Ed Gorman's Blog, page 113

The still hot "The Big Heat"

From Blouin Artinfo
Thanks to Terry Butler for the link

Fissionable material: Gloria Grahame and Glenn Ford in "The Big Heat"
by Graham Fuller
Published: October 11, 2013


Sixty years ago next Monday, Columbia released “The Big Heat.” Although the Los Angeles County Museum of Art screened Fritz Lang’s film noir as a matinee on Tuesday, its anniversary appears not to have excited the nation’s repertory programmers as a whole. Turner Classic Movies isn’t showing it. Film Forum in New York is instead celebrating 60 years of Yasujiro Ozu’s “Tokyo Story.”
“The Big Heat” got short shrift back in 1953, too, especially in comparison with Columbia’s “From Here to Eternity,” which dominated the Oscars with its eight wins (including Best Picture). Lang’s film won a single Edgar Award.


“The reviews were fair, the box-office average,”Patrick McGilligan wrote in his Lang biography. Its $1.25 million rental earnings were, in fact, paltry compared with “The Robe”’s $17.5 million and “From Here to Eternity”’s $12.5 million.It would be folly now, however, to suggest that “From Here to Eternity,” for all that it sets up the attack on Pearl Harbor, is the more resonant of the two pictures. As does Raoul Walsh’s James Cagney vehicle “White Heat” (1949), “The Big Heat” subtextually addresses post-Hiroshima and Nagasaki “nuclear trauma,” in the phrase of film scholar Walter Metz, and anticipates the Cold War paranoia of Robert Aldrich’s “Kiss Me Deadly” (1955).
http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/sto...

This is like going to paperback heaven - The John Lange aka Michael Crichton Books from Hard Case

Eight years ago, I reached out to Michael Crichton – author of JURASSIC PARK and THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN, scripter of WESTWORLD and TWISTER, creator of the TV show ER --  to see whether he might let us reprint some of the wonderful paperback thrillers he wrote under  the top-secret pen name “John Lange” back when he was a student at Harvard Medical School.
I knew the odds weren’t good, since he hadn’t acknowledged those books publicly or let anyone reprint them (at least in this country – I think he may have given the nod to a foreign edition or two). But…nothing ventured, nothing gained, so I wrote to him. And to my delight and surprise he said yes – provided that we keep his secret.  That is, he wanted our John Lange books to be published as by John Lange, sort of the way J.K. Rowling recently published her new crime novel as by “Robert Galbraith.” We weren’t to breathe a word of his real identity.  Well, of course we said yes, and he and we had a lot of fun working together, first on a reissue of the Edgar Award-nominated GRAVE DESCEND and then on one of ZERO COOL (for which Michael even penned two new chapters set in the present day to open and close the book…the first new writing he’d done as John Lange in more than 30 years!).  He enjoyed the new covers Greg Manchess painted for the books and the old-fashioned paperback feel, and we were talking with him about which Lange book to reissue next – ODDS ON or DRUG OF CHOICE? – when he was suddenly taken from us by cancer at the age of 66.
Working with Michael (even if we had to keep it secret) was one of the great pleasures and privileges of my career, and ever since, I’ve wished we could have completed what we began. I’ve also wondered whether Michael might eventually have given in to temptation and written a whole new Lange novel for us -- no less persuasive a figure than Stephen King was encouraging him to do so! Alas, a new Lange novel will never be…but we’re very pleased to announce that five years later we finally will get to finish what we started.  We’re going to be bringing all eight John Lange novels back to bookstores for the first time in more than four decades – and with the blessing of Michael’s family, the first time ever under the his real name.
The books are terrific reads, really delicious examples of Michael experimenting with the genres he would become famous for in later life – you’ll find sinister consequences of bioengineering (on a secret island vacation resort, no less!), you’ll find a race-against-the-clock political thriller penned long before the TV series “24,” you’ll find an archaeology professor hunting for a lost tomb in the Egyptian desert decades before Harrison Ford ever donned a fedora…plus a heist of a luxury hotel planned with the aid of a computer, a case of mistaken identity that pits an innocent man against a league of assassins, and more, all presented behind the gorgeous painted cover art of Greg Manchess and Glen Orbik.

Ida Lupino, Robert Ryan Bewaer, My Lovely

Ed here: This in minor but effective. Gripping all the way. Tight script and Ryan-Lupino at their best. Caught it the other day on TCM.

Posted by medusamorlock

Sure, I admit it’s only 77 short minutes long, and maybe feels more like an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, but in terms of sheer creepy atmosphere played for all it’s worth by two outstanding performers, RKO’s 1952 low-budget thriller Beware, My Lovely delivers.  The intelligent and talented Ida Lupino stars as Helen Gordon, a widow with a boardinghouse who hires the wrong guy as her handyman.  The complex and gifted Robert Ryan plays Howard Wilton, rejected for service in WWI because of emotional issues, a poor soul who is more severely disturbed than even the military docs could have imagined.  Beware, My Lovelymost definitely is your parents’ stalker movie, and if things seem a little familiar along the way, it’s because movies for the last nearly sixty years have been following the same template, but hardly to better effect.I won’t recount the whole plot now; TCM has a reallydetailed synopsis here (spoilers, naturally!), and there’s also a nice article on the production of the movie here.  Beware, My Lovely wasn’t the first time that Lupino and Ryan had appeared together onscreen; earlier that same year RKO released On Dangerous Ground featuring the pair, and to more critical acclaim.  While there may not have been much hoopla coming from the studio for Beware, My Lovely, and granted, it lays it on pretty thick sometimes, the movie still is a quick and exciting character study that genuinely has the goods to get your pulse going. If Robert Ryan weren’t such an effective actor, you wouldn’t have even an iota of empathy for Wilton, but you do, even as he’s totally creeping you out and doing things like trying on Ida Lupino’s dead husband’s military coat, for instance, or having murderous flashbacks, or hiding door keys, or ripping telephone cords out of the wall.  Things like that.  You know, the normal bag of tricks the typical unhinged drifter-type usually pulls from, only seldom as well as Ryan or with such a skill that you almost can’t blame Mrs. Gordon for falling for it.

for the rest go here:
http://moviemorlocks.com/2009/11/09/r...
-beware-my-lovely/#more-15878

Forgotten Books: Biographical Dictionary of Film

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2006
Character parts I like to read while I eat. Lately I've been working my way through David Thomson's enormous Biographical Dictionary of Film at lunch time. Thomson is the most interesting and entertaining flm critic since Pauline Kael--and every bit as frustrating. When I disagree with him, I want to all him up and read him his rights--before violating every one of them.

Today I read his take on Edmond O'Brien. Thomson notes going in that movie stars aren't supposed to sweat. That makes them too much like everybody in the audience. Part of movie stardom is inaccessability, fantasy. But what a clever hook because beefy O'Brien sweated all the time, especially in his most memorable movie DOA. He was also fat, frequently out of breath, devoutly neurotic and often frightened. He was, in other words, pretty much like the people in the darkness watching him on the big screen. An Everyman of sorts.

In the course of his entry on O'Brien, Thomson makes clear that he enjoys the odd-ball actors and actresses far more than he does the stars. Thus he finds Warren Oates vastly more compelling than Robert Redford and Jeff Goldblum more intriguing than Paul Newman.

When I was a kid I rarely wondered about the lives of the stars. But I was always curious about character actors such as Elisha Cook, Jr. and J. Carrol Naish. There was a vitality to their performances that the stars were rarely capable of matching. And in the case of Cook, there was a melancholy and weariness that I recognized even then as being much like my own.

Same with the women. The ones I was always excited about were the second- and third-leads. They were the ones I got crushes on. They were often as pretty as the leading ladies, sometimes even prettier. And they frequently had more interesting roles, the bitch, the tart, the victim.

Barry Gifford once remarked that when you see a musical with all those young gorgeous girl dancers you have to wonder what became of them. The majority probably became housewives; more than a few probably took to the streets as parts became harder and harder to come by; and a lucky handful became the wives of powerful Hwood men.

I've been watching a lot of silent films of TCM and the same impulse grabs me then, too. Who were they? What happened to them? Did they know they'd become immortal? A full century later I sit in our family room and watch them as--most likely anyway--another century from now people will still be watching them. This is probably heresy of sorts but to me film immortality is far more imposing than literary immortality.

Ed Gorman's western collection The Long Ride Back-Westlake, Willeford

The Long Ride Back Readers who stumble onto Ed Gorman's writing soon find their pulse quickening with excitement as they discover that he's one of the best mystery, horror and Western writers working today. Here's what a few critics are saying about Ed's exceptional Western collection, The Long Ride Back & Other Western Stories:
"This being my first exposure to Gorman, I loved every second of it. Expecting a typical Western, I was blown away by how he turns the genre on its ear like some of the Western writing of Elmore Leonard." Bruce Grossman, Bookgasm
"Simply one of the best western writers of our time." Rocky Mountain News
"Ed Gorman's western stories are anything but ordinary. They often take take place in lonely, tragic, mythical landscapes." Goodreads
"Donald E. Westlake (to whom Ghost Town is dedicated) pointed out similarities to the Westerns of Will Charles (crime author Charles Willeford writing under a pseudonym) Willeford and Gorman approached their material in the same way, namely that criminals are the same no matter what time period they're living in. That's Western noir. What Gorman is doing with the Western may not be new, but it's still a fresh approach that hasn't been done to death. He did not create the concept of Western noir, but he gave it a name, and he is certainly the best at it." Somebody Dies
THE LONG RIDE BACK AND OTHER WESTERN STORIES is the biggest collection of Ed Gorman's critically acclaimed, award-winning Western fiction ever published. This massive trade paperback brings together the complete contents of the three e-book Gorman collections published by the Western Fictioneers Library: DEAD MAN'S GUN, A DISGRACE TO THE BADGE, and ENEMIES. Nineteen short stories and novellas and two essays add up to more than 100,000 words from one of the finest writers of our time. This indispensable collection is available only from the Western Fictioneers Library.
Also available for the Kindle are these celebrated Gorman Western novels :
Death GroundWolf Moon Guild

Pro-File Dana King

PRO-FILE Dana King
Bio: Dana King has published three e-books, Wild Bill, Worst Enemies, and A Small Sacrifice. Grind Joint, the second book in the series begun by Worst Enemies, will be published in paper by Stark House in November of 2013. His short fiction has appeared in Thuglit, Powder Burn Flash, New Mystery Reader, and Mysterical-E, as well as the anthology, Blood, Guts, and Whisky.
1. Tell us about your current novel or project.Grind Joint  is a story about a small, economically depressed town in Western Pennsylvania. The economy went south when the mills in the Pittsburgh area started closing in the early 70s. Pittsburgh and some surrounding towns recovered; Penns River did not. City government is promised a windfall when a developer wants to build an inexpensive, slots-only casino (aka a grind joint) in an abandoned shopping center, and they don’t look as closely at the unintended consequences as they should. There’s more to this casino than meets the eye—an indirect connection to the Russian mob, for instance—and a town of thirty or so cops isn’t equipped to handle it.
2. Can you give us a sense of what you’re working on now? Resurrection Mall picks up several months after Grind Joint leaves off. A small television minister with a growing audience wants to take advantage of the bad publicity generated by the casino fiasco by expanding his ministry into another abandoned shopping center in a more urban part of Penn River; he plans to use the rest of the space for Christian-themed businesses. The casino brought problems to its part of town; Resurrection Mall is moving into an area with plenty of problems of its own. The results are no prettier.
3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?I don’t have a contract beyond Grind Joint, so I can safely say the greatest pleasure is writing whatever I want without deadlines, then looking to see what kind of reception it gets. I self-published three e-books before Grind Joint. They sold into the dozens, but the feedback I received from people I respect was gratifying and has given me the confidence to believe there may be an audience for my stories, after all. I’ve always loved telling stories. Writing novels allows me to broaden the scope and detail in which I can tell them.
4. The greatest displeasure? The frustration that goes with a fluctuating market and no set standards. People who make their livings based on their abilities in this area can’t tell you what will sell, only what won’t. I was close to quitting a few years ago after receiving conflicting reasons for rejections and receiving suggestions to write books I wouldn’t read if I wanted to be published. (That’s not how they phrased it, but that’s how it would have come out.) I was talked out of it and returned to writing whatever the hell I wanted. All I can control is the writing; everything else is pretty much out of my hands.
5. Advice to the publishing world?Your traditional business model doesn’t work anymore; change it. Some of this is happening now. The pace is glacial, but once glaciers get moving they’re impossible to stop.
The other big thing would be not to focus so exclusively on blockbuster best-sellers. Those books are important, but having a good list of steady, if unspectacular earners will provide cash flow that should be able to tide a company over when a book that received a huge advance and marketing budget flops, as some inevitably will.
6. Are there any forgotten writers you’d like to see in print again?This is an embarrassing answer, but my deep involvement in crime fiction is relatively recent, in the past fifteen to twenty years; writers we’d consider to be forgotten were already forgotten when I got into it. There are writers from the past I don’t think receive their due, but are still in print.
Maybe my perception is skewed because I’m just now getting recognition myself, but I focus more on writers who are working today who I think are exceptional and don’t receive their due. The list is voluminous, and I apologize for leaving out many names, but writers like Declan Burke, John McFetridge, Adrian McKinty, and Charlie Stella are writing great stuff. Other writers and hard core fans are aware of them, but they haven’t been given the opportunities they deserve with the broader public. Terrence McCauley is doing great things with a series that takes place in New York near the end of Prohibition that deserves more notice. I apologize to at least that many people I didn’t mention.
7. Tell us about selling your first novel.  A lot of that is your fault, Ed. It’s my understanding it was you who encouraged Stark House to do more than re-issues. Charlie Stella was the first author whose originals they published. Charlie and I had become friends and he asked to see some of what I’d written. He liked Worst Enemies, the e-book I self-pubbed that opens the Penns River series, and I sent him a draft of Grind Joint. He asked what I planned to do with it; I told him probably give it a few more drafts, then release it as an e-book. Charlie told me not to mess with it, send it to publishers. I’d pretty much given up on traditional publishing, because of the frustrations I mentioned earlier, and hemmed and hawed about it. I think you know Charlie; he’s a force of nature. He kept after me and Rick Ollerman, his editor at Stark House, until Rick and I agreed I’d send him a copy and he’d read if Charlie would—well, if he’d leave us alone about it.  Rick liked the book and Stark House bought it. So, I have you to thank, but the debt I owe Charlie Stella is beyond measure. I would never have senFROM SANDRA BALZO

Sandra has invited you to the event: Murder on the Orient Espresso LIVE Facebook Chat. 

Date: October 10, 2013 12:00PM
Venue: Facebook
Location: The United States
Description:
SANDRA BALZO discusses her new book, MURDER ON THE ORIENT ESPRESSO!
On October 10th, join Sandra Balzo as she answers your questions about her work, creative process, favorite characters and more during a live Facebook chat. This chat will appear on Facebook as one regular Facebook post but Sandra will be there to answer all questions in real time! 


Your Response:
Yes
No
Maybe

Day Keene's JOY HOUSE- The French film version

. JOY HOUSE AKA LES FELINS AKA THE LOVE CAGE
Posted by Jeff Stafford on July 22, 2012  MOVIE MORLOCKS

Ed here: This is one of my favorite Day Keene novels. Here's what Rene Clement, the famous French director, did with it. Or to it depending on who you listen to,

When a movie is released under numerous titles it usually means there are problems. It could be confusion over how to market it or a simple case of a movie that doesn’t fit clearly into any designated genre or maybe it’s a star-driven, major studio release that’s too quirky for the average moviegoer but yields enough curiosity value to inspire various promotional approaches to finding the right audience. All of these could apply to JOY HOUSE (1964), an international production based on a pulp fiction paperback by American author Day Keene and filmed on the Riviera near Nice featuring English-speaking (Lola Albright, Jane Fonda, Sorrell Booke, George Gaynes of Tootsie fame) and French-speaking actors (Alain Delon, Andre Oumansky, Annette Poivre, Marc Mazza). It was not a popular success at the time – most critics were unkind in their coverage – but it is a favorite film of mine, warts and all.(more) Consider the storyline, transplanted from the sleazy urban milieu of Keene’s original novel to the sunny Mediterranean environs of a jet set resort area [Spoilers ahead]. Marc (Delon) is a two-bit hustler and playboy who makes the mistake of seducing the wife of an American gangster. Soon he is running for his life as hired hit men pursue him along the French Riviera coast. Taking refuge in a homeless shelter, he attracts the attention of Barbara (Albright), a wealthy widow, and her niece Melinda (Fonda), who distribute food to the poor on a weekly basis. The two women offer Marc room and board and a position as their chauffeur and he eagerly accepts, despite their strange behavior, because the assassins have traced him to the mission. Once inside Barbara’s chateau, Marc begins to realize he is a pawn in some mysterious plot but what is his alternative? So he plays along, biding his time as both women demand more and more of his attention.

for the rest go here:
http://moviemorlocks.com/2012/07/22/j...

WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH! REVIEWED! Posted by Richard Smith

From Movie Morlocks



WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH! REVIEWED! Posted by Richard Smith on March 8, 2013Don’t get me wrong — cinemania will always be my favorite mania… but I do understand and appreciate other kinds of madness and passion. The compulsion to collect vinyl, for example (records, I mean, not pants) or for following the Grateful Dead, or for owning first editions, or for reading and even owning original copies of the men’s magazines that proliferated on America’s newsstands after World War II. I know, you hear “men’s magazines” and you immediately think Playboy or  Gent  or  Hustler  but I’m not talking about skin mags. No, I mean men’sadventure mags, monthly collections of pulp fiction, he-man tales of derring-do (did you even know it was spelled that way?! Five hundred years later and we’re still dancing to Chaucer’s tune.) that were popular with the generation of American males who had come home from conflicts in World War II and Korea with an unquenchable taste for two-fisted tales of bravery, resolve, vengeance, lust, greed, cunning and every other quality Ava Gardner looked for in a husband. Before porn wormed its way out of the back room and onto the high shelf, before Hugh Hefner arranged the marriage of Joe Sixpack and Rosie Palmer, before they became obsessed with their manscapes and their electronics and their microbrews and how to grill the perfect steak, American men thrilled to the ephemeral offerings of such established and fly-by-night publications as  Man’s Life, Man’s Look, Real Men, For Men Only, Sir!, Stag, Battle Cry, Argosy, Adventure, True Adventures, Adventure Life, Escape to Adventure, Saga, Rage, Gusto  and many more. (Experts in this field tend to disagree but one estimate of the total number of men’s adventure magazines that came and went between 1950 and 1980 runs to 150.) Running low on word count (all the better to read in the donnicker) but high on testosterone, these tales ranged from true war chronicles of courage behind enemy lines (Robert F. Dorr’s “Bayonet Killer of Heartbreak Ridge”) to EC Comics-style cautionary tales of the awful wages of sin (Harlan Ellison’s “Death Climb”), to exposes purporting to take the reader into the throbbing demimonde of casual sex (Gilbert Nash’s “Beat Girls: Worshippers of Zen and Sin”) to gonzo revenge-of-nature stories about humans pitted against a proactive and predatory nature (“Weasels Ripped My Flesh,” the classic Man’s Life story penned by the pseudonymous “Mike Kamens,” whose identity was never revealed and remains to this day… unknown.) If your fists aren’t curling just by reading this, you should just stop reading now.
If, however, this kind of thing seems right up your alley, you’ll probably want to get on eBay and start bidding on remaining issues of these long-MIA magazines. Assembling a small collection would probably only run you a few hundred or thousand dollars… orrrrrr you could just pop down a double-sawbuck for Weasels Ripped My Flesh! Two-Fisted Stories from Men’s Adventure Magazines of the 1950s, ’60s, & ’70s. Put out by the California-based independent publisher New Texture, this concordance collects two dozen of the stories that first appeared between the lushly-illustrated covers of assorted men’s adventure magazines, among them Walter Kaylin’s “Bar Room Girl Who Touched Off a Tribal War” (first published in Male Main June 1966), Bruce Jay Friedman’s “Eat Her … Bones and All” ( Gent , December 1954), Robert Silverberg’s “Trapped by the Mau Mau Terror” ( Exotic Adventures , 1959), Vic Pate’s “Chewed to Bits by Giant Turtles” (Man’s Life, May 1957), Jim McDonald’s “Grisly Rites of Hitler’s Monster Flesh Stripper” ( Man’s Story , March 1965), Ken Krippene’s “I Married a Jungle Savage” ( Sir!, November 1962), Joanne Beardon’s “I Went to a Lesbian Party” (All Man, May 1964) and, of course, the title track, Weasels Ripped My Flesh ( Man’s Life , September 1956).  If the title sounds oddly familiar, it may be because Frank Zappa cadged it for the title of a 1970 Mothers of Invention album, and its title track, making it one of those classic titles that has been referenced more often than actually read. Unavailable for years, the story leads this collection, like a dogface taking point, like Korean war hero Donn F. Porter, “The Bayonet Killer of Heartbreak Ridge,” whose story is also told here for the first time since it was published in Man’s Magazine in October 1964.
for the rest go here:http://moviemorlocks.com/2013/03/08/w...

Charlotte ArmstrongI believe it was Anthony Boucher who o...

[image error]


















Charlotte ArmstrongI believe it was Anthony Boucher who once desc


I believe it was Anthony Boucher who described Charlotte Armstrong as a mixture of Cornell Woolrich and Shirley Jackson. I'm not sure I quite agree with that but it's headed in the right direction anyway.

Armstrong was pure 100% white bread. Well-bred, middle class if not upper middle class, traditional in virtually every respect, her forte was gently undermining the kind of women's fiction you found in the slicks of the 1940s and 1950s. (I've always remembered how she challenged the masculinty of a girl friend's lover. "He's the sort of man who's interested in women's hats." And her own lover says: "Lord." She was also good at spoofing the Martha Stewarts of her day. You could tell what she thought of a woman just by how she set her table. Too fancy was deadly.)
Her fiction is...odd. Nearly everybody in her stories is neurotic and overmuch. My favorite Armstrong is Michief, a short novel that made a much-denigrated film called Don't Bother To Knock, which features chilling performance by a young Marilyn Monroe as a mentally unbalanced babsyitter. It's a flawed movie but for me an entertaining one. And Monroe is great.
Her greatest success was with her novel The Unsuspected which became a smash hit with Claude Raines. The problem with the film is that running time doesn't permit all the really slick plot twists Armstrong brought to the novel.

She died way too young, at sixty-four, at the heighth of her popularity. Her stories were regularly adapted for TV. She won the Edgar for her novel A Dram of Poison which again struck me as an...odd book. A clever book, a well written book, but one that always left me cold.

You see her at her best, I think, in her short stories, many of which are stunning. And you have to applaud the slick magazine editors of the time for publishing some of them. She published two collections during her lifetime and you won't find a bad one in the bunch. And a few of them are stunning, dark as noir but played out against middle class setting and situations. Even most of her cozier material has an edge (with one goofy exception).

If she wasn't the equal of Margaret Millar, whom she resembles in certain ways, nor Elizabeth Sanxay Holding, whom she also resembles, she is certainly worth buying and enjoying.

POSTED BY ED GORMAN AT 2:11 PM NO C

Jonathan Lethem on the subversive power of comics and science fiction (and sometimes crime fiction)

[image error]























Ed here: Here's Jonathan Lethem being interviewed on Verge.


Jonathan Lethem makes no secret of his influences. His first published novel,Gun, with Occasional Music, riffed on the hard-boiled detective fiction of Raymond Chandler. He’s written an academic novel in the style of Don Delillo (As She Climbed Across the Table), and crossbred E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India with John Ford’s The Searchers, transporting the Western to an alien world in Girl in Landscape. He’s even written about “the ecstasy of influence,” reminding us that no creative act arrives ex nihilo — it’s all, like his own work, a product of influences and appropriations, conscious and not.His latest novel, Dissident Gardens, follows three generations of utopian seekers whose American dreams are thwarted by reality. They’re activists to varying degrees and, as Lethem says, fundamentally uncomfortable in everyday life. Their stories trace a particular vein running through the country’s history, from the Communist cells of the 1930s to the Occupy movement of today.


By telephone from his home in California, Lethem discussed the porous borders between science fiction and “the mainstream,” how contemporary fiction acknowledges (or doesn’t) technology and capitalism, and wanting to write about his grandmother’s sex life.
Last time we talked, we discussed Philip K. Dick, a science fiction writer who had a great influence on you — not just as a writer, but as a person. You've mentioned early in your career wanting to align yourself with genre writers, who you called “those exiles within their own culture.” As someone well into your career, with more than a half-dozen published novels, what's your relationship to science fiction today?That's a really great and really complicated, wide-open opportunity there. There are so many different angles on what it even means to speak with confidence about a science fiction genre. It's a bit like an oasis in the desert that looks coherent from a distance, and when you get closer is not just a mirage — there's something there — but some of it was a mirage. And certainly, there's a lot of sand between the trees and the little trickle of water that looked like one coherent thing in the distance.By the way, every time I laugh, you should insert [laughter], okay? I think it just makes things much better, because I'm constantly being taken for a pompous asshole when I was just trying to be funny about something. Something about my tone requires a tremendous number of [laughter], okay?Do you want me to —Yeah, that's all on the record. You can say that whole thing.
I don't feel that way about everything. The “crime” section contains those hard-boiled detective stories, but it also contains this other genre, which is about the criminal protagonist. They’re the kinds of books you encounter in Charles Willeford and Donald Westlake. They may both be read by people who dig mysteries, but they're different things. And they're different things yet again from the well-ordered, English-style Agatha Christie pursuit-by-armchair-detective, sequence-of-likely-suspects-leading-to-apprehending-the-culprit-by-way-of-organized-clues that makes you go “Aha!” and “Oh ho!” That's another genre.So, speaking as a novelist, I feel great confidence that the hard-boiled detective story is a genre. When I read Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett or Ross Macdonald or the very early James Ellroy, I see the pattern. When I wrote Gun, with Occasional Music and Motherless Brooklyn, those were genre novels: the hard-boiled detective story gave me a reliable template.

for the rest go here:
http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/29/472...