Some books really do age well

Yesterday a delightful package from Stark House Publishers, a company devoted to reissuing classic crime fiction, came in the mail. There were lots of goodies but what immediately caught my eye was a double volume of Vin Packer novels. Packer, for those unaware, was the first pen name of Marijane Meaker, aka YA writer M.E. Kerr (who happened to be one of my favorite YA authors when I was a kid) aka lesbian pulp writer Ann Aldrich. Oh yeah, she was also Patricia Highsmith's lover back in the 1950s. An interesting life, personally and professionally, to say the least.

Packer's name caught my consciousness because Ed Gorman often mentions her as one of the best of the pulp writers from the Fawcett Gold Medal years. I've just begun reading SOMETHING IN THE SHADOWS (originally published in 1961) and I completely get what the fuss was, and should still be, about. Not only is Packer an excellent writer but she's got an uncanny insight into human frailty and what makes seemingly ordinary people do very bad things. Nobody's a hero, but nobody's a true villain, either.

This book pits Joseph Meaker (yup, she pilfered her real last name for his character), a fortyish folklorist stuck in a decaying marriage to Maggie, against the owner of a Mercedes-Benz who, inexplicably, runs over Meaker's cat. Instead of going about the usual business of finding out who and suing the crap out of him, Meaker wants something else--revenge. The slow kind.

I'll find out what it is soon enough, but I'm already marking down passages that resonate even today. Meaker spends a fair amount of time wondering why he even bothered to get married:

Had marriage happened to other people in the same random way? Unmarried people at 36, 37, 38, who suddenly leaped headlong into something they somehow had avoided for years, with someone they knew less well than girls they had known ten years ago? Was that moment of their marriage--the moment when it became a fact--the same for them as for Joseph? He had thought of it as being the "hour of lead;" he had read in a poem somewhere about such a moment, "the freezing and the numbness--then the letting go." He had remember himself a very young man wondering about such a day far off in the future, about his bride, who she would be and what it would be lie, and how on earth it would all be accomplished and then happily ever after, and that young man that he had been, broke his heart to remember. Was everyone disillusioned, whether they had married at 21 or 36? Or was it that, for Joseph, disillusionment itself was an illusion?

He also ruminates on how sex in novels compares to real life:

In so many of the modern novels Joseph read, love-making was described in a clinical, antiseptical way; it was a world of condoms (their color described for the reader by the bold author, as though only he had ever seen one and remembered its color) and women heroines outdoing other author's heroines by shouting something different during climax. Where was joy? In modern novels it was often a memory in the hero's mind, a memory of some flaxen-haired sixteen-year-old with whom the hero had once walked along a river and done nothing more than held hands; but a wife was not joy. A wife was a blue and white Tampax box in the bathroom cabinet (with the more precise author remembering the red splotch on the box, the yellow line of cellophane around it); or a wife was stretch marks in bright sunlight on a once-young body. Joseph always became confused when he wondered about such things: was that the way Life Really Was, the way it was with Maggie and him, the way it was in best sellers? Or was there more? Was he no better than a caricature of some fictional character, off in his room rereading Varda's words?

With passages like those you better believe I'll be reading more of Vin Packer's work. There are nineteen novels under that pseudonym, one of which especially floored me. THE EVIL FRIENDSHIP (1958) was written a mere four years after a celebrated case of murder in New Zealand perpetuated by Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme--who would later go to prison, get out and re-emerge as bestselling crime writer Anne Perry. How bizarre to think that a noted crime writer was writing a novel based on a crime committed by a girl who would grow up to be the exact same thing...

Comments

[ed gorman]

Hi Sarah--
Wow, what a fine piece of writing. I can hear Marijane now. She's a lot of fun and has great stories about the Gold Medal days, all the writers who came and went. Thanks for covering her book. There should be another one along soon. One to watch for is her novel about the murder of Emmett Till. Dark Don't Catch Me. PBS did a docu on it last week. Still want to go down there and do a little lynching of my own. Thanks again. Ed

[ed gorman]

Hi Sarah--
imprecise wording. PBS did a docu on Emmett Till not Vin's Dark Don't Catch Me. May as well throw in a couple recommendations. Bravo ran (and I believe is still running) the American Theater's Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh with its extraordinary performances especially by Robert Ryan and Lee Marvin; and the Starz folks seem to be agani running the Chabrol version of Madame Bovary (or Madame Ovary if you prefer George Cosanza's title) with its painterly visuals of the French countryside and Isabelle Huppetr at her more devastating both physically and emotionally. For once Chabrol acted against instinct (his) and took everything down. Ed

[Trey R. Barker]

Ed is always a great one for turning me on to an author new to me. Whenever I go trolling for some classic that had escaped my attention, he's the one to whom I go.

Thanks for the heads up for Vin Packer, not only the mention, but the quote. I've not read any of her stuff but she's on my list now.

One of the great things about this blog, and those you link to, is that I can always find something new and interesting to delve into, even if it's an author from 100 years ago!

Thanks again, Trey

[Sarah]

I love going back in time, so to speak, because it's also a really good break from reading current galleys. Sometimes it's refreshing to remind myself that the crime fiction world didn't just begin with the writers I started reading first, and that a lot of the older voices, especially female (Packer, Dorothy B. Hughes, and Maritta Wolff especially) I discover deserve to be reprinted.

[ed gorman]

Hear, hear Sarah for saying that a lot of the older books deserve to be reprinted. Occasionally at Mystery Scene we'd get letters saying why "waste time" on dead writers when there were so many living ones who need magazine space. True, there are a lot of deserving unknowns today but we all came from someplace.

The other night I was talking about Phillip Macdonald novel from the Thirties at one of the libraries here. I said it has been knocked off at least twenty-five times by Hwood and probably hundreds of times by book writers. Then I said I'll bet that not 15% of under forty readers have ever heard his name. Macdonald had been a genre betseller, sold to all the major slicks, and had a A level career in Hwood.a giant seller and his plots were among the most innovative of his time. I don't say this in any snobbish ways. Hell there are dozens and dozens of older important mystery writers I've never heard of let alone read. But it's a sad fact that very few writers outlive their time on planet earth. Many of the biggies vanish just as quickly as the rest of us. Ed

[Robert Ward]

Sarah: Love old books and will look into Packer. I've read a couple of Philip MacDonald's books, The List of Adrian Messenger was fabulous, and The Rasp was good too. Charming and great fun and brilliantly plotted. My father turned me onto him. 'Messenger' was made into a pretty good John Houston movie in the 50's with all the actors Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, and others wearing masks. Part of the fun was the audience trying to guess who was who. Ok it was kind of lame, but I still dug it. Hooray for P. Macdonald and hooray for all good writers everywhere. Dead or alive.

[Robert Ward]

Hey, and as long as we're talking about female mystery writers of yore, don't forget my fave, Dorothy L. Hughes whose In A Lonely Place is back out and super cool. Not to forget Ride a Pink Horse, which was made into a great Robert Montgomery flick (speaking of names nearly forgotten. I doubt any of the kids remember Montgomery at all)...Hughes was really amazing andher work totally holds up today.