Blindside by Ed Gorman; The Ugly Truth About Consumer Book Reviews

Ed Gorman. Severn, $28.95 (192p) ISBN 978-0-7278-8025-3
Shamus Award–winner Gorman’s absorbing third mystery featuring Dev Conrad (after 2010’s Stranglehold) finds the Illinois political consultant stepping into a congressional match between liberal incumbent Jeff Ward and Ward’s blustery right-wing opponent, Rusty Burkhart. As a favor to Ward’s father, Conrad agrees to spend a couple of days with Ward’s campaign to try to discover a spy within the organization. Conrad doesn’t like either of the candidates—Burkhart because of his stances and Ward because of his arrogance and tomcatting. When the shooting death of one of Ward’s senior advisers threatens to derail the campaign, Conrad discovers that both candidates have secrets that might end their careers. After analyzing the good and the bad—mostly the bad—in current political campaigns, cynical, sharp-witted Conrad concludes, “We still had a country that we could be rightly proud of.” Readers should take that message to heart as the 2012 election cycle heats up. Agent: Dominick Abel. (Feb.)

Reviewed on: 12/05/2011

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The Ugly Truth About Consumer Book Reviews: Part One
Posted: 12/ 5/11 10:36 AM ET

For IndieReader, by Terri Giuliano Long:

Love it or hate it, this is an exciting time in the publishing world. Technological advances have made the long, arduous process of publishing a book cheap, easy and fast--giving voice to millions of new authors and providing readers with a richer, more interesting selection of books.

That's the good news. The challenge is, with so many new choices, how do readers determine which titles to pick?

With indie books, it can be especially hard. Only a handful of indie authors have been around long enough to have an identifiable "brand" (think James Patterson or Nora Roberts). To buy a book by an unfamiliar author, even if it costs only 99¢, readers must take a chance. This perception of risk is amplified by the stigma still associated with self-publishing. Complicating matters, traditional media rarely (if ever), review indie books, forcing readers to rely on consumer reviews--putting disproportionate authority into the hands of consumer reviewers.

Why is this bad? While the majority of consumer reviews are genuine and well-intended, anyone who has visited a review site like Trip Advisor or Yelp knows that they can also be unreliable and-- sometimes--downright dishonest. Some reviewers will lower a restaurant's rating because their server happened to be in a bad mood. Others fake their own glowing reviews or post reviews intended to damage a competitor's reputation. One popular up-and-coming restaurant received caustic reviews on Yelp--posted, it turned out, by a restaurant owner down the street, infuriated because he thought the new guy was "stealing" his business.

With the industry in tumult, publishing has become a free-for-all, akin to the Wild West. Eventually, a new hierarchy will emerge and rules will be set in place. In the meantime, the rules are ambiguous and loosely enforced. In a highly competitive environment, uncertainty and lax regulation offer people plenty of incentive to game the system


for the rest go here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/indiereader/consumer-book-reviews_b_1129373.html?view=print&comm_ref=false

A disabled writer's book unfolds a tap at a time

Ed here: As many of you know Peter Winkler posts comments on a fair share of stories I run. I had no idea of the courage and determination it takes to do so. Let alone the courage and determination it takes him to write books. Here's his story from the LA Times.


A disabled writer's book unfolds a tap at a time
By Nita Lelyveld, Los Angeles Times

Peter Winkler, his body trapped by rheumatoid arthritis, wrote the first biography of Dennis Hopper to come out after the actor's death. Little did his agent know that he had to punch out the manuscript one letter at a time, using a red plastic chopstick.


Writer Peter Winkler works on his computer in his North Hollywood home. Winker, 55, has limited movement because of rheumatoid arthritis and suffers from other ailments. To write his biography of actor Dennis Hopper, he tapped out each letter using a long, red plastic chopstick. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times / November 2, 2011)
ALSO

Dennis Hopper dies at 74; actor directed counterculture classic 'Easy Rider'

Story of determination comes out of Afghanistan

Electrical stimulation creates images that could help blind see

By Nita Lelyveld, Los Angeles Times
December 3, 2011
Thanks to the conveniences of the wired world, Peter Winkler was able to write a book and find an agent and a publisher without ever having to leave his North Hollywood home.

Winkler raced to produce the first biography of Dennis Hopper to come out after the actor died in May 2010.

It was only when the book was on the shelves that his agent learned how he had done it.

"My God, I had no idea," said Robert Diforio of Weston, Conn., who sold "Dennis Hopper: The Wild Ride of a Hollywood Rebel" to a small East Coast publisher, Barricade Books.

In the virtual world, Winkler roams free. He blogs. He comments. He write articles about film.

In the physical world, he increasingly is trapped — dependent on his sister and a long, red plastic chopstick.

Rheumatoid arthritis has battered him for 46 of his 55 years.

His neck won't turn. His head is pitched down, chin to chest. His elbow and wrist joints are so fixed in place, he cannot touch his face.

Sitting up in bed, he can no longer extend his arms far enough to place his fingertips on the keyboard of the MacBook Pro propped on a lap desk across his thighs.

Instead, he braces the chopstick between several fingers on his right hand and uses it to tap, tap, tap one key after another.

It's not so bad, he says. He's gotten pretty fast, and anyway, "I was always a two-finger typist."

:Winkler never told his faraway agent about his stiff, bent fingers and locked joints, he says, because "frankly, it was not his business, it was not germane."

for the rest go here: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-adv-chopstick-book-20111203,0,2389268.story?page=1&track=rss

Scandal On The Sand by John Trinian

Reprinted from 2007
SCANDAL ON THE SAND by John Trinian
John Trinian was a working name of Zekial Marko. He was a former
> convicted criminal who started publishing when he got out of jail
> in the early sixties. His first novel was under his real name
> (Scratch a Thief, Fawcett Gold Medal 1961, also as Once a Thief),
> after which he started using the pseudonym. As Trinian, he
> published five or six novels with various paperback houses, such
> as Pyramid.
>
> Scratch a Thief is an excellent novel, you should try it. That's
> the only book I've read by him, sadly, so I can't comment on the
> others. >
> Juri Nummelin (on Rara-Avis)

Ed here:

Further information on Trinian has him writing for The Rockford Files and other TV shows. While I don't think he was as good as Malcolm Braly, another Gold Medal author who served hard time, I do think his novels had both a lyrical and sexual aspect that we don't find in most of Braly.

I just finished Trinian's SCANDAL ON THE SAND (1964) and I have to say that it offers just about everything I ask for from a novel. A unique story, a strong voice, a definite worldview and several compelling characters, most notably the rich young woman at the book's center, Karen Fornier.

A dying killer whale washes up on a stretch of deserted Southern California beach. Karen, hungover and dismal that she finally gave into the childish wanna-be macho man Hobart, the one her parents would like her to marry...she leaves their beach motel hoping to lose him. Wandering along the beach she finds the whale and for her its appearance is almost religious. The way she bonds with it is moving and is a credit to Trinian's skill.

Hobart insists that the whale is dead and should be cut up for cat food. He finds a sinister, arrogant young cop, Mulford, who agrees with him. Mulford orders a tow truck to come in and drag it away. He then orders Hobart and Karen to leave the area. Hobart sees in the harsh machismo of Mulford everything he's secretly wanted to be, that not even his considerable inheritance could buy him. He sides with Mulford and tries to drag Karen away. But she defies them both and stays. Not even when the whale proves to be alive will Mulford stop the tow truck. He says he'll shoot the whale.

All this is being observed from close-by a hood named Bonniano who is to meet a runner who will give him enough money to escape to Mexico. Bonniano is in the news for being a hit man who last night iced a prominent mob figure. Everybody's looking for him.

These and others play into the story of whale on the beach. The character sketches show the influences of Sherwood Anderson and John O'Hara and the cutaways to life on the beach bring the 1964 era alive. Boys wearing white clam digger pants--girls lying about in pink bikinis with transistor radios stuck to their ears--and just about everybody managing to grab themselves a little marijuana whenever the opportunity comes up...all this being the lull before the flower power storm that was less than two years away.

A cunning little book. rinian was the real deal.

A Note from a reader:
Anonymous said...
Marko was one of the best friends I've ever had. We ran together in Marin County and Sausalito in the early to late Sixties. He was never a criminal, much less convicted of anything. This is all myth-making, maybe even by Marko himself. After all, he not only wrote under John Trinian, he made up the name "Zekial Marko." Zekial he picked out of the Bible, Marko was because he felt he was a gypsy. His real name was Marvin Smucker. You can see why he changed it. He was born in 1931 and his mother lived in San Bruno. He wrote House of Evil starring me and him. He was Paul Berko. I was Anne Woodbridge. And I was there for the entire writing and making of Once A Thief. So please, forget the criminal nonsense. I do wish I could find him. That's why I ran across this. Looking for Marko.

Might as well this as Anne.

They never quite became stars

Ed here: I read TCM's Movie Morlocks whenever I get a chance. Recently I found this piece about actors who had a chance to become stars but never quite made it to the big big time. This is a pretty cool piece. Read the whole thing and I think you'll agree. You'll also have some of your own nominees for people who should've made it.

The Stars That Never Shone
Posted by Greg Ferrara on September 28, 2011

Every star started out small. Depending on the time and era of any given star’s ascendance they may have done time on stage, television or played bit parts in films working their way up the ladder. The stars that everyone knows, the ones of which even the most casual filmgoer is aware, from Bette Davis, James Cagney and Katherine Hepburn to Peter O’Toole, Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep, are the ones that had not only the talent, not only the charisma, not only the charm but, crucially, the right roles at the right time to make an impression, a big one. Think Dustin Hoffman. A talented actor who, were it not for The Graduate, may have labored as a character actor for years before stardom or, perhaps, never achieved it at all. I think he would have anyway but what do I know? I only know his career from the trajectory it took so any speculation I may have on whether or not he would have become a star without The Graduate is severely biased by that pesky little thing, reality.

But there are other actors who were given the lead role, not once, not twice, but several times and every time, they came up short. Oh, not necessarily in their performances, mind you. The audience simply didn’t respond to them, for whatever reason. They were given the opportunity to become a star. They were pushed by the powers that be to hit the big time but they never did. These actors, the stars that never shone, are the actors that fascinate me, at times, more than the stars. What must it be like to get so close only to be pulled away by the unblinking forces of gravity, always tugging, always willing to bring the starry-eyed back down to earth?

Of course, for those it happens to, I imagine there’s nothing but gratitude at being given the chance and enjoying a rich, rewarding and successful career filling character roles when the leads dried up. Back in the studio days of Hollywood, stars were crafted and when it didn’t work, the actor in question was either relegated to character roles or leads in B pictures. One that comes to mind is Lizabeth Scott. She was given big parts in big films but her brand of charisma never quite took hold enough to become one of the big-time stars. And not for not trying either. In fact, Scott was practically given the keys to the kingdom. After her unsettling, bizarre and off-kilter portrayal of Toni in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, she received starring roles opposite Humphrey Bogart, Dick Powell and Burt Lancaster. Despite this obvious advantage, she never became a hit with the public as did Barbara Stanwyck, Lana Turner or Veronica Lake. She was a star, all right, but a minor one.

for the rest go here: http://moviemorlocks.com/2011/09/28/stars-that-never-shone/

Forgotten Books: Hardboiled American by Geofrrey O'Brien

Forgotten Books: Hardboiled America
How's this for a resume (from Wikipedia): "Geoffrey O'Brien (b. 1948) is a widely published author, editor, book and film critic, poet, and cultural historian. In 1992, he joined the staff of the Library of America, (later) becoming editor in chief. He has been a contributor to Artforum, Film Comment, The New York Times, Village Voice, New Republic, Filmmaker and, especially, to the New York Review of Books."

With cred like this you might expect his writing to be hoity or at least toity. Nope. No matter what he's writing about O'Brien is a pleasure to read. He has a voice and style all his own. And he's never more compelling than when he's writing about "Lurid Paperbacks and Masters of Noir," the sub-title of Hardboiled America.

There is no equivalent to this study of the largely forgotten writers who were conduits to the present day likes of Lehane and Pelecanos and Zeltserman. Even if these men never read the paperback writers of the Fifties they could not escape their influence. It was everywhere, adapted to radio and movies and comic books. And O'Brien is masterful at tracing the hardboiled vision from generation to generation.

O'Brien takes seriously the writing of such people as Day Keene, Harry Whittington and Brett Halliday and many other paperback men and women. He's opinionated of course. His take on John D. MacDonald and Dorothy Hughes never fails to rankle me. But his observations on the work of Jim Thompson and W.R. Burnett and Ross Macdonald and Charles Williams are eloquent and so well reasoned I reread them several times a year. He also brings in literary writers whose work was sometimes in the spirit of hardboiled. Nelson Algren is a natural. But I'm glad he referenced Calder Willingham, too. A fine novelist whose short stories in particular are so dark they can disturb your sleep for a few nights.

Then there is a checklist of hardboiled novels from 1929-1960. Again there is nothing like this anywhere else. You'll encounter names you've never heard of as well as the paperback staples of the various eras. I was so taken with the checklist I once called O'Brien and asked him if he'd let me reprint it in a coffee table book I was editing on noir. He didn't bother to hide his irritation. His checklist, he said, was one of the selling points of the his book. Why would he let me reprint it? He was right of course. But what the hell, it was worth a try.

If you don't have this book in your collection then you don't have a serious collection. Period. O'Brien is a savvy and witty writer and his words are complemented by a healthy number of black and white paperback cover reproductions. Get this book
posted by Ed Gorman @ 3:21 PM 7

7 Hit TV Shows That Have Stayed Too Long at the Party

7 Hit TV Shows That Have Stayed Too Long at the Party
Published: November 29, 2011 @ 7:57 pm
FROM THE WRAP

By Kimberly Potts
This is not a story about ratings. This is a story about shows that have overstayed their welcome.

Shows like “Glee,” “House” and "Grey’s Anatomy” are still pulling in respectable ratings, but are a shadow of what they once were. For every show like "Freaks and Geeks," "Sports Night" and "Party Down" -- great shows that were canceled too soon -- there are series that risk their ultimate TV legacy by staying too late at the party.

Here's why "Dexter" and six other once-terrific shows are past their prime in primetime.

Also read: Mindy Kaling on 'The Office,' Chest Hair and Sexy Andy Rooney

1. "DEXTER"

That twist in Sunday night's episode -- which we won't spoil in case it's still sitting on your DVR -- gave us pause for a moment. Could this be the thing that turns season six around? Nope … the season's still a mess.

Writers have Dexter Morgan tackling religion and where, or if, it fits into his life.

A guest stint by Mos Def as reformed killer Brother Sam was the highlight of those efforts, but everything else about season six has fallen flat.

That includes the return, sorta, of Dexter's dead serial killer brother; the painfully cheesy therapy sessions for Deb; the embarrassing way the writers have completely decimated Maria LaGuerta; and the mind-boggling reason Dexter has all of a sudden embraced killers like Travis and Trinity's son, Jonah.

Also read: 'Dexter' Renewed for Another 2 Seasons

If "Dexter" had been a lesser show, around season two or three viewers might have started to question the fact that there seem to be an awful lot of serial killers who a) live in Miami and b) always seem to cross paths with Dexter, even outside his police duties.

"Darkly Dreaming Dexter," the novel in which the Dexter Morgan character was introduced, has become "Deeply Disappointing Dexter."

2. "HOUSE"

He's been in jail and rehab. That's fine if you're, say, playing Iron Man. But if you're a doctor, the go-to diagnostician, this is not the resume you want to present to your patients.

Add in the many, many cast changes, and the fact that the show has fallen into a formula of bringing Hugh Laurie's House to the brink of redemption, only to see him embrace his inner jerk once again, and the diagnosis is clear: After this, the show's eighth season, it is most definitely time for "House" to be surgically removed from the Fox lineup.

Also read: 'House' Season 8 Trailer: Watch Hugh Laurie Get Pummeled in Prison (Video)

3. "GLEE"

The first season of the show was something new and different and fun.

The second season … it was kind of like that kid you knew in junior high who came back from summer vacation for the first year of high school and had outgrown his awkward phase.

for the rest go here:
http://www.thewrap.com/tv/column-post/dexter-glee-and-other-tv-shows-have-stayed-too-long-primetime-party-33147

Patricia Cornwell: 'Powerful women are more likely to kill’

FROM THE TELEGRAPH UK
Patricia Cornwell: 'Powerful women are more likely to kill’
Patricia Cornwell, the doyenne of crime fiction, explains why her new book is filled with female psychopaths.

'Red Mist’ is Cornwell’s 19th book to feature Kay Scarpetta, who Angelina Jolie has signed up to portray in a forthcoming film Photo: ANDREW CROWLEY
By Bryony Gordon7:30AM GMT 29 Nov 2011 40 Comments

IIt isn’t giving too much away to reveal that all of the criminals in Patricia Cornwell’s new book – and there are several – are female. There is one who hammers nails into a child’s head, another who is a convicted sex offender, and a woman on death row for murdering a family as they slept. Then there is the mother who smothers her children and – my personal favourite – the woman who condemns her victims to long and painful deaths by Botox (she injects food with the botulinum toxin). Meanwhile, men are reduced to mere walk-on roles, emasculated, castrated – not literally, though this process does appear in other
Cornwell novels – and cast as helpless husbands and ineffectual police officers.

Red Mist is Cornwell’s 19th Scarpetta novel, the one that will nudge her over the magical 100 million copies mark. It is also the book that coincides with her work finally hitting the big screen. Angelina Jolie has signed up to play Cornwell’s protagonist, Dr Kay Scarpetta, a former chief medical examiner of the state of Virginia and forensic consultant.

In previous novels Scarpetta has dealt with sexual sadists and serial killers who leave limbless corpses, but none have featured quite so many female psychopaths. The main killer in Red Mist poisons her victims, which Cornwell tells me “is very female”. She says this in a cool, clinical manner, matter-of-factly, as if poisoning people was the most natural thing a woman could do after having periods and growing breasts (I suppose this detachment must be what happens when you have worked in a morgue, spent much of your time shadowing forensics experts and frequently attended autopsies, as Cornwell has.) “[Poisoning is] a long, drawn-out death, so it’s diabolical, sadistic, psychological, which is a female thing. It’s an inversion of the maternal instinct to nurture.”

for the rest go here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/8921614/Patricia-Cornwell-Powerful-women-are-more-likely-to-kill.html

New Books: Cemetery Girl by David Bell

Cemetery Girl tells the story of Tom and Abby Stuart. They are a perfect couple with good jobs, a nice home, and a beautiful twelve-year-old daughter named Caitlin. Everything is great in their lives until the unthinkable happens—one day Caitlin goes out to walk the family dog, and she doesn’t come home. When the book begins, Caitlin has been gone for four years, and Tom and Abby are facing a dilemma that the loved ones of missing people face all the time: Do we move on and accept that our child isn’t coming back? Or do we keep hope alive against all odds and never give up or let go?

I started writing this book because I think one of the most terrifying things a person can encounter in life is the unknown, especially as it relates to those closest to us. What could be more frightening than having someone very close to you who harbors a secret they won’t share? What could be more frightening than having someone in your own house who may have been keeping secrets from you? What if someone in your own house suddenly turned into someone you can’t recognize and don't even know? These are some of the questions that sent me down the road to Cemetery Girl.

One of the questions I get asked a lot is: How can you write a book about a father when you don’t have children yourself? The novel is narrated by Tom Stuart, the father of the missing girl, and it’s his obsession with finding the truth that drives the book. The answer to that question about having children is simple: No, I don't have children, but I have been someone’s child my whole life. I understand the parent-child dynamic from that side, and I understand what it’s like to be part of a family, to be a husband, a son, a brother, a nephew. Cemetery Girl is very much a story about a family. It is about the ties that bind us to one another. It’s also about the way those ties change as our circumstances change. The ties bend, stretch and sometimes even break, but they are always there. We never stop being our parents’ children, even after they are gone and we are grown. We never stop being brothers and sisters. We never stop being family whether we want to admit it or not.

It’s not giving too much away about the book to say that Caitlin comes home after four years. (This is in the summary on the back of the book.) And her return only creates more problems for the family. Rather than having a tearful, heartfelt reunion, the family is faced with even more questions: Where was she for four years? Who was she with? Did she choose to be gone—or as she taken? These questions carry the book through to the end and seem to provide the suspense and emotion that thriller readers respond to. I’ve been fortunate to receive some good reviews and great blurbs from writers I admire so much: Lisa Unger, John Lescroart, Will Lavender, Jonathan Maberry, and Tom Monteleone. If you like a suspenseful tale about a family pushed to the limit, a tale full of twists and turns, then you’ll probably like Cemetery Girl. It makes a good choice for book clubs because of the many questions it raises about the characters’ behavior and motivations. Let me know what you think when you read it. I can be reached through my website: www.davidbellnovels.com

The Night Editor-Orson Welles

Ed here: The last time I talked about Orson Welles I got into some trouble. A few readers of the blog felt that I was denigrating him when I said that he was not a martyr but frequently the cause of his own trouble. I cited a tape I'd heard of him from the 1970s in which he was reading copy for the wine company he then represented. The tape was of the recording session itself with Welles doing various takes on the copy. He didn't like the direction he was getting and became so abusive and angry it almost sounded like a gag. He went out of his way to insult the ad agency people. And he kept it up. He was being paid a lot of money. There wasn't a better way to handle it? Jake Hinson at The Night Editor speaks to this and other Wellesian issues in a fine piece he recently wrote.

Jake Hinson:

By then, however, the money had dried up in Europe. Welles may have been a great artist, but he was never box office gold. He was barely box office bronze. He returned to America and took roles in films that were beneath him. He channeled the money back into his projects like THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, a drama featuring John Huston, Peter Bogdanovich, and his buddy from his RKO days, JOURNEY INTO FEAR director Norman Foster.

He still dabbled in pulp and noir, too. He shot an adaptation of Charles Williams’s DEAD CALM called THE DEEP with Laurence Harvey, working on it until Harvey died. He planned an adaptation of Jim Thompson’s A HELL OF A WOMAN with director Gary Graver, but like almost all of his projects in the seventies and eighties, it had to be shelved for lack of funds. Hollywood, which had never liked Welles, had now forgotten him. He was old and broke in a town where only youth and money mattered. In 1985, at the age of 70, he died at home working on a script.

There is a heartbreaking bargain you have to make with Orson Welles. Much of his work—more than that of any other major director—comes to us in damaged shape. When you consider that he was making difficult films to begin with, the full picture begins to emerge.

Orson Welles was either too much of an artist or too much of an egomaniac—perhaps both—to ever fully commit to genre, even for the duration of a single film. He liked genre but viewed it as a beginning, a jumping off place. This was no less true for a thriller than for a Shakespeare adaptation. His instinct was to be, as he once angrily wrote Harry Cohn, “original, or at the least somewhat oblique.” Win or lose—and he lost often—his films were stamped with the conviction that cinema was an instrument of experimentation and poetry, not formula.

for the rest go here:http://thenighteditor.blogspot.com/2011/10/noir-of-orson-welles-part-v-rosebud.html

Forgotten Movies: Netflixing: Showtime’s Rebel Highway (1994)

FROM TCM MOVIE MORLOCKS
Netflixing: Showtime’s Rebel Highway (1994)
Posted by R. Emmet Sweeney on November 8, 2011

In one of the stranger experiments in cable television history, Showtime’s 1994 Rebel Highway series commissioned ten filmmakers to remake a 1950s exploitation movie. It was the brainchild of Lou Arkoff (the son of American International Pictures founder Samuel Z. Arkoff) and Debra Hill (producer of Halloween). They gave directors $ 1.3 million and a 12 day shooting schedule, to roughly approximate the original shooting conditions (modified for inflation). Unlike the ’50s cheapies, though, they were given final cut, and could choose their own screenwriter, editor and director of photography. This proved irresistible to the (mostly) impressive list of talents who signed on: Robert Rodriguez (Machete), John McNaughton (Wild Things), Mary Lambert (Pet Sematary), Allan Arkush (Rock ‘N’ Roll High School), Joe Dante (Gremlins), Jonathan Kaplan (The Accused), John Milius (Conan the Barbarian), William Friedkin (The Exorcist), Ralph Bakshi (Fritz the Cat) and Uli Edel (The Baader Meinhof Complex).

All of the filmmakers, except for Rodriguez, were old enough to have lived through the era of the film they remade, engaging the aesthetics and politics of the originals in strikingly different ways, alternating between affection and parody often in the same film. Since its original airing, the series has completely disappeared from cultural memory, but Netflix Watch Instantly, that haphazard repository of moving image detritus, is now streaming every entry, and it’s well worth sampling the project’s eccentric film-historical time travel. Below, some thoughts on my favorites.

Joe Dante’s Runaway Daughters, an adaptation of Edward L. Cahn’s 1956 AIP production, is one of the few entries to completely stand on its own as a feature. It is a companion piece to Matinee, Dante’s loving evocation of a 1950s movie-huckster, modeled on William Castle, that he made the previous year. Both films were written by Charlie Haas, and share a tone of gentle satire, about the paranoia brought on by the threat of nuclear war and the space race, respectively. Runaway Daughters follows three high school girlfriends who chase down the no-good boy who loved and left. Working class Holly (Mary Nicholson) thinks she’s pregnant, and is convinced by rich girl Angie (Julie Bowen from Modern Family) and middle-class Laura (Jenny Lewis, who later formed indie-rock band Rilo Kiley) to track the dog down. So they steal a car and hit the road, intercepting the cad before he signs up for the Navy.

Dante opens the film with an irony-drenched found footage montage set to “Let the Good Times Roll”, from a jubilant Eisenhower and Nixon, to the NAACP hung in effigy, and closing with the repressed sexual longings of I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), the title character getting hairy while watching a stretching gymnast. The longing on-screen enters the narrative, as the trio of not-so-repressed girls is watching Werewolf at a drive-in, necking with impunity and ignoring the metaphors on screen. One of the neckees is Paul Rudd in one of his earliest roles, playing Angie’s bad boy squeeze, Jimmy Rusoff (named after the original screenwriter, Lou Rusoff). Dante gifts Rudd with the catch phrase from Speed Crazy (1959, a major part of Dante’s mash-up Movie Orgy (’68)), “Don’t crowd me!”, which Rudd dishes with appropriate petulance to his greasy gearhead Dad (played against type by Fabian, a late ’50s teen idol).

for the rest go here:http://moviemorlocks.com/2011/11/08/netflixing-showtimes-rebel-highway-1994/#more-42656

New Books: ESCAPE FROM PARIS by Carolyn Hart, Oct. 2011 edition

There are edits and there are edits. This book was first published in England in 1982. It came out with a word count of 55,000 words. The problem was the manuscript was 93,000 words. Now THAT's an edit.

Fortunately Oconee Spirit Press has now published the full version in a very natty trade paperback. Since we all know most of my synopses are terrible let me as usual I'll let the press release do the heavy lifting.

"ESCAPE FROM PARIS is the story of a year of war, the year France fell to the Germans and England awaited invasion. It is the story of people around the world, touched by war. It is also the story of two American sisters (Linda and Eleanor) in Paris who help British fliers from Occupied France. The Gestapo has decreed death for all involved in saving RTF fliers."

I wasn't sure what to expect when I started reading Escape but within four pages I was hooked. The book begins cleverly and powerfully with short sharp chapters focusing on various people in various places caught up in the war. Readers get a vital sense of a WORLD war right at the start.

Though the novel is rich with historical touches and insights the story is relentlessly told with numerous scenes of suspense perfectly set up and executed. From the psychotic German obsession with destroying Jews to the turncoat cooperation of the Vichy government to the underground movements (such as the one the sisters participate in) Escape is a non-stop thriller that a wide range of readers will not only enjoy but also remember.

Buy Bill Crider's Book

Amazon.com: A Werewolf Named Wayne eBook: Bill Crider: Kindle Store: Al's new next-door neighbors have just arrived in a smoke-belching DeSoto convertible. They may travel in style, but there's more to them than meets their strangely eerie eyes. Things are going to get hairy as Al gets to know these new additions to the neighborhood. He's ready to face any challenges they bring--secret construction projects and cravings for canned dog food included. But first Al may have to answer a tough question: is it harder being friends with a werewolf, or a girl?

Hermie, Al, and Carl from Bill Crider's first young adult novel A VAMPIRE NAMED FRED, are back in action for another adventure in A WEREWOLF NAMED WAYNE - published for the first time ever.

The Collected Nathan Heller Short Stories $0.99

Ed here: The writer who gave us Road To Perdition, the Nathan Heller novels and so many other fine books
has put his Nathan Heller short stories into a great new collection. Classic hardboiled stories that readers of every kind will enjoy. One of my favorite books of the year.

Start reading Chicago Lightning: The Collected Nathan Heller Short Stories on your Kindle in under a minute. Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here.

Buy for $0.99
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New eBooks: Kill Them All by Harry Shannon

Kill Them All (Dead Man #6) [Kindle Edition]
Harry Shannon (Author), Lee Goldberg (Author), William Rabkin (Author)

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Q&A With Harry Shannon, author of Kill Them All

Q: How did you become a novelist?

HS: I adore books, always have. The itch to write one has always been there. Like a lot of authors, I've worked at a number of professions over the years, from music publisher and song lyricist to film executive and psychological counselor. I'd always intended to try my hand at a novel someday, perhaps after retirement, but when my daughter was born so was the necessary drive. I figured, why wait? So I began to outline my first Mick Callahan mystery Memorial Day. It was published two years later.

Q: How did you get involved in The Dead Man series?

HS: In 2010, several experienced authors joined me in forming a loose organization called Top Suspense Group. Among them was Lee Goldberg, who co-created The Dead Man series. Lee asked me if I'd be willing to contribute a novella. Since I grew up on Gold Medal novels, Lancer books and other men's pulp fiction, I loved the concept and jumped at the chance. It was a wonderful experience, and now I'm looking forward to seeing how readers react to my take on Matt's character.

Q: You've written a lot of horror books, including Clan, The Hungry and the Lionsgate movie and novel Dead and Gone. How is the horror in The Dead Man different from what you have done before?

HS: That's an interesting question. For me, horror is not a genre so much as an emotion, so it can be expressed in any number of ways. I generally gravitate towards dry humor coupled with a serious exploration of existential themes--literally the meaning of life, death and those fragile emotional attachments we form along the way. With my entry Kill Them All, I wanted to use the horror as a metaphor for moral corruption. I immediately saw Matt as the classic American hero, an archetypal loner wandering into and out of a troubled desert town, standing up to evil on behalf of the weak and downtrodden. I often set novels in Nevada, but to answer your question, this one has the feeling of a graphic novel, and though it's contemporary it is far more of a classic western than anything else I've ever done. It tempts me to try my hand at a period piece.

Q: This is the first time you've written in someone else's "universe." What was it like writing characters you didn't create?

HS: To be honest, it wasn't easy at first. I'm not used to having to discipline my muse to that degree. Lee Goldberg and William Rabkin were very patient with me, red-lining and sending back a couple of drafts, pointing out where I'd gotten something wrong about Matt's personality or background. The tone had to be just right, and my goofiness had to be reigned in a bit. Kill Them All ended up far, far better as result of their patience. I'll have to prepare and outline more carefully the next time I do a project like this. But once the boundaries were nailed down properly, it just started flowing out. I'm proud of i>Kill Them All. It has substance to it, and was lots of fun to write.

Q: What you've written in so many genres. What genre do you like best?

HS: Like most of the folks contributing to The Dead Man series, I'm very comfortable wandering the boundary between horror and crime fiction and occasionally blurring the line between the two. And I do love a good western. If forced to choose just one genre, I'd say my heart is in the mystery/thriller, where supernatural elements aren't present, but human evil certainly is. My character Mick Callahan is a troubled young psychologist with anger problems. I work a lot of my own issues out when writing Callahan books. There are plenty of horrific moments in his life, though none involving zombies or ghosts. I enjoy exploring Callahan's inner world.

Q: Is there a common strain that runs through your writing regardless of whatever genre you're writing in?

HS: Another interesting question. The short answer is yes. Doing the right thing. I am drawn to stories that use temptation and terror to force a protagonist to examine his or her own character. My favorite definition of the word integrity is "obedience to the unenforceable." Okay, you could get away with doing this, but could you live with it? I also believe the old saw "all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for a good man to do nothing." I'm always working to understand my own conflicting impulses and drives, and believe that very human struggle to be a noble endeavor. I'm sure all that comes out in my writing, book after book, and that it's also there in Kill Them All.

Q: What are you working on now?

HS: I'm hard at work on a new Mick Callahan thriller, tentatively entitled Rough Men. I'm also toying with a crime novella for Top Suspense Group, and a sequel to my zombie apocalypse novel The Hungry. So there you go, I'm writing a mystery, a thriller, and a horror novel!
Product Description
Matt Cahill was an ordinary man leading a simple life until a shocking accident changed everything. Now he can see a nightmarish netherworld that exists within our own. Now he's on a dangerous quest for the answers to who he is and what he has become...and engaged in an epic battle to save us, and his soul, from the clutches of pure evil.

When Matt wanders into a struggling Nevada tourist trap recreation of an "old west" town, he's unaware that he’s being trailed by a Special Ops team of professional mercenaries hired by a University desperate to unlock the secret behind his resurrection...and that he's put everyone around him in dire jeopardy. The mercenaries have no intention of letting Matt escape...or letting any witnesses survive. Matt finds himself in a deadly bind. Somehow he must rally the peaceful citizens into defending themselves against the sadistic, well-armed mercenaries… or sacrifice himself to save them from certain death.

The Dead Man Series:
Face of Evil by Lee Goldberg & William Rabkin
Ring of Knives by James Daniels
Hell in Heaven by Lee Goldberg & William Rabkin
The Dead Woman by David McAfee
The Blood Mesa by James Reasoner
Kill Them All by Harry Shannon
The Beast Within by James Daniels
See all Editorial Reviews

New from Haffner Press: Shannach – The Last: Farewell to Mars Leigh Brackett

Shannach – The Last:
Farewell to Mars
Leigh Brackett
Introduction by Anne McCaffrey
Illustrated by Ed Emshwiller and Frank Kelly Freas
ISBN 9781893887442
$40.00
500+ pages Hardcover

Description

Picking up where Lorelei of the Red Mist: Planetary Romances left off, this volume collects the final 17 stories of strange adventures on other worlds from the undisputed "Queen of Space Opera." Drawn from the last years of pulp magazines such as Planet Stories, Startling Stories, and Thrilling Wonder Stories, Shannach – The Last: Farewell to Mars sees Brackett at the peak of her talents. Oddly, it is at this point where she abandons the "planetary romance" sub-genre and embarks on a small string of stories tinged with social relevance. This departure didn't stop editors asking for some of "that old Brackett magic" and she offered up two latter day tales ("The Road to Sinharat" and "Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon") before returning to chronicle further adventures of Eric John Stark in her final "Skaith" novels. Closing out the collection is a trio of tales written on commission from the "king of anthologies," Roger Elwood.

The book is adorned with Frank Kelly Freas' and Ed Emshwiller's vintage illustrations from the original pulp magazines.


In a review of Lorelei of the Red Mist: Planetary Romances Paul di Filippo says "[Brackett's work] is replete with hard-bitten protagonists with wounded psyches, females both nurturing and malevolent, weird alien life forms, strange planetary environments, danger, treachery, camaraderie and even spiritual epiphanies. In short, this book holds the essence of SF—at least, the essence of one very important school of it."

Yeah, that's the stuff!


Table of Contents
Reviews
Excerpts

Related Books
Martian Quest
Lorelei of the Red Mist
Stark and the Star Kings

Table of Contents
"Introduction" by Anne McCaffrey
The Truants (Startling Stories Jul ’50)
The Citadel of Lost Ages (Startling Stories Dec ’50)
The Woman from Altair (Startling Stories Jul ’51)
The Shadows (Startling Stories Feb ’52)
The Last Days of Shandakor (Startling Stories Apr ’52)
Shannach—the Last (Planet Stories Nov ’52)
Mars Minus Bisha (Planet Stories Jan ’54)
Runaway (Startling Stories Spr ’54)
The Tweener (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction Feb ’55)
Last Call from Sector 9G (Planet Stories Sum '55)
The Queer Ones (Venture Mar ’57)
All the Colors of the Rainbow (Venture Nov ’57)
The Road to Sinharat (Amazing Stories May ’63)
Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon (ss) F&SF Oct ’64)
Come Sing the Moons of Moravenn (The Other Side of Tomorrow, ed. Roger Elwood, 1973)
How Bright the Stars (Flame Tree Planet, ed. Roger Elwood, 1973)
Mommies and Daddies (Crisis, ed. Roger Elwood, 1974)
"Afterword" by Leigh Brackett

NEW BOOK: ASK THE DICE by Ed Lynskey

NEW BOOK: ASK THE DICE by Ed Lynskey
November 2011. Crossroad Press.

Digital List Price: $3.99

Ask the Dice is my new crime noir written in the brisk, lean tradition of the classic Fawcett/Gold Medal PBOs. Ask the Dice is my second stand-alone novel after Lake Charles.

Middle-aged Tommy Mack Zane, an ace hit man for organized crime, is looking forward to retiring from the grisly profession and going to live out his golden years. His crime boss catches wind of Tommy Mack’s plans and seemingly sets him up for the murder of the rebellious crime boss’s niece. No choice, Tommy Mack takes it on the lam and with the aid of a few solid friends battles his vengeful crime boss. And who couldn’t use a few solid friends in a jam like his?

When I decided to use the hit man trope from crime fiction, I wanted to create mine as distinctive but without going over the top with his character. Tommy Mack is a black kid adopted by a white family in the Washington, D.C. suburbs. His early childhood spent in rural Texas figures predominantly in determining his career. A lover of jazz and poetry, he pursues outside interests, and therefore he enjoys a life outside of his job. In other words, he feels ready to something else besides bumping off marked victims for his crime boss who insists, “It’s just business.”

The use of back-story in crime fiction has somewhat fallen out of vogue, but for me it remains essential. Tommy Mack’s past makes him the unsympathetic protagonist he is, but the back-story also fleshes out just why he takes up his assassin trade. By the climax, he unearths a few nasty surprises and deals with them in his way.

Ask the Dice has its own noirish roots. The title is derived from a Marilyn Monroe quote to the director John Huston at the Reno craps table in Spring 1960, during the filming of The Misfits, her final motion picture. She’s a film noir starlet from her incandescent presence in The Asphalt Jungle while Huston’s contributions to the genre are legendary.

Thanks for your interest in Ask the Dice, and to Ed for having me back again.

Kindle users: http://tiny.cc/0fqpp

Nook users: http://tiny.cc/lddk5

-Ed Lynskey
Twitter: @edlynskey

Still hanging in there on Baker & Taylor Top 15 at #9

From author Charlie Stella Temporary Knuckline

The Sam McCain mysteries are always fun for this reader; partly because they are always historical novels and partly because they’re always so well written. Bad Moon Rising is no exception. The Gorman-McCain formula touches on nostalgia and easily identifiable landmarks along a familiar timeline. The fact Gorman has been doing this longer than my married kids are alive is no fluke; he’s survived where many authors haven’t. Bad Moon Rising offers the usual cast of Black River Falls fun and interesting characters, plus a few new ones, and a plot that twists as good as any. A reader choosing any one of the series will be well invested in Sam McCain before they know it.

Having read a few of the McCain series, I was smiling and nodding as soon as I came across an early passage where Sam mentions the Sitar (and how mostly annoying it is to have to listen to one—music to torture one’s ears has always been my definition). It is that sense of timeline/nostalgia/Americana (so what Ravi Shankar was Indian? I remember being tortured by his sitar at the Concert for Bangladesh in Madison Square Garden).

And let’s face it ... people went to the bathroom in masses when two things happened back in the day ... Ravi Shanker took the stage or a twenty-minute drum solo began.

Gorman presents what many of us assume are the good old days while always reminding us there was some bad days as well; Vietnam, long awaited civil rights legislation waiting to take hold, etc.. In Bad Moon Rising, McCain is confronted with the death of the daughter of a wealthy libertarian of sorts. Paul Manwearing was recently widowed and quickly remarried but the stepmom to his two daughters is well versed in remarrying. Paul’s daughters were not happy with the new woman in their lives and each dealt with it in her own way; seeking attention from their father in self destructive ways—how kids in such situations often seek attention.

There’s also a high school football star with very dysfunctional parents forever fighting one another (at the top of their lungs) making their home a place not to be. A multitude of potential suspects to the murder of Manwearing’s daughter will keep you guessing throughout. There’s a hippie commune that drives many of the good folk of Black River Falls somewhat crazy and preacher Cartwright does his usual fire and brimstone routine (something that drives Sam crazy throughout the series), but if there’s anything missing (for this reader) from Bad Moon Rising, it is more of the back and forth between Sam and Judge Whitney (Sam’s Republican Alter ego) … and if I’m not mistaken, she didn’t even shoot a rubber band at him this go. A reformed Judge Whitney? Say it ain’t so, Mr. Gorman.

Sam is always fun to read about and Bad Moon Rising is no disappointment to this wonderful series.

New Books: Saboteur-Richard S. Wheeler Writing as Axel Brand

The Saboteur (Lieutenant Joe Sonntag Mysteries) [Kindle Edition]

Digital List Price: $2.99

A violent strike; murder at the factory gates.

Milwaukee, 1949. There's labor turmoil in Beer City. Joe Sonntag gets called to the strike-bound West Allis tractor factory, where a temporary employee has been shot and killed in the middle of the night. The struggle between the Machinists Union and the company has boiled over into murder.

But it proves to be more complex than that. The police soon find that mobsters are attempting to take over the union. And also they discover a romantic radical, Anastasia Ryan, who seems to be all too present when more people suddenly die of gunshot wounds, including a respected union leader. She can recite the poetry of John Donne, and lay yellow roses on the grave of an unnamed "scab." Who is she, and why is she there?

This is all a strange world for Joe Sonntag. He's used to dealing with crooks and thugs, but here are people fighting a war to the death over ideals, and jobs, and pay, and maybe the future of the world.

Joe's finest young detective, Frank Silva, who comes from a socialist family, confesses that he once had a romance with Anastasia. She was an experienced older radical; he was a teenager blotting up her beliefs and her world. Suddenly young Frank Silva becomes the lead detective, his bitter insights leading Sonntag's detectives toward the tangled and tragic truth.

EXCITING NEW HARD CASE CRIME NOVEL

We just added a new book to the Hard Case Crime Web site (www.hardcasecrime.com), a first novel by a young Baltimore-based writer named Ariel S. Winter that we’ll be publishing next summer. It’s not the sort of book that generally attracts a lot of coverage merely as a result of being announced – obviously no one knows the author’s name yet, since he hasn’t published any books before. The main thing it does have going for it is that it’s an amazing, amazing book – one that really knocked my socks off – but that’s something no one else will appreciate until they actually get to read it, which is months away.

However –

There is another story here, which is the book’s very unusual structure. The book is called THE TWENTY-YEAR DEATH, and it’s the story of a husband and wife whose lives collapse as violence intrudes – not an unusual premise for a noir novel. But the form Winter chose for it is very unusual: he decided to tell the story of these two doomed characters in the form of three separate old-fashioned crime novels, each set in a different decade and written in the style of one of the iconic mystery writers of that time. It feels a little like opening a Christmas package and finding new novels by three of your favorite pulp-era crime writers. The first is set in 1931 and features a French police inspector investigating the death of a convict in a rain gutter 20 miles away from the prison where he was supposed to be serving a 40-year jail sentence. The second is set in 1941 and features a hardboiled private eye in Hollywood who is hired by one of the big movie studios to watch over one of their leading ladies, who either is showing signs of paranoid dementia or is actually being stalked by a mysterious man on the set of her new picture. And the third is set in 1951 and puts us deep inside the dark and troubled mind of a desperate man, a drunken writer who has lost almost everything he had and is about to tip over the edge separating ‘troubled’ from ‘dangerous.’

What’s more, these aren’t just pastiches – what's wonderful is that each book works not only as a tribute to a great mystery writer of the past but also as a standalone novel with substance and emotional heft, and as part of the combined larger whole. It’s fascinating, for instance, to watch a background character in the first book become a more central figure in the second and then the first-person narrator in the third. I don’t know any other book that’s ever done anything like it.

In any event…I fell in love with the book, and bought it even though it’s three times the length of our usual books (by far the longest book we’ve ever published – 180,000 words), and even though you’re always told, as a publisher, that first novels don’t sell. I did it because it’s a stunning performance and just left me grinning the widest grin I’ve had on my face for a long, long time.

I don't know if you'll want to run anything about it this early, but if you do, let me know and I can get you a high-res image of the cover art. (Painted by Chuck Pyle, it features the Hollywood star from the 1941 novel…and actual Hollywood star Rose McGowan posed for the painting!) If not, I'm glad to at least plant a seed in the back of your mind now, which will hopefully ripen into full-blown curiosity when we get closer to the book's publication date...

Best,
Charles

Max Allan Collins makes one more 'Return to Perdition' USA TODAY

Max Allan Collins makes one more 'Return to Perdition'
By Brian Truitt, USA TODAY Updated 2d ago

After three graphic novels, two prose books and a Tom Hanks movie, Max Allan Collins' Road to Perdition saga is winding to a close — and a somewhat surprisingly peaceful ending.

The writer's 1998 graphic novel Road to Perdition introduced 1930s Mob enforcer Michael O'Sullivan, his young son, and their quest for revenge, and the new Return to Perdition, out now from DC Comics' Vertigo imprint, completes the tale with O'Sullivan's grandson, Michael Satariano Jr., who returns home from the Vietnam War in the 1970s to an equally violent life as a government assassin.

Collins' ambitious journey dates back to 1993. Working with his editor at DC's now-defunct Paradox Press, Collins initially envisioned three graphic novels of 300 pages each that would tell the adventures of O'Sullivan and his kid on the road, robbing banks and eluding gangsters a la The Fugitive.

He had started planning a sequel two-thirds of the way through Road when he heard that DC was cancelling the line, meaning he had to wrap his story up in the final 100 pages. In the meantime, he had been arguing with his editor about whether the series should simply be about the father and son, or a bigger generational saga like The Godfather.

"The more I thought about, the more I thought he had a good point," Collins recalls. "I mapped out the subsequent generations: The boy in Road to Perdition growing up, going to war, getting sucked into the Mob himself and ultimately having a son who similarly — primarily because of the role of vengeance in their lives — got drawn into thus life of crime."

for the rest go here: http://www.usatoday.com/life/comics/story/2011-11-16/Max-Allan-Collins-Return-to-Perdition-graphic-novel/51241222/1