WILLIAM LINDSAY GRESHAM – Monster Midway: An Uninhibited Look at the Glittering World of the Carny. Rinehart & Co., hardcover, 1953. Dunce Books, softcover, 2021.

   William Lindsay Gresham wrote Nightmare Alley (1946), arguably one of the great American novels about carnivals. Readers familiar with the Bret Wood-edited anthology Grindshow: The Selected Writings of William Lindsay Gresham (2013, see Walker Martin’s Mystery*File review) will know Gresham also published many articles and short stories about “the carny.”

   Monster Midway, first published in 1953 and recently reissued by small press Dunce Books, offers a detailed look into the carnival as an attraction and self-contained world. Gresham describes many larger-than-life figures: daredevil motorcyclists, snake handlers, knife throwers, airplane stunt pilots, and human oddities (the more accepted term for people with disabilities performing in “freak shows”). Interviews with the performers explore what the carny life looks like, and why some go from trying it for a season to living it for a lifetime.

   During an October 2023 visit to Gresham’s archived papers at Wheaton College’s Marion E. Wade Center, I discovered he kept a huge folder of this book’s reviews. Many were positive, although less-impressed reviewers noted it is based on previously published articles. While this is true, it’s notable that aside from a chapter on Houdini (more than that later), Gresham has rewritten the material enough that the book reads in one consistent style.

   It’s also an entertaining style: incredible topics explained with Hemingwayesque language (short, simple). His “tell big things in a small voice” often amplifies his ideas. For example, Gresham takes time to discuss technical details that make feats understandable while underlining the risks (like why a daredevil motorcycle ramp must be just the right height to avoid killing drivers).

   The style may be read as an extension of Gresham’s approach in Nightmare Alley and perhaps helps explain why his second novel Limbo Tower (1949) flounders. Critics have sometimes argued Nightmare Alley is overheated, especially in sexual scenes like a Freudian psychoanalyst making a patient paint her toenails. (As far as I know, Stanley Kubrick hadn’t read Gresham’s book before he made Lolita, but stranger things have happened.)

   Gresham’s content may get pulpy in Nightmare Alley but especially compared to many contemporaries who started in the pulps, his writing style is spare. Limbo Tower (reviewed by me earlier in Mystery*File) is more operatic. It opens with a faux Islamic parable about blind men and an elephant before shifting to events in a hospital, filling the early chapters with references to golden sunlight that make the setting feel otherworldly. But the promise something incredible will happen in the limbo tower never arrives.

   Gresham returns to telling big events in a small voice in Monster Midway and it works. The events may be “uninhibited,” but not how Gresham writes.

   Occasionally, he does something a little outré, like writing himself into the story. The chapter on knife throwing opens with a folk singer doing the trick in a club, and it’s only after the trick succeeds that Gresham reveals he’s talking about himself (he dabbled in folk singing in the 1930s-1940s).

   These “journalist becoming the material” moments are fun, not unlike Hunter S. Thompson’s work. But if so, it’s early Thompson (On the Road with the Hell’s Angels), objectively describing strange worlds without any surrealism (for that, read Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72). Gresham is daring without being extreme (or indulgent, as Thompson became).

   The fact Gresham never gets too indulgent also means he can explore things with a little distance. That distance is helpful when he looks at paradoxes between a performer’s public image and private life. For example, he notes how safety-conscious daredevil drivers are, and quotes one driver saying his son admires his work but wants to be a baseball player. Or maybe he’s told his son to be a baseball player. Gresham never deconstructs anyone cynically, but he pokes at their paradoxes a little.

   The one moment where Gresham doesn’t dissect his subjects enough is in his chapter on Houdini. It reads like hagiography as he talks about his childhood love for Houdini’s tricks, then goes behind the scenes to explain how assistants and tools enabled the master’s work. This chapter sets the stage for his less-gushing 1959 book Houdini: The Man Who Walked Through Walls, but perhaps predicts why his book on Houdini has been surpassed.

   Gresham is often credited with writing “the first great Houdini biography,” the first to correct many mistakes about Houdini’s life and show how he accomplished his tricks. Very true, but one thing Gresham doesn’t do that later biographies do better is face how much Houdini’s ruthless ego made him and killed him. Houdini’s ruthless self-confidence made him try what no one else tried, brag he could take any punch… then die via a ruptured appendix when he got when he wasn’t prepared.

   Gresham lays the groundwork for exploring that kind of paradox in Monster Midway but never goes far enough (in his Houdini chapter or his later biography). It’s never easy to interrogate childhood heroes.

   One or two missed opportunities aside, Monster Midway remains entertaining today. As his wife Joy Davidman commented in their letters, it proves that Gresham went from being an outsider looking into carnivals to being a “true carny” insider.

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About the Reviewer: G. Connor Salter is a writer and editor. He has contributed over 1,400 articles to various publications, including Mythlore, The Tolkienist, and Fellowship & Fairydust. His interview with mystery author Clayton Rawson’s son was published here earlier in Mystery*File.