Ed Gorman's Blog, page 195

Lee Goldberg TOP SUSPENSE GROUP WATCH ME DIE

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READ THE FIRST CHAPTER FREE- at end of article http://topsuspense.blogspot.com/

TOP SUSPENSE GROUP BLOG

WEDNESDAY, JULY 13, 2011

Sizzling Summer Reads - WATCH ME DIE

Lee Goldberg's Watch Me Die, one of the most acclaimed PI novels in years and a finalist for best novel by the Private Eye Writers of America, is now available as an ebook and in a new paperback edition.
"As dark and twisted as anything Hammett or Chandler ever dreamed up...." Kirkus, Starred Review


"Approaching the level of Lawrence Block is no mean feat, but Goldberg succeeds with this engaging PI novel." Publishers Weekly


Harvey Mapes is a 26-year-old security guard who spends his nights in a guard shack outside a gated community in Southern California, reading detective novels, watching reruns, and waiting for his life to finally start... which happens when Cyril Parkus, one of the wealthy residents, asks Harvey to follow his beautiful wife Lauren.
The lowly security guard jumps at the opportunity to fulfill his private eye fantasies and use everything he's learned from Spenser, Magnum, and Mannix. But things don't exactly go according to the books...or the reruns. As Harvey fumbles and stumbles through his first investigation, he discovers that the differences between fiction and reality can be deadly.


(This book was previously released under the title The Man With the Iron-On Badge)


A SAMPLING OF THE ACCLAIM FOR "WATCH ME DIE"


"A wonderfully fresh voice in the mystery genre, Goldberg will delight fans of Janet Evanovich and Robert Crais," - Rick Riordan, author of "The Throne of Fire."


"Great concept and great execution...it's funny, thrilling, and quirky, with a completely satisfying ending you won't see coming. --Barry Eisler, New York Times bestselling author of "The Last Assassin"

"Lee Goldberg is known for his cleverness and sense of humor. He shows how a masterful plotter can take a character in a comic situation and lead him into unexpected danger in an eye-blink," --Thomas Perry, New York Times bestselling author of "The Informant."



"Lee Goldberg bravely marches into territory already staked out by some fierce competition--Donald Westlake, Lawrence Block, the early Harlan Coben--and comes out virtually unscathed." The Chicago Tribune

"Goldberg has a knack for combining just the right amount of humor and realism with his obvious love for the PI genre and his own smart ass sensibilities. [...]A terrific read. Goldberg is the real deal and should be on everyone's must read list." Crimespree Magazine

"Likeable loser Harvey Mapes is my new favorite private eye," —Victor Gischler, Edgar-nominated author of "Gun Monkeys"

"More than any other element in the book, it's Harvey's voice you'll remember. There's a workaday universality to it that gives the novel its wit and insight and truth," Ed Gorman, founder of Mystery Scene Magazine and author of "Blood Money."

"A quick, fun read with a satisfying and unexpected ending. Harvey Mapes is a hero I hope we see in a sequel." -- Phillip M

THE FIRST CHAPTER...Go here http://topsuspense.blogspot.com/

Bob Levinson; Book Show

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY STARRED REVIEW:

A Rhumba in Waltz Time
Robert S. Levinson. Five Star, $25.95 (350p) ISBN 978-1-4328-2497-6
Depression-era Hollywood forms the backdrop for this sharp-edged noir from Levinson (The Traitor in Us All). In 1933, Chris Blanchard's career as an LAPD detective comes to an abrupt end after he refuses to look the other way when his colleagues victimize a prostitute. Five years later, Blanchard undertakes "special problems" for the MGM studio. One such problem involves actress Marie MacDaniels, who comes to his apartment drunk late one night, distraught over having shot her actor husband, Day Covington, and hands over the murder weapon. When Blanchard visits the scene of the crime, he quickly finds evidence clearing MacDaniels and sends her into hiding while he looks into the matter. That crime proves to be but the tip of a very violent iceberg. Photographer to the stars Otto Rothman also ends up dead, and mobster Bugsy Siegel and some American Nazi sympathizers appear to be behind some of the untimely deaths. Blanchard, a character Chandler would recognize, deserves a series of his own. (Aug.)
Reviewed on: 06/27/2011


----------------------------------------------------
COME TO THE BOOK SHOW!
The 23rd annual
New York City Collectible Paperback &
Pulp Fiction Expo,
our big 2011 book show will be held
Sunday, October 16, 2011,
at the Holiday Inn on 57th Street in NYC in the BIG ROOM.

A limited number of 6' and 8' tables available but email for tables asap, as they go fast.

Admission: Preview (8am) $10; General (9am - 3pm) $5; After 3pm FREE

Guest authors and artists so far include:
CHARLES ARDAI, award-winning crime author and editor of the Hard Case Crime series.

LAWRENCE BLOCK, legendry mystery and crime author, creator of the Matt Scudder series & more!

ED BALCOURT, renown artist rep who was a key player in paperback cover art and pb publishing.

LINTON BALDWIN, Lion Books crime author, who wrote Lion classic noir, Sinner's Game.

MARCUS BOAS, fabulous fantasy artist who will display some of his wonderful paintings!

CAROL BUGGE, author of many fine mystery novels and some fine Sherlockian pastiches!

ELAINE DUILLO, famous cover artist and the "Queen of the Romance Paperback!"

RON GOULART, master storyteller, SF writer, pulp and comic book scholar.

JACK FARAGASSO: Famous vintage paperback cover artists and master illustrator!

C.J. HENDERSON, hard-boiled crime, fantasy and horror author.

MORRIS HERSHMAN, original Manhunt author and also Midwood Books author as Arnold English.

MARVIN KAYE, famous fantasy author and renown Sherlockian anthologist and editor of SHMM.

SANDY KOSSIN, vintage paperback cover artist and classic master illustrator!

RON LESSER: Classic paperback book cover artist and master illustrator.

ANNETTE & MARTIN MEYERS, mystery author couple, who also write as Maan Meyers.

S.J. ROZAN, crime author and creator of the famous Lydia Chin series and much more.

NORMAN SPINRAD, legendry science fiction author.

JASON STARR, author of many excellent crime and noir thrillers.

STAN TRYBULSKI, hard-boiled crime author with many fine books to his credit.

KEN WISHNIA, hard crime as well as historical mystery author.

Guest signing times will be posted on our website, www.gryphonbooks.com and also on the Program given out at the day of the show.

PLEASE SEND THIS EMAIL TO YOUR BOOK COLLECTOR FRIENDS!

New Vonnegut collection

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FROM NEW YORK MAGAZINE

Apocalypse Now and Forever
A new collection of Kurt Vonnegut's early work shows him to be the world's sweetest man of war.

By Jacob Rubin Published Jul 10, 2011

(Photo: Israel Shenker/New York Times Co./Getty Images)
A cranky ostrich in a rumpled suit, Kurt Vonnegut might seem an odd fit for the staid Library of America. (His advice to young writers? "Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.") But Vonnegut, like his hero Mark Twain, has always been something of a paradox—a beloved grouch, a man who has a bad thing to say about almost everybody but for whom no one has a cross word.

Scratch many a satirist and you find a wounded optimist still hoping to chip away at the world with the pick of his derision. In Vonnegut, though, one rarely senses the reformer's zeal that energizes so much satire, from Swift to South Park. Doom, in his novels, is a given. The foreshadowing is all but lacquered on, so that early in Cat's Cradle the end of the world is guaranteed. In Slaughterhouse-Five, characters' fates are often meted out the moment we meet them. "There are almost no characters in this story," Vonnegut writes in the novel, "and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces."

Slaughterhouse was an unlikely book—an earnest war novel tricked out with pomo special effects and framed with a loopy sci-fi conceit. And it transformed Vonnegut, a genre-fiction workhorse and WWII vet, into an even unlikelier hero of the counterculture. Almost instantly, the novel joined Catch-22 (1961) and V (1963) in the rabidly dog-eared, passed-from-friend-to-friend canon of literary cult objects. Like "Catch-22," its immortal refrain "so it goes" seeped into the national parlance, even rising to the level of protest mantra. (To appreciate how weird this is, compare it with "Yes, we can.") Today, his influence is so ubiquitous as to be invisible, though carbon traces can be detected in the work of any writer who deploys earnestness under cover of irony. And as far as I can tell, Vonnegut remains one of the very few socially mandatory reading experiences of high school.

for the rest go here:
http://nymag.com/print/?/arts/books/r...[image error]

Marty Greenberg, R.I. P.

As many of you know my best friend Marty Greenberg died two weeks ago. I've been trying to write about him ever since but II'm not satisfied with anything we've done. When John D. MacDonald died (Marty had done a few books with him) we published a trade paperback (The Mystery Scene Reader) dedicated to him. Everybody from Donald Westlake to Charles Willeford wrote short pieces about what JDM's work had meant to them. Marty and I were big fans of his novel A Deadly SShade of Gold and in particular a moving passage he wrote about death. That passage seems appropriate here:

"It is so damn strange about the dead. Life is like a big ship, all lights and action and turmoil, chugging across a dark sea. You have to drop the dead ones over the side. An insignificant little splash, and the ship goes on. For them the ship stops at that instant. For me Sam was back there somewhere, further behind the ship every day. I could look back and think of all the others I knew, dropped all the way back to the horizon and beyond, and so much had changed since they were gone and they wouldn't know the people aboard, know the rules of the deck games. The voyage saddens as you lose them. You wish they could see how things are. You know that inevitably they'll drop you over the side, you and everyone you have loved and known, little consecutive splashes in the silent sea, while the ship maintains its unknown course. "

TEN CURRENT CELEBRITIES I CAN LIVE WITHOUT-

Ed here: I know I'm a cranky old bastard who gets too easily annoyed but for what it's worth:

TEN CURRENT CELEBRITIES I COULD LIVE WITHOUT-

1. Nancy Grace - as ugly outside as in
2. Jennifer Aniston - cute but dull. Lisa Kudrow's Showtime show was infinitely braver and wittier anything Aniston will ever do.
3. Lawrence O'Donnell - I liked him till he turned drama queen. Enough already.
4. Gwyneth Paltrow - started out strong but devolved into this spoiled whining heiress married to one of the biggest assholes in rock and role. Her mother Blythe Danner is far more talented and sexy.
5. The cast of Modern Family. I keep being told how good it is but I can't get through a single episode.
6. Any political talk show host who puts Mike Allen on his/her program. He is the single dumbest (and I'm including Fox) talking head of all time, the plutocrat's lap dog.
7. Zach Galifianakis--I know, right now he's St. Zach. But he's basically a one-trick pony and the pony is getting real tired.
8. All overpaid sports stars who break the law.
9. Diane Sawyer. Maybe just because she worked for Henry Kissinger but also maybe because she comes off like The Seven Sisters Do The News.
10. Lady Ga-Ga--yes she can really sing but all the artsy -craftsy stagecraft is getting tedious. She may be able to stretch her fifteen minutes to seventeen but not eighteen.

John D. Macdonald rejects his rejecters

Ed here: JDM always told the story that he had enough rejection slips to paper his walls. But he decided at one point to let the editors know that he too had the power of rejection. This is from Galleycat.

AUTHORS, WRITER RESOURCES
John D. MacDonald Wrote Form Rejection Letter To Magazines

By Jason Boog on July 6, 2011 11:58 AM

The Letters of Note blog has published a letter from the late hardboiled writer John D. MacDonald.

Later in his career, the novelist referenced his past as an aspiring author and wrote a satirical rejection letter to magazine editors who wanted to publish his work. This one is for all the GalleyCat readers who have a stack of rejection letters at home (just like this editor). Don't give up hope–someday you could be forced to reject an editor!

Here's an excerpt from the letter: "We would like to write a personal letter to each and every one of you, but the great mass of stories submitted from this office makes such a procedure impractical. Surely you can understand that! If by any chance we have been unable to use your magazine, don't be discouraged. It may not be due to any particular deficiency in the magazine, but instead to the fact that we haven't recently been writing the type of THING that you use. Try again, won't you?" (Via Reddit)

Mystery Scene Summer Issue #120

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July Greetings
Summer Issue #120, Colin Cotterill on Puckoon and Spike Milligan, More Summer Recommendations, Sony Reader Giveaway.

Hi everyone,

Our jumbo Summer Issue #120 is in the mail and it's a corker!

First we talk to Karin Slaughter, whose gripping, graphic Georgia police procedurals take as their theme violence, particularly violence against women, and its repercussions. Then Jeff Abbott tells us about his new international thriller series featuring a young CIA agent.

Mickey Spillane would often proclaim: "I'm not an author. I'm a writer." In "The Murders in Memory Lane," Lawrence Block ponders the subtleties of that statement - with a little help from the French author Colette.

When the nine-year-old Megan Abbott first saw the classic Rita Hayworth film Gilda, she distinctly remembers thinking "This is what life is." Some years and a literary career of her own later, she reconsiders in her essay "Bar Nothing."

Decades after the Golden Age of Mystery ended, James Anderson's lighthearted puzzles both parodied and paid homage to classic tropes of yesteryear. The Affair of the Bloodstained Egg Cosy, The Affair of the Thirty-Nine Cufflinks and The Affair of the Mutilated Mink are just as delightful as their titles suggest - and they have no bigger fan than Jon L. Breen who discusses them in this issue.

Figuring out if a book is a true first edition is often surprisingly complicated - but vital. As Nate Pederson notes in his column, "Properly identifying a subtle variant in a printing of an edition can turn a $5 thrift store find into a $150 collectable book."

Also in this issue, Katherine Hall Page discusses the enduring appeal of Mary Stewart's novels of romantic suspense, and Kevin Burton Smith looks at William Ard, whose untimely death in 1960 robbed the genre of a potential hardboiled master. We also chat with Juliet Blackwell, whose Lily Ivory mysteries about a young witch in San Francisco offer spells, demons, romance...and some interesting thoughts on a gifted woman finding her place in the world.

Over the summer, we will be publishing more original articles, book reviews, and commentary at the MS Website. We'll also be active on Twitter and Facebook,
so do come join us.

Sincerely,
Kate Stine
Editor-in-Chief

THE BOLERO OF ANDI ROWE by Toni Plummer

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Toni Margarita Plummer is a former editor of mine so when I heard that her first collection of short stories had just been published I wanted to take a look. I'm not sure what I expected but what I got is one of the most original and elegantly told collection of literary stories I've read in years.

THE BOLERO OF ANDI ROWE charts the Rowe family and its lives in the San Gabriel Valley. We see three generations and the disparate ways they respond to life in Los Angeles. The images and the feeling of everyday life in the Latino community are presented with powerful simplicity and memorable detail.

I especially liked the stories with the sisters Andi and Olivia. In "Olivia's Roses" we see the difficulty she is having wither boyfriend Anthony, a strange teen the family disapproves of. Especially her grandmother. It is sad, funny, wise and takes us inside the dynamics of a close Latino family.

One of the finest stories, "The Desert in Green," gives us a look at illegal immigration that offers poetry instead of punditry. Plummer's ability to bring characters to ambiguous life--no easy answers here--and to play these lives off against her place descriptions (perfect indelible descriptions of city and countryside alike) make her stories readable again and again.

In "All The Sex is West" Plummer enriches the undertone of sexuality inherent in her tales of Andi and Olivia. Here we have the singles bars scene and the icy temptations of stranger danger. Plummer goes for it here--sex, droll and astute perception, humor, and the foibles of trying to find a friend or a lover in transit, whichever comes first. This one is like a Charlie Parker riff.

Toni Plummer is on her way. These stories will be with me for a long, long time. You know, the way real literature always is.

What happened to John Carpenter?

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Ed here: As a John Carpenter fan I was eager to read this. I don't agree with all of it but I think he does try to post a reasonable understanding of Carpenter's virtues and shortcomings.

Horror-meister John Carpenter's mediocre comeback
The director of "Halloween" and "The Thing" is back -- with another middling spookfest. Where did things go wrong?
BY ANDREW O'HEHIR

Much of the coverage of John Carpenter's new film, "The Ward" -- or rather "John Carpenter's The Ward," as some of the P.R. material distressingly insists -- revolves around the idea that the legendary horror-meister gets to take a mulligan on this one. Hell, the guy made "Halloween" and "The Thing" (or so the argument seems to go), and we're grateful to have him back making features after a decade-long hiatus, even if the result is a mediocre mental-hospital shocker starring Amber Heard that feels an awful lot like a low-budget knockoff of Zack Snyder's "Sucker Punch."

I'd be happy to go along with that argument, if it made any sense. Unfortunately, "The Ward" fits entirely too well in Carpenter's oeuvre, which is consistently inconsistent. There's no disputing Carpenter's place in the history of horror movies, or his status as a genuine pioneer of American independent filmmaking. When somebody challenged me, a year or so ago, to one of those Facebook exercises where you name the 10 directors most important to you, right off the top of your head without cogitating or Googling, Carpenter made the list. (Along with Wes Craven and Paul Verhoeven and Michael Haneke and David Cronenberg and Tarkovsky and ... let's not get sidetracked, but it's a cool little self-administered personality test.) And it's not like "The Ward" is unbelievably terrible or anything. Hell, go see it, or better yet watch it on pay-per-view: It's a competent horror flick with creepy wide-screen atmospherics, a decent cast and a thoroughly worn-out premise, better than 75 percent of the genre.

for the rest go here:
http://www.salon.com/books/horror_fic...

The Seventh Victim

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Even if he was overlooked in his lifetime Val Lewton's horror and dark suspense films are not only remembered today but also celebrated. His movies changed horror fiction from the more obvious monsters teeming on Universal's lot to the subtler and darker insinuations we can still see in the horror films of our own time.

There's now a collection of Lewton's finest films available on DVD. In this age of the auteur you might make the assumption that Lewton directed the films but he didn't. He was the producer.

'I'll let Wikipedia do the heavy lifting here: "In 1942, Lewton was named head of the horror unit at RKO studios, at a salary of US$250 per week. As head of the B-horror unit he would have to follow three rules: each film had to come in under a US$150,000 budget, each film was to run under seventy-five minutes, and Lewton's supervisors would supply the title for each film.

"Lewton's first production was Cat People, released in 1942. The film was directed by Jacques Tourneur, who subsequently also directed I Walked With a Zombie and The Leopard Man for Lewton. Made for US$134,000, the film went on to earn nearly US$4 million, and was the top moneymaker for RKO that year. This success enabled Lewton to make his next films with relatively little studio interference, allowing him to avoid the sensationalist material suggested by the film titles he was given, instead focusing on ominous suggestion and themes of existential ambivalence.

"Lewton always wrote the final draft of the screenplays for his films, but avoided an on-screen co-writing credit except in two cases, The Body Snatcher and Bedlam, for which he used the pseudonym "Carlos Keith", which he had previously used on the novel, Where the Cobra Sings. After Jacques Tourneur left RKO's horror film unit, Lewton gave first directing opportunities to Robert Wise and Mark Robson."

Lewton was a sophisticated man familiar with all the arts and it was this intelligence that informed his films. I've watched most of his movies many times and I never get tired of them. They work as classic dark tales of vengeance and retribution and, most of all, as portals into terrifying worlds we only reluctantly enter. There are always moments in these pictures when Hitchcockian shocks slams us up against the wall (he revere Hitchcock). For me there are more of these shocks in "The Seventh Victim" than in any of the other Lewton films.

Victim is Lewton's noir. Occasionally his films had lyrical, almost ethereal moments but not here. The plot details the plight of young Mary who is forced to leave an upscale boarding school because her older sister has not been paying her bills. Mary goes to New York in search of her sister Jacqueline who owned a profitable cosmetics company. But when she reaches the company she discovers that her sister has sold it to another woman and had not been heard of in some time. All too soon a shrink who'd been dealing with Mary—a sinister figure in his own right—relates that Jacqueline has taken up with some strange friends.

To say more about the story from this point I'd have to include spoilers. Story and style are one. Most of the city scenes are ominous and are Germanic in their dense shadow and faintly heard sounds. Young Kim Hunter, who went on to many other fine performances but had a troubled passage in Hollywood, is perfect as the wary naïf desperate to connect with her sister. And to protect her. She fears that her sister has been harmed in some way.

With the exception of a dozen scenes or so the tone is grim, even in spots morbid. This is a film about nothing less than death, about the essence and meaning of death itself. In the last few minutes of the picture we're presented with an image that I remembered exactly from my childhood when I first saw it in a second-run house after the big war. In some ways it's a bitter and brutal philosophical affirmation of the movie's theme. This is what you'll find in the city, it says, in the shadowy towers of privilege; this is extinction.

A number of critics consider this a prequel to "Cat People". Some consider it a sequel to Lewton's "Cat People." The latter makes no sense to me at all. But then we know how critics are, don't we?