Perhaps Neglected Short Fiction: Collected Short Stories, by Kingsley Amis

Collected Short Stories, by Kingsley Amis

a review by Rich Horton

Kingsley Amis (1922-1995) is one of my personal favorite writers. He's best known for his many novels, mostly comic novels set in contemporary Britain, including of course his first novel, and still most famous, Lucky Jim; his Booker Prize winner, The Old Devils; Ending Up; The Alteration, The Green Man; Take a Girl Like You; and many more. In addition to novels he wrote a fair amount of reviews and criticism and some poetry. (He was one of the Movement poets, a group of poets in the UK in the 50s who pushed for more natural imagery and emotion, and somewhat more traditional forms: others included most notably Philip Larkin (the best of the Movement poets and probably Amis' best friend), but also Elizabeth Jennings, Robert Conquest (another great friend of Amis and best known as a Sovietologist), Donald Davie, and one or two more.) Amis was an SF fan, and he is famous within the genre for writing one of the earliest academic studies of genre SF: New Maps of Hell. He also wrote several SF or Fantasy novels: most obviously The Alteration (an alternate history set in a Catholic-dominated world) and The Green Man (a ghost story in which God is a character); but also Russian Hide-and-Seek (set in 21st Century England under Russian rule), The Anti-Death League (near future to its time of writing, tangentially about the development of a secret weapon), and Colonel Sun (as by Robert Markham, a James Bond novel). (Ending Up is also set in the future, but it's not precisely easy to notice that.

Amis also wrote a fairly small quantity of short stories, no more than a couple of dozen in about 40 years of active writing. His imagination was clearly a novelist's imagination. I had previously read his collection Mr. Barrett's Secret, which I believe included most or all of his post-1980 stories. I have just finished his Collected Short Stories, which was published in 1980, and includes everything Amis felt worthy of preservation at that time. (It subsumes a previous collection, My Enemy's Enemy.) Amis in his introduction somewhat sardonically mentions that he felt his story "The Sacred Rhino of Uganda", written when he was a schoolboy, was "uncharacteristic" -- it's not clear to me, though, whether there were other stories written and published during his adulthood that he also declined to collect.

Interestingly, the great bulk of Amis's short stories seem to be genre pieces. Most or perhaps all of the stories in Mr. Barrett's Secret qualify, as I recall. (Not necessarily as SF: the title story is historical fiction (about Elizabeth Barrett's father) and another story is a spy story.) In Collected Short Stories, the first six are pretty standard contemporary mainstream fiction, but the remaining 10 are all genre pieces: several SF stories, a vampire story, an odd thriller about strange goings-on in Crete in 1898 that may not be precisely SF, fantasy, or a spy story but combines them all in a curious fashion, a "weird tale", and a Holmes pastiche.

The three opening pieces are linked stories about a Signals unit in the British Army, in the days just after the end of World War II. Amis is rather cynical about the quality of officers. The first two stories. "My Enemy's Enemy" and "Court of Inquiry", put a somewhat sympathetic main character in a sticky moral situation and watch him fail. The third, "I Spy Strangers", is set against the post-war election that gave a huge majority to Labor: a somewhat foolish Tory officer is shown gobsmacked by this.

"Moral Fibre" appears perhaps to feature the protagonist of Amis's second novel, That Uncertain Feeling, though he denies in his introduction that the story is an outtake from a draft of the novel. A pushy social worker tries to set a sluttish lower class girl straight (she has a baby at the age of 16 or so and quickly turns to prostitution), but the social worker's insensitive actions only make things worse. "All the Blood Within Me" is a subtly devastating look at the relationship between three people: a man and his wife, and their old friend who has always hopelessly loved the wife. At the occasion of the woman's funeral, we meet the old friend, and he reminisces on his idealized view of their old friendship and his perception of their characters -- only to have his views challenged in a short conversation with the couple's daughter. "Dear Illusion" is a rather intriguing story, in which Amis gets in his whacks against pretentious meaningless contemporary poetry (i.e. everything the Movement was against). A journalist interviews a celebrated poet about his methods, and learns that he (the poet) isn't really sure he's any good. The poet threatens to quit, but instead produces one last book, to great acclaim. The journalist gets one more interview, after reading the book in horror: the poet admits to have written these last poems more or less randomly, in an attempt to see if his readers can be trusted -- of course, they can't. Part of this is Amis's rather Blimpish anti-Modernism, and rather crude in that way, but his portrayal of the poet, seen through the eyes of the journalist, manages to be quite moving.

"Something Strange" is a rather good straight SF story, about a group of four people inhabiting a space station in a remote area of the galaxy. They deal with interpersonal issues (who's sleeping with whom, etc.) and also with strange, unexplainable, manifestations outside the station. At the end things are revealed (not too surprisingly) to be very different than they think. This appeared in the Spectator in 1960, but I could easily imagine it in New Worlds of that time, or even in Galaxy (though it's a very British story in flavour). (No doubt Amis was paid better, and received more prestigious notice, for placing the story with the Spectator, to be sure.)

There are three slight, humourous, SF stories about the future of drinking, "The 2003 Claret", "The Friends of Plonk", and "Too Much Trouble". In each story a man is sent forward in time, and after gathering data on the general state of future society he manages to end up in a drinking establishment, learning horrible things in each case about the future degradation of drink. Slight and faintly amusing stuff, but pretty minor, with jokes on the level of the acronymic names of the time travelling equipment: TIOPEPE, TIAMARIA, TAITTINGERS.

"Hemingway in Space" is just what the title might lead one to expect: a parodic recasting of a Hemingway story (in this case "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber") as SF (i.e. the hunt occurs with blasters in the orbit of Mars).

"Who or What Was It?" is a pretty neat story, a piece of metafiction in which Amis and his then wife Elizabeth Jane Howard are portrayed as visiting an inn that coincidentally bears considerable resemblance to the title inn of his novel The Green Man. The Amis character in the story decides that he is fated to reenact an encounter from the novel (in which the protagonist faces a terrifying monster made of foliage, a "green man"), with curious results that lead to a very nice closing stinger.

"The Darkwater Hall Mystery" is a Holmes pastiche, though Holmes does not really figure in it. Watson orders Holmes to take a couple of weeks of rest, and in the great man's absence he consents to substitute for him and investigate a threat on the life of a baronet at his country home. The real interest in the story, of course, is the portrayal of the various characters: Watson, the baronet and his beautiful wife, the baronet's dissolute and bitter twin brother, another guest, an Army veteran, who is besotted with the wife. The "mystery" is (quite on purpose) almost trivial. Not a particularly great story, but interesting. "The House on the Headland" is the Cretan story, in which a pair of British spies, keeping on eye on Crete as the Turks leave, investigate strange goings on at the title house, which turn out to have little indeed to do with international affairs.

"To See the Sun" is a long (19,000 words) story that first appeared in this volume. It tells of an Englishman coming to a mysterious castle in Dacia, investigating the vampire legend. He is a skeptic, but he falls instantly for the beautiful lady of the castle -- who of course is in fact a vampire. Things work out not quite as we might expect. The story is probably a bit long, but otherwise it's really a pretty solid vampire story, very much in the basic vampire tradition. (I.e. it's not a sendup, but a sincere piece of vampire fiction.)

Finally, "Mason's Life" is a short-short that originally appeared in the Sunday Times, though I read it years ago in a volume of the Aldiss/Harrison Best SF of the Year series. It's slight, but not bad, about a man in a bar confronted by another man, who insists that he must be a figment of that man's dream. Leading to a quite predictable resolution.

One certainly comes away from this volume convinced that Amis was first and best a novelist, but on the whole it is still pretty enjoyable reading, and occasionally quite good indeed.

Old Bestsellers: When Knighthood Was in Flower, by "Edwin Caskoden" (Charles Major)

When Knighthood Was in Flower, by "Edwin Caskoden" (Charles Major)

This is an interesting case, I think. For reasons not always having to do with the book: I'll be blathering about the movies made from it, the career of one of the actresses in the movies, and publishing history ...

When Knighthood Was in Flower was a true bestseller. It was published in 1898, and it was the second bestselling novel of 1899, and the fifth bestselling novel of 1900. Yet it seems all but entirely forgotten today, as does its author. (It was at least modestly well-remembered into the 1950s.)

Charles Major was an Indiana lawyer (and one-term state legislator), born in 1856 in Indianapolis, a graduate of the University of Michigan, and resident in Shelbyville (only 30 or so miles SE of Indianapolis) for most of his adult life. He died quite young, in 1913. When Knighthood Was in Flower was his first novel. He closed his law practice after its success and continued to write. He had one more major bestseller, Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall (1902), set in Elizabethan times (and later filmed starring Mary Pickford). He wrote several more historical novels, as well as a few children's adventure stories set in Indiana.

Major published When Knighthood Was in Flower under the pseudonym "Edwin Caskoden", partly perhaps to avoid interfering with his law practice, but also as part of the novel's conceit: the narrator is named Edwin Caskoden, and the story is presented as being an edited version of Edwin Caskoden's memoir, done by his distant descendant of the same name. Not surprisingly for such a successful book, it became a successful play and movie. The first movie version was as early as 1908, produced by D. W. Griffith, and retitled When Knights Were Bold. (No copies survive.) The next version was made in 1922, and starred William Randolph Hearst's mistress Marion Davies. Finally, Disney made a live-action movie in 1953, renaming it (in the US) The Sword and the Rose.

(That version starred Glynis Johns, whom I remember (not from seeing the play, just from listening to the soundtrack) as the original Desiree Arnfeldt in Sondheim's A Little Night Music, and thus the original singer of "Send in the Clowns". Johns also played Mrs. Banks in Mary Poppins. She was the daughter of actor Mervyn Johns, and more importantly, she shares a birthday, October 5, with no other than ... me!. She is still alive, aged 91.)

My edition of the book is a Grossett and Dunlap reprint, called the "Theatre Edition", presumably because it is illustrated with still photos from a production of the play. (That seems to have been common at that time. The picture I have so clumsily reproduced above (my son not being available to do the photography) is of Roselle Knott playing Mary Tudor, though the role was actually originated by Shakespearean actress Julia Marlow.) This edition is undated, but may have appeared in 1907, as it is inscribed "Mr. Virgil S. Kenninger, from Mamma, Christmas 1907". At least by the time this edition appeared, Major was acknowledging his authorship: the title page says "Rewritten and rendered into modern English from Sir Edwin Caskoden's memoir by Edwin Caskoden (Charles Major)". The original publisher was Bowen-Merrill, the predecessor to the Bobbs Merrill publishing firm. Bobbs-Merrill was best known for publishing The Joy of Cooking, as well as L. Frank Baum. They were based in Indianapolis, hence the connection to Major: a salesman for the firm tried to sell him some law books, and instead he brought back a copy of the manuscript.

The book is held to have been at the forefront of a sudden fashion for historical romances. I found it quite enjoyable, but it does not have much of a remaining reputation. I found the following in a 1955 article by a Professor of History at Indiana University, Howard J. Baetxhold:

"Charles Major's works will be long remembered in American literary history. To be thoroughly honest and objective, however, we must admit that, dear as they are to the hearts of Hoosiers, their place has not been determined by intrinsic literary merit. They have the characteristics of the historical novels of the time -- overly rhetorical and bombastic language; heroes possessing impossible skill, bravery, and foresight; plots determined largely by coincidence. Modern critics do not always deal kindly with Major. One contemporary scholar writes: "Although his importance may be said to be entirely in the historical field, Major made no real contribution to the development of the historical novel created by Scott and Americanized by Cooper. He had their faults but seldom possessed their powers." But the books do tell an exciting story, and Major certainly holds his own in the genre with his contemporaries: writers like Maurice Thompson, George Barr McCutcheon, and the early Tarkington."

Baetxhold was quite wrong in his assertion that Major's works will be long remembered -- they are now nearly forgotten. But I think he, and the scholar he quotes, are also off the mark in their judgement of his work. Major, at least in this first novel, is not terribly bombastic in his language, and while the primary hero does possess unusual skill, and lots of bravery, and perhaps overemphasized virtue, the plot is not really driven by coincidence at all, and in fact much goes wrong for the characters. But most of all, the chief virtue of this book is one seemingly completely missed by those commentators: the narrative voice of "Edwin Caskoden", which is a purposely self-deprecating mixture of some pomposity, some family pride, and lots of (probably deserved) modesty about his abilities in certain spheres. Moreover, he is witty throughout, and plausibly and funnily observant about most of the characters around him (the perhaps too perfect hero, Charles Brandon, excepted). It's really not bad stuff at all, though it's not earthshakingly great either.

The novel's title comes from a couplet by Leigh Hunt: "There Bred a Knight, when Knighthood was in flow'r/Who charmed alike the tilt-yard and the bow'r". The novel has a long subtitle: The Love Story of Charles Brandon and Mary Tudor, the King's Sister, and Happening in the Reign of His August Majesty, King Henry VIII. It opens with a preface detailing the supposed origin of the story: one Edwin Caskoden gives a short history of his often illustrious family, especially noting how one of his ancestors made a fortune by wisely ignoring the then King's cuckolding of him, instead gaining favor and selling him lots of jewelry (he was a goldsmith). The goldsmith's grandson is Sir Edwin Caskoden, Master of the Dance for King Henry VIII, and the story is supposed to be a rewritten extract from his memoirs.

Caskoden tells of Charles Brandon, a commoner who had made something of a name for himself by fighting in the wars in Europe, and who after returning home, fought a duel with a man famous for having killed numerous men in other duels, including Brandon's father and brother. It turns out the other man was a cheater, wearing mail under his clothes, and Brandon disarms and blinds him. His fame leads to an invitation to King Henry's court. As Caskoden notes, the King's 19 year old sister, Mary Tudor, is the leading beauty of the court, and many men had fallen for her only to be rejected (Caskoden included, though on the rebound he started courting Mary's best friend, in the end successfully). Naturally he assumes that Brandon will fall for her too, which could be disastrous as he is a commoner. The two men are soon close friends, and by convincingly feigning complete indifference Brandon manages to attract Mary's attention.

Before long the two are completely in love, to Henry's anger, as he wishes to marry her off to the aging King Louis of France. A further complication comes from a former suitor of Mary's, the dastardly Duke of Buckingham, who attempts to disgrace Mary when she makes a visit to a fortuneteller who happens also to run a house of ill repute. When Brandon rescues the girls, he kills two of Buckingham's hired men, and Buckingham has him thrown into prison.

Brandon is finally released and plans to travel to New Spain (i.e, America) because he knows that the King will have him executed for daring to mess with his sister. Before long Mary plans to come along with him, dressed as a man, but that plan fails because she it too beautiful to pass herself as a male. Brandon ends up in the Tower, and Mary can only save him by finally promising to marry the French King.

The rest of the novel is fairly true to the historical record ... the King of France dies soon after the marriage (Caskoden suggest, and in fact contemporary wags thought so as well, that Mary (presumably on purpose) wore the old man out), and Brandon goes to France and secretly marries her, despite the odious attentions of the Dauphin, the new King (a married man it should be noted). Henry VIII makes the best of things by making Brandon 1st Duke of Suffolk.

Major claimed to have deviated from the historical record only in small ways (Brandon's father is supposed to have been killed by Richard III, not in a duel; and Brandon was given his titles before marrying Mary Tudor); but there are other departures. Most obviously, the novel's Brandon is portrayed as quite young and unimportant, but in fact he was 31 in 1515 (when the action takes place), and had already been married twice (scandalously, Wikipedia says) and widowed twice, and was engaged to his 8 year old ward, Elizabeth Grey. He married another ward (this one 13) after Mary Tudor's death. Clearly not the paragon portrayed in the novel -- though he was in fact a notable soldier, and a very influential man in Henry's court. He and Mary were the grandparents of the tragic near-Queen Lady Jane Grey.

A Not Quite Forgotten Book: Palladian, by Elizabeth Taylor

Palladian, by Elizabeth Taylor

a review by Rich Horton

One of the great mid-20th century English writers was Elizabeth Taylor (needless to say, not the actress). Taylor, daughter of an insurance inspector, was born in 1912 and died in 1975. She married John Taylor, who owned a candy company, in 1936. Her friend the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard declined to write a biography of Taylor due to "lack of incident" in her life, though as Taylor was notably a very private person, it may be that Howard was simply deferring to her friend's presumed wishes.

I discovered Taylor because Howard's husband, Kingsley Amis, one of my favorite writers, called her "one of the best English novelists born this century". Taylor can be placed with others of the great run of English women writers of quiet but sharp social comedy of roughly the middle of the 20th Century: the obvious comparisons are Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Bowen, perhaps Anita Brookner or Muriel Spark, even. (Even perhaps another friend of Taylor's, the somewhat older and decidedly odder Ivy Compton-Burnett.) I've read a few of her novels: I like in particular Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, one of the great novels of old age. (Amis has one too: Ending Up; and so does Spark: Memento Mori.)

This book certainly wasn't a "bestseller" -- none of Taylor's novels were. She might have been in danger of becoming forgotten at some point, but her champions such as Howard, Amis, and Anne Tyler have kept her novels in people's minds. Many of her books were reprinted in trade paper by Virago Press, a feminist imprint, in the 1980s. My copy of the book at hand, Palladian, is the Virago reprint. Taylor's work got some more notice in the 2000s with the appearance of a couple of movies based on her best-known novels, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (starring Joan Plowright) in 2005, and Angel (starring Romola Garai) in 2007.

Palladian is her second novel, from 1946. The nominal protagonist is Cassandra Dashwood, who becomes governess to Sophy, daughter of a rather ineffectual widower, Marion Vanbrugh, who lives in a decayed manor house with his drunk cousin Tom, Tom's pregnant sister Margaret, a couple of not very respectful servants, and Tom and Margaret's somewhat dotty mother. Cassandra is a romantical young woman who determines in advance to fall in love with Marion. And so she does. But that is a small part of the story. More important, perhaps, is Tom's tawdry relationship with the local publican's wife, and Tom's secret past involving Marion's dead wife. There are also telling tidbits from the POV of the two servants. Margaret's rather bossy and excessively bracing nature. Sophy is depicted as a pretty normal girl of her age, not at all a prodigy, desperate about her failure to be the beauty her mother was.

The novel turns on a shocking event with about 40 pages to go. I admit I put the book down for a day or so at that point -- it seemed unearned, unfair. But -- though I am still unsure that that plot development works -- Taylor still brings home the novel quite effectively. It's by no means her best novel, but it's fine work. Delicately funny, acute, honest about its characters' failings but still fair to them. Taylor was a fan of Jane Austen, which is fairly clear in all her work, but perhaps never more so than here, as indicated by her protagonist's name, by the reference to the Greer Garson*/Laurence Olivier vehicle Pride and Prejudice, which is shown at the local theater, and by a couple further overt references to Austen.

(*As it happens I just the other night watched another Greer Garson film, Random Harvest, based on the novel of the same title by James Hilton, which I covered in this space a couple of months ago.)

Old Bestsellers: The Bondage of Ballinger, by Roswell Field

 
The Bondage of Ballinger, by Roswell Field

a review by Rich Horton

Well, I don't think this book was a bestseller. And the writer is, as far as I can tell, quite forgotten, and perhaps only ever known for having a notable father and a quite famous writer for a brother. What it is, is a book for a certain class of people ... many of whom may read this blog, or, at least, are part of what I perceive my desired audience for this blog to be. And those people are "bookmen": book collectors, indeed, as portrayed in this novel, obsessive book collectors to the point of unhealthiness.

Roswell Field's father, also named Roswell Field, was a St. Louis lawyer, and he is remembered for one earth-shaking case, the Dred Scott case: he was Scott's advocate. (So, like Clarence Darrow, he is remembered for a case he lost.) He had two sons with literary careers. By far the more famous is Eugene Field (1850-1895), still very well remembered for light verse, often for children, such as "The Duel" (aka "The Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat") and "Wynken, Blynken, and Nod"; as well as for one short story, "Daniel and the Devil", an inspiration for Stephen Vincent Benet's much more famous "The Devil and Daniel Webster". The Eugene Field House is a minor attraction in St. Louis (where I live), though Eugene, as with his brother, later moved to Chicago. The younger brother was Roswell Field (1851-1919), who, like Eugene, attended the University of Missouri and ended up moving to Chicago.

Roswell seems to have been a quite prolific writer of books that seem, at glance, to be somewhat gloopily sentimental. Certainly "gloopily sentimental" applies to The Bondage of Ballinger. This book was published in 1903 by Fleming H. Revell, a Chicago-based firm that began as a publisher of Christian tracts. My edition, which I found at an antique mall in Springfield, IL, seems quite possibly to be a first, and it's in very fine condition, though there is no dust jacket.

The book opens with a longish history of the Ballinger family, beginning with Giles, a "staunch Puritan" who fought with Cromwell, and fled to Massachusetts after the Restoration. His descendants were for some time clergymen, and then schoolteachers, and then comes Thomas, sometime in the first half of the 19th century. Thomas is pleasant and sweet and lazy and loves nothing but books. He fails at every trade he tries except for printer. He falls in love from childhood with a Quaker girl, Hannah, and marries her despite her father's misgivings, after which they enter on a peripatetic life, Thomas finding jobs for a year or two at a time as a printer, but spending most of his money on books, especially rare books. He treasures especially books he has had personally autographed by the likes of Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau. He and Hannah make it all the way to California, before wandering back to Chicago, and settling permanently in a cottage on the lakeshore (apparently on the North Side).

All this time Thomas is just barely making enough to keep he and his wife provided for, but then he is enticed to quit his job and open a rare book store. This actually might have worked out well, except that he can hardly bear to sell any of his books, so he ends up mostly just buying more books and refusing to sell his treasures even when customers beg him. Clearly bankruptcy is the only future for him ... but, somewhere along the way, a chance collision with a very young girl, Helen Bascom, the only daughter of a very wealthy grocer, leads to a sort of redemption, as Helen become entranced with Thomas and his books, and Thomas, almost by accident, gives her an excellent education in literature, which proves vital when disaster looms for the Ballinger couple.

The portrayal of Thomas Ballinger and his wife Hannah is sweet but almost cruel. Field calls them "children" throughout, though the novel follows them from very young childhood to somewhere in their 60s. Hannah's sin is weakness: an inability to stand up to Thomas's refusal to properly provide for her. Thomas, though a very sweet and nice man, an enemy to no one, simply will not take any responsibility to provide for his wife. And Field makes this very clear. That their ultimate fate is happy is simply due to luck.

The book is really not very good. As I said before, it's gloopy. It is also often quite boring. The sweetness cloys, and Thomas unworldly attitude towards finance seems exaggerated to the point of caricature ... well, really, Thomas' entire character is a caricature. The resolution, with Helen prevailing on her father to secretly provide for Thomas and Hannah, is pleasant but not quite plausible. In reality, it's a minor and deservedly forgotten book.

But I'm glad I found it, for two reasons: one, the portrayal, even if exaggerated, of a breed to which I belong: book collector; and, two: the serendipitous discovery of connections to St. Louis natives of some note in Roswell Field the elder and in Eugene Field.

Old Bestsellers: The Adventures of Richard Hannay, by John Buchan

The Adventures of Richard Hannay, by John Buchan

a review by Rich Horton

John Buchan (pronounced, apparently, Bucken, instead of Bewcan as I had always thought) is primarily remembered these days for one short novel, published almost exactly a century ago (in 1915): The Thirty-Nine Steps. The book I am considering here is an omnibus (published by Houghton Mifflin) of that novel and its first two sequels, Greenmantle (1916) and Mr. Standfast (1919). The form of the book is curious: the three novels are bound together in what appear to be the original plates of the standalone books. Each novel is much longer than its predecessor: The Thirty-Nine Steps is about 35,000 words, Greenmantle about 90,000, and Mr. Standfast about 120,000. So each novel is printed in a different font: the first quite large, the second normal, and the last smallish. This particular edition seems to have been put out not long before the Second World War, probably not long before Buchan died.

Buchan was born in Perth, Scotland, in 1875, son of a Minister in the Free Church of Scotland. He was educated at Oxford, and entered government service upon graduation, first working in South Africa. By this time he had already published four novels. Upon his return to England he joined the publishing firm of Thomas Nelson (which eventually became the now prominent American Christian publishing firm, though not entirely directly). He also studied law and passed the bar. Buchan married in 1907. He became a Member of Parliament, served with some distinction in the First World War (though not in combat), and continued a prominent career after the war, returning to Parliament and also lecturing and otherwise maintaining involvement with several Scottish universities. In 1935 he was appointed Governor General of Canada (as a result of which he is often considered a significant figure in Canadian Literature, which seems a bit of a stretch), and at the same time he was made the First Baron Tweedsmuir. Throughout this time he continued writing, publishing some 27 novels in all. He died in 1940. Quite an impressive career, really.

The three novels in this omnibus form what could be called a World War I trilogy. The Thirty-Nine Steps is set in the early summer of 1914, in England and Scotland, in the runup to the War. Greenmantle is set in winter 1915/1916, mostly in Germany and Turkey. And Mr. Standfast covers the period from late 1917 to the middle of 1918, with major episodes in Scotland, Switzerland, and in France (during the crucial turning back of a major German offensive aimed at Amiens). All are narrated by Richard Hannay, a Scotsman who has spent much of his life in South Africa. He is a Major in the first book, a Colonel in the second, and a Major General by the end. Buchan wrote two more novels (The Island of Sheep and The Three Hostages) featuring Hannay as the main character, and he appeared in smaller roles in other works.

The Thirty-Nine Steps is easily the most famous. Hannay, at loose ends in London, encounters an odd American named Scudder who claims to have stumbled on a dangerous conspiracy aimed at murdering a Greek politician, but who is suddenly murdered, leaving Hannay as the prime suspect. Hannay flees to Scotland, partly because of hints that Scudder gave him, hoping he can track down the conspirators, even though he cannot even read Scudder's encoded journal. The bulk of the book is an extended chase scene, or series of chase scenes, quite exciting and imaginative stuff, with Hannay repeatedly disguising himself as characters of various nationalities, and barely escaping both the police and the conspirators. He finally comes up with sufficient evidence to take to the government, and to organize an effort to capture the bad guys, the only clue being Scudder's mention of "thirty-nine steps".

This book has been treated very well in the theatre, in movies, on TV, and on radio. The most famous adaptation is Alfred Hitchcock's 1935 movie version, one of Hitchcock's greatest early films. This starred Robert Donat and Madeline Carroll, and it differed quite significantly from the novel. The best of the other versions, to me, is a comical theatrical adaptation, first staged in 1995 and significantly revised in 2005. Its plot is a combination of Buchan's original and Hitchcock's adaptation, though it has a lot of fun throwing in references to other Hitchcock movies. I have seen a local production, and it is thoroughly delightful.

Greenmantle was published just a year after The Thirty-Nine Steps, only months after the action it depicts. Here Hannay, now serving in France and Belgium, is called back to London for a dangerous mission: it seems that the Germans are planning to use an Islamic prophet of sorts to help cause trouble in the Middle East. Hannay and three companions: his old friend from South African, Peter Pienaar; a dyspeptic American named John Blenkiron; and a fellow military man and good friend named Sandy, must find their separate ways to Istanbul, trying to figure out who this mysterious prophet might be. Again much of the novel is chase scenes, particularly in Germany, where Hannay, disguised as a disaffected Boer, manages to fool some important Germans, including a certain Colonel Stumm, and the beautiful, mysterious, and evil Hilda von Einem, into taking him part of the way to his destination, before he is discovered. In Istanbul he runs afoul of a prideful Turk, and ends up along with his friends in the middle of a pitched battle at Erzerum. (This is in fact one of the key battles of World War I.) Again, pretty exciting stuff, and Blenkiron in particular is a neat character.

Finally, in Mr. Standfast, Hannay is again unhappily taken from his command in Europe and sent to hunting spies. He begins by trying to find out who the real bad guys are in a nest of silly pacifists (to his disgust, pretending to be a pacifist himself) ... and discovers to his horror that one of them was one of the conspirators from The Thirty-Nine Steps, a master of disguise himself. Another mission to Scotland (particularly the Isle of Skye) leads him to one of the communication depots of the spies, but he is unable to get enough information to truly stop them. Meanwhile he has met and fallen for a beautiful girl, at 19 less than half his age, one Mary Lamington. The story continues to Switzerland and a reunion with Peter Pienaar, who has been crippled flying a warplane. The mission is to finally trap the master spy, with Mary as the bait ... and after that episode, we proceed to France, and a not badly done description of one of the most desperate late battles of the War. So this too is a gripping adventure story, with chase scenes and desperate escapes, masters of disguise, and even a scene where the villain gloats over the hero, and forbears to kill him, trusting that he cannot escape certain death anyway. It's also a fine love story, and a pretty good war story.

I've given these novels shortish shrift, but they are all very good fun. It should be added that Buchan had at least his share of the prejudices of the time: there is some casual anti-Semitism, the attitudes towards black people are, I suppose, what you might expect from a South African of that period, and the treatment of Germans is almost silly in its caricature. But if you can ignore that, or calibrate it to the attitudes of that day, these are three very fine adventure stories.

A Forgotten SF Novel: Planet Patrol, by Sonya Dorman

Planet Patrol, by Sonya Dorman

a review by Rich Horton

Once again I haven't finished my latest true "Old Bestseller". Instead I'm covering a Young Adult science fiction novel from 1978, that is, I think it's fair to say, quite forgotten now, and was really never well known at all. But the writer was an interesting and (in a very modest way) somewhat notable writer in her day. Sonya Dorman. born 1924, died 2005 (married name Sonya Dorman Hess, and she sometimes signed herself a form of that name), published about 20 stories in the SF magazines and anthologies between 1963 and 1980, as well as one story (also apparently SF) in Cosmopolitan in 1961. At least two stories received particular notice. "When I Was Miss Dow" first appeared in 1966 in Galaxy, and has been widely anthologized, including in the second Nebula Award Stories volume, in Pamela Sargent's influential anthology Women of Wonder, and in the landmark Norton Book of Science Fiction (edited by Ursula Le Guin and Brian Attebery). And "Go, Go, Go, Said the Bird" appeared in Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions.

Dorman was also a poet, and arguably her reputation as a poet surpassed her reputation as an SF writer. I recall running across one of her poems in a school anthology back in high school, and I was shocked to realize I knew the author as an SF writer.

Between 1969 and 1973 she published three delightful (if slightly retro) novelets in F&SF about a young woman named Roxy Rimidon. Roxy is a young woman in the "Planet Patrol", sort of a special police group in a unified Earth sometime in the nearish future. The three stories are "Bye, Bye, Banana Bird" (December 1969), "Alpha Bets" (November 1970), and "The Bear Went Over the Mountain" (August 1973). A little while back I ran across Dorman's only novel, Planet Patrol. I quickly gathered that it was a Roxy Rimidon story, and so I snapped it up. It was published by Coward, McCann & Geoghegan (there's a classic old publishing house, long gone now I guess) in 1978.

I had hoped it might be a completely new story, but I wasn't surprised to find out that it's mostly a fixup of the three F&SF stories. Well, there's nothing wrong with that, and it had been some time since I had read the stories, so I read the novel, and I confess the first thing I thought was "This isn't as good as I remembered". That too is not a rare feeling, but it really did seem disappointing. So I went back to the original F&SF issues, and reread the stories, and found that, while they are substantially the same as the episodes in the novel, the original stories have a distinct energy that seemed lacking in the novel. Most of this, I believe, is due to the market for the novel: YA. Dorman rewrote the stories, presumably to fit the market, and the rewrite leached a lot of the charm from the stories, for me. Some of the changes are pretty minor: a couple of character names are altered. But there a further changes that are much more important, and not surprisingly, most of them involve sex. To begin with, in the stories Roxy's age is between 22 and 25, while in the novel she's between 17 and 19. Right at the beginning, when she's in training, she throws herself (more or less) at the Planet Patrol Academy's leader, a Colonel with an unsuitable wife -- that's entirely excised from the novel. And in the final episode, the F&SF version has Roxy jumping into bed with one of her colleagues -- again, gone from the novel. There a few other less prominent changes, but to me they all work to the detriment of the novel version. It should be said, the fundamental plots of the episodes remain unchanged (and there is one additional shortish episode in the novel). (there is also a subplot in the stories suggesting Roxy has mild telepathic abilities which is removed in the novel.)

Planet Patrol opens with Roxy in the Planet Patrol Academy, getting criticized for being a bit too full in the hips. (I said the stories are a bit "retro".) There is a little bit about the training exercises, mostly the same in the book and the first story ("Bye, Bye, Banana Bird"), though the original story has a more and more interesting stuff (including the bits about Roxy making a bit of a move (unsuccessfully, I should add) on the Colonel). The novel continues to her first assignment (not in any of the F&SF stories), a somewhat implausible and slight story of rescuing an Akita from a crevasse.

The next segment in the novel is the story "Alpha Bets", set at the biannual "Games" (sort of a future Olympics between the ten Dominions into which Earth is divided). Here we are introduced to the central conflict (such as it is) of the novel: the resentment felt by Earth's two interstellar colonies, Alpha and Vogl, over their restricted roles as basically "breadbaskets" or "mines" for Earth. They are not even allowed to compete in the Games, though that will change in the next year. Roxy's brother is one of the best Tumblers in the world, and when his partner is injured, Roxy improvises by recruiting a new partner for him from an Alphan family that she had met, whose son had made it clear he resented not being able to compete.

Then Roxy is assigned to investigate potential Vogl insurrectionists on a Caribbean island. (This segment was originally the second half of "Bye, Bye, Banana Bird", and thus originally Roxy's first assignment.) She discovers a murdered Planet Patrol Sergeant, and ferrets out the nasty Voglians who are responsible, but in the process comes to realize that while their methods are evil, the Vogl insurrectionists have a valid grievance.

This leads to the final episode, which was, in F&SF, "The Bear Went Over the Mountain". (Curiously, the title derives from a brief scene in "Bye, Bye, Banana Bird" (that does not appear at all in the novel).) Roxy visits her mother while planning to testify at the Inter Dominion meeting in favor of more autonomy, and especially an independent Planet Patrol branch, for Vogl and Alpha. But she is kidnapped and threatened by more Vogl insurrectionists, leading to a crisis of conscience: should she still testify as she had planned, or will that testimony seem to endorse their violent methods? She finds a way to testify honorably, and ends up assigned to be part of the Planet Patrol group that will help set up the first Vogl Planet Patrol academy. But on Vogl she learns that Vogl has its own internal problems, and also that they have secretly done some original research into cyborgization that surpasses anything Earth has done ... The resolution is a little bit odd, in that Roxy and company do fairly little to solve the problems ... but perhaps that makes some sense.

I still quite enjoyed the stories on rereading them -- as noted, the novel not quite so much. It's all very fast moving stuff, a bit retro in feel in a couple of ways, but very good fun. And, I should add, rather uncharacteristic of the rest of her work, which is by and large still quite worth looking up.

Old Bestsellers: A Fool There Was, by Porter Emerson Browne

A Fool There Was, by Porter Emerson Browne

a review by Rich Horton

Last week I wrote about The Sheik, by E. M. Hull, one of the worst books in many ways among those I have reviewed on this blog. But The Sheik's badness was in large part its objectionable treatment of women and Arabs, especially of course the rape plot. Not to say that it's all that well-written a book either, but you can see if you squint why it was so popular. A Fool There Was is bad in a different way: it's just poorly constructed, and poorly written.

A Fool There Was shares something else interesting with The Sheik. The film version of The Sheik was critical to establishing the persona of one of the most famous male sex symbols of the silent era, in Rudolf Valentino. And the 1915 film version of A Fool There Was established the persona of one of the most famous female sex symbols of the silent era, Theda Bara. (Bara played a femme fatale who was regarded as sort of a Vampire, hence her nickname, the Vamp, and hence the term "vamping".)

I can find only minimal details of Porter Emerson Browne's career in searching the internet. He was born in 1879 and died in 1934. He was a journalist and a playwright. Supposedly he was for a time secretary to Pancho Villa, and also a speechwriter for Theodore Roosevelt. He wrote many plays, of which the most famous are probably A Fool There Was (which was filmed twice) and The Bad Man (filmed three times).

A Fool There Was was written for Broadway, apparently, and ran early in 1909. The copy I have is in novel form, and frankly doesn't seem very much like a play. I assume Browne adapted it for book publication. It was originally published in 1909 by H. K. Fly (this was, actually, most likely the play version), and my copy is a Grosset and Dunlap reprint (possibly the first novelized edition). It is illustrated, curiously, by two different people: there are a few lightly colored plates by Edmund Magrath, and quite a number of pen and ink illustrations W. W. Fawcett. (I preferred the Fawcett illustrations.) The book is dedicated to Robert Hilliard, who was the star of the Broadway production. It is quite short, about 42,000 words, divided into many often very short chapters.

The story is nominally based on an 1897 poem by Rudyard Kipling called "The Vampire". The play and book's title is the first four words of the poem, and the first stanza is given as an epigraph. (Apparently, when the 1915 movie version was presented, the entire poem was recited (live) several times during the showing.) The poem is about a man who gives up his "goods", and his "honour and faith", to a woman who didn't much care and eventually "threw him aside".

The novel tells of two men who grew up together in New York City, both falling for the same neighbor girl. John Schuyler eventually wins the girl, and they have a daughter, and all are happy. The other man, Thomas Blake, never marries, and continues as a good friend to the Schuyler family. Both men become quite successful.

There are a series of curious interludes, never adequately explained, set in Brittany, detailing the squalid birth of an illegitimate child, and later the now beautiful young woman encountering her father and killing him, and later an odd scene where a young man comes on a naked woman in a forest, and turns away. I can only assume these are scenes of the early life of the femme fatale character who turns up later (this is the character played by Theda Bara in the movie), but the novel never deigns to really connect things.

Eventually John Schuyler is appointed to a diplomatic post in England. He has to go alone, though Blake sees him off, and hears the story of the suicide of "Young Parmalee", who had been making a fool of himself over a wanton woman. Blake sees the woman briefly on the ship ... and also sees Schuyler see the woman ... Well, you see what happens. Schuyler is drawn helplessly (as if!) into the woman's arms, and begins an affair, which continues throughout his (apparently botched) mission, and even on his return to the US. Eventually he leaves his wife, loses his job, and falls into drunkenness. Blake makes a last attempt to save him from degradation, but the woman, contemptuously, insists Schuyler kiss her one more time before he leaves ... and all is lost.

And that's all!

So, a morality tale. The problem is the construction, and the oddly flippant prose. And the failure to really suggest much of anything believable in any of the relationships: certainly not Schuyler's with his wife, but also not his attraction to the "vampire" character. The only character who came close to convincing me was Schuyler's young daughter. As I noted, the prose is a bit odd -- flippant somehow, given to silly epigrams, and often just trailing off in a sort of dying fall. There isn't a lot of dialogue, which seems strange in a book apparently adapted from a play. Perhaps the play was better! And it is intriguing to have -- purely by accident! -- run across the source material for Theda Bara's first big film (even odder to have done so just after reading the source material for a crucial early Valentino film).