Sunday Sentence: The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.

Spade lighted his cigarette and laughed his mouth empty of smoke.

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

Soup and Salad: Murakami stickers, PEN shortlist, Joe Sacco's The Great War goes underground, the Consequence of war, a new Sun also rises, GIFing The Scarlet Letter, hugging John Green, staging The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, walking Hammett's San Francisco, win Press 53 books for life(!!)

On today's menu:

1.  The Guardian is rightly critical of the "ludicrous marketing campaign" for the new Haruki Murakami novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage: first editions of the novel will include a special sheet of stickers designed by five Japanese illustrators.  This is obviously a move designed to stir the juices of eBay collectors rather than sticker-obsessed youngsters who won't have a clue as to what's going on in Murakami's 400-page novel.  Still, you have to admit those stickers are pretty cool-looking.

2.  My, my, my....this year's shortlist for the PEN Literary Awards is a tasty one.  Though I've only read one of the books on the list, Victoria Wilson's excellent biography of Barbara Stanwyck, many of the others are perched near the top of my To-Be-Read stack: Cowboys and East Indians by Nina McConigley (which I purchased directly from the publisher, Five Chapters), A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra, Brief Encounters With the Enemy by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, Godforsaken Idaho by Shawn Vestal (which has been TBR'ed for way too damn long), Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls by David Sedaris, American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell by Deborah Solomon, and The Emerald Mile by Kevin Fedarko.   Congratulations to all the nominees--and well done, PEN!

3.  Another book which has been in my To-Be-Read stack for too damn long (TBR4TDL, my ongoing lament, is going to be the next vanity plate for my vehicle) is Joe Sacco's The Great War, the 24-foot-long graphic novel about the Battle of the Somme.  David Ulin in the L.A. Times reports that a single-panel from The Great War has become a mural in the Montparnasse station of the Paris Metro, stretching 500 feet--almost double the length of the Bayeux Tapestry, which was one of the inspirations behind The Great War, Sacco says.  For those not up on their World War I history, the Battle of the Somme saw more than 20,000 British troops and 10,000 Germans killed on a single day.  Did you catch that?  A single day.  In his book and especially in the 500-foot mural in the Paris subway, Sacco notes, “I wanted to give an idea of the size of the massacre, an idea of the losses and the human suffering.”


4.  Speaking of war, if you haven't subscribed to Consequence, then you're missing out on some first-rate war literature.  (Full disclosure: I had a story published in a previous issue.)  To get a feel for what you might find in the annual journal's pages, let's eavesdrop on this interview with editor Catherine Parnell:

George Kovach founded the magazine in 2009, and he asked me to come on board in the spring of 2010.  We’re a team, co-conspirators, so to speak, working to expose the myths, sentimentality and knee-jerk patriotism associated with the wide spectrum of violence and combat—to not only enrich reality, but to effect change.  CONSEQUENCE’s subject is war and how it affects us at every level of society, in every country in the world.  Our mission statement—to focus on the culture and consequences of war—lends itself to an eyes-wide-open approach.  Initially, we published work that was anti-war, not hippie peacenik, but informed and subjective reflections on battle.  But we’ve grown with every issue, not just in page count, but in terms of considered outrage and range.  Diversity—gender, faith, ethnicity, point of view—is critical to our mission.  We tackle these issues on a national and international scale....Sadly, there’s a wealth of war material available to writers from the battlefields of ancient Greece (Margaret Luongo’s “History of Art”) to the bases in Afghanistan (Tony Schwalm’s “Combat Anthropology”).  As Bob Shacochis (author of The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, excerpted in Volume 4) said at our panel discussion in April of 2014, “We want peace and yes, we are willing to kill for it.”  I’m not naïve; I understand the algorithm at work, but on a personal level I weep when I read some of our submissions.

5.  Think you know the first line of The Sun Also Rises?  Guess again.  The New York Times reports Hemingway's earlier draft of the novel did not start with “Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton.”


6.  Need a good literary laugh?  (Or, at the very least, a mildly-amused "hmf!")  Check out this mash-up of GIFs and classic literature--like this one for The Scarlet Letter--courtesy of the bemused folks at Ploughshares.


7.  What happens when an excited fan impulsively hugs an author?  You can read about one woman's embarrassing embrace at Reddit's TIFU (Today, I Fucked Up):

I went to see The Book of Mormon Saturday night in Indianapolis. At intermission, I hit the loo, got another beer (a mistake, it seems), and met up with my husband to head back to our seats. Spotted John Green ahead of me. Told my husband who he was and SPRINTED toward him. Realized midway that I didn't really have a plan. What was I going to say when I got there? By the time I formed the thought, it was too late and I was tipsy and excited, so I did the first thing that came to my mind. I said, "I'm sorry, but I have to do this." And hugged him. Him: "That...was very nice of you." Me: "No, that was very nice of YOU." Then I ran away before he had a chance to call security on me.

There's more to the story, including a generous response from John "The Fault In Our Stars" Green himself (posting as thesoundandthefury), so be sure to scroll all the way through the comments.

8.  Word has reached Quivering Pen Headquarters that a Seattle repertory theater is staging a five-hour production of Michael Chabon's 636-page novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.  (*swoon*   *thunk*)  Even though Brendan Kiley, writing in The Stranger, gave it a mixed review ("It's a wild story that maintains a cliff-hanging tension, but it doesn't contain any deeply transcendent moments.  As a golem, it's a little more clay than spirit."), I would still pay good money to see it.  If only I had spare change, as well as spare time.  As Kiley writes: "In a recent fit of ambition, Book-It Repertory Theatre decided to adapt this mammoth story for the stage. (The adapter, Jeff Schwager, says Chabon was a good sport about the project—the theater pitched the idea, Chabon said okay and was totally hands-off throughout the process.)  The result is a five-hour saga with 18 actors that maintains the page-turning action of the original and energy that only occasionally flags (mostly in the third of its four acts)."

9.  In The New York Times' travel section, Dan Saltzstein takes us on a tour of Dashiell Hammett's San Francisco:

Perhaps no spot better celebrates the San Francisco-noir association better than a speakeasy-style bar secreted within another speakeasy-style bar — and in the Tenderloin no less. Heading down Jones Street toward O’Farrell, I passed a pane of frosted glass labeled the Wilson and Wilson Private Detective Agency. With a password, I gained entry to Bourbon and Branch, a dimly lit and bustling cocktail bar. After a quick right through a fake wall, I headed into Wilson and Wilson, a love letter to noir, Prohibition-era drinking and, as the name indicates, the detective trade.

10.  Press 53 is going all Willy Wonka on us.  Pre-order Wendy J. Fox's debut collection of short stories, The Seven Stages of Anger, and inside you might find a lucky Orange Ticket "worth FREE Press 53 books for the life of the ticket holder, beginning with the first book published after The Seven Stages of Anger and Other Stories.  One copy (signed when available) of every book published by Press 53 (hardcovers and limited editions not included) will be automatically shipped free of charge to the holder of the Press 53 Orange Ticket."  See, those Press 53 marketing gurus are pretty smart: "for the life of the ticket holder."  If I got the Orange Ticket, I'd probably drop dead of a heart attack right on the spot.  But seriously, folks....I think Fox's collection is worth a pre-order.  Check out this praise from Carol Guess, author of Doll Studies: Forensics: “What happens when a still life speaks?  Wendy J. Fox invites us to eavesdrop.  These beautiful, lyrical stories describe ordinary lives: speckled eggshells, creeping vines.  Here’s the threat of fire out east and endless rain when the map meets Seattle.  Here are characters so real you know them already.  They’ve misplaced your keys and borrowed your car.”

Good Medicine: A Tribute to Elmore Leonard

Car bombs exploded in Baghdad neighborhoods that summer like synchronized cannons.  Bodies incinerated.  Engine parts whizzed through the air like hot boomerangs.  Smoke, fire.  Death, destruction, chaos.

Meanwhile, I sat in my trailer on Camp Victory, a U.S. Forward Operating Base, two miles away–safe, cool, happy.  I was happy because I lay on my bed, The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard propped on my chest, my imaginative Reader mind somewhere far, far away, sneaking through Arizona deserts, hiding in rimrock, squinting down along my rifle barrel, placing the notch of the gunsight on the chests of no-good bastards who deserved to die.

Off the page, in the real world, the heat seared my tin-sided trailer and Blackhawk helicopters flew overhead, blades slicing the air as they ferried medical teams to the site of another attack.  I needed to escape from the sound of those Blackhawks—the dopplering chop which meant more soldiers had lost their lives (or, at the very least, an arm or leg).  I needed fiction to relieve me from reality.

I was deployed to Baghdad with the 3rd Infantry Division in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom and I was supposed to be helping bring Western democracy to an Islamic nation reluctant to accept it.  I was a soldier, I carried a rifle, I’d been trained to be a killing machine.

Trouble was, I hadn’t killed anyone.  I was a paper-pusher in division headquarters, working in the public affairs office and writing press releases meant to reassure the rest of the world that, yes, we were kicking terrorism’s ass over there in Iraq.  In truth, we were barely making a dent against the daily barrage of improvised explosive devices, rocket-propelled grenades and sniper bullets.  If I ever stopped to look at the long-range big picture, I was filled with frustration to the point of despair.

When I got off work, I hurried back to my trailer (my “hooch” in military parlance) where I’d strip out of my uniform and sit on my bed in shorts and T-shirt with Elmore Leonard’s stories open in front of me.  For the space of a couple hours, I could be a gunslinger in Baghdad, serving justice with hot bullets and bringing down bad guys left and right.

This was my introduction to Leonard’s writing—somehow, I’d missed reading his crime novels (Get Shorty, Mr. Majestyk, Out of Sight, etc.)—and I immediately saw why so many others thought he was Prince of the Page.  His writing popped and sizzled.  As Stephen King wrote in the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly, he wrote "stories that contained zero bullshit, because he was a zero bullshit kind of guy."  Put another way, Elmore Leonard's fiction is as lean and tasty as a filet mignon.

Leonard sure knew how to kick-start a story, too.  Check out this complete list of first lines from his novels.

Once I opened Leonard's collection of stories which first appeared in pulp periodicals like Argosy, Zane Grey's Western Magazine, and Gunsmoke, it was like I'd discovered the finest of literary drugs.  Capsules full of no-bullshit granules.  I was entranced and easily transported to the Old West, away from the woes of Operation Iraqi Freedom.  Sure there was violence on these pages, too.  But it was different in Leonard’s hands.  It was cool as a drink from a mountain stream.  Take, for instance, these opening paragraphs from the short story “The Boy Who Smiled”:

      When Mickey Segundo was fourteen, he tracked a man almost two hundred miles–from the Jicarilla Subagency down into the malpais.
      He caught up with him at a water hole in late afternoon and stayed behind a rock outcropping watching the man drink.  Mickey Segundo had not tasted water in three days, but he sat patiently behind the cover while the man quenched his thirst, watching him relax and make himself comfortable as the hot lava country cooled with the approach of evening.
      Finally Mickey Segundo stirred.  He broke open the .50-caliber Gallagher and inserted the paper cartridge and the cap.  Then he eased the carbine between a niche in the rocks, sighting on the back of the man’s head.  He called in a low voice, “Tony Choddi . . .” and as the face with the wide-open eyes came around, he fired casually.
      He lay on his stomach and slowly drank the water he needed, filling his canteen and the one that had belonged to Tony Choddi.  Then he took his hunting knife and sawed both of the man’s ears off, close to the head.  These he put into his saddle pouch, leaving the rest for the buzzards.

When I heard Tuesday that Leonard, the “Dickens of Detroit,” had passed away after earlier suffering a stroke, my mind went back to Baghdad.  If it’s possible to be nostalgic for a war zone, then EL’s death triggered some golden memories for me.

I saw myself in my tin-walled trailer, air-conditioner rattling in one corner of the room, dripping condensation tears.  I saw the bed, the wall locker, the mounds of junk food from care packages, the bookshelves I’d built one day after arriving at Camp Victory.  And on those bookshelves, I saw the spine of The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard.  I saw myself reach forward, pluck it out, and turn to a page at random.

At midmorning six riders came down out of the cavernous pine shadows, down the slope swept yellow with arrowroot blossoms, down through the scattered aspen at the north end of the meadow, then across the meadow and into the yard of the one-story adobe house.

For nearly a month of my time in Iraq, I was lost in the Arizona arroyos, felt the Winchester in my hand as I sneaked through the canyons tracking Apaches, and tasted the swirling dust as I reined my horse sharply when the whine of a bullet ricocheted off a boulder.  In my journal, I wrote, “Elmore Leonard is good medicine.”

Indeed.  That year, I needed good medicine—especially of the literary, imaginative kind—to counteract all the bad shit going down outside the concertina wire of our camp: the bombs, the blasts, the bloodletting.

Thank you, Mr. Leonard, for writing my escape route.


A version of this essay first appeared at Book Riot.

Friday Freebie: Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives, edited by Sarah Weinman

Congratulations to Mike Hooker, Christine LaRue, and Drew Broussard, winners of last week's Friday Freebie contest: Tumbledown by Robert Boswell.

This week's book giveaway is the exciting new short-story anthology Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives, edited by Sarah Weinman.  And when I say "exciting," I mean the whole package is thrilling--from the pulpy cover art right down to the selection of female thriller writers (many of whom will be new to most readers).  As I wrote earlier here at The Quivering Pen,

Weinman knows crime fiction inside and out and has written on the subject for the Los Angeles Times and The Barnes and Noble Review (among others), so I totally trust her judgment when it comes to literature about the darker side of domesticity.  In her introduction to Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives, she talks about the early female pioneers of crime fiction: "Their books color outside the lines, blur between categories, and give readers a glimpse of the darkest impulses that pervade every part of contemporary society.  Especially those impulses that begin in the home."  Contemporary female writers particularly intrigue the editor--authors like Gillian Flynn, Tana French and Attica Locke who "take a scalpel to contemporary society and slice away until its dark essence reveals itself: the ways in which women continue to be victimized, their misfortunes downplayed by men (and women) who don't believe them, and how they eventually overcome."  For this anthology, Weinman stretches farther back to a goldener age of suspense fiction to bring us short stories by Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson, Dorothy B. Hughes, Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, Margaret Millar and several others to paint a portrait of troubled domesticity in mid-century America.

Here's a small sample of what you'll find in this wicked-good collection--the opening lines to "Sugar and Spice" by Vera Caspary (whose best-known work is probably the 1943 novel Laura):

I have never known a murderer, a murder victim, nor anyone involved in a murder case.  I admit that I am a snob, but to my mind crime is sordid and inevitably associated with gangsters, frustrated choir singers in dusty suburban towns, and starving old ladies supposed to have hidden vast fortunes in the bedsprings.  I once remarked to a friend that people of our sort were not in the homicide set, and three weeks later heard that her brother-in-law had been arrested as a suspect in the shooting of his rich uncle.  It was proved, however, that this was a hunting accident and the brother-in-law exonerated.  But it gave me quite a jolt.

If you'd like a chance at winning a copy of Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives, simply email your name and mailing address to

thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line.  One entry per person, please.  Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on Aug. 29, at which time I'll draw the winning name.  I'll announce the lucky reader on Aug. 30.  If you'd like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week newsletter, simply add the words "Sign me up for the newsletter" in the body of your email.  Your email address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third party (except in those instances where the publisher requires a mailing address for sending Friday Freebie winners copies of the book).

Want to double your odds of winning?  Get an extra entry in the contest by posting a link to this webpage on your blog, your Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter.  Once you've done any of those things, send me an additional e-mail saying "I've shared" and I'll put your name in the hat twice.

Front Porch Books: May 2013 edition

Front Porch Books is a monthly tally of books--mainly advance review copies (aka "uncorrected proofs" and "galleys")--I've received from publishers, but also sprinkled with packages from Book Mooch, Amazon and other sources.  Because my dear friends, Mr. FedEx and Mrs. UPS, leave them with a doorbell-and-dash method of delivery, I call them my Front Porch Books.  In this digital age, ARCs are also beamed to the doorstep of my Kindle via NetGalley and Edelweiss.  Note: most of these books won't be released for another 2-6 months; I'm just here to pique your interest and stock your wish lists. Cover art and opening lines may change before the book is finally released.

Guests on Earth by Lee Smith (Algonquin Books):  As I mentioned before, 2013 is shaping up to be the Year of Zelda.  While I'm looking forward to reading Erika Robuck's Call Me Zelda and Therese Anne Fowler's Z, Lee Smith's new novel about Mrs. Fitzgerald also intrigues.  I'm a long-standing member of the Lee Smith Fan Club and a quick skim through the early pages in Guests on Earth reminds me that few writers are her equal in creating a vivid world simply through dialect and narrative rhythm.  As in so many recent novels about historical figures (especially artists), Smith comes at her subject obliquely through the eyes of her own fictional creation.  Here's the Jacket Copy to explain more:

Evalina Toussaint, the orphaned child of an exotic dancer in New Orleans, is just thirteen when she is admitted to Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. The year is 1936, and the mental hospital is under the direction of the celebrated psychiatrist Robert S. Carroll. His innovative program of treatment for mental and nervous disorders and addictions is based on exercise, diet, art, and occupational therapies—and experimental shock therapy.  Evalina finds herself in the company of some notable fellow patients, including Zelda Fitzgerald, estranged wife of F. Scott, who takes the young piano prodigy under her wing. Evalina becomes the accompanist for the musical programs at the hospital. This provides privileged insight into the events that transpire over the next twelve years, culminating in a tragic fire—its mystery unsolved to this day—that killed nine women in a locked ward, Zelda among them. At all costs, Evalina listens, observes, remembers—and tells us everything.

The title, by the way, comes from a letter F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to his daughter Scottie on December 15, 1940:  "The insane are always mere guests on earth, eternal strangers carrying around broken decalogues that they cannot read."

The Exiles by Allison Lynn (New Harvest):  I like novels in which authors begin by thrusting their characters into difficult, seemingly impossible situations almost from the first page.  The Jacket Copy for The Exiles shows how Allison Lynn jeopardizes her creations:

A couple escaping the over-the-top lifestyle of Manhattan's Upper East Side move to comparably quaint Newport, Rhode Island, only to be confronted by truths they tried to leave behind. Nate, a midlevel Wall Streeter, and his partner Emily are effectively evicted from New York City when they can no longer afford their cramped apartment on the Upper East Side. An out presents itself when Nate's offered a job in Newport—complete with a bucolic, small-scale, and seemingly affordable new house. They're eager to start fresh, yet within minutes of arriving in Rhode Island, their car and belongings are stolen, and they're left with nothing but the keys to an empty house and a bawling 10-month-old son. Over the three-day weekend that follows, as Emily and Nate watch their meager pile of cash dwindle and tension increase, the secrets they kept from each other in the city emerge—and threaten to destroy their hope for a future. A story about economic precariousness, family history, tainted gene pools, art theft, architecture, and the mad grab for the American Dream, The Exiles bravely explores the weights of our pasts—and whether or not it's possible to start over.

I like the repeated cry of "promise" in the Opening Lines:

It's 5:10 p.m. and the bay is a hazy blue, the sky a hint of orange, the land full of promise, promise, promise. Cars creep across the bridge as if pulled by the force of that promise itself. Look, sailboats! Hark, a resort hotel. Ho there, bloated gulls line up along the bridge's side rails and point their beaks toward the traffic, guiding the way. In three days the high season will be over and Newport's ice cream vendors, trinket traders, and yachtsmen will crawl deep into their off-season dens to hibernate. Off-season: the beach's sand will turn gray and flat overnight; the historic mansions will offer tours only two days a week; boats will be pulled from the water.

Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense by Sarah Weinman (Penguin Books):  Let me start by saying how much I love the cover design for this anthology of classic mystery stories.  Evocative of pulp fiction covers in their heyday, Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives gives us a femme fatale* caught in the beam of a flashlight, startled eyes popping out of her head, hand up, fingers curled, claws out.  This is a cover that will reach out and grab bookstore browsers.  Once past the packaging, however, they'll find stories which will sink even deeper claws into their attention.  Editor Sarah Weinman assembles a line-up of authors whose names might not be heard in even the most literate of households these days.  Weinman knows crime fiction inside and out and has written on the subject for the Los Angeles Times and The Barnes and Noble Review (among others), so I totally trust her judgment when it comes to literature about the darker side of domesticity.  In her introduction to Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives, she talks about the early female pioneers of crime fiction: "Their books color outside the lines, blur between categories, and give readers a glimpse of the darkest impulses that pervade every part of contemporary society.  Especially those impulses that begin in the home."  Contemporary female writers particularly intrigue the editor--authors like Gillian Flynn, Tana French and Attica Locke who "take a scalpel to contemporary society and slice away until its dark essence reveals itself: the ways in which women continue to be victimized, their misfortunes downplayed by men (and women) who don't believe them, and how they eventually overcome."  For this anthology, Weinman stretches farther back to a goldener age of suspense fiction to bring us short stories by Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson, Dorothy B. Hughes, Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, Margaret Millar and several others to paint a portrait of troubled domesticity in mid-century America.  At the anthology's companion website, Weinman further defines "domestic suspense":

To my mind, it’s a genre of books published between World War II and the height of the Cold War, written by women primarily about the concerns and fears of women of the day. These novels and stories operate on the ground level, peer into marriages whose hairline fractures will crack wide open, turn ordinary household chores into potential for terror, and transform fears about motherhood into horrifying reality. They deal with class and race, sexism and economic disparity, but they have little need to show off that breadth. Instead, they turn our most deep-seated worries into narrative gold, delving into the dark side of human behavior that threatens to come out with the dinner dishes, the laundry, or taking care of a child. They are about ordinary, everyday life, and that’s what makes these novels of domestic suspense so frightening. The nerves they hit are really fault lines.

Blurbworthiness: “At last, the anthology we have been waiting for: a veritable goldmine of spellbinding, psychologically rich tales. Masterfully curated by crime fiction expert Sarah Weinman, Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives not only brings much-deserved attention to fourteen unjustly neglected, pioneering writers—it also changes the way we think about the history, and the future, of the suspense genre.” (Megan Abbott, author of Dare Me)

Tumbledown by Robert Boswell (Graywolf Press):  Robert Boswell (author of The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards: Stories and Century's Son) has written a big book.  Big in all senses of the word--page count, cast of characters, sentences ripe as plums.  Big like the epic-length works of Tom Wolfe**, Michael Chabon and John Irving.  Hard-to-zipper-the-suitcase-shut big.  Here, for instance, is the Jacket Copy:

Welcome to the Onyx Springs Rehabilitation and Therapeutic Center. Mick Coury is schizophrenic, and he doesn’t feel alive when he takes the drugs that keep him sane. Alonso Duran is, among other things, a compulsive masturbator. Bellamy Rhine has his head in the clouds. All three of them are in love with the gorgeous Karly Hopper, who is developmentally disabled and living with a trucker whose motives are questionable at best. Guillermo Mendez is clinically sane and of average to above-average intelligence, but desperately wants to avoid another tour of Iraq so he can start a real life. Maura Wood is extremely intelligent but has terrible judgment, among other problems; she’s also in love with Mick. Therapist James Candler is about to be made director of the center. A program he devised, a sheltered workshop where patients practice working on an assembly line, is a huge success. His unreliable best friend from childhood, Billy Atlas, has moved in temporarily, and Candler has found him a job managing the sheltered workshop, a serious miscalculation. He doesn’t really know his fiancée, Lolly (they got engaged via text message), and he seems to be falling in love with Lise, a girl he meets one night at a bar, who, unbeknownst to him, has been trailing him for years, after one counseling session with him that changed her life. And then there’s the reason that Candler is doing this kind of work, trying to save everyone else, in the first place: his older brother Pook, a talented artist whose life came to a tragic end. They’re all trying, and succeeding or failing in varying degrees, to make sense of an irrational, unfair world, to “accommodate the impossible.”

Or take a look at Exhibit B, the Opening Lines of Tumbledown:

      There are yet states of being that have no name, anonymous human conditions that thrive at the periphery of powerful emotion the way bedroom communities manacle a city. James Candler and Elizabeth Ray reside in such a place.  Separately.  They are new arrivals.  Candler showed up the last week of January, purchasing a big stucco house snouted by a two-car garage.  A few weeks later, Elizabeth Ray paused in her pale subcompact to eye his residence.  Neither the ugliness of it nor its enormity could dissuade her.  She circled the block several times to look it over.  Around the corner, she parked at an apartment complex.  Her studio-with-balcony rented by the week.
      The subtle pleasures of suburban life would prove difficult for Candler to seize.  Shoving the mower around his front lawn left him without the humblest sense of accomplishment: what could he do in that yard?  The elementary school down the street spawned a daily parade of idling station wagons and SUVs, a surprisingly civil motorcade that left gaps to protect the right-of-way at every household drive, but the polite convoy struck Candler as a funeral procession for the ozone layer.  He managed to locate a decent local restaurant, a steakhouse that also served Mexican food, but it played CNN day and night on an elevated screen the size of a motel mattress. "I don't suppose you could turn that off," he asked.  The waiter, a Sinaloa transplant who walked past Candler's house every weekday morning, holding hands with his fourth-grade daughter and practicing English according to her strict instructions, smiled and shook his head, saying, "People like."  Even the spitting applause of sprinklers oppressed Candler, reminding him of waking as a child to a snow-covered television screen and the disturbing sense that he was sleeping through his life, and it would soon be time to die.

There's a lot of information to process in those two paragraphs--and the formality of language in that first sentence is, admittedly, a little off-putting--but I really, really love some of the fresh, startling images Boswell gives us: the snout of the two-car garage, Elizabeth's "pale subcompact," the "spitting applause of sprinklers."  I will happily clear the calendar and burrow deep in a book to be rewarded with language like that.  Blurbworthiness: "If you read Tumbledown in public, beware: Boswell's story is barkingly, snort-spurtingly, people-give-you-looks funny. Yet its humor is the most generous kind, uncynical and unsentimental, and woven through an ensemble story so large-hearted it keeps bursting its narrative seams. The result is a brilliant, humane, engrossing argument for how infinitely whacked and contingent life can be, and therefore how desperately we need one another to survive. I finished it with a long contented sigh, thinking, this is why I love reading novels."  (David Wroblewski, author of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle)


*At least, I assume she's an ff; maybe she's a good girl, the nice wife, the pure heroine, the wifely Jane Wyatt rather than the vixen Lizabeth Scott
**Typo joke which might be funny only to me: I initially wrote his name as "Tome Wolf.""

Paperback Flashback: One For Hell by Jada M. Davis

Celebrating vintage paperbacks--both the cheesy & the profound.
But mostly the cheesy.

Let's start with the cover, shall we?  A laughing pinup in a negligee stands over a salt-and-pepper-haired man who looks suspiciously like a wayward Mitt Romney clutching his chest as he's crumpled to the floor beside a bed (and is that a spot of blood coming from under his hand?).  One for Hell by Jada M. Davis screams political sex scandal to me.

But, after some careful and thorough internet detective work this morning, I find that One For Hell has been hailed as a classic noir novel on the order of Jim Thompson, one of my favorites of the hard-boiled typewriter.  In a nutshell, the story is about Willa Ree, a boxcar hobo who hops off the train in a small town, determined to pick it clean in a one-man crime spree, but who ends up become chief of police.  It's an easy plot to mock...but, frankly, when I turned to page 100, I found some pretty decent writing:

click to enlarge

What's easier to lampoon is the back cover of the Red Seal paperback (which I picked up in some now-forgotten antique store here in western Montana earlier this year):

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Jada who?  According to this website, Mr. Davis seemed to suffer from a life of hard luck and bad choices.  Brutal poverty in his Depression-era childhood, tuberculosis while serving with the Army in World War Two, volunteering (!) for "atomic medical experiments" after the war, and turning his back on a writing career to take a job with Southwestern Bell Telephone Company, "where he worked as a PR executive until his retirement."  That's the stuff novels are made of, my friend.

Soup and Salad: Buh-Bye Borders: Writers Reflect on Chain's Impact, World Book Night, Where in the World is Alice Bliss?, Agatha Christie Hangs Ten, What to Read at the Beach, Lassie's Author was Hardboiled, Ridiculous Book Titles, Flannery O'Connor Bathroom Supplies, 2011 Man Booker Prize, What Will Happen to the Wall of Books?

On today's menu:

1.  I'm feeling iffy about the meltdown and closure of Borders.  It was always my least-favorite of the mega-bookstores (the one in Columbia, Maryland was consistently filthy and cluttery), but I understand the upheaval its departure is causing some communities.  I'm always sad when another place to buy books and host readings is taken away from readers; and my heart does go out to suddenly-jobless bookanistas.  At Salon, a dozen-plus writers--including Ann Patchett, Erica Jong and Darin Strauss--offer "A Wistful Farewell" to the chain.  Anthony Doerr writes: "What does the demise of Borders mean?  It means we lose a few more dazzling temples to the written word.  It means more good people lose their jobs.  And it means--one can hope--that there’s more room in the meadow for some upstart saplings."  I especially liked this reflection from Lauren Groff (The Monsters of Templeton):

      I grew up in the tiny village of Cooperstown, N.Y., where there were precisely two places to buy new books: the grocery store, which had all of your sexy and bloody stuff; and Augur's Books, which slowly replaced most of their bookshelves with baseball jewelry and signed balls until a tiny but beautifully curated collection remained. Beyond that, there was the annual library book sale, where you could get an 1890s "Daniel Deronda" and complete Modern Library collections of Sir Walter Scott with squished insects inside.
      When I first came to a blockbuster bookstore--bright, cool, caffeinated, filled with endless quantities of books that smelled clean and had no silverfish running out of them--it seemed not unlike my idea of heaven. The truth is I love bookstores, any bookstores. I'm terribly sad when an indie goes out of business, but I've never fully understood the rage against big chain bookstores, because I've found that, more likely than not, they're staffed by smart, passionate, well-read book lovers. It breaks my heart that these people will now be out of jobs.
      As a citizen, it's cause for mourning, because you worry about people eating and paying rent; as a writer, it's also scary because we need all the solvent book-readers we can possibly get. It seems to me that we should reserve our fury about this for the virtual bookstores who don't love teachers or firemen or roads or municipal water supplies or feeding hungry children at least one good meal a day in school. You know, all the things that make civilization more sturdy, and all the things that are supposed to be paid for by taxes--which aforementioned virtual bookstores somehow believe they're above.

You can read all of the authors' reflections on the liquidation here.


2.  Here's some exciting news to counteract the black-cloud headlines about Borders:  World Book Night is coming to the United States.  The UK event was a big hit this past March, and so as with anything the Royals do we Yanks must follow suit (except for that afternoon tea thing, that's never really caught on over here).  Shelf Awareness has the details on World Book Night, American Style which is set for April 23, 2012:

Imagine being given 48 copies of one of your favorite books for free to give to anyone you want. That's the basic idea behind World Book Night, which was held for the first time in the U.K. this past March 5. Participants chose one of 25 titles, and then received 48 copies of the book and gave them out to anyone they wanted. During the first World Book Night, some 20,000 people gave away a million specially printed books--40,000 copies each of the 25 titles that included Life of Pi by Yann Martel, New Selected Poems by Seamus Heaney, The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carre, Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Beloved by Toni Morrison. All parts of the book world came together to support the effort, including publishers, booksellers, writers and, last but not least, readers. Just in the past few months readers in the U.K. nominated titles for next year's U.K. World Book Night. The final list of 25 titles for 2012 will be announced at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October.

3.  Speaking of the globe, Laura Harrington's new novel Alice Bliss is packing her trunks and heading around the world on a reader-to-reader tour.  The Where's Alice Bliss? campaign hopes to send the book to four continents and all 50 states courtesy of Book Crossing.  You can sign up to be part of Harrington's ambitious plan at her website.  No word on whether or not Alice will be traveling with Carmen Sandiego and Waldo.


4.  This is hardly news to those of us who have read Agatha Christie's autobiography, but The Guardian is breathlessly trumpeting the headline that the Grand Dame of Murder was one of the first Britons to surf....standing up.  She "was something of a pioneering and diehard wave-rider.  At a time when many of her contemporaries were chugging cocktails in Blighty, Agatha Christie was paddling out from beaches in Cape Town and Honolulu to earn her surfing stripes."  Not necessarily news, but it's always fun to see Agatha Christie in a bathing suit.



5.  If you're one of those who are only just now taking a much-needed summer break, Michael Dirda offers guidance at The Barnes and Noble Review on what to read at the beach or in the hammock:

      Summertime, and the reading is easy….Well, maybe not easy exactly, but July and August are hardly the months to start working your way through the works of Germanic philosophers. Save Hegel, Heidegger, and Husserl for the bleaker days of February.
      No, what you want at this time of the year are the books that you can idly pick up, readily put down, then lazily pick up again, as you snooze in a hammock or toast in the sun. Neither too absorbing or too emotionally demanding, they should lull, inspire reveries, provoke a smile, or maybe set off a few memories suitable for an afternoon's daydreaming. If summer were a movie, it would be a stylish romantic comedy like The Princess Bride or To Catch a Thief.

6.  One book you might want to pack along (if you can find it) is You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up a hardboiled noir from 1938.  I'd heard of it before, but it wasn't until I read Woody Haut's excellent essay at the Los Angeles Review of Books that I learned the author, Richard Hallas, was the pseudonym for Eric Knight.  Eric Knight's greatest claim to literary fame?  Lassie Come-Home.  Like me, Haut has a hard time reconciling "a hardboiled novel filled with murder, robbery, gambling, blackmail, scams, and suicide" written by the same guy who made his fortune from a tale about a cuddly collie.


7.  HuffPo has the 15 Most Ridiculous Book Titles Ever.  I think Come On Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All is rather catchy, but I'd probably steer clear of The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification.


8.  Because I'm such a Flan Fan, I have a Google News Alert set for "Flannery O'Connor."  Imagine my surprise when I saw a link for "Flannery O'Connor bathroom supplies."  Turns out "Flannery O'Connor" is the name of a dorm at Loyola.  Dang!  I was all set to buy some Hazel Motes Toilet Paper.


9.  The 2011 Man Booker Prize longlist has been announced:

Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
Sebastian Barry, On Canaan's Side
Carol Birch, Jamrach's Menagerie
Patrick deWitt, The Sisters Brothers
Esi Edugyan, Half Blood Blues
Yvvette Edwards, A Cupboard Full of Coats
Alan Hollinghurst, The Stranger's Child
Stephen Kelman, Pigeon English
Patrick McGuinness, The Last Hundred Days
A.D. Miller, Snowdrops
Alison Pick, Far to Go
Jane Rogers, The Testament of Jessie Lamb
D.J. Taylor, Derby Day

As usual, I haven't read any of the nominees, but The Sisters Brothers, Pigeon English and Jamrach's Menagerie are all on my short-list of TBR books.  Galley Cat has free samples of all the titles.


10.  Over at Writerly Life, Blair wonders "What Will Happen to the Wall of Books?" if she keeps filling up her Kindle:

The process of change is slow, and we’re at a very early stage. But in looking at the collapse of Borders this week, I can’t help wondering whether the delight in books as physical artistic objects might be a fading phenomenon. Or books might become an elite, artisanal object rather than a mass-produced and highly common thing. We might begin to treasure the few physical books we have, while somewhere alone on a shelf a slim hard drive is holding the world’s texts.

H is for Heroin

Sometimes you find a book and sometimes the book finds you.

Last night, I made a quick after-work run to one of Butte's thrift shops with my wife where I was to give my husbandly approval of a table and chairs she wanted to buy and re-finish for her funky-junk business.  The furniture was fine--bolts and screws needed a little tightening, but otherwise I could see how Jean would work her magic on this early-century table and turn it into something beautiful and vintage-y.  She's good at breathing new life into old things (present company included).

While she paid for the junk furniture, I beat a predictable path toward the book section.  (What?  You thought this was going to be a post about repurposing furniture?)

The tattered and torn book spines were a siren song, drawing me closer and closer to the cast-off David Baldaccis and DaVinci Codes.  My pulse always quickens and I break into a light sweat whenever I'm around books that smell like someone's basement.  Yesterday was no exception.  Just look at one of the treasures which had been sitting on the shelf waiting for me to come along with my coins:

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Oh sure, we can laugh about it now, but back in 1952, they took heroin addiction very seriously.  In its June 9, 1952 issue, TIME magazine offered less of a review of Hulburd's book than a cautionary sermon dotted with excerpts from the pages of H is for Heroin.

"One day," says Amy, "Jocelyn. and I rode around in Jocelyn's car and she started telling me all over again what kicks I would get out of blowing up a joint....We parked way down the other side of the abalone pier. She gave me the joint and I lit it. Yeah....I liked it. I had a ball real soon....It made me feel just good, I guess. Kind of silly-like....Then we had another and then we just rode around and goofed."

I don't know about you, but I'm fascinated by books like this which pull up the shades on windows to earlier times.  This is one reason my collections of Dell mapbacks and vintage pulp fiction novels are so large.  Apart from the cover art, I love reading the jacket copy and phraseology of a society that now seems quaint in how it commercially treated sex and violence.  "Shocking" and "sordid" are tossed around like firecrackers, even though the actual contents of the book usually turn out to be tame by comparison.

There was never any question I would buy H is for Heroin from that Butte thrift store.  While my wife was feeding her furniture addiction, I was busy paying 33-1/3 cents for Hulburd's narcotic expose.  The store had a special 3-for-$1 deal on books (I spent my other 66-2/3 cents on The Foolish Immortals by Paul Gallico and Killing Time by Thomas Berger).

So one day in the near future, don't be surprised if you find me sitting at a circa 1945 table reading a 1952 account of a young girl's downward spiral into a shocking and sordid lifestyle.  For good measure, maybe I'll watch Reefer Madness later that night.

Mildred Pierce: "Southern California abominations"

"If there are more vicious quarrels in print than those in which these characters indulge their sadism I have not seen them. (...) That this is a novel that, once begun, will almost surely be read to the end is understandable, for it has in it the deep, slow pull of the ancient ooze where worms and serpents crawled; it reflects no codes, no restrictions, and none but the primordial necessities.  It is a bath in sensation."

That's Robert van Gelder writing in The New York Times Book Review in 1941.  The book in question is James M. Cain's potboiler Mildred Pierce and when van Gelder said the novel was bathed in sensationalism, I think he was politely holding back.  He began that review by saying, "the entire cast of this novel is made up of Southern California abominations."  In anticipation of the HBO mini-series which premieres tonight, I started reading Mildred Pierce yesterday.  I'm only a few dozen pages into it, but I can already tell this is one book that went around kicking the feet out from under stuffy do-gooders of post-Depression America.  It's a wonder it got published at all.

The book opens with a peaceful scene of a man doing yard work on a hot afternoon in Glendale, California.  He goes inside, takes a bath, gets dressed, then walks to the kitchen where his wife is icing a cake.  They talk about the weather and the husband casually mentions he might take a stroll down the street since he has nothing better to do.  Suddenly, the mood turns and the wife snaps at him, blades in her voice:

     "She's waiting for you, so go on."
     "Who's waiting for me?"
     "I think you know."
     "If you're talking about Maggie Biederhof, I haven't seen her for a week, and she never did mean a thing to me except somebody to play rummy with when I had nothing else to do."
     "That's practically all the time, if you ask me."
     "I wasn't asking you."
     "What do you do with her?  Play rummy with her a while, and then unbutton that red dress she's always wearing without any brassieres under it, and flop her on the bed?  And then have yourself a nice sleep, and then get up and see if there's some cold chicken in her icebox, and then play rummy some more, and then flop her on the bed again?  Gee, that must be swell.  I can't imagine anything nicer than that."

Meet Mr. and Mrs. Pierce, Bert and Mildred.  Don't get too cozy with them, however, because they're about to split up.  In fact, in a few minutes Bert will be storming out of the house and their marriage will be kaput.  As they argue about Bert's "flopping" with Maggie B., Cain writes: "They spoke quickly, as though they were saying things that scalded their mouths, and had to be cooled with spit."

It's a helluva gangbusters way to open a novel.  Cain doesn't take the time to stop and give much exposition about the adultery, he just brings you right in when the marital simmer has reached a rapid boil.  From this point forward (at least up through the first 45 pages I've read), Mildred Pierce is a fast-moving, hard-hitting account of divorce, abandonment, unemployment, suffering, and humiliation.  Cain is brutal in what he says as well as how he says it--short, direct sentences that feel like punches clipping the underside of the reader's jaw.  I can imagine there were plenty of readers back in 1941 who didn't even make it as far as page 20 before casting the book aside in horror.  Cain was, in one sense, the Chuck Palahniuk of his day.

The novel is not without its critics, of course.  The Village Voice recently called it "a two-fisted, corn-fed, star-spangled Madame Bovary."  Hey, I happened to like Madame B., so that's pretty much a ringing endorsement as far as I'm concerned.

Though I'm still early in the novel and I generally like to wait until the final page before giving my full assessment, I can tell right from the start that Mildred Pierce is going to be a loop-de-loop ride through a noir-colored sky.  Cain writes like a man full of lust and rage and it's easy to interpret his work as cynical and unkind toward women, even though Mildred Pierce eventually rises above the sexual oppression of the 1940s and does well for herself as a businesswoman in a businessman's world (it's no coincidence that the top choice for Michael Curtiz' movie was one of the most mannish actresses of her era).  There's certainly the pull of the chauvinistic, "ancient ooze" in this description of the novel's main character: "And Mildred's figure got her attention in any crowd and all crowds.  She had a soft, childish neck that perked her head up at a pretty angle; her shoulders drooped, but gracefully; her brassiere ballooned a little, with an extremely seductive burden."  Only a man cut from Mad Men cloth would label breasts "seductive burdens."

I've seen the Joan Crawford version of Mildred Pierce, so I know the real focus of the story is the live-wire relationship between Mildred and her spoiled, scheming daughter Veda.  Cain writes: "Mildred doted on her, for her looks, her promise of talent, and her snobbery, which hinted at things superior to her own commonplace nature."  The relationship is rife with all the ingredients of Greek and Shakespearean tragedy combined; both the book and the 1945 movie are brutal in their portrayal of how Veda bites Mommy Dearest with a sharpened serpent's tooth.

Speaking of that Oscar-winning movie, I found this interesting tidbit in Joseph Blotner's biography of William Faulkner:

James M. Cain's story of a divorcee and her lover, Mildred Pierce, had been undertaken by Jerry Wald and temporarily renamed House on the Sand.  When he had a completed script in hand, he asked for Faulkner to make changes.  By November 18, the end of his first week, Faulkner had reworked much of it.  Then, at a story conference, he met the director, Mike Curtiz, known to some as a "butcher."  After his lengthy comments elicited only silence from Faulkner, he turned on him.  "Why don't you say something?" he said.  Faulkner rose and left the room without answering.  Back in his office, he began drinking.  It took Jo Pagano and another writer, Tom Reed, to get him off the lot safely.

Even though I don't subscribe to HBO (we're a Showtime household), I'm looking forward to the mini-series with Kate Winslet, Evan Rachel Wood and Guy Pearce.  In fact, I'm so anxious to see Todd Haynes' five-and-a-half-hour version, I'll be checking into a hotel to do so.*  I was already interested in the new Mildred based on my fanboy love for Kate Winslet, but this preview shoved me right over the edge of the cliff:



By comparison, here's the trailer for the original 1945 Mildred Pierce:



"Haven't I given you...everything?"

*This is not as slavish as it sounds because I'll be on a business trip and living in a hotel anyway.  Still, I thought I'd throw it in for effect.

Stories in your stocking

Christmas comes a little early for short-story lovers today at The Quivering Pen.  I've got a few gifts for you to unwrap.  Enjoy these short gems.

1.  This past weekend, while on a shopping trip to Bozeman, my wife suggested we spend the night at my parents' house on the outskirts of the city.  It was late in the day and the drive back to Butte suddenly seemed dangerous: fading light, ice-polished interstate, deer leaping out in front of the car.  Ordinarily, I wouldn't have any heartburn crashing for the night at Mom and Dad's, but in this instance, I hadn't packed my toothbrush, a change of underwear, or--worst of all--the book I'm currently reading (A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley).  A night without a book is simply unthinkable.  Lunatic bibliophiles out there, you know what I'm talking about.  I didn't have a toothbrush, fresh underwear or a book, but I did have a coupon for Borders Books.  A quick trip there solved my dilemma.  In no time at all, I was curled up on my parents' couch, reading 20 Under 40, the complete collection of tales from The New Yorker's acclaimed/controversial list of young writers chosen earlier this year.  I read 100 pages of the book in one sustained gulp, my eyes flying over stories by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Chris Adrian, Daniel Alarcon, David Bezmozgis, and Sarah Shun-lien Bynum.  This first quarter of the collection was good, but I especially like Adrian's story "The Warm Fuzzies" which is about a Christian family band who makes happy Jesus music and life is all sunshine and rainbows....except for the teenage daughter Molly who is having a crisis of faith even as she jangles her tambourine.  Good stuff.  The entire book is worth your while and would make a nice Christmas gift to yourself (or someone else on your list, if you could bear to part with it).

2.  Montana author Craig Lancaster (600 Hours of Edward, The Summer Son) has written a story especially for the holidays.  "Comfort and Joy" is a sweet-hearted story about an 83-year-old widower named Frank Abrams (no relation to yours truly) who reaches out to a neighboring family suffering a devastating loss.  Lancaster is only charging $1 for the story and is donating all the proceeds (minus any PayPal fees) to a good cause: Feeding America.  So, you can feel good while reading a feel-good story.  You can buy "Comfort and Joy" (literally) in a variety of ways: at Amazon where you can get the story for your Kindle, at Smashwords, or at Lancaster's website.

3.  Andrew Klavan (The Identity Man) has a story, "The Windows," published at City Journal (allegedly the only fiction the publication has ever featured, apart from a story by Charles Dickens).  It's a knife-sharp portrait of a paranoiac holed up in his New York apartment.

       This morning, his coffee half-done, he stopped by the window beside his desk.  Lifted the slats on the shutter.  Peeked out at the sidewalk three stories below: the sidewalk and the brownstones and the pale green sycamores of West 69th Street near the park.  Suits and skirts on their way to work.  Artists and neighborhood ladies walking their dogs.  No one suspicious.  No one standing strangely still, watching his window.  As there sometimes was.  Or as he sometimes thought there was.
       He closed the slats.  He never opened the shutters.  Never.

You can read the entire story for free HERE.

4.  The Story of the Week at The Library of America's website is "I'll Be Waiting" by Raymond Chandler and it's a classic example of what makes pulp fiction click (like a pair of heels on a deserted sidewalk at midnight).  Written in 1939 and first published in The Saturday Evening Post, "I'll Be Waiting" is a tense tale of a hotel detective, a dame in trouble, and racketeering thugs--all of whom converge on Room 14-B.  It's filled with snappy, Chandler-esque phrases (a girl is curled up on a davenport "like a corsage in the florist's tissue paper," silence behind a closed door "like the silence of a glacier"--that sort of thing).  It's well worth your time if you'd like a little noir to darken your Christmas mood.  By the way, if you haven't done so already, you should subscribe to The Library of America's Story of the Week.  Every Monday, you'll receive a short work of fiction, a character sketch, an essay, a journalist's dispatch, or a poem.  It's a nice way to start your week.