R. Holmes & Co. **

** R. Holmes & Co., John Kendrick Bangs, 1906

As a kid I devoured the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, and read them again many years later. However, Doyle is dead and he left behind only 4 novels and 56 short stories about Holmes. It doesn't take long to exhaust the oeuvre, so one must look beyond the canon for fresh material. A skim of the reading lists from 1992, 1994 and 1995, will reveal that I have amassed a decent collection of extra-canonical works, some brilliant, some abysmal.

R. Holmes & Co ranks below the middle of that scale. It's clever and diverting, but has, from my perspective, some fatal flaws that keep it from rising out of the ratings basement.

A bit of history may be in order for those not familiar with the genre. The character of Raffles, the gentleman thief, was created by E. W. Hornung, who was the brother-in-law of Doyle in the 1890s, the same time Doyle was writing the Holmes stories. Raffles is the evil twin of Holmes, brilliant and urbane, but using his powers for ill-gotten gain rather than for good.

In 1905, Bangs evidently got the idea to create a mash up of Raffles and Holmes, creating Raffles Holmes, the son of Sherlock Holmes and Marjorie Raffles, the daughter of Arthur Raffles, the thief. The second story in the collection chronicles how this came to pass.

My biggest compliant about the stories is that the premise makes no sense. Raffles Holmes seeks out the narrator, Jenkins, to make a bundle by having Jenkins publish his exploits as Dr. Watson did for Holmes and Bunny Manders did for Raffles. However, R. Holmes does some decidedly questionable and sometimes illegal things in the stories. If you're going to be deceiving folks to make money, you can hardly then publish the stories and expect to get away with it or continue to do so in the future.

My second complaint is that the language is unnecessarily stilted, even more so than the originals it draws from.

R. Holmes & Co is available at the Gutenberg Project if you want to check it out for yourself.

Paperback Chair

Check out this chair made from paperback books.

Romancing Hollywood Nobody ***

*** Romancing Hollywood Nobody, Lisa Samson, 2008

This one got delivered to Casa Wunderfool the day before my Orlando trip. Yeah! Reading material for the plane. It was just the right size for the trip and just the thing for my frazzled brain. While I was in Orlando, the first Hollywood Nobody won a Christy award. I reviewed the second one (FHN) here.

RHN fits right in with the rest of the series. In fact, I like it better than FHN. Rumor has it that only one volume remains in this series. Dang.

Texas: A Year with the Boys **

** Texas: A Year with the Boys, by William Hoffman, 1983

A fellow screenwriter loaned me this book because she said some of the characters reminded her of the characters in my latest project. It's an interesting read, and there's one guy in there who is almost a dead ringer for my college roommate. However, it's not a particularly great book.

Conflicts

Volunteering as a reader for a screenplay competition has seriously cut into the amount of reviewable material I can read. I'm doing tons of reading (have to wade through 80 screenplays) but I can't write about any of it, and even if I did, you wouldn't be able to get a copy, so it would be pointless.

All that so say that until I get through them, posting will be a bit sparse. On the upside, for all my trouble I get a full-access badge to the festival. Of course, when you do the math for the benefit on a per-hour basis, it would be cheaper to buy the badge. But for me, someone who is navigating the journey from novelist to screenwriter, the experience as a first reader is very valuable. I'm getting to see first hand what it is like to evaluate random stuff that comes in, just like somebody will one day evaluate a screenplay I send in.

The main thing I've learned so far is that I have to up my game. If I got my first project, currently in fourth draft, to read, I'd drop it in the No box.

Anatomy of a Rodeo Clown **

** Anatomy of a Rodeo Clown, Aleta Lutz

Last year I was at an open mike at The Oaks when a rousing chorus of Happy Birthday broke out for Aleta Lutz, a 91-year-old lady sitting on at a side table sipping Shiner from a small glass. After my set I snagged an empty chair at her table to chat. After all, how often do you get a chance to talk to someone who is 91?

That's intriguing enough, but when I discovered she was a writer, I was hooked. We talked until she had to go home, and made arrangements to keep in touch. A few months later, Aleta and her son Jim the Bola Man made the trek from Manor to South Austin for dinner We talked of the writing life and other things. She started out as a young girl during the Depression, writing true crime stories and being paid per word. For many years she lived down around South Padre Island and wrote a society column for the newspaper. Now she lives with Jim in a old farm house, the house where they filmed What's Eating Gilbert Grape.

After dinner, I gave her a FredBook. She gave me a copy of her book, Anatomy of a Rodeo Clown: The Story of Charley Shultz.

I've kept it by the bedside and read the short, bite-sized chapters and learned of the hard times of a Depression-era Okie who stumbled into a career as a rodeo clown. Interesting story. And autographed by the author!

Burning Bright **

** Burning Bright, John Steinbeck, 1950

Like many baby boomers, my first exposure to Steinbeck was being traumatized by The Red Pony and The Pearl in school. I don't know what these educators are thinking. High school is depressing enough without adding stories like that to it. In the 80s, I was properly introduced to Steinbeck by a cab driver in San Francisco who recommended I read Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday. A much better introduction. I fell in love with Steinbeck and began collecting novels as I worked my way through used book stores across the country.

I have a stack of Steinbeck in the To Be Read shelf that are not mentioned in The Stack. When the fancy strikes me, I grab one. Some are more compelling than others. I'm partial to Tortilla Flat and The Winter of our Discontent. And Travels with Charley, but that's not a novel.

So, when I was headed as a volunteer to a fund raising event where I thought I might have some time on my hands, I grabbed a Burning Bright because it is short, under 100 pages. I didn't get to read much more than the introduction at that time, which I found to be as interesting as the book itself.

Steinbeck wrote Burning Bright as a stage play and then filled in description and action to turn it into a novella. It was intended to be able to be performed simply by lifting the dialog out of the book without any significant adaptation. A production was done in New Haven and Boston. It was his third attempt at such a form, the first two being Of Mice and Men and The Moon is Down. (More information at wikipedia.)

It's an unusual book. Divided into three acts, each act has the same four characters but the setting for each of the three acts recasts the four characters in different situations: the first act is set in a circus, Saul and Victor are trapeze artists and Friend Ed, a clown; in the second act, Saul and Friend Ed are neighboring farmers and Victor is Saul's farmhand. In the final act Saul is the captain of a ship, Mr. Victor, his mate, and Friend Ed a seaman about to put out on a different ship. In all acts, Mordeen is Saul's wife. If you don't know this going in, the transition to the second act is confusing.

Also, the dialog is a bit ornate and poetic for the humble characters who speak it and takes a little getting used to. However, it's an interesting story and I found the character arcs engaging.

Two stars for the general reader, three stars for students of the craft.

The Writer's Journey ***

*** The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers and Screenwriters, Christopher Vogler, 1992

Three stars for the general public. Four stars for writers. I can't believe I took this long to finally read this classic and immensely valuable work. I began taking notes halfway through as the implications for my two current projects began to crystallize. When I finished, I opened it back up to the front and started again, reading the entire book through twice. I expect I'll read it, or at least skim it, again in a year or two.

If you're a writer of fiction or screenplays, you owe it to yourself, your work and your readers to read this at least once.

Highly recommended.

A Place Called Wiregrass **

** A Place Called Wiregrass, by Michael Morris, 2002

I picked this book up because it won the Christy Award for First Novel the year before I did with Welcome to Fred. I'm a firm believer in knowing the competition.

I'd like to note right up front that I rank this down at two stars not for the writing, which is good enough, but for the story, which is not the kind of thing I like to read as a rule. Too much second-guessing romance action for my tastes.

But for all that, Morris spins a worthy tale with engaging characters. I was fully invested in the main three characters, all women, being the protagonist, Erma Lee, her granddaughter, Cher, and her mentor, Miss Claudia.

If you're of a mind to appreciate well-written novels with a romantic bent, although not a genre romance novel, you may find this novel to your liking.

Muslim Women in America ***

*** Muslim Women in America: The Challenge of Islamic Identity Today. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, Jane I. Smith, Kathleen M. Moore, 2006

With the exception of The Holland Suggestions, everything I've read so far this year has been a three star book. That's unusual, but nice for me. Maybe I'm getting better at picking a book by its cover.

When I co-wrote Hell in a Briefcase with Phil Little, I had to do a lot of research on the Middle East, the Palestinian conflict, Arab culture and terrorism. A couple of years ago I had an idea for a new project that would use a lot of that research, but go in a different direction. This lead me to begin researching the experience of American Muslim women.

Muslim Women in America is the fourth of fifth book I've read on the subject, and one of the best. It's only 164 pages, but it's dense. You won't just breeze through this one. If this subject is of interest to you, this book is worth reading.