Ed Gorman's Blog, page 198

The Great Jack Davis

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Ed here: I likely became a fan of Jack Davis when I started reading Mad magazine in the early fifties. Davis went on to an enormous career in virtually every kind of commercial art. Drew Freidman has posted many of Davis pieces for TV Guide over the years. The site is well worth linking to. http://drewfriedman.blogspot.com/2011...

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New e Books: The Final Countdown by Joel Goldman

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Michael Connelly recommends Motion To Kill!

When two of his partners are killed, corruption, sex and murder fill trial lawyer Lou Mason's docket as he tracks the killer. Will Lou be the next victim? Find out in Motion to Kill.

From Joel Goldman:

The final countdown is on for the launch of the ebook edition of Motion To Kill!! In only 48 hours - absent any last second techno-glitches, my first self-published ebook will go live on Amazon and I can't wait!

Help make the launch rocket through the roof by going to my Amazon page and "Like" Motion To Kill and read the reviews (all 5 and 4 stars!) and click "Yes" on each one as a helpful review. Amazon loves these kinds of statistics and the more "Likes" and the more "Yes" clicks, the more Amazon will promote the book and the happier my wife will be!

And, if you prefer another format besides Kindle, you can order it right now on Smashwords!

Stay tuned! It's going to be a great week!

The William Conrad story

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Ed here: I was always a big fan of William Conrad. My first introduction to gritty westerns was his radio version of Gunsmoke back in the fifties. I have twenty of those episodes and have listened to all of them over the past two weeks. They were as grim as radio got and far grittier than the tv version, which he was too hefty to star in. And on Rocky and Bullwinkle he was as much fun in the narratation as the moose and squirrel were in the adventures. His series Cannon was a typically bland Quinn Martin production but his size if nothing else made it a bit different. TCM Movie Morlocks (great site) has a piece about his almost-ascent as a director of horror films. He'd directed a memorable western The Ride Back among other films and he proved to be good in this niche as well.

Movie Morlocks:

William Conrad: The Lost Master of Horror?

Posted by rhsmith on June 3, 2011

Short answer: no. But dig… in 1965, the hard-working Hollywood character actor (THE KILLERS, SORRY WRONG NUMBER, -30-), TV director-for hire (HAVE GUN – WILL TRAVEL, BAT MASTERSON, 77 SUNSET STRIP), producer (AN AMERICAN DREAM, THE COOL ONES, COUNTDOWN), radio voice of Marshal Matt Dillon before GUNSMOKE came to television, narrator of THE FUGITIVE ("Name: Richard Kimball, doctor of medicine. Destination: Death Row…"), commercial voiceover artist and indefatigable BULLWINKLE pitchman released three feature films, rat-a-tat-tat, between January and May. Well-remembered less by those who saw these first run than by the generation that caught up with them on TV, TWO ON A GUILLOTINE, MY BLOOD RUNS COLD and BRAINSTORM have been lauded by genre archivists and cult film aficionados for their individual merits but never, to my knowledge, have the three been considered as a body of work bearing the signature of a back lot auteur. All three have been brought to DVD under the aegis of the Warner Archive Collection, making a reappraisal not only long overdue but deucedly easy. And yet that's not my goal today. Today I want to discuss how Warners seemed primed to push William Conrad to the world as a fright-maker nonpareil, putting him on par with William Castle, the "King of the Gimmick." Press releases hawking BRAINSTORM said as much, putting wheels in motion to build for Conrad a new reputation. And then… nothing. He never directed another movie.

for the rest go here:

http://moviemorlocks.com/2011/06/03/w...

Paul Levine to Donate Proceeds from Sale of Legal Thriller to Children's Cancer Fund

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THURSDAY, JUNE 09, 2011

Paul Levine to Donate Proceeds from Sale of Legal Thriller to Children's Cancer Fund

We were delighted to receive an e-mail from crime novelist Paul Levine letting us know that he is once again providing the royalties from the sale one of his legal thrillers to the Four Diamonds Fund, which supports cancer treatment for kids at the Penn State Hershey Children's Hospital.

For a limited time, the 7th book in his Jake Lassiter series, Flesh & Bones, is available for just 99 cents. And by purchasing and downloading it, you're helping fund pediatric cancer research and treatment.

You can use these links to purchase the book: Kindle edition from Amazon.com, Nook Book edition from Barnes & Noble, or multiple ebook formats from Smashwords.

Last year, according to Paul, thousands of dollars were raised for the fund from the sale of To Speak for the Dead, the first book in the Jake Lassiter series. We were happy to support that effort as well, and are so pleased to know that it was such a success.

About Flesh & Bones: "I was sitting at the end of the bar sipping single-malt Scotch when I spotted the tall blond woman with the large green eyes and the small gray gun."

The next thing Jake Lassiter knows, the woman pumps three bullets into the man on the next barstool.

And Jake, the linebacker-turned-lawyer, has a new client.

She's stunning model Chrissy Bernhardt, and the dead man is her wealthy father. The defense? Chrissy claims that she's recently recovered repressed memories of having been sexually abused by her father. Jake wants to believe her but suspects that the memories were either implanted by a shady psychiatrist or fabricated by Chrissy herself. Complicating the situation, Jake falls for his client, clouding his judgment.

Is she an anguished victim or a cold-blooded killer? And what about her brother, who stands to inherit a fortune if Chrissy goes to prison? Jake wades into a quagmire of dirty water deals, big money, and family corruption, all leading to an explosive finale.[image error]

Black River Falls by Ed Gorman

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AVAILABLE NOW on Kindle $2.99


Who would want to kill a beautiful young woman like Alison...and why? But whatever happened, nineteen-year-old Ben swore that he would protect her. It hadn't been easy for Ben--the boy the other kids always picked on. But then Ben found Alison and at last things were going his way...

Until one day he learned a secret so ugly that his entire life was changed forever. A secret that threatened to destroy everyone he loved. A secret as dark and dangerous as the tumbling waters of Black River Falls.

"A horrorific suspense novel that Alfred Hitchcock would have loved!" - Mystery Books

"The strongest suspense novel I've read all year!" -Gauntlet

"Gorman has the ability to hold the reader in the palm of his hand. In Black River Falls he demonstrates that he's a master storyteller." -A Shot in The Dark

FORGOTTEN BOOKS: THE LAST MATCH by David Dodge

FORGOTTEN BOOKS: THE LAST MATCH by David Dodge

Dictionary: The word "picaresque" is taken from a form of satirical prose originating in Spain, depicting realistically and often humorously the adventures of a low-born, roguish hero living by his/her wits in a corrupt society.

This is the only word I can find to adequately describe THE LAST MATCH by David Dodge. In a winningly cynical voice, a young swindler tells us all about working scams in places as far flung as Cannes, Tangiers and Lima, among others. He is particularly deft with women.

Good to remember that Dodge was also a travel writer of considerable note, so the backdrops here are almost as vivid as the characters, who are mostly low-borns working their way downward reeking of sweat, booze and occasionally blood.
Dodge hangs a good deal of his tale on the romance between Curly and a fetching young woman of British royalty named Regina. She, unlike most other humans who trod the earth, seems to feel that Curly's soul is worth saving and she attacks this task with almost saintly (and sexy) determination.

I didn't care much about the story, but was won over completely by the high style of the prose, the incorrigible personality of the narrator and the unending list of badasses who appear along the various map points. This has the feel of a memoir rather than a novel, and that makes it all the more realistic.

I think you'd have to say that Dodge – who wrote this novel sometime in the early '70s even though this is its first publication – didn't have much interest in the usual tropes of genre thriller fiction. Graceful and sardonic writing seem his biggest fascination, a true world view with some gunfights, fist fights and bad ladies thrown in every once in a while to honor pulp expectations. I should note here that early in the first chapter, Dodge struts his stuff, introducing us to an attractive and appealing middle-aged woman who is using him as her current boy-toy. You know you're in the hands of a real writer when Dodge makes us like and even respect the woman. Not a cliché in sight. I knew right off I'd like book just because of its opening chapter.

His daughter Kendal Dodge Butler provides a loving, even endearing afterword about her father. He seems to be about what I expected: a man who had his darkest adventures early on and then settled into a respectable middle-aged family life that allowed him the leisure and luxury to pursue his writing where he got to polish up some of those old adventures and display his wide knowledge of cons and scams.
Buy it at Amazon.

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA AND CELEBRATED MYSTERY EXPERT OTTO PENZLER FORM A PUBLISHING PARTNERSHIP

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA AND CELEBRATED MYSTERY EXPERT
OTTO PENZLER FORM A PUBLISHING PARTNERSHIP
TO BRING CLASSIC AND ORIGINAL MYSTERY AND CRIME TITLES TO E

Penzler Launches MysteriousPress.com to Acquire Classic and Original Mystery and Crime Titles, Which Open Road Will Digitally Publish and Market

Launch Ebooks Include Titles from James Ellroy, Charles McCarry, Ross Thomas, Joseph Wambaugh, Thomas H. Cook, Colin Dexter, Donald E. Westlake and Others

(New York, NY June 6, 2011) Open Road Integrated Media Inc. (www.openroadmedia.com), a digital publisher and multimedia content company, and Otto Penzler, the founder of the Mysterious Press and the Mysterious Bookshop, announced today a new digital publishing partnership to bring classic mystery and crime books to E. Penzler is launching MysteriousPress.com to acquire a diverse range of mystery and crime titles which Open Road will digitally publish and market. The announcement was made by Open Road Cofounder and CEO Jane Friedman and Otto Penzler.

Penzler is one of the most respected experts, editors, booksellers, and publishers in the crime and mystery genre and will utilize his experience and relationships to build a catalog of backlist and original titles from renowned writers.

Friedman said: "Otto Penzler's incredible reputation, vision, and experience and Open Road's powerful marketing platform are the perfect combination to bring a wide range of classic and original crime and mystery titles to E. Otto has already acquired an exciting launch list which complements our crime and mystery catalog and we are eager to digitally publish these and future books."

"Having created the Mysterious Press, a traditional print publisher, in 1975," Penzler said, "it is thrilling to begin this new venture with Jane Friedman, one of the most successful and brilliant publishers I've ever known. She and her team are already acknowledged as the most creative and innovative publisher in this vibrant field. I am confident that the strengths of Open Road and MysteriousPress.com will mesh perfectly."

Open Road will work with Penzler to digitally market the ebooks. Open Road will produce marketing videos about the authors, books, and the themes that they explore. These videos, along with other curated and originally produced marketing materials, will be distributed though Open Road's online platform and syndicated to online content partners.
A number of MysteriousPress.com titles will be available early in the summer and numerous others are in the pipeline. In addition to the authors mentioned above, such iconic titles as James Grady's Six Days of the Condor, Mark McShane's Séance on a Wet Afternoon, and Ellery Queen's The Roman Hat Mystery will soon be made available, as will original, never-before-published titles by Charles McCarry, Nelson DeMille, Lorenzo Carcaterra, and C.J. Box.
This announcement builds on Open Road's growing mystery and crime list, which already includes renowned authors such as Lawrence Block, Ruth Rendell, and Jonathan King.
About Open Road Integrated Media
Open Road Integrated Media is a digital publisher and multimedia content company. Open Road creates connections between authors and their audiences by marketing its ebooks through a new proprietary online platform, which uses premium video content and social media. Open Road has published ebooks from legendary authors including William Styron, Pat Conroy, Jack Higgins, and Virginia Hamilton, and has launched new e-stars like Mary Glickman. As part of Open Road's commitment to bring books to all screens, several book-to-film adaptations, including William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness and Mary Glickman's Home in the Morning, are in development.
About MysteriousPress.com
Dedicated to providing the greatest mystery, crime, suspense, and espionage fiction of the past as well as new works just being created, MysteriousPress.com has the goal to accomplish in electronic format what the Mysterious Press is noted for in traditional print publishing—providing through a recognizable and highly regarded brand name assurance to book buyers of carefully selected and high-quality titles. The Mysterious Press, now an imprint at Grove/Atlantic for traditional print books, publishes such authors as Thomas H. Cook, Joyce Carol Oates, Ken Bruen, Thomas Perry, and Andrew Klavan.

New Books: The Bastard Hand by Heath Lowrance

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Heath Lowrance:

Three or four years ago, I wrote this book, the one that's now called The Bastard Hand. I wrote it without any thought about a market or an audience or a future. It was just something that kept eating away at me, wouldn't get off my back until it was done. It took a long time. I mean, a real long time. But one day I was shocked to discover that I'd actually finished the damn thing. I'd finished it, and I had no idea what to do with it.

If you haven't read it, I'll tell you this much: The Bastard Hand is a violent, profane, black comedy-noir-southern gothic. There are no good guys in it, and no bad guys either, not really. There's just some messed-up people, doing messed-up things. All my personal obsessions got poured into it along the way, and it wound up being a bizarre hodge-podge of genres and influences.

But you know what? I thought it was a pretty good book. I still think so.

For a while, though, it seemed as if I was the only one who felt that way. After the usual editing and polishing up, I did my research and started sending that sucker out to literary agents, one or two at a time. I'd send it off, and sit back to wait for the fame and fortune due me as the creator of this weird literary mess.

I didn't wait long. The rejections flooded in like a tsunami. There were a lot of the usual "not right for us" sort of things, but also the occasional "no clear market" or "difficult to categorize". I even got a few "too offensive" and "too depressing" comments.

After about a year of this, I gave up. Just shelved it. This book I'd poured every bit of myself into seemed destined to die alone on some street corner, bumming change from every passing James Patterson or Michael Connelly. But so what? It happens every day, doesn't it? Some wanna-be strips himself bare on the page, bleeding out his guts, only to be ignored. Sad, but true. I resolved to start working on something new and forget all about The Bastard Hand.

Some time later, I started my blog, Psycho-Noir, more or less just to spout off about books, movies, etc. Maybe even to promote myself a little. On a whim, I posted the first chapter of The Bastard Hand there, along with some short stories and essays I'd written.

And one day… one fine day… I get this e-mail from a guy calling himself Bassoff. Jon Bassoff, from New Pulp Press. Said he liked that first chapter, wanted to know if I'd be interested in showing him the rest. I checked his bone fides and found he'd published 10 or 12 very highly regarded books—and had even done a reprint of an old Gil Brewer!

I sent The Bastard Hand off to him, not expecting anything, to be honest. He'd read it, and write back saying, "Ah, sorry, my mistake. Not quite right for NPP" or, even worse, he'd just "lose" my e-mail.

But that's not what happened. He loved it.

Weird, huh?

So flash-forward a little over a year, and The Bastard Hand comes out and holy shit, everyone seems to like it a lot. Not just readers of nasty crime fiction, but some of my own literary heroes—Allan Guthrie, Megan Abbott, Dave Zeltserman, Vincent Zandri…

Reviews at genre websites are uniformly positive. People are saying REALLY NICE THINGS.

And I take it all very personally, you know? Because this book was very personal to me, just like most first novels, I've been told.

As a bonus, I've made some great new friends, people who share a common interest in this thing we call noir. They've enriched my life, above and beyond the success of the novel. And many of them have gone to great lengths to promote my work, and to help me ease my way through the professional stuff (of which I was absolutely clueless).

I've finished a second novel in the meantime, and am working on a third. But I know that this moment, this weird, invigorating time in my life in which my first novel has come out and struck a chord with readers and writers alike, is something I'll never get to experience again.

It's been a strange, wonderful time.

New Books: Cold Shot to the Heart by Wallace Stroby

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"This guy can write ... The beauty of this tightly plotted little book is that nothing is as it appears. COLD SHOT TO THE HEART is a riveting page turner." - The New York Times

"Just when you think that you can't be surprised anymore, a writer like Wallace Stroby ups the ante."
- Laura Lippman

"Stroby evokes memories of the best of Richard Stark's (aka Donald Westlake) Parker series ... The characterizations are strong and convincing, and the pace is swift and assured... Stroby has shot right to the top of dark-tinged crime authors worth noting and following." - Bookgasm


New Books: Cold Shot to the Heart by Wallace Stroby

It's tough to make it simple.

When I began my fourth novel, COLD SHOT TO THE HEART, I consciously strove for a specific tone and voice: lean and mean, no wasted words, direct, and to the point. In a way, it was my homage to some of the writers I'd read and admired most in my formative years, skilled craftsmen such as Donald E. Westlake, Lawrence Block, Brian Garfield and Dan J. Marlowe, among others.

The plot itself was a bit of a throwback – professional thief pursued by psychotic mob hitman after robbery goes awry. But in my case, the thief was a woman – Crissa Stone – and the hitman had his own agenda beyond that of his gangster bosses. Still, I realized it was a story that needed that voice I'd long admired in others. I wanted it to be terse, precise, economical, and mindful of the reader's time commitment and attention span.

At the same time, it needed something new. My previous novel, GONE 'TIL NOVEMBER, was about a female sheriff's deputy and single mom in a rural Florida town, the only woman on an otherwise all-male force. I was still intrigued by the idea of a smart, self-sufficient woman making her way in a man's world. The irony, of course, was that, just to be treated as an equal, she had to be twice as smart, twice as tough and twice as efficient as the men around her.

There's a Buddhist saying that advises, "Don't follow the masters. Follow what the masters followed." I wanted COLD SHOT to have echoes of those novels I'd loved so much, but at the same time I needed to steer clear of pastiche. It had to be something that felt true, even as it aspired to those qualities I most admired – straightforward narrative drive, emotional realism and a seamless blend of character and action. I owe a lot to Block, Westlake and those others, for both the content of their stories and the clarity of their prose. By listening to their voices, I found my own.

So, in no particular order – of either era or level of influence – here are some of the books I went back to while writing COLD SHOT.

1.) EVERYBODY DIES by Lawrence Block. A Matt Scudder novel from 1999. A simple story, but absolutely perfect in terms of tone and style. Every telling detail in place, and not a one more than necessary. Actually, that can be said of most of his Scudder books, including the new one, A DROP OF THE HARD STUFF. Reading Block is like a master class in crime fiction. The frustrating thing is he makes it all seem effortless.

2.) THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE by George V. Higgins. Straightforward street dialogue, a blue-collar workaday environment and a creeping anxiety as the dominoes start to fall. *This* is the real underworld. And about as glamorous as having your hand slammed shut in a desk drawer.

3.) THE NAME OF THE GAME IS DEATH by Dan J. Marlowe. A wolf howl in the night. This Gold Medal paperback original, about a nameless career criminal, is disguised as a standard early-'60s, first-person, tough-guy crime thriller. It's really a molotov cocktail of alienation and rage. Marlowe's anti-hero goes undercover in small-town America and finds it rotten to the core.

4.) THE SOUR LEMON SCORE by Donald E. Westlake (writing as "Richard Stark"). Another simple story. A heπist goes wrong and Parker, Westlake's professional thief, tries to pick up the pieces, recover some of the money and stay alive in the process. No extravagant plot, no over-the-top villains. Just a deadly game being played out by professionals (with some collateral damage to civilians), and all the action taking place in nondescript suburban tract homes, garages, farmhouses and cars. Like Block, Westlake made it all look easy.

5.) THE HUNTERS by James Salter. Not a crime novel, but a fictionalized memoir of the author's days as a fighter pilot during the Korean War. Terse-yet-eloquent prose, with the repressed emotions all the stronger as they emerge in the narrative. A powerful and beautifully crafted book.

Pre-Publication Review: Bye, Bye Bay by Max Allan Collins

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This title will be released on August 16, 2011.

I was especially interested Bye, Bye Baby, the new Nathan Heller novel by Max Allan Collins, because so much of the history here (Collins is the master of the historical private eye novel) was such a vivid part of American life as I was entering college. The novel is so rich it not only offers takes on some of the most famous (and infamous) people of the time, it also does nothing less than recreate the era. At several points I was back in the early Sixties; the writing was that evocative.

Marilyn Monroe hires Nathan Heller, her friend, to electronically bug her bedroom. She's at war with her movie studio and wants a record of all the calls she gets on the matter. Her version, as she says, of a paper trail. Heller proceeds but is troubled by his sense that Marilyn hasn't told him everything behind her urgent need to have her bedroom phone calls recorded.

Heller's instincts were right. Soon Marilyn is found dead in her bedroom of an overdose. Or so goes the official judgement, one that Heller rejects. And so his own investigation begins.

Collins is always good at bringing historical figures alive. He gives them motives and quirks we believe, not the awkward posturing of so many historical dramas. Thus Jack Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy come of as complicated if sometimes reckless
(Jack with his women and Bobby with his understandable vendetta against Jimmy Hoffa). Collins' take on The Rat Pack is particularly bracing. From the toadying of Peter Lawford to the racism Sammy Davis, Jr. has to endure nightly from other Pack members, we see Sinatra and company in the light they deserve--without the protection of the myth.

In the end, Heller finds the real killer and what was behind her murder. The finale is properly cynical. This is La-La Land after all.The only happy endings are on the screen.

A great read and a fascinating look at a world that was quickly coming to an end. Just a few years away were the hippies and the anti-war protests that changed America forever.