Month: May 2014

Buck is back. That’s Baruch “Buck” Schatz, 88 years old and retired from the Memphis Police Department, but he’s still got a way with words and he’s not afraid to use them. As in this exchange between Buck and a young detective on the force (the subject, crime in general; the asterisks not in the original):

“That’s how you and I are different,” Buck says. “You look at crime as a computer program. As a collection of statistics. It’s easy to take a compassionate view of criminals when you treat them as a group of the disenfranchised and the downtrodden. You have to sympathize with them in the aggregate, because on an individual basis, these mother****ers are goddamn intolerable. And statistics turn the suffering of the victims into an abstraction. Crime, to me, was always personal; a thing people do to each other.”

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One crime in particular: a heist from the Cotton Planters Union Bank in downtown Memphis back in 1965 — a crime committed by a famous Jewish thief using a gang of Jewish accomplices and with the help of corrupt Jewish police.

Flash forward to 2009, and Buck is still wearing his Members Only jacket, and that famous thief, named Elijah, is once more on the scene (Memphis) in Daniel Friedman’s second (and latest) Buck Schatz mystery, Don’t Ever Look Back (Minotaur Books). And Buck being Buck, he’s still got a way with words and his own understanding of Old Testament history. Elijah (the prophet)? He’s, according to Buck, “the sneakiest bastard in all of Jewish theology.”

For more on Don’t Ever Look Back, on its hard-nosed but hard to dislike protagonist, and on its author, see the May issue of Memphis magazine. On a more serious note, for now, consider this, according to Friedman:

“The question of who [Buck] is, whether he’s right or wrong in his worldview, whether he’s ultimately a good guy or a bad guy, his rationalizations and defense mechanisms: The greater business in the [Buck Schatz] series is … getting to the core of those questions. Ultimately, at the center of the story is Buck’s character and his journey or refusal to take the journey toward embracing his own frailty and own mortality …. There’s a good mystery novel in there as well.”

There sure is, and local readers need to know the name Daniel Friedman. His first book, Friedman admitted by phone from New York, where he now lives, was a bit of a sleeper. But foreign sales of that book, Don’t Ever Get Old, have been good, and in Germany, it’s made the best-seller list. Libraries and independent book stores in the U.S. have been supportive too.

But Friedman’s hoping that Don’t Ever Look Back will “double-down” on readers’ awareness of Buck Schatz and the two mysteries so far starring him. Memphis readers, also be aware: On Tuesday, May 27th, 6-7 p.m., Daniel Friedman is here to sign Don’t Ever Look Back at The Booksellers at Laurelwood. “Back” because the writer’s hometown is Memphis, Tennessee. •

It’s official: On the evening of May 21st, fans of J.D. Salinger could do something they couldn’t do before: Go to Amazon, type in “J.D. Salinger” and “ebook,” and download the result onto their Kindles. This makes Three Early Stories (for $9.99 and at just under 80 pages) the first time Salinger’s been made available in ebook form, and readers have Memphis-based Devault-Graves Digital Editions to thank.

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The collected stories in Three Early Stories are:

“The Young Folks” (originally published in Story magazine in 1940, the first time Salinger saw a story his in print); “Go See Eddie” (from University of Kansas City Review, December 1940); and “Once a Week Won’t Kill You” (Story magazine, November-December 1944). Illustrating the stories is New York-based Anna Rose Yoken, daughter of Memphians Tony Yoken and Pamela Denney, dining columnist and food blogger for the Memphis Flyer’s sister publication, Memphis magazine. (Shown below: one of Yoken’s illustrations for “The Young Folks.”)

All three stories are notable for what they reveal of Salinger’s early debt to Hemingway and as early indicators of Salinger’s style. In “The Young Folks,” the banal cocktail-party chatter between a young woman and a college boy says far more to the reader than that young woman and student know themselves. In “Go See Eddie,” the erotic charge between a man and his sister is unmistakable, the threatening undertones of their exchange made suddenly manifest in a single, alarming gesture. In “Once a Week Won’t Kill You,” by a writer who’d seen more than his share of World War II horrors, a man prepares to enter the service — and prepares, perhaps, his wife and mentally failing aunt (and himself?) for the possibility of personal tragedy.

According to Tom Graves, who co-founded The Devault-Graves Agency with business partner Darrin Devault, publishing these three Salinger stories was the ideal project for an agency whose mission is to bring neglected titles, out-of-print titles, and uncopyrighted titles to the reading public in a polished ebook format.

in the past, Devault-Graves has “rescued” the autobiography of the photographer Weegee, collections by celebrity profiler Rex Reed, and a novel by noir master Jim Thompson. The company’s biggest seller has proved to be Big Sur by Jack Kerouac. But in the case of Salinger, Devault-Graves is planning to go beyond ebooks. A print edition (the agency’s first) of Three Early Stories is scheduled for June, Graves said by phone this past week.

“We’ve been a little hush-hush about all of this,” Graves said, “but we’re really proud of Three Early Stories. We only went ‘live’ with it on Amazon on Wednesday night. It’s a coup for us” — an enterprise Graves compared to David (Devault-Graves) vs. Goliath (the larger publishing world). “We want word of it to build.”

What Graves didn’t want was a cover that too closely mimicked the one for the famous paperback edition of The Catcher in the Rye, which features simply the title and author’s name on a solid maroon background. But he and Devault did ask that graphic artist Martina Voriskova keep the cover of Three Early Stories equally simple. What Graves would like to emphasize, however, is that Three Early Stories is (as stated on the book’s Amazon page) “the first legitimately published book by J.D. Salinger in more than 50 years.”

Bootleg, unauthorized, and editorially sloppy versions of Salinger’s stories have been leaked before. “Leaked” is not the word for Three Early Stories. Legitimacy is.

The stories were never (“ever,” according to Graves) registered to Salinger. Three Early Stories with its illustrations — together with high editorial standards and clean layout — means that the Devault-Graves Agency has its own copyright to the edition. It’s the business of the agency to do the deep research to obtain and secure that right.

“Long-term, we hope to build a lasting reputation for the excellence of taste in our book selections and for producing a quality ebook product,” Graves said.

And who knows? Three Early Stories by J.D. Salinger could be just the “coup” to put Devault-Graves on the big map. •