Ed Gorman's blog

CINEMA RETRO ISSUE #22 NOW SHIPPING WORLDWIDE! ...

2012-01-28T19:22:00.000-08:00

Ed here:n ANOTHER AMAZING ISSUE PACKED FULL WITH SEVERAL MAJOR ARTICLES AND INTERVIEWS!

CINEMA RETRO ISSUE #22 NOW SHIPPING WORLDWIDE! ...
Celebrating Films of the 1960s & 1970s
CINEMA RETRO ISSUE #22 NOW SHIPPING WORLDWIDE! CINERAMA CELEBRATION ISSUE!
Cinema Retro enters its eighth great year with issue #22, now shipping worldwide. All subscribers will be receiving their copies shortly.

If you have not renewed your subscription, please do so today! We cannot hold copies in reserve for you, so don't miss out on a single great issue during 2012. Click here to subscribe instantly through our Ebay affiliate store or click here for other methods of subscribing.

Highlights of issue #22 include special features that celebrate the 60th anniversary of Cinerama:

Sir Christopher Frayling provides a major 10 page article on the making of MGM's Cinerama blockbuster How the West Was Won, featuring deleted scenes and a wealth of rarely seen photographs.
Howard Hughes pays tribute to Jack Cardiff's 1968 gut-busting adventure Dark of the Sun (aka The Mercenaries) starring Rod Taylor
Dave Worrall blows the lid off the 1969 Cinerama epic Krakatoa, East of Java and takes us behind the scenes for the Cinerama family classic The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm.
Thomas Hauerslev takes us back to those wonderful Cinerama travelogues This is Cinerama, Seven Wonders of the World and traces the history of the format.
Lee Pfeiffer reviews a plethora of spy movies on DVD including The Man From U.N.C.L.E. feature films
Adrian Smith interviews actress Anneke Wills, star of the mod London cult classic The Pleasure Girls and pays tribute to Jane Asher in Jerzy Skolimowsky's Deep End
Raymond Benson looks at the best films of 1981
Gareth Owen revisits the filming of The Great Gatsby at Pinewood Studios
Plus the latest DVD, soundtrack and film book reviews

David Milch’s “Luck” hits the HBO trifecta

2012-01-28T14:44:00.001-08:00

Ed here: I'm really looking forward to this.

David Milch’s “Luck” hits the HBO trifecta
Dustin Hoffman stars in the next great series from the creator of "Deadwood" and "John From Cincinnati"
BY ROGER CATLIN

Dennis Farina and Dustin Hoffman in "Luck" (Credit: HBO)

TOPICS:TELEVISION, HBO, DAVID MILCH, EDITOR'S PICKS
HBO has always been a good place for the literary-minded David Milch, the brainy former Yale lecturer. (Of course, the networks weren’t bad either; Milch created “NYPD Blue” while still working on “Hill Street Blues.”)

Milch conceived the richly detailed retooled western “Deadwood,” with characters spouting the prosaic and profane. If “Deadwood” ultimately didn’t have an ending, Milch’s next project, “John From Cincinnati,” almost didn’t have a beginning; the spiritual metaphor set in the underbelly of the surfing world lasted just a season.

With “Luck,” which begins Sunday on HBO, he’s got a better shot at longevity, while still creating groups of scruffy underdogs in seedy motels and grandiose, malevolent businessmen all buzzing around the same goal. In “Deadwood,” it was gold; in “John,” spiritual enlightenment. In “Luck,” it’s the hard-won riches and redemption captured through the majesty of horse racing.

Creating these various worlds means creating their own language and jargon, something Milch is especially adept at doing (or perhaps he’s so subsumed in the world of the track after his own years hanging out there, it’s second nature). All of these terms and vocal shorthand can be off-putting to audiences at first – especially when they’re mostly mumbled by the characters.

for the rest go here: http://www.salon.com/2012/01/28/david_milchs_luck_hits_the_hbo_trifecta/

Thought for the day

2012-01-27T17:52:00.000-08:00

“I haven't laughed so much over anything since the hogs ate my kid brother.”
― Dashiell Hammett

6 Movies That Better Be Damned Good in 2012

2012-01-26T13:03:00.001-08:00

The Amazing Spider-Man

From The Wrap 6 Movies That Better Be Damned Good in 2012

Here are six movies that have the studios and the participants crossing their fingers with particular fervor. The stakes are high for the filmmakers and the talent.

The Amazing Spider-Man
Lincoln
The Hunger Games
The Hobbit
Men In Black 3
John Carter
Dark Shadows

Forgotten Books: A House In Naples by Peter Rabe

2012-01-25T09:30:00.000-08:00

Forgotten Books: A House In Naples by Peter Rabe

Whenever I read Peter Rabe at his best--or hell, even when he's mediocore--I realize how bogus a lot of hardboiled fiction is. Raymond Chandler likely learned about crime from the pulps and B-movies. As did many pulp writers.

Today we tart things up in a way previous hardboiled writers didn't and that gives it a semblance of reality anyway. Or we parody it and that makes us feel superior to it. Nothing wrong with these approaches, either. They're entertaining, amusing, fun.

Maybe it was because Rabe approached his writing as mainstream instead of genre. While he honors the tropes set down by W.R. Burnett and his imitators Rabe's crime novels are idiosyncratic, sometimes to a fault. In a few books he wanders, gets lost, and it's always because he wants to tell us something fascinating but not germane to the story. I actually enjoy his side trips but they do damage a couple of his books.

A House in Naples is about two people who are pretty much despicable, deserters at the end of the big war who run a black market operation. They aren't much better morally than Graham Greene's Harry Lime. Charley and Joe they are, friends in greed. They are living in Naples and living well. But Charley doesn't have his papers and could get extradited. Uncle Sam is not looking favorably on deserters these days.

As the book opens Charley is wounded and recognized for who and what he is. He ends stealing the papers from a dying drunk and then ends up dragging the body into the Tiber to cover his tracks. But by this time his wound has taken his toll. He is barely concious when he looks up and sees a beautiful girl staring down at him from the bridge above. He falls in love. Rabe gives this unlikely moment an ethereal power that few others could have pulled off. You buy it.

The book is a fast, sure read and the ending is a shocker. But the characters and Rabe's observations on post-war Europe are the source of the book's rich bleakness. The bleakness is very much like the realist filmmakers who appeared in Italy right after the war.

Rabe uses The Girl to contrast Charley and Joe. In some respects she's almost a religious figure, a woman who can evoke good or evil in everyone she meets. She evokes what's in you already.

For some reason A House in Naples isn't mentioned as often as Rabe's other most successful novels. But its harsh poetry and exciting action will keep it in memory long after you're done with it.

Blues In The Night by Dick Lochte

2012-01-24T14:03:00.000-08:00

If I wrote a column called Thriller of The Month my choice for January would definitely be Dick Lochte's slick, sleek, knockout novel Blues In The Night.

An ex-con named David "Mace" Mason decides to help out mobster Paulie LaCotta. This means going back to LA for Mace and putting up with Paulie's quirky ways as well. But in this case Paulie isn't just quirky, he's deceitful and Mace soon learns that he's involved in a violent confrontation with mysterious forces without knowing why.

Since this is a Dick Lochte novel the story is told in a sardonic voice that enriches the cast of very real people, people being one of Lochte's specialties. Another speciality is Lochte's ability to turn wheels within wheels until you have no idea who's really do what. What makes this especially intriguing and memorable is the tour of modern-day LA Lochte gives us in his pursuit of the truth. '

I was going to start listing some of my favorite scenes but I stopped counting after fifteen. Perfectly realized, perfect paced sequences that set up even more twists and turns. Such as the eerie and startling one where Mace does or doesn't see a mutant dog. Straight out of a horror novel.

Dick Lochte has long been one of my favorite writers and this time out he's delivered a five star thrillerthat will stay with you for a long time after you close the covers.

Oh--and Mace is winning protagonist--tough but smart, knowing but not cynical. He could do with another book.

Man With A Camera

2012-01-23T14:59:00.000-08:00

Ed here: I watched an episode of this last night because I had fond memories of it. Always a dicey undertaking. But it held up pretty well. Bronson broke the mold as far as TV detectives went. He wasn't all shiny and neat.

From Wikipedia: Man with a Camera is a 1950s television crime drama starring Charles Bronson.

Throughout the 1950s, Charles Bronson spent most of his early acting career in TV-shows as well as small parts in films, until he landed the lead in the ABC series The Man with a Camera.

In the series Bronson portrayed Mike Kovac, a former World War II combat photographer freelancing in New York City, who specialized in getting the photographs that other lensmen could not. He usually assisted newspapers, insurance companies, the police and private individuals, all of whom wanted a filmed record of an event.
By often acting as a private eye, Kovac gets himself into plenty of troubles involving criminals of every kind, helping with cases the police could not handle.

Besides an array of cameras for normal use, for surreptitious work Kovac employed cameras hidden in a radio, cigarette lighter and even his necktie. He also had a phone in his car, and a portable darkroom in the trunk where he could develop his negatives on the spot.

Kovac's police liaison was Lieutenant Donovan (James Flavin), though he frequently came for advice from Anton Kovac (Ludwig Stössel), his immigrant father.

Oh my God no!! It's Sharktopus!!!!!!

2012-01-22T12:25:00.000-08:00

From TCM Movie Morlocks

Monsters Among Us!
Posted by Richard Harland Smith on January 20, 2012

This week, two screenwriter friends of mine were retained to write monster movies for a new production company called The Monster Machine. David Rosiak and Matthew Chernov have already written the made-for-TV chompalooza SHARK SWARM (2008) and are pushing forward to craft more supersized and hybridized horrors for the producers of DINOSHARK (2010) and SHARKTOPUS (2010). I’m happy for my friends and the news evoked in me the kneejerk response “Good… I miss monsters.” And then the strangeness of that reaction struck me — there are monsters everywhere these days, so what’s the big deal? Watch any SyFy and it’s back-to-back ads for video games and made-for-TV movies and theatrical releases offering all manner of freakish folderol and dedicated reality TV shows for Bigfoot, river monsters and ghosts foreign and domestic. We’re actually living in what could be called, quantitatively, a monster renaissance akin to the glory days of the 1940s and 1950s, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and sent real estate values crumbling like so many scale model metropoli… but it’s not the same. It’s just not the same.

Sixty years ago, monster movies were crumbs cast off from the major studios, chicken feed for the kids and the punters who liked to eat popcorn and have something big to look at while doing it. Titles like THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS (1953), THEM! (1954) and IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA (1955) and others were not staffed with movie stars but cast instead from the ranks of the contract players, workaday actors who owed some time or some years to their home studios, or who were on loan-out from another. Most of the people doing the movies had no love for the genre, for horror, for le fantastique — it was just rent and gas money, alimony, braces for the kids, a down payment. From the directors down to the writers, actors and technicians, monster movies were the cinematic equivalent of the $2 betting window at the race track… a place where a little money could be made and better things financed. Sure, some studios (Universal, for one) made bank off the tendering of horror and science fiction but the category was still considered down-market, common, dumb. Happily, crafty artisans used the medium to sneak in ideas and techniques that were brash, blasphemous and novel at the time and in retrospect a lot of monster movies of the Classic Age of Hollywood play better now than they did originally, now that we can appreciate their subthemes and hidden motifs

What’s great about old monster movies is that there is always a reliable level of craftsmanship, of competence and reliability. If the script is dodgy, the playing is persuasive. If the acting is wooden, the script will offer thought-provoking ideas or smart dialogue. Even if the scenario boils down to little more than a guy in an ape suit and gabardine slacks or a mollusk puppet dripping Noxema from its molded rubber maw, the effects entertain, sometimes fascinate, and invariably charm while reality is worked in from the side through the matter-of-fact playing of the ensemble and the insistence on the part of everyone involved of absolute professionalism. And some of the time — and THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD (1951) comes immediately to mind — book, performance and production come together to give us something truly unforgettable… something our children and grandchildren will be talking about long after we’re gone.

for the rest go here:http://moviemorlocks.com/2012/01/20/monsters-among-us/#more-45817

Remembering John D. MacDonald's pulp fiction by Fred Blosser

2012-01-20T20:44:00.001-08:00

Remembering John D. MacDonald's pulp fiction by Fred Blosser

Years ago, as a fledgling enthusiast of pulp and paperback fiction, I was a big fan of the legendary JDMBibliophile ‘zine. I was especially fond of the “Early JDM” column, in which Francis M. Nevins Jr. profiled MacDonald’s pulp stories from Black Mask, Dime Detective, and other such wonderful treasuries of hardboiled fiction.

Several of those stories, with JDM’s blessings, were eventually collected by Martin H. Greenberg, Nevins, Walter Shine, and Jean Shine in the two “Good Old Stuff” volumes of the 1980s. But many others remain unreprinted. This is unfortunate, because nuggets of tough-guy gold repose in those now-crumbling pulpwood pages. As cases in point, I would refer you to two novelettes from Dime Detective that show MacDonald at his youthful peak as a riveting storyteller.

I wrote about those stories in the Spring 1992 issue of The JDM Review, and what follows is an updated recap of the article. I figure that most of you are unfamiliar with the 1992 article. Twenty years later, with pulp making a resurgence of sorts with e-books and POD houses, it may be a good time for a reminder as to how energetic MacDonald’s magazine work was.

First, “Call Your Murder Signals!” (Dime Detective, June 1948). As in most of JDM’s pulp stories, the protagonist of this 12,000-word effort isn’t the typical private eye or police detective pulp hero. Benjamin “Tige” Gaynor, war hero and former All-American lineman, is coach of a pro football team called the Port Davis Travelers.

When Tige runs afoul of a crooked gambling ring, local gangsters try to kill him. Failing that, they frame him for the murder of a former player. With a pert young woman on his side, Gaynor clears his name and brings the bad guys to lead-laced justice. (Man, pulp lingo is contagious.)

From the first page, in which Tige is shot and pushed out of a speeding car on a lonely country road, “Call Your Murder Signals!” is textbook-perfect pulp. JDM keeps the plot moving at high velocity, while throwing in the occasional twist of phrase that presages his mature Gold Medal style:

“Without knowing how it happened, I was on my face in the shallow ditch, and my hands were no longer tied. My right arm was twisted under me at a funny angle. I burned in a dozen places. My cheek rested in a puddle, and the rain beat down on me.

“The legs were gone, too. Oh, they were there, but they were old stockings filled with sand and putty.”

The blurb on the magazine’s contents page is pure pulp platinum: “Snap into kill formation, boys, and -- CALL YOUR MURDER SIGNALS! When the trigger toughs tried to bench him for keeps, All-American Gaynor decides he’d rather do-in than die.”

Incidentally, by that June 1948 cover date, Dime Detective no longer sold for 10 cents. Cover price: 15 cents.

Another placid town seething with hidden corruption, Hunt City, is the setting for “Too Many Sinners” (Dime Detective, June 1949). Johnny Rogan, a “tall, hardy-looking young man with a firm jaw, friendly blue eyes, and a shock of yellow hair,” is a soft-hearted repo man. Assigned to repossess a car for a bank, he encounters a prostitution and extortion ring, a deceptively cherubic old man named Esperance whose enemies have a way of disappearing suddenly, and a lethal beauty named Carlotta.

In the 1992 article, mentioning Carlotta, I suggested that readers visualize Barbara Carrera in a 1940s pageboy hairdo. Now I would suggest Eva Mendes, Sofia Vergara, maybe Eva Longoria.

With a plot slightly reminiscent of Hammett’s “The Scorched Face” (in the 1992 article, I goofed and inexplicably cited Hammett’s “Fly Paper”), “Too Many Sinners” may strike modern readers as dated, at least in regard to details of technology. Esperance drugs local young women, puts them into what the tabloids used to call compromising positions, and uses the photos to blackmail the women or force them into turning tricks. Nowadays, I guess sex videos or on-line porn would be involved.

As in “Call Your Murder Signals!”, JDM keeps the action rocketing along. There’s a masterful sequence in which Johnny, tied up in his car and doused with gasoline, struggles to free himself before a lighted cigarette burns down and ignites the petrol.

The blurb for this one is even better than the one for the 1948 novelette:

“A thrill-starved girl’s fury cremates -- TOO MANY SINNERS. She was just a brunette on a skip list -- steering Johnny to hell."

In between the beatings, shootings, and stabbings, the mundane details of Rogan’s repo job have an authentic ring. One suspects that JDM drew on his own brief career in repossessing cars and appliances while putting himself through college.

Incidentally, if you think “Call Your Murder Signals!” and “Too Many Sinners” push the limits of corn, consider that two other titles in the June 1949 issue were “A Sap Takes the Rap” and “Tin-Lizzy Houdini.” As noted in the “Good Old Stuff” collections, the titles of MacDonald’s pulp stories were often changed as they crossed the editor's desk. Whatever the title, they deserve better than the impermanence of brittling pulpwood pages.

Karl Edward Wagner

2012-01-20T13:29:00.000-08:00

Ed here: This is one of the most extraordinary collections I've ever seen. The making of the massive book with its astonishing illustrations reminds us of how nothing will ever replace the sheer beauty and craftsmanship of finely made books. Then there are the stories. Wagner has long been one of my favorite horror story writers because he was able to balance the psychological so well with the outre. There is a pure pulp poetry and mordancy to his work that I equate with the best genre fiction has to offer.

I didn't know Karl. He took a few of my stories for his Year's Best anthologies, which pleased me, and one of my stories caused him to write me about a friend of his who was in steep decline. He said he'd never been able to understand this man but that after reading my story he realized what his friend was going through. The irony being, as several writers attest in their introductions to his various stories, that Karl himself was in steep decline for quite a long time before he died.

I felt that he never got his due as a writer. He was able to create moods, back stories, histories that far more popular writers would never even dare attempt. If you think I exaggerate read any of the stories in this book.

KARL EDWARD WAGNER
MASTERS OF THE WEIRD TALE

SYNOPSIS

With over 700 pages, including all of Karl Edward Wagner’s horror fiction, this is one of the best, most impeccably proofed and designed in our Masters of the Weird Tale series. This collection includes Sticks, Where the Summer Ends, In the Pines; in sum, all of the horror fiction. Feel free to email us for a list of the stories as a PDF file, or click here to download it yourself.
This collection has a color cover by J.K. Potter and over ten full-page, full-color interior illustrations by Potter as well. The book is edited and introduced by Stephen Jones, has an additional introduction by Peter Straub, a remembrance by David Drake, and a new afterword by Laird Barron. The introductions are profusely illustrated with pictures of Karl in both black & white and color.
The edition is limited to 200 copies for sale. Each numbered copy is signed by Stephen Jones, J.K. Potter, Peter Straub, Laird Barron, and David Drake.
Each book is fully bound in cloth and comes in a handsome two-tone slipcase to match your other volumes in the Masters of the Weird Tale series. It will be shipping in early to mid November. Sorry for the delay!
The queries we have been receiving on this title have been considerable; we expect it to be fully subscribed before publication.

EDITION INFORMATION

Limited to 200 copies.
Introductions by Stephen Jones and Peter Straub.
New color illustrations by J.K. Potter.
Signed by J.K. Potter, Stephen Jones, Peter Straub, Laird Barron and David Drake.
Slipcase, ribbon marker, head and tail bands, three-piece cloth construction.

Forgotten Books: The American Cinema by Andrew Sarris

2012-01-19T14:26:00.000-08:00

Ed here: I'm going through some health problems which is why I haven't been posting the last few nights. I'm feeling better but the issues haven't been resolved as yet.

Forgotten Books: The American Cinema by Andrew Sarris

There was a time in my life, college age and maybe a decade after, when I took Andrews Sarris' opinions of American films and American filmmakers pretty much as gospel. Times and people change. I bought a copy in a dime bin and looked through it and realized that it is in fact a rather pedantic and downright goofy survey of American films.

Sarris sensibly enough divides his opinions into chapters with headings such as Pantheon Directors, The Far Side of Paradise and Less Than Meets The Eye and so on. Hard to disagree with his Pantheon which includes Keaton, Chaplin, Ford, Ophuls and so on. With one exception that is. He includes Fritz Lang in the Pantheon and then in Less Than Meets The Eye dumps on Billy Wilder. What? There are few directors who have captured their AMERICAN time better than Wilder. The Lost Weekend, Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Ace In The Hole, The Seven Year Itch, Some Like It Hot,The Apartment...I take nothing away from Lang, though his self-mythologizing got tiresome. He is certainly a major director. But as far as serious accomplishments go...Lang but not Wilder in this so-called Pantheon?

He also dumps on, among others, Robert Aldrich, Robert Wise, Nicholas Ray, Preston Sturges and Anthony Mann--good sometimes but not good enough for the Pantheon. Really? Preston Sturges not as "good" as Ernest Lubitsch? Not even Sturges would have claimed he was. And Wilder doesn't belong even on this list?

Sarris is at his most readable when he deals with directors he considers sub-human. Peckinpah, Roger Corman, Curtis Harrington and Ida Lupino. He has cordial fun with them and sees merit in their assumed irrelevance.

But unfortunately then it's back to the pot shots. Under the Heading "Strained Seriousness" we have...Stanley Kubrick? Really Stanley Kubrick?

Be warned: You'll neeed a lot of Prozac for this one. And your dental bill will shoot up because of all your teeth gnashing.'

A new Psycho? NOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!

2012-01-15T12:53:00.000-08:00

Ed here: Lee Pfeiffer is one of my favorite movie reviewers/commentators. H's also of course published and editor of Cinema Retro my favorite magazine about films.I had the same response to this news that Lee did.

By Lee Pfeiffer

Look, I'm not one of these high-brow guys who knock all of the programming on cable TV. About the only shows I ever have time to watch are guilty pleasures like Hoarders and Storage Wars plus various National Geographic programs that center on helpless humans being devoured by wild animals. Most of the time I'm working on my computer, so the only programs that run consistently are political shows that don't require me to sit in front of a screen. In fact, with all the heated debates on these programs, they provide plenty of wild animal-like behavior in and of themselves. What I do find really offensive is when a cable network decides to use a legendary movie as the basis of a low-grade TV concept. For example, A&E has just announced that it is developing a series titled Bates Motel that will explore the early years of Psycho's legendary cinematic killer Norman Bates, as well as his Oedipus-like relationship with his mother. Is this really what classic movie lovers have been clamoring for? Obviously not. How many people even remember that there was a TV movie sequel to Psycho back in 1987? So this new project is a rip-off of a rip-off. However, A&E is gambling that there are plenty of undiscriminating viewers out there who probably never even saw the original film and will think this concept is a hoot. Murder and implied incest? Irresistable! And now Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece can be improved upon with the inclusion of numerous dumb-ass commercials, color cinematography and answers to the mysteries surrounding Bates' background that were so annoyingly mysterious that they might have inspired you to use your own imagination. Click here for the lurid details.

-------------------THE LURID DETAILS FROM HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

TCA: 'Psycho' Prequel Series 'Bates Motel' in the Works at A&E
The cable network that's home to "Intervention" and "The Glades" also picks up the rights to Danish serial killer drama "Those Who Kill."
11:44 AM PST 1/13/2012 by Lesley Goldberg
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Everett Collection
"Psycho"
A&E is continuing its push into scripted programming, developing series projects based on the famed hotel featured in Psycho and a Danish format about serial killers.
OUR EDITOR RECOMMENDS

A&E Network Hires Three Programming Executives

'Hoarders,' 'Intervention' Have Solid Returns on A&E

Pierce Brosnan's 'Bag of Bones' Miniseries Boosts Ratings for A&E
The network Friday announced it is in early development on Bates Motel, a potential series from Universal Television for A&E that would serve as a prequel to the Alfred Hitchcock 1960 classic Psycho.
The series would offer an understanding into how Norman Bates' psyche developed and would tell the back story of the film's killer, learning of how his mother, Norma, and her lover damaged him, transforming him into serial-killing motel owner. Anthony Perkins played Norman in the film.
Anthony Cipriano penned the script.
The project is not the first time a Psycho spinoff effort has been attempted. NBC aired a 90-minute TV movie titled Bates Motel in 1987.
Meanwhile, the cable net that's home to unscripted fare including Intervention and Hoarders has acquired the rights to Danish format Those Who Kill.
Based on the best-seller by Elsebeth Egholm, the Danish series is about serial killers and the people who pursue and catch them.
The original series revolves around a female police detective who works to understand her connection into the mind of a serial killer and a profiler who has a deeper psychological understanding that connects them to the killer and their victims.
Kill hails from Imagine Television and Fox 21. Glen Morgan will pen the script and executive produce alongside Brian Grazer, Francie Calfo, Peter Bose and Jonas Allen.
Should either project go to series, it would join the network's original scripted offerings that include The Glades and Breakout Kings.
Email: Lesley.Goldberg@thr.com; Twitter: @Snoodit

Pity Him Afterward Donald Westlake

2012-01-14T13:14:00.001-08:00

Pity Him Afterward Donald Westlake

Ed here: One day a publisher I knew called me and said is there a Don Westlake novel that has never been in paperback. I immediately said yes. He asked me if I had a copy of it. I said yes. I sent him my one and only copy, a very good hardcover edition of Pity Him Afterwrd. As it turned out they had to destroy it to create the new book. But it was worth it so other people could read it. It's that good.

From 2007:

Every once in awhile I get stoned just watching a literary master do his work. The last two nights I was flat out dazzled from beginning to end with Donald Westlake's 1964 novels PITY HIM AFTERWARD.

The story concerns an escaped madman who takes the identity of a man who is headed to a theater that does summer stock. While we see the story several times from the madman's point of view, we're never sure who he is. This is a fair clue mystery.

In quick succession, a young woman who works summer stock is found murdered in the house where the young, struggling actors stay. A part-time chief of police appears to find the killer.

Two points: writers owe their readers original takes on familiar tropes as often as possible. The madman here is no slobbering beast but rather a deranged and sometimes pitiful lunatic (the opening three thousand words are among the most accomplished Westlake pieces I've ever read). And the police chief Eric Songard is one of the most unique cops I've come across in mystery fiction. He works nine months of the year as a professor and summers as a police chief. The small town he oversees usually offers nothing worse than drunks and the occasional fight. Murder is another matter. Westake gives us a cop whose self-confidence is so bad all he can do is try and hasten the appearance of the regular cops from a nearby district. Meanwhile he has to pretend he knows what's going on. He could easily have gone to series. He's a great character.

As the story is told, we get a beleivable look at summer stock with its low pay, brutal hours, frequent rivalries. The payoff is that some of the actors will get their Equity card at the end of the nine week run and thereby become professional actors.

Then there is the telling. The craft is impeccable. Precise and concise and yet evocative because of the images Westlake constantly presents us. You also have to marvel at the rhythm of his language, watching how'll he'll shave an anticpated word here for a certain effect, add a word there for the sake of cadence. These sentences are CRAFTED.

There are so many great Westlake novels it's impossble to rank them. But given what he accomplished, I'd have to say this is one of his early best.

Ricky Gervais Is Losing His Edge by Not Shutting Up About His Edge

2012-01-13T12:42:00.000-08:00

Ed here: To me Ricky Gervais is a genius. That isn't to say he's been a genius lately. A lame end to Extras (one of my all-time favorites shows), truly bad movies and lately being inescapable on tv and in print coming on like Napoleon before Waterloo. When he was famous he was fun to listen to. His descriptions of growing up, of trying to sell his shows, of being at least a bit of every one of his noodgy protagonists--he was great. But now that he's SUPER famous he's a lot less clever and likable. I always wondered if Larry David wasn't secretly exposing the new Gervais in their Curb episode. His "outsider" and "iconoclast" routine is especially irritating. This guy is an outsider like I'm an insider. I take no pleasure in saying these things. His is an enduring and exciting talent. But he doesn't wear his new super fame very well at all. I watched three episodes of Extras last night. For me Gervais at his best.

Ricky Gervais Is Losing His Edge by Not Shutting Up About His Edge
By Willa Paskin FROM VULTURE

Exactly a year ago, days before Ricky Gervais was set to host the Golden Globes for the second time, there seemed to be no more perfect an awards show host in the universe. To that point, Gervais had made himself into something of an awards show treasure: Whenever he was trotted out for his few minutes of on-air patter, he was always funny — which, given the typical caliber of such banter, made him a walking miracle. And then came the 68th annual Golden Globes, an event at which Gervais had the audacity to level some actual fastballs (or fast relative to the standard softballs) at the rich, famous, beautiful people sitting in the audience and/or watching from home. Not everyone was pleased with Gervais's gleeful skewering, and the likes of Judd Apatow and the Hollywood Foreign Press argued that Gervais’s performance had crossed a line, making for an unnecessarily bitter and antagonistic show. Vulture was on record as enjoying the whole thing — it was the perfect antidote to the season's award show circuit of overstated mutual praise — and the Hollywood Foreign Press lightened up after a few months and asked Gervais to repeat as the host this year. But in the year since the Globes, one person has appeared to be more amused and delighted by Gervais's performance than anyone else, in or out of Hollywood: Ricky Gervais himself. Having spent an awards show deflating the hype around movie stars, Gervais has spent the last year buying his own.

Ricky Gervais told some appealingly honest-to-mean jokes about famous people. And he has spent the last few months smugly discussing them as though they were tragically misunderstood by oversensitive actors. He self-importantly talks about how great it is to have Hollywood "scared to death of me." Just this week, baldly flouting the truism that to explain humor is to kill humor, he gave an interview to EW dissecting all of his Golden Globes jokes, pedantically offering up highfalutin reasons why it's funny to give Robert Downey Jr. a hard time about his addictive past — all as if his awards show patter was a complicated and multilayered upending of the social order rather than just funny jabs. He behaves as if telling Angelina Jolie she was in a bad movie is somehow striking a blow for the common man, and not, in its way, as totally frivolous as telling her she was in a good one. (It's not that insulting her isn't entertaining, but when Perez Hilton was still in his drawing-penises-on-her-face phase, he didn't pretend he was doing important work.)

Gervais seems determined to keep promoting the notion that his performance at the Globes was wildly offensive, but it was only mildly offensive, at best, however many easily offended people he managed to offend. You can revisit most of last year's jokes here: In addition to knocks on Robert Downey Jr. and The Tourist, they included digs at Cher, Scientology, Charlie Sheen, Hugh Hefner, Sex and the City 2, and and the HFPA. Sure, to that insular industry audience the jabs were more cutting than the usual award show fare and were pretty gloriously ungrateful (he went after no one so much as the hosting HFPA, accusing them of bribery and making a joke about how the president had dentures), but as The New York Times Magazine puts it in a profile of him running this weekend, "It was the sort of material that would have barely rattled Medic Alert bracelets at a Friars Club roast." Gervais took some hard shots at easy, deserving targets, and if that made for a fairly shocking awards show, that's because awards shows are absurdly staid and self-important, not because Gervais was breaking new ground — something that a comedian of Gervais's stature and know-how should be the first to admit. But you wouldn't know it from Gervais, who has spent the last twelve months reveling in his iconoclasm (posing as Jesus and all).

(more)”
That does in fact say it all: Gervais is a rich, powerful guy who one night a year makes fun of his brethren. He's not an outsider, he's just imagining himself to be. If Hollywood isn't offended by his jokes, why does he feel the need to keep patronizingly explaining why they weren't offensive? And if Hollywood did, in fact, take offense, why is he insecurely going out of his way to say they didn't? Whether people were offended or not, shouldn't he just laugh it off and move on, rather than harping on his accomplishment for months and months?

Promoting the notion that he doesn't play by Hollywood's sycophantic rules is good branding for Gervais; it'll certainly get more people to watch the show this Sunday night. (The ad campaign for the Globes has Gervais telling audiences that the only difference between them and him, is that they'll be saying catty things from home, and he'll be doing it to celebrities' faces.) We know we're looking forward to it because he will take more digs than anyone else would, and the show will be less bland for it. But we will also spend the entire night worrying that at the end of the show, we are in for another yearlong didactic and scolding explanation about how humor works and a giggling identity crisis about whether he's a Hollywood insider or outsider. We'll also spend the night wondering where the man went who made his career by being unerringly clear-eyed about the ways that a lack of self-awareness and desire for approval can turn a person into a buffoon, i.e., a David Brent. Because he doesn't seem to be the same guy telling the jokes anymore.

GET MORE: BLASPHEMY, RICKY GERVAIS, GOLDEN GLOBES 2012, JOHNNY DEPP,

Forgotten Books: How Like An Angel by Margaret Millar

2012-01-12T13:13:00.001-08:00

How Like an Angel by Margaret Millar

I've always held the opinion that some writers are just too good for the mass market. This is a true of a number of literary writers but it's also true of at least one writer of crime fiction, the late Margret Millar. For all her many deserved awards, she never became the enormous commercial success she deserved to be.

For me she's the single most elegant stylist who ever shaped a mystery story. You revel in her sentences. She used wit and dark humor in the direst of novels long before it was fashionable in the genre. And she was a better (and much fairer) bamboozler than Agatha Christie.

I recently reread her How Like and Angel and its richness, its darkness, its perverse wit make me repeat what I've said many times before--if this isn't the perfect mystery novel, it comes damned close.

The story, complex as it becomes, is simple in its set-up. Private eye Joe Quinn, having gambled away all his money, begins hitchiking from Reno to Caifornia. Along the way he sees the Tower, the symbol of a religious cult that eventually offers him not only shelter but a chance to put his skills to use. Sister Blessing asks him to find a man named Patrick O'Gorman. The man is dead. Which makes Quinn suspicious of why they want him located.

Among its many pleasures is the way this novel, published in the early sixties, anticipates some of the fringe cults that would grow out of the flower power days. There's more than a touch of ole Charlie Manson in the Tower.

I've always argued that the traditional mystery can be used for purposes other than simply whodunit. Here Millar gives us a great novel of character, a wry and not unkind look at people drawn to cults and a dark stunning story of forged lives.

From Jack O'Connell 1970s Movies of The Week Casting Game!

2012-01-11T11:37:00.001-08:00

Ed,

As a lover of the 1970s Movie of the Week, I really grooved on this morn's posting.

Have you played the "Cast the 1970s Movie of the Week" game? Here's the list:

The Playbook for Making a 1970s MFTVM

Now that you’ve watched a bushel of MFTVMs, you’re ready to make your own. Below you’ll find a manual we picked up from central casting

Young Turk

Peter Haskell: slick young turk

Michael Parks: brooding young turk

Frank Converse: smart young turk

Christopher George: hotheaded young turk

Peter Mark Richman: duplicitous young turk

James Franciscus: WASPY young turk

Jan‑Michael Vincent: surfer‑dude young turk

Michael Cole: confused young turk

Glenn Corbett: mild‑mannered young turk

Dack Rambo: cowboy young turk

Woman In Jeopardy

Rosemary Forsyth: woman in jeopardy

Hope Lange: woman in jeopardy

Blythe Danner: woman in jeopardy

Lee Grant: woman in jeopardy

Rosemary Forsyth: woman in jeopardy

Yvette Mimieux: woman in jeopardy

Mariette Hartley: woman in jeopardy

Elizabeth Montgomery: woman in jeopardy

Donna Mills: woman in jeopardy

Ingenue

Carol Lynley: ingenue in trouble

Lesley Ann Warren: ingenue in heat

Lynda Day George: ingenue in mourning

Tisha Sterling: hippy deb ingenue

Suburban Mom

Sandy Dennis: jilted suburban wife drifting into diet pill abuse

Suburban Dad

Carl Betz: suburban dad with a mistress

Mike Farrell: suburban dad with an issue

Dennis Weaver: suburban dad in jeopardy

Kids

Richard Thomas: overly sensitive youth

Mitch Vogel: overly sensitive youth

Lance Kerwin: overly sensitive youth

Robby Benson: overly sensitive youth

Jennifer Salt: rebellious daughter

Glynnis O'Connor: girl with a problem

Linda Blair: girl with a big problem

Grandma

Estelle Parsons: grandma

Granddad

Arthur Kennedy: granddad

Will Geer: dotty old granddad

Cop

Robert Forster: detective first class loner

Harry Guardino: media savvy police commissioner

Cameron Mitchell: good cop gone bad

Claude Akins: Deputy Bud

Lawyer

Richard Basehart: district attorney

Pernell Roberts: politically ambitious DA

James Whitmore: defense attorney

Howard Duff: stop‑at‑nothing defense attorney

Simon Oakland: badly dressed ambulance chaser

Hugh O'Brian: playboy lawyer

Doctor

Lloyd Nolan: kind‑but‑wise doctor

Barnard Hughes: kindly‑but‑eccentric doctor

William Windom: alcoholic mess doctor

Sam Groom: playboy surgeon

Businessmen

Barry Sullivan: craven industrialist

Peter Graves: the CEO

Monte Markham: real estate mogul with a secret

Richard Anderson: supervisor Adams

Mark Goddard: double‑crossing business partner

Herb Edelman: sales, any kind of sales

Jim Hutton: Dodge dealership owner

Ed Nelson: life‑insurance saleman with a dozen blue blazers

David Hedison: desperate stockbroker

Government

Broderick Crawford: by‑the‑book alderman

William Schallert: head of the school board

Arts and Entertainment

Anthony Perkins: repressed young artist

Sheree North: nightclub singer with heart of gold

Roddy McDowall: in the closet art dealer

High Society

Agnes Moorehead: bitter, catty socialite

Henry Jones: snotty garden club chairman

Grayson Hall: divorced nympho lush

Working Stiffs

Eugene Roche: rubbish hauler

John Karlen: Handyman Tom

Norman Fell: summons server

William Demarest: mean barkeep

Arlene Golonka: waitress at the diner

Sports

Alex Karras: Coach Roy

Robert Foxworth: weekend white water rafter in safari vest

Joseph Campanella: golf pro

Academics

Percy Rodriguez: Professor of obscure myths and legends

Georg Stanford Brown: head of the black students union

Head Cases

John Carradine: creepy old coot

Zalman King: obsessive psycho boyfriend

John Savage: recently released young mental patient

Utility Players

Edward Asner: cop or crooked union official

Leslie Nielsen: cop or well‑dressed embezzler

Avery Schreiber: chauffeur or diner owner

Cleavon Little: pimp or revolutionary

Darren McGavin: average‑guy‑in‑over‑his‑head or editor‑in‑chief

Elke Sommer: woman with a past or spy

Ted Bessell: the new boyfriend or management trainee

Now post your concept and ideal cast!

Sam McCain now on Kindle

2012-01-10T13:17:00.000-08:00

Ed here: Part of the reason I started writing the Sam McCain novels was because I was sick of hearing about how wonderful the decade of the Fifties was. You know, Ozzie & Harriet and Father Knows Best. Most egregious, to me, was Happy Days. By then even the Republicans knew better. If you were white, Christian, middle-class, straight and white collar the decade was probably more decent to you than not. But given the racism, sexism, Communist witch hunts, union-busting and large pockets of poverty, not even Ozzie's dopey smile could make the excluded Happy.

The books aren't sermons. All of them are humorous more than not and all of them are, I think, solid fair clue puzzles. But I also touch on the demons of the time; as one of the Chicago papers noted "This is Happy Days as it really was." There's even nostalgia for those who recall the times I use. The Day The Music Died begins on the night Buddy Holly died in that terrible needless plane crash; Wake Up Little Suzie begins on the day the Edsel was unveiled. I have some fun with the difficulty the press, national and local, had describing the Edsel grill. As a New York Times reporter said: "We had to say it looked like a vagina without using that word."

I honestly think you'll enjoy the Sam McCain novels. They begin, as I said, in 1958. The latest, Bad Moon Rising, takes place in 1968. And yes, each book is titled after a then current song.

Here are some press quotes:

"Gorman's delightful series...provokes a bracing nostalgia for a time that was neither as innocent nor as dull as is sometimes said." -The Wall Street Journal

"Offers the rueful wisdom and and charm of an exemplary hero who is curious not only about whodunit but also about some of the more elusive riddles and human existence." -San Francisco Chronicle

"Gorman knowingly invests his whodunit with all the right cultural touches...but, by not ignoring the racism and sexual taboos of the time he elevates it to a story with bite and substance." Chicago Tribune

"McCain's zeal to cleanse Black River Fall of evil makes him the kind of hero any small town could take to its heart." --New York Times

"In (the Sam McCain books) good and evil clash with the same heartbreaking results as they have in the more urban crime drama of Block or Leonard." Booklist

The first two novels are now available for $4.99 each or $6.99for both in one package.

The Day The Music Died (The Sam McCain Mysteries) [Kindle Edition]
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ABC'S MOVIE OF THE WEEK

2012-01-09T12:27:00.000-08:00

Ed here: Yeah a lot of them were trashy but some were fun-trashy and a few of them were actually good. I'd take them over most of the predictable sit-coms and cop shows airing now. One especially fine one was Ira Levin's "Dr. Cook's Garden" with believe-it-or-not Bing Crosby in this creepy but oddly moving tv version of the play. There was another good one, too, that always struck me as a knock-off of a very good John Brunner science fiction story but that may just have been the fan boy in me wanting to promote an sf writer.

FROM CLASSIC-FILM-TV.blogspot
http://classic-film-tv.blogspot.com/

ABC's The Movie of the Week

Made-for-TV movies eventually got a bad rap, which explains why they pretty much faded from network television in the 1990s. But I still fondly recall what I call the "Golden Age of the TV Movie": the early 1970s when ABC began broadcasting its Movie of the Week.

Every Tuesday night, ABC introduced a world premiere telefilm in a ninety-minute time slot (about 72 minutes without commercials). The success of the series can be attributed, in part, to the variety of its films: suspense (The Longest Night), horror (The Night Stalker), science fiction (Night Slaves), World War II action (Death Race), comedy (The Daughters of Joshua Cabe), Western (The Hanged Man), serious drama (That Certain Smile), film noir (Goodnight, My Love) and even kung fu (Men of the Dragon). Many of the telefilms were also pilots for TV series--some of which made it as regular series (The Six Million Dollar Man) and some that didn’t (The Monk with George Maharis as a private eye).

Dennis Weaver in Duel, written by
Richard Matheson.
Several films earned critical plaudits, such as Brian's Song, Duel, That Certain Summer, Tribes, and The Point. Occasionally, one would be released theatrically in either in the U.S. or Europe--often with additional footage--after its TV broadcast. That was the case with Steven Spielberg's suspenseful chase drama Duel and The Sex Symbol with Connie Stevens playing an actress loosely inspired by Marilyn Monroe.

I'm always surprised by how many of the ABC Movie of Week telefilms are fondly remembered by fellow film buffs. For example, people may not remember the title of Trilogy of Terror--but mention the creepy TV movie with Karen Black about the killer doll and a lot of folks will know it.

The original Movie of the Week debuted on Tuesday night in 1969. It was so successful that ABC launched a Movie of the Weekend, which subsequently shifted to mid-week so there were Tuesday and Wednesday Movies of the Week installments. The final Movie of the Week was broadcast in 1976.

The catchy theme to the Movie of the Week opening was written by Burt Bacharach. Its actual title is "Nikki," named after Burt's daughter with Angie Dickinson. Click on the clip below to view the full opening for When Michael Calls, a thriller with Ben Gazzara, Elizabeth Ashley, and Michal Douglas. At the end of the clip is preview for the following week's movie, The Screaming Woman, starring Olivia de Havilland. Unfortunately, the video quality doesn't do justice to the bright, colorful graphics.

In terms of originality, the only network that competed with ABC was CBS, which launched CBS Tuesday Night Movie in 1972. It sent speeding helicopters (Birds of Prey), ancient evil Druids (The Horror at 37,000 Feet), and, most memorably, Gargoyles to battle its TV-movie rival at ABC.

Crosby as Dr. Cook.
Sadly, only a handful of these films are available on DVD (and even then, the prints are usually inferior in quality). I’d love to see TCM get the rights to the Movie of the Week. It’d be great to see Bing Crosby in Dr. Cook’s Garden again and see if the film as good as I remember.

Below is a sampling of the telefilms that played on The Movie of the Week (to include the Tuesday and Wednesay editions and The Movie of the Weekend on Saturday). Note that several movies featured performers from the classic film era:

Seven in Darkness (1969)
Daughter of the Mind (1969) with Gene Tierney & Ray Milland
Gidget Grows Up (1969)
Honeymoon with a Stranger (1969)
The Over-the-Hill Gang (1969) with Walter Brennan & Andy Devine
The Ballad of Andy Crocker (1969)
The Immortal (1969)
Wake Me When the War Is Over (1969)
Along Came a Spider (1970)
Carter's Army (1970)
Crowhaven Farm (1970)
How Awful about Allan (1970) with Anthony Perkins & Julie Harris
Night Slaves (1970)
The Over the Hill Gang Rides Again with Walter Brennan & Fred Astaire
Run, Simon, Run (1970)
The Love War (1970)
Tribes (1970)
Brian's Song (1971)
Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate (1971) with Helen Hayes, Myrna Loy, Sylvia Sidney
Dr. Cook's Garden (1971)
Duel (1971)
In Broad Daylight (1971)
In Search of America (1971)
Maybe I'll Come Home in the Spring (1971)
The Birdmen (1971)
The Devil and Miss Sarah (1971)
The Feminist and the Fuzz (1971)
The Point! (1971)
The Reluctant Heroes (1971)
A Great American Tragedy (1972)
Goodnight, My Love (1972)
Moon of the Wolf (1972)
That Certain Summer (1972)
The Astronaut (1972)
The Daughters of Joshua Cabe (1972) with Buddy Ebsen & Sandra Dee
The Longest Night (1972)
Madame Sin (1972) with Bette Davis & Robert Wagner
The People (1972)
The Screaming Woman (1972) with Olivia de Havilland
Women in Chains (1972)
A Cold Night's Death (1973)
A Summer Without Boys (1973)
Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (1973)
Female Artillery (1973)
Go Ask Alice (1973)
Isn't It Shocking? (1973)
Satan's School for Girls (1973)
Shirts/Skins (1973)
The Girl Most Likely to... (1973)
The Girls of Huntington House (1973)
The Man Without a Country (1973) with Cliff Robertson
The Night Strangler (1973)
The Third Girl from the Left (1973)
Get Christie Love! (1974)
Hit Lady (1974)
Houston, We've Got a Problem (1974)
Killdozer (1974)
Locusts (1974)
The Mark of Zorro (1974)
The Morning After (1974)
Thursday's Game (1974)
Winter Kill (1974)
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Labels: dr. cook's garden, duel, movie of the week, rick29 (author), trilogy of terror

Interesting material about Dashiell Hammet

2012-01-08T17:54:00.000-08:00

From Fred Blosser--thanks Fred:

Ed, I came across this document on the web, a Maryland state historic trust form
and supporting documentation describing Hopewell and Aim, the one-time Hammett
family property in St. Mary's County, MD, where Dashiell Hammett was born in
1894. Very interesting stuff for a Hammett fan; I pass it along for posting on
the blog if you'd like:
http://www.msa.md.gov/megafile/msa/stagsere/se1/se5/026000/026500/026515/pdf/msa_se5_26515.pdf
.

There's also a highway marker for Hammett on Great Mills road, near the
property. I don't see a photo on any of the Maryland state sites offhand, but
there's one (with a funny accompanying writeup) on the "Big Read Blog" from
7/14/2008 at http://www.arts.gov/bigreadblog/?cat=9&paged=2 .

Now if only someone could find the files of Hammett's service with the
Pinkertons, so we would know for sure whether Hammett was offered money to
murder labor organizer Frank Little, as the story goes . . . and whether the
reference to the wide-open 1915 boom town of Hopewell, VA, in "Nightmare Town"
reflected Hammett's first-hand experience . . . and the name of the young woman
who didn't tell young Sam in Washington, DC, in 1917 that his work as a private
investigator must be very interesting. From all accounts, sadly, the Pinkerton
records no longer exist.

Fred

Jack Kerouac's Letter To Marlon Brando: 'On The Road' Movie Plea

2012-01-07T15:08:00.001-08:00

Jack Kerouac's Letter To Marlon Brando: 'On The Road' Movie Plea
First Posted: 1/6/12 02:22 PM ET Updated: 1/6/12 04:09 PM ET
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Two legendary rebels of the 1950s, one legendary opportunity missed.

Jack Kerouac famously became a recluse, but it turns out he had movie star ambitions. In this 1957 letter, found by a memorabilia expert in 2005 and recently sold at auction by Christie's, the famed beat author asked Marlon Brando to buy the rights to "On the Road" and turn it into a movie -- in which they would both star.

The letter begins:

I'm praying that you'll buy ON THE ROAD and make a movie of it. Don't worry about the structure, I know to compress and re-arrange the plot a bit to give a perfectly acceptable movie-type structure: making it into one all-inclusive trip instead of the several voyages coast-to-coast in the book, one vast round trip from New York to Denver to Frisco to Mexico to New Orleans to New York again. I visualize the beautiful shots could be made with the camera on the front seat of the car showing the road (day and night) unwinding into the windshield, as Sal and Dean yak. I wanted you to play the part because Dean (as you know) is no dopey hotrodder but a real intelligent (in fact Jesuit) Irishman. You play Dean and I'll play Sal (Warner Bros. mentioned I play Sal) and I'll show you how Dean acts in real life.
Sal is the narrator of "On the Road" and a thinly veiled version of Kerouac himself, while Dean represents Neil Cassady. The book sees them travel across the nation a number of times, stopping in Mexico along the way, getting drunk and high experiencing the glories of freedom and the existential terrors of 1950s America.

Kerouac writes that he wants to make the film so that he can establish a healthy bank account for himself and his mother, with whom he was very close. In fact, the letter is addressed from Orlando, where he would spend time living with his mother. But he

So many terrible vampire novels--here's a GREAT one

2012-01-07T14:21:00.001-08:00

Maybe I hate so many vampire novels because I know how good the great ones are. I've practically memorized I Am Legend and the same for Salem's Lot. And the same for the-too-seldom mentioned Live Girls by Ray Garton.

I don’t know how many times I’ve reviewed LIVE GIRLS by Ray Garton but I'm going to keep pushing it until every lawn in America has a big sign stating: WE OWN A COPY OF LIVE GIRLS! There'll come a day when you'll be put under house arrest and forced to listen to Rick Santorum discuss his sex tips ten hours a day if you don't have that sign.

What Garton has done is take the tropes of the vampire novel and sexualize them in a way that would have been impossible a quarter century ago. This is a raunchy, gritty, sometimes hilarious and always spellbinding novel set in the universe most of us inhabit. At least most of the time – bosses, lovers, budgets, relatives, etc. Where we depart company with the protagonist is when he starts going to live porn shows and, baby, that’s when he starts the long, dark slide into several kinds of death.

Garton nails every character. For all the cult praise laid upon the novel, I’ve never seen anybody talk about its people. They’re great. A few of them I’ve never seen before anywhere and I don’t mean just the vampires. Even the walk-ons have the stink and sass of real people – not necessarily people I’d like to have lunch with, you understand, but real nonetheless. And the writing is sleek and efficient and vivid enough to rattle your dentures in places.

The other thing Garton does is make the sex here both truly seductive and truly scary. You think AIDS is scary? Wait ’til you meet this crew. This is one of the novels I give mystery readers who are leery of horror. It usually meets with effusive approval.
This is one you’ve got to pick up.

So how soon will YOUR yard sign be going up?

The great fantasy writer Charles Beaumont on pulp fiction

2012-01-06T13:28:00.001-08:00

The great fantasy writer Charles Beaumont on pulp fiction

One of the best pieces ever written on the real pulp fiction of the last century was done by Charles Beaumont for Playboy back in 1962. Thanks to Adventurehouse.com the article is available once again in full. I was struck by the opening paragraphs and wonder if kids today are still drawn to books and magazines the way we were or if it's video games and special effects movies that will shape their memories and creative pursuits.

Beaumont:

THERE WAS A RITUAL.

It was dark and mysterious, as rituals ought to be, and—for those who enacted it—a holy and enchanted thing. If you were a prepubescent American male in the Twenties, the Thirties or the Forties, chances are you performed the ritual. If you were a little too tall, a little too short, a little too fat, skinny, pimply, an only child, painfully shy, awkward, scared of girls, terrified of bullies, poor at your schoolwork (not because you weren’t bright but because you wouldn’t apply yourself), uncomfortable in large crowds, given to brooding, and totally and overwhelmingly convinced of your personal inadequacy in any situation, then you certainly performed it. Which is to say, you worshiped at the shrine of the pulps.

What were the pulps? Cheaply printed, luridly illustrated, sensationally written magazines of fiction aimed at the lower and lower-middle classes. Were they any good? No. They were great.potent literary drug known to boy, and all of us suffer withdrawal symptoms to this day.

No one ever kicked the pulps cold turkey. They were too powerful an influence. Instead, most of us tried to ease off. Having dreamed of owning complete sets, in mint condition, of all the pulp titles ever published, and having realized perhaps a tenth part of the dream—say, 1500 magazines, or a bedroomful—we suffered that vague disenchantment that is the first sign of approaching maturity (16, going on 17, was usually when it happened) and decided to be sensible.

Accordingly, we stopped buying all the new mags as fast as they could appear, and concentrated instead upon a few indispensable items. Gradually we cut down until we were keeping up the files on only three or four, or possibly five or six, publications. After a few years, when we had left high school, we got the number down to two. Which is where most of us stand today. We don’t read the magazines, of course. But we go on buying them. Not regularly, and not in any sense because we want to, but

Forgotten Books: Down There by David Goodis

2012-01-05T20:17:00.000-08:00

Forgotten Books: Down There by David Goodis from 2010

"Love between the ugly/is the most beautiful love of all."
--Todd Rundgren

I haven't kept up with all the Goodis mania of the past five years or so so forgive me if what I'm about to say has been said not only better but quite often as well.

To me Down There is one of Goodis' finest novels filled with all his strengths and none of his weaknesses. The world here is his natural milieu, the world of America's underclass. Yes, there are working class men and women in Harriet's Hut, the tavern in which a good share of the action happens, but most of the book centers on two people, Eddie Lynn, the strange protagonist and piano player and Lena, the strange somewhat masochistic waitress. They live on pennies.

The story is this: Eddie's brother Turley is a criminal and a criminal being sought by two killers. In defending Turley, allowing him to escape, Eddie himself becomes a target. Not until well into the novel do we learn why the killers want to "talk" to Turley. It takes almost as long to learn Eddie's personal secret, that he was once a Carnegie Hall attraction with a golden future of him. What happened?

Triffault filmed this in the sixties. Much as I like Triffault's films I was disappointed by this one. There is a purity of composition here that Triffault missed entirely. Few crime writers have the skill to vary melodrama and comedy as well as Goodis did. Even fewer have the nerve to extend set pieces the way he does.

For just one example there's a scene where the two killers have captured Eddie and Lena and are taking them to find Turley. The two men, Morris and Feather, begin to argue about Feather's driving. This becomes a mean, bitchy Laurel and Hardy sequence with the heavy threat of violence. This is a kidnapping scene. The comedy isn't foreshadowed. A high risk break in mood. And it works perfectly. And it is three or four times longer than most scenes found in the paperback originals of the time.

The Todd Rundgren quote applies to many of Goodis' lovers and never more so than here. Even by Goodis standards these two people are ugly with failure, with distrust of the world, with contempt for the values most people hold dear and most of all with loathing for what they've become. Goodis breaks your heart with them, especially in the surreal scene in which they are forced to hide out. Lena touches Eddie's arm--one of the first time they have any physical contact of any kind--and it's powerfully erotic because it is charged with desperation and an inkling of trust and forgiveness.

No matter where you look you won't find a novel as unique, and as shrewdly observed (there's a long bar scene that would fit perfectly into The Iceman Cometh) as Down There. I guess it's time I need to get all caught up in this Goodis mania after all.Forgotten Books: Down There by David Goodis
From 2010

"Love between the ugly/is the most beautiful love of all."
--Todd Rundgren

I haven't kept up with all the Goodis mania of the past five years or so so forgive me if what I'm about to say has been said not only better but quite often as well.

To me Down There is one of Goodis' finest novels filled with all his strengths and none of his weaknesses. The world here is his natural milieu, the world of America's underclass. Yes, there are working class men and women in Harriet's Hut, the tavern in which a good share of the action happens, but most of the book centers on two people, Eddie Lynn, the strange protagonist and piano player and Lena, the strange somewhat masochistic waitress. They live on pennies.

The story is this: Eddie's brother Turley is a criminal and a criminal being sought by two killers. In defending Turley, allowing him to escape, Eddie himself becomes a target. Not until well into the novel do we learn why the killers want to "talk" to Turley. It takes almost as long to learn Eddie's personal secret, that he was once a Carnegie Hall attraction with a golden future of him. What happened?

Triffault filmed this in the sixties. Much as I like Triffault's films I was disappointed by this one. There is a purity of composition here that Triffault missed entirely. Few crime writers have the skill to vary melodrama and comedy as well as Goodis did. Even fewer have the nerve to extend set pieces the way he do

For just one example there's a scene where the two killers have captured Eddie and Lena and are taking them to find Turley. The two men, Morris and Feather, begin to argue about Feather's driving. This becomes a mean, bitchy Laurel and Hardy sequence with the heavy threat of violence. This is a kidnapping scene. The comedy isn't foreshadowed. A high risk break in mood. And it works perfectly. And it is three or four times longer than most scenes found in the paperback originals of the time.

The Todd Rundgren quote applies to many of Goodis' lovers and never more so than here. Even by Goodis standards these two people are ugly with failure, with distrust of the world, with contempt for the values most people hold dear and most of all with loathing for what they've become. Goodis breaks your heart with them, especially in the surreal scene in which they are forced to hide out. Lena touches Eddie's arm--one of the first time they have any physical contact of any kind--and it's powerfully erotic because it is charged with desperation and an inkling of trust and forgiveness.

No matter where you look you won't find a novel as unique, and as shrewdly observed (there's a long bar scene that would fit perfectly into The Iceman Cometh) as Down There. I guess it's time I need to get all caught up in this Goodis mania after all.

From Cinema Retro: The Movies Nov 4, 1968

2012-01-04T17:21:00.000-08:00

The following news items were in The Hollywood Reporter on November 4, 1968:

Cloris Leachman and Henry Jones have been cast in 20th Century Fox's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

Neal Hefti has been signed by Howard W. Koch to to arrange and conduct Paramount's On a Clear Day You Can See Forever

You can call Elizabeth Taylor "Myra" for sure unless an unexpected snag develops in the current agreeable negotiations we're not supposed to know anything about...Elizabeth is now Dick Zanuck's number one choice to prove she can play both sexes as his Myra Breckenridge and she is in verbal agreement- no doubt for her usual million bucks plus a piece of the action. (Cinema Retro notes that Raquel Welch ended up playing Myra in the distastrous screen version of the bestseller. Film critic Rex Reed played Myra in her male persona)

In order to allow Burt Lancaster to star in Ross Hunter's Airport at Universal, producer Ira Steiner postoned start of United Artists' Valdez is Coming. Lancaster checks in with writer-director George Seaton on Airport as soon as he winds MGM's The Gypsy Moths.

Now that Dean Martin and Burt Lancaster have been signed for Airport, scribbled on Ross Hunter's memo pad are Natalie Wood, Patricia Neal and Helen Hayes. (Cinema Retro notes that only Hayes was in the film.)

Sammy Davis and Peter Lawford won't be going back to London for their Salt and Pepper sequel. Las Vegas will be the place. (Cinema Retro notes that the sequel, One More Time, directed by Jerry Lewis, was indeed filmed in England.)

Carlo Ponti's Zabriskie Point issued a call for 3000 extras in Las Vegas last week and you should have seen the line that formed! Hear they'll be shooting in Death Valley.

A new direction for mob series? From The Wrap

2012-01-03T18:32:00.000-08:00

Netflix Locks Release Date for Mobster Series 'Lilyhammer'
Published: January 03, 2012 @ 9:59 am

By Kurt Orzeck
Netflix is no longer hunting down a release date for "Lilyhammer," its new original series starring Steven Van Zandt as a mobster in witness protection. The first eight episodes of the comedy-drama's first season will be available for online streaming in the U.S., Canada and Latin America starting Feb. 6.

Netflix had said it was planning a first-quarter rollout for the show, in which the E Street Band guitarist plays a mobster reminiscent of his "Sopranos" character, Silvio Dante.

Also read: Netflix Stock Plunge: Will Reed Hastings’ Hubris Bring Down an Internet Meteor?

The one-hour show -- which is set in Lillehammer, Norway, where New York transplant Frank "The Fixer" Tagliano tries to make a new life for himself -- was developed by and is a production of Norway's Rubicon TV AS. "Lilyhammer" will also air on Norwegian TV, Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos recently told TheWrap.

"It's a very quirky, funny, serious show that I think people are really going to love," he said. "It's a really fun thing to watch, because it is a really familiar character in a totally unfamiliar place. It's [like] 'Northern Exposure' meets 'Sopranos.' "

"I am very careful with my choices and this project was so exciting to me because of the wonderful writing, the rich characters and the fascinating culture of Norway," Van Zandt, who is also executive producing the show, said in a statement. "Netflix is the perfect home for such a unique show."

Among the other original series Netflix has planned is David Fincher's "House of Cards," due in the fourth quarter or early 2013. The company is also planning to relaunch "Arrested Development" next year.

Also read: Ted Sarandos: 'Negative Momentum' at Netflix Will Turn Around in December

"Lilyhammer" was created by Anne Bjornstad and Eilif Skodvin and developed by Rubicon TV AS. It was written by Bjornstad, Skodvin and Van Zandt. Trond Berg Nilsen and Agnete Thuland are producing, while Lasse Hallberg and Van Zandt are executive producing.

Here's the trailer for "Lilyhammer": http://www.thewrap.com/tv/article/netflix-locks-release-date-mobster-series-lilyhammer-34032

Carol Gorman is one lucky lady

2012-01-02T12:59:00.001-08:00

Carol and I celebrated our Thirtieth wedding anniversary today. We kept to our long held tradition of sharing a Spam loaf and listening to me sing "You're Once, Twice, Three Times A lady." My version isn't like Lionel Richie's at all. It's more like Newman's on Seinfeld when his mail truck was on fire. My beautiful Carol rescued and redeemed me and gave me the kind of life I'd always wanted but never had. I sure do love you, honey.

Strange maybe cool film news

2012-01-01T08:43:00.001-08:00

Helen Mirren To Play Alfred Hitchcock's Wife In 'The Making Of Psycho'?

First Posted: 8/12/11 12:33 GMT Updated: 8/12/11 12:37 GMT
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Dame Helen Mirren is apparently in talks to play Alfred Hitchcock's wife in a forthcoming biopic.

The Oscar-winning star could be portraying Alma Reville opposite Sir Anthony Hopkins as the legendary filmmaker in Sacha Gervasi's Alfred Hitchcock And The Making Of Psycho, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

The film would focus on the director's passion for Psycho - despite Paramount's reported disapproval - and how he backed the movie through his own production company, built his own sets and used crew members from his TV show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

It would be the second film about the famed filmmaker, following The Girl starring Toby Jones and Sienna Miller.

The BBC Two drama, to be screened next year, centres on the director's obsessive relationship with leading lady Tippi Hedren.

Alfred Hitchcock And The Making Of Psycho is expected to start shooting next April.

Religious Sex-Toy Sites Vow to Save Marriages

2012-01-01T08:32:00.000-08:00

Ed here: I thought I'd start the New Year on a positive, helpful note. I have to say I find this a much more dignified and honest pitch (seriously) than the scurrilous Christian MIngle with "Find God's match for you" or whatever. If I were a devout Christian I would find the notion of God as a pimp blasphemous.

Huffington Post:

Religious Sex-Toy Sites Vow to Save Marriages
Christian, Jewish, and Muslim entrepreneurs have launched ‘religious’ sex-toy shops online in an effort to improve pious couples’ sex lives—and strengthen the marital bond. Allison Yarrow investigates: what makes a vibrator holy?

by Allison Yarrow | December 30, 2011 4:45 AM EST
Joyce’s sex life can be divided into two acts: before and after the Turbo 8 Accelerator.   

The evangelical Christian from California’s central valley had never had an orgasm alone nor with her husband of 25 years. “I didn’t know I wasn’t having one,” the 59-year-old mother of two told The Daily Beast. Yet after chatting with some church girlfriends, she learned what she was missing. “’All that happens to you?’” she asked. “They looked at me like I was crazy.”
Joyce, who requested that we use only her first name, and her equally devout spouse never would have found the bullet-shaped vibrator or the array of “marital aids” they’ve ordered since, if it wasn’t for the Christian sex toy website Book 22—introduced to her by a friend after their chat. “I’m a Christian, but this is awesome,” she said. “It was like being newlyweds again.”
Photos: 'Holy' Sex Toys

Christian, Jewish and Muslim entrepreneurs have launched ‘religious’ sex toy shops online, in an effort to improve pious couples’ sex lives—and strengthen the marital bond. , Charles Benavidez / Getty Images

Sex and religion have long been perceived to be at odds, with carnal pleasures representing sin more than saintliness. Yet in recent years, a handful of savvy Christian, Jewish and Muslim entrepreneurs have embraced the notion that the two can coexist in a way that jibes with doctrine—and even glorifies traditional values by strengthening marriages.
Enter the religious sex-toy industry, which carefully markets and sells a range of sexual-pleasure products to the faithful. With the voice and disposition of a summer-camp director, Joy Wilson founded Book 22 a decade ago, when she had trouble “getting her body to respond” to her husband after their second child, and her online search for remedies yielded scandalous imagery that offended more than it helped. The pioneering site, named after the Biblical book also known as the Song of Solomon, now faces growing competition from rival vendors including Hooking Up Holy, Intimacy of Eden, and Covenant Spice.

And the industry grew exponentially this fall with the launch of the Orthodox Jewish shop Kosher Sex Toys, and last year with the Muslim vendor El Asira. The sites even enjoy the support of many community leaders. “Religious people do it like everybody else,” said David Ribner, a rabbi and sex therapist based in Israel, who works as a consultant for Kosher Sex Toys. “Why shouldn’t they have access to toys that make their lives more satisfying?”

To be clear, the “religious people” targeted are married, heterosexual religious people; pious sex-toy vendors market their products exclusively to these couples. Unlucky in love and looking for some solitary fun after morning prayers? Look elsewhere.

What happens in the heterosexual marital bed, however, should be nothing short of transcendent, say the site owners, who happily report that their holy books not only permit sexual fulfillment between partners, but require it. “If a man is unable to please a woman in bed, she can divorce him,” said Abdelaziz Aouragh, a 30-year-old Dutch Muslim businessman who founded El Asira—stressing the Islamic belief that “man and woman must reach their peak” during intercourse, and that only then is the “deed complete.”

The burgeoning niche, part of the roughly $15 billion sex-toy industry, reports that business has been steadily growing, with most sites shipping a few hundred orders per month. Clients usually find them through Google, say the owners, or a thoughtful religious leader or astute sex therapist. The vendors use many of the same distributors as secular shops, with most products made in China. Gavriel, a 25-year-old furniture salesman who owns Kosher Sex Toys (and asked that we use only his middle name) stressed in an interview, “There’s nothing wrong with having all the sex you want.”  

To an outsider, visiting the religious sites feels a bit like listening to the bleeped-out version of an explicit hip-hop song: the substance is the same, it’s just missing the X-rated details. None of the sites feature any nudity, instead relying on mannequins to display lingerie. Nor do they feature any sexy language. Kosher Sex Toys, for example, rewrites product descriptions that risk shocking its audience. (The “Butterfly Clitoris Stimulator” becomes, simply, the “Vibrating Stimulator.”) And while they don’t flaunt their holiness, they’ll occasionally rely on religious messaging to sell themselves, or perhaps put potential customers at ease. Book 22, for example, promises to “enhance the intimate life of all God’s children.”

The “piousness” of the products themselves comes down to packaging and presentation. Book 22’s Wilson, who is 22 and lives in central Oregon, repackages plastics in plain boxes and includes additional care instructions. Kosher Sex Toys’s Gavriel also removes items from offensive packaging before shipping. Meanwhile, El Asira’s Aouragh only stocks brands that arrive in tasteful and inoffensive wrappings.

Despite consistencies across the religious sites, the vendors do vary based on doctrine, audience, and each owner’s preferences. Wilson refuses to sell anal devices and condoms, not because she objects, but because her customers do. “The Catholics protested the condoms, and the evangelical Christian community is sensitive about anal sex and play,” she said. “But I’ll special order anything if people ask.”

Aouragh, who rejects the term “sex shop,” preferring to say that he’s in the business of “sexual well-being,” sells only Sharia-compliant items. Meaning: no vibrators, dildos, or drugs that claim to enhance size or use, because these items misinterpret the male form. The homepage for El Asira, which means “The Society” in Arabic, is partitioned by gender, with two ornate mosque doors—and while it carries women's lingerie and a range of massage products, oils and lubricants sell best.

Meanwhile, Kosher Sex Toys’ Gavriel won’t stock male masturbatory aids because, he says, God frowns on wasted potential, according to the Torah. However, since Judaism doesn't prohibit female self-pleasure, he carries myriad trinkets that buzz. He also proudly sells whips and drip candles; performance-enhancing pills and sprays; clear-heeled shoes and thigh-high boots; and a variety of handcuffs, restraints, and tools for cutting them off.

"You can’t buy love and respect between a man and a woman," said Aouragh. "But we’re trying to be creative and clever in selling it."

And at least one customer is grateful for this inventory. Yaakov, a 25-year-old ultra-Orthodox Jewish salesman from New Jersey who preferred not to use his last name, views the site as a godsend. Shortly into his marriage, he discovered that he suffered from premature ejaculation, and his therapist, who works with many Orthodox couples, prescribed him “marital aids,” and directed him to Kosher Sex Toys. Without getting into detail, Yaakov told The Daily Beast simply, “It should be considered a mitzvah to use these things.”   Of course, many religious leaders and worshipers disagree. Rabbi Avi Shafran, who works in communications at an Orthodox communal organization in New York City, said in an email that Kosher Sex Toys is “about as immodest—in the definition of the Jewish religious tradition—as one can get.” He describes Judaism's stance on sexual intimacy as “sublime” and “holy,” but believes toys taint this intention.

Indeed, navigating ingrained religious beliefs, and misconceptions, about sex and pleasure poses a continuous challenge for site owners, who have either taken it upon themselves to advise clients or enlisted the help of experts. Wilson pursued a master's degree in counseling to better help her customers. And Kosher Sex Toys keeps the rabbi and sex therapist Ribner on call as a licensed authority on both sex and scripture. Because of a lack of proper sex education, Ribner said, religious couples often suffer from misguided advice. “One couple was told that if the woman does not like sex, she should take two Tylenol and finish as quickly as possible,” he said. In his work with Kosher Sex Toys, he has advised on topics ranging from the science of erectile dysfunction to the morality of spanking a partner.

Ultimately, across religions, owners share the same lofty goal: to help fellow (married) worshipers find happiness and peace behind closed doors. “You can’t buy love and respect between a man and a woman,” said Aouragh. “But we’re trying to be creative and clever in selling it.”

Tags:

sexual health products,
Lifestyle,
religion
©2011 The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC

Great Duane Swierczynski take on Heist novels from Alan Guthrie's NOIR ORIGINALS

2011-12-31T10:33:00.001-08:00

LET'S BOOK 'EM: A SURE-FIRE SURVEY OF BANK ROBBERY NOVELS FROM 'THIS HERE'S A STICK-UP'

by Duane Swierczynski

Consult this survey of sure-fire bank robbery novels and curl up with a good 211.

"Parker is very popular in prison," wrote 1960s-era bank robber Al Nussbaum. "Despite the fact that almost everyone can find some nit to pick with the criminal methods he describes, the strength of the Parker character overshadows any small flaws." Nussbaum was referring to the hardboiled crime series by Richard Stark (a pseudonym of mystery writer Donald Westlake) featuring a professional heister named Parker—no first name, thankyouverymuch. The Parker novels are crisp, cold, suspenseful—and apparently, inspirational. "I’ve not only read them," wrote Nussbaum, "I’ve even tried to live a couple of them."

Of course, Nussbaum wasn’t your average crime buff—he had a vested interest in the topic. But what might modern-day Nussbaums be reading in the slammer these days?

Blood Money (1927) by Dashiell Hammett. The hero of this short novel—and many other short stories, first published in Black Mask magazine during the 1920s—is a balding, middle aged operative who works for the Continental Detective Agency (think: Pinkerton Agency). In Blood Money—which is actually two related novellas, "The Big Knockover" and "$106,000 Blood Money"—the Continental Op tangles with a criminal mastermind named Popadopalous who organizes an audacious double-bank heist perpetrated by no less than 150 (!) criminals. The $106,000 refers not to the take from the robbery, but rather the bounty on Popadopalous's head. Hammett's seminal hardboiled novel Red Harvest also features a bank robbery as a subplot.

Thieves Like Us (1937) by Edward Anderson. Three escaped convicts resume their careers as bank robbers in Oklahoma, but things become complicated when the youngest bandit, Bowie A. Bowers, falls in love with a cousin of one of the older robbers and decides to make a run at the straight life. Anderson got the idea for the novel after interviewing his cousin Roy Johnson, who was in the Huntsville State Penitentiary for armed robbery; the original title was They’re Thieves Like Us. The novel was later filmed as Nicholas Ray’s They Live By Night (1949) and Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us (1974), starring Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall.

Hell Hath No Fury (1953) by Charles Williams. A drifter named Madox wanders into a small town and finds work at a used car lot, but is just biding his time until he can devise the perfect bank robbery by setting diversion fires all over town. But someone’s already set a fire for Madox: the used car lot owner’s wife. In 1990, Hell was turned into a Dennis Hopper-directed movie called The Hot Spot starring Don Johnson (as Madox), and Virginia Madsen (as the boss’s wife, Dolly Harshaw).

The Big Caper (1955) and Steal Big (1960) by Lionel White. White was the king of pulp caper novels—his racetrack robbery thriller, Clean Break, was the basis for Stanley Kubrick's early film noir The Killing. In The Big Caper, White details a complex bank heist, complete with a safecracker, an arsonist, a pair of tough guys, and a phony husband and wife whose job it is to case the bank. But what happens when that couple decides they'd rather live as man and wife for real than pull the bank job? White described another bank heist gone south five years later in Steal Big, where a hardened con named Donovan puts together what he considers the ultimate bank robbing gang—but all of them turn out to be the ultimate collection of sociopathic losers. White has some fun with in-jokes; one Manhattan black market gun dealer operates under the front, "Kubric Novelty Company."

The Getaway (1958) by Jim Thompson. A bank heist perpetrated by a pair of married ex-cons—Doc and Carol McCoy—goes sour, and suddenly a clean getaway is the only thing that matters. Of course, this is a Jim Thompson novel, and in Thompson’s sordid little corner of the universe, nothing is clean or easy. Still, Doc McCoy has a few clever heist techniques up his sleeve. Explains one thug named Rudy early in the novel: "First, [Doc] looks for a bank that ain’t a member of the Federal Reserve System."

"Oh. Oh, I see," says another criminal. "The Feds don’t come in on the case, right, Rudy?"

"Right," says Rudy. "So anyway, he checks that angle, and then he checks on interest rates. If a bank’s paying little or nothing on savings, y’see, it means they got a lot more dough than they can loan out. So that tips Doc off on the most likely prospects, and all he has to do then is check their statements of condition—you’ve seen them printed in the newspapers, haven’t you?"

for the rest of this vey groovy (that's right--I said groovy) article go here http://www.allanguthrie.co.uk/pages/noir_zine/articles/lets_book_em.php

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYBODY! GOOD HEALTH AND GOOD FORTUNE IN 2012!!!!

Start the New Year right...buy BLINDSIDE!

2011-12-30T13:57:00.001-08:00

"A fascinating glimpse inside a bruising election campaign replete with ambitious staff (and) odious candidates." Booklist

Kirkus

"In such an amoral world, nothing, it seems, can save the Ward campaign—unless of course Dev discovers that his opponent has fallen victim to the same blackmailer too. Perfect.

Another caustic indictment of electoral politics at its most American. No wonder it’s hard to muster much moral outrage when Dev, efficient as ever, identifies the blackmailer and the killer, who act just like everyone else."

Publisher's Weekly:

"Shamus Award–winner Gorman’s absorbing third mystery...(analyzes) the good and bad--mostly bad--in current political campaigns...cynical, sharp witted."

Booklist:

"In the third Dev Conrad mystery, veteran Shamus Award winner Gorman does what he does best. His characters are never less than fully realized, his dialogue crackles, and the plot is clever and credible. Using his past experience as a political speechwriter, Gorman provides a fascinating glimpse inside a bruising election campaign replete with ambitious staff, odious candidates, and idealistic volunteers.

Praise for Dev Conrad STRANGLEHOLD

"The most frightening revelations in `Stranglehold' may be the unseemly truths it seems to tell about the status quo of our electoral process."

Severn House
Price: $19.11 from Amazon

Forgotten Books: Black Friday by David Goodis

2011-12-29T13:38:00.000-08:00

"In fact, the craftsmanship (David Goodis) mastered in all those years of turning out fiction for the pulps was sometimes all that salvaged his books from a morass of aberrant psychology and obsession." --James Sallis

Black Friday is proof absolute of Sallis' comment. It's a crime novel only by default. Here we have the typical Goodis loser loner protagonist, this time named Hart who is on the run from a murder charge. Through a cosmic coincidence he is taken in by a murderous big time burglar named Charley. And his gang.

The story arc deals with a pending huge burglary of fine art and jewelry that Hart will be allowed to join in if he can prove to Charley that he is a "professional"--i.e. a man who never kills for passion but only for money. Loopy at this measure is Goodis makes it go.

But please don't confuse this heist with the book's real import. I remember reading a lot of August Strindberg in my college days as a wanna-be playwright. Goodis has pulled a Strindberg. What a feckless loveless hopeless cast of oddballs and freaks he offers us.

The gang doesn't like Hart so we have scenes of frequent intimidation except for the gangster who starts to like Hart because Hart finds the man's artistic skills impressive (or claims he does), Then there's Freida the obese sad crazed dangerous vamp of Goodisworld. Repellent as he finds her he has to sleep with her because she needs the kind of sex her man Charley can't deliver. He's impotent most of the time. Hart is using her--he literally grimaces when he touches her--but she falls in love with him and Charley figures it out. Charley is not happy.

Then there's Myrna the forlorn faded woman whose brother Paul Hart killed because he seemingly had no choice. She despises Hart at first but eventually they come together. The interplay of all these relationships accounts for seventy-five, maybe eighty per cent of the novel. I couldn't stop flipping the pages though several times I wanted to. This is the only book I've ever read that makes Orwell's Down and Out In Paris and London read like a B'way musical. It's past grim. It's a violent ward of wanton treachery and despair.

It's as close to Grand Guignol as crime fiction gets.

CHARLES BECKMAN, HONKY-TONK GIRL, AND I by Gary Lovisi

2011-12-28T08:40:00.001-08:00

CHARLES BECKMAN, HONKY-TONK GIRL, AND I
by Gary Lovisi

One of the great things about publishing Paperback Parade, my magazine about collectable paperbacks and paperback publishing is all the wonderful articles and interviews it contains with so many artists and authors. My writers and I do a lot of research to find vintage era artists and authors, but sometimes they find me. Like when I received an email from Patti Boeckman, the wife of legendry pulp writer and jazz musician Charles Boeckman, Jr., who wrote under the name Charles Beckman, Jr.

When Patti asked me in her email if I knew who her husband was, I just blushed with joy and told her -- do I! Of course I recognized his name! In fact, I had many of his stories and books in my collection. From then on I had many back and forth emails with Charles, now 92. I eventually interveiwed him for Paperback Parade #77 and we became fast friends. He's a fine geltleman, a master jazz muscian for over 6 decades and a vintage era pulpster who has been writing for over half a century. The issue also featured rare excerpts from letters to him from his pulp editors of the 1940s, all about him and his work that open a fascinating window into the pulp writing business of that era. Charles wrote westerns for the 1940s pulps, crime stories for the 1950s digest mags and one early novel from 1953, Honky-Tonk Girl, which I feel is a minor hard crime and noir masterpiece, a classic crime novel.

Honky-Tonk Girl tells the tough story of Jazz musician Johnny Nickles and the members of his band adrift in a crooked town where every hand is played against him and his band. Beckman gives us great characters all awash in his authentic jazz background -- he is after all a longtime jazzman and knows all the riffs -- then he mixes in murder, mystery, and not one, but 3 femme fatales! It's a furiously churning noir soup. A very cool and fun novel to read. After I read it I immediately knew this was a book that was ripe for reprinting and deserved a new edition so it could be enjoyed by today's noir and crime fan audience.

Now, through the graces of Robert Reginald at Borgo Press / Wildside Books, $18.00 www.wildsidebooks.com) Honky-Tonk Girl has been reprinted in a new and attractive trade paperback. This is the first and only edition in over 60 years! This new Borgo Press edition features my introduction and the classic bad-gal sexy cover art from the original rare Falcon Books digest paperback edition. That original digest is rare today and sells for a hundred bucks or more, but this new Borgo edition really hits the mark and brings back to life a very underrated crime noir novel at a very affordable price.

Anyone interested in Honky-Tonk Girl can order a copy through Wildside Press. If you are interested in vintage and collectable paperbacks, I know you will get a kick out of my magazine Paperback Parade; a 4-issue subscription is just $35 in the US. You can find out more at my website www.gryphonbooks.com.

END

Very Cool Books From The Pulps; Black Dog Books

2011-12-27T13:49:00.000-08:00

Yes there actually were pulp writers other than Hammett, Chandler Gardner worth reading and studying. Tom Roberts Roberts at Black Dogs Books has heroically set about demonstrating that with his line of sturdy, attractive trade paperbacks that highlight some of the lesser known scribes who filled the pages of pulps major and minor.

BODYGUARD AND OTHER STORIES

Roger Torrey isn't somebody I knew much about. I'd read a few of his stories but hadn't been impressed enough to hunt more down. My loss. In this collection of hardboiled crime stories we find a storyteller whose tales go down as smoothly as a chocolate malt. He knew how to keep excitement at a high pitch but what keeps his tales memorable is a mordancy you don't find in a lot of routine pulp crime. There's a grittiness and sense of doom in these pieces that make you realize you're reading about real human beings instead of the usual stereotypes (though you'll find those here too).

The biographical piece by Ron Goulart is excellent and gives amply motive for the mordancy I mentioned. Torrey died whenhe was not quite forty. He never met a bottle he didn't like.

DEAD MAN'S BRAND AND OTHER STORIES

As readers of this blog know, Norbert Davis is my favorite pulp writer. Not only was he masterful at plot and pace his sly and wry take on humanity oddly enough gave his stories a reality his more melodramatic peers rarely equaled. As a fan of forty years, I've read as much of his crime fiction as I could find. I learned through various biographical studies that Davis had also written for western pulps but except for a few odd samples here and there I'd never read any.

Once again Tom Roberts and Black Dog Books have rescued a major writer's lesser known work and published it in an attractive durable edition complete with one of Bill Pronzini's unequaled portraits of a pulp writer.

What sets Davis' western fiction apart from standard fair is once again his take on humanity. I recall reading a long time ago a criticism of his work that claimed his stories suffered because of his "odd" characters. But that's what makes the stories work. All the familiar tropes of the western are here--though I think Davis brought not only action but a real western color to his stories; he'd done his homework--but also some of his usual insights into people who are just a wee bit different from standard pulp types.

As with the Torrey, I had a great time reading this collection and I want to tip my hat to Tim Roberts and all the fine salvage work Black Dog Books is doing.

Dennis Hopper vs. Don Johnson

2011-12-26T10:39:00.000-08:00

Here's a movie note from Wikipedia about The Hot Spot as directed by Dennis Hopper. Imagine Mitchum in the lead. Wow. Don Johnson never did much for me though I thought he did a good job here.

"Charles Williams wrote a screenplay version of his own novel with Nona Tyson in 1962.[1] It was intended for Robert Mitchum. Many years later, Dennis Hopper found the script and updated it.[1] The director described the film as "Last Tango in Texas. Real hot, steamy stuff".[2] A bedroom scene originally called for Madsen to appear naked, but she decided to put on a negligee because she felt that, "Not only was the nudity weak storywise, but it didn't let the audience undress her".[3] Hopper later admitted that Madsen was right.[3] The director gave his impressions of working with Johnson: "He wasn't that bad. He has a lot of people with him. He came on to this film with two bodyguards, a cook, a trainer, ah let's see, a helicopter pilot he comes to and from the set in a helicopter, very glamorous let's see, two drivers, a secretary, and, oh yes, his own hair person, his own make-up person, his own wardrobe person. So when he walks to the set he has five people with him".[4] Johnson found Hopper's approach to filmmaking "a little disappointing, I gotta tell you".[5] Hopper shot the film in Texas during what he described as the "hottest, steamiest weather you could imagine".[6]"

Eastwood-Tarantino-Towne: Sarris: Boetticher

2011-12-25T19:27:00.000-08:00

Thanks to a tip from my cousin I ordered the Netflix version of the Budd Boetticher-Randolph Scott film The Tall T which has, as one of its features, the documentary about Budd Boetticher's life and career. With commentary by the likes of Clint Eastwood, Quentin Tarantino, Paul Schrader, Peter Bogdonovich, Taylor Hackford and and Andrew Sarris. A fascinating life and a fascinating career. The surprise for me was Clint Eastwood--smart, affable, wry and eager to tell some really good Hwood stories, especially about the evolution of Two Mules for Sister Sara. I want to start seeing some of his movies again. I was a big fan for a long time. Anyway if you're a film fan this is an important look at Hwood.

John Fante

2011-12-24T14:51:00.001-08:00

Ed here: I reread Ask The Dust this week and it had its usual narcotic effect on me. Strange that in the next novel I read, David Goodis' Black Friday, I saw in the story and heard in the language some of the darkest moments of Fante's novel. If you haven't read it--or read the Goodis for that matter--do so.

Happy Holidays everybody!

Discovering John Fante FROM THE GUARDIAN UK From 2010

As in life, he seems forever on the brink of eclipse, so finding his work comes as a revelation to successive generations of readers. How did you find him?

I came upon John Fante's Ask the Dust by the window on the first floor of Waterstone's Piccadilly. It wasn't a very cool way to discover him – he was there as part of a half-table promotion on cult writers and renegades, alongside James Joyce, Richard Brautigan, William Burroughs and Irvine Welsh – but it still felt like an epiphany.

"Los Angeles, give me some of you!" pleads aspiring writer Arturo Bandini in the opening chapter. "Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town …"

As I read I forgot to breathe. Fante's sentences ran into a dark wilderness; a winded substratum of 30s LA. I felt dared and defiled and improved; like I'd joined a secret club consisting of everyone in the universe who wants to write:

"Only two words written over and over across the page, up and down, the same words: palm tree, palm tree, palm tree, a battle to the death between the palm tree and me, and the palm tree won: see it out there swaying in the blue air, creaking sweetly in the blue air."

The frankness, the spare and open description, was shaming and expansive all at once. I couldn't believe no one had ever told me that Holden Caulfield, that neurotic miracle, had this wild older brother:

"They say it's a dollar, they say it's two dollars in the swell places, but down on the Plaza it's a dollar; swell, only you haven't got a dollar, and another thing, you coward, even if you had a dollar you wouldn't go, because you had a chance to go once in Denver and you didn't."

Today, at 11am the Los Angeles Visionaries Association invites you to the corner of 5th & Grand, next to the library in downtown LA. This is the library where Charles Bukowski took Ask the Dust back to his desk "like a man who had found gold in the city dump". He spent years attempting to rescue Fante, whom he called "a God" of energy and form, but Fante remained an outsider, buried under Raymond Chandler, then Hollywood, then Depression-era reading lists partial to Steinbeck and Harper Lee. Now, though, on the 101st anniversary of his birth, the city is renaming that intersection John Fante Square.

Like his Square, Fante-the-author is generally happened upon; never really finding his own audience but always surviving another curve. His writing, though, is so clean and clear that it speaks plainly and entirely for itself. "The book," writes Bukowski, "is yours".

So let's get this 101st birthday party started. How did you discover John Fante?

Amazon Deal of the Day!

2011-12-23T14:20:00.001-08:00

Amazon Deal of the Day!
Amazon.com: The Kindle Daily Deal: Kindle Daily Deal: "The Dead Man" Books 1-5

Today only, the first five books in Lee Goldberg and William Rabkin's "Dead Man" series--original short novels that blend the horror of Stephen King with the action of classic adventure novels--are just $0.99 each (67% off yesterday's price).
Yesterday's Price: $2.99
Today's Discount: $2.00

Kindle Daily Deal Price: $0.99 (67% off)

HALO FOR HIRE: THE COMPLETE PAUL PINE by Howard Browne

2011-12-23T08:32:00.000-08:00

HALO FOR HIRE: THE COMPLETE PAUL PINE by Howard Browne

Not much to add on this title at the moment, except to say that work progresses and we thought we'd give you a look back at some of the covers to the original presentation of the "Paul Pine" stories by Howard Browne (aka John Evans):

• HALO IN BLOOD
• HALO FOR SATAN
• HALO IN BRASS
• "So Dark for April" from MANHUNT
• THE TASTE OF ASHES
• "The Paper Gun"

Was Robert Ludlum Murdered?

2011-12-22T14:37:00.000-08:00

FROM THE HUFFINGTON POST

December 22, 2011

Kenneth Michael Kearns, M.D.Gynecologic Oncologist
GET UPDATES FROM KENNETH MICHAEL KEARNS, M.D.

L
Was Bourne Identity Author Robert Ludlum Murdered?
Posted: 12/19/11 02:11 PM ET

A spectacular headline in one London daily tabloid read, "Did Robert Ludlum's Gold-Digging wife murder him?" And another UK paper ran a similar story with a photo of Ludlum burning alive in his recliner. That's the sensational reaction I got earlier this year when I introduced my book, "The Ludlum Identity." I'm the nephew of Robert Ludlum, one of the most successful writers of the 20th century. A few years before his death in 2001, I made a promise to him to write his biography. But after his death, all sorts of things--including my medical practice--prevented me from starting my research in earnest. When I did, my book project quickly turned into more of a murder investigation worthy of my uncle's most riviting storylines.

My mother's sister was Robert's first wife and the love of his life. Shortly after his untimely death, Uncle Robert remarried and his life turned bad. At first, I did not pay much attention to this aspect of his life. There was so much more color and pizzazz in the life of this famous spy novelist and actor; enough action to keep readers turning pages to keep pace with all his hard living lifestyle, the international intrigue, the intelligence agency connection and the pain and sacrifice during his early years.

His was a life of unimaginable achievement and adventure. As an adopted child, Robert Ludlum explored the limits of reasonable behavior and parental tolerance. After a seemingly endless period of rowdy behavior, this future superstar settled down at the famed Connecticut prep-school, Cheshire Academy, and began to establish himself as a credible student of the arts as well as exceptional athlete. He entered the Marines after graduation and saw combat in the South Pacific. Returning from war, he attended Wesleyan College in Connecticut, where he focused on theatre and met his future wife. They got married, worked in television and theatre together and opened a successful playhouse in northern New Jersey.

Life was good, but at age 40 Robert walked away from his acting, advertising voice-over and producing career to devote all of his time to writing. That was a big gamble, but it paid off handsomely. His first book was a best seller, as were all that followed. More than a half billion copies of his fast-paced novels, which have been translated into 32 languages, were sold around the world. But what I found was that like so many of his works, in the final chapter of his life, Robert Ludlum was caught in a trap as deadly as any faced by his character Jason Bourne. The more I learned about the horrific last days of Robert Ludlum's life, the more I realized I wasn't writing a biography, I was conducting a criminal investigation. Robert Ludlum was found burning alive in his recliner one evening and the only person home at the time was Robert's second wife, Karen. She was unscathed and uncooperative with authorities. I needed to find out more.

It was the acclaimed defense attorney Jim Oliver, a bulldog of a litigator, who brought the "team" together to find out how Robert Ludlum died in his Florida home. Oliver introduced me to two of the top services in the nation, CJM Associates and Sutton Associates. These private investigators and forensic specialists looked into the case and agreed to come on board.

First I met Cynthia Michaud, a dead ringer for a James Bond girl from one of Ian Flemings' famous novels. She was blond, beautiful, highly intelligent, exceptionally well trained and deadly, I am sure. With her disarmingly sexy smile and Hollywood hourglass figure, I was captivated. This first meeting took place on a cold November day a year ago and was only an introduction to what lay ahead.

I was coming off a flight from JFK to LAX when my cell phone rang. "Doctor Kearns, this is Mike. I'm in charge of the Western States and I'd like to meet you at your office as soon as possible." The commanding, authoritative, yet kind voice on the line belonged to one of the former decorated FBI agents who had been assigned to this case.

Many days of testimony followed and Mike ultimately became a very close friend. I never saw Mike's car. He came to the office but I never knew how he got there. I did not ask. As it turned out, Mike was a veteran of some of the most sensational domestic crimes in America and it took me a few sessions before I really relaxed. I became "Kenny." It was, "So, Kenny, who was in the room when the second will was signed?" or "Kenny, tell me about the housekeeper and the nurse," and "Tell me every detail," "Try to remember," "Sleep on it," "Call me immediately if you think of something you might have missed".

I also was introduced to the Boss, the real capo di tuti capi, Mr. James F. Murphy, who was one of the nation's most decorated and proclaimed FBI Agents. I would come to find out that he was also a real- life hero as portrayed in the finale of the Al Pacino film, "Dog Day Afternoon." Jim was the real undercover agent who shot and killed a psychopathic bank robber and kidnapper at point blank range. Jim had saved the lives of eight people.

The Ludlum affair was right up Jim's alley. There was money, greed, sex, power and unexplained death. Murphy focused on the players and, as I would come to find out, every person in Robert Ludlum's life would be scrutinized.

Before hiring these professionals, I had found that key witnesses to Robert Ludlum's untimely death and a prior attempt on his life, would not talk. The pros took care of this problem. Six former FBI Agents conducted interviews in multiple states over a five month period, and the plot thickened. Robert's younger son Jonathan, who was in the process of investigating his father's death as well as beginning a challenge to the Ludlum Estate, disappeared two years ago and was ultimately found dead in his home. No one had heard from him for over a month. Karen Ludlum, Robert's second wife and the only witness to the event that took his life, died last year. The cause of death was listed as "suicide."

There currently is ongoing dialogue with police authorities and one coroner. True to the promise I made to Uncle Robert, I'm going to finish this story.

Correction: The character "Jason Bourne"'s name was originally misspelled. This has been corrected.

Forgotten Books: ON THE LOOSE Andrew Coburn

2011-12-22T13:23:00.000-08:00

ON THE LOOSE
Andrew Coburn

I've been saying for years that the single most neglected major crime fiction writer in the United States is Andrew Coburn. And here he is with a new novel to prove me right again.

I've spent two days trying to think of a tidy way to describe On The Loose (Leisure,$6.99) and thus far my best shot is to imagine a collaboration between John D. MacDonald Ruth Rendell. MacDonald for the page-turning excitement of following the most unique serial killer since The Bad Seed and Rendell for some of the quirkiest characters outside several of her own masterpieces.

Coburn is a profoundly American writer as he demonstrates in this novel that spans slightly more than a decade in the life of a small New England town. The storyline never lets you go. The murders are committed by one of the mostly stunningly enigmatic killers in mystery fiction. He is barely ten the first time he strikes. He is not much older the second time. The killings are what propel the storyline.

But Coburn's sense of the town and the lives of his people are what give the book the depth and range of a true novel. He does what Hitchcock did in Shadow of a Doubt--takes a story that has a death-grip on its readers and then walk thems around the lives and town that surround the killer. The fading beauty lost to excess weight and clinical depression; the police chief who believes he is beyond passion only to find it again and risk being crushed by it; the man dying of AIDs and the woman who befriends him; the divide between rich and poor that belittles both sides.

And the writing itself. Coburn plays all the instruments in the orchestra for this book which is, by turns, lyrical, funny, solemn, sarcastic, violent, terrifying and human in a way page-turners rarely are.

It's time for Andrew Coburn to be recognized for the master stylist and storyteller extraordinaire he has been for more than two decades now. On The Run--and everybody in the book really is running from something--proves that he gets better with each new novel.

W.R. Burnett

2011-12-21T13:41:00.000-08:00

SEPTEMBER 15, 2007
W.R. Burnett
Here, from the Turner Classic Movie site, is a biography of the much underrated writer:

Biography

A highly-prolific author whose novels and short stories provided the basis for numerous films ranging from the gangster classic "Little Caesar" (1930) to the Western "Dark Command" (1940), W R Burnett also adapted his own work for film (e.g., "High Sierra" 1941) and wrote original screenplays, both alone and in collaboration (e.g., "This Gun for Hire" 1942, "The Great Escape" 1963).

A former government statistician, Burnett settled in Chicago at the height of Prohibition and penned his first novel "Little Caesar" in 1929. A veiled study of the rise and fall of a mobster who bore a passing resemblance to Al Capone, the novel was an success as was the screen version starring Edward G Robinson. Books and stories with Burnett's by-line were almost a guaranteed sale to Hollywood (not unlike John Grisham and Stephen King in the late 20th Century), and eventually the writer turned to penning his own scripts for Tinseltown. Not only were the villains in Burnett novels revealed in full human texture--something little seen in melodramas--but also the characters of the cops and other urban authority figures were often idiosyncratic and full-bodied, His storytelling practically created the Warner Bros. gangster cycle of the 1930s, reaching a high point with his contributions to the dialogue of "Scarface" (1932). "High Sierra" (1941), adapted from his own novel, offered Humphrey Bogart one of his signature villains and "This Gun for Hire" (1942) brought Alan Ladd to the forefront as a hit man seeking revenge.

With the advent of World War II, gangster films lessened in popularity so Burnett turned to writing or co-writing dramas about men in combat situations. He and co-writer Frank Butler shared an Academy Award nomination for their original screenplay of "Wake Island" (1942), a gripping drama about American troops fighting to maintain control of the titular Pacific island at the outbreak of WWII. He went on to collaborate on "Crash Dive" and "Action in the North Atlantic" (both 1943), among others. Following the war, Burnett turned to Westerns (e.g., "San Antonio" 1946; "Belle Starr's Daughter" 1948) and then returned to form with the film noir "The Racket" (1951). He added a dose of humor to the action genre with "Sergeants Three" (1962), a loose remake of "Gunga Din" with Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr before penning his final credited screenplay, 1963's tense "The Great Escape", based on the largest escape of Allied POWs in World War II and featuring a star-making turn by Steve McQueen.

Clint Eastwood's Family to Star in Bunim/Murray Reality Show; HBO Cancels 3 Shows

2011-12-19T15:08:00.001-08:00

Cinema Retro: Clint Eastwood's Family to Star in Bunim/Murray Reality Show

Keeping Up With The Eastwoods? Believe it: Bunim/Murray productions, creators of reality sensations The Kardashians and "The Real World," are taking Clint Eastwood's family and turning them into the next big thing with a new E! reality show.

According to TMZ, the show will follow the life of Eastwood's wife Dina, the couple's 15-year-old daughter Morgan, and Eastwood's 18-year-old daughter Francesca Fisher-Eastwood from his relationship with actress Frances Fisher. The point, it seems, is to peek inside the lives of "Hollywood royalty," and the show's focus will mainly be on Francesca's aspirations to become an actress.

But if you're imagining Eastwood as the next Bruce Jenner, think again. Busy basking in his post "J. Edgar" glory and gearing up to star as a nearly-blind sports scout in the upcoming"Trouble with the Curve", Eastwood is only slated to make a few cameos on the still untitled show.

The series is set to air in early 2012. For more, click over to TMZ.
=========================================== HBO

Ed here: Nerts. I really liked Bored to Death and to a lesser degree Hung.

FROM HUFFINGTON POST

HBO Cancels 'Hung,' 'Bored To Death' And 'How To Make It In America,' Renews 'Enlightened'

HBO has canceled three of its shows: "Hung," "How to Make it in America" and "Bored to Death," Variety was the first to report. But the primetime cable network did spare one series. According to TVLine, the struggling "Enlightened" was renewed.

"Hung," which just ended its third season, starred Thomas Jane as a gym teacher-turned male hooker. Jane Adams, Anne Heche and Rebecca Creskoff also starred. The Season 3 finale aired on Dec. 4 and pulled in under 1 million viewers.

The Bryan Greenberg-fronted "How to Make it in America," about breaking into New York City's fashion scene, just ended its second season. The show, which also starred Lake Bell and Victor Rasuk, brought in under 600,000 for its Season 2 finale.

"Bored to Death" wrapped its third season in late November. The show starred Jason Schwartzman as a fictional Jonathan Ames as well as Ted Danson and Zach Galifianakis. Despite its impressive cast, "Bored to Death" only had 200,000 viewers tune into the Season 3 finale last month.

The survivor, "Enlightened," starring Laura Dern, will return for a second season. The show recently picked up several Golden Globe nominations, including one for Best Comedy.

RELATED ON HUFFPOST:

James Franco; Jerry Lewis

2011-12-19T13:04:00.000-08:00

Did James Franco Get an NYU Prof Fired?
Ed here: Obviously I have no idea if the following is true. But I do know for sure that a little of James Franco goes a loooooong way. This fromNew York Magazine's website.

By Noreen Malone

James Franco.

José Angel Santana, a 58-year-old former professor at NYU's Tisch school, alleges he lost his job because of the grade he gave master's student James Franco — a D. Franco showed up to just two of the semester's fourteen classes, says Santana (an attendance record that would go a long way toward explaining how Franco is able to juggle so many obligations). Franco, complaining publicly about the poor mark last year, said "I did well in everything else,” which is basically the professor's point. Santana, who is suing the school, also suggested that other professors gave Franco good grades partly as "payback"; the actor hired professor Jay Anania to write and direct the film William Vincent. The lawsuit also points out that the graduate film department's chairman made a cameo in a Franco film. The school didn't reply to the Post for comment. It all sort of sounds like a meta-meditation on the power and portrayal of celebrity — are we sure this wasn't Franco's final academic project?

---------------------Jerry Lewis

As many of you know by now, I'm not a big fan of Jerry Lewis' work. I'm wiling to admit it's me. I watched part of Nutty Professor the other night and I didn't even care much for that. Clever, yes, but no resonance beyond that. (I know I'll get letters). Encore is now running a documentary/tribute and predictably the reviews have broken down into the fans and the haters. Oh, yes, people really HATE Jerry Lewis, actor and man both. I don't know if you'll find the excerpt from Mark Evanier's review even-handed but I do. Evanier knows more about show business than anybody I've ever read and he's spent decades producing TV shows, cartoon shows, writing for TV, writing for comic books, and most recently doing the definitive book on Jack Kirby. As I've said before I find him amazingly intelligent, humane and funny as hell. Here's his take on the Encore show:

Mark Evanier:

I like Jerry Lewis. I like him enough that when he made his Broadway debut in Damn Yankees, my friend Paul Dini and I flew back just to be in the audience for opening night.

(more)

I like the guy but to be a Jerry Lewis fan is to cringe often at the man's excesses, ramblings, self-serving statements, angry lash-outs at those he thinks have wronged him, etc. On that great new boxed DVD set of Laurel and Hardy films (this one), he babbles on about their history, getting it all wrong, apparently unaware that there are in this world people who actually know the truth. If someone had made so many errors telling the story of Martin and Lewis, he'd have been furious...but he just goes on and on doing this stuff. Given that he's 85, you might excuse it because of age. Trouble is, he's been like this all his life.

Jerry Lewis: Method to the Madness is the new two-hour documentary that's now playing on the Encore channel. What's wrong with it is summarized in the second on-screen title card at the end — an Executive Producer credit for Jerry Lewis. I don't know how much he actually did on it or what kind of freedom filmmaker Gregg Barson had, but you wish someone could or would tell Jerry, "Uh, it isn't a great idea to announce you were the top guy in charge of an overexcessive tribute to yourself."

Not only that but it's a tribute that so deifies its subject that the mortal can't measure up to the hype. The clips of his work do not demonstrate the brilliance described by the talking heads that range from Jerry Seinfeld's to Carol Burnett's. There may be no clips in the world by anyone that would. I can well imagine younger folks, unfamiliar with Lewis's body of work, watching this, hearing of his comedic genius...and then wondering what's so spectacular about wedging the entire mouth of a drinking glass in your mouth for half a century. All the material of Lewis on-stage in his eighties is a little sad in that way.

for all of it go here--well worth reading: http://www.newsfromme.com/

7 Surprise Twists I’d Rather Live Without

2011-12-18T13:29:00.000-08:00

FROM BOOK RIOT
7 Surprise Twists I’d Rather Live Without [or The Airing of Grievances, Literary Style]
Rebecca Joines Schinsky , posted on December 14, 2011 in Humor, Opinion

Dear Elizabeth Kostova: this would have been a better reveal.
A truly surprising surprise twist—the kind that makes you gasp or clutch your pearls or reexamine everything you thought you knew about a book—is a thing of beauty, especially when you’re the kind of reader for whom suspending disbelief doesn’t come so naturally. (Who’s with me?)

When it works, I can love it, but in general, I am not a fan of the surprise twist, be it a reversal at the ending or a mid-plot change-up. It often seems lazy, a “give ‘em the old razzle-dazzle” approach to distracting readers from a lack of substance, and when done poorly, it can ruin a book for me. And let’s be honest, there are some surprise twist conceits so played out and/or impossible to pull off that no writer should use them again, ever. I propose we start with these. Be warned: I’m spoiling the surprises in half a dozen books here.

1. The Parent Switcheroo – This one boils down to: if I have to read one more story in which it turns out that the sister/aunt/close-family-friend is actually the main character’s mother, I’m going to flip a biscuit. That’s Southern for “rethink that whole ‘book burning is bad’ policy.”

2. The “Dracula lives!”–Oh, Elizabeth Kostova. I wanted to love The Historian. Really, I did. It has the story-within-a-story thing that happens to be one of my personal literary kryptonites AND an epistolary structure that pressed a bunch of my happy buttons. Aside from the fact that it was a couple hundred pages too long, it was a good idea. But then it turns out that not only is Dracula really still alive, he’s also ridiculously easy to kill? I was born at night, but not last night.

3. The “They were lovers!”—Favored by soap operas the world over, this surprise inevitably cheapens a story. I’ve encountered it several times, but Naseem Rakha’s The Crying Tree, which had a lot going for it at the start, is the most recent offender I’ve found. It’s about a couple whose son was killed several years prior, and the mother reaches out to her son’s convicted killer as his execution date approaches. They forge a relationship that teaches them both about healing and forgiveness, and Rakha manages to address questions about the morality of capital punishment without being preachy. No easy feat, that.

The book is a little heavy handed but generally quite fine, and THEN! Then it goes off the rails when we find out that the killer was actually the son’s lover and (double surprise!) the son was secretly gay. This particular use of the “They Were Lovers!” twist is even more egregious because Rakha telegraphs it at least a hundred pages before it is revealed. And I don’t think I only picked up on that because I paid a lot of attention to the lessons about foreshadowing in high school. It was so completely unnecessary and maddening that it’s now the only thing I really recall about this book, and that’s too bad, mmkay.

for the rest go here:http://bookriot.com/2011/12/14/7-surprise-twists-id-rather-live-without-or-the-airing-of-grievances-literary-style/

Had To Happen: Don’t Support Your Local Bookseller

2011-12-17T10:39:00.000-08:00

Ed here: There's always a contrarian somewhere. In the past months there's been a glut of pieces about supporting your local bookstores, which I'm all in favor of. Now here's a piece that claims we shouldn't. Had to happen.

Don’t Support Your Local Bookseller
Buying books on Amazon is better for authors, better for the economy, and better for you.
By Farhad Manjoo|Posted Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2011, at 6:50 PM ET

The independent bookstore is not the last stronghold of literary culture you think it is

Amazon just did a boneheaded thing, and it deserves all the scorn you want to heap on it. Last week, the company offered people cash in exchange for going into retail stores and scanning items using the company’s Price Check smartphone app. If you scanned a product and then purchased it from Amazon rather than the shop you were standing in, Amazon would give you a 5 percent discount on the sale. (Disclosure: Slate is an Amazon affiliate; when you click on an Amazon link from Slate, the magazine gets a cut of the proceeds from whatever you buy.)

I’m generally a fan of price comparison—like everyone else, I hate spending more than I should—but I can understand physical retailers’ fear of the practice becoming widespread. When you walk into Best Buy and get a salesperson to spend 10 minutes showing you a television, then leave empty-handed so you can buy the TV for less on Amazon, you’ve just turned Best Buy into Jeff Bezos’ chump. The Price Check promotion (which lasted only one day) was, like Amazon’s aggressive efforts to dodge the collection of sales tax, a brazen attempt to crush local retailers, and I (as did many others) found it distasteful. Sure, I’m a fan of Amazon and devote a substantial portion of my income to its coffers—but does it have to be so wantonly callous about destroying its competitors?
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All of which is to say that I was primed to nod in vigorous agreement when I saw novelist Richard Russo’s New York Times op-ed taking on Amazon’s thuggish ways. But as I waded into Russo’s piece—which was widely passed around on Tuesday—I realized that he’d made a critical and common mistake in his argument. Rather than focus on the ways that Amazon’s promotion would harm businesses whose demise might actually be a cause for alarm (like a big-box electronics store that hires hundreds of local residents), Russo hangs his tirade on some of the least efficient, least user-friendly, and most mistakenly mythologized local establishments you can find: independent bookstores. Russo and his novelist friends take for granted that sustaining these cultish, moldering institutions is the only way to foster a “real-life literary culture,” as writer Tom Perrotta puts it. Russo claims that Amazon, unlike the bookstore down the street, “doesn’t care about the larger bookselling universe” and has no interest in fostering “literary culture.”

for the rest go here: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/12/independent_bookstores_vs_amazon_buying_books_online_is_better_for_authors_better_for_the_economy_and_better_for_you_.html

Robert J. Randisi; Christopher Hitchens

2011-12-16T13:36:00.000-08:00

From Robert J. Randisi: Hard on the heels of the newly reissued Gunsmith #'s 1 & 2 comes TRACKER #1: THE WINNING HAND and ANGEL EYES #1: THE MIRACLE OF REVENGE. These series appeared in the 80's under the pseudonyms "Tom Cutter" and "W.B. Longely" but are now being published by Speaking Volumes LLC under the Randisi name, with kick-ass covers! Available in POD paper and Ebook, and soon to be on Audio. Order from the Speaking Volumes LLC website, or Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com.

------------------CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

I have nothing original or important to say about Christopher Hitchens. I do believe he was a fine teacher for a mediocore student of history and politics like me. Even when I disagreed with him I tried to stay calm enough question my own take on a subject. He was a true intellectual dedicated to making his arguments accessible to people willing to learn and to study. He could be as brilliant about ancient politics as our own; and blistering about people he often admired but felt needed a drubbing.

I mentioned staying calm while disagreeing with him. There were two times I couldn't. I thought his book about Mother Theresa was one of the silliest attacks I've ever read. Yes she dealt with dictators to secure food and medicine for the people she served and yes she tried to convert her people into Catholics with daily prayer and the usual conversion drill. I think it was Howard Fineman (I may be wrong) who said of all the terrible despots on the planet you go after Mother Theresa?

The other time was when he angrily advocated for our invasion of Iraq. I stopped reading him for awhile because of that. Throwing in with Cheney-Wolfowitz-Addison was too much for me. Of course Andrew Sullivan pushed for the invasion, too. They often appeared together on the tube. Hitchens would make nasty veiled comments about Sullivan's being gay which I thought was strange because Hitchens (before he discovered women) had several prominent gay affairs himself. At that time I couldn't stand either of them. Sullivan later recanted on the war; Hitchens never did.

Hitchens was an iconolclast and a brave one. Amid all the furor about water boarding Hitchens allowed himself to be water boarded and came away angrily disputing Bush that it wasn't torture. He was also among the first to seriously take on Obama at the time (in Jon Stewart's words) when everybody still thought "he was our boyfriend." He was prescient enough to see that Obama would call on the same Harvard crowd that had helped destroy our economy to help destroy it even further.

When he first began writing about the evils of religion I agreed with him. We have come in this country to believe that religion (Christian, of course) should be an integral part of our politics. I despise this idea. I'm so fucking sick of Believers quoting the Bible to me I now just simply say "We can't talk. You have all the answers." I agree with Hitchens. It's a book of fables reflecting the prejudices of the tribal communities responsible for writing it. I see all these Family Values crackpots on TV and I always wonder how much money they're making for this cynical gig. Like "The Catholic League" which has six (six!) members.

However.

Like Bill Maher I think Hitchens dined out too long on this particular rant. I'm now as sick of the Atheists as I am the Believers.
The Atheists say that an Agnostic is really an Atheist and the Believers say the same thing. I disagree. I'm an Agnostic--I just don't know. I also think that despite the evils of religion (just about any religion) that it does offer its adherents comfort and succor and community. Which used properly--as is the case with most mainstream religions (except for when the Catholic Bishops get involved)--is a good thing.

I realize that my religious rant here was something of a side trail but I must have seen Hitchens on the tube a dozen times arguing about Belief. This was my post game response. It's a disagreement and a minor one compared to the pleasure and insight Hitchens gave me for fifteen years. His prose was electric and his thinking often startling. He was generally on the side of the underdog and treated many media-sanctified overlords with contempt. His scathing take downs were read around the world.

He was my brother in incurable cancer. I've been much luckier than Hitchens. Most of the people with multiple myeloma die in the first three years. I'm entering my tenth year. And Hitchens suffered. It's a terrible way to go, esophogeal cancer. I remember his responses to people who'd write and plead with him to convert to Christianity. He was sweet but firm in his response. He appreciated their well wishing but there would be no deathbed conversion.

I'm not conveying here the sheer genius of the man and how extraordinarily important his words were to our time. As a political and intellectual guide to our era his work is without equal.

Forgotten Books: The Killer by Wade Miller

2011-12-15T11:19:00.000-08:00

Forgotten Books: The Killer by Wade Miller

Wade Miller was of course Bob Wade and Bill Miller. They collaborated on a few dozen novels until Miller died of a heart attack in the office they shared. He was forty-one.

Much of their best work was done for Gold Medal. The Killer is a fine example. A rich man named Stennis owns a number of banks. His son works in one of them. During a robbery his son is killed. Stennis hires a big game hunter named Farrow to find the notorious bank robber Clel Bocock and his gang. When Farrow locates them he is to call Stennis who wants to be there to watch them die. Farrow is a unique character and not just because of the big game angle. He's middle-aged and feeling it, something rare in that era of crime fiction.

The search for Stennis--and the love story that involves Bocock's wife--takes Farrow from the swamps to Iowa (including, yes, Cedar Rapids) to Wisconsin to Colorado. The place description is extraordinary. Probably too much for today's readers but the Miller books are filled with strong cunning writing. Same for twists and turns. For the length of the first act you can never be sure who anybody is. They're all traveling under assumed names and with shadowy motives. The only thing that binds them is Clel Bocock.

For anybody who thinks that Gold Medals were largely routine crime stories, this is the noel you should pick up. Stark House published this a few years back (still available) along with Devil On Two Sticks, one of the most original mob novels I've ever read. There's also an excellent David Laurence Wilson introduction on the careers of the two writers.

Wade Miller got lost in the shuffle of bringing back the writers of the fifties and sixties. This book, so strong on character and place and plot turns, will demonstrate why more of their books should be in print.

Is Amazon Pushing Publishers to Brink On Terms, Co-op?

2011-12-15T09:24:00.001-08:00

Is Amazon Pushing Publishers to Brink On Terms, Co-op?
By Rachel Deahl and Jim Milliot
Dec 15, 2011
| Reader Comments 14

Last week Amazon caused a furor in the bookselling world, with its reveal of a price check app consumers could use in bricks-and-mortar stores to get discounts at the retailer. Although the app did not include books, its announcement offered many a chance to slam Amazon as a ruthless corporation out to destroy the community bookstore and, as Richard Russo claimed in the New York Times, literary culture along with it. Although the price check app is what continues to be discussed in the media, what has publishers riled, behind the scenes, is aggressive moves the retailer is making in its demands on co-op and discounts. A number of sources in the industry, all of whom spoke to PW on the condition of anonymity, said the retailer is, in certain cases, threatening to stop selling titles from companies who won't pay up.

Many sources said Amazon has been asking for a steeper wholesale discount on books. (Although e-books are sold on the agency model, print books continue to be sold on the wholesale model, in which retailers purchase titles at a certain percentage off the list price.) Co-op requests from Amazon have also escalated, according to a number of insiders. Although publishers and distributors regularly have discussions with Amazon about these issues--negotiating the terms on these matters is a standard aspect of doing business--the retailer's requests, in recent weeks, have sent shocks through many in the industry, some of whom are worried about what will happen to their books if they cannot meet the demands.

Publishers and distributors have called the latest negotiations with Amazon the most adversarial to date, and many have noted that, for the first time, the retailer is outlining co-op costs for digital, as well as print. Amazon has, as some sources explained, long been pressuring publishers to provide ancillary content on the pages where their books are sold, from videos and q&a's to links to similar books. That content has always been something publishers have had to both pay for and provide. In the latest negotiations with Amazon, sources told PW, the price of providing that content has jumped to what sources say are astronomical percentages (but those sources would not provide specific numbers).

Many publishers and distributors said they have not, and cannot, cave to this newest set of demands from Amazon. The fear, though, is that the retailer could take punitive action. Recalling the most infamous instance of what can happen to a publisher that refuses Amazon's terms, many cite the showdown between Macmillan and Amazon when, in February 2010, the retailer removed the buy buttons to all Macmillan titles after the publisher said it would sell its e-books to the retailer on agency terms, as opposed to wholesale terms.

Although publishers fear seeing their titles disappear from Amazon--for many in the industry the retailer accounts for 20% to 25% of their business--some say the demands the retailer is making are impossible to meet and would nearly wipe out all of their profits there anyway. Furthermore, as some have noted, changing wholesale terms with Amazon, could present a legal issue. Although co-op deals can be varied and private, publishers are prevented by the Robinson-Patman Act from favoring one account over another with notably different wholesale terms. (It was the broad discrepancy in discount terms among accounts that led the ABA to sue Barnes & Noble and Borders in the 1990s.)

The demands regarding co-op have some particularly on edge. Not only are many publishers frustrated about being asked to pay more money for content they are providing, but the whole notion of co-op at the online retailer is unsettling. While the case can be made that co-op in a bricks-and -mortar store is a worthwhile investment--money is spent on getting books to physical areas of the store, such as front tables, where consumers will see those books first--it's much less logical on a Web site. Does having a video or an author Q&A on a book's page on Amazon really encourage a customer who has already clicked on that book to make a purchase?

More problematically, for many in the industry, the latest talks with Amazon are being described as less of a dialogue than a dictation of terms. As one source explained, the talks have boiled down to "what publishers can do for Amazon, and not what Amazon can do for publishers." Most ironically, the new terms would allow Amazon to continue to gain market share as it always has: driving book prices down. As one source put it: "If Amazon wants to improve its margins, it should cut back on the discounting."

What do Isaac Asimov, Robert Bloch, Harlan Ellison. James Gunn, Jack Vance, and Donald Westlake have in common?

2011-12-14T12:51:00.000-08:00

Ed here: For people like Bill Crider and me the announcement that follows is like the pearly gates opening up. There was no other sf mag like Super-Science Fiction. Scoffers might say that no other sf mag WANTED to be like Super-Science but if you were the right pimply age no other mag provided the same thrills. The copy below tells you all about it. Once again the great Haffner Press comes through.

Tales From Super-Science Fiction

Edited by Robert Silverberg
Illustrated by Frank Kelly Freas & Ed Emshwiller
ISBN: 9781893887480
$30.00
400+ pp. Hardcover
Color endpapers

(coming soon)

Description
Robert Silverberg has assembled a collection of 14 stories from Super-Science Fiction. S-SF was launched during the sf boom of the mid-1950s. Paying a princely rate of 2 cents a word the magazine attracted fiction by Isaac Asimov, Robert Bloch, Harlan Ellison. James Gunn, Jack Vance, and Donald Westlake, and featured cover art by Frank Kelly Freas and Ed Emshwiller. Running for 18 bi-monthly issues (Dec ‘55 to Oct ‘59), the magazine eventually devolved into a publication capitalizing on the then-current craze of “monster” stories.

Editor Silverberg traces the genesis of Super-Science Fiction from it’s beginnings as an outlet for numerous colonization/expedition stories to its conclusion with such stories as “Creatures of the Green Slime,” “Beasts of Nightmare Horror” and “Vampires from Outer Space.” It’s fun, it’s cheesy, and we’re really looking forward to it!

Table of Contents
Reviews
Excerpts

Table of Contents
Introduction by Robert Silverberg
"Catch 'Em All Alive" by Robert Silverberg
"Who Am I?" by Henry Slesar
"Every Day is Christmas" by James E. Gunn
"I'll Take Over" by A.Bertram Chandler
"Song of the Axe" by Don Berry
"Broomstick Ride" by Robert Bloch
"Worlds of Origin" by Jack Vance
"The Tool of Creation" by J.F. Bone
"I Want to Go Home" by Robert Moore Williams
"Hostile Life-Form" by Daniel L. Galouye
"The Gift of Numbers" by Alan E. Nourse
"First Man in a Satellite" by Charles W. Runyon
"A Place Beyond the Stars" by Tom Godwin
"The Loathsome Beasts" by Dan Malcolm (aka Silverberg)

Pete Enfantino-A Tribute To Robert Colby

2011-12-13T18:32:00.000-08:00

Ed Gorman: When Robert Colby died my friend Pete Enfantino wrote a fine piece about Bob, who was a gentleman of the old school and a damned fine human being as well as a damned fine writer. After reading The Captain Must Die again for the twenty fifth time or thereabouts (I read it when it came out and have been reading it over and over ever since) I decided to read Pete's piece again. It's a good one.

ROBERT COLBY - A TRIBUTE by Peter Enfantino

Robert Colby died last week. A lot of people won’t even recognize the name. That’s a shame, but it’s their loss. Colby was every bit as good a writer as the other Gold Medal authors of the 50s and 60s who’ve found favor among historians and collectors. He just never had one of those million sellers like the other guys did. There was no Death of a Citizen or Hill Girl. Just respectable sales for some of his “adult” titles like Lament for Julie (Monarch, 1961) and Executive Wife (Monarch, 1964).

My introduction to Robert Colby, as was my introduction to all the classic Gold medal authors, was through an article Ed Gorman wrote for a magazine I used to co-publish called The Scream Factory. In the piece Ed sang the praises of a couple dozen GM authors, writers such as Peter Rabe, Vin Packer, Gil Brewer, Wade Miller, and Harry Whittington. Back in 1993, (when the article first appeared) Black Lizard was publishing a lot of forgotten writers like Packer, Rabe, and Brewer, so I was fairly familiar with those guys. One of the writers Ed praised was Robert Colby, a name I was not so familiar with. Ed called Colby’s The Captain Must Die (Gold Medal, 1959) “one of the great GM novels,” so I knew I had to check this one out.

Because of Ed’s article, I had a long grocery list when I hit Tom Lesser’s annual Paperback Show (a must for pb collectors, by the way) in Mission Hills that following April. There I found plenty of the recommended reading, including The Captain Must Die (in a quarter box, no less) and two other Colbys: The Star Trap and Murder Times Five. The latter two were decent reads, but Ed was right on in his assessment that Captain was a must. It’s a nasty revenge tale that holds its own with the best “nasty revenge tales” that Gold Medal excelled in and could have been made into a nice, tight little 50s noir had the movie deal not fallen through.

for the rest go here: http://www.mysteryfile.com/Colby/Tribute.html

George Clooney Producing Smothers Brothers Movie -- NPH as Tommy Smothers?

2011-12-12T12:51:00.000-08:00

FROM THE WRAP

George Clooney Producing Smothers Brothers Movie -- NPH as Tommy Smothers?
Published: December 12, 2011 @ 7:50 am

By Kimberly Potts
Oscar winner George Clooney -- a current awards season favorite with "The Descendants" -- has added another project to his packed upcoming movie slate: Clooney and Smokehouse Pictures partner Grant Heslov will produce a movie about the Smothers Brothers and their groundbreaking TV series.

Clooney and Heslov are teaming with Sony to turn David Bianculli's 2009 book "Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of 'The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour'" into a film.

Bianculli confirmed the project on his site, TV Worth Watching. He called Clooney his dream choice for the movie adaptation of his book about the Smothers and their 1967-69 variety hour series.

His dream casting choice? Neil Patrick Harris as Tommy Smothers.

Read more: Clooney Tells Berlusconi Over Sex Trial: Do I Know You?

"The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" -- which counted Steve Martin and Rob Reiner among its writers -- drew the ire of CBS censors by including social commentary about the Vietnam War and politicians. It was cancelled by the network in 1969.

"First, I'm thrilled on behalf of Tom and Dick, whose story deserves to be told and retold, and whose efforts to inject topicality into scripted TV comedy in the 1960s led very directly to the sort of thing Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Bill Maher are doing today," Bianculli wrote.

"But I'm also thrilled because, when the book was still in galleys and I was asked by the film-division agent at my literacy agency to name my dream filmmaker for a Smothers Brothers movie, I said two words. One was George. The other was Clooney."

Read more: Hugh Jackman Shows Conan How to Be Like George Clooney (Video)

Bianculli, a TV critic and Rowan University professor, said he uses Clooney's Oscar-winning film "Good Night, and Good Luck," and live remake of "Fail Safe," in his courses.

Brian Hecker and Craig Sherman will write the screenplay for the Smothers movie. They are also co-writing "Atari," a biopic about Atari founder Nolan Bushnell.

Bill Pronzini on Elilott Chaze

2011-12-11T09:01:00.000-08:00

Ed here: Bill Pronzini's contributions to the genre of crime fiction have been enormous. First he created the groundbreaking Nameless series (stronger than ever) second he wrote numerous stand-alones and stories that have won praise and awards world-wide and third he has compiled a body of excellent literary biography and criticism that needs to be collected and published. Here is an example from Mystery*File.

ON ELLIOTT CHAZE
by Bill Pronzini

Elliott Chaze (1915-1990) was an old-school newspaperman who began his journalism career with the New Orleans Bureau of the Associated Press shortly before Pearl Harbor, worked for a time for AP’s Denver office after paratrooper service in WW II, and then migrated south to Mississippi where he spent twenty years as reporter and award-winning columnist and ten years as city editor with the Hattiesburg American.

In his spare time he wrote articles and short stories for The New Yorker, Redbook, Collier’s, Cosmopolitan, and other magazines, and all too infrequently, a novel. In an interview he once stated that his motivation in writing fiction, “if there is any discernible, is probably ego and fear of mathematics, with overtones of money. Primarily I have a simple desire to shine my ass — to show off a bit in print.”

His first two novels were literary mainstream. The Stainless Steel Kimono (Simon & Schuster, 1947), a post-war tale about a group of American paratroopers in Japan, was a modest bestseller and an avowed favorite of Ernest Hemingway.

The Golden Tag (Simon & Schuster, 1950), like most of his long works, has a newspaper background, contains a good deal of autobiography, and is both funny and poignant; it concerns a young wire service reporter and would-be novelist in New Orleans who becomes involved with two women, one of them married, while reporting on a sensational murder case.

His third novel was the one for which he is best remembered today, Black Wings Has My Angel (Gold Medal, 1953; also published as One for My Money, Berkley, 1962 and as One for the Money, Robert Hale, 1985).

for the rest go here:http://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=142

BEHIND THE BATES MOTEL: Robert Bloch

2011-12-10T13:07:00.000-08:00

Ed here: I've been reading a collection of Robert Bloch's stories this week and remembered a fine piece about Bloch written by the always entertaining and insightful Paula Guran.

BEHIND THE BATES MOTEL: Robert Bloch

August 1999
By Paula Guran

"PSYCHO all came from Robert Bloch's book." -- Alfred Hitchcock

With the current centennial of Alfred Hitchcock's birth being noted with various events and symposia, I can't help but observe that PSYCHO -- the most notorious and perhaps best known of all of Hitchcock's films -- was adapted from a novel of the same name by Robert Bloch. As Douglas E. Winter put it in his 1985 FACES OF FEAR, "Two masters of horror have been immortalized by the motion picture PSYCHO...One, of course, is its director, Alfred Hitchcock; the other is the man who wrote the novel on which it is based. And no one ever said it better than Hitchcock himself: 'PSYCHO all came from Robert Bloch's book.'"

Before his death in 1994 at age 77, Bloch often joked that his obituary would begin with PSYCHO, a novel that was just a tiny part of his flood of work. Of course, he was right. And, although Mr. Bloch might disagree, perhaps that's the way it should be. PSYCHO, both the film and the book, had a resounding effect on both literary and cinematic horror. Quoting Winter again, "From the Depression heyday of WEIRD TALES and the evocative Universal film adaptations of FRANKENSTEIN and DRACULA, the tale of terror had suffered until the mid-1950s, as if the real horrors of World War Two had snuffed out the human need for fictional confrontation with death. Not until the Eisenhower era did the monsters reemerge in force: first in the innocuous science-fictional context of the "big bug" films, then in the exuberant American International youth films like I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF (1957), and finally in the serious context of films and books like PSYCHO."

PSYCHO, however, was not Bloch's first or last exploration of psychopathology or the only way in which he influenced modern horror fiction.

fo the rest go here: http://www.darkecho.com/darkecho/horroronline/bloch.html

Pro-File: Tony Richards

2011-12-09T13:38:00.001-08:00

Here are two collections of stories from Dark Regions Press that should become staples for readers (and writers) of dark suspense and horror fiction. Tony Richards has been writing some of the most unique and most disturbing fiction since the 1980s when the horror boom was still going strong.

Our Lady of Shadows emphasizes the kind of ghost stories that will linger with you long after you close the book, stories that manage to be both chilling and thoughtful. One of Tony's strengths as a writer is to put his people in terrifying situations and increase their desperation page by page.

Shadows and Other Tales offers a wide range of horrorific and dark suspense themes, tropes and creative twists. Tony's take on various modern dilemmas, physical and emotional, power these stories. As always the tales are both page turners and intelligent commentaries on the dark sides of life today.

Here's an interesting and entertaining Pro-Fie with Tony Richards.

Q&A with ED GORMAN

Q1/ Tell us about your current novel or project.

A1/ I have two major books on the go at the moment. The first is another short story collection that I’ve just put together. The title is ‘Summertime: The Best SF of Tony Richards.’ I realize that I’m better known as a horror and supernatural author, but I’ve been penning the occasional SF tale for over three decades, and these are my favorites. The collection includes two novelettes that first appeared in Asimov’s in the Eighties, plus a story -- from an old British magazine called Ad Astra -- that first saw print in 1979. The complete book is with Dark Regions Press at the moment, and hopefully they’ll publish it in 2012.

The second is the one I’m working on right now, and it’s a new Raine’s Landing novel. And in case your readers do not know, I’ll explain the premise behind the series. The idea is that there were real witches in Salem, Massachusetts. Clever and prescient, they fled that town before the infamous Trials of 1792 began. They decamped to the town of Raine’s Landing instead, and the place has been full of magic and strangeness ever since. Except there are a couple of small problems. Because of the nature of the Landing, supernatural badness is attracted there like iron filings to a magnet. And the town is affected by a curse -- nobody born there can ever leave.

The chief protagonist -- the town’s main troubleshooter -- is a man called Ross Devries, a former cop who’s lost his family to magic gone badly wrong. He never uses the stuff himself, partially because of that, but he has several people who help him, not least a gun-toting young woman -- formerly a criminal -- name of Cassie Mallory. The first two books -- ‘Dark Rain’ and ‘Night of Demons’ -- were brought out by HarperCollins. And the third -- ‘Midnight’s Angels’ -- has recently been released by Dark Regions. They’ve had brilliant reviews and attracted a following, but they haven’t made the big time yet. Although I’ve had a couple of tentative approaches from movie and TV people, so who knows?

Q2/ Can you give us a sense of what you’re working on now?

A2/ The new Raine’s Landing novel is called ‘Speak of the Devil,’ and it’s something of a departure from the earlier books. In the first few novels, the supernatural menace came from outside the town. This time, it’s a small group of townsfolk trying to take power by means of the darker arts. And because of that -- because it’s his own neighbors -- Ross finds what’s going on much harder to deal with. Additionally, he doesn’t have Cassie with him for most of the book … she is pregnant, and has been hospitalized. That’s something I’m very much trying to do with this series, have things happen to the characters that are outside the main story arc, have them go through setbacks and events that change them, just like people in the real world.

In the earlier books, as well, the threats mainly came from inhuman, or barely human, sources. Whereas in ‘Speak of the Devil,’ I’m dealing with human evil, including one bad guy who’s so innately vicious he makes Hannibal Lecter look like Jimmy Stewart. It’s been tremendous fun writing about him.

Q3/ What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?

A3/ I’ve seen more than a hundred short stories in print, two stand-alone novellas, five novels and six collections. And after all this time, I still get a tremendous buzz when something new comes out with my name on it, particularly when it comes with a great cover like the ones Wayne Miller has been doing for my books over at DRP. I’m definitely not someone who writes stuff just to put it away in a drawer … I like to see my work out there and being read. And hearing back from readers -- and the Raine’s Landing novels have generated a good few enthusiastic emails -- is always a pleasure.

On that subject, I’ve in recent years derived a great deal of satisfaction from giving public readings of my work. I was nervous as all hell the first time that I did it, but have begun to genuinely enjoy it since. Writing is mostly a very isolated job, and I’ve no particular problem with that. I’d hate to try and write with people looking over my shoulder and going “You spelt that wrong” or “Ooh, what happens next?” But it’s nice to get out there into the world beyond my head sometimes, and giving a reading let’s you connect with your audience on a very direct level.

Q4/ The greatest displeasure?

A4/ Most writers I’ve ever spoken to agree on this one. I’ve no problem at all with polishing up a short story, but rewriting a full-sized novel is largely drudgery, an enervating slog with very little that is joyful or creative to it. But it has to be done and, since I’m something of a perfectionist, it usually gets done at least four times, often more, before I’m happy with a finished book. All that you can do is tuck your head down and get on with it, looking forward to the day you reach the final page and can start on something new again, the fresh creative juices flowing.

Q5/ Advice to the publishing world?

A5/ Publishing’s a business, sure, and the houses have to either make money or go broke and wind up publishing no one. A smart writer understands that and does not whine on about ‘commercialism.’ But the plain fact of the matter is, far too many publishers don’t conduct themselves in much of a businesslike way. I’m constantly hearing from writer friends who were told that this and that publicity was going to happen and it never did. I even know one woman whose novel got turned into a TV miniseries, starring a well-known actor … and her publishers never even bothered to tie it in. So my advice to publishers would be, ‘be better, smarter businessmen and do more for your authors -- you will sell more books.’

Q6/ Are there any forgotten writers you’d like to see in print again?

A6/ The thing that’s really changing this -- bringing authors back -- is not print but ebooks, although it is a slow process. I was horrified to see that, until recently, there was barely any Bradbury on Kindle, except that’s changing with the re-publication of Fahrenheit 451.

One series that I used to love, and do not see around much any more, was Peter O’Donnell’s Modesty Blaise novels. She’s a secret agent, and the books are kind of distaff James Bond stuff. But they’re considerably better written than you would expect, with good characters and exciting plots.

When I was a kid, there used to be an English series -- written, if I recall, by different authors -- about a detective called Sexton Blake, a rather more down-to-earth version of Sherlock Holmes. That could stand revisiting.

How many people these days know about Joan Aiken’s Wolves of Willoughby Chase books? They’re ostensibly fantasies for older children, but are wonderfully imaginative and so beautifully told that any adult can enjoy them, and they’ve invited praise from the likes of Michael Moorcock.

And when it comes to science fiction, did I hear someone mention Cordwainer Smith, who wrote some truly amazing stories such as ‘Scanners Live in Vain’?

Q7/ Tell us about selling your first novel?

A7/ It was called ‘The Harvest Bride,’ and was a supernatural thriller about an alcoholic American journalist, currently living in London, England, who finds his colleagues being murdered and starts linking those crimes to the time they spent in Vietnam, covering the war there. I wrote it on a big blue Olivetti manual typewriter that I still keep tucked away in a closet in my study. And because you could not delete and alter anything you wanted, writing was a rather different process back then. You had to go at your prose rather more carefully the first time around. In fact, I finished ‘The Harvest Bride’ in two drafts. (The following year I bought my very first word-processor, and my next novel -- ‘Night Feast’ -- went through seven, which demonstrates how that kind of technology has changed the way we work).

I then went looking for an agent, and Leslie Gardner, a native Manhattanite who now lives in London as well, picked me up. She showed the novel to Tor, and they bought it straight off. Huge joy in the Richards household, as you can imagine. Headline Books took the rights for the British market. It went on to be nominated for the HWA Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel, alongside Clive Barker’s and Dan Simmons’ debut books. And it got some wonderful reviews, including one from a certain E. Gorman, which is why I’m so pleased to be appearing on this blog. Huge thanks, Ed.

Forgotten Books: Fake I.D. by Jason Starr

2011-12-08T08:56:00.000-08:00

Jason Starr is the poet of pathological lives. In Fake I.D. he gives us Tony Russo, gambling addict and bartender/actor, who believes, despite enormous evidence to the contrary, that someday real soon now he will reap a bonanza with his gambling just as he knows that he will soon enough be King of Hollywood. Gold at the track and movie star pussy forever.

One of the ways he hopes to hurry his dreams along is by stealing ten thousand dollars from the bar where he works. He has a chance to buy a share of a race horse and thus become a (another fantasy) a gentleman of the horsey set (his daydream about standing in the winner's circle with a movie star lady practically going down on him is especially embarrassing and pathetic). But being the good businessman he is he takes the ten grand and goes to Vegas where he is real real sure he will play this into much much more. He returns home broke of course.

Being a good sociopath Tony must now replace the money he lost in Vegas. This quest, and it is nothing less, involves more stealing and not incidentally murder. Starr gives us a trio of women who become indelible in the reader's mind. My favorite is Janene. Like Frank, the man who owns the bar where Tony works, she is sensible, intelligent and honest. It is from her that he lifts jewelry.

Starr has one of those quintessential New York voices. Because Richard Price's Ladies' Man is one of my favorite novels I kept hearing riffs on that in this book especially when Starr was writing about the bar and the people who work there and hang out there. Starr has an almost surreal eye and ear for manners and he can be both witty and chilling at the same time. He's excellent with boozy conversation.

Starr is on record acknowledging his debt to certain of the paperbacks of the 1950s and 1960s and the pace and punch of his novel certainly demonstrate that affection especially when all of Tony's sweaty plans begun to unravel. But the book is wholly Starr's and it's a sound strong good one. So many writers try hard to replicate Jim Thompson by using similar material. Tony Russo's heart is as dark as any of Thomson's sociopaths but his environment and his style could not be more disimilar. Lew Ford wouldn't know what to make of him.

Because of his social eye and because of his ambition to include the wider world in his work, Jason Starr is among my favorites of the neo-noir writers. Fake I.D. is a gem of treachery.

Sara Paretsky discusses Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo

2011-12-06T14:40:00.000-08:00

On Watching Vertigo on the Big Screen in 35mm with an Audience
Posted by suzidoll on December 5, 2011 FROM TCM MOVIE MORLOCKS

On a cold, blustery Chicago afternoon, I was safely tucked in the back row of a theater watching Vertigo as it was intended to be seen—on the big screen in 35mm with a theater full of movie buffs, cinephiles, and Hitchcock fans. The rich, saturated colors of the new print were a treat after seeing so many contemporary films shot in the drab, flat, burnished colors of digital cinematography. The film was followed by a commentary and discussion led by mystery writer Sara Paretsky and psychologist James W. Anderson, a professor at Northwestern University. Watching Vertigo on the big screen helped me notice details that had eluded me on previous viewings, while comments by Paretsky and Anderson offered a different point of view on the film. I also learned a great deal from the insightful observations of the audience members.

Part detective story and part psychological thriller, Vertigo is about a man who cannot come to grips with his obsession for a woman. And, it is also the story of what it means for the woman to be the object of that obsession, though that part of the tale is often overlooked. Hitchcock was fond using a doppelganger theme in his films, in which one of the main characters has a double who is exactly like them and yet the opposite of them. A doppelganger theme often employs a doubling structure in the narrative; in other words, patterns or events are repeated twice. With this viewing of Vertigo, I noticed that the doubling structure for this film consists of the real version of a character or event juxtaposed with a phony version. Kim Novak is introduced as Madeleine Elster, but she is really Judy Barton who is masquerading as Madeleine as part of an elaborate murder plot. The phony Madeleine pretends to be obsessed with her great grandmother, Carlotta Valdes. Jimmy Stewart is John “Scottie” Ferguson, who is hired by Gavin Elster to follow his “wife” to learn more about her obsession. Scottie is the dupe in the plot who will ensure that Elster’s plan is successful. In pretending to be obsessed, Madeleine visits places associated with her ancestor, including the graveyard where Carlotta is buried and the museum where her portrait hangs. Scottie’s desire for the phony Madeleine, especially after her death, turns into a real obsession, which is manifested through his haunting of the same places—her gravesite, the museum, etc. We see Scottie follow Madeleine to these places in the first half of the film as part of her pretense; then we see him haunt these places in the second half of the movie as part of his real obsession. While recovering from his breakdown, Scottie runs into the real Judy, whom he tries to recreate into the Madeleine who never existed, which duplicates Gavin Elster’s deeds though for different reasons. Truth and illusion follow the same patterns in this story, and, like Scottie, we can’t always tell the difference.

for the rest go here: http://moviemorlocks.com/2011/12/05/on-watching-vertigo-on-the-big-screen-in-35mm-with-an-audience/#more-43893

Blindside by Ed Gorman; The Ugly Truth About Consumer Book Reviews

2011-12-05T09:02:00.001-08:00

Ed Gorman. Severn, $28.95 (192p) ISBN 978-0-7278-8025-3
Shamus Award–winner Gorman’s absorbing third mystery featuring Dev Conrad (after 2010’s Stranglehold) finds the Illinois political consultant stepping into a congressional match between liberal incumbent Jeff Ward and Ward’s blustery right-wing opponent, Rusty Burkhart. As a favor to Ward’s father, Conrad agrees to spend a couple of days with Ward’s campaign to try to discover a spy within the organization. Conrad doesn’t like either of the candidates—Burkhart because of his stances and Ward because of his arrogance and tomcatting. When the shooting death of one of Ward’s senior advisers threatens to derail the campaign, Conrad discovers that both candidates have secrets that might end their careers. After analyzing the good and the bad—mostly the bad—in current political campaigns, cynical, sharp-witted Conrad concludes, “We still had a country that we could be rightly proud of.” Readers should take that message to heart as the 2012 election cycle heats up. Agent: Dominick Abel. (Feb.)

Reviewed on: 12/05/2011

-------------
The Ugly Truth About Consumer Book Reviews: Part One
Posted: 12/ 5/11 10:36 AM ET

For IndieReader, by Terri Giuliano Long:

Love it or hate it, this is an exciting time in the publishing world. Technological advances have made the long, arduous process of publishing a book cheap, easy and fast--giving voice to millions of new authors and providing readers with a richer, more interesting selection of books.

That's the good news. The challenge is, with so many new choices, how do readers determine which titles to pick?

With indie books, it can be especially hard. Only a handful of indie authors have been around long enough to have an identifiable "brand" (think James Patterson or Nora Roberts). To buy a book by an unfamiliar author, even if it costs only 99¢, readers must take a chance. This perception of risk is amplified by the stigma still associated with self-publishing. Complicating matters, traditional media rarely (if ever), review indie books, forcing readers to rely on consumer reviews--putting disproportionate authority into the hands of consumer reviewers.

Why is this bad? While the majority of consumer reviews are genuine and well-intended, anyone who has visited a review site like Trip Advisor or Yelp knows that they can also be unreliable and-- sometimes--downright dishonest. Some reviewers will lower a restaurant's rating because their server happened to be in a bad mood. Others fake their own glowing reviews or post reviews intended to damage a competitor's reputation. One popular up-and-coming restaurant received caustic reviews on Yelp--posted, it turned out, by a restaurant owner down the street, infuriated because he thought the new guy was "stealing" his business.

With the industry in tumult, publishing has become a free-for-all, akin to the Wild West. Eventually, a new hierarchy will emerge and rules will be set in place. In the meantime, the rules are ambiguous and loosely enforced. In a highly competitive environment, uncertainty and lax regulation offer people plenty of incentive to game the system

for the rest go here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/indiereader/consumer-book-reviews_b_1129373.html?view=print&comm_ref=false

A disabled writer's book unfolds a tap at a time

2011-12-04T09:04:00.000-08:00

Ed here: As many of you know Peter Winkler posts comments on a fair share of stories I run. I had no idea of the courage and determination it takes to do so. Let alone the courage and determination it takes him to write books. Here's his story from the LA Times.

A disabled writer's book unfolds a tap at a time
By Nita Lelyveld, Los Angeles Times

Peter Winkler, his body trapped by rheumatoid arthritis, wrote the first biography of Dennis Hopper to come out after the actor's death. Little did his agent know that he had to punch out the manuscript one letter at a time, using a red plastic chopstick.

Writer Peter Winkler works on his computer in his North Hollywood home. Winker, 55, has limited movement because of rheumatoid arthritis and suffers from other ailments. To write his biography of actor Dennis Hopper, he tapped out each letter using a long, red plastic chopstick. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times / November 2, 2011)
ALSO

Dennis Hopper dies at 74; actor directed counterculture classic 'Easy Rider'

Story of determination comes out of Afghanistan

Electrical stimulation creates images that could help blind see

By Nita Lelyveld, Los Angeles Times
December 3, 2011
Thanks to the conveniences of the wired world, Peter Winkler was able to write a book and find an agent and a publisher without ever having to leave his North Hollywood home.

Winkler raced to produce the first biography of Dennis Hopper to come out after the actor died in May 2010.

It was only when the book was on the shelves that his agent learned how he had done it.

"My God, I had no idea," said Robert Diforio of Weston, Conn., who sold "Dennis Hopper: The Wild Ride of a Hollywood Rebel" to a small East Coast publisher, Barricade Books.

In the virtual world, Winkler roams free. He blogs. He comments. He write articles about film.

In the physical world, he increasingly is trapped — dependent on his sister and a long, red plastic chopstick.

Rheumatoid arthritis has battered him for 46 of his 55 years.

His neck won't turn. His head is pitched down, chin to chest. His elbow and wrist joints are so fixed in place, he cannot touch his face.

Sitting up in bed, he can no longer extend his arms far enough to place his fingertips on the keyboard of the MacBook Pro propped on a lap desk across his thighs.

Instead, he braces the chopstick between several fingers on his right hand and uses it to tap, tap, tap one key after another.

It's not so bad, he says. He's gotten pretty fast, and anyway, "I was always a two-finger typist."

:Winkler never told his faraway agent about his stiff, bent fingers and locked joints, he says, because "frankly, it was not his business, it was not germane."

for the rest go here: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-adv-chopstick-book-20111203,0,2389268.story?page=1&track=rss

Scandal On The Sand by John Trinian

2011-12-03T15:02:00.000-08:00

Reprinted from 2007
SCANDAL ON THE SAND by John Trinian
John Trinian was a working name of Zekial Marko. He was a former
> convicted criminal who started publishing when he got out of jail
> in the early sixties. His first novel was under his real name
> (Scratch a Thief, Fawcett Gold Medal 1961, also as Once a Thief),
> after which he started using the pseudonym. As Trinian, he
> published five or six novels with various paperback houses, such
> as Pyramid.
>
> Scratch a Thief is an excellent novel, you should try it. That's
> the only book I've read by him, sadly, so I can't comment on the
> others. >
> Juri Nummelin (on Rara-Avis)

Ed here:

Further information on Trinian has him writing for The Rockford Files and other TV shows. While I don't think he was as good as Malcolm Braly, another Gold Medal author who served hard time, I do think his novels had both a lyrical and sexual aspect that we don't find in most of Braly.

I just finished Trinian's SCANDAL ON THE SAND (1964) and I have to say that it offers just about everything I ask for from a novel. A unique story, a strong voice, a definite worldview and several compelling characters, most notably the rich young woman at the book's center, Karen Fornier.

A dying killer whale washes up on a stretch of deserted Southern California beach. Karen, hungover and dismal that she finally gave into the childish wanna-be macho man Hobart, the one her parents would like her to marry...she leaves their beach motel hoping to lose him. Wandering along the beach she finds the whale and for her its appearance is almost religious. The way she bonds with it is moving and is a credit to Trinian's skill.

Hobart insists that the whale is dead and should be cut up for cat food. He finds a sinister, arrogant young cop, Mulford, who agrees with him. Mulford orders a tow truck to come in and drag it away. He then orders Hobart and Karen to leave the area. Hobart sees in the harsh machismo of Mulford everything he's secretly wanted to be, that not even his considerable inheritance could buy him. He sides with Mulford and tries to drag Karen away. But she defies them both and stays. Not even when the whale proves to be alive will Mulford stop the tow truck. He says he'll shoot the whale.

All this is being observed from close-by a hood named Bonniano who is to meet a runner who will give him enough money to escape to Mexico. Bonniano is in the news for being a hit man who last night iced a prominent mob figure. Everybody's looking for him.

These and others play into the story of whale on the beach. The character sketches show the influences of Sherwood Anderson and John O'Hara and the cutaways to life on the beach bring the 1964 era alive. Boys wearing white clam digger pants--girls lying about in pink bikinis with transistor radios stuck to their ears--and just about everybody managing to grab themselves a little marijuana whenever the opportunity comes up...all this being the lull before the flower power storm that was less than two years away.

A cunning little book. rinian was the real deal.

A Note from a reader:
Anonymous said...
Marko was one of the best friends I've ever had. We ran together in Marin County and Sausalito in the early to late Sixties. He was never a criminal, much less convicted of anything. This is all myth-making, maybe even by Marko himself. After all, he not only wrote under John Trinian, he made up the name "Zekial Marko." Zekial he picked out of the Bible, Marko was because he felt he was a gypsy. His real name was Marvin Smucker. You can see why he changed it. He was born in 1931 and his mother lived in San Bruno. He wrote House of Evil starring me and him. He was Paul Berko. I was Anne Woodbridge. And I was there for the entire writing and making of Once A Thief. So please, forget the criminal nonsense. I do wish I could find him. That's why I ran across this. Looking for Marko.

Might as well this as Anne.

They never quite became stars

2011-12-02T13:01:00.001-08:00

Ed here: I read TCM's Movie Morlocks whenever I get a chance. Recently I found this piece about actors who had a chance to become stars but never quite made it to the big big time. This is a pretty cool piece. Read the whole thing and I think you'll agree. You'll also have some of your own nominees for people who should've made it.

The Stars That Never Shone
Posted by Greg Ferrara on September 28, 2011

Every star started out small. Depending on the time and era of any given star’s ascendance they may have done time on stage, television or played bit parts in films working their way up the ladder. The stars that everyone knows, the ones of which even the most casual filmgoer is aware, from Bette Davis, James Cagney and Katherine Hepburn to Peter O’Toole, Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep, are the ones that had not only the talent, not only the charisma, not only the charm but, crucially, the right roles at the right time to make an impression, a big one. Think Dustin Hoffman. A talented actor who, were it not for The Graduate, may have labored as a character actor for years before stardom or, perhaps, never achieved it at all. I think he would have anyway but what do I know? I only know his career from the trajectory it took so any speculation I may have on whether or not he would have become a star without The Graduate is severely biased by that pesky little thing, reality.

But there are other actors who were given the lead role, not once, not twice, but several times and every time, they came up short. Oh, not necessarily in their performances, mind you. The audience simply didn’t respond to them, for whatever reason. They were given the opportunity to become a star. They were pushed by the powers that be to hit the big time but they never did. These actors, the stars that never shone, are the actors that fascinate me, at times, more than the stars. What must it be like to get so close only to be pulled away by the unblinking forces of gravity, always tugging, always willing to bring the starry-eyed back down to earth?

Of course, for those it happens to, I imagine there’s nothing but gratitude at being given the chance and enjoying a rich, rewarding and successful career filling character roles when the leads dried up. Back in the studio days of Hollywood, stars were crafted and when it didn’t work, the actor in question was either relegated to character roles or leads in B pictures. One that comes to mind is Lizabeth Scott. She was given big parts in big films but her brand of charisma never quite took hold enough to become one of the big-time stars. And not for not trying either. In fact, Scott was practically given the keys to the kingdom. After her unsettling, bizarre and off-kilter portrayal of Toni in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, she received starring roles opposite Humphrey Bogart, Dick Powell and Burt Lancaster. Despite this obvious advantage, she never became a hit with the public as did Barbara Stanwyck, Lana Turner or Veronica Lake. She was a star, all right, but a minor one.

for the rest go here: http://moviemorlocks.com/2011/09/28/stars-that-never-shone/

Forgotten Books: Hardboiled American by Geofrrey O'Brien

2011-12-01T10:04:00.001-08:00

Forgotten Books: Hardboiled America
How's this for a resume (from Wikipedia): "Geoffrey O'Brien (b. 1948) is a widely published author, editor, book and film critic, poet, and cultural historian. In 1992, he joined the staff of the Library of America, (later) becoming editor in chief. He has been a contributor to Artforum, Film Comment, The New York Times, Village Voice, New Republic, Filmmaker and, especially, to the New York Review of Books."

With cred like this you might expect his writing to be hoity or at least toity. Nope. No matter what he's writing about O'Brien is a pleasure to read. He has a voice and style all his own. And he's never more compelling than when he's writing about "Lurid Paperbacks and Masters of Noir," the sub-title of Hardboiled America.

There is no equivalent to this study of the largely forgotten writers who were conduits to the present day likes of Lehane and Pelecanos and Zeltserman. Even if these men never read the paperback writers of the Fifties they could not escape their influence. It was everywhere, adapted to radio and movies and comic books. And O'Brien is masterful at tracing the hardboiled vision from generation to generation.

O'Brien takes seriously the writing of such people as Day Keene, Harry Whittington and Brett Halliday and many other paperback men and women. He's opinionated of course. His take on John D. MacDonald and Dorothy Hughes never fails to rankle me. But his observations on the work of Jim Thompson and W.R. Burnett and Ross Macdonald and Charles Williams are eloquent and so well reasoned I reread them several times a year. He also brings in literary writers whose work was sometimes in the spirit of hardboiled. Nelson Algren is a natural. But I'm glad he referenced Calder Willingham, too. A fine novelist whose short stories in particular are so dark they can disturb your sleep for a few nights.

Then there is a checklist of hardboiled novels from 1929-1960. Again there is nothing like this anywhere else. You'll encounter names you've never heard of as well as the paperback staples of the various eras. I was so taken with the checklist I once called O'Brien and asked him if he'd let me reprint it in a coffee table book I was editing on noir. He didn't bother to hide his irritation. His checklist, he said, was one of the selling points of the his book. Why would he let me reprint it? He was right of course. But what the hell, it was worth a try.

If you don't have this book in your collection then you don't have a serious collection. Period. O'Brien is a savvy and witty writer and his words are complemented by a healthy number of black and white paperback cover reproductions. Get this book
posted by Ed Gorman @ 3:21 PM 7

7 Hit TV Shows That Have Stayed Too Long at the Party

2011-11-30T12:49:00.001-08:00

7 Hit TV Shows That Have Stayed Too Long at the Party
Published: November 29, 2011 @ 7:57 pm
FROM THE WRAP

By Kimberly Potts
This is not a story about ratings. This is a story about shows that have overstayed their welcome.

Shows like “Glee,” “House” and "Grey’s Anatomy” are still pulling in respectable ratings, but are a shadow of what they once were. For every show like "Freaks and Geeks," "Sports Night" and "Party Down" -- great shows that were canceled too soon -- there are series that risk their ultimate TV legacy by staying too late at the party.

Here's why "Dexter" and six other once-terrific shows are past their prime in primetime.

Also read: Mindy Kaling on 'The Office,' Chest Hair and Sexy Andy Rooney

1. "DEXTER"

That twist in Sunday night's episode -- which we won't spoil in case it's still sitting on your DVR -- gave us pause for a moment. Could this be the thing that turns season six around? Nope … the season's still a mess.

Writers have Dexter Morgan tackling religion and where, or if, it fits into his life.

A guest stint by Mos Def as reformed killer Brother Sam was the highlight of those efforts, but everything else about season six has fallen flat.

That includes the return, sorta, of Dexter's dead serial killer brother; the painfully cheesy therapy sessions for Deb; the embarrassing way the writers have completely decimated Maria LaGuerta; and the mind-boggling reason Dexter has all of a sudden embraced killers like Travis and Trinity's son, Jonah.

Also read: 'Dexter' Renewed for Another 2 Seasons

If "Dexter" had been a lesser show, around season two or three viewers might have started to question the fact that there seem to be an awful lot of serial killers who a) live in Miami and b) always seem to cross paths with Dexter, even outside his police duties.

"Darkly Dreaming Dexter," the novel in which the Dexter Morgan character was introduced, has become "Deeply Disappointing Dexter."

2. "HOUSE"

He's been in jail and rehab. That's fine if you're, say, playing Iron Man. But if you're a doctor, the go-to diagnostician, this is not the resume you want to present to your patients.

Add in the many, many cast changes, and the fact that the show has fallen into a formula of bringing Hugh Laurie's House to the brink of redemption, only to see him embrace his inner jerk once again, and the diagnosis is clear: After this, the show's eighth season, it is most definitely time for "House" to be surgically removed from the Fox lineup.

Also read: 'House' Season 8 Trailer: Watch Hugh Laurie Get Pummeled in Prison (Video)

3. "GLEE"

The first season of the show was something new and different and fun.

The second season … it was kind of like that kid you knew in junior high who came back from summer vacation for the first year of high school and had outgrown his awkward phase.

for the rest go here:
http://www.thewrap.com/tv/column-post/dexter-glee-and-other-tv-shows-have-stayed-too-long-primetime-party-33147

Patricia Cornwell: 'Powerful women are more likely to kill’

2011-11-29T13:07:00.000-08:00

FROM THE TELEGRAPH UK
Patricia Cornwell: 'Powerful women are more likely to kill’
Patricia Cornwell, the doyenne of crime fiction, explains why her new book is filled with female psychopaths.

'Red Mist’ is Cornwell’s 19th book to feature Kay Scarpetta, who Angelina Jolie has signed up to portray in a forthcoming film Photo: ANDREW CROWLEY
By Bryony Gordon7:30AM GMT 29 Nov 2011 40 Comments

IIt isn’t giving too much away to reveal that all of the criminals in Patricia Cornwell’s new book – and there are several – are female. There is one who hammers nails into a child’s head, another who is a convicted sex offender, and a woman on death row for murdering a family as they slept. Then there is the mother who smothers her children and – my personal favourite – the woman who condemns her victims to long and painful deaths by Botox (she injects food with the botulinum toxin). Meanwhile, men are reduced to mere walk-on roles, emasculated, castrated – not literally, though this process does appear in other
Cornwell novels – and cast as helpless husbands and ineffectual police officers.

Red Mist is Cornwell’s 19th Scarpetta novel, the one that will nudge her over the magical 100 million copies mark. It is also the book that coincides with her work finally hitting the big screen. Angelina Jolie has signed up to play Cornwell’s protagonist, Dr Kay Scarpetta, a former chief medical examiner of the state of Virginia and forensic consultant.

In previous novels Scarpetta has dealt with sexual sadists and serial killers who leave limbless corpses, but none have featured quite so many female psychopaths. The main killer in Red Mist poisons her victims, which Cornwell tells me “is very female”. She says this in a cool, clinical manner, matter-of-factly, as if poisoning people was the most natural thing a woman could do after having periods and growing breasts (I suppose this detachment must be what happens when you have worked in a morgue, spent much of your time shadowing forensics experts and frequently attended autopsies, as Cornwell has.) “[Poisoning is] a long, drawn-out death, so it’s diabolical, sadistic, psychological, which is a female thing. It’s an inversion of the maternal instinct to nurture.”

for the rest go here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/8921614/Patricia-Cornwell-Powerful-women-are-more-likely-to-kill.html

New Books: Cemetery Girl by David Bell

2011-11-27T20:41:00.001-08:00

Cemetery Girl tells the story of Tom and Abby Stuart. They are a perfect couple with good jobs, a nice home, and a beautiful twelve-year-old daughter named Caitlin. Everything is great in their lives until the unthinkable happens—one day Caitlin goes out to walk the family dog, and she doesn’t come home. When the book begins, Caitlin has been gone for four years, and Tom and Abby are facing a dilemma that the loved ones of missing people face all the time: Do we move on and accept that our child isn’t coming back? Or do we keep hope alive against all odds and never give up or let go?

I started writing this book because I think one of the most terrifying things a person can encounter in life is the unknown, especially as it relates to those closest to us. What could be more frightening than having someone very close to you who harbors a secret they won’t share? What could be more frightening than having someone in your own house who may have been keeping secrets from you? What if someone in your own house suddenly turned into someone you can’t recognize and don't even know? These are some of the questions that sent me down the road to Cemetery Girl.

One of the questions I get asked a lot is: How can you write a book about a father when you don’t have children yourself? The novel is narrated by Tom Stuart, the father of the missing girl, and it’s his obsession with finding the truth that drives the book. The answer to that question about having children is simple: No, I don't have children, but I have been someone’s child my whole life. I understand the parent-child dynamic from that side, and I understand what it’s like to be part of a family, to be a husband, a son, a brother, a nephew. Cemetery Girl is very much a story about a family. It is about the ties that bind us to one another. It’s also about the way those ties change as our circumstances change. The ties bend, stretch and sometimes even break, but they are always there. We never stop being our parents’ children, even after they are gone and we are grown. We never stop being brothers and sisters. We never stop being family whether we want to admit it or not.

It’s not giving too much away about the book to say that Caitlin comes home after four years. (This is in the summary on the back of the book.) And her return only creates more problems for the family. Rather than having a tearful, heartfelt reunion, the family is faced with even more questions: Where was she for four years? Who was she with? Did she choose to be gone—or as she taken? These questions carry the book through to the end and seem to provide the suspense and emotion that thriller readers respond to. I’ve been fortunate to receive some good reviews and great blurbs from writers I admire so much: Lisa Unger, John Lescroart, Will Lavender, Jonathan Maberry, and Tom Monteleone. If you like a suspenseful tale about a family pushed to the limit, a tale full of twists and turns, then you’ll probably like Cemetery Girl. It makes a good choice for book clubs because of the many questions it raises about the characters’ behavior and motivations. Let me know what you think when you read it. I can be reached through my website: www.davidbellnovels.com

The Night Editor-Orson Welles

2011-11-27T13:03:00.001-08:00

Ed here: The last time I talked about Orson Welles I got into some trouble. A few readers of the blog felt that I was denigrating him when I said that he was not a martyr but frequently the cause of his own trouble. I cited a tape I'd heard of him from the 1970s in which he was reading copy for the wine company he then represented. The tape was of the recording session itself with Welles doing various takes on the copy. He didn't like the direction he was getting and became so abusive and angry it almost sounded like a gag. He went out of his way to insult the ad agency people. And he kept it up. He was being paid a lot of money. There wasn't a better way to handle it? Jake Hinson at The Night Editor speaks to this and other Wellesian issues in a fine piece he recently wrote.

Jake Hinson:

By then, however, the money had dried up in Europe. Welles may have been a great artist, but he was never box office gold. He was barely box office bronze. He returned to America and took roles in films that were beneath him. He channeled the money back into his projects like THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, a drama featuring John Huston, Peter Bogdanovich, and his buddy from his RKO days, JOURNEY INTO FEAR director Norman Foster.

He still dabbled in pulp and noir, too. He shot an adaptation of Charles Williams’s DEAD CALM called THE DEEP with Laurence Harvey, working on it until Harvey died. He planned an adaptation of Jim Thompson’s A HELL OF A WOMAN with director Gary Graver, but like almost all of his projects in the seventies and eighties, it had to be shelved for lack of funds. Hollywood, which had never liked Welles, had now forgotten him. He was old and broke in a town where only youth and money mattered. In 1985, at the age of 70, he died at home working on a script.

There is a heartbreaking bargain you have to make with Orson Welles. Much of his work—more than that of any other major director—comes to us in damaged shape. When you consider that he was making difficult films to begin with, the full picture begins to emerge.

Orson Welles was either too much of an artist or too much of an egomaniac—perhaps both—to ever fully commit to genre, even for the duration of a single film. He liked genre but viewed it as a beginning, a jumping off place. This was no less true for a thriller than for a Shakespeare adaptation. His instinct was to be, as he once angrily wrote Harry Cohn, “original, or at the least somewhat oblique.” Win or lose—and he lost often—his films were stamped with the conviction that cinema was an instrument of experimentation and poetry, not formula.

for the rest go here:http://thenighteditor.blogspot.com/2011/10/noir-of-orson-welles-part-v-rosebud.html

Forgotten Movies: Netflixing: Showtime’s Rebel Highway (1994)

2011-11-26T11:32:00.000-08:00

FROM TCM MOVIE MORLOCKS
Netflixing: Showtime’s Rebel Highway (1994)
Posted by R. Emmet Sweeney on November 8, 2011

In one of the stranger experiments in cable television history, Showtime’s 1994 Rebel Highway series commissioned ten filmmakers to remake a 1950s exploitation movie. It was the brainchild of Lou Arkoff (the son of American International Pictures founder Samuel Z. Arkoff) and Debra Hill (producer of Halloween). They gave directors $ 1.3 million and a 12 day shooting schedule, to roughly approximate the original shooting conditions (modified for inflation). Unlike the ’50s cheapies, though, they were given final cut, and could choose their own screenwriter, editor and director of photography. This proved irresistible to the (mostly) impressive list of talents who signed on: Robert Rodriguez (Machete), John McNaughton (Wild Things), Mary Lambert (Pet Sematary), Allan Arkush (Rock ‘N’ Roll High School), Joe Dante (Gremlins), Jonathan Kaplan (The Accused), John Milius (Conan the Barbarian), William Friedkin (The Exorcist), Ralph Bakshi (Fritz the Cat) and Uli Edel (The Baader Meinhof Complex).

All of the filmmakers, except for Rodriguez, were old enough to have lived through the era of the film they remade, engaging the aesthetics and politics of the originals in strikingly different ways, alternating between affection and parody often in the same film. Since its original airing, the series has completely disappeared from cultural memory, but Netflix Watch Instantly, that haphazard repository of moving image detritus, is now streaming every entry, and it’s well worth sampling the project’s eccentric film-historical time travel. Below, some thoughts on my favorites.

Joe Dante’s Runaway Daughters, an adaptation of Edward L. Cahn’s 1956 AIP production, is one of the few entries to completely stand on its own as a feature. It is a companion piece to Matinee, Dante’s loving evocation of a 1950s movie-huckster, modeled on William Castle, that he made the previous year. Both films were written by Charlie Haas, and share a tone of gentle satire, about the paranoia brought on by the threat of nuclear war and the space race, respectively. Runaway Daughters follows three high school girlfriends who chase down the no-good boy who loved and left. Working class Holly (Mary Nicholson) thinks she’s pregnant, and is convinced by rich girl Angie (Julie Bowen from Modern Family) and middle-class Laura (Jenny Lewis, who later formed indie-rock band Rilo Kiley) to track the dog down. So they steal a car and hit the road, intercepting the cad before he signs up for the Navy.

Dante opens the film with an irony-drenched found footage montage set to “Let the Good Times Roll”, from a jubilant Eisenhower and Nixon, to the NAACP hung in effigy, and closing with the repressed sexual longings of I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), the title character getting hairy while watching a stretching gymnast. The longing on-screen enters the narrative, as the trio of not-so-repressed girls is watching Werewolf at a drive-in, necking with impunity and ignoring the metaphors on screen. One of the neckees is Paul Rudd in one of his earliest roles, playing Angie’s bad boy squeeze, Jimmy Rusoff (named after the original screenwriter, Lou Rusoff). Dante gifts Rudd with the catch phrase from Speed Crazy (1959, a major part of Dante’s mash-up Movie Orgy (’68)), “Don’t crowd me!”, which Rudd dishes with appropriate petulance to his greasy gearhead Dad (played against type by Fabian, a late ’50s teen idol).

for the rest go here:http://moviemorlocks.com/2011/11/08/netflixing-showtimes-rebel-highway-1994/#more-42656

New Books: ESCAPE FROM PARIS by Carolyn Hart, Oct. 2011 edition

2011-11-25T15:09:00.000-08:00

There are edits and there are edits. This book was first published in England in 1982. It came out with a word count of 55,000 words. The problem was the manuscript was 93,000 words. Now THAT's an edit.

Fortunately Oconee Spirit Press has now published the full version in a very natty trade paperback. Since we all know most of my synopses are terrible let me as usual I'll let the press release do the heavy lifting.

"ESCAPE FROM PARIS is the story of a year of war, the year France fell to the Germans and England awaited invasion. It is the story of people around the world, touched by war. It is also the story of two American sisters (Linda and Eleanor) in Paris who help British fliers from Occupied France. The Gestapo has decreed death for all involved in saving RTF fliers."

I wasn't sure what to expect when I started reading Escape but within four pages I was hooked. The book begins cleverly and powerfully with short sharp chapters focusing on various people in various places caught up in the war. Readers get a vital sense of a WORLD war right at the start.

Though the novel is rich with historical touches and insights the story is relentlessly told with numerous scenes of suspense perfectly set up and executed. From the psychotic German obsession with destroying Jews to the turncoat cooperation of the Vichy government to the underground movements (such as the one the sisters participate in) Escape is a non-stop thriller that a wide range of readers will not only enjoy but also remember.

Buy Bill Crider's Book

2011-11-24T20:10:00.000-08:00

Amazon.com: A Werewolf Named Wayne eBook: Bill Crider: Kindle Store: Al's new next-door neighbors have just arrived in a smoke-belching DeSoto convertible. They may travel in style, but there's more to them than meets their strangely eerie eyes. Things are going to get hairy as Al gets to know these new additions to the neighborhood. He's ready to face any challenges they bring--secret construction projects and cravings for canned dog food included. But first Al may have to answer a tough question: is it harder being friends with a werewolf, or a girl?

Hermie, Al, and Carl from Bill Crider's first young adult novel A VAMPIRE NAMED FRED, are back in action for another adventure in A WEREWOLF NAMED WAYNE - published for the first time ever.

The Collected Nathan Heller Short Stories $0.99

2011-11-23T09:08:00.000-08:00

Ed here: The writer who gave us Road To Perdition, the Nathan Heller novels and so many other fine books
has put his Nathan Heller short stories into a great new collection. Classic hardboiled stories that readers of every kind will enjoy. One of my favorite books of the year.

Start reading Chicago Lightning: The Collected Nathan Heller Short Stories on your Kindle in under a minute. Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here.

Buy for $0.99
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0054LXX36/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=frifamfanofma-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399373&creativeASIN=B0054LXX36

New eBooks: Kill Them All by Harry Shannon

2011-11-22T15:09:00.000-08:00

Kill Them All (Dead Man #6) [Kindle Edition]
Harry Shannon (Author), Lee Goldberg (Author), William Rabkin (Author)

Digital List Price: $2.99 What's this?
Prime Members: $0.00 (read for free)
Kindle Purchase Price: $0.99
When Purchased, You Save: $2.00 (67%)

Q&A With Harry Shannon, author of Kill Them All

Q: How did you become a novelist?

HS: I adore books, always have. The itch to write one has always been there. Like a lot of authors, I've worked at a number of professions over the years, from music publisher and song lyricist to film executive and psychological counselor. I'd always intended to try my hand at a novel someday, perhaps after retirement, but when my daughter was born so was the necessary drive. I figured, why wait? So I began to outline my first Mick Callahan mystery Memorial Day. It was published two years later.

Q: How did you get involved in The Dead Man series?

HS: In 2010, several experienced authors joined me in forming a loose organization called Top Suspense Group. Among them was Lee Goldberg, who co-created The Dead Man series. Lee asked me if I'd be willing to contribute a novella. Since I grew up on Gold Medal novels, Lancer books and other men's pulp fiction, I loved the concept and jumped at the chance. It was a wonderful experience, and now I'm looking forward to seeing how readers react to my take on Matt's character.

Q: You've written a lot of horror books, including Clan, The Hungry and the Lionsgate movie and novel Dead and Gone. How is the horror in The Dead Man different from what you have done before?

HS: That's an interesting question. For me, horror is not a genre so much as an emotion, so it can be expressed in any number of ways. I generally gravitate towards dry humor coupled with a serious exploration of existential themes--literally the meaning of life, death and those fragile emotional attachments we form along the way. With my entry Kill Them All, I wanted to use the horror as a metaphor for moral corruption. I immediately saw Matt as the classic American hero, an archetypal loner wandering into and out of a troubled desert town, standing up to evil on behalf of the weak and downtrodden. I often set novels in Nevada, but to answer your question, this one has the feeling of a graphic novel, and though it's contemporary it is far more of a classic western than anything else I've ever done. It tempts me to try my hand at a period piece.

Q: This is the first time you've written in someone else's "universe." What was it like writing characters you didn't create?

HS: To be honest, it wasn't easy at first. I'm not used to having to discipline my muse to that degree. Lee Goldberg and William Rabkin were very patient with me, red-lining and sending back a couple of drafts, pointing out where I'd gotten something wrong about Matt's personality or background. The tone had to be just right, and my goofiness had to be reigned in a bit. Kill Them All ended up far, far better as result of their patience. I'll have to prepare and outline more carefully the next time I do a project like this. But once the boundaries were nailed down properly, it just started flowing out. I'm proud of i>Kill Them All. It has substance to it, and was lots of fun to write.

Q: What you've written in so many genres. What genre do you like best?

HS: Like most of the folks contributing to The Dead Man series, I'm very comfortable wandering the boundary between horror and crime fiction and occasionally blurring the line between the two. And I do love a good western. If forced to choose just one genre, I'd say my heart is in the mystery/thriller, where supernatural elements aren't present, but human evil certainly is. My character Mick Callahan is a troubled young psychologist with anger problems. I work a lot of my own issues out when writing Callahan books. There are plenty of horrific moments in his life, though none involving zombies or ghosts. I enjoy exploring Callahan's inner world.

Q: Is there a common strain that runs through your writing regardless of whatever genre you're writing in?

HS: Another interesting question. The short answer is yes. Doing the right thing. I am drawn to stories that use temptation and terror to force a protagonist to examine his or her own character. My favorite definition of the word integrity is "obedience to the unenforceable." Okay, you could get away with doing this, but could you live with it? I also believe the old saw "all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for a good man to do nothing." I'm always working to understand my own conflicting impulses and drives, and believe that very human struggle to be a noble endeavor. I'm sure all that comes out in my writing, book after book, and that it's also there in Kill Them All.

Q: What are you working on now?

HS: I'm hard at work on a new Mick Callahan thriller, tentatively entitled Rough Men. I'm also toying with a crime novella for Top Suspense Group, and a sequel to my zombie apocalypse novel The Hungry. So there you go, I'm writing a mystery, a thriller, and a horror novel!
Product Description
Matt Cahill was an ordinary man leading a simple life until a shocking accident changed everything. Now he can see a nightmarish netherworld that exists within our own. Now he's on a dangerous quest for the answers to who he is and what he has become...and engaged in an epic battle to save us, and his soul, from the clutches of pure evil.

When Matt wanders into a struggling Nevada tourist trap recreation of an "old west" town, he's unaware that he’s being trailed by a Special Ops team of professional mercenaries hired by a University desperate to unlock the secret behind his resurrection...and that he's put everyone around him in dire jeopardy. The mercenaries have no intention of letting Matt escape...or letting any witnesses survive. Matt finds himself in a deadly bind. Somehow he must rally the peaceful citizens into defending themselves against the sadistic, well-armed mercenaries… or sacrifice himself to save them from certain death.

The Dead Man Series:
Face of Evil by Lee Goldberg & William Rabkin
Ring of Knives by James Daniels
Hell in Heaven by Lee Goldberg & William Rabkin
The Dead Woman by David McAfee
The Blood Mesa by James Reasoner
Kill Them All by Harry Shannon
The Beast Within by James Daniels
See all Editorial Reviews

New from Haffner Press: Shannach – The Last: Farewell to Mars Leigh Brackett

2011-11-22T06:18:00.001-08:00

Shannach – The Last:
Farewell to Mars
Leigh Brackett
Introduction by Anne McCaffrey
Illustrated by Ed Emshwiller and Frank Kelly Freas
ISBN 9781893887442
$40.00
500+ pages Hardcover

Description

Picking up where Lorelei of the Red Mist: Planetary Romances left off, this volume collects the final 17 stories of strange adventures on other worlds from the undisputed "Queen of Space Opera." Drawn from the last years of pulp magazines such as Planet Stories, Startling Stories, and Thrilling Wonder Stories, Shannach – The Last: Farewell to Mars sees Brackett at the peak of her talents. Oddly, it is at this point where she abandons the "planetary romance" sub-genre and embarks on a small string of stories tinged with social relevance. This departure didn't stop editors asking for some of "that old Brackett magic" and she offered up two latter day tales ("The Road to Sinharat" and "Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon") before returning to chronicle further adventures of Eric John Stark in her final "Skaith" novels. Closing out the collection is a trio of tales written on commission from the "king of anthologies," Roger Elwood.

The book is adorned with Frank Kelly Freas' and Ed Emshwiller's vintage illustrations from the original pulp magazines.

In a review of Lorelei of the Red Mist: Planetary Romances Paul di Filippo says "[Brackett's work] is replete with hard-bitten protagonists with wounded psyches, females both nurturing and malevolent, weird alien life forms, strange planetary environments, danger, treachery, camaraderie and even spiritual epiphanies. In short, this book holds the essence of SF—at least, the essence of one very important school of it."

Yeah, that's the stuff!

Table of Contents
Reviews
Excerpts

Related Books
Martian Quest
Lorelei of the Red Mist
Stark and the Star Kings

Table of Contents
"Introduction" by Anne McCaffrey
The Truants (Startling Stories Jul ’50)
The Citadel of Lost Ages (Startling Stories Dec ’50)
The Woman from Altair (Startling Stories Jul ’51)
The Shadows (Startling Stories Feb ’52)
The Last Days of Shandakor (Startling Stories Apr ’52)
Shannach—the Last (Planet Stories Nov ’52)
Mars Minus Bisha (Planet Stories Jan ’54)
Runaway (Startling Stories Spr ’54)
The Tweener (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction Feb ’55)
Last Call from Sector 9G (Planet Stories Sum '55)
The Queer Ones (Venture Mar ’57)
All the Colors of the Rainbow (Venture Nov ’57)
The Road to Sinharat (Amazing Stories May ’63)
Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon (ss) F&SF Oct ’64)
Come Sing the Moons of Moravenn (The Other Side of Tomorrow, ed. Roger Elwood, 1973)
How Bright the Stars (Flame Tree Planet, ed. Roger Elwood, 1973)
Mommies and Daddies (Crisis, ed. Roger Elwood, 1974)
"Afterword" by Leigh Brackett

NEW BOOK: ASK THE DICE by Ed Lynskey

2011-11-21T07:23:00.000-08:00

NEW BOOK: ASK THE DICE by Ed Lynskey
November 2011. Crossroad Press.

Digital List Price: $3.99

Ask the Dice is my new crime noir written in the brisk, lean tradition of the classic Fawcett/Gold Medal PBOs. Ask the Dice is my second stand-alone novel after Lake Charles.

Middle-aged Tommy Mack Zane, an ace hit man for organized crime, is looking forward to retiring from the grisly profession and going to live out his golden years. His crime boss catches wind of Tommy Mack’s plans and seemingly sets him up for the murder of the rebellious crime boss’s niece. No choice, Tommy Mack takes it on the lam and with the aid of a few solid friends battles his vengeful crime boss. And who couldn’t use a few solid friends in a jam like his?

When I decided to use the hit man trope from crime fiction, I wanted to create mine as distinctive but without going over the top with his character. Tommy Mack is a black kid adopted by a white family in the Washington, D.C. suburbs. His early childhood spent in rural Texas figures predominantly in determining his career. A lover of jazz and poetry, he pursues outside interests, and therefore he enjoys a life outside of his job. In other words, he feels ready to something else besides bumping off marked victims for his crime boss who insists, “It’s just business.”

The use of back-story in crime fiction has somewhat fallen out of vogue, but for me it remains essential. Tommy Mack’s past makes him the unsympathetic protagonist he is, but the back-story also fleshes out just why he takes up his assassin trade. By the climax, he unearths a few nasty surprises and deals with them in his way.

Ask the Dice has its own noirish roots. The title is derived from a Marilyn Monroe quote to the director John Huston at the Reno craps table in Spring 1960, during the filming of The Misfits, her final motion picture. She’s a film noir starlet from her incandescent presence in The Asphalt Jungle while Huston’s contributions to the genre are legendary.

Thanks for your interest in Ask the Dice, and to Ed for having me back again.

Kindle users: http://tiny.cc/0fqpp

Nook users: http://tiny.cc/lddk5

-Ed Lynskey
Twitter: @edlynskey

2011-11-20T12:53:00.000-08:00

Still hanging in there on Baker & Taylor Top 15 at #9

From author Charlie Stella Temporary Knuckline

The Sam McCain mysteries are always fun for this reader; partly because they are always historical novels and partly because they’re always so well written. Bad Moon Rising is no exception. The Gorman-McCain formula touches on nostalgia and easily identifiable landmarks along a familiar timeline. The fact Gorman has been doing this longer than my married kids are alive is no fluke; he’s survived where many authors haven’t. Bad Moon Rising offers the usual cast of Black River Falls fun and interesting characters, plus a few new ones, and a plot that twists as good as any. A reader choosing any one of the series will be well invested in Sam McCain before they know it.

Having read a few of the McCain series, I was smiling and nodding as soon as I came across an early passage where Sam mentions the Sitar (and how mostly annoying it is to have to listen to one—music to torture one’s ears has always been my definition). It is that sense of timeline/nostalgia/Americana (so what Ravi Shankar was Indian? I remember being tortured by his sitar at the Concert for Bangladesh in Madison Square Garden).

And let’s face it ... people went to the bathroom in masses when two things happened back in the day ... Ravi Shanker took the stage or a twenty-minute drum solo began.

Gorman presents what many of us assume are the good old days while always reminding us there was some bad days as well; Vietnam, long awaited civil rights legislation waiting to take hold, etc.. In Bad Moon Rising, McCain is confronted with the death of the daughter of a wealthy libertarian of sorts. Paul Manwearing was recently widowed and quickly remarried but the stepmom to his two daughters is well versed in remarrying. Paul’s daughters were not happy with the new woman in their lives and each dealt with it in her own way; seeking attention from their father in self destructive ways—how kids in such situations often seek attention.

There’s also a high school football star with very dysfunctional parents forever fighting one another (at the top of their lungs) making their home a place not to be. A multitude of potential suspects to the murder of Manwearing’s daughter will keep you guessing throughout. There’s a hippie commune that drives many of the good folk of Black River Falls somewhat crazy and preacher Cartwright does his usual fire and brimstone routine (something that drives Sam crazy throughout the series), but if there’s anything missing (for this reader) from Bad Moon Rising, it is more of the back and forth between Sam and Judge Whitney (Sam’s Republican Alter ego) … and if I’m not mistaken, she didn’t even shoot a rubber band at him this go. A reformed Judge Whitney? Say it ain’t so, Mr. Gorman.

Sam is always fun to read about and Bad Moon Rising is no disappointment to this wonderful series.

New Books: Saboteur-Richard S. Wheeler Writing as Axel Brand

2011-11-19T18:13:00.000-08:00

The Saboteur (Lieutenant Joe Sonntag Mysteries) [Kindle Edition]

Digital List Price: $2.99

A violent strike; murder at the factory gates.

Milwaukee, 1949. There's labor turmoil in Beer City. Joe Sonntag gets called to the strike-bound West Allis tractor factory, where a temporary employee has been shot and killed in the middle of the night. The struggle between the Machinists Union and the company has boiled over into murder.

But it proves to be more complex than that. The police soon find that mobsters are attempting to take over the union. And also they discover a romantic radical, Anastasia Ryan, who seems to be all too present when more people suddenly die of gunshot wounds, including a respected union leader. She can recite the poetry of John Donne, and lay yellow roses on the grave of an unnamed "scab." Who is she, and why is she there?

This is all a strange world for Joe Sonntag. He's used to dealing with crooks and thugs, but here are people fighting a war to the death over ideals, and jobs, and pay, and maybe the future of the world.

Joe's finest young detective, Frank Silva, who comes from a socialist family, confesses that he once had a romance with Anastasia. She was an experienced older radical; he was a teenager blotting up her beliefs and her world. Suddenly young Frank Silva becomes the lead detective, his bitter insights leading Sonntag's detectives toward the tangled and tragic truth.

EXCITING NEW HARD CASE CRIME NOVEL

2011-11-19T10:44:00.001-08:00

We just added a new book to the Hard Case Crime Web site (www.hardcasecrime.com), a first novel by a young Baltimore-based writer named Ariel S. Winter that we’ll be publishing next summer. It’s not the sort of book that generally attracts a lot of coverage merely as a result of being announced – obviously no one knows the author’s name yet, since he hasn’t published any books before. The main thing it does have going for it is that it’s an amazing, amazing book – one that really knocked my socks off – but that’s something no one else will appreciate until they actually get to read it, which is months away.

However –

There is another story here, which is the book’s very unusual structure. The book is called THE TWENTY-YEAR DEATH, and it’s the story of a husband and wife whose lives collapse as violence intrudes – not an unusual premise for a noir novel. But the form Winter chose for it is very unusual: he decided to tell the story of these two doomed characters in the form of three separate old-fashioned crime novels, each set in a different decade and written in the style of one of the iconic mystery writers of that time. It feels a little like opening a Christmas package and finding new novels by three of your favorite pulp-era crime writers. The first is set in 1931 and features a French police inspector investigating the death of a convict in a rain gutter 20 miles away from the prison where he was supposed to be serving a 40-year jail sentence. The second is set in 1941 and features a hardboiled private eye in Hollywood who is hired by one of the big movie studios to watch over one of their leading ladies, who either is showing signs of paranoid dementia or is actually being stalked by a mysterious man on the set of her new picture. And the third is set in 1951 and puts us deep inside the dark and troubled mind of a desperate man, a drunken writer who has lost almost everything he had and is about to tip over the edge separating ‘troubled’ from ‘dangerous.’

What’s more, these aren’t just pastiches – what's wonderful is that each book works not only as a tribute to a great mystery writer of the past but also as a standalone novel with substance and emotional heft, and as part of the combined larger whole. It’s fascinating, for instance, to watch a background character in the first book become a more central figure in the second and then the first-person narrator in the third. I don’t know any other book that’s ever done anything like it.

In any event…I fell in love with the book, and bought it even though it’s three times the length of our usual books (by far the longest book we’ve ever published – 180,000 words), and even though you’re always told, as a publisher, that first novels don’t sell. I did it because it’s a stunning performance and just left me grinning the widest grin I’ve had on my face for a long, long time.

I don't know if you'll want to run anything about it this early, but if you do, let me know and I can get you a high-res image of the cover art. (Painted by Chuck Pyle, it features the Hollywood star from the 1941 novel…and actual Hollywood star Rose McGowan posed for the painting!) If not, I'm glad to at least plant a seed in the back of your mind now, which will hopefully ripen into full-blown curiosity when we get closer to the book's publication date...

Best,
Charles

Max Allan Collins makes one more 'Return to Perdition' USA TODAY

2011-11-18T13:12:00.001-08:00

Max Allan Collins makes one more 'Return to Perdition'
By Brian Truitt, USA TODAY Updated 2d ago

After three graphic novels, two prose books and a Tom Hanks movie, Max Allan Collins' Road to Perdition saga is winding to a close — and a somewhat surprisingly peaceful ending.

The writer's 1998 graphic novel Road to Perdition introduced 1930s Mob enforcer Michael O'Sullivan, his young son, and their quest for revenge, and the new Return to Perdition, out now from DC Comics' Vertigo imprint, completes the tale with O'Sullivan's grandson, Michael Satariano Jr., who returns home from the Vietnam War in the 1970s to an equally violent life as a government assassin.

Collins' ambitious journey dates back to 1993. Working with his editor at DC's now-defunct Paradox Press, Collins initially envisioned three graphic novels of 300 pages each that would tell the adventures of O'Sullivan and his kid on the road, robbing banks and eluding gangsters a la The Fugitive.

He had started planning a sequel two-thirds of the way through Road when he heard that DC was cancelling the line, meaning he had to wrap his story up in the final 100 pages. In the meantime, he had been arguing with his editor about whether the series should simply be about the father and son, or a bigger generational saga like The Godfather.

"The more I thought about, the more I thought he had a good point," Collins recalls. "I mapped out the subsequent generations: The boy in Road to Perdition growing up, going to war, getting sucked into the Mob himself and ultimately having a son who similarly — primarily because of the role of vengeance in their lives — got drawn into thus life of crime."

for the rest go here: http://www.usatoday.com/life/comics/story/2011-11-16/Max-Allan-Collins-Return-to-Perdition-graphic-novel/51241222/1

Forgotten Books: Conan Doyle, Detective by Peter Costello

2011-11-17T14:41:00.001-08:00

I always thought that Arthur Conan Doyle was a pretty cool guy. When I was young, I was all caught up in the almost otherworldly portrait he gave us of Victorian London and environs: the fog, the hansom cabs, the echoing footsteps down the dark alleys, the pitiful ones of Whitechapel, the self-indulgent ones of the aristocracy. And then when I got older and had more appreciation of what it was like for a father to lose a son, the way Doyle turned to mentalism of various sorts…

The one aspect of the Doyle story I’d never paid much attention to was his very real interest in true-crime cases. As Erle Stanley Gardner would do several decades later, Doyle helped clear innocents and thus helped them escape the gallows. And he worked with police from a variety of cities, towns and even other countries when they asked his opinion or advice on matters concerning open cases.

All this is documented in a fine new book CONAN DOYLE, DETECTIVE: THE TRUE CRIMES INVESTIGATED BY THE CREATOR OF SHERLOCK HOLMES by Peter Costello that moves as swiftly as a Doyle story while offering us a look at a Doyle most of us have ever encountered, even in some of the better Doyle biographies.

There are chapters on six of the UK’s most famous cases, including Crippen, Jack the Ripper and the Irish Crown Jewels. Even when Doyle was wrong in his conjectures, his process of deduction is fascinating to follow. Likewise, even in cases of lesser fame, Costello sets all the crimes in a context that helps give us a vivid sense of the era.

A real treat for several audiences: those who love Holmes, those fascinated with Doyle himself, those interested in the formation of modern crime-solving techniques and those (and there seem to be many) who wished they’d lived in the time of Queen Victoria.

Fight Card #1 Felony Fists by Jack Tunney

2011-11-16T18:32:00.000-08:00

(I apologize for not having the excellent cover at hand. My computer will not cooperate in getting the image to reproduce. I apologize to Paul especially.)

As someone who grew up in the Forties and Fifties boxing fiction was almost as familiar to me as detective stories and westerns. Hollywood especially loved boxing material. Some of the movies were extraordinary but most were lame and predictable.

When I read about Paul Bishop’s Felony Fists (under the name Jack Tunney) I wanted to read it because Paul is such a good writer and because he set his story in his hometown, Los Angeles in the historically interesting year of 1954 (Joe McCarthy, mob hearings in the Senate and Ike promising to end the Korean war one way or the other, including dropping the big bomb).

Felony Fists give us the era vividly and it also delivers a knock out story with the protagonist police officer (and amateur boxer) Patrick “Felony” Flynn.

Here’s the Amazon description (I do this because a number of you have complained about my lax attempts at summarizing stories—apparently forgetting all the sacrifices I’ve made for this country).

“Patrick “Felony” Flynn has been fighting all his life. Learning the “sweet science” from Father Tim the fighting priest at St. Vincent’s, the Chicago orphanage where Pat and his older brother Mickey were raised, Pat has battled his way around the world – first with the Navy and now with the Los Angeles Police Department.

“Legendary LAPD chief William Parker is on a rampage to clean up both the department and the city. His elite crew of detectives known as The Hat Squad is his blunt instrument – dedicated, honest, and fearless. Promotion from patrol to detective is Pat’s goal, but he also yearns to be one of the elite.

“And his fists are going to give him the chance.

“Gangster Mickey Cohen runs LA’s rackets, and murderous heavyweight Solomon King is Cohen’s key to taking over the fight game. Chief Parker wants Patrick “Felony” Flynn to stop him – a tall order for middleweight ship’s champion with no professional record.

“Leading with his chin, and with his partner, LA’s first black detective Tombstone Jones, covering his back, Patrick Flynn and his Felony Fists are about to fight for his future, the future of the department, and the future of Los Angeles.”

If I had to categorize Felony Fists I’d call it New Pulp. Yes it’s fast paced, honors many pulp tropes and delivers everything pulp readers require but it’s much more realistic than Old Pulp. For one thing Paul Bishop knows boxing and it shows. He also gives headline names like Mickey Cohen real life.

This is a story that just won’t quit. I read it in two sittings and enjoyed every page. And all it cost me was $2.99. Next in the series is Mel Odom’s Cut Man.

Frank Miller: Occupy Wall Street 'Louts, Thieves & Rapists,' Comic Writer Says

2011-11-16T05:39:00.000-08:00

Frank Miller: Occupy Wall Street 'Louts, Thieves & Rapists,' Comic Writer Says

Huffington Post

Frank Miller has spent much of his famed comic book writing career creating dark, urban dystopias, but the groundbreaking scribe has little regard for the chaos he says reigns at Zuccotti Park.
The man behind such famed comic series as "Batman: The Dark Knight Returns," "Sin City" and "300," in fact, is entirely against the Occupy Wall Street movement.
"'Occupy' is nothing but a pack of louts, thieves, and rapists, an unruly mob, fed by Woodstock-era nostalgia and putrid false righteousness," Miller wrote in a blog entry last week. "These clowns can do nothing but harm America."
Though, for the most part, the participants in the now-global Occupy moment have protested the imbalances of the economy, corporate fiscal abuses and government officials' close ties to Wall Street, Miller mentions the War on Terror in his slamming of the nascent movement.
"Wake up, pond scum. America is at war against a ruthless enemy," he later continues. "Maybe, between bouts of self-pity and all the other tasty tidbits of narcissism you've been served up in your sheltered, comfy little worlds, you've heard terms like al-Qaeda and Islamicism."
Miller then implores protestors to join the military, or otherwise, to go "back to your mommas' basements and play with your Lords Of Warcraft."
In his work, Miller's protagonists often face off against corrupt government officials. Batman, in both "The Dark Knight Returns" and "The Dark Knight Strikes Again" is faced with heavy governmental opposition, with the latter featuring an especially oppressive and corrupt government.
In 2006, Miller announced that he would have Batman take on Osama bin Laden in "Holy Terror, Batman!" but later dropped Batman from the book; it became "Holy Terror," and has been highly criticized for being hatefully anti-Islam.
In a blog entry on his own site posted in September, Miller calls the book "propaganda," a sort of throw-back to when Captain America punched Hitler, rips the news media as slanted propaganda in its own right, and says, "3000 of my neighbors were murdered. My country was, utterly unprovoked, savagely attacked. I wish all those responsible for the Atrocity of 9/11 to burn in hell."

Matthew R. Bradley: Donald Hamilton’s Serious Spy Becomes a Bond Parody

2011-11-14T19:14:00.001-08:00

This link came from the always excellent Cinema Retro and is written by the always excellent Matthew Bradley. I saw the first Helm movie when it appeared and really hated it. If The Helm books obviously aren't the the equal of either Deighton or le Carre t they're first class American Cold War pulp and not without a good deal of wisdom about life in this vale of tears. To me Hamilton was a far better writer than Fleming or the many Fleming imitators. I wish JFK had picked up a Helm book instead of a Bond but then Bond flattered Kennedy's mystique--the handsome stud who cleverly defeated all the bad guys. Helm was cowboy boots and burgers by comparison. My kind of protagonist.

RETRO-ACTIVE: THE BEST FROM CINEMA RETRO'S ARCHIVES

Donald Hamilton’s Serious Spy Becomes a Bond Parody
By Matthew R. Bradley

When JFK revealed his fondness for the James Bond books by Ian Fleming, and 007—ably embodied by Sean Connery—struck box-office gold with Dr. No (1962) and its sequels, the resultant “Bondmania” set off a spy craze manifested in everything from atmospheric adaptations of Len Deighton and John le Carré to tongue-in-cheek secret agents on screens small and large. Perhaps the most successful of the latter was Matt Helm, a singing and swinging spy played in four films for Columbia Pictures by Rat Pack member Dean Martin, who unlike Connery shared in the profits from the outset via his own company, Meadway-Claude Productions. The former partner of Bond producer Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli - Irving Allen - was playing catch-up after deeming Fleming’s work unworthy of filming, which speeded his breakup with Broccoli. But ironically, his quartet of quintessential spy spoofs was actually based on a series of gritty Gold Medal paperback originals by Donald Hamilton that had been launched by Fawcett before Kennedy was even in office, or Connery started shaking his martinis.

According to Jeff Banks in Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers, Fawcett chose Swedish émigré Hamilton (1916-2006) to create a new series as a follow-up to the adventures of CIA agent Sam Durell, begun by Edward S. Aarons in 1955: “He had established a reputation with half a dozen non-series suspense novels and his popular westerns. Since assassination had been a frequent feature of Hamilton’s suspense fiction, and since Durell worked directly as a spy and usually in exotic foreign locations, the companion series was developed about a hero who was primarily a counterspy (and the ultimate way to counter a spy is to kill him), operating usually within the continental United States.” Hamilton’s work had already been filmed as The Violent Men (1955), Five Steps to Danger (1957), and The Big Country (1958), but beginning in 1960, he focused largely on the Helm series. Twenty-seven novels were published through The Damagers (1993), with the twenty-eighth, The Dominators, as yet unpublished.

When we meet him in Hamilton’s Death of a Citizen (1960), Helm is a happily married writer-photographer specializing in Westerns, living in Santa Fe with his wife, Beth, and their three children, until he is brought face to face with his wartime past as an assassin. Arriving unexpectedly at a party, Tina—with whom he was involved personally and professionally—claims that she still works for their old boss, Mac, and dupes Helm into helping her dispose of a rival agent before Mac reveals that she has gone over to the other side. After Tina kidnaps Helm’s baby daughter, Betsy, to force him to undertake a hit (or “touch”) for her, he cold-bloodedly kills her male accomplice, tortures Tina to elicit Betsy’s location, and fakes her suicide. Scarcely the stuff of spoofery, it would seem, yet Helm’s cinematic debut, The Silencers (1966), was officially based on both Hamilton’s 1962 novel and Death of a Citizen, although Oscar Saul, a veteran screenwriter with credits ranging from A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) to Major Dundee (1965), liberated Martin’s conspicuously single Helm from any pesky family ties.

for the rest go here:
http://www.cinemaretro.com/index.php?/archives/164-MR.-HELM-GOES-TO-HOLLYWOOD.html#extended

Pamela Anderson to Play Virgin Mary in Apparently Ironic Christmas Special

2011-11-14T15:10:00.000-08:00

From The Wrap:

Pamela Anderson to Play Virgin Mary in Apparently Ironic Christmas Special
Published: November 14, 2011 @ 2:13 pm

By Tim Kenneally
Sex-tape veteran and frequent "Playboy" Playmate Pamela Anderson is reclaiming her virginity -- at least on Canadian television.

The former "Baywatch" babe will play the Virgin Mary -- yes, the chaste mother of the Son of God -- in CTV's "A Russell Peters Christmas," the Canadian network announced Monday.

The special, which will be hosted by comedian Russell Peters, will deliver "an irreverent twist on the Christmas special making it unlike anything viewers have seen before."

No kidding. What, Ron Jeremy wasn't available to play Joseph?

Also joining in for the twisted Yuletide festivities: Michael Buble, Jon Lovitz and Ted Lange, lovingly known by millions as Isaac the bartender from "The Love Boat."

"A Russell Peters Christmas" will air Dec. 1 at 9 p.m. ET on CTV -- assuming the Christian community doesn't somehow cause a power meltdown with mass collective outrage.

Excellent writer and bestseller Kevin J. Anderson-Those good old lowest-price bots

2011-11-13T11:56:00.000-08:00

Kevin J. Anderson (From Novelscribes):

A fan reported to me that Amazon has my new novel HELLHOLE with Brian Herbert,
hardcover first edition�not remaindered�for $1.77 (regular $25.99). The mass
market comes out in a few weeks and I was originally alarmed. What's going on?
Who in the world would buy the $9.99 mass market when they can get the original
hardcover for $1.77?

Tor books pressed amazon for two weeks trying to get them to fix it, with no
response. My agent looked into it, couldn't get them to do anything. As near as
we can tell, amazon's lowest-price bots got into some sort of feedback duel with
another bookstore and automatically drove the price down to nearly nothing. And
yet amazon still has to get the books from Tor at regular price, and Brian and I
still get our full royalties ($3 or more per copy) even when customers buy it at
$1.77. (Since we get free shipping as amazon prime customers, I bought 60
copies myself...I can't even buy remainders for that.)

gotta love those automatic price droppers. Here's the link, if any of you wants
to get a super-cheap hardcover http://tinyurl.com/d374wzj

Kevin J Anderson
kja@wordfire.com

many of my hard-to-find novels and short stories now available as ebooks, all
under $5.

www.wordfire.com

Amazon reviews

2011-11-12T12:14:00.000-08:00

Ed here: The wonderful Patti Abbott blogs today about Amazon reviews and their worthiness as guides to buying books.

"Apparently a lot of people don't see irony or satire or even an attempt to point up societal flaws in what they read. They read each book as if it was written by the same writer and should be held to the same standards. They choose a book using these wrong standards and then hold the book accountable for their mistake in choosing it or their inability to understand it.

"Amazon has brought about the democratization of book reviewing, but is that a good thing. Are you always sure that your perception of a book is correct. I'm not. I have only ever posted one bad review on amazon and that was out of pique that an ordinary book was getting so much hype. How about you?"

Ed here: My favorite experience here was a woman's response to one of my westerns. Now even though I don't claim to be a historian I do research my backgrounds as carefully as I can. In this case the city was Denver and what I referred to (I believe this was the 1880s) was how magnificent it was in some ways but appalling in others because of the poverty. I didn't think this was big news. What city then or now doesn't have these striking differences? I guess the poverty was particularly striking because it was so raw.

This woman climbed all over me for defaming her beautiful city. I even wrote her and made my case but she was having none of it. As I recall she was on some historical committee. Yes, everything was beautiful and wonderful in Denver from Day One. And the waters, much like Lourdes, had amazing healing powers.

When I read Amazon I look for industry reviews before reader takes. You can figure out pretty quickly if a review is worth reading. I've gotten good ones and bad ones. Sometimes--true facts--the good ones are so exultant they're as embarrassing as the bad ones (are you listening Mom?). I'm not a regular reader of the reviews anyway. I tend to put a lot more credence in certain bloggers as well as a handful of established mainstream reviewers.

Goodbye, Smokin' Joe by Norman Partridge

2011-11-11T12:28:00.000-08:00

Ed here: Norman Partridge is one of my favorite writers. He's that best thing of all, an original. :Here's a post on his blog about the death of boxer Joe Frazier. The truth, masterfully stated. (This'll take you to his website for other excellent pieces as well http://americanfrankenstein.blogspot.com/2011/11/goodbye-smokin-joe.html)

Goodbye, Smokin' Joe by
Norman Partridge

Of the men who held the heavyweight championship in the seventies, Joe Frazier was my favorite. Fact is, Frazier may be my favorite heavyweight champ, period. I loved the way the guy fought. His signature left hook was a miracle of speed, precision, and devastating power, a punch that made a liar of any math geek who'd try to tell you that the shortest distance between two points was a straight line. I loved Frazier's backstory, how he'd come out of nowhere to make himself into a fighter, how he'd torn up his hand in the Olympics and managed to bring home a gold medal anyway, how he'd had to work in a slaughterhouse and bust his ass to become champ even after he had that gold medal around his neck. I loved Frazier's work ethic, and the way he carried himself, and the way he did his business in the ring.

I loved the way Joe Frazier did his business out of the ring, too.

And when it comes to Frazier's life in and out of the ring, you can't talk about Smokin' Joe without talking about Muhammad Ali. While I always respected Ali's skill as a fighter, I lost respect for him as a man because of the way he treated Joe Frazier. What Ali did went far beyond gamesmanship, promotion, or any sense of common decency. Plain and simple, he started off calling Frazier an "Uncle Tom" before their first fight, and ended up calling him a "gorilla" before the third. You can't scrape much lower than that kind of snake-bellied jabber unless you start badmouthing a man's mama.

You can alibi for Ali -- he certainly had a raw deal when his heavyweight title was stripped in the sixties, and he had a lot to be angry about -- but why Joe Frazier became his most frequent target is a mystery. Frazier had done Ali several good turns when Ali's career looked like it was way past gone. But whatever Ali's reason, he wasn't fooling around with the stuff he put on Frazier. He used his words with the same precision and power that he used his fists. Those words were built to hurt Frazier, and wound him in places punches couldn't touch, and I have to think they did their job.

But Joe Frazier did his job, too.

And the thing that always stuck with me is this: Smokin' Joe did his job in the ring.

Looking back, Frazier's first fight with Ali has to stand out as the biggest of all the big fights to come along in my lifetime. I still remember how Ali's trash talk became the focus as the fight built... just as I remember the beating Frazier put on Ali once the bell rang, and the brutal left hook that knocked Ali down that night in New York, sealing the deal and letting the world know who the real heavyweight champ was, for sure and for certain.

Yep. That's what I took from Joe Frazier.

Here was a fighter who did his talking in the ring.

And, man, I'm here to tell you: I liked what he had to say.

The first Ali fight was the top of the mountain for Smokin' Joe. Somehow, I don't think it ever got better than that. To Ali's credit, he took the second fight of the trilogy, nearly putting Frazier out for the count in that one. The third fight is a legend, and much has been made of it. Read what Ali had to say, and it was the closest thing to death a fighter could experience. Read what Frazier had to say and it's a miracle he made it into that ring in Manila, let alone managed to fight the fight he did that night. As the old saying goes, Frazier was blind in one eye and couldn't see too well out of the other by the time he tangled with Ali for the third time. He had cataracts, plus other problems, and still fought one hell of a fight. "I accepted the hurt, and damage, as the price of being the best," Frazier said. "I saw myself as a warrior who was obliged to carry on through thick and thin. I wasn't the best athlete in the world, but I had that fire in my belly. And I was reckless in my determination."

One last memory -- Joe Frazier was one fighter I always wanted to meet, but I never did... though I could have. I was in Vegas when his son Marvis fought Larry Holmes for the title, and I spent a week going to both training camps and watching their workouts. Of course, Smokin' Joe trained Marvis, who was the nicest young guy in the world. But Joe Frazier just didn't seem like the kind of guy you'd walk up to and start a conversation. He didn't give off that vibe. He came into the room (which was actually a big corrugated metal equipment shed behind Caesar's Palace), and he looked like a man who was there to take care of business, not chitchat about it, or talk about his own glory days. He was there to work with his son, and try to help Marvis snatch the belt from Holmes. So I didn't really regret not talking to Frazier. Fact is, watching him work with Marvis that week just cemented the way I'd already come to see the man, so maybe it was better that way.

I'll tell you this, though. Seeing Joe Frazier up close, I was surprised how small he actually was. Mostly, he's listed as 5' 11 1/2", but he sure looked a lot more like five-ten to me. And, really, that just makes the guy all the more amazing.

Anyway, I've linked this before, but if you've never seen Smokin' Joe in action or want another look, check out this clip over on youtube. If you're a fight fan, you'll notice right away that the timeline is a little off, but hey, what can I say -- its heart is in the right place.

So was Joe Frazier's.

Goodbye, Champ. You'll be missed... and remembered.

NORMAN PARTRIDGE
Nix that. Call me Norm. I write stuff. Horror,suspense, noir, pulp -- with combo plates available for repeat customers. My “personal best” novel is Dark Harvest, which was chosen as one of Publishers Weekly’s 100 Best Books of 2006. My sixth short story collection, Johnny Halloween, is now available from Cemetery Dance Publications. "It’s a Boris Custom painted metal-flake black, and it buries all the competition at the track..."
VIEW MY COMPLETE PROFILE

Forgotten Books: The Jugger By Richard Stark

2011-11-10T12:23:00.000-08:00

FORGOTTEN BOOKS: THE JUGGER BY RICHARD STARK

How this for an opener? I'm about to review the worst book Donald E. Westlake ever wrote. Don't take my word for it. Here's Westlake himself speaking.

"I spoiled a book by having him do something he wouldn’t do. The sixth book in the series is called The Jugger, and that book is one of the worst failures I’ve ever had. The problem with it is, in the beginning of the book this guy calls him and says “I’m in trouble out here and these guys are leaning on me and I need help,” and Parker goes to help him. I mean, he wouldn’t do that, and in fact, the guy wouldn’t even think to call him! (laughs)"

I found this quote on The Violent World of Parker website, a goodie. More" Westlake has more than once cited The Jugger as a failure, and although I’ve never seen it straight from the horse’s mouth, I’ve heard he considers it the worst book he’s ever written. Well, Mr. Westlake, if this is the worst you can do after cranking out more books than I can count, I am in great envy of your abilities.

"Mr. Westlake is wrong about Parker acting out of character in The Jugger. He seems to have forgotten the details, which is perfectly understandable, as the book was written in 1965 and he probably has not had much reason to revisit it if he doesn’t care for it that much."

Me again: I frequently find myself liking books most other people don't and vice-versa. The Jugger's a good example. No it's not a great Parker adventure but it's got a lot of early Sixties atmosphere, a cast of truly despicable characters and a constantly shifting plot.

What we have here is a kind of psychodrama. We have a dumb but crafty Sheriff, a smart but unlucky FBI man, a dumb but uncrafty lady friend of a pathetic dead guy who'd been trying to find an imaginary sum of money hidden by Joe Sheer.

It goes like this. Parker and Sheer worked together sometimes and then Sheer got old and all he did was serve as a way station for Parker. If you wanted to talk to the big man you had to call Sheer who'd screen you. But when Parter got a nervous communication from Sheer he got concerned that maybe the old man was coming apart and would blow Parker's cover. He had to go to the small Midwestern city and make sure that didn't happen.

But when he got there Sheer was dead. And the (imaginary) enormous amount of stolen money was nowhere to be found--yes there;s money but it's modest compared to what others think. So Parker proceeds to deal with both problems. Under the name of Willis.

The Psychodrama: The Sheriff is a dope but a brutal one and Parker has to string him along in order to learn what he needs to. Watching Parter mislead him is a game worth watching. The Sheriff is a human pit bull. He's capable of killing Parker at any moment. But then Parker is more than willing to strike first. On the other hand the FBI man is slick and political. Mitt Romney could play him. Quoting Norman Mailer on a writer he didn't like: "He's as full of shit as a Thanksgiving turkey." But he suspects that this guy Willis is really a big catch under another name. He's already signing a book contract and learning to wave in parades.

So The Jugger ain't perfect and ain't gonna win none of them NYC awards but I don't care. I just enjoyed this particular take on Parker's world. I read it in two dazzled sittings.

New Books: Centipede Press' Hell House Richard Matheson; Karl Edward Wagner

2011-11-10T10:35:00.001-08:00

CENTIPEDE PRESS
RICHARD MATHESON
HELL HOUSE
NOW SHIPPING!

RICHARD MATHESON
HELL HOUSE
A shining exemplar of the haunted house genre, Hell House is a terrifying classic. Now in a new edition with a a fine front cover image cover gallery and from old editions, a movie poster, and a lengthy, 30-page interview with Matheson by James H. Burns. William F. Nolan has written a insightful introduction to the book wherein he talks about the novel and his long relationship with Matheson.
This edition is oversize at 7 x 10 inches with a printed cloth front panel, and luxurious velvety cloth spine and back panels. The book is enclosed in a cloth-bound slipcase lined with black on the inside. The book also has a top-edge stain and ribbon marker. There are color endpapers and a cover gallery inside, along with a handsome photograph of Matheson. This classic novel has finally received the deluxe treatment it deserves. At only 100 copies for sale, it will sell out quickly. We are offering it at $25 off for one week only.
Each numbered copy is signed by William F. Nolan, Harry O. Morris, and James H. Burns. There is a facsimile signature by Richard Matheson which Mr Matheson and his representative authorized. The edition is limited to 100 copies for sale. Sample page spreads appear below. Click here to order.
Is anyone heading to San Diego for the World Fantasy Convention? Centipede Press will have two tables, and Hell House will be on display. We hope to see you there!

FORTHCOMING TITLES!

Karl Edward Wagner: Masters of the Weird Tale will be shipping by early to mid November. The Golem is at the bindery. That should ship in November or December. Lee Brown Coye is also in the works. We have the slipcases done and it should ship in a couple weeks.

CENTIPEDE PRESS HOME | BOOKS | AUTHORS | GENRES | OPINIONS
Centipede Press
2565 Teller Court | Lakewood, Colorado 80214
Tel 303 231 9720 | jerad@centipedepress.com

New Books: Murder New York Style: Fresh Slices edited by Terrie Moran; Naomi Hirahara

2011-11-08T15:03:00.001-08:00

Hi Ed,

Thanks so much for giving me the opportunity to tell the world about the Sisters in Crime New York/Tri-State chapter’s newest anthology, Murder New York Style: Fresh Slices, edited by Terrie Farley Moran.

The twenty-two stories in Fresh Slices take the reader around and about neighborhoods all over the five boroughs of New York City, places that are not usually visited by tourists; and within those places, murder and mayhem reign. Derringer winner Anita Page kicks off the anthology in Gerritsen Beach, Brooklyn and tells about a long ago murder through the eyes of a life long resident in “Tear Down.” While in the final story, “North of Clinton” Edgar and Anthony nominee K.j.a. Wishnia travels east through Queens and plunges us into the lives of day laborers struggling to get by.

Within the pages of Fresh Slices you can hang out with a community of New Yorkers living in a boat basin on the Hudson River; get an insider view of the Russian community in Brighton Beach; or stand on a rise in MacNeil Park overlooking Manhattan as the locals gather on 9/11.

The neighborhood explored in “The Green Market Violinist” by Triss Stein is a small public park which sits on land where in August 1776, British forces under General Howe defeated Revolutionary forces under General Washington during the Battle of Brooklyn. Later the site became the first home of the baseball team that grew to be the Brooklyn Dodgers, when the team was managed by Mister Ebbets himself, long before their true Brooklyn home, Ebbets Field was built.

For a taste of the kinds of odd locations and diverse stories you can expect to find here, click over to Clare Toohey’s story, “A Morbid Case of Identity Theft” which is available online at Criminal Element. The story starts in The Morbid Anatomy Library, “a private research library and collection of curiosities” which sits beside the Gowanus Canal.

On behalf of the anthology authors and all of the members of the Sisters in Crime New York/Tri-State chapter, many thanks to Ed Gorman for allowing us the chance to introduce Fresh Slices. Information about the stories, the authors and book availability is available at Murder New York Style: Fresh Slices. http://www.murdernystyle.com/

Terrie Farley Moran

--------------WEST COAST CRIME WAVE ANTHOLOGY INTERVIEW WITH NAOMI HIRAHARA

Michael Wolf asked each of the authors to share a little bit about themselves, talk a little about the story they contributed to West Coast Crime Wave, and tell us their thoughts about e-books. Today we talk to Edgar award winning author Naomi Hirahara.

Tell us about yourself.

After graduating from college and spending a year in Japan, I worked at a small daily newspaper as a reporter and then editor while taking creative writing classes at UCLA Extension. I don’t know if it was hubris or if I was delusional, but I was committed to being a published novelist someday. Probably what fueled me more than anything was that I felt that I had stories to tell. Not necessary of my life, but of my parents’ experiences and my larger community’s collective experience.

My first mystery, SUMMER OF THE BIG BACHI, took me fifteen years to write and get published. It didn’t start off as a mystery; it evolved into one. I was first attempting to write . a literary novel, but my prose was too simple and straight-forward, just as my journalistic training had taught me. Walking alongside me during this time were mystery authors and their books: Walter Mosley and his Easy Rawlings series, Barbara Neely and her Blanche White series. I began to see a place for my lead protagonist, Mas Arai, an aging Japanese American gardener who had survived the atomic blast in Hiroshima, in a mystery landscape. This turned out to be the perfect container for him, a passive character who needed a high-stakes situation to push him out of his dust-ridden house in Altadena, California.

The third novel in the series, SNAKESKIN SHAMISEN, won an Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Paperback Original. I remember walking back from a post-award party down a Midtown New York City street. It must have been past midnight. The streets were wet and shiny; the rain had ceased for an evening. Mas Arai had made it in New York!

I’ve published four Mas Arai mysteries — three with Random House and one with St. Martin’s. I’ve also had one middle-grade novel published with Random House’s imprint, Delacorte. Before all this, I’ve had a number of nonfiction books published by either small presses/reference publishers or my own press, Midori Books.

for the rest go here:http://mysteryanthology.com/

Jack O'Connell's Novels now available on e-books!

2011-11-08T08:47:00.000-08:00

http://mysteriouspress.com/products/hard-boiled/box-nine-by-jack-oconnell.asp

http://mysteriouspress.com/

Ed here: Few crime writers have been as celebrated (and deservedly) as Jack O'Connell. Now four of Jack's novels are available on the new Mysterious Press e book website.

Jack O'Connell

Jack O’Connell (b. 1959) is the author of five critically acclaimed, New York Times bestselling crime novels. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, O’Connell’s earliest reading was the dime novel paperbacks and pulp fiction sold in his corner drug store, whose hard boiled attitude he carried over to his fiction. He has cited his hometown’s bleak, crumbling infrastructure as an influence on Quinsigamond, the fictional city where his first four novels were set, and whose decaying industrial landscape served as a backdrop for strange thrillers which earned O’Connell the nickname of a “cyberpunk Dashiell Hammett.”

O’Connell’s most recent novel was The Resurrectionist (2008), which was chosen by Amazon as one of the top 10 science fiction novels of 2008. It won the Le prix Mystère de la critique and the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire in France, and was nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award. O’Connell lives in Worcester, Massachusetts, with his wife and two children.

Books by this author

Wireless by Jack O'Connell

The Skin Palace by Jack O'Connell

Box Nine by Jack O'Connell

Word Made Flesh by Jack O'Connell

Brett Rattner again; Graham Nolan

2011-11-07T14:51:00.000-08:00

Last week I told you what a loud mouth fake-macho no-talent blowhard Brett Rattner is. Apparently the gods agreed. Not a good week for our boy Brett. First Olivia Munn reveals in her autobiography that Brett baby has a teeny tiny pee-pee; then Tower Heist flops; and now our boy runs his mouth about gay people.

First of all the slur makes no sense. Only gay people rehearse? That would come as news to thousands of straight actors and directors. But maybe our boy should've done a little rehearsing since by almost all accounts Tower Heist was a real bad movie. In other words a Brett Rattner movie.

Let's see off hand Hitchcock, Hawks, Mann, Lupino, Ford, Spielberg...how many directors can you think of who rehearse their actors before directing a scene?

Brett Ratner Gay Slur: 'Tower Heist' Director Apologizes Over Q&A 'Fag' Gaffe (Huffington Post)

Brett Ratner has never been one to mince words, but some say the "Tower Heist" director's latest admission is downright deplorable.

After being asked whether he rehearses with his actors before shooting a scene, Ratner replied, "Rehearsing is for fags," according to New York Magazine's Vulture blog.

The gaffe, made during a Q&A session following a "Tower Heist" screening, seemed questionable even for the sharp-tongued Ratner, who is the producer of this year’s Oscar telecast and is said to be in talks to direct an adaptation of the Broadway musical "Wicked." One audience member is said to have been so upset by the reference that they immediately left the session.

The statement was quickly condemned by the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) via Twitter. Entertainment Weekly writer Mark Harris felt similarly, saying that Ratner should step down from his Oscar producing duties as a result: "If he had used an equivalent racial or religious slur, the discussion would go something like, 'You're fired.' Apology or not. The same rule applies here. You don't get a mulligan on homophobia. Not in 2011."

Ratner, who also directed "X-Men: The Last Stand" and and the "Rush Hour" trilogy, quickly apologized in a statement via the Wrap. "It was a dumb way of expressing myself," he wrote. "Everyone who knows me knows that I don't have a prejudiced bone in my body. But as a storyteller I should have been much more thoughtful about the power of language and my choice of words."

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article identified Ratner as the director of the "X-Men" trilogy. Ratner directed "X-Men: The Last Stand," the third firm in the series.

------------------ON A MUCH HAPPIER NOTE

Hello, gang!

All this week, Sunshine State will be celebrating that most cherished of relationships; FRIENDS.

They say if you can count one or two really close friends in your life, you are truly blessed. I know I am blessed and I am sure you are too. I hope you will e-mail these strips or post and share them on your Facebook or other social media pages with your friends.

Share the love...that's what friends do!

I hope you enjoy the week.

All the best,

Graham Nolan
Cartoonist
www.sunshinestatecomics.com

From The Violent World of Parker: Blood Moon Review

2011-11-07T09:58:00.000-08:00

From The Violent World of Parker:

Review: Wolf Moon by Ed Gorman
By Trent

If you’re looking at the above cover image and scratching your head, don’t worry–you’re still at The Violent World of Parker and I haven’t gone off the rails.

Ed Gorman’s Wolf Moon is a Western, but it is also noir. It certainly fits Otto Penzler’s definition that “noir is about losers” (a definition I don’t entirely agree with in its full explication). Wolf Moon could have taken place in the 1940s or another decade more associated with noir, except for one critical element: The title character, a huge wolf raised in captivity to be a savage killer. He wouldn’t exactly fit on the dirty streets of San Francisco in the 1940s.

Wolf Moon is the story of Robert Chase, who is hired along with his two brothers by Schroeder, partner in a bank and owner of the wolf, to rob Schroeder’s own bank. Schroeder betrays them, leaving Chase’s brothers dead and Chase in jail for several years. When Chase is released from prison, he heads to the town of Rock Ridge to reunite with his old flame, Gillian. And Schroeder.

A sense of inevitability infuses the entirety of Wolf Moon. While this makes some elements of the story predictable, it also imparts a lingering dread over the entire novel that adds greatly to its effectiveness–a worthwhile tradeoff that also contributes to it being more noir than Western.

Wonderfully efficient (Amazon lists the paperback at 163 pages), you could easily polish off Wolf Moon in one sitting and there’s a good chance you will. It’s the first of Ed Gorman’s books that I’ve read, but it most definitely won’t be the last.

Wolf Moon is available for the Kindle at a mere $2.99 (a Nook edition is promised soon). The paper version is out of print, but used copies can be found inexpensively from the usual sources. The Kindle edition features the bonus short story, “Deathman,” also quite dark.

Fred Brown, Howard Browne; Bad Moon #7; Triumph The Insult Comic Dog

2011-11-06T10:59:00.000-08:00

Ed here: The crime publications --Fredric Brown, Howard Browne, Henry Kuttner-C.L. Moore--are knockouts enough. But for those of us who like-sf-fantasy this is an unimaginable list!

From Stephen Haffner::

Hey, everybody!

Things have been über-busy at the Secret Moon Base, but it's time for a status update on all that's happening so . . . Onward!

1) SHANNACH—THE LAST: FAREWELL TO MARS
We now hold copies of this brand new release—and it's be-yoo-tee-full! With Kelly Freas' vintage cover art, this is a really great looking book. And the contents are equally awesome. Of course, with all this "keen-ness" something went wrong. The original dustjacket had an intolerable typo (my bad) on the spine, so we've gone ahead and printed a corrected second-state dustjacket. All copies ordered direct from Haffner Press, and select retailers, will ship with the first-state jacket wrapped to the book and shrinkwrapped, with a rolled and bagged copy of the second state jacket included. $40 gets it to you with free shipping in the Continental USA.

2) 2011 WORLD FANTASY CONVENTION
We're also recovering from an unplanned opportunity to exhibit at the 2011 World Fantasy Convention in San Diego last week. We arranged to have SHANNACH—THE LAST: FAREWELL TO MARS make it's debut, and we tried as best we could to collect autographs in the charity books, IN MEMORY OF WONDER'S CHILD and THIRTY-FIVE YEARS OF THE JACK WILLIAMSON LECTURESHIP. We think succeeded fairly well on all counts and we'll announce in a few weeks what new signatures have been added to these books.

3) ARTIST ROLL CALL
We are *extremely* pleased to announce that we have deals with the following artists for two of our 2012 releases:

• THE COMPLETE JOHN THUNSTONE by Manly Wade Wellman will have cover art by Raymond Swanland. Raymond's work is ideally suited to the supernatural horrors that John Thunstone faces in this massive collection. We hope to have images before the end of the year.

• THE MICHAEL GRAY MYSTERIES by Henry Kuttner & Catherine L. Moore, a collection of four paperback original novels from the late 50s, will feature original cover art by classic movie poster and paperback artist Robert McGinnis. Mr. McGinnis has recently been providing cover art for Hard Case Crime's line of books, and we're eager to see what he delivers for this Kuttner/Moore title.

4) THUNDER IN THE VOID
Holy cow! As if that weren't enough, we're days away from sending THUNDER IN THE VOID, a massive collection of Space Opera stories by Henry Kuttner (including a never-before-published story, "The Interplanetary Limited") to the printer. You can reserve your $40 copy here: http://www.haffnerpress.com/Thunder.html or, preorder it as part of one of our (in)famous "Early Bird" deals on the Haffner Press homepage: http://www.haffnerpress.com.

5) HOLLYWOOD ON THE MOON / MAN ABOUT TIME: THE PETE MANX ADVENTURES
With all the other goings-on with our Henry Kuttner projects, we want to assure you all that this project to collect all the SF collaborations of Henry Kuttner and Arthur K. Barnes is going forward and we look for a release in Late February. Details are here: http://www.haffnerpress.com/hollywood.html

6) FREDRIC BROWN MYSTERIES
Keep Watching the Skies for news on our upcoming slate of Fredric Brown titles. Editorial work on the first two volumes is in the home stretch and we will announce contents, pricing, and availability as soon as possible.

7) HALO FOR HIRE: THE PAUL PINE MYSTERIES
Meanwhile, we will take this opportunity to briefly announce that we have an agreement to collect all the novels and shorts featuring Chicago private eye Paul Pine from Howard Browne (sometimes writing as "John Evans".)
Contents are:
• HALO IN BLOOD
• HALO FOR SATAN
• HALO IN BRASS
• "So Dark for April"
• A TASTE OF ASHES
• "The Paper Gun"

A fine summary of the "Paul Pine" works is here: http://www.thrillingdetective.com/pine.html

We'll have ordering information as soon as it becomes available.

Okay, fellow astrogators. That's it for now. We'll send another update around the Thanksgiving holiday.

Meanwhile, there are hundred of orders still to be processed for SHANNACH—THE LAST: FAREWELL TO MARS. (Oh, my aching back!)

Keep Watching the Skies!

Stephen Haffner
Big Poobah
HAFFNER PRESS

-------------Yesterday Bad Moon Rising was #6 and Baker & Taylor now #7 so maybe its run is ending. But it was good while it lasted

------------http://teamcoco.com/video/triumph-occupy-wall-st Triumph The Insult Comic Dog goes to Occupy. The dog's material is always the most obvious (how many geeks-are-virgins gags did he do visiting that Star Trek convention?) but somehow in his irritating way he's funny. Though I still think someday somebody's going to rip him off Smigel's arm and punch Smigel in the mouth.

.

Joe Frazier

2011-11-06T10:00:00.000-08:00

Former boxing champion Joe Frazier has liver cancer
Former heavyweight champion Joe Frazier, 67, was diagnosed four or five weeks ago and is under hospice care.

Ed here: There were only two sports I ever followed. I grew up on baseball and boxing. Baseball I gave up in my Twenties (though after this recent World Series--I watched three games--I'm probably coming back) and boxing in my Sixties when being in the chemo room twice a month gave me all the death thrills I needed.

I also used to be a Muhammed Ali fan but that ended when he fought Joe Frazier. Yes, Frazier is uneducated, has a difficult time expressing himself and has always been something of a joke to the Ali-crazed boxing press. But the humiliation and scorn and outright hatred Ali subjected Frazier to put me off Ali forever. I was happy that Frazier won. He's a damned good fighter and has always struck me as a decent sincere man.. I wish he'd won all his fights against Ali..

My thoughts and prayers are with Joe.

Associated Press
November 5, 2011, 3:50 p.m.
PHILADELPHIA — Former heavyweight champion Joe Frazier has liver cancer and is under hospice care.

The 67-year-old boxer was diagnosed four or five weeks ago, Frazier's personal and business manager said Saturday. Leslie Wolff told the Associated Press the doctors have not yet told Frazier how long he has to live.

"We have medical experts looking into all the options that are out there," Wolff said. "There are very few. But that doesn't mean we're going to stop looking."

Wolff, who has been Frazier's manager for seven years, said the boxer had been in and out of the hospital since early October and receiving hospice treatment for the last week.

"We appreciate every prayer we can get," Wolff said. "I've got everybody praying for him. We'll just keep our fingers crossed and hope for a miracle."

Frazier was the first man to beat Muhammad Ali, knocking him down and taking a decision in the so-called "Fight of the Century" in 1971. He would go on to lose two more fights to Ali, including the epic "Thrilla in Manila" in 1975.

Frazier was bitter for many years about the way Ali treated him then. More recently, he said he had forgiven Ali for repeatedly taunting him.

Frazier was a small yet ferocious fighter who smothered his opponents with punches, including a devastating left hook he used to end many of his fights early. It was the left hook that dropped Ali in the 15th round at Madison Square Garden in 1971 to seal a win in a bout where each fighter earned an unheard-of $2.5 million.

Ali and Frazier put on an even better show in their third fight, held in a sweltering arena in Manila as part of Ali's world tour of fights in 1975. Nearly blinded by Ali's punches, Frazier still wanted to go out for the 15th round but was held back by trainer Eddie Futch in a bout Ali would later say was the closest thing to death he could imagine.

Frazier won the heavyweight title in 1970 by stopping Jimmy Ellis in the fifth round of their fight at Madison Square Garden. He defended it successfully four times before George Foreman knocked him down six times in the first two rounds to take the title from him in 1973.

Frazier would never be heavyweight champion again.

In recent years, Frazier had been doing regular autograph appearances, including one in Las Vegas the weekend of a Floyd Mayweather Jr. fight in September.

“The Bride Wore Black”: Truffaut’s homage to Hitchcock Joan Didion

2011-11-04T14:51:00.000-07:00

Jeanne Moreau in "The Bride Wore Black"

from Salon:

FRIDAY, NOV 4, 2011 4:25 PM CDT
“The Bride Wore Black”: Truffaut’s delicious homage to Hitchcock
Jeanne Moreau plays the ultimate femme fatale in a summery, deceptive fable of a woman's murderous revenge

BY ANDREW O'HEHIR

What begins as a French cinephile’s almost obsessive tribute to Alfred Hitchcock becomes progressively weirder, wittier and more Continental in François Truffaut’s 1968 “The Bride Wore Black,” which begins a New York run this week and will then play in many other cities. Truffaut is sometimes viewed as a relative lightweight among the company of big-name ’60s and ’70s European directors, and there’s no doubt his work is uneven. But I find myself appreciating his double-edged, seductive films more and more on repeat viewings. With its summery, Mediterranean surface, Jeanne Moreau as the ultimate femme fatale heroine and a knife-twisting tale of murderous revenge and unexpected romance, “The Bride Wore Black” is well worth rediscovering.

The first thing we see in “The Bride Wore Black” is a printing press churning out black-and-white images of a topless Moreau, but that’s one of several misdirections in this movie, since the story is almost entirely chaste, and the color photography of famed cinematographer Raoul Coutard (who shot Godard’s “Breathless,” Truffaut’s “Jules and Jim” and numerous other New Wave classics) is brilliant. With a deliberately obtrusive Bernard Herrmann score and its roots in a novel by Cornell Woolrich (whose short story “It Had to Be Murder” was the basis for “Rear Window”), “The Bride Wore Black” is more like a Hitchcock movie than some of Hitchcock’s actual movies, at least at first.

for the rest go here:
http://www.salon.com/2011/11/04/the_bride_wore_black_truffauts_delicious_homage_to_hitchcock/

------------------John Banville reviewing Joan Didion's new book BLUE NIGHTS in the New York Times

"Certainly as a testament of suffering nobly borne, which is what it will be generally taken for, it is exemplary. However, it is most profound, and most provocative, at another level, the level at which the author comes fully to realize, and to face squarely, the dismaying fact that against life’s worst onslaughts nothing avails, not even art; especially not art."

Ed here: I'd always half-assed believe in Boethius' "The Consolation of Philosophy" but as I get older I wonder. Manville lays out the contrary pretty effectively.

New Books: A Killer's Essence by Dave Zeltserman

2011-11-04T13:29:00.000-07:00

FROM BOOKGASM
A Killer’s Essence
by BRUCE GROSSMAN on NOVEMBER 4, 2011

It’s here: another entry into the gritty and grim world of Dave Zeltserman. For those unfamiliar, Zeltserman has crafted some of the darkest crime novels to have come out in the past few years, and A KILLER’S ESSENCE shows it’s still a world with no sunshine in sight.

Stan Green is a put-upon New York City detective who is short on funds and wishes his ex-wife hadn’t taken the kids and moved to Rhode Island. He is assigned a case of a truly brutal killing. To say the crime scene is grisly is an understatement. He’s forced to work the case alone, running himself ragged while trying to balance his personal life with a girlfriend who does not understand that going out with a police officer has disadvantages.

Green finds the one witness who saw the murder, but there’s a major catch, and here Zeltserman uses the supernatural to a degree that has popped up in some of his earlier novels. The witness, Zach, can’t describe the killer, since suffers from a condition where he sees the true selves of people. Plus, it drains Zach even to leave his apartment since his condition is so intense.

For those thinking that this is one of those books that takes place in a short time frame, Zeltserman shows that cases such as this take time. That other killings happen that might tie in just adds to the frustration for the police and the FBI, who are called in to help. Zeltserman pulls no punches, with a subplot involving Russian mob types, but that is nothing to some of the emotional draining moments that come later. This book is not for the squeamish, that’s for sure.

And that is the kind of writing which shines, especially in a genre that can be filled with books that seem to feature super cops or, worse, know-it-alls who figure out the mystery faster than a speeding bullet. ESSENCE is hard to classify since it’s as much a crime story as one in which fantastical elements play a central role. This is a terrific introduction to a writer on the rise whose style only grows each time. —Bruce Grossman

Buy it at Amazon.

I was planning to see this until

2011-11-03T14:44:00.000-07:00

Ed here: I don't go to many movies. But this one looked like it might be fun. Until I realized (which I should have realized along time ago) it was directed by Brett Rattner than whom there is no lower form of director. I've seen a number of his movies and they were all terrible. Plus I've seen him interviewed. He does himself no favors by letting the public hear him celebrate his wonderfulness. With so many good actors in it I may see it anyway. Hope and hype spring eternal.

FROM THE WRAP
Review: 'Tower Heist' a Great, Star-Studded Caper -- on Paper
Published: November 03, 2011 @ 11:52 am

By Alonso Duralde
In the new action-comedy “Tower Heist,” Alan Alda plays a Bernie Madoff–ish financier who promotes his business acumen and lives a flashy lifestyle, complete with penthouse apartment and world-class art collection, but winds up being a total fraud.

The character winds up being a walking metaphor for the movie itself, which boasts a terrific cast, gorgeous cinematography and a caper-flick score that drives the action. Too bad that when it’s over you realize that the characters aren’t interesting and the titular heist wasn’t all that thrilling.

Arthur Shaw (Alda) lives atop the Tower, New York’s priciest and most exclusive high-rise, where a devoted staff sees to the needs of its demanding tenants. Running that staff is Josh Kovacs (Ben Stiller), who’s so devoted to his job that he seems to have little time for any fun apart from the online chess games he’s always losing to Shaw.

Shaw gets arrested for fraud, and Josh is forced to tell the staff that he’d given their pension fund over to Shaw to invest for them. FBI special agent Claire (Téa Leoni) tells Josh that they didn’t find any money in Shaw’s apartment, but Josh remembers that Shaw had installed a hidden wall safe years earlier.

With blind faith that Shaw’s emergency nest egg is locked in that safe, Josh decides to plan a robbery, using the knowledge that he and his brother-in-law, building concierge Charlie (Casey Affleck), have of the Tower to get the money out under the nose of Shaw and the FBI agents watching over him while he’s under house arrest.

On paper, this has all the makings of a great caper comedy, from a timely revenge-on-the-rich-guy plotline to terrific New York locations shot by Dante Spinotti to a jazzy Lalo Schifrin–esque score by Christophe Beck to a snappy comic ensemble (which also includes Eddie Murphy as Josh’s childhood-acquaintance-turned-petty-thief, Judd Hirsch as a humorless building manager, and Gabourey Sidibe as a maid with a talent for safe-cracking).

for the rest go here:
http://www.thewrap.com/movies/column-post/tower-heist-makes-glitzy-hollow-bauble-32454

Mystery Scene November 2011; Sandy Balzo

2011-11-02T21:14:00.000-07:00

MYSTERY SCENE
At the Scene, November 2011 Solving the mystery of what to read next!
In this Issue
Anne Perry on Dante's Inferno
Overheard
The Blond Leading the Blond Review
NEW2011 MS Sale
November Greetings

Anne Perry reflects on Dante's Inferno, Jayne Ormerod's Blond Leading the Blond web exclusive review, holiday gift ideas, and One for the Money at the movies!

November kid pick: When Alex Parakeet's secret pie recipe is stolen, he and fellow 11-year-old sleuth Yasmeen Popp race to find the thief, recover the recipe, and save the day.

Hello everyone!

As I write this, Holiday Issue #122 is just getting ready to go to print for late-November newsstands.

You can look forward to a conversation with Marcia Muller, creator of the groundbreaking female private eye Sharon McCone. Margaret Maron describes the fateful meeting of her two detectives, Sigrid Harald and Deborah Knott, and we consider the UK series Garrow's Law which was based on a real-life 18th-century barrister sometimes called the 'Robin Hood of the Old Bailey." Also Jon L. Breen rounds up the year's best legal thrillers, and Lawrence Block continues his informal memoirs in "The Murders in Memory Lane."

Plus, there's the next installment of our book collecting series, a whole slew of great new book, DVD, audiobook, and other reviews, and, of course, the annual Mystery Scene Gift Guide, a stockingful of fun ideas for your crime and mystery lover.

Best wishes,
Kate Stine
Editor

Anne Perry on Dante's Inferno
We are not punished for our sins, but by them

Dante Alighieri in a 14th century painting attributed to Giotto, in the chapel of the Bargello Palace in Florence.

The book whose philosophy has held me more than any other is Dante's Inferno, written around 1310. I read
it haltingly in Italian, and with speed and joy in English (preferably the Dorothy L. Sayers translation, with captions and fascinating footnotes). There is passion and music in it, wit, character, and imagination
to equal that of any sci-fi or horror story. And the plot carries you forward at a hectic pace, always wondering what next.

Why do I care? We spend our lives fascinated with mankind, and with the quest to understand good and evil. Dante encapsulates the soul of it in his vision showing how we are not punished for our sins, but by them. It is not an external thing visited upon us by God, or fate. It is an internal change we have wrought in ourselves. Each bad choice diminishes us in a particular way, just as each good one adds to us.

His classification of sins is most thought-provoking. Lightest are the sins of the Leopard - those of incontinence. In the middle are the sins of the Lion - those of violence. Deepest are the Sins of the Wolf - those of fraud, deceit and betrayal - a capacity peculiar to man.

Among these lowest are flatterers (debasing the means of communication between individuals): forgers (destroying the means of trade); propagandists (polluting all trust and belief between peoples). Pollution of the earth we now understand and condemn as damaging the very world we live in, and therefore all life. Who else grasped that in 1300?

For sheer enjoyment - and perhaps a touch of "schadenfreude," there are the grotesque punishments so exquisitely fitting the crimes - e.g., the lustful swept along by violent winds, never allowed to rest; thieves who now cannot possess even their own bodily forms and are forever changing. It gives the term "poetic justice" a whole new meaning.

And there is the beauty. In that terrible place you still see Christ "walking the waters of Styx with unwet feet."

Every time I return to it I am caught up in the power of Dante's imagination and made to think again "Am I turning myself into who I really want to be? If I saw my acts without the comfortable mask of self-delusion, would I still want them to be part of me?" Thank you, Dante Alighieri.

Anne Perry's latest book is A Christmas Homecoming (Ballantine, October 2011). www.anneperry.net

"Writers on Reading" is a special ongoing Mystery Scene series available as a first look exclusive to our newsletter subscribers.

----------------SANDY BALZO

The second part of my article, Writing the Killer Series, just hit the stands in this month's issue of Southern Writers Magazine.

The two-part article discusses eight major decisions that a writer needs to make before sitting down to begin the first book of what will become--fingers crossed--a series. In this second part, I cover things like:
Location: Fresh meat delivered to your door
Timing: Rip Van Winkle vs. Dorian Gray, your choice
Susan Reichert, editor of Southern Writers, calls the article "great" and says she got so much out of it that every writer needs to read it. High praise!

All the best,
Sandy

Sandra Balzo is an award-winning author of crime fiction, including eight books in two different mystery series--one set in the High Country of North Carolina and the other outside Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her books have garnered starred reviews from Kirkus and Booklist, while being recommended to readers of Janet Evanovich, Charlaine Harris, Harlan Coben, Joan Hess and Margaret Maron. A recent member of the National Board of Directors for the Mystery Writers of America, Sandy now splits her time between South Florida and North Carolina.
www.SandraBalzo.com

Heath Lowrance; Kirkus; Beat To A Pulp; Mystery Readers Journal

2011-11-01T13:30:00.001-07:00

From Heath Lowrance:

Hi Ed, thought you might be interested in my new e-short. It's a horror-western-pulp-adventure mash-up, the first in a new series from Trestle Press. Ed here: That Damned Coyote is really a hoot and a fine story. Check it out.

------------

I hadn't seen the Kirkus review of Bad Moon Rising until yesterday afternoon. Decent marks with a nice money quote: "Read this installment, like all the others (Ticket to Ride, 2009, etc.), for the pop-historical detail and the loving evocation of small-town America."

-----------
From David Cranmer:

A real quick letter to let everyone know the latest eBook I've edited has just been released. It is called BEAT to a PULP: HARDBOILED and is available at Amazon for $0.99: http://www.amazon.com/BEAT-PULP-Hardboiled-ebook/dp/B0061NQXHY/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1320091997&sr=1-1#_.

HARDBOILED is a compilation of uncompromising, gritty tales following in the footsteps of the tough and violent fiction popularized by the legendary Black Mask magazine in its early days. This collection includes thirteen lean and mean stories from the fingertips of Garnett Elliott, Glenn Gray, John Hornor Jacobs, Patricia Abbott, Thomas Pluck, Brad Green, Ron Earl Phillips, Kent Gowran, Amy Grech, Benoit Lelievre, Kieran Shea, Wayne D. Dundee, and yours truly and a boiled down look at hardboiled fiction in an introduction by Ron Scheer. I co-edited the collection with Scott D. Parker.

-----------

From Janet Rudolph

"The next issue of Mystery Readers Journal will focus on Shrinks and other Mental Healthcare Professionals. Would love to have an Author! Author! essay from you for this issue (Volume 27:4). 500-2500 words, first person, upclose and personal about yourself, your books and the 'shrink' connection. Think of it as talking to friends and other writers in the cafe or bar. Please add a 2-3 sentence bio/tagline and snail-mail address (I'll send a copy when it comes out).

Mystery Readers Journal is in its 27th year of publication. We are a review quarterly. MRJ is available in both hardcopy and PDF. Have a look at tables of contents from past themed issues.
http://www.mysteryreaders.org/journal.html

Bad Moon Rising in Baker & Taylor Top Ten; Warren Adler/Pauline Kael

2011-10-31T13:14:00.000-07:00

#
Three weeks on Baker & Taylor Mystery Bestseller List from #15 to #11 this week #9
------------------------------------------------------------------
Warren Adler has written a number of bestsellers and has seen some of them turned into major movies. His piece in the Huffington Post makes some memorable and striking comments about the effect movies have on us.

I Found It At The Movies by Warren Adler

Pauline Kael, who reviewed movies for The New Yorker for many years, was considered by many to be the goddess of film critics. Her comments on movies were both insightful and controversial. Once again, a compendium of her reviews is coming out in a newly published book.

Her writings were distinguished by her sharp opinions. When she was negative about the quality of a film, she was downright lethal. When she was positive, she was ecstatic. But whatever her thoughts were about films, her enduring view was that movies were transformative, important, and, in some cases, life changing.

On the surface, such a conclusion might seem, to say the least, exaggerated and over expansive. Indeed, how many times have I heard it said: "It's only a movie."

Years ago, I might have dismissed her opinion, but after a very long, personal retrospective on the impact of movies on my own life, I'm inclined to see her point.

The effect that movies have had on my life, psyche, worldview, relationship with people, knowledge of the human condition, hopes and fears, emulations and aspirations, romanticism, speech, general appearance, taste in clothing, courting, sex, travel, yearnings and ambitions has been profound. There is no denying it.

for the rest go here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/warren-adler/i-found-it-at-the-movies_b_1064284.html?ref=entertainment