Anthologize me

I'm very fond of the remainders shelves, which always conceal unanticipated goodies somewhere among the piles of cheap Gramercy reprints and omnibus editions of Dickens' novels.  I'm not so fond of going-out-of-business sales, since I'm a firm believer in bookstores remaining in business--especially when the sort-of dearly departed bookstore was the only one in the local mall.  In any event, the former and the latter recently yielded a couple of anthologies devoted to things mysterious...

1.  Martin Edwards, ed., Mysterious Pleasures: A Celebration of the Crime Writers' Association's 50th Anniversary (Little, Brown, 2003).  This anthology combines older stories by authors mostly now-deceased with new work from popular contemporary authors, many of them British.  By and large, the stories are well-executed traditional puzzlers.  While Margery Allingham's "One Morning They'll Hang Him" failed to reconcile me to Albert Campion--one of the more annoying examples of detective-as-twit--there were some very good entries from authors I haven't been impressed with in the past: Dick Francis' "The Gift," in which a racing correspondent on the skids finds himself privy to a secret that could redeem his career; Val McDermid's "Consolation Blonde," an example of that anti-Mary Sue subsubgenre, "the horrors of the publishing industry"; and Ed McBain's "The Interview," featuring a director who takes auteurism to new heights.  The funniest story is Lindsey Davis' "Something Spooky on Geophys," which somehow manages to combine ghosts, a satire on celebrity culture, archaeology, and a remarkably out-of-place Marcus Didius Falco; Reginald Hill's "The Game of Dog" runs a close second, with its goofy and elaborate solution to the crime (even Peter Pascoe has to admit that Andrew Dalziel won't buy it), but Hill is at the head of the pack when it comes to turning a phrase.  Colin Dexter's "The Double Crossing" is an amusing bit of metafiction.  While the other stories in the collection are not as memorable, there are no real disasters.  Overall, this is a well-edited effort, offering stories far more consistent in quality than I've come to expect in such anthologies.

2.  Ed McBain, ed., Transgressions (Forge, 2005).  This book certainly looks slick, with its minimalist police-tape color scheme and silver lettering.  Unfortunately, the contents fail to live up to the cover design.  The brilliant idea behind this collection: get several famous authors to write original novellas on matters mysterious or horrific.  Yet most of the contributors handle the novella form clumsily--including the ones who have written novellas before.  The resulting tales veer awkwardly between two extremes: overstuffed short stories and half-baked novels.  Only Walter Mosley's vertiginous Archibald Lawless, Anarchist at Large: Walking the Line, featuring a young collegian who encounters all sorts of baffling characters in his new job, truly escapes the curse.  Of the other novellas, the least redeemable effort is Anne Perry's Hostages, which ornaments a predictable tale of the Irish Troubles with equally predictable dollops of female self-empowerment (to which I obviously have no objection, but one shouldn't see it coming from the very first paragraph) and banal reflections on religious conflict ("They created God in their own image: vengeful, partisan, too small of mind to love everyone, incapable of accepting differences" [99]).  Joyce Carol Oates' "The Corn Maiden," which is Oates in her Gothic/sadistic/torture-of-the-innocents mode, falls into the half-baked novel category: she doesn't really develop the youthful evildoer, Jude, and her various ruminations on abandoned children and group hysteria never gel.   In the overstuffed short story category, John Farris' "The Ransome Women" stretches a predictable plotline about the mysterious mutilations suffered by a painter's models well beyond the breaking point; it's a horror story in the Many Characters Behaving Utterly Idiotically mode.  (I had to sympathize with the detectives who, late in the story, bluntly inform one of the protagonists that "we can smell a crock of shit when it's right under our noses" [585]).  Sharyn McCrumb's historical "The Resurrection Man," based on a real slave who was purchased to steal bodies for medical students to dissect, starts off evocatively but winds up wandering off aimlessly.  It's a good idea, but McCrumb doesn't seem to have known where to take it.  Stephen King's "The Things They Left Behind" and Lawrence Block's "Keller's Adjustment" are at least reasonably engaging, reasonably inoffensive (from an aesthetic standpoint) stories about life after 9-11.  Not a resounding success, to say the least. 

Comments

[Sredni Vashtar]

The Powell's store on S. Wabash in Chicago has a huge selection of remainders.

[Arnold]

Don't be too hard on Albert Campion. The short stories are without exception terrible, but the later novels are extremely good.