Ed Gorman's Blog, page 135

Shadow Morton, Songwriter and Producer, Dies at 71

February 15, 2013Shadow Morton, Songwriter and Producer, Dies at 71By MARGALIT FOXShadow Morton, a songwriter and producer who for a brief, luminous period in the 1960s poured the discontents of adolescence into original hit songs, including “Leader of the Pack” and “Remember (Walking in the Sand),” died on Thursday in Laguna Beach, Calif. He was 71.The cause was cancer, said Amy Krakow, a family friend.By all accounts possessed of a brazen, naïve genius — he played no instrument, could not read music and wrote his songs in his head — Mr. Morton was almost single-handedly responsible for the wild success of the Shangri-Las, the Queens girl group he introduced and propelled to international stardom.The group had its first hit in 1964 with “Remember,” recorded more or less on a dare in a session frantically pulled together by Mr. Morton, who had never written a song before.The result, with lyrics and music conceived by Mr. Morton in what he later said was about 22 minutes, was released on the Red Bird label and reached No. 5 on the Billboard singles chart.A song of lost love, “Remember” was imbued with the lush, infectious strangeness that would prove a hallmark of Mr. Morton’s other hits. It employed a narrative, quasi-operatic plot, spoken dialogue, chanting, unconventional sound effects (in this case sea gulls) and lyrics that encapsulated all the ardor and angst of the teenage years.The song was followed later that year by “Leader of the Pack,” written with Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry. It told the story of Betty, who falls for Jimmy, a young tough on a bike:I met him at the candy store.He turned around and smiled at me.You get the picture? [Spoken]: Yes, we see.That’s when I fell for ... the leader of the pack.As the melodrama unfolds to the sound of a revving motorcycle, Jimmy, banished by Betty on her parents’ orders, peels off on his bike, only to crash. “Look out!” the Shangri-Las’ lead singer, Mary Weiss, cries over and over, but it is too late. Jimmy is dead.The song, which reached No. 1, has been covered by artists as diverse as Bette Midler, Twisted Sister and Alvin and the Chipmunks; it remains omnipresent in movies and on television.Mr. Morton also wrote “Give Him a Great Big Kiss” and “I Can Never Go Home Anymore,” which became hits for the Shangri-Las in 1965. But in the years that followed, he largely abandoned his songwriting career, partly because he cared little for the music business and partly, he later said in interviews, because of the rigors of battling alcoholism.The nickname Shadow was bestowed on him by a Brill Building colleague to describe his habitually evanescent presence.As a producer, Mr. Morton was best known for Janis Ian’s hit single “Society’s Child,” recorded in 1965 when she was 14; several albums by the psychedelic rock group Vanilla Fudge; and “Too Much Too Soon” (1974), by the protopunk New York Dolls.George Francis Morton was born in Brooklyn on Sept. 3, 1941. When he was about 14, his family moved to Hicksville, on Long Island, which his parents thought would provide a wholesome atmosphere.“They had the theory, ‘My boy’s gonna get in trouble, so we’re gonna move him out of Brooklyn,’ ” Mr. Morton told the music magazine Time Barrier Express in 1979.Scarcely into their suburban idyll, the Mortons discovered that the parents of every budding juvenile delinquent in the city had had the same idea. To young Mr. Morton’s boundless delight, he said, he found the largest gang “walking the streets of Bethpage and Hicksville that you ever want to meet.”In high school, Mr. Morton formed a doo-wop group. But, leaving school before graduating, he found himself at loose ends.In 1964 he paid a call on Ms. Greenwich, an acquaintance from Long Island musical circles. She had hit the big time — working for the producer-songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller in the Brill Building, Manhattan’s vaunted hive of composers and lyricists.Also in the office that day, working quietly at the piano, was Mr. Barry, Ms. Greenwich’s husband and collaborator.“My Brooklyn alcoholic paranoia kicked in,” Mr. Morton recalled in an interview with Vanity Fair in 2001. “I saw a guy sitting with his back to me, ignoring me — and being very impolite.”As Mr. Morton rose to leave, Mr. Barry turned to him. “Just what is it you do for a living?” he asked.“I’m a songwriter — like you,” Mr. Morton replied, with full Brooklyn braggadocio.“What kind of songs?”“Hit songs.”“Why don’t you bring me one?” Mr. Barry said, with audible skepticism.Mr. Morton phoned a friend who had a basement recording studio. He phoned another friend, who had a four-piece band. He phoned a third, who knew some high school girls from Queens who sang locally as the Shangri-Las.With these elements in place, Mr. Morton, on his way to the recording session, realized he lacked one thing: a song. Pulling his car over on a stretch of Long Island road, he wrote “Remember.”Mr. Morton’s marriage to Lois Berman ended in divorce. His survivors include three daughters, Stacey Morton, Danielle Morton and Keli Morton Gerrits; a sister, Geraldine; and three grandchildren.In later years, Mr. Morton, who underwent treatment for alcoholism in the mid-1980s and remained sober to the end of his life, had a second career as a designer of golf clubs.He never abandoned songwriting. At his death, Ms. Krakow said, Mr. Morton had more than 300 songs to his credit, most unrecorded.
MORE IN MUSIC (3 OF 50 ARTICLES)Music Review: From Abroad, High Doses of AdrenalineRead More »Close

Superman vs. the Homophobe

Illustration by The Daily Beast; Photo: CorbisSuperman vs. the Homophobe by Sujay Kumar  THE DAILY BEAST

Feb 15, 2013 4:46 AM ESTDC Comics has hired an anti-gay crusader to write the franchise’s latest installment. Sujay Kumar on the outcry among fans—and Clark Kent’s surprisingly queer-friendly lifestyle.45        inShare     106 
For one panel in the history of comic books, Superman is really gay.
In 2003’s Supergirl #79, exposure to pink kryptonite turns the hero into a man of steel who likes men. “Did I ever tell you how smashing you look in bowties, Jimmy?” Superman gushes, his underwear bulge looming dangerously close to his pal’s face. “By the way, that's a fabulous window treatment you've put together.”Just don’t bring this up with science-fiction authorOrson Scott Card, whom DC Comics has just hired to write the first two issues of the Adventures of Superman, the franchise’s latest series, due in April. Aside from being the brilliant mind behind the novel Ender’s Game, Card is a raging homophobe.A devout Mormon and a board member of the National Organization of Marriage, Card has been quite prolific and aggressive in his anti-gay campaign, but his views are well summed up in this passage from a 2004 essay titled “Homosexual ‘Marriage’ and Civilization”:“The dark secret of homosexual society—the one that dares not speak its name—is how many homosexuals first entered into that world through a disturbing seduction or rape or molestation or abuse.”Yeah, he’s really not a fan. Not surprisingly, his selection has prompted calls for a boycott DC. The equality advocacy group All Out has led the war against Card, demanding that DC “sack homophobia” and fire the author. “Americans take their superheroes seriously,” says executive director Andre Banks. “And we didn’t want Orson Scott Card as the voice of Superman.”In response, DC Comics released a statement touting freedom of expression and saying that the personal views of a writer are not those of the company. And in its defense, DC has been pretty gay-friendly lately. Green Lantern came out last year. Batwoman is “a lesbian socialite by night and a crime-fighter by later in the night." (Through his wife, Card declined to comment for this article.)But for a publisher to work with an author who advocates for the exile of gays is clearly a bad idea. Right?! “Nobody was repressing his right to say anything,” says openly gay (and Mormon) author Andy Mangels, “But that doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be consequences.” Paige Braddock, author of the lesbian-friendly comic strip “Jane’s World” believes there is no way Card’s personal views won’t seep into his storytelling. And it goes on.

45        inShare     106  TAGS:

from Bob Levinson -- Free Criterion films

From: boblevinson@robertslevinson.com
To: leviinc@aol.com
Sent: 2/15/2013 8:23:45 A.M. Pacific Standard Time
Subj: Fwd: Criterion films now available free on Hulu including THE NAKED CITY 
---------- Original Message ----------
From: Alan R Wald <alanrwald@gmail.com>
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Date: February 14, 2013 at 9:59 PM
Subject: Criterion films now available free on Hulu including THE NAKED CITYhttp://www.hulu.com/movies/criterionCriterion films are now available free on Hulu Criterion has made high quality versions of many classic films that are superior to the regular releases. This is includes the 1948 film The Naked City written by my father Malvin Wald  He received a Best Original Oscar Nomination. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040636/Amid a semi-documentary portrait of New York and its people, Jean Dexter, an attractive blonde model, is murdered in her apartment. Homicide detectives Dan Muldoon and Jimmy Halloran ... See full summary »
Director:  
Stars:  ,  ,    |  See full cast and crewThe Criterion DVD has a separate sound track with my father telling stories about the different scenes as they unfold, I don't know if this extra track is available or not on Hulu. In 2007,  The Naked City  was selected for preservation in the United States  National Film Registry  by the  Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

A TRUE GUILTY PLEASURE

"THE NORLISS TAPES": THE CLASSIC 1970S TV MOVIE

The folks at Kindertrauma, a web site dedicated to everthing that scared baby boomers as children, has a good tribute toThe Norliss Tapes, the 1970s TV movie starring Roy Thinnes and Angie Dickinson. It's sounds intriguing enough for us to order the DVD. To read the article click here.To order the DVD from the Cinema Retro Amazon Movie Store, click here.Ed here:

Here's a long piece on Dan Curtis, Darren McGavin and (finally) The Norliss Tapes and its resemblance to The Night Stalker.

http://www.braineater.com/norliss.html 

THE GREAT KEN LEVINE-OVER AND UNDER

Let's play Over-Under!
It’s always fun to involve you readers in a blog post. Today let’s play Over-Under! Over-under is a betting term. A certain number is assigned (like the total points for a particular football game) and people bet whether the final score will be either over or under that number. 

But the category doesn’t have to be sports. Here are a few over-unders. I’m the self-appointed odds maker. Get your bets down.

THE OVER-UNDER…

…on Steven Soderbergh coming out of retirement -- 3 years. He’ll find a script or project that he just “had” to do. Or his investments will tank and he’ll run to OCEANS 16.

… on the number of new steroid charges implicating Alex Rodriquez – 5. If investigators dig deeply enough they’ll probably find his name among the Watergate burglars.

… on the number of stupid questions Sam Rubin will ask during the Oscars red carpet show – 25. The show is only an hour and he has a co-host.

… on the number of years Lena Dunham is the flavor-of-the-month – 3. Since she writes, directs, and acts you have to take Diablo Cody’s flavor-of-the-month tenure and multiply by three.

….on the number of years Seth MacFarlane hosts the Oscars – 1.

…on the number of shows Chuck Lorre will have on the air next year – 4. He’s the Dick Wolf of CBS.

…on the number of years before big movie star Nicole Kidman winds up on television starring in the spinoff, NCIS-WALLA WALLA – 3.

…on the number of times NBC develops a reboot of THE MUNSTERS – 37.

…on the number of years before big movie star Jennifer Aniston returns to television starring in RACHEL & ROSS – 2.   They have a baby and must deal with first-time parenthood.  NBC is going to do UP ALL NIGHT if it kills them. 

…on the number of years until Justin Bieber is performing at Six Flags Magic Mountain: 6. It would be 5 but he’ll be touring for a year in the national roadshow of BOOK OF MORMON.

…on the number of times Lindsay Lohan is arrested this year – 8. And none of them will be her fault.

…on the number of TWILIGHT sequels that will be released this year – 6. They hope to surpass the James Bond franchise of 50 films by June.

…on the number of years before Hugh Hefner leaves his latest wife Crystal Harris – 1. That’s when she turns 25 and will be too old for him.

…on the number of guys who look forward to Valentine’s Day – 0. 

John McPartand by John Fraser

Feb 2007

Dear Ed,

McPartland deserves the attention. He seems rather to have slipped through the critical net, maybe
because he didn't deal in the to my mind rather cliched noir depressiveness,
with the inevitable failure of love. I'm glad you yourself have been onto
him.

He can really SCARE you, can't he?

Best,

John.

John Fraser has a very readable and wise website devited to books of various kinds. http://www.jottings.ca/john/thriller_...

John McPartland by John Fraser

John McPartland

She was the kind of woman a man noticed, mostly because of her eyes. Dark, almost black pools, they had a warmth that I felt could turn to fire. She had turned her head, looking over the shoulder of the man she was with, and we looked at each other. The third or fourth time it happened he noticed it and I paid some attention to what he was like.

He was a type. You find guys like him driving ten-wheeler transport trucks, or flying, or sometimes as chief petty officers in the Navy, on a sub or a destroyer. Square-built, tough tanned skin, big hands with knuckles that are chunks of stone.The type—what makes him recognizable as a wanderer, a fighter, sometimes a killer—shows in his face.

Big white teeth, yellow a little from cigarettes like his fingers, and he smiles with his teeth closed, talking through them when he’s angry. A thin line of short black hairs for a mustache, sideburns of curling hair, hair black and curly, a face that is rough and yet young, and it won’t change much if he lives to be fifty. The eyes are fierce, amused, hard.

It’s a special breed of man, and the breed are men. Maybe a mixture of German, Irish, French-Canadian, with a streak of Comanche, Ute, or Cheyenne in there about three generations back. You meet men like this one in the truck-stop cafés along U.S. 40, with the diesels drumming outside; or you meet them walking toward the plane on the airstrip; or in jail, still smiling, still ready for a fight.

This guy was laughing as he swung off the bar stool. He was still laughing as he walked over to me.

The Face of Evil (1954)
I

McPartland is that rarity, a writer of tough novels who feels tough himself. (Was Spillane a barroom brawler? If so, did he win?)

McPartland was one of the Gold Medal blue-collar writers; had served in Korea; obviously knew the black-market milieu of that war; came back and wrote raw, rugged, at times very powerful novels; obviously drank, lived with a mistress and illegitimate kids before it was OK to do so; and died young of a heart attack. He was the kind of person who knew what it meant to be in trouble with the law, doing dumb impetuous things, getting into fights.

What comes across again and again in his novels is his understanding of power, the hard masculine will to dominate others, break them, destroy them. His bad guys are some of the most frightening in thriller fiction: Southern rednecks, syndicate “troopers,” the Mob. His fights are fights in which the loser can get hurt very badly.

When a black-marketing non-com says he’s going to scramble someone’s eggs with his combat boots (crush his testicles), or the middle-echelon syndicate enforcer Whitey Darcy tells the fixer Bill Oxford, “We’re going to make you cry, feller,” or when Buddy Brown, the twenty-year-old petty crook in Big Red’s Daughter (1955) tells Jim Work that he’s going to make him crawl, we know that’s just what they intend to do.

They are hard men.

King McCarthy in The Face of Evil (1955) is a natural fighter. Buddy Brown wins his first two fights with the hero—knocks him down with a sucker punch; gets a painful lock on his knuckles and punches him in the throat while they’re sitting drinking beer in a barroom booth. And the Syndicate, the Mafia, punish offenders ruthlessly. Oxford knows what it will be like to go to prison and have your kidneys smashed by an inmate, crippled with pain for the rest of your life every time you pee. Johnny Cool’s end in The Kingdom of Johnny Cool is dreadful.

However, in most of the novels there isn’t just violence, there’s also love, and things work out all right in the end for the hero and heroine. They very easily couldn’t, though. A strong, focussed counter-energy on the part of the heroes is necessary.
II

McPartland’s best book is The Face of Evil, about the fixer Bill Oxford, who’s been on the long downward slide of compromise, complicity, corruption, and has been sent to Long Beach by the PR agency to which he’s attached to ruin a genuinely decent reform candidate, upon pain of being stripped of all his high-living perks and slammed into prison. It is tense and well-made throughout.

The Kingdom of Johnny Cool is his other best novel. When it appeared, I wrote to Ross Macdonald (a total stranger, but he’d done a Ph.D. in English himself) to ask him to review it for a student journal I was co-editing. He declined, saying that it seemed to be simply Spillane-type melodrama. He was wrong.

The novel is a powerful account of a Sicilian criminal’s rise and fall in America—a more interesting one than W.R. Burnett’s Little Caesar (1929)—and it takes us into dark cold waters full of predators. McPartland was on to the Mafia as a subject twelve years before The Godfather, and his attitude towards it is far healthier than Puzo’s sentimental power worship. There’s nothing cute or admirable about McPartland’s Italianos.

Forgotten Books: Plunder Squad by Richard Stark

Forgotten Books: Plunder Squad by Richard StarkForgotten Books: Plunder Squad by Richard Stark

One of the ways Donald Westlake kept his Parker novels fresh was to vary the the success his man had as a professional criminal. Sometimes the magic worked, sometimes it didn't.

Plunder Squad is a long (for a Parker novel) and intense study of how things can go wrong in trying to plan and execute a robbery. Not anywhere as easy as you thought.

Parker is near broke and in bad need of money. As often happens he's forced to deal with people who overestimate their worth as professionals. In this novel we meet a number of them. We also meet a woman who is familiar to readers of Parker books, the sullen horny slut who has affixed herself to the man who has the idea for the heist. Parker knocks several points off the man's score for even having her around. Inevitably she means trouble not just for her honey bunny but for all of them involved in the robbery. She is contrasted, later in the book, by the crisp, pretty, bright young woman who is a helpmate to her criminal boyfriend.

Plunder Squad is a maze of false starts and bad turns. The heist Parker eventually settles on is complicated and requires the kind of skill and oversight only he can bring to the job. As usual the story is enriched by all the men involved, each with different needs and capabilities. And with different degrees of trustworthyness. In a book of this length you really get into Parker's head and pick up on his paranoia and general distrust of those terrible creatures known as human beings.

This is a major addition to the Richard Stark canon, a relentless and often bleak look at life on the wrong side of the law. Though in the Stark books cops often have fewer scruples than cons.
posted by Ed Gorman @ 2:41 PM

Cullen Gallagher on Femme, Kinsmen , The Bughouse Affair

[image error] Cullen Gallagher on Femme, Kinsmen , The Bughouse Affair 
From The Los Angeles Review of Books

February 10th, 2013RESET-+
Triptych Image: "Eavesdropper"
Image Credit: Amalia Pica


2013 MARKS THE 45th ANNIVERSARY of one of crime fiction’s most enduring and hardest working PIs: Bill Pronzini’s Nameless Detective. Making his first appearance in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine in 1968’s “It’s a Lousy World,” Nameless has appeared in 36 novels and more than 40 short stories. At the moment, his is the longest running PI series currently in print. By this point, he’s out performed and outlived the Continental Op, Spade, Marlowe, Archer, Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones, and most of his snoopy brethren. Nameless now stands with Holmes, Poirot, Nero Wolfe, and Spenser as one of the longest surviving literary private eyes of all time, and Pronzini deservedly towers tall alongside their titanic scribes. Pronzini was instrumental in modernizing the private eye genre, moving away from overly stylized syntax and hardboiled super heroes towards a more realistic and humanistic presentation in which we can recognize our own world and ourselves. Whether they know it or not (and hopefully they do), all contemporary PI writers and readers owe a great debt to Pronzini. Scholar, collector, editor, anthologist, and writer, he is, without a doubt, among the most significant minds in the mystery field of the past century.Over the years, Pronzini has kept the name of his first-person narrator closely guarded, revealing it only once in the entire run of the series thus far (or so rumor has it, I’m still playing catch-up and haven’t come across it yet). Despite his anonymity, however, Nameless is among the most recognizably human of private eyes. He is an archetype fueled by heart rather than hype. He carries a gun not out of bloodlust (like Mike Hammer), but for protection from a world he knows is twisted, violent, and remorseless. He’s not hard drinking, fast loving, or quick with the quip. A San Francisco resident, devoted collector of pulp magazines and crime fiction scholar (like Pronzini, himself), Nameless is aware of his profession’s literary tradition, and he shows affection for his predecessors without ever seeming affected or self-conscious. He’s less extraordinary than he is ordinary; more like a neighbor we’re likely to sit at a counter with at the diner than someone who would save the world from certain doom. Nameless is a professional, he does his job, and he cares about it, but he’s mortal, and — more importantly — he mourns. “It’s a hell of a world we live in,” he says in Kinsmen, “A hell of a world.”Cemetery Dance has contributed two new editions to Pronzini’s ever-lengthening bibliography, the novellas Kinsmen and Femme. Kinsmen, originally published in Criminal Intent magazine in 1993, finds Nameless investigating the disappearance of two college students last seen at a backwoods motel in upstate California. When he learns the couple was interracial, Nameless begins to wonder if there’s more behind the townsfolk’s tight lips than just innocent resentment of his prying eyes. Pronzini doesn’t indulge in the usual PI dramatics; like Ed Gorman, the great humanist amongst all PI writers, Pronzini is too sensitive to the pain of the victims, too sick over the hate of the criminals, and too hungover from bearing witness for too damn long. Says Nameless as he exits a movie theater in disgust at the film, “Entertainment? Hell no. There’s nothing entertaining about blood and pain and abused flesh. Not at the best of times and sure as hell not when your job is dealing with the real thing in the real world.” Pronzini has exchanged romance for reticence, excitement for empathy. “It made me feel cold, dirty, and sad and angry,” Nameless says of the case, and it’s a feeling that pervades the whole work. There’s nothing sanctimonious about this, as one might expect from Chandler or Spillane. Instead, Pronzini offers weariness and melancholy.Femme, a new work from Pronzini, is an outstanding addition to his already impressive body of work, and proof that after nearly 80 adventures, the Nameless series is still going strong, still crisp, and never boring. Evoking the famous meeting of Private Detective Sam Spade and duplicitous dame Brigid O’Shaughnessy, who claims to be looking for her sibling, Nameless’s new case begins when Cory Beckett engages him to find her missing brother, Ken, wanted for stealing a diamond necklace from his employer’s wife. The case may be classical PI territory, but Pronzini’s approach is fresh. The initial investigation has amusing trappings — annoying yachtsmen, packing-peanut entrepreneurs, union leaders, and extramarital affairs — but, in characteristic Pronzini fashion, the emotional ruin at the heart of the case is devastating, and downright sorrowful. “Sickness and disgust, mingled with sadness and an impotent anger at the inhumanity of it,” is what Nameless feels. Private eye fiction isn’t all fun and games anymore.As Kinsmen and Femme exemplify, the mechanics of Pronzini’s plotting are flawless and fluid. No hiccups, no stretches in logic, nothing beyond believability. He is reticent with his use of similes, but when he does use one it is uncontrived and spot-on. Ken Beckett is described not just as a moth “unable to resist the pull of a destructive flame,” but as one “fluttering back and forth, going nowhere.” The elegance of Pronzini’s language prevents it from seeming a cliché. His phrasing, so direct, is at times like poetry. “Alive, she’d been beautiful; dead, she was a torn and ugly travesty.” His use of the semicolon is a surprising and delicate touch, maintaining the subtle, lyrical lilt of the sentence.Both novellas have the smooth efficiency and concision of a short story, but expanded to 180-ish easy-reading but hard-hitting pages. Unpretentious, Pronzini doesn’t resort to extreme violence, kooky concepts, or narrative or stylistic gimmicks. He doesn’t have to. There’s an ease to his prose, like João Gilberto’s guitar work. The skill is in making something so complicated sound so effortless, relaxation the true sign of mastery. He doesn’t pander or perform; where others stretch the private eye form to make room for themselves, Pronzini tightens it in calm confidence.The real pleasure, though, is in the voice. His detective isn’t out to change the world, just out to do a job and do it well. Along the way, he’ll do the right thing if he can. Nameless isn’t an idealist. He’s a realist — and Pronzini is the same, not out to change the game, just to do his job, tell a good story, and entertain a few readers.Did I say prolific? He has a third new release, The Bughouse Affair, written in collaboration with another modern legend of the PI genre (who also happens to be his wife), Marcia Muller. Just as influential as Nameless is Muller’s series detective, Sharon McCone. First seen in 1977’s now-classic Edwin of the Iron Shoes, McCone showed that modern-day mean streets are not just for boys, and cemented the female PI as a character to be taken seriously by writers and readers alike.Since the passing of Kenneth Millar (a.k.a. Ross Macdonald) and Margaret Millar, Pronzini and Muller have been the reigning King and Queen of mystery fiction. Like the Millars, their marriage is a match made in heaven: two top-tier crime writers, each with their own distinctive style and independent reputation. Also like the Millars, Pronzini and Muller are the only other partners to receive the Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master Award. Unlike the Millars, however, Pronzini and Muller have also consummated their marriage on the page, through numerous collaborative novels and anthologies.A delightfully screwball historical set in late-19th century San Francisco, The Bughouse Affair centers around the PI firm of ex–Secret Service agent John Quincannon and ex-Pinkerton Sabina Carpenter: partners in profession, not love, much to Quincannon’s dismay. With Quincannon repeatedly lousing up his attempts to catch a serial burglar, and Carpenter losing track of the female pickpocket she is trailing, business is not going so well. The cases seem increasingly to be interrelated, and a fellow claiming to be “Sherlock Holmes” enters their lives, and makes things worse. This pain in their necks claims to have both cases wrapped up but doesn’t, and it’s up to Quincannon and Carpenter to step up their games, save face, and solve the case.The Bughouse Affair may be a more cordial cozy than the noir-laden Kinsmen and Femme, but it’s an equally fine piece of mystery craftsmanship. Like a tightly edited, multinarrative movie, The Bughouse Affair never drags, jumping between Quincannon and Carpenter’s adventures, creating a comical dialectic between their diametrically opposed personalities. Stubborn with unrequited love, Quincannon is the classic hardboiled dick who acts out of instinct rather than intellect. Carpenter is more sophisticated and cerebral in her practices but equally stubborn when it comes to her feelings, hence her refusal to give Quincannon the time of day. Originally appearing in Pronzini’s 1985 novel, Quincannon, it’s great to see the two detectives back on the page again. They’re an instantly likable duo, charming and amiable enough to win over even a noir-hardened, cozy-phobic reader like myself. I hope it won’t be too long before Pronzini and Muller pair them up on another case.

Dog Soldiers

SUNDAY, JUNE 22, 2008Forgotten Books - Dog SoldiersI've always had the feeling that Robert Stone, not unlike Graham Greene, was a bit too much of a storyteller for the literary crowd and a bit too literary for the storytelling crowd. Which is shorthand for saying that he's never had the giant bestseller he's long deserved. He doesn't quit fit into a marketing plan.

"In Saigon during the waning days of the Vietnam War, a small-time journalist named John Converse thinks he'll find action - and profit - by getting involved in a big-time drug deal. But back in the States, things go horribly wrong for him. "

Stone uses Converse as our guide through underground America in the early 70s. Through him we meet drug dealers, killers, hippies, flambouyant street bullshit artists, police informers, crooked agents and high-minded intellectuals who find themselves reduced to babbling helplessness in the face of all their political nightmares.

Bare bones this is a powerful crime story. The real thing. Real criminals. Real cops. Real streets. Nothing tarted up for effect.

But it is also, for me, the truest portrait of that time I've ever read. His portrayl of the narcissistic foolish left and the brute fascist right are without peer in the literature of the time. And we see all this through the eyes of a man who is at least as delusional as everybody else in the novel. What redeems him is his cynical humor (the book is very funny in places as when Converse recalls stories he once hacked out for a low-rung tabloid, "Hungry Skydiver Eats Woman") and his obsession with trying to find a philosophical justifcation for existence. Good luck.

From the NY Times 1974 review:

"The plot is melodramatic: A confused and traumatized hack journalist in Vietnam buys three kilos of pure heroin and has it smuggled to his wife in Berkeley. She has gone from a job in the university anthropology department to selling tickets at a San Francisco porn film theater. The drugs are brought from Vietnam by an ex-Marine Corps friend of the journalist, a self-styled samurai, a zen psychopath, a desperado. The money will be very good, they "don't respond to the moral objections," they're all very frightened and fascinated by death.

"They are immediately discovered by "regulatory agents," who are extremely violent and obviously dealing in drugs themselves. The ex-Marine and the journalist's wife flee south from Berkeley to L.A., where they try to unload the stuff on a small-time Hollywood actor with gangster connections: he doesn't buy it; in a very crazy and chilling displaced act of revenge, the ex-Marine kills a naïve writer with an overdose. He has by now hooked the wife and fallen in love, of sorts, with her. She is terrified and attracted by him and enjoys the righteous and serene pleasure of a heroin high. They flee east into the desert and take refuge with a German zen roshi who had been a Ken Kesey-like master of dope (I am not now--nor have I ever been--God"). The journalist returns from Vietnam and is immediately picked up by the agents, tortured and put on his wife's trail. The book concludes with a Vietnam-style fire-fight on a California mountainside and a trek across the salt flats.

"It is all very suspenseful and convincing and cruel. It is very frightening. It is elaborately grim. Only the ironic energy and wit of the author's imagination and the authority of his voice suggest a less nihilistic or satanic way of living, acting, feeling. Stone took the epigraph for the novel from Conrad's "Heart of Darkness": "I've seen the devil of violence and the devil of greed and the devil of hot desire. . .I foresaw that in the blinding sunshine of that land, I would become acquainted with a flabby, pretending weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly." This is indeed the spirit that drives his desperate characters."


Ffor thrills I rank it with the best of Greene's "entertainments." Non-stop thrills rendered in prose as stripped-down and evocative as early Hemingway. It has the power to truly shock.

A novel that deserves reading many times over.

Karl Riez's film adaptation of the novel was generally overwrought but fis illed with fine performaces by Nick Nolte, Tuesday Weld, Ray Sharkey and many others.

Noir’s Hard Luck Ladies: Martha Vickers

  by JAKE HINSON FOR TH CRIMINAL ELEMNT
If you spend enough time in the shadow gallery that is film noir certain faces start to haunt you. I’m not talking here about the icons like Mitchum or Grahame or Bennett or Andrews—their legends were set a long time ago, so we approach them with the expectation of greatness. And I’m not talking about recovered figures such as Lizabeth Scott or Ann Savage, who were forgotten in their time and then reborn as stars when noir enthusiasts discovered them and enshrined them as icons.I’m talking about Martha Vickers. She’s remembered today for two roles, one she played onscreen and one she played in life. The onscreen role was her firecracker performance as Lauren Bacall’s nymphomaniac sister in The Big Sleep. The real life role was her stormy tenure as Mickey Rooney’s third wife.Her part in The Big Sleep got her noticed but didn’t do much for a career that began to flounder almost immediately. She always gets noticed by audiences watching the film—she’s weird and sexy at the same time, always an exciting combo—and people often ask, “Whatever became of that girl who played the sister?” The answer is: she made a few more films, did some television, married and divorced Mickey Rooney, had some children, retired from films, and died young at the age of 46.Yet, if you’re a noir geek, you can’t help but bump into her from time to time. She never made another film as good as The Big Sleep, but she pops up in supporting parts in interesting pictures like Raoul Walsh’s The Man I Love, or Edgar G. Ulmer’s Ruthless, W. Lee Wilder’s The Big Bluff or the Paul Wendkos adaptation of David Goodis’s The Burglar. The two constants in these films are that Vickers is always good and she is always underused.

for the entire article go here:http://www.criminalelement.com/blogs/...