While doing some additional research on Peter Driscoll, the author of Pangolin, a spy thriller I reviewed here only a day or so ago, I discovered the sad news of his death, a fact not known to Al Hubin and the Revised Crime Fiction IV before now.

   The Wikipedia entry for Driscoll is not very large. It’s only one sentence long, followed by a list of the books he wrote:

   Taken from an interview with Mr Driscoll and appearing in his entry in Contemporary Authors, he had this to say about his early career:

   Here below is a checklist of all of Peter Driscoll’s crime fiction, expanded upon from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

DRISCOLL, PETER (John). 1942-2005.

      * The White Lie Assignment (n.) Macdonald, UK. hc, 1971. Lippincott, US, 1975. [Albania] “Michael Mannis, a freelance photographer, knew how the Albanian Secret Police dealt with spies. So it took a great deal of money to tempt him into accepting a mission to cross the Albanian frontier and photograph the Chinese missile sites there. He certainly earned it hte hard way when he discovered that his contact was a fugitive double agent with Russian killers waiting for him at the end of the run.”

      * The Wilby Conspiracy (n.) Macdonald, UK, hc, 1973. Lippincott, US, hc, 1972. [South Africa] Film: Optimus, 1975 (scw: Rod Amateau, Harold Nebenzal; dir: Ralph Nelson; starring: Sidney Poitier, Michael Caine). “A white mining engineer plunged into an underground world of intrigue and violence. A beautiful, sensual woman whom he must trust. A black fugitive whom he must save. And hanging in the balance, the fate of a vast, vicious struggle between a clandestine revolutionary organization and a diabolically efficient secret police amid the ugly slums and breathtaking wilderness of present-day Africa.”

      * In Connection with Kilshaw (n.) Macdonald, UK, hc, 1974. Lippincott, US, hc, 1974. [Ireland]

      * The Barboza Credentials (n.) Macdonald, UK, hc, 1976. Lippincott, US, hc, 1976. [Mozambique] “British-born Joe Hickey is charged with finding a mercenary killer in Africa’s dark heart. But time is running out for this ex-cop turned Rhodesian sanctions-buster, and the life he has to save – as the seconds tick relentlessly by – is his own.”

      * Pangolin (n.) Macdonald, UK, hc, 1979. Lippincott, US, hc, 1979. [Hong Kong]

      * -Heritage (n.) Granada, UK, hc, 1982. Doubleday, US, hc, 1982. [Algeria; 1945-62]

      * Spearhead (n.) Bantam, UK, hc, 1988. Little-Brown, US, hc, 1989. [South Africa] “The story of the terror and strife of a South Africa in deep racial conflict. Major Patrick Marriner, a retired British paratrooper and Falklands veteran, is recruited by the Black Nationalist leader Kumalo’s exiled comrades to do the seemingly impossible — free Kumalo before the National Intelligence Service can rid themselves of international humiliation.”

       Secrets of State (n.) Bantam, UK, hc, 1991

       Spoils of War (n.) Bantam, UK, hc, 1994 [Kuwait]

JULIAN SYMONS – Bogue’s Fortune.

Perennial Library; paperback reprint, 1980. Harper & Brothers, US, hc, 1957. Other US paperback editions under this title: Dolphin, 1961; Carroll & Graf, 1988, 1993. First published in the UK as The Paper Chase: Collins Crime Club, hc, 1956. Paperback reprints under this title: Fontana, UK, 1958, 1966; Corgi, UK, 1970; Beagle, US, 1971.

   This is the book I began reading immediately after I finished The India-Rubber Men, by Edgar Wallace, and reviewed here not too long ago. It is also the book that I contrasted the Wallace book to in the comments that followed, saying:

   I confess that I got sidetracked in reading Bogue’s Fortune – since the time I started the book and now, my wife and I have been watching the entire 13-episode season of Eli Stone on DVD, not crime-related but we both think it’s a fabulous show. But I finished the book in one last gulp last night, closing the pages around 2 a.m., and now here I am and ready to report.

   Don’t expect a long analysis of all of Symons’ work, however, or any, for that matter. This is the first one I can recall ever having read, but no matter if it’s typical of his crime fiction – and I suspect not – it will not be my last.

   He was in thriller mode when he wrote this one – which is what brought up the comparison with Edgar Wallace in the first place – and I’m sticking with my original impression. It’s witty and clever, and filled with engaging people, as I said earlier.

   The story – at least he’s getting to it, you say, and I am – begins with a chap named Charles Applegate about to embark on a new career, that of instructor at Bramley, an ultra-progressive school for delinquent children somewhere outside of London. He has an ulterior motive, as he is no teacher, only a detective story writer looking to place his next mystery in such an establishment.

   After some hugger-mugger on the train down, his first night at the school is marred by the discovery of his also newly-arrived colleague dead in the victim’s own bed in the room next door. Murder it is, committed with the knife that Applegate took from one of the students around meal time the evening before.

   This all in the first 50 pages, and by page 72 he is having the following conversation with Hedda Pont, the young matron of the school and the niece of the director. She is as equally progressive as the school, which of course part of her charm to Applegate:

   Not surprisingly, perhaps, it is Hedda who has a better head on her shoulders for detecting than does Applegate, and perhaps even more physically active in the case that follows as well. One begins to think that Symons is being a bit satirical here, and once started thinking in this direction, one cannot begin to stop. Nor should one, and the way the ending plays out will only reinforce that thought.

   I do not think that Symons was thinking so much of Wallace when he write this, however, and while I am also not so very familiar with John Buchan, the latter’s name is invoked on page 135, in the following conversation that closes Chapter 16:

   Don’t get the wrong idea from the first sentence in that last selection. Hedda’s previous sentence had been, “A girl just can’t be ardent all the time. Will you turn out the light? Good night.”

   While both the beginning and end of this thriller adventure, combined with a little bit of detection, meet my prior expectations and then some, the middle sags a little, beginning with a 20 page exposition of the facts of the matter by one of the participants on the adversarial side, or at least his version of them, and no, it is not really known for a while whose side he is on, besides his own, and the jury may safely disregard this entire remark – or at least the second half of it.

   The overall rating, then, if I were to give one, still averages out to much better than average. Much. (And if you were to ask, I would have to say that the US title is the better one. By far.)

PETER DRISCOLL – Pangolin.

Detective Book Club; hardcover reprint (3-in-1 edition), May 1979. Macdonald & Jane, UK, hc, 1979; Granada/Panther, UK, pb, 1980; Corgi, UK, pb, 1989. J. B. Lippincott, US, hc, 1979; Popular Library, US, pb, date not stated.

   It’s wrong to generalize, I know, so generally speaking, I never do. But I still think that the English write espionage thrillers better than anyone else. And while this particular novel written by British author Peter Driscoll never won any awards, it certainly offers many more high points than low.

   Driscoll is probably best known for his book, The Wilby Conspiracy (Macdonald, 1973), and basis for the movie of the same name, but back in the 70s and 80s, he wrote a number of others, all presumably spy thrillers as well. (As a measure of a small comeback, ending a six-year hiatus in 1988, three more books were added to his total.)

   This one takes place in Hong Kong, back in the post-Viet Nam era, but before the British gave up control to the Chinese. A group of would-be adventurers down on their luck plan a kidnapping that will net them ten million dollars, if they can pull it off. The victim, they know — and this is what makes him so valuable — is the undercover head of American CIA operations in the Far East.

   What they do not know is that the man, whose wife has been sleeping with one of the kidnappers, is in the midst of a delicate espionage operation involving the head of the Chinese missile program. Moro rebels in the Philippines are involved, as well as a typhoon, the Hong Kong police, the British foreign office, and of course the CIA.

   It’s obvious that Driscoll must have spent some time in Hong Kong, and some of the greatest pleasures he supplies are the sights, sounds and smells of that city as it was 20 years ago. There are double-crosses galore, as well as massive (and painful) errors of judgment, great detective work, and did I mention double-dealing?

   Not an award-winner, as I stated above — it’s just a little too predictable for that — but it still packs a pretty good punch, providing the reader several full evenings’ worth of intrigue of the sit-back fasten-the-seatbelts-on-your-armchair kind of novel.

[UPDATE] 06-14-08.    The full list of Forgotten Books submitted for this past Friday can be found on Patti Abbott’s blog, where the idea first began.

   And I have discovered some bad news. While doing some research on Peter Driscoll the author, I learned that he died in 2005, a fact not known to Al Hubin and the Revised Crime Fiction IV until now. Look for a separate posting later today on this blog for a short tribute to him.

BOB GARLAND – Derfflinger

Manor Books 17181; paperback original. First printing, 1978. Trade paperback reprint: Writer’s Showcase Press, 2000.

   The Manor edition of this title is a very scarce book. As I type this, there is only one copy online on ABE. Manor books never did get distributed very widely, and when (or where) they did, the authors generally never had any “name appeal,” or not at least on the ones that were paperback originals. Usually an author wrote one or maybe two books for them and nobody else, and nobody ever heard from them (the authors) again.

   Which is why it surprised the something out of me to learn that Bob Garland, now a retired business executive, has written a total of four other book-length adventures of Humboldt Prior, computer manufacturing executive for Intercontinental Data Processing, of New York, NY. The order in which the adventures occur and in which the books were published is a little confusing, and I will try to elucidate as best I can.

   The only one published at the time it was written, I think, is the one at hand. As stated above, the book was reprinted as a trade paperback by Writer’s Showcase Press, in October 2000, and as such it is denoted as a Second Edition. (I do not know if the book has been revised for this edition, but there is the possibility, as there is a good chance Manor chopped it up and did a quick “make it fit” procedure on it, even before WordPerfect came along and made it easy.) It is interesting to note, however, that this 2000 edition is described as the “Second Humboldt Prior Mystery.”

   The other books in the series are the following, in order as published. All are trade paperbacks:

R.I.P. 37E: The Third Humboldt Prior Mystery Writer’s Showcase Press, October 2000.

Slaying the Red Slayer: The First Humboldt Prior Adventure. Writers Club Press; 2nd edition, April 2001. [If there was ever a First Edition, I do not know about it.]

The Elephant Mask: The Fourth Humboldt Prior Mystery. iUniverse, January 2004.

Tradedown: The Fifth Humboldt Prior Mystery. iUniverse, December 2005.

   The only one of these last four which I have is a copy of the third adventure, R.I.P. 37E. I have not read it, but from a quick peek inside, the story appears to have taken place in 1979, so there is the possibility that it was written back then, around that time, but it was never published until Garland retired from his day job.

   I’m really reaching now, but on Amazon.com, there is a short description of the last two books that tells us that Prior is “now … aging” (Elephant Mask) and is “now 60 years old” (Tradedown). Which really makes me feel old, but that’s not the point I’m trying to make. It could be that these last two books were written recently, and not earlier.

   But where Slaying the Red Slayer fits in as nominally the “first” book in the series, I do not know.

   In any case, Derfflinger certainly reads like a debut appearance, as in it an amateurish but enthusiastic Humboldt Prior agrees to help the widow of a friend in England who had been doing some investigation on his own into a ship salvaging operation conducted at the end of World War II. He was killed in an auto accident, but as Humboldt takes over the investigation, he too becomes the target of some very narrow scrapes.

   The reason the book reads like the first in a series is that Humboldt seems to be awfully new and/or naive in matters which he seems to be in over his head about. Almost, I hasten to add, because he is quite competent at what he normally does, in a global business sense, and he doesn’t mind admitting it.

   With a billion dollar operation behind him (Intercontinental Data), Humboldt gets around fairly easily and comfortably – to Scotland and then to Germany before heading back to England – on the company’s private Jet Star, with various nefarious villains on his tail most of the way.

   Not only is Humboldt amateurish but enthusiastic, but so is the story. It’s enjoyable enough, but until the end, which contains a surprise or two, there’s no meat to the tale at all, nor does it quite connect on many levels. On the other hand, enthusiasm is sometimes all it takes, and even though this may surprise you, given my comments so far, I discovered when I was finished that I really wouldn’t mind reading any of the four follow-up adventures at all.

   And so perhaps I will.

POSTSCRIPT.   If you would like to know something more about the primary focus of the travail that Humboldt encounters, you could do no worse than to look the word Derfflinger up on Google, say. It’s just a suggestion.

[UPDATE] 06-12-08.   To no one’s surprise, I am assuming, including my own, I have not yet read or obtained any of the other books in the series. There is still only one copy of the Manor edition of Derfflinger offered on ABE, and in fact it may be the very same book. I also do not know any more about the publishing history of the Bob Garland’s work than is stated here.

KIM NEWMAN – The Man from the Diogenes Club.

MonkeyBrain Books. Trade paperback original, June 2006.

   Richard Jeperson, a member of the little-known Diogenes Club and investigator of peculiar crimes, often in collaboration with the exotically beautiful Vanessa and commonsensical former policeman Fred Regent, was created by Newman in his pre-professional days, then revived in the 1990s in a series of stories (often of novella length) that have now been collected by an enterprising American small press publisher.

   I would like to have been able to greet this bizarre collection with some warmth, but I must report that it took me several months to make my way through Newman’s elaborate prose that, at times, brought me to the point of tossing the book in a box of discards, unfinished and unloved. Or at least by me.

   I’ve a high tolerance for the outré, to which several shelves of occult fiction mutely testify, but Kim’s ornate descriptions tended to make my progress slower than that of the proverbial snail and undercut much of the pleasure I might have taken in the fanciful tales of mummies, zombies, and a wayward golem, all of them preserved in intractable amber-like prose.

   >>>

[EDITORIAL COMMENT.]   The book Walter reviews is now out of print, and commands a premium price on the secondary market. (I always wanted to say that.)

  Contents:

      End of the Pier Show
      You Don’t Have to Be Mad
      Tomorrow Town
      Egyptian Avenue
      Soho Golem
      The Serial Murders
      The Man Who Got Off the Ghost Train
      Swellhead

   A fascinating thread! As has been observed, Edgar Wallace was a very big name in thriller fiction in the 1920s and ’30s, but he was not, of course, part of the Golden Age of Detection, which makes comparisons with Christie — even Symons — in many ways inappropriate. Wallace was still a big name after the Second World War and right up to the 1960s, when I founded and edited the Edgar Wallace Mystery Magazine. At that time, his books and stories were already regarded as having a quaint flavor, which a daughter, Penelope Wallace, was largely responsible for trying to remove by supplying publishers with revised versions.

   Such revisions are, of course, an ultimately futile exercise and may even remove future points of appeal — something I realized even then though I was only 21 years of age. For the short time I ran the magazine, I concentrated on the “action” end of the mystery field, running the kind of stories Americans would have called “pulp fiction” and which I believe were written by authors who were worthy successors of Wallace himself. I also used full-color, vigorous pictorial covers that reflected this content.

   Ultimately, the publishing company running the magazine — and employing me as the editor of it and a raft of digest-size “pocket libraries” — ran into financial difficulties and the Wallace family took over the magazine. I was replaced by a “more experienced” editor: elderly writer Nigel Morland who was said to be a family friend, and as a contributor to the magazine had previously flattered me with consistently favorable comment on my editorial work and policies.

   The illustrated covers were replaced by wholly typographical, two-color covers that at best were a poor imitation of Ellery Queen’s. The content changed, too, certainly abandoning what I considered the true Wallace tradition in preference for material that had more of a “whodunit,” intellectual slant.

   From the online FictionMags Index:

Edgar Wallace Mystery Magazine

Publishers
      Aug-1964 – Nov-1964: Micron Publications, Micron House, Gorringe Park Avenue, Mitcham
      Dec-1964 – Jun-1967: Edgar Wallace Magazines Ltd., 4 Bradmore Road, Oxford
      1969? – 1970?: Edgar Wallace Magazines Ltd., 50 Alexandra Road, London SW19

Editors
      Aug-1964 – Nov-1964: Keith Chapman
      Dec-1964 – Jun-1967: Nigel Morland
      1969? – 1970?: Leonard Holdsworth, Kurt Mueller & James Hughes

THE MAN I LOVE. Warner Brothers, 1947. Ida Lupino, Robert Alda, Andrea King, Martha Vickers, Bruce Bennett, Alan Hale, Dolores Moran. Based on the novel Night Shift, by Maritta Woolf. Screenplay by Jo Pagano, Catherine Turney & W. R. Burnett (the latter uncredited). Director: Raoul Walsh.

   Believe it or not, the book this movie is based on is still in print (Scribner, trade paperback, 2006). From the Amazon description:

   Night Shift is not included in Al Hubin’s Revised Crime Fiction IV, but Whistle Stop is, although only marginally:

WOLFF, MARITTA M(artin). 1918-2002.
      -Whistle Stop (Random, 1941, hc) [Michigan] Film: United Artists, 1946 (scw: Philip Yordan; dir: Leonide Moguy).

   Whistle Stop the movie starred Ava Gardner and George Raft – now there’s a combination, for you – and IMDB describes the plot thusly:

   This latter film is available on DVD, most easily by means of one the various box sets of Noir Films that everybody seems to be packaging together these days.

   Both Jo Pagano and Catherine Turney have one book each in CFIV. For the former, it’s The Condemned, filmed in 1951 as Try and Get Me; for the latter, it’s The Other One, filmed in 1957 as Back from the Dead. Everybody reading this knows W. R. Burnett, or should, and of course in our circle director Raoul Walsh is even more well known, the circle being, of course, the extended realm of crime, mystery and adventure fiction.

   Which is a long, long introduction to convince myself, first of all, then maybe you, that The Man I Love actually belongs and should come up for discussion in a mystery-oriented blog.

   I’ll keep writing, and later on, I’ll ask what you think.

   The basic synopsis of the story as being the same as the book, as stated above. Ida Lupino is Petey Brown (not Braun; that was changed, for obvious reasons), the nightclub singer from New York who comes to visit her family in California and decides that their problems might as well be hers for a while. Robert Alda plays Nicky Toresca, the slick-talking nightclub owner she goes to work for, a man who’s hot for every woman he knows and meets, including Petey’s married sister, until the former puts an end to that.

   Not mentioned in the Amazon description is former jazz pianist San Thomas, played in solid if not stolid brooding fashion by Bruce Bennett (formerly Herman Brix, but who turned out to be an actor after all). Petey has been dallying around with her boss on a strictly hands-off basis – perhaps the only woman who’s been able to handle him that way – but when she meets San, it is lust at first sight, movie code or no.

   Turns out, though, that San has baggage of his own. He’s divorced but still loves his wife who dumped him, and he’s currently but only temporarily AWOL from the Merchant Marine. There’s more. The woman living across the hall from Petey’s sister is bored with her marriage and her small twin babies, and she’s cheating on her husband, who’s a naively nice guy that Petey’s younger sister has eyes for.

   I think you have the picture by now. There is way too much plot to be covered adequately in one ninety minute movie, but what this is is obviously drama of the soap opera variety, gussied up a bit for the night time audience. Is it also a crime movie, as IMDB says it is? Not a bit of it.

   But is it Noir, as IMDB also suggests? Yes, absolutely, not completely, but yes. It’s the lighting. It’s the location. (Outside of the drab apartment where the Otis family lives, nightclubs and after-hours jazz spots predominate, with the opening scene worth 100% of the price of admission. Even though Ida Lupino is only lip-synching the words, the music is terrific).

   It’s also the sense of quiet desperation that exists in these people’s existences. It’s the ray of hope that exists and blooms in one area of their lives, only to diminish in another.

   So noir, yes. A crime film, no. I wish I could find a longer clip, but this one will have to do. It’s about the only scene of almost actual violence in the movie, and in it Petey stops the husband next door from committing a real act of violence on Nicky, the nightclub owner. If you haven’t seen it, you’ve never seen anything like it, and even if you have, you still haven’t seen anything like it.

   Are you back? To get back to the question I told you I was going to ask later, what do you think?

   Algis Budrys, best known as a science fiction writer and critic, died on June 9th. For an overview of his career in that field, I can do no better than send you to Todd Mason’s blog, thanks to a tip from Bill Crider, from whom I borrowed the cover image below.

   Most of the other websites and blogs covering his passing will talk about his SF. He does have, however, one work cited in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, an artifact of sorts of the Cold War:

BUDRYS, ALGIS. Working name of Algirdas Jonas Budrys, 1931-2008.

      Who? (Pyramid, 1958, pb) Badger (U.K.), 1960. Film: British Lion 1974, released in the U.S. as Man Without a Face; also released as Man in the Steel Mask; and as Prisoner of the Skull (scw: John Gould; dir: Jack Gold).

   From wikipedia comes a detailed synopsis of the tale:

    “A Soviet team abducts Dr. Lucas Martino, a leading Allied physicist in charge of a secret, high-priority project called K-88.

    “Several months later, under American pressure, the Communist officials finally hand over an individual, claiming that he is Dr. Martino. The man has undergone extensive surgery for his injuries. He has a mechanical arm advanced beyond any produced in the West. More importantly, his face and head have been dramatically rebuilt, now resembling a near-featureless metal mask. A medical evaluation reveals that several of the man’s internal organs are also artificial. The Allies are suspicious that the Soviets have sent them a spy and are holding the real Martino for further interrogation.

    “The struggle to determine the man’s true identity is the novel’s central conflict.”

   But the book is much more than a Cold War espionage caper. Extracted from a review at www.trashfiction.co.uk/who.html is the following:

    “It’s a philosophical piece about the nature of human identity, and how bound up it is in the existence of a face. Does a man lose his past if he (literally) loses face? Can you trust such a man? Is human interaction possible if one party can’t read the facial expressions of the other?”

   Among these entries in Part 26 of the online Addenda to the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, are two I’d especially like point out to you.

   First of all, the entry for Michael E. Knerr has been completely revised. New data had been spread out over several parts of the Addenda; it’s now combined in one spot in Part 26, with one newly discovered book also included. That book also makes Mike Travis a series character, and this fact is now noted.

   Secondly, I have been in touch with the family of Jon Messmann, and I talked to his son Alan for about 45 minutes late last week. As a consequence, the autobiographical portion of his entry has been rewritten, and a newly revealed pen name is made known for the first time.

JOSEPH, ALAN. Add: Pseudonym of Jon (Joseph) Messman, 1920-2004. Under this pen name, the author of two books included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV. Series character: Logan, in both:
       Killers at Sea. Belmont, pb, 1970. Setting: South Carolina. “Logan finds a dead man on the beach [leading] to danger, diamonds and death.”
       Logan. Belmont, pb, 1970. Setting: Ship. [Mystery and adventure aboard the Sea Urchin.]

KNERR, MICHAEL E. 1936-1999. (Corrected dates.) For a lengthy discussion of the author’s mystery fiction, see a review of his private eye novel Travis posted earlier here on the Mystery*File blog. A biographical reminiscence of his life by John F. Carr can be found in this follow-up post. Below is a completely revised entry for the author; add the books indicated with a (*).
       * Heavy Weather. Tower, pb, 1979. Setting: Ship. “On the Mexico run the Pandora carried a cargo of drugs, danger and death!”

       Operation: Lust, as by M. E. Knerr. Epic, pb, 1962.
      * Port of Passion, as by M. E. Knerr. Imperial, pb, 1965. Series character: Mike Travis. Setting: Mexico. [Travis tries to discover who killed a Mexican deep-sea diver.]
       * Travis, as by M. E. Knerr. Series character: MikeTravis. Pike, pb, 1962. Setting: California. [Travis is hired as a PI to stop the drug trade coming up from Mexico.]

       The Violent Lady. Monarch, pb, 1963.

MESSMANN, JON (JOSEPH). 1920-2004. Pseudonyms: Alan Joseph, q.v., Claude Nicole & Claudette Nicole (add the former). House pseudonyms: Nick Carter & Paul Richards. In the 1940s and early 50s, the author of many comic book stories for Fawcett Publications. (See this webpage for more information, noting however that in this short biography of him, his name is incorrectly given as Eric Jon Messmann.) Under his own name, the author of 18 crime and suspense novels cited in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, including seven about men’s adventure series hero Jefferson Boone, The Handyman, and six with Ben Martin, aka The Revenger. As a writer of adult westerns, Jon Messman was better known as Jon Sharpe, author of many of the early adventures of The Trailsman books, including the first one, as well as most of the Canyon O’Grady books.

MILLER, BEN E. Author of two detective novels included in the Revised Crime Fiction IV. Series character in each: Cory Barnett, nominally a detective for the Chicago police force.
       Death Deal. Powell, pb, 1969. Setting: Paris, New York City. (Add the former.) [Barnett, acting as a US agent, is assigned to protect a political target in France.]

       The Set-Up, as by Ben Miller. [New: Note the shortened form of his name.] Powell, pb, 1969. [Forced from his position on the Chicago PD, Barnett begins a new career as a PI in New York City.]

   I posted a review of Robert Crane’s The Sergeant and the Queen here on the Mystery*File blog not too long ago, and I kind of had the idea that it may have been the longest review ever written for either Crane or his real life persona, a writer by the name of Con Sellers. Authors of paperback originals didn’t get much coverage back in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, long before the Internet and blogs came along, that’s for sure.

   But if my review was the longest at the time, it certainly isn’t now. The people at the Conelrad website have just uploaded a review of a sleazy piece of cold war fiction called Red Rape, by Con Sellers, that has to be twice as long as the one I did of Crane’s book.

   Excerpted from the second paragraph of the review is the following:  

   You’ll have to read the rest of the review on the Conelrad frequency (follow the second link above) along with a huge image of the cover. Some additional details are given about Sellers’ life, along with a bibliography of some of the work he did that weren’t chronicled here.

   And, for those of you who may be wondering, here is part of the Conelrad mission statement:

   What is CONELRAD? CONELRAD is a site devoted to ATOMIC CULTURE past and present but without all the distracting and pedantic polemics.

   The end-all five-o-clock shadow CONELRAD is the creation of writers who grew up in the shadow of the BOMB and all its attendant pop culture fallout. We wish to share our collected interest, experience and obsession with this strange era and thereby provide as much information as possible to the public.