Ed Gorman's Blog, page 120

R.I.P. Barbara Mertz

By Emily Langer Washington Post:

Barbara Mertz, an erstwhile Egyptologist better known to millions of readers as Barbara Michaels or Elizabeth Peters, the noms de plume on the covers of her dozens of top-selling historical mysteries and romantic thrillers, died Aug. 8 at her home near Frederick. She was 85.Her daughter, Elizabeth Mertz, confirmed her death and said she did not yet know the cause.

Dr. Mertz was one of the most popular writers of her era and genres. Her oeuvre encompassed ad ven ture, romance, history, the supernatural and timeless themes such as the imprudence of standing in the way of a woman on a mission. She churned out books with extraordinary speed, once remarking that she had lost count of them sometime around the publication of her 50th volume.She wrote more than two dozen novels as Barbara Michaels, the pseudonym under which she made her fiction debut with “The Master of Blacktower” in 1966, and more than three dozen as Elizabeth Peters. Those books included a long-running series about the parasol-toting Victorian pyramid explorer Amelia Peabody.“Between Amelia Peabody and Indiana Jones, it’s Amelia — in wit and daring — by a landslide,” author Paul Theroux once wrote in the New York Times.

SANDRA BALZO'S REVIEW OF AMMIE, COME HOME



On AMMIE, COME HOME by Barbara Michaels Barbara Mertz (aka Elizabeth Petersand Barbara Michaels) passed away August 8. Her AMMIE, COME HOME, written as Barbara Michaels, is my all-time favorite book and helped me through a difficult time in my life. When I wrote an essay about it for Jim Huang’s Mystery Muses: 100 Classics That Inspire Today’s Mystery Writers, Barbara (who I’d never met) sent me a handwritten note saying she was glad the book hadn’t been forgotten. Bless her–neither she nor her books will be. 




Sandra BalzoAuthor of the Maggy Thorsen and Main Street Mysteries from Severn HouseWatch for Murder on the Orient Espresso, coming in December!www.SandraBalzo.com

FORGOTTEN BOOKS: THE VENGEFUL VIRGIN BY GIL BREWER

The Vengeful ViriginF. Scott Fitzgerald once noted that Hemingway (then at his peak) wrote with the authority of success while Fitzgerald (then in the dumps) wrote with the authority of failure.

The authority of failure is what animates virtually all of Gil Brewer's work and certainly The Vengeful Virgin  is no exception. In outline it's nothing new--a very James M. Cainian scenario in which a TV repairman gets involved with an eighteen year old temptress who is taking care of a dying old man (and one we don't take to at all). He's promised to leave her a fortune when he dies. The trouble is he's dying very slowly. It won't surprise you that the temptress has thoughts of inviting the Reaper in a little ahead of schedule.

What makes this one of Gil Brewer's most successful novels is that a couple of the plot turns are truly shocking and that he is in complete control of his material. He paces this one well right up to the end. And the end is a powerhouse.

I mentioned the authority of failure. In Brewer's case it's usually because his protagonists let their dissatisfaction with their lot become a kind of self-pity that lets them justify whatever they need to do to improve their lot. They generally learn too late that maybe the old TV repair gig wasn't so bad at all.

Contrast this attitude with the reckless but doomed romantics of Charles Williams (whom I prefer). They're smarter than Brewer's men and there's rarely any self-pity. They seem to be on some kind of quest, which is a twist on the Cain-style tale. Yes they meet a bad girl. Yes they do something stupid. But what gets them through is enormous energy and a sense of mission and an undertow of anger. They're like Brewer's men, too, failures. But they are the tarnished knights that Phillip Marlowe and all his imitators only pretended to be.

Max Allan Collins, Jake Hinkson, Chris Morgan

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 07, 2013



Max Allan Collins' great Quarry series may be coming to TV. Right now a pilot is filming and both Al (Max) and Barb Collins are there and obviously having a great time.

Virtually everyone we met on set was great. The crew is a friendly, hardworking bunch from four states – California, Mississippi, Tennessee and (I think) Louisiana…though it may be Arkansas. I immediately got hugs from both director John Hillcoat (LAWLESS) and a particularly warm one from director of photography Javier Aguirresarobe when I complimented him on his terrific work on WARM BODIES. Producer David Kanter of Anonymous was essentially our tour guide, a warm and friendly one at that. But best of all was getting to know and really talk Quarry with writers Michael D. Fuller and Graham Gordy (both of RECTIFIED). Before going to set, I delivered to their trailer complete sets of the first editions of the original 1970s Quarry paperbacks THE BROKER, THE BROKER’S WIFE, THE DEALER and THE SLASHER. I don’t have many of these left, and Michael and Graham were like fanboys reacting to receiving them. These are smart, talented guys who know the Quarry series inside out. I’m very lucky to have them (as they put it) “playing in my sandbox.”

for the rest go here: http://www.maxallancollins.com/blog/

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Fine writer Jake Hinkson who shines as both a noir novelist and an essayist on all things noir is interviewed at All Things Read.

What kick started your love affair with all things noir?
I think you fall in love with noir because you have a noir disposition. I can tell you that I bought the 1950 Edmond O’Brien film noir DOA out of a Walmart bargain bin when I was still in junior high school, but I can’t tell you why. The plot—a man discovers that he’s been fatally poisoned and then sets out in a desperate race against time to find his own murderer—appealed to some pre-existing sense of pulp fatalism that was already in me.http://everyreadthing.com/2013/08/05/...

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In the current issue of The Los Angeles Review of Books Chris Morgan writes  a stunning overview of Gil Brewer's work and makes some controversial assessments along the way.

Ultimately, parsing Brewer’s republished works suggests there is a place for him in noir’s tumultuous, barroom-style Valhalla. He certainly seems to surpass Cornell Woolrich, who was the King of obscure noir but also one of the genre’s most flawed writers. Woolrich’s writing was convoluted and sloppy, his plots not only defying logic but insulting it. He also had a true genius for the mixed and awkward metaphor (“His heart was frothing like an eggbeater.”). By contrast, Brewer’s own slapdash work habits seem vindicated. His plots were as involved as they needed to be but not over-the-top (aside from the cases, such as in  Devil , in which his tongue was planted in cheek). His style was lean and hard, meeting Swift’s dictum of putting “proper words in their proper places.” And he was able to make his mixed metaphors sing a little (“The air was knife-cold.”). Yet Woolrich remains a standard-bearer for the genre as a whole, even if some people aren’t willing to grant him the status of a Cain, Chandler, or Hammett.

for the rest go here:
http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/the-...

Max Allan Collins, Jake Hinkson, Chris Morgan

Max Allan Collins' great Quarry series may be coming to TV. Right now a pilot is filming and both Al (Max) and Barb Collins are there and obviously having a great time.

Virtually everyone we met on set was great. The crew is a friendly, hardworking bunch from four states – California, Mississippi, Tennessee and (I think) Louisiana…though it may be Arkansas. I immediately got hugs from both director John Hillcoat (LAWLESS) and a particularly warm one from director of photography Javier Aguirresarobe when I complimented him on his terrific work on WARM BODIES. Producer David Kanter of Anonymous was essentially our tour guide, a warm and friendly one at that. But best of all was getting to know and really talk Quarry with writers Michael D. Fuller and Graham Gordy (both of RECTIFIED). Before going to set, I delivered to their trailer complete sets of the first editions of the original 1970s Quarry paperbacks THE BROKER, THE BROKER’S WIFE, THE DEALER and THE SLASHER. I don’t have many of these left, and Michael and Graham were like fanboys reacting to receiving them. These are smart, talented guys who know the Quarry series inside out. I’m very lucky to have them (as they put it) “playing in my sandbox.”

for the rest go here: http://www.maxallancollins.com/blog/

-----------------------------------------------

Fine writer Jake Hinkson who shines as both a noir novelist and an essayist on all things noir is interviewed at All Things Read.

What kick started your love affair with all things noir?
I think you fall in love with noir because you have a noir disposition. I can tell you that I bought the 1950 Edmond O’Brien film noir DOA out of a Walmart bargain bin when I was still in junior high school, but I can’t tell you why. The plot—a man discovers that he’s been fatally poisoned and then sets out in a desperate race against time to find his own murderer—appealed to some pre-existing sense of pulp fatalism that was already in me.http://everyreadthing.com/2013/08/05/...

-----------------------------------------------

In the current issue of The Los Angeles Review of Books Chris Morgan writes  a stunning overview of Gil Brewer's work and makes some controversial assessments along the way.

Ultimately, parsing Brewer’s republished works suggests there is a place for him in noir’s tumultuous, barroom-style Valhalla. He certainly seems to surpass Cornell Woolrich, who was the King of obscure noir but also one of the genre’s most flawed writers. Woolrich’s writing was convoluted and sloppy, his plots not only defying logic but insulting it. He also had a true genius for the mixed and awkward metaphor (“His heart was frothing like an eggbeater.”). By contrast, Brewer’s own slapdash work habits seem vindicated. His plots were as involved as they needed to be but not over-the-top (aside from the cases, such as in  Devil , in which his tongue was planted in cheek). His style was lean and hard, meeting Swift’s dictum of putting “proper words in their proper places.” And he was able to make his mixed metaphors sing a little (“The air was knife-cold.”). Yet Woolrich remains a standard-bearer for the genre as a whole, even if some people aren’t willing to grant him the status of a Cain, Chandler, or Hammett.

for the rest go here:
http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/the-...

Pro-File: Sandra Balzo

 PRO-FILE: 
 1. Tell us about your current novel or project.MURDER ON THE ORIENT ESPRESSO is my eighth Maggy Thorsen Mystery and will be released in the U.S. on December 1st by Severn House. I had great fun with this one because I took Maggy, who owns a coffeehouse in my home state of Wisconsin, on a road trip to my new stomping grounds--South Florida. Maggy tags along vacation-style when her main squeeze, Sheriff Jake Pavlik, is asked to speak at a mystery writers' conference. [Disclaimer: Any resemblance to Sleuthfest, a conference hosted by the Florida Chapter of Mystery Writers of America, is coincidental, if occasionally inspirational.] The coffeehouse owner is hoping for a romantic long weekend, but upon arrival they're whisked away to the opening night's event, a reenactment of Agatha Christie's MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS, staged onboard a chartered night train into the Everglades. As you might guess, the trip goes downhill from there. Like I said, this book was a treat to write. Not only did I have the opportunity to involve the mystery-writing and publishing community and pay homage to Christie's classic, but I also was able to explore the eccentricities that are South Florida through a tourist's eyes.
> 2. Can you give us a sense of what you’re working on now?I have two series published by Severn House, so next up is book three in my Main Street Murder series. Main Street features journalist AnnaLise Griggs, who has returned to Sutherton, a resort town in the North Carolina mountains, to deal with her mother's health problems. This third installment in the series is tentatively entitled TO HEIR IS HUMAN and involves swinger and local real estate developer, Dickens Hart, who decades before had owned and operated the White Tail, a Playboy Club knockoff (think "Fawns" instead of "Bunnies").In declining health, the wealthy Hart decides to invite his past lovers and possible heirs to his North Carolina estate en masse. When the man is found murdered the weekend of this awkward get-together, his daughter AnnaLise--with the most to lose if Hart had lived to recognize additional heirs--is the logical suspect.

> 3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?Being the master of my own real-life time and place, I think. My work can be performed whenever I please and from anywhere I can plug in a computer. And I love, love, LOVE that moment when things seem to shift and focus, the plot pieces tumbling into place almost of their own volition. For example, a throw-away character I inserted in the first scene for some mundane purpose suddenly becomes central to the storyline in ways I didn't anticipate. It feels magical when that happens--like being "in the zone" while running five miles or playing three sets of tennis--but I prefer to think my subconscious knew where I was going the whole time. Yeah, right.

> 4. The greatest displeasure?I suppose no regular paycheck. Or vital insurance, like health and disability, being automatically provided. But these are trade-offs for being the aforementioned "master of my own time and place," so I'm not complaining.

> 5. Advice to the publishing world?Social media is a wonderful way of staying in touch with readers and having human interaction--or at least human interaction, once removed--that we didn't always have as writers. Now someone is on the other side of the computer screen tweeting and posting, texting and emailing right back. And that's pretty cool.If we're not careful, though
> 6. Are there any forgotten writers you’d like to see in print again?Well, I don't think he's forgotten, but I'm very excited that my fiancé, Jeremiah Healy, has seen his first nine John Francis Cuddy private investigator novels mounted as e-books, with seven scheduled for audio so far. Since Cuddy, Jerry has written the Mairead O'Clare legal thrillers (under the pseudonym "Terry Devane"), as well as screenplays, the "bible" for a proposed TV series called OFFICER INVOLVED, and various other projects, but I've missed Cuddy. Jerry has promised me to produce a new novel on his best-known character before the dawn of 2014, and I'm holding him to it!Two other writer/protagonist duos I'd dearly love to see back are Neil Albert's private investigator, Dave Garrett, and Marissa Piesman's lawyer, Nina Fischman--both from the '90s. > 7. Tell us about selling your first novel.

How long do you have? I was downsized from my corporate public relations job in 1996 and, like a lot of P.R. people and journalists, had always wanted to write a novel. I had nine months of severance, which I figured would be plenty of time. Well, that book, UNCOMMON GROUNDS, was published eight years later. Two literary agents tried unsuccessfully to sell it and finally, un-agented, I sent the manuscript to Tekno Books for Five Star. Debbie Brod (writing her own fiction as "D.C. Brod") was the editor I drew, and she invested the time to identify what was wrong with my story (its ending, to be charitable, sucked). UNCOMMON GROUNDS appeared from Five Star in 2004 to great reviews and even award nominations, prompting my current agent to contact me toward representation. We've been together ever since.

BIO: Sandra Balzo is an award-winning author of crime fiction, including nine books in two different mystery series from Severn House--the Wisconsin-based Maggy Thorsen Mysteries and Main Street Murders, set in the High Country of North Carolina and featuring journalist AnnaLise Griggs. Balzo's books have garnered starred reviews from Kirkus and Booklist, while being recommended to readers of Janet Evanovich, Charlaine Harris, Harlan Coben, Joan Hess and Margaret Maron. A Wisconsin native, Sandy and her fiancé, fellow crimewriter Jeremiah Healy, now split their time between South Florida and North Carolina. Find Sandy online at www.SandraBalzo.com, Pinterest (http://pinterest.com/sandrabalzo), Facebook (www.facebook/SandraBalzoMysteries), Goodreads (www.goodreads.com/SandraBalzo) and Twitter (@SandraBalzo).

Elmore Leonard in hospital recovering from stroke

August 5, 2013 at 7:43 pmElmore Leonard in hospital recovering from strokeSusan WhitallThe Detroit News26 Comments
Purchase ImageElmore Leonard has written 45 novels. (Ricardo Thomas/The Detroit News)Crime writer Elmore Leonard suffered a stroke a week ago and remains hospitalized at an undisclosed Detroit area hospital, his longtime researcher Gregg Sutter confirmed today.“Elmore had a stroke; it happened a week ago, last Monday,” Sutter said. “He’s doing better every day, and the family is guardedly optimistic. He’s showing great spirit. He’s a fighter, and we’re glad to see that.”With 45 novels under his belt, if Leonard, 87, had slowed down his writing schedule prior to the stroke, it’s only compared to his prolific earlier days. He’s been working on his latest book.“He’s very much into his 46th novel,” Sutter said, “working very hard.”Last November, the National Book Foundation honored Leonard with its medallion, an award saluting lifetime achievement.With his knack for snappy dialogue, many of Leonard’s works have been turned into movies, including “Hombre” (starring Paul Newman), “Get Shorty,” “Out of Sight” and “Jackie Brown” (based upon his “Rum Punch”).Leonard particularly enjoyed the hit F/X series “Justified,” based on his novella “Fire in the Hole,” and was inspired to write a novel, “Raylan,” in 2012, about the title character.A longtime Bloomfield Township resident, Leonard could have moved to Hollywood or somewhere equally glamorous years ago, but he stayed, and Detroit has been the gift that keeps on giving in his fiction.“I like it,” Leonard said in 2012. “Great music ... lot of poverty. I wouldn't move anywhere else. Now, it's too late. I'd never be able to drive in San Francisco or Los Angeles.”swhitall@detroitnews.com
twitter.com/swhitall

From The Detroit News: http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20130805/ENT06/308050096#ixzz2bBr7VXjZ

Walter Hill Interview FROM THE HOLLYWOOD INTERVIEW

Ed here:  At his best Walter Hill is one of the true pure dark poets of American film.This interview captures the essence of a major career that has had its troubles.
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2009Walter Hill Interview  FROM THE HOLLYWOOD INTERVIEWThink Walter Hill and you likely think of his enormous hit 48 Hours or Brewster's Millions or Streets of Fire. Crowd pleasers for sure. But for me his more interesting work can be found in the more personal films he's done in the action genres. Southern Comfort, The Driver and Hard Times re a few of them. He's not always successful. I remember how disappointed I was sitting through Johnny Handsome. Most writers have had projects like that, where you just can't make the thing work the way you want it to. In the case of Johnny Handsome Hill resorted to heavy violence every time he seemed to run out of good ideas. Once in awhile the violence even got to be funny. Ellen Barkin and Lance Henriksen were SO tough they were parodies of tough. On the other hand Hill managed to take the Charles Bronson of Death Wish 9,10, 11 and 74 and turn him into an actual person. To me it's a small masterpiece, bitter, brutal but not without a certain elegaic quality as well, particularly in the closing scenes. All this said Hill is an extremely intelligent, articulate and engagingly modest guy. And this is one hell of a good interview.
From the interview:
Q I’m a big Anthony Mann fan, and there are a lot of parallels between your bodies of work. Mann said his movies were about “the use of violence by thoughtful men.”
H The kinds of stories I like to tell are part of a tradition—and I’m not comparing myself to, or placing myself as the equal of some of the great storytellers I’m going to mention; I’m artistically modest, as everyone ought to be—but it’s the tradition practiced by Robert Aldrich, Anthony Mann, Don Siegel, Howard Hawks, Sam Fuller.
I think there’s less room in the marketplace now for the kinds of stories I enjoy telling, and which I tend to think of as my strength; action movies today are more fantasy, exaggerated, comic book… That sounds pejorative… but tastes change. Audiences change. I think the older tradition was more intellectually rigorous, and the newer tradition is more pure sensation… and that’s not necessarily bad. It’s the old Apollonian vs. Dionysian controversy… Nietzsche might very well have liked the newer films more than the older ones… (laughs)
Q I was thinking about why things have changed. Do you think in the time of Ford, Hawks, Mann—when these kinds of films were being made regularly—the audience, the studio bosses, and those directors all shared a more common sense of morality?
H Sure. I talked to Lindsay Anderson about this once; he’d made the remark about what a lucky director John Ford was… that in addition to his great talent, his sensibility was by and large in step with that of the mass audience. An obvious contrary example would be Orson Welles, who did not come along at the perfect time to find an audience for his vision, an audience that would have made his work commercially sustainable.
for the rest go here:http://thehollywoodinterview.blogspot...

Mr. Beaks Talks Passion With Brian DePalma from Ain't It Cool News

for the entire interview go here:
http://www.aintitcool.com/node/63531
Ed here: I look at long careers this way. Have they given me more pleasure than not. In the case of filmmaker Brian DePalma the answer is definitely yes.

Ain't It Cool News:

PASSION is back-to-basics Brian De Palma: a sexy, slippery corporate thriller infused with just enough kink to call to mind the full-blown eroticism of classics like DRESSED TO KILL, BODY DOUBLE and FEMME FATALE. Based on the 2010 film by Alain Corneau, it's an unusually contained movie for the director; this is close-quarters combat between two ambitious women (Rachel McAdams and Noomi Rapace) desperate to maintain and/or acquire power within a major advertising agency. Their battlefield is the company's Berlin office and the bedroom, and, this being a Brian De Palma film, there are cameras observing every last inch. Surveillance is a given. They're watching. We're watching. It's a twisted little game of shifting and constantly unreliable perspective.




PASSION also finds De Palma picking up where he left off eleven years ago with FEMME FATALE. While that film was a genre study of a female archetype resisting her predetermined-by-gender doom, this latest work unfolds in a workplace seemingly controlled by women. There are men knocking about, but they're pawns relegated to the periphery of De Palma's narrative (this is his first movie without a major male character); there's nothing to overcome here but another woman. Though two films aren't enough to categorize this as a phase (especially when they're broken up by two testosterone-heavy movies), it appears pretty obvious that De Palma, after decades of pondering male inadequacy, would prefer to keep cinematic company with women exclusively.

But by his own admission, De Palma isn't currently in a position to dictate the direction of his career; the next film is basically the one that finds financing first. In fact, had he managed to get THE BOSTON STRANGLERS or THE UNTOUCHABLES: CAPONE RISING off the ground at Paramount, it's likely PASSION would've never been made. So the extent to which there is a phase nowadays, even for one of our greatest living filmmakers, is accidental. You make what's greenlit.Fortunately, De Palma is not one to remain idle. While he's out promoting the joint theatrical/VOD release of PASSION, he's moving forward with HAPPY VALLEY, his Joe Paterno biopic starring Al Pacino. There's also the possibility of a Daft Punk musical based on the director's 1974 cult hit PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE. De Palma's still raring to go, and the dextrous staging of PASSION - in particular the split-screen set piece juxtaposing a murder with a performance of Debussy's AFTERNOON OF A FAUN - proves there's plenty of zip left on his fastball. It's just a question of whether studios or financiers understand that there's a hunger for what it is he does as well as anyone out there: pure cinema.
Mr. Beaks: This is a genre you know well. Having made so many thrillers, how do you apply your style without repeating yourself?Brian De Palma: It's great to start with something that's pretty good to begin with. The Alain Corneau movie has a very good character relationship: these two women who are basically destroying each other. I use a lot of that dialogue in the beginning. But in his original movie, it's revealed right at the beginning that Isabelle kills Christine. I wanted to keep the audience guessing right until the end. I thought that that would make it a very good mystery. Christine... she's got enough enemies around the office, and to put Isabelle into this place of "Did she do it? Did she dream it? What the hell happened?" Just keep the audience guessing right until the reveal at the end. I had a chance to do all of these surrealistic sequences where you're not quite sure whether it's happening or not.

Beaks: Which is a hallmark of yours. It's also something I think movies are afraid to do nowadays, which is to completely befuddle the audience.De Palma: It's that kind of mystery procedural drama that's done all the time on television, so you've got to come up with something a little different.Beaks: This is a film that's very contained in terms of locations, which forces you to place a very high premium on locations. You've chosen some visually striking interiors that also seem to comment on or reflect the twisted nature of the power struggle between these two women. How did you go about finding these locations?De Palma: Good art director and a lot of good luck. A lot of it takes place in offices. We were first going to set it in London, and we were going to shoot the interiors in Berlin. But when I went to the London location, I said, "Why don't we shoot the whole thing in Berlin? It's an international corporation." There are a lot of really great exteriors in Berlin that no one had seen before, so we moved the whole production to Berlin. And we were very fortunate to get this great office building that was vacant because of the recession, so we could sort of take it over. That's always the problem with office buildings: you've got to work around the office. But this was not the case here. It was a great looking building that gave us interesting office locations, which, of course, can be extremely boring.

A Diet of Treacle Lawrence Block

TUESDAY, JANUARY 01, 2008A Diet of Treacle by Lawrence Block Hard Case CrimeBack in the late Fifties and early Sixties paperback original novels about the Beat generation appeared regularly. Sex, drugs, jazz, weirdness. Today few of them bear rereading. Certainly Vin Packer's take on the subject holds up very well but some of the bigger names who took a tour through Kerouac-land ended up looking and sounding silly. They were writing tour guides without having ever been there.

A Diet of Treacle by Lawrence Block on the other hand has the feel of first-hand observation. Set in Greenwich Village in 1960, peopled by faux-beat losers of various kind and a cop out of Malcom Braly, the drug scene, the crime scene and the scene of hardscrabble drifting life in the big bad city crackle with authenticity.

There are three prime players. Joe is a cipher of sort, not a good guy or a bad guy, one of those people who just sort of take up space. His friend Shank, an angry street hustler, suports them both by selling pot. The third person, and by far the most interesting, is Anita, a young, attractive woman engaged to a square engineer while still living under the auspices of an overly pious grandmother.

When the main heroin dealer in the area is busted, Shank decides to quit selling pot and go into the junk business, at first unbeknownest to Anita and Joe, with whom he is sharing a shabby little apartment.

The transformation of Anita from the good girl to the lover of a drifter like Joe to somebdy inadvertently involved in murder is what gives the book its power. Block is too good a writer to try to explain away her changes with melodramatic motivatons. She remains somewhat mysterious throughout the book, both to the reader and to herself. At one point, even though she considers marrying Joe, she wonders if she even loves him. At another, she begins to feel oppressed by his lifestyle of hanging out in beat dives (Block has a beat poet read a "poem" that manages to be both short and interminable) and letting Shank dicate much of his life.

Block is always good with his female characters and Anita, sweet, warm, confused, ultimately as adrift as Joe himself, is a fine, endearing creation.

The party scenes are spot on. Cheap wine, portentuous and pretentious conversations, sex sex sex and unending tributes to the powers of pot. Everybody yakking so much about how good pot makes them feel it starts sounding like a revival meeting with hemp substituting for God. Very wittily observed.

The plot kicks in full tilt in the the third act and it's breathtaking. The hard ass cop, whom we meet early on, reappears and what had been minor cat-and-mouse becomes explosive confrontation.

Of all the hardboiled writers working today, Block for me remains the most believable in dealing with crime and criminals. He's able to write about them and their milieu without tricking them up or romaniticising them. And, as he demonstrates here, he was doing it as far back as 1961.

ForgottenBooks: Fright by Cornell Woolrich

Fright
Cornell Woolrich's first novel emulated the novels of his literary hero, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Judging from the first act of the new Woolrich novel Fright from Hardcase Crime, the Fitzgerald influence lasted well into Woolrich's later career as a suspense writer.
The young, handsome, successful Prescott Marshall could be any of Fitzgerald's early protagonists. New York, Wall Street, a striver eager to marry a beauiful young socialite and acquire the sheen only she can give him...even the prose early on here reminds us of Fitzgerald's "Winter Dreams" and "The Rich Boy." Strivers dashed by fate.
Bu since Woolrich was by this time writing for the pulps and not Smart Set or Scribners Magazine, young Prescott Marshall's fate is not simply to lose face or be banished from some Edenic yacht cruise...but to face execution at the hands of the State for killing a young woman he slept with once and who turned into a blackmailer. This is in the Teens of the last century, by the way; a historical novel if you will.
From here on we leave the verities of Fitzgerald behind and step into the noose provided by another excellent writer and strong influence on Woolrich...Guy de Maupassant. In the Frenchman's world it's not enough to merely die, you must die in a tortured inch-by-inch way that makes the final darkness almost something to be desired. And dying for some ironic turn of events is best of all.
I read this in a single sitting. It's one those melodramas that carry you along on sheer narrative brute force. I woudn't say it's major Woolrich but I woud say that it's awfully good Woolrich with all the master's cruel tricks at work and a particularly claustrophobic sense of doom. Readers will appreciate its dark twists. Collectors will want to buy a few extra copies.