P. D. JAMES – The Lighthouse. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover. First US Edition, 2005. Vintage, trade paperback, October 2016.

   Yes, Steve reviewed this recently, and no he didn’t much care for it, in fact he didn’t get far before James somewhat dense prose slowed him to a halt. This is a much more positive review of the same book.

   The Lighthouse is a somewhat slimmer book than many of the later James novels, a welcome respite from writers like Elizabeth George who seem determined to slay Sherwood Forest with their latest doorstop mystery. It is the 16th Adam Dalgliesh mystery and finds him at a crossroads in his life.

   Our sleuths are Commander Adam Dalgliesh of New Scotland Yard whose unit, consisting of D.I. Kate Miskin and Sgt. Francis Benton-Smith catches a possible murder on Combe Island off the Cornish coast. Dalgiesh is in the middle of an affair and torn about his feelings for the woman; Miskin involved with a former colleague; and Benton-Smith, a half-Indian bright young thing newly assigned to the unit falling in love with a woman he knows isn’t going to fall in love with him.

   To further muddy waters Miskin doesn’t much like Benton-Smith and resents his class, and he in turn is none to happy to have a woman who obviously dislikes him in charge of him. Add to the team the difficult forensic pathologist Professor Glenister, a woman in her mid-sixties, semi-retired with a tendency to pedantry, who is assigned to accompany the trio.

   Combe Island is another of James’s closed societies, the kind of place James loves to set her novels in, a place with a colorful history of pirates, wreckers, storms, and cruelty. Owned by the Holcombe family for generations it was left to be used as a sort of secular retreat for the great and famous who need a little down time and privacy.

   The PM hopes to hold a high end meeting on the island in the near future so security and discretion are of the highest order. Now one of the guests, novelist Nathan Oliver, has been found hanged in the old lighthouse which was burned in WWII and restored. None of the people on the island is particularly happy to see outsiders arrive, much less nosy police types asking awkward questions.

   As Emily Holcombe, last of the Holcombe’s observes, they aren’t the sort who usually visit the island.

   Steve found the going too slow and dense, and I don’t flaw him on that, but I enjoyed James carefully crafted prose. You don’t find passages like this too often today describing the scene as Dalgliesh leaves the room where the body has been examined:

   It’s a good investigation. Dalgliesh finds his life threatened by an unexpected outside force and Miskin and Benton-Smith are forced to work together in a way neither is ready for. Of course the usual lies are uncovered, a crime dating back to WWII surfaces, raw emotions are laid bare, and Miskin and Benton-Smith are forced to face the killer before he strikes again in the deserted lighthouse of the title.

   This one proves a very physical case, and there are some fine passages late in the book where Benton-Smith puts his life in real danger simply retrieving evidence, the climbing scenes particularly well-written.

   I will add a small caveat. I’m afraid I spotted the killer, not because of clues or any mistake on James part, but because of a certain distaste both Miskin and Benton-Smith show for a rather fussy porcelain figure in the suspects living quarters. I refer to these as television moments because they are the literary equivalent of figuring out who the killer is because of the actor cast in the part. In a James novel tacky taste is motive enough to be a murderer.

   James does not write in short staccato sentences. She not an advocate of the hard-boiled style, and her books are more novels about murder than thrillers, detective novels more than detective stories, a subtle difference, but one I think true of her work as well as Ruth Rendell and Elizabeth George. She became more novelistic as she aged, and while her work is nowhere near as painful to read as John Le Carré’s tangled prose, she writes English prose ‘as she is written’ to borrow a phrase.

   Most readers are not going to race through this at a sitting. If, on the other hand, you invest some time, let James detail-oriented heavily descriptive prose envelop you, and become involved with Dalgiesh, Miskin, and Benton-Smith as well as the various suspects, it is a good book, a solid read and not a flashy or quick one. I enjoyed getting to know the people involved as human beings and not simply quickly sketched in character parts. James can be cinematic, but only in the sense of a Gainsborough Studio or Ivory and Merchant film.

   I have to admit there are things in James books that I enjoy that most people would not care for. When someone leaves a copy of Middlemarch for Dalgliesh to read, he thinks of it as “that safe stand-by for a desert island” — as good of a description of that book as I have ever read. A mention of William Morris wallpaper tells us all we need to know of a room and its potential inhabitants, and Miskin hearing “small agreeable sounds from the kitchen” as her lover makes coffee of morning is a perfect touch.

   I’ll read almost anything with passages like that.

   Perhaps the best line comes mid-book when Benton-Smith wonders if the murder of Nathan Oliver will harm the island’s reputation and Dalgliesh replies: “Combe will recover. The island has forgotten worse horrors than putting an end to Nathan Oliver.”

   Depending on what kind of mystery you are looking for, this is a fine example, especially for a book so late in a writer’s career and an ongoing series.

KING OF GAMBLERS. Paramount Pictures, 1937. Claire Trevor, Lloyd Nolan, Akim Tamiroff, Larry Crabbe, Helen Burgess, Porter Hall, Barlowe Borland. Writing credits: Doris Anderson (screenplay), Tiffany Thayer (story), Ben Hecht & Charles MacArthur (neither credited). Director: Robert Florey.

   King of Gamblers is an immensely fun little “B” from Paramount, one of a series put out by that studio in the late 30s. These films, with titles like Dangerous to Know, Hunted Men, Tip-Off Girls, Illegal Traffic and Parole Fixers offered fast-moving stories, stylish direction and strong acting from a revolving stock company that included Robert Preston, Akim Tamiroff, J. Carroll Naish, Buster Crabbe, Anthony Quinn and (almost invariably) Lloyd Nolan.

   But they are primarily triumphs of Production. Someone at Paramount cared enough to get directors like Robert Florey, writers (sometimes uncredited) like Ben Hecht, Horace McCoy and S. J. Perelman, and cameramen and editors who knew how to lend class to tight budgets. And it shows. You can watch almost any film from this series and get an hour of solid entertainment from it.

   King of Gamblers features Tamiroff in his usual Mob-Boss stint, Lloyd Nolan as his reporter-nemesis and Claire Trevor as (you guessed it) the girl they both love. But the show gets stolen by an actor even I never heard of named Barlowe Borland.

   Who? That’s right, I guess. Borland was an Edmund Gwenn type before there was Edmund Gwenn, usually type-cast as the fussy professor or prissy butler, but here quite effective as Tamiroff’s “arranger” Maybe he’s so chilling because he doesn’t try to act nasty; whether he’s setting up Trevor’s seduction, abetting a woman’s kidnapping, or covering up a murder, he keeps up a cheery Dickensian demeanor quite in keeping with the modest virtues of the film itself.

   One to look for.

MAX FRANKLIN – Charlie’s Angels. Ballantine, paperback original; adapted from the ABC-TV series. 1st printing, January 1977.

   I think perhaps this was actually the pilot episode that was adapted here, a made-for-TV movie shown in advance of the series itself. Charlie’s client is an heiress to a valuable estate in California wine country, or she will be if she’s allowed to return safely to prove her claim. The task of Kelly, Jill and Sabrina is to pave the way, solve a murder, and collect a quarter of a million dollars in the process.

   I don’t know why anybody would read this. People who watch the show must watch for visual attributes not possibly duplicated in print. People who don’t watch know what the are missing.

   Max Franklin is a pen-name of mystery writer Richard Deming, and he obviously read the script and has watched the show. I don’t think he added anything, however, and it all seemed pretty flat to me. Perry Mason never had much background personality either, but he did do his own thinking. What would the Angels do without Charlie?

Rating:   D.

[UPDATE] 02-11-16.   With IMDb available now, and not back in 1977 when I wrote this, I can now confirm that my assumption in the first paragraph is correct. This novel did indeed adapt the pilot episode, first shown on ABC on 21 March 1976. There were five of these novelizations in all; presumably episodes of the series itself were adapted in later books.

MICHAEL REAVES & JOHN PELAN, Editors – Shadows Over Baker Street. Del Rey / Ballantine, trade paperback, 2003.

   This collection of stories in which the Sherlock Holmes canon is expanded by apocryphal tales confronting the dean of intellectual detectives with H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos is probably one of those projects that sounded more promising in the proposal than it is has turned out to be in the execution.

   Holmes’ antipathy to the supernatural as a factor in his cases is well-documented and I rather think he would be embarrassed by the outlandish capers he is obliged to be engaged in to seek what is often a tentative solution to the Lovecraftian horrors intruding on his rational terrain.

   I’m certainly not opposed — as some fans of the genre are — to the use of supernatural elements in detective fiction (a use I feel can be documented throughout its distinguished history), but I’m not persuaded that this collection makes a strong case for Lovecraft’s particular, and very personal, chamber of horrors as a viable device for the crossover.

   This does not mean that I derived no pleasure from the collection. In small doses, over a period of time, the stories by a variety of authors such as 8rian Stapleford, Richard Lupoff, and Barbara Hambly afford a modicum of chills and thrills, albeit at times not far from the comically absurd. None of the stories has lingered with any particular resonance in my tattered memory, so I’ll just add that if you aren’t opposed to the supernatural in your short fiction and don’t find Lovecraft’s name a turnoff, you should have some fun with the stories.

   The wraparound jacket illustration by John Jude Palencar doesn’t make a good case for the monsters lurking between the book’s covers. (I was amused rather than horrified by the two creatures posing in the lower right hand comer of the front cover) but has one nice idea in the depiction of Sherlock Holmes as the Invisible Man. Come to think of it, that’s not such an inappropriate portrait since the traditional Holmes is largely absent from these stories.

MICHAEL COLLINS – Crime, Punishment, and Resurrection. PI Dan Fortune short stories. Donald I. Fine, hardcover, 1992. No paperback edition. Introduction by Sue Grafton.

   I’m not a big reader of short stories. It isn’t that I dislike them, it’s just that I like novels much more, and my time is sadly finite.

   I do like Michael Collins and Dan Fortune very much, and so couldn’t resist this. Two of the stories including the novella that closes the book are new, the rest (seven of them) reprinted from various magazines.

   The stories ranged in my estimation from barely adequate — “The Woman Who Ruined John Ireland” — to excellent — “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” and the novella, “Resurrection.” The latter is very nearly worth the price of the book. It is a grim and powerful story of a cult and its leader, written with all of Collins’ considerable skill.

   I am not sure, no, not sure at all, that there is a consistently better writer in the hardboiled field today than Michael Collins. Highly recommended.

DRACULA. Universal Pictures, 1979. Frank Langella (Count Dracula), Laurence Olivier (Professor Abraham Van Helsing), Donald Pleasence, Kate Nelligan, Trevor Eve, Jan Francis. Screenplay: W. D. Richter, based on a play by Hamilton Deane & John L. Balderston, based in turn on the novel by Bram Stoker. Music by John Williams. Director: John Badham.

   Although it’s been quite a while since I read Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), there are quite a few aspects of the text that I remember quite well. Or at least I think I do. And not just plot points or vividly realized scenes such as when Dracula crawls down a wall. I’m talking about the work’s atmosphere, its sense of impending doom and sheer weirdness. Because let’s face it: >Dracula is an early example of modern weird fiction.

   Personally, I don’t think Stoker wrote the best vampire story ever told and I’ll leave it to you to decide which one you might think is the best. But I’ll readily admit that Stoker was remarkably effective in vividly describing a decidedly off-kilter world, one in which the notion of an undead Carpathian ruler haunting Victorian London doesn’t seem so far-fetched. Now, that’s an accomplishment and a testament to why Dracula is still read and appreciated to this very day.

   As far as film adaptations of Stoker’s novel go, I’m definitely of the opinion that the original Bela Lugosi version (1931) is the one I like the best (some people believe that the concurrent Spanish version is even better). To me, there’s something about Lugosi as Dracula that’s just so classic, so darn iconic that it’s difficult for me to fully imagine other actors stepping into the famed vampire’s shoes (or cape), though the late, great Christopher Lee comes pretty close.

   I remember watching Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 version in the theater and didn’t come away super impressed. There were some great moments, to be sure, but it just seemed so lavish, so colorful that somehow I didn’t see it as a fully authentic realization of Stoker’s vision. Keanu Reeves, who I don’t dislike as an actor and who I thought was great in Speed (1994), didn’t seem to me to be an effective choice for the role of Jonathan Harker. And I don’t think I’m the only one.

   It was with this background that I finally got around to watching the 1979 film version, one that transports the entirety of the proceedings to England and is closest to the spirit, if not the story, of Stoker’s novel.

   Directed by John Badham, this one features Frank Langella as Dracula and Laurence Olivier as vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing. Langella, it seems to me, is a fairly effective Dracula, particularly because the story played up the romantic and seductive aspect of the Dracula and Lucy relationship.

   Olivier, with a faux Dutch/Flemish accent, is an extraordinarily effective Van Helsing and really transforms the movie into a serene, melancholy operatic experience, one aided by John Williams’ hauntingly beautiful score. Olivier’s Van Helsing is a forlorn, world-weary warrior, someone who takes no pleasure in what he must do to stop Dracula.

   This version, which never garnered the same degree of critical attention as the original or Coppola’s version, is definitely worth watching for those who haven’t seen it. Also, for those who may have seen it decades ago and not again since then, it’s worth taking the time to rediscover how extraordinarily well this film holds up. It helps that, in this late 1970s version, Dracula crawls down a wall not once but twice. Chillingly sublime weirdness at its very best.

PETER CHAMBERS – Downbeat Kill. Abelard-Schuman, US, hardcover, 1964. First published in the UK by Robert Hale, hardcover, 1963.

   There was a time — this was long ago — when I thought there was somehow a connection between the author Peter Chambers, and the private eye character Peter Chambers whose adventures were told by Henry Kane. That the author Peter Chambers’s most frequently used character was also a PI (named Mark Preston) made such a connection all the more plausible. So so I thought.

   It turns out, as has been well known for many years now, that even though his character’s stories take place in California, Peter Chambers the author is as British as they come, and there is no connection to Henry Kane or his character whatsoever. Chambers’ real name is Dennis Phillips (1924-2006), and while having written only one crime novel under his own name, he wrote almost 40 as Chambers — most but not all with Preston — one as Simon Challis, five as Peter Chester, and thirteen as Philip Daniels.

   Very few of them have been reprinted in this country. Downbeat Kill is one of only eight of Preston’s cases to have been published over here. On the basis of this sample of size one, in spite of this overall rather sizable output of 36 in all, I find it really doubtful that I will find myself searching out any others.

   For one thing, Chambers (the author) has a totally tin ear when it comes to things Americana. This is the story of a universally disliked TV deejay whose death has been threatened, calling Preston in, His name is Donny Jingle (not his real one, though); the man works for a TV conglomerate called Amalgamated Inter-Coastal Television (or A.I.C.T. for short); and in a town called Monkton City, California. Worse, to my sense of hearing, every time Preston mentions his car by name, he calls it a Chev, but maybe that’s me.

   The case turns into murder when one of the go-fer guys working for Donny Jingle dies in a car bombing in his place. Preston digs up a lot of dirt as he investigates, but none of it is very interesting, and the ending is one big yawner.

   He doesn’t even make a big play for Donny Jingle’s personal secretary. Meh. This is one mediocre mystery at best.

H. ASHBROOK – The Murder of Stephen Kester. Coward-McCann, hardcover, 1931. Forthcoming from Resurrected Press, softcover, 2016.

GREEN EYES. Chesterfield, 1934. Charles Starrett, Shirley Grey, Claude Gillingwater, John Wray. Screenplay by Andrew Moss, based on The Murder of Stephen Kester by H. Ashbrook. Directed by Richard Thorpe.

   Until Resurrected Press began reissuing the novels of Harriette Cora Ashbrook (1898-1946) who wrote as H. Ashbrook and Susannah Shane, she was a virtually forgotten follower of the Philo Vance school of detective fiction that featured talented amateurs with connections and more than a little contempt for the authorities. As H. Ashbrook she wrote thirteen mysteries featuring Philip “Spike” Tracy and six as Shane about Christopher Saxe.

   The Murder of Stephen Kester is a Spike Tracy mystery. Tracy, the brother of New York District Attorney Richard Tracy (yup, Dick Tracy is his brother), is a layabout and playboy with a penchant for lolling about making wisecracks while either suffering a hangover or drinking, getting thrown in various jails for being drunk and disorderly, and brilliantly solving crimes.

   If that doesn’t sound like much of a recommendation it should be pointed out that Ashbrook writes well, the dialogue has a certain crackle, the wise cracks are fairly good, and the pace much better than usual for the Van Dine school.

   The plots and detection are workmanlike at best, no Ellery Queen here, and equally no Rex Stout with characters as fascinating as Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, but still well above most of her competitors. As in many of the Van Dine school there is also a bit of social commentary thrown into the mix.

   The adjective that comes to mind is crisp.

   Here, wealthy Stephen Kester is murdered at a costume ball given by his granddaughter Jean. Numerous people attending have reason to kill the old man including Jean and her fiancé who have stolen money to elope, Kester’s manager/accountant with the high maintenance wife, the butler who calls the old man a Simon Legree, the housemaid who loves Jean and knows where the old man buried the bodies, and the mysterious Wall, who showed up and argued with Kester, but is staying at the house, and who Jean seems to know but can’t remember.

   Tracy sorts through the evidence and suspects, uncovers the truth despite being hindered by his brother and lunk-headed cop Inspector Hershman, and two murders later lets the killer escape by means of suicide in true Philo Vance fashion, though the spineless weasel killer in this one deserves no such grace.

   The film, renamed Green Eyes for no apparent reason other than a pair of glow-in-the-dark marbles that feature in the solution, stars Charles Starrett as Michael Tracy (no idea why Spike was dropped much less Philip), a writer who specializes in being a pain in the police posterior, and who has an admitted history of visiting various jails around the world for drunk and disorderly charges. He’s at the party when Kester is murdered and injects himself in the investigation by Captain Crofton and his version of Hershman, both of whom know Tracy.

   Why any of these changes were made is a greater mystery than the plot, but that’s Hollywood for you. Maybe they thought Tracy was more appealing as a total outsider and a bit more sober and collegiate. Maybe they didn’t want the public to make the Dick Tracy connection with the brother.

   At just a bit over an hour it moves well, Starrett makes a pretty good amateur sleuth even though it is a bit hard to imagine him dissolute in any way, and the plot doesn’t veer too significantly from the book. It’s a pleasant enough well made little mystery, and frankly better written and acted than any of the God awful Ellery Queen pictures from the same era. I wouldn’t have minded seeing Starrett in a second outing as Tracy.

   Read the book and see the film. Both are available, the book from Resurrected Press, and the movie on YouTube. Of the two the book offers more pleasures, but the movie looks and plays better than most of its type thanks to a good cast and Richard Thorpe’s direction.

   I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by both.

A track from The Rose of San Joaquin, this country-western singer’s 1995 CD on Hightone:

   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.

   â€œThe 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.”

   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.”

   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.”

   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.”

   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.”

   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.

   â€œI 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?