REVIEWED BY WALTER ALBERT:         


JOSEPH NATHENSON – The Library of Alex Brandt. Manor, paperback original, 1978.

    “The omen that hovered over the rotting library brought terror to all those who crossed its threshold.”

   In spite of this cover blurb, angled above a devilish bloke in a stage magician’s outfit, gesturing at an open book and some skimpy laboratory paraphernalia, the novel owes almost nothing to Lovecraft and is another of those endless tales of a loony-bin psycho who has a hangup about the “woman-whore” and does something violent and bloody about it periodically.

   What gives this Manor cheapie some interest is that the psycho is also a book collector and there are splendid thrift shop book hunting sequences. The first-person narrator also has a sense of humor and introduces a brutish chap to mumble an unforgettable line when he is asked by the narrator if he is looking for an S. S. Van Dine thriller:

    “I don’t want no sea stories … just mysteries. You know, detectives and hot broads, and all that crap.”

    I was half tempted to give him a copy of Wilkie Collins’ detective classic The Moonstone that I held in my hand, but I was sure that he would have thought the story line concerned the Apollo Space Program.

   I rather suspect Mr. Nathenson of throwing in the gore to ensure the publication of a highly subversive book that may lure some of the incipient psychos who drool over it to experience the even more sexually exciting pleasures of the Book Hunt.

Editorial & Bibliographic Comments:   I have no cover image to go with this book, alas. When Walter sent me this review, earlier today, he said he wrote it in 1979, and “I didn’t keep a copy of the book, but if I had I would be inclined to reread it.”

JOSEPH NATHENSON

   I suspect that this is the only review that Joseph Nathenson received for any of the four books credited to him in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin:

NATHENSON, JOSEPH (RUTH), 1925-2006.

      The Library of Alex Brandt (n.) Manor 1979
      Radnitz (n.) Manor 1979
      See Naples and Die (n.) Manor 1979
      A Puzzle for Experts (n.) SOS 1985

   He also wrote one New Age or sci-fi novel Deep, Very Deep Space: A Journey to the Infinite (Manor, 1978). He’s also generally considered to have been the author of Land of Dreams, a historical romance for Harlequin in 1995 under the byline of Cheryl St. John. (Other books by Cheryl St. John do not appear to have been by him.)

   A brief obituary notice can be found here: http://www.jewishjournal.com/obituaries/article/obituaries_20061020/

[UPDATE] 06-17-10.   A comment left by Cheryl St. John states that the book Land of Dreams is definitely one she wrote, not Mr. Nathenson.