Friday's Forgotten Books, February 5, 2010

I'll be out of town next weekend. I'll post the usual names before I go. If you don't review regularly but have one for next week, let me know by Tuesday because computer use will be limited.

The links will only be to your blogs so I will adjust them when I return and also add The Summing Up.

Milton T. Burton was born and raised in East Texas and has never been convicted of any of his felonies. Aside from fiction writing, other shady activities in which he has indulged himself include college teaching, cattle trading, and political consultation. He has four children, four grandchildren and lives in Tyler, Texas, where he may be seen skulking around town oggling pretty women in a beautifully restored and fancy 1988 Ford F-150 pickup. His third crime novel, "Nights of The Red Moon," is scheduled for release by St. Martin's press in the fall of 2010.

The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester

Far Away and Long Ago...

The year was 1956. President Eisenhower was running for a second term; Dave Brubeck had recently taken Progressive Jazz into the mainstream; Jackie Robinson, major league baseball’s first black player, was winding up his last season with the Brooklyn Dodgers; a new literary sensation called Peyton Place was destined to prove that the American people---even in the decade of Joe McCarthy---still harbored a sound interest in sex and adultery; Elvis Presley was on the verge of becoming Rock & Roll’s first superstar, I Love Lucy was the year’s most popular TV show; plans were being made to make Tennessee Williams Cat On A Hot Tin Roof into a landmark movie that would star Burl Ives, Paul Newman, and Elizabeth Taylor; cars had tailfins; girls wore bobby socks; father still knew best; you could get a real hamburger for a quarter. And Galaxy Magazine was in the process of publishing---in four parts---a lengthy science fiction manuscript by a forty-three-year-old freelance writer named Alfred Bester. Released in hardcover in England as Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright, it eventually became known to Americans as The Stars My Destination.

“Gully Foyle is my name

And Terra is my nation

Deep space is my dwelling place

And death’s my destination.”

Three hundred years into our world’s future, the inner planets and the outer satellites been colonized, but mankind’s teeming billions seem forever trapped in our own solar system. Gully Foyle is an illiterate spaceman of unknown parentage who has been subsisting in the wreckage of the space freighter Nomad near the asteroid belt. Described by Bester as “a hundred and seventy days dying and not yet dead.” Unbathed, unkempt, and reeking, he has been kept alive by food concentrates and recycled urine. Suddenly, unexpectedly, another ship, the private yacht Vorga, comes nearby. Ecstatic, Foyle sends out a series of flares only to have the Vorga glide majestically alongside, coolly examine his predicament, and then slip quietly away, leaving him to die.

As such things so often happen, in that one fateful moment a man who had never before possessed a purpose more elevated than the next paycheck, the next bottle of whiskey, and the next spaceport harlot had acquired a new meaning and a new purpose: “I kill you Vorga. I kill you filthy!” Foyle vows. How he escapes from the wreckage, comes to earth and eventually becomes one of the system’s wealthiest men occupies bulk of the story.

It is no secret that this book is a retelling of Dumas’ Count of Monte Cristo, but it is a retelling in a style that is bitterly satirical---a retelling set in a world where teleporting (“jaunteing” as it is called) has led to the re-cloistering of women, where all religion is forbidden by law, where mega corporations are more powerful than governments, and where their owner/managerial class constitutes an actual titled nobility.

Eventually Foyle comes to realize that the real cargo of the Nomad was a substance called PyrE, an artificial element with a destructive potential a hundred times greater than that of Plutonium, a substance which can be set into a chain reaction by a single, hostile thought by anyone. Rather than let the PyrE fall into the hands of the Powers That Be, Foyle jauntes about the world from major city to major city on New Year’s Eve, flinging capsules the stuff wildly into the celebrating crowds. “Grow up or blow up” is his message, thus connecting the story to one of the prime obsessions of the decade in which it was written---nuclear catastrophe. Only those who lived through the early years of the Cold War with its obsession with the Bomb, fallout shelters, and home Geiger counters can fully understand the frustration voiced in those five words: “grow up or blow up.”

In the end, Gully Foyle has a new bit of doggerel verse for himself:

Gully Foyle is my name

And Terra is my nation

Deep space is my dwelling place

THE STARS my destination.”

for he has learned the secret that will allow humankind to break free of the confines of the solar system and find its destiny in the vast reaches of the universe. But first it must overcome its own darkest impulses---something that is not a foregone conclusion by any means.

There is, of course, much more to the story, but to reveal too much would dilute the emotional impact for those who come to the book for the first time. Suffice to say that Bester’s unique literary style renders ideas coldly plausible that would only seem childish coming from a lesser writer. Like Juvenal and Swift and other great satirists of the past, he uses the fantastic as a scalpel with which to dissect and critique his own society by taking many of its current trends all the way out to their logical conclusions.

Get it. Read it. There may be other science fiction novels that are its equal. I doubt that one will ever be found that excels it.

Texas native George Wier lives in Austin, Texas with his lovely wife, Sallie. His story "Duckweed" will appear this fall in Akashic Press's anthology "Lone Star Noir." He is currently co-authoring a crime novel with Texas novelist, Milton T. Burton.

His website is www.billtravismysteries.com.

The Lost Ones, Ian Cameron (Gordon Payne)
The "Lost Ones" is an appropriate title for a work of pure adventure fiction to be included among the really great but forgotten books.First published in 1961 by Hutchison & Company, it was picked up by Avon in 1970 upon Disney’s option to turn it into a motion picture. And Disney did just that, except they changed the name to the catchy "Island At The Top Of The World," released to theatres in 1974, and starring the then virtually unknown David Hartman. Though the original story-line was not so well-represented on the silver screen, it was as
action-packed as the book, though not nearly as cerebral. The purely commercial “blockbuster” re-release of the book under the new title spelled doom for an extremely well-written and compelling adventure yarn which should have become a true classic. It became relegated to the status of a 90-day wonder, and like its prophetic title, became lost. But such is the price of short-lived, pre-packaged fame.

Ian Cameron is one of a few pseudonyms of respected British author Gordon Payne, of Surrey, England. As far as can be figured, he is still alive—and, I hope—well.
This is an arctic adventure which takes place in 1959 and includes the elements of a great graveyard of the whales, a treasure beyond price, a father’s quest to find his missing (and presumed dead) son, and a
workingman’s struggle between doing what is right, doing what is safe, or succumbing to greed.

This book (forget the movie, please), is most recommended for the reader who likes a story that he can taste, smell and otherwise feel fully. Just try this for feel:
“We camped that evening in the mouth of the inlet. And it wasn’t long before the old familiar feeling of being spied on came creeping over us: unaccountable, inexplicable, insidious as marsh gas filtering out
through the pores of a swamp. We were, by this time, so accustomed to the feeling that we hardly discussed it.... We did, however, comment on the fact that the sensation was more overpowering, that evening, than usual—and this I put down to the claustrophobic effect of the cliffs lining the fjord, which were somber and forbidding in the
extreme.”
You may occasionally run across the book in the stacks of a good used paperback bookstore. Finding it is sort of like finding the books fabled whales’ graveyard. If you are fortunate enough, however, to find it, I advise grabbing it and holding on tight.

Ed Gorman is the author most recently of A TICKET TO RIDE and THE MURDER ROOM. You find him him here,

Robert Bloch, THE SCARF

"This is a thread that runs through all of my mystery/suspense fiction," Bloch has pointed out. "The terrible inability to understand the irrational behavior of certain human beings, what is it that impels that sometime senseless sadistic cruelty, and I tried to familiarize myself with it because I can recognize that, deep down within, there are certain of those aspects within myself which I probably manage to exorcise by way of the typewriter."

This was Robert Bloch talking to an interviewer about why his early career shifted from Lovecraftian horror to the more frightening horror of the human mind.

Bloch had long been fascinated with the fact that while some killers were transparent many others were hidden safely inside a studied disguise of normality.

Daniel Morley, for instance, the narrator of The Scarf, is a young man gliding through life. First a novelist and then a screenwriter, always attractive to women and smooth with the men he must deal with.

One thing I admire about this novel is Morley's agonizing over what he does. He is not in control of his urges and he suffers for it. He's not the sleek stereotype of the mastermind serial killer of today. And his fetishisticattachment to the red scarf with which he strangles his victims haunts his nightmares.

I'm sure many readers will disagree with me that The Scarf is at least the equal of Psycho and maybe even a little bit better. Bloch had a good time playing humor off the Norman Bates character. You could even imagine Bloch smiling if not laughing out loud in places. For that reason I suspect that the Daniel Morley character was more difficult to make human. More pitfalls in making him believable. This is Jim Thompson country.

Much of Bloch's work has faded, the fate of most prolific writers. I was never a particular fan of his humor and it has not worn well. But he wrote two remarkable and timeless novels, Psycho and The Scarf, and
a fine single volume collection of his very best stories could be set on the same shelf with the two books.

Hell, very late in his career he wrote a masterpiece, the long story "The Yugoslavs," one of the finest, darkest and most original stories I've ever read. The Scarf is well worth looking up.

Kent Morgan writes a sports column for a paper in Winnipeg, Manitoba, but spends most of his time puzzling over what to do with all the books piled on his furniture and floor and stored in his garage. More bookcases are not the answer as he has no room for them

Crazy Heart - Thomas Cobb

This 1987 novel would really be forgotten if it wasn't for Jeff Bridges' performance in the movie of the same name. Just this week Bridges was nominated for an Academy Award as best actor for his role as country singer Bad Blake. When I first heard about the movie, I had to check the small print in the movie advertisement to see if it had any connection to Cobb's book. I had remembered reading Crazy Heart when it was published and must have liked the story if I've kept my hardcover copy for more than 20 years. I haven't seen the movie so I don't know how closely it follows the book's plotline.

Bad Blake has fallen on hard times. He no longer has a recording contract and is relegated to playing in bowling alleys and cheap bars for little money plus his accommodation and food. He's an alcoholic and his agent tells the people hiring him to not let him run a bar tab. While booked into a bar in Santa Fe, he meets up with a female journalist with a four-year-old son. They connect and Bad develops a friendship with the boy and hopes for a permanent one with the mother. While she likes Blake, she is well aware of his history of unsuccessful marriages. Realizing what he may have missed because of his life on the road combined with his drinking, Blake decides to track down the 24-year-old son he hasn't seen since he was a young boy. He also joins AA and starts writing songs once again in the hope of getting a recording contract. How does it all work out? All I should need to tell you that George Jones would be the perfect singer of a ballad about Bad Blake's life.

When I dug the book out of my library, I was surprised to see how much Bridges looks like an older version of author Thomas Cobb. A college instructor and a magazine editor, Cobb also played in a group called Moist and the Towelettes that Texas Monthly called ' the worst band in Houston, if not the universe."

Paul Bishop

Paul Brazill

Bill Crider

Loren Eaton

Ray Foster

Randy Johnson

George Kelley

B.V. Lawson

Evan Lewis

Steve Lewis

Todd Mason

Eric Peterson

Matt Benyon Rees

James Reasoner

Rick Robinson

Kieran Shea

Kerrie Smith