The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music by Dunstan Prial

One of jazz and rock’s most influential tastemakers

As a fan of classic rock music, I know of John Hammond as the record producer and Columbia executive who discovered Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Stevie Ray Vaughan. (It’s Hammond’s grinning visage, looking like he could be Stevie Ray’s dad, that graces the back cover of Vaughan’s debut album Texas Flood.) Journalist Dunstan Prial’s 2006 Hammond biography The Producer, however, has taught me that there was much more to Hammond’s long and influential career in the recording industry.

The bulk of this book is concerned not with the history of rock but with jazz. In fact, Hammond’s first encounter with Dylan in the early 1960s doesn’t occur until chapter 12 of 16. Hammond’s career started way back in the 1930s working with artists like Benny Goodman (who eventually became his brother-in-law), Billie Holiday, and Count Basie. Through his work as a critic for DownBeat magazine, a talent scout and producer for record companies, and an all-around jazz impresario, Hammond helped launch some of the biggest stars of the swing era. On the tail end of the jazz age, he also discovered Aretha Franklin and produced her first two albums.

John Henry Hammond Jr. decided at a young age that he wanted to work in the music industry. One of the reasons he was able to make that dream a reality is that he was independently wealthy, being a great-great-grandson of railroad and shipping tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt. (Gloria Vanderbilt, more famous in recent years, was his first cousin.) To establish himself in the music business, Hammond often worked for free or for little pay, just for the joy of making music. He would often use his own money to finance a record, a concert, or to keep a hungry musician afloat. He had no musical talent himself (at least none is discussed in this book), but he had great taste and a keen eye for spotting future superstars. In The Producer, Prial argues convincingly that Hammond’s taste was instrumental in shaping American popular music in the 20th century.

In addition to his contributions to the music industry and popular culture, Hammond was active in the civil rights movement. Seeing jazz music as a means to further the integration of Blacks into American society, Hammond was the first music producer/promoter to put Black and White musicians together on the same stage. When, at Hammond’s urging, Benny Goodman added Black musicians Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton to his band, it was a milestone moment in racial integration that preceded Jackie Robinson’s debut in Major League Baseball by a decade. Hammond was also a long-time board member of the NAACP before resigning in protest over the organization’s disagreements with Martin Luther King Jr.

Prial interviewed Hammond’s sister and sister-in-law, some industry associates like Atlantic Records’ Ahmet Ertegun, and a few musicians such as Hampton, Springsteen, and the surviving members of Vaughan’s band Double Trouble. Most of Prial’s research, however, comes from previously published biographies, interviews, and some archival documents—sources into which he has dug admirably deep and wide. Springsteen’s vivid and exuberant recollections of Hammond’s benevolent guidance are really the highlight of the book for rock fans. Much of the Dylan material comes from Dylan’s Chronicles memoir. Prial’s narrative highlights about ten or twelve big stars that Hammond discovered and/or championed. There is much praise here for Hammond’s major accomplishments, but this is not a unilaterally positive, hero-worshipping biography. Hammond had his faults and difficulties as well. The reader gets a balanced and comprehensive sense of Hammond’s personality from Prial’s well-researched and well-written account.

The Shadow Puppet by Georges Simenon

Only murder in the building

First published in 1912, The Shadow Puppet is the twelfth novel in Belgian author Georges Simenon’s series of mystery novels starring Parisian police detective Jules Maigret. The original French title of this novel is L’Ombre chinoise, meaning literally “the Chinese shadow,” which refers to a certain type of shadow puppet. This novel has also been published in English under the titles of Maigret Mystified and The Shadow in the Courtyard, the latter title being the most accurate. If this were a Hardy Boys mystery, the story would actually involve a shadow puppet, but here the title is strictly metaphorical, referring to a human silhouette viewed through a window shade.

A concierge at an apartment building on the Place des Vosges calls the police to report a murder, and Maigret reports to the scene of the crime. Passing through an arched entryway, he enters the large courtyard of this apartment complex. On one side of this courtyard resides the laboratory of a serum manufacturer (medical elixirs, I presume). The owner of the company, Monsieur Couchet, has been found seated at his desk, shot to death, and his safe emptied of its contents, estimated to be 360,000 francs. Couchet, a very wealthy man, doesn’t actually reside in this building, but through an unfortunate coincidence, his ex-wife does. Both have remarried since their divorce. Couchet also had a mistress, not much of a secret, for whom Maigret develops a sympathy. Although on the surface this crime appears to be a typical armed robbery killing, Maigret comes to suspect that the murder may have been committed by one of the building’s residents. As he delves into the case, he uncovers the secret lives of these tenants and their tangled web of relationships.

The fact that an industrial pharmaceutical laboratory would exist on the ground floor of an apartment building is one of those little historical details that makes Maigret novels interesting. From reading these mysteries, you learn a lot about what life was like in Paris, and France at large, in the early twentieth century. The reader gets to see aspects of Parisian life they’d never find in a tourism brochure. One facet of French society that Simenon often addresses in these novels is class consciousness and social status. In The Shadow Puppet, differences in financial status—between the rich Couchets in their mansion on Boulevard Haussmann, the middle-class tenants of the apartment block at the Place des Vosges, and the hard-up mistress and her peers living in Montmarte—play an important part in the story. As usual, Simenon goes beyond mere stereotypes and caricatures to create complex characters with realistic psychological motives.

I became very involved with the lives of these characters; that aspect of the novel is expertly done. The mystery story itself, however, is not one of the most artfully constructed puzzles in Maigret’s casebook. To set up this unusual web of relationships between the characters, Simenon had to rely on maybe one too many coincidences. It is a little hard to believe that some of these people just happened to end up as next-door neighbors to each other. This murder also suffers from a shortage of viable suspects, leading to a conclusion that’s not unforeseen, though there are some creative revelations in the details of the crime. As always, this Maigret novel is a compelling read, thoroughly entertaining, but would it make a top-ten list of Maigret books? Probably not.  

The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson

Boring horror quest with creepy marital advice

English author William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918) got his start writing nautical adventure stories for pulp fiction magazines, then eventually moved on to fantasy and horror fiction. He is best remembered today for his two novels The House on the Borderland (1908) and The Night Land (1912), both of which span the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres.

The Night Land opens in the “present day,” at least as far as the narrator is concerned, but to us the world depicted seems rather medieval, like something from a William Morris novel or a pre-Raphaelite painting. The narrator writes in a sort of antiquated Yoda-speak, in which every sentence begins with “And,” or, on rare occasions, “Then.” The unnamed hero falls in love with his neighbor, Lady Mirdath the Beautiful. They marry, but she soon dies in childbirth. That all happens in chapter one. In chapter two, the narrator is inexplicably transmigrated to a world millions of years in the future. The sun has died, leaving the Earth in perpetual night, but heat and some light are provided by geothermal energies. This dark world is filled with monsters and evil. The surviving humans have retreated to a giant pyramid, miles wide and tall, containing over a thousand cities. The narrator begins receiving telepathic messages from a woman named Naani, who lives in another stronghold of human holdouts in a distant unknown location. He suspects that this Naani may actually be his deceased love Mirdath, so he sets out alone upon the Night Lands to find her.

The Night Land is slightly better than The House on the Borderland, simply because House was a messy assemblage of spooky imagery with no rhyme or reason to it, while the happenings in The Night Land actually obey a fictional logic. But boy, is this book boring! While Hodgson seems to have put a lot of thought into the creation of this world, it reads as if no forethought whatsoever was put into the story that takes place there. Random events just happen without building upon each other, and the text is unforgivably repetitive. The narrator wanders through the land, eats, and sleeps. Occasionally he sees a monster, which he either avoids or fights. Certain phrases are repeated over and over again, to the point where you’ve gotta wonder if it’s intended to be a joke: “I ate two of the capsules and drank some of the water.” “I saw x number of fire pits,” and “I lie down and rest among the moss bushes.” While reading The Night Land, you could space out for a half an hour and not miss anything, because each chapter is pretty much the same as the one before. There’s only chapter towards the end that could be called exciting.

And then there’s the love story . . . ugh. A large portion of the book is basically a marriage manual for troglodytes: If you’re woman is “naughty” and doesn’t know who’s boss, flog her. Because the novel was published before World War I, popular morals wouldn’t have allowed the hero and his female companion to have sex (because there’s no marriage in the wildernesses of the Night Land). Nevertheless, there are all kinds of clumsy, gooey love scenes in which Hodgson hints at his own propensity towards foot fetishism and S&M fantasies. Such intimate moments are not only creepy but also boring, because they’re just as repetitive as the rest of the book. H. P. Lovecraft greatly admired this novel, but then again, H. P. Lovecraft died in 1937. Given all the talk of wife-whipping, I’m not sure how one can justify admiring this novel in the 21st century.

Fool me once, Hodgson, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I gave him a second chance after The House on the Borderland, but The Night Land really wasn’t much better. This might appeal somewhat to the Dungeons & Dragons crowd, but I would imagine most avid readers of sci-fi, fantasy, or horror would find this book to be a rather dull and clumsy foray into those genres.

My Life as an Explorer by Sven Hedin

Deadly treks through Asia with a Swedish adventurer

When Sven Hedin was a young boy in Stockholm, he dreamed of being an arctic explorer. As a young man, however, his early career led him to far Eastern Europe. There he realized that he could still be an explorer, but he directed his sights eastward to Asia instead. From 1885 to 1890, Hedin made two trips into Iran and several of the “Stans” of the Near East. He then organized a series of more extensive expeditions deeper into Asia, where his journeys took him to India, China, Tibet, and Nepal. Hedin’s main goal was to fill in the “white spaces” on European maps, to chart uncharted territories. He was one of the first, if not the first, European to set foot in many of the sites he explored. In fact, Tibet didn’t want Westerners in their country, so Hedin had to sneak in. Often he and his all-Asian crew would go two months without seeing another human being, and they once went two years without seeing another European. Hedin’s explorations made him the undisputed firsthand authority on the mountainous region known as the Transhimalaya. In his autobiography My Life as an Explorer, Hedin recaps his daring, adventurous, globe-trotting life. I believe the book was written in 1924, and the first English edition came out in 1925. Despite all the amazing achievements catalogued within, this is not even a complete career memoir because Hedin continued to explore Asia for another decade after this book was published.

While engaged in his expeditions, Hedin surveyed and mapped the terrain and gathered geographic, geologic, zoologic, and ethnographic information. The problem with My Life as an Explorer, however, is that you don’t really get to learn a lot about his discoveries in the places he explored. Hedin published that sort of data in more specialized volumes, such as Scientific Results of a Journey in Central Asia, 1899–1902 (12 volumes). My Life as an Explorer, however, is devoted more to tales of survival and adventure aimed at general readers: nearly starving to death or dying of thirst in the desert, nearly freezing to death in the mountains, nearly drowning in rivers and lakes, nearly suffocating in sandstorms, etc. You will be amazed at the scores, nay hundreds, of horses, camels, mules, and dogs, and even about a dozen humans, who perish over the course of this book. The tenacious Hedin plows ever forward, regardless of body count. The last quarter of this memoir, in which he recounts his third expedition to Tibet (1905–1908), is the exception to this adventure-only style of narrative. There he does go deeper into what he observed of Buddhist culture in his visits to Tibetan holy sites. The first half of the narrative is a bit slow, but the book finishes on a high note.

It’s not too easy to follow along with where Hedin is at any given moment or where he’s going. Many of the place names he uses aren’t current, though a Wikipedia search can usually clear up such uncertainties. The book includes a few simplified cartoony maps, but they don’t help much. Hedin’s detailed, professional maps are printed in other books like the Scientific Findings mentioned above. In addition to the maps, this autobiography is loaded with illustrations drawn by Hedin himself. With his sketchbook, he chronicled the people, places, and memorable moments encountered along the way. He’s a pretty good artist, but his drawings don’t come across very clearly on a Kindle Paperwhite. (He also took photographs, but they’re not in this book.)

Armchair explorers will envy Hedin’s travels but not his hardships and near-death experiences. If you like to read historical explorer accounts, this is a good one, though maybe too long and arduous for casual readers. Reading this autobiography makes me want to look into Hedin’s previously published reports of each individual expedition. They’re probably less exciting than this book, but I think one would learn more about the places visited.  

The White Rose by B. Traven

Home sweet hacienda 

The German author who went by the pen name of B. Traven (real name unknown, or at least unconfirmed) made a career out of writing fiction set in Mexico and Latin America. In novels such as The Cotton-Pickers and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Traven painted socially and politically realistic images of life in Mexico in the years immediately following the Revolution. His works often express his anarchist views by criticizing American imperialism and the capitalist exploitation of resources and people. In his novel The White Rose, Traven continues to explore these themes. The White Rose was originally published in Germany in 1929 and wasn’t published in English translation until 1979.

In the state of Veracruz, Mexico, near the state capital of Jalapa, lies la Rosa Blanca, the White Rose, a beautiful hacienda run according to generations-old Mexican traditions. The owner of this fertile land is neither a Spanish colonist nor a White opportunist, but a man of Indian (Native Mexican) heritage, Jacinto Yañez, who presides over the land that was his father’s, his grandfather’s, his great grandfather’s, and so on. Several multi-generational families live on and work the lands of Rosa Blanca, all of them likely related to Jacinto by blood. He presides over this extended family like a benevolent godfather, and though the work is hard and modern comforts are few, the people are happy. The Condor Oil Company, an American firm, has bought up all the surrounding land to drill for oil. They want Rosa Blanca in order to fill the empty hole in their lucrative dominion. No matter how much money they offer Jacinto, however, he refuses to sell, insisting that though by law he may be the official owner of the hacienda, it is his moral obligation to steward the land and pass it along to his descendants. This refusal to play ball really sticks in Condor’s craw, and they are not used to taking no for an answer.

The first two chapters of the book, in which la Rosa Blanca and its inhabitants are introduced, immediately draws you into the pleasant life of this hacienda. Traven really understands Mexican culture and is able to capture the philosophy and mindset of a Mexican perspective. No other White author writes about Mexico with the same insightfulness and authenticity as Traven (and unfortunately, too few Mexican authors have been translated into English). He has obviously spent some time in that country, not just as a tourist but as a drifting laborer, not just in cities but in rural areas as well, among both capitalists and peasants, and his experiences inform his fiction. When this novel is set in Mexico, it’s a superb five-star read.

The problem is, most of the story doesn’t take place in Mexico, but in San Francisco. Traven devotes more chapters to the American capitalists and their oil company than he does to the Mexican farmers or their hacienda. The bulk of the book is a character study of Mr. Collins, the president of Condor Oil. At least four or five chapters are solely devoted to his extramarital affairs (Traven seems to imply, maybe not intentionally, that capitalism and its excesses are the fault of womankind). There are also a few dry chapters on stock market manipulation. These portions of the book are more predictable and less enlightening than Traven’s perspective on Mexico. They read more like an average Upton Sinclair novel than a Traven book.

All that said, I am a big fan of Traven’s writing, both as a Mexicophile and as a lover of realist literature. I am usually quite impressed by his work and have yet to be truly disappointed. The White Rose is not as excellent as The Cotton-Pickers, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, or The Bridge in the Jungle, but it is still a very good novel. Traven deserves commendation for this eye-opening indictment of the injustices of economic imperialism in Latin America at a time when few European or American writers were concerned with such matters.

The Novels of Clifford D. Simak

Career overview of a sci-fi grand master

Clifford D. Simak

A few months ago, I finished reading and reviewing the complete works of American science fiction author Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988). Since he’s been a favorite here at Old Books by Dead Guys, I think it’s time for a summary look at his literary career.

Simak was born in Millville, Wisconsin, a small town in the southwest of the state, near Prairie du Chien. For over three decades, Simak worked as a reporter and editor for the Minneapolis Star and Tribune while building a successful career as a fiction writer on the side. Simak published his first short story in 1931 and his final novel in 1986, with a prolific and steady output in between. He won three Hugo Awards (for the novel Way Station, the novellette “The Big Front Yard,” and the short story “Grotto of the Dancing Deer”) and one Nebula Award (also “Grotto of the Dancing Deer”). In 1977, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association named Simak a Grand Master of the genre, and he has also been honored with a lifetime achievement award from the Horror Writers Association.

Critics have often referred to Simak’s science fiction as “pastoral” because his stories often take place in rural and small-town locales. Rarely is a Simak story set in New York or Washington, DC. The bulk of his fiction is set in Wisconsin and Minnesota. His protagonists, even the nonhuman ones, often take part in outdoor activities like hunting, fishing, camping, and farming. He also wrote quite a few quest novels featuring cross-country treks in which the characters sleep around campfires and live off the land. Also in the write-what-you-know department, Simak often casts newspaper reporters and editors as the heroes in his stories. Despite the frequent small-town Midwestern atmosphere, Simak’s science fiction concepts are as innovative and mind-blowing as any big-city writer. His works run the gamut from laugh-out-loud comical to deadly serious and often engage in philosophical contemplation on mankind’s destiny, our relationship to nature, and our place within the universe. 

In recent years, Open Road Media has released just about all of Simak’s novels in inexpensive ebook editions, so it’s no longer necessary to hunt down old paperbacks in used bookstores or on ebay. Below are brief summaries and ratings of Simak’s 27 novels. Click on the titles below to read the complete reviews.

Short Fiction
This overview of Simak’s novels does not cover his short fiction. Simak’s short stories and novellas are even more consistently good than his novels. The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak series collects all of Simak’s fiction into 14 volumes. Each book contains about eight or nine science fiction stories plus one Western story or World War II adventure, genres in which Simak published a few pieces early in his career. The stories in these 14 volumes are not arranged in any kind of chronological or thematic order, so each volume is as good as another, and they are all very good collections. The ebooks often show up for three dollars or less on Amazon.

 

Novels

Cosmic Engineers (1939) - 3.5 stars
In the year 6948, mankind has colonized other planets in the solar system but has yet to venture to another star. Scientists working in a base on Pluto receive messages from the far-off edge of the universe. One human holds the key to understanding these cosmic messages and communicating with the beings of profound intelligence who sent them. An ambitious debut, though Simak has not yet reached his mature style.

Time and Again (1950) - 4.5 stars
The year is 7990. Humanity has spread throughout the galaxy and conquered a multitude of planets. Twenty years ago, astronaut Asher Sutton was sent to the 61 Cygni star system as one of many advanced scouts sent to make first contact with other worlds. Now, a government functionary is visited by a being claiming to be from the future, who informs him that Sutton will soon be returning to Earth, and when he arrives, he must be killed, or mankind will suffer grave consequences. A complex and ingenious time-travel mystery thriller.

Empire (1951) - 3.5 stars
Centuries in the future, humans from Earth have established colonies, mines, prisons, and industrial plants on all the planets in the solar system. This is made possible by an advanced technology that harvests great quantities of energy from the Sun. The tycoon who holds the monopoly on this energy source is the de facto dictator of the solar system, until a rival billionaire comes up with an alternate and superior source of power. Not one of Simak’s better works, with too much sketchy science and subpar storytelling.

City (1952) - 4.5 stars
The book that Simak is best-known for, City is actually made up of previously published short stories that have been adapted into a unified novel. Simak explores the philosophical question of what would happen if mankind had the benefit of communicating with another intelligent species? How would this help or hinder our development? The narrative encompasses tens of thousands of years in the future history of life on Earth, a future that humanity shares with Martians, robots, mutants, and talking dogs. A complex, epic saga that makes for a challenging read, but worth the effort.

Ring Around the Sun (1952) - 4 stars
The story takes place on Earth, perhaps a few decades in the future. The Cold War is still raging, inspiring fears of nuclear Armageddon. Recently, the American market has been mysteriously glutted by inexpensive goods of impeccable manufacture and unknown origin. Could this abundance of technological wonders be an attempt by some secret cabal to subvert our capitalist system and destroy our economy? Despite the title, the novel has nothing to do with space travel. 

Time is the Simplest Thing (1961) - 4 stars
In a not-so distant future, mankind has abandoned space travel. Instead, certain humans have developed the power to explore other star systems through a form of telepathic projection. But what might such a traveler inadvertently bring home from an interstellar journey? This novel is not so much about space or time travel, but more about the paranormal powers of these special individuals. Simak gets a little farfetched here at times, but it’s an exciting adventure novel. 

They Walked Like Men (1962) - 3 stars
A Midwestern newspaper reporter uncovers a sinister plot that threatens the world. The book’s title, as well as an alien encounter in the first chapter, give away that this is a mystery/thriller in which the villains are nonhuman invaders. The aliens are interesting and scary, but their plot to take over the world defies logic. The book contains some thrilling and suspenseful scenes, but overall feels half-baked.

Way Station (1963) - 4.5 stars
One of Simak’s best and best-known works. Enoch Wallace, veteran of the American Civil War, is chosen by an extraterrestrial governing body to serve as a galactic innkeeper for interstellar travelers teleporting through our solar system. His rural Wisconsin home is a layover stop for myriad alien species and cultures. Enoch’s neighbors begin to get suspicious of the fact that he never ages, which leads to the CIA putting him under surveillance. Classic Simak!

All Flesh is Grass (1965) - 3.5 stars
Set in Simak’s hometown of Millville, Wisconsin. A local man is on his way out of town for a fishing trip when his car strikes an invisible, impenetrable barrier. Further investigation reveals that this mysterious barricade completely encircles the town, closing it off from the rest of the world. This plot sounds remarkably similar to Stephen King’s Under the Dome, but Simak beat him to the idea by over 40 years.

The Werewolf Principle (1967) - 5 stars
500 years in the future, a space capsule is found with a John Doe astronaut sealed inside, under suspended animation. When awakened, he has no memory of his past or identity. He is obviously a space traveler from Earth’s past, but how far in the past? The Werewolf Principle is not about werewolves at all but rather about space travelers that are bioengineered to transform and adapt to varying conditions on other worlds. A constantly surprising, entertaining, and though-provoking thriller.

Why Call Them Back from Heaven? (1967) - 4 stars
In the year 2148, scientists are on the verge of cracking the secret to immortality. Billions of people have chosen to have their bodies frozen after death, waiting for a future “revival day” when they will embark on their “second life.” In an already overpopulated world, How will humanity cope when the billions of dead are revived? An innovative and thought-provoking dystopian thriller with interesting philosophical implications. 

The Goblin Reservation (1968) - 3.5 stars
At an unspecified time in the future, space travel throughout other star systems has acquainted mankind with various life forms, some of whom have emigrated to Earth. Time travel is also possible, and a Time College has been established in Madison, Wisconsin, devoted to the study of the past. Humans have also discovered that many of the creatures we thought were mythical or supernatural are in fact real, and many of them now reside in the Goblin Reservation outside Madison. The main plot of the novel deals with time travel, not so much goblins. This is a humorous novel in which Simak throws everything but the kitchen sink. It’s sometimes nonsensical, but it is fun.

Out of Their Minds (1970) - 1.5 stars
A minor celebrity returns to his rural hometown to write a book. When he gets there, he is confronted by all kinds of bizarre and dangerous phenomena, such as a charging triceratops. The title Out of Their Minds could refer to persons who are insane, but in this case it primarily pertains to characters and events from people’s imaginations that manifest themselves in physical reality, literally arising out of their minds. This premise leads to an anything-goes plot that defies all logic and just allows Simak to throw in random imagery without any rhyme or reason. His worst novel, in my opinion.

Destiny Doll (1971) - 3.5 stars
a.k.a Reality Doll
A freelance spaceship captain is hired by three individuals to transport them into deep space. One of them has been hearing voices he believes are interstellar transmissions from a long-lost legendary Earth adventurer who is rumored to have found a paradise on a distant unknown planet. The first half of the book is a little too weird-for-weird’s-sake, but it improves over time and offers some interesting philosophical conjectures about the destiny of humankind, multiple realities, and alien intelligences.

A Choice of Gods (1971) - 4 stars
In the year 2135, the vast majority of humanity mysteriously disappears from the Earth, leaving only a few hundred people behind in the vicinity of Minneapolis. These survivors discover that they have stopped aging, and some have developed advanced parapsychic abilities like interstellar telepathy. A band of Native Americans and some sentient, masterless robots round out the cast of this thoughtful post-apocalyptic tale that asks some deep, dark questions about the purpose of mankind.

Cemetery World (1972) - 3 stars
Thousands of years in the future, mankind has colonized many planets throughout the galaxy. Though few humans have set foot on the planet, Old Earth has become an object of fond nostalgia, and billions of people want to be buried there. An artist travels to Earth to create a multimedia piece that encapsulates the essence of Earth. When he uncovers a sinister plot by the Cemetery corporation, who run the funerary tourism industry, the artist is forced to flee for his life. High on imagination but low on logic, this novel is just so-so.

Our Children’s Children (1973) - 4 stars
Five centuries in the future, mankind faces an alien attack. Unable to defeat the invaders, the human race flees their enemies by time traveling to the past, becoming refugees in our present-day world. These unexpected billions place a heavy burden on our already overpopulated and overtaxed world. Though these uninvited visitors are our distant descendants, do we have the means or the wherewithal to help them? Not one of Simak’s best, but it’s a brisk and engaging read.

Enchanted Pilgrimage (1975) - 3.5 stars
The first of three novels that Simak published in the Dungeons & Dragons/Lord of the Rings fantasy genre. In medieval times, Mark Cornwall, a university scholar, discovers a mysterious page of manuscript hidden in the school’s library. When others find out about this discovery, they are willing to kill to get their hands on the parchment. To decipher the text, Cornwall must leave civilization and venture out into the Wastelands. For the journey, he assembles a team of adventurers including a goblin, a gnome, and an intelligent raccoon. I don’t consider this type of thing to be Simak’s forte, but this is the best of his three novels in this genre.

Shakespeare’s Planet (1976) - 4.5 stars
In the 25th century, Carter Horton was sent on a mission to find planets habitable to humans. He awakes from suspended animation to find that a thousand years have passed, and his human crew are dead. The good news is he’s found a habitable planet, but he’s stranded on it. With the help of his robot companion and some local alien inhabitants, can he find a way off of this mysterious world? Rather than settling for mere interspecies conflict, Simak emphasizes  friendship and cooperation between intelligent life from different worlds and expresses a kind of interstellar environmental ethic.

A Heritage of Stars (1977) - 3.5 stars
Two thousand years in the future, Earth is now a post-apocalyptic world in which mankind has reverted to barbarism. In a fit of worldwide rage, humans rebelled against their technology and destroyed it. One bastion of intelligent civilization still holds out on the campus of the former University of Minnesota. When a member of this community comes across a millennium-old history mentioning a Place of Going to the Stars, he leaves the safety of the university and heads West on a quest to find this mythical site. This story has its fair share of flaws, resulting in a mediocre work by Simak standards.

Mastodonia (1978) - 5 stars
On a farm in Western Wisconsin, a professor of paleontology discovers a time tunnel through which he can walk 100,000 years in the past. He and his colleague decide that in order to fully explore the scientific research potential of time travel, they must first develop it into a commercially viable business, one centered around prehistoric safaris. First, they declare their prehistoric haven an independent nation, dubbed Mastodonia. The pleasant surprise of this time-travel story is that instead of focusing on adventures with saber-toothed tigers, Simak explores the ethical, legal, and logistical complications of time travel.

The Fellowship of the Talisman (1978) - 2 stars
The second of Simak’s D&D-flavored novels. In this alternate history, it’s the 20th century, but Europe has yet to emerge from the Dark Ages. The progress of civilization has been halted by hordes of evil nonhuman beings known as the Harriers. A manuscript is discovered that purports to be an eyewitness account of the life of Christ. A young nobleman is tasked with delivering this document to a scholar who can translate and authenticate it. Not only is this novel filled with some silly sword-and-sorcery clichés, it also has a very preachy Christian message that’s not even historically accurate.

The Visitors (1979) - 4.5 stars
An immense black box descends upon the small town of Lone Pine, Minnesota, hovering just above the ground. The unexplainable nature of this object leads to speculation that it may be of extraterrestrial origin, but is it a living being or a mechanical probe? The box moves around, “eating” trees and ignoring humans. No one can find a way of communicating with it, until one fly fisherman feels a momentary telepathic bond with the visitor. A riveting close-encounters tale that is really less about the aliens and more about humanity’s reaction to them.

Project Pope (1981) - 3.5 stars
In the distant future, a physician stows away on a spacecraft headed to a planet on the very outskirts of our galaxy. There he finds a society established by robots from Earth, who have created a center of theological research named Vatican 17, complete with a supercomputer as pope. These robot clergy employ humans with telepathic powers to gather information on alien cultures and faiths. When one of the listeners claims to have found Heaven, it causes turmoil within the vatican hierarchy. While investigating the dichotomy between knowledge and faith, Simak both criticizes organized religion and respects spiritual faith.

Special Deliverance (1982) - 3 stars
A half dozen individuals find themselves mysteriously transported to an unknown world. They figure out that they have all been abducted from different universes—Earths with alternate histories. But abducted by whom, and why? Convinced that they have been brought together to undertake some mission by which they might return to their homes, the six characters set out to look for clues to the mysterious purpose behind their involuntary journey. A rather meandering plot in the Twilight Zone fantasy vein.

Where the Evil Dwells (1982) - 2 stars
Simak’s third sword-and-sorcery novel takes place during the Roman Empire. In between the Romans and the Germanic barbarians of the Earth lies a zone called the Empty Land, inhabited by a horde of evil creatures and mystical monsters. A young man embarks on a quest to rescue a holy relic from the Empty Land, accompanied by a motley crew of companions, of course. Typical Dungeons & Dragons fare, and rather boring.

Highway of Eternity (1986) - 3 stars
Two individuals with the inexplicable abilities to see and move through alternate worlds stumble upon an 18th-century English manor house that exists in an isolated bubble outside of time and space. There they meet a group of refugees from the future. The rest of the novel follows them as they hop through time and space fleeing the persecution of a foe that threatens the end of humanity as we know it. This premise is vague enough to allow Simak to throw just about anything into this kitchen sink, and he does, resulting in something that reads more like fantasy than hard sci-fi.

 

War with the Newts by Karel Capek

A brilliant work of dark satire

Czech author Karel Capek is most famous for coining the term “robot” in his 1920 play entitled R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). There is much more to this author, however, than just the answer to that trivia question. The more I delve into Capek’s catalog of works, the more I come to admire him as one of the better modernist European writers of the early 20th century. Like his countryman Franz Kafka, Capek’s fiction is often innovative, quirky, and profound. While most of Capek’s published writings fall outside the realm of science fiction, he is best known for two works in that genre: R.U.R. and his 1936 novel War with the Newts.

Captain van Toch, a Czech seaman (apparently not an oxymoron, even for this landlocked nation) leads a pearl-hunting expedition to a South Pacific island. In a secluded cove, he discovers a race of intelligent, chimp-sized, bipedal salamanders living in an underwater community. What would mankind do if we discovered another intelligent species on our planet? Breed them for slave labor, of course! Van Toch soon has the Newts harvesting pearls for him. He transports them to other islands and coastlines all over the world to increase his pearl production. Soon, due to their prolific breeding, the Newts are no longer van Toch’s little secret. As their population grows millions upon millions, the Newts become common knowledge and are taken for granted as manual laborers in many diverse industries.

From his 1922 debut novel The Absolute at Large, Capek resurrects the character of G. H. Bondy, a Czech industrialist who invests in van Toch’s pearl scheme. War with the Newts starts out in very much the same lighthearted humorous tone as that earlier book. While The Absolute at Large, however, just read like one joke repeated over and over again, War with the Newts is delightfully wide-ranging in its satirical targets. Capek manages to lampoon imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, militarism, nationalism, the Nazis, American racism, slavery, British pompousness, the League of Nations, animal cruelty, environmental degradation, religion, and more. War with the Newts is truly an ingenious and innovative work of sci-fi satire.

If there is a flaw to this novel, it’s that Book One is so different in style and tone from Books Two and Three. Book One is written largely in the silly, almost slapstick style of The Absolute at Large. There are even a couple of unnecessary chapters that satirize movie stars and the film industry. Books Two and Three, however, present a dark dystopian future crafted with meticulous and insightful detail. The reader can’t help but admire the levels of depth that Capek builds into this world he has created. The “Newt problem” is explored through political, social, economic, religious, cultural, and evolutionary dimensions, among others. The centerpiece of the novel, Book Two, is a brilliant faux scientific report on the Newts, complete with footnotes, that is permeated by between-the-lines revelations of human cruelty. Even when he’s depicting atrocities, Capek slyly works wry and biting humor into the telling.

A major focus of mockery in the novel is the slave trade. The exploitation of the Newts very much reflects that of Africans in prior centuries. Why write a book satirizing slavery in the 1930s? Likely Capek could see what was coming with the rise of the Nazis, who would soon treat many segments of the European population in much the same inhuman fashion in which the Newts are treated here. A passage on the use of Newts for biological experimentation presages the horrors of Joseph Mengele’s sadistic “research.” World War I was an extravagant showcase of human cruelty, and by the 1930s Capek could look to multiple instances of genocide taking place throughout the world and see the writing on the wall for the next world war. While there may be a dark sense of humor to Capek’s social commentary, one can also learn much from this book. Even today, many of the points made and issues addressed are still sadly valid and relevant.

Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space by Carl Sagan

Big thoughts inspired by unmanned space exploration

When astronomer and science educator Carl Sagan (1934-1996) was at the height of his fame and influence in the 1980s and early ’90s, I was a little too young to appreciate what he had to say. Later in life, however, I have come to enjoy his books and consider him a sort of intellectual hero. Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot, a book on planetary science for a popular audience, was published in 1994. Like many of Sagan’s books, this is a collection of essays and articles, some of which were previously published in magazines and journals, that have been adapted to form a cohesive whole. In this case, the common theme tying the chapters together is our solar system and all the worlds therein: the planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and everything in between. Sagan reviews what we’ve already learned (up until 1994) from unmanned spacecraft launched by NASA and the space agencies of other Earth nations. From there, he ventures into informed speculation on future spaceflight missions, manned and unmanned, and the possibility of colonizing other celestial bodies within our solar system.

The pale blue dot referenced in the title is, of course, our Earth. Pale Blue Dot is also the title of a famous photograph taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1990. In the photo, shot from beyond the orbit of Neptune, the Earth is an infinitesimal dust mote in a sea of black. Sagan specifically discusses the photo in this book of the same title (but the Ballantine ebook edition has no photos, so I had to look it up online). The image is a potent illustration of our insignificance in the universe. In the first few chapters of the book, Sagan dwells on mankind’s tendency towards anthropocentrism, and how each successive astronomical discovery over the past several centuries has proven time and time again that humans from Earth are not the center of the universe. Our insignificance is nothing to be ashamed of, just a matter of fact, and Sagan argues that we can find humble satisfaction in knowing our place as part of the greater whole. 

Not surprisingly, Sagan spends much of the book advocating for a bigger space program and more space missions to learn more about the wonders of our solar system. He argues that although a space program is expensive, NASA’s budget is but a tiny fraction of what the United States spends on weaponry and defense. Much of the was written shortly after Voyager 2’s flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Sagan also discusses at length the findings of some of the earlier Mars and Venus probes. Thirty years after publication, some of the science here maybe outdated, but the philosophical discussions Sagan draws from the science are still valid, and the issues that he raises concerning the space program are still relevant today. Sagan is a big advocate for unmanned space missions. He also debates the pros and cons of manned spaceflight, first asking if it’s really worth the cost in money and lives, then building an argument for a mission to Mars. Other more futuristic projects that Sagan contemplates are developing technology to deliberately redirect asteroids and comets, terraforming other planets and moons for human colonization, and a beefing up of the SETI program’s monitoring of radio waves from space.

Sagan points out that if mankind wants to perpetuate its species forever, we are going to have to eventually spread out and colonize other astronomical bodies before we destroy the Earth or our dying Sun does it for us. Can’t argue with that logic. Sagan, however, might strike some as extreme in his urging that we start working towards such an extraterrestrial diaspora right now. I for one find his “Why wait?” attitude inspiring. Even if we never succeed in building a hotel on Mars, imagine all we would learn in the attempt. Throughout his career, Sagan was driven by the excitement of unlocking the secrets of the universe and building upon humanity’s shared storehouse of knowledge. When you read Pale Blue Dot, that excitement is infectious.

Java Head by Joseph Hergesheimer

Interracial marriage disturbs small New England town

Philadelphia-born author Joseph Hergesheimer (1880-1954) enjoyed some moderate literary success in the early 20th century. His novel Java Head, published in 1919, is his most popular and highly regarded work. Progressive for its time, the novel deals with the issues of interracial marriage, colonialism, and culture clash between the East and West. In 1934, Java Head was adapted into a British feature film starring Anna May Wong.

The Ammidon family owns a shipping company that transports cargo all over the world. Jeremy Ammidon, the patriarch, is a salty old sea dog, now retired. His son William is essentially the CEO who manages the home office or “counting house” in Salem, Massachusetts. William’s brother Gerrit is the firm’s head sea captain who commands its primary sailing ship. The title of Java Head refers to a rocky promontory on the island of Java in Indonesia. It is also the name that Jeremy Ammidon has chosen for the family mansion in Salem. It is at this latter Java Head that the novel takes place. The story never ventures to Indonesia, nor is the reader taken to sea. Unlike metropolitan Boston, Hergesheimer depicts Salem as an insular, provincial, somewhat rednecky town. Many of Salem’s yankees, however, have sailed to Asia, Africa, South America, and the islands of the South Pacific.

The drama begins when Gerrit returns from abroad after a long absence, accompanied by his new Chinese wife. Not surprisingly, this interracial marriage is met with some scorn and indignation: How dare he mate outside his race! A commendably unexpected plot development, however, is that another Salem sailor, an avid sinophile (lover of Chinese culture), is jealous of Gerrit and wants the Chinese woman for himself. Another subplot, not particularly compelling, concerns a Salem woman who has long been in love with Gerrit. This hinges on archaic Victorian conventions that stipulated if a man shows any personal attention to a woman, he’s obligated to marry her, or she’s destined to become a spinster for life. Even if that may be realistic for the time period, it’s hard to take such maudlinness seriously.

Hergesheimer’s prose is annoying from the get-go. You know you’re in for a long haul when the opening pages are spent on an 11-year-old girl contemplating different types of chairs. Then the adult characters constantly spout out non-sequitirs related to distant ports of call, like “It wasn’t bad at Calcutta, either, with an awning on the quarter-deck, watching the carriages and syces in the Maidan and maybe a corpse or two floating about the gangway from the burning ghauts.” OK, I get it, they’re sailors; can we get on with a story now? Judging by all the lengthy descriptions of clothing and furniture, Hergesheimer seems more concerned with showing off his window-dressing skills. “See how clever I am? How I can decorate a stage!” What actually takes place on that stage is almost an afterthought. This kind of verbal ostentation is the same reason I don’t much care for the writings of Joseph Conrad or Rudyard Kipling.

Admittedly, the last few chapters of Java Head are quite good. Hergesheimer finally starts to pay some attention to the Chinese woman at the center of the story. Commendably, she’s not just a racial stereotype. Hergesheimer has clearly done some research into Chinese culture. If anything, he makes her too much of a philosopher and embodiment of Confucianism. Java Head is a short novel, but it still wastes too much time setting the stage before it commences with its story. If the whole book were as interesting as its last three chapters, it would make for a more worthwhile read.

Oil! by Upton Sinclair

The prototype for Lanny Budd

Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil! was published in 1927. It takes place in Southern California, amid fictional towns with names like Angel City and Beach City. The story opens somewhere around 1910. J. Arnold Ross, a former mule driver, has struck it rich as a self-made oil tycoon. He travels around California buying up land and drilling exploratory wells, some of which have paid off quite handsomely. Accompanying him on his business trips is his young son, J. Arnold Ross Jr., nicknamed Bunny. As he grows into manhood, Bunny enjoys the wealthy lifestyle made possible by Dad’s profits, but he doesn’t understand why the laborers who make such profits possible are often forced to live less fortunate lives and endure relative poverty and dangerous occupational hazards. When the oil workers strike against Dad’s company, Bunny finds himself advocating for the workers’ rights. As the story progresses through World War I, the Harding and Coolidge administrations, and the Teapot Dome scandal, Bunny’s personal values grow more and more anti-capitalist, and he becomes a more active ally of the socialist movement in America.

In recent years, Oil! has enjoyed some resurgence of attention because it is the book upon which the film There Will Be Blood is based. There’s very little similarity between that movie and this novel, however, other than they both deal with the oil business during the same time period.

Anyone who has read any of the novels in Sinclair’s Lanny Budd series will be struck by the close resemblance between Oil! and the eleven novels in that series. All are written in exactly the same style. Although dealing with serious subject matter like war, poverty, and labor unrest, the tone of the writing in both cases is oddly breezy and light-hearted, with a somewhat sarcastic humor. Bunny, for all intents and purposes, is Lanny Budd, except that instead of a European playboy, Bunny’s a Californian. Both characters are wealthy young men with wealthy fathers who, despite their high class status, learn to sympathize with the socialist cause. Their leftist ideals clash with those of their more conservative fathers. Lanny and Bunny even have similar love lives, and both become annoyingly involved in séances and mediums, allowing Sinclair to indulge his pet paranormal interest of spiritualism (communication with the dead).

In both cases, Dad’s job and wealth allows the son to mingle with all kinds of important personages. The Lanny Budd series uses real famous people, but almost all of the politicians, movie stars, and tycoons in Oil! are fictitious. Sinclair supplies supporting characters representing all levels of social status and class hierarchy in order to explore events and issues of the period, thus compiling a fictional narrative loaded with “people’s history” in the vein of Howard Zinn. To that end, however, Oil! is less successful than any of the Lanny Budd novels because it’s less realistic in its conspiracy-theories and in its optimistic visions of a utopian socialist future. Sinclair spends many pages praising the Soviet Union to high heaven in this novel. Eventually, after Stalin’s atrocities became common knowledge, he would do some major back-pedaling in books like The Return of Lanny Budd (1953). Despite all of its exaggerations and meandering storytelling, however, like all of Sinclair’s books it nevertheless ends up being a valuable historical document of American culture at the time the story is set, albeit from a leftist perspective.

It’s hard to understand why Oil! is Sinclair’s second best-known book after The Jungle, since it certainly isn’t close to being his second-best book. The Lanny Budd series may be intimidating to those who don’t want to settle in for an 11-novel haul, but it is ultimately worth the effort. Having read about 30 of Sinclair’s books myself, I would also recommend Mountain City and 100%: The Story of a Patriot.

His Family by Ernest Poole

Aging widower with three daughters contends with modern womanhood

Trivia question: What was the first novel to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction? That would be His Family by Ernest Poole, published in 1917. The Chicago-born Poole was better known back in the golden age of muckraking fiction. These days his name is unlikely to ring a bell with anyone but professors of American literature. Poole’s novel His Family, however, is worth more than just the answer to a trivia question. It is a fine work of realism from the World War I era. I had previously read Poole’s novel The Harbor, which was good, but I liked His Family even better.

Roger Gale grew up on a farm in New Hampshire and came to become a successful businessman in New York City. As the novel opens around 1913, he is a widower with three adult daughters. Although one of his daughters is married, all three still depend on him a great deal for emotional and financial support. In his wife’s absence, Roger is resolved to be actively involved in his daughters’ lives and see to their happiness. His daughters are modern women in a modern world, which can be a source of frustration for Roger, whose ideas of feminine gender roles were formed in an earlier era. When the outbreak of the Great War in Europe causes economic troubles in America, this well-to-do upper middle class family faces hard times.

The Gale daughters embody three archetypal women’s roles of a century ago: the devoted mother, the working woman, and the socialite. The eldest daughter, Edith, is a housewife and mother of a handful of children. She is such a dutiful mother that the welfare of her children is all that matters to her, to the degree that she really has no life outside of their care. Deborah is a schoolteacher turned principal turned superintendent of “tenement schools”—i.e. inner-city schools that serve mostly poor immigrant children. A feminist, suffragist, and social reformer, Deborah looks at the 3,000 students under her charge as if they were her own family and drives herself hard in working for their betterment. This prevents her from allowing herself to start a family of her own. Laura, the youngest sister, is a rather flighty party girl who just wants to dress nice and have fun. She takes nothing seriously, including the idea of family, and has resolved not to have children, much to her father’s chagrin. These three sisters are some of the more complexly drawn female characters I’ve encountered in fiction of this era. Though times have changed much in the past century, the Gale daughters still read as real women, not caricatures or stereotypes.

His Family is a thoughtfully written work of realism. It’s not what you could call exciting, because nothing is exaggerated for dramatic effect. One does, however, become very involved in the lives of this family, and the reader comes to anticipate each successive chapter. Unlike a feature film that builds to a powerful climax, the story here is more like an episodic television series. A problem arises, and the family deals with it; then another problem arises, and the family faces that. It’s much like life itself in that regard. Poole is faithful to the naturalist school of literature in showing us the heroic dramas of everyday life without romantic embellishment. Of course, some aspects of life were a bigger deal in 1917 than they are now, like a case of the flu or a divorce. While conveying the gravity of such events, Poole handles them with a ring of truth that still holds up to this day. Perhaps some of the family’s problems are resolved a bit too conveniently, whereas an author of a few decades later might have written with more pessimism.

While The Harbor left me with mixed feelings about Poole’s literary talents, His Family has convinced me that he was one of the better unsung realist writers in early 20th-century America, worthy of being mentioned in the same sentence with Theodore Dreiser or Frank Norris. After reading this fine novel, I’d definitely like to read more of Poole’s work.

Fatelessness by Imre Kertész

Impassive account of Nazi concentration camps

Hungarian author Imre Kertész (1929-2016) won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature. To this date, he is Hungary’s only Nobel laureate in literature. Kertész’s debut novel Fatelessness, published in 1975, is about a 14-year-old Hungarian Jewish boy and his experiences in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Although Kertész once asserted that Fatelessness was not an autobiographical novel, the story closely parallels events in the life of the author, who himself at 14 was imprisoned in the same concentration camps as the novel’s narrator. No doubt the vivid descriptions of life and death in the camps is informed by Kertész’s own first-hand experiences.

As the novel opens, the 14-year-old narrator György Köves is living in Budapest with his father and stepmother. The father has just received an order to report to a Nazi labor camp in a few days. The night before his departure, family and friends gather for a goodbye dinner. Everyone, with the possible exception of György, suspects there is a good chance the father may not return from the labor camp, but no one wants to say it out loud. After the father leaves, György gets a work permit for employment at a petroleum refinery on Csepel Island in the Danube. He likes the work well enough, and he’s happy to be employed. One day, however, the bus that shuttles him from Budapest to the island is stopped by police. György and his coworkers, all Jews, are asked to exit the bus and assemble at a nearby holding station to have their papers examined. The workers see this as merely a bureaucratic inconvenience, until they are detained overnight and then informed that they will be sent to a work camp in Germany. They and many other Jews are then packed and locked into train cars for a three-day journey without a drink of water.

The destination is Auschwitz. The narrator is eventually transferred to Buchenwald and then to a third camp named Zeitz. While today those place names inspire horror due to the atrocities committed there, in Kertész’s narrative, the Jewish internees (or at least the teenagers among them) are very unsuspecting of the camps’ ultimate purpose. During his train ride to Germany, György actually looks forward to arriving at a new work camp. Hopefully the food will be good and the beds comfortable. It never appears to bother him that his family doesn’t know what happened to him, and he may never see them again. Perhaps this is an indication of the Hungarian mindset at the time, having been under the yoke of Germany and the Nazis for some years prior. By this time, the Jews were probably accustomed to oppression, but they were not expecting the mass extermination that was awaiting them at the camps. György eludes execution because he is a male of an age suitable for slave labor.

The tone of this novel is oddly unlike any other Holocaust narrative I’ve ever encountered. The overall feeling is one of abject and even bemused resignation. The narrator describes horrible things he’s seen but never expresses horror, outrage, anger, and very rarely fear. He does complain about hunger and pain, but with an emotionless air of weary acceptance. Kertész is not writing a tearjerking drama here; it reads more like investigative journalism. György speaks almost as if he deserved this treatment, or it was a fate he was powerless to resist. Over time this seems to build into a self-criticism by Kertész, most blatantly in the final chapter, that the Jews were somehow complicit in their tragedy by not being outraged enough, by indulging in too much passive acceptance, as epitomized by György. Of course, that’s only my gentile interpretation of Kertész’s intent, for what it’s worth, which might not be much. After reading Fatelessness, however, I understand more than I did before. Kertész’s rather deadpan descriptions of what went on at Auschwitz and Buchenwald hit me with the reality of the concentration camps more powerfully than many of the more overtly emotional Holocaust dramas that I’ve come across.  

The Black Hunter by James Oliver Curwood

Chivalric romance in the French and Indian Wars

James Oliver Curwood (1878–1927) was a Michigan-born writer who built a successful career writing popular wilderness adventure novels along the lines of Jack London. Many of Curwood’s books are set in Alaska or the Yukon, and some feature canine protagonists, much like London’s The Call of the Wild, White Fang, or Jerry of the Islands, among others. Curwood’s 1926 novel The Black Hunter, however, is a dog of a different color. This is a historical novel set in Quebec during the French and Indian Wars of the 18th century.

The story takes place in 1754 and 1755. David Rock is a young man who lives in the Valley of the Richelieu, a rural area in Southwestern Quebec. Though of English extraction, David lives in New France and is loyal to the French crown. He comes from a poor family and spends much of his time hunting in the nearby forests. His girlfriend, however, is loaded. Anne St. Denis, the daughter of a seigneur, lives in the local chateau. She and David have known each other since childhood and intend to marry. When some bigwigs from Quebec City come to visit Anne’s father, they insult the rustic David, and he responds by throwing two of them into a fountain. Since one of his victims is a high government official—François Bigot, the Intendant of New France—David is sentenced to a flogging. Bigot, however, at the advice of his cronies, pardons David of the sentence. What Bigot really wants is to hook up with the lovely Anne, and he figures he has a better chance of working his way into her heart (or rather her dress) if he is nice to her boyfriend rather than torturing him. The wily Bigot then takes the suspicious David under his wing, offering him a promising career in Quebec, much to the joy of Anne.

When I saw that this novel is set in “Old Quebec,” I expected a lot of backwoods Canada adventure typical of Curwood. Instead, Curwood’s depiction of Canada (New France) feels more like medieval Europe. This is mostly a courtly drama of romance and honor, somewhat along the lines of a Sir Walter Scott novel such as Ivanhoe, except that the good-versus-evil, damsel-in-distress triangle in this storyline is about as formulaic as the cartoon adventures of Dudley Do-Right, Nell Fenwick, and Snidely Whiplash. The book defies believability in the lengths that the villains go to pretend they are David’s friends and benefactors. In reality, if a powerful man of the 18th century wanted a helpless woman, he would probably use more barbaric methods rather than go to such sly lengths, but this is fiction not history, and that wouldn’t make much of a novel.

Most of the characters in the book, including Bigot, are real figures from Canadian history. Even the Black Hunter is a figure of local legend. He is a White man with black hair and black clothes, a nomadic backwoodsman with mythical skills as a hunter and warrior, like a cross between the Outlaw Josey Wales and James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty “Hawkeye” Bumppo. While David is the star of the book, the Black Hunter is a supporting character who barely appears in the book.

Only in the last quarter of the book does Curwood really dive into the French and Indian Wars, but that is the best part of the book. He has clearly done his research, and the brutality and gore of the final chapters belies the genteel chivalric tone of what came before. The treatment of Native Americans in the book is complicated. They are depicted largely as savage killing machines, but it is acknowledged that they have been made so by the English and French, with bounties and booze, who use the Indians for their own selfish ends. If Curwood had concentrated more on the wars and the Whites relations with the First Nations, it would have been a better book. Instead, you have to wade through an awful lot of wholesome romance and courtly intrigue to get to the good stuff. Nevertheless, the novel is fine overall and one of Curwood’s better efforts.