Retro Reads discussion

Perhaps rather than fill up the Idle Chatter thread, a new one devoted to current reading is called for; especially since this seems to be a topic where I post a lot of content. 🙂

Mystery novelist Dorothy Cameron Disney (1903-1992) is easily confused with her contemporaries Dorothy Salisbury Davis (1916-2014) (I’ve read her novel The Clay Hand) and Doris Miles Disney (1907-1976) (haven’t read yet, but plan to). DCD is usually grouped with Mary Roberts Rinehart and Mignon G. Eberhart in the “Had I But Known” school. These books feature female protagonists / narrators who do not see dangers coming, although of course it all becomes clear in retrospect.

There are certainly traces of this approach in DCD’s first novel, Death in the Back Seat (1936), about a nice young couple who find themselves in way over their heads during a home caretaking gig in Connecticut. I thoroughly enjoyed this story and its small town atmosphere. The solution is VERY complicated, you won’t figure it out.

I obtained this book through one of those many “Megapack” / omnibus editions of genre fiction that are all over Amazon. I find that these often represent a very good value.

Upton Sinclair’s Lanny Budd series, 11 doorstop novels published between 1940 and 1953, are like The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles at a political affairs rather than an adventure level, and are comparable good fun. Lanny, born with the century into a situation of privilege, finds himself part of everything (and I do mean everything) that goes on in the first half of the 20th Century. Although I’ll never forget the young John Gunther Jr. rejecting the series (in Death Be Not Proud) - “I prefer my Superman straight” - still, Lanny is a cool fellow to know, and after being neglected for several decades, the novels seem to be finding new fans through ebook publication.

Arthur Machen’s The London Adventure, or The Art of Wandering (1924) is a mite difficult to classify. As the subtitle indicates, it is partly about ambling and meandering, both physically through the streets of London, and mentally wherever Machen’s mind takes him. It is sometimes put forward as a pioneering text of psychogeography. It has elements of memoir. It overlaps a little in its approach with two other London books that I like very much - H.V. Morton’s Ghosts of London (1939) (semi-forgotten bits of history tucked away in odd corners) and Arthur Ransome’s Bohemia in London (1907) (first-hand account of the back-street literary life). It has a proto-post-modernist side, since Machen writes at length about the writing of this very book, and the difficulties involved in deciding what it is going to be, and in executing the plan if there ever is a plan.

In any case, it is a short book, only 150 pages, and very much of a fun, refreshing, and unusual read.