A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Power of Positive Loving - William Johnston

When I was a kid, I read all the tie-in novels by William Johnston based on the TV series GET SMART. I think I liked them even more than the TV show. I also recall reading and enjoying the novelization of the movie LT. ROBIN CRUSOE, USN, which Johnston wrote under the pseudonym Bill Ford. Johnston’s books were all over the spinner racks back in those days, since he wrote dozens of excellent movie novelizations and TV tie-ins. 

However, a friend mentioned to me that Johnston’s early, non-tie-in novels are very good, too, so I decided to try a few of them. First up is THE POWER OF POSITIVE LOVING, published by Monarch Books in 1964. I don’t mind admitting that one reason I bought this book is because of the cover. That’s one of the cutest redheads I’ve seen on a paperback cover, and the wink really sells the book.

As for the novel itself, well, that’s pretty good, too. The protagonist is Harry Ash, a down-on-his-luck public relations guy who comes up with a scheme to promote a sleepy little coastal town in California as a hotbed of sin and sensationalism. He plans to do this by teaming up with sexpot movie starlet Babe O’Flynn (that’s a great name), who has a habit of losing her clothes and winding up in the slick magazines like LIFE and LOOK. Harry comes up with a wild story for the gossip columnists about Babe going to this little town to recover from a broken heart after a top-secret love affair with the Secretary of State. He’s going to have a photographer get pictures of her on the beach in a bikini – or less – and figures that tourists, scandal-seekers, and sensation-mongers will converge on the motel and bar that he buys in partnership with a hamburger magnate. Naturally, things don’t work out quite like Harry plans.

Monarch Books lasted only a few years, but the company published quite a few books including some Westerns and mysteries. However, it’s best known for the abundance of slightly less graphic sleaze novels it put out. Donald Westlake, Lawrence Block, and Robert Silverberg all wrote pseudonymous books for Monarch, including a number of so-called non-fiction studies of various sexual subjects that were really fiction, under imposing sounding names like L.T. Woodward, M.D., and Dr. Benjamin Morse.

THE POWER OF POSITIVE LOVING is risqué enough to fall into the sleaze category, but just barely. Unlike most books in that genre from that era, this one is a comedy, a racy, romantic, screwball farce that takes satiric shots at morality, the advertising business, politics, show business, the military, the media, and just about anything else you can think of. The title itself is a pun on the self-help bestseller THE POWER OF POSITIVE THINKING by Norman Vincent Peale. If it had been made into a movie in 1964, it probably would have starred Jack Lemmon as Harry and Ann-Margret as Babe. As usual with such a scattershot yarn, not all the jokes work all the time, but enough of them do that this is a pretty funny book. It reminds me a little of the work of Max Shulman, for those of you old enough to remember his books. (Probably the same ones who remember Jack Lemmon and Ann-Margret.)

Johnston was nothing if not a versatile writer, though. I have several more of his non-tie-in novels on hand, and it looks like every one of them is considerably different from the others. I’ll be getting to them in due time and reporting on them here. For now, if you want a nice entertaining slice of mid-Sixties comedy, THE POWER OF POSITIVE LOVING is well worth reading.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on August 27, 2010. Despite the good intentions expressed in the final paragraph, I haven't read any more of William Johnston's novels, tie-in or otherwise, since then. But I still might. I know where they are on my shelves--I think. And I stand by my comment about the redhead on the cover. She's really cute. The cover art is by Tom Miller.)

Florida Man - Mike Baron

Mike Baron was one of the top comic book scripters for many years and these days is a very popular, critically acclaimed mystery and horror novelist. His latest book, FLORIDA MAN, is a bit of a departure. There’s crime in it, but it’s not really a crime novel. It’s more a wild, fast-paced comedy that manages to be dark, profane (it even says so right on the cover), very well-written, and very funny.

The title character is Gary Duba, a perpetually down on his luck Florida redneck who lives up to all the stereotypes, right down to the trailer house in which he lives (held down by giant chains called House Suspenders by Gary, who believes he’s invented the perfect hurricane protection system). Needing money to bail out his girlfriend, who’s gotten arrested for fighting with a Waffle House manager, he sets out to sell one of his prized baseball cards, and when that doesn’t work, he takes on some work for a sleazy attorney that makes him an unofficial private detective. (This isn’t a private eye novel, either.)

Of course things go wrong, and Gary runs into a multitude of characters who are just as colorful and eccentric as he is, and wild adventures pile up . . . until the plot takes an abrupt turn that would seem to indicate Gary’s luck has finally changed for the better. Some things never change, though, including Gary’s devil-may-care approach to life.

FLORIDA MAN is filled with sex, drugs, violence, politically incorrect humor, and gators. The best way to describe it is this: FLORIDA MAN is a hoot. I had a great time reading it and give it a high recommendation.

Forgotten Books: Pal Joey - John O'Hara

(This post originally appeared in slightly different form on October 18, 2007.)

PAL JOEY is an early novel of John O'Hara's from 1940 that’s told in the form of letters from Joey, a struggling nightclub singer in the Midwest, to his friend Ted, a much more successful singer and bandleader. I was aware of PAL JOEY only as a movie musical I’ve never seen starring Frank Sinatra and didn’t know the film was based on an O’Hara novel until recently. It must have been quite a chore for the screenwriter to turn this book into a coherent screenplay, since there’s not much actual story to work with. Joey sings in various second-rate nightclubs, romances an assortment of beautiful young women (or “mice”, as he calls them), and is jealous of his friend Ted’s success. That’s about it for the plot.

But O’Hara’s work isn’t really strong on plot to start with. He concentrates on characterization and dialogue instead. PAL JOEY manages to be both funny and very dark at the same time. Joey is uneducated, as is evident from the misspellings, grammatical errors, and tortured sentence structures in the letters he writes, but he has more than enough lust, greed, and ambition to make up for it. His jealousy of his friend’s success comes through plainly, as does his unwillingness to take any of the blame for his failures, even though most of them result from losing his temper or trying to take advantage of someone. He’s about the most venal character you’re ever going to come across, which is probably just what O’Hara intended.

PAL JOEY is also short and moves right along, always a plus in my book. I enjoyed it, and it’s got me really curious about the film version. I’m going to have to hunt up a copy of the DVD and give it a try.

UPDATE: So, have I watched the movie version of PAL JOEY, in the almost six-and-a-half years since this post first appeared? Well, no, not yet. But I'll get around to it one of these days!

Forgotten Books: Lady - Thomas Tryon

If you spent much time in used bookstores during the Seventies like I did, you probably saw some books by Thomas Tryon. Lots and lots of books by Thomas Tryon, in fact, usually overstock copies of his horror novels THE OTHER and HARVEST HOME, stacked high on top of the regular shelves along with scores of copies of JAWS and AIRPORT. I remember Tryon as an actor, the big, handsome, square-jawed hero of the TV series TEXAS JOHN SLAUGHTER, as well as movies like Disney's MOON PILOT and the unlikely-titled cavalry Western THE GLORY GUYS. I never read any of his novels, though, until now.

THE OTHER and HARVEST HOME were his first two novels, and they were both set in a small Connecticut town called Pequot's Landing. So is his third novel LADY, but unlike the earlier two books, LADY isn't a horror novel, despite some horrible things that happen in it and a few metaphorical mentions of ghosts.

Instead it's more of a mainstream coming-of-age novel narrated by a boy nicknamed Woody, who's about twelve years old when the story begins in the early Thirties. Woody befriends a rich young widow who lives across the town green from him, Adelaide (Lady) Harleigh. Thankfully, although the novel covers more than twenty years in time and Woody grows into a man, there's never any hint of romance between him and Lady. They're simply good friends, that's all. And that's enough.

Although there are a few sinister hints along the way, the first three-quarters of this novel provide an old-fashioned, leisurely look at growing up in a particular time and place, with lots of period detail (but not too much) that makes it feel like a 1940s black-and-white movie. But then the plot takes an abrupt and much darker twist, and things just continue to get worse as the secrets of Lady Harleigh's past are revealed. Tryon doesn't cheat in this twist, either; looking back at the earlier part of the book, the reader can see where he was setting everything up. But the writing skillfully glides right past what's under the surface, making all the revelations in the later part of the book seem even more shocking.

To be honest, LADY is the sort of slow-paced, long-winded book that I normally find very hard to read. Tryon even indulges in the old "Had I but known" bit. But here's the thing: he makes it work. I got caught up in the story and had to find out what was going to happen. The characters are all vividly drawn, even the unsympathetic ones, and I wanted to know how things were going to turn out for them. For those of you old enough to remember them, LADY is from the same school as PEYTON PLACE and KING'S ROW, long, lush novels with large casts, soapy plots, and at least a skin of realism.

Originally published in 1974, this novel is available again in an e-book edition, which is what I read. I thoroughly enjoyed it, enough so that I might read some of Tryon's other novels. I wouldn't mind paying another visit to Pequot's Landing. There has to be a reason all those copies were stacked up on top of the used bookstore shelves back in the Seventies.

Forgotten Books: Best Offer - Robert Calder

When I was in the used book business in the Eighties, copies of this novel from 1981 were everywhere. Now I'd hate to have to try to find one, although they can be had on-line. It was probably so popular because of that sexy cover, and the salacious subject matter probably didn't hurt sales, either. BEST OFFER is basically a sex comedy about a group of suburban couples who decide to auction off the wives for a night to raise money and save the private school all their kids attend.

I haven't read this novel since then, so I don't know how it holds up, but I remember it being surprisingly good, with some darker, more serious aspects underneath all the wink-wink, nudge-nudge sleaziness of it. If you ever run across a copy, you might give it a try, although I make no guarantees. As far as I know, Robert Calder published only one other book, a horror novel called THE DOGS that I never read.

Forgotten Books: Slattery's Hurricane - Herman Wouk

(This post first appeared on August 12, 2007, in slightly different form.) 

SLATTERY’S HURRICANE is something of an oddity in the career of Herman Wouk. It’s usually not included in the lists of his novels, and I’d never even heard of it until I happened to run across a copy at Half Price Books recently. As it turns out, this paperback original published in 1956 is a novelization of a 1949 movie based on a story by Wouk that was published in the slick magazine AMERICAN. Why there was a seven-year gap between the movie and the novelization, I have no idea.

I’ve never seen the movie, at least not that I recall, but I’ve read the book now and it’s pretty darned good. It’s definitely a Forties-style drama. Navy pilot Will Slattery is passed over for the medal he deserves for sinking a Japanese ship because his squadron leader lies about what happens and claims the honor for himself. Embittered by this experience, after the war Slattery goes to work as a private pilot for a mysterious millionaire and becomes pretty much of a heel, indulging in a series of meaningless love affairs and ignoring the fact that his boss is probably a shady character of some sort. Meanwhile Slattery’s best friend and fellow pilot “Hobby” Hobson stays in the Navy and becomes a hurricane chaser, helping to track the big storms that develop in the Atlantic off the coast of Florida. Hobby also has a beautiful young wife, and when Slattery meets her, sparks fly between them.

Well, if you’ve ever seen very many movies from the Forties, you can predict just about everything that’s going to happen in this novel, from the romantic triangle to the criminal goings-on to the giant hurricane that’s bearing down on Miami before the book is over. It’s the same sort of glossy soap opera that was popular during that era. I thoroughly enjoyed the book anyway because I’m a sucker for that sort of stuff. The movie starred Richard Widmark, Veronica Lake, and Linda Darnell. That should tell some of you all you need to know about the novelization, except for the fact that it’s well worth reading if you should happen to find a copy.

My reading of Herman Wouk’s work has been spotty. I’ve never attempted to get through his giant bestselling historical novels like THE WINDS OF WAR and WAR AND REMEMBRANCE. But I have read his fine early novel THE CITY BOY and his first big success THE CAINE MUTINY and an often overlooked novel from the early Sixties called DON’T STOP THE CARNIVAL (which should have ended one chapter sooner than it did). I read YOUNGBLOOD HAWKE, his novel about a Thomas Wolfe-like novelist, and loved it. I might even reread YOUNGBLOOD HAWKE one of these days, although I probably won’t because it’s so long. I keep picking up a large print copy of MARJORIE MORNINGSTAR at the local library and being tempted to check it out, but again, it’s so blasted long that I haven’t tried to read it yet.
I’m glad I read SLATTERY’S HURRICANE, though. It’s a lot of fun.

Forgotten Books: The Farmer's Hotel - John O'Hara

(This post originally appeared on July 31, 2007.) 

A lot of authors have used the old plot of having a group of strangers thrown together by circumstances and then seeing what happens among them. John O’Hara does it in a short novel from 1951 called THE FARMERS HOTEL. Set in a small town in Pennsylvania, the story finds a rich couple from Philadelphia who are married (but not to each other), a trio of small-time entertainers (a couple of strippers and their piano player), and a sullen truck driver who drinks too much all forced by a blizzard to stop at the hotel of the title, which, as it happens, has just reopened under new ownership. The middle-aged hotel owner, the cook, the black bellman/bartender (who has an adventurous history involving World War I and gangsters), and the local doctor are also on hand.

As usual with O’Hara, there’s lots of dialogue, most of it very well-written. The story gets darker as it goes on, and the ending is downright bleak. I gather from what I’ve read that this isn’t regarded as one of O’Hara’s better novels; in fact, some critics at the time called it his worst. I haven’t read enough of his work to make any judgments of that sort. But I can say that I enjoyed THE FARMERS HOTEL quite a bit, and it only makes me want to read more of O’Hara’s books.

Forgotten Books: Rapture Alley - Whit Harrison (Harry Whittington)

RAPTURE ALLEY, another novel in the latest Harry Whittington triple volume from Stark House, ventures into Orrie Hitt territory, since its plot includes both nude modeling (sort of) and the plight of unwed motherhood. For the most part, though, this is Whittington's dope novel, and in that respect it reminded me of Robert Silverberg's first Don Elliott novel, LUST ADDICT.

Originally published in 1953 by Carnival Books under the pseudonym Whit Harrison, RAPTURE ALLEY is the story of Lora Cassel, a beautiful young woman who moves to New York in an attempt to become successful as a singer and actress. She lives with her sister, a sweet-natured invalid who's confined to a wheelchair, and her brother-in-law, a virile, successful salesman. Doesn't take a genius to figure out what's going to happen from that set-up, and as Whittington quickly reveals to the reader, an affair is already going on between Lora and her brother-in-law Ken.

The stress and guilt of this affair, plus her continuing trouble finding any success in her career, lead Lora to make a bad decision and start going to marijuana parties with a TV industry flunkey she meets on a job. From here the plot begins to take on a slight feeling of REEFER MADNESS as Lora's life spirals more and more out of control. Whittington does a great job with it, though, keeping the story moving along at a brisk pace and making the reader feel Lora's desperation as she makes bad decision after bad decision.

Eventually things work out, as they usually do in books from this era, but not until there's a minor but interesting plot twist late in the game. RAPTURE ALLEY is a very solid, very entertaining entry from Whittington, and one more reason, as if you needed it, to pick up this collection from Stark House.

Every Shallow Cut - Tom Piccirilli

The plot of Tom Piccirilli’s short novel EVERY SHALLOW CUT is fairly simple: A failed writer, with his marriage broken up and his house lost to foreclosure, sets out to drive across country with his few possessions and his English bulldog Churchill to visit his brother, his agent, and an old friend.


Oh, and he has a gun, too, to go along with his despair.


If you’re a writer, this is one of the truest books you’ll ever read. I’ve been in many of the same places where Piccirilli’s unnamed narrator finds himself, and I’ve thought many of the same thoughts that go through his head. I’ve been luckier in many respects than this poor guy, but a lot of the feelings are the same and I suspect that’s true of most writers. EVERY SHALLOW CUT is one of those rare books that’s so good it hurts.


And that’s all I have to say about it except that you should read it, whether you’re a writer or not. But if you’re a writer, you really should.

Forgotten Books: Your Turn to Curtsy My Turn to Bow - William Goldman

William Goldman is best known for his screenplays, like BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID, and his thrillers like MARATHON MAN and MAGIC, many of which were made into movies for which Goldman wrote the scripts.


But he started his career with mainstream novels like this one, along with BOYS AND GIRLS TOGETHER, THE TEMPLE OF GOLD, and SOLDIER IN THE RAIN, which were very popular in the late Fifties and early Sixties but have sort of faded from view over the years.


YOUR TURN TO CURTSY MY TURN TO BOW is a summer camp novel, which almost automatically means that it’s a coming of age novel as well. Peter Bell, who is sort of the narrator (Goldman switches back and forth between first person and third person), has just graduated from high school and goes to Camp Blackpine to be a counselor for the summer. The camp is owned by acquaintances of Peter’s father, so he knows the young man in charge of the counselors, Granville “Granny” Kemper. Also working at the camp is Chad Kimberly, golden boy football hero on the surface but a troubled young man underneath. Then there’s Tillie Keck, the beautiful, redheaded, teenage niece of the camp’s secretary, who is also living there. See where this is going?


Goldman’s prose is a little self-consciously literary, but at heart this short novel is a soap opera complete with insanity, mutilation, angst, and a touch of sex. The cover copy makes it sound like the book is all about sex, but it really isn’t. It’s a pretty good story, although I think my favorite summer camp novel is still Herman Wouk’s THE CITY BOY. I’ve got to reread that one and post about it one of these days.


In the meantime, YOUR TURN TO CURTSY MY TURN TO BOW probably has to be considered one of Goldman’s minor works, but I enjoyed it anyway. The used bookstores used to be full of this and his other early novels, but I imagine they’re more difficult to find now. If you run across a copy, it’s worth reading.

Baseball Novels

When I was a kid I loved baseball. Loved playing, loved watching it, and loved reading baseball books, mostly novels. In honor of the Texas Rangers winning the American League pennant last night and going to the World Series for the first time in team history, here are some of my favorite baseball books I read as a kid and a young adult.

The Bronc Burnett series by Wilfred McCormick. High school hero Bronc Burnett (who was a modest, decent guy despite his athletic prowess) played all the major sports, but it’s the books about his baseball exploits that I remember the best. In one of the books, I don’t remember which, Bronc’s high school team plays an exhibition game against the Yankees and beats them.


THE KID WHO BATTED 1.000 by Bob Allison and Frank Ernest Hill. This is one of the books where I bought the Scholastic edition at school.

THE KID COMES BACK by John R. Tunis. I don’t recall much about this one except the climactic scene about a great catch in the first game of the World Series. I need to find a copy of this and read it again.

THE YEAR THE YANKEES LOST THE PENNANT by Douglas Wallop. My junior high library had a copy of this book, which was the source novel for the musical DAMN YANKEES. I thought it was pretty funny and risqué then. Don’t know how it would hold up now.

RHUBARB by H. Allen Smith. The classic about the cat who inherits a baseball team. One of the funniest books I’ve ever read, and another one I need to reread. Made into a decent movie.

THE SOUTHPAW, BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY, and A TICKET FOR A SEAMSTITCH by Mark Harris. I read BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY, the middle book in this trilogy, when the movie based on it came out, then backtracked and read the other two. Great stuff, although A TICKET FOR A SEAMSTITCH is a fairly minor novel, as I recall. The first two are great, though. There may be a fourth book in the series, I can’t recall, but if there is, I’ve never read it.


I’m sure there were other baseball novels I read, but these are the ones that come to mind first. If you have a favorite baseball novel, feel free to mention it in the comments.

Rainwater - Sandra Brown

Almost thirty years ago, I was part of an informal writers’ group located in the Fort Worth/Dallas area. We called ourselves the Higher Arts Council – and yes, of course we pronounced it “hack”. The first meeting was held in a small sandwich shop in Arlington, near the UTA campus, and to the best of my memory, five people were in attendance: me, Warren Norwood, Geo. W. Proctor, Bob Vardeman (Proctor’s good friend and frequent collaborator who lived in New Mexico but was visiting him at the time), and Sandra Brown. I knew who Sandra was because I’d seen her doing some weather forecasts on one of the local TV stations, and because her husband Michael Brown was the host of a morning show on the same station. I wasn’t aware until then that she wanted to be a writer, too, and had, in fact, recently sold her first novel, LOVE’S ENCORE, which Dell published later that year as part of its Candlelight Romance line, under the pseudonym Rachel Ryan – a pen-name derived from the names of her kids, Sandra explained to us.


The hacks’ meetings continued for several years and expanded to include many other writers from the area, including Neal Barrett Jr., Kerry Newcomb, and Laura Parker. I don’t recall Sandra attending any of the other meetings, so that was the only time I’ve met her. I have, however, read quite a few of her books over the years. She quickly became a best-selling author of romantic suspense novels, and she’s one of the very best at that genre, in my opinion. Many of her novels that were published as category romances also have suspense and thriller elements in them and are worth reading. She has that storyteller’s knack of being able to keep the readers turning the pages at a rapid clip.


Which brings us to her recent novel RAINWATER.


As she explains in the brief note that opens the book, she wrote this novel on spec, something she probably hasn’t done since breaking in back in 1981. Instead of romance or romantic suspense, it’s more of a mainstream novel set in a small town in central Texas in 1934, at the height of the depression. There’s a modern-day framing sequence that flashes back to the story of Ella Barron, who runs a boardinghouse in Gilead, Texas, and tries to cope with her mentally disturbed ten-year-old son Solly (short for Solomon). The local doctor thinks that Solly is too much of a burden for Ella as a single parent (what happened to her husband is one of several mysteries that gets resolved in the course of the book) and ought to be institutionalized. Ella is determined to keep Solly at home and do the best she can for him, though. Then a mysterious new boarder named David Rainwater shows up and changes everything.


It would have been easy for Brown to turn this into a standard romance novel, but she doesn’t. Rainwater has secrets that make that impossible. In a plotline that’s reminiscent of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, the town’s bigoted bully-in-chief harasses not only the local black community but also the poor whites who have lost their homes in the Depression. There’s plenty of drama, along with a healthy slice of small-town Americana, before everything comes to a head in a surprising but very effective conclusion. Then Brown springs a nice last-minute twist that I didn’t see coming and makes the book even better.


I really like Depression-era fiction, and Brown does a fine job capturing the setting and the time period. Back in the Sixties there were a lot of little Texas towns that hadn’t really changed much since the Thirties, and having been around many of those, I felt like I had been to Gilead, too. RAINWATER is an excellent novel, one of the best I’ve read this year, and if you’re looking for a change of pace, I highly recommend it.

The Walk - Lee Goldberg

We all know Lee Goldberg as the author of the Monk and Diagnosis Murder novels, as well as a prolific and top-notch screenwriter, but this is one of his non-series novels, originally published back in 2004 by Five Star. The ebook version has been very successful for Lee, and it’s now available in print again, this time as a trade paperback. So you shouldn’t have any trouble finding a copy of it to read.


And you should find a copy and read it, just as soon as you possibly can. It’s that good.


THE WALK takes place in the first two days after the Big One, the incredibly devastating earthquake that everybody knows is coming, finally hits Los Angeles. TV executive Marty Slack is on the other side of the city from his wife and his home when everything comes crashing down. Marty survives the actual quake in fairly good shape, but his car is crushed and the streets are too torn up to drive on, anyway. So the only way he can get home and get back to his wife is to walk across the dangerous chaos that is Los Angeles after the earthquake.


Naturally it’s not easy. Marty runs into all sorts of trouble from looters, aftershocks, explosions, and other natural disasters. He nearly gets killed time and again and probably wouldn’t make it if not for the help of Buck Weaver, a very colorful bounty hunter and private detective he runs into along the way. While he’s trying to survive this odyssey, Marty also goes through an emotional journey as well, coming to grips with some of the problems that have plagued him throughout his life.


THE WALK is part adventure novel, part horror novel, part comedy. A lot of terrible, tragic things happen, but Goldberg’s dry, satiric wit crops up often enough to keep things from getting overwhelmingly gloomy. Marty and Buck are fine characters who play off each other wonderfully well, and the pacing really keeps the reader turning the pages. All of it leads up to an absolutely great ending that really put a grin on my face.


As with Cap’n Bob Napier’s THE TOYMAN RIDES AGAIN, this is hardly an unbiased review, since Lee Goldberg and I have been friends for years. However, trust me on this. THE WALK is one of the very best novels you’ll read this year or any other year.

Forgotten Books: The Power of Positive Loving - William Johnston

When I was a kid, I read all the tie-in novels by William Johnston based on the TV series GET SMART. I think I liked them even more than the TV show. I also recall reading and enjoying the novelization of the movie LT. ROBIN CRUSOE, USN, which Johnston wrote under the pseudonym Bill Ford. Johnston’s books were all over the place back in those days, since he wrote dozens of excellent movie novelizations and TV tie-ins. For that reason, he was a more than worthy recipient of the IAMTW’s Grandmaster Award earlier this year. There’s a lot about Johnston in my buddy David Spencer’s chapter on TV tie-ins in the book TIED IN, which I posted about here a few weeks ago.


However, David has also mentioned to me that Johnston’s early, non-tie-in novels are very good, too, so I decided to try a few of them. First up is THE POWER OF POSITIVE LOVING, published by Monarch Books in 1964. I don’t mind admitting that one reason I bought this book is because of the cover. That’s one of the cutest redheads I’ve seen on a paperback cover, and the wink really sells the book.


As for the novel itself, well, that’s pretty good, too. The protagonist is Harry Ash, a down-on-his-luck public relations guy who comes up with a scheme to promote a sleepy little coastal town in California as a hotbed of sin and sensationalism. He plans to do this by teaming up with sexpot movie starlet Babe O’Flynn (that’s a great name), who has a habit of losing her clothes and winding up in the slick magazines like LIFE and LOOK. Harry comes up with a wild story for the gossip columnists about Babe going to this little town to recover from a broken heart after a top-secret love affair with the Secretary of State. He’s going to have a photographer get pictures of her on the beach in a bikini – or less – and figures that tourists, scandal-seekers, and sensation-mongers will converge on the motel and bar that he buys in partnership with a hamburger magnate. Naturally, things don’t work out quite like Harry plans.


Monarch Books lasted only a few years, but the company published quite a few books including some Westerns and mysteries. However, it’s best known for the abundance of slightly less graphic sleaze novels it put out. Donald Westlake, Lawrence Block, and Robert Silverberg all wrote pseudonymous books for Monarch, including a number of so-called non-fiction studies of various sexual subjects that were really fiction, under imposing sounding names like L.T. Woodward, M.D.


THE POWER OF POSITIVE LOVING is risqué enough to fall into the sleaze category, but just barely. Unlike most books in that genre from that era, this one is a comedy, a racy, romantic, screwball farce that takes satiric shots at morality, the advertising business, politics, show business, the military, the media, and just about anything else you can think of. The title itself is a pun on the self-help bestseller THE POWER OF POSITIVE THINKING by Norman Vincent Peale. If it had been made into a movie in 1964, it probably would have starred Jack Lemmon as Harry and Ann-Margret as Babe. As usual with such a scattershot yarn, not all the jokes work all the time, but enough of them do that this is a pretty funny book. It reminds me a little of the work of Max Shulman, for those of you old enough to remember his books. (Probably the same ones who remember Jack Lemmon and Ann-Margret.)


Johnston was nothing if not a versatile writer, though. I have several more of his non-tie-in novels on hand, and it looks like every one of them is considerably different from the others. I’ll be getting to them in due time and reporting on them here. For now, if you want a nice entertaining slice of mid-Sixties comedy, THE POWER OF POSITIVE LOVING is well worth reading.

Forgotten Books: Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

I mentioned this book a couple of weeks ago in my post about Philipp Meyer’s novel AMERICAN RUST, and I realized then that I’d never read it. So I found a copy and remedied that situation.

There’s no point in going into the plot to any great extent. I imagine most of you have read OF MICE AND MEN, either in high school or college or on your own. (I still remember a librarian asking me, “Which class is this for?” when I checked out a copy of THE GREAT GATSBY. I told her it wasn’t for a class, I just wanted to read it. She looked surprised.)

But to get back to what I was saying, you know the story: George and Lennie, the rabbits, the tragic ending. I knew the story and I’d never read the book or seen any of the movie versions. So what is there to say about it?

Well, it’s really well-written. Steinbeck’s descriptions of the Salinas Valley are very effective, and the terse, hardboiled, realistic dialogue is great, conveying a lot more than just what’s said on the surface. The book is noir as all get-out, with a pervading sense of doom that makes you root for the characters even though you know things aren’t going to end well for them. In fact, the whole thing reminds me very much of a Gold Medal novel, with the farm setting, the restless, slutty wife, etc. Heck, this could almost be an Orrie Hitt novel!

Which leads me to say something that some of you may consider heretical: classic or not, I don’t think OF MICE AND MEN is any better than the best of, say, Charles Williams’ or Harry Whittington’s work. I’m not sure it’s even as good as some of their novels. It’s true that Steinbeck was trying to write literature and Williams and Whittington were writing to put food on the table and gasoline in the car. But here’s what it comes down to for me, and this is something I firmly believe.

They’re all words on paper.

Doesn’t matter who wrote them, doesn’t matter the intent, once they’re there, they’re just words on paper and the only thing that’s important is what they say. In this particular case, I think some of the Gold Medal writers said the same sort of thing that Steinbeck is saying in OF MICE AND MEN, only they did it better.

That said, I don’t want to disregard the quality of Steinbeck’s book. It’s regarded as a classic for a reason. It’s very, very good, very evocative, very suspenseful. Indeed, a great book, if for no other reason than the influence it had on popular culture. If by some chance you haven’t read it, you should. It’s short, fast, and mean, and reading it is a powerful experience. Highly recommended.

Last Day to Enter for American Rust

Don't forget, today's the last day to throw your name in the hat for a free copy of Philipp Meyer's fine novel AMERICAN RUST. I'll be doing the random drawing shortly after midnight tonight (that's Central Standard Time), or first thing in the morning if I'm already asleep by then. US or Canadian entrants only, please, since the copy will come from the publisher, not me.

American Rust -- Philipp Meyer (plus Book Giveaway!)

When I was asked if this blog could be one of the stops on the virtual tour for the trade paperback edition of Philipp Meyer’s novel AMERICAN RUST, I didn’t hesitate to say yes. I recalled that Vince Keenan read the book and liked it, and while Vince’s tastes and mine don’t agree 100% of the time, the percentage is high enough that I was glad to give this novel a try. I’m glad I did, because it’s excellent.

I suppose any novel about a smart little guy and a dumb big guy will be compared to John Steinbeck’s OF MICE AND MEN somewhere along the way, and so it is here. And yet, as if aware of that, Meyer puts some subtle yet distinctive spins on that formula to create a book that’s very different from Steinbeck’s novel. (Which, come to think of it, I’ve never read. I guess it’s just that OF MICE AND MEN is so ingrained in the public consciousness that I know what happens in it, whether I’ve read it or not. But I really ought to remedy that, and not rely on the references to it in old Bugs Bunny cartoons.)

I didn’t mean to digress. The protagonists of AMERICAN RUST, a pair of young men named Isaac English and Billy Poe, have that Mutt-and-Jeff quality to them, size-wise, but while Isaac, the little one, is book-smart (he wants to be an astronomer), he’s sometimes lacking in common sense. And Poe, the big galoot of the duo, may lack Isaac’s IQ, but he’s more grounded in real life.

Meyer also sets up his novel so that you think you know what’s going to happen, but he starts pulling plot twists early on and never really stops. These aren’t dramatic, turn-on-a-dime twists, mind you, but they keep steering the novel in directions you don’t really expect.

The plot is fairly simple. Isaac wants to get out of the place where he grew up, a steel mill town in Pennsylvania where the mill has closed down and the resulting economic depression has settled over the entire area. His friend Poe agrees to go with him part of the way, to a place where Isaac can hop a freight and head west. But something happens along the way that keeps them from leaving, and that violent incident overshadows the rest of the novel as the two of them and the circle of people around them, including Poe’s mother and the local sheriff, are forced to deal with it.

The story itself is fine, but where AMERICAN RUST really shines is in its characters and its grim yet beautiful depiction of the setting. Meyer does an excellent job of capturing the desperation smoldering inside all these people. Some of that desperation is rooted in economics, but for the most part it’s just sheer humanity, the longing to connect with other people and the inability to do so, the easy falling back into a pattern of mistakes, the futility of best efforts wasted by events beyond our control. Meyer also paints a vivid picture of the ruined and dying Pennsylvania towns.

AMERICAN RUST isn’t a particularly pleasant book, but it’s very well-written and tells a compelling story, and it builds to a fine ending. One of the best books I’ve read recently, and highly recommended. I have one copy to give away, so if you'd like to enter the drawing for it, send me an email or let me know in the comments. The deadline is midnight Friday, and this one is open to only to readers in the United States and Canada.

Wild Lovers - Orrie Hitt

This novel, a 1961 release from Kozy Books, is a typical Orrie Hitt yarn in some respects, but not in others. It’s a backwoods book, as you can probably tell from the cover, and sort of reminds me of some of Harry Whittington’s novels. It’s about the lives and loves of several people who come from a poor area in upstate New York known as Shanty Road. (There is, in fact, a sleaze novel by Whittington called SHANTY ROAD, published by Original Novels in 1954 under the Whit Harrison name. It would have made a good title for this book, too.)

Unlike the usual male protagonist you find in Hitt’s novels, the main character in WILD LOVERS is a young woman, Joy Gordon, who was orphaned at sixteen when a fire burned down the farm house where she lived with her parents, killing her mother and father. Left on her own, Joy moves into a shed that remains standing on the property and supports herself by selling eggs from the flock of chickens that’s almost her only possession of any value.

Almost, but not quite, because the property she inherited from her parents includes the only easy access to a lake which some developers want to turn into a hunting and fishing resort (another interest of Hitt’s). As the novel opens, though, the real estate agent in charge of the negotiations won’t meet Joy’s price. Actually, the agent is just trying to get her to go to bed with him, because in the five years since she was orphaned, she has grown up into a virginal, twenty-one-year-old beauty.

Helping out Joy is her neighbor, mechanic Pug Stark, who does meet the usual description of a big, burly Hitt hero. Pug comes from a real white trash family: his father refuses to work, and his sister is pregnant and has no idea who the father is. (Ah, the unwanted, unwed pregnancy, another favorite theme of Hitt’s.)

Then a stranger shows up, an artist from New York City whose family owns one of the properties along Shanty Road. He’s come up there to work and brought his beautiful mistress with him, and he’s a big, brawny guy, too. When he sees Joy, he immediately wants to paint a portrait of her – nude, of course – and his arrival changes everything, as Joy winds up juggling the three men who are interested in her, a neat reversal of the standard Hitt plot where the hero has to decide between three women.

That’s not the only twist that Hitt throws into the plot, as characters do things that take the reader by surprise and turn out not to be exactly what they appear to be at first. The ending won’t be any huge shock for Hitt fans, but it is pretty satisfying. The writing is good in this one, too, not quite as terse and hardboiled as in some of Hitt’s other books but with quite a few good lines.

WILD LOVERS is a good solid Orrie Hitt novel and very entertaining. If you haven’t read his work before, it would be a decent place to start, and if you have, you’ll want to read this one, too.

Forgotten Books: The Nick Adams Stories - Ernest Hemingway

Does anybody read Ernest Hemingway anymore? Is his work still taught in school, or has he gone the way of so many other Dead White Males? I read “Big Two-Hearted River” (which is in this collection) and THE SUN ALSO RISES for high school classes back in the Sixties, but I was already a Hemingway fan and eventually read just about everything he wrote.

And even though I’d read some of the stories separately, I read this collection when it came out in 1972. Like Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories, Hemingway’s stories about his sort-of alter ego Nick Adams weren’t written and published in chronological order, so whoever put together THE NICK ADAMS STORIES set out to rearrange them and include some material that wasn’t published in Hemingway’s lifetime to form a somewhat coherent narrative of Nick’s life. While in general I’m not sure that sort of thing is a good idea (L. Sprague De Camp did the same thing with the Conan stories, which as it turns out are much more effective if read in the order in which Howard wrote them, as the recent Del Rey editions have proven), the end result here is to make the stories read more like an episodic novel, and it works very well. Some of them, as the preface points out, make a lot more sense this way.

Of course, the stories are good anyway, no matter in which order you read them. Included are classics like “The Light of the World” (which has one of the all-time great opening paragraphs), “The Killers”, and “Big Two-Hearted River”. The previously unpublished material includes the novella-length “The Last Good Country”, which unfortunately ends in the middle of the action, as if Hemingway couldn’t figure out where to go from there. What we have of the story is really good, though, and it’s a shame he never finished it because it could have been a classic hardboiled adventure yarn.

I had a good time rereading this book, although I did notice one thing. It may be better not to read too many Hemingway stories back to back, because his style is so distinctive that after a while it starts to seem a little like a parody of itself. That’s a minor complaint, though. THE NICK ADAMS STORIES is one of the best books I’ve read this year and one that I highly recommend.

Forgotten Books: The Death Committee - Noah Gordon

I’ve always been a sucker for soap opera. Not necessarily the daytime TV kind, although at various times of my life I’ve been a regular viewer of shows such as RYAN’S HOPE and THE EDGE OF NIGHT. I’m talking more about novels that were bestsellers in the Fifties and Sixties by authors like Harold Robbins, Arthur Hailey, Henry Denker, Herbert Kastle, and Wirt Williams. (Other than Robbins and Hailey, there are some forgotten names for you. Maybe Robbins and Hailey, too, more than I’d like to think.) These novels were often about Hollywood, or fancy hotels, or the publishing business (usually bearing little resemblance to the real publishing business), or some other glamorous, high-pressure setting like, say, a big-city hospital.

Which brings us to THE DEATH COMMITTEE. I remembered reading this novel when it came out in 1969 and enjoying it, so I thought I’d give a try again. It’s pure soap opera, centered around the life and loves of three doctors in a Boston hospital, following them from one summer to the next. Along the way there are flashbacks to fill in the histories of the main characters, as well as a framing sequence involving the Death Committee of the title, which meets whenever a patient dies unexpectedly to find out what went wrong and who is to blame.

This book is really dated in one respect. Nearly all the doctors are men, with female characters relegated to playing wife/girlfriend/nurse/patient roles. You can’t blame a book for being a product of its time, but in this case it does seem to limit the dramatic possibilities quite a bit. But the writing is very clear and direct, with hardly a literary flourish to be seen. Everything goes to the service of story and character, which is not a bad thing as far as I’m concerned. Gordon keeps the pace perking along with plenty of complications, and I can see why I enjoyed it forty years ago. It’s just a good, involving story, well-told.

If you’re a fan of ER or GRAY’S ANATOMY, you’ll probably find a lot that’s familiar in THE DEATH COMMITTEE, though the novel is, of course, a lot more old-fashioned than those shows and lacking in the bizarre quirks that show up so often on GRAY’S. Some modern readers might find it a little too slow, but if you’re looking for a nice hefty chunk of former bestsellerdom, give THE DEATH COMMITTEE a try.