Best guess is in '52 he and another noncom met at a writing
class at Marin Jr. College, collaborated, alternate-chapter
and rewrite style, on a book they called "Deliver Me from
Dallas." The LA cop is a mild precursor of the narrators of
"High Priest..." and "The Woman Chaser," the trio from
Oklahoma in the chapters I assume W. Franklin
("Sandy") Sanders wrote derive from Al Capp, with a soupcan,
as they say in French, of Jim Thompson. They sent the ms.
off, it was rejected, Charles headed to a new assignment in
Santa Barbara and lost touch with Sanders. In 1961, Fawcett
published "Whip Hand" under Franklin Sanders' byline. It is
the only book, to my knowledge, published under his name.
Charles didn't know about it. Somehwhere on the Dennis &
Maura website you might find the piece Jesse ("The Rock
Critic Murders") Sublett wrote for the Austin Chronicle about
the book's history. Or you can try http://www.overbooked.org/Sublett.html
Dennis McMillan is bringing out a an edition of the original
ms. submitted by the two men, together with an intro by Jesse
Sublett and a letter from Sanders to Charles, written in
June, 1952, when he mailed the ms. to an editor named Jim
Bishop; some of you might know which publishing house he
worked for. I don't. A critic might say that the book has
elements of zany caper and of hard-boiled novel. I'd be
curious to know what those of you who have read it think.
Betsy
In a message dated 1/29/01 11:03:37 PM,
Moorich2@aol.com writes:
<< The second question is about the 1961 Gold Medal
novel WHIP HAND by W. Franklin Sanders. From Don Herron's
book WILLEFORD and another article I found just tonight, it
seems this was a collaboration that was published without
Willeford's knowledge and certainly without any byline
credit. In fact, he died before the connection was made
between the novel and an unpublished manuscript by Willeford
and Sanders. Herron believes he never knew of the novel's
publication.
Is that true Betsy? What's the background on WHIP HAND?
>>
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 30 Jan 2001 EST