Ed Gorman's Blog, page 133

Salon Review Blindside Matt Paust

Deliver to your Kindle or other device
How buying worksAvailable on your Mac   Try it freeSample the beginning of this book for freeDeliver to your Kindle or other device
How sampling worksAvailable on your Mac Read books on your computer or other mobile devices with ourFREE Kindle Reading Apps.

Blindside  $9.39 on KindlePosted by Matt Paust on March 7, 2013 at 12:25pm  from SalonView Blog Every time I open a new Dev Conrad book I win an entertainment hat trick: I get another ticket to join consultant Conrad behind the scenes of a nasty political campaign; I get a major caliber murder mystery, and, best of all, I get another lesson in the craft of storytelling from Ed Gorman, one of the master yarn spinners of our day.I've just finished Blindside , Gorman's third and latest novel in the Dev Conrad series. It's his best yet -- of the series and, in fact, of all the Gorman novels I've read to date.My wife introduced me to Ed Gorman on June 19, 2005, when she gave me a copy of Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? The novel is one of a series of mysteries featuring small-town Midwest lawyer/detective Sam McCain, who, for the sake of these stories, does more detecting than practicing law. His sole client is the eccentric, irascible female judge who uses McCain as a foil to embarrass the brutish, inept police chief, who secretly thinks he's the movie actor Glenn Ford.I've since read the entire Sam McCain series, all seven of them set in the 1950s and '60s and each sharing its title with a pop song from the period. I've also come to know Ed through his blog – http://newimprovedgorman.blogspot.com / – and have learned he's a prolific writer in other genres, including horror, noir, westerns, and historical and science fiction. I haven't sampled all of his wares, but nothing I've read of his has disappointed. I'm partial to mysteries, and I'm hooked on the Dev Conrad series.Part of the attraction is a feeling of authenticity. Gorman has worked in political campaigns as a speechwriter and a TV producer. His novels capture the language and the personalities, the cynicism of the professionals trying to handle and sell candidates who rarely live up to the portrayals they want voters to believe.Dev Conrad is the consummate professional, having inherited the Chicago-based political consultancy from his father after a stint in Army intelligence. Despite his pragmatic approach to the political game, Conrad has a streak of decency. He'll work for scalawags but only if their politics are righteous, and if electing their opponents would be worse. His client in Blindside is spoiled, philandering rich boy Jeff Ward, a liberal congressman who's being challenged by a yahoo demagogue who vows to shut down the Department of Education and the Environmental Protection Agency, and who would prove “once and for all that the president was a Muslim Manchurian Candidate.” Sound familiar?Things heat up when Ward's speechwriter is found shot dead in his car behind campaign headquarters. The opposition hints publicly that Ward murdered his own staffer. Meanwhile, Conrad tries to smoke out a spy in Ward's camp rumored to be working for his opponent. Gorman's plot has just enough twists and surprises to keep me guessing without getting hopelessly confused, as I do with many lesser mystery craftsmen. I hereby vow to read as many Dev Conrad mysteries as Ed Gorman chooses to write.
Make this post my weekly Reader's Choice.


Views: 4Tags: campaigning, conrad, dev, ed, fiction, gorman, mystery, political Like 1 member likes this Share On Facebook < Previous PostYou might also like: Comment by JMac1949 Memories 7 minutes ago Thanks for the tip, I have to admit that the pop song in the titles of his other books has put a hook in me.  I've got my own tale to tell about Will You Still Love Me, but that's for a later day... R&L CommentYou need to be a member of Our Salon to add comments!Join Our SalonRSS Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Privacy Policy  |  Terms of Service Sign in to chat!

No Suit, Sherlock: Doyle Estate is Embroiled in Public Domain Legal Battle

No Suit, Sherlock: Doyle Estate is Embroiled in Public Domain Legal Battle Maggie Lange
Just like the tweedy detective, Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts are obsessive, fanatical, and even controlling. Hence—Sherlock Holmes and the Clamorous Debate Over Public Domain Rights.This current skirmish pits old-guard and new-guard Sherlockians in a debate about whether Conan Doyle's creation should be a copyright-free character. Just like A Scandal in Bohemia, this conflict is replete with intrigue, British insults, and particularly eccentric characters. Here are the key players:The Baker Street Irregulars: an invitation-only literary club that seems to host a mix of hoity-toity types and people who are amused to see Holmes continue on into the modern world. Doubleday editor Christopher Morley founded the organization in 1934 to maintain "the myth the Sherlock Holmes was not a myth."Baker Street Babes: a group of young female Holmes fans (the Irregulars did not allow females until 1990). The Babes host a regular podcast about the detective. While most Irregulars seem to like the Babes, a former editor of the Irregular's journal, Philip Shreffler, compared their podcast to "a potting shed on which is scrawled desultory graffiti"—a British insult I don't understand, but nonetheless sounds harsh.Mr. Leslie S. Klinger: a Malibu lawyer who edited the three-volume, nearly 3,000-page "New Annotated Sherlock Holmes" and is currently editing the new volume "In the Company of Sherlock Holmes".Jon Lellenberg: a retired Defense Department strategist who has served as the "hard-nosed American agent" of Conan Doyle's estate for three decades. He has condoned lucrative projects like BBC's Sherlock and CBS's Elementary. While Lellenberg was once an official historian for the Irregulars, he is estranged from the group.Klinger has filed a suit which argues that only 10 of the 60 Conan Doyle stories and novels about the detective remain under copyright, so many fees paid to the estate are unwarranted. The estate is currently trying to collect a licensing fee for "In the Company of Sherlock Holmes," an upcoming collection of new Holmes stories, featuring works by writers like Sara Paretsky and Micheal Connelly.In support of this upcoming collection and other creative endeavors about the detective, Klinger advocates that Donan's character be considered in the public domain. In mid-February a Holmes scholar and Irregular member also filed a legal complaint, which argued that the world of Sherlock should be in the public domain. Mr. Klinger has noted that he wants to take his claim to the next level and formally oppose the estate's trademark claims.Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's estate has always been a source of much debate and even conspiracy. In 2004 a prominent Holmes scholar was strangled with a shoelace right before a lucrative auction of some of Doyle's letters, which Mr. Richard Lancelyn Green vociferously argued should not be sold piecemeal, but rather given over to scholarship. It sounds like this whole bunch could do with a little break from reading whodunits.[New York Times, image via Ostill/Shutterstock]

Western Noir: Law and Order Tombstone-Fred Blosser

LAW AND ORDER: TOMBSTONE Reviewed by Fred Blosser
An early example of Western Noir deserves to be better known than it is.  At the very least, there should be a legitimate, remastered DVD edition.  Absent one, I'm grateful for the gray market copy I recently found on the web.  William K. Everson, the venerable movie historian, called Ed Cahn’s LAW AND ORDER (1932) one “of the sound era’s most overlooked Westerns (and one its finest).”  The source novel was W.R. Burnett’s SAINT JOHNSON, one of the first fictionalizations of the Wyatt Earp story.  John Huston was credited for “adaptation and dialogue.”
In Cahn’s stark, black-and-white production, Walter Huston plays Frame Johnson, the Wyatt Earp character -- “the killin’est marshal in the West.”  Harry Carey Sr. plays the Doc Holliday counterpart, shotgun-toting gambler Ed Brandt.  Johnson, his brother Lute, Brandt, and their pal Deadwood drift into lawless Tombstone, where the rustling Northrup brothers (the surrogates of the notorious Clantons of Arizona history) ride roughshod.  
The town fathers offer Johnson the job of peace officer.  “Nope, I’m done with that,” the flinty Johnson says at first.  “All it’s gotten me is a trail of dead men and a heap of enemies.”  The locals cagily change his mind by playing on his pride: “Pin Northrup’s bet a thousand dollars that you won’t go up agin’ em.”  But once Frame pins on the star and begins to enforce the law with an iron hand, the mayor and town council begin to regret their choice.
The dialogue is hardboiled, almost the only women-folk in sight are the saloon floozies, and the script establishes a bleak, fatalistic tone early on.  Drifting, Johnson and his companions match cards on the trail to determine whether to go to Alkali or Tombstone; Brandt offhandedly votes for Tombstone and draws the winning hand -- aces over eights, the set that Wild Bill Hickok held when he was shot to death in Deadwood.
In real life, the grudge shootings and shotgun ambushes of the Earp-Clanton feud followed after the O.K. Corral showdown.  In the movie, they lead up to Frame Johnson’s climactic gunfight with the Northrups inside the “OK Barn,” staged by Cahn as a brutal, running gunbattle around hay bales and horse stalls.  A gangster film from the same year, THE BEAST OF THE CITY, also starring Huston and co-scripted by W.R. Burnett, ended with the same sort of last-ditch, straight-up shootout between cops led by Huston and mobsters led by Jean Hersholt as a thinly disguised Al Capone.
Universal-International remade LAW AND ORDER in 1953, smoothing out the rough edges of the original.  In Nathan Juran’s technicolor version, Frame Johnson, his brothers Lute and Jimmy, and their undertaker pal Denver settle in the town of Cottonwood, where Frame intends to take up ranching and marry his girlfriend  Jeannie.  In Cottonwood, the stand-ins for the Clantons are Durling brothers.  No Doc Holliday character in sight.
Where the 1932 film had one scene where Frame stands up to a lynch mob, this one has two.  Where Huston’s character signed on as marshal before any shots were fired with the bad guys, the 1953 hero has a personal motivation for doing so, after one of his brothers is killed by the Durlings.  
Hostilities are settled with fists instead of guns, and in place of the somber ending from the original, things come to a happy resolution as they usually did in Universal-International’s 1950s westerns.  Well-produced, efficiently directed, and nicely played by Ronald Reagan as Frame, Alex Nicol and Russell Johnson (yes, the Professor) as his brothers, Preston Foster as the chief bad guy, Dennis Weaver as Foster’s brother, Jack Kelly as their henchman, and Dorothy Malone as Jeannie, it’s a good western.  It just isn’t the rough-cut gem that the 1932 film was.  And wouldn't you know it: you have to scratch to find a copy of Cahn's movie, while the remake had a commercial DVD release a couple of years back. 
   

A short history of Gold Medal Books

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2006Here's a really fine history of Gold Medal and its impact on literary and film culture courtesy of http://www.2blowhards.com/.The writers describe their site as being "a group of graying eternal amateurs discuss their passions, interests and obsessions, among them: movies, art, politics, evolutionary biology, taxes, writing, computers, these kids these days, and lousy educations." 2 Blowhards.com --Ed


1000 Words -- Gold Medal Books

Michael Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards --

Another installment in my all-too-occasional series of looks at culturally-significant, underknown phenomena and events, "1000 Words."
***

1000 Words -- Gold Medal Books


What if you could trace the French New Wave, Sam Peckinpah, cyberpunk, "Pulp Fiction," "Mulholland Drive," and "Sin City" back to one business gamble taken by a third-tier publisher in 1949? In fact, you can, and without being guilty of too much overstatement. A little, sure, but not that much.

The publisher was Roscoe Kent Fawcett of Fawcett Publications, and his gamble was to try something no one else had tried before. He decided to publish original novels in paperback. In 1950, his new line of paperback originals was launched. It was called Gold Medal Books, and it became not just a tremendous commercial success but a culture-shaping one too.



Before discussing the impact of Gold Medal Books, let me take a few paragraphs to situate Gold Medal in time. The immediate post-WWII era was an interesting moment in publishing history. A variety of vectors were in collision:

* One was the existence of paperbacks themselves. In 1949, paperbacks were still a recent innovation. The first large-scale experiment in paperback publishing had only taken place 1935 with Britain's Penguin Books; soon after in the States, Pocket Books began selling paperbacks. During WWII, soldiers developed the habit of carrying around, reading, and trading paperbacks. Tastes were shaped; new readers were reached.

* Another vector: the era of "the pulps" was drawing to a close. The pulps were cheap magazines that published sensationalistic fiction. They had their origins in the late 1800s; Frank Munsey's "Argosy" is usually cited as the first pulp magazine. The pulp magazines often specialized in male genres: adventure, sci-fi, war, crime, western. And they were often seriously popular. The most successful pulps often had monthly print runs of over a million copies. They also had their artistic achievements. The pulps were where sci-fi flourished. And, under the editorship of Capt. Joseph T. Shaw, the hardboiled detective fiction of Black Mask magazine developed into something remarkable. But by the late 1940s, the pulps had begun to run out of commercial steam. Even so, the demand for hard-hitting and juicy fiction persisted.

* Another: the new taste for comic books. Comic strips may have been around for a while; Fawcett Publications itself got started in the late 19-teens with a joke-book / comicstrip publication called Captain Billy's Whiz Bang. But comic books per se were an innovation of the 1930s (and Fawcett -- as much a distributor as a traditional publisher -- had had a major hit with Captain Marvel). Superheroes, adventure, crime ... Once again, fans were won over and expectations were affected.

* And a final vector: Mickey Spillane. Spillane (who died only this past July, aged 88) was the author of the Mike Hammer detective novels. As a publishing phenomenon, Spillane was like nothing ever before witnessed. His first novel -- the two-fisted, paranoid-macho, hardboiled "I, The Jury" -- sold only a couple of thousand copies when it was released in hardcover in 1947. But when Signet released the book in paperback the following year, it stunned the book industry by selling many millions of copies. Former GI's and flyboys had seen a lot of tough action, and they'd brought back to the States the habit of comic-book and paperback-novel reading. Mickey Spillane's hard-hitting fiction appealed to them strongly. Was it pure coincidence that Mickey had, before turning to novel-writing, written for the comic-book industry?

In any case, Roscoe Kent Fawcett wondered why he shouldn't cater to the comic-book / pulp-fiction / former-GI market. And why not, he wondered, skip entirely over the whole damn hardcover-publishing ritual and offer readers tough, pulpy, hard-hitting novels in easy-to-obtain, cheap, straight-to-paperback form?

No one would dispute that Gold Medal revolutionized American book publishing. For one thing, Gold Medal represented the first serious challenge to the traditional hardcover-publishing game. In a famous response, Doubleday's LeBaron R. Barker said that paperback originals could "undermine the whole structure of publishing." (Yippee to that!) Even in the line's first year, some Gold Medal novels sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Very quickly, other publishers (Dell, Lion) moved to imitate Gold Medal's strategy.

For another, it may also not be an overstatement to assert that Gold Medal had a greater impact on the content and form American fiction-writing than any other postwar book publisher. Gold Medal novels were intended as reliable, disposable entertainments: fast, short, and full of action. Noir-ish intrigue, westerns, and adventure tales were the general rule; sensationalism and sleaze were encouraged. Despite that, though, writers -- in TV and movies as well as on-the-page fiction -- as well as audiences are still looking to these books for inspiration.

Gold Medal was emphatically a business, and anything but a high-minded one -- reserving, for example, the right to do with the books' covers what it pleased, which included not just choosing the art but also the title. Still, the writers generally liked the work. Gold Medal dealt with them fair and square, relatively speaking. Editing was quick and to-the-point. Snobbery was nonexistent. If Gold Medal retitled your book, well, what the hell, and on to the next one.

The writers did OK financially too. They were tickled that they didn't have to split their royalties with a hardcover house, and that they were paid instead on the actual number of copies sold. Was it a coincidence that Richard Carroll, the best-known of Gold Medal's editors, wasn't a longterm publishing guy? Instead, he had previously worked as a Hollywood story editor.

And get a gander at some of the writers Gold Medal put into print: Elmore Leonard, Peter Rabe, Kurt Vonnegut, Day Keene, Jim Thompson, William Goldman, John D. MacDonald, Louis L'Amour, David Goodis, Richard Matheson, Charles Williams, and John Faulkner (William's brother).

Depending on how you read the history, the glory years of Gold Medal-style book publishing were over by the mid-1960s. But the influence of the era lives on. It's in the very air around us.

To illustrate, let me connect a few dots. French New Wave titans Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut both loved Gold Medal books, and both based films on novels by Gold Medal authors: Godard's "Pierrot le Fou" was based on a novel by Lionel White; Truffaut based "Shoot the Piano Player" on a novel by David Goodis. By the way, did you realize that Godard based "Made in USA" on a novel by Donald Westlake? Hey, I see that Donald Westlake wrote a few books for Gold Medal himself.

Closer to home, the movies of the American film renaissance of the 1970s were partly inspired by such New Wave artists as Godard and Truffaut. "Bonnie and Clyde," for instance -- one of the two films that's generally said to have kicked off the American film renaissance -- was a deliberate attempt to make a New Wave-esque movie. The script of "Bonnie and Clyde" was at one point even offered to Truffaut to direct.

Moving into the present ... David Lynch is an example of a guy in love with the dreamy mood of exploitation and noir. On a couple of his films, Lynch collaborated with the noir specialist Barry Gifford. Gifford in turn was, in the 1980s, the creator of Black Lizard Books, an outfit that brought a number of Gold Medal titles back into print.

The recent and current indie movement in American film considers itself inspired not just by such Gold Medal-influenced auteurs as Lynch, but by the Gold Medal-influenced American films of the 1970s. P.T. Anderson, Robert Rodriguez, and Quentin Tarantino are directly inspired by '70s films. Rodriguez is now making a sequel to his (and Frank Miller's) ultry-pulpy "Sin City" ; Tarantino of course directed a film straightforwardly entitled "Pulp Fiction," as well as another that was an adaptation of a novel by onetime Gold Medal novelist Elmore Leonard -- who, like Westlake, continues to create wonderful fiction.

And the noir, violent mood of many current video and computer games? Straight out of -- or at least partly out of -- Gold Medal fiction.

Moviebuffs revere the careers and influence of Roger Corman and AIP, hardheaded exploitation-meisters who nonetheless created tons of fun movies and gave many talented people their first breaks. Music buffs love plunging into the seedy, exuberant, unself-conscious early years of rock and roll. Perhaps it would be OK to say that the Gold Medal (and Lion and Dell, etc) years were the fiction-writing equivalent of these more-familiar artistic Big Bangs. So why aren't they better known than they are?

The canon-maker-wannabes of respectable culture are people you'd expect to be foot-draggers, of course. And where Gold Medal fiction is concerned, they haven't disappointed. Back when Friedrich von Blowhard and I were in college, the official story of postwar American fiction recoiled entirely from the Gold Medal writers. At the time, the line of descent went: Capote, Cheever, Bellow, Updike, Mailer, Roth, Pynchon ... No, actually: Even Pynchon was considered a little too poppy for the era's profs and critics. Incidentally, I have nothing against this stuff, which I've read a great deal of. It just doesn't represent anything like a fair account of postwar American fiction.

These days, it appears that some academics and intellectuals have finally seen fit to make room -- a little room -- for Gold Medal-style fiction. Many colleges now offer a course or three in the history of hardboiled and / or detective fiction. Even the disntinguished Library of America publishes a couple of volumes of pulp fiction.

All that acknowledged, I also have to report that I have found it astonishing how stuffy the New York City trade publishing biz remains. Many people in it know little about the early days of Gold Medal, and few of them have read much of this fiction. Imagine finding yourself among movie people unaware of Roger Corman, or rock musicians unfamiliar with the Sun Sessions. Bizarre.

But the hell with the prisses, eh? Hipsters and fans of lowdown fiction keep the era alive. They also keep trying to kick some raw energy back into fiction-book publishing. It's hard to manage, though. Much has changed. Publishing has gone corporate ... Many people no longer read the way they once did ... Fawcett still exists, but in name only; it was sold in 1972 to CBS, and was then acquired by Ballantine (a division of Random House) in 1982. Black Lizard was bought by Vintage in 1990.

Today, Max Phillips and Charles Ardai's Hard Case Crime reprints some of the Gold Medal books and promotes Gold Medal-style new work too, complete with ultry-pulpy covers. The excellent Stark House Press reissues a lot of old-school fantasy, mystery, and suspense -- including early lesbian tales by the Gold Medal novelist "Vin Packer," which continue to inspire today's queer authors.

But these are cult / coterie phenomena. Excellent as it is, Hard Case Crime bears the same relationship to Gold Medal that Chris Isaak does to Elvis Presley. (Nothing against Hard Case or Chris Isaak, both of whom I like.) So who are the innovative, earthily-opportunistic fiction publishers of today? There are great, buccaneering publishers alive: Peter Kindersley, Jack Jensen, and Berndt Taschen come to mind. But these guys publish little if any fiction. Some small presses have done shit-kicking work with fiction. But none have been able to connect with a large audience.

Why should this be so? Have movies and television usurped the creation of and the taste for pulp fiction? Has the multiplication of entertainment options meant that Americans now look to books for respectable pleasures, and leave the gritty fun to other media? Are today's wild-ass and funky cultural energies more likely to go into music and YouTube than into novel-writing?

Perhaps all the above are true. In any case, the takeaway lesson, as far as I'm concerned, is: It's nearly always a mistake to think of the on-the-page-fiction thang as a matter of high-mindedness, let alone of writers-writing. "Fiction" certainly involves writers writing, of course. And high-mindedness makes the occasional appearance. But on-the-page-fiction is nearly always a matter of commercial calculation, publishing, design, timing, money, promotion, luck, and audiences as well. Oh, and criticism too. Sometimes.

My friend Bob Levinson corrects me

[image error]
Ed here: Last night I said that JohnFord had directed The Red Badge of Courage but it was, as Bob has pointed out, John Huston.
I noted that Julie Adams was the reigning babe of Universal westerns. And Julie Adams is still a babe!  

Hi, Ed...Re today's blog: A  typing oops--"Red Badge of Courage" was directed by John Huston (not Ford)... (Huston later used Audie Murphy in "The Unforgiven" with Lancaster and A. Hepburn.) ...Julie Adams is our across-the-street neighbor, still lovely after all these decades. ... Pix  taken at the Skylight Books launch for IN THE KEY OF DEATH about five years ago. : )Have a lovely, relaxing Sunday.Warmest regards,Bob

The second-run houses of my yute-Universal westerns

Gunfight at the Universal-International CorralRory Calhoun and David Brian
Ed here: I saw a lot of these in second run houses where a lot of working class folks saw their movies. I always liked the globe that was the Universal logo at the start of the film. Thrilling. To me the mainstay--not to say the best--of the Universal westerns were the Audie Murphy pictures.   (I think) Because of the failure of John Ford's Red Badge of Courage (in which re he was very good). Director Anthony Mann was the genius of the entire Universal enterprise and, for me, a far finer, more nuanced director than John Ford because he didn't buy into the myth of the west.  The truly lovely Julie Adams was the resident babe.


By DAVE KEHR for  the New York Times
Western HorizonsA new five-disc anthology from TCM’s Vault Collection, “Western Horizons,” assembles five of the Technicolor adult westerns that were the bread and butter of Universal-International’s production schedule during the 1950s.Positioned ambiguously between A and B status — they often featured major stars, like James Stewart and, in this collection, Alan Ladd and Richard Widmark, and production values that could expand beyond the Universal City back lot to include extensive and expensive location work — these films were among the final manifestations of a fully functioning studio system.This collection covers a whole range of achievements, including a couple of outright mediocrities. With “Backlash” (1956), the hard-working but rarely inspired John Sturges fails to bring out the dramatic intensity of a fine screenplay by Borden Chase, whose work with James Stewart and the director Anthony Mann during this period (“Bend of the River,” “The Far Country”) represents the Universal western at its best. And in “Pillars of the Sky” (1956) the journeyman director George Marshall brings merely a Sunday school didacticism to an ambitious script about frontier race relations originally intended for John Ford and John Wayne.“Horizons West” (1952) offers the tenebrous Robert Ryan as an impatient rancher who turns to rustling, in one of several “big ranch” westerns of the early ’50s that expressed a populist fear of expanding corporatism in postwar America. Directed in a dark, shadowy style that sneaks up to the edge of film noir, it is one of the best of the early westerns directed by Budd Boetticher, who would become one of the genre’s great figures when he found his definitive voice a few years later with “Seven Men From Now” (1956).For consistency of vision and sheer filmmaking skill the best film in this set is “Saskatchewan” (1954), a sort of northwestern, set in the Canadian province of the same name and directed by one of the giants of the American cinema, Raoul Walsh. At first the story appears to be a spinoff from one of Walsh’s most famous movies, the 1941 “They Died With Their Boots On,” which starred Errol Flynn as a charismatically overbearing George Armstrong Custer. Here a band of renegade Sioux, encouraged by their victory at Little Big Horn, invade Canada with the hope of enlisting the peaceful Cree into joining their revolt against white domination.for the rest go here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/mov...

From my old friend Stephen Marlowe-about Evan Hunter

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2008
Stephen Marlowe remembers Evan Hunter
THOUGHTS ABOUT EVAN, AND ME, AND EVAN AND ME

In the early 1950s, when we first met, he was still Sal Lombino and I was still Milt Lesser. Sal, a Navy veteran and sometime schoolteacher, was working the phones for a wholesaler of lobsters in New York, taking orders from restaurants, and I was working as chief editor–at the grand old age of 23–of a large literary agency, having been hired straight out of college because the agent, Scott Meredith, didn't like to advance editors through the ranks and dreaded resorting to a classified ad in the New York Times, knowing it would result in a couple hundred wannabes storming his office. I'd got the job on a tip from sci-fi writer Damon Knight the day before Meredith would have placed his ad, and I worked a year or so before deciding to give up the munificent salary of 40 bucks a week (raise to 50, if I stayed!) to freelance full-time–this on the basis of a couple of sci-fi stories I'd sold to Howard Browne at Amazing Stories.

I well knew the problem of those wannabes storming the gates, because interviewing for staff positions had become one of my jobs at the Meredith office. How to winnow the applicants? Well, I wrote a short story called "Rattlesnake Cave," intentionally the worst short story ever written, though on the surface it seemed plausible. Applicants for the job, before being interviewed, wrote a critique of the story, and it swiftly cut the number from hundreds to a handful.

The wholesale lobster salesman, Sal Lombino, showed an immediate and instinctive grasp of all I'd intentionally done wrong in the story–and maybe a few things I hadn't realized I'd done wrong. He wryly observed that this story hadn't come in over the transom, as I'd claimed, but had been concocted for the purpose, and dared me to deny it. I didn't. Milt Lesser became the freelance writer and Sal Lombino the editor who wrote nights.

The Meredith office in those years was a spawning ground for writers, some of whom stayed on for years, some hardly long enough to hang their hats. Two who come immediately to mind are Lester del Rey and Don Westlake, but there are others.
By the mid-1950s, after a couple of years that Sal spent at the agency and I in the army, we were both freelancing. Sal/Evan lived in Hicksville, NY, with his wife Anita and their three children, and I a few miles away in Syosset with my wife Leigh and our two daughters. We had drinks and dinner every month or so, until it became apparent that Leigh and Anita disliked each other. Both were New Yorkers born and bred, both were brash and bright. Possibly they saw in each other aspects of themselves that less than pleased them.

Sal by then had written a couple of suspense novels and a short story that in 1954 became his groundbreaking first straight novel The Blackboard Jungle. Earlier, when Popular Library was about to publish the first suspense novel, Sal had put the pen name Evan Hunter on it. Nice name, I said. He smiled, waiting for me to ask how he'd come up with it. I asked. "Simple," he said. "I went to Evander Childs High School and Hunter College." He would sometimes later deny the origin of the name, but that was what he told me then.

And so a writer with a brand-new name was born, and he made it his legal name (half a dozen years before I changed mine). He quickly needed another one, as Ed McBain split off for the 87th Precinct.

Evan was the easiest writer I ever knew. By this I mean that his stuff just flowed, as they say, swift as a mountain stream, letter perfect, as fast as he could type. And he avoided revisions like the plague. I wrote that way too, when I was young. Evan wrote that way the rest of his life, and the quality of his work never diminished.

One morning out of the blue he phoned me to ask for a short-short story to fill a hole in Ed McBain's Mystery Magazine, which he was editing. When did he need it? That afternoon. We batted it around for a while, and I sat down and wrote "Drumbeat" in about an hour, took the train to New York, and gave it to him. We both smiled. In a way I'd accepted his challenge, as he'd accepted the challenge of "Rattlesnake Cave." "Drumbeat" has been anthologized more times than I can count. Evan was contagious that way.

But our friendship got hung up for a time on the rock of geography and our wives' mutual dislike. I began to wander the world in search of background material for my globe-trotting private eye, Chet Drum. Evan, meanwhile, was a quintessential New Yorker. How he loved that town–and showed it in every page of his nameless 87th Precinct city. The geography may have been turned on its side so that Isola was a sort of horizontal Manhattan, but the entire city itself was straight-up New York, though in the 87th Precinct's fifty novels he never called it anything but this city.

When I next saw Evan, in the 1980s, it was not in New York. After some phone tag, we caught up with each other in London, where I was lunching at the Groucho Club with my second wife, Ann, and Liz Calder of Jonathan Cape to celebrate the publication in the UK of my novel The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus, and Evan was at Claridge's with his second wife, Mary Vann. I had reason to thank Evan. A couple of years earlier, I'd begun to write Columbus but felt very insecure about such an offbeat novel. I wrote to Evan and he urged me on. After I finished it, four good U.S. agents said its anachonistic tone made it unsalable. It was many months–by which time Ann and I were in Spain with scarcely a peseta–before a Brit agent saw it, loved it, and sold it at auction. Other countries followed, including the USA, with advances of the sort I'd never seen before. Evan didn't know any of this until I wrote him a long letter that seemed to be saying, "You and your advice, thanks for nothing, pal"–until I divulged the good news at the end. The letter didn't fool Evan. Hey, he wrote back, I write mysteries too and I know how to foreshadow happy endings, but I didn't peek at the ending, I read your letter in the order you wrote it.
In London we had lunch, and I met Mary Vann for the first time. She was very much the Suth-ren belle, and my wife Ann had been born in a village on Canada's Gaspe Peninsula, literally within sight of spouting whales. Both had done some writing–Ann had published a trio of romantic suspense novels, Mary Vann a literary novel. As they felt each other out, a look passed between Evan and me, as if to say, Is it happening again?

Evan and I stayed in touch, and back in Connecticut for a spell, where the Hunters owned a splendid house in Norwalk and the Marlowes rented one in Madison, we got together periodically. Evan and I talked nostalgically about old times and with great optimism about what we still planned to do. (Like most writers, we both lived as much in the future and the past as in the present.) Our wives remained as studiedly sweet to each other as only women who disdain each other can.
Ann and I wandered overseas again, and came back to find that Evan and Mary Vann had split, and Evan had found the delightful Dragica (called Dina early on, until Evan decided people could handle Dragica's real name)–and Ann and Dragica liked each other!

In all the years I knew him–half a century and more, on and off–Evan's writing never changed, except to get better. "One and only," indeed. Long friendship aside, he was the sharpest, clearest, and best suspense writer I ever knew.

MUST READ The Business Rusch: The Death of Publishing

The Business Rusch: The Death of PublishingWRITTEN BY: KRISTINE KATHRYN RUSCH - FEB• 28•13It is the last day of February, 2013, and by now, traditional publishing should have mailed its holiday cards with the gleeful misquote attributed to Mark Twain on the cards’ interior: The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.Not that there were actual news reports of the death of traditional publishing. But if you read the blogosphere in 2010 and 2011, a wide number of reputable publishing industry insiders predicted that traditional publishing would be dead or unrecognizable by the end of the Mayan Calendar on 12/21/12.I’m serious. And I’m not sourcing the predictions for fear of embarrassing some good friends.Those of us who understand how the large industry that is publishing works, and how business works in general knew that those predictions were misguided to say the least. A number of the folks who predicted such things stopped when it became clear that the e-publishing revolution wasn’t storming the barricades of traditional publishing. Like most revolutionaries, e-publishing grew older and got subsumed into the traditional system. And those who felt the revolution’s initial passion and fire have either given up proselytizing, settled into the daily grind that a real work brings, or have given up the cause altogether.Where is traditional publishing four-plus years into the revolution? Bigger, stronger, and richer than ever. Who ended up getting harmed by the revolution itself? Writers who never really learned how the business worked and/or writers who believed their traditional publishing careers were bulletproof, that these crazy changes in the delivery method wouldn’t touch them.Even now, these formerly bulletproof writers have no idea what happened to them. They blame traditional publishing, rather than their own business acumen.The writing was on the wall as much as four years ago, when the recession hit. Book advances worldwide went down significantly, as much as three-quarters, according to an article in the London Times. Writers continued to accept those advances and bemoan them, so as the e-publishing revolution hit and publishers started to realize they could make moremoney than they ever had, they kept the advances low. Why put out a ton of money up front if authors will accept less?It’s excellent business. Minimize your up-front costs. Think about it. Would you pay in advance for something if you could get the same (or better) product for less money, money paid out made six months after you’ve already profited from that product? You’d do the latter, of course. And many traditional publishers are doing the same. Pay less, pay lower royalties, get the same product for one-quarter the cost. Makes tremendous business sense to me. for the rest go here:http://kriswrites.com/2013/02/28/the-... http://kriswrites.com/2013/02/28/the-...

Blindside by Ed Gorman Jon Breen Review

 
 Share your own customer images
Blindside (Dev Conrad) [Kindle Edition]Ed Gorman (Author)Print List Price:$32.95Kindle Price:$9.39 includes free wireless delivery via  Amazon Whispernet You Save:$23.56 (72%)Length: 192 pages Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here.FormatsAmazon priceNew fromUsed fromKindle Edition$9.39 ----ExpandHardcover, Large Print
Most Helpful Customer Reviews5.0 out of 5 stars  The best book yet in a unique series  June 25, 2012By Jon BreenFormat:Hardcover|Amazon Verified PurchaseEd Gorman has the same infallible readability as writers like Lawrence Block, Max Allan Collins, Donald E. Westlake, Ed McBain, and John D. MacDonald. His political consultant sleuth Dev Conrad, introduced during the last Presidential election year in SLEEPING DOGS, returned last year in STRANGLEHOLD. BLINDSIDE, the third novel in the series, is the best yet, combining a trickily plotted mystery, narrative wit, and appropriately cynical political satire. While it's clear which side Dev and his creator are on, they balance the scales somewhat by making the "good guy" candidate as despicable in his way as his opponent. The jaded operative notes of his candidate, "I was in no position to judge him morally. I was in a perfect position to judge him professionally." Observers of various ideological stripes might share Gorman's underlying regret at the dysfunctional state of American politics in the 21st Century. Dev Conrad's final dramatic act is a gesture toward restoring hope, a possibility that always hovers on the edge of vision even in the author's most downbeat fiction.

If Dogs Worked in Offices (thanks to Terry Butler)

If Dogs Worked in Offices 
[image error]
[image error]


[image error]
Secretary

[image error]


[image error]


[image error]

[image error]
[image error]


[image error]

[image error]

[image error]

[image error]

[image error]

[image error]

[image error]

[image error][image error]