Friday's Forgotten Books, July 31, 2009

Harpo Marx reading.

August 21st. How about "Forgotten Movies?" This is Dick Adler's idea and a good one and to give credit where it is due Steve Allan suggested this a few years ago too.

Dick Adler wrote this week about Chinatown. Not forgotten exactly, but perhaps a movie that needs to be seen again. Crank up your DVD players and tell us what we all need to watch. Again or for the first time. August 21st. Let me know if you have a movie review to post on my blog or one on yours.
Come on-you know you have one.

Clayton Moore is the crime and mystery columnist for Bookslut.com and reviews fiction and nonfiction for Kirkus Reviews, The Denver Post and other media outlets. His work has also appeared in Paste Magazine, Atomic Magazine and The Rocky Mountain News.

Fuel-Injected Dreams and Boy Wonder by James Robert Baker

Every time I go in a used bookstore, I still buy books by James Robert Baker because they’re so hard to find, and I tend to give them away to the deserving (and those I think have the temperament to appreciate them). He was a truly gifted satirical writer, cult filmmaker, anarchist, left-wing iconoclast and activist, who was well ahead of his time but also deeply troubled, and ultimately committed suicide in 1997. Over the course of a half-dozen novels, he left behind two unconventional beauties that are, shockingly, his most mainstream work.

The first, Fuel-Injected Dreams, was thankfully re-released in 2003 by Thunder’s Mouth Press. It was so full of delightfully lewd turns of phrase that when I first ran across it in 1986, I couldn’t believe anyone would actually let you write like this, and it was one of the books that convinced me to start writing in the first place. A thinly-veiled (and as it turns out, somewhat prescient) portrait of the psychotic architect of the Wall of Sound, Phil Spector it celebrates low-brow language, the madness of rock n’ roll, and the visceral weirdness of sweltering Los Angeles. Just read the fantastic, five-page monologue that opens Fuel-Injected Dreams, a spinning, malevolent diatribe by DJ Scott Cochrane, and try not to revel in the joy of its retro-radio-inflected patois.

After being unchained from his booth, Cochrane gets embroiled with Dennis Contrelle, the fictionalized record producer, delving deeper and deeper into the man’s disturbing obsession with one of the bee-hived honeys in 1960’s girl-group The Stingrays. It’s a little dated in places and is embedded with a macabre twist in its denouement but otherwise holds up very well as an offbeat, sharply written pop-culture mystery referencing the maddening obsession of record collectors in those heady days before the music died.

Even darker is Baker’s own crack at a Hollywood that tempted and scorned him, the satiric out-of-print epic that is Boy Wonder(1988). It’s a exceptionally original idea for its time, a fictional oral history that portrays the life story of Shark Trager, a director broken by film school who turns into the producing wunderkind of the movie industry, through the memories of his friends, enemies, lovers and family. Fans of movie trivia will love it from Shark’s birth when his dad bumps some punk in a Porsche off the road in 1955 to his final drug-addled moments plowing through a theater full of filmgoers to the sounds of The Thrill of It All by Roxy Music.

In-between, Baker ravages every aspect of the golden age of movie making, skewering Close Encounters, Sam Peckinpah, Bonnie & Clyde, Touch of Evil and dozens of other celluloid moments. It has exploding suburbs, incestuous twins, chainsaw massacres and another romantic obsession as big as Shark’s drug-addled irises. It is, like Fuel-Injected Dreams, an acquired taste. But it’s also a shame that a writer as talented as Baker, who obviously loved the medium of film and the language of literature (even if the business didn’t always love him back)didn’t get the attention in his lifetime that he deserved. James Robert Baker is gone, but no, he shouldn’t be forgotten.

Patti Abbott, SPIES, Michael Frayn

An elderly man returns to the scene of his childhood and remembers the games he played with a friend during the World War II. This book follows HEADS UP by Frayn, a brilliant novel about art forgery and the delicious play COPENHAGEN. I have a weakness for books where children get it all wrong, perhaps because I always did. And this book concerns two boys, overly caught up in the war, and inventing a role for one's mother during wartime England-spying on her and coming to the wrong conclusions. . One boy convinces the other that his mother is a German spy and they are both to ready to accept this, following her, taking notes, making this pursuit their preoccupation. The plot eventually turns everything they believe on its ear. Frayn perfectly captures the voice of children of that time: their ability to focus on behavior that is perhaps lost to modern kids. I wonder if kids today would bother to put down their cellphones and Ipods. I also wonder if adults have lost their allure. It did remind me of THE GO-BETWEEN, another wonderful British book by L.P. Hartley. You can't go wrong with either of these choices.

Craig Johnson is the author of Penguin’s Sheriff Walt Longmire series, The Cold Dish, Death Without Company, Kindness Goes Unpunished, Another Man’s Moccasins and The Dark Horse.

Doctor Dogbody’s Leg, by James Norman Hall

This almost unheard of book is one of my all-time favorites. As a land-locked cowboy, when my mind is troubled, I go down to the sea. The more romantic side of my nature has been lured by a few authors who saw fit to swash their buckles with a scalpel along with a sword, including C. S. Forrester, Patrick O’Brian, and Gabriel Sabatini. I suppose when they decided to make their heroes doctors, they wanted an erudite narrator who would be capable of uttering more comprehensible statements than “Argh… Shiver me timbers.” Whatever that means. I have to tell you, though that Doctor Dogbody’s Leg is the best.

I stumbled across this slim volume by James Hall, half of the Nordoff/Hall duo famous for the historic Bounty trilogy, in a used bookstore in Boston. The story of the author is as interesting as his novels. Hall, an American, fought in the trenches in World War I before the U.S. joined the war, then as an American fighter pilot—and was the commanding officer of the Hat-In-The-Ring Squadron with such luminaries as Eddie Rickenbacker. Hall explored the Pacific, island hopping on his own, finally settling in Fiji.

I suppose after producing some of the greatest sea-faring literature of our time, James Norman Hall decided to have a little fun later in life, and Doctor Dogbody’s Leg has made me laugh since I read the first chapter where the doc loses his ‘larboard’ leg to an American Indian’s cutlass. . . Then in another where he loses it to a French guillotine. . . And then again when he sacrifices it to the wolves in Russia in the service of Catherine the Great. . . Hmm, that would be three legs, wouldn’t it? Maybe I should explain—in ten chapters, Doctor F. Dogbody loses a leg a chapter, which probably qualifies the naval surgeon as either a human caterpillar or one of the great liars of all time. But after a night in mist-shrouded Plymouth and Will Tunn’s Cheerful Tortoise, repaired with a few old acquaintances from the Royal Naval, Dogbody (Imagine Baron Munchhausen, Harry Flashman and Horatio Hornblower all rolled into one) holds forth and it doesn’t matter if the stories are true or not, they’re just so good; like a bottle of good grog, you’ll find yourself metering each chapter out so that they last.

Terrie F. Moran

James Reasoner

Bill Crider

George Kelley

Scott Parker

Kerrie Smith

Randy Johnson

J. Kingston Pierce

Todd Mason

Martin Edwards

R.T.

Kieran Shea

Donna Moore

Michael Carlson