Pulpetti
Pulpetti: short reviews and articles on pulps and paperbacks, adventure, sleaze, hardboiled, noir, you name it. Peppered with some comments on everyday life of a writer and politics (mainly in Finland) and also some very, very high-brow literature.
Updated: 6 hours 23 min ago
Pulpetti
Some months ago I wrote about my friend Jukka Murtosaari's attempt to break through in the US and send cover illustrations to Hard Case Crime's Charles Ardai. The illos were turned down, but now one of them has been published.
The eye-patch lady now illustrates Helena Numminen's short story collection Murhaavasti/Murderingly that had its launch party earlier today. The publisher is Turbator for whom Jukka has done lots of covers and for which I've edited some anthologies and collections. Helena's book collects 14 bitter and hard-hitting crime stories no ordinary publisher would touch. Two of the stories were originally published in my crime fiction fanzine, Isku, namely "Molotovin cocktail" (which is very urgent in its depiction of hospitalized old women) and "Vekan pedissä". Helena seems to have rewritten the ending of the latter. Highly recommended.
There were also two other books launched today: publisher Harri Kumpulainen's own collection of absurdist short-shorts and composer Matti Rag Paananen's collection of poetry that he wrote while in Africa. Both have already been reviewed here.
Jukka still has a great cover available - anyone? (Check the link to my earlier post.)
Does anyone recognize in what book this cover by Paul Rader was originally published? In Finland it illustrated a rather forgotten hardboiled mystery by Aylwin Lee Martin. Mustat helmet started the famous Ilves (= Tomcat) series in 1960. Martin's novel was originally called The Crimson Frame (Fawcett Gold Medal 1952) and I seem to remember it was okay, mildly reminiscent of The Maltese Falcon. The hero is P.I. Matt Hughes. (And he's not mentioned in the Thrilling Detective listings!)
I finished Hard Case Crime's latest title, David J. Schow's Gun Work, last night. I was really prepared to like this, since the cover is great and I knew of Schow's reputation as a good horror writer (I think I've read only some of his short stories in that genre). I did like the book, but not as much as I would've loved to.
There's plenty of violence in Gun Work, but maybe I was expecting too much of it, since I kept thinking: why don't they blast up more things? (I realize this isn't a very good argument against a book.) The action slows down at times, too. The plot is good and there are lots of twists, which I liked, and the opening sentence hooked me pretty well. But in the middle I lost some of my interest, when the hero of the book is being rescued and nurtured by an old Mexican. That part of the book could've been shortened - even though it would've been unrealistic, given how much the hero was being beat up and tortured in a Mexican kidnapping hotel. There are also some Mexican wrestlers in the book, but I didn't think Schow got much out of them.
After the middle, when the hero is getting his revenge, the book somewhat resembles the eighties' men's adventures series, like those by David Robbins and Rich Rainey: a group of heavily-armed men are after some baddies. In the end, the hero is left alone, so there can't be a sequel - at least with the same guys. There was some implausibility on how the group gets together - or at least one coincidence too many.
Gun Work is well-written, though, and you shouldn't listen to me too much, since others have liked this a great deal. Here's Ed Gorman and here's Somebody Dies.
I don't know whether any book by John Fowles could be called forgotten, since he must be one of the highest regarded British authors of the last thirty decades. But I don't see a lot of discussion on him lately, so when I read this, I thought I'd do a Forgotten Book post about it.
A Maggot is a historical novel, but it's not for a historical novel purist. The events of the book take place in the early 18th century, but the narrator makes clear that "he" narrates the text from the late 20th century, i.e. from now (the book is from 1983, if I remember correctly [it's not at hand and I don't feel like opening a new browser and checking]). In this regard, the book resembles Fowles's best-known novel, The French Lieutenant's Lady. Both are essays on the historical novel, not historical novels per se. Fowles also uses many different narrative techniques - some pieces of the book are told in present tense, some are transcripts of interviews or interrogations and some are the narrator's own ponderings and mini-essays. This can be annoying if you're accustomed to more straight-forward narratives.
What's it about, then? A Maggot tells about mysterious events regarding a disappeared duke (or whatever, I already forgot, a man of nobility in any case) and his servant who's found dead hanging from a tree. The events involve a known prostitute. There's also a sort of private eye, a lawyer who interrogates some of the people that had to do with the said events. There are fantasy or even science fiction elements in the book, but we never know if they are only imagination.
The reader is left unconscious of what actually happened, which works very well, in my view. I had some trouble getting into the book, but halfway through I was actually quite excited about it. The ending is powerful and links the book in actual events that have taken place. (If you want to know what they are about, read the book.)
Pulp fan and science fiction and fantasy author Gerald W. Page wrote a lengthy piece on one of the forgotten pulp Western writers, W. C. Tuttle, on the PulpMags list some time ago. It was intriguing enough, so I asked Gerald (or Jerry, as he signs his posts) for a permission to post his essay here in Pulpetti. (I'll be publishing one of Page's older stories, "The City in the Syrtis", in my fanzine, Seikkailukertomuksia/Adventure Stories.) In Finnish, there's one novel translated starring Hashknife and Sleepy. The novel in question is Diamond Knife (Timanttiloukku in Finnish, Kirjayhtymä 1968), which seems to have been published in a book form only in the UK (Collins, 1962). I don't know the original pulp appearance. Hashknife's name has been translated as Hakkelus.
There are also three stories in the Finnish pulp, Seikkailujen Maailma, one of them being a serial, "Katoavaa karjaa" in SM 11-12/1960-1/1961 (originally "Vanishing Brands" (originally Adventure, Jan. 1926). The serial stars Red Storm whose name has been translated as Palokärki Storm. The other two stories are "Lapsen ryöstö" (SM 12/1950; with marshall Jim Lane) and "Menneisyys herää elämään" (SM 9/1952) for which I haven't been able to find the original publishing info.
And here's Gerald Page:
W.C. Tuttle wrote westerns almost exclusively, and had at least five or six series going. During most of his career, you couldn't find him in a western pulp. He appeared in the general fiction magazines like Argosy and Short Stories.
His main series featured a couple of wandering cowboys named Hashknife Hartley and Sleepy Stevens. As I understand it, the series started in Adventure in 1917 as humor stories. But they transformed into a sort of easy-going action western typical of Tuttle. Our wandering heroes rode from place to place, always finding a town being overrun by rustlers or swindlers or bank robbers. They were prodded along by Bob Marsh, secretary of the Cattleman's Association, who would make use of them as range detectives - which they insisted they were not.
But Marsh knew that there were two great urges in Hartley's psyche. One, shared with Sleepy Stevens, was a desire to see what was on the other side of the next hill. But the other was an obsession to straighten out (he claimed he wasn't smart enough to solve them) any mystery he came across. The towns would all bear quite a resemblance to one another, as would the people they encountered. There would be an older sheriff, usually honest and with good intentions, though often in over his head. There would be a young man who was in love with a young woman, except that they were from families that their parents were feuding with one another. The sheriff would have a deputy with a sardonic, often somewhat dry sense of humor, who usually helped Hasknife and Sleepy get to the bottom of the mystery. Those deputies were so much alike that they seemed at times to transform the the series into stories about three men - one of whom changed his name but not his description or character, from story to story.
Because of all that, if you read a couple of Hasknife and Sleepy stories, you get the impression that there's not much there. But if you read several of them, it seems to me, you begin to detect small pleasures in the way Tuttle handles the formula. He has a fair, if unadventurous, knack for characterization, and his female characters can be quite original on occasion. At least they have the ability to occasionally surprise the reader by not being the same sort of cyphers female characters usually are in this sort of story. And though he doesn't write detective stories - his heroes usually guess the plot and a dying outlaw confirms it for them - he writes damned good little mysteries. These stories can be addictive and you quickly understand why they ran in the better pulps.
The Henry stories are even better.
Henry is Henry Conroy, a vaudeville comedian who comes across as being a lot like W.C. Fields. When vaudeville collapses, Henry finds himself stranded in a small town in Arizona. As a joke the townfolk elect him sheriff and as a joke he does a pretty good job. To go along with the spirit under which he was elected, he hires the town drunk as his deputy. The stories feature a lot of humor and for that reason, as well as the character of Henry himself, the formula sheriff vs. badguy stories take on a freshness that makes them seem more original than they are. I think a lot of people who hate westerns would enjoy the Henry stories. Those who like westerns would like them, too.
The Henry stories were set in the twentieth century, though much about his Arizona town seemed to have changed little from the nineteenth. Hashknife and Sleepy seemed occasionally to be working in a contemporary world, and occasionally to be definitely in the old west. You sometimes wondered if Tuttle actually knew what period he was writing about.
During the twenties and possibly into the thirties, Tuttle's main hero was a man with the unlikely name of Cultus Collins, a range detective and lawman who appeared in a number of short novels in Adventure, Short Stories and the like. Collins faded out. He reappeared in the 40s in a Hashknife and Sleepy story where he and Hashknife take down a gang of smugglers running drugs into the States from Mexico. I think that was Collins' swan song, though certainly not Hashknife's.
There was a series by Tuttle in the late forties and early fifties in Exciting Western about a couple of cowboys who seemed to be Hashknife and Sleepy played for laughs. I can't find a copy of Exciting Western to check their names right now. They were notably dumber than their horses and you wonder how the heck they could ever actually solve a mystery. There was also a series of short stories (Tuttle mainly wrote at around 20- or 25,000 words, a pretty good length for the kind of thing he wrote) in Argosy about a western town called Dogieville where the inhabitants would try out something such as a sport (baseball, foortball, etc.) or otherwise get involved in some comedy of errors in each story. At 5,000 words or so these stories are entertaining. But while Tuttle was often pretty good at lacing a "serious" story with humor, his attempts at outright humor often seemed strained. He didn't always write westerns, by the way. I've read two baseball stories by him, both about a pair of really stupid umpires working the minor leagues. They try much too hard to be funny and I don't recall them often succeeding. Ring Lardner and Robert E. Howard did it better.
I suspect a lot of modern pulp collectors, when they sit down to read a good story, pass up Tuttle. I suggest you give Henry a try - and if you can read two or three of them, Hashknife and Sleepy. Tuttle never takes himself too seriously and at least in the short novel length, never takes himself too lightly, either. He can be a lot of fun.
And here's Gerald Page:
W.C. Tuttle wrote westerns almost exclusively, and had at least five or six series going. During most of his career, you couldn't find him in a western pulp. He appeared in the general fiction magazines like Argosy and Short Stories.
His main series featured a couple of wandering cowboys named Hashknife Hartley and Sleepy Stevens. As I understand it, the series started in Adventure in 1917 as humor stories. But they transformed into a sort of easy-going action western typical of Tuttle. Our wandering heroes rode from place to place, always finding a town being overrun by rustlers or swindlers or bank robbers. They were prodded along by Bob Marsh, secretary of the Cattleman's Association, who would make use of them as range detectives - which they insisted they were not.
But Marsh knew that there were two great urges in Hartley's psyche. One, shared with Sleepy Stevens, was a desire to see what was on the other side of the next hill. But the other was an obsession to straighten out (he claimed he wasn't smart enough to solve them) any mystery he came across. The towns would all bear quite a resemblance to one another, as would the people they encountered. There would be an older sheriff, usually honest and with good intentions, though often in over his head. There would be a young man who was in love with a young woman, except that they were from families that their parents were feuding with one another. The sheriff would have a deputy with a sardonic, often somewhat dry sense of humor, who usually helped Hasknife and Sleepy get to the bottom of the mystery. Those deputies were so much alike that they seemed at times to transform the the series into stories about three men - one of whom changed his name but not his description or character, from story to story.
Because of all that, if you read a couple of Hasknife and Sleepy stories, you get the impression that there's not much there. But if you read several of them, it seems to me, you begin to detect small pleasures in the way Tuttle handles the formula. He has a fair, if unadventurous, knack for characterization, and his female characters can be quite original on occasion. At least they have the ability to occasionally surprise the reader by not being the same sort of cyphers female characters usually are in this sort of story. And though he doesn't write detective stories - his heroes usually guess the plot and a dying outlaw confirms it for them - he writes damned good little mysteries. These stories can be addictive and you quickly understand why they ran in the better pulps.The Henry stories are even better.
Henry is Henry Conroy, a vaudeville comedian who comes across as being a lot like W.C. Fields. When vaudeville collapses, Henry finds himself stranded in a small town in Arizona. As a joke the townfolk elect him sheriff and as a joke he does a pretty good job. To go along with the spirit under which he was elected, he hires the town drunk as his deputy. The stories feature a lot of humor and for that reason, as well as the character of Henry himself, the formula sheriff vs. badguy stories take on a freshness that makes them seem more original than they are. I think a lot of people who hate westerns would enjoy the Henry stories. Those who like westerns would like them, too.
The Henry stories were set in the twentieth century, though much about his Arizona town seemed to have changed little from the nineteenth. Hashknife and Sleepy seemed occasionally to be working in a contemporary world, and occasionally to be definitely in the old west. You sometimes wondered if Tuttle actually knew what period he was writing about.
During the twenties and possibly into the thirties, Tuttle's main hero was a man with the unlikely name of Cultus Collins, a range detective and lawman who appeared in a number of short novels in Adventure, Short Stories and the like. Collins faded out. He reappeared in the 40s in a Hashknife and Sleepy story where he and Hashknife take down a gang of smugglers running drugs into the States from Mexico. I think that was Collins' swan song, though certainly not Hashknife's.
There was a series by Tuttle in the late forties and early fifties in Exciting Western about a couple of cowboys who seemed to be Hashknife and Sleepy played for laughs. I can't find a copy of Exciting Western to check their names right now. They were notably dumber than their horses and you wonder how the heck they could ever actually solve a mystery. There was also a series of short stories (Tuttle mainly wrote at around 20- or 25,000 words, a pretty good length for the kind of thing he wrote) in Argosy about a western town called Dogieville where the inhabitants would try out something such as a sport (baseball, foortball, etc.) or otherwise get involved in some comedy of errors in each story. At 5,000 words or so these stories are entertaining. But while Tuttle was often pretty good at lacing a "serious" story with humor, his attempts at outright humor often seemed strained. He didn't always write westerns, by the way. I've read two baseball stories by him, both about a pair of really stupid umpires working the minor leagues. They try much too hard to be funny and I don't recall them often succeeding. Ring Lardner and Robert E. Howard did it better.I suspect a lot of modern pulp collectors, when they sit down to read a good story, pass up Tuttle. I suggest you give Henry a try - and if you can read two or three of them, Hashknife and Sleepy. Tuttle never takes himself too seriously and at least in the short novel length, never takes himself too lightly, either. He can be a lot of fun.
Hard Case Crime is one of the most exciting publishers working now in the crime fiction. They have inspired a lot of people (including me) and the illustrated covers for their books started the vogue that's visible in the covers for such authors as Megan Abbott and Linda L. Richards and such series as the new Penguin reprints of Ian Fleming's James Bond. And some of the books... I remember the best Fade to Blonde by Max Phillips and Money Shot by Christa Faust, but their reprint line is also thrilling (and it will see Jason Starr's long-lost masterpiece Fake I.D.!), covering well- and little-known authors. What's most exciting about them is that they've been up and running for quite a while now. The next month will see their fiftieth book, which is Charles Ardai's Fifty-to-One. Ardai is the founder and the head honcho of Hard Case Crime and he's written two books for the line under the Richard Aleas byline. I read Songs of Innocence and liked it a great deal - a private eye novel at its bleakest.
I finished Fifty-to-One late last night and I must say two things: the book entertained me very much and I was disappointed. There were some things that left me unsatisfied: the book is too long and the essential mystery is too easy to solve. It's also so obvious that it's a wonder the characters in the book don't come up with it.
I can understand where the length comes from, and it's partly due to the book's general idea: the book has fifty chapters, all named after Hard Case Crime books. It's a nice joke, but I thought there were some chapters that really didn't move things along. (I'm pretty sure Ardai knows this himself.) But Ardai writes smoothly, he has the genre settings down pat, and he has an energetic young woman as the hero, so I won't complain more. Also the setting is nice - Fifty-to-One is set in 1958 and Hard Case Crime is an actual publishing house working in the years of the paperback boom, doing books like Eye the Jury and Hot-House Honey. (Someone should write these and the current, real-life Hard Case Crime should publish them.)
Ardai says in his afterword that one of the chapters is written by Max Phillips, the co-founder of Hard Case Crime and the writer of Fade to Blonde. I'm pretty sure it's the chapter 27, called "The Peddler" (after Richard S. Prather's reprint novel), with the memorable character of Royal Barrone in it. The dialogue feels exactly the same as in Fade to Blonde. (Or then it's the chapter 28.) Is there a reward for this?
The book will have a gallery of all the 50 Hard Case Crime covers. Too bad my ARC didn't have that... Out in December, like I said.
Ardai says in his afterword that one of the chapters is written by Max Phillips, the co-founder of Hard Case Crime and the writer of Fade to Blonde. I'm pretty sure it's the chapter 27, called "The Peddler" (after Richard S. Prather's reprint novel), with the memorable character of Royal Barrone in it. The dialogue feels exactly the same as in Fade to Blonde. (Or then it's the chapter 28.) Is there a reward for this?
The book will have a gallery of all the 50 Hard Case Crime covers. Too bad my ARC didn't have that... Out in December, like I said.
Here's Mickey Mouse dressed up in a woollen shirt. The picture is from a DDR broschure for making up clothes for dolls and other toys - I found it in a thrift store earlier this week (the broschure is actually in Russian). I can't find a year in the whole thing, but it must be from the sixties.
I don't really remember whether I've mentioned it here or not, but I wrote a foreword to a reprint a small publisher working in Turku, Savukeidas, did a month back. It's Kaarlo Uskela's Pillastunut runohepo (The Crazed-Up Pegasos, if you will) from 1921. The book was deemed revolutionary (which it is, very much indeed) and the remaining copies of the print run were destroyed. I believe also some of the copies already sold to customers were taken away and burned - the book is really scarce. I don't believe it for a minute, but let it be said that a book antiquarian I know told me that the book, if it can be found, would cost 1,000 euros.
Well, here it is anyway. The book is not mine, I'm sorry to say, but it is almost mine, since it belongs to a dear friend of mine with whom I've been swapping books for two decades now. He borrowed the book for me when I was writing the foreword (which actually became an afterword in the process). Savukeidas made a pictureless cover for the book, because they didn't know I had the book with the illustrated cover - more's the pity! The cover is done by the famous Ola Fogelberg, who's best known for his Pekka Puupää comics here in Finland. The colours show anarchistic ideology: black and red.
Should you want to know more about Uskela's poems (which are pretty old-fashioned and metric, but show some flair for bad taste and black humour), ask. I'll be writing more about this stuff at my Finnish-speaking blog, Julkaisemattomia, here. But not now. Suffice it to say that Kaarlo Uskela died in 1922, after having refused to have a rotten tooth taken care of. And that after the Civil War he was put in a concentration camp for some months in 1919. There are some really touching poems about this in the book.
Some days ago I posted a brief item about Norman Mailer writing a story for the horror pulp magazine, Weird Tales. The discussion over Mailer on the PulpMags e-mail list continued and I got the permission to post some stuff from there to here. (This discussion is probably pretty meaningless to someone who has no knowledge about the old pulp mags.)
Someone said that if Mailer's story was rejected, it must've been pretty bad, since Weird Tales published so much terrible stories. Pulp and adventure fan Morgan Holmes wrote (and I asked his permission to post his response here):
I wouldn't assume that Mailer's story submitted to WEIRD TALES was terrible. [The Weird Tales editor] Farnsworth Wright was a mediocre editor who was lucky. Take the Lovecraft circle out of the equation and what do you have left? Wright ran lots bad stories while rejecting Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness" which Lovecraft worked on to make into a two-part serial. Wright rejected it saying "not convincing."
Lovecraft didn't submit anything directly to Wright for about six years. We probably lost at least six stories from Lovecraft because of Wright. Wright also rejected Clark Ashton Smith's "Abominations of Yondo" in 1925. Smith's fiction writing career could have started five years earlier.
Wright rejected two stories by Henry Kuttner about King Alfred saying they were "delectibly weird" but gave no reason for rejection. Kuttner pounded out the first Elak story, "Thunder in the Dawn" as a satire in response. He wrote a letter to Clark Ashton Smith wondering if any of the readers would catch the satirical elements in it.
Cap Shaw turned BLACK MASK around, F. Orlin Tremaine took ASTOUNDING STORIES to the next level. WEIRD TALES could have been more successful if there had been an editor willing to take risks and not second guess some of the readers. Mailer might have sent something in that might have needed some polish. Wright probably just rejected it instead of making suggested improvements. I have noted some interesting writers in the late 1920s that had one or two stories and then disappeared. A good editor would have been working with those neophytes. If you take Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and C. L. Moore out of the 1930s "Golden Age," you don't have much left.
There was also some discussion over when Mailer wrote the said story. The original contributor said Mailer had said to him that he wrote it in "his middle teens, or maybe younger". So it could've been before 1940 - Mailer was born in 1923. (And then, said someone, he would've sent the story to another editor that Farnsworth Wright, namely Dorothy McIlwraith.)
Someone said that if Mailer's story was rejected, it must've been pretty bad, since Weird Tales published so much terrible stories. Pulp and adventure fan Morgan Holmes wrote (and I asked his permission to post his response here):
I wouldn't assume that Mailer's story submitted to WEIRD TALES was terrible. [The Weird Tales editor] Farnsworth Wright was a mediocre editor who was lucky. Take the Lovecraft circle out of the equation and what do you have left? Wright ran lots bad stories while rejecting Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness" which Lovecraft worked on to make into a two-part serial. Wright rejected it saying "not convincing."
Lovecraft didn't submit anything directly to Wright for about six years. We probably lost at least six stories from Lovecraft because of Wright. Wright also rejected Clark Ashton Smith's "Abominations of Yondo" in 1925. Smith's fiction writing career could have started five years earlier.
Wright rejected two stories by Henry Kuttner about King Alfred saying they were "delectibly weird" but gave no reason for rejection. Kuttner pounded out the first Elak story, "Thunder in the Dawn" as a satire in response. He wrote a letter to Clark Ashton Smith wondering if any of the readers would catch the satirical elements in it.
Cap Shaw turned BLACK MASK around, F. Orlin Tremaine took ASTOUNDING STORIES to the next level. WEIRD TALES could have been more successful if there had been an editor willing to take risks and not second guess some of the readers. Mailer might have sent something in that might have needed some polish. Wright probably just rejected it instead of making suggested improvements. I have noted some interesting writers in the late 1920s that had one or two stories and then disappeared. A good editor would have been working with those neophytes. If you take Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and C. L. Moore out of the 1930s "Golden Age," you don't have much left.
There was also some discussion over when Mailer wrote the said story. The original contributor said Mailer had said to him that he wrote it in "his middle teens, or maybe younger". So it could've been before 1940 - Mailer was born in 1923. (And then, said someone, he would've sent the story to another editor that Farnsworth Wright, namely Dorothy McIlwraith.)
The image above is from 1942, when Mailer could've been writing his story for the magazine. I don't know the cover illustrator, maybe Boris Dolgov? (I'm not really good in pulp illustrators, I'm sorry to say. Maybe someone can tell.)
Then at the Fictionmags e-mail list there was a discussion of stychomythia (in which someone says something and someone else grabs the sentence and ends it, just like Hewey, Dewey ja Louie do in Donald Duck). This has been also used in many paperback novels when a writer wanted to fill pages quickly and wrote short sentences that made up a whole paragraph (which may not actually be an example of stychomythia). However, Malzberg wrote on the said list:
I made my own contribution to stychomythia in DIARY OF A PARISIAN CHAMBERMAID, Midwood Books 1969 (my 16-hour novel).
The protagonist wrote a poem.
Quite a long poem.
A long poem of short lines.
It absorbed five pages.
I remember the first line:
"Paris is a nipple."
I asked Malzberg more about this and he wrote back:
[The book in question was] DIARY OF A PARISIAN CHAMBERMAID, by Claudine Dumas. Midwood Books 1969. 60,000 words. Written on St. Valentine's Day that year. I could do something like that in those years. Mozart wrote the Paris Symphony in three days. But I am no Mozart. Nor is DIARY OF A PARISIAN CHAMBERMAID the Paris Symphony.
(I understand there's a NaNoWriMo going on at the moment (National Novel Writing Month, if you don't know). Who needs thirty days to write a novel? 60,000 words! I'd always thought Malzberg's book would've been something like 30,000 words. Me, I've been writing and rewriting a novel of that length for years now!)
Sorry, no picture available! If anyone reading this blog has the said book, send me a scan!
This is something I've come across in Finland as well. Even though the best hardboiled crime fiction is serious literature and not just slam-bang pulpy action, people still seem to think hardboiled is only about raincoats and dangerous dames. Like Christa says in her own post, German critics said Hard Case Crime is only "retro". There's nothing retro in Money Shot, it's modern, it's contemporary, it doesn't have any knowing cultural references. Not to be retro, hardboiled has to be ultra-serious to be successful in Finland, à la Dennis Lehane. (Lucky thing we have Michael Connelly. He walks the narrow line between serious and ultra-serious.)
Some writers in Finland seem also to have decided that if hardboiled crime fiction is not taken seriously, then hell with it - they write stuff that veers towards parody and pastiche, with too many jokes and in-jokes and not enough plot and character development. (At least for me. Some of these writers are very popular in Finland.)
I can see, though, why German literary critics are quick to attack hardboiled crime fiction. It's because their own pulp tradition is thin, even though it's decades old, and of not very good quality. The short Romanhäfte à la Jason Dark and Jerry Cotton (not to say anything about German Westerns!) are poor compared to their American or even British counterparts - more poorly written and executed. (This is also one of the reasons this kind of stuff is not taken more seriously in Finland. "You're interested in hardboiled? Ah, that's, what's it called now, pulp, right? And pulp is, let me think, Jerry Cotton, right?" And this is actually quite common.)
I'd very much like to see Money Shot translated in Finnish. It's a serious novel, told in a serious voice, but it's still touching and contains lots of sex and violence. That's a killing combination. With powers invested in me, we just might see the book appear also in here.
(Hat tip to Peter Rozovsky, whose delightful blog I read all too rarely!)
I've been editing a collection of Veikko Hannuniemi's sea stories for a book. Hannuniemi was a sea captain stationed in Turku and he wrote short stories from the late thirties to the late sixties. He also has three sea novels to his name. One wonders why he is so little-known today - the man wrote at least hundred short stories. The novels aren't bad either.This is about something different however, but related to him. Here are two illustrations from the Koti-Posti magazine he contributed to. Both are signed "pk" and are, to my mind, very good pin-uppish illos, with a somewhat modern slant to them. I don't know who "pk" was, but I'd really like to find out. His line is very assured and easy at the same time.
Sorry about the poor scans. I took photocopies at the university library and scanned them, with some colours totally fading out of the picture. Will try to come up with better ones.
So I'm making some changes. Nothing big and the pulp stuff keeps on coming, that's for sure, but I'm directing my Finnish-language posts to another blog. I'm not setting up a new blog, but I'll be posting my stuff about politics and shit to the Julkaisemattomia/The Unpublished blog that I've had for some years now as some sort of a sidekick blog. Now it'll become the main blog for my Finnish-speaking blog posts. So, all the stuff about my personal life, national politics or some such will be there. I won't promise I'll post there often, but I'll be peppering the blog with what was the purpose of the blog in the first place: my unpublished stuff or stuff that was published in too ephemeral places for a general reader to find. (Peppering? That's some spicy stuff, I'll tell you...)
We'll see how this keeps on working. And don't worry: if I'll be drawing any new comics about the adventures of Ottilia and Kauto, I'll be posting them here.
Okay, I run into trouble already - got to thinking where I'll post the old Finnish pulp and paperback covers (and I have a patch of vintage Finnish pin-up illos coming). Umm... Decided! I'll post them here. The Julkaisemattomia blog will remain a rather non-visual blog.
Mailer lived at the foot of my street (I still pass his house everyday) and I ran into him quite a lot in later years. He told me once he submitted a story to WEIRD TALES when he was a teenager, but it was rejected.
I don't know if this is mentioned in any of the Norman Mailer biographies.
Sorry, a bit busy and should be on holiday, since Ottilia is with us for this week.
Näin kirjoittaa Vaskikirjojen Erkka Leppänen:
Kustantamo Vaskikirjoilta on ilmestynyt kuukauden sisällä kaksi uutta fantasiakirjaa.
Jokin aika sitten ilmestyi Roger Zelaznyn Avalonin luodit, joka on jatko-osa Amberin yhdeksälle prinssille ja Amberin kronikoiden toinen osa. Vetävää, klassista, pulp-henkistä seikkailua.
http://www.vaskikirjat.fi/amber2.html
Eilen painosta tuli Ellen Kushnerin Thomas Riiminiekka, palkittu, kaunis, jopa eroottisia sävyjä sisältävä itsenäinen fantasiaromaani. Johanna Vainikainen-Uusitalo on jälleen loistanut käännöksessä.
http://www.vaskikirjat.fi/thomas.html
Molemmat kirjat ovat saatavilla Helsingin kirjamessuilta Suomen Pienkustantajien yhteisestä myyntipisteestä messuhintaan. Tietenkin niitä voi tilata myös Vaskikirjojen kotisivujen kautta suoraan kotiin.
http://www.vaskikirjat.fi/kauppa.htm
The mail brought the newest entry in the Hard Case Crime line, David J. Schow's Gun Work. It looks absolutely thrilling, but I'm truly sorry to say that I don't have the time right now to read it. Will try in the coming weeks, however. (I also received the ARC for Charles Ardai's Fifty-To-One, which is famously the fiftieth Hard Case Crime. Here's to you, guys.)
Here's the opening line from Gun Work that will hook any reader:
How Barney came to occupy a room on the wrong side of management in a hostage hotel deep inside Mexico City had to do with his friend Carl Ledbetter and one of those scary phone calls that come not always in the middle of the night, but whenever you are most asleep and foggy.
Gotta love that cover (by Joe DeVito), too, even though it's strictly anything but PC.
I also dropped in by the digital printing house at the Turku university and lo and behold! they'd printed three new works for me!
One of these is the new issue of Pulp, my fanzine, for which I should finally set up a blog. This has a large article by Jukka Murtosaari on the Holland-origin paperback series for juveniles four of which were translated in Finnish in 1958-1959. Called Mikro-Sarja. Will try to remember to post covers later.
Then there is a poetry collection called Kauhajoen runot/The Poems of Kauhajoki, which refers to the Kauhajoki massacre a while back. (I realize now that I didn't get back to this theme, even though I promised so in a comment.) I posted one of the poems here in an English translation. This is a small pamphlet, of 18 pages.
The last one is also a pamphlet, a bit larger, but still only 18 pages. It's one of my mildly parodic private eye Joe Novak stories, this time called The Case of the Frozen Detective. It has Novak running away from an oil gangster whose moll he had been dancing and flirting with. Nothing memorable, I'm sure, but maybe a leisurely way to spend 30 minutes or so.
This may seem a bit weird. I'm publishing a very serious collection of poems and a intentionally stupid private eye story at the same time. But life is full of paradoxes, isn't it? But all these are for sale! Just ask!
(Sen verran piti vielä sanomani, että puhun Waltari-kirjasta BTJ:n osastolla lauantaina klo 12. Huomenna torstaina klo 12 puhun esipuheesta, jonka tein Savukeitaalle Kaarlo Uskelan runokirjan Pillastunut runohepo uusintapainokseen (tai siis kai puhumme ennen kaikkea kommunistirunoilija Uskelasta), ja perjantaina yhdessä Villen ja Vesan kanssa juttelemme Eroticasta. Se on klo 15. Kättäni saa nykiä messuilla, jos osun vastaan.)
There's much to like in the film. I love Barry Sonnenfeld's photography, with smoke rings reflecting blue neon lights. I love the characters and actors, Dan Hedaya and Frances McDormand. We're never told much about them, but still we know who they are and where they come from. Someone should write a book about Loren, the private eye of the film, played by the great M. Emmet Walsh - he must've had some interesting cases. But especially I love how the audience is kept at the edge of their seats: the Coens never tell what's going to happen or even what's happening. Important story points come only later. And it's done with great verve.
Here's the explanation. My dad bought a year ago the remainders of a used book store in Tampere and I've been carrying many of the English-language books home to Turku bag by bag. The last bag - before this one, I mean - contained for example Lionel White's Hostage for a Hood (the original GM edition), Cleve Adams's Private Eye and Lionel Olay's The Dark Corners of the Night.
Who says life isn't nice? Here's hoping I'll be able to do posts at least on some of these books.
The Finnish Whodunnit Society has started a blog.
I took another day off (I've been having back problems and my masseur told me to rest for a few days) and read some non-work books. Well, nothing I read is absolutely non-work, but at the moment I'm not writing a reference book on Australian Western writers.So it was like rest to me when I picked up a Finnish translation of Clint McCall's Half Breed. McCall is a pseudonym and I think this was written by Keith Hetherington, one of the best Australian paperbackers - who's still working full time. I don't know when Half Breed was first published, but I believe it's a product of the sixties. It might also be from the seventies, since the hero is a half-breed and the portrait of him is certainly sympathetic, even though the guy is a born crook, a sociopath and a killer. Furthermore, I believe that the original publisher is Cleveland, which has been the foremost publisher of Australian Westerns. All their books are, I believe, 96-page booklets. Someone really should compile a bibliography of Australian Westerns! The Finnish translation (roughly Doomed To Be a Criminal) is from 1981 (I read a 1990 reprint which I bought for 20 cents recently) and belongs to the long-lived Lännensarja series. [Lännensarja = The Western Series. Not very imaginative, huh?]
Half Breed is a tale of Billy Slaughter who's given no slack, because he's a half-breed, and he's fast living the life of crime, smuggling rifles to Indians, robbing banks and trains and finally killing someone. He takes another identity and even ends up married, but then he's recognized and he's sentenced to jail. He gets out for good behaviour, but after getting his revenge he starts all over again.
The story is episodic, but it doesn't lack dramatic impact. McCall writes solid hardboiled prose and moves things along swiftly. Even without any padding he creates a sympathetic picture of young Billy and finally, it seems, has him a happy future.
I've been wondering about one thing: how come Australian Westerns are always so solid and good, when their crime fiction with series like Larry Kent and Marc Brody is so awful? Of course they had Carter Brown, but I don't think he really is up there with even his second-rate American counterparts. (It's been years since I read anything as by K.T. McCall, so won't say anything about theose books.) Now, of course they have writers to be taken seriously, such as Peter Corris and Shane Maloney.
I also read a Finnish Western from the early eighties. It was part of the FinnWest series, also published as a booklet (shorter than 96 pages, though), and published anonymously. My bet on the writer's identity is Juhani Salomaa, who also created the character in the mid-seventies. Clint McCall was definitely better, I'm sorry to say. It had impact, while this lingers on for ages, before it speeds off and then it's over too fast.
By the way, here's a link to a bookseller's collection of Australian paperbacks.
My contribution to Patti Abbott's Friday's Forgotten Book series. (Posted already on Thursday, since I don't know if I have the time tomorrow.)
Now there's another financial crisis on. As I was reading Ackroyd's book, I said to Elina that why everyone still thinks capitalism is a good way to handle economy when it seems that the tendency to break down and go into a crisis is inherently built into it. I don't think there were any financial crises during the era 1930-1980 when the economy was regulated heavily throughout the world, starting from the Roosevelt era United States. (And the financial growth was steadier and even faster than it was before the current crisis.) These post-1980 crises started when the regulation ceased - and that was a deliberate decision from the politicians, not just some freak coincidence or a sign of the market's own will. After 1989 there have been at least three global financial crises - in twenty years! And still people think that capitalism is a good system! (Of course the era 1930-1980 contained a world war, the Cold War, lots of international conflicts throughout the world etc., lots of political suppression, but in the Western world, or in the free countries, if you will, and especially in the Nordic countries, many things were better than they are now.)
PS. Hmm.. did I mention the Poe biography only in a comment on Patti Abbott's blog?
I said earlier that it seems that Coleman had a stricter editor at Plume. I'd've taken out almost all the stuff that was put in italics to show Coleman's private eye, Moe Prager, thinking to himself. I didn't find the bits necessary and they stopped the narrative flow. Some of the dialogue was a bit too cryptic for me and there were some passages that I thought were overwritten (and at times I thought that Moe Prager is a bore to be thinking all his thoughts about mankind and loneliness and angst and fear. C'mon, man, get a grip!).
But all in all, Soul Patch is a good example of the strong condition the American private eye novel is in. I'd like to bring Coleman to the Finnish audiences, but we'll see about that.
PS. Did you know that in Finnish "soul patch" is also called "pussy brush"?
The best first novel and the best paperback novel I both read, but unfortunately never managed to talk about them here in Pulpetti: I think I mentioned Sean Chercover's Big City, Bad Blood, but I know I didn't mention Charles Ard.. ehem, Richard Aleas's Songs of Innocence. Even though I thought it was great - a private eye book just won't get any bleaker than this. And Aleas writes with ease and keeps you turning the pages, even though you know the ending will be grim. I also liked Chercover's book, but it was a bit too long on the private eye's personal life even when it didn't seem to be important to the book and the plot - compare it to Coleman's Soul Patch in which Moe Prager's love life is essential to the plot.
Mind you, these are not average private eye novels in any way. There are still many readers (especially in Finland - since we don't get these books in Finnish) who think that the private eye genre is locked somewhere in the era and style of Raymond Chandler or that it's just some lone hero joking around and drinking booze à la our very own Reijo Mäki. All these three books bring fresh air to the genre that many thought was dead by the eighties.
(Which was nonsense in the first place. [Which I came to understand only later. {But more on that later.}])
We took a day off, Elina and I, last Friday and jumped on a train and travelled to Salo (which is half an hour away from Turku) and hunted its thrift stores (and the only second hand book store which didn't yield much). And I came back with over 60 books.
The story requires to be told. We were at Fida, the local store of the Christian thrift store chain (much like Oxfam in the UK), and it seemed there wasn't much of anything, certainly not in the way of books - the usual thrift store stuff, handbags from the nineties, boring T-shirts and way too large jeans. But then I noticed the door to the warehouse was open. I noticed there were some cardboard boxes with books. They didn't look interesting, but I decided to look around a bit more. I noticed there were some paperbacks in boxes, leaning against the wall, stacked over each other. The paperbacks seemed to be in English, and they seemed to be old.. and then I noticed they were science fiction paperbacks. Names: Moorcock, Piers Anthony, Andre Norton, Asimov... you name it.
I checked further, from what I could see. I managed to take some out of the boxes. Edmond Hamilton, Kornbluth-Pohl, Sturgeon, Henry Kuttner... very much old stuff, Pyramids and Ballantines and Beacons, with covers by Richard Powers and others. Also newer books, DAWs and such. My heart beat fast, when I walked to the manager of the store and asked whether I could take a closer look. The guy - mustachioed, with stupid looking eyeglasses - said they are not for sale. "Why?" I cried. "They haven't been checked and put on the shelves." "What do you think if I'll take a look and buy a bunch and save you some trouble? Look, I'm not from here, I don't know when I'll be coming back", I tried. It seemed at first I wouldn't be able to turn his head - and actually I couldn't, since he let me go through only four of five boxes. There were at least eight! "How much do these cost?" I asked, my sweaty hands holding British Panther hardbacks from the fifties: H.J. Campbell, Roy Sheldon, H.K. Bulmer... "Paperbacks 40 cents, but hardbacks cost more", said the guy. Then my eyes hit on a Panther paperback, from 1952, by A.V. Clarke and H.K. Bulmer. Space Treason. I gotta have this!
Then the guy let me take a look. He didn't like it, since, as he said, this put other customers in an inequal position. Like I care. I thought about saying to the guy that no one in Salo will buy any of these, but refrained. I also refrained when he said that they'll be throwing away the trash, such as the witchcraft books. Then I delved into the books.
Came up buying over 60. For 40 cents a piece. Nice ladies at the cashier said that the old English-language hardbacks are also 40 cents a piece. And they gave me discount! I paid 25 euros for the whole bunch. And what great finds there were: J.T. McIntosh's World Out of Mind (Perma 1953), Pohl-Kornbluth's Gladiator-at-Law (Ballantine 1955; well, not in a very good shape, but still), de Camp and Pratt's The Incomplete Enchanter (Pyramid 1960), Farmer's The Other Log of Phileas Fogg (DAW 1973)... These are just some examples that I picked up from the stack. Space Treason seems to be scarce and commands 50$ at Abebooks... Vow! Some of the books were in an extremely good shape, some not - and some had been damaged while in the warehouse!
I've been thinking that I should've said to the manager of the store: "I'll buy them all" and pay, say, 150 euros for the whole bunch (and think later how I'll get them back home to Turku), but maybe I'll make another trip to Salo in the coming weeks. Now, if they'd been crime novels of the same era... I'd be in hospital from a stroke. But when I'd've managed to crawl back, I'd've said: "I'll buy them all." (At least I should've taken all the books that hinted at witchcraft or some such "trash", so they wouldn't've get discarded and thrown into garbage.)
I have no idea what these books were doing in a little town like Salo. It must've been some local science fiction aficionado who's been buying books from the fifties on and concentrated on the English language. Nevertheless, this was a thrilling experience.
But then I picked up the new Poe biography by Peter Ackroyd. I was tired as hell, but the book grabbed me and I read till midnight. It's a very good biography - and it's short, so it's highly recommended. (The Finnish translation just came out. I understood the book was published in UK only this year.)
Over at Facebook, I commented Ed Lynskey's status. His computer had broken down or something and he was thinking whether he should take out his type writer. I wrote, sure, type writers generate pulpish stuff all by themselves. Here's an example. It's a beginning of a story I typed just for the fun of it.It goes roughly like this:
She was something I hadn't seen during my whole career. Just pure flesh and yearning. The combination was special to say the least, and I just had to gulp down my bourbon. I would've done that, no matter what. Her husky voice also told me what I'd already expected: she'd bring trouble into my life.
Elina was cleaning up and found a clip from the Finnish rock magazine, Rumba, that I'd saved in order to scan a piece from it and post here. It's from an interview with the Japanese rock band, Electric Eel Shock.It says roughly like this:
"The members of the band are known to have backgrounds with lots of rock credibility. The drummer or the band was working in a factory that manifactured false teeth. The bass player played for years in a Japanese funk band, while Aki still writes about fishing for the most important Japanese fishing magazine."
Rock cred? Sure. But then I have more rock cred than these guys. I mean, I've been offered marijuana once.
(Source: Rumba 4/2008.)
One picture more from Muestrario Gaucho.
I picked this book for 50 cents at the university library's remainder sale. I didn't know what I'd do with it, but the subject was interesting enough and the illustrations beautiful. Gauchos, if you don't know, are the Argentine equivalent of the Wild West Cowboys, always driving cattle and shooting their way out. (As if... But you know what I'm talking about.) The book contains short essays on the Gaucho way of life. Since I don't speak Spanish, I don't know what the texts are really about. I've found a good home for this and am sending it overseas, but thought I'd post the cover and some illos first.
Elbio Bernárdez Jacques's Muestrario Gaucho was published by Ciordia & Rodriguez, Buenos Aires, in 1953. The illustrations are by Juan Hohmann.
As for the Gauchos, there's a book on them, written by an American (I believe), called Amongst the Gauchos. It was translated in Finnish and published here in 1947. And John Benteen's AKA Richard Meade's (or was Ben Haas his real name?) Fargo has at least one paperback adventure set in Argentine in the 1910s.
As some readers of this blog may remember, I've been doing a book on British pulp and paperback fiction for years now. It's been on a hiatus for over almost a year, mainly because I haven't had any financial support to be able to concentrate on it, but also because I find most of the British books of this sort to be a bit dull. In average, the British paperbacks are worse than their American counterparts. I don't know why this is, but I'll take a second-rate American paperbacker over a second-rate British paperbacker anytime.This book, however, proved to be something better. I also had a right to suspect it would be: its author, Jimmy Sangster, has been one of the most prominent British screenwriters from the late fifties on, and he has penned many classic films, mainly for Hammer: The Curse of Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mummy, Taste of Fear, The Nanny... Sangster has also written some outright trash, but I read from a recent interview that he thinks the scriptwriter is not to blame, since the script always gets altered, there are always at least eight people at it before it hits the screen.
Sangster has also written thrillers, seven according to Hubin's 1975 bibliography (sorry, it was at hand and my portable's CD drive doesn't work, so I can't check a more recent edition of the biblio). His first novel is The Man Who Could Cheat Death from 1959 (Avon; so it's an American book?), written with Barre Lyndon. There was a movie based on this, so it's probably a novelization. His first solo novel seems to have been a novelization of his own script, The Terror of the Tongs (Digit 1962), which seems like it was a paperback original. The film is not horror - it's more of an actioneer. His first original book was Private I (Triton 1967), which I'm reading at the moment and which he followed with Foreign Exchange (Triton 1968). And that's the book I recently read and enjoyed. Sangster is no second-rate British paperbacker (and this was originally a hardback, even though the Finnish translation was a PBO; FWIW, it's Manhattan No. 73, from 1970).
Private I and Foreign Exchange feature John Smith, who works as a private eye after retiring from the British Intelligence. In the both books he gets a new job from his former boss, Max, and he takes both with long teeth. (Isn't this an appropriate phrase here?) John Smith is a coward and not very good at his job, and his PI jobs are not much: usually he peeks at husbands cheating on their wives. His spy assignments are not much better: in Foreign Exchange he's imported to the Soviet Union, playing to be a tractor salesman, in order to get caught by the KGB, because the Brits want to change some political prisoners with the Soviets and they need a pawn. As you might guess, John Smith gets into trouble, especially when he's told that the Soviet spy the Brits want to swap is actually dead. Smith is sentenced into 15 years of hard labour in Siberia. There's not much action in the book, but it moves along swiftly and Sangster makes John Smith a sympathetic character, who's rather close to Stephen "Hank Janson" Frances's Leftist spy John Gail. The book is funny, but it isn't parodic, which is a good thing in my mind (parodies become outdated pretty soon). Smith's personal life is drawn into the mix with interesting results. There seems to be a TV movie based on this, anyone seen it? (And Private I, too.)
I'm only some 50 pages into Private I, but it also reads like a very good book. Recommended. (Besides the Finnish and the American editions of Foreign Exchange you'll have the American edition of Private I. Sleazy, huh? It's by Lancer.)
My contribution to this Friday's Forgotten Book series, concocted by Patti Abbott.
I've edited a collection of the Western short stories of two Finnish writers, namely Joni Skiftesvik and Totti Karpela and wrote a lengthy introduction to Finnish Westerns in general (I might post the text on one of my other blogs some day). I'd really like to do a more thorough anthology of Finnish Western short stories, but I don't really think there's a market for this kind of book. We'll see. I have another Western book coming, though, more on that later. (And possibly some others, too.)
The book will be out in just two days and the launch party is at the Turku Book Fair. Here's the cover by Jukka Murtosaari. The contents are as follows:
Juri Nummelin: Lukijalle / For the reader
Juri Nummelin: Suomalaisen lännenromaanin vaiheet / The history of Finnish Western fiction
Joni Skiftesvik:
Menneisyyden vanki, FinnWest 12/1983
Elämä edessä – elämä takana, FinnWest 2–5/1985
Larryn lomapäivä, Kostaja 2/1984
Etsivä Moore ja jokirosvot, Kostaja 3/1984
Kuolemaantuomitun pako, Kostaja 5/1984
Totti Karpela:
Maine ja kunnia, Ruudinsavu 2/2006
Työtä arkkunikkarille, Seikkailujen Maailma 5/1959 (julkaistu salanimellä T. Teller)
Kaupunki ilman lakia, Seikkailujen Maailma 5–6/1960 (julkaistu ilman tekijän nimeä)
Hylkiön mahdollisuus, julkaisematon
Juri Nummelin: Lukijalle / For the reader
Juri Nummelin: Suomalaisen lännenromaanin vaiheet / The history of Finnish Western fiction
Joni Skiftesvik:
Menneisyyden vanki, FinnWest 12/1983
Elämä edessä – elämä takana, FinnWest 2–5/1985
Larryn lomapäivä, Kostaja 2/1984
Etsivä Moore ja jokirosvot, Kostaja 3/1984
Kuolemaantuomitun pako, Kostaja 5/1984
Totti Karpela:
Maine ja kunnia, Ruudinsavu 2/2006
Työtä arkkunikkarille, Seikkailujen Maailma 5/1959 (julkaistu salanimellä T. Teller)
Kaupunki ilman lakia, Seikkailujen Maailma 5–6/1960 (julkaistu ilman tekijän nimeä)
Hylkiön mahdollisuus, julkaisematon
Nota bene in Finnish: kirja sisältää kaikki Skiftesvikin kirjoittamat lännentarinat, Totti Karpelalta jätettiin yksi pois hänen omasta pyynnöstään (ensimmäinen, "Neljän sheriffin kaupunki", joka ilmestyi Seikkailujen Maailmassa alkuvuonna 1959). "Hylkiön mahdollisuus" kirjoitettiin 1960-luvun alussa, mutta se ei ilmestynyt Seikkailujen Maailmassa, koska lehti lakkautettiin. Karpela on sen tätä kirjaa varten kirjoittanut uudestaan. Hänen muut vanhat novellinsa on kevyesti editoitu ja hän on itsekin ne käynyt läpi. Skiftesvikin tekstit on julkaistu suurin piirtein sellaisenaan kuin ne alun perin lehdissäkin ilmestyivät.
I did analyze the event, mainly in some blogs, here and elsewhere, but I don't think those did much good to anything or anyone. Certainly not to those who were in midst of their grief, who'd lost some of their loved ones. I can't imagine what they feel and think.
But writing about it is all I can do. Maybe beside bringing up my own children in respect of other human beings and everything living.
I've been questioning also my own role. I've been touting violent fiction here in my blog and my reviews and articles for the last ten years. I've helped starting a book line that will feature books in which people maim and kill each other, in some just for the sake of it. And why? Some books - the best books in this vein - always have a some sort of quality, a dignity in which the people in the book are portrayed, but not all. Some are just fun. And it's the fun part that's getting to me. Is it really okay to show people kill each other just because it's fun? Take Kill Bill for instance. Well, okay, I didn't like the film (and I've been very disappointed with Tarantino, since I really, really loved Reservoir Dogs: it had dignity his later films don't, the main exception being the very mature Jackie Brown), but still I've got feelings lately that I should've rallied against the film, marched down the street and shouted: "Ban Bill! Ban Bill!" or some such nonsense (in which I don't believe for a minute).
This is probably not making any sense. Films or books didn't have anything to do with the wacko that killed ten in Kauhajoki - but I still have a nagging feeling that the guy was thinking of Die Hard and Steven Seagal and John Woo, when he shot the glass walls down in the school hall. The aesthetics of action film came alive in those minutes. (But, hey, I've never said I liked Seagal or Woo. Die Hard, the first, is a very good film, probably one of the best actioneers of the eighties, but nothing to follow ethically or aesthetically in my books.)
I'm rambling. Let me say it again: films or books didn't cause anything. If something should be rallied against it's the availability of small weapons. Who needs .22 guns the guy used to shoot ten people? No one. Absolutely no one. There's been discussion in Finland whether all the pistols should be abandoned. Some say that hey, it's great sports and didn't we just win gold in the Beijing Olympics in shooting? Yes, we did, but then again we lost ten kids. Which is more important, some people's hobby or everyone's right to stay alive?
I've been thinking about lot of other issues lately. I even came up with an idea that maybe we should drop eating dead animals. Then we wouldn't so easily think of other human beings as objects with which we can do anything we please. Maybe. I don't know. (But we really should at least diminish eating dead animals, only for the climate's sake. I've tried to cut down that myself.)
It all comes down to this: I don't know. I don't know what caused all this and I don't know will prevent it. We can only try and abandoning all small handguns would be one step ahead.
(Ah, well, I guess I must move own. Stuff on violent fiction coming soon.)
Olen runoja kirjoittaessani huomannut joutuneeni umpikujaan ja minun on ollut pakko purkaa Kauhajoen tapahtumia edes jotenkin älyllisesti. Olen postittanut tulokset Min Dikt -blogiin, mutta pistän nämä kaksi miniesseeksi luokiteltavaa tekstiä tännekin.
jotenkin tulee äkkiseltään olo ettei tästä aiheesta enää pysty sanomaan mitään. viittaan siis kauhajokeen. olo on kuin olisi katsonut alain resnaisin yön ja usvan ja sen jälkeen vielä joitain muita keskitysleirielokuvia. ne vaikuttavat vain tarpeettomilta ja lässyttäviltä. en siis tarkoita, että oma runoni ("kun maailma masentaa") olisi resnaisin runon veroinen. ajatuksen muodostaminen tällaisista tapahtumista vaikuttaa banaanilta. siihen tappaja ehkä pyrkiikin. että oma maailmamme ja se, mitä siitä ajattelemme, vaikuttaisi banaalilta. siinä mielessä projekti on sama kuin 70-luvun äärivasemmistolaisten terroristien: maailman tietty luonne pitää väkivallan avulla tuoda näkyviin, jotta muuttaisimme sitä. ehkä tappaja ajattelee, että kaikkien pitäisi elää maailmassa, jossa kuka tahansa riittävän vahva voi ampua kenet tahansa. kyse on vain siitä, kumpi on vahvempi ja/tai nopeampi. tappajat vetoavat sosiaalidarvinismiin, mutta herbert spencer ei koskaan kai ehdottanut, että ihmisten pitäisi ammuskella toisiaan. ihmisten välinen taistelu tässä merkityksessä on luotu, keinotekoinen taistelu, jolloin se vain heijastelee kapitalismin tai markkinatalouden luomaa ihmisten välistä, perustaltaan aivan yhtä keinotekoista taistelua.
1970-luvun amerikassa teurastamo oli oiva vertauskuva sisimpänsä menettäneelle ihmiselle. texasin moottorisahamurhat kertoo edelleen vakuuttavasti perheestä, jonka ainoa elämänsisältö oli teurastaminen, ja kun eläinten lihaksi teurastaminen menetti taloudellisen merkityksensä, perhe siirtyi ihmisten teurastamiseen, kauniiden ja banaalien nuorten ihmisten teurastamiseen. sama vertauskuva pätenee edelleenkin. oletus on, että ihminen voi alentaa muut oman elämänsä objekteiksi ja tämän avulla menestyä taloudellisesti. kun tämä ei ole mahdollista, on kuitenkin edelleen mahdollista alentaa muut objekteiksi suhteessa omaan itseensä. objekteillehan voi sitten tehdä mitä haluaa.
Paras lukemani juttu aiheesta on muuten tänään ilmestyneessä Kansan Uutisten Viikkolehdessä oleva Kai Hirvasnoron artikkeli, jossa hän lähestyy tapahtumia sekä omakohtaisesti että tuoreen artikkelikokoelman kautta. Samalla kannattaa lukea hänen pääkirjoituksensa lehden viitossivulta. Toivottavasti hän postittaa ne blogiinsa pikaisesti.
Viikkolehdessä myös Tuula-Leena Varis kommentoi tapahtumia pitkälti. Vihreän Langan Niemeläinenkin puhuu aiheesta, hyvä, joskin aika lohduton teksti, koska hän päätyy siihen, että Kauhajoen tapauksessa yhteisö nimenomaan toimi: joku Saaren tuttavista oli suoraa kysynyt, meinaako tämä oikeasti ruveta ampumaan ihmisiä, ja ilmoittanut sitten poliisille, että kaveria kannattaisi haastatella. Saari oli sitten vain onnistunut vakuuttamaan poliisin siitä, että ei hänellä ole oikeasti sellaisia aikeita. Mutta yhteisö oli toiminut. Kaikki oli mennyt juuri niin kuin pitikin. (Mieleen tulee jopa kammottava ajatus, että jos yhteisö ei olisi toiminut, ehkä Saari olisi vielä ainakin lykännyt tapahtumia ja ehkä ne olisi jollain toisella tavalla toimimalla voitu estää. Myönnän, etten ole lukenut esimerkiksi iltapäivälehtiä - en yksinkertaisesti pysty - enkä tiedä kaikkea mitä Saaresta on kirjoitettu.)
when the world gets you down,
count to six, when you don't wake up,
count to seven
strange songs are ringing in your head,
some have no liver
when you are laying on straws, your eyes wide open,
think of the fatherland,
its face has been torn open
And the answer is: Yes, we are as freaked out as you Americans are. But I'm not talking about the financial crisis now, I'm talking about the new school massacre that took place yesterday in a small town of Kauhajoki. The guy killed ten and shot himself. He was taken to a hospital, but he didn't survive. I would've liked to see him apologize for what he did. It wouldn't've helped, but, well, we'll never know.
I don't really know what to say. I've felt depressed and I slept badly and I feel bad about taking my kids out to the world. Come back home, here you are safe! But then I say to myself that we can't afford let those bastards win. The world is ours, no matter how stupid or arrogant we may seem to you, and we won't let you have it!
Sorry, don't have an energy to come up with an English-speaking news link.
Here's a poem I wrote this morning, somewhat relating to the events yesterday. In Finnish. And here, in Finnish again, a rambling I wrote on another blog.
Grilled Chicken With Alabama White Sauce Chicken:
1 /4 teaspoon garlic powder
1 /2 teaspoon paprika
1 /4 teaspoon chili powder
Dash salt
4 boneless, skinless chicken breast halves
Sauce:
1 /2 cup reduced-fat mayonnaise
1 /3 cup cider vinegar
1 tablespoon coarsely ground black pepper
Dash hot pepper sauce
Dash salt
1 teaspoon lemon juice
To make the chicken: Combine garlic powder, paprika, chili powder and a dash of salt. Rinse chicken breasts and pat dry; rub seasoning mixture evenly over both sides of chicken.
Heat grill or let coals burn down to white ash. Grill chicken 9 to 12 minutes, until fully cooked and meat thermometer registers 170 degrees, turning midway through cooking.
To make the sauce: Combine all ingredients and whisk until smooth. Serve sauce spooned over grilled chicken or serve as a dipping sauce. Makes 4 servings.
The Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat had a largeish piece on how Americans are getting fatter and fatter, mainly because of the extra large dishes. The article was accompanied by the picture on top. I think it was from Kansas. But just what are those big white chunks, covered with a white sauce, on the left? (What's on the right plate looks absolutely delicious, but I could live three days with that amount of food.)
I found an article featuring the paperback cover for Mika Waltari's The Egyptian. The illo for Pocket Cardinal Giant No. GC-31 is by Charles Binger, the publication year is 1956. The guy is more heroic in the cover that he's in the novel!
I don't have any of Waltari's English-translated paperbacks, so if there's anyone out there with The Etruscan or The Dark Angel or other adventure novels of his, I'd be thrilled to see what they look like. Make those scanners sing!
I corresponded with Clayton Matthews some years ago - it must've been in 2001 or 2002. He's an American novelist and short story writer who focused mainly on paperback markets. He started out in late 1950s writing short stories and then coming up with paperback novels, mostly in the crime genre, in the early 1960s. I notice now that Clayton Matthews died in 2004, quite shortly after my interview (damn, the Nummelin curse again!). His widow and long-time collaborator Patricia Matthews (who was once called "the queen of the romance paperbacks" or something along those lines) died in 2006. Had Clayton Matthews lived to see this day, he'd be 90.I wrote a short article based on his letter and published it in my fanzine, Pulp. I've posted the article in here. It's understandably in Finnish.
Nevertheless, late last night I came across his letter and the bibliography he sent alongside it. They were buries in a heap of books. I've scanned the bibliography and put it up in the Pulpetti Bibliographic Section. For some reason or another, Matthews didn't include his solo efforts in the bibliography, so I'm putting them as a separate post here. I've compiled the data from Hubin's bibliography and the Fictionmags Index and checking out Abebooks.
There's one curious item in Clayton Matthews's letter. There's a paperback novel called Las Vegas from 1974 (Pocket Books) that he wrote in collaboration with Arthur Moore, but there are also rumours that he himself was Arthur Moore. Some sources say Moore died in 1977, after penning some other paperbacks with Marilyn Granbeck and Don Hoyt and writing some Western paperbacks under his own name. I asked about this from Matthews and all he had to say was: "Yes, Arthur Moore is still alive and definitely did not die in 1977." I gather this means that he really was Arthur Moore and there was never a "real" Arthur Moore. So Matthews may have written all the books that have been published as Arthur Moore. But I can't say I know this for sure.
On the side (or on top, actually, since this got so long) the cover of the only book-length translation from Matthews, Dive into Death (1969) under the title Houkutteleva saalis (Manhattan 91, 1971). His first name is written wrong in the cover. Matthews told me he didn't know his book had been translated into Finnish. It's possible he got royalties only from the Swedish edition (or that the royalties included also possible publications in other Nordic countries). The book is very much okay, a hardboiled adventure yarn, and reminiscent of John MacDonald's Travis McGee books. Matthews had also some short stories translated in the Alfred Hitchcock mags in the seventies and they are okay, too, if nothing spectacular.
