Ed Gorman's Blog, page 140

Julius Katz Mysteries only 99 cents RIGHT NOW!

Ed here: Julius Katz is the most innovative (and flat out enjoyable) mystery creation in the last few years.  Read the first Julius short story collection for only 99 cents but you have to order RIGHT NOW on Kindle!

If you like JULIUS KATZ MYSTERIES, you'll love  THE BOAT HOUSE by Stephen Gallagher. Give it a try! amzn.to/W97pbj


And check out 11 more Thrillers, all for 99 cents, during the TOP SUSPENSE New Year's promotion:  amzn.to/YlEzpj
These award-winning Julius Katz mysteries have delighted thousands of fans since first appearing on the pages of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine in 2009. JULIUS KATZ introduced readers to Boston's most brilliant, eccentric and possibly laziest detective, Julius Katz, as well as his sidekick, Archie, a tiny marvel of whizbang computer technology with the heart and soul of a hard-boiled PI. In Julius and Archie's second adventure, ARCHIE'S BEEN FRAMED, the little guy is framed for murder and Julius needs to use all his wits to keep his inimitable assistant out of the slammer.

JULIUS KATZ attracted a devoted following when it first came out, and has since won the Shamus Awardfrom the Private Eye Writers of America, as well as the Derringer Award from the Short Mystery Fiction Society. ARCHIE'S BEEN FRAMED won 1st place in Ellery Queen's Readers Choice Award. 

If you haven't had a chance to meet Julius and Archie yet, now's your chance to get caught up in these charming, delightful and very unusual mystery stories. As a bonus, the first chapter of the full-length Julius Katz mystery novel, JULIUS KATZ AND ARCHIE, has been added. Also, look for ONE ANGRY JULIUS AND OTHER STORIES, available now!

PWA TAKES A STEP FORWARD from Robert J. Randisi

  PWA TAKES A STEP FORWARDfrom Robert J. Randisi         PWA has instituted a new Shamus Award for works published in 2012. It is the Best Indie P.I. Novel. This is for novels that have been published by the authors themselves. Entries must bear a 2012 copyright.       President  Steve Hamilton, Vice-President DeNoux O'Neil, and Founder/Director Robert J. Randisi have decided it's time to open the organization to self-published works as the category now includes many established authors who, for one reason or another, have decided to publish their own work. The same professional standards used to judge our other categories will be used here. This category will include e-books. However, this is an experiment and does not effect any of the other categories. Hopefully, we are taking a huge step forward here, as the business itself undergoes drastic changes.    The judges in this category are Robert Randisi, Steve Hamilton and Jan Grape. Email Bob Randisi at RRandisi@aol.com for further information. 

SUNDAY, AUGUST 5, 2012The Five Best "Outer Limits" Episod...

SUNDAY, AUGUST 5, 2012The Five Best "Outer Limits" Episodes
Ed here: Classic Film and TV listed their most popular pieces of the year. Here's my favorite.  Leslie Stevens and Joseph Stefano (who wrote the screenplay for Psycho) were the creative talents behind the best sci fi anthology of the 1960s (maybe of all time). The concept was that each show would stay within the confines of the science fiction genre and feature a “bear”—Stefano’s nickname for a scary monster. The scripts weren't as consistently strong as The Twilight Zone and the show’s budget often worked against some of the high-end concepts. But when The Outer Limits was good, it was very good. Without further adieu, we list our picks for the five best episodes.

Trent getting handy advice.1. Demon with A Glass Hand - Trent (Robert Culp) is a man “born ten days ago” who has no previous memory and is being pursued throughout a huge deserted office building by alien beings that want to kill him. His actions are guided solely by his hand, which is made of glass with a tiny computer inside. The hand has two digits—the thumb and pinky—and talks to Trent. This fascinating episode penned by Harlan Ellison showcased The Outer Limits at its best: a brilliant concept, an offbeat setting, and a strong central performance.

for the rest go here:
http://www.classicfilmtvcafe.com/2012...

Top Suspense Group's BIG Promotion

Top Suspense Group's BIG PromotionTop Suspense Group: New e-reader for Christmas? Or just weary of the hunt for writing of genuine quality in the ever-growing eBook marketplace? 

For two days only, January 1st and 2nd 2013, selected titles from the twelve authors of the Top Suspense Group will be selling for 99c each. That's a dozen proven thriller and suspense titles for less than the cost of... I don't know, something that sells for twelve dollars. But you get the idea. 

Go here to see and order any or all of the books you can see below.  tp://bit.ly/U4o2Kc     Favorite Kills is a collection of award-winning and nominated short stories by Top Suspense Group members and includes Number 19 by Naomi Hirahara.

Poor Scott Fitzgerald - Jay-Z to score The Great Gatsby!!!!!!

Jay-Z & 'The Great Gatsby': Rapper Tapped To Score Upcoming Film AdaptationThe Huffington Post  |  By Madeline Boardman Posted: 12/31/2012 1:43 pm EST  |  Updated: 12/31/2012 1:43 pm ESTJay-Z is reportedly scoring "The Great Gatsby."Jay Gatsby, meet Jay-Z.Hov is reportedly the latest star to attach his name to the upcoming film adaptation of "The Great Gatsby." According to Jeymes Samuel of The Bullitts, he and Jay-Z will be writing the score for "Gatsby."The first clue of Jay-Z's involvement with "The Great Gatsby" was shown in the film's trailer. The opulent lifestyle of Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio) was set to the pumping beat of Jay-Z and Kanye West's "No Church In The Wild" -- take a look in the video above.Cast members also leaked in April that director Baz Luhrmann played Jay-Z music on the set of "The Great Gatsby." "On my first day he had Jay-Z pumped up full, and we did the entire scene with, you know, Jay-Z in our ear on full blast while acting, and it was just so liberating," Isla Fischer told MTV.Samuel announced the news on his Twitter account.

Twelve Top Suspense E BOOKs only 99 cents

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The Late Show and the Private Eye

The Late Show and the Private EyeEd here: Here is one of my all-time favorite private eye films. I've probably seen it seven or eight times since it appeared and it never lets me down. The acting is astonishing.

BTW Last night I thanked everybody associated with helping us get THE INTERROGATOR into print--EXCEPT I DIDN'T THANK THE WRITERS. Duh. No writers no book. THANK YOU TO EVERYBODY IN THE BOOK. THANK YOU FOR LETTING US USE YOUR WONDERFUL STORIES. EG



Posted by Greg Ferrara on December 26, 2012Any good detective story focuses more on the detective than the story.  If the detective, cop, private eye, what have you, is interesting then the plot will be interesting, while remaining oddly secondary to the characters.  It’s how so many private dick yarns that tend towards the confusing side still work as entertainment.  The most notable example is The Big Sleep and all its half-apocryphal accompanying stories and legends wherein the point isn’t whether the story makes sense or not, the point is whether you care.  If you care, you’re probably paying attention to the wrong thing.  You should be focusing on Philip Marlowe and Vivian Rutledge.   The story should only act to propel the characters along so we can watch them for longer periods of time.  Robert Benton’sThe Late Show understands this exactly and gives us one of the best of the genre and one of the best movies of the seventies.


The seventies saw a reinvention of detective fiction with three in particular, The Long Goodbye, Chinatown andThe Late Show, each taking a different route.  Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye sought to deconstruct the private eye, and noir, in one big California-Cool package.  Chinatown presented it as a reinvention within the traditional outlines of the form and The Late Show presented it as is, set in the present day of 1977 with its lead private dick, Ira Wells, old and limping, hard of hearing but still able to wield a gun, talk tough and call every lady he meets “doll.”
The story of The Late Show begins when Ira’s landlady, Mrs. Schmidt (Ruth Nelson), knocks on his door (he rents a room in a boarding house) and announces he has a guest.  Ira doesn’t hear the knock at first as he’s busy doing a crossword while the late show plays loudly in the background.  When he does answer, he finds it’s his partner, Harry Regan (Howard Duff), who looks like he’s been out all night, prompting Ira to comment on the bender he’s apparently been on.  That’s when blood starts pouring from his mouth and it becomes clear he’s been on no bender, he’s been shot.  Ira lays him down, has Mrs. Schmidt call the police, and scolds Harry for letting himself get shot.  Then, with only a few words, Ira says his goodbyes to his old partner in what has to be the most affecting opening scenes to any private dick movie ever.  And it only works because the characters are older.  Younger partners, like Spade and Archer, would have no such visible emotional attachment, but the emotion that barely seeps out from Ira indicates a long, hard-knock life that’s been through everything and probably just wishes that his partner could go in his sleep at a comfortable old age.  Hell, he made it this long.  Maybe Ira still will.

for the rest go here: http://moviemorlocks.com/2012/12/26/t...

The Interrogator and other Criminally Good Fiction

The Interrogator and other Criminally Good Fiction
























From Publisher's Weekly:


"Heavyweights of the genre such as Lee Child, Laura Lippman, and David Morrell headline this strong anthology of 26 crime stories. Unsurprisingly, there’s not a dud in the bunch; surprisingly, the best entry may be a comic riff on Rex Stout—Dave Zeltserman’s “Archie’s Been Framed.” It’s hard to resist a line like: “While Julius refers to me as Archie, and I act as his private secretary, research assistant, unofficial biographer, and all-around man Friday, I am in actuality a four-inch rectangular piece of advanced technology that Julius wears as a tie clip.” Wry humor is in play in Jeffery Deaver’s “The Plot,” which takes some affectionate pokes at the James Patterson fiction factory. Other highlights include Loren D. Estleman’s Valentino mystery, “The List”; T. Jefferson Parker’s twisty “Luck”; and Doug Allyn’s Civil War thriller, “The Scent of Lilacs.” (Nov.)
Ed here: This was the last anthology I did with my long time best friend and publishing partner Marty Greenberg so it's a special book to me. I also think--and I'm not blowing smoke--that I prefer this one to all our other annuals. So many, many fine stories and such a fine  package. 
I want to thank publisher Rich Chizmar of Cemetery Dance for taking the chance with us; Brian Freeman the point man from CD who had to put up with me three times a week. And thank you to  J.T. Lindross for the cover; Gail Cross for the cover design; and Kate Freeman Design for the interior design.

Copies will be available in a few days. Amazon is selling the 500 page anthology for $13.19 which is six dollars off the retail price. It will also be available on Kindle and other e services. 

Fred Zackel

Ed here: This then is my final blog post. At least for now. But I want to make something clear. When I said I was giving up my blog I was in the throes of bone exhaustion. I didn't mean to imply that I was dying or near death just that all the bumps on the health road were starting to wear me down. I want to emphasize that given some of the horrible conditions some of my fellow suffers from multiple myeloma have to endure I have been, as usual in my life, a lightweight and tourist. I'm sorry if I made things sounds worse than they are. I appreciate all your thoughtful and concerned responses. 




FRED ZACKEL

Fred Zackel is a writer of fiction and non-fiction. Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, he spent many years in California.

Zackel was discovered by the award winning novelist Ross MacDonald at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference in 1975. MacDonald became a mentor and was influential in the direction of Zackel's fiction writing.

Zackel published his first novel, COCAINE AND BLUE EYES in 1978 and it was followed by CINDERELLA AFTER MIDNIGHT. Both novels feature his San Francisco private detective, Michael Brennen. In 1983 the TV movie Cocaine&Blue Eyes was aired on NBC.

Now on Kindle for $3.99

“Angel Noir” is horror / crime / suspense from the author of THE BLONDE IN THE RED CORVETTE, CREEPIER THAN A WHOREHOUSE KISS, and TIGHT FIT IN A LONG COLD BOX. "You can't kill an angel, fallen or otherwise." What if Angels had free will? What if they had vengeance in their heart? They met one night at the Rowdy Yates Cantina near the California-Nevada stateline. She drank mezcal tequila and played lead guitar in an all-girl hard rock band. He was a serial killer with a baker's dozen under his belt. She could have been just a ditsy, sickly blonde in dreadlocks living alone in a rusty trailer in the Mohave Desert. He prowled the Interstates west of the Rockies giving into his urges and rage. Face to face, eye to eye and belly to belly, they were both dead wrong about each other. "Wrestling with your angel might be another form of foreplay." Intense themes. Intense situations. Language and violence. Not for the squeamish. 

FRED ZACKEL PRO-FILE:

1. Tell us about your current novel or project.
I have this big fat multigenerational novel THE KELLY VENDETTA that my agent's been shopping since February. Mulholland said it was too noirish for them, while Grove/Atlantic said it wasn't "quite literary enough for us to publish well." It's also too long and deals with the race issue in 1960s Cleveland.

After 38 years, a man returns home to solve his brother’s murder.

Bobbie Kelly is a successful Phoenix ad agency exec. After a massive heart attack puts him in the ICU, the first chance Bobbie gets, he sneaks out and catches a plane to Cleveland, the hometown he never before had gone back to. San Francisco Homicide Detective Max Kelly is the son drafted to go after him. "Grandpa Kelly ran away from the hospital," his son tells Max. "He went to Cleveland and he didn’t take his meds or his cell phone. Grandma’s Glock is gone, too. She wants you to go get Pops." So Max goes after his father. What he doesn’t know is that the killings have started up again.
2. Can you give us a sense of what you’re working on now?
Twenty-three year old Charlie Dixon is feeling the Big Squeeze in Las Vegas. He is shackled to the Mob. He has a special talent that should get him killed. He would be okay with that if they would leave his wife and five year old son alone. But it’s not just the Mob that’s squeezing the juice out of him. There’s the Feds, the local cops, and the dirty cops. His in-laws, too. And then there are the Bad Guys new to town. They have already killed his father. Now they’re going after Charlie and his family. They plan to squeeze the entire city of Las Vegas. It’s the biggest jackpot of them all, and nobody believes Charlie.

I knew a kid just like Charlie D. in high school. But in Cleveland nobody ruthless enough, evil enough was interested in his extraordinary talent, his incredible gift, his special skills. I always wondered what happened to him. Did he find himself in life? Was going from a boy to a man somehow easier with that special skill? Did other people -- bad people -- take advantage of him? Did he ever find true love and happiness, success and a special kind of fame? I kept thinking, what if …
3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?
The joy when the writing and the universe flies by …
4. The greatest displeasure?

When you finish writing, knowing that everything is now out of your hands.

5. Advice to the publishing world?
At every chance you get, kiss your kids, no matter how old they are.
6. Are there any forgotten writers you’d like to see in print again?

I love Robert Van Gulik’s "Sexual Life in Ancient China: A Preliminary Survey of Chinese Sex and Society from ca. 1500 B.C. till 1644 A.D." Mystery fans know that Van Gulik wrote the Judge Dee mysteries. But he was also a Dutch diplomat and a brilliant scholar.

This text is more sociological and cultural than scatological, and boy is it fascinating. One of my favorite stories is about Lady Wu Zetian of the T’ang Dynasty, a "pretty" concubine who used sex and murder to make herself into the only Empress in Chinese history. You want ruthless ambition? She murdered her own daughter to frame the Emperor’s wife and her mother to help her ascension to the throne. She had both of them murdered and mutilated, by the way. You want vicious governance? "Wu's method of making an example out of a rival was blinding her, cutting out her tongue, amputating her arms and legs, and keeping her alive by feeding her slops and letting her wallow in her own excrement, like a pig." She ruled for more than fifty years. Oh, and murdered two of her sons along the way for political reasons. As she neared the end of her life, she tried installing her 27 year old lover, a Buddhist monk, as the next emperor, and the real historical figure behind Judge Dee stories helped talk her out of it. But even her fiercest critics at the time admitted how well she governed. She also reformed the bureaucracy and always promoted the best candidate for any office. This astonishing woman left it to future generations to decide her place in Chinese history, and to this day her tombstone bears no epitaph. (Fourteen centuries of historians can't decide.) Wikipedia gives her 32 pages of bibliography.

It is an astonishing book in other ways, too. I understand the more explicit sexual positions that Van Gulik wrote in Latin have been translated into English for modern scholars. I know that, with my two years of Catholic high school Latin, I had a difficult time.
7. Tell us about selling your first novel.

I was driving taxicab at nights in San Francisco and reconciled that this was my future. Expecting only a mini-vacation, I went to a writer’s conference. I had written a poem about the nasty streets and Ross Macdonald heard me read it. He came up to me in the bar and introduced himself, we started having long talks together, and then he decided to mentor me. When he read "Cocaine & Blue Eyes," he passed it to his agent, who still reps me.

No So Fast-Robert S. Levinson

 
Ed here: As I said last night I'm giving up my blog at least for some time. But I also mentioned that I had two excellent PRO-FILE pieces that I really wanted to share with my readers.

Bob Levinson is a good friend of mine. Among the many, many interesting aspects of his life is the fact that he grew up in Old Hollywood. He lived near an open air market where stars big and small shopped several times a week. And Bob has got the photographs and autograph pages to prove it. He met dozens and dozens of actors over his young years. Add to this the fact that he grew up to become a prominent talent agent--well who better to write Phony Tinsel?

This is one of the freshest, liveliest and page-turningest  takes on Old Hollywood ever written.  Buy a copy for yourself and then rack up a few more for gifts.

PRO-FILE: Robert S. Levinson


1. Tell us about your current novel or project.I've been gearing up to put some serious promotion behind my tenth novel, PHONY TINSEL, a seriocomic thriller set in 30's Hollywood, the “Golden Age of Movies,” that ships in January. Booklist comments in an early review: “The author could have played the story as a noir—all the elements are here—but, instead, he takes a lighter tone, peppering the tale with humor and wordplay…Fans of Hollywood’s Golden Age will have lots of fun with the real-life movie references.”
PHONY TINSEL focuses on fledgling screenwriter Charlie Dickens, who’s lured into a cockeyed scheme to murder her autocratic, skirt-chasing, producer-director husband, Maxwell Moonglow, by internationally adored film idol Sarah Darling, more femme fatale in real life than in reel life. At the same time, he’s torn between Polly Wilde, a conniving ingénue more in love with the promise of stardom than with Charlie, and Robin Moon, a missing damsel in distress he’s vowed to rescue from the realities of life beyond the silver screen.
Mystery and intrigue skyrockets, con artists, crooks and killers appear and disappear, and the body count multiplies as Charlie stumbles through a series of mishaps at locales as diverse as the high-priced, ultra-exclusive neighborhoods of filmdom’s elite (e.g.,Cecil B. DeMille, Buster Keaton); small-scale Southern California cities and farming communities on the edge of nowhere; hobo-infested freight trains; depression-era Hooverville homes to the blessed and the damned; a Chinatown opium den; the RKO and David O. Selznick movie studios; and the set of a B-western cast with cowboy actors of the era (e.g., Tim Holt, Harry Carey, Andy Devine, Ward Bond) and a Cheyenne Indian, Wahanassatta (“He who walks with his toes turned outward”), who has more than scalps on his mind.
2. Can you give us a sense of what you’re working on now? 

Next in the pipeline, for 2014, is FINDERS, KEEPERS, LOSERS, WEEPERS, a far tougher, darker crime story than PHONY TINSEL that draws on personal experience during the decades I spent in the music industry running a major international public relations organization that over time represented more than 700 top-tier clients. (A sampling in my web site bio: www.robertslevinson.com )
FKLW’s anti-hero, an international rock idol, is sentenced to prison on a trumped-up rape charge. Nine years later, he emerges a mental and physical cripple bent on revenge, pursued by a tabloid reporter suffering her own demons and a failed record company executive chasing after personal redemption. They ultimately cross paths on interlocking journeys that will not end well for all of them.
Meanwhile, I'm playing around with ideas for the next traditional hardcover novel, as well as a possible novel and some short story collections to go direct to eBook, where I'm already invested with earlier and new titles on Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, etc. A lot if not all of the work will use show business past and present as home ground.
3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?The act of writing, of course, along with the luxury of writing what I choose to write, frequently outside the box that's outside the box, in both novels and short stories. … To my ongoing amazement, I’ve passed the tenth anniversary mark in a world where my dream of many years standing was to get one novel written and published.
4. The greatest displeasure?
Understanding there's not enough time in a day to live much of a life away from the computer and the work(s) in progress, especially hard for someone (aka me) who's always been a people person. I only have me for company when I'm writing, no radio, no music, no television, no distractions whatsoever, and rarely a time out or time away from a seven-days-a-week discipline that daily runs from early morning to late afternoon, taking time outs only for lunch and toilet travel. In fact, be right back... 
5. Advice to the publishing world?
It's no longer news that an author can position himself to build a bigger, better career and earn more in royalties by abandoning traditional publishing for the ebook revolution. Perhaps one smart move traditional publishers might make in order to justify their holding onto an author and taking a chunk of his ebook royalties: more favorable contractual terms and broader, stronger marketing, publicity and promotional support.
6. Are there any forgotten writers you’d like to see in print again?Thanks to ebooks and the proliferation of small presses, most of the writers I might name are again in print or otherwise available. Among some who might be "overlooked" and are worth giving a try for the first time or again: John O'Hara, Oakley Hall, W.P. Kinsella, Jack Finney, Gerald Seymour, Peter De Vries. Through his blog, that Ed Gorman guy has been familiarizing me with a batch of mystery authors I've known by name only (or not at all), and hope to check out when reading time allows.
7. Tell us about selling your first novel.  It's after eight or nine months of submissions and rejections for THE ELVIS AND MARILYN AFFAIR. My agent calls. "Didn't you say you're coming to New York?" "Yeah. Why?" "An editor is thinking seriously about acquiring the novel. I think we can close the sale if she has a chance to meet you." "Done," I say, my pulse doing gymnastics. "Set it. I'm there."

In New York, I do three days of PR business and then must sit out a weekend and a Monday in front of a Tuesday lunch with the editor, three and a half days of nervous anticipation. I have a Monday lunch with a couple old friends at a budget-busting restaurant overlooking the Radio City ice rink. I explain what's keeping me in New York. I'm told, "Elvis? Marilyn? Don't worry, she'll buy the book." I worry anyway.

Tuesday. The editor and I lunch one-on-one at Bobby Flay's Mesa Grill. We get along famously. Her nice words about the book precede questions about my show biz background. I flood her with anecdotes, including a few about Elvis (whom I knew casually) and Marilyn (whom I'd never met, only several friends in common). We part all smiles, no further reference to the book and its status with her; me too polite to put her on the spot with the question; also, for fear of getting an answer I don't want to hear. Flying home, best I can do is hope for the best. The answer comes by phone a few days later. "Congratulations," my agent says. "We have a deal."