Ed Gorman's Blog, page 11

Gravetapping:: The Sundown Speech by Loren D. Estleman

Ben Boulden:

The Sundown Speech is the most recent entry, 25th overall, in Loren Estleman’s justly celebrated Amos Walker private detective series. Dante and Heloise Gunnar were swindled out of $15,000 by a would-be director named Jerry Marcus. Jerry hooked the couple for an investment in a film dubiously titled Mr. Alien Elect, and when he stopped returning telephone calls the couple contacted Walker. It is a straight missing person case and Amos reluctantly takes it; reluctantly because the Gunnar’s, particularly Heloise, are off-putting to his working class sensibilities, and all the leads are in Ann Arbor, Michigan. A scant 45 minutes from his beloved Detroit, but worlds apart—
“The place looked as far away from the Motor City as Morocco.”
The setting is post 9/11, but not by much. The preamble is as cool and stylish as anything I’ve read:
“Roll the clock back a dozen years, maybe more; Michael Jackson was still alive, Iris, too. I could walk all day without limping. Tweet was bird talk, the chain bookstore was the greatest threat to civilization since ragtime music, and the only time you saw a black president was in a sci-fi film. Going back is always a crapshoot.”
[image error] And it only gets better. Amos Walker is his usual smart ass and hard-boiled self, and the mystery is something of a locked door job. This time, however—and not to give too much away—the locked door is in the police forensics lab. The supporting cast is college town unusual; big and brassy while lacking experience and boasting excessive aspirations. A photographer who photographs nudes in public places not minding the accompanying public decency ticket and bail money for his model. The local police have a thing for writing parking tickets, and the detective working the case keeps giving Amos a polite, but resolute “sundown speech”—thanks for your help, please go back to Detroit. Amos doesn’t much want to stick around either, but the facts keep him there as the case turns more and more serious, and more and more curious. 
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Gravetapping: Anything Goes Richard S. Wheeler

GravetappingRichard Wheeler’s latest novel, Anything Goes, is now available in hardcover from Forge. It is Mr. Wheeler’s “first print novel…published in three years,”and it, like all of Forge’s Westerns, is handsomely designed. 
Richard Wheeler’s fiction has won an astounding six Spur Awards and the Owen Wister Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Western Writers of America. I have been a longtime fan of his work, and he, at least by email, is one of the kindest, polite, and knowledgeable people I have corresponded with. Earlier this year I conducted an interview with Mr. Wheeler—one I’m particularly proud of—you should read. 
I am also planning to review Anything Goes in the next few weeks, but until then here is the publisher’s description—
“Anything Goes: the enchanting story of a vaudeville troupe that makes its way to Western mining towns, from renowned master of the Western novel, Richard S. Wheeler.
“The cowboys, gold miners, outlaws, gunmen, prostitutes, and marshals who populate the Wild West never see much big-city entertainment. Most towns are too wild and rowdy for entertainers to enter, let alone perform in. All that is about to change.
“August Beausoleil and his colleague, Charles Pomerantz, have taken the Beausoleil Brothers Follies to the remote mining towns of Montana, far from the powerful impresarios who own the talent and control the theaters on the big vaudeville circuits. Their cast includes a collection of has-beens and second-tier performers: Mary Mabel Markey, the shopworn singer now a little out of breath; Wayne Windsor, "The Profile," who favors his audiences with just one side of his face while needling them with acerbic dialogue; Harry the Juggler, who went from tossing teacups to tossing scimitars; Mrs. McGivers and her capuchin monkey band; and the Wildroot Sisters, born to show business and managed by a stage mother who drives August mad.
“Though the towns are starved for entertainment, the Follies struggles to fill seats as the show grinds from town to town. Just when the company is desperate for fresh talent, a mysterious young woman astonishes everyone with her exquisite voice.
“The Wild West will never be the same. They've seen comics, gorgeous singers, and scimitar-tossing jugglers. Now if the troupers can only make it back East . . . alive!”
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Pro-File: Gary Phillips ONLY THE WICKED

Pro-File: Gary Phillips

Tell us about Only The Wicked
1)  Only the Wicked begins when Old Man Spears drops dead in the Abyssinia Barber Shop & Shine Parlor in South Central while my PI Ivan Monk and the other patrons trash talk. Turns out Spears played in the Negro Baseball Leagues with Monk’s cousin, Kennesaw Riles, a man whose questionable testimony put civil rights leader, Damon Creel behind bars on a trumped up murder charge back in the ’60s. But when Riles mysteriously dies, Monk knows that something is happening besides coincidence. Then his mother Nona is attacked -- it becomes personal.

This sets Monk down a trail that leads from baseball to blues to the new south of Mississippi, where the ghosts of the past are restless…all the while, the haunting refrain of Delta bluesman Charlie Patton’s purported lost recording of the “Killin’ Blues” provides the prophetic soundtrack to the deadly goings on.
What are you working on currently?
2) I’m happy to say I recently participated with four other writers, me being the only male, writing a round robin novel, Beat, Slay, Love: One Chef’s Hunger for Delicious Revenge under the pen name Thalia Filbert.  It’s a darkly comic send-up of foodie thrillers and Chick Lit.  Currently, I’m going to be working on my Vietnam era graphic novel that I won’t elaborate on just yet, but I think it’s a ‘Nam story not done so far.  Will also be putting the finishing touches on the anthology I’m co-editing with the prolific Bob Randisi, Forty-Four Caliber Funk, including stories by Elaine Viets, Michael Gonzales and Bill Crider. 
What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?
3) I guess at this stage of the game, still being in the game given all the changes and such in the publishing world.
What is the greatest DISPLEASURE?
4) To sound like a cranky old timer, all this social media tweeting, pintering, facebooking and what not one is supposed to do these days to get the word out about your book or other effort.  Bah, humbug.  But I’m a storyteller and as long as people want to read them be it on a tablet, your iPhone or scrolling through on your wired-in glasses, I’m wiling to adapt.
What advice would you give publishers?
5) Aw jeez, don’t us writers always have more than two cents to burn the ears of editors and publishers to mix my metaphors?  Give bigger advances or at least put money back into promotional budgets (and hire those young people to do all that creative social media outreach)…just sell the hell out of each book you publish.
Any writers you'd like to see brought back?
6) Gardner Fox wrote every damn DC Comics character ever.  Okay, maybe not all of them but during the Golden and Silver Age of comics he wrote Batman, Speed Saunders, the Flash, Hawkman, Hawkgirl, the Justice Society of America, the Justice League of America and on and on. He even worked for Marvel writing Tomb of Dracula, Red Wolf and Dr. Strange.  He also created a barbarian character Kolthar in paperback and wrote crime, mystery, sci-fi and spy novels too.
Because I’ve recently done a piece on him, Roosevelt Mallory also comes to mind.  As far as I can tell, he only wrote four novels, all of them about a Vietnam vet turned freelance hitman for the mob, a cat called Joe Radcliff.  Mind you, Radcliff was always double-crossed by his employers and Mallory wrote these books for the L.A.-based Holloway House, where the godfathers of Street Lit, Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines, were also published.  The Radcliff books are a bloody good romp.
Everybody remembers the thrill selling visor her first novel. What was your experience? 
7) (this is what I wrote before when asked) Selling my first novel was a rather circuitous route.  My then agent couldn’t sell my manuscript.  Simultaneously me and that fine mystery writer John Shannon (the Jack Liffey series, Palos Verdes Blue, On the Nickel, etc.), entered into a partnership with some folks up in Portland in what became West Coast Crime, a small press publisher of mysteries with a political edge.  And so Violent Sprint, my first published Ivan Monk novel came out under that banner, along with two other books, Elvis in Aspic by the late Gordon DeMarco and Served Cold by Ed Goldberg, which went on to win a Shamus.  And VS, the book that several publishers passed on, was optioned by HBO – it’s set in the aftermath of the ’92 riots in L.A., and me, John and Ed were picked up (and eventually dropped) by Berkley Prime Crime.
Black Gat #5: 

Only the Wicked by Gary Phillips978-1-933586-93-9  *  $9.99  *  mass market paperback

The fifth Black Gat book from Stark House Press reprints a fairly recent book, but one that has never appeared in paperback before: the fourth Ivan Monk mystery by Gary Phillips called Only the Wicked.
Ivan Monk is a Los Angeles private detective who premiered in Violent Springin 1994, garnering much praise for Phillips from his fellow authors as well as from critics at Publishers Weekly and Booklist. In fact, referring to the second Monk novel, Perdition U.S.A., PW called it a “hard-boiled detective adventure with plenty of raw energy.”
In Only the Wicked, Phillips utilizes multiple story lines to tie together a tale that includes negro baseball, an old blues artist, racial discrimination, the Deep South and a decades-old murder in a mystery that jumps from Los Angeles to Mississippi and back again.
Author Sara Paretsky calls Phillips “my kind of crime writer and Ivan Monk is my kind of detective.” Walter Mosley, creator of the Easy Rawlins series, had this to say: "Ivan Monk takes on a corrupt world ... He makes us feel that the war he’s wagering is for our own salvation.” 


Originally published in 2000 by Write Way, Only the Wicked is currently only available as an ebook. We’re excited to be able to offer this fine Gary Phillips novel to a paperback audience at last.

Pro-File: Tim Lebbon & INCURSION

                                                            FROM TITAN BOOKS

It's a  particular pleasure to do a Pro-File of Tim Lebbon. He's been one of my favorite writers for some time. His prose blends muscle with elegance and his people are always finely drawn and achingly true voyagers on our ship of fools. 


He also writes one hell of a good novelization. I've never understood the scorn the form receives so often. Sure there are bad novelizations but if you've glanced at some of the treacle on the bestseller lists lately...are bad novelizations any worse? Besides, I've read two or three dozen movie inspired novels that were far superior to films they were designed to promote. People such as Max Allan Collins, Nancy Holder, Greg Cox, Christopher Golden,  Alan Dean Foster and many, many others bring all their skills to the form. Like Tim Lebbon, they make the story their own.

PREDATOR: Incursion is an example of a franchise novel rich in all that muscular and elegant prose I spoke of above and what's more the dark brutal chase and confrontation scenes are rendered with a Peckinpahesque menace.
PRO-FILE TIM LEBBON
 1. Tell us about INCURSION and how you generally approach novelizations. 

PREDATOR: INCURSION is the first of an Alien/Predator trilogy called The Rage War, which I'm writing for Titan. 20th Century Fox licensed the project.  It's set hundreds of years after the Alien/Predator movies, and involves a threat to the Human Sphere (the expanse of human exploration in the galaxy) from beyond.  So while it's tie-in, it's not strictly a novelisation, as it's all my own story and characters.  The outline concept came from Titan/Fox, and I took it from there and fleshed it out, creating characters and concepts, worlds and technology, and the large background arc.  These are pretty unusual novels for me as I don't normally write such wide-ranging stories with so many characters.  But it's an epic story, so for that I needed to spread my wings and create an epic cast of characters and situations.  I think it's turning out pretty well.
I approach such novels the same was as I approach my original books, really, and I don't really treat them any differently.  It's still all about the story and the characters, it's just that in these novels I'm including creatures and creations from someone else's universe.   

2. Can you give a sense of what you're working on now?

I'm writing the third book in The Rage War, Alien vs Predator: Armageddon.  I've also just finished editing my new novel Relics, for Titan, which will be out early 2017.  A long wait, but I think it'll be worth it.  I'm also writing a proposal with Christopher Golden for a new series of novels, as well as working on a couple of screenplays and more novel ideas.  I'm always working on a few things at any one time.    

3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?

Can I list a few? Making a living out of my hobby.  Having the time and opportunity to let my imagination run wild.  Being my own boss (to a degree...).  Making up stuff out of my weird, twisted head and making money from it.  Keeping my own hours. Meeting some wonderful people and making loads of great friends.  The commute is good, too.   

4. What is the greatest DISpleasure?

Another list? The constant fear.  Not only about money, but about where the next idea's coming from, will it be any good, is my current project any good, am I losing 'it', did I ever have 'it' in the first place, what happens if the ideas and/or deals dry up, what about if everyone realises what a fraud I am .... etc.
But I have to say the positives FAR outweigh the negatives. 

5. If you have one piece of advice for the publishing world, what is it?

Apart from pay writers more?  Well, the whole sales numbers versus orders situation frustrates me a huge amount.  If you print ten thousand books and sell seven thousand, the way to go for the next book ISN'T to only print seven thousand, because then you'll only sell four thousand.  You print ten thousand of book two and you'll sell another seven thousand.  I guess this is a bookseller problem rather than a publishing problem, but they're closely connected.  I'm not an old hand yet, but I've been around long enough, and seen enough books published, to know that the more copies of your book get out there into the big wide world, the more you'll sell, regardless of publicity budgets and quirky marketing campaigns.   

6. Are there two or three forgotten mystery writers you'd like to see in print again?

(Ed, not sure I can think of any really.  I'll mention a horror writer though)

I'm a big Arthur Machen fan.  His work is still in print, but usually only in small editions and from small or specialty publishers.  It would be great to see his work more widely available, to the extent that people who've never heard of him might pick up his work.

7. Tell us about selling your first novel. Most writers never forget
that moment.

How true!  I was sitting in work (I worked for the local authority at the time).  I'd sent my novel Mesmer in to Tanjen Publications about two months before.  This was back in 1996. So I gave them a call one lunchtime from work when most people were out at lunch.  I spoke to Anthony Barker, the owner and editor, and he told me that he'd just read it and would like to accept the book for publication!  So the first person I told the news to was my boss, who came out wondering why I was jumping up and down and shouting. A good moment.  Tanjen were an indie press, and I think I made about £200 from that first book. But it got me on the shelves and on the radar, it was shortlisted for a British Fantasy Award, and from then on I never looked back.  I knew what I wanted to do, and I worked hard for the next seven years until going part time, then four years later I quit to write for a living. And I'm still working hard on being an overnight success!
I recall my wife and I went out for a beer that evening :-)

Gravetapping-Carolyn Hart HIGH STAKES

Ben Boulden: 
Kirsten Soderstrom is a Hollywood actress; young, blonde, and beautiful. A common recipe in the City of Angels. She has a handful of television credits, but a depleted bank account and no work on the horizon has her in a bind. Her choices: land “an acting job pronto,” go back to waiting, or return to Minnesota a failure. Her prospects improve with an obscure ad in a tabloid:
“WANTED: BLONDE ACTRESS, CHALLENGING ROLE, EXCELLENT PAY.”
The ad is odd, but the audition is more so. It begins with a long questionnaire about her personal history, and a casting agent more interested in her subject of study at Vassar than her acting abilities. The call back brings a job offer far from a straight acting gig. The FBI wants her to seduce a United States Senator suspected of taking kickbacks, and in the process locate the evidence needed for the charges to be filed. The job isn’t ideal, but Kirsten’s position doesn’t allow her to walk away from a paycheck, and what she finds is far worse than a simple pay for play scam. 
The setting is mid-1980s and the plot is a nostalgic—for me at least—cold war scheme. It involves the CIA, KGB, and FBI. The mystery solidly masks the identity of the antagonist and provides a couple nicely executed and satisfying twists. Kirsten is likable in a light, almost dreamy way. She is beautiful, intelligent, and honest. The story fits comfortably in the romantic suspense category, and it presents a healthy, and satisfying, serving of both.
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Forgotten Books: The Ever-Running Man by Marcia Muller

 
Graham Greene spoiled me as far as thriller writers go. His thrillers (or "entertainments" as he chose to call them) always worked on at least three levels, the tension of the story itself and then the characters and the milieu they inhabited. 

Cardboard cut-outs of Washington and its people just don't do it for me, whether CIA or FBI, the men too bold (though always with that One Serious Flaw) and the women too beautiful (though always with that One Serious Flaw). Thriller Writing 101. 

Marcia Muller In  The Ever-Running Man shows us how to write a thriller that honors the Greene method--tension-filled story, with believeable characters in a carefully detailed milieu.

Private investigator Sharon McCone's husband is one of the owners of RKI, a security company that competes with the best and the brightest in the business. But RKI, home office and affiliates, has been set upon with a domestic terrorist who uses explosive devices with deadly cunning and precision. McCone, barely escaping such an explosion, glimpses the man who means to make things ugly for the company. 

RKI hires McCone to see what she can find out. The search is intense, a relentless hunt to discover and stop the killer before he wreaks any more damage. 

But in the course of the search McCone is forced to confront certain truths about herself, her husband and his business partners. Muller gives us the world as it is--the world of Starbucks, reading the Sunday paper, the inevitable misunderstandings in marriage--seamlessly enhancing the chilling plot.

An A+ suspense novel.

Valdez is Coming by Elmore Leonard

"The basic structure of an Elmore Leonard plot," Larry Beinhart explains in How to Write a Mystery, "is that a big tough guy pushes a little tough guy. The little guy doesn't take it. He shoves back. The little guy is the kinda guy, the harder you shove him, the more trouble he's gonna be. In the end, the big guy really wishes he'd picked someone else to shove. When Leonard started he wrote westerns, and in those early books you can see the bones without an X-ray. I recommend Valdez Is Coming to anyone who wants to understand the structure of an Elmore Leonard novel."
Exactly and in all respects. One of the most enlightened and enlightening insights ever written about Leonard's work. 
Valdez is one of my favorite of the Leonard novels. The villain Frank Tanner is drawn in bile and blood and Valdez, thought by townspeople to be something of a loser, shines when reveals himself to be a former Army tracker and killer. 
The story is simple and straightforward. As part-time constable Valdez is tricked into killing an innocent man. Afterward, regretting what he's done, he asks Tanner and his cronies to at least chip in and give the dead man's widow some money. They treat him as if he were drunk and crazy. But he keeps on with his servile (he is a man who knows his place) until they begin to punish him. They crucify him as the cover depicts and leave him to death in the desert.
But he comes back to ask Tanner once again for the widow's money. Tanner declines and soon comes to regret it as Valdez now becomes the deadly man he was in his Army days.
We forget that in novels such as 52 Pick-Up and a few others Leonard had the power to hurt you. You see that especially in his western stories, the complete collection of which is readily available.

Barry Malzberg comments on Gil Brewer & The Red Scarf

Comment to Bill Pronzini right after completing my second reading, 35 years after the first.  You're welcome to post.Barry

From: Conmoto2@aol.com
To: pronhack@comcast.net
Sent: 12/11/2015 8:05:22 P.M. Eastern Standard Time
Subj: The Red Scarf
Finished this just minutes ago.
It occurred to me - an odd, paradoxical thought - that if this novel had been any better it would not have been as good.  With deeper characterization, more careful pacing, a more complex rendering of and explanation for the protagonist's mad self-destructiveness the novel would have lost the spare, ungiving propulsion which not only centers but justifies.  There are many such paradoxes in the so-called arts...if Liberace (who began as a fourteen year old prodigy soloing one of the Chopin concertos with the Chicago Symphony) had been a better pianist he would not have made a fiftieth of the money or had a hundredth of the celebrity.  Leroy Anderson at Harvard in the 30's wanted to be a symphonic composer like Copland but Harvard did not want to admit him to the graduate program and Koussevitzky later did not want him hanging around the Boston Symphony.  So he wrote novelty pieces like SLEIGH RIDE and BLUE TANGO for the Boston Pops and late in life one extended work (20 minutes), a piano concerto which he withdrew after its premiere.    If Bradbury, a Kuttner and Lovecraft imitator, had been good enough to have had the career as a leading ASTOUNDING writer to which he aspired, he would have been as exhausted in 1953 and forgotten today as Kuttner.  Brewer was destroyed by a multiplicity of problems but his pathetic attempts in the 1960's to become an important literary writer like his idol Hemingway were perhaps the most salient factor.Barry

REVIEW: “LEGEND” (2015), by Fred Blosser

BY FRED BLOSSER from cinema retroThe conventions of the gangster movie are rigidly defined, critic Robert Warshow observed in a famous 1948 essay.  At heart is the character arc of the socially deviant protagonist, whether Rico Bandello, Tony Montana, or Michael Corleone: “a steady upward progress followed by a very precipitate fall.”
In Brian Helgeland’s excellent biopic “Legend” (2015), currently playing in limited theatrical release, the twin brothers Reggie and Ronnie Kray (Tom Hardy, in a dual role) are already on the upward curve of Warshow’s character arc in the 1960s London underworld as the film begins. “Reggie was a gangster prince of the East End,” Reggie’s future wife Frances (Emily Browning) muses in voiceover. “Ronnie was a one-man mob.” In the first scene, the dapper Reggie derisively brings tea to two rumpled detectives who are staking him out, the senior of whom, Inspector Nipper Read (Christopher Eccleston), is determined to bring him down. The mentally disturbed Ronnie is behind bars, but a prison psychiatrist is intimidated into clearing his early release. The doctor’s honest assessment when Reggie comes to escort his brother home: “Your brother Ron is violent and psychopathic, and I suspect he’s paranoid schizophrenic. To put it simply, he’s off his fucking rocker.”
The Krays control the run-down East End and wage sporadic turf battles with their rivals, the Richardson brothers’ “Torture Gang” in South London. When the Richardsons are sent up the river, the Krays’ extortion-based empire expands to swallow their territory. Reggie opens a posh nightclub, Esmeralda’s Barn, whose clientele of slumming celebrities impresses sheltered teenager Frances on their first date: “Oh look, is that Joan Collins?” she asks breathlessly. It is. Reggie’s financial advisor Leslie Payne (David Thewlis) tries to convince him to move into legitimate business, but the big money from the rackets is a powerful inducement to remain on the other side of the law, especially when the twins seal a trans-Atlantic partnership with Meyer Lansky through a Mafia intermediary (Chazz Palminteri). The homosexual Ronnie hosts orgies that attract a varied following, including a politically powerful Peer, Lord Boothby (John Sessions). Scotland Yard begins to close in, but the vested establishment pulls strings all the way up through the Prime Minister to protect Boothby from public scandal, and Read’s superiors order him to curtail his investigation. Ronnie murders a rival mobster in a pub, and Read thinks he’s finally got a case, but the key witness refuses to identify Kray in a lineup for fear of her family’s safety.
Hardy’s performance is a remarkable, Academy Award-worthy achievement. Part of the credit goes to the superior facial prosthetics that transform Hardy into the thuggish, bespectacled Ronnie, but even more credit goes to Hardy’s own talent and physicality. The actor gives each brother a distinctive posture, gait, and voice. The tricks used to put both characters on the screen simultaneously are seamless, notably in a long fight scene where the twins slug each other to a pulp with fists and champagne bottles. At the same time, with one actor in the dual roles, Hardy and Helgeland underscore the fact that beneath the surface, both brothers are very much alike in their propensity for violence. Reggie is simply better able to control himself. This shared volatility becomes more apparent in the second part of the movie, the downward curve of Warshow’s arc, as Reggie becomes increasingly unhinged because of a personal tragedy. When he bloodily stabs an underling, Jack “the Hat” McVitie (Sam Spruell), to death, the murder unravels the Krays’ enterprise. As the closing credits note, the brothers were sent to prison in 1968. The real-life Ronnie died in 1995, Reggie in 2000.
Cinema Retro fans are likely to get a charge out of the movie’s 1960s costumes and cars, the stream of oldie hits on the soundtrack (when’s the last time you heard “Soulful Strut” or “The ‘In’ Crowd”?), and the scenes of music divas Timi Yuro (Duffy) and Shirley Bassey (Samantha Pearl) performing at Reggie’s club. Pearl doesn’t sing “Goldfinger” in her cameo as Bassey, but there’s still a one-degree association between “Legend” and 007 that should interest Bond fans: Helgeland’s script was based on a 1973 biography of the Krays by John Pearson, who also wrote two superlative books in the Bond canon, “The Life of Ian Fleming” and “James Bond: The Authorized Biography.” The film’s supporting performances are outstanding, with Thewlis and Spruell in particular nearly giving Hardy a run for his money. The movie suggests a host of comparisons with other gangland classics, including the British productions “The Criminal” (Joseph Losey, 1960) and “Get Carter” (Mike Hodges, 1971), which bookended the actual Kray era; Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas” (1989), from which Helgeland clearly draws inspiration; and Helgeland’s own “Payback” (1999); in that film, Mel Gibson’s character Porter and Gregg Henry’s manic Val seem like early foreshadowings of the Reg/Ron duality. If “Legend” inspires you to watch or re-watch those pictures, all the better.
If I have a quibble with the film, it’s with the title “Legend,” which isn’t very evocative of a gangster saga. Worse, it poses the risk of confusion with a very different movie, Ridley Scott’s 1986 fantasy-adventure with Tom Cruise and Mia Sara. “The Krays” might have better done as a title, except that -- in fairness to Helgeland, I should point out -- it was already taken as the title of a 1990 movie by Peter Medak, with Gary and Martin Kemp as Ronnie and Reggie. The Medak version filled out the details about the twins’ early lives more thoroughly than Helgeland does, and it’s not a bad film itself, if not as riveting and stylish as “Legend.” It’s currently streaming on Netflix.

Staying up late with Evan Tanner by Lawrence Block

Staying up late with Evan Tannerby LB | Dec 9, 2015 | Evan Tanner, News | 1 commentThe other day, my Talkwalker alert let me know that the third Evan Tanner novel, Tanner’s Twelve Swingers, had been reviewed online. Now it’s true that the book, like its seven companions, is very much in print, and has been on offer from one publisher or another more often than not. You’d be hard put to find it in a bookstore, but then it’s increasingly hard to find a bookstore in the first place, isn’t it? But it’s widely available online, as a mass-market paperback or as an ebook.OTOH, the book made its first appearance on bookstore shelves almost fifty years ago—four or five years before Tommy Hancock, the Australian who reviewed it, made his first appearance on the planet. If realizing as much did not make me feel especially youthful, it damn well made me feel durable. I—and Evan Tanner—have been around a while, haven’t we?Took me back, I must say.I began writing about Tanner in early 1966, toward the end of my year and a half in Racine, Wisconsin. (My only post-college job, as an editor in the coin supply division of Whitman Publishing. I liked it well enough there, but it cured me of the notion that I could undertake honest work, and I’ve steered clear of it ever since.) That first book, The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep, was arguably the first book in which I found a voice that was uniquely mine, and it spoiled me; the next book I wrote, The Canceled Czech, was a sequel, and a series was born.

for the rest go here:
http://lawrenceblock.com/staying-up-l...