tstock@concentric.net wrote:
>
> Jim Doherty mentioned his belief that most people on
this list were first
> "blown away" by a hard-boiled writer while they were
in high school. I'm
> wondering if that is true, just as I am wondering if
most of you were born
> after '58, as another recent post
suggested.
I was born three weeks after the bomb was dropped on
Hiroshima. My mother taught me to read when I was four and by
the time I was ten I'd read everything, fiction and
nonfiction, that was available in the juvenile room of the
local library. With my parents written permission, the
library then allowed me to check out books from the adult
section.
My early favorites were the Freddy the Pig books by Walter R.
Brooks, Fran Striker's Lone Ranger series, Rachel Carson's
THE SEA AROUND US, retellings of Greek and Norse mythology,
Heinlein's juveniles, Kipling, Poe. I memorized the poetry of
the latter two and, being a kid, I giggled at Poe's line
about how "angels tinkled on the tufted floor." But it was
the driving rhythms of Kipling that really turned me
on.
The first things I read in the adult section, on my father's
recommendation, were the Tarzan and Martian novels of Edgar
Rice Burroughs -- not sure why they weren't in the juvenile
room. The Martian novels were my favorites, with all those
weird critters and scantily clad Barsoomian lassies. I went
through a major Western period: Luke Short, Zane Gray, Frank
Gruber, William Colt McDonald, W. C. Tuttle, Dorothy M.
Johnson, etc.
Not much SF was available in hardcover those days, but I read
what I could find: Groff Conklin's thick anthologies,
Heinlein again, Van Vogt, Asimov, Clarke, Sturgeon, the usual
suspects. Ray Bradbury and Fredric Brown were my favorites.
In the meantime, I was plucking stuff randomly off the
shelves: social novels by James T. Farrell -- as a young
second generation Massachusetts Irish Catholic farmboy, I
found his stories about Irish ghetto life in Chicago
fascinating -- Willard Motley, Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair --
another of my father's recommendations. I expect these
realistic tales formed the foundation of my interest in HB
fiction. I was especially fond of comic novels and stories.
Among my favorites were the Don Camillo books by Giovanni
Guareschi, anything by P. G. Wodehouse, the Gunner Asch books
by Hans Hellmut Kirst, Guy Gilpatric's tales of that rogue
Glencannon, anything by Thurber, Robert Benchley, Perleman,
E. B. White, Dorothy Parker -- the whole New Yorker/Algonquin
crowd. And I really loved Damon Runyon, another writer who
pointed me in the direction of HB fiction.
The first mysteries I read, and my first taste of pulp HB,
were by Earl Stanley Gardner. His early Perry Masons were a
lot harder boiled than the later stuff he did for the
Saturday Evening Post. I devoured them all. And then I just
worked my way through the mystery section, eventually hitting
the Black Mask Boys, but at age ten or eleven I preferred
Ellery Queen, Anthony Boucher and John Dickson Carr, creators
of complicated puzzles and impossible crimes. But Agatha
Christie and her ilk never did anything for me. I had no
problem with an imaginary Mars or Africa, but English country
house life was too foreign to my experience.
Around this time -- I was maybe twelve -- I discovered a
secondhand bookstore that sold tons of used paperbacks for a
nickel each, six for a quarter. At first I just filled in
books by favorite authors that weren't in the library:
Bantam's reprints of Fredric Brown and Frank Gruber, Signet's
reprints of Heinlein and Asimov, etc. From there I moved on
to paperback originals.
Richard S. Prather's Gold Medal books starring Shell Scott,
that
"happy-go-lookie" private eyeball, really knocked me out.
Lots of action, bad puns and, most importantly for my
pubescent libido, the requisite scantily clad ladies. From
there, the deluge. My shelves at home filled up with Gold
Medals: Edward Aarons spy thrillers, Dan Cushman westerns,
Bruno Fischer, Donald Hamilton, John D. McDonald, Stephen
Marlowe, Richard Matheson, Theodore Pratt, Peter Rabe, Jim
Thompson (I grabbed his Lion books too), Jonas Ward's
Buchanan westerns, Harry Whittington, Charles Williams, names
fondly remembered or nearly forgotton. I bought them all, six
for a quarter, as long as the covers showed scantily clad
females -- and all of them did in those days.
It was quite an education for a repressed Irish Catholic
farmboy from Massachusetts.
BobT
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