Authority control databases
| International | |
|---|---|
| Other | |
Categories
Howard Lachtman | |
|---|---|
| Born | Howard Lawrence Lachtman |
| Education | M.A., Ph.D.[1] |
| Occupation(s) | Critic, editor, author |
| Notable work | Sherlock Slept Here[2] |
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]
Howard attended Lowell High School, UC Berkeley and UC Hastings Law,[5] and obtained his M.A and Ph.D. from University of the Pacific.[1]
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,[a] who happens to be at least the nominal leader of a small group of Sherlock Holmes devotees, figures prominently in Chapter II of Stuart Kaminsky's 1983 detective novel He Done Her Wrong.[13]