Ed Gorman's Blog, page 142

The Pat Hobby Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald

FORGOTTEN BOOKS - The Pat Hobby StoriesLosers have always interested me more than winners. There's a line from a Leonard Cohen poem "The simple life of heroes/The twisted lives of saints." I'll take the saints (though Cohen isn't talking about folks the Vatican bestows sainthood on that's for sure).

My formative years were the Fifties. The films that influenced me the most were the noirs my father took me to and such fare as The Sweet Smell of Success and A Face in the Crowd. No heroes there. The same for my preferred reading (in additon to the Gold Medals and sf)--Hemingway, James Jones, Irwin Shaw (short stories), Graham Greene and Richard Wright among others. No heroes there either. Same for theater (I was writing terrible plays early on). O'Neill, Miller, Williams. Not a hero in sight.

We call a good deal of crime fiction dark. But is it? Cops replaced cowboys and now we have Cops (or investigators of any kind) with Personal Problems and reviewers think this is some kind of dangerous fiction. Not to me.

The constraints of commercial fiction are such that you risk losing a sale if your protagoist is an outright loser. The Brits were way ahead of us Yanks. Derek Raymond has spawned two generations of daring writers. The first time I read him I was struck by how much the texture of his prose remided me of one of my five favorite books of all time, Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell. I read fifty pages of it the other day. What with globalization the world is once again as Orwell described it in the Thirties.

The literary writer Brian Moore (who started out writing Gold Medals and Dell originals under three different names) made a brief early career out of losers. The Lucky Of Ginger Coffee, for only one example, is about a daydreamer most people love but ultimately a selfish man whose daydreams are destroying his wife and children. He can't accept that he's an average guy--a loser. And that turns him into a dark loser indeed.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's work is filled with losers. Handsome, poetic ones, yes, but losers nonetheless. Winter Dreams, as one of his best stories is called, describes the near lifelong love of a man for woman he can never have. He has great business success but still there is his failure to possess her. The last few pages will give you chills.

Here we have The Pat Hobby Stories. They are set in the Hollywood of the late Thirties and feature a once prominent screeenwriter who is reduced to virtually begging for work at the various studios that once wined and dined him. The Fitzgerald myth is so tied to the notion of Romantic Loss that we forget that he was also funnier than hell. And causitc.

As Arnold Gingrich said shortly after Fitzgerald's death, "These stories were the last word from his last home, for much of what he felt about Hollywood and about himself permeated these stories."

And damned good stories they are, too. Not major Fitzgerald but cunning and crafty tales of bars, studios, whores of both genders, unhappy winners and drunken losers.

My favorite here is "Pat Hobby and Orson Welles." The luckless Hobby is hanging around the writer's building trying to cadge anything he can get--even a B-western--when somebody mentions Orson Welles. And Hobby almost loses it. Everywere he turns he hears about Orson Welles--newspaper, magazines, radio, movies. Orson Welles Orson Welles.

Fitzgerald uses Welles as a symbol of generational turn. Hobby and other men his age were major players in their time but now their time is gone. One studio head admits (reluctantly) to Hobby that he doesn't know what the hell all the fuss about Welles is either but dammit the young people on his staff swoon every time his name is mentioned. So this studio head and others push enormous sums of money on Welles. Hobby bitterly wonders why Welles doesn't stay in the East where he belongs---with the snobs. The West, dammit, is for common folk. (Well, except for the mansions and Rodeo Drive.)

This is a book fille with boozy grief, hilarious bitterness, shameless self-pity and  and a fascinating look from the inside as to what writers went through under the old studio management.

As Fitzgerald himself said, "This was not art, this was industry. (Who) you sat with at lunch was more important than what you (wrote) in your office."

A fine little collection.

Forgotten Books - Dog SoldiersI've always had the feeling...

Forgotten 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."
 ED HERE:

For 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 is powerful for two acts but then becomes so melodramatic it  begins to stumble. But it is filled with fine performaces by Nick Nolte, Tuesday Weld, Michael Moriarty, Ray Sharkey and many others. If you want to know what the Sixties were like get your hands on this movie.

The Murder Vine by Shepard Rifkin

The Murder Vine





The Fifties were packed tight with private eye writers trying to out tough Mickey Spillane. I Eat Your Kidney etc. By the early Sixties a general reaction had set in. Larger-than-life became life size. Some private eyes even began to have the same problems we all do--taxes, upset stomachs, women who don't find you all that attractive. So long Mike Hammer hello Dustin Hoffman.

Joe Dunne in The Murder Vine splits the difference. He has some of the cynical attiude of the Spillane era but none of the bombast. No evictions for him. He runs his business as a business and does well.

The book focuses on the murder of three Civil Rights workers in the South in the late Sixties. We all know the real story. It still enrages me, makes me sick.

One of the dead boys has a wealthy father who hires Dunne to go South and find his boy's killer. Very big dollars for Dunne for even trying to find him; enormous dollars if he succeeds. As cover (Dunne is an unreconstructed Yankee and sounds like it) he takes his fetching and magnolia-dripping secretary Kirby along as cover.

Rifkin is a fine man with a sentence. He understands that written language has some of the same rythms as spoken language. Some parts of this book really sing. And while many of the scenes are s.o.p. for a private eye novel each is enlivened with one of those little grace notes that make you feel you're reading something fresh.

The story is a brutal look at a brutal period of time when the CivIl War was being fought again by proxy. I admire Rifkin for never speechifying and for never turning Dunne into a saint on a mission. He's comfortable in his own seediness.

Rifkin is a good and too-long overlooked writer who made a difference in the paperback world of the Fifties and Sixties.

Forgotten Books: Deadlier Than The Male by James Gunn

Deadlier Than The MaleEd here: Happy Thanksgiving everybody.
Of Deadlier Than the Male by James Gunn*, the novel that became the basis for the Robert Wise film Born To Kill, the French Director Claude Chabrol said: "It has a freely developed plot and an absolutely extraordinary tone, pushing each scene towards a violent, ironic and macabre paroxysm...an unexpected dimension, a poetic depth..."

I'd put it more simply: If there is a hell, these are the people you'll find in its deepest part.

The story concerns a psychopath (in the movie well played by Lawrence Tierney) and a beautiful brittle gold digger (played with equal skill by Claire Trevor) and how they come first as partners of a sort and then as enemies. It is Swiftian in its contempt for humanity. The ugliness of Jim Thompson (whose favorite writer happened to be Johnathan Swift) was redeemed somewhat by the madness and occasional pathos of his people.

No madness or pathos here. These are the two most hard-boiled ruthless people I've ever encountered in crime fiction. Of necessity (censors) the film softens them slightly but only slightly.

In broadstroke the movie plot is generally like the movie plot. Here's IMBD:

In Reno a man kills a girl he likes and her boyfriend out of jealousy; it may not be the first time. A woman whose divorce has just come through finds the bodies but decides not to become involved. The two meet next day on the train to San Francisco unaware of this link between them. They are attracted to each other, and the relationship survives his marriage to her half-sister for money and status. It even survives the woman discovering that he was the murderer, though she may not realise how easily someone who has killed this way before can do so again. Written by Jeremy Perkins {jwp@aber.ac.uk}

Ed here: The cast of characters, with very few exceptions, fit exactly Chabrol's description: "violent, ironic and macabre." The attitude of the book, which which Chabrol also notes, reels between black comedy and surrealism drenched in a misanthropy that is occasionally stunning. The two old floozies we meet in the early boarding house scenes are worthy of Thompson at his best.

Deadlier Than The Male is one of those odd litle books that is both unique and successful on its own terms. This should definitely be back in print.

*not the science fiction writer

Anthony Hopkins Interview

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Anthony Hopkins, "Hitchcock" star, photographed in 2011.
FROM THE HUFFINGTON POST

Anthony Hopkins, 'Hitchcock' Star, On Oscar Season Glad-Handing: 'It's Disgusting'



















"She was exactly what I expected," Hopkins said about his co-star. "Very professional, friendly, very good. Excellent actress. No-nonsense."Neither is Hopkins, which is why it wasn't that surprising to hear the Oscar-winning star rail against both Method acting and the dog-and-pony show known as awards season.You've played historical figures before. Did you have any apprehension about taking on another real-life character?
Initially, yes, I did. I had apprehension all the way through the movie. I had done all my preparation, but being a perfectionist I wanted to make sure it was absolutely right. But Sacha said, "You're not Alfred Hitchcock, you're Anthony Hopkins playing him." I said, "Yeah, I know." But I wouldn't even look at the monitor screens [during production]. I didn't want to see myself or hear myself. I had done enough preparation to do the part.What was the most difficult part of preparation?
I think getting the makeup right was the first one. It wasn't difficult in itself, but we did about four or five camera tests to modify to make sure there wasn't too much makeup. Getting the voice right, too. I watched a lot of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" on television.Did you ever meet Alfred Hitchcock before he died?
I did in West Hollywood. My agent took me to this restaurant one day and said, "There's Alfred Hitchcock down there." I said, "Oh, God. Can I meet him?" Hitchcock had just gotten his knighthood, so we're walking past him and my agent said, "Good afternoon, Sir Alfred." He said, "Hello. How are you?" He said, "This is my client Anthony Hopkins." Hitchcock said [to me], "Charmed, I'm sure."for the rest go here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11...

Pro-File Reed Farrel Coleman

Gun Church reviewed by Publisher's Weekly:

New Jersey community college teacher Kip Weiler, who was “a writer to watch” in the 1980s before drug addiction and an utter lack of self-discipline ended his career and his marriage, gets a second chance in this superior crime thriller from Shamus Award–winner Coleman (Hurt Machine and six other Moe Prager novels). When Frank Vuchovich, one of Weiler’s creative writing students, pulls a gun and holds him and the rest of the class hostage, Weiler manages to temporarily disarm Vuchovich so the others can escape. Weiler’s heroism attracts the attention of a publisher interested in reprinting his work; a sexy blonde finds a way into his bed; and another student, an unabashed fan, invites him to join a secret group that gathers to shoot guns at each other wearing protective vests. As Weiler’s new relationships progress, the line between his reality and his fiction blur. Coleman keeps readers guessing to the end. Agent: David Hale Smith, Inkwell Management. (Oct.)


Advance Praise for GunChurch
“Reed Farrel Coleman is again operating at a very high level in Gun Church.”—Daniel Woodrell, author of Winter’s Bone & Tomato Red
“If this is church, I might start going. Sign me up as a parishioner.”—Don Winslow, New York Times best-selling author of Savages
“Coleman’s GunChurchis wonderful. His protagonist, Kip Weiler, is one of the most fascinating characters in years.”—David Morrell, New York Times best-selling author of The Brotherhood of the Rose

Reed Farrel Coleman:

1. Tell us about your current novel or project. I have many projects. As you know, such is the life in the new world of publishing. But the novel I'm touring right now is a real labor of love: GUN CHURCH. I got the idea for it in a flash six years ago and struggled to get it right for five of those years. It's the story of a former 80s wunderkind, Kip Weiler, a supremely talented writer with a supremely big ego and big addictions. We find him many years after his fame has faded and his money dried up. He's teaching creative writing to, as he says, "rural yahoos" in a small mining town community college. Oh how the mighty have fallen. One day, a student tries to hold Kip's class hostage and Kip, much to his own surprise, saves the class from harm. He gets a second fifteen minutes of fame and his life takes a bizarre twist from there. He gets involved with a cult that worships the essential nature of handguns. Once he's in, he's in, and life begins to imitate art imitating life.2. Can you give us a sense of what you’re working on now?  I'm working on the final book in the Moe Prager mystery series. It's called THE HOLLOW GIRL and it's scheduled out sometime in 2014. It will feature Moe solving his last case while living through terrible grief and a downward spiral. I don't want to say more for fear of spoiling it.3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career? The greatest pleasure is the writing itself. I learned a long time ago that a writer should fall in love with writing, not with what he's written. Well, I'm still deeply in love with the process. Of course there's always those few moments when you finish a sentence or paragraph and it hits you that no one else in the world could have written those words quite that way.4. The greatest displeasure?  Marketing. I love fans and readers, but the pressure to do more than my job, which is to produce the best books I can, weighs heavily on me. I don't hate social media, but I don't like it when all I do is say, "Hey, look at me." And I'm hopeless on Twitter. 5. Advice to the publishing world? Don't fight battles you've already lost. Adjust to the new reality.I have an author friend who says that traditional publishers are guarding the gate, but that the walls have already been breeched. I didn't love the whole ebook phenomenon either at first, but they're here and here to stay. I think traditional publishers need to do more than hold their noses and accept the new reality. I hope they embrace it and the marketing strategies that come with that. Traditional publishers hate the concept of free giveaways, but they are the reality. I also think indie bookstores have to come to grips with Thomas and Mercer and other similar imprints. People are going to want that product and to not carry those books will be self-defeating. Authors have had to adjust because in some ways we are at the bottom of the food chain. But tomorrow all of this can change. That's what makes the new world of publishing so frightening and exciting.6. Are there any forgotten writers you’d like to see in print again? I'm sure there are hundreds, thousands, but there's no one I can point to specifically.For example, about eight years ago my late friend David Thompson recommended I read Daniel Woodrell. Problem was I couldn't find any of his work in stores. Finally, I got hold of an ARC of TOMATO RED. I was stunned at his amazing talent and at the beauty and hopelessness in his work. It dawned on me that my books were mostly all in print and his were out of print. It was a great injustice that has since been undone. His career is thriving and he is finally getting the recognition he deserves. I urge readers to look beyond the best seller list and dig beneath the surface. There really are treasures there.7. Tell us about selling your first novel.     It was in the ancient days when you could submit unsolicited manuscripts. I got a friend in a big NY law firm to make copies of the manuscript on the side and I would send them out five at a time. I was about to give up when I got a call from Marty Sheperd at Ther Permanent Press. I think the first thing he said was, "We want to publish your novel." I thought he was one of my friends breaking my shoes. But it was real.  I've tried not to look back.


Amazon: amzn.to/SK6GiGB&N: bit.ly/NKIUmBTyrus Books: bit.ly/S1QABW

The 25th HourI watched the 25th Hour again last night. I'...

The 25th Hour [image error]


I watched the 25th Hour again last night. I've recommended it before. Flawed as it is--the first act needed to be trimmed--it is still one of the most powerful crime films I've ever seen simply because it doesn't rely on any of the neo-noir tropes so fashionable today. It is the story of an intelligent, otherwise decent young man so fucking stupid he started dealing drugs. And in so doing lost his claim to both intelligence and decency.

The film takes place in the final 24 hours before he goes to prison. Ed Norton as the dealer, Phillip Seymour Hoffman as his hapless friend, Rosario Dawson as Norton's lover and Anna Paquin as the teenage student Hoffman is fixated on form a crushing ensemble. The acting is flawless.

The final twenty minutes, in the scene with Norton's father and the scene with Norton and Hoffman and another friend, are as good as anything I've seen in the last fifteen years.

I am a lonely voice recommending this movie but I think it will eventually get its due.

PEEPERThis is my annual shout-out to Loren Estleman's dem...

PEEPER



This is my annual shout-out to Loren Estleman's demented and hilarious destruction of the Lonely But Honorable Private Eye myth.

Detroit private eye Ralph Poteet is a sink-hole dirtbag whose grubby life manages to get even grubbier with the each chapter.

Even after three readings over the years, Peeper keeps me laughing--many times out loud--all the way through. This isn't cheap parody. It's a witty take on many private eye cliches filled with people you wouldn't want to meet without wearing a bio-hazard suit, including a monsignor who dies in a whorehouse. Poteet is asked to help secret the man's enormous body to a more discreet location. And he decides while he's at it...to snap a few pics of the corpse. Never know what kind of money they'll bring on the open market.

Estleman takes numerous shots at Churchly cover-ups and this was before (1994) the scandals broke. What makes this work is Estleman's enormous skill. Nobody writes a better classical private eye story better than Loren and even when he's having fun with the tropes. He does so with his usual mastery of language, pacing and storytelling.

Trust me. You'l like this one a lot.

MysteryFile; Arnold Hano; Stark House; Gary Lovisi

GIL DODGE – Flint. Signet #1414, paperback original, 1957. Included in  3 Steps to Hell  as by Arnold Hano, Stark House, softcover, October 2012, along with  So I’m a Heel  and  The Big Out .

Ed here: Dan Stumpf writes numerous cool reviews for one of the coolest websites of all Steve Lewis Mysteryfile. Here's an example.  As for Arnold Hano, the featured author, Stark House was a brand new way cool three-fer of Hano novels including FLINT as noted above..    Flint  offers some fine Western characters and a terse, hard-boiled opening, but ultimately it’s more interesting for the story behind it than the story within.   Arnold Hano, the editor-in-chief at Lion Books back in the 1950s ought to be legendary for the quality of the work he sustained. While not every Lion Book was a classic of its time, Hano gave work to writers like Jim Thompson, Robert Bloch, David Goodis and Richard Matheson when they needed it most. And he didn’t just give them work, he gave them free rein to indulge their pulpy passions on the printed page.   Books like  The Kidnaper ,  The Killer Inside Me ,  The Burglar  and Someone Is Bleeding teem with genuine artistry inside their gaudy covers that would be admirable anywhere, and simply amazing inside a cheap paperback.   So when I learned that Hano himself wrote a western based on Jim Thompson’s  Savage Night  (with Thompson’s blessing) I came to it with high expectations — maybe too high. It starts well, with Flint, a notorious Hired Gun, previously lung-shot and in hiding, making his painful way across barren countryside to keep a rendezvous with a mysterious cattle baron named Good who needs a job done right—very close to the same situation the tubercular Charlie Biggers walks into in  Savage Night .for the rest go here:,http://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=20072


NOW AVAILABLE FROM STARK HOUSE

Arnold Hano's 3 Steps to Hell: So I'm a Heel / Flint / The Big Out. Hano was the editor of Lion Books when the one and only Jim Thompson was just getting started. A fine writer in his own right, Hano asked Thompson if he could take one of his themes and make a western out of it. It turned into a dark one, of course, and that's the second book, Flint, which Thompson himself praised. Each of these books are tales of tarnished heroes--a blackmailer, a hired gun, and a disgraced baseball player. Author of the definitive baseball memoir, A Day in the Bleachers, Hano writes hard and lean and doesn't shy away from the less pleasant side of human nature. Includes a new introduction by Gary Phillips as well as an interview with Hano by Dan Duling. Welcome back, Arnold.  

-----------SHOUT OUT TO GARY LOVISI

Here's a letter from writer Terry Butler about our friend writer-piblisher-great guy-Gary Lovisi. Hang in there Gary. A lot of us are sending you our best.

Ed, Gary has been almost wiped out in the flood of Sandy. I was told he
lost a lot of his books under three feet of water.
Some of his friends on Staten island were ruined also.
I emailed him yesterday and got this reply;
Hey, Terry,
Those are very kind words, thank you for them. We were devastated
here but will rebuild some time, all best,
Gary
Thought you might send him a hello and maybe a note on the blog.
He's a really good man and has helped a lot of people as you know.
Thanks, T

Forgotten Books: A Touch of Death by Charles Williams

A TOUCH OF DEATH[image error]




I spent a good share of last night reading Hard Case Crime's snappy edition of A Touch of Death by Charles Williams and I'll say what I've said before about this book. It likely has more plot turns than just about any suspense novel I can ever recall reading.

One of Charles Williams' amoral failed men narrate. He was briefly a football star. Now he's a busted real estate agent. No wonder he gets interested, after initial reluctance, in stealing an one hundred twenty thousand dollars that a bank president took from his own bank. The woman who convinces him to help her makes it sound simple. It's probably in this mansion. All you have to do is get in there and find it. The bank president's wife won't be home for two days. You'll have plenty of time.

Right. Well, we know better than that, don't we? Yes, he gets in but he finds he's not alone. The woman is there, beautiful beyond description, and drunk beyond belief. But so is a killer. After saving her life, failed star takes her to a cabin in the woods where he plans to persuade her to tell him where the money is.

That's the beginning. Everybody in this book is a professional liar. And the bank president's wife is the most fatale of femmes. She lies on virtually every page and occasionally almost gets them killed. That she knows where the money is is obvious. That she killed her husband is also obvious. But who is trying to kill her and why?

While Touch isn't as rich in characterization as most Williams its construction is so dazzling it doesn't matter for once. And as always there is the mordant undertow of all major Williams novels--failure, violence, oblivion.  Most Williams is now available on Otto Penzler's Mysterious Press e book site.