Wednesday, November 16, 2005

Benjamin Appel from Stark House


Stark House Press (no, their website hasn't been updated) has another great double book coming in January. Benjamin Appel wrote hardboiled with the best of them, as these two novels prove. There's also a short introduction by his daughter, well worth reading.

3 comments:

Juri said...

I have only one Appel novel and I would like to ask if it's worth reading, but I can't remember the title and I don't know where I have put the book... It's set in Malaysia or somewhere around there and it's about spying some communists during the Cold War. It was a hardback and from the fifties. I paid 20 cents for it (roughly 15 American cents) - with a DJ!

It could be FOUR ROADS TO DEATH, but if it is, it's not the first edition, since the DJ is different from what I see on Abebooks.

Was there any sense making this comment?

Juri said...

No, it wasn't, but this however is pure, hmm, hog meat?

It's FORTRESS IN THE RICE and it's a war novel set in the Philippines during WWII. (Weren't there communist guerrillas, though?) It seems pretty pricy:

http://dogbert.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?bx=off&sts=t&ds=30&bi=0&an=Benjamin+Appel&tn=Fortress+in+the+Rice&sortby=2

But it also seems that Appel abridged it for the paperback edition almost ten years later. Maybe it's tighter and hence better?

Unknown said...

I haven't read that one, Juri. However, according to the intro in the new book, it was made into a movie with Van Heflin and Rita Moreno.