Reading California Fiction

NOVELS TO MOVIES

By my count more than two dozen California novels from the 1950s have had film treatments. At least a couple of them, No Down Payment and Riders to the Stars, were perhaps closer to novelizations than adaptations since the movies were in the works before the books were published. Here's the list:

 

 

About Mrs. Leslie used the same title, 1954
The Body Snatchers used similar titles, 1956, 1983, 1993, 2007
The Chapman Report used the same title, 1962;
Confessions of a Crap Artist released as Confessions d’un Barjo, 1992
Fiddler’s Green released as The Raging Tide, 1951
The Flower Drum Song used the same title, 1961
Full of Life used the same title, 1956
Gidget used the same title, 1959
The Girl He Left Behind used the same title, 1956
The House of Numbers used the same title, 1957
Kitten with a Whip used the same title, 1964
The Long Goodbye used the same title, 1973
The Mark used the same title, 1961
Muscle Beach released as Don’t Make Waves, 1967
No Down Payment used the same title, 1957
Nothing in Her Way released as Peau de Banane, 1965
The Other One released as Back from the Dead, 1957
Riders to the Stars used the same title, 1954
So Love Returns used the same title, 2007
Someone Is Bleeding released as Les Seins de Glace, 1974
The Square Trap released as The Ring, 1952
A Stir of Echoes used the same title, 1999?
The Subterraneans used the same title, 1960
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? used the same title, 1962
The Wild Party used the same title, 1956
The Woman Chaser used the same title, 1999

THE FORGOTTEN FIFTEEN FROM THE 'FIFTIES

         As a companion to the last post, I’ve put together a list of the least available California novels of the 1950s. The numbers after the title, showing library holdings, are purely decorative, since no North American repository has a copy of any of these books. Special mention should go to Private Practice, Passion’s Harvest and Boss Man, because no internet bookseller has a copy either. Once again, the Forgotten Fifteen do not share any literary quality that explains their disappearance. They are all paperback originals, of course, but so are dozens of other novels that have found their way into a library or two. But even these books are only nominally available, since they usually are buried in non-circulating special collections. I’d like to report that Google is busily digitizing the books, but until that work extends to more university libraries -- Buffalo, Bowling Green and Ohio State appear to be the first choices -- it will not find much to digitize. Fortunately, publishers are reissuing many titles from the period. That’s a worthy effort but (so far, at least) one that’s limited mostly to the crime and mystery genres. In the list below, for example, only Tramp Girl stands out as a likely candidate for a new edition.

Bligh, Norman      Remembered Moment      0/0
Dixon, H. Vernor       Hunger and the Hate, The       0/0
Taylor, Robert W.       Mimi       0/0
Stonebraker, Florence       Private Practice       0/0
Mason, Raymond       Bedeviled       0/0
Stonebraker, Florence       Frisco Dame       0/0
Nickerson, Kate       Passion Is a Woman       0/0
Stonebraker, Florence       Lust for Love       0/0
Stonebraker, Florence       Strange Sinner       0/0
Stonebraker, Florence       Flesh Is Weak       0/0
Stonebraker, Florence       Passion’s Harvest       0/0
Stone, Thomas       Tramp Girl       0/0
Stone, Thomas       Raging Passions       0/0
Sparkia, Roy Benard       Boss Man       0/0
Smith, Pauline C.       Carnal Greed       0/0

THE FAMOUS FIFTEEN FROM THE 'FIFTIES

    Lately I’ve been focusing on my reading from the 1950s, a process that (inevitably) led to the creation of some lists. I thought it might be interesting to discover which books have had the most lasting reputations - - in other words, a small version of the Famous Fifty. To make the list a book needed to be a work of fiction and both set and written from 1950 to 1960. Missing are novels by Steinbeck and Saroyan, short story collections by Chandler and Hammett, and a few other well known books that are set before 1950. To compile the rankings I used information from WorldCat which shows the number of libraries that have at least one copy of a book. So here are the top fifteen, with holdings in California libraries added but not figured in the ranking. I wasn’t able, by the way, to link the group with shared literary qualities that could explain the rankings.

Kerouac, Jack    Dharma Bums, The    1,787/97
Chandler, Raymond    Long Goodbye, The    1,387/66
West, Jessamyn    Cress Delahanty    1,161/60
Mailer, Norman    Deer Park, The    1,121/53
Kerouac, Jack    Subterraneans, The    1,001/59
Chandler, Raymond    Playback    668/53
Burdick, Eugene    Ninth Wave, The    605/39
Lee, C. Y.    Flower Drum Song, The    594/64
Dick, Philip K.    Voices from the Street    573/44
Dick, Philip K.    Eye in the Sky    559/31
Morris, Wright    Love among the Cannibals    546/25
Dick, Philip K.    Humpty Dumpty in Oakland    470/31
Finney, Jack    Body Snatchers, The    445/17
Dick, Philip K.    Mary and the Giant    415/35
Gann, Ernest    Fiddler’s Green    382/32

DANA LYON: THE MISSING TITLES

    As far as I can tell, mystery and suspense writer Dana Lyon published fifteen novels during her thirty-year career. She set most, probably nearly all, in California. So I was puzzled when only five showed up in An Annotated Bibliography of California Fiction, 1664-1970 by Newton D. Baird and Robert Greenwood. Using WorldCat and the catalog of the Los Angeles Public Library, I was able to come up with the longer list. It turned out that the missing novels came from publishers that either were small and obscure, specialized in books mostly for rental libraries, or printed paperback originals. I'm still surprised that a well known author such as Lyon would use these publishers so often -- and that a standard bibliographical source would skip them so frequently. Here’s the list, with an asterisk marking the missing titles.

The Bathtub Murder. Williams Publishing Co., 1933 (with Josephine Hughston)
*Retaliation: Love's Kickback. Authors Publications, 1934
*Heartbreak. Godwin, 1935
*Follow Men. Godwin, 1936
*Let Me Go. Hillman Curl, 1937
*Rapture Yet to Come. Gramercy, 1939
No Shelter for the Heart. M. S. Mill, 1940
*A Good Family. Gramercy, 1942
*It's My Own Funeral. Farrar & Rinehart. 1944
*I'll Be Glad When You're Dead. Royce, 1945
The Frightened Child. Harper, 1948
    aka House on Telegraph Hill. Mercury Publications, 1948
The Tentacles. Harper, 1950
The Lost One. Harper, 1958
*Spin the Web Tight. Ace, 1963
*The Trusting Victim. Ace, 1964

LGBT PORTRAYALS: WHAT TO READ

    LGBT characters appear seldom in the books I've been reading. (In fact, no transgender character shows up at all.) When they do, they usually play minor roles. Other novels reflect what might be called a “gay sensibility,” with some characters not exactly in the closet but not publicly “out” either. Men in For the Pleasure of His Company and Hooper Dooper! provide examples. In contrast, the books on the list below do not just hint at sexual orientation. Leading characters are sometimes worried about it and sometimes not, but the issue is never far from their minds. The list is chronological.

    1. The Western Shore by Clarkson Crane. An English professor, one of many characters in this panorama of Berkeley after World War I, seeks fulfilling gay relationships that are also discreet.

    2. We Too Are Drifting by Gale Wilhelm. A thirty-year-old engraver finds herself uninspired by her girlfriend, the San Francisco art scene and life in general.

    3. Shadows Flying by John Evans. [a.k.a. Love in the Shadows] A young man in San Francisco has an unrequited crush on his roommate, who turns out to have sexual issues of his own.

    4. Trio by Dorothy Baker. The relationship between a Berkeley professor and her graduate assistant is threatened when an attractive young man comes to work briefly in their apartment.

    5. Strange Passions by Florence Stonebraker [a.k.a. Sinful Desires and  Who Knows Love]. A young woman, staying in Laguna Beach for the summer, strikes up a friendship with an uncloseted lesbian.

    The first four books have substantial library holdings and shouldn’t be difficult to find. They also have at least a dozen copies for sale at internet booksellers (but be sure to search for Shadows Flying under its paperback title, Love in the Shadows). Strange Passions, despite its three editions, is more of a problem. Only a few copies are available on line, and library copies are unlikely to circulate.

PSEUDONYMS

This pseudonym list turned out be more of a project than I expected. Of the writers I’ve been reading, more than three dozen used pseudonyms -- sometimes just once, sometimes for their entire careers. Some authors, especially those with extensive paperback oeuvres, probably worried about diluting their brands. But others really wanted to hide -- and have remained hidden. The list includes only authors whose identity is unknown or who wrote under at least two names. The books in parenthesis are ones I've read. I haven't posted reviews for all of them, however.

● Arnold B. Armstrong (Parched Earth), nominal author of one of the most important California novels, has remained anonymous for 83 years.
● Loren Beauchamp (Meg) was one of dozens of pseudonyms used by Robert Silverberg.
● Norman Bligh (Remembered Moment) was a pseudonym used some 22 times by William Arthur Neubauer.
● Robert Bloomfield (Vengeance Street) was a pseudonym used for Crime Club books by Leslie Edgley.
● Florenz Branch (She Had What They Wanted and a half-dozen other novels I've read) was a pseudonym used many times by Florence Stonebraker.
● Paul Cain (Fast One) was an early pseudonym of the screenwriter usually known as Peter Ruric.
● Owen Dudley (The Deep End) was a name occasionally employed by the author who usually used the pseudonym Dean McCoy.
● John Evans (at least the one credited with writing If You Have Tears) was a pseudonym of crime writer Howard Browne.
● John Farr (The Lady and the Snake) was a pseudonym sometimes used by mystery writer Jack Webb.
● Gerald Foster (’Frisco Sweetheart) and Roy Booth (Sin Suits Me) were both pseudonyms employed by James Noble Gifford.
● Mary Cavendish Gore (Mad Hatter’s Village) was a pseudonym of a very accomplished writer who might have been Liam O’Flaherty.
● Richard Hallas (You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up) was a pseudonym used by Eric Knight.
● Whit Harrison (Sailor’s Weekend) was one of the pseudonyms used by prolific novelist Harry Whittington.
● Richard Hayward (Trapped) was a pseudonym of Baynard H. Kendrick.
● Geoffrey Homes (The Doctor Died at Dusk) was a pseudonym of successful screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring.
● Steve January (Rusty Diamond) was a pseudonym used only once by an author still unknown.
● Martin Kramer (Sons of the Fathers) was a pseudonym used by Beatrice Ann Wright before she became well known as a psychologist.
● Rae Loomis (Marina Street Girls and two other books) was a pseudonym used by Shelby Steger for her California novels.
● Haynes Lubou (Reckless Hollywood) was the pseudonym chosen by the writer who published as
Dorothy Lubov (when she was single) and Dorothy Hart (after she married).
● Ross Macdonald (The Three Roads and ten other books I’ve read) was the pseudonym employed by famed mystery writer Kenneth Millar after he stopped using his real name.
● Conrad Maine (Good-Time Girl) was the pseudonym concocted by C. G. Lumbard and Ken Kolb for the only book they wrote together.    
● Jason Manor (The Tramplers and The Red Jaguar) was the pseudonym used by Oakley Hall for his crime stories.
● Reed Marr (Catch a Falling Star) was the easy-to-figure-out pseudonym of P. J. Reed-Marr.
● Kay Martin (On Easy Terms and The Whispered Sex) was one of at least three pseudonyms used by Adela Maritano.
● Richard McKaye (Portrait of the Damned) was the pseudonym employed by Richard K. Brunner, who later wrote religious and ethical commentary.
● Wade Miller (Kitten with a Whip and Guilty Bystander) was a pseudonym used by Robert Wade and Bill Miller, a San Diego writing team that produced 33 novels between 1946 and 1961. Wade then wrote under his own name and as Whit Masterson.
● Kate Nickerson (Passion Is a Woman) was a pseudonym of Lulla Adler [Rosenfeld].
● Philip Race (Self-Made Widow) was a pseudonym used for a few books by E. M. Parsons.
● Douglas Ring (The Peddler) was an early pseudonym employed by best-selling paperback writer Richard S. Prather.
● Marta Roberts (Tumbleweeds) was a pseudonym of an author who used the name only once and remains anonymous today.
● Roney Scott (Shakedown) was a pseudonym of William Campbell Gault.
● Thomas Stone (Tramp Girl and eleven other novels I’ve read) was a pseudonym used many times by Florence Stonebraker.
● Florence Stuart (Police Lady) was yet another pseudonym of Florence Stonebraker, this one used for her romances.
● John Trinian (North Beach Girl) was a pseudonym used by Zekial Marko.
● James Updyke (It’s Always Four O’Clock) was a pseudonym of well known crime writer W. R. Burnett.
● J. X. Williams (Carnival of Lust) was a popular pseudonym apparently first used for this book by John Jakes.

FAMOUS NOVELISTS WHO ALMOST WROTE CALIFORNIA FICTION

Sometimes I need to do a little research to determine if books are actually set in California. Sometimes bibliographers make mistakes, and sometimes they say a book is partly set in California without indicating the size of the part. So here’s a list of famous authors who for one reason or another did not quite write books of California fiction.

Willa Cather, known for her grim novels of the American plains, set nearly (but not quite) half of My Mortal Enemy (1926) in an unnamed western state that must, because of its unnamed sprawling metropolis, be California.

Walter van Tilburg Clark, author of western novels The Ox-Bow Incident (1940) and The Track of the Cat (1949), also didn’t name the coastal state in the novella that takes up most of The Watchful Gods and Other Stories (1950). It could be California, but then again it could be Oregon or Washington.

John Dos Passos wrote many novels after his monumental trilogy, U. S. A. (1930-36). One was Most Likely to Succeed (1954), the tale of a writer whose career includes time in Hollywood. Just over half the book, however, is set in New York.

James T. Farrell, author of his own famous trilogy, Studs Lonigan (1932-35), produced dozens of short stories in his nearly fifty-year career. One of his collections, $1000 a Week and Other Stories (1942) begins with a tale of a writer in Hollywood. But then it offers little mention of California elsewhere in the book.

Jean Stafford, once a well known personality in the New York literary scene, wrote only a few novels. One, The Mountain Lion (1947), is still admired. Despite the title, she sets a surprising amount of the story in her birthplace, mountainless Covina, California. The book’s not a California novel, however, since most of it takes place somewhere else -- in this case, Colorado.

Cornell Woolrich (a.k.a. George Hopley, William Irish), master of suspense, produced dozens of stories that were made into movies and TV shows. So it’s easy to imagine confusing the setting of at least one of the books with the setting of the film adaptation.  That may be why Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1945) is sometimes considered a California novel. The movie apparently takes place mostly in Los Angeles but, as far as I can tell, the book is set in no specific place.

MOVIE STARS -- WHAT TO READ

    Considering America’s longtime obsession with Hollywood celebrities, you might think that movie stars would be the subjects of many interesting novels. But that does not appear to be the case. I had trouble digging out a list, and it includes two entries from the “Women in Hollywood” post. Only Ideal, incidentally, takes place over a few days. The others look at whole careers and cover many years. The books are in chronological order by the year they were written.

    1. Roman Holiday by Don Ryan (1930). An unusually complicated and self-sufficient actress experiences dramatic swings in her career.

    2. Ideal by Ayn Rand (1934). A famous movie star discovers what her screen image means to her most dedicated admirers.

    3. Remember Valerie March by Katherine Albert (1939). A movie director recounts the career and personal relationships of the actress who was once his protégé.

    4. The Golden Sorrow by Oliver Pratt (1952). Childhood experiences explain the unruly nature of a young leading man.

    5. Catch a Falling Star by Reed Marr (1956). A relationship much like the one attributed to Judy Garland and Louis B. Mayer lurks behind an actress’s downfall.

    6. Love Affair by Robert Carson (1958). Influential women guide the career of a weak-willed actor.

    It was quite a while since I’d checked the availability of the four books not on the recent list. In general, the numbers both in libraries and from internet booksellers seem to be slowly decreasing. Still, at least a few copies should be available for all the books. Ideal, published only a few months ago, is in print and easy to find. The Golden Sorrow and Catch a Falling Star, on the other hand, only came out in paperback editions and are unlikely to be circulating through interlibrary loan.

WOMEN IN HOLLYWOOD -- WHAT TO READ

    Creating lists about the film industry presents problems because so many books have been written about it. I’ve read around 175 books dealing with movies That’s a lot but way less than the 1,200 presented by Anthony Slide in The Hollywood Novel. True, his survey extends to 1994, while mine stops in 1960. But my reading is still not close to comprehensive. For example, he lists seventeen books published in 1951. I've only read four of them (and don't intend to read the rest). Ignorance, however, is not going to stop me. So I'm starting with a tiny subset of Hollywood novels, those written by women that have women as the main characters. It's a pretty varied list, not only in characters depicted but also in theme, style and overall attitude. I've put the books in chronological order by the year they were written.

    1. Reckless Hollywood by Haynes Lubou. A fan-magazine writer learns some painful lessons about love when she takes up with a movie stunt pilot.

    2. Ideal by Ayn Rand. A famous movie star discovers what her screen image means to her most dedicated admirers.

    3. I Lost My Girlish Laughter by Jane Allen. The secretary to a big-time film producer describes her work with droll astonishment.

    4. Remember Valerie March by Katherine Albert. A movie director recounts the career and personal relationships of the actress who was once his protégé.

    5. Married at Leisure by Virginia Lederer. The wife of a screenwriter quietly lampoons the Hollywood social scene while ignoring the pointlessness of her own life.

    6. Memory and Desire by Leonora Hornblow. A well-heeled Hollywood divorcée falls for a married screenwriter with a wife and child in New York.

    7. Passion Is a Woman by Kate Nickerson. A beautiful bit-player keeps control of her love life while promoting her movie career.

    As we know, seeing a book title on a list is not the same as actually acquiring a copy. Ideal, just published in 2015 though written in 1934, is the easiest to get. It's in print, available on Kindle and stocked by hundreds of libraries. Books 3 through 6 are similar in availability -- a few copies for sale online, plenty obtainable through interlibrary loan. The first and last books on the list, however, have pretty much disappeared from American culture. Two libraries but no internet booksellers have copies of Reckless Hollywood. Four booksellers but no libraries have copies of Passion Is a Woman. That's American libraries. If you have nothing better to do the next time you’re in Paris, you could drop into the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and look up the French translation, La Passion de Femme.

WHAT TO READ

Here are links to my suggestions for books to read on various topics.

Adultery
The Beach
Boyhood
Community
Criminals
Dubious Relationships
Femmes Fatales
First-Person Narrators
Good Books into Terrible Movies
Happy Families
Hooking Up in the Depression
Kids
Loners
LGBT Portrayals
Middle-Class Realism in the 1950s
Monterey County
Movie Stars
Not So Happy Families
Panoramas
Politics
Short Stories about Place
Slackers
Working Women