Ed Gorman's Blog, page 165

DEATH COMES SILENTLY BY CAROLYN HART

DEATH COMES SILENTLY BY CAROLYN HART DEATH COMES SILENTLYOn sale April 3Annie Darling drops by a local charity to check on the woman who took Annie's shift,then peppered Annie with calls hinting at scandal. Annie finds her sub dead ofmultiple wounds with the handyman's axe nearby. Convinced the policeare seeking the wrong man, Annie and her husband Max follow thetrail of an overturned kayak, a stolen motorboat, a troubled loveaffair, a reckless teenager, and a missing friend. Anniebelieves she is close to an answer when she sets out in the fog,but Death is waiting in the swirling mist.
Recent publications:DEAD BY MIDNIGHTESCAPE FROM PARISRENDEZVOUS IN VERACRUZ

Forgotten Books: The Crimes of Jordan Wise by Bill Pronzini

The Crimes of Jordan Wise, by Bill Pronzini.

Actuary Jordan Wise tells a joke on himself a third of the way through the novel: (paraphrase) an actuary is somebody who doesn't have the personality to be an accountant.

If you watch many true crime shows, you see a lot of Jordan Wises. People who fall into crime through circumstance rather than those who go looking for it.

Jordan becomes a criminal only after meeting Annalise, a troubled and very attractive young woman who needs two things badly – sex and money. But in order to get the sex on a regular basis, Jordan must first provide the money. He embezzles a half million dollars and flees with Annalise to the Virgin Islands. In this first part of the novel, there's nice James M. Cainian detail about how Jordan comes alive for the first time in his life. Some of this is due, whether he admits it or not, to the danger of committing a serious crime. But most of it is due to Annalise and his profound sexual awakening.

The central section of the book reminds me of one of Maugham's great South Seas tales – lust, betrayal, shame played out against vast natural beauty and a native society that, thanks to an old sea man named Bone, Jordan comes to see value in – even if Annalise, her head filled with dreams of Paris and glamor, does not. Old Maugham got one thing right for sure – as Pronzini demonstrates here – a good share of humanity, wherever you find them, is both treacherous and more than slightly insane.

There are amazing sections of writing about sea craft and sailing that remind me not of old Travis McGee but of the profoundly more troubled and desperate men of Charles Williams who find purity and peace only in the great and epic truths of the sea. That they may be as crazed and treacherous as everybdy else does not seem to bother them unduly.

There are also amazing sections (almost diaristic sections) where Jordan tells of us his fears and desires, his failings and his dreams. In places he deals vididly, painfully with his secret terror of not being enough of a man in any sense to hold Annalise.

The publisher calls this a novel and so it is. Pronzini brings great original depth to the telling of this dark adventure that is both physical and spiritual. He has never written a better novel, the prose here literary in the best sense, lucid and compelling, fit for both action and introspection.

You can't read a page of this without seeing it in movie terms. The psychologically violent love story played out against a variety of contemporary settings gives the narrative great scope. And in Jordan Wise and Annalise he has created two timeless people. This story could have been set in ancient Egypt or Harlem in 1903 or an LA roller skating disco in 1981. As Faulkner said, neither the human heart nor the human dilemma ever changes.

A starred PW review of Dublin Dead by Gerard O'Donovan

A starred PW review of Dublin Dead by Gerard O'Donovan

Why I love writing about Dublin - Gerard O'Donovan

One of my great pleasures is writing about Dublin. I've lived all over the world and sure, there are more exciting, more dangerous, more colourful places – and just about everywhere else on Earth feels like it has less rain. But Dublin is unique – a city that has changed enormously over the last twenty years of boom and bust, yet which remains essentially the same; a welcoming city whose people so often look out towards the wider world and not always in upon themselves.

The well known Irish literary novelist Colm Toibin was asked recently why Dublin, where he lives, features so rarely in his work. "Perhaps it's because I feel I've never lost it," he said. That's a sentiment that resonates strongly with me, as my desire to capture and replicate the cityscape and atmosphere of Dublin in my fiction comes from a similar emotional source – the fear of "losing" the city that I grew up in, went to school and university in, worked in for years before leaving to pursue my career in journalism. I don't live so far away now, and in this era of mass communications and transport the distance is easily and regularly closed. But in my heart I miss living in the city where my family and so many of my friends still live, and for me, writing about Dublin is a way to bring the city alive in my imagination and bridge that emotional gap.

As such, Dublin is more than a background for me. It is an excuse to stay in touch, to dig my nails into the fabric of the city and refuse to let go. People in Ireland have gone through so much change in recent years – the appalling clerical abuse scandals, the boom and bust of the Celtic Tiger years – and I'd like to think that my efforts to understand and come to terms with those changes through my writing make Dublin come all the more alive on the page. Because in life where people live – and their economic circumstances – really does affect the way they behave. That's why I ended up with two main characters when writing my first novel The Priest because I felt thatb to di justice to Dublin it had to be looked at from inside and out. For that reason Detective Inspector Mike Mulcahy is a cop who's been away and returns to the city with broader horizons and an outsider's eye, while Siobhan Fallon, a tabloid journalist is the ultimate Dublin insider, a woman whose job it is to know everybody's secrets.

In Dublin Dead Mulcahy and Fallon explore the seamier side of the city, and Ireland more generally: the drug gangs and criminal sub-culture that never get talked about in the tourist brochures but which are all too regularly splashed across the newspapers' front pages. I've always loved novels with a strong sense of place and I do my utmost to imbue my own books with that quality. From this point of view, I'm lucky that Dublin has it all. In its people, pub culture, grit and wit the city is endlessly inspiring; in its urban energy and atmosphere, a crucial element in so many good crime novels, Dublin really is very hard to beat. Gerard O'Donovan

You can't keep a good racist down

Ed here: This was in the news today. A minor incident involving only a few people (hopefully) but it shows how ugly and stupid it is out there.
'Hunger Games,' Lenny Kravitz Criticized in Racist TweetsPublished: March 27, 2012 @ 10:16 am2 CommentsPrint This Page73
inShareBy Brent Lang"The Hunger Games" and stars Lenny Kravitz and Amandla Stenberg have been targeted in a series of racist tweets. The bulk of the complaints center on the casting of black actors as characters that some Twitter users argue were portrayed as white in the Suzanne Collins' hit book. Kravitz plays a stylist named Cinna.Also read: Jon Stewart on Alleged Trayvon Martin Slur: 'That Doesn't Sound Like a Word At All!' (Video)Stenberg portrays Rue, the brave little girl who nurses Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) back to health at a key point in the film. As E! Online notes, contrary to these complaints, Collins actually depicts Rue as having "dark brown skin and eyes." Cinna's race is never explicitly mentioned. Many of the tweets are peppered with racial slurs.One particularly shocking tweet reads: "Sense when has Rue been a nigger."Another alluding to Rue's untimely death reads: "call me racist but when i found out rue was black her death wasn't as sad #ihatemyself."A few commentators struck back at the remarks using humor. "I hear that Donald Trump is trying to prove that Rue wasn't even BORN in Panem," one tweeter wrote, with a nod to the "Birther" controversy that "The Apprentice" star kicked up over Barack Obama's American citizenship. The comments came to light thanks to a Tumblr page maintained by a fan of Collins' young adult novels.The page collects tweets that the author says expose other alleged fans' ignorance of "The Hunger Games." [image error]

HELLBOX by Bill Pronzini

Few writers depict modern terrors as well as Bill Pronzini and in HELLBOX the fear of unhinged outsiders suddenly swooping down and changing the lives of average people becomes a page-turning and frightening journey.
The man's name is Pete Balfour. You've read about his kind many times in the papers and seen it on TV. The loner who is also a hater. Sometimes he kills abortion doctors or blows up Planned Parenthood sites. Just this weekend this weeekend such a man kicked in a church door and stormed in with a rifle. Fortunately he was subdued before he could fire.
In HELLBOX Bill (Nameless) and Kerry travel to the small town of Six Pines where they are considering buying a vacation home. Things turn bad quickly. Pete Balfour, mocked by the townspeople, decides it's time for vengeance. ,Among other things he kidnaps Kerry because she happened to be in the way. If you remember Bill Pronzini's masterful SHACKLES you have some sense of the horrors that lie ahead for Kerry. In order to find her, the local officials busy with another case, Bill enlists Jake Runyon one of his people at the detective agency. Runyon has two jobs--to find Kerry and to keep Bill from going berserk as they search.
Every element of the novel works. The Kerry scenes are especially vivid; Bill Pronzini writes particularly well about women. You're right there with Kerry as she tries to gather herself and fight back against a madman. Early on in his career Pronzini learned how to perfectly pace a novel using multiple viewpoints. He gets better and better at it and here you're flipping the pages as fast as you can.
There's a reason the Mystery Writers of America named Bill Pronzini a Grand Master. All you need to do is read a few chapters of HELLBOX and you'll know why.

BTW Great cover![image error]

DARK THOUGHTS by Harry Shannon

Start reading Dark Thoughts on your Kindle in under a minute. Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here.

Share your own customer images DARK THOUGHTS [Kindle Edition]Harry Shannon (Author)Be the first to review this item | Like(2)Digital List Price:$3.29 What's this? Kindle Price:$3.29 includes free wireless delivery via Amazon Whispernet Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here.Editorial ReviewsProduct DescriptionDark Thoughts contains five shocking short stories written by veteran author Harry Shannon. Shannon has twice been nominated for the Stoker by the Horror Writer's Association and has won both the Tombstone and Black Quill awards. He lives in Los Angeles, California.

"Impeccable pacing and an eye for the terrifying." -Publisher's Weekly

"Master craftsmanship." -Cemetery Dance

"At the top of his game. Honest, cutting, and just plain talented as hell."
-Hellnotes

Dodsworth

Turner Classic Movies frequently runs this film so keep an eye out for it. William Wyler's Dodsworth. It's based on one of Sinclair Lewis' most popular novels. I assume it will now go into general rotation. I've seen it three times. I think it's that good.

Previously only two Wyler films interested me, The Best Years of Our Lives and The Letter. His other films never moved me. But now I see that the problem was mine not his. The power of the drama, the acuity of the social and psychological themes and the sheer beauty of scenes themselves make this for me a major film.

And was it ahead of its time. Walter Huston, always good but here great, plays Dodsworth, a wealthy automobile manufacturer who has just retired with his millions. His wife of twenty years, played with equal skill and range by Ruth Chetterton, admits she's "afraid of getting" old and wants to go to Europe. She is twenty years younger than her husband.

She likes Europe so much that she stays for a few extra months and sends her husband, who is content to stay in the midwestern town of Zenith, back home alone. She then proceeds to have two affairs with very "continental" men. One of whom asks her to divorce Dodsworth long distance so that he may marry her. In the meantime Mary Astor becomes Dodsworth's love interest. God she was gorgeous.

The writers clearly want us to identify with Dodsworth and we do. Huston and Wyler give him a simple goodness that we have to admire. And he is certainly indulgent of his wife. Even after seeing her through her affairs he loves her and wants her back.

But by the end I felt sorry for his wife, too. He was happy sitting in his home library in Zenith, playing golf and going to the same dinners and cafes the rest of his life. And she is younger and quite attractive and if she's foolish in some respects it's only because the mid-like crisis is not his but hers. Wyler emphasizes how much she fears getting old; and fears death.

I don't think I can oversell this movie. Most novelists complain that Hollywood films do them in. Sinclair Lewis had to be awfully proud of this one.

Blood On The Mink; Texas Wind

Excuse me while I back into this review.

By my strictly scientific calculation I first read Robert Silverberg in late 1955 or early 1956. In those days I was eagerly buying all four of the science fiction magazines aimed at deranged adolescents who preferred Bug Eye Monsters and Brass Bra'd Beauties to reality.
Amazing and Fantastic from Ziff-Davis and Imagination and Imaginative Tales from Bill Hamling, these were my mainstays. The latter, especially its short lead "novels," were, as I recall slightly more sophisticated than the stories in the Ziff-Davis books. But probably not by much.

Silverberg and his sometime collaborator Randall Garrett were everywhere in sf under various names. From the slam-bang action of the aforementioned mags to the more sophisticated Astounding and (to me the best of them all) the wry prescient Galaxy. And as we now know Silverberg was also writing for men's magazines and numerous Manhunt imitators. Plus many other markets even Silverberg may not remember. In 1959 or so he began writing one or two or three soft core novels a month. You know in his spare time.

Even in his action adventure mode his sf often showed an intelligence and a humanity not found in the work of his competitors. He was fascinated by political systems and their effects on people and used his tales to extrapolate and demonstrate where some our of contemporary systems were headed.

As early as 1959 his work started to foreshadow the genius (yes, genius) that was to appear full born in the Sixties. The genius that survives today.

I mention all this to salute one of the great writers of our time and to give you a sense of how excited I was to get my hands on a copy of Blood On The MInk, Silverberg's magazine novel written for TRAPPED, another faux Manhunt mag that went out of business just before it was to publish Mink.

It was well worth the wait. The short novel plus the two short stories round out a collection that has the energy of an assault. The two main tropes in Mink very much reflect the times--stories about undercover agents were popular as were agents who posed as other people. (Harry Whittington must have done four or five of them.) Both tropes were frequently seen on TV. But Silverberg's storytelling powers make both of them his own.

I've always imagined that Silverberg was a quick study when surveying a given market. Mink has everything--va-voom blondes, sadistic thugs, plot twists every ten pages and ample supplies of sex and violence--plus actual suspense. You really do wonder where our undercover Federal Agent is taking us. He's trying to to break up a counterfeit ring by locating not only the exquisite plates but also the man who made them.

As with his action sf there is a hard intelligence working here. His contrast of bad queer money and good queer money is fascinating as is the means through which such money is put into the system. His knowledge lends the story a realism it wouldn't have otherwise.

You'll have a great time with this. For duffers it'll bring back the real Fifties perfectly. And for readers of every age it'll be a great good time.

-----------------------------TEXAS WIND

We all have books we go back to several times over the years. For me one of the finest private eye novels I've ever read is Texas Wind by James Reasoner. It is a virtually perfect utterance, a story of a man, an era and a place.

While the set-up is familiar, "a missing daughter job" as Hammett once began a story of his, the op here, named Cody, gives us a Texas I'd never seen before and a private eye who might be the guy you have coffee with at the donut shop counter a couple days a week. The reality is what makes the dark surprises of the book stay real. A real person is telling you the story.

Texas is too often writ so large it becomes comic without meaning to be. James' social observations are worth the price alone. My favorite is a scene where Cody, a Southerner, wonders about a man because he's a Northerner. I've seen this written so many times by Yankees that it was a jolt realizing that it cuts both ways. I loved it.

Filled with exciting incident and humane observation, Texas Wind is one of those books that should be read by everyone who wants to write a mystery novel. This will show you how.

Livia Washburn, James' talented and lovely writer wife, is also a talented and lovely artist. Who knew? Here's her new cover for Texas Wind.


New Cover for Texas Wind

Forgotten Books: Richard Neely

Forgotten Books: The Plastic Nightmare


Richard Neely wrote non-series crime novels that pretty much covered the entire range of dark suspense. I mentioned that in the best of them the weapon of choice is not poison, bullets or garrote. He always prefered sexual betrayl.

Plastic is a good example. Using amnesia as the central device ,Dan Mariotte must reconstruct his life. Learning that the beautiful woman at his bedside all these months in the hospital--his wife--may have tried to kill him in a car accident is only the first of many surprises shared by Mariotte and the reader alike.

What gives the novel grit is Neely's take on the privileged class. He frequently wrote about very successful men (he was a very successful adverts man himself) and their women. The time was the Seventies. Private clubs, privte planes, private lives. But for all the sparkle of their lives there was in Neely's people a despair that could only be assauged (briefly) by sex. Preferably illicit sex. Betrayl sex. Men betrayed women and women betrayed men. It was Jackie Collins only for real.

Plastic is a snapshot of a certain period, the Seventies when the Fortune 500 dudes wore sideburns and faux hippie clothes and flashed the peace sign almost as often as they flashed their American Express Gold cards. Johny Carson hipsters. The counter culture co-opted by the pigs.

The end is a stunner, which is why I can say little about the plot. Neely knew what he was doing. Watching him work was always a pleasure.

Blood on The Mink; Texas Wind

Excuse me while I back into this review.

By my strictly scientific calculation I first read Robert Silverberg in late 1955 or early 1956. In those days I was eagerly buying all four of the science fiction magazines aimed at deranged adolescents who preferred Bug Eye Monsters and Brass Bra'd Beauties to reality.
Amazing and Fantastic from Ziff-Davis and Imagination and Imaginative Tales from Bill Hamling, these were my mainstays. The latter, especially its short lead "novels," were, as I recall slightly more sophisticated than the stories in the Ziff-Davis books. But probably not by much.

Silverberg and his sometime collaborator Randall Garrett were everywhere in sf under various names. From the slam-bang action of the aforementioned mags to the more sophisticated Astounding and (to me the best of them all) the wry prescient Galaxy. And as we now know Silverberg was also writing for men's magazines and numerous Manhunt imitators. Plus many other markets even Silverberg may not remember. In 1959 or so he began writing one or two or three soft core novels a month. You know in his spare time.

Even in his action adventure mode his sf often showed an intelligence and a humanity not found in the work of his competitors. He was fascinated by political systems and their effects on people and used his tales to extrapolate and demonstrate where some our of contemporary systems were headed.

As early as 1959 his work started to foreshadow the genius (yes, genius) that was to appear full born in the Sixties. The genius that survives today.

I mention all this to salute one of the great writers of our time and to give you a sense of how excited I was to get my hands on a copy of Blood On The MInk, Silverberg's magazine novel written for TRAPPED, another faux Manhunt mag that went out of business just before it was to publish Mink.

It was well worth the wait. The short novel plus the two short stories round out a collection that has the energy of an assault. The two main tropes in Mink very much reflect the times--stories about undercover agents were popular as were agents who posed as other people. (Harry Whittington must have done four or five of them.) Both tropes were frequently seen on TV. But Silverberg's storytelling powers make both of them his own.

I've always imagined that Silverberg was a quick study when surveying a given market. Mink has everything--va-voom blondes, sadistic thugs, plot twists every ten pages and ample supplies of sex and violence--plus actual suspense. You really do wonder where our undercover Federal Agent is taking us. He's trying to to break up a counterfeit ring by locating not only the exquisite plates but also the man who made them.

As with his action sf there is a hard intelligence working here. His contrast of bad queer money and good queer money is fascinating as is the means through which such money is put into the system. His knowledge lends the story a realism it wouldn't have otherwise.

You'll have a great time with this. For duffers it'll bring back the real Fifties perfectly. And for readers of every age it'll be a great good time.

-----------------------------TEXAS WIND

We all have books we go back to several times over the years. For me one of the finest private eye novels I've ever read is Texas Wind by James Reasoner. It is a virtually perfect utterance, a story of a man, an era and a place.

While the set-up is familiar, "a missing daughter job" as Hammett once began a story of his, the op here, named Cody, gives us a Texas I'd never seen before and a private eye who might be the guy you have coffee with at the donut shop counter a couple days a week. The reality is what makes the dark surprises of the book stay real. A real person is telling you the story.

Texas is too often writ so large it becomes comic without meaning to be. James' social observations are worth the price alone. My favorite is a scene where Cody, a Southerner, wonders about a man because he's a Northerner. I've seen this written so many times by Yankees that it was a jolt realizing that it cuts both ways. I loved it.

Filled with exciting incident and humane observation, Texas Wind is one of those books that should be read by everyone who wants to write a mystery novel. This will show you how.

Livia Washburn, James' talented and lovely writer wife, is also a talented and lovely artist. Who knew? Here's her new cover for Texas Wind.


New Cover for Texas Wind