Ed Gorman's Blog, page 115

Max Allan Collins ASK NOT

  
















  On the day Jack Kennedy was killed, I was sitting home with my father watching TV and eating an early lunch. In an hour or so I'd be headed back to school. I was then a part-time college student and part-time bag boy at a supermarket. I was also intensely political and even more intensely a left wing labor Democrat. I'd walked dozens of picket lines from five years on and frequently traveled to Iowa City to hear many left speakers talk.    As I recall my father and I watched each successive network Breaking News story with increasing disbelief. This was after all America. Things like this just didn't happen here.    Reading Max Allan Collins' latest Nathan Heller novel, ASK NOT, all my memories of that bloody day and night returned as if I was paging through a scrapbook of nightmares.  The rage, the sorrow, the impotence.
  ASK NOT is Collins' take on the suspicion many of us still feel after being lied to by the Warren Commission. And as Collins captures so well in this brilliant book, the suspicion that remains to this day.   The book teems with real people in the saga--everybody from the legendary including Robert Kennedy to most suspicious player of all, Jack Ruby. It is with no less a person than the late and controversial columnist Dororthy Kilgallen (here Flo Kilgore) that he joins forces to investigate the killing. Collins cleverly ties this book back to the previous Heller novel TARGET KILLING. In fact in a chilling scene Heller and his sixteen year old son are almost run down by someone from that novel.
   The consummate craftsman has once again moved in on the turf of the late Richard Condon in this powerful, rich and ultimately disturbing novel.   
  

On the day Jack Kennedy was killed, I was si...

   On the day Jack Kennedy was killed, I was sitting home with my father watching TV and eating an early lunch. In an hour or so I'd be headed back to school. I was then a part-time college student and part-time bag boy at a supermarket. I was also intensely political and even more intensely a left wing labor Democrat. I'd walked dozens of picket lines from five years on and frequently traveled to Iowa City to hear many left speakers talk.     As I recall my father and I watched each successive network Breaking News story with increasing disbelief. This was after all America. Things like this just didn't happen here.     Reading Max Allan Collins' latest Nathan Heller novel, ASK NOT,  all my memories of that bloody day and night returned as if I was paging through a scrapbook of nightmares.  The rage, the sorrow, the impotence.   ASK NOT is Collins' take on the suspicion many of us still feel after being lied to by the Warren Commission.  And as Collins captures so well in this brilliant book, the suspicion that remains to this day.    The book teems with real people in the saga--everybody from the legendary including Robert Kennedy to most suspicious player of all, Jack Ruby. It is with no less a person than the late and controversial columnist Dororthy Kilgallen (here Flo Kilgore) that he joins forces to investigate the killing.  Collins cleverly ties this book back to the previous Heller novel TARGET KILLING. In fact in a chilling scene Heller and his sixteen year old son are almost run down by someone from that novel.
   The consummate craftsman has once again moved in on the turf of the late Richard Condon in this powerful, rich and ultimately disturbing novel.      

Max Allan Collins ASK NOT

  On the day Jack Kennedy was killed, I was sitting home with my father watching TV and eating an early lunch. In an hour or so I'd be headed back to school. I was then a part-time college student and part-time bag boy at a supermarket. I was also intensely political and even more intensely a left wing labor Democrat. I'd walked dozens of picket lines from five years on and frequently traveled to Iowa City to hear many left speakers talk.
    As I recall my father and I watched each successive network Breaking News story with increasing disbelief. This was after all America. Things like this just didn't happen here. 
   Reading Max Allan Collins' latest Nathan Heller novel, ASK NOT, 
all my memories of that bloody day and night returned as if I was paging through a scrapbook of nightmares.  The rage, the sorrow, the impotence.   ASK NOT is Collins' take on the suspicion many of us still feel after being lied to by the Warren Commission.  And as Collins captures so well in this brilliant book, the suspicion that remains to this day.    The book teems with real people in the saga--everybody from the legendary including Robert Kennedy to most suspicious player of all, Jack Ruby. It is with no less a person than the late and controversial columnist Dororthy Kilgallen (here Flo Kilgore) that he joins forces to investigate the killing.  Collins cleverly ties this book back to the previous Heller novel TARGET KILLING. In fact in a chilling scene Heller and his sixteen year old son are almost run down by someone from that novel.    The consummate craftsman has once again moved in on the turf of the late Richard Condon in this powerful, rich and ultimately disturbing novel.   

  

Westworld may be a TV series

(thanks to Cinema Retro for this link to Hollywood Reporter story)

Ed Gorman: This is one of my favorite lightweight science fiction movies.
HBO Buys 'Westworld' Adaptation From J.J. Abrams2:37 PM PDT 8/30/2013 by Lacey Rose5891100EmailPrintComments (4)The premium cable network has made a pilot production commitment for a drama adaptation of the 1973 Michael Crichton sci-fi movie of the same name.J.J. AbramsHBO is making a foray into theJ.J. Abrams business.OUR EDITOR RECOMMENDSJ.J. Abrams Reteaming With DP Daniel Mindel to Shoot 'Star Wars' - On Film Did J.J. Abrams' 'Star Trek' Kill a 'Worf' TV Series?In another example of the premium cable network buying a project from an outside studio, HBO has made a pilot production commitment for a Westworld adaptation from Warner Bros. TV. The drama effort, inspired by MichaelCrichton's 1973 film of the same name, is being billed as a dark odyssey about the dawn of artificial consciousness and the future of sin. PHOTOS: Power Lawyers: 'Star Trek's' J.J. Abrams, Michael Bay Pose With Their Attorneys Abrams will executive produce alongside veteran producer Jerry Weintraub and Bad Robot's Bryan Burk, with Person of Interest's Jonathan Nolanattached to co-write, EP and direct the pilot. Lisa Joywill join him as a co-writer and EP, while Kathy Lingg and Athena Wickham are on board as a co-executive producer and a producer, respectively. The drama is being produced by Bad Robot Productions, Jerry Weintraub Productions and Kilter Films in association with Warner Bros.The move marks the first HBO project for Bad Robot, the prolific TV and film shingle behind such series as NBC's Revolution, CBS' Person of Interest and newcomers Almost Human (Fox) and Believe (NBC). For the network, which has a history of owning the bulk of its series, it follows recent outside orders for Fox 21's Open from Ryan Murphy and Warner Bros. TV's The Leftovers from Damon Lindelof.

CONTEMPLATING THE RECENT GANGSTER MOVIES by Fred Blosser

CONTEMPLATING THE RECENT GANGSTER MOVIES by Fred Blosser
In the 1950s, the decade when I was a kid, the popularity of the gangster movie genre was fueled by real-life headlines and the success of TV’s THE UNTOUCHABLES.  In the ‘60s, movie hoods were briefly overshadowed by the Bond craze: even when emissaries of the American Mafia appeared in the 007 movie universe in GOLDFINGER, they were simply there to support the title mastermind’s criminal enterprise.  Arguably, the notoriety of 1967’s POINT BLANK and BONNIE AND CLYDE whetted the public’s appetite for a modern era of mob films; the epic popularity of THE GODFATHER followed.
SCARFACE and GOODFELLAS were the hallmark gangster movies of the ‘80s, followed in the mid-’90s by PULP FICTION and its imitators.  Tarantino’s style continued to influence moviemakers into the 2000s, if Guy Ritchie, SMOKIN’ ACES, LUCKY NUMBER SLEVIN, and BOONDOCK SAINTS are any indication.  Ritchie’s ROCKnROLLA (2008) may have been the last gasp of the jokey, time-twisting Tarantino  approach to mobster narrative, at least for now.  I have a feeling that we’ll experience a wave of new Tarantino imitations in the next couple of years, in the form of emerging thirty-five-ish writers and directors who saw PULP FICTION at the impressionable age of 12 or 13.
I watched a bunch of new -- that is, post-2010 -- gangster films recently.  On the whole, they were varied in setting and approach, but all were comfortably (or uncomfortably, depending on your fondness for what some would call genre conventions; others, cliches) rooted in classic traditions.
KILL THE IRISHMAN (2011) and THE ICEMAN (2013) purport to be based on true stories from the 1970s.  The Irishman, Danny Greene (Ray Stevenson), rises from Cleveland dockworker to money-making Mafia associate by impressing the local mob, then incurs their wrath when he turns informant for the FBI.  The Iceman, Richard Kuklinski, follows a similar trajectory: he becomes a hit man for Roy DeMeo’s Brooklyn crew, then becomes too enterprising for the paranoid DeMeo’s comfort.
THE ICEMAN is the stronger movie, thanks to Michael Shannon’s performance as Kuklinski and edgy support by an unrecognizable Chris Evans as fellow killer Robert Pronge.  Both movies tip their hats to their cinematic predecessors by central casting of supporting roles from mob movies and shows past: Ray Liotta and Robert Davi in THE ICEMAN, Paul Sorvino, Vinnie Jones, Christopher Walken, Steve Schirripa,and Tony LoBianco in KILL THE IRISHMAN.
Walken and Al Pacino are aging mobsters in STAND UP GUYS (2012); maybe more precisely stated, they play Walken and Pacino playing mobsters.  Walken’s boss forces Walken to take a contract on his old friend Pacino when Pacino is released from prison.   The plot is predictable, but then that’s the point of casting iconic actors by type, isn’t it?
Walter Hill’s BULLET TO THE HEAD (2013), based on a graphic novel, teams Sylvester Stallone as a hit man with a Washington, D.C., Asian-American detective (Taylor Kwon) to bust a ring of mobsters and power brokers in New Orleans.  I’ve never quite shared many critics’ fondness for Hill.  I’m not sure who the real auteur here is supposed to be, him or Stallone, although the movie repeats motifs from Hill’s past movies, 48 HRS and RED HEAT.  As the evil mob henchman, in a role that calls for the heft of a modern Jack Palance or Ernest Borgnine, Jason Mamoa is as empty of charisma as he was in the 2011 remake of CONAN THE BARBARIAN.  Kwon’s cop wins a prize for stupidity as he continues to trust the New Orleans PD after it becomes painfully clear that they are in the bad guys’ pockets.
KILLING THEM SOFTLY (2013), based on George V. Higgins’ COGAN’S TRADE, updates Higgins’ 1974 setting to 2008.  As politicians attempt to stabilize the collapsing American economy in TV clips of Bush and Obama that play in the background of several scenes, the Boston mob tries to stabilize their local criminal economy by finding and executing two gunmen who robbed a mob-protected card game.  I rather liked the style of the film, which punctuates long, conversation-driven scenes with sudden bursts of brutal violence.  The best single visual is a shot of a shivering little stolen chihuahua on a leash, looking up at the two gunmen on a bleak street corner as they plan their ill-fated holdup.
I haven’t read the Higgins novel, so I don’t know how he described his hit man character, Jackie Cogan; Brad Pitt gives it a heartfelt try, but I kept thinking how much more believable Lee Marvin or Henry Silva would have been.  Ray Liotta is in this one too as a hapless hood, and the late James Gandolfini as another hit man; come to think of it, Gandolfini should have played Cogan, and Pitt should have played his role.  I think there is a homage to David Lynch’s BLUE VELVET when “Love Letters,” the old Ketty Lester ballad, plays in the background of a slow-motion scene of a rub-out.
Tom Hardy anchors LAWLESS (2012) as a moonshiner in the Blue Ridge in the 1930s in another “based on a true story’ script.  The film starts well, with Guy Pearce suitably nasty as a crooked Revenue agent in a role that seems to combine Richard Widmark’s and Patrick McGoohan’s characters from the 1969 movie version of Elmore Leonard’s THE MOONSHINE WAR.  But the ending collapses into a far-fetched, over-the-top shootout between the bootleggers and the law; less would have been better.
VIVA RIVA! (2010) has the most exotic location of the recent gang movies: Kinshasa, the capital of the Republic of Congo, where go-getter Riva hijacks a valuable cargo of gasoline the way the 1930s gangsters hijacked shipments of booze.  This does not sit well with the local boss, Azor.  The setting may be modern urban Africa, but Riva -- like the Irishman and the Iceman -- follows a pattern that goes back at least to James Cagney’s Tom Powers and Edward G. Robinson’s Rico Bandello, eighty years ago: “a steady upward progress followed by a very precipitate fall,” in Robert Warshow’s words.  Warshow wrote his essay on the movie gangster in 1948; I don’t know whether he would have been surprised or reassured  that, 65 years later, today’s productions continue to ply the same formula.
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Ross Macdonald (from 2012)

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Ross Macdonald (2012)The first Ross Macdonald novel I ever read was The Way Some People Die. He was John Ross Macdonald then, still going back and forth I suppose with John D. MacDonald about the use of names so similar.

I was fifteen, steeped in Gold Medals and Lions and Ace Doubles. By then I'd read a good deal of Hammett and Chandler as well. None of it prepared me for Ross Macdonald.

I was too ignorant to pick up on stylistic differences. What I noticed were the characters. Few of them were new to me as types, most of them in fact were in most of the hardboiled novels I'd read, but Macdonald brought a depth and humanity to them that made me think not of other crime writers but of authors such as Fitzgerald and Hemingway and James T. Farrell and Graham Greene, my idols. This was real no bullshit psychological writing.

Just as superheroes never outgrow their need for milk, I've never outgrown my need for the novels and stories of Ross Macdonald. I share his view of humanity, that amalgam of fascination, disappointment, anger and sorrow that fill his work.

If you want to remind yourself of how good he was even early on, I'd recommend The Archer Files edited by Tom Nolan and published by Crippen and Landru. In addition to being a fine looking collection, it contains all the published Lew Archer short stories plus an intriguing section called "Notes." Macdonald started stories that he planned to someday finish, a way of keeping thoughts alive. Most of these sure would have made superb tales.

Then there's the long introduction by Tom Nolan in which he takes the reader into the work and life of Kenneth Millar a/k/a Ross Macdonald. Nolan wrote the Edgar-nominated biography of Macdonald and this introduction is almost a synthesis of it in its information, insight and elegantly arranged presentation.

Oh, yes--the stories.There are an even dozen and while some are better than others all of them demonstrate why he became so important so quickly, even though his real fame took many years to achieve. My favorite is an imperfect piece called "Wild Goose Chase." There's a sort of gothic frenzy to it that kept me flipping those pages.

This is an essential acquisition for all libraries, home or public.

The Randolph Scott Budd Boetticher westerns

Greenbriar Picture Show http://greenbriarpictureshows.blogspo...


Ed here: As most of you have figured out by now I'm a big fan of the Randolph Scott-Budd-Boetticher movies made at Warner Brothers in the 1950s. I was Googling the writer of most of those films Burt Kennedy when I came across an amazing movie site called Greenbriar Pictures. There's no other site with the scope and depth of movie history. Check this site out right now.

by JOHN MCELWEE at Greenbriar for the entire article go here: http://greenbriarpictureshows.blogspo...

Scott was the constant current running beneath "A" westerns flourishing after the war. He’d gone over completely to cowboy parts,profited handsomely on many he produced, and passed shooting breaks conferring with stockbrokers. There were ongoing deals with Warners and Columbia, permitting Randy to knock off four and sometimes five a year while bigger names like Wayne, Stewart, and Cooper limited western output and spent themselves as heavily hammering out percentage memos and negative ownership. Scott was on and off jobs within three or so weeks and traveled no further than Lone Pine to finish yearly quotas. He was unstoppable in small towns and all his shows met payroll. His Southern accent was apple butter to kinsmen here in North Carolina where Scott grew up, and no frontiersman came more credibly of times and places his westerns depicted. You figured any Scott character for recent service with the Confederacy, and though his cowboys were square shooters, they never came across as square.


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Bob Thomas told a priceless Jack Warner anecdote in his biography of the studio head that neatly sums up declining fortunes of medium-budget westerns by the mid-fifties. Warner had gathered his line producers and lower execs to map out the year’s program. We’ll make the usual number of Randolph Scott westerns at seven hundred and fifty thousand apiece. We can always count on rentals of a million and a quarter, he said. Could I make a suggestion?, asked a young man in the room. Why not spend a million dollars on the Scott westerns? With improved quality, maybe they could bring back two million, he said hopefully. Kid, you’re fired, replied Warner. I’ll tell you why you were fired. Those westerns are a dying market. The public is getting all the shit-kickers they need on our TV shows. Now if you had said, "Why don’t we make the Randy Scott westerns for half a million?", I would have made you my assistant. This, unfortunately, was the backdrop against which Seven Men From Now was produced, for by then Scott grosses were declining. Warner’s most recent with him, Tall Man Riding (1955), barely cracked a million in domestic rentals, while across-town Columbia saw just $777,000 from 1956’s 7th Cavalry. WB did try economizing to the extent of shooting in-house Shootout At Medicine Bend in black-and-white the following year, an act punishable in this instance with domestic rentals lowest of any so far --- $655,000. Budgets and profits both fell as tele-cowboys rose, with WB enthusiastically competing with itself. Cheyenne was breaking big on ABC by 1956-57, having gone to new episodes every other week after an initial season among revolving wheels on the failed Warner Brothers Presents, and Maverickwas in preparation for a 1957 premiere. "B" westerns had been wiped off industry production charts for several years as cowboys migrated to television, and many of Randolph Scott’s oldies were turning up there as Seven Men From Now opened in August 1956. This was the new team’s first project (minus Harry Joe Brown, who’d be back when they moved to Columbia), Burt Kennedy having brought his original script to John Wayne’s Batjac company (its product distributed by Warners), with Scott and Boetticher added at Wayne’s instigation. The star was himself reluctant to do another western so soon after The Searchers (a decision he’d regret after seeing how well Seven Men turned out), and besides, a modest negative cost ($719,000) could not have been maintained with Wayne in the lead. Boetticher recalled JW’s fury when a preview of Seven Men found it playing to an audience who’d come to see Serenade with Mario Lanza. Trade reviews were favorable, but counted little among showmen who regarded most westerns as interchangeable at best. It was immaterial which Randolph Scott "shit-kicker" was which, as long as prints were available and bookings cheap. Seven Men From Now did gross better than Scott’s recent ones at Columbia, but with final tallies of $989,000, it represented the first of his Warner released westerns to fall below a million in domestic rentals.

The Hiding Place by David Jack Bell Now on Kindle only $2.99

The Hiding Place [Kindle Edition]David Bell (Author)My next novel NEVER COME BACK will be out on October 1. In
advance of that, Amazon has chosen THE HIDING PLACE as the Kindle Deal of the
Day for Thursday September 19th.







Praise for Cemetery Girl



"Cemetery Girl is a smasher. It
twists and turns and never lets go, and...it could happen just this way."

—Jacquelyn Mitchard, New York Times
bestselling author of The Deep End



"Cemetery Girl is more than just an
utterly compelling thriller—and it certainly is that. David Bell's stellar
novel is also a haunting meditation on the ties that bind parent to child,
husband to wife, brother to brother­—and what survives even under the most
shattering possible circumstance. An absolutely riveting, absorbing read not to
be missed."

—Lisa Unger, New York Times bestselling
author of Darkness, My Old Friend



"Trust me: you have never read a missing
persons story like this one....A fast, mean head trip of a thriller that reads
like a collaboration between Michael Connelly and the gothic fiction of Joyce
Carol Oates, Cemetery Girl is one of those novels that you cannot shake after
it's over. A winner on every level."

—Will Lavender, New York Times bestselling
author of Dominance



"Cemetery Girl grabbed me by the
throat on page one and never let up. An intense, unrelenting powerhouse of a
book, and the work of a master."

—John Lescroart, New York Times
bestselling author of Damage



"A smart, tense, creepy take on the story of
a missing daughter, told by her far-from-perfect father. If you think you know
this tale—from all- too-familiar newspaper accounts, from lesser movies and
books--then this terrific novel will make you think otherwise."

—Brock Clarke, national bestselling author of Exley
and An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England

Forgotten Books: The Plastic Nightmare

I've written here before about Richard Neely. He wrote non-series crime novels that pretty much covered the entire range of dark suspense. I mentioned that in the best of them the weapon of choice is not poison, bullets or garrote. He always prefered sexual betrayl.

Plastic is a good example. Using amnesia as the central device Dan Mariotte must reconstruct his life. Learning that the beautiful woman at his bedside all these months in the hospital--his wife--may have tried to kill him in a car accident is only the first of many surprises shared by Mariotte and the reader alike.

What gives the novel grit is Neely's take on the privileged class. He frequently wrote about very successful men (he was a very successful adverts man himself) and their women. The time was the Seventies. Private clubs, privte planes, private lives. But for all the sparkle of their lives there was in Neely's people a despair that could only be assauged (briefly) by sex. Preferably illicit sex. Betrayl sex. Men betrayed women and women betrayed men. It was Jackie Collins only for real.

Plastic is a snapshot of a certain period, the Seventies when the Fortune 500 dudes wore sideburns and faux hippie clothes and flashed the peace sign almost as often as they flashed their American Express Gold cards. Johny Carson hipsters. The counter culture co-opted by the pigs.

The end is a stunner, which is why I can say little about the plot. Neely knew what he was doing and I'm glad to see his book back in print. Watching Nerely work is always a pleasure.         Somebody should  make most of his novels available in e book form.

New Books: Killer Green by David Niall Wilson

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KILLER GREEN – by David Niall Wilson
Quentin Tarantino meets Smokey & the Bandit in this noir, pseudo-science thriller.  Sometimes, people just need killing. When Sam West wanders into the Sunny-Side-Up Diner for the last time, hoping for a last slice of Mort's world-class pie, and one last look at a waitress named Delilah, he has no idea he's about to become the instrument of a great, karmic cleansing.  The only thing crazier than the seemingly inevitable trail of bodies following Sam and Delilah south is the fact that - as State Police and local sheriffs begin to investigate - they find no evidence.  Nothing. And the missing bodies are just the start, as an unlikely band of companions are drawn together in a scientific experiment more in line with the TV Series Fringe than anything in reality, with the threat of alien probes, local law enforcement, and rednecks around every corner.
Killer Green began life as a joking conversation on Twitter. It became a phenomenon - was written into a screenplay - shared on the Internet, optioned by a production company, and continues its social media-born roll toward the Mexican border.
It's ecologically relevant. It's good for the environment.  It's a novel you will not forget, that will leave you laughing and hold your attention to the last word. 
Wouldn't you rather be green?

David Niall Wilson, author of The DeChance Chronicles, Sins of the Flash, This is My Blood, On the Third Day, and more than thirty other books is a former president of the Horror Writers of America, multiple winner of the Bram Stoker Award, an ordained minister in the Universal Life Church, and nearly as crazy as his characters.  Find him on Twitter at @David_N_Wilson to be in on the next big thing. Search his name for his other titles, or click on the handy Linked Author Name here on Amazon to visit his Amazon Author Central page.
David is also CEO and founder of Crossroad Press, a cutting edge digital, audio, and print publishing company representing more than 700 titles and 130 authors, spanning horror, mystery, science fiction, new age, biography, and more.  Crossroad Press is the publisher of the original series projects Tales of the Scattered Earth, O.C.L.T., Super City Police Department, The Order of the Air, and The DeChance Chronicles.  Crossroad Press authors include Clive Barker, Tom Piccirilli, Bill Crider, Joe R. Lansdale, Irving Wallace, Willam Bayer, P. F. Kluge, Melissa Scott, Jo Graham, Aaron Rosenberg, Steven Savile and a host of others.  Find them at http://store.crossroadpress.com