Unseen Joseph Heller story out this week Jul 22nd 2013, 14:19
Written before Catch-22, 'Almost Like Christmas' is a surprisingly sober tale of racism in the American South
A previously unseen short story by Catch-22 writer Joseph Heller about the stabbing of a white man and a southern community's racist desire for revenge is to be published by US magazine the Strand this week.
"Almost Like Christmas" is a bleak short story concerning a fight – with "the primordial brutality of an alley fracas" – which leaves a white man in a coma and a young black man, Jess Calgary, as the prime suspect. A teacher called Carter must persuade Calgary to come in for questioning.
Andrew Gulli, managing editor of the Strand, who has previously unearthed little-known works by authors such as Mark Twain, Graham Greene, Agatha Christie and PG Wodehouse, said: "Heller was to a large extent a guy who saw through hypocrisy, greed, and the backward nature of a mob better than most writers – so it's no wonder that he turned his pen to a racist mob in a small southern town."
Heller is thought to have written the piece in the late 1940s or early 1950s after his return from the second world war. Biographer Tracy Daugherty, whose Just One Catch: The Passionate Life of Joseph Heller came out in 2011, told Associated Pressthat the story is as bleak as any of Heller's novels, but that it is "uncharacteristic" in lacking his signature satirical edge .
"William Saroyon was an influence on Heller at the time. Stories of Depression-era hardships, written in a hard-boiled style," Daugherty said.
There was evidence that Heller was working on a war story at the time he wrote "Almost Like Christmas", but he was also being advised by editors to avoid war fiction because the market was already dominated by novels such as Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, and James Jones's From Here to Eternity.
Catch-22, drawing on Heller's own war experiences, was eight years in the writing and was finally published in 1961. It became required reading for the anti-Vietnam left during the 1960s and 1970s, and achieved the rare feat of retaining its cult novel status at the same time as selling more than 10m copies.
The Strand magazine, which specialises in crime fiction and short stories, is named after a mystery magazine published in London between 1891 and 1950.
The earlier magazine brought out the first of the Sherlock Holmes stories: In 1893 the death of Sherlock Holmes caused an outcry among readers and Arthur Conan Doyle was forced to resurrect him. Other famous literary names published in the London version of the Strand included HG Wells, Somerset Maugham, GK Chesterton and PG Wodehouse, who contributed 150 stories over a period of 30 years.
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