Letter
A. Bertram Chandler

I thank Bruce Western for his apology but assure him that I have long been of the opinion that a bad review is better than no review at all. And anybody who sets up shop as a public entertainer must expect brickbats as well as bouquets.

As a matter of fact I often write stinking letters myself when displeased by something that I have read or seen on TV. I do not post these at once, however. After a couple or three days I reread them and either tear them up or entrust them to the uncertain mercies of our postal service. Sometimes I get a reply, sometimes I don’t. On three recent occasions when I didn’t, the Long Loud Silence on the part of the recipient was obviously due to his/her/their guilty conscience... (One of those was to a local TV station whose asinine news reader referred to the ill fated Lusitania as an “American cruise liner...”

© 2004 Used with kind permission of Susan Chandler and her agents, JABberwocky Literary Agency, PO Box 4558, Sunnyside, NY 11104-0558 USA. The "John Grimes" novels of A. Bertram Chandler are available in electronic form for your Palm OS handheld at Palm Digital Media. They are also available through the Science Fiction Book Club to readers in the US and Canada and forthcoming from Wales Publishers in the Czech Republic.

Originally Published in The Mentor #40, October 1982 © Ron Clarke

© www.bertramchandler.com, David Kelleher 2004