Ed Gorman's Blog, page 219

The Essentials

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The other day Terry Gross on NPR played a 1993 interview with Eli Wallach in celebration of the honorary Oscar he'll receive. Listening to him talk about his decades-long career I realized how good and sometimes great he was in dozens of pictures I'd seen over my lifetime. He did everything from tough cops to ironic killer cowboys to drawing room comedy. There was a time when he headlined a few films and did well for himself on Broadway. He acted until recently.

I've mentioned before that for me there are a number of actors who redeemed even bad films just by walking into camera range. Robert Ryan, Jack Warden, Jack Weston, Gloria Graham, Carole Lombard, James Garner, Marsha Hunt, Constance Bennett, Lee Marvin--a complete list would take me a couple of hours to type out.

There are a number of excellent younger actors today. They may be even better than the people I listed above. But none of them give me quite the movie thrill I get from those on my list. This may well be because I grew up watching the actors above. Do you think we're more comfortable with those we spent long hours with in the movie theaters?

Could product placement work in books?

From Galleycat

Could Product Placement Work in Books?


Do you want ads in your books? How about product placement? Today Entertainment Weekly collected clips of product placement in the soap opera, Days of Our Lives. The Cheerios placement embedded above makes us laugh, but the advertising dollars also helped keep the show on the air.

Earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal touched off a publishing debate the prospect of advertisements in digital books: "With e-reader prices dropping like a stone and major tech players jumping into the book retail business, what room is left for publishers' profits? The surprising answer: ads. They're coming soon to a book near you."

Could you handle strategic product placement in your favorite book or eBook? Movable Type Literary Group founder Jason Ashlock started the Twitter hashtag #adsinbooks back in August. It might be time to revisit the debate. (Via Edward Champion)

UPDATE: Reader Ted Weinstein reminds us that Fay Weldon made headlines back in 2001 for product placement in her novel, The Bulgari Connection. In addition, reader Alex Irvine shared another product placement story from 2008.

THE HIDDEN by Bill Pronzini

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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.

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BILL PRONZINI – The Hidden. Walker & Co., hardcover, November 2010. (Available for pre-order online.)



No one currently writing orchestrates the elements of the suspense novel with half the finesse of Bill Pronzini. If that were all — and it would be enough — he would be our best suspense novelist, but he also gets inside of the head of the characters in his novels and gets them into our heads, all done with simple elegance, and without the sturm und drang of many lesser writers.

We don't just identify with his characters, we experience with them. We get to know them; innocents, and not so innocents, madmen, lovers, and killers, all drawn simply with a few deft strokes that none the less present fully developed characters — people we recognize and know, and sometimes are.

Jay and Shelby Macklin are a young couple in crisis, emotional and financial crisis. Jay is emotionally remote and withdrawn ("All his life he had been a closed book, not just to her and others, but to himself too."), Shelby is hurt and has fought for their marriage about as long as she is willing to ("Twelve years of marriage to him had sucked the youth out of her.").

The two of them are taking a Christmas vacation at a friend's vacation home on the rugged Northern California coast.

Their timing could be better. Since midsummer the coast has been haunted by the so called Coast Line Killer, a murderer whose motives are obscure and who seems to strike randomly. For a number of reasons this holiday is a less than wise choice for the troubled couple, not the least Shelby's nyctaphobia, her fear of the dark:

… she'd never quite lost her fear of the dark.
She had it as far back as she could remember. Not of ordinary darkness, the light-tinged kind where you had some limited vision of objects or shapes. Of blackness so complete you couldn't see anything at all, the kind a blind person must feel …

Pronzini has already introduced us to the killer, and his motive, to protect the rugged coastline from any and all intruders, so we know ahead of time what sets him off, and wait breathlessly for the young couple to cross his deadly path. And even here Pronzini rings in changes and surprises that both fill our expectations and take us in new directions.

His killer is no monster, no sex-obsessed cartoonish serial killer leaving a trail of extravagant sado-masochistic crimes behind him, but instead a quiet man become reluctant and rather tired avenger of the vulnerable coast. It is because his crimes seem so mundane and so reasoned that he is frightening.

He is the stuff of headlines, not nightmares. He is frightening for being familiar, for being someone we might know, might see in our daily lives, might not notice until it is too late:

Clouds shifted away from the moon, and the wind and the slow-breaking waves lit up with a kind of iridescent white glow. A long yellow white streak appeared on the ocean's surface, extending out over some of the offshore rocks where the gulls nested, giving their limed surface a patch-painted look. He paused to take in the view. Nice night. He liked nights like this, quiet, peaceful, empty, as if he had the sea and the scalloped shoreline all to himself.
As has happened in past Pronzini novels the setting, the Northern California coast where Pronzini lives, is also a character in the novel as is the weather, in this case a brutal winter storm.

And with those elements set in motion he then begins to add the twists and refinements. Not far from where Jay and Shelby are staying two other couples are also vacationing in a sort of domestic hell that makes the Macklin's problems look simple.

Human nature, the weather, too great passion and passion dying, a madman, human weakness, and human fears — these are the ingredients Pronzini stirs into his mix, having already warned us with his choice of epigraphs from Georges Bataille and Friedrich Nietzsche as well as his title that it is not the obvious dangers that should concern us, but those things we hide from others and from ourselves.

Theme, plot, setting, and character are one, a grand design, and a unity, not merely disparate entities thrown together.

The monsters are not in the outer dark, but the inner dark we create within ourselves. Shelby has more to fear from that inner dark than anything lurking on the outside, even the Coast Line Killer:

The night seemed alive with shrieks, whistles, fluttery moans.
His Coast Line Killer is, much like the great storm that spawns the breathless climax of the novel, only a force that brings those hidden things to the surface. Not all the violence, nor all the crime in the novel arises from the disturbed man's actions though like the storm his presence and his actions bring things to a head. There are other currents and other crimes that will test Jay and Shelby to their limits, and in Jay's case an enemy more implacable and deadly than any serial killer, and begin the process of healing — or end their lives.

There are no easy answers in Pronzini's novels, whether suspense or his tales of his private detective Nameless. Heroism can come down to putting one foot in front of another because you have to, to showing simple courage in face of madness, to overcoming a phobia, a childhood trauma, ourselves, to discovering how much you love another, and to just doing the right thing. Survival can hang on those small things as well. Sometimes heroism and love comes down to saving each other:

He was just a man who'd finally stepped up, finally proved to himself — and, if he was lucky, to her — that he wasn't a failure or loser after all.
The Hidden is a fairly short novel in these days of bloated best sellers, tightly written and tightly plotted, but never mechanical or obvious. It is strongly cinematic, but the pleasures, as always with Pronzini, are in the writing and not merely his visual sense.

His characters are recognizable people, not merely pawns to the suspense element. There is always a sense that they exist beyond the confines of the novel, that they are people and not merely characters.

You will reach the end of the book emotionally drained and with nerves on edge, but like the master that he is, Pronzini manages to let you off the hook without ever quite letting you forget just how tight the pinch was.

It is not a book you will close and walk away from. Things linger, not just the frights, but also those moments of recognition when he cuts close enough to the bone for most of us to recognize ourselves and the hidden within us.

Bill Pronzini doesn't need much introduction here. He is a six time Edgar nominee, three time winner of the Shamus award, winner of the Grand Master award from the Mystery Writers of America, creator of the Nameless series of hard boiled mysteries, anthologist, genre historian and critic, western novelist, and has collaborated with numerous writers including Barry Malzberg and wife mystery novelist Marcia Muller.

But to put this book in perspective, it would be a major book and a fine suspense novel from any writer. It is perhaps the best tribute we can pay to a writer as accomplished as Bill Pronzini to simply say that if he had no history as a writer and had written nothing else, this book would mark him as one of the finest voices in the suspense field today.

Such consistent quality may sometimes lead us to take a writer for granted. We should not. A new book by Bill Pronzini should be a reason for celebration. This one certainly is.


2 RESPONSES TO "A REVIEW BY DAVID L. VINEYARD: BILL PRONZINI – THE HIDDEN."

Bill Pronzini Says:
August 6th, 2010 at 9:56 pm
David: I wish I could think of something to say that would adequately express my reaction to your review, but all that comes to mind is an inadequate thank you. You just made my day, week, and probably month.

David Vineyard Says:
August 6th, 2010 at 11:39 pm
Bill

You are welcome.

And I'm sincere. The suspense novel seems to be becoming a lost art, bloated out of recognition and forgetting the central point of the whole business — suspense.

You are one of the few masters still consistently working in the form and I think that deserves recognition, especially since you do it so well.

Simply because you make it look easy doesn't mean it is, and I can't think of anyone else writing these who brings the same set of virtues to the form.

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Terror In The House by Henry Kuttner

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I've just finished reading this massive handsomely made collection of Henry Kuttner's early terror and dark suspense stories. As I've mentioned here many times, Kuttner is my favorite of all thirties and forties pulp writers and this book demonstrates why. Just about every single trope of the terror magazines can be found in these stories. Kuttner was part of a group including Robert Bloch who incorporated its idol H.P. Lovecraft's work into their own. A half dozen of these stories reflect that influence.

To me Kuttner was always at his best when he wrote dark. And these stories qualify as that. Plus they offer an interesting historical viewpoint of Depression America. Garyn G. Roberts writes a long and rich introduction.

But it is Richard Matheson's shorter piece that contains one of the funniest stories I've ever read. Seems that in the late forties The Fictioneers--the group of pulp writers that later became legend--got into some kind of argument with another group of writers. Bill Cox (William R. Cox) and Bill Gault (William Campbell Gault) decided to go punch it out with them. I knew both of them and that is certainly within the realm of possibility. Kuttner insisted on going along. They were skeptical.

Every photo I've ever seen of Kuttner shows him to have been a slim extremely well-dressed man. I get the impression he weighed very little and wasn't at all the fighting type. But nobody ever mentioned his attire until Matheson's piece. His first word is "Dapper." All this plays into the fact that he wouldn't take no for an answer. He insisted on going along for the fight. Did it ever come off? Was anybody hurt? How drunk were they when they arrived? The answers are lost to time. Or at least to fuzzy hangover memories. :)

This is a knock-out collection in every sense. And there is a second volume to come. Grab it now before it goes out of print.

www.haffnerpress.com



≤≤<< TERROR IN THE HOUSE >>
by Henry Kuttner
is, uh, in the house!

TERROR IN THE HOUSE
THE EARLY KUTTNER
VOLUME ONE
$40.00
click image for more info
Preface by
Richard Matheson
Introduction by
Dr. Garyn G. Roberts

Contents:
The Graveyard Rats, Weird Tales Mar '36
Bamboo Death, Thrilling Mystery Jun '36
The Devil Rides, Thrilling Mystery Sep '36
The Secret of Kralitz, Weird Tales Oct '36
Power of the Snake, Thrilling Mystery Nov '36
Coffins for Six, Thrilling Mystery Dec '36
It Walks by Night, Weird Tales Dec '36
Laughter of the Dead, Thrilling Mystery Dec '36
The Eater of Souls, Weird Tales Jan '37
Terror in the House, Thrilling Mystery Jan '37
The Faceless Fiend, Thrilling Mystery Jan '37
The Dweller in the Tomb, Thrilling Mystery Feb '37
I, the Vampire, Weird Tales Feb '37
Nightmare Woman, Thrilling Mystery Mar '37
The Salem Horror, Weird Tales May '37
My Brother, The Ghoul, Thrilling Mystery Jun '37
I Am the Wolf, Thrilling Mystery Jul '37
The Jest of Droom-Avista, Weird Tales Aug '37
Four Frightful Men, Thrilling Mystery Sep '37
When the Earth Lived, Thrilling Wonder Stories Oct '37
Terror on the Stage, Thrilling Mystery Sep '37
Lord of the Lions, Thrilling Mystery Nov '37
The Bloodless Peril, Thrilling Wonder Stories Dec '37
Invasion from the Fourth Dimension, Thrilling Mystery Jan '38
Messer Orsini's Hands, Spicy Mystery Jan '38
Worlds' End, Weird Tales Feb '38
The Graveyard Curse, Spicy Mystery Mar '38
The Unresting Dead, Thrilling Mystery Mar '38
The Shadow on the Screen, Weird Tales Mar '38
Hell's Archangel, Spicy Mystery Apr '38
My Name Is Death, Spicy Mystery May '38
Devil's Masquerade, Mystery Tales Jun '38
The Dark Heritage, Marvel Science Stories Aug '38
Dictator of the Americas, Marvel Science Stories Aug '38
The Disinherited, Astounding Science Fiction Aug '38
Hands Across the Void, Thrilling Wonder Stories Dec '38
The Frog, Strange Stories Feb '39
The Invaders, Strange Stories Feb '39
The Bells of Horror, Strange Stories Apr '39
Beyond Annihilation, Thrilling Wonder Stories Apr '39

Peripatetic Penzler Moves Again, Now to Grove/Atlantic

Peripatetic Penzler Moves Again, Now to Grove/Atlantic

Otto Penzler, who has been publishing through Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the US for the past six years, is relaunching the Mysterious Press imprint with his newest publishing partner, Grove/Atlantic. Penzler reacquired the imprint's name from Hachette Book Group, having sold the original Mysterious Press to Warner Books in 1989.

That move parallels Penzler's relocation in the UK, where moved his line to Grove/Atlantic spin-off Atlantic Books, as part of the new Corvus division led by Anthony Cheetham, last November. (Cheetham has previously set up Penzler's line at his former company Quercus, after almost setting it up at Random UK's Century/Arrow.)

Aside from the connection already established at Atlantic Books in the UK, Grove/Atlantic publisher Morgan Entrekin says in the announcement "we have been publishing in this area for the last few years with success, most notably with Donna Leon. We are thrilled to start this partnership with Otto Penzler, who is recognized as one of the premier editors and publishers of mysteries and thrillers working today."

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My cousin Terry Butler who is, knows I'm not a sports fan. I guess he sent me these to cheer me up.

GREAT MOMENTS IN SPORTS TALK

Football commentator and former player Joe Theismann:
"Nobody in football should be called a genius. A genius is a guy like
Norman Einstein."

Senior basketball player at the University of Pittsburgh :
"I'm going to graduate on time, no matter how long it takes."

Bill Peterson, a Florida State football coach:
"You guys line up alphabetically by height.."
And, "You guys pair up in groups of three, and then line up in a
circle."

Stu Grimson, Chicago Blackhawks left wing, explaining why he keeps a
color photo of himself above his locker:
"That's so when I forget how to spell my name, I can still find my
clothes."

And, best of all:

Frank Layden, Utah Jazz president, on a former player:
"I asked him, 'Son, what is it with you? Is it ignorance or apathy?'
He said, 'Coach, I don't know and I don't care.'"

Mystery Scene Holiday issue; Kris Rusch e books will save publishing

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Holiday Issue: Out Mid-November
Dennis Lehane, Tasha Alexander, 2010 Gift Guide, Joseph Wambaugh, 2010 Mystery and Crime Award Reads

Mystery Scene's 2010 Holiday Issue, #117

Hi everyone,

We're just finishing up Holiday Issue #117, which should hit newsstands in mid-November.

In the new issue, author Dennis Lehane discusses the much-anticipated return of Boston PIs Angie Gennaro and Patrick Kenzie in Moonlight Mile. We also talk to Tasha Alexander about her new novel Dangerous to Know and her Victorian heroine Lady Emily, a woman truly before her time. And you won't want to miss our examination of Stuart Neville's tough, morally complex Irish thrillers The Ghosts of Belfast and Collusion.

Author Carolyn Hart discusses the solace that good books can provide in hard times, and we hear from other writers who share their favorite comfort reads. If you're just getting started on holiday gift buying, be sure to consult the annual Mystery Scene Gift Guide. We'll also be making online additions throughout the next month. The first online list, "Spy Kids," is available here.

Lawrence Block remembers the colorful bank-robber-turned-crime-writer Albert Nussbaum, and lots more!

Sincerely,
Kate Stine
Editor-in-Chief

Read Anything Good Lately?

--------------------------------------------
The Business Rusch: How E-Books Will Save Big Publishing

(Changing Times Continued)

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

In my very first post in this long series of linked topics, I advised anyone who cared about publishing to keep up with the day-to-day industry news. I wrote that blog post in my spare time over four days and I noted: "In four days, some parts of the [publishing] landscape changed—small parts, mind you, but they changed. That's how quickly the sands are shifting."

The sands continue to shift. Last week, I mentioned that expensive overhead is one of the problems Big Publishing has—and by Big Publishing , I mean established commercial publishers who run multimillion dollar (in many cases multibillion dollar) corporations. (Find that definition and more essential stuff in my second post). One aspect of that expensive overhead are the long-term rents they pay for their office buildings.

I posted that on the 2nd of November. On the 6th of November, The Wall Street Journal ran this article: "Big Book Publisher to Reduce Its Offices." Random House Incorporated—which is a unit of Bertelsmann AG (remember, corporations inside of conglomerates)—announced that it plans to sublease more than a third of the office space that it holds in its headquarters building. (It has other buildings.)

for the rest go here:
http://kriswrites.com/2010/11/10/the-...

Forgotten Books: Secret Window, Secret Garden by Stephen King; Executive Pink

You're right. No novel or story by Stephen King is forgotten. But his newer material sometimes causes pieces of his enormous and generally excellent body of work to fade from time to time.

Secret Window, Secret Garden is contained in a fine collection called Four Past Midnight. Originally published in1990, in 2004 it became a feature film starring Johnny Depp, Maria Bello and John Turturro. I pretty much liked the movie but I missed the richness of King's writing.

Morton Rainey is a best-selling novelist living alone in isolated western Maine in a cabin that was once the summer home of Rainey and his wife. They have just divorced and Rainey is devastated. His emotional distress has led to his inability to write. He sits uselessly at his computer.

One day a strange man shows up at Rainey's. He is Southern Gothic, the mutant offspring of a marriage between William Faulker and Flannery O'Connor. He introduces himself as Johnny Shooter, an unlikely name. He accuses Rainey of plagiarizing a story that he, Shooter wrote, some years ago. Rainey recognizes Shooter for what he is. A lunatic.

But a relentless and crafty one. He wants Rainey to confess his sin and will settle for nothing less than that admission. Bizarre and terrible things begin to happen, not the least of which is Rainey's cat being nailed to Rainey's back porch.

I don't want to do any spoiling so I'll simply say that just about all of King's virtues are on display here. The land, the local customs, the sweaty Woolrichian desperation and the absolute gripping storytelling. I've read this novella three or four times but I was flipping the pages the same way when I read it most recently. It is a startling piece of suspense writing and demonstrates why he still dominates the book charts.

Alternately moving--King gives us a believable and moving look at a lost marriage--and terrifying--Rainey's interior monologues are a miasma of horror, dysfunction, sadness and rage--making the characters every bit as stunning as the plot. Fine work by a master.

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Executive Pink
by Mathew Paust
194 pages
President invites suspected assassins to Rose Garden press conference.
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I almost feel sorry for them. Almost.

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Ed here: In case you don't know Opus Dei is the scumbag secret far far far right Catholic organization that Dan Brown used as the villain in The Da Vinci Code, truly one of the worst books I ever managed to get halfway through. It is in all respects a slimy organization which, of course, the Vatican is quite proud of. But as proof that real real real rich people are as dumb as the rest of us...here is a tale designed to make all of us class warriors quite happy.


From Huff Post:

Music composer and oil-family heir Roger Davidson heard kind of an unbelievable story when he went into Datalink Computer Services in Mount Kisco to get a virus removed from an infected computer. The company's owner, Vickram Bedi, who realized Davidson was heir to the Schlumberger oil fortune (yes, everything about this fiasco sounds fake), tried to con Davidson by telling him further investigation of the infected device revealed that Davidson and his family were the target of an assassination plot by Polish priests affiliated with Opus Dei, the Roman Catholic organization best known for its starring role in The Da Vinci Code. With terrifically convincing details — like the fact that Bedi's uncle used an Indian military aircraft to track down the computer virus to a remote village in Honduras — Bedi and his girlfriend were able to bilk Davidson of $20 million over six years for data security and 24-hour covert protection.

Sure, it sounds implausible. But who are you going to believe: that nagging feeling that tells you maybe a fictionalized version of a murderous Catholic cult is not really plotting your demise or a shifty-looking IT repairman in Mount Kisco who promises that some version of Paul Bettany might one day show up at your front door?
Virus Leads to $20 Milli

Conan's Real Late-Night Foe Is Jon Stewart

Conan's Real Late-Night Foe Isn't Jay or Dave -- It's Jon Stewart
By Dylan Stableford From The Wrap
Published: November 07, 2010 @ 5:14 pm


Last week, when Conan O'Brien made a surprise, pre-launch appearance on "Lopez Tonight," George Lopez greeted him saying, "welcome to basic cable."

It was a warm welcome -- something Jay Leno and NBC failed to give O'Brien when they forced him out of the "Tonight Show" chair just seven months in.

But as O'Brien makes his historic late-night leap -- or fall -- from broadcast to cable (with a lower budget to match) one person who might not be so welcoming is Jon Stewart.

Why? Because the "Daily Show" now faces something it didn't have before: competition.

"'Conan' absolutely presents a threat for Stewart," Brad Adgate, senior vice president of research at Horizon Media, told TheWrap. "Until now, 'The Daily Show' has had to compete with local news and syndicated sitcoms."


Ed here:

Conan starts tonight on TBS. And I don't give a shit. To tell you the truth I gave up late night a long time ago. Just not worth staying up for or taping.

Letterman will always be a bully boy asshole (which he undoubtedly was in high school and college) though he remains the funniest of the three; Leno was very, very funny when he was on the old Letterman show on NBC but since then he's a gagster and nothing more and I doubt he's The Everyman he pretends to be, a berserker in his own way; and I was never crazy about O'Brien, much less so now that since he's been playing the Wronged Person in the entire Jeff Zucker fuck up. It's hard to cry for somebody who'll collect eighteen or nineteen mil out of the thirty five or whatever NBC gave him.

I still like Stewart though I think the "importance" the media has bestowed on him is showing in his performances more and more. I've actually come to prefer Colbert because a) he's funnier and b) he's actually nastier on pols than Stewart.

I wonder what Mylie Cyrus makes of all this.