Friday, March 15, 2013

My last post for awhile

This weekend Carol and I are driving up to Rochester, MN. where the process for my Stem Cell Transplant begins at Mayo. If everything goes all right I'll be up there 4-6 weeks. Then I'll be blogging again.

Carol will be posting every day on how I'm doing. Here's the link.



Here are the instructions:

Go to caringbridge.org

On the right it says VISIT SOMEONE. Under that is a rectangular field 
that says "enter site or planner." In that field, type edgorman. (lower 
case letters, no space)

Click the pink Visit button.

You can click on Sign the Guest Book and leave a message or just read 
the postings that we write about what's happening with Ed's care.

That's it!

Thursday, March 14, 2013

Amazon has now published DEATH GROUND in trade pb




Formats

Amazon priceNew fromUsed from
ExpandKindle Edition$3.99 
ExpandHardcover, Large Print$28.99
ExpandPaperback$14.95
ExpandMass Market Paperback-- 
Unknown Binding-- 
Audible Audio Edition, Unabridged$14.95or Free with Audible 30-day free trial


From Publishers Weekly

This is a western for grown-ups, written in a lean, hardboiled style that should appeal to readers who "don't read westerns." In the waning years of the frontier, in an unnamed territory, bounty-hunter Guild celebrates a joyless 54th birthday in a brothel. Guild is acting as bodyguard for Merle Rig, a very unpleasant man who is soon murdered, along with a teenager whom Guild had reluctantly hired as an assistant. Suspicion points to Kriker, a notoriously violent mountain man, bank robber and leader of a secluded settlement of former low-lifes. The laconic Guild, carrying his own personal guilt about a dead child, sets out to bring Kriker to justice, accompanied by the nasty Bruckner brothers, sheriff's deputies. Kriker, meanwhile, is nursing his adoptive daughter, using a "granny woman's" folk medicine that is useless against what turns out to be cholera. Gorman ( Guild and the Jack Dwyer mysteries) uses the period setting effectively and draws his characters with a deft hand.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --
5.0 out of 5 stars DEATH GROUND by Ed Gorman October 24, 2009
By Benjamin Boulden of GravetappingFormat:Mass Market Paperback
Leo Guild is an aging bounty hunter. He is a former lawman, father and husband, but that is all behind him. Now he rides alone. He is melancholy, intelligent and violent; when he needs to be. He also has a past that sticks with him. He killed a little girl. The courts forgave him, but he can't find the heart to forgive himself.

DEATH GROUND opens on the evening of Guild's 54th birthday. In lonely celebration he makes a date at the local brothel with a young "straw-haired" girl. Things don't go as expected with the girl and his birthday truly turns for the worse when he is summoned to the Sheriff's office.

Two men are dead. One--Merle Rig--hired Guild as a bodyguard and the other--Kenny Tolliver--was technically Guild's employee. He hired Kenny to protect Rig while he paid a visit to the "straw-haired" girl. As he looks at the cadavers on the heavy mortician's tables he figures his job is gone and it is time to ride on, but first he pays a visit to Kenny's mother. A scene that unsettles Guild and also piques his interest; Kenny's mother knew Rig and Kenny palled around with a couple local deputies.

Leo Guild decides he can't leave town until he figures who really killed the pair and why. He has a feeling it is not the violent mountain man being blamed by the Sheriff, but he doesn't have many suspects. He doesn't have anything but a hunch, really.

DEATH GROUND isn't a traditional Western. It, like all of Gorman's Westerns, is a noir mystery wrapped in the trappings of the Old West. That is not to say that the historical element isn't accurate or interesting, because it is. It is also central to the story, but an Ed Gorman Western is more of a historical mystery than anything else. A hardboiled historical mystery at that.

The prose is tough and tender in varying shades. It defines the story, action, and protagonist with a lean, smart and melancholy and literate style:

"Then he started digging snow up with both hands, and he covered them good, the two of them, and then he stood up and looked out on the unfurling white land. There was blue sky and a full yellow sun. Warmer now, there was even that kind of sweetness that comes on sunny winter days. It made him think of pretty women on ice skates, their cheeks touched perfect red by the cold, their eyes daring and blue."

Leo Guild is an everyman. He is the man who does what needs to be done. He isn't a hero, or a villain, but rather he is simply a man; a man who has seen much, done much, and lost much. Guild is an example of what makes Ed Gorman's fiction so damn good: characters that are measured and three-dimensional; characters that act, feel and sound real. His male characters are strong and pitiful, lustful and scared, vain and dangerous, lonely and weak--generally all at the same time--and more importantly they are recognizable. And his female characters exhibit the same steady qualities. Neither wholly good nor bad, just human.

DEATH GROUND is a Western that should have wide appeal. It will please the traditionalist with its rugged description of frontier life and the people who settled it. It will also introduce readers of hardboiled crime fiction to a new genre, but mostly it will please any reader who wants something tangible and meaningful mixed into a well-told, excellently plotted and immensely entertaining novel.

-Gravetapping

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Carolyn Hart, Margaret Maron Oconee Press


Picture


A Settling of Accounts involves a seemingly conventional American antiques dealer returning to  London after an absence of decades. We slowly begin to realize that as quiet and pleasant as our heroine is she is also a gritty survivor of the OSS during the big war in London.  

Hart's heroines are never swooning girls; they're strong-willed women. And in this case that means there's somebody she would like to murder. I especially liked the atmospherics of wartime London. Hart is also superb with scenes of chase and mystery.

A fine addition to both the Oconee Carolyn Hart library.






This is a true whodunit and a good one. Lt. Sigrid Harald must find out who murdered a lawyer who’d been planning his retirement. Seems his office safe was filled with secrets that needed to remain secret.

The cast is colorful one and Maron keeps us turning pages with realistic and serio-comic problems badgering Harald—such as apartment hunting in blistering August and being forced to confront the horrifying fact that she doesn’t own an evening gown.

As with the early novels of Carolyn Hart, you can see here the makings of a star.


Monday, March 11, 2013

Weasels Ripped My Flesh from Movie Morlocks




by Richard Harland Smith from Movie Morlocks

Don’t get me wrong — cinemania will always be my favorite mania… but I do understand and appreciate other kinds of madness and passion. The compulsion to collect vinyl, for example (records, I mean, not pants) or for following the Grateful Dead, or for owning first editions, or for reading and even owning original copies of the men’s magazines that proliferated on America’s newsstands after World War II. I know, you hear “men’s magazines” and you immediately think Playboy or Gent or Hustler but I’m not talking about skin mags. No, I mean men’s adventure mags, monthly collections of pulp fiction, he-man tales of derring-do (did you even know it was spelled that way?! Five hundred years later and we’re still dancing to Chaucer’s tune.) that were popular with the generation of American males who had come home from conflicts in World War II and Korea with an unquenchable taste for two-fisted tales of bravery, resolve, vengeance, lust, greed, cunning and every other quality Ava Gardner looked for in a husband. Before porn wormed its way out of the back room and onto the high shelf, before Hugh Hefner arranged the marriage of Joe Sixpack and Rosie Palmer, before they became obsessed with their manscapes and their electronics and their microbrews and how to grill the perfect steak, American men thrilled to the ephemeral offerings of such established and fly-by-night publications as Man’s Life, Man’s Look, Real Men, For Men Only, Sir!, Stag, Battle Cry, Argosy, Adventure, True Adventures, Adventure Life, Escape to Adventure, Saga, Rage, Gusto and many more. (Experts in this field tend to disagree but one estimate of the total number of men’s adventure magazines that came and went between 1950 and 1980 runs to 150.) Running low on word count (all the better to read in the donnicker) but high on testosterone, these tales ranged from true war chronicles of courage behind enemy lines (Robert F. Dorr’s “Bayonet Killer of Heartbreak Ridge”) to EC Comics-style cautionary tales of the awful wages of sin (Harlan Ellison’s “Death Climb”), to exposes purporting to take the reader into the throbbing demimonde of casual sex (Gilbert Nash’s “Beat Girls: Worshippers of Zen and Sin”) to gonzo revenge-of-nature stories about humans pitted against a proactive and predatory nature (“Weasels Ripped My Flesh,” the classic Man’s Life story penned by the pseudonymous “Mike Kamens,” whose identity was never revealed and remains to this day… unknown.) If your fists aren’t curling just by reading this, you should just stop reading now.
If, however, this kind of thing seems right up your alley, you’ll probably want to get on eBay and start bidding on remaining issues of these long-MIA magazines. Assembling a small collection would probably only run you a few hundred or thousand dollars… orrrrrr you could just pop down a double-sawbuck for Weasels Ripped My Flesh! Two-Fisted Stories from Men’s Adventure Magazines of the 1950s, ’60s, & ’70s. Put out by the California-based independent publisher New Texture, this concordance collects two dozen of the stories that first appeared between the lushly-illustrated covers of assorted men’s adventure magazines, among them Walter Kaylin’s “Bar Room Girl Who Touched Off a Tribal War” (first published in Male Main June 1966), Bruce Jay Friedman’s “Eat Her … Bones and All” (Gent, December 1954), Robert Silverberg’s “Trapped by the Mau Mau Terror” (Exotic Adventures, 1959), Vic Pate’s “Chewed to Bits by Giant Turtles” (Man’s Life, May 1957), Jim McDonald’s “Grisly Rites of Hitler’s Monster Flesh Stripper” (Man’s Story, March 1965), Ken Krippene’s “I Married a Jungle Savage” (Sir!, November 1962), Joanne Beardon’s “I Went to a Lesbian Party” (All Man, May 1964) and, of course, the title track, Weasels Ripped My Flesh (Man’s Life, September 1956).  If the title sounds oddly familiar, it may be because Frank Zappa cadged it for the title of a 1970 Mothers of Invention album, and its title track, making it one of those classic titles that has been referenced more often than actually read. Unavailable for years, the story leads this collection, like a dogface taking point, like Korean war hero Donn F. Porter, “The Bayonet Killer of Heartbreak Ridge,” whose story is also told here for the first time since it was published in Man’s Magazine in October 1964.

for the rest go here: http://moviemorlocks.com/2013/03/08/weasels-ripped-my-flesh-reviewed/

Sunday, March 10, 2013

Joseph Lewis






MONDAY, DECEMBER 10, 2007


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)

Saturday, March 09, 2013

movie movie





From Roger Freidman's great column copyright 2008 http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,342109,00.html

Richard Widmark: 'I Don't Have a Great Movie'

Richard Widmark died on Wednesday at age 93. I had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing him in January 2002 at his home in Connecticut with my friend John Connolly.

The consummate actor and gentleman, Widmark should have been given a Lifetime Achievement award by the Oscars a long time ago. He was only nominated once, in 1947, for his debut as Tommy Udo in "Kiss of Death."

He laughed when we talked about that film — and the famous scene in which he pushes wheelchair-bound Mildred Dunnock down a flight of stairs.

"You make 50 movies over a lifetime and that’s the one they remember you for," he chuckled.

He told me that he never had "a great movie," but I differ. He had several: "Night and the City," "Pick Up on South Street," "The Street With No Name" and "No Way Out" are all classics. Today, you can see a lot of Widmark in Viggo Mortensen’s face. He was the king of film noir; Mortensen seems sometimes to be echoing his pathos.

Widmark was married for 50 years to the same woman, his beloved Jean. When she died in 1997, he married one more time to Susan Blanchard, the third wife of the late Henry Fonda. They were friends and neighbors. It was through Peter and Becky Fonda that I got to talk to Richard; Peter still considered Susan his "mom." I am so grateful it worked out.

Here are a couple of things he told me for our interview: Karl Malden was his oldest friend. They’d met in 1938 doing radio work. About his contemporary, Robert Mitchum: "I liked old Bob but he was a real bullshitter. We were in different worlds. He was in the booze world."

Bette Davis, he said, was "tough." Marilyn Monroe "was a ding dong. I liked old Marilyn. No one could get her out on the set."

Widmark’s last film was "True Colors" in 1991. After that, he didn’t see the need to continue. His favorite actors? "Spencer Tracy, Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart. I’d go back to work if I could work with those guys. I loved them."

Just a great guy, and such a wonderful actor. His death marks the end of an era.

GRAND HOTEL

We watched it on TCM last night. Despite the barqoue qualities of the script (both dialogue and plot) it did present the Old World in such detail that at moments it had the qualities of a documentary. James Wolcott nailed it all this morning:

Crystal Blue Persuasion

"Watching Grand Hotel on TCM, it occurred to me, not for the first time, that the world was never more beautiful than it was in classic Hollywood black and white. Certainly women never were. Black and white gave their eyes and skin a glisten, their hair a backlit aurora, that now seems to belong to some now-gone mechanical age of the gods. Grand Hotel seems all ink and ivory, with little intermittent gray. The image of Garbo's ballerina, crumpled on the floor, her tutu a luminous tissue paper white, intercut with John Barrymore's profile as he tenderly spies on her, his presence shielded in shadow--it makes you wish the movie could dispense with the Old World weariness of the dialogue and just keep on contemplating itself. (Dinner at Eight, so much more fun.) In Joan Crawford's scenes with Wallace Beery, you can see each eyebrow, mouth corner, pupil, and shapely ankle individually doing its dramatic bit to create a composite portrait of a secretary to a tycoon type leveraging her assets while maintaining a cool deposit of pride and reserve. Inspired by the Siren's Joan Crawford birthday wishes, NYCweboy unveils his shrine to Cukor's The Women, where Crawford and Shearer had their memorable slag match over some dope named Steve."

for the rest go here
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/blogs/wolcottFrom Roger Freidman's great column copyright 2008 http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,342109,00.html

Richard Widmark: 'I Don't Have a Great Movie'

Richard Widmark died on Wednesday at age 93. I had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing him in January 2002 at his home in Connecticut with my friend John Connolly.

The consummate actor and gentleman, Widmark should have been given a Lifetime Achievement award by the Oscars a long time ago. He was only nominated once, in 1947, for his debut as Tommy Udo in "Kiss of Death."

He laughed when we talked about that film — and the famous scene in which he pushes wheelchair-bound Mildred Dunnock down a flight of stairs.

"You make 50 movies over a lifetime and that’s the one they remember you for," he chuckled.

He told me that he never had "a great movie," but I differ. He had several: "Night and the City," "Pick Up on South Street," "The Street With No Name" and "No Way Out" are all classics. Today, you can see a lot of Widmark in Viggo Mortensen’s face. He was the king of film noir; Mortensen seems sometimes to be echoing his pathos.

Widmark was married for 50 years to the same woman, his beloved Jean. When she died in 1997, he married one more time to Susan Blanchard, the third wife of the late Henry Fonda. They were friends and neighbors. It was through Peter and Becky Fonda that I got to talk to Richard; Peter still considered Susan his "mom." I am so grateful it worked out.

Here are a couple of things he told me for our interview: Karl Malden was his oldest friend. They’d met in 1938 doing radio work. About his contemporary, Robert Mitchum: "I liked old Bob but he was a real bullshitter. We were in different worlds. He was in the booze world."

Bette Davis, he said, was "tough." Marilyn Monroe "was a ding dong. I liked old Marilyn. No one could get her out on the set."

Widmark’s last film was "True Colors" in 1991. After that, he didn’t see the need to continue. His favorite actors? "Spencer Tracy, Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart. I’d go back to work if I could work with those guys. I loved them."

Just a great guy, and such a wonderful actor. His death marks the end of an era.

GRAND HOTEL

We watched it on TCM last night. Despite the barqoue qualities of the script (both dialogue and plot) it did present the Old World in such detail that at moments it had the qualities of a documentary. James Wolcott nailed it all this morning:

Crystal Blue Persuasion

"Watching Grand Hotel on TCM, it occurred to me, not for the first time, that the world was never more beautiful than it was in classic Hollywood black and white. Certainly women never were. Black and white gave their eyes and skin a glisten, their hair a backlit aurora, that now seems to belong to some now-gone mechanical age of the gods. Grand Hotel seems all ink and ivory, with little intermittent gray. The image of Garbo's ballerina, crumpled on the floor, her tutu a luminous tissue paper white, intercut with John Barrymore's profile as he tenderly spies on her, his presence shielded in shadow--it makes you wish the movie could dispense with the Old World weariness of the dialogue and just keep on contemplating itself. (Dinner at Eight, so much more fun.) In Joan Crawford's scenes with Wallace Beery, you can see each eyebrow, mouth corner, pupil, and shapely ankle individually doing its dramatic bit to create a composite portrait of a secretary to a tycoon type leveraging her assets while maintaining a cool deposit of pride and reserve. Inspired by the Siren's Joan Crawford birthday wishes, NYCweboy unveils his shrine to Cukor's The Women, where Crawford and Shearer had their memorable slag match over some dope named Steve."

for the rest go here
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/blogs/wolcott




From Roger Freidman's great column copyright 2008 http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,342109,00.html

Richard Widmark: 'I Don't Have a Great Movie'

Richard Widmark died on Wednesday at age 93. I had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing him in January 2002 at his home in Connecticut with my friend John Connolly.

The consummate actor and gentleman, Widmark should have been given a Lifetime Achievement award by the Oscars a long time ago. He was only nominated once, in 1947, for his debut as Tommy Udo in "Kiss of Death."

He laughed when we talked about that film — and the famous scene in which he pushes wheelchair-bound Mildred Dunnock down a flight of stairs.

"You make 50 movies over a lifetime and that’s the one they remember you for," he chuckled.

He told me that he never had "a great movie," but I differ. He had several: "Night and the City," "Pick Up on South Street," "The Street With No Name" and "No Way Out" are all classics. Today, you can see a lot of Widmark in Viggo Mortensen’s face. He was the king of film noir; Mortensen seems sometimes to be echoing his pathos.

Widmark was married for 50 years to the same woman, his beloved Jean. When she died in 1997, he married one more time to Susan Blanchard, the third wife of the late Henry Fonda. They were friends and neighbors. It was through Peter and Becky Fonda that I got to talk to Richard; Peter still considered Susan his "mom." I am so grateful it worked out.

Here are a couple of things he told me for our interview: Karl Malden was his oldest friend. They’d met in 1938 doing radio work. About his contemporary, Robert Mitchum: "I liked old Bob but he was a real bullshitter. We were in different worlds. He was in the booze world."

Bette Davis, he said, was "tough." Marilyn Monroe "was a ding dong. I liked old Marilyn. No one could get her out on the set."

Widmark’s last film was "True Colors" in 1991. After that, he didn’t see the need to continue. His favorite actors? "Spencer Tracy, Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart. I’d go back to work if I could work with those guys. I loved them."

Just a great guy, and such a wonderful actor. His death marks the end of an era.

GRAND HOTEL

We watched it on TCM last night. Despite the barqoue qualities of the script (both dialogue and plot) it did present the Old World in such detail that at moments it had the qualities of a documentary. James Wolcott nailed it all this morning:

Crystal Blue Persuasion

"Watching Grand Hotel on TCM, it occurred to me, not for the first time, that the world was never more beautiful than it was in classic Hollywood black and white. Certainly women never were. Black and white gave their eyes and skin a glisten, their hair a backlit aurora, that now seems to belong to some now-gone mechanical age of the gods. Grand Hotel seems all ink and ivory, with little intermittent gray. The image of Garbo's ballerina, crumpled on the floor, her tutu a luminous tissue paper white, intercut with John Barrymore's profile as he tenderly spies on her, his presence shielded in shadow--it makes you wish the movie could dispense with the Old World weariness of the dialogue and just keep on contemplating itself. (Dinner at Eight, so much more fun.) In Joan Crawford's scenes with Wallace Beery, you can see each eyebrow, mouth corner, pupil, and shapely ankle individually doing its dramatic bit to create a composite portrait of a secretary to a tycoon type leveraging her assets while maintaining a cool deposit of pride and reserve. Inspired by the Siren's Joan Crawford birthday wishes, NYCweboy unveils his shrine to Cukor's The Women, where Crawford and Shearer had their memorable slag match over some dope named Steve."

for the rest go here
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/blogs/wolcott




From Roger Freidman's great column copyright 2008 http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,342109,00.html

Ed here: Richard Widmark DID have a great movie--Night & The City.Richard Widmark: 'I Don't Have a Great Movie'

Richard Widmark died on Wednesday at age 93. I had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing him in January 2002 at his home in Connecticut with my friend John Connolly.

The consummate actor and gentleman, Widmark should have been given a Lifetime Achievement award by the Oscars a long time ago. He was only nominated once, in 1947, for his debut as Tommy Udo in "Kiss of Death."

He laughed when we talked about that film — and the famous scene in which he pushes wheelchair-bound Mildred Dunnock down a flight of stairs.

"You make 50 movies over a lifetime and that’s the one they remember you for," he chuckled.

He told me that he never had "a great movie," but I differ. He had several: "Night and the City," "Pick Up on South Street," "The Street With No Name" and "No Way Out" are all classics. Today, you can see a lot of Widmark in Viggo Mortensen’s face. He was the king of film noir; Mortensen seems sometimes to be echoing his pathos.

Widmark was married for 50 years to the same woman, his beloved Jean. When she died in 1997, he married one more time to Susan Blanchard, the third wife of the late Henry Fonda. They were friends and neighbors. It was through Peter and Becky Fonda that I got to talk to Richard; Peter still considered Susan his "mom." I am so grateful it worked out.

Here are a couple of things he told me for our interview: Karl Malden was his oldest friend. They’d met in 1938 doing radio work. About his contemporary, Robert Mitchum: "I liked old Bob but he was a real bullshitter. We were in different worlds. He was in the booze world."

Bette Davis, he said, was "tough." Marilyn Monroe "was a ding dong. I liked old Marilyn. No one could get her out on the set."

Widmark’s last film was "True Colors" in 1991. After that, he didn’t see the need to continue. His favorite actors? "Spencer Tracy, Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart. I’d go back to work if I could work with those guys. I loved them."

Just a great guy, and such a wonderful actor. His death marks the end of an era.

GRAND HOTEL

We watched it on TCM last night. Despite the barqoue qualities of the script (both dialogue and plot) it did present the Old World in such detail that at moments it had the qualities of a documentary. James Wolcott nailed it all this morning:

Crystal Blue Persuasion

"Watching Grand Hotel on TCM, it occurred to me, not for the first time, that the world was never more beautiful than it was in classic Hollywood black and white. Certainly women never were. Black and white gave their eyes and skin a glisten, their hair a backlit aurora, that now seems to belong to some now-gone mechanical age of the gods. Grand Hotel seems all ink and ivory, with little intermittent gray. The image of Garbo's ballerina, crumpled on the floor, her tutu a luminous tissue paper white, intercut with John Barrymore's profile as he tenderly spies on her, his presence shielded in shadow--it makes you wish the movie could dispense with the Old World weariness of the dialogue and just keep on contemplating itself. (Dinner at Eight, so much more fun.) In Joan Crawford's scenes with Wallace Beery, you can see each eyebrow, mouth corner, pupil, and shapely ankle individually doing its dramatic bit to create a composite portrait of a secretary to a tycoon type leveraging her assets while maintaining a cool deposit of pride and reserve. Inspired by the Siren's Joan Crawford birthday wishes, NYCweboy unveils his shrine to Cukor's The Women, where Crawford and Shearer had their memorable slag match over some dope named Steve."

for the rest go here
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/blogs/wolcott

Friday, March 08, 2013

GUNSHOTS IN ANOTHER ROM by Charles Kelly

Gunshots in Another Room: The Forgotten Life of Dan J. Marlowe

     To say that noir writer Dan J. Marlowe was an enigma is to understate.  A respectable Chamber of Commerce type, he enjoyed spanking women and creating some of the great dark classics of our time.  Novelist Charles Kelly tell us all about him with stylish skill and admirable detail.

    From being a small-time business-politician in Harbor Bar, Michigan to living and collaborating with former bank robber Albert Nussbaum, Kelly presents us with a man we observe without ever quite understanding. To his credit Kelly forgoes offering  too-easy Freudian insights. There is no "Rosebud" to be found here.

   Following the death of his wife, Marlowe set out to become a writer by moving ultimately to New York.  When he finally came up with a series of hotel crime novels his book career began.  Just as I've read few crime author biographies that include the same huge number of interviews by people who knew the subejct, I've read even fewer that so deftly limn the creative process. Stephen King contributes to this with excerpts from his piece on knowing Marlowe.

   When the seminal novels came, THE NAME OF THE GAME IS DEATH and the others, they pointed hardboiled fiction in a new direction. There would be no third act attempt on the protagonist's part seeking sympathy or understanding for his violence--even Lou Ford in Jim Thompson's THE KILLER INSIDE ME pleads for understanding--nor any sense of remorse. Fuck you is the message.

   Marlowe's life was not easy. Kelly shows us the true life of most freelance fiction writers of the time. The constant struggle for money for shelter, food and something resembling peace of mind. Marlowe's health was never much good and got even worse when he developed amnesia. Neither his writing noir  his career ever really recovered.

   I still remember buying THE NAME OF THE GAME IS DEATH on a metal spin rack whenI was in college.  No novel except THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON'T THEY? had ever shocked me to the same degree.

   Marlowe had created a masterpiece. So has Charles Kelly.

Thursday, March 07, 2013

Salon Review Blindside Matt Paust


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Blindside (Dev Conrad)

Every time I open a new Dev Conrad book I win an entertainment hat trick: I get another ticket to join consultant Conrad behind the scenes of a nasty political campaign; I get a major caliber murder mystery, and, best of all, I get another lesson in the craft of storytelling from Ed Gorman, one of the master yarn spinners of our day.
I've just finished Blindside, Gorman's third and latest novel in the Dev Conrad series. It's his best yet -- of the series and, in fact, of all the Gorman novels I've read to date.
My wife introduced me to Ed Gorman on June 19, 2005, when she gave me a copy of Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? The novel is one of a series of mysteries featuring small-town Midwest lawyer/detective Sam McCain, who, for the sake of these stories, does more detecting than practicing law. His sole client is the eccentric, irascible female judge who uses McCain as a foil to embarrass the brutish, inept police chief, who secretly thinks he's the movie actor Glenn Ford.
I've since read the entire Sam McCain series, all seven of them set in the 1950s and '60s and each sharing its title with a pop song from the period. I've also come to know Ed through his blog – http://newimprovedgorman.blogspot.com /– and have learned he's a prolific writer in other genres, including horror, noir, westerns, and historical and science fiction. I haven't sampled all of his wares, but nothing I've read of his has disappointed. I'm partial to mysteries, and I'm hooked on the Dev Conrad series.
Blindside (Dev Conrad)
Part of the attraction is a feeling of authenticity. Gorman has worked in political campaigns as a speechwriter and a TV producer. His novels capture the language and the personalities, the cynicism of the professionals trying to handle and sell candidates who rarely live up to the portrayals they want voters to believe.
Dev Conrad is the consummate professional, having inherited the Chicago-based political consultancy from his father after a stint in Army intelligence. Despite his pragmatic approach to the political game, Conrad has a streak of decency. He'll work for scalawags but only if their politics are righteous, and if electing their opponents would be worse. His client in Blindside is spoiled, philandering rich boy Jeff Ward, a liberal congressman who's being challenged by a yahoo demagogue who vows to shut down the Department of Education and the Environmental Protection Agency, and who would prove “once and for all that the president was a Muslim Manchurian Candidate.” Sound familiar?
Things heat up when Ward's speechwriter is found shot dead in his car behind campaign headquarters. The opposition hints publicly that Ward murdered his own staffer. Meanwhile, Conrad tries to smoke out a spy in Ward's camp rumored to be working for his opponent. Gorman's plot has just enough twists and surprises to keep me guessing without getting hopelessly confused, as I do with many lesser mystery craftsmen. I hereby vow to read as many Dev Conrad mysteries as Ed Gorman chooses to write.

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Comment by JMac1949 Memories 7 minutes ago
Thanks for the tip, I have to admit that the pop song in the titles of his other books has put a hook in me.  I've got my own tale to tell about Will You Still Love Me, but that's for a later day... R&L
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