Under an alias

The late Donald E. Westlake was such a prolific writer that he could afford to do what a few other prolific writers such as Stephen King and Joyce Carol Oates have done — write novels under another name in order to have more than one new book in bookstores at the same time. Westlake had another purpose back in the 1980s: He wanted to see whether his books would sell as well if readers and reviewers didn't know he was the one writing them. Thus came a brief series of books under the name of Samuel Holt.

His experiment failed miserably because his publisher couldn't keep the secret. Their business is selling books, after all, and they knew Westlake books would sell better than Holt books. So the series was short-lived. One of these novels is What I Tell You Three Times Is False (1987), a meaningless title except that it tells you it's the third book in the series. Other titles include One of Us Is Wrong and I Know a Trick or Two of That.

This mystery falls somewhere between the comic caper novels Westlake wrote under his own name and the hardboiled Parker novels he wrote under the name of Richard Stark. It may remind you of one of those Agatha Christie novels where a group of  people are isolated and then murdered one after the other. In this case several actors known for playing famous fictional detectives, along with a few other people, gather on a remote island to make a film for charity. The murders, plus a prolonged tropical storm, force the actors to try to equal the detective skills of their fictional personas, the likes of Sherlock Holmes, Jane Marple and Charlie Chan.

Sam Holt, who played a popular TV detective named Jack Packard and who is the actor most eager to put the role behind him, is nevertheless the one who eventually identities the murderer. The novel stays interesting and fun while never becoming exciting or memorable. Westlake may have had another good reason to want to publish this book under another name.

Nazis again

Relatively few people remain alive who even remember the Nazis — I can remember the Eichmann trial, but that's as good as I can do — yet Nazis remain one of the most frequent and most popular subjects for books, both fiction and nonfiction. They are about as close to absolute evil as we can imagine, and pure evil fascinates us all.

Meg Waite Clayton, much too young to remember the Nazis, writes a compelling novel on the subject nonetheless, The Last Train to London (2019). Much of her fiction is truth. A Dutch woman named Truus Wijsmuller really did help rescue thousands of children, most of them Jewish, from Germany and Nazi-occupied territory.

Clayton's novel focuses on three children, two of them teenagers, in Vienna in the late 1930s. Stephan Neuman, son of a Jewish chocolatier, aspires to become a writer. He is in love with Zofie-Helene, not a Jew but the daughter of a controversial journalist — controversial because she tells the truth about the growing Nazi menace and the persecution of Jews. Zofie, a mathematical genius, equally loves Stephan, the only boy who doesn't think she's weird. The other is five-year-old Walter, Stephan's brother, who expresses his feelings through his stuffed rabbit, Peter.

The author builds the suspense gradually, as Stephan's father is captured by the Nazis and Stephan himself goes into hiding in the sewers. Meanwhile Zofie's mother is imprisoned for what she has written. Tante Truus, as she asks all the children to call her, goes to Austria to make a deal with Adolf Eichmann himself. He allows her to take 600 children by train — but it must be exactly 600 children, no more or no less. Or else none will be allowed out of the country.

How Stephan, Walter and Zofie — plus a surprising 601st child — make it to London rounds out her fine, quick-moving  story.

Reading titles

Reading books can be fun, but then so can reading the titles of books. I noticed this again while leafing through the latest catalog from Edward R. Hamilton Bookseller.

When I wrote recently about how books attract customers ("How to sell books," Jan. 5), I neglected to mention the importance of titles. A good title can grab your attention, whether you are browsing through a catalog or in a bookstore. You may have no interest at all in the subject of the book, but some titles just make you stop and look twice. Here are some titles that made me look twice at listings in the Hamilton catalog:

The Military Guide to Armageddon

The Secret Life of Fat

Don't Be Evil

No One Cares About Crazy People

How to Examine a Wolverine

History of Ohio in Words of One Syllable

Pigs, Missiles and the CIA

How to Make a Plant Love You

Ghost Dogs of the South

The Secret Life of Groceries

The Hilarious World of Depression

How to Think Like a Fish

The Good Provider Is One Who Leaves

Arguing with Zombies

Philosophy for Polar Explorers

Tin Can Magic

A Celebration of Dolly Parton Activity Book

The Cancer Whisperer

The (Other) F Word

Heather and Homicide

I don't plan to order any of those books, but I must confess the titles did make me stop to read the book descriptions. If you are publishing an obscure book — as most of these books certainly are — then that is what you hope for.

A sanctuary of reading

Like churches during the Middle Ages, books conferred instant sanctuary. Once you entered one, you couldn't be disturbed.

Will Schwalbe, The End of Your Life Book Club

Will Schwalbe

Will Schwalbe, above,  is describing his family's attitude toward reading during his boyhood. It sounds like heaven to me.

Both of his parents were readers, especially on weekends, and didn't like having their own reading disturbed by demanding children. They extended the same respect to those children when they had books in their hands. If there was a chore to be done, it could wait until the end of the book, or at least the end of the chapter. Schwalbe comments that discipline for wrongdoing couldn't be escaped altogether, but it could be postponed as long as you were reading. "But we quickly learned you had to both look and be completely engrossed — just flipping pages didn't count," he adds.

I am suddenly reminded of a cartoon showing a clergyman on his knees praying in his office when his secretary bursts in and says, "Oh good, you're not busy." That was something of the attitude I faced in my own family as I was growing up — and later in my marriage. When I was "only reading," I was considered to be doing nothing and available for service. Of course, considering how often I had a book in my hands, this may have been the only way to get me to do do anything.

Yet now living alone in the twilight of my life, I don't seem to read much more than I did previously. I create my own interruptions — to play a game of spider solitaire, to make a pot of tea, to add a few pieces to a jigsaw puzzle or to find a Sirius station playing a better song. Prolonged reading without interruption still seems like heaven.

Success story

Animated films don't generally have a strong appeal for me, but I make an exception for Wallace & Gromit movies, Chicken Run, Creature Comforts and anything else from Aardman, so I was eager to read A Grand Success! The Aardman Journey, One Frame at a Time by Peter Lord and David Sproxton.

Lord and Sproxton met as schoolboys and began making brief animated films, inspired by Terry Gilliam of Monty Python. Lord had the more creative mind, while his friend was more comfortable with technology and photography. Between the two of them they had what it takes to make Plasticine figures move on film. Soon they were making short films for British television, which led to their work on the Pee-wee Herman show in America, then Wallace & Gromit (and the genius of Nick Park), a series of Oscars and finally a thriving studio in out-of-the-way Bristol.

The two old friends fill their book with odd trivia that will amuse admirers of their work. Aardman, the name of their company, was actually the name of their first character, a comic superhero named Aardman. Gromit was a cat before he became a dog. Wallace's celebrated fondness for Wensleydale cheese actually rescued Wensleydale cheese. The creamery that produced it had been threatened with closing before the films significantly increased demand for the cheese. Chicken Run was inspired by The Great Escape.

Aardman was courted by Hollywood and made films for both Disney and DreamWorks, while resisting efforts to purchase their most popular characters. Eventually they were freed from their contracts and able to make their own films in their own way, with the British humor intact.

They could have used some help with their book, however. Their narrative often shifts awkwardly from talking about themselves in third person to first person before switching back again. In one instance, a quote from Sproxton on one page is repeated word for word on the very next page. So the book may not quite be the grand success the movies are, yet true fans will love it as I do.

Reading until the end

We're all in the end-of-our-life book club, whether we acknowledge it or not; each book we read may well be the last, each conversation the final one

Will Schwalbe, The End of Your Life Book Club

Everyone's mother dies, so why does the death of Will Schwalbe's mother rate a book? The answer is not just that Mary Anne Schwalbe was a remarkable woman, but that mother and son spent so much time over the last months of her life in doctors' waiting rooms, in cancer centers, in hospitals and in hospice care talking about books. Will Schwalbe tells about the experience — and his mother — in The End of Your Life Book Club (2012).

Theirs had always been a reading family, but like most people, each read their own books according to their own taste. After the cancer diagnosis, Will and his mother decide to read the same books and then talk about them during those hours spent together. The books they talked about so often opened doors to personal topics that otherwise might never have been spoken about.

Each chapter of the book is named for one of the books they discussed during that period. Talking about The Painted Veil, they branch off into a discussion of courage. Murder in the Cathedral leads naturally into frank talk about facing death head-on. Everyone talks about the importance of first impressions, but the novel Brooklyn mentions the importance of last impressions, a good topic for a dying woman and her son to talk about.

Readers will come to love Mary Anne Schwalbe as her son did. She's a woman of remarkable faith, remarkable concern for others and remarkable ambition to make a difference in the world, not just in the United States but as far away as Afghanistan, where she visited many times. Even close to death, she worked for others as long as her strength held out. Yet she always found time to read, and she always understood the importance of talking to someone about what she read.

A page, not a column

As an editorial page editor in Mansfield, Ohio, during the Seventies and Eighties, I was responsible for producing an editorial page each day of the week. On Sundays, however, we had a second opinion page for columns, cartoons, letters to the editor or whatever. Because it was always located opposite the editorial page, we called it the "op-ed page."

Merriam-Webster still defines op-ed as "a page of special features usually opposite the editorial page of a newspaper."

Somehow over the decades, however, op-ed has come to mean not a page but what used to be called a column. And to most people now it means not "opposite editorial" but "opinion/editorial." A column, whether in a newspaper, magazine or online, is usuallly just referred to as an op-ed, but the other day I heard someone on television use the full phrase — she referred to someone who had written an "opinion/editorial."

An editorial has a specific meaning. It is an opinion by definition, usually unsigned, representing the voice of the publication itself. As editorial page editor I wrote most of the editorials, but officially it was not my opinion but that of the News Journal. I also wrote many columns for the newspaper, which included both my name and my photograph. These were not editorials or opinion/editorials, but just columns. Anyone can express an opinion, but an editorial is more exclusive. To say "opinion/editorial" just makes no sense at all. If it refers to editorials, it is redundant. If it refers to columns, it is wrong.

The blame for this change of meaning may lie with newspapers themselves, such as the one represented above that calls its op-ed page the "Op-ed page," without bothering to explain what an op-ed page is. Readers may scratch their heads before deciding it must mean a page for op-eds, or opinions and editorials.

Many newspapers still have op-ed pages, I am happy to say. Publications still run columns. Why not just call them that? Or call them opinions. Leave newspaper lingo to newspapers. Unfortunately, it's probably already too late to rescue the term, and I expect Merriam-Webster will soon have to cave to those who don't know what they're talking about.

No hero

One feels sorry for Adam Woods when he becomes a live-in assistant to an elderly recluse in Venice named Gordon Crace in Andrew Wilson's diabolical 2007 novel The Lying Tongue. After a few chapters, one begins to feel sorry for Crace. By the end we know they deserve each other.

Crace wrote a best-selling novel years before and survives on the continuing income from that one book. He never leaves his residence and hates being alone. He has a mysterious past involving the death of a young man, his former student. He delights in grisly stories about suffering and death. He can't bear for Adam to leave his side for more than a few minutes at a time.

Adam, the narrator, portrays himself at first as a recent college graduate who has recently broken up with his girlfriend. He goes to Venice to write a novel, and he hopes living with Crace will provide him with an opportunity to do just that.

As Adam reveals more and more about himself, however, we realize that he too has a dark past. He raped that girlfriend, for example. The young man lies so consistently that when he does tell the truth, he stops in his narrative to point it out. As he learns more and more about the secretive Crace, he decides to scrap his novel and write the man's biography, the last thing Crace would want. But a woman in England is already at work on a Crace biography, and Adam decides he must learn what she already knows and then stop her from finishing her own book.

Crace, meanwhile, turns out not to be the helpless old man Adam has come to believe, and in the end it becomes a question of which evil will prevail.

Wilson's ending disappoints a bit, although it does have the advantage of being surprising. If one is willing to accept a thriller without a hero, The Lying Tongue is a gem.

Do we deserve this?

Usually I avoid TV commercials by recording programs and movies, then later skipping past the ads. I watch football games live, however, and that means exposing myself to commercials trying to sell me things I don't want. (I'm surprised by how often I watch TV ads without even understanding what it is they are trying to sell me.)

One thing I've noticed in the commercials I've been forced to watch is how often the phrase "you deserve" pops up. I think Joe Namath may have started this trend a few years ago with those Medicare supplement commercials where he talks about "all the benefits you deserve." Now insurance companies, phone companies and many others have gotten into act, assuring us all that we all deserve something better.

I'm not sure why the word deserve repels me so whenever I hear it in an ad. It did even when only Joe Namath said it, before it became so commonplace. Now I'm ready to boycott any company that says I deserve their product. My question is, do they deserve my business?

One series of commercials I do enjoy — even though I have no idea what the ads have to do with whatever product they are selling (I can never remember what it is) — is the one about trying to teach young adults not to turn into their parents. I watch them — with the sound unmuted — each time they come on. 

Watching them one might get the idea that only nerdy people turn into their parents, although I am struck by how nice their parents must be. If these young adults are turning into their parents, it might not be such a bad thing.

Mostly I notice, however, that the man trying to keep them from turning into their parents is the one who has already turned into a parent. He scolds. He corrects. He nags. He should have taken his own course years before. He deserved it.

Haunting novel

Ghosts, like UFOs and fibermyalgia, are something many people believe to be very real, while others scoff. We hear from both sides in The Little Stranger (2009), a superb novel by Sarah Waters.

The scoffer is Dr. Faraday, a middle-aged physician who becomes a regular visitor at Hundreds Hall, a decaying English mansion where the three surviving members of the one proud Ayers family have fallen on hard times. They make do by selling off portions of their land to developers. Roderick, a young man wounded in World War II, manages the estate for his mother and his sister, Caroline.

Faraday, the narrator of the story, often describes Caroline in negative terms, calling her plain and thick-legged, even as Waters slowly reveals he is falling in love with her. She is, in fact, the most appealing character in the novel, and readers will fall in love with her, as well.

Betty, the teenage maid, is the first to sense "a bad thing" in the old house. Then Gyp, Caroline's sweet dog, inexplicably bites a little girl, and Roderick, already broken psychologically by the war, is driven to madness. Mrs. Ayers comes to believe the ghost of her first daughter, Susan, may be haunting the house. She hears strange noises and voices. There are fires and markings on walls.

The doctor sees that Roderick gets the care he needs in an asylum, while trying to assure Mrs. Ayers, and eventually Caroline, that no spirits or poltergeists roam the house. Meanwhile he begins to court Caroline, although the more he presses for marriage, the more distracted she becomes. Is there really a "little stranger" in this spooky old house? Who is really being deceived, the Ayers family or the doctor?

This novel is long and slow-moving, yet one's interest in the story never lags. As with The Paying Guests, Sarah Waters delivers a winner.

Chance and coincidence

You swam in a river of chance and coincidence. You clung to the happiest accidents — the rest you let float by.

David Wroblewski, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

One unhappy accident that Edgar Sawtelle cannot let float by is his inability to talk. He learns sign language at an early age in David Wroblewski's 2008 novel The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. His parents make their living by breeding, training and selling dogs — the famous Sawtelle dogs — and when Edgar is old enough to train his first litter of dogs, he teaches them using sign language.

Edgar's idyllic life begins to become unsettled when Claude, his father's brother, moves in with them. The brothers argue frequently, and when his father dies mysteriously, Edgar suspects his uncle of murder. Then when Claude moves into his mother's bedroom and the boy overhears his uncle plotting with the veterinarian who owns a small share of the family business, Edgar begins acting strangely, unable to control or communicate his feelings. Then the vet dies in an accident in which the boy plays a role. Edgar flees into the Wisconsin wilderness with three of his dogs, while the vet's son, the county sheriff, searches for him.

This is a long novel, and this brief synopsis hardly gives the full picture. But then Wroblewski doesn't give the full picture either, being one of those writers who prefers ambiguity to clarity at key moments in the story. Ambiguity makes for art, but too much ambiguity just makes for confusion, and the author often comes too close to that line.

Still this is a powerful novel that offers the reader many rewards, chief among them being the main character and his dogs. The details about living with an inability to speak, training dogs and surviving for weeks in a national forest are excellent, as is the story itself. Such a story does not happen by chance and coincidence.

How to sell books

My publisher said they don't advertise my books because word of mouth sells books. But, unfortunately, my readers were intellectual recluses without friends and ... they had nobody to tell, hence no word of mouth.

Ross Thomas, quoted in The Armchair Detective, No. 2, 1986

Ross Thomas

Ross Thomas, the late author of suspense novels, was hardly the only writer to complain about publishers failing to advertise their books. In fact, book advertising seems to have declined significantly over the years, while publishers pressure authors to sell their own books with signings at bookstores and appearances at book fairs. Advertising dollars are spent mostly on books that don't need them, novels by top authors whose books become bestsellers on the day they are published.

Publishers may be right, however, that advertising may not be the best way to sell books. I frankly cannot think of any instance when I purchased a book because of an advertisement. There must surely have been at least one, but I can't remember it.  So what does sell books? Let us consider some possibilities.

Word of mouth: Thomas was probably correct that many readers are introverts with few friends, yet when these introverts do engage in conversation with those few friends, books are more likely to be a topic that comes up. My own reading has been influenced by friends, and in some cases virtual strangers, over the years. This was especially true in college, where I discovered C.S. Lewis, A.A. Milne and Paul Tourier thanks to friends. I just finished a book recommended by a neighbor. I'm sure I must have led others to some of my own favorite books and authors.

Book events: Book fairs, book signings, public readings, etc., do seem to have become more common than they once were, and that's because they sell books. Hearing an author speak or simply talking with an author across a book table can sometimes make us want to buy his or her book. This has happened to me many times with such writers as Jess Walter, Gary Shteyngart, Dani Shapiro, Russell Banks, Laura Lippman, Amor Towles and Peter Roy Clark. Writers may resent it, but many of them are the best salesmen for their books. But they can be only in one place at one time, and the more time they devote to selling their last book, the less time they have to devote to writing their next one.

Covers: Maybe we are not supposed to judge books by their covers, but we all do. Many of the books in my own library were purchased mainly because of alluring titles and cover illustrations. An ugly cover, rightly or wrongly, gives a negative impression about the book behind the cover. Attractive covers do the opposite. Those people who design book covers are the unsung heroes in the publishing industry.

Blurbs: If there's one thing most authors hate more than having to sell their own book it's having to sell other writers' books. After they achieve a certain level of success, writers are often sent advanced copies of upcoming books and asked to write a line or two of praise to place on the cover. Sometime just a choice adjective will do. Novels I purchased most recently include praise from Neil Gaiman, Diane Setterfield and Craig Johnson. None of these persuaded me to buy the books, and in fact I didn't read them until after I made the purchases. But sometimes a kind word from an admired writer can influence a purchase.

Reviews: The decline of newspapers has led to a corresponding decline in the influence of book reviews, simply because there aren't as many of them anymore. When I wrote newspaper reviews on a weekly basis, I know they helped sell a few copies of certain books (and they probably discouraged a few sales, too), but on the whole I doubt book reviews have ever been a major factor in book sales. They sometimes influence me, however. When I read a review of a book that sounds appealing, I write down the title and author. Sometimes I will actually buy the book.

Best seller lists: I rarely concern myself with what other people are reading, but some people do. So popular books tend to become more popular once they make the list.

Books in stores: The best way to sell books, I'm convinced, is simply to get them out there where people can see them. Either they sell themselves or they don't. The bookstore is where all the other influences listed above come together and shoppers decide whether to pull out their wallets. Many people walk into bookstores just looking for something to read. Maybe they have a certain kind of book in mind, a certain topic, a certain genre, a certain author. Once at the store, however, they see an array of books. They pick them up, see how they feel in their hands, open them and look inside, read the cover flaps or back covers to see what the book is about, read the opening lines perhaps, then make their decisions. Books on tables sell better than books on shelves, simply because front covers work better than spines to draw someone's attention.

Literary history, one day at a time

During 2021 I read, at a rate of a page a day, Tom Nissley's A Reader's Book of Days, and I recommend it to other serious readers.

Published in 2014, the book the lists events that took place in the literary world on each day of the year. Some of these are major, such as the publication of George Orwell's 1984 on June 8, 1949; others quite insignificant, such as Tennessee Williams mentioning in his diary on April 29, 1940, that he "saw a silly picture called 1,000,000 Years B.C."

Nissley includes fictional events in his calendar as well. Scarlett O'Hara marries Charles Hamilton on April 30, for example.

In addition, Nissley gives us a couple of writers who were born and a couple of writers who died each day of the year. We discover, for example, that J.R.R. Tolkien was born on Jan. 3, 1892, or 130 years ago today, and that cartoonist Will Eisner died on this same date in 2009.

The research required for such a book must have been imposing. How does one discover that Arthur Rimbaud's right leg was amputated on May 27th or that Orwell made two pounds of blackberry jelly on Oct. 10? By reading lots of books and taking lots of notes, I suppose.

Nissley's years of research gives his readers three minutes of pleasure a day. Just the idea of Tennessee Williams watching One Million B.C. (the actual title of the 1940 movie he saw) or George Orwell making blackberry jelly gave me pleasure.