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Remembering Publishing Pal Peter Warner, RIP

I am happy I can revisit a blog post I wrote and published almost nine years ago, when publishing friend Peter Warner was launching a book of his own, The Mole—The Cold War Memoir of Winston Bates: A Novel. It was a clever turn on meta spy fiction, and I loved it reading it back then. I share this today, to honor Peter, who died last September, age 79, and for whom there will be a memorial tomorrow which I’m going to attend. Peter was for years the chief in NYC for Thames & Hudson, the publisher of illustrated books, where he was a participant in dozens and dozens of international co-publishing arrangements. The occasion for my post was the novel’s launch party, hosted by Will Balliet, a longtime editorial colleague of mine when we were both at Carroll & Graf, who succeeded Peter at T & H.

Peter and I were members of a monthly lunch club, Book Table, where I always enjoyed conversing with him. His literary skills were prodigious, and extended to this engrossing thriller, a historical narrative that spans the Suez Crisis, the downing of an American U-2 plane, the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, and Watergate, all told in a faux memoir by Canadian protagonist Winston Bates. I loved it, and so did readers like author Stacy Schiff. She blurbed it thus: “Who better to trust for a through-the-looking-glass tour of Cold War Washington than a short, self-doubting Canadian with a photographic memory? A rich, buoyant ruse of a novel.” I am glad I can share word of it again with friends here.

Chuck Verrill, Editor and Agent, RIP

Went to a memorial today for Chuck Verrill, longtime editor at Viking Press, and later agent for many great books. Held at the Center for Fiction in Brooklyn, the brief speeches by friends and colleagues were full of sweet memories and humorous stories. Speakers included Stephen King; Scribner’s Nan Graham; Verrill’s fellow agent Liz Darhansoff, who made Chuck her agency partner in 1991; Abigail Thomas, a longtime Viking editor, and memoirist; and a number of family members. Verrill worked with King on his books for more than forty years, first as his editor and then as his agent.

I didn’t know Verrill well, but we did have lunch a couple times over the years, and I remember he enjoyed hearing about how in 1979 King was on tour for his early novel The Dead Zone and he visited Undercover Books, my family’s bookstore in Cleveland. King was escorted by a Viking sale rep named Dennis Ciccone, and the subject came up of other Viking novelists being published by the Press at that time. I mentioned that I had enjoyed Ernest Hebert’s The Dogs of March, set in New Hampshire, and Howard Frank Mosher’s Disappearances, set in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. King, a Maine native, beamed hearing me extol his fellow New England writers, and agreed that both of those novels were exceptional.

At the memorial on Saturday, I learned that Chuck Verrill had for a time been an editorial assistant to the estimable Viking editor Alan Williams, who was himself editor for work by Mosher. #publishing #friendship

Remembering David Janssen in “The Fugitive,” an Every(Wronged)Man Hero

My favorite male TV star from childhood was David Janssen in “The Fugitive,” playing the wrongly convicted Dr. Richard Kimball. The sympathetic protagonist endures the loss of his murdered wife, then gets collared and condemned for the killing until a train wreck en route to the “death house*” frees him from the clutches of the implacable Lt. Inspector Philip Gerard. Played by the sober Canadian actor Barry Morse, Gerard, like Javert in Les Miserables, tracks the escaped man from one end of the land to the next. Floating from town-to-town, job-to-job, Kimball relies on the anonymity a loner could still have in the 1960s—no one ever asks him for so much as a Social Security number. I don’t think the program could be made today. The show was inspired, in part, by the real-life murder of Marilyn Sheppard in Cleveland, with her doctor husband Sam the accused, which I also paid attention to in the mid-60s. As the fugitive who could never set down roots anywhere, in each teleplay forced to abandon newly forged friendships, Janssen’s Kimball somehow maintained a grim good humor, which I’ve always admired. The show still looks good nowadays.

I have no doubt that my enjoyment of “The Fugitive” is part of the reason why I have always been drawn to publishing books about the unjustly accused, such as Dead Run: The Shocking Story of Dennis Stockton and Life on Death Row in America. by William F. Burke and Joe Jackson, Introduction by William Styron. One of the first posts I published on the blog was the story of how I came to work with Styron in championing Dead Run.

#TVShows #1960s #exonerations
*The pulse-pounding Intro, with its line about “the death house” was voiced by the baritone actor William Conrad.

Manhattan’s Metro Theater, Reopening at Last

In 2012, I was excited I could report this on my blog, some good news for denizens of my Manhattan neighborhood, and other New Yorkers.

Following Sept 11, 2001, which hit NY’s infrastructure and economy so hard, and Superstorm Sandy in 2012, which added to the damage, it would have been a real shot in the arm for the city to have the renovated movie theater open just four blocks from my apartment, but alas, in 2015, this was the outcome to Alamo’s interest.

Last week with my wife—artist Kyle Gallup, who made a collage of the Metro marquee seen below—we were walking up Broadway at 98th Street in front of the old Metro, where we were surprised to see the building’s omnipresent steel doors had been raised and people were working inside. Kyle took a picture:

Now this week comes the welcome news, first in via Westside Rag, and then today in Gothamist that the Metro will finally be reopening. Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine told Gothamist reporter Ben Yakas that though he himself had been skeptical himself—due to the past abandonment by Alamo—he’d spoken to the CEO of the as-yet unnamed exhibitor, who told him that the company has actually signed a lease. Renovations will begin soon to turn it into a cinema complex with multiple screens and an event space, to reopen in 2023.

Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Pioneer and Childhood Hero, Guest Post by M. G. Turner

When I was eight years old I had the privilege of meeting one of the greats—in fact the greatest cinema special effects pioneer of the 20th Century. That man’s name was Ray Harryhausen, and to movie fans worldwide he represents the start of a great age in filmmaking, where the previously unthinkable could be projected on screen, using two primary techniques, known as Stop-Motion Animation, and Dynamation, which each pushed the boundaries of what had previously been possible in the fantasy, adventure, and sci-fi realms. But to me, Ray Harryhausen, for all his cinematic splendor and cultural renown, represented something else: magic. For me, this took the form of an idea, that art was not only impressive and important, that it could also be fun.

I can’t recall which Harryhausen movie I saw first, but it was probably Jason and the Argonauts, which remains my favorite of his films, though Mysterious Island is a close second. In those days—the early 2000s—I used to watch films on our bulbous, analog TV set. This included VHS tapes and eventually DVDs that we rented from our neighborhood video store and some of the first films I watched were Harryhausen’s. Something I used to do, in lieu of being in a real theater, was use chairs, pillows, and then a large bed-sheet to create a kind of makeshift fort, inside of which I could watch films. This had a curious cave-like effect and helped pull my focus to the images on screen, which were dazzling, especially to my young, uncritical mind. This was long before IMAX, and 48 frames per second, and on the fly CGI; this was an only child discovering one of his first artistic heroes, a man I would go on to meet, whom I would initially correspond with over a series of letters, first sent in the fall of 2003.

At that time I was starting second grade, and for my first two years in school had faced a great deal of bullying and harassment from other kids. I was always shy and quiet, preferring to read Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings instead of running wild with my classmates on the playground. As many people are subjects of bullying and intimidation early in their school years, I don’t suggest I was unique in this, but do think it intensified my wish to escape into other worlds, to lose myself in some grand swashbuckling action. I was looking for something to fill the void, and though the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the Star Wars space opera did some of the work, it was really Harryhausen who made me feel complete, Harryhausen who opened my mind and showed me that movies could be both entertaining and meaningful. In short, that they could be art.

With my mother herself being a visual artist, I already knew that art was an important element of one’s emotional and intellectual life, but I didn’t know it could also be fun. Seeing Harryhausen’s creatures come to life not only felt like the most special sort of magic trick, but an experience akin to walking through the halls of a wondrous and thought-provoking museum, which in those difficult days of 1st Grade helped me see that there was something outside of the difficult, tedious, and at times Kafkaesque experience of New York public school with its inane standardized tests, its lack of discipline, and myriad bureaucratic cruelties.

Thus I escaped into Harryhausen’s movies, watching them on the weekends, and sometimes on school nights. I even watched all the Sinbad films in succession when recovering from a traumatic ear operation. Because I was so moved by them, and because they meant so much to me, and because they had granted me my first glimpse into seeing film as an art-form, and not just a mode of entertainment, I decided to write him a letter.

I was luckier than most kids in this endeavor, because my father was and still is an influential book editor and was able to obtain Harryhausen’s address through his publishing house. In the letters, which I wrote the summer before first grade began, I told him how much I liked his films, that I wanted to be an animator when I grew up, and even included some drawings depicting his monsters. I simply wanted to connect with the man who’d brought wonder into my life, to convey to him, in no uncertain terms, my appreciation, childlike as it might have been. Of course, in our overly critical culture some might look back and say the Harryhausen icons such as the skeletons in Jason, or his Emir from 20,000,000 Miles to Earth, or any of the other colossal creatures which graced his films, didn’t look real per se, it didn’t matter and still doesn’t. There is a suspension of disbelief necessary for appreciating a Harryhausen film, a suspension that modern audiences have become poorly practiced at, but remains important to one’s overall aesthetic health. For a child it was easy to deploy this ability, and to derive enjoyment from the visions he conjured, and so I felt a letter was the best way to express my, well, gratitude.

We waited a month or two, and in that time worried that the letter might have gone astray or hadn’t reached him, until finally from England, where the great man lived, a reply came, a photo of which is depicted below. I remember holding the letter in my hands in disbelief, a similar disbelief to the kind I felt when I watched his movies: utter amazement, combined with sheer joy. Reading the letter over and over, I felt I had finally made contact with someone who understood me, and who, in a sense, had freed me from the fear and worry that pervaded so much of my existence. We exchanged another letter or two over the course of the next few months, and after a time our correspondence faltered.

But it did not falter for long, as roughly a year later, my parents received word that a special “Harryhausen Night” was being held at Lincoln Center. Our eventual meeting occurred on a rainy evening in the autumn of 2004, after I had turned eight years old. My mother had discovered that for the release of his heavily illustrated book Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life (co-authored with Tony Dalton, Watson-Guptill, 2004), the man himself would be speaking and signing copies at Lincoln Center. And like a great New Yorker who knows what she wants and how to get it, she took me to meet him, and managed to get us to the front of the line.

There he was: a handsome, distinguished older gentleman with fraying white hair and a round, inviting face, who in some ways reminded me of my own grandfather, a civil engineer who had his own meticulous pursuits. I remember being nervous but Harryhausen being welcoming in a way that went beyond simple politeness; he seemed genuinely touched that we’d come out to see his classic films, and touched by the nervousness we both showed. And luckily Ray and I were not complete strangers! My mother and I were sure to remind Ray—he was now Ray in my mind—that we’d had a brief correspondence. To this, he said he remembered us and that he was happy to finally meet me in person. It didn’t matter if this was true or not—for all I know he could have received hundreds of fan letters a year from kids like me—but this was all I needed to feel like I had been seen and heard and accepted.

While we stood there, with a legion of people behind us, each waiting anxiously for their own moment with him, I repeated how much I loved Jason and the Argonauts, and The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, and him smiling and saying how he appreciated my interest. He was also extremely patient as my mother attempted to take a photo of us. After several failed tries—in the picture below you can see in my eyes the fear that this moment would be lost—she managed to snap a few good ones. Ray smiled at us and signed our book and the line continued moving.

There was a screening happening in tandem with the in-person event, and soon we found our seats in the Walter Reade Cinema at Lincoln Center, settling in for a night of his classic films. Previously I had only been to the theater to see The Lord of the Rings, so this was a special night for me—perhaps one of the most special nights of my young life, and something I consider to be a personal success, though it occurred when age was still in single digits. I was having an experience that most people had not had since the sixties and seventies when his films first hit theaters and later the small screen. In fact, I don’t believe I had had such a unique experience until then, unique because I not only got to see his films in a more enjoyable setting—a great improvement over my unwieldy TV set, over which I had thrown a literal tarp—but meeting my hero in person and being touched by his genuine warmth.

Later, during a break between movies, we met the actress Kathy Crosby (listed in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad as Kathryn Grant) who starred in that film alongside Kerwin Mathews; she was lovely and down to earth and I think this was the first time I realized that actors and artists and performers were heroes, not only because they achieved the astounding feats of slaying dragons, and fencing with skeletons, and battling evil sorcerers, but because they were, just like Ray, real people. Real people, with the ability to practice a kind of cinematic magic, a shamanistic talent at making the impossible possible. The fact that Harryhausen had not forfeit the interests of his own childhood lent me hope I could participate someday in a great creative enterprise, or even make a career out of it, just as he and his lifelong friend, the renowned sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury had, whose work I was also beginning to discover.

I did not meet Ray Harryhausen again that night; nor did I meet him ever again. He passed away in 2013, long after I had garnered new heroes and new experiences. I changed schools; took up acting; picked up the guitar. My interests waxed and waned. I was drawn more to writing. But even with all the changes I went through, both mental and physical, I never forgot the person who had first made me believe in the unbelievable, who had altered my perception of the movies and made them a place where art happened and not just entertainment. He’d taught me that art, whether it be the manipulation of molded figures, or the manipulation of words on a page, or some other equally valid creative endeavor, is worthwhile and can be meaningful. Sure, you can become discouraged by the elements of creativity; you can be stymied by the logistics of plot and character; you can be interrupted in your painstaking work by a ringing phone or a director calling “Cut!”; you can be disheartened and lose interest altogether in the projects you’d previously been bound to—all that being true, Harryhausen’s lesson is one we can all learn from and take to heart. And it was that magic matters. Stories matter; they make our lives richer. To an only child who had faced some difficulty early in his life, I can honestly say that Harryhausen saved me, not only by his technical prowess, and controlled mayhem, and the delight of sharp teeth and clashing swords, but by the kindness he showed, in replying to a seven-year-old’s hopeful letter. Sometimes the best magic is the kind exchanged from person to person. Or to put it another, clearer, more perfect way: sometimes kindness is the real magic.

M. G. Turner
February 2022

Pre-ordering “The Barrens: A Novel of Love and Death in the Canadian Arctic”

For friends of this site who’ve been reading about and are intrigued by the novel coming in May 2022 from Arcade Publishing, The Barrens: A Novel of Love and Death in the Canadian Arctic, by the father-daughter duo from Minnesota Kurt Johnson and Ellie Johnson, you can now pre-order it on the publisher’s website. This link is to a buy button for a number of different booksellers.

The novel is picking up a number of enthusiastic endorsements from readers and writers.

“Terrific novel about canoe trip taken by two women in subarctic Canada. An adventure book, a relationship book, a celebration of the outdoors and the challenges one faces in an at times dangerous environment. It reminded me a bit of Peter Heller’s The River.” Andy Weiner, a publishers’ sale representative

The Barrens grabbed me from the opening pages and never let go, a riveting adventure story written by a father-daughter team who clearly have wilderness chops.”—Michael Punke, author of The Revenant and Ridgeline

I’ve rarely come across a novel that’s simultaneously so economical and fulsome, that’s as restrained as it is brimming with unspoken wisdom, and that manages all this while also being propulsive in its storytelling. It’s bravura work that demands a wide audience.”—Peter Geye, author of Wintering and Safe from the Sea

“A deeply compelling tale, told in vivid, elegant but concise prose, The Barrens carried me along, swiftly as the river at the heart of the story. The central character, Lee, will break your heart, although she’ll have none of it. Love, loss, life and death, against a landscape as raw and ancient as the human heart. Most highly recommended.”—Jeffrey Lent, author of In the Fall

“As harrowing as the whitewater adventure it chronicles, The Barrens is an epic tale of wilderness survival and death in the techno age. The writing throbs with presence: the life-force embedded in Canada’s northern frontier landscape and in the life-scape of its queer young heroine as she journeys toward selfhood. Co-authors Kurt and Ellie Johnson reveal the pulse of identity, born of the stories we weave. A mesmerizing, devastating read.”—Carol Bruneau, Canadian author of Brighten the Corner Where You Are: A Novel Inspired by the Life of Maud Lewis

The Barrens is the raw and moving story of two young women paddling by canoe down one of North America’s the most remote rivers—of their coming of age, their love, and terrible loss. I’ve rarely come across a text that is so visual, and so tangible. The Barrens is a vivid portrayal of the Canadian subarctic, and of the human drive to persevere.”—Alex Messenger, author of The Twenty-Ninth Day: Surviving a Grizzly Attack in the Canadian Tundra

#debutnovels #wildernessfiction #canoeing #paddling #Canada #ThelonRiver #queerlit #writers #writingcommunity

 

Sold: “Heroes are Human: Lessons in Resilience, Courage, and Wisdom from the COVID Front Lines” by Bob Delaney with Dave Scheiber

I’m delighted to announce the upcoming publication of Heroes are Human: Lessons in Resilience, Courage, and Wisdom from the COVID Front Lines by Bob Delaney with award-winning journalist Dave Scheiber, which will be the first book published in the US to tell the stories of healthcare workers struggling through the pandemic, with guidance on how they can heal from the herculean challenges they’re facing. It’s scheduled to come out in October 2022 from City Point Press, a distribution client of Simon & Schuster. Our deal for it was announced on Publishersmarketplace this morning.

Delaney’s first book was the 2008 USA Today bestseller Covert: My Years Infiltrating the Mob, also co-authored with Dave Scheiber, for which I was his editor and publisher at Union Square Press. During a dangerous undercover assignment while a New Jersey State Trooper in his mid-twenties, Bob fell victim to post-traumatic stress (PTS). He recovered with the aid of peer-to-peer therapy—a key ingredient of the new book—and afterward enjoyed a 25-year career as a referee in the National Basketball Association (NBA). Delaney and Scheiber are also co-authors of Surviving the Shadows: A Journey of Hope into Post Traumatic Stress (Sourcebooks 2011). Over the years he’s established himself as a nationally respected leader in dealing with PTS and recovery from trauma. He addresses members of the US armed forces and foreign military, law enforcement, firefighters, first responders, and since COVID began, healthcare workers.

Delaney served the NBA not only as a referee—making it to the top of the field as an “NBA Finals” level official—but also as a supervisor of referees and a spokesperson for the league’s philanthropy NBA Cares. He is known to sports and mainstream media all over the country. The authors will be working with the same high-profile publicity firm that made Covert a national bestseller, which has experience with the NBA and the USA Dream Team squads that won Olympic gold medals.

Heroes are Human is made up of oral history-style testimonials from nurses, doctors, techs, and family members relating their experiences—caring for patients, talking with the very sick, Face-timing with the loved ones of the ill, and trying to save lives the past two years—in Delaney’s empathetic voice, detailing how they can alleviate anxiety and reduce their stress, with examples of peer-to-peer dialogue. The combination of gripping first-hand accounts from doctors, nurses, and families in the COVID trenches joined with Bob’s message of healing and acceptance will be a balm to our fellow Americans from whom so much is being asked.

I’ve long admired and respected Bob’s salt of the earth wisdom and am grateful that we’re working together again to bring his healing message to a wide readership.

Bob Delaney accepting the 2014 Basketball Hall of Fame Human Spirit award.
(Copyright NBAE via Getty / Photo by Nathaniel S. Butler)