Old Bestsellers: Rogue Male, by Geoffrey Household

Rogue Male, by Geoffrey Household


A review by Rich Horton

Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male is a classic thriller. It's not really forgotten, but it has, I think entered a phase of slow drifting out of any sort of general consciousness. Though perhaps not: it has been reprinted as recently as 2007, and it has been cited by David Morrell as a significant influence on First Blood (the Morrell novel that introduced Rambo to the world).

Household was a British writer, born 1900, died 1988, who spent some time in the US "just in time for the Depression". He began writing in the US, then returned to England. This is his second novel, published in 1939. He spent the War as an Intelligence Officer in Rumania, then returned to a fairly successful career writing. Rogue Male remains his most famous novel, though Arabesque (made into a movie with Gregory Peck, as I recall) is also well known. Rogue Male itself has been filmed at least twice, as Man Hunt in 1941 and as Rogue Male for TV in 1976.

Rogue Male opens with the never named first person protagonist aiming a rifle with a telescopic sight from 550 yards at a certain Head of State. It's never made precisely clear who that is -- a country on one side or the other of Poland, which leaves two pretty evil candidates as of the late 30s. The cover of my 1977 Penguin edition shows a picture of Hitler in the crosshairs, which to be fair is pretty likely who Household intended. But the book takes care never to reveal which of Hitler or Stalin was the target -- on purpose, I think -- and I think the cover illustration is a blunder.

The protagonist claims he had no intention of shooting -- he was just "stalking the most dangerous game" for the fun of it, to see if he could be successful. This doesn't play well with the local secret police, who torture him and leave him for dead. But he rather incredibly escapes, and makes his way down a river, soon pursued by his enemies. He stows away on a boat for England, but soon is again pursued. When he is forced to kill one of his pursuers, he becomes wanted for murder by the British police. He flees to the country, planning to literally hole up for the duration. But even his careful plans aren't quite enough -- some bad luck leads to the British police getting a lead, and though he can elude them, the bad guys are able to track him down.

It's pretty good stuff. Exciting, not too ridiculously implausible, and at least somewhat interested in exploring the moral basis of the protagonist's decisions. (Though there is plenty of guff, too, in particular lots of stuff about the wonderful ineffable qualities of the English Upper Class.) (Some of the book is the protagonist's own coming to terms with his real motives and intentions.) It helps of course that the protagonist's target is a real-life maximally evil sort -- even if we continue to disapprove of his assassination attempt, it's hard not to sympathize at some level. The book is also quite dryly funny on occasion. The ending is interesting in retrospect. The protagonist, having again escaped, decides his only recourse is to finish the assassination job. And there the book ends. But it was published in 1939. Then it was a very "open" ending. Now -- any time since 1945 really -- the ending has closed somewhat -- we can only conclude that the protagonist failed in his attempt and was presumable summarily executed. (Though there was a sequel, Rogue Justice, published much later (in 1982).)

Ace Doubles: The Blank Wall/The Girl Who Had to Die, by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding

The Blank Wall/The Girl Who Had to Die, by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding

a review by Rich Horton

This blog is primarily about "old bestsellers", but other "old" books are interesting to me, and one of my favorite publishing lines of the past is Ace Doubles, inexpensive paperbacks featuring two books printed back-to-back (or dos-a-dos), each upside down relative to the other. These appeared between 1952 and 1973. They are most famous in the Science Fiction genre, but a number were printed in other genres, especially mysteries and Westerns.

I went to an antique mall in Kansas City after attending ConQuest (a science fiction convention) a few weeks ago. One stall had a bunch of old paperbacks, including an Ace Double. This one intrigued me because it was a mystery by an author I had never heard of, Elisabeth Sanxay Holding. The covers including some impressive quotes praising Holding, from places like the New Yorker; as well as one from Raymond Chandler: "She's the top suspense writer of them all."

I confess I had visions of rediscovering a completely forgotten master of the pulp era. But when I researched Holding I learned that plenty of people are way ahead of me. That's not to say she wasn't somewhat unfairly forgotten. She was born in 1889, died in 1955. She began her writing career as a romance novelist, but switched to mysteries during the depression. Her novels sold fairly well, and she was well-praised. She wrote at least one YA fantasy, Miss Kelly, which Anthony Boucher praised in the pages of F&SF. But she did seem to be mostly forgotten after her death.

That said, The Blank Wall, generally considered her best novel, had already been filmed in 1949 as The Reckless Moment (starring Joan Bennett and James Mason). It was filmed again in 2001 as The Deep End, starring Tilda Swinton. (This was pretty much Swinton's "breakout" film, "breakout" here being relative to Swinton's career -- that is, she didn't become a major movie star, she just moved from a well-respected indie actress to an even more respected Hollywood actress, who would contend for Academy Awards (and, indeed, eventually win one).) More recently, a number of Holding's books have been reprinted by Persephone Press and by Stark House (the latter, neatly, are double editions). The Blank Wall was even featured in a Guardian list, in 2011, of the "Ten Best Neglected Literary Classics". She has been called "The Godmother of Noir". So she's not forgotten, and indeed I think her reputation is slowly increasing at last.

My Ace Double includes two novels, The Girl Who Had to Die (1940) and The Blank Wall (1947). The Girl Who Had to Die was first published by Dodd, Mead; and The Blank Wall by Simon and Schuster. There was a 1950 Pocket Books edition of The Blank Wall, with the classic blurb: "Playing with jail bait earned him a date with death!". (In perfect blurb fashion, this is not at all false, but neither does it describe the book in any useful way.) The Ace Double edition was part of a series of six Holding doubles that appeared in 1965.

Both books are told in tight third person, and spend much of the time in the protagonist's mind, exploring their internal reactions. This serves to portray the character quite effectively, at least in The Blank Wall -- one of the weaknesses of The Girl Who Had to Die is that the main character never really convinces.

The Blank Wall's protagonist is Lucia Holley, a New York housewife in her late 30s, who has rented a house on Long Island, on the ocean, while her husband is away. (He's an officer in the U.S. Navy in World War II.) She lives with her two children, 17 year old Bee and 15 year old David; as well as with her elderly father (who is English) and an African-American maid, Sibyl. Bee is going to art school and New York, and Lucia is upset that she has been seeing a 35-year-old married man, Ted Darby. Darby shows up at their house, lurking by the boathouse, and Lucia's father goes out to confront him, and (without knowing it) accidentally kills him. Lucia discovers the dead body the next morning and, to protect her father and Bee from scandal, hides the body on an island.

Of course this doesn't work, for multiple reasons. The body is soon discovered. Darby, it turns out, is every bit as bad as Lucia thought, a gangster and a dealer in porn (no doubt his intention for Bee was to make her a model). For a time it seems the crime might be pinned on a ganster associate of Darby's. But Lucia has further troubles: a couple more gangsters show up trying to extort money from her in exchange for some embarrassing letters from Bee to Darby that Darby had sold them. And a neighbor saw Lucia taking the boat out with Darby's body, though not closely enough to identify her. But that -- and other aspects of the crime -- is enough to raise the suspicions of the investigator, Lieutenant Levy (who is apparently a character in a number of Holding's books).

Then Lucia starts to get a bit attached to one of the blackmailers, Martin Donnelly. He seems to like Lucia, and offers to pay off his partner so that he'll stop the blackmail, and he even sends them some black market meat. (One of the excellent minor points of the novel is its depiction of the difficulties of household management because of the rationing during the War.) Their meetings, though basically innocent (if hinting at suppressed sexual attraction) infuriate David and Bee, who suspect the worst.

There is another killing, and another desperate attempt to hide a body, and Lieutenant Levy seems to know pretty much everything ... well, I won't detail the ending. But the book works beautifully. Lucia's actions, each on the face of it understandable, if often foolish, keep winding the noose tighter around her. Her motivations ring true, her inner life -- missing her husband while worrying she's forgetting him, fretting that she hasn't raised Bee right, frustration at her relative incompetence as a housekeeper (only Sybil really keeps the household going), her isolation from the neighbors -- is excellently portrayed. The prose is quite fine as well. As noted, Lucia is depicted very well, and so is Sybil (who has her own sad back story, a husband unfairly imprisoned (in a way only too understandable for African-Americans of that time). The children are perhaps a bit caricatured, especially Bee; and Martin Donnelly's unexpected nobility, though affecting and well-described, seems perhaps a bit fortuitous. As I said, the background details of wartime life on the home front are very well done. This is a novel that deserves its reputation.

The Girl Who Had to Die is less successful. The protagonist is Jocko Killian, a clerk from New York who has spent a year in Argentina, and is returning in the company of an unstable and alcholic 19 year old girl, Jocelyn. Jocelyn tells him that there are 5 people who want to murder her. Soon after she falls overboard, and though she is rescued, Jocko is accused of pushing her. This leverage ends up enough to force him to accompany her to the Long Island home of a rich old man, Luther Bell, along with a few other people from the ship.

Over the next couple of days Jocko learns a bit more of Jocelyn's unfortunate history. She is given an overdose of drugs, and one of the other men flees, perhaps incriminating himself. In something like desperation, Jocko decides to marry Jocelyn, as much because she insists he's the only man who truly cares for her, essentially making him feel guilty -- he half or more suspects that both the overdose and the plunge into the ocean were suicide attempts. But there are more and more secrets in Jocelyn's life, and concerning her history with the various residents of the Bell household as well as the visitors from the ship. Can Jocko escape her clutches -- or instead can he rescue her from her sordid past?

As I said above, my main problem with this book is that Jocko's motivations and thoughts just didn't seem real to me. Jocelyn's story is interesting and sad, but a bit fuzzed out, held too much at a distance. The novel is interesting and strange but on the whole it seemed too artificial a construct to me.

Old Bestsellers: The Man in Lower Ten, by Mary Roberts Rinehart

The Man in Lower Ten, by Mary Roberts Rinehart

a review by Rich Horton

Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876-1958) was a very popular mystery/suspense writer in her time, and her fame, while slowly dwindling, seems to me, has not disappeared. I certainly was aware of her in the '70s when I was reading Agatha Christie and the like. I confess I'd have guessed she was closer to a contemporary of Christie's, and that she was still alive in the '70s. (For that matter, I sometimes have confused her with Mary Higgins Clark.) Rinehart was often called "the American Christie", but that was really unfair to her, as she started 15 years or so before Christie (who was 12 years her junior) and was quite popular well before Christie even began writing.

Rinehart was born in (what is now) Pittsburgh, trained to be a nurse, and married a doctor, Stanley Rinehart. She began publishing stories in the downmarket magazines of the time in 1904, to help her family's finances after the stock market crash of 1903. Her first novel was the one covered here, The Man in Lower Ten, which was serialized in All-Story Magazine in 1906. (Her second novel, The Circular Staircase (1907) is often sloppily called her first, as it was the first to become a book.) The Man in Lower Ten was published in book form in 1909, and it was the fourth bestselling novel of that year according to Publishers' Weekly. It is considered the first novel clearly in the mystery genre to become a general fiction bestseller. My copy is a 1959 Dell paperback, complete with interior illustrations.

A bit later I ran across an early hardcover reprint as well -- I had hoped on first seeing it that it might be a first edition, but instead it's a Grosset and Dunlap reprint from perhaps 1913. It is also illustrated, by Howard Chandler Christy. I've reproduced (in photographs by my son Geoff) the cover, and title page with frontispiece, below:

Rinehart diversified somewhat in later years, writing Broadway comedies, nurse fiction, and mainstream novels. (The latter apparently at the urging of her husband, who seems to have been a bit ashamed of her reputation as a trashy genre writer. He also apparently eventually resented the fact that she made much more money than he did.) By the end though she returned most often to mystery/suspense stories, and those are by far her best remembered works. I can recommend an excellent website by Michael Grost (mikegrost.com/rinehart.htm) for a detailed analysis of her career.

One tidbit about Rinehart that is often repeated is that she originated the phrase "The butler did it". This is untrue, though in one of her better known novels the butler is indeed the murderer. But there were novels and stories in which the butler was the murderer before that, and she never used that exact phrase.

According to Grost, her first two novels, The Man in Lower Ten and The Circular Staircase, may be her best. I can't comment -- The Man in Lower Ten is the only novel of hers I've read. But it is pretty decent work.

Lawrence Blakely is a Washington, DC, lawyer. His partner, Richey McKnight, inveigles him into taking a trip to Pittsburgh to take a deposition from a rich old man in a forgery case. It seems McKnight has a date with a girlfriend. Girls are famously of no particular interest to Blakeley ...

On the way back from Pittsburgh, strange things happen. There is repeated confusion over which bunk Blakely has engaged. There are a couple of interesting seeming people on the train. Blakely ends up forced into another bunk by a drunk passenger, and when he wakes up, his bag -- with the critical deposition -- and also his clothes are gone. He is forced to dress in another man's clothes, and in searching for his bag he discovers a murdered man.

Almost immediately Blakely is the prime suspect -- but before anything further happens the train crashes. Blakely is thrown free, and indeed is one of only four survivors, sustaining only a broken arm. He and another survivor, a beautiful young woman, Alison West, escape to a farmhouse where something unusual happens that Blakely doesn't understand for some time. He does realize, however, that a) Alison West is the granddaughter of the rich old man from whom he took the deposition; b) she is another prime suspect in the murder; and c) he is in love with her.

Blakely returns to DC but soon his troubles multiply. The police are lurking around his house. Another survivor from the wreck fancies himself an amateur detective and insists on investigating the otherwise almost moot murder case (after all, the witnesses are mostly dead and the victim could have been written off as merely another casualty of the train crash). Someone seems to be lurking in the house next door. And, finally, it seems that Alison West is the girl whom his partner McKnight has been seeing.

The shape of the resolution is not surprising, and indeed the solution to the primary crime, while not ridiculous, does seem a bit strained. But the novel bounces along nicely enough. Lawrence Blakely is not exactly a convincing three-dimensional character, but he's still kind of intriguing, and his voice, as teller of the story, is effective. Rinehart's writing is not brilliant, but it's solid storytelling prose, with some good turns of phrase. She does slip once or twice (for example, Blakely's arm heals for a brief passage before returning to its broken state), but really it's a solid professional effort. I liked it, though I have to say, not enough to make a special effort to seek out more of Rinehart's work.

Old Bestsellers: The King's Jackal, by Richard Harding Davis

The King's Jackal, by Richard Harding Davis

a review by Rich Horton

Richard Harding Davis (1864-1916) was the son of Rebecca Harding Davis, a fairly well-known and significant writer in her day. His father was a journalist, editor of the Philadelphia Public Ledger. So perhaps it's not a surprise that Richard became a very famous journalist and novelist. He was something of a football star in his abbreviated college days (this would have been very early indeed in the history of American football). After being invited to leave two colleges (Lehigh and Johns Hopkins) he became a journalist, gaining a reputation for a flamboyant style and for tackling controversial subjects. (All this from Wikipedia.)

He became a leading war correspondent, and was particularly noted for helping to create the legend of Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders, and also for his reports on the Boer War. He was also strikingly good looking (so I judge from the picture on his Wikipedia page), and was credited for popularizing the clean-shaven look, and as the model for the the "Gibson Man", the analog to his friend Charles Dana Gibson's "Gibson Girl".

Davis was likely better known then, and is still more remembered, for his journalism, but he wrote quite a lot of fiction as well, much of it very successful. (To be sure, there are those who would suggest that some of his journalism was fiction as well!) The only book of his I can find on the Publishers' Weekly fiction bestseller lists (the top ten of each year) is Soldiers of Fortune, the #3 bestseller of 1897. But the book I have is from 1903, The King's Jackal, which comprises two novellas, "The King's Jackal" (30,000 words) and "The Reporter Who Made Himself King" (17000 words). The publication history is a bit complicated, and worth addressing as it hints at some of the publishing world of that time. "The Reporter Who Made Himself King" was written in 1891, and sold to the McClure syndicate for serialization -- presumably it appeared in various newspapers (the Boston Globe being one of them). That same year it was published in a collection, Stories For Boys (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1891); and again in 1896 in another collection, Cinderella and Other Stories. (At a guess, the latter book was considered for adults, while Stories for Boys was marketed for children, so "The Reporter Who Made Himself King" was being repositioned as an adult story (which it surely is) in the second collection.) "The King's Jackal" was serialized in Scribner's Monthly in 4 parts, April 1898 through July 1898. A book edition came out from Scribner's that same year. Finally, in 1903, "The King's Jackal" and "The Reporter Who Made Himself King" were reissued together as The King's Jackal, also from Scribner's. The copyright page for that book, which is the one I have, duly reports "Copyright 1891, 1896, 1898, 1903".

(Let me add thanks to the help of Endre Zsoldos, Denny Lien, Richard Fidczuk, and the excellent resource unz.org in clarifying this complex publication history.)

Todd Mason noted of a couple of previous books I reviewed in this series that the covers appeared to be Gibson Girl covers. (I don't know if those covers were actually by Gibson or derivative of him (or even of someone else like Harrison Fisher).) (Indeed, I saw a copy of Harrison Fisher's American Beauties (1909) at an antique mall in St. Joseph, MO, this past weekend, and Fisher strikes me as wholly as important as Gibson in promulgating a turn of the century image of American women.) The King's Jackal truly is illustrated by Charles Dana Gibson. My copy doesn't have a dust jacket, but I've turned up a couple of images of the original dust jacket and it is indeed by Gibson (a reproduction of the frontispiece art from my edition). Above I show (somewhat pointlessly) a picture of the cover of my edition (which is just the Charles Scribner's Sons monogram, really), plus pictures of the title page and frontispiece.

"The King's Jackal" is about the exiled King of Messina. Messina of course is a major city on Sicily. In this novel, it is said that the Republican movement in Italy kicked the King out, and also made the Catholic Church illegal. I don't know if this corresponds very closely to history. It doesn't seem to jibe exactly with the events portrayed in one of my favorite novels, Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard (one of the greatest novels of the 20th Century in my opinion), which is about a Duke in Sicily at the time of the Risorgimento.

Anyway, the King is actually fairly happy to be exiled. He didn't care for the burdens of actually ruling his people, nor did he care for his home. He spends his time in Paris and Tangier and such places, with his mistress and a few fellow exiles. He's a thoroughly nasty man, corrupt, a sexual predator, lazy. He's also running out of money, so he has hatched a scheme to raise a lot of money from loyalist families and from monarchists in general, and to stage a fake invasion of Messina which will fail. Then he'll keep the rest of the money.

The only problem is that a couple of his associates are true believers. These include the title character, Prince Kalonay, called "The King's Jackal" because out of misplaced loyalty to the King he has assisted cynically in his debaucheries. But he has been "saved", as it were, by Father Paul, a monk who is wholly devoted to restoring the Church to Messina. The King is worried that Prince Kalonay and Father Paul, in leading the expedition to Messina, might actually succeed -- so he has had his mistress betray the plans to the General of the Republican forces.

A further complication is Patty Carson, a beautiful young American woman, a devout Catholic, who has pledged a great sum of money to Father Paul to restore the Church. The King's problem is twofold -- one, to keep Patty from figuring out the deception, and, two, to try to get his hands on the money, which she would prefer go straight to Father Paul.

Perhaps predictably, Patty Carson and the Prince Kalonay fall rapidly in love (without revealing their feelings to each other). Kalonay, in particular, considers himself unworthy, due to his previous corrupt ways -- but perhaps if he is successful in his expedition to Messina, he will have restored his honor sufficiently. (The King, meanwhile, considers raping Patty Carson as part of the project, and also because he seems to regard it as sort of his droit de seigneur. He really is a nasty man.) Meanwhile, an heroic American reporter shows up to cause further problems for the King. This is Archie Gordon (who, one thinks, might be modeled in the author's mind on himself), who inconveniently is well acquainted with Miss Carson. Gordon is horrified that Patty is involved with a group of people he knows to be reprobates ... and then he runs into a spy for the Republican side of Messina ... Will he queer the whole pitch by finding out the real plans of the King? Or can Patty convince him to support her goals? Or ...

It ends more or less as one might expect, though curiously (and, I think, correctly), at the psychological climax -- we are never to know how things really turn out, but we do know how Prince Kalonay and Patty Carson and even Archie Gordon are changed, and what they plan to do. Not great stuff but fairly enjoyable in its way.

"The Reporter Who Made Himself King" is cynical as well, but in a different and much more comical way. The protagonist is another journalist named A. Gordon -- A for Albert in this case. He's a young pup just out of college, and desperate to find a war to cover, but there are no wars on the horizon. So he decides to write a novel instead, and jumps at the chance to serve as secretary for the newly appointed American Consul to the remote and tiny Pacific island Opeki. On arriving at the beachfront village where lives the tribe with whom the US apparently has established tenuous relations, the Consul immediately quits, leaving the job to Albert. His only assistants are a very young telegraph operator for a nearly defunct telegraph company, and two British seamen, deserters. Soon he realizes that war threatens, in the form of another tribe, which lives in the interior hills of the island and periodically raids the coastal tribe.

Albert convinces the local King to start an army for defense purposes, but when the hill tribe invades, things don't go quite as planned, mainly because a German ship has shown up with the intention of planting their flag on the island, and they have negotiated with the hill tribe. Albert manages to convince the Kings of both tribes that that isn't a good solution, and he gets them, implausibly, to agree to make him King temporarily. And then he manages, more or less, by accident, to provoke a hostile response from the Germans. Which would be no big deal, except the telegraph company, on receiving Albert's report (his first war correspondence!) decides to rather exaggerate what happened, risking starting a war between the US and Germany.

Again the story ends more or less at the climax -- when we realize exactly what sort of fix the characters have got into, but not how things will end. Which works out fine in this case as well. Here Davis' intent is more purely comical, along with a fair amount of satirical comment on the influence of the news media on national relations, and their culpability in fanning the flames of war (something Davis himself was accused of later). Again, not a bad story, fairly funny at times. (And, I must add somewhat obviously, somewhat racist in its depiction of the natives, though perhaps this is blunted a bit because none of this is really intended to be taken at all seriously.)

Old Bestsellers: Laughing Boy, by Oliver La Farge

Laughing Boy, by Oliver La Farge

a review by Rich Horton

I don't know for sure that Laughing Boy was a major bestseller when first published in 1929 -- it doesn't show up on any of the bestseller lists I can find (which typically list the top ten each year). But it probably sold reasonably well, and has kept selling at some level for quite a while. It seems to be still in print, with the most recent edition from Mariner Books in 2004. Most importantly, it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1930. It was made into a movie in 1934, by most accounts not too successfully. (It starred two Hispanic actors, Ramon Novarro and Lupe Velez.) So, it's not precisely forgotten, but it has somewhat dwindled from the general consciousness over time, in part because Native Americans tend to resist (somewhat reflexively) any depiction of Native American characters by outsiders.

Oliver La Farge, full name Oliver Hazard Perry La Farge, was born in New York City in 1901. As his full name suggests, he was the grandson of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, famous for winning the naval Battle of Lake Erie during the War of 1812. La Farge was also a descendant of William Brewster, spiritual leader of the Pilgrims of the Mayflower. (I will note by the by that I too am descended from a Mayflower passenger, though my ancestor, Richard Warren, is much less significant (and he apparently was not a Puritan).)

La Farge attended Harvard, receiving a Bachelor's and a Master's. He was an anthropologist, and spent time in Central America and Mexico, discovering a couple of languages then unknown to Europeans, and doing important work on the Olmecs. But his most significant work was with the Navajos, on the reservation (or Navajo Nation) in Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico. The introduction to my edition of Laughing Boy claims that Indians of other tribes thought La Farge was Navajo (though likely no Navajo thought the same). He was an advocate for Native American rights and for some time was President of the Association for American Indian Affairs. He died in Santa Fe in 1963.

Laughing Boy was his first and by far most successful novel. I had encountered one previous story by him, "Spud and Cochise", which appeared in La Farge's collection A Pause in the Desert (1957) and was reprinted in the December 1957 F&SF. I saw it when it was featured in Spider Robinson's 1990 anthology The Best of All Possible Worlds. The conceit for Spider's book was that he chose several of his favorite stories, and the authors of those stories each chose a personal favorite as well. "Spud and Cochise" was Larry Niven's choice. I remember enjoying that story, which is why I picked up Laughing Boy when I saw it at an antique mall. My edition is a 1951 Pocket Books reprint. The official first edition appeared in November 1929 from Houghton Mifflin, but the "true" first appears to have been the Book Club edition, from the Literary Guild, in September 1929.

Laughing Boy is the name of one of the lead characters, a traditional Navajo, in about 1915. He is a young man, a silversmith of some modest note, and he comes to a dance at the southern part of Navajo Nation. There he finds himself entranced by a girl he doesn't know -- a very beautiful but unconventional young woman, called Slim Girl. Before long they have decided to marry, despite the misgivings of Laughing Boy's uncle.

We soon gather that there is a dark side to Slim Girl's life. She insists that the couple live isolated from the rest of their society, near a reservation border town, into which she disappears every so often. She has a fair amount of money and wants to earn enough to set them up well. She also wants Laughing Boy to teach her the traditional ways of Navajo society, such as weaving and general manners. The reader soon learns that she grew up in a White milieu, and grew discontented with American ways, particularly after she was seduced and made pregnant, then cruelly rejected by the missionary priest who had befriended her. After a miscarriage she became a prostitute, eventually becoming the mistress of a rich cowboy. Her plan is to take as much money from that man as she can, then move with Laughing Boy back to his true home. All this is unknown to Laughing Boy.

The story is structured, then, as pure tragedy -- their inevitable doom is clear from early on. And so it goes, quite affectingly. For all her flaws, we sympathize with Slim Girl, and Laughing Boy is a very likeable character. The resolution is powerfully portrayed. I enjoyed the book a great deal.

For all that one does wonder how well a New Yorker from a privileged family really understood Navajo culture from the inside. From my (ignorant) perspective, La Farge seems to do a good job, but I'm sure he got things wrong, and for all his good intentions there is a sense of something just a bit like patronization in his depiction of the Navajos. He's clearly on their side, but -- I don't know. That said, I suspect a 21st Century American Indian (especially a non-Navajo) would have difficulty as well -- it's quite clear that to a great extent the Navajos of Laughing Boy's time were isolated from the main stream of American culture much more than reservation Indians of today are. So -- an interesting and moving book, with a lot of depictions of Navajo life -- the dances, the marriage customs, the weaving and other artwork, the horse's place -- that ring true to my ears. Did it deserve the Pulitzer if books like The Sound and the Fury and A Farewell to Arms (not to mention Look Homeward, Angel, not a book I'm a partisan of) appeared the same year? I'd say probably not -- but I did enjoy it.

Old Bestsellers: Portrait of Jennie (and One More Spring), by Robert Nathan

Portrait of Jennie (and One More Spring), by Robert Nathan

a review by Rich Horton

This blog is about Old Bestsellers, and Portrait of Jennie certainly qualifies as such. But it's also to some extent about "forgotten" books, and in this case I'm not quite as sure Portrait of Jennie qualifies as "forgotten". But surely less well-known now than it once was. It does have the advantage of having been made into a reasonably successful movie. That said, I remember a panel at a convention some years ago about "Authors in danger of being forgotten". Peter Beagle was one of the panelists, and he cited Nathan as one writer he thought was on the way to being forgotten who should be remembered. (He also credited Nathan as something of a mentor to the young Beagle, and as an influence. You can definitely see the influence of a novel like One More Spring in Beagle's A Fine and Private Place, I would say.)

Robert Nathan (1894-1985) was a quite popular novelist in his time, and he had a very long career: his first novel appeared in 1919 and his last in 1975. (I remember seeing that last novel, Heaven and Hell and the Megas Factor, in bookstores when I was first buying books.) Besides Portrait of Jennie his best known work, also made into a well-received film, is The Bishop's Wife. In the SF field he is slightly known for his 1956 short story "Digging the Weans". His cousins included Emma Lazarus, who wrote the poem ("The New Colossus") on the Statue of Liberty; and Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo. He married seven times.

Portrait of Jennie is a very short novel at about 32000 words. (Most of Nathan's novels were quite short.) It was published in 1940, and made into a movie with Joseph Cotten and the appropriately named Jennifer Jones in 1948.

It's an odd and very haunting book. It fits into the category of "timeslip" novel, one of the most common SF tropes used by non-genre writers. (Other examples include Sumner Locke Elliott's The Man Who Got Away, Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife, perhaps you could add Martin Amis' Time's Arrow or Ken Grimwood's Replay.)  I found it extremely beautiful and moving, though I don't think Nathan quite managed the ending: which isn't to say I can see a better answer. Indeed, even if I don't think the book perfect, I love it in a way that I perhaps don't love books that I might think more fully executed.

It's about a young struggling artist who meets a mysterious little girl playing by herself in a park.  He befriends her and learns that her parents are high wire jugglers.  Then she disappears,but reappears a few more times, always a few years older.  After a while the artist realizes how strange things are, and this girl, Jennie, always seems to know.  Basically, she seems disconnected from time.  The artist's sketches of Jennie give him the break he needs to make his career, but before long Jennie is all he cares about.  The book moves quickly to the inevitable ending.  Parts of it, as I said, are extraordinarily haunting: the images of the lonely girl in the park bring tears to my eyes as I type.  And there are some very fine lines as well.  Really a very good book. The movie, by the way, is not bad, though not as good as the book.

I ran across another Nathan novel at an antique mall: One More Spring. It was published in 1933, and it is very overtly a Depression novel, written essentially as the events portrayed occur. And, perhaps as a result, it is rather a bitter book, despite essentially attempting to tell a sweet story. (It was also filmed, though less successfully than Portrait of Jennie or The Bishop's Wife, and Peter Beagle mentioned that it was lost for a long time, but that a print had been found shortly before the convention I saw him at, and he (Beagle) had seen a screening. It starred Janet Gaynor.)

The main character is an antique dealer, Mr. Otkar, who has to close his shop because of debt. He is left with one large bed. When a likewise penniless violinist, Morris Rosenberg, shows up, they decide to take the bed to Central Park and live there. After one cold night they befriend a street cleaner, who lets them stay in his equipment shed, in exchange for violin lessons. For a bit they feed on pigeons and such, and contemplate stealing a pig from the petting zoo, but then Rosenberg manages to make some money playing on the street corner. But when Mr. Otkar tries to steal from a restaurant, he instead rescues a young woman, Elizabeth, also stealing. She is a prostitute, but with a heart of gold naturally -- driven to prostitution by destitution. She joins them and the three people spend a (chaste) winter in the park, helped by Mr. Sweeney and his wife, who works at a bank. But the bank fails, and the bank president runs away in despair, ending up at the park with the others. They protect him for a bit, but he ends up turning himself in, and finding that the bank will survive anyway. Rosenberg ends up on his feet, more or less, and Mr. Otkar and Elizabeth realize they are in love, but so disillusioned with the world that Mr. Otkar refuses a job offer from the bank and the two decide to wander across the country, living in fields and parks, and likely starving (the author tells us) the next winter. A sad but often sweet novel, not in any real sense believable (but not asking to be believed), and as I said underlaid with bitterness over the economic conditions of the time. Notable is the cynical portrayal of the bank president -- not actually a bad man, nor even corrupt, but quite oblivious to anyone's distress but his own, despite the fact that his circumstances, while straitened, are not nearly so bad as most people's.

A Fifties Mystery Novel: The April Robin Murders, by Craig Rice and Ed McBain

The April Robin Murders, by Craig Rice and Ed McBain

a review by Rich Horton

A little break from old bestsellers this week. Instead I'm writing about a detective novel from the '50s.

Craig Rice was born Georgiana Ann Randolph Craig in 1908. Her parents did not want an infant messing with their world traveling, and basically abandoned the child to a string of relatives. Eventually she settled with an aunt and uncle, the Rices. Hence her penname, derived from her surname and her adoptive parents' surname. She was married four times and had three children, had numerous affairs, became an alcoholic, and died fairly young in 1957.

Ed McBain, best known by far for his 87th Precinct novels, was born Salvatore Lombino in 1926 and legally changed his name to Evan Hunter in 1952. (He always said Hunter was the most innocuous "white-bread" name he could come up with, but the name also echoes a couple of schools he attended.) Ed McBain was his usual pseudonym, but he also often published as Hunter, and early in his career published as S. A. Lombino. Though best known for his mysteries, he published a number of SF stories, mostly as Lombino or Hunter but also under a few more pseudonyms. (I have read a couple of the Lombino stories, his earliest, and wasn't impressed, but he got better.) He died in 2005.

Craig Rice's most successful series featured a detective named John Joseph Malone. But The April Robin Murders is from her second series, which featured Bingo Riggs and Handsome Kusak, a pair of small-time photographers who keep getting into trouble and needing to solve mysteries to get out of it. The April Robin Murders was left unfinished at Rice's death in 1957, and McBain finished it and it was published in 1958. The back cover copy of my edition (a book club edition, which I found in an antique store in Union, MO) says that the book was 3/4 finished, but, according to Wikipedia, McBain, that is, Hunter, claimed it was only half-finished and he had to solve the mystery before finishing it. Based on style and pace, I would have guessed Rice wrote rather more than half the book, though I certainly believe McBain came up with the solution.

Bingo is the main POV character. He and Handsome have come to Hollywood to make their fortunes. (They started in New York.) They call their company The International Foto, Motion Picture, and Television Corporation of America, but basically they are street photographers -- taking pictures of tourists and offering to develop the prints for a price.

In Hollywood they go looking for office space and a home; and they seem to succeed easily ... though to the reader it's obvious that they are being taken in by a con man when they "buy" their house. The house, they are told, was once the home of the legendary movie star April Robin. But now it is abandoned except for a rather sinister caretaker. The previous owner, Julien Lattimer, died in mysterious circumstances. But, they learn soon enough, a body was never found, and moreover there are two wives, his fourth and fifth, disputing the matter. The fourth thinks Lattimer is dead (we assume murdered by the fifth wife), and so she should get the inheritance, while the fifth claims Lattimer is alive and so she still gets the property.

In good time there are a couple of further murders, and Bingo and Handsome are in a bit of a pinch, between the importunings of a couple of different conmen, the interests of agents and producers and neighbors, and the suspicions of two policeman, a classic good cop/bad cop pair. The solution is a bit intricate, maybe a bit of a stretch, but not a bad one -- involving (as it should) the mystery of April Robin's brief career along with the stories of Julien Lattimer, his wives, and a couple of other people Bingo and Handsome bump into.

For the first two thirds or so of the book things meander along. The main interest is in the characters of Bingo and Handsome -- neither terribly intelligent, both quite likable, Handsome with maybe better instincts but Bingo a bit more agressive and hopeful. Really all this is very fun -- funny in a rather understated way, a bit sad in that you really like Bingo and Handsome but you can see that they're not at all in control of their lives. Then towards the end there is a distinct acceleration, and a slight change in style, and the characters, though not inconsistent with themselves, seem to change focus a bit. I assume that's McBain taking over, but you could argue that it's more a case of the writer, whoever it was by then, realizing that it's about time to get things moving and finish the story.

Anyway, the novel was enjoyable enough that I'll probably be reading another of Rice's novels sometime in the future, assuming I run across a copy, but not enjoyable enough that I'll eagerly search such books out.