Kenneth Atchity's Blog, page 18

Ken's Story Merchant Book Recommendation!!

LAST DAY TO GET YOUR FREE COPY OF CAJUN HOUSEHOLD WISDOM!


Laissez les bon temps roulez! Let the good times roll!

 

AVAILABLE ON AMAZON
Cajun culture is funny and fun-loving. It's rooted in the earth. It's rooted in the kitchen. It's needlessly, hopelessly, complicated, and yet is utterly simple and suspicious of all things modern, especially food and drink.
CAJUN HOUSEHOLD WISDOM takes you back to the days when family gatherings stretched far into summer nights with endless food and fun, when uncles and aunts, sisters and brothers, and countless cousins teased and taunted and chased fireflies, while grandpere spouted yet another story about "that ol' white mule," and strains of fiddle music lured lovers off into the dark.
You'll be reminded that the best therapy for whatever ails you, other than eating and laughing, is dancing. In little towns throughout the state of Louisiana, in lounges like the Rainbeaux in New Ibera, the Green Frog in Lake Charles, and the Purple Peacock in EUnice, you'll find people of all ages--from three to 103--dancing the two-step or the Cajun waltz at the fais-do-do nearly every night of the week--and they're still there at 9 a.m. the next morning. Cajun wisdom holds tru for young and old alike:

"If at foist you doan succeed, go an' dance!"

Story Merchant E-Book Deal! #FREE May 27 - May 31 Kenneth Atchity's Cajun Household Wisdom

Laissez les bon temps roulez! Let the good times roll!

AVAILABLE ON AMAZON
Cajun culture is funny and fun-loving. It's rooted in the earth. It's rooted in the kitchen. It's needlessly, hopelessly, complicated, and yet is utterly simple and suspicious of all things modern, especially food and drink.
CAJUN HOUSEHOLD WISDOM takes you back to the days when family gatherings stretched far into summer nights with endless food and fun, when uncles and aunts, sisters and brothers, and countless cousins teased and taunted and chased fireflies, while grandpere spouted yet another story about "that ol' white mule," and strains of fiddle music lured lovers off into the dark.
You'll be reminded that the best therapy for whatever ails you, other than eating and laughing, is dancing. In little towns throughout the state of Louisiana, in lounges like the Rainbeaux in New Ibera, the Green Frog in Lake Charles, and the Purple Peacock in EUnice, you'll find people of all ages--from three to 103--dancing the two-step or the Cajun waltz at the fais-do-do nearly every night of the week--and they're still there at 9 a.m. the next morning. Cajun wisdom holds tru for young and old alike:

"If at foist you doan succeed, go an' dance!"

Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the '80s with William Diehl An Interview with Kevin Courrier

 

Author William Diehl (Sharky's Machine, Chameleon, Primal Fear), a writer who wrote luridly powerful pulp with a political tinge, became a fascinating exercise in self-examination. When I discovered that Diehl was a pacifist who once marched with Martin Luther King in the South during the demonstrations against segregation, I was compelled to find out how such a peaceful man reconciled his polar opposites. To both my surprise and satisfaction, he was more than happy to comply while providing a vivid examination (through his thriller Chameleon) of the growing political mercenary movements in the eighties that would ultimately lead to Waco and Oklahoma City. Diehl would die at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta on November 24, 2006, of an aortic aneurysm. At the time of his death, he was working on his tenth novel Seven Ways to Die.

******

kc: I get the impression that when you sit down to write there's quite a war going on in your head.

wd: That's quite true. I find that subconsciously things from my past keep getting in and coming out of the books. A lot of the critics in reviewing Chameleon have called it one of the most violent books ever written. Yet I'm basically a pacifist. I don't own weapons. I don't even have a gun in the house. I live alone on an island. No doubt that it's a throwback to World War II when I served as a ball-turret gunner. All of those latent aggressions and violence are surfacing now. It has to be that because I'm certainly not interested in becoming active in the things I write about. But I should say that there's nothing about the violence and the weaponry that I depict in Chameleon that isn't really happening today.

kc: In this book, you examine an assassination squad -- a secret terrorist organization that trains at "The Farm" -- What is that?

wd: I knew that "The Farm" existed. I've known about it for several years and I met the man who runs it. He's a guy named Mitch Warbell. One night, we started talking about the place and he told me that while a lot of mercenaries go through the training course, many of these people are bankers and folks going to countries where terrorism is prevalent. They take the course as a self-protective device. That's what triggered the idea. Then I went out and took the course. Over a period of six months, I spent time talking to the instructors. Their stories gave me the basis for the book.

kc: When you were describing a moment ago those latent aggressions and the violence, how does it manifest itself when you are writing a book like Chameleon?

wd: The first chapter of the book was triggered by the Doobie Brothers' song "What a Fool Believes," which I heard on the radio as I was driving home. The song started a lovely little romantic story going in my head. Suddenly, it turned very dangerous and it got very violent. I don't know where it came from. All of a sudden, as I'm working on this romantic idyll, it got very tough. It was then that the story took off.

kc: At the heart of this violent story is a particular code of honour. Where does this come from?

wd: Chameleon is a story about honorable people versus dishonorable people. And I've put at the heart of it the Oriental philosophy of honor. My belief is that the Oriental philosophy of honour is a very positive and uncompromising belief. Whereas in my country, you have to struggle just to be a little bit honest. That's why in my novel Sharky's Machine you have four cops who are basically losers who become winners in the end because they couldn't be corrupted. That's also the story of Chameleon where you have two or three people who are honourable. I'm dealing with knights on white horses slaying dragons. And I still believe that's possible.

kc: Does the writing of action fiction though become a safety valve for your own violent fantasies?

wd: It's indeed a great release. What it is, is playing out your fantasies on paper. For instance, in Chameleon, I developed my own brand of martial arts. What I did was draw stick figures where I could try out the moves -- sometimes in front of a video camera -- and describe them. I really got into it. Then I also got into the method of trying to remember things without taking notes which is what these people in the book could do. I never took it as far as them but I found that if I went into a restaurant and found it fascinating enough to use in a book, I can remember every little detail of it. Then I file it away in my word processor. Often I tell people that I'm a method writer because I actually act things out in the room because you deal with your psyche on paper.

kc: How do you act these things out?

wd: If I'm angry, I go in and write a violent passage for a book. When I come out, I don't even want to step on an ant. If I'm writing about a character that I really like, and I know that the character is going to be killed, I can get depressed for a couple of days. In Sharky's Machine, when Nosh, Sharky's best friend, gets killed, I got into a funk over that and I couldn't write for over three days. I was so upset over having to kill that character. When certain things happen, I react emotionally as it is really happening. It can be draining at times. It's a good thing that I live on an island where my house is a hundred feet from the Atlantic Ocean. A lot of times after writing a passage I'll go down to the beach just to calm myself down. What happens is that I get hysterical inside and I can't translate that on paper. How do you describe to anybody the feelings and thoughts that go through your head at times like that? The best thing to do is find a way to get rid of it, once you've used up the part you need to put on paper.

kc: I'd like to take that a step further. If you resolve certain conflicts within yourself, does it also mean that your writing will change?

wd: Absolutely. My writing changed radically from Sharky's Machine to Chameleon. And a lot of it is in the emotional content of the book. I think Chameleon is a better book than Sharky even though it feels colder. Maybe that's because of what some of the characters do in the story.

kc: Has living on the beach provided the sanctuary needed?

wd: Yeah. I remember when the film of Sharky's Machine had its world premiere in Atlanta. All of the movie stars came and it seemed like the biggest thing since Gone With the Wind. As a result of it, I started to get a celebrity status in Atlanta. I was expected to be places and doing things. This started to really disturb me because I started to lose the independence that I had gained by writing these books. One day, I got on this airplane and flew down to the coast of Georgia and told this real estate agent that I wanted an island. The agent found me one immediately. Now I don't even go to the mainland. I don't even want to leave this place. There's one place there that is like Cannery Row restaurant filled with expatriates and people who just go to escape like me. I go there in the morning, read the newspaper and chat, then I don't see them until the next day. Since I moved there my writing productivity just jumped.


kc: I guess the biggest distinction some would have to make meeting you -- or knowing you -- is to separate the man from the writer?

wd: Probably most writers become very involuted and difficult to deal with when they're working. And I feel that I'm difficult to deal with because I vague-out. I can hold a conversation without even knowing what I'm saying. I'm so used to doing it. When I'm through, I wake up one morning and the book is finished and I have nothing to do. It's a bit of a downer because I've been living with it for so long. Then I go and do crazy things like scuba diving for weeks at a time. It's a schizophrenic way to make a living, but I wouldn't have it any other way. I love the isolation. Nobody can invade it. What other occupation is there where you can be totally isolated and deal with yourself in whatever terms you want to deal with yourself in?

Talking Out of Turn #13: William Diehl (1982)
-- Kevin Courrier is a writer/broadcaster, film critic, teacher and author. His forthcoming book is Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism. Courrier continues his lecture series on Film Noir ( Roads to Perdition ) at the Revue Cinema in Toronto in March. He's also facilitating a film series called Reel Politics at Ryerson University continuing February 27th.

#FREE May 20 - May 24! William Diehl’s “Thai Horse”⁠ - COMING TO THE SCREEN!

Atchity Productions Hatcher: The Search for Thai Horse Based on William Diehl’s novel Thai Horse Scripted by Kevin Bernardt (Medieval, Echo Boomers) 

AVAILABLE ON AMAZON

Christian Hatcher, the licensed killer they call the Shadow Warrior, is free from a hellhole South American jail. The former special ops officer returns to Hong Kong and Bangkok--- deadly and seductive stops on the heroin pipeline—to track down his best friend, missing since the war.⁠

⁠

"Diehl knows how to tell a story, and his novel moves."⁠

-- The New York Times Book Review⁠

"In the best thriller tradition.,"⁠

-- Los Angeles Times⁠

Writers Write!

 

When LA Review of Books Reviewed Dennis Palumbo's Night Terrors

The Criminal Kind: Dennis Palumbo’s "Night Terrors"

By Cullen Gallagher

Night Terrors by Dennis Palumbo

NIGHT TERRORS, the third in Dennis Palumbo’s series featuring clinical psychologist Daniel Rinaldi, proves that there is more to a procedural mystery than mere procedure. A cunning reworking of genre conventions, it is consistently surprising and occasionally even subversive, undermining our expectations and challenging the fundamentals of procedural mysteries.

In his latest literary outing, Rinaldi is abducted in the night by the FBI and thrown into a case against his will. He’s been assigned to Lyle Barnes, a recently retired FBI agent who is suffering from a severe case of night terrors that has him on the brink of collapse. Barnes’s condition isn’t helped by the fact that he, too, is in the custody of the Feds. Barnes’s final job was helping to apprehend a serial killer of prostitutes, John Jessup, who recently died during a prison riot. Now, one of Jessup’s admirers — an anonymous letter writer known only by his signature tag, “Your Biggest Fan” — has been avenging Jessup’s death by murdering those responsible for his imprisonment. Barnes is high on the list. But before Rinaldi can begin the therapy, Barnes escapes, and it’s a race against time to find him before the “Fan” does. Concurrently, Rinaldi is pushed into yet another investigation when he agrees to meet the mother of Wesley Currim, a young man who has confessed to the brutal murder of a local businessman. Besides pleading guilty and leading the police and Rinaldi to the body, however, Currim has revealed no details as to how, or why, the crime was committed, or why he denies his mother’s alibi. Initially called in for his psychological expertise,

Rinaldi soon finds himself acting as detective more than therapist — a role far more dangerous than he anticipated.

Smartly structured with well-timed twists and revelations, Palumbo and his surprises are always one step ahead of the reader. Though at times dense on procedural exposition, Palumbo deserves high praise for playing so fairly with readers. His style is low on red herrings, out-of-the-blue clues, and last-minute rescues — the puzzle pieces are all there from page one, and while the way they fit together isn’t obvious, the conclusion is achieved naturally.

Whereas conventional mysteries can be seen as reasserting stability on an unstable world — uncovering the truth, righting wrongs, and asserting justice — Palumbo in Night Terrors repeatedly disrupts any notion of security. Fiendishly clever villains and feeble authorities are nothing new to the mystery field, but Palumbo approaches these stale tropes with a fresh perspective. So much of Night Terrors’s exposition is dedicated not to how the investigative process pieces things together, but rather how it frequently fails to. “They still don’t have squat, do they?” asks Barnes. “That’s ’cause they rely too much on procedure and modern forensics.” In this sense, Night Terrors is an anti-procedural. And whereas one would expect a professional specialist like Daniel Rinaldi to use his vocation like “magic” at key points throughout the narrative, Palumbo repeatedly denies any such narrative convenience. (Barnes, too, is apathetic toward Rinaldi’s attempts at psychology: “That’s just therapeutic bullshit.”) Palumbo challenges his character to move beyond the niche he has created for himself — a provocation that many series creators (and their protagonists) don’t often place themselves in.

Among the most distinguishing facets of noir is the way in which it responds to social conditions. Even in literature, crimes don’t happen in a vacuum. Economic desperation fuels the nihilism of James M. Cain and Horace McCoy’s 1930s novels, just as post– World War II discontent and malaise runs deep through the 1950s paperbacks of Day Keene and Harry Whittington. In Night Terrors, Palumbo reacts to a distinctly post-economic-collapse American geography:

Unlike Pittsburgh, whose seventeen miles of steel works had been torn down, victims of the economic cataclysm that ultimately revitalized the city, towns like Braddock had no reason to dismantle their dying mills and factories. Nothing was going to take their place.

And in retired FBI agent Lyle Barnes — at one point the grand protector of the country — Palumbo sees a fractured, shaken consciousness that hasn’t been pieced together again.

Clinicians are blaming the unusual rise in adult symptoms to the uncertainty of contemporary life. The economy, terrorism. Even the recent natural disasters. Tsunamis. Earthquakes. The daily anxiety suppressed by adults during waking life, later invading their sleep.

Palumbo may state his theme obviously, but he’s not trite about it, nor does he pretend that Rinaldi could solve these paramount issues. Once more, Palumbo contests the notion of the fix-it-all detective in favor of one whose wisdom lies not in his power, but in his powerlessness.

¤

Cullen Gallagher regularly reviews noir novels and anthologies for LARB.

LARB CONTRIBUTOR

Cullen Gallagher lives in Brooklyn, New York. His writing has appeared in many publications including The Paris Review, Brooklyn Rail, and Not Coming to a Theater Near You, as well as in the anthologies Cult Cinema: An Arrow Video Companion (2016), edited by Anthony Nield, and Screen Slate: New York City Cinema 2011–2015 (2017), edited by Jon Dieringer. He blogs about crime fiction at Pulp Serenade (www.pulp-serenade.com).

Teresa Weaver's Bookshelf Atlanta Magazine

 

SEVEN WAYS TO DIE by William Diehl with Kenneth John Atchity 
Before he died in 2006, Diehl (Sharky's Machine and Primal Fear) had written more than 400 pages of his tenth novel, about a captain in the NYPD on the trail of a serial killer in Manhattan. Using an outline and notes that Diehl left behind, Atchity finished the thriller, staying very true to the fast-paced, screenplay-ready plot that was the author's trademark. It's a fitting posthumous tribute to the former journalist-and first managing editor of Atlanta magazine who left his day job in his fifties to pursue his dream of writing fiction.

FIRST LOOK: As always his psyche was momentarily askew. He performed each autopsy compassionately. They were constant reminders of the finite line between life and death, between the human body and a corpse without a soul.

Author Spotlight William Diehl

Critically acclaimed author William Diehl was an extraordinarily gifted storyteller who enjoyed an unbroken string of bestselling novels.

Born in New York in 1924 he flew 29 bombing raids over Europe as a teenaged ball-turret gunner. After the war Diehl was working as a reporter for his hometown paper, The Clearfield Progress, in a town he describes as "so far up in the mountains you had to bail out of a plane to get out." His hometown friend, Bob Wallace called, with news that his father-in-law had found a job for Diehl at The Atlanta Constitution. Diehl headed south. But somehow, the Atlanta newspaper missed the memo. There was no job.

"I stood in the lobby, waiting for editor Ralph McGill to come out. When Mr. McGill came out, I told him what had happened. He asked if I had been in the war. I said yes, as a ball turret gunner in a B-24. He said that if I could survive that, I could certainly do a reporter's job," Diehl recalls. "I went to work that night."

Diehl first wrote obituaries for the Atlanta Constitution, then moved to the police beat. Always, writing was his first love, but when the Constitution and rival Atlanta Journal merged in 1950, confusion and layoffs in the reorganized photo department led to his second career: photography.

In 1956, Diehl left the Constitution, turning almost exclusively to freelance photography in the next years.

Bill was among the early photographers to use a 35-millimeter camera. Most of the others were using Liecas or 4x5s. He shot every [Geogia Tech] football game for 11 years, then assignments for the alumni publications. He did some really experimental stuff that worked very well. Some of Diehl's football pictures were printed in Sports Illustrated, rushed after the game to a Delta airplane that would deliver them to New York overnight.

Much of his work was for Georgia Tech; other assignments, including a portrait of Coca-Cola Company Chairman Robert Woodruff that appeared on the cover of Business Week magazine, came through contacts and friends from Tech.

In 1960, Diehl became managing editor of Atlanta magazine.

On his 50th birthday his wife threw a birthday party for him, and one of the gifts was an ice-cream typewriter from Baskin-Robbins. It was so neat that nobody would eat it," he says. "After the party, I went back to get a piece, but the typewriter was just a molten pile of ice cream. I thought, 'That's my career.’”

The next morning, Diehl sold all his cameras and soon began the nine-month effort of birthing "Sharky's Machine," a dark look at the world of an Atlanta vice cop.

Giving up his profession of journalist and photographer at 50 was a big gamble, but it paid off. Sharky was a big book, a big movie.

Bill Diehl caught the proverbial brass ring, but it was with a last-minute lunge: As he and his agents were talking on the phone about which of two offers to accept from publishing companies for his first book, the phone company cut off his service for non-payment.

"I had to walk about a half-mile to a phone booth to finish the negotiations."

From that phone booth, Diehl negotiated a $1 million deal with the Dell publishing company.
Following the success of Sharky's Machine, Diehl relocated to St. Simons Island, GA in the early 80's with his wife Virginia Gunn, an Atlanta television personality, where he lived for the next 15 years completing eight more novels including 27 aka THE HUNT, THAI HORSE, HOOLIGANS, CHAMELEON, PRIMAL FEAR, which also became a movie by the same name starring Richard Gere and Edward Norton, SHOW OF EVIL and EUREKA

 

 

Story Merchant E-Book Deals: FREE May 6 - May 10 Seven Ways to Die by William Diehl with Kenneth Atchity⁠

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Manhattan Murders... by the book! There are seven basic ways to die. In 1969 Dr. John C. Cavanaugh catalogued them all in his Primer of Forensic Pathology-Case Studies for the Novice M.E. and someone is using it as a handbook to kill!⁠⁠From the New York Times bestselling author of PRIMAL FEAR and SHARKY'S MACHINE -- From the Nez Perce Indian reservation in Idaho to New York's Central Park is a straight line right through Bill Diehl's last and most intriguing lead character, Micah Cody.⁠

TRULY EXCELLENT WRITING: The Ghosts of Ponce De Leon Park by Fred Willard

Part Four


Del woke up, or he thought he woke up. It seemed like he was back in the kudzu field and there were men standing around him, but something reminded him of the mission back at Nashville.
It was the picture the reverend had taken him aside to see. Some old drunk had painted it from the Book of Revelation showing skeletons on winged horses, the four horsemen of the apocalypse riding above the battle field at Armageddon. He hadn't understood then what the preacher had meant, showing it to him like that, but now he knew that he had been shown his death.

He might as well have put his hands on Del's head in benediction and said, "Go forth my son, and die by skinhead," because Del knew the four men looking down at him were going to kill him. They didn't have any hair and their skin was stretched tight and showed their skulls. The moonlight made it seem they had bleached bone instead of flesh and their eyes had retreated in their sockets. They leaned over Del lying in his bedroll and his own piss.


"He smells rank," one of the men said.

"Let's put him out of his misery."

"It's my legs," Del said. "They ain't no good."

"Don't worry old man. God's going to give you a new body."

Del saw the heel of the boot coming down on his face, felt bone crunching, and heard a sound like loud ringing in his ears. He let go of everything and didn't know nothing they did after that.

Del was unconscious and then he saw the kudzu in front of his face again. There was a man standing next to him. The man knelt down and put his hand on Del's shoulder.

"Hello, son. I've been wanting to talk to you for a long time."

Del knew he was dead because it was his father's voice. He stood up quickly, held his arm in front of him and marveled at it.  It was milky white under the full moon and had perfect skin like a baby's, like he had never worked in the sun or fallen down.

The dark green kudzu was silver where it was kissed by the light and his father's face was beautiful like a blessing Del had never seen in this world.

"I've been wanting to tell you that I always loved you. I didn't leave you that night, and that's the truth. Some bad men took me away from the ball park in their automobile. They took me out of town and killed me. They cut my gut open so my body wouldn't float, and they wrapped me in burlap, and tied cement blocks to me, and they threw me in the Chattahoochee River. I swear, son, that I never meant to leave you that night. I always loved you. And now I've been sent down here to take you up to heaven," he said.

Del picked up the bottle, took a little sip and saw the hunger on his father's face as he looked at the sherry. He wouldn't offer him any.  He'd wait for him to ask ... or maybe even beg.

"If you just come from heaven, how come you want a drink so bad?" Del asked.

"They sent me down to get you, son. You don't go with me, you got to stay by yourself."

"You always were a liar. How do I know it’s heaven you’re taking me to?"

"Could you give me a taste of that wine? Then we could go up there. Don't you want to be with the other people? Your mother's up there."


Del turned around, kicked his dirty bed roll and started walking fast to the railroad, then running down the tracks leaving his father far behind. Now that God have given him his new body, he didn't need nobody or their stinking lies. From now on he would travel alone.



AVAILABLE ON AMAZON

A Note From the Editor
There is, in every city of some size, "a street of appetites" — a place where people with hungers congregate, a street where things happen in dark places. In Atlanta, The Bitter Southerner’s hometown, that street has always been Ponce de Leon Avenue. Ponce, as we call it, is home to the legendary Clermont Lounge, where strippers whose average age is 46.5 shake their moneymakers, and the Majestic Diner, which has been serving hangover prevention and cures 24/7 since 1929. Ponce always begs to be the setting of a novel. Back in 1997, an Atlanta writer named Fred Willard delivered a great one. “Down on Ponce” was hard-boiled crime fiction, solidly in the tradition of Raymond Chandler and Jim Thompson. “Down on Ponce” permanently planted itself in my brain. I was 36 years old when it came out, and I’ve gone back to reread it several times. For a guy like me, who loves crime fiction written with verve and feistiness, “Down on Ponce” was just the ticket, particularly because I knew its setting like the back of my hand.But in the last decade or so, the literary world hasn't seen much of Fred Willard's work. Then a few weeks ago, out of the blue, Willard sent The Bitter Southerner a short story.This made me a happy guy — happier still because his story is set once again on Ponce, Atlanta's “street of appetites,” as Willard so aptly describes it here. You'll experience two Ponces in this story. One is the Ponce of the 1990s, when the kudzu-shrouded, long-unused railroad tracks that bisect the street were still the home of much nefarious activity. Today, those tracks are a pedestrian trail called the BeltLine. The other is the Ponce of the mid-20th century, when the Negro League Atlanta Black Crackers and the minor-league Atlanta Crackers shared Ponce de Leon Park, an old baseball field now long gone. Today, a Whole Foods sits about where center field was. A crime does occur in this story, and the writing is as blunt as the best crime fiction, but in “The Ghosts of Ponce de Leon Park,” Willard is now exploring different characters with different hungers — the homeless. We meet Bob and Del soon after they arrive in Atlanta, having come to the city after Del “just wore out my welcome too many places” in Nashville.Speaking of welcomes, we’re happy to welcome one of our favorites, Fred Willard, to the pages of The Bitter Southerner.— Chuck Reece
Repost from the Bitter Southerner