Nothing Mickey Mouse About It: A Century of Amoral Rodents

By Dale D. Dalenberg, M.D.

January 5, 2014

An important centennial sneaked by un-noticed this October 28: the 100th anniversary of the publication of the first Krazy Kat comic strip by George Herriman. The character of Krazy Kat had first appeared in Herriman’s newspaper comic strips in 1909 or 1910, but the Kat didn’t headline a strip until October 28, 1913. This most influential of comic strips then lasted several decades, until Herriman’s death in 1944.  It’s most ardent fan was none other than William Randolph Hearst, who kept the Kat going in his newspapers long after most everyone else had stopped reading. Krazy Kat had it’s greatest popularity in the World War I era, and readership gradually dropped off over the years.  Hearst loved the strip and kept it alive. When Herriman died, Hearst allowed the strip to die with him and did not designate an artist successor.  

Krazy Kat has gone on to become a legendary comic strip adored by comic artists and critics.  Many comic strip artists claim it as a major influence. And serious literary critics have waxed eloquent about it since the 1920’s. The premise is deceptively simple.  There are three major characters: Krazy Kat, Ignatz Mouse, and Offissa Pup. The cat is in love with the mouse, but all the mouse wants to do is to bean the cat in the head with a brick.  The cat misinterprets the mouse’s intentions as a sign of love. Offissa Pup is a dog dressed as a sheriff who tries to inject some order into the surrounding mayhem. The whole thing takes place against an-ever shifting backdrop supplied by scenes inspired by Coconino County, in northern Arizona, where Herriman would often vacation.  Other characters (a stork, a duck, etc.) wander in and out of the action, but the main thrust of the strip for over 30 years was the endless permutation of interactions between the three principle characters, the cat, the mouse, and the dog.  

There is no question that Krazy Kat is a strange production. The desert landscapes in the background of the action shift surrealistically. Often the characters will be in the same pose having a conversation across several panels of the strip while the desert mesas and vegetation in the background have completely changed from panel to panel. The lengths to which Ignatz Mouse will go to bean the cat with a brick often reach the height of demented lunacy.  One week the mouse is manufacturing bricks wholesale in a brick factory; another time he is trying to bribe the stork into colluding with an aerial brick attack upon the cat; and so on for 30 years of one mouse conspiring to hurl bricks at a cat and trying to avoid being arrested for it by the dog.  

Krazy Kat is a literary wonder among comic strips, rivaled only perhaps by Pogo, another defunct masterpiece that we will discuss in a future blog.  The Kat, who is somewhere on the axis between being a simpleton or being a savant, speaks in a polylingual argot that has Yiddish and other less identifiable languages thrown in.  Like watching Shakespeare comedies, you have to get into the Krazy Kat idiom for a while before you pick up on how funny some of the lines are.  Another odd feature:  many analysts have pointed out the sexual ambiguity of the characters and situations in Krazy Kat.  And that’s not just revisionist psycho-analysis.  Herriman himself was very vague on Krazy’s sexual identity and made a point of calling him a he and a she at various times in the strip.  

For me, Herriman’s most enduring creation is Ignatz Mouse. He is mischievous, clever, and a total scofflaw.  Here is a 4-panel daily strip from 1918-19 to illustrate my point.  

Far and away the most creative and consistently hilarious comic strip being published in newspapers today is Stephan Pastis’s Pearls Before Swine.  While Pearls has a lot of sub-plots with separate little enclaves of characters for each sub-plot, the main story always gets back to Rat (a self-assured, amoral rodent with no concept of political correctness) and Pig (who is just delightfully dumb.)  Much of the humor in Pearls derives from the fact that Rat is innocent of how evil he really is and Pig is innocent of his own stupidity. Like the title implies, if you show each of these characters themselves in a mirror, they wouldn’t recognize themselves. If you throw pearls before swine, they fail to appreciate the value.  

I have no idea whether Pastis has studied Herriman’s Krazy Kat, or if the similarity arose independently from two creators working a century apart, but there is no question that Rat is a descendant of Ignatz Mouse.  Both characters have an evil innocence about them that is quite disarming. They are both bad, bad rodents, but you cheer them on. 

Literary Pilgrimage: San Francisco

By Dale D. Dalenberg, M.D.

December 1, 2013

We here at the Dalenberg Library are all about literary pilgrimages. I’ve personally been to Edgar Poe’s grave in Baltimore, which is in a slightly creepy city churchyard with actual crypts, where Poe is buried with his female relatives alongside a bunch of War of 1812 veterans.I’ve visited the Bahia Mar Marina in Fort Lauderdale where John MacDonald’s fictional sleuth and “salvage expert” Travis McGee moored his fictional houseboat, The Busted Flush.  I’ve traveled to Mission San Juan Bautista for no other reason than that’s where Carlotta Valdes (as played by Kim Novak) plunged to her death (twice) from the bell tower in Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo, which was based on a novel by Pierre Boileau & Thomas Narcejac, who revolutionized suspense stories by adding psychology to the mix (see my review in this blog some months ago of Eyes Without a Face.)

Now, freshly returned to the Plains from the San Francisco area, I’ll share three more literary pilgrimages.  Snapped some photos.  Here they are:

It is still possible to do a walking tour of Dashiell Hammett’s 1930 novel The Maltese Falcon.  The places and addresses in downtown San Francisco really haven’t changed all that much.  You can see the corner where Sam Spade’s partner was killed in the novel.  And highlight of any such tour is a visit to John’s Grill, which has celebrated over a century in existence.  Hammett’s detective Sam Spade stops to eat there in the novel, chops and sliced tomatoes and whatnot, and you can still order the meal at John’s Grill.  The Dalenberg Library copy of The Maltese Falcon is in a Library of America compilation of his works, which isn’t all that exciting to show here, but we do have a collection of vintage Dell mapbacks, which is a lot more interesting to show off on the antique popular literature blog.  This is Dell #411 from 1950, which includes the only three other Sam Spade stories that Hammett wrote, plus a couple other miscellaneous short stories.  

North Beach is easily one of my favorite spots in San Francisco.  It is an eclectic mix of literature, Italian restaurants, imposing churches, and strip clubs, with the booming edges of Chinatown trying to edge its way in.  City Lights Bookstore, in North Beach, remains to this day a bastion to the Beat Poets, still owned and operated by one of the greatest of them, Lawrence Ferlinghetti.  I discovered Ferlinghetti while doing a poetry project in high school, and I have returned to him again and again since.  He is not a great literary poet, but I truly don’t think he pretends to be.  He is a very humorous poet, and he can be a biting satirical poet at the same time.  His views are very liberal, coming from what would have been considered a counterculture sensibility at one time in the past.  He ran with the Allen Ginsberg/Jack Kerouac crowd.  He is VERY good for reading out loud.  I particularly enjoy one wall of the bookstore upstairs, which is dedicated to the Beat Poets.  I always buy something off that wall when I am there. Since City Lights is a publisher as well as a bookstore, buying their books right from their store seems as fresh as drinking springwater from the source. 

One such book purchased at the source is Pictures of the Gone World by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.  This copy is Number One in City Lights’ Pocket Poets Series.  It is a  Second Edition from 1995 of Ferlinghetti’s 1955 book.  Turn to page 25 for an excerpt:

     The world is a beautiful place

                          to be born into

If you don’t mind some people dying 

                    all the time

           or maybe only starving

                     some of the time

         which isn’t half so bad

                                          if it isn’t you

Nowadays, Cannery Row in Monterey is dominated by the famous Aquarium, the memory of John Steinbeck, a row of tourist shops, and of course, beautiful views of Monterey Bay.  Every now and then you can get an evocation of older, wilder times.  I’ve dined by the Bay and watched real wild sea otters playing on the rocks below my window. They seemed oblivious to all the salt water taffy and Made in China objects being sold on the street above.  

Steinbeck’s novella Cannery Row from 1945 sketches a time before tourism. Doc’s Western Biological laboratory was a real place, and Doc was a real person.  The building still stands.  The story is full of poetic descriptions, but just the first paragraph give you a hint:

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.  Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants, and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses.  Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, “whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,” by which he meant Everybody.  Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, “Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,” and he would have meant the same thing.  

The Dalenberg Library copy of Cannery Row is in the 1963 edition of The Short Novels of John Steinbeck (originally published in 1953 by The Viking Press.)  New theatrical adaptations of Of Mice and Men show up every now and then.  Back when kids used to be encouraged to read literature in school, before they dumbed everything down with standardized tests and “No Child Left Behind,” Steinbeck’s The Pearl and The Red Pony was on the reading lists in junior high or high schools.  Now you get to read them for fun. Do people still do that? 

Two tentpoles of the Harlem Renaissance

W.E.B. DuBois, the leading African-American intellectual of his time, from Molesworth’s new biography of Countee Cullen. Both Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes were championed by DuBois, who was an influence to both poets.  DuBois’ famous book, The Souls of Black Folk, appeared in 1903. DuBois published Hughes’ first nationally published, and most signature, poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” in his journal The Crisis, in 1921.  And DuBois was, for a time, Cullen’s father-in-law. This photo is by Carl Van Vechten, white chronicler and patron (and contributor) to the Harlem Renaissance, who will be the subject of a future blog on white contributions to the Harlem Renaissance.  

By Dale D. Dalenberg, M.D.

November, 24, 2013

The Dalenberg Library isn’t all mystery & science fiction, pulp magazines and comic books. The poetry section is bigger than most bookstores, or libraries, that I know. So we should look at a poet or two every month.  

Generally speaking, poetry is more to the literary end of the spectrum covered by the Antique Popular Literature collection, but despite that, let me say that I don’t have much truck with university poets. Poets need to have something to say, and that something needs to come from some kind of life other than that of an academic with a “publish or perish” agenda. The Dalenberg Library is more interested in William Carlos Williams, because he was a doctor, or Wallace Stevens, because he was an insurance attorney. These poets had lives outside of poetry. Give me a war poet who penned his lines with bombs dropping all around him. Give me a street poet any day over a university professor. Give me a rapper laying down some rhymes. Give me LL Cool J or Eminem over some PhD. 

It’s a topic for another essay, but there is a lineage to be traced from the jazz poets of the Harlem Renaissance to the Beat poets of the 1950’s to the hip-hop emcees of today. Today, we’ll start at the beginning of that lineage, in the Harlem Renaissance. 

The two most celebrated poets of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920’s were Langston Hughes (1902-1967) and Countee Cullen (1903-1946.) For some reason, the past year has been a time of resurgence for both these men. Langston Hughes’ play Black Nativity is getting a big screen musical treatment this year, opening in theaters on November 27. Countee Cullen has seen a biography out this past year (And Bid Him Sing by Charles Molesworth, University of Chicago Press) and a Collected Poems (American Poets Project—The Library of America, edited by Major Jackson.)

Both Hughes and Cullen were promising young men who wrote memorable work right out of their teens. Hughes’ signature poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” was written when he was 18. Cullen’s most famous two poems were written in his early 20s (“Yet Do I Marvel” and “Incident”). Both men enshrined the hustle and bustle of Harlem life in their youthful poetry, imbued with heavy doses of commentary on their African-American culture. They were both much influenced by (and in turn respected by) the black thought leaders of their day, men such as Alain Locke,  W.E.B. DuBois, and James Weldon Johnson. Countee Cullen’s first book of poems, Color, appeared in 1925, and it signaled the arrival of a kind of black poetic messiah, a young writer who could discuss black themes in the same language as the famous (mostly white) European poets that preceded him. Langston Hughes first book of poems, The Weary Blues, was published in 1926. Hughes’ poetry was a freer, looser form of expression than Cullen’s (which was very formal, metered and rhymed and sticking to classic forms.)  

Starting with that first book, Langston Hughes helped originate what later came to be known as jazz poetry. It was characterized by references to jazz/blues culture and with lyrics that had rhythms, refrains, and chants equally suited to jazz music as to poetry. Because of his eschewing traditional forms and evoking popular music in his lyrics, some critics since have lampooned Hughes for being a lazy poet, or at least a not very literary one. But his work remains accessible, and at its best it evokes its surroundings and its era.  Hughes achieves a distillation of his time and place into his poetry. Poems like “Harlem Sweeties,” “Mother to Son,” and “The Weary Blues” transport you to Harlem in the 1920s while at the same time having more timeless things to say with resonances that still make them relevant. “Mother to Son,” with its refrain “Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair,” may be autobiographical about a certain young man and his mother in a certain place at a certain time, but it generalizes to become an encouragement for all people everywhere to rise above humble origins.   

Countee Cullen gets criticized for exactly the opposite reasons as Langston Hughes.  Cullen was devoted to traditional verse forms, so in a time (the 1920s) when art was trending toward modernism, he wrote in an archaic style. Some mostly black critics have faulted him for not being original enough, for being too devoted to forms created by his white poetic predecessors, for essentially being a sell-out to a kind of white poetry written by a black man. On the other hand, some who praise him for sticking to traditional verse forms go so far as to say the only reason he’s still known is because he was a black man writing about black topics, and other than that he’s not that great of a poet. Neither of those critical approaches to Cullen does him justice. Such criticisms point up a dilemma that still haunts African-American artists today. If they become too accessible to the general non-black audience, they get dismissed by their own people as being “Oreos”, black people who are really white inside. At the same time, the successful African-American artist runs the risk of being dismissed by white people as only have “got there” because he had the affirmative action advantage of being black.  

Frankly, most of the aforementioned criticisms about both these writers don’t amount to much, and they certainly do not detract from an appreciation of their poetry. Both poets are worth reading today, both as poets in general outside of their context, but especially if you put them in the context of when and where they were writing. As you read Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen today, you realize that they both shouldered a tremendous burden as representatives of their race, and that they knew about that burden, and that they took it seriously. This was an important motif of the Harlem Renaissance, that black artists should be creating art that reflected on black origins, black culture, furthered the African American struggle for civil rights and social equality, and put the lie to the notion of white supremacy. W.E.B. DuBois was very impressed that Cullen’s verse could be mistaken for Browning or Tennyson, because for him it was proof that African Americans were equal to their white counterparts. About black artists creating black art, DuBois actually made the statement, “I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.” There is a kind of revisionism today that has exalted the works of the Harlem Renaissance (the novels of Zora Neale Hurston, for instance) to a status equal to the works of Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, etc, in the mainstream of American literature. Maybe it is high time that happened. But to look back to the 1920’s and place ourselves in the shoes of the black thinkers and black artists of those days, they were acutely aware that their art was not on the same shelf as Hemingway, and that the function of black art as propaganda for the black people was very important. Countee Cullen’s solution was to excel at telling the black story with the same skill and using the same techniques as white writers, proving to W.E.B. DuBois and the world that a black writer could be every bit as skillful and powerful as, say, Longfellow. Langston Hughes’ solution was to tell the exact same story (Cullen’s and Hughes’ subject matter often overlapped, because they were surrounded by the same inspirations) in a language inspired by the sights and sounds and music indigenous to African-American culture.  

Ironically, it is W.E.B. DuBois himself who sets up an apparent contradiction as we strive to appreciate the work of the Harlem Renaissance writers. The contradiction consists in whether black artists should stick to black messages or graduate to being artists in general with a more universal appeal. DuBois was thrilled that Countee Cullen had the skill to be mistaken for Tennyson, but DuBois also reveled in black art as black propaganda. DuBois is one of the originators of the concept of “whiteness studies,” a discipline which makes much of the unstated advantages of being white in our society. “Whiteness studies” outline the advantages that white people take for granted but that people of color (black, Hispanic, etc) see as obvious, glaring inequalities. One of the things you always hear about in “whiteness studies” is that white people are free to write about or create art about anything, but that African-Americans are artistically shackled because it is always expected that their writing or art must be some kind of referendum on their race. Thus, the standard set by thinkers like DuBois in the 1920’s for “Negro” artists, that their art should be about blackness and serve to further black causes, has become a difficult thing for black artists to deal with and move beyond in the decades since. Even Cullen during his lifetime chafed at this limitation placed on him by his racial identity. In a 1924 interview, he proclaimed, “If I am going to be a poet at all, I am going to be POET and not NEGRO POET.” It can be argued that Langston Hughes has stood the test of time better than Cullen, because unlike Cullen, Hughes embraced modernism in his poetry, Hughes’ lyrics sang more true to his “race” than Cullen, who was a black poet singing with a voice indistinguishable from, say, Keats. In fact, Keats was a big influence on Cullen, whereas you could say that his own autobiography and the goings-on in the street was a bigger influence for Hughes. Nowadays, black artists continue to be frustrated that everything they do is interpreted with reference to their “race.” But often, when the same artists cross over to mainstream success, they get accused by their own people of selling out. Black people stopped buying M.C. Hammer albums when white people embraced his music. The soul of W.E.B. DuBois still casts a long shadow. Even in death, he’s still praising black artists for propagating a black message, but he’s giving them kudos for achieving a level of indistinguishability from white artists.  

Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes, for all their similar backgrounds, using the same backdrop of Harlem in the 1920’s for inspiration, stand at opposite ends of the poetic spectrum. The content of their poems is similar, the things they are trying to say. But the form of their works are quite different when compared, Cullen’s rigid versifying in meters, stanzas and rhyme, and Hughes’ free-form jazz poetry. Here is an example of the difference, comparing two poems about the same subject, drawn from the streets of Harlem in the 1920’s.  Like Langston Hughes, Cullen also draws from his own autobiography for his poetry, as this poem isn’t just about streetwalkers, but it is also richly informed by Cullen’s own struggle with heathenism versus Christianity, as he was the adopted son of a minister who struggled life-long with his own doubts about his adopted father’s faith.  

Black Magdalens 

by Countee Cullen 

These have no Christ to spit and stoop

    To write upon the sand, 

Inviting him that has not sinned

    To raise the first rude hand. 

And if he came they could not buy

    Rich ointment for his feet, 

The body’s sale scarce yields enough

    To let the body eat. 

The chaste clean ladies pass them by

    And draw their skirts aside,

But Magdalens have a ready laugh; 

    They wrap their wounds in pride.  

They fare full ill since Christ forsook

    The cross to mount a throne,

And Virtue still is stooping down

    To cast the first hard stone. 

Young Prostitute

by Langston Hughes

Her dark brown face

Is like a withered flower

On a broken stem. 

Those kind come cheap in Harlem

So they say. 

A Hammer Films Double Feature

By Dale D. Dalenberg, M.D.

November 17, 2013

The Dalenberg Library of Antique Popular Literature convenes its Film Society again this week to screen vintage suspense films from 1960/61. The British film production company Hammer Films provides us with a back catalog that is a treasure trove of lurid potboilers, film noir, science fiction, and especially, horror films. Founded in 1934 and continuing in its latest iteration today, the peak of Hammer Horror was the mid-50’s into the 1970’s. Certain actors’ work became synonymous with the look and feel of Hammer Horror, such as Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. It is really as an homage to Hammer Horror that we got to see Cushing show up in the original Star Wars and Lee in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films and George Lucas’s later  Star Wars  sequels.  

For me, one of the attractions of many Hammer films is their B movie ambience and a certain antiquated lack of modern political correctness. There is often a hint of a then-future R rating bubbling up beneath the surface waiting to erupt. There is usually a cast of unknowns acting their hearts out in their one chance at cinematic glory.  Sometimes, there is a whole plot device based on blatant pseudo-science that wouldn’t actually work in the real world.  

. . .and sometimes Hammer gave us a film that featured then-unknowns on the cusp of bigger things in their careers.  One such film is the first in this week’s double feature:

These Are the Damned  (1961)

Columbia Pictures presents a Hammer Film production.  Produced by Anthony Hinds, Directed by Joseph Losey, Screenplay by Evan Jones, based on a novel by H.L. Lawrence.  Starring:  McDonald Carey, Shirley Ann Field, Viveca Lindfors, 

Alexander Knox, and an early, memorable performance by Oliver Reed.

In These Are the Damned, Swedish actress Viveca Lindfors plays a sculptor who lives on a cliff overlooking the ocean.  Her haunting sculptures form only part of the strange mise-en-scène of this wonderfully weird movie.  

Hammer produced one of the their most atmospheric, suspenseful masterpieces in this offbeat experiment of a film, directed by the great Joseph Losey, who at this point had escaped McCarthy-era blacklisting in Hollywood.  In 1961, Losey was just a couple years shy of his greatest film achievements in The Servant and Accident.  These Are the Damned was so inscrutable to the distributors that both the English and the American releases had their running times substantially cut. Thankfully, Columbia Pictures has re-released some collections of these Hammer Films on quality DVDs, so this film is now presented with a pristine black & white picture, its original 2.35:1 aspect ratio, and its original running time restored.  

Briefly, the plot concerns a couple on the run from a gang of motorcycle hooligans who stumble into a secret government installation and discover 9 imprisoned radioactive children. The children, born of mothers who were exposed to a nuclear accident, are being raised by government handlers as a hedge against the coming nuclear holocaust, because it is believed that their intrinsic radioactivity will make it possible to them to survive the conditions following a nuclear war.  The science is shaky, but when you watch the movie you don’t care, because the film in convincingly spine-tingling.  While These Are the Damned takes as its starting premise the same nuclear threat that fueled most science fiction films from the late 1950’s, it presents a unique take on the topic, approaching it from a different angle than any other film.  It doesn’t even start out as a science fiction film, and you are well into the plot development before you even get your first inklings that you are dealing with a science fiction story.  

The Hammer charms are everywhere evident here.  The film is wide screen and glossy, but it has a B movie feel.  It is offbeat and edgy. It benefits from not having a big name star (Oliver Reed was not yet a household name at this point). And it does not have a happy ending, as most of the principal characters die, or about to die, at the end of the film, while the radioactive children who tried to escape their environs are all captured and re-imprisoned and crying out for help over the closing credits.  It’s a harrowing ending that stays with you.  And when you take a film home from the theater afterwards, that is a sign of an effective film.  

But, we didn’t go home afterwards—we stayed for another Hammer film:

Never Take Candy From a Stranger (1960)—original British title: Never Take Sweets From a Stranger

Columbia Films presents a Hammer Film production.  Produced by Anthony Hinds, Directed by Cyril Frankel, Screenplay by John Hunter.  Starring:  Gwen Watford, Patrick Allen, Felix Aylmer, and Niall MacGinnis.

Part social commentary, part film noir, this Hammer manages to tackle pedophilia and inject what could have been a preachy message picture with some real tension as an outsider in a small town goes up against the corrupt establishment. Along the way, we get treated to some disturbing images of Hammer Horror as British character actor Felix Aylmer turns in some of the most memorable snapshots of demented pedophilia since Peter Lorre in Fritz Lang’s M decades earlier.  

The events take place in a small Canadian town where an outsider has moved his family to become the new high school principal. His 10-year old daughter and a friend are enticed into a sexual situation with the promise of candy by the senile and aging patriarch of the family who runs the sawmill and therefore the town. The prominent family knows granddad has a problem with little girls, but they have successfully kept it under wraps like everything else in their town. But this time, the enraged parents press charges.  Naturally, in the course of terrorizing the child by forcing her to be a witness in court, among other insults, the charges get dropped, and the newcomers prepare to move out of town. The climactic scenes have granddad, moving like a stroke-afflicted Frankenstein monster, chasing the girls through the woods, police with dogs and parents frantically combing the countryside for the missing kids, and not catching up with grand-dad until he has killed one of the girls after molesting her in an abandoned cabin.   

The film has even more resonance today because it is so dated.  It comes from a time before Amber alerts.  People in this movie apparently don’t even know the word “pedophile” yet.  Part of the creepiness you feel watching this is the notion that people used to get away with bad stuff in small towns because of the same conspiracy of silence depicted in this story. 

Clinton T. Duffy was a well-known warden of San Quentin penitentiary for many years, prison reformer and outspoken opponent of capital punishment (although he presided over more than 80 executions during his tenure.)  His 1965 book “Sex and Crime” presents  earlier ideas about pedophilia typical of the time frame of Never Take Candy From a Stranger ( the Dalenberg Library copy is the first Pocket Books pb. printing  from Aug. 1967).  Duffy’s book is not very scientific, based almost entirely on personally acquired anecdotes and experiences in his long life as a prison warden. The main theory he advances in the book, largely based on a kind of dime store Freudianism, is that 90% of inmates’ crimes were related to sexual problems, even things like burglary and forgery.  In his chapter on child molesters, he does hammer home the concept that they are bad recidivists and often cannot be rehabilitated. But he departs from modern thinking by saying that most child molesters are either 1) people with physical issues who couldn’t attract normal female relationships, or 2) older men who are having trouble with sexual performance and therefore turn to children (which is seemingly the stereotype portrayed in Never Take Candy From a Stranger.)  These are quaint views by comparison with contemporary research.  Oddly, Duffy fails to mention in his Child Molesters chapter any examples of children being physically injured or murdered by their molesters, and in his other chapter on sex-related Murder, he doesn’t give any examples of children being murdered.  A lot has changed since the 1960’s, including among other things the murder of John Walsh’s son Adam in 1981 (spawning various reforms and “America’s Most Wanted”), the passing of Amber laws, and the dawn of the Internet era creating a whole new frontier for pedophiles and pedophile-trackers alike.  

In Memory of Richard Matheson (1926 – 2013)

 By Dale D. Dalenberg, M.D.

 November 10, 2013

Even in the Internet era, news sometimes travels slowly, as I just learned this month of the passing of Richard Matheson on June 23. There has always been a special place in the Dalenberg Library for Mr. Matheson. His stories, novels, and screenplays occupy a unique position at the cusp between science fiction, horror, and fantasy, and an even more unique position at the intersection between genre science fiction and popular entertainment. Long before anybody else was able to pull it off, Matheson brought legitimate science fiction from the world of paperback originals and sf digest magazines into the mainstream entertainment world, starting with his screenplay for his own novel The Shrinking Man (1956; filmed in 1957 as “The Incredible Shrinking Man”) and culminating in his 16 teleplays for Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone TV series.  Duel became Steven Spielberg’s first film, an effective made-for-TV thriller in 1971.  Later years saw a succession of fine films either written by or inspired by Matheson, memorably including Somewhere in Time (1980),  What Dreams May Come (1998) and Real Steel (2011).  

The Dalenberg Library boasts a copy of the Summer, 1950, issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, only the 3rd issue of that long-running digest.  F&SF from the 1950’s is a veritable cornucopia of classic or soon-to-be-classic authors and stories.  It is a joy to pick up many of the issues from this period and read the who’s-who list of writers on the contents page.  Matheson’s very first published story “Born of Man and Woman” was an instant classic and has been occasionally anthologized since.  I was very affected by it in high school, and I tried to do a pantomime to it in drama class, but the teacher couldn’t figure out what I was trying to portray.  That was more a testament to my mime skills than to Matheson’s story, however.  

The May, 1956, 1st printing of The Shrinking Man was Matheson’s second Gold Medal paperback original novel, after I Am Legend.  These two books are pivotal 1950’s science fiction works with influence far outstripping their humble origins as throw-away paperbacks.  The Shrinking Man was Matheson’s foot in the door to Hollywood.  His screenplay the following year became “The Incredible Shrinking Man,” still one of the films of that era that rang truest to the sense of awe and wonder that sf fans got out of their literature.  When I saw it as a child, I thought the ending was mind-blowing as the hero was shrinking ever and ever smaller with the unknown microscopic cosmos  awaiting him with new discoveries and new terrors unimagined.  It’s still powerful today.  

1958’s A Stir of Echoes became a rather average Kevin Bacon vehicle in 1999 (Matheson didn’t write the screenplay.)  But I had discovered it several years earlier in this Detective Book Club 3-in-1 edition.  It is a creepy mystery that morphs into a ghost story. The Detective Book Club editions are ubiquitous in antique or used bookstores that have lots of vintage mystery fiction. As collectibles, they are generally not worth that much, but they are fun to collect and look good on the book shelf.  I have never been able to find a definitive list of them, but collectors on line have reported finding up to 900 unique editions in the 3-in-1 format. Based on my own reading, the selections are a remarkably solid cross-section of popular mystery fiction published between the 1940’s and 1970’s.  They are not to be confused with the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, which were in a similar multiple-novel-in-a-single-volume format during most of the same years.  The Reader’s Digest Condensed Books were abridgements of bestsellers, and like most of Reader’s Digest’s output, completely distasteful to discerning readers.  The Detective Book Club editions are NOT abridged, and from what I can tell, they were tastefully selected by people who care about mystery fiction.  

This 2002 anthology of Matheson’s horror stories is dedicated to Stephen King and kicks off with an effusive intro by Mr. King himself.  The stories are a diverse mix of 1951 to 1969 material first published in magazines as diverse as Fantasy & Science Fiction, Weird Tales, and Playboy.  The title story, of course, is the basis for the famed Twilight Zone episode starring William Shatner as a man afraid of flying who sees a monster on the wing that is going to bring down the plane, only nobody believes him. John Lithgow did a fine, paranoid turn on the same character in the only good segment of the otherwise forgettable Twilight Zone: The Movie in 1983.  A number of years ago, I slogged through all the original Twilight Zone TV episodes, back when Columbia House used to charge too much money for VHS tapes of old television episodes, but I bought them anyway, because it was the only way to see the shows.  Now the tapes are worthless, because you can get everything on DVD or even Blu-Ray.  But I keep them anyway, because I must have spent about $1,000 on Twilight Zone episodes.  Anyway, I rated all the shows and found that about one-third of Twilight Zone was excellent classic television, one-third was at least average fare, and one-third was awful (mostly because of preachiness or Rod Serling’s purple prose).  Of 5 seasons and 159 episodes, the 16 Richard Matheson episodes are heavily represented in the excellent third. October 4 and October 11, 1963, featured the television premieres in two successive weeks of Matheson’s arguably best screenplays based on his own short stories, “Steel” and “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.”