Ed Gorman's Blog, page 145

Carolyn Hart's Cool New Website: 3 New Books

Three– a Lucky Number?by carolynhart on September 28, 2012[image error]Underdogs firmly believe the third time’s the charm. So you’ve tried and tried and failed each time. Keep after it and the third time will be the charm.There are lots of fun facts about threes:Elbows usually consist of three bones. We all need elbows. Hard to pick up that mug of coffee without one and everyone knows that coffee enhances life.Earth is the third planet in our solar system. Has to be a good spot, right?White is a mixture of three primary colors, red, green and blue. Lots of white light makes us happier. All of this combines to make me confident that three is indeed a lucky number and this fall I hope three shines for me.The changing face of publishing – experimentation with e-books, a traditional hardcover release, and a reprint -  brings three of my books to readers starting in September.September 12: CRY IN THE NIGHT, a never before published suspense novel, will be published as an ebook only by Berkley. Sheila Ramsay, a young museum curator, comes to Mexico City in 1982 on a romantic whim and soon finds herself involved in a life-and-death hunt for missing gold.October 2: WHAT THE CAT SAW, Berkley Prime Crime. After the death of her fiance in Afghanistan, Nela Farley feels an eerie connection when she looks into the eyes of a cat. She dismisses the thoughts as irrational, her mind’s way of avoiding painful memories, until the night she looks into the eyes of a cat and sees more than is safe to know.
November 13: SKULDUGGERY, Seventh Street Books, reprint of an early suspense novel set in Chinatown. A desperate search for the missing Peking Man bones brings danger, death, and difficult choices for anthropologist Ellen Christie.By the way, clovers have three leaves and that’s enough for me. I hope readers agree. [image error] Cry in the NightSeptember 12, 2012Never before published, this suspense novel was released as an ebook only by Berkley.Sheila Ramsay, a young museum curator, comes to Mexico City in 1982 on a romantic whim and soon finds herself involved in a life-and-death hunt for missing gold.Available from
Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment [image error]
November 13, 2012Seventh Street Books has reprinted an early suspense novel set in Chinatown.A desperate search for the missing Peking Man bones brings danger, death, and difficult choices for anthropologist Ellen Christie.Available from your favorite booksellerAmazon.com  - Books-a-Million -  B&N - IndieBoundNew: What the Cat Saw!by carolynhart on September 29, 2012
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“Carolyn Hart’s work is both utterly reliable and utterly unpredictable. What the Cat Saw will surprise and engage any mystery reader.”- Charlaine Harris, #1 New York Times Bestselling Author
   Berkley Prime Crime  Presents     WHAT THE CAT SAW Since the death of her fiance in Afghanistan, Nela Farley feels an eerie connection when she looks into the eyes of a cat. She convinces herself she is simply avoiding painful memories, but one night she looks into the eyes of a cat and learns more than it is safe for her to know.When Nela first arrives at a garage apartment in a small town in Oklahoma, she is greeted by a grieving brown tabby. She looks in his eyes and is bewildered by his thoughts: She didn’t see the rolling board on the step.. That night an intruder breaks in, leaving behind wanton destruction. Nela learns that the woman who lived in the apartment had died in a fall down the apartment stairs.Nela’s flaky sister Chloe is always fun and often in need of a sisterly boost. Nela is a reporter looking for work. She agrees to take Chloe’s place at her job so Chloe and her boyfriend can take advantage of a free trip to Tahiti. The Oklahoma landscape is strange to Nela and she finds even stranger the current of hostility at the workplace, a charitable foundation beset with troubles: Arson of an employee’s car, destruction of Indian artifacts, vandalism in the courtyard, obscene material mailed on the foundation letterhead, and the late revelation of the theft of a quarter million dollar diamond necklace.The police detective is a smart, tough woman who sees the stranger in town as an accomplice to her sister in a clever scheme to hide a theft. The local newspaper reporter Steve Flynn knows the cop well, respects her, but finds the new woman in town intriguing. Steve is struggling to recover from an unhappy divorce. Nela had hoped to leave sadness behind in California but finds that she is still burdened by grief. An LA girl she is stirred by Steve’s loyalty and love for his hometown – and by Steve.Nela plunges into an effort to clear her name and her sister’s, but the net draws ever tighter and then the cat warns once again, “. . .danger . . .”Check out the whole new website  here: http://www.carolynhart.com/

Forgotten Books: Having Wonderful Crime by Craig Rice

Having Wonderful CrimeI just finished reading Craig Rice's 1944 novel Having Wonderful Crime. Rice is, of course, the grand dame of mystery mixed with screwball comedy. I hadn't read the novel in thirty years so I came to it fresh. And I was surprised.

Yes, it's larky in its plotting, and as usual smart-ass in its dialogue but there are moments that are serious and amazing.

As an alcoholic, I became all too familiar with blackouts and hangovers that kept me in bed for two and three days. Rice opens the book with a long scene involving a man who lacks the strength to get out of bed. He is beseiged by the furies and terrified of what he might have done. This is one of the most powerful morning-after scenes I've ever read. I think most alcoholics would agree with me. And Rice, a terrible alcoholic herself, knew what she was writing about first hand.

Then there's part of a scene in which Rice (using interior monologue) assess a room full of glamorous people and their worth on the glitz scale. Her observations are worthy of Tom Wolfe at his best and nastiest.

This book makes a good case for what we call today the traditional mystery. It's a pleasure to read as pure entertainment but there's a also a wicked social voice relating the reality of this particular time and this particular strata of society. Despite her reputation, I don't think she's hardboiled. At least not in this book. She's just a very good storyeller reporting back from the eyries of the wealthy and privileged. And laughing up her silk sleeve.

Movie Wednesday -Randolph Scott & Budd Botticher

Among the best American westerns ever made are those done quickly and inexpensively by director Budd Boetticher and star Randolph Scott in the mid-to-late 1950s. These are among the most celebrated in film history and deservedly so. My favorite is 7 Men From Now because of the ironic relatsionhip between Scott and Lee Marvin. John Wayne owned some of the scripts and was scheduled to star in them but was too busy with his A movies to do Bs so he handed them off to Scott and Boetticher. There aren't any other westerns quite like them. Here's the list written by somebody for a festival:

7 MEN FROM NOW, 1956, Batjac Prod., 78 min. Dir. Budd Boetticher. The first of the Randolph Scott Westerns (and Budd’s personal favorite of all his movies), the legendary 7 MEN FROM NOW was long thought to be a lost film – until it was recently restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, with the cooperation of producer John Wayne’s son, Michael. And what a rediscovery it is: Scott stars as a tight-lipped sheriff relentlessly hunting the men who killed his wife, while fending off distractions from lovely Gail Russell and loquacious bandido Lee Marvin.

THE TALL T, 1957, Columbia, 78 min. Dir. Budd Boetticher. Tense, sexually ambiguous story of rancher Randolph Scott kidnapped by killer Richard Boone (in a career-making performance) and his gun-happy henchmen. Brilliantly scripted by Burt Kennedy (based on an Elmore Leonard story), THE TALL T switches effortlessly from folksy humor to tragic violence, leaving the viewer literally breathless. "In every one of the Scott pictures, I felt I could have traded Randy’s part with the villain’s." – Budd Boetticher. With Henry Silva, Maureen O’Sullivan.

DECISION AT SUNDOWN, 1957, Columbia, 77 min. Dir. Budd Boetticher. The most atypical of the Ranown Westerns, the morally complex DECISION finds Randolph Scott hunting for the man responsible for his wife’s suicide, but realizing he himself may be at fault. Co-starring Karen Steele, Noah Beery.

BUCHANAN RIDES ALONE, 1958, Columbia, 78 min. Dir. Budd Boetticher. Scott stars as a former mercenary, carrying $2,000 in blood money, trapped in a border town by a corrupt family. Everyone is willing to trade a dead man’s honor for hard cash in this almost comically remorseless Western. With Craig Stevens, L.Q. Jones.

RIDE LONESOME, 1959, Columbia, 73 min. Dir. Budd Boetticher. Complex, poetic revenge tragedy starring Randolph Scott as a sheriff-turned bounty hunter, using a young desperado to flush out his murderous older brother. Scott’s final act of absolution at the hanging tree ranks with John Wayne’s last moments in THE SEARCHERS. With Pernell Roberts, James Coburn.

COMANCHE STATION, 1960, Columbia, 74 min. Dir. Budd Boetticher. In the last of the Ranown cycle, Scott buys a white woman back from the Indians, hoping to find his wife. Instead, he finds himself locked in a lethal struggle with a bounty hunter (Claude Akins) to return the woman to her husband for a large reward.

Raw Deal

FROM 2007 SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 28 — The orange and blue neon lights of the Castro Theater shone blurrily on the damp asphalt beneath the crisscrossing catenary wires of the streetcars. The words on the marquee in the Friday night gloom, read:

“Marsha Hunt: In Person.”

Jim Wilson/The New York Times
The Castro Theater in San Francisco on opening night of the Noir City film festival.
Film Noir Foundation

John Ireland and Marsha Hunt in “Raw Deal” (1948).

Jim Wilson/The New York TimesMs. Hunt made more than 50 movies before her career was wrecked in 1950 by the Hollywood blacklist. One of them, a 1948 crime melodrama called “Raw Deal,” has gone on to an unlikely second life as a favorite of the cultish devotees of film noir. On Friday it opened the fifth annual Noir City film festival here, and Ms. Hunt, 89, was on hand to watch its dreamlike silvery hues make a rare appearance on a big — very big — screen.

Lithe and glowing, Ms. Hunt took the stage after the film and said she was surprised not only that this dark little B movie had found fans nearly 60 years after its release, but that so many of them were here, nearly filling the Castro’s more than 1,400 seats. The crowd was a mix of young and old, polished and scruffy, with only a few fedoras in sight.

“I can’t get over this,” Ms. Hunt said as the film festival’s founder and organizer, Eddie Muller, genially interviewed her at the foot of the stage. “It was a strange sort of film,” she added, “about as negative as you can get. They hadn’t coined the term ‘noir’ yet.”

She’s right. It’s hard to imagine a darker film, literally or figuratively, than “Raw Deal.” Consisting almost entirely of luminescent day-for-night photography, it’s the story of an escaped con (played by Dennis O’Keefe) and the two women who love him (Ms. Hunt was one; Claire Trevor was the other), and features, among other pitch-black set pieces, a villain (Raymond Burr) who disfigures his girlfriend with a flaming dessert, and a furious midnight brawl in a seaside taxidermy shop. At the end everyone is either ruined, dead or under arrest.

And that darkness was just fine with the moviegoers here, which applauded vigorously as the closing titles rolled, just as they had at the beginning when the credit for the film’s director of photography, John Alton, the master of all that darkness, appeared on screen.

Ed here: interesting to note that John Ireland gets top billing when the stars are Dennis O'Keefe and Marsha Hunt. But then nobody would know who O'Keefe is, right? Fair enough.

But if you grew up in Iowa you knew O'Keefe, of course. he was born here. He had a decent career in the Bs as a sort of road show Cary Grant. Most of his films were forgettable but every once in a while he stumbled over a good script. This is his best movie and one hell of a good noir. Three times a decade the film magazine carry articles claiming that O'Keefe's career needs to be reconsidered. I don't know about that but here, older, heavier, a real sadness in the gaze, he does some fine fine work. And Raymond Burr is truly scary.

My apologies to John D. Macdonald

from 2006

A few months ago a number of bloggers decided to make clear their thoughts about the work of John D. MacDonald. They didn't like much of what he'd written. 

As somebody who'd been reading him for fifty-plus years I tried not to be influenced by all the knocks but I did find myself foolishly passing up my monthly JDM re-read. 

Well, today, I took Soft Touch down from the shelf and read half of it in a single sitting. I loved it. JDM's best work was the logical extension of the stories you found in Black Mask. Except, for the most part, they were better written and much more realistic. What JDM did was take crime out of both the drawing room (which Hammett did) and the alley (where it's claimed Hammett and Chandler put it) and plopped it right down in the middle-class of middle-America. 

I think this is what people who prefer standard hardboiled fail to see in the darkness in virtually all his work. Crime is going on for sure but it takes place amid discussions of mortgages, promotions, budgets and the kind of middle-class guilt you don't find in most noir fiction. 

Forgive me father for I have sinned. JDM once talked about the influence of John O'Hara's Appointment in Summara on his work. I see that four or five times a page in most of his novels. And since Appointment is one of my ten all-time favorite American novels, I'm happy JDM was bedazzled by that particular novel and author.

A Brief History of Marvel Comics

From Salon

By Panio Gianopoulos



Thanks to the box office domination of superhero movies like “The Avengers,” “Iron-Man,” “Spider-Man” and “The X-Men,” Marvel Entertainment has become as widely recognizable as Disney, its parent company. What you may be less familiar with, however, are Marvel’s comics.Decades before the movies and TV shows and fast-food tie-ins, before the lunchboxes and the Halloween costumes, a tiny, understaffed and restlessly creative magazine publisher began churning out pages and pages of comic book art. Whereas comics had once been characterized by junky kids’ titles, repetitive genre pieces and stiff, wearyingly noble superhero archetypes, Marvel characters were a revelation. Marked by humor, pathos and bold artwork, they were refreshingly complicated creations.Perhaps the most complicated creation of all, however, was Marvel itself. As Sean Howe details in his exhaustively researched and extraordinarily compelling “Marvel Comics: The Untold Story,” the company behind the creative onslaught was as contradictory and capricious as any of its characters. In the “Merry Marvel Bullpen,” friendships were wrecked, careers were destroyed and hearts were routinely broken. Peter Parker’s stint at the arachnophobic Daily Bugle was, in comparison, like working at Google.

for the rest go here:
http://www.salon.com/writer/panio_gia...

Target Lancer by Max Allan Collins

  The curse of all long-running series is that the writer can get as tired of writing them as  his readers are of reading them. Max Collins' massive and masterful Nathan Heller series is the exception and if you don't believe me I invite you to read his richest and most powerful Heller yet.
   I say this because for older Americans the most unforgettable shared memory, even including the walk on the moon, was the terrible day John Kennedy was assassinated. Where were you? What were you doing? How did you spend the rest of the day?  Many of us can count off that day by the second.  We were in emotional and spiritual free fall.
   In the words of Mark Lane's famous book RUSH TO JUDGEMENT there was an official and frenzied determination to blame Lee Harvey Oswald and shut the subject down. The onerous Warren Commission smugly attempted to do this by discrediting anyone who disagreed with its conclusion.
   I've never been much for conspiracies. With the JFK assassination I've always tried to keep an open mind. While I thought the Warren Commission was pure public relations for a government eager to change the subject most of the contrary theories struck me as loopy.
   This novel has changed my mind.
   First of all there's the premise. While ultimately the subject is JFK's murder Collins foregoes all the standard tropes by taking us to Chicago before the fatal day.
   Chicago? Huh? Well few names resonate in our history books like that of Jack Ruby, the same Jack Ruby who asks Nathan Heller to help him. The men have known each other for some time. Something ominous is going on with The Outfit, of which Ruby is a marginal member, and Ruby feels he needs protection. And who better to hire than Nathan Heller?
    Thus we are led into a Richard Condonesque novel of plot and counterplot with thugs as well known as Jimmy Hoffa and Sam Giancana and entities as supposedly respectable as The Secret Service.
    You see there really was a plot to murder JFK on one of his trips to Chicago and Collins lays it out perfectly. Since some of the same names came up in the Dallas murder was there a connection to this earlier plan?
    Collins' storytelling skills have never been stronger. TARGET LANCER is  pure page turner but told with far greater style and finesse than with most page turners and buttressed with a spellbinding history of the era as well as the conspiracy itself. And Collins has wrought subtle changes in Heller who is older now, no less hard nose, but more introspective and open to nuance.
    This novel should run the tables. Edgar, Shamus, Anthony and all the rest. It should also win Nathan Heller a large number of new readers.
  

  
   

Forgotten Books: The Body In The Library by Agatha Christie

Some of the reviews of this novel, written at the time of its publication, will make you smile. Replace Poirot with an old woman named Miss Jane Marple? How"unrealistic" she is as a detective. As if Poirot is an exemplar of hardbitten realism. (I've always preferred Jane to Hercule.)  

This is my favorite Christie novel for three reasons. First she obviously set out to ransack the cliche set-up of the mysterious body found in an unlikely place, in this case the library of an upright, upper class couple whose social reputation is beyond question.  

Second because in looking into the background of the dead young woman Christie examines both the class system--not only is the young woman's corpse a problem, so is her lower order upbringing, as disturbing in its way as death itself--and the show business life she lead. 

Which leads into point number Three. Suspects include people at a nearby posh hotel where the dead woman was (among other duties) a substitute dancer in the nightly cabaret. Christie's social eye and ear are as good for the realm of lower order performers as they are for pompous upper class members who pay to see them.

But Christie being Christie she has to do a little trashing of the moderne which takes the form of a young Londoner who uses his home here for wild assignations and parties. He is connected to the film industry which makes him a fitting target for Christie's satiric side.  Film industry? You mean boorish idlers who deflower naive young women and plunder otherwise happy marriages?

As I mentioned some of the initial reviews knocked the novel for its unrealistic detective (Jane Marple) and plotting. I ran across a quote from that most excellent writer Robert Barnard that  makes the case for the book very well.  "Bravura performance on a classic situation. St Mary Mead regulars figure in the case, pleasantly diversified by fashionable seaside hotel guests and the film crowd. If you think what happens to the body after death is unlikely, try the more 'realistic' P.D. James'  An Unsuitable Job for a Woman ."

Anthony Hopkins as Hitchcock; Helen Mirren as his wife; Scarlett Johansen as Janet Leigh...see the trailer

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From Slate:When it was announced recently that Hitchcock, previously slated for a 2013 release, would come out this November, Oscar-watchers immediately took note: The race, they said, has just been shaken up.And not without reason: With Anthony Hopkins in the title role, Helen Mirren as his wife, and Scarlett Johansson as Janet Leigh—not to mention Michael Stuhlbarg, Toni Collette, and others (even Ralph Macchio!)—the film has Academy Award written all over it. (Though Hitchcock himself was notoriously snubbed by the Oscars throughout his career; he was nominated for Best Director five times but never won.)Now the trailer’s arrived, and what it says to me is less “Academy Award” than “biopic” (granted those words are often interchangeable):The trailer itself is very well made. It moves quickly, it builds to that amazing scene of Hitchcock jabbing with the knife in the shower as Janet Leigh screams in seemingly genuine terror, it has Helen Mirren delivering icy cold one-liners. But there’s an awful lot here about the financial difficulty of getting Psycho made. Is that really the most dramatic story to tell?I hope that the final film goes in more heavily for the psychological angle, rather than the financial one. But I will be there watching either way.Ed here: See the trailer here--cool trailer! (BTW This makes me sentimental
about Robert Bloch. Without his novel there would've been nothing.) www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2012/10/...
with_anthony_hopkins_scarlett_johansson_and_helen_mirren.html

Cool Review by Vince Keenan-Best Seller

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Ed here here: This is the poster of one of my favorite cop movies--a movie only Larry Cohen could've written as Vince Keenan in a very sharp and wise review points out.  BTW the quote made me laugh out loud. On the money about Larry Cohen pictures. Here's anan excerpt and a link from 2010.

 "Cohen wrote the film for Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster but Larry, bless his B-movie heart, can only work in fast-and-cheap mode. The result is the most underpopulated conspiracy movie ever. It’s basically just two guys."

http://blog.vincekeenan.com/2010/01/m...