 We're having a baseball season after all, baby. But before I go, you sure you don't want to learn the backdoor slider? 
We were really worried for a while. Baseball had been postponed, and while some blamed the owners and others blamed the players, we blamed the entire universe. Well, except for Bernard Malamud, a favorite writer of ours, who we were forced to read in high school and expected to hate, but loved. The Natural wasn't the book we read. We read selections from The Stories of Bernard Malamud. If you're going to read serious literature, bite-sized chunks can ease the digestion process. We digress—baseball, delayed, now back on track. The best part? Living overseas as we do, it means we get to have our yearly conversations with baffled friends who just can't wrap their heads around the sport's rules—or really, its entire concept. We enjoy that.
 When an unknown neighbor commits murder peace of mind is the next casualty. 
It's always nice to come across a book with a fresh approach. This book for example, The Woman on the Roof by Helen Nielsen, deals with a disturbed woman who has the key clues to a murder mystery due to being able to see directly into a neighbor's apartment. But she's considered a kook by family, friends, and the police, who've interacted with her before on the occasion of her being committed to a mental institution. Upon her release she wanted nothing more than peace and tranquility, but now she's a murder witness. Socially awkward, afraid of people, obsessive compulsive, and psychically tethered to the garage-top apartment that is her sole safe zone, this killing thing really turns her life upside down.
There's a great sequence where the character gets lost on the streets of L.A., and seeing the city from her point of view, experiencing all its nocturnal strangeness and indecipherable cacophony and perceived danger through her eyes, is tremendously affecting. We can't remember feeling that level of sympathy for a character in a jam in a long time. Not sure many male authors could have pulled it off quite as deftly. Nielsen's good ideas, written well with a unique angle on murder—figuratively and literally—made for a very worthwhile read. It was originally published in 1954, and the Dell paperback you see above appeared in 1956 with excellent cover art by William George.
 I think I've finally got his strategy figured out. Every time he throws a punch he hits me. 
William Campbell Gault was a fan of sports—or at least of using sports as a backdrop for his fiction. In The Canvas Coffin the boxer hero Luke Pilgrim wakes up the morning after a tough title fight and fears he may have killed Brenda Vane, the woman he escorted to his victory party. He can't quite remember, though, what with all those blows to the head, but she's definitely dead, and he needs to unpuzzle the mystery before he ends up in prison. As set-ups go, this is a nice one. Guys who think they may have committed murder are staples of crime fiction and film noir, but the idea of making the character a concussed boxer is clever. Gault wrote about twenty sports thrillers, so he knew his stuff. Illustrator William George knew his stuff too, and produced a nice cover for this Dell paperback, dated 1954.
 Oh darling, I’m so proud of you. It’s tough to get any kind of work right now. 
In a down job market you take what you can get, especially if it makes your woman this happy. This cool cover for Brett Halliday’s Murder Is My Business was painted by William George for Dell Publishing in 1949. Halliday was reprinted a bunch, so there are multiple covers for this book. The one just below is the original hardback from 1945, and after that, in order, are the 1945 paperback by Gerald Gregg, a photorealistic 1958 cover, a 1963 Robert McGinnis cover, and lastly, the recent Hard Case Crime version with Robert McGinnis cover art once again. There are others, as well, but we couldn’t track them all down.
    
 He’s always hanging around. 
William Wister Haines wrote six screenplays, saw several books adapted to film, and was considered by some to be a literary talent on the level of John Steinbeck. But you’d never know any of that from looking at the William George cover art for his Depression-era novel Slim, with its shirtless hunk of burnin’ love casually doing a little pole smoking. The novel was mainly a drama about the dangerous working conditions for electrical linemen, but Bantam opted to sex it up a bit for the 1957 re-issue with a cover that looks like a Marlboro ad. We hope Slim remembered his sunblock.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1957—Ginsberg Poem Seized by Customs
On the basis of alleged obscenity, United States Customs officials seize 520 copies of Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl" that had been shipped from a London printer. The poem contained mention of illegal drugs and explicitly referred to sexual practices. A subsequent obscenity trial was brought against Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who ran City Lights Bookstore, the poem's domestic publisher. Nine literary experts testified on the poem's behalf, and Ferlinghetti won the case when a judge decided that the poem was of redeeming social importance. 1975—King Faisal Is Assassinated
King Faisal of Saudi Arabia dies after his nephew Prince Faisal Ibu Musaed shoots him during a royal audience. As King Faisal bent forward to kiss his nephew the Prince pulled out a pistol and shot him under the chin and through the ear. King Faisal died in the hospital after surgery. The prince is later beheaded in the public square in Riyadh. 1981—Ronnie Biggs Rescued After Kidnapping
Fugitive thief Ronnie Biggs, a British citizen who was a member of the gang that pulled off the Great Train Robbery, is rescued by police in Barbados after being kidnapped. Biggs had been abducted a week earlier from a bar in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil by members of a British security firm. Upon release he was returned to Brazil and continued to be a fugitive from British justice. 2011—Elizabeth Taylor Dies
American actress Elizabeth Taylor, whose career began at age 12 when she starred in National Velvet, and who would eventually be nominated for five Academy Awards as best actress and win for Butterfield 8 and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, dies of congestive heart failure in Los Angeles. During her life she had been hospitalized more than 70 times. |
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