Ed Gorman's Blog, page 263

The Care and Feeding of Dead People; Doug Clegg

I've always maintained that anything created for the good of mankind will within thirty days be turned into something bad for mankind. Human flight was quickly weaponized. Drugs were used to addict as well as cure. And the internet is filled with so many poisonous websites you feel contaminated just hearing about them.

But one of the many worthwhile things the internet has done is secure the work of writers who have passed on. Even famous writers fade from popularity sooner than some of us wis...

Glee

There was so much drumbeat about "Glee" we thought our TV would be taken away if we didn't watch it.

I have to say up front that Carol mostly enjoyed it. She was in theater in both high school and college and then did a lot of acting and commercial work after graduating. We in fact met on a commercial I was working on in Chicago. So the world of Glee is in several respects her world. All these young Glee club singers and actors. It's not my world at all. I never joined anything remotely like ...

Shadow Season

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Starred Publisher's Weekly Review

An interview with Tom Piccirilli

Tell us about Shadow Season.

SHADOW SEASON is a crime/suspense novel about a blind ex-cop turned English professor at an all-girls school. During the winter vacation he, along with a skeletal crew of faculty, watch over a handful of remaining students. My protagonist is forced to deal with his missing girlfriend, a seductive teenager, the impending release of his dirty ex–partner who wants to kill him, and his own loosening ho...

Joan Blondell

Turner has been running Joan Blondell movies for the past week and it's been particularly interesting for me because by the early Fifties when I first became aware of actors as actors Blondell was past her Hwood prime. She spent the last three decades of her life doing more television than anything, and usually playing the knowing but not quite cynical older woman whose wisdom comforts young women and whose loveless life gives her a sense of nightclub melancholy.

I've now seen three of her ...

Forgotten Books: The Dame by Richard Stark

Don Westlake used to say that he didn't like to outline, that he preferred letting the story take him where it chose to go. I suppose this was another way of saying what Theodore Sturgeon said a long time ago, that if the writer is surprised the reader will be surprised.

Well, Westlake was probably not only surprised by the various twists and turns The Dame takes, he must have been downright shocked in places.

Our old friend Alan Grofield, flush with money from a bank robbery, is intrigued by ...

Good People Marcus Sakey

I'll tell you just about everything I love about crime fiction can be found in the novel Good People by Marcus Sakey. Bare bones it's not an unfamiliar tale. Tom and Anna Reed, a Yuppie couple strung out on debt and Anna's desperate and expensive dependence on a fertility clinic to help her produce the miracle she wants, rent out the bottom half of their Chicago house to a strange and frequently surly man.

One day they find him dead of natural causes. But that's not all they find. He had con...

Stark House & Harry Whittington

I'm reprinting this to acquaint new people to Stark House. And because Whittington will always be one of my favorite pulpers.


Back in the 1950s you could run but you couldn't hide from Harry Whittington. Those were the days when many if not most paperbacks were sold in wire racks found in drug stores, grocery stores and what were then called dime stores.

Harry told me that he'd once seen five books of his displayed on the same rack, all published that month. He worked for everybody, ...

Radio Days

I'm sure there are a few of you out there who remember, as I do, what it was like to spend hours in front of a radio listening to shows that meant adventure (Superman, Green Hornet, Hopalong Cassidy etc) and shows that meant laughs (I loved Jack Benny, The Great Gildersleeve, Bob Hope (who knew what a dick he was in reality?) and of course Fibber McGee and Molly.

Two of the shows my little brother and I liked best were The Lone Ranger and Tom Mix. The Lone Ranger was sponsored by Cheerios so ...

Magazines fading

Part of the pleasure of growing up in the era I did was going to news stands. I liked confronting all those bright, snappy magazine covers. Though I usually ended up buying science fiction and mystery magazines, I usually tried other types, too. For no apparent reason I got hooked for a year or so on civil war magazines.

Later on, in college, I started reading political magazines, The New Republic, the Nation and sometimes the more radical kind featuring people such as Paul Krassner.

I continue

Western movies

Patti Abbott posted her thoughts on western movies the other day and to date she's received forty eight replies. That's why I read her every day. She's always entertaining and interesting. But forty-eight replies to western movies--who woulda thunk it?

The last time I posted some of my own thoughts on the subject I got several off line letters calling me a crank, mostly because I'm not much of a fan of either John Wayne or John Ford.

As for Wayne he was a great presence but not much of an actor wi