My Wicked, Wicked Ways – Errol Flynn, 1959 ★

Confessions of a Debauched Swashbuckler

When it comes to getting a manuscript published, most times an author’s sudden death won’t help it to the finish line. In the case of My Wicked, Wicked Ways, I think Errol Flynn dying helped get it out. Hard to imagine him ever wanting this version of himself exposed in public.

Maybe it was the spirit of the 1960s. True, the decade was still days away when My Wicked, Wicked Ways was released, two months after Flynn’s October 1959 death. The author’s desire to shock and offend readers with his wild life feels more in tune with the coming decade.

Whatever era you are in, it’s hard to like this guy. In his own telling, Flynn was a rank bastard. What starts out as candid recollections over drinks soon feels more like an exclusive audience with a sociopath.

As he so charmingly puts it late in the book: “Ts-t! Ts-t! It takes some ladies so long to realise they have been raped.”

Period Of Adjustment – Tennessee Williams, 1960 ★½

Manly Men and Women Stuck with Them

Two youngish couples struggling to find Christmas Eve contentment in Eisenhower-era suburbia may not seem like fertile ground for an outsider’s artist like Tennessee Williams. And it isn’t.

Written both as a send-up and a genuine appreciation for the American middle class, Period Of Adjustment is billed as “a serious comedy,” when it is really neither. Williams has a sense of sarcasm about his characters, but his need to convey their basic goodness dampens any edges he might have had. Maybe on stage the right actors could inject a spark of life, but on the page it makes for a stiff, mawkish read.

Before The Fall – William Safire, 1975 ★★★★

Run of the Milhous

From 1966 to 1973, William Safire was one of Richard Nixon’s top speechwriters. In Before The Fall, Safire makes use of his vantage point as crafter of the Nixon message to relate everything he saw, and much of what he didn’t, of Nixon’s triumphant, calamitous presidency.

Among the things he missed was the Watergate break-in which forced Nixon’s resignation. As that was dark ops and Safire was in the business of public relations, his orbit lay well outside the infamous Plumbers breaking into Democratic headquarters.

Yet this didn’t protect Safire from being bugged when Attorney General John Mitchell pegged him as a potential security leak.

Nightwalk – Bob Shaw, 1967 ★½

Crossing the Genre Streams

Science fiction stories fall into two broad camps: fantastic adventures and conceptual thinkpieces. What happens when someone brings them together by writing a captured-spy escape adventure that incorporates abstract theories about human vision and infinity?

Give Bob Shaw credit for never taking the easy way. Nightwalk may not be engaging or convincing, but the author’s ambition to blend the categories of rugged adventure and quantum physics is something to behold.

Never mind its jerky pace, strained narrative, thin setting, and dull characters; you do go on a ride.

Glory Road – Bruce Catton, 1952 ★★★★★

Death Before Victory

War is hell, a fact even honest combat histories often sidestep. Not to deny its ugliness, but rather to craft a narrative palatable to a broader audience. Bitter reality is acknowledged, but details not dwelt upon.

Glory Road is different. It is the Saving Private Ryan of American Civil War histories, a blow-by-blow account of the terrors of war not for the squeamish. In his depiction of the Battle of Gettysburg, the war’s turning point, Bruce Catton describes a Bosch-like canvas where eyes are shot out, maddened horses gallop on three legs, and men duck bullets behind the bodies of dead comrades.

One soldier is so horribly maimed that he is described putting a gun to his head and blowing out his brains. Meanwhile, others are directed to throw themselves into an exposed position, just to buy a few precious minutes after one general had put his part of the line too far out.

The New Thinking Fan’s Guide To Baseball – Leonard Koppett, 1991 ★½

Change for the Worse

When someone creates something widely regarded as a classic of its kind, the impulse to go back and touch it up should be stubbornly resisted. Even if you are its creator, there is something in the way your work engaged the public that no longer belongs to you alone. Whatever that is, it should be respected.

Back in 1967, a beat reporter named Leonard Koppett put out a book about baseball that crystalized the way many people thought about the game. The Thinking Man’s Guide To Baseball took in a range of topics, analyzed them in depth, explained why managers and players did what they did, detailed the roles of owners, umpires, media, scorers, and more. It was thoughtful, original, and highly praised.

I wish I had gotten to read that, but I didn’t. Instead I had this 1991 revision, a grab bag of sententious truisms with zero flow and an occasional 1990s player sprinkled amid heaps of anecdotes spotlighting players from much older times.

The Loved One – Evelyn Waugh, 1948 ★★★½

Death Be Not Cheap

A novel easy to enjoy but hard to love, The Loved One demonstrates how able a novelist Evelyn Waugh was when he didn’t give a hoot about any of the characters in his book.

It may well be the bleakest satire Waugh ever crafted, plunging his readers into an utterly alien and forlorn land known as California. There celebrity reigns supreme, death is the ultimate arbiter of social status, and empty chatter replaces serious conversation. This is a point in its favor, our English protagonist Dennis Barlow is told:

“They are a very decent, generous lot of people out here and they don’t expect you to listen. Always remember that, dear boy. It’s the secret of social ease in this country. They talk entirely for their own pleasure. Nothing they say is designed to be heard.”