Friday's Forgotten Book, May 6, 2011

I will be back later in the day to add any other posts. At 8:46 AM these were the post up.


Ed Gorman is the author of TICKET TO RIDE and STRANGLEHOLD. You can find him here.

I was fourteen when I read What Makes Sammy Run. I bought it off the same wire rack where I bought some of my science fiction and mysteries. The back cover copy interested me enough to open the book. I liked the smooth realistic style of the book so much I finished it by the time I went to bed that night.

Budd Schulberg's take on American Success stories is more relevant than ever.

Wikipedia:

"Told in first person narrative by Al Manheim, drama critic of The New York Record, this is the tale of Sammy Glick, a young uneducated boy who rises from copy boy to the top of the screenwriting profession in 1930s Hollywood by backstabbing others.

Manheim recalls how he first met the 16-year-old Sammy Glick when Sammy was working as a copy boy at Manheim's newspaper. Both awed and disturbed by Sammy's aggressive personality, Manheim becomes Sammy's primary observer, mentor and, as Sammy asserts numerous times, his best friend.

Tasked with taking Manheim's column down to the printing room, one day Glick rewrites Manheim's column, impressing the managing editor and gaining a column of his own. Later he steals a piece by an aspiring young writer, Julian Blumberg, sending it under his own name to the famous Hollywood talent agent Myron Selznick. Glick sells the piece, "Girl Steals Boy", for $10,000 and leaves the paper to go to work in Hollywood, leaving behind his girlfriend, Rosalie Goldbaum. When the film of Girl Steals Boy opens, Sammy is credited for "original screenplay" and Blumberg is not acknowledged.

Glick rises to the top in Hollywood over the succeeding years, paying Blumberg a small salary under the table to be his ghost writer. "

Ed here: Glick reminds me of so many CEOs on Wall Street. They ride a rigged system that allows them to preen and pose and steal. They produce nothing. And what Glick does to poor Julian Bloomberg is exactly what Wall Street has done to us.

Budd Schulberg is above all a great reporter as well as a great storyteller. Mannheim shows us the Hollywood of that era from the from offices that are run like war rooms to the constant attempts by the studio magnates to break writers every way they can to the ridiculously glitzy parties. The people we like in Sammy--and there are a lot of them; generally the people who do the actual work--are rarely invited to the splashy parties of course.

Just as Billy Wilder was attacked by studio heads for writing producing Sunset Boulevard, so was Schulberg attacked for Sammy.

From American Legends:

"When published in 1941, What Makes Sammy Run? was a best seller and was praised by Scott Fitzgerald, John O'Hara, and Dorothy Parker who said the book captured the "shittiness" of the film business.

Sammy hit Hollywood like a firestorm. Louis B. Mayer attacked the novel publically and privately and vowed to run Schulberg out of town. He almost succeeded. Budd was fired from the Samuel Goldwyn Studios where he was then working, and it was several years before he landed another screenwriting job.

Some critics feared that the book would contribute to the anti-Semitic stereotype of the Hollywood mogul or provide ammo to those who were persecuting the Jews of Europe.

Schulberg strongly objected to this criticism. To him, Sammy represented the dark side of the Horatio Alger legend: someone who was an "all- American heel," regardless of religion.

Indeed, Sammy himself was areligious, as well as apolitical and amoral. When a company informed him that it was not hiring "Hebes," without missing a beat, Sammy passed himself off as an Italian- American."

Ed here: Schulberg is especially good writing about women and the book boasts at least three fascinating females who offer interesting takes on all the would-be macho business games the men play.

To me this is one of the most vital novels of its era. It certainly spawned hundreds of imitators; none ever as good. And it shows how eloquent the American tongue was when used skillfully. As Mark Twain said write the way you talk and Schulberg certainly does that here.

Patti Abbott, A JUDGEMENT IN STONE, Ruth Rendell

I have read almost all of Ruth Rendell's books. She has been mentioned here very little, a surprise to me. Because between the Wexford series, the Rendell standalones and the books written as Barbara Vine, she has pretty much covered all the bases in crime fiction. Her short stories are to be savored also.

One of my favorites is A JUDGEMENT IN STONE which begins like this:

Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write. There was no real motive and no premeditation; no money was gained and no security. As a result of her crime, Eunice Parchman's disability was made known not to a mere family or a handful of villagers but to the whole country. She accomplished nothing by it but disaster for herself, and all along, somewhere in her strange mind, she knew she would accomplish nothing. And yet, although her companion and partner was mad, Eunice was not. She had the awful practical sanity of the atavistic ape disguised as twentieth-century woman."

This description of the price of illiteracy could also apply to the more recently published book THE READER. But Rendell did it first. Two movies have been made of this novel. The more recent Chabrol adaptation (Ceremonie) was riveting.

While we are repulsed by the behavior of the housekeeper, Eunice Parchman, we also understand and pity her. Who can ask more?

Yvette Banek
Joe Barone
Paul Bishop
Michael Carlson
Bill Crider
Scott Cupp
Martin Edwards
Elizabeth Foxwell
Jerry House
Randy Johnson
George Kelley
B.V. Lawson
Evan Lewis
Steve Lewis/Allen Hubin
Todd Mason
J. F. Norris
Richard Pangborn
David Rachels
James Reasoner
Richard Robinson
Gerard Saylor
Ron Scheer
Kerrie Smith
Kevin Tipple