Flashes of Panic

As a reader, I prefer to find authors I like, then try to consume their entire output. Sometimes this works; sometimes there are one or two dogs that need avoiding. But I’m not the first to point out that an author’s name is a brand, and consumers follow that brand for a reason.

My aunt knows this, and is good about keeping me up to date on the recent output of (say) Bernd Heinrich. She’s also aware that I have the family gene for seafaring books, many of which I poached from my grandfather’s library. I’ve read and reread C.S. Forester’s Hornblower Saga to the point of memorization (the DVD set arrived at Christmas, but I’ve only had time to watch two of them,) so she’s managed to dig up The Hornblower Companion and the unlikely Life and Times volume. (Nothing like a biography of a fictional character, that’s what I say.)

Last weekend, she handed me two tiny paperbacks which turned out to be some of Forester’s lesser-known work. And deservedly so, as far as I can tell. The Nightmare is a collection of bleak short stories about Nazi Germany; Brown on Resolution has some glowing reviews (and plot synopses) on Amazon, but just felt overly melodramatic to me; a lengthy stage-setting for an ending that can’t really live up to its introduction.

The books are pocket-sized paperbacks from, my aunt thought, the library book sale, and the pencilled prices inside the front cover bear that out. The printed prices are more fun: Australia 80c, N.Z. 75c, Spain 65 Pts. Brown on Resolution notes, inside the cover, that the first printing was in 1929, this edition was 1963, and this was the sixth (1972) printing of that edition. Evidently this one was well-liked in its day.

Forester really is unpredictable, though. I read many of his more obscure titles from the library back in the day, and there are some which weren’t terribly memorable (The Good Shepherd) there were others (The Gun, The Captain From Connecticut) which were pretty powerful in their own way. His collections of stories, like The Man in the Yellow Raft and Gold From Crete, made excellent school-bus reading. The take-away message seems to be that if you follow the brand of the author, you can’t expect everything to be top of the line.

Now Playing: Other Side from Golden Age of Radio by Josh Ritter