Ed Gorman's Blog, page 150
August 21, 2012
The bestsellers of yesterday
When I was college age I read everything including best sellers. The Daily Beast ran a piece today about some of the Beach Reads of the Sixties.http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles...
As for the ones shown above at the time I was a big Harold Robbins fan. The Carpetbaggers and A Stone For Danny Fisher being my favorites among his novels. I've reread both these books in the years since and they hold up (for me) very well. He was a story teller in the grand tradition but when he got into writing sex books I gave up on him. Places like Midwood and Nightstand were publishing far more interesting and entertaining books with far more realistic stories and characters. I'm serious. Ditto "sex shock" novels like The Chapman Report. Not as much fun as the Midwoods.
Rona Jaffe was an excellent storyteller and a talented observer of life in New York City. I know a number of female novelists who credit The Best Of Everything as being an important novel in the creation of feminist literature. I read many of her books over the years. She was very good.
I always preferred Irving Wallace to Sidney Sheldon. Wallace was the better novelist, storyteller and observer. Sheldon's stuff was so over the top it got boring after about thirty pages.
Jacqueline Susann was one of the nastiest people I ever saw on TV so I had no interest in reading her books, the godmother to Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin sans politics. Her perpetual self-promotion was her least irritating trait if that tells you anything. She insisted she wrote her books herself which I never believed.
Nothing Arthur Hailey wrote ever interested me.
One name missing here is Herman Wouk. My high school friend Steve Schwartz recommended Marjorie Morningstar as a way to learn about certain kinds of Jewish life. I was dating a Jewish girl at the time as well. Her mother kept raving about it. Hell of a good solid serious fascinating novel. I liked Youngblood Hawk and a few others by Wouk too. He was in the tradition of popular novelists who really had something to say about how we lived such as Jerome Weidman. I wish we had novelists like those today.
For me Peyton Place remains my favorite best seller of all-time. It came damned close to being real literature far more than the sudsy Gone With The Wind. I reread it every few years and it never lets me down. I just wish poor Grace Metalious' had played out more happily. Another name that should appear here is Maritta Wolff. Her Whistle Stop is well in league with Peyton Place. Popular but serious and lasting fiction.
August 20, 2012
Forgotten Books: Rogue Cop by William P. McGivern
Carmody is a competent detective but a bad guy, having been on the take so long that his allegiance is to his mob bosses rather than the police force itself. But now there is problem. His younger brother Eddie, a patrolman, eye witnessed a murder and can identify the killer. The mob wants Carmody to make sure his brother doesn't testify. They hope Eddie will take a bribe and relent. But Eddie is a good cop and refuses.
Editors of the pulp era always talked about "narrative drive." Well this narrative will flatten you like a speeding bus. William P. McGivern graduated from the pulp (he worked a good deal for the Ziff-Davis magazines of Chicago) and learned how to keep the reader in heart attack mode. The scenes of Carmody pleading with his brother to forget about testifying--and then trying to placate the mob so that they won't kill Eddie--are classic moments of desperation.
I mean no disrespect when I say that I always considered McGivern a road show version of Graham Greene, a writer he clearly admired. Though his novels were never as rich or in some cases sly as Greene's, in their blunt American way they were compelling looks at our society and our ideas of success and loyalty and honor. There is real power in his best work and that work certainly includes Rogue Cop with its two soiled doves and its sad earnest look at the process of redemption.
I don't much care for the movie that was made of this. Robert Taylor is too slick and wooden to play a beast like Carmody. In various forms and under many different titles this movie has been remade many times and much better as "homages."
McGivern died way too young, early fifties of throat cancer. Most of his author photos show him with his pipe. He had a successful career by any measure and in his last years wrote the enormous (and excellent) bestseller Night of The Juggler. For me his finest novel is Odds Against Tomorrow which Robert Wise turned into a fine movie with Harry Belafonte. Robert Ryan and Ed Begley.
August 19, 2012
The often sad life of Edward G. Robinson
Ed here: Edward G. Robinson is one of my three favorite actors. I will watch him in ANYTHING, the worst film ever made, knowing that even if he's not quite at his best he will be better than anything else in the picture. This is a long, fine biography of the man from that most excellent site Where Danger lives.
--------------It’s fitting that so many of the movies Edward G. Robinson made after he parted ways with Warner Bros. were film noirs: persecuted by red-baiters, alienated from the film community, and fated to a terribly unhappy home, Robinson’s personal life had taken on the dimensions of a real-life film noir. He was living an ordeal often worse than those of the men he portrayed on screen. And regardless of what anyone would consider an avalanche of bad luck, Robinson himself was partly to blame. He suffered from imperfections that led him to make foolish decisions that resulted in tremendous personal grief: He was naïve, incautious, and overly trusting. He cared — perhaps too much — about his image and what people thought of him. He didn’t fit the mold of the typical Hollywood leading man, so it was important to him that he be accepted and liked — even admired. He failed to anticipate problems, and then ignored them, hoping that they would simply go away. Yet if these qualities hurt him personally, they benefitted him greatly in his craft. Fritz Lang understood him well: “Each part he plays he enriches with deep and warm understanding of human frailties and compels us to pity rather than condemnation, always adding vivid color to the intricate mosaic of motion picture reality.” Even when he broke into the movies playing gangster parts, audiences were always able to sense the weakness and fear lurking just beneath the surface sheen of cartoonish bravado; as he branched off into other kinds of roles, he imbued his characters with aspects of his own personality that gave them a depth and subtlety surprising for the era. And although Robinson was embarrassed to star in many of the fifties crime films that enthusiasts now covet, his unique combination of talent and imperfection helped him become one of the great protagonists of film noir.
Robinson was born Emmanuel Goldenberg (hence the ‘G’) in 1893 in Bucharest. When the anti-Semitism that beset Romania at the time struck close to home, his father knew it was time to get out. So like nearly half of all Romanian Jews, the Goldenbergs began the arduous process of immigrating to the United States. Theirs is the quintessential story: unable to afford passage for all at once, they saved their pennies and sent one family member at a time. Goldenberg would arrive last, along with his younger brother, his mother, and his grandmother. The crossing was rough: the ten-year-old boy was forced to endure the hell of steerage for twenty-three days, constantly seasick. He was so depleted upon docking in New York that he had to be carried from the ship.
For the rest go here:http://wheredangerlives.blogspot.com/...
August 18, 2012
For Ed McBain Fans
Remarking on how the line goes from Hammett to Chandler and then on to succeeding generations, Parker says:
"By the time Ed McBain began writing fiction, this tradition was decades old. McBain scanned the landscape, saw what was what, judged the speed of the moving traffic, and merged right in, going zero to sixty in seconds. And he never looked back, even when he changed lanes. Everyone else had to swerve to get out of the way of this fast-moving car whose driver knew exactly what he wanted and where he wanted to go."
Perfect-o!
August 15, 2012
Pro-File: Steve Rasnic Tem-
Ugly Behavior by Steve Rasnic TemISBN: 978-0-9828436-9-7
Purchase at Indie Bound
or Amazon
or Barnes & Noble.
Ugly Behavior collects 19 of Steve Rasnic Tem’s best noir tales, ugly stories about people behaving quite badly indeed. These are the stories in that box under your bed, pushed all the way back against the wall, the one that takes some effort to get to, the one you thought your momma didn’t know about.
Raves for Ugly Behavior“Ugly Behavior is a powerfully dark collection of crime fiction showcasing Steve Rasnic Tem’s handling of uber-disturbing themes, characters, and confrontations. All of the pieces here are unsettling, wrenching, and affecting, yet polished to a poetic perfection. The author valiantly goes to the bad places and shares his insights so you don’t have to face head-on those same vicious struggles. As always, Tem demonstrates impressive range and sensitivity in this grouping of black jewels.”
—Tom Piccirilli, author of The Last Kind Words
“Steve Tem is a writer’s writer and he and his stories are hidden treasures. Here are some of those beautiful gems revealed.”
—Joe Lansdale, author of Edge of Dark Water
“Lusciously grizzly, creepy, and original, glimpses into the souls of people you would never want to meet. Tem actually scares me—hard to do—and I love it.”
—Vicki Hendricks, author of Miami Purity
“I’ve not only read Steve Rasnic Tem over the years I’ve also learned from him as both a writer and a human being. He’s one of the true masters.”
—Ed Gorman, author of The Poker Club
“I’ve read a lot of stories by Steve Rasnic Tem and have never failed to be impressed by their extraordinary range and originality.”
—Otto Penzler, editor of The Best American Crime Writing
Pro File: Steve Rasnic Tem
1. Tell us about your current novel or project.
The new book is Ugly Behavior, out from New Pulp Press http://www.newpulppress.com/titles/ugly_behavior/. I've never done an all crime/noir collection before, and this includes my best work in the genre from places like Crimewave, Hardboiled, The Saint, and anthologies such as Dark at Heart, Shivers, and New Crimes. It also includes a new story, "Saguaro Night."
2. Can you give us a sense of what you’re working on now?
I'm always working on multiple projects. Right now it's a book on writing with my wife Melanie, a Lovecraftian novella, a science fiction novel called Before Oblivion, and a novel based on my zombie short story Bodies & Heads.
3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?
Being lucky enough to have the opportunity to speak from the heart. I was a very shy kid, still am at my core, and for me writing was always the one way I could articulate what I cared about. I've never been a traditionally religious person, but for me writing was always a kind of prayer.
4. The greatest displeasure?
I'm not great at self-promotion, and although I definitely see the need for it, it doesn't come naturally to me, or bring me pleasure. I also think writers are generally underpaid for all they put into the work—that's not necessarily the fault of the publishers—I think it's a problem in the culture.
5. Advice to the publishing world?
I'm not sure I'm one who should be giving out any business advice, but I would say that decision times on books and projects have become impossibly long. And increasingly I hear about publishers who won't even respond unless it's a "yes." It's a bad trend, and I think it shows a lack of respect for what we do. Writers can't conduct their careers as a business that way, and it will drive some very good writers away from the vocation.
6. Are there any forgotten writers you’d like to see in print again?
Don Robertson, Gerald Kersh, to name two.
7. Tell us about selling your first novel.
That was Excavation. It began as a short story that didn't work. I tried to fix it and it grew. My agent at the time, Ellen Levine, had been sending it around for over a year. It collected some very nice rejections, but no serious interest. She did get a note from John Douglas at Avon saying he liked the book, but that it didn't really fit in to what he was publishing at the time. A year later the book still hadn't sold, and she received another note from John saying that the book had stayed with him, and things had changed a bit—was it still available? I was both thrilled and numb, because I'd pretty much given up on having a novel published at that point.
August 14, 2012
Detour's Detour
Ed here: This is a long TCM Movie Morlocks piece on Detour. A lot of you film folks will know a good deal of this but there are some interesting aspects about the picture I didn't know.
Detour's Detour by David Kalat
Once upon a time there was a motion picture called Detour (1945). It was a small, wiry thing, gristle and bone. It would have been the runt of any litter, except for the sad fact that it came from a litter of runts, movies made for pocket change and thrust out into the world without support, left to fend for themselves in a harsh and competitive environment.
What Detour lacked in polish and graces it made up for with a steely constitution. It was made of stern stuff, this angry little poem written in the language of failure and defeat. Its flickering frames contain a story of an aspiring artist whose talent would seem to merit one kind of fate, glorious and celebratory, but whose life is shuttled down a cruel detour to a very different destination. He begins his adventure dreaming of a new life in a sunnier world, and finishes up lost and lonely, an exile.
The grubby little picture flailed its way across movie screens in 1945 with no greater or lesser prominence than any of its impoverished brethren. It was a B-movie, and such things have no shelf life. Detour, however, did. More than a half-century later, film critics and fans were still falling over themselves to shower it with accolades. In movie parlance, Detour had “legs.”
It was fashioned by a man named Edgar G. Ulmer, who like some Jewish mystic of myth had a habit of pulling clay from the ground and giving it his special imprint such that it could come to eternal life, a Golem. Detour was not Ulmer’s only bid to cinema immortality, but it was his most distinctive and memorable. His own life had been touched by such detours: an artist of no small ability whose destiny was redirected, stunted, misfired. For the pointy-heads who took up Detour as their cause-celebre, the film and its maker were a recursive Moebius strip, art and artist endlessly reflected in one another.
Ulmer has been called many things—King of the B’s is a common title. But the nickname says more about his circumstances than his role within them. Look past the fact that he made low-budget programmers, look only at the films themselves, and we can see he was heir to the grand traditions of German Expressionism, and a direct precursor and inspiration to the avatars of the French New Wave. That he worked in American genre pictures, mercenary as mercenary gets, makes his legacy that much more important: here was living proof that the world of European high-art cinema and American commercial moviemaking were not mutually exclusive.
Or so film historical conventional wisdom would have you believe. Real life is never so tidy.
for the rest go here:http://moviemorlocks.com/2012/03/10/d...
August 13, 2012
More on the great Joe Kubert
Joe Kubert, R.I.P. by Mark Evanier
One of comics' most prolific and respected comic book creators, Joe Kubert, died this morning at the age of 85. This probably comes as a special jolt to those who knew him and thought of him as a healthy, vital individual. Joe drew stories of strong, rugged men and unlike so many who do those, seemed like a strong, rugged man himself. Whether it was a war comic, a super-hero comic, a comic about a caveman or his acclaimed run on Tarzan, Joe had a way of imbuing the work with a kind of four-color testosterone. No one did malebetter.
I suppose in private he had other passions but those who knew him professionally knew of two: He loved to draw and he loved to teach. The love of drawing began at early age. He was born in Poland on September 18, 1926 and brought to the U.S. (to Brooklyn) as an infant. Reared as the son of a Kosher butcher, he started doodling on dad's wrapping paper and soon proved to have the kind of flair on which you could build a career.
Joe told several stories about where and when he got his first professional job. In some, he was as young as ten; in others, as old as thirteen. Even the latter would be amazing. But he started young either in the shop of Harry "A" Chesler or at MLJ, now better known as Archie comics, and was quickly promoted from office boy to art apprentice to artist. He was definitely drawing stories under his own signature by 1942 when he was sixteen. That would have been for a company called Holyoke.
for the rest go here: http://www.newsfromme.com/2012/08/12/...
August 12, 2012
Joe Kubert: 1926 - 2012
Joe Kubert: 1926 - 2012Ed here: I was never much of a war comic book fan with the exception of the great Joe Kubert's work. He brought intelligence and compassion and honor to the genre. I loved his Hawkman too--hell I loved everything he did. He's a fine obit for the man--
http://ohdannyboy.blogspot.com/
August 11, 2012
Character parts
Today I read his take on Edmond O'Brien. Thomson notes going in that movie stars aren't supposed to sweat. That makes them too much like everybody in the audience. Part of movie stardom is inaccessability, fantasy. But what a clever hook because beefy O'Brien sweated all the time, especially in his most memorable movie DOA. He was also fat, frequently out of breath, devoutly neurotic and often frightened. He was, in other words, pretty much like the people in the darkness watching him on the big screen. An Everyman of sorts.
In the course of his entry on O'Brien, Thomson makes clear that he enjoys the odd-ball actors and actresses far more than he does the stars. Thus he finds Warren Oates vastly more compelling than Robert Redford and Jeff Goldblum more intriguing than Paul Newman.
When I was a kid I rarely wondered about the lives of the stars. But I was always curious about character actors such as Elisha Cook, Jr. and J. Carrol Naish. There was a vitality to their performances that the stars were rarely capable of matching. And in the case of Cook, there was a melancholy and weariness that I recognized even then as being much like my own.
Same with the women. The ones I was always excited about were the second- and third-leads. They were the ones I got crushes on. They were often as pretty as the leading ladies, sometimes even prettier. And they frequently had more interesting roles, the bitch, the tart, the victim.
Barry Gifford once remarked that when you see a musical with all those young gorgeous girl dancers you have to wonder what became of them. The majority probably became housewives; more than a few probably took to the streets as parts became harder and harder to come by; and a lucky handful became the wives of powerful Hwood men.
I've been watching a lot of silent films of TCM and the same impulse grabs me then, too. Who were they? What happened to them? Did they know they'd become immortal? A full century later I sit in our family room and watch them as--most likely anyway--another century from now people will still be watching them. This is probably heresy of sorts but to me film immortality is far more imposing than literary immortality.
August 10, 2012
Leave Philip Marlowe Alone
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