Forty Lashes Less One by Elmore Leonard

Smart and suspenseful Western prison thriller

Forty Lashes Less One, published in 1972, is a novel by American author Elmore Leonard. Nowadays he’s best known for his crime fiction, which has spawned many recent film adaptations, but in the early days of his career, Westerns were Leonard’s bread and butter. Forty Lashes Less One is included in the Library of America’s volume Elmore Leonard: Westerns, but it’s really only a Western because it takes place in Arizona. Yeah, it’s got some horses, but it’s got some motor cars too. This novel is really a prison drama—a thriller with comedic elements, more Cool Hand Luke than Butch & Sundance. The title Forty Lashes Less One is taken from a Bible quote and is in no way a literal indication of happenings in the story.

The novel is set in 1909 at Yuma Territorial Prison, a penitentiary on the verge of closing. A new prison is being built in Florence, Arizona, and when it’s completed, the prisoners will be moved to the new facility. While the old prison is still functioning, however, a Mr. Manly has been appointed acting warden at Yuma. Manley has no prior experience in the penal system; his background is in Christian ministry. Contrary to the fictional stereotype of prison wardens as sadistic dictators, Manly is depicted as lenient, benevolent, and naive. He sometimes calls to mind Father Mulcahy from M*A*S*H.

As the novel opens, prisoner Harold Jackson arrives at the Yuma prison, having been transferred from Ft. Leavenworth. Jackson is the only Black prisoner at Yuma, and he is singled out for abuse by some of the meaner guards and prisoners, led by Yuma’s resident alpha convict Frank Shelby. Raymond San Carlos, an Apache-Mexican prisoner, is sent by Shelby to pick a fight with Jackson, and the two prisoners of color soon develop an animosity for one another. Warden Manly, however, takes a special interest in these two prisoners and singles them out for his own private motivational ministry. As Jackson and San Carlos are repeatedly thrust together into work assignments and solitary confinement, they develop a friendship and begin to realize that they don’t have to play by Shelby’s rules, nor Manly’s.

I have expressed admiration for Leonard’s Westerns before, and Forty Lashes Less One is every bit as good as Hombre, Valdez Is Coming, and Last Stand at Sabre River. I’m not even a habitual fan of the Western genre, but what a run of novels! Leonard’s prose is about as perfect as it gets. Not a word is wasted. Every sentence develops the characters or propels the story forward. Every line of dialogue is sharp, smart, and often quite funny. There are some ridiculous elements to this story, but Leonard manages to make them come across as realistic, yet without denying their ridiculousness. This ain’t your everyday prison Western. It’s quirky but not silly, and it’s an entertaining and exciting ride.

Quentin Tarantino purchased the rights to Forty Lashes Less One back in the 1990s, but he never made a movie from it, and he probably never will. That’s a shame, because a film adapted from this novel surely would have been better than The Hateful Eight. The well-drawn characters and engrossing plot of this novel are ripe for a cinematic adaptation and would yield some great roles for its cast of actors. Regardless of whether that will ever come to fruition, this book is a great read, whether you’re a fan of Westerns or not.

The Complete Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Part 1: 1832–1839

Off to a slow start

Unlike other A-list names in the history of American literature, Edgar Allan Poe is not known for his novels. He only published one: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), and it wasn’t a hit. Other than his poem “The Raven,” we know Poe primarily for his short stories. Counts vary, based on what’s considered a short story, but I’m going to go with Wikipedia and the Delphi Classics and say he published 65 stories, plus one unfinished at the time of his death. These stories, or “tales” as they are often called in Poe’s case, have been selected and shuffled like a deck of cards into thousands of published volumes. I’m going to review these 65 and a half stories in chronological order, in three chunks of about 20 stories each.

Poe’s first published story, “Metzengerstein,” happens to be a horror story, and a pretty good one, but very few of the tales published in these first seven or eight years of his career could be considered classic Poe horror stories. Another early entry, the nautical ghost story “MS. Found in a Bottle,” is also a step in the right direction. “Ligeia,” from 1838, seems like a turning point in Poe’s career. This is the first story to really epitomize the mix of gothic romance and terrifying horror that we usually think of when we think of Poe. “William Wilson,” a horror story about a man tormented by his doppelganger, is another strong entry from this period. The only selection from this chunk of stories that can truly be considered a Poe masterpiece, however, is “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Poe is also remembered for mystery stories and, to a lesser extent, science fiction. None of the former category are here, but sci-fi is represented by the postapocalyptic “The Conversation Between Eiros and Charmion,” and “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall,” which shows us Poe operating in Jules Verne mode, with only partial success.

In this first act of Poe’s career, he wrote just as many humor stories as horror stories. In most cases, the humor has not survived the past nine decades very well. A couple of these comedic efforts remain moderately funny, however, like “Devil in the Belfry” and “A Predicament.” In “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” Poe satirizes the typical fare from the English literary periodical Blackwood’s Magazine. Many of the literary pretensions Poe pokes fun at in this piece, however, are sins he is frequently guilty of committing himself. In these early writings, his biggest fault as a writer is his uncontrollable desire to show of his erudition by loading his prose with gratuitous references to classical poetry, mythology, opera, or other high-brow literature. He also loves to throw in untranslated phrases in French, Latin, Greek, and maybe even German. There’s no need for any of this, and it’s just Poe showing off how well-read he is. In this regard, he’s more pretentious than Melville or Hawthorne. Thankfully, Poe seems to gradually cure himself of this annoying habit towards the end of the 1830s.

I had read “greatest hits” collections of Poe’s horror stories in the past and liked them well enough, but I have to admit that this first foray into his complete works was a disappointment. As previously mentioned, there’s just too much laughless humor and too much effort to impress with high-falutin allusions. His writing did improve over the course of these years, however, and I am confident that the second round of his stories that I dive into will be superior to the first.

Stories in this collection

Metzengerstein

The Duc de l’Omelette

A Tale of Jerusalem

Loss of Breath

Bon-Bon

MS. Found in a Bottle

The Assignation

Berenice

Morella

Lionizing

The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall

King Pest

Shadow

Four Beasts in One

Mystification

Silence

Ligeia

How to Write a Blackwood Article

A Predicament

The Devil in the Belfry

The Man That Was Used Up

The Fall of the House of Usher

William Wilson

The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion

An Alfred Russel Wallace Companion, edited by Charles H. Smith, James T. Costa, and David Collard

A survey of his career in and beyond biology

Alfred Russel Wallace is known as the other British naturalist who formulated the theory of evolution. While Darwin was taking his time writing On the Origin of Species, Wallace wrote a paper that also spelled out the process of natural selection. Through a gentleman’s agreement, Wallace stepped aside and let Darwin finish his book. That’s a highly abbreviated summary of what happened; the truth, of course, is more complicated. Nevertheless, Darwin’s name will forever be associated with evolution while many an average Joe these days has never even heard of Wallace. Wallace was nevertheless a very accomplished and respected biologist in his own right. He explored the Amazon basin and the Malay Archipelago, outlived Darwin by 31 years, and enjoyed a reputation as a “grand old man” of science. The book An Alfred Russel Wallace Companion, published in 2019, is an edited collection of essays by nine academics who examine various aspects of Wallace’s career. They give much-deserved consideration to his numerous accomplishments in the biological sciences while also shedding light on his endeavors further afield.

This is not an introduction to Wallace, but it is a synthesis. The reader is expected to have a basic knowledge of who Wallace was and his relation to Darwin and the theory of evolution through natural selection, but the book does not get into arcane matters that require a PhD to understand. The essays are written with scholarly rigor, citations, and notes. The reading degree of difficulty is about at an undergraduate level of proficiency. Although all the contributors are clearly very knowledgeable about Wallace’s life and career, they explain matters sufficiently for those who are not. As a survey of Wallace’s career, the book is successful in educating the reader about his significant accomplishments and influence. The scope of the essays sometimes overlap, however, which results in reading some of the same information multiple times.

If another goal of this book, as I suspect, is to get the reader to admire and esteem Wallace, it is less successful on that score. My regard for Wallace as a scientist actually lessened as I worked my way through this book. For starters, the book opens with a discussion of Wallace’s belief in spiritualism. The word “spiritualism,” in the late 19th century, meant a belief in ghosts, the “spirit world,” and communication with the dead. In other words, Wallace was attending séances and being fooled by spirit-conjuring mediums. Although Wallace was one of the chief formulators of evolutionary science, he also believed in intelligent design. When animals became humans, God intervened and somehow turned on their minds and souls. The book closes with a discussion of Wallace’s writings on extraterrestrial life. He thought humans on Earth must be the only intelligent life in the universe because God essentially created evolution for us: We are the purpose of the universe. It gets hard to take seriously a scientist who clings to such superstitious, supernatural, and teleological beliefs. The book also discusses disagreements between Wallace and Darwin over the details of natural selection, and in most cases, it seems Darwin was in the right. In the end, one doesn’t feel so bad that Darwin got most of the credit for evolution.

Wallace was also an outspoken public intellectual on socioeconomic matters. He advocated socialism and came up with a plan for land nationalization. If you’re reading this book because you’re interested in natural history, you won’t relish the chapter on British land law, tariffs, etc. The main positive verdict with which one comes away from this book is that Wallace was a pioneer in the field of biogeography: the study and mapping of the distribution ranges of species. In the days before genetics and continental drift, this was a key to determining where species arose, how they spread, and how they were related to other species. Although Alexander von Humboldt preceded him in the creation of this field, Wallace developed it to a higher level, carving out a specific domain of research in which he surpassed Darwin. There is no doubt that Wallace is an immensely important scientist in the pantheon of natural history, but the spiritualism and anthropocentric teleology are definitely a disappointment. If you’re only going to read one book on Wallace, this volume does provide a fine overview of his thought, for better or for worse.

Metropolis by Thea von Harbou

Simplistic dystopian epic adapted into a landmark film

The 1927 science fiction film Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang, is widely considered one of the masterpieces of the silent era of film. Few these days are likely to remember, however, that the film was adapted from a book. Metropolis the novel, published in 1925, was written by Thea von Harbou, who also wrote the screenplay for the film. She and Lang were married at the time.

The novel takes place at an unspecified time in the future, though some promotional copy for the book states the date as 2026, a hundred years after publication. Metropolis is a technologically advanced urban industrial center. It is not intended to be a future vision of New York or London, both of which are mentioned as separate cities. It’s unclear exactly where Metropolis is supposed to be located, though Germany would be a safe bet. Metropolis is ruled by wealthy capitalist oligarchs who live in lofty towers. Chief among these is Joh Fredersen, the city’s most powerful citizen, dubbed “the brain of Metropolis.” The army of laborers who operate Metropolis’s machinery of production dwell in underground cities. Existing only to perform their robotic jobs, they are veritable slaves to the machines they tend.

Joh Fredersen has a son, Freder, who lives an idle life hanging out at the Club of the Sons, a resort for male heirs of the oligarchs. One day while visiting his father’s place of work, however, he develops sympathetic feelings towards labor. He also falls in love with a beautiful woman who seems to run the factory’s day care. As he pursues this mysterious maiden, Freder learns that she is the leader and cult figurehead of an underground (literally) revolutionary movement. Meanwhile, a mad scientist has created a robot woman, which you likely already know if you’ve ever seen a single shot from the movie.

The story is fine, though rather predictable. I didn’t care much for the way that story is told, however. Von Harbou grandiosely exaggerates every phrase. She saturates the text with biblical imagery and constant hyperbolic references to “the gods.” Realism is not a concern. The prose is largely written in incomplete, choppy sentences, and sometimes it’s difficult to tell exactly what’s going on. In spite of the futuristic sci-fi trappings, the story resembles yet another Victorian-era romance. I guess this is German expressionist literature, but if so, it’s not as effective as German expressionist film or visual art. What makes Lang’s Metropolis such a stunning film are the visuals, which were developed apart from the novel. Von Harbou’s text doesn’t contain much visual description at all, not even of the robot woman. The author doesn’t go into a great deal of detail in describing the dystopian future she has created. There isn’t much futuristic tech, for example, or sophisticated social and political commentary. The most outstanding feature of this dystopia is the obvious extreme disparity between the lives of the rich and poor.

The revolution of the workers against the oligarchs inevitably delivers a socialist message, though it feels half-hearted, intended more to generate drama then for actual political persuasion. If social reform or forebodings of an authoritarian future were the important concern here, the novel would have needed more of a grounding in the reality of the class struggle. Metropolis reads more like opera than realism. It has more in common with sci-fi films like Star Wars or Logan’s Run than with novels like Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1908), or even Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). Metropolis is what it is, and it’s pretty good at what it is, but the film is more impressive than the book.

The Terror by Arthur Machen

Ingenious and spooky WWI thriller

Welsh author Arthur Machen (1863–1947) wrote primarily in the horror and fantasy genres, and his work has proved greatly influential to subsequent authors in those areas, from H. P. Lovecraft to Stephen King. Machen has only recently come to my attention, and so far I have enjoyed everything I’ve read by him. He may be the greatest of Edgar Allan Poe’s successors in the literature of horror and the supernatural. Machen’s work of the late 19th and early 20th centuries brings Poe’s gothic terror into the modern era in a way that can still be appreciated by, and frightening to, 21st-century readers.

Machen’s novel The Terror was published in 1917. It takes place in a small rural coastal village of southwestern Wales named Meirion. In 1915, at the height of World War I, a shocking rash of mysterious deaths occurs in and around this village. Children have fallen off of cliffs, or were they pushed? Bodies are found of people who appear to have died of asphyxiation, but with no apparent evidence of strangulation or other trauma. A family lies dead in the highway out in front of their home, their brains bashed in. A girl is stung to death by bees. A farmer is found dead of a stab wound, as if pierced by a spear. There are no witnesses to these killings, and no clues as to their causes or perpetrators. Since it’s wartime, however, one can’t help but wonder if the Germans are responsible. Could there be a secret network of German soldiers operating within the British Isles, spreading terror throughout the countryside? Whether the Germans are responsible or not, this tragedy and terror on the home front is certainly not helping Britain’s war effort and has greatly hindered England’s fight against Germany.

Two local citizens attempt to find an explanation for these bizarre happenings. Dr. Lewis is a country physician, while Mr. Remnant seems to be a well-read retiree. The two theorize as to the causes of these events and bounce ideas off of each other. Lewis seems to be the more rationally scientific of the two. Remnant is more open to far-fetched conspiracy theories. The story is related by an unidentified third-person narrator who, like an investigative journalist, has gathered testimony related to these incidents, much of it from the mouths of Lewis and Remnant.

Even to today’s audience, who has developed an immunity to murder novels and serial killer movies, Machen’s descriptions of the deaths are bluntly brutal and must have been quite shocking to readers of a century ago. Many horror filmmakers of today are still squeamish about killing children in their stories, but not so with Machen. The indiscriminateness of this tragedy, coupled with the journalistic style with which the details are presented, give the novel an air of realism, even when contemplating possible supernatural occurrences. There are times over the course of the novel when the plot just seems to be a collection of random scary events with no rhyme or reason to the proceedings. Machen concludes the mystery, however, with an ending that ingeniously ties all loose ends together into a unique, imaginative, and praiseworthy resolution.

Of the three novels by Machen I’ve read so far, The Terror is superior to The Hill of Dreams but falls just short of The Great God Pan. All three are really quite exceptional works. While it’s easy to draw comparisons to Poe, Machen really has a distinctive voice and style all his own. His writing is quite unlike any of his contemporaries. The horror stories of Arthur Conan Doyle, Ambrose Bierce, and Algernon Blackwood seem tame and quaint by comparison. I’m not an habitual reader of horror or supernatural fiction, but in Machen’s case I will gladly make an exception.

Foma Gordyeff (The Man Who Was Afraid) by Maxim Gorky

Born into the bourgeoisie

Maxim Gorky (1868–1936) is one of the all-time greats in Russian and Soviet literary history, though American readers these days are unlikely to be familiar with his work. He is considered the founder of socialist realism, that Soviet genre of literature that advocates socialist and communist ideals. While we often hear about Russian writers or artists who were persecuted by the Soviet government, Gorky was embraced by the Soviets as a national hero. That’s not to say he was a sell-out to the regime in power, however. Gorky really believed in socialism and wrote realist works with proletarian themes. His fiction gained a wide readership in Western Europe and America in the early 20th century, back when readers in those nations were more sympathetic to labor and more open to socialist ideas. As the world became disgusted with Joseph Stalin and his authoritarian regime, however, Gorky’s brand of literature fell out of favor with readers outside the Soviet Union.

Gorky’s novel Foma Gordyeff was published in 1899. The title of the book is the name of its main character. The original title in Russian is Фома Гордеев. The 1901 translation by Herman Bernstein, available in the public domain, bears the spelling I’ve used in the title of this review. Within that edition, however, the name is spelled at least three different ways: Gordyeff, Gordyeef, and Gordyeeff. Alternate English spellings include Gordeyev and Gordjejew. The Man Who Was Afraid was tacked onto an English translation and doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense in relation to the book itself.

Foma Gordyeff is the son of a rich father who owns a successful shipping business that moves agricultural and industrial goods up and down the Volga River. From a young age, Foma is groomed to take over the family business, even though, as Gorky bluntly states, he’s not very smart. As a young man, Foma has a love affair that ends disappointingly and instills in him a bitterness toward the hypocrisy of polite society. When his father dies, Foma is taken under the care of his godfather, also his father’s right-hand-man, Yakov Mayakin, who continues to train Foma in the shipping business while trying to control every other aspect of the young man’s life. As Foma learns that Mayakin and capitalists like him are greedy exploiters of labor, he loses interest in the family business and starts leading a dissipated life of drinking and partying. He can find no satisfaction in life and longs to be free of Mayakin and his father’s legacy.

Foma Gordyeff is an anti-capitalist novel, but it stops short of being a pro-socialist novel. The hero is a wealthy bourgeoisie, and the word “proletariat” isn’t even mentioned until three-quarters of the way through the book. For the most part, this novel is simply about a rich guy continually bitching about how life is meaningless and sucky, and that goes on way too long. Gorky never gets you to like Foma before he turns him into a bitter, insufferable grouch. Gorky tried to cap the story off with a shocking ending, but it just feels week and anticlimactic. This novel is much less radical than the works of some American writers of the time, like Jack London (The Iron Heel) and Upton Sinclair (The Jungle). A few years after the publication of Foma Gordyeff, Gorky himself would crank the red rhetoric higher in works like The Mother.

London, a proclaimed socialist himself, loved this novel and even wrote an introduction to one of its English-language editions. That’s not surprising, since London, although born poor, was practically an American incarnation of Foma. London not only shared Gorky’s political beliefs but shared Foma’s depressing outlook on life and disgust at the pointless shallowness of much of modern capitalist society. By the time you’ve read through this protracted and dreary exercise in pessimism, you might find their depressing outlook to be contagious.

Finding Order in Nature: The Naturalist Tradition from Linnaeus to E. O. Wilson by Paul Lawrence Farber

A brief primer on the history of natural history

Paul Lawrence Farber (1944–2021) was a professor of the history of science at Oregon State University. His specific area of interest was biology and natural history. His book Finding Order in Nature was first published in 1994. It relates how, over the course of about 250 years, the science of natural history progressed from the earliest efforts at species classification to the development of unified theories of life and the discovery of universal laws of nature.

Farber begins in the mid-18th century with the work of Sweden’s Carl Linnaeus and France’s Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, both of whom brought the classification of species to a systematic level that formed the foundation of modern natural history as we know it today. Many of the subsequent chapters revolve around conflicts of opposing views in the biological sciences: religious vs. secular views, form-ists (e.g. Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire) vs. function-ists (e.g. Georges Cuvier), experimental physiologists vs. collector/taxonomists, morphology vs. genetics. Of course, there’s a chapter on Charles Darwin, as well as those who championed his theory of evolution (e.g. Ernst Haeckel, Thomas Henry Huxley) and those who opposed it (e.g. Louis Agassiz, Richard Owen). As the subtitle indicates, the book ends with the recent work of E. O. Wilson, who pretty much gets a chapter all to himself.

This book is in Johns Hopkins University Press’s series Introductory Studies in the History of Science. The volumes in this series are deliberately intended to be brief overviews of their particular domains of science. Judging by Farber’s book alone, the only one I’ve read, these books are indeed introductory and written for students or other nonscientists. Finding Order in Nature runs about 200 pages. There are only about two or three footnotes per chapter and a bibliographic essay at the end. To me, this book reads as if it were meant to be a textbook for undergraduate students. The reading level is accessible enough, however, that it could even be used as a text for a high school course, if a course on such a subject existed.

I myself am not a scientist, but I read quite a few history books and biographies of naturalists. I like to live vicariously through their travels, researches, and discoveries. I was hoping that by reading this book I might discover some naturalists I’d never heard of and perhaps a few books I might want to pursue reading. The contents of Finding Order in Nature, however, were already largely familiar to me. In each of the book’s nine chapters, Farber covers two or three major players in natural history, and for the most part they are very well-known individuals. The most I got out of this was a few interesting biographical details on some of the scientists featured. I found a few titles of interest in the bibliographic essay, but the list of books is almost entirely comprised of secondary texts from the past fifty years rather than accounts written by the naturalists themselves.

That’s not to say that the book was a disappointment. I kind of knew what I was getting into when I bought it (as a Kindle Daily Deal). Farber accomplishes exactly what he set out to do. If I had read this book in my college days, it would have sparked my interest in natural history and given me a basic foundation for building further knowledge. At my present state of life and education, it was a brief and satisfying recap of a subject that I enjoy.