THE COLD WAR SWAP – Ross Thomas

Ross Thomas in death continues to serve a dessert too rich for the ego, but so good you can't get enough of it. His writing enters the blood with an uncanny ease, and changes you. What he did when alive was as close to real magic as a mortal being can conjure. And his power lives on.

As for the ego thing, most of us who read think we can write. I mean, it can't be that hard, right? You can read, so you must be able to write. That's what Thomas thought when, at age 40, he wrote his first novel, The Cold War Swap. It took him less than two months. The first publisher he sent it to, William Morrow, bought it. Published in 1966, it won the Edgar Award for best first novel.

YeahYeahYeah, you might feel like saying, like I did before I read further. He had an ace up his sleeve, I figured. The publisher was an old poker buddy, they sang in the same choir. Had to be something, right? Master of fine arts degree? Well...nuh uh. He did have a varied background, the kind some writers have turned to profit: World War II infantryman, public relations specialist, correspondent with the Armed Forces Network, union spokesman, and political strategist—the latter in the U.S., Germany, and Nigeria. Probably picked up a few tricks writing jingles, memos and strategy papers. But...but is that enough by itself to produce an award-winning novel first time out? C'mon, I'm dying here!

Can Amazon Find the Jewels in its Kindle Scout Slush Pile?

[Disclaimer: As a Kindle Scout “loser” my opinions are without question a tad subjective, although I've sensed a familiar air of disenchantment among fellow scriveners.]

Business genius Jeff Bezos has been a godsend to bookselling, no matter how eloquent the grumbling oldtimers with their tales of good times past or snarky the ho hum youngsters with “better” ideas in mind.

Amazon's publishing arm has opened the door for hordes of new authors to market their words worldwide with little or no money down and no hands in the middle grabbing a piece of the profits.

One of the more interesting of its innovations is the digital slush pile. In a handful of minutes, without so much as the cost of postage, an unknown author can upload a future bestseller over Amazon's electronic transom for a chance at being read by a real editor, hopefully one with literary chops as well as marketing savvy.

There have been two versions of this slush pile. The first, called Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, lasted seven years until Kindle Scout succeeded it a year ago. I've flunked out of both. Each, as I saw them, had merits and disadvantages.

ABNA, as we contenders called it, was an annual affair in which authors could enter novels they'd already published. There were four rounds. Elimination in Round 1, based solely on the novel's “pitch”, was the equivalent of having your traditionally slush piled manuscript rejected because its envelope smelled funny or was addressed to “Editer.” Entries were weeded out through subsequent rounds based on excerpts from the actual novels. At one point Amazon customers were invited to vote on the excerpts. The entry that remained standing after months of secret weeding and winnowing won a publishing contract with a significant cash advance.

Kindle Scout starts right out with the customers, who are invited to vote for contenders from those whose covers, pitches and excerpts are posted on the site. Voters are told they will win a free download of whichever three books they “nominate” should Amazon choose them to publish as ebooks. An advantage Kindle Scout has over ABNA is that it's year-round. Entries stay on the site for 30 days of voting. I had been gearing up to enter ABNA for a second try when I learned it was ending, so I jumped right into the new slush pile. Amazon touted it as “reader-powered publishing.” Media sites called it “crowdsourced publishing.” Aha, thought I, having attained a certain comfort level with social media.

APOCALYPSE – D. H. Lawrence

D.H. Lawrence was not yet thirty when he wrote the following to an editor who'd rejected his third novel, Sons and Lovers:

Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rotters, the flaming sods, the sniveling, dribbling, dithering palsied pulse-less lot that make up England today. . . . God, how I hate them! God curse them, funkers. God blast them, wishwash. Exterminate them, slime.

If not the precise vocabulary, certainly the same apocalyptic sentiment exhorted by the Book of Revelation, which, in fact, he calls “Apocalypse” in the testament he wrote sixteen years later during the final months of his life. Clearly not a writer to mince words, Lawrence tackles Christianity with a passion equally furious to what he displayed for the editor who'd informed him his publisher feared the public would find unacceptable the novel's “want of reticence.”

He states his bias flat out in the first several paragraphs of Apocalypse, noting that he'd been douched with the Bible growing up so that I need only begin to read a chapter to realize I “know” it with an almost nauseating fixity. And I must confess, my first reaction is one of dislike, repulsion, and even resentment. My very instincts resent the Bible.

THE SHIFTING REALITIES OF PHILP K. DICK: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings – Edited by Lawrence Sutin

Years before my first experience with psychotropic drugs I came across an observation by Edna Ferber that her everyday consciousness seemed to her similar to the heightened perceptions reported by people who'd experienced chemical psychedelia. She said she'd not tried them herself.

Meanwhile in a parallel universe Philip K. Dick wrote The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, considered by some to be the classic LSD novel, two years before he took any psychedelic drugs. This, according to Paul Williams in his extensive 1975 Rolling Stone piece on Dick. Dick told Williams he did try writing once on LSD, to disastrous effect: “It came out all in Latin and Sanskrit.” Williams attributes “probably” Dick's internal chemistry for the “stunning, almost hallucinogenic sense of reality” Dick created in his writings.

This “internal chemistry” apparently extended even to the dizzying pace of his creative imagination. He admitted he wrote his first thirty-some novels on amphetamines, but then was told by psychiatrists who tested him for possible drug addiction that the drugs had not been working. He was told his liver detoxified the chemicals so they never reached his brain. He found he'd been fooling himself.

SHELLSHOCK - Richard S. Prather

Shell Scott? Meh—today's chichi word that describes my reaction to the first Richard S. Prather mystery novel I read some serious decades past, when I was a serious fan of serious fictional private eyes with names like Spade, Archer, Marlowe, Hammer, and Continental Op. Scott, in my serious opinion then, was a fop.

And I never looked back at the silly, smartassy, white-crewcutted, embarrassing imitation of the “real” P.I.s a mature guy like me could dig. Mature. That was me. So much older then. Thanks be to God's grace and Bob Dylan I'm younger than that now, although I did cringe at the thought of revisiting the extensive Prather canon when crime author Patti Abbott suggested that contributors to her blog's weekly Friday's Forgotten Book feature might consider picking a Prather novel to write about. She dropped this hint just before Christmas. I dragged my feet and finally downloaded the cheapest Prather book on Kindle I could find: three short stories called Squeeze Play. It's named for one of the two Shell Scott stories sandwiching a non-Shell Scott story called The Spirit of the Convention, which I liked. The two Scott stories? Meh. Same reaction essentially I had before.

But as we moved closer and closer to the deadline—it's this Friday—I decided to give Shell Scott another chance. On Monday I downloaded Shellshock, his last published novel before he died on Valentine's Day nine years ago next month. Enjoyed it so much I am now a devoted fan. Scott is a hoot, and Shellshock was a masterful mix of parody with enough serious, twisty plot to keep me scrolling down the Kindle pages. Evidently I didn't appreciate parody when I was older. At the same time, I don't believe parody works in the short story form—at least not Prather's style. The limited length simply cannot accommodate the complex plotting and exaggerated attention to certain details that worked so well in the novel.

Bacon's Blood (59)

Blow became aware of a sense of disconnectedness as he followed Gobble from the judge's chambers into the courtroom. It was similar to the feeling—relief tainted by a vague disenchantment—that had come over him once in his acting days. He'd stepped back onstage, outside the curtain, following what he knew had been one of his finest performances. He was in his street clothes. The spotlights had been extinguished and the voices of stage hands working behind the curtain swept away any lingering wisps of illusion the performance might have left.

What he faced when he looked out over the rows of emptying seats where moments before a packed house had risen to its feet and given the players a sustained ovation with commanding applause, shouts of bravo! and the occasional shriek of a tooth whistle, what he faced now was an indifferent reality, the diminishing sounds of shuffling feet, private chatter, the mockery of one hand clapping. He had no presence.

The tension of pendency takes up residence in a courtroom during a trial. It hovers as a palpable current at all times, relenting only by degrees during the inevitable hiatuses—the restroom breaks, lunchtimes and overnight recesses in trials that last longer than a day. Blow had returned one night early in the Bacon trial to retrieve a file folder the janitors had found on the floor under the defense table. The bailiff had called him at home. He was eating dinner with his father and Lila. Embarrassed, he drove to the courthouse and was let in by a sheriff's deputy who waited for him at the front door. The janitors had finished up and gone home, leaving the folder on the table. Blow's relief to find nothing in the folder of any special importance was dampened by an odd feeling he was being seen, although the courtroom was deserted and contained no security cameras. He knew no one was watching him, yet the feeling persisted. It was the courtroom itself, he concluded. The courtroom was at rest but remained poised, as was the trial itself. It wasn't over, and until it was, until Judge Pendleton banged his gavel for the last time and delivered the word adjourned, the benches, the tables, the chairs, ceiling, lighting, portraits on the wall—everything, the very air in the room--hung in apprehension, waiting.

PRIME GREEN: REMEMBERING THE SIXTIES – Robert Stone

As it seems so often many true artists must die to earn their recognition, so it was with me and Robert Stone.

In my mind, when I learned this time last year Stone had died, he was a mean old drunk who as a young man had written a couple of novels. I'd read one—Dog Soldiers—and had not been able to get very far in the other, his first novel, Hall of Mirrors. I remembered Dog Soldiers as compelling but bleak. Hall of Mirrors was giving off the same artfully crafted sense of doom when I started it, and I just wasn't up for another downer. Life moved on. There were plenty more downers to come, more than enough as I see it, but without Hall of Mirrors.

Never got back to Stone. I recall seeing his name once in a feature article. He'd been recognized in a bar drinking alone, somewhere tropical, I believe, looking uncommunicative. When I saw his name again, on novelist Ed Gorman's blog, it was accompanied by news of his death at age 77. Gorman lauded Stone as suffering from “the Graham Greene problem--yes he was a brilliant novelist but he was also a brilliant storyteller. There are Those who distrust this combination, notably, as William Goldman maintains, The Nobel Prize Committee.” The New York Times obituary Gorman included mentioned that Stone had published a memoir “about his years in California as one of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters.”

Bacon's Blood (58)

The first image that drew his focus when Blow pushed through the courtroom doors was the small white face atop the billowing black robe of Circuit Judge Roger Pendleton. He (the judge) was perched on his leather-padded throne at the very center of the elevated, polished walnut furniture ensemble that comprised The Bench. As the doors swished shut behind Blow he saw the judge tilt his face downward and fix his countenance upon him. Blow's peripheral vision detected his client seated at the defense table; five yards away, the prosecutor at his. The air snapped with electric anticipation.

“Your honor.” Blow's salute as he brisk-walked up the aisle between the rows of empty benches.

Pendleton spoke into a little black curved microphone on his desktop. He sounded friendly. “Sorry to interrupt your lunch, Mr. Stone. Hope you had time to get something to eat.”

“Yes, sir, Judge.” He pushed through the bar gate and headed for the table. Elvin Bacon was facing him. The vacant look was gone, replaced by something new, unfamiliar. No smile, no sneer. The eyes were focused, but there was something strange in them. Bacon returned Blow's polite nod. It occurred to Blow that Leonard wasn't present. Another flag.

Blow went to his chair. The judge held up a hand. “Not yet, Mr. Stone. I'd like to meet with you and Mr. Gobble in chambers.” Blow heard Gobble push to his feet. Bacon started to rise, but Pendleton checked him.

“Just counsel, Mr. Bacon, for now.”

“I'm an attorney, your honor.” Bacon's voice was tense.

“You're also the defendant. Unless you're representing yourself you will allow us this conference. We won't be--”

Bacon shot to his feet. “Dammit, Judge, I have a right--”

LILA: AN INQUIRY INTO MORALS -- Robert M. Pirsig

The first thing I learned from Robert Pirsig was that I'm a romantic. A mildly unsettling discovery as I started reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values shortly after the paperback edition came out in the mid-'70s. I had assumed romantics were dreamy sappy sorts who loved show tunes and craved syrup on their stories. Couldn't be me, the cynical Army vet, digger of Mailer, Jones, the Dead and the Stones. It wasn't until later, postPirsig, that I read somewhere cynics are disenchanted romantics, and it resonated.

But I wasn't there yet when I started Zen. My “cynicism” was more unconscious affectation than true, akin to whistling in the dark with a secret faith in the happy ending. I was a romantic in disguise from myself.

Pirsig's skill at leading me to this reluctant discovery was masterful. It started with the title. For me, Zen Buddhism was a one-hand-clapping fad, the kind of esoteria that enabled hipsters to sneer at the Mr. Joneses for not knowing what was happening. I identified with Mr. Jones. But paired with something so two-handed as mechanics, and with the ingenious embellishment of the pragmatic with “art,” the book felt more than accessible. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance intrigued me. It didn't hurt that mainstream critics raved about Zen, lauding it as, in one review, “profoundly important, disturbing, deeply moving, full of insights, a wonderful book."

Such endorsements on top of a sly title sold me the book. Pirsig's voice did the rest.

THE BEAST THAT SHOUTED LOVE AT THE HEART OF THE WORLD - Harlan Ellison

I instantly disliked Harlan Ellison when I first met him, two weeks ago. He struck me as the type of guy I've run into over the years who is smart as a whip and lives on his wits. The type of guy who picks fights in bars—or anywhere—because he knows he can cow most opponents without having to throw a punch. He does this because he's learned he can take a punch if necessary, and can handle getting the crap kicked out of him if it comes to that, without letting go of his quick, cocky mouth. Being relatively slow-witted myself, and nonviolent as default, I try to avoid guys like this.

I'm pretty good at spotting them in a crowd, as they tend to be smaller than average in stature. That's the first clue. If they're louder than those around them, their voices penetrating and persistent, eyes assertive, roaming...the aversion I feel is proof positive. Mere awareness of their presence at, say, a party, sullies the convivial ambience I'd anticipated. Thus my introduction to Harlan Ellison, by way of the cover photo on the book I bought two weeks ago. I did not look closely at the photo when I clicked the download button. It was the title that sold me: The Beast That Shouted Love to the Heart of the World

BOOKER - David McClain

Should you happen to be looking around this Christmas season for something to give that child you know or are raising, whose penchant for pulling the wings off flies and torturing the family pets has you worried he or she might grow up to become a serial killer or a Fox TV commentator, here's an idea:

Let Booker talk to the rascal, shape the kid up a tad, take the little wing-plucker into his world. Booker's story starts out kinda scary. He's the runt of a litter of four Jack Russell Terrier mix pups. Their mother, who lost her human family, gives birth to them on a snowy day under the porch of a farmer who doesn't want them and who takes them out into the woods and abandons them.

Before long a raptor swoops down and flies off with his sister in its talons. Soon afterward Booker is on his own, fleeing a pack of coyotes while his mother and two brothers stay back and try to fight them. Starving, cold, and alone, he's rescued in the nick of time by “Linda,” who finds him lying near death beside a busy highway. She takes him home to Almosta Ranch, feeds him, introduces him to the three dogs who will become his best friends—Shepherd, Mollie and Sassy—and persuades her reluctant husband to break his own rule of accepting no more strays.

Seems like a happy ending. Compared with Booker's life up to now, it is. But more trouble lies ahead, for Booker as well as for Linda and her husband (Mom and Dad) and for the many other critters at Almosta Ranch, all of whom, by the way, speak English amongst themselves.

Natural, I suppose, to expect a novel a dog narrates to be a tad cutesy for a budding sociopath. Instead, I would say Booker—the book and the voice—is charming. Many believe empathy can only be learned, that instinct alone isn't enough to embrace the Golden Rule. I'm not among them. From my own experience it took a marriage of nature and nurture. I remember killing ants on the sidewalk, focusing sun rays on them with a magnifying glass until they burst into flame. After boasting about my prowess with this technique to my mother one day, she casually asked, “Why would you kill ants? Aren't they your little friends?” I had never thought of the tiny insects in quite that way, as my friends, nor have I ever since. But somehow my mother's comment broke through the fantasy I'd been entertaining. I never burned another ant. They might not have become my friends, but from that point on I felt differently about them. I no longer saw them merely as specks that moved. Now they were earnest little living creatures, maybe even friendly if not particularly friends of mine. In my young mind they now had feelings, too.

Booker's story can have a similar effect on youngsters, I believe. Reading it, or having it read to them, in his voice, seeing his world through his eyes, it would take a pretty hard case not to identify with the little dog and his four-legged friends. Hard to imagine anyone, especially a child, intentionally mistreating a pet after living awhile in Booker's head. It might also be good to know that while Booker's story is fiction, he is most definitely not imaginary. Here's author David McClain:

While this book is a work of fiction, it is based on very real characters. Booker is a very real dog and is, in fact, the Barn Dog of Almosta ranch, a job he takes very seriously. While I have taken liberties with his personal history before he came to the ranch, the scenario I depict is a very possible one and is one that, sadly plays out every day across rural America.

Here's author McClain again on “talking” animals:

Something you will notice as you read the story is that I have given the animals the power of speech. Of course we all know that animals do not have a spoken language in real life, but make no mistake about it, animals do have a language. Their language, while not verbal, is instead based mainly on posture and body language and they are every bit as capable as humans in communicating not only with each other, but with us humans if we but take the trouble to learn their speech.

I came upon Booker while looking for a present for a special friend's 9^th birthday. Evan doesn't need to learn about empathy. He's already sensitive to others' feelings, and he's a smart young man. But he also loves a good story. I have no doubt he will love Booker. I cannot imagine anyone but a monster who wouldn't.

Click to order: http://www.amazon.com/Booker-Almosta-Ranch-Book-1-ebook/dp/B00S8NIM7O/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top?ie=UTF8

A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ – Walter M. Miller Jr.

My laughter when I first read the opening scene of A Canticle for Leibowitz was of the near-maniacal kind that might accompany an epiphany. I was in the Army at the time, stationed in Germany during the Cold War. Madness hummed always somewhere in the air. We drank. Our humor tended toward the cruelly ironic. A particularly irreverent friend had recommended Canticle as a particularly funny book.

I was already primed to appreciate the ghastly irony of the second scene that made me laugh, the one where we learn of the sacred relic, the scrap of paper containing a grocery list in the handwriting of the now St. Leibowitz, found in ruins by survivors of a nuclear holocaust. My outburst at this revelation was less raucous than the first.

By now Walter M. Miller Jr.'s drollery had completely captivated me. His writing at the very start--the dot on the horizon that wriggles in the shimmering heat waves as it grows, drawing relentlessly nearer--was the snare that closed around my ankle and tugged me through a narrative so complex and esoteric that without its unceasing crafty brilliance I'd surely have broken free and fled in utter befuddlement.

SOME CAME RUNNING (revisited) - James Jones

I am yet under the spell Some Came Running put on me fifty-two years ago. If James Jones wasn't himself a sorcerer, he surely must have tapped into some magic reservoir of imagination when he created the most poignant romantic tragedy I've ever read.

I've kept the paperback copy from 1963 but haven't opened it since. Was afraid Jones's story might no longer affect the profound emotions it did back then in me—a small-town Midwesterner on the verge of running away to the Army to flee his failures. I've learned from sad experience along the way trying to recapture a past enchantment often dispels the memory's potency. Some Came Running's was one I had rather not risked losing.

What finally prompted me to take that risk was hearing “Gwen's Theme” from the novel's movie version. Now, the movie left so little impression on me I have barely a recollection of seeing it. I did not recognize the music. Knowing what it represented, though, I could feel through its peculiar, rending harmonies, its swells, diminishes, and earnest tempos, the depth of longing and anguish and sorrow shared by Gwen and her lover as they returned to me from the book. It drew me in like a siren song. With my old paperback copy still in boxes with hundreds of other books from my recent move, I went online to see if maybe there was an ebook version. This is when I learned not only that Some Came Running had been out of print for over half a century, but that a newly abridged edition appeared just last year.

The Consequences of Desire - Dennis Hathaway

Awfully good writing about awful people. This can be said of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction's namesake as well as the award's 1992 recipient. Commonality beyond these two broad distinctions, however, if they exist, are hard to find

The late Ms. O'Connor's style follows one of the basic commandments of good writing: she shows us what's happening. She doesn't tell us Grandmother is a domineering, self-centered hypocrite. We get to watch the old gal in action, bossing her unattractive family around to suit her fancy. In his winning collection of stories, The Consequences of Desire, we see little outward action involving Dennis Hathaway's characters. But inside their heads, oh, mercy. We're immersed in the kaleidoscopic battling of their thoughts and emotions.

Themewise the stories could hardly be further apart—on the surface. O'Connor, while keeping obvious signposts of her Roman Catholicism deeply camouflaged in subtlety, pushes her characters to extremes of happenstance, including death, where their mortal actions can bring them heavenly grace. Religion or spiritual faith are absent from Hathaway's tales. His self-absorbed characters invariably find their dreams, their hopes, their desires coming up short or crashing to pieces when they find themselves face to face with stark reality. Teenager Justine feels the dream she's had most of her life of becoming a private eye blink out when she loses her nerve tailing a mysterious stranger into a rough part of town.

St. Albert the Great - Kevin Vost

Sunday I missed my first Feast of St. Albert. I had a couple of excuses, the first being I was already committed to something. The second, of arguably greater weight, was my never having been a Roman Catholic, thus not knowing a whit about St. Albert. In retrospect it is clear I might have brushed either excuse aside with nary a blink of remorse. As a working news reporter I'd eaten free food at many events where I knew little or nothing about the principals.

The feast hosts who'd invited me were my Facebook friends, Mahogany Roasters, a local craft coffee company, the mere scent of whose coffee is enough to lure me to their door through thick or thin.

My curiosity is what did me in. Googling St. Albert, I found right off he was known as “Albert the Great, champion of faith and reason” as well as the patron saint of science. Faith and reason, most unusual bedfellows it seemed. And science? Agogged at the implication of clashing outlooks and stubborn mindsets, practical and metaphysical, and learning also that Albert had been the teacher of a more famous saint, Thomas Aquinas, I bought the book.

The Black Cloud - by Fred Hoyle

A Silicon Valley survey by The Atlantic, published in its November issue, found the “greatest work of science fiction ever written” to be Asimov's Foundation novels. For their next choice the techies picked Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. If Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud got any votes its total would have come in somewhere behind Star Wars, which captured the only honorable mention.

I've read nothing by Asimov, and the closest I came to Hitchhiker's Guide was to pluck it off the bookstore shelf, read the cover blurb and the first few paragraphs, and return it to the shelf. Science Fiction has so never been my thing I feel awkward just using the genre's vernacular abbreviations. For the sake of brevity in this instance, though, I'll grit my teeth and leap over what seems to be the no-longer-in scifi straight to what I sense is the current password: SF? Or is it lower case?

On second thought I probly wasted most of the previous paragraph building a defense against presumed sf snobbery. This because I just remembered various devoted sf fans have assured me they were unfamiliar with The Black Cloud, and I don't believe they were patronizing me. All the same, as a precaution I fought to withhold any implication of “gotcha” for having read what I considered a prerequisite for anyone pretending intimacy with the literature.

The Fly on the Wall - Tony Hillerman

Odd. The Fly on the Wall. A book so unlike Tony Hillerman's other novels, all but one being his celebrated Navajo Tribal Police series, it seems an anomaly. A fly in the ointment, one might say, cheap pun though it be.

Mystery fans enamored of the legend-hued tales featuring Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee indeed are apt to overlook an early one about a newspaper reporter, suspecting perhaps it was a false start, the clumsy effort of a novice before he hit his stride.

In fact Hillerman's false-start novel--the clumsy one, in his own estimation—turned out to be the first in the series that ultimately brought him fame. The Fly on the Wall came out in 1971, a year after The Blessing Way. Yet it was the Indian culture that fascinated him. Wanting to “get it right,” he followed Fly with Dance Hall of the Dead. He knew now he was hooked, and went on to write sixteen more featuring the same milieu and cast. His burgeoning readership got hooked in the process.