Glad to see our hard-working Pres enjoying one of the world’s great wonders. Not surprisingly, right-wingers, many of whom probably don’t have a passport, are criticizing him for making this stop. Such know-nothings and idiots. From the look of it, some of them think he flew deliberately to Britain, just to see the ancient site, not conceding he had already been in Wales.
#FridayReads—In the House of Secret Enemies by George C. Chesbro, ten short stories featuring one of the all-time greatest detective series characters, Mongo the Magnificent, aka Robert Frederickson, Ph.D.—former headlining acrobat performer for the Statler Bros Circus; black belt in karate; criminology professor at a New York City university; and dwarf. I found this mass-market paperback, a 1990 Mysterious Press edition, when I browsed and shopped at Myopic Books on Milwaukee Ave in Chicago last month, a great second-hand store with a really extensive inventory. The collection also includes a revealing intro by Chesbro, “The Birth of a Series Character,” explaining how he came to dream up the character of Mongo, and how he persevered despite little encouragement from editors, at least at the beginning. After the intro, Chesbro offers notes before each tale explaining the role that the story played in his ongoing development of the character. These stories were all written before he dared put Mongo in a full-length novel—hell, before he even knew if he could write a Mongo novel, and whether the emerging character could bear the weight of a full-length book, leave alone find it accepted by a publisher—so each of these stories was a key experiment in character creation and development. The collection is full of great writing and shop-talk. I read the first few Mongo novels when I operated my bookstore, Undercover Books, but haven’t read one in many years. I love mystery series publishing, with so many great and memorable characters, such as Michael Connelly’s LAPD detective Harry Bosch, Archer Mayor’s Vermont police detective Joe Gunther, Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache, and Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander. Now, I gotta find more of Chesbro’s Mongo titles, which combine two of my favorite enthusiasms—the circus and detective fiction! For more info on Mongo and Chesbro—who died, sadly, in 2008, but was around long enough to republish many of the fifteen Mongo titles in POD editions under his own Apache Beach imprint—I suggest you visit the author’s Wikipedia page and this site, Dangerous Dwarf.
Undercover Books, the bookstore operated by my two siblings, Joel and Pamela, and our parents, Earl and Sylvia, opened for business on May 4, 1978. Five years later, we were enough of a fixture in the community that a local newspaper was arranging interviews with us, to talk about books, and the business. They did one on me, and one on Pam. When I visited her in Cleveland last month, I was surprised to see them preserved in a scrapbook she had. Here’s the one they did on me. To read the entire column, click on the image and pause the slideshow as it comes on-screen.
Tho I began my bike ride late in the day, I'm all the way up at Hudson Beach&the Great Gray Bridge. Low tide. pic.twitter.com/YGEeFdGlNC
— Philip Turner (@philipsturner) September 3, 2014
Pundits like to intone that political autobiographies, published under the name of top candidates for public office, are all but obligatory, but the thing is, they actually have to come out to have any salutary effect for the politician, otherwise they’re apt to become an embarrassment. That proviso seems to have eluded NY Governor Cuomo, whose own book, originally due out in August, has been postponed twice, and will finally, if it comes out now as (re-)scheduled, be out for only a couple weeks prior to the November canvass. That’s assuming Cuomo makes it past his Democratic primary challenger Zephyr Teachout, whom he’s energetically ignoring in advance of the Sept 9 vote for the Democratic ballot. I like Teachout, and will be voting for her and her Lt Gov running mate Timothy Wu. It’s not that I believe either will win his/her race, but it’s important there be a protest vote lodged against Cuomo, who’s often governed with more deference to Republicans than Democrats; short-circuited his own corruption commission before it had the chance to finish its job; selected a far-right Democrat, Kathy Hochul, as his Lt Gov running mate; and refused to debate Teachout. He’s insulting voters, including ones like me who voted for him in 2010.
I really enjoyed reading Cold Type after getting a copy at BEA in early summer, and it was fun meeting Araton last night at Book Court. It’s like a Tom Wolfe novel, in that it’s set against a churning social backdrop, the NYC that was emerging in 1994, just as the Internet was about to change journalism, but it has a lot more heart than Wolfe, with characters whose fates you really ponder, even the bad guys. Araton’s been writing about sports, in the NY Times and in books for years, but this is his first novel and it’s really good. I wrote about it on this blog June 14.