Ed Gorman's Blog, page 108

Just too dagnabbed sleazy not to post

Texas cop shoots man after women refuse his ‘wife-swapping’ planBy David Edwards
Tuesday, December 3, 2013 12:08 ESTTopics: Jesus Edward Guitron ♦ Olmos Park Officer Frankie Salazar ♦ Olmos Park Police Chief Fritz Bohne ♦ police officer 2157  A police officer in Texas has been accused of shooting another man multiple times after two women reportedly refused to go along with a plan to swap sexual partners for the night.According to the  San Antonio Express-News , 29-year-old Olmos Park Officer Frankie Salazar and 33-year-old Jesus Edward Guitron had talked about swapping partners for several months.But when Guitron showed up at Salazar’s apartment on Saturday night, things did not go as planned.A woman who apparently came to the apartment with Guitron told police that they all had a few drinks, but she “didn’t feel right” and pushed Salazar away when he started kissing her in the bedroom.The police report indicated that a second 29-year-old woman — presumably Salazar’s partner — became upset when she came in the bedroom because she had not been told about the plan to swap partners.The first woman urged Guitron to leave, but he began to fight with Salazar. Police documents alleged that the Olmos Park officer then told the 29-year-old woman to get his .45-caliber Springfield XDS pistol. She told police that she fired a shot at Guitron “just to scare him,” but then later said she couldn’t remember firing the shot.As Guitron and the first woman were making their way out the door, Salazar fired three more shots, the first woman told police.Guitron suffered gunshot wounds to his chest, right hand and his left pinky may have also been hit. He was listed in critical but stable condition after being taken to San Antonio Military Medical Center.Salazar was charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and released on $50,000 bail. He has been placed on leave without pay by the Olmos Park Police Department.“We have an officer that made a mistake, made a bad judgement,” Olmos Park Police Chief Fritz Bohne told WOAI. “And as I tried to tell kids that want to get into law enforcement, be careful about your decisions cause decisions have long-term consequences.”Watch the video below from WOAI, broadcast Dec. 3, 2013.

Ken Levine's Great Chistmas story - hilarious and all too true

AKen LevKENKENime: NaVote    VVmed one of the BEST 25 BLOGS OF 2011 by TIME Magazine. Ken Levine is an Emmy winning writer/director/producer/major league baseball announcer. In a career that has spanned over 30 years Ken has worked on MASH, CHEERS, FRASIER, THE SIMPSONS, WINGS, EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND, BECKER, DHARMA & GREG, and has co-created his own series including ALMOST PERFECT starring Nancy Travis. He and his partner wrote the feature VOLUNTEERS. Ken has also been the radio/TV play-by-play voice of the Baltimore Orioles, Seattle Mariners, San Diego Padres. and has hosted Dodger Talk on the Dodger Radio Network.A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS meets MAD MEN BY KEN LEVINE
A holiday tradition is A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS and we pretty much have a Mad Man to thank for it. John Allen was a Don Draper at McCann-Erickson in the mid '60s. On behalf of Coca-Cola he was lobbying for Charlie Brown. It would be the first animated adaptation of Charles M. Schultz’s classic PEANUTS comic strip. But Allen had to really twist arms because in typical fashion, CBS hated it.

They thought the animation was awful, the story too thin and depressing, the jazz score inappropriate for kids, and of course wanted a laugh-track. I'm surprised they didn't require a laugh-track on THE TWILIGHT ZONE.

And CBS was especially opposed to Linus reciting the story of the birth of Christ from the Bible. What the hell is that doing in a Christmas Special?

Oh, and they didn’t like that children were doing the voices of the…uh, children. In other words, all the things that made it distinctive; all the things that made it great. One high-ranking CBS program executive/visionary said it was a “piece of shit”.

And CBS had a lot riding on this. It was going to pre-empt THE MUNSTERS and follow GILLIGAN’S ISLAND. The quality had to be top notch to join that pantheon of excellence.

But John Allen pushed and pushed and finally persuaded the reluctant program chief to air the special. A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS premiered 48 years ago this month.

And got a 50 share.


It won an Emmy and a Peabody and became an instant holiday classic. I guess children doing the voices of children did not result in a viewer revolt.

CBS began running the special every year (taking credit for it of course). And it achieved the almost unheard of feat of getting higher ratings year after year. By 1969 it was scoring a 53 share.

CBS continued to air the special until 2000. ABC then took over. and has aired it ever since.  They'll show it again tomorrow night at 8:00/7:00 Central.  

MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY ANNIVERSARY CHARLIE BROWN.

And thanks to John Allen.

Mel Odom's interesting take on A Purple Place for Dying by John D. MacDonald (scroll down)

A Purple Place for Dying  is one of the more twisted Travis McGee novels. The third in the series, it’s one of the landlocked adventures in the early books. The novel is also one of the most surprising with the shocking murder taking place in the opening pages.The cast of characters that glide through the pages are an interesting and over-the-top bunch, but they’re also very true to the kind of people they are. I grew up in an area that feels a lot like the setting for the book. Jass Yeoman is a lot like the tough cowboy types I grew up with, hard drinking, hard fisted men that didn’t back down from anything. The college professor and his doting sister seem really out of place in today’s world, but I can remember when people like this were almost – but not quite – the norm. for the rest go here: http://bookhound.wordpress.com/

on movie morlocks this a.m. jack benny and raymond burr great stuff lordy i miss jack benny

burr http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hPq9q...

ATribute To Ray Bradbury fromm the SF SITE

Jason Sturgis is a freelance writer and an avid Sci-Fi and comic book fan. Ray Bradbury is his favorite writer.

Ray Bradbury May Have Passed Away, but His Stories Remain Foreverby Jason StrangisI thought Ray Bradbury was going live forever. I really did!So imagine my surprise when I heard that one of the all-time greats of the literary field died on June 5, 2012, at a mere 91 years of age. Well, if the incomparable Ray Bradbury wasn’t going to live forever, I thought he would at least make it to 100.Alas, no person can escape death, not even the legends.

It’s been more than a year now since Bradbury’s passing and I still can’t believe it.But I shouldn’t be too sad. None of us in the literary community should be. After all, Bradbury lived a long, rich, full, and incredibly rewarding life with no regrets. He always believed that he never worked a day in his life because he did what he loved most.“Stuff your eyes with wonder,” Bradbury once stated in one of his novels. “See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream…”The legacy Bradbury leaves behind is nearly unmatched among the great writers of all time. Immortality is reserved for a select few in their chosen field. In the literary world there’s Shakespeare, Shelley, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Poe among others. Include to that list Ray Bradbury.Fortunately, we still have Bradbury’s sensational short stories and classic novels such as The Martian Chronicles, Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and perhaps his most acclaimed masterpiece, Fahrenheit 451.A cautionary tale where books are outlawed and burned in a futuristic totalitarian state, Fahrenheit 451 is perhaps Bradbury’s most personal and strongly felt novel. Self-educated in libraries (for he did not go to college), Bradbury wanted to make sure his beloved books would be safe from censorship and perhaps even worse – banning.“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture,” Bradbury once said. “Just get people to stop reading them.”I can’t help but wonder what Bradbury must have thought about the uprising of video games and reality TV. Of course I know the answer. Forever the rebel and anti-conformist, Bradbury would rage against anything (even the Kindle) that takes the place of good old-fashioned, beautiful books.

for the rest go here:
http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2013...

Villains

SATURDAY, MAY 23, 2009VillainsIn the Guardian (UK) Michael Hann responds to David Thomson's piece about movie villains. The major and minor ones of different types.

"David Thomson thinks it's Robert Shaw – even when, as in Jaws, he's on the side of the angels, David believes Shaw to have the been the scariest man to stride across the cinema screens. So who are the greatest villains in cinema history? They must be characters who compel us to watch, people who make us wonder: what happened to make them that way?

"So those villains who are set up purely to teach us about the hero – as in the likes of Zodiac or Rear Window – don't work. Not least because you never get to encounter them as real characters. Nor do "supervillains" – the likes of Blofeld or the Joker in either his Ledger or Nicholson guises – because we know they are not and can never be real. They are cartoons, and we know they exist only to entertain.

"The villains who truly terrify are those who we might plausibly encounter, if we are unlucky, if our lives go right off the rails, if we simply happen to be in their path when they come through town. They are those who bring disorder, the thing that those of us whose lives follow patterns fear most. They are the likes of Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men, who holds the life of a petrol station attendant in his fingers, even if the hapless old man doesn't realise it. We are horrified, because of the discrepancy between our knowledge and the petrol pumper's. Or Tommy DeVito in Goodfellas, who turns from genial to petrifying in the blink of an eye, and – worse for us – does so without recognising the distinction. Or Tommy's homegrown cousin, Trainspotting's Begbie, whom an awful lot of YouTube posters seem to regard, worryingly, as a role model."

Ed here:

"The villains who truly terrify are those who we might plausibly encounter, if we are unlucky, if our lives go right off the rails, if we simply happen to be in their path when they come through town."

If that's the measure I'd go with Robert Mitchum in Cape Fear and Joe Pesci in Casino. Mitchum is controlled madness, Pesci is a psychopath with no control whatsoever. Mitchum's lizard looks and Pesci's compulsive explosions are what we hear about on the news today. For instance, in NYC yesterday a man ran his car into a traffic agent about to give him a parking ticket; a few days ago a man tore out his small son's eye; a woman threw her four month old baby out the window of a speeding car.

The other night I quoted Robert Bloch about his crime novels and how he tried to cope with "The terrible inability to understand the irrational behavior of certain human beings, what is it that impels that sometime senseless sadistic cruelty."

There's been a merging of horror and crime fiction and you'll find many examples in both genres. The stuff of this merger scares me (as a reader and viewer) far more than the traditional approach of haunted houses and spooky trappings. Stephen King is largely responsible for this. Carrie terrified because the emotional center of the fear was Carrie's reaction to the horrors of high school, horrors many us us have suffered.

A fair share of King's short stories give us nightmares because they're rooted in reality. Even a complete fantasy such as The Mangler--about a laundry press machine with murderous intentions--gives us the creeps because many of us are luddites and suspect that we aren't using machines, they're using us. Hell, look at our relationship with our computers. A fair share of us work every day at their mercy. They can take a day off and tell us to shove it. They just might be be able to do a lot of to do a lot of other things, too. Things we don't like to think about especially when we see what the Japanese are starting to do with robots.

All this bears on the villains we create today. The original Cape Fear had the power to shock because audiences had rarely seen a madman like Mitchum on the screen. And each decade since then has built on that Mitchum icon, trying to put him in a more contemporary setting without losing any of his animal lunacy. Some of these versions work; far too many don't. The Bad Guy has become a cliche. But true villain--the real Boogeyman--has likely been with us since (in whatever form) we crawled from the sea.

I grew up with men like Robert Shaw--dangerous and unpredictable Irishers. Scary men. I also knew a few guys, later on, who were at least shirttail kin to the Mitchum icon--breathtakingly cruel. One of them ended up being stabbed to death by the wife he'd beaten over the course of many years. She had her leg in a cast thanks to him the night she killed him. He came at her and she picked up a butcher knife and that was that. The jury was out less than an hour. She walked. It was way past time.

To me the most haunting villains have this streak of almost inhuman cruelty in them, a king of cruelty that makes them unrecognizable as people. . I think that's what Robert Bloch was talking about. Think about Lou Ford in Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me.

Hell just take a minute and study Dick Cheney's face. It's all there.

How do you folks feel about villainy?

for the rest of the Michael Hann article go here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmbl...

Why Alfred Hitchcock Still Lives BY DAVID THOMSON from the New Republic

AUG


Why Alfred Hitchcock Still LivesBY DAVID THOMSON
TTt
The other day, two esteemed literary figures sent me a short questionnaire on
Alfred Hitchcock. They wondered, do I think about him? I do.
The questions were going to a lot of people, and I don’t know what the esteemed lit figs plan to do with the survey. But what struck me was the currency of Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980). It’s not that he has an anniversary, but those dates are telling. He has been dead more than thirty years. A group of exceptional film-makers died at about the same moment: Howard Hawks, Chaplin, Nicholas Ray, George Cukor, William Wyler, Vincente Minnelli, Douglas Sirk, King Vidor. With regret, I have to concede that those careers are now known in the halls of cinephilia but hardly anywhere else. Yet if you say “Hitch” out loud on any bus, people start looking for a bomb, or a fat man with a poker face who is studiously ignoring the search. That voice, his look, the promise, and the threat—they’re all with us still.A package of Hitchcock’s silent films, beautifully restored by the British Film Institute’s National Archive, is traveling round the country and delighting viewers who had come to think of him as American, Technicolored, and a devotee of desperate cries and screaming music. Recently two feature films about him— The Girl and Hitchcock —had a commercial release. They weren’t any good, but someone reckoned that this director’s curious and repressed sex life was a subject for entertainment instead of biographical research. And in 2012, the poll of critics organized by Sight & Sound (it comes once a decade) determined that at long last Citizen Kane should step aside. Vertigo was the greatest film ever made.That’s a curious shift. When it opened in 1958, Vertigo was a flop, in an age when Hitch was not accustomed to such affronts. Not long afterward, he withdrew the film, which surely helped to increase its allure. I was entranced by Vertigo in 1958, and I am fascinated by its courage still—I mean its resolve to defy the box office and expose the workings of a secretive man. But is it even the best Hitchcock film? I’d rather see Rear Window , North by Northwest , Psycho , or Notorious . That hardly matters. As soon as you mention Psycho, the cabinet of Dr. Hitchcock is ajar, allowing us to see and hear his insolent mixture of menace and contempt, murder and mischief. My problem with Vertigo’s gloom is that there are no laughs (except for the absurd ease of parking in San Francisco). When Hitch is most himself, we laugh as we cringe, and sooner or later we get the inner message—what are the movies if we don’t know whether to smile or to shudder?When I imagined the bomb on the bus, with the fat man taking no notice, I was alluding to a big scene in Sabotage (1936), but the example is important to most of Hitchcock. He wanted to devastate us, but he preferred to stay cool and professional about it. He was confirmed in his respect for fear, like a great artist, or a great torturer. His films were experiments in what a screen, darkness, and apprehension could do, and he liked to maintain the manner of the laboratory technician, observing but himself unmoved. So part of the recklessness in Vertigo was the way a private (if not secretive) man was prepared to disclose his own disquiet over this chronic detachment. The guilty passion glimpsed in that film was of a man falling into his own sexual fascination with a story until it drowned life. Thus the greatest film ever made (for now) is a stricken admission about film itself and the fantasy it 
feeds on.

for the rest go here: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/11...

Forgotten Books: A Memory of Murder by Ray Bradbury

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2009Forgotten Books: A Memory of MurderRay Bradbury's first collection, published in 1947 by Arkham House, contained so many memorable and lasting stories it has become legendary. A single book by a young writer including true masterpieces such as "The Lake," "The Small Assassin," "The Homecoming," "Uncle Einar" and many, many more--just about unthinkable. A fair share of these stories were later included in The October Country, a collection that is for me the equal of The Martian Chronicles.

There's another collection that in the scheme of Bradbury's career is far less important but equally interesting. When Dell published A Memory of Murder we were given our first look at the crime and suspense stories Bradbury wrote for such pulps as Dime Mystery Magazine and New Detective Magazine. Most of the stories appeared between 1944 and 1946.

I've probably read this book four or five times over the years. It has the energy and inventiveness of all good pulp with the bonus of watching a young writer struggle to find the voice that is really his. In several of the stories we hear the voice that Bradbury will later perfect. He's often proclaimed his admiration of Cornell Woolrich and here we see the dark Woolrich influence, especially in the excellent "The Candy Skull" (Mexico has long fascinated Bradbury; here it's nightmare Mexico), "The Trunk Lady" and (what a title) "Corpse Carnival." One of Bradbury's most famous stories is here also, "The Small Assassin," written for a penny a word for Dime Mystery Magazine in 1946.

The most interesting story is "The Long Night." I remember the editor who bought it writing a piece years later about what a find it was. And it is. A story set in the Hispanic area of Los Angeles during the war, it deals with race and race riots, with the juvenile delinquency that was a major problem for this country in the war years (remember The Amboy Dukes?) and the the paternal bonds that teenage boys need and reject at the same time. A haunting, powerful story that hints at the greatness that was only a few years away from Bradbury.

What can I tell you? I love this book. At its least it's a pure pulp romp and at its best it's the master about to change science fiction forever. And making a memorable pass at making his mark on crime fiction as well.

Excellent Max Allan Collins piece Why I Write from Publisher's Weekly

WHY I WRITE
by Max Allan Collins
Why do you write?Many writers have a glib comeback for this question. Samuel Johnson famously said, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” Asked what inspired him, Mickey Spillane would reply, “The urgent need for money.” And I have often described my career as an ongoing effort to avoid a real job.Certainly earning a living is a valid reason to write; but really, getting paid is what allows me to write – and has made me a full-time writer since 1977. I take pride in not having a day job, and when asked why I write so much, I usually say, “To keep the lights on.” Anyway, what else am I supposed to do with my time?The ranks of successful authors include lawyers, doctors and in particular teachers – noble professions, but part-time scribes all. Early on I taught at a college myself, though never more than half-time, having sold my first two novels at the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop. Teaching drains the creative juices that writing requires, and I got out of academia as soon as possible.Stories have been my main interest longer than I can remember. My mother read me Tarzan books at bedtime and encouraged me to read Dick Tracy comic books (her favorite strip). Chester Gould’s famous dick led me into Sherlock Holmes, Ellery Queen and the Saint, and – by junior high – Sam Spade, Phillip Marlowe and Mike Hammer, an interest fostered by the wave of TV private eyes of the late ‘50s. My sixth-grade teacher told me I would never be successful because I insisted on writing “blood and thunder” (the title of my 1995 Nathan Heller novel, by the way).
 for the rest go here: http://www.maxallancollins.com/blog/

Trouble Man available again for only $2.99

WESTERN NOIR




















Best known for his novels of mystery and suspense, Ed Gorman is also a practiced Spur Award winning writer of westerns, in both novel and short story form. "Simply one  of the best western writers of our time," said the ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS. "Gorman turns the western genre on its ear much like the western writing of Elmore Leonard," wrote BOOKGASM. "Ed Gorman's western stories are anything but ordinary. They often take place in lonely,tragic, mythical landscapes," noted GOODREADS. "Western noir...and Gorman's certainly the best at it," declared SOMEBODY DIES.


Ray Coyle hadn't been a real gunfighter for ten years, and that was the way he liked it. He would have been content to live out his life as a performer in a Wild West show. But then he got the news that his son was dead, killed in suspicious circumstances, and so Coyle set out to discover the truth.

Coopersville was a town full of secrets, most of them ugly. Brutal ex-convict Harry Winston knows those secrets, many of them involving the wealthy Trevor family. And Harry wants not only money but also revenge on the Trevors. His plans are complicated by the arrival of Ray Coyle, who has a score of his own to settle with one of the Trevors . . . and for anybody to get what they want, blood will have to be spilled.

Master storyteller Ed Gorman spins a dark, compelling tale of greed, lust, and murder in TROUBLE MAN, one of the best Western noir novels ever written, now available again from Rough Edges Press. Powerful, tragic, and deeply compassionate, Gorman's critically acclaimed stories and novels have made him one of today's leading authors of Western, crime, suspense, and horror fiction.
 AVAILABLE AT THE FOLLOWING PLACES for $2.99

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GUYDMG4
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