A Nearly Forgotten SF Novel: Hello Summer, Goodbye, by Michael G. Coney

Hello Summer Goodbye (and I Remember Pallahaxi), by Michael Coney

A review by Rich Horton


Hello Summer, Goodbye came out in the UK from Gollancz in 1975. It was later published in the US (by DAW) as Rax, and in Canada as Pallahaxi Tide. Coney wrote a sequel to it, I Remember Pallahaxi, but was not able to publish it. When he was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2005, he placed three novels and some short stories on his website, including I Remember Pallahaxi. It was published in hardcover by PS Publishing after Coney's death.

Michael G. Coney (1932-2005) was born and raised in the UK but spent about the last half of his life in Canada. He published a great many stories and novels from about 1969 through the early 80s, then fell mostly silent: after 1984 there were a pair of novels in 1988 and 1989, and a new spate of stories in the mid-90s, mostly in F&SF, with a couple of later stories in Spectrum SF. He was a colorful writer, notably influenced, it seems to me, by Cordwainer Smith and Jack Vance. Many of my favorites among his stories were those set on the "Peninsula", a touristy area a bit reminiscent of J. G. Ballard's Vermilion Sands or Lee Killough's Aventine. He was a very fine writer, of just that sort of quiet accomplishment to doom him to obscurity even as he was often praised ...  and it seems to me that after his death his reputation has only receded.

Hello Summer, Goodbye concerns Drove, a teenaged boy on an alien planet. (He seems very human, but eventually we learn that his species is humanoid but not exactly human.) His family summers at the coastal town of Pallahaxi. At Pallahaxi Drove hopes to meet again the girl he met the previous summer, Browneyes. But Browneyes is an innkeeper's daughter -- too lower-class for Drove's father's taste. Still, they do meet again, and they begin a sweet love affair. Their relationship is strongly affected by tensions between the Pallahaxi villagers and the government. The villagers are not enthusiastic supporters of an ongoing war, and they are suspicious of the government's motives in diverting supplies from Pallahaxi, and of their intentions for the weapons that are passing through town. All this is set against a backdrop of climate change caused by the planet's unusual orbit about its Sun and the effect of the large nearby planet Rax.

The SFnal color in the background includes interesting creatures such as ice-demons and the telepathic (or at least empathic) lorin; the apparently highly mutagenic environment of this planet; the somewhat exaggerated fear the natives have of cold; and some curious weather such as the grume -- a decidedly odd ocean current that comes every summer. Much of this is fascinating but scientifically difficult to take. I was reminded of Jack Vance in everything but the prose.

The novel comes to a rather unexpected climax, when the reason for the war and especially for the government's actions in Pallahaxi are revealed. They are quite surprising, and rather bitter in implication. Drove's sympathies of course align with the villagers and Browneyes, but his father forces him in another direction. The ending of the novel is deeply sad, but also somewhat ambiguous -- there is a hint of a possible sort of redemption for at least Drove. It is finally quite a beautiful bittersweet book.

The sequel, I Remember Pallahaxi, is set centuries in the future of Hello Summer, Goodbye. It explains the backstory and mysteries of that novel in a very satisfying and interesting fashion. (I have to suspect that Coney invented much of this after writing the first book -- though who knows! Though if he did have it all in mind when writing the first novel, he showed amazing restraint in concealing some neat ideas, including a rare example of actual real live Alien Space Bats.)

Right at the opening we learn that the narrator is a stilk -- humanoid but not human. Much is made of the differences between humans and stilks, most importantly the stilk ability to directly experience the memories of ancestors in their same sex line. The stilk with the longest memories is traditionally chief of his village -- or of hers. Males and females live separately, coming together only to mate.

The hero is Hardy, the nephew of his village's chief. Their family has a tradition that their memories go back all the way to the legendary founders of stilk society, Drove and Browneyes. Hardy soon meets a girl, Charm, from a fishing village, thus not considered an appropriate mate. To complicate things, they realize they love each other enough to want to live together -- much like Hardy's father and mother, who do not actually live together but who pervertedly see each other again and again and feel continued affection.

The novel’s plot turns immediately on Hardy’s father’s murder, but more importantly on the coming climate change -- it seems that the dead planet Rax is once again claiming their world, threatening another long freeze and starvation. But this time, the situation is complicated by the presence of humans, who have traded with the locals for mining rights. The humans, however, refuse to help with the freeze, citing the Prime Directive (not called that, of course). Stilk society begins to fall apart. And Hardy and Charm begin to sense a great secret involving the telepathic lorin.

The resolution is largely as we begin to expect, though with some nice fillips. The love story of Charm and Hardy isn't quite is sweet as that of Drove and Browneyes, but it works. The various revealed mysteries are quite delightful, and also rather thought-provoking (and, in a way, ultimately perhaps tragic -- or perhaps not -- hence the "thought".) I enjoyed it -- if perhaps not quite as much as Hello Summer, Goodbye (the first novel’s heartbreaking sweetness is hard to top) and I am thrilled to see both novels back in print.

Old Bestsellers: The New Arabian Nights, by Robert Louis Stevenson

The New Arabian Nights, by Robert Louis Stevenson

A review by Rich Horton


Robert Louis Stevenson of course remains a very famous writer, with a reputation skewed slightly towards books for younger readers, like Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and The Child's Garden of Verses; though of course his adult horror story The Strange Tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde remains very popular as well. This is somewhat unfair, and it's partly due to the disdain of the modernists, notably Virginia Woolf, whose criticism led to a distinct dimming of his literary reputation, though he has been (justly) rehabilitated somewhat in more recent decades.

He was famous as well for his somewhat dramatic biography. He was born in Edinburgh in 1850 to a family of lighthouse engineers. He somewhat disappointed his father by not taking to engineering, though he did eventually take a law degree, even though he never practiced. He was sickly his entire life (at the time, tuberculosis was blamed, but more recently, Wikipedia says, other diseases like bronchiectasis and sarcoidisis have been proposed). He traveled widely, partly for his health. He married an American woman, ten years his senior, Fanny Van de Grift, and eventually moved to the United States, before finally moving to Samoa, which probably was ideal for his health. He was an advocate for independence for the Pacific Islanders, and was apparently very well-liked by his neighbors. His health eventually failed completely, and he died in 1894.

When a teen I read The Black Arrow, an historical novel set during the Wars of the Roses. It was one of my favorite books. Oddly enough I didn't read much else by Stevenson -- I did read, and enjoy, David Balfour, the sequel to Kidnapped (apparently better known everywhere but the U. S. as Catriona), and I read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but never Treasure Island nor Kidnapped. I knew of other well-regarded works like The Master of Ballantrae and the unfinished Weir of Hemiston, but again never read them.

I ran across my copy of The New Arabian Nights at an antique mall recently. I had never heard of it. Turns out it's his first book of fiction -- it was published in 1882, comprising stories that appeared in magazines between 1877 and 1880. It has a fairly strong reputation. He put out another collection, unrelated except by title, called More New Arabian Nights, in collaboration with Fanny Van de Grift, in 1885. My edition is a 1906 reprint, the "Medallion Edition", octavo size, from Current Literature Publishing of New York. I have to say I like the habit of books of that era of including illustrations, even just author portraits as here.

The "Arabian Nights" conceit comes from the first two sets of stories in the book, one group of three entitled "The Suicide Club", comprising "Story of the Young Man with the Cream Tarts", "Story of the Physician and the Saratoga Trunk", and "The Adventure of the Hansom Cab", and another group of four called "The Rajah's Diamond", comprising "Story of the Bandbox", "Story of the Young Man in Holy Orders", "The Story of the House with the Green Blinds", and "Adventure of Prince Florizel and the Detective". These are linked stories, each ending with a postscript from "my Arabian author", perhaps telling of the final fate of a major character, and also hinting that the reader might want to continue to the next stories. All the stories feature Prince Florizel of Bohemia and his Master of the Horse, Colonel Geraldine. Prince Florizel is accomplished, rich, and very well liked, but on occasion he and the Colonel, out of a taste for more adventure, go in disguise to low places.

The three stories about "The Suicide Club" open with the Prince and the Colonel meeting a young man who despairs of his life, and who invites the two men to join the title club, which he himself has just joined. There are several members of the club, and each time they meet they choose by lot one member to be killed, and one member to do the killing. (All members have sworn to accept this lot (they are all tired of life anyway), and to keep things secret.) The Prince realizes of course that this is an evil thing, and that the Club's leader, the one man who is exempt from the lotteries, is actually acting for his own ghoulish entertainment. In the first story, the man who invited the Prince to join the Club is chosen as the "murderer", and the Prince acts to save him from the consequences of his murder and to unmask the President of the Club, who escapes to Paris, where Colonel Geraldine's brother vows to go to find him. In the second story, an American in Paris is inveigled into a relationship with a woman of questionable morals, who it turns out is in league with the President of the Suicide Club -- they have a rather grisly use for the American's huge Saratoga Trunk. In the third, Prince Florizel finally tracks down the President and puts and end to his career.

"The Rajah's Diamond" concerns the unpleasant General Vandaleur, who has been given a diamond by an Indian Rajah for his service in that country. The diamond proves sufficient to lure get the General a beautiful wife, but she soon tires of him, and he tires of her spendthrift ways, not to mention her encouragement of the rather feminine and useless Harry Hartley as her sycophant. Lady Vandeleur finally decides to sell her jewels, with the diamond, to get more money after her husband refuses to continue to pay her bills, and she sends Harry on that errand, but he proves unequal to the task, and loses most of the jewels. In the next tales, the diamonds, stolen by a gardener, ends up with a less than honest young clergyman, who, in looking for a way to safely get rid of the diamond, encounters, the General's equally unpleasant, and estranged, brother. The two become accomplices, but hardly happy ones. There is an episode with a poor young man who is offered a good deal of money if only he will agree come to Paris at a certain night and attend a play, and also to marry the woman chosen by his benefactor (who turns out to be his illegitimate father) ... Obviously something funny is going on, and Prince Florizel, in the end, helps set things straight.

These are both enjoyable story cycles. The Prince is an amusing character (with an amusing final career). The various hapless young men who get involved are a bit less convincing, and the way things turn out reasonably well for them seems a bit undeserved and perhaps implausible on occasion. The plots are driven by a certain degree of coincidence, to be sure. But they are fun.

There are four further stories, all unrelated. "The Pavilion on the Links" is a long story (25,000 or more words) about a man who encounters an old acquaintance at a secluded pavilion in the Scottish linksland (I confess I thought "the Links" meant a golf course, but instead it means the seaside land where many of the greatest Scottish golf courses are placed; and "links" must mean something like land linking the inland to the sea, instead of the links between one golf hole and the next). His acquaintance, a less than pleasant man, seems to be up to something -- he's accompanied by a beautiful young woman and by her father. It turns out the father is a criminal who caused a bank to fail, and made off with the remaining funds, and he's being pursued by Italians related to Garibaldi ... The hero falls in love with the young woman, which enrages his acquaintance who wants her for himself, but all must band together to save the others from the Italians.

The other three are set in France. "A Lodging for the Night" is about Francis Villon, and portrays him as a decidedly nasty man, on the run after his involvement with the murder of a fellow thief, himself destitute after his other fellows have robbed him, desperately looking for shelter on a snowy night. "The Sire de Maletroit's Door" is about a soldier who by accident ends up going through the title door, and being forced by the unpleasant Sire to marry his daughter, whom he believes has had her virtue compromised. And "Providence and the Guitar" is a lighthearted story about a French man and his wife, traveling musicians, and their troubles in a small town where the Commissaire is corrupt and the residents ungenerous, until they meet an unhappy couple (the wife wants the husband to get a real job).

Stevenson is known as one of the progenitors of what is called "the Age of the Storytellers", and this collection of stories supports that -- they are all enjoyable, full of adventure, and engagingly told.

Old Bestsellers: A Lost Lady, by Willa Cather

Old Bestsellers: A Lost Lady, by Willa Cather

A review by Rich Horton

One of my secret shames is a habit of introducing myself to great writers I haven't tried by picking really short books. So, for example, George Eliot: I haven't read Middlemarch but I have read Silas Marner and The Lifted Veil. Don De Lillo: I haven't read Underworld but I have read The Body Artist and Cosmopolis. Edith Wharton: not The Age of Innocence but instead Ethan Frome. John Banville: not The Sea but The Newton Letter.

And so when I ran across a copy of A Lost Lady, by Willa Cather, it seemed like a good opportunity to mend another of the many lacunae in my reading, without having to tackle something long like O Pioneers! or My Antonia. And actually this turns out to have been a very worthwhile choice! (And it seems it's a book that is very highly regarded among her oeuvre.)

This blog is about "Old Bestsellers", supposedly, though I often enough violate that rule. Willa Cather, as it turns out, actually enjoyed very good sales for her work; and even once, with Shadows on the Rock, appeared on the Publishers' Weekly list of Bestselling Novels of 1931 (it was third). That's actually not at all one of her better known books. To me it seems that O Pioneers! and My Antonia are very clearly, at this remove, her best-remembered novels; but some will plump for Death Comes for the Archbishop or her Pulitzer-winning One of Ours.

Cather (1873-1947) is regarded as a writer of the American West, particularly the Great Plains, more particularly still Nebraska. She was born in Virginia, but spent many of her formative years in Nebraska, in the town of Red Cloud (close to the Kansas border). She moved back East (to Pittsburgh) as a young woman. As with some other women of about that generation that I've covered (Ivy Compton-Burnett and Octave Thanet for two) she lived for a long time with another woman, and many scholars assume she was a Lesbian, but she did not seem to choose to identify herself as such, and the question of her sexuality is controversial. It's easy enough to explain that reticence as the natural reaction of people to society's prejudices -- and indeed that seems a plausible explanation -- but personal lives are complicated things, so who knows?

Anyway, to A Lost Lady. This is a short book, just a bit over 30,000 words. It was first published in 1923. My copy is from 1945. It's set in Sweet Water, Nebraska, a small town pretty clearly based on Red Cloud. Sweet Water is on the Burlington railroad line (which also runs through my home town of Naperville, IL), and Captain Daniel Forrester is a man in late middle age, retired from building railroads, who owns a beautiful property on the outskirts of town. His second wife, a great deal younger, Marian Forrester, is a striking woman, very fashionable, very sociable, and a great hostess to the men of the railroad that the Captain entertains.

We see snapshots of her over a decade or more, mostly through the eyes of young Niel Herbert, who is smitten with Mrs. Forrester from the age of 10 or so. She seems to him the epitome of womanhood, and manners, and class. And Captain Forrester is a pillar himself, a strong man slowed a bit by an injury, a rigorously honest man, and a symbol of, one supposes, the pioneer spirit. As Niel, an orphan, grows older he studies law with his Uncle, the town lawyer, and finds himself occasionally invited to the Forrester house. It seems Mrs. Forrester has a special liking for him, and she introduces him to her Denver friends, including some people who make Niel a bit uneasy, such as Frank Ellinger.

It is by slow degrees that we learn that Mrs. Forrester is unfaithful, for some time carrying on with Ellinger, though Niel refuses to see this. Then a series of reverses affect the town of Sweet Water, and most particularly Captain Forrester, whose honesty compels him to take the full burden of the failure of a bank he has invested in; and who is further felled by a stroke. We learn, as Niel is slow to, that Mrs. Forrester needs the Captain's money more than his person -- and finally Niel is fully disillusioned when she takes up with a loathsome local man.

So, it is a portrait of a "Lost Lady" -- with a back story involving her marriage to the Captain that is only revealed late. She is a sad character, much more to be pitied than held in contempt, and Niel's early admiration can be seen as not really so misplaced, if misemphasized. And of course there is behind all this the story of the West, and of the displacement of the pioneer spirit (represented by Captain Forrester) with the corruption of money-grubbing Eastern ways (represented by Ivy Peters, the loathsome fellow, who becomes a slimy lawyer, with whom Mrs. Forrester takes up).

I thought it a marvelous book, beautifully written and honest and convincing. And with some really striking passages. Here's one: "The Old West had been settled by dreamers, great-hearted adventurers who were practical to the point of magnificence; a courteous brotherhood, strong in attack but weak in defence, who could conquer but could not hold. Now all the vast territory they had won was to be at the mercy of people like Ivy Peters, who had never dared anything, never risked anything." I confess I'm not entirely sure that she's correct with her point here -- but, it's pretty to think so! Here's another passage: "He had seen the end of an era, the sunset of the pioneer. He had come upon it when already the glory was nearly spent. So in the buffalo times a traveller used to come upon the embers of a hunter's fire on the prairie, after the hunter was up and gone; the coals would be trampled out, but the ground was warm, and the flattened grass where he had slept and where his pony had grazed, told the story."

Old Bestsellers: Ellen Adair, by Frederick Niven

Ellen Adair, by Frederick Niven

A review by Rich Horton

Here's a truly obscure book that likely was not a bestseller of any sort, though the writer did have a modest reputation in his day. He was regarded, it seems, as a writer of fairly serious intent, and he does seem still to be remembered in Canada as a fairly significant early writer of the Canadian West -- "British Columbia's first professional man of letters" one article says.

Frederick Niven, like his very near contemporary John Buchan, was a Scottish writer who ended up in Canada, and as such is claimed by both countries. Buchan has never struck me as very Canadian at all, spending only his last five years there, and as far as I know writing very little if any fiction set there. But Niven, who was born in in Chile in 1878 to Scottish parents, and lived in Scotland from a very young age, spent several years in Canada in his early adulthood, and moved permanently to British Columbia in 1920, for his health. He died in 1944. A number of his later novels were set in Canada, mostly historicals, while most of his Scottish novels are set in his present day, more often in his true home town of Glasgow, but in the case of Ellen Adair in Edinburgh.

Niven spent some time writing for the Glasgow Weekly Herald and other papers as a young man, often writing about Western Canada. He was not able to fight in the Great War due to health, but he did write for the Ministry of Information, similar to other writers I've covered like Buchan and, as I recall, Anthony Hope. Writing appears to have been his only profession.

Ellen Adair was first published in 1913. My edition seems to be the first American edition, and it came out in 1925 from Boni and Liveright. It is set in the early 20th century, in Edinburgh. It opens with the title character at her very first dance. We quickly gather that she's pretty, and lively, and very flirtatious. She has an older sister, Louise, who is rather more serious and studious than she, and an older brother, Tom, who doesn't play much of a role besides introducing the girls to various friends and acquaintances, for both good and ill. She also has an admirer, Jimmy Ray, who works at his father's jewelry store -- but she seems contemptuous of his attentions.

Ellen's father is of humble origins, and has a modest job as a porter. Her mother is ashamed of her husband's position, and accent, and even his church, and has worked to improve all those things -- by misrepresenting his job to her friends, by insisting he abandon his accent, and by insisting they leave the Methodist church for something more socially respectable (Church of Scotland, I suppose).

At first the story seems likely to be a coming of age story -- Ellen will have a couple of love affairs, treat some people poorly, but grow up and come to her senses and marry, perhaps, Jimmy Ray. But we soon realize that she's not just careless, but rather stupid, and cruel, and not at all interested in learning better. Indeed, after a while it seems like she might be called Lydia, and her mother might be Mrs. Bennett. (Louise, I suppose, might be seen as a combination of Jane and Mary Bennett. There is no Elizabeth on hand.) Ellen gets a job at a used bookstore, typing up catalogs, but instead of helping out at the shop when not busy typing, she turns away customers and flirts with the other assistants, eventually causing one to be dismissed by lying about his actions; and causing another to leave on his own. Her career only gets worse -- she is dismissed, then takes up with a rather nasty seducer, against Louise's insistence but with the unfortunate implicit approval (very Mrs. Bennett-like) of her mother -- and the inevitable occurs.

The ending sequences are quite melodramatic (a weakness of Niven's, reviews suggest). Up until then, though, it's a pretty well-written book, with fairly believable and well-depicted characters, solid dialogue, and convincing descriptions of Edinburgh life. Of course Ellen's fate is unfair to a considerable extent, and the result of a sexist society -- but it's also the result of quite real and convincing faults in her character (and that of her mother; and to be sure a father who would not stand up to his wife's pretensions). It's not a particularly special novel, but it's nicely enough done -- a solid example, I suppose, of a decent piece of somewhat moralistic midlist fiction.

Not a Bestseller: The Avram Davidson Treasury, edited by Robert Silverberg and Grania Davis

Not a Bestseller: The Avram Davidson Treasury, edited by Robert Silverberg and Grania Davis

A review by Rich Horton


Not done with my latest Old Bestseller, so I'm turning to a review I did quite a while ago of a magnificent posthumous collection of stories by one of SF's greatest and most individual writers, Avram Davidson. I hope his work is not forgotten ... I don't think it is -- but it does seem to get less mention than it used to. 

Avram Davidson died in 1993, 70 years old and too young. He was, as is so often said, one of the great originals. His writing was elegant and complex, always adapted to the voices of his narrators and characters, and always at some level humorous even when telling a dark story. He was one of those writers whose stories were consistently enjoyable for just wallowing in the prose, with its sprung rhythms and fine, out of the way, images. His stories also were enjoyable for wallowing in atmosphere, with their evocation of exotic place-times, whether it be late-50s New York City or early-70s Belize, turn-of-the-century Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania or far-future Barnum's Planet, and for their evocation of exotic world-views, and the packing and repacking of wondrous, seemingly inconsequential (though rarely truly so) background tidbits of history and unhistory. His best stories took these characteristics and harnessed them in the service of well-honed themes or (sometimes) clever plots. 

This collection is organized as a retrospective, with the selections placed in order of first appearance. This is, I think, an excellent choice for any collection of this magnitude. It allows the interested reader to try to track evolutions in the writer's style and thematic concerns over time. (I would suggest, perhaps, that the older Davidson was more prone to explorations of esoterica than the younger, and less often openly angry. Throughout his career, he was ready with the comic touch, even in the midst of a darker context. His style was always special, but perhaps grew more involved as he grew older.)

Another feature of this collection is the introductions by many of Davidson's friends -- mostly fellow authors and editors, but also his son; and too his bibliographer, Henry Wessels. This represents a significant chunk of "value added": they include some personal reminiscences, some analyses of the work, and some elegiac passages. I'll add that the book is nicely and elegantly put together, and that editors Robert Silverberg and Grania Davis (as well as Tor in-house editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden) deserve thanks and applause for working to bring us this book.

But, of course, there is no Avram Davidson Treasury without the stories Avram Davidson wrote, and 38 are assembled here. And, the stories are the only real reason to buy and exult in this book. I'm a big Davidson fan: make no mistake. I come to this review not at all objective, and having reading all but a few of the stories already, many of them several times. At least one, "The Sources of the Nile," is firmly on my personal list of the best SF stories of all time.

So, highlights? As mentioned, "The Sources of the Nile" is an all-time favorite of mine, a mordantly funny (indeed very funny) story of a young writer who stumbles across a family that anticipates future fashion trends. This proves of great interest to the advertising industry, and the writer chases after the secret. But he's not the only person who could make use of such information. It's tightly plotted, always logical, and perfectly resolved (the first two features not being very high on Davidson's list of strengths). It's also full of gorgeous telling details of character and setting, as well as the odd Davidsonian bit of thematically-pointed esoteric knowledge. And, as Gregory Feeley's introduction points out, it has a sound moral core.

"Manatee Gal Won't You Come Out Tonight?" was the first of the Jack Limekiller tales, and "Polly Charms the Sleeping Woman" the first of the Dr. Eszterhazy tales. Each serves as the representative in this anthology for its respective series, and each is wonderful in its own right as well as a great introduction to the characters and settings (both important) of both sets of stories.

The Limekiller stories are often called "Magic Realism." I don't want to try to define that term but it does give a small sense of their flavor. "Manatee Gal ..." introduces Jack Limekiller, expatriate Canadian, owner of the boat Sacarissa, and his adopted home of British Hidalgo (i.e. British Honduras, or Belize). Jack gets entwined with a mystery concerning manatees, the old African tribes called Mantee or Mandingo, a lost colony in the British Hidalgo bush, and plenty more. The mystery is satisfactory and nicely resolved, but the joy of the story is the detail of the Caribbean setting, and such points as the nicely recorded voices of the various characters. "Polly Charms ..." is set in a Ruritanian sort of locale: the Triune Monarchy of Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania. Again, there is a mystery: a young woman who has been sleeping for decades, without growing older, is put on display. The "unquestionably great and justly famous Engelbert Eszterhazy, Doctor of Jurisprudence, Doctor of Medicine, Doctor of Philosophy, Doctor of Literature, Doctor of Science, et sic cetera" is urged to investigate, perhaps because fraud is suspected, but the story comes to a sadder, more moving, conclusion than would result from any bald explanation of the facts. Once again, the finely rendered details of life in the Triune Monarchy provide a major portion of the pleasure of the story.

I had read, I said, the great majority of these stories, but a few were new to me. "The Affair at Lahore Cantonment" is one of Davidson's mysteries (he was a regular contributor to mystery magazines). This story won the Edgar Award, but has apparently not been reprinted until now. I've been reading a lot of Kipling lately, and it occurs to me that Davidson is definitely like Kipling in many important ways (although not politically, except perhaps for disliking Germans! Ray Bradbury makes this point briefly in an afterword, as well). "The Affair ..." is, in fact, based on a certain famous Kipling poem, and as such is perhaps too obvious an example. However, it shows how Davidson shares with Kipling the ability to use a frame story subtly to the advantage of the main story, the love of planting subtle clues in places you don't expect (little details which seem interesting when introduced and are vital later in the story), and, of course, the beautiful use of characters' voices, especially the ear for accents.

Another story new to me was the rather recent "The Slovo Stove." This is a great story, telling of a man returning to his hometown after many years, and encountering a family of immigrants. The plot, about a wonderful device (the title stove) brought over from the old country, echoes "The Sources of the Nile" in some ways. But thematically, and more importantly, the story carefully, and mostly in the background, recapitulates the process of assimilation of immigrants into the dominant culture of the new land. Again, it's very moving, and very funny too. And, it seems to me, deeply true.

Davidson was at the same time an instantly recognizable writer, with an eccentric and lovable prose style, and a writer of great range. He could do straight comedy, quirky horror, mystery, social criticism, pure fantasy, mainstream, and at least relatively hard SF. (OK, pretty squishy, but real SF for all that.) He's shown in all these phases in this anthology (and of course, many stories combine several of the above features). So read "Author, Author" for comedy, "Dagon" for eerie horror, "The Necessity of His Condition" for bitter social commentary, and "Now Let Us Sleep" for SF (and also bitter social commentary).

There is not space to list the remainder of the delightful stories herein contained, such as ""Hark! Was That the Squeal of an Angry Thoat?" with its loving portrayal of Greenwich Village; "Yellow Rome; or, Vergil and the Vestal Virgin", a tempting beginning to the third Vergil novel; and the truly creepy SF horror story, "The House the Blakeneys Built." Suffice it to say that this collection is big enough, and varied enough, to whet the appetite of any reader whose ear can be tuned to catch the strains of Davidson's voice. And even this large collection inevitably leaves out many fine stories (the other Eszterhazy and Limekiller stories, "The Lord of Central Park," and many more), to say nothing of his engaging collection of essays, Adventures in Unhistory, in which he discusses at length many obscure legends and their possible bases in fact. So buy it and read it, and very likely you will find yourself searching out the out-of-print and small press books which house the rest of his work (for now). Very likely too you will be hoping with the rest of us Davidson lovers for a few more treasures to be dug from his papers, like the recent novella The Boss in the Wall, or perhaps the third Vergil novel.

Old Bestsellers: Black Plumes, by Margery Allingham

Old Bestsellers: Black Plumes, by Margery Allingham

A review by Rich Horton

Margery Allingham (1902-1966) was one of the Grandes Dames of British mystery writing in the middle of the last century, very well known -- perhaps only Agatha Christie was more famous among British women mystery writers of her time. The bulk of her books featured Albert Campion, an aristocratic character, sometimes detective, sometimes adventurer or spy. I think I read one or two of those back in the day, but I can't say I'm terribly familiar with her.

Black Plumes struck my eye not because I wanted to read something else by Allingham (though that was a plus), but because of the publication venue of the edition I found. It's a reprint in the "Bestseller Mystery" series by Lawrence E. Spivak. This was part of Mercury Press, the original publishers of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (as well as Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine); and indeed the "book" has the look and feel of early issues of F&SF or EQMM. The book was originally published by Doubleday, Doran in 1940. This edition seems to have come out in about 1942. A note inside the book states "Sometimes [Bestseller Mysteries] are reprinted in full, but more often they are cut to speed up the story ...". Black Plumes in this printing seems perhaps 63,000 words -- probably representing a slight cut from the original edition.

This is one of the relatively few Allingham mysteries not to feature Albert Campion. The detective is one Inspector Bridie, from Orkney, and he's an amusing enough character, but not really that important. The book centers on Frances Ivory, a 20 year old woman who at the beginning of the book is visiting her intimidating grandmother Gabrielle, complaining that her elder half-sister Phillida's husband, Robert Madrigal, is suggesting that she marry his odious business partner, Henry Lucar. Lucar is a pushy young man who gained a mild reputation as a hero for saving Madrigal on an expedition to Tibet with the notorious adventurer Dolly Godolphin, who died in the Himalayas. Frances is also upset because some disturbing things are happening at the art gallery owned by her father, but run by Madrigal and Lucar in her father's absence. The latest issue is a slashed painting, and the painter, David Field, shows up to complain. Field had painted Frances when she was 14 ... now she's 20, and he seems suddenly attracted, as she is to him. Things get further complicated when Field suggests they pretend to be engaged, in order to deflect Lucar's attentions.

That's the setup ... and then comes the murder. Robert Madrigal disappears for a few days, before he's discovered stuffed in a closet. At the same time, more or less, it is revealed that Dolly Godolphin is not dead after all ... he was rescued by monks at a lamasery, and after a few years is finally returning to England. Evidence seems to point to either David Field or Henry Lucar as the main suspect. Frances finds herself shading the truth slightly, about events she witnessed the night of Madrigal's disappearance, in order to protect David Field. Meanwhile Henry Lucar has apparently fled to America.

Lucar's a convenient villain -- and he's a bad guy, all right -- but that means he can't possibly be the murderer, and so it proves to be. So the novel turns on Field's apparent possible guilt, and Frances' decision to protect him, despite her fears he may really be guilty. Godolphin returns to England, and there are further revelations of tangled relationships among Madrigal, Godolphin, and Field, and the fact that all of them were at one time or another involved with Phillida. Inspector Bridie seems to know when one is lying ... And then there is grandmother Gabrielle, trying to control events in her imperious Victorian fashion.

It's a nice book, classic crime fiction of its era, with a strong and nicely resolved murder mystery at the core, and an affecting enough romance plot as well. I liked it -- Allingham seems worthy of her reputation even in this book not featuring her main detective character. The abridgement, assuming the book was abridged, isn't obviously noticeable.

A Forgotten SF Novel: D-99, by H. B. Fyfe

A Forgotten SF Novel: D-99, by H. B. Fyfe

A review by Rich Horton

Horace Browne Fyfe (1918-1997) was an active SF writer from 1940 through 1967, with the bulk of his work appearing between 1947 and 1963. He appeared mostly in Astounding, though by the '60s often in Fred Pohl's magazines (Galaxy and If), and he appeared elsewhere as well, in places like Amazing, Fantastic, and Gamma. The similarity of his name to another writer named H. B. plus something to do with a flute-like instrument (H. Beam Piper), along with the fact that both writers appeared often in Astounding, at about the same time, led to some speculation that one name or the other was a pseudonym, which is not true. Indeed, rather than Piper, Fyfe reminds me more of another Astounding/Analog writer, Christopher Anvil (Harry Crosby), and indeed also of a similarly obscure member of John W. Campbell's stable, Everett B. Cole.

The novel at hand, D-99, was published in 1962 by Pyramid, in paperback. Fyfe's most famous stories might be the five concerning an organization called the Bureau of Special Trading, or more colloquially, the Bureau of Slick Tricks. These stories appeared in Astounding between 1948 and 1952. The ISFDB lists D-99, his only novel, as another Bureau of Slick Tricks story, but though there are some similarities of theme and tone, that's not correct.

D-99 is a special division of the Department of Interstellar Relations, so named because it is on the 99th floor of the Department's building. This novel depicts a single night in the Department's history. It's job is to find ways to rescue Terrans from alien prisons, or other alien predicaments. This night there are four planets on which Terrans are in trouble: Tridentia, where a man named Harris has been captured by an aquatic race; Greenhaven, a puritanical Terran colony where a woman reporter, Maria Ringstad, has been imprisoned for violating the planet's rather strict moral rules; Yoleen, where one Gerson has been imprisoned for no discernible reason; and Syssoka, where two spacemen, Taranto and Meyers, have crashlanded and thus offended the local species.

The main viewpoint character at D-99 is Willy Westervelt, a young man, a pretty new recruit. The others with him are his boss, Smith; the boss's chief assistant, Pete Parrish; the genius gadgeteer Bob Lydman, who was himself once confined in an alien prison; and three woman, a couple of secretaries and a switchboard operator: Simonetta, Beryl, and Pauline, and well as a couple other minor characters. Westervelt is infatuated with Beryl, a bottle blond, to the point of outrageous sexual harassment, but alas she is more interested in being harassed by Parrish. Simonetta is the girl he should be after -- she clearly likes him. That whole aspect of the book is wildly sexist, in a vaguely Mad Men-ish fashion.

In between trying to steal a kiss from Beryl, Willy, who has very little agency (nor talent, far as we can tell) witnesses the department's monitoring the situation on each of the above-mentioned planets. At least in the story as show, we see very little that D-99 actually does to solve the problems. In fact, probably in at attempt to be true to life, sort of, the book shows, of the five prisoners, three successful rescues, one failure, and one left hanging at the end of the night. In between the chapters set at D-99 we get chapters from the points of view of the various imprisoned Terrans -- these in many ways are the more interesting.

There is another, rather trivial, crisis for D-99 to deal with: a power failure has stopped the elevators from working, trapping them on the 99th floor. (Also, implausibly, the doors to the stairways are locked because, you see, electricity is needed to open them -- which is not how such doors work, precisely because of the possibility of a power failure.) This means the D-99 folks need to stay late at work, and eat dinners like reconstituted martinis.

Anyway, this is an awfully trivial piece of work, not as interesting as the Bureau of Slick Tricks stories, not really very interesting at all. It is further weakened by Willy Westervelt's ineffectiveness ... it's hard to root for him, or even to see why he was hired. The sexism is, I suppose, much of it's time, but it still grates. I've seen other Pyramid novels from this period that were similarly trivial -- they seem to have been desperate, almost, and perhaps in a case like this to have turned to a veteran writer of short fiction and asked for a novel, getting in response a padded, ill-structured, thing that may have been based on unfinished ideas for a few shorter pieces.

Old Bestsellers: The Lion's Share, by Octave Thanet

Old Bestsellers: The Lion's Share, by Octave Thanet

A review by Rich Horton


It's always neat to run across an old book by a writer I've never heard of, and to find that they have an interesting story. Octave Thanet was the pseudonym of Alice French (1850-1934), born in Massachusetts (granddaughter of a Governer of that state), but who lived from the age of 6 mostly in Iowa and Arkansas. She was apparently a Lesbian, living with Joan Crawford for 40 years, though that seems to not to have been accepted widely until more recently (one site I saw calls Crawford her "widowed friend", apparently true but not the whole story -- another reference suggests that Crawford's husband's death was "mysterious"). As usual, contemporary Lesbian critics seem to stretch rather to find "coded" themes in her stories -- perhaps that's true, but I confess I found nothing of the sort in The Lion's Share, which of course doesn't mean much beyond that she was writing what she thought might sell, and avoiding controversy. Thanet was a very popular writer for a time, particularly, it seems, in the 1890s. Her novel Expiation seems to get, forgive me, the "lion's share" of praise.

Thanet's views, for the most part, for good and bad, were consistent with popular attitudes of the time, particularly in racial matters. The Lion's Share, noticeably, is full of absurdly racist depictions of Japanese characters (which is not to say they were regarded as bad -- in fact, by and large, they are portrayed as good people, but in the most patronizing fashion). Thanet was pro-Capitalist, and it's a bit amusing to see some critics regard that as more objectionable than her racism.

Thanet's primary reputation was as a "local color" writer -- apparently many of her stories were set in Iowa or Arkansas, and were highly regarded for capturing local landscapes, mores, and dialect. The Lion's Share is an exception to this, however. It was published in 1907, and it's set primarily in San Francisco, which ought to be a hint as to a major event in the story! The original publisher was Bobbs-Merrill. My edition might be a first, but there's a pasted in page on the inside cover that suggests it was distributed by something called the Tabard Inn Library -- basically, you paid $1.50 for lifetime membership, and a nickel a week to borrow a book. (There are fairly nice black and white illustrations by E. M. Ashe, as well.)

It opens with Colonel Rupert Winter, on furlough from the Philippines, visiting the son of a friend, at Harvard. He witnesses the aftermath of the suicide of a young man named Mercer, gathering that Mercer killed himself because the depression of 1903 had ruined his family, partly because of the unwise investments of his older brother Cary, whom he meets as well.

A few years later, Colonel Winter, now invalided out of the Army, is in Chicago boarding a train, to accompany his sister-in-law, the rather pompous Mrs. Melville Winter, and his much more interesting Aunt, Rebecca Winter, on a trip to San Francisco. He happens to overhear someone he recognizes as Cary Mercer, seemingly plotting something nasty. The Winter women are taking young Archie Winter with them, and of a sudden it seems kidnapping is a possibility. Also on the train is Edgar Keatchem, a leading Robber Baron of the time, it seems, whose machinations seem to have contributed to the failure of the Mercer steel mill ... and who now threatens the owner of the railroad on which they ride. Finally, we meet Janet Smith, a Southern woman of a certain age (not a debutante, but not too terribly old) -- she's acting as Rebecca Winter's companion, but Mrs. Melville Winter is convinced she's a nasty schemer.

Not without incident (a robbery attempt) they reach San Francisco. Colonel Winter is concerned on numerous grounds -- he finds himself strangely attracted to Janet Smith, but he suspects she may be somehow connected to the putative kidnappers. And indeed Archie is kidnapped, under very odd circumstances ... and in the end he seems to quite enjoy the experience. Cary Mercer is involved, at first snubbing Colonel Winter ... Other Harvard boys are also involved. Then there is an attempt on the life of Edgar Keatchem, who seemed to be at the center of the scheming.

It's all quite a tangle, and it comes to a head with a certain major historical event in San Francisco in 1906. Things of course sort themselves out quite neatly. All the supposed potential villains that we have met turn out to be basically all right (if perhaps in some cases temporarily misguided), with one mostly offstage individual the real bad guy. The course or true love runs straight. Mrs. Melville Winter is appropriately put in her place, while Aunt Rebecca is vindicated. And the Colonel's soldierly instincts are to be sure the most virtuous of all.

Hmmm ... all in all, a minor work but amusing for the most part. Predictable as popular fiction so often is, but entertaining too. Another writer who I'm glad enough to have sampled, but of whose work I don't feel any particular need to read anything more.

Another not so old Non-Bestseller: The Walled Orchard, by Tom Holt

Another not so old Non-Bestseller: The Walled Orchard, by Tom Holt

A review by Rich Horton


Tom Holt recently made a fair amount of news when he outed himself as the man behind the "K. J. Parker" pseudonym. This was not exactly a major shock -- Holt was by far the name most commonly suggested as being behind the Parker name. There were those who though Parker might be a woman (a notion I always thought unlikely, not because of any sense that the writing was "ineluctably masculine", but because of the treatment of men, women, and their relationships in Parker's books). Others were thrown off by stunts like Holt's publishing an "interview" with "Parker" at Subterranean a few years ago.

As for me, in the December 2010 issue of Locus I wrote the following: "I had more pleasure reading K J. Parker’s Blue and Gold than just about anything I've read all year. It features a beautifully constructed plot, plenty of cynical jokes and even some worthwhile commentary on man as a political beast. The story is set in what seemed to me something of an alternate Rome or Byzantium, perhaps a bit like the Rome of Avram Davidson's Vergil stories or his Peregrine stories. It concerns one Saloninus, who opens the book by telling someone "In the morning I discovered the secret of changing base metal into gold. In the afternoon, I murdered my wife." Whether either or both or neither of these claims is true is much of what the story is about, as well as what to make of his relationship with his city’s ruler, Prince Phocas. This is an extremely funny story through and through. The humor, and some of the darkness behind it, reminded me a good deal of Tom Holt's masterpiece, The Walled Orchard, which is close to as high praise as I have in me." Obviously that put me in the Holt=Parker camp, and after that I stayed silent on the subject at request, in order to keep a confidence.

Blue and Gold was one of the first "K. J. Parker" stories I read, and I have read many since, including several novels, among them the Engineer Trilogy, possibly his most famous work. I like them all, for the voice, yes, and for the intricate plots, and for the intriguing details of ancient technology and politics, and for the neat magic systems (when magic is present, that is), and for the dark but not quite despairing view of human nature.

I daresay most readers know Tom Holt best for his humorous fantasies, which began appearing in 1987 with Expecting Someone Taller. These are very funny and clever, and I read them happily for a while, but they began to seem a bit samey-samey after the first few. Since then I've sampled a couple more, with modest but not tremendous enjoyment. Holt also wrote a couple of sequels to E. F. Benson's series of books about Lucia and Mrs. Mapp (which I have not read because I tried the first of Benson's Lucia novels and disliked it), and, famously and (to Holt) embarrassingly, a collection of poems published when he was 13. I am not sure that I would ever have thought that K. J. Parker and the Tom Holt of the humorous fantasies were the same writer.

Parker's stories are all nominally fantasies, but many of them lack explicit magic, and all are set in a quasi-historical past, seeming to resemble Earth of some centuries or a couple millenia past. Names often echo Latin or Greek. Thus they have a distinct feeling of being historical novels to some degree. As it happens, in 1989, Holt published an historical novel set in Classical Greece, the time of Pericles, Socrates, and Euripides. This novel was called Goat Song, and its sequel, The Walled Orchard, appeared the following year. The two books really form a single novel, and they were later published together under the title The Walled Orchard. Holt has published several further historical novels, set in Hellenistic and later times: Alexander at the World's End (a loose sequel to The Walled Orchard), Olympiad, The Song of Nero, and Meadowland. Eventually he decided to publish these historical novels as by "Thomas Holt". These novels are all darkly comic, cynical, and full of plausible detail about the history and politics involved.

Of one of Parker's stories I observed that it is about the problems caused by both love and war, and in fact that theme runs through a number of his stories, including most obviously the Engineer Trilogy. And that theme is utterly central to The Walled Orchard, which I consider his masterpiece, both in the correct sense (the work that proved his ability as a master craftsman), and in the more common contemporary sense: his best and deepest story. The Walled Orchard is very very funny, but in the darkest of ways, and it is ultimately a true tragedy (after all, the title of the original first volume, Goat Song, means tragedy), and very moving indeed.

The novel is told by Eupolis of Pallene, a Greek dramatist, a writer of comedies, and a rival of Aristophanes. He is writing the history of his times, which ends up being the history of the fall of Athens from its place of importance. It's also of course the story of his life, and the story of his love for his wife, Phaedra, whom he loves desperately and also cannot stand, cannot live with.

I won't go into much detail about the plot. It concerns Eupolis' playwrighting, the contests Athens had every year for plays, as well as Athenian politics, and the original democracy. But ultimately it concerns the Athenian adventure at Syracuse on Sicily, during the Pelopennesian War, which ended in complete disaster for Athens. Eupolis is conscripted to fight at Syracuse, and he is one of the few survivors, hence this history. There's much more going on that that of course, but much of the burden of the novel is the horrors and folly of war, especially as experience at the walled orchard on Sicily.

As I said, it's a truly powerful and moving novel, both in its depiction of war, and also in the terribly sad love story of Eupolis and Phaedra. But it remains blackly funny as well. In the end, very true. And ... I will say, rereading passages of the novel, the connections with K. J. Parker's work, and voice, seem extremely obvious. To conclude -- one of the great historical novels of the past few decades, and a somewhat neglected one, I suspect because Holt's name is stereotyped as a writer of light comedies.

Newish, Not a Bestseller, hopefully not Forgotten: Remains, by Mark W. Tiedemann

Remains, by Mark Tiedemann

A review by Rich Horton


Not ready to post about the last Old Bestseller I've read, so I'll post a review of a fairly recent novel, from 2005, Science Fiction, certainly not a bestseller (alas) … and hopefully not forgotten, but a novel that really never got a lot of notice. I say not a lot, but I should note that it was shortlisted for the 2005 Tiptree Award (which frankly surprised me (and the author) as gender does not strike me as a particularly front and center concern of the novel – that said, I'm happy it got the nod). At any rate, however, the novel in question, Mark Tiedemann's Remains, was published by a small press, BenBella , which is best known for “smart pop” books (examples include an Adam-Troy Castro book on Amazing Race, the TV show; and a Mad Men cookbook; as well as books on True Blood, Divergent, etc.). To put it simply, the novel qualifies as a prime example of the phenomenon called “Death of the Midlist”.

Full disclosure here – Mark Tiedemann is a friend of mine, a fellow St. Louisan, and I regularly attend a book group he hosts at Left Bank Books in the Central West End of St. Louis. This month we (the group members) had decided to read one of Mark's books, as he had to miss last month's get-together due to arm surgery. And the book we chose was Remains.

Remains is a pure Science Fiction novel, and also a mystery, and a love story, and it integrates all those elements quite seamlessly. It is set in the 22nd Century, mostly on Aea, an O'Neill cylinder at the Earth/Moon L5 point. Earth has first shunned its space colonies after they asserted their independence, and subsequently they seem to have experienced some apocalyptic disaster, leaving the colonies essentially isolated, with a combined population of only a few million. These colonies are on the Moon (Lunase), in Earth orbit (Aea and others), on Mars, and in a few other places.

The novel opens with Mace Preston, a security professional for PolyCarb Corporation, investigating a disaster at Hellas Planitia on Mars, where a PolyCarb manufactured shield was destroyed in a dust storm. Mace has shoehorned himself into the investigation because his wife Helen was at Hellas Planitia. But before long he is shouldered aside, forced to concede his wife's death, even as the corporation denies she was at the site, and even as her body was never found.

A few years later he is back at Aea, having retired and living quite comfortably off the proceeds of his wife's life insurance as well as some settlement money PolyCarb has given him. After some time privately trying to find out what really happened on Mars, he has largely given up, but has not precisely recovered from his wife's death. A friend, a high-level PolyCarb employee, throws him a party, and he surprises himself by having a good time and going home with Nemily Dollard, a fairly recent immigrant from Lunase.

Nemily, it turns out, is a cyberlink: due to a congenital disorder, she has a mental handicap that is cured by a variety of implants in her brain, that she can switch out as desired: one for mathematical assistance, one called “sensualist”, a synthesist, etc. This is the most Sfnally interesting part of the book: it's an interesting idea on its own, and it's used well to portray Nemily's own difficulty with accepting her individual identity – most notably, she has a hard timing believing she can love. (And an earlier career included “ghosting” – taking on other personalities via her cyberlink for prostitution (a career which does not seem to be held in particular disdain in Aea's culture, I note).)

In rapid order, Mace and Nemily are falling love, while both their pasts begin to intersect. Nemily was used by someone from Lunase to smuggle in some contraband when she emigrated to Aea; and it begins to seem that this person might be related to a series of disasters on various space habitats. It also begins to seem that these disasters might be related to the one on Hellas Planitia that killed Mace's wife – only, is she really dead?

That sets up a pretty neat thriller plot, which has a good and slightly (plausibly) messy resolution. The central love story – or pair of love stories, because the question Mace's marriage to Helen, and whether or not she loved him, is also critical to the book – is quite nicely handled as well. And the book is also full of nice Science Fictional ideas.

I don't think it's fair to call the book forgotten, after only 10 years. (And it is still available from BenBella, and at least at a couple of St. Louis bookstores, including Left Bank Books.) But it is a book that never seemed to me to get the attention it deserved on first release, and it's a book that still deserves a look.

Old Bestsellers: Love Insurance, by Earl Derr Biggers

Old Bestsellers: Love Insurance, by Earl Derr Biggers

a review by Rich Horton


Earl Derr Biggers (1884-1933) was an Ohio native, educated at Harvard, who worked for the Cleveland Plain-Dealer before turning to fiction and plays. He had a fair amount of success early on, and a number of his novels were filmed, but his real success came somewhat late in his shortish life, with a series of books about a Chinese-American detective in Honolulu, Charlie Chan. (Chan was based on an actual Hawaiian detective of Chinese descent, Chang Apana.)

Love Insurance comes from earlier in Biggers' career. It was published in 1914. Like a surprising number of the books I cover in this series, it turns out to have been the basis for a fairly significant movie. In this case the movie was One Night in the Tropics (1940), the first film to feature Abbott and Costello. (The two have a fairly minor role in the film, but apparently stole the show, among other things doing an abbreviated version of "Who's on First?") (Love Insurance was also twice made into a silent movie.)

The book opens with a British aristocrat, Lord Harrowby, visiting Lloyd's of London's New York office with a proposition: he wants them to insure the prospect of his marriage to an American heiress. It seems he needs her money to settle his debts, and if for some reason the marriage doesn't go off, at least the insurance policy will clear what he owes. Lloyd's sends a young man, Dick Minot, down to Florida where the wedding is scheduled to keep an eye on Harrowby, and on the others involved, and make sure the wedding goes through.

On the train to Florida, Minot chances across a very pretty girl; and indeed after the train breaks down, he and she engage an automobile to take them the last stage to their destination, San Marco, FL. Of course it turns out that the girl is Cynthia Meyrick, and she is headed to San Marco to marry Lord Harrowby. (San Marco is a real place, now a neighborhood in Jacksonville, but back then apparently a separate town.) It will hardly come as a surprise that Minot has already fallen for Cynthia, and that he is now faced with the agonizing duty to honorably fulfill his mission for Lloyd's and resist the temptation to let the wedding fail to come off and leave him free to court Cynthia.

And so he does, even as a whole variety of occurrences conspire to interfere with the wedding: a jewel thief, blackmailing newspapermen, a rival claimant to Lord Harrowby's title, Lord Harrowby's apparent cold feet, etc. etc. There are other comic bits, most notably a friend of Minot's who makes money by selling jokes to a rich old lady so she can get a reputation as the wittiest woman in San Marco.

We all know pretty much how things will conclude. The novel gets there bouncily enough, though often in quite preposterous fashion. It fits into the category of books that it doesn't surprise me were once popular, but which don't seem destined to ever be read much again, and which don't seem to deserve a revival.

My edition seems to be possibly a first, from Bobbs-Merrill. It was illustrated, pleasantly enough, by Frank Snapp. The 1940 movie, by the way, is a loosish adaptation, though it does retain the fundamental plot devices. But for example San Marco has become a South American country instead of a Jacksonville exurb. And the Abbott and Costello characters are not to be found in the book (though they may be vague amalgams of a few different characters). Still and all, seems like a movie that might be worth checking out.

Old Bestsellers: Bound to Rise, by Horatio Alger, Jr.

Old Bestsellers: Bound to Rise, by Horatio Alger, Jr.

A review by Rich Horton

Back to the later middle 19th Century, and one of the most famous American popular writers of that time. Horatio Alger is best known for “rags to riches” stories of poor young men making their fortunes through hard work.

Horatio Alger, Jr., was born in 1832. His father was a Unitarian minister, of old American stock (several Pilgrims were among his ancestors), but not well off. Young Horatio was a good student, and ended up graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard. He became a minister himself, but was eventually dismissed after allegations of overfamiliarity with the young boys in his congregation. Alger had published occasion stories, poems, and articles to this point, and he turned to more active writing. A few books for adults followed, with limited success. His métier was established with the publication of Ragged Dick in 1868. Most of the books that followed (around a hundred by the end of his life) were very similar: a poor boy, through hard work (and often enough the fortuitous financial assistance of an older wealthy man who the boy might impress through courage or honesty), attains respectably middle class status. Later in his life Alger’s books became a bit more sensational in content, in response to changing public taste. Though his books sold reasonably well, his financial position was never secure. He never married, and that, coupled with the early accusations that cost him his ministerial career, along with veiled references attributed to Henry James, or discovered in some of his books, leads to the assumption by many that he was homosexual, though no hard evidence is available. (Not too surprising, given the views of the times, and the likely affect any such revelation might have had on the sales of his books for boys.)

Alger’s reputation was probably at its highest in the decades just after his death, when reprints of his books sold very widely. But by the middle of the century he was no longer much read, and frankly I doubt he will ever be much read again.

As far as I can tell the book I read, Bound to Rise, is from 1872. It is a reprint, from at a guess somewhere around 1920, published by M. A. Donohue, as part of a series of very inexpensive reprints.

Bound to Rise seems entirely typical of Alger's output. As the story opens, Harry Walton is 14 years old (though the first page says 12 … but 14 is soon after established as correct). His father is a poor farmer in New Hampshire, with six children, just barely scraping by until his cow dies. He is forced to buy a new cow on credit from miserly Squire Green. Harry, after finishing school as the prize student, decides to go off on his own and find a job, hoping to pay back his father's debt.

He spends some time work in a shoemaker's shop, and earns some decent money, while virtuously refusing to waste it on clothes or pool or cigars or any other vice. Thereby he makes an enemy of a dissolute fellow worker, who is always in debt to his tailor. Harry's first catastrophe is when he loses his pocketbook and the other boy steals it … but that is soon rectified. Then the shoe business slows, but Harry finds a place with a magician. Soon he's making even more money – enough to pay off his father's debt, but disaster strikes again when Harry is robbed at gunpoint. In this case he is saved by an even more fortuitous event (the thief steals Harry's fine overcoat, but leaves him his own shabby one in recompense, and forgets that his (the thief's) pocketbook, with even more money than was stolen, is in the overcoat). The novel ends, somewhat abruptly, as the magician, having fallen sick, releases Harry to his next job, his dream job, working for a printer. (Harry is fascinated by Ben Franklin, and eventually wants to be an editor.) Before taking up his new position, Harry returns home to pay off his father's debt, to the discomfiture of the evil Squire Green.

There's little enough action there, to be sure. And if the novel seems incomplete – it was: there was an immediate sequel, Risen from the Ranks. It's really not terribly interesting. Alger's style was quite prosy, and moralizing. He also had the habit of half-describing something interesting, then saying something like “but our story need not dwell on this detail ...” and going on. Women are not very present in the novel, and there is never a suggestion that Harry even notices girls, nor that he ever thinks of a relationship with one. And Harry's path is quite straightforward … he is a hard worker, and thrifty, but otherwise opportunities are thrown willy-nilly in his path, and difficulties are overcome with sheer good luck. All in all, just not a very good book, but it is possible to see why it and its fellows were once very popular.

Old Bestsellers: I Love You, I Love You, I Love You, by Ludwig Bemelmans

Old Bestsellers: I Love You, I Love You, I Love You, by Ludwig Bemelmans

a review by Rich Horton

I dare say most of you have heard of, and indeed have read, at least one and possibly several books by Ludwig Bemelmans. He was the author of a delightful series of children's books about a little girl named Madeline, who went to a boarding school in Paris. The opening lines are widely remembered: "In an old house in Paris all covered with vines/lived twelve little girls in two straight lines/and the smallest one was Madeline." My mother read those books to me when I was young, and I read them to my children when they were young. Indeed, I read them to my daughter probably dozens of times.

By now I think that is all Bemelmans is remembered for. But in his prime he was an active writer of mostly humorous short stories, published in places like Harper's and the New Yorker. He wrote movie scripts as well, and a well-received memoir of his experiences as a not fully trusted volunteer in the U. S. Army during World War I (My War with the United States).

Bemelmans was born in the Tyrol, in what was then Austria-Hungary (it is now Italy), to a Belgian father and a German mother, in 1898. After his father ran off with Ludwig's governess, his mother returned to Germany, which Ludwig disliked. He eventually took an apprentice position at a hotel, but after shooting (though not killing) a waiter, he chose to be deported to the US in lieu of reform school. He worked in hotels and restaurants in the US, spent time in the Army, as noted above, and tried to make it as an artist, among other things briefly writing a comic strip. His friendship with a children's book editor at Viking, May Massee, seems to have been his big break.

I Love You, I Love You, I Love You was published in 1942 by Viking. My edition is a paperback from Signet, published in 1948. There are 12 stories included, all quite short, probably totalling no more than 30,000 words. The stories are "Souvenir", "I Love You, I Love You, I Love You", "Star of Hope", "Pale Hands", "Watch the Birdie", "Bride of Berchtesgaden", "Chagrin D'Amour", "Head-Hunters of the Quito Hills", "Vacation", "Cher Ami", "Camp Nomopo", and "Sweet Death in the Electric Chair". They are illustrated liberally by the author, in a style immediately recognizable to readers of the Madeline books.

Bemelmans, as noted, worked in hotels and restaurants for much of his life. He also owned a restaurant (later a cabaret); and he travelled very widely. So it is no surprise that the bulk of the stories here concern travel, such as the opener, "Souvenir", which has almost no plot as it tells of a trip to France (and back) on the Normandie, one way in a luxury suite, then in third class on the way back. The narrator usually seems to be Bemelmans himself, and very often his daughter Barbara is an important character. For example, "I Love You, I Love You, I Love You" opens suggestively, with a girl slipping into bed with the narrator ... but soon we realize it's his very young daughter. In the end it's about her wheedling ways, and her friendship with a small-time thief named Georges. "Camp Nomopo" is about Barbara again, this time her unhappiness at summer camp. Georges appears again in the following story, "Star of Hope", complaining that the French aren't allowing him to make a dishonest living, and wishing he could be in America, where things are much better. Georges, possibly the same character, shows up again in the next story, helping an art dealer smuggle a painting out of the hands of the Nazis. That is one of a couple of stories that balance the generally light-hearted tone of the collection with mention of the war -- the stories remain humorous but not inappropriately.

"Watch the Birdie" concerns a photographer of nudes and his unsuccessful attempts to practice his art on a beautiful American model, after which he ends up in the US and is chagrined when his agent offhandedly reveals his fortuitous success with the same young woman. "Chagrin D'Amour" feels just a bit dated ... it's set at a Haitian hotel, and turns on a supposed twist, when it is revealed that the local policeman who is in love with a pretty lady's maid is black. "Head-Hunters of the Quito Hills" is another amusing travel story, in which the narrator visits Ecuador, only to be repeatedly importuned by offers to sell him shrunken heads ... he finally learns the secret of their manufacture.

The stories as a whole are a rather slight lot, and very much of their time. But they are an easy, pleasant, read. They are humorous, but not uproariously funny. I wouldn't go out of my way to find more "adult" Bemelmans, but I'm glad to have run across this little book.

Old Bestsellers: The King's General, by Daphne du Maurier

Old Bestsellers: The King's General, by Daphne du Maurier

a review by Rich Horton

"TheKingsGeneral" by Source. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:TheKingsGeneral.jpg#/media/File:TheKingsGeneral.jpg

Back to a true Old Bestseller this week. The King's General was the bestselling book in the United States in 1946 according to Publishers' Weekly. (One review I saw called it a "modest bestseller" which makes me wonder what it would have taken for that person to call it a big bestseller?)

Daphne du Maurier (1907-1989) was a very popular author and playwright. Her best known novel, by far, was Rebecca (1938), but novels such as Jamaica Inn, Frenchman's Creek, The Scapegoat, and the book at hand, The King's General, also attracted plenty of notice. She was treated very well by filmmakers, especially Alfred Hitchcock, who filmed Jamaica Inn, Rebecca (Best Picture winner in 1940), and The Birds (from a novella). Another movie often called "Hitchcockian", Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now, comes from a du Maurier short story. Other significant films from du Maurier novels include Frenchman's Creek (starring Joan Fontaine), The Scapegoat (starring Alec Guinness), and My Cousin Rachel (starring Richard Burton and Olivia de Havilland).

Du Maurier came from a literary family: her grandfather George du Maurier wrote the notorious 19th century novel Trilby, which introduced the term "Svengali" for a behind the scenes manipulator of another's career; and her sister Angela was also a writer. (Her father Gerald was an actor, and her other sister Jeanne was a painter.) She was also a cousin of the Llewellyn Davies family, whose boys were the inspiration for Peter Pan. Du Maurier became a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, styled Lady Browning.

Du Maurier's critical reputation suffered because of her popularity, it seems to me ... at any rate, she seems to have felt that. Of Rebecca, for example, V. S. Pritchett said it would be "here today, gone tomorrow". Pritchett got that prediction rather spectacularly wrong. She was stereotyped as a romance novelist, though most of her novels have sad or ambiguous endings. Jennifer Weiner would probably have a field day analyzing her reviews.

For all that, I hadn't read any of her books, though I have copies of at least Jamaica Inn and The Scapegoat on my bookshelves, in addition to The King's General. I read the latter because the historical setting seemed interesting.

It's a story of the English Civil War. Du Maurier tells it from a deliberately unpromising viewpoint: the narrator, Honor Harris, is a crippled woman, remembering in 1653, shortly before her death, the events of the Civil War, from more or less the late '30s to 1648. She's a Royalist, but fully aware of the shortcomings of King Charles I, and of the mistakes and wrongs perpetuated by her side. As of 1653 Cromwell's tyranny (as she (and I, mostly) would see it), is at its peak. So we know that the novel will end badly -- Honor's side loses, and, because of her injuries, she never marries and dies fairly young.

Her respectably Cornish family becomes entangled with the more prominent Grenvile family when she is 10 (about 1620) as her older brother Kit falls for and marries Gartred Grenvile. Honor, even at that age, dislikes Gartred from the start, and her dislike is proven correct as Gartred is unfaithful to Kit, who soon after dies. A bit later Honor falls for Gartred's brother Richard, a brilliant soldier with a nasty temper and reputation, and they become engaged, but the engagement is broken off when Honor is paralyzed after a nasty fall from a horse, partially caused, it is suggested, by Gartred.

Years pass, and Richard Grenvile makes a disastrous marriage for money, fathering a son and a daughter before the marriage founders. Honor lives quietly at her family's home. Then the Civil War starts, setting family against family, even in mostly Royalist Cornwall. Honor stays with her sister's family at Menabilly (where du Maurier herself lived, and also the model for Manderley in Rebecca). She ends up saving Richard Grenvile's son from the Roundheads using a secret passage she discovers, even while dealing with more bad faith acts by Gartred.

Honor and Richard, despite her injuries, and Richard's mercurial temper, become closer than ever (though it's not clear they are actually lovers -- she may be unable, actually, because of her injuries). Richard is a key general in the Royalist Army, portrayed in the book (fairly accurately, it seems) as probably the most talented Royalist soldier but fatally flawed because he, er, doesn't play well with others. Richard has many other flaws, most notably his inability to deal with his son Dick, whom he hates because he is not very brave, and because he hates his mother. Honor, however, becomes close to Dick. Richard and his cause fail (as he would have it, because of the incompetence of the King and his advisers as well as some of Richard's officers), and he goes into exile, only to return for the abortive rising of 1648 in Cornwall, which fails, as this book has it, because of a truly wrenching piece of treachery by someone close to him.

The novel is, really, a true tragedy, portrayal of a brilliant but fatally flawed man. And du Maurier's portrayal works, in good part of because we end up believing that Honor truly loves Richard, but also sees his terrible failings. Honor herself is an involving protagonist, and an affecting case. Despite the mostly inactive main character, there is a plenty of action; and a pretty legitimate-seeming portrayal of the war in the West, and of the atrocities committed by both sides.

I wouldn't call it a masterwork, but it's enjoyable and interesting, and the decision to end it in 1653, at the lowest ebb, more or less, for its characters, is effective. (The real Honor Harris did die in 1653, and Richard Grenville (as the name is usually spelled) died in 1659, just before the Restoration. But his nephew, Jack Grenville, was a major supporter of Charles II, and was created Earl of Bath after the Restoration, so in the end Honor and Richard's side, in a sense, did make out OK.)

An Appreciation of John Crowley's Engine Summer

I prepared this for an April 1 book group presentation at Left Bank Books in St. Louis. For those coming to this from Patti Abbott's Friday's Forgotten Books, I'm not really suggesting it's forgotten (if perhaps a bit eclipsed by Little, Big and by Aegypt). And it certainly isn't old, nor, alas, a bestseller.

Engine Summer, by John Crowley

Doubleday, 1979

 an appreciation by Rich Horton

"Ever after. I promise. Now close your eyes." So ends John Crowley's Engine Summer, one of my favorite SF novels of all time. I think that's one of the most affecting last lines I've ever read, but I have to admit, on its own, its impact is pretty minimal. Probably that's a feature of great last lines ... they are great because of what came before. So, what came before?

Well, first, two previous novels: The Deep (1975), and Beasts (1976). I found The Deep not long after its publication, and, expecting nothing much, was really impressed. Beasts probably got more notice, but though I thought it just fine, it wasn't as mysterious and original (to my mind) as its predecessor. Then came Engine Summer, which just detonated in my soul. Apparently it was Crowley's fourth novel, Little, Big (1981), which detonated in everyone else's soul, however. I don't want to denigrate that lovely book, but it is still Engine Summer which is first among his books in my heart. (Crowley followed up Little, Big with the four volume Aegypt sequence (which had a difficult path to print) and two unrelated novels, The Translator and Four Freedoms. Neither should his short fiction be forgotten: the novellas "Great Work of Time" and "The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines", as well as the short stories "Snow" and "Gone", are thoroughly magnificent, and almost everything else he has published is nearly as good.)

But I digress. (Snakes' hands, maybe. Which is an Engine Summer reference.) What is Engine Summer, then? In a way it is a bildungsroman set in a society which has abandoned even the possibility of a bildungsroman. In another way it is a post-apocalyptic elegy, resembling at a distance perhaps Edgar Pangborn's Davy. It is impossibly bittersweet, and at some level I can't say why, except everytime I finish it I am in tears. Perhaps the question is, tears for what, or who? For the main character, Rush that Speaks, who has lost his love? For the main character, who is doomed to endless repetition of his story, never knowing how it ends? For the person the tale is told to (either in the story, or, I suppose, me), who lives in a world separate from Rush That Speaks' world, a fragile and isolated world, a world, it would seem, doomed by its reliance on high technology. For humankind?

The story hinges importantly on its frame ... it opens with the narrator, in conversation with another person, denying that he was asleep – he has only closed his eyes. He opens them, above the clouds, below the sky, talking to an angel, who asks him for his story. "Shall I begin by being born? Is that a beginning?". How those lines resonate when the story is over!

The narrator is a young man named Rush That Speaks, who grew up in a commune of sorts called Little Belaire. The first section tells of his young life in Little Belaire, of his Mbaba (his mother's mother), who raised him, and of his cord (Palm cord) and his mother and father ... The customs of Little Belaire, which seem long established and little-changing, are introduced. He meets a girl named Once a Day (the names of characters in this story are one of its many wonders), and falls in love with her (over years) and she leaves to join the wandering Dr. Boots' List. I have of course elided a great deal.

We slowly gather a bit about this future ... it is centuries (probably) after an apocalypse called the Storm. (This is never clearly described, but it seems more an infrastructure collapse than the result of a war or of an overt catastrophe.) Most people died, but the Long League of Women had been planning how to cope for a long time, and they, it seems, enforced some sort of return to living lightly on the Earth for the survivors. It's never clear how many people survived, but quite few. Little Belaire seems to be the descendant of a group, Big Belaire, that came together towards the close of industrial civilization, before eventually leaving their home (in a city?) to wander (a time they call "When We Wandered") until somehow founding Little Belaire. They call people in their history with important stories to tell "Saints". And along the way, Rush That Speaks decides he wants to become a Saint. The people of Little Belaire have one critical characteristic: they are Truthful Speakers (a Heinlein allusion?): "they say what they mean, and they mean what they say".

This being a bildungsroman of sorts, Rush must leave his home. And so he does, first spending a year or so with an hermit who Rush thinks might be a Saint, a man called Blink. Then he wanders further, trying to find Dr. Boots' List, the group Once a Day joined. There are other wonders: the Planters, source of the unearthly psychotropic fungus that Little Belaire harvests and sells; the mystery of the silver glove and the ball; the mystery of the letter from Dr. Boots; the avvengers; and the Four Dead Men. And, of course, the question of where (and who?) Rush That Speaks is as he tells his story.

The story is magnificently written, not in any ostentatious way, but supremely gracefully. The choices of names, as I've said, are lovely. The simple descriptions of things – some familiar to us, some new – are beautiful; and we see things like "Road" newly as Rush That Speaks describes them. And the mysteries are made – if not clear, at least perceptible – in good time, and in a very satisfying way.

Engine Summer is one of my favorite SF novels of all time, and this reread reinforced my view. (Not a new view – my votes in the Locus Poll of a few years ago for Best SF Novels of the 20^th Century are public record, and Engine Summer was on my Top Ten list.) It is heartbreaking in one sense but arguably nothing terribly bad happens to Rush That Speaks (except the girl he loves goes away – but to how many teenagers does that happen, anyway?) It is suffused with a sense of loss, but its world could possibly be called utopian (from some angles, anyway).