Friday's Forgotten Books, July 10, 2009

Julie Christie Reading.










Nik Morton's crime thriller about a nun who used to be a cop, Pain Wears No Mask, has picked up good reviews, while his psychic spy thriller set in 1975 Czechoslovakia, The Prague Manuscript, has readers wanting more. His short stories have recently been published in Beat to a Pulp and a number of English magazines in Spain. He also writes westerns as Ross Morton. Visit him at www.freewebs.com/nikmorton and http://nik-writealot.blogspot.com.%27/.'

THE THIRD SECRET
Michael Parker

Spanning the period 1941 to 1970, this sixth book by Parker is a relentless page-turning adventure that should appeal to fans of Frederick Forsyth. It opens in the Vatican in 1941 and a Cardinal is substituting an important document in the Secret Archives. He is fearful for the original’s safety, as it, together with Vatican gold, was being shipped abroad before either the Nazis or the Russians might plunder Rome. While passing through Chad, the secret Italian convoy transporting the Vatican gold is attacked by British troops led by Captain Miles Roselli. The transport truck is hidden away…

Some 22 years later, one of the Vatican gold ingots is located and the hunt is on to find the hiding place. In truth, the document is more valuable than the gold, as if it is revealed to the world as a fake it could discredit the Roman Catholic Church. Those involved in the search are Roselli, the Vatican’s special agent Cellini, the Mafia family Galliano, a French Foreign Legion commandant and Roselli’s children Angelina and Bruno.

Until her stepbrother arrived on the scene, Angelina’s life had been pretty ordinary. Once she decided to take the chance ‘to change from a kind of quiescence that characterized her life into something that promised the unknown’, she found herself fighting for dear life in dark wet caves and dodging bullets.

Parker has peppered the story with telling description, notably of the inhospitable mountains, and nuggets of information whether about bullion dealing or the Vatican Institute for Religious Works. Also, there are plenty of great phrases, for example: ‘… once he stopped trying, he would start dying.’ Another: ‘… began to think of other things rather than the footprints of a memory that he didn’t know he possessed.’

If you like your adventure tales with pace, intriguing characters, believable heroes and exotic locations, then this is definitely for you.


Ed Gorman's latest book THE MIDNIGHT ROOM was released this week. You can find him here.

ON THE LOOSE, Andrew Coburn

There are so many neglected crime writers it's impossible to even begin to list them. But one writer who has been neglected for decades is Andrew Coburn.

I've spent two days trying to think of a tidy way to describe On The Loose and thus far my best shot is to imagine a collaboration between John D. MacDonald and Ruth Rendell. MacDonald for the page-turning excitement of following the most unique serial killer since The Bad Seed and Rendell for some of the quirkiest characters outside several of her own masterpieces.

Coburn is a profoundly American writer as he demonstrates in this novel that spans slightly more than a decade in the life of a small New England town. The storyline never lets you go. The murders are committed by one of the mostly stunningly enigmatic killers in mystery fiction. He is barely ten the first time he strikes. He is not much older the second time. The killings are what propel the storyline.

But Coburn's sense of the town and the lives of his people are what give the book the depth and range of a true novel. He does what Hitchcock did in Shadow of a Doubt--takes a story that has a death-grip on its readers and then walk thems around the lives and town that surround the killer. The fading beauty lost to excess weight and clinical depression; the police chief who believes he is beyond passion only to find it again and risk being crushed by it; the man dying of AIDs and the woman who befriends him; the divide between rich and poor that belittles both sides.

And the writing itself. Coburn plays all the instruments in the orchestra for this book which is, by turns, lyrical, funny, solemn, sarcastic, violent, terrifying and human in a way page-turners rarely are.

It's time for Andrew Coburn to be recognized for the master stylist and storyteller extraordinaire he has been for more than decades now. On The Loose--and everybody in the book really is running from something--demonstrates both his power and his poetry.



FREDERICK ZACKEL is the author of Cocaine and Blue Eyes (1978) and Cinderella After Midnight (1980). He teaches at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Trivia buffs should note that the 1983 TV adaptation of Cocaine and Blue Eyes was co-produced by O.J. Simpson, who also starred as Zackel's detective, Michael Brennen. "Look at it this way," Zackel says: "I was discovered by Ross Macdonald and O.J. Simpson. That can haunt you in the wee hours of the night."

“FANTASTICS AND OTHER FANTASIES” Lafcadio Hearn

When she was seven, my daughter said, “I don’t believe in ghosts.”
Neither do I, I said. But I believe in ghost stories. I am even more a devoted fan of Lafcadio Hearn’s Fantastics and Other Fancies. This fiction is dark, nightmarish, unreal, sexual and sensual, and deadly.

While he is internationally famous for his translation of “Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things,” which are Japanese ghost stories, his "dreams of a tropical city," as he called them, are delicate little things: slight, morbid, and fragile.

Hearn’s tales luxuriates in the exotic, including grisly murders, brothels, murderers, and voodoo priestesses. They haunt me. He concentrated on the sketch. Listen to his definition, written almost three decades after he first began writing them.

"By the word sketch I mean any brief study in prose which is either an actual picture of life as seen with the eyes, or of life as felt by the mind."

In short, he painted with words, and they haunt like a French Impressionist.

Let me shamelessly quote one passage from Hearn's "The Bird and The Girl" in his Fantastics to show his love for words, for images of words, for the mood that can be created by words, and to show the very tone of his voice:

“Again he saw the rigging of masts making cobweb lines across the faces of stars and white streams sleeping in ranks across the river's crescent-curve, and cottages vine-garlanded or banana shaded, and woods in their dreamy drapery of Spanish moss.”

Few other writers have such grace. One thinks of Lawrence Durrel's Alexandrian Quartet or Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Love In the Time of Cholera.

I am a sucker for his phrasings, like his line that "There are tropical lilies which are venomous, but they are more beautiful that the frail and icy-white lilies of the north." If I could read with my eyes closed, I'd be in seventh heaven.

I understand Hearn's passion for these prose poems. I have my favorites, too, within Fantastics. "The Black Cupid," for one. And then there’s “The Ghostly Kiss.” Go find it on your own. At your own peril, of course.

These reveries or sketches written between 1879 and 1884 are a delicious blend of Poe, Baudelaire, Colridge with the scent of the trade winds wafting over all. I love how Hearn renders images, how he matches impressions with words. Reading his work, I do feel like I am "reading a painting," which was Hearn's lifelong aesthetic project. I enjoy his mania for colors, too; his sketches are "like a watercolor," as Hearn always wanted.

True, his style doesn't always hold up in his longer pieces. For instance, his first novel Chita may have been a commercial success, but as a "novel" it was a failure. Its plot is weak and unsustainable, built upon contrivance and coincidence. Being evocative isn't always enough. But Hearn's lyricism works very well with these reveries, fantasies, and dreams. These thousand-word prose poems soar with imaginative power. I like his fluid rhythmic sentences, and the atmospheres he creates around his chosen locales are a pleasure to envelope oneself within.

Oh yes, I have problems with Lafcadio Hearn, too. His love for adjectives can be wearisome, as can his poetic solemnity. I forgive him when he's heavy-handed, and when he assumes his longer pieces do not need a suspenseful plot. One can always quibble. Like most dream-fictions, most of these sketches do not offer a truly coherent inner logic).

And, like most dream fictions, repetition is almost inevitable. For instance, in one sketch, "The Night of All Souls," Hearn writes, "For the perfume of a flower is but the presence of its invisible soul,” and in a later piece, "The Ghostly Kiss," Hearn writes, "The perfume of the night was but the breath of flowers dying upon the tombs.” And one can clearly see how Baudelaire's "The Double Room" was transformed into Hearn's "The Idylls of a French Snuff-box."

But I also see a haunted author within these sketches, too. Hearn always wrote from personal obsessions and personal experience, and this is evident no matter how carefully he guarded his self.

Fired in 1877 for his brief marriage to a black woman in Cincinnati, Lafcadio Hearn traveled south and discovered himself in New Orleans. Voodoo, tombstones above sea level, exotic tropical plants, Creole cooking, and swamp air thick with humidity became his palate. He wrote out his dreams and his nightmares there, and some say he was the true lover of voodoo queen Marie Laveau.

It is Hearn's essential strangeness that adds immeasurable to the flavor of his writings. He believed, "When the best result comes, it ought to surprise you, for our best work comes out of the Unconscious."

Hearn was always the outsider. A short, one-eyed, grotesquely featured man, Hearn was resigned to his marginal status. Born in the Greek isles in 1850, Lafcadio Hearn was the classic 19th Century Restless Heart. His father was English and his mother was Maltese. In his life Hearn traveled three-quarters around the world, became a Japanese citizen, and is revered there for giving an entire nation its own literature.

Yet Hearn was a "classic" American immigrant. He emigrated to New York at the age of nineteen and found himself isolated and on his own in the big city. He went west, as so many other immigrants did. In Cincinnati, Ohio, my god, half-starved and homeless, he lived among the poor and gathered impressions he would later turn into bitingly visual words as a reporter of crime fiction.

By the time he was twenty four, he became the best feature writer the city had ever seen, writing the kind of Sunday paper sensationalism which has justifiably given American journalism the great reputation that it has.

He became the master of American crime writing. One story in particular, known about the Tan-Yard Murder, went coast to coast in November, 1874. A century later, the reportage of how two men cremated an innocent victim and what the charred remains look like is still harrowing to read. It’s worth all the effort put into locating.

As I said, Lafcadio Hearn went on to New Orleans, where he wrote a novel Chita centered around a hurricane, one of the first disaster novels written by an American. More than a journalistic novel, it is both poetry and story. Exotic and dramatic, Chita has some horrifying realistic prose. The hurricane is very graphically rendered. To Hearn, atmosphere was more important than plot. I also like Hearn because he has an aesthetic, an elitist point of view.

Hearn may well have been the Last Romantic in that Age of Howells. Style was more important to him than material or social change. Like any good American, Lafcadio Hearn kept traveling. He followed the sun westward to Japan, where he wrote sketches, essays, legends and prose poems. He wrote Ghost Stories.

I find almost as much pleasure in the legends and folklore Hearn translated into English from the Japanese as in his Fantastics. His translations of Japanese legends (for instance, "The Story of Mimi-Nashi Hoichi") are straight-forward, old-fashioned storytelling; they are also simple, colloquial masterpieces. They may not be literal, may not even be good paraphrase, yet these reconstructions are his and no other's. They seem to me honest and accurate probes into the necro-romantic soul of the Japanese. (My mother-in-law who is native-born Japanese has always described a happy ending in any Japanese love story is "where everybody's dead in the end.")

I am impressed with how Hearn uses perspective in these Kwaidan tales. The shifts are subtle and precise. There is an exact economy of words. And though I prefer the Fantastics, they are perhaps his best work. The tale of Hoichi-the-Earless is my favorite, as well as Hearn's. I can see how this tale of artistic obsession reverberates in me, too.

I could never write with his ornamentation; it is a very narrow, confining style that isn't very functional. Drama (which is the marrow of fiction) has no time to luxuriate in tropical sunsets. The sunsets must be subservient to the story. They distract the reader from the story.

(A writer must always ask oneself: Does the style serve the plot, the story itself, or does it simply enrich it? If it's the latter, then it must be jettisoned.) Hearn was a writer converted by his mistakes. After he left Cincinnati for New Orleans, Hearn found a new style, a sort of cubist approach to fiction. He eventually adapted it to whole books -- each part of which is a piece in itself, related only by a kind of sympathy or compatibility with the pieces around it.

Hearn attempted this in his novel Chita. It too has the form of musical structure. No one character dominates. There is no one specially privileged point of view.
Because of that, we see the context the story takes place within. We see the social and the political and the cultural. We breathe the atmosphere as if it too were a living breathing character. (Look for that in most contemporary fiction.)

Hearn’s evolution as a writer is fascinating. After decades of "imitating florid Romanticism," he switched gears and modified his literary style. Gradually there were no more important-sounding words, just simple words. By the time he reached Japan, the wanderer had turned inward, and more and more self-effacement of narrator appears. There is more impersonality in his text.

In Japan he learned to let the event itself impress the reader, to let the words reveal the event. He understood its necessity and the price exacted by such a drastic change. He was submerging his style and becoming a storyteller. And in some ways what happened became a de-volution, rather than an evolution. Telling folktales (especially ghost stories) does represent a return to “community.”

By his own standards, he may have condemned himself to a lesser place in posterity. He never wrote the long prose piece, be it a novel or a play. His work was the short piece: the essay, the sketch, the prose piece.

Sadly to me, he is more revered in Japan than America. And it is right that the Japanese should treasure him. By retrieving and interpreting Japanese folktales and culture for western mind, he saved their past, the one from which they were rushing so quickly away.

But I hope time will change that, and his own countrymen will gain an awareness and an appreciation of a vital talent.

Lastly, I am also impressed by Hearn as a teacher. He taught an appreciation of English literature to Japanese college students and urged young writers there "to make literature in your own tongue."

During his stint in Japanese universities, Hearn rarely resorted to class notes. Instead, he spoke from memory, and his thoughtful opinions are a testament to his vast readings.

As a college teacher, too, I confess I am impressed that his students slavishly took down his every word (this must be a cultural thing), and after his death almost a half-million of his words were collated into a series of books on English literature.

His students worshiped him. Seven volumes of his lecture notes (word for word) were published after his death. More impressively, he became the most important literary interpreter of Japan's aesthetic culture to the English-speaking world.

That Lafcadio Hearn worked -- constantly honing his craft, his art -- until his death is a badge of honor, a mark of professionalism and dedication.

He died in 1904, a Japanese citizen, a national treasure.

By my standards, Lafcadio Hearn was heroic, substantial, a craftsman extraordinaire, and in many ways a mentor to all creative writers.

Start with his Fantastics. Then read up on the man.

David Cranmer
Bill Crider
Rafe McGregor
James Reasoner
Randy Johnson
George Kelley
Paul Bishop
Kerrie Smith
Cullen Gallagher
Eric Peterson
Ray Banks
Martin Edwards
Todd Mason
Ray Foster
Michael Carlson