Ed Gorman's Blog, page 18

Forgotten Books: Lemons Never Lie by Richard Stark

Forgotten Books: Lemons Never Lie by Richard Stark


There are so many twists, turns, starts and stops in Lemons Never Lie by Donald E. Westlake as Richard Stark that the novel becomes a kind of a crimonious picaresque filled with mugs, thugs, killers, victims and Parker's redoutable thespian friend, Alan Grofiled. There's also a lot of notably brutal violence.
The book begins with Grofield visiting Vegas to partake of a robbery that will give him the money to survive one more season in his summer theater. Grofield, in case you didn't know, is a "purist" when it comes to acting, his chosen profession. No movies or television for him. Stage only. But it takes his other profession, robbery, to support his theater. Only his long-supportive wife understands how hard he works at both careers.
A man named Myers has set up a robbery plan and has called in amateurs to help him. With the exception of a man named Caithcart and a dangerous man named Dan Leach, the group is a zero. As is Myers. Now Myers, who speaks with a boarding school accent, is one of the great villains in Westlake's world. He is a true sociopathic murderer; a serial killer of a kind. Grofield and Leach decide against working with him.
This is the set-up. There's an early twist that lets us know just how nasty Myers is. And then the various adventures start. Grofield resembles his friend (and fellow robber) Parker only occasionally. For instance, he loves chit-chat, feels sorry even for a guy who tries to kill him and lets another live that (as reader) you know should be killed on the spot, slowly and joyously.
There's also a lot of witty humor. Grofield gets into the damnedest conversations with people. Once in a while you may even forget you're reading a crime novel. Westlake has a great time riffing on all the cliche exchanges you read in most crime fiction. At a couple of point Grofield starts sounding like a TV shrink.
Lemons Never Lie is Westlake at his very best. While there's a screwball comedy-feel to some of the misadventures, the unrelenting violence reminds readers that the Richard Stark is the master of the hardboiled. The masterful plotting, the wry way the genre cliches are turned inside out, and the earnestness and humanity of Alan Grofield make this a pleasure from page one to the unexpected ending.

Great AV Club Interview with Tom Selleck

The AV Club website has come up with this cool way to do a sort of career overview with actors. Here's a very good one with Tom Selleck. I'll always be grateful to him for Lance White. http://www.avclub.com/article/tom-sel...



The

YESTERYEAR’S CRIME: “SUPERCOP” (CRITERION LASER DISC, 1997)

YESTERYEAR’S CRIME: “SUPERCOP” (CRITERION LASER DISC, 1997)
by Fred BlosserLife moves at warp speed these days.  Almost overnight, cutting-edge in arts and technology becomes old-school.  
It seems like only yesterday that the Hong Kong movies of Jackie Chan and John Woo were the big new flavor in action cinema, and laser disc was the medium of choice for upscale home theater.  In reality, it’s more like yesteryear, and at that, nearly two decades of yesteryears.  
How many of today’s kids under 20 would you have to ask before you found one who’s seen a Jackie Chan film?  How many have even heard of laser disc, let alone loaded one of those unwieldy LP-sized platters into an equally clunky player?
These nostalgic if chilling thoughts occurred to me when I browsed through an old issue of “Mystery Scene” and came across a review I’d written back in the day.  The topic was Jackie Chan, and more specifically, the availability of Jackie’s Hong Kong-made, martial-arts police movies on U.S. digital home video.  At the time I wrote the review in late 1998, laser disc was already in defensive posture against the rapid growth of the more affordable, more physically convenient DVD format.  By the time it appeared in print in 2000, DVD had taken over the digital market.  Shortly, it would supplant VHS as the dominant home-video product.  
In the review, I sorted out the Chan titles then on American DVD from those that remained available domestically only on laser.  Most of it is badly outdated now.  However, I believe that one observation remains true: on authorized American VHS and DVD editions (and more recently, Blu-ray), you can only find Jackie’s arguably best HK police caper, “Police Story 3,” directed by Stanley Tong, in the dubbed, edited version released to U.S. theaters by Miramax’s Dimension Films in 1996 as “Supercop.” 
For U.S. moviegoers, Dimension deleted some 10 minutes of the original HK version, inserted spastic opening credits, replaced the original Cantonese voice track with an English dub, and added new music tracks, including hip-hop in some scenes and “Kung Fu Fighting” over the end blooper reel.  “Kung Fu Fighting” was an OK Tom Jones remake, not the vastly superior, wonderfully cheesy 1974 Carl Douglas original.
A few months after the theatrical release, “Supercop” moved to American VHS and DVD on Buena Vista Home Entertainment, and to laser disc from the prestigious Criterion Collection.  Of them all, the only American edition that included the original Cantonese soundtrack as an audio option, and the only one that included the five scenes excised by Dimension, was the 1997 laser disc.    
As I noted in the “Mystery Scene” review, Jackie’s character in the movie was Officer Kevin Chan of the Hong Kong Police Department (in the HK original, Chan Ka-Kui), continued over from the first two “Police Story” films.  Kevin is teamed with a Mainland Chinese officer, Inspector Hannah (in the original Cantonese track, Inspector Wah), to infiltrate  an international drug cartel led by kingpin Chaibat (Ken Tsang).  To do so, they have to bust Chaibat’s brother, Panther (Wah Yuen), out of a Chinese labor camp.  Then, accepted into the gang, they accompany the gangsters to Cambodia, where Chaibat closes a heroin deal, and after that to Malaysia.  In Kuala Lampur, the kingpin intends to break his wife out of jail before the authorities can force her to reveal the code to Chaibat’s offshore bank account.
Jackie is well matched with Michelle Yeoh (then billed as Michelle Khan) playing Hannah, and Maggie Cheung as Kevin’s sweetheart May.  Cheung’s character was also carried over from the two prior movies. There’s a rather simplistic but funny complication when May catches Kevin in Hannah’s company at a vacation resort in Kuala Lampur.  Not knowing that her boyfriend is on an undercover assignment, she assumes he’s cheating on her.  It’s the kind of contrivance that dates back at least as far as silent movies, if not to Shakespeare.  But Cheung is cute, the physical comedy is well timed by Tong, and the set-up isn’t much more primitive than the twists you’d see in a 2015 chick flick.
Yeoh, a truly awesome beauty, has wonderful comedy timing of her own, great rapport with Jackie, fluid grace in the martial arts fights, and remarkable gumption in doing many of her own stunts.  In one wince-inducing outtake in the blooper reel, Yeoh misses her grip as she drops onto a moving sports car, tumbling backward onto the street as car and camera speed away.  All of the action in the movie has this visceral immediacy, which movies largely have lost in the past decade with CGI effects and ADHD editing.    
It’s easy to guess why one scene from “Police Story 3” was removed in the editing as potentially offensive.  A snickering Chinese punk helps a couple of Caucasian teeny-boppers shoot up with heroin.  One of the girls dies -- offscreen -- from an overdose.  Chaibat suggests that the corpse be used to smuggle a cache of smack past customs.  “Waste utilization,” he cackles.  Even without this callous bit, the American cut retains enough gun mayhem and blood squibs to earn an “R” rating, a rarity in the Chan movies tooled for the U.S. market, which typically earned the family friendlier PG-13.
On the Criterion laser disc, the five deleted scenes were added at the end of the disc as a supplemental chapter, not re-integrated into the “Supercop” cut.  The laser disc also benefitted from appreciative back-sleeve notes by film critic Dave Kehr.  A 2009 DVD reissue under the Weinstein Brothers’ Dragon Dynasty label restored the Cantonese voice track as an audio option, along with supplemental interviews, “making of” shorts, and an audio commentary by a kung fu movie expert, but the deleted scenes remained MIA.  Reviews suggest that a more recent Blu-ray edition from Echo Bridge Home Entertainment lacks any supplements, not even a Cantonese voice track.  
So, for a full package, the obsessive collector may want to get the 2009 DVD and the Criterion Collection laser disc (available cheap from online dealers), assuming he has one of the antique players lying around.  Another option -- ordering the original “Police Story 3” on Blu-ray or DVD from import dealers.  Online marketing has made it tremendously easier for U.S. collectors to obtain overseas videos than 20 years ago.

Cinemax Orders Pilot Based on George R.R. Martin’s Gory Werewolf Novella

Cinemax Orders Pilot Based on George R.R. Martin’s Gory Werewolf Novella MOZE HALPERIN OCTOBER 12, 2015 10:46 AM SHARE TWEET [image error]
Ed here: This is such a fine piece of work I reread it every year or so.This is cutting edge horror fiction even years after its first appearance.  (BTW: I apologize for all the post glitches. I've spent several hundred dollars trying to fix my computer since the two hacks but there are still so many problems. Obviously.)HBO clearly made one of the best decisions in the company’s history by beginning to develop Game of Thrones nearly a decade ago. Now that the show itself rests atop the zeitgeist’s throne, the network’s sister channel, Cinemax, seems aware of how much they’d  benefit from the power of the name George R.R. Martin: they’ve ordered a pilot based on his werewolf-centric novella, The Skin Trade — first published in the 1989 horror compilation, Night Visions 5. (It appeared alongside works by Stephen King and Dan Simmons, and went on to win the 1989 World Fantasy award for Best Novella.)The novella follows a private detective named Randi Wade, who begins having suspicions about the connection between the murder of her father 20 years ago and a series of recent, just-as-gross-as-anything-on-GOT murders in her town. The official synopsis says the story takes a turn “when a close friend suddenly becomes a target,” leading Randi to be “quickly pulled into a dark underworld where monsters exist and prey on the living.” EW reportsthat it’s being adapted by Once Upon a Time‘s co-executive producer, Kalinda Vazquez.Martin said on his blog that he always thought it could become a TV show or a film (while warning that, despite being excited about the news, this is Hollywood and there’s always a possibility a pilot will never air). “Those of you who know the story of Doorways, my ill-fated ABC pilot from the early ’90s, may even recall that it was Skin Trade that I was actually trying to sell back in 1991, when I flew out to L.A. for a round of pitch meetings. So we’re a few decades late…” he wrote. He mentions how nearly a dozen TV writers were considered, and that Vazquez seemed, to him, the perfect fit to adapt his work:

Kalinda’s take on the story and the characters blew me away. She loves the story and the world, and really seems to get Willie and Randi, and her pitch to Cinemax was one of the most polished and professional I’ve ever heard. I love her enthusiasm, and look forward to working with her.

A Song of Ice and Fire devotees will be happy to hear that, despite this new project, he, too, is still just as devoted to the former. “And no,” he says, “While I would have loved to write the script and run the show myself myself, that was never really in the cards. I have this book to finish. You know the one.”Tags:A Song Of Ice And Fire, Cinemax, Game Of Thrones, George R.R. Martin, HBO, Kalinda Vazquez, The Skin Trade, Werewolf

CORRECTED: ARCHIE GOODWIN’S SHERLOCKIAN “CONTROVERSY”

MONDAY, OCTOBER 12, 2015ARCHIE GOODWIN’S SHERLOCKIAN “CONTROVERSY”



Ed here: Pic showed fine when I posted it but not so much as the day progressed. My apologies to Andy and blog readers.
Ed: Thought this piece about Rex Stout and Sherlock Holmes might be fun. The attached charcoal sketch is the very one that hung in Rex's office.

-Best Andy

A Special to Ed Gorman’s Blogfrom Andrew McAleer

ARCHIE GOODWIN’S 
SHERLOCKIAN “CONTROVERSY”

This “controversial” charcoal sketch of Sherlock Homes hung for many years in the High Meadow, Connecticut study of Rex Stout, where he wrote a majority of the Nero Wolfe stories.  The sketch was given to Rex’s authorized biographer John McAleer after Rex’s death on October 27, 1975 and has held a prominent spot in McAleer’s study since!  Sherlockian and Neronean fans will recall how Archie Goodwin mentions a picture of Sherlock Holmes hanging above his office desk located in Wolfe’s W. 35thStreet Brownstone.  While writing Rex’s biography, McAleer had occasion to ask Stout about the genesis of the Holmes picture during the following conversation:

McAleer:   Did Archie hang up the picture of Sherlock Holmes that is found over his desk, or did Wolfe put it there?
Stout:  I was a damn fool to do it. Obviously it’s always an artistic fault in any fiction to mention any other character in fiction. It should never be done. (Royal Decree:  Conversations with Rex Stout, John McAleer, Pontes Press – 1983 [p.52])
Stout may have been a bit hard on himself.  Or perhaps he found some fraternal need to cover for Goodwin.  In a June 14, 1955 letter to the Baker Street Journal, Stout clarified his helpful role in codifying Wolfe’s fight against crime.  Stout claimed he served merely as literary agent to Goodwin and was not privy to most of the day-to-day complexities within the brownstone.  Accordingly, the “artistic fault”—if indeed it was one—would fall on Goodwin – not Stout.  Regardless, Ed Gorman Blog devotees can now enjoy this satisfactory and rare glimpse of Sherlock Holmes’s W. 35th Street visit, where undoubtedly Wolfe consulted the great detective on various cases.  —Andrew McAleer

  1 Attached Images

ARCHIE GOODWIN’S SHERLOCKIAN “CONTROVERSY”

MONDAY, OCTOBER 12, 2015ARCHIE GOODWIN’S SHERLOCKIAN “CONTROVERSY”





thought this piece about Rex Stout and Sherlock Holmes might be fun. The attached charcoal sketch is the very one that hung in Rex's office.
-Best Andy
A Special to Ed Gorman’s Blogfrom Andrew McAleer

ARCHIE GOODWIN’S 
SHERLOCKIAN “CONTROVERSY”

This “controversial” charcoal sketch of Sherlock Homes hung for many years in the High Meadow, Connecticut study of Rex Stout, where he wrote a majority of the Nero Wolfe stories.  The sketch was given to Rex’s authorized biographer John McAleer after Rex’s death on October 27, 1975 and has held a prominent spot in McAleer’s study since!  Sherlockian and Neronean fans will recall how Archie Goodwin mentions a picture of Sherlock Holmes hanging above his office desk located in Wolfe’s W. 35thStreet Brownstone.  While writing Rex’s biography, McAleer had occasion to ask Stout about the genesis of the Holmes picture during the following conversation:

McAleer:   Did Archie hang up the picture of Sherlock Holmes that is found over his desk, or did Wolfe put it there?
Stout:  I was a damn fool to do it. Obviously it’s always an artistic fault in any fiction to mention any other character in fiction. It should never be done. (Royal Decree:  Conversations with Rex Stout, John McAleer, Pontes Press – 1983 [p.52])
Stout may have been a bit hard on himself.  Or perhaps he found some fraternal need to cover for Goodwin.  In a June 14, 1955 letter to the Baker Street Journal, Stout clarified his helpful role in codifying Wolfe’s fight against crime.  Stout claimed he served merely as literary agent to Goodwin and was not privy to most of the day-to-day complexities within the brownstone.  Accordingly, the “artistic fault”—if indeed it was one—would fall on Goodwin – not Stout.  Regardless, Ed Gorman Blog devotees can now enjoy this satisfactory and rare glimpse of Sherlock Holmes’s W. 35th Street visit, where undoubtedly Wolfe consulted the great detective on various cases.  —Andrew McAleer

  1 Attached Images

Stephen King set to conclude crime trilogy next summer

Stephen King set to conclude crime trilogy next summerfrom The Guardian
End of Watch, the final instalment in King’s trio of novels about a retired detective in pursuit of a multiple murderer, will be published in June 2016




 Taking the detective novel in ‘a sublimely powerful new direction’ ... Stephen King. Photograph: Francois Mori/AP
Alison FloodFriday 9 October 2015 09.38 EDTShare on PinterestShare on LinkedInShare on Google+Shares9930
Comments6 Save for laterStephen King will conclude his trilogy about retired detective Bill Hodges and multiple murderer Brady Hartsfield in a new novel, due out next summer.King’s publishers have announced that the final novel in the Hodges trilogy, End of Watch, will be published on 7 June 2016. It follows Mr Mercedes, in which Hartsfield killed eight people and ended up in a vegetative state in hospital, and Finders Keepers.



Finders Keepers by Stephen King – writers, beware your fansA psychopath’s literary obsession spells bad news for his favourite author – and for the teenager who discovers his unpublished works 
Read more
UK editor Philippa Pride at Hodder & Stoughton said End of Watch brings the trilogy “to a terrifying and poignant conclusion”, praising “the brilliant versatility of Stephen King’s writing as he takes the detective novel [in] a sublimely powerful new direction”.Hodges, who runs an investigation agency with the woman who put Hartsfield into hospital in Mr Mercedes, Holly Gibney, has continued to visit the murderer in Finders Keepers, not entirely convinced by his brain injury. In End of Watch, he and Holly take on a murder-suicide linked to the Mercedes massacre.“Foiled in his attempt to commit a second mass murder, Hartsfield is confined to a hospital brain injury unit in a seemingly unresponsive state. But all is not what it seems: Brady is able to influence both his physician and the hospital librarian to commit crimes in the outside world,” said Hodder. “Now, the technological genius has created a hypnotic electronic fishing game which compels users to commit suicide, and he is determined to target the three people who put him in hospital – Hodges and his sidekicks Holly and Jerome. Then he plans to initiate a suicide epidemic.”The first novel in the series, Mr Mercedes, is being developed for television by Sonar Entertainment. “When it comes to grabbing an audience by the throat and giving them no choice but to keep reading, King has no equal, and I challenge you not to finish this novel in one breathless sitting,” wrote author Michael Marshall Smith of the novel in the Guardian.

The new Coen Bros movie trailer--looks fantastic!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/h...

This reminds of an an old Black Mask WT Ballard novelette I read long time ago.

Grampa bragia' My granddaughter Reagan

Read more...
Read more...Washington freshman Reagan Gorman (left) races Cassidy Christopher of Cedar Falls during an early stage of the MVC Super Meet on Thursday in Waterloo. Gorman finished second. (MSR photo by Ken Gilchrist).Gorman excels as member of 'Team Jenks'Thu - 08 Oct  Written by Jim Ecker WATERL00 - Pound for pound, inch for inch, year for year, Reagan Gorman of Cedar Rapids Washington is the best distance runner in the Mississippi ValleyConference and perhaps the best in the state.The petite freshman finished a resounding second at the Mississippi Valley Conference Super Meet on Thursday at Byrnes Park in Waterloo by a scant sixseconds behind Iowa City High junior Mary Arch.Gorman, who measures 5-foot-2 and about 85 pounds, might have caught Arch if the 5K race had been a little longer. She was getting closer and closeras the race wound around the Irv Warren Golf Course.It's hard to believe a 14-year-old girl who is that small could have so much strength and energy, but Gorman has been running since was about 7 years old and excels in triathlons, a grueling event that combines running, swimming and biking.Gorman trains for the triathlon with "Team Jenks," a group of outstanding young athletes that features Linn-Mar senior Stephanie Jenks and is operated bythe Jenks family. Gorman placed 31st at the national triathlon meet in Westchester, Ohio, this August in the youth elite 13-to-15 age group and is the second-highest ranked triathlete in the state in her division.Share on facebookShare on twitterShare on myspaceShare on diggShare on rssShare on printShare on emailMore Sharing ServicesShareLast Updated on 

The great Jake Hinkson-Dorothy Malone

The great Jake Hinkson-Dorothy Malone



So the sexy librarian image begins here!The one scene that every film noir remembers Dorothy Malone for is her brief appearance in Howard Hawks’s 1946 adaptation of The Big Sleep.Private eye Philip Marlowe is investigating a phony bookshop that operates as the front for a pornography ring. He ducks into the legitimate book store across the street to see if the proprietress there can give him any info on her creepy neighbors. And who should he find except the prettiest girl in the world.

He questions her. Her hair is up and she’s wearing glasses—but she has that sexy librarian vibe, especially when she tells him, “You begin to interest me…vaguely.”She tells him what he needs to know about the creep next door. He starts to leave, but it’s raining outside and when she says, “It’s coming down pretty hard out there” something in her voice insinuates that she’s not interested in the weather.When she gives him the sexy librarian look again, he says, “You know, as it happens I have a bottle of pretty good rye in my pocket. I’d a lot rather get wet in here.”She flips the sign and lowers the shade, takes off her glasses and lowers her hair. “Looks like we’re closed for the rest of the afternoon.”And...fade to black.That, folks, is how you implied fornication in 1946.The scene is greatly expanded from Raymond Chandler’s source novel (Chandler’s Marlowe is far more sexually uptight—even repressed—than Hawks’s Marlowe). In keeping with the film’s freewheeling, let’s-just-be-entertaining ethos, the scene was included Hawks later said, “Just because the girl was so damn pretty.”


for the rest go here:
http://www.criminalelement.com/blogs/...
She was pushed into S