As a young boy discovering a love of reading even as I was learning, John Brunner was an early find, third I believe, behind Heinlein and Norton. The early stuff was mostly from the Ace Doubles. Black Is The Color is a little bit different. From 1969, part spy novel, it has a plot line that would fit in in things happening today.
Mark Hanwell, a disillusioned young man returns home to London after six months in Spain where he’d met and worked for The Big Famous Writer he only ever refers to as Hairy Harry. It didn’t take long for him to realize his hero had feet of clay, making the bulk of his money selling pornography and weed. In fact, the last four pieces of writing under his name had been written by Mark.
Home, he goes looking for a woman who’d sent him a few letters early on, then stopped. A singer, he traced the bank d she’d been with falling into as different a world as he’d ever run into.
Sadism was part of it, voodoo, a plan to start a race war in England, Mark finds his work an and the man she’d taken up with, a South Africaner.
I’d never heard of this book before I came across it recently.
*******************
Randy Johnson's blog is still up under NOT THE BASEBALL PITCHER-and if you look at his categories, you can learn a lot about his life under the heading Family. Some of it is sad, but much of it captures the same lively childhood we all shared. He seems to have had a close family. Hope that sustained him.
Missing Randy, Bill Crider, Ed Gorman, Ron Scheer, Sandra Seamans and others no longer with us.
9 comments:
This one sounds interesting, Patti. It sounds as much coming of age as anything, and that can be really interesting.
I've read plenty of John Brunner's Science Fiction novels. Brunner tried to break out of the genre with various books like THE GREAT STEAMBOAT RACE and BLACK IS THE COLOR but never achieved the mainstream success he craved.
I miss them, too, Patti. My post on Kit Reed is getting attention from somewhere this week...one of the annoyances of New Blogspot is removing all the data about referral sources.
Brunner had a lot of frustration with clumsy packaging and copy-editing of his work by his US publishers in the '70s...to a ridiculous extent (most egregiously THE SHOCKWAVE RIDER had two brother characters with similar names as protagonists, and a clever copywriter decided he meant the two brothers to be the same character, so "fixed" it for him without mentioning it to anyone).
I miss them, too, especially Bill and Randy.
Bruner is a hit-and-miss author, I think. He wrote some very good things, like THE SHEEP LOOK UP and some strange ones like this.
Not a week goes by without thinking about Bill. Whether it is something that makes me think "Texas leads the way" or feral hogs somewhere, or Paris Hilton's latest "announcement," I always think, "Bill would have loved this!"
He was obsessed with the absurdity of Paris Hilton for a long time.
I almost got to meet Ron. We were going to meet in Palm Springs (he lived in Dessert Springs) for lunch but he was feeling some paralysis and went into the doctor and that was that for him basically. If I had come just a week earlier, I might have met him. Never met Randy or Ed. Only Bill.
I miss Richard Wheeler, too. A low-key, kindly fellow whose westerns were set with meticulous historical accuracy. And there were his Axel Brand cop stories. I've read only a couple, but his voice comes thru with clarity and a light touch of humor. I must read more of them.
Slight typo on Brunner's name...he had two Ns in his surname.
Although Richard didn't do FFB, he was a dear man I emailed with often. What a great writer too.
Post a Comment