Sun 7 Feb 2016
Mike Nevins on ALLINGHAM, CREASEY, KEELER, QUEEN, MacDONALD and Unconscionable Updates.
Posted by Steve under Authors , Columns[14] Comments
by Francis M. Nevins
On Christmas morning I finished proofreading my next book — which has nothing to do with mystery fiction and won’t be described here — and, with time on my hands, began reading a pile of randomly chosen short stories in the hope that at least one would generate an item for this column. I was not disappointed.
In addition to her well-known Albert Campion stories, Margery Allingham (1903-1966) wrote a few dozen non-series shorts, most of them for English newspapers. I’d read only a couple of these but, finding one in Thomas F. Godfrey’s anthology English Country House Murders (1988), decided to give it a whirl.
“The Same to Us†has to do with a jewel robbery at posh Molesworth Manor during a house party whose guest of honor is Dr. Koo Fin, “the Chinese Einstein†and creator of the Theory of Objectivity (obviously a take-off on Einstein’s Relativity hypothesis). What brought me up short was Allingham’s remark that “already television comedians referred to his great objectivity theory in their patter.â€
Come again? Television comedians? In a story that was first published in 1934 and clearly takes place during that “long weekend†between World Wars? I realized at once that I’d stumbled upon yet another specimen of Unconscionable Updating, where an author tries to make an old story seem up-to-the-minute.
But could I prove it? My shelves didn’t happen to include a copy of the London Daily Express for May 17, 1934, in which the tale had first appeared, but I did have The Allingham Minibus (1973), where it was first collected. No help: the same TV comedians pop up there.
Luckily I also had Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine for January 1950, in which Fred Dannay had reprinted the tale long before its book appearance. There I found what I take it Allingham had written: “….and already music-hall comedians referred to [Dr. Koo Fin’s] great ‘objectivity’ theory in their routines.†My guess is that the change was made after her death.
Among English writers perhaps the most unconscionable updater was John Creasey (1908-1973), who wrote countless thrillers set in London during World War II and then later, when he’d become rich and internationally famous, revised them to get rid of the war atmosphere and sold them as contemporary novels.
Two examples of the harm he did to his own work will suffice here. In Chapters 12 and 13 of Inspector West Regrets (1945) Roger West and his sergeant find themselves in a gun battle with gangsters that takes place in two connected air-raid shelters dug into the earth in the adjoining backyards of two houses in parallel streets. In the revised version of 1965 the bomb shelters become conventional garages.
In Holiday for Inspector West (1945) as first written and published, Roger and a contingent of cops lay siege to a gang headquarters in a complex of arches supporting a wartime railway bridge and intended to shelter Londoners bombed out in the Blitz. In the 1957 updated version that setting too becomes a casualty.
Anyone interested in reading these two novels the way Creasey originally wrote them, plus three others from the WWII years, should hunt down Inspector West Goes to War (2011), a handsome coffee-table book with an introduction by — oh hell, how did you guess?
There have been updaters on our side of the pond too, among them that kafoozalus of wackadoodledom Harry Stephen Keeler (1890-1967). One of the earliest examples of a youthful specialty of his, which most of us call short novels or novelettes and he liked to call novellos (no doubt with the accent on the first syllahble) was originally titled “Misled in Milwaukee.â€
Keeler wrote this 26,000-word novello in 1916 and sold first publication rights for a whopping $65 to the Chicago Ledger, where it appeared as a 5-part serial (23 June-21 July 1917). As the year of publication tells us, Prohibition was still in the future at the time this tale first appeared. Five years later, as “The Search for Xeno,†it was included in the December 1922 issue of 10-Story Book under the byline of York T. Sibley — a bit of deception Keeler thought prudent because the editor to whom he sold the reprint rights was himself!
(Between 1919 and 1940 he spent his afternoons editing the magazine while devoting mornings to writing dozens of the long, convoluted and sublimely nutty novels for which he is famous, or perhaps le mot juste is notorious.)
The 1922 version is the earliest that survives and was used as the text for the presently available edition of the tale, first published by Ramble House in 2003 as a separate volume and, two years later, as part of the collection Three Novellos,both graced with an introduction by — oh hell, you guessed it again!
This version keeps what I assume was the original description of what protagonist Clint Farrell sees as he approaches Milwaukee by rail. “Outside in the darkness, great breweries slid past the train, their square-cut buildings, dotted with tiny windows, looming against the pink-tinged sky from the foundries, their gigantic grain and hop silos illuminated by sputtering, brilliant lights strung up and down the concrete cylinders.â€
But, since this time the year is 1922 and Prohibition is in full swing, Farrell quickly learns that the man he’s looking for works at “the Southern Wisconsin Near-Beer Company on East Water Street, near Grand.â€
That wasn’t the last time Keeler fiddled with this tale. Sometime in the late 1950s or early Sixties, long after all his English-language publishers had dumped him, he completely rewrote it — eliminating the 1916-era shirt collars that are crucial to the plot, replacing the near-beer with drinks that weren’t ersatz, and splicing in some references to the atomic bomb and other feeble attempts to update — and, retitling it “Adventure in Milwaukee,†included it with two other novellos in a package he sent to his Madrid publisher Instituto Editorial Reus. Señor Reus passed on this one, saying — assuming he spoke Keeler Spanglish! — “We no wan’ theez novelitos, my fr’an.†The threesome remained unpublished until that incomparable loon sanctuary Ramble House got into the act early in the 21st century.
Even Ellery Queen was not immune to the updating bug. In EQMM for March 1959 Fred Dannay reprinted “Long Shot,†a Queen story that takes place in Hollywood and was first published in 1939. This time around, the names of all but one of the Tinseltown luminaries who attend the big horse race have been changed.
Joan Crawford and Greta Garbo are fused into Sophia Loren, Al Jolson is replaced by Bob Hope, Bob Burns (remember him?) by Rock Hudson, Joan Crawford the second time by Marilyn Monroe, and Carole Lombard by Jayne Mansfield. Who’s the only star with enough name recognition to survive the update process intact? Clark Gable.
Any number of writers have played the updating game but the only one I know of who defended doing so was John D. MacDonald (1915-1985). Back in the early Eighties I and a few others who admired John’s early work persuaded him that we should put together a large collection of his pulp stories, along the lines of what I had done a decade earlier with Cornell Woolrich’s stories in Nightwebs (1972).
With John’s help we got hold of photocopies of just about every published tale of his salad days, mailed them back and forth to each other with comments, and ultimately winnowed the list down to thirty.
These we submitted to John, who axed three of them but was satisfied with the other 27. The result was not one sizable collection but two: The Good Old Stuff (1982) and More Good Old Stuff (1984).
But before these 27 stories were republished, John insisted on updating — not all but some of them — and, in his Author’s Foreword, defended the practice vigorously. Most of his changes, he said, had to do with “references which could confuse the reader. Thirty years ago [i.e. back in the early 1950s] everyone understood the phrase ‘unless he threw the gun as far as Carnera could.’ But the Primo is largely forgotten, and I changed him to Superman.â€
Where a particular story was “entangled with and dependent upon†the years following World War II when the tales were written, he wisely chose not to update. But where a story “could happen at any time,†he did.
“I changed a live radio show to a live television show. And in others I changed pay scales, taxi fares, long-distance phoning procedures, beer prices, and so forth to keep from watering down the attention of the reader. This may offend the purists,†he concedes, and it did indeed bother all four of us who edited the books (Marty Greenberg, Jean and Walter Shine and myself), but John of course outvoted us. Someday I’d love to see those collections in print yet again, with every story restored to the way he first wrote it. That’ll be the day!
If John’s rationale for updating ever had any validity, I submit that it has none at all in our high-tech era. To use his own example, anyone who sees the word Carnera and is baffled need only Google the name, as I just did, and find more than 600,000 references in less than a second. Do we live in amazing times or what?
February 7th, 2016 at 11:33 pm
I complained a lot about the updating in the JDM collections when they first appeared. I believe I said something about Hemingway updating “The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio” to “The Gambler, the Nun, and the TV Set.” Now even that title would have to be updated, so you can’t win.
February 8th, 2016 at 12:17 am
The changes JDM made were small but often rather jarring. Putting on a radio show is NOT the same as putting a TV show together, even live in a studio.
When I read that story, I stopped, said to myself, what was he thinking, put the book down and never opened it again.
February 8th, 2016 at 12:24 am
In which I dare to dissent (sort of):
First off, I went to the reference shelf, where I note that Margery Allingham lived to 1966, and her husband/collaborator Youngman Carter to 1970.
The Carters were still selling new stories and novels in the marketplace, as well as keeping their backlist in as much print as possible. The publishing business was starting to morph into the demographics-driven monstrosity it is today, so it’s entirely possible that the Carters (or their heirs) did their own updating, to keep their earlier stories in the market.
What we’re talking about here is the overall loss in our society of a sense of history – something I had to develop in childhood in order to read books and watch movies that had been made long before I was born. I enjoyed this process, but unfortunately, far too many of my classmates didn’t want to put forth the effort – and there you are.
The same applies to works that initially appeared in “British English” – not just ‘u’ and ‘re’ spellings, but things like Cockney rhyming slang and British Army expressions which Yanks wouldn’t be expected to know. I remember reading an interview with John Creasey wherein he admitted to “usually doing a heavy revision (of the working novel) for the USA”.
I’ve long been curious about Creasey’s Westerns, which as far as I know never saw publication in the USA (correction welcome if needed). How did the Creasey version of the American West look in the British books?
(And how would the British books look to American readers?)
Years ago, I read a memoir by Leslie MacFarlane, who created The Hardy Boys series for the Stratemeyer Syndicate, and wrote the first several books in the series.
MacFarlane tells how, years after the fact, he found that Grosset & Dunlap was putting out “updated” Hardy Boys books that had in fact been totally rewritten, top to bottom (I believe the term “dumbed down” cropped up here).
As I recall, what bothered MacFarlane wasn’t the updating as such (he felt that readers in the ’60s-’70s likely wouldn’t know about running boards and rumble seats) – it was that he hadn’t been asked to do it himself.
I guess John D. MacDonald felt pretty much the same way regarding his own older works – and since they were his own older works, who among us can say him nay?
I guess this makes me a “non-purist”; I can live with that.
But take it a step further:
Does this mean that any publication that came out before a certain date might have to include a glossary of the “outdated” references, for the youthful reader who didn’t learn to have that sense of history I spoke of before?
Such glossaries might double the size of many classic books …
Well, that’s one man’s opinion, however confused it might be.
We can still be friends … ?
February 8th, 2016 at 2:51 am
Film has had increasing amount of this, from colorization to George Lucas updating STAR WARS. The fans howled in protest. Yet today one of the greatest TV SF series ever BABYLON 5 faces oblivion because it featured cutting edge special effects (CGI) that now looks absurdly outdated. But because the digital systems change so often there is no system compatible to update it.
Moving film to digital changes the look of a movie and can cause problems with the content of the picture. When Fox started the cable station FXX they used THE SIMPSONS reruns to get people to demand their local cable provider add the channel. Fox remastered the prints making them the latest in HD and screwed up the picture ratio so edges of the screen was lost. People howled in protest.
Yet the common audience today won’t watch shows in black and white and most demand the latest in digital technology for their movies.
Perhaps the question this updating asks – and why the answer bothers some of us – is are books, films, and TV art or products to be sold?
February 8th, 2016 at 5:30 am
Some books suffer more from updating than others.Authors like Keeler, MacDonald etc. wrote novels that reflected their times, and the updates destroy that dated but timeless charm.
February 8th, 2016 at 6:01 am
In 2013 CADS published as a supplement The Short Stories of Margery Allingham: a definite listing by Allingham expert B.A.Pike. Looking up “The Same to Us” it says that the story had “changes and additions made by Youngman Carter” for publication in the collection The Allingham Minibus (1973). Carter was Allingham’s widower who continued the Albert Campion series. The original text can also be found in the Detection Club anthology Detection Medley (1939). Incidentally Ostara Publishing have just issued a collection of Youngman Carter stories, Tales on the Off-Beat, some of which were in EQMM.
February 8th, 2016 at 6:10 am
Sorry I made a mistake in my first comment. Of course Youngman Carter had died before The Allinghan Minibus was published. However he did make changes to the original and the first book publication with those changes was in The Allingham Minibus. Incidentally B.A. Pike records that the 1950 EQMM reprint of the story is not entirely faithful to the original as it “alters the occasional word and omits one sentence”.
February 8th, 2016 at 6:58 am
I agree with Mike, Bill and Steve about how jarring the updates were in those JDM collections. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that they ruined the books but they sure didn’t help.
If a story or novel can’t be reprinted as originally published – with very few exceptions – I think you should not republish it at all.
February 8th, 2016 at 7:43 am
Concerning JDM and updating the stories, I can’t recall anyone who agreed with him about the practice. I have the two collections but I only read his stories in the original pulp magazines. I think he made a big mistake…
February 8th, 2016 at 1:57 pm
Answering Mike Doran’s question, three of JOhn Creasey’s westerns were reprinted in the U.S., all as digest size paperbacks. I have two of them but I’ve never read them. Creasey himself told an anecdote about confusing his western fauna in one of his novels, where he had some poor fellow crawling across the desert while the coyotes circled slowly overhead.
A more recent example of a British writer having to “translate” her books into American English is J. K. Rowling. The first couple Harry Potter novels had a lot of their British ambience altered into American equivalents. The most depressing change was the title of the first book, changing “Philosopher’s Stone” into “Sorcerer’s Stone,” assuming that American readers were too ignorant to understand the classic alchemical reference. One of these days I’m going to get my hands on a British edition of that one, just to see what I missed.
February 8th, 2016 at 2:54 pm
It may be part of the aging process but it seems to me that year by year the pace of change in our social lives and the technologies we use grows increasingly rapid. My current take on updating fiction is similar to that I believe was eventually adopted by Leslie Charteris. All such updating is ultimately futile, needing constant repetition. Let your work stand as a fascinating piece of history in the making, so that those who follow will have truer insight on how we once lived and wrote. Re Creasey … some of his westerns also appeared in the US western pulps … whether edited or abridged I don’t know. And the quaint mistakes? Well, let them stand as an indication of just how hard it once was for a foreigner to set a book in territory he’d never visited. International travel was expensive and time-consuming; plus the Internet didn’t exist!
February 8th, 2016 at 3:51 pm
A thought: It seems that books and shorts written in the 30s/40s were deemed to be out of date and in need of updating by the 70s/80s. So why does nobody think that books written in the 70s/80s require updating? We’re talking about a comparable time span, and anyone reading a thriller from then will realise how much the mobile phone and the internet has changed society. At some point it seems as though the concept of ‘period charm’ has crept in (at least in the UK: The TV show LIFE ON MARS, with its modern copper returning to the 70s, was massively popular, whereas the US spin-off enjoyed nothing like the same success).
The general US audience does seem less willing to put in the effort to understand anything foreign. Bill Bryson pointed out that a US review of a book about the collapse of Barings Bank criticised it for too much ‘Brit Speak’. As Bryson pointed out ‘How dare the author do that! I mean, a British book by a British author about a British subject…’
As for Creasey’s Westerns, there’s a lovely story, perhaps apocryphal, where one of the them is supposed to begin with the author describing Coyotes circling above the head of the hero.
February 8th, 2016 at 5:36 pm
Oddly Charteris chose not to update THE LAST HERO and explains why in the introduction to the book, even pointing out in the sequel that flying then and flying when it was republished were quite different activities.
I live in a kind of anticipatory horror someone will try to update SORRY WRONG NUMBER or Poul Anderson’s “Dead Phone”on an Android.
I have even seen some idiot update and rewrite Conan Doyle and Jules Verne for audiences today — in both cases with hideous results, though in Verne’s case a novelization of FIVE WEEKS IN A BALOON was justified since the film wasn’t all that much like the book. It’s about like the Lamb’s Shakespeare, only not anywhere near as good.
If I remember a few Woolrich shorts were ruined by updating too, or at least harmed.
Alas, the current generation is so ignorant they will have to annotate Harry Potter for them to get the ancient references.
As a writer I try not to do much in the way of contemporary references such as actors or celebrities. Books tend to last much longer than their fame, though in a piece set in the past it is a good way to establish the time period.
Ian Fleming rather dated himself though in the Bond books the only time he mentioned films. He did fine on books mentioning Simenon, Rex Stout, Eric Ambler, and Patrick Leigh Fermor, but the only movies he mentioned were THE PRIVATE LIFE OF HENRY THE VIII with Charles Laughton and THE BLACK PIRATE with Douglas Fairbanks. Bond and his creator didn’t get to the movies often it seemed.
I do give a pass on slang usage though. Many once quite popular slang phrases may be totally forgotten by the time a book is republished. And there is a case for Americanizing books first published in England. The British editions of Simenon used here for ages seriously needed updating if only to call Maigret a Commissaire and not an Inspector.
It really isn’t fair to a book first published in the UK to leave in a reference to a woman asking the hero to “knock her up,” when it is published here. A friend of mine once informed me he disliked a British mystery novel because it was so silly. When I asked for an example he explained the killer in the book had been trying to stuff a body in a shoe and succeeded. He had me for a minute until I realized the killer had put the body in the ‘boot’ of the car.
Philip Macdonald even made good use of this in THE LIST OF ADRIAN MESSENGER where the pronunciation of the name Broughtonholme proved a major clue.
February 8th, 2016 at 11:46 pm
Creasey is supposed to have said his westerns got better when he got the “coyotes out of the sky.”
I’ll have to look for that book on the wartime West novels.