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Twenty and living at
home, what I scraped together from a call centre job seemed then to be enough
to buy whatever I wanted, especially as whatever I wanted was a few jars down
the local and as many books and CDs as I could lay my hands on. This was a
different time—a small town might have an HMV and an Ottaker’s right across
from one another, and they might happen to be on your journey home, providing
easy browsing opportunities on the way.
If I read book reviews
in the press at all, it wasn’t to garner opinions on new releases, but rather
to scour them for those moments when the reviewer might draw parallels with
other books or other writers. This to me was the nitty gritty—these comparisons
felt like the really personal stuff, the stuff the reviewer really wanted you
to listen to.
More often than not,
I’d forget about whatever book was being reviewed and just latch onto the
comparisons. This is how I found Newton Thornburg. For the life of me, I can’t
remember what the book being reviewed was, but it must have been a 70s American
crime novel, or one set in 70s America at least, as the writer found
similarities in its exploration of the post-Vietnam post-Watergate American
psyche to Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers
and Thornburg’s Cutter and Bone.
This was new information
to me, new names to scour the shelves for on the way back from work. The Stone
was easy. Picador had recently put out new reprint editions of a lot of his
books, and Ottaker’s had Dog Soldiers
nestled there as if it had always been waiting for me. Thornburg not so much.
I searched the crime
and general fiction sections for any sign of him and then searched again,
because imagine asking at the counter only to find you’d missed the thing
sitting there in plain sight—that way abject mortification lies. The staff at
Ottaker’s were always incredibly helpful, and though they hadn’t heard of the
book or of Thornburg, they gladly looked it up. Yes, Cutter and Bone, there it was. A hardback from Heinemann in 1978,
no longer in print. A paperback from Simon and Schuster in 1988 as part of
their Blue Murder range (a selection edited by lifelong champion of neglected
crime fiction, Maxim Jakubowski, which had put out volumes from Dolores
Hitchens, David Goodis, Leigh Brackett, and William McGivern among others). Unfortunately,
they couldn’t source a copy.
This was worse than
being told the book didn’t exist and the reviewer had been pranking their
readers. It was out there in the world, but I couldn’t get it. The movie of my
book-buying life would cut to a musical montage of me skipping through
second-hand bookshops on Charing Cross Road as the seasons slowly turned,
ending with me dashing out of the rain with a folded paper over my head to find
a knowledgeable store-owner who had a hardback upstacked somewhere.
I’ve never been much of
a skipper or a dasher. We were on the cusp of a new millennium and online
shopping was in its nascent form, still something of a niche industry. But it
was there. I don’t remember if I knew about Amazon or Abebooks at the time, but
eBay was there and after periodically searching all combinations of Newton and
Thornburg and Cutter and Bone over a few months, a copy was finally listed. In
a bookshop in New Hampshire. That didn’t offer international delivery. They
did, however, have a link to their own website, which had an email address, and
after some negotiating in which I agreed to pay an embarrassing amount of
postage, one copy of the Little, Brown hardback US 1st from 1977
landed on my doormat in pristine condition.
Feeling like I’d slayed
a dragon, I devoured the thing in a day. Then I had to read it again
immediately. At the time it was hard to determine how much my love for the book
was tied up in the quest and subsequent glory of actually finding a copy, but
the years since have made it clear that it is a straight up masterwork. Yes, at
its heart it was a murder mystery—the dumping of a body is witnessed, a suspect
is identified, a plan is hatched. It features two colourful leads—a worn out
gigolo with nothing in the bank, and a one-armed, one-legged, one-eyed Vietnam
veteran who excesses Thornburg never allows to topple over into cartoon
territory. But there are a million murder mysteries. Thornburg’s writing was
elegant and fluid, and his plotting never missed an opportunity to surprise,
usually in some soul-scarringly melancholy fashion. The first line is up there
with Crumley’s opening to The Last Good
Kiss, and Thornburg’s ending, right down to its final sentence, remains the
most perfect dénouement I’ve ever read.
This was to be the
first of many such quests and rabbit-hole adventures over the years, and I’ve
consistently found myself drawn away from the centre of the publishing universe
to the fringes and frayed edges. Sometimes, the books you find at the end of your
searching might not live up to expectations (and the act of searching itself
can so elevate expectations), but often the writers uncovered feel like veins
of gold that should be opened up to everyone.
Some writers begin at
the hems of the mainstream and forever remain there, others find themselves
pushed from the middle to the outside by time and neglect (suggesting the
process can be reversed and they can be restored to the popular pantheon). I’ve
found many favourites there.
Jerome Charyn’s Isaac novels and George Baxt’s mysteries
featuring the gay black P.I. Pharoah Love made noise in their day but are
sorely overlooked now. Walter Mosley led me back to Chester Himes and into an
exploration of less well-known African American crime writers like Rudolph
Fisher, Julian Mayfield, Clarence Cooper Jr, and Vern E Smith.
Even geography can do
it. Doris Gercke is a popular and well-received writer in her native Germany,
but only one of her novels (the slender, unsettling, and very good How Many Miles to Babylon) is available
in English, and even then not always cheaply or readily.
Frederic Brown, Kay
Boyle, Alexander Baron, Barbara Comyns, Owen Cameron, Sylvia Townsend Warner,
Gerald Kersh, Vera Caspary, James Hadley Chase, Bette Howland, Don Carpenter,
Kent Anderson, Joanna Russ, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Henry Green, Elizabeth
Harrower are an unspeakably random selection from a million other names I want
to shout from the rooftop, some being brought back into the light quicker than
others as time goes by.
There seems no rhyme
nor reason why some writers’ legacies are better protected in the mainstream
than others. It certainly has nothing to do with the quality of writing. Ross
Macdonald’s classic mysteries are easily available, but his wife Margaret
Millar is mostly relegated to compilation editions typeset in nearly unreadable
ways. She was critically and commercially successful in her lifetime and every
bit the equal of Macdonald (Millar was his name—he changed it professionally
because his wife was already so well known). It isn’t just older books. How is
Maggie Estep’s brilliant Ruby Murphy trilogy (Hex, Gargantuan, Flamethrower) out of print only 13 years
after the last one was published? My beaten up ex-library copies wear their
spine labels proudly.
What makes the
neglected attractive? I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t an innate satisfaction
in the process of discovering writers who are no longer widely read. Even
though you want everyone to read them, there is also an incongruous proprietary
pleasure to having them to yourself for a while. If we all read the same
things, we’ll end up thinking and writing the same things.
Perhaps it is just my
long-held suspicion that any book I ever managed to get published would itself
probably end up in the outer reaches sooner or later, and I wanted to know my
fellow denizens before I got there.
Newton Thornburg was
saved. A couple of years after I found Cutter
and Bone, I could have walked into any decent bookshop in the country and
found it on their shelves as Serpent’s Tail reissued it and two of his other
best works (To Die in California and Dreamland). Although out of print
physically, Serpent’s Tail continue their good work and have all but two of his
novels available in digital.
So raise a glass with
me to all searchers past, present, and future who truffle out the good stuff,
and those who strive to bring it back into print. And if you’re reading this
twenty years from now (it’s 2019 and Britain is on the verge of punching itself
in the face again, as it no doubt is when you are too), have a search on
whatever technology binds you to the world, go look for some of these books if
they remain underappreciated.
Hell, go look for one
of mine.
Publisher: Headline (7 Mar. 2019) HBK: £18.99
Read SHOTS' review
