Friday's Forgotten Books, Friday, July 28, 2008

Kevin Guilfoile is the author of Cast of Shadows and Wicker.

The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester

I first heard of Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination when I moved to Chicago and found a sci-fi bookstore near my apartment that had taken its name from the title. Bester is best known as the winner of the first Hugo Award in 1953 for his futuristic police procedural The Demolished Man. Although I considered myself fairly well-read in science fiction (a notion that would be exposed as delusional after a few weeks living around the corner from this store)

I had never heard of The Stars My Destination. The story is too weird and complicated to describe here. It's a revenge tale that is, on some level, a retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo. But the thing I remember most about reading it for the first time is how familiar so much of it seemed. The ideas in this novel I'd never heard of seemed to have influenced almost every science fiction novel I'd ever read. And it is a novel thick with ideas. From the moment the victimized and bitter protagonist is introduced (Gully Foyle is his name.

Gully Foyle! Guilfoile! I could hardly believe it!) I was riveted. One of the most memorable devices in the story is the concept of "jaunting," a newly
discovered capability of all human beings to teleport themselves. I became obsessed with the idea that every person had within him a latent superpower and that, once the secret was discovered, nearly anyone could learn to do it. It was a powerful atomic metaphor in the fifties, and it is no less powerful in the era of nuclear proliferation. The Stars My Destination is not a book that has been forgotten by science fiction fans. Indeed, many

think it's one of the great sci-fi novels ever written. But I don't know anyone who doesn't read widely within the genre who has even heard of it. Perhaps this is unsurprising. The casual dabbler in sci-fi might find Bester too fantastic for their tastes. (Even that awesome Belmont Avenue bookstore, The Stars Our Destination, is sadly gone now.) But if readers had any clue how many of the ideas in this book had, well, proliferated throughout twentieth-century fiction--both on the page and on the screen--they might have a lot more respect for it.

Ed Lynskey is the author of Pelham Fell Here and The Blue Cheer

A Feast of Snakes by Harry Crews.

Back in 1976 when the USA was agog over the Bicentennial hoopla (the bumper stickers were plastered everywhere), a Georgia author named Harry Crews published a lean, savage noir titled A Feast of Snakes. I don’t know if it’s forgotten or not. I do know I haven’t forgotten it some twenty-five years after reading it for the first time.

The premise is simple enough. Every year rural Mystic, Georgia, sponsors a big rattlesnake rodeo. Everybody comes. It’s a free pass for the locals and tourists to go nuts over a wild weekend. Ex-high school gridiron star Joe Lon Mackey is the semi-literate, brutal protagonist.

But Joe Lon is no altar boy. Wifebeating, bootlegging, and hazing are his tamer pastimes. His hulking daddy trains prized pit bulls to compete in the local dogfights. His sister is mentally challenged, watching TV all day in her room. The local sheriff is a Viet vet with personal issues and demons. Joe Lon has a total meltdown right before your eyes. The ultra-violence crashing in makes little sense to him, but he feels powerless to slow or stop it. Or does he?

My take on all this is a biting satire on the American competition ethic (as I’ve written elsewhere). But there’s no shot for redemption in Mystic. Murder and mayhem drips off each page with castration, rape, and assorted horrors. As a matter of fact, the pit bulls and rattlesnakes soon look better than the primitive human crazies. Fortunately well-timed doses of genuine humor -- as always in the best of noirs -- leavens the dark-hearted stuff.

I see from Amazon that A Feast of Snakes was reprinted in 1998, and copies are available for less than four bucks. I also checked my local library system and find four copies of the original hardback are still in the fiction stacks. So, the title is somewhat available. A Feast of Snakes has to rank among the best fiction Mr. Crews has yet produced.

Craig McDonald is the author of Head Games and Toros & Torsos

Death Will Have Your Eyes by James Sallis

Death Will Have Your Eyes appeared in the summer of 1997 from St. Martin’s.

The novel debuted about the same time as Sallis’ Eye of the Cricket — arguably the finest of the novels in Sallis’ Lew Griffin cycle that is for me the high-water mark of crime fiction series and the works that most influenced my own published novels to-date.

Death Will Have Your Eyes, a spy novel like no other, is in some ways a mirror image of Cricket. In both books, rare men in search of another man venture out into the world, seeming to trust the gravity of their persona and movement into the world will draw their quarry to them. James Joyce’s eerie "Nighttown" sequence from Ulysses informs both novels.

What we get in Death is part road novel, part existential meditation and part bloodbath.

Along the way, both Death and Eye force radical reconsiderations of “fiction” and our relationship as readers to the characters living within the novels we savor.

In Death Will Have Your Eyes narrator/spy David Edwards reflects, "One thing I knew absolutely was that the stories we live by are as real as anything else is. As long as we live by them. Even when we know they’re lies."

One of the most obscure of Sallis’ novels, and, along with Renderings, perhaps the most interior of his fictional works, Death Will Have Your Eyes is, with Drive, one of the few of Sallis’ novels to be optioned for film.

"For three years I got these really nice checks in the mail for not doing anything," Sallis told me when I discussed the book with him a few years ago. “The guy who made ‘The Avengers’ film was in London and when the book came out there were piles of it in the bookstores. He saw it and thought, ‘I’m making this spy film and here’s another one.’ So it was optioned for three years. The option money for each year was more than I got for the hardback, so it was welcome.”

One has to wonder what that filmmaker was thinking. Although Sallis says he was inspired by pulp fiction, the Death Will reads deep…and seems rather a challenge to put on film.

"Sort of like Drive, it was something that I realized I wanted to do,” Sallis told me. “I wanted to write a spy novel. Because I love Phillip Attlee, Donald Hamilton — that sort of Gold Medal genre of spy novels. I wanted to write something that would be an homage to that. As a gift to myself, I decided I would write this novel that I’d wanted to.”

Sallis said he told his wife, “‘Nobody in the states is going to buy this book, but it will do well in Europe.’ And, indeed, it did well in Europe, and I had a heck of a time selling it here in the states. It came out here in hardcover, fell off the face of the earth and never had a paperback printing.”

And that is truly a crime.

John McAuley is the author of many flash fiction stories in venues such as Muzzle Flash, Clarity of Night, Flash Pan Alley and Flashing in the Gutters.

Joseph Wambaugh, The New Centurions

It might be a stretch to call anything by fomer L.A. detective/ best selling author Joseph Wambaugh "forgotten" but it surprises me how many people haven't read his earliest work. This novel doesn't have much of the dark humor I enjoyed in his later stuff but The New Centurions was a real eye opener to me when I read it in 1973. Prior to Wambaugh all I knew about police officers was the cardboard crap I'd seen on TV and films---the stereotypically fat, racist, southern sheriff and the too-squeaky-clean -to- be- true fair- haired boys of Adam-12. Wambaugh changed all that.

The basic plot of The New Centurions is about how police work in a major metro department affects several very different rookie officers who go through the L.A.P.D. Academy in 1960. Even though the story takes place almost fifty years ago, [up to the Watts riots of 1965,] it think it still holds up incredibly well. Maybe because one thing about police work is still the same today: Nobody's all sinner, nobody's all saint and if you see enough bad shit it's definitely going to change you. With this first novel Wambaugh wrote about those changes in a way that made people want to read about them. I hope a few more do.

Paul McGoran’s short story, “The Thanks You Get,” was published by the U.K.'s PulpPusher. He also write flash fiction for venues such as Muzzle Flash.

Deadlier Than the Male (1942) by James Gunn.

James Gunn (no relation to the sci-fi writer) was a 21-year old senior at Stanford when he wrote Deadlier Than the Male as a creative writing assignment. It was his only novel. He spent the next twenty-some years in Hollywood as a writer for movies and television before dying in 1966.

Gunn’s hardboiled thriller caused quite a stir in 1942. But there is so much wrong with it – plotting by coincidence, impossible dialog, extraneous characters – you have to wonder why.

Gunn is all tell and no show in DTTM. And yet, a little on-line research reveals that a first edition costs as much as $1,250.00. What’s going on here?

It seems to be a case of Hollywood-to-the-rescue. In 1947, RKO Pictures released Born to Kill, a streamlined piece of nasty noir based on Gunn’s thriller that redeemed the source material for all time. In a fortuitous configuration of good screenwriting, great direction and perfect casting, the basic premise of an ambitious psychopath (Sam Wilde) romancing a mercenary socialite (Helen Brent) received its ultimate expression at the hands of director Robert Wise and costars Lawrence Tierney and Claire Trevor.

In the film version, Gunn’s authorial flippancy has been transmuted into hard-edged cynicism, a stance that provides justification for Sam’s malevolence and Helen’s callousness. And mercifully, four impossible characters have been stripped away: a quack psychiatrist, his earth-mother masseuse, Sam’s low rent sister Rachel, and her fey boyfriend Jack. In their place, the screenwriters wisely inserted a sleazoid P. I. to pull various plot elements together and provide a final commentary.

We’ve all been disappointed by lousy movies devolving from novels we love. Once in a while, the opposite has to occur. In the case of Deadlier Than the Male, skip the book and see the movie instead.


Stephen D. Rogers: Over five hundred of Stephen's stories and poems have been selected to appear in more than two hundred publications.

Death of a Citizen by Donald Hamilton

Donald Hamilton's DEATH OF A CITIZEN changed my life.

I was brought up to be polite and courteous, to put others first, and -- if I had nothing good to say -- to say nothing at all.

Then, as a young teen, I opened DEATH OF A CITIZEN. Read it, flipped it over, and read it again. And again.

Matt Helm was a no-nonsense protagonist who thought for himself and did what needed to be done. If he was polite and courteous, he was polite and courteous because he'd decided to be, not because someone else how told him how to behave.

Some may say I'm splitting hairs here, but DEATH OF A CITIZEN taught me not only self-awareness but self-determination.

Sure, Helm killed people, but nobody's perfect.

No book is perfect. DEATH OF A CITIZEN comes very close.

Take the following exchange. Helm and his ex-lover Tina are traveling together. Teasing has lead to a game of tag, and the longer-legged Helm eventually brings her down.

"'Old,' she jeered, still lying there. 'Old and fat and slow. Helm the human vegetable. Help me up, turnip.'"

It's funny and it's fitting and it's a damn fine piece of writing. I've read the book dozens of times and still continue to be blow away by that paragraph.

As a bit of background, Tina and Helm (or Eric, as he was known at the time) worked together during the war as government assassins. He gets out once Germany is defeated, marries, and leads a normal life until Tina reappears.

Donald Hamilton delivers on multiple levels. Not only does he create entertaining plots, and write them well, he provides a rich array of three-dimensional characters.

Take, for example, what happens when Helm borrows a car, rushing home to save his daughter who's been kidnapped by Tina and her partner Frank.

"It was the ugliest damn hunk of automotive machine I'd ever had the misfortune to be associated with...

"[The gas attendant thinks differently.] 'That's quite a car you've got there. I tell you ... when they can get something real sharp made right here in America.'

"Well, it's all a matter of taste, I guess."

Helm might be his own person, but he understands and accepts that his way is not the only way. That's as rare in books as it is in real life.

One finds murder, kidnapping, and torture within DEATH OF A CITIZEN. The disembowelment of a pet cat. And yet, one finds the following passage while Helm waits for a female guest to leave Frank's hotel room.

"...the tartier the girl, strangely enough, the longer the skirt. You'd think it would be the other way around.

"This one was pretty well hobbled."

And after the woman leaves, and Helm follows Frank out of the hotel and under a nearby bridge:

"There were a couple of cars going past overhead. It was a good a time as any. I took out the gun and shot him five times in the chest."

Only later does Helm explain that Frank was too big and unimaginative to be made to talk. Killing Frank at least took him out of the equation, freeing Helm to concentrate on Tina.

"She licked her lips. 'Better men than you have tried to make me talk, Eric.'

"I said, 'This doesn't take better men, sweetheart. This takes worse men. And at the moment, with my kid in danger, I'm just about as bad as they come."

Between 1960 (DEATH OF A CITIZEN) and 1993 (THE DAMAGERS), Matt Helm appeared in 27 books. Donald Hamilton died in late 2006. He was just about as good as they came.

S.J. Rozan is the author of In this Rain and Absent Friends

Ira Levin, THIS PERFECT DAY

Ira Levin wrote an exemplary work in every sub-genre he could find. I mean that literally: if you needed one example to encapsulate the possessed-by-the-Devil book, what could be better than ROSEMARY'S BABY? The mystery play? DEATHTRAP. The creepy "haunted" village? THE STEPFORD WIVES. These more famous works overshadow my personal favorite, Levin's contribution to dystopian literature, THIS PERFECT DAY. This is a perfect book. That the characters are outlines not fully fleshed and the settings are perfunctorily described are not failings in this book. They're the point: form as content. The story progresses through twist and turns until the penultimate and final twists, which are, as they should be, perfect. This skinny little book is out of print, but not impossible to find. It will repay every reader who picks it up, and especially if that reader's a writer.

S. J. Rozan is the author of In This Rain and Absent Friends

Ira Levin, THIS PERFECT DAY

Ira Levin wrote an exemplary work in every sub-genre he could find. I mean that literally: if you needed one example to encapsulate the possessed-by-the-Devil book, what could be better than ROSEMARY'S BABY? The mystery play? DEATHTRAP. The creepy "haunted" village? THE STEPFORD WIVES. These more famous works overshadow my personal favorite, Levin's contribution to dystopian literature, THIS PERFECT DAY. This is a perfect book. That the characters are outlines not fully fleshed and the settings are perfunctorily described are not failings in this book. They're the point: form as content. The story progresses through twist and turns until the penultimate and final twists, which are, as they should be, perfect. This skinny little book is out of print, but not impossible to find. It will repay every reader who picks it up, and especially if that reader's a writer.

PS-Two weeks from today, (August 8) I will be on vacation. Brian Lindenmuth, out of Fantasy Bookspot (http://www.fantasybookspot.com/) volunteered to host. Please help me out by volunteering to to a review that day. If you let me know you are going to do one, I'll forward your name to him.

Check out other Forgotten Books

http://newimprovedgorman.blogspot.com/2008/07/forgotten-books-pat-hobby-stories.html
http://www.planetpeschel.com/index?/reviews/bookreview/a_new_york_state_of_murder/
http://billcrider.blogspot.com/
http://tinyurl.com/666q7n
http://jamesreasoner.blogspot.com/
http://patrickshawnbagley.blogspot.com/
http://randall120.wordpress.com/
http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/
http://davidcranmer.blogspot.com/
http://www.journalscape.com/Hedgehog/2008-07-24-19:40/
http://noirwriter.blogspot.com/2008/07/non-oprah-book-club-getting-away-with.html
http://joeboland.blogspot.com/2008/07/fridays-forgotten-book-quick-change.html
http://www.fantasybookspot.com/jaytomio/2008/07/forgotten-fridays-the-last-hot-time-by-john-m-ford/