BANDERSNATCHES

by Steve Steinbock

Son of a King

Last week I mentioned the growing pile of short story anthologies weighing down my nightstand. One of the books I named was 20th Century Ghosts. It’s by an author I’d never heard of, Joe Hill (although I had heard of his novel, The Heart-Shaped Box). The book attracted my attention because of the unusual design. Instead of a dustjacket, the book has an attractive, almost metallic sticker attached to the front, and another sticker attached to the back. The boards and spine are wrapped in black fabric, something seldom seen in mass market hardcovers in the past century except for those “blank books” you find at Hallmark stores.

Despite the novelty of the design, and the spooky attractiveness of the art on cover sticker (it looks like a piece of movie film with a picture of a man kissing a ghostly woman with a movie screen in the background), I became annoyed when the sticker on the back cover began to peel off, with no help from anyone, unless some 21st century ghost was at work.

I’ve read the first two stories, and enjoyed them both. Perhaps I’ll provide a more full review next week.

But the real embarrassing part is that I learned on Wednesday that Joe Hill is the pseudonym of the son of a rather famous horror writer and mystery Grandmaster. Silly me.

Politics Aside

I belong to a Yahoo! group called The Golden Age of Detection. I tend to be a lurker, i.e. one who follows the discussions but doesn’t participate much. It’s a good place to go if you like older mysteries (1910-1960). Postings tend to include reviews and discussions of specific books and authors, reprinted essays, trivia questions, and friendly banter. One of the threads that briefly flitted across my screen this past week involved the politics – or lack thereof – in mystery writers.

Politics are integral to human interaction, so it’s hard to separate it from any artistic endeavor. Authors with strong political views will often have those views reflected in their writing. Mickey Spillane and Dennis Lynds both had strong views, and their readers get a general sense of their respective views, for the most part without being hit over the head with it. I suppose any time a writer decides whether to make his (or her) villain a wealthy industrialist, a troubled psychopath, or a radical Muslim, a political statement is being made. But I can’t think of a single mystery writer who consciously used her (or his) fiction as a bully pulpit and had anything good come out of it.

I assert that hands down, the worst book to become a huge bestseller in American publishing history is Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. While 150 years later, I still applaud Stowe’s abolitionist politics, I dare anyone to find a more sickly saccharine piece of propaganda disguised as fiction. (It’s alleged that upon meeting Stowe, President Lincoln said, “So this is the little lady who made this big war.” But I’m skeptical that the conversation ever occurred).

Some would assert that the second worst book to become a bestseller is also propaganda disguised as fiction: setting out to prove that Jesus of Nazereth was a family man, and that the Vatican is/was in a conspiracy to keep it secret. But I won’t go there.

In some future Bandersnatch, I’ll try to tackle the myth of realism in crime fiction.

A Mysterious Canon Update

There were some strong responses to my discussion of the mystery canon in last week’s Bandersnatch. Part of me wants to pompously declare that no one can claim to really know mysteries until they’ve read so-and-so and such-and-such. But that too, to quote another preacher, is toiling after wind. But here, for your consideration, are the names mentioned by me and by the various comment writers of authors who might serve as a nice syllabus:

Edgar Allan Poe
Arthur Conan Doyle
G.K. Chesterton
Raymond Chandler
R. Austin Freeman
John Dickson Carr
Agatha Christie
Dashiell Hammett
Ngaio Marsh
H.C. Bailey
Anthony Berkeley
Philip MacDonald
Ross Macdonald
John D. MacDonald
Dorothy L. Sayers
Ellery Queen
Margaret Millar
E.C. Bentley
Josephine Tey
Cornell Woolrich
Patricia Highsmith
Jim Thompson
Margery Allingham
Craig Rice
Melville Davisson Post
Anthony Boucher
Robert Arthur
Rex Stout
Erle Stanley Gardner

To these I would add Patricia McGerr, Fredric Brown, Ed McBain, and as much as it pains me, Mary Roberts Rinehart. (Rinehart was an extremely important writer with a ton of bestsellers; is probably the mother of the modern suspense novel and is the creator of the “had-I-but-known” plot device. But for me, reading Rinehart is like watching rancid paint dry).