by Неизвестный
Fill and bake tart:
Reduce oven temperature to 325°F.
Scatter mushrooms evenly in tart shell and pour custard over them. Bake tart in pan on a baking sheet until custard is just set and slightly puffed, 35 to 45 minutes.
Cool tart in pan on rack at least 20 minutes, then remove side of pan. Serve tart warm or at room temperature.
SHMM SPEAKS WITH RON GOULART
Interview conducted by Carole Buggé
Ron Goulart is one of the most prolific genre authors with more than 180 published works, including approximately fifty science fantasy novels and twenty mystery novels, including his popular series starring Groucho Marx as detective. His Harry Challenge stories are special favorites of this magazine’s editor, who has commissioned several new stories in the series. Twice nominated for the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar award, Ron Goulart is an acknowledged expert on comic books and pulp magazines; his most recent book, just published, is Cheap Thrills, an Informal History of the Pulp Magazines. He and his wife Frances, who is also a writer, live in Ridgefield, Connecticut.
* * * *
SHMM: Where were you born?
Ron Goulart: In Berkeley, California. That was in January of 1933, just a couple of months before Roosevelt was inaugurated for the first of several terms as President. I grew up in a peaceful, pleasant neighborhood, even though it was on the wrong side of the tracks.
SHMM: What did your parents do?
RG: My father came to America from the Azore Islands when he was in his teens and worked in the same factory for the next fifty years. He was a dapper, handsome fellow in his youth and in Oakland, where he then resided, his friends called him the Sheik of Kirkham Street. My mother, who was born in this country, grew up in Oakland with a bunch of siblings and a one-armed father. She worked in a couple of factories, one of which manufactured light bulbs, until she married. In the early 1940’s, she started working as the head cook in the cafeteria of the Berkeley grammar school that I attended. She stayed at that job until she died of cancer at the age of forty-five. I’m an only child, as is my wife. Makes for very sparsely attended family reunions.
SHMM: What in your background led to a writing career?
RG: Writing was only one of several careers I had my eye on as a kid. Our family consumed all the cheap popular arts forms — movies, radio, pulp magazines, library books and (for me, anyway) funny papers and comic books. I saw no reason why I couldn’t grow up to be a writer, a star of stage, screen and radio, a comedian and a cartoonist who drew a newspaper strip and a batch of comic books. From grade school through college I fooled with all of these callings. Wrote and drew for the high school newspaper, wrote and drew for the college humor magazine (at UC Berkeley), starred in the senior play at high school, belonged to a radio workshop that broadcast a dramatic show once a week on a local station, did a standup comedy act that wowed them at Cub Scout picnics and, later, at the Junior Prom.
SHMM: Were your ambitions nurtured by your upbringing and background, or did you have to overcome obstacles?
RG: Neither of my parents wanted me to end up in a factory. So they always encouraged my efforts to aim higher. My mother was convinced that I was destined for greatness and saw to it that by the time I was thirteen I had my own typewriter and drawing board. My father, more practical, suggested that I also think about an occupation to fall back on. That’s why I told the folks at UC that I wanted to become an English teacher.
SHMM: When did you get started writing?
RG: I was telling stories at school show-and-tell days from the first grade on and putting them on paper from about the second. I started submitting stories to professional magazines from the time I was about fifteen. I collected rejection slips from Planet Stories, Thrilling Wonder, Weird Tales and The New Yorker. When I was about sixteen or thereabouts I signed up for a one-night-a-week writing class that Anthony Boucher taught out of his house up on the right side of the tracks. I was certain that once he saw a sample of my work, I’d become a regular contributor to his Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. It didn’t work out that way and I was nineteen before I made my first sale to F&SF.
SHMM: Did you ever have to support yourself with “day jobs,” and if so, what were they and what were they like? Did any of them feed your writing?
RG: I’ve always, once I got out of college, supported myself by writing. However, for the first dozen or so years I wrote copy for ad agencies in addition to selling stories to F&SF, Amazing, Hitchcock, etc. What I’d do was work for a couple of years at an agency, then quit and live on my savings while writing stories. The first year I tried this I wrote fifty stories, sent out about twenty-five and sold six. When my money ran out I’d go back into the ad game for a couple more years. I was a pretty good copywriter, and also fast, so I didn’t have much trouble getting a job. The San Francisco agency where I did two stretches hired me initially after reading some of what I’d written for the college humor magazine. That saved me from a life of teaching, as well as kept me from living off a generous pension now.
SHMM: Which of your books or stories do you like most, and why?
RG: I like most everything I’ve written over the years. Right now the Groucho Marx mystery novels I’m doing for St. Martin’s Press strike me as being pretty good — and funny. The latest one, Groucho Marx, King of the Jungle, is about a murder on the set of a Tarzan-like movie. It’ll be appearing in a book store near you this July. And I’ve always been fond of Harry Challenge in both novels and short stories.
SHMM: With regard to comic books, what have you done, and what your views of the genre’s significance? When did your interest in comics begin, and what are some of your likes and dislikes?
RG: I got hooked on funnies at a very early age. I was reading the Sunday comic sections before I could read, spreading them out on the kitchen floor and savoring the pictures. Comic books came along about the same time I did, and I started buying them (financed by my mother) from about the age of four. Graphic images of all sorts have always appealed to me, even the ones I turn out. In the middle 1970’s, Gil Kane and his family moved into the same Connecticut town where we were living. He was a great fan of science fiction and was familiar with my work. Or so he said. He introduced me to Roy Thomas, who was the head editor at Marvel back then. I got about a dozen scripting jobs, mostly adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft, Robert Bloch and the like. In the late 1970’s, Kane and I collaborated on a syndicated comic strip called Star Hawks. In the 1990’s I wrote the first eighteen issues of William Shatner’s Tekworld for Marvel. I was never able to work on DC comic books and the late Julie Schwartz once told me I ought to stick to novel writing. I still buy comic books every week and like a wide range of stuff, from Bone to 100 Bullets.
SHMM: Which genre authors influenced your style and career?
RG: I wrote fan letters to a few of my favorite writers in my distant youth: Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sax Rohmer and Leslie Charteris among them. Burroughs and Rohmer obliged with autographs and a few kind words. Charteris actually wrote a couple of letters answering my questions. I read Charteris in those days not for his plots but for the adventure and the humor. The Saint was all over the place in the 1940’s. Movies, radio, comics and the affordable two-bit paperback. Charteris even had his own paperback outfit — Chartered Books for a time. The lesson from him was that a mystery could also be funny. It wasn’t until years later that I learned that some of his stuff was ghosted. By Henry Kutter (another of my favorites), Cleve Cartmill, etc.
SHMM: Do you have advice or observations on the plotting process, which some writers regard as the toughest part of story writing?
RG: My approach to plotting? My basic theory is that a good short story is constructed like a good joke. Or maybe a good shaggy dog story. So you have to know the punchline before you can start telling it. Usually I try to know what the ending is goi
ng to be and sometimes I even write out the last lines first. That way, I know where I’m heading. I must admit that in recent years I sometimes start a story without that punchline clearly in mind. To get myself going on the plotting process, I often think up titles first. Those often trigger a plot. Although I have some titles that I jotted down years ago and am still trying to figure out a story to go with. One a long time on my list is The Case of the Extra Ventriloquist. Another method for me to get a plot going is to put the end at the beginning, but in a vague way that is hopefully intriguing. For example
— “As to why they found his body floating in the Pacific wearing those strange shoes.” Then you go back and explain why. Another source of inspiration is the old what if? approach. Works for both fantasy and mystery.
SHMM: Where do you think the business is going? What’s wrong — or right — with it?
RG: No idea. I just hope it lasts as long as I do.
SHMM: This issue contains a new Harry Challenge story. How did you come up with Harry and his magician sidekick in the first place?
RG: Harry was inspired in part by my interest in Victorian fiction. Especially the sort of romantic thrillers produced by the likes of Anthony Hope with such novels as The Prisoner of Zenda. And there’s a bit of an homage to one of the favorite writers of my teens, the incomparable Sax Rohmer. It occurred to me some years ago that there was no reason why I couldn’t turn out stuff like that myself. I see the Harry Challenge yarns as falling somewhere between pastiche and spoof. Harry first appeared a couple of decades ago in a paperback novel titled The Prisoner of Blackwood Castle. Most all of my novels, even the ones that aren’t officially mysteries, tend to have a mystery plot and so it seemed only logical to make Harry a detective in the tradition of both Nick Carter and Carnacki. The Great Lorenzo, his magician friend, was partially inspired by my interest in stage magic of a century ago, especially the gaudy posters. And I’ve been using plump, avuncular likeable windbags in my stories since grade school days. The other recurring character in the series is Jennie Barr, the daredevil reporter who frequently crosses Harry’s path. She’s part Nellie Bly, a real life daredevil reporter, and part a fictional reporter that Robert Barr wrote an adventure novel about and part my feisty writer wife.
SHMM: Are there any of your interests outside of your writing that you feel have influenced your writing?
RG: Comics have always been an influence. I’ve written quite a few stories, as well as a couple of novels, about cartoonists and the comics world. All the radio dramas and comedies I listened to while young also had their effect and I think my habit of telling quite a bit of a story in dialogue I owe to my long ago listening habits. I’ve always been a fan of jazz and the blues and I’ve used lines from blues songs for story and book titles — such as Broke Down Engine. This is something I was more inclined to do in my younger days.
THE STRANGE CASE OF THE HAUNTED FREIGHTER, by Carole Buggé
“Watson, I do believe we have a client.” I looked up from my armchair by the fire at Holmes, who was standing in front of the window, peering down into the street. It was a chilly, overcast day in October, and the grey afternoon light fell listlessly between the parted curtains onto the keen face of my friend, who was as keyed up and attentive as the day was dreary and dull.
“Who might that be, Holmes?” I asked, putting aside the magazine I was reading. His words brought me out of the article I was reading about spiritualism, a subject that my wife had recently become interested in. I myself was more than a little skeptical about the topic, but had agreed to read the article to humour her.
“I can only say that there is every indication that we will have a visitor at any moment.”
My wife was in the country visiting her sister, and I had left my surgery in the hands of a colleague for a few days so that Holmes and I could do some ordinance walking in the Lake District. Then we were to meet up with my wife in Windermere, where I was hoping Holmes would take some much needed rest. He had been driving himself too much as usual, having taken on several cases at once. As a result, he had been smoking far too much and eating far too little, and my concern for him had reached such a point that I could no longer hide it. I had suggested the trip to the Lake District not so much for my own sake as for his — I thought that a week of fresh air and exercise might do him some good, stimulate his appetite, and calm his already overstrung nerves.
Now, watching as he stood gazing out the window, my heart sank and I feared that the promised vacation would be indefinitely postponed.
“Look here, Holmes—” I began, but he silenced me with an upheld index finger.
“Yes, Watson, I think that gentleman is definitely in need of our services.”
He turned abruptly from the window and flung open the door to the sitting room.
“Mrs Hudson!” he bellowed out into the hallway. “Could you bring tea for three, please?”
I took the opportunity to go to the window myself and look out, in hopes of seeing whoever it was Holmes had been looking at. The lackluster grey day was surrendering quietly to an early dusk, and visibility outside was poor, but I could just make out a figure in the street below. He was wrapped in a dun colored raincoat with a rubbery sheen to it — the kind of sturdy rain slicker one often saw on professional sailors. He stood next to the stoop of our building, and his stillness set him apart from the forward rush of people hurrying homeward — office workers, umbrellas tucked underneath their arms, the men dressed in bowler hats and gabardine overcoats, the women in long skirts and capes, with short laced ankle boots to protect their feet from the mud and muck of London streets. The man’s hat, a wool nautical cap, was pulled low over his eyes, so that I could not see his face.
The rattle of wooden cart wheels, passing merchants’ wagons and hansom cabs on the cobblestones accompanied the singsong calls of the street vendors serenading the homeward bound workers, tempting them with their wares:
“Fresh cress, penny a pound!”
“Oy — get yer herring here! Fresh herring!”
“Oysters, cockles, mussels — never better! By them here!”
The mysterious man stood in solitary contrast to the bustle surrounding him. Hands shoved deep into his coat pockets, he leaned up against the building for a few more moments before turning quickly and heading for our front door.
“By Jove, Holmes, I believe you’re right,” I said as I heard the front doorbell ring. “This fellow has come to see us! How did you know?”
“My dear Watson,” Holmes replied, “when a man paces for some time outside of a building, it is a safe bet that he is either waiting for someone or that he is trying to make up his mind whether or not to go inside. In this case, as he did not appear to be waiting for anyone, I could safely surmise that he was intending to pay us a visit, as soon as he collected his wits enough to do so.”
“I see. But Holmes, do you think you should be taking on another case just now? I mean, we were planning on getting away.”
At that moment Mrs Hudson’s short, comfortably plump form appeared at the door. She was carrying a tea tray.
“There’s a Mr Crane to see you,” she said as she sat the tea upon the table.
“Thank you, Mrs Hudson,” Holmes replied. “Would you ask Mr Crane to come in?”
“It’s Captain Crane,” said a man’s voice behind her.
I turned to see our visitor standing in the doorway. He was tall and lean, with a wiry build similar to Holmes, only broader of shoulder — and his hands had none of the thin nervousness I had come to associate with my friend; they were broad and strong and sunburnt. His face was exceptionally handsome, with luminous, deep-set eyes over high cheekbones and a full mouth. His eyes were a peculiar golden color, like roasted almonds. He wore a dark navy pea jacket, double-breasted with brass buttons, and a simple wool cap, also dark blue, with a leather brim and a
yellow braided outline of an anchor on the front. His boots were of good quality, but worn and caked with mud; they looked as though they had not been cleaned in some time.
“Well, Captain Crane, what can I do for you?” Holmes asked.
The captain took a hesitant step into the room. Such timidity sat oddly on a man who was clearly used to giving orders. I wondered what had brought him to our doorstep — he was obviously not the kind of man to seek help lightly.
Holmes turned to Mrs Hudson, who was bustling about setting out the tea. “That will be all, Mrs Hudson, thank you.”
The estimable landlady looked as though she wanted to say something, but instead she sighed, turned and departed. I could hear her footsteps as she descended the stairs, favouring her right leg; her knee tended to swell in inclement weather.
“Now then, Captain Crane, won’t you join us for tea?” Holmes said. “Or perhaps you’d like something a bit more bracing? A tonic, as it were, against the coming storm?”
The captain took another step into the room and looked around. I had become so inured to Holmes’ odd habits that I hardly noticed what must have seemed strange to our visitor — the correspondence attached to the mantelpiece with a pen knife, the chemistry set, the piles of unfiled newspaper clippings stacked in the corners of the room. As Crane gazed around, his hesitancy vanished and was replaced by a firmness of voice and manner, as if he had suddenly made up his mind to the task and was resolved to see it through.
“Very well, Mr Holmes,” he replied, “I’ll join you for tea, thank you.”
“Allow me to introduce my colleague, Dr—”
“Dr Watson, yes,” Crane interrupted, seizing my hand in his. His palm was calloused and dry as the skin of a cocoanut. “It is good to meet you,” he said, pumping my hand energetically. I felt the athleticism in his powerful grip — I didn’t need Holmes to tell me that here was a man accustomed to a vigorous outdoor life.