FORGOTTEN CHARACTER: LEFTY FEEP

My week's reading has not touched any Forgotten Books:  some Ed Gorman westerns, some Joe R. Lansdale, some of Joe Hill's Locke and Key graphic novels, and some Stephen King graphic novels.  Everything fairly recent and nothing I would call forgotten.  Luckily, I've also been reading a few of Robert Bloch's Lefty Feep stories from the 1940s.

    Lefty is not like the other children.  To say that he dresses loudly is like saying Sarah Palin ever had a shot at being elected president.  Lefty is a con man, a grifter, a lover of the racetrack, and not so intelligent, although he has a naive wiliness about him which helps him get out of scrapes.  Lefty is also a storyteller...and what fantastic stories.

     The Lefty Feep stories are told in a Runyonesque style.  On steroids.  Lefty's misadventures feature fantastic situations, rhyming phrases, outrageous puns, and a little twist at the end, all narrated in the present tense.  The stories should not be read in one big gulp.  A little Lefty goes a long way.

     The series appeared in Fantastic Adventures from 1942 to 1950 (with two exceptions) so there a lot of refernces to the war and some now non-PC descriptions of Germans and Japanese.  In one, Lefty gets Aladdin's lamp and asks the genie for a room full of riches; what he gets is a room full of rubber tires.  Rationing made them very valuable, you know.  The stories are firmly embedded in their time: a gun is called a "not-so-Gabriel heater," for example.

     He has adventures with time travel, wizards, the devil, living statues, the Fountain of Youth, robots...well, you get the idea.  Anything can happen to Lefty Feep, and usually does.  The strange characters he meets up with have names like Lower Bertha, Joe Blow, Jack Fu Groan and his brother Wuan Low Groan, Gorilla Gabface, Bernie the Attorney, and Horace Hormone.  The stories may not be sophisticated but they sure are enjoyable.

     The first eight Lefty Feep stories were collected, along with an original story, in Lost in Time and Space with Lefty Feep, Volume One in 1987 by the small press Creatures at Large.  Further volumes never appeared.

     There were twenty-five Lefty Feep stories all together (information mainly from ISFDB):

• *Time Wounds All Heels (Fantastic Adventures, April 1942; The Time Curve, edited by Sam Moskowitz and Roger Elwood, 1968; Lost in Time and Space with Lefty Feep, Volume One, 1987)
• *Gather 'Round the Flowing Bowler (FA, May 1942; LiTaSwLF)
• The Pied Piper Fights the Gestapo (FA, June 1942; LiTaSwLF)
• *The Weird Doom of Floyd Scrilch (FA, July 1942; LiTaSwLF; Rivals of Weird Tales, edited by Robert Weinberg, Stefan Dziemanowicz, and Martin H. Greenberg, 1990) 
• *The Little Man Who Wasn't All There (FA, August 1942; LiTaSwLF; Knights of Madness:  Further Comic Tales of Comic, edited by Peter Haining, 1998)
• *Son of a Witch (FA, September 1942; The Second Book of Unknown Tales of Horror, edited by Peter Haining, 1978; Tales of Unknown Horror, edited by Peter Haining, 1978; LiTaSwLF)
• Jerk the Giant Killer (FA, October 1942; LiTaSwLF)
• The Golden Opportunity of Lefty Feep (FA, November 1942; LiTaSwLF)
• Lefty Feep and the Sleepy-Time Gal (FA, December 1942)
• *Lefty Feep Catches Hell (FA, January 1943)
• Nothing Happens to Lefty Feep (FA, February 1943)
• The Chance of a Ghost (FA, March 1943)
• *Lefty Feep and the Racing Robot (FA, April 1943)
• *Genie with the Light Brown Hair (FA, May 1943)
• *Stuporman (FA, June 1943; Superheroes, edited by Michael Parry, 1978)
• *The Goon from Ragoon (FA, July 1943)
• *You Can't Kid Lefty Feep (FA, August 1943)
• *A Horse on Lefty Feep (FA, October 1943)
• Lefty Feep's Arabian Nightmare (FA, February 1944)
• *Lefty Feep Does Time (FA, April 1944)
• *Lefty Feep Gets Henpecked (FA, April 1945; Satan's Pets, edited by Vic Ghadalia, 1972)
• *Tree's a Crowd (FA, July 1946)
• *End of Your Rope (FA, July 1950; Science Fantasy Yearbook [no.1], 1970)
• The Return of Lefty Feep (Out of My Head, 1986)
• A Snitch in Time (LiTaSwLF)

* available online at unz.org

     Lefty Feep is part of a tradition of way-out humorous fantasy stories.  There was also Nelson bond's Horse-Sense Hank, Squaredeal Sam McGhee and Pat Pending, Dwight V. Swain's Henry Horn, and Leroy Yerxa's Freddie Funk.  Later (and more sophisticated) cousins were H. Nearing's C.P. Ransom and R. Bretnor's incorrigible Papa Schimmelhorn.  All of which are worth reading, but there's a special place in my heart for the hapless Lefty Feep.

THE HOLY MODEL ROUNDERS

Everybody needs a little toe-tapping Euphoria in life.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJ1J99feOZw

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, AMY!

She turned fourteen today, still holding the title of One of the Four Best Children on the Planet.  (No fair guessing who the other three are.)  She's bright, funny, caring, beautiful...she's a walking book of superlatives.  She's our Amy-Daisy and our Blondie-Bear.  The world is a sunnier, happier place with her on it.  I hope she has a fantastic day today.  I know she will have a fantastic life.

OVERLOOKED FILM AND WHATNOT: FIVE FROM THE GOLDEN AGE

You often hear of the Five British Ladies of Mystery.  The big five from the Golden Age of British Mystery being Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Josephine Tey, Ngaio Marsh (even though Marsh was from New Zealand), and Margery Allingham.  Here are some links for each you may not have been aware of.

A Tribute to Agatha Christie:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7G5qCnKjaEU

And a Monty Python tribute:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0BuKYiwhVQ

The Agatha Christie Festival on the English Riviera:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up-r2wHZOWY

Christopher Lee reads Christie's The Lamp:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ze18tWlNR7Q
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErPmp_U1gs8&feature=relmfu
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ze18tWlNR7Q&feature=relmfu


A Dorothy L. Sayers story, from Studio One, September 3, 1951:

http://archive.org/details/studioOneMr.MummerysSuspicion1951

Benedict Cumberbatch reads Ngaio Marsh's Death in White Tie (follow the links):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCqHUKfvjck&feature=bf_prev&list=PLA1487282CEFC79B7&lf=results_main

And here's Ngaio Marsh as Hamlet (1936-7?)...

http://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/ObjectDetails.aspx?oid=438470

...And not as Hamlet:

http://christchurchcitylibraries.com/Heritage/Photos/Topics/People/MarshNgaio/

Josephine Tey's The Franchise Affair (1951), in seven parts:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnNR4nHW5cc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-PB4yZuXJo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wEpzxwRq9I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Apxbqbga3w8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9iALw2GdM8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmhNqNdPel8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7w_WCTD8Yw


Margery Allingham's Albert Campion introduces himself:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9zwbjtW0Ls

Margery Allingham, from the National Portrait Gallery (1936):

http://www.npg.org.uk/index.php?id=534

Here's a link to the Margery Allingham Society:

http://www.margeryallingham.org.uk/

     Who would be the Five British Ladies of today's mystery fiction.  P. D. James and Ruth Rendell, surely, but who else?

INCOMING

It has been a quiet week.  My back is feeling better, despite last Thursday when we brought the kids into Tyson's Corner for a book signing by "Erin Hunter."  Hunter is the author of the very popular  juvenile series Warriors and Seekers.  (Think tribes of cats and tribes of bears.)  The two series were created by Victoria Holmes, who oversees both series.  To help with the workload, three other writers were brought in (four other writers, if you count the graphic novels).  There have been umpty millions of Hunter books sold; half (I swear) on Thursday night.  The "Erin Hunter" who was at the signing was Vicky Holmes and she was perfectly charming and openly honest.  (She starts each Warriors book by deciding what cat to kill and how -- she's allergic to cats, you see, and doesn't really like them.)  Anyway, there were thousands of gibbering children at the signing, climbing over the shelves, biffing siblings with soda cups, and doing all the obnoxious things kids do while under the doting eyes of parents.  Let me add that both Mark and Erin did none of those things [so sayeth the prideful grandfather].  We had to get there at  4:30 in order to get tickets at 5:00 for a 7:00 signing.  We arrived slightly after a busload of kids shipped in from Pennsylvania.  It's a two-hour drive for us each way, so we started out at 2:30 and didn't get home until 10:30.  The kids were happy -- far happier than my back was.  I took it easy for the next couple of days, until overwhelmed by guilt, I did our taxes.  So it's been a fairly light week for book-buying -- at least for myself.

• Ben Bova, Mercury.  SF.
• "Joe Bob Briggs" (John Bloom), Profoundly Disturbing:  Shocking Movies That Changed History!  Joe Bob takes on fifteen cult films, including Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS.
• Leonard Carpenter, Conan the Raider.  The barbarian who just will not die.
• Jeffrey Carver, The Rapture Effect.  SF.
• Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, editors, Sirens and Other Demons.  Erotic horror; twenty-two stories.
• [Detective Book Club], omnibus of three novels:  Gideon's Fog by "J. J. Marric" (John Creasey), Alive and Dead by E. X. (Elizabeth) Ferrars, and The Big Call by John Creasey as "Gordon Ashe."  The last is part of the Patrick Dawlish/Crimehaters series.
• Steve Perry, Conan the Formidable.  One of some two dozen Conan pastiches (see Leonard Carpenter, above) published by Tor.
• "Dodge Tyler" (evidently John Edward Ames), Dan'l Boone:  The Lost Wilderness Tales:  Taos Death Cry.  Number eight (of eleven) in the western series.

     And on the e-book front:

• Kevin J. Anderson, Tau Ceti.
• Douglas R. Brown, Tamed.
• Robert Brumm, Windigo Soul.
• Lee Goldberg, The Jury Series.
• Timothy Hallinan, The Four Last Things.
• Elizabeth Massie, Aberrations:  Horror Stories.
• Richard McManus, The Chip-Head Apocalypse.
• John Jackson Miller, Star Wars:  Lost Tribe of the Sith:  Secrets.
• Scott Nicholson, Write Good or Die.
• Darren Pillsbury, Imaginary Friends.
• Anthony J. Rapino, Welcome to Moon Hill.
• Sam Winston, The Mechanist, Stories, and What Came After.

HYMN TIME (VERY EARLY VERSION)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLYfLEZW3bc

IMPORTANT DECISION MAKING: A HOW TO BLOGPOST

Decisions, decisions, decision.  Should I do my taxes or should I play around on the computer? Hmmm.  Hmmm.  A lightbulb flashes dimly over my head and -- just as quickly -- flashes out.  There was a sharp, bright electical shock from the extinquished light, reminescent of electoshock therapy.  "Eureka!" cried I, preparatory to taking off my clothes and running through the town.  Today, I realized,  was April 14th...I have plenty of time to do my taxes!  Why not play on the computer, at least until the bailiffs come.

     And...wait for it...April is month number four.  Today is day number fourteen.  If you subtract the four from the fourteen, the result is ten!  And, yes, I know one could have reserversed the order and suntract fourteen from four, but that's confusing and hurts my head and goes into territory where no man has entered and lived!!!  Anyway we are left with ten, consisting of two mumbers, 1 and 0.  We can divide ten by two in two different ways, I guess.  We can divide it in two horizontally, but we areleft with a 1 and an 0; but 0 is nothing  so we really have just one number and that just won't suit our purpose and make my head hurt even more.  We could the other way and used the Miss Primsnort method she taught us in second grade.  That would make the whole job easier (the answer's five -- see how easy!) but does introduce another problem in the form of Miss Primsnort, the meanest, nastiest, ugliest teacher in the whole world -- and that includes Kentucky.  Jerry, I hear you telling me, Miss Primsnort has been dead and buried for over twenty years.  To that I answer Bushwah!  Evil never sleeps.  One day she will rise from her hellish grave and haunt me with word problems about two trains rushing to their bloody, crushed fates while she merrily asks how fast are they going and how far out of St. Louis will their inevitable, tragic deaths occur and was the baby in the third car a boy or a girl.  I have had dreams of hee savagely attacking me with finely-honed hypotenuse, capable of cleaving one of my mother's corn cassaroles with a single swipe!  **BRRRR!**  But I digress.  I force myself to breathe deeply and think happy thoughts.  Besides, ever since she was put in the ground, a long, rotating line of her former students take turns peeing on her grave, 24/7.  Nobody, no matter how mean, wants tocrawl up through the dirt only the face that.

     So the die has been cast.  I have crosses the Rubicon with my army of elephants.  I haveput on my big-girl panties and have eated the Brussel sprouts while belling the cat.  SPOILER ALERT:  I have made my momentous decision and I think it has something to do with the number 5.

     All of this heavy thinking has made me tired so I'm going to bed.  Maybe I can think of what I'm going to do with the number 5.  Feel free, if you will, to carry on without me for the rest of the night.