Overlooked Authors . . . for Various Reasons

November 1, 2017 6:38 PM

The first article is about writers who've faded into obscurity and some who could repay new fans. Most of them are British, but the story of one who quit after being a best-selling author and went into an entirely new line of work—well, he was American. The second article is about horror authors who deserve movie or tv adaptations of their work. Some have had small success, some have never been on any screen. Horror writers
posted by MovableBookLady (37 comments total)

Heh. Starting that second article with Clive Barker is a bit of cheek. And though someone having a go at Laird Barron I can't help feeling that you don't really need an adaptation to be a success and he does just fine on the page.
posted by Artw at 6:47 PM on November 1, 2017

Kyril Bonfiglioli is enormously fun and certainly didn't deserve the adaptation that happened to him.
posted by Artw at 6:50 PM on November 1, 2017 [2 favorites]

FTA: Unlike musicians or filmmakers, authors can vanish completely. Their print-runs can be pulped, copies misfiled, manuscripts lost, banned and burned. They can be ubiquitous, influential and massively successful only to disappear within their own lifetimes.

I'm pretty sure this has happened to musicians and filmmakers as well. Look at all the lost silent films - estimates as high as 90% of them are vanished.
posted by Chrysostom at 6:58 PM on November 1, 2017 [3 favorites]

Didn't anybody's jaw drop at what happened to Patrick Dennis? I was gobsmacked.

Also, I'm a friend of Quinn Yarbro's and used to publish a newsletter about her, so naturally I think she deserves some screen time.
posted by MovableBookLady at 7:40 PM on November 1, 2017 [5 favorites]

I've been reading "The Book of Forgotten Authors" and it is fascinating. But I'm not sure it was a good idea for me to buy a book that's leading me to add more and more titles to my already massive to-read list.
posted by maurice at 7:54 PM on November 1, 2017 [2 favorites]

Laird Barron is one of those writers whose work I find fascinating, but it's mixed bag. I like his ideas and his writing style is engaging but something always feels slightly off with his stories and I'm not ever quite sure I really enjoy his work. But I keep going back to him for some reason. It's a weird thing.
posted by Fizz at 8:10 PM on November 1, 2017 [3 favorites]

I feel that Barron's reach often exceeds his grasp. He has a fine head for ideas, but I think some more basic storytelling fundamentals could elevate his stuff to the next level.
posted by smoke at 8:18 PM on November 1, 2017 [2 favorites]

Smoke, you said what I was struggling to put into words. Thing is though, he's been this way for so long, I think it's just how he writes and he'll always sort of be at this level. And yet as I said, I'm always going back because he intrigues mes.
posted by Fizz at 8:31 PM on November 1, 2017

Billy-Bunter-creator Charles Hamilton (pen name Frank Richards)

I have heard of this guy due to reading Orwell's essay about his work in an anthology, followed by his cranky retort.
posted by thelonius at 8:44 PM on November 1, 2017 [2 favorites]

Didn't anybody's jaw drop at what happened to Patrick Dennis? I was gobsmacked.

I came in here to say that very thing. Also, I didn’t realize that one reason J. G. Farrell disappeared from the public view was because he’d died. (According to the Wikipedia, drowned “by a rogue wave while angling.”)

John Collier’s “I sometimes marvel that a third-rate writer like me has been able to palm himself off as a second-rate writer” makes me think of Robert Benchley’s “It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.”
posted by LeLiLo at 9:29 PM on November 1, 2017 [5 favorites]

Elizabeth Daly's name rings a bell; I read a few of her mysteries years ago. Georgette Heyer too, her detective series was good fun. I found these authors like I did many others: scanning the spines in library stacks for book jackets/covers that looked like they were designed in the 40s and 50s and then reading the first page or two.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 9:53 PM on November 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

This is amazingly relevant to my interests.
I'm completely fascinated by forgotten works, and have been reading a lot of Victorian authors I've never heard of, that turn out to be not at all unknown by the more knowledgeable.

I found this while browsing;

“Invisible Ink,” a series by Christopher Fowler, published in The Independent

on The Neglected Books Page.
posted by bongo_x at 10:50 PM on November 1, 2017 [2 favorites]

Booth Tarkington was stupid-famous and one of only three writers to win the Pulitzer for fiction twice (the others are Updike and Faulkner), and these days nobody's heard of him! And his books are entertaining and accessible, mostly closely-observed and snarktastic dissections of the American class system at the dawn of the 20th century, mostly set in rising Midwestern cities that are rapidly industrializing.

I forget how I accidentally stumbled into him, but he definitely rewards the archaeological reader looking for forgotten treasures!
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 11:09 PM on November 1, 2017 [4 favorites]

I love the Count of Saint-Germain as depicted by Yarbro and I truly expected there to have been a tv series by now, what with the enduring popularity of costume dramas and vampires.

Georgette Heyer may be "forgotten" by mainstream fiction readers, but romance readers have been voraciously glomming her Regencies for as long as I can remember. I'm personally not much of a fan of her style, but I tend to get eschew romantic comedies of manners. I can thank her for introducing me to the ridiculousness of a dandyish duke's affectation of the "quizzing glass," though, so there's that.

I was never a big fan of Barker's horror cycles, but I re-read his fantasy epic Imajica several times. I think it was the first overtly queer fiction I ever read, and it was definitely the first time I was exposed to non-binary gender and alternative pronoun use. Quite eye-opening for a cishet 16 year-old girl, let me tell you. I've frequently credited my affection for that book with my tendency to seek out other queer fiction in any number of genres.
posted by xyzzy at 11:18 PM on November 1, 2017 [5 favorites]

Didn't anybody's jaw drop at what happened to Patrick Dennis?



I've known since a bio was published 17 years ago; the complete sequel to Auntie Mame (a chapter set in the Soviet Union was cut because of the cold war) was reissued at the same time.

His roman á clef about Orson Welles will be reissued next year .
posted by brujita at 11:28 PM on November 1, 2017 [2 favorites]

Just to close the circle, Orson Welles's 1942 film adaptation of Booth Tarkington's 1919 Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Magnificent Ambersons is pretty magnificent. (I liked the book a lot as well.) Even though RKO Pictures chopped it up, deleting at least 40 minutes of Welles’s footage, it was nominated for four Academy Awards including Best Picture, and routinely is considered one of the great American films.
posted by LeLiLo at 1:56 AM on November 2, 2017

@bongo_x

Geoffrey Willans is an odd one, the Molesworth books are well known to many people 40 years old or more in the UK I would say.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 3:03 AM on November 2, 2017 [1 favorite]

It surprised me to see J G Farrell and Georgette Heyer referenced in an article about forgotten writers! Especially Heyer as I know so many people who adore her, with whom I can have animated conversations about our favourite novels and favourite couples (for me, it's a tough choice but very possibly Phoebe and Sylvester from Sylvester). I am actually working my way through her collected romance works as bedtime reading, once again. Her detective novels are great - I really like The Unfinished Clue.

I loved the closing lines of the first article linked:
Fowler attempted to track down a copy of Where the Rainbow Ends by Clifford Mills – incidentally, an example of a book justly buried thanks to its fascist leanings. Eventually, a copy turned up in Kent. When Fowler opened the front cover, he found his own name written inside, inscribed by his seven-year-old self. Magic.

For fans of horror and forgotten masterpieces, I recently read Paperbacks from Hell which is a delirious overview of paperback horror fiction over the 20th century. Beautifully produced with full-colour reproductions of those crazy-ass covers and features on cover artists. It introduced me to lots of horror writers I had never otherwise heard of.
posted by Ziggy500 at 3:03 AM on November 2, 2017 [5 favorites]

Cait Kiernan, absolutely. I'd arguably say that her weird fiction is the best in the field and she's so damn prolific. I think one of the challenges with her is that she tends to be very cantankerous in personality--mostly stemming from feeling out of step with the current reliance on social media/smartphone/etc--and doesn't suffer fools at all.

I've loved Cait for about 20 years now, and used to enjoy occasional acquaintance with her when she lived in Athens and Atlanta. She was the first author I ever met when I was 19. I'd especially love to see The Red Tree adapted for screen. Or anything about the ghouls, really.
posted by Kitteh at 4:47 AM on November 2, 2017 [1 favorite]

I remember in college being told by a professor that to look at the book math like this - if 5,000 books get written in a year, 500 will be published commercially. Of the 500, only 100 will make enough for the authors to live off of for the year of promoting the book, and fifty will make enough to cover the second year of writing a second novel. Of those fifty, only twenty-five will have success and only ten from that group will continue on to the third. That if we remember an author after they finished writing, and remember them fondly enough to teach about them to other potential writers it's a near miracle.

She was a nun so she ended with I believe in miracles and I believe in you. But really it was a depressing speech.
posted by 80 Cats in a Dog Suit at 5:20 AM on November 2, 2017

Booth Tarkington was stupid-famous and one of only three writers to win the Pulitzer for fiction twice (the others are Updike and Faulkner), and these days nobody's heard of him!

I had, because Dorothy Parker had a good word for him in her reviews, and there was a room named after him at my school. I decided to give Seventeen a try at one point, but pretty much veered off between the old-fashioned minstrel-show racism and the general lack of interest in the narrative.

Humor often doesn’t keep well. I once read a humor anthology edited by Wodehouse himself, and it was surprisingly grim.
posted by Countess Elena at 6:49 AM on November 2, 2017

Betsy-Tacy and Maud Hart Lovelace fans know about Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Lady Audley's Secret. In Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown, Tacy borrows it from the hired girl, but when Mr. Kelly discovers his daughter reading such "trash," he burns the book in the kitchen range.

Actually, the Betsy-Tacy books themselves faded into obscurity for years, until brought back into print through the efforts of the Betsy-Tacy Society and HarperCollins.
posted by elphaba at 7:15 AM on November 2, 2017 [2 favorites]

Kyril Bonfiglioli is enormously fun and certainly didn't deserve the adaptation that happened to him.

One of the books is basically LOL rape, and all of them have an atmosphere of sour misogyny. I’m always puzzled when I see them recommended for Wodehouse fans and wonder which version of the Jeeves stories they’ve read.
posted by betweenthebars at 7:59 AM on November 2, 2017

Didn't anybody's jaw drop at what happened to Patrick Dennis? I was gobsmacked.

I find it hard to think of Patrick Dennis as a "forgotten writer." Auntie Mame has been a staple in my circle for years and I found a copy of Little Me: The Intimate Memoirs of that Great Star of Stage, Screen and Television at a thrift store just this past summer. (But, then I don't think of several of the other writers mentioned as "forgotten," either.) Persephone Books, one of my favorite publishers, introduced me to Winifred Watson.

Julian Maclaren-Ross, the memorist of Fitzrovia, suggests a whole crowd of more or less forgotten writers, foremost among them, Tambimuttu, the Tamil poet and publisher who was so central to mid-20th century English literature.

Is Ernest Bramah forgotten? Is Stephen Leacock?

In the US, Vera Caspary comes to mind as a once popular, now mostly forgotten author. If she's known for anything today, it's as the author of Laura, the source for the Otto Preminger movie. Is John Dickson Carr forgotten? I think of him as someone who was immensely popular in his day but I never see his books anywhere and I rarely hear his name come up.

The list of books included in the WWII era Armed Services Editions project is an interesting look at popular mostly mid-list authors of the period. The titles were included because they were popular; now probably two-thirds of the list will be utterly unknown to anyone but academics and serious book nerds.
posted by octobersurprise at 9:08 AM on November 2, 2017 [1 favorite]

When I worked in my college’s rare book room, there was a big collection of John Masefield first editions that someone had left it. He was a huge poet and novelist in the early twentieth century, and now? All I’d ever heard of from him was the line “a tall ship and a star to steer her by,” and I didn’t even know it was his. I would have thought it was Coleridge or something.
posted by Countess Elena at 9:43 AM on November 2, 2017

I love the Count of Saint-Germain as depicted by Yarbro and I truly expected there to have been a tv series by now, what with the enduring popularity of costume dramas and vampires.

Yarbro's multi-media career may have been stifled by her reactions to fanfic; authors who take legal action against the fans who are most inspired by their work, may not be the best risk for studios.

I am still intensely bitter about the Bride of St Germain filksong; it's what first got me interested in copyright activism.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 9:57 AM on November 2, 2017 [1 favorite]

I think I'm a bad judge of what's obscure. The other day, Tor ran a piece about the Max Beerbohm story "Enoch Soames" and called it, "The best story you've never heard of" or some such. And my reaction was, "Wait, people don't know Enoch Soames?!?"
posted by Chrysostom at 10:25 AM on November 2, 2017 [1 favorite]

My library sorted books by the author's real name so John Creasey was hard to miss because he took up an entire shelf. According to wiki, he wrote over 600 books under 28 pseudonyms.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 11:48 AM on November 2, 2017

The Feminist Press has reissued Caspary's works.

I think that the Betsy-Tacy books went out of print after Maud Hart Lovelace died in 1980; they were reprinted in the 90s and 2000s. The editions published in the 2010s remain in print (Mankato's Lebanese Catholic community figures into several of the books).
posted by brujita at 12:39 PM on November 2, 2017

Geoffrey Willans is an odd one, the Molesworth books are well known to many people 40 years old or more in the UK I would say.

And even in America. Molesworth is as much remembered for Ronald Searle's illustrations as for the writing. Which is unfair for Willans, because besides the Molesworth books, he wrote several other comic novels, several of which I own and no you cannot borrow them.

Humor often doesn’t keep well. I once read a humor anthology edited by Wodehouse himself, and it was surprisingly grim.

True enough, though to be fair, a lot of stuff that is called humorous these days is surprisingly grim. Or just unfunny. To my way of thinking. Dying's easy....
posted by BWA at 2:18 PM on November 2, 2017 [1 favorite]

Is Stephen Leacock?

Not for Canadians (I hope at least) since there's the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. I don't know about other Canadians of a certain age but I did Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town in high school English class.
posted by Ashwagandha at 3:39 PM on November 2, 2017 [1 favorite]

Peter De Vries. New Yorker staffer for 40 years.

Brilliant mid-century humourist and satirist. All his books were out of print by the time of his death in 1993, but some of them were re-issued a few years ago.

George Will was a big fan, and devoted a column to De Vries whenever a new book was published.
posted by bcarter3 at 3:50 PM on November 2, 2017

Why aren't there move Lovecraft films? - features a whole bunch of, well, you've guessed it...
posted by Artw at 9:01 AM on November 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

Racism?
posted by Countess Elena at 9:05 AM on November 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

I kid, I kid our Uncle Howard, whose works I have built so much from. But he really does have, at his best, an M.R. Jamesian quality. What's memorable to me about his work is not so much the monsters, but the genuine antiquarianism, together with the sense of a dread that is rooted not merely in repulsion by strange creatures but by any difference whatsoever. That's very difficult to capture on film, if not impossible, especially if you switch time periods to make a movie more accessible or cheaper to make.
posted by Countess Elena at 9:10 AM on November 3, 2017

Plus the racism.
posted by Artw at 9:14 AM on November 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

I'd love to see a Caitlin Kiernan or Laird Barron film.
I also dream of Thomas Ligotti movies, puppets and all.
posted by doctornemo at 1:37 AM on November 4, 2017 [1 favorite]