Jane Smiley on Eight Belles

Like a lot of people, I was heartbroken to see the tragic end the lovely filly Eight Belles came to in Saturday’s Kentucky Derby. I won’t go into it in any detail here, it’s not the place -- though I sobbed a bit about it on my personal blog a few hours after the race -- but I did want to point you at Pulitzer Prize-winning (for 1992’s A Thousand Acres) novelist Jane Smiley’s take on the matter in The New York Times:

This is what we saw in Eight Belles: she was more resolute and competitive than was good for her, and she literally ran herself to death. When the race was finished, every part of her was exhausted, including, I am sure, the support apparatus of ligaments and tendons that were keeping her bones together. She probably stumbled and broke one ankle, then stepped hard on the other and broke that one. Then she fell.

But Big Brown was the other half of the equation. Big Brown looks to be a truly exceptional horse -- exceptionally strong and exceptionally competitive, possibly the Secretariat of our day. When Eight Belles decided she wasn’t going to give up, she risked herself more than she would have with a lesser horse -- and in general, male horses are stronger than female horses, which is why so few fillies run in the Derby.

Smiley goes on to offer a brief, expert and eloquent assessment of American-style horse racing. If the tragedy that grew from the 134th running of the Kentucky Derby was something that moved you, don’t miss Smiley’s piece.

Want more horse sense from Smiley? Try her 2004 memoir, A Year at the Races: Reflections on Horses, Humans, Love, Money, and Luck (Knopf) or her wonderful 2000 novel, Horse Heaven (Knopf).

Minghella Passes

A day meant for sadness: Anthony Minghella died earlier today. Minghella was, arguably, best known for his brilliant adaptations of several books that, on the surface of things, you might not have thought would make terrific films. (The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Cold Mountain.) According to AP:

Minghella’s publicist, Jonathan Rutter, said the Oscar-winning filmmaker died at London’s Charing Cross Hospital. He said Minghella was operated on last week for a growth in his neck, “and the operation seemed to have gone well. At 5 a.m. today he had a fatal hemorrhage.”

The BBC looks back at Minghella’s life:

Born on the Isle of Wight to Italian parents in 1954, Anthony Minghella went on to become one of Britain's most celebrated film-makers and screenwriters.

His crowning achievement came in 1997, when The English Patient won him the Academy Award for best director -- more than 20 years after he began directing on the stage.

At the time of his death, Minghella was working on a television adaptation of Alexander McCall Smith’s The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency for the BBC.

Arthur C. Clarke Dies Tomorrow

Sir Arthur C. Clarke died today in hospital in Sri Lanka where he had lived since the 1950s--and where it is already tomorrow. He was 90. Somehow one can’t help but think that the timing of the thing would have pleased him: that for so many of us that would report on his passing, from the perspective of date, we’d be reporting on something still to occur. Says MSNBC:

Clarke, who had battled debilitating post-polio syndrome since the 1960s and sometimes used a wheelchair, died at 1:30 a.m. local time after suffering breathing problems, aide Rohan De Silva said.

Clarke moved to Sri Lanka in 1956, lured by his interest in marine diving -- which he said was as close as he could get to the weightless feeling of space. “I’m perfectly operational underwater,” he once said.

Sir Arthur was born in Somerset, England in 1917 and is perhaps best known for his authorship of 2001: A Space Odyssey but his body of work and contributions to the fields of both science and fiction are almost too vast to relay in their entirety. For starters, though, Clarke wrote 32 novels, 29 book length works of non-fiction and saw the publication of 13 collections of his short stories. And his publication history only touches the surface. The Arthur C. Clarke Foundation offers a full biography here. Bloomberg hits some of the highlights here.

READ MORE: “Arthur C. Clarke’s Down-to-Earth Legacy,” by Ed Park (Los Angeles Times); “For Clarke, Issues of Faith, but Tackled Scientifically,” by Edward Rothstein (The New York Times); “R.I.P. Arthur C. Clarke,” by Edward Champion (Edward Champion’s Filthy Habits); “Sir Arthur C. Clarke: 90th Birthday Reflections” (YouTube).

Buckley Dead at 82

In this instance, the New York Times says it best:

William F. Buckley Jr., who marshaled polysyllabic exuberance, famously arched eyebrows and a refined, perspicacious mind to elevate conservatism to the center of American political discourse, died Wednesday at his home in Stamford, Conn.

The New York Times obituary is here. The Rap Sheet takes a look from a more personal perspective here.

Phyllis A. Whitney Dead at 104

Phyllis Ayame Whitney, who The New York Times once called the Queen of the American Gothics, died yesterday, “peacefully, after a brief illness.” She was 104.

Born to American parents in Yokohama, Japan, on September 9, 1903, she spent her youth in the Orient.

Whitney’s first book, a young adult novel called A Place for Ann, was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1941. Once she’d achieved novel-length publication, there was no stopping Whitney and, by 1960, she was the author of 25 books. In fact, between 1941 and 1994, Whitney wrote and published a book each year, often doubling that pace in the early years. Her most recent novel, Amethyst Dreams, was published in 1997 when Whitney was 94.

In 1961, Whitney’s 26th novel, a young adult book called Mystery of the Haunted Pool, won the Edgar Award for best children’s mystery. Three years later, another young adult book, Mystery of the Hidden Hand, also won an Edgar. In 1988, the Mystery Writers of America accorded Whitney their highest honor: the Grand Master Award, which celebrates a lifetime of achievement.

The author was published in over 30 countries and more than 50 million copies of her books are currently in print.

The New York Times obituary is quite lovely, and it’s here.

Theodora Keogh Dies

Like a lot of people I guess, I had never heard of Theodora Roosevelt Rauchfuss Keogh until The Telegraph ran her obituary today. An obituary, as a matter of fact, Keogh had requested not run at all, according to The Charlotte Observer who said that one time novelist, socialite and ballet dancer had requested there be “no funeral or obituary and leaves no children of her own, according to family and friends.”

Keogh died January 5th at age 88 and was, according to The Telegraph, the granddaughter of President Theodore Roosevelt and “the author of nine novels, all of them dark in tone and many of them peopled with sinister figures.”

The remarkable early novels treated young girls facing sexual conflict in New York and Paris, and critics could not decide whether Theodora Keogh possessed extraordinary understanding of these matters or was merely aiming to shock.

Though Keogh’s work gained some critical respect, in the United States her novels were produced as pulps and are all out of print, though in the last few years, reports The Telegraph, “she was tracked down by a disparate group of new readers from various lands, some bearing offers of republication.”

Theodora Keogh published her first novel, Meg, in 1950. Partly autobiographical (the heroine came from an Upper East Side family), it tackled dark areas - the heroine was raped, and passed her history exam by threatening to expose her teacher as a lesbian.

John Betjeman described it as a “brutally frightening picture of what may happen to a little girl in New York”, and Nigel Nicolson wrote: “A great many people will be outraged by this book, but I place it first on my list because of its remarkable originality, good sense and utter lack of sentimentality.”

In the Saturday Review, Patricia Highsmith gave an unknown woman a rare favourable review: “She writes with a skill and command of her material that should set her promptly into the ranks of the finer young writers of today.”

Though from the little I’ve been able to learn about Keogh, I think she would have hated all this fuss about her, The Telegraph obituary paints an amazing portrait of a life well lived. The author herself might have paused before making some of this stuff up. The Charlotte Observer adds a bit here and here.

Ironically, we bring you the news about Keogh’s death on the very day former first daughter and mystery author Margaret Truman Daniel passes away at age 83. The Rap Sheet has that story here.

Ed Hoch Passes

The crime fiction blogosphere let our a collective cry of sadness yesterday when word began to spread that novelist and prolific short story writer Edward Dentinger Hoch had passed away at the age of 77.

The Rap Sheet leads us through some of this outpouring here.

Flashman Creator Passes

Author George MacDonald Fraser passed away earlier today, following a battle with cancer.

Born April 2, 1925, the author was best known for his Flashman series of historical novels featuring the dashing and daring Sir Harry Flashman. His most recent novel, The Reavers, was published in the United Kingdom by HarperCollins UK last autumn and will be published in the US by Knopf this coming April. From the synopsis on the UK edition:

Elizabethan England, and a dastardly Spanish plot to take over the throne is uncovered. It's up to Agent Archie Noble to save Queen and country in this saucy and swashbuckling romp from the bestselling author of “The Flashman Papers” and “The Pyrates”.

Born in England and educated in Scotland, the author served in the Gordon Highlanders in India, Africa, and the Middle East. He incorporated many personal anecdotes from this time of his life in his McAuslan series including Quartered Safe Out Here, The General Danced at Dawn, McAuslan in the Rough and The Sheikh and the Dustbin.

Fraser also worked extensively in film, writing or co-writing such well known movies as The Three Musketeers, The Four Musketeers, Royal Flash, Octopussy, Red Sonja and others. He was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1999.

We Bow Our Heads

The past 12 months represent a cruelly expensive year in the literary world. We lost some of the greats in 2007 and, sadly, sometimes it seemed we spent as much time at January last year saying good-bye to authors as we did in celebrating their lives.

As Sarah Weinman commented in The Guardian in November, “No doubt people say this every year, but I can’t remember a 12-month period in which America has lost so many of its best-known writers.” I agree.

At January Magazine alone we commented on the deaths of Jane Rule, Ira Levin and Norman Mailer, all in November. Earlier in the year, there was Madeleine L’Engle (September), Margaret Clark (May), David Halberstam, June Callwood, Kurt Vonnegut and Michael Dibdin (all April) and Richard S. Prather back in February.

Our sister publication, The Rap Sheet, commented on some of the same passages, as well as Marc Behm (September), Joe L. Hensley, Magdalen Nabb, John Gardner and Rodney D. Wingfield (all in August), Philip R. Craig (May), Donald Hamilton (April) and Barbara Seranella and Sidney Sheldon (January).

You can see all of our tributes labeled as Passages and collected here.

Jane Rule Gone at 76

Celebrated adopted Canadian writer Jane Rule died last night of complications due to liver cancer. She was 76.

Born in Plainfield, New Jersey in 1931, Rule had lived in British Columbia since the 1950s. Rule was inducted into the Order of Canada last summer, Canada’s highest civilian honor. According to Arsenal Pulp Press, the current publisher of Rule’s 1977 novel, The Young in One Another’s Arms, in January of 2007, Rule was awarded the Alice B. Toklas Medal “for her long and storied career as a lesbian novelist.”

Writing in The Globe and Mail today, Sandra Martin described Rule as, “Writer, teacher, cultural nationalist and lesbian role model,” in a lengthy and affectionate obituary:

The author of a dozen books, including the novels Desert of the Heart, This is not for You and Memory Board, and the non-fiction essays Lesbian Images, Ms. Rule brought the idea of women loving women into the quotidian world both in her personal life, which was lived openly for nearly 50 years with her partner Helen Sonthoff, and in her writing.

She explored the conflict between desire and convention and the constriction that fear can extol on intimacy, joyfulness and freedom. Her fiction falls into the category of social realism, but it was always driven by character rather than polemics. Typically an ensemble of homosexual and heterosexual characters interact, often communally, to represent the position of the artist in society or to confront bureaucratic oppression of difference.

The Globe piece is here. CBC Arts doesn’t add much here. Smith College professor Marilyn Schuster says a beautiful good-bye in XTra here.

A Dangerous Year for Authors

On The Guardian’s books blog, the incomparable Sarah Weinman looks back at what was a dangerous year for authors. More to the point, she wonders how long we’ll care:

No doubt people say this every year, but I can’t remember a 12-month period in which America has lost so many of its best-known writers. Potboiler king Sidney Sheldon crossed over to the other side of midnight on January 30. The world mourned the loss of Kurt Vonnegut and his unique brand of satire on April 11. Lloyd Alexander, author of the marvellous Chronicles of Prydain books, passed away on May 17, while New Jersey native Marc Behm died in his adopted home of France on July 12. September 16 saw the passing of Robert Jordan, the bestselling author of fantasy epic Wheel of Time, which will remain in suspended animation at volume 11 unless someone else decides to finish it up. And earlier this month, Norman Mailer and Ira Levin died within two days of each other.

The full piece is well thought out, deeply entertaining and just a touch sad. And it’s here.

Levin Passes

Novelist and playwright Ira Levin (Rosemary’s Baby, The Boys from Brazil, Stepford Wives) passed away at his home in Manhattan on Monday. He was 78.

The New York Times reports that no cause of death has been named, “but Mr. Levin appeared to have died of natural causes, his son Nicholas said yesterday.”

Mr. Levin’s output was modest -- just seven novels in four decades -- but his work was firmly ensconced in the popular imagination. Together, his novels sold tens of millions of copies, his literary agent, Phyllis Westberg, said yesterday. Nearly all of his books were made into Hollywood movies, some more than once. Mr. Levin also wrote the long-running Broadway play “Deathtrap,” a comic thriller.

Levin is sent off here, here, here and here.

Tough Guys Don’t Live Forever

Controversial American author Norman Mailer died this morning at age 84. He rose to international fame in 1948 with the publication of The Naked and the Dead, a novel based on his experiences during World War II. He went on to co-create a genre of writing known as “creative non-fiction” and help found The Village Voice; win the Pulitzer Price twice (for Armies of the Night and The Executioner’s Song) and the National Book Award once (also for Armies); protest the Vietnam War, oppose women’s liberation, and run for the New York City mayor’s office; marry six times and have nine children; and become famous for his feuds with fellow wordsmiths Gore Vidal, William Styron, and Truman Capote. However, Mailer never lost sight of the fact that he was, first and foremost and always, a writer. And like all determined writers, he was a willing slave to his work, unable to imagine himself doing anything else except continuing to turn out words on the page that either sang or sank, but that he thought worth writing, and that he would write--no matter the skepticism voiced by critics.

“I am the only major writer in America who has had more bad reviews than good reviews in the course of his writing life,” Mailer once told an interviewer. “So that gives me a certain pride, you know. I feel they keep taking their best shot, and they’re ... not going to stop me, ya know.”

There are many fine remembrances being either published or broadcast today of Norman Mailer, the runty New Jersey kid who grew up to be a giant of his craft, and there will no doubt be considerably more to come in the next week. (One of the best so far is Lynn Neary’s segment this morning on National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition Saturday.) Yet the greatest tribute to Mailer is the endurance of his literary efforts. His writing will outlive him by a longshot, which is just what every author wants for his or her own work.

READ MORE: “Norman Mailer: Death of an Icon” (Guardian Unlimited); “Remembering Norman Mailer Through His Books,” by A.O. Scott (Salon); “Norman Mailer, Towering Writer With Matching Ego, Is Dead,” by Charles McGrath (The New York Times); “Mailer Made America His Subject,” by Michiko Kakutani (The New York Times); “Remembrances: Norman Mailer 1923-2007,” compiled by Dana Cook (Salon); “Stormin’ Norman,” by Gregory Kirschling (Entertainment Weekly).

L'Engle Dead at 88

One of the best loved children’s writers of all time died at home in Connecticut yesterday. Madeleine L’Engle wrote more than 60 books, but was best known for the children’s fantasy novel A Wrinkle in Time, first published in 1963.

The New York Times takes an affectionate look at L’Engle’s life today:

The “St. James Guide to Children’s Writers” called Ms. L’Engle “one of the truly important writers of juvenile fiction in recent decades.” Such accolades did not come from pulling punches: “Wrinkle” is one of the most banned books because of its treatment of the deity.

The Times reported that L’Engle died of natural causes. She was 88.

Good-bye to an Editor from My Childhood

Before the irritating Harry Potter became ubiquitous in youth literature, there was an influential British editor called Margaret Clark who shaped some of my juvenile reading. I’m sad to report Margaret Clark passed away last month. According to The Guardian:

Margaret Clark, who has died following a brain tumour aged 80, was one of a distinguished band of children’s book editors who were responsible for changing the profile of children’s book publishing during the 1970s and 80s. They were passionate about the quality of the books themselves and about reaching more readers by publishing a wider range of fiction and picture books which reflected the changing experiences and expectations of contemporary children.

The Guardian’s obituary is here.

Some of us still remember the publishing houses that became imprints when larger conglomerates gobbled them up. One of these was Bodley Head where Clark found herself as a senior editor. I recall reading her “new adults” series which included work by Aidan Chambers -- who I remember reading avidly along with Paul Zindel’s The Pigman.

The Times reports:

Like all the Bodley Head books of these years before the firm’s absorption into the Random House conglomerate, Clark’s were helped towards distinction by the genius of the production director, John Ryder, and it is matter for regret that many of the books whose publication she oversaw have not survived the current fashions.

Lucy Boston, whose later work she edited, paid tribute to her skills in her memoir Memory in a House (1973) and these are seen most notably in her cultivated regard for poetry, conspicuous in her editing of David Mackay’s A Flock of Words (1969) and of the Bodley Head Poets series (1964-72) – great poetry selected by eminent and sympathetic modern writers.

Clark was also foremost among British editors in seeking to cater for a teenage readership through the Bodley Head’s “New Adults” series of fiction, following and sometimes, as with Paul Zindel’s The Pigman, adopting texts from the already busy exploitation of the genre in the US. (An influential British “first” came with Breaktime (1978) by Aidan Chambers.)

In 1980, Clark became the chief of the Bodley Head’s children’s division, and even after her retirement in 1988 she continued with what was more or less a lifetime’s preoccupation with children’s literature.

The Times piece is here.

Margaret Clark was born September 19, 1926 and died April 25, 2007. I celebrate her contribution to my early reading habits. Her efforts still linger in my memory.

David Halberstam Dead at 73

Pulitzer Prize winner David Halberstam died this morning in a San Francisco-area car crash, just two weeks after his 73rd birthday.

According to the San Jose Mercury News, “Halberstam, author of 15 bestsellers, died at the scene after the car in which he was a front-seat passenger was broadsided by another vehicle. The coroner’s office said he died of massive internal injuries.”

The resident of New York had given a speech at UC-Berkeley on Saturday night on “Turning Journalism into History.” The Mercury News reports that, at the time of his death, Halberstam was on his way “to an interview for his next book, about the Korean War.”

Perhaps best known for his work covering the Vietnam war for the New York Times in the 1960s -- the work that led to his Pulitzer at age 30 -- in later years, Halberstam turned his keen eye and passionate voice on a wide variety of topics of sharp interest to Americans.

Between 1961 and 2005, Halberstam wrote 21 books -- 15 of them bestsellers -- including The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam during the Kennedy Era (1965), The Best and the Brightest (1972) about the Vietnam war and War in a Time of Peace (2002) which was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction.

In a 1993 interview with the Mercury News, Halberstam spoke eloquently about his life and career.

“It’s been a wonderful life,” he said. “Actually, when I think about my career I am sometimes stunned. I’m stunned by the richness of it. It gave me all the things I ever wanted. I loved being a reporter.”

The Mercury News piece is lovely and it’s here. AP adds its voice here. This is what Reuters had to say.

Callwood Passes

Canadian journalist, author and activist June Callwood passed away April 14th after a lengthy battle with cancer.

In her final interview, early in April, with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s George Stroumboulopoulos, she addressed this moment. “I’m okay. I’m 82 years old, for heaven’s sake. Dust to dust is the way it ought to be. The death of the young is inexcusable.”

Still. We bow our heads. Another vibrant voice lost. The Toronto Star published an affectionate look at the late writer here. The CBC has a wonderful selection of interviews with Callwood over the years archived here. The Toronto Star covered a candlelight walk in memory of Callwood on Tuesday night here.

The Night I Shared a Beer with Vonnegut

There’s a bar in Bloomington, Indiana, about three blocks west of the Indiana University campus. It’s called Nick’s English Hut, but all the students know it simply as Nick’s.

When you walk into Nick’s you see a wide aisle with booths along either side. Back when I attended IU, the booths were wooden and hard. There’s a small gold plaque screwed into one booth on the left side of the aisle. It commemorates a night in 1983 when the writer Kurt Vonnegut walked in with three IU students, sat down, and had a couple of beers.

The plaque is actually in the wrong booth; the correct booth is one over.

I should know. I was one of the three IU students who accompanied Vonnegut to Nick’s.

Vonnegut was the first subversive writer I ever read (unless you count Maurice Sendak). I discovered him on my parents’ bookshelf, a paperback copy of Slaughterhouse-Five. I was 15 years old. I was transfixed from the opening line: “All this happened, more or less.” I had never read anything like this novel, the story of Billy Pilgrim, his “bad chemicals” and the firebombing of Dresden. It was sparse, it was cynical, it was compact, yet it yearned for hope.

I dove into Vonnegut’s work with the zeal of a convert, which I largely was. From there I went to Breakfast of Champions, followed by God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, to Slapstick, which was a Christmas gift from my mother. Vonnegut was the first writer I ever consumed so passionately that was still alive and working. The news of a new book being published was cause for great celebration and anticipation.

Fast forward to 1983. I was a junior at IU, and I worked on the student programming committee that brought lectures, films, and concerts to the campus. I was on the lecture subcommittee and after years of attempts, we finally got Vonnegut to come to IU for a lecture. Even though I was 21 and saw myself as way too cool for words, I couldn’t wait to shake the hand of my literary idol.

The lecture Vonnegut gave that night to a sold out crowd was How to Get a Job Like Mine, a stump speech he had been delivering on college campuses for years. He carried the text of the speech with him to the podium, even though he probably had it memorized. He diagrammed Shakespeare with the aid of an overhead projector. He told the audience that every story needed a character like Iago. He railed against what was then called a “word processor” proclaiming that inventions that put people (like his typist) out of a job were unworthy (his idea of a perfect invention was the paper clip). He held the audience in the palm of his hand and the applause was nothing short of rapturous.

Back at an informal reception at the student union, Vonnegut fielded questions. Yes, he said, Kilgore Trout would reappear someday. Yes, he liked the film adaptation of Slaughterhouse—Five. No, he had nothing to do with the film.

During the reception, I was standing next to the chairman of the lecture subcommittee, a frat rat whose name I don’t recall, but whom I’ll call Doug. Vonnegut leaned into Doug as he was signing autographs and asked if there was somewhere nearby where he could get a beer. We piled into a university vehicle (how we had one at our disposal escapes my memory) and drove off to Nick’s.

I was sitting on the outside of one side of the booth at Nick’s. Doug was to my left and Vonnegut was directly across from me. Baskets of popcorn appeared and Vonnegut reached into his suit coat pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, which he lit one after another (this was 1983, remember).

I was utterly stupefied, unable to fully comprehend the fact I was seated at a booth in a bar, sharing popcorn, beer and second hand smoke with Kurt Vonnegut. My self-consciousness shifted into overdrive. I could barely stammer anything remotely intelligent or articulate. I remember asking him what he read for pleasure. He sighed and confessed that he read a lot but rarely for pleasure. He felt obliged to read new books so he could stay on top of what was discussed at the cocktail parties and dinners he attended. He felt burdened to read the books of his many friends, just so he could remain social and polite.

I’ve thought a lot about my brief encounter with Vonnegut since I heard of his death. I wasn’t terribly surprised at his passing. There had been rumors of declining health and of injuries sustained in a house fire. Truthfully, even 24 years ago he looked like he already had one foot in the grave. His face was haggard and drawn, he appeared too thin, and he smoked like a blast furnace.

And yet, even though it’s been at least 15 years since I read any of his work, I always thought of him as being there. To me, he was the Old Faithful of literature, occasionally blasting a hot plume of words, then settling down beneath the surface until another eruption seemed appropriate.

I get nervous about returning to the work of my idols after too many years have gone by. I have a suspicion that Vonnegut, like Ayn Rand and J.D. Salinger, is a writer best experienced in the bloom of one’s youth. I am middle-aged now, about to turn 45, and I’d hate to revisit his books and wonder what all the fuss was about.

Yet, two of my favorite Vonneguts are staring at me from the bookshelf: Jailbird, his fictional explanation of the Nixon White House, and Palm Sunday, a marvelous anthology of non-fiction pieces. Plus, there is that copy of Deadeye Dick that he signed for me after our beers at Nick’s.

But maybe all you need is to be young at heart, and Vonnegut will speak to you again. I hope so. God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut.

Vonnegut Passes

Kurt Vonnegut, considered by many to be one of America's finest authors, died in New York City on April 11, of complications after a fall. He was 84 years old.

Vonnegut, the author of Slaughterhouse Five, Breakfast of Champions and about 17 others, was born in Indianapolis on November 11, 1922. The Los Angeles Times’ Elaine Woo has put together an affectionate and in-depth look at the literary giant:

An obscure science fiction writer for two decades before earning mainstream acclaim in 1969 with Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut was an American original, often compared to Mark Twain for a vision that combined social criticism, wildly black humor and a call to basic human decency. He was, novelist Jay MacInerny [sic] once said, “a satirist with a heart, a moralist with a whoopee cushion.”

Although he was disdained by some critics who thought his work was too popular and accessible, his fiction inspired volumes of scholarly comment as well as websites maintained by young fans who have helped keep all 14 of his novels in print over a 50-year career. Five of his novels have made the leap into films.

His last novel was 1997’s Timequake, a book that critics said was murky and odd and confusing, but mostly loved anyway. Valerie Sayers called it both of those things in The New York Times, then gave it some serious love:

Nearly 30 years later, Vonnegut is still making the pompous look silly and the decent and lovely look decent and lovely. His new so-called novel, “Timequake,” is, as Vonnegut describes it, a “stew.” He has taken the best pickings from a novel that wasn’t working and interspersed them with a running commentary on his own life and the state of the universe. The mix is thick and rich: a political novel that's not a novel, a memoir that is not inclined to reveal the most private details of the writer’s life.

The NYT review of Timequake is here. Elaine Woo’s LAT remembrance is here.

Dibdin’s Short Finish

The sad news coming out of Seattle, Washington, today is that Michael Dibdin, the 60-year-old author of an award-winning series starring Venetian detective Aurelio Zen (Back to Bologna) died there last Friday, March 30, after what Britain’s Telegraph says was “a short illness.”

Of both generous size and tone, the Telegraph’s obituary of Dibdin, who was born in Wolverhampton, England, in March 1947, but has lived in the United States since the early ’90s, is the best one I’ve seen yet. As it explains:

Dibdin combined a flair for complex plotting and biting characterisation with a mastery of satire and the surreal.

In all he produced 16 novels, 11 of them featuring Zen, and his work was translated into 18 languages. With popular success came critical acclaim: “During the Nineties,” noted the legal commentator Marcel Berlins, “no writer of crime fiction attracted as much praise, and gave as much enjoyment, as Michael Dibdin.”

His trademark was the multi-layered literary whodunnit, couched in prose that his contemporary Val McDermid described as “limpid and extraordinary”; another admirer concluded that Dibdin remained “one of an elite cadre of crime fiction writers for whom literary critics break out all of their favourite adjectives”.

Dibdin deliberately tapped into British middle-class fantasies in the Aurelio Zen series. The appeal of the books lay partly in his decision to set each one in a different part of Italy (starting in the beautiful medieval city of Perugia), but also in the character of Zen himself: Dibdin invented him as an outsider, coming to Perugia as a stranger, much as Didbin himself had done when he arrived to teach English at the university there in the late 1970s.

Aurelio Zen’s initials offered a clue to his creator’s methods and motives; in the course of the series, Dibdin pieced together an A to Z of contemporary Italy, a composite of finely-drawn observations about the country and its people. The picture he painted, however, was no rose-tinted idyll: his tenth Zen mystery, Back to Bologna (2005), opened with a football club tycoon slumped dead over the wheel of his Audi, a bullet in his brain and a Parmesan cheese knife rammed through his chest.

Dibdin was an outsized figure with outsized traits and appetites; he had a fondness for fine food and drink, and liked to sport a Panama hat (“he embraces excess”, one observer wrote). Although in person he was private and shy, his books were larded with sex and violence--“two of the things we can do,” Dibdin noted, “which were not possible for earlier generations [of writers], so there’s an understandable tendency to want to take it to the max”.

Although his plots were convoluted (“as tangled as a dish of spag bol,” as one reviewer put it), Dibdin was a thoughtful exponent of crime fiction with a literary cast, specialising in unsympathetic heroes (someone noted that Aurelio Zen is not a man with whom one would want to be marooned in a gondola), and he took an academic interest in the history of the genre.

As for politics, Dibdin was careful not to taint his narratives with an identifiable ideology, but he believed that a wider political lens was not only essential to telling criminal tales but also unavoidable. He admired Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, both of whom were Left-leaning and disturbed by the corruption and abuses they saw in the society they wrote about. Like them, Dibdin shunned an overt political agenda in his books. “They exposed problems,” Dibdin said of them, “they didn’t propose solutions.”

The Telegraph piece goes on to quote Dibdin on the reason he devoted his novel-writing career to crime fiction: “The mainstream has lost its way. Crime fiction is an objective, realistic genre because it’s about the real world, real bodies really being killed by somebody. And this involves the investigator in trying to understand the society that the person lived in.”

Dibdin’s first published novel, a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, was The Last Sherlock Holmes Story (1978). It was followed 10 years later by Ratking, the first of his Commissario Zen crime novels, which won the Macallan Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award. “Other books in this series,” The Telegraph notes, “include two of his best titles, Cabal (1992), which was awarded the French Grand Prix du Roman Policier, and Dead Lagoon (1994). Cosi Fan Tutti (1996), a brutal exposé of Italian organised crime and a brilliantly funny pastiche of Mozart and Da Ponte’s opera buffa, was followed by A Long Finish (1998) and Blood Rain (1999), in which Zen faced death at the hands of the Sicilian Mafia.” In addition to his Italian series, Dibdin wrote standalones such as Dark Spectre (1995), which was set in an American town traumatized by an apparently random set of killings, and Thanksgiving (2000), about a journalist fixated on the recent death of his wife.

Back to Bologna was Dibdin’s most recent title, but he has an 11th (and probably last) Zen novel, End Games, due out in the UK in July and in the States in November.

I had the opportunity to talk with Michael Dibdin only once, shortly after the publication in 1997 of The Vintage Book of Classic Crime, a rather curious literary sampler he’d edited. He was by then living in rainy Seattle, after meeting (at a 1993 writers’ conference in Spain) and then marrying local mystery author Kathrine Beck (aka K.K. Beck). I found Dibdin to be a bit gruff at first, delivering clipped responses that he evidently believed would be quite sufficient for an interviewer with no more than passing interest in crime fiction. After we’d spent a good while talking about his work and the genre at a coffee shop in Seattle’s historic Pioneer Square district, though, he realized that I was no general assignment reporter, but instead had a longtime interest in the very variety of story to which he had devoted himself. We then carried on for another hour or so, exchanging the names of favorite recent books and talking about some of the acknowledged giants and lesser-known stars of this genre, many of whose work figured into his Vintage collection. We promised to get together again someday, but never did.

My January Magazine colleague Linda L. Richards had a similar experience when she sat down to interview him in 1999. In the resulting article, she wrote:

In person Michael Dibdin’s warmth is not immediately apparent. There is, at first, almost a shyness to our exchange: perhaps a caution. This is the slightly self-protective, intensely private Dibdin who--when he married Seattle writer and single mom Kathrine Beck ...--acquired the house next door to hers in order to have a peaceful nest where he could spin his yarns.Dibdin does warm, though. He has the sort of passion for his work and his genre that doesn’t allow distance in discussion that he finds interesting. Before long, his self-protection is abandoned and his eyes sparkle with interest and intelligence as he discusses his work and his passions.

Regrettably, such encounters are now no longer possible.

Blogger-mystery maven Sarah Weinman remarks that Dibdin’s demise is a “huge blow to the crime fiction world and to literature at large.” I’m sure that much more will be expressed about Dibdin’s loss in days to come. He demonstrated crime fiction’s potential for making sense of the world, at the same as it entertains. Can literature expect to do any more than that?

Prather Passes

It was sad to read of the passing of 85-year-old Richard S. Prather, best known as the creator of Hollywood gumshoe Shell Scott. According to the Rap Sheet:

Although Prather hadn’t seen a new book of his published since Shellshock (1987), Hard Case Crime last year reissued his 1952 standalone, The Peddler (which originally appeared under his pseudonym “Douglas Ring”), and interviewer Linda Pendleton, the widow of pulp novelist Don Pendleton, noted in her recent interview with Prather that the author was sitting on an as-yet-unpublished, 1,000-page Shell Scott manuscript, The Death Gods.

Though Rap Sheet editor J. Kingston Pierce doesn’t “feel qualified to eulogize over this author,” he’s included many links to more information about the well-loved Prather, as well as links to sites on the Web that are mourning him today.