Friday's "Forgotten" Books: the links to reviews and more 9 February 2018

This week's books, unfairly (or sometimes fairly) neglected, or simply those the reviewers below think you might find of some interest (or, infrequently, you should be warned away from)--certainly, this week we have a few not at all forgotten titles. Patti Abbott will host again in three weeks.

Yvette Banek: Swan Song by Edmund Crispin

Bernadette: Breakheart Hill by Thomas Cook

Les Blatt: The House Without the Door by Elizabeth Daly

Elgin Bleecker: Art in America by Ron McLarty

Ben Boulden: Fallout by Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason

Brian Busby: Margaret Millar in translation (en français)

Martin Edwards: The Paddington Mystery by John Rhode

Peter Enfantino, Jack Seabrook and Jose Cruz: EC Comics, September 1954

Barry Ergang (hosted by Kevin Tipple): The Lost Get-Back Boogie by James Lee Burke

Will Errickson: Echoes from the Macabre by Daphne du Maurier 

Curtis Evans: By Hook or By Crook by "Emma Lathen" (Martha Henissart and Mary Jane Latsis)

Paul Fraser: Stirring Science Stories, March 1942, edited by Donald A. Wollheim 

Charles Gramlich: The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Short Stories by Leo Tolstoi

John Grant: Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin  (translated by Megan McDowell);  Death in the Garden by Elizabeth Ironside

Bev Hankins: The Pink Camellia by Temple Bailey

Don Herron: Prague Noir edited by Pavel Mandys and featuring “The Cabinet of Seven Pierced Books” by Petr Stančík...and Avram Davidson

Rich Horton: Time Bomb by Wilson Tucker

Jerry House: Shrine by James Herbert

Tracy K: Death in the Stocks by Georgette Heyer

Kate: The May Week Murders by Douglas G. Browne; Fire in the Thatch by E. C. R. Lorac

Colman Keane: The Shooting Gallery by Hugh C. Rae  and more Scottish crime fiction

George Kelley: The Best Science-Fiction Stories · 1949 edited by Everett E. Bleiler and T. E. Ditky

Joe Kenney: Taurus Four by Rena Vale

Margot Kinberg: Laura by Vera Caspary 

Rob Kitchin: Burial Rites by Hannah Kent

BV Lawson: Science and the Detective by Brian H. Kaye

D. F. Lewis: Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #61, edited by Stephen Theaker and John Greenwood

Evan Lewis: Flight to Darkness by Gil Brewer

Steve Lewis: Please Pass the Guilt by Rex Stout; "Vampire's Honeymoon" by Cornell Woolrich

Gideon Marcus: Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1963, edited by Frederik Pohl

Todd Mason: US science fiction magazines, Autumn 1978 (and crime fiction magazines and others)

Francis M. Nevins: Donald A. Yates, editor and translator of Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges and much more...  

James Nicoll: Report from Planet Midnight by Nalo Hopkinson

John F. Norris: Mix Me a Person by John Trevor Story

John O'Neill: The Exile Waiting by Vonda N. McIntyre

Matt Paust: And Be a Villain; The Second Confession; In the Best of Families by Rex Stout (inspired by Yvette Banek's review of Triple Zeck)

James Reasoner: The Black Ice Score by "Richard Stark" (Donald Westlake)

Gerard Saylor: Cogan's Trade (also published as Killing Me Softly) by George V. Higgins; Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes

Jack Seabrook: Oh, for the Life of a Writer's Wife by Elizabeth Brown

John Self: Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Doblin (translated by Michael Hofmann)

Steven Silver: "Always" by Karen Joy Fowler 

Kerrie Smith: 10 Short Stories You Must Read This Year edited by Sandra Yates

W. Royal Stokes: 140 or so recent Jazz, Blues and Related Books of interest
 
"TomCat": The Case of the Chinese Gong by Christopher Bush; Death of an OddFellow by Eric Wood

David Vineyard: "Werewolf" by "Max Brand"

 

Features a revised "Vampire's Honeymoon"

This week's list dedicated to the memory of Camilla Mason, whose 81st birthday today would be, and Niki Chang-Mason, a cat who was euthanized yesterday, after mostly doing well despite cancer till the last month or so, but cancer won. 

FFB: some entry points: THE COMPLETE [sic] HUMOROUS SKETCHES AND TALES OF MARK TWAIN edited by Charles Neider (Doubleday 1961); STORIES OF MARK TWAIN, recorded by Walter Brennan and Brandon de Wilde (Caedmon Records 1956); OFFICIAL GUIDE TO THE FANTASTICS/FANTASTIC LITERATURE by Michael Resnick (House of Collectibles 1976)

The HarperAudio omnibus re-issue. Possibly packaged first by 
Caedmon before they were bought out by HarperCollins.

Well, this week was going to be devoted to the last long fictions published by Joanna Russ and Michael Shaara, but reading about the frustrations of their later careers ended up squeezing out the rereading of the novellas in question...next week, perhaps, while I host FFB while the Abbott family gets ready for the run up, we can hope, to picking up a few Anthony Awards at Bouchercon in Toronto.

I first encountered Mark Twain in very adulterated form, I think...Sid and Marty Krofft offered a typically surreal serialized sequel to Twain's four notable Sawyer/Finn stories as a part of The Banana Splits tv series...and perhaps one or another of the televised film or tv adaptations of the actual Twain stories. But not long after I started reading anthologies, I started reading Twain, and one of the first big fat adult books I tackled was Charles Neider's remarkably foolishly titled Complete Humorous Sketches and Tales (R. Kent Rasmussen notes in his review of the Library of America volumes of Twain's short work, and their predecessors such as Neider's volumes including the sketch and story collection Mark Twain: Life as I Find It, also published in 1961: 'One wonders, incidentally, if Neider recognized the strangeness of calling his Humorous Sketches anthology "complete" while simultaneously issuing another volume [Life as I Find It] which contained sketches that the "Complete Sketches" lacked.'). Nonetheless, even given a similarly ponderous introduction, it was quite the Book of Gold:

Table of Contents: 

• Curing a cold 
• Aurelia's unfortunate young man 
• Info. for the million 
• Killing of Julius Caesar "Localized" 
• Lucretia Smith's soldier 
• George Washington's boyhood 
• Advice to little girls 
• "After" Jenkins 
• Answers to correspondents 
• Mr. Bloke's Item 
• From California almanac 
• Scriptural panoramist 
• Among the spirits 
• Sketch of George Washington 
• Complaint about correspondents 
• Re. chambermaids 
• Honored as a curiosity 
• About insurances 
• Literature in the dry diggings 
• Origin of illustrious men 
• The recent resignation 
• Washington's negro body-servant 
• Information wanted 
• My late senatorial secretaryship 
• Playbill 
• Back from "Yurrup" 
• Benton house 
• Fine old man 
• Guying the guides 
• Mental photographs 
• Beecher's farm 
• Turkish bath 
• George Fisher 
• Article 
• History repeats itself 
• John Chinaman in New York 
• Judge's "Spirited Woman" 
• Late Benjamin Franklin 
• Map of Paris 
• My bloody massacre 
• Mysterious visit 
• Note on "Petrified man" 
• Post-mortem poetry 
• Riley-Newspaper correspondent 
• Running for Governor 
• To raise poultry 
• Undertaker's chat 
• Widow's protest 
• Inspirations of "Two-year-olds" 
• About barbers 
• Burlesque biography.
• Danger of lying in bed 
• Fashion item 
• Interview with Artemus Ward 
• My first literary venture 
• New Beecher Church 
• King William III 
• "Blanketing" the Admiral 
• Deception 
• Genuine Mexican Plug 
• Great landslide case 
• How the author was sold in Newark 
• 110 tin whistles 
• Lionizing murderers 
• Markiss, King of Liars 
• Mr. Arkansas 
• Nevada Nabobs 
• What Hank said to
• Horace Greeley 
• When the buffalo climbed a tree 
• Curious pleasure excursion 
• Rogers 
• Speech 
• Poems by Twain & Moore 
• Encounter with an Interviewer 
• Johnny Greer 
• Jumping frog 
• Office bore 
• "Party cries" in Ireland 
• Petition re. copyright 
• Siamese twins 
• Speech at the Scottish banquet 
• Speech on accident insurance 
• Facts re. recent carnival of crime in Connecticut 
• Letter 
• Punch, brothers, punch 
• Notes of an idle excursion 
• Speech on the weather 
• Whittier birthday speech.
• About magnanimous-incident literature 
• O'Shah 
• Great revolution in Pitcairn 
• Speech: the babies 
• American in Europe 
• American party 
• Ascending the Riffelberg 
• Awful German language 
• Great French duel 
• King's encore 
• Laborious ant 
• My long crawl in the dark - Nicodemus Dodge 
• Skeleton for a Black Forest novel 
• Telephonic conversation 
• 2 works of art 
• Why Germans wear spectacles 
• Young Cholley Adams 
• Plymouth Rock & the Pilgrims 
• Re. the American language 
• Legend of Sagenfeld in Germany 
• On the decay of the art of lying 
• Paris notes.
• Art of inhumation 
• Keelboat talk & manners 
• Intro. "The new guide of the conversation in Portuguese & English" 
• Petition to the Queen of England 
• Majestic literary fossil 
• About all kinds of ships 
• Cure for the blues 
• Enemy conquered ... 
• Traveling with a Reformer 
• Private history of the "Jumping Frog" 
• Fenimore Cooper's literary offenses 
• Hell of a hotel at Maryborough 
• Indian crow 
• At the appetite cure 
• Austrian Edison keeping school again 
• From "London Times" of 1904 
• My first lie... 
• My boyhood dreams 
• Amended obituaries 
• Does the race of man love a Lord? 
• Instructions in art 
• Italian with grammar 
• Italian without a master 
• Petrified man 
• Dutch Nick massacre.

Some of the most famous items before this book was assembled were unsurprisingly among those which have stuck with me the longest, such as "Punch, Brothers, Punch" (my introduction to the notion of "buff" as a color), "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses", "Carnival of Crime in Connecticut" (where my family and I lived at the time) and of course the Jumping Frog, but no few others were more than fitfully amusing, even when they more thoroughly sent me scrambling to fill in data points (aside from what aide Neider provided in his notes). This one I borrowed (several times to get through it) from the Enfield library and not long after, at a yard sale, I picked up a battered copy of Neider's earlier The Complete Stories of Mark Twain (similarly misleading a title) and made my more leisurely way through that volume, as a fine complement to my reading the Sawyer/Finn/Jim stories and the single novels in the Signet Classic editions I gathered while still in elementary school...finishing most of his work in the summer before my 7th Grade matriculation into a new school in Londonderry, NH. The Enfield Central Library also had no few spoken word LPs for members to dig into, and one Caedmon item featured Brandon de Wilde narrating a couple/few chapters of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn on the flipside of Walter Brennan reading "Jumping Frog" and "Jim Baker's Bluejay Yarn"--this was one of the many I dubbed on cassette or open-reel tape and listened to repeatedly over the years...

One of the few times the HarperAudio package
is better than the Caedmon.

Here's Brennan reading "The Celebrated Jumping Frog"...which was released, despite the assertion of the WFMU blogger who posts the audio file, by Caedmon Records in 1956, the year before Brennan began his run with The Real McCoys television series.

And here's Brennan reading "Jim Baker's Bluejay Yarn" (from A Tramp Abroad, not "Tramps Abroad") and there's a weird little second-long glitch in this YT post recording that isn't present in this slightly scratchy WFMU post taken from a copy of the lp.

One development that came along with the relocation to New Hampshire was the discovery of how many interesting fiction magazines were still being published in 1978, and I gathered most of those I could find at a store in Derry called Book Corner, which also had a small alcove of remainders in the back, one of which was stray copy or so of this item (with one title on the cover and another on the title page), by a writer I hadn't previously encountered, before he was most likely to sign himself Mike Resnick, providing us with a price guide full of warnings that prices in this field were widely variable and extremely dependent on condition...but which, along with such other purchases as Brian Ash's The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, gave a vivid sense of the history of these fascinating magazines and their stablemates and fallen fellow-travelers over the years. Resnick also missed a trick or two, noting without explication that the great expense of the citation for The Ship That Sailed to Mars by William Timlin was no typo...no mention of the gorgeous artwork in the one published edition then extant being part of the allure. But it was useful and fun for a catalog,,,and I, not long after picking this book up for 50c, started collecting older back issues with a grab-bag from dealer and small-press publisher Gerry de la Ree at not Too much more per good-to-reading-copy items.

For somewhat less capsule, and perhaps less nostalgic, reviews of this week's books and more, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

Some illustration from The Ship That Sailed to Mars:

Some important horror fiction you can read online, at least at this time:

A few examples of the better horror fiction you can currently read online (no promises that any given item will still be posted tomorrow, but I'm avoiding the more obviously criminal sites on the web, or anything that demands that you download):


Fritz Leiber:
Conjure Wfie (original magazine publication)
"Smoke Ghost"
You're All Alone (original magazine edit)

Theodore Sturgeon:
"It"
"Shottle Bop"
"The Professor's Teddy Bear"

Damon Knight: 
"Special Delivery"

Robert Bloch:
"The Weird Tailor"
"The Man Who Collected Poe"
"Enoch"

Ray Bradbury:
"The October Game"

H. Russell Wakefield:
"Ghost Hunt" (if you were wondering about ancestors of The Blair Witch Project)

Saki:
Beasts and Super-Beasts (for a sample, try "Laura," the second story)

Ambrose Bierce:
Can Such Things Be?

and, for some Real Life Horror (aside from that included among the above):
William Saroyan:
"Seventy Thousand Assyrians"

(a few suggestions for Prashant Trikannad and others...more to be added soon)