Ed Gorman's Blog, page 204

eBook Tops All Trade Publishing Categories in February

eBook Newser:

eBook Tops All Trade Publishing Categories in February


By Jason Boog on April 14, 2011 3:47 PM
eBooks hit a major milestone in February. According to Association of American Publishers (AAP) sales figures, eBooks ranked as the top format "among all categories of trade publishing" that month.

eBook sales totaled $90.3 million for the month, expanding 202 percent compared to the same period last year. Below, we've embedded the full release.

Here's more from the AAP: "This one-month surge is primarily attributed to a high level of strong post-holiday e-Book buying, or 'loading,' by consumers who received e-Reader devices as gifts. Experts note that the expanded selection of e-Readers introduced for the holidays and the broader availability of titles are factors."


AAPFebruary2011

A fine Piece of Writing

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Ed here: Megan Abbott and Sara Gran call their shared blog The Abbott Gran Old Tyme Medicine Show. I've only started reading it and now I never miss it because in terms of keen observation and wonderful writing I think it's without peer.

In the piece I'm linking to a writer named Stonafitch writes a memoir of his uncle William Harrington who wrote crime novels and ghosted a large number of books. Stonafitch charts the life of a man who never won the acclaim or fame he wanted and turned bitter because of it. Harrington lived large as they say. He also lived in one of those inchoate alcoholic hazes that only the true warrior drunks can sustains. Sometimes for years. (I know whereof I speak.)

His bitterness reminds me of a few writers I've met along the way. There was one critically acclaimed horror writer who wrote for Mystery Scene I couldn't take more than a few minutes of on the phone. I've always been an enthusiast. I enjoy pushing writer and books I like. But no matter who I mentioned he'd have some snarky remark to make. He'd always been thought to be The Next Big Thing but not even two lead slots with a big house broke him out and by God he was going to take it out on the rest of us. A prick.

This is a remarkable piece of work. And when you finish that scroll down to Megan Abbott's take on Gloria Graham. Eloquent and definitive.


Stonafitch:

The real Uncle Bill was often charming and occasionally mean but it was excusable because he was a writer, and so, insecure and deeply flawed. He looked like a pocket-sized Norman Mailer, without as much genius or popularity but with an extra dose of street smarts. Bill inspired a kind of fearful awe in our family because he was pretty much always half-drunk and prone to conversational bullying.

Bill took great delight in turning any family occasion into a debacle, which I appreciated, kind of:

Florida, 1968–Family vacation. We climb a tower at a scenic overlook. When everyone else is climbing down, Bill grabs me by the ankles and hangs my scrawny, seven-year-old ass, Pip-like, above the Everglades. When I scream and squirm like a psychotic shrimp, he tells me now you know what if feels like to be scared.

(more)

I had dinner with Bill spring of my senior year in college, hoping for advice for a young writer about to venture out into the marketplace. What I got instead was an evening-long, soul-killing rant about his huge book advances, celebrities he knew, and how bad most other writers (Harold Robbins!) were.

After dinner, which included drinking most of the red wine in southern Connecticut, my ursine uncle padded off to his study to write. I could barely walk but Uncle Bill was writing, or appeared to be. My last memory of that night? His puffy face and glittering eyes lit green by the screen of his expensive PC, the first I had ever seen.

There goes a pro, I thought at the time, too young to recognize a drinker with a writing problem. After that, I lost touch with Uncle Bill on purpose, trying to avoid contagion from the palpable bitterness that pumped through him like central air.

for the rest go here:

http://abbottgran.wordpress.com/

New Books: Fall From Grace by Wayne Arthurson

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By Wayne Arthurson
Author of Fall From Grace

I've been answering many questions about my recent release, Fall From
Grace, but probably the most common has been: "Where do you end and where
does your main character Leo Desroches begin?"

I've been very polite responding to that question, not only because I'm
Canadian and we're supposed to be more inclined towards politeness, but
it's also a valid question. There are many similarities between me, the
writer, and Leo, the main character in Fall From Grace and future novels
in this series.

For one, Leo and I are both journalists. We are also Cree, a type of
Canadian Indian, although in Canada we don't use the term Indian. It's
considered derogatory so we just say First Nations or Aboriginal. Leo and
I are also French Canadian, but the difference is that Leo's father is
French Canadian and his mother is Cree. For me it's the opposite. Not
that big a difference, I know.

Leo and I both grew up on Canadian Armed Forces bases, and that childhood
connection also plays into our aboriginal background. Because these bases
tend to be more homogenous in culture, many of them like a small town
even those located in the middle of a major city, my family put aside or
ignored much of our cultural background, especially the aboriginal side.
So Leo's initial forays into his aboriginal background echoed mine;
although we both took different routes. In Fall From Grace, Leo meets
Francis, an aboriginal elder. Francis takes Leo under his wing, offering
him opportunities to explore this side of his personal history. Francis
also plays a role in the plot of the mystery, although I'm not going to
give away any spoilers.

My exploration was more individual, beginning about 15 years ago with a
visit to my father's home town of Norway House, an aboriginal community
about 40 miles north of Lake Winnipeg. And my journey has also been more
of an internal one, with the acceptance that even though I didn't grow up
in a traditional aboriginal home on a Reserve, my life story is still a
valid Canadian aboriginal story and more common than you think.

So in those ways, Leo and I are similar. But like I say in my interviews
about Fall From Grace, Leo investigates the murder of a prostitute and
because of that, draws the ire of some bad folks who threaten his life in
numerous ways. I have never investigated such a story in my journalism
career. And the oly people I've angered are those whose names I spelled
incorrectly. Also, Leo is a degenerate gambler with a serious proclivity towards risk
taking behavior. I'm being very polite here because Leo has a very acute
gambling problem that has resulted in losing his family and forcing him
to live on the street for a number of years. His risk taking behavior has
also surprised many readers; it even surprised me when I was writing the
book. I rarely gamble, save for the buying of the odd lottery ticket. And
my risk taking behavior consists of trying to make a living as a writer
and being a punk rock drummer a number of years ago.

But regardless of Leo's faults, we are both hopeful people. And I like
Leo, and hope that many others do as well.

A Grandmaster is Having a Birthday

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Ed here: Bill Pronzini is having a birthday today. This is an opportune time for me to thank him for thirty years of friendship, innumerable kinds of help and for never complaining about how much I've learned (i.e. stolen) from his work. Happy birthday, Bill.

Here's a review from a few years ago. This is one of my favorites of Bill's stand alones.

The Other Side of Silence

Bill Pronzini has become not only a poet of people, but a poet of place as well. In THE OTHER SIDE OF SILENCE, corporate security specialist Rick Fallon is, like many Pronzini protagonists, spiritually adrift. And with good reason: The death of his son also meant the death of his marriage. So when he finds Casey Dunbar in an isolated pocket of Death Valley and finds her suicidal, he recognizes a kindred spirit.

Her son has been abducted by her vengeful and cynical husband, not because he cares about the boy, but because he wants to destroy her. The desert speaks to both Fallon and Casey, and in its solemn silence, they agree to start on the long and dangerous journey to recapture her son.


Pronzini's prose has never been more evocative, giving us a land as seared as the people who inhabit it. The pursuit of the boy is filled with page-turning suspense and constant revelation of the characters the two protagonists meet on their way to the explosive and unexpected ending.

If you need any more evidence as to why The Mystery Writers of America named Pronzini this year's Grand Master, this novel should make the case once and for all. —Ed Gorman

Paris Review Interview With Ray Bradbury

Ed here: I want to Thank Terry Butler again for the link. This is the most insightful Bradbury interview I've ever read.


"Around 1947, when I published my first novel, Dark Carnival, I met the secretary of Norman Corwin, a big name in radio—a director, writer, and producer. Through her I sent him a copy of Dark Carnival and wrote a letter saying, If you like this book as much as I like your work, I'd like to buy you drinks someday. A week later the phone rang and it was Norman. He said, You're not buying me drinks, I'm buying you dinner. That was the start of a lifelong friendship. That first time he took me to dinner I told him about my Martian story "Ylla." He said, Wow, that's great, write more of those. So I did. In a way, that was what caused The Martian Chronicles to be born.

There was another reason. In 1949, my wife Maggie became pregnant with our first daughter, Susan. Up until then, Maggie had worked full-time and I stayed home writing my short stories. But now that she was going to have the baby, I needed to earn more money. I needed a book contract. Norman suggested I travel to New York City to meet editors and make an impression, so I took a Greyhound bus to New York and stayed at the YMCA, fifty cents a night. I took my stories around to a dozen publishers. Nobody wanted them. They said, We don't publish stories. Nobody reads them. Don't you have a novel? I said, No, I don't. I'm a sprinter, not a marathon runner. I was ready to go home when, on my last night, I had dinner with an editor at Doubleday named Walter Bradbury—no relation. He said, Wouldn't there be a book if you took all those Martian stories and tied them together? You could call it "The Martian Chronicles." It was his title, not mine. I said, Oh, my God. I had read Winesburg, Ohio when I was twenty-four years old, in 1944. I was so taken with it that I thought, Someday I'd like to write a book like this, but I'd set it on Mars. I'd actually made a note about this in 1944, but I'd forgotten about it.

I stayed up all night at the YMCA and typed out an outline. I took it to him the next morning. He read it and said, I'll give you a check for seven hundred and fifty bucks. I went back to Los Angeles and connected all the short stories and it became The Martian Chronicles. It's called a novel, but you're right, it's really a book of short stories all tied together."

for the rest go here:
http://www.theparisreview.org/intervi...

William Ard Back in Print

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PERFECT .38

A Double Shot of Timothy Dane by William Ard

THE PERFECT FRAME and .38

With an Introduction by Francis M. Nevins

In 1951 William Ard, in response to the wave of sadism and cruelty that was personified in the novels of Mickey Spillane, introduced Timothy Dane, a kinder, gentler PI. He set the tone for a series of Timothy Dane mysteries and Ramble House is proud to be bringing them back, two at a time, for all the young readers who may have missed the great William Ard. It's also for us oldsters who remember reading Ard the first time but can't easily find the rare Monarch and Popular Library vintage paperbacks.

Read Francis M. Nevins' informative introduction to see why William Ard matters and why all of his books need to be brought back into print.

(Ed here:Ard also created and wrote (under the name Jonas Ward) The Buchanan western series, a fine long running Gold Medal, one of which became a pretty good Randolph Scott movie. ,

304 pages. Cover designed by Gavin L. O'Keefe.

Available Editions
$18 Trade Paperback

$30 Hardcover with dust jacket

THE PERSONAL TOUCH E-mail fender@ramblehouse.com and give me your complete mailing address. If my painkillers have kicked in I'll probably give you a discount. Free shipping to US. I take PayPal or a check.

$18 Trade Paperback 6" x 9"
$30 hardcover with dustjacket 6" x 9"

DISASTER AHEAD - Baz Luhrmann

Having just reread The Great Gatsby the past two nights and finding it, as always, my single favorite American novel (because it is the most American novel I've ever read) I've watched with, to be charitable. great skepticism as Baz Luhrmann sets about turning Fitzgerald's masterpiece into a 3-D movie. Really? 3-D? Isn't that like having a T.S. Eliot reading with rap music playing loud in the background? Now of course Luhrmann, reacting to criticism, keeps sending mixed signals about the 3-D. maybe maybe not he says, but that aside given the films of his I've seen he looks spectacularly wrong for this project. The only piece of good news in this A.V. Club news item is that he won't give Bradley Cooper the chance to ham up the role of Tom Buchanan but I'm not sure that Ben Affleck is much better. (This is why Hwood pays me the big bucks for my takes on things.) I also have my doubts about DiCaprio. He's too smirky and arrogant to be the sensible and somewhat forlorn narrator. Anyway here's the item.

NEWSWIRE
Ben Affleck likely joining Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby

By Sean O'Neal April 8, 2011
Ben Affleck has been concentrating on turning himself into a respected director, thereby making people forget all about his mid-'00s run of films like Gigli, Paycheck, Jersey Girl, and Surviving Christmas—which was working until we just now brought them up. So anytime he settles on to an acting role these days it's extra noteworthy, particularly when it means he'll be taking on the role of Tom Buchanan in Baz Luhrmann's sure to be subtle and nuanced 3-D version The Great Gatsby. Bradley Cooper had been openly campaigning for the role of the wealthy, brutish, adulterous athlete going to seed, but it seems as though Luhrmann has been chasing Affleck all along, perhaps envisioning Tom as a more society-minded version of Affleck's asshole football player character in Dazed And Confused. Or maybe that's just wishful thinking. Anyway, now it looks as though he'll be making some room in his crowded schedule to intimidate Leonardo DiCaprio. In 3-D. We can't say that enough.

The Hidden Hunter - Night of The Hunter

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Ed here: Thanks to Terry Butler for this link

The hidden hunter - The Guardian

The classic Night of the Hunter is rumoured to have been a poisonous film to shoot. Can the restored outtakes reveal what really went on? By Robert Gitt

Robert Gitt
The Guardian, Friday 6 June 2003

I first saw The Night of the Hunter on late-night television in Hanover, Pennsylvania, in the summer of 1959, just after graduation from high school. At that time, it was still fairly rare to see a recent film on American TV, but it wasn't the newness of the film, or the presence of big stars like Robert Mitchum and Shelley Winters that made my parents look forward to seeing the film with such excitement. It was the information that Lillian Gish was in the cast. My mother and father were older than most of my friends' parents (my father had been born at the end of the 19th century), and they had the fondest memories of and greatest respect for Gish from their youthful moviegoing experiences.

The film was a revelation to my parents and to me. It was not only Gish's great performance and the fine work by the rest of the cast, but also the audacious storytelling techniques that made me immediately fall in love with The Night of the Hunter. And what a surprise it was that the great actor Charles Laughton, of all people, had actually directed this bizarre, frightening and amazing film.

Fifteen years later, in the summer of 1974, it was a great thrill to visit Laughton's widow, Elsa Lanchester, at her home in Hollywood. I was working for the American Film Institute in Washington, DC, and fellow archivist Anthony Slide and I had been sent by curator Larry Karr to retrieve the many boxes of photographs, sketches, memos and letters relating to The Night of the Hunter that Lanchester had agreed to turn over to the AFI for deposit at the Library of Congress.

For the rest go here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2003/j...

Seeing Paul Schrader last night

Carol and I went to see Paul Schrader speak last night at Coe. Carol teaches there and in fact has Schrader's son Forrest in her writing class. I've read a few of Forrest's story. He's sure got the stuff, a real pleasure to read. And Carol says he a great guy as well.

Schrader spoke for nearly ninety minutes and every one of them was worth hearing.

* He said that the movie business was dying and that soon you'd be seeing theaters disappear. Like the publishing industry, Holllywood hasn't figured out how to use profitably use the new media.

* He was asked about the most difficult actor he'd ever worked with and he said Richard Pryor in Blue Collar (which I love). He said Pryor really hated white people back then and took it out on director Schrader and the cast. But, he said, Pryor's biggest problem was that he wanted to be the most popular comic in America and at the same time the blackest and angriest. Schrader said was impossible to be both. He said that whenever the cast turned against him Pryor then went into his charm mode and charmed them back to his side. Then once he had them again he'd turn on them.

* He said that now people were flooding film festivals with junk nobody wanted to see. It was aimed just at festivals not at the audience.

* He said that despite his strict religious upbringing he no longer believed in God. He quoted a South American writer: "We live in an age of religious feelings without religious beliefs." Fascinating.

* He doesn't think much of 3-D, said that it's been shown that our vision can't process it well.

* He said that he'd been told he could direct Rolling Thunder based on his own screenplay. But that when the movie had hopped from one studio to another the suits said no way could he direct. And they completely revised his script. He'd been on the set of The Wild Bunch and meant Thunder to be his Peckinpah flick. But to him the poor director and screenplay turned it into conventional melodrama.

* He spoke at length about the new technology in film. Sound, lighting and shooting in digital which he said will soon be preferred by the entire industry. Cheaper, faster, much easier to edit.

* He said that Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver was inspired by his own life and dilemma at the time and by a French film called Pickpocket.

And there was so much more.

Man, that was one of the finest ninety minutes of my life. I can see why he's in such demand as a teacher, which he is when he's between films.

Forgotten Books-The Broker by Max Allan Collins

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MAX COLLINS – The Broker. Berkley, paperback original, 1976. Paperback reprint: Foul Play Press, 1985, as Quarry.

Now that Max Collins' Quarry novels have been reissued by Perfect Crime in truly impressive trade paperbacks, I thought I'd look at again at a review of mine from the mid-Eighties when Foul Play Press reissued the first four from the original Berkley editions.

Collins has always made hired hit-man Quarry believable to me for two reasons. One because he makes the convincing case that the only people he kills are scum, often mobbed-up scum, anyway. And second because of Quarry's sardonic voice. Humor has a way of making things real and Collins is a master of it.

In The Broker, the first in the series, we meet Quarry shooting a man in an airport men's room. Quarry's assignment is to bring what the man is holding (heroin) back to his employer, an icy sort called the Broker. Quarry complies.

After complaining that he does not like to deal in drug killings, he reluctantly takes another Broker assignment, this one working with a homosexual killer named Boyd. In the rest of the novel, Collins shows us an abundantly unpleasant world peopled with all sorts of characters, from cuckolded husbands to porno-crazed geezers who look like Gabby Hayes.

The Broker and the other three novels in the first series — The Broker's Wife (1976), The Dealer (1976), and The Slasher (1977) — depict the waning hippie/flower-power days with a great deal of historical accuracy. The Quarry books are therefore an important part of the crime fiction of the Seventies — a quirky, idiosyncratic look at the Midwest during the Gerald Ford regime.

The Quarry novels belong the shelves of every hardboiled fan. Max Collins is one of the finest artists of the form and these are vivid and compelling books that can be read again and again.
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