Just read this as I have been offline for a few days. I too
am a little puzzled as to why Avram Davidson's CRIMES AND
CHAOS has remained out of print when other works by him have
been published. I would guess that the mainstream publishers
did not see enough sales of the St. Martin collections to
justify going deeper into his backlist. The small publishers
are typically oriented toward specific genres. CRIMES AND
CHAOS being true crime would not fit the list of the SF,
fantasy or mystery small press publishers.
I was interested in your statement that THE ENQUIRIES OF
DOCTOR ESTERHAZY is Davidson's magnum opus and that MASTERS
OF THE MAZE was his most successful novel. I agree with the
opinion on the Esterhazy series, wonderfully textured
stories, but I thought mine was a minority viewpoint. As to
the novel MASTERS OF THE MAZE, I read it when it was a new
paperback from Pryamid more than forty years ago and felt it
captured an alien viewpoint or strangeness as well as
anything I had ever read. I seem to recall that critics of
the time felt it began quite well but lost steam by the last
half. It is a novel I need to reread.
I don't keep up with current critical opinion very well these
days but three decades ago, I think the nominees for best
Davidson would have been THE PHOENIX AND THE MIRROR. It was a
fine novel but I prefer Esterhazy and Maze. I have yet to
read THE SCARLET FIG (how's that for a unmarketable title),
the last of the Vergil Magus novels.
Richard Moore
--- In
rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com, "foxbrick"
<foxbrick@...> wrote:
>
>
> "The Necessity of His Condition" was most recently
in THE AVRAM
> DAVIDSON TREASURY, edited by Grania Davidson, and
the excellent
> posthumous collection of his crime fiction is THE
INVESTIGATIONS OF
> AVRAM DAVIDSON edited by Davis and Richard Lupoff, a
title which
> echoes by intention that of perhaps Davidson's
magnum opus, THE
> ENQUIRIES OF DOCTOR ESTERHAZY, which will reward any
reader of
crime
> fiction who also appreciates the fantastic and the
baroque...an
> expanded editiion, THE ADVENTURES OF DOCTOR
ESTERHAZY, is in print.
>
> At the current remove, it seems very clear that
EQMM's Fred Dannay
> liked to encourage crime fiction that spoke up for
civil rights and
> against bigotry whenever possible.
>
> Davidson's most completely successful novel, MASTERS
OF THE MAZE,
> draws on his experience as a responsible writer of
historical crime
> articles for Men's Sweat and true crime magazines;
his protagonist
> is one of the more typical irresponsible
contributors. Algis Budrys
> noted that Davidson's meticulous research, including
interviews and
> site investigation, caused much eye-rolling among
those who wrote
> bad fiction to be presented as fact, all published
under variations
> of the title (as Harry Harrison put it once, iirc)
"Love Starved
> Arabs Raped Me Often." At least one major anthology
of those "true
> men's adventure" stories and covers has been
published recently
(and
> bits of them are all over the web, of course), but
no one's
bothered
> to put CRIMES AND CHAOS back into print...perhaps
Grania Davis or
> Henry Wessells will manage that
eventually.
>
>
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