Ed Gorman's Blog, page 241

Cast in Dark Waters

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On Pulp Serenade tonight Cullen Gallagher reviews as short novel that Tom Piccirrilli and I did back at the start of this decade:
Thanks, Cullen.

Cullen Gallagher:


"Cast in Dark Waters" by Ed Gorman and Tom Piccirilli (Cemetery Dance, 2002)

Released by Cemetery Dance Publications in 2002, Cast in Dark Waters is a collaboration between Ed Gorman and Tom Piccirilli that fluidly and creatively combines two genres: horror and sea-faring adventure. It also features artwork by Keith Minnion. Set in a d...

Doris Day (honest)

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Ed here: Cinema Retro links to an interesting About.com interview with Tom Santopietro author the book Considering Doris Day. A portion of his conjecture applies to Teresa Wright, too, a fine (and to me lovely) actress who went abruptly out of fashion after the war was over and America tired of "good girls." As he piiunts out Day was a different kind of good girl--robust and optimistic. I grew up watching Doris Day movies. I liked them well enough even though they were invariably corny love ...

Forgotten Books: The Stories of Ray Bradbury

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For many writers my age, and I mean writers of all kinds, Ray Bradbury was responsible for our first encounter with stories as rich with language as they were the telling itself. The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man became high school staples throughout the country. Fahrenheit 451 and Something Wicked This Ways Comes became novels accessible and appreciated by young readers of every taste. He became sui generis for high school English departments looking for a good writer students ...

A very cool dude

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Punching Out
[Apparently a young tech analyst at Credit Suisse returned to the office drunk and left this messy present for a co-worker. He's since been fired, not surprisingly. Image via Dealbreaker:]

Ed here: The pic and copy comes from Gawker today. Man just staring at that photo reminds me of my own days of working in an office and how much I wanted to do just what this guy did. To my own cubicle. This is a brilliant starting point (or end point) for a novel or film script.

Bobby Driscoll; Marty Greenberg

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The blog The Night Editor posts today about my cousin the child movie actor of the Forties and early Fifties Bobby Driscoll. He was said to be Walt Disney's favorite employee for years before teenage acne ruined his chances for going before a camera for several years and he let heroin take over his life. My other cousin Terry Butler, whom some of you know as a writer of fine noir fiction, and I were both beneficiaries of Bobby's very pricey clothes as he outgrew them. Jackets, trousers, shi...

New Books: 21 Tales

A New Books Piece by Dave Zeltserman

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The year of the short story


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Well, with Killer due out in May and The Caretaker of Lorne Field out in August, as well as Outsourced out in the UK and other European countries this year (US next Feb.), it's also going to be the year of the novel for me. But I've got 29 stories so far this year that are going to be coming out in print, 21 of which will be in my collection, '21 Tales', three scheduled later this year for Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, 'Juliu...

Update on Marty Greenberg

Dear Friends of Tekno Books,

Please excuse the form e-mail. This message is to a select group whom we are keeping appraised of Marty's condition on an ongoing basis. We will most likely be making a more general announcement regarding this news early next week, but wanted to let you know what is happening as soon as possible.

Due to an overall lack of improvement (but fortunately no further decline either) Marty is being transferred to an excellent tertiary care hospital in Milwaukee this afte...

Richard Basehart

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Richard Basehart in Federico Fellini's classic film La Strada

Over the past year I've seen four or five Richard Basehart films, early ones, and they reminded me of what a fine actor he'd been before-- I was in a hospital bed the first time I ever saw Voyage To The Bottom of The Sea. I hadn't been warned. Here was Basehart of the great range and the great voice playing some sullen Navy dude in one of THE worst shows that's ever been on TV. Remember when they'd jerk the camera back and forth to...

Day Keene

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Day Keene was the pseudonym of Gunard Hjerstedt who was born on the south side of Chicago, the son of a paving contractor, in 1903. Keene became an actor in repertory theatre in the early 1920s. When some of his friends, such as Melvyn Douglas and Barton McClain, decided to try movies, Keene, who had already had some success writing plays for the group, flipped a coin to decide between acting and writing. Writing won.

In the 1930s he began writing scripts for radio soap operas. He was the prin...

The Sweet Smell of Success

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Ed here: There is no other film quite like The Sweet Smell of Success. I still remember the afternoon I saw it. I was fifteen and I realized that I was seeing a movie that was real art. Parts of it reminded me of Norman Mailer's novel The Deer Park, which I'd read recently. But not even the psychotic darkness of Mailer's book could compare with the snake pit that the creators of Sweet Smell had concocted. These are two brief excerpts from a very long article appearing in Vanity Fair. If you ...