Michael AKA Mike Hervey, pt. 2

I promised to say something about short story writer Mike Hervey's short stories. I covered what I know of his life in this post. It's not much and lots is mere speculation.

Same goes for his short stories. I can't say I read them carefully, many I only eyed lazily. Lots were translated in Finnish and published in mags in the late fourties and the fifties. As you remember, he had a magazine to his own name in Australia, called The Mike Hervey Detective Monthly Magazine. The Finnish magazine called Salapoliisilukemisto (Detective Digest; see photo) seems to have taken its stories from that magazine, since it had issues that contained only stories by Hervey! And many were straight from the Australian magazine.

Hervey was as prolific as hell, writing over 3000 short stories in a span of ten years. That must show in the quality of his stories. Many are pretty simple, focusing on the twist at the end, as in the story "Death of a Widow" (1953). There's not much description of the scenery, nor is there much character development. Most of the characters are what's usually called stock characters: detective, police officer, career criminal, deceitful babe, disappointed wife, etc. In "Nick to the Rescue" (1953) that's almost of a flash fiction length we get both the career criminal and the deceitful babe. There are some variations, though. "Death on Wheels" (1953) is about a race driver who's forced to win in a race. If he loses, he'll be killed.

Some of the stories are science fictional, for example in the story called "In the Year 2500" (I don't know the original title, and I don't even know what really takes place in the story). "You Can't Deceit Faith" (the original title missing, probably from 1953) is about foreseeing the future and clairvoyance.

I realize this isn't much, but it's a start! There's not much info on Mike Hervey in the web.

Toni Johnson-Woods on Carter Brown

I interviewed the Australian scholar Toni Johnson-Woods about her book project on Australian paperback crime fictioneer, Carter Brown. I posted the interview in Finnish here, here are the Q&A. Toni's blog on Aussie pulp fiction is here.

Just what are you doing regards to Carter Brown?

Carter Brown is part of a larger project of mine. In 2007 I received a grant from the Australian Research Council to document the spread of Australian “popular” (more often called pulp) fiction of the 1950s throughout the world. Carter Brown was one of the most widespread authors. Carter Brown is really Alan Geoffrey Yates who wrote nearly 300 books as Carter Brown between 1951 and 1985.
What got you attracted to Carter Brown in the first place?

Carter Brown is the person about whom I talk the most because he is probably the best known of all Australian writers. It started, as most research projects do, from a very simple question – who is Australia’s most *popular* author…my colleagues at the University of Queensland and I were having a cup of tea asking this question. Someone said “Carter Brown”. I’d never heard of him so I went to our national library and discovered that he’d written nearly 300 novels. After ten years of studying Australian literature I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t heard his name mentioned once. Then I dug a little deeper and found dozens of Australian writers had written thousands of books in the 1950s — romances, westerns, and crime. And yet not one academic in Australia had investigated them more fully. So I decided it was time for the academy to get a bit of a wakeup call.

What's interesting about Brown to modern readers? Does he still hold up?

He is of interest to readers because his stories are so representative of the time in which they were written. The language, fashions, technology, consumerism, representations of women, women and sex are all snapshots into the various decades. For instance, the earliest stories are very hardboiled and reflect the James Hadley Chase style of fiction – mean streets, political corruption and dangerous dames. Later the stories are much more light-hearted and poke fun at the “heroes”. The final stories are pretty much sex and sadism. I prefer the light-hearted funny ones and they still are amusing.

Why was he so popular around the world?

I think it was the funny Carter Browns who amused people all over the world. It seems that some humour does transcend national boundaries. My favourite character is Mavis Seidlitz who is a ditzy blonde – she

is like a detective Lucille Ball. I think his steady stream of fiction meant that a publisher could rely on a new title every

month to fill the bookshelves and so maybe it was just because he was there.

How could he be so prolific?

Yates never owned the name “Carter Brown” – it was owned by the publisher Horwitz. So when the owner Stanley Horwitz sold the licence for Carter Brown to Signet in the USA, he signed at 10 books a year deal. So if Yates wanted to earn money he had to supply those ten books. It was a harrowing deal—as often Yates was writing a current book, editing his last book and plotting his next one. He confessed that he took Dexedrine (which was legal then) and would write the whole book in 48 hours. The book then was edited by the Sydney offices of Horwitz, they sent the edited version to the USA where their editorial team fixed mistakes and then the manuscript was sent back to Australia for approval. Can you image the pressure? So from 1957 – 1985 he was writing between 6 and 10 books a year. Most of the earlier “books” were really short – about 34 pages -- and he wrote two of those a month.

I spoke with Yates’ widow last year and she said he didn’t even have a full collection of his books. So I’m unsure if there is a complete collection anywhere in the world. Even the Australian National Library, our legal repository, does not have all of his books.

What can you tell us about your research about Brown in Finland? Did you find any explanation why there was so much of Australian stuff published here?

I was in Finland to present a paper on Carter Brown at the annual SHARP conference. I focused on my findings in Nordic countries; earlier this year I was in Copenhagen and Oslo (I didn’t have time to visit Sweden). I spent the first week in the Finnish National Library; and I spent some time with some enthusiastic collectors. Finland has a unique relationship with Carter Brown because it was the FIRST overseas country to translate him—between 1957 and 1985 Finland published 140 Carter Browns…second only to France (222 books). Finland also has different covers to those in Denmark, Norway and Sweden: it reused the Australian covers. This suggests that Finland had an agreement with Horwitz (the Australian publisher) and not with Signet (the US publisher). Why or how this happened is still unknown. Unfortunately the Horwitz archives are not available and the company was sold last year so we

will probably never know.

Any interesting anecdotes you can share about CB?

Australia’s popular crime writer Peter Corris tells how he used to steal Carter Browns from his local newsagency. He says Carter Brown influenced his writing style. Mickey Spillane trashed Carter Brown on American television once – apparently Spillane had been drinking and Yates found it amusing. Yates had been writing about the USA for half a dozen years before he finally visited there. He was very popular in Japan – and his Japanese covers are the most beautiful of all I think. His material was turned into two French films (both are pretty ordinary). Richard O’Brien of The Rocky Horror Picture Show fame has written a musical, The Stripper, based on the CB book of the same name. It is supposed to be playing in the UK at the moment.

You've read some other Australian writers and I've understood they are pretty bad compared to Carter Brown. Is this true?

Yes. Because CB was so successful a rival publishing company started Larry Kent. Kent lacks the humour of CB. He is just a little too violent for my taste. Marc Brody’s stories are just poorly written and an effort to read. Carl Dekker has an interesting “hook” each story is written in a different location – again, the writing is pretty poor. The best of the ‘second’ string CB is K T McCall – the author is supposed to be the girlfriend of Johnny Buchanan, but really the series was written by two women.

Could you name some other interesting Australian writers?

I believe that Australian Peter Temple is one of the leading crime fiction writers in the world today. But as to the fiction of the 1950s – I find myself more engaged by the westerns—Marshall Grover, Emerson Dodge…there are dozens of them. I think I’ve read way too many crime fiction novels and so I find

Why was there so much pulp and paperback publishing in Australia? Could you share some of that history?

In 1939 the Australian government imposed taxes on non-essential imports such as books. After the war was finished the taxes were not lifted and so Sydney publishers found a gap in the book market. Previously the majority of cheap fiction had come from America – Australia hadn’t developed its own publishing ethos. Suddenly there was a ready market for cheap fiction – these publishers desperately looked for authors who could write genre fiction (romances, westerns, crime, science fiction) quickly. They wanted to fill the stands at railways with reading material each month. As there weren’t that many experienced writers, the publishers asked all sorts of people to write. The result was that anyone who could provide enough words got published – hence the poor quality of some of the material. Still it provided extra income for railway workers, accountants, teachers and those willing to spend their weekends writing at their kitchen table. Many of the writers I interviewed admitted that they wanted the extra money to buy a house. It was the post-World War Two boom in Australia.

What's next after your CB book is completed? More Australian pulp?

After I’ve finished the CB book (which has taken me about three years) I am going to publish a complete list of all of the Australian authors and editions I have found—that should be a couple of volumes. At least that’s what I hope. My next big project is to trace all the Australian westerns published around the world. Western fiction is the least researched of all ‘pulp’ fictions.

The pictures are Finnish editions of Carter Browns, the latter two are with original Australian covers.

"I want the gams"

A piece of Australian pulp fiction, a digest-sized paperback of 98 pages from 1962. Max Strong was a series character by Australian hack called Robert Dudgeon.* Strong had a magazine of his own name in Finland, but there were also stories about other characters by other writers (and some fillers, too, this one has a story "Oil Rain" by someone called Ron Miller).

The cover is.. well, eh.. grunt.. groan.. nice? I don't know the illustrator and I don't know what the Australian digests looked like, so I can't begin to guess if this is original or what. I haven't read the book (just bought it earlier today), but as I've said here (or somewhere else) before, the Australian crime fiction was usually below their Western fiction, which is weird.

* House pseudonym, says Pat Hawk's pseudonyms catalogue. The primary writer was Frank S. Greenop (who has also written as Jess Beaumont, Walt Dundee and Hart E. Martin; you can guess the genre by his 'nyms). Others included such authors as Uell Stanley Anderson and William Listle Stuart. Pat Hawk also mentions American writers having written as Dudgeon: Jack Ehrlich and William Fuller. He also mentions Victor Hanson, whom I've thought to be British. What's going on? (And to make matters worse, Finnish bibliographer Simo Sjöblom states, for some reason, that the Max Strongs published in Finnish in the early sixties were actually written by Lennart Hoffren, a Finnish hack from the sixties and seventies! I don't know where this info is coming from, but it is very doubtful.)

[Digging further into Hawk's Pseudonyms, it seems the Dudgeon name was used (in pirated editions?) with reprints of Ehrlich's and Fuller's novels, presumably in German. The same with Vic Hanson. Hawk's notes are not always very clear.]

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.)

Books read: Charlie Huston, Arthur Maling, Emerson Dodge (almost)

Some capsule reviews of some books I've read recently, after completing the book on forgotten writers:

Charlie Huston: Already Dead. One of Huston's Vampyre novels, with Joe Pitt as the vampire private eye. I'm not sure whether I'll read more of these, but this was entertaining enough, with Huston's ultrahardboiled style that moves in present tense. A bit too long, perhaps, and not enough plot for my taste. Huston's received lots of praise from the hardboiled aficionado, but the Vampyre mythology pretty much wore me out. Couple of real Ross Macdonaldish moments in the bunch, however, which makes me want to read more of his non-Vampyre work.

Arthur Maling: From Thunder Bay (1981, translated in Finnish as Veljensä vartija, WSOY/SAPO 1988 or so). Seems pretty obscure these days, but Maling has published quite many books. This one is a Dortmunderish story, without Westlake's humour, about a two-bit loser who accidentally kills a cop after a raid on a plane he's been flying without knowing he's smuggling guns into the US. I had mixed feelings about this - it's touching and warm in its depiction of its anti-hero, but also pretty long, and as I said, there's not much humour in it. But I did finish the book and should say that read it if you can find it cheap. There are elements you don't easily find in an American crime novel - one of the heroes (or anti-heroes, actually) is an Ojibwa Indian who belongs to the Canadian Marxist-Stalinist Party.

I've been also reading Emerson Dodge's Australian paperback novel that was published in Finnish as Lyijypuuroa aamiaiseksi (translates back as Lead Porridge for Breakfast), without mentioning the original title. I've carried this along with me to buses and banks and such, so I'm pretty much in the middle. It's pretty okay so far, traditional Western with raggedly handsome Buck Fallon as the hero. Dodge is Paul Wheelahan, one of the most prolific Australian paperbackers.

Now I'm reading Laura Lippman's Charm City from 1998, but really have to get on again with my work.

A Killer Can Die by Brad Cordell; My disappointment in Daniel Woodrell

In the last day of my holiday, I read another Australian western paperback, A Killer Can Die by Brad Cordell (published in 1980 in Finnish with a misleading title Preerian painajainen). Brad Cordell was actually Gordon Clive Bleeck, who was one of the most prominent Australian paperbackers and pulpsters. It shows here: the story moves on swiftly and economically, even though there are no big surprises. Some of the plot points seemed a bit arbitrary, though. Still a pretty enjoyable and unpretentious yarn. Bleeck died already in 1971 and had given up writing in the fifties, so this must be from that era. It seems, though, from the Australian National Library's website, that some of Bleeck's stuff under the Bard Cordell byline was reprinted as late as 1984.

I almost forgot to mention that I tried to read Daniel Woodrell's Give Us a Kiss. Emphasis on "tried": I dropped the book somewhere in the middle. Woodrell's been one of the best reviewed new (or newish) American crime writers and he seemed just like my man. But no. The book was very well written, but there wasn't much plot to attach to and I didn't believe in the main character, a macho prison guy who's written four novels and who reads Carson McCullers and John McGahern. Woodrell's other books have seemed very interesting, but I don't think I'll be trying them very soon.

The Clay Anthony book

In an earlier post I mentioned an Australian paperback western by Clay Anthony, also known as Don Haring. Here's the quite garish Finnish cover. The original title for the book is The Good and the Evil and the publishing year is 1977.

I've been thinking about compiling a reference work about Australian pulp fiction, but there are tons of Australian westerns in the market... Everytime I take a look at these Colt and other Finnish western series, I'm exhausted by the idea of having to read hundred stories by Cord McCabe, two hundred by Emerson Dodge, three hundred by Brad Cordell... Maybe dozen by each would just about cut it. Later, later. I'd just have to get my Pulpografia Britannica ready. Do you think the book on Australian pulp could be called "Pulpografia Australiensis"?

Better reading

I had a chance to read some other books as well during our cabin trip. They were all better than Paul Malmont's Chinatown book.

I had two short Australian paperback westerns with me. I don't have Clay Anthony's book with me right now and I already forgot the original title, but the Finnish title for it was Oman köyden oikeus (meaning Rope Justice). Clay Anthony was really Don Haring whom someone might recognize as the writer of the Larry Kent series and even though there seems to be a consensus that Larry Kent was bottom of the barrel, I actually enjoyed Don Haring's western quite a bit. It's a fast-moving story of two young men who end up in the both sides of the law and have to duel to death in the end.

The other I read only when we got back from the trip - Cord McCabe's Kostajan ase ei kylmene/Trail to Eternity (the Finnish year is 1974; I don't know when the original was published, but it must've been by Cleveland). It wasn't as good as Anthony's - the plotline was too thin and the narrative too loose. Cord McCabe is (was?) really an Australian writer called R.J. Fittock who also wrote as Walt Beaumont and Lou Donovan. The Finnish title means The Revenger's Gun Won't Get Cold. The McCabe book was published in the Arizona series, Anthony's book in the Colt series. Both were long-lived digest-sized paperback series.

I started Paul Hamill's The Deadly Piece (1979) and finished it when we got back to Turku. Hamill's hero is Sam Briscoe, a tough newspaperman who seems to get into trouble and resolves them with his fists and wit. There's a melancholy feel to the book even though it's strictly hardboiled. I liked this quite a bit and could read more of Hamill's Sam Briscoe novels. Hard Case Crime reprinted recently one of Hamill's other Briscoes, The Guns of Heaven. I haven't really seen any reports on the book, but I remember stepping upon a negative comment. Wouldn't really be so harsh based on The Deadly Piece.

I also read Jennifer Lynch's Twin Peaks tie-in, The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer. You may remember (I mentioned this only in passing, though) that I watched the reruns of Twin Peaks on the Finnish television couple months back and was captivated once again. I remembered that I'd never read the two Twin Peaks novelizations (well, they are not really novelizations). Lynch's book on Laura Palmer's life doesn't really work as an independent work of art (I find it difficult to fathom what a reader who hasn't seen any episode of Twin Peaks would get out of the book), but I enjoyed it nevertheless. I forgot to bring the biography of Dale Cooper with me, but I intend to read it nevertheless in the near future.