Ed Gorman's Blog, page 151

Forgotten Books: The Money Trap by Lionel White

The Money Trap

I've always enjoyed cops turned bad novels. These days when they go bad they automatically become killing machines. I prefer the older style where one murder will do and the book focuses on the mental and spiritual disintegration of the cop. Bad Lt. is the greatest example even though it's certainly modern.
I mention this because last night I read Lionel White's The Money Trap and realized that just about everything I like about genre fiction is packed into that novel. Compelling characters, an extremely cunning storyline and a believable if bitter love story that is truly adult.

Two cops cover a crime scene in which a wealthy doctor claims that he caught a burglar in his bedroom and shot him in the back. The doctor's prestige saves him from any serious scrutiny. But before the intruder died he told one of the cops something about the contents of the wall safe where the doctor hid an illicit one million dollars.

Though the narrator has to be dragged into it, he joins his fellow cop in figuring out how to separate the doctor from his million. Paralleling this is the story of his disintegrating marriage. For anybody who's ever drunk his way through a bad marriage some of the scenes are pretty grim.

White was a master of the multiple viewpoint caper novel. But I wish he'd written more intimate I-narratives like this one. He wrote a few others in this style but this was the best.Couple of points first about the book. Donald Westlake always acknowledged White's influence on his work and reading this White novel you certainly see what he was talking about. The characters, the milieu and the plot turns Westlake learned from him became tropes in the vast Westlake library of tropes especially in the early years though throughout the Parker series all the way to the end.Glenn Ford was right for the film as was Rita Hayworth here, sadly, near the end of her run. The beauty was almost all gone but somehow that was all right--somehow she was still beautiful anyway. You wanted to hold her, protect her. The soundtrack was way too melodramatic, Ricardo Montalban as the second cop would have been great if his part had been better written and the scenes with Ford's wife don't work right because they're too Hollywood. In the book she's independently wealthy--you accept that because the difference is, say, he's a working stiff and drives a new Chevy and she drives maybe a Caddy. But as only Hwood can...the place they live in is a palace and the parties she throws are enormous with Beautiful People walking around in evening attire while plucking martinis from the trays of servants. And I'm talking maybe a hundred people. Too much. But worth seeing. Oh and Joseph Cotton ala Montalban needed better writing to pull off his part. In the novel the doctor is a snake and should've been here, too.

True Grit: Ross Macdonald Gets His Due

True Grit: Ross Macdonald Gets His Due

The beautifully charged language of Ross Macdonald’s detective novels do more than adorn—it also helps swiftly clinch a character for the reader. By Malcolm Forbes.Ed here: For me the finest private eye writer of all time and one of the five most important writers of American crime fiction in the genre's history. This is from The Daily Beast.
by Malcolm Forbes | August 7, 2012 6:30 PM EDT

‘The Underground Man’ by Ross Macdonald. 320 pp. Penguin. $10. (Bettmann / Corbis)

True Grit: Ross Macdonald Gets His Due

True Grit: Ross Macdonald Gets His Due

The beautifully charged language of Ross Macdonald’s detective novels do more than adorn—it also helps swiftly clinch a character for the reader. By Malcolm Forbes.Ed here: For me the finest private eye writer of all time and one of the five most important writers of American crime fiction in the genre's history. This is from The Daily Beast.
by Malcolm Forbes | August 7, 2012 6:30 PM EDT

‘The Underground Man’ by Ross Macdonald. 320 pp. Penguin. $10. (Bettmann / Corbis)

The Roy Huggins Controversy at UCLA

Ed here: Few people's work has given me as much pleasure as Roy Huggins. I'm running this partial story and link only because it does it does make a point about how his career flourished during the time of the blacklist. I believe his career would have flourished at any time. But I think the folks at Classic TV History Blog make an interesting if arguable point.were correct in running this.
Black List, White WashLast month, in a buffoonishly McCarthyesque moment, Representative Allen West (R-Fla.)claimed in a town hall meeting that there were “about 78 to 81” communists in the United States House of Representatives. Asked to support that claim, West’s office could provide only some qualified (and unreciprocated) statements of support for the Congressional Progressive Caucus that appeared in a Communist Party USA publication. The Communist Party itself confirmed that it lists no members of Congress in its membership rolls. (If only….)

Also last month, a post on the UCLA Library Special Collections Blog announced that it has made available the papers of television pioneer Roy Huggins. The headline of the post characterized Huggins as a “blacklisted writer,” and the article went on to offer a description of Huggins’s relationship to the blacklist so artfully sanitized that it deserves to be called Orwellian:

In September of 1952, Huggins was summoned before the infamous U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to answer questions about his brief membership in the Communist Party. He continued to write under his own name, and under the name “John Thomas James,” combining the names of his three sons.

It would seem that, more than two decades after the demise of the Cold War and the end of anti-communist hysteria, the subject still encourages the most basic and blatant distortions of fact.

Roy Huggins was a gifted television producer. With Maverick, The Fugitive, and The Rockford Files, all of which were largely his conception, Huggins proved that ongoing television series could defy genre conventions – could have authority figures as villains and defiers of authority as protagonists – and still attract an audience. The other series that bore Huggins’s imprint – 77 Sunset Strip, Run For Your Life, The Outsider, theLawyers segments of The Bold Ones, Alias Smith and Jones – were less adventurous, but were consistently smart and well-produced.

Roy Huggins was also a fink.

On September 29, 1952, Huggins appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee and gave the names of nineteen colleagues and acquaintances whom he believed to be present or former members of the Communist Party. He gave the names with the full knowledge that, if they hadn’t been already, the careers of those men and women would be destroyed.

Huggins stood behind the defense that all of the names he supplied were already known to the Committee; in other words, he wasn’t fingering anyone whose life hadn’t already been wrecked. Huggins even worked that rationalization into his testimony (which is fascinating to read), although it does not bear up under scrutiny: if the handy appendix in Robert Vaughn’s Only Victims is accurate, Huggins was the only witness to name the optometrist Howard Davis in public testimony, and a few of the other eighteen were fingered in the HUAC record for the first time by Huggins (and then subsequently repeated by other friendly witnesses).

And of course, as Huggins later articulated, the actual names were irrelevant. HUAC was not interested in the names (which its investigators, and the FBI, already had); it was interested in legitimizing itself through the ritual of naming. Anyone who gave names bolstered the witchhunters’ influence, and prolonged the blacklist for everyone. Huggins thought he was beating HUAC at its own game (not just in his choice of names, but through several more arcane gambits that I haven’t gone into here). But, in the end, the House won.

It’s not my desire to rake Huggins over the coals again. Huggins himself was blunt, and repentant, on the subject of HUAC. In an eloquent interview in Victor Navasky’s Naming Names, Huggins called his cooperative testimony “a failure of nerve” and said that he was “ashamed of myself.”

The problem is that, no matter how much UCLA might like to, it is impossible to separate Huggins’s HUAC record from his later success. The inconvenient truth is that his career thrived during the era of the blacklist. Maverick, 77 Sunset Strip, and even The Fugitivecame about during the decade when anyone who defied HUAC could not work in Hollywood. Had Huggins chosen not to give names, none of those shows would exist.

http://classictvhistory.wordpress.com...

James Garner's autobiography

A Review from Classic TV History

“Didn’t enjoy working with Tony Franciosa, who kept abusing the stunt men. He purposely wasn’t pulling his punches in fight scenes, and he kept doing it despite my warnings to stop . . . so I had to pop him one.”

- James Garner, The Garner Files

The succinct sketch of John Frankenheimer that James Garner offers in his long-awaited memoir, The Garner Files, is probably as valuable an observation as any offered in A Little Solitaire. Garner, who starred in Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix, thought the director was something of a humorless control freak, who “didn’t want anyone with an opinion” in the cast. But Garner admired Frankenheimer’s encyclopedic attention to detail and his ability to command a production as huge and potentially dangerous as Grand Prix.

A number of my friends, of both the real and Facebook varieties, have been praising and quoting from The Garner Files. I assume that’s because Garner is one of the few living stars from whom many of us would really want to hear at some length, and also (more importantly) because Garner does not shy away from, and indeed even seems to relish, naming and shaming anyone who ever pissed him off. It’s a long and entertaining list, one that includes Charles Bronson (“a pain in the ass”), Glen A. Larson (a “thief”), and Lee Marvin (another “pain in the ass”), among others.

In The Garner Files, Garner comes across as a straight shooter, smarter and more introspective than the most of characters he played. He is, for instance, quite conscious of how the laid-back, “natural” quality that was his trademark was in fact carefully constructed. (Garner’s theory is that his studied casualness emerged out of a process of getting past his stage fright.) The book ends with a section of testimonials from Garner’s family and friends, which include major movie stars as well as racing pals and “below the line” crew members. That kind of victory roll would constitute an exhibition of appalling arrogance in almost anyone else’s memoirs, but Garner has allowed his friends to tell stories on him. Some of them are flattering, but others hint at Garner’s fallibility and his legendary temper. (The words of Rockford Files co-star Joe Santos, in their entirety: “Garner says he’s easygoing, but he’s lying. He’s angry and desperate, just like I am. That’s why Rockford has always worked so well, because Jim is coming from a very passionate, driven place.”)

Garner is so resolutely forthright that his book is worth reading, but it’s hardly one of the great or even very good autobiographies. Garner acknowledges his collaborator, Jon Winokur, with typical generosity, but that doesn’t prevent the book from coming to a dead stop whenever Winokur takes over to fill in the basic facts about Garner’s movies and television projects. The sections on the star’s two major TV series, Maverick and The Rockford Files, feel especially ghost-written, and add little or nothing to the stories told in Ed Robertson’s books on those shows. Garner comes to life a bit more when discussing his favorite films (The Great Escape, The Americanization of Emily, Grand Prix), but I sense that his real passions are for boring shit like golf, auto racing, making money, and (to use his oft-repeated term) “decking” people.

Garner presents himself as a defender of the little guy, and I don’t doubt the truth of that. But he also seems to have enjoyed maneuvering himself into situations in which he could punch out people and – because the punchee was behaving badly in some way – still hold onto his image as a good guy. One such person, a golf course heckler, turned out to be aRockford fan with alcohol and drug problems, who cried after Garner knocked him down. (Again, full credit to Garner for leaving those details in, even if they are presented with a not-my-fault shrug.)

Garner’s particular ethics of violence may make him less of a bully than some of the bullies he criticizes (including Frankenheimer), but he strikes me as a bully nonetheless, a hothead who cultivated his temper and unloaded on people whenever he knew he could get away with it. Is a wealthy, powerful, and well-liked movie star ever likely to find himself in situations where he has to hit someone? Was socking Tony Franciosa really an act of standing up for defenseless stuntmen (note the oxymoronic aspect of that phrase) – many of whom probably later found themselves on sets where Franciosa had the power to fire them and Garner wasn’t around to intercede – or was it just an ostentatious display of machismo? I still love the television James Garner, the pragmatic, risk-averse “reluctant hero” (Garner’s own term) who made Maverick and Rockford so distinctive and down-to-earth and compulsively watchable. But after reading his book, I wonder whether I would like the real James Garner.

Posted by Stephen Bowie
Filed in The Book Corner
Tags: academia, Bill Krohn, film studies, Impossible Object, James Garner, John Frankenheimer, Jon Winokur, Murray Pomerance, Oral History, R. Barton Palmer, Tony Franciosa
4 Comments »

The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut

Ed here: I still remember the day I bought The Sirens of Titan off a pharmacy pb display. I knew Vonnegut from a few short stories. But between the handsome cover (Richard Powers no less) and the opening page I sensed this was an important book. As it proved to be. This is from ConceptualFiction by Ted Gioia:
Kurt Vonnegut only managed to sell two short stories in 1957, and the next year he placed just one. His work- in-progress Cat's Cradle remained unfinished, and Vonnegut's editor at Scribner's, who had been waiting for four years for this novel to reach fruition, complained that the "production has been very slow."
Unless Vonnegut provided his publisher with a finished manuscript or at least0 a complete outline—both of which he seemed incapable of doing—Scribner's would neither offer him a contract nor release him from their option on Cat's Cradle. Yet the author had other concerns that kept him from completing the book. In a desperate bid to improve his financial prospects, Vonnegut embarked on a disastrous career running a car dealership. Personal tragedy added to his woes. His sister Alice died of cancer in 1958, just two days after husband was killed in a train wreck— leaving Kurt and his wife Jane with the care of four orphaned youngsters.
In addition to their own three children, Vonnegut now had seven kids to support. At this low point, pressed by need and uncertainty, Vonnegut encountered his old Cornell classmate Knox Burger, now an editor at Dell, at a New York cocktail party. Burger asked whether Vonnegut had any ideas for a marketable novel. Seizing the opportunity, Kurt spun out a fanciful synopsis of a science fiction space opera that would turn into The Sirens of Titan. Offered a contract for the book, Vonnegut completed the manuscript in just a few months. Vonnegut mself similarly mistreated by an apathetic universe. for the rest go herehttp://www.conceptualfiction.com/Kurt...

All-Time Top 10 Lists From Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola, Quentin Tarantino & More

All-Time Top 10 Lists From Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola, Quentin Tarantino & MoreEd here: I've never figured out how you could possibly choose an all-time "best" novel or movie or piece of music. So many factors involved. Lists are a better idea though even with them if you list in order you are selecting a number one best. These are smart people and smart sometimes surprising lists. Tarantino as usual comes up with the most surprises. I don't know if I'd put Carrie or Rolling Thunder on a Top Ten list but I think they're truly good movies. The latter was savaged and I could never figure out why. It also bombed. Sorcerer I consider a masterpiece but it was also savaged and bombed. For me there is no equal to the final scene. Anyway, smart men, smart choices though of course I'd have subtracted some and added other. Enjoy.
Woody Allen
"Bicycle Thieves" (1948, dir. Vittorio De Sica)
"The Seventh Seal" (1957, dir. Ingmar Bergman)
"Citizen Kane" (1941, dir. Orson Welles
"Amarcord" (1973, dir. Federico Fellini
"8 1/2" (1963, dir. Federico Fellini)
"The 400 Blows" (1959, dir. Francois Truffaut)
"Rashomon" (1950, dir. Akira Kurosawa)
"La Grande Illusion" (1937, dir. Jean Renoir)
"The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie" (1972, dir. Luis Bunuel)
"Paths Of Glory" (1957, dir. Stanley Kubrick)

[image error]Francis Ford Coppola
"Ashes And Diamonds" (1958, dir. Andrzej Wajda)
"The Best Years Of Our Lives" (1946, dir William Wyler)
"I Vitteloni" (1953, dir. Federico Fellini)
"The Bad Sleep Well (1960, dir. Akira Kurosawa)
"Yojimbo" (1961, dir. Akira Kurosawa)
"Singin' In The Rain (1952, dir. Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly)
"The King Of Comedy" (1983, dir Martin Scorsese)
"Raging Bull" (1980, dir. Martin Scorsese)
"The Apartment" (1960s, dir. Billy Wilder)
"Sunrise" (1927, dir. F.W. Murnau)

[image error]Michael Mann
"Apocalypse Now" (1979, dir. Francis Ford Coppola)
"Battleship Potemkin" (1925, dir. Sergei Eisenstein)
"Citizen Kane" (1941, dir. Orson Welles)
"Avatar" (2009, dir. James Cameron)
"Dr. Strangelove" (1964, dir. Stanley Kubrick)
"Biutiful" (2010, dir. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu)
"My Darling Clementine" (1946, dir. John Ford)
"The Passion Of Joan Of Arc" (1928, dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer)
"Raging Bull" (1980, dir. Martin Scorsese)
"The Wild Bunch" (1969, dir. Sam Peckinpah)

[image error]Martin Scorsese
"8 1/2" (1963, dir. Federico Fellini)
"2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968, dir. Stanley Kubrick)
"Ashes And Diamonds" (1958, dir. Andrzej Wajda)
"Citizen Kane" (1941, dir. Orson Welles)
"The Leopard" (1963, dir. Luchino Visconti)
"Paisan" (1946, dir. Roberto Rossellini)
"The Red Shoes" (1948, dir. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger)
"The River" (1951, dir. Jean Renoir)
"Salvatore Giuliano" (1962, dir. Francesco Rosi)
"The Searchers" (1956, dir. John Ford)
"Ugetsu Monogatari" (1953, dir. Kenji Mizoguchi)
"Vertigo" (1958, dir. Alfred Hitchcock)


Quentin Tarantino
"The Good, The Bad & The Ugly" (1966, dir. Sergio Leone)
"Apocalypse Now" (1979, dir. Francis Ford Coppola)
"The Bad News Bears" (1976, dir. Michael Ritchie)
"Carrie" (1976, dir. Brian DePalma)
"Dazed And Confused" (1993, dir. Richard Linklater)
"The Great Escape" (1963, dir. John Sturges)
"His Girl Friday" (1940, dir. Howard Hawks)
"Jaws" (1975, dir. Steven Spielberg)
"Pretty Maids All In A Row (1971, dir. Roger Vadim)
"Rolling Thunder" (1977, dir. John Flynn)
"Sorcerer" (1977, dir. William Friedkin)
"Taxi Driver" (1976, dir. Martin Scorsese)

Lists used courtesy of Sight & Sound.

50 Shades of Gunsmith; Gorman

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(Above: TheNewest Gunsmiths)

50 SHADES OF GUNSMITH

by Robert J. Randisi

Okay believe me, this is NOT sour grapes, but the success of 50 SHADE SOF GREY makes one wonder—why does a book offering nothing new become a best seller?

Essentially, what 50 Shades offers is sex. For 30 years I’ve been writing The Gunsmith series as “J.R. Roberts,” for The Berkley Publishing Group. It began in January of 1982, during a time when “Adult” westerns flooded the market, and has been appearing monthly since then. What’s an Adult Western? It’s a western novel with sex in it. That’s right, the cowboy has sex with women. A new idea? Probably not, but heretofore this had not been seen in western novels (certainly not by Max Brand, Zane Grey, Owen Wister or Louis L’Amour). What these books actually showed was that men and women really did have sex in the old west. (Back when I started the series a rigidly traditional western writer of my acquaintance insisted to me that “women did not have orgasms in the old west.”). Clint Adams, the Gunsmith, has had sex over the past 30 years with many women of different sizes and shapes, and in many different ways. That’s why I say the kind of sex depicted in 50 SHADES is nothing new.

So if you’re one of the people who ran out to buy 50 SHADES when you heard about it, then run right out again and buy some Gunsmith books. The flood of Adult Westerns in the market during the 80’s has slowed to a trickle. There are 4 left, but The Gunsmith remains the only such series still being written by a single author.

It’s a fact that there is a current resurgence in Westerns. The Gunsmith series, in particular, has experienced increased sales. But if a combination of action and sex appeals to you, then get yourself 50 Shades of Gunsmith—or 350.

-------------------------------------------And I say to hell with it. Yesterday I went into the shiny new oncology center at ten a.m. and left at five fifteen. X-Ray and an MRI. Throw in a couple procedures and two longs talks with my onc and I was completely exhaustsed. Thought I needed to save all my energy for writing on my book. More energey today because I started steroids again. The fun isn't over yet.Monday a Pet Scan and Tues Radiation starts.

Not blogging for awhile.

Folks some health issues have come up so I won't be blogging for several days. opefully I;ll be back very soon. Thanks Ed

Forgotten Books: Earthquake Weather by Terrill Lee Lankford

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I have about a dozen novels I keep on a shelf to the right of my desk. The writers include Fitzgerald, Graham Greene, Nathaniel West, Dorothy Parker, O'Hara, and about half a dozen contemporary novels. I keep these there as vitamins for when style and lucidity wane in my own work. In the truest sense I derive inspiration from reading twenty-five pages or so of them.
Lately I find that the novel I pick up most often is Earthquake Weather by Terrill Lee Lankford which, in some respects, is an amalgam of Fitzgerald-West-O'Hara.

The falsely accused protagonist is nothing new but set against natural disaster in the bowels (in all respects) of the movie industry you have something completely fresh, especially when he's presented in language as powerful and lyric and spot-on true as Lankford is able to summon here. The pace is as relentless as the people and the noir effects are born not of standard noir tropes but of the world today, a new kind of noir where Bush, infomercials, special effects movies, trash TV and street gangs are the noises you hear rather the the somber trumpet of traditional noir. There are moments when you think you're reading Philip K. Dick.

The novel works perfectly on three levels--as an insider novel work novel about present day Hollywood; as a dark driven story about the Wrong Man; and as a Westian portait of a man in the final stages of spiritual disintegration. It's the final level that sets this book apart from the flavors-of-the-month and the overwrought neo-noirs of our time. Finally the book is about a man who is a victim of himself and those he's chosen to surround himself with. This is the theme of a good deal of classical literature and Lankford seems well aware of that on every page of the book.

Yes, it was well reviewed. I think it even appeared on a few Best of The Year lists. But given its worth, it passed, in hard and soft appearances, without sufficient note.

It's easily available on Kindle, abe and alibris. Do yourself a great favor and order it now.

posted by Ed Gorman @ 2:52 PM