Just a couple of things this week, and an oddball pair they are.
SALT & PEPPER – Alex Austin. Novelization of the 1968 comedy thriller movie starring Sammy Davis Jr. and Peter Lawford. If I ever saw the movie, I've totally forgotten it. I saw the book and wanted it. Don't ask me why.
INTERSTELLAR PATROL – Christopher Anvil. One of those big Baen Books collections including 14 related science fiction stories originally published in ASTOUNDING and ANALOG from the late Fifties to the late Sixties. First of all, I like the title, and I think I've read some stories by Anvil here and there (probably in ANALOG) that I enjoyed. If I like these, Baen has reprinted the rest of the Interstellar Patrol series and I can look for those volumes as well.
10 comments:
Oh,Salt n Pepper is great fun. Full of Swingin' London clichés that make it look a tad Austin Powers these days but a fun film.
Agree with Paul. Salt 'n' Pepper was a lot of fun.
Christopher Anvil is one of the few authors who can make me laugh out loud.
(And don't think your absence from Cross Plains wasn't noticed by several people.)
I actually thought for a while that this year might be the year when I finally made it to Cross Plains for the entire weekend. Well, real life had something to say about that. Maybe next year.
I remember reading Salt n Pepper when I was a kid. There was a sequel called, I think, One More Time. Read both books, never saw either movie.
I love Anvil, and have read this and the rest of the Baen volumes, as well as having read the stories in Astounding/Analog. Good stuff!
Salt and Pepper is one of those movies that's very much of its time. But few people ever mention the sequel, One More Time. Directed by Jerry Lewis, it is notable only for the uncredited guests appearances (blink-and-you-miss-'em) of Peter Cushing as Baron Frankenstein and Christopher Lee as Count Dracula! This sequence was included because Sammy Davis Jr was a big fan of Hammer horror and I suppose Jerry decided to indulge him.
One more time sounds beaut, Ben. Thanks for the tip off!
SALT & PEPPER is a fun read and in some ways more fun than the film, to which time has not been kind. But, full disclosure, I thought it was very cool as a kid. Alex Austin was an interesting writer of the late 50s-60s (not to be confused with a current novelist who has the same by-line); other than S&P (his only tie-in), he has only three other novels to his credit (though he may have written stories for men's pulps). All his novels are about sexual relationships; his first, THE GREATEST LOVER IN THE WORLD, is a comic novel; the remaining two are more serious: THE BRIDE, about a marriage breaking down; and THE BLUE GUITAR, about an incestuous brother-sister relationship. If there's any biographical information on him, I imagine it exists only on the hardcover bookjackets (I've never seen one; only the paperbacks). I only know about his other books *because* of S&P, which I liked well enough to seek out the rest. Impossible to know, but I imagine he got the gig because S&P is about two guys who run a swingin', mod club in London who unwittingly get caught up in spy stuff, and there's a lotta babes. Though sexually S&P, film and novel, is tame enough not to raise any eyebrows.
To add to your pulp pleasure: The aforementioned (in a previous comment) sequel, ONE MORE TIME, was novelized by the one and only, accept no imitations, Michael Avallone.
Reading Alex Austin's other novels now, and I was wrong; he wrote FIVE that weren't tie-ins; but while the first three sold well, the last two were almost instantly obscure: ELEANORE (1968, same year as SALT & PEPPER), published by Olympia press in its last gasp, before it went into Chapter 11. According to Barry Malzberg, who was also an Olympia author around then, it sold 52 copies. And LOOKING FOR A GIRL (Dell paperback original, 1972), which seems to have gone unreviewed and unheralded. They're about the most sleazarific non-sleaze books you can imagine. If they weren't written so beautifully they'd be borderline porn. Interesting writer…not like anyone else. That may be why I liked the SALT & PEPPER novelization so much: not that he imbued it with literary brilliance—but for a few passages (most strikingly the opening) it's pretty straightforward…but I still felt like I was in good, capable hands, and that he understood how to deliver the balance of suspense and comedy withouty getting in the way of either. (Maybe that's why you bought it.) :-)
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