Queries, Comments and Complaints

Correspondence with L. J. Hurst


 

Reviews and References

Amazon.com's search inside allows one to identify where Hurst has been quoted, either as a source or as a reviewer.
  • Hurst is both quoted in and has reviewed Gavriel D. Rosenfeld's The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism;
  • his review of Barrie Roberts is quoted on Crowner and Justice, and
  • Hurst is referenced in Patrick Parrinder's Learning from Other Worlds: Estrangement, Cognition, and the Politics of Science Fiction and Utopia

    This misses Hurst's contribution to : The Arthur C. Clarke Award: A Critical Anthology, Edited by Paul Kincaid.

    THE AUTHORS

    Just got the new Barrie Roberts Crowner and Justice out of the library and noticed on the back cover a quote from your review from Shots you did of an earlier title of his. I'm just waiting for a quote from one of my reviews in CADS to make it to a DW!

    19 Nov 2002

    Hi there. This is Nadia Lemmon, my husband is celebrity writer Don Lemmon from http://www.planetofthegods.com I'm writing to ask if you would you like to exchange website links?
    Please let me know what you decide and include your site details in your reply. Thanks for keeping sci-fi alive online!
    Sincerely,
    Nadia Lemmon
    Over 45,000,000 hits and counting since Nov. 1997
    http://www.planetofthegods.com
    Planet Of The Gods - This could have been your typical good versus evil fantasy novel but it goes way deeper. If you are a Lord of the Rings or Star Wars fan... You'll become a Planet of the Gods fan overnight.
    February 2002
     1. I have a new book out about the late science fantasy author A. E. van Vogt.
    2. The title of my book is "A. E. van Vogt: Science Fantasy's Icon"(ISBN 1-59113-054-9) and is available in e-book and Print-On-Demand formats.
    3. I notice on your web site a page titled "A. E. van Vogt on John W. Gallishaw's rules for Writing", a synopsis written by you from Charles Platt's book, "Who Writes Science Fiction."
    4. My van Vogt book features information from several interviews which I had with van Vogt and at times, he had various things to say about his writing style.
    5. Would you be interested in mentioning my book on your web site?
    6. My book page address is: http://www.booklocker.com/bookpages/vogt.html
    7. I will send more information, if you are interested.
    Sincerely,
    H. L. Drake
    September 2000
     Heard the news? I've been signed by Pan Macmillan - three book contract. I promise not to torture anyone (Heh).
    All the best.

    ON CRIME FICTION


    Date: Sun, 22 Nov 1998 16:57:40 +0000 From: L J Hurst

    > Subject: First crime - from a British pov

    > When I was eight or nine (in the mid-60s) I was reading novels about a cat and dog detective pair - the cat was Mr Twink and the dog was Sergeant Boffer (as the names suggest it was a Holmes and Watson relationship). Sergeant Boffer was owned by the local policeman and therefore felt he should police the local animal community. I remember vaguely that weasels were behind some of the crimes they investigated.
    Can anyone remember the author or any titles?
    Were they published outside Britain?

    Robert Hooper wrote:

    I found the following e-mail recently on a bulletin board and wondered if you ever got an answer in case you didn't I've included some details on the Mr Twink series which you may find interesting

    I myself grew up with my mother reading Mr Twink books to me and that helped instill a love of reading in me. I always wanted to read others in the series but we could never find them. I have since learnt that there was only ever 1 edition of the books in hardback published by Epworth Press in the early 1960's this had made them very scarce and hard to come by, but I am still trying to get a complete set although this is proving a long task and quite expensive. There was also a paperback edition published by Koala Books - itself owned by Epworth Press - (I only found out about these last week) so they may well be rarer these days than the hardbacks.

    The books were written by Freda Hurt a noted children's author of the time (i haven't read any of her other works). There were 9 books in the series

    Clever Mr Twink

    Mr Twink Takes Charge

    Mr Twink Finds Out

    Mr Twink, Detective

    Mr Twink & the Kitten Mystery

    Mr Twink & the Pirates

    Mr Twink & the Jungle Garden (this is supposed to be the rarest and hardest to find)

    Mr Twink Finds a Family

    Mr Twink & the Cat Thief



    Mr Twink must have made a big impression on his readers. You're the second person who has contacted me in the last four years (since I sent that message to DL). I had found the author's name, but I had never seen a complete list before. Thanks for sending it.

    I found the author by using the search facility at WWW.ABEBOOKS.COM. Abebooks, perhaps you know, is basically a database of books offered by secondhand booksellers around the world. I still check it on odd occasions. There is a specialist dealer in Peterborough who has the odd title, but rarely anything else. Rather like J P Martin's Uncle books we fans know something good, but unfortunately would have to pay dearly for the chance to read again those books we used to borrow from the public library.

    Does anyone know of a source that can give me a list of the books written by John Creasey with the date written and the main character (i.e. Roger West, etc.)

    Allen J Hubin's CRIME FICTION: A COMPREHENSIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY (Garland: NY) will give you all the facts. Hubin is the place to start for most authors. He had published 3 editions now of this seminal work.

    I well remember the Man in Black series which carried on for some time after he war. Valentine Dyall was the eponymous hero.

    The Man in Black series was called Appointment With Fear on the BBC, and the scripts were used in the USA in a series called Suspense. They were all written by John Dickson Carr, the Locked Room specialist. I have had a boxed set of tapes of Suspense for several years and still have got around to listening to them.
    Ironically, of course, Appointment with Fear, had its greatest audience during the blitz. Who'd have thought that anyone wanted more fear in their life, but they did.

    THE BOOKS

    On George Orwell's 1984 - April 2000
     Hi i am an english 12 stydent looking for ideas to write on about george orwell and 1984. could you give me a few ideas/possibilities to write on.
    thank you very much

    One thing in NINETEEN EIGHTY FOUR that you might like to write about is to list all the things that George Orwell knew would be invented, or would become much more important than they were in his time. He finished the novel in 1947, but it includes things such as interactive television (Winston watches an exercise program on breakfast TV, and they are atching him, too); closed-circuit television; word-processors at work; and voice recognition software for the computer on which he writes his newspaper stories. Orwell had worked in the BBC during World War Two but he had never seen television (though he knew about it), and he had never seen a computer - but he knew that they were coming and that they could be mis-used.

    I don't think there is anything like the internet in NINETEEN EIGHTY FOUR, but look at something else which has become important while you have been at school. When Winston is in the canteen they are given artificial food to eat - his colleague thinks it is good thing but Winston is not so sure. This means that Orwell also foresaw that there would be a dialogue (or dialog) about these things. The food example is very close to the current debates about Genetically Modified food.

    I can't give you much more help, but I hope this starts you thinking.

    On H G Wells Information - February 1999

    this is a relly cool web page and it helped me alot. If you have any more information on H.G. Wells could you send it to me. If you have reports i would like to see them please.
    Thank you very much

    Everything I have on Wells is on my home page, I'm afraid. But I have just searched http://www.metacrawler.com which brings up some interesting sites:

    http://home.olemiss.edu/~egcash/wells.html

    http://www.clarndon.demon.co.uk/wells.htm

    And there are others.

    On H G Wells and the Second World War - April 2000
     I was interested in your page concerning H.G.Wells. and have decided to make comment to that page. We all perceive things first hand and are dependent on the knowledge we have acquired as we grow.
    Thus the out look and image we shape in our unique mind can never be the same. this makes reading and thought very unique. reading and the nature of radio make for a very exiting experience.
    A vista is built into the mind and imagination fed not through visual stimuli, but through ideas from spoken words and sounds. The brain is then only able to use data received, then forcing it to bring out images and ideas from sounds and any dormant thoughts.
    Wells wrote a pamphlet called The Common Sense of War and Peace,a penguin booklett. This produced in the period leading up to the outbreak of world war two, it is quite interesting. He makes comment on the concentration camps, Nazis etc are known by other words. In a number of pages the reader would be fooled into thinking he had written the booklet to day. He condemns the action world governments and business are inflicting on the planet and warns of it's consequences. Such Ideas you would think out of place for the time that H.G.Wells had been writing. I will never Know for sure if the meanings I read from his writings are correct at all?

    Much of Wells's late material is difficult to obtain (though I do have a copy of another of his WW2 Penguin publications CRUX ANSATA in which he calls for the bombing of Rome - which the Allies had been avoiding because of the presence of the Pope). I do know though that George Orwell felt that Wells was old and tired, even before the publication of "Mind at the end of its tether", but Wells's earlier writings had introduced many young people to ideas beyond this world, including the young Orwell, for which Orwell felt forever indebted.
    The recent 20 volume Collected Works of George Orwell allows us to see how he continued to review Wells's new work throughout the war.

    On J G Ballard's The Drowned World - May 1999
    I've been reading your very interesting essay on The Drowned World. Did Ballard somewhere make reference to a connection between Dr. Bodkin and Maud Bodkin's Archetypal Patterns in Poetry or is this a conjecture on> your part? And the same question on the origin of Kerans name in the captain of HMS Amethyst. I suspect that you're right, but wonder about the supporting evidence. Ballard's done so many interviews, but it's difficult obtaining copies of anything but a fraction of them.
    Thanks for any light you can shed on this. At any rate, I've ordered my own copy of Archetypal Patterns in Poetry. As you can see, I'm very interested in working through Ballard's background reading to some of his books.

    The Bodkin association is probably my own, but Ballard is so well read that the connection could not have escaped him.
    The Kerans identification again was my own, but was later confirmed by David Pringle, who in a letter to me years ago when he was starting the Ballard newsletter, told me that he had asked Ballard about the name, and had the association confirmed.

    On J G Ballard's Empire of the Sun - April 2000
    What do you guys think the theme of Empire of the Sun is? I know there's more than one, and I've only been informed of one. If anyone can help, I would appreciate it. THanks!

    What your essay should include is something like the following:

    EMPIRE OF THE SUN describes the life of British middle-class expatriats in Shanghai from 1941 to 1945. Although they were living in China these people were still living an essentially British life with many advantages such as wealth, servants etc. They did not mix with the Chinese socially. China was theoretically a republic then, and the British were members of the British empire.

    The Japanese had invaded large parts of China in the 1930s but they did not occupy and imprison the civilians until war broke out with the Americans after the attach on Pearl Harbour in December 1941. Japan was an Empire and its symbol is the sun - it is sometimes called the Land of the Rising Sun. So literally Jim the boy hero of the book and all the Europeans become prisoners of the EMPIRE OF THE SUN. The had lost the benefits of the British empire.

    Although he is a prisoner Jim does not hate his captors - he rather admires the spirit of the Japanese officers and guards. So, metaphorically, the centre of his universe changes, the old centre had been British/European values - they become more centered on the Japanese. So a bit of his mind becomes occupied by this "Empire of the Sun". But he does not give way completely, and he admires the Americans when they arrive at the end of the war. Jim's parents and the other adults keep their original British imperial mind-set.

    Finally, consider the geography. Shanghai was hot and tropical and not like Britain. In Jim's world it was full of big houses and swimming pools; but beyond them were rice paddy fields and starving Chinese. Then the swimming pools were drained as the Japanese arrived, and Jim's residence became the camp. So the Empire of the Sun, geographically, was this changing physical world of different residences.

    Hope this helps. Do try to re-read the book, you'll find a lot in it a second time.

    On Charles Todd's A Test of Wills - May 1999

    I enjoyed your home page very much. I enjoyed and have put to use your critique of Charles Todd's work. As with Mr. Todd, I am an American writing a murder mystery which is set during the Blitz and I found your critique most helpful. I have been reading British authored detective fiction written during WW II as background research and your bibliography was most helpful for that endeavor as well.

    An interesting comparison with Charles Todd's Test of Wills has just been published - Rennie Airth's River of Darkness, set in the same period. Airth is British and culturally makes fewer mistakes, but even he is not exempt. I will sit down with River of Darkness soon, I hope, and do another report, though the worst example I have found is the phrase "ploughman's lunch" used for a meal of bread and cheese. This phrase is now so common in Britain that almost no one seems to realise that it was invented in the 1960s.
    Referring to the detective stories of the period gives one a strong idea of the social background to the period. It seems to me that Todd has not read enough of the genre (hence my comment about invisible postmen in the study). I extended the bibliography beyond my original cut-off date of 1947 to include John Rhode's A VILLLAGE AFRAID because it revolves around a murder of someone who is blackmailing others when she discovers they have been cheating the rationing system: rationing was still that important 5 years after the end of the war.
    I suppose that you have read John Lawton's BLACKOUT, published a couple of years ago, and set in the London blitz. It is the first of a trilogy. The second is set in the mid-fifties, and in it his character comes back to the Derbyshire town of Belper (Lawton himself is from Derbyshire), and knowing the geography myself I can see how well Lawton has re-created the town of forty years ago. The third novel is set in 1963. Lawton has now started on a fourth set in the war again.
    I don't like everything Lawton has done - his detective is part of the upper class, although born into a Russian emigre family, and a bit of a Lord Peter Wimsey character - but his historical re-creation is good.

    On Charles Todd's A Test of Wills - August 2000

    Re Charles Todd's A Test of Wills: I'm not particularly favourable to most of those American spellings you pointed out in this book either, but I'm not so sure about "plow". I've heard that both "plow" and "plough" were current in 18th-century England; but the former eventually became the standard spelling for the US apparently, while the latter did on this side of the Atlantic. I've noticed that the King James Bible uses "plow" (as well as some other archaic English spellings such as "shew" and "publickly"), so perhaps there is some truth in this.
    Jon

    Thanks for your comments. I think the significant thing is that an educated man such as Todd's protagonist would have used "plough", not "plow" as that would have been regarded as an Americanism or an illiteracy by someone of the car owning classes in 1920.
    Getting "voice" right is very difficult. I read a recent-ish Len Deighton novel last night, VIOLENT WARD (1993), which is narrated by a Californian lawyer. I had some difficulty at first and then realised that Deighton had got his Americanisms right - it was me who was speaking what I thought was hard-boiled, demotic Californian and finding that in fact my Britishisms were slipping in.

    On J P Martin's Uncle Stories - February 2000
     We are trying to find an old book that we read as children around 1970. We think it was illustrated by Quentin Blake and had a reference to Uncle Elephant in the title. Also we think it was one of a series of perhaps six titles. Can you help?
    ****

    These could be the 'Uncle' books that I too have read and L J Hurst (who runs our Cafe Phil page - which is actually on his website) collects. Did Uncle live in a very, very, very large castle (needing railway trips to get to the other side of it?) and did the stories have a wonderfully bizarre and surreal side to them? If so its the same books. They are out of print but do turn up and have a loyal and somewhat fanatical following.
    The catch is that I do not recall them being illustrated by Q B.
    Hurst may be able to help (ljh3@hurstportal..net) and we will do some checking here.
    > Pleased you like the site!

    These are the Uncle books by J. P. Martin, published by Jonathan Cape, and illustrated by Quentin Blake as you say. I believe that they were never published in paperback.

    • Uncle
    • Uncle and His Detective
    • Uncle and the Treacle Trouble
    • Uncle and Claudius the Camel
    • Uncle and the Battle for Badger Town.
    Martin died before the last two were published in the early seventies and I have never seen copies of those last two. Over the last couple of years dealers have found me secondhand copies of the first three, but they are very rare and I have never been offered a second copy of any of them.
    I'm only a reader (and collector) myself so I don't have any special sources. Later on this year the monthly bookfairs at the Buxton Pailion (telephone them for dates) will start again. You could try visiting to leave your wants list with the specialist children's dealers, as I have never found a copy on a dealer's open shelves.
    Authors who admired Martin's work include Richard Ingrams and Neil Gaiman.
    ** Your query has driven me to try to consolidate my knowledge and I have been researching J. P. Martin's Uncle books via the internet. This is the result of my search.
    • Uncle - 1964
    • Uncle Cleans Up - 1965
    • Uncle and His Detective - 1966
    • Uncle and the Treacle Trouble - 1967
    • Uncle and Claudius the Camel - 1969
    • Uncle and the Battle for Badgertown - (1969? 1973)
    All published by Jonathan Cape, with illustrations by Quention Blake
    There were some paperback editions, but I am not sure I have a complete list: Uncle was published in paperback by NEL, and Uncle Cleans Up by Sparrow.

    There is a web-site run by the fantasy authors Diane Duane and her husband, dedicated to Uncle here. This includes the good news that Random House (which now owns the Cape imprint) will be re-printing the first two volumes in one paperback omnibus later this year, and the others later if the first volume is a success. But that does mean that the two least available volumes will appear last, if at all.

    The web-site WWW.ABEBOOKS.COM (the advanced book exchange) showed two British secondhand booksellers with copies - but one was a first edition in good condition at 150 pounds, and the other had a paperback copy of Uncle at eight pounds. Unfortunately that had gone when I telephoned. But it looks worthwhile keeping an eye on ABE. (The prices of the US editions are just out of this world).

    What is slightly unusual, perhaps, is that fans of Quentin Blake are not demanding the reprinting of these books with his fantastic illustrations running across the pages. Nevertheless, welcome to a club that is not as small as I once imagined.

    I'm sorry this is rather negative.

    THE FACTS

    Hello,

    > My name is A..... M....., and I am doing a research paper on Capital Punishment in Britain in the 1930s. I would very much like to cite your work. Perchance, could you tell me the latest date it was updated. I would greatly appreciate it.

    Dear Ms M.....,

    Thanks for your interest. I would have posted the article on the Death Penalty in Britain on June 28th 2001 (there was a slightly shorter version a month or two before).

    THE DAMBUSTERS
    I found your page on the 'Dam Busters' during a search - I realise that you were writing about the movie which was made of the incident in Paul Brickhill's book, but I was wondering if you might be able to steer me in the direction of some solid, documented information on the raid(s).
    It's a long story, but suffice it to say that I am at present in the middle of a long argument with my son about the darned bomb they used... Someone (a third party) referred to it as a 'rolling bomb' and I said that EVERYone knows that it was a 'bouncing bomb'... You wouldn't believe the argument that has ensued! Gauntlets have been thrown in the shape of URLs which supposedly tell the story - you wouldn't believe some of the claims! - and we're at the point now where neither of us believes anything, any longer... I tried a search on 'British Air Ministry' but I can't find anything which gives anything definitive about the raid.
    Your notes on the movie contain some good points - they've set me to thinking differently about some aspects of the movie, which my husband and I have just finished watching, in an attempt to settle the argument, but, when you get right down to it, the movie is as about as useful for solid information as some of the webpages I've been reading about the Squadron... A point, though: I agree about the 'lonesomeness' of the main characters and the sparseness of plot, etc., but I wonder if this is merely hindsight from a more affluent age? I believe this was made about ten years after the war - how much money would be spared from re-building of the country to allow for fripperies like movie-making?
    Any help you may be able to offer would be very much appreciated, and I thank you for taking the time to read this.
    Cheers from an expatriated Brit - from the Bristol area, where Barnes Wallis worked at one time.

    I have been looking for Dam Busters material on the net myself (I wanted to steal a picture of a Lancaster) but have not found much.
    The principle source I used (in addition to Brickhill's and Gibson's books) was John Sweetman's THE DAMBUSTERS RAID (revised edition: Arms and Armour Press 1990). Sweetman also acted as the consultant to a program on Channel Four TV some years ago called "The Real Dam Busters Raid", which included some archive photographs of the tests. They were very similar to those in the film.
    The bomb was always referred to as "The bouncing bomb", however, it also rotated - something that was not shown in the film. The real bomb, in addition, according to Sweetman was not a bomb but a mine - a distinction I have difficulty in understanding. It did not look like the bomb in the film, which resembles a large doughnut - the real bombs looked more like oil drums on their sides, bound in wooden staves which split off on the bomb's first landing, protecting the inner casing.
    The bombs were on axles beneath the Lancasters, and before the aeroplanes went in on their final runs motors in the aircraft started the bombs rotating. As the film also makes clear the height and distance at which the bomb was released was essential for the thing to work ("down, down, steady, steady"). The bomb was then released ("Bomb gone, skipper") and proceded as shown in the film - the rotation made each one bounce along the water towards the dam, and over the netting.
    Incidentally, Barnes Wallis was born at Ripley here in Derbyshire, and Eric Coates who composed "The Dam Busters March" was born just across the border in Hucknall in Nottinghamshire. Barnes Wallis worked on the airship R101 in the 1930s, where his chief engineer was Neville Shute (before he became a successful novelist) - Shute describes this in his memoir SLIDERULE. There was a biography of Guy Gibson a few years ago which I only glanced at in the bookshop. I was looking for references to ghost writers for Gibson's wartime memoir ENEMY COAST AHEAD, but the biography rejecting ideas that the RAF authors H E Bates or Roald Dahl might have helped suggested it was the work of Gibson alone. The author did not seem to have considered the Shute connection - Shute had already published a couple of flying books at the beginning of the war (WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE CORBETTS was written before Sept 1939 and describes the Germans bombing Southampton successfully due to a new sextant. The Y shaped device used by the Dam Buster bomb aimers to fix their position was an alternative sextant I suppose). Shute's next novel LANDFALL describes life in Coastal Command during the phoney war, and was well reviewed at the time by George Orwell. But I fear this is off the subject.
    There seem to be differences of spelling on the subject: Sweetman's title is one word, but on the video case it is two.

    THE SITE

    c... d..... wrote:

    >

    > I know that it may be ignorant but I disregarded what you had to say about the Turner Diaries mostly due to the fact that the problems that are going on with our nation right now and I say right now are problems that are associated with people that are racist against our country although our involvement with Israel has gotten us in all of this mess the way that we are being treated as Americans is the same crap that this book teaches and the same ideology as mentally challenged leaders has taught. Where in the bible does it say all of this rationality? find it I would like to know. Before anyone writes a book they should do some research and know what they are talking about. Hate is not an answer, Hate is not taught by GOD. What do you think Jesus was about anyway??? I would like to know what you think. I will be waiting. Again sorry for not reading your home page I am just so disgusted with who people believe GOD is hateful and it makes me wonder where this is all coming from???
    with love,
    an american girl

    Dear C... D.....,

    Thank you for your message.

    I can see that you are very concerned about matters, but I am rather confused about your reading of my review of THE TURNER DIARIES. Anyway, John Sutherland, whom I quote in my review, has now reported that William Pierce, the author, died in July. Presumably Pierce is now being judged as he was not judged on Earth.

    Contra ...
    I disagree with almost everything you've written here, you... you philistine. (August 2000)

    Red text on a blacj background. Not the best of choices. (September 1997)

    On the Other Hand - January 2000
     I would like to submit my zine link to your cool directory. The name of the zine is Wet Devoh: The "not-so-punk" Punk Fanzine.
    Thanks,
    Seth

    Variously
     Congratulations on the web site!

    Very Flash, I particularly like the starry background and the animations.

    We think your page is very cooooooooooool.
    Love the stars.

    What a wonder site, so visual! My is so drab, but then I'm just trying to get rid of books.
    It really is a neat site, I like it.

    I've paid you a visit. Must say that at first sight it looks pretty impressive. I will go and have a read of some of the material on offer.

    Many correspondents have offered to make L J Hurst a millionaire, and to provide him with evidence of the lifestyles of neighboursand strangers. Unfortunately, space does not permit their appearance here.




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