Stephen Crane

(It's about a coming collection of Stephen Crane's Western short stories that have never before been translated.)

Turkulaiselta kulttuurikustantamolta Farokselta tulee kevään aikana kokoelma Stephen Cranen lännentarinoita, joita ei ole aiemmin suomeksi käännetty (paitsi "Sininen hotelli", joka ilmestyi puolitoista vuotta sitten Länkkäriseuran tilaajalahjana). Anssi Hynysen kokoama ja kääntämä kirja on sen verran hieno kulttuuriteko, että pistän tähän kirjan sisällön:

"Morsian saapuu kaupunkiin ja muita lännentarinoita" (työnimi) sisältää seuraavat tarinat:

Takaa-ajo (”Horses – One Dash!”, Philadelphia Press, tammikuu 1896)
Mies ja muutama muu (”A Man and Some Others”, Century, helmikuu 1897)
Morsian saapuu kaupunkiin (”The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky”, McClure’s Magazine, helmikuu 1898)
Viisi valkoista hiirtä (”The Five White Mice”, New York World, huhtikuu 1898)
Sininen hotelli (”The Blue Hotel”, Collier’s Weekly, marraskuu 1898)
Kello kaksitoista (”Twelve O’Clock”, Pall Mall Gazette, joulukuu 1899)

Authors translated only in Readers' Digest Condensed books

As I mentioned the Readers' Digest books below, I thought I'd make a list of, mostly American, crime and thriller writers who have been translated only in those abridged collections.

F. Paul Wilson (apart from short stories in SF/horror fanzines and collections; the medical thriller, The Select, in 1995)
Stephen Hunter (Point of Impact, in 1997; there seems to be a movie coming up on this)
Barry Eisler (Rain Fall, in 2003)
Stephen Leather
James Thayer (several translations in Condensed Books)
Greg Iles
Susan Geason
Brian Haig
C.J. Box
David Lavallee
S.K. Wolf (just who is this? gotta be a pseudonym)
Sam Llewellyn
Robert Byrne
Ken McClure

Doing the research I noticed that there's a novel The Long Kill by Reginald Hill in 1991 in one of the Condensed books under the pseudonym Patrick Ruell. I don't think this is mentioned anywhere else (in Finnish sources, that is).

Ridley Pearson in Finland

As a part of my on-going series on crime and thriller writers' reception by the Finnish publishers, here's something on Ridley Pearson (whose The Angel Maker I didn't like a bit, as evidenced below). I'd thought he would've been bigger in Finland than he apparently is.

He's had only four books published in Finland by a big house, Gummerus. These include The Angel Maker, No Witnesses, Beyond Recognition and Chain of Evidence. Two of his books, Hard Fall and The Seizing of Yankee Green Mall, were published by Kauppiaitten Kustannus which is a publishing house not specialized in translated fiction. These precede the ones by Gummerus. There are two books done abridged in the Readers' Digest collections, but they were already published by others.

1997's Chain of Evidence (Todistusketju in Finnish) was the last Pearson to be translated. While I might be able to say that this speaks for the Finnish readership's good taste, it's still a puzzle to me. The Angel Maker had two printings in 1994 and while the first one may have been a small one, it's still an evidence pointing out there could be a market for Pearson in Finland. It is no service to Finnish readers - and to the reading culture - to drop authors like this.

Ridley Pearson sucks!

(I had difficulty writing the last word on the title: "susck", "sucsk", "suksc", "sukcs". It sets the tone for this diatribe.)

I finished my first Ridley Pearson last night. It was The Angel Maker from 1993, second offering in the series recounting the adventures of Boldt and Matthews, the cop couple almost in love with each other. It was such a boring book that I had difficulties to get through with it. I almost fell asleep reading it... And this is a friggin' bestselling crime thriller! C'mon! What's with you people, getting this kind of bull to the bestselling level?! Read something good for a change!

Okay, let's calm down. I'll give you that there was some inventiveness in the ways the serial killer did his stuff, but beyond that there were no redeeming elements. The characters are clearly meant to be paradoxical and deep human beings, with inner contradictions and ever-going self-doubt, but Pearson cannot give them but some extra points - i.e., Boldt takes his little baby with him to interview possible leads (but the baby really doesn't act like a baby; if I were to take my little boy (0kay, he's two) to my job gigs, it would only break all hell loose) - that really don't add much to anything. The same with the baddie, a heart surgeon/vet who's supposed to be this monumental genius seeing himself above all the others - I didn't believe in him for a minute.

Pearson says this at his website: "Being a fiction writer is really like being an actor, because if you're going to write convincingly it has to sound right and play right." Okay, the guy's right. But why then does he write books that don't sound and play right? It was like watching some puppets do overlong scenes. (Or then too short. This guy switches the point of view every two pages, when he's not doing scenes that take 300 pages. Especially the scene at the pawn shop had me bite my nails - but not with excitement. And don't ask me about the action scenes. My mother would write better action scenes.)

Someone might say that it was the Finnish translation. No way translators are not that bad in here. It might be the case, though, that Ilkka Rekiaro was so bored with the book that he did a purposefully bad job. But then he wouldn't be so prolific a translator as he is. He'd get canned.

I remember when my book on crime paperback fiction, Pulpografia, came out in 2001 and I was on television. The interviewer asked me if there were any well-written books in the selection. I was mildly put off by the question, but didn't let it show. I could say now that each and every one was written better than The Angel Maker. What's worrying is that this is what people buy and read and think it's the state of the art.

I must be a bit slow

I just should've payed more attention. The shutting down of Flashing In The Gutters got good coverage here.

Untranslated paperbackers

After writing down how the Finnish publishers have treated Block, Leonard and Brian Garfield, I decided it might be interesting to see which prominent (and not so prominent) paperback writers have been neglected in Finland. The list focuses mainly on crime fiction writers and is in random order.

Charles Willeford: no translations before Miami Blues in the late eighties (I don't really consider this surprising, since Willeford wrote mostly for quite obscure publishers)
William Ard: no translations, unless one wants to count a pseudonymous effort that was really written by John Jakes (Give Me This Woman, Monarch 1963, which is great and sleazy in the best paperback tradition)
Frank McAuliffe: no translations
Malcolm Braly: no translations
Glenn Canary: no translations
James O. Causey: no translations
Jay Flynn: no translations
Al Fray: no translations
Charles Runyon: no translations
William Fuller: no translations
Donald Goines: no translations
Iceberg Slim: no translations
David Karp: no translations
Herbert D. Kastle: no translations
Robert Donald Locke: no translations (or actually "no translation", since A Taste of Brass (1957) seems to be his only work, apart from science fiction stories in mags)
David Markson: no translations (the link says that there should've been a reprint of his early crime novels, but has anyone seen them?)
Vin Packer: no translations
James Reasoner: no translations (with the exception of two stories, one in Isku, one in Ruudinsavu, that have been conducted by me in the recent years)

Robert Randisi has got only four or five of his adult Westerns translated and having read those, I find it hard to believe they represent him at his best. He has also some Destroyers, written with Warren Murphy, and Nick Carters (that are quite good within the series). Nothing under his own name and not even his Gunsmiths or other series he's deservedly famous for.

There are no Ed Noons by Michael Avallone translated. He's "known" here only through his pseudonymous work in the U.N.C.L.E. series and Nick Carters.

One of the most peculiar cases is Jim Thompson. The Getaway was translated as a hardback after the Peckinpah movie came out, but we had to wait until the late eighties to see Killer Inside Me in Finnish by a very small press. After that there was still a long gap before Like started translating his books in the nineties.

In the Western field, the most prominent example must be H.A. DeRosso, but there's four or five of his short stories published in Finnish fictionmags, so he won't quite qualify. Other important Western paperbackers not translated in Finnish include authors like Matt Braun, Dan Cushman, Vernon Fluharty, Paul Durst, Lee Hoffman, William C. Johnstone, Nelson Nye, T.V. Olsen and Giles Tippette.

Most of the above-mentioned writers wrote paperbacks. Here are some earlier pulpsters and hardbackers who never made it to Finland:

Cleve F. Adams
Dwight V. Babcock
Leigh Brackett (see also this)
Charles G. Booth
Paul Cain
Lester Dent
Kenneth Fearing
Richard Hallas (unless one wants to count his Lassie, Come Home and a war novel, This Above All, as by Eric Knight)
Roy Huggins (I mean his three early crime novels)
Robert Reeves
Eric Taylor
Roger Torrey
Raoul Whitfield
P.J. Wolfson
Benjamin Appel
A.I. Bezzerides (just recently deceased)
Jay J. Dratler

There's of course the possibility that some of the pulpsters above may have had some stories translated, since the prominent Finnish pulp, Seikkailujen Maailma, didn't always print the writers' names on translated stories.

I may have and must have forgotten lots of authors, but I'll keep you posted if I come up with other names. I couldn't find a link to all the authors, sorry.

Flashing In The Gutters gone

I haven't seen anyone post about Flashing In The Gutters having gone and been shut down. Man, that's huge. I would've hoped he'd've at least saved the archives, there was lot of excellent stuff there.

Richard S. Prather talks about Shell Scott and channeling

Here's a lengthy interview with Richard S. Prather who penned many entertaining and funny PI spoofs with Shell Scott as his hero. The interview focuses sometimes on other things than Prather's career, but it's interesting to see that Prather is a devout in new age religions (or something like that, I'm not exactly sure what his beliefs should be called).

But the most interesting thing to see is that he's very critical of the Bush administration and talks in length about the 9/11 lies (or "lies"). The Shell Scott books are very anti-Red and anti-Left, so I would've thought that Prather is a right-winger himself. Clearly this is not the case. (Or then he shouldn't be discussed in these terms at all.)

Also don't mind the fact that the interviewer is Don Pendleton's widow. It only explain why she's so enthusiastic about Don Pendleton's Mack Bolans. Having read some ten of them I can tell you that Pendleton wasn't the one to ask questions about plotting and style.

Thanks to Steve Lewis for the tip! On top there's Shell Scott as drawn by Robert McGinnis.

Hard Case Crime update

I should really post more often this kind of news items. I'm lazy, though, and I suspect that those who follow this blog also follow those blogs that do post interesting pieces of crime fiction related news - such as Bill Crider's Pop Culture Magazine.

But as I've liked the Hard Case Crime line very much, I can't help but link to their latest list about coming books. It's impressive - two Robert Bloch crime novels as a Double edition! - and I'd like to start something similar here in Finland. (It's just that the Finnish crime fiction has been pretty lame and there's not so much to reprint even from the seventies and eighties.)

Here's also a list of Stark House coming releases. Elizabeth Sanxay Holding comes very highly recommended by me: nice touch on female noir. Dan J. Marlowe's The Vengeance Man is also very, very good.

I also want to congratulate James Reasoner for writing his 200th novel. Amazing!

PS. I seem to have left out that the Spunk magazine mentioned earlier will be one of those mags I edit and publish with my own money (like Isku), so the publication isn't much of a merit to me. But there are other writers, too, with very funny takes on the so called true stories of the sixties' and seventies' men mags. And there's also some vintage stuff: a story from a Finnish porn mag from 1974.

Spunky story

I'm again writing a new story about my private eye hero, Joe Novak. It's set in a PI conference in the early sixties (Novak is already thinking about getting married and settling down) and Novak is only an innocent bystander when a Texas private eye with cowboy boots comes to him and starts spinning his tall tale about a gig gone hugely wrong. It's meant to be a pastiche of the wild stories that sixties' men's adventure mags printed, but as yet I don't exactly know what will happen. Something wild about biker gangs and their blood-lusty cult leader and his horde of rapist baboons (that are results of a Nazi experiment conducted in Madagascar).

This will come out in Mälli: Tosi Miesten Toimintakertomuksia, which will translate as Spunk: True Men's Action Stories. (There's a spin in Finnish "toimintakertomuksia", but it won't translate.) The mag will come out in late Spring or early Summer.

The Texas private eye in the story is called Jack MacLane. His and Novak's mutual friend is mentioned in dialogue, his name is Jay Reasoner. You know who you are.

Brian Garfield

I'll mention briefly one other author for whom I have high respect and who has had a rather nonchalant response from Finnish publishers: Brian Garfield. He's had four different publishers (one being a paperback house in the mid-seventies) and none of the big houses that have translated his work has done more than two books. The latest ones seem to be two reprints from the early nineties.

The weirdest thing is that Garfield's best-selling Death Wish came from a big house (Karisto, which has always been second rank among the big houses in Finland) in 1975 and its sequel, Death Sentence (1975), came out in paperback from a totally different publisher in 1979, without any blurbs or other stuff pointing out that it was the sequel of the famous book whose film version had spawned a bunch of sequels of its own. (And, by the way, Garfield's own sequel is excellent and very reflective of the vigilante idiocy of the Charles Bronson films.)

Crime fiction careers in Finland

I was writing earlier about John Gardner's following in Finland, which has been sporadic at best. First, three Boysie Oakes books, then nothing, then some half dozen of his James Bonds. A one-off during the interval. At least, the publisher has remained the same.

I got to thinking about other examples. Two of the most frustrating ones have been Elmore Leonard and Lawrence Block, both very professional and widely-read authors working in the crime and mystery field. Leonard has had at least four different publishers, even though there's been some 15 translations in all. Some of the translations are wildly wrong about Leonard's style.

The first Leonard novel to come out in Finnish was, to me, one of his best, Mr. Majestyk. It came out as a cheap paperback in 1979 and it was followed by 52 Pickup from the same paperback house the next year. I think it's a small wonder none of his Western novels came out as paperbacks, even though there were lots of those by writers like Lewis B. Patten and Gordon Shirreffs.

Then the turn was shifted to Tammi who did some pretty bad translations in the late eighties - this was a phase when I was wondering what was so great about this Leonard (I'd been reading some magazines that had articles about hardboiled crime fiction that praised Leonard). Then came Book Studio, a smallish independent publisher, who did lots of Leonard's later efforts from Rum Punch to Out Of Sight. And then another big house steps in with Pagan Babies and Tishomingo Blues - I hear with good results regards to translation. These are the only Leonard translations in the 2000's. No one has ever touched his earlier books, save for the paperback house who did Mr. Majestyk and 52 Pickup.

Lawrence Block has been served more ill than Leonard. He's had only two publishers in Finland, first Vaasa Oy, newspaper publisher and printing house, who had several paperback lines from early sixties to the eighties. In the Manhattan series (which was actually of Swedish origin) Block's thriller Deadly Honeymoon (1967) came out in 1974. I think it's a small wonder that not even Block's paperback originals came to be translated, when there were at least two or three new titles every month from the Finnish paperback houses. I'd love to see a Tanner novel by Block to have come out from Vaasa Oy in their Manhattan series.

Then there was a long break, after which Book Studio made several of Block's Matt Scudder and Bernie Rhodenbarr novels, starting from the mid-eighties. Then Book Studio was bought by a bigger house, which ultimately caused the main editor and original publisher to leave the business and the Book Studio line was dropped with all of its crime fiction. Without Book Studio, Block has no Finnish publisher. (The Book Studio head honcho Kari Lindgren has a new publishing firm with him, but last I heard he had dropped the plans to publish more Block - I think it was meant to be a collection of Block's short stories. I'd hope someone grabbed Block's early novels, the ones that have been dug out by the good folks at Hard Case Crime.)

Alongside Deadly Honeymoon, there were half dozen short stories in several magazines in the 70's and 80's and an early porn paperback Block is reported having written as by Sheldon Lord (Kept, I think, is the title; Maksettu rakastaja in Finnish). I don't think Block ever received any money from the translation...

The similar thing has occurred also with Donald Westlake. And I bet there are dozens of other good, respectable authors who should've deserved better.

Cranky heirs

Some of you may remember that I've compiled a book of Finnish pulp fiction. It should come out soon, but there are now problems. I wanted to reprint a total unknown who had a rather good private eye story in the late fifties. I didn't even know if the name was a pseudonym or not, but the surname was rare. The phone numbers for the possible relatives were restricted, but I was able to find one with Google: a young guy, playing hockey in a junior team.

I wrote to the coach of the team and asked him to deliver the message. Then one day the father of the hockey player phoned me. He was the grandson of the said writer. He hadn't read any of his granddad's stories,which seemed pretty weird to me.

The phone numbers were restricted because his father's ex-wife (father had died a while back) made harrassment calls. It turned out that this son felt pretty much okay if there were a reprint, but there's an evil and greedybrother. The son I talked to said that he fears that his brother - with whom he doesn't communicate at all - gets ideas that there's lots of money in this. I said that there would be some sort of a payment for the reprint rights, but nothing fancy. The man said he'll talk with his sister - who obviously is a sane person - and will get back to me. (Nothing has happened so far, though.)

I asked around some people who have done similar collections of old stuff and found out that it's not actually a simple issue: heirs don't necessarily represent the rights of a writer. A writer may have donated his rights to charity or something like that.

I don't think, though, that was the case with a Finnish guy who penned two dozen short stories just to make some quick money and abandoned writing soon after that. I don't think he ever dreamed about getting his stuff back to print, even in fifty years' time. I hope that the thing resolves and I'll manage to make justice for a forgotten author.

Back to work

Will be busy for couple of days, but there are some things to blog about, so stay tuned.

Reading Fear Is The Key by Alistair MacLean. It's pretty good and the opening is catchy. If this were written by an American author, it would be even better - MacLean is strictly British in his choice of words and sentence structures. I seem to have first hardback edition by Collins from 1961 - am I a millionaire? Will post the cover scan later on. And the Finnish cover, too, by the great Eino Tepponen.

Ottilia's bunnies

I've been posting lots of Ottilia's and my drawings and comics in Pulpetti. Here are some ad hoc drawings about bunnies Ottilia made on receipts during a train trip not long ago. There's also a comic strip, but I don't know what's going on in there. It says "The End" in the end.

Evil Buddhists and lame superheroes

Couple of links I stumbled upon:

The Lamest Superheroes (I don't know much about superhero comics, but these dudes sure sound lame!)

The Attack of the Evil Buddhist Monks (it's about real history, not pulps of any kind, even though there were some Eastern monk heroes in pulps, most notably in Arthur J. Burks's The Great Mirror (1942/1952), in which the Buddhist monks fight the Martians)

Still on Gardner

I forgot to note that Understrike was published in Finnish in 1967 under the title Isku vyön alle. The publisher was Gummerus. Gardner hasn't had a good luck with Finnish publishers: out of his whole output, there has been only three Boysie Oakes books and some of his James Bonds published in Finnish. And a one-off novel called Flamingo from 1983. From a quick look, I'd say there was almost a fifteen-year gap between the third Oakes book, Amber Nine, up to Icebreaker which was translated as Tehtävä Suomessa, James Bond/Mission In Finland, James Bond in the early eighties. This is typical of Finnish publishers who don't care to follow anauthor's career, unless he/she is big or very respected. And John Gardner isn't either, even though he seems very capable (though I had my reservations about Understrike and his James Bonds).

Here's his bibliography.

John Gardner's Understrike

As I promised, I'd say something about Understrike, a comic spy thriller by the English writer John Gardner. He's nowadays best known as a writer of James Bond sequels (one of which didn't impress me a bit), but earlier he was known first as the creator of the Boysie Oakes series which are spoofs, and then complex and serious spy novels. It seems to me, based on an conversation on an e-mail list I'm on, that Gardner's reputation was pretty much marred by the Bond books and his new books - which I've been told are quite good - don't gather much readers.

Understrike, from 1965, is the second of the Boysie Oakes books ("Poju" in Finnish) and, to me, it's a bit dated. There's too much interplay with beautiful women and not enough action. When there's action, in the climax, there's not much of it, even though it's expertly written. The parody and spoof elements don't seem as funny as they could be - someone like Richard S. Prather did this sort of thing much better. It never seems very convincing to me how a self-pitying coward like Boysie Oakes gets to be a spy, and I think Stephen Frances, of the Hank Janson fame, did more convincing job with his John Gail thrillers he wrote after abandoning Janson in the mid-sixties. John Gail, besides being a self-pitying coward, is also a Leftist and a pacifist...

If this were not my job, I'd give up, but as I'll have to write an entry for Gardner for the upcoming reference book on thriller writers, I'll have to read some more of his work.

Right now, I'm reading Ice Station Zebra by Alistair MacLean. The opening has so many catches for the reader that it almost makes me want to say that MacLean is the master of the genre! ("I've seen the future of the thriller genre and his name is..." Well, not that.)

Victorian snakes?

A new article by a friend of mine, Jussi Parikka (and also another writer), about the cultural history of mobile games. May contain some tough-to-crack terms and words.

What happened?

Some of the bloggers I follow have been posting posts about what happened in 2006 (I especially envy James Reasoner when he writes having read 139 books last year!), but I don't seem quite up to it. I couldn't say what was the best book I read last year. Or the best film.

And I've got some work to do: I'm going on a sofa to read John Gardner's comic spy triller, Understrike. Comments later.

(I realize I promised I'd blog about Peter Jackson's Tolkien trilogy and the last episode of Six Feet Under, but I really don't know whether I'd have anything worthwhile to say, something others haven't already said before.)