from Criminal Element:m The Obscure, Peculiar, and Clairvoyant Black Rainbow BRIAN GREENE

The Obscure, Peculiar, and Clairvoyant Black Rainbow

BRIAN GREENE

Ed here: A minor favorite of mine--I'm a big Hodges fan

Brian Greene

I first watched the 1989 film Black Rainbow a few years ago, and I took an interest in the movie for three reasons: 1. It was directed by Mike Hodges. Hodges is the auteur behind what are, to me, two superbly-made films: 1971’s Get Carter and 1998’s Croupier. I’m up for seeing anything the guy directed. 2. It stars Rosanna Arquette. I have a soft spot for her, and not just because I think she’s pretty. I like her acting, particularly in John Sayles’ 1983 title Baby, It’s You and Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985). If she’s in a movie, I’m curious about it. 3. The film’s obscurity. You almost never hear or read anything about Black Rainbow, even in quarters where you might expect it to come under discussion. I’ve read lengthy overviews of Hodges’s career, that don’t even mention the film. It only got a limited theatrical run at the time of its release and doesn’t appear to have scored any notable rave reviews or awards nominations, but still... it’s a film directed by a living legend and that has a big-name star (two, actually, as Jason Robards plays another lead role). So I wanted to know why is it so forgotten despite all of that, and despite its having been released on DVD in 2004 and on VHS before that.

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for the rest go here:

http://www.criminalelement.com/blogs/2015/03/the-obscure-peculiar-and-clairvoyant-black-rainbow-director-mike-hodges-california-brian-greene

From Lev Levinson-Another Movie About Women

Lev Levinson:

I watched another movie about women last Sunday (3/29):   “Memoirs of a Geisha” released in 2005, directed by Rob Marshall from a novel of the same name by Arthur Golden, based on extensive interviews with surviving Geishas. 

This movie is haunting me - I can’t forget it - perhaps because it was so lushly exotic, representing an entirely different world from Western Civilization, beautifully photographed and with many powerful scenes.  The backdrop is Japan in the 1930s to late 1940s, which includes World War Two.  It can be considered historical drama although it’s also much more than that.

It tells of an eight-year-old girl Chiyo Sakamoto who is sold to a geisha house by her impoverished parents and trained to become a geisha.

The movie makes clear that geishas aren’t prostitutes per se.  They’re entertainers whose audiences consists of wealthy men in loveless arranged marriages who are looking for feminine companionship and hopefully a bit of romance.

The goal of every geisha is to become supported in grand style by a wealthy preferably royal patron with whom she hopefully falls in love.  These relationships are depicted as secondary marriages, similar to the old European custom of royal men in loveless arranged marriages maintaining long-term mistresses on the side.

A geisha house was an all female environment when men weren’t being entertained.  As depicted in this movie, sometimes the women are very supportive and sisterly to each other, which was lovely and quite touching to observe.  But unfortunately the women also could be vicious, exploitive, diabolical and vengeful to each other.  One geisha even sets fire to a building in the hope of incinerating a rival. 

Young girls training to be geishas are taught how to dress, apply cosmetics, singing, dancing, the tea ceremony, and how to conduct interesting conversations, which is to say they’re taught the art of diplomacy.  Girls needed above-average intelligence to become suitable companions for successful men, many of whom were royals with advanced educations.

Although geishas aren’t presented as prostitutes, their female owners auction the teenaged geishas’ virginities in order to recoup their investments.  The geishas compete with each other for the highest bids, to prove their desirability and superiority, like a boxer winning the heavyweight championship of the world.

Geishas “come out” like American debutantes.  Each is given a big party in which she must dance in a room full of men.  Chiyo’s coming out was the most smashing scene in the film for me.  Fully clothed in traditional style, her dance was nothing like ballet, Broadway chorus routines, thoroughly modern interpretive dance, or hootchy-kootchy burlesque dances.  Instead it consisted of weird highly stylized movements to strange (to American ears) music, dramatic lighting, and a background of what looked like undulating strips of red fabric.  I’ve never seen anything like it during my 42 years in New York City, where I attended all manner of dance programs.  It was enchanting, hypnotic, like teleportation to a strange land.

The movie also was a very complicated love story, but I won’t provide details because I don’t to spoil it for you.  I never heard of any of the Asian actresses and actors, all of whom were excellent.  I think it’s fair to say this was one of the best movies I’ve ever seen in my life, up there with “Gone With the Wind”, “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Apocalypse Now”.  I cannot recommend it highly enough.  Watching it was like living another incarnation.

from The Criminal Element Ed Gorman’s Relentless Western Noir EDWARD A. GRAINGER

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Ed Gorman’s Relentless Western Noir

EDWARD A. GRAINGER

Relentless by Ed Gorman was published in 2003 and has now been rereleased in eBook format through Rough Edges Press.

As a marshal working in Skylar, Colorado, Lane Morgan sees it all and then some. His day has him separating two old timers with medical conditions to keep them from beating each other up, relaying the good news to an old woman that the county assessor is going to reappraise her property, and teaching a tinhorn hell-bent on being a shootist a valuable lesson. 

He even finds time to debunk the flourishing myths about a lawman’s occupation to the kids at the local school (being the 1890s, this is one of the first generations corrupted by the sensationalism of the dime novels) where his wife Callie is the schoolmarm. Lane Morgan is an honorable lawman trying to do what’s right in the waning days of the Old West. His life, more or less, is one of routine.

That’s about to change.

He’s scheduled to testify against the young, unprincipled Trent Webley who had tried to kill him. Should be easy enough except Trent’s father pretty much owns the town. But daddy Webley doesn’t own Lane Morgan, and the sheriff rejects a bribe of nearly $10,000. Webley then goes for the jugular by informing the sheriff that he had The Pinkerton’s dig up dirt on Callie’s first marriage to a lout named David Stanton.

The Pinkerton ruse fails. But Stanton, who is in Skylar under Webley’s employ, ends up murdered, and the evidence points close to Lane’s home when he finds blood stains on Callie’s dress and a button from her sleeve at the crime scene. Webley is one step ahead and threatens that he knows Callie had visited Stanton’s hotel room before the murder, and he can round up two witnesses to corroborate his account—even the wannabe shootist is claiming to have seen Callie exit the dead man’s room. Webley bullies, “How do you think all this would sound if the county attorney presented it to a grand jury, Marshal?”

The late Stanton had been quite the philanderer and was romancing a married woman named Sylvia Adams who had also visited him the night of his misfortune. Though she had strayed a time or two before, she’s no longer able to live with the thought of what she had done to her husband and two children. Lane approaches her but is unable to save the distraught woman from committing suicide.

She was slumped over in a rocking chair. The six-shooter hung from two of her fingers, angled down across her bosom. She’d put the barrel to her temple. Not even death could destroy the small, perfect, almost doll-like features of her face. The eyes looked stunned and sad at the same time.

Now with at least three suspects having motive to kill Stanton—one of them being Lane’s wife— Gorman constructs tighter and tighter nooses for Lane Morgan to escape. For example, a lieutenant governor is due to visit, and the town council is more interested in settling matters before the VIP’s arrival than uncovering the truth. They give Lane twenty-four hours to solve the murder of David Stanton, but he doesn’t kowtow to their demands and abruptly resigns. Free, to an extent, of the shackles of the marshal’s office, Lane still has a murder to solve especially when his replacement almost immediately arrests Callie for her ex-husband’s death.

With Relentless, Gorman transcends the Western genre akin to what writer Jack Schaefer did with Monte Walsh and film director Robert Altman accomplished with McCabe & Mrs. Miller. No mythological posturing between these pages but real individuals on the edge with seemingly no way out. Ernest Hemingway said, “When writing a novel, a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.”

Ed Gorman writes living people. Their hopes and dreams and the high costs of turning a blind eye to social justice. Relentless doesn’t have a lot of action per se but that makes sense in this noir Western that eschews fabled clichés and instead builds strong, riveting passages in the formation of these desperate lives.

To learn more about, or order a copy, visit:

Edward A. Grainger aka David Cranmer is the editor/publisher of the BEAT to a PULP webzine and books and the recent Western novella, Hell Town Shootout.

Read all of Edward A. Grainger's posts for Criminal Element.

Historical Mysteries and Westerns

Colorado | Ed Gorman | Marshal | Old and New West

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6 comments

1. BillCrider

WEDNESDAY APRIL 01, 2015 08:05PM EDT

Ed Gorman's westerns are just as good as his crime novels, and Relentless is a great combination of both. Glad to see it getting some ink here.

2. EdwardAGrainger

VIEW ALL BY EDWARDAGRAINGER | WEDNESDAY APRIL 01, 2015 08:20PM EDT

I couldn't agree more, Bill. A fabulous mixture of both genres.

3. Evan Lewis

WEDNESDAY APRIL 01, 2015 08:38PM EDT

Damn. Sounds good.

4. EdwardAGrainger

VIEW ALL BY EDWARDAGRAINGER | THURSDAY APRIL 02, 2015 02:04AM EDT

This noir hit is out of the park, Evan.

5. mates

THURSDAY APRIL 02, 2015 09:21AM EDT

My son, Kyle, enjoyed reading Ed Gorman's "The End of It All" Short story collection.

6. EdwardAGrainger

VIEW ALL BY EDWARDAGRAINGER | THURSDAY APRIL 02, 2015 10:27AM EDT

"The End of It All" has some of the very best of Ed Gorman's writing. Stories that once again defy easy categorization. Good taste, Kyle!

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A fine fine review by J. Kingston Pierce of Erle Stanley Gardner's The Case of The Haunted Husband

I Rest My Case: Perry Mason Still Rules in the Courtroom

By J. Kingston Pierce on March 31, 2015

My maternal grandfather is largely to blame for my interest in Erle Stanley Gardner and that California author’s best-remembered fictional creation, Los Angeles defense attorney Perry Mason. As boys, my brother and I would spend occasional nights at the home of our mother’s parents, while our own father and mother visited with their friends or dined out together. Our grandfather was a great fan of TV crime dramas, and evidently less concerned than our mother was about how television might corrupt young minds. So he let us sit with him while he watched such classic small-screen fare as Adam-12, The F.B.I., Cannon, Mannix and, of course, Perry Mason.

I didn’t realize back then how formulaic those Perry Mason episodes were. But they followed a familiar pattern: a murder takes place; an innocent person (most often a woman) is charged with the crime; and Mason (played so well by Raymond Burr) not only takes on the difficult defense of the accused, but manages in the end to convince the real killer to stand up in court and—tossing aside his or her Fifth Amendment rights—confess in a tearful or angry outburst. “I did it! And I’m glad I did!” that person might declare, much to the astonishment of District Attorney Hamilton Burger, whose haplessness somehow never lost him his high-profile job.

Not until many years later, after I’d added crime-fiction reviewing to my journalistic endeavors and begun collecting vintage mystery novels to study how the genre had evolved, did I discover that Gardner’s Mason books—at least the initial ones (he penned a total of 82!)—were rather different from the courtroom action-heavy pursuits of justice presented on the boob tube. Editor and New York City bookseller Otto Penzler got it right when he explained, in 1977’s The Private Lives of Private Eyes, Spies, Crime Fighters and Other Good Guys, that “Mason’s earliest cases are straightforward, action-filled thrillers which have little to do with jurisprudence.…A considerable disdain for the law is in evidence (as in most books about private detectives, particularly in the 1930s when Mason’s recorded career began), and results are more often obtained with a punch to the mouth or a blasting revolver than by a clever deduction.”

for the rest go here:
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/features/i-rest-my-case-perry-mason-still-rules-courtroom/
J. Kingston Pierce is both the editor of The Rap Sheet and the senior editor of January Magazine. You can link here to previous entries in his “rediscovered reads

Lawrence Block's Masterful, Elegant The Crime of Our Lives

Ed here:  It has been ordained by the Mystery Gods that I begin each comment on Lawrence Block by noting that he writes the best sentences in the business. He does and I don't say that frivolously. There is an unpretentious elegance in just about everything he writes. Words never had a better friend.

If you read the following you won't need any sales pitch from me. This is one of the most incisive and fascinating collections about living it out as a full time professional writer I've ever read. I read it in three eager sessions and came away enlightened, amused and wanting more.  This is a legacy collection for Larry. Perfecto, dude, perfecto.

Here are a few samples plus the table of contents. 

An MWA Grand Master tells it straight: 

Fredric Brown: “When I read Murder Can Be Fun, I had a bottle of 

bourbon on the table and every time Brown’s hero took a drink, I had a snort myself. This is a hazardous undertaking when in the company of Brown’s characters, and, I’ve been given to understand, would have been just as dangerous around the author himself. By the time the book was finished, so was I.” 

Raymond Chandler: “You have to wonder how he got it so right. 

He spent a lot of time in the house—working, reading, writing letters. He saw to his wife, who required a lot of attention in her later years. And when he did get out, you wouldn’t find him walking the mean streets. La Jolla, it must be noted, was never much for mean streets.” 

Evan Hunter: “In his mid-seventies, after a couple of heart attacks, an aneurysm, and a siege of cancer that had led to the removal of his larynx, Evan wrote Alice in Jeopardy. And went to work right away on Becca in Jeopardy, with every intention of working his way through the alphabet. Don’t you love it? Here’s a man with one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel, and he’s perfectly comfortable launching a twenty-six book series.” 

Donald E. Westlake’s Memory: “Here’s the point: Don’s manuscript 

arrived, and we had dinner and put the kid to bed, and I started 

reading. And my wife went to bed, and I stayed up reading, and after a while I forgot I was having a heart attack, and just kept reading until I finished the book around dawn. And somewhere along the way I became aware that my friend Don, who’d written a couple of mysteries and some science fiction and his fair share of soft-core erotica, had just produced a great novel.” 

Charles Willeford: “Can a self-diagnosed sociopath be at the same 

time an intensely moral person? Can one be a sociopath, virtually unaware of socially prescribed morality, and yet be consumed with the desire to do the right thing? That strikes me as a spot-on description of just about every character Willeford ever wrote. How could he come up with characters like that? My God, how could he help it?” 

An MWA Grand Master and a multiple winner of the Edgar, Shamus, and Maltese Falcon awards, Lawrence Block’s reflections and observations come from over a half century as a writer of bestselling crime fiction. . Several of his novels have been filmed, most recently A Walk Among the Tombstones, starring Liam Neeson. While he’s best known for his novels and short fiction, along with his books on the craft of writing, that's not all he’s written. THE CRIME OF OUR LIVES collects his observations and personal reminiscences of the crime fiction field and some of its leading practitioners. He has a lot to say, and he says it here in convincing and entertaining fashion. 

Table of Contents

Table of Contents BEFORE WE BEGIN . . . MY LIFE IN CRIME Anthony Boucher (1911-68) Fredric Brown (1906-72) James M. Cain (1892-1977) Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) Stanley Ellin (1916-86) Erie Stanley Gardner (1889-1970) Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961) Chester Himes (1909-84) John D. MacDonald (1916-1986) Ross Macdonald (1915-83) Ellery Queen (Frederic Dannay, 1905- 82, and Manfred B. Lee, 1905-71) Jack Ritchie (1922-83) Rex Stout (1886-1975) Jim Thompson (1906-76) Charles Willeford (1919-88) Cornell Woolrich (1903-68)

EDWARD ANDERSON
FREDRIC BROWN
RAYMOND CHANDLER
MARY HIGGINS CLARK
JOSEPH CONRAD I

INTRODUCING
DASHIELL HAMMETT
GAR HAYWOOD
EVAN HUNTER

Evan Hunter Was My Hero
HENRY KANE T
THOSE SCOTT MEREDITH DAYS
REMEMBERING AL NUSSBAUM
ROBERT B. PARKER “They Like the Way It Sounds”
EDGAR ALLAN POE “It All Started With Poe” The Curse of Amontillado
The Edgar and I
SPIDER ROBINSON
MICKEY SPILLANE
ROSS THOMAS Remembering Ross Thomas
JIM THOMPSON
DONALD E. WESTLAKE Remembering Memory Butcher’s Moon Comeback Backflash
CHARLES WILLEFORD AND IN CONCLUSION . . .

The Crime of Our Lives Lawrence Block Copyright © 2015, Lawrence Block All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the express written permission of the author. Ebook Production: QAProductions ALawrence Block Production lawrenceblock.com F

Bushwhackers, Desperadoes, and a Damsel in Distress: “Lone Star Fury” by James Reasoner

EDWARD A. GRAINGER

I have been reading James Reasoner Westerns since long before I knew I was reading James Reasoner Westerns. A prolific and in-demand author since the 1970s, he has written under a number of pseudonyms and house-names for series titles including the Trailsman (as Jon Sharpe) and Longarm (asTabor Evans). He’s also adept at crime fiction and adventure—he penned Hard Case Crime’s debut Gabriel Hunt novel, Hunt at the Well of Eternity—but this Spur Award nominee, with 200 or more books to his name, is widely revered for his Western tales like “Lone Star Fury,” where he is writing as Jackson Cole. This story actually heralds from earlier in the author’s career—going back near twenty years when it was originally published in Classic Pulp Fiction Stories (No. 2, July, 1995)—and is fortunately available again as an ebook.

Two men waited in the stygian shadows of the alley, cocked revolvers in their hands. Across the broad, dusty, tumbleweed-littered street, two more men stood in similar concealment, guns in hand, murder in their hearts.

Into this cauldron of death in the ghost town of Palminter rides Texas Ranger Jim Hatfield, sometimes referred to as the Lone Wolf. What brought him to this desolate, and deadly, locale in the western part of Texas? A message seemingly from the great beyond: a former flame named Sally Conway, whom Hatfield believed had died five years before in a horse accident, sends for his help.

The cover of Classic Pulp Fiction Stories #2 (July 1995) in which "Lone Star Fury" First Appeared.

With a skilled precision honed from many other deadly encounters, Hatfield makes quick disposal of the bushwhackers, and then he begins backtracking their trail to locate the source of the perplexing correspondence.

That path leads him, and his faithful golden sorrel, south and eventually along the Rio Grande to the once notorious Mesa City. The denizens had settled down into a proper community, but, again, it’s in danger of becoming a hell town thanks to the opportunist desperadoes infesting the region. Hatfield finds Sally very much among the living near Mesa City and married to a wealthy rancher named Ben Jardine, and the two men instantly detest one other. Hatfield also learns Sally is being treated by a doctor who has been caring for her since the accident. The sawbones explains she’s in a fragile state, requiring constant care and medicine or else she tends to see things that are not really there. But the ranger isn’t buying it. Something is amiss with his onetime sweetheart and Jardine, and Hatfield is determined to get to the bottom of Sally’s visions and the marauding owlhoots who are plaguing Mesa City. Naturally, this will bring him face to face with some rough-and-tumble renegades:

Hatfield’s fingers closed on Deke’s wrist like a vise as the outlaw tried to bring the Colt to bear. The Ranger’s other hand locked on Deke’s throat, and the two men did a desperate dance of death on the terrace, Deke struggling for breath, Hatfield trying to keep the barrel of the gun from pointing at him.

A generous helping of robust action rounds out this swift-moving, 7K word novelette but also some old-fashioned moral shrewdness that you would expect from a white hat like the Lone Wolf (whose adventures stretch to the 1930s golden era of pulp) factors in. Think Have Gun Will Travel’s Paladin with his code of honor mixed with Wanted: Dead or Alive’s volatile action.

Mr. Reasoner has been writing Westerns since Gunsmoke was a weekly staple, and in all these years his storytelling abilities haven’t diminished one iota, with recent highpoints including Outlaw Ranger, Hangman’s Knot, and Last Stagecoach to Hell.

Never read the sage from Texas? Then you have a lot of catching up to do, pilgrim. And Lone Star Fury is as good of a place to swing up into that saddle as any. For his many loyal fans, this tale is another reason why we return again and again to Mr. Reasoner’s appealing storytelling.

---

Edward A. Grainger aka David Cranmer is the editor/publisher of theBEAT to a PULP webzine and books and the recent Western novella, Hell Town Shootout.

Read all of Edward A. Grainger's posts for Criminal Element.

Gravetapping: "Nina" by Robert Bloch

"Nina" by Robert Bloch

Posted: 28 Mar 2015 02:37 PM PDT

Robert Bloch is a legend. He is popularly known as a horror writer, but his production was wide and impressive. He wrote extensively in the crime, science fiction and horror genres. He had a particular skill at taking the style of one genre—hardboiled crime—and mixing it with the theme and expectations of another genre—horror. Think Psycho .

I recently read his short story “Nina” and I was impressed (to say the least). Nolan is an American running a plantation in the wild country of Brazil. The closest city: Manaus. The plantation’s only access is by boat, and Nolan isn’t completely comfortable with the workers. It’s not that they don’t work well, but rather it is their ceaseless drumming during the night. Add the heat. The humidity. The mosquitoes. And Nolan is a miserable man.

His life on the plantation changes when a woman appears. She is unknown to the local workers, and Nolan’s translator, Moises, calls her an “Indio” and “savage.” She soon becomes Nolan’s bedmate, and when his wife and child arrive to visit, Nolan’s world is shaken on its head.

“Nina” has all of the elements of a terrific horror story: a foreign and exotic location; a creepy and dark fabric; mysticism; outright strangeness; and a violent, and very peculiar, loss. It is very much horror, but it is brilliantly delivered with hardboiled prose, which provides a raw power—not to mention forward momentum—many horror stories lack:

“After the lovemaking Nolan needed another drink.

“He fumbled for the bottle beside the bed, gripping it with a sweaty hand. His entire body was wet and clammy, and his fingers shook as they unscrewed the cap. For a moment Nolan wondered if he was coming down with another bout of fever. Then, as the harsh heat of the sun scalded his stomach, he realized the truth.”

“Nina” is one of the better genre stories I have read. Its power is heady and visceral with a shadow-like quality; the narrative creates a shifting, soft focus, of the events. The characters feel real and the narrative is perfect. It captures the essence of the story and delivers it with an impressive blend of force and jaded subtlety most writers never achieve.

“Nina” originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1977. I read it in the anthology The Best Horror Stories Volume 1 edited by Edward L. Ferman and Anne Jordan. It was published by St Martin’s Press in 1988.

This was originally posted February 6, 2009, but since I have read a few Robert Bloch short stories recently, and reviewed his fantastic “The Hell-Bound Train”I thought it would be interesting to find some of my prior writings about Mr Bloch’s work. I also reviewed his stories “The Real Bad Friend” and “Lucy Comesto Town” in 2014.

Hey, Man, Dig the Crazy Hippie Flicks ‘The Wild Angels’ and ‘Psych-Out’ New York Times

Hey, Man, Dig the Crazy Hippie Flicks ‘The Wild Angels’ and ‘Psych-Out’

from the New York Times by J Hoberman

American International Pictures, the studio that pioneered the low-budget drive-in fare of the 1950s, specialized in two genres: horror films and youth pictures. Often, the two modes were conflated. In 1957, AIP unleashed “I Was a Teenage Werewolf”; in 1966, the studio brought forth “The Wild Angels.”

Out on Blu-ray and DVD in a fine digital transfer, “The Wild Angels” may not have been the first movie in which a character exclaimed “Out of sight, man!” but, released three summers before “Easy Rider,” and introducing much of the same iconography, this “brutal little picture,” as the New York Times critic Bosley Crowther characterized it, made the hippie youth film possible — and also transformed Henry Fonda’s 26-year-old son, Peter, into Hollywood’s personification of the generation gap.

Exuberantly directed by AIP’s mainstay, Roger Corman, and propelled by a twangy surf-music score (credited to California’s future lieutenant governor, Mike Curb of the singing group the Mike Curb Congregation), “The Wild Angels” traffics in speed, drugs and nihilism. Mr. Fonda stars as the diffident leader of a biker gang, a character he has said he named Heavenly Blues after an allegedly psychedelic strain of morning-glory seeds. Swastikas abound, beginning with the logo for the movie’s title in the opening credits, which transforms a capital T into a version of the crooked cross.

Heavenly Blues’ love interest is played by Nancy Sinatra. Her hair frosted and teased and her part underwritten, she is required to adore Mr. Fonda, although this devotion seems tinged with disdain. Ms. Sinatra had a No. 1 single earlier that year with “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ ” — a proto-punk anthem far tougher than her co-star’s petulant posturing. (Would that the Scopitone film made to promote the song were included as an extra with the disc!) Michael J. Pollard, a year away from his career peak as a sidekick in “Bonnie and Clyde,” plays the gang’s resident beatnik, but the movie belongs to Bruce Dern.

Cast opposite his wife at the time, Diane Ladd, as the wild man the gang calls the Loser, Mr. Dern has a fabulous death scene. His last request is a hit of weed, and his funeral — over which, having been liberated from its coffin, his corpse presides — provides the movie’s most outrageous scene. “We want to be free to ride our machines without being hassled by the Man,” Heavenly Blues proclaims, “and we want to get loaded!” thus signaling his fellow Angels to trash the church, beat up the preacher and stage an orgy in which the Loser’s grieving widow is raped behind the altar.

“The Wild Angels” was hugely profitable and received with appropriate alarm, particularly after being selected to open the 1966 Venice Film Festival. This disgrace “caused a few diplomats to mop their brows,” Crowther wrote, calling the event “an embarrassment.” But the times were changing, and, released 18 months later, in 1968, AIP’s “Psych-Out” (also from Olive on Blu-ray and DVD), an even more delirious exercise in exploitation grooviness, would be praised for its “élan” by Crowther’s successor, Renata Adler.

for the rest of the story go here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/29/movies/homevideo/hey-man-dig-the-crazy-hippie-flicks-the-wild-angels-and-psych-out.html?ref=arts

Gravetapping: "The Hell-Bound Train" by Robert Bloch

"The Hell-Bound Train" by Robert Bloch from Gravetapping by Ben Boulden: Robert Bloch, at least to the small but select audience of this blog, needs no introduction. He is one of the great writers to graduate from the mid-Twentieth Century pulp racket, and—like all true pulp writers—if it sold, he wrote it. He worked several genres including crime, horror, science fiction and fantasy. He is best known for his fine novel Psycho—later transformed into its faithful film adaptation Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho—but his work has a depth and quality rarely seen. If Mr Bloch wrote it, it is likely pretty great. On the far side of great is his 1958 story “The Hell-Bound Train”. It won the 1959 Hugo Award, and it is the best science fiction story—short or otherwise—I have read in a long time. It features a young bindlestiff called Martin. His father “walked the tracks for the CB&Q” until he met with a drunken accident and his mother ran off with a traveling salesman. He skipped the orphanage and drifted with the rails. He tried his hand at crime, and on a cold and lonely November midnight he determined to go straight— “No sir, he just wasn’t cut out for petty larceny. It was worse than a sin—it was unprofitable, too. Bad enough to do the Devil’s work, but then get such miserable pay on top of it!” Martin’s dream of a straight life is interrupted by the unexpected appearance of an unfamiliar running train. The windows dark. Its whistle “screaming like a lost soul.” The conductor who steps from its forward car is off—the way he drags a foot when he walks, and his nonstandard technique of lighting his lantern with his breath. It takes only a moment for an offer of a ride to be tendered, but Martin negotiates a deal. He will gladly ride for a single wish in exchange. He wants, at his own choosing in a moment of happy contentment, to stop time. The conductor accepts the bargain, and Martin is certain he fooled the devil. He finds a job in the nearest town and plots his own happiness, looking for that moment where he wants to spend forever. “The Hell-Bound Train” is brilliantly executed. Its narrative is seemingly simple, but the simplicity is misleading. A study of misdirection, really. It shows the reader enough to make a conclusion (incorrectly) about where the story will finish, fulfilling that expectation in a way, and then taking it further. And that final step takes the story from pretty good to great. It is very much like the best of  The Twilight Zone , and a shame it was never treated in an episode. “The Hell-Bound Train” was originally published in the September 1958 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. I read it in the anthology The Hugo Winners, Volume 1 edited by Isaac Asimov and published by Fawcett Crest in 1973.

From Pulp Serenade:Brian Garfield on Playing Poker with Donald Westlake and Lawrence Block

Monday, April 4, 2011

Brian Garfield on Playing Poker with Donald Westlake and Lawrence Block

Cullen Gallagher: 

Imagine a poker game with Brian Garfield, Donald Westlake, Lawrence Block, and occasionally Robert Ludlum. That's one game I'd gladly pay to sit in on! (And I'm sure I would pay--my poker days ended in middle school, and even then I wasn't exactly Orono, Maine's sharpest card shark.)

Head on over to The Chicago Blog (courtesy of the University of Chicago Press) to read the interview with Brian Garfield. And dig those crazy beards!

Here's a little sample:

LTS: First off, why don't you just tell us a bit about your friendship with Donald Westlake. When and where did you meet? Were you friends for a long time?

BG: We met at a poker game in New York, 1965. It was a regular weekly quarter-limit writers' game. Lawrence Block and agent Henry Morrison were regulars. The game was a wonderful source of one-liners—now if only I remembered them. . . .

[…]

Our "lit'ry" discussions might have seemed odd to people who weren't writers. For example I remember Don's fascination with the way Ira Levin had cleverly concealed the identity of the killer in A Kiss Before Dying, and we all admired the way Mickey Spillane solved the mystery in Vengeance is Mine in the final word of the novel. I don't know that it's ever been done that way before. Spillane was a comic book-style writer, but we all thought he was much underrated as a storyteller. We didn't talk about his writing style; we talked about his inventiveness. It helps, I suppose, to realize that we all had worked our way up through the pulps—probably the last generation to do that, as the pulps mostly died by the early 1960s. Don and Larry wrote crime stories and softcore porn; I wrote crime stories and Westerns. (They came from the Northeast; I came from the Southwest.) We all had been published since the end of the 1950s. By the mid-60s we'd found a way to do the apprenticeship and make a sort of living out of it, although it wasn't a great living; most of my early books earned somewhere between a few hundred and a thousand dollars. All that meant was we had to write them fast. We thought of the work as fun, challenging but easy to do.

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Gold Medal Corner -- John McPartland by Bill Crider

Gold Medal Corner -- John McPartland

This is a little essay I did for Steve Lewis's Mystery*File. I'm reprinting it here because Duane Swierczynski recently read a McPartland book and wrote about it in his blog. Now Ed Gorman has joined in the fun with a reprint on his own blog.

Gold Medal Corner

by Bill Crider

If people of a certain age (that would be my age) remember John McPartland at all, it’s probably because of his 1957 “breakthrough” novel, No Down Payment. But the truth is hardly anybody remembers even that. (Try a google search if you don’t believe me.) Probably even fewer people remember that both before and after the publication of his “big” book, McPartland published novels with Gold Medal. And they were good ones.

Probably my favorite is The Kingdom of Johnny Cool (1959). Written years before Mario Puzo thought of The Godfather, this is a crackerjack novel about the Mafia (McPartland calls it the Outfit). The title has a couple of meanings, as there are two Johnny Cools in the novel, one young, one old. The young one is the killer, the man who’s going coast-to-coast to kill five men in one day. How he does it, what he becomes in the process, and what happens to him are just a few of the things the book is about. Although there are only 160 pages, this novel has enough details about the Outfit and the way it operates to make even Puzo blink. I seem to recall that Puzo said he made everything up. McPartland may have done the same, but it certainly sounds authentic, as do the all the details of police procedure that are introduced after the murders. The book had at least two Gold Medal printings, and they probably weren’t small ones, but I’m surprised it didn’t do even better. 

Maybe it would have, in a different time. McPartland was restricted by publishing conventions of the 1950s, so he couldn’t be nearly as explicit as Puzo was able to be later on. For example, after a young woman with the unlikely name of Dare Guiness is raped, Johnny takes revenge on the killers by stabbing them with a knife from Dare’s kitchen. And then: “There was a tradition for bodies like these two, a tradition that required the use of the knife once more on each of them. Johnny did this and left the bodies where they lay on the gray sidewalk near the garage.” Readers these days (and probably those days, too) knew what it was that Johnny did, but specificity in that sort of thing seems mean bigger sales. McPartland did his best. And even with the restrictions, this is a brutal book, maybe even a little shocking for 1959, and the ending is a real downer. 

But there are a couple of lighter moments, including some snappy patter that wouldn’t be out of place in an Arnold Swarzenegger movie of a few years ago. After a couple of killings in Las Vegas, Johnny gets on a package tour bus and sits down next to a guy counting his winnings. The guy wants to talk:

“Boy, I murdered them here,” he said. “How did you do?”

“I did all right,” said Johnny.

McPartland’s books are well worth reading if you like hardboiled action, as I do now and then, and the writing’s fine, too. The Wild Party is another good one, as are the others I’ve read.

If McPartland was so good, why didn’t he make a bigger impact on the crime field? One reason might be that he died at the age of forty-seven. He was already dead by the time The Kingdom of Johnny Cool was published. Too bad he didn’t stick around longer. A lot longer.

Gold Medal Media Bonus: In 1963, The Kingdom of Johnny Cool was made into a movie with the shortened title of Johnny Cool. It starred Henry Silva and Elizabeth Montgomery, and it made a big impression on me and my date (who’s still my date to the movies, by the way). I thought it would make Silva a big star. He was a brat-packer at the time, and Joey Bishop and Sammy Davis, Jr., make cameos in the movie. The real revelation, though, is Montgomery. Wotta performance! After you see her in this movie, you’ll never be able to think of her as that cute Samantha again.

Non-Gold Medal Media Bonus #1: After you see Johnny Cool (which will be next to impossible, as I don’t believe it’s available), you should watch Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: the Way of the Samurai (1999). Supposedly it’s based on some French film, and I might be the only major movie critic who noticed that it’s sort of a remake of Johnny Cool. Forrest Whitaker is the star, but the old Mafia guy is (a great touch) Henry Silva.

Non-Gold Medal Media Bonus #2: And after that, see if you can find the movie version of No Down Payment. I’m betting you can’t, but give it a try. It’s one of the better “lost” movies of the 1950s, with Joanne Woodward and Tony Randall, who proves here that he could do a lot more than just play the comic sidekick in movies with Doris Day and Rock Hudson. This is one of the best portrayals of suburbia ever, or at least of what people thought suburbia was like in the 1950s. I’ve never read the book, but I really should, one of these days.

Posted by Bill Crider at 8:46 AM 

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Gregory Walcott, Actor Known for ‘Plan 9 From Outer Space,’ Dies at 87

TELEVISION|Gregory Walcott, Actor Known for ‘Plan 9 From Outer Space,’ Dies at 87

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TELEVISION

Gregory Walcott, Actor Known for ‘Plan 9 From Outer Space,’ Dies at 87

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Gregory Walcott, a character actor whose résumé included numerous television westerns, several Clint Eastwood movies and prestige films like “Norma Rae” — but who was probably best known as one of the stars of “Plan 9 From Outer Space,” often called the worst movie ever made — died on Friday at his home in the Canoga Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. He was 87.

His death was confirmed by his son, Todd Mattox, who said Mr. Walcott had been in poor health for some time.

When Mr. Walcott, a tall, ruggedly handsome Southerner, was offered the key role of a pilot in “Plan 9 From Outer Space,” the idiosyncratic director Edward D. Wood Jr.’s low-budget 1959 oddity about aliens who bring the dead back to life, he had already been in the hit Henry Fonda Navy comedy “Mister Roberts” (1955) and other movies. He said in a 1998 interview that the “Plan 9” script “made no sense” but that he took the job because one of the producers was a friend of his.

“I thought maybe my name could give the show some credibility,” he said.

The film seemed destined to be no more than a footnote in Mr. Walcott’s busy career. He was a regular on the 1961-62 police series “87th Precinct” and had guest roles on “Bonanza,” “Maverick” and virtually every other TV western. He acted alongside Mr. Eastwood on “Rawhide” and in “The Eiger Sanction” (1975), “Every Which Way but Loose” (1978) and other movies. Often cast as an authority figure, he played lawmen in Steven Spielberg’s “The Sugarland Express” (1974) and Martin Ritt’s “NormaRae” (1979).

But “Plan 9 From Outer Space” slowly developed a following for its cheap effects, its stilted dialogue and a ragtag cast that included the one-name TV personalities Vampira and Criswell as well as Bela Lugosi, in footage shot shortly before his death in 1956. To Mr. Walcott’s embarrassment, “Plan 9” became a staple at bad-film festivals and the movie with which he was most often associated.

He was born Bernard Wasdon Mattox on Jan. 13, 1928, in Wendell, N.C. After graduating from high school and serving in the Army for two years, he hitchhiked to Hollywood and before long had given himself a new name and was landing small film roles.

In addition to his son, Mr. Walcott is survived by two daughters, Pamela Graves and Jina Virtue, and six grandchildren. His wife of 55 years, the former Barbara May Watkins, died in 2010.

Mr. Walcott came to accept his bad-film fame with good humor. His last screen role was a cameo in Tim Burton’s “Ed Wood” (1994), about the making of “Plan 9” and its eccentric auteur. Mr. Mattox, his son, said that when a bar called Plan 9 Alehouse opened near his home in Escondido, Calif., last year, he gave the owners, with Mr. Walcott’s blessing, a copy of his “Plan 9” script to use as wallpaper in the men’s room.

“I didn’t want to be remembered for that,” Mr. Walcott told The Los Angeles Times in 2000. “But it’s better to be remembered for something than for nothing, don’t you think?”

A version of this article appears in print on March 26, 2015, on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: Gregory Walcott, 87, a Star of ‘Plan 9’. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

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Carolyn Hart; Gravetapping: A Case of Need Michael Crichton

From Carolyn Hart:

Annie and Max will be back

I penned a Farewell to Death on Demand this spring, but a funny thing happened on the way to Life Without Annie and Max. A knock on my door. There stood Annie, a glint in her gray eyes, a determined tilt to her chin. “What are you thinking?” Max was right behind her, his usual easy going smile absent. “No more island sunshine? No alligators basking on a bank? No more laughter?” Annie and Max looked me in the eye and said, “We’re here to stay.” 

    Do I want to see the displays at Death on Demand, catch up on the new mysteries, talk about old favorites? Or drop into Confidential Commissions and have a slice of Barb’s lemon pie?

    Oh, yes. The scent of the ocean, the rattle of magnolia leaves, the grace and elegance of Spanish moss, hot heavy summer days, windy walks on a chilly winter beach, all await on the small sea island of Broward’s Rock. I’ll see everyone again, ebullient Annie, charming Max, curmudgeonly author Emma Clyde, mystery maven Henny Brawley, ditzy mother-in-law Laurel Darling Roethke, intense reporter Marian Kenyon, stalwart police chief Billy Cameron, observant officer Hyla Harrison . . .

    I realized I’d miss them too much. So I changed my mind and hope to write their 26th adventure as soon as Bailey Ruth persuades a lovelorn  ghost to climb the shining stairs to Heaven.

    And now for Annie and Max’s 25th (and continuing) adventure:

     DON’T GO HOME – Annie is hosting a party to celebrate a successful Southern literary icon and island native and his best selling novel, Don’t Go Home. The local newspaper announces that the author intends to reveal the real life island inspirations behind his characters and the dark secrets in their lives. Reporter Marian Kenyon, Annie and Max’s good friend, quarrels bitterly with the author. When his body is found, Annie knows her friend will be a suspect. Despite an array of people who feared the author’s revelations and Annie’s promise to Max that she will steer clear of sleuthing, Annie is drawn into the hunt because the police may close the book on Marian unless Annie finds the truth.

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A CASE OF NEED by Michael Crichton Posted: 23 Mar 2015 02:16 PM PDT Michael Crichton was a writer who knew how to write, and what he chose to write seemingly meant something to him.  His later novels tended to deal with science, technology and ethics, and his early works—particularly the novels written “as by”—dealt with both youth and culture in a strikingly simple and meaningful manner.  His 1968 novel A Case of Need written as by Jeffery Hudson is not only the best of his early works, but it is also arguably his best novel. John Berry is a pathologist at a Boston hospital and the novel opens with a heart surgeon ranting about losing a patient on the table.  Berry doesn’t pay much attention because this is how the surgeon deals with the stress and anger of a lost patient.  The rant, like everything in the novel, has the subtle feel of reality and prepares the scene for the main crux of the novel: an abortion gone wrong.  A procedure that was illegal when the novel was published and no less controversial than it is today. Dr. Art Lee is an OBGYN and an abortionist.  He is also one of John Berry’s best friends.  When a young woman dies in an ER hemorrhaging from a botched abortion, Dr. Lee is the primary suspect.  This sets the novel in motion—John Berry is certain his friend didn’t perform the procedure and he wants to clear Dr. Lee’s name, but his motives become less clear as the novel unravels. A Case of Need is a crossroads novel between Mr Crichton’s early pulp adventure novels and his larger, more complex modern novels.  It is something like a DMZ between the John Lange thrillers and The Andromeda Strain.  It features many of the hallmarks of his later works, particularly cultural and medical ethics, but it is wrapped in a damn terrific mystery.  It won an Edgar in 1969 for best novel and it represents Crichton’s talent at its highest. What truly separates A Case of Need from the herd is its setting, theme and dialogue.  The setting is the world of medicine.  It clearly focuses the reader’s attention on not only what it is like, or was like, to be a work-a-day physician, but it also thematically explores the ethical decisions that lurk in the industry.  It gives a murky representation of abortion and its relation to both physicians who perform the procedure and those who do not. And the dialogue is vintage Crichton; it moves the story forward in quick and linear fashion. There really isn’t anything about the novel that is weak or underdeveloped.  The prose is strong and vivid— “All heart surgeons are bastards, and Conway is no exception. He came storming into the path lab at 8:30 in the morning, still wearing his green surgical gown and cap, and he was furious.” The mystery is plotted perfectly and the suspense is built as well as any novel I have read.  It begins with what appears to be a moment of subterfuge—the angry heart surgeon—but ties the seemingly out-of-place opening scene perfectly into the theme of the story; the imperfect surgeon struggling with his own limitations and balancing the imperfections of society with the needs and demands of his patients. A Case of Need is a terrific novel that is as relevant and entertaining today as it was forty years ago.  In a sense it is very much a novel of its time, but it also has a timeless quality in that the questions it never quite answers will continue to debated generations from now.  And it very well may be the evidence we need to prove Michael Crichton was from another world.  He really was that good, and this novel proves it.

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