New Books Carolyn Hart-MERRY, MERRY GHOST

MERRY, MERRY GHOST by Carolyn Hart

The late Bailey Ruth Raeburn from Adelaide, OK, has added a sparkle to my life. I enjoy lively, energetic Annie Darling in my Death on Demand series and acerbic, assertive retired reporter Henrietta O’Dwyer Collins in my Henrie O series, but now-you-see-her, now-you-don’t Bailey Ruth is an adventure in the making.. I adore writing about my impetuous, redheaded ghost.

I have always loved fun ghost tales, the Topper books and films, Blithe Spirit, the occasional romantic H’Wood flick with the winsome heroine from beyond . Writing a book with a ghost had great appeal for me. I suggested the idea to my editor and this was before the current craze for the paranormal. She encouraged me and I sat down to write a ghost story.

In most fiction, the ghost is a sidekick, an important character but not the protagonist. The ghost helps or hinders the protagonist. However, when Bailey Ruth came swinging around a cumulous cloud to greet me, she immediately became the star of the show.

I learned a great deal about Bailey Ruth - what she can and cannot do - in GHOST AT WORK, her first adventure. When invisible and not carrying a physical object, she can immediately go from one spot to another. She thinks: Main Square. She is in Main Square. However, if she carries an object - car keys, a gun, a flashlight - she can remain invisible, but she progresses on the earthly plane. When she decides to appear, she also decides how she will appear. Bailey Ruth loves high fashion and takes great pleasure in a well cut blouse and the latest style slacks. Oh, and shoes . . . those require serious consideration.

Bailey Ruth comes to earth as an emissary from the Department of Good Intentions. That’s where I first met her. She was shyly approaching the train station which serves as the department headquarters. Her hope was to be sent to earth to help someone in trouble. A brave sailor saved her from drowning when she was a little girl and she’d like to bring help in turn.

In MERRY, MERRY GHOST, Bailey Ruth receives the assignment because she loves Christmas. She enjoys carols and gifts and decorated houses and the generosity that brings smiles in the dreary depth of winter.

Her assignment in MERRY, MERRY GHOST is to protect a little boy whose unexpected arrival at his grandmother’s house shortly before Christmas reveals the earthly vanities and sins in a gathering family that threaten to being ruin and misery and death.

Christmas affords joy from the sparkle of the holiday. Shining through that glitter is the golden glow of the child in the manger who came to earth to offer redemption. MERRY, MERRY GHOST offers glitter, but I hope it also offers a glimpse of the world as we would all wish it to be.

Bailey Ruth was my guide in Merry, Merry Ghost and she led me on a merry chase. I hope readers will enjoy spending a bit of their holiday in her holiday.
- 30 -

The only person I didn't hear from was Serena Williams

I always forget that people are going to get mad when I talk politics. I get mad when I read the political sentiments of other people. Why shouldn't people get mad at me?

On line I was criticised by the right who seem to think I'm a big Obama fan. Off line I was criticised by the left who thought I was dumping on Obama.

1. I'm beginning to believe that Obama may have been a better candidate than a president. Read Frank Rich in the NY Times today. He seems to be wondering the same thing. That said, I don't think he had any choice but to bail out Wall Street. But as Senator Bernie Sanders, Robert Reich, Josh Marshall and Rich, among many others have been saying ever since, THEN was when the handcuffs should have been put on Wall Street. Tough, punitive legislation (including long prison terms) for offenses ranging from insider trading to selling unlicensed derivatives). Barney Frank had a bill with fourteen hardball rules in it for Wall Street. The bill included prison terms. Obama said he liked it and then two weeks later backed away from it. There's a long article on HuffPost today about how the five biggest banks have all displaced hordes of lobbyists with ready access to campaign cash for Washington. They go to work tomorrow. Like Frank Rich I don't see how any serious Wall Street legislation will get passed. Obama didn't do his job.

2. Was everybody who attended the march yesterday a racist? No; and I corrected myself soon after I wrote that. I said that while there were serious and honest people attending, there were too many whackjobs. I watched a bunch of interview with attendees and read some blogs by reporters who were there. Here are some of their beliefs.

Don't cooperate with consensus takers. They'll just use the info to put you and your family in "Obama camps."

Gay Muslims are taking over our government. Wow. The middle east has never cared much for gay people. In fact in Iraq right now many gays have been killed in drive by shootings without the govt doing much about it.

Obama has ruined our economy. From a recent census on the recent we learned the following from The Washington Monthly::

"Ron Brownstein took a closer look at the Census Bureau's latest report on income, poverty, and health insurance, and what the data tells us about "the economic record of George W. Bush."

"On every major measurement, the Census Bureau report shows that the country lost ground during Bush's two terms. While Bush was in office, the median household income declined, poverty increased, childhood poverty increased even more, and the number of Americans without health insurance spiked. By contrast, the country's condition improved on each of those measures during Bill Clinton's two terms, often substantially.

"The Census' final report card on Bush's record presents an intriguing backdrop to today's economic debate. Bush built his economic strategy around tax cuts, passing large reductions both in 2001 and 2003. Congressional Republicans are insisting that a similar agenda focused on tax cuts offers better prospects of reviving the economy than President Obama's combination of some tax cuts with heavy government spending. But the bleak economic results from Bush's two terms, tarnish, to put it mildly, the idea that tax cuts represent an economic silver bullet."

Ed here: It's been said so many times today that it's already a cliche. Given what Bush did to the economy, the Constitution and the health system, why didn't we see all the tea baggers and Confederate flag-wavers and strict constructionists out in the streets back then? For some reason Obama got elected and they've been piling on ever since. And most curious of all, they started piling on even before he took office.

THIS WILL BE MY ABSOLUTE LAST POLITICAL POST. I PROMISE.

-----------------------------------------Love songs

I was punching the car radio station selector for a song I liked when I caught a really cool sounding young woman singing a very erotic love song. She was talking about being breathless and being shaken and longing for him. And then I realized she was talking about Jesus. Whoa Nelly. I'd heard similar songs before but never one quite as well done or obvious, Jesus/God as a love object. We've come a long way from Ave Maria. The thing is that a lot of songs on the religious stations are pretty damned good just as music. Few of them are quite as polished as the big secular studios produce but that's half their charm. It's good music without an abundance of effects. But man equating love for Jesus in orgasmic terms--I dunno. You'd think the true believers would find this offensive.

Political-enter at your own risk

A lot of us who write westerns read a fair share of history about our country as it pushed west. I like to look through old journals in used bookstores because they often contain material you don't find in books. Today I was at Half Price and I found a Journal of Popular Culture from 76 that had a number of interesting articles in it. By far the most striking was "Racial Reservations: Indian and Blacks in American Magazines, 1865-1900" by Professor Charles R. Wilson. The piece introduced me to a particularly repellent racial theory I'd never heard of before.

White intellectuals of the highest order found blacks superior to Indians for a simple reason. Here's Nathan Shaler, Dean of the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard:

"We see the essential difference between the African and the Indian in the measure of this faculty (the tendency to imitate whites). The American aborigines are content with their ways, and slow to take on the manners and customs of the whites; they have thus never reconciled themselves with their conquerers. The Negro is contented only when he feels that he has brought himself into accord with his superiors."

There are three pages of quotes like this from various academic publications. I chose the above because it was the easiest to condense.

After I read this I turned on the news and saw the Glen Beck rally in D.C. Wile I'm sure there were some decent and well-meaning people there, I'm assuming that most of them were the dirtbags, KKK wanna bes, mental defectives and white trashers who squelched all serious discussion at town hall meetings. Today they probably went to the bathroom on the street and killed squirrels and kittens for their food.

You know, there's a legitimate argument to make about how Obama has spent our money. Yesterday, the NY Times, the Los Angeles Times and Huffington Post all ran long articles attacking Obama for doing nothing to change Wall Street. The CEOs who should have gone to prison are back to making millions a year and the unlicensed derivates that caused a good deal of the trouble are being sold again. Every piece predicted that we will have an even bigger crash within ten years because Obama let Bernacke, Geithner and Summers sell us out to Wall Street. To me they should be sentenced to prison for life. Paulson would go in first.

But as much as I find it hard to forgive Obama for his cowardice and incompetence with Wall Street, I have no stomach for what I saw on the streets of D.C. today because despite the posturing of "he's spending too much money" just about everybody I saw interviewed said in one way or another "We want our country back." I.e., we don't want no colored guy in the White House. Pure and simple. The placards were offensive as usual--Obama with big lips; Obama as Hitler; and a new one, "Obamacare should be buried along with Kennedy." Nice. Plus a variety of misspellings. I can't spell either but how tough is "nation"?

Do we really want a dirtbag nation? I always quote Mencken: "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people." That was proved again today in Washington, D.C. I came from the working class. I met very few people of the sort I saw on screen today.

I thought of something today I'd never considered before. If Reagan hadn't fought Gerry Ford in 76 then Ford (Ford had also come to hate his neo-con employees Cheney and Rumsfeld) would have won. We wouldn't have had Carter, to me one of the worst presidents in our history and thus we wouldn't have had Reagan and "acceptable racism" ("welfare queens" anybody?). We would have had a nice moderate GOP president like Ford or somebody and we wouldn't be where we are today.

We're in a hell of a fix when the dems stand by and let their president sell us out to Wall Street and the only opposition can be found in the streets at the behest of a sissy like Glen Beck who, I'm pretty sure, agrees with that Harvard quote I used to introduce this post.

The Care and Feeding of Dead People; Doug Clegg

I've always maintained that anything created for the good of mankind will within thirty days be turned into something bad for mankind. Human flight was quickly weaponized. Drugs were used to addict as well as cure. And the internet is filled with so many poisonous websites you feel contaminated just hearing about them.

But one of the many worthwhile things the internet has done is secure the work of writers who have passed on. Even famous writers fade from popularity sooner than some of us wish. Two examples would be Robert Bloch and John D. MacDonald.

Except for Psycho Bloch was never a bestseller as such but he was read and respected worldwide by horror and mystery fans alike. A few years before his death there was some carping about how his time had passed. Irritating as the criticism was it seems in retrospect to have foreshadowed how interest in him seems to have faded. Part of this is simply because he's dead. Writers and their work generally fade after they've passed on. But if you Goggle Robert Bloch you'll see that not only his work but also his life are alive and well on various websites. Now when I try to interest somebody in Bloch I just say Google him.

Less than fifteen years ago this wouldn't have been possible. Lost writers were discussed only in fanzines read by a few hundred people at most.

And it wasn't only non-bestsellers who faded. Read through twenty years of New York Times bestseller lists sometime and you'll see how quickly even big sellers vanish.

Which brings me to John D. MacDonald. I was one of the lucky ones who was old enough to read most his books as they were published. He sold big time in the heyday of paperback originals and when he switched to hardcovers with his Travis McGee series he became and remained for approximately fifteen years an enormous international bestseller. He was feted by some of the world's most important critics and the McGees became a benchmark for a certain kind of adventure fiction.

I don't think I've ever seen a writer's books fade from popularity as quickly as MacDonald's did. The McGees are in print but little else. For those of us who believe that MacDonald's best work was often in the stand-alones he wrote for Gold Medal this is sad news because few if any of them in print today. Even the critical acclaim has waned. He doesn't seem to appeal much to people under forty-five. I understand that the McGees have dated. MacDonald got pretty pontifical and silly about modern life in his speechifying. But when you read End of The Night and Cape Fear (The Executioners) and The Last One Left and many of his other books you're in the hands of a master.

Sez me.

But not enough of other people to bring him back into print. So what we're left with are some good sites that steer us to his books and his very interesting life. Maybe the next couple generations up will rediscover him all over again.

For those of you who grew up with the internet, I'm sure all this sounds crazy. So who didn't know there were a lot of sites dedicated to the work of dead writers? Well, a lot of us actually. I had never heard of Elizabeth Sanxay Holding, for instance. I saw a reference to her on a site, ordered a used book of hers and was hooked for life. Her suspense novels walk right on the edge of horror, almost fever dreams. She was so good Raymond Chandler called her "the best suspense writer of (my) generation." I'm told she's about to get a serious website. And maybe some serious new readers, too.

Zombies aren't the only dead people who deserve attention.

-------------FROM DOUG CLEGG

Ed,

Trying to spread this around, so if there are any friends you can send it to, please share it.

A game was developed from the illustrations for my book, Isis, which comes out in about 2 weeks. And we're within two days of hitting a million players (we're over 860,000 now and it moves from 80,000-110,000 players per day.)

The illustrations -- by Glenn Chadbourne - are stunning.

It's beautiful, fun and fairly easy:

http://www.Isisthebook.com/game.php

Glee

There was so much drumbeat about "Glee" we thought our TV would be taken away if we didn't watch it.

I have to say up front that Carol mostly enjoyed it. She was in theater in both high school and college and then did a lot of acting and commercial work after graduating. We in fact met on a commercial I was working on in Chicago. So the world of Glee is in several respects her world. All these young Glee club singers and actors. It's not my world at all. I never joined anything remotely like Glee or theater until my final two years when I got a playwriting scholarship. Then I spent four or five years with various acting groups. But my experience was very different. We spent most of the time avoiding the landlords who wanted to evict us for not paying the rent.

I guess what startled me about the episode I saw was how stereotyped the characters are and how much it reminded me of High School Musical, which I managed to get through only because two of my granddaughters wanted me to see it. They sat on either side of me. It was cute but vapid. Glee isn't even cute, except for the actress who plays the germ-a-phobe guidance counselor, Jayma Mays. Matthew Morrison is believable but bland as the star but Jessalyn Gilsig as his wife is given a character that is both shrill and profoundly irritating.

The big disappointment here is Jane Lynch. I've been a fan of hers since I saw her as the gay dog trainer in "Best of Show." I'd follow her anywhere. But she's wasted here as a butch coach of the cheerleaders. She's Cruella McNasty and not convincing for a second.

I'm not capable of seriously reviewing the singing or dancing since I know nothing about either art. All I can say as an amateur is that it all it sounded and looked like a series of uninspired music videos. All the songs are lip-synched of course but when you're looking at a lead and three backup singers on a bare stage but what you're hearing is this large sleek chorus...it kind of breaks the illusion.

Damned if I know what the fuss was all about. But I suppose there's a chance it'll be a big hit with teenagers.

Shadow Season

Starred Publisher's Weekly Review

An interview with Tom Piccirilli

Tell us about Shadow Season.

SHADOW SEASON is a crime/suspense novel about a blind ex-cop turned English professor at an all-girls school. During the winter vacation he, along with a skeletal crew of faculty, watch over a handful of remaining students. My protagonist is forced to deal with his missing girlfriend, a seductive teenager, the impending release of his dirty ex–partner who wants to kill him, and his own loosening hold on the world as the worsening storm leaves him almost wholly sensory deprived. I really had to alter my narrative voice for this one. Since the story is told from my protagonist's point of view, I couldn't write with any kind of concrete images or visual details. I had to rethink my entire process.

You seem to make it a point not to write the same book twice.

I have no interest in retelling the same kind of story the same way. A new novel has to really grab me with a concept or a theme or some overwhelming image, and from there it just unrolls and I'm drawn along, learning the tale as it unfolds. I'm most interested in the surprise and discovery of a new book. If it's not keeping me excited and intrigued, how can it possibly do it for my audience?

Not many people realize how long you've been publishing. You started in the semi-professional magazine, right?

Actually, just about the first thing I sold was my first novel DARK FATHER, which Pocket Books brought out. Then I spent a few years writing novels I couldn't sell. I eventually had to come to realization that the books weren't working and I needed to go back to the beginning and learn how to write a solid short story. I spent a full year doing nothing but writing short fiction. When it began to sell regularly I went back to those early manuscripts and saw a plethora of problems. Writing the short stories had taught me how to strengthen my own narrative voice and edit my work. So I rewrote those books and eventually they began to sell too, several years after I originally wrote them.

You made a serious and respected name for yourself in the small press. What were those early years like for you?

It was rough carving out any kind of a reputation, but the small press is wonderful for encouragement and contact with like-minded folks. It's a real community feeling. People trade magazines, books, discuss their favorite fiction and writers until they're blue in the face. You're younger and filled with more bombast and passion. In the bigger marketplace there's more emphasis on making your mortgage and trying to sell film rights and all of these grander ambitions. The really fun stuff tends to seep out. That's just the nature of the beast, I think.

You gradually phased out the horror elements in your work and took up straight suspense. Was this a conscious decision or did it evolve by itself?

It seemed to happen on its own. I wrote two or three supernatural-suspense crossovers and then just forged ahead with the crime/suspense fiction on its own. I was heading into my mid-life crisis and I think noir just sort of dovetails with my own changing needs and hopes. When you're young you're looking ahead and wondering what might be creeping around the corner. When you're older you're looking back and trying to make sense of your life. I started becoming more interested in reality-based fiction as opposed to the fantastical. Maybe the wheel will come around again one of these days, but right now I feel comfortable writing noir and whatever else might go under that umbrella.

You seem to speak with authority about damaged people. As a writer are you more attracted to them than the standard commercial protagonist?

The standard commercial protagonist just doesn't seem to be very realistic to me. It's a false front, an act fabricated by films/fiction/advertising. There is no normal. The norm is that we're all abnormal and fucked in our own ways. We've all got scars and heartaches and regrets, and we're at least as much a product of our fears and failures as we are our successes. Drama is built on conflict and tension so I focus in on those dark dank places. They're more interesting and more universal, even if some folks don't wish to accept that.

What's a working day like for you?

I burn out at the keyboard very easily, so I write in bursts all day long. I prefer to write a page or two, then watch a movie, then write for a bit, then read for a couple hours, walk the dogs, then get back to writing. It seems to help me stay fresher and keep in the proper mindset. I don't understand these people who say they can sit at the desk and write for ten hours straight. I'd be a basket case after about an hour. It's too hard to dig into yourself that deeply for that long.

Would you change anything you've done with your career thus far?

Oh hell yes. There's been a hundred times when I should have zagged when I zigged. When I should have gotten an agent instead of going it alone or I should have dumped one sooner than I did. Or worked on a short story instead of a novel or vice versa. I took bad deals, I was indebted to people I shouldn't have been. But what's the point in complaining? Hopefully I've learned some hard-fought lessons and can keep striving forward. I suppose that's all any of us can do.

What's next for you?

SHADOW SEASON hits at the end of October. Cemetery Dance is bringing out a huge collection of my short fiction & novellas entitled FUTILE EFFORTS, hopefully by the end of the year. My next novel THE UNDERNEATH should hit in 2010. A small press novella THE LAST DEEP BREATH will be out in early ‘10 from Tasmaniac, the good folks who published THE NOBODY.

Thanks, Tom

Thank you, Ed!

Joan Blondell

Turner has been running Joan Blondell movies for the past week and it's been particularly interesting for me because by the early Fifties when I first became aware of actors as actors Blondell was past her Hwood prime. She spent the last three decades of her life doing more television than anything, and usually playing the knowing but not quite cynical older woman whose wisdom comforts young women and whose loveless life gives her a sense of nightclub melancholy.

I've now seen three of her movies from the Thirties and she was damned fine in every one of them. In Three On A Match she's cast as a working girl fighting her way through the Depression along with a very young and prim Betty Davis. The Third of the title is Ann Dvorak in a wild and finally savage performance that she considered the finest of her career. In Night Nurse she plays Barbara Stanwyck's best friend. The working class element here is played up. Stanwyck has trouble getting into nursing school because she hasn't finished high school. In both Blondell is the sarcastic but loyal friend of the star.

Though she made dozens of movies, she was frequently cast in the sidekick role so I was interested to see how she'd do as the co-star of a comedy mystery with no less than Melvin Douglas, one of the finest actors in Hwood history.

The name of the picture is There's Always A Woman. After I saw it I went to IMDB to read up on its history. Included in the long review is the following: One warning: those who are sensitive to any allusion to spousal physical abuse, however playful, will not enjoy this movie.)

I laughed out loud when I saw that.

There's Always a Woman is about an investigator for the DA's office (Douglas) who lets his wife (Blondell) convince him that he could do better as a private detective on his own. The movie opens with Douglas about to be evicted from his office. He is broke. His detective agency was a bust. He will no longer listen to Blondell who begs him to give it a little more time. But no he says and heads straight to the DA's office to beg for his job back. Meanwhile a woman straight out of Raymond Chandler (beautifully played by Mary Astor) appears and asks for the detective. She wants a woman followed--a woman she suspects is trying to steal her husband. Blondell, who is tired of Douglas demanding that she stay home and be a housewife, listens and says she's the detective. And takes the case. But this isn't Lucy Ricardo. Blondell lies, bullies, entraps and falsifies evidence without any qualm. She's quite charming while she's doing all this but if you hesitate for even a moment you realize she's really menace. But a damned funny one.

This is a great screwball comedy with a whodunit thrown in. It is also shocking in its way. Douglas is hired to solve the case for the DA but Blondell wants to solve it first. The race is played with great comic gusto and more physical interplay between a man and a woman I've ever seen. Though Blondell is very glamorous here with numerous chic outfits and hairdos, she and Douglas go at it every few minutes. And not just verbally (though some of Douglas' zingers are wonderful). No, throughout the movie they are constantly kicking, stomping, shoving, kidney punching, elbowing, jabbing, poking and prodding each other. And she's frequently giving it to him first and hardest. I'm not sure I'd like a relationship like that but the pounding these two give each other kept me laughing for the entire 86 minutes. Again I've never seen anything like it.

One of the many reasons to be thankful for Turner is that you get to discover not just actors but careers. Blondell was a very good actress and certainly worthy of Turner's recent retrospective.

Forgotten Books: The Dame by Richard Stark

Don Westlake used to say that he didn't like to outline, that he preferred letting the story take him where it chose to go. I suppose this was another way of saying what Theodore Sturgeon said a long time ago, that if the writer is surprised the reader will be surprised.

Well, Westlake was probably not only surprised by the various twists and turns The Dame takes, he must have been downright shocked in places.

Our old friend Alan Grofield, flush with money from a bank robbery, is intrigued by a message from a Latin American dictator whose friend needs help. Turns out the friend, the forty-something dragon lady Belle Danamato, lives in Puerto Rico and is seeking a divorce from her mobster husband. She is under the impression that he will do her violence rather than actually go through with the settlement their lawyers have come up with. She already has a bodyguard but he's too ugly to be seen with in public. Grofield hates her and her thugs and quickly departs. Only to return a bit later under duress.

All too soon--or not soon enough from Grofield's point of view--Belle Danamato is murdered. B.G. Danamato, mob boss and now widower, appears and decides that Grofield murdered her. He will be quickly tortured and then executed. But lest we forget, Grofield is a professional actor and he puts on enough of a show to plant doubt in Danamato's mind about the identity of the true killer.

For the next several chapters we have a whodunit. B.G. and Grofield interview each of the six guests, trying to see if one of them cracks or inadvertently reveals something he or she shouldn't. It's quite a crew, the most interesting being the brother and sister team Roy and Patricia Chelm. The lad is a gigolo of some kind and the sister an iron virgin of twenty-three.

But don't be misled. Sure we have a one act version of a whodunit but then we go back to some of the finest chase scenes I've read in a long time. Westlake makes the jungles menacing, fetid in heat and humidity and the decay of dead things.

As I read The Dame I thought of all the different genres of popular fiction Westlake touches on in this novel. A partial list would include screwball comedies, chase and adventure, mobsters, country manor whodunits and Agatha Christie clue planting.

One piece of business is, to me at least, unique. Grofield announces about fifteen thousand words before the end that he knows who the killer is but he won't share his surmise with anybody. Westlake uses it as a very nifty tease.

Couple things: I wouldn't say this is major Westlake but it is an example what the pro of pros could do to exalt a story even he wasn't taking too seriously. The writing is astonishingly crisp and vivid. Once a page he jars you with something, some little turn or piece of psychology that only Westlake could have come up with.

The other thing is Grofield himself. I've noticed over the years that every once in awhile Grofield comes off as a jerk. That's my reaction and maybe my reaction alone. He gets a little too full of himself and a little too coy and glib. Then he settles back down and he's an intriguing protagonist again.

I read The Dame in two sittings and enjoyed the super-charged plot and watching Westlake throw one fast ball after another straight across the plate.

Good People Marcus Sakey

I'll tell you just about everything I love about crime fiction can be found in the novel Good People by Marcus Sakey. Bare bones it's not an unfamiliar tale. Tom and Anna Reed, a Yuppie couple strung out on debt and Anna's desperate and expensive dependence on a fertility clinic to help her produce the miracle she wants, rent out the bottom half of their Chicago house to a strange and frequently surly man.

One day they find him dead of natural causes. But that's not all they find. He had concealed $400,000 in cookie jars, cereal boxes and other kitchen hiding places. After much deliberation they decide to keep it. They will be debt free and Anna can afford more treatments at the fertility clinic.

What they don't know is that the money was part of a robbery. Two people want it. Jack, a psychotic career criminal whose younger brother was murdered by one of the robbers in a double cross (I was thinking Richard Stark here); and Malachi a drug dealer who was humiliated by Jack in the course of the robbery while he was delivering a huge amount of coke. The dealer wants his coke back and a chance to kill the robber.

That's the set-up. As I said, nothing shiny new. But man Sakey is a writer's writer. Not only is the book polished to a razor-edge it's also filled with flashes of insight that jar you. The opening pages describing the robbery are so well laid out and detailed you want to memorize them. The suspicious cop who knows they took the money is ultimately just as morally corrupt as everybody else in the book, a very interesting portrait of a cop. And the robber Jack is Satan's nightmare.
His scenes of violence made me hurt along with the victims. They're that vivid.

Then we have the marriage of Tom and Anna. Neither of them are especially likable. I say that not because they're villains but because they're weak in the way real people are weak. It's sort of embarrassing to read about yourself. They are at the point in their marriage where everything turns into a debate and debate into anger, especially on Anna's part. Her obsession with having a baby is sympathetic at first but, for me, anyway, becomes irritating. Tom wants to adopt but she says no. Period. But Tom isn't a exactly a great mate, either. He's one of the self-absorbed boy-men America seems to produce by the millions. It seems natural that he's in advertising. But it's their failings that are fascinating. No Dr. Phil for these two thank God. They're terrified people (terrified well before they decide to take the money) and settled into battering each other over their mutual helplessness. No need to call for more troops. They're doing just fine.

As a suspense novel it's exemplary. This is one of those books that involves you to the point where you start talking to the characters, saying do this or for God's sake don't do that. Where you physically writhe as Sakey twists every drop of blood from his suspense scenes. You want to see how a master creates a suspense story? Here you go.

I guess this didn't win an Edgar. Maybe somebody could explain to me why not. I came to Sakey late but having just finished one of the most cunningly conceived and executed suspense novels I've ever read, I sure plan to read more of his stuff.

Stark House & Harry Whittington

I'm reprinting this to acquaint new people to Stark House. And because Whittington will always be one of my favorite pulpers.


Back in the 1950s you could run but you couldn’t hide from Harry Whittington. Those were the days when many if not most paperbacks were sold in wire racks found in drug stores, grocery stores and what were then called dime stores.

Harry told me that he’d once seen five books of his displayed on the same rack, all published that month. He worked for everybody, from Gold Medal all the way down to Carnival. He did westerns, nurse romances, tie-ins, war stories and of course crime novels. The last was his true calling. There there was no sub-genre of suspense/mystery he didn’t like. Or apply himself to.

I mention Harry because Stark House Publishing has just published two of his best in a single attractive volume, A Night for Screaming and Any Woman He Wanted. I should also mention here that I’m a free-lance editor for Stark House, though I’d be reviewing this two-fer with the same enthusiasm even if I weren’t.

Harry’s world was not one of ratiocination. There wasn’t time for that. Most of his white working class protagonists were on the run from cosmic forces that would have given Lovecraft pause. In Night, for instance, the villain is so oppressive you seriously begin to wonder if the protagonist will survive. Seriously. The setting is one of those labor camp where drifters and small-time cons are forced to toil for the local politicians who make money on them. If the characterizations are less subtle than COOL HAND LUKE, the violence is every bit as painful. There are two scenes that literally made me wince. Harry knew the Deep South all too well.

Any Woman is a working class nightmare of a different kind. A once crooked cop stumbles on to a situation even he doesn’t want to cover up and joins his former enemy the DA in trying to right it. But the DA dies mysteriously and the cop is forced to go after the mob that runs the town by himself. Although this is a familiar 50s theme (the crooked town), Harry throws in a complication that makes the story personal and harsh. Harry always said that he knew how to do two things – plot and create characters. And this book proves that wasn’t any empty boast.

Here’s the Stark House website: http://www.starkhousepress.com. Publisher Greg Shepard is bringing back the favorites of the 50s including Malcolm Braly, Gil Brewer, Stephen Marlowe, Day Keene, Vin Packer, Doug Sanderson and now Harry Whittington. He needs your support and I feel he deserves it, which is why I’m lending a hand. As I mentioned on my blog the other day, I recently paid $15 for a paperback from ABE. Well, I just got it today. It’s yellowed and the spine cracked when I opened it. Stark House sells two-fers (two books per volume) in handsome, sturdy editions for $19.95 that will last much longer than most pbs. I have no financial stake in this, I merely want to see the line thrive. Check out the website.

Radio Days

I'm sure there are a few of you out there who remember, as I do, what it was like to spend hours in front of a radio listening to shows that meant adventure (Superman, Green Hornet, Hopalong Cassidy etc) and shows that meant laughs (I loved Jack Benny, The Great Gildersleeve, Bob Hope (who knew what a dick he was in reality?) and of course Fibber McGee and Molly.

Two of the shows my little brother and I liked best were The Lone Ranger and Tom Mix. The Lone Ranger was sponsored by Cheerios so of course we wanted to eat same while the show was on. No problem because Cheerios were great. The trouble came with cowboy legend Tom Mix. He had the coolest offers. Send in a box top and a quarter and you could get a pair of authentic plastic glow-in-the-dark spurs. We had a deal with our mother. She'd buy us any cereal we wanted as long as we promised to eat all of it. Tom Mix was sponsored by Chex, which has always tasted to me like ground up concrete. But we had to eat it to get those spurs. It was worth it because in the dark of our room we could see the spurs hanging off our shoes. Pretty damned cool.

-----------

I was reminded of this while I was reading the new Crippen and Landru collection The Casebook of Gregory Hood, the scripts of fourteen radio shows by none other than Anthony Boucher and co-creator Denis Green. The shows were not only Golden Age Radio they were Golden Age Mysteries. Gregory Hood is one of those amateur sleuths who learned his stripes reading the Sherlock Holmes stories. He's a wealthy man of course and a dashing figure even among all the other dashing figures.

The whodunit set up challenges the reader to guess along with the detective. And they're a lot of fun, so much so that I'll probably invest a little and buy some of the tapes as well. There were a number of similar shows on radio over the decades (John Dickson Carr had a pretty good one) but I'd give the nod to Boucher because the way he has fun with the clues--a beeswax candle anyone?

The Crippen and Landru `Lost Classics' are always important additions to the general mystery library. And this one is no exception.

Visions Deferred- Richard Matheson

I can't think of a better current bargain than this collection of three Richard Matheson screenplays as well as two excellent pieces about him.

If you're like most Matheson fans, you didn't much care for any of the versions of I Am Legend, not the very early b&w Vincent Price one, not the 60s hippie version (though I do have a certain fondness for the kitschiness of it) or the Will Smith version, which I like least of all. In Visions you get to see I Am Legend as a screenplay written by Matheson himself. It's the only version that counts, savage and true to the novel. This is accompanied by an egregious letter from the Motion Picture Association informing Richard of why his movie is too brutal and uses too many "bad" words.

The second script is based on Matheson's famous short story "The Distributor." Here we have wealthy Theo Gordon imposing himself on a reasonably happy suburb. It is his pleasure to destroy it. He starts so many rumors and falsehoods about the neighbors that they begin to believe them and turn on each other, even turning to violence. To me this is one of Matheson's true masterpieces, a story that never loses its shock value. It is a bitter commentary on how lies can turn human being into savages. And the screenplay captures it all perfectly.

The third, "Sweetheart and Horrors," is an ingenious piece of black comedy. After the murder of the the insane family elder, The Sweetheart siblings are ensconced in a mansion filled with booby traps for one night, the elder's money going to the sibling who can knock off the others by the time the sun comes out. Matheson has fun with the farce but introduces us to some truly terrible people in the meantime. A fine funny dark script.

Mark Dawidziak and Matthhew R. Bradley both o sensational work addressing Matheson and his work. Between them they offer a great deal of new information about the most influential horror writer of all time. Richard himself writes afterwards as well.

As I said at the begining, this is the best current bargain I know of. $16.95 for a seminal piece of the Matheson library.

headlines of the day: no comment

Wheelchair-Bound Woman Shouted Down At New Jersey Health Care Town Hall

65-year-old Healthcare reform advocate punched by opponent at Nelson event

Broward schools remove `negro' from racial background form

Japan's New First Lady: I Rode A UFO To Venus

Low-Wage Workers Constantly Being Cheated Out Of Pay: Study

Top Execs At Bailed-Out Banks Stand To Make Millions In Stock Options

Pay For Execs At Bailed Out Banks 40% Higher Than Peers: Report

So You Just Squandered Billions . . . Take Another Whack at It (Wall Street starting to sell unregulated derivatives again)

Man Succumbs To 7-Year Battle With Health Insurance 09.02.09 (The Onion)

Megan Fox Has Vagina Power, Self-Loathing (Cosmo cover story)

Magazines fading

Part of the pleasure of growing up in the era I did was going to news stands. I liked confronting all those bright, snappy magazine covers. Though I usually ended up buying science fiction and mystery magazines, I usually tried other types, too. For no apparent reason I got hooked for a year or so on civil war magazines.

Later on, in college, I started reading political magazines, The New Republic, the Nation and sometimes the more radical kind featuring people such as Paul Krassner.

I continued to buy sf magazines long after I'd given up reading most of them. It may have been a neurotic attachment to my youth. Or maybe it was because I kept hearing how badly they were doing so I thought I'd kick in a buck to help keep them going.

I can remember my folks getting The Saturday Evening Post, Colliers and The American. The latter was where I first read the Nero Wolfe novellas. I always watched for them. The Post seemed to have everybody from Luke Short to John D. MacDonald. John D. seemed to be in every issue of Colliers with great stuff.

I mention this because today I read a long article about how magazine are vanishing. Maybe the only people who'll miss them are my age or a little younger. But it sure was fun going to those news stands.

--------------------Letters

I want to thank everybody who wrote letters about westerns. What a fine collection of thoughts and suggestions.

Western movies

Patti Abbott posted her thoughts on western movies the other day and to date she's received forty eight replies. That's why I read her every day. She's always entertaining and interesting. But forty-eight replies to western movies--who woulda thunk it?

The last time I posted some of my own thoughts on the subject I got several off line letters calling me a crank, mostly because I'm not much of a fan of either John Wayne or John Ford.

As for Wayne he was a great presence but not much of an actor with the exceptions (to me) of The Searchers (and again you have to balance his great presence against the nuances a better actor could have brought to the role) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

I like a number of Ford's pictures but his frontier Army stuff has always struck me as juvenile. It's Boy's Adventure, the Kipling romance of the military at its most treacly. Wayne's gray hair at the end of "She Wore A Yellow Ribbon" still doesn't make it a movie for adults. Read any serious history of the Army in the frontier west and you'll see what hokum it is. Plus all the phony Irish horseshit. Spare me.

I guess because I grew up watching so many noirs I early on liked the movies in which the characters seemed real. I remember being stunned by seeing Winchester 73, The Naked Spur and The Devil's Doorway.I was eleven and twelve. These were people I recognized from my everyday life. And their rage and sorrow and violence I was all too familiar with.. By the time I was fourteen or fifteen Anthony Mann was my western god. Later in the same decade I saw all the Budd Boetticher-Randolph Scott westerns. They didn't have the same emotional power of Mann's films but they did have a laconic lonely truth. And they hold up. We just watched Seven Men From Now last week. The performances by Scott and Lee Marvin are as vital as ever and Boetticher's use of landscape is a perfect metaphor for the story he's telling.

No big argument, just my opinion. Hey, I can't help it if Anthony Mann is a god, one who managed to find the savage dark side of the wistful James Stewart. That accomplishment alone should put Mann in the pantheon.

I want to thank Tom Piccirilli for letting me reprint this interview from his blog The Big Adios




Ken Bruen is the author of the popular Jack Taylor series and Brant series. He has over twenty novels to his credit, including THE GUARDS, PRIEST, CROSS, BLITZ, AMMUNITION, AMERICAN SKIN, LONDON BOULEVARD. Oscar-winning screenwriter William Monahan (The Departed) has teamed with Quentin Curtis to film the Ken Bruen novel LONDON BOULEVARD. Stay up to date with Ken's work at www.kenbruen.com.

Reed Farrel Coleman is the former executive vice president of MWA. He's published eleven novels, two under his pen name Tony Spinosa and one with multiple award-winning Irish author Ken Bruen. He's been nominated for the Edgar Award twice and for the Shamus Award three times. He's been honored with the Shamus twice and has won both the Barry and Anthony Awards as well. He was the editor of the anthology Hardboiled Brooklyn and his short fiction and essays have appeared in several anthologies and magazines. Reed is an adjunct lecturer in creative writing at Hofstra University and he lives with his family on Long Island. www.reedcoleman.com


PIC: Ken, you mentioned that halfway through with your opening of the novel, you knew it was going to be a "two-hander." What was it that made you decide that? Was it just not working?

KB: TOM, IT JUST SEEMED IT NEEDED ANOTHER WAY OF SEEING THE STORY, OUTSIDE OF ME
PIC: How long after you finished the fragment was it before Reed came into the project?

KB: ONLY A FEW MONTHS

PIC: Despite the eighth anniversary of 9/11 coming up, the subject is still rather taboo. But here's a novel that uses the Twin Towers as a metaphor both before the fall and after. It was a ballsy move, brother. What made you give it a whirl?

KB: AS ALWAYS WITH ME, BECAUSE THEY SAID, IT'S NOT A GOOD IDEA......THAT IS ALWAYS ME FUEL

PIC: Reed, as a native New Yorker, how did you feel about coming in a project that dealt with the Towers? Was there any trepidation or did you find yourself eager to tackle such a subject?

RFC: I have to say that Tower is a story about two Brooklyn friends who have always gotten-as we say in Brooklyn-the shit end of the stick in their lives. That's what the book is about and I would hate for people to think that the book is about 9/11. As you astutely mentioned in a previous question, we use the Twin Towers as a metaphor, but a quiet metaphor. Yet, I think the time has come for us, as authors and artists, to begin to explore the small tragedies, the personal tragedies of that day. For eight years it's been the elephant in the room no one could write about because it was such an enormous event, such a horrible event, that we all struggled with how to make sense of it. Well, it's a writer's job to make sense of the senseless and the way to do that is on the small scale, on the personal scale. I have always admired my friends SJ Rozan and Jim Fusilli for trying to take this on immediately in the wake of those awful days.

PIC: Since Ken's voice is so distinctive you must've thought about emulating it. What stopped you?

RFC: Well, I have twice, in short stories-"Requiem For Jack" and Requiem For Moe"-done a fairly good job of imitating Ken's voice in the form of Jack Taylor. I've always been good at imitating voices both actually and in my writing. However, it's much more easily done for a few pages than for a few hundred pages. I think me doing Ken's voice in Tower would have been a huge misstep. First, why would Ken have needed a co-author to write in a voice he does better than his would-be co-author? The whole notion of the book is that it's done in distinctive parallel narratives. Ergo you have narratives from two different characters with different points of view. It would have been very bizarre to have two characters writing in one voice, no? But I didn't feel my normal writing voice was appropriate to the book, so I took an ax to my usual style. This way my narrative has a similar meter to Ken's so that it's not jarring to read.

PIC Ken, having collaborated with you on a short story myself, I know you're a very easy partner to work with. By your own admission you didn't change a single word of Reed's portions of the novel. Why aren't you a control freak like just about every writer I know?

KB: TRULY, I'M BLESSED, LIKE WORKING WITH YOU, JASON, REED, THE STUFF YOU GUY'S WRITE NEVER NEEDS CHANGING, NOW LESS THAT SOUND LIKE BLARNEY, JUST READ THE BOOKS OF THOSE GUYS AND ASK............WHAT'S TO IMPROVE?

PIC: Even as a two-man effort TOWER is a lean, mean slice of noir. Was there any pressure, either internally or from publishers, to lengthen it?

RFC: One party who was interested very early on in the process wanted us to lengthen the book, but Ken wisely made the choice not to go in that direction. One of the reasons the book is as effective as it is in terms of darkness is that it is sparse and laser-like. We dispensed with frills and subplots and went for the jugular. If the book aches and bleeds, it's because we kept the knife sharp and focused.

KB: BUT WE DID GET LOTS OF SUGGESTIONS AS TO IT NOT SEEMING QUITE DONE, THUS AL CAME ON BOARD AND DID SOME TERRIFIC EDITING AND THEN REED ADDED PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE AND WE KNEW IT WAS DONE, GOD BLESS REED AND AL

PIC: Reed, your section of the novel really takes a wild left hand turn. You reinterpret the opening section and come at it from a whole new angle. Why put yourself through that? Did it feel natural to you or did you just feel that it might be boring to follow along in an expected fashion?

RFC: I didn't see the point in simply rehashing what Ken had written. I knew Ken was challenging me to do better, to make hard choices, to stretch the book and, as he might say, me own self. I felt I had to rise to the occasion and that just doing a fair job would have meant letting Ken down, the book down and me down. SJ Rozan and I went to dinner soon after she read the book and, after praising the book to the rafters, she asked me, "Are you crazy?" I know I took a big chance with Todd's narrative, but I don't think Ken would have wanted it any other way nor would I. It was the hardest work I've ever done, but the best work.

PIC: Ken, now that Hollywood has come knocking and you've got two novels (BLITZ and LONDON BOULEVARD) currently being filmed, do you feel you can relax where the writing is concerned? You started off because you had gnawing demons driving you on. Can you finally just kick back and enjoy a well-deserved rest?

KB: I'M INVOLVED IN A MAJOR NEW PROJECT THAT IS AS RISKY AS IT IS SO FAR OUT THERE, 2 MORE MOVIES READY TO ROCK N ROLL, THE DEMONS SEEM TO DEMAND MORE , GREEDY BASTARDS, AS SOON AS I FINISH A PROJECT, I'M FRETTING ABOUT THE NEW ONE, UNCURLING IN ME HEAD, THE DEMONS CHANGE IN THAT THEY DEMAND HIGHER LEVELS, AND KEEP REPEATING, 'WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO WRITE A BOOK THAT WILL SHUT US UP. NO SIGN OF THAT YET

What's next for the both of you?

KB: GETTING THE CHILDRENS BOOK OUT THERE AND FINISHING BOOK ONE OF A NEW SERIES TITLED MERRICK

RFC: I'm doing about a three week tour in support of Tower. I've just finished a new novel that my agent is about to send out. I'm working on a new Moe Prager book. I've just had a short story accepted in Indian Country Noir and I'm getting ready to go back to this "big" novel I've been working on for years. Other than that…

PIC: Thanks so much for your time, gents, much appreciated.


[Bruen and Coleman interviewed by Tom Piccirilli 08/29/09]

More Mad Men

I don't know much about Lance Mannion except that cultural critic James Wolcott likes his stuff so that's all the recommendation I need. Wolcott quoted at length from Mannion's take on Mad Men. While his angle isn't the same as mine
they both pretty much end in the same place, that Mad Men is pretty dumb as a melodrama but would be a hoot as a flat ut comedy.

Lance Mannion:

"The first episode of the new season of Mad Men struck comedic gold, every situation a laugh riot straight out of the best bedroom farce and classic satire. The fire alarm interrupting Don's and Sal's trysts in the hotel, Pete and Ken in the elevator, each thinking the other is congratulating him on the promotion, Sally Draper finding the stewardess's wings in Don's pocket and asking if he'd brought them back for her---these were scenes worthy of Feydeau, Wilde, and Shaw.

"Too bad none of them were played for laughs.

"But this has always been one of the most maddening things about Mad Men. It's a comedy with all the jokes removed.
Last Sunday's episode, Out of Town, is a perfect illustration. Except for the opening, Don Draper's bizarre vision of "Dick Whitman's" birth, the whole episode could have and should have been funny. It wasn't just that drained of humor the situations I listed were flat and lifeless. They were also without point or purpose. More than that, though, they were without sense. Played as they were, as naturalistic drama, they came across as mere constructions for construction's sake, there simply to give the actors things to do and say. But a character like Shelly the Stewie only makes sense as trouble for the philandering male lead in a farce. The point of her being there is to give us reason to laugh at the man who's foolish enough to pursue her. She doesn't exist as a character except in the act of causing laughter for us and embarrassment for the man. Any line of dialog she's given that isn't a variation of "Coffee, tea, or me?" reveals her not as a person but as a fantasy, and a not particularly imaginative fantasy at that. Take away her jokes and what you have left is a pretty actress acting her heart out to bring a stick to life."

for the rest go here:

Lance Mannion http://lancemannion.typepad.com/lance_mannion/2009/08/all-the-mad-men-and-all-the-mad-women-cant-tell-a-joke-to-save-their-lives.html

Publishing

Kate Stine was kind enough to send me a link to a very interesting piece from the PW website. Go to Commentary to check it out.


Why scaling down is good for publishing

by Douglas Rushkoff -- Publishers Weekly, 8/24/2009

The corporate consolidation of publishing over the past two decades has finally maxed out. Borders is verging on bankruptcy; Barnes & Noble is closing stores; and major media conglomerates are closing imprints and ejecting talent faster than they gobbled it up in the 1990s. While this makes for some bleak headlines in the short term, it bodes well for the future of a publishing industry that operates on a scale more appropriate to the medium we're all creating and selling.

Publishing is a sustainable industry—and a great one at that. The book business, however, was never a good fit for today's corporate behemoths. The corporations that went on spending sprees in the 1980s and '90s were not truly interested in the art of publishing. These conglomerates, from Time Warner to Vivendi, are really just holding companies. They service their shareholders by servicing debt more rapidly than they accrue it. Their businesses are really just the stories they use to garner more investment capital. In order to continue leveraging debt, they need to demonstrate growth. The problem is that media, especially books, can't offer enough organic growth—people can only read so many books from so many authors.


Douglas Rushkoff is the author of Life Inc: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back.

for the rest go here:

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6685324.html

Edmond Hamilton - Haffner Press

If you grew up reading science fiction in the Twenties, Thirties, Forties or Fifties the name Edmond Hamilton was a revered one. A pioneer in creating the kind of far-flung galaxy smashing action-packed sf that fan boys of every age hounded their newstands for...Hamilton survived all the changes common to any genre. The reason was simple. He was not only a superb storyteller, he was also an innovator. Many of the sf action tropes we take for granted today (hello there Star Wars) came from Hamilton's typewriter early in the last century. Along with his wife Leigh Brackett Hamilton virtually created galaxies and universes that kept writers fed for decades.

Volume One The Metal Giants and Others are stories collected from Weird Tales and introduced by Robert Weinberg; Volume Two The Star-Stealers also come from Weird Tales and includes the complete tales of The Interstellar Patrol with an introduction by Walter Jon Watkins; the third volume is Volume One of Hamilton's Captain Future stories, introduced by Richard A. Lupoff.

Haffner Press has published these in inordinately hefty and beautiful editions. Short of having every single word you've ever written collected in leather bound editions...this has to be the kind of tribute only a handful of writers (of any kind) ever receive.

One of the most fascinating elements of Hamilton's literary history is the award-winning short story he wrote in the late Thirties. He called it "What's It Like Out There?" It was a somber realistic story about men who'd been to space and come back. Nothing like it had ever been published. Hamilton decided to hang on to it. Not until the early Fifties did he decide that the field was ready for it. While he had previously been known for action fiction he was now heralded as a writer of sensitivity and serious themes. The novels he wrote after this reflected this newly revealed side of his talent.

But why listen to me. Check out the Haffner Press webiste for yourself.

http://www.haffnerpress.com/ehql.html

Catching up

Well, in all I had seven tests to find out why I'm not getting enough oxygen. The initial results of one of the tests worried both Carol and I as well as my oncologist but it turned out all right after all. The conjecture now is that taking two years of steroids not only packed on pounds but put me badly out of shape. Hand me those carrots please. Thanks to all of you who wrote with good wishes. I really appreciated all the kind and supportive words.

Here are some things I want to mention:

Honey in His Mouth by Lester Dent is one one of the most interesting books Charles Ardai has yet published in his Hard Case line. And it's also one of the damndest novels I've ever read.

Whenever I see the name Lester Dent I think of a) all the Doc Savage novels he wrote and b) the pleasure he took in sailing, mountain climbing and searching for gold. A man of action who wrote action books.

Now one thing I should have remembered was that Dent got so tired of writing the Savage novels that he gave ole Doc some strange occupations from time to time (Ron Goulart can check me on this). In one novel he had Doc lead a dance band aboard a ship and on another he had Doc be a fashion designer. He mentioned that nary a single reader complained about the disguise jobs he gave our hero.

I should have remembered this because far from being thud-and-blunder pulp Honey In His Mouth has elements of black comedy and dares to offer you a wide range of characters who have one thing in common--they are greedy ruthless people starting with the ostensible protagonist, a dimwit named Walter Harsh who didn't manage to make it through the eighth grade.

The set-up was familiar in the Fifties. You want to get rid of somebody, in this case a cruel Latin dictator, but you need somebody who looks like him to pull it off. Walter Harsh not only looks like him but he's also a perfect match for the dictator's rare blood type.

The group running this whole scam work for the dictator. They've been stealing from him for years. He asks them to bank his money throughout the world. They bank some, skim the rest. Now the dictator is being forced out by a revolution. The group wants to get all his money. Walter Harsh, the perfect double, will get it for them. Then of course they'll kill Harsh.

The story is cunningly structured and told. It's laid out so well it's easy to keep up with all the crosses and double crosses and triple crosses going on within the group itself. And as I said, it's very funny in places.

The standard Latina beauty in Honey In The Mouth turns out to be as ruthless as the rest of them but also (something new) a brilliant intellectual. She gets the job of trying to teach Harsh a little bit of Spanish so he can fake it properly when the time comes. All he wants to do is sleep with her. So her revenge is to read him something sure to be boring--she takes out a volume of Spinoza and inflicts it on him.

Dortmunder would probably have hired several of these people. Parker would have lined them up against the wall and shot them on general principles.

I love this book and I think you will, too.


-----------------From Vince Keenan:

Got a chance to meet Alan Rode of the Film Noir Foundation over the weekend. We're going to collaborate on a big piece about the Whistler films for a future issue of the Sentinel. Turner is going to run all 8 movies in sequence in November, you know.

-----------------Two of The Deadliest

As I mentioned awhile back I'm reading for next year's best of anthology. One of the finest collections I've come across this year is Two of The Deadliest edited by Elizabeth George. In addition to terrific stories by Laura Lippman, Nancy Pickard and many others, Wendy Hornsby offers a piece of historical fiction that will be of interest to all readers of Jack London.

London historians have long disagreed about the effects London's second wife, Charmian had on Jack as a man and as a writer Well, Hornsby has a definite opinion on the subject and in the course of encapsulating the last ten years of London's life, she brings alive the entire era in which he lived and long disputed saga. A fine piece of work.