Maker Of Shadows by Jack Mann

[helrunar]

Some comments on the Gees series. I've now read four of the novels in the series: Grey Shapes, The Ninth Life, Maker of Shadows, and The Glass Too Many. Until today I'd always thought that the last named was the final entry in the series, but this morning, having re-read a blog entry about the books more carefully, I realized that Her Ways are Death was the last volume. Maybe at some point in the future I'll want to read that and Nightmare Farm (which gets good marks in this thread). I did see a little while ago that Her Ways are Death is currently available to read on archive dot org (seems available to read, not "borrow"). For now I feel like I need a break from this series.

I think the Gees character is a lot of fun. But in The Glass Too Many, which I just finished last night, he makes several stupid mistakes which I put down to poor plotting by the author. He also gets a tremulous romance with this book's heroine and (shock, horror!) the two have pre-marital sex (offstage, of course!!! why, whatEVER were you thinking???) which they then discuss ENDLESSLY in very soggy, cliche-ridden prose. When Mann gets tired of writing this sort of thing himself, he has them either quote Browning, or make the heroine perch at the piano to perform a musical setting of a Browning, or Browning-esque poem. There are literally pages of this kind of thing:

"Those eyes of yours, Claire? Did you rake pieces down out of the sky in a summer twilight? How did you get them, wonder girl?"

"I stole a paint-box, and mixed the colours to suit myself. Gees, you're not such a fool as to think I got those eyes honestly, are you?"

"I dunno. You're capable of anything, wonder girl."

I skipped quite a bit of this and don't feel I missed anything pertinent to the plot.

Mann is good on character and atmosphere, but plotting seems to have been a weakness. And that may have been why he extensively plagiarized the Bliss novel a few years prior to this entry. In all four of the books I have read, the climax seemed absurdly anti-climactic, given the build-up. The painting of the big finale of Maker of Shadows, displayed on the cover of that old issue of Argosy, is much more exciting than the author's description of the proceedings. Maker is less marred by soppy romantic tosh but there's an element of it in some of the middle chapters. 

To sum up, I thought Grey Shapes and The Ninth Life were the superior entries of the four novels I read. It's interesting to me that the late Karl Wagner was such a huge fan of Maker of Shadows; I thought the book had good potential, which wasn't fully realized in Mann's handling of the material. (Jack Mann's real name as I believe is discussed elsewhere here was Charles Cannell, but for the sake of convenience I simply refer to him as Jack Mann when discussing the Gees books.)

H.

[helrunar]

Update: a certain popular retail site's robot servitor advises that Nightmare Farm became available in portable electronic book format last July (choose your poison). Priced to sell at $1.99.

H.