Tony Baer: Recent Reads (a guest post): Anna Kavan, Ted Lewis, W.L. Heath, John Allen, Nat Turner, John Rechy, Eugene O'Neill, Carl Panzram, Agnes Smedley, Nelson Algren, Carlos Bulosan, Ralph Ellison

Ice, Anna Kavan.  A waifish, opiate-addled writer’s last breath:  a translucent bone thin blond heroine.  An obsessive pursuer, racing through a glacial earth, hallucinations and reality colliding like icebergs in a continental drift.  Sparse, terse prose, reporting a world to come.  Catch her if you can. 

GBH, Ted Lewis.  A drunken, booze guzzled writer’s last belch:  an alcoholic paranoid underworld kingpin, some underling in his outfit is screwing him.  How many kills and how much isolation til he peels down to the ugly core, exposing the rotting seed within. 
Only bummer is that unlike Kavan, Lewis lacks the courage of his convictions, going 3rd person omniscient after the kaleidoscopic downfall—just to make sure you got it, dear reader.  Wouldn’t want you left feeling as confused and wasted as your protagonist, would we?

Violent Saturday, W.L. Heath. So you’re reading Appointment in Samarra, or Tender is the Night, or maybe Revolutionary Road, and in the middle of it, and while the upper crust handsome couples self-immolate in wanton lust and plastered parties, some bank robbers come to town and blow everything to smithereens.  
I dug it.

Narrative of the Life of John Allen, alias Jonas Pierce, alias James H. York, alias Burley Grove, the Highwayman, Being His Death-bed Confession to the Warden of the Massachusetts State Prison (1837).  Short, surprisingly readable, unapologetic, plain language life story of a burglar.  It's surprising to see that people were actually able to write in fairly modern American English in 1837.  Mainly a series of stories recounting various crimes and time in prison.  Unfortunately, he died about 2/3 of the way through the story, so the end of the book is written in the 3rd person by the warden.  According to Wikipedia, and probably more interesting than any content in the book, is this factoid:  "The book is most often associated with the copy in the collection of the Boston Athenaeum. This copy was bound in the author's own skin, tradition holding that Allen requested that a copy of his confession be bound in his skin and given to John A. Fenno, who had earlier resisted Allen's attempt to rob him."

Confessions of Nat Turner (the 1831 version--not the Styron novel).  Again, fairly plain English, which is nice.  I was shocked how violent Nat Turner's Confession was.  God told him to start killing slaveholders, so he and his buddies started doing it--Manson style.  They axe-murdered entire families, men, women, children, even infants.  Not at all apologetic, and not particularly abolitionist.  Nat Turner says his own master and family were fairly kind to him--so it wasn't retribution.  Nat Turner was a very religious man, memorized large chunks of the Bible, never took a drink, never gambled, never cursed, never engaged in sexual improprieties, and was revered by the other slaves who knew him as a kind of a prophet who thought he was on some apocalyptic mission from God.

City of Night, John Rechy (1963).  Semi-autobiographical story of a hustler, raised (razed) in El Paso, then onto New York, LA, Hollywood, San Fran, Chicago and finally to Mardi Gras in New Orleans.  Definitely gives you the feeling for the life of a hustler in mid-century America, and all of the strange encounters of street life.  Has the ring of truth.

Long Day's Journey Into Night, Eugene O'Neill.  You know what's odd is the passive-aggressiveness of the upper class when compared to the pure violence of the lower depths in the prior 3 books mentioned above.  Yes, the characters are all tearing each other apart.  But if you translated it in into another language, I bet the violence wouldn't register with the reader at all.  They're all drinking and syringing themselves to death, yes, but the proximate cause of all the pain is the guilt they thrust at each other like rapiers to the gut.

Panzram Papers by Carl Panzram:  The short memoir of a serial killer written right before execution in 1930.  Remarkable document.  Clean, simple, hardboiled prose.  Events flatly described without remorse and without pride.  No desire for either reprieve or profit.  No belief in redemption in this world or the next.  He made a gift of the memoir to a death-row guard he'd grown to like.  The guard, trying to find a publisher for years, finally got it published in 1970.  Read on Kindle:  $2.99 on Amazon

Daughter of Earth, Agnes Smedley.  1929, semi-autobiographical novel of a poor Missouri farmer's daughter.  But this daughter is a freaking firebrand.  She is not going to accept a mediocre life if she can help it.  And she ain't gonna be dominated by shit.  This is the story of a born rebel who tries to bull her way through all the world's oppressive forces to become free.  No prison can cage her spirit.   Her only novel.  And pouring your soul into something like this, you doubt she had anything much left to say on the subject of her life.  [TM: she did write some short fiction, and nonfiction for The Masses and elsewhere]

Somebody in Boots, Nelson Algren.  1935.  Semi-autobiography of a road kid, part time hobo, part time pimp, small time criminal, full time loser, wandering around aimlessly across America after his father murders the guy that took his job and his sister converts the family home to her personal brothel.  After the book failed to sell, Algren tried to gas himself.  When that failed, he reinvented himself with the much less convincing (IMHO) but much better loved Never Come Morning.  Algren rewrote the book in the '60s using '60s hipster prose as Walk on the Wild Side, from which Lou Reed made a song (with some Warholian Factory flourishes).    

America is in the Heart, Carlos Bulosan.  1946.  Semi-autobiographical novel about a poor Philippine farmer's kid chasing after the American dream, travelling across the sea, finally to arrive at Alaskan canneries and migrant labor camps.  Trying to avoid the life of crime of his brother, a cheap crook, he shifts back and forth between shiftlessness and decency.  Inspired by his buddy John Fante, he writes down the story of his life.  

Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison. 1952. Despite a long life, Ellison only finished this one novel--another semi-autobiographical one.  And reading it, it's pretty easy to see that he, like Smedley, probably said all he had to say.  He grew up believing all the bullshit.  That if he'd be a good boy he could pull himself up by his bootstraps and make something of himself.  He was a really good orator.  He was recognized in high school for it.  And was to be given a medal and scholarship by the mayor at a town hall.  So he showed up to give his speech about being a good boy and lifting yourself by your bootstraps.  But the mayor said 'Oh, first things first, boy--first you gotta have a boxing match with 5 other black boys'.  So the white drunken crowd threw them all but naked into the ring and wanted the black boys tear each other to pieces, which they did, the winner getting a $10 bill.  Afterwards, he gives his speech on black and white unity to which no one listens.  He then goes to Howard University, where he works really hard to be a good boy.  He's so good that the chancellor chooses him to chauffeur around a big fat old white donor.  The donor orders him around.  He wants to see the real townfolk.  So on the white dude's orders they stop by the house of the town pariah who tells the donor his story of how he mistakenly impregnated his daughter one drunken evening.  The donor is equal parts appalled and titillated and really needs a drink.  So demands to be driven to the closest watering hole which happens to be the town whorehouse.  For showing the donor the reality of the town, he's expelled by the chancellor.  He heads to NYC, where the Commies pretend to befriend him in order use his oratory to cause Harlem riots, which they think might spearhead a revolution.  Now everyone hates him.  The Commies, the Black community, his family, the university.  He is nothing.  He is an invisible man.  

Reprinted from the Rara-Avis discussion with Tony's kind permission...

Crime Faction: Fiction based on real crimes; as compiled by Georgine Olson

Two omissions come immediately to mind: The Price of Silence by Kate Wilhelm and The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum. But an impressive list.--TM

Crime Faction: 

Fiction based on real crimes

Bury Me Deep by Megan E.  Abbott – based on Winnie Ruth Judd (aka the Trunk Murderess)

The Song is You by Megan E. Abbott- based on 1949 disappearance of actress Jean Spangler, linked to the Black Dahlia killings

To Cut a Long Story Short by Jeffrey Archer - fourteen stories, many of which are based on incidents recounted to the author in his travels throughout the world

Devil's Garden by Ace Atkins - San Francisco, 1921; silent-film actor Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle is arrested for murder after a wild party ends in the death of starlet Virginia Rappe

White Shadow by Ace Atkins - based on the Charlie Wall murder case in 1955 Tampa, Florida

Wicked City by Ace Atkins - The murder of a crime-busting attorney in 1954 in Phenix City, Alabama, spurs the community to stand up against the underworld empire that ruled the city

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood - Canadian housemaid murders her employer and his mistress in 1843.

Arthur & George by Julian Barnes – George Edalji, an English lawyer of Indian descent, asks Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for help following his unjust conviction for mutilating horses. 

13 1/2 by Nevada Barr - partially based on the true account of a young boy who killed his entire family with an ax in Rochester, Minnesota

Nemesis: the final case of Eliot Ness:  a novel by William Bernhardt – based on the Cleveland Torso murders

Legion by William Peter Blatty – a sequel to The Exorcist about an apparent copycat killer copying the long-deceased Gemini Killer (based on the real Zodiac Killer)

Psycho by Robert Bloch - loosely based on the early reporting about the discovery of Ed Gein's victims 

The Wettest County in the World: a novel based on a true story by Matt Bondurant - based on the author’s bootlegging relatives and events in the hollows of western Virginia in the mid-1930s

Crippen: a novel of murder by John Boyne - based on the 1910 transatlantic pursuit of Dr. Hawley Crippen for the murder and brutal dismemberment of his wife, Cora.

The Frightened Man by Kenneth M. Cameron— based on Jack the Ripper history

In Cold Blood: a True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences by Truman Capote - the story of the mass murder of a farmer, his wife, and their two children is considered to be the origin of the non-fiction novel. (HV 6533 .K3 .C3)

True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey - historically based story of outlaw Ned Kelly and his contentious Irish clan

The Alienist by Caleb Carr - police New York police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt uses  a psychological profile of the criminal to help identify a brutal killer before he strikes again.

The Man Who Was Thursday: a nightmare by G.K. Chesterton — published in 1908,“Thursday” is Lucian Gregory, an anarchistic poet in London 

Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie- based on the Lindbergh kidnapping case

George & Rue by George Elliott Clarke – based on the 1949 murder of a taxi driver in New Brunswick, Canada, by Clarke's first cousins

Kings of the Earth by Jon Clinch - modeled after the three Ward brothers from upstate New York who work their farm and mind their own business, until one is suspected of fratricide.

Max Allan Collins's Nathan Heller series investigates famous cases:

True Detective - the fatal shooting of Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak, who was chatting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the time

Stolen Away – the Lindbergh baby kidnapping

Carnal Hours –Canadian millionaire Harry Oakes is murdered and his son-in-law is arrested

Blood and thunder - events leading to the assassination of Louisiana’s Huey Long 

Damned in Paradise –Clarence Darrow’s 1931 defense of a group of men in Hawaii accused of killing a man thought to have been a rapist

Flying Blind - Amelia Earhart begins receiving threatening letters.

Majic Man - retiring Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, thinks someone is out to get him

Angel in Black - the notorious Black Dahlia homicide where victim, Elizabeth Short, is a young woman whom Heller had known in Chicago

Chicago Confidential - In 1950, a congressional investigation into organized crime sparks an all-out mob war that claims the life of Heller’s partner

Bye Bye, Baby - Marilyn Monroe receives threatening phone calls from a movie studio 

Target Lancer - a favor for a friend leads to the murder of a Mafia contact, leading to a conspiracy to assassinate JFK

Dying in the Post-War World  - short stories about murders in '30s, '40s, and '50s Chicago.

Kisses of Death  – several cases including the murder of actress Thelma Todd and the suspicious death of Eddie Gaedel (the only midget to play major-league baseball).

All That Remains by Patricia Cornwell - loosely based on the Parkway Murders in Williamsburg.

The House of Lost Souls by F.G. Cottam — hangs on group of Satanists, including real-life novelist Dennis Wheatley and occultist Aleister Crowley involved in child sacrifice in 1930’s

The Great Train Robbery - Michael Crichton - the story of the Great Gold Robbery of 1855, a massive gold heist on a train traveling through England 

Fred and Edie by Jill Dawson - based on the Thompson-Bywaters murder case in which Edith Thompson’s affair with Frederick Bywaters is cut short when Fred fatally stabs Edith's husband

The Devil Himself by Eric Dezenhal - explains the role Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano, and other mobsters played in ridding New York harbor of spies and preparing for the invasion of Sicily

Goodnight, Sweet Prince by David Dickinson — a tale of blackmail and murder among the royals late in Victoria's reign when the dissolute Prince of Wales’ equally dissolute son is murdered

Room by Emma Donoghue - was inspired by the story of an Austrian man who fathered seven children with his daughter and kept her and three of her children in a secret basement room

An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser -based on the Chester Gillette-Grace Brown murder case set in the Adirondacks in the early 1900s 

Another City, Not My Own: a novel in the form of a memoir by Dominick Dunne - a fictional rendering of the O.J. Simpson trial, based on the author's inside coverage of the case 

A Season in Purgatory by Dominick Dunne – inspired by the 1975 murder of Martha Moxley, for which Michael Skakel, the nephew of Ethel Skakel Kennedy, eventually was convicted. 

The Two Mrs. Grenvilles by Dominick Dunne - based on the Woodward murder case of 1955 in which wealthy Billy Woodward was shot to death by his wife in the "Shooting of the Century"

The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy - story of the 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short (“Black Dahlia”), wannabe starlet, who makes headlines after she is found gruesomely murdered 

Lizzie Borden by Elizabeth Engstrom - novelization of the Fall River murders

Night Watch by Linda Fairstein - loosely based on the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair in which the former director of the World Bank is accused by a hotel chamber-maid of attempted rape.

The Geographer's Library by Jon Fasman – based on a 12^th century theft involving the arcane work of Al Idrisi, a Muslim geographer, cartographer, and Egyptologist living in Sicily

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald - based on NJ's Hall-Mills 1922 murder case involving an Episcopal priest and a member of his choir with whom he was having an affair 

A Model Crime: a true fiction by Curtis Gathje - based on a triple murder in 1937 Manhattan

Q is for Quarry by Sue Grafton - based on an actual unsolved murder case, a Jane Doe murder from the 1960's where the body was dumped in a quarry.

Hard Twisted by C. Joseph Greaves - a young girl is forced by a charismatic drifter to participate in a crime spree that ends in the notorious Greenville "skeleton murder" trial of 1935.

The Yard by Alex Grecian — filled with fascinating period detail and real historical figures, this showcases the depravity of late Victorian London and the advent of criminology

Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris –the serial killer is based on six real serial killers 

Jazz Bird by Craig Holden - bootlegger, George Remus, kills his socialite wife, once known as the Jazz Bird, in Cincinnati on October 6, 1927 – why; what happened to $80 million?

31 Bond Street by Ellen Horan - draws on primary sources to re-create the murder of Dr. Harvey Burdell in mid-1800s New York and the trial of Burdell's widowed household manager

Loving Frank by Nancy Horan - about Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Cheney's love affair, but it does include an account of the murders of seven adults and children by a handyman in 1914

Lizzie by Evan Hunter - novelization of the Fall River murders

The Successor by Ismail Kadare- based on true-life events follows the events surrounding the death of Mehmet Shehu, a hand-picked successor to hated ailing Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha

Burial Rites by Hannah Kent – based on the story of a young country maid accused, in 1829, of the murder of her former employer in Iceland. 

The Constant Gardener by John le Carre – this angry novel is loosely based on a real case involving Pfizer's testing of a meningitis drug on Nigerian children 

Compulsion by Meyer Levin - narrates in graphic detail the circumstances surrounding the crime committed by two troubled college students in Chicago- Leopold and Loeb

What the Dead Know by Laura Lippman - loosely based on the disappearance of two sisters from a mall in the 1970s

The Silence of Our Friends by Mark Long – two families - one black, one white - cross Houston’s color line to clear five black college students charged with murdering a policeman in 1968 (GL)

The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer - based on the case of murderer Gary Gilmore, who insisted on dying for his crime of robbing and killing two men 

To Die For by Joyce Maynard - based on the sensational case of Pamela Smart, a weatherwoman who seduces a teenager and convinces him to murder her in-the-way-of fame husband. 

The Ballad of Tom Dooley by Sharyn McCrumb - reimagines the events surrounding the murder of a North Carolina mountain girl and the hanging of her lover, Tom Dula

The Devil Amongst the Lawyers by Sharyn McCrumb -based a sensationalized 1934 trial involving an Appalachian Virginia teacher's alleged murder of her tyrant father

The Ballad of Frankie Silver by Sharyn McCrumb - based on a crime from the 1830's; 18-year-old Frances "Frankie" Silver was convicted of murdering her husband and cutting him into pieces.

Place of Execution by Val McDermid - two children disappear from the streets of Manchester in 1963; the murderous careers of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady have begun (the Moors Murders)

Book of Lies by Brad Meltzer - about the unsolved murder of Jerry Siegel's father when Siegel was a child and how that might have affected his later creation of Superman

The White City by Alec Michod - based on the Mudgett/Holmes "murder castle" at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Sutton by J.R. Moehringer - based on the life of the famous bank robber, Willie Sutton

Yummy: the last days of a Southside Shorty by Greg Neri - story of an 11-year old Chicago African American gang member who shot a young girl and was then shot by his own gang

Calumet City by Charlie Newton - highly decorated Chicago cop, Patti Black, finds herself implicated in a series of seemingly unrelated crimes in a tale based on real-life events

Black Water by Joyce Carol Oates - based loosely on the Chappaquiddick incident that involved longtime U. S. Senator Ted Kennedy. 

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates - very loosely based on Jeffrey Dahmer and his predation.

Tokyo Year Zero by David Peace – based on a real-life serial-killer case in post-WWII Japan

Quiet Dell by Jayne Anne Phillips – based on the crimes of a real con man, a 1930’s Chicago woman journalist investigates the deaths of a woman and her three children.

Cottonwood by Scott Philips – set in a Kansas town that was home to the Bloody Benders with a plot that includes actual crimes and trials of the 1870s and 1880s 

The Longings of Women by Marge Piercy – the story of Becky, one of the three main women in the book, parallels that of Pamela Smart, accused of conspiring to murder her husband in 1990

The Mystery of Marie Rogêt by Edgar Allan Poe – a short story known for being one of the first mysteries based on a real murder (of a New York cigar girl) and for using Holmes-like logic.

The Pieces from Berlin by Michael Pye - based on a real-life historical figure, a woman who made a fortune dealing in stolen art in wartime Berlin.

Possession by Ann Rule - a fictionalized account of the "Bagby Hot Springs" camper murders that happened a long time ago

Miss Lizzie by Walter Satterthwait – a young girl becomes friends with her elderly neighbor, Lizzie Borden, who was acquitted in the 1892 ax murders of her father and stepmother

A Twist at the End: a novel of O. Henry by Steven Saylor – crimes of the "The Servant Girl Annihilator" who roamed the streets of Austin, Texas a century ago impact a famous author

Tell Me Your Dreams by Sidney Sheldon - based on actual events, three beautiful young women become the prime suspects in a series of brutal killings 

The Weight of Water by Anita Shreve - a photographer is to take photos of an island off the coast of New Hampshire, home to an immigrant family involved in an 1873 ax murder

Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey - Richard III and the princes in the Tower

The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey - a 1940s take on the “kidnapping” of Elizabeth Canning in 1753

Two for Sorrow by Nicola Upson – based on the crimes of Amelia Sach and Annie Walters, who killed infants born of baby farming and were executed in London in 1903

The Benson Murder Case by S.S. van Dine - based on the murder of Joseph Elwell in 1920

Mafia Summer: the ballad of Sydney Butcher by E. Duke Vincent - based loosely on events from his own life in the summer of 1950 at the dawn of a new age of organized crime in the U.S.

Outside Valentine by Liza Ward - based on the murders committed by Charles Starkweather in Nebraska and Wyoming in the 1950s; Ward's grandparents were two of Starkweather's victims

Candle of the Wicked by Manly Wade Wellman - novelizes the events leading up to the discovery of the Bender killings.

The Garden 0f Martyrs by Michael C. White - based on actual events from 1806, traces the arrests and executions of two innocent Irish immigrants who are falsely accused of murder.

The Italian Boy by Sarah Wise —based on the story of three men arrested in London in 1831 for attempting to sell the suspiciously fresh cadaver of a teenage boy to a medical college

Dream of Ding Village by Lianke Yan – story of the impoverished village targeted by a blood-selling operation and the catastrophic outbreak of AIDS that decimated the community.

Georgine Olson, for FNSB Libraries

With much assistance from Fiction_L subscribers and the NoveList database

April 30, 2013

Dennis Lien notes on 5 November 2016 via email:

Belated addition:

I've been listening to the run of the old time radio show THE BLACK
MUSEUM, where Orson Welles introduces narrations of British murder
cases, most of them fairly famous.  In looking at the Wikipedia entry
for the OTR show

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Museum

I found that it has a list of the real cases which inspired the radio
episodes (which generally chnaged names of participants but kept
fairly close to details of the crimes).  Most of said cases cited
there have links to their own Wikipedia articles, and the individual
ones I looked at as of special interest to me in turn had listings on
their own sites of fiction inspired by the murders.  Somewhat to my
surprise there doesn't seem to be an "overarching" Wikipedia article
for "fiction inspired by famous murder cases," but by looking these up
individually you should be able to retrieve a large number of
suggestions -- at least for pre-1950 British cases. . .

For instance, the entry for the Florence Maybrick case offers these:

Fiction inspired by the case

Ackroyd, Peter. Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994).
Berkeley, Anthony. The Wychford Poisoning Case (1926).
Edwards, Martin. The Case of the Choleric Cotton Broker (2015).
Fessenden, Laura Dayton. Bonnie Mackirby (1898).
Lowndes, Mrs. Belloc. Letty Lynton (1931).
Lowndes, Mrs. Belloc. Story of Ivy (1928).
Purdy, Brandy. The Ripper's Wife (2014).
Sayers, Dorothy L. Strong Poison (1930).
Shearing, Joseph. Airing in a Closed Carriage (1943).


Dennis Lien

FFB: CRIMES AND CHAOS by Avram Davidson (Regency 1962); GATEWAYS TO FOREVER: THE STORY OF THE SCIENCE-FICTION [AND FANTASY FICTION] MAGAZINES FROM 1970 TO 1980 by Mike Ashley (Liverpool University Press 2006)

A considerable augmentation to a contents list at Goodreads; all the previously published work (with uniformly fiddled-with titles) had been published in one of Fawcett's men's sweat magazines (probably mostly if not all in True, one of the industry leaders), but it's significant that rather than a Fawcett original, this was published by Regency, the paperback arm of the same publishing folks who had started with sf/fantasy magazines (notably Imagination and Imaginative Tales) and eventually gave them up in favor of concentrating on Rogue, one of the better Playboy imitators of the '50s and '60s...and in the '60s made their way from Chicago to Los Angeles and started the Greenleaf line of porn novels and nonfiction work that raised the ire of the Nixon Admin, leading among other things to editor Earl Kemp's imprisonment on ridiculous charges...an obscenity, though not on the part of Earl. It probably didn't help, for the purposes of taking the manuscript from one office at Fawcett to another, that Davidson once had burnt a hole in Fawcett Books editor Knox Burger's suit with careless cigaret handling; this during a conference in which Davidson and Harlan Ellison nonetheless did manage to sell Burger on a proposed crime-fiction novel, still unfinished and much loathed by Ellison, with a working title of Speak Not of Rope (this data from the memoirs around the Davidson/Ellison collaboration "Up Christopher to Madness" in the collection of Ellison collaborations, Partners in Wonder); Ellison was editing Regency Books at the time this was put together (hence, in part, the slogan on their titles "Regency Books Mean Controversy"); among the projects hanging fire when Ellison was replaced by publisher William Hamling (Ellison's friend Algis Budrys was brought in, and the upshot of the hassle alienated Ellison from Budrys and Kemp for decades) was an anthology of new fiction with Controversial themes, to be edited by Judith Merril...this of course was the seed of Ellison's 1967 Doubleday anthology Dangerous Visions, and perhaps also partially sparked Merril (and certainly to interest publisher Doubleday in encouraging her) to eventually supplement her adventurous Year's Best SF annuals (for Dell/Delacorte) with England Swings SF (1968; reprints, but most of the contents not previously published in the US).

7 - A Rain of Burning Girls (originally published as "The Day It Rained Burning Girls") 1961 (about the Triangle Shirt-Waist Co. fire--the PBS American Experience documentary about this horror will be repeated in February)
23 - The Furniture Fellow ("The King of the U.S.A.") 1959 (Al Capone)
49 - Midwife to Murder ("The Riddle of Jack the Ripper") 1960 (guess who?)
64 - The Forgotten Soldier ("Greatest Soldier in the AEF") 1960 (Samuel Woodfill)
77 - The Death of the Henry Clay ("Death Duel of the River Kings") 1959 (steamboat racing accident)
90 - Beer like Water (Yonkers' Prohibition sewer mystery) --no previous publication information cited
106 - The Men who Killed the Brigade ("The Day the Light Brigade Died") 1961 (Charge of the Light Brigade)
124 - Little René ("The Man Who Killed Devil's Island") 1959 (A decade before Papillon, which was not about René Belbenoit)
141 - The Last Excursion (the sinking of the General Slocum) --no previous publication information cited

Davidson, as Algis Budrys noted in his review of AD's Masters of the Maze for Galaxy magazine (see the Budrys collection Benchmarks: Galaxy Bookshelf) was famous among his puzzled colleagues for taking the initiative to rather extensively and sometime relatively expensively research his historical articles for the likes of True, which often didn't worry about how true a contribution was if it was sufficiently hairy-chested (albeit True was less prone to this than almost all its competitors, they celebrated considerably of late...the Fawcett magazine not actually averse to, and editors such as Ken Purdy were apparently appreciative of, Davidson's efforts).  The essays as presented in this book have been revised for collection, though perhaps that mostly means the editorial cuts and rewrites to make them more like the typical run of the magazines' contents have been excised, the cut material re-added. Davidson didn't write as personally, for obvious reasons, in this work as he would in much if not most of his fiction, or the later Borgesian essay/fictions of Adventures in Unhistory. But these works are elegantly and compellingly told, and pain can be felt, the humor where appropriate or needed in place; I've been meaning to read this book for decades, and finally got around to buying it online, and picked it up at the end of a very long day and made the mistake of starting the Triangle essay...there was no stopping till I finished it in the very small hours. Davidson's sorrow and rage are still very alive as he recounted the incident (even if the endless use of "girls" to refer to women does sound strange to me now...though I wonder how many of the younger women were actually girls, it seems as if not too many), and the quiet stress (in both senses) in noting that the NYU building next to the still-extant building which had housed Triangle, to that turn of the 1960s day, continued to have insufficient fire-emergency egress. It remains insane that this is the only non-chapbook of Davidson nonfiction published either during his life or since...and this one never, as far as I know, reprinted after the death of Regency (the end of the romance...).

Mike Ashley, for his part, has been editing anthologies and researching the histories of fiction magazines (even if he does here try to lump in fantasy magazines under the rubric of sf) to a greater extent than nearly anyone, for the last four decades and more...his multivolume enlarged and upgraded account of the development of fantastic-fiction magazines over the last century has managed to recomplicate and grow ever larger (even as he attempts to throw in only the most important and pertinent of related developments, which leads to a few slight but understandable distortions at the edges...for example, he assumes that the Warren magazines (notably Creepy, Eerie, Vampirella, but also Help!, Famous Monsters of Filmland, Spacemen, etc.)  were the first to publish horror comics again after the Comics Code was created in the mid 1950s...that honor actually goes to Dell, of all publishers, which never joined the Code Authority because their comics were so obviously wholesome (and perhaps because George Delacorte didn't enjoy being bullied by the Archie Comics folks), but who saw an empty market niche when it was glaring and began publishing relatively clever horror comics in 1962--though Dell wouldn't become too terribly relevant to Ashley's subject matter at hand till after the sale of the Davis Publications fiction titles to their old paperback partners at Dell in 1992...Dell had been publishing Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine best-of anthologies for decades, and now published the magazine Davis had bought in the mid '70s, after a disastrous gamble on a Sylvia Porter consumer-affairs title nearly bankrupted Davis, leading to the liquidation of his firm. Though before finally beginning to read my copy of this fourth volume in what is currently projected to be a five-volume series (for now!), I didn't know all of what put Universal Publishing and Distributing in such a tailspin in the mid 1970s...a mixture of selling, too hastily, their real moneymakers Ski and Golf magazines and taking on the sinking ship of an upscale lifestyle magazine of which they had only had partial ownership before...this led, in large part, to the shuttering of If magazine and the subsequent slow slide into folding for Galaxy magazine, despite editor James Baen managing to pump new life into the magazines, and gaining contributors ranging from Joanna Russ to Isaac Asimov to Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle for the magazines, again or for the first time. The '70s, as this blog repeatedly demonstrates, was the decade in which I grew passionate about fiction magazines, so you know I'm the audience for this book...and if you have to wonder what might actually interest someone less invested than myself, be aware that the cover painting used by Ashley here was originally painted by Frank Kelly Freas (who also painted the Astounding cover used, in slightly altered form, by the rock band Queen for their News of the World album cover, the one most folks remember) for a story by George R. R. Martin, who's gained some readership in the last few. Ashley finds himself dealing with OMNI and the other pop-science and non-pop magazines adding some fiction into their mixes, gaming magazines, Heavy Metal and to some extent other comics magazines, and the efflorescence of anthologies of first-publication fiction...and writes in a breezy and enthusiastic style that incorporates his footnotes well, and has only occasionally been typo'd by his university press compositors.  Worth the look for anyone even casually interested in best single source we have on this corner of the culture, and the extensions outward...hell, Ben Bova and Ted White, after spending the decade doing mostly good and better things at, respectively, Analog, and Fantastic and Amazing, walked away at decade's end...only to find themselves editing at OMNI and Heavy Metal, respectively, shortly thereafter, at hefty raises in pay and level of support...and reaching, if less immediately in a sense, much larger audiences...

For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.