Ed Gorman's Blog, page 257

You can't go home again--thank God

For us Saturday nights are the dead zone for watching TV. We usually watch something On Demand because cable has zip. I was doing my usual psychotic channel surfing when I saw that Housewives of Orange County was on. I had to talk Carol into it but we watched.

No fun in it anymore. Though some it is probably producer-contrived, their meanness to each other manages to be savage and dull at the same time. You have one blonde whose obsession with money got old two years ago calling another dumb...

Forgotten Books: A Memory of Murder

Ray Bradbury's first collection, published in 1947 by Arkham House, contained so many memorable and lasting stories it has become legendary. A single book by a young writer including true masterpieces such as "The Lake," "The Small Assassin," "The Homecoming," "Uncle Einar" and many, many more--just about unthinkable. A fair share of these stories were later included in The October Country, a collection that is for me the equal of The Martian Chronicles.

There's another collection that in the ...

Shtick With a Thousand Lives

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I've been laughing at these two for fifty years

Shtick With a Thousand Lives

By ARI KARPEL
Published: November 12, 2009

MEL BROOKS and Carl Reiner have been cracking each other up for nearly 60 years. The two met while working on Sid Caesar's early television series "Your Show of Shows," when they cooked up a routine in which Mr. Reiner played an earnest, unnamed TV interviewer, and Mr. Brooks, the 2,000 Year Old Man.

In a Yiddish accent, the old guy held forth on the questionable wisdom of an ab...

The 25th Hour

My buddy Vince Keenan was nice enough to send me a link to the following Noah Forrest review of Spike Lee's The 25th Hour which was either (generally) panned or ignored. I've said before that few movies have ever moved me the way this one does. There is a long scene near the end when Edward Norton and his father are driving that gives me literal chills no matter how many times I see it. And Philip Seymour Hoffman is heartbreaking as only Hoffman can be. And sexy as Anna Paquin is in True Blo...

Forgotten Books: Loser Takes All

I mean no disrespect when I say that I imagine Graham Greene conceived of Loser Takes All (one of his self-described "entertainments") as a film before he decided to write it as a short novella. It's big and colorful and hangs on two cunning twists that neatly divide the piece into curtain act one and curtain act two.

The story concerns the honeymoon of Mr. Bertram and his bethrothed Cary. They are planning to go on a modest short vacation when fate, in the the person of Dreuther, an incalcula...

FORGOTTEN WRITERS: John Brunner

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One of the real pleasures of my teenage years was reading the space operas of John Brunner, which mostly appeared in Ace Double Book form, sometimes taking up both sides.

Except for Leigh Brackett and some of Edmond Hamilton, I couldn't handle most space opera after I reached about age fifteen. But Brunner was both a superb writer of swift colorful action stories and a true citizen of the world, this last lending his tales a real sense of history which he projected into the future.

His charact...

Pariah; Bored To Death; Internet

I can't remember if I read Dave Zeltserman's Pariah in manuscript or got an early galley but as soon as I finished it I felt protective of it. I knew there would be some people who just wouldn't get it. Because if there are 143 rules about writing crime fiction Dave managed to break 156 of them. Believe me you have never NEVER read a novel like this one. A major major novel. Yesterday The Washington Post ran a long exuberant review of it.

By Maureen Corrigan
Monday, November 9, 2009
PARIAH

By Da...

Margaret Millar

I reread How Like An Angel the last two nights so thought I'd reprint this.

I've spoken here many times of my admiration for the novels of Margaret Millar. Her fate seems to be that of great praise 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 som...

Top Ten; Punisher

Well, I got four off-line letters today about the Publisher's Weekly Top Ten post of late night. So to make myself perfectly clear:

1) I don't think there was any kind of conspiracy in voting the list. The jury (and there may well have been a woman or women on it) voted their honest beliefs. I doubt sexism had anything to do with it.

2) As I said, choose another jury at random and you'd have a different list, maybe a very different list. We're talking random variables here. This is a completel...

No women?

From Galleycat:

By Jason Boog on Nov 06, 2009 09:23 AM

When Publishers Weekly released a series of Best Books of 2009 lists this week, the "Top Ten" list did not include any books by women authors. GalleyCat wrote about the ensuing controversy on Wednesday, as the founders of Women In Letters And Literary Arts (WILLA) passionately rejected the list.

The story generated a stream of Twitter posts and plenty of literary debate. Since that story, a number of other news outlets reported on the story,...