Month: April 2024

The Kiss of Death – Eleazar Lipsky

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A 100-page manuscript by Mr. Lipsky was the basis of the 1947 film “Kiss of Death,” starring Richard Widmark, and the full novel was published by Penguin that same year. 

New York Times obituary – Eleazar Lipsky – February 15, 1993

This is that first edition, published by the USA division of Penguin in August 1947, I also have the first UK Penguin edition, with a significantly less garish cover, from December 1949. see image at the end of this blog. Lipsky was by trade a lawyer and served as an assistant district attorney for Manhattan in the 1940’s, he later had a law practice in Manhattan and amongst other jobs served as legal counsel to the Mystery Writers of America. He was still practising law up to three weeks before his death at the age of eighty one from leukaemia. This solid background in law shows itself in his writing and you can be certain that the trial scenes and interactions with the Manhattan assistant district attorney in the book are procedurally accurate.

It’s an unusual crime novel as it is less concerned with the crime undertaken by Vanni Bianco and his mob then the repercussions of the act. Vanni is quickly captured and in the lead up to his trial D’Angelo, the assistant D.A. tries to persuade him to turn in the other members of his gang to avoid the mandatory thirty year jail sentence he faces for a fourth offence and this time involving a gun although it wasn’t fired during the robbery. Bianco refuses due to a code of honour and determines to do his time leaving his wife and children to be looked after by his gang. This however they fail to do and four years into his sentence word reached Bianco that his wife has died of tuberculosis brought on by cash shortages so she was looking after their daughters as well as she could to the detriment of her own health. The children were admitted into a home. This terrible situation strikes home at Bianco who determines to testify against his fellow criminals in an act of recrimination.

This is where the story totally changes tack as we follow Bianco into a new ‘career’ of stool pigeon being placed in prison cells with criminals where the D.A.’s office had insufficient evidence to see if he could get them to talk to him, an extremely dangerous role which could easily have got Bianco killed if he was suspected. It’s a very interesting aspect to the way of working of the District Attorney’s office and presumably is based on real life examples that Lipsky had during his professional career. I don’t remember reading a book dealing so specifically with the way the District Attorney would handle an informant of the type of Vanni Bianco. However I certainly didn’t see the final twist in the plot coming and it transforms the whole story in a completely believable but totally unexpected way.

As for the film mentioned in the obituary, it doesn’t really star Richard Widmark as claimed, as it was actually his debut. The film actually stars Victor Mature as Bianco and Brian Donlevy as D’Angelo with Widmark playing one of the criminals D’Angelo hopes Bianco will manage to get some more information on. I tried watching some of the movie and frankly wasn’t particularly impressed, unlike the book which was fast moving and a delight to read. It is nowadays sadly out of print but is pretty easy to track down on the second-hand market in either the USA or UK Penguin editions.

Short Stories – H G Wells

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At 474 pages this is an excellent selection of the short stories and three of the short novels from the pen of H G Wells, a man most people think of as a Victorian science fiction writer but who was much more than that not only in output but also his timeline as he survived until after WWII, dying in 1946 at the age of seventy nine. So why is Wells so popularly thought of as being earlier than he truly was, well his best known works were certainly written during the Victorian era, such as ‘The Time Machine’ (1895), ‘The Island of Doctor Moreau’ (1896), ‘The Invisible Man’ (1897), and ‘The War of the Worlds’ (1898) however at the turn of the century he largely moved away from science fiction towards more contemporary novels such as ‘Kipps’ and ‘Tono-Bungay’ and later almost abandoned fiction altogether and produced his ‘A Short History of the World’ which attempted to summarise all of history into a single volume, I also have the earlier ‘The Outline of History’ in two illustrated volumes and the odd ‘Crux Ansata’ from 1943 which is basically a polemic against the Catholic Church.

This book was published by Flame Tree Publishing in 2017 and was the first of their Gothic and Fantasy series of books to be dedicated to just one author, closely followed by H P Lovecraft. Along with what would normally be regarded as short stories the collection includes three short novels, or novellas, ‘The Invisible Man’, ‘The Time Machine’ and ‘The Story of the Days to Come’. I have previously reviewed The Invisible Man as part of the August 2018 review of the first set of ten Penguin crime novels, and it was the inclusion of The Time Machine that prompted me to pick up this collection after last weeks ‘The H-Bomb Girl’ including as that does a time travelling character called Miss Wells which is clearly a reference to H G Wells. Along with these three novellas are thirty three short stories which vary from a simple crime caper ‘The Hammerpond Park Burglary’ through murder ‘The Cone’ amongst others and but the majority fall into the loose category of intriguing fantasy but I wouldn’t describe many of them as Gothic in the way that Lovecraft is definitely Gothic Fantasy, the one significant exception is ‘The Red Room’ which reads like a ghost story with a great twist at the end. I also have The Folio Society collection published in 1990 and which is based on the selection published by J.M. Dent and Sons in 1927 although that only has twenty two stories But even that shorter collection has seven stories not included in the Flame Tree edition and that still leaves over fifty short stories that I don’t have. as Wikipedia lists 94 short stories and the same number of novels or novellas.

That Wells was a prolific author is not in doubt and the quality of his writing can also not be underestimated, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times although never won it, frankly I suspect the judges regarded him as insufficiently high brow to be properly considered. But he was undoubtedly a popular writer from his earliest works and still sells well. I’ve really enjoyed reading some of the stories that I didn’t know and revisiting the ones I read many years ago. If you haven’t read Wells’ short stories then I heartily recommend them, no matter which collection, and there are many, that you manage to pick up.

The H-Bomb Girl – Stephen Baxter

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First up, the quote by Paul Cornell on the cover gives away a lot of the plot, immediately you are on the look out for a time travel angle in a book ostensibly about a fourteen year old girl moving to Liverpool after the collapse of her parent’s marriage and having to start again making new friends at a time of international tension, for it is October 1962 and Russia is moving nuclear missiles to Cuba in order to be able to have a shorter strike time against the USA and match the American missiles based in Turkey. Therefore when the somewhat creepy Miss Wells at Laura’s new school appears to know more than she should and also has a resemblance to what an older Laura might look like and Agatha at the cafe the school friends go to also looks similar and furthermore has what appears to be a tattier version of Laura’s diary in one pocket the reader is considerably less surprised than they probably should have been.

Laura is given the nickname of The H-Bomb Girl after the very unusual item she has hanging round her neck is spotted by her school friends. Not many teenage girls walk round with the priming key for a Vulcan bomber hanging on a chain. Her father is a senior RAF officer in charge of the UK nuclear warheads, and in a slightly convoluted plot line has decided that a good way to keep his daughter safe in the event of a nuclear war is to give her the key and get her to memorise a phone number to ring and the arming codes so that if things go badly, which he suspects may well be the case, she can call and be whisked away to a safe place. I’m more inclined to believe that both father and daughter would be more likely to be taken to prison than to a place of safety but a certain amount of leeway has to be given here as the plot has more holes than a colander and the more you think about it the less believable it becomes. After all Miss Wells and Agatha must have been hanging around for some time waiting for Laura to move to Liverpool as Miss Wells at least appears to have a senior role in the school and is not mentioned as a new arrival.

It’s a pity that Baxter didn’t do more research into the period, if he had then the three anachronisms that I spotted immediately, there may well be others, wouldn’t have appeared. The first is minor in that in the introduction by way of explaining pre-decimal currency to modern readers he mentions the farthing which had ceased to be legal currency in January 1961 almost two years before the book is set. The second is more significant as during one of the versions of the post missile crisis where the world descends into nuclear war he refers to the first strike on Liverpool which led to the melting of the glass crown on Paddy’s Wigwam aka the Catholic Metropolitan Cathedral of Liverpool. Unfortunately this building only started construction in October 1962, the same month as the crisis occurred, it wasn’t completed until 1967 and gained it’s nickname soon afterwards, so it wasn’t there to be destroyed in October 1962. If you don’t know why it got the nickname see here. Finally in a book about time travel which also has a character mention Doctor Who starting soon he got the year wrong as it was the 23rd November 1963 when the show was first broadcast, nobody would have known about the show in 1962 as the BBC didn’t even start referring to Doctor Who internally until the summer of 1963. Finally as somebody who studied nuclear engineering the positioning of the open nuclear pool in the main control room hall, whilst needed for the plot, is simply ridiculous. These obvious errors, especially to someone born in 1962, as I was, were mildly annoying but apart from them and the dubious plot holes the story was a fun read.

Just My Type – Simon Garfield

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This fascinating book delves into the almost six hundred years of typesetting from Gutenberg with his introduction and popularisation of movable type on the printing press that he invented in the late 1440’s to the modern computer generated pages; whilst discussing the history and development of typefaces and fonts which have grown to well over 100,000 different styles over the centuries. One particular feature of the book is the use of the font referred to for most occasions that a specific font is discussed. This has led to almost two hundred different fonts being used in the book from the black lettering used by Gutenberg and Caxton which looks like the letters produced by monks in handwritten documents and books from the previous centuries to surprisingly recent classic examples which have become ubiquitous such as Helvetica (1957) which has become the font of choice for American transport systems, to its near copy Arial (1982). Arial was deliberately created by the Monotype Corporation to be very similar to Helvetica owned by their rival Linotype and owes its spread to being bundled by Microsoft from Windows 3.1 because the license was cheaper than Helvetica. There is also a chapter on the font developed by Herbert Spenser and Margaret Calvert for British road signs in the 1960’s and which has now spread across Europe, the name of the font is appropriately Transport.

I think anyone with an interest in books develops a parallel interest in fonts especially when the publisher, such as The Folio Society, always includes a reference to the chosen font at the start of the book. We don’t always notice when the choice is done well but certainly do when it is done badly. This is sadly the case with a book I am struggling with currently despite the contents being really interesting the poor paper quality, which is a little grey, along with the faint small thin font utilised makes reading more than a dozen or so pages in one go impossible due to the eye strain resulting from the attempt, Papyrus by Irene Vallejo published in paperback by Hodder & Stoughton is going to have to wait for it’s time on this blog, the subject is great but the reading experience is painful.

Garfield refers to many books about printing in this volume, several of which are now on my wants list including an interesting double book by Paul Felton which started from one direction is called ‘The Ten Commandments of Typography’ but turn it round and start from the other end it becomes ‘Type Heresy’. Amongst the commandments is “Thou shalt not apply more than three typefaces in a document” something that ‘Just My Type’ breaks for excellent reasons. But in ‘Type Heresy’ there is a full page rebuttal to this argument.

Oddly Profile Books who published this volume categorise it as ‘Reference/Humour’ which I think is simply down to the inclusion of this cartoon.

Vincent Connare who created Comic Sans whilst working for Microsoft as a font designer in 1994 is used to the criticism of his best known font design, but all he was trying to do was come up with an approachable design which resembled simple handwriting and was based on the handwritten lettering used in comic books by Marvel and DC at the time hence the name. It is worth noting that Comic Sans, the Sans indicating that it doesn’t have serifs (a small addition to the lines making up the character) on the letters, is particularly popular with teachers of dyslexic children due to its simple nonthreatening style.

The book covers a wide spectrum of fonts and typographical examples from histories of specific fonts in short chapters interleaved within the main text and each entitled Fontbreak, which starts with Eric Gill’s best known font Gill Sans (1928). Through to The John Bull Printing Outfit which I’m pretty certain I never owned although I do remember using something similar as a child to typeset short documents and print my own items. There is also a chapter on the worst fonts in the world which includes the truly awful font designed for the 2012 London Olympics.

So what font am I using for this blog? Well it’s the now somewhat unfashionable Times New Roman, chosen for the same reason that it was developed, to be clear and easy to read even down to small sizes, after all you may well be reading this on your phone. Times New Roman was created by Stanley Morrison in the early 1930’s to improve the legibility of The Times newspaper in Britain which up until then had used the somewhat spindly letters standard across most newspapers since the 19th century. The thickening of the very narrow letters also improved the robustness off the cast metal type, particularly useful given the high speed rotary presses in use.

When You are Old: Early Poems and Fairy Tales – W B Yeats

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This collection of Yeats’ early works is split roughly 50/50 between his poems and other works including the play ‘The Land of Hearts Desire’ and selections from ‘Irish Folk Tales’, ‘The Celtic Twilight’, John Sherman and Dhota’ and ‘Stories of Red Hanrahan’. There are eighty eight poems split into four categories by subject including the work that gives this collection its title, ‘When You are Old’.

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Yeats would come to look back on his early works with distaste as he regarded his more mature works as far superior and in the original preface of this collection he made clear that he thought the works that were cut were not worth retaining.

The first poem mentioned above ‘The Wanderings of Usheen’, more commonly titled ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ is the longest poem included in the collection and takes up 35 of the 158 pages dedicated to poetry. I love the rhythm of this poem and despite its length it is actually quite an easy read and takes the form of a conversation between the legendary hero Usheen/Oisin and Saint Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, although it is somewhat one sided with Saint Patrick barely managing to get a word in. It tells the story of Oisin’s journey into the land of Faerie and his wanderings with the fairy princess Niamh there for the last three hundred years. A small extract from the first section of the poem will give some idea of the work.

But now the moon like a white rose shone
In the pale west, and the sun’s rim sank,
And clouds arrayed their rank on rank
About his fading crimson ball:
The floor of Emen’s hosting hall
Was not more level than the sea,
As full of loving phantasy,
And with low murmurs we rode on,
Where many a trumpet-twisted shell
That in immortal silence sleeps
Dreaming of her own melting hues,
Her golds, her ambers, and her blues,
Pierced with soft light the shallowing deeps.
But now a wandering land breeze came
And a far sound of feathery quires;
It seemed to blow from the dying flame,
They seemed to sing in the smouldering fires.

One thing I didn’t realise until I read this collection and recognised the words, is that one of my favourite tracks by Irish band The Chieftains uses one of Yeats’ poems for the lyrics, beautifully read by Brenda Fricker, ‘Never give all the heart‘.

Leaving the poetry behind and delving into the second half of the book took me to totally unfamiliar territory as I had only read Yeats’ poetic works before. The one play included here has us yet again dealing with a character from the land of Faerie, this time the fairy is tempting a newly married woman to join her and leave the mortal realm. Following that is a very short and disappointing because of that, extract from the 1891 ‘Irish Fairy Tales’ which seems to just consist of an introduction and the enjoyable ‘Appendix: Classification of Irish Fairies’ this starts off with the largely friendly Sociable Fairies and then goes deeper into the mainly disagreeable Solitary Fairies. The brevity of this section makes me want to hunt out the complete book and read the actual folk tales told within it.

The next extract from a book, this time ‘The Celtic Twilight’ is at over forty pages quite a bit more representative than the handful of pages given to ‘Irish Fairy Tales’, it consists of a series of essays dealing with fairies, ghosts and other such supernatural characters and their encounters with humans. These essays are quite short, often just a single page but explore the myths of the Irish people with tales either told to Yeats or experienced by him. The selection from ‘John Sherman and Dhoya’ is again very short being just concerned with the story of Dhoya a giant mortal living alone who attracts the attention of a fairy lady who decides to become his companion until she is taken away by a male of her own folk leaving him alone again and inconsolable. Like ‘Irish Fairy Tales’ I’d like to read more of these stories as the taster is too brief. The final selection is actually complete and includes the six short stories concerning Red Hanrahan that were published together in 1897. These tell tales of Hanrahan’s, often ill-fated, encounters with women and supernatural beings.

If you want to get a representative overview of early works by William Butler Yeats then this collection would be a great place to start and like myself you will probably end up wanting more, especially of the prose works. This is the fourth book from the Penguin Drop Caps series I have written about along with a general overview of the series. There are twenty six in total, one author per letter of the alphabet and previously I have covered Ellery Queen, John Steinbeck and Xinran.