Jack Adrian (1)Besprekingen

My grandfather used to tell us kids (grandchildren) adventure stories. Our favourite stories were about the explorers, Jack Sam and Pete though Pop varied the diet....depending on what he happened to be reading at the moment ...and somewhat on his memory of reading Penny Dreadfuls in London. We loved these stories ...even if they came with the occasional inconsistency .....and constantly pestered him for another story. I recall that one of his sequence of stories was about "Sexton Blake". I'd certainly heard of Sherlock Holmes and before I was about 14 I had read various anthologies of Sherlock Holmes stories. But I'd never actually come across a Sexton Blake story....so, when I saw this at a pretty good price at Berkelow's, I bought it. And I've not been disappointed. I learned that the Sexton Blake stories were written by a whole host of different writers and were just churned out for the various weekly newspapers or magazines. Some were written as full length novels. They modelled themselves on the sleuth of Baker Street.....and, in fact, Sexton Blake even moved into Baker Street. This particular collection has nine stories and I've just read four of them,: sufficient to give me a pretty good idea of the calibre and style of the genre. Yes....pretty much like Pop's stories.....racy, full of action and surprises, Somewhat devoid of overriding moral principles ....apart from "crime does not pay".....and even the most cunning of villains was no match, in the end, for Sexton Blake and Tinker. (Both Tinker and my grandfather seemed to share a common heritage in Cockney London).
The style is overwrought with adjectives viz:`"The solicitor's companion was a spare, angular man, dressed in dark clothes of old-fashioned cut". But they are great stories. I found myself reading them at great pace and more or less unable to put them down. the formula is the same as in Sherlock Holmes:.....some mysterious happenings, impossible to see the connections until Sexton Blake comes on the scene and starts to apply his analytical genius. All is revealed in the last few paragraphs....how the villains did it and how they are brought to justice. Frequent violence and the use of revolvers. I found myself, wondering how they would be able to do that in England....leaving bodies and wounded behind them and travelling internationally with their weapons. But, hey! this is escapism not an essay in logic.
I enjoyed the stories that I read. But four was enough. I now see where Pop was able to draw on his misspent youth reading penny dreadfuls (he left home at 14 and went to sea.....never returning to the family home....... for the last 60 years of his life, anyway)......and produce such wonderful adventure stories for us kids. It's not great literature but it is fun: Four stars from me.

The variety in this book was the greatest thing. Growing up on the Sherlock Holmes stories as the primary source for my mysteries, with a few Poirots and Nero Wolfes thrown in, I had a specific idea of the formulation of a detective story: The mystery is presented, the detective goes to solve the problem, and while this collection did of course have a few that followed that form, including a Sherlock and a Father Brown, it also had other stories which fit the category rather less squarely. The Ministering Angel was the first of these, a story of a woman married to a man she hounded because she wanted his money after he died—what a classic motive, I’m discovering, and such a rampant trope, although for stories in this book, they’re written so early as to be, perhaps, the ones that built the trope.
Not Guilty is a story about a woman who gets away with murder, as is The Idol’s Eye, and The Perfect Crime and The Intruder are about people who get caught doing crimes, although not by people who are detectives in particular. Cast-Iron Alibi is about someone who very nearly gets away with it, including a police detective who very narrowly doesn’t solve the case, which is a refreshing turn.
Huxley’s A Deal in Old Masters is simply about a skillful fake art trafficker, although maybe skillful is an overstatement. It’s really just about an art salesman passing off a fake to a rube who doesn’t know any better, which kind of annoyed me to have in this collection when I read it. But then again Huxley usually strikes me as overblown.
A few more little stories of hoaxes follow, and then tales of murder with little twists but no detectives. Last, a few Sherlocks by Doyle and one by Knox.
In all, an interesting and good collection of detective stories that sparked a hunger (which I have, alas, continued with Agatha Christie remake movies from the library via hoopla rather than continuing getting through my books...) But thankfully I have a couple more books, a Victorian detective anthology, a Nero Wolfe anthology and a novel-length mystery, to satisfy me after I finish a couple of the books I just picked up this weekend.

This slender volume of ghost stories, an annual tradition issued by Canadian Ash-Tree Press for several years, was quite good as well as interesting. The theme was authors who rarely, or never wrote ghost stories and certainly weren't known, except for Buchan, for their macabre output. These are all stories of the "classic" Jamesian nature only marred by an over-reliance on the unnecessary "club tale" as a framing device, probably an artifact of each author's unfamiliarity of writing in the genre.

Still an interesting little volume with a nice introduction and good story notes.

The topic is plagiarism, intentional and otherwise. The editor gives some of the authors the benefit of the doubt, but in some cases, Agatha Christie for instance, a notorious plagiarist AND recycler of her own oeuvre, he gives no excuses to. These stories run from the better known to the, in some cases, deservedly obscure.

The fare is the usual Ash Tree fare but the stories are generally quite better than the usual.. Nothing is newer than 1945 and most are late nineteenth to the first third of the twentieth century.

The editor is a delight and a real wit. Get out the dictionary though.

Loses one star for cheapness in not including the [a:Arthur Conan Doyle|2448|Arthur Conan Doyle|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1495008883p2/2448.jpg], [a:Agatha Christie|123715|Agatha Christie|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1589991473p2/123715.jpg], and [a:Daphne du Maurier|2001717|Daphne du Maurier|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1422444467p2/2001717.jpg] stories, forcing you to look them up elsewhere (they didn’t want to pay the royalties). Fortunately most of these you will have read before. The only one I hadn’t read was the Christie, whom I despise.

An unusually lengthy annual for Ash Tree. It was sadly their last.

I just edited this. I’m not sure whether to blame auto fill or operator. Really looses for loses!

This is far from perfect, but there's a lot to like about it and I have to say it exceeded my expectations. It's the first of a long series of novels set in a post apocalyptic America and started in the 1980s. That sentence probably tells you a lot of what you need to know and the book delivers the extreme violence and despair you'd expect, but there's an inventiveness and playfulness to the storytelling that lifts it enough to make it a fun and satisfying read.

The original Strand Magazine was published in London from 1891 to 1950; its initial slogan described it as “a monthly magazine costing sixpence *but worth a shilling*,” which I find hilarious. On the 100th anniversary of the initial publication, Oxford University Press released this and a companion volume (“Detective Stories from The Strand”) to celebrate its accomplishments. The tales in this anthology are all somehow “weird” or uncanny, and feature some of the most notable writers of the day: Arthur Conan Doyle (with non-Sherlock stories), E. Nesbit (decidedly NOT children’s tales), Graham Greene, H.G. Wells, D.H. Lawrence and more. The structure is a little odd: each section of the anthology (“Revenants,” “Murder and Madness,” “Odd Man Out,” “Sheer Melodrama,” “Superbeasts,” “Unnatural Disasters” and “Two Storytellers”) is prefaced with brief biographies of the writers featured in the section, but once the reader gets used to that system, the stories are easily entered into and extremely enjoyable. Of course, given the time and place, pretty much each story deals primarily if not exclusively with rich white men, but that’s what people were writing and reading back then. An historical treasure-trove, really; recommended!

Short story collection from the 1920s through the 1990s. Strongest material is through the 60s, after which the stories tend towards failed caricature.

One of the better anthologies of pulp crime stories, and an ideal starting point for newcomers to the genre. No single collection can be definitive, of course, but this one features nearly all of the big names--Hammett, Whitfield, Chandler, Spillane, Ross Macdonald--as well as genuinely obscure authors like William Cole (which, co-compiler Adrian suggests, may have been a pseudonym of Black Mask editor Fanny Ellsworth). While most readers will be happy to hear that this volume doesn't oblige them to plod through a Carroll John Daly tale, something by the fantastic, underrated John K. Butler (author of Dime Detective's Steve Midnight stories) would have been a welcome addition to the thirty-six pieces collected here. Expendable, in my view, are Daniel Mainwaring's Depression-era tragedy "Fruit Tramp" and Elmore Leonard's straight Western "Three-Ten to Yuma." Each is a fine example of the art of the short story; neither fits the hard-boiled mode.

The stories are grouped by decade, with the 1930s being far and away the most fruitful period for the brand of terse, rough-and-tumble detective story which is generally associated with the term "hard-boiled." As the editors progress into the mid-1950s the old-fashioned private eyes begin to disappear, supplanted by the dreary amorality of noir. A few of these stories are okay (the Jim Thompson selection is pretty damned good, in fact), but noir and hard-boiled are not synonymous. These later tales have a different flavor, and their aimless, destructive nastiness is not to my liking.

Standouts: Hammett's "The Scorched Face", Whitfield's "Mistral" (arguably the best story in the book, and quite a departure from the author's usual cornball fare), Norbert Davis's "Who Said I Was Dead?", Macdonald's "Guilt-Edged Blonde" and Thompson's "Forever After."

Hard-Boiled contains mystery short stories from the 1920s through the 1990s. While I picked it up primarily to read the pulps from the 1920s - 1940s, I figured I'd read the rest while I'm at it. Bill Pronzini has edited several books of mysteries and knows what he's doing.

For the most part, Hard-Boiled reinforced what I already knew--I like the pulp mysteries the best. The editors included stories by such pulp luminaries as Paul Cain, Raoul Whitfield, Dashiell Hammett, Frederick Nebel and Raymond Chandler. They also included several authors I was not all that familiar with like Brett Halliday and William Cole.

In the post pulp era, the authors included were Elmore Leonard, Ross Macdonald, Mickey Spillane, Ed McBain (Evan Hunter), and Lawrence Block along with unknowns (to me) Leigh Brackett, Helen Nielson and others.

I found the latter stories to be more morbid, more depressing, and less inclined to focus on atmosphere. The pulp mysteries were gritty and some had a more 'noir' feeling to them. The language in the pulps seemed to be more descriptive and thought out as well.

The editors included a little bio of each author, noting their best known works, anthologies and those that were made into films. Many of the authors had short careers, some moved into script writing and editing and some veered away from mysteries altogether.

Hard-Boiled is a well rounded anthology of crime stories and one that should be in every mystery lover's library

Lucky enough to pick this book up at a used book store for a dollar. What a steal! I enjoyed reading the editor's selections of stories from the famous detective/mystery/suspense magazine The Strand.

As with any compilation, there are stories that are stronger or weaker than others, but on the whole, excellent quality stories, with a few introductions to let the reader understand more about the stories and authors we may nit be familiar with.

Lucky enough to pick this book up at a used book store for a dollar. What a steal! I enjoyed reading the editor's selections of stories from the famous detective/mystery/suspense magazine The Strand.

As with any compilation, there are stories that are stronger or weaker than others, but on the whole, excellent quality stories, with a few introductions to let the reader understand more about the stories and authors we may nit be familiar with.

My dad is a fan of this classic 80s pulp science fiction series about life after worldwide nuclear apocalypse (think if Matthew Broderick did not succeed in preventing global thermonuclear war at the end of War Games) and he gave me the first two books to read. It's a lot of fun if you go into with the right expectations, and by that I mean, no expectations of quality writing but lots of gore and explosions and weaponry and devastated landscapes and mutated creatures and a series of hard-bitten testosterone-fueled men who are either outright villains or antiheroes just trying to survive. They could all be played by Arnold Schwarzenegger as Dutch and Sly Stallone as Rambo. Oh, and one hot outrageously sexualized chick who can hold her own with the menfolk but still, of course, is repeatedly threatened with sexual violence throughout the course of the book. I won't even get started on the role of women in this story.

OK, let's be honest: these are not good novels. Even in the 80s, they were not good novels. Still, there was something nostalgic about reading this for me, because it reminded me of all the time I spent in the 80s and early 90s reading RPG-related novels and all the other serialized novels, like the Thieves World stories and another shared-world series (that I can't remember the title of) that involved magical races returning in this technology-heavy future, so there were elves who could hack computers with chips in their brains and so on. (If any of you reading this know what I'm talking about, tell me!) And there are some really cool, creative details to the world-building and mutations that no amount of bad, melodramatic purple prose can mask, and despite myself there were a couple of times where I really wanted to know what was going to happen, especially since it ended in exactly the right place. I would never seek out and read the 100 novels in this series (many hard to find these days), but I'll skim through the start of the second just to see what happens to Ryan and Krysty (yes, I know, I know).

Before I read this anthology, The Strand Magazine brought to mind only Sherlock Holmes. My three-and-one-half stars rating is only an average. Judging by the stories here, Mr. Adrian is correct about their writers knowing how to entertain. The stories I gave only three stars I would probably have rated higher if I hadn't been reading strange fiction since the fifth grade, very close to five decades ago.

When I buy an anthology of weird fiction, I like to check the table of contents to see if at least half of them are unfamiliar. Of the stories here, I'd read only 'A Torture of Hope' before, and I'm pretty sure that was for some class. That makes this collection a particularly happy find.

Here's my rating for and a short description of each story:

'All But Empty' by Graham Greene ***
Sitting next to a chatty stranger in a cinema shouldn't be a big problem when the movie is silent.

'Lord Beden's Motor' by Mr. J. B. Harris-Burland ***1/2
Lord Beden is determined to catch up with that strange vehicle no matter how fast he has to drive or how bad the road -- and seat belts and air bags haven't been invented yet.

'The Tarn' by Hugh Walpole *****
A man who blames the bitter failures of his life on another finally has the object of his hatred in his power.

'Resurgam' by Rina Ramsay ***
A parson from a London slum can't imagine what could possibly be making the parson of a peaceful country town a nervous wreck.

'The Railway Carriage' by Ms. F. Tennyson Jesse***
There's something rather creepy about the other passengers in Solange's railway car.

'The Bell' by Mr. Beverley Nichols ***
A middle-aged man with a weak heart contemplates the freedom he'll have now that his control freak manservant is dead.

'His Brother's Keeper' by Mr. W. W. Jacobs****
Can't a poor, honest murderer get a bit of peace?

'Touch and Go' by Sapper [Herman Cyril McNeile]****
If you knowingly rent a house where a brutal murder once took place, you have to expect difficulties keeping servants.

'Waxworks' by Mr. W. L. George ***1/2
We have our cover story and the look of fear on the visitors is deserved. Here's a link to one of the lesser-known exhibits:
http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2010/10/murder-in-19th-century-france-and-the-birth-of...

'White Spectre' by Mr. B. L. Jacot***1/2
Six plane crash survivors holed up in a cave in the mountains, then there were five...

'Tickets, Please' by D. H. Lawrence**** [uncut version]
A handsome young ladies' man may have been dating a few too many of his co-workers, heh-heh...

'A Torture by Hope' by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam [Philippe-Auguste. Compte de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam]****
A very nasty story set in the bad old days of the Spanish Inquisition.

'A Horrible Fright' by Mrs. L. T. Meade***
A foolhardy girl soon wishes she'd stayed in a ladies' railway carriage as her father had advised.

'The Case of Roger Carboyne' by Mr. H. Greenhough Smith***1/2
It's the late 19th century and there are no helicopters, so how could the marks of a body being dragged suddenly stop, leaving only unbroken snow? (From my copy of The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allen Poe, I believe that when the Coroner asks if the police are entirely at fault, he is using 'fault' in the hunting jargon sense of being at a loss or puzzled.)

'The Orchestra of Death by Ianthe Jerrold***1/2
A dancer fears she will be mudered, but the show must go on.

'The Lizard' by C. J. Cutcliffe-Hyne***1/2
A hunter and cave enthusiast finds something special during a new exploration.

'Inexplicable' by Ms. L. G. Moberly****
The couple are so pleased with their new house, especially that beautiful carved crocodile or alligator-legged table that the last tenant left behind for some reason. (Both terms are used.)

'The Prophetic Camera' by L. de Giberne Sieveking [L = 'Lancelot,' also known as 'Lance Sieveking']***1/2
Yes, the camera takes pictures of the future. My favorite reaction was the wife's.

'Cavalanci's Curse' by Henry A. Hering ***1/2
The curse involves magic violins. The dialogue of the non-English characters was so stupidly stereotypical that it made me snicker.

'The Queer Story of Brownlow's Newspaper' by H. G. Wells [Herbert George]***
1930s Wells' idea of what the world would be like in 1971 is good for some chuckles. Note: 'queer' is being used in its old sense of being strange, odd, weird, etc. Also, when Brownlow's state is described as having been on the gayer side of sobriety, it means he was happy, cheerful, blithe, etc.

'The Black Grippe' by Edgar Wallace***1/2
A London doctor's animal testing shows that what seemed to be a minor pandemic will make people blind for days, and he tries to warn the world.

'The Fog' by Morley Roberts*****
London is choked by a fog we'd probably call 'smog' that's so dark and thick that the people can't see. A blind veteran is trying to keep a small group alive. The descriptions of mob behavior are very believable.

'The Thames Valley Catastrophe' by Grant Allen****
A man tries to warn others of the terrible danger they're in while he races to rescue his family.

'A Sense of the Future' by Martin Swayne***
If a canny financier is correct, the world's oil will soon run out. There'll be no more petrol (gasoline)! What's a car lover to do?

'The Silver Mirror' by Arthur Conan Doyle***1/2
An accountant's antique mirror starts showing him a dramatic scene from the past.

'The Haunted House' by E. Nesbit****
A young man answers an advertisement to investigate a haunting. Is it ghost or a vampire that infests the place?

'How It Happened' by Arthur Conan Doyle***
We get the story through a writing medium [a medium who practices automatic writing?]. It's rather like one of those mystery shows where the audience is shown the murderer before the first commercial, so the rest of the show is spent wondering how or when the hero/ine will figure it out.

'The Power of Darkness' by E. Nesbit****
Two friends, both in love with the same woman, have bet each other that neither could bear to spend a night alone in a wax museum.

'The Horror of the Heights' by Arthur Conan Doyle****
In a story published the year before World War I started, a pilot is determined to take his little monoplane more than 40,000 feet into the air -- even though he suspects he'll encounter something deadly. I don't know if the descriptions of the plane's workings are accurate, but even the thought of going that high in a plane of that era certainly scared me.

I recommend this collection to weird fiction fans who enjoy late 19th through the first half of 20th century writing.½

This second volume of collected Judge Dredd strips from the pages of 2000 AD is a mixed bag. On the one hand, it includes "The Cursed Earth" cycle, possibly the greatest adventure in the history of the character. "The Cursed Earth" features spectacular artwork from the amazing Mike McMahon, and a Pat Mills script that is almost as good. Unfortunately, the rest of the contents of this volume represents mediocre work at best, both in terms of lackluster artwork and story lines that are either just plain dull ("The DNA Man") or bloated and tedious ("The Day The Law Died"). Still, Mike McMahon's work on "The Cursed Earth" is truly something to behold...

More interesting as artifacts than thrilling reading material. ‘Mystery’ in the title refers to stories that invoke wonder, dread or suspense, and though most of them are concerned with the solving of crimes, a few have supernatural themes. The stories are presented chronologically by publication date and, to my mind, are more interesting the newer they are. Each bears scrutiny, but are probably more to scholars than beach readers. The Man with the Ebony Crutches (with some nice steampunk details) presages the coming of WW I, The Yellow Box is a nice ambiguous story about haunting and obsession, The Story of the Man with Watches has gay elements, The Horror of the Automaton is genuinely creepy, and the oldest story, A Night in an Old Castle (1843) is notable because of its smooth and unadorned prose. Jack Adrian has done a lot of good work pulling together anthologies of stories that have fallen out of favor through neglect. His ‘stories from the Strand’ collections are the strongest that I know of.

A collection of 36 of the very best hardboiled stories filling more than 500 pages and arranged decade by decade, commencing in the 1920s and finishing up-to-date in the '90s. All of the usual suspects are present: Hammett, Chandler, Cain (both James M and Paul), Burnett representing the early years, with Goodis, Himes, Gil Brewer, Mickey Spillane, John D MacDonald, Ross Macdonald, and others standing in for the '40s and '50s. The later years are represented by the likes of Jim Thompson, Andrew Vachss, James Ellroy, Lawrence Block and Ed Gorman.

The editors are experts in their field, and an excellent feature of the book is the one- or two-page biographical overview of each author, preceding their work. The book also sports a useful long introduction by the editors which attempts to define the sub-genre of hardboiled crime fiction and to set it into proper context. In this task they succeed well, and the entire book is a delight to browse through and dip into -- to sample again the old favourites and also to learn about the lesser known. An essential buy for the lover of the hardboiled.

Representative stories from the beginning of the genre/form until the book's publication (1995), organized by decade. Heavy on the 1930s and 1950s. By page count, about half the book comprises what I think of as hard-boiled crime, 3/4 of which are in the first half of the book. The other stories, not so much. They're good, mostly, but hardly hard-boiled, as most people understand the term.

Part of the problem, as I see it, is evident in the introductory essay, where they spend three and a half half-assed, contradictory pages failing to describe what makes a hard-boiled crime story. They float a number of terms, some familiar to lit-crit and some not. They don't detail the application of the familiar ones to the hard-boiled story, and they don't even define the unfamiliar ones. They even seem to lump 'hard-boiled' and 'noir.' So, in the remainder of the essay, which is basically a 15-page publishing history of the genre/form/whatever (they use both words, apparently interchangeably), when they say that this author or that period expanded the definition or broadened the genre/form/whatever, I was left wondering, WTF? Because as far as I can tell, most of the later (mid-1950s on) stories that are included can only be included if one uses a (to my mind) overly broad definition of hard-boiled, which they do, but they never tell you what their definition is. They just paste on the hard-boiled label to suit themselves. All of this is particularly ironic given their complaint in the first paragraph of the intro essay about the misuse and misunderstanding of the hard-boiled label and genre/form/whatever.

In summary: good stories, bad anthologizing.

A small review of one the stories of this collection:
Rex Hardinge, The man I Killed.
Hardinge's stories are often repetitive and formulaic. But this one isn't. It's an inverted mystery, we know the murderer from the outset. Indeed, he tells us his story in first person, the story of his 'perfect' crime. His friend Sexton Blake himself, he planned, should provide his alibi. The suspense arises not from whodunit but from watching Sexton Blake discovering how it was done. The main mystery, why it was done, is only revealed at the end.
And we learn something astonishing about Blake. He plays the violin so good "he could justifiably have made it his profession". Even in his recreations he is superior to the other Baker Street detective.
This is certainly one of the best stories Hardinge has written.

A pretty damn definitive collection on the subject--working so hard to include all the greats that an unpublished screen test written by Spillane is in there, because he didn't do short stories. The lesser-known hidden gems are also definitely worth your time.

SFF