Ed Gorman's Blog, page 206

Pity Him Afterward Donald Westlake

Ed here: One day a publisher I knew called me and said is there a Don Westlake novel that has never been in paperback. I immediately said yes. He asked me if I had a copy of it. I said yes. I sent him my one and only copy, a very good hardcover edition of Pity Him Afterwrd. As it turned out they had to destroy it to create the new book. But it was worth it so other people could read it. It's that good.

From 2007:

Every once in awhile I get stoned just watching a literary master do his work. The last two nights I was flat out dazzled from beginning to end with Donald Westlake's 1964 novels PITY HIM AFTERWARD.

The story concerns an escaped madman who takes the identity of a man who is headed to a theater that does summer stock. While we see the story several times from the madman's point of view, we're never sure who he is. This is a fair clue mystery.

In quick succession, a young woman who works summer stock is found murdered in the house where the young, struggling actors stay. A part-time chief of police appears to find the killer.

Two points: writers owe their readers original takes on familiar tropes as often as possible. The madman here is no slobbering beast but rather a deranged and sometimes pitiful lunatic (the opening three thousand words are among the most accomplished Westlake pieces I've ever read). And the police chief Eric Songard is one of the most unique cops I've come across in mystery fiction. He works nine months of the year as a professor and summers as a police chief. The small town he oversees usually offers nothing worse than drunks and the occasional fight. Murder is another matter. Westake gives us a cop whose self-confidence is so bad all he can do is try and hasten the appearance of the regular cops from a nearby district. Meanwhile he has to pretend he knows what's going on. He could easily have gone to series. He's a great character.

As the story is told, we get a beleivable look at summer stock with its low pay, brutal hours, frequent rivalries. The payoff is that some of the actors will get their Equity card at the end of the nine week run and thereby become professional actors.

Then there is the telling. The craft is impeccable. Precise and concise and yet evocative because of the images Westlake constantly presents us. You also have to marvel at the rhythm of his language, watching how'll he'll shave an anticpated word here for a certain effect, add a word there for the sake of cadence. These sentences are CRAFTED.

There are so many great Westlake novels it's impossble to rank them. But given what he accomplished, I'd have to say this is one of his early best.

Gorman-Piccirilli Cast in Dark Waters

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Cast in Dark Waters $2.99

http://store.crossroadpress.com/index...


Cast in Dark Waters
by Ed Gorman & Tom Piccirilli

Her name was Crimson... and she was a legend. A beautiful pirate queen who plundered the 16th Century Caribbean sea by day and confronted voodoo and vampires during the steaming tropical nights.

Cast in Dark Waters is an original dark adventure tale by Ed Gorman and Tom Piccirilli...

This eBook is available in MOBI (Kindle) EPUB (Sony / Nook / Ipad / Kobo) PDF (Adobe) and PRC (Mobipocket) formats. Please choose your preference from the drop-down menu below before proceeding to check-out.

200 Units in Stock
Published by: Crossroad Press

New Books: Dead By Midnight Carolyn Hart

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DEAD BY MIDNIGHT by Carolyn Hart On Sale March 29

The police say suicide. Annie Darling suspects murder. Max is unconvinced until Annie follows a trail behind the dead woman's house.

Annie unravels the mystery of a towel hidden at midnight in a gazebo, the interesting lack of fingerprints on a crystal mug, blood on a teenager's blue shirt, and the secret of a lovers' tryst. Max plunges deep into the woods to find incriminating evidence.

Annie sets the perfect trap for a merciless killer, but her cell phone rings and Death is on the line.

www.CarolynHart.com

And for cat lovers:

DEAD BY MIDNIGHT by Carolyn Hart

I love to have fun when writing a mystery. If I laugh, I think a reader will laugh. In the Death on Demand series, I especially enjoy writing about Annie Darling's ditzy mother-in-law, Laurel Roethke. Laurel is usually excited about a new interest, something that surprises and often confounds Annie.

In Dead by Midnight, Laurel creates Cat Truth Posters, which she wants Annie to hang in the bookstore. Annie thinks books should be the store's focus, but the posters enchant her.

Each poster features a cat's photograph with a caption. Here are three of the Cat Truth posters;

. . . a silky furred, mitted, and bicolored Ragdoll stretched out on a red silk cushion, looking as comfy as Eva Longoria in a Hanes ad: Go with the Flow.

A rectangular-muzzled, green-eyed, cholocolate colored cat appeared as brooding as a Gothic hero: Always Say Yes to Adventure.

. . . a thick-furred, piebald Siberian forest cat, its white front a brilliant contrast to a charcoal back and head. Its face appeared almost angelic: Always try a Smile First.

And yes, one of the posters points to a killer.

Fun for me and fun, I hope for readers

Charles Williams A TOUCH OF DEATH

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A TOUCH OF DEATH (from 2008)

I spent a good share of last night reading Hard Case Crime's snappy edition of A Touch of Death by Charles Williams and I'll say what I've said before about this book. It likely has more plot turns than just about any suspense novel I can ever recall reading.

One of Charles Williams' amoral failed men narrate. He was briefly a football star. Now he's a busted real estate agent. No wonder he gets interested, after initial reluctance, in stealing an one hundred twenty thousand dollars that a bank president took from his own bank. The woman who convinces him to help her makes it sound simple. It's probably in this mansion. All you have to do is get in there and find it. The bank president's wife won't be home for two days. You'll have plenty of time.

Right. Well, we know better than that, don't we? Yes, he gets in but he finds he's not alone. The woman is there, beautiful beyond description, and drunk beyond belief. But so is a killer. After saving her life, failed star takes her to a cabin in the woods where he plans to persuade her to tell him where the money is.

That's the beginning. Everybody in this book is a professional liar. And the bank president's wife is the most fatale of femmes. She lies on virtually every page and occasionally almost gets them killed. That she knows where the money is is obvious. That she killed her husband is also obvious. But who is trying to kill her and why?

As always with the Williams protagonist there is that sense of bitter melancholy. He is a prisoner of his failed past but naive about sex and money healing his loneliness. The sea novels contrast conspicuously with the small town novels. The sea gives the Williams protagonist purpose and the hope of spiritual redemption. But in the small towns, trapped in the vagaries of hypocrisy and constant judgement, he is always crushed by the forces he helped to set loose.

A Great Deal - The Top Suspense Group Anthology

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Ed here: You won't find a better deal anywhere. These are killer stories by writers you know and read. All for $2.99. If you're not familiar with the Top Suspense Group, here's the best kind introduction. If you're already reading some of our books, you'll know that this is indeed a bargain. Either way enjoy yourselves. We;re really proud of this anthology.

Synopsis

Hold on tight for a literary thrill-ride into the wickedly clever, frightening, and exhilarating world of Top Suspense, a sizzling collaboration of twelve master storytellers at the peak of their powers in thirteen unforgettable tales. This unforgettable anthology – packed full of cold-blooded killers, erotic tension, shady private eyes, craven drug dealers, vicious betrayals, crafty thieves, and shocking twists – is only a taste of the thrills you will find in the breathtakingly original ebooks by these authors at www.topsuspensegroup.com.

So sit back, bite down on a piece of strong leather, and prepare to get hit by some gale-force suspense and writing so sharp it will draw blood.

Top Suspense includes:

Unreasonable Doubt by Max Allan Collins
Death's Brother by Bill Crider
Poisoned by Stephen Gallagher
Remaindered by Lee Goldberg
Fire in the Sky by Joel Goldman
The Baby Store by Ed Gorman
The Jade Elephant by Libby Fischer Hellmann
The Big O by Vicki Hendricks
The Chirashi Covenant by Naomi Hirahara
El Valiente en el Infierno by Paul Levine
A Handful of Dust by Harry Shannon
The Canary by Dave Zeltserman
The Chase by Top Suspense Group

The 25th Hour

Ed here: I watched this again last night so I'm reposting this review.

The 25th Hour

I watched the 25th Hour again last night. I've recommended it before. Flawed as it is--the first act needed to be trimmed--it is still one of the most powerful crime films I've ever seen simply because it doesn't rely on any of the neo-noir tropes so fashionable today. It is the story of an intelligent, otherwise decent young man so fucking stupid he started dealing drugs. And in so doing lost his claim on both intelligence and decency.

The film takes place in the final 24 hours before he goes to prison. Ed Norton as the dealer, Phillip Seymour Hoffman as his hapless friend, Rosario Dawson as Norton's lover and Anna Paquin as the teenage student Hoffman is fixated on form a crushing ensemble. The acting is flawless.

The final twenty minutes, in the scene with Norton's father and the scene with Norton and Hoffman and another friend, are as good as anything I've seen in the last fifteen years.

I am a lonely voice recommending this movie but I think it will eventually get its due.

Update: It was even richer, more powerful on my third viewing last night. This was Spike Lee's triumph.

Forgotten Books: THE HIDDEN by Bill Pronzini

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Forgotten Books: THE HIDDEN by Bill Pronzini

I know, I know, since this was published not long ago, it's hardly forgotten. But it is one of those books that deserved much more promotion and notice than it received. Bill Pronzini the master of mixing shattered lives and violence and The Hidden is almost claustrophobic in its shadowy Woolrichian power.

THE HIDDEN by Bill Pronzini

Bill Pronzini is not only a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America, he's a Grand Master of the dark and sinister noir novel. He demonstrates this again in one of his finest (perhaps the finest) books in his long career.

Jay Macklin is a failed man. A career as a baseball player was ended early by injury. As were other attempts at establishing himself. His decade-plus marriage to Shelby was so solid and good for a long time but unemployment and heart trouble (the latter something she doesn't know about) have taken their toll. Shelby finds herself attracted to a doctor at the hospital where she works as a paramedic.

The novel brings Jay and Shelby together in an anxious attempt to find their old love and respect. They travel to a cottage in rugged Northern California only to meet Brian and Claire Lomax, a married couple who has even more problems than they do. They also become aware of a serial killer who has been traveling this same area. A power failure seems symbolic of their marriage's final days.

Pronzini has always been at his best dealing with smashed lives. HIs descriptions of violent weather and pitiless nature only enhance the emotional turbulence that make the drama so rich. Gripping, sinister, unpredictable, The Hidden is a masterful novel of treachery and terror by a true master of the form.

Sue Grafton's short stories

I've been rereading Sue Grafton's short stories again. I wish she'd make it easy for me and put a collection together. And add a few new stories while she's at it. Here's a post from 2005

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 02, 2005

Sue Grafton

Without intending to, I believe I've read most of Sue Grafton's short stories in the past few days. I got hooked. Then I started going through every anthology in the house. Way past time for a Grafton collection.

At the moment, her new novel is riding high on all the lists and the reviewers are fawning. Understandably. I've seen Grafton's style and substance anaylized from many different perspectives but I've never seen anybody state the obvious. She's just a damned good, which is to say first-rate, storyteller.

She's much more obersavant than many writers lauded for their seriousness. And she's much more plain fun to read than a whole Greyhound bus full of cliff-hanger specialists like James Patterson.

Her turf is the American middle-class. High end and low end. Her cases are never flashy nor are her investigative techniques anything fancy. She gives us perfectly composed snapshots of our time. She has a fondness for everyday folks that makes you like her and she never lets her villains get all Lectered up. She sees them for what most villains are--mean, greedy, selfish, often self-pitying jerks who put themselves in situations for which violence seems to be the only solution.

She's created her own world and time and it's one I enjoy visiting.

Ghost Town; Dave Zeltserman

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Ed here: I got three letters in the past four days about my noir western Ghost Town. Since it's available on Kindle I thought I'd plug it again.

BTW Dave Zeltserman has a truly fine story right here http://www.beattoapulp.com/stor/2011/...

SOMEBODY DIES

TUESDAY, MAY 11, 2010
Ghost Town by Ed Gorman (Western noir)

Author Ed Gorman's Western novels are primarily in the genre he calls "Western noir." In many ways — just about every way except the setting — Ghost Town is more like typical crime fiction than other, more traditional Westerns.

Prison-educated trial lawyer (and sometime thief and con artist) Bryce Lamont is keen to find his old partners Jed Wylie and Frank Stodla. Especially since they still owe him his cut from the job that put him away. He's tracked them down to the midwestern town of Wyatt, Wisconsin, where Jed and Frank appear to have gone legit as a banker and his handyman (though enforcer is more like it).

Unfortunately, a really bad malaria epidemic has hit Wylie, and Bryce's brother Paul has a particularly bad case of it, though Bryce refuses to believe it until he hears it from Laura, Paul's heretofore unmet fiancée and the local doctor. She is the only woman of dignity in a town of iniquity.

Bryce gets the money but loses his brother and sets out to find the ones responsible for Paul's death with only the help of a 15-year-old wannabe bounty hunter and a snake-oil salesman. Threaded throughout — and somehow tying in with all this — is the trial of one Jenny Rice, accused of murdering her own fiancée.

Gorman's Western novels are the perfect stepping stone for the crime-fiction enthusiast wanting to get his or her feet wet in the Western genre. Ghost Town doesn't shy away from the painful parts of life, covering unrequited love, the pain of loss, the suffering of sickness, and the anxiety of hiding from justice, among others.

Ed Gorman is one of my favorite Western writers. His works are largely influenced by the Gold Medal novels of the 1950s and '60s. Donald E. Westlake (to whom Ghost Town is dedicated) pointed out similarities to the Westerns of Will Charles (crime author Charles Willeford writing under a pseudonym), stories that Gorman had not read.

Willeford and Gorman approached their material in the same way, namely that criminals are the same no matter what time period they're living in. That's Western noir. What Gorman is doing with the Western that may not be new, but it's still a fresh approach that hasn't been done to death. He did not create the concept of Western noir, but he gave it a name, and he is certainly the best at it.

Further reading:
Vendetta by Ed Gorman — another Western noir, a multilayered story of revenge.
The Midnight Room by Ed Gorman — his own "Gold Medal novel" dedicated to "old friends who were masters of the form": Peter Rabe, Stephen Marlowe, William Campbell Gault, and Robert Colby.
The Hombre from Sonora by Will Charles — one of Charles Willeford's pseudonymous Westerns.
You might also like:
Vendetta by Ed Gorman (Western noir)
Death Ground by Ed Gorman (Leo Guild Western)
The Midnight Room by Ed Gorman (dark suspense)

The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Jon L. Breen

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FR0M MYSTERY SCENE web site http://www.mysteryscenemag.com/

The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
by Jon L. Breen


In The Ectoplasmic Man, Harry Houdini joins forces with Holmes and Watson is given the chance to play stooge to a genius magician as well as a genius detective. And that's only one of his new adventures....

For reasons related more to fear of litigation by the Arthur Conan Doyle estate than any lack of irregular enthusiasm, novel-length Sherlock Holmes pastiches were rare indeed before the 1970s. H.F. Heard's A Taste for Honey (1941) was the pioneer—the beekeeping sleuth in this novel and two sequels was known as Mr. Mycroft, but any knowledgeable reader knew it was Sherlock and not his brother. Ellery Queen's A Study in Terror (1966), probably the first in which the Baker Street sleuth took on Jack the Ripper, was the novelization of a movie. Not until Nicholas Meyer's bestseller The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1974) did the floodgates open. Since then there have been scores of ersatz Holmes novels. Some of them have been excellent; others have only the authors' devotion and enthusiasm to recommend them. They take many different forms, some of them shifting the central role to another character or reshuffling canonical details in shocking ways. I prefer those that stick closest to the original pattern: told in the first person by Watson throughout, keeping to a length not much greater than Conan Doyle's own novels, and not distorting the characters as they appear in the original stories.

Eventually some industrious Sherlockian will read all these varied offerings and produce a critical volume advising which to seek out and which to avoid. (I've even thought of attempting this myself but quickly came to my senses.) Until that comprehensive guide comes to pass, we have The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, a new reprint series from the British publisher Titan Books, intended to single out some of the better pastiches. Their first set of four selections, distributed in the US at $9.95 per trade paper volume, illustrates some of the varied approaches taken to pastiche writing.

Some writers involve Holmes with other fictional characters from outside the canon or put the Baker Street sleuth in fantastical or science fictional situations. Both these approaches are used in the earliest and least typical book chosen for reprint, Sherlock Holmes: War of the Worlds (1975) by the father-son team of Manly Wade Wellman and Wade Wellman. It inserts both Holmes and Doyle's science-fiction character Professor Challenger into H.G. Wells' famous Martian invasion scenario. Some of the parts were originally published separately in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and the very enjoyable volume is less a novel than a set of five linked short stories, the first three narrated by Challenger's own Watson figure, journalist Edward Malone, the final two by Watson himself.

Other pastichers follow the lead of Nicholas Meyer in bringing real historical personages into the mix. In Daniel Stashower's The Ectoplasmic Man (1985), set in 1910, Harry Houdini has brought his magic act to London and successfully escaped from a Scotland Yard jail cell as part of his publicity campaign. His feats are so amazing, many think he has supernatural powers. Lestrade, suspecting Houdini of a crime he initially refuses to specify, entreats Holmes to meet and observe the young American entertainer. The crime in question proves to be the theft of scandalous documents from a vault at a government residence where Houdini attended a party for the Prince of Wales, soon to be George V. The detective work and the characterization of Houdini (whom Stashower would feature in at least three subsequent mysteries) are outstanding, along with an exciting aerial action scene reminiscent of one of Houdini's silent movies. Watson is given the chance to play stooge to a genius magician as well as a genius detective. This novel is the best of the four reprints, as well as the truest to the original stories.

The Scroll of the Dead (1998) by David Stuart Davies begins with Holmes attending a séance conducted by Mr. Uriah Hawkshaw, a charlatan who has been deceiving a member of Mycroft's staff whose son died in a boating accident. In the course of exposing Hawkshaw, Holmes meets the aesthete dandy Sebastian Melmoth (once a pseudonym of Oscar Wilde), a sinister researcher into the phenomenon of death. In 1896, Holmes again encounters Melmoth in the course of investigating the theft of an Egyptian scroll from the British Museum. The MacGuffin here represents nothing less than the secret of immortality. This is another well-made and well-told tale, most of it in traditional Watsonian style, but as the denouement approaches, the cinematic cross-cutting between first person and third-person omniscient narrative breaks the mood somewhat and probably ought to have been resisted. All the drama and all the plot points could have been achieved just as well through Watson's narrative.

The other Davies title in the group, The Veiled Detective (2004), is also effectively written, though it belongs to that group of pastiches that turn the whole saga on its head, changing the nature of the characters and their relationships as we've come to know them. Admittedly, this sort of thing goes back at least to The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, but Davies' revisionist biography is even more extreme than Meyer's. The story begins in 1880, first in Afghanistan with the third-person account of Dr. John Walker (sic), a dispirited army surgeon, then back in London where young Sherlock Holmes is already helping out Lestrade and Gregson, and Professor Moriarty, aided by Colonel Moran, is pulling the criminal strings. Davies gives Watson a whole new dishonorable back story and alters our understanding of virtually every character in some way, with no satirical intent apparent. Holmes' career from A Study in Scarlet through "The Final Problem" is summarized in light of the reshuffled relationships, often with direct quotes and restated storylines from the original stories. Much as I admire the skill and inventiveness of the author, I would much prefer a straightforward case.

Three out of four isn't a bad average. The Titan series, which has gone on to publish several more in this series, deserves the Sherlockian reader's support.

For more about Mystery Scene contributor Jon L. Breen, please visit Our Contributors page.