Just noticed a quick email from 2022 where Brian Leno told me:
Came across a letter where Lawrence of Arabia — in his T. E. Shaw alias — tells a bookseller he will take a copy of Shiel’s The Purple Cloud.
Pretty cool.
But over 3,000 bucks cool.
I replied, “Man, if only John D. Squires and Steve Eng were alive to fwd this delightful tidbit to!”
My M.P. Shiel pals JDS and Eng were back in mind recently as I was prepping a section of essays about the author of The Purple Cloud for my next LitCrit MegaPack. The sequel to Death Lit.
The section Crime and Company this time spotlights Shiel and Floyd Salas — last time Hammett and San Francisco and Charles Willeford ate up most of the space. Plus other pieces. I’ve been poking along on a rumination about The Shadow, getting it where I want it.
And I realized that I had never written up one of my top fave humorous anecdotes about Dennis McMillan — an incident Dennis himself doesn’t even remember any more. I eased a mini-memoir about Eddie Little in as an aside in that one.
Buried in that material, I realize I haven’t done much posting lately — now you know why. The general intent is to have the book ready for Halloween — or Xmas — release. May be able to do it. All-new memoirs of Fritz Leiber, Ed Price and others. A touch-up on my long article about H. Warner Munn. And if you wondered why Clark Ashton Smith and Donald Wandrei didn’t seem to get mentioned much in Death Lit, hey, here you go.
