Ed Gorman's Blog, page 207

The Evil Days by Bruno Fischer

[image error]

The Evil Days by Bruno Fischer

Bruno Fischer had one of those careers you can't have any more. There's no market for any of it. He started out as editor and writer for a Socialist newspaper, shifted to terror pulps when the newspaper started failing, became a successful and respected hardcover mystery novelist in the Forties and early Fifties, and finally turned to Gold Medal originals when the pb boom began. His GMs sold in the millions. His House of Flesh is for me in the top ten of all GMs.

Then for reasons only God and Gary Lovisi understand, Fischer gave up writing and became an editor for Colliers books. But he had one more book in him and it turned out to be the finest of his long career.

Fischer shared with Howard Fast (Fast when he was writing mysteries under his pen names) a grim interest in the way unfulfilling jobs grind us down, leave us soulless. Maybe this was a reflection of his years on the Socialist newspaper. The soullessness features prominently in The Evil Days because it is narrated by a suburban husband who trains to work each day to labor as an editor in a publishing company where he is considered expendable. Worse, his wife constantly reminds him (and not unfairly) that they don't have enough money to pay their bills or find any of the pleasures they knew in the early years of their marriage. Fischer makes you feel the husband's helplessness and the wife's anger and despair.

The A plot concerns the wife finding jewels and refusing to turn them in. A familiar trope, yes, but Fischer makes it work because of the anger and dismay the husband feels when he sees how his wife has turned into a thief. But ultimately he goes along with her. Just when you think you can scope out the rest of the story yourself, Fischer goes all Guy de Maupassant on us. Is the wife having an affair? Did she murder her lover? Is any of this connected to the jewels? What the hell is really going on here?

Sometimes we forget how well the traditional mystery can deal with the social problems of an era and the real lives of real people. The hopelessness and despair of these characters was right for their time of the inflation-dazed Seventies. But it's just as compelling now as it was then when you look at the unemployment numbers and the calm reassurances by those who claim to know that the worst is yet to come.

A wily little novel that rattled me the first time I read it and rattles me still on rereading.

Forgotten Books: The Captain Must Die by Robert Colby

[image error]



Forgotten Books: The Captain Must Die by Robert Colby

I've seen a few recent references to one of the great overlooked Gold Medal novels, The Captain Must Die by Robert Colby. If you want a feel for the real Fifties in the form of a grim caper novel, this is your book. It's tight, deftly plotted and one of those hardboiled novels that is genuinely tough without showing off.

There's a sweaty post-war anger on every page. For some the war was fading into memory. WW11 hated. This could easily have been a John D. MacDonald but JDM wouldn't have infused it with quite so much rage and nihilism. I really recommend it.

Bob Colby was a nice guy who struggled through a four decade run as a free-lancer. He never had the hit he deserved. He had a bittersweet sense of the failed man in a society that despises failure, the man always looking for the long chance who never seems to understand--or even anticipate--that the long chance will do him in. Like JDM he wrote middle-class noir, the sort of thing Claude Chabrol does in his best crime movies.

I got to know him in the last six or seven years of his life. He'd spent his early life in radio and tv and you could tell that by the smooth, almost courtly way he did business. They were gentlemen back then by God. His glory days were with Richard Carroll at Gold Medal. Apparently Knox Burger didn't like his stuff and he was soon shuffled off to places like Monarch.

He's worth looking up. If you read nothing else, make it The Captain. It's damned fine book. He had a journalist's eye for his times. This was especially true in the novels he set in Hollywood. Captain is his masterpiece. You will not be disappointed.

Free Top Suspense Anthology; Apologies to Bill Crrider

[image error]

Get your free Top Suspense Anthology!

Well, not exactly free in that you need to agree to write a review (good or bad, we don't care as long as it's honest) somewhere. Your blog, amazon, kindleboards, b&n, facebook, all of the above, but somewhere. And we're serious about the review. If you don't write one we'll be sending The Enforcer (AKA Ed Gorman) to your door, and he can do nasty things with a Louisville slugger. Trust me, you don't want that to happen!!

So here's what you get with the anthology--one story by each Top Suspense member, plus the original round robin story, plus a link that will reveal the authors for each section of the round robin story.

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

So if you want a copy, send me an email (dave.zeltserman@gmail.com) letting me know what format you want: Kindle, E-Pub, or PDF. Each Top Suspense member has been allocated 25 copies to give out, and copies are going fast, and so get me your email soon. And remember, we are going to want to see a review out of this. You don't want Ed knocking on your door!

Ed here: After Dave sent me this I e mailed him "Well Dave if you think an overweight exhausted guy who can't see real well will scare people...I'll be happy to do it. :)"

PS My apologies to Bill Crider-I thought I'd scooped him with my boob biting snake story. But I somehow missed the fact that he'd already covered it. I read his blog two or three times a day but somehow I missed it. I'm sorry Bill. But I;ll scoop ya yet!

Snake Dies of Silicone Poisoning After Biting Model's Fake Breast

(How did Bill Crider miss this one? :)

Snake Dies of Silicone Poisoning After Biting Model's Fake Breast (The Daily Beast)
Mar 14, 2011 – 4:10 PM


Steven Hoffer
Contributor
It was another trip to the Garden of Eden cut short for one legless reptile.

Israeli model Orit Fox was attempting to lick a snake during a publicity stunt for radio DJ Shmulik Tayar when the lucky serpent, presumably aroused, lunged forward and bit Fox's fake breast, sending witnesses into a frenzy.

Fox, who is rumored to have the largest bosom in all of Israel, was hurried to a hospital outside Jerusalem where she received a tetanus shot and was later discharged.

As for the snake, puckering up with a supermodel proved to be the kiss of death. The creature succumbed to silicone poisoning shortly after the incident.

HELP!; The Dirtiest Word In Hollywood

HELP! I need to hire somebody who can convert my Kindle to accommodate Nook and other e book services. I'll pay $40 an hour but please don't respond unless you really know what you're doing. I know that sounds harsh and I apologize for the tone but I've had trouble with even welll-intenioned people who knew only slightly more about computers than I do. And since I know nothing...I think you can figure out the level they were operating at. Thank you very much.


Huffington Post:

John FarrEditor, bestmoviesbyfarr.com
Posted: March 7, 2011 05:34 PM
The Dirtiest Word in Hollywood

You'll never guess. It's "originality".

But perhaps I should explain.

A few weeks back, I read an announcement that the now white hot Colin Firth might be signing on for a re-make of "My Fair Lady".

Not since Steve Martin decided to put a new spin on "The Pink Panther" have I been so moved to ask, "Why?"

Will a remake of this venerable 1964 musical, even one featuring Mr. Firth, really improve on Rex Harrison's definitive performance, one he originated on Broadway?

Flush with success, does Mr. Firth really think he can bring something new and fresh to Rex's immortal rendition of "Why Can't A Woman Be More Like A Man?"

I for one doubt it.

The truth is, if you span the course of movie-making history, it becomes abundantly clear that remakes and sequels tend not to improve on the originals.

Recognizing this, the actor Michael Caine, who knows a thing or two about the industry, once suggested that it would be more logical for Hollywood to remake mediocre movies rather than acknowledged classics.

(This is why the new "True Grit" worked out so well in my opinion...the original was never really all that good, even with the Duke on-board.)

But the Hollywood suits who took Marketing 101 know better. You remake past successes because that's where the name recognition lies. From purely a sales standpoint- that is, getting butts in movie seats, it gives you a big head start on piquing the audience's interest, or so the thinking goes...

for the rest go here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-fa...

Paris Review interviews James M. Cain

[image error]

Ed here: If you know much about James M. Cain, who I think was a better writer than either Hammett or Chandler, you know that he had a fascinating career before, at age forty, he wrote Postman. David Zinsser at the Paris Review did the definitive Cain interview and here is a link to it. Fascinating takes on the people Cain worked with--not flattering at all of H.L. Mencken, mixed feelings about Harold Ross of The New Yorker, nothing but praise for Walter Lippmann. Thanks to Terry Butler for the link.

CAIN

Oh yes, I can remember the beginning of The Postman. It was based on the Snyder-Gray case, which was in the papers about then. You ever hear of it? Well, Grey and this woman Snyder killed her husband for the insurance money. Walter Lippmann went to that trial one day and she brushed by him, what was her name? Lee Snyder.* Walter said it seemed very odd to be inhaling the perfume or being brushed by the dress of a woman he knew was going to be electrocuted. So the Snyder-Grey case provided the basis. The big influence in how I wrote The Postman Always Rings Twice was this strange guy, Vincent Lawrence, who had more effect on my writing than anyone else. He had a device which he thought was so important—the "love rack" he called it. I have never yet, as I sit here, figured out how this goddamn rack was spelled . . . whether it was wrack, or rack, or what dictionary connection could be found between the word and his concept. What he meant by the "love rack" was the poetic situation whereby the audience felt the love between the characters. He called this the "one, the two and the three." Someone, I think it was Phil Goodman, the producer and another great influence, once reminded him that this one, two, and three was nothing more than Aristotle's beginning, middle, and end. "Okay, Goody," Lawrence said, "who the hell was Aristotle, and who did he lick?" I always thought that was the perfect Philistinism.

for the rest go here:

http://www.theparisreview.org/intervi...

Two and A Half Men is Better Than None - Alec Baldwin

Ed here: In addition to being a fine actor--one of the best--and a generally cool dude, Alec Baldwin is also a damned good writer. Here he talks about some of his own travails in Hollywood and how they relate to Charlie Sheen's meltdown.

The Huffington Post
MARCH 12, 2011

Alec Baldwin
Posted: March 11, 2011 10:50 PM
Two and a Half Men Is Better Than None

I read in the paper today that Conan O'Brien's documentary is out this weekend. The one that chronicles the purportedly healing journey/concert tour he went on after his messy divorce from NBC. I also read that Charlie Sheen is suing Warner Brothers for $100 million and the two of these things reminded me of one of the more character-building experiences that I had in my career, many years ago.

People often ask me why I never continued in the role of Jack Ryan in the movies based on Tom Clancy's great novels. Usually, I have given a half truth as an answer, something about scheduling conflicts and so forth. But the truth is the studio cut my throat. Or, more specifically, an executive at the studio named David Kirkpatrick who was, as studio executives are on their way both up and down the ladder, eager to prove he had that special quality that studio executives are eager to display. That quality is an utter lack of sentimentality while transacting deals around a business built on sentimentality.

The run of events in 1991 went like this. John McTiernan, who directed The Hunt For Red October, called me repeatedly over a period of a few days and that got my attention because John was not someone who did that. I knew it must be something important. I had been traveling to Syracuse to see my mother who had been diagnosed with breast cancer. I had lost my dad in 1983 to lung cancer when he was fifty-five and the idea of being an orphan, technically speaking, at the age of 33 weighed heavily on me. It took a few rounds before John and I connected.

for the rest go here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alec-ba...

Brian DePalma - The AV Club

[image error]


Ed here: For all the ups and downs of his career, Brian DePalma still intrigues me as a director. His troubled, almost incestuous relationship with the work of Alfred Hitchcock notwithstanding, he's brought real style and truth to several of his movies. I don't know if he's able of dealing with the new century the way he did with the eighties and nineties but I'd like to see him a try a thriller as perverse as Sisters in this new world.

The AV Club posted an imposing interview with DePalma, one well worth reading.


Primer is The A.V. Club's ongoing series of beginners' guides to pop culture's most notable subjects: filmmakers, music styles, literary genres, and whatever else interests us—and hopefully you. This installment: a guide to watching Brian De Palma's movies about watching.

101: The Thrillers
Before Brian De Palma dedicated himself to making movies, he was a teenage science whiz, which may explain how he became such a peerless technician. Like his fellow "film school brats" Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, De Palma is a filmmaker who thinks cinematically, using visual quotes from other movies and the grammar of cinema itself as his way of expressing something more personal than just what's in the script. Frequently derided as an Alfred Hitchcock imitator, De Palma actually uses the trappings of Hitchcockian suspense as a cage in which to hold his pet themes: the thrill of voyeurism, the fear of helplessness, and a motion picture's paradoxical power to explicate the real world through blatant artificiality. At his best, De Palma constructs movies that have the surface of crowd-pleasing entertainment but the guts of high art, filled with bravura sequences that don't so much pay off as let go.

De Palma first impressed critics with his documentary shorts and shaggy underground comedies, then made his first unmitigated foray into the genre that would define him with 1973's Sisters, a wacko Psycho/Rear Window homage starring Margot Kidder in a dual role as a Quebecois model and her detached Siamese twin sister. Kidder murders a man while neighbor Jennifer Salt watches from the building across the street, which leads Salt—a crusading journalist with a radical streak—to hire private detective Charles Durning to help her investigate both the crime and Kidder's association with creepy doctor William Finley. A tense Bernard Herrmann score and scenes of graphic violence make Sisters pretty harrowing, but the movie displays the puckish wit that would also become a De Palma hallmark...

for the rest go here:

http://www.avclub.com/articles/brian-...

Forgotten Books: Dark Passage by David Goodis

If David Goodis hadn't written this book it would have fallen to Cornell Woolrich to do the job. The set-up (and several parts of the book) are pure Woolrich.

Vincent Parry escapes San Quentin where he's serving life for a murder he didn't commit. He goes back to his old haunts in San Francisco intent on finding the real killer. But he's talked into a plastic surgery that certainly borders on science fiction. Zip zap, wait a few days and you're walking around with a completely new face. I supplement my income with The Ed Gorman Medical Drive-Through; you get a burger and fries with every procedure. But not even MY docs could do what this doc did.

Anyway despite my doubts about the medicine practiced here the book is gripping from page one to the finale. And Goodis is as good at menace and paranoia as Woolrich. His San Francisco bears a real resemblance to the London of The Ripper. There's an extended scene in the fog with a cop that starts to choke you. Will the cop figure out who he is? There are chase scenes in the fog that take on the aspect of horror fiction. And there is the ever-shifting game of whodunit.

There's the beautiful blonde stranger (Lauren Bacall in the film version) who helps him for mysterious reasons of her own; the old friend we begin to have doubts about; and the shrew (Agnes Moorehead in the movie) who is almost as much of a bitch as his dead wife--though nobody could have out-bitched her.

A very dark (in all respects) and very rich novel (parts of it read more like a mainstream book than a genre one) with an ending I'm sure Hollywood changed (I haven't seen it for some time). A page-turner and a masterful story of menace.

New Books: Lake Charles by Ed Lynskey; Behold The Child Harry Shannon

[image error]

New Books: Lake Charles by Ed Lynskey

Lake Charles is my new title. This is its story. Like a slew of other writers' books, mine has bounced around over the past eight years. Agents, publishers, editors, and readers have had their fingerprints on it. Recounting its exact history is almost impossible. One vivid memory stands out. I sat editing the early manuscript while my wife underwent a gall bladder operation. I had to do something to distract me.

The waiting area was one of those dim bullpens in a big city hospital smelling of Pine Sol. Later I ate lunch—egg salad sandwich with Dr. Pepper—still cranking away on Lake Charles in the renovated cafeteria. Her surgeon was an intense cuss who sketched me a diagram of the nifty procedure he'd used. I thanked him. She did fine. And Lake Charles moved on to its next gestation period.

One publisher paying real money up front turned down looking at Lake Charles because the characters smoked joints. On the other hand, gory homicides seemed to be okay with them. The manuscript, my records show, was also mailed out to a dozen literary agents requesting to see it. Years later, they've yet to get back to me. Hey, I know. Things get busy. Life intrudes. But we all carry on.

Tired of seeing cell phones used everywhere (remember party lines?), I anchored Lake Charles in the 1970s. That time period didn't vary through the revisions. As for the setting in the Great Smoky Mountains , I drew on a few of my experiences hiking 150 miles through the Smokies as a kid. It was a golden age to be young. I can recall the songs, the vibes, and the hopes. Then Nixon was elected, but I digress. This is about Lake Charles , after all.

Somebody tipped me off literary novels are supposed to use dreams, and I dig the literary stuff, so I wove a dream sequence into Lake Charles . My main character Brendan Fishback is in the throes of a marijuana detox, so he's endowed with a rich dream life. That's one of the side effects, I researched. I also heard literary novels include letters, so I used a key letter that Brendan receives near Lake Charles 's ending.

People have pointed out Lake Charles is already located in Louisiana . Is it? At the time of my writing, I didn't realize that. A manmade lake becomes my novel's setting, and I needed a name fast, so I cribbed my middle name. I have a first cousin Charles, as was my grandfather's younger brother, so we've got a family legacy there to lay claim to.

Ed invited me to write this post for his great blog. I love reading about the older noirs and hardboiled titles (Charles Williams, Ed Lacy, etc.). Lake Charles has been called "Appalachian noir," a term John Lescroart coined when blurbing my previous book, The Blue Cheer, set in the wilds of West Virginia . If any of my books provides any entertainment bang for the reader's buck, I'm humbled and thrilled at the same time. So, I'll close by saying my thanks.

Lake Charles is now up for pre-orders at Amazon. The publication date is set for June 15, 2011.

----------------------TOP SUSPENSE GROUP, HARRY SHANNON

Behild the Child .99 on Kindle
HARRY SHANNON

"BEHOLD THE CHILD" first appeared in the Cemetery Dance anthology "Brimstone Turnpike." Sam Kenzie is an LAPD cop who can't escape his obsession with a serial killer due to demons of his own...

"Behold the Child", by Harry Shannon, is the perfect mix of classic Noir and the supernatural. A maverick, burned-out cop haunted by his last city case ignores advice and a "wrong" turn en route to his retirement gig in the isolated desert town of his youth. It's dark, brooding, and reminds us that unfortunately, not everyone takes advantage of divine second chances."
-SHROUD Magazine

http://www.amazon.com/Behold-the-Chil...