Ed Gorman's Blog, page 141

My Final Post - Illness

I've been fighting a mysterious disease for the past five weeks that has now all but laid me flat.  It has now taken my voice (which some would consider a blessing) and reduced me to having about two hours a day of minimal activity.  I mostly sleep. This has nothing to do with my cancer. Or so they think at the moment.

I have two excellent Pro-File new books piece (on from Fred Zaeckel and one from Bob Levinson) that I will see get published.

No need to send good wishes. I know a lot of us have become blog friends over the years. I feel just as good about you as some of you do about me.

But maybe I just need to give this up altogether. The illnesses come more frequently and more severely now.

FNALLY ALL THE JOHN Ds TO BE BACK IN PRINT

RANDOM HOUSE TO REISSUE JOHN D. MACDONALD’S CLASSIC TRAVIS MCGEE SERIES AND OTHER ACCLAIMED WORKS FOR THE FIRST TIME AS BOTH TRADE PAPERBACKS AND E-BOOKS On January 8, 2013, Random House Trade Paperbacks will launch their new publishing program to release, for the first time ever, eBook editions of 70 of John D. Macdonald’s novels, including all of the Travis McGee novels which will kick off the program. At the same time, Random House will publish—also for the first-time ever—the McGee novels in trade paperback, starting with the classic THE DEEP BLUE GOOD-BY on January 8, with trade paperback reissues of the rest of the McGee novels below coming throughout the year.  In addition, Random House will publish some of MacDonald’s long-out-of-print classics as eBook-only editions, starting in June 2013, and will continue the trade paperback and eBook releases of MacDonald’s most notable stand-alone novels, including the iconic Cape Fear, throughout the year and into 2014. MacDonald’s work has influenced some of today’s critically acclaimed authors from Stephen King and Mary Higgins Clark to #1 New York Times bestselling author Lee Child, who wrote a new introduction for the reissued McGee series, a hero he has called “a knight in rusted armor.” Sue Grafton has called MacDonald “a dominant influence” in the genre, while Dean Koontz crowned him “my favorite novelist of all time.” The covers for these new editions introduce an entirely new look for MacDonald, which will appeal both to paperback readers and to eBook consumers. Leaving behind the pulpy character of his original paperbacks and the slick appearance of the 1995 repackages, these new covers have a classic and timeless feel. Consistent across all 21 Travis titles with bold fonts, bright colors, and vibrant photographic imagery, these covers evoke time and place while balancing the dark humor of McGee’s narration with the serious themes that underlie all of MacDonald’s work.     ABOUT THE AUTHOR: John D. MacDonald was an American novelist and short-story writer. His works include the Travis McGee series and the novel The Executioners, which was adapted into the film Cape Fear. In 1962, MacDonald was named a grandmaster of the Mystery Writers of America; in 1980, he won a National Book Award. In print, he delighted in smashing the bad guys, deflating the pompous, and exposing the venal. In life, he was a truly empathic man; his friends, family, and colleagues found him to be loyal, generous, and practical. In business, he was fastidiously ethical. About being a writer, he once expressed with gleeful astonishment, “They pay me to do this! They don’t realize, I would pay them.” He spent the later part of his life in Florida with his wife and son, and died in 1986.

Blood Moon-my most popular novel

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EDWARD MATHIS

Edward MathisI was at a Half Price today and found a Dan Roman private eye novel by Edward Mathis. After reading a few pages I bought both the Mathis novels there.

Mathis was the real thing--a fine writer with a slant and style all his own. He brought us a dusty tapped-out Texas I'd never encountered before.If he reminded me of anybody it was the proletariat novelists of the Forties and Fifties such as Harvey Swados and Clancy Sigal.

I'm looking forward to rereading him. He was a serious contender for the big prize.

Here are some comments from Kevin Burton Smith's excellent profile of him on Thrilling Detective:

Dan Roman
Created by Edward Mathis (1927-1988)

"... life was nothing more than a complicated mosaic of personal triumphs and tragedies, of chance encounters and random couplings and... we no more controlled our fate than the rabbit ruled the hound. The road was already there, the course charted; about the best we could do was give it a nudge once in a while, try our best to keep from crossing the center line."
(Dark Streaks)

Texas private eye DAN ROMAN was a little bit country, and a little bit Lew Archer, although he tends to lean toward the shitkicker side, referred to at one point as "mean enough to bite and tough enough to hold on." Still, he can also display plenty of compassion when the occasion warrants it.

Middle-aged, Dan favors cowboy boots, pickup trucks and deer hunting (although he no longer enjoys it quite as much as he used to). Besides his hunting rifles he owns a Smith and Wesson .38 airweight and a small .22 automatic.He also likes to read, smoke, and enjoy an occasional Jack Daniels or Scotch. He also drinks a lot of beer , particularly Miller, although he claims he doesn't really like it all that much since, as he declares in Dark Streets and Empty Places, "it all tastes like bear piss anyway."

Hmmm... maybe he should switch brands...

There's a dark quality to the series, helped along considerably by the ongoing tragedy that seems to follow Dan along. An only child, he was born to strict religious parents who weren't particularly loving. So perhaps it's no surprise that he spent a lot of time with the cowboys on the working ranch he grew up on rather than his own parents. Still, he spent the summer he turned fourteen (the "best summer of his life") helping his father build a hunting cabin. It was then he discovered that his father was a secret drinker -- a secret that was revealed to one and all a few years later, during Dan's last year of high school, when his mother passed away and his father hit the bottle hard.

for the rest go here http://www.thrillingdetective.com/eye...

The Dead Beat by Robert Bloch

Robert Bloch [image error]


A while back writer John Peyton Cooke made the case for The Scarf and not Psycho being Robert Bloch's true masterpiece. I'm not sure I agree but since they're both fine books what the hell.

Cooke's excellent review reminds me of another overlooked Bloch novel, the one that came right after Psycho and that nobody much seemed to care for, namely The Dead Beat. What I've always liked about it is the way Bloch took a sleazy no-good bastard and set him right down in the middle of a Midwestern family that could have doubled as sit-com people. But Bloch really makes you care about these folks and how they are so slow to catch on to the psychotic jazz musician they make the mistake of trying to help.

The title signals the era, the early sixties when the beats were so much in the news. He shows us a kind of faux beat existence with the musicians we meet early on. Bloch gets the one night stand life (in both meanings of that phrase) down just as well as he gets the middle-class days and nights of the family the musician will ultimately turn on.

Reviewers of the time didn't like the relatvely slow pace. They also complained (as I recall) that the novel didn't offer the shock or sass of Psycho (I say sass because the novel is very funny in places--something Hitchcock picked up on immediately). While The Dead Beat certainly isn't Bob Bloch's masterpiece, it's a novel that shows him in a more expansive mood, showing an interest not just in the story but in showing us life as it was lived back in the day.

The Bughouse Affair by Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini

From Publisher's Weekly:

Fans of Steve Hockensmith’s Holmes on the Range historicals will welcome this Carpenter and Quincannon novel, billed as the first in a new series from husband-and-wife MWA Grand Masters Muller and Pronzini (Beyond the Grave). In 1891, Sabina Carpenter, one of the original Pinkerton female operatives, the Pink Roses, moved to San Francisco to join former Secret Service agent John Quincannon in establishing the city’s “premier investigative agency.” In 1894, two simultaneous cases preoccupy the pair: a pickpocket is targeting the patrons of the Haight Street Chutes Amusement Park, and six policyholders of the Great Western insurance company have been burglarized. Meanwhile, Quincannon is bemused by press reports that Sherlock Holmes has survived his supposed death and has taken up residence in San Francisco, until the claimant to the master detective’s mantle becomes an unexpected rival. A doubly impossible crime only adds to the enjoyable plot. 


Ed here: This novel is so chock full of twists, surprises, humor, classic ratiocination and amused/bemused portraits of historical San Francisco you literally don't want it to end. Thank God the sequel is already on the Forge schedule. I sincerely believe this would make a great TV series for either network or cable. Sabina Carpenter and John Quincannon are characters made for the millions in the fashion of the great BBC series.

Pro-File MarciaMuller and Bill Pronzini

   Tell us about your current novel or project.Marcia:  Although Bughouse is the first of a new collaborative series, Bill originated the characters in his solo western novel, Quincannon, in 1985, and then continued their adventures in a Quincannon—Elena Oliverez mystery we wrote together and in a number of short stories.  A couple of years ago, as a lark, we collaborated on a C&Q short for EQMM, with me writing the scenes from Sabina’s viewpoint and Bill those from Quincannon’s.  I had no difficulty slipping into Sabina’s voice and persona, and the story turned out so well that we decided to use the same method on a batch of novels.  Tor was enthusiastic enough to give us a three-book contract.Bill:  We’ve delivered the second, The Spook Lights Affair, and will start work on the third, The Body Snatchers Affair, sometime after the first of the year.  There’ll be more after that, sales permitting. 
2.    Can you give us a sense of what you’re working on now? Marcia:  The next Sharon McCone, The Night Searchers, for Grand Central Books.Bill:  The 2014 Nameless, Strangers, for Tor/Forge.
3.     What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?      Marcia:  Positive feedback from readers, especially those who tell me that my books have helped them survive difficult personal crises.Bill:  Peer respect.  There’s nothing more gratifying than favorable reaction to my work from writers I admire.
4.     The greatest displeasure? Marcia:  Facing the blank computer screen every day with the irrational fear that it’ll stay that way.Bill:  Having my work unfairly trashed by anonymous, clueless idiots passing themselves off as reviewers.
5.     Advice to the publishing world?       Marcia:  Invest more time in and attention to your new authors.  Give them a chance to grow, as publishers did back when I first entered the business.      Bill:  Quit judging a novel’s merits and promotional value based on its length.  Word-bloat isn't a synonym for quality.
Are there any forgotten writers you’d like to see in print again?      Marcia:  Too many to list.      Bill:  Ditto.  Our library is full of books by forgotten writers.
Tell us about selling your first novel. Marcia:  In 1976 I submitted Edwin of the Iron Shoes over the transom to Michele Slung at David McKay, who had foolishly put an ad for manuscripts in The Writer.  She was inundated with submissions, and I was fortunate enough to be on top of one of the piles.  She called and told me she wanted to buy it, but she was about to leave on a 3-week vacation in Europe.  Four weeks passed, then five; I panicked and wrote her a pleading note, which arrived on her desk the day after she called again and made me an offer.Bill:  I was lucky enough to sell The Stalker on its first submission in 1970, to Lee Wright at Random House.  She asked for several revisions, which I was happy to make.  After reading and cringing my way through portions of the published version a while back, I wish she’d asked for a whole lot more.

The Girl and The Genie

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00AF0R2YCThe Girl and the Genie [Kindle Edition] E. M. Lilly (Author) Be the first to review this item | Like (2) Digital List Price: $4.50 What's this? Kindle Purchase Price: $4.50 Prime Members: $0.00 (borrow for free from your Kindle) Prime Eligible Book DescriptionPublication Date: November 28, 2012

"Emily Mignon’s love life is a disaster, and she’s not at all happy
about it! When she finds a genie and is granted nine wishes, she’s
determined to use one of them to find her one true love. But the genie
warns her that any wish for romance always ends disastrously. Emily,
not to be denied, will try to find a loophole to this rule.

The Girl and the Genie is a fun, exciting and charming mix of
paranormal romance and urban fantasy, that will leave you rooting for
Emily, the genie, and a fat little English Bulldog named Winston.

E. M. Lilly is the nom de plume of an award-winning mystery author."

Forgotten Books: The Plastic Nightmare by Richard Neely

The Plastic Nightmare


I've written here before about Richard Neely. He wrote non-series crime novels that pretty much covered the entire range of dark suspense. I mentioned that in the best of them the weapon of choice is not poison, bullets or garrote. He always prefered sexual betrayl.

Plastic is a good example. Using amnesia as the central device Dan Mariotte must reconstruct his life. Learning that the beautiful woman at his bedside all these months in the hospital--his wife--may have tried to kill him in a car accident is only the first of many surprises shared by Mariotte and the reader alike.

What gives the novel grit is Neely's take on the privileged class. He frequently wrote about very successful men (he was a very successful adverts man himself) and their women. The time was the Seventies. Private clubs, privte planes, private lives. But for all the sparkle of their lives there was in Neely's people a despair that could only be assauged (briefly) by sex. Preferably illicit sex. Betrayl sex. Men betrayed women and women betrayed men. It was Jackie Collins only for real.

Plastic is a snapshot of a certain period, the Seventies when the Fortune 500 dudes wore sideburns and faux hippie clothes and flashed the peace sign almost as often as they flashed their American Express Gold cards. Johny Carson hipsters. The counter culture co-opted by the pigs.

The end is a stunner, which is why I can say little about the plot. Neely knew what he was doing and I'm glad to see his book back in print. Watching Nerely work is always a pleasure.

Capricorn One

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2008
Here's a piece of the Cinema Retro review:

"Capricorn Onewas the first major release to center on a clearly crackpot theory and present it as a plausible thesis. In this case, the notion is that corrupt NASA executives concoct an audacious plot to fake the first landing on Mars. They gain the co-operation of the three astronauts involved using a combination of appeals to their patriotism coupled with implied threats against their families. As crazy as the scenario sounds, Hal Holbrook, as the plot's mastermind, delivers a speech to the men that makes it sound sensible (they have to have a triumph or public apathy for NASA will result in cancelation of the space program). Things quickly go awry when technical glitches make it appear the capsule was destroyed en route back to earth. In order to maintain the facade, Holbrook has to order the assassination of the astronauts, played by James Brolin, Sam Waterston and O.J. Simpson. The men realize they are expendable and make a daring break for freedom across the desert."

The show we heard had listeners calling in from the US and Canada claiming that this was in fact what happened when we claimed to have landed on the moon. It was all staged in a TV studio by the US government.

I'm pretty sure this theory still has credence among the full-mooners. In fact I heard Sarah Palin promise to look into it if she and that nasty old bastard she's running with ever happen to take the White House.

Movie Day

Movie DayI spent a good share of the day watching two movies. I'd been waiting for the Independent Film Channel to run Claude Chabrol's Story of Women (1990 USA) again. Here's a partial review from IMDB:

Abortion in Nazi-occupied France

Author: Dennis Littrell (dalittrell@yahoo.com) from SoCal

"Claude Charbrol's stark and unsentimental masterpiece about the last woman to be executed in France--she was guillotined for performing abortions in Nazi-occupied France during World War II--forces us to see a side of war not often depicted. What does a woman with two little children do when her country is occupied by the brute forces of the enemy? How is she to find enough to eat, to buy the increasingly scarce and costly necessities of life? How is she to find joy in life? Women often turn to prostitution during such times, but Maire Latour does not. Instead she aborts the foetuses of the prostitutes and of other women impregnated, often by the Nazis. In a sense this is her "resistence." However she prospers and takes up with a Nazi collaborator. In the process she reduces her husband to frustration and humiliation.

"Isabelle Huppert as Marie Latour is mesmerizing in a role that allows her talent full latitude. She is clear-headed and sly as a business woman, warm and ordinary as a mother, cold and brutal as a wife, childish and careless as an adulteress, resourceful and fearless as an abortionist, and unrepentant as she awaits the executioner (foreshadowed, by the way, by her son, who wants to be an executioner when he grows up). "

Ed here:

The more movies I watch the more I feel drawn to Chabrol and his seminal actress Isabelle Huppert. I know I am in a minority for admiring what the two of them did with Madame Bovary but I think that film will have its day eventually. In terms of both intelligent and sexual beauty I can't think of another actress who comes close to Huppert. I could imagine her face dominating the days of silent films; with her gentle hesitant style given voice she's all the more remarkable. A lesser actor would have donned masks to show us all the different sides of Marie. But somehow Huppert integrates all contradictory aspects of Marie into one believe whole. This is a masterpiece.

------------------Libeled Lady (1936)

IMDB "Warren Haggerty is the chief editor of the New York Evening Star. He keeps on delaying his marriage with Gladys because of problems his newspapers must face. When it is filed a 5 million dollars claim by Connie Allenbury for having printed she is a marriage-breaker, he organizes the unconsummated marriage of Gladys and the don Juan Bill Chandler. The goal is to catch Connie alone with a married man... Written by Yepok"

I laughed all the way through this screwball comedy that could never have been made after the Hayes office took power. Spencer Tracy and Jean Harlow as editor and fiance reminded my of why I never much cared for the Tracy-Hepburn pictures. Too chaste. Harlowe takes the picture for me. This is the best I've ever seen he and I'm a big fan. Funny, sexy, a little bit trashy and cunning in the way she battles Tracy, who keeps breaking his promise to marry her, they dominate the screen in a way the more staid William Powell and Myrna Lowe don't. The latter two are good but predictable. Harlowe and Tracty spill real blood. The last six minutes give us three plot twists.