Old Bestsellers: A Diversity of Creatures, by Rudyard Kipling

Old Bestsellers: A Diversity of Creatures, by Rudyard Kipling

A review by Rich Horton

I have no idea if this was a bestseller, but Rudyard Kipling was a very popular writer, so doubtless this sold nicely enough. A Diversity of Creatures was published in 1917, but most of the stories predate World War I, and it shows. The book resembles the just preceding adult collection, Actions and Reactions, more than it does the postwar collections such as Limits and Renewals. It does include one of his all-time great stories, "Mary Postgate", and one other very fine story, the odd SF piece "As Easy as A. B. C." Perhaps not surprisingly these close and open the collection. The other fairly famous story here is "The Village That Voted the Earth Was Flat".

I won't go into my usual detail about Kipling's biography: it's pretty familiar. Born in 1865, died in 1936. He had his foot in three countries: England, where his loyalties lay and where he lived more than half his life; India, where he was born and spent much of his youth and young manhood, and where he made his reputation and set most of his early stories; and the United States: he married an American woman, and they lived in Vermont for about four years. Kipling won the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature (before much of his very best work appeared, which is not to say that the stories up until then, including his best-known novel, Kim (1901), weren't often outstanding). He is one of my favorite writers, and a great example of the fact that you can disagree profoundly with many of an author's views and still love the work. (A maxim many would do well to remember.)

The most obvious recurring theme in A Diversity of Creatures is revenge -- indeed, this is a central theme in much of Kipling, and not always in a good way. Quite often the revenge is by characters Kipling appears to approve of against hapless or awkward antagonists, and seems out of proportion to the original offense. In "The Village That Voted the Earth Was Flat", a group of people in an early motorcar are caught in a sort of speed trap, clearly a revenue grab by a local Baronet. They are newspaper people, as well as an M. P. and (in another car) a theatre man. They get together to subject the village in which they were mistreated to humiliation by such means as arranging for them to be hoodwinked into voting that the Earth is flat after a presentation by a fake member of the Flat Earth Society. That annoyed me enough on first reading to put me off the story entirely, but on rereading it this time I realized, for one thing, how funny the story can be; and, secondly, that the story takes an ambiguous view of the appropriateness of the "revenge". In many ways this is really about the sometimes dangerous power of the press. (It also introduces a character, singer Vidal Benzaguen, who shows up later in another revenge story, one of Kipling's very greatest, "Dayspring Mishandled", from Limits and Renewals. Kipling was wont to reuse characters, even minor ones, as we shall see again in this book.)

In "The Honours of War", a "Stalky as an adult" story, a rather silly young officer too much taken up with book-learning is the target. The story, from 1911, defends old-style traditional officers and military values -- and by the time the book was published surely it was already clear how horribly these were faring. (The following poem, "The Children", is a wrenching lament for young men dead in war -- whether it was written in response to WWI I don't know.) Another revenge story is "Friendly Brook", in which a drunk blackmails (more or less) a country couple who have adopted his child by threatening to assert his parental rights. He ends up drowning in the title brook, clearly a response of a "friendly" entity to the threat to the brook's local couple. "The Edge of the Evening" is a pre-war spy story. Laughton Zigler, the American entrepreneur who showed up previously in "The Captive" (Traffics and Discoveries), has now married and rents an English estate. The narrator character runs into him and comes up for a weekend, at which he hears a story of a German plane crashlanding on the estate, and Zigler and company (half by accident) killing the occupants and sending the plane off to harmlessly ditch in the Channel. In "The Vortex", a foolish representative of one of the Empire's Dominions, spouting rot about going it alone independent from England, etc., is given his comeuppance via a drive in a motorcar, some bees, and an accident. "In the Presence" tells two stories of Indian soldiers: in one, a pair of Sikh brothers take vengeance on the locals who take advantage of their absence in the British Army, in the other, a group of Goorkhas faithfully mourn the death of the King.

There is also a Pyecroft story, "The Horse Marines", about mishaps with a motorcar stumbling into a military exercise. "'My Son's Wife'" is one of those Kipling stories where a city boy discovers the value of country life and country people. In this case a foolish young radical bohemian sort ("He had suffered from the disease of the century", the story opens), depressed after his free-loving girlfriend dumps him, inherits his aunt's estate. At first he plans to sell it, but the attractions of hard work, hunting, and a local girl all work to turn him into a man of the land -- and a Tory too, no doubt! "'Swept and Garnished'" is one of the two war stories, a ghost story in which a German woman is visited by the shades of the children of a French village overrun by the German army. It's a pretty powerful piece. "Regulus" is another Stalky story, though he's not a main character. It's set in school, and concerns a prim and virtuous young man getting in some trouble and being compared to the Roman hero Regulus.

"In the Same Boat" is a tale of drug addiction. Two young people are treated for addiction to sleeping pills by the same doctor, and they support each other on train trips as they try to go cold turkey. Both have terrible dreams that drove them to their addictions. The source of the dreams are eventually revealed, and give the story a slightly supernatural edge. The two seem well suited to each other, but one point of the story is that even though they become friendly they can never love each other -- perhaps the knowledge of each other's weakness is too much for them. "The Dog Hervey" is about an old maid who gets a rather mangy dog as a pet, and how this unlovely beast finally leads her to romance.

Now to the cream of the crop. "As Easy as A.B.C." is a sequel to "With the Night Mail". It is set in 2065. The world by this time has become a mostly libertarian paradise, with a declining population and a horror of invasion of privacy. One form of invasion of privacy, in this formulation, is democracy, with its imposure of majority will. Paradoxically (or not), the generally libertarian nature of this society is maintained by the Draconian rule of "The A.B.C., that semi-elected, semi-nominated, body of a few score persons", as the introductory paragraph has it. In this story some members of the A.B.C. are traveling to Chicago, where it seems a few idlers and no-accounts have been assembling and trying to force votes on various issues. The other locals, horrified, call in the A.B.C. demanding that they take over -- if they don't, they say, people might get killed. And so the A.B.C., rather drastically it seemed to me, takes things in hand -- though with magic tech that supposedly won't actually really hurt anyone. Politics aside (the views put forth are, I think, purposely exaggerated for effect), I really liked the story. It seems very fresh, very science-fictional and well thought out, for all that it dates to 1912. It is probably my favorite of Kipling's "Science Fiction" stories.

The title character of "Mary Postgate" is a spinster hired to be companion to a well-off woman, Miss Fowler. Miss Fowler's nephew Wynn is orphaned, and she and Mary Postgate more or less raise him, until he joins the nascent Flying Corps at the outbreak of war. Soon he dies in a training accident. Through all this we gather something of Mary Postgate's relationship to him: clearly she dotes on the boy while he treats her with casual disrespect that one supposes includes a reluctant admixture of affection. Mary Postgate suffers in silence through the funeral, and the cleaning up of his effects. The two women decide to burn some of Wynn's belongings, and as Mary is working on his there is another accident -- a building collapses, and a local child is killed. At about the same time an airplane crashes near the incinerator where Mary Postgate is burying Wynn's effects. Mary immediately (and almost certainly erroneously) decides that the airplane had dropped a bomb, causing the building collapse. When she finds the downed pilot, she refuses him any help (though he speaks in French, albeit possibly German-accented French), instead guarding him until he dies -- an event she reacts to in a stunning scene in which she seems perhaps to come to orgasm as the man dies.

It's an odd odd story, and Mary Postgate is one of Kipling's stranger characters. You might think that the story, written in about 1915, in the midst of the War, should be read straight -- that Mary is simply doing her bit for the War effort, killing her German, as it were, while mourning her lost surrogate son, who died as a result of the War. But everywhere this is undermined. Mary's actions are hardly heroic, and her orgasmic reaction to his death is distasteful. The German pilot isn't even necessarily German -- he could be French, an ally. Mary assumes he dropped a bomb on the village and killed a child -- but that does not seem likely. Mary's beloved Wynn does not die in action but in a training accident. To me the story seems rather to be concerned with the tragic waste of war, with the danger of excessive vengefulness, and with one particular character: the spinster Mary Postgate.

Old Bestsellers: The Blood of the Lamb, by Peter De Vries

The Blood of the Lamb, by Peter De Vries

A review by Rich Horton

As I have said in one form or another here, this blog's main aims are to a) examine books from at least 50 years ago (and preferably rather more) that sold well in their time; and b) to bring unjustly forgotten books to (minimally, alas!) wider attention. Sometimes posts do more of the one, some more of the other. (For example, some "Old Bestsellers" pretty much deserve to be forgotten!) And some, of course, are really about neither category. This week my aim was more at bringing a somewhat unjustly forgotten book (and author) to wider attention ... though the book in question likely sold nicely enough. But I find, searching the Web, that this book, and this author, beginning perhaps a decade ago, are quite often written about, with the same intention: to restore a sadly neglected writer, and his consensus best book, to our attention. So perhaps he's not that neglected after all? But ... I still sense he is, to some extent.

Peter De Vries (1910-1993) was one of the great American comic novelists of the latter half of the 20th Century. While never, I think, precisely a bestseller, he was a popular writer through the '50s and '60s. His most enduring theme was suburban adultery, already expressed in his first "mature" novel, The Tunnel of Love (1954). (He wrote three earlier novels that he largely repudiated.) This theme seemed to lose its force -- perhaps through repetition, perhaps because of societal change, perhaps because De Vries lost energy -- and his novels after the late '60s, though still fitfully funny, were also at times tedious. Four of his novels became movies, perhaps most notably Pete'n'Tillie (1972, based on the 1968 short novel Witch's Milk). De Vries was also a long-time editor at the New Yorker, having previously worked at Poetry. He served in the OSS during the War. All in all, a very impressive career. And for all that, he seems on the road to being forgotten already. Indeed, at the time of his death, all his novels were out of print. (About 10 years ago, the estimable University of Chicago press reprinted a few of his novels (The Blood of the Lamb included), so I think it has become easier to find his work.)

I read a great many of De Vries' novels 15 or 20 years ago, with tremendous enjoyment. My particular favorites are The Tunnel of Love (1954), The Mackerel Plaza (1958), and the book at hand, The Blood of the Lamb (1961). Also well regarded are the diptych The Cat's Pajamas/Witch's Milk (1968), Reuben, Reuben (1964), and another linked pair, Comfort Me With Apples (1956) and The Tents of Wickedness (1959) ... the latter composed of chapters quite brilliantly parodying well-known writers of that time.

De Vries was born to Dutch immigrants in Chicago, and raised in the Dutch Reformed Church (technically, the Christian Reformed Church of America). This is an explicitly Calvinist sect (much more so, it seems to me, than the largest American denomination in the Calvinist lineage, the United Church of Christ (especially the Congregationalist branch of same)). (I visited a Reformed Church of America church a few years ago, and was struck even then by the predominance of Vans and "oe"s among the names listed in the bulletin.) De Vries attended Northwestern, but graduated from Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI, a well-respected college sponsored by the CRC. (By rank coincidence, I met two unrelated graduates of Calvin within days of reading that detail of De Vries' biography.)

The Blood of the Lamb is narrated by Don Wanderhope, who shares significant elements of De Vries' biography -- he too was born to Dutch immigrants in Chicago, and raised in the Dutch Reformed Church, and attended Northwestern. His father is first an iceman, then a garbageman. His beloved older brother Louie dies of tuberculosis at about 20, leaving young Don a legacy of skepticism about religion. Don later gets tuberculosis himself, leading to a critical interlude at a church-run sanatorium. (In De Vries' case, it was his sister who died of tuberculosis ... and while his father did not go insane, he did suffer from depression, and did a stint at a church-run sanatorium>)

The general tone of the novel is at first comic, De Vriesian, one might say, but one quickly notices that Wanderhope's life is full of loss. His brother dies. Then, at the sanatorium, he falls in love (his one true love, it seems) with another patient, who then dies. His father goes insane (requiring Don to take over the family garbage business). Before Don's stay in the sanatorium, he had, er, compromised the virtue of Greta, another girl in his church, and was at the point of marrying her, but they broke off after his illness. He meets her again at his father's asylum -- he is accused of having driven her mad by "ruining" her, and agrees to marry her (even though he is blameless as to her condition). Wanderhope sells his garbage route and moves to New York to work in advertising, and they have a girl, Carol, before Greta has another nervous breakdown and commits suicide. The woes continue ... his father and mother both die.

But all this is nothing next to the closing of the novel, which is an extended depiction of the horrors of Carol's long losing battle with leukemia, and it is here that the novel moves into another dimension. It is one of the most moving books I have read ... the depiction of a father's love for his daughter is wholly convincing and utterly wrenching. The portraits of other parents in extremis is likewise wrenching, particularly Wanderhope's new friend Stein, a Jewish man with a daughter just Carol's age (they become fast friends: one of the lines that struck me most on this reading was from Stein, looking at Carol and his Rachel: "'Lifelong friends,' said Stein, who gave, and asked, no quarter.") De Vries does not lose his comic touch here, though of course the comedy is, not black but, rather, agonized, as he describes the physicians and their treatments; and his housekeeper, Mrs. Brodhag; and the sometimes silly but never other than human fellow sufferers. There is also much beauty: Wanderhope trying to experience life with his daughter as fully as possible, knowing it will not last. And finally there are the last spasms of Wanderhope's skepticism about religion, his half-hearted attempts to believe at last (hoping, perhaps, that that way might lie some amelioration for Carol's suffering), and finally her granting him absolution, posthumously ... The arguments presented here are never convincing (and perhaps not intended to be so): they are the old sophomoric plaints (all having their root in Louie's arguments: after all, he was a sophomore when he died): the only real argument is purely emotional, and that is where it connects.

Autobiography as an explanation for a novelist's imagination is always a treacherous crutch. It is obvious that Don Wanderhope's history shares a fair amount with that of De Vries (perhaps extended to the War: it is curiously not mentioned at all (one assumes perhaps his illness gave Wanderhope a deferment), but one notes that De Vries never elaborated on his OSS experience (doubtless because it was classified). Still there are differences: Wanderhope was in advertising, not editing and writing like De Vries, other details like their marriages are radically different ... but in the most crucial area, De Vries did draw on his own life for The Blood of the Lamb. His daughter Emily died in 1960 of leukemia. I didn't know this when I first read the book, and it doesn't matter to the text, but it does add another layer of sadness once you have heard of it. (Kingsley Amis, a great admirer of De Vries' work, describes meeting him once (presumably in 1959 when Amis was at Princeton, writing New Maps of Hell) with a seriously ill little girl in tow.)

The Blood of the Lamb is a stunning, moving novel. The rest of his oeuvre, at least until his late decline, is also remarkable, if never as moving as in this book, it is often remarkably funny, and also shadowed, quite serious in its comedy. One could do much worse than to seek out the University of Chicago reprints of his work.

Old Bestsellers: Stormswift, by "Madeleine Brent" (Peter O'Donnell)

Stormswift, by "Madeleine Brent" (Peter O'Donnell)

A review by Rich Horton

Again, this book is not really that old, and not really a bestseller, though I imagine a decent seller at least. But I do sense that just a few years after his death, the author is slipping from the public consciousness a bit.

"Madeleine Brent" is a pseudonym for Peter O'Donnell (1920-2010), by far best known as the author of the Modesty Blaise novels (and comics). These books, about an orphan girl, displaced by the Second World War, who becomes first a criminal and then a spy for the British government, are tremendously enjoyable. (They actually began as a comic strip. The comic strip and the novels have different continuity.)

As Madeleine Brent O'Donnell wrote a number of historical romances, generally featuring a woman in peril who finds resources within herself to make her own way -- and, of course, to eventually win a good man. Apparently he maintained the Brent pseudonym as a secret successfully for some time. The Brent novels were generally quite well received. I saw Stormswift, one of the later Brent novels, from 1984, for $1 at a book sale, and as an admirer of the Modesty Blaise books I figured it was worth a try. And I was on the whole rather pleased.

Stormswift opens in Afghanistan in the 1880s. Jemimah Lawley, the spoiled daughter of a British civil servant who was killed in the Kabul massacre in 1979, has spent the past couple of years in an isolated "kingdom", at first as the "wife" of the local pacha, then as the slave of the local doctor, a Greek/English man who has himself been a captive of the local Kafirs for decades. After her rape by the pacha, who then discarded her after she failed to provide him a child, she has adapted well to being the doctor's assistant, and she is no longer spoiled. But then she is sold to another local pacha -- this one with a reputation for extreme sadism. She decides to escape, and the doctor arranges for her to go in the company of a peddler, Kassim.

Kassim, it turns out, is not what he seems. He hates Jemimah, out of resentment for his obligation to rescue her. But in the end she saves his life -- and she learns that he is actually a British spy posing as an Afghan. And she hears his mysterious delirious reference to "Melanie ... Stormswift ... bitch-goddess".

Jemimah returns to England, only to find that an imposter claiming to be her has taken over her home. She ends up touring the countryside in a Punch and Judy show ... the beginning of a journey that will lead her -- by a series of coincidences (mostly in the end reasonably well explained, I should say) -- to meet once again Kassim, and to learn the secret of Stormswift -- and to learn who her true love is -- and to even help another long lost friend ...

It is certainly in many ways quite preposterous. But it is also great fun. There is no point complaining about the contrivances involved -- they are part of the deal, and "Brent" embraces them thoroughly rather than trying to make this any sort of naturalist novel. I will say that the end is a bit unsatisfying -- Jemimah is put in a wrenching personal situation which ends up resolved very conveniently -- the whole finish is a bit abrupt, really. Still, fun work.

Old Bestsellers: Edmund Dantes, by "Alexander Dumas"

Edmund Dantès, by "Alexander Dumas"

A review by Rich Horton

A short while ago in an antique store I saw this book, Edmund Dantès, subtitled "The Sequel to the Celebrated Count of Monte Cristo", bylined Alexander Dumas. I haven't read much Dumas ... The Three Musketeers, when I was a teen, might be the only one. I know the story of The Count of Monte Cristo, of course, and I've seen a couple of versions in other media. I knew Dumas was prolific (and that he ran a sort of fiction factory, a bit like James Patterson does these day), so I thought it very plausible that he might have written a sequel. So I bought the book ... seemed like a worthwhile thing to try, an obscurer work by a famous author.

Alexandre Dumas was born in Picardy in 1802. His father was born in Haiti, the illegitimate son of a Marquis and a slave woman. His mother was an innkeeper's daughter. Dumas was his grandmother's family name, adopted by Alexandre's father after a break with his noble father. Alexandre's father was a successful general under Napoleon, but died of cancer in 1806. Dumas's family connections got him a decent position with Louis-Philippe, future King of France. Dumas soon began writing articles and then plays, and after a couple of successes became a full-time writer, and turned to novels. His most significant works appeared in quick succession between 1844 and 1847: The Three Musketeers and its sequels; The Corsican Brothers, and The Count of Monte Cristo. Dumas died in 1870.

His son, also illegitimate, also named Alexandre Dumas, became a successful writer as well, best known for La Dame Aux Camellias (or Camille), source material for the opera La Traviata.

Dumas was known, as I said, for running a sort of fiction factory: a variety of assistants helped write his books. The most famous was Auguste Maquet, who suggested the plots and wrote first drafts for a number of Dumas's novels (including The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers). Dumas would then rewrite the books, adding dialogue and details and presumably finishing the prose. Maquet later sued Dumas, asking for credit and more money. He got the latter.

But what of this novel, Edmund Dantès? I began it with some optimism, and the opening is at least mildly interesting. Dantès and his beloved Haydee are sailing to Dantès' private island, where they get married and have a boy and a girl. Some ten years later, though, brigands led by one of the men Dantès ruined in his thirst for vengeance attack his house, and kill Haydee. Edmund and his children return to France. And suddenly the novel becomes a political novel. Edmund becomes a representative for Marseilles, and a leading Republican advocate, inveighing against the injustice of the political structure. He writes a popular play. The revolutions of 1848 are approaching ... And this goes on and on, at boring and very tiresome length.

Not much else really happens. There is a bit of a subplot involving his daughter and her love affair with an Italian, which seems doomed to failure because her brother swears that the Italian is a villain (apparently, or so her brother thinks, he kidnapped and raped a peasant girl). Alas, this story is not resolved in the book -- instead, in the last pages, we are directed to another sequel (The Countess of Monte Cristo). There is a trival subplot in which Dantès becomes very ill and is nursed to life by the very woman who had rejected him in The Count of Monte Cristo.

So anyway ... as the book went on -- really, from very early -- I was thinking, "My gosh, this is awful stuff. Can it really be by Dumas?" At first I thought, maybe it's a bad translation. But no translator (well, maybe the Swedish translator who rewrote sections of Last and First Men to make Stalin win) could make a good book THAT bad. So then I thought, maybe it was a product of Dumas's "factory" that he didn't really pay much attention to. But that's not how Dumas worked. Besides, Dumas was an ally of Louis-Philippe, the King who was deposed in 1848, so I doubt he'd have written a book promoting the February revolution. (And indeed Dumas had to go into exile after Louis Napoleon took over, later in 1848.)

So I did some more investigating, and finally found the truth ... There have been, in fact, a number of sequels to The Count of Monte Cristo, by various writers, probably none of whom got permission from Dumas or paid him anything. This particular one is by an American named Edmund Flagg (1815-1890). It seems to have been first published in 1878, though my edition is dated 1884. Flagg actually wrote two sequels to this book: Monte Cristo's Daughter (1880) and The Wife of Monte Cristo (1884). I suppose perhaps Monte Cristo's Daughter reveals the conclusion to the sublot about his daughter's love affair with the Italian nobleman, though perhaps also it is in the book mentioned in the text, The Countess of Monte Cristo, which was by Jean Charles du Buys, published in 1869.

In the end, then, I was another, very late, victim of a fraud perpetrated some 140 years ago. A look at the Amazon reviews, as well as the Goodreads reviews, of Edmund Dantès, by the way, will reveal that I'm not the only contemporary reader to be quite disgusted by this book. But all in all it's an interesting story of the publishing world of the past (and of American copyright laws, which were quite lax in the 19th century -- nowadays, if anything, they are too strict, at least since Disney took over the job).

Old Bestsellers: A Princess of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs

A Princess of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs

A review by Rich Horton


This is hardly a forgotten book -- it's one of those old bestsellers that has remained popular for a long time, though when it first appeared I bet few would have predicted that.

In 1912, before such a thing as SF existed as a separate genre, I'm not sure how the serial in All-Story called "Under the Moons of Mars", by "Norman Bean" (the magazine editor's typo for "Normal Bean"), was received. Probably simply as an adventure story, one that harkened back pretty clearly to the lost race tales of the likes of H. Rider Haggard. (And to be sure at the very same time Edgar Rice Burroughs was publishing the first of his Tarzan stories, which much more overtly can be placed in the "lost race" lineage.) "Norman Bean", of course, was a pseudonym for Edgar Rice Burroughs, and in 1917 "Under the Moons of Mars" was reprinted in book form as A Princess of Mars, under Burroughs' own name. (As far as I or anyone I have asked can tell, the two versions of the story are identical.

art by Frank Schoonover
(photograph from "Mars Book Covers: Science Fiction and Fantasy")  

Burroughs (1875-1950) was born in Chicago. He had a spotty early career, attending a couple of private high schools, failing to get into West Point, and serving briefly as a soldier before being invalided out. He worked for his father's company for some years, apparently with little distinction, before decided that he could write stuff better and more interesting than the junk he was seeing in pulp magazines. And he was right ... "Under the Moons of Mars" was his first sale, followed quickly by the first Tarzan story. Tarzan made it to book form first, but by 1917, with four further Barsoom serials already having appeared in magazines, A. C. McClurg published . Interestingly, Burroughs is the great-grandfather of one of my favorite movie directors, Wes Anderson (The Grand Budapest Hotel).

Burroughs was for a long time one of many perhaps surprising lacunae in my SF/F reading. I knew much of him, naturally, and I have a dim memory of reading a chapter or two of Tarzan of the Apes at a cousin's house long ago. I rectified that in 2004 when I found a paperback of A Princess of Mars. (At the time a movie was supposedly in development, to be directed by Kerry Conran of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, but that never happened, perhaps because of the relative failure of that movie. Alas, the eventual movie version of A Princess of Mars, directed by Andrew Stanton and called John Carter, was a bit of a mess.)

How necessary is it to describe the plot of A Princess of Mars? Briefly, Civil War veteran (for the South) Colonel John Carter and a friend discover a gold mine in Arizona. They run afoul of Indians, and while hiding in a cave, Carter is mysteriously transported to Mars. There he encounters the rather brutish "Green Martians", and is taken captive by them. They are constantly battling each other, and the rather more civilized (and humanoid, though egg-laying) "Red Martians". They capture a Princess of the Red Martians, the beautiful Dejah Thoris. After a rocky start, John Carter and Dejah Thoris fall in love. The leader of the Green Martians plans terrible tortures for them, so it becomes necessary to escape. They become separated, and Carter makes his way to a rival city of Dejah Thoris's. He and a friend plot to undo the dastardly plans of this rival city, and rescue Dejah Thoris's city, which they do in very adventurous fashion. By the end, John Carter has managed to effect positive political change among both the Red Martians and Green Martians, and he and Dejah Thoris are husband and wife, awaiting the hatching of a child, when a crisis in the air-manufacturing plant intervenes.

The whole thing is a wild mess of faintly plausible SFnal ideas, totally ridiculous SFnal ideas, and pure fantasy. Much is absurd, but much is really quite fun. The writing is rather stilted but occasionally striking. The characters are very stiff. The attitudes are consistent with the time -- the references to Indians are pretty racist, and there is no reason to believe that the Confederate John Carter would be any more admirable in his attitudes toward black people, but on the whole these aspects are much in the background. It can't be regarded as a great book, but it remains appealing.

Old Bestsellers: Finnley Wren, by Philip Wylie

Finnley Wren, by Philip Wylie

a review by Rich Horton

Philip Wylie was once a very famous writer, both for his polemics and his fiction. He was born in 1902, died in 1971. Much of his work was SF, though he did not work within the confines of the genre. His most famous novel may be The Disappearance (1951), in which the world splits into two timelines, one with all the men, the other with all the women. His two collaborations with Edwin Balmer, When Worlds Collide (1933) and After Worlds Collide (1934), concern a rogue planet colliding with Earth, and an escape to the planet's moon. They were very popular, and a movie was made in 1951, produced by George Pal (and departing quite a lot from the plot of the novels). Wylie's non-fiction screed Generation of Vipers (1942) also attracted a lot of attention. Novels like Gladiator (said to be an inspiration for Superman) and The Savage Gentleman (said to be an inspiration for Doc Savage) also were noticed. He also wrote a great many stories about deep sea fishing, featuring the characters Crunch and Des: these appeared regularly in the Saturday Evening Post, and became a TV series in the 1950s. Many of his later novels concerned nuclear war, and close to the end of his life he wrote the screenplay for a special episode of the TV series The Name of the Game, set in LA in 2017: this episode was directed by a very young Steven Spielberg.

Wren's family members gained a bit of notoriety, in one case quite tragically: his niece Janice Wylie was murdered with her roommate in 1963 in a famous case called the "Career Girls Murder". A man of limited intelligence was originally charged with the murders and was coerced into confessing ... he was eventually exonerated and the actual murderer was caught, but the case was one of those that led to the Miranda rules. Janice Wylie's father Max was an advertising man and a novelist. Philip Wylie's daughter Karen Wylie Pryor wrote an influential book on breastfeeding, and was married at one time to Charles Lindbergh's son Jon.

Though his reputation was well-established in the literary world, a quick look at the above list shows an abiding interest in genre fiction, including outrightly pulpy stuff. (He also wrote some mysteries.) But he did also write straightforward literary fiction, and one perhaps his best-known effort in that vein is Finnley Wren, from 1934. I say best known, but I have to confess that while I was very familiar with The Disappearance, Generation of Vipers, and When Worlds Collide, and had at least heard of Gladiator, I had no idea Finnley Wren existed until Gregory Feeley pointed me in its direction a couple of months ago. Based on that, I think it qualifies this days as a largely forgotten book.

Finnley Wren appeared during a period of tremendous productivity for Wylie: he published 10 novels between 1928 and 1934, three in that last year alone. It has a long subtitle that describes the novel reasonably well: "His Notions and Opinions together with a Haphazard History of His Career and Amours in These Moody Years as well as Sundry Rhymes, Fables, Diatribes and Literary Misdemeanors". My edition is the Thirteenth Printing, from Rinehart and Company (owned by Mary Roberts Rinehart's sons). It is marked by some minor typographical experiments ... not sure how they are reproduced in newer editions.

It opens in a bar in New York, on a Friday afternoon, in perhaps 1932 or 1933. The narrator, Philip Wylie, at loose ends because his wife is traveling to the Caribbean, meets a man named Finnley Wren who starts to tell him the story of his life. Much of the early history of his life is given in a few long conversations over the next couple of hours -- Finnley was born in South Dakota in 1900, went to elementary school there (described cynically), had a brother and sister named Tom and Vi. (I thought of T. S. Eliot and his wife, called Tom and Viv: I am sure Wylie was not thinking of them.) Sometime in Wren's teens they moved to New Jersey. At a dance just before going to college Finnley is spurned by his longtime sweetheart, and ends up sleeping with another girl, who then accuses him of getting her pregnant, even though the baby shows up far too soon to be his. Finnley is ostracized, and ends up playing piano on a cruise ship heading to Europe, where he is seduced by the wife of an advertising man and then falls in love with her daughter. After some travail, they get married and Finnley takes a job working for his father-in-law ... and at the time of the story, he is a fairly prominent advertising man, though no longer married to his boss's daughter.

All this seems quite simple but there is much more going on ... vicious description of Finnley's rather awful father ... revelation of Finnley's early loss of faith and his cynicism about education and women ... portraits of his brother, sister, and mother, all of whom he loves but all of whom seem weak ... etc. etc.

The novel continues as Finnley takes Wylie to a strange party on Long Island, where Wylie seems ready to sleep with a beautiful married woman but instead inveigles from her the story of Finnley's horrible second wife, who decided to become a single mother despite having no intention of raising the child, and who ruins another man's life in the process. We learn what happened to Finnley's first wife (a rather gothic tale) and the also rather gothic tale of his second wife's pregnancy. Wylie eventually sleeps with a different woman, a nice but apparently stupid chorus girl ... but she has a secret too. There are brief cynical depictions of the other people at the party, an apparently typical messed up bunch of affluent New Yorkers and suburbanites. We see a couple of Finnley Wren's efforts at fiction, which he calls "Epistles", and which are fable-like SF stories actually.

More of Wren's life story comes out over the weekend, including a gruesome episode in the Canadian woods, and the story of his second marriage, and the story of his spinster secretary ... There are crises in Finnley's siblings' lives, and then in his marriage ...

It's a curious construct, this novel. Much of it is indeed given to Finnley Wren's Amours, and much to Fables and Diatribes (not just by Finnley), and there is plenty of often cynical philosophical musing. It is often funny, but sometimes quite tragic. It is certainly polemical. And in the end, one realizes somewhat unexpectedly that Finnley Wren is actually a somewhat ordinary man -- after all, he's in advertising. Perhaps that's the point -- the extraordinary ordinary life. Or perhaps he's a tragic case ... trapped in a career unworthy of his talents. Or perhaps it's just a story of its time.

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

Collected Short Stories, by Kingsley Amis

a review by Rich Horton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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