Some books really do age well

Yesterday a delightful package from Stark House Publishers, a company devoted to reissuing classic crime fiction, came in the mail. There were lots of goodies but what immediately caught my eye was a double volume of Vin Packer novels. Packer, for those unaware, was the first pen name of Marijane Meaker, aka YA writer M.E. Kerr (who happened to be one of my favorite YA authors when I was a kid) aka lesbian pulp writer Ann Aldrich. Oh yeah, she was also Patricia Highsmith’s lover back in the 1950s. An interesting life, personally and professionally, to say the least.

Packer’s name caught my consciousness because Ed Gorman often mentions her as one of the best of the pulp writers from the Fawcett Gold Medal years. I’ve just begun reading SOMETHING IN THE SHADOWS (originally published in 1961) and I completely get what the fuss was, and should still be, about. Not only is Packer an excellent writer but she’s got an uncanny insight into human frailty and what makes seemingly ordinary people do very bad things. Nobody’s a hero, but nobody’s a true villain, either.

This book pits Joseph Meaker (yup, she pilfered her real last name for his character), a fortyish folklorist stuck in a decaying marriage to Maggie, against the owner of a Mercedes-Benz who, inexplicably, runs over Meaker’s cat. Instead of going about the usual business of finding out who and suing the crap out of him, Meaker wants something else–revenge. The slow kind.

I’ll find out what it is soon enough, but I’m already marking down passages that resonate even today. Meaker spends a fair amount of time wondering why he even bothered to get married:

Had marriage happened to other people in the same random way? Unmarried people at 36, 37, 38, who suddenly leaped headlong into something they somehow had avoided for years, with someone they knew less well than girls they had known ten years ago? Was that moment of their marriage–the moment when it became a fact–the same for them as for Joseph? He had thought of it as being the “hour of lead;” he had read in a poem somewhere about such a moment, “the freezing and the numbness–then the letting go.” He had remember himself a very young man wondering about such a day far off in the future, about his bride, who she would be and what it would be lie, and how on earth it would all be accomplished and then happily ever after, and that young man that he had been, broke his heart to remember. Was everyone disillusioned, whether they had married at 21 or 36? Or was it that, for Joseph, disillusionment itself was an illusion?

He also ruminates on how sex in novels compares to real life:

In so many of the modern novels Joseph read, love-making was described in a clinical, antiseptical way; it was a world of condoms (their color described for the reader by the bold author, as though only he had ever seen one and remembered its color) and women heroines outdoing other author’s heroines by shouting something different during climax. Where was joy? In modern novels it was often a memory in the hero’s mind, a memory of some flaxen-haired sixteen-year-old with whom the hero had once walked along a river and done nothing more than held hands; but a wife was not joy. A wife was a blue and white Tampax box in the bathroom cabinet (with the more precise author remembering the red splotch on the box, the yellow line of cellophane around it); or a wife was stretch marks in bright sunlight on a once-young body. Joseph always became confused when he wondered about such things: was that the way Life Really Was, the way it was with Maggie and him, the way it was in best sellers? Or was there more? Was he no better than a caricature of some fictional character, off in his room rereading Varda’s words?

With passages like those you better believe I’ll be reading more of Vin Packer’s work. There are nineteen novels under that pseudonym, one of which especially floored me. THE EVIL FRIENDSHIP (1958) was written a mere four years after a celebrated case of murder in New Zealand perpetuated by Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme–who would later go to prison, get out and re-emerge as bestselling crime writer Anne Perry. How bizarre to think that a noted crime writer was writing a novel based on a crime committed by a girl who would grow up to be the exact same thing…