Friday's Forgotten Books, August 27, 2010

Next week, George Kelley will post Friday's Forgotten Books. You can find his link below. Excuse the spacing issues below. Why does this happen?


Milton T. Burton was born and raised in East Texas. He has been variously a cattleman, college history teacher, and an aide to the Dean of the Texas House of Representatives. His third crime novel, "Nights of The Red Moon," is due for release from St. Martin's in December.

Earth Abides

by George R. Stewart

This magnificent and compelling book is a post-apocalyptic novel that burst on the American scene to critical acclaim in 1949. No doubt inspired by concerns over the advent of the atomic bomb and the coming nuclear energy, it is the story of a small group of survivors trying to maintain civilization in the wake of a pandemic that has killed off the vast majority of mankind. Its author, George R . Stewart, was a longtime English professor at Berkley with a scholar's interest in the etymology of place names. Among other books on the subject, his 1970 A Concise Dictionary of American Place-Names is considered the standard work in the field.

Earth Abides follows the story of Isherwood "Ish" Williams, Emma, the woman he takes as his wife after the plague has passed, and a small group of survivors who gather around them as a community. With the best of intentions, Ish, a scientist and intellectual, tries to educate the subsequent generation in order to revive and perpetuate civilization. Without giving away too much of the plot, I will only say that he meets with less than success.

This wonderful but sad work, now largely forgotten, was something of a cause celebre in its time and garnered much critical praise. James Sallis, writing in the Boston Globe, said:

This is a book, mind you, that I'd place not only among the greatest science fiction but among our very best novels. Each time I read it, I'm profoundly affected, affected in a way only the greatest art — Ulysses, Matisse or Beethoven symphonies, say — affects me. Epic in sweep, centering on the person of Isherwood Williams, Earth Abides proves a kind of antihistory, relating the story of humankind backwards, from ever-more-abstract civilization to stone-age primitivism. Everything passes — everything. Writers' reputations. The ripe experience of a book in which we find ourselves immersed. Star systems, worlds, states, individual lives. Humankind. Few of us get to read our own eulogies, but here is mankind's. Making Earth Abides a novel for which words like elegiac and transcendent come easily to mind, a novel bearing, in critic Adam-Troy Castro's words, "a great dark beauty."

One of the most interesting and insightful moments comes when, after many years of marriage, Ish realizes that Emma is part black. With the vast bulk of the human race gone, race had ceased to matter even to the point that it was not noticed.

Also interesting is that Stephen King cited this work as the inspiration for his epic novel, The Stand. Indeed, the mood is almost the same in both books.

At the end of Earth Abides, Ish, now ancient and a figure of legend---"The Last American" the young men call him---dies. But the earth abides and the human race goes on. Esh's last thought is the hope that the world young people build is better than the one destroyed by the pandemic.

Get it and read it. You will not be disappointed.

P.M. is a lawyer, plying his trade in the still wild west. He is a fan of all things pulp, scribbling about some of his readings at www.oldbonesreviews.com.

"-And the Girl Screamed" by Gil Brewer
Crest Book No. 147, 1956

The story begins with our hero, Cliff, being denied an opportunity to return to the police force after having his arm permanently injured by an escaped convict. The chief opposition to his return is mounted by Edward Thayer, with whose wife Cliff has been having an affair. Cliff is despondent at the decision, his only solace is the knowledge that he is closer than ever to convincing Eve Thayer to leave her husband. That night Cliff and Eve are on the beach discussing how they can deal with Edward, who has vowed to destroy both Cliff and Eve if they don’t terminate their affair, when . . .

“A girl screamed. It was the damnedest thing I’d ever heard. It ripped across the soft night, a crazed shriek of pure helplessness and fear.”

Cliff and Eve discover a young blond, dead. They catch a glimpse of the killer and he, perhaps, sees them. While trying to figure out how to deal with the situation, without making their seaside tryst public knowledge, Cliff makes a mistake and becomes the prime suspect in the young girl’s murder.

While -And The Girl Screamed employs the very common theme of a man wrongly accused trying to clear his name, it is relatively original in its approach and highly entertaining. Brewer was firing on all cylinders and I rank The Girl up there with some of his best. I found it far superior to So Rich, So Dead, another of Brewer's man wrongly accused stories.

The entertainment value comes primarily from the fact that the killer turns out to be the leader of a vicious gang of high school kids. Cliff has some violent run-ins with the gang and is nearly seduced by one of the gang’s 16 year-old female members. This is the first Brewer novel I’ve come across that incorporates a 50s social scare issue. If parents don’t pay enough attention to their kids, obviously they will form a hyper-violent and depraved youth gang while hiding it through decent grades and football scholarships! It's a good thing that all those happy young families in the 50s had novels like this to warn them of the perils lurking in the dark side of suburbia. I particularly liked the message at the end:

“Something’s got to be done about all those kids.” Andy said. “Jinny’s dead, and God knows what a jury will do to Roberson. But maybe if we get the town stirred up enough, get their parents feeling guilty enough, we can help the rest of them. They’re young,” he said “they don’t have to spend their lives this crazy way.”

In all seriousness, -And The Girl Screamed is a damned good read. It’s not hard-boiled and it has a happy ending, but it is a crime story and those dark noir elements, of which Brewer was a master, show through. Any fan of 50s pulps should enjoy it, if for nothing more than to learn how important it is to pay attention to the kids.

Jeff Meyerson, Never Too Late for Love, Warren Adler

Warren Adler is probably best known as the author of The War of the Roses, a very nasty novel about divorce turned into a movie with Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner. He also wrote a series of books about Washington D. C. homicide detective Fiona Fitzgerald. For the purpose of this review, however, let me cite his earlier collection of stories, The Sunset Gang, set in a Florida retirement community called Sunset Village. (Any resemblance to Century Village and the like is understandable.)

In 1991 PBS did an adaptation of three of the stories, including the memorable "Yiddish," that led me to seek out the book and read it.

Years later I discovered Adler had penned a second collection of Florida stories, this one, so I got a copy and recently read it. This one has fifteen stories, including five repeats from the earlier collection. The title story is a partial rewrite and expansion of "Yiddish" about two members of the condo's Yiddish club who fall in love, much to the dismay of their spouses and children. The stories are not always happy or pleasant, but Adler does a good job with the setting and characters, many of whom seem to be Jews from Brooklyn who have retired to Florida, more or less happily. As with the earlier collection, I enjoyed reading this one.

Ed Gorman is the author of the soon to be released STRANGEHOLD. You can find him here.

Forgotten Books: Missionary Stew by Ross Thomas
Our story opens in a grubby African prison with an American named Citron who will, in the course of this introductory chapter, and I'm not making this up, eat a child. It seems the sociopath who is the exalted grand wazoo leader of this country is a cannibal. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.) Citron, a decent guy, asks what happened to the little kid who came around the prison. The henchman in charge of the prison tell shim that the grand wazoo was displeased with him for some reason. Citron says the stew tastes funny. The henchman watches him eat with a broad smile. It is only afterward the Citron realizes what he has just consumed. Welcome to the wold of Ross Thomas. I can't think of a better story teller than he was. The language is so deft and graceful, the characterization so perfectly etched even though much of the novel is the blackest of comedies, that you are swept away into a very believable world of government treachery, incompetence and viciousness all the more startling because of the ironic tone of the writing. The novel was published in 1983 thus the U.S. government in power is quite Reaganesque and the dilemma it finds itself in not unlike (prescience on Thomas' part) Iran-Contra. The McGuffin here is intriguing--the incompeents of the CIA and the FBI want to silence anybody who can tell the tale of our government's atrocities. And "tell" is the correct word. None of the evidence is written down but there are a number of participants who can tell the story. One of the funniest running gags in the book is how when Citron is returned to the United States everybody he meets asks him the same question, "Was that grand wazoo guy really a cannibal?" He doesn't tell them about his last meal om captivity; all he says is that "I'm not sure." And I dare you to find another book where the lead female is named Velveeta Keats. Her parents were once hippies who believed in their stoner wisdom that you should name things after other things that give you pleasure. Since they weren't exactly gourmets, they called her Velveeta. Of course later on they changed horses and became as evil as the Cheneys. There is no other writer like Ross Thomas and no other novel like Missionary Stew (or most of his novels for that matter). Treat yourself to two nights of amazing reading. While he exposes the practices of our government with comedic effect, he also constructs a novel of inter-locking cliff hangers that keep you flipping pages long after you should have grabbed your teddy bear and gone to sleep.

Joe Barone

Paul Bishop

Paul Brazill
Bill Crider

Scott Cupp
Martin Edwards

R,J. Ellory
Glenn Harper
Randy Johnson
George Kelley

Rob Kitchin

B.V. Lawson
Evan Lewis

Steve Lewis/David L.Vineyard
Todd Mason

James Reasoner

Richard Robinson
Kerrie Smith