Ed Gorman's Blog, page 217

Killing Reveals Truths of Life at Limelight's Edge

Ed here: The difference between tabloid reporting (and I include everything I've seen on TV about Ronni Chasen up to now) and real reporting is the difference between urine and apple cider. They look similar when you hold them up to the light but if you know what you're looking at, you won't be fooled. Like many people I've been following the Ronni Chasen murder case but not until I read this article did I realize just how downright inept all the other stories about her really were. She was, according to the press reports since day one,, super-rich, super-popwerful and the belle of any ball she attended. I guess not.


December 4, 2010
Killing Reveals Truths of Life at Limelight's Edge
By MICHAEL CIEPLY and BROOKS BARNES
LOS ANGELES — Ronni Chasen could be loud. And she pushed.

At an event like the Governors Awards of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, one of the last show business soirées she attended before her murder on Nov. 16, Ms. Chasen sent reporters skittering for shelter as she scanned the room for targets of opportunity — people to introduce to clients like the film composer Hans Zimmer and the soundtrack expert Diane Warren.

At 64, Ms. Chasen was fighting to keep her place in a Hollywood public relations game that had mostly gone to firms bigger than her boutique Chasen and Company, or to players who were younger.

Assumptions of a pampered Hollywood life have shifted since she was killed last month, shot repeatedly while driving home from a movie premiere. The unsolved killing is pulling back the veil on a person who, like many in the show business capital, focused on holding onto a steadily eroding modicum of glamour.

Dismissing impressions of privilege, her longtime friend Martha Smilgis said: "Ronni was not a Jewish princess. She was a Jewish businesswoman."

The distinction was Ms. Smilgis's way of sorting through a bewildering thicket of facts that have begun to surface as both friends and investigators come to terms with the shooting of a woman who was hardly the most important in Hollywood but had become one of its best-known stock characters.

Ms. Chasen operated a modest public relations firm with the sort of clients who might be expected to pay fees of only a few thousand dollars a month — not much when measured against the need to pay salaries for her staff of four and the demands of a Hollywood life.

for the rest go here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/us/...

Six Rules for Success; Women in Baseball

Ed Here: Writer Susan Oleksiw has an an interesting piece on her blog tonight:

Six Rules for Success by Susan Oleksiw

Mystery writing conferences are a great opportunity for those of use who work at our craft in isolation most of the time to get together and renew our enthusiasm. This year's Crime Bake was one of the best, and I came away with lots of things to think about and new books to read. The panels brought a lot of new names and topics, but through it all, writers came back to a few main points about writing and the life of a writer. These are worth keeping in mind no matter who the writer is—the author of a bestseller, of a first book, or of half a dozen mysteries that sell modestly. So here they are, the qualities of a successful writer as reiterated by a number of writers who have achieved a range of success.

First, be persistent. Writing the novel takes time, selling it to a publisher takes time, producing it takes time, and selling it to the book-buying public takes time. It can take twenty years to become an overnight sensation, so keep working year after year after year, and you will continue to learn and grow and eventually get there.

for the rest go here:

ttp://www.susanoleksiw.blogspot.com/

-------------------------------Barbara Gregorich


Hi Ed,

You may have seen this on my posts, but in case not I'm writing to tell you that I've just published Research Notes for Women at Play: The Story of Women in Baseball, Vol. I: Maud Nelson, Margaret Nabel. This is an 8x10 book (notebook sized) of 114 pages, consisting of original newspaper articles written between 1875 and 1935. Most of the articles are quoted in their entirety, some are summarized. These are a portion of the research notes from which I wrote Women at Play back in 1992.

This book will be of interest to baseball researchers, to women in baseball who want to know their history, perhaps to baseball fans who aren't interested in research but would enjoy reading old-timey articles, maybe to novelists looking for the flavor of the times, and, I hope, to high school English teachers who assign research papers to students.

Since publishing this book last month, I've already heard from baseball researchers who said that information in my book led them to some aspect of their own research they didn't know about or hadn't considered.

The book is available only through Amazon, $12 for the softbound format, $5 for the Kindle format.

Here's the link:

http://www.facebook.com/l/12944YBo8tb...

Best wishes,
Barbara

Pulp Serenade; GOS Multimedia

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http://www.pulpserenade.com/

For those of you you haven't noticed, Cullen Gallagher at Pulp Serenade is running an exceptionally good series on Gold Medal westerns. A number of the GM western writers also wrote hardboiled GMs. Tonight for example deals with William Ard and the series he wrote under the name of Jonas Ward, good westerner sounding name. The Buchanan books always reminded me a bit of Norbert Davis' sly and wily approach to hardboiled. Through Buchanan's sardonic eyes we see the ship of fools run aground again and again. One of the Buchanan's became a good Randolph Scott western. Salute to Cullen for such great work.

-----------------------------------------GOS Multimedia

Ever since Top Suspense Group appeared on the net people have been asking who did all that fantastic work for us. We are mighty proud of the website and grateful to the man, Steven Booth, who conceived the look, the details and getting it to the net. He did everything start to finish. And he did it efficiently and inexpensively and was open to any questions or suggestions as he showed us versions of it as we went along.

Harry Shannon said it best:: "Steven Booth of GOS Multimedia may contact you. He's a great guy and does remarkable, inexpensive work on video book trailers, websites, etc. Also has some cool ideas for marketing and an abiding interest in books."

In case you think this is hype ask any writer who's part of the Top Suspense Group. We looked around for some time before going to Steven. Steven will be contacting writers or, if you're in need of his services right away, here's the information.

Steven W. Booth
GOS Multimedia
(818) 585-9945
www.gosmultimedia.com
steven@gosmultimedia.com
"Make a Great Impression Every Time!"

A Touch of Death by Charles Williams

(From January 2006)



A Touch of Death by Charles Wiliams

I once read an unfavorable review of a Charles Williams novel that said the protagonist was unbeleivably naive. How could he not know know that the people he was getting involved with were criminals? Which, to most Williams fans, has to sound unbeleivably naive on the part of the reviewer.

In his exceptionally fine piece on the work of Charles Williams, poet, journalist and editor (the Library of America) Geoffrey O'Brien notes that of all the paperback original writers, Williams' protagonists are the ones most predisposed to criminality themselves. If they are naive, it's only in the women they choose to hook up with. And they are rarely naive even about the ladies.

Madelone Butler, in Williams' A Touch of Death (Hardcase, $6.99), is the kind of woman most men would run from. It's too easy to say that Madelone is a deceitful, duplicitous shrew, which she is of course. But that's putting too much on her. She presents Lee Scarborough with the chance of stealing $120,000 in stolen cash or just walking away. Which he could easily do. But--and this is the point many reviewers miss about many of Williams' men--his boys are a lot like his girls, the one difference being that they generally don't betray their partners.

Williams has always been my favorite of the Gold Medal writers. As John D. MacDonald said of him, "Nobody can make violence seem more real." The reason for this is that Williams' men are violent themselves. Not predatory. But certainly tough men, usually from workingclass backgrounds, who use violence when it becomes necessary. Another point too seldom made about his work. He was the master of the slow-build suspense novel; he clearly enjoyed twisting every aspect of the treachery and surprise that fill his books.

This isn't always true of Williams' work. The sea novels for which he's most famous (the excellent film Dead Calm was based on a Williams novel) are usually told by men who, if not heroic, are not crooked. But I've always preferred the deep South, small-town novels usually set after the big war when our wandering boy meets our wandering girl and together they decide to make a little money.

Line by line I think that Williams is by far the best of all the early Gold Medal folks with the exception of Vin Packer and Malcolm Braly. There's real beauty in his descriptions of nature and a true feel for the hypocrisy of small towns. And there is that great frantic sense of being unfulfilled--of looking for something, a woman, a gig, a place, anything that might offer him peace--that always eludes. Williams is the great melancholic, especially his men whose two dominate emotions seem to be remorse and a paranoid sense of betrayl.

Hell, yes, they know what they're getting into, his people, and they get into it gladly. As Sartre once said, go figure.

Harry Whittington - A Question

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Ed here: I ran across this old post of mine--five years ago--and realized I never did find the answer to my question. Maybe by now somebody knows.

Harry Whittington

I was looking through a catalog for 50s paperbacks and naturally enough I came across Harry Whittington's name just about everywhere. He wrote for companies large and small, some so small that even today I've never seen one of their books.

This started me thinking of the one mystery about Harry I was never able to clear up even after three somewhat lengthy interviews and a couple of phone conversations.

The story is familiar to most people who have even a cursory knowledge of his career. One day, after dropping from the heights of Gold Medal and Crest, Harry found himself writing Man From Uncle Books for a flat $1000. But not even this was the bottom because soon enough his agent would tell Harry that Harry just wasn't marketable anymore. Period.

I asked Harry twice about this and he said that that was just the way it was so he went back to full-time work for the government. I remember that I seemed to surprise him when I asked why he didn't look around for a different agent. But again he just said that that was how things were and so back to full-time jobs.

Harry was a pro's pro. He did it all. I can understand how he stopped hitting the top markets in the mid-60s. The market was changing, his kind of lean, mean sex-and-murder book was no longer in fashion. But Harry could write anything. And all his agent could get was flat-fee work for hire? Harry Whittington?

A few years later, he did contact another agent and was almost immediately back in the saddle with adult westerns nd ultimately, back at Gold Medal/Fawcett, with Southern plantation epics. But I'm sure this agent could have sold him back when his came came to a so-called end.

I've often wondered if that was really all there was to it. That he would give up the fight so easily, take the word of a single agent that he was no longer marketable.

Anybody help me out with this?

Robert Aldrich

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Ed here: Excellent long post by Matthew Bradley on his Bradley on Film blog. Robert Aldrich has always been one of my favorite under-rated directors. Matthew does a great job elaborating on Aldrich's importance.

Matthew Bradley:

At his best when prefiguring or subverting entire genres and subgenres, Aldrich made heroes of a sympathetic Indian in Apache, at a time when few would do so, and unsympathetic—but weirdly compelling—p.i. Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) in Kiss Me Deadly. The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) anticipated the wave of all-star disaster films launched, as it were, by Airport (1970), and Ulzana's Raid used a Western setting to make a statement about the war then raging in Vietnam. In The Dirty Dozen, he turned the star-studded WW II epic on its head twice, first by making a bunch of convicted criminals his main characters, and then by making us really care about them.

With Baby Jane, Aldrich could lay claim to creating an entire subgenre of his own, unleashing a torrent of "dotty old lady" thrillers, which he perpetuated as both a director (Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte [1964]) and a producer (What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? [1969]). In fact, he often produced his own films and, like Dino De Laurentiis, used his early success to establish his own production company, only to have it shuttered by a series of flops. Among his directorial efforts, he's credited as a writer on only three (Ten Seconds to Hell [1959], 4 for Texas, and Too Late the Hero [1970]) and, perhaps predictably, was never so much as nominated for an Academy Award.

for the rest go here:
http://bradleyonfilm.wordpress.com/

More News from Stark House

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Ed here: I've mentioned many times before that Robert Silverberg has been one of my idols/favorite writers since I was a teenager. Such novels, to name just a few, as Dying Inside (which I consider to be true literature), Hawksbill Station, The Book of Skulls and Nightwings are matched by literally dozens of powerful short stories.

And then there are the making-a-living books. Silverberg did a large number of soft core books in the Fifties and Sixties. I read a good share of them and almost always liked them. Along with Don Westlake, Larry Block, Hal Dresner and many others the books they wrote meant money, yes, but I also believe it probably learned them a thing or two about their craft as well.

When I saw the announcement about the forthcoming Silverberg duo over on Those Sexy Vintage Sleaze Books I thought I'd run the same thing here. Thanks, Stark House for another look at these books. And thanks to Bob Silverberg for always delivering good solid work no matter what the venue.

From Stark House:

DON ELLIOTT

Don Elliott is better known under his real name, Robert Silverberg, where he has forged a career as one of science fiction's most respected writers and editors. Author of such seminal works as Hawksbill Station, Dying Inside, A Time of Changes and Downward to the Earth, as well as the more recent Majipoor Chronicles, he has also produced innumerable non-fiction works, historical novels and hundreds of erotic books for such publishers as Nightstand and Midwood Books in the 1950's and early 60's. He has written under many names, but his most off-used pseudonym for Nightstand was "Don Elliott." Silverberg lives and continues to write in Oakland, CA.
Gang Girl / Sex Bum
1-933586-34-6 $19.95

Two compulsively readable erotic novels written by Robert Silverberg under his Don Elliott pseudonym for Nightstand Books. Back in print after 50 years with an introduction by the author.
"Don Elliott is my kind of writer." Andrew Shaw, author of Campus Tramp

Important Announcements from Stark House

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"Hitch was with this great, high-heeled monster of a woman and the only
reason I was along, I spoke Italian and Hitch did not. It turned out that the
woman was not Italian at all, she was Sicilian, and her glue-voiced accent
was so heavy that I understood almost as little as Hitch. Not that it mattered."

Hello Everyone--

Stark House Press is happy to announce the long-awaited publication of the late, great Peter Rabe's final manuscripts, The Silent Wall and The Return of Marvin Palaver. Along with a very rare Rabe short story, "Hard Case Redhead," the books will appear in a single volume this coming January. The above passage is the opening from The Silent Wall, which Booklist calls "a claustrophobic noir, at times almost unbearably tense." And it is certainly that. Matty Matheson has the run of an entire town but he is not allowed to leave, held captive by the Mafia for reasons he only thinks he knows.

The Return of Marvin Palaver is a darkly comic, highly complex short book about a swindle, payback and the incredible lengths one man will go to get his revenge against the man who ruined him. Rabe never wrote the same book twice and even with his talent for writing different kinds of crime fiction, the story will leave you breathless with its unique voice and dark sense of humor.

Shortly before his death in 1990, Rabe had sent these manuscripts to friend and author Ed Gorman, who's had them in his possession until now. We're ecstatic to be the ones who are finally bringing these books, along with the short story "Hard Case Redhead," into the world. In "Redhead," two thieves and their uninvited guest try to wait out the aftermath of a troublesome heist. It's hard-boiled and noir and shows that Rabe could write just as well at shorter lengths.

Donald E. Westlake named Rabe and Hammett his two major genre influences, Bill Pronzini called him "a kind of fictional surgeon," and Bill Crider said, "Few writers are Rabe's equal in the field of the hardboiled gangster story." If you've never read Peter Rabe, there's no better time to start.

We're also announcing the creation of the Stark House Book Club with a special offer of free shipping on all our books to everyone who signs up now. No minimum to buy, no obligation, just sign up and you'll receive each new release, hassle free and with no shipping, as they are published. For a limited time, each new member can order as many backlist titles as they'd like for 15% off list price and again, free shipping. To sign up for the club, e-mail us at griffinskye3@sbcglobal.net. And to check out our list of authors and titles, visit our website at www.starkhousepress.com.

On tap for the near future are a two-in-one volume of vintage sleaze crime novels from the famous (under his real name) Don Elliott and a nice trio from Day Keene, and many other exciting titles. So sign up now and don't miss a book!

To receive this newsletter automatically, please send your e-mail address. We look forward to hearing from you.

Cheers,
Greg Shepard, publisher
Stark House Press

Interview with Tim Meadows; Max Allan Collins

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Photo: Stephen Shugerman/Getty Images

Ed here: I've always liked Tim Meadows' work. He generally works quietly and precisely. My perception of SNL is that it's never been especially kind to its actors of color (or to some of its lesser white ones, either). Eddie Murphy was the exception. But he stormed the bastille. There was no denying him. I've enjoyed a lot of Meadows' work since he left SNL, particularly the scam artist he plays on Stephen Colbert.

Today there's a great interview with Max Allan Collins (of Top Suspense Group) that's well worth reading. Asked about himself as a writer he says "I'm a storyteller. I work in whatever medium is available to me -- where the possibilities of getting stories told are. Where the money is." As I read it I was thinking about the Tim Meadows interview I'd read earlier in the morning--and how similar they were in several ways. To read the Collins interview go here: http://topsuspense.blogspot.com/2010/...


From New York Magazine

Tim Meadows has always had a low-key style of comedy. He's never been a pratfaller or a screamer, and his impressions on Saturday Night Live never involved any great verbal calisthenics. When he left SNL in 2000 after ten seasons, his career seemed low-key as well; apart from his Ladies Man film, he mostly kept busy with a series of supporting roles as deadpan peeved neighbors, doctors, and teachers, in shows ranging from high quality (Curb Your Enthusiasm, Mean Girls) to not-so-high (The Even Stevens Movie, According to Jim). He's now starring as a frustrated political-science professor on TBS's new college comedy, Glory Daze, which airs tonight. We talked to the 49-year-old actor to discuss how he made his career choices and were pleasantly surprised by his candor, which was just as low-key as you'd expect.

You were on Saturday Night Live for ten seasons. Did you get the sense at some point that the length of your tenure had turned into a negative?
It surprised me around year eight or nine when people would say — especially in the press — that I'd been on the show for a long time. It was like they were saying, "He won't leave and go do something else." It sort of bothered me because I felt like, this is the job I'm working, and this is still a great place to be. So, yeah, I was surprised by the criticism of it.

Do you think the criticism arose because SNL is viewed as a launching pad?
Yeah. But what people don't understand is that in show business, you don't get those jobs often. So I didn't want to give it up until I felt like, (1) I had done everything I could do on the show and, (2) I wasn't creatively able to contribute. And by the tenth season, I felt that way. I just wasn't inspired. I was tired. And I was, you know, married. I felt like it was time to move on.

When the first two things you did post-SNL — namely, The Ladies Man and The Michael Richards Show — totally tanked, did you ever think, Holy shit, what's happening to me?

Yes. Although the Michael Richards thing was different from The Ladies Man, because I had no control over it. The Ladies Man I can live with because it's my comedy, you know? I'm not ashamed of that movie. But with The Michael Richards Show, the thing that made me feel like I'd made a wrong choice was at the press conference for the show. The pilot they'd showed me was a single-camera show, and then at the press conference they said it was going to be multiple cameras. I just looked at Andy Robin, who was the show-runner, and I was like, "Really?" And he said, "Yeah." I just sat back in my chair and I knew: "We're doomed."

for the rest go here:
http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/
2010/11/tim_meadows_career_interview.html

Video for Top Suspense Group

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Thanks to Steven Booth who produced the commercial and to Terrill Lankford who took the time to to make it blog ready for me, here is the video for The Top Suspense Group, whose newest member is Lee Goldberg. Howdy, Lee!


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