Hollywood had decided not to do a new version of The Glass Key. So they were working Red Harvest into the schedule, to star Brian Donlevy and Paulette Goddard — with the hot young actor Alan Ladd as the third-billed player.
By the time a movie was made for a 1942 release, it was The Glass Key — with Donlevy still top-billed, although anyone can see third-billed Alan Ladd is the star. Somewhere in there Goddard was replaced with Veronica Lake (second billed).
Lake and Ladd — hot young stars fresh off This Gun for Hire, released earlier in 1942.
The creative — and commercial — foment of Tinseltown.
And the Alan Ladd Red Harvest, yet another lost film.
I popped the news to him, and Haefele replied: “Amazing! After seeing multiple copies available on every site for it seems like forever, suddenly they are gone from ABE, Amazon, and eBay.”
Yeah, I noticed that Amazon lists it as Out of Print-Limited Availability — which I think translates as, Good luck finding one, compadres.
With a reported print run of strictly 150 copies, not everyone will be able to track it down. Not as bad as his Cimmerian Library booklet at around 100 copies. Amazon just says Currently Unavailable on that one. No shit.
The first book from the author of Lovecraft: The Great Tales. . . .
It’ll be fun to watch the proceedings.
And don’t forget that Redux sports a rousing one-page intro by me, as I took the fledgling author under my wing and kicked him out of the nest into the wide world of books.
Brian Leno has been ditching unwanted odds and ends on eBay, Stephen King and stuff like that, saleable at the moment (but what savant would bet money on those books keeping their value, long-term?) — which led to him sending in this sad tale:
Was digging through the darkest areas of the Leno horde, looking for stuff to sell, and I came upon this item:
Adventure. March 20, 1924.
Noteworthy because of Robert E. Howard’s letter requesting information on the Mongolians.
I’ve been looking for this pulp on the book sites for a long time.
Autograph Hound Super-Sunday again, in this instance spurred on by Terry Zobeck mentioning to me that he finally landed a copy of the Hammett-edited Creeps by Night in dustjacket — after years of having it as a Grail Item on his Want List.
I then mentioned the find to Brian Leno, who told me he has a copy of Creeps, too.
No dustjacket.
However, it’s the copy once owned by famous Black Mask editor Joseph T. Shaw. Brian says:
Inscribed to Shaw by J. Paul Suter, whose story “Beyond the Door” is included. Would have been nice to be additionally signed by Faulkner and Hammett, but I’m happy.
Awhile back I linked to a set of contemporary newsprint articles on Hammett and the assault on Elise De Viane. At that moment Cosby had been thrown in the hoosegow — and now he’s out. The weird meanderings of history-in-the-making. . . .
Michael S. Chong just hit my inbox with another piece on “Whatever Happened to Elise De Viane?” from CrimeReads, if you want to explore more of the story. Probably goes on too long — Tl;dr — for most people, but you can skim around and get the main points.
And don’t miss the Comments, where Nathan Ward slugs out a defense against a little attack made in passing on his book The Lost Detective. (One reason I merely skimmed the article is that the guy seems to use the Joan Mellen biography of Hammett as his main go-to. Please. She makes up entire conversations between Hammett and Lillian Hellman when they’re sitting in the back seat of cabs. Among other improbabilities.)
A large part of the mystique of S&SA consists of the fact that by chance and happenstance it was the last Arkham House book released under the personal guidance of Derleth. As I once noted in Firsts: The Book Collectors Magazine, by one calculus of collecting you could begin your set of Arkham House books with Lovecraft’s The Outsider and Others from 1939 and close it down with S&SA.
The Derleth Years.
A good run.
Over on the DMR blog Deuce Richardson handled the landmark anniversary of Derleth’s death yesterday. If interested in this sort of arcane literary material, surf over and check it out. Many intriguing points — perhaps my favorite being the note that Derleth did what he did in real time, which is to say editing collections of modern science fiction when the genre was emerging from the pulp magazines and the top talents weren’t as yet deified. Battling to get recognition for Lovecraft when he had only the most tentative toeholds on cultural standing.
Martin Stever has been on the tour in years past, and keeps his thumb on the pulse by checking Mean Streets — he just shipped in the image above of the inscription in his copy of S&SA after reading my account of picking up a variety of inscribed copies.
The Stever copy is pretty interesting. Obviously one of an unknown number of copies DSF flat-signed with his name and title as Last of the Courtly Poets. Until better evidence shows up, I think of these copies as signed early in the life of the book.
Looks like a flat-signed copy was taken up and the actual inscription added later — different pen, pretty obvious even if you’re not Sherlock Holmes. The holograph strikes me as more typical of DSF’s hand a few years after the summer 1971 release, but we won’t get into the forensics now. With the colored pen DSF added a little paraph as a flourish to the final “d” in Donald, made the dash much bolder in the Sidney-Fryer (I wonder if the original dash struck him as just not marked enough — or possibly he may have signed some copies without the dash, just his birth name Donald Sidney Fryer, and needed to update it). And he followed Poets with a period — I’ve seen other flat-signed autographs with and without the period.
Martin’s copy once belonged to Sabato Fiorello, pretty famous as a Gay Artist (since it’s Pride Month, quite fitting for this occasion). He died January 13, 2017 at the age of 79. I’ll have to check with Martin to see if he landed the item after the estate was broken up, or if it had gone out into the marketplace earlier.
If you read DSF’s autobio Hobgoblin Apollo you’ll get some of his history as a Gay Man, or as I think of it in his case, Mostly Gay (like “Mostly dead” in The Princess Bride).
Fritz Leiber was telling me once how L. Sprague de Camp (pronounced El Spray guh dee Kamp) kept asking him after seeing DSF do his flamboyant poetry performance at the First World Fantasy Convention in Providence, 1975: “Honest, that Donald Sidney-Fryer was in the Marines???!!!”
Sure. Check his autobio. The Marines. You can be a Marine and a Last Courtly Poet, too. A bit too complicated for a linear thinker like de Camp, perhaps.
Someone somewhere sometime may have knocked out more ephemera than August Derleth, but who it might have been I can’t imagine.
John D. Haefele and I are beginning to poke around on our book listing all the Arkham House ephemera from the classic Derleth era of the press, Stock Lists, Brochures, Inserts. But Derleth did so many items — even including match book covers — that I suppose it is impossible to track down and list them all.
We’ll stick to the material related to the small press proper, the books — we probably won’t try to squeeze the Xmas Cards into the lineup.
But the Xmas Cards, as Haefele notes, is “a subject that should probably get a summary-mention in our ephemera book.”
Yeah, hell, why not? — and how much MORE is Out There???
After many years digging around Haefele thinks he’s figured out how many Xmas Cards — all with an original wood block heading by artist Frank Utpatel — Derleth sent out, and during which years, and why those Xmas verses, and why he stopped. For Derleth fans, fascinating stuff — and a little taste of the info to come in Haefele’s next book, August Derleth of Arkham House.
Surf over and check it out, if you want to discover another collecting corner you’ll probably never be able to complete.
And if you haven’t tried Haefele’s latest study, Lovecraft: The Great Tales — jeez, you’re really missing out. But not everyone is a major Lovecraft fan.
As I’ve mentioned in articles for Firsts: The Book Collectors Magazine, S&SA was the first Arkham I personally ever bought, after meeting the poet during one of his cross-country swings through college campuses, doing readings from the likes of Edmund Spenser, Clark Ashton Smith, and others.
Very soon after I moved to San Francisco I had DSF inscribe that copy on “15th February 1974.”
And I don’t know how I had the presence of mind to keep on top of it, but I had him once more inscribe that same copy: “Twenty years after, on the occasion of my 60th birthday. . . 10th September 1994.”
And in a super-heroic act of keeping track of dates on my part, inscribe it again: “Yet another 20 years have passed, and it is now the occasion of my 80th birthday party. . . 6 September 2014.”
I’m thinking that it is unlikely that either DSF or I will be around in 2034 to record the following 20 year-mark. But we’ll see.
In any case, we both made it to the fiftieth anniversary of first publication. Not bad.
In 1977 Don Herron began leading The Dashiell Hammett Tour, now the longest-running literary tour in the nation. On this site you’ll find information on current walks — dates, where to meet, arranging tours by appointment — plus a hard-boiled blog with news, reviews of books and film, and a dash of noir.
