Bought: Memory

I have a frequent and fervent desire to go back in time and slap my younger self around.

I hated DAW Books when I was a teenager. I bought the Elric books because of the Michael Whelan covers and because my God it was Elric, the doomed, drug-taking albino sorcerer whose black blade demanded souls! (If Tolkien was beer and D&D was pot, Elric was basically crack.) But I didn't buy any other DAWs until much later. It was the spines that did it. The thought of all those identical yellow spines with the author's name in red and the title in black just rubbed me the wrong way. Book covers should be as varied as their contents, I thought. Didn't these DAW people understand that? Were they just too cheap to spend the money? Too lazy to make the effort? Didn't they care?

Now that I'm older and a bit wiser I realize that the yellow spines were an example of cheap and effective branding. DAW was hoping to foster brand awareness and, if at all possible, loyalty. Books are products, after all. Especially genre books. That bare fact is at odds with the reverence I had (and have) for books, my conviction that they aren't just products to be consumed, like bananas or beer. Books are special. Books are the collective memory of our species. Etc., etc. A publisher that makes their books visually indistinguishable is tacitly saying that they are interchangeable. Etc., etc.

Cue fantasy:

Idiot! *SLAP* You pompous, ridiculous snob! *Suh-LAP* Do you know how much Morlock Night is going to sell for in 30 years?!!

*EPIC SLAP*

The books I could have read! The worlds I might have explored! Back in my prime exploring years when my heart was a bonfire and my imagination was unbounded and I could swallow seven different kinds of horseshit, each more absurd than the last, as if it was the word of God made flesh and dipped in pure milk chocolate!

*Sigh*

Now I own more of those old yellow spine DAWs than I can easily count (I counted them anyway: 274). I seek out the yellowest copies, the ones that haven't faded from exposure to sunlight. Oh the irony. I toy with the idea of trying to complete a set. Only 580 of them were published, give or take. I'm almost half way there.

DAW was a cool and quirky publisher in many ways. They were the first mass market publisher devoted to sf and fantasy. They published a lot of foreign language sf in translation - Gerard Klein, Pierre Barbet, Herbert Franke, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. They published very good, long-running "year's best" anthology series for sf, fantasy and horror. In a field dominated by men many of their best and most prolific writers were women: Marion Zimmer Bradley, Andre Norton, Tanith Lee, C. J. Cherryh.

And the covers! Whelan. Josh Kirby. George Barr. Kelly Freas. Bob Pepper. Vincent Di Fate. Don Maitz. A lot of the books had some interior art as well. And as far as I know DAW always credited their artists on the copyright page. You might think that would just be common courtesy, to reader and artist both, but until quite recently it was all too rare and it still isn't universal.

So Viva DAW! Long may they publish, though the yellow is long gone and most of the quirks have been worn away by the years. And all due praise to their late founder Don A. Wollheim. According to their website they are still privately owned, though apparently they have some kind of distribution deal with Penguin.

And Viva Hard Case Crime! Of course I noticed the line of retro hard-boiled paperbacks when they started showing up on retail shelves, but the similarity to DAW didn't occur to me until I began actively looking for them at my local used book shop. The white Hard Case spines - author in black, title in red - are almost like a negative image (evil twin?) of those old DAWs. They're not quite as distinctive, but they stand out enough that you can scan the shelves at speed and count on spotting them.

I've only got five Hard Case books so far, with four more on the way from Amazon where, at the moment, they qualify for a 4-for-the-price-of-3 promotion. Collecting crime fiction is only a sideline with me. Most of the crime paperbacks I own were bought for the covers, though I read John Dickson Carr voraciously for a while, and I'm a fan of John le Carré (spy fiction is technically crime fiction, right?) and Gregory Mcdonald.

And Donald Westlake. Which brings us, finally, to Memory, and this fantastic cover. There's a good review of the novel on this excellent blog, which includes a link to an article on this other excellent blog that explains how this almost fifty year old story ended up being published now, posthumously.

I just want to draw attention to the cover. The design of the Hard Case books is meant to evoke the golden age of paperbacks. The breathless blurbery. The yellow ribbon with crown and gun logo. And especially the cover art. They commission new paintings from old masters like Robert McGinnis (whose site seems to be in limbo - a sampling of his paperback work is here and other commercial work can be found here) and young turks like Glen Orbik. All of it defiantly old fashioned.

And then there's this sucker, with Orbik art but otherwise like nothing else Hard Case has published. Holy Hannah. What do I love about this cover?

Everything. That slab of solid black is an attention-grabber, of course. But it's also the black of death and of mourning. Westlake died on the last day of 2008. With his name centered near the top and the word memory directly below, the cover effectively becomes a cenotaph, the title perhaps short for In memory of.

It's the black of noir fiction, naturally. The shadows that loom over the characters, and in which they are lost. Sin. Night. Blindness. Despair. Above all the existential blank against which the noir story is set, where God is absent and Fate is an amalgam of character and perversely bad luck.

And specific to this novel is the black of broken memory. On page one actor Paul Cole is caught in flagrante by an enraged husband, who grabs a chair, lifts it over his head and... It is the last thing Cole remembers seeing before he wakes in a hospital with gaping holes in his existing memories and his ability to form and hold new ones damaged.

That's a lot of heavy lifting for 30 square inches of glossy paper!

The only downside to the cover design is that the figures are, necessarily, reduced to postage stamp size. Hopefully Orbik will post a good scan of the original art on his site soon. I wrote to him, asking about the initial inspiration for the cover. He graciously took the time to reply (Thank you, sir!) and says:

The concept was Hard Case Crime's from the beginning. They said they wanted something which felt "like this is some sort of existentialist drama we're seeing play out" of the scene from the very beginning of the book. A bare-stage set-up (perhaps alluding to the actor in the story...?) --- something like a James Bama cover 40+ years back of fully rendered mini-figures on a solid black background.

So bravo to Hard Case for concept and to Orbik for execution. Buy their books! Look for his glossy yet gritty art! Do it!

While I'm at it I can't help giving a quick nod to another Hard Case title featuring Orbik. Once again Sarah Weinman has the story on how this one came about. I'll just say that anyone who would publish a Sherlock Holmes novel with this beautiful and deliriously inappropriate cover and the tagline "They All Answered to... The BODYMASTER!" does not lack for chutzpah or a sense of humor. And yes the book does include a character with that rather evocative title. In some fraternal organizations and secret societies the chief officer of a lodge was (and presumably is, though it's hard to imagine anyone saying it with a straight face now) the Body Master. In Doyle's novel Black Jack McGinty is a Bodymaster in the Eminent Order of Freemen, a (fictional) mutual aid society among Irish immigrants working the Pennsylvania coal mines circa 1870. Valley is very loosely based on real events, or alleged events anyway. The Wikipedia page has an excellent plot summary which also touches upon the novel's connection to the Molly Maguires, but if you are curious about the "Mollies" be warned: their story is a quagmire of controversy, ideology and partisan bullshit, and no matter what version of events you decide is most likely, it sure won't give you that "proud to be an American" feeling. Caveat Lector.