Inan arvio Kauhajoen runoista

Kuten tuolla aiemmin, ennen kirjamessuja kirjoitin, tein pienen runovihon nimeltä Kauhajoen runot. Ina Westman sai sen messuilla ja intoutui oikein kirjoittamaan siitä. Kiitos! Olen otettu. (Vihkoa voi tilata kommenttia pistämällä tai kirjoittamalla sähköpostia: juri.nummelin(a)pp.inet.fi.)

My book out

My book on Mika Waltari's little-known works is out. Unohdettu Waltari is available through bookstores and libraries, but since it came out at the last week's book fair in Helsinki, it may not be on the stands as yet.

Sorry, a bit busy and should be on holiday, since Ottilia is with us for this week.

[Added the cover. Art is by Tarja Kettunen. Hope I'm correct on this, it doesn't say in the book.]

Vaskikirjojen uutuuksia

(Just wanted to give a little boost to a small SF/fantasy publisher working in Finland.)

Näin kirjoittaa Vaskikirjojen Erkka Leppänen:

Kustantamo Vaskikirjoilta on ilmestynyt kuukauden sisällä kaksi uutta fantasiakirjaa.

Jokin aika sitten ilmestyi Roger Zelaznyn Avalonin luodit, joka on jatko-osa Amberin yhdeksälle prinssille ja Amberin kronikoiden toinen osa. Vetävää, klassista, pulp-henkistä seikkailua.
http://www.vaskikirjat.fi/amber2.html

Eilen painosta tuli Ellen Kushnerin Thomas Riiminiekka, palkittu, kaunis, jopa eroottisia sävyjä sisältävä itsenäinen fantasiaromaani. Johanna Vainikainen-Uusitalo on jälleen loistanut käännöksessä.
http://www.vaskikirjat.fi/thomas.html

Molemmat kirjat ovat saatavilla Helsingin kirjamessuilta Suomen Pienkustantajien yhteisestä myyntipisteestä messuhintaan. Tietenkin niitä voi tilata myös Vaskikirjojen kotisivujen kautta suoraan kotiin.
http://www.vaskikirjat.fi/kauppa.htm

David Schow's Gun Work out from Hard Case Crime

The mail brought the newest entry in the Hard Case Crime line, David J. Schow's Gun Work. It looks absolutely thrilling, but I'm truly sorry to say that I don't have the time right now to read it. Will try in the coming weeks, however. (I also received the ARC for Charles Ardai's Fifty-To-One, which is famously the fiftieth Hard Case Crime. Here's to you, guys.)

Here's the opening line from Gun Work that will hook any reader:

How Barney came to occupy a room on the wrong side of management in a hostage hotel deep inside Mexico City had to do with his friend Carl Ledbetter and one of those scary phone calls that come not always in the middle of the night, but whenever you are most asleep and foggy.

Gotta love that cover (by Joe DeVito), too, even though it's strictly anything but PC.

I ain't no slouch

I heard today that my book on Mika Waltari has come out of the printers. Will post the cover in due time.

I also dropped in by the digital printing house at the Turku university and lo and behold! they'd printed three new works for me!

One of these is the new issue of Pulp, my fanzine, for which I should finally set up a blog. This has a large article by Jukka Murtosaari on the Holland-origin paperback series for juveniles four of which were translated in Finnish in 1958-1959. Called Mikro-Sarja. Will try to remember to post covers later.

Then there is a poetry collection called Kauhajoen runot/The Poems of Kauhajoki, which refers to the Kauhajoki massacre a while back. (I realize now that I didn't get back to this theme, even though I promised so in a comment.) I posted one of the poems here in an English translation. This is a small pamphlet, of 18 pages.

The last one is also a pamphlet, a bit larger, but still only 18 pages. It's one of my mildly parodic private eye Joe Novak stories, this time called The Case of the Frozen Detective. It has Novak running away from an oil gangster whose moll he had been dancing and flirting with. Nothing memorable, I'm sure, but maybe a leisurely way to spend 30 minutes or so.

This may seem a bit weird. I'm publishing a very serious collection of poems and a intentionally stupid private eye story at the same time. But life is full of paradoxes, isn't it? But all these are for sale! Just ask!

(Sen verran piti vielä sanomani, että puhun Waltari-kirjasta BTJ:n osastolla lauantaina klo 12. Huomenna torstaina klo 12 puhun esipuheesta, jonka tein Savukeitaalle Kaarlo Uskelan runokirjan Pillastunut runohepo uusintapainokseen (tai siis kai puhumme ennen kaikkea kommunistirunoilija Uskelasta), ja perjantaina yhdessä Villen ja Vesan kanssa juttelemme Eroticasta. Se on klo 15. Kättäni saa nykiä messuilla, jos osun vastaan.)

Blood Simple

Last night I saw the Coen brothers' first film Blood Simple, well, maybe for the fourth time. It's an excellent film - a fitting tribute to film noir or maybe more to noir paperbacks of the fifties and sixties. The story resembles books by such writers as Harry Whittington and Gil Brewer very much. Too bad there's not a novelization of Blood Simple. It's never too late! (A British paperback publisher ordered novelizations of old Disney films and horror classics in the seventies, so why couldn't the same thing happen again?)

There's much to like in the film. I love Barry Sonnenfeld's photography, with smoke rings reflecting blue neon lights. I love the characters and actors, Dan Hedaya and Frances McDormand. We're never told much about them, but still we know who they are and where they come from. Someone should write a book about Loren, the private eye of the film, played by the great M. Emmet Walsh - he must've had some interesting cases. But especially I love how the audience is kept at the edge of their seats: the Coens never tell what's going to happen or even what's happening. Important story points come only later. And it's done with great verve.

A new cache of books...

Just when James and Bill lamented over the fact that they can't find book caches like I do, I come home with a large plastic bag full of books... mainly old paperbacks, crime and science fiction: Spencer Dean's Murder on Delivery (Pocket 1958), Fredric Brown's The Screaming Mimi (Bantam 1958), The 11th Hour by someone called Robert B. Sinclair (Pocket 1952)... A paperback edition of Dangerous Visions, books by Ed McBain, Michael Moorcock, Poul Anderson... Lots of first editions of Nick Carter paperbacks.

Here's the explanation. My dad bought a year ago the remainders of a used book store in Tampere and I've been carrying many of the English-language books home to Turku bag by bag. The last bag - before this one, I mean - contained for example Lionel White's Hostage for a Hood (the original GM edition), Cleve Adams's Private Eye and Lionel Olay's The Dark Corners of the Night.

Who says life isn't nice? Here's hoping I'll be able to do posts at least on some of these books.

Suomen Dekkariseuran blogi

Suomen Dekkariseura on perustanut blogin, jota vetää seuran puheenjohtaja Kirsi Luukkanen. Uuden blogin voit tsekata täältä.

The Finnish Whodunnit Society has started a blog.

Friday's Forgotten Book: Half Breed, by Clint McCall

I took another day off (I've been having back problems and my masseur told me to rest for a few days) and read some non-work books. Well, nothing I read is absolutely non-work, but at the moment I'm not writing a reference book on Australian Western writers.

So it was like rest to me when I picked up a Finnish translation of Clint McCall's Half Breed. McCall is a pseudonym and I think this was written by Keith Hetherington, one of the best Australian paperbackers - who's still working full time. I don't know when Half Breed was first published, but I believe it's a product of the sixties. It might also be from the seventies, since the hero is a half-breed and the portrait of him is certainly sympathetic, even though the guy is a born crook, a sociopath and a killer. Furthermore, I believe that the original publisher is Cleveland, which has been the foremost publisher of Australian Westerns. All their books are, I believe, 96-page booklets. Someone really should compile a bibliography of Australian Westerns! The Finnish translation (roughly Doomed To Be a Criminal) is from 1981 (I read a 1990 reprint which I bought for 20 cents recently) and belongs to the long-lived Lännensarja series. [Lännensarja = The Western Series. Not very imaginative, huh?]

Half Breed is a tale of Billy Slaughter who's given no slack, because he's a half-breed, and he's fast living the life of crime, smuggling rifles to Indians, robbing banks and trains and finally killing someone. He takes another identity and even ends up married, but then he's recognized and he's sentenced to jail. He gets out for good behaviour, but after getting his revenge he starts all over again.

The story is episodic, but it doesn't lack dramatic impact. McCall writes solid hardboiled prose and moves things along swiftly. Even without any padding he creates a sympathetic picture of young Billy and finally, it seems, has him a happy future.

I've been wondering about one thing: how come Australian Westerns are always so solid and good, when their crime fiction with series like Larry Kent and Marc Brody is so awful? Of course they had Carter Brown, but I don't think he really is up there with even his second-rate American counterparts. (It's been years since I read anything as by K.T. McCall, so won't say anything about theose books.) Now, of course they have writers to be taken seriously, such as Peter Corris and Shane Maloney.

I also read a Finnish Western from the early eighties. It was part of the FinnWest series, also published as a booklet (shorter than 96 pages, though), and published anonymously. My bet on the writer's identity is Juhani Salomaa, who also created the character in the mid-seventies. Clint McCall was definitely better, I'm sorry to say. It had impact, while this lingers on for ages, before it speeds off and then it's over too fast.

By the way, here's a link to a bookseller's collection of Australian paperbacks.

My contribution to Patti Abbott's Friday's Forgotten Book series. (Posted already on Thursday, since I don't know if I have the time tomorrow.)

The financial crisis: nothing new

As I said earlier, I was reading Peter Ackroyd's new biography of Poe (highly recommended, solidly written and short and seems to contain everything one needs to know about Poe, if one's not a scholar) and I noticed that there were at least two grave financial crises during Poe's lifetime - which was short, only 40 years, as all the readers surely know. And the both crises seemed to fasten Poe's demise.

Now there's another financial crisis on. As I was reading Ackroyd's book, I said to Elina that why everyone still thinks capitalism is a good way to handle economy when it seems that the tendency to break down and go into a crisis is inherently built into it. I don't think there were any financial crises during the era 1930-1980 when the economy was regulated heavily throughout the world, starting from the Roosevelt era United States. (And the financial growth was steadier and even faster than it was before the current crisis.) These post-1980 crises started when the regulation ceased - and that was a deliberate decision from the politicians, not just some freak coincidence or a sign of the market's own will. After 1989 there have been at least three global financial crises - in twenty years! And still people think that capitalism is a good system! (Of course the era 1930-1980 contained a world war, the Cold War, lots of international conflicts throughout the world etc., lots of political suppression, but in the Western world, or in the free countries, if you will, and especially in the Nordic countries, many things were better than they are now.)

PS. Hmm.. did I mention the Poe biography only in a comment on Patti Abbott's blog?

Soul Patch [with links added]

I have a soul patch, so there was a personal sympathy involved when I read Reed Farrel Coleman's award-winning novel Soul Patch. I finished it late last night. I liked it very much, as I hinted at in the previous post, but not as much as I liked Coleman's previous novel, The James Deans.

I said earlier that it seems that Coleman had a stricter editor at Plume. I'd've taken out almost all the stuff that was put in italics to show Coleman's private eye, Moe Prager, thinking to himself. I didn't find the bits necessary and they stopped the narrative flow. Some of the dialogue was a bit too cryptic for me and there were some passages that I thought were overwritten (and at times I thought that Moe Prager is a bore to be thinking all his thoughts about mankind and loneliness and angst and fear. C'mon, man, get a grip!).

But all in all, Soul Patch is a good example of the strong condition the American private eye novel is in. I'd like to bring Coleman to the Finnish audiences, but we'll see about that.

PS. Did you know that in Finnish "soul patch" is also called "pussy brush"?

The Shamus awards

I notice from The Rap Sheet that the Shamus awards (given to the best private eye novels published during a year, mainly (or only?) in the US) have been given to books I've read or am reading at the moment. The Shamus for the best novel went to Reed Farrel Coleman whose The James Deans I liked a great deal (this machine is working so slow that I won't go looking for the post I made on it in Pulpetti, um, 1½ years ago). I'm just now reading Soul Patch, the book that won the first prize. It's wonderful so far, but it seems that Coleman had a stricter editor at Plume, his previous publisher. But more on that later.

The best first novel and the best paperback novel I both read, but unfortunately never managed to talk about them here in Pulpetti: I think I mentioned Sean Chercover's Big City, Bad Blood, but I know I didn't mention Charles Ard.. ehem, Richard Aleas's Songs of Innocence. Even though I thought it was great - a private eye book just won't get any bleaker than this. And Aleas writes with ease and keeps you turning the pages, even though you know the ending will be grim. I also liked Chercover's book, but it was a bit too long on the private eye's personal life even when it didn't seem to be important to the book and the plot - compare it to Coleman's Soul Patch in which Moe Prager's love life is essential to the plot.

Mind you, these are not average private eye novels in any way. There are still many readers (especially in Finland - since we don't get these books in Finnish) who think that the private eye genre is locked somewhere in the era and style of Raymond Chandler or that it's just some lone hero joking around and drinking booze à la our very own Reijo Mäki. All these three books bring fresh air to the genre that many thought was dead by the eighties.

(Which was nonsense in the first place. [Which I came to understand only later. {But more on that later.}])

The year's best book haul

We took a day off, Elina and I, last Friday and jumped on a train and travelled to Salo (which is half an hour away from Turku) and hunted its thrift stores (and the only second hand book store which didn't yield much). And I came back with over 60 books.

The story requires to be told. We were at Fida, the local store of the Christian thrift store chain (much like Oxfam in the UK), and it seemed there wasn't much of anything, certainly not in the way of books - the usual thrift store stuff, handbags from the nineties, boring T-shirts and way too large jeans. But then I noticed the door to the warehouse was open. I noticed there were some cardboard boxes with books. They didn't look interesting, but I decided to look around a bit more. I noticed there were some paperbacks in boxes, leaning against the wall, stacked over each other. The paperbacks seemed to be in English, and they seemed to be old.. and then I noticed they were science fiction paperbacks. Names: Moorcock, Piers Anthony, Andre Norton, Asimov... you name it.

I checked further, from what I could see. I managed to take some out of the boxes. Edmond Hamilton, Kornbluth-Pohl, Sturgeon, Henry Kuttner... very much old stuff, Pyramids and Ballantines and Beacons, with covers by Richard Powers and others. Also newer books, DAWs and such. My heart beat fast, when I walked to the manager of the store and asked whether I could take a closer look. The guy - mustachioed, with stupid looking eyeglasses - said they are not for sale. "Why?" I cried. "They haven't been checked and put on the shelves." "What do you think if I'll take a look and buy a bunch and save you some trouble? Look, I'm not from here, I don't know when I'll be coming back", I tried. It seemed at first I wouldn't be able to turn his head - and actually I couldn't, since he let me go through only four of five boxes. There were at least eight! "How much do these cost?" I asked, my sweaty hands holding British Panther hardbacks from the fifties: H.J. Campbell, Roy Sheldon, H.K. Bulmer... "Paperbacks 40 cents, but hardbacks cost more", said the guy. Then my eyes hit on a Panther paperback, from 1952, by A.V. Clarke and H.K. Bulmer. Space Treason. I gotta have this!

Then the guy let me take a look. He didn't like it, since, as he said, this put other customers in an inequal position. Like I care. I thought about saying to the guy that no one in Salo will buy any of these, but refrained. I also refrained when he said that they'll be throwing away the trash, such as the witchcraft books. Then I delved into the books.

Came up buying over 60. For 40 cents a piece. Nice ladies at the cashier said that the old English-language hardbacks are also 40 cents a piece. And they gave me discount! I paid 25 euros for the whole bunch. And what great finds there were: J.T. McIntosh's World Out of Mind (Perma 1953), Pohl-Kornbluth's Gladiator-at-Law (Ballantine 1955; well, not in a very good shape, but still), de Camp and Pratt's The Incomplete Enchanter (Pyramid 1960), Farmer's The Other Log of Phileas Fogg (DAW 1973)... These are just some examples that I picked up from the stack. Space Treason seems to be scarce and commands 50$ at Abebooks... Vow! Some of the books were in an extremely good shape, some not - and some had been damaged while in the warehouse!

I've been thinking that I should've said to the manager of the store: "I'll buy them all" and pay, say, 150 euros for the whole bunch (and think later how I'll get them back home to Turku), but maybe I'll make another trip to Salo in the coming weeks. Now, if they'd been crime novels of the same era... I'd be in hospital from a stroke. But when I'd've managed to crawl back, I'd've said: "I'll buy them all." (At least I should've taken all the books that hinted at witchcraft or some such "trash", so they wouldn't've get discarded and thrown into garbage.)

I have no idea what these books were doing in a little town like Salo. It must've been some local science fiction aficionado who's been buying books from the fifties on and concentrated on the English language. Nevertheless, this was a thrilling experience.

Sangster's Private I

I finished this last night. Well, I can't actually say I finished it, because I had to stop reading some 40 pages before the actual end. I just couldn't concentrate on it in any way. I've been quarreling with my ex about many things (you may remember that they moved to Luxembourg and I haven't seen Ottilia for almost two months now and it seems that they won't be able to travel to Finland as often as I was originally told), and last night I realized that I hadn't understood anything that had been going on in the book for the last 50 pages. I didn't know what Sangster's hero, private eye John Smith, was talking about and who some of the characters were, so I thought it would be better just to drop it and read it some other time. (If you're new to this blog, scroll down a bit - there's a longer post about Sangster.)

But then I picked up the new Poe biography by Peter Ackroyd. I was tired as hell, but the book grabbed me and I read till midnight. It's a very good biography - and it's short, so it's highly recommended. (The Finnish translation just came out. I understood the book was published in UK only this year.)

Typewriter generated stuff

Over at Facebook, I commented Ed Lynskey's status. His computer had broken down or something and he was thinking whether he should take out his typewriter. I wrote, sure, typewriters generate pulpish stuff all by themselves. Here's an example. It's a beginning of a story I typed just for the fun of it.

It goes roughly like this:

She was something I hadn't seen during my whole career. Just pure flesh and yearning. The combination was special to say the least, and I just had to gulp down my bourbon. I would've done that, no matter what. Her husky voice also told me what I'd already expected: she'd bring trouble into my life.

They give rock cred a new meaning

Elina was cleaning up and found a clip from the Finnish rock magazine, Rumba, that I'd saved in order to scan a piece from it and post here. It's from an interview with the Japanese rock band, Electric Eel Shock.

It says roughly like this:

"The members of the band are known to have backgrounds with lots of rock credibility. The drummer or the band was working in a factory that manifactured false teeth. The bass player played for years in a Japanese funk band, while Aki still writes about fishing for the most important Japanese fishing magazine."

Rock cred? Sure. But then I have more rock cred than these guys. I mean, I've been offered marijuana once.

(Source: Rumba 4/2008.)

Oh, there was one more still

One picture more from Muestrario Gaucho.

Muestrario Gaucho

I picked this book for 50 cents at the university library's remainder sale. I didn't know what I'd do with it, but the subject was interesting enough and the illustrations beautiful. Gauchos, if you don't know, are the Argentine equivalent of the Wild West Cowboys, always driving cattle and shooting their way out. (As if... But you know what I'm talking about.) The book contains short essays on the Gaucho way of life. Since I don't speak Spanish, I don't know what the texts are really about. I've found a good home for this and am sending it overseas, but thought I'd post the cover and some illos first.

Elbio Bernárdez Jacques's Muestrario Gaucho was published by Ciordia & Rodriguez, Buenos Aires, in 1953. The illustrations are by Juan Hohmann.










As for the Gauchos, there's a book on them, written by an American (I believe), called Amongst the Gauchos. It was translated in Finnish and published here in 1947. And John Benteen's AKA Richard Meade's (or was Ben Haas his real name?) Fargo has at least one paperback adventure set in Argentine in the 1910s.

African psychedelia, pt. 2

I still get a few hits on my old posts that I wrote about African music. A collection that I'd been listening to contained some pieces that I thought were more psychedelic rock or even heavy metal. Here's a link to a South-African garage/r&b band that Sarah posted and here's a link to Vum Vum's "Muzangola" that another commentator posted. On Sarah's seemingly very new blog you get a link to her radio show's podcast: check it out, it contains really interesting garage punk stuff from the sixties, from countries like Poland and Japanese! Here's a shortcut to the podcast.

Friday's Forgotten Book: Foreign Exchange, by Jimmy Sangster

As some readers of this blog may remember, I've been doing a book on British pulp and paperback fiction for years now. It's been on a hiatus for over almost a year, mainly because I haven't had any financial support to be able to concentrate on it, but also because I find most of the British books of this sort to be a bit dull. In average, the British paperbacks are worse than their American counterparts. I don't know why this is, but I'll take a second-rate American paperbacker over a second-rate British paperbacker anytime.

This book, however, proved to be something better. I also had a right to suspect it would be: its author, Jimmy Sangster, has been one of the most prominent British screenwriters from the late fifties on, and he has penned many classic films, mainly for Hammer: The Curse of Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mummy, Taste of Fear, The Nanny... Sangster has also written some outright trash, but I read from a recent interview that he thinks the scriptwriter is not to blame, since the script always gets altered, there are always at least eight people at it before it hits the screen.

Sangster has also written thrillers, seven according to Hubin's 1975 bibliography (sorry, it was at hand and my portable's CD drive doesn't work, so I can't check a more recent edition of the biblio). His first novel is The Man Who Could Cheat Death from 1959 (Avon; so it's an American book?), written with Barre Lyndon. There was a movie based on this, so it's probably a novelization.

His first solo novel seems to have been a novelization of his own script, The Terror of the Tongs (Digit 1962), which seems like it was a paperback original. The film is not horror - it's more of an actioneer. His first original book was Private I (Triton 1967), which I'm reading at the moment and which he followed with Foreign Exchange (Triton 1968). And that's the book I recently read and enjoyed. Sangster is no second-rate British paperbacker (and this was originally a hardback, even though the Finnish translation was a PBO; FWIW, it's Manhattan No. 73, from 1970).

Private I and Foreign Exchange feature John Smith, who works as a private eye after retiring from the British Intelligence. In the both books he gets a new job from his former boss, Max, and he takes both with long teeth. (Isn't this an appropriate phrase here?) John Smith is a coward and not very good at his job, and his PI jobs are not much: usually he peeks at husbands cheating on their wives. His spy assignments are not much better: in Foreign Exchange he's imported to the Soviet Union, playing to be a tractor salesman, in order to get caught by the KGB, because the Brits want to change some political prisoners with the Soviets and they need a pawn. As you might guess, John Smith gets into trouble, especially when he's told that the Soviet spy the Brits want to swap is actually dead. Smith is sentenced into 15 years of hard labour in Siberia.

There's not much action in the book, but it moves along swiftly and Sangster makes John Smith a sympathetic character, who's rather close to Stephen "Hank Janson" Frances's Leftist spy John Gail. The book is funny, but it isn't parodic, which is a good thing in my mind (parodies become outdated pretty soon). Smith's personal life is drawn into the mix with interesting results. There seems to be a TV movie based on this, anyone seen it? (And Private I, too.)

I'm only some 50 pages into Private I, but it also reads like a very good book. Recommended. (Besides the Finnish and the American editions of Foreign Exchange you'll have the American edition of Private I. Sleazy, huh? It's by Lancer.)

My contribution to this Friday's Forgotten Book series, concocted by Patti Abbott.

Another book out: my first Western short story collection

I've edited a collection of the Western short stories of two Finnish writers, namely Joni Skiftesvik and Totti Karpela and wrote a lengthy introduction to Finnish Westerns in general (I might post the text on one of my other blogs some day). I'd really like to do a more thorough anthology of Finnish Western short stories, but I don't really think there's a market for this kind of book. We'll see. I have another Western book coming, though, more on that later. (And possibly some others, too.)

The book will be out in just two days and the launch party is at the Turku Book Fair. Here's the cover by Jukka Murtosaari. The contents are as follows:

Juri Nummelin: Lukijalle / For the reader
Juri Nummelin: Suomalaisen lännenromaanin vaiheet / The history of Finnish Western fiction

Joni Skiftesvik:
Menneisyyden vanki, FinnWest 12/1983
Elämä edessä – elämä takana, FinnWest 2–5/1985
Larryn lomapäivä, Kostaja 2/1984
Etsivä Moore ja jokirosvot, Kostaja 3/1984
Kuolemaantuomitun pako, Kostaja 5/1984

Totti Karpela:
Maine ja kunnia, Ruudinsavu 2/2006
Työtä arkkunikkarille, Seikkailujen Maailma 5/1959 (julkaistu salanimellä T. Teller)
Kaupunki ilman lakia, Seikkailujen Maailma 5–6/1960 (julkaistu ilman tekijän nimeä)
Hylkiön mahdollisuus, julkaisematon

Nota bene in Finnish: kirja sisältää kaikki Skiftesvikin kirjoittamat lännentarinat, Totti Karpelalta jätettiin yksi pois hänen omasta pyynnöstään (ensimmäinen, "Neljän sheriffin kaupunki", joka ilmestyi Seikkailujen Maailmassa alkuvuonna 1959). "Hylkiön mahdollisuus" kirjoitettiin 1960-luvun alussa, mutta se ei ilmestynyt Seikkailujen Maailmassa, koska lehti lakkautettiin. Karpela on sen tätä kirjaa varten kirjoittanut uudestaan. Hänen muut vanhat novellinsa on kevyesti editoitu ja hän on itsekin ne käynyt läpi. Skiftesvikin tekstit on julkaistu suurin piirtein sellaisenaan kuin ne alun perin lehdissäkin ilmestyivät.