Ed Gorman's Blog, page 15

A very cool guy Allen Toussaint, New Orleans R&B Mainstay, Dies at 77

Allen Toussaint, New Orleans R&B Mainstay, Dies at 77By KATIE ROGERS and BEN SISARIONOV. 10, 2015









Photo
Allen Toussaint at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in 2010. 

CreditSkip Bolen/European Pressphoto Agency  Allen Toussaint, the versatile producer, songwriter, pianist and singer who was a fixture of New Orleans R&B, died after appearing in concert in Madrid on Monday. He was 77.His daughter, Alison Toussaint-LeBeaux, confirmed his death in an email, and said the cause appeared to be a heart attack. El Mundo reported in Spain that Mr. Toussaint (pronounced too-SAHNT) had collapsed at a hotel after the performance and was taken to a hospital.He had been keeping a busy schedule, appearing in the United States and in Europe in recent weeks, with plans to perform in Belgium and Britain after his appearance in Spain. On Monday evening, fans who attended the performance at the Teatro Lara in Madrid posted video of Mr. Toussaint as he sat at a piano and sang.“The @teatrolara is a Southern party thanks to the great Allen Toussaint,” a local music club wrote on Twitter.  ontinue reading the main story Mr. Toussaint was born in 1938 in Gert Town, a humble, working-class neighborhood of New Orleans, where he taught himself piano. He began his career as a teenager in the 1950s, releasing his first album in 1958 under the name Tousan. In 1960, he became the house producer, arranger and songwriter for the Minit label, working on songs like Ernie K-Doe’s “Mother in Law,” Lee Dorsey’s “Ya Ya” and Jessie Hill’s “Ooh Poo Pah Doo.”Throughout his career, Mr. Toussaint embodied the traditions of the New Orleans R&B scene, working as one of the city’s most prolific and influential songwriters and producers during the 1960s and 70s. Even in that fertile period of New Orleans music, Mr. Toussaint’s work stood out for its humor, jaunty style and arrangements with piano flourishes that showed the influence of Professor Longhair.After a brief stint in the United States Army, Mr. Toussaint returned to music in 1965 and continued to work with a range of New Orleans musicians, including the early funk group the Meters. He co-founded Sea-Saint Studios in 1972, which attracted Paul Simon, Paul McCartney and others.His songs would eventually be covered widely by other musicians, including “Java,” a hit for Al Hirt in 1964, and “Fortune Teller,” which became a standard among British Invasion rock bands in the mid-60s, recorded by the Who and the Rolling Stones, among others.“I was so glad when the Stones recorded my song,” Mr. Toussaint once told an interviewer. “ I knew they would know how to roll it all the way to the bank.”On Tuesday, the Rolling Stones posted the song on Twitter, with the message “RIP Allen Toussaint.” Other musicians, like Harry Shearer and Harry Connick Jr., also posted messages.“We have lost a giant,” Mr. Shearer wrote.In recent years, Mr. Toussaint continued to be a frequent and versatile collaborator, whether it was exploring his roots with New Orleans musicians or pairing with pop stars like Elvis Costello, with whom he recorded the album “The River in Reverse,” a response to Hurricane Katrina.According to his website, Mr. Toussaint said his career was rebooted a decade ago when the storm forced him to move to New York, where he often performed alone at Joe’s Pub on Lafayette Street.Mr. Toussaint would eventually return home, where he was a beloved local figure with an understated demeanor.“I’m not accustomed to talking about myself,” he said, according to his website. “I talk in the studio with musicians. Or through my songs.”
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James Bond $73,000,000 Gorman $0-An Exclusive to Ed Gorman’s Blog "The Lady and the King. . .Christie on Stout"

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

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

From the Desk of Andrew McAleer, Co-Author, Coast to Coast: Murder from Sea to Shining Sea

Gravetapping: Ben Boulden Reviews Beating the Bushes by Christine Matthews

Vincent Lloyd is broken. His six-year old daughter disappeared a few years earlier, and he was the prime suspect. He was suspected by the police and hounded by the media. When a teenage boy named Steven Kracher disappears from the small town of Kimmswick, Missouri, Vincent sees his participation in the search as an atonement for his inability to protect his daughter.
The search is fruitless, and the media, recognizing Vincent, takes a few punches before turning its attention to Steven’s father, Baylor. Vincent and Baylor bond and as the years pass help each other heal, but Baylor, against all reason, is convinced his son is alive. A conviction that turns to hope, but leads to dark conspiracy. 
Beating the Bushes is smoothly told with multiple perspectives—some in first and others in third—in an unrushed style. Its storyline is provocative in its depiction of the relationship between the media, ratings based television news sensationalism, and those left behind after the disappearance of a child. The initial sympathy turning quickly to insinuation and ultimately accusation. The characters are complicated and believable, and the relationship between Vincent and Baylor has a subtle depth.
The plot develops unexpectedly. It twists away from the expected in interesting and satisfying ways. It is less mystery and more thriller with a stylish grittiness—
“Rain, heat and claustrophobic humidity. While my feet swell, my boots shrink, and as much as I want to put on the dark glasses in my pocket when the migraines come, I don’t for fear of missing something. Something important.”
It viscerally depicts the sadness if losing a child, and preys on the fear of a parent. The possibility. The horror. Beating the Bushes is my first experience with the work of Christine Matthews, but it will definitely not be the last. 

Gravetapping THE BABYSITTER by Andrew Coburn

Gravetapping by Ben Boulden“‘I don’t understand. I’m nobody. I’m not rich or famous or influential. I’m only a teacher. I don’t even have tenure.’”
John and Merle Wright arrive home from a movie to find the babysitter brutally murdered, and their 16-month old daughter missing. The only clue is the babysitter. Paula Aherne. A student at the local college, well-liked by the Wrights and wonderful with the baby. The investigation uncovers everything Paula told the Wrights to be a lie. She wasn’t enrolled at the school. Her childhood stories are false. And her name isn’t Paula.
The police investigation is empty, and two unscrupulous feds manipulate it for their own ends. The Wrights take matters into their own hands and start an amateurish investigation. An investigation that leads them into Paula’s past, and a lineup of unsavory characters. 
The Babysitter is wholly original. Its setup is straight mystery—a murder, a kidnapping, a police investigation—but it unravels in unexpected ways. It is unsolvable by the reader and more suspense than mystery. The characters, excepting the Wrights, are secretive and frightening in a recognizable and common form. Everyone has a secret. It is nightmarishly real to a suburban audience in a bleak and satisfying manner.
The Babysitter was originally published in 1979, and it has new life with its recent Stark House Press trade paperback edition.
Purchase a copy of TheBabysitter at Amazon, or directly from Stark House.You are subscribed to email updates from Gravetapping.
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The Wasp Woman Murder: The Death of Susan Cabot JAMES MARRISON

The Wasp Woman Murder: The Death of Susan CabotJAMES MARRISON
From the great Criminal Element 
Ed gorman: based on this I sure am buying 
James Morrison's novel. 












Many of the elements of my first novel The Drowning Ground are based around killers I have researched in the past. I used to be a regular contributor to Bizarre magazine in the UK. While working for Bizarre, I interviewed some of the most eminent psychologists, criminologist, and CSI investigators operating in their field today and wrote extensively about some of the world’s most notorious killers. It was after these experiences that I wrote The World’s Most Bizarre Murders. Perhaps the strangest of all the cases I have ever covered is the Wasp Woman Murder, elements of which also served as inspiration for the first Inspector Guillermo Downes thriller, specifically the death of a recluse who is found dead on the top of a remote hill in the Cotswolds.   Among the many murderers and psychotics portrayed in the movies there is one type of deranged lunatic particularly close to Hollywood’s heart:  the actress-turned-recluse. Both Billy Wilder’s film noir Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Robert Aldrich’s gothic horror What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) were set in decaying Hollywood mansions and both tell the story of actresses driven mad by their sudden loss of fame. Both movies end in tragedy. So, when in 1986 a real Hollywood recluse was found bludgeoned to death in her dilapidated home, it made headlines all over America. Throw in a Latin American ninja and a dwarf on a strange experimental drug and the “Wasp Woman murder,” as it was known, became a Hollywood legend almost overnight.The murder victim was Susan Cabot, who had been a household name in the 1950s. Cabot had acted alongside Hollywood legends such as Humphrey Bogart, Charles Bronson, and Lee Marvin. But Cabot abruptly terminated her contract with Universal after a brief stint on Broadway where she started working with Roger Corman and starred in The Wasp Woman, where she excelled in what was to be her final role – as Janice Starlin, a character who unwisely tests out a rejuvenating beauty product derived from wasp enzymes. Extracted from royal jelly, these enzymes make her young again but ultimately, turn Cabot’s character into a lustful, murderous queen wasp.Cabot soon afterwards disappeared into obscurity. Cabot and her son lived in a large property in an exclusive neighbourhood in Encino in Los Angeles but were very rarely seen by neighbours. For all intents and purposes, Cabot had vanished.On the night of December 10, 1986, emergency services received a call from Susan Cabot’s home on 4601 Charmion Lane. The caller breathlessly identified himself as Timothy Cabot and he reported the entry of a burglar at the house that he shared with his mother. A fire department paramedic unit responded to the call and arrived just four minutes later, by which time Timothy was waiting for them, now quite calmly, outside the front door. He told the two paramedics that he had been attacked, that his mother was in the bedroom and that he believed she was also injured.Their house was a prime piece of real estate perched on top of a hill with a view of the lights of Los Angeles below, though it seemed a bit dilapidated from the outside and shabbier than the other impeccably maintained properties on the street. Nothing, however, could have prepared paramedics for the chaos that met them when they pushed open the door.Inside, rubbish bags lay strewn in every room, newspapers and magazines were stacked in toppling piles along the corridors and trash and rotting food was everywhere. The house also appeared to have been ransacked: furniture was overturned, drawers were open and their contents strewn about the house. The sudden eeriness was made worse by the sound of Timothy’s four pet Attika dogs. Usually a docile breed, these four were in an absolute frenzy, and Timothy, in order to protect the paramedics, had locked them up in his room.  The paramedics found Susan Cabot lying dead on her bed dressed only in a purple V-neck nightgown. There was blood everywhere: a large arc of it was sprayed on the bedroom mirror near her bed, there were large splatter stains on the ceiling above her prone body and further bloodstains on the floor and the bed. For some reason, the killer had covered Cabot’s face and head with a piece of bed linen before bludgeoning her to death. Under the blood soaked material, Cabot’s face was all but unrecognisable. There were human hairs and brain matter smeared on the linen, and shards and splinters of bone protruding from the back of her shattered skull.By now police had arrived on the scene and were busy checking all of the other rooms to check for signs of forced entry and to make sure that the intruder was no longer on the premises. But the dogs were deemed too vicious and dangerous to remove without the help of animal control and so there was one room they could not enter. Investigators were, however, able to glimpse weight-training equipment and barbells on the floor. On the walls were pictures of Timothy’s idol, Bruce Lee.There was something rather unnerving about Susan Cabot’s son. With soft brown eyes and straight chestnut hair, Timothy looked just like a teenage boy upon first glance. But on closer inspection, his face seemed older, as if a wizened adult were somehow peering from out of a young boy’s face. He didn’t act and talk like a teenager either. In fact, Timothy was 22 years old.Born with a form of dwarfism caused by a defective pituitary gland, he should have stood at only just four foot. But due to an experimental growth hormone, which he had been taking for 15 years, he had grown by almost a foot and a half and  what he said next stunned investigators.He told police that he had woken up at around 9:30, when he had heard his mother being attacked in her room. He had gone into the kitchen, where he confronted a burglar. The burglar, he told police, was a tall Latino man with curly hair, and he had been dressed like a Japanese ninja warrior. Timothy was a practising martial-arts enthusiast, but despite this he proved no match for the masked intruder, who had knocked him out cold.Over the next few hours Timothy’s statements became “increasingly inconsistent.” The doubts increased when the paramedics examined his injuries. Timothy was immediately taken in for questioning at LAPD West Valley station, where he held his own during a three hour grilling. When asked about his relationship with his mother, he described it as “very close.” His mother and he talked about everything, he told investigators, including “intimate sexual matters.” When the questioning was over, Timothy was formally charged with his mother’s murder. He demanded that he be taken home to collect some medication that he said he needed, and there, without any prompting at all, Timothy led detectives to the murder weapon.By this time, it was the early hours of the morning. It had taken animal-control officers six hours to finally remove the dogs and Timothy now led police to a hamper in the room where they had been. Inside the hamper was a box of soap powder and in the box was a bloody barbell and a scalpel. His fingerprints were on one end of the barbell and his mother’s blood was on the other. Timothy said that he had hidden the barbell because he was sure that no one would have believed his story.And, of course, nobody did. Apart from the forensic evidence stacked against him, his story just didn’t make any sense. Yet it wasn’t going to be a straightforward matter for the prosecution team, even when later he confessed to lawyers that he had made up the whole ninja story and killed his own mother. When he stood trial in May 1989, his legal defence initially put in a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. In arguably one of the strangest defence strategies of all time, Timothy’s lawyers argued that he could not be held responsible for his actions because their client was “a human experiment gone wrong.”The experiment in question had first begun in 1958, and Timothy had been one of many test subjects. As a possible cure for dwarfism, the National Institute of Health had started to offer a supply of cadaver-derived pituitary free of charge to children diagnosed with growth hormone deficiency (GHD); the batch of hormones had been extracted from the pituitary glands of around 80,000 dead human bodies. The experiment lasted eight years and around 700 children with GHD received the treatment.Timothy, who had been diagnosed with pituitary dwarfism as a child, was one of them and had been taking the injections since he was six years old. But, for some, the wonder cure was to have tragic results. Due to a contaminated batch of growth hormones, the supply had been infected with a fatal neurological illness. Over the years, an unusually high percentage of the test subjects had developed Creutzfeldt Jakob disease (more commonly known today as mad cow disease). The incubation period for CJD is long, in some cases 20 years, and as there was no way to diagnose for CJD there was no way of knowing if Timothy had CJD or would one day contract it. All the same, his lawyers used it as a cornerstone of his defence. His mother, they argued, had warped his mind by bombing it for decades with potent chemicals, harvested from the genetic material of hundreds of thousands of dead bodies.This all fitted in perfectly with Timothy’s insanity plea, because the psychological symptoms of CJD include extreme changes in personality, dementia, the loss of the ability to think clearly and memory loss. Then, it was sensationally revealed that Cabot, wrongly believing that it would help her look younger, had been helping herself to her son’s drugs for years too. So had the frequent injections affected Susan Cabot’s mental stability as well? Had she become deranged and attacked Timothy and if so had he simply been acting in self-defense?It was just another bizarre twist to the death of Susan Cabot and inevitably recalled one of her most famous roles as The Wasp Woman, a character who had taken an experimental anti-aging drug only to become a crazed and violent killer. Timothy’s lawyers were busy painting a disturbing profile of Susan Cabot as a woman unable to cope with her loss of fame, a faded Hollywood has-been who had shut herself up and away from the lights of Hollywood and slowly driven both herself and her son insane.Actually, very little is known about what really happened behind the walls of 4601 Charmion Lane, or indeed the kind of life Timothy had to endure under his mother’s roof. One person who had been allowed to set foot inside the house was Timothy’s tutor, who was called as a witness at his trial. She stated that his mother frequently screamed at her son, apparently for no reason. According to a paediatric report presented as evidence for the defence, Susan Cabot’s degenerating mental illness had already taken its toll on Timothy by the time he was just 11 years old. The report described Cabot as overly dramatic and overly protective and Timothy as emotionally immature and disturbed. But the state of disrepair of the house was perhaps the most shocking indicator as to just how mentally unbalanced Susan Cabot was and filmed footage of the house was shown in court.In September, Timothy changed his plea from not guilty for reasons of insanity to not guilty. He finally took the stand on October 6, 1989. There, he quickly broke into tears and recalled that his mother, moments before her death, had started screaming at him and had seemed to have had no idea of who he was. Fearful of her worsening state, he had tried to call paramedics, at which point she had attacked him with the barbell. Timothy had taken the barbell off her but she had come at him again – this time with a scalpel. Timothy, in self defence, had beaten her to death.On October 10, 1989, he was found  guilty of involuntary manslaughter – a sentence that carried a sentence of six years in jail; he had already spent two-and-a-half years in jail while awaiting trial. He was given three years’ probation. The judge concluded her summation by saying that that there was no doubt in her mind that he had “loved his mother very much.”Meanwhile, the house he once shared with his mother on Charmion Lane has since been demolished and in its place stands a newer, more luxurious property more in keeping with the other elegant houses on the street. What really happened that night over 20 years ago remains a mystery.Comment below for a chance to win a copy of The Drowning Ground by James Marrison!To enter, make sure you're a registered member of the site and simply leave a comment below.TIP: Since only comments from registered users will be tabulated, if your user name appears in red above your comment—STOP—go log in, then try commenting again. If your user name appears in black above your comment,You’re In!The Drowning Ground Comment Sweepstakes: NO PURCHASE NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN.  A purchase does not improve your chances of winning.  Sweepstakes open to legal residents of 50 United States, D.C., and Canada (excluding Quebec), who are 18 years or older as of the date of entry.  To enter, complete the “Post a Comment” entry at http://www.criminalelement.com/blogs/2015/11/the-wasp-woman-murder-the-death-of-susan-cabot-by-james-marrison-true-crime-hollywood beginning at 3:30 p.m. Eastern Time (ET) November 6, 2015. Sweepstakes ends 3:29 p.m. ET November 13, 2015. Void outside the United States and Canada and where prohibited by law. Please see full details and official rules here. Sponsor: Macmillan, 175 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10010.James Marrison is a journalist with a Master's degree in history, specializing in American Secret Intelligence, from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Marrison was a regular contributor to Bizarre magazine in the UK, where he wrote about true crime, and he also wrote for an English language newspaper in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he now lives. The Drowning Ground is his first novel.

Forgotten Books: Mermaid by Margaret Millar

One of Margaret Millar's final novels is also perhaps her most brutal.
Cleo Jasper is a beautiful but sightly retarded twenty-two year old woman who has been taken care of by her wealthy and pompous older brother Hilton since the death of their parents. One day she stops in to attorney-detective Tom Aragon's office to inquire about the rights of slightly retarded people. Aragon was one of Millar's few series leads, an honorable young man trying to move his career forward while worrying about his marriage coming apart. Cleo's beauty and gentle confusion give him respite from his worries so he allows himself to be momentarily transfixed by her. 
He doesn't hear her name until until her brother Hilton appears and informs Aragon that she is missing. It seems he caught her late at night having sex (she'd been a virgin) in his college age son's bedroom. He was so angry he kicked him out of the house. In sympathy Cleo left later in the middle of the night.
I used the word "brutal" because this is a breathtaking suspense novel in which a large cast of characters is aggrieved but none find solace. The major characters are Hilton's wife who resents how her husband has always considered his sister more important than anyone else in the family and whose bitterness has caused her to despise Mermaid Cleo; the very proper sixty-year-old woman who runs the expensive school where the slightly retarded students go and knows that scandal will end her tenure where she's worked thirty years; the spoiled and violent fifteen-year-old boy who goes to school with Cleo and whose only desire is to someday be accepted by his playboy father; and the detective whose class resentment makes him dislike everybody involved in the case except for Aragon who is not wealthy. And finally to himself by proposing to her. Aragon believes that she has run off with him. But then the counselor is found murdered.
Millar's novels are always tours of the upper and lower classes and Mermaid is no different. Cleo's beauty is such that men of every class are dazzled by her; oddly her mental impairment has a certain wistful charm to add to her fetching face and body.
And Millar's novels always shock and surprise--she was Dame Agatha's favorite crime writer--so much so that they are textbooks for style and structure. Oh yes--and they are always comic as hell at moments.
In every respect Mermaid is stunning.

William Goldman Brings the Pain to the Stage With a Broadway Adaptation of Misery

November 4, 20158:00 a.m.William Goldman Brings the Pain to the Stage With a Broadway Adaptation of MiseryBy Boris Kachka from New York Magazine19 SharesShare 1Tweet 17Share 1Email0Print
















If the film Misery has an iconic moment, it’s when crazed fan Annie Wilkes takes a sledgehammer to the ankles of her captive, novelist Paul Sheldon, in an effort to ensure he doesn’t escape. This is the prosthetic from the movie. Photo: Courtesy of Tom Spina Designs“Screenwriting is shitwork,” William Goldman wrote in his 1983 industry bible Adventures in the Screen Trade, source of both the famous dictum “Nobody knows anything” and the popular notion that writers are Hollywood’s janitors. At 84, he’s the exception that proves both rules: the business’s greatest living screenwriter and its savviest truth-teller, a man whom stars treat with a deference he doesn’t always reciprocate. Bruce Willis is one of those stars. On a recent evening in a midtown rehearsal studio, the actor has just finished a run-through of  Misery on Broadway . Goldman wrote the 1990 film version of Stephen King’s novel about an author and his No. 1 fan — a minor highlight for the writer of The Princess Bride, All the President’s Men, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The stage adaptation is Goldman’s first produced script since Dreamcatcher a dozen years ago and his first time on Broadway since 1962. Today is his first peek at the show, which co-stars Laurie Metcalf as Annie Wilkes, the psychotic rescuer-captor immortalized in Kathy Bates’s Oscar-winning turn. Willis sidles across the room to pay Goldman his respects.Related StoriesBroadway Rookies Bruce and Rumer Willis on Preparing for the Stage“Are you exhausted?” Goldman asks. “A little punchy but not exhausted,” Willis says. The actor thinks they’ve worked together before, “in the ’80s,” but neither can recall where. I ask Willis if he’s a fan of the writer’s work. “What the fuck’s he gonna answer?” Goldman snaps. “ ‘Oh, yes, I’m a huge fan of Bill Goldman.’ He can’t spell Bill Goldman!”Like his wisecracks, Goldman’s writing spares and bores no one, himself included. His screenplays can telegraph a character in a couple of words (the Sundance Kid’s “I can’t swim!”). His 16 novels haven’t aged as well, except the ones he’s turned into movies (Princess Bride, Marathon Man). But his evergreen nonfiction — ­Adventures as well as The Season, his brutal 1969 analysis of Broadway — brims with koans that sound like a showbiz Yogi Berra. (“There are no rules on Broadway, and one of them is this … you must surprise an audience in an expected way.”) Will Frears, Misery’s director, calls those books “samizdat smuggled out from the only man who would speak the truth.”Misery the play emerged from conversations between Castle Rock Entertainment, the movie’s producers, and the Warner Bros. theatrical division, which was hunting for film properties to adapt. Former Castle Rock president Liz Glotzer says she envisioned Misery as the kind of psycho-thriller Broadway hasn’t seen since Deathtrap, a twisty late-’70s murder mystery that ran for four years. “And I said we would only want to do it if Bill wanted to do it.”Even though King held the rights, and there had already been a British play based on the novel, Warner agreed that Goldman should adapt Misery. Warner’s executive VP of theater ventures, Mark Kaufman, was a film student at Columbia when Goldman gave a guest talk in 1990, and “I hung on every word.” He says, “I consider it an honor to work with him.”“Note to fledgling writers,” Adventures advises. “Never never write for Broadway. Nothing is as wracking as a show that stiffs in New York.” Goldman wrote two of those stiffs in the early ’60s: a play co-written with his brother, James (who went on to write the book for Follies and The Lion in Winter), and a musical with James and their lifelong friend John Kander (of Kander and Ebb). After both shows “died bouncing,” he left Broadway for good — until now. Misery isn’t his first theatrical assay since then; he co-wrote a musical of The Princess Bride that wasn’t made and is a consultant on another version Disney has in the works. He took a few days to agree to adapt Misery but came around “because it was King, and it’s wonderful material,” he says. “And because I hadn’t done anything like this, and it was there.”In Which Lie Did I Tell?, his sequel to Adventures, Goldman listed the many actors who declined to play the movie’s literally hobbled author, Paul Sheldon (proving his maxim “Stars will not play weak”): William Hurt, Kevin Kline, Michael Douglas, Harrison Ford, Dustin Hoffman, Gene Hackman, De Niro, Pacino, Dreyfuss. James Caan only took it because he “had been in the wilderness.” This time around, casting was easy. Bruce Willis had put word out that he was looking to make his Broadway debut. Warner invited him to a reading of the play and he “had a ball,” Willis says now. “Misery sometimes feels like a story about manners, and the next minute it’s a story about a caveman and a cavewoman.” Over lunch after the table read, he said yes. (Metcalf was cast after their first Annie, Elizabeth Marvel, dropped out.) Goldman was relieved to have a star. “With a play, Jesus Christ, they’re so fucking expensive,” he says. “There’s no law that says we can make this.”In adapting the show, Frears and Goldman knew they couldn’t compete with the movie. Without the benefit of close-ups and quick cuts, they had to approach the horror more psychologically.Shifting focus away from action sequences and toward what Frears calls “the internal struggle of Paul Sheldon,” he and Goldman went back to the well of the novel and emerged with new exposition. Frears learned Adventures’s lesson that “Screenplays Are Structure” (as opposed to dialogue). When he asked Goldman for a monologue about Sheldon’s childhood, Goldman complied but added, “I followed your terrible idea, and I don’t think you should do it.” In the end, Frears didn’t.Frears also tutored Goldman, though, on writing for a looser, chattier medium and staging transitions instead of simply writing “cut to.” “I have very little visual sense,” Goldman says during a post-rehearsal chat with Frears. His reasons for never directing have shifted over the years, but he settles now on that shortcoming. “It’s just something I’ve never had any interest in doing,” he says. “And I’m very anxious, and this is a big thing for me,” he adds, turning to Frears, “to see your play today.”The possessive pronoun isn’t incidental. Even in theater, where the writer supposedly has final cut, Goldman feels the weight of all those actors and directors who rode to glory on his shoulders, compensating him only with lots of money and several books’ worth of anecdotes. “I came to him hat in hand,” Frears remembers, “and said, ‘Tell me what to do and I’ll do it.’ And he said, ‘Look, I work for you.’ He writes to order like no other playwright I’ve seen.”Goldman has called the auteur theory “demeaning” and “dangerous,” but his governing attitude toward directors is “There but for the grace of God go I.” “I have no way of knowing if Bruce Willis is a prick or a fabulous creature, but this is not my problem,” he says. “I don’t want the power. When a project is given to me and I say yes, I’m gonna oblige everybody who has the power to try to make it work.”He doesn’t much envy younger screenwriters either. He’s written five unproduced screenplays since 2003. “I don’t like a lot of movies that get made now,” he says. Goldman could never be mistaken for an optimist. He had a hard upbringing — a deaf mother and an alcoholic father who killed himself in their house — and the last couple of years have brought declining health and private losses. But he’s feeling pretty good about the play, especially after this run-through. “I think we’re all in agreement that we saw a quality show today,” he says. Frears agrees: “We’re getting there.”“Well, I wouldn’t open with this,” Goldman tells Frears, lest he think it’s perfect. The show starts previews nine days from our talk. Goldman asks Frears, “Do you have any idea how it’s going in the selling of tickets and shit?”Frears shrugs. “Nobody sent me an email offering discounts for my friends.” Goldman isn’t reassured: “You don’t know what the fuck’s gonna work.” Frears smiles and says, “That’s the main thing I’ve learned from spending five years with Bill. You have no fucking idea.”Misery opens at the Broadhurst Theatre on November 15.*This article appears in the November 2, 2015 issue of New York Magazine.

From Ben Boulden and Gravetapping My Reviews Elsewhere: "The Girl Without a Name"

From Ben Boulden and Gravetapping

From Gravetapping and Ben Boulden:For some reason Mystery Scene Magazine is allowing me to do a few book reviews for its print and online editions. The first is for Sandra Block’s entertaining novel The Girl Without a Name. It is available in Mystery Scene No. 141, and on its website. It is the first, but it won't be the last (with any luck).
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Now Available: The Candy Cane Cupcake Killer - Livia J. Washburn

Now Available: The Candy Cane Cupcake Killer - Livia J. Washburn

From James Reasoner's blog: In the latest from the national bestselling author of Trick or Deadly Treat, Phyllis Newsom returns with a festive Christmas recipe that’s to die for…

‘Tis the season in Weatherford, Texas, and everyone in town is gearing up for the annual holiday parade and tree-lighting ceremony in the town square, where Phyllis Newsom will be serving her much-anticipated candy cane cupcakes. Local rancher Barney McCrory manages to charm one away from her before the ceremony begins. But unfortunately, when the minty confection is finished, so is he.

This isn’t the first time someone has dropped dead after eating one of Phyllis’s treats. But when the paramedics determine the rancher was shot, suspicion swiftly falls on McCrory’s daughter and her husband—who both stand to reap some sweet rewards from his death. Though Phyllis doesn’t want to get mixed up in another murder investigation, something about this case doesn’t sit right with her. With a little help from a tabloid TV news crew, Phyllis must unwrap the truth and restore good cheer to Weatherford before it’s too late…

Includes recipes!

(And on a personal note, while I'm hardly unbiased, I think this is one of the best in the series, with some great characters and really funny dialogue, not to mention a fine mystery.) 

An excellent piece by Brian Greene on Charles Beaumont

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 02, 2015An excellent piece by Brian Greene on Charles BeaumontCharles BeaumontBRIAN GREENE from criminal elementThere are so many notable aspects of Charles Beaumont’s(1929-67) life and work, it’s hard to know where to being in naming them. He was a gifted writer of short stories and novels, one who showed easy mastery of various genres including horror, sci-fi, dark comedy, and socially conscious literary fiction. He was the first writer to have a short story published in Playboy. He often worked with two of the more influential pioneers of filmed media – B-movie king Roger Corman and TV’s leading light Rod Serling. He is probably best known for his work on Serling’s show The Twilight Zone. He penned 22 episodes of that groundbreaking program, including some of the more memorable installments. And then there’s the matter of Beaumont’s bizarre and saddening life story. He died at age 38 from a degenerative brain disease that couldn’t be diagnosed at the time and that had him looking, according to his son, like he was 95 when he passed away.This collection of Beaumont’s writings could make an excellent introduction to his work for someone new to his writing. There are 23 stories which, taken together, show him to have been a master of the short fiction form, and one who had no trouble jumping around from one genre to another. Fans of The Twilight Zone will be pleased to see the short story versions of some of Beaumont’s tales that became the foundations of episodes of the show. There are three such selections in the book that are particularly memorable: the title story, in which a psychologically desperate man tells his psychiatrist that he cannot allow himself to sleep, because he knows that when he does he will return to an ongoing dream in which he will eventually die; “The Howling Man,” which concerns a haggard American tramping through Europe, who wanders into a dwelling in which a man (or is he a man?) who might be Satan is being held captive; and “The Beautiful People,” which became the Twilight Zone episode “Number 12 Looks Just Like You,” about a young woman who fights against her society’s practice of forcing people who reach the age of 19 to undergo an operation in which they are physically changed to look just like one of a handful of antiseptically attractive models.Every story in the collection is worth reading but there are a handful, apart from those mentioned above, that stand out. Within this group, a wide spectrum of Beaumont’s varied talents and inclinations are revealed. “Free Dirt” is a darkly comic tale about a man who is obsessed with getting salable goods without having to pay for them. In “Last Rites,” a holy man is forced to face the question of whether he would give those rites to a person who seems human but is actually a robot. “The New People” is a progressively intense story about a couple who moves to a new neighborhood and discovers that some of the people living around them are getting up to sinister activities through the wee hours. The most noir story in the collection, “A Death in the Country,” follows the thoughts and actions of a small-time race car driver as he preps for, engages in, and then exits a contest. In “Traumeiri,” a man who is about to be executed as punishment for a murder he committed, warns the people around him that if they kill him they will all die, because they are only a part of a dream he’s having. Any of these stories could have been the basis of an excellent Twilight Zone episode. All of them are products of a talented and imaginative writer working in a feverish vein. Beaumont’s stories sometimes induce laughter and other times fear, but they almost always engage the reader’s imagination and they often challenge how we think about metaphysical matters.The introduction to this book is a reprint of a 1981 essay by Ray Bradbury, who helped Beaumont break in as a writer, and who knew him well; Bradbury’s piece shares his reminiscences of Beaumont the man while reflecting on the work of Beaumont the writer. William Shatner’s afterword focuses on his memories of the daringly controversial 1962 movie The Intruder, which was written by Beaumont and directed by Corman, and in which Shatner plays the lead role.As Bradbury states in his essay, we can only wonder what Charles Beaumont might have been able to accomplish as a writer if he had lived a few decades longer than his short 38 years. What these 23 stories reveal, though, is that he certainly made good use of the time that he had.Brian Greene writes short stories, personal essays, and reviews and articles of/on books, music, and film. His work has appeared in over 20 publications since 2008. His pieces on crime fiction and film have been published by Noir Originals, Crime Time, Crimeculture, Paperback Parade, Mulholland Books, and Stark House Press. He is a regular contributor to The Life Sentence crime fiction web site, and Shindig! music magazine. Brian lives in Durham, North Carolina. He can be found on Twitter @brianjoebrain.See all posts by Brian Greene for Criminal Element.Thrillers and Noir, Paranormal Crime and HorrorCharles Beaumont | Ray Bradbury | Sci-fi | Short Fiction | TV | The Twilight Zone