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Post by pulphack on Dec 7, 2008 21:06:43 GMT
there's not much to say about steve francis other than to advise reading everythingsteve holland's written about him. but to just precis a bit of it...
francis grew up in ppoverty and wrote the typical first novel of the times - semi-autobiographical. but it didn't do that well, so he decided to take advantage of the paper rationing and mushroom jungle times, and started churning out fiction to order - such as whenever he could get a paper ration! the creation of janson - part hammett, part james hadley chase - was his master stroke, but he got into some business deals with guys who liked flirting with the law, and this caused him no end of problems, espcecially as he'd moved to spain.
post- janson, his career was erratic. he was quite good at some things, but wasn't versatile. hence his blakes and saxon title are class, but he also wrote the script for Adventures Of A Plumbers Mate, the least funny of the series. according to Stanley Long's autobiography, he was very disappointed with it, but likedFrancis so still paid him and then tinkered with it. Francis meisterwork was a historical novel set in spain that was released as a hardback in the USA to good reviews, but was chopped into three short pb's in this country and crept out. which kind of sums up his luck.
according to mike moorcock, in a letter to PPC in the 90's, Francis was a bit shaky on spelling and grammar, and a lot of his work was copy-edited by his mother in law, who was very hot on these things. blimey, i could do with a mum-in-law like that!
Steve Francis was a decvent writer who was capable of the odd gem, but he was dogged by bad luck all his life, it seems. still, for Scream And Scream Again i'd forgive him anything!
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Post by pulphack on Dec 7, 2008 20:56:07 GMT
mayeb that's why this kind of fiction has died out...
we don't need it. the pulpmeisters were right, guy was a prophet, and we're all doomed. mutation in viruses is growing incrementally all the time, so why not in insects and creepy crawlies.
we're doomed...
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Post by pulphack on Dec 7, 2008 20:50:40 GMT
bit late picking this up, but... nice gag!
the book, needless to say, should be read by everyone onthis board. a sleazy classic of its sort.
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Post by pulphack on Dec 7, 2008 20:48:33 GMT
not read this, but just wanted to share that i was round my mate paul's the other day, and the subject of DF came up - paul's mum and his late dad knew DF in the sixties and used to go to the Watermans a lot. it was a notorious hangout, and they rubbed shoulders with lots of media and gangster types. she also had a good chuckle over his lack of restraint about his sexuality, considering it was still (shamefully) illegal back then. yet - and this is odd considering how DF hammered it when he was alive - she didn't know he was related to Stoker!
i have to say, it sounds like his autobiography would beat his fiction hands down.
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Post by pulphack on Dec 7, 2008 20:44:01 GMT
the whole Hank Janson affair is one that really highlights how permissiveness in popular culture has changed over the years. Francis' stuff is very tame, and in truth later Jansons written by the likes of Jim Moffatt are much stronger (some of the turn of the seventies Compact stuff is quite nasty in tone) but still plae into nothing compared to what we can buy now.
having read your 'groovy age' article the other day (sterling stuff, btw), it strikes me that you had this problem much more in germany than here by the seventies. the Lady Chatterly trial at the turn of the sixties, where penguin went to court to fight for the publication in the uk of a book deemed obscene, was a watershed that can't be underestimated. after that, the floodgates (thankfully) creaked open. to be a bit marxist, it was really about whether or not the working classes (ie low culture readers) should have access to a more open form of expression. thankfully, the working classes won. as did the posh publishers who peddled the new filth. oh well.
back to the point. to read a Francis' Janson now, and think that trial was only a few years before Chatterly, just shows how repressed things were. and don't get me started on No Orchids For Miss Blandish...
got more to say about Francis, but that'll continue over on the Hank Janson thread.
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Post by pulphack on Dec 7, 2008 20:33:49 GMT
Arlen suffered because of his one bestseller - it was SO huge that it fostered critial discontent, and his mannered style is not for everyone. which is probably why it didn't catch on long-term. but he did create the Falcon, detective hero of a whole series of B's with Tom Conway. and his tales of Mayfair life with Shelmerdene and her friends as a recurrent cast have a charm that has perhaps grown with time. certainly, the late Peter Tinniswood (comedy writer best remembered for his cricketing Brigadier, and the I Didn't Know You Cared series) was a fan - his seventies novel Shemerelda is very different to most of his books, and this puzzled me for years until i stumbled on Arlen. in truth, it's a beautifully observed homage. do check out any Arlen if you get the chance.
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Post by pulphack on Dec 7, 2008 20:28:48 GMT
forry's activities as fanzine pioneer, champion of genre, and lit agent should never be overlooked. a man without whom many would not have got a break, and a true eccentric and enthusiast.
rip.
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Post by pulphack on Nov 28, 2008 21:05:06 GMT
That's a very good idea, dem. hopefully michel is still looking in occassionally and will think about it.
meantime - aaarrrgghh!! number three - the woman and the severed head! my ex picked this up years and years ago (must be at least fifteen, as i can remember where i read it and we left there in '94), and i was going through a 'not able to settle to victorian prose' period. i remember wondering why the stradivarius story wasn't as much fun as erich zann - which is a ludicrous comparison, but perhaps i'd just read that one again. and i also remember ploughing through henry james and wondering if he'd ever thought of the concept of pace. whereas now i think his style is what marks him out. ah, the callowness of youth (well, late twenties, then).
god, i'd love to still have that one on the shelf now, just to go back and read it in a better mood. but at a tenner a pop, i think i'll hope dem can badger wordsworth a bit...
thought about that, dem? a sort of ghouls lit agent, striking deals for the dead?
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Post by pulphack on Nov 28, 2008 20:57:45 GMT
blimey! so that's what don houghton did after helping speed the demise of Hammer?!
(actually, i liked the ones he scripted, but no-one else did at the time, more's the pity.)
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Post by pulphack on Nov 28, 2008 20:53:45 GMT
that is quite... incredible. insane, genius, both, or just aware he was a few hundred words short? truly, the Rev is like Eric Vornoff in Bride Of The Monster... 'brilliant... but insane...'
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Post by pulphack on Nov 28, 2008 20:48:55 GMT
this should be something to look forward to - like many of us, they seem to have grown up watching the portable, late at night, under the covers, and trying to get the arial to stay in tune for an ITV 'appointment with fear' sort of season. if any of you have the Tigon box set, i recommend listening to their commentary on Blood On Satan's Claw for some very enlightening and amusing stories.
i picked up mark gatiss' 'Nightshade' a few years back, a doctor who novel. i don't know if he did more than one, but even if you wouldn't go near a who novel in a month of sundays i'd still say read this, as it's set in the sixties and features a shape changing evil that preys on the subconscious fears of those around, and happens across an ageing actor who was once Nightshade, a very thinly disguised homage to Quatermass. ticks all the boxes, and even makes you forget he's had the sylvester mccoy dr fosited on him, which also gives us the execrable ace.
i say 'even if you wouldn't...' as that's me generally. but the first Lucifer Box tempted me to give it a go. as should you.
and let's hope xmas lives up to what we're expecting of him!
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Post by pulphack on Nov 28, 2008 20:17:53 GMT
was lee as mr james really that far back, caroline? i thought it was only a couple of years back - god how the xmases go. that was a wonderful programme, and very well filmed, too. not too much farting about, so you became focused on the man.
MES reading Lovecraft?! that one passed me by! i had that odd 'solo' album MES did a few years back, which was partly him reading, partly him talking into a dictaphone, and partly him talking while some other Mancs talked over him. very odd, disorienting, and scary in quite its own way...
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Post by pulphack on Nov 28, 2008 20:13:39 GMT
they're certainly worth a try. detective fiction that sort of follows the usual templates, but tends to veer off at odd angles. his take on the workings of the human mind, and the frailties of character lift him out of the plot-driven realms of most whodunnits, and leave him hovering - sometimes a little uneasily - in the lands between the genre novel and the novel as it is supposed to be in lit, where the characters and the human condition are the meat.
which means sometimes you just wish it'd come down on one side of the fence or the other and get on with it. but for all that, he walks that tightrope very well, rarely stumbling.
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Post by pulphack on Nov 26, 2008 23:38:28 GMT
ah, mr horler... yes, he does love to over-explain, but that is part of his charm, isn't it. and let's face it, both he and the Rev must have twigged to something as they had absolutely shedloads of readers in their day.
mr h was a graduate of the Amalgamated school of writers, having cut his teeth on a number of storypaper tales, lots involving footer. indeed, his style might come from that, as the likes of Charles Hamilton (aka Frank Richards, Martin Clifford, Owen Conquest, etc) and Edwy Searles Brooks (writer of Nelson Lee, the schoolmaster detective who encountered lots of spooky stuff - you really couldn't make these guys up could you - and was later a decades long crime novelist as Victor Gunn and Berkeley Grey) churned out reams of thrilling tales. Hamilton in particular evolved a style in which repetition was used for dramatic and comic effect to boost word count, which is either irritating or endearing, dependant on taste. mr h's use of exposition is also endearing, and echoes the great JT Edson's habit of editorialising mid-tale. however, using these techniques for ironic or satiric effect can open you up for criticism by those that miss the point (sorry, personal bugbear there!) - but i digress...
anyway, back to the point. mr h was not above purloining available heroes, having penned tales of Tiger Standish, the secret agent originally created by Sapper (creator of thick-necked Bulldog Drummond, a bit iffy politically in these PC times, but a great ghost story writer as the Dent collection by Jack Adrian from the late 80's reminds). he also saw himself fitting nicely into the mantle of Edgar Wallace, so much so that after the king of thrillers pegged it in Hollywood in '32, mr h purchased EW's work desk, making great play of it to reinforce this ambition in the minds of the public.
as EW's greatest success was during the 20's, when he signed with Hodder to produce a thriller a month, and they already had mr h, it all seemed set. trouble was, whereas EW had been very modern - his books may seem dated now, but from The Four Just Men he had been one of the writers to define the modern thriller novel in terms of pace, style, economy of prose, and the mix of sex, action and sadism that seems tame now was pushed a few boundaries at the time - mr h was still at his storypaper roots an edwardian, and had more in common with E Phillips Oppenheim, whose wordy spy stories seem arcane and charming now, but for so long just seemed unfashionable and 'ripe as cheese' (thank you Hugh Carlton Greene).
mr h still had a long and successful career, but doesn't even warrant the footnote that EW gets in fiction history (well, in this country - the yanks still recall him, and in europe he's still legend).
this sounds typical Horler, and i don't mean that disparagingly. charming and thrilling by turns, i'll be bound, and fun all the way. you don't see that many of his books knocking about*, but they're usually worth a punt.
*not sure why this is - my theory is that like a lot of pre-war bestsellers who weren't so big or republished post-war, many copies were gathered for salvage or destroyed during WWII, which is why it's hard to find some things from this period.
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Post by pulphack on Nov 26, 2008 19:16:08 GMT
that would be fascinating - the Badger covers were, erm, colourful if a little hurried. rather like the Rev's writing. or, indeed, many pulp paperback covers of the mushroom jungle years.
Spencers were amongst the poorest payers of that era, which was probably why the Rev decided that he needed to really go at it. armed with tape recorder and a typing agency (or his mum, maybe) around the corner, he would dictate rapidly while the previous spool was transcribed, hot from the reels. and then find he only had a couple of pages to tie it all up, hence some of the endings.
hence, too, gems like the sentence quoted by dem - that only happens when you're not looking at what you write (a bit like my posts). but there's little doubt that given the chance to reflect and slow the pace, the passages of 'quality' would have grown lengthier.
one thing i can't remember ever reading, and i'd love to know, is where all the pseudonyms came from - did he make them up, or some house sub at Spencers?
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