Up In Honey's Room - Elmore Leonard

This was a weird one. Most of the Elmore Leonard I’ve read has been contemporary crime fiction, so if it took place in the 70s it’s because it was written in the 70s. Up In Honey’s Room is set during World War II, and is a follow up to another historical crime thriller, the Hot Kid, which I haven’t read. The setting might not seem that different, but Elmore Leonard’s dialogue is so distinct that it felt weird coming out of the mouths of these characters. Maybe people talked like that in 1944, but I found it jarring.

Leonard’s novels are never particularly plot heavy, and the principal plan or focus tends to shift midway through. I like that about them, as it feels more realistic, but it can also muddy the action. In this case ,the story is ostensibly about Carl “the Hot Kid” Webster chasing down a pair of escaped German POWs. His pursuit brings him to Detroit, where he encounters Honey Deal, a young woman previously married to a pro-Nazi German immigrant named Walter.

Carl suspects Walter might be involved in hiding the POWs, and enlists Honey to help interrogate him, under the reasoning that her presence will throw him off balance. There are some other characters, including a spy named Vera and an officer named Kevin, but their roles aren’t always that clear, and Walter’s plan to murder president Roosevelt is mentioned suddenly and comes to nothing when the man dies of natural causes. Walter’s lame attempts to make people think he was responsible were funny, but they leant to the overall sense of narrative drift.

I wouldn’t want Leonard to write tight, plotted novels like Frederick Forsythe, as the meandering stories and bumbling criminals are part of the charm, but for whatever reason this one didn’t feel like it came together as nicely as his previous work.

The Collected Fantasies Vol 1: The End of the Story - Clark Ashton Smith

Clark Ashton Smith is not a name I’d come across until recently. Though he is widely regarded as one of the three biggest voices to emerge from the Weird Fiction world of 1930s pulps, alongside Lovecraft and Robert E Howard, I would argue he has become the most obscure of the three. None of his works have received the major motion picture treatment, nor do any of his characters or stories have the universal name recognition of a Conan or a Cthulhu.

The reason for this may be that, unlike Lovecraft and Howard, who focussed the bulk of their talents and energy on short fiction, Smith was a poet above all, and seemed to consider prose writing as a side project of sorts, somethign to help pay the bills. It was, however, a very fruitful side project, since he wrote and published well over a hundred short stories in his lifetime, with 53 of them published in the seminal journal Weird Tales alone. (By comparison, Lovecraft, widely seen as the author of a sizable canon, wrote only 65 stories total).

Comparisons with Lovecraft are inevitable, and would not have been ill-received by the author—the two were friends and mutual admirers—but it is a gross oversimplication to call Smith’s work Lovecraftian. For one thing, he covered a much wider range of genres than Lovecraft, who dabbled in satire and fantasy on a couple of occasions, but for most of his literary career remained firmly fixed in the horror camp, veering only between cosmic and terrestrial strains.

Smith, on the other hand, wrote stories of high fantasy that hewed closer to Fritz Leiber or Robert E Howard, as well as sci-fi of a Bradburian or Vancian bent. Whiel certainly he favored plot over characters, as did Lovecraft, Smith’s creations are more full-blooded, bespeaking a greater comfort and familiarity with humanity than the perennial misfit Lovecraft ever managed (though Smith’s dialogue could be as stilted as Lovecraft’s at times, a fact that is so ubiquitous among pulps it seems more like a stylistic choice than a defect). Romance also gets more mileage in Smith’s writing, with characters professing love for one another and engaging in canoodling that, while hardly enough to go toe-to-toe with Tropic of Cancer, goes far beyond anything I remember from Lovecraft.

Smith is most regarded now for his prose style, rather than his stories, and it does bear a pleasing grandiloquence, though I think Lovecraft gets short shrift in this regard, since he too could cobble together gravity-defying towers of archaism-stuffed csubclauses that imporbably remained aloft. I enjoyed Smith’s writing now, but I would have absolutely loved it at 20, when my passion for earnest if strained metaphor had reached full flower (probably better I didn’t find it until late,r though; it would only have spurred on my worst impulses)

All told, Smith’s stories were a good find, and I intend to track down the second volume soon, Eventually, i suspect I’ll get all of them.