FFB: THE CRIME OF OUR LIVES by Lawrence Block (Lawrence Block, 2015 hardcover)

Lawrence Block is a friendly acquaintance. I've mostly avoided reviewing the work of friends and close acquaintances, for much the same sort of reasons Block gives here for usually not writing about his living friends...you don't want to leave anyone out (at least for praise), you don't want to strain relations by not actually loving their (creative) children, nor do you want to damn something, necessarily subjectively, that the next reader might reasonably love. He has produced this collection of his columns in Mystery Scene magazine and introductions to books (while the title essay was an assignment from American Heritage magazine), most of the books collections by the writer-subjects of the short essays, and most of those dead writers Block admired and continues to admire. Ed Gorman, a "virtual" friend to me and that and more to not a few who might read this, being one of the notable exceptions to the long line of dead men (and a few women) otherwise celebrated here (Mary Higgins Clark, Spider Robinson and Gar Anthony Haywood are the only other living writers to get their own entries in the table of contents). But reluctance and perhaps even a bit of bashfulness will out...he has a running joke throughout the Gorman piece about keeping a tally of how many words he's already put down in the essay, very much including the toting-up sentences, as he's been asked for a thousand words.

Block, I gather, isn't Too impressed with his work in this mode, even while often glad to do it, whether to pay back and forward simultaneously, or also to help work out or express a few ideas about the writing life (he notes his Haywood introduction is also a rumination on the place of short fiction in publishing these years).  Unsurprisingly, the longest essay in the book is about one of his closest friends, Donald Westlake; the next longest, after the title-essay which deals with several writers, is Block's memoir of working at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, at midcentury hugely influential, particularly on crime fiction publishing in the U.S. and important beyond that, and employing not a few young writers (such as Block, Westlake, Evan Hunter and others) for such tasks as "reading fee" criticism of would-be professional writers' manuscripts, sent in to SMLA with the required fee; the standard operating procedure, set by Meredith himself, was to string the aspiring writers along and get as much repeat business out of them as possible. (The book is dedicated to Barry Malzberg, a slightly younger veteran of SMLA in various positions, including his current one of basically serving as the legatee of SMLA's remaining business.) A few details of Block's career differ from essay to essay here (not so very much, but the timeline of his first sale of a short story to Manhunt magazine is retold slightly differently in two accounts); in his concluding short essay, which touches heavily on the career of William Campbell Gault, Block  conflates a Damon Knight assessment of Gault's more or less adult sports pulp stories and his later series of YA sports novels...as good as the YA novels were, the pulp stories were better, because somewhat less self-censored (oddly enough, I read several of them in 1960s and '70s anthologies aimed at YA readers...but Gault had made a major name for himself as a YA novelist by then). 

Block, having self-published the hardcover and paperback editions of this book along with the electronic form, has a few minor copy-editing bobbles here and there (there's a typo in the page numbers in the table of contents), and one does have to consult the headnotes to each piece to find the previous publication credits (no individual copyrights page), but these are not reasons to not consider picking this one up...and Block is liquidating his stash of the hardcover at Amazon.com while supplies last, $9.99 a throw (Amazon Prime members get shipping for free; the paperback edition, which will remain available, currently runs $14.99; though the electronic version runs a little less than five bucks and will also continue to be offered). 

For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog...I will host the links next Friday.

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.