Amazon reviews

I have two or three friends who take Amazon reviews very seriously. By that I mean they get really pissed off when some dude or dudette trashes their books. I agree that this is an odd way to sell books--by having reviews that trash the merchandise. Though you can make the case for providing a consumer guide by offering yay and nay opinions.

I've certainly been disembowled by Amazon reviews. One woman hated my book so much I thought she'd probably turn me into the feds. She even wrote me personally to tell me how much she hated my book. She wanted to make sure that I saw the review she'd posted.

Now, I like Amazon. I buy virtually all my new books from them. But their reviews--not so much. And not just because I get dinged occsionaly but also because there's always seemed to me some weird Phillip K. Dickian system at play that low lives (i.e. me and my buds) aren't supposed to know about.

All this is preamble to recommending a fine strange article by Garth Risk Hallberg on Slate http://www.slate.com/id/2182002/pagenum/all/#page_start that is well worth your time.

What's interesting is that Hallberg isn't just complaining. He's seriously trying to understand the process by which you become a Top Ten Amazon reviewe and what such reviewers portend for the future.

This certainly won't deter me from shopping on Amazon. But it is a lenghty look at a rather weird reviewing system.


the literary amateur.
By Garth Risk Hallberg
Posted Tuesday, Jan. 22, 2008, at 7:33 AM ET

"Full disclosure: It was late at night, in a fit of furtive self-Googling, that I discovered the first Amazon customer review of my debut book of fiction. "Superb," wrote Grady Harp of Los Angeles. "Fascinating ... addictive." Not to mention "profound." Such extravagance should have aroused suspicion, but I was too busy basking in the glow of a five-star rave to worry about the finer points of Harp's style. Sure, he'd spelled my name wrong, but hadn't he also judged me "a sensitive observer of human foibles"? Only when I noticed the "Top 10 Reviewer" tag did I wonder whether Grady Harp was more than just a satisfied customer. After a brief e-mail exchange, my publicist confirmed that she'd solicited Grady Harp's review.

"I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised, but I had imagined Amazon's customer reviews as a refuge from the machinations of the publishing industry: "an intelligent and articulate conversation ... conducted by a group of disinterested, disembodied spirits," as James Marcus, a former editor at the company, wrote in his memoir, Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut. Indeed, with customers unseating salaried employees like Marcus as the company's leading content producers, Amazon had been hailed as a harbinger of "Web 2.0"—an ideal realm where user-generated consensus trumps the bankrupt pieties of experts. As I explored the murky understory of Amazon's reviewer rankings, however, I came to see the real Web 2.0 as a tangle of hidden agendas—one in which the disinterested amateur may be an endangered species.

(more)

"Like celebrity bloggers and Wikipedia "Gnomes," then, the Top Amazon Reviewer heralds the arrival of a curious hybrid: part customer, part employee. This feels like a loss. But perhaps it means that in the coming age, every writer will be a salesman: up past dark, sifting through the data stream for evidence that somewhere, some honest soul is buying."

American Detective; Nicky Hilton

Every once in a while I read a novel that reminds me why I've spent a good share of my life reading fiction. Loren D. Estleman's American Detective is such a book.

Characters, plot, milieu all dazzle as private investigator Amos Walker tries to help former Detroit Tigers pitching ace Philip Darius Fuller stop his daughter Dierdre from getting even more involved with a sleaze named Hilary Bairn. Estleman is often compared to Raymond Chandler but in most respects I think he's a better writer. Not as playful maybe in the telling but far superior in drawing characters (to me Chandler's people are generally types from B movies) and twisting plots. And just being enjoyable as hell to read. He's realistic downscale to Robert B. Parker's L.L. Bean upscale. I'll take the downscale.

For pure pleasure, American Detective is a novel you should buy post haste.

-------------------
IF BILL CRIDER CAN REPORT ON PARIS HILTON...WELL THEN I'LL JUST REPORT NICKY HILTON


From Page Six this morning:


January 22, 2008 -- While most of the celebrities at Sundance came to see movies or promote them, and actually do some work, the usual hangers-on came along for the ride just to party and cause chaos in Park City.

Nicky Hilton, her boyfriend, David Katzenberg and their entourage hit Club Stereo, which took over Doolin's bar on Main Street, for the Anamigo party on Friday. Katzenberg stood in a corner at the club pulling down his belted jeans and taking pictures of his private parts bulging through his gray boxer briefs, while Nicky giggled next to him.

Heather Graham; H'wood nepotism

Probably everybody except Dick Cheney has sexual fantasies (he prefers killing). Remmber when movie critic David Thomson got lampooned for writing a book about Nicole Kidman that was a revery of lust and devotion (few bothered to note how well written it was)? A few days ago, mentioning David Mamet's play in NYC, the always elegant James Wolcott mentions reviewers Mannion and Cassavetes and how they perceived Heather Graham's presence in the Mamet satire. I'd say Heather is high on his list of fetching young ladies. As well she should be.

"Lance Mannion finds entrancement in Heather Graham's eyes, and Cassavetes candor in the desperate abandon of her behind. It's true that whatever end of Heather Graham you're gazing at, there's something to reward your attention. I happened to see an early cut of James Toback's Two Girls and a Guy in which Robert Downey Jr. buried his face between Graham's butt cheeks and seemed to disappear for a few minutes, perhaps breathing through his nose to prevent blacking out from lack of oxygen. I wasn't sure where this scene fit in the film's arc of character development and thematic advance but I decided to set my rational mind aside and simply "go" with the experience, figuring Toback would fill me in later if he happened to be hanging around outside the screening room afterwards. Anyway, I like Heather Graham; she's sweet, vulnerable, gifted, natural, unabashed, with a plaintive quality that fills in the blanks when the dialogue she's given is insufficient."

-------------------

Hwood nepotism

When screenwriter Dalton Trumbo moved to Los Angeles in the late Thirties he noted: "Hollywood is a town of nephews." John Patterson recently expanded on that notion in the UK's Guardian newspaper:

"I see that nepotism is alive and well in Hollywood. In Tinseltown terms that means that God is in his heaven and all's right with the world, especially if you're the son, daughter, nephew, niece, brother-in-law or bastard offspring of said God or one of his major cronies.

"Check the recent releases. We've had Chromophobia, directed by Martha Fiennes with room for an eye-catching role for her backer-bait brother Ralph. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, directed by Jake Kasdan, son of Lawrence. No Country For Old Men stars Josh Brolin, son of James, and, perhaps more crucially in getting-ahead terms, the stepson of Barbra Streisand. And this week sees the UK release of The Good Night, starring Gwyneth Paltrow (offspring of actors Bruce Paltrow and Blythe Danner) and directed by her brother Jake, whose previous achievements have been in the heavily nepotistic arena of directing episodic TV.


"Elsewhere we've had movies from pointless hack Nick Cassavetes, son of John (Alpha Dog), and from Jason Reitman, son of Ivan (Juno). Hell, even man of the moment Daniel Day-Lewis, for all his talent, started out with one of the legendary producers of British cinema, Michael Balcon, for a grandfather. We hardly need add such names as Gyllenhaal, Hudson, Spelling or Barrymore.

"....in truth, Kasdan and Sofia Coppola and the Gyllenhaal kids are not without their talents; their elevation is no more harmful to the world than installing Jason Bonham behind his late father's drumkit.

Now, if only we could confine all nepotism to Los Angeles. Surely this industry could have found safe and comfy berths (safe for us, that is) for the likes of failed sons like George W Bush or the myriad second-generation neo-cons who cheerled the stupid Iraq war. Dubya, the archetypal useless-wastrel rich kid, might have found his true metier in press-junket party management or PR mendacity (spin and bullshit being truly his thang), and think what that might have spared us. The junior fantasists of the pro-war right would have been much more useful, and far less dangerous, as script-doctors to warmongering crap like 300 or the xenophobic The Kingdom."

Paperback Parade #69

There's a new issue of Paperback Parade featuring, among many other goodies, a history of Mike Shayne novels and a long interview with cover artist William George. One of the best issues yet.

As I've said before, Gary Lovisi deserves great credit for creating an ongoing hstory of paperbacks worldwide. I'm hopng that someday he'll do a Best Of. That'd make a fne collection.

From Lynne Myers-Bob Randisi-Ben Schutz dies

Hey Guys,

Got this from Ben Schutz's agent, Lynn Myers, just this morning. What a shock! I already passed it on to my newsletter editor.

From: Lynn Myers
To: RRandisi@aol.com
Sent: Sun, 20 Jan 2008 12:05 pm
Subject: Benjamin Schutz, two-time Shamus winner

Dear Bob:

It is with great sadness that I must report the death of Benjamin M. Schutz. He has a massive heart attack while playing racquetball on Thursday evening. He won two Shamus awards and his one Shamus win also was selected for an Edgar. If you tall me who is in charge of the PWA newsletter, I will contact them.

Best,


Lynn Myers

Juno

We caught a morning showing of Juno. Carol liked it a lot. I liked it with reservations.

For me the biggest problem was that it kept falling in love with itself. Young Ellen Page is so beautiful and so fetching and so talented she doesn''t need to hype the cutesy quotient as she does from tim to time. And the orginal songs that seem to have captivated everybody are (again) so cutesy-poo and self-conscious I was tempted to stick Milk Duds in my ears.

That said, it's a fine, funny, endearing little movie. Michael Cera, the boy from Arrested Development, plays teenage male innocence as well as I've ever seen it done. Yes, for all that we hear Teenagers Run Wild, there are boys and girls who haven't been caught up in their cultural moment.

The adults, especially Allison Janney and J.K. Simmons, are excellent. I'm happy that director Jason Reitman chose to make her parents workingclass people. Decent, hardworking, loving parents. I was less taken with the performances of Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman only because they had much less to work with. They play a wealthy yuppie couple that can't have children and arrange to adopt the baby Juno is famously carrying. Nonetheless, the plot twist that comes at the end of the second act gives Garner and Bateman some real moments and they're up to them.

For all wingnut bullshit we hear about family values from homegrown Talibanistas like Mike Huckabee, this to me is what the phrase should mean. This family draws together in a time of crisis with understanding, forgiveness and a determination to make it all come out right.

Hard to imagine anybody not liking this sweet fresh film.

Ed Hoch

As many of you probably know, Ed Hoch died today. I don't know any of the details.

I wasn't a close friend of his but we worked together on projects from time to time and I always found him to be a gentleman and a bright, witty, courteous man who was eager to help new writers get started.

I'm not sure there was ever anybody like him before in the mystery field. I'm sure thre will never be anybody like him again. He was nearing his one thousandth story when he passed. He worked in every genre and sub-genre in the field. He may even have created a sub-genre or two. He was indisputably the greatest idea man of our time. I reprinted six or seven of his hardboiled stories. These showed not only a darkness but a richness of character that surprised peopple.

I'm looking forward to tributes from his close friends. He was a man among, that's for sure.

So long, Ed.

Dr. Watson I presume

Let us now offer up a communal prayer for the sanity of Duane Swierczynski. And for our own sanity. Even though he pretends to be a contemporary dude who writes wryly hardboiled novels of the first-order, Duane S. is really a time bum pausing in our era to mess with our minds.

You may buy into the fiction that he's Duane S. But there is now proof positive that he's actually the true Dr. Watson of the Sherlock Holmes stories.

The Crimes of Dr. Watson is a clever, rich interactive game filled with enough fair clues to give Golden Age Detectives the vapors. I'm not much for games--I'm too stupid--but this one is involving and fun.

But be hip to the fact that of what the two names (in addition to Holmes himself) portend. Supposedly the entire book is a letter from Dr. Watson. But read down further and you'll see that it is "edited and with an introduction by" Duane S.

See the mind game here? One really devious dude. And one excellent, slickly packaged game.

------

Under his Duane S. name, Dr. Watson has also penned a very cool comic book, Moon Knight Annual. This is a creepy, noirish story about a man who preys on women wearing a variety of disguises. The dialogue is adult, the storyline twists and then twists again, and the art is as good as the concept and the writing. Another winner for Dr. Watson.

Val Lewton;Cassie Edwards; eBay

REMEMBER TONIGHT'S THE NIGHT FOR THE MARTIN SCORCESE VAL LEWTON DOCUMENTARY--
Here' a preview from Cinema-Retro:

"(Tonight) Turner Classic Movies premieres a major tribute to producer Val Lewton followed by an eight film marathon. Cinema Retro was provided with an advanced screener of the documentary, Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows and we found it to be one of the most unique and informative documentaries about a filmmaker that we've ever seen. The tribute is a collaboration between Martin Scorsese and writer/director Kent Jones.

"I don't want to go into too many details regarding this remarkable man's life and career. It's best you let these fact unravel as you watch the documentary. Director/writer Kent Jones has worked wonders with the little material that is available on Lewton. There is no known film footage of him or even any audio recordings of his voice, thus the documentary's sub-tirle, The Man in the Shadows. The film contains interviews with Roger Corman, Lewton's son Val, Ann Carter Newton (star of Lewton's Curse of the Cat People) and archival interviews with directors Jacques Tourneur and Robert Wise, both of whom distinguished themselves by working on Lewton films."

Update on Cassie Edwards

Mediabistro reprints a piece from Smart Bitches updating the Cassie Edwards plagiarism story:

(Blog co-propreitor) Candy Tan.. "Using passages, word-for-word, of research material still isn't a good thing by a long shot, but I can understand somebody being confused about the protocols of how much to acknowledge in a work of fiction. Using descriptive passages from another work of fiction, however, changes the tenor entirely."
The usual chart juxtaposing Edwards' prose with that of her likely source material is provided.

Pure decadence

From MarkEvanier's News From Me

"Someone on eBay is selling a pair of Gary Coleman's pants, autographed by the former star of Diff'rent Strokes and gubernatorial candidate. The other night on his show, Jimmy Kimmel put in a bid and warned viewers, "Don't try to outbid me on this." Well, of course, people are trying. The other day when I checked, the top bid was up to something like a million and a half dollars with many folks bidding six and seven figure amounts. I immediately thought, "Hmm...I may be wrong but I have a hunch some of these aren't legitimate bids."

"eBay has since cancelled out all the six and seven figure bids, labelling them as "bogus bids." But the auction is still on and as I write this, the top bid is $33,433.33 ..."

Think of all the people, charities who could use the money. Hell, Coleman could probably use the dough.

Stuff

Last night my post included references to the sf magazine Planet Stories. If you want to take a look at some of those great gaudy covers, Bill Crider has posted a gallery of them on his most excellent website. http://billcrider.blogspot.com/

With horny vampires still in fashion I should mention an erotic vampire novel I usually read once a year because it's so sleek, dark, witty and truly erotic. I'm talking about Ray Garton's Live Girls. Its structure is so cunning it intimidates me. I just wish I could make a book cook the way Ray does. I'm pretty sure it's still in print from Leisure. If you've never read it, pick it up right away.

I didn't really pay much attenton to the Cassie Edwards plagiarism controversy until the NY Times piece this morning. Edwards, a bestselling romance writer, is alleged to have cribbed lines, sentences and more from works of fiction and non-fiction alike. The fiction I understand. The non-fiction I don't. One of her defenses is that she tried to credit sources but that she didn't for reasons I don't understand. I've tried to credit sources in my westerns on occasion and been told that they weren't approriate. The article insists that romance writers frequently credit sources. This makes me nervous, not cribbing the fiction but making sure that I sufficiently change factual material I learn on websites and in books. I rewrite everything but maybe not enough.

This Sunday's NY Times magazine has a long, fascinating article about the singer Shelby Lynne. I wasn't aware of her until a few years ago when one of her concerts was shown on (probably) Ovation. She started out in country but soon tired of the formulas. Except for a massive critical hit five years ago, she's had at best a ragged career. She's never really had a hit record. She's now teamed with producer Phil Ramone to record an album of Dusty Springfield covers. Entertainment Weekly has posted the Dionne Warwick-Springfield "Anyone Who Had a Heart" on line. I don't know what to call except a jazz interpretation. I like it a lot.

Leigh Brackett

In a recent issue of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction magazine Robert Silverberg wrote a smart piece about growing up in the Fifties with your bedroom packed full of science fiction magazines. Easy to turn such a memoir into treacle but with only a tad of sentimentality Silverberg explained how those magazines influenced us and how, in turn, the writers, editors and readers of that time went on to infuence other generations to come.

I started reading sf magazines when I was eleven. I preferred the action-oriented titles, the most famous (or notorious, take your pick) was the great grand Planet Stories. While it published Ray Bradbury (some of his best work in fact) very early Philip K. Dick, most of the magazine was give over to splashy adventure featuring sweaty white heroes fighting sweatier green aliens for the right to despoil the inviolate white heroine.

My favorite in Planet Stories was Leigh Brackett. Her characters were hard-boiled (she collaborated with William Faulkner on the screenplay for The Big Sleep) and her universe painted in the same colors and textures as her idols, among them Edgar Rice Burroughs. She created a mythic Mars of vast deserts and cut-throat tribes and ancient terrors an earthman could never quite comprehend. Her people lived by one rule: trust no one.

Haffner Press has now published volume two in its series of Brackett stories: Lorelei of the Red Mist: Planetary Romances. The huge volume is packed with some of Brackett's best space opera, especially the Jewel of Bas, The Lake of the Gone Forever and The Dancing Girl of Ganymede. Ray Badbury writes a fond remembrance of Brackett, who was one of his most important teachers (one of their collaborations is in the book) and Harry Turtledove makes a strong case for Brackett being one of the truly great pulp writers. And there are some evocative illustrations by Frank Kelly Freas from the original appearrance of te title novelette.

Martian Quest: The Early Brackett, the first volume, demonstrates how quickly she was learning and how unique her approach to adventure fiction was becoming. Michael Moorcock delivers a long and exceptionally fine overview of Bracketts career.

There is even more Brackett in Stark and The Star Kings. Here Brackett's Eric John Stark joins her husband Edmond Hamilton's The Star Kings in the only tale to feature them both. This book is packed with two full-length novels by Hamilton as well as three novelettes by Brackett. John Jakes provides a knowing and entertaining introduction.

A word about the production qualities of the books. They're among the best made and most handsomely illustrated of all the collectibles I've ever seen. These are masterpieces in every way.

Just when you thought publishing couldn't get any stranger...

Galleycat (via e Fine Books & Collections blog) today carries the story of Scribners publishing taking a new look at the ARC s(galleys) it sends out to reviewers:

...the parent company Simon & Schuster "reserves the right to cancel the loan and recall possession of the proof at any time."
The assumption being that galleys are "loaned" for promotional purposes.

"Scribner didn't say on the outside of the package—which was left on our doorstep by the delivery company—that accepting the package bound us to these terms. They didn't provide a way for us to return the book at Scribner's expense. In short, they are attempting to saddle us with a book we don't want and are hinting that legal action might follow if we dispose of it or sell it."

As the blog goes on to note, many ARCs tend to be sent to reviewers unsolicited, and that makes them gifts in the eyes of federal law, gifts which the recipient "has the right to retain, use, discard, or dispose of it in any manner he sees fit without any obligation whatsoever to the sender." So let's put it to the lawyers in the readership: Is Scribner's effort to prevent the sale of ARCs on the used-book market by binding recipients to its imposed terms legal?

A TOUCH OF DEATH

I spent a good share of last night reading Hard Case Crime's snappy edition of A Touch of Death by Charles Williams and I'll say what I've said before about this book. It likely has more plot turns than just about any suspense novel I can ever recall reading.

One of Charles Williams' amoral failed men narrate. He was briefly a football star. Now he's a busted real estate agent. No wonder he gets interested, after initial reluctance, in stealing an one hundred twenty thousand dollars that a bank president took from his own bank. The woman who convinces him to help her makes it sound simple. It's probably in this mansion. All you have to do is get in there and find it. The bank president's wife won't be home for two days. You'll have plenty of time.

Right. Well, we know better than that, don't we? Yes, he gets in but he finds he's not alone. The woman is there, beautiful beyond description, and drunk beyond belief. But so is a killer. After saving her life, failed star takes her to a cabin in the woods where he plans to persuade her to tell him where the money is.

That's the beginning. Everybody in this book is a professional liar. And the bank president's wife is the most fatale of femmes. She lies on virtually every page and occasionally almost gets them killed. That she knows where the money is is obvious. That she killed her husband is also obvious. But who is trying to kill her and why?

While Touch isn't as rich in characterization as most Williams its story is so daazling it doesn't matter for once. More evidence that a good share of his work should be returned to print.

Magazines; Val Lewton

Magazines:

Andy Cox is one of the most talented editor-publishers working today. His second issue of Black Static is rich with dark fiction as well as articles about writers and writing. With stories by such fine writers as Lisa Tuttle & Steven Utley in collaboration; Christopher Fowler, Scott Nicholson and Steve Rasnic Tem (and many others), Andy has created a type of magazine uniquely his own. The excellent layout and design enhances the material. This is a must-read for those who like their fiction contemporary and uncensored. TTAPRESS.COM

Cinema Retro #10 is packed with a wide assortment of goodies in both prose and photographs. CR bills itself as "The Essential Guide To Movies of the 60s and 70s" and so it is. But it's not just a nostalgia trip. The articles show how we got here today from back there. Interesting takes on Elke Sommer, Doris Day, Hammer Films, Richard Johnson (the actor who turned down the Bond job originally) and Sam Peckinpah--to mention just a few. My favorite is a retro review of "I'll Never Forget What's His Name," a British film about advertising agencies and treachery in Mod UK. Great issue.


From our friend Toss Mason on Rara-Avis today:
As the TCM website puts it:

Martin Scorsese presents [and produces and narrates] VAL LEWTON: THE
MAN IN THE SHADOWS, which is being
produced for TCM by Scorsese's Sikelia Productions, with Kent Jones
writing and directing.

The following is the schedule for the Jan. 14-15 premiere and
marathon
of Lewton classics (all times Eastern):

8 p.m. Martin Scorsese Presents: VAL LEWTON - THE MAN IN THE SHADOWS

9:30 p.m. Cat People (1942) - starring Simone Simon, Kent Smith and
Tom
Conway.

10:45 p.m. I Walked with a Zombie (1943) - starring Frances Dee and
Tom
Conway.

Midnight Martin Scorsese Presents: VAL LEWTON - THE MAN IN THE
SHADOWS

1:30 a.m. The Leopard Man (1943) - starring Dennis O'Keefe and
Margot [based on Cornell Woolrich's novel BLACK ALIBI]

2:45 a.m. The Seventh Victim (1943) - starring Kim Hunter, Tom Conway
and Hugh Beaumont.

4 a.m. The Curse of the Cat People (1944) - starring Simone Simon and
Kent Smith.

5:15 a.m. The Body Snatcher (1945) - starring Boris Karloff, Bela
Lugosi
and Henry Daniell.

6:30 a.m. Isle of the Dead (1945) - starring Boris Karloff, Ellen
Drew
and Marc Cramer.

7:45 a.m. Bedlam (1946) - starring Boris Karloff, Anna Lee and Ian
Wolfe.

***The TCM website uncleverly fails to note that this will be
immediately followed by:

9:15 a..m. Martin Scorsese Presents: VAL LEWTON - THE MAN IN THE
SHADOWS

10:45 am Youth Runs Wild

12p Madamemoiselle Fifi

--and since they for some reason decided to drop one of the
horror/suspense films from the unit's work, they've wisely chosen THE
GHOST SHIP to drop. The last two titles are the other two films the
Unit made, the spy drama MADAMEMOISELLE FIFI and wartime j.d. drama
YOUTH RUNS WILD, unlike THE GHOST SHIP missing from the recentish DVD
box set.

Todd Mason

__._,_.___
M

The Executioners

I usually read a John D. novel every month or so. There are eight or nine I never get tired of simply because they're so well done.

Last night I picked up The Executioners (Cape Fear) for bedtime reading and read to page 102 before turning out the light. Yes, there's cutesy-poo dialogue but mostly in first half of the first act. But except for that this is a virtually perfect suspense novel. MacDonald wisely hews to the Hitchcock rule--suspense comes from knowing that the bomb is under the chair. MacDonald plants the bomb in the first chapter and they slowly lets the wick burn lower and lower. Several lesser incidents anticipating the final explosion.

Cady isn't Robert Mitchum's Cady but he could be his cousin. The scene where the family buries the dog Cady kills is as fresh and moving as it was the first time I read it. The wife is a tough woman, not the Polly Bergen version. And protagonist Sam, while not a typical MacDonald tough guy, is not the cipher he seems to be in the movie. JDM gives him real depth here.

As for being slow...I suppose it is. And for good reason. In those days one of the marks of a serious writer was the ability to make part of the narrative a portrait of the milieu where the story is taking place. Last week I mentioned how well Lawrence Block did this in A Diet of Treacle. MacDonald does it well here, too. We get to know the sociology of the time and place almost as well as we get to know the people. I'm sure this is a matter of age--I like this kind of writing.

The Executioners would be written very differently today. It would be angrier, bloodier, more brutal in terms of Cady's psychology (Mitchum got it exactly). But for me The Executioners bears re-reading because it's one of the best stories told by one of the best storytellers of my time on the planet.

Val Lewton

A week from tomorrow night TCM will air the original Martin Scorcese docu bio of Val Lewton. This should be of interest to most genre writers and readers. But it should be especially interesting to those of us who like hardboiled and noir. Certain kinds of horror incorporate noir atmosphere and tropes. Most of Lewton's nine most famous horror movies demonstrate this clearly, most especially (for me anyway) The Seventh Victim and The Leopard Man.

I was reminded of all this today because of a post of Todd Mason's on Rara-Avis. Speaking of Fritz Leiber he says: "His very important early story "Smoke Ghost," (is) as noir as you could possibly want."

True. A number of Weird Tales writers were able to work in hardboiled because the turf was similar. The darkness that only some of us can see. The Leiber story is a masterpiece and one of the most memorable stories I've ever read. It dramatizes and explains the modern world more elegantly and terrifyingly than anything I've read. Not bad for five thousand words.

Give the Lewton bio a look. I tend to agree with David Thomson that when people say Lewton should have been given more expensive films to make they're missing the point. This type of material was his passion. He wasn't a song and dance man nor a Big Theme guy. He was what he was and what he was was a damned good B film maker.

Generations

On his blog tonight Bill Crider reviews John D. MacDonald's Where is Janice Gantry, a Gold Medal from the early Sixties. I've always remembered it for its strong, evocative opening. And the story holds up throughout. Bill offers his usual incisive criticism and makes a point we've both discussed before. Here's Bill:

"MacDonald has his flaws, the irritating male/female dialog exchanges chief among them, but when it came to getting down the details of his time (he seemed to know everything about everything) and creating memorable characters, situations, and stories, he was hard to beat. I know some younger readers find him slow. I can't imagine that, but maybe the attention to detail, character, and description has something to do with it. Times and tastes (not mine) have changed."

Awhile back I did a signing at a mystery store. I happened to be sitting in front of a shelf of John D paperbacks and so when readers and I began bandying writer names back and forth it was logical I'd bring him up. Those over forty-five were big fans of JDM. The under forty-fives seemed to find him slow. Too much description and psychology.

I held my temper in check (though I did later take an ice pick to several tires)-- Kidding. I wanted to know who the younger people were reading. And to quote Gomer Pyle surprise surprise--they were reading younger writers. They liked stripped down, they liked larger than life, they liked thrill upon thrill. Some of the "new" writers are already middle aged. But they don't write like it.

There's a new generation just as there'll always be a new generation. And while all of us read back and forth across the decades, there's definitely a new style, a new voice, a new take on the kind of hardboiled crime fiction Bill and I grew up reading.

No right or wong here. Just many gifted new writers showing us duffers some new dance steps.

THE COLD SPOT

Bill Crider's running a review of Tom Piccirilli's forthcoming Bantam novel The Cold Spot. I like it as much as he does.

In broadstroke it's sort of a Dickensian hardboiled crime novel. Chase's family is gone early on and he's raised by his crooked grandfather. Like all upwardly mobile kids who think their grandads are cool guys, Chase becomes a getaway driver. But soon enough he takes to the straight life, the world of stickups and guns taking its toll. He marries, becomes a teacher (he teaches auto mechanics, a nice wry touch for a former getaway driver), and things are looking good until he gets dragged back into his former life, meeting up again with his diffident, complex grandfather.

I said this was Dickensian because it has the feel of the way Dickens used family relationships strained by a violent world (as London was and is in some parts).

For all the violence and hardboiled attitude, The Cold Spot has great heart. Is also has a breakneck plot and a number of fascinating relatoinships. The ending anticipates a sequel. I can't wait to read it.

MY long national nightmare is over

Yes, in five hours, it'll all be over. The pols'll leave Ioway. I'm not fond of the way we do business out here. The caucus is mostly an abberation left over from the 1972 Dem convention when everybody was smoking way too much dope.

Carol's going to caucus tonight. I'm sitting home. I have a two-three hour window with the oral chemo I take every day. Then I go into a severe vegatative state. Not only would I be unable to throw punches; I'd be unable to ward them off.

As sinister as Huckabee is (anybody who believes in Creationism is dangerous to me because if they'll buy that they'll buy any kind of myth/prejudice/hooey) he got the best joke of the whole shebang. In a refrence to Ken Doll Romney he said, "People want a president who looks like the guy who they work with. Not like the guy who laid them off."

I'd vote for Biden or Dodd. I know they won't change things but then I don't think Hillary will either. She's mobbed up with most of the big lobbyists. And to me Obama is more of a beauty contestant than a serious candidate. Except for his ill-fated health plan (something he and Hill the Pill have in common) I've never hard him offer anything except embarrassing platitudes.

Biden and Dodd are mobbed up too but they're smart and they'd place steady hands on the tiller. And maybe best of all they wouldn't inflict Bill Clinton on us again.

I swear to God that guy's going to end up doing a lounge act in Vegas. There just isn't enough applause in th entire universe to satisfy him.

Old Times' Sake

Jacket design by Gavin L. O'Keefe
OLD TIMES' SAKE
Ed here: I was pleased when James Reasoner asked me to write the introduction to his collection of short stories OLD TIMES' SAKE. Ramble House is the publisher (and a fine publisher at that) so check out the book and the website. This is a serious collection of first-rate fiction. Parts of my introduction are quoted below. http://www.ramblehouse.com/


James Reasoner

James Reasoner, author of more than 200 novels, presents 17 short stories, most of which were published in the MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY Magazine in the 70s and 80s. Now collected for the first time, they show you why he's the master story-teller he is and why those in the know, like Ed Gorman, have so many good things to say about him. For instance:

James is an artist, not just a writer. Hemingway called it “angle of vision,” the way one sees the world. James Reasoner puts his stamp on everything he writes. His work can be funny, violent, sad, even whimsical at times but it doesn’t matter because the craft and the art are always informed by the wisdom of the man telling the stories.
Any man who wrote both Texas Wind and Dust Devils is obviously a major crime fiction novelist. As this collection will convince, he’s also a major crime fiction short story writer as well.
Ed Gorman

Buy Trade Paperback from Lulu $18

Buy Hardcover from Lulu $28

A Diet of Treacle by Lawrence Block Hard Case Crime

Back in the late Fifties and early Sixties paperback original novels about the Beat generation appeared regularly. Sex, drugs, jazz, weirdness. Today few of them bear rereading. Certainly Vin Packer's take on the subject holds up very well but some of the bigger names who took a tour through Kerouac-land ended up looking and sounding silly. They were writing tour guides without having ever been there.

A Diet of Treacle by Lawrence Block on the other hand has the feel of first-hand observation. Set in Greenwich Village in 1960, peopled by faux-beat losers of various kind and a cop out of Malcom Braly, the drug scene, the crime scene and the scene of hardscrabble drifting life in the big bad city crackles with authenticity.

There are three prime players. Joe is a cipher of sort, not a good guy or a bad guy, one of those people who just sort of take up space. His friend Shank, an angry street hustler, suports them both by selling pot. The third person, and by far the most interesting, is Anita, a young, attractive woman engaged to a square engineer while still living under the auspices of an overly pious grandmother.

When the main heroin dealer in the area is busted, Shank decides to quit selling pot and go into the junk business, at first unbeknownest to Anita and Joe, with whom he is sharing a shabby little apartment.

The transformation of Anita from the good girl to the lover of a drifter like Joe to somebdy inadvertently involved in murder is what gives the book its power. Block is too good a writer to try to explain away her changes with melodramatic motivatons. She remains somewhat mysterious throughout the book, both to the reader and to herself. At one point, even though she considers marrying Joe, she wonders if she even loves him. At another, she begins to feel oppressed by his lifestyle of hanging out in beat dives (Block has a beat poet read a "poem" that manages to be both short and interminable) and letting Shank dicate much of his life.

Block is always good with his female characters and Anita, sweet, warm, confused, ultimately as adrift as Joe himself, is a fine, endearing creation.

The party scenes are spot on. Cheap wine, portentuous and pretentious conversations, sex sex sex and unending tributes to the powers of pot. Everybody yakking so much about how good pot makes them feel it starts sounding like a revival meeting with hemp substituting for God. Very wittily observed.

The plot kicks in full tilt in the the third act and it's breathtaking. The hard ass cop, whom we meet early on, reappears and what had been minor cat-and-mouse becomes explosive confrontation.

Of all the hardboiled writers working today, Block for me remains the most believable in dealing with crime and criminals. He's able to write about them and their milieu without tricking them up or romaniticising them. And, as he demonstrates here, he was doing it as far back as 1961.

Salute to Bill Crider

Somewhere today (can't find it again) I saw (I think) a brief story conveying the (to me) astonishing fact that toniight the two Hilton sisetrs Paris and Niki will hostess a club party and be paid $500,000. I guess because I'll always be a prairie boy the simple amorality of this is staggering. Homeless shelters, cancer research, orphanages--there isn't some better way to spend $500,000.

Happy New Year

Jury Duty

I've never served on a jury and I don't want to.

This afternoon I saw a rerun of a true crime show that focused on a cop accused of murdering his mistress. The police department fiercely fought what appeared to be the evidence at first but finally gave in and arrested him. He was found guilty and sentenced to eighty years in prison. There were those who felt he should have been given the death penalty.

His mistress was found in a burning house. She'd been stabbed multiple times. The DA contended that in panic the cop first contrived the scene to look like a burglary and then decided to set it on fire. A good deal of the evidence rested on the local fire marshal's assessment of the time the fire had been set and how long it had been burning. The cop argued that he arrived at the scene when the house was on fire. A neighbor said he saw the cop rush in to save her but was too late.

The cop foolishly took a lie detector test without consulting a lawyer. He failed. I'm with Ted Kennedy on this one. Lie detectors are a joke, deadly ones in some cases. The cop also did something else foolish. When the DA got him on the stand the cop got sarcastic and belittled the DA and the oter cops he now saw as his enemies. Not exactly a good way to impress the jury. He was sentenced and sent off to prison.

A young woman who'd known the cop most of his life so believed in his innocence that she left her teaching job and went to law school just so she could work on his case and prove his innocence. This wasn't a romance. She was happily married. She just didn't believe her friend had done what the DA had accused him of doing.

Over nine years the woman has become a lawyer and gotten two highly regarded fire experts to help her dispute the tesimony of the fire marshal. The cop is interviewed throughout the hour and he struck me as beleivable.

This is why I wouldn't want to be on a jury. If I been impaneled on the first jury I'd have voted for conviction. But if I'd been able to hear the two fire experts I probably would have voted him innocent.

I'm not smart enough to make judgements on a man or woman's life. I'd want to hear a videotaped confession as well as a videotaped scene of the murder being committed before I made up my mind.

Unless the defendant was OJ of course. That one I could've voted guilty on without undue doubts.

The Power

The other night Bill Crider wrote about how much the novel I Am Legend has meant to him over the years. Same here. It's my favorite science fiction novel. I've read it as recently as a year ago. It never loses its power for me.

Another novel I first read in 1956 is The Power by Frank M. Robinson. You may know the name because he's written blockbuster international bestsellers as well as award-winning science fiction novels.

The Power was his first novel. If Cornell Woolrich had ever used the paranormal in any coherent way he'd have done something like The Power. It's a perfect noir, a dark chase novel through Chicago as a small group of scientists try to find out which of them has The Power. Robinson enriches the book by giving us, on the fly, a wry look at academia of that era. He also gives us a man so alone and desperate as to make Richard Kimble of The Fugitive look like a game show contestant. Like I Am Legend, I reread this every so often. I yet to come across a single moment in it that I would change in any way.

The 25th Hour

I watched the 25th Hour again last night. I've recommended it before. Flawed as it is--the first act needed to be trimmed--it is still one of the most powerful crime films I've ever seen simply because it doesn't rely on any of the neo-noir tropes so fashionable today. It is the story of an intelligent, otherwise decent young man so fucking stupid he started dealing drugs. And in so doing lost his claim on both intelligence and decency.

The film takes place in the final 24 hours before he goes to prison. Ed Norton as the dealer, Phillip Seymour Hoffman as his hapless friend, Rosario Dawson as Norton's lover and Anna Paquin as the teenage student Hoffman is fixated on form a crushing ensemble. The acting is flawless.

The final twenty minutes, in the scene with Norton's father and the scene with Norton and Hoffman and another friend, are as good as anything I've seen in the last fifteen years.

I am a lonely voice recommending this movie but I think it will eventually get its due.

Coen Brothers western; Spector on Ike

From the Hollywood Reporter

Coen Brothers to Make Spaghetti Western
Filmmaking siblings Joel and Ethan Coen are set to make their goriest film ever - a Spaghetti Western featuring scenes of primitive torture methods. The brothers, whose notoriously gory new film No Country for Old Men has been tipped for Oscar glory, are desperate to make a film about the days of cowboys and Indians battling it out in the Wild West of America. But - as Joel warns - it won't be one for the faint-hearted. He says, "We've written a western with a lot of violence in it. There's scalping and hanging ... it's good. Indians torturing people with ants, cutting their eyelids off." Ethan adds, "It's a proper western, a real western, set in the 1870s. It's got a scene that no one will ever forget because of one particular chicken."


From Roger Freidman The New York Post

Music legend and murder suspect, Phil Spector, isn't trying to make friends or curry favor with old pals while he waits for a second trial. He turned up at reviled R&B legend Ike Turner's Los Angeles funeral on Friday and gave an impromptu speech that laid into both Tina Turner and Oprah Winfrey.

Spector, according to our spy in the Greater Bethany Community Church in Gardena, Calif., was among several celebrity mourners including Bonnie Raitt and Little Richard who gathered to say good-bye to the Grammy-winning musician.

more

"First of all, the things that were said about Ike, that were in that piece-of-trash movie they made about him were ... (applause), it was a piece-of-trash movie. I haven't seen the movie but it was told to me, and [Barney] Kessel was the world's greatest guitar player in the world and the only reason that Ike didn't play on 'River Deep, Mountain High' was because Ike was the second greatest guitar player in the world. I treasured him and everybody knew it except Ike. That's how good he was

"B.B. King told me at a party with Doc Pomus and Joe Turner and Ray Charles sitting there that Ike Turner was the only guitar player he wouldn't play behind. That's how good he was. But Ike never boasted. He came to parties with me and I'd say, 'play, play' and Ike would never play.

more

"Ike could play circles around Eric Clapton and Eric knew it. I had someone once ask me what's the difference between Ike Turner and Eric Clapton. I said, 'you don't know the difference between Eric Clapton and Ike Turner? That's funny, why don't you ask Eric, Eric knows.'"

"Ike made Tina the jewel she was. When I went to see Ike play at the Cinegrill in the '90s after his absurd reason for being sent to prison for no reason other than being a black man in America, there were at least, and I counted them, five Tina Turners on the stage performing that night, any one of them could have been Tina Turner."

A sentimental Iowa Christmas tale

Septic tank snares D.M. man
BY TOM BARTON • REGISTER STAFF WRITER • December 26, 2007
What’s this?
Christmas Eve downright stunk for Robert Schoff of Des Moines, but he was able to laugh about it by Tuesday.

Firefighters had to rescue the 77-year-old when he got stuck in the opening to his septic tank.

He had dug a hole and reached inside to find a clog when he lost his balance and became wedged.

"It wasn't good, I'll tell you what," said Schoff, of 4300 N.E. 27th St. "It was the worst Christmas Eve I've ever had,"

The 5-foot-5-inch, 135-pound Schoff hollered, screamed, and hoped his wife, Toni, would hear his cries for help.

He waited for an hour until she walked by a window and noticed feet in the air.

"I saw these kicking feet and ran out, but couldn't get him out," Toni Schoff said.

She went to the house and called 911, and two Polk County sheriff's deputies arrived to yank her husband out.

A Delaware Township rescue crew took Schoff to the hospital, where he was treated for bruises and a ruptured eardrum.

"How that happened, I don't know," he said. "I thought it was the end of my life. Thank God my wife saw me. I don't think I could have stood staying in there much more. She's my lifesaver."

I

Quotes of The Day

By Heather Havrilesky from Salon


Dec. 26, 2007 | When I was in third grade in Catholic school, one of the girls in my class wrote "Fuck You" all over the stalls of the girls' bathroom in red Magic Marker. When I walked into the bathroom and saw those words, I didn't think, "Oh my God! Who would do such a thing?" I thought, "Wow, Tracy Griffin is going to be in big trouble for this one!" Among the dutiful Catholic students who suspected that God would punish them for merely talking in class, Tracy Griffin stood out like a hungry pit bull at a free-range chicken ranch.

But anonymity is never really the sociopath's goal, least of all now, when the mentally unstable have the media savvy to know how to get their message across, whether they're marching into Hillary Clinton's campaign office with fake explosives taped to their chests or mailing detailed videotaped tomes to the appropriate department at NBC News in order to clarify the nuances of their upcoming suicidal killing spree.
(more)

IWhile formerly scorned loose cannons of the celebrity magazine world like Star and InTouch -- plus newly minted rags like TMZ and Gawker -- gained massive audiences by serving up appetizing pap to feed our worst impulses, an odd group of attention-seeking celebrity sociopaths rose to the occasion with increasingly aggressive public displays of affection for themselves and no one else. These were the Tracy Griffins of the entertainment world, an unruly gaggle of whoring celebrity sea donkeys who kept the rubberneckers in their thrall by showing up half-dressed and half-conscious wherever they knew flashing cameras would be present.

(more)

But in this head-spinning year of celebrity obsession and backlash, did we gain anything by listening in on Alec Baldwin's private phone message to his daughter, or watching camera-phone footage of David Hasselhoff drunkenly scarfing down a hamburger, or reading Charlie Sheen's alleged e-mails to his ex, Denise Richards? While none of us are above snickering at a rare glimpse of a celebrity during a particularly low moment, those glimpses are so common these days that they're really not all that amusing anymore, particularly when they're followed by a slew of Op-Eds, follow-up pieces and 15 million Web posts about whether Baldwin or Hasselhoff or Richards is a good parent, talented actor, upstanding citizen, worthwhile human being, on and on and on until our minds are thoroughly scrambled. You may have clicked on Perez Hilton or Gawker out of casual curiosity, but when you woke up three hours later, your head filled with an addled jumble of unsubstantiated gossip and idle judgment plus a dizzying volume of disconcertingly passionate opinions from the unwashed masses, your worldview and your priorities were irretrievably skewed, like it or not.

From Maureen Dowd from The New York Times

"Now the melancholy days have come,” Groucho Marx wrote to pal and fellow comic Fred Allen on Dec. 23, 1953. “The department stores call it Christmas. Other than for children and elderly shut-ins, the thing has developed to such ridiculous proportions — well, I won’t go into it. This is not an original nor novel observation, and I am sure everyone in my position has similar emotions. Some of the recipients are so ungrateful.

“For example, yesterday I gave the man who cleans my swimming pool $5. This morning I found two dead fish floating in the drink. Last year I gave the mailman $5. I heard later he took the five bucks, bought two quarts of rotgut and went on a three-week bender. I didn’t get any mail from Dec. 24th to Jan. 15th. ... For Christmas, I bought the cook a cookbook. She promptly fried it, and we had it for dinner last night. It was the first decent meal we had in three weeks. From now on I am going to buy all my food at the bookstore.”

From a review of the Craig Unger book on Truthout

Unger traces the origins of Bush's foreign policy to the 1970s, when prominent bureaucrats and writers gathered around such converts to conservatism as Irving Kristol and Albert Wohlstetter. The neocons scored their first big success in 1976, when two of their allies in President Ford's administration, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, created a group outside the CIA to assess the Soviet threat. That panel, dubbed Team B, was staffed by neocon worthies and led by Richard Pipes of Harvard University. One of the group's advisers was a Wohlstetter protege named Paul Wolfowitz.

Team B concluded that the CIA had vastly underestimated Soviet power and that supporters of detente were merely assisting the Kremlin's drive for world domination. It was an imaginative assessment, given that the economy of the USSR was crippled and its military infrastructure was suffering as CIA officers pointed out. Pipes's group held, for instance, that the USSR had probably deployed a top-secret antisubmarine system, even though U.S. intelligence had found no credible evidence of such a program. As Unger writes, "The absence of evidence, [Team B] reasoned, merely proved how secretive the Soviets were!" It was a bold preemptive attack on fact and logic.

The Truth about Chuck Norris

Cinema Retro carries a story tonight about the Chuck Norris folks being unhappy because a spoof book called The Truth About Chuck Norris has been written.

Here's Cinema Retro:

Chuck Norris is sure in the news a lot lately. He's now suing author Ian Spector in an attempt to get his new book The Truth About Chuck Norris withdrawn from distribution. Norris' lawsuit also lists Penguin publishers as co-defendants. At first glance, it might seem that the martial arts icon is being a bit thin-skinned. Spector's book is an obvious farce that centers on web-based Paul Bunyan-like tall tales relating to his image as a seemingly invincible action star. Among the witticisms found in the book:

• Chuck Norris can charge a cell phone by rubbing it against his beard.
• When an episode of “Walker, Texas Ranger” aired in France, the French surrendered to Chuck Norris just to be on the safe side.
• Chuck Norris was the first person to tame a dinosaur.
• Chuck Norris once visited The Virgin Islands. Afterward, they were renamed The Islands.
• Every piece of furniture in Chuck Norris’s house is a Total Gym.

Ed here: It doesn't say much for Chuck Norris' fans if they believe this. Nor for Norris himself. (I keep rubbing my cell phone against my own beard but so far no luck.)

Suspicious Origins

Back in the late 70s and early 80s I reviewed mysteries for the local paper. The editor asked me to cover the entire field from cozies to hard boiled. At first I wasn't sure I wanted to sort through any but the hardboiled stacks but gradually I found writers in every sub-category of crime fiction that I enjoyed and admired.

One of my most pleasant discoveries was Patricia MacDonald. Her first novel Unforgiven was not only a clever stalker tale but also an exemplary piece of writing. She had major stuff from the git-go.

This weekend I'm reading, for the second time, a recent novel of hers called Suspicious Origins. This deals with a woman who has a falling out with the older sister who raised her. The two haven't spoken in years. Then the older sister dies in a fire before they ever resolve their differences. The woman goes to the snowy New England town for the funeral where she meets, among many others, her sister's husband and the little niece she's been trading cards and letters with for years. On the night of the funeral, the fire chief tells her that what appeared to be an accidental fire was actually arson, intended to kill both the mother and the daughter. The husband was working late--midnight--at the time. Thus the mystery is set in place.

What makes the book remarkable is the writing. Nothing flashy or trendy. Just sound solid sentences that create a picture of a society and its people in quiet but vivid strokes. Deft, evocative passages that stay with you. And characters so richly drawn they only enhance the page-turning edge of the plot.

In the era of James Patterson and all his clones reading a novel so full of real everyday life and real everyday people in a Hitchcock-tight novel is a pleasure not to be taken lightly.

Lawless by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips

Brubaker-Phillips have produced two of my favorite graphic novels, COWARD and now LAWLESS. If you crossed Richard Stark's Parker with Get Carter and set it all in America you'd have a good sense of what these remarkable stories are about.
Tracy Lawless escaped the slums of his country by becoming a professional military man battling in Afghanistan and Iraq. But he comes back when he hears that his troubled little brother was killed, a little brother he now feels he selfishly deserted. He should've stuck around and seen that the kid had the same chance of escaping the mean streets he did.
The novel runs on two tracks, forward and backward. Forward Lawless prowls the badlands in seach of the people who killed Rick. Backward he discovers the sad violent life the kid led.
The artwork is as dark and evocative as the writing. The mean streets have never looked meaner. The characters are neurotic enough to be different and psychotic enough to be believable in this urban-hell context. There are a few scenes that are as rich as anything I've seen in contemporary hard boiled novels.
Lawless is well worth your money and your time.

More Top Ten

I didn't realize until I read the responses to last night's top ten favorites (not best; simple saying they're my favorites) that all but one of them is black and white. So tonight I mention color fims.

1.Taxi Driver
2. Get Carter
3. Point Blank
4. Body Heat
5. The Cooler
6. Night Moves
7. True Confessions
8. The Grifters
9. The Long Goodbye
10. The Outfit

And man I don't know how I forgot to inclue Doible Indemnity last night. Maybe my favorite noir of all.

Top Ten Noirs

Dave Zeltersman has suggested that I list my ten favorite noir films. My problem is that my choices vary according to my mood. But because several million people have been asking for the list. Here goes.

1. Out of The Past
2. Night and The City
3. The Third Man
4. Kiss Me Deadly
5. The Big Combo
6. Gun Crazy
7. The Anthony Manns-- Desperate Railroaded T-Men Raw Deal
8. Chinatown
9. In A Lonely Place
10. Sweet Smell of Success

Hooray for Hwood sort of

David Rensin has spent decades in Hollywood. He set many of his memories to paper in the excellent The Mailroom. Freddie Fields, one of the two or three most powerful agents in Hwood history, asked Rensin to help him write his memoirs. While they spent a good number of hours together--they were long time friends--Fields didn't live to complete the book. Now Rensin has a blog and is recounting some of the stories Fields told him.

The url below will lead you to a long and complicated story about the many many blind alleys that somehow led to the making of Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid. There are only two constants in the story--scripter William Goldman and star Paul Newman. Finding a Sundance made for many tangled troubles.

Originally Jack Lemon was suggested as Sundance but the studio didn't want him. Then names such as Marlon Brando and Steve McQueen began buzzing around the project. The McQueen episode is the most interesting part of the piece. My interpretation of the tale is that McQueen felt he wouldn't get enough attention if he co-starred with a luminary like Newman. He presented this as a difficulty with the billing. Who's name would be first?

Fascinating stuff.


http://www.laobserved.com/intell/2007/12/postcards_from_hollywood_1.php

News for writers

I hope this is okay to post here. If not, apologies in advance, and it won't
happen twice.

Folks, just thought I'd mention: I'm the new president of Novelists, Inc.,
and I urge you to think about joining, if you're not already a member!

Novelists, Inc. is a multi-genre organization for writers who are
multi-published in book-length fiction. Founded by romance writers almost 20 years ago,
it's still heavily romance, in terms of membership, but also has a fair number
of mystery, thriller, and mainstream writers, and quite a few cross-genre
writers. Sure could use more sf/f writers, though!

The monthly newsletter is terrific. There's a free sample copy available
electronically on our website at www.ninc.com.

Our annual national conference has (as per Del Rey VP Betsy Mitchell's
comments from the 2007 conference) an unusually high level of professionalism and
professional experience on offer. This year's conf will be in NYC end-March, and
the speakers and program and updates are all on our website at (again)
www.ninc.com.

One of our new features is the Legal Fund, where we pay for up to two
billable hours of consultation with a literary lawyer (we have a list of approved
attorneys whom we researched and interviewed) for members who have a
publishing-related legal problem and want to assess their options and risks. (Ex. You've
been plagiarized, and you don't even know where to start, in terms of
addressing the problem. Ex. Or you sold a book to a small press which has published
your book without ever paying your advance, and has stopped even returning your
calls or emails. Ex. A bad press you dealt with has decided to sue you for
defamation after reading in your public blog that you were unhappy with the
way they did business.)

We've also recently established a collaborative relationship with Tekno
Books, to develop and market anthologies and collections written exclusively by
Ninc members. First book project is currently being worked on, second book
project will start up in spring 2008.

Any questions, contact me at LauraNincBox@aol.com. Meanwhile, information for
prospective members, as well as applications, etc., and plenty of info about
Ninc, is at www.ninc.com.

Laura Resnick

**************************************
See AOL's top rated
recipes (http://food.aol.com/top-rated-recipes?NCID=aoltop00030000000004)

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Heroes and Villains

And no I don't mean that great overlooked Beach Boys song.

TCM is running a short piece that offers different Hollywood opinions of Alfred Hitchcock the man. David Raskin fairly spits when talking about AH. Martin Landau canonizes him.

I've always run into the same disparity of opinions when I've recommended agents to other writers. Agent A is a career-saving man among men who once dragged three orphans from a burning fire with his teeth. That's one opinion. The other opinion has it that Agent B is a sub-literate crook who takes the first offer an editor makes. And after he rescued three orphans from a burning fire with his teeth, he sold them to a sex-slave operation.

And then of course we have book reviews. How is it possible that a novel is brilliant and an abomination to another? After the AH bit I picked up a magazine that reviewed a novel I'd recently read. I'd seen only one review of it and that had been the type your Mom would write. But the review I read today was written by someone who seemed to have a personal grudge against the writer (as perhaps he does--you never know).

I mention all this because a reader wrote me about how difficult conflicting reviews make it for the book buyer. True enough. In self-defense I've developed a list of reviewers whose judgement I trust. Don't always agree with them. But in many instances their rationale for liking or disliking a book seems reasonable and informed to me. Though here you run into the rep of the reviewers. There are two whose work I like especially. But there's a group who dismiss them superficial and dull.

The late Pavoratti, as I've mentioned here before, said that all you can do is play to those who love you. It's difficult for some of us to imagine that there is somewhere in the vast universe who actually dislikes our work--or worse, dislikes us personally.

Catch the the clever TCM piece on AH and you'll begin to understand the wisdom of Shakespeare's advice to keep your own counsel. Despite what some of those crummy sleazy twisted bastards might think.

Performer-aversion

'People like strange, distasteful things today. We need to give children magic and hope'
--Mickey Rooney

I was catching up on reading the Guardian today when I came across an unsettling photograph of Mickey Rooney in costume for a new performance.

As someone who's facing old age, I don't want to sound insensitive or uncharitable but I wonder if there isn't a time when performers shouldn't just let it all rest.

This isn't just true of performers, of course. Virtually everybody reaches a time when it's probably best to rest. And just about every career seems to have people who stay too long. Surgeons, commercial pilots, politicians...to name a few careers that get dangerous for folks at the mercy of those who won't retire. And writers, too, of course, peak and decline.

But we see performers at work. Being seen is the essence of their work. That's why it's so painful to watch somebody like Rooney--who I never liked even when I was a kid and supposed to--keep hamming it up. "People like strange, disasteful things." And I can't think of much that's sadder and more pathetic than the strange, distasteful sight of a ham staying too long at the fair.

I know this sounds cruel and I'm sorry for that. But I don't apply my performer-aversion just to age. Dennis Hopper irritates and embarasses me as much as Rooney does. Hopper was none too bright as a hippie; now he's added smugness to his act as he whores for the capitalists.

The Extras Finale

Well, the 90 minute Extras finale has come and gone. I haven't seen a positive review. Most were mixed at best and a few almost angry that a series this good should end on so strained a note. The jabber on the Seinfeld finale was similar.

Last night we learned that Gervais doesn't do straight drama with any originality or even vitality. His forte seems to be bitter comedy with melancholy underpinnings. At that he's a genius.

Too much much last night, though lingering on Ashley Jensen's face so often was effective not only because of her sweet looks but also because you rarely see a middle-aged woman celebrated this way.

The big name gambit of having famous actors behave badly was either overdone or underdone. For just two examples, Clive Owen was too much of a jerk; George Michael was so understated I didn't quite get the point of his appearance.

The guy who played the agent could give Jeremy Piven some pointers on how to be sincerely avaricious without being a bad guy. He interpreted his role intelligently. If you're willing to do trash, I can make you some money. None of Ari's frantic bullshit.

The reality show segment was clumsily paced and unfocused and way to much to be beleivable, though the old Gervais wit was on display with the woman whose "celebrity" was based on the fact that her son was murdered. She is apparently trying to ride tragedy into cheesy fame.

For me the most enjoyable parts of the show involved Merchant as Gervais' incompetent agent and his sidekick Barry. I'd like to see a half hour for them, a day at the office maybe. Their scenes as cell phone salesmen were fine, especially the dance they did whenever one of their phones rang. A weird riff on the Marx brothers (just as there was at least one weird riff on Seinfeld).

I'd give the finale a B though maybe I'm being just as sentimental as Gervais was being last night.

The Blonde

I wasn't sure that anybody could or would write a novel quite as crazed as Downtown by Ed McBain but damned if Duane Swierczynski hasn't done it.

In Downtown the hapless protagonist endures an unending series of con jobs and con artists on a winry Christmas Eve. In The Blonde journalist Jack Eisley meets his own kind of con artist, the lovely Kelly White of the title, who doses Eisley with the McGuffin that sets everything in motion, including a government agent straight out of Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia. All on a single night in Philadelphia.

Swierczynski gets better every time out and his handling of what amounts to screwball spy fiction is masterful. The story keeps you flipping the pages, the characters are believable and unique and the construction extraordinary. Swierczynski really understands how to set up, pace and pay off a scene. One more thing he shares with the late McBain.

The Blonde is a straight shot of pure pleasure. You'll like it, too.

Attention writers: A new market

When I was but a lad my room looked like a book annex. Stacks of Imagination, Manhunt, Galaxy, Mike Shayne, Gold Medals, Ace Doubles, Ballantines etc.

In my college days my room was still filled with mystery and sf but supplemented with Fitzgerald, Kerouac, Dreiser, Roth, Evergreen Review and the precursors of Flower Power...the City Lights poets and the invective of the first underground newspapers.

In the Seventies my various apartments were lined with bookcases that contained all the above plus runs of Westlake and Block and Rendell.

And all of the above could be found in the basements of the houses Carol and I bought over the next twenty-seven years. Lots of money for unreliable contractors for built-in bookcases.

And then with the cancer giving away about sixty to seventy per cent of all of it so Carol wouldn't have to deal with it all when my time came to shuffle off.

But there was one constant. Books were books and magazines were magazines. You could see that at a glance. You could pick them up and hold them if you still had any doubts.

But then came the internet and duffers like me had to undergo the Phil Dickian-like trauma of confronting a world that was evolving and redefining itself every few days. And after my initial knee-jerk sneering and scoffing I began to dig it. And still do. What a wonderful world the net is.

The evolving and redefining bit I mentioned? Well, every once in awhile I, in my dufferness, can still be forced to face the fact that the net will never rest in the way it defines what we call books and magazines.

Here, an excerpt from a recent Galleycat:

Posted by Ron | 08:04 AM | Trends | Email this post

"Mobile Novels" Already Big in Japan
After spotting my item earlier this about Harlequin serializing romance novels by email, a reader steered me towards an article that ran last week in The Times of London on Japan's "mobile novel" phenomenon, and the "anxious debate about the nature of literature and the future of reading in Japan" provoked by the success of the keitai shosetsu.

"Five of the year's most successful novels, including the top three, were first written for downloading on mobile phones before being republished in book form," Richard Lloyd Parry reported, describing their format as "short, simple sentences using relatively few characters, featuring melodramatic plots heavy on violence, sex and tear-jerking sentiment."

Ed here: I already have my title ready if the mobile novel people ever contact me. I Want To Screw Your Bloody Brains Out On Valentine's Day.

I think that pretty much covers all the mobile novel bases doesn't it?

Mystery history

The other night Martin Edwards posted a particularly thoughtful piece on British writer W.J. Burley : "Although Burley wrote in popular genres, his work is quiet and generally eschews melodrama, but he excelled at the evocation of place and mood. He may not belong in the Premier League of crime writers, but his was a career of solid and lasting achievement."

I agree about Burley. He worked in watercolors rather than the violent hues popular the last four decades. Martin compares him to Simenon and I think that's both fair and accurate. You can probably find a title or two of Burleys at your local library. He's well worth trying.

Which leads my to the Mystery File blog http://mysteryfile.com/blog/.

Here's a site that covers virtually every aspect of mystery history. Hard-boiled, cozies, popular authors, forgotten authors. And great cover reproductions. For me the covers of the Forties were particulary stylish (not all of them God knows) and memorable. Editor Steve Lewis publishes substantial pieces by writers such as Bill Pronzini and Francis Nevins on writers who deserve to be rediscovered or at least briefly remembered.

It's always interesting to see where we came from.

Ross Macdonald

My good friend Bill Crider reminds us that it's Ross Macdonald's birthday.

I certainly salute the man under his pen name Ross Macdonald and his real name Ken Millar. In fact I'll go as far to say that Millar and his wife Margaret Millar were the two best crime writers of their generation. For me nobody brought true novelistic talents to the private eye novel that Ken did--nor true novelistic talents to the traditional crime novel that Margaret did.

This would be a good time to choose their finest novels for rereading. For me that would be The Chill and The Way Some People Die by Ken and How Like An Angel and A Stranger In My Grave by Margaret.

It's also time to reread Tom Nolan's superb biography of Ken.

Thanks for reminding us, Bill.

The final word on JDM

This is one of the off-line letters I got on the John D. MacDonald issue. I think it's an interesting way to end the discussion:

Hi Ed,

Well, I'm in my (late) thirties and I love JDM. But I
grew up with my Dad reading him and a lot of
westerns--L'Amour and Luke Short--so maybe I have JDM
appreciation in my DNA. (Sorry for all the
abbreviations.) Deep Blue Good-By, Dead Low Tide etc
are some of my favorites. And I love the social
commentary, even if it is a little dated. His
observations about human nature are not dated at all.
I think you're right that Leonard is the right writer
for these times--a little slick, a little quirky, a
little self-consciously hip. I tend to like his
westerns better these days, although some of his crime
novels--like Cat Chaser--are excellent of course.

Hope you are well. My novel hits the streets on
January 29th, so I'm getting excited.

Take care,

David

David Jack Bell | http://www.davidjackbell.com


Ed here: Me, too, with the westerns. And his crime stuff up to and including Unknown Man Number 89, 52 Pick-Up and Ryan's Rules. My favorite Leonard flat out is Valdez Is Coming. Yes I'm a heretic and will burn in hell.

Old and new

I received three off-blog letters about the John D. post the other night. Two of the people were in their Thirties and felt that he was a slow read. And one was in his Fifties and thought he read just fine.

I make a point of their ages because I think it's an important consideration. Folks from age forty-five and up were raised in a very different culture from those who came after. Happy News was inaguarated in 1968. The dictum there was that people wouldn't sit still for any TV news story longer than sixty seconds. Anchors also began their inane blabbing to on-air subordinates. Ted Baxter reigned.

Movies changed, too. Action flicks, riding the back of spaghetti westerns, were as much spectacles as stories. The movie Help influenced films, too. Fast cuts, disjointed narrative lines, images for images' sake.

If you grew up under the influence of all this (and many many other changes in popular culture) I can see why John D might read slow. He came from a time when fiction was fixed on sociology. He was an enormous fan of John O'Hara. Open any O'Hara novel and you'll see half page long paragraphs. You'll find an indelible impression of the world he's working in. Sociology. Backstory. Writing.

Take a look at any early 87th Precinct and compare it to the later ones. From 1992 or so they haul ass as they never had before. The reader doesn't get all those great rambling takes on mores and morals that McBain was so good at. The marketplace had changed.

These days long books make me groan. I like short books. I've even been known to enjoy a Stuart Wood (but not for several years) and James Patterson (before he decided he wanted to make enough money to buy France). But not a steady diet thereof. There are plenty of thoughtful writers in our field, everybody from Laura Lippman to S.J. Rozan to Nancy Pickard to Michael Connelly. These and many others are the ones that give lasting pleasure.

I think Elmore Leonard is probably the right writer for this time. He reads fast, he's fun and he's clever as hell. He likes to say that he leaves out stuff other writers leave in. I think he's on to something there.

Joseph Lewis

I watched Gun Crazy last night and was struck as always by the folk tale power of the story and the bravado with which it was directed. Mystery writer Mike Nevins has written a long and to me definitive piece-interview on Lewis' career and through it I came to understand Lewis' notion that to have suspense you first need to have characters who are slightly askew. You never quite understand their motives so you never quite know what to expect from them.

Most evaluations of Lewis' career speculate what he would have done with A picture budgets. He ended up doing a lot of TV work. He made a good deal of money but presumably wasn't as satisfied with his Bonanza stories as he was with his more personal work. He started in westerns and finished in westerns.

As for what he would have done with A-picture money...who knows. But there's at least a chance that he was most comfortable working with the money he was given. Hard to imagine that pictures as gritty as Gun Crazy and The Big Combo could have been shot the way he wanted them to be in an A-picture environment. These are films that took no prisoners and Hwood, especially in those days, wasn't real keen on grim movies.

I found this evaluation of Lewis by David Thomson, my favorite film critic:

"There is no point in overpraising Lewis. The limitations of the B picture lean on all his films. But the plunder he came away with is astonishing and - here is the rub - more durable than the output of many better-known directors...Joseph Lewis never had the chance to discover whether he was an "artist," but - like Edgar Ulmer and Budd Boetticher - he has made better films than Fred Zinnemann, John Frankenheimer, or John Schlesinger." - David Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 2002)

JDM Redux from Fred Blosser

Ed,

You made an interesting observation a couple of weeks ago, "I was shocked when I saw how quickly John D. MacDonald started to fade after his death. I've given his books to several thirty-somethings and to a person they find him 'slow.' " I've been thinking about that reaction. I was big into MacDonald when I was 19 or 20. His books could be easily found in any newsstand, corner drug store, or bus station, kept perpetually in print (or so it seemed at the time) by Fawcett. I never thought of him as slow; far from it. I generally ran through each book in no more than a couple of sittings.

I had hoped for more reaction to your comment than it received. Maybe in itself, that's a measure of how much MacDonald has slipped below the radar, even among crime fiction buffs. If newer readers find him slow going, could it be for these reasons?

--He didn't write in the pared-down, dialogue-driven style now employed by James Patterson, John Sandford, and John Grisham, whose names are as ubiquitous on bookshelves today as JDM's once was. At random, I recently picked up one of MacDonald's Gold Medals, DEADLY WELCOME. At 160 pages, it should be as much of a fast read as they come. Nevertheless, MacDonald devotes as much space to describing his sleepy, stagnant Florida backwater setting as he does to finding out whodunit. For a reader who comes to the novel from Patterson, there may be too much sensory description, not enough straight-ahead action.

--The familiar conventions of today's crime fiction -- serial killers, female sleuths, self-loathing police officers, wacky petty criminals or colorful Mafia goons, detectives defined by vocation (forensic examiners) or ethnicity (Navaho tribal cops) -- are largely absent from JDM's fiction. Could "slow" mean that these younger readers had difficulty adjusting to a novel that lacked those kinds of touchstones? Maybe. Along the same lines, fans of Carl Hiassen, Elmore Leonard, or Tim Dorsey are likely to be disappointed that DEADLY WELCOME, the Travis McGees, and JDM's other novels set in the Sunshine State lack the off-the-wall wackiness and demented characters of the modern Florida crime novels.

--And then there's the fact that society as a whole has changed so much since MacDonald's heyday. How much is the average, thirty-something reader likely to identify with the mindset that generally informs JDM's novels, in which a capable male protagonist drives the action, female characters are usually subsidiary, and crime is an aberration in a generally orderly, forward-looking society?

You compared JDM's relative slide into obscurity with Ross Macdonald's resurgence. Ross benefitted from the fact that, toward the end of his career, he picked up some acclaim and recognition from the academics. That may have helped Ross to keep going in recent years, if at a lower level of commercial success than in his high-water period between THE UNDERGROUND MAN and his death. To my mind, the current incarnation of the Archer novels, in the Vintage trade pb editions, is more likely to appeal to the cult, scholastic crowd than to the casual surfer of popular fiction.

Fred B.

Stark House; Brian Keene

Hello Mystery Fans:

I just want to announce that Stark House Press has just signed a contract with Harry Whittington's Estate and will be bringing back three rare short novels by Whittington in one edition next November 2008.

The novels are:

To Find Cora -- originally published as Cora is a Nympho by Novel Books in 1963 -- To Find Cora is Harry's original title, and much truer to the story.

Like Mink Like Murder -- originally published only in French in 1957 as Mink, then rewritten later by Harry as Passion Hangover for one of the sex lines and published under a pseudonym -- again, Like Mink Like Murder is Harry's title.

Body and Passion -- originally published by Original Novels in 1952 under the Whit Harrison pseudonym -- a strange story of switched identities that will keep you guessing until the end.

Three hard-to-find books in one volume, with a new introduction by Whittington specialist, David Laurence Wilson. Three compelling stories from one of the noir masters. Three novels of suspense and hardboiled action.

We hope you are as excited as we are.

Cheers,
Greg Shepard, publisher
Stark House Press
------------------
My police buddy Mark sent this along from Brian Keene's blog. Brian's Ten Best Books of The Year

6. THE COLLECTED ED GORMAN, VOLUME ONE by Ed Gorman: This is the first volume of PS Publishing's 'The Collected Ed Gorman' (which you have probably already determined by the title) and all I can say is, "It's about time!" I've been hoping for a complete collection of Ed Gorman's short fiction for years, but figured it would be a daunting task for any publisher, simply because the man is so prolific. Kudos to PS Publishing for undertaking the task, and boos to you if you haven't yet read him. This volume focuses on his crime, mystery, and suspense tales, and includes the fan favorite "Moonchasers", as well as an introduction by Lawrence Block. There is a deep, underlying nostalgia and sadness in many of these stories, and they moved me in a way most fiction doesn't anymore.

steve badger - Anthony Mann

The older I get the more I feel close to the work of Anthony Mann. I suppose being a crazed paranoid loser helps but my appreciation for his skills both with character and style grow every time I see one of his films.

I don't know who Steve Badger is. I ran across this site yesterday and think it's worth checking out. Here are a couple samples of his assessments of Mann's work.

3) The Naked Spur, 1953. Jimmy Stewart made eight films with Anthony Mann. Five were westerns. Many film critics consider The Naked Spur to be the finest western ever made. Besides Stewart there are four other characters, played by Robert Ryan, Janet Leigh, Millard Mitchell (also in Winchester '73) and the always watchable Ralph Meeker (memorable in Jeopardy and as Mike Hammer in Kiss Me Deadly). Technically Ryan is the villain, but each male character is nuts in his way. Meeker in particular personifies heroic villainy, if that is possible. When watching the sunny, breathtaking scenery of The Naked Spur, I always think of the darkness of Mann’s film noir movies. Mann’s command of both interior darkness and panoramic light is an amazing accomplishment.

6) Raw Deal, 1948. Here we discover something Anthony Mann loves to film as much as shadows: co-star Marsha Hunt’s face. Aside from how beautiful it is, one reason may be because she is the only sympathetic character in this movie -- and she isn’t even the most likeable! (That honor goes to the #2 villain played by John Ireland.) The lead bad guy here is perhaps the heaviest heavy in the history of American film: Raymond Burr. Perry Mason fans unfamiliar with Burr’s film noir work are in for a jolt here when he throws burning alcohol on a party guest when she accidentally bumps him: "She should have been more careful." True to Anthony Mann movies though, that scene isn’t the creepiest. That distinction goes to John Ireland and the deer antlers... YOW!

http://www.suspense-movies.com/directors/anthony-mann/

Top Ten Most Irritating People On TV

Everywhere I look I'm seeing top ten lists. In no particular order here are the people whose presence on the tube deeply offends me.

Ty Penninngton-the "host" of Extreme Makeover. His breathy and contrived way of talking really really really irritates me.

Charles Gibson-a smug loudmouth who, except for the "news" people at Fox, is the most local TV of anybody on a network news show

The Kardashian Women who can't even get people to watch the youngun's sex video for free

Barbara Walters a hard unlovely imperious and profoundly silly woman

All the comedians Keith Olberman uses on his show--none of whom happen to be funny

Tom Brokaw--who died and left him historian? He was a lightweight when he was on the air and he ain't no different now. He fronts the books, folks, he don't write them.

Flava Flave--I only watched him once, that being the episode where the young woman went number two on his rug. She said she wanted to get his attention. Do I have to elaborate?

Don Rickles--I seem to be alone in finding him trite, dull and a jerk. Somebody should've flattened him a long time ago. Ninth grade humor.

Trey Parker--another icon who should be pumping gas. Hate South Park and the new show (to judge by the promos) looks even worse. Fart jokes in the promos?

Tim Russert--smoke but no fire. He loves the theatricality of asking pointed questions but twenty minutes after the show is over you realize you haven't learned anything. The political equivalent of a Vegas lounge act.

Can Do

In Sunday's LA Times Richard Rayner wrote a perceptive review of Otto Penzler's The Big Book of Pulps. He admires it, as how can you not?

In the course of the review he wrote a line that fascinates me, even though I'm not sure I understand it. Or understand it as he meant it anyway.

"Writers don't really write what they know; they write what they can."

According to my dictionary can means "to be capable of." Over a quarter century of knowing writers of various kinds I've heard a fair number--even a few of the best sellers--talk about the books they wish they'd written. Or could have written. In the case of genre writers this frequently means a literary novel or a genre-bending book that leaves a permanent mark on the field.

I've mentioned before that while I was poundiing them out for men's magazine back in the `60s and `70's, I entered a Scribners short story contest. They were looking for pieces that dealt with alcoholism. Since I'd recently given up drink and drug I didn't have any trouble dealing with the subject. Ultimately twelve stories were selected and they appeared in an anthology.

One of the Scribners editors called me and asked me if I'd thought of expanding the story into a novel. While I'd sold some stories to some very minor literary magazines, and while I'd always wanted to be Fitzgerald or Mailer, I'd never really thought of writing a literary novel before.

With his guidance, I began. I spent six months struggling with one hundred pages or so. At that point I realized that I don't have the talent for writing unplotted stories. I was bored. I gave it up.

I don't feel I've deprived the world of any great novel. I know better. But Rayner's "can" has stayed in my mind for forty-eight hours. "Can" not only in terms of skill but also in terms of acceptance in the marketplace. Are literary careers much different from acting careers? Do a lot of writers live out their years writing only what the market will buy or taking only what comes along? And are some writers trapped by success, writing virtually the same book over and over again because of the money involved, like a stereotyped actor the p[ublic will accept in only one role?

I don't have any answers to these questions. And my questions may be inane or misplaced. But Rayner's "can" really got to me.

Mr. Monk in Outer Space

I've been waiting for a novel that combines a mystery with elements of Galaxy Quest. And now I've found it.
In the sleek new adventure Mr. Monk in Outer Space Lee Goldberg takes our favorite neurotic deep into the lives of those involved with the cult TV show Beyond Earth (this after confronting another case that may be a murder that is not a murder--only Monk). The producer of the show has been murdered by a guy dressed up like one of the series characters.
You know you've landed in an alternate universe when you meet "Mr. Snork, security chief of the starship Discovery," one of the many fans also dressed up like peoples on the show. The ones who wear elephant trunks being my favorite.
The only thing goofier than the fans is when Monk looks at them and says "I don't associate with freaks like that." And then proceeds to do some riffing on the Sixties to "prove" that they're all "high on LSD." A great scene.
This is probably my favorite Monk book because it contains a gag that is in my top ten of Monk jokes (Monk being the favorite show of Mr. and Mrs. Gorman).
"You remember a cop named Monk?" Stottelmeyer asked.
"Wasn't he the guy who ticketed a hundred people outside a movie theater for not lining up according to height?"
And indeed he was.

From Fred Blosser THE BURGLARS

Ed, for possible interest by the gang,

I wonder how many besides me remember THE BURGLARS, from 1971, based on David Goodis’ THE BURGLAR. I found it recently on a DVD from Alfa Digital, and on watching it again for the first time in 30+ years, I found myself liking it a lot more than I remember liking it when I saw it in the theater in 1972, when it had a brief U.S. release.

Then: I think I was disappointed in large part because I was expecting a violent noir-ish crime movie along the lines of other late ‘60s and early ‘70s films like POINT BLANK, GET CARTER, THE FRENCH CONNECTION, and DIRTY HARRY. I didn’t find much noir in THE BURGLARS, which was mounted as one of those shiny, big-name international productions that enjoyed a vogue at the time. (In this case, Jean-Paul Belmondo and director Henri Verneuil for the French market, Ennio Morricone’s jazzy soundtrack for the Italian theaters, Dyan Cannon and Omar Sharif for U.S. marquees, and a solid supporting cast of Euro-movie types like Robert Hossein and Jess -- not to be confused with Jessica -- Hahn.) I was also familiar with Verneuil's 1969 THE SICILIAN CLAN, which was almost as glitzy but nevertheless more noir-ish and more tightly knit.

Now: I would give Verneuil more noir credit than I did at the time. I haven’t read Goodis’ novel or seen the earlier movie version from the late ‘50s, but from other reviews, I infer that Goodis was just a point of departure for Verneuil, not a template for mood or style. Still, Omar Sharif’s sleazy police detective, who discovers that Belmondo and his gang has burglared a fortune in emeralds from a millionaire’s villa, and decides to grab the stolen goods for himself rather than arrest the culprits, is a dependable noir type. And Sharif, wearing a cool white fedora and white trench coat, turns in a pitch-perfect performance, just the right mix of charm and nastiness.

And three decades on, I seem to find the movie’s meandering style – constructed around the lengthy burglary that opens the movie, followed over the course of the story by four big action set pieces – more tolerable than I did then. Maybe because so many of today’s action flicks are even more meandering, to the point of frustration, as the viewer checks his watch at the two-hour point, and realizes that the film has at least another half hour to run – PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN and LORD OF THE RINGS, anyone? At least Verneuil kept his running time under two hours.

Dyan Cannon, playing a magazine centerfold whom Belmondo picks up in a swank bar with a mellow Morricone lounge tune playing in the background, seems to randomly move in and out of the storyline – but pay attention, because as it turns out, her character serves a venerable noir function as well, including the classic bit (probably now verboten for fear of offending audiences) where the leading lady gets slapped around by the leading man. Verneuil compounds the sin by giving the scene a would-be comic edge. Cannon has an electronic "clapper" in her apartment (probably cutting edge high-tech in those days). Slap, the lights in the apartment go out. Slap, on again. Slap, off again.

Belmondo apparently did his own stunts in scenes where he eludes Sharif by jumping onto the sides of buses in moving traffic, sprints across the roofs of cars when the traffic stalls, and gets ejected over a hillside by a dump truck. I’m sure the stunts were set up with great care to minimize any risk of the star getting hurt, but still, it’s nice to see the old movie style where the stunts interact with real props, not with a phony CGI green screen, and the action hero’s movements are limited by the physical laws of the real world. I wish the Alfa Digital DVD were better than it is (it appears to have been struck from an aging print with less than optimal DVD technology), but it’s the only one on the market.

Hugh B. Cave

Imagine this:

Bitter winter. Midnight. You're driving as fast as you can to an urgent appointment. On your right you see a wide frozen lake gleaming in the moonlight. A bit further on you see an amusement park that is closed for the season, everything shiny with ice. But as you come upon it you hear an impossible clamor--the thunderous sound of the ferris wheel starting up. Then comes the sound of a woman screaming. You stop the car to watch in disbelief as the ferris wheel car holding the woman begins its climb up the tracks, tracks covered in ice that will certainly hurl the car to the ground when it reaches the top.

Now is that a hook or is that a hook? We're trapped in an ice-snow-rain storm out here so I spent my free time checking out websites I'd hadn't read for a long time. One of them ran a long piece on the career of Hugh B. Cave, a man who made his mark in horror and fantasy but who also did some exotic crime work for the detective pulps. The piece made me grab a collection of his called Bottled in Blonde about (get this) a private eye who is always half-drunk while working on a case. The above opens one of nine adventures that appeared in Dime Detective in the Thirties.

Cave's work as a crime writer compels because of the unsettling horrific aspects of the stories, a Weird Tales star picking up some of the small time money the tec boys are chasing.

Cave had a long run in the slicks as well as the pulps and in the Fifties Cave had three NY Times bestsellers. He wrote and sold fiction well into his nineties.