Carole Nelson Douglas

Ed here: On his blog the other night Martin Edwards talked about how many good writers were being let go by their publishers only to find themselves unable to sell their books anywhere. A few writers I know have simply given up. They've even lost the will to sit at the machine any longer. Most of us battle on.

Carole Nelson Douglas and I have been friends for more than twenty years. She's a smart, hard-working and very talented woman whose books are known and loved around the world. She's worked successfully in mystery, suspense, science fiction, fantasy and romance. And what's more impressive is that she's brought something fresh to each genre. So I wasn't surprised when she wrote a paranormal novel that is witty, unique in concept and a hell of a lot of fun to read--as the title itself tells you: DANCING WITH WEREWOLVES.

Carole updated me yesterday about her recent success and I asked her permission to share it with our readers. It shows you that there are many paths to heaven--especially for writers who don't give up.

From Carole:

Ed, thanks for your ear and advice all these years. I thought
you'd like to know that what I expected to be a mild down-sizing
in 2004 turned into 3 1/2 years of being publishing poison. But
Katharine Hepburn came back from being box office poison and
so have I made a comeback finally, I think.

Dancing with Werewolves, the first of my new Delilah Street,
Paranormal Investigator series, just out from a new imprint of
a small press, debuted at # 20 in its category it's first week out on
Nielsen Bookscan and has maintained this week. And the _names_
it sits next to there and on all the Amazon lists! Wow.

DWW is an urban fantasy/noir paranormal set in a slightly futuristic Las
Vegas from Hell. The reviews are great, including a starred one in
Publishers Weekly. It's hung in the mid-hundreds on Amazon for
the three weeks it's been available there. And all this without yet
being available in Barnes and Nobles stores. (Due later this month.)

Speaking of Las Vegas, feline PI Midnight Louie's Vegas-set
mystery series kept on going strong through all this; it was a
replacement for my Irene Adler suspense series that proved
to be an unexpected problem.

Happily writing Louie and Irene for seventeen years, I noticed a
softening in the mystery market, so wasn't surprised when it came
time to drop my Victorian Sherlockian series. Others had ended
even earlier.

I hadn't been to market with a book since 1990, so was startled
to find that even after 50 published novels in several genres, a New
York Times Notable Book of the Year citation, and more than 50 fiction
and nonfiction awards or nominations, I had to write an entire novel on
spec to sell in the current market.

In fact, I ended up writing three, and none of them sold.

Oh, sure, the editors were willing to read the books. And for each
spec novel, one of the ten-to-twelve editors showed a twinge of interest,
or even, in one heart-breaking case, extreme enthusiasm and a thirst
for a series. But everything melted away in the face of "committee"
decisions and editors being overruled.

I really shouldn't have been surprised, but I was: I'd always sold
everything I wrote before. And the rejections didn't hurt my ego so
much as my pocketbook. Writing has been my livelihood for decades.
Suddenly, I wasn't being _allowed_ to work, to prove that my career
had built an audience.

I was surprised when my "DaVinci Code for Smart Chicks" novel was rejected
in 2005 by all the major editors available these days, but with respectful
mentions of my good characters, writing, and research. One editor even
went into a flurry over it, copying it to everyone and asking for time, but
that suddenly iced over into nothing.

One editor contacted my agent, raved about me, and suggested I try an urban/
paranormal fantasy. Thank you, ma'am. We went back and forth on a proposal for
two weeks before she vanished off my email forever. (I discovered the house had
made a surprising major move Upstairs at the same time.)

I pitched a partial of the urban fantasy to another editor who'd read and rejected
the first spec novel and mentioned liking the Adler novels. She accepted a partial to
read, but rejected it with high praise, citing overbuying in the genre in recent months.
Thank you, ma'am. Now that I know book buys are committee decisions these days,
I'm guessing she was overruled.

I finished Dancing with Werewolves and it went to market in March of '06. These
rejections were particularly bad. They said that it had too many ideas and social issues.
Um, the sf/f genre used to be noted for ideas, besides, this was basically a fun,
imaginative, adventuresome read. The only male editor on the list was inclined toward
buying and "fixing" it, but was overruled.

The funny thing is, my first high fantasy novel back in the '80s was roundly rejected until
one house bought it. Six of Swords became a "surprise" bestseller, it and its sequel selling 375,000 paperbacks with no marketing. But that was in the old days when sales figures weren't common knowledge and my super-success in fantasy was secret.

So I commissioned a gorgeous cover for Dancing with Werewolves from retired sf/f
artist David Cherry, the kind of guy who'll help out a friend. I decided to self-publish it.

Last year at this time, at the World Fantasy convention in Austin, Texas, near my home,
I spotted some great covers on a new imprint focusing on women fantasy writers, Juno Books, associated with Prime and Wildside Books, long active in the sf/f world. I decided to try Dancing with Werewolves with editor Paula Guran. When she expressed interest, I asked my agent if he'd handle a small press book, and he did.

Suddenly, I was small-press published. A key factor was Juno moving from trade
paperback format to more highly distributed mass market paperback, through the encouragement of its distributor and the chain bookstores.

That's how it happened that last weekend, exactly a year after I crossed paths with
Juno, Dancing with Werewolves debuted as # 20 in its mass market category on
Nielsen Bookscan. I'm now getting reviews that make one wonder what those editors
were thinking:

"the fantastic first of a new paranormal series . . . fresh . . . spectacularly stylish . . . fabulous."-- starred PW review

“This is a smartly written, plot driven, original novel that deftly combines the elements
of fantasy, mystery, and romance to the well sated delight of the reader. Enthusiastically recommended."--Midwest Review of Books

"With a brilliant eye for detail, Douglas demonstrates her creative talents with a captivating storyline and some of the most unique supporting characters around. This is truly a fantastic start to a series that paranormal romance readers are sure to enjoy."--Darque Reviews

Juno and artist Tim Lantz did a stunning cover. The concept and title are strong, and my name is proving to have lots of pulling power in fantasy and romance as well as mystery. Five wonderful bestselling paranormal authors knew, or knew of, my work, and gave me great quotes: Kelley Armstrong, Heather Graham, Sherrilyn Kenyon, mystery star Nancy Pickard, and Rebecca York. I had a lot of help from my friends and long-time readers who have never forgotten my fantasy roots.

This story, which has a happy ending, so far, is not really about me "knowing best" and
being ahead of the curve, although I am a pretty savvy marketer, and you'd think
I'd get some credit for that after all these books and years.

It's about the industry needing to trust the time-tested creative artist, including their editors.

Clint Eastwood had a great quote in Parade magazine, which I saved and therefore lost, about Hollywood nowadays being cautious and following formula and thereby creating the surfeit of unoriginal products that disappoint and lose audiences. Only he said it much
better.

If even "Dirty Harry" is having trouble getting support for his work, it's a wicked world.

Burt Reynolds

Today I watched about ten minutes of a late-career Burt Reynolds picture called Malone. Though it's in modern dress and has to do with scientific secrets it's really a western, Reynolds as the disinterested cowpoke who gets mighty interested when things go wrong in Dodge. This is my recollection, anyway. Believe it or not I saw it in a theater back when Carol and I went to two or three movies a week. I remember it being much better than it should have been. A strong B.

But when I saw Reynolds today I wondered again why he handled his career the way he did. Deliverance, Semi-Tough, Starting Over...these were Movie Star pictures and he did well in them. One story goes that he constantly needed cash to support a) an expensive wife and b) his theater in Florida. Maybe.

Whatever happened he suddenly started turning out crap at an assembly line rate. Where his buddy Clint Eastwood chose material carefully, Reynolds seemed to take the least bad thing on his desk. Smokey 1 was hokey enough. By the end the Smokey were more like a Dean Martin Roast than a movie--knocking out the fourth wall, the actors all doing numbrs on each others so the yokels (us) could see How Real Hollywood People Behave. Yuks galore.

I saw him interviewed at length a couple of times. He's a bright enough guy but I never sensed any real commitment or interest in craft other than stunt work. Eastwood, though I think he's over-rated as a director and certainly as an actor, has a decided world view and the talent to turn that world view into entertaining and sometimes disturbing pictures.

Maybe all he wanted to be was a movie star. A male fold out. A smart ass on Carson. A seemingly self-deprecating ass bandit.

Too bad. I think he had a modest amount of real talent that he never let himself use.

For once I can beat Bill Crider to a scoop!

Danger: Beware of Falling Cows
Nov 6 02:27 PM US/Eastern

Couple Escapes Injury When Falling Cow Hits Minivan

MANSON, Wash. (AP) - Charles and Linda Everson were driving back to their hotel when their minivan was struck by a falling object—a 600-pound cow.

The Eversons were unhurt but the cow, which had fallen off a cliff, had to be euthanized.

The year-old cow fell about 200 feet from the cliff and landed on the hood of the couple's minivan, causing heavy damage.

A Chelan County fire chief, Arnold Baker, said the couple missed being killed by a matter of inches in the accident Sunday on a highway near Manson.

The Eversons, visiting the area from their home in Westland, Mich., to celebrate their first wedding anniversary, were checked at Lake Chelan Community Hospital as a precaution.

Everson, 49, said he didn't see the cow falling and didn't know what happened until afterward.

He said he kept repeating: "I don't believe this. I don't believe this."


Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Stuff

I was never A Man From Uncle fan and today Turner Classic Movies is reminding my why. They've been running Uncle movies and Uncle compilations peddled as movies all day. If Flint was a K-Mart version of Bond at least it had James Coburn and a certain merry Cold War cynicism. Uncle had Robert Vaughan, who always struck me as a singularly uninteresting mid-level corporate executive, and some of the chessiest sets outside of an Irwin Allen TV series. I watched a half hour of one of them today and the only fun was seeing Dorothy Provine again. Damn she was good looking. Those facial bones were perfect. Jack Palance was the overwrought bad guy and David McCallum looked sort of lost in all the to-ing and fro-ing. I didn't get it back then and I still don't.

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My old buddy John McCarty was on NPR this afternoon talking about the American fascination with mobsters. He did a damned good job as usual. I hope they have him on again soon.

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I have a link to Martin Edwards' blog. Very good writer, very good reviewer. He's of the old Brit school, which is to say he honors the past as well as the present. A few days ago he reviewed the first two volumes of my Collected Works, for which I've thanked him. But this isn't log-rolling. I really do like his fiction, which is rich with character, incident and a serious look at the world around us. He should be much better known in the States. I'm hoping we publish him in Five Star again. Poisoned Pen has done a few of his novels, too. Try the link. I think you'll find him interesting and erudite.

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I see that one of my favorite Elmore Leonard novels Killshot has been turned into a film with Diane Lane. Now that' may be worth seeing.

Pulp-a-Palooza

In my recent review of Otto Penzler's mammoth collection The Big Book of Pulp Fiction I mentioned that it is the only such book that gives the reader a real sense of what pulp fiction was really like because it includes so many different types of stories. Not just Chandler-Hammett but a cross-section of worthy lesser knowns who wrote just about every kind of suspense story a feller could think up.

And the good stuff keeps on coming:

MAX BRAND: Ten Crime Stories edited by Wm. F. Nolan, Jr. Nolan has edited some masterful collections previously and this is one of his best. Brand was one of the most famous of all pulp writers. But he also made extraordinary money in the slicks and in Hollywood. Whatever the format, Brand was up to the task as these stories, culled from both the pulps (including Black Mask) and million-selling magazines The American and Colliers. Whether he was writing westerns, sea adventures or suspense (or his famous Dr. Kildare novels), Brand emphasized character as well as action and it's the people that keep these stories fresh for readers today. An excellent addition to The Lost Classics Series from Crippen & Landru.

JOEL TOWNSLEY ROGERS: Night of Horror and Other Stories. Rogers is remembered today for one of the strangest and most compelling mystery novels ever written, The Red Right Hand. But like Brand he was a writer who worked for the pulps as well as the slicks. These stories, from sources as well-known as The Saturday Evening Post and as forgotten as Mystery Book Magazine, show that Rogers, like Brand, was a first-class yarn-spinner. No matter what the tale, though, there's always an effective hint of the macabre or ironic in Rogers' material whether that be in the straightforward "The Hanging Rope" from New Detective or "Pink Diamond" from Argosy. This is another example of what magazine fiction was really like back in the Thirties and Forties. And if you've got a taste for it, this is a book you'll want to have. Volume Two is already on the way.

From Fred Blosser - ho ho ho - sort of

Ed, you've probably already seen the article by Caryn James in today'd NY TIMES http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/movies/moviesspecial/04jame.html?_r=1&ref=movies&oref=slogin that discerns a trend in the movies slated to open this holiday season: "There is blood on the snow in “Lions for Lambs,” blood on the living room carpet in “American Gangster,” blood just about everywhere in “No Country for Old Men.” The more lighthearted “Sweeney Todd” has its singing, throat-slitting barber. “There Will Be Blood” may be the title of a film opening the day after Christmas, but it could be the slogan for this entire holiday season."

Ms. James may not remember (or may not be old enough to remember) the Christmas movie season of 1971, when the big holiday fare consisted of "Dirty Harry," "The French Connection," "Straw Dogs," and "A Clockwork Orange." Also "Diamonds Are Forever" (if you count Bond-movie violence as violence), "The Last Picture Show" (no violence per se that I can remember, but a real ultra-downer), and "Man in the Wilderness" (mountain man Richard Harris gets mauled by a grizzly, left for dead by his partners, recovers, and sets off for revenge).

I'll leave others to (psycho)analyze the endless sociological implications. For me -- not being a fan of the current Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Will Ferrell, Vince Vaughn school of movie "comedy" -- the most depressing sentence in Ms. James article: "And every holiday season needs to fill its bad-Santa/grown-up elf slot; this year that movie is “Fred Claus,” with Vince Vaughn as Santa’s underachieving brother."

Fred B.

Addenda

This is why I shoudn't make lists--I listed some current innovators in crime fiction tonight and somehow overlooked Allan Guthrie, one of the best.

Follow Up

"I agree with what you say about contemporary crime fiction. There are a lot of fine technical writers who turn out overblown stories with self indulgent hero(ine)s. Everything seems to strive to be Tarantino smooth instead of simply realistic. mtm"

The above was one of the responses to my post last night about the sameness of too much current crime fiction in subject matter if not technique as well. I think it says exactly what I should have said. (Please keep in mind that my First Rule of Reading is--we read what gives us pleasure no matter who says it's good or bad--and that includes Gorman's bloviating. I don't need to remind you that these are my opinions as a reader, nothing more.)

I was responding to stopping by a fairly sizable paperback stand yesterday and looking through the the crime fiction titles I found there. Without an exception they were all about troubled FBI agents, troubled macho cops or troubled heroines threatened by some person from the past. They were outnumbered of course by the number of titles about vampires diddling each other.

As mtm says, most of these books are undoubtedly skillfully crafted and entertaining to read. All I wonder about is how the same tropes can find an audience again and again. This isn't to say that there aren't fine serial killer novels--try John Lutz's a In At The Kill, a particularly fine example of the sub-genre. As for troubled heroines, try anything by Patricia MacDonald. Like Lutz, she's a real writer whose books have true inner lives. Macho cops...Michael Black stands the sub-genre on its head. He's something fresh in the field.

As a writer, I'm not an innovator, either. Real innovators sometimes come along in groups. Right now you can find most of them in the group that includes Ken Bruen, Jason Starr, Vicki Hendricks, Duane Swierczynski, Dave Zeltersman etc. It's significant that I've never seen any of their books on a supermarket/pharmacy/Wal-Mart bookshelf. This may simply be because I live in Iowa where the distributors never stock anything that isn't on The List. We get a very narrow spectrum of titles out here except, of course, for the chains.

It's not that I don't enjoy nail-biters or adventure novels. Love the damned things. I just like them when they're not same old same old. There are a number of crossover horror writers doing dark suspense these days who deserve mainstream audiences, Tom Piccirilli chief among them. And I wish somebody would backlist Norm Partridge. He's done some extraordinary work in the suspense genre.

In mystery and suspense I still like books that have some relevance to everyday life. I mentioned King's Cujo. The belly fire in that book is how it shows us decent, common people struggling not just against the problems of the plot but with their own difficulties as human beings. Yes, poor Cujo is memorable as hell. But so are the people.

Nancy Pickard and Laura Lippmann are two of the best writers we have. They give us books about us. The Way We Live Now was a book title in the sixties. That's what these two writers bring to the table every book out.

There's a whole hell of a lot going on in mystery fiction...I just wish more of it was available where we buy milk and shaving cream.

Stuff

I should note that Saddlebums was nice enough to interview me a week ago. I'm somewhere down the scroll line http://www.saddlebums.blogspot.com/ It's my usual interview in which I discuss my plans to turn the subject of quantam physics into a musical, why I think the Carter Brown has it all over that Chandler guy, and how I'm doing here on the seventh floor violent ward.
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Got a funny off-line message from a woman I used to know. She was amused by my comments about beaver-flashing starlets. She pointed out that we're all getting older and that in the old days I would've paid big dollars to see such things. I noted that I was just agreeing with what Kathy Griffin said on her current special that to show yourself while getting out a car takes a) some very shrewd and unnatural body movements and b) beaver-flashing is now so common it's getting passe. Mostly I was responding to the NY Times article about the reality show of some daughter of some vaguely prominent guy who said that she began her climb to stardom by having a sex tape made with some dude and putting it on the internet. I was laughing out loud as I read this, thinking back to the studio days when fixers would pay big bucks to supress "dirty" photos of the movie stars on the studio roster. My God is that Helen Hayes flashing her--?

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I started reading Cujo by Stephen King last night and have been getting back to it every chance I've had today. He really is the great storyteller of our generation. I've probably read Cujo ten times over the years and not because of the rabies or even the suspense. The woman and man at the center of the story, how she confesses having an affair and the way he responds. I think that's why I'm not much interested in so much popular crime fiction today. All these FBI agents; all these serial killers who creep back into vulnerable (and predictable) lives; all the macho cops. The same thing over and over and over. And there's seemingly no end. If you want to read a real novel try Cujo. There's no supernatural for people who don't dig such.

Samuel Fuller, Novelist - Turner Classic Movies

Ed here: Not only does TCM offer the best cable selection of movies, its website is packed with interesting mini-essays. Here's its commentary on Sam Fuller's The Dark Page:

(copyright 2007 TCM)

THE DARK PAGE - Samuel Fuller's 1944 Noir Novel is Available Again!


Coming soon to a bookstore near you, Samuel Fuller's pulp novel The Dark Page is being republished by Kingly Reprieve. As director and writer, Sam Fuller is revered for raw films noir like Pickup on South Street and searing war movies such as The Big Red One, earning a devoted cult of fans that has included filmmakers from Jean-Luc Godard to Quentin Tarantino, and writers from James Ellroy to George Pelecanos. Before movies, however, Fuller was a newspaperman, and a prolific novelist, blasting out books for the disreputable pulp market.

Drawing on his own experience, Fuller sets this story against the vividly rendered world of Manhattan’s ravenous tabloid newspaper industry. The Dark Page is the tale of Carl Chapman, a powerful city editor turned murderer, who finds himself hunted through the pages of his own paper by the young star crime reporter he personally groomed.

First published in 1944, this fantastically readable murder story has been unavailable for decades, and never published in the UK before. A bestseller in its day – when it was awarded “Best Psychological Novel of 1944” - the novel’s page turning pace, hardboiled stance, cynical wit and grit remain surprising, as do the cinematic eye and powerhouse story-telling of its author. A gripping noir snapshot of its era, with still-pertinent observations on the workings of the tabloid press, it is one of the great rediscoveries of the year.

Director Wim Wenders in his introduction to this edition wrote: "For Sam Fuller the world condensed into stories. That’s what he saw wherever he looked. Whatever reality, incident, fact or event presented itself, he saw it as narrative material. Rereading The Dark Page I hear Sam’s voice, very clearly, as if he was talking to me, intense, excited, passionate, honest. I never met anybody else who would actually talk the same way he would write, let alone anybody who would also make movies with that very same impetus and attitude. One of the great movie directors of the 20th century, sure. But most certainly its greatest storyteller. In my book, at least."

PEEPER

The other night a few of you joined me in saying that it's nice to read/see something purely entertaining sometimes. One of my favorites in this category is Loren Estleman's 1989 novel about a sink-hole dirtbag Detroit private eye named Ralph Poteet.

Even after three readings over the years, Peeper keeps me laughing--many times out loud--all the way through. This isn't cheap parody. It's a witty take on many private eye cliches filled with people you wouldn't want to meet without wearing a bio-hazard suit, including a monsignor who dies in a whorehouse. Poteet is asked to help secret the man's enormous body to a more discreet location. And he decides while he's at it...to snap a few pics of the corpse. Never know what kind of money they'll bring on the open market.

What makes this work is Estleman's enormous skill. Nobody writes a better classical private eye story better than Loren and even when he's having fun with the tropes. He does so with his usual mastery of language, pacing and storytelling.

Trust me. You'l like this one a lot.

The Pulp Fanatic

Terry Southern once said that the lower echelons of publishing provided glimpses of America you just couldn't get in the mainstream. I take that to mean he believed that you could find some interesting takes if not exactly Higher Truths in, for instance, the downmarket paperback market of the era he wrote in, the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies.

Such magazines as Paperback Parade certainly examine those decades carefully and well. And so do several websites. Thanks to Curt Purcell's groovy Groovy Age of Horror http://groovyageofhorror.blogspot.com/ you can revisit the newstands of your youth in lurid living color. And with savvy commentary to boot. .

It was thanks to Groovy that I heard of The Paperback Fanatic justin@justincultprint@free-online.co.uk I have the two most recent issues at hand and they should be enough to inspire literary web dreams for collectors and paperback afficiandos around the world.

They're well laid out, packed with cover reproductions and filled with interesting and entertaining articles and interviews of writers and artists alike. Though the slant is British a good deal of the subject matter deals with American pbs.

Editor Justin Marriott is an incisvive interviewer and writer. In the two issues I have he deals with the mostly forgotten (Robert Lory, a good pb writer) and the famous James Herbert. His piece on Herbert is especially good because of his take on a huge bestseller for whom neither fame nor money is quite enough. He wants respect, too. I like Herbert's books so I sympathize with his anger and frustration to some degree. But given the number of struggling wrters in the world, my sympathy is limited.

Justin covers everything from British porn (think Midwood and Beacon with a Cockney accent), the Kung-Fu pb phenom,and even a collection of war novels (viewers of the Nazi channel in America (better known as the History Channel) would drool over these covers if not the books themselves.

For mystery readers there's a look at what Peter Tremayne was doing back in the Seventies and Eighties. Writing originals with titles such as Zombie!. Kiss of The Cobra, Swamp! and Trollnight. I'm assuming this is the same Peter Tremayne who is the author of many notable mystery novels and stories.

Justin also sent me the forerunner of The Pulp Fanatic, PulpMania, which is packed with eveything from articles on Biker fiction to the myriad shock novels of Guy N. Smith.

If you're into paperbacks you'd better be into The Pulp Fanatic. No fooling.

More from Fred Blosser

Ed, a few blogs back, you mentioned that TCM recently aired one of the early "Lone Wolf" B-movies from Columbia, starring Warren William. TCM ran the final two entries in the series this weekend, starring Gerald Mohr and Ron Randell, respectively. I suppose these programmers were the movie equivalent of 1940s pulp stories, quickly and simply written and filmed. The acting and direction were lighthearted (I guess the term in 1949 would have been "gay," before the word acquired other connotations), the sets no-frills, the production values technically accomplished. The writing was snappy and clever. It seemed to assume that the viewer had an appreciation for wordplay and an ability to follow verbal give-and-take. At the same time, it never slipped into cleverness simply for the sake of showing off. What a difference from, uh, like, you know, the dialogue in most of today's films and TV shows.

Today's younger viewers must watch this stuff and feel that they've encountered a broadcast from some alien society. Invariably, the protagonists in modern TV and movies are pretty sad specimens, always feeling sexually inadequate, burdened by past sins that they've committed or had committed on them, overworked, underappreciated, alienated. Geez, give me a break, I have enough problems in my own life. Mohr and Randell breeze through their problems in perfect command of the situation, charming the gorgeous leading ladies and never raising a crease in their dinner jackets. I don't know whether Mohr and Randell were such jolly fellows in real life, but it probably doesn't matter. On screen, they're guys with whom I'd like to have a beer or a cup of coffee, and take some cheer from their company. I'd cross the street in heavy traffic to avoid most of the depressing characters I see in today's "entertainments."

Fred B.

Ed here: I suspect you're right. People under forty probably find it hard to imagine that we found such programmers entertaining. Part of the appeal for me is the innocence and I don't mean the sexuality. Nobody has any problem except that which the plot gives him or her. You note today's "sad specimens." That makes me recall half a famous line "After such innocence--" Once Hwood began dealing realistically with our lives (at least more realistically than previously) there was no way back. I think the phrase "guilty pleasures" is especially applicable here. As I watch these old Bs I feel guilty for watching them--a dude called the Lone Wolf; c'mon--but then I say to hell with it and just enjoy myself.

Story and style

Over on Rara Avis they're having an interesting discussion about the value of style to a story. In other words, I suppose, can mediocore writing be saved by a damned good story?

The most interesting response so far has come from Dick Lochte:

I partially agree with Jack Bludis' note about the importance of the story.
In the world of blockbuster books, the one in which we now find ourselves,
story trumps everything. If you want to hit the bestseller lists, an
engaging style alone won't be much help; you need a good story, preferably
one with the age-old movie necessity high concept. To have a long-lasting
career as a writer, however, it helps to be able to tell that good story
well. The great comedians, from Bob Hope to Chris Rock, have used jokes that
were honed to perfection. But, as anyone my age who used to try and repeat a
Newhart or Cosby routine to friends can recall, the delivery can be just as
important as the material.

Dick Lochte

Ed here:

Much of the fiction I read as a youth was pretty lame when it came to style. Story and occasionally character triumphed over all sorts of stylist infelicities.

Even today I can read a piece of badly written fiction if the story holds me. Dick nails it with bestsellers. There story is all. And high concept story at that. I don't know that this applies to bestselling mystery series, however. With these the character's occupation or the milieu seems to suffice for high concept (maybe occupation and/or mileu IS the high concept). I pay particular attention to what Dick says because's he's one of the finest sylists working in the field today.

Stephen King became a much better writer over the years. But I still reread Salem's Lot and The Shining and The Bachman Books with great pleasure. Same with his early short stuff. Some of those stories had the same effect on me as getting stabbed. In a pleasurable way, of course. (And no, I've never been stabbed, though seeing Bush or Cheney on TV puts me in equivalent pain.)

A few weeks ago I reviewed a 1964 Gold Medal novel called Scandal on The Sand by John Trinian. Really fine pb. The structure was masterful and the social observation surpisingly rich. And the plot cooked. This guy knew how to tell a story. And the writing was equal to the other aspects of the tale. Deft turns of phrase; conscious rythms in the sentences; interesting, even entertaining word choices.

I don't know that it has to be either or. But I sure do appreciate a well-turned sentence now and then.

From our friend Fred Blosser

Ed, I tend to despise these lists of "100 Best Such-and-Such Movies" that the American Film Institute and the glossy magazines gin up every month or so. Invariably, they appear to have been compiled by some smart-ass 25 year old whose idea of a classic old movie is PRETTY WOMAN. Still, it's a tempting game to play, and I sometimes tend to wander over to the Dark Side myself .

Like now. I wonder what fans would nominate as the worst or most disappointing movies based on well-loved detective and mystery novels and series.

My top two choices, coincidentally, are from the same year -- 1986, that golden era of Reagan, Thatcher, and Iran-Contra:

BLUE CITY, directed by Michelle Manning (who?), from the novel by Ross Macdonald. Judd Nelson starred as Macdonald's seething protagonist, Johnny Weather. Seething ... Judd Nelson ... need I say more? I don't remember much by way of details, except that RM's dour Post-World War II setting was updated to the '80s, and Nelson ambled through the opening scene listlessly bouncing a basketball. I kept waiting in anticipation for someone to grind his smirk into the sidewalk. The IMDB says that Walter Hill produced and (with Lukas Heller, another usually reliable guy) wrote the script. And buried somewhere in the cast was the great Scott Wilson. Sad.

EIGHT MILLION WAYS TO DIE. "Miami Vice" was big that year, so they transplanted Lawrence Block's Matt Scudder from New York to LA, the better to swipe Michael Mann's pastel color schemes and Latino vibe. Jeff Bridges did about the best he could as Scudder, I suppose, but if you're going to pluck Scudder out of Gotham, why not just give the character another name? Somewhere I read (I think in EASY RIDERS, RAGING BULLS) that Hal Ashby was allegedly stoned throughout the whole shoot, letting the actors "improvise" their dialogue. This meant that in most of the scenes, the dialogue mostly consisted of Bridges and the other actors yelling "F*ck you!" at each other over and over again. (I've read that the BURGLAR movie with Whoopie Goldberg was even worse, but I never had the heart to see it.)

Number three in the list, NO GOOD DEED from 2002, probably qualifies more as a disappointment than as an out and out bad movie. At least, it doesn't plumb the stygian depths of putridity that BLUE CITY and EIGHT MILLION WAYS TO DIE did. Still, if you have a story based on Hammett ("The House on Turk Street"), Bob Rafelson as the director, and Sam Jackson, Stellen Skarsgard, Mila Jovovich, Joss Ackland, and Grace Zabriskie in the cast, you might expect something better than what Rafelson delivered. For some reason, maybe to meet his quota of cliches, the screenwriter felt compelled to give Jackson's character a "gimmick" (in the Hammett story, he was the comfortably anonymous Continental Op). And so he's a failed jazz musician who toots on a saxophone.

It would be interesting if others can make a case for merits in these three films that I failed to see ..........

Fred B.

The Big Book of Pulps

Well, I guess Otto Penzler settled THAT argument. Ever since the Forties there have been discussions about which collection of stories best gives a real idea of what pulp magazines were like in breadth and scope. The Hardboiled Omnibus edited by Joseph "Cap" Shaw has always been the most prestigous because Shaw was for years the editor of Black Mask, the magazine both Hammett and Chandler called home.

There have since been many others. I've even co-edited a few pulp collections myself. Each book has its own merits--particuarly Ron Goulart's Hardboiled Dicks--but nothing, nothing even approximates The Black Lizard Book of Pulps that Otto Penzler edited and that Random House has just released.

Over a thousand densley packed pages. Reprint of pulp illustrations. Fascinating biographies of each writer. Commentary by Harlan Coben, Harlan Ellison and Laura Lippman. AND MORE THAN 1000 pages.

Yes, Hammett is here and with an original story. Chndler is here, too. So is Cain. So is Horace McCoy. And so are some of lesser names still familiar to readers of the pulps--Carroll John Daly, Frederick Nebel, George Harmon Coxe and Frank Gruber among others. My favorite of the lesser knowns, Norbert Davis, has two stories (Chandler, Hammett and Woolrich have three each.) All well and good. Great great stuff.

But what makes this collection notable for me is the inclusion of many writers I've never heard of before and the diversity of story material they chose. Most hardboiled anthologies leave the impression that the magazines were filled with straightforward private eye and police procedural tales. Not so. And this anthology proves it. The material ranges from the waterfront to the newspaper office to outre chambers that may be under supernatural assault. In other words, if you went to a newsstand in 1935 you could buy seven or eight crime fiction magazines and get everything from The Saint (included here) to those in touch with the dead.

This is the one and only. No doubt about it. A true masterpiece. AND MORE THAN 1000 pages for only $25 in an extremely handsome package. Witht the holidays sneaking up on us, I don't have to tel you what to get that crime fiction fan do I?

The Kingdom of Bones

I read Stephen Gallagher for two reasons. First because he's one of the most entertaining writers I've ever read. And second because I can't read a short story of his let alone a novel without picking up a few pointers about writing. He's an elegant stylist, a shrewd psychologist and a powerful storyteller with enormous range and depth.

I finished his latest novel The Kingdom of Bones and I was honestly stunned by what he'd done. The sweep, the majesty, the grit, the grue, the great grief (and the underpinning of gallows humor from time to time). This is not only the finest novel I've read this year but the finest novel I've read in the past two or three years.

As most of you know by now, I'm terrible at describing plots. I've had three agents over the years assure me that my outlines are the worst they've ever read (those insensitive bastards).

So I'll spare you my inept attempt at giving you the details of the story and let PW and the publisher do it. Whatever your book budget is make an allowance for this one. You won't be sorry.


From Publishers Weekly
Set mainly in late 19th-century England, Gallagher's ingenious horror thriller revolves around the extraordinary life—and death—of Tom Sayers, a real-life bare-knuckle fighter who, after retiring, briefly traveled the country staging reenactments of his most memorable bouts. While working as a manager for a touring theatrical company, Sayers falls in love with the troupe's leading lady, 22-year-old Louise Porter, who unfortunately doesn't share his feelings. Sayers also becomes the prime suspect in a series of mutilation murders and, while barely evading arrest, embarks on a quest to save Porter, who's become hopelessly entangled in an all-too-real occult legend. Bram Stoker and Aleister Crowley play minor roles. Combining the meticulous historical detail of Caleb Carr's The Alienist with gothic mysticism and Christian mythology, Gallagher (The Painted Bride) delivers a nicely macabre blend of fact and fiction. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Book Description
The Kingdom of Bones is the haunting story of Tom Sayers, a former boxing champion who must
continue to fight—to clear his name after a series of gruesome murders, for the heart and soul of a leading lady, and to uncover the truth behind a legend as old as evil itself.

Wrongly accused of the slaughter of pauper children in the wake of the touring theater company he manages, Tom Sayers is forced to disappear into a twilight world of music halls and traveling boxing booths. Beginning with a chance encounter in a Philadelphia pleasure park one weekend in 1903, this brilliantly macabre mystery traces Sayers’ journey from England’s provincial playhouses through London’s mighty Lyceum Theatre and on to the high society of a transforming American South—with many a secret to be uncovered in the dark alleyways, backstage areas, and houses of ill repute that lie along the way.

As Sayers seeks the truth behind the killings, he is pursued in turn by the tireless Detective Inspector Sebastian Becker. Desperate to ensure the safety of actress Louise Porter, Sayers calls on an old friend, Bram Stoker, for help. But Stoker’s links with the world of the Victorian occult lead Sayers to discover a danger even greater than he could have imagined.

Thrown into a maelstrom of obsession, betrayal, and sacrifice—where even the pure may not escape damnation—Sayers must face the implications of an unthinkable bargain: the exchange of a soul for a chance at eternal life.

With action that spans continents, decades, and every level of society, The Kingdom of Bones follows the troubled lives of those touched by Tom Sayers, ultimately weaving their stories into a harrowing climax that stirs the mind—and the blood.

Jay Flynn Part Three

He was shorter than I had envisioned him, less bulky, not at all imposing. No outstanding features, except maybe for a bristly salt-and-pepper mustache. I was vaguely disappointed. Flynn in person was nowhere near as impressive as he was in the abstract.

Over the next couple of years we got together every time I went to Manhattan. On one occasion he took me up to see his ex-agent (they were still friendly even though they could no longer work together) because the agent kept a bottle of 30-year-old Scotch for after-hours visitors and why pay for cheap booze, Flynn said, when you could get vintage stuff free? Mostly, though, we sat in the bar at Rosoff’s and drank cheap liquor and talked shop. One of the things we talked about – and wrote each other about from time to time – was collaborating on a novel, but somehow we never got together on a mutually appealing idea. I wish we had; the finished product may not have been much good, but it would have been interesting.

Once when I went to see him, he announced that he was on the wagon for good. I asked him why. “Damn croaker said I’d be dead inside a year if I didn’t,” he said.

Two days later he was drinking again.

But he was still alive and kicking when the year was up.

That was Flynn.

During his association with Belmont-Tower, he published several novels as by Jay Flynn under their B-T and Leisure imprints – all of them bad. Sexed-up westerns about a World War I-era operative for the Gallows Detective Agency, Jim Bannerman: sexed-up adventure tales featuring a drifter named Venable; sexed-up, violent cop melodramas starring San Francisco police sergeant Joe Rigg.

Worst of the lot were the Joe Riggs books. Trouble Is My Business (1976, no apologies to Chandler), about a psycho who chopped off his victims’ heads with a Bowie knife, which Flynn had the puckish audacity to dedicate to Wallmann and me; and Blood on Frisco Bay (1976), a scandalous anti-police diatribe about the murder of a San Francisco socialite. He inscribed my copy of the latter: “For Bill Pronzini – a jolly tosspot [sic] and a hell of a fine friend. After this thing, let on you know me and the S.F.P.D. will have your ass – sit tight.” I took his advice and sat tight.

Flynn did publish one reasonably good novel during this period, though it was written a year and a half to two years earlier while he was in Ireland. Warlock (Pocket Books, 1976, as by J.M. Flynn) features psychic detective John Christian Fifer and his 15-year-old daughter, Fiona, a full-fledged, spell-casting witch. Fey stuff, mixing crime and fantasy – not wholly successful, but with some of the same positive energy that made his Ace and Avon novels so enjoyable. I t was supposed to be the first of a series, and in fact he wrote and delivered a second book; but that second manuscript was close to 200,000 words in length and very eccentric, and when Flynn refused to cut or revise a word, his editor rejected it outright and canceled the series. My copy of Warlock carries this inscription: “For Bill Pronzini – who knows where it’s at – from the founder of the Day Late & Dollar Short Writers’ Assn.”

It took Flynn just about two years to wear out his welcome at Belmont-Tower, which for him was quite a long time. One of the reasons for the wear-out was the increasing eccentricity of the contract novels he delivered; another reason was his failure to deliver at all on other contracts; a third reason was that he had begun to foul up on his editorial duties because he was drinking on the job. His bosses knew he had booze stashed in the office; he would get increasingly oiled as each day wore on, without ever leaving the premises. He would also lurch into the john periodically to freshen his breath from a bottle of Listerine he kept in his desk. It took them weeks to figure out that he had his booze in the Listerine bottle and the Listerine stashed somewhere else.

That was Flynn.

After B-T fired him, and he couldn’t find any other contract or editorial work, he quit New York and the writing business for good. The first place he went was to Richmond, Virginia, for reasons that never were quite clear to me. Inside of a year he was broke and living on Richmond’s skid row, where he fell in with a bunch of white-lightning bootleggers; for a time he ran an illegal “nip shop” for them in the rear of a neighborhood barbershop. Then, also for obscure reasons, he quit the bootleggers and took a legit job as a uniformed security guard – a job that required him to carry a handgun.

One night during a heavy rainstorm, drunk on white-lightning or the like, he noticed that the ceiling of his furnished room was bulging strangely. Maybe he thought he had the DTs and demons were coming after him; maybe he was just too drunk to know what he was doing. In any event he grabbed up his revolver and pumped five shots into the ominous bulge. Whereupon the entire ceiling collapsed and the ensuing deluge of trapped rainwater knocked him flat, broke his leg, and almost drowned him.

That was Flynn.

I had lost touch with him again by this time, but he and Wallmann (who had also returned to the States and was quartered in Eugene, Oregon – still is, in fact) continued to exchange an occasional letter. So I found out that after his leg healed Flynn left Richmond, broke and jobless again, and went to Connecticut, where he talked his ex-agent into letting him live on the agent's estate as a nominal caretaker. He stayed out of trouble there, for the most part, but he still and inevitably managed to wear out another welcome. In February of 1985 he decided to move back to Richmond. But he’d been feeling poorly, he wrote Wallmann just before he left, and so he intended to put himself into a V.A. hospital en route for a checkup.

He never got back to Richmond because he never got out of the hospital. Within a week of his admission, he was dead.

Ironically, it wasn’t the booze that killed him; the damn croakers never did get that right. It was cancer. A tumor the size of a beer bottle. Doesn’t seem possible, but he was still a relatively young man, still in his fifties. Wallmann and I each thought he was that age the first time we met him, thirteen and ten years earlier.

Yeah, Jay Flynn was a character.

The tragicomic variety, with accent on the tragic.


This article first appeared in Mystery Scene #13. Copyright © 1988 by Bill Pronzini.

Jay Flynn Part Two

I exchanged a couple of letters with him shortly afterward, but at that point none of us seemed inclined to keep up a regular correspondence. It would be almost two years before Wallmann and I got to know Flynn well. And how that came about requires a couple of paragraphs of relevant autobiography.

In mid-1969 Jeff and I succumbed to an offer to write sex books for an outfit called Liverpool Library Press, aka LLP – partly for the money, which was top market dollar in those days ($1200 per title), and partly because it enabled us to finance our legitimate work. Soon we were collaborating on a book every two months for LLP. We churned them out in four or five days of intensive effort, so we could spend the rest of our time writing fiction we cared about.

Late that year LLP moved its base of operations from California to the Mediterranean island of Majorca, where the high-rolling publisher (an Ivy-League American) had rented a palatial villa. For tax and other reasons he preferred his writers to also live on Majorca – or at least somewhere in Europe – and so he offered to pay the way of anyone who was willing to make the move. Wallmann and I were willing. We took a freighter for Amsterdam in February of 1970, and we arrived on Majorca in a broken-down VW station wagon five weeks later.

Neither of us remembers corresponding with Flynn while we were on Majorca; and we have only dim recollections of receiving some kind of communication from him at Christmas of 1970, when we returned to California for a brief holiday visit. But we’re both sure that after we moved from Majorca to a small Bavarian town near Munich in the spring of 1971, we were not only in touch with him again but exchanging frequent letters.

Toward the end of that year Flynn wrote saying he was broke and looking for work – a letter that arrived at about the same time LLP’s publisher decided to move his headquarters to Paris and to increase the number of books he was publishing. LLP was in need of writers; Flynn was in need of work, and claimed to have been writing sex books off and on since his legitimate paperback markets dried up in 1962 (which was probably true). So we got them together, Flynn submitted some sample material, and LLP put him on the payroll.

It was six months or so before the publisher offered to pay his way to Europe. By that time Jeff had made up his mind to move again, this time to France. He and Flynn arrived in Paris not long apart, and met there for the first time in the fall of 1972.

I was doing well enough with legitimate fiction by then to quit the sex-book racket, and I opted to get married and to stay in West Germany. But I continued to correspond with Flynn, and the better I got to know him through his letters (he wrote great letters), the more he intrigued me. I used him as the model for the boozy ex-pulp writer, Russell Dancer, who first appeared in the “Nameless Detective” novel, Undercurrent, in 1973 and who made encore appearances in Hoodwink and Bones. There are a number of differences between Dancer and Flynn, but none of them is fundamental; the lines Dancer speaks in the three “Nameless” novels either were or might have been spoken by Flynn.

He stayed in Paris for a while, at LLP’s expense, and then moved to Majorca, at least in part because Wallmann and I had extolled the island’s virtues to him on numerous occasions. He somehow managed to rent the same small villa Jeff and I had occupied in Palma Nova, and stayed there for about a year, getting himself into and out of a series of minor misadventures with LLP (he was fired at least once, briefly, for delivering “unacceptable” material), a group of other LLP writers living on the island, and the owners of several bars and discos. Then his wanderlust got the best of him, and he hied himself off to Monte Carlo, near where Jeff and his girlfriend had moved from Paris.

In Monte Carlo, Flynn fell passionately in love with a 25-year-old suicidal West German beautician named Hildegarde. But their romance didn’t last long; she threw him over for a randy Bulgarian and went back to Germany. This so upset Flynn that he, too, fled Monte Carlo. He went first to Ireland, on the mistaken assumption that any writer could live there cheaply and tax-free. When he found out that in order to obtain the tax-free status he would have to exchange his American citizenship for an Irish one, he figured it was time to return to the States. Specifically, to New York to look for writing work, since the bottom was already beginning to drop out of the sex-book market.

He took a room in Rosoff’s, an old and now-defunct hotel-and-restaurant on West 43rd just off Times Square, and managed to scrounge up a contract to write several books in the then popular Lassiter paperback western series. The job didn’t last long; he screwed up somehow on one of his manuscripts and was fired. But it so happened that Wallmann arrived in New York just about then, on a business trip; and Jeff, who was doing a book for Belmont-Tower, one of the lower echelon paperback houses, learned that B-T was in need of an assistant editor and house writer. He recommended Flynn, and Flynn got the dual job.

This was 1975. By which time I had been back in the U.S. myself for well over a year, living in San Francisco and also making periodic business trips to New York. So it was in Rosoff’s in early ’75 that Flynn and I finally came face to face.

Jay Flynn

Last night, in discussing Ace Books, I referenced Jay Flynn. After I posted I remembered a piece by Bill Pronzini about Flynn on Mystery*File.com. It originally appeared in Mystery Scene in 1989. I remembered it as being one of Bill's exceptional profiles on overlooked writers (I consider his Forgotten Writers pieces among the two or three finest things published during my tenure with the magazine). I reread it last night and it was even richer, wryer and more memorable than I recalled. It's long so I'm publishing it in segments over the next three nights. Thanks, Bill.

Part One

FORGOTTEN WRITERS #1 : Jay / J.M. Flynn

by Bill Pronzini


Jay Flynn was a character. The tragicomic variety, with accent on the tragic.

In many ways he was a throwback, a stereotype. Hard-drinking, rough-living, blarney-spouting Boston Irishman. Ex-GI, newspaperman (ten years as a crime reporter on the Portland Express, Portland, Maine; stints on the San Jose Mercury and other California papers), bartender, editor, mystery writer, sex novelist, bootlegger, security guard, caretaker, and (so he claimed) prisoner in a hell-hole Mexican jail on a trumped-up charge and “writer-in-residence” at a Nevada whorehouse.

A screw-up of the first rank, with sometimes hilarious results. Lousy luck with women and games of chance, much of it of his own making. Restless, peripatetic; “everybody’s got to be someplace,” he said once, “but it don’t always have to be the same damn place.” Lazy, ambitious, apathetic, energetic, generous, selfish, cynical, sentimental, don’t-give-a-damn, care-too-much – all the schizophrenic contradictions that make up most of us, but that in him seemed magnified to an even greater degree. As has been said about Hemingway, he was just a little larger – and just a little smaller – than life.

There is a schizophrenic quality to his fiction as well. He was like the proverbial little girl: When he was good he was very good, but when he was bad he was very, very bad. His characters and his plots, like Flynn himself, were full of BS and on the screwball side. Big, tough, occasionally inept Irish heroes with names like McHugh, Tighe Slattery, Joe Mannix (no relation or resemblance to the Mike Conners TV character), Burdis Gannon, Matt Tara, Burl Stannard, John Christian Fifer.

Beautiful, willing, treacherous women. Ultra-nasty villains. Action fast and furious – and scatterbrained and often implausible. Storylines, some solidly constructed and some riddled with holes, involving elaborate capers, hijackings, modern-day bootlegging, the hot-car racket, military-base intrigue, the Mafia, vigilante cops and serial killers, Nazi war spoils, spy stuff, even a treasure hidden inside an Irish pub’s thirty-foot, hand-carved mahogany bar. Typical paperback fare of the sixties and seventies, in one sense; atypical, in another, because of Flynn’s slightly skewed perceptions and not inconsiderable (when he worked at it) storytelling skills.

His first published work and only published short story, “The Badger Game,” as by Jay Flynn, appeared in the November 1956 issue of the hard-boiled, J.D.-oriented mystery magazine, Guilty; his first novel, The Deadly Combo, as by J. M. Flynn, was an Ace Double two years later. The short story isn’t such-a-much; the novel is a pretty fair maiden effort.

There is a similar dichotomy among his six other Ace Doubles published between 1959 and 1961, all as by J. M. Flynn. Four are varying degrees of good: The Hot Chariot, Ring Around a Rogue, Drink with the Dead, The Girl from Las Vegas. The other two, One for the Death House and Deep Six, are rather awful.

His best novels of the period are a pair of capers, Terror Tournament and The Action Man, and the five titles that comprise his series featuring an off-the-wall San Francisco bar owner and secret agent named McHugh. Terror Tournament (Bouregy, 1959, his only hardcover) is an effective tale of the carefully planned heist of the gate receipts of a golf tournament modeled after the one at Pebble Beach. Even better – his magnum opus, in fact – is The Action Man (Avon, 1961, as by Jay Flynn). The caper here is a bank heist, and its mastermind, anti-hero Denton Farr, is Flynn’s most complex and believable protagonist. A high level of suspense and a savagely ironic ending are two of the novel’s other pluses.

If Denton Farr is Flynn’s most complex and believable character, McHugh is his most memorable. In McHugh, A Body for McHugh, It’s Murder McHugh, Viva McHugh!, and The Five Faces of Murder (Avon, 1959-62, all as by Jay Flynn), this two-fisted Irish-American James Bond blithely brawls and blusters his way through dizzy plot-swirls concerning a missing electronics expert, Mafia hit men, a couple of Navy flyers mysteriously AWOL in Mexico, a Caribbean island dictator and his army of thugs, and a fortune in hidden Nazi loot.

Along the way he drinks prodigious amounts of booze, trades quips with his fellow agent, Bud Chapman, and his boss, General Burton Harts, and has more problems than sack time with bevies of good and bad women. None of his adventures make much sense, really, but there is a good deal of energy in each, plus plenty of sly humor, breakneck pacing, and some lean, evocative writing. As in the barbed narrative hook that opens It’s Murder McHugh:

McHugh pushed the Polish girl away and went on watching the door of the cantina. He wished Bramhall would show up. It would be even better if Long was with him.
That would make his job easier, because he could kill both of them at the same time.

(Flynn once told me that the McHugh series was the result of a drunken lunch with his agent and an editor at Avon. The agent, he said, began extolling the virtues of “a great new series” Flynn had concocted, and did such a good selling job that afterward the three of them lurched back to the Avon offices, where the editor immediately put through a request for a three-book contract. The only problem was, Flynn had not concocted anything at this point; had never heard the name McHugh until his silver-tongued agent mentioned it, nor had any idea of who or what McHugh was going to be. This anecdote may be true and it may be apocryphal. With Flynn, you just never knew what was fact and what was bullshit.)

I read most of his Ace and Avon novels, either when they were first published or at some point in the sixties. One of my favorites was Drink with the Dead, which has a modern-day bootlegging theme, and in early 1969 I recommended it to friend and fellow writer Jeff Wallmann. Jeff liked it so much he suggested we write a story with a similar theme, which we proceeded to do. The result, “Day of the Moon,” was published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine in 1970 under our William Jeffrey pseudonym. Much later, we expanded the story into a novel that was published under the same title and same pseudonym.

One evening after we’d written the story, over too many drinks in Wallmann’s house near San Francisco, we got to talking about Flynn and his work; to wondering why he hadn’t published a new novel in seven years; and whether or not he was still living on the Monterey Peninsula, where much of his fiction was set and where a brief bio in one of the Ace Doubles said he made his home. As a lark, we began that night to track him down. It took us a while, following a cold and circuitous trail, but we finally found him – not on the Monterey Peninsula but in a V.A. facility in Portland, Maine. On the phone he claimed to be recuperating from a buckshot wound – in the ass, no less – administered by an irate husband. He also claimed to be writing a new McHugh novel to pay his medical expenses, which proved definitely to be hooey because no such book was ever published.

That was Flynn.