Howard Lachtman

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Howard Lawrence Lachtman is an American academic, literary critic, editor and author, who has written extensively on the life and works of Jack London, Arthur Conan Doyle,^[1][3] and on crime fiction as a whole.^[4]

Early life and career

Howard attended

Assessing Lachtman's contribution to a 1979 collection of London's own essays entitled Jack London: No Mentor But Myself, Los Angeles Times critic Sal Noto states:

This collection also contains a broad and perceptive foreword by Howard Lachtman, who has three books in the making on London. Lachtman shows the unfamiliar side of the London persona; he pares away much of the myth surrounding the man and offers a candid look at a writer who has all too often been dismissed or overlooked by critics of American literature.^[6]

Reviewing Lachtman's 1982 anthology, Sporting Blood: Jack London's Greatest Sports Writing, the El Paso Herald-Post's David Innes notes that the book "could serve as a pattern for what a good theme anthology should be," adding that "Lachtman's introductory essay is a fine one, as are his short, scene-setting paragraphs."^[7] Regarding the 1984 collection, Young Wolf: The Early Adventure Stories of Jack London, El Paso Times critic Dale L. Walker writes:

Lachtman's fine collection of London's early career adventure stories adds an important link to an astonishingly long chain of London stories published in the past two decades. [It] includes some of London's best early work. Here are 16 stories that ought to be read in high school and college classrooms today in lieu of the shopworn "To Build a Fire".^[8]

Writing two years later in the same paper, Walker calls Lachtman's Sherlock Slept Here a "superb and authoritative little study [of] Arthur Conan Doyle's debt to the United States," commending in particular Lachtman's "thoroughly fascinating analysis of that most American of Holmes stories, 'The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor'."^[2]

Lachtman also reviewed books—primarily mysteries—for the Los Angeles Times between 1976 and 1981, and, from 1977 to 1986, for the San Francisco Examiner.^{[9][10][11][12]}

A decidedly unimposing fictional character named Howard Lachtman,

• Sporting Blood: Selections from Jack London's greatest sports writing. Novato, CA : Presidio Press. 1981
  OCLC 1151317362
  .
• Young Wolf: The Early Adventure Stories of Jack London. Santa Barbara, CA : Capra Press. 1984.
  ISBN 9780884962106
  .
• Sherlock Slept Here ; being a brief history of the singular adventures of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in America, with some observations upon the exploits of Mr. Sherlock Holmes. Santa Barbara, CA : Capra Press. 1985.
  ISBN 088496227X
  .

• [1] "Man and Superwoman in Jack London's 'The Kanaka Surf'"].] Western American Literature. Summer 1972. Vol. VII, No. 2, pp. 101–110[2]
• "All That Glitters: Jack London's Gold". Jack London Newsletter. September–December, 1972. pp. 172–175, 196–178.
• "Doyle in Dreamland: The education of an eminent Victorian". The Los Angeles Times. October 30, 1977. Sec. Reviews, pp. 3, 20.
• "The Nine Lives of Jack London". The San Francisco Examiner. November 6, 1977.
• "Oscar in California: A Wilde West Show". The Los Angeles Times. September 24, 1978.
• "Willard Wright's Philo Vance: A Dandy in Acid". Los Angeles Times. June 3, 1979. Sec. Reviews, pp. 3, 25.
• "Mysterious Case of the Gardner-Chandler Friendship". The Los Angeles Times. January 4, 1981.
• "When Jack London Answered the Call of the Orange Blossoms". The Los Angeles Times. March 30, 1981. Sec. Reviews, pg. 3.

Poetry

• "Losses for Review" (1970)^[14]
• "Three Poems: Fat City, The River Merchant to His Wife: A Letter, News from Thermopylae" (1972)^[15]
• "Elegy for William Claude Dunkenfield (W. C. Fields)" (1972)^[16]
• "Handiwork" (2021)^[17]
• "Sentry" (2021)^[18]
• "One of the Lucky Ones" (2023)^[19]

Notes

References