Fri 6 Jan 2017
ROBERT BLOCH – The Scarf. Dial Press,. hardcover, 1947. Avon #211, paperback, as The Scarf of Passion, 1949. Gold Medal d1727, paperback, 1966.
Movie-makers aren’t the only ones who commit violence on books. Toward the end of October I was reading a 1966 reprint of Robert Bloch’s first novel, The Scarf. It’s a first-person serial-killer tale, and it’s creepy enough that it probably worried Bloch’s friends and family at the time and still packs a chill or two. And while I was reading this late-40s novel, I came upon a reference to Bob Dylan.
That got me curious, so I looked up the passage in an earlier edition, and found it had been considerably re-written, either by Bloch himself or by some talented hack at Fawcett who could ape his style. And so it goes throughout the 1966 edition: a train trip becomes a plane ride, a radio is rewritten as a stereo, and there’s even a reference to dancing the Frug. (Ah, who could forget the Frug?) All of which were no doubt intended to make The Scarf pass for a contemporary novel in ’66, but now seem oddly quaint.
January 6th, 2017 at 10:09 pm
Quite a few writers updated their works themselves, almost always a mistake.
January 6th, 2017 at 10:33 pm
I don’t know why, but I have a feeling that Bloch did the updating himself. Whether on his own, or if he was asked to, that I have no idea about.
Either way, I agree. It was a mistake.
I think it falls into the same category as colorizing black and white movies. (I don’t think anyone’s doing that any more, are they?)
January 6th, 2017 at 11:04 pm
My understanding is that in 1966 for the paperback reprint Bloch added various new elements, the extent of those revisions is unknown to me, but in his biography, Once Around the Bloch he spends several pages on post publications problems with his publisher and agents. There is also an indication that he intended later to address The Scarf further, but there is nothing more other than the title popping up in the index again.
January 7th, 2017 at 1:02 am
Thanks, Barry. It makes sense that Bloch did the revisions himself. Too bad he didn’t say more as to whose idea it was.
January 6th, 2017 at 11:52 pm
One of the more famous or infamous examples of updating occurred when John D. MacDonald updated his pulp stories that were collected in the two big collections: THE GOOD STUFF and MORE GOOD STUFF. Just about everyone agreed it was a mistake.
I also remember laughing when The Spider pulp hero was updated for the paperback reprints back in the 1990’s. The covers looked silly.
January 7th, 2017 at 1:05 am
I hate to say it, but when I learned that MacDonald insisted on making those changes, I kind of lost interest in reading him altogether.