Ed Gorman's Blog, page 212

Kindle Books Outsell Paperback Books on Amazon

From Galleycat:


AMAZON
Kindle Books Outsell Paperback Books on Amazon
By Jason Boog on January 27, 2011 4:27 PM
Amazon.com, Inc. announced its fourth quarter results today, hitting a major milestone: Kindle books are now more popular than paperback books on the bookselling website.

In addition, the company said it sold "millions of third-generation Kindles" during the quarter, keeping figures cloudy. eBookNewser has more about the company's multibillion dollar sales last quarter.

Here's more from CEO Jeff Bezos, from the release: "We had our first $10 billion quarter, and after selling millions of third-generation Kindles with the new Pearl e-ink display during the quarter, Kindle books have now overtaken paperback books as the most popular format on Amazon.com. Last July we announced that Kindle books had passed hardcovers and predicted that Kindle would surpass paperbacks in the second quarter of this year, so this milestone has come even sooner than we expected – and it's on top of continued growth in paperback sales."

Dog In The Manger by Mike Resnick

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I've been reading Mike Resnick since the Eighties. He's written just about every conceivable kind of science fiction and fantasy and has always done well by both genres. And he's got the Hugo awards, among many many others, to prove it. I'm an especially big fan of his Widowmaker series--my kind of action science fiction--and his novel Walpurgis lll, which is the most fascinating study of pure evil I've ever read. And is a fine example of how espionage/assassination fiction can be used to propel sf.

In Dog In The Manger (Alexander Books; also available on Kindle) Mike works in the classic private eye tradition. But wait--as Barry Malzberg notes in his excellent introduction--"You can't fake this voice and you have to attach it to a real character with a genuine, refractory situation." Exactly and absolutely. We've finally moved beyond the cliche of the hardboiled gumshoe of bad pulp and bad movies/tv. We are now in a time when private eye fiction can have the reach and resonance of literary fiction. F. Paul Wilson said once that p.i. fiction offers us "snapshots of our time" (or other eras in the case of historical p.i. fiction).

Eli Paxton's voice in Dog In The Manger is exactly right. A decent guy, smart but not a genius, courageous but not a fool, and with just a hint of weariness and malaise in some of the scenes, a resident of a Cincinatti he seems to love, Eli agrees to try and track down a lost dog--an expensive show dog that was supposed to be shipped via plane to another city. But no dog arrived there. Or did one? And why do the people involved in the shipping and receiving all end up dead in a matter of days? Over a dog?

Not only is the plot a damned good (with big surprises in store), through Eli we are taken into the world of show dogs and their trainers, doctors and groupies (yes at several points "Best In Show" did come to mind). I did something I rarely do these days--I read it in a single sitting.

I think you'll do the same.

MR. MONK ON THE ROAD by Lee Goldberg

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Question: What could be worse than taking a trip with Adrian Monk? Answer: Taking a trip with Adrian Monk and his brother Ambrose. Nuclear Neuroses Overload.

Yet the comely Natalie Teeger not only goes along for the ride, she's one of the instigators. Because Ambrose Monk suffers from agoraphobia Natalie and Monk decide--wait for it--to rent a motor home, drug Ambrose and install Ambrose in said RV so that he wakes up while they are in motion. Natalie has the whole trip planned. How can he complain? He's inside a sort of house, isn't?

Lee Goldberg has cast the new and extremely enjoyable Monk book as a picaresque adventure. First of all it's fun to watch Natalie, who is not up for taking any grief from either brother, run the show while listening to Adrian bitch and whine his way through the entire book. My favorite moment is when Adrian learns that people who go through burger drive-ins frequently sit in the parking lot with the food on their laps. Food resting on your crotch? "It's like eating your food off a toilet seat." Who wouldn't want to travel with Adrian?

Lee cleverly ties a few of their adventures into murders. Adrian wants to linger and solve them but Sgt. Natalie won't have it. They keep moving. Parts of the book are given over to Lee's descriptions of and commentaries about various places in Southern California. Some very nice writing. He also shows how how life can vary in different RV camps. Some are pretty nice; some send both the Monk brothers into existential dread.

Of all the characters we meet along the way the most vivid to me are Dub (an aging reporter dying of lung cancer determined to learn the identity of a serial killer he's been searching for) and some older whacky women traveling together in an RV and devoutly wishing they were twenty again.

I've given up trying to rank the Monk books. I've read them all and think they each have different pleasures to offer, which is a tribute to Lee's savvy as a writer. But I have to say that putting both the Monks in a RV with Natalie-take-no-crap-Teeger has got to be the funniest premise yet. A truly hilarious read with a surprise shout-out to the movie "Duel" coming out of nowhere. Among many other surprises.

New Books: I'm A Fool To Kill You by Robert J. Randisi

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I'm A Fool To Kill You by Robert J. Randisi

I'M A FOOL TO KILL YOU
By Robert J. Randisi


I'm a frustrated lounge singer.
Frank Sinatra always said he was just a lounge singer. At a live concert during the 80's I heard him say that he and "Mr. Bennett" were the last of the lounge singers.
Well, I sing in my office, and on my own karaoke machine, and at a small karaoke lounge a friend of mine has in his basement (and at some PWA Shamus Award Banquets). And when I got the opportunity to write the screenplay for the first Rat Pack book, EVERYBODY KILLS SOMEBODY, SOMETIME, I wrote myself a part as—you guessed it, a washed up lounge singer. If and when that script gets made you'll see me in the screen, singing.
But until my singing debut comes, I'm still writing Rat Pack mysteries.
I wrote four of them for St. Martin's Press, and have now moved on to Severn House with the next two. You'll notice the difference, as the covers are very dissimilar. However, whether it was St. Martins or Severn, for some reason I have had more input into these book covers than at any time in my career.
I am a huge, HUGE, Rat Pack fan, which is the reason I'm writing these books in the first place. With book #4 I went just outside the Rat Pack to their extended family member, Marilyn Monroe. With the new one, book #5, I'M A FOOL TO KILL YOU, I used my favorite screen siren, Ava Gardner. Her marriage to Frank made her fair game, plus the fact that Frank wrote the lyrics of "I'm A Fool To Love You" specifically for her.
Eddie G. and Jerry Epstein are asked by Frank to look into Ava's blackout to see if she actually killed the gangster she woke up in bed next to in a Chicago Hotel. Of course, Dino is around, and Sammy accompanies Eddie to a Chicago meeting with mob boss Sam "Momo" Giancana. Joey Bishop does a cameo, and Peter Lawford finds himself on the outs with Frank, at this point. Since I'm with Frank on this point, Peter finds himself out of the book (he was also replaced by Frank with Bing Crosby in the movie Robin and The 7 Hoods).
(Lawford sidebar: I always wondered what the hell this stiff-backed actor was doing on stage with the other four. Turns out there was a time during his career when he had a stage act with—guess who—Jimmy Durante.)
Some nice things have been said about my depiction of Ava Gardner in this book. Actually, this one and the Marilyn are two of my favorites in this series. The next book, FLY ME TO THE MORGUE, is only 6 months away and features Bing Crosby, with a cameo by Bob Hope.
Future books includes appearances by Howard Hughes and Jimmy Durante, and the effect Frank Jr.'s kidnapping and JFK's assassination have on Frank, as they occurred only weeks apart at the end of 1963.

Margaret Millar

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Ed here: I picked up Tom Nolan's collection of Margaret Millar short stories last night and read two of them. Perfect in every way. So once again I'm suggesting that she be brought back in print and appreciated for the fine stylist and bewitching storyteller she was. In 2007 CLUES did an issue devoted to her work. Here's my review from that time.

Clues, Spring 2007 - Margaret Millar
I've spoken here many times of my admiration for the novels of Margaret Millar. Her fate seems to be that of great if only occasional press but not many readers. She won an Edgar, she was frequently judged to be as good a writer as her husband Ken Millar (Ross Macdonald), and her books are dazzlers both as stories and exemplars of witty and sometimes mordant style.

I also once said that there are writers too good for the masses and I sometimes wonder if Millar isn't one of them. She makes few concessions to the commercial mystery. Her people are very much her own. In this regard she reminds me of someone I'm sure she read early in her career, Elizabeth Sanxay Holding. Her characters are unique to genre fiction, drawn from life rather than books. And I'm pretty sure this is off-putting to readers who want the familiar types we find in so much commercial fiction.

I'm saying all this because I've just finished reading the Spring 2007 issue of Clues, which is mostly devoted to Millar. Editor Dean James has put together the most interesting, enlightening and memorable work I've ever seen about her. Tom Nolan, who wrote the outstanding biography of Ross Macdonald a few years back, takes us here into the heart of lives of two writers who are not only husband and wife but (as a Millar quote gently suggests) competitors. A fine fine piece.

Ana Patricia Rodriguez, on the other hand, gives us a polemic on Millar's view of Mexicans and Mexico as found in her Tom Aragon novels and in the standalone BEYOND THIS POINT ARE MONSTERS. Rodriguez is indusputably correct. Millar's writing reflected the opinions of many white, middle-class (or upper-middle-class) Californians. Their misgivings about the immigrants weren't expressed in any "common" vulgar way but you do see in Millar's writing the disdain she and her crowd felt for them.

The essay by Kelly C. Connelly compares the psychologoy in Dorothy Sayers to the psychology of Millar. And Dean James tells us which Millar books are in print.

Robert Barnard takes a sage look at Millar's final novels, among them the sinfully overlooked THE MURDER OF MIRANDA. For one thing, the sections dealing with the poisoned pen writer at the country club are among the most savagely bitchy (and hilarious) moments in all of Millar's writing. And for another, I've rarely seen a more moving portrait of a beautiful woman who is losing the one thing she's depended on all her life--her looks, The twins here are out of the black humor of Terry Southern. Barnard's as good a critic as he is a novelist and short story writer. I put him at the top in all three categories.

There's also a Caren J. Town piece on the racism and sexism that Deborah Knott must face in the excellent novels by Margaret Maron. "The Same old Same old" says it all.

Quite an issue. In fact, one of the best Clues I've ever read.

******************Careers: Erle Stanley Gardner(from 2006...

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Careers: Erle Stanley Gardner
(from 2006)

I've never been able to figure out why Raymond Chandler felt he owed such a literary debt to Erle Stanley Gardner. He told Gardner that he'd once copied a Gardner story so closely that he couldn't submit it for publication. I guess he felt it would look like plagiarism. But what did he learn from Gardner? Certainly not style. Certainly not dialogue. Certainly not structure. Writers learn from unlikely sources, true enough. But Chandler seemed to lavish so much praise on Gardner you have to wonder what inspired him exactly.

But Chandler was a snob and when you examine the nature of his praise, you get a sense he was being condescending. He said that only when you wrote at great speed (as Gardner did) could you make such unbeleivable plot turns palatable to otherwise sensible readers. I've always wondered what Gardner made of that. He was no fool.

All this comes to mind because I had several doctor appointments in the past few weeks and I'm always careful to bring fast and uncomplicated reads along with me. For the last few doc visits I brought along Perry Mason novels. Early Perry Mason novels, I should note, when Mason was still a creature of Black Mask rather than The Saturday Evening Post. Throughout his career he was wise enough to recognize one of the great true American boogeymen, big business. His social conscience came fom his days as a lawyer when he represented Native Americans, black Americans and Latino Americans in towns that did not want them.

I still find the Masons good reads. True, Gardner worked with stereotypes--The Bad Wife, The Crooked Cop, The Loyal Servant--and he told his stories largely through (sometimes interminable) dialogue but while I'm reading them I'm almost always caught up in the puzzle he's given us. Nobody is what they claim to be. Everybody has a secret, usually a nasty one, the exception being the tortured person Mason has agreed to take on as a client, usually while shunning much more lucrative work.

The early Masons were written before Gardner decided to make his work "timeless." There is little place description in the later books. He didn't want to "date" them. I like the history I get from the first dozen Masons, from all of the Doug Selbys and even from the A.A. Fairs written during the war years. I enjoy sitting in the tea rooms, bars, mansions, hotels and trains of the Thirties and early Forties. His work became far less interesting when it was shorn of any physical specificity.

The Masons owe much more to the Golden Age than most critics seem to have noticed. Their plot pieces are no less unlikely, the clues no less exotic and the conclusions no less bombastic. But I'm not complaining. Most Golden Age stuff except for John Dickson Carr is difficult for me to gak down. But somehow Perry, Della and Paul make it all fun again. I'm a Gardner fan for life.

PS When I first published this Brendan DuBois wrote to tell me that his middle school nun used to assign Perry Masons for book reports. Very cool nun.

Cape Fear reviewed by Dean Brierly

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Cady channels his inner beatnik.

Dean Brierly reviews for both Cinema Retro and other magazines and has two of his own websites--Films of The Fifties, Films of The Sixties. Here's an example of his work, a section from his long review of Cape Fear. You'll have to scroll down a ways to get the entire review. It's excellent.


The Lawless

Robert Mitchum rarely played out and out villains, but when he did, the results were spectacular. No one who has seen Night of the Hunter (1955) is likely to forget his murderous preacher with the words "love" and "hate" tattooed on his knuckles. The actor brought equal intensity to his role as Max Cady, whose heavy-lidded, baleful stare hints at barely repressed psychotic undercurrents. Mitchum's powerful physique, on frequent display throughout the film, holds the promise of unstoppable violence. He imbues Cady with a reptilian quality that evokes nothing so much as a ravenous crocodile as he pursues the Bowden family through Georgia swampland in the film's final minutes.

The revelation of Mitchum's performance, however, is its redneck hipster quality. Cady is without doubt one of the most visceral predators ever burned onto celluloid. But he's also an undeniably cool cat, a sociopathic Jack Kerouac, if you will. Cady's sartorial style—chinos, sport shirt, windbreaker and, most distinctively, a sporty Panama hat tilted back at a cocksure angle—immediately sets him apart from the conservative citizenry of the small Southern town where the story unfolds. Cady doesn't walk, he saunters. His body language is arrogant and knowing, and his face is set in a perpetual smirk, as if he's enjoying a secret joke at the expense of all the rubes around him. He's also a fount of sardonic humor, delivered in streetwise jargon that nicely counterbalances the film's visual and thematic darkness. His first words in the movie, addressed to an elderly black janitor, are: "Hey, daddy, where does Sam Bowden hang out?" Although Cady uses the word "daddy" as a casual form of an address to an older man, the term also harbors racial and sexual implications that possibly relate to his life in prison. The viewer has already pegged Cady as an unregenerate sleazeball, so anything's possible.

But what really makes Cady cool is how easily he dominates people and situations. When he's arrested in a cocktail bar on the orders of Chief Dutton, he doesn't meekly submit, but first ambles over to the sexy girl he's been eyeballing, tosses a contemptuous glance at her male companion, and says, "I'm going to give you just one hour to get rid of your friend." "Are you trying to pick me up?" she asks. He relies with a knowing leer and emphatic "Yes," pushes the brim of his hat down Sinatra style and strolls out like the arrogant badass he is.

for the rest go here http://sixtiescrimefilms.blogspot.com/

George Axelrod

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Ed here: I watched "The Seven Year Itch" the other night and that made me remember George Axelrod. And that made me remember my review of his Gold Medal novel, which Hard Case Crime reissued a few years back.

BLACKMAILER by George Axelrod

There were few cooler guys on TV in the Fifties than George Axelrod. I didn't see him that often--he did a few talk shows; a few arts shows--but I always thought Now that's the kind of guy I wish I could be. Hip but accessible.

Not only had Axelrod produced such fine B'way and movie hits as "The Seven Year Itch" and "Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?," he'd adapted such novels as "The Manchurian Candidate" and "Breakfast at Tiffany's" to the screen.

And on TV he was slick and and funny and serious about his craft.

Oh, and one more thing. He was the author of a genuine Gold Medal novel.

I bought BLACKMAILER a few years after it appeared...say forty-five years ago. Now Hard Case Crime has reissued it and even after all this time it holds up well, albeit as a tribute to a time long past but fondly remembered by some portions of my generation.

What Axelrod did here was take the elements of the standard hardboiled crime novel--good bad girls and bad bad men, the prospect of lots of cash--and mix them up with talent agents and movie stars. And relate all this in a voice that is both literate and a bit larky at times--and works surprisingly well, even in the scenes of violence. There's a faux Hemingway (who was God at that time), a faux Marilyn Monroe (who was Goddess at that time) and enough double-crossing to make you cross-eyed.

This is one of those kick-back novels. A beer or two, a night with nothing to do, a devout desire for pure escape. I enjoyed the hell out of it.

Forgotten Books: The Innocent Mrs. Duff by Elizabeth Sanxay Holding

THE INNOCENT MRS. DUFF
One of the more familiar knocks on mystery fiction is that it rarely treats death seriously. That too often murder is simply the device that propels the story and not much more. I think that's a fair criticism and I certainly include my own work as being guilty of that particular sin. Murder, even literary murder, should HURT.

I'd also add to that criticism the various addictions common to the genre, namely alcoholism and drug addiction. Only Larry Block and a few others have taken us into the real world of recovering alcoholics. For the most part addiction has become just another keystroke common to the world of mystery fiction.

I've read three novels in my life that have described accurately--in my experience as an alcoholic--the horrors of being drunk most of your life. Certainly Under The Volcano by Malcolm Lowry, After the First Death by Larry Block and a novel you've probably never heard of, though alcoholic Raymond Chandler pushed it as one of the finest suspense novels of his time.

For some reason, much as I've pushed her here, I'd never read THE INNOCENT MRS. DUFF by Elizabeth Sanxay Holding. It is remarkable in many ways, not least because the protagonis. Jacob Duff is drunk for virtually the entire novel. And we see 95% of the book through his eyes. Functionally drunk for most of it but also falling-down drunk in places. Holding's genius was to sustain a sense of dread that I don't think even Ruth Rendell has equaled. There are times in her novels when I have to put the book down for a few minutes. They are that claustrophobic in mood and action.

That's the first most remarkable aspect of the book. The second most remarkable is the fact that we see the book through the eyes of one of the most arrogant, self-invoved, cold and self-deluded man I've ever encountered in fiction of any kind. I hated the bastard so much--I'm not enamored of the upper-classes, alas, and Duff embodies everything I loathe about them--I almost gave up after chapter three. I wasn't sure I wanted to learn anything more about this jerk,

But Holding has the voodoo, at least for me. She makes me turn pages faster than any best-seller because what you're rushing to discover is the fate of her people. All the good folks in this one are women, especially Duff's younger, beautiful and very decent wife. He constantly compares her unfavorably to his first wife, though we soon learn that he didn't care much for his first wife, either. At age forty he's still looking for his dream woman. God have mercy on her soul if he ever finds her.

As always with Holding, as with much of Poe, what we have is not so much a plot (though she's as good as Christie) as a phantasmagoria of despair, distrust and suspicion that consumes the protagonist. Is his wife cheating on him? Is she setting up his death so she'll inherit his estate? Is she turning his young son against him? Has his wealthy aunt, his life-long mentor and mother confessor, taken the side of his young wife? Has his drinking disgraced him in his small town and are all those smirks aimed at him? And finally, is he a murderer? And why does he have to sneak around these days to drink?

If you're curious about Holding, this is a good place to start. Anthony Boucher always said that she was the mother of all psychological suspense novelists. What's intresting is how few, fifty-some years after her death, have come close to equaling her enormous powers.

Pro-File: Loren D. Estleman

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"Nobody does it better." Elmore Leonard

The Left-Handed Dollar is Loren Estleman's twentieth Amos Walker novel--and the thirtieth anniversary of the series!

Pro-File LorenD. Estleman

Tell us about your current novel or project?

1. Another Amos Walker, INFERNAL ANGELS, is scheduled for July 2011: It's about Homeland Security's increasing threat to our liberties, and will most likely fatten my FBI file. In 2012 Forge will publish a huge dream project, THE CONFESSIONS OF AL CAPONE. It came in at 796 pp. manuscript and takes place in Miami in 1944 and Chicago during Prohibition. If Capone ever entertained writing his autobiography, I like to think it would bear a close resemblance to this.

Can you give us a sense of what you're working on now?

2. I'm fooling around with another project I've tinkered with off and on for years. One advantage of being months ahead on all your deadlines is you get to flirt with some bizarre stuff.

What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?

3. Doing what you most like to do and getting paid for it. It beats working.

The greatest displeasure?

4. Meeting people who find out what I do, then say they're not much for reading, mot even realizing they're insulting you to your face.

Advice to the publishing world?

5. Print far more copies tan you can ever expect to sell. It's the only way to galvanize the sales team.

Rules for the road?

6. Learn another skill in case the writing doesn't work out. I got this from my college journalism professor. I took him to mean I should get a job with a newspaper so I'd always have it for a backup.

Advice for new writers?

7. Don't write about Detroit.

Worst writiing advice you ever got?

8. Let us, your publishers, deal with Hollywood.

Writers you'd like to see in print again?

9. Fletcher Flora and Jack Ritchie.

Thank you very much, Loren.