New Books:DERANGED by Lonni Lees; more Robert Ryan

“Lonni Lees sends chills down my spine!”
Terrill Lee Lankford, Novelist and Filmmaker

DERANGED
By Lonni Lees

Being a writer as well as an artist, I’ve always been torn between the two. I’d dabbled in non-fiction, writing magazine articles and working for a small newspaper, but a few years ago I dove head first into short story writing and published several in Hardboiled Magazine and on some ezines.
I wondered why I hadn’t started years ago. I discovered noir and crime and dark stories. This was where I belonged!

A collection of my short stories, titled CRAWLSPACE, will be released shortly from Wildside Books as a double. The other side, COLD BULLETS AND HOT BABES, is by my sister, Arlette Lees. I’m working on my second novel and more short stories.

I knew it was time to dust off and finish a story I’d started awhile back. It began with a dream. Literally. One of those dreams so vivid that upon my awakening still felt very real. It was a story I had to tell. That dream plus a real life event were the catalysts. We all read about murders but few of us are personally touched by the violence. I was twice. The one that left the deepest impact on me was a young friend who was abducted, raped and murdered, her body buried in a shallow grave in the California desert. Her killer was never found. I wanted to give her short life a different ending. DERANGED is the result.

Some monsters are born that way, others are created as a result of their own victimization. But the result is the same. Ultimately, one is no less dangerous than the other. The madman we fear doesn’t wear a warning sign. He is likely cloaked in a facade of normalcy, wearing a mask that makes him look like the rest of us. He could be the man standing behind you at the check-out line at the grocery store, the quiet neighbor who borrows your tools, the teenage boy who mows your lawn with a smile, or the stranger who stops along the highway to offer a hitchhiker a ride. He moves among us, invisible, leaving death and destruction in his wake.

Charlie Blackhawk is such a man. Twisted fantasies lure him to the neon-splashed alleys of Hollywood to feed his hunger. He’s a cold-blooded killer who likes to use a knife. When his path crosses that of Meg Stinson and her 12-year-old daughter, Sabrina, their lives are changed forever. What’s the connection between the Stinsons and a girl named Amy? Do Amy’s nightmares hold the key to Sabrina’s survival?

DERANGED is a journey into the darkest corners of the human psyche, but it is also a tale of survival, redemption, forgiveness and hope. It’s a chilling, thrilling exercise in unrelenting horror and suspense.

“DERANGED is a hell of a good read by a bright new talent. It’s a harrowing ride, a first novel mixing crime with horror and horror with crime in a way you won’t soon forget. Bravo!”
Gary Lovisi, HARDBOILED MAGAZINE and GRYPHON BOOKS

“Lonni Lees sends chills down my spine!”
Terrill Lee Lankford, Novelist and Filmmaker
DERANGED is available at $14.99 from Wildside Press
9710 Traville Gateway Dr. #234
Rockville MD 20850-7408
301-762-1305 wildsidepress.com

Also available at amazon.com bn.com or may be ordered from your local bookstore.

------------------------------------------------MORE ROBERT RYAN


The Quiet Furies of Robert Ryan by MANOHLA DARGIS from the New York Times

Ryan made “The Set-Up,” one of his favorites and most indelible films, two years later. Directed by Robert Wise (who had edited “Citizen Kane”), “The Set-Up” is a tight, intensely moving, pocket-size masterwork about Stoker Thompson, a washed-up, 35-year-old heavyweight who believes he’s just “one punch away” from changing his lousy luck. Part redemption story, part romance (his wife is played by Audrey Totter), the film unfolds in close to real time and takes place in the cruelly named Paradise City. Ryan, all muscle, sinew and heart-rending longing, slugs through one punishing round after another — look for the photographer Weegee hitting the bell as the timekeeper — creating a portrait of a man who endures ghastly physical punishment on his way to redemption.

“The Set-Up” almost didn’t happen, having been canceled by Howard Hughes, who had bought a controlling interest in RKO in 1948. Oddly, that same year Ryan starred in “Caught,” a non-RKO thriller directed by Max Ophuls about a naïf (Barbara Bel Geddes) who dreams of money and is punished for her yearning with a marriage to a millionaire psychopath (Ryan), modeled on Hughes, and rewarded with the love of a kind doctor (James Mason). Though based on a novel, the movie turned into a veiled story of Hughes because, as its screenwriter, Arthur Laurents, claimed in his memoir, Ophuls hated Hughes. “Make him an idiot,” Ophuls demanded of Laurents. “Kill him off.” While melodramatic, the movie is a fascinating dark look at desire and power as is Ryan’s sexually charged take on a man whose savagery wounds himself as much as everyone else.

for the rest go here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/movies/the-quiet-furies-of-robert-ryan.html?ref=arts