Ed Gorman's Blog, page 14

Why the western version of High Sierra is preferable to the original by Jake Hinkson

Joel McCrea and COLORADO TERRITORY (1949)
















by Jake Hinkson

When Raoul Walsh remade his 1940 gangster flick HIGH SIERRA almost twenty years later as the Western COLORADO TERRITORY, he improved on the story. Today, the Western isn't as well known as the gangster story. I suspect this has everything to do with the fact that the original movie starred Humphrey Bogart, while the remake starred Joel McCrea.


Today, Bogart is one of only a handful of golden age movie stars still remembered by the public at large. We like to talk about stars as immortal figures, but the truth is that we're only now entering the second century of filmmaking and most of us have already forgotten most of the last century's biggest stars. Don't believe me? Take a poll of the people under thirty and ask them if they know who Bette Davis was. Ask them if they can name a Gary Cooper movie. Go back further. How many can have any clue who Pearl White was?


This isn't a lament. Nor is it a "what's wrong with these kids these days." Movie stardom is, relatively speaking, still a new phenomenon. Maybe this is just what happens to movie stars. Nobody really gets to live forever.



for the entire article ttp://thenighteditor.blogspot.com/

Forgotten Books: How Like An Angel by Margaret Millar

How Like an AngelI've always held the opinion that some writers are just too good for the mass market. This is a true of a number of literary writers but it's also true of at least one writer of crime fiction, the late Margret Millar. For all her many deserved awards, she never became the enormous commercial success she deserved to be.

For me she's the single most elegant stylist who ever shaped a mystery story. You revel in her sentences. She used wit and dark humor in the direst of novels long before it was fashionable in the genre. And she was a better (and much fairer) bamboozler than Agatha Christie.

I recently reread her How Like and Angel and its richness, its darkness, its perverse wit make me repeat what I've said many times before--if this isn't the perfect mystery novel, it comes damned close.

The story, complex as it becomes, is simple in its set-up. Private eye Joe Quinn, having gambled away all his money, begins hitchiking from Reno to Caifornia. Along the way he sees the Tower, the symbol of a religious cult that eventually offers him not only shelter but a chance to put his skills to use. Sister Blessing asks him to find a man named Patrick O'Gorman. The man is dead. Which makes Quinn suspicious of why they want him located.

Among its many pleasures is the way this novel, published in the early sixties, anticipates some of the fringe cults that would grow out of the flower power days. There's more than a touch of ole Charlie Manson in the Tower.

Call your favorite mystery bookstore for this one. If they don't have it, I'm sure they can get it. I think you'll be as amazed by it as I am. This is one of the most artfully rendered novels of any kind I've ever read.

Sara Paretsky discusses Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 06, 2011Sara Paretsky discusses Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo

On Watching Vertigo on the Big Screen in 35mm with an Audience
Posted by suzidoll on December 5, 2011 FROM TCM MOVIE MORLOCKS

On a cold, blustery Chicago afternoon, I was safely tucked in the back row of a theater watching Vertigo as it was intended to be seen—on the big screen in 35mm with a theater full of movie buffs, cinephiles, and Hitchcock fans. The rich, saturated colors of the new print were a treat after seeing so many contemporary films shot in the drab, flat, burnished colors of digital cinematography. The film was followed by a commentary and discussion led by mystery writer Sara Paretsky and psychologist James W. Anderson, a professor at Northwestern University. Watching Vertigo on the big screen helped me notice details that had eluded me on previous viewings, while comments by Paretsky and Anderson offered a different point of view on the film. I also learned a great deal from the insightful observations of the audience members.

Part detective story and part psychological thriller, Vertigo is about a man who cannot come to grips with his obsession for a woman. And, it is also the story of what it means for the woman to be the object of that obsession, though that part of the tale is often overlooked. Hitchcock was fond using a doppelganger theme in his films, in which one of the main characters has a double who is exactly like them and yet the opposite of them. A doppelganger theme often employs a doubling structure in the narrative; in other words, patterns or events are repeated twice. With this viewing of Vertigo, I noticed that the doubling structure for this film consists of the real version of a character or event juxtaposed with a phony version. Kim Novak is introduced as Madeleine Elster, but she is really Judy Barton who is masquerading as Madeleine as part of an elaborate murder plot. The phony Madeleine pretends to be obsessed with her great grandmother, Carlotta Valdes. Jimmy Stewart is John “Scottie” Ferguson, who is hired by Gavin Elster to follow his “wife” to learn more about her obsession. Scottie is the dupe in the plot who will ensure that Elster’s plan is successful. In pretending to be obsessed, Madeleine visits places associated with her ancestor, including the graveyard where Carlotta is buried and the museum where her portrait hangs. Scottie’s desire for the phony Madeleine, especially after her death, turns into a real obsession, which is manifested through his haunting of the same places—her gravesite, the museum, etc. We see Scottie follow Madeleine to these places in the first half of the film as part of her pretense; then we see him haunt these places in the second half of the movie as part of his real obsession. While recovering from his breakdown, Scottie runs into the real Judy, whom he tries to recreate into the Madeleine who never existed, which duplicates Gavin Elster’s deeds though for different reasons. Truth and illusion follow the same patterns in this story, and, like Scottie, we can’t always tell the difference.

for the rest go here: http://moviemorlocks.com/2011/12/05/o...
POSTED BY ED GORMAN AT 2:40 PM 2 COMMENTS: LINKS TO THIS POST 

Ben Boulden Gravetapping Reviews Fate of The Union by Max Allan Collins with Matthew V. Clemens

Fate of the Union is the second novel—after Supreme Court (2014)—featuring former Secret Service Agent Joe Reeder and current FBI Agent Patti Rogers written by Max Allan Collins and Matthew V. Clemens. Reeder is popularly known as an American hero—a notion he chafes from—for saving the lives of a President and a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. In retirement he operates a successful investigative and security firm, and, as the story opens, Joe is concerned by a voicemail from a former Secret Service colleague named Chris Bryson—
“Call this number when you get this. Life and death, brother—don’t let me down.”
Chris is a professional, ex-Secret Service working a one horse private eye shop, not easily panicked. Joe returns the call with no response. He hears nothing until his wife finds him at Arlington National Cemetery and tells him Chris was found dead at a cheap motel, hanging by a belt from the shower rod. Chris’s wife doesn’t believe it is suicide, and asks Joe to investigate.  The only clues are Chris’s uncharacteristic nervousness the few days before his death, and a single word uttered to his wife: “sink.”  
The setting is Washington, D. C. of the late 2020s, and the story, while not political, is very much a political thriller. The political landscape is much like our own—non-cooperative partisanship as the parties splinter away from each other and the moderate middle—and acts as both antagonist and battlefield. The story is larger than a simple murder as suicide, and involves a shady cast of characters, including a Warren Buffet-style billionaire, a Department of Defense contractor, and a nasty psychopath. It is something of a mix between television’s Criminal Minds and a Robert Ludlum novel. But better than either because of its ability to surprise, and make the reader believe.
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Max Allan Collins (and his beautiful wife Barb) Go To The Movies

Ed here: One of the great pleasures of editing Mystery Scene in the old days was reading Max's movie reviews. Glad to see his latest column on his great blog http://www.maxallancollins.com/blog/


Max Allan Collins:
Regular readers of this blog/update may recall that Barb and I see a lot of movies – usually one a week, sometimes more than that; when you work at home, you need the occasional escape. And you’ll know that I at times write about movies here, as I did last time with SPECTRE.Here are a few quick notes on other movies I’ve seen over the last several months.GOOSEBUMPS – We saw this in 3-D, perhaps proving my son Nate’s point that I will see anything in 3-D. Not true: I didn’t go to THE WALK, about that guy who did a tightrope act between the Twin Towers. But then I have vertigo (probably given to me by the movie of the same name). Back to GOOSEBUMPS. This is a basically kid friendly movie that is a lot of fun for grown-ups who were “monster kids” themselves (monster kids being those of us who grew up on FAMOUS MONSTERS and other such horror-movie mags). This is a very funny flick in the monster rally vein, featuring Jack Black as R.L. Stine, whose imagination is so strong, his creepy creations come to life, and must stay locked in their respective bound manuscripts or else (or else we have a movie). Black, playing a grumpy-father role that is quite different for him, is nonetheless very funny, particularly when he pronounces the name of the evil ventriloquist’s dummy he’s conjured: “Slaaappy!” The kid leads are appealing enough, too, and the monsters just keep coming.BRIDGE OF SPIES – Tom Hanks plays insurance lawyer James B. Donovan, who brokered the trade between the USA and Russia of Soviet spy Rudolf Abel for U-2 pilot Gary Powers (note: U-2 is not a rock band in this instance). While I admittedly have a unique point of view here, I see this as something of a companion piece to ROAD TO PERDITION, with Hanks back in a topcoat and hat, a somber period setting, PERDITION producer Spielberg behind the camera, and influential composer Thomas Newman providing music with its many echoes of that previous score. This first-rate film recalls such ‘60s non-Bond movies as FUNERAL IN BERLIN and THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD – the story is essentially a John Le Carre novel in real life – and Hanks quietly carries the equally quiet screenplay (the Coen brothers were involved) on his shoulders. STEVE JOBS – This apparently bombed at the box office (as did the previous JOBS), but it shouldn’t have. Michael Fassbender is particularly strong in a stellar cast that includes Kate Winslet, Jeff Daniels, and Seth Rogen, all beautifully cast in a warts-and-all biopic. Danny Boyle’s direction of what is at heart a stage play opens things up with a drifting camera and the occasional daring effect, as when he uses a wall in a hallway to cast a moving image relating to the topic at hand. But the real star is Aaron Sorkin, whose screenplay represents the best post-WEST WING example of his walk-and-talk approach. Perhaps the people in Sorkin’s world are too witty and too articulate, and would that the world itself had the same problem. Sorkin brilliantly structures the film around three key introductions of new product by Jobs, and Boyle gives each section a distinct look, in part via film stock. I have the math skills of a third-grader, and not a top-notch one at that, but I had no trouble following the tech stuff enough to stay in the game. STEVE JOBS plays really well on the big screen, though its life will largely be on video. A pity.CRIMSON PEAK – Guillermo Del Toro’s haunted house movie is a near masterpiece swaddled in gothic trappings with steampunk seasoning. It’s as if Stephen King was writing DOWNTON ABBEY – actually, the first act, set in 1880s Boston, exceeds the latter in its time-machine feel. Essentially a gothic romance – think JANE EYRE or even REBECCA – CRIMSON PEAK weds a young, talented woman (Mia Wasikowska) with writerly ambitions to a mysterious, handsome, financially strapped aristocrat (Tom Hiddleston) with a tragic background. She soon finds herself in a magnificent but ramshackle mansion where her husband and his spooky sister (Jessica Chastain) share secrets. This is sumptuous filmmaking, filled with haunting images, like the snowy landscape turned red by the brick-fodder clay beneath.SICARIO – A crime movie with a fine cast, stylish direction and a compelling score has no excuse to be this disappointing. Emily Blunt as an FBI agent is at the center of the action, but despite her T-shirt and sloppy attire, she is painfully girly, whining and deferring to men and even being saved by one, after she makes a bad dating decision. The script is a mess, illogical and poorly structured, with Blunt disappearing from the twenty-minute climax, which suddenly, jarringly puts Benicio Del Toro in charge of the narrative. And the joint CIA/FBI plot to bring down a drug lord is stunningly stupid. Still, the film has a lot going for it, in particular its unsettling look at crime-ridden Juarez. But the failed FX series, THE BRIDGE (reworking the nordic original), mined similar territory much more effectively, particularly in its second season.

THE PEANUTS MOVIE – Okay, it’s in 3-D. You don’t have to see it in 3-D, but why would you not? Do you really want to see Snoopy go after the Red Baron, all two-dimensional? My wife gave me a sideways look when I said I wanted to go to this, but in the theater, she came around quickly when we discovered that the film was a faithful compendium of the great Schulz comic strip, essentially Peanuts’ greatest hits wrapped up in a loose but rewarding narrative. The three-dimensional modeling of the characters is offset by their facial expressions having a drawn-on look. 

Gravetapping: Thrift Shop Book Covers: "The Stars Like Dust"

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2015Gravetapping: Thrift Shop Book Covers: "The Stars Like Dust"  by Ben Boulden




















The opening sentence:
“The bedroom murmured to itself gently. It was almost below the limits of hearing—an irregular little sound, yet quite unmistakable, and quite deadly.”
The Stars Like Dust was serialized as “Tyrann” by Galaxy. I’ve read Galaxy’s editor, H. L. Gold, who was notorious for changing story titles, changed the title to “Tyrann”, Mr. Asimov’s preferred title was used on its first book appearance. BLOG

Gravetapping: THE KING OF HORROR & OTHER STORIES by Stephen Mertz

byBen Boulden    Posted: 12 Nov 2015 05:03 PM PST

























I’ve been knowingly reading the work of Stephen Mertz for nearly a decade; unknowingly since I was a teenager—all the way back in the late-1980s and early-1990s—devouring men’s adventure series novels like The Executionerand M. I. A. Hunter. He wrote some of the better non-Don Pendleton titles of the former, and created, writing many of the books, in the latter. In recent years he has broken away from series work and produced several high quality novels in a variety of genres—The Korean Intercept,  Dragon Games ,  The Castro Directive , Fade to Tomorrow, Hank & Muddy, and others.
Mr. Mertz is primarily a novelist, but his career began with the sale of his short story, “The Busy Corpse,” in 1975 to the short-lived The Executioner Mystery Magazine. In the forty years since, and including that first sale, he has published “a mere twelve stories”—his words, not mine—and each is included in his collection, The King of Horror & Other Stories. The stories are as varied as his novels. There is an action story, “Fragged,” three featuring a P. I. named O’Dair, and an old-school pulp adventure yarn, “The Lizard Men of Blood River,” which is aptly dedicated to Lester Dent. 
The best story in the collection, and they are all very good, is the title story, “The King of Horror.” In the Afterword Mr. Mertz describes it as “[a] cautionary tale for writers.” It features one Rigby Balbo, an aging writer angry at his irrelevance. Rig believes he is blacklisted by the industry and his fellow writers intentionally ignore the influence of his early work. But he has a plan to get even. A plan that turns blackly ironic for him, and darkly satisfying for the reader. I reviewed this story back in 2009. 
“The Basics of Murder” is a straight P. I. story. O’Dair—no first name—is on vacation visiting an old friend who made the Army a career after Vietnam. O’Dair’s leisure time is cut short when an officer is killed on the firing range, and his friend asks him to look into it. What he finds is something altogether unexpected for both O’Dair and the reader.   
The Afterword is worth the price of admission alone. It details Mr. Mertz’s thoughts on each of the stories, and illuminates a little of the personal Stephen Mertz. A few of my favorites: 
“The King of Horror” was written as “an open letter to” Michael Avallone; a popular writer of the paperback era, and close personal friend of Mr. Mertz, whose markets were gone and who felt some bitterness about it.
Stephen Mertz worked as a touring musician for seven years playing “the beer bar circuit.”  He played the harp—“blues lingo for amplified harmonica”—and vocals. 
The King of Horror & Other Stories is pure entertainment. It showcases the work of an underappreciated writer whose talent and excitement is present in each tale. The style is quietly smooth, and the plotting is sharp and surprising. Mr. Mertz may not be a prolific writer of short stories, but what he does write is damn good.

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Forgotten Books: The Yellow Dog by Georges Simenon

The early Maigret detective novels by Georges Simenon bear the stamp of the busy pulp writer Simenon he was before finding his voice and mission with the cranky even surly Commissaire.

In the Yellow Dog, a particularly well-plotted crime novel, Maigret travels to the small coastal town of Concarneau where a local wine merchant has been murdered under mysterious circumstances. According to a witness the man was strolling home on a windy night and paused to walk up steps leading to the narrow sheltered porch of a long empty house. Moments later the man fell backwards, dead from the shots.
Once there Maigret meets the four men and one waitress who seem to know much more than they're willing to share with him. He also sees a large yellow dog that keeps appearing at the crime scenes to come. Maigret feels a kinship with the animal which is more than he can say for anybody he meets in the town. 
Where did the dog come from? Why does he keep showing up at such odd moments? Does he belong to the person who by book's end kills more people?
This is a serial killer novel. Simenon even casts the local newspaper as one of the villains. The editor has a history of exploiting bad news to the point of making each local tragedy worse. And the killings are no exception. Simenon suggests that it is sop for Frenchmen to a) have mistresses and b) go about armed. Both are factors in the investigation. 
Most of the elements of classic Maigret are here. The weather is as vivid as the characters; Simenon buttresses his sociological look at French life with bleak humor; and his pity for decent people life has treated badly borders on the religious along with his contempt for pomposity and self-importance and cruelty. 
There is always a claustrophobic feel to the Maigrets; this allows the reader to experience what the Inspector himself does. As a forlorn chronicler of humankind Simenon is still without peer.

The western heist film: Yesterday’s Westerns: ‘Badman’ by Clair Huffaker by Fred Blosser

Yesterday’s Westerns: ‘Badman’ by Clair Huffakerby Fred Blosser    
In Clair Huffaker’s “Badman” (1957), gunfighter Jack “Taw” Tawlin drifts into Pawnee Fork, S.D., after serving a sentence in Arizona’s Yuma Prison.  He wants to put his violent past behind him, but his reputation stands in the way.  Wary of his prison record and his legacy of  gunplay and brawls, the local sheriff and the other good folk of Pawnee Fork think the worst of him when he arrives in town to visit his younger brother Jess.  So when Jess offers him a part in a big-time robbery that Jess and four partners are planning, the ostracized Taw figures why not.  The target is “Old Ironsides,” a steel-reinforced stagecoach hauling a $300,000 load of gold dust from the Black Hills for mine owner Chunk Holiday.  
The heist is plotted as carefully as one of Parker’s modern-day scores in the Richard Stark books.  The mastermind of the robbery, Snyder, incites an attack by Sioux to draw off Old Ironsides’ escort of heavily armed, mounted guards.  Once the horsemen are diverted, the robbers further isolate the coach by blowing up a bridge after the vehicle crosses.  Then the driver and the guards in the coach are spooked by a fake tree laid across the road by the robbers; fearing a collision, they all jump out, abandoning the vehicle.  Further down the road, as the runaway coach reaches an abutment, the weakened trestles underneath collapse under its weight.  The vehicle plummets into the valley below, where the robbers relieve it of the gold dust.
Like those of other classic big-heist books and movies from “The Asphalt Jungle” and “Rififi” on, the robbery comes off much as planned.  Minor complications arise, threaten to disrupt the carefully laid scheme just long enough to worry Taw and his partners, and are quickly surmounted.  But -- SPOILER ALERT -- things go awry in the aftermath of the heist, and Taw discovers that Jess and his partners had ulterior motives for bringing him in on the job.
“Old Ironsides” . . . big gold heist . . . a character named “Taw.”  Yep, “Badman” was the basis for John Wayne’s “The War Wagon” (1967), directed by Burt Kennedy.  Huffaker himself wrote the script, retooling the elements of the story and the character of Jack Tawlin -- renamed “Taw Jackson” for the film -- to fit Wayne’s big-screen persona.  Huffaker had done much the same thing six years earlier in adapting Paul I. Wellman’s 1952 novel, “The Comancheros,” into one of Wayne’s seminal 1960s westerns. 
The opening scene of “Badman” is virtually identical to the opening title shots of “The War Wagon.”   You can almost hear the first notes of Dmitri Tiomkin’s rousing theme song in the background:
“In a stunted oak near the foot of the pass a sleepy sparrow hawk suddenly became alert, arching its head high.  Alarmed, it stretched up, spreading itself.  Then, wings thumping a hollow, rapid beat on the still air, it flapped away from its perch.
“The bird was a hundred feet high and gaining speed when the sound came.  A low, rumbling sound as of distant thunder booming beyond the edge of the cloudless sky.
“In a moment two outriders came into sight.  They topped a rise and held their blowing horses in briefly, the worked-up animals edging into choppy, side-stepping walks while the men searched the passage ahead with quick, restless eyes.
“Satisfied, they let the mounts move back into easy, deceptively swift lopes, their eyes still tirelessly exploring the hills and ridges to each side of the dusty trail before them.”
But the film swiftly diverges from the novel in nearly every detail.  In “The War Wagon,” Taw Jackson returns home to Emmett, N.M., released from prison on parole.  Taw had been a respectable rancher until mine owner Frank Pierce (Bruce Cabot) had him railroaded on a trumped-up charge, and confiscated his land.  Taw masterminds the robbery to get even with Pierce by stealing the gold that is rightfully, if not legally, his.  The script eliminates virtually all the characters from the novel and introduces new ones who serve similar functions, notably Kirk Douglas’ flamboyant gunslinger Lomax.  
Where the novel is taut and earnest, the movie is briskly paced but looser and more inclined to exploit the material for sardonic laughs, as in a scene where Pierce orders two hands, Hammond (Chuck Roberson) and Brown (Bruce Dern), to offer Lomax $10,000 to kill Taw.  With shifty eyes and fawning grin in the best 1960s Bruce Dern style, Brown says, “Hell, Mr. Pierce, we’d be willing to kill him for a lot less than ten thousand dollars.”  Later, Taw and Lomax have a characteristic one-ups-man exchange after a fatal shootout with the two hapless henchmen.  “Mine hit the ground first,” Lomax claims.  “Mine was taller,” Taw rejoins.  
This jokey, “Don’t take this seriously, folks,” approach became Burt Kennedy’s primary stock-in-trade as a director and scriptwriter of western films and made-for-TV movies through the rest of his career, from “Support Your Local Sheriff” and “The Good Guys and the Bad Guys” in 1969 to “Once Upon a Texas Train” and “Where the Hell’s That Gold” in 1988.  Until the Budd Boetticher revival a few years ago, you tended to forget that Kennedy first made his mark as a writer with his tough, tense scripts for “Seven Men from Now” (1956), “The Tall T” (1958), and Boetticher’s other classics with Randolph Scott.    Later editions of “Badman” were renamed “The War Wagon” to tie in with the movie.  The original edition was a Crest Original that carried a 25¢ cover price and deftly packed a lot of plot into 128 pages, including a budding romance between Jack Tawlin and Jess’s mistreated wife, Christine.  Christine is also a decent person trying to escape a shady past -- in her case, saloon girl:  “Thoughtful Christine.  The only cowtown girl in Dodge that every rich cattleman took to his hotel room and proposed to the next morning,” she says flatly about herself.  The TV westerns of the time like “Gunsmoke” and “Lawman” tended to skirt the seamy reality of prostitution in the Old West, but Huffaker acknowledges it as the backstory that informs Christine’s empathy with Taw.   


The copyright page of the Crest paperback says that a shorter version of the novel, “Holdup at Stony Flat,” appeared in “Ranch Romances” in the twilight gasp of the western pulp magazines.  Huffaker’s prose is lean and flavorful in the way in which western novels began to move in a grittier, more character-grounded direction in the late ‘50s and 1960s, thanks to writers like Huffaker, Elmore Leonard, and Brian Garfield.

James Bond $73,000,000 Gorman $0-Stout & Christie

Ed here: I wrote last week that  I didn't much like James Bond books or movies. I should've mentioned that a few of the movies were fun and enjoyable for me. I'm noting that James Bond had one hell of a weekend. Mea culpa.

An Exclusive to Ed Gorman’s Blog
"The Lady and the King. . .Christie on Stout"Devotees of Ed Gorman's Blog will enjoy this original publication of a May 10, 1972 signed missive from Dame Agatha Christie to my father John McAleer, while he was writing the future Edgar Award winner Rex Stout: A Biography.  Here Dame Agatha shares her thoughts on Stout, Nero Wolfe & Archie, her love of food, and what it's like to be an octogenarian.