A jaunty taxi ride courtesy of jawboning Roscoe Karns. From Come On Marines!, in which Richard Arlen leads a squad of Marines to rescue Ida Lupino and a group of debutantes from South American guerrillas. In true Pre-Code fashion, the debs spend most of the film in their negligees.

On April Fool's Day in 2023, I surveyed baker’s dozen of autobiographies (and diaries) that are not — Surprise! — by the people they claim to be. Cecil Beaton loved this odd sub-genre so much that he wrote two of them. neglectedbooks.com/?...

I'll even forego the seeing different people for the other part.

Why should anyone read the story of some unknown woman written by some unknown writer? Here's a little attempt to answer that question. Available now from @univnebpress.bsky.social: Virginia Faulkner: A Life in Two Acts by Brad Bigelow

Well, Pilgrimage fans, one dream is coming true. Naxos audiobooks has just released the first of four volumes of Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage, read by Lucy Scott (an ideal reader, IMHO). No word on when the next three are coming, but this is a wonderful start! www.naxos.com/CatalogueDet...

Edgar Bergen managed to become a radio star as a ventriloquist, so who's to say the McCarty girls couldn't have make it as tap dancers? A media nonsequitur from Ladies in Love (1930).

With the publication today of Friedrich Torberg's stunning Holocaust novella, Vengeance is Mine, never before translated into English, the Recovered Books series from @bhousepress.bsky.social has reached 19 titles.

Naked Morning (1957), about a beautiful, vulnerable young woman who wanders into a Midwest college town, was one of R. V. Cassill's many pulp originals, but a few readers would have recognized places and faces from Ames, Iowa, where Cassell attended the Writer's Workshop. neglectedbooks.com/?...

Aline MacMahon puts on a great show of being "just plain folks" after husband Guy Kibbee makes a stink about his daughter getting engaged to a son of "snooty society people." From Big-Hearted Herbert (1934), a fun little comedy about comeuppance.

Gilbert Sorrentino: An Introduction is available in these formats: Print Print-on-demand barnesandnoble.com/w/gilbert-so... Paperback lulu.com/shop/daniel-... Ebook (free) books2read.com/sorrentino/ Pdf readexperience.net/wp-content/u... Website sorrentinobook.blogspot.com

Giovanni Papini’s satire, Gog, rates its own Wikipedia entry and is easily available in Italian, Spanish, French and German, but in English, it’s been out of print until recently (and that a crappy page-image reprint). Notable more as experiment than literature, I'm afraid. neglectedbooks.com/?...

Ernest Truex, veteran of Broadway and the West End, was a bit long in the tooth (and short in the inseam) to play a suave romantic lead, but he gives it his all as a would-be ladies' man reporter in Get That Venus (1933), a Poverty Row comedy that's much better than its budget.

John T. McIntyre wrote "gimcrack historical novels and Broadway melodramas" until he turned 65. Then, in 3 years, he wrote 3 tough, realistic novels about Philadelphia's underworld. Signing Off (1938), about a racketeer murdered on his wedding day, was his last.

"She has a bit of a limp...but she's jolly!" Finding your match in the days before Tinder. Lillian Gish in His Double Life (1933), a fun comedy with Charlie Ruggles about how to go on living when everyone thinks you're dead.

H. T. Webster was probably the best-known cartoonist in mid-20th century America. Who, many of you are asking? neglectedbooks.com/?... 1/5

Random Neglected Book(s): Cry Into the Wind and Remember Me? by Eugenie Gaffney (1964) Two paperback originals, both set in a lightly-fictionalized Bangor, Maine. Gaffney was a Dutch war bride who spent the 1950s in Bangor, perhaps taking some Peyton Place-like revenge with these.

"It has an intensity and force which puts it in the front rank of Holocaust fiction"— @john-self.bsky.social in The Critic on Friedrich Torberg's Vengeance is Mine, out on March 31 in the Recovered Books series from @bhousepress.bsky.social.

A special event to launch our next Recovered Book from @bhousepress.bsky.social: Friedrich Torberg's Vengeance Is Mine, perhaps the earliest example of Holocaust fiction, never before translated into English. Thursday, April 2 7PM MDT at Shakespeare & Company Books in Missoula, MT and on Zoom.

A riff on Radclyffe (Hall, that is). Blanche Friderici as publisher Lewis Stone's most successful writer, in The Office Wife (1930), based on the novel of the same name by Faith Baldwin (who did not favor menswear).

From neglected books to America's least neglected book. I'm looking forward to leading a six-week course for the Montana Osher Life-Long Learning Institute on The Great Gatsby starting next week.

Katharine Brush's 1931 novel, Red-Headed Woman, is largely remembered now as the source for the legendary 1932 Pre-Code film starring Jean Harlow, but it's worth another look as a study of the ways of small-city society of the 1920s, as good as Sinclair Lewis's Main Street. neglectedbooks.com/?...

You can find the complete list of books recommended in Rediscoveries (I) here: neglectedbooks.com?page_id=75 ... and of its sequel in the reply...

Today's #bookmail. From 1961, Love in Question, a novel by an American in England about a young American in England sent to a psychiatrist to help figure out what to do with her life. With that premise, it can only be comic or tragic--nothing in between. (I'm hoping the former.)

RIP Alexander Kluge. One of the great creators of our time. A writer, filmmaker, artist, thinker, and catalyst. His books are among the most intellectually and visually striking of the last 60 years. Air Raid, Cinema Stories, and 30 April 1945 are good places to start, but there are plenty of others

"Happiness? I want money! Money and power!" Add on immortality and Paul Harvey's character sums up the mindset of today's billionaires. From August Weekend (1936), one of many films based on novels and stories by the hyperprolific Faith Baldwin.

I feel lucky to have seen these dowager C-124 "Globemasters" flying out of McChord Air Force Base in the late 1960s. You can almost see a hand reaching out to clutch the pearls.

“In Ireland why a man becomes a poet is a question not to be asked,” writes Darcy O’Brien in his fine memoir of W. R. Rodgers, a writer whose quietly intense poetry deserves to be remembered as well as his more flamboyant contemporaries. neglectedbooks.com/?...

Out of idle curiosity, I went to see what were some of the earliest books that were described as "Joycean." The first use in the TLS (21 Apr 1932) was in an for Memoirs of Another War. Published anonymously, it was written by John Rodker, Mary Butts's first husband. 1/11

I've been making a few detours from Pre-Code land into UK noir of the 1950s and 1960s. This credit sequence from Hell is a City (1960), directed by Val Guest and with a soundtrack by Stanley Black, is good illustration of how the Brits could do noir just as well as the Yanks did.

“A man spends the first year of his life learning that he ends at his own skin, and the rest of his life learning that he doesn’t.” — Saul Gorn Unless you're Trump or one of his supporters...

I was skeptical when I began Howard Nemerov's Stories, Fables and Other Diversions (1971): small press, short length, fiction by a best-known-as poet. But after some forgettable openers, it offers some fabulous riffs on the theme of taking things far past the point of reason. neglectedbooks.com/?...

American Bloodhound Mysteries from T. V. Boardman, with terrific covers by Denis McLoughlin: #309: A Real Gone Goose by George Bagby

Ford Sterling was something of a king of silent comedy as the chief of the Keystone Kops, but he made one of the smoother transitions to sound, proving himself a deft hand with dialogue, as in this sequence from Spring in Here (1930).

H. L. Mencken said of Isabel Paterson’s first novel, The Shadow Riders (1916) that despite “a certain readableness,” it would soon be “dead and forgotten.” He wasn't wrong. Paterson had to crank out four more bad novels before hitting her stride with Never Ask the End (1933) neglectedbooks.com/?...

I thumbed through a copy of Libbie Block's 1946 novel Wild Calendar and saw the name Smith Ohlrig. I instantly recognized it as Robert Ryan's role as the sadistic husband in the Max Ophuls classic Caught, which I saw 30+ years ago. Talk about embedding a character in your brain.

One rule of thumb when it comes to Pre-Code films: the cheaper the budget, the more likely one of the characters will refer to "Los Angle-us." From Tangled Destinies (1932), in which the dark old house mystery is spiced up solely by the twist of having everyone arrive by a grounded plane.

For years, I toted around a copy of Peter Green's story collection, Habeas Corpus (1962). Then, in 2017, when I devoted a year to reading neglected short stories, I finally got around to reading it: a solid work of well-crafted, intelligent mid-century fiction. neglectedbooks.com/?...

Fugitive Books Intercepted. From the letterhead of an long-gone antiquarian bookseller. This is the only FBI I'm interested in.

W. C. Fields plays pool in one of his best skits, consisting mostly of not playing pool. From Six of a Kind (1933), in which he plays Honest John, a Nevada town's crooked sheriff.

Sarah Salt's 1929 novel Sense and Sensuality reminded me of Ursula Parrott's Ex-Wife: both books seem to teeter uncomfortably on the incompatibility of traditional marriage and sexual liberation and end up retreating into the safety of the former. neglectedbooks.com/?...

"I often sit down to a letter not because I intend writing anything of importance to you, but just to touch a piece of paper which you will be holding in your hand..." Andrei Sinyavsky from prison to his wife Maria Rozanova (from A Voice from the Chorus)

From Kid Millions (1934), one of the earliest film appearances of the legendary Nicholas Brothers. As is often the case in early sound musicals, this rendition of "Mandy" goes on for roughly 27 minutes -- so be grateful I'm sharing just the best bit.

A man has his ticket and passport stolen moments before boarding a flight from Berlin to Frankfurt. When the airplane then crashes, it presents an opportunity to escape and reinvent himself. No Right to Live (1934) by Esther Grenen (Maria Lazar). neglectedbooks.com/?...

Five years ago today, I reached the "Let's order a bunch of fancy bitters!" stage of lockdown.

"Hold the baby!" This is the tail end of an extended game of "Pass the Baby" from Speak Easily (1932). Buster Keaton's talkies are, overall, a big step down in quality for his silents, but there's a special ensemble quality of the comedy here that's almost as good as his silent solo masterpieces.

Josephine Herbst's "Hunter of Doves" is a lightly fictionalized portrait of the novelist Nathanael West. It only ever appeared in a 1954 issue of Botteghe Oscure, so I took the liberty of posting PDF/EPUB/Kindle versions online on this date in 2015. neglectedbooks.com/?...

A few finds from a visit to Iliad Books in LA today. I wrote about Reach to the Stars, an odd novel about a fancy hotel on the California coast that Calder Willingham interspersed with snippets of SF stories. I've never seen it in hardback. 1/4 neglectedbooks.com?p=310

The Secret of Life, Chart I. Now I understand why I'm such a loser.

Tallulah Bankhead is not my favorite actress, but she definitely excelled when it came to playing women at the end of their ropes. Here, she's only prevented from committing suicide by the sudden arrival of Fredric March. From My Sin (1931).

In late February 2020, I bought an old paperback copy of One by One, Penelope Gilliatt's 1965 novel of a devastating pandemic. Like everyone else, I little guessed that a few weeks later we would be living (and too often dying) from our own version. neglectedbooks.com/?...