PicoBlog

Here’s a literary phenomenon that you don’t see much about: the decade writer. Some novelists and short-story writers do so much of their best work in a particular decade that you can practically ignore everything they ever wrote that was published outside of that decade and still consider yourself a relative authority on their fiction. For the purposes of this essay, I am not talking about any random ten-year stretch in an author’s working life, say 1847-1856. I’m talking about work that was done entirely within a calendar decade i.e., the 1920s, the 1930s, etc. I first became aware of this phenomenon back in the early 1990s when I was devouring all of the Wilkie Collins sensation novels I could get my hands on. I was fairly obsessed with Collins, and when Catherine Peters’s biography, The King of the Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins, came out in 1992 I immediately got hold of a copy and read that as well. I hadn’t paid much attention to the publication dates of Collins’s various novels. I just thought of them all as belonging to the Victorian era. But Peters pointed out (as has every other Collins scholar) that almost all of Collins’s best work was done in the 1860s. Prior to that he was a bit too much under the influence of his frenemy/mentor Charles Dickens. After the 1860s he was a bit too much under the influence of laudanum and missionary zeal. But during the 1860s he was at his peak, and during that period he practically invented the Victorian sensation novel, which is what we would probably nowadays call a thriller. He began the decade with the publication of his best known and – in my opinion – best novel, The Woman in White, published in 1860. It was a massive hit and inspired all sorts of imitators, including Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Gray Woman (1865). Collins followed it up with No Name, in 1862, another big success and another one of his signature works. It dealt with illegitimate births, a subject that was important to him because he would produce a few illegitimate children of his own. He always showed great sympathy to common-law wives and illegitimate children in his work – but not in his own life. In 1866 he published his longest and most complex novel, Armadale, another masterpiece. It has been called the most complexly plotted work of popular fiction of all time. For example, it has at least five different characters called Allan Armadale. Lydia Gwilt, the antiheroine of the novel, is one of his most fascinating characters and, in theatrical adaptations of the novel, she became a favorite villainess of the Victorian stage. And finally, in 1868, he gave his readers The Moonstone, the only one of his novels that may have outsold even The Woman in White over the course of its long life. T.S. Eliot called it, “the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels…” In fact, he credited Collins with inventing what we now consider to be the detective novel. This was another novel that was imitated by dozens of others, including Anthony Trollope, who made no pretense of the fact that his 1873 novel, The Eustace Diamonds, was inspired by The Moonstone. Collins would write nine more novels before his death in 1889, but none of these would ever match the quality and popularity of his work of the 1860s. One problem was that, after the 1860s, Collins began writing novels with a social purpose. He seemed to want to become not just a storyteller but an influencer of popular opinion. His novels became increasingly didactic and less sensational. Poet Algernon Charles Swinburne summed up the problem with Collins’s later works with this terse couplet:

What brought good Wilkie’s genius nigh perdition?

Some demon whispered, “Wilkie! have a mission.”

It was cruel but true. Nonetheless, the work that Collins did in the 1860s was enough to secure him literary immortality. In his day, Collins was considered a much lesser writer than William Makepeace Thackeray. Thackeray produced about a dozen novels, numerous shorter works of fiction, travel books, essay collections, poetry collections, and more. But nowadays only his 1848 novel, Vanity Fair, remains well known. His reputation has diminished greatly from what it was during his lifetime, while Collins’s reputation has increased quite a bit. And his reputation rests almost entirely on his work of the 1860s. It wouldn’t be right to say that, where English literature was concerned, he owned that decade. Several other English writers had similar successes in the 1860s. George Eliot, for example, published four of her best novels in that decade (though not her masterpiece Middlemarch, which was published in 1872). Dickens published Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend in that decade, which would be his last (he died June, 9, 1870). Elizabeth Gaskell published some of her best work in that decade. But for the fiction of Wilkie Collins, it is the only decade that really matters. Unless you are a superfan or a completist, you can safely ignore pretty much everything he published before or after the 1860s.

Robert Louis Stevenson is another great, though late, Victorian author who did most of his best work in a single decade, in this case the 1880s. Treasure Island (1883), Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Kidnapped (1886), The Black Arrow (1888), The Master of Ballantrae (1889), and The Wrong Box (1889, written in collaboration with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne and, in my opinion, an underappreciated masterpiece) all belong to that most productive decade of Stevenson’s short life (1850-1894). Stevenson’s earliest short story was published in 1875, and his last completed story was published in 1892. But almost every worthwhile piece of his short fiction and poetry was written during the 1880s. I won’t claim that you can safely ignore everything he wrote before or after the 1880s because I happen to be a huge fan of his 1892 novel, The Wrecker, and, to a lesser extent, his 1894 novel The Ebb-Tide (co-written with Osbourne). Catriona, published in 1893, is a sequel, and pretty much an equal, to Kidnapped, so you wouldn’t want to ignore that either. But few writers have ever done as much good work in a single decade as Stevenson did in the 1880s.

Almost all of Jack London’s best and best-known works were published in the first decade of the twentieth century. The Call of the Wild (1903), The Sea Wolf (1904), White Fang (1906), and Martin Eden (1909) all arrived in that decade. That was also far and away his most prolific decade for short story production. He also produced plenty of essays, a memoir (The Road) and work of social commentary (The People of the Abyss).

Hector Hugh Munro (better known by the pen name Saki) was almost an exact contemporary of Jack London. Munro was born in 1870 and died in November of 1916. London was born in 1876 and died in November of 1916. Most of the comic stories and novels we remember Saki for were published in book form during the second decade of the twentieth century. This includes his only two novels The Unbearable Bassington (1912) and When William Came (1913), as well as the story collections The Chronicles of Clovis (1911), Beasts and Super-Beasts (1914), and The Toys of Peace (1919, thus posthumously). That is about all the Saki any one reader can possibly drink.

American crime writer Dorothy B. Hughes did almost all of her best work in the 1940s. Her first novel, The So Blue Marble, was published in 1940. She published eleven more novels in that decade, including Ride the Pink Horse (1946) and In a Lonely Place (1947). My late friend Don Napoli, an authority on California fiction, told me that he considered Hughes’ 1952 novel, The Davidian Report, to be the best spy novel ever set in California. I haven’t read it but I’ll trust his opinion. But, with that one exception, you can probably ignore anything that Hughes published before or after the 1940s.

British science-fiction writer John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris did us all a favor when he shortened his name to John Wyndham in the 1950s. Prior to that he published a lot of short stories and a handful of novels under a variety of pseudonyms that employed various combinations of his birth names – John B. Harris, John Beynon, John Beynon Harris, etc. The adoption of the name John Wyndham seems to have been an inspired one because, under that moniker, he produced all of his best work, most of it published in the 1950s. He began the decade by publishing, in 1951, his most famous novel, The Day of the Triffids. It is a post-apocalypse novel and an extremely influential one. Sci-fi writer Brian Aldiss charged Wyndham with having invented a genre he called the “cozy catastrophe novel.” He didn’t mean it as a compliment. Aldiss disliked Wyndham’s penchant for destroying much of the earth’s population in his stories but then focusing primarily on a character who isn’t greatly affected by the catastrophe. This isn’t an entirely accurate description of all of Wyndham’s work, but there is some truth to it. The Day of the Triffids tells of an earth that has been nearly destroyed by a deadly pandemic, a separate outbreak that has rendered almost all the remaining humans on earth blind, and a plague of ambulatory plants that can cause blindness with their stingers (oddly, this blindness is unrelated to the mass blindness of the earth’s population, which was triggered by a meteor shower). This all sounds rather bleak and hopeless but, as Aldiss would note, Wyndham’s story is narrated by a man who hasn’t been blinded and doesn’t contract the illness that is killing so many of his fellow earthlings. At any rate, the book is now regarded as a sci-fi milestone and it was certainly one of the five or ten most influential sci-fi novels of the 1950s. Wyndham followed it up, in 1953, with The Kraken Wakes, one of the first novels to posit what might happen to human kind if the polar ice caps were to melt. This too was a highly influential work of sci-fi and remains fairly popular. Two years later (all of his best novels were published in odd numbered years during the 1950s), he published what many believe to be his best novel, The Chrysalids. This, too, is a post-apocalypse novel. It isn’t exactly cozy but it has a happy ending. And, finally, in 1959, he published, The Midwich Cuckoos, the last of his four great novels. This one probably most justly deserves the title of cozy catastrophe. The story tells of a small British village, Midwich, which is completely cut off from the outside world by an invisible force field of some kind. The force field remains in place for only twenty-four hours, after which it is lifted. None of the residents of Midwich can recall anything that happened during the 24-hour period but, fairly soon, it is discovered that all of the village’s women are pregnant. It will eventually become clear that they have been impregnated by members of an alien race. The narrator of this book is a young, married man who lives with his wife in Midwich. But, naturally, he and his wife were out of town during the “Midwich Dayout,” and thus they aren’t personally connected to the odd events. The narrator here is basically just an observer. As such, his life is much cozier than the lives of the other residents of Midwich.

Wyndham also published two short story collections in the 1950s. The first of these, amusingly, was titled Jizzle, and was published in 1954. The book is being reprinted in August of this year, but the title has been changed to Technical Slip. The Seeds of Time, another collection, was published in 1956. Those two collections were published in Great Britain. The best stories from those two books were combined into a volume called Tales of Gooseflesh and Laughter, which was published in the U.S. in 1956 (all of Wyndham’s best story collections were published in even numbered years during the 1950s). Wyndham published two novels in the 1960s, The Trouble With Lichen (1960) and Chocky (1968). He died in 1969. Two more novels were published posthumously but didn’t generate much buzz. If you read only the novels and story collections published in the 1950s, you will get pretty much all of the John Wyndham fiction you need in order to be knowledgeable of his best work. The only exception to this is the novel Chocky, which was reprinted in 2015 as a part of the New York Review of Books Classics series, with an afterword by Margaret Atwood. Chocky wasn’t a huge hit when first published, but over the years it has gained a sort of cult following. Many fans of Wyndham’s rank it as an equal of Triffids, Kraken, Chrysalids, and Midwich. But, for the most part, Wyndham was a one-decade wonder.

The same can almost be said about J.R.R. Tolkein. He is best remembered for the three books in the Lord of the Rings cycle, all of which were published in the mid-1950s.

Neither Frederick Forsyth nor Joseph Wambaugh can in any way be considered a one-decade wonder. But both men made their fictional debuts in the early 1970s and both men produced four of the decade’s best books. Forsyth gave us The Day of the Jackal (probably the decade’s most influential work of pop fiction), The Odessa File, The Dogs of War, and The Devil’s Alternative. He also gave us a stand-alone Christmas story called The Shepherd. If he had never written anything else after 1979, he’d probably still be remembered as one of the twentieth century’s best writers of pop fiction. Wambaugh gave us The New Centurions, The Blue Knight, The Onion Field (a so-called nonfiction novel, it depicts real-life events using novelistic technique), and The Choirboys. Those four books alone would have probably served to make him America’s all-time greatest writer of cop novels. He also wrote a slightly less interesting novel, The Black Marble, which was published in 1978. Both Wambaugh and Forsyth produced a lot of good work in the 1980s. In fact, my favorite Forsyth books – The Fourth Protocol, The Negotiator, No Comebacks, and The Deceiver – were all published in the 1980s. The only indispensible Wambaugh book of the 1980s, in my opinion, is the nonfiction novel The Blooding, published in 1989. Both men continued publishing novels well into the twenty-first century, and Wambaugh’s five twenty-first-century novels are, in my opinion, the equal of his 1970s books. So, neither man was a one-decade wonder, but they did enough great work in the 1970s that you can read only those books and come away with a good understanding of what made them so successful.

A more traditional decade writer from the 1970s is Rodney William Whitaker, who wrote under the pen name Trevanian. Most fans of his work would probably rate The Eiger Sanction (1972), The Loo Sanction (1973), The Main (1976), and Shibumi (1979) as his four best novels. My favorite is The Summer of Katya, published in 1983. Nonetheless, I think he did enough good work in the 1970s that, had he never published another word after 1979, he’d have earned himself a spot among the most interesting second-tier pop-fiction writers of his generation.

Earl Thompson was another second-tier author of the era who deserves to be remembered. His first and best-known novel, A Garden of Sand, was published in 1970. He followed it up with Tattoo (1974) and Caldo Largo (1976). He died in 1978. His final novel, The Devil to Pay, was written in the 1970s but published posthumously in 1982. 

Plenty of other names could be enshrined in the Decade Writer Hall of Fame. Obviously, writers like Margaret Mitchell and Ross Lockridge and Leonard Gardner and others who produced just a single novel are, by default, decade writers. But they belong more properly to the category of writers I call one-book wonders. Scroll through this Substack and you’ll find my May 2021 essay called One and Done, which deals with that subject. In the meantime, I plan to put together additional lists of decade writers and write about them some more. Feel free to suggest some candidates for future lists.

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