Reclaimed SF Site Review: Deep Secret, by Diana Wynne Jones

Here's another review I did for the late great science fiction site SF Site, which gave me a huge leg up in my book reviewing career. This was one of my earlier reviews for them, from 1999, when Tor published the first US edition of Deep Secret, which first appeared in the UK in 1997. The review is as it appeared then, reflecting my relative newness back then to her work, and failing to note that she died in 2011 after a remarkable career.

Seldom recently have I simply enjoyed reading a book as much as I enjoyed Diana Wynne Jones' Deep Secret. Jones employs a mixture of engaging characters, interesting fantasy concepts, and a light touch with serious undertones, to create a novel that is infectious and absorbing. This is not new with her: I just discovered her work last year, and the YA novels Howl's Moving Castle and Charmed Life (which has certain similarities to Deep Secret) affected me in similar ways. Deep Secret, I should say, was marketed in the US as an adult novel, although I would imagine it would be appreciated by younger readers. (And to be sure, Jones' YA novels are certainly good fare for adults, and I have seen Deep Secret called YA anyway.)

Right from the beginning we know something is up, as narrator Rupert Venables is called away to the Koryfonic Empire, to give his stamp of approval as a Magid to a legal proceeding there. Koryfonic Empire? Magid? We are told that the Multiverse consists of worlds arranged in a sort of infinity figure, with one half (including Earth), negative magically (this is the Naywards half). These worlds tend not to believe in magic, and magic is harder to do there. The other (Ayewards) half are positive magically: for instance, creatures such as centaurs can exist there. The Koryfonic Empire is very important, as it occupies the exact middle of the infinity sign. And Magids are a variety of wizard, with the duty to subtly influence events on whatever worlds they are responsible for in the appropriate direction. Rupert is Earth's junior Magid, and he is fresh from helping out in Yugoslavia and Northern Ireland, when he gets sent to the Empire.

Rupert is soon engaged in two succession problems. His mentor has died, and he must select a new Magid from among several human candidates. In addition, the Koryfonic Emperor is assassinated, and Rupert has to try to track down the proper heir -- a process complicated by the previous Emperor's paranoia, which caused him to hide away his heirs so they wouldn't try to take over before their time. Even so, Rupert has an unexpectedly hard time tracking down the various Magid candidates. Even the young Englishwoman, Maree Mallory, who should be easy to find, is surprisingly difficult to get in touch with. And when Rupert finally does meet her, he doesn't like her at all, and crosses her off his list.

An alternate narrative path starts to follow Maree, which ought to be a clue to any reader that Rupert may have a harder time avoiding her in the long run than he thinks. Maree's father has cancer, and she's gone to live with her Uncle, a fantasy writer. But her Aunt and she don't get along at all. Plus her boyfriend has dumped her, which complicates her veterinary studies. (He's another student.) And then she gets these annoying letters from Rupert...

Rupert finally decides to weave a spell (a working) to bring the various candidates (except Maree, whom he thinks he's already rejected) together, where he can find and interview them. The real world result of this is that they are all brought to a Science Fiction convention. (It seems to be an Eastercon, actually.) A convention at which (you guessed it), Maree's uncle is to be Guest-of-Honour.

As we should expect, the convention, the interviewing of the Magid candidates, and the question of the Koryfonic succession are all intertwined. Much of the action is superficially light in tone, including some funny bits involving the difficulty of navigating the hotel's corridors. But at the same time the concerns are deadly serious, and Jones doesn't cheat us there: real mistakes are made, people are really hurt and killed. So it's not just a light-hearted romp, and though it's often funny, Deep Secret is not a comedy.

What it is, is a thoroughly involving book. Jones is one of those natural storytellers: her books compel reading. The characters are real, and very likable. The plot is exciting, and resolved logically. The magical system is lightly sketched, but what we see is interesting and well drawn. The resolution is largely what we expect, but it also involves satisfying surprises. This book kept me up late at night, and made me eager for each chance to read another chapter.

It's not perfect: the overall setup, although interesting, is a bit strained, and a bit too lightly sketched, which reduced the immediacy of some of the events. And structurally there is a slight burp: the book ends, more or less, followed by an odd sort of coda, which fills us in on an earlier event that was missed in the main narrative. But Jones finds a way to round up that coda nicely, without causing too muffled an end to things. And I came away from this book a satisfied customer. Highly recommended. And hopefully, the publication of this novel in the United States is a harbinger of more Diana Wynne Jones to come, since her earlier works are not so easy to find in the New World.

Rescued Review: Uncle Bones, by Damien Broderick

Here is another review I first wrote for SF Site, back in 2010. With the demise of SF Site, I am slowly reprinting some of those reviews at this blog.

Uncle Bones, by Damien Broderick

a review by Rich Horton

Damien Broderick died this past April, three days shy of his 81st birthday. He was born in Melbourne, and late in his life lived for some time in Texas and for a couple of years in Portugal. He had an impressive career, as novelist, short story writer, editor, anthologist, and writer of popular science, that lasted over 50 years. I corresponded with him extensively for about a quarter century, and though we only met once in person I considered him a friend.

Broderick gained admiring attention for novels like The Dreaming Dragons (revised as The Dreaming), The Judas Mandala, and The White Abacus; and for nonfiction like The Spike. But to my mind he never received quite the notice, at least in the US, that he deserved. In 2009 he made a rather dramatic return to short fiction with a series of outstanding stories, mostly in Asimov's. In that year he published this book, Uncle Bones, which collected four novellas, one from both the beginning of his career but newly revised, another from 2009, and two from the early 80s, a particularly productive period for Broderick.

The title story was the first to appear in his late flood of new work. "Uncle Bones" is arguably a Young Adult story, and also a zombie story as well as pure Science Fiction: not at all the tiresome cliché zombie stuff we see altogether too much of these days. Jim lives with his mother and his uncle, but his uncle is dead. However, he has been reanimated by nanotechnology: he was lucky enough -- for certain values of "lucky" -- to get an experimental and not wholly successful treatment. Side effects include a terrible smell and flaky skin and worse. Jim knows another "Stinky," the sister of one of his friends. He's not sure what to think about the whole thing, but when it seems his Uncle might be involved in something shady, he tries to find out what's going on, with unfortunate results. It's an enjoyable story, if just a bit predictable and perhaps too convenient in its resolution.

The other new story is actually a very old one, though it appears in this book for the first time in this form. "A Game of Stars and Souls" is an expanded version of his first story, which appeared as "The Sea's Furthest End" in the first of John Carnell's famous UK original anthology series New Writings in SF, way back in 1964. (Broderick was just a kid at the time.) It was much expanded, with a contemporary subplot added, as a YA novel in 1993, also called The Sea's Furthest End. "A Game of Stars and Souls" extracts from the novel the expanded version of the original story, with some revisions: a 40,000 word novella, pure wild space opera, reminiscent (to me) of Charles Harness. (Though Broderick, in his afterword, cites Friedrich Schiller's Don Carlos as his inspiration.) The story deals with the evil Galactic Emperor Jagannatha, in what seems to be the very far future. He has arranged for his weak son Chakravalin to marry Adriel Corydon, the beautiful daughter of the leader of an independent planet. Adriel has been genetically altered to be very beautiful, very smart, and to be able to control the emotions of others. She and Chakravalin fall in love, which is the plan, in order to motivate Jagannatha to spare Adriel's planet. But Jagannatha lusts after Adriel, and steals her from his son. Which sets in motion his son's rebellion... Tied in with this is a mysterious alien race, resident in the Singularity at the heart of the Galaxy, which has its own mystical motivations. It's not Broderick's best work, but it's fun and highly imaginative.

The best two stories are those from the 1980s. "The Ballad of Bowsprit Bear's Stead" appeared in 1980 in Ursula K. Le Guin and Virginia Kidd's original anthology Edges. (Le Guin is not thought of as an anthologist, but she and Kidd edited two impressive books around that time: Edges and Interfaces.) This is a bravura performance, spectacularly written and stuffed with SFnal ideas. The title character is an historian from the future, and an Ainu, sent back in time to observe the fall of the "Old Galactics," an empire of Neanderthals. It's often provocative -- incest is a major theme, for instance, and so is personal hygiene, and so is genocide. (Neither the Ainu depicted here nor the Neanderthals have attitudes much in sympathy with 21st Century Western attitudes.) As I mentioned, the writing is arresting, often quite funny (as with the depiction of the Emperor's robots, modelled on Karl Marx and Adam Smith), sometimes punny, sometimes bawdy. I think it rather a discovery.

The other piece may be somewhat better known, but even so I don't think it has got quite the recognition it deserves. This is "The Magi," from Alan Ryan's 1982 anthology of religious SF, Perpetual Light. Broderick has said of this story: "Arguably the best story I ever wrote, and maybe the one I'll be remembered for, if I'm remembered for anything." Here Father Raphael Silverman, born a Jew, now a Jesuit, discovers a mysteriously beautiful but empty city on a distant planet. Meanwhile he is wracked by guilt, some of it survival guilt -- his family are all dead, mostly as a result of Greater Islam invading Israel, and some of it related to a shocking discovery he made on a rescue mission to the first human starship. The story is in dialogue with a much more famous SF story about a Jesuit, Arthur C. Clarke's "The Star," and the closing revelation about the aliens who abandoned the city Silverman discovers is lovely.

Review: A Christmas Carol and Other Holiday Treasures, by Charles Dickens

Review: A Christmas Carol and Other Holiday Treasures, by Charles Dickens

by Rich Horton

Charles Dickens wrote five novellas, of almost equal length (about 30,000 words) in the 1840s. The most famous of these by far is of course A Christmas Carol (1843). It was followed, one a year except 1847, by The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, and The Haunted Man. Each novella was published as a slim illustrated book, the first two by Chapman and Hall, the latter three by Bradbury and Evans. The illustrators were a varied lot, often several to a given volume. (The most famous of them might be John Tenniel and Edwin Landseer.) 

I read A Christmas Carol first in my teens, and have reread it since plus seen many film and TV adaptations. (My personal favorite is The Muppet Christmas Carol, with Michael Caine as Scrooge, though many of the others are very good too, perhaps especially the Alastair Sim movie from 1951.) I had never read any of the other novellas, however, and so I went looking for them. But I found that most of the collections I saw were confusingly assembled. Some included only a couple of the novellas besides A Christmas Carol; others included some of Dickens' other Christmas writings, such as extracts from The Pickwick Papers, or other shorter stories Dickens wrote about the season -- "The Holly-Tree" and "A Christmas Tree" seem the most famous of those. I was feeling stubborn: I felt like there ought to be a collection of the main five holiday novellas! (Though, mind you, I do plan eventually to read some of these other stories!) So I gave up for a while and then by happenstance ran across a book called A Christmas Carol and Other Holiday Treasures, in a Half-Price Books. It was very reasonably priced, and attractive enough, so I bought it.

This book is published by Canterbury Classics, located in San Diego, though the book itself was
produced in China. It is part of a series of reprints called "Word Cloud Classics". As I said above, it's not bad looking -- bound in green faux leather, with the title embossed in red on the cover, and a number of quotes in smaller print (presumably the "Word Cloud"). It is barely edited at all -- there are a number of minor typographical errors throughout, and the introduction consists of a single page very briefly recounting the publishing history of these stories. But it does reproduce exactly the five "holiday" novellas I was looking for, in the order they were first published.

I read the book on purpose just as Christmas was approaching. It turns out, however, that the only story truly "about" Christmas is A Christmas Carol. The Chimes is about the New Year, quite explicitly. The Cricket on the Hearth is not really a holiday story at all, and neither is The Battle of Life, though one scene is set at Christmas. And The Haunted Man is indeed set at Christmas, but the story doesn't really concern that holiday, except that the winter setting and the proximity of the new year are important.

Thomas Parker told me that the Christmas novellas, while all worth reading, are each worse than their predecessor, and I'd agree that that's roughly true, though I think I'd rank The Cricket on the Hearth ahead of The Chimes, and The Haunted Man ahead of The Battle of Life. One thing the stories do have in common, save The Battle of Life, is the central importance of ghosts, fairies, or goblins to the plot, and a theme of regret for mistakes made in one's past, tied to a deep concern for the plight of poor people.

I'll very briefly discuss each story. I don't actually think I need say much about A Christmas Carol. It is subtitled "In Prose, being a Ghost Story of Christmas". It obviously deserves its enduring popularity. I won't bother to summarize the plot -- everyone knows it, I trust -- I'll only say that it's written with Dickens' customary exuberance, and his customary (but generally earned) sentimentality. It's a delight to read, its message is powerful, and its effects are affecting. It survives very well its adaptations, even those that make twists on the story, such as the Bill Murray vehicle Scrooged! I'd recommend anyone who hasn't read the original story to be sure to do so -- but don't be ashamed to have enjoyed the films!

The Chimes, subtitled "A Goblin Story of Some Bells that Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In", centers on a very poor man name "Trotty" Veck, who works near an old church with great chimes that ring out periodically. Trotty's daughter Meg is ready to marry her similarly poor fiancé Richard. Trotty meets Will Fern, a man from the country charged with vagrancy, even as he cares for his young niece.. And despite his sympathy for his daughter's poverty, and for Will Fern's even more desperate straits (and political fervor), he begins to be affected by the lectures he gets from the sanctimonious Alderman Cute, who is certain that poor people are responsible for their misfortunes, and the hypocritical MP Joseph Bowley, who eagerly dispenses charity, but with conditions. Trotty climbs into the belltower and falls, and as the chimes ring out, he is transported to the future, and as a ghost sees the fate of Meg, convinced by arguments that she should not marry Richard because they are poor, and the fates of Will and his niece. The resolution -- as the New Year arrives heralded by the chimes -- is hopeful, much as with A Christmas Carol, as Trotty's vision of the future allows him to help.

A Cricket on the Hearth seems to be the best-known of these novellas besides A Christmas Carol. It is subtitled "A Fairytale of Home". (Vladimir Lenin reportedly hated it, which I'll take as a recommendation.) The title comes from John Milton's poem "Il Penseroso", and reflects a legend that to a cricket chirping on your hearth was good luck. (It is somewhat annoying to try to search for the source of Dickens' title and have AI and such confidently tell you it's from a Charles Dickens novella!)

The story is about John Peerybingle, a steady and hardworking carrier, but not learned, who has a very pretty but much younger wife, Dot. They have a child, and employ a rather silly nurse, Tilly. They are poor but not desperately so, and seem quite happy. One of their friends is Caleb Plummer, a talented but very poor toymaker, whose daughter Bertha is blind. Caleb's son Edward had been going to marry Dot's school friend May, but Edmund had gone to South America and not return, presumed dead. The miserly owner of the toy company where Caleb works now wishes to marry May, and her mother insists she do so. Meanwhile a strange elderly man comes and asks to stay with the Peerybingles. Dot eagerly allows him to stay, somewhat to John's surprise, and later distress, when he notices a young man (the elderly man out of his diguise) spending time with Dot. John gets very angry, but, influenced by the cricket on their hearth, refrains from violence and vows to set Dot free to be with a younger man if she so wishes. There is a secret here, of course, and one soon resolved to most everyone's satisfaction. It's a fine story, enlivened by the comic antics of Tilly, and the moving care Caleb Plummer gives to his Bertha, including describing their poor dwelling as a place of luxury.

The Battle of Life is simply subtitled "A Love Story". It's set in a small village built upon the site of a centuries past battle -- a ground once thought haunted, though now that old battle has passed out of memory. Grace and Marion are the daughters of Doctor Jeddler, who thinks the whole of life a joke. The older sister, Grace, is very solicitous of her pretty younger sister, regarding her as almost a daughter (their mother is dead.) And Grace believes that Marion loves a young man named Alfred, and she has determined that they will marry. But the reader perceives immediately that Marion is not so enthusiastic. Alfred does feel for Marion, but first he will spend a couple of years studying in France, hoping to marry her upon his return. But when he does return, Marion suddenly vanishes, at the same time as Michael Warden, a dissolute young man who has run through his inheritance and must flee England. The mystery of Marion's actions is explained several years later, when Michael Warden returns, his debts have been worked off, but without Marion. I'll leave the revelation for the reader to find, but I will say that I found the conclusion, though the general outline of it was easy to see in advance, a bit disappointingly handled in detail.

The best parts of The Battle of Life involve a few secondary characters: Doctor Jeddler's servants Mr. Britain and Clemency Newcome; and the local lawyers, Snitchey and Craggs, along with their wives. All are generally good people*, and very amusingly depicted, in the best Dickensian fashion. Unfortunately the plot of the story is a bit too routinely worked out. (*Of course the lawyers are Dickensian lawyers, so they have their shortcomings, but they are overall pretty honest.)

The Haunted Man's full title is The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain. (Some sources give "A Fancy for Christmas-Time" as the subtitle, and that does appear to have been the case in the 1849 Harper Brothers edition. It's not clear to me that that subtitle was included in the English first edition.) The title character is Mr. Redlaw, a highly-respected Chemist and a sort of professor of his science. But he's an old and rather bitter man, due to having lost the woman he loved to a fellow student back in their college days. A ghost shows up -- apparently a spirit formed somehow from the Chemist's bitterness -- and offers him a bargain -- he can have the memory of all the ills done him removed, which should make him less bitter. But if he does so, anyone he touches will also have those memories removed. The Chemist accepts, and begins wandering the town, soon accompanied by an almost savage young child. He encounters his servant William Swidger, Mr. Swidger's father Philip, and William's wife Millie ("Mrs. William"), plus William's brother George, who is about to die after a life of ruin. One of Mr. Redwall's students, Mr. Denham, has abandoned his studies, and has taken ill. He's staying at the house of Mr. Tetterby, a not very successful newspaper seller who has several children. Millie is nursing Mr. Denham. But on each of these people (except Millie) meeting Mr. Redwall, they lose their memory of past troubles -- and somehow this makes their present situation seem worse, and they treat their fellows harshly. Mr. Redwall realizes what a plague he has become, and begs for a cure ... The moral is simple -- that our memory of ills as well as joys is important to deal with. As with so much Dickens, including other stories in this collection, the plight of the poorest people, especially children, is also highlighted.

I'm glad to have read this collection -- it's Dickens, so it can hardly be a waste of time. As noted, none of this stories besides A Christmas Carol is truly Dickens at his best, but all have their good points.

Resurrected Review: The End of Eternity, by Isaac Asimov

I call some of my reviews "Resurrected Review", typically when I grab something from my old blog or SFF Net newsgroup and republish it here. This one is even more truly resurrected -- it's one of very many reviews I did for the pioneering website SF Site, which was founded by Rodger Turner and John O'Neill back in 1997. John recruited me to write reviews for the site, and he soon became -- and remains -- a very close friend. John left to found the magazine Black Gate, which survives as a first rate website. Rodger Turner maintained SF Site for quite a while, but the changing nature of the internet eventually led to its end -- it was mostly finished by 2013, and formally closed in 2018, but the site remained until very recently. Rodger died in October of 2025, and SF Site left the internet not long after. I've been saving some of the best work I did, and some of that will migrate here.

This review dates to 2000, on the occasion of the Victor Gallancz SF Collectors Edition of the novel.

Resurrected Review: The End of Eternity, by Isaac Asimov

I've long been of the slightly heterodox (though far from rare) opinion that The End of Eternity is Isaac Asimov's best novel. It benefits partly from being unconnected to his various series (though there are hints, both within this book and in some of the later books, that there could be a tenuous connection). In addition, Asimov is interested in a significant, and resonant, theme, in a way the central theme of 50s SF: the human desire for exploration, and the concomitant link between risk-taking and expansion of the human spirit. This still works now, nearly at the turn of the millennium, though inevitably the theme needs to be viewed with a touch of irony. Finally, the story is cleverly constructed, and really quite well-written in spots, within the constraints of Asimov's goals and style.

There are weaknesses, to be sure. The central love story is awkwardly handled, and the treatment of women in general is creaky, while the characterization of heroine Noÿs Lambent in particular is uneven. And as with almost any time travel story, the clever structure of the plot tends to wobble on close examination: but that is a fault endemic to the form, and, I think, excusable here. I was a bit concerned about rereading this book now, not having read it in 20 years, though I read it multiple times as a teen. Would it hold up? With the one caveat that I couldn't quite buy his portrayal of women and romance (which I think I did pretty much accept as a callow teen), I think the book holds up fine.

The End of Eternity concerns Andrew Harlan, a Technician for the organization called Eternity. As a Technician, Harlan is an expert at determining and executing the Minimum Necessary Change in a timeline to attain a desired Change in history. For the Eternals, men who live "outside Time," monitor human history from the 27th century to about the 70,000th century, trying to maintain a stable society, with reasonable prosperity. They allow some trade between centuries, but for the most part they work at eliminating worrisome trends: excessively unusual social mores, dangerous technology such as atomic weapons, and, to be sure, excessive curiosity about the nature of Eternity.

As the book opens Harlan is shown committing a crime: in exchange for concealing a minor error by a functionary of one of the Eternity bases, he arranges to have the Life Plot of a certain woman tracked through a change. For, you see, when Reality Changes, everybody changes with it. And a woman you loved might suddenly be married, or have suffered an accident, or be altered in personality.

Flashbacks then show Harlan's history: his recruitment from a somewhat conservative century, his early career as an Eternal, his interest in Primitive history (from before the invention of time travel, thus before Eternity can manipulate history). Finally he encounters the alluring Noÿs Lambent, a woman from a sexually loose century, and the stiff, inexperienced Harlan falls in love, and before long is ready to risk the very existence of Eternity to keep his woman.

Asimov resolves his story, as I've said, fairly cleverly, in the process giving us a look at the creation of Eternity, and at the Hidden Centuries so far in the future that the Eternals can't penetrate, or aren't allowed to penetrate. He makes use of time paradoxes worthy of Charles Harness, but Asimov's presentation is so deadpan and rationalistic that he almost makes them believable. And in the end, he asks whether stability and general happiness is the most worthwhile goal. His answer is the expected answer for a Campbell-nurtured writer of the 50s, but it's still the answer I'd give, with modifications. (After all, Asimov's ideal vision, as presented in this book and elaborated in his Foundation/Empire books, is of a human-dominated galaxy. In essence, he suggests, we need to get to the stars before They -- the aliens -- do. Surely it's better that we get to the stars along with Them?)

Upon rereading The End of Eternity I'd still call it Asimov's best novel. If his picture of an all-male Eternity (admittedly given at least nominal justification in the book) seems risible from a contemporary perspective, so does much 50s SF fail in treatment of women. So too his sex scenes and love scenes are awkward (and the book does have a sex scene, albeit a very discreet one, despite Asimov's habit of joking that he didn't write about sex until he wrote about alien sex in The Gods Themselves): but 50s SF writers were rarely allowed much practice in that area. The ideas presented in the book are still compelling: the meta-society of Eternity is nicely worked out, with many cute details, and the overarching theme is well-argued, and still merits thought. And Asimov's prose, so often denigrated, is here, as ever, well-wielded in service of his goals. It's not beautiful, but it's well-constructed, and the occasional telling line (as a character's soft sentence about a spaceport wiped out in a Change: "It had been very beautiful") really works. This is the kind of book that made me an SF fan, and it's still worth reading.

Review: The Horse Without a Head, by Paul Berna

Review: The Horse Without a Head, by Paul Berna

by Rich Horton

At an estate sale recently, whose deceased owner clearly had interesting taste, I saw a copy of The Horse Without a Head, for 50 cents (about what it cost in the first place) and it was just intriguing enough to buy. It was a Scholastic edition, so a children's book (really what we'd now call Young Adult though the primary characters are between about 10 and 13.) And the writer was French. And, as I quickly learned, the book became a Disney movie for television -- Disney's Wonderful World of Color series -- in 1963. The movie -- called The Horse Without a Head -- appears to be fairly well regarded, though it's not well known at all.

Paul Berna was the pseudonym used for his fiction by Jean-Marie-Edmond Sabran (1908-1994), a French journalist who wrote novels mostly for children. He did publish a few science fiction novels, the best known probably a diptych published in 1954 and 1955: Threshold of the Stars and Continent in the Sky. The Horse Without a Head was published in French in 1955 as Le Cheval Sans Tête, which actually does mean The Horse Without a Head. The English translation, by John Buchanan-Brown, was first titled One Hundred Million Francs in 1957, but my Scholastic edition, presumably in response to the movie, is called The Horse Without a Head. My copy is the first Scholastic edition, from 1964. It is illustrated by Jon Nielsen.

The title horse is a play horse, stretched over a sort of tricycle frame, the head of which has fallen off. A group of ten children from a grubby Paris suburb called Louvigny play with with -- riding dangerously down a steep street, heedless of traffic and pedestrians. It is shortly after the end of the Second World War, and there is evidence of the war around -- bomb craters and such. The kids are poor, but seem pretty happy, though it's clear their parents are struggling to get by. Most of the adults tolerate the kids, but the police sometimes harass them, and a couple of merchants object to the occasional upsetting of their products.

The most prominent kids are Gaby, the oldest, and the gang's leader; Fernand; and Marion, a girl of about 12 who is beloved by all the dogs in the town. Berna lightly sketches these kids in a believable way, and the portrayal of their lives and their parents is down to Earth and seems a quite honest look at working class life in postwar France. 

One day the horse crashes, and the frame is broken. Fernand's father has a friend who can fix it, and shortly after it is fixed, some suspicious characters begin to ask the children to sell it to them for a fairly exhorbitant price. But they aren't interested, and things turn more threatening. Eventually the horse is stolen. The kids complain to the police, who don't take them too seriously, and they also find another place to play -- an abandoned factory.

Meanwhile the police are complaining that they never get any action, or chance for promotion, even though there was recently a robbery of the train that runs through the town, in which 100,000,000 francs* were stolen. It seems clear that the suspicious folks hanging around are probably the criminals, and they must be looking for the the loot. Could the horse be involved somehow? And then Fernand realizes that in the junk recovered from the horse's hollow frame when it was recovered, there was a key. 

No need to detail the ending. It involves the key, of course, and some bumbling thieves, and the mildly bumbling police, and the kids' new hiding place, and Marion's dogs. It's really quite nicely done. As I said -- a believable portrayal of life in a Paris slum (for want of a nicer word), and a bunch of decent kids making their childhood special. The actual details of the crime and the way the children thwart it may not be wholly plausible, but that doesn't really matter. Worth the time.

*100,000,000 francs is stated to be worth about $200,000, which seemed awfully small to me -- but it turns out that that is about right for the exchange rate between francs and dollars around 1950.

Old Bestseller Review: The Feathered Serpent, by Edgar Wallace

Old Bestseller Review: The Feathered Serpent, by Edgar Wallace

by Rich Horton

Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace was born in 1875 in London. He was illegitimate, and grew up in poverty. He left school at age 12, joined the Army at 21, and acted as a war correspondent in the second Boer War. He turned to writing in 1905, beginning with stories based on his journalistic work (among other things, he investigated Belgian atrocities in the Congo.) His writing proved very successful, and he was very prolific, writing over 150 novels, and nearly a thousand short stories, as well as plays, poetry, non-fiction and screenplays. He moved to the US in 1931 to write screen plays for RKO, and he wrote the first draft of the screenplay for King Kong, but died rather suddenly in 1932. (Perhaps he could be called the "Leigh Brackett" of King Kong!)

He is not widely read now, and I had not read anything by him. But I found a copy of The Feathered Serpent at an estate sale, and figured I'd give it a try. The novel was serialized in the Weekly Telegraph in 1926 and 1927, and published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1927, with a US edition from Doubleday Doran. My copy is from Grossett and Dunlap in 1928. 

Many sources claim that the novel was later reprinted as Inspector Wade and the Feathered Serpent. This is not really true. There was a comic strip based (very loosely) on the stories of Wallace, some time after his death. They seem to have decided to unify the different stories by using the same name for the Inspector character in each story, so for The Feathered Serpent, the character Inspector Clarke (a somewhat minor character in the original book) became Inspector Wade. The comic strips seem to have been "renovelized" for republication as a Big Little Book. Three Inspector Wade books were published beginning in 1939. Inspector Wade and the Feathered Serpent came out in 1940. Based on snippets of that book I could find, the plot was radically changed from the original novel, and the book completely rewritten (in much worse style.) It seems to have been much shorter -- and after all Big Little Books were for children.

Back to the actual novel. It's fairly good fun -- no lasting masterpiece, but a nice readable novel with an interesting if implausible central mystery. The two central characters -- the "detectives" if you will -- are Peter Dewin, a reporter, and Daphne Olroyd, a young woman trying to make her way in London -- at first she is an assistant to the very wealthy Leicester Crewe, but when he decides to go overseas she gets a new job with another wealthy man, the scientist and philanthropist Geoffrey Beale. A side plot, of course, is the quickly developing relationship between Dewin and Olroyd.

The primary mystery concerns some threatening messages that some people receive featuring an illustration of a "Feathered Serpent" -- a Central American quasi-religious figure. The vulgar but popular actress Ella Creed gets one, Leicester Crewe, who seems to be perhaps her sugar daddy. And then there is a murder, of a man named Joe Farmer, who seemed to have some connection to both Creed and Crewe. There are rumors that a criminal named William Lane, thought to be dead, has been seen alive. Daphne Olroyd is briefly kidnapped at one point, while Peter Dewin keeps figuring out bits and pieces of the mystery without quite understanding it. And Geoffrey Beale's scientific knowledge -- he had been doing anthropological studies in Central America -- offers some hints. A past counterfeiting scheme, involving at least the mysterious William Lane as well as Joe Farmer, and a woman named Paula Staines, might have some bearing on things ...

The conclusion involves yet another murder, sort of an "impossible" crime, and a convoluted but reasonably interesting explanation for just what has been going on. All in all, as I said, by no means a great mystery, but not bad -- worth your time if you like classical mysteries with a soupçon of sensationalism. I don't think I'll actively seek out more of Edgar Wallace's work, but if another novel comes my way I might go ahead and read it.

Review: Ladies Whose Bright Eyes, by Ford Madox Ford

In 2022 I had a Curiosities feature in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction on Ford Madox Ford's time travel novel Ladies Whose Bright Eyes. Curiosities is a long running feature of the magazine highlighting relatively obscure science fiction and fantasy, and I've contributed several such features to F&SF. It's been a while since that issue appeared, and F&SF's website seems to have disappeared for now, so I thought I'd post about that novel here. My process for writing a Curiosities piece is to write an extensive review and cut, cut, cut -- Curiosities are limited to about 250 words. So I have reproduced the whole initial piece I wrote, with revisions based in part on improvements that resulted from the cutting process. 

Ladies Whose Bright Eyes, by Ford Madox Ford

A review by Rich Horton

Ford Madox Ford was born Joseph Leopold Ford Herman Madox Hueffer in Surrey, England, in 1873, the son of a German immigrant. His mother was the daughter of painter Ford Madox Brown, and Hueffer styled himself Ford Madox Hueffer for much of his life, and most of his earlier books were first published under that name. He legally changed his name to Ford Madox Ford in 1919 (partly in reaction to anti-German sentiment), and his later work, as well as reissues of the earlier work, was generally as by Ford Madox Ford, the name by which he is now remembered. (It is sometimes called a pseudonym, which is incorrect.) He died in 1939.

He is the author of one of my favorite novels, The Good Soldier (1915, first published as by Ford Madox Hueffer), a bleakly comic novel of a man with a “heart condition” (in more ways than one). It is widely featured on lists of the 100 best novels of the 20th Century, a laurel it surely deserves

Ford was particularly close friends (and a sometime collaborator) with Joseph Conrad (until they fell out), and was also close to the likes of Henry James, Stephen Crane, H. G. Wells, and Ezra Pound. He founded a key literary review of the Modernist period, the English Review. He fought in the First World War and suffered major injuries, from shellfire and poison gas. Later he was a founder of the Transatlantic Review, another major Modernist publication, supporting James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Jean Rhys, and Ernest Hemingway among others. Besides The Good Soldier he is best known for a quartet of novels about the War, collectively called Parade's End. His earlier Fifth Queen trilogy is also well-regarded. All in all, a major career, but scandal involving his fraught relationships with a series of wives and mistresses, and perhaps just the normal shifts in literary fashion, led to a temporary eclipse of his reputation, though it has been long since restored.

He was certainly by inclination a Modernist/realist writer, so Ladies Whose Bright Eyes stands out to some extent as having a science-fictional theme. It is the story of William Sorrell, a somewhat humbuggish publisher, who has an accident on a train while returning from a trip to the United States, where he got involved with a Mrs. Lee-Egerton. She gives him a gold cross that has been in her family for centuries as security for a loan in assistance of her rackety son … and then there is a crash.

Sorrell finds himself wandering across a plain, strangely dressed, clutching the gold cross. Before long he realizes he's in some sort of medieval situation, complete with hanged men on gibbets. He tries to convince himself that it's all a play of some sort, but eventually he arrives at a castle, and is taken in by a certain Lady Blanche, mistress of the castle while her husband is away fighting in Scotland. Sorrell soon realizes that his cross is regarded as an important relic, and it is battled over between the Lady Blanche, her rival Lady Dionissia, the betrothed wife of her husband's cousin Sir Egerton of Tamville, and the local order of nuns.

As Sorrell realizes he really does seem to be in the Middle Ages (about 1326, it seems), he hatches schemes to, Connecticut Yankee-like, use modern technology to make his way in the past. But he soon realizes that he really knows nothing valuable about how to make, say, an aeroplane. But he still finds some degree of success, mostly by accident, managing for example to subdue a group of bandits, and to improve the sanitation of the nuns' chickens. But the story turns rather more on the actions of the women, especially the combative, vain, and grasping Lady Blanche, and the rather more calm Lady Dionissia. We learn a lot about their positions and attitudes, and about everyday life in that time, and the politics of the day. All comes to a head when the two women, in the absence of their husbands, decide to joust for possession of the coveted gold cross.

This leads to a somewhat striking conclusion, as Sorrell seems to waver between two worlds, the present and the past. Is Lady Dionissia his nurse, and is he a delirious patient? Or are they both truly inhabiting the bodies of ancestors (perhaps)? Or is the time travel real? It hardly matters – Sorrell for certain is a radically changed (and improved) man; and he reaches the end valuing people and things much differently than he began.

The novel has an interesting publishing history. It first appeared in 1911, as by Ford Madox Hueffer. It was extensively revised and reissued in 1935, as by Ford Madox Ford. I've read both versions (the earlier one can be found at Project Gutenberg), and on the whole I prefer the revision. It gives us a bit more of Sorrell's personal history (and projects it a couple of decades in the future), shows us a bit more of the medieval ladies' positions, and has a better ending (including more interesting speculations and images of Sorrell's cross-time situation): Ford, revising following a terrible war and just preceding another, takes a darker view of the 20th Century, and Sorrell's hopes to be a better man, though real, are not celebrated so optimistically.