Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 11

AS I PLEASE XIX: ME VERSUS MY BRAIN

Tonight I walked out of the longest preliminary hearing I have ever attended -- over five hours in length. The ordinary "prelim" usually lasts a few minutes; an extraordinary one might go on for 30 - 45. Five and a quarter hours is unheard-of, and contributed decisively to a twelve hour workday. Now, when my ADHD-addled brain is forced into long and intense periods of concentration on any subject other than writing, I emerge from the trials exhausted and in dire need of letting my mind ramble in any direction it pleases. This is how I relax and unwind without bellying up to a bar, something I have largely given up since I began to lose weight five months ago. So buckle up, friends, because I am going to hit you with yet another glimpse into the chaos and disorder which lies between my ears:

* I have now lived back East again for over three years, and am still getting used to the idea of seasons. In Southern California, we have two of them: one is called Summer, and the other, Not Summer. Summer does not require an explanation, except that it lasts about twice as long as an Eastern summer, say 5 - 7 months. Not Summer is a kind of leftover, which at its coldest and wettest may vaguely resemble winter, but generally feels like very mild fall weather, with chilly nights but temperate days. In Pennsylvania and Maryland, distinct seasons, though certainly affected by climate change, still exist and often pack a wallop. Tonight, for example, still a few days shy of Thanksgiving, it is 44 degrees and raining hard. Do not take this as a complaint. I desperately missed seasons when I lived in Los Angeles and now that I have them, I greatly enjoy them, even when they manifest in such a grim way as tonight. The truth is that I grew terribly bored of the "endless summer" teenage wardrobe that SoCal demands; little is more pitiful than a middle-aged man dressing like he's still in high school.

* Last weekend I was in Miami to accept the Reader's Favorite Gold Medal for my fourth novel Sinner's Cross. I had never been to Miami before, and I must say, since we're talking about the weather, that it reminded me very much of L.A., what with the palm trees and the diversity of faces and slight to middling shabbiness; the exceptions being humidity and the ultra-prevalence of Cuban music. One cannot, of course, learn much about a city in 48 hours, but I got a taste of it, anyway, and even slammed down a hideous, fruit-infested, drink called a Miami Vice, which reminded me to do a "Memory Lane" blog about that iconic 80s show. I suppose residents of the actual city tire quickly of references to it, but for me, Miami will always and forever be associated with Crockett and Tubbs, just as Las Vegas will forever be associated (in my mind) with CSI. The funny thing is that, as a former entertainment industry stooge, I know how little cities portrayed on television actually resemble themselves in real life. It's all fakery and sleight of hand. All that having been said, I enjoyed my brief visit, and even more than that, enjoyed receiving recognition for my book. Such moments of triumph are rare for authors, and must be savored: you will forgive us if we crow about them.

* Working twelve hours seems monumental to me now, but when I worked in the entertainment industry, anything less than this figure struck me as shockingly slight. On film location, I have worked a 24 hour day almost entirely on my feet, and in video games I once clocked 29 hours straight, albeit from the seated position. I have experienced 80 - 100 hour workweeks for months on end, and in these very pages documented a 30 day "workweek." I know there are people who work much harder; I am just pointing this out because as a government worker, I seldom go over 40. The difference, of course, is consequence. A mistake on a movie or film set or a video game studio is important in the sense it costs money and possibly standing; a mistake in the criminal justice and law enforcement world can be disastrous. If people in my line of work seem unnaturally drained by four-thirty, it's usually a question of responsibility, not laziness.

* Another thing I will say in favor of the much-maligned "government worker" is that the stereotype of the lazy, sullen, slovenly drone who sits at a cubicle, listlessly tapping a keyboard while awaiting quitting time and never doing a stroke of avoidable work, is far more apropros of highly paid private sector workers than it is of the vast majority of GC's I've worked with in Pennsylvania or Maryland, or who I saw in Washington, D.C. growing up. In my experience, government workers, far from getting paid little to do nothing, are usually massively overworked, and spend most of their shifts hustling ceaselessly from one half-finished task to the next: if anything, most wish they could work a few extra hours just to clear their desks. If it seems as if they never accomplish anything, it is because emptying the ocean with a spoon is hard work. Indeed, with a few notable exceptions, the hardest workers I have ever seen were in public service jobs that paid, in some cases, a third or even a quarter of what that person could make in the private sector. In contrast, the best gigs I worked in California all but encouraged laziness and a facetious, sophomoric, surfer-boy approach to work.

* Incidentally, I was asked recently by a police officer if I missed Hollywood. The answer was no. Sometimes, however, we lie without realizing it when asked questions of this sort, so I gave the matter some thought in private afterwards, and came to the same conclusion. My experience in the industry was fascinating and occasionally deeply rewarding, but like living in the dormitory when I was a freshman in college, it is more fun to reflect upon than it was to experience, and while I wouldn't trade it for anything, I am not sure I would ever repeat it -- not, at least, on the terms I was forced to accept before. Hollywood thrives on naive enthusiasm and a willingness to work very hard indeed for bum pay, little or no credit, and (sometimes) less than zero respect. Enduring this, and learning from it, has made me a much tougher, savvier negotiator in the publishing world than I ever was a journeyman effects artist or industry flunky: I can and do say "no" to projects that don't pay me enough, or deprive me of credit for work done. I learn slowly and painfully, but I do learn.

* Speaking (more) of work done: Exiles: A Tale from the Chronicles of Magnus is now ready for release: I just have to decide when, exactly, I'm going to release it. A book tour is scheduled in March of 2024, so with the end of the year drawing nigh, I'm thinking Christmas Week the most likely time, perhaps with a brief pre-order available via Amazon. You may or may not remember that this novel, my fifth, is a full length prequel to the novella Deus Ex I released at the end of 2021. Because I am telling the story of Magnus out of order, in different ways and through different points of view, I may have a bit of a time moving this novel. However, since it is a passion project, written out of the sheer love of storytelling rather than commercial reasons, I don't give a damn: I've discovered that if one is patient and relentless, the audience will eventually take their seats. It may be a small audience, but that is also irrelevant: as I once said in an interview, writing isn't something I do, it's something I am. And I do carry one maxim from the entertainment industry to heart at all times: whether the audience is 50,000 or 50 or 5, put out the same damned energy. After all, they paid for the show.

REFLECTIONS ON, AND OF, DOMENIC DA VINCI

If you're not cop, you're little people. -- Bryant, Blade Runner

Get used to the name: Domenic Da Vinci. You will be seeing a lot of it in these blogs over the next year or so, and don't worry if it means nothing to you. It means nothing to most folks nowadays. It is often the fate of the best books, the best movies, the best television shows, to exist on the edges of obscurity, never completely fading into it, but never emerging into the golden glow of true recognition, either.

Perhaps this is for the best. We all know, don't we, that the great unwashed masses, the lumpenproletariat, wouldn't know quality if it beat the shit out of them in a well-lighted alley? And we also know that being part of a cult audience of any kind, whether musical or cinematic or what have you, is deeply rewarding. Well, Da Vinci's Inquest a television show which ran from 1998 - 2008 in one form or another on the Canadian Broadcast Channel and various regional channels in the northern United States, is the type of nectar best savored only by the truly discriminating palate. I intend to discuss the show and its characters and themes in great detail here in the future, believing there is great literary merit in the lessons of this television show, so I'll leave off everything else now except this very brief explanation of just what the hell it was about:

Inquest followed Domenic Da Vinci, a divorced, non-recovering alcoholic coroner for the city of Vancouver, British Columbia. The former undercover narc uses the power of the Coroner's Mandate to investigate suspicious deaths hand-in-hand with the Vancouver Homicide squad, and to make recommendations for how future tragedy may be avoided. He walks a whiskey-blurred line between police work and social justice, fighting pitched battles over Canada's drug policies, trying to shield sex workers from serial predation, and generally tilting a lance at ever windmill of societal evil he can find, no matter how small. Naturally, this leaves his personal life a smoldering wreck. Da Vinci is the sort who is absolutely rock solid on the job but wobbly as hell away from it: his nights are spent in drunken stupors in dive bars, or slumped in his undershirt in front of a hockey game on television with all the lights off. He can't keep a woman. He fights with his friends as much as his enemies. Everything about him seems to indicate he will die alone, and while it's never examined to any real extent, we get the impression that when he's sober and not working, he doesn't have the faintest idea what the hell to do with himself, which is why he's generally either bagged or on the clock. As he puts it: "Some nights I think things are going to hell, and other nights I know it's just me. Maybe I've reached a time in my life when I have to think what the hell I'm going to do: hide under the blanket, or get up and join the war again."

It has been said that the best books are the ones we think are about us; the ones that speak directly to our souls. It is the same with film, and with television. I have watched Da Vinci's Inquest from start to finish five or six times over the last few years, with ever-deepening appreciation for its writing, acting, honesty, grittiness, and sense of social responsibility. I credit the show, which I discovered when I was still living in Burbank and working in the entertainment industry, for inspiring me to move East and return to "The Job" -- the world of criminal justice. But it was not until last night that I began to understand that there is a much deeper and more personal angle here, one which, as I just said, speaks to my very soul.

I have long pondered exactly why so many talented, intelligent people, who could make big money in the private sector if they so chose, dedicate their lives, and often destroy those lives, to work low-paying, high-stress, generally thankless public service jobs. I myself have spent almost ten years in such work, and in a purely material sense have absolutely nothing to show for it. When I started as a parole officer in 1997, I made $19,800 a year. These were poverty wages even 25 years ago, and they did not much improve over time: at the district attorney's office, five years later, where I was a unit supervisor, my salary was a whopping $31,000. You can starve on those wages, and I did so neatly and effectively, living a life of working poverty (which you can examine in a previous blog I wrote years ago entitled "Life on £1 a week"), but you cannot really live on them. I wore a suit and tie, carried a badge, had a job of some societal prestige...and went hungry. And yet walking away from that live was damnably difficult. Financially, it is no different for me now. Any savings I actually have, and it is not much, comes from stocks, bonds, or writing paydays. Indeed, I make less money as an advocate for victims of crime in a district attorney's office, than I did as a bottom-level make up effects artist at KNB Studios a few years ago. I can theoretically retire in nine years, but if I do, my pension wouldn't do much more than pay my mortgage: little things like utilities, food, gas and so on would necessitate a second income, something considerably more than I presently make as a writer. In a purely corporeal sense, I am inviting geriatric poverty by doing what i do.

Now, I don't normally do this, but I am going to share a slightly edited passage from my journal which explains why. I adduce this because every writer is or ought to be a student of human moves, and there is no human which requires a better understanding of a writer than himself:

"I was philosophical generally this evening. I think it's because I started a much-needed rewatch of Da Vinci's Inquest, which is like a bath in steel for me; it refreshes my will to continue. Of course I reluctantly realize that life is not a television show, but what I was thinking about today was how certain persistent memories I have, and certain experiences I'm having now, weave rather neatly into the story I am watching onscreen. Specifically, I remember coming home to the Haines Building at dusk on those coldly beautiful late fall days in, say, 2000 or so, and eating at the counter of the diner on the ground floor. Those wintry sunsets -- yellow and charcoal -- were lovely, like something out of the opening chapters of The Great Gatsby but also piercingly, cruelly lonely. At the time I probably thought that loneliness was simply simply of an acute, post-breakup character; my run-down flat in the Haines, with its grease-yellowed kitchen and peeling paint, seemed an appropriate backdrop for my new and unwated singlehood. I did not realize how easy it is for someone in my profession (the profession I had at the time, I mean; and again, now) to be alone all the time. I was thinking of that tonight when I came home, after an endless, uncomfortable day spent in a cold magisterial district justice's office, to an empty refrigerator and a sink full of dirty dishes. Oh, I improvised a meal from odds and ends – just the sort of thing Da Vinci might have done. This cold, unappetizing grub did the job, but it was deeply unsatisfying. Like masturbation, like morphine, it is an anodyne, not a cure. But there is a curiously addictive quality to the sort of life Da Vinci leads – a life of work, alcoholism, quarrels, and causes. A life of cheap Scotch and cold pizza. A life of professional friends, professional enemies, and the occasional love affair, inevitably bungled amid much cursing and acrimony. A life, in short, given up to a job that doesn't want you, need you, or like you, nor show you any particular respect, and one which will likely breathe a sigh of relief when you're gone; and in any case, forget you quickly – 'What ever happened to Da Vinci, anyway? That son of a bitch.'

"I think that's what haunts me about Inquest when I watch it. Yes, it hails from that last portion of time before social media, before 'mobile devices' and all their attendant problems and stupidities, a time I mythologize and nostalgify; but no, it's the idea of what Hawkeye Pierce likened to “a bunch of people huddling in a doorway during a thunderstorm,” who form a brief, close alliance and then scatter as soon as the clouds disappear. Da Vinci and his crew of pathologists, coroners, cops and politicians are together because of circumstance. And that's what The Job -- his job, my job -- is like. People are placed under pressure. They form bonds under that pressure. Alliances are produced. Enemies are made. Stresses are endured. Battles are fought, won and lost. It goes on for years, this unlikely confluence: you get to know each other, you drink together, eat together, attend parties together, see the inside of each other's houses and apartments, share secrets and shames. And then someone quits or is fired, and before you know it, before you would even want to believe it would be possible, they are forgotten. The pitched battles, the bitter arguments, the nagging recriminations, the beer-sodden assurances of loyalty, the silly jokes, the elevator confessionals, the shared moments of amusement, humiliation, epiphany, triumph, defeat; who the hell is even left to remember them after just a year or two? Life on The Job is like life in a WW2 fighter squadron, where the danger and the glory and the fear and the camraderie are real, but the dead are washed away with their blood and relegated to a shadowy, seldom-visited corner of the mind. Nothing lasts. Not pilots. Not aircraft. Only the mission.

"There's an element of existential agony in these reflections, certainly; but more than element of truth. When I think of the fictive battles Da Vinci, Shannon, Leary, Kosmo, Savoy and all the rest of them fought over those seven, eight years in Vancouver, and I think of the passage of time since, I think if I went – fictively – back to Vancouver Homicide and the Coroner's Service, and said their names, I'd get a bunch of, “Huh? What? Who?” It was like that the other day, when chance took me into the Probation Department. I recognized and was recognized by a solitary face: all the rest were strangers, no more interested in me than I was in them. You pour yourself into the vessel for years, even for decades, only to find the vessel has no bottom and the bonding tension of its interior is so smooth you leave not a trace upon its walls. You come and go like a ghost.

"And yet.

"And yet knowing all this, experiencing all the frustration, being underpaid, overworked, disrespected, and grasping completely how futile it all is, there's a curious romance to it all. It's romance of a curious character, for true: because it's inextricably mixed up with self-pity, with a need or at least a want for self-martyrdom: there is a melodramatic, self-conscious relish for the life of a Film Noir detective, with his five-day growth of beard and cigarette addiction, his unpaid bills and alimony payments. One must go into the job with a knowledge, and indeed a relish, for one's own ultimate destruction: the broken marriage, the estranged children, the crippling debts, the bleeding ulcer, the societal ingratitude, and the final, prison-like loneliness of the boarding house. There is a neon-lighted romance to this, because you're nobody's sucker: the cards are on the table and you sit down at the table of your own free will.

"Why? Why?

"This is the question that haunts me, because it concerns me. Me, Miles Girard Watson. When I speak of Domenic Da Vinci, fictional character of a half-forgotten Canadian television show, I am speaking of myself and everyone like me. Everyone who allows themselves to be nailed to a cross, and indeed, controls the nail concession and even loans out the hammer. In studying Da Vinci -- I am just realizing this now, as I write the words -- I am looking at something of a reflection, which is probably what draws me so closely and intensely to this series. Da Vinci is a realistic-looking man with realistic flaws. He's intelligent, humorous, hard-working, morally courageous, street savvy, and is generally on the right side of things; he fills out a necessary role in society and does it extremely well...but he is often difficult to like. He can be petty, childish, and needlessly antagonistic, enjoying conflict for its own sake and seldom pausing to count the cost in human collateral. He often goes off half-cocked, and does not understand the concept of picking one's battles; he equates political sense with cowardice, and losing a good fight with virtue. He has a superiority complex and his hands are filthy from shifting the goalposts. He's a pain in the ass and a son a bitch; but as Harry Truman once remarked about a certain Latin American dictator, 'He's our son of a bitch.' A rebel angel who somehow remains in the service of God, blaspheming under his breath but doing all the right thing. Usually.

"So what is the appeal of this person, and the life he leads? There is a surface answer – several of them, actually. One is simply that he's addicted to the game. To the quiet adrenaline rush of the jury trial, or the subtler pleasures of sipping coffee and trading war stories with cops and lawyers in some Godforsaken magisterial district justice's office on the fringes of nowhere in the middle of a snowstorm. To the feeling of self-importance you get walking down the courthouse steps in your finest threads with your briefcase swinging after your side wins the big case. To the goosebumps you experience when you help some wounded, weary victim of crime navigate the broken wreckage of the system and reach a safe harbor. To the heartfelt 'thank you' that is worth much more than my meager paycheck, especially when uttered by someone with no inherent trust in the system.

"But there's something deeper than this: freedom. It's a curiously free life. You know you're fucked, but you're fucked in a different way from most. Everyone wastes the best years of their lives at work, but at least we, the players in this great game, waste it in a meaningful way. We are not the 'little people' Bryant talks about in Blade Runner. We play for real stakes – human lives. Our triumphs can change the course of those lives. Our defeats can do this, too. We are not selling bath soaps or time shares or working swing-shift at the rubber vomit factory. We don't count beans or crunch numbers. What we do actually matters. And when you step away from that, when you turn in your tin and go get a "real job" in the "private sector," you do it at first with relief, as a man might feel when stepping away from a ledge, but also with a profound and ever-growing sense of loss, of inadequacy. Because as I said before, there is something horribly, fatally attractive to finding a single slice of congealed pizza in the fridge, and eating it with a cold, flat beer as you sit in your wife-beater in front of re-runs of "Three's Company" at four in the morning. In damnation comes a profound sense of mission, and the most sublime sense of willful self-sacrifice. You're finished and you know it, but by God, you're cool in a gritty, sixteen-millimeter, down-at-heel kind of way. Other people crunch numbers. They push paper. They debug code. You traffic in human hopes. Isn't that worth your own?"

I suppose this comes off as melodramatic and vaguely insulting. I don't mean it to be: like Da Vinci, I want to do more good than harm. But it is the way that I do in fact feel about my profession and my life: a curious combination of exuberance and existential woe, child-like joy and sickening dread. Because the dirty dishes in the sink, the empty refrigerator, the busted bank account, the failed relationships and ever-approaching prospect of Golden Years which are anything but, are real things: they creep up on me in the watches of the night when I can't sleep. They whisper seditiously that I will end up in that boarding house with cardboard boxes full of yellowing photographs and dusty awards nobody gives a shit about, mumbling to the ghosts of friends and lovers who long, along ago left my life and forgot who the hell I was, except, perhaps, to mutter, "Whatever happened to Miles Watson, anyway? That son of a bitch."

MEMORY LANE: REMEMBERING "TALES OF THE GOLD MONKEY"

I think you would agree that Memory Lane is a place full of wonderful old mansions, of vast villas and rambling estates, in which it is easy to get lost and even easier to remain so. Pop culture nostalgia is a powerful thing, and sometimes, if we are not careful, or if we are feeling a little too keenly a yearning for a particular part of our youth, we can lose ourselves in these spaces, which remain intact and well-maintained despite the passage of years since their cancellation. When one thinks about a show of yesteryear like "Magnum, P.I." or "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" or "Frasier," one gets the sense that the lights are still on, the furniture is neatly in place, and while the door hinges may be in need of a dash of oil, the appliances would still work if you cared to use them, and the wine in the cellar would taste agreeably sweet. In short, you would feel very much at home.

But along with the vast edifices we have previously explored, shows which ran for many seasons and had appreciable cultural impact, there are also places which are as small as summer cottages, and upon closer inspection -- once we push past the creepers and vines which have overgrown their decaying wood beams -- we see that the series in question were never even completed during their own lifetimes. What lies beneath the moss and cobwebs is incomplete as well as half lost in the weeds, abandoned before its time. "Tales of the Gold Monkey" (1982 - 1983) is such a show. It existed only briefly, it died an unfair and unnatural death, and its star was retroactively tainted by a scandal which broke decades after the series left the airwaves. In short, it is quite forgotten by all save television historians and those who grew up in the early 80s. Yet it has a place on Memory Lane, however small, because it speaks to something which lies deep within the heart of every small boy, now as then.

I should begin stating flatly that, not only in retrospect but at the time it aired, "Tales of the Gold Monkey" was an easy show to make fun of. It is full of worn-out clichés, embarrassing stereotypes, stupid dialogue, needless narration, bad blue screen effects, cruddy matte paintings, ill-fitting stock footage, archaic costumes, cringeworthy acting, fake sets and utterly preposterous plots. When fans try to defend this series against ridicule or even room-temperature observational criticism, they often begin by pretending as if this isn't so, and thus discredit their own arguments before they can even get going. I would never make the case that "Tales" was great television taken as such. I would actually start by acknowledging that in many ways it was terrible television...and then explain just why that doesn't make a halluva lot of difference.

"Tales" was concieved by the legendary writer-producer Donald P. Bellisario, who, along with Glen Larson and Stephen J. Cannell, is inarguably one of the pillars upon which modern TV rests. He was the brain behind "Magnum, P.I.", "Airwolf," "Quantum Leap," "JAG," and "NCIS" (which is still running after twenty years). Contrary to popular opinion, it was not a slapped-together imitation of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, which exploded onto movie screens in 1981, but an old idea which had been stewing on a back burner called "development" for years before the success of RAIDERS pushed it to the front of the stove. "Tales" is in fact a series which even in 1982 was a rare breed: the action-adventure show, with emphasis on adventure. It recreated a period in history (the last period in history, actually) when vast areas of the Earth were still unconquered, and thus adventure and exploration still possible: the pre-WW2 age of colonial empire. We forget it now, but there was a time within the living memory of some people when a large portion of this planet still slept in the pre-industrial era, and wandering too far off the map could get you eaten by cannibals, devoured by wild beasts, or plunk you down amidst the ruins of a lost city. When men and women who lived on the edge of that map literally straddled the line between civilization and savagery, the known world and the deep blue. It was an era of explorers, treasure-hunters, missionaries, smugglers, sailors, silk-scarfed pilots, drunken storytellers, one-eyed traders, pirate, crooks, spies, unscrupulous businessmen, absinthe-sodden colonial governors, dispossessed tribesmen, and ruthless empire-builders. And that is what "Tales of the Gold Monkey" was all about. That brawling, half-tamed lawless time when half the world was an unknown quantity and wonder was still possible. Think "Magnum P.I." train-wrecked into "Indiana Jones" (with just a little "Land of the Lost" sprinkled on top) and you have "Tales Of The Gold Monkey." It's the chaos and rawness of the Wild West, but with .45s instead of six guns, twin-engined aircraft instead of horses, and palm trees instead of tumbleweed.

The premise of "Tales" was dead simple. An ex-Flying Tiger named Jake Cutter (Stephen Collins), his drunken, memory-challenged sidekick Corky (Jeff Mackay), and their one-eyed dog Jack (Leo the Dog) operate their seaplane, Cutter's Goose, out of the fictional island of Boragora, somewhere in the Marivellas Islands of the South Pacific, in the last few years before the outbreak of WW2, when a great deal of the world was owned by colonial powers. When our heroes are not flying supplies, mail or passengers to this or that far-flung outpost in the French or Japanese mandates, they are belly-up at the Monkey Bar, which is operated by the island's enigmatic magistrate Bon Chance Louie (Ron Moody in the pilot, Roddy McDowell in the series). In the bar are likely to be found Sarah Stickney White (Caitlin O'Heany), a redheaded lounge singer and American spy; the Reverend Willie Tenboom (John Calvin), who is also a spy, albeit for Nazi Germany; and Gushie, a crippled ex-member of the Foreign Legion (Les Jankey). Pushing through the saloon doors every now and again are the villainous but charming Japanese princess Koji (the super-lovely Marta DuBois, staple femme fatale of the 80s and 90s) and her grumpy samurai henchman Todo (the ubiquitous John Fujioka, in full samurai rig), who longs to cut off Jake's head. With a group like this, where nearly everyone is hiding secrets from each other and unknowingly working at cross-purposes, you just know all sorts of wacky adventures are going to ensue, and believe me, they do. Over the course of the season (sadly, the only one the show ever produced), Jake & Co. come up against human traffickers, spies, cultists, boys raised by apes, treasure hunters, giant octopi, rebel insurgents, angry mobs, Japanese Zeroes, Nazis, ancient curses, and pretty much anything else you can think of. (In one memorable episode, samurai warriors battle huge, semi-carniverous monkeys.) It's incredibly silly, cheesy, clichéd and outlandish, ripping off from just about every old movie and Western you can think of, and often looking as if it were shot entirely on dusty old sets on the studio backlot...which in fact it was...but it's also great, great fun. And this is a large part of why it still occupies space, however overgrown and bug-eaten, in Memory Lane.

"Tales" is a show that made up for in heart and good, clean adventure what it lacked in other places. Though it was shot in 1982, it was essentially the product of a much earlier era, the era of the sensational tales written for boys and young men back in pulp magazines the 20s, 30s and 40s, which Bellasario undoubtedly grew up on, and that sense of lighthearted, "fistfights are fun, don't-worry-it's-just-a-flesh-wound" heroics, percolates all throughout the series. When Jake revs up the coughing, smoking motors of Cutter's Goose, we know that just over the glimmering Pacific horizon lies adventure, treasure, good-looking women, and sweaty, squinty-eyed villains of all races who cheat at cards and sell people into slavery. I cannot tell you how much I looked forward to watching this show every week when I was ten years old, or how bitter I was when it failed to be renewed for a second season. All children, especially boys, long for adventure, for dangerous quests in faraway and exotic lands. "Tales of the Gold Monkey" gave me all that, and when it disappeared, a piece of my childhood disappeared with it. I loved Jake Cutter because, like Thomas Magnum, he was a badass under pressure, but rather a dumbass when the pressure was off: he fumbled romances, got thrown through windows, lost at cards, tried in vain to keep Corky sober, and everlastingly argued with his one-eyed dog Jake. He was heroic but relatable, and his fondness for cigars, eye for the ladies and passion for baseball gave him just enough spice to escape the Dudley Doorite dullness that sometimes afflicted 80s-era heroes.

The bitterness of the pill was accentuated by the fact that "Tales" was cancelled not because of low ratings, but due to a pissing contest between Bellisario and ABC network executives: Bellisario wanted the show to stay reasonably grounded, with stories about spying, smuggling, and so forth, while the suits wanted more extreme plotlines that blurred the lines between adventure and fantasy. Bellisario would not budge, so to spite him, the series was relegated to the dustbin, an act that reportedly caused rival networks to literally uncork champagne, since they believed "Tales" was potential mega-hit which would have run as long as seven seasons. Such is Hollywood, then as now, a fact which brings me no comfort...now or then.

So where does that leave us? Does "Tales" have any relevance forty years down the road? Are there lessons to be learned from its brief existence? Can a show that ran a single year have a legacy? Does it deserve one, romanticizing colonialism as it was sometimes accused of doing?

I would argue that "Tales" is actually more relevant and more necessary now, despite all of its early-80s silliness, than it was back then. The age we live in is cynical, and cynicism is the opposite of wonder. Kids nowadays sit in front of first-person shooter video games, Snapchat and Tik Tok with glassed-over eyes, and seldom get a chance to flex the adventure-muscles that are every child's absolute birthright. "Tales" harkens back to a time when the craving for adventure was accepted as a natural function of boyhood and girlhood, as craving for unearned fame and gross material wealth is today. It presupposes that there are realms beyond the border of electric light and air conditioning, where people have to live by their wits or die, something every Western child should consider in this age of flabby keyboard warriors and porn-addicted, basement-dwelling trolls. The fact that it expired after only a year, despite ratings success, serves as a salutary warning about the role of ego in the decision-making process: Bellisario, in my mind, was right to fight for his vision of the show, but naive and silly to let the fight escalate to the point where men obsessed with money were willing to sacrifice hefty future profits just to step on his dream. The very act of bringing a television series into existence is a vast series of painful and occasionally humiliating compromises, conducted for the greater good: it is the painful intersection of the commercial and the artistic, and that intersection is usually littered with blood and wreckage. Bellisario knew this better than anyone. He could have been more strategic, chosen his battles more carefully. In the modern parlance, however, he chose violence, and the people employed by the show, and its many fans, paid the price.

Now we come to the last point. Did "Tales" romanticize colonialism, European or otherwise? The answer, as is so often the case in questions like this, is yes, and no. It is often taken for granted in the series that European colonialism is reasonable or at least justifiable or unquestionable, just as it is taken for granted that Japanese aspirations of this type are inherently sinister. Few of the episodes question the fact that so much of the world was divvied up between a few European powers like so much pie at a Thanksgiving feast. Moreover, native anti-colonialists, though depicted, are not always painted in a good light, but rather as embittered, angry disruptors of the social order; and the whole mystique of mercenaries, smugglers, explorers, spies and and so forth, playing poker in the Monkey Bar beneath clouds of cigar smoke as they plotted their next adventure, is undoubtedly rooted in a deep nostalgia for this era: indeed, as I have said, it is a large part of the show's appeal, just as it is a large part of the appeal of the Indiana Jones films. But it would be unfair to say that "Tales" simply ignored the evils of colonialism. The episode "Shangheid" tackled modern-day slavery, while "Escape from Death Island" chronicled the cruelty of French penal colonies. "Boragora or Bust" centers around the exploitation of mineral rights, while "A Distant Shout of Thunder" directly addresses native hostility and resentment to colonial domination. The writers were not entirely blind to the nature of the world their characters were living.

I don't mean to imply that "Tales" offered sophisticated commentary on this subject or any other; only that it was not completely lacking in nuance (the character of Willy Tenboom, for example, was a German spy, but manifestly not a Nazi; his main interest was bedding nubile island girls, and he often pitched in to help Jake). The show may have romanticized the age and the setting, but its moral compass was firmly in place: right remained right, wrong remained wrong. It was manifestly on the side of the little man against the big man, for individuality and, ultimately, the freedom that comes with living on the edge of the world, where law is more of an idea than a reality, and civilization comes in the form of once-a-month clippers full of mail, cigars, phonograph records and whisky. My ultimate verdict is this: if you're a parent of a youngish kid, "Tales" is as good an antidote for today's world as anything out there. And if you happened to be growing up in the early 80s, it's a fabulous flight down Memory Lane.

THE HOBBIT ON THE ROCKS IS CRYING (A RANT)

FRODO: I'm going to Mordor alone, Sam.
SAM: I know! And I'm coming with you.

Rewatching The Lord of the Rings, now a quarter century old, I was struck by how human these films are, and how universal and timeless their values: friendship, loyalty, courage, duty, honor, sacrifice. There is nothing in the LOTR movies which has aged a day or will not be equally valid a century from now.

Modern movies tend to suck in large part because they are unable to produce memorable dialog or relatable characters we actually care about. They don't instruct; they condescend. They don't make music, they make noise. The bar for storytelling is not low; it is on the ground. Writers who might have once, generously, been allowed to sharpen pencils on a studio lot are now making millions to give us shit that could have been written by AI. And by AI, I mean the sort of AI which once opposed me in a game of "Pong."

In Braveheart, William Wallace tells Robert the Bruce, "Your title gives you claim to the throne of our country; but men don't follow titles, they follow courage." Not only is this a great line, it's also true of Hollywood: the title gives it claim to our attention and money, but people do not follow titles, they follow stories. And good storytelling is dependent on basic principles. Almost every movie I've seen in recent years is...content. Not art. Not even good popcorn entertainment: content. Disposable and forgettable. They differ from the bad movies of yesteryear in that they do not even try to be good. Nor is there any real attempt at originality. I can hardly think of an A-list, theatrical release movie I've seen in recent years which had any new ideas in it at all. On the other hand, I have seen almost every major legacy franchise and many minor ones desecrated out of recognition by reboots, spin-offs, remakes, sequels, prequels, and "re-imaginings" that attempt to "fix" what was never broken in the first place.

Making a great movie is not easy, but the principles that drive great movies are easy to understand. Audiences want to be entertained, sure, but they also want to be inspired and have the deeper values of humankind affirmed...after being put to a harsh test. From Rocky to Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker to Bilbo Baggins, it's all about the journey.

There and back again.

Modern movie writers need to understand why people go to the movies in the first place.

PROHIBITION EDITION

George Orwell once made a joke about "the horror of the English Sunday." He was referring to the boredom endured by all Englishmen on this day, due to the fact that all pubs, and nearly all businesses, were forcibly closed by law, leaving the populace with nothing to do except go for long walks...or go to church. Needless to say, it was the Church of England which lay behind these laws: they didn't want competition, and so did everything in their power to eliminate it and make uncomfortable wooden pews, dull sermons and off-key singing more palatable to people who would have preferred a pint and a game of football. It didn't really work, most prohibitions don't, and it merely created boredom and resentment from the people; but it was enforced rigorously for centuries -- indeed, long after the Church lost both its power and its relevancy, the horror of its blue laws persisted.

The need governments, religious groups and so forth feel to bludgeon supposedly free people into doing "what's best for them" is a source of ongoing fascination for me. I first noticed this phenomena when I was attending college in Pennsylvania many years ago. As someone born in Illinois and raised in Maryland, I was unfamiliar with PA blue laws until I ran headfirst into them as an undergraduate with a perpetual thirst for beer. I soon discovered two remarkable facts about the Commonwealth in which I attended school: the first was that Pennsylvanians drink an astonishing amount of alcohol. The second was that every form of legal nuisance had been created in order to separate them from their pints, wine bottles and fifths of whiskey.

You could not, in the Commonwealth of PA, buy liquor or wine anywhere but a state owned liquor store whose hours were designed to make them almost inaccessible to anyone working during normal business hours: they were briefly open on Saturday mornings, but not, of course, on Sundays. You could not buy beer at grocery or conveience stores, and the laws prevented other stores, or bars, from selling six packs unless they also had a food license and did a certain percentage of their business exclusively in food sales. (Beer purchased at these sorts of bars or restaurants was, of course, priced far above market value.) Thus, your only choice was a beer distributor: but these sold only cases or kegs. Simply going out and grabbing a six of brew somewhere was a tedious, complicated, often expensive task, and on Sundays, as often as not, people were forced to drive on down to Maryland to get what they wanted, something feasible only because my college town happened to be 20 miles from the state border. Indeed, those who forgot to stock up for Superbowl Sunday faced a choice of either going dry or on what might have been a very long trip.

In addition to the deliberate and systematic fragmentation of the way alcohol was sold, and not sold, in PA, there was also a continuous petty harassment on alcohol purchasers, conducted by the police and various liquor control entities. They used to set up shop near bars, distributors and liquor stores and try to catch under-age people buying the product, which I suppose is natural enough, except that even when those asked to produce identification did so and were proven to be of age, they were often treated like criminals: one police officer shouted at me and friends of mine because we "weren't much over twenty-one," which prompted my normally meek friend Steve to shout back, "What fucking difference does that make?" Another time during this same era, the proprietor of a bowling alley demanded not only that we produce identification, but that we sign legal paperwork in order to be served his special blend of flat, room-temperature beer. In a third incident, my friend Eddie was threatened with a citation by the Liquor Control Board, not because he was underage, but because he had "given agents the impression that he was hesitant to produce identification proving his age." I could provide reams of additional, anecdotal evidence from this period, including the time my valid passport was rejected as a form of identification in a liquor store, but you get the picture: the purchase of alcohol was made deliberately more difficult than necessary, and virtually impossible on Sundays.

And what was the net result of all this pettifogging, nitpicking, ticket-writing, blue-nosed interference? Pennsylvania was routinely on the list of the ten most drunken states in the Union. Not only college students but poor people, blue collar workers, and middle class folk of every description were forever emptying beer, malt liquor, rum, whiskey, vodka, hard lemonade, spiked sparkling water, mixed drinks and wine down their throats. The bars and nightclubs were jam-packed all night long. After-hours parties raged until three or four in the morning. The beer distributors did rip-roaring trade from Thursday noon to closing time on Saturday night, and the caravans down to the Maryland Line to bring back kegs of beer ran continuously on Sundays. On Monday mornings, the recycling bins and trash cans on my block were overflowing with bottles and cans, and on my way to work in my post-college career, I often saw people sitting on their stoops in all weather, early in the mornings, drinking 22 ounce bottles of Silver Thunder. And it is no use to say, as many do, that it would all have been worse if these barriers had not been put into place, for it is well known that banning things is one of the most effective means of making them attractive and popular to the masses. I was reminded of my grandmother's stories about the Prohibition Era, and how all it seemed to accomplish in Chicago was to make people thirstier.

There is, and always has been, a lively debate about the role of the state in the life of the individual citizen or subject, especially in a democracy, where people are supposed to have freedom of choice. The old Roman doctrine of parens patriae -- "the state is the parent" -- is right up there with the "social contract" theories of Hobbes, Locke and Rosseau for its ability to provoke argument about the rights and obligations of the individual versus the rights and obligations of the group...or the government. The absurdity of entities we the people created for our own benefit making it more difficult for us to do something we desire, is wrapped around the quite logical idea that total freedom is anarchy, and anarchy is not freedom at all; and therefore we must be restrained to a degree if we cannot restrain ourselves. And yet it seems to me that freedom has very little value unless it includes the freedom to make personal choices about one's body and what one does with it. Knowing this, however, governments and religious organizations usually go at what they see as "the problem" (your freedom) sideways. Just as those who want to censor art or speech will never admit what they are doing is censorship, those who want to tell you what to eat, drink, smoke, etc. will very rarley admit they want to control your behavior. And if they do, they will usually say those dreaded parental words, "it's for your own good."

Many would argue this is factually true. Drinking alcohol is not very good for you, especially the way it tends to get consumed in small town Pennsylvania, where people work hard and play harder, and it leads directly to all manner of crimes, from physical and sexual assaults to drunk driving. The tax revenue it brings in is probably offset to a great degree by the vandalism, destruction, and criminality it also produces. And forms of the same argument can also be made about smoking, or eating fast food or junk food: efforts were recently made in various cities to outlaw everything from the Big Gulp to Skittles, because they are so wretchedly unhealthy. But this slope is very slippery indeed. Bacon is profoundly unhealthy, but the average American consumes 18 lbs of it per year. Refined sugar is even worse for you, and every American gets 60 lbs of added sugar in the same time frame, and I don't (yet) hear anyone calling for bans or controls on them.

The extent to which ordinary people can be trusted to live their own lives is at the core of democratic identity. If the state really is the parent, it has the right to set rules within its house: but is the state the parent, and if it is, is it a fit one? How does it draw the line between allowing its children freedom of choice and stepping in to protect them from harm? What is the difference between restraints for the good of the people and tyranny, however petty the tyranny may be? America was founded on the idea that government could not be trusted, that it bent naturally toward absolutism, and had to be restrained by as many checks and balances upon its own power as could be put into place without making it actually impossible to do its job. This idea has lost currency in recent generations, but in a curiously sideways manner: no one really trusts the government anymore, but millions believe it is fit to decide what its citizens can and cannot do...at least when they agree with whatever decision it happens to make in that regard.

The horror of the Pennsylvania Sunday began to slacken some years before I moved back here from California in 2020. The monopoly of the state liquor store was broken, beer and wine are now sold conditionally in grocery stores (and even some convenience stores), and I doubt such of the old Sunday blue laws as are still on the books or enforced prevent anyone from getting as tanked as they please on the Lord's day. This battle, waged so absurdly and bitterly for so many years, has been won and lost -- at least for now. But the larger issue of why institutions created by human beings, so often fight against the wishes of human beings, and whether this is a good thing or an evil one, or falls into some nebulous third category, is a subject which deserves ongoing study.

HALLOWEEN HORROR (2023) THE FINAL CHAPTER

Well, here we are in November. The jack o' lanterns have been hauled in, and the orange lights taken down. The candy which hasn't been consumed is beginning the slow process of petrification in jars and plastic bags on cabinet shelves and in desk drawers, and costumes have been returned to stores, stuffed into trunks or simply hurled into the trash. Even pumpkin spice, the joy or bane of millions of North Americans, is disappearing streadily from coffee shops and gas stations everywhere. Halloween, like most big holidays, leaves a kind of hangover in its wake -- a feeling of having overindulged in something silly and artificial, much like the candy which accompanies it. But the guilt is of a pleasurable sort, and as we clean up the debris of pumpkin seeds and cellophane wrappers and beer pull tabs, we also come to this, the last (for 2023) installment of Halloween Horror.

My goal for October this year was the same as last: carve a pumpkin, attend a costume party, and watch 31 horror films I've never seen before in 31 days. With a slight allowance for error, I succeeded, and the time has come for me to finish the list of those movies which I watched, and in some cases, endured, to celebrate the season. I find nothing weird or paradoxical in the fact that I tend to turn October into a form of self-flagellation, because Halloween, being a time for frights, therefore by definition must also include some discomfort. For those who actually care about cinema of this type, some of my opinions will be controversial, but I am always ready to defend them or expand upon them, and indeed, tomorrow I will be making my umpteenth appearance on the LCS Hockey Radio Show to do just that. You may be wondering why a show with thats port in the title cares about such things: all I can do is assure you that the last thing I ever hear on that podcast is anything about hockey. Anyway, here we go....

Get Out (2017). This film was such a huge hit, and made so many "best of" lists, that it was bound to disappoint me, and lo and behold, it did. GET OUT is the story of a (black) man with a (white) girlfriend, who goes to the country to "meet the parents" and discovers something is wrong with his perspective in-laws. Very wrong. Playing on themes of black distrust of white folks, the real motives behind interracial relationships, racism, class privileged, and general paranoia, the first half of this movie is actually very good and does a fine job of slowly building tension. Alas, just when it is firing on all cylinders it changes its tone and dives into comedy and absurdity. Horror comedy is damnably and devilishly difficult to pull off, and GET OUT is undeniably funny, but it's not supposed to be funny: it's supposed to be scary. Jordan Peele's background in sketch comedy betrays him here, and ruins what might have been a fine film.

Don't Breathe (2016). What happens when three amoral burglars decide to rob a blind war veteran of the insurance settlement cash he was awarded following the wrongful death of his only daughter? A morally bankrupt movie. Ripping many pages from the book of Wes Craven's THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS, another "home invasion gone wrong" film with overtones about class warfare, DON'T BREATHE finds our singularly loathsome protagonists up against an ex-special forces man whose blindness doesn't stop him from defending his castle against their intrusion. Stephen Lang does a lot with a little as The Blind Man, whose grief has driven him into violent insanity, but it's impossible to sympathize with our heroine, whose sense of entitlement is so colossal that she comes off as worse than he is -- old Blindy at least has the excuse that he's nuts. What's hers? This is a pretty good suspense movie, but its moral compass us wedged firmly in its digestive tract.

Howl (2015). This British werewolf movie is not really scary, but it is entertaining and very well-acted. In essence, it presages TRAIN TO BUSAN in that it's about a midnight train which breaks down in the remote British countryside and is then beset by furry, flesh-eating beasts which force our passengers and crew to find their own inner heroes, or die. Like the other movies here, there are undertones of class warfare and societal commentary, but they are low key and unannoying, and the flick moves at such a swift pace it's as if the editor was trying to cut every extraneous frame: there's no fat here at all, just movement. It also features a blinky cameo from Sean Pertwee in an obvious homage to DOG SOLDIERS, another British werewolf romp (see my previous blog).

Insidious (2010). This movie's sole distinction is that it delivers a large number of effective jump scares and a pretty good performance by Rose Byrne. Aside from that, it's absolute garbage, which isn't surprising, considering it's from the gang that gave us SAW, another hugely overrated movie which failed to live up to its own, superb premise. The story follows the attempts of a husband and wife to rescue their comatose (read: possessed) son from a demonic realm called The Further. This flick falls off the rails with a bang about halfway through, and even tries GET OUT's tone-inconsistent humor to soften the blow of the fall, but every twist is telegraphed so badly I felt as if I'd read the script before I watched the movie. In fact, despite some early-mid promise, almost everything INSIDIOUS does reads like every other possession film you've ever seen. There is nothing new here, just an above-average number of jump scares which peter out all too soon.

Alice Sweet Alice (1976). Some horror movies are scary. Some are just disturbing. ALICE SWEET ALICE is extremely disturbing, one might even say disgusting, but not in a blood 'n guts way. This gritty, low-budget psychological-slasher movie plunges a meat cleaver into every taboo I can think of, from child murder to child sexual molestation to religious blasphemy to animal cruelty. It is the story of Alice, a deeply disturbed young girl whose older sister is murdered on her confirmation day, and who is the suspect in this killing, and a number of other horrible crimes which subsequently plague her apartment building and church. Her dad returns from divorce exile to try and root out the truth, but does he even want it? Is Alice in fact the sadistic, mask-wearing, knife-wielding murderer? I won't answer that, but I will say it doesn't much matter, because the movie never even attempts paint Alice as anything but a burgeoning psychopath. I kinda wanted a shower after this movie, but I can't deny its impact: and if you look real closely, you'll see Brooke Shields making her film debut.

The Pope's Exorcist (2023). Russell Crowe always brings his A-game. Unfortunately, he often brings it to the wrong place. Yet another possession movie, supposedly based on the exploits of the Vatican's actual chief exorcist, Gabrielle Amorth, takes us to Italy, where a visiting American family moves into the wrong house, one occupied by a lively demon. Cue said exorcist, who comes to battle evil with a cross in one hand and a flask in the other. There's nothing here we haven't seen in the original EXORCIST or its sequels, from a foul-mouthed demon with a taste for cruel invective, to possessed people doing the spide-walk on the ceiling, to priests chanting incantations while chaos ensues. Throw in a great deal of noisy CGI and this was a waste of a fine actor doing his best to elevate prosaic material.

Halloween (2007). Rob Zombie was a pretty good heavy metal singer. He should have stuck to that, and not tortured us with his vulgar, tawdry, intellectually and morally bankrupt cinematic pretentions. HALLOWEEN is his take on a classic horror movie, maybe the classic horror movie, John Carpenter's 1978 film of the same name. This version lifts the bad guy, mask, and music, but leaves behind the scares, ingenuity, restraint, and underlying horror -- everything, in fact, that made the first one great. The original HALLOWEEN was essentially the Book of Job set in a small Illinois town: in other words, bad things happening to good people. Carpenter presented Michael Myers, the unspeaking, murderous villain, as a force rather than a person: The Boogeyman, without motive, evil incarnate, existing only to spread pointless suffering. Zombie, in contrast, explains everything, reducing Michael to a mere set of influences. When a director has no real talent, he pushes everything to extremes in the hopes you won't notice this ugly fact. This movie should actually be called ANTI-HALLOWEEN, so thoroughly does it upend what Carpenter did so brilliantly in his original film. Just an endless, foul-mouthed, blood-drenched mess that bludgeons the audience into stupefaction and has nothing new or interesting to say.

Hell Night (1981). Linda Blair, of EXORCIST fame, stars in this quite unscary, but rather fun, slasher set in a supposedly haunted mansion on a fraternity-sorority hell night. And wouldn't you know it? It really is haunted, by a lunatic -- or lunatics -- who don't like intruders one bit. Our pledges are far more interesting than the usual 80s-era slasher fodder, especially Timothy Van Patten as a surfer dude with a yellow streak that turns a heroic gold as the film progresses, and I credit the director for the opening party sequence on Halloween night, which involved hundreds of drunken extras, not one of whom looks at the camera. Blair doesn't light up the screen, but her character is plucky and resourceful without being at all a boring "strong [read: perfect] female character" of the modern sort. While decidedly a B-movie in every way, it has touches of class, such as its decidedly Gothic tone, which give it a sincerity lacking in most movies of this type.

Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977). Widely derided as one of the worst threatrical release movies of its era, if not all time, this sluggish, utterly incoherent sequel to the immortal classic finds Linda Blair's Reagan McNeil four years older, but facing an old problem: demonic possession. A star-studded cast (Richard Burton, Max von Sydow, Ned Beatty, James Earl Jones, etc., etc.), an up-and-coming director (John Boorman), and an amazing theme song by Ennio Morricone ("Ecstasy and Magic") are wasted on this nonsensical fever-dream, which is full of fantastic imagery but plays out like the script was written by someone who chugged a bottle of Jack Daniels spiked with 30 doses of LSD. I seriously never knew what the hell was happening in this movie and I'm damned sure Richard Burton was too drunk to care.

And with that, I leave my fifty-first Halloween behind me. I managed to make a serious dent in the number of more modern horror films I'd somehow never seen, and picked off a few lingering oldies in the bargain, but the supply seems inexhaustible, and next year, the good gods willing, I'll be back here rambling about all of this again. But for now, I'm sealing up this tomb.

MEMORY LANE: REMEMBERING "QUINCY"

You can scare me, but you can't stop me. -- Quincy

Everything in existence has a point of origin, but sometimes it is damnably difficult to find. This is true even in television, a medium which is not even a century old and by its nature is extraordinarily well documented. The effective origin of the forensic or medical detective show was QUINCY, M.E., which ran from 1976 to 1983 on the NBC network. It is remembered as "the first drama series to regularly feature detailed forensic investigations" [Google] and is thus the Big Bang of this particular genre of television. A search I conducted on reality and scripted medical detective series turned up 96 in English speaking countries alone, and this list only ran from the early 1990s. It does not include a number of series which came in the intervening decade between '93 and '92, including DA VINCI'S INQUEST, CORONER, HOUSE or even PROFILER, which wobbled on the borderline of this genre but probably falls within its reach.

I could a tale unfold about the history of this genre and what I truly feel precipitated its explosion in popularity, but let us stick to cases -- the case of Quincy, the crime-fighting coroner from Los Angles with the big nose, big mouth, and big heart, whose absence is felt as keenly, in my own heart anyway, as his once-overwhelming presence.

QUINCY was originally envisioned by legendary TV producer-writer Glen Larson as a series of TV movies in which a crusty, hot-tempered, skirt-chasing L.A. County coroner would utilize his knowledge of forensic pathology to solve seemingly impenetrable murder mysteries. At the time, the "holy trinity" of TV was composed of doctor shows, lawyer shows and cop shows: QUINCY offered something different: a doctor show in which all the "patients" were already dead, combined with a cop show in which the coroner outhustled and outhought the police. Hell, it even threw in a fair amount of legalese, and thus seemed to cover every base, at least partially. Cast in the starring role was a reluctant and combative Jack Klugman, co-star of THE ODD COUPLE, who didn't see himself in such a role and had little patience for the sort of weak, by-the-numbers storytelling which abounded on TV (then as now). Indeed, Klugman's determination to bring something "more than just screeching tires" to the boob tube led to the more orthodox-thinking Larson being elbowed out of his own show, and Klugman became, in effect, not merely QUINCY's star, but his own executive producer, showrunner and executive story editor. This act of aggressive egotism was to have profound consequences for the whole history of television.

Why? Because the ratings success of the four QUINCY TV movies led the show to be bumped unexpectedly to a weekly episodic series, and Klugman, who had a ferocious temper and was legendary for his screaming fits and stinging insults ("There are a lot of people in Hollywood who can type," he once remarked acidly. "There aren't many writers."), forced the ever-changing writers' room to bring him scripts which were actually about something. This led QUINCY to develop a unique identity as "the show with a cause."

Actually, "the with causes" would have been a better description, for although there are many QUINCY episodes which are simply forensic murder mysteries without societal commentary, every season devoted a hefty number of stories to questions of social justice. The way these topics were approached was by dressing them up as mere murder mysteries, and then -- usually by the second commercial at the latest -- revealing the underlying societal evil the producers wished to address, combat and correct. Without consulting the internet, I can think of dozens of causes the show dragged into the light of day for discussion: a random sampling would include autism, alcoholism, industrial waste, fad diets, orphan drugs, illegal immigration, airline safety, Tourette's Syndrome, PTSD, affirmative action, bureacracy, gun control, illiteracy, big pharma, pollution, the federal grand jury system, DUI laws, juvenile crime, incest, domestic violence, elder abuse, mental health, drug culture, child pornography and human trafficking, drug use in sports, medical insurance, Down's syndrome, abortion, vigilantism, PCP, holistic medicine, ghost surgery, and numerous issues within the medical community itself, such as incompetence, negligence, ethics, and addiction. Some topics were visited several times from different angles. What is particularly striking about this sampling is how timely most of the causes remain, even viewed through a distance of half a century. If ever we needed a reminder that some social problems are always with us, watching QUINCY rage, in 1978 or so, about topics we see in the 2023 headlines on a weekly basis, will surely fill the perscription. I myself have noted in my professional life as an advocate for victims of crime how ahead of the curve QUINCY was about lax drunk driving laws, or the loopholes the criminally insane or sex offenders used to wreak yet more havoc. In the case of so-called orphan drugs -- drugs developed to fight extremely rare diseases, which are therefore not profitable to manufacture -- QUINCY was actually instrumental in getting laws changed. It was a case of life consciously choosing to imitate art.

Klugman's performance as the crusading coroner deserves especial mention. While some of the dialog defeated his acting abilities, and his own acting range was not especially wide, his passion for the role generally overflowed even the weaker scripts and more hastily-constructed storylines. He is one of those performers who is just a joy to watch, as much for his flinty charisma as for his actual thespianism. The heavy New York accent ("coffee" is pronounced "cawfee") only adds flavor to a delivery already spiced by his deep, raspy voice. He is of that category of actor whose acting is less important than his presence -- and that he has in spades.

Quincy the character was given very little background. We never even learned his first name, not in eight years and 156 episodes ("I have one," he informs his soon-to-be-wife in the final season, "but nobody ever seems to use it.") We only knew that he was a surgeon who chucked his practice following the death of his wife from a brain tumor; that he lived on a boat and did not own a car; that had devoted his life to forensic pathology; that he was a womanizing workaholic with a fiery temper and a restless social conscience; and that his penchant for liberal muckraking belied a naive belief that we fight the fights that need fighting and that one man can make a difference if he pushes hard enough. QUINCY, the show, was at its heart a harsh civics lesson using forensic medicine as a kind of sugar-coating: beneath the sophisticated jargon and flashy science and the curiosity about whodunnit, it ceaselessly and shamelessly preached the need to get involved, to petition, to protest, to vote, to march, to meet, and to treat democracy as a cranky pull-motor that needed a lot of elbow grease and forehead sweat to get going. Quincy the character hated injustice and cruelty, fought for the little man against the big man, and preached a never-ceasing sermon against apathy; he believed the truth was holy.

Quincy was supported by, and often fought with, his good natured but long-suffering assistant Sam Fujiyama (Robert Ito); his equally long-suffering boss, the paper-pushing but principled Dr. Robert Asten (John S. Ragin); fiesty homicide detective Lt. Frank Monohan (Garry Walberg) and his sidekick Sgt Brill (Joe Roman); and sarcastic ex-con Danny Tovo (Sal Bisoglio), whose dockside restaurant was Quincy's favorite hangout. These co-stars were archetypes frozen in personality, changing not a whit over the course of eight years, but their very stolidity buttressed the show's theme that right and wrong, while not oversimple concepts, were fixed and not situational. Aside from the transition from periodic TV movies to series, only really atomic change in the show was Quincy's marriage to Emily Hanover (Anita Gillette) in the final season, but even this was more a nod to the fact that the story needed an ending than a desire to acknowledge the passage of time.

QUINCY reflected the spirit of its age, the 1970s, which was a curious mixture of post-Vietnam exuberance, post-Watergate cynicism, and Cold War nihilism. It had a tendency toward naivete in dialog and often tacked on unrealistically happy endings onto stories, though this was certainly not the case in episodes like "Scream to the Skies," "Headhunter," "Guns Don't Die," or "Into the Murdering Mind," to cite just a few examples. Its sense of humor was quite lively and stinging, though it could often be cringe-inducing and silly. Some of the funnier running gags were Sam's inability to keep dates because of Quincy forcing him to work late hours, Quincy bitterly railing about the taste of the office coffee, Asten's merciless penny-pinching, Quincy insisting on parking the coroner's meatwagon outside Danny's restaurant, and Danny's jokes, which were almost 100% at Quincy's expense. Though its politics were generally left of center, it generally gave at least lip service to critics of the "causes" in question, and while it took some pains to actually reflect the racial and cultural diversity of Los Angeles, by today's standards, a lot of the humor at Sam's expense was flat-out racist. Additionally, it sometimes saw boogeymen where none were present: its most notorious episode "Next Stop, Nowhere" memorably and laughably presented the extended musical belch that was punk rock movement as an imminent societal threat. Other "causes" such as look-alike drugs and midwifery, did not stand the test of time. But in the last analysis, QUINCY had an almost eerie sense of timeliness, of prescience. It -- by which I mean Klugman and his producers and such writers as survived his temper and his purges -- had a remakable ability to sense which headlines really mattered, which evils needed to be fought and defeated. The speech Quincy gives railing against big pharma's effect on society -- From birth, children are told by newspapers, by radio, television commercials that they needn't put up with one moment of mental anguish, that relief is just a short reach away to the nearest bottle of pills. It's become a form of escape and a form of recreation. -- is more relevant now, in 2023, than when it was given, in 1979. And it is but one of many which have remained relevant, despite the feeling, when one watches an episode now, that one is looking into an unrecognizably distant past.

So where does that leave QUINCY after an interval of almost fifty years? Does the show still matter in this age of unremitting cynicism? What is its legacy?

As I said above, QUINCY feels enormously dated, more because of the heavy-handed way it presents its stories rather than because of the stories themselves: it tends toward naivete or at least a fairly shiny idealism, towards a belief that despite every manner of villainy, the universe bends toward justice. It can be terribly, almost irredeemably cheesy, especially when it insists on unrealistic happily ever afters. And yet, if one can get past the thick, stale layers of this pasteurized product, one cuts through to a heart which is still powerfully beating. I have often praised the tendency of older television shows to come down on the side of decency, chivalry, honor, etc. rather than cyncism and moral ambiguity: QUINCY is a mighty spear-carrier for this cause, but it carries its spear in a more mature way than you might expect. It insists, shrilly and insistently, that people have to get off their ass if they want to live in the world they actually desire, rather than the shitty one they actually inhabit. It pokes the chest of its audience like an ill-tempered ethics teacher trying to get a stoned, cheetoh-eating teenager to vote. It underscores, with a large red marker, the fact that democracy is everybody's job. In the age of Trump, of Putin and Netanyahu, this is more important than ever.

QUINCY went off the air forty years ago, but if you want to see its practical legacy, you have only to look at the monkey-branch of forensic and medical detective shows that have proliferated since it went off the air. QUINCY is not solely responsible for them -- Thomas Harris, who wrote Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs is probably the real culprit, and QUINCY was predated and probably heavily influenced by WOJECK, a Canadian forensics show from the late 1960s which also embrace "causes" -- but it is the series which brought forensic pathology to the broad masses, and in a way that made science approachable and even sexy. Quincy didn't beat people up; he outthought them. His weapons were a microscope, a scalpel, the scientific method, and a belief in "civility," meaning not merely politeness or nonviolence, but an abiding faith in human civilization. SEINFELD was once aptly described as "a show about nothing." QUINCY was a show about decency -- how hard it can be to achieve, and how impossible it is to live without.

MIDDLE AGE AND EMBRACING THE SUCK

Yesterday I went to my barber, Olivia, for my tri-weekly haircut. I estimate the hair I have was perhaps a half-inch long at the most, but it was too much: a few swipes of the electric razor later, it was nothing but stubble. Marine recruits have more hair. Before I left, I decided to come back not in three but two weeks: I don't want even that barely half inch. Just Kojack me.

To anyone who knew me in college, the idea of me rocking a nearly bald dome would be beyond belief. I was famous for my luxurious head of hair, which I modeled after James Dean and Mickey Rourke and Luke Perry, and infamous for my vanity about it. My college dorm-mates laughed at the sight of my "preening bucket" -- the bucket I took to the showers each morning which contained a brush, a blow-drier, gel, mousse, a comb, and God knows what else. I quite enjoyed this mockery. I enjoyed the jokes about me doubling for Vanilla Ice. I was proud of my heavy brown locks and was more than willing to endure some ribbing about it.

I remember the day when it finally sank in that I was losing that hair. I was about twenty-eight or twenty-nine years old, and I compared the driver's license picture from my final year of college with the one just snapped. It struck me then that I had a lot more forehead. A lot more. I don't mean I was bald. I wasn't even what is generally referring to as balding. I just had...more forehead.

I began to sweat. As ridiculous as it sounds, a good deal of my identity had been invested in those follicles. They were part of my look, which was part of my vanity, which was part of my personality. I went into a state of denial, and after denial eroded in the face of the slowly growing forehead, I engaged in a bitter struggle to find hairstyles that worked. This struggle lasted almost twenty years, and the later half of it was very ugly indeed. Sometimes I'd go a whole year, or more, without a haircut, in hopes of compensating for fewer follicles. (This worked the first time, but never again.) Sometimes I'd rock the classic Caesar cut, which worked wonders until the quarter-sized bald spot on the back of my head grew to fifty-cent-piece, silver dollar, and finally teacup circumference. Sometimes, at the behest of my barber in Burbank, I'd powder the bald spot and grow out the front. Later, I grew out the front for almost two years and slicked it back, which bared yet more forehead but covered the growing desert in the back. I always congratulated myself on the success of these camouflage manuevers until I realized, usually through photography, that I was fooling no one but myself.

Not too long ago, I marched into the barber shop I've been utilizing here in York for several years, and told my cutter to let fly with those clippers. Just buzz the whole goddamn dome. I believe the number I selected was a No. 2. This looked pretty good to me, but it grew back all too quickly -- the central irony of baldness is that the hair you have grows like weeds -- so I returned and asked for a No. 1.5, and then a No. 1, which is the afformentioned Marine recruit buzz.

I'm like that: I will do everything humanly possible to avoid a decision I don't want to make, but when I finally make it, I run headlong at it like Sgt. Rock at the German lines, yelling "You wanna live forever?" between bursts of Tommy gun fire and hurling hand grenades. I do what folks in the military call "embracing the suck." Embracing the suck, I'm told, consists of not merely accepting that you are in a shitty situation, but opening your arms to it, and even learning how to enjoy it, whether on a philosophical or ironic level. It is, after all, unavoidable, so why bother crying and moaning?

Middle age is a damned strange business. Physically, I don't feel any different now than I did at thirty: I'm actually stronger, more muscular and probably a little more flexible. I've noticed no decline in stamina. Creatively, I'm doing better than ever, so there has been no cognitive decline. It's harder for me to lose weight, for sure, but I can still lose it, as I have documented on these very pages. Sexually I'm not twenty-one anymore, but show me a fifty year old man who is without having a Viagra I.V. The only real decline I can think of has been in terms of the quality of my sleep, but I've found ways to improve even that. And yet, according to the United Nations, old age begins at sixty. For me, that is nine years away. So I'd say you're only as old as you feel...but then I look in the mirror and remember I used to have James Dean hair, and I feel, well, kinda long in the tooth. Kinda gray in the muzzle. Kinda silver in the back. And I say to myself, "This is what it is, and you have to accept it. You have to embrace the suck."

It isn't easy. Not for me, anyway. I want to cry. I want to moan. The vanity of my youth persists in my mind like a poltergeist, and like a poltergeist gives me no rest on the days when a photograph or a video forces me to accept the 25 or 30 year old man I expect to see in the mirror is gone and ain't coming back. This happened to me recently, and at an inopportune time: celebrating the loss of almost fifteen pounds, I was sent nightly news footage of myself at a charity event...and I saw a bald, beefy, tired-looking guy who looked like he needed to lose another ten or fifteen pounds, easily. It was tough to take. I didn't get what I wanted after a lot of hard work. But rather than run to the nearest hair transplant center by way of a plastic surgeon specializing in liposuction, I just took a deep breath, sulked for the rest of the night, and then went back to the grind of shaving an ounce here, and an ounce there...and my head, now every two weeks.

Kierkegaard said that life was lived forward but understood backwards. He was more right than he knew. The more progress I make toward my real life goals, the further I get from my own physical ideal, and more I realize that the old me, the one which is evaporating, sloughing off, flaking away, is not going quietly or easily. I may be embracing the suck, but he is not. This poltergeist ain't getting exorcised quietly. He's gonna smash plates, up-end tables, spill drinks, blow out candles, and knock pictures off the wall. He's gonna crack windows and make thumping noises at three in the morning when all I want to do is sleep. Vanity is a bitch and doesn't want to be dumped. Who knows? Maybe this is a bit of a good thing. Maybe wanting to be young physically forces me to be as young, physically, as a fifty-one year old man can be. But chasing youth is a dangerous business, ultimately futile, and contains a note of tragic absurdity. The line between fighting the good fight and the cost-loss fallacy is fine, and middle-aged men don't always have the clearest or sharpest vision. It is, however, a little easier to see if you shave your head: at least the hair won't get in your eyes.

HALLOWEEN HORROR (2023) PART II

Hullo folks. It's 11:45 PM on Saturday night, I have just returned from a costume party, and since I am endeavoring to maintain the Wednesday - Saturday blogging schedule, I thought I'd pop in to regale you with my further explorations into the world of horror movies. As you know, I have vowed to watch one for every day in October, and right now I am precisely on schedule. So without further ado, here is what I've seen since last we met:

Final Prayer a.k.a The Borderlands (2013). I normally detest "found footage" films, but this small cast British movie about a small team of Vatican experts sent to a rural church to investigate, and in fact debunk, purported "miracles" is well-acted, offbeat, and comes to a thoroughly disturbing climax which is all the more disturbing for having been foreshadowed, albeit in very subtle ways. Gordon Kennedy is exceptional as an disillusioned, burned-out priest with a quick temper and a drinking problem.

Host (2020). Along with "mockumentaries" and "found footage" movies, there are now "screenlife" films which take place entirely in online formats. "Host" is just such a film. A large group of female friends, bored by Covid quarantine, hire a psychic to guide them through an online seance on Zoom, only to discover the spirit they have summoned has a definite taste for blood. I confess this was a much better film than I was expecting: it's lean, it's mean, the performances are good, and I have to respect the cleverness of the approach.

The Ritual (2017). This is a prime example of a movie which is well-made, well-acted, and has a simple but intriguing premise, yet ultimately fails to deliver. "The Ritual" is the story of four British lads who go on a hiking tour of northern Sweden, only to discover there is something in the woods hunting them, something very old and driven by a peculiar need. Seldom have I watched a horror movie this well-crafted and thoughtful, yet the payoff is lacking: it would have been more interesting had it stuck to its early explorations of friendship, grief, cowardice and courage.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023). This is a movie drawn out of a single, terrifying chapter of Bram Stoker's "Dracula," specifically the part where Dracula systematically murders the crew of the transport ship he is using to take himself from Transylvania to England. It's well crafted, and boasts the mighty Liam Cunningham in its cast, but after a fairly promising start, it runs head-first into every problem modern moviemaking throws at us: over-reliance on CGI, disrespect for the source material, wokeist themes. In the hands of a better writer and director, it could have been a kind of 19th century "Alien," but it ends up just another example of how modern writers cannot create anything, but only desecrate the work of their betters.

Crucible of Terror (1971). I confess my dumb ass found this by mistake. I was looking for the movie below, and by the time I'd figured out my blunder was too invested, timewise, to stop watching. "Terror" is a gritty, low-budget flick about a British artist who makes sculptures out of his subjects -- literally. Although not without some memorable moments and boasting some credible actors, it comes off as cheap and amateurish, a kind of sleazy knock-off of Hammer Horror, and its general air of cheesy weirdness doesn't help.

Crucible of Horror (1971). Also known simply as "The Corpse," this is a much better British flick shot in the same year which stars the normally cuddly Michael Gough as the stuffy, sadistic, misogynistic patriarch of an upper middle-class family. His long-suffering wife and daughter decide to murder him, but discover that this is a hell of a lot easier said than done. An often surreal movie full of cruel symbolism and very definite things to say about sexual and spiritual repression and their effects on the mind and soul, it resembles "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty"...but with a corpse. Gough is superb as a man who clips roses, in more ways than one.

The Quiet Place (2018). While I wasn't enamored of this movie nearly as much as I expected to be given all the hype surrounding it, I found the story of a silent post-apocalyptic world where monsters hunt surviving humans by sound alone, engaging and quite well made. John Krasinski continues to show us that he can do a lot more than play Jim on "The Office," and in this film has to do it with almost no dialog at all, a challenge he accepts, and overcomes. The troublesome insistence on CGI over practical effects is increasingly tiresome to me, but in this case it's not much more than annoying.

Dog Soldiers (2002). Yet another British movie pits a squad of soldiers against a pack of slavering werewolves who have ambushed them deep in the Scottish wilderness. A fast, cleverly written, homage-laden action-horror piece with strong performances by Kevin McKidd, Sean Pertwee and Liam Cunningham, it retains a profane sense of humor throughout, but never slides too far into comedic territory to let audiences breathe easy. It's not at all scary, but damn, is it entertaining.

And that is as far as I've gotten, lads. I have ten more movies to go before Halloween night, but I have to say that with a few exceptions, the quality of the films I've seen lately is, overall, much better than those I watched last year. I make a point of mixing old ones with contemporary, and foreign flicks with American, but I never know just what the hell I'm going to encounter. And that, of course, is the essence of horror.

MY CATALOG AS A WRITER

At the beginning of this year I made some...predictions...about what I would accomplish this year (we all know I don't make resolutions). One of them was to make an effort to partially transition into traditional, mainstream publishing. I say "partially" because my fiction covers so many genres that I cannot possibly publish all of it under my own name using the traditional methods. Publishers, understandably, want to brand their authors with a simple, clearly understandable label -- mystery, horror, techno-thriller, fantasy, whatever -- and once branded, it is damnably hard for said authors to branch out without using a pseudonym. I am proud of my name, and proud of the work I do under it, and would prefer to avoid nom de plumes except under very specific, necessary circumstances. But at any rate, and without getting into details, I'm doing what I set out to do: I haven't succeeded, but important steps have been taken and good progress has been made. Whether the deal will be sealed is another matter entirely: you don't spend twelve and a half years slogging away in Hollywood and count any chickens -- and I mean any chickens -- before they hatch.

I mention this because I'm not sure if I've ever actually sat down and discussed, with the few thousand people who read this regularly, everything that I have published to date, mostly through the microimprint One Nine Books, directly to Amazon. I am not talking about short stories I've had published in print magazines. Nor am I talking about the short stories I've made available for purchase on Amazon. Longer forms only.

So, here goes:

NOVELS

CAGE LIFE (Cage Life Series #1). This is my first novel, the story of a New York-based MMA fighter who slugs the wrong guy in a barroom brawl and ends up owing the local Mafia his physical services as a means of paying his "debt." As a former parole officer with a background in martial arts, I was able to bring a lot of personal experience, knowledge and research into this novel that made both the criminal sequences and the fight scenes pass the tests thrown at them by, well, the actual criminals, cops and fighters who actually read it. This novel is like Film Noir minus most of the moral ambiguity, and there's a love story in there, too, as my hero, Mick, struggles with temptations of the criminal life and the violence it brings, and tries to find his way back to "normal" life. CAGE LIFE was Zealot Script Magazine's "Book of the Year" in 2016 and won the Best Indie Book Award.

KNUCKLE DOWN (Cage Life Series #2). The second book in the CAGE LIFE series finds Mick returning to New York to investigate threats made against the life of his ex-girlfriend...who is now engaged to his worst enemy. Battling with his feelings for her as he delves back into the underworld he escaped, he's also embroiled in an old-school fighting tournament with a million-dollar prize. The first book was a crime thriller; this one combines thrills with a mystery which Mick must solve if he wants to save the life of his estranged beloved, and delves into the dark intersection between big business and transnational crime. KNUCKLE DOWN won the Best Indie Book Award in 2019 and was a Writer's Digest Honorable Mention.

SINNER'S CROSS (Sinner's Cross Series #1). I've studied the Second World War since I was a small boy. I have a degree in history. I've read hundreds of books on the subject (in English and German), interviewed WW2 veterans, obtained boxes' worth of original documents, the Nuremberg Trials documents, etc., etc. SINNER'S CROSS is a WW2 novel told from both the American and the German points of view, describing their lives as they fight for a worthless crossroads on the Belgian-German border during the final months of 1944. It is not a story about strategy or technology. It is a study of human beings under the most extreme psychological and physical pressures men can experience. It is a deliberate, systematic attempt to avoid cliche, propaganda, and the sort of nationalistic feelings and "greatest generation" hero worship that abound in most stories of this type. Nobody has ever told me this was an easy book to read: the violence is relentless and extreme, and I play no favorites with the characters. But SINNER'S CROSS is a hit with critics. It has won the Book Excellence Award, the Literary Titan Gold Medal, the Best Indie Book Award, and the Reader's Favorite Gold Medal, among other accolades.

THE VERY DEAD OF WINTER (Sinner's Cross Series #2). This novel picks up where SINNER'S CROSS left off; it follows the surviving characters from the Battle of the Huertgen Forest into the opening stage of the Battle of the Bulge, i.e. the Ardennes Campaign of 1944 - 1945. It retains the split perspective of Americans and Germans, but like its predecessor, intersects and weaves the fates of these men closely together in a kind of violent 6-Degrees-of-Separation-meets-the-Butterfly Effect. It also highlights a part of the famous campaign which is little known -- the Battle of the Snow Eifel, an American catastrophe. THE VERY DEAD OF WINTER has won the Pinnacle Book Achievement Award, the Literary Titan Gold Medal, Book Excellence Award Finalist, and is a Reader's Favorite Five Star.

COLLECTIONS

DEVILS YOU KNOW. This is a collection of thirteen short stories I wrote over a 26 year period, covering subjects as diverse as grief, the devil, Nazism, gangterism, the Civil War, dystopia, and so on; but the unifying theme is horror. A few were previously published in literary magazines, but most were purpose-built for the collection, which -- as the name implies -- explores some of the darker aspects of human motivation and existence. There is some humor, too, though it tends toward the midnight black variety. If you by some chance have an interest as to how a writer's style develops over a quarter of a century at the keys, this is also for you.

COMING SOON

EXILES: A TALE FROM THE CHRONICLES OF MAGNUS (Magnus Chronicles II). My novella DEUS EX (see below) explored the idea of a dictator's downfall and attempt to escape from justice while proving -- to himself -- that he had been right all along. In writing the novella, I developed not only the world he occupied, but within my mind, the one he had destroyed in order to take power. In EXILES I explored this barely hinted-at world at length in full novel form, through the eyes of two protagonists at odds with the aspiring Tyrant. I have never had so much fun writing a book as this one, or written it as easily or in such a short time. This is part alternative history, part adventure, and part thriller. While reading DEUS EX might make the experience more enjoyable, it is not necessary, as I am not telling the story of Magnus in order, and indeed, the first entry in the series is actually its end. So spoilers are impossible. This novel will be released either later this year or early in 2024.

NOVELLAS

NOSFERATU. A non-supernatural horror story set in WW2 on the Eastern Front, it chronicles the experiences of a courageous, principled, but morally blind German officer who, after being wounded in battle, discovers the sinister origins of the means used to save his life. Winner of the Pinnacle Book Achievement Award.

SHADOWS AND GLORY. Another WW2 tale from the German perspective, it is the story of a naive, brainwashed young boy who idolizes his U-boat commander father, only to discover his hero has ideological feet of clay.

SEELENMORD. A nonmagical fantasy set in an ancient land, SEELENMORD tells of the arrival into a peaceful, pagan village of a mysterious stranger preaching a sinister new religion.

THE NUMBERS GAME. Yet another WW2 tale, from the British perspective and told in the black comic style of Evelyn Waugh and Derek Robinson, it is the story of a Hurricane pilot in the Battle of Britain whose passion for numbers, statistics and probabilities leads him to the inescapable conclusion that he can predict the exact moment of his death. A Pinnacle Book Achivement Award winner.

DEUS EX. Magnus Antonius Magnus once ruled a quarter of the Earth and was worshiped by millions as a god; now he is fleeing the ruins of his capital as his enemies close in from all sides. What went wrong? Can he escape justice? And if he does, has he learned anything from his downfall? (Alternative history)

WOLF WEATHER. A dark fantasy set in the wastes of the frozen north, finds the hero the sole survivor of an isolated fort, beset on all sides by werewolves whose plan for him is far worse than death. An exploration of what happens when wild savagery collides with iron discipline.

And that, friends and neighbors, is my catalog as of today, 10/18/23. There is, of course, more coming: if I do one thing correctly (an arguable assertion) it is get the ideas in my head onto paper. Feel free to explore all of them (save EXILES) via the links below.