Writers hope their work will live on after them (I do, at least). In some ways our books are like our children. We don’t like to think they’ll just dry up and vanish.
I’d like to mention two novelists who were very successful in their day but who are now fading into undeserved obscurity: Edison Marshall (American) and Arthur Upfield (Australian).
Marshall wrote, among other things, historical novels. His most productive decade was the 1950s. Among his most successful books was The Viking (1951), which was made into one of my favorite movies as a kid, The Vikings, in 1958, starring Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis, and Ernest Borgnine. All the kids in my neighborhood played “Vikings” for weeks afterward.
Upfield wrote mysteries set in the Australian Outback featuring “the half-caste detective,” Napoleon Bonaparte, Bony to his friends. My wife and I are crazy about these books, we have dozens of them, and we’d like to have them all. But that’s getting harder and harder to do, because reprints have not been forthcoming: Arthur Upfield, it seems, is going out of print.
After wondering about it for years, I finally tracked down a copy of The Viking and have just finished reading it. I was amazed. Marshall not only created a dramatic story, and brought vividly to life a long-ago and faraway period of history. Without resorting to archaism, he even made his characters talk like people in Old Norse sagas and poetry! I consider that a tremendous artistic accomplishment.
I don’t have the sales figures for Marshall’s books, but he must have sold millions of copies, all told. Several of his titles made it into the Book-of-the-Month Club. As for Upfield, New Zealand TV produced a series of “Boney” episodes (don’t ask me why they changed the spelling!) which were well received. Marshall was a very good writer, but Upfield was a genius. The natural marvels of the Outbook loom large in his books; and the sociology and psychology of the various characters looms even larger.
Why have Edison Marshall’s books nearly passed into sheer oblivion? Another generation, maybe less, and they’ll be gone. The copy of The Viking that I got from the state library had been mended and rebound several times; obviously they aren’t able to replace it. If you can get the paperback edition via amazon.com, you will be flabbergasted at the price.
Why is no one reprinting Arthur Upfield’s mysteries? They’re not just great detective novels. They’re unique works of art. You’d think someone in Australia would want to keep them in print, but apparently not.
What is it that makes an author’s work sink into the shadows? I don’t know enough about the personal lives of either of these two authors to make a judgment about their religious faith, so I try to make an educated guess, based on the novels themselves. Marshall’s characters don’t have much use for Christianity, and Bony himself is not a Christian, although he does have some Christian friends whom he respects.
I’m not saying an author’s Christian faith guarantees immortality to his work, or that his non-Christianity prevents it. It’s always good to be a Christian, regardless of how well you do by worldly standards. On the other hand, it’s hard to think of anything worthwhile and lasting that has been produced by atheists.
Meanwhile, it’s not for lack of artistic merit that both Marshall and Upfield are on their way out. They both wrote fine books, and Upfield wrote some great ones. While the authors were alive, readers gobbled up their books. There seems to be no reason why these books should not endure… and yet they’re fading into obscurity.
I can’t figure it. Can you?
Sadly, so much is being produced these days that great works are lost in the tide.
The same is happening in music, although digital song distribution has given older songs new life. While not on the centerline of my tastes, I have a soft spot for the Surf music of the early ‘60s; guitar instrumentals that were popular for s few years, just before The Beatles changed everything.
Most of the classic recordings are available on CD, or as digital downloads, but there are countless new artists, recording in this style, and that market has become cluttered. The product varies, from pointless rehashes that drone on endlessly to some truly brilliant works. The trick is in separating the wheat from the chaff.
It’s a good thing that Lee’s books are on Kindle. The cost to keep a book available on Kindle is nearly zero, and good woks like Lee’s can persist for a long, long time in this format.
Thanks for the positive news. Sometimes things can be a bit down. Patty
I certainly would like to see these book persist for a long time to come. They have a good moral foundation and are entertaining, in a wholesome way.
Thank you, me too. Patty
I’m not sure I’d call 20th century popular music, however much to an individual’s taste, “great works” of music. How about the truly great such as Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Handel, Telemann, Vivaldi, and my own favorite opera composers: Donizetti, Bellini, Verdi, Rossini, Handel (again), Hasse, Bizet, and Gounod?
There is very little attention being paid to classical music these days. When I was in school, we were exposed to all the classical composers. There is also the problem of everything becoming a “niche market” Patty
“There is very little attention being paid to classical music these days. When I was in school, we were exposed to all the classical composers. There is also the problem of everything becoming a ‘niche market’. Patty”
When I went to school, we were definitely exposed to classical music. Most adults didn’t take Rock n’ Roll seriously in those days, and Classical was the standard, by which all other music was judged.
But various developments over the years made more types of music accessible to more people. Niches could grow, because radio exposed niche music to a wider audience. When I was a child, my father loced radios, and would experiment, trying to get distant clear channel stations on his car radio. One night, he tuned in what he called Hillbilly Music, which was probably Appalachian music, perhaps some Bluegrass. While the standard Nashville output was played on some local stations, this was different. I had never heard anything like that before.
Nowadays, there’s a Sirius XM satellite radio channel called Bluegrass Junction, another for Classic Country, and another for contemporary Country. Not to mention several Jazz channels, at least one Blues channel, numerous Rock channels, from ‘50s to the present, and just about anything else you can think of. I love it, when I take a road trip, because I can mix it up, and find something that interests me, even after many hours on the road.
There’s a Yacht Rock channel, mellow Soft Rock of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s (think Bobby Caldwell’s What You Won’t Do For Love) or I can listen to Classical, Jazz, you name it. It’s very nice if I’m on the road. But this is true on any number of other platforms, such as Spotify, which offers unlimited streaming of music over the Internet.
Whether this is good or bad, it is inevitable. Go back to the mid 19th century and all music was essentially live music. Most people heard music in church, and if they were lucky, might hear a local brass band in the town park, hear music at a circus, or possibly from a traveling minstrel show. Unless you lived in a big city, that was it.
Then came the Victrola and the Player Piano. When radio graduated from Morse Code to modulated sounds, someone thought to play a record over the airwaves, and soon radio became the distribution medium of choice for music, which promoted sales of records, and stations paid a license fee to the song owners.
My point is that the method of distribution was the greatest determining factor and a record succeeded or failed by airplay. Various stations served various market segments. My parents listened to one station, but my sister and I listened to a different station, which served our age group.
Those were the days of AM radio, but when FM grew, it could economically serve smaller potential markets, allowing special interest areas to be served. For example, in New York City there is/was an FM station that only played Led Zeppelin records. It’s not my first choice of stations, but it obviously holds a market.
As I said earlier, the division into niche markets is all but inevitable. I miss the fact that in my teen years, I, and most of my friends were probably listening to KIMN, the Top 40 station in Denver, and heard the same songs, even when we were away from one another. It was a sense of community shared by most of the young people in Denver, until FM began to erode their market.
What I din’t see, at least in the foreseeable future, is a return to what we had in the past, where a relative handful of music sources dominated the market. I’m afraid that cat is out of the bag, and long gone.
I’m afraid that you are right. Patty
“ I’m afraid that you are right. Patty”
So am I. I don’t like that things have gone the direction it has, and the music business has become a shambles, but it’s way beyond my power to change. There is some good news; a lot of good music is still being produced, but it’s no longer being played on the radio or being distributed through major record labels. One could see this as either good or bad. It’s good, in that anyone can record and distribute their music, but the massive markets of the past are still very difficult to access and radio airplay is no longer the driving market force it once was.
The biggest thing that has changed over the centuries is how music is produced. In the days of the classical masters, there were keyboard based instruments, such as the clavichord, the harpsichord and the pianoforte which was a relatively new development. Beyond that, you needed an ensemble and that could get expensive.
Mozart is a particular favorite, he came up with many of the ideas we use to this day. Likewise, Bach showed us the way, especially with regard to intricate harmonic motion.
But times and circumstances changed over the years, and technological developments created new possibilities. When radio came along, this necessitated the development of the audio amplifier, which allowed movies to have sound, and could be applied to musical performance. You no longer needed an orchestra to fill a large concert venue.
A 19 piece Big Band could fill a moderate sized venue and back a crooner who sang through an audio amplifier. After WW II, there were a generation of veterans who had been trained in electronics and that lead to the development of better, more cost effective amplification. This had the effect of lowering costs and also reduced the number of musicians needed to fill a room with sound.
This was both good and bad. Even before WW II Charlie Christian played horn lines on an electrically amplified guitar, in the Benny Goodman orchestra, making the guitar a melodic voice which could compete with the trumpets and saxophones.
But the electric guitar also made possible some truly tasteless and very low content music in the early days of Rock n’ Roll, where at least some of the artists could do little more than bang out rhythms. The electric bass allowed a compact instrument to replace the Double Bass Violin, which changed the sound of music ever since.
So there was good and bad. IMHO, Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass was a positive example. Using two trumpets, a trombone, an electric bass, an electric guitar, drums and marimbas, he created some pleasant, highly melodic music that appealed to a wide audience. He also sold more records than The Beatles, in 1966.
About the same time, highly distorted Rock n’ Roll became a thing, and I didn’t care for that, at all. So, even as a kid, I was a lot more interested in Herb Alpert than in the Rolling Stones. But music continued to change, and there were bright spots along the way.
It may be surprising, but Pop, Rock and Country artists are not necessarily ignorant of, or defiant towards, the Classical Masters. Some of these artists are well educated musicians with classical training. The thing is, if you want to make a living, you have to sell something that the public is willing to buy.
I was fortunate to become the student of a national caliber Jazz guitarist, while still in my teens. Jazz is very theory heavy music, and I learned musical possibilities far beyond what could be heard on most radio stations.
Eventually, I decided to make my living playing music and teaching one to one lessons. Expecting to be welcomed with open arms, because of my exposure to theory and knowledge of harmony, I soon found out that if I wanted to earn any money, I had better learn to play what was played on the Top 40 and Country radio stations. As it turned out, that was not as easy as I thought it would be, with a completely different approach.
In decades of having played in bands, my Jazz and (to some extent) Classical background has not been utilized nearly as often as I would have wished. The market for serious music is microscopic, these days, and quite closely guarded.
But there are still bright spots. In the ‘50s, a fellow named Chet Atkins combined classical guitar technique with some Stride Piano ideas from the world of Jazz and created some very good music, which bridged Country, Pop, Jazz and a rare bit of Classical. I’ve spent the last 60 years trying to catch up, and the techniques I’ve learned have come in pretty handy, and for what it’s worth, I play a pretty decent version of Mozart’s 40th (transposed to E minor) on solo guitar, using Classical guitar technique, on an electric guitar.
So, while I admire the great Classical works, I do not discount everything which has come since. Many modern artists know their theory and knowingly adapt classical developments to modern instruments. I hear Mozart all over music of the ‘60s and ‘70s. It may sound different, being played on electric instruments, instead of an orchestra, but at least some of what is happening could be seen as every bit as legitimate as what was happening in the 18th century.
And sometimes, it’s OK to just have some fun. When I was fairly young, Surf Music came along, and while it’s simple, audiences love it, and I get to practice my minor key scales at breakneck speeds.
That was absolutely fascinating! Patty
There is a group of volunteers saving books (Project Gutenberg), at least digitized copies people can read for free. I did find a few of Edison Marshall’s books there, but not “The Viking.” And to my joy, I found a few books by my favorite author, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and was able to read them again, after fifty years ago when I was a teenager.
I do prefer reading books, but if a copy is not available, a digitized book is still much better than no book at all.
Project Gutenberg is the oldest digital library, offering over 75,000 free e-books, primarily public domain works, which are digitized and distributed by volunteers. Founded in 1971 by Michael Hart, its mission is to make cultural and historical works accessible to everyone. The project focuses on older books for which US copyright has expired, and volunteers work to ensure the accuracy of the texts, which are available in various formats like plain text, EPUB, and Kindle.
Lee adored Edgar Rice Burroughs. Patty
When I was 16, a nearby mall had a huge bookstore (I can’t remember the name), I would visit often, and head to the science fiction section. I’d search for new titles about “Conan the Barbarian” by Robert E. Howard, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, stocked since my last visit. And to my joy, most times there would be one or two new titles that I hadn’t yet read. I think I read every book Burroughs and Howard wrote.
I’d take those wonderful books to school, and read them during my classes, trying not to get caught reading. Oh, how I wish I would still have those books.