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originaldetectivesheep · 5 years

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Year In Review - Books I Read in 2018

Last year, I thought I was at the limits by reading 300ish books, mostly old Gutenberg stuff. This year...kind of left that for dead, with 689 books or book-like things scratched off. This is not merely 'way', but 'way, way' too many, and may have contributed to stagnation as an author in the middle of the year: what we read inevitably ends up setting the context for what we write, and the amount of Edgar Wallace and E. P. Oppenheim I read this year can't have been good.

To try and make sense out of these way too many books, I'm not going to post review snippets for each of them, or even the 50ish (less than 15%) that I unreservedly liked; instead, I'm going to go through and find something to say about every author I read at least three books from this year. This is still going to be huge, but hopefully, it'll be more coherent huge, and less bad-huge.

A. Hyatt Verrill was an immense chore to read, astonishingly racist almost everywhere and completely up his own ass about branches of science he knew literally nothing about, but fighting through it, I managed to get a lot of close description of the Caribbean as it was in the early 20th century. This isn't a recommendation of, really, any of his work, but more of a warning about how to be sure you know what you know -- that, and maybe establishing a full-privilege-people shoveling bureau to help recover any diamonds from similar shitpiles of the past for general use. :\

Alfred J. Church never, as far as I read this year, put out a good book -- he was fatally tripped up by, to some degree, the expectations of his time and markets, and in another way, by not really understanding what fiction is and how it works. I didn't have to read his crap to find this out, but it was faster than doing another lit class and I could do it while waiting for airplanes, so again :\

I read the first 30 of Arthur Leo Zagat's Doc Turner stories this year; in addition to being critical two-fisted pulps, they're also an object lesson in self-examination: Turner's whole deal is being the protector of the downtrodden new-Americans of Morris Street, but at such an angle that you can't help but notice who gets to be human and worthy under their hokey dialect and who doesn't. This series was trying to be woke and progressive in its day, and where and how it fails at that should be a critical pointer for people trying, also, to lead the moment and hopefully not look grimy and problematic in another fifteen years.

I'd obviously read some Arthur Machen before, but doing a deep dive over his whole corpus this year was still a revelation. A lot of his stuff is kind of far-corner weird, and it was really interesting to come back later in life and see the threads of just how it ended up that weird.

Arthur Morrison put up a real mixed bag: a lot of good humor and some solid detective bits, but with real problems with dialect; this is something you kind of get with nineteenth-century humor, but that doesn't make it not suck. There's always going to be a use, as a writer, to faithfully representing non-classroom-standard pronunciation and usage, but reading stuff with major dialect should be a bucket of cold water to rethink about how you actually put that on paper.

C. Dudley Lampen's shit-bad books, exactly enough to qualify, show how a sufficiently-motivated author, regardless of ability above a certain and very low minimum standard, can always find a publisher. Lampen got there with Christianity; there are other paths for other bads, but taking them rather than taking your rejections will not get you where you actually want to be.

I had a bunch of D. W. O'Brien short stories this year that added up to about a qualifying extent; he's one of those writers who for the most part does make it up in volume, but there was a lot of breadth there this year, and more good material than before. I can't understand why he isn't better known among general audiences, in the context of pulp writers before the end of the Second World War.

I notched 126 books or book-equivalents from E. Phillips Oppenheim this year, and nearly all of them were a dreadful waste of time. Craft-wise, I liked seeing how he put together serial collections as dismembered novels, unlike Wallace's barely-attached piles of independent stories, and the way he, in mid-life, read one of his early books, threw it into the sea because it was so bad, and then got somewhat better is heartening, but that is a lot of material for very little result. Oppenheim always wants to be literary and do well, but he never got any good at it, and "churn out a lot of barely-qualifying crap" is no longer a valid market strategy with so many other entertainment options.

I read all of E. W. Hornung, including all of the Raffles stuff, this year, mostly sitting in one place in London waiting for a plane to Jo'burg. The cricket interplay was pretty good, and there was a lot more to think about, in a social-history dimension, than I thought there would be, but there also was a lot less material than I thought this guy had put up.

Earl Derr Biggers (including all the original Charlie Chan books) was a lot less racist than I was dreading going in, and a lot better at all kinds of stuff about place and human relationships than you really expect a detective writer to be. Biggers is another one where you really see the contrasts between 'trying' and 'succeeding' at including marginalized people as truly human, and how you take that lesson forward is important.

This year accounted for 111 Edgar Wallace things, which were less of a waste of time than the Oppenheim if immensely more aggravating. Wallace is a better and snappier technical writer, but he has dialect problems, he's intensely racist, he ran out so many failed experiments and slabbed together so many reprint collections, and his organization of anything novel-length is frequently a disaster. It's more informative, maybe, to read Wallace writing about writing than it is to read his own stuff; he's thoroughly, professionally artless, but he has a distinct vision for what can sell where, and a grounded approach to writing as craft. But for general audiences, god, no, stoppit.

Edward Lucas White had a minimum-qualifying extent this year, all read in Zambia, which was good in places and eh in others. I liked his shorter stories better than his full-length novels, but they really go to show how a racist and orientalist fear of the unknown underlies a lot of that great early-20th-century boom in weird fiction -- as someone who likes reading and writing that sort of weird, it's another spur to re-examine what I'm doing and how I do it.

I covered all of Elizabeth McKintosh this year as well, and as much as I liked the Inspector Grant material, her non-Grant mysteries were maybe better. It was also cool to get her full spread, and see her doing things other than mysteries; too often you see authors only through a lens of what stays in print, what the library buys, etc, and you miss these parts of their development or personality.

I finished up most of the Ernest Bramah I'd missed five years ago in Russia while I was in Zambia, and enjoyed the more Max Carrados stuff I hadn't found before. I did not enjoy another volume of Kai Lung shittiness, but will keep it as a memento mori for doing characters so significantly outside oneself. :\

This year also saw all of Ethel Lina White's thrillers, and while I was reading them, it was ceaselessly awesome. If there's anything in this year that's going to qualify for re-reads in some distant future, these are going to be it.

I ground through all of Felix Dahn while I was in France, and hated about every single page of it. The transition from late antiquity to the early Middle Ages is interesting, but maybe don't send a moustache-twirling kleindeutsch racist to tell the tales of Germans taking over from Rome. :\

Intensely stupid and so significantly, broad-spectrum racist that I frequently wondered whether I was unexpectedly drunk rather than the book being just that bad, I somehow made it through most of Francis H. Atkins' material this year, and the most significant thing I gained out of it was never having to read those atrocious crap piles ever again. There are a very few interesting or novel points in this guy's fiction, and none of them are worth putting up with the writing to dig out.

If you need a sleeping pill, you could do worse than Frederic W. Farrar -- unless you break out into uncontrollable laughter when confronted with mid-Victorian pietisms. His school stories are picture-primer trash; his Romanica is ahistorical sermonizing trash. Again, do not.

Georg Ebers can't draw characters, compose a plot, or hold reader interest, but he does a hell of a job re-writing research on Roman-era Alexandria over into thick piles of sequential words. Dude sucks, but if you can skip around, he's done all of the work on this little corner of Egyptian history and it just remains for moderns to take that work and re-cast it.

George A. Henty made the minimum qualification, and I wish he hadn't -- his three bad to very bad novels made the worst of the flight out to Hong Kong, and should not be given the chance to spoil anyone else's time, ever again.

George Griffith had a fuck of an arc -- some of his early material was just blindingly awful, both stupid and poorly composed, but he recovered and improved in later books to put up some stuff that's borderline worth seeking out. That this kind of metamorphosis is possible is a great encouragement to keep going: no matter how bad you are, you will not necessarily *stay that bad forever.

I've still got a couple left before I finish George J. Whyte-Melville, but from what I did read of him this year, it's pretty clear that sometimes authors have fields they're good at and fields they suck at. His Victorian stuff is not that bad -- and his riding manual is an unintentional treasure -- but his sword-and-sandal stuff sucks major balls. If you need to stay in your lane, that's something to learn as soon as possible.

H. Bedford-Jones is a weird one; not real good, but he takes on these gigantic imaginative ideas and does them almost correctly, almost completely. I obviously want to avoid that sort of missed-it-by-that-much outcome, but to a certain degree you need to take on big challenges to even have a chance at that.

I read most of J. U. Giesy's work (with Junius Smith on Semi Dual) last year, and the minimum-qualifying stuff that slopped over into this year was mostly very bad, but there was a WWI novella in the bunch that was so good I wondered if it had been misattributed. Again, what's good, what you like, and what will sell are all completely disconnected propositions.

James Hilton provided the requisite Mid-Century Popular Intentional Literature ration this year, some of which was good, some of which was confusingly-accumulated, and some of which ended up lapped by Richard Rhodes. Hilton is another re-read candidate, but not all of his stuff; in bulk, this is a lesson about the advantages and disadvantages of throwing yourself so wholly into your works.

The John Buchan I had left for this year, after reading him in the main, much younger, was a picked-over bunch to be sure, and as usual to be grappled with rather than just taken up entire. It's not something I'd go and recommend to others, but A Lodge In the Wilderness was maybe the most important and impactful book I read, personally, this whole year.

The one good thing I, or anyone else, can take from John W. Duffield's shitty corpus, is the expression "what is this Bomba-the-Jungle-Boy horseshit?", which means exactly what it looks like it means. Duffield has some imaginative ideas, but has zero capacity to actually execute on them, ever, and put up some of the most virulently stupid racism I had to grind through this year. Bad even among his contemporaries, the likes of Duffield are why informed people are reluctant to make major hay out of Lovecraft's racism -- not because he isn't still problematic, but because a lot of stuff in the contemporary popular press was that much even worse.

I technically had a qualifying amount of Ladbroke Black this year, but you blink at this dude -- who ghosted a lot of the high-speed, instantly-disposable Sexton Blake as well -- and his entire corpus is gone. As much as I can remember, the stuff I read this year was similarly functional but not noteworthy, and fortunately not real influential.

I probably read enough Leroy Yerxa to qualify, between various short repacks; he's a middling pulp author, but going through, all of his stuff is still publishable, which is important. He turned in acceptable work in the right trip lengths, over diverse subjects, to place out; there's a place for this kind of workmanship, even if it doesn't ever get to great heights.

I didn't expect I'd like the Lloyd C. Douglas stuff that I liked as much as I ended up liking it: there's bits of clunk through his whole corpus, but he almost never gets preachy, and where his stuff works, it hits just absolutely ceaselessly, and is very cool. (But yes, some of it does suck, very important to note.)

M. P. Shiel was responsible for the book that I got maybe the maddest at this year, and definitely the one I wrote the longest negative review blurb for. He had a couple good parts, but there was too much that was just over-ornamented where it didn't straight up suck. Honestly, all of this material was back last January and a pain to think about even then.

For Golden-Age space-opera, it doesn't get much better than Malcolm Jameson, who I mostly cleaned up this year and who barely got over the qualifying line. This took in a little more of his range than I had before, which was really good: he always comes up with neat outer angles on stuff, and almost always with correct science, at least of his time.

Max Brand is my current 'major' campaign, and reading the next hundred-ish things from him in the pile will take most of 2019. I've already chewed a decently big chunk, though, and it's interesting to see more of his warts and weak points as a writer, where what I'd seen from him before lacked a lot of that. I'm also seeing, for the first time, some of his non-cowboy fiction, and for the most part that's another 'stay in your lane' incentive; we'll see what of this changes next year.

I finally got around to reading most of Otis A. Kline's corpus, and it...was not really worth the wait. Kline is another idea factory, and while he's generally more able to execute on them than Duffield and less racist in doing so, neither comes out perfect and he's substantially in the shadow of Abraham Merritt on Earth and E. Rice Burroughs when he's off on a planetary romance. Functional and imaginative, yes, but you really really want that extra push to make it through to 'good'.

The one thing you really want to take out of S. S. Van Dine is his 20 rules for detective fiction; I got that this year, in amid the Philo Vance stuff, which takes a bit of an effort. Van Dine's career arc is a hell of weird one, and it must have hurt, from the cleaned-up later books, to look at the over-artifacted mess of the first couple and regret not doing them better. This sort of view is why I want to read less of these in the future -- I can't keep having my mental context dictated by works that are a hundred years and more out of date.

Sabine Baring-Gould is approached a lot better as an antiquarian and a writer of sourcebooks than of fiction. His fictional works are okay, if you excuse some major structural problems, but for all of their unstoppable thickness, his collections of legends and historical tales are just mighty. Maybe not an author to read, but definitely one to keep around.

I'm also kind of in the middle on Sapper, who's showing some okay range, but in many parts really exemplifying how perspective and market demands can put blinders on you. His wartime stuff recalls Tim O'Brien or Joseph Heller in places -- mechanized warfare tends to have similar effects at whatever distance -- but there as in his thriller serials he's also the staunchest guy since Wallace, and he does a really poor job of not Drudge-siren hyperventilating about threats to the class system. Again, we'll see next year how the rest of this goes.

I read all of Tacitus' Annals and Histories this year, and damned if I can remember a whole lot about them that deterministically wasn't in Suetonius or Julius Caesar last year. Roman writers are definitely more primary-source than pleasure-reading at this point, but it does help to have that text as a reference for reading bads out of the Bibliotheca Romanica.

The Talbot Mundy I had on the stack this year was very much for cleanup, and doesn't change last year's impressions: a still-problematic dude who is less racist, less colonialist, and less bad than a lot of people are willing to extend him credit. If a book has Chullunder Ghose in it, it's probably worth reading, even if I still would like to see a South Asian writer pick up and grapple with the character.

Thomas C. Bridges did probably the best boys'-own adventures I read this year, which is kind of like "least stinky garbage dump" or "best-tasting light beer". He does good stuff and some absolute horseshit, but his pacing and action flow is just magic, even when his characters are being intolerable racist fucks; another one to scrape the gunk off maybe.

I got to see Valentine Williams turn, over the course of a lot of books this year, from a John Buchan disciple so close to almost be clone into an independent if not always original thrillerist; in 2018, we'd read the Clubfoot series out for ableism -- von Grundt is kind of defined in his villainy and power by his grotesque body -- but Clubfoot himself is one of the classic spy villains and an absolute monster of a character. There are ways to get to that level without punching down, but this is the mark, right here.

Wilkie Collins was mostly accounted for in 2017, but the three books finished this year -- The Moonstone, The Queen of Hearts, and The Woman In White -- would be a sufficient reading for a whole year for a lot of people. Every single one of these is plain and pure magic, and if you haven't read them, there's your '19 project.

Somehow, I made it through all of William H. Ainsworth's wild and degenerate gothicisms; I'm just not always sure how, or completely why. Ainsworth is another author to be handled with the fireplace tongs, not because he's bad or problematic, but because he's just so weird and relentlessly extra, and I'm not really sure you want to get that on you.

* * * What stands out in the above, or what should, is how unbalanced it is: I read a couple other women authors this year who fell below the threshold, and McKintosh and White put up some of the best total results of anyone I read this year, but the volume problem is exactly as bad as it looks. This is something I really need to make a point of fixing, but it's something that ought to also come naturally in making the other change I'm targeting for 2019.

That other change, of course, is to read more contemporary material. There's stuff to be gleaned from the past, sure, but what I got from chewing through that much Oppenheim is of seriously debatable value. To some extent, pulping Gutenbooks is what I do because I can do it easily at work or on the road, but I really need to set aside time to read newer, better, smarter, more diverse material if I actually want to improve as an author -- and it'll probably be less teeth-grinding, too.

#meta #criticism #wow that is way too many books #why do i do this to myself

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