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 been producing a book a year since his debut, “Williwaw”, in 1946, and had run afoul of certain quarters of the literary world with his 1948 novel “The City & the Pillar”, which featured a violent homosexual relationship. Vidal claims he was blackballed by the New York Times, which refused to run reviews of his books in the daily paper. His books were still reviewed in the Sunday Book Review section. I’m not sure if there was a great significance in this distinction.
Vidal is best remembered today for his historical novels, particularly his American History cycle. This is an early shot at the genre, focusing on an episode in the life of Richard the Lionheart. Vidal admits that he followed legend rather than history. His hero, Blondel the troubadour, is returning with King Richard from the crusades, when the King is taken prisoner by Duke Leopold of Austria. Blondel eludes capture and spends most of the book devising ways to a free Richard, passing himself off as various people.
The world here is enchanted and heroic. The characters are attacked by a dragon (actually a large snake) and by werewolves (likely just wolves.) There is some philosophical talk of the role of god in the medieval life and some wonderfully poetic descriptive passages. Court intrigue happens as well, but mostly off stage, as Blondel picks up rumors of the machinations of the Holy Roman Emperor and Richard’s brother John, who uses the imprisonment as an opportunity to take the crown.
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 set in Argentina just after WWII, but nearly every character is European or American, with the local population only showing up in the form of (not terribly effective) policemen and servants. Rick Vanner, a guest at the party, has a knack for crime solving and an interest in clearing the main suspect, his friend, who is discovered standing over the dead body with a dagger in his hand. There is some tasty political intrigue, with whiffs of Nazi collaboration, and a satisfying resolution.
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 two movies starring Paul Newman, who had Archer’s name changed to Harper for some superstitious voodoo attachment to the letter H. The series seemingly did not benefit from the pulp revival of the 90s, perhaps because the books are not as shocking or as seemingly amphetamine fueled as some of the other 40s and 50s crime fiction unearthed by the Black Lizard imprint (by writers such as David Goodis and Jim Thompson.) However, there are now Black Lizard Quality Paperback editions available for most of the series.
I first heard of Ross MacDonald (pseudonym of Kenneth Millar) when reading either an essay or interview with Joan Didion, who praised the Archer books. I can see why Didion responded to the writing—-its moody evocation of the Southern California desert is quite similar to what can be found in her early work.
MacDonald was an heir to Raymond Chandler’s hardboiled, simile-heavy style, though his characters feel more organic and believable, though “The Moving Target” at times feels cluttered with characters—-so many low-lives, bookies, failed actresses and religious charlatans blew through I felt like I’d picked up a James Ellroy book by mistake.
The case concerns a kidnapped millionaire of questionable morality. Strike breaking and voyeurism are among his vices. His damaged family doesn’t seem as concerned as they should be, and go through the expected motions, moving large sums of money around without care. We get glimpses of Archer’s moral code, though not a complete look at the character.
A fine start to the series, which would surely have propelled me on to the second book “The Drowning Pool” had I not already read it a few years ago.
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 Arcturus, his first thought is to crank out a few adventure stories and sell them for quick cash. Of course attempting to sell his stories to a slightly different version of himself leads to trouble…
This is a fun satire of science fiction writers and fandom. Winton is the editor of “Surprising Stories” a sci-fi pulp in the mirror universe is an Adventure magazine, since SF conventions like Bug Eyed Monsters and space women in skimpy outfits are a fact of daily life. When he tries to find his New York City apartment he is lost in a nightly Mist-Out–a complete blackening of the city to mask it from Arcturan attacks. Though no one can see more than three inches in any direction, gangs roam the streets, arms locked tapping canes against concrete.
There are quirky details here. Winton tries to buy something with a 1928 quarter and a shopkeeper tells him the coin is worth a lot of money. But when he then produces a 1935 coin the shopkeeper calls him an Arcturan spy and starts shooting at him.
Very fun, though readers looking for hard SF may be disappointed–the exploited moon men and cultured Venusians date this quite a bit.
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 blown up?” She quotes at length from Faulkner’s Nobel speech about rediscovering “the old verities and truths of the heart,” positing that some writers are trying to do that now, and that a modernism-damaged literary world finds it “corny.”
1. Flight Through the Dark by Roger Angell
This first story is appropriately placed after the introduction as its main character, a traveling bureaucrat named Halleck, suffers from anxiety and dread stemming partly from recent and current world events–WWII, the new war in Korea, a photograph from Hiroshima–while flying alone. A visit to his less lucky-in-life sister increases his gloom. At the end he melts back into his comfortable life.
Rating: 4.2 of 10
2. Inland, Western Sea by Nathan Asch
A group of strangers on the same bus touch each others’ lives briefly in this fairly well-executed piece.
Rating: 5.5 of 10
3. A Fugitive From the Mind by Peggy Bennett
I liked this morbid tale of accidental death and guilt. It doesn’t feel dated in the least and contains some fine writing: “He was acquainted with the gaudy comic books. Thus, when he saw crudely pictured on coarse paper the Nazi doctor killing innocents by slowly tightening clamps on their heads, testing the scientific theory that the skull can be decreased by 10 percent before it cracks, Ezzie, farm boy alone, felt the fine frenzy of conquests, of wars and guerrilla stabbings, appeal in all its glamour to his ego.”
Rating: 7.4 of 10
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 Via Flamina” an American serviceman, a “conqueror” named Robert is set up with a young Italian woman named Lisa. Lisa is prideful and does not trust Americans. She believes that Robert will leave her behind when he goes back to the U.S. and is using her much as he would a prostitute–which is exactly what she is mistaken for by the police.
Ultimately Hayes debt to Hemingway is too much to pay back satisfactorily.
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 his only novel. Like his poetry the book is philosophical and witty–Nemerov once described his own poems as being “bad jokes.” A single setting, the home of the Boyne family, is used to stage battles between religion and secularism, chastity and promiscuity, insanity and rationality. The story is set in 1940-41, with the Second World War (which America had yet to enter) providing a conversational and metaphorical backdrop to the action. (An early version of the still-popular Neville Chamberlain metaphor: “They were both offering up Leonora on the altars of an armed truce: rather, he thought, like Munich, except that in Leona one did not deal with a helpless Czechoslovakia.”)
As the novel opens the Boynes, a Boston clan whose wealth and coldness is witheringly viewed through the eyes of daughter Claire, a Protestant girl flirting with Catholicism: “When [Claire's] mother wept, as she did now, all the jewels on her fingers and at her throat winked in sparkling connivance as at a joke which, they seemed to say, you too might appreciate, were you as detached as a stone.”
The Boyne family begins to crack apart when son Roger announces his intention to divorce his wife Leonora and then runs off to Canada to join the military. Mr. Boyne has a mental collapse—he will not leave his bathtub—and is taken by his wife to an institution, where she is often confused by the doctors for a patient. Claire becomes pious and eventually transforms the family home into a reform facility for prostitutes. The other daughter, Susan, takes up with a middle aged Jewish psychoanalyst, Dr. Einman, a refugee from Auschwitz who sleeps with all of his female patients. She tries to keep her affair a secret from her family only to end up as the victim of blackmail by the butler.
The novel’s philosophical core is the conflict between Susan’s free spirit and Claire’s cautious devotion. A key passage: “Much in the world frightened Claire, but most of all the contemplation of the number of wicked things people might do and still not merely live on, but preserve as well their social position… Susan seemed to understand so well about time and its modifying effect on action—how time was a desert, in which the lineaments of decisive acts crumbled or got covered, lost, in sand—and seemed ready to accept this, even take it for granted: a concession Claire could not by any means make. Sometimes she felt that one’s potential for disaster grew with one…and when she looked into the future she saw but two alternatives: a strict negative volition, a will-not-to-do, or swift catastrophe, not killing at once leaving her to the quiet, often offensively humorous depredations of time, while there grew up a new, cruel generation that would not understand.”
Claire’s attempt at do-gooding backfires when the prostitutes take over, turning the Boyne residence into a cathouse. While I appreciate the absurd twists, I would have preferred the book to court humor a bit more aggressively, as even the most farcical situations here seem pretexts to get priests and whores into the same room with psychoanalysts so that long-winded discussions of forgiveness and morality can occur. Even the tragic conclusion seems less an emotional inevitability than an illustration of a philosophical point. Still, the writing is excellent and massively quotable.
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 vanishing. No, the pool itself has not disappeared but a man (H.M.’s old pal Frederick Manning) has jumped into it and left nothing of himself behind except a floating hat. The plot diverts from the main mystery to show us H.M. toying with an Irish cop in the subway and knocking a baseball out of ball field and into a cemetery. The puzzle becomes a bit more serious when the vanished man turns up stabbed nearly to death and his dead-for-decades wife reappears, looking quite unlike a corpse.
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 mentally at home while his younger assistant Archie Goodwin performs the legwork and all necessary seductions. The Second Confession, however, breaks from form by sending Wolfe out his office—-for awhile at least.
Hired by the owner of a mining company to prove that the man his daughter is dating is a Communist, Wolfe is accidentally drawn into the sphere of Arnold Zeck, an underworld kingpin (and the only man Wolfe fears.) Zeck’s idea of sending a message is having one his goons machine gun $40,000 worth of damage into the detective’s orchid garden. Wolfe, however, does not retreat. He is bound by honor not to drop a case until it is solved. But when the subject of his investigation, the boyfriend/potential Communist is found dead and an associate of Wolfe’s client makes a dubious confession to a hit-and-run, Wolfe finds himself fired by the mining magnate only to be hired by the shadowy Zeck to look into the death.
The case takes Wolfe and Archie into the upper reaches of the American Communist Party, as Wolfe tries to smoke out information by writing and sending to a newspaper a fake “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” style document that is supposedly the minutes of a meeting of Communists plotting to influence the 1948 Presidential Election.
Though the Communists in the book are portrayed negatively, Rex Stout was himself the target of J. Edgar Hoover’s anti-communist crusade, earning himself a thick file that the FBI attempted to keep sealed even a dozen years after the author’s death.
The Second Confession is appropriately lean and fast-paced. It is quite satisfying, though the storyline with the underworld overlord Zeck are clearly a set-up for a coming book, 1950′s In the Best Families.
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 issues. Most early SF books were reprints of these stories, targeted at a larger audience that had missed them the first time around. Anthologizers however, quickly strip-mined the field’s greatest hits. A massive (1000+ page) anthology called Adventures in Time & Space reprinted nearly all the short works that comprise the canon of the so-called Golden Age of SF. The editors were racing against several competing anthologies in the works and sent out their offers first to writers such as Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke, snagging rights to their signature work. Anthologies continued to appear after this, as well as short story collections by individual authors, but what the book buying public really wanted were novels. Longer, serialized works of around 100-150 pages were polished off and fattened up. Sometimes a 20 or 30 page novelette would be “fixed-up”–expanded or padded out to fit the length requirements of the paperback novel market.
Another method was to take a series of interlinking magazine stories, stick them into a book (sometimes with newly written segue material,) and call them a novel. The most successful example of this is probably Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. Jack Williamson’s Seetee Ship is not nearly as famous. It comprises several short stories about an anti-matter stuff called Seetee that were published throughout the 40s. They were transformed into a novel in 1951, after Williamson had written another book-length work on the subject called Seetee Shock. (The two works were reprinted in one volume by Jove in 1979.)
Williamson wrote the Seetee books under the pseudonym Will Stewart. Some massively productive authors used several noms-de-plume so that pulp magazine readers didn’t get sick of seeing their names in the table of contents month after month. Some authors used these other identities to publish stories that veered away from the type of writing they’d branded under their real (or primary) names. An SF writer might publish Fantasy stories or humorous pieces under another name so as not to confuse or disappoint his fans. The Seetee stories though are Hard SF and not wildly different from the stuff Jack Williamson published under his own name. Since his famous novel The Humanoids was written the same year (1949) as Seetee Shock, I imagine that over-production was the reason for the deployment of the Will Stewart name.
Williamson was older than many of the other Golden Age writers–over 40 when Seetee Shock was published–who were in some cases barely out of their teens when they did the writing they are remembered for. He’d been writing Space Operas before the dominant force of the Golden Age, John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding, veered the entire field away from ray gun and bug-eyed monster tales and toward what became known as Hard SF–stories in which the future science utilized could be extrapolated from some plausible scientific theory. Authors of Hard SF were often more concerned with explaining a concept or playing with it than with draping an enjoyable or coherent plot structure around it. In magazine letters sections readers would rarely comment of the aesthetics of a story but rather would nitpick the science the author used. Williamson, however, was a talented storyteller and his tales are still enjoyable, even if the science in some of them is now outdated or implausible.
Seetee Ship concerns space mining, resource wars, and the struggle of independent contractors against the corporate colossus in the late 22nd century. The asteroid belt has been nearly mined out of useful minerals by the corporations of the nearby planets (the Earth, Mars, Jupiter) and the future of industry depends upon finding a new source of energy. Some believe that Seetee, a highly unstable anti-matter, is that source, but no safe way has yet been found to work with it. When Seetee comes into contact with actual matter it causes a massive radioactive explosion. This means that it is impossible to study closely or manipulate physically. This also makes it of interest to the bomb makers of the planets’ militaries.
Rich Drake, part of a clan of rock rats–unaffiliated miners often enslaved or imprisoned as “traitors” by corporations–is hired by the ominous Interplanet (a space age Dutch East India trading company) to find a way to work with Seetee. He fails. His father conducts independent research on his own asteroid called Freedonia (the same name as Groucho Marx’s absurdist realm in Duck Soup.) Upon the shards of a Seetee asteroid, the ruins of a civilization are found. Were they built by men or by Seetee life forms?
Such is the peril of the short story fix-up that Rich, hero the first half of the book, very nearly disappears in the second half. His rival Paul Anders, an Interplanet agent, is lured by a series of unlikely communications to a floating Seetee Ship. The ship contains the elusive “bedplate” that the Drakes and Interplanet have been trying to build–a fusion of Seetee and terrene matter that makes working with the hazardous space material possible. It turns out that the Seetee ship is hundreds of billions of years old, a warship from a long extinct race of Seetee beings. Contact with normal matter has propelled the ship backwards in time. Anders sees in the relics of this dead civilization the folly of using Seetee matter to create weapons, for it can only lead humanity to a similar extinction.
But since the bed plates are on the Seetee ship, the need to for humans to invent them is eliminated. They can be reverse engineered from the Seetee beings’ technology.
The sequel Seetee Shock opens with a bit of a shock. Most of the characters from the previous book are lying unconscious and dying of radiation exposure (Seetee Shock) upon the Freedonia asteroid, the victims of a saboteur who steals Seetee bombs in order to begin an interplanetary war. Nick Jenkins, a worker who joined the Drakes’ company after they began using the Seetee bedplates, is the only survivor–but he is also exposed to lethal levels of radiation.
With only about a week left to live he begins a desperate quest to repair the machinery on Freedonia and finish building a Seetee generator which will finally bring forth the Fifth Freedom–free energy which can be wirelessly tapped into. Since the Fifth Freedom would bankrupt energy producing firms such as Interplanet, and destroy their rule of the solar system, Jenkins runs into a lot of resistance. First from his famous uncle, Martin Brand, who wrote the original Fifth Freedom manifesto, but who is now a corrupt corporate schemer.
Seetee Shock gives us quite a bit of background about Williamson’s interesting future history though the ending is a bit rushed, with people running in and out of the triumphant and cured Jenkins’ hospital room telling him about evolutionary leaps and the social and industrial upheavals his Fifth Freedom is causing.
The Seetee saga promises us that our current state of affairs–wars over dwindling energy reserves,
corporate quashing of innovations or reforms that will threaten profits–will continue on far into the future.