Friday's Forgotten Book: Livia Reasoner: The Vampire Affair

I won this book from Livia Reasoner, James Reasoner's wife, some years ago in a blog or a Facebook contest. I got around to reading it only now, but luckily it still seems to be available as an e-book, though I believe these Silhouette books have a short shelf life.

This is the only paranormal Silhouette book Livia has written, but I don't know why this is, since The Vampire Affair is a solid book, fast-paced thriller with enough vampires, romance and erotic love. It's a clearly work of a professional. The main characters are a young and eager female journalist and a mysterious millionaire who turns out to be a vampire hunter and a bit of a vampire himself. This may sound cliched (and indeed many parts of the book are), but Reasoner writes deftly and keeps the story running. The book is quite short, so the cliches don't get in the way. In the end Livia throws some American Indian mystique in the mix, and it works, too!

The Vampire Affair could've also easily started a series, since both major characters could well play leading parts in coming books as well. Here's hoping it will happen!

More Forgotten Books here on Patti Abbott's blog.

A bit more about the Harlequin vintage collection

I noticed that someone had posted this link to my earlier post on Harlequin's collection of vintage crime. This follows closely, with quotes, what Harlequin had done to the books they reprinted.

Harlequin's vintage collection, pt. 2

Harlequin's line of crime and melodrama reprints was met with joy from the enthusiasts. Now that Harlequin's told that the books were slightly revised, maybe even censored, everyone's angry and not wanting to buy the books. See the comments.

Okay, I can understand that. But hey, were the books any good to begin with? I would say that Harlequin did the larger mistake by bringing these six books back to print. The crime fiction community was fooled: what are these hardboiled classics I've never heard of? Yeah, there are books that are very good even though no one's ever heard of them, but these six just are not any of those. Someone's talking about To Kill a Mockingbird and Gone With the Wind in the Harlequin blog's comment section, but that makes no sense to me.

The fact that James Hadley Chase's books are probably the best in the bunch says quite a lot. Not every hardboiled paperback original of the bygone years is good.

Vintage Harlequins

Here's a link to an article about Harlequin's vintage collection of their old crime titles. I wrote about them earlier here. And here's James Reasoner writing about the books, which prompted me to provide the link - and here's James still at it, providing some great vintage Harlequin covers.

I promised to dig up little something about one M. Scott Michel who wrote some private eye novels for Harlequin in the late fourties and early fifties, but that'll have to wait.

Harlequin's vintage collection

Someone pointed out earlier today at the Rara-Avis e-mail list (which is focused on hardboiled and noir crime writing) that Harlequin is bringing back into print some old crime novels. Here's a link. There are two titles by James Hadley Chase - I think those were reprints already back in the day. The other three novels are pretty obscure. The Dale Bogard one, Pardon My Body (gotta love these titles!), was first published by Harlequin in 1951 - so it was one of their early original crime paperbacks, before they started concentrating on romance. "Dale Bogard" was a pseudonym for a British paperback hack Douglas Enefer, who wrote lots of other stuff, too, like some Cannon TV tie-ins in the seventies.

I can't find any info on Perry Lindsay's No Nice Girl, but Alan Handley's Kiss Your Elbow (Kiss Your Elbow?) was originally published by McKay in 1948. The reprint came from Pyramid in 1950, under the pretty different-sounding title Terror in Times Square, but there must've been a Harlequin one.

The fact that Harlequin is doing these under the original illustrated covers must have something to with Hard Case Crime. You see, they created a fashion! (Or, actually, recreated.)

Okay, I couldn't leave this unchecked: Perry Lindsay was the same writer as Peggy Gaddis, who started out back in the 1920's and continued penning cheap romance and sleaze way into the sixties. No Nice Girl was a Phoenix Press title in 1946 and the Harlequin reprint came in 1949. This information comes from Abebooks and is highly suspectible, but I'd like to hear otherwise.