Prose fiction

H. G. Wells’s “The Chronic Argonauts” to See Publication

March 24, 2011
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H. G. Wells’s “The Chronic Argonauts” to See Publication

By Mike Gray . . . . as a graphic novel, we hasten to add. The short story “The Chronic Argonauts” (1888) was Wells’s first foray into time travel fiction and is very different from his famous The Time Machine (1895): This brief story begins with a third-person account of the arrival of a mysterious inventor to the peaceful Welsh town of Llyddwdd. Dr. Moses Nebogipfel takes up residence in a house sorely neglected after the deaths of its former inhabitants. The main bulk of the story concerns the apprehension of the simple rural folk who eventually storm the inventor’s “devilish” workshop in an effort to repay supposed witchery. Nebogipfel escapes with one other person—the sympathetic Reverend Elijah Ulysses Cook—in what is later revealed to be a time machine. The next part picks up with an unnamed “Author” character discovering the dazed Reverend Cook returned from unbelievable exploits after having been missing for three weeks. The remainder of the story is the Reverend’s short retelling (again in the third-person) of the events that took place that night and the revelation that Nebogipfel is an “Anachronic Man” whose genius drives him to seek out a time more suited to his abilities.

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‘The Gray and Guilty Sea’ Isn’t MacDonald, But It Isn’t Bad, Either

March 21, 2011
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‘The Gray and Guilty Sea’ Isn’t MacDonald, But It Isn’t Bad, Either

Many fictional detectives have been touted as “the new Travis McGee” since MacDonald's death, but (in my opinion) none of them has quite lived up to that standard. Nolte's detective, Garrison Gage, doesn't, either. But he's still pretty good.

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Hard Stuff Goes Down Smoothly

March 15, 2011
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Hard Stuff Goes Down Smoothly

A Drop of the Hard Stuff, a novel by Lawrence Block. Mulholland Books. Available in May 2011. A review by Warren Moore. Any mystery fan worth his or her Maltese Falcon gets excited when a new novel from Lawrence Block hits the shelves. The thrill is even greater when the novel in question is one of the adventures of private eye/recovering alcoholic Matthew Scudder. Many of Block’s fans thought the series had concluded in 2005 with All the Flowers Are Dying, the sixteenth book in what Block has described as Scudder’s fictional autobiography, which began with The Sins of the Fathers in 1976. Along the way, Block’s readers have seen his hero move in real time from an ex-cop and blackout drunk to a happy marriage and long-term sobriety. The novels are hard-boiled and gritty, and reflect a New York that remains a dangerous place. But like the rest of us, Scudder has grown older, and as Block has observed, what a man in his mid-forties might do seems less likely for a man decades older, and Block, too, thought the sixteenth novel was the end of the series. However, he realized that he had thought he had finished the

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‘The Days of Lamech’

March 15, 2011
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‘The Days of Lamech’

By Mike Gray Jon Saboe, author of The Days of Peleg (now in its 4th edition), has announced that a prequel — The Days of Lamech — is currently scheduled for release in June. The Days of Peleg deals with the adventures — and misadventures — of a man who lived in the patriarchal period of the Bible (see Genesis 10:25), the time after the Great Flood of Noah prior to the establishment of the nation of Israel. Links: A TAC review is here. Peleg’s Facebook page is here. Jon’s extensive website is here. And the book is available on Amazon.com here.

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Prose & Poetry Weekly

March 14, 2011
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Prose & Poetry Weekly

“In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent business man; and I, for one, am only too glad that the man who has the rare skill to season his message with interesting reading matter and who shows both purpose and pep in handling his literary wares has a chance to drag down his fifty thousand bucks a year, to mingle with the biggest executives on terms of perfect equality, and to show as big a house and as swell a car as any Captain of Industry!” - Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt Short Fiction A Call to Prayer by Joy Wambeke ” ‘For the poor souls in purgatory,’ I heard my father mutter through clenched teeth. Through the shadows of the upstairs hallway, I could often see my father in my parents’ darkened room, his hands wound around his foot or grasping his knee. He always got ready for work at Sydney harbor in the dark so as not to wake mum. It was his habit to offer the inevitable bumps into furniture

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Libertarian Science Fiction from Non-libertarians

March 11, 2011
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Libertarian Science Fiction from Non-libertarians

By Mike Gray human being is endowed with free will. He can use this to choose between good and evil. If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange — meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil or (since this is increasingly replacing both) the Almighty State. — Anthony Burgess On the Mises Daily website, Jeff Riggenbach continues with his study of libertarian themes in science fiction: This essay is about . . . writers, none of whom was a libertarian, but each of whom wrote something back in the 1960s that made a significant contribution to the libertarian tradition. The two authors he covers here include Anthony Burgess, whose A Clockwork Orange was described by Burgess himself as “a jeu d’esprit knocked off for money in three weeks.” Riggenbach warns us Clockwork is . . . not an easy book to read, and I don’t mean because of the ultra-violence, though that is pretty sickening, certainly. What I mean when I say it’s not easy to read

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Halter’s Impossible Crime Mystery a Brilliantly Plotted Page-Turner

March 9, 2011
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Halter’s Impossible Crime Mystery a Brilliantly Plotted Page-Turner

By Barry Ergang Review of The Lord of Misrule, by Paul Halter My favorite kind of traditional mystery is the “impossible crime” tale. You know,  the kind of story in which a crime is committed in a room later found to be locked from the inside, from which there is no apparent means of egress for the criminal. Or the one in which someone is murdered in a field of snow or on a sandy beach—killed in a manner that requires his assailant to be up close and personal—but the only footprints in evidence are the victim’s. Or any other kinds of seemingly impossible situations writers can invent and solve. Writers who specialized in impossible situations included Hake Talbot, Clayton Rawson, Herbert Brean, Joseph Commings, Edward D. Hoch, and the acknowledged all-time master, John Dickson Carr. Many others have contributed impossible crime stories to the genre, but few outside of those mentioned above have specialized in them. One notable modern exception is Carr disciple Paul Halter, an award-winning French author whose work, thanks to translator John Pugmire, is starting to become available to those of us who don‘t read French. Having previously translated some of Halter’s short stories and brought

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‘If the Dead Rise Not,’ a Mystery That Asks Profound Questions

March 8, 2011
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‘If the Dead Rise Not,’ a Mystery That Asks Profound Questions

I liked it. A lot. Not only for the writing, and the fascinating narrator, soul-weary German detective Bernie Gunther, but for something else I think I detect in the text. A spiritual element.

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Notable Quote: Mary Theroux on the Surveillance State

March 8, 2011
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Notable Quote: Mary Theroux on the Surveillance State

By Mike Gray They’re here —”porn scanners” at airports, snitching cell phones and computers, satellite images of your house available to anyone, portable DNA scanners, X-ray machines roaming the streets, and “a centralized national identification database.” They make George Orwell’s predictions look pretty outdated; things seem to be conforming more to Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopic vision: Government abuses of technology and data already in their possession makes the the current mild debate over the extension of the REAL-ID Act and its creation of a centralized national identification database—complete with biometric identifying information—seem a little late. So, assuming courts keep ruling that all this intrusiveness is Constitutional, what are we to do? Unfortunately, looking to the legislative branch for help won’t work. Tea Party patriots, who gained election claiming to want to restore government by the people, recently voted to extend expiring provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act, including those authorizing wireless wiretaps—and even voted against a proposed revision that would have specified that investigations of U.S. citizens under such extended authority “shall be conducted in a manner that complies with the Constitution of the United States,” including the Bill of Rights. Aren’t these the same legislators who insisted on opening their

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Prose and Poetry Weekly

March 7, 2011
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Prose and Poetry Weekly

Kicking off this week’s entry: Sir Walter Scott, “Chivalry!—why, maiden, she is the nurse of pure and high affection—the stay of the oppressed, the redresser of grievances, the curb of the power of the tyrant —Nobility were but an empty name without her, and liberty finds the best protection in her lance and her sword.” - from Ivanhoe: A Romance Short Fiction Favorite Son by Jennifer Haigh (from Virginia Quarterly Review) “Buck season opened-still does-on the Monday after Thanksgiving. In Bakerton it is a holiday of sorts. School was closed for the day, and I reported to Keener’s at 4 a.m. to serve eggs and sausages and countless cups of coffee to men in orange vests and jackets. Every table was full despite heavy competition from annual pancake breakfasts at the AmVets, the Elks, and the Moose.” Monkey and Man by John Warner (from Bull: Fiction for Thinking Men) “Now, let’s get going, because any minute the cops are going to show up and ask questions you can’t answer, which is going to make you look truly suspicious, and if you’re locked up you’ll never be able to prove yourself innocent.” “But I am innocent,” I told the monkey. “Don’t

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The British Golden Age of Detection’s Deposed Crime Kings (Part 2 of 2)

March 3, 2011
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The British Golden Age of Detection’s Deposed Crime Kings (Part 2 of 2)

By Curt Evans Read part 1 here. In part 1 of this essay I noted that the received wisdom in mystery fiction is wrong: far from being dominated by four “Crime Queens” in the UK and hardboiled novelists in the United States, the Golden Age of mystery fiction (approximately the period between the two world wars) included an impressive roster of highly successful male writers in the UK and a like number of hugely influential traditional-puzzle writers in the United States. In this half of the essay I examine several UK male writers unfairly dismissed as “humdrums.” “Humdrum” Golden Age detective novelists have been disparaged with that word because ostensibly they cared only about the puzzle in their mystery works and nothing whatsoever about character, setting, or theme. This assertion is untrue about all these authors, and particularly so in the case of G. D. H. Cole and the man who wrote under the name of Henry Wade. It is true that the greatest detective-writing gifts of Freeman Wills Crofts, R. Austin Freeman, John Street, and J. J. Connington were their technical skills, which placed them among the most popular British detective novelists of the Golden Age, however disregarded they may

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The British Golden Age of Detection’s Deposed Crime Kings (Part 1 of 2)

March 1, 2011
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The British Golden Age of Detection’s Deposed Crime Kings (Part 1 of 2)

By Curt Evans In the introduction to a recent academic monograph on nineteenth-century women writers of crime fiction, the well-known British crime novelist Val McDermid noted in passing, “And, of course, whenever the so-called Golden Age of detective fiction is mentioned, the names associated with it are female—Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh.” Critic Sarah Weinman illustrated McDermid’s contention in the January 29, 2011 ”Reputations” column of the Wall Street Journal, in an article about Golden Age detective novelist Allingham. Weinman declared, “Four ‘queens of crime’ dominated the Golden Age of the mystery novel, the years just before and after World War II: Agatha Christie … Dorothy Sayers … Ngaio Marsh … and Margery Allingham.” Examples abound of this insistently gendered approach to the mystery genre’s history, by which the numerous works produced by a vast multitude of men and women during the Golden Age of the British detective novel are distilled into the product of four celebrated “Crime Queens.” One academic authority, for example, asserts that the Golden Age of British detection is “commonly conceived” as having run from “the first novel of Agatha Christie (1920) to the last novel by Dorothy L. Sayers (1937),” while another writes that the Golden Age “is generally

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