Collecting: Shane Stevens

I suspect many of you see the title of this entry and it leaves you a little cold. Meaning, you have no idea what, or more precisely who, the title refers to. Some of you, Stephen King fans no doubt, may recognize the name. A few of you (prove me wrong) may have actually read something by the man.

You see, Shane Stevens is one of my most favorite writers. You know, one of the people you consider in the desert island question. I became aware of him through Stephen King's The Dark Half, where King wrote about Stevens in the afterword of his book. At the time, everything of Stevens' was out of print. After The Dark Half, a few books came back into print: By Reason of Insanity, Dead City, and The Anvil Chorus. There were three more Stevens novels (and two as J. W. Rider: Jersey Tomatoes and Hot Tickets) that remained out of print. Strangely enough, the ones that remained out of print were his earliest books: Go Down Dead, Rat Pack, and Way Uptown in Another World.

I say strangely enough because it was these three books that gave Stevens any sort of mark on the literary map early in his career. To be fair, King only mentions By Reason of Insanity and Dead City in the afterword of The Dark Half, so those are most likely the books people asked for. Also, the first books are very different from his subsequent books. Dead City was a gangster novel and By Reason of Insanity was a serial killer book (published before The Silence of the Lambs). Another novel, The Anvil Chorus, is about Nazis.

In stark contrast to those ideas, Stevens' first novel, Go Down Dead, was published in 1966 and it tells the story of King, a teenage gang leader from Harlem. The book is written in King's vernacular and it always reminded me of A Clockwork Orange as the accent/vocabulary of the narrator was at least as important as the events that unfold in the pages. The world King lived in was the world of the people who lived below Central Park; it was not the world of people outside of the city; it was not the world of West Side Story. There's little pretty about King's world. Life is fast, you take what you can get, and you give harder so that there's no one left behind you. It seemed like the book only someone who knew could write. This wasn't the book that someone from the outside could write.

Chester Himes called Stevens the 'Greatest black novelist in Harlem.' The only problem is that Stevens is white. People were startled that a white man could capture the voice of black youth so accurately, that a white man could know--at least so it seemed--the indignant rage of African Americans in 1960s America so intimately. It made the book even more powerful since it was apparent that it wasn't just black people writing about race issues; other people had noticed and had a problem with it, too. This book should have been the beginning of a conflagration of literary prowess that would captivate a world undergoing severe political and social change. Stevens' book carries all the burning rage of its time and it should have exploded with the Civil Rights movement. I think the subsequent books, and their lack of narrative strength, prevented that from happening.

Stevens' second book, Rat Pack was published in the early 1970s, and it was not about Sinatra and his cronies. Stevens again dove back into race inequality for his literary foil and spun a tale of four young black men who go on a night of rape and destruction in New York city. This book is not nearly as powerful as his first. It moves away from the literary chances he took in writing in the vernacular of the black youth and tries to move into more directly speaking about the inequality between races.

I first found By Reason of Insanity and Dead City in the Carroll & Graf reprints in a mall bookstore. I then went searching for other books. This was before the Internet, so searching consisted of checking Books in Print and reading the front matter in books hoping for a list of published works. The best way to find books by an author pre-Internet, however, was to go to used bookstores and scan the shelves. This was how I found Go Down Dead. This book is truly powerful and worth checking out. It's fairly easy to find. It was published originally in hardcover and had two subsequent paperback editions. I own all three. It was in the first paperback edition that I became aware of Rat Pack.

It was not easy to find Rat Pack. There was a biography of Sinatra et al that made Internet searching difficult. Thankfully ABE Books exists so I could create a Want and have ABE search for me. I eventually was able to buy a copy for about $20. For a 75 cent paperback, that's quite the mark-up. I know there are more expensive paperbacks, but this was the most I had ever spent on a used paperback. I was very excited to read the book. This was it. This was the end of Shane Stevens books and then I had read them all. Except that the front of Rat Pack mentioned another book: Way Uptown in Another World. My heart sank. I had never heard of this book and it made my skin crawl thinking of the search that would follow.

When I went to ABE, my worst fears were confirmed. There were copies, but the cheapest was more than $150. Now, this was for a hardcover. Rat Pack hadn't inspired me with enough literary verve to feel that putting down a couple hundred dollars on a book I knew nothing about was worth it. (a side note: spending a couple hundred on a signed Stephen King book I've never read is not the same thing) So I waited and hoped. Years passed and there was nothing but these $200 and $300 editions of the book. Then a few weeks ago I saw a copy for $25. I didn't even think about it, I just ordered it:

 
Way Uptown in Another World (a book I spent more than 10 years searching for an affordable copy) is also about black inequality. The reviews I've read are not good. It seems to lack a story, which is too bad since Stevens can certainly write an entertaining yarn when he wants to. I'm still looking forward to reading it, if for no other reason than I'll have read all of his books.

It was 1989 when I first found out about Shane Stevens. And now, almost twenty years later I've finally got copies of all his books. I'd love to see the first three come back into print, even if after Go Down Dead they're not the strongest books out there. You can see Stevens' narrative power in By Reason of Insanity, a literary precursor to The Silence of the Lambs, The Bone Collector, and American Psycho. I don't know if people feel the verbiage of the first book would scare people away. I do know that if A Clockwork Orange (and yes, I am comparing a book you've never read to one of the literary masterpieces of this last century as equals) can sell tons of copies, Go Down Dead can too. Maybe it just needs to be made into a movie first.

I've heard that Stevens is a pseudonym, but no one seems to know if that's true. I've tried contacting Carroll & Graf, but I never back from them. These are the types of books that I would publish if I could find a way to contact the author. Any ideas?