Ed Gorman's Blog, page 160
May 17, 2012
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.
May 16, 2012
How I Wrote KING CITY by Lee Goldberg
Today, Amazon's Thomas & Mercer imprint released my crime novelKING CITY in digital and printeditions...and Brilliance Audio released the 7-hour audio version,read by Patrick Lawlor.
Here's an essay I posted on this blog in August about the writing process behind the book...
I've written over thirty novels, and my process with all of them was pretty much the same. I had an idea, I wrote a bullet-point outline, and I started writing the book, revising my outline along the way (I call them "living outlines," since I usually finish writing them a few days before I complete my manuscripts). But the process of writing KING CITY, my new standalone crime novel, was entirely different.
KING CITY began as a TV series pitch that I took all over Hollywood four or five years ago. It generated some interest but ultimately didn't lead to anything. So I put it in a drawer and moved on.
But the idea nagged at me anyway and I began to think KING CITY might make a better book than a screenplay. So, between MONK novels three years ago, I wrote 200 pages and a broad-strokes outline for the rest of the book.
I sent the proposal to my agent and began writing my next MONK book. The first place she sent KING CITY to was Penguin/Putnam, my MONK publisher, because she felt certain they'd snap it up. Between DIAGNOSIS MURDER and MONK, I'd written twenty-some novels for them. We knew that they liked me and my work, which had been successful for them, so we didn't think they'd see KING CITY as much of a gamble.
But they passed, surprising us both. My agent felt the rejection was less about me or the book than the way the business had changed. Mid-list authors were being dropped, editors were being fired, and the days of selling book proposals was over. If I wanted to sell KING CITY, I'd have to write the whole book and then shop it around.
I wasn't wild about that idea. If editors who knew me and my work well didn't find the first 200 pages compelling enough to merit an offer, I doubted that reading the whole novel would change their minds. And if these editors, folks I'd worked with for years, weren't willing to gamble on me, why would someone else?
for the rest go here:
leegoldberg.typepad.com/
May 15, 2012
Excellent Piece on e Books by Libby Fischer Hellmann
I’m frustrated. A little angry. But most of all, opinionated (Yeah, I know.. what else is new?)
Over the past few days people have been chattering about a couple of articles dealing with authors and publishing. One is a New York Times story about best-selling authors now being told to publish more than one book a year.
The other is a breezy analysis from Forbes which basically says that anyone with a good brand can become a successful author.
At first I saw these articles as the antithesis of each other, exploring both the opportunity and the curse of the digital revolution. But then I realized they actually were the mirror image of each other. Or more accurately, cause and effect. Bottom line: the two articles reinforce an inherent paradox. A Digital Catch-22.
The New York Times article examines how best-selling authors, many of them crime fiction authors, are now being forced to double-down on product. Authors like Lee Child and Lisa Scottoline are now expected to write more than one novel a year. Whether it’s a short story (in Lee’s case) or a second novel (in Lisa’s), Big Publishing is requiring more product. This isn’t a new phenomenon. Michael Connelly has been doing this for years. Lee Goldberg, too. And, of course, Joe Konrath. More power to them. They are amazing writers. Most of us aren’t.
The Forbes article discusses how writers are increasingly interacting with readers through social marketing and working hard to create their brand. The key sentence for me was: “If someone writes well and is skillful about how to build his or her brand, incredible things can happen.“
Hold on. Not so fast.
Incredible things? Well, maybe. Financial success? Perhaps. But what about the phrase “writes well” which the Forbes article kind of tossed off? What about the quality?
for the rest go here: www.libbyhellmann.com/wp/
May 14, 2012
Link Wray: So Glad, So Proud
Rock pioneer Link Wray, most famous for "Rumble" was boss in every era.
In 2000, at a small club in Portland, Ore., I witnessed this for myself. The half Shawnee shaman, at the age of 71, performed one of the greatest shows I've ever seen in my life. Some time had passed since Quentin Tarantino featured Wray's famed "Rumble" in Pulp Fiction, so the "Rawhide" rocker attracted a smaller crowd this time around. The better for all of us. The crowd consisted of die-hard Rockabillies, a smattering of older people, varied Wray fans, me and my little siste gods work his power -- taking all that is raucous and dark and soulful and yes, light, and hypnotizing us. There were no bad vibes in that cramped crowd of potential rowdies. Moving on stage like the half-Shawnee he was, he worked us as if performing some kind of Native American rock and roll rain dance, while still playing down and dirty -- music that made us feel alive and real and raw. And then dreamy -- a seedy, sexy, soulful, demonic, beatific dream.
And then this wide awake fever dream became so tangibly real -- a moment that's remained a highlight of my life: Link Wray handed me his guitar in the middle of "Rumble." Yes, he actually, mid-performance, leaned over from the stage, and placed his guitar in my hands. And that devil (an angel in disguise) did so with a grin on his face. I was holding Link Wray's guitar! I didn't scream or cry or crumble into Beatlemania hysterics; instead I held it as long as I could and then, in a trance-like state, passed that sacred idol through the crowd. This was to be shared. And Link just took it all in -- jovial and delighted as the awed audience passed it along, and with great, religious respect. He trusted us. It was safely returned back to Wray who, in spite of his dark image (Wray was still one of the greatest looking leather clad rockers ever) and menacing sound, smiled broadly. I still have his pick, stashed safely in my jewelry box.
for the rest go here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kim-mor...
May 12, 2012
The Mitt Hits The Fan
When the Mitt Hits the Fanby James Wolcott MAY 11, 2012
Once of the reasons Mitt Romney seems like such a time-warped, B-actor leading man of a candidate--a cross between John Gavin and Tom Tryon, with high-gloss Hollywood black hair for that new Cadillac shine and a smile that always has money on its mind--is that surface is all he seems to sport. Below the lacquer, there's no underlife; no doubts, no sawing contradictions, no gnawing resentments. As a human being, he still doesn't seem fully thawed, and you get the sense that his sweat would be cold, like refrigerator condensation. What's strange isn't that Romney seems capable of expressing empathy, since empathy is clearly not something he considers of corporate value, but that in all his years of public life he hasn't learned to fake it, to at least pretend he cares about those less fortunate or vulnerable, something even Rick Perry was able to do with his "have a heart" comment re immigrants. For this brief outburst of humanity, Perry suffered major backlash from the rightwing ghoul squad, but at least it showed a bit of blood circulation on his part. Romney's rusty mechanics on the campaign trail, the forced banter and the creak of premeditation at even the most casual moments, has evoked comparisons with Richard Nixon, but Nixon was genuinely an introspective loner; Romney is a joiner and belonger without any moon shadow of introspection. He doesn't seem to have given anything any deep thought, which is another reason he's no Nixon; Nixon was a law-school grind and a user-upper of yellow legal pads to work out the pros and cons and details of domestic and foreign policy issues, while Romney's policy brain operates on frictionless cruise control. He's a conservative corporate capitalist at home and abroad his thinking is so old, encrusted, and stuck in the frozen tundra that, as Daniel Larison has pointed out, he doesn't even qualify as a neoconservative--he's an unreconstructed Cold Warrior from the 50s or 60s. Another reason he seems like a throwback to the cardboard leading men of lesser Hitchcock and Preminger films.
(more)
He's a coward. He's never gone against the grain, stood up for an underdog or advanced an unpopular cause before it became popular, risked a single gleaming hair off his head, shone any backbone apart from the determination to win, tapped into anything larger than himself, risen to the moment.
May 11, 2012
The Matilyn Tapes
For four decades there have been rumours that Marilyn Monroe's death was not a simple suicide. Now a Los Angeles-based Australian writer and director, Philippe Mora, has uncovered an FBI document that throws up a chilling new scenario.
The screen legend Marilyn Monroe...the FBI report says she "expected to have her stomach pumped out and get sympathy for her suicide attempt", but it suggests she was left to die. Photo: Harold Lloyd/The Harold Lloyd Collection
BOBBY KENNEDY'S affair with the screen idol Marilyn Monroe has been documented, but a secret FBI file suggests the late US attorney-general was aware of - and perhaps even a participant in - a plan "to induce" her suicide.
The detailed three-page report implicates the Hollywood actor Peter Lawford, Monroe's psychiatrist, staff and her publicist in the plot.
The allegations suggest the 36-year-old actress, who had a history of staging attention-seeking suicide attempts, was deliberately given the means to fake another suicide on August 4, 1962. But this time, it is suggested, she was allowed to die as she sought help.
The document, hidden among thousands of pages released under freedom-of-information laws last October, was received by the FBI on October 19, 1964 - two years after her death - and titled simply "ROBERT F KENNEDY".
It was compiled by an unnamed former special agent working for the then Democrat governor of California, Pat Brown, and forwarded to Washington by Curtis Lynum,then head of the San Francisco FBI. Despite a disclaimer that it could not be sourced or authenticated, it was considered important enough to immediately circulate to the FBI's five most senior officers, including director J. Edgar Hoover's right-hand man, Clyde Tolson.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/kenn... for the rest
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THE MARILYN TAPES IS AVAILABLE ON KINDLE FOR $2.99Here's a piece I wrote in 2007 when a book appeared claiming that Marilyn Monroe was murdered by Bobby Kennedy and his friends."BOBBY KENNEDY'S affair with the screen idol Marilyn Monroe has been documented, but a secret FBI file suggests the late US attorney-general was aware of - and perhaps even a participant in - a plan "to induce" her suicide.
"The detailed three-page report implicates the Hollywood actor Peter Lawford, Monroe's psychiatrist, staff and her publicist in the plot."
Ed here: Back in 1994 Tor published a novel of mine about Marilyn Monroe called THE MARILYN TAPES. The premise was that the Kennedy Brothers and J. Edgar Hoover had been audio taping Monroe's bedroom at the time of her death. Both tried desperately to get those tapes. The reels would destroy the Kennedys. Hoover could use them to blackmail Jack and Bobby whom he loathed.
I spent most of 1993 writing the book. For the first and only time I hired a reseracher. She lived in LA and had access to all kinds of Marilyn material. Early on I was intrduced to the Marilyn cult. One guy called me and said that his group would have to "approve" my manuscript before I pubished it. They cared deeply, he said, about her reputation. Other callers told me strange Marilyn stories they wanted to to see in the book. I still don't know how they learned I was writing it. Maybe the researcher told them.
I'm no Marilyn expert. In the course of writing the novel I came to realize that I probably wouldn't have liked her much. I say this based on how much trouble she gave various directors and because she insisted on bringing Lee Strasberg to all the sets of her pictures. She would check every bit of acting she did with him no matter what the director said. That said two or three of the reviews noted how sympathetic my portrait of her was. I felt sorry for her but I think she would have been hell to know (my late friend the actor Kevin McCarthy who knew her disagreed with me).
The problem with all this is that there are so many conspiracy theories any semblance of truth gets lost in the fog. As I was thinking when I wrote the following in response to the news story above.
1) The Kennedy-Lawford-etc. conspiracy has been around for years. Here's why I doubt its validity. Remember Monica Lewinsky? I saw her on Larry King one night where she allowed as how in the month after her first tryst with Clinton she told "only three or four people." Do the math on that. And those three or four people told how many other people? Who needs mass communications when you have this much word of mouth going on. Same with the Kennedy-Lawford theory. You've got a minmum of five people involved in this plot. No group of five people, including Lawford who drank a lot, can keep such a dark secret forever. They're going to share it with somebody. And that somebody is going to share it with somebody else. Etc. It just doesn't work. Sorry.
2) The book that contended that J. Edgar Hoover was a cross-dresser. No way. Made up of whole cloth. The same as the story, passed down through the decades, that Hoover wouldn't go after the Mafia because a mob boss had a photo of J. and Tolson in bed together. Urban legend. It's always put this way: "I didn't see it myself but a buddy of mine knows somebdy who DID see it." False. The even better story is the one about (this may have been the same book) Hoover dressing up in a nifty black cocktail dress for New Year's Eve 1958. Please. The most feared and despised man in Washington, D.C?. People praying for his downfall? And he goes out in a cocktail dress? Sure he does. Hoover and Tolson were probably gay but I wonder if they ever acted on it. My opinion only. In my reading I got the sense that Tolson was a decent guy. Hoover was a ruthless psychotic paranoid prick. Other than that I hold his memory in the highest regard.THE MARILYN TAPES IN AVAILABLE ON KINDLE FOR $2.99
May 10, 2012
Forgotten Books: Having Wonderful Crime by Craig Rice
Having Wonderful CrimeI've just reread Craig Rice's 1944 novel Having Wonderful Crime. Rice was, of course, the grand dame of mystery mixed with screwball comedy. She was on the cover of Time in the late Forties and was considered one of the dominant forces in the mystery fiction of the time. But she had demons that were only exacerbated by her alcoholism and wedded up a number of times, once to a man who allegedly did some of her writing or declared that her writing was actually his. The rumors vary.Having Wonderful Crime is larky in its plotting and typically smart-ass in its dialogue. Customers got what they paid for but beneath the frivolity (which is quite amusing) there's a darkness that makes the drinking scenes (everybody is at least half drunk in a Rice novel) not so much fun. 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 demons 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. Then her character, the always inebriated lawyer-slueth John J. Malone of Chicago, must do his thing.As an aside the book made a frothy B-movie. From IMDB:" Lawyer Malone's two zany friends embroil him in detective work once too often, and the police are after all three. So Malone must accompany Jake and beautiful Helene on their honeymoon at rustic Lenhart Lodge. There, they plunge into a broad burlesque of murder mystery cliches, with rapid-fire wisecracks, double takes, and every sight gag known to Hollywood."One thing the movie couldn't get to were Rice's social perceptions. There's a scene in which Rice (using interior monologue) assesses 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.
May 9, 2012
Edmond O'Brien
I watched DOA recently and reaffirmed my opinion that it's one of the great B pulp stories of all time."I'd like to report a murder."
"Whose?"
"Mine."
Hw can you miss with an opening like that? This is pure noir from first frame to last, an almost surreal experience of radioactive drugs (the scene with the doctor telling him that he's going to die is handled flawlessly), the almost documentary-like observation of San Francisco architecture, the quick vicious violence.
There's even a snarky bit of satire. The war has ended and prosperity has come to many. Salesmen abound. They fill the hotel where O'Brien first stays. As he goes into his room he sees there's a party going on in the room across from him. He accepts the invitation. Director Rudolph Mate gets everything right in this bit--the inane chatter, the sexual undertone, the sudden drunken jealousy, the goofy hats of the women and the effusive Chamber of Commerce attitude of the men.
From that point on it's grim without relief. As many critics have noted the black band in the jazz club scene was pushing the envelope. There was studio concern the film wouldn't be shown in the South (though I never quite understood that--the band did nothing but make some sweet music, they weren't hitting on white chicks). And then comes the succession of liars O'Brien encounters as he tries to figure out who poisoned him and why. He becomes a de facto hardboiled private eye and a better peeper than most. There's all that anger, all that fear.
I saw this new at Half Price for (I think) $3. Hard to go wrong.
As for O'Brien...several years ago TCM showed him as a very young man in a costume drama. He was thin and theatrcal. Studied. Weight and years gave him a more comfortable persona, the perpetually agigated average man who lost just about every battle with the dark gods. Though he would do more work after his part in The Wild Bunch, I think he was especially memorable as the crazed-wise old coot with rotted teeth and a wino laugh. Fitting and ironic in context that his character and Robert Ryan's were the only two left in the coda. Fine work capping a significant career.
May 8, 2012
Sleep With Strangers by Dolores Hitchens
SLEEP WITH STRANGERS
SLEEP WITH STRANGERS
Ed here: While Dolores Hitchens' Sleep with Slander is even stronger than Sleep with Strangers this is a brooding and dark character-driven mystery that keeps the pages turning. This is a very different take on the California noir. The reviewer here is wrong about Hitchens' career. Hitchens "strayed"many times from cozies and did quite well with the suspense-mysterygenre. And while there is a Ross Macdonald influence in her darker books there's also a strong hint of Dorothy B. Hughes. Despite my quibbles I think the writer here filed a solid helpful review from Reading California. This is in my Keeper bookcase.
SLEEP WITH STRANGERS
Dolores Hitchens holds down the No. 3 spot in mylist of prolific California novelists. Her output was impressive. She produced some forty-five books in a career that began in 1938 and continued until her death in 1973. Only twice did she stray from standard puzzle mysteries, many of which featured a cat named Samantha, into the world of the hard-boiled. Both forays proved successful. Author and critic Bill Pronzini calls Sleep with Slander (1960) “the best traditional male private eye novel written by a woman.” And noir authority Woody Haut lists Sleep with Strangers as one of the "primary pulp culture texts." It's also probably the best novel set in Long Beach, although the public library there doesn't have a copy.
Sleep with Strangers by Dolores Hitchens. Doubleday (1955), 192 pp.
Forty-something Long Beach P. I. Jim Sader has begun a new case. His client, young and apparently unsullied Kay Wanderley, comes from one of the town's most prominent families. She wants Jim to locate her mother, Felicia, who left home three nights before and hasn't been seen since. He begins interviewing acquaintances, starting with Felicia's attractive drinking partner, Tina Griffin, and her surly would-be real estate client, Charlie Ott. Meanwhile, Jim's junior partner, Dan Scarborough, is working on a similar case. The missing person is Perry Ajoukian, whose now-frail father lives off a fortune made in the local oil boom. Of more interest to Dan is Perry's neglected wife, Connie, who stuns him with her glittering beauty. Jim at first doubts that the two simultaneous disappearances are connected.
Hitchens renders this mystery story much in the Ross Macdonald style. Jim and Dan are calm and meticulous. They avoid wisecracks and mayhem. More important, they operate in a fully realized setting. Social class and historical precedent have as much importance as appearances. Unlike Macdonald Hitchens uses a third-person narrator, but she keeps the focus tightly on Jim. He's in every scene, and his are the only thoughts the narrator relates. The author goes her own way, however, in the depiction of her protagonist. In contrast to Lew Archer, the Macdonald hero who possesses relentless stamina, Jim is coming to realize that he's growing older and less energetic. More to the point, he fears that his appeal to ingenuous but sexy young women is vanishing. The more he thinks about Kay, the more she becomes a challenge to his manhood -- and his judgment. The solution to the mystery might have been trickier, but otherwise the book is highly recommended.
S
May 7, 2012
The Captain Must Die; Koenig; Piccirilli
I hope you're doing well.
This week Robert Colby's THE CAPTAIN MUST DIE is free for Nook and Kindle (available in the respective stores). I know that was one you liked.
Best, Ben LeRoy
Ed here: I think this is one of the great Gold Medals, right near the top of the list. And now it's FREE!
BTW I got four e mails off line about recommending Joseph Koenig's False Negative and saying it was my choice for an Edgar. This would be in the Paperback Original Category. So enquiring minds wanted to know if I had a choice for Best Novel as indeed I do. The Last Kind Words by Tom Piccirilli is not only a breakthrough for Tom but for the field itself. A brilliant literary crime novel dealing with a family you will never forget. A masterpiece.
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