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6/29/2010 2:37:08 PM
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AHMM Editorial
Posts 45
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The Pleasures of Rereading
I recently ran across this blog post about the forgotten writer Robert Colby. Apparently he had published in AHMM. I’m always interested to learn about the forgotten and neglected authors. Who are your favorites? Bonus points for writers who published with AHMM.
We think of fat thrillers as summer reads, but summer for me is a time to reread old books from college or read for the first time the book I should have already read by now. Right now I am rereading the stories of John Cheever. I am admiring the simple (or deceptively simple) artistry of the stories, and the economy with which he captures all we need to know about a character for the story to begin. In “The Enormous Radio,” Irene Westcott is described aptly by her “forehead upon which nothing had been written,” and her husband Jim as “intentionally naive.” They are a 20th-century Adam and Eve, who are seduced by a radio with a “sensitivity to discord” that picks up and broadcasts snippets of the private lives of the other tenants in their building. This is a terrific premise on which to build a story, and it can go in so many directions, but Cheever controls his material to the narrow world that surrounds the elevator shaft of the Westcotts’ apartment building. At the center of this universe is the living room in which the enormous radio, with its “malevolent green lights,” resides. Cheever manages in a few pages to capture a culture and class of people and their discontents and illusions with a careful stacking of revealed details.
My new read this summer will be Jane Eyre, but I first going to go back to our archives and find the Robert Colby stories. What are you planning on reading over the summer?
Linda Landrigan
Editor. AHMM
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6/29/2010 10:49:13 PM
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Jeff Baker
Posts 132
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I'll probably bum my way through some of A.C. Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories again. Then I may get around to reading through some of his stories I haven't read yet! (Every time I sit down to read Doyle or Kipling I find myself going to the stuff I've already read first!) Oh, and I do have my copy of the Criminal Brief anthology (Many Thanks Folks!)
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6/30/2010 11:01:39 AM
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Jon L. Breen
Posts 67
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Richard Deming was a very good and very prolific short-story writer for MANHUNT in the 1950s, later contributed frequently in the early days of AHMM. Once or twice in EQMM, and he was one of the EQ ghosts on their 1960s paperback originals. Possibly the greatest AHMM writers of them all were Henry Slesar and Jack Ritchie.
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