Lester Morris: Savage Lust (1962)

Here's another noir novel masquerading as a sleaze paperback! No one has ever heard of Lester Morris, let alone his sole novel Savage Lust that came out from a small paperback house called Private Editions. I thought this was pretty good and solid and could've been written by some better known paperbacker. The ending is devilishly cruel and ironic. 

Savage Lust's anti-hero is Si, a heel and a gigolo who uses and cheats women all the time. He's living in Florida and skimming money from every broad he can get his hands on. One of his lady friends, the wife of a hotel owner, wants to get Si all to herself and kills her husband and tells Si they can get the husband's money. Si doesn't want to get involved in a murder, but manages, almost accidentally, to kill the lady friend. Si buries the bodies and tries to act as the caretaker of the hotel while the owners are on a vacation. You can see this is not going to end well, right? And it sure doesn't! The ending is a punishment you just don't see coming. 

Not altogether plausible, but entertaining nevertheless, and the more noir aspects of the story are worth your while. I seem to enjoy the American sleaze paperbacks where the main guy is a no-good heel, who's getting beaten. No idea who really wrote this, but there were other Lesters writing sleaze at the same time, for example Lester Lake and Lester Arthur. They might be the same guy or,
then again, might not. 

Friday's Forgotten Book: Sébastien Japrisot: The Lady in the Car With Glasses and a Gun

Still suffering from a bad back, I finished lying on a sofa the French writer Sébastien Japrisot's thriller La Dame dans l'auto avec des lunettes et un fusil (1966). I had a beat-up copy I'd found somewhere cheap, and upon noticing I already have a better copy I decided to throw this away - most certainly something I wouldn't normally do.

This is a very good crime novel. I once read somewhere that if you're a male writer, don't try a woman's point of view (unless you're Cornell Woolrich). Japrisot does it and does it very well. Of course some of the stuff in the book depicting a young woman's sexual and social disorientation is dated, but they didn't overrun the reading experience. The book reminded me a bit of Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, which I liked to a certain point, but I also got weary of its longevity. Not so with Japrisot's novel, as it clocks at about 250 pages. The book starts in the middle of the woman's noir nightmare of which the characters and the reader can't possibly fathom what's going on. Japrisot likes to toy with the reader's expectations and this is far more exciting and surprising than Gone Girl. Japrisot also writes in a very French style that's both hypnotic and diffuse at the same time. This is a very engaging book and although the prose isn't the most straight-forward one, you can't help but read the book in one sitting.

The book was made into a British movie in 1970 with Samantha Eggar and Oliver Reed. Haven't seen it, though. Seems like there's no decent DVD on it. Here's a good blog post on the film.

More Forgotten Books coming up here.

Edit: I forgot to mention it, but I read the Finnish translation from 1967. The title means "The Woman in the Car". Guess this was clear to anyone. Crime Club (with the nice logo) was a quality paperback series from the large Finnish publishing house Otava back in the late sixties. 

Friday's Forgotten Book: Dean Koontz: Shattered (1973)

I've never read much Dean Koontz and my impression of his later and longer work (see here) has not been very good, but Shattered proved out to be short, gripping and brisk. It's one of Koontz's early books, published initially under his K. W. Dwyer pseudonym (and later on published as Dean Koontz), and still it tells a full-bloodied tale of full-bloodied people.

The premise is not very different from Richard Matheson's and Steven Spielberg's Duel which is two years senior, so Koontz may have had it in mind. Shattered also differs from Matheson's work in that the chase is personal in tone. A dark, mysterious van is behind two drivers, a young boy and the boyfriend of his older sister, who's a father figure to the kid. They don't know who drives the van, but Koontz shows he's a menace in the chapters narrated through the mysterious driver.

The ending is a bit too abrupt and there are some characters of which I didn't know whether they really were necessary. But Shattered is still a
suspenseful book that feels for its doomed characters.

This came out in Finnish in 1994 from Book Studio under the title Varjostaja. See the Finnish cover here.

More Forgotten Books here.

Friday's Forgotten Book: Jack Williamson: Darker Than You Think

I'm writing this before I've finished the book, so I don't know the outcome and how it will play out, but here goes nevertheless.

Jack Williamson's Darker Than You Think (published first in 1940 in Unknown, then in book form in 1948) is a werewolf classic and as such it seems dated now, though it must've been pretty ground-breaking at the time, for all its realism and psychological acuteness. Williamson even strives for a plausible explanation of lycanthropy, but the explanation of course seems dated now.

The title of the book is a lot like many film noirs with its emphasis on dark, and sure enough one could see this as a film noir, especially with the red-haired femme fatale of the book, April Bell. The hero of the book, Will Barbee, is an ordinary sap, hacking newspaper stories and drinking whiskey and waking up to a nightmare of his life.

More Forgotten Books here at Patti Abbott's blog. There's an Elmore Leonard week, but I wasn't able to participate in that.

Friday's Forgotten Book: Adam Diment: The Dolly Dolly Spy

Adam Diment's The Dolly Dolly Spy (translated in Finnish with a misleading title Nukkevakooja) was an enormously popular spy novel published in 1968 that's largely forgotten these days. It does seem to have some sort of a cult following, though, which I can understand, but not easily relate to.

I did enjoy the book mildly. The book has lost some of its shock value - I mean, we have seen quite a lot of free sex and the use of mild drugs since 1968, there's not much to it anymore. But it's still entertaining, even though in the case The Dolly Dolly Spy there's also lots of old-fashioned sexism to it. A blogger wrote that Adam Diment's Philip McAlpine makes Ian Fleming's James Bond books feel like they were written by Andrea Dworkin!

The main problem for me in The Dolly Dolly Spy was that the book was too episodic. There's not much coherence to it. I'm the first to admit this was probably something Diment was aiming at, but it doesn't work very well (though it does work in some books). The first part of the book is pretty good, and so is the end, but the middle part drags - and none of them have much to do with each other! It does, however, add to the overall parodic quality of the book. The parody goes well with Philip McAlpine's character, since he couldn't be less interested in the Cold War affairs and he gets rather pissed off by the fact that his employers want him to help an old Nazi officer escape.

Adam Diment's story has been interesting, read for more here and here.

More Forgotten Books here.

Monday's Forgotten Book: Michael Crichton's Eaters of the Dead

Should I save this for the coming Friday or write about it now? I've noticed that if I don't write about books or movies I've read or seen at once, I just don't write about them. So here's a new series: Monday's Forgotten Books. It's possible that this will be the only entry.

Now, is anything by Michael Crichton really forgotten - now that Hard Case Crime brought out two early outings by him as "John Lange"? And Eaters of the Dead was made into a film, The Thirteenth Warrior, with Antonio Banderas in the lead. Forgotten?

At least in Finland. For some reason or another, the book has never been translated in Finnish. Eaters of the Dead was originally published in 1976. My battered paperback copy I purchased for 50 cents recently is from the nineties, when the movie was coming out. You can see from the film's credits in the back cover that the movie was supposed to be called Eaters of the Dead, but then it was changed, for some reason, into The Thirteenth Warrior. Maybe "Eaters of the Dead" was thought to be too garish. The reprint has a 1992 afterword by Crichton, in which he tells anecdotes about making of the book. It's interesting in its own right and gives some background to what Crichton did with his novel. [Editing the entry and Googling for links I notice that the Wikipedia article on the film has many anecdotes about making the film.]

Eaters of the Dead is essentially a postmodern novel, since many - if not all - of the sources Crichton mentions are fictional. The book consists of the diary of one Ibn Fadlan, an Arab diplomat travelling to the city of Bulgar and meeting a bunch of Vikings in the way. He's assigned to be the thirteenth warrior when the Vikings are told to come back to help their king fighting an anonymous enemy. (This assignment must be the weakest element in the book. I couldn't decide whether it was logical or not. It might've been better if Ibn Fadlan had followed them by his own choice.) In the North, they fight against hairy beasts that may or may not turn out to be Neanderthals. There's also some fighting amongst the Vikings, and some anthropological notions about the Vikings and their habits. Seems like Crichton has done his homework - but of course I'm not sure, since I don't know much about Vikings.

This is not a straight-forward adventure novel, mainly due to the ancient diary style Crichton mimicks. But it's still a gripping yarn. There are some good horror scenes with the Neanderthals attacking in the night. The book has some connections to Beowulf - even though Crichton admits in his afterword the chronology is way off -, which are not necessary to decipher if one simply wants to enjoy the adventure. Crichton also gives a possible and plausible explanation to the dragon-like monster described in Beowulf.

All in all, I enjoyed the novel. It was actually my first Crichton, but I'm not very interested in his other work - beside the John Langes which I may read in the future (and possibly Congo, another of his early novels, but I found much to dislike in the film). I'd very much like to see this translated in Finnish, but I don't think I'd be up to it. I'm not sure though who'd make a good publisher for this: the SF/fantasy folks don't necessarily want to read Crichton and the usual Crichton readers might be put off by the postmodern narrative techniques.

Friday's Forgotten Book: Thomas B. Costain: The Black Rose

Okay, I'll do one while I'm still here.

Thomas B. Costain was one of the most popular of the American mid-20th century historical writers, the others including Kenneth Roberts, Edison Marshall, Frank Yerby, F. Van Wyck Mason... The Black Rose from 1945 has been one of his best-known novels and it was made into film with Tyrone Power and Orson Welles and directed by Henry Hathaway. It's a vast epic tale of two young Britons who travel all the way Cathay (aka China) just after the big Crusades to Jerusalem. They notice Europeans are regarded barbarians, but they also encounter cruelty amongst the Mongols and other nations of the Far East. The novel is not free from racism of its time, but it's also a great tale of adventure. I recommend this highly, if you're into this sort of thing.

(Sorry, a bit too short, but I've been sitting here all day and I'm hungry now.)

Friday's Forgotten Book: Mika Waltari's The Etruscan (Turms, kuolematon)

This is basically a rerun of my earlier post about the book, but I've edited it a bit and added a photo of the American edition.

Finnish writer Mika Waltari (1908-1979) wrote many historical novels in grand scale. The best-known of his historical novels is The Egyptian (1945; Sinuhe egyptiläinen in Finnish) that was made into a mediocre spectacle film in the mid-fifties, but I think a later novel, called The Etruscan from 1958 is better. (The Egyptian handles more interesting political themes, though, while The Etruscan is more on the mystic side.)

The Etruscan's original title, Turms, kuolematon, means "Turms, the Immortal". Turms is a young man who's found mysteriously lying outside a temple somewhere near Efesos, in Turkey, with no memories about his past life. He sets the temple on fire, flees and gets out on an adventure through all the Mediterranean Sea, getting strange feelings about this nature as one who can't die. He gets involved in piracy in the Mediterranean Sea and fights off some bad-ass Carthageans. Finally he ends up with the Etruscans, the strange and happy tribe of which little is now known. The book takes place in 400 B.C.

If you have patience enough for a 700-page novel and a taste for grand adventure, grab this: there are some really good battle scenes and even some sword and sorceryish moments. The prose is better than in The Egyptian which I found overwritten. A word of warning: there are also some long, philosophical moments, but then again you can't have everything.

The amnesia plot brings mind one of my favourite topics: the themes and tropes of film noir of the fourties and fifties were actually prevalent throughout the whole Western culture after the World War II. This is clear also in Waltari's other works, especially The Egyptian, in which Sinuhe's own innocence brings doom upon his head.

There seems to have been a Pocket Book edition of The Etruscan, which is abridged (I think the hardcover is also abridged). For all I know, shortening the book may've done good to The Etruscan, since I also find it too long and a bit formless in places (at times it's perfectly clear that Waltari didn't do much revising). The hardcover copies by Putnam seem to be pricey.

[My entry to Patti Abbott's great Friday's Forgotten Books series. Hey, it's still Friday in Finland!]

Friday's Forgotten Book: A Maggot, by John Fowles

(Been busy all this week, hence no blogging. And this will be short.)

I don't know whether any book by John Fowles could be called forgotten, since he must be one of the highest regarded British authors of the last thirty decades. But I don't see a lot of discussion on him lately, so when I read this, I thought I'd do a Forgotten Book post about it.

A Maggot is a historical novel, but it's not for a historical novel purist. The events of the book take place in the early 18th century, but the narrator makes clear that "he" narrates the text from the late 20th century, i.e. from now (the book is from 1983, if I remember correctly [it's not at hand and I don't feel like opening a new browser and checking]). In this regard, the book resembles Fowles's best-known novel, The French Lieutenant's Lady. Both are essays on the historical novel, not historical novels per se. Fowles also uses many different narrative techniques - some pieces of the book are told in present tense, some are transcripts of interviews or interrogations and some are the narrator's own ponderings and mini-essays. This can be annoying if you're accustomed to more straight-forward narratives.

What's it about, then? A Maggot tells about mysterious events regarding a disappeared duke (or whatever, I already forgot, a man of nobility in any case) and his servant who's found dead hanging from a tree. The events involve a known prostitute. There's also a sort of private eye, a lawyer who interrogates some of the people that had to do with the said events. There are fantasy or even science fiction elements in the book, but we never know if they are only imagination.

The reader is left unconscious of what actually happened, which works very well, in my view. I had some trouble getting into the book, but halfway through I was actually quite excited about it. The ending is powerful and links the book in actual events that have taken place. (If you want to know what they are about, read the book.)

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.

Friday's Forgotten Book: Dumbo, The Flying Elephant

"There's a twist I didn't see coming."

You know that sentence? It's usually a sign of a good book: the book takes the reader by surprise and only tightens the suspense and leaves the reader thrilled. It works in most cases.

But not in all.

We have an old children's book which certainly has a twist I didn't see coming - and neither does anyone else in this household.

It's a Disney-themed Little Golden Book called Dumbo, The Flying Elephant from 1959 (translated in Finnish as Rakettinorsu Dumbo; our edition is from 1980, but there must've been an earlier edition). I don't know the writer or the illustrator.

The story is mostly your usual Disney-fare, pretty stupid but also quite acceptable by low standards. Mickey Mouse gives flying shows with Dumbo, but they are losing competition to new rocket planes. (Do you think a flying elephant ever would lose its novelty value?) After some kicking around, Mickey Mouse comes up with an idea: he puts some rockets in a box, ties the box up in Dumbo's back and bang! they fly faster than any rocket plane. (And he just sits on the back of Dumbo like nothing happens when they fly over 1,000 kilometers an hour. Yeah, right. But then again, Mickey Mouse is one tough customer.)

Okay so far. But then there's the final climax. It's told, just like that, in the middle of the narration, that the circus teddy bear Bongo has shipwrecked on a remote island. I mean, what the fuck? Bongo is never mentioned in the story before the climax, he's not in any of the pictures, and if you don't know just who this guy is, you have no idea why he's suddenly brought into the story. And why the hell is he on that island? Where was he going? With what was he travelling? Why's there no sign of the wrecked ship or plane - and what happened to the other passengers?

Well, I must admit that Kauto has never asked us who the guy is.

You pretty much guess what happens next. The planes can't land on the tiny island, so Mickey and Dumbo rescue Bongo. And come back as heroes.

And that's that.

(I don't exactly know whether this was a Little Golden Book or not. I can't find any trace of it being published as a Little Golden Book, but in Finland it was published in the similar series in which many books had originally been Little Golden Books. Anyone recognize the cover?)

My contribution to Patti Abbott's Friday's Forgotten Books series.

Friday's other forgotten books

I forgot to link to Patti Abbott's list of other forgotten books. Here's the list of the books and here are the links. Patti is a wonderful writer and the mastermind behind this great Friday series, which someone should import to Finland and Finnish blogs. (Me? I don't have have the time, I'm sorry to say.)

Friday's Forgotten Book: The Hell Bent Kid

Charles O. Locke's The Hell Bent Kid (1957) is a very interesting curiosity, a Western novel that seems at times like an absurdist play, in which people don't act rationally and resemble characters in a Samuel Beckett play, yet there's enough action to keep a Western reader interested. The novel won a Spur for the best novel, yet it seems to be now totally unknown and doesn't appear to be in print at all. I even think it was one of the best 25 Western novels in the list that the Western Writers of America voted in the late seventies. It was published in Finnish as Tuhoon tuomittu (Doomed) in 1959, in hardcover by Otava.

It is interesting to note that this was published the same year Arthur Penn's Billy the Kid film with Paul Newman, The Left-Hand Kid was first shown. Both have the same type of qualities, absurd humour, absurd characters and some kind of twisted sense of the West. In Penn's film, the characters are always a bit out of focus and never in the middle of the frame, always on the outer edge of the frame, like moving away, schizophrenically. This applies also to The Hell Bent Kid. A movie was made from Locke's novel, by Henry Hathaway, under the title of From Hell to Texas (seen in Finland as Ajojahti).

I found a biblio for Charles Locke from a site that doesn't seem to be around anymore:

Charles O. Locke was born in Tiffin, Ohio in 1896. He worked for the Toledo Blade (the family newspaper) until he finished college in 1918. From 1928 until 1936 he worked as a desk and rewrite man for the New York Post and the World Telegram. From 1936 to 1944 he was the assistant publicity director for Benton and Bowles handling such companies as Bristol Myers, Colgate-Palmolive-Peet, U. S Rubber, and General Foods. He was also a ghost writer for such celebrities as Fred Allen and Charles Winninger and wrote the lyrics for So This Is Paris and Cyrano de Bergerac. During this period he also worked for the Office of War Information, while writing for the New York Post, the New York Herald Tribune, and the Sun. From 1945 to 1956 he worked for the Batten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborne agency but also operated on his own as a publicist for General Electric, The American Cancer Society, U.S. Steel, and Ethyl Corp.

In the 1950s Mr. Locke wrote several novels including his most popular book, The Hell Bent Kid. Other novels include A Shadow of Our Own, The Last Princess, Amelia Rankin, and The Taste of Infamy. He and his wife, the former Virginia Sherer, spent most of their life in Boonton, New Jersey. Mrs. Locke died in 1970 and Charles Locke died in 1977. Charles Locke was a grand nephew of David Ross Locke the famous Civil War humorist who wrote a column under the name "Petroleum V. Nasby".

Charles Locke is best known as the author of The Hell Bent Kid, which was very popular and one of the first "psychological" westerns. He was also known as the 1930s script writer for a musical version of Cyrano de Bergerac.

Friday's forgotten book: James Cross: Root of Evil

Finally I had a chance to chime in with Patti Abbott's Friday's Forgotten Book blog thing. I've been posting - in Finnish - the entries of my first book, Pulpografia, in another blog of mine here and when I came across James Cross's Root of Evil I thought I should say something about it in English, too.

I found this novel when I was going through some magazines at the university library and noticed there was a serial in a magazine called Mies (Male or Man) in 1959. It was by a writer not known to me, James Cross. The story looked interesting, so I took a look at Allen Hubin's bibliography and noticed Cross was actually named Hugh Parry and that he had four crime novels to his name. Then I spotted a book by James Cross in a second hand book store. It was called Root of Evil and even though I don't have the book at hand (I think it's in a box in the cellar..), I do remember it was a British paperback reprint. Quick glance told me it was the same book that was serialized in the mag.

So I read the book instead of the serialization. And man, I was sure glad I read it, since Root of Evil is a fast-moving tale of intrigue, murder and extortion. Two brothers buy a house and find a huge treasure of old coins in the backyard. They dig them up and after thinking about it for a while, they decide to keep them. First the taxman comes in, but then come the local criminals and then comes the greedy ex-wife and even if that's not enough, the military also tries to get their hands on the money. From what I remember of the book, it was told in a snappy, hardboiled style in the first narration. It's a very entertaining and well-written book.

Cross seems to have written some short stories, one for Playboy in 1967, and I seem to remember someone saying that he had a story in Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions. That aside, I've never heard or read anyone commenting on his work. Root of Evil should merit at least a mention.

Sorry for the lousy picture - it was the only one I found on Abebooks. It's a Crest reprint from 1958; the original edition is from Messner, 1957.