Archive for the 'books' Category
Search for the King by Gore Vidal
It occurs to me that Gore Vidal is the only writer I’ve been reading from the late 40s/early 50s era who, as of this writing, is still alive. He was just 25 years old in 1950 when “Search for the King”, his fifth novel, was published. A sixth would appear later that same year. He’d [...]
Read More..>>Engaged to Murder by M.V. Heberden
Published in 1949. The edition of Engaged to Murder I picked up was a reprint from Jacques Barzun’s series of overlooked mystery novels. It’s a fairly classical dinner party murder puzzler, in which a groom-to-be is stabbed to death by one of a group of suspects present, all with a plausible motive. The book is [...]
Read More..>>Ross MacDonald- The Moving Target (1949)
This is the first of the Lew Archer books—-a detective series that eventually stretched to 18 novels and 3 short story collections. The series was popular during its run (from 1946, when the character first appeared in the story “Find the Woman,” to 1976, when the final installment “The Blue Hammer” was published) and inspired [...]
Read More..>>Frederic Brown- What Mad Universe
Originally published in 1949. Frederic Brown was a creature of the pulps, a master of several genres, with stories ready to go for whichever magazines was willing to buy them. When Keith Winton, the pulp editor hero of this novel, finds himself lost in an alternate universe where Earth is under attack by creatures from [...]
Read More..>>Best American Short Stories 1951 part one
Martha Foley, the editor of the Best American Short Stories series from 1941 to 1977, introduces the 1951 volume (whose stories were published in magazines in 1950) with a note on the nuclear anxiety hanging over the literature: “There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be [...]
Read More..>>The Girl on the Via Flaminia by Alfred Hayes
Published in 1949. This intriguing, though somewhat slight tale of Italy at the end of World War II was written by an American has a similar feel to many Italian post war neo-realist novels and films. Hayes actually participated in the movement, co-writing the films Paisan and the Bicycle Thief. In “The Girl on the [...]
Read More..>>The Melodramatists by Howard Nemerov
Howard Nemerov was a Pulitizer Prize winning Poet, but his fiction is less well-known. The Melodramatists was published in 1949, in-between the appearances of his first (The Image & the Law, 1947) and second (Guide to the Ruins, 1950) collections of poetry. He went on to write several books of short stories, but this was [...]
Read More..>>A Graveyard to Let by Carter Dickson
Published in 1949 Sir Henry Merrivale, the British detective known as H.M., made a fictional name for himself by solving complicated locked-room mysteries. In 1949 he took a trip to the United States (with a letter in hand for Harry Truman) and found himself competing with the New York police to crack a swimming pool [...]
Read More..>>The Second Confession by Rex Stout
By 1949, Rex Stout had written fifteen crime novels featuring the homebody gardener/detective Nero Wolfe, and the no-nonsense series was a reliable source of entertaining puzzles. The Wolfe books make good use of the body-mind split concept, with Wolfe—-an obese man who uses an elevator to go from floor to floor in his home—-pondering cases [...]
Read More..>>The Seetee Books by Jack Williamson
Originally published 1949-1950 In the waning days of the 1940s the Science Fiction book market was picking up steam and publishers had quite a trove of material to draw from. Pulp magazines such as Astounding and Amazing had long been printing wonderful stories of various lengths–some of them longer works that were serialized over multiple [...]
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