Ed Gorman's Blog, page 239

Bizness as usual - I say your thong is on fire!

5 killed while playing soccer in southern Mexico

MARK STEVENSON | May 3, 2010 03:41 PM EST |
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MEXICO CITY — Gunmen drove up to a soccer field and shot five men to death as they played early Monday near the Pacific coast resort of Acapulco, police in southern Mexico said.
It was unclear why the five men were playing so late, but the region of Guerrero state is often so hot and humid by day by day that athletes wait until night to compete. Many people also work unu...

Forgotten Books: Blood Marks by Bill Crider

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Serial killer novels have to run a close second to vampire novels in popularity. And serial killer novels have been with us at least since the grandaddy break-out of The First Deadly Sin by Lawrence Sanders back in the early Seventies.

Tiresome as the sub-genre can be (though there are always good ones; the John Lutz books for Kensington are particularly notable) one of my favorites was first published in 1991.

Nine women are savagely murdered. They don't seem to have anything in common. Police...

All About Eve

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I finally caught up with "All About Eve." TCM ran it on a night when I just wanted to zone out and it was Eve or several mindless action flicks. I enjoyed it but the central premise--that here was this seeming innocent young woman whom nobody but Eve (at first) recognized as a scheming little bitch--wore thin fast. Anybody who has any talent for spotting psychos would have picked Eve Harrington off in twenty minutes. She put the unc in unctuous.

I have to say that two of Hollywood's most borin...

The Fund Raiser

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Last night Max Allan Collins was at his finest. I've always said that Al (Max) could be a very successful politician. He can hold a room with his mixture of serious and humorous comments.

Al's lovely wife Barb and my lovely wife Carol accompanied us to a winery where we answered the answers of fourteen people who bid on us at the Iowa City Library fund raiser. Traveling from Cedar Rapids to Iowa City/Coralville is like traveling to a different planet. I lived in IC twice and every time I go t...

Forgotten Books: The Collected Stories of Ernest Hemingway

If you grew up in the Forties or Fifties it was impossible to imagine that the literary luster of Ernest Hemingway would ever dim. I've never known of a writer as imitated (usually badly) as ole Papa.

He loved it. He carefully crafted the public persona of adventurer and man's man the press and the people loved. Novels such as A Farewell To Arms and For Whom The Bell Tolls outsold the books of his contemporaries.

But time and taste caught up with him and we now see that Hemingway's novels wer...

Stupid and proud of it

We hear a lot about the dumbing down of America. If you want evidence of this you need look no further than TV beer commercials. Since I don't drink, hate sports and consider most macho guys to be clowns, I come to beer commercials with a lot of prejudices. Most of them are stupid enough to be forgettable but the current Bud Light commercial where the geek decides to sit down and listen to his wife's book club because there's Bud Lite...wow. We're supposed to identify with this scurvy-looking...

History is the lie we all agree to

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On his show the other night Bill Maher ran through a list Dwight D. Eisenhower's accomplishments as president of the United States, everything from imagining and building the freeways to his famous falling out with (and warnings about) the military-industrialist complex. He was making the point that Ike was one of the few presidents we've ever had who was willing to say fuck you and get something done, pissing off both sides if he needed to. He wasn't perfect but he was a giant compared to th...

Travis McGee; All About Eve

The Big Bang by Mickey Spillane & Max Allan Collins

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Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins: The Big Bang
Penzler/ Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25.00

Jon Breen reviews The Big Bang in Ellery Queen:

*** – In New York of the 1960's, Mike Hammer confronts the counterculture and battles the drug trade. The tough private eye is sent on an unusual journey late in the going. This one is vastly better than the first posthumous Hammer, The Goliath Bone (reviewed here in March/April 2009), probably because Spillane's part was written when he was closer to his...

Pro-File: Bev Vincent

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Pro-File: Bev Vincent::
Bev Vincent is the author of The Road to the Dark Tower, the Bram Stoker Award nominated com panion to Stephen King's Dark Tower series, and The Stephen King Illustrated Companion, which was nominated for an Edgar Award and a Stoker Award. His short fiction has appeared in places like Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Who Died in Here? (mystery stories set in bathrooms!), From the Borderlands and the MWA anthology The Blue Religion. He is a contributing editor with Cemet...