I've been looking to buy somecopies of Manhunt lately, and noticed that in the Oct. '54 issue there was a story by Erskine Caldwell. That may be old news here, but I just saw it.
RJR
--- In rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com, "Allan Guthrie" <allan@...> wrote:
>
> Interesting, Dave. There's no denying that paperback originals exploded in
> the 50s and gave us a lot of the writers we admire these days. Many of those
> writers were struggling to find a hardcover publisher and the pbo explosion
> was something of a godsend. I'm not sure how prevalent noir was in the 50s,
> though. Most paperback originals weren't that dark. Goodis, Thompson, etc.,
> were exceptions rather than the norm.
>
> Books like Double Indemnity, How Like A God and Anyone's My Name were highly
> original in concept at the time they were published. These days they'd seem
> pretty cliched because they've been imitated so often (I don't know if
> that's true of HLaG, haven't read it, but I suspect if it failed to get
> published it would be on account of the second person narrative rather than
> being too dark). Not sure who published Woolrich or Macdonald originally,
> but I'm pretty sure Woolrich's first published books weren't crime novels.
> Incidentally, Erskine Caldwell's debut -- the ultra-noir THE BASTARD, from
> 1929 -- would appear to have been self-published, something I only recently
> discovered. Too dark for New York, I suspect. Might also explain why he
> rarely spoke about it.
>
> Al
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "davezeltserman" <Dave.Zeltserman@...>
> To: <rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com>
> Sent: Thursday, March 11, 2010 6:03 PM
> Subject: RARA-AVIS: Re: Small Crimes
>
>
> > Al, thinking about this a little bit, I'll stick with my original
> > observation, and that's that publishing has changed dramatically over the
> > past 25 years, specifically crime fiction, with much more resistance by NY
> > to publish dark crime fiction and real noir. Yes, many of the great noir
> > books from Jim Thompson, David Goodis, Charles Williams, Dan Marlowe,
> > Peter Rabe, etc. came from Gold Medal and other paperback publishers, but
> > at least they existed--today, Hard Case is the only equivalent I can think
> > of, and Charles is publishing a tiny fraction of original crime fiction
> > compared to Gold Medal. And I'll stick by that books like Dead City,
> > Cain's Postman and Double Indemnity, Seymour Shubin's Anyone's My Name,
> > Rex Stout's How Like a God, all published by NY as hardcovers would be
> > just about off limits to NY today. All you have to do is look at the most
> > popular PI from the 50s, Mike Hammer, and the last 25 years, Spenser, to
> > see how much crime fiction changed. Btw. who published Cornell Woolrich
> > and Ross Macdonald originally?
> >
> > --Dave
>
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