FRIDAY'S FORGOTTEN BOOKS, JULY 18, 2008

Barbara D'Amato is the author of Death of a Thousand Cuts and White Male Infant.

HMS ULYSSES by Alistair MacLean

HMS Ulysses [1955] was the first novel Alistair MacLean wrote, and it’s a remarkable achievement. He had many other successes—The Guns of Navarone, The Satan Bug, Ice Station Zebra, Where Eagles Dare, Breakheart Pass, and many more, many made into movies, but HMS Ulysses remains his very best.

MacLean had served in the Royal Navy from 1941 through the end of the war, as Ordinary Seaman, Able Seaman, and Torpedo Operator, and saw action in the north Atlantic, escorting carrier groups in operations against targets in the arctic and off the coast of Norway.

HMS Ulysses throbs with authenticity. I read it at least twenty-five years ago and it still produces a thrill when I think of it. Not an easy book, often grim, always real, it is the tale of a light cruiser, put to sea to guard an important convoy heading for Murmansk. The convoy runs into crisis after crisis--German warships, an arctic storm, attacks from U-boats beneath, and from the Luftwaffe overhead. Slowly thirty-two ships are reduced to five. Then the Ulysses is called on to do the impossible--

As a depiction of the human cost of war, HMS Ulysses has never been surpassed.

Charlie Huston is the author of Every Last Drop and Half the Blood in Brooklyn

Complicity by Iain Banks

I don't know if it counts as a forgotten book, more like a
book that no one has ever heard of, but Iain Banks'
"Complicity" deserves to be known.
Broke in New York, I stumbled across the 1996 Bantam mass market edition.
I'd heard about Banks' cult novel "The Wasp Factory," but had never been
able to find a copy.  On a flier I purchased this conveniently inexpensive
substitute.  To this day I know of only one other person in the United
States who has read this former #1 British best seller, and I loaned that
reader my copy, the only copy I have ever seen in person.  "Listen," I told
him, "I generally don't loan books.  I give them away.  If I have something
on my shelves that I want someone to read, I give them the book.  I don't
want to ever worry about getting a book back.  But this book, I can't lose
the book.  I really want you to read it, but you have to get it back to me.
The covers can be torn and the pages dogeared, but I have to have this book
back."  He read it, bowed down to it, and returned it to me via registered
express mail.  What's it about?  Told from two points of view (first person
reporter and second person killer), it's a cat and mouse about a serial
killer going about Britain and Scotland killing people in brutally
appropriate styles to suit their real or perceived crimes.  Been there and
done that you have, but not with a writer up to Banks' snuff.  The
complicity of the title is not just related to protagonist journalist
Cameron Colley's possible involvement in the crimes he's investigating, but
the reader's own involvement and enjoyment of the crimes.  Putting the
reader in the front row of every murder with his second person narration,
Banks lets us stick the knife in, or close the book if we can't take it.
And trust me, there are bits that will be hard to stomach.  That complicity
exists at another level as well.  How much enjoyment can you draw from the
grotesque when you are cast as the executioner?  You can read the book with
an eye toward answering that question, or you can skip over the morality
play and just rip through the pages as quickly as possible.  A mad fucking
read, there are dozens of new and used copies available online, most of them
seem to be a 2002 Simon and Schuster TPB that I knew nothing about.

David Montgomery writes about authors and books for several of the country's largest newspapers, including the Chicago Sun-Times, Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer and Boston Globe.

Ross Thomas, Chinaman's Chance, 1978

When Ross Thomas died in 1995, twenty-four of his twenty-five books were out-of-print – the only one that was still available in a current edition was perhaps his best. (A few years back, St. Martin's Press undertook a program to return Thomas' novels to print. Sadly, it was discontinued after only a handful of titles were published.)

Chinaman's Chance (1978) introduced readers to Artie Woo and Quincy Durant, two of the best, most memorable characters ever to appear in fiction. Lifelong pals since they hooked up in a San Francisco orphanage, Woo and Durant were lovable grifters, con men with hearts of gold ever searching for their next big score.

The bent duo usually plied their trade somewhere on the Pacific Rim, and Chinaman's Chance finds them in Pelican Bay, a small, down-at-the-heels (fictional) town south of Los Angeles. You wouldn't know it at first glance, but Pelican Bay is the most corrupt American city outside of Washington, D.C. Crooked politicians, bent cops, shadowy Company rejects and the Mob are all up for a piece of the action. In other words, the perfect setting for Woo and Durant to work their magic.

With his commitment to sharp and precise prose, Thomas raised the stakes for thriller writers, showing a generation of readers and writers that suspenseful writing could be lean, but still meaty. His keen eye for political chicanery and insight into the devious side of human nature helped him create stories that are as delightful to enjoy on the fifth reading as they are on the first. (That quality makes him among the rarest of genre writers.)

Thomas had a remarkable ability of making cynical characters likable and complex plots believable. His novels are "page-turners," but they're also insightful and poignant sketches of the human condition. He was truly an uncommon talent, and Chinaman's Chance ranks among his best. If you haven't read it...Well, now you know what you're missing.

Colman Keene is a prolific reader, sometimes notching a book a day, and the father of three in the UK.

Paco’s Story by Larry Heinemann

Originally published in 1986, this moving tale was in my opinion a worthy winner of the National Book Award for Fiction.

I first discovered this book in 1989, a period when I was obsessed with both reading and watching a lot of books and films about the Vietnam War.

The conflict was the first war that was delivered to people daily in their living rooms. Growing up in the 60’s and 70’s, my interest must have been piqued by the coverage……..Saigon, Ho Chi Minh, Cu Chi tunnels, My Lai, MIAs, gooks, grunts, napalm……thousands of tragedies – from small to vast, personal to national……….I rubber-necked at a car crash of monumental proportions.

I had previously read and enjoyed Heinemann’s first book – Close Quarters.
Bagging a copy of his next work was a no-brainer.

Paco’s Story relates the moving tale of a survivor back in the US.
His post-war experiences are related through the voices of his dead comrades from the war.

Paco is the sole survivor of a base camp massacre, with a body held together by screws and steel, and a mind by whisky and painkillers.

Eerie, unsettling, disturbing, moving, powerful – all inadequate in describing the full effect this novel had on me.

Read it and weep – I did.

Sandy Parshall is the author of Disturbing the Dead and The Heat of the Moon (Poison Pen Press)

We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) by Shirley Jackson

Shirley Jackson has been one of my favorite writers since I was a teenager, and it saddens me that so few people read her work now. If younger people have read anything of hers, it’s likely to be “The Lottery” – a 1948 New Yorker short story credited with a deep metaphorical meaning and sociological insight that Ms. Jackson herself found amusing and baffling. It was “just a story,” she insisted. But what a story: a leisurely description of an annual ritual in an ordinary New England village, rendered in Jackson’s clear, evocative prose, and building to the death by stoning of a village woman.

My favorite Jackson novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, has the same stunning juxtaposition of the normal and the unthinkable that both captivates and repels readers in “The Lottery,” and it has the bonus of fully developed characters who pull you into their strange world instead of making you watch from the outside. I was delighted to read that the Penguin Classics Reading Group on Amazon made the book their July selection, bringing it to the attention of readers not familiar with Jackson’s work. But I was annoyed by the way the book was described in the reading groups announcement: “a nice creepy, angst-ridden horror story.” Creepy it certainly is, but you won’t find any of the ghouls, ghosts, and vampires usually associated with horror stories in We Have Always Lived in the Castle. This is a book about human nature and the lengths people will go to in preserving what they believe is a normal existence, and in the telling Jackson used many ingredients of classic gothic tales.

In 18-year-old Merricat, Castle has a supremely unreliable narrator, and much of the book’s power comes from her skewed perspective on events. Merricat, her older sister Constance, and their uncle are the only survivors of a poisoned meal that killed the rest of the Blackwood family. The truth of what happened has never been told, and local people view the survivors with revulsion and hostility, forcing them to live in seclusion on their estate. The three have developed rituals and delusions that allow them to survive. Their insular world is turned upside down with the arrival, as in most gothic tales, of a stranger. Cousin Charles, with an eye on the family’s money, installs himself in the household and sets about wreaking havoc with his relatives’ minds as well as their routines. This isn’t an easy or comfortable read, but it is a powerful story that exhibits all of Jackson’s strengths as a writer.

Here are some more suggestions for this week.

http://austincarrscrimediary.blogspot.com/

http://jacksondonne.blogspot.com/

http://randall120.wordpress.com//

http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/

http://lesasbookcritiques.blogspot.com/

http://davidcranmer.blogspot.com/

http://billcrider.blogspot.com/

http://www.jamesreasoner.blogspot.com/

http://www.crimefictionblog.com/2008/07/fridays-forgott.html

http://barriesummy.blogspot.com/

http://ofblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/forgotten-friday-spotlight-thomas-disch.html - Larry

http://nethspace.blogspot.com/2008/07/forgotten-fridays-kage-baker-writes.html - Ken

The following is several weeks’ worth of books from Jay Tomio and Medora from Fantasy Bookspot that I inadvertently missed. Thanks, Jay and Medora, and sorry.

http://www.fantasybookspot.com/jaytomio/2008/07/forgotten-fridays-saturday-edition-dossier-by-stepan-chapman/

http://www.fantasybookspot.com/medora/?p=43