Where Memory Hides: A Writer's Life

by Richard A. Lupoff

Overview

"Where Memory Hides" is a guided tour through the life and career of mystery and science fiction’s most versatile practitioner. Richard A. Lupoff has been a professional author for six decades, and a life-time fan of everything from pulp magazines to comic books, science fiction and mystery, and more. As the extensive bibliography (included in this book) demonstrates, Lupoff's credits run the gamut of fiction, nonfiction, mainstream publishing, and fan journals. In the 1960s, he penned "All In Color For a Dime," a foundation-laying work for modern comic book fandom, and "Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure," a study of Tarzan's creator. "The Comic Book Killer" and "Marblehead" are among his best-known novels. His short story 12:01 PM, filmed twice in the 1990s, added a new sub-genre to science fiction and spawned a legion of imitators.

In "Where Memory Hides," Lupoff regales readers with triumphs and tribulations from his six-decade plus career. He also offers insights of writing, and haggling with agents, and literary criticism of authors such as Dashiell Hammett, H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and many others.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940153940113
Publisher:	Bold Venture Press
Publication date:	01/05/2017
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
File size:	552 KB

About the Author

In his highly checkered career, Richard A. Lupoff has been a short-order cook, dishwasher, movie usher, military policeman, college professor, and petty bureaucrat. All of these experiences have fed into the rich — if somewhat chaotic — data bank that nourishes his literary career. In that career he has been a sports writer, radio news writer and broadcaster, novelist, short story writer, critic, screen-writer, editor, anthologist, and on very rare occasions, poet. He has the rare distinction of having had stories selected for best-of-the-year anthologies in three fields: science fiction, mystery, and horror.

Editorial Reviews

11/07/2016
Lupoff’s autobiography, distilled from the many essays he has written on science fiction, comic books, old-time radio programs, genre fiction, movies, and other forms of contemporary popular culture, is a delightful tour in which the subjects that caught his fancy and stoked his enthusiasm for them are front and center. Lupoff wears more hats than Bartholomew Cubbins: he jump-started modern comic book fandom with his wife, Pat; he edited and published the fiction of Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs; he held down white-collar jobs at IBM; and, in the last two decades, he has become a prolific writer of mystery, fantasy, and science fiction. Each of these professional and semi-professional turns gets its due, along with absolutely endearing accounts of Lupoff sharing comics which his beloved brother, Jerry; enduring the rituals and discipline of military boarding school; writing up high school sports games for the local newspapers; and enjoying his lifelong fondness for the game of baseball. Lupoff writes on these subjects with the immediacy and detail of someone who is not so much recalling them as living them now. He is gracious in his praise of the many people he has known professionally, but not uncritical. He lauds much of the work of SF titan Robert A. Heinlein, but notes that because Heinlein “reached such a level that he rises above the norms of critical assessment,” he wasn’t called on some of his substandard efforts. Of one editor (left unnamed), Lupoff writes that he “was a talented, energetic salesman. He was also totally lacking in ethics. Perhaps those qualities go together.” The roster of writers and editors whom he knows and names reads like a who’s who of contemporary popular publishing. Lupoff, always a fan at heart, has left his mark on genre fiction and popular culture of the last five decades, and readers with an interest in the fields he has touched will want to read this memoir and his reflections. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly