Friday's "Forgotten" Book - Sylvia

Howard Melvin Fast (1914–2003) is perhaps best known for his popular historical fiction like Spartacus (the basis for the 1960 film by Stanley Kubrick) and his television scripts, including such programs as How the West Was Won and the Battle of Lexington and Concord, based on one of his novels. He was also blacklisted by the House un-American activities committee during the McCarthy era and became unpublishable. As a result, he started self-publishing (including Spartacus) and remade himself as the author of thrillers written under the pen name E.V. Cunningham, most featuring Masao Masuto, a Japanese-American detective in the Beverly Hills Police Department who's devoted to growng roses and Zen meditation.

Fast also wrote standalone crime fiction under his pseudonym, including the very first book he published as E.V. Cunningham, 1960's Sylvia, made into a film five years later, directed by Gordon Douglas and starring Peter Lawford, George Laharis and Carroll Baker. In his introduction to the 1992 reprint of the novel, published under the author's real name, Fast wrote "It began with a woman's name: Sylvia. I loved the name, I loved the (Franz Schubert) song, 'Who is Sylvia and what is she?' And the other sweet song 'Sylvia's hair is like the night.' Dark hair, raven black, a tall woman and beautiful. I could envision her as I might a living person."

Sylvia is a novel of suspense rather than crime-based detection story, focusing on would-be teacher of ancient history turned private investigator, Alan Macklin, who is handed a tough case by wealthy businessman Frederic Summers: trace the past of a beautiful woman you've never met, with only a book of poems, two lines of handwriting, and a fake story to go on. The mysterious woman in question is Summers's fiancee, Sylvia West, who owns property in Coldwater Canyon, raises prize-winning roses, is independently wealthy and fluent in French, Spanish and Chinese. But the story of her past doesn't check out, which is why the suspicious Summers hires Macklin to investigate.

Despite hating Summers for his cold objectivity and himself for taking the job for the money, Macklin sets out on an elusive trail through Sylvia's past, which grows more sordid yet strangely compelling as he travels to Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, New York City, El Paso, and across the border into Mexico. As he learns more of Sylvia's troubled past and her dark secrets, the down-on-his-luck private eye finds he's not only become obssessed with his phantom target, he's falling in love with her.

As Fast's first foray into the crime fiction genre, his neophyte chops become obvious when his characters tend to over-philosophize, such as Macklin noting, "There can be nothing as cold and deadly as an evening of pedagogues frozen in their timidity of thought and multifold institutional fears, or pompous and irrational in their half-knowledge and their book-bound ignorance. . . ." Yet Sylvia was popular enough at the time to be well received, praised in its reviews and sold to Paramount Pictures for the 1965 film. As an interesting aside, in France, where they didn't care about U.S. blacklists, Sylvia was published under Howard Fast's own name and sold over a hundred thousand copies.

Comments

[Todd Mason]

Fast was, unsurprisingly, able to publish under his own name in the sf magazines in the 1950s, albeit he was even more of a tyro in this field (even given he'd sold one story very early on, to AMAZING in 1932) and he didn't even much get going till the late '50s. And even given the obvious kinship between historical and fantastic fiction. But there were a lot of ex-Communists and more than one active Trotskyist working the sf field (and to some extent fantasy) and they were often already demonstrating bravery by trying to Make It in a low-paying field where the serious work appealed to a very small audience, indeed...)...and the bulk of Fast's fantasticated work would appear in the 1970s...even if his most widely regarded story in this mode was probably "The Large Ant" (FANTASTIC UNIVERSE, February 1960...FU was edited in those latter years by Hans Stefan Santesson, who had been the editor for the Unicorn Mystery book club, which did omnibus volumes like the more durable Detective Book Club did, and HSS would go on to edit THE SAINT MYSTERY MAGAZINE in the 1960s...).

[Martin Edwards]

Very interesting. I've never read anything by Fast, but this one sounds well worth a look. Thanks fo the review.

[BV Lawson]

Fast likes to use strong female characters in his writing, which I do admire, Martin. I've got his similarly one-name-titled book, "Sally," on my TBR pile right now.