for its market, the November 1963 issue of Boys' Life, one of the most reliable markets for sports fiction in the latter half of the 1900s in the US. It involves a high-school football team, and the rather supercilious but effective motivational analysis a European exchange student, and soccer star back home, manages to apply to his US football teammates. One of whom is also a Manley, albeit not a Dick.

Three decent stories, to say the least, even if the Gault might be drowning in details of the game (and its slang and argot) for those in a less passionate readership than a sports-fiction pulp might serve; the Powell is far lighter on the gridiron chat per se, if also a bit more melodramatic (as is Powell's wont) in the manner it lays out its tale, and the Ritchie is also rather typical of its author in the reasonably sly manner in which the foreign-exchange antagonist of sorts sizes up and re-motivates his American teammates. The Gault is unsurprisingly the best and most adult of them, clearly by design, and certainly with the intended audiences in mind. 

Interesting example of Whitman/NFL cross-promotion in 1969; I could see Sayers, at least, feeling reasonably at home in picking out stories, perhaps all four were, though I have to wonder who at Western Publishing might've culled a longlist for them to pick from. 




























For more of today's Short Story Wednesday posts, please see Patti Abbott's blog.



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Wednesday, October 28, 2020

Short Story Wednesday: DIME MYSTERY MAGAZINE, October 1949: John D. MacDonald, Margaret St. Clair, Day Keene, Lix Agrabee...

Well, isn't that a hell of a line-up of writers...St. Clair, MacDonald, Gault, "Keene", Powell, Siegel and Holden, even if I've barely read the last two...much as I've never before read the work of  Ms. "Lix Agrabee" (one of the more flagrant pseudonyms I've run across) as far as I know (Helen D. Conway has only four stories as by Agrabee listed in the FictionMags Index, all a cluster in Dime Mystery in 1947-49, and nothing much else pops up for her in a quick set of searches). 

What's notable about these folks, for the most part, is that they are writing better than serviceable pulp prose, as one might expect, even in this late pulp issue...inasmuch as all of them except, I think, Holden (and Conway) were going on to sustained careers in post-pulp-era publishing, several already contributing to higher-paying or more widely-respected markets by 1949. They were already writing fiction here and elsewhere that could fit in "slicks" or "little" magazines, paperbacks and Best of the Year annuals. Even if all but one of these short stories, in this penultimate issue of Dime Mystery (already costing the newsstand browser two dimes, and about to have its name changed, for a few more issues before folding, to 15 Story Mystery) are simply good reading, usually with excellent detail if not breaking much in the way of new ground. 

And so much burial ground to break, since all the short stories in this issue save St. Clair's involve corpses (or presumed corpses)  that need to be disposed of (in a variety of bucolic settings), but just keep coming back or refuse to stay where they were left or go where they should--or are they simply ghosts? Well, mostly corpses. The legacy of Dime Mystery as one of the original "shudder pulps" when that form was being more or less invented at Popular Publications in the early '30s gets its last licks in as this late issue features essentially all conventional but more or less "off-trail" crime fiction. 

Margaret St. Clair's "Nightmare Lady" is a turning worm story with an unsurprisingly (for its author) feminist edge (likewise, an openness to taking premonition dreams seriously), wherein a long-suffering sister/aunt, who has served as caretaker to her brother and his two children since the death of his wife, decides she won't allow him to crush the spirit of his daughter, her niece, through his bitter selfishness and stubbornness. Rather more deftly played out here than in too many episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents: not too long after...

John D. MacDonald's "The Last Rendezvous" is also a revenger's tale, somewhat more improbable but neatly enough done, involving a husband and his young sister-in-law who play a kind of vicious turnabout trick on a drunken lout, who had caused the death of their wife/sister in such a way it couldn't be easily proven in court. Thus, in a small way, an early movement in the direction of The Executioners, filmed inadequately twice as Cape Fear.

"Day Keene" (Gunard Hjerstedt)'s "The Laughing Dead" is closer to its author at full display of his powers, wherein a very mean piece of human furniture kills a distant cousin of his wife in an opportune encounter on a lonely road, but has the damnedest time taking care of the corpse, which seems to keep popping up and/or refusing to be disposed of/temporarily hidden as well as it might be. Also depends on some rather improbable coincidences, but is a little less in need of being indulged by the reader than the plot of the MacDonald, though at least one of the coincidences is rather quickly papered over. 

While all the rest of these are at least well-enough-written and indicative of the better work these people would do elsewhere, "The Corpse Came Back!" (surprise!) by "Lix Agrabee" is a notable exception, trying breathlessly yet almost always clumsily to get across the rising desperation of its protagonist, telling us frequently in the same sentence two or three times what is happening/has just happened, just in case we wouldn't believe it the first time...which is odd, since the thin plot of this one, disenchanted poor boy bumps off his doting, but (very) slightly overbearing, wealthy young wife, is the least improbable of the quartet (even if the resolution is about as awkward as most of the prose). Less odd, though, given that pulps usually paid by the word, and this reads a bit like the clumsier passages in later Harold Robbins/Jackie Collins-style "glam" fiction, particularly when describing wardrobe selections in repetitious detail or with lines such as: "He leaned out, palms spread to balance himself, laughing insanely now that calm sanity had come to him, knowing as he did so that he must pull himself together and, as soon as possible, pull himself out of the whole thing." 

Dime Detective, of course, was at its height one of the most important of  crime-fiction magazines in the field, a notable heir to Black Mask, and its stablemate Dime Western had a similar influence in its field; Dime Mystery was always a bit overshadowed by its littermates except in its shudder primacy years, but I'll be reading at very least the William Campbell Gault story here, and the other work by some of the better writers as pops up in this issue and others archived on-line. 

Please see Patti Abbott's blog for the rest of this week's SSW entries!


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Friday, December 20, 2013

FFB: William Campbell Gault: uncollected short stories (online)


William Campbell Gault, the much-admired writer of mostly crime fiction by the end of his career, first made his mark as a sports-fiction specialist in the pulps of the 1940s and into the '50s...while also writing crime fiction, sf and no doubt other work (ISFDB apparently misunderstands the eventual agent Larry Sternig to have been a Gault pseudonym, as opposed to friend and occasional collaborator, in their early years together; Roney Scott was Gault's most famous penname).

 As I've mentioned before here, I first read Gault's work in a couple of auto-racing anthologies, one (High Gear) all fiction, the other, The Great Auto Race and Other Stories of Men and Cars, a mixed group of short stories and nonfiction. Not too long after, I started finding the YA sports novels Gault wrote for his primary bread and butter by the end of the 1950s and through the next decade, until for some reason the market began to turn away from those (Bill Crider is probably correct in suggesting he was important in getting Gault to start writing crime fiction again, some years later). I read a few of those, and they helped give me further evidence that even though I wasn't all that interested in sports per se, that didn't mean great sports fiction wasn't worth looking into. (I preferred the short fiction he'd written for adult audiences, but the YA books were not too shabby.) And when, a few years later on (newly a sophomore at my second high school, the one with an impressive library for even a wealthy private high school), I was first reading Damon Knight's collection of critical essays and book reviews, In Search of Wonder, I came across his passage about how he had a positive antipathy to sports, and had found Gault's sf to be weak tea, but that the man was Hell on Wheels in the sports fiction field (where Knight was working as an editor at the Popular Publications line of pulps--Argosy, the Dime titles such as Dime Detective and Dime Sports, etc., and had duties across the range of magazines they published), the best he'd read, and that Knight liked everything about that fiction, except the sports element.

 Now, what's a pity is that no one has ever bothered to collect Gault's sports fiction in any sort of best-of nor representative volume, in the manner of Bill Pronzini's Gault collection Marksman and Other Stories, collecting some of the best of his crime fiction. The sports stories remain buried in the back pages of the sports and general-interest pulps, and probably a few other magazines (Boy's Life? Playboy? Argosy after it went over to being the downmarket Esquire?)...but several are online these days, and you can enjoy at least the following, as I have had over this very busy week (where I've had no time to read nor reread any of Robert Barnard's work, alas...a man who was the same age as my parents when he died this year...).
Gault's initials typo'd.

 Among those I've picked up over the last week:
"Sweet Chariot" from Argosy, 2 August 1941--a solid, early story of dirt-track auto racing. short and pretty sweet and swinging, indeed.
"A Colt for the Carlton" from Short Stories, August 1949--a longer and somewhat more complex story about aspirants on the less financially secure edge of the horseracing business. (Also, from the period where Dorothy McIlwraith was impressively editing both Weird Tales and Short Stories, though given the perceived manly audience for the latter, she was always signed as "D. McIlwraith" on the masthead.)

 Romance and adrenaline go hand in hand (or hand on steering wheel and hand on reins) in these two stories, along with a easy mastery of the argot of the respective sports--I still need to look up a few terms from the horse-racing story, but it's not intrusive and one picks up what's necessary from context...Gault's prose is sometimes dismissed or at least underrated in some quarters, but he actually (at very least in most of his work I've read) is a lean writer without making a fetish of that, quite capable of turning a deft phrase and with an excellent eye for characterization in short focus. Ed, the jockey protagonist of "Colt," for example, is a young man of some emotional limitation, but not unaware of how to manipulate a situation non-maliciously, and not the kind of slightly-off-center character (without being at all a caricature) that the uninformed are likely to assume they could find in a pulp story...and neither of these stories is Gault at his absolute best, but are fine examples which reward the reading. As some more knowledgeable critics had noted, Gault is (at least) almost always good...and often better than that. (The first Gault crime novel I read was the version of the fine Don't Call Tonight in the Mercury Mystery issue above...reissued in book form as End of a Call Girl...not the kind of title his YA sports novels featured often...)

 from WorldCat:
The great auto race, and other stories of men and cars 
Editors: Ruth Christoffer Carlsen (also illustrator); G Robert Carlsen 
Publisher: New York : Scholastic Book Services, ©1965.

Contents:
The great auto race, by T. Mahoney
Old enough to drive, by S. McNeil
Wizard on wheels, by L.M. Nash
Rallye ride, by C.H. Rathjen
The hustling dream that ran on steam, by L.M. Nash
Won by inches, by M. Campbell
Greatest driver of them all, by Ken Purdy
The dream, by W.C. Gault






For actually book-length manuscripts for this week, please see Patti Abbott's blog.


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Friday, July 8, 2011

FFB: long stories: Ray Nelson, "Turn Off the Sky" (1963); William Campbell Gault, "Deadly Beloved" (1956); Stuart Dybek, "Four Deuces" (2011)

Three novelets and/or novellas this week, from old favorites...including one I've been meaning to read for more than thirty years, the Nelson.
"Turn Off the Sky" appears to be the first professionally-published fiction of Ray Nelson (who has also signed his fiction R. Faraday Nelson), and first and so far I think only has appeared in the August, 1963, issue of F&SF, getting a pretty striking Ed Emshwiller cover illustration, and sharing cover-space with Asimov (the pop-science columnist for F&SF; he and editor Avram Davidson didn't get along very well; previous editor Robert Mills, who had asked Asimov to start the column, was referred to by Asimov ungrammatically as the Kindly Editor; typically, Davidson took this as a cue to refer to himself as the Cruelly Editor) and Heinlein (whose influence on Nelson in this story is strong, and whose not atypically flawed fantasy novel Glory Road saw the second of three parts of its serialization in this issue)(typically flawed in that it had started well and with typically pointed Heinleinian asides, about the Vietnam War and other matters, that helped ground it in reality, only to see those asides take over the story and remake it into a dull lecture about Heinlein's worldview, not too far along). Davidson mentions in his long headnote that he'd read the Nelson four years before, and had been looking for an opportunity to help it into print; Nelson was already a well-known or Big Name Fan, having been active as a cartoonist and writer for fanzines for some years, and credited as the inventor of the propeller beanie as the shorthand indicator of sf fannishness in those cartoons (this has since gone well beyond sf fandom to be a nearly universally-recognized mark of the enthusiastic geek in all sorts of geekish subcultural portrayal). Nelson was also already well-known in fandom for his sharp observation, and sophisticated take on matters both within and outside the subculture, and that's reflected in the story as well.

It's a very much Beat sf story, when there were relatively few such in evidence (William Burroughs was just beginning to publish his own within the several years previous, and Fritz Leiber, Damon Knight, Davidson, Heinlein and a few others, particularly Theodore Sturgeon, were first exploring the Beat subcultural tendencies, tentatively yet for more than mere outre background, as many of their peers had been doing); the influence of Jack Kerouac on the approach and the content is at least as strong as Heinlein's, even if Heinlein is name-checked at one point. In an affluent, post-scarcity social-democratic world state of the not terribly distant future, among an often shallow and conformist but influential bohemian fringe, a youngish African-American pacifist anarchist named Abelard Rosenburg interacts with greater or lesser degrees of disillusionment with his fellow bohos, and escapes from an increasingly hostile party (a "clean" musician was being forcibly introduced to opiates, with little Rosenburg could do to help him, in a stinging satire of countercultural peer pressure) and meets his dream woman, Reva, on the subway. Reva engages him intellectually, emotionally and sexually, but is too much a free spirit to choose to stick with Abelard initially; she vanishes after a day or so till a fortuitous reunion at a coffee shop, when she's in the company of a FSU (or "fuck shit up") pseudo-anarchist would-be terrorist who goes by Little Brother (whether this was further inspiration to Cory Doctorow's much later work is unknown to me); Little Brother, who admires Lenin and Trotsky (those murderers of anarchists and enemies of anarchism) more than anyone else, is all barely-contained id, and attacks Abelard, losing Reva to Abelard as a result. Reva and Abelard enjoy a bit of an idyll, but Little Brother isn't through with them yet.

A clever and mostly engaging tale, with indicators of Early Work apparent here and there (such later work as "Nightfall on the Dead Sea" was much more thoroughly assured, if also less ambitious), and worth the effort to procure the back-issue; not long after, F&SF would publish the Nelson vignette "Eight O'Clock in the Morning," which would much later serve as the basis for the rather less mordant film They Live!. I would've loved "Sky" that much more when I was thirteen, when the not altogether dissimilar John Varley novella "The Persistence of Vision" was blowing my doors off. Following the Nelson in the issue is a Calvin W. Demmon vignette, Demmon being another fannish writer who contributed mostly clever and disturbing vignettes to Davidson's F&SF and later fiction to Ted White's magazines, but is underappreciated; such similar writers as Samuel Delany and Chet Anderson and Richard Brautigan and Thomas Pynchon were just beginning to publish at about the same time, and the still-new Carol Emshwiller and Joanna Russ to begin to take on similar matter.

Time grows tight, so I will note for now that William Campbell Gault's "Deadly Beloved" is a Joe Puma story, wherein Puma is, typically, as quick with his fists when he needs to be and as attractive to women who are game as most of his peers in fictional private detection in the 1950s, but Gault never lets the tropes take over the story, nor force him to be less than verisimilitudinous; Puma knows better, as a former boxer, than to pick fistfights he's likely to lose, and is acutely aware that not every woman is actually attracted to him, even when some of them might pretend to be. The web of jealousy surrounding the murder of a mildly philandering unsuccessful actor (and all but gigolo) is reasonably well worked-out here, but the characterization of Puma and the other characters, even when they could just as easily be straight stock ciphers, is the biggest draw. I haven't yet checked if this Manhunt novelet (October, 1956) has been collected or anthologized, but Richard Moore is kind enough to remind us in comments that it's included in Bill Pronzini's collection of Gault short fiction, Marksman and Other Stories (Crippen and Landru).

Stuart Dybek's "Four Deuces" is the longest piece of fiction in the current issue, 13, of A Public Space, and I haven't quite finished it yet, but it's a fine example of Dybek's way with character and pacing, as well. Rosie, the owner and widow of the co-owner of the Chicago bar which shares its name with the story, gives an account to a customer of how the bar came to be, and her late husband's obsession with Rosie's apparent ability to pick winning horses, which led up to the bar's purchase; the story is all in the form of her side of the conversation.

All three stories are perhaps linked in my mind in part because of the diversity of ethnicities of the characters running through them; ameliorated tragedies (and love stories), all, too.

I first read Nelson with "Nightfall on the Dead Sea" (1978) and "Eight O'Clock in the Morning" (1963) in, respectively, new and back issues of F&SF in 1978.

I first read Gault with his pulp-magazine auto-racing short stories in anthologies and at least one of his YA baseball or basketball novels in the mid-1970s (sports fiction was his first love, and if there was anyone better at it, I don't know of them...though a few about as good).

I first read Dybek with "Horror Movie" in the first F&SF I ever actually saw, January 1976, which leads off with Joanna Russ's "My Boat."

For more of today's books (most of them, at least, books!), please see Patti Abbott's blog.
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