Book Review: The Flaming Island by Donald Barr Chidesey

The Flaming Island by Donald Barr Chidsey
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a forgotten pulp novel from a now sadly overlooked author, so forgotten and overlooked that I had to add this book to Goodreads! Chidsey was a regular contributor to the pulp magazines in the 1930s, writing in a wide range of genres as many of the old pulp writers did. He spent much of his youth as a merchant seaman and wrote many stories set on the sea in various exotic locales. Later in life he earned a bit of fame as a history writer, once again focusing on the sea.
This novel is from 1959, relatively late in his fiction career as he was making the transition to nonfiction writing. It is a tale of an American demolitions expert who gets caught up in the Cuban revolution of the 1890s.
Our hero, George Heritage, thought he was going to work on a land clearance project, which shows just how clueless he is. Didn't he know there was a war on? Soon he's drafted into the revolutionary army, falls in love with a beautiful señorita, and is blowing up stuff all over the island. It's fast paced, exciting, and often funny. One interesting aspect is that the Cubans are shown in a three-dimensional, sympathetic light. The most intelligent character is black. This is rare for a novel from the 1950s (or even the 1990s). Chidsey must have learned a thing or two in his travels around the world.
As a writer myself, I can often tell when a writer is rushed or enthusiastic. Chidsey is at his best when writing about ships and the sea, and in those passages his prose rises to the level of poetry. The description of sailing into Havana at dawn is breathtaking. As was the custom with pulp writers, he was given a set word count and deadline and, like with so many pulp novels, this one feels rushed at the end with all the hero's problems getting resolved in a few short paragraphs. I can practically hear Chidsey's editor: "OK Chidsey, give me 60,000 words by the end of the month and I'll give you 500 smackers. No, I don't care what you write about as long as it's exotic and has some ships in it. You're great when you write about ships. And don't forget the beautiful foreign dames. Readers love beautiful foreign dames. Now hit that typewriter and make sure you're manuscript is on time."
Ah, for the days of the pulps!

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Book Review: Pulp Writer: Twenty Years in the American Grub Street

Pulp Writer: Twenty Years in the American Grub Street by Paul S. Powers
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

As a writer, I've always been interested in the pulp magazine era. It was a time when writers could make a living on short stories by writing for the myriad of pulp titles available on the newsstands. Some writers were massively prolific, often churning out millions of words a year.
Paul Powers, the author of this memoir, was one of those writers. He wrote hundreds of short stories and novellas and lived through the golden age of the pulps.
His tale is a sad one, however. He wrote almost exclusively for the Western magazines, a genre that was dwindling as early as the 1930s. Yet Powers forged on well into the 1950s, making less and less money as he succumbed to exhaustion, lack of inspiration, and alcoholism. This provdes a doubly cautionary tale for writers--don't be a one-trick pony and don't get sucked into the bottle.
Besides this important bit of wisdom, the book is less than useful for someone interested in the writing of the period. Much of the memoir is about Powers' various moves throughout the West, and is padded out with a long intorduction and conculsion by his granddaughter, who discovered the manuscript, researched Powers, and finally got it published. A large amount of her writing is only of personal interest to members of the family and I found myself skimming these parts.
If you're going to read only one book on the era, I would suggest The Pulp Jungle by Frank Gruber, which is far more informative about the lives of writers and editors and the business of pulp magazine publishing. I've reviewed it here. If you want some more detail about the Western pulps, and the sad tale of how the pulp era ground down writers, give the Powers memoir a try.

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