The New York Times article yesterday on noir in San Francisco also featured a slideshow of sites and personalities.
A few days before that, though, the Frommer’s website put up another slideshow featuring five literary walks done around the entire world.
I’m glad the Dashiell Hammett Tour made the cut for both. But I guess it should, since you don’t get more noir — or definitely more literary walking — than on the tour.
The New York Times just put up today Daniel Saltzstein’s on-the-ground-in-Frisco ruminations on noir — check it out.
I’m interviewed, and photographed against a wall in Burritt alley. Plus Daniel gabs it up with other people and tracks down some off trail noir spots. I guided him into one of those places, where I’d never set foot before — but figured it was ripe for discovery.
It never hurts to keep up with what’s going on, right?
Noir. It never ends.
Just the other day Terry Zobeck did up a list of pretty much everything Hammett ever wrote or edited, including a single anthology — of horror fiction. Creeps by Night. Take a gander at the cover for a British paperback reprint of the same, lifted from Doug Draa’s new online survey of fiction from the pulp Weird Tales that made it into wraps. And he also includes various incarnations of the title that appeared as paperback originals. Anyway, a cool little survey, worth it for the vintage cover images alone.
Weird Tales has been much on my mind lately as I’ve been assisting Haefele’s Heretics in completing a little project (you’ll see the name August Derleth on several of the vintage covers, plus other names with arch-associations with the Cthulhu Mythos such as H.P. Lovecraft, Robert Bloch, Frank Belknap Long and Robert E. Howard ). Impossible to say if the Mythos would have jumped to eldritch life if the magazine Weird Tales hadn’t been there as the major watering hole for Shoggoths and Deep Ones, but I’m sure it would have been much harder to get the concept going without that marketplace for the interplay between Lovecraft and his peers and protégés. Even if the erratically capricious (or capriciously erratic) editor of the day, Farnsworth Wright, did reject many of Lovecraft’s major tales.
And still the Mythos grew. . . .
Draa is assisting with the most recent incarnation of WT — which came to life with a Mythos issue (#360) and just announced an Undead theme for #362. You can get print versions and also — would a bookman of Derleth’s stripe have approved??? — ebook versions.
As always, I’m leery of ebooks over books, though I admit they take up less room. You could be an incredible hoarder of ebooks and no one need ever know.
By the time I wake up today copies of Two-Gun Raconteur 17 ought to be moving briskly out of the Gift Shop in the Robert E. Howard House in Cross Plains, Texas — a little something extra to help kick off the latest REH Days in that burg.
And as soon as he gets home from the Howardian action, our longtime pal Damon Sasser will be processing orders, packaging and shipping the only magazine devoted to REH left standing at the moment. (By left standing, I mean that actual issues hit the mean streets, not that someone somewhere vaguely intends to do another issue someday. If you haven’t had an issue out in two or three years, I figure you’re in big trouble, if not already dead.)
You can check out the contents off the link — this is the one where my latest ruminations on Howard vs. the Academics appear, a topic I’ve been covering for around thirty years at this point, waiting for the profs to spring into action. Now that they finally are getting some material into print, it reminds me of The Story of the Talking Dog:
“This here dog talks!”
“Yeah, but everything it says is stupid.”
“But it talks!”
That’s the article I mentioned the other day where I also respond to the idea that my 1984 book The Dark Barbarian was written by all men. Worth adding to your collection for that angle alone? Perhaps.
And in addition to other stuff, our pal and occasional Guest Blogger Brian Leno (hot off his three-part review of Conan Meets the Academy — man, you could tell how painful it was for him to drudge his way through the contents of that collection — sorry, Brian!) shows up with one of his trademark boxing articles on the connections between REH, Ernest Hemingway and the ring fighter Battling Siki.
On June 11, 1936 — 78 years ago today — the thirty-year-old Texas author Robert E. Howard shot himself in the head, ending a volcanic career at the keys of a typewriter which included the creation of such cultural icons as Conan and King Kull.
To mark the occasion we’ve pulled Brian Leno’s review of the academic book Conan Meets the Academy off the ice as a Three Round match.
Round One saw Brian dismayed by the Jonas Prida intro to the collection.
Round Two got Brian grabbling with Part One about the literary Conan, which he wraps up here with a quick mention of the stylometry essay, before hitting Part Two — covering stuff Brian isn’t interested in reading.
You can’t blame him. I can’t believe he made it this far.
And here’s Brian Leno, Howard fan, with some final jabs:
I was a bit hesitant when I started to read Daniel M. Look’s “Statistics in the Hyborian Age: An Introduction to Stylometry.” Any article that has tables of figures and graphs sends out a warning sign to me that can only spell boredom. At first I was pleasantly surprised to find it actually interesting, as Look started his essay with a short history of Stylometry that was enjoyable and informative.
This did not last long, however, and soon the tables of figures titled “Hapax Dislegomena” and “Zipf’s Ratio” had me scratching my head and thinking I now knew how Dorothy felt when she woke up in Oz.
At one point Look writes that his figures show “works written by Howard are significantly different than those edited by de Camp.” Any Howard fan could have told him that — without the use of figures and tables.
Now we come to “Part Two: The Cultural Conan.” I decided, because of my Conan purist stance, and the fact that I don’t indulge in literary masochism, to read only two of the four essays in this section — a decision I don’t think I’ll ever regret.
The first article, “Arnold at the Gates: Subverting Star Persona in Conan the Barbarian” is by Nicky Falkof and while she does have some interesting observations on the first Conan movie there is nothing here that will further my understanding of Howard — or his barbarian adventurer. She states that James Earl Jones, who portrayed Thulsa Doom, “is the lone black face in the entire film,” and I guess I had never realized that — but considering the only time I watched the complete movie was at the initial release thirty-some years ago I’m not too surprised.
In a bit of praise, Falkof adds that Conan the Barbarian “manages to overstep most of the injunctions attendant upon the cinematic depictions of black people and white people.” After her statement about “the lone black face” I’d be interested to know how she felt about the dismal sequel, Conan the Destroyer, which co-starred Grace Jones and Wilt Chamberlain, but she never brings up this entry in the Schwarzenegger saga. How could you not reference, in an article on Schwarzenegger as Conan, both of his starring roles as Howard’s greatest creation?
Another name not appearing in Falkof’s article is that of Robert E. Howard. He’s not mentioned even once and that had me scratching my head. Howard should always be acknowledged when we’re talking about Conan.
Stephen Wall starts his essay “Fandom and the Nostalgia of Masculinity” off by declaring that this “project began as an endeavor to understand the place of masculinity in Conan.” Stifling a yawn, I began to read. . . .
The only part of this essay I want to discuss is the section titled “Jim: Anatomy of a Conan Fan.” For this article Wall evidently had a number of conversations with a fan who on the Official Robert E. Howard website goes by the name of “Jim.” I’m pretty much a non-participating member of this site, having posted only a couple dozen times, and this makes me a “lurker” — I just enjoy traveling there to see what topics are drawing the attention of REH fans at any given moment.
Apparently Jim is also a lurker and he told Wall that he is the “world’s greatest fan” of Conan and that he has “thousands of dollars worth of Conan statues.” I certainly don’t plan on making disparaging remarks about any fan of Conan’s but Jim has to realize (right?) that he’s not the lone stranger when it comes to owning thousands of dollars worth of Howard-related paraphernalia. (Plus I’ll admit having issues with someone who proclaims himself the “world’s greatest fan” of anything — come on, now, really.)
A few of Jim’s remarks trouble me. He declares that he’s “read lots of deep, thought-provoking literature . . . that’s not what I want out of Conan.” Jim further states that “Conan is not complex” and I think he needs to go back and reread Howard, not the pastiches — his reading enjoyment will increase when he discovers that Howard can be very “thought-provoking” and that Conan is really a very complex character, if a person does more than just superficially read the Cimmerian’s saga.
When this book was announced some Conan fans were delighted that their favorite character was being recognized by the Academy. I hope those folks all picked this book up and read it through — or at least the majority of it, as I did.
Sometimes what you wish for isn’t so good when you get it.
This is a boring, pretentious book, and I’m amazed that the writing of Howard, which is some of the most action-packed storytelling ever put down on paper, can be analyzed in such a dull style.
Some of the essays have merit, as I’ve indicated, but once done with the book I wish I’d have saved the thirty-five dollars and applied that monetary amount to the next book coming from the Robert E. Howard Foundation. Since starting on this review I’ve noticed a book on Howard and other pulp authors, Critical Insights: Pulp Fiction of the 1920s and 1930s is soon to be available — for $85. You’ve got to be kidding — even a former Howard completist has to cry “Uncle!” at some point.
So, as you’ve probably already guessed, Conan Meets the Academy will take its place on my “lost” shelves with the Schweitzer and Szumskyj volumes — a year from now I won’t be able to remember where I put it.
Ding-ding!
End Round Three. End review.
Surfing around in Bill Crider’s Pop Culture blog the other day, I noticed a link to an article about no less than eight literary homes being up for sale at the moment. I’d seen separate articles about Ray Bradbury’s long time residence coming on the market, and several that mentioned the so-called “Scarface Mansion” (that would be Al Pacino’s Scarface) being offered, if you just had enough moola.
None of the other articles mentioned that the Scarface Mansion once housed Thomas Mann, however. . . .
At any rate, check it out if you dig literary landmark action. The only big time literary home I recall being on the block recently was the Zane Grey adobe in Catalina, which I mentioned awhile back. (You’ll find a couple of shots of the adobe in that link, and a couple more in a follow-up post.)
Among other writers featured are Norman Mailer and Elizabeth Bishop (I have notes on Bishop’s stay in San Francisco in the event I ever do a revamped Literary World of San Francisco).
What most intrigues me about this news is whether or not Fritz Leiber visited Thomas Mann during his residency in the future Scarface Mansion — and would Fritz have had some nagging thought about the house looking Very Familiar when he caught the movie? (Pretty sure he would have caught the movie — director Brian De Palma was a darling of cineastes in that day, and Fritz was a cineaste living among cineastes.)
Fritz wrote about visiting Mann during his LA years in one article or another — don’t recall if there was enough description of the place to figure out a Scarface Mansion angle or not, and a quick check of various essays didn’t turn up the blurbage. If I stumble across it later I’ll do an update.
But for me that’s the cool aspect: yeah, Mann abiding in the future home of “Say hello to my little friend!” is interesting, but Fritz Leiber — a writer I knew — possibly visiting him there is much cooler.
Okay, June is coming up fast — kicking off with a walk on Sunday June 1 and another on Sunday June 22 (with at least one tour by appointment booked in there, too, thus far).
For the walks on June 1 or 22, anyone can show up, no reservations needed. (For a recent tour a guy up in Portland just got in his machine and pointed the nose south. What the hell, right?)
Start at noon near the revolving “L” sculpture.
$20 per person. Four hours or so.
Comfortable gumshoes, hats and trench coats — well, that’s up to you.
(Pic at top — showing off the plaque next to the doorway of 891 Post Street, where Hammett wrote The Maltese Falcon.)
And now, on Birthday 120, it is time to do a recount — we’ll call these The Zobeck Statistics. As anyone who has been on the tour knows, I personally count The Big Knockover as a novel (if a short novel), and I know some people will want to keep “The Parthian Shot” and “Immortality” in the list as full-fledged stories (if super-short vignette-style stories). Pulp dealer Paul Herman was just on the walk this past Sunday, and kicked over the idea of anything being taken off the list.
Hashing it out, that’s half the fun.
Still, niceties aside, here’s the up-to-date count on Hammett’s known output — five or six novels, depending — around eighty short stories.
And to do the official tally, once again we give you the Master Record Keeper and Prince of the Pure Texts, Terry Zobeck:
It’s been three years to the month since I began posting guest blogs here on the Mean Streets on the pure texts of Hammett’s short stories. Back then I provided a brief overview of Hammett’s stories and the edits Dannay made to them. At that time I noted Hammett had published 66 short stories, the final one, “A Man Named Thin” (Hammett’s original title was “The Figure of Incongruity”), appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine just days after his death on January 10, 1961.
With the publication of The Hunter and Other Stories we can now update this overview. The new volume includes 15 stories from the Hammett archives at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin that were unpublished during his lifetime. This would take the total to 81; however, after reading Hammett’s article “Vamping Samson”, I think we should remove from the total two very short pieces — “The Parthian Shot” and “Immortality” — that Hammett himself did not include among his stories; he considered these two pieces to be “short miscellaneous matter.”
So, Hammett’s published oeuvre now consists of the following material:
This list does not include the fragmentary material published in The Hunter (the ARC and e-book version contain additional such material) or the unfinished first version of The Thin Man, or “The Thin Man and the Flack” (a photoplay with captions supposedly written by Hammett that appeared in the December 1941 edition of Click), advertising copy for Samuels Jewelry Company, political petitions signed by Hammett, interviews, or his contributions to Lillian Hellman’s plays.
