Up To Here!
The World Of Shaft
By Steve Aldous
Foreword by David F. Walker
McFarland Books, ISBN 9780786499236
Subtitled, on the edition I read, A Complete Guide To The Novels, Comic Strip, Films And Television Series, Steve Aldous’ book The World Of Shaft is an almost but not quite complete overview of the Shaft phenomenom, which of course was started by writer Ernest Tidyman in the late 1960s/early 1970s (indeed, that original first novel was sold to the studio before it was published and was released at more or less the same time as the original movie). I say almost complete because this was written just before modern comic book imprint Dynamite had released their comics and new Shaft novel and, this was also a few years before the advent of the fifth (and probably final) of the Shaft cinema movies, which reunited Richard Roundtree and Samuel L. Jackson for a second time. Which is a shame because of a point the author makes in this book but I’ll get to that in a minute.
Okay, the book is written by someone with an obvious love and respect for the character and the writer behind him. Indeed, the research which has gone into this, which includes going through a load of the late Tidyman’s boxes full of notes and letters, is nothing if not thorough. And, after a potted history of Tidyman’s career which is very illuminating, I’d say the emphasis is possibly more on the books themselves but he does bring a deep knowledge of this when looking at the rest of the media involved in Shaft.
And it’s a cool breeze to read and, since there’s not much written critically. at least all gathered in one substantial place as it is here, it’s an absolutely essential tome to own in regards to the black private dick who’s a sex machine to all the chicks. For instance, I didn’t know that of the seven Shaft books that Tidyman wrote... due to his being busy with other projects... the last four were partially ghost written by two other writers he was employing with the man himself coming in to flesh out and rewrite for the final draft. I liked those books as an early teen but never got around to acquiring the three gaps I had in the run. Silly me… I may have been picking them up for 30p a piece in second hand book shops in the 1980s but, when I looked into filling in my holes while reading this, I was shocked to find that they’ve been long out of print and mostly attract three figure sums on the likes of eBay. Apparently, the only place where the books are still in print is in Germany, where they still love the character but, you know, I don’t speak the language.
After covering the books (Shaft, Shaft Among The Jews, Shaft’s Big Score, Shaft Has A Ball, Goodbye Mr. Shaft, Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers and The Last Shaft), their collective creators and the various character traits of regular characters in the books, not to mention a load about the proposed Shaft newspaper strip which never came to fruition (with some rare samples of the artwork)... there’s also a big section on the movies and TV movies/series. This includes a breakdown of each episode/film of the series and, of course, gets to the first revival film with Samuel L. Jackson. One of the author’s sticking points is that Jackson’s Shaft couldn’t possibly be the nephew of the original Shaft because he had no surviving kin in the books (and didn’t survive the last book himself, for that matter). So this makes it a shame that there’s no coverage of the last movie because, as you may or may not know, they retconned this in that story and it turned out that, actually, he’s Shaft’s son after all. Of course, given their similar ages, Roundtree would have had to have fathered Jackson when he was four but, yeah, that’s another story.
But yeah, this is an informative read and it would be true to say I had a ball with The World Of Shaft. What it really needs now, though, is a second, revised edition to take into account the Dynamite stuff and the 2019 movie… can you dig it?
