Forgotten Books: Love Me and Die - Day Keene and Gil Brewer

The origins of Day Keene’s 1951 novel LOVE ME AND DIE are a little murky. According to Gil Brewer’s stepdaughter, Brewer ghosted this novel for Keene, expanding one of Keene’s pulp stories to book length. One website identifies the source novella as “Marry the Sixth for Murder”, from the May 1948 issue of DETECTIVE TALES. This seems pretty feasible to me. Keene and Brewer were friends, and since Keene was already an established writer as the Fifties began, with more than ten years as a popular pulp author under his belt, I can easily see him farming out this expansion to Brewer. Whether LOVE ME AND DIE was written before or after the first two novels Brewer sold to Gold Medal, SATAN IS A WOMAN and SO RICH, SO DEAD (both of which also came out in 1951), I have no idea. But since Brewer probably used quite a bit of Keene’s original novella, I think the book-length version can be regarded as a true collaboration between two of the top suspense novelists of the Fifties. But the question remains, is it any good?

Well, yeah. What did you expect?

The narrator/protagonist of LOVE ME AND DIE is Johnny Slagle (not a great name for the hero of a book like this). Like W.T. Ballard’s Bill Lennox and Robert Leslie Bellem’s Dan Turner before him and Carter Brown’s Rick Holman after him, Slagle is a Hollywood troubleshooter, a private eye who’s on retainer to the movie studios to keep their big stars out of trouble. As such, he gets a call in the middle of the night from an aging, many-times-married screen idol who thinks he has just run over a woman while driving drunk in the middle of a rainstorm. He’s not sure, though, because he didn’t stop to check. That job falls to Slagle, who has to find out if his client is really a hit-and-run killer, and if so, figure out a way to cover it up.

Of course, things don’t stay that simple. Gamblers and starlets and thugs are involved, as well as a gun-toting cowboy from Oklahoma, and wouldn’t you know it, not only does Johnny get hit on the head and knocked out a couple of times, but there’s another murder and he’s framed for it, which means he has to dodge the cops while trying to find the real killer. Yes, it’s a standard plot, but Keene and Brewer throw in some nice twists on it, holding back two of them until very late in the book.

The key to a book like this is the writing, and the pace never slows down for very long in this one, which is all to the good. For the most part, it lacks the intensity of some of Brewer’s other books, but there are a few scenes that vividly capture the sweaty desperation that threatens to overwhelm most of his protagonists. I got the feeling that maybe Brewer was holding back a little on his natural voice as he expanded Keene’s novella, perhaps in an effort to make the book sound more like Keene’s work. I don’t know the details of their arrangement, so I can only speculate. As it is, the blend is a good one. LOVE ME AND DIE is no lost classic or anything – it’s just a shade too generic for that – but if you’re like me and grew up reading and loving books like this, I think you’ll thoroughly enjoy it.

Unfortunately, it seems to be pretty rare. Originally published as a digest-sized novel by Phantom Books, it was reprinted by Harlequin in the Fifties, Paperback Library in the Sixties, and Manor Books in the Seventies (the edition I stumbled across and read). A few copies of the earlier editions are available on-line, but they’re pricey. The Manor edition doesn’t show up at all. So if you ever come across a copy of any of the editions, my advice would be to grab it. And if you happen to have a copy on your shelves but have never read it, I think LOVE ME AND DIE is well worth the time. Keene and Brewer have both made a comeback of sorts in recent years. Maybe some enterprising publisher will reprint this collaboration by them, one of these days.

Weirdness

Like a lot of writers, I have a Google search saved for my name, so if anything new about me turns up on the Internet, I get an email about it. (Egomaniac? Who's an egomaniac?) Anyway, today Google sent me a link for a website supposedly containing my name, and when I went to look at it, it turned out to be a porn site. (No, I'm not going to post the link.) Underneath a bunch of rather disturbing pictures, there was a big block of text that consisted mainly of what I guess you could call porno-words, which I think they put on there so that the site will turn up in Web searches for that stuff. However . . . right in the middle of this porno-gibberish, there's a paragraph about one of the house-name Western series I write for, and sure enough, there's my name, along with the names of some of the other authors. So my question is . . . why? Why include this in the middle of a porn site? Some things just don't make any sense. But it gave me a laugh, anyway. Sort of.

Women of the West

Cullen Gallagher and his friends at Not Coming to a Theater Near You are putting together what looks like it'll be an excellent series of reviews about women in the world of Western films. The first review is up now, of a film I'd never heard of, 49-17, the first Western directed by a woman, way back in 1917. This is great stuff for film buffs and Western fans, and I can't wait to see what else they'll come up with. Check it out.

Bury Me Deep - Megan Abbott

Over the past few years, Megan Abbott has become not just one of my favorite new writers, but one of my favorite writers, period. Her new novel, BURY ME DEEP, is out now, and it continues a string of very potent successes. It’s one of the best novels of the year.

Inspired by the true-crime case of Winnie Ruth Judd, the infamous “Trunk Murderess”, BURY ME DEEP tells the story of Marion Seeley, who finds herself alone in Phoenix in 1930. Her husband, a doctor who has a morphine addiction, has lost his license to practice in the States, so he has to go to Mexico to be the camp doctor at a remote mine. Marion has a job as a typist at a medical clinic, and she becomes friends with one of the nurses there, whose roommate is a young woman suffering from tuberculosis. Marion spends a lot of time at the house these two friends of hers share, and she’s soon drawn into their life of wild parties. In the process, she meets Gentleman Joe Lanigan, a successful local businessman who has an ill, invalid wife, and when Marion falls in love with Lanigan despite her resolve not to, all the elements are there for a noirish yarn that pulls Marion into a harrowing spiral of crime.

Although I had heard of Winnie Ruth Judd, I didn’t know the details of the case that made her notorious, so I didn’t really know what was going to happen in this novel. And as Abbott explains in an interesting, informative author’s note at the end of the book, her story diverges from the facts of the Winnie Ruth Judd case in several important aspects, anyway. One thing I really like about Abbott’s work is that each of her four novels have been written in a distinctive voice, but there are subtle differences in that voice from book to book. In BURY ME DEEP, although it’s written in third person, the point of view is entirely Marion’s, and so the style is a languid, dreamy, romantic one for most of the book, like something from one of the love pulps of the era, but underlying it is the desperation that Marion feels at being left alone in a strange town that results in her eagerness for something or someone to latch on to. The reader gets so deep into Marion’s thoughts that it’s almost like first-person narration, and after a while you have to start wondering just how reliable that narration is. Marion’s desperation eventually turns to horror, fear, and anger, and those emotions come across in the writing so vividly that the ending of the book is very satisfying.

If I had to choose, I’d say that the terse, hardboiled prose of Abbott’s previous novel, the Edgar-winning QUEENPIN, resonates with me as a reader slightly stronger than the more deliberately-paced style of BURY ME DEEP. However, I’d sure hate to have to live on the difference. Like the rest of her books, this one drew me in and really had me flipping the pages to find out what was going to happen. Also like the rest of her books, BURY ME DEEP has a great cover, the sort that really pulls you in as well. If you like beautifully written historical noir, you can’t go wrong with BURY ME DEEP, or any of Abbott’s other novels, for that matter. Very highly recommended.

Children of Men

We’re still watching other movies besides those based on Tennessee Williams plays, of course. CHILDREN OF MEN, which came out a few years ago, is based on a P.D. James novel I haven’t read. (That would be true of any movie based on a P.D. James novel.) It’s a near-future science fiction thriller set in England, the only country left in the world that hasn’t descended into chaos after women everywhere became unable to have babies some eighteen years earlier. This sudden and unexplained catastrophe has evidently doomed the human race. It’s just a matter of waiting for everyone to die off.

But then somehow, a young woman in England gets pregnant, and a bureaucrat played by Clive Owen gets mixed up in the plot to smuggle her out of the country and get her into the hands of the mysterious Human Project, a group of scientists trying to figure out a cure for the sudden infertility that’s taken over the planet. Various feuding factions within England want control of the girl and her baby for themselves, which leads to double-crosses, shootouts, and running and chasing.

As an action movie, CHILDREN OF MEN is pretty good. Those scenes are plentiful, well-staged, and harrowing. As science fiction, it kind of falls flat because there’s no attempt to explain anything; the situation just is. On the other hand, the characters involved in this particular story probably wouldn’t be aware of any scientific explanations for what’s happened, so I’m willing to give it a pass on that. As entertainment, well, it’s awfully bleak and grim, but not totally without hope. I like Clive Owen (although after seeing the wonderfully goofy SHOOT ‘EM UP, I can’t watch him in anything without wondering where his carrot is), and Michael Caine is fine as usual in a strong supporting role. I don’t think CHILDREN OF MEN is a great film, but I enjoyed it and think it’s worth watching.

Write With Fire - Charles Allen Gramlich

I don't normally recommend a book I haven't even seen yet, let alone read, but I have no trouble doing so in this case. I've spent many hours talking writing with Charles at Cross Plains, during the Robert E. Howard Days get-togethers, and the conversations are always enjoyable and thought-provoking. I'm sure this new collection of his articles and essays on writing will be, too. My copy is already on order.

This Property is Condemned

This is one I had seen before, so I can’t call it a Movie I’ve Missed, but it’s been close to forty years since I watched it, and on late night TV at that, cut up for commercials and probably shortened to run in a two-hour time slot, as well. So it was almost new to me.

There’s not nearly as much Tennessee Williams material in this film, which was “suggested” (according to the credits) by a short, one-act Williams play of the same name. While much of the dialogue from the play was used, the screenplay, which was co-authored by Francis Ford Coppola, splits the source material in two and uses it as a prologue and epilogue and invents the long flashback in between that makes up most of the movie, although the storyline is at least extrapolated from bits of dialogue in the original.

The film takes place in the small town of Dodson, Mississippi, where we first meet the 13-year-old girl Willie Starr walking along the railroad tracks near an abandoned and condemned boarding house that her mother used to run. Willie tells the story to a boy about her own age she encounters on the tracks, launching the flashback in which the boarding house is still occupied and Willie’s beautiful older sister Alva has numerous suitors among the railroad men who live there. But then a railroad employee named Owen Legate arrives to cut the runs that go through Dodson and lay off most of the men who work for the railroad, and things begin to fall apart for the Starr family. Naturally, a romance develops between Alva and Owen (they’re played by Natalie Wood and Robert Redford, what else would you expect?), which ruins the plan hatched by Alva’s mother to push Alva into the arms of a well-to-do railroad superintendent with a sick wife.

Things play out in Southern, depression-era, soap opera fashion, and even though I had a pretty good idea what was going to happen, I found the movie really entertaining in an old-fashioned way. I remembered liking it when I saw it before, and I did this time, too. It’s got a fine cast. I’ve always liked Robert Redford, Natalie Wood is beautiful (and it’s amazing how even at the age she was then, you can often see the little girl from MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET in her), and Charles Bronson is good in an unsympathetic role as a brutal railroad worker who plays up to Alva’s mother in order to get closer to Alva. Mary Badham, who played Scout in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, plays Willie. The photography by James Wong Howe is excellent, and I think the screenwriters did a pretty good job of expanding the play (which, admittedly, I’ve neither seen nor read).

Overall, I had a fine time watching this one. If you’ve never seen it, it’s worth a look. If it’s been forty years since you watched it, like me, it’s worth watching again.

Livia's Blog

Livia has a really nice post over on her blog tonight about the life of a freelance writer. It won't necessarily cheer you up, but I think it's very well-written (and not just because she says kind things about me in it). Check it out.

Forgotten Books: Conquerors From the Darkness - Robert Silverberg

I’m writing about another science fiction novel this week, although of somewhat more recent vintage than last week’s THE GIRL IN THE GOLDEN ATOM. As author Robert Silverberg explains in his introduction to the 1979 Ace reprint of CONQUERORS FROM THE DARKNESS, the story first saw life as a novella, “Spawn of the Deadly Sea”, in the April 1957 issue of the SF digest SCIENCE FICTION ADVENTURES. (I’d be willing to bet that at least one reader of this blog owns a copy of that particular digest magazine.) A few years later he expanded the story into a full-length novel that was published by Holt, reprinted in paperback by Dell, and then finally reprinted again by Ace in a double volume with Silverberg’s 1957 novel MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH (which I’ll probably read and comment on eventually). That’s the edition I read. As far as I know, it hasn’t been reprinted since.

CONQUERORS FROM THE DARKNESS is exactly the sort of vivid, galloping action yarn that made me a science fiction fan in the first place. At first it seems like a heroic fantasy novel, set in some totally different universe than ours. The oceans cover the entire planet except for a few floating cities. The only commerce is between those cities, and keeping the seas safe for the merchant vessels is a Viking-like group known as the Sea-Lords. The hero of the novel, a young man named Dovirr, lives in one of the cities but wants to be a Sea-Lord and take to the oceans. He gets his wish and rapidly rises in the ranks, and along the way the reader learns that this is indeed Earth, a thousand years after alien invaders flooded the planet for reasons known only to them, preserving a little of humanity in those floating cities. After a while, the aliens abandoned Earth, also for reasons unknown, leaving it in a vaguely medieval state except for a few remnants of the alien technology that still works.

You’d think that that background, along with Dovirr’s life among the Sea-Lords and his ascent to a position of power among them, might be enough material for a novel, but if you’ve read many books like this, the twist about halfway through won’t come as any surprise: the alien Star Beasts return to take over the planet again, and Dovirr and his comrades have to find some way to stop them with swords and sailing ships.

I really enjoyed this book. In his introduction, Silverberg mentions reading the work of Robert E. Howard, and I can see some Howardian influence in CONQUERORS FROM THE DARKNESS, most notably in the way Dovirr manages to seize command of every situation in which he finds himself, much like Conan, and in a very Howard-like final line. The pace is fast, the writing colorful, and the inner 14-year-old in me just loved it. The adult reader in me thought some parts of the story could have been developed a little more and a little better, but hey, adult readers weren’t the target audience for this yarn in the first place. I really like a lot of Silverberg’s early SF (as well as the sort-core sleaze novels he wrote as Don Elliott), and if you want to settle back and have a fine time, I highly recommend CONQUERORS FROM THE DARKNESS.

Agent of T.E.R.R.A. News

Like Randy Johnson, I've heard from the daughter of Jack Jardine ("Larry Maddock") about my posts on his Agent of T.E.R.R.A. series. I loved these books when I read them back in the Sixties and think it's pretty cool that the author's daughter got in touch with me. The most exciting thing, though, is learning that manuscripts exist of two unpublished books in the series. I can tell you, if any publishers are interested, I'd buy those books right now.