"Forty Lashes Less One" by Elmore Leonard (Bantam, 1972)

Elmore Leonard broke the mold when he wrote Forty Lashes Less One. He not only put the “wild” back into the “Wild West,” he made it crazier than ever before. Originally published in 1972, today the book still exudes a rare and precious chaotic energy and uninhibited creativity. When you get right down to it, the book is totally twisted—the humor is surreal, the violence palpable, and the characters are amoral at best. The story doesn’t proceed in any conventional direction, and it’s difficult to predict exactly where Leonard is taking you—and perhaps that’s because even the characters seem to be at a complete loss for control. Leonard leaves the typical Western paradigms in the dust, and instead creates something fresh, daring, and truly innovative.

As Forty Lashes Less One begins, Yuma penitentiary is getting a new superintendent, the ironically named Mr. Everett Manly. A minister by trade, he has no prior prison experience. Arriving at the same time is former soldier named Harold Jackson, Right away, the predominantly white inmates single him out because he’s black, but Harold remains defiant and holds his head high. Frank Shelby, the local kingpin among the inmates, decides to put Harold in his place and engineers a fight between him and another outcast, a Chiricahua Apache named Raymond San Carlos.

After spending time in the hole—“the snake den,” as they call it—Raymond and Harold become friends. Things begin to get strange when Mr. Manly decides to reform the two prisoners in an unconventional way: he wants them to become “warriors” like their ancestors. Raymond and Harold realize Mr. Manly is a little cuckoo, but who are they to argue for getting out of work duty? So, they run in the fields all day, and practice throwing spears. Then comes word that Yuma Penitentiary is shutting down. Everyone knows that Frank Shelby is going to try and make his escape. Meanwhile, Raymond and Harold start to plan their own escape, and how to exact revenge on Shelby and his goons.

That, in a nutshell, is Forty Lashes Less One. But it is a highly condensed nutshell that loses the ferocity of the characters, the spontaneity of the plot, and the unexpected humor and violence of the narrative. Everything unfolds so whimsically that the story feels alternately like a hardboiled prison narrative, a magical realist fantasy, and farcical nightmare. At points, Leonard seems to even be channeling the sardonic, anticlerical humor of Luis Buñuel, particularly in Mr. Manly’s attempts at educating Harold and Jackson about the Bible. Manly’s story about how all men are brothers turns into an unintended defense for incest. And Manly even admits to himself that one of the biggest motivations for him reforming these prisoners is so that, in the eyes of God, he might be redeemed for lusting after the female prisoners. Mr. Manly may be a minister, but his soul is as impure and corrupt as the murderers in his prison.

One of the reasons Forty Lashes Less One feels so unique is that, in many ways, it runs completely antithetical to the traditional Western. The West is supposed to offer endless horizons, heavenly vistas, and opportunities for renewal and purification. Forty Lashes Less One is the exact opposite: almost the entire book takes place within the penitentiary walls, and a significant portion even takes place in solitary confinement. All the characters are filthy, sweaty, and covered in blood or feces or sand. Even the brief glimpses of the landscape don’t inspire hope in the prisoners: “There was nothing out there but sky and rocks and desert growth that looked as if it would never die, but offered a man no hope of life.” The prisoners are confronted with a harsh landscape with little food or water, and few places to hide. An early escape attempt proves almost immediately futile. So much for Manifest Destiny—these characters couldn’t control their lives, let alone the world that surrounds them, no matter how hard they tried.

Another of Elmore Leonard’s masterful touches to Forty Lashes Less One is his choice of protagonists: Harold Jackson and Raymond San Carlos. The traditional Western is populated by cowboys, ranchers, lawyers, homesteaders, and other character-types who are typically white. Here, it is eye-opening and refreshing to see the West through the eyes of non-traditional characters. Not only is it a welcome reminder to how diverse the population of the West was, but also how divergent their experiences were. Brian Garfield’s Tripwire, published two years later, similarly focuses on a black protagonist, and uses his story as a lens for reconsidering what we typically consider the Western experience. Prejudice and racism were still present in the aftermath of the Civil War, and these narratives are useful critiques not only of American society in the past, but also the present. Ed Gorman’s masterful third book in his Guild saga, Blood Game, also examines racial conflicts in the West. More recently, Edward A. Grainger (David Cranmer) has been exploring similar themes in his Cash Laramie and Gideon Miles Western stories.

One of the great legacies of the Western genre is its social commentary. The building of homes, communities, industries, and legal systems are recurring themes in Western novels. While some books choose to idealize the past, others use the stories as an opportunity to deconstruct both historical and modern life, to take apart the pieces and examine them critically before piecing them back together. In Leonard’s book, Yuma Penitentiary becomes a microcosm for society as a whole. He critiques power structures, racial and gender attitudes, legal corruption, and even religion. When looked at in this light, Harold and Raymond’s rebellion becomes heroic not because they embody any righteous moral attitudes, but because of their defiant spirit. They’re non-conformists to the core. They recognize the bullshit and the corruption around them, and they don’t want to correct it so much as get the hell away from it all. There’s more than a bit of Huck Finn in them. In the end, however, they realize that a little revenge goes a long way, and they decide to revel in the pleasure of giving Frank Shelby and Mr. Manly their long-overdue comeuppance. Their final gesture in the novel is an inspiring moment of cultural dissent, a true declaration of independence. Harold and Raymond were freethinkers, counter-cultural idols whose resistance wasn’t at all out of place amidst the political upheaval of 1970s, Vietnam-era America. Elmore Leonard may have set Forty Lashes Less One in the first decade of the 20th century, but in a way he was still writing about contemporary times. Nearly four decades later, Harold and Raymond still have a lot to reveal about the topsy-turvy, politically screwed up world we live in. The Old West may be long gone, but it is still ever-present in the world in which we live.

"Shadow Season" by Tom Piccirilli (Bantam, 2009)

Is it that a book just happens to come along at the right time of your life, or do your own circumstances open up the text in distinctly personal ways? Tom Piccirilli’s Shadow Season was one of those books that I connected with from the very first line, and went on to read in a single afternoon. It’s an uncompromisingly dark story masterfully told that speaks well beyond its gripping scenario. As one character reflects on his own life, “It’s not much of a story. A common drama, an average tragedy just like everyone’s. When you boiled it down to the highlights you realized that you were where you were because you look a left turn instead of a right…” Piccarilli allows us to connect with the characters on a level that feels very private, perhaps all the more so because of the main protagonist’s blindness: together, we share in his darkness.

The most redolent description of Shadow Season comes from Piccirilli himself: “savage hopelessness.” It’s how he describes the atmosphere of a train ride to Sing Sing prison, but it is equally suggestive of the cold flames that slowly consume St. Valarian’s Academy for Girls and the small town of Three Rivers, NY one bleak wintry day. It is as though the uncomfortably familiar Cold Spot (the title of his excellent, Edgar-nominated novel published in 2008) had somehow become manifest and escaped the deep recesses of a character’s subconscious and taken root in reality: “it was a deeper and blacker place than he remembered, but the ice slid over his utter desolation, cooling him, forcing him to function.”

As snow falls and the temperature continues drops, the cast of characters in Shadow Season find themselves deep in the winter of their discontent. Finn is an ex-cop-turned-teacher unable to shake the anguish of a former case that resulted in the death of his wife, the permanent loss of his sight, and the incarceration of his former police partner. But even the isolation of the woods can’t provide a haven, as the amorous advances of a young female student have recently compromised his position with his boss, Judith, and his girlfriend, Roz. (That Roz used to be involved with his former partner doesn’t make things any less complicated.) A stroll through the cemetery destroys his already fragile sense of equilibrium as Finn comes across a battered young girl named Harley Moon who suggests that he is in danger, and then disappears as mysteriously as she first appeared. Finn thinks nothing of it, until Roz fails to return from an impulsive run to town. As the snowstorm worsens and school becomes cut off from the outside world, Finn begins to sense that they aren’t alone at the school anymore.

Piccirilli’s refined artistry as a writer, particularly his expressive phrasing and impeccable pacing, are on display throughout Shadow Season. Finn’s hyper-sensory perception as a result of his blindness seems to infect Piccirilli’s prose, which uses touch and temperature, sound and smell, to evoke the physical surroundings of the campus, and the increasing isolation of the hostile environment. Even Piccirilli’s decision to write in the present tense seems related to this overarching sense of “blindness”: everything is happening “now,” with no foresight into the future, and no assurance that everything will turn out all right in the end, if in fact there ever will be a finite “end” to any of this. This only adds to the highly cinematic quality of the narrative, with the bulk of it occurring on a single day with the occasional flashback to earlier times.

Much like Ed Gorman with his recent The Midnight Room, Piccirilli (who collaborated with Gorman on the book Cast in Dark Waters) isn’t interested in standard divisions of good and evil. As one character says, “In the movies the heroes are supposed to be more clever and outwit the bad lads…But I’m not clever, I’m a fookin’ idjit in most things.” It isn’t even that Piccirilli’s heroes show shades of villainy, or that his villains are sympathetic, because the narrative doesn’t rely on such dichotomies. Instead, human failure seems the operative motivation for all the characters, which brings to mind the famous quotation from Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game: “The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons.” It is the search for these reasons that preoccupies Finn – not only about his partner’s corruption and his wife’s death, but also the mutual attraction with his student and the sudden appearance of Harley Moon and her brothers that seem to want something from Finn and falsely assume that he knows what it is they are after. As his past and present reveal themselves to be more connected than even Finn was aware of, the answers to his questions become at once more apparent and increasingly opaque.

Finn is dismayed to discover that, indeed, everyone does have their reasons, but that doesn’t give any more coherence or meaning to life. “You’ve got to wonder what any of it means. Maybe there will be revelations and understanding at the end, but probably not. You don’t always get the answers you need.” What Finn is after is control, not only over his own life, but the world around him. First as a police officer and then as a teacher, he sought to assert his own influence over others. Even his switch of locations from New York City to small town Three Rivers can be seen as an attempt to regulate his grasp on reality (literally and figuratively). In this light, “blindness” becomes emblematic of our own uncertainty and anxiety about where we have been, where we are now, and where we are going in the future.

Finn’s increasing disappointment with himself and his failures is highly relatable, and it is not just limited to his character. Were Piccarilli to tell the story from Judith’s perspective, we would see dissatisfied spouses and professional collapse; or from the point of view of Murph (the school’s custodian) we get a sense of unrequited ambition, the unsuccessful dreams of an Irish immigrant who comes to America and is as far away from his goals as ever. We only get hints of these parallel, unexplored narratives, but even this is enough to remind us that Finn is not alone in his condition – and Piccirilli and us are right there alongside him every faltering, uncertain step of the way.

Favorite quotes:

“Everyone needs affirmation.”

“In a lifetime of mistakes, she’s only about halfway up the list, but she might be the one to finally bring me down.”

“The old ways don’t die, they persist through poverty, illness, depression, murder.”

“Sometimes you play the role and sometimes the role plays you.”

“He falls to his knees as the past embraces, fondles, and murders him.”

“Anyone worth a damn has secrets.”

“Egos are delicate. Inconsequential achievements are sometimes the only ones you get.”

“His past wants him more than he wants it.”

“Even shadows want to survive between the moments when clouds pass overhead.”

"Donovan's Brain" by Curt Siodmak (Knopf, 1943/Bantam, 1950)

Curt Siodmak’s career is truly something extraordinary. Born in Dresden, Germany in 1902, he earned a Ph.D. in Mathematics before he decided to change paths and become a writer and filmmaker. An early collaboration with his brother, Robert Siodmak, was the now-legendary People on Sunday (1930), a documentary-esque fictional story about a group of working-class citizens who go for a picnic on their day off. One of the first naturalistic films of its kind, it was co-directed by both Siodmak brothers as well as Edgar G. Ulmer and Fred Zinnemann, and was co-scripted by the Siodmaks with the help of Billy Wilder. At the time, these were unknown but ambitious young artists making an unknown, low-budget movie. Within a few years, they would all meet again – but this time in Hollywood, where they all fled to because of Nazi persecution, and it is here in America that they would leave their indelible mark on the arts.

After leaving Berlin, Curt Siodmak made his way to England where he made several films, but it was in Hollywood where he truly hit is stride, writing some of the best horror and sci-fi scripts of his time, most notably The Wolf Man (1941) and I Walked With a Zombie (1943). It was around this same time that he also wrote the novel for which he would be most famous for – Donovan’s Brain (first printed in Hardcover by Knopf in 1943; Mercury Mystery digest in 1945; first Bantam paperback in 1950). Three times the novel has appeared on the big-screen (1944’s The Lady and the Brain, 1953’s Donovan’s Brain, 1962’s The Brain) and once on television (an episode of Studio One in 1965 entitled, “Donovan’s Brain”), in addition to several radio broadcasts (twice by Suspense in 1944 and 1948, and a parody by Orson Welles also in 1944).

Fusing elements of Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Siodmak’s Donovan’s Brain takes the standard archetypes of “the mad scientist” and “the monster” and combines them. Dr. Patrick Cory has been experimenting, without success, to keep a brain alive outside of its body. He is convinced that the brain has untapped power to continue being conscious – and to communicate – even after death. When he gets an emergency call to assist with plane crash victims, he brings the sole survivor back to his laboratory for last-minute operations. But when he realizes that death is inevitable, Cory decides that he has the perfect candidate for his own experiment: the brain of Warren Horace Donovan, a world-famous millionaire and genius.

With the brain stabilized, Cory begins a series of seemingly futile attempts to communicate with the brain. And then one night he begins to get subconscious commands that he cannot control: to write with his left hand – even though he is right-handed – names he knows nothing about. It is then that Cory knows his experiment is a success, and that Donovan’s brain is alive and in communication with him. But soon Cory begins to question whether he is really in control of the experiment, or whether he himself is the lab rat. And so begins Cory’s travels to unravel not only the mystery of Donovan’s brain, but also the mystery of Donovan’s past life and his unfinished business.

The novel is written as though it is Dr. Cory’s diary, filled with his muses on the day’s progress (or lack thereof). It helps to keep the story moving quickly, as we aren’t bogged down by excessive background detail or character descriptions. There’s plenty of mystery, as we have to keep reading in order to collect enough contextual information to fully comprehend the story.

While the science behind the story acts as an implausible but interesting “what if...” scenario, Donovan’s Brain seems much more an exploration of one man’s monomania. Much like Ahab in Moby Dick, we watch as the character is transformed through passion and determination into the very thing he is trying to hunt down. The quest for “the monster” ends ironically with him finding “the monster” within himself. The power that Cory sought through his experiments he is able to enact in reality though the commands of Donovan. Money, authority, prestige, and physical force – things that he never had in his own life are now suddenly at his fingertips. But are they really “his” or are they Donovan’s?

Much of the story has to do with this gradual change of identity, until Cory and Donovan are inseparable, sharing not only the same thoughts, but also the same ailments and experiences. Cautionary tales abound within horror and sci-fi stories, but more than the morality of Cory’s experiments Siodmak seems concerned with the limitations of the scientist himself rather than science. In trying to manifest a more perfect human consciousness, Cory only magnifies the human weakness for corruption, violence, and greed. It is us, and not science, that is the problem. As Siodmak writes, “Man can engender what he is himself. Nothing more.”

And now for a few more of my favorite quotes from Donovan’s Brain:

“The human body can adjust itself to most unnatural conditions.”

“I’m not interested in civilization. We are so ignorant of our souls that we take refuge in mechanics, physics, chemistry. We are losing our consciousness of the human dignity that distinguished man from animal. You are making the human being a highly specialized stone-age man ruled by egotism. You are creating a mechanical, synthetic life and killing the spirit that has lifted humanity above the beast.”

“He may have been an honest man all his life only because he was convinced if things were ever too bad, he could be dishonest and change his luck. Now that this had not worked out either, he despaired.”

“When hope ends, the world ends too.”

Fredric Brown's "Night of the Jabberwock"

I had the honor and pleasure of contributing to Pattinase's "Friday's Forgotten Books" this week, so head on over to her excellent blog and check it out! You can always see her latest update in my Blog List, as well.

I wrote about Fredric Brown's marvelous Night of the Jabberwock (1950), a hardboiled-Lewis Carroll mystery, with plenty of alcohol and an escaped lunatic thrown in, just for fun. It is out of print at the moment (as most of Brown's novels unfortunately are) but it is most definitely worth hunting down.

Thanks to Patti for inviting me to join in!

http://pattinase.blogspot.com/2009/01/fridays-forgotten-books-january-16-2009_16.html

And, as always, here is the original vintage artwork for the first Bantam paperback edition (Bantam #990) from 1950. Click for larger, hi-res images.