by Duane Spurlock
Bound to Please by Michael Dirda (New York: W.W. Norton & Co. 2005)
A collection of “essays on great writers and their books” may not at first seem appropriate for readers of high-energy, action-blasting pulp fiction, but be warned that Michael Dirda, a longtime writer and editor for the Washington Post Book World and 1993 recipient of the Pulitzer Price for distinguished criticism, is a great promoter of genre fiction.
Alongside essays on Thomas Pynchon, Herodotus, Ovid, Gustave Flaubert and so forth, you’ll be happy to find ghost-story writers Vernon Lee and Algernon Blackwood, Cornell Woolrich, Avram Davidson, Charles McCarry (remember my eccentric thesis that if an anachronistic version of Blue Book were still be published today, McCarry would be one of its writers?), a “Science Fiction Reading List,” and “Dirda’s Dozen,” which includes alongside the obvious Hemingway and Faulkner such pulp luminaries as Lord Dunsany, H.P. Lovecraft, Raymond Chandler, and P.K. Dick. Let’s face it -— how can you take a high-minded reader's recommendations seriously if he doesn’t also read something just for fun every now and then? Thank goodness we have W.C. Tuttle to balance against Luke Short. Doc Savage saves us from When Worlds Collide. How can you not like a book that includes this passage:
Surely everyone agrees that the most thrilling line in popular literature is “Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!” (If you don’t recognize this sentence from The Hound of the Baskervilles, you now know what to read on your next holiday.) That said, the final sentences of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes are as perfectly noble, simple, and heartbreaking as -— what? Hamlet’s dying words? Plato’s valedictory praise of Socrates at the end of the Phaedo? It seems ludicrous to suggest such comparisons, but they are the ones that come to mind. (p. 224)
He’s talking about pulp fiction here, folks! Check this book out from the library, even if you don't buy a copy to keep handy by the bedside -— you may find something fun in it!
Links:
Michael Dirda's Bound to Please: An Extraordinary One-Volume Literary Education is now available in paperback. You can learn more about it at Amazon by clicking here.
You didn't recognize that quote from The Hound of the Baskervilles? Then get a copy and read it, quick! You'll find a variety of editions at Amazon by clicking here.
Can't recall the final sentences of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes? For shame! Check out Amazon for a number of editions by clicking here.
You'll find my eccentric thesis about the excellent spy and action novels of Charles McCarry elsewhere on The Pulp Rack in "If the Pulps Still Thrived: Charles McCarry as a Contemporary Blue Book writer" by clicking here.
Posted by ds at March 6, 2007 09:11 PM
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