Friday's Forgotten Books, October 23, 2009

Martin Edwards reading.












Steve Weddle graduated with an MFA in poetry from Louisiana State University.
Weddle, a former English professor, now works for a newspaper group in
Virginia and writes fiction.
Each Monday, he blogs about reading and writing over at DoSomeDamage.

ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein

How’s this for a great story? A Yale grad and Navy lieutenant tries to get a reporter’s job at the Washington Post, but only gets a two-week tryout. His boss doesn’t like him enough to hire him, but gives him a job at a weekly paper in the suburbs. In 1971, he moves to the Post.
One night five guys were arrested for a break-in. This metro/crime reporter covers it along with someone who was never mistaken for a Navy lieutenant, the child of communists who’d begun work at the Washington Star as a copy boy when he was a teenager.
Together, these two young reporters -- one a Yale-graduated, Navy lieutenant with little journalistic experience and the other a disheveled reporter with plenty of experience but no comb -- solved a political mystery that would unseat the US President.
All The President’s Men was published in 1974 and is every bit as procedural a mystery as anything you will ever read.
Bob Woodward, with a degree from Yale and hardly any writing experience, works a contact from his Navy days to keep pointed in the right direction.
Carl Bernstein travels to Florida to dig through files and check stubs, finally finding a link to a Presidential slush fund.
Together the two of them sneak around the suburbs of Washington, DC, talking to secretaries and accountants, all of whom fear for their safety.
The prose is straightforward and gripping, with enough suspense to make you forget about Dan Brown.
All The President’s Men is a fantastic mystery, a timeless exploration of power, greed, and corruption, with clearly defined villains and heroes who continue to find themselves well out of their depths.
Political thriller, mystery, procedural, all thrown together with an incredible narrative, this book should be read by every mystery lover out there because it truly contains a gripping story that you can’t put down.


Deb-About me: I was a technical writer in the financial and software industries for the better part of two decades. Then, after being a stay-at-home mom for several years, I went to work in the public school system. I currently work in a junior high school library. I love to read across all genres, but mysteries are my favorite. I also enjoy reading blogs about books—I’m always discovering new (to me) authors and titles.

The Parasites by Daphne du Maurier

(Note: The following is reworded and expanded from an abbreviated review I posted several months ago in the comments section of John Self’s Asylum blog in response to his request for du Maurier reading recommendations.)

I first read The Parasites in the early 1970s when I found it in a box of used books someone had given my mother. I was captivated by its intriguing narrative structure (three characters simultaneously narrate the story in the first person) and wonderfully evocative scenes of Europe between the wars. I can’t understand why the BBC hasn’t snatched up The Parasites and rescued it from oblivion by producing a glossy Masterpiece Theater-type miniseries from it. With a prestige author like Daphne du Maurier and glamorous settings, the book would seem to lend itself to that sort of adaptation. Instead the book languishes, forgotten and unappreciated.

Obviously Daphne du Maurier is not a forgotten author; she wrote a number of books and short stories that are considered classics and are still popular today, including Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel, The Birds, and Don’t Look Now (each of which made the transition to film). However, The Parasites (published in 1949) is truly forgotten: even in du Maurier biographies, The Parasites is referenced only fleetingly and dismissively; yet, I think it’s her best book. True, it has none of the supernatural elements of Don’t Look Now, none of the atmospheric dread of Rebecca or The Birds, none of the romance of The King’s General, but it is redolent of a certain time and place and effortlessly conjures up pre-war Europe with controlled, confident writing and a very adroit narrative style.

The Parasites begins on a rainy afternoon in England in the late 1940s. Three step/half-siblings (their parents had a “yours, mine, and ours” situation) are spending the day together. Maria Delaney is a successful West End actress; Niall Delaney is a songwriter in the Noel Coward/Cole Porter vein; Celia Delaney is an artist whose talent has never flourished because she has been too busy looking after “Pappy,” her widowed father. Maria’s husband accuses the three of them of being parasites, of using their talent, charm, and family connections to avoid life outside of their own charmed circle. This prompts them to spend the rest of the afternoon reflecting on their lives, trying to determine if the accusation is true.

The siblings’ memories begin with their youth as the children of entertainers (a dancer and a singer) who performed across the continent during the 1920s & 30s. Their parents may have been grande artistes, but they were dreadfully negligent toward their offspring, as indicated in this paragraph where the siblings describe their upbringing—

We were too greatly indulged; a shocking thing. We were permitted to eat rich food, drink wine, stay up to all hours, roam about London and Paris on our own, or whatever other city we happened to be living in at the time; so from an early age we were cosmopolitan in outlook, belonging to no particular country, with a smattering of several languages, none of which we ever learnt to speak with fluency.

You hear the tone—self-mocking, world-weary, with just enough self-awareness to keep you interested. In addition, du Maurier uses an ingenious device: the book is written in first person from the point of view of all three siblings. In some places, you’re not sure which character is narrating, the point-of-view goes back and forth between the three. Take, for example, this passage describing their childhood preparation for bed:

We stole along in our night clothes. Maria, her fair hair short and curling like a boy’s, wearing her own nightgown tucked into a pair of Niall’s striped pyjamas, with Niall slopping along behind in Truda [the nanny]’s bedroom slippers, because he had been unable to find his own. Celia trailing a stuffed monkey, brought up the rear.

Du Maurier excels at this very difficult narrative technique, sustaining it without flagging for the length of the novel.

As the book progresses, each sibling remembers people and events from the past and wonders if they indeed have been parasites—feeding on other people and on each other. Their memories include superbly atmospheric scenes of the entertainment and theater world of pre-WWII Europe. Du Maurier was intimately familiar with this world—her grandfather was George du Maurier, the writer who created Trilby and Svengali, her father was Gerald du Maurier, the most famous actor of his day, and her cousins were the “lost boys” of J. M. Barrie (who was a close du Maurier family friend).

Darker memories emerge: As a young teenager, Maria loses her virginity to a predatory older man; Niall remembers the woman he abandoned after she had supported him and helped him become famous; Celia thinks back to Pappy’s final years when he drank too much and was surrounded by hangers-on who always left Celia to repair the damage and pick up the tab. Hovering over all of their memories is the quasi-incestuous relationship between Maria and Niall (they are not technically related, being step-siblings, but their connection is so strong it excludes others, including Maria’s husband).

By the end of the book, changes are coming and each sibling has to grapple with how their lives will be different. But du Maurier has one more surprise left—an event that may devastate the siblings, but perhaps allow them to break out of the closed circle in which they have lived their lives. We’re not sure—the ending is ambiguous. What we are sure of is that we have just finished a remarkable book that deserves to be better-known and more frequently read.

Jack Bates grew up in Macomb County, Michigan. He got his first rejection letter at 18 from Saturday Night Live who turned down his sketch for 'religious, ethical, and moral reasons.' Thirty years later he writes a PI series for Mind Wings Audio Books. He hopes to eventually write the old fashion way- as a book.ie Howard reading.

Empire of the Ants, Bernard Werber

1991 might be pushing it for labeling a book ‘forgotten’, but in a span of 18 years, it is possible it’s gotten ‘lost’. Bernard Werber wrote Empire of the Ants almost twenty years ago. I read it about ten years ago. Portions of it have stuck with me. If there’s one thing I like about a book it’s an image that does just that. The final scenes in EOTA are so vivid and shocking I still find myself squinching- you know: closing my eyes, tightening my fists, scrunching down my neck.
Empire of the Ants is set in a 21st century Paris falling under the effects of global warming. Jonathon Wells is the protagonist and he is eager to discover what happened to his uncle who had become obsessed with ants. Wells moves his family into what he thinks is his uncle’s abandoned house hoping to unlock the mystery. Once there, he discovers a locked door with this warning: Above all else, never go down in the cellar. Well, guess what begins to happen. One by one, people do go down in the cellar until at last Wells must go as well to find his son and wife. He reaches a point where he discovers there is no turning back- literally. He can’t.
At the same time as Webber gets us involved with the humans, we begin to relate to the plight of an ant known as the 327th male. Werber hypothesizes that ants communicate through pheromones and smell (something my acoustical engineer father-in-law denies: ‘They have mandibles. They click!’). When the 327th male is ambushed by compatriots he has conspired with to overthrow a current queen ant, he is stripped of his antennae. No longer able to communicate with his female friend who will be queen, he struggles through a self-identity crisis. He is a lone ant unable to share his scents and thus becomes unrecognizable, which will cost him in the end.
As horrifying as some of the moments are in this book, Werber also manages to make the reader laugh. One scene that comes to mind is when a male ant confront a vast stretch of black surfacing- a road. The male ant is desperate to deliver information to the colony but fears the rush of the loud, heavy shadows- cars. Summing up his courage and convincing himself that ants are far superior to the beings zooming past, the ant moves forward in his short lived mission and discovers all too late the deadly bite of hubris.
But like I’ve said, the true entertainment in this book is the startling images Webber leaves the reader with at the end. They still freak me out all these years later.

Charlie Stella's new book, JOHNY PORNO, debuts in 2010. MAFIYA is out now. You can find him here.

The Ripley series, Patricia Highsmith

Ripley Under Ground ... book two in the series (of 5) was equal to the debut. The dark, somehow sympathetic, sociopathic Tom Ripley is a few years removed from his murder of Dickie Greenleaf and Freddie Miles. He’s married (rich) and although doing well enough for himself, he has a small percentage in the side business of art forgery. When an art aficionado figures out the scam, Tom tries a few different tricks to keep the buyer from blowing the whistle ... and when all else fails, Tom whacks him.

I have become such a fan of Patricia Highsmith’s work, I have gone and ordered books outside the Ripley series. The mark of great writers for me is their ability to sustain a high quality of product. Highsmith achieved that in spades within the series and I can’t help but assume she did so outside the world of Thomas Ripley.

How’s this for a Ripley Under Ground teaser:

A pair of flies, insane as usual, were annoying Tom. He pulled one out of his hair. They were zooming around his night table. Late for flies, and he’d had quite enough of them this summer. The French countryside was famous for its variety of flies, which outnumbered the variety of cheeses, Tom had read somewhere. One fly jumped on the other’s back. In plain view! Quickly Tom struck a match and held it to the bastards. Wings sizzled. Buzz-buzz. Legs stuck in the air and flailed their last. Ah, Liebestod, united even in death!

If it could happen in Pompeii, why not at Belle Ombre, Tom thought.

Ripley’s Game ... here our likeable sociopath takes on the mob (yes, that mob, the one in Italia) ... with mentions of Joe Colombo (Thomas is, after all, Americano) and capos and all forms of organized crime as it attempts to establish itself in Hamburg, Deutschland (yes, Germany) … this was a fun read that was written in a slightly different manner from the other Ripley’s. In this one, Ripley is slighted at a party and feels a need to take a shot back at the guy who did the slighting (usually he just kills them), but before long he goes from screwing with the guy’s head to helping him whack a capo on a train. No spoilers here, except to say Highsmith shocked the shit out of me with this terrific addition to Ripley world. Much of the novel doesn’t include Ripley himself but when he returns, it’s in all his sociopathic splendor and he’s taken arms (and hammers) against the real mafia.

For those of yous who like novels that come in bunches (series), you’re really missing out on some terrific writing and wonderful storytelling. Patricia Highsmith’s work is incredible, pure and simple.

Ed Gorman is the editor of BETWEEN THE DARK AND THE DAYLIGHT, newly released. You can find him here.

Hardboiled America, Geoffrey O'Brien

How's this for a resume (from Wikipedia): "Geoffrey O'Brien (b. 1948) is a widely published author, editor, book and film critic, poet, and cultural historian. In 1992, he joined the staff of the Library of America, (later) becoming editor in chief. He has been a contributor to Artforum, Film Comment, The New York Times, Village Voice, New Republic, Filmmaker and, especially, to the New York Review of Books."

With cred like this you might expect his writing to be hoity or at least toity. Nope. No matter what he's writing about O'Brien is a pleasure to read. He has a voice and style all his own. And he's never more compelling than when he's writing about "Lurid Paperbacks and Masters of Noir," the sub-title of Hardboiled America.

There is no equivalent to this study of the largely forgotten writers who were conduits to the present day likes of Lehane and Pelecanos and Zeltserman. Even if these men never read the paperback writers of the Fifties they could not escape their influence. It was everywhere, adapted to radio and movies and comic books. And O'Brien is masterful at tracing the hardboiled vision from generation to generation.

O'Brien takes seriously the writing of such people as Day Keene, Harry Whittington and Brett Halliday and many other paperback men and women. He's opinionated of course. His take on John D. MacDonald and Dorothy Hughes never fails to rankle me. But his observations on the work of Jim Thompson and W.R. Burnett and Ross Macdonald and Charles Williams are eloquent and so well reasoned I reread them several times a year. He also brings in literary writers whose work was sometimes in the spirit of hardboiled. Nelson Algren is a natural. But I'm glad he referenced Calder Willingham, too. A fine novelist whose short stories in particular are so dark they can disturb your sleep for a few nights.

Then there is a checklist of hardboiled novels from 1929-1960. Again there is nothing like this anywhere else. You'll encounter names you've never heard of as well as the paperback staples of the various eras. I was so taken with the checklist I once called O'Brien and asked him if he'd let me reprint it in a coffee table book I was editing on noir. He didn't bother to hide his irritation. His checklist, he said, was one of the selling points of the his book. Why would he let me reprint it? He was right of course. But what the hell, it was worth a try.

If you don't have this book in your collection then you don't have a serious collection. Period. O'Brien is a savvy and witty writer and his words are complemented by a healthy number of black and white paperback cover reproductions. Get this book

Paul Bishop
Bill Crider

Martin Edwards

George Kelley

B.V. Lawson

Todd Mason
Eric Peterson
Richard Prosch
Randy Johnson

James Reasoner
Rick Robinson
Kerrie Smith
R.T.
The Rap Sheet-Ed Lynksey

Cullen Gallagher
Steve Lewis
Jim Winter
Claire2E (Women of Mystery)