Sunday, December 12, 2021

FFB: THE 1965 ANNUALS of fiction and drama, further augmented...some more...

The Best American Short Stories 1965  edited by Martha Foley and David Burnett 
The 10th Annual of the Year’s Best S-F  edited by Judith Merril 
Best Detective Stories of the Year, 20th Annual Collection edited by Anthony Boucher 
World's Best Science Fiction: 1965 edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr 
Prize Stories 1965: The O. Henry Awards edited by Richard Poirier and William Abrahams 
The Best Plays of 1964-1965 
edited by Otis L. Guernsey, Jr.
The Great SF Stories: 1964 edited by Robert Silverberg and Martin H. Greenberg (2001)
The Best American Plays, Sixth Series: 1963-1967 edited by John Gassner and Clive Barnes (1971)
Coast to Coast: Australian Short Stories of Today 1963-1964 edited by Leonie Kramer (1965)

In 1965, the five best of the year fiction annuals (imagine a time where only five such series existed, one new that year, albeit a sixth was issued biennially in Australia, even then) were facing some number magic: the 50th 
annual Best American Short Stories (there was also a 50th anniversary Best of the Series); the 20th annual Year's Best Detective  Stories; the 10th volume of Judith Merril's annual (the only series still being edited by its founder, aside from the new one), the first as noted from Donald Wollheim and Terry Carr; and the 45th volume of The O. Henry Awards (which lost a few volumes after the then-current editor in 1951 died unexpectedly, and Doubleday was clearly considering discontinuing the series, before eventually continuing several years later). There's number magic in regards to these volumes now, as well: they were fifty years old the year I first attempted this survey (and there was the "Century of BASS" volume in 2015 along with the annual series entry); and for me there's a personal number magic, inasmuch as the stories collected in these volumes were mostly first published in the year I first emerged into the world, too: 1964. (The
O. Henry book, as they did in those years, collects stories first published from June 1963 to June '64, and the Coast to Coast series was devised to draw from the two previous years in each volume; the other volumes include  a few stragglers, as well, with various excuses employed.) The Foley and the Merril saw both hardcover and paperback editions; the other four prose compilations saw only one edition each (the first Ace annual didn't get a book club edition, as later volumes would; the Boucher and Poirier/Abrahams possibly did get book-club hardcovers, but no paperbacks; the publishers  of Coast to Coast had a London office and presses to go with theirs in Sydney and Melbourne; my copy of the UK edition set one back 26 shillings in '65).  I'd just become fully aware of the Aussie series, which began in the 1940s and ran at least into the '70s; as far as I know (in December, 2021), there were no British nor other Anglophone annuals nor biannuals being published in 1965 (nor later, drawing explicitly on 1964 publications from multiple sources) but Oz's books should've come to my full attention earlier!  It's notable how the intentionally eclectic fiction anthologies will restrict themselves to writers from the US (O. Henry), North America (BASS), Australia (Coast to Coast); the other fiction anthologies attempt to be international, if not too surprisingly and rather slightly so, in most cases. 

John Brunner is represented in three volumes, with the same short story. A number of the playwrights are represented by the same play between the two drama volumes. Dennis Lynds has a story in each of the Best Detective and the BASS volumes, John D. MacDonald one each in the Merril S-F (a hot-rod youth v. cops/elders horror story from Cosmopolitan) and the Best Detective, Joseph Nesvaba has different stories from his Vampires, Ltd. in both the Merril and the Wollheim/Carr SF volumes; Fritz Leiber and Thomas Disch have two stories each in the speculative fiction annuals. Joyce Carol Oates has stories, different ones, in both O. Henry and BASS; Isaac Bashevis Singer has different stories, one each, in the Foley and the Merril. Peter Beagle is in the O. Henry with what I believe to be his third published short story (two of them followed his first novel, A Fine and Private Place), the impressive and straightforward fantasy "Come Lady Death", from an issue of The Atlantic.

More important measures, than the blown opportunity to write these up in detail on their golden anniversary (things were in some ways Even More trying, at least for me, in 2015, than they have been for the human species as a default of late), come to mind...these were, as all art and commerce is, products of their time, and their time was one of a number of  emerging forces in the arts and culture...newly energized liberation movements hadn't quite come to full strength, so that the remarkable lack of women contributors in comparison to the men, even in the annuals edited by women, would be a lot less likely to happen today (and certainly more would be made of it); ethnic and other diversity also only starting to be felt...the contemporary-mimetic short fiction anthologies are less imbalanced than the others, where two feature no contributions by women at all, but none are indicative of an equal access to the fields being surveyed. And the barriers between "high" and "low" and Dwight Macdonald's "midcult" culture, never terribly robust, were crumbling in every way, as is positively indicated by the contents here, albeit it did mean that slight work is as likely to be showcased along with the more lasting--as in previous volumes in these series or the later volumes...just perhaps in later volumes with a slightly less gleeful sense of artificial restrictions being breached in both the magazines and other sources (very much including theaters, obviously) consulted and the range of sources being consulted by each of the sets of editors. Abrahams, particularly, in his introduction to the O. Henry volume, can almost be heard to be shaking his head in wonder at how fiction writers do not attempt to change their tone nor approach when writing for Partisan Review or The Ladies Home Journal...perhaps, unfortunately, part of what led the publishers to eventually see fiction as dispensable in the large-circulation magazines. 


Meanwhile, the fiction annuals, which had had as accompaniment a humor annual for three volumes at the turn of the 1950s, and would soon after 1965 see the advent of Best Magazine Article and Best Political Cartoon annuals in the US, did have a yearbook cousin in The Best Plays annual, which underwent its own major change in 1965, when founding editor Burns Mantle was succeeded by Owen Guernsey, who would edit or co-edit the series for some decades. My memory of looking at some of the 1970s volumes was hazier than I thought, as I'd remembered the volumes reprinting the entirety of the selected plays, when actually they instead featured synopses of and excerpts from the scripts, with the first-time exception in the 1965 volume (the 48th), perhaps because of a book contract elsewhere for Neil Simon, of an extensive photo sequence instead, representing The Odd Couple...with Art Carney playing Felix along with Walter Matthau as Oscar. 

Then I finally stumbled across the not-quite-annual volume, edited by John Gassner in its early issues, which with its delayed 1963-67 volume did collect the notable plays of 1964 and thereabouts in their entirety...a book delayed by Gassner's death, as he was preparing the final selections, and finally published in 1971, with new editor Clive Barnes's headnotes, introductions, and tweaking of the content for purposes of both representation and lack of reprint rights availability (and Barnes's not always flattering descriptions of the items included and those which got away are refreshingly earnest, if not always supportive of the notion of a Best-Of so much as Representation-Of anthology). Barnes would continue with even more widely-spaced volumes into the next decades.

Fuller reviews of these books will be forthcoming soon (or so I hoped at mid-decade), as I get further along in each (I'm reading or rereading each more or less together, and these are not slender volumes!), and I had hoped, when first posting this in 2015, to present an interview with Kit Reed (who died in 2017), among much else the author of the lead-off story in the Merril volume, "Automatic Tiger"...perhaps the story which got her the most early attention in fantasy and sf circles (and her career was one rather gracefully devoted to fantastic fiction, crime fiction and contemporary-mimetic fiction in nearly equal measure).  Meanwhile, along with introducing/presenting the only image online I'm aware of the Best Plays volume's cover (with a gracious assist from Alice Chang)(my copy deaccessioned from a Belfast, Eire public library, of all places), I will at least provide some preliminary indices...and perhaps even a few more comments over the course of the day.  (I will note that Flannery O'Connor's lead-off story in the O. Henry volume, "Revelation," was offered the "first prize" in this volume, I suspect, more as memorial for her than as measured judgement of this story, not, I'd suggest, one of the best she'd published, though solid work.)

Indices below; for more of today's books, almost all more thoroughly considered, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

Indices courtesy William Contento/Galactic Central
and WorldCat with a few corrections and added bells and whistles (and ghosts of layout imports into ever-clunky Blogspot).






And, in 2001, a latecomer chose to join this company, in the form of Robert Silverberg and Martin H. Greenberg's one-volume continuation of the Great SF Stories series Greenberg had been editing with Isaac Asimov...the last Asimov volume, finished up as Asimov lay dying, also treated with stories from the year 1963, meant to be the last in that series from DAW Books since DAW's own first annual, the World's Best SF cited above, began in '65 choosing among 1964 publication. But Silverberg, Greenberg and NESFA Press were all game, and gave a revival a shot...apparently to little response, critically or commercially, in the wake of the 11 September attacks and whatever else drew attention away.  Eppur si muove. 

    • 1 · Center of Gravity · L. J. Amster · nv The Saturday Evening Post Mar 14 1964
    • 45 · The Returning · Daniel De Paola · ss Prairie Schooner Spr 1964
    • 57 · The Transient · Stanley Elkin · nv The Saturday Evening Post Apr 25 1964
    • 93 · Opening Day · Jack Gilchrist · ss Georgia Review Spr 1964, as by John Shafter
    • 99 · The Gesture · James W. Groshong · ss The Antioch Review Sum 1964
    • 113 · Sarah · Martin J. Hamer · ss Atlantic Monthly Jan 1964
    • 125 · Sherry · Maureen Howard · nv The Hudson Review Aut 1964
    • 167 · A Family Man · Donald Hutter · ss The Saturday Evening Post Feb 22 1964
    • 187 · The Month of His Birthday · Henia Karmel-Wolfe · ss Mademoiselle Dec 1964
    • 199 · Heart of Gold · Mary Lavin · nv The New Yorker Jun 27 1964
    • 223 · A Blue Blonde in the Sky Over Pennsylvania · Dennis Lynds · ss The Hudson Review Spr 1964
    • 241 · The Guest · Frederic Morton · ss The Hudson Review Win 1964
    • 251 · The Application · Jay Neugeboren · ss Transatlantic Review Oct 1964
    • 259 · First Views of the Enemy · Joyce Carol Oates · ss Prairie Schooner Spr 1964
    • 271 · The Practice of an Art · Leonard Wallace Robinson · ss The Saturday Evening Post Sep 5 1964
    • 283 · A Sacrifice · Isaac Bashevis Singer · ss Harper’s Feb 1964
    • 291 · Eskimo Pies · Robert Somerlott · ss Atlantic Monthly Jan 1964
    • 299 · The Visit · Elizabeth Spencer · ss Prairie Schooner Sum 1964
    • 313 · The Tea Time of Stouthearted Ladies · Jean Stafford · ss The Kenyon Review Win 1964
    • 325 · For I Have Wept · Gerald Stein · ss The Saturday Evening Post Jan 4-11 1964
    • 345 · There · Peter Taylor · nv The Kenyon Review Win 1964
    • 371 · The Last Right · Lee Yu-Hwa · ss The Literary Review Sum 1964
    • 385 · Biographical Notes · [Misc.] · bg
    • 393 · The Yearbook of the American Short Story, January 1 to December 31, 1964 · [Misc.] · bi

Best Detective Stories of the Year: 20th Annual Collection

Editor:Anthony Boucher
Publisher:New York : E.P. Dutton & Co., 1965.
Contents:
9 Introduction/Anthony Boucher
13 H as in Homicide / Lawrence Treat 
(ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Mar 1964

31 Routine Investigation / Robert Twohy (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Apr 1964
39 No Way Out / Dennis Lynds (ss) Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine Feb 1964 
55 Payoff / Ellery Queen (ss) Cavalier Aug 1964, as “Crime Syndicate Payoff”
61 Temple by the River / Leon Comber (ss) The Strange Cases of Magistrate Pao, Charles E. Tuttle 1964; Short Story International Aug 1978
75 Return of Schlock Homes / Robert L Fish (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Jun 1964
89 Short and Simple Annals / Dan J. Marlowe (ss) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine Aug 1964
103 The Ingenious Mind of Mr. Rigby Lacksome / Ernest Bramah (ss) Max Carrados Mysteries (Hodder and Stoughton, London 1927)
135 Credit to Shakespeare / Julian Symons (ss) Murder! Murder!, Fontana 1961, as “Credit to William Shakespeare”; Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Nov 1964
145 A Soliloquy in Tongues / William Wiser (ss) Cosmopolitan May 1964
159 Papa Tral's Harvest / Barry Perowne (nv) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Mar 1964
183 Blurred View / John D. MacDonald (ss) This Week Feb 23 1964
189 Reunion / Edward D. Hoch (ss) The Saint Mystery Magazine December 1964
219 Violet / Hal Ellson (ss) Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine May 1964
233 A Case for the UN / Miriam Allen deFord (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Jul 1964
245 Legacy of Office / Rog Phillips (ss) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine Jun 1964
259 The Yearbook of the Detective Story / Anthony Boucher:
259 Bibliography
262 Awards
264 Necrology
267 Honor Roll
Description:271 pages ; 21 cm

Prize Stories 1965 : The O. Henry Awards

Editors:Richard Poirier; William Miller Abrahams
Publisher:Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday & Co., 1965.

ix Introduction / by William Abrahams --
1  Revelation / Flannery O'Connor (ss), The Sewanee Review, Spring 1964
21  Ocean / Sanford Friedman (nv) Partisan Review, Winter 1964
53  The Ballad of Jesse Neighbours / William Humphrey (ss) Esquire September 1963
73  Homecoming / Tom Mayer (ss) Harper’s Magazine August 1963
81  Mama and the Spy / Eva Manoff (ss) Mademoiselle August 1963
93  Sunday's Children / Nancy A.J. Potter (ss) Four Quarters, November 1963
103  Margins / Donald Barthelme (ss) The New Yorker, February 22 1963
109  If Lost Return to the Swiss Arms / Leon Rooke The Carolina Quarterly Winter 1963
115   There / Peter Taylor nv The Kenyon Review Winter 1964
149  Come Lady Death / Peter S. Beagle (ss) The Atlantic Monthly September 1963
165  First Views of the Enemy / Joyce Carol Oates (ss) Prairie Schooner Spring 1964
177  Fifty-Fifty / Leonard Wolf  (ss)  The Kenyon Review Autumn 1963
189  Sucker / Carson McCullers  (ss)  The Saturday Evening Post September 28 1963
199  Love in the Winter / Daniel Curley (ss)  The Colorado Quarterly Winter 1964
213  A Woman of Her Age / Jack Ludwig  (ss)  The Quarterly Review of Literature Vol. 12
233  What I Wish (Oh, I Wish) I Had Said / Arthur Cavanaugh (ss) McCall’s August 1963
249  The Hounds of Summer / Mary McCarthy (ss) The New Yorker 14 September 1963
287  Chaos, Disorder and the Late Show / Warren Miller (ss) The Saturday Evening Post October 5 1963
Description:xii, 295 pages ; 22 cm.
The World’s Best Science Fiction: 1965 ed. 

Donald A. Wollheim & Terry Carr, editors (Ace G-551, 1965, 50¢, 288pp, pb)

7 · Introduction · Donald A. Wollheim & Terry Carr · in
12 · Greenplace · Tom Purdom · ss F&SF Nov 1964
26 · Men of Good Will · Ben Bova & Myron R. Lewis · ss Galaxy Jun 1964
32 · Bill for Delivery [Al & Sam] · Christopher Anvil · ss Analog Nov 1964
53 · Four Brands of Impossible · Norman Kagan · nv F&SF Sep 1964
86 · A Niche in Time · William F. Temple · ss Analog May 1964
103 · Sea Wrack · Edward Jesby · nv F&SF May 1964
123 · For Every Action · C. C. MacApp · ss Amazing May 1964
131 · Vampires Ltd. · Josef Nesvadba; trans. by Iris Urwin · ss Vampires Ltd., New York: A. Vanous 1964
142 · The Last Lonely Man · John Brunner · ss New Worlds May/Jun 1964
160 · The Star Party · Robert Lory · ss F&SF Sep 1964
169 · The Weather in the Underworld · Colin Free · ss Squire Jun 1965
178 · Oh, to Be a Blobel! · Philip K. Dick · ss Galaxy Feb 1964
199 · The Unremembered · Edward Mackin · ss New Worlds Mar 1964
211 · What Happened to Sergeant Masuro? · Harry Mulisch; trans. by Roy Edwards · nv The Busy Bee Review: New Writing from the Netherlands No.1 1964
235 · Now Is Forever · Thomas M. Disch · ss Amazing Mar 1964
252 · The Competitors · Jack B. Lawson · nv If Jan 1964
279 · When the Change-Winds Blow [Change War] · Fritz Leiber · ss F&SF Aug 1964

The Great SF Stories: 1964 
ed. Robert Silverberg & Martin H. Greenberg (NESFA Press 1-886778-21-3, Jan 2002, $25.00, 395pp, hc, cover by Eddie Jones). 
Anthology of 15 stories first published in 1964, a continuation of the series originally edited by Isaac Asimov and Greenberg. Authors include Norman Spinrad, Poul Anderson, and John Brunner. Foreword and introduction by Silverberg, who discusses why he decided to do the anthology, and the state of the US and science fiction in 1964. Order from NESFA Press, PO Box 809, Framingham MA 01701; [www.nesfapress.com].

The Best Plays of 1964-65

Editor:Otis L Guernsey
Publisher:New York : Dodd Mead, ©1965.

434 pages : illustrations by Al Hirschfeld ; 24 cm.


contents:

photo essay: The Odd Couple by Neil Simon
excerpts:
Frank D. Gilroy, The Subject was Roses--
Joseph Stein, Fiddler on the Roof--
Friedrich Duerrenmatt, The Physicists--
Murray Schisgal, Luv--
Jean Anouilh, Poor Bitos--
William Hanley, Slow Dance on the Killing Ground--
Arthur Miller, Incident at Vichy--
LeRoi Jones, The Toilet--
Edward Albee, Tiny Alice.


Best American Plays: Sixth Series, 1963-1967 




John Gassner; 
Clive Barnes, editors

New York : Crown Publishers, 1971

Description:xii, 594 pages ; 24 cm
Contents:

Tiny Alice / Edward Albee --
Blues for Mister Charlie / James Baldwin --
The Last Analysis / Saul Bellow --
Hogan's Goat / William Alfred --
The Fantasticks / Tom Jones --
The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window / Lorraine Hansberry --
The Lion in Winter / James Goldman --
Hughie / Eugene O'Neill --
The Toilet / LeRoi Jones --
You Know I Can't Hear You When the Water's Running / Robert Anderson --
Benito Cereno / Robert Lowell --
Fiddler on the Roof / Joseph Stein --
Slow Dance on the Killing Ground / William Hanley --
In White America / Martin B. Duberman --
The Owl and the Pussycat / Bill Manhoff --
The Odd Couple / Neil Simon --
The Subject was Roses / Frank D. Gilroy.
Responsibility:
edited by John Gassner and Clive Barnes;
with an introduction and prefaces to the plays by Clive Barnes.


Coast to Coast: Australian Stories of Today 1963-1964 

edited by Leonie Kramer (Angus & Robertson 1965)

1 * Boy in a Ford * Hugh Atkinson (ss) ** (apparently original to this volume)
7 * Journey to Olympus * Thea Astley (ss) **
15 * The Tractor * Peter Cowan (ss) Meanjin Quarterly January 1964; 
Short Story International #7, April 1978
28 * Impasse * Bary Dowling  (ss)  **
45 * The Widow * Thelma Forshaw (ss) The Literary Review Winter 1963-64: Australia number
51
* Boy at Play * G. M. Glaskin 
(ss) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine January 1964
65 * The Silent Woman * Esme A. Gollschewsky (ss) Meanjin Quarterly March 1963
74 * Remora * T.A.G. Hungerford 
(ss) The Literary Review Winter 1963-64: Australia number
82 * Mr. Morris * Gwen Kelly (ss) Southerly December 1963
87 * In the Manner of a Champion * Brian McPhee (ss) ** (reprinted in The Bulletin, 23-30 December 1966)
95 * Every Man Has His Price * David Martin (ss) 20th Century: An Australian Quarterly Review [seeking issue date, apparently 1964]
103 * Bushfire * John Morrison (ss) Overland [issue date tbd]
114 * The Madame * Bobby Nelson (ss) **
120 * The Odds * Heinz Nonweiller (ss) **
134 * Doctor Deju * Desmond O'Grady (ss) ** (possibly first published 1961?)
147 * Uncle Fred's Christmas * John O'Grady (ss) The Bulletin 17 September 1958; 
Argosy (UK) January 1967
153 * Gretel * Hal Porter (ss) The Literary Review Winter 1963-64: Australia number
166 * A Really Splendid Evening * Lesley Rowlands (ss) **
174 * The Miracle * A.E. Sturges (ss) Quadrant Autumn 1963; 
Short Story International #20, June 1980
181 * The Game * R. Thomson (ss) **
184 * Pill, Etc. * Margaret Trist (ss) **
191 * The Eye Stopper * M.G. Vincent 
(ss) The Literary Review Winter 1963-64: Australia number
203 * Mr. Forster's Christmas party * Peter Ward 
(ss) The Literary Review Winter 1963-64: Australia number
215 * Sunday-School Picnic * H.H. Wilson 
(ss) The Literary Review Winter 1963-64: Australia number
 

Originally posted in revised form   --Many added bits and pieces since then!

novels by Dorothy B. Hughes, Barry N. Malzberg, Murray Morgan, P. J. Wolfson: Tony Baer: Short Reviews from the Rara-Avis hardboiled/noir discussion list



Fire, Barry N. Malzberg (Stark House)

Coleman is on the front lines in Vietnam, on a 3-day leave, dreaming of his fiancé, can only remember the feel of flesh from the slap of a foot and an arm of comrades blown up by bombs.  Needing discharge of one kind, he gets the other, caught screwing a prostitute snuck into camp, he’s sentenced to 60 days in the stateside stockade and given his discharge.

He comes home, feeling otherworldly.  Tunnel-visioned, drunk, incapable of discharge.  He fiancée dumps him, impugning his virility.  

“[H]e was not a person anymore, but merely an abstraction, a figure, perhaps, in a collection of grotesque cartoons he was thumbing through.  Or worse than that, he was a memory”.  

He heads for NYC, and works at a dildo factory.  He cannot feel real, and he can’t consummate anything.  Hooking up with a coworker's horrible, ugly friend at a porno theater, even she slaps him and calls him a piece of shit. 

So he quits his job, goes on a drunk, and falls in love with a Harlem prostitute.  All he has to do is beat Iceberg Slim in a knife fight and she’s his for the taking. 

Very entertaining book—and as Barry mentions in the afterword, perhaps the first book to present a protagonist with PTSD.




Three by Dorothy B. Hughes:
The Expendable Man:  A young black LA doctor drives to Phoenix for his sister’s wedding.  On the way he sees a white trash teen runaway hitchhiking on the desert highway between LA and Phoenix.  He has a mixture of pity, paternal concern for her safety, and racial paranoia for the judgment he expects to come from racist onlookers envying a black man driving a white teen girl around in a white caddy convertible in 50’s Arizona.

Suffice it to say you’re not paranoid if they really are out to get you.  And they are.  In full fucking force.

Ride the Pink Horse: A senator’s fixer (Sailor) gets shafted after helping kill the senator’s wife for the insurance money.  He’s still owed a grand for the kill—enough to stake him in Mexico. But the sen’s not returning his calls.  Sailor catches up with the sen at fiesta in small town New Mexico.  Fireworks ensue.  

In a Lonely Place
:  The book and film are both great. But aside from title, character names and setting they are pretty much completely unrelated. Dix (Dickson Steele) is equal parts Tom Ripley, Ted Bundy and Lou Ford. He’s a serial killer from the title page on. He’s a nobody. He’s a fake. He’s a homicidal maniac whose quivering fingers can only be quelled in the supple squelch of strangulation.  





The Viewless Winds, Murray Morgan (1949)

A horny old drifter accidentally kills a lumber-union leader’s wife in an attempted rape in the Pacific Northwest. The rest of the book shows the perverted machinations of a lumber baron leveraging a corrupt sheriff into pinning the murder on the bereaved labor leader—whilst union officials try to pin the murder on the lumber baron’s cronies. Fascinating even-handed assessment of the interplay of small town politics, slanted journalism, corporate towns, unions and law enforcement.  A fictionalized account of the murder of Laura Law in Aberdeen, Washington in 1940.  I enjoyed it quite a bit.  Another one from James Sandoe’s hardboiled checklist.



Bodies Are Dust
(aka Hell Cop),

P.J. Wolfson, as reviewed by the Paperback Warrior blog

You know, I appreciate the fact that the "Paperback Warrior" blog exists.  It's by far the most active hardboiled crime blog going these days that I'm aware of.  So for that, I'm glad.  And I'm glad that someone is bringing attention to these frequently neglected writers. 

Unfortunately I find their reviews to be quite sloppy, with little historical context, unverified and frequently mistaken publishing history, and never any quotations from the books reviewed.  The book reviews are pretty much of 3 types:  Amazing, Pretty Good, and Terrible.  All books can apparently be categorized into these 3 types of books.  And one 'amazing'/'pretty good'/'terrible' review is fairly interchangeable with any other, as there are very few distinguishing details set forth.    

Their review of Bodies are Dust is symptomatic of the malaise.  It has been years since I read the book on the fervent recommendation of Al Guthrie both in this listserv's archives, on his 200 noirs list, and in interviews.  I ordered the book on eBay for somewhere around $15, which to me is a lot of money to spend on an old ratty reading-copy of a paperback that dissipates, all but turns to dust as you flip each page.  Especially since I could only afford the Hell Cop-retitled reprint.

In any case, the book has stuck with me.  One of the amazing things about early hardboiled/noir/ crime fiction books is their absolute uniqueness and unpredictability.  These protagonists of ambiguous morality were fairly unprecedented.  And the main character's pathological desire for everything within his orbit makes King David's seduction of Bathsheba look tame.  And the justice here is meted out by karma alone.  Not some avenging angel but by justice itself.  And it's heartbreaking.  The man is destroyed.  But not by his own actions.  He's destroyed because he deserves it.                



Wednesday, November 17, 2021

Short Story Wednesdays: Wilma Shore stories (a redux review): stories from THE NEW YORKER, STORY, F&SF, GALAXY, COSMOPOLITAN, SATURDAY EVENING POST and more...


On Wilma Shore on Sweet Freedom.

Wilma Shore: 

The following four short stories (and a very brief "casual") can be read online, but behind a paywall, at The New Yorker Online:

80 * The Curving Road (ss) The New Yorker, June 12, 1948

26 *  and * The New Yorker, December 4, 1948: 
The Talk of the Town: "West Coast Intelligence: A nursery school has opened in Los Angeles, called the Tot-orium." * jk/cl




and...free of charge...

80 * Dress from Bergdorf’s (Shore's preferred title: "All Sales Final" --see the review of her collection Women Should Be Allowed here) (ss) Cosmopolitan Jun 1959, which can be read online here

May Your Days Be Merry and Bright, (ss) The Saturday Evening Post Dec 21/28 1963 (which can be read online here)

A Bulletin from the Trustees of the Institute for Advanced Research at Marmouth, Mass., (ss) The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction Aug 1964 (which can be read online here)
The Podiatrist’s Tale, (ss) The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction Apr 1977 (which can be read online here)
...and some nonfiction, from The Writer's Handbook, 1974 edition (online here) "The Hand is Quicker Than the I" (Shore on the uses of first-person narrative form, among an appropriately star-studded cast in the how-to essay anthology.)

Encouraging the reading of Wilma Shore's frequently brilliant fiction (among other writing) is an ongoing concern of this blog, and in the pursuit of that goal, I finally purchased a discounted six week subscription trial to The New Yorker (50% discount code, courtesy of Jackie Kashian's podcast The Dork Forest, is "DORK") so as to allow me online access to the four TNY stories grouped above, while also refreshing my memory of the two latter-day The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction stories (I can only assume that Edward Ferman at F&SF was offered the viciously unnerving "Goodbye, Amanda Jean" but for whatever foolish reason didn't accept it, so that it appeared in Ejler Jakobsson's Galaxy instead). 

"The Butcher" (in Story magazine in 1940) was Shore's second published story, but the first one she liked, as did the editor of Best Stories annual (soon to become, and remain today, The Best American Short Stories series), which demonstrates the early and continuing concern Shore had with the constrictions of traditional roles on men and particularly women; her idealistic and very competent young office worker is as certain she's ready to be an ideal wife as she is an utterly competent and conscientious stenographer, for all practical purposes the only profession a woman can expect to have in New York City in 1940 aside from teaching school. But, somehow, even with an appreciative and reasonably sensitive husband...domestic work at home isn't quite what she hoped it might be. And she couldn't tell you why. As the daughter of an accomplished writer, who dropped out of a California high school to study painting in France and be praised as a budding genius in that field by Gertrude Stein's brother, and then putting aside painting to be the wife of a failing actor, and mother of their child while still very young...one can see where the story might have some autobiographical resonance. 

Eight years later, when the first of Shore's New Yorker stories is published, she has a firmer grip on her tools, can work in the disparities of class as well as the hemming in of sexual assignments in detailing a reunion between a young woman and her former family maid, once a friend as well as servant, now far enough removed from her former ward's life that the latter, also, can't quite put her finger on why their last encounter feels hollow in comparison to their easy interaction when the elder woman worked for the young woman's family...at least not at the time, but, as the former Miss looks back on it a few more years later, she understands better. 
"The Ostrich Farm" deals with family dynamics of a rather more heated sort, as a boundary-free mother and her overdependent daughter don't realize there's any other way to act in regard to each other and their respective husbands. This one, and the two later stories sold to Harold Ross's magazine, are notable compared to Shore's women's and little/radical magazine stories in the degree to which the men are far more in the foreground of the stories...for TNY is about Important Matters, the kind that feature Men, doncha know, in these early but still pretty influential issues of the magazine, where the at times apparently bumptious Ross could express utter confusion in most dealings with women (his successor in the chair would famously hide from everyone). 

But "The Moon Belongs to Everyone", while written from the viewpoint of a male protagonist, still manages to have a gentler if no less wrenching emotional underpinning, where it's less the assignment of roles by society that can be constricting so much as those driven by tragedy...as when a young family, with an infant and a boy on the cusp of adolescence, loses their wife and mother suddenly. And the sense of compromises acquiesced to in the face of tragedy and need, and difficulties in fully overcoming those challenges, taking their toll. 

And by "Lock, Stock and Barrel", the wry sense of humor Shore brings to her best work is in full flower, while no less deftly drawing the predicament of the man who can't quite understand how or why his marriage has failed, and how he tries to come to grips with that fact...or, perhaps more accurately, tries very hard not to. 

These are all good stories, if not quite up to those Shore would collect from her slightly later writing for Women Should Be Allowed, her only published collection...and presumably one delivered to her book publisher about the same time as she contributed to Avram Davidson's Fantasy & Science Fiction "A Bulletin from the Trustees...", her first overt sf story, or at very least her first story for the speculative fiction magazines, and discussed in the earlier posts. Following the savage satire of "Goodbye, Amanda Jean", "Is It the End of the World?" is only a bit less (obviously) apocalyptic, dealing as it does with environmental (mostly atmospheric) degradation so profound that it might well kill us all at any time during the events of the story, but that doesn't mean that the small power-struggles and mutual dependences of family life are any less distracting from that greater danger, and how people will tolerate and adapt to almost any threat in the face of the "need" to simply get to where they want to meet, for one small purpose or another, and on time.

And while "Amanda Jean" and "End" certainly could qualify this post for consideration as entries in the February is Women in Horror Fiction Month observations, "The Podiatrist's Tale", a grimly amusing ghost story, helps clinch the deal...this might not be the last short story Shore published, but I'm not yet aware of another after 1977, and it deals with how the vicissitudes of aging might not be relieved even after death...

Even as we lost another writer not too unlike Wilma Shore in her sensitivity, craft, insight and wit, and bubbling-under influence, Carol Emshwiller, this past Saturday at age 97, with her daughter Susan and son Peter/"Stoney" announcing the fact on Tuesday. Emshwiller, who also had a not to too dissimilar life from Shore's beyond their literary work in some ways, not least in terms of engagement with the community of the avant garde in several artforms, followed such other recently-lost peers as Ursula Le Guin, Kit Reed, Grania Davis and Kate Wilhelm...and inasmuch as I attempted to write up her brilliant first collection Joy in Our Cause a few years back while staying in a hotel in Barre, Vermont, with wonky computer access and there to attend the memorial service for one of the last of my aunts, my father's sister Shirley, it might be past time for a better try. For Emshwiller, too, is perhaps not fully appreciated enough for what she contributed, sometimes obliquely, to modern horror, as well...while writing primarily surreal or satirical or metafictional work, in the modes of contemporary/mimetic fiction, science fiction and fantasy, and even in two innovative western novels.

Please see Patti Abbott's blog for more of today's reviews.