Most of you know that it’s hard to go wrong with Edmond Hamilton’s fiction. THE LAKE OF LIFE is a novel of his that I hadn’t heard of until recently. Originally serialized in the September, October, and November 1937 issues of WEIRD TALES, it was reprinted in 2019 by Armchair Fiction, the edition I read.
At first glance, THE LAKE OF LIFE bears a superficial resemblance to a Doc
Savage novel. The protagonist’s name is even Clark . . . Clark Stannard, an
adventurer and explorer who finds himself in financial straits and needs money
to help his family. Because of this, he agrees to take on a job for millionaire
Montgomery Burns—I’m sorry, I mean Asa Brand, but when you read this
description from Hamilton, you’ll see why I made that mistake: “The old man was
quite bald, and his hairless, yellowed skull and wrinkled hatchet face and
scrawny neck made him look like an ancient, unclean vulture.”
Anyway, Brand hires Clark Stannard to find the legendary Lake of Life, which is
supposedly located in deepest, darkest Africa behind a range of mountains known
as the Mountains of Death. The legendary part comes in because the water from
the Lake of Life is supposed to confer immortality on whoever drinks it, and
Brand is willing to pay a high price for eternal life. In order to accomplish
this, Stannard recruits a crew of five assistants (there’s that possible Doc
Savage influence again) who are highly competent but who have suffered some
sort of setback in life: Ephraim Quell, a sea captain who lost his ship in an
accident and was stripped of his captain’s license; Mike Shinn, a heavyweight
boxer whose career ended after he was paid to take a dive; John Morrow, an
former army officer dishonorably discharged for punching a superior officer in
a fight over a woman; gangster Blacky Cain, who had to leave the States because
the law is after him; and Link Wilson, a gunfighting Texan on the run from a
murder charge arising from a deadly shootout in a bordertown cantina.
Are all these stereotypes? Sure they are. Do I care? Not one bit, because
Hamilton uses them to tell a very fast-paced tale full of colorful settings and
breathless adventure and even a little bit of philosophy. Stannard and his crew
find a way through the Mountains of Death, of course, and discover the Lake of
Life, but at the same time they also discover a war between two lost races (a
favorite plot of Edgar Rice Burroughs, as most of you probably are thinking
right now). Our heroes get mixed up in that war, naturally, and equally
naturally, there are two beautiful young women on hand, one good, one maybe not
so good. Will Clark Stannard and his men survive the epic battles between one
group that wants to protect the Lake of Life and another that wants to use it
for evil?
I had an absolutely wonderful time reading this novel. It’s a Front Porch Book,
for sure. The plot is nothing we haven’t all seen before, but Hamilton does
such a superb job of spinning his yarn that I couldn’t stop turning the pages.
I’m shocked that this was never published as half of an Ace Double in the
Sixties, as some of Hamilton’s other pulp work was. If it had been, I’d have
been right there on my parents’ front porch with it, galloping through it on a
summer day with a big grin on my face. If you’ve read this far, you already know
whether or not you like this kind of stuff. If you do, I give THE LAKE OF LIFE
a very high recommendation.
A note on the cover of the Armchair Fiction edition: That’s actually a Robert
Gibson Jones cover from the August 1951 issue of FANTASTIC ADVENTURES. As soon
as I saw it, I thought to myself that it must have been a FANTASTIC ADVENTURES
cover. It just has that look. But it kind of fits THE LAKE OF LIFE, too, if you
squint your eyes and hold your mouth just right. I put that image at the top of
this review because I wanted it to pop up when I share the post on Facebook. I
figured the original WEIRD TALES covers by Margaret Brundage, which you can see
below, might catch me a jail term from the censors over there.
9 comments:
You need to watch out with Armchair books. When they first started coming out, I was very happy to get them because they would relieve the stress on the original pulp paper as I read them. I soon noticed that all the books I had purchased had the same number of pages, a sure sign of sneak editing and abridging. Sure enough, when I compared Armchair texts to the original texts, I found they were severely mutilated and abridged without notice to the reader. I would not recommend these books to anyone. I am particularly annoyed by the fact that there is no notice to the reader of what was done. I don't know if they did this with all their books. but they did it with most of the ones I bought.
Thank you for putting us on our guard! This is very sneaky indeed, especially cobsidering they are reprinting novella's, not even full novels.
I actually have access to the WEIRD TALES issues where THE LAKE OF LIFE is serialized, so I'll have to skim through them and see if I can tell if it's been abridged. I didn't notice anything that seemed off when I read the book, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything.
James, let us know. I would be interested in reading an unabridged version but would not buy an abridged version.
Let me explain what I mean. I bought the Armchair edition of The Conquerors by David H. Keller. It happened that I also had a copy of the original text. Thus on page 583 (the first page of the original text), I find the following sentences: "Born in Philadelphia, raised and educated in the cities of the East, he had never knowingly killed anything, except a few flies; and even then he was better pleased to chase them to an open window than to squash them with a swatter." The Armchair text ends with the word "flies". It leaves out the rest of the sentence about the swatter.
Likewise, a few sentences further down, the original text has the following sentences: "Thus, he felt that he was prepared for any stroke of luck that might place big-game shooting in his way in the future. But, beyond the mechanism of a rifle, he knew nothing of machinery; and the mysteries of science lay beyond a closed door that he never tried to open." The Armchair text entirely leaves out the entire sentence after "in the future."
I checked a few more Armchair books after that, and they all had the same type of abridgements. I have seen a number of other reviews of Armchair books on other blogs, and they sometimes complain of typos or that the books don't make sense. This is the sort of complaints you would see with inexpert abridgement. I do not know to what extent this has happened in their other books.
I further note that the double volume Ten to the Stars and The Conquerors has a combined 216 pages. Likewise, the double volume Beyond Pluto and Artery of Fire likewise has a combined page count of exactly 216 pages. This is the sort of thing you see when the editor has decided to maintain a page count of not more than a prescribed number of pages.
After that I stopped buying them, so I have no way to tell the extent of the problem. I would recommend that those who have purchased their books to check it out and see if it is just a few or constant. It is more likely to occur in their double volumes.
I would also note that the texts of more than a few of the Armchair books (and their cover illustrations) listed in their catalogue would appear to be still under copyright, although there is no evidence that estates have been contacted or fees paid. Instead, one Gregory J. Luce appears to have copyrighted the books to himself. This is the sort of thing you might see when an editor is copyrighting an unauthorized abridgement he has made himself.
I haven't done an exhaustive comparison, but I didn't find anything missing from the first couple of chapters in the Armchair Fiction edition of THE LAKE OF LIFE. I own a couple dozen of their books, at least, but most of them are where I can't get to them easily. Of the five different books of theirs I have sitting out, two of them are 216 pages, but the other three are 188, 232, and 254. Some books obviously have been abridged, others may not have been, and I don't have a clue how widespread the practice is. In general, I don't like the idea of abridging books, so this will make me more leery of buying Armchair Fiction books in the future, but it won't stop me from reading the ones I already have. A lot of the material being reprinted comes from pulps that are at least assumed to be in the public domain (that's such a murky area that in some cases, literally no one knows whether a story is PD or not), but not all.
I note that Armchair has printed a number of Edmond Hamilton's books (including The Lake of Life). Hamilton started being published in 1926, so virtually everything he wrote is probably still under copyright. I have the Haffner Press edition of his works, and I note they needed the permission of the Spectrum Literary Agency and Huntington National Bank (probably the agents for the Hamilton and Brackett Estates) to do the printing.
The problem is that a lot of material published in the pulps or by long-defunct paperback publishers was copyrighted by the publishers and never renewed by either the author or publisher and because of that fell into public domain. So as long as you use those particular versions and don't violate any trademarks, that material is fair game to reprint. A lot of publishers currently reprinting vintage work do take the time and trouble to track down authors' estates and make arrangements for payment, but they don't necessarily have to. It's done more as a courtesy and to give their books an air of legitimacy that the efforts of the more cut-rate publishers don't have. In the case of WEIRD TALES, where THE LAKE OF LIFE originally appeared, some issues were renewed, others were not, and determining what's public domain and what isn't is a mess. I suspect that the fellow behind Armchair Fiction often doesn't know the status of the books he reprints, just that other books from those sources have been reprinted frequently and with impunity in the past.
A lot of times the question of who owns the rights or whether a work is in public domain falls into the class of what I call "Nobody knows and nobody cares", meaning that the issue is so convoluted and has such small profit potential that it's not worth involving lawyers. Several years ago, a publisher approached a big corporation that supposedly held the copyright to some novels originally published in the pulps and asked for permission to reprint them. The permissions department of that corporation responded that they didn't own those rights. The potential reprint publisher insisted that they did. They told him to go away, reprint whatever he wanted to, and stop bothering them. Such is the murky world of intellectual property.
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