Ricky Sprague's Blog, page 5

The Case of the Velvet Claws by Erle Stanley Gardner

You can't "spoil" great art. But some people are touchy about learning specific story details before experiencing a work of art on their own. With that in mind, this post features "mild spoilers."

Erle Stanley Gardner was a fascinating man. This brief biography at Thrilling Detective gives you a taste of his varied and very successful life. He wasn’t someone who wasted time. He went to

Christmas with Barbara Stanwyck

It’s impossible to “spoil” great art. Everyone knows that Hamlet and Ophelia get married and have four children at the end of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but that doesn’t stop us from listening to the audio version over and over again. That said, this post contains very specific and detailed plot information about the two films discussed. If you don’t want to know what happens in them and you

The Room Upstairs by Mildred Davis

NOTE: Although it’s impossible to “spoil” a real work of art—we all know that Holden Caulfield marries Jane Gallagher and has four children and lives happily ever after at the end of The Catcher in the Rye yet we continue to read and re-read it—please be warned that this post contains very specific information about the plot and the ending of the book discussed.






The Room Upstairs by Mildred

A Stranger in My Grave by Margaret Millar

About halfway through A Stranger in My Grave, it occurred to me that I was reading a Cornell Woolrich pastiche, written by an exceptionally talented writer. The dreamily purple writing style, the heavy psychological gimmickry, the reliance on coincidence and the importance of dreams… This is pure Woolrich. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I did start to wonder to what extent Millar was

Sleep With Strangers and Sleep With Slander by Dolores Hitchens

Sleep With Strangers introduces Jim Sader, a hardboiled or at least medium boiled Long Beach Private Investigator hired by Kay Wanderly to find her mother Felicia, who disappeared three nights before. Like many young women who hire private investigators, Kay is evasive in her answers and flighty and panicked in her attitude.

At the same time and completely coincidentally and unrelatedly,

Scientology in the age of Donald Trump

A&E has a fascinating and entertaining documentary series called “Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath,” which details the actress’s break from Scientology after spending decades within the church/corporation, and follows her as she listens to (fairly horrible) stories of other’s experiences.It’s interesting not just because of what it reveals about Scientology and its adherents, but about

Max Landis and the three institutionalized film industry flaws

Max Landis is the talented screenwriter/director son of the talented director John Landis. He is "up to his knees," so to speak, in Hollywood. And even as he is successfully participating in the process of creating corporate studio product, he’s also willing to comment on that process. This makes him invaluable, even if you disagree with his commentary or dislike his product.

Recently he posted

Fake Satire is an even worse threat than Fake News

When you just can't even and it's the current year.

Remember when certain Democrats, including President Barack Obama himself, tested out the idea of “false balance”— "giving equal weight to unsupported or even discredited claims for the sake of appearing impartial"*? That kind of fizzled out. But in its place has surged the idea of “fake news.”

“Fake news” seems to be whatever runs counter

The Bleeding Scissors / The Evil Days by Bruno Fischer

This beautiful Robert Maguire cover was an unused design for the original Bleeding Scissors paperback edition.

Stark House Press’s The Bleeding Scissors / The Evil Days double edition is an exciting and compulsively readable book, featuring two examples of fine pulp storytelling, suspense, and literate psychological insight.According to Gary Lovisi’s introduction, The Evil Days was

The Neon Jungle by John D. MacDonald

John D. MacDonald is one of the titans of American noir fiction. He’s best known for his famous Travis McGee books, but he wrote an astonishing number of superior stand alone suspense novels, and The Neon Jungle is an entertaining, breathless page turner.The book starts with a vignette about “The Neighborhood,” part of the fictional town of Johnston, where the reader is introduced to Varaki