Ed Gorman's Blog, page 266

About Dean Koontz

John Schoenfelder is an editor at St. Martin's. We've been exchanging e mails dealing with different topics. He made a very interesting point about the work of Dean Koontz as well as the state of the art of reviews in general.

"Far beyond the ever present scope of (Dean's) huge sales, the more I've looked at Koontz' work, the more it becomes apparent to me just how much he's accomplished in terms of adding to the canon of what I term "ultimate suspense". Maybe it's just me but I often lament th

Forgotten Books: The Disenchanted by Budd Schulberg

The passing of Budd Schulberg at age 95 is getting a lot of press, surprisingly so since we don't much value writers in America. While most of the comments are flattering, there are a few that ask us to remember that Schulberg was a "friendly witness" when brought in front of HUAC in the Fifties. It is claimed, without much proof, that his testimony put an old friend or two behind bars. I'm nobody's idea of hero so I have to say that I have no idea how I would've reacted if I'd been dragged in f

Killing Mum

Killing Mum -- Allan Guthrie

Whenever I feel that life has cheated me I don't need to pick up a Prozac. I just read something by Alan Guthrie. Compared to the lives of his people, my life has been a breeze.

In the entrepreneurial spirit we all admire so much, Carlos Morales has found himself a fine little niche that keeps him in cookies. He's the guy who'll find you a killer for whatever job you need done. All he needs are your wishes and some serious cash and pretty darn soon the guy Morales ch

Noir City Sentinel

I guess the only way to say it is that I've done gone and died and found myself in noir heaven.

When I say I've never seen a book as packed with fresh information about various aspects of noir history, I'm not exaggerating. Eddie Muller and his staff at the Film Noir Foundation have published Vol. 4 No.3 of the Noir City Sentinel and it is so crowded with topics, insights and photographs that I'd need four or five nightly posts to do it justice. Seriously.

I started by reading my friend Vince Keen

The Missing Kubricks

(I haven't been blogging because I've run into a patch of bad health. Still not feeling very good but at least not as bad as I was last week.)

Cinema Retro linked to the magazine Empire which recently ran a piece on the films Stanley Kubrick hoped to make but never did. Here are two examples:

"One-Eyed Jacks
This hoary environmental Western paired Kubrick (up-and-coming director) with Marlon Brando (fully-fledged superstar) in what should have been a match made in Hollywood heaven but, well, wasn't

From Brendan DuBois; A New Censorship in Hollywood?

Hi Ed ---

Not sure if you got the news or not, but I've heard that Bill Tapply, author of the Brady Coyne mysteries and a host of other books, died last night of cancer.

Damn.

He was active in the New England chapter of MWA, for a while we shared agents, and he was overall just the best... and he will be missed.

Well, thought you'd like to know.

And I visit your site at least twice a day; it's one of my favorites...

You take care.

All best, Brendan DuBois

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A NEW CENSORSHIP IN

When Novelists Sober Up

Ed here: Richard Wheeler was kind enough to send me a link to a piece called When Novelists Sober Up by Tom Shone. It's excellent except for one thing--his notion that Richard Yates was a one-book author. Many people, me included, rate his collection Eleven Kinds of Loneliness as the equal of Fitzgerald or Hemingway's story collections. I see readers were quick to point this out to Shone. But it's an excellent and serious piece and makes me want to read Shone's own novel about drying out.

Here a

I'll bet Orson Welles was never invited

In the Thirties P.G. Wodehouse was invited to William Randolph Hearst's San Simeon. The LA Times' Jacket Copy recently reviewed The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes, among them Wodehouse's description of Heart's modest little abode.

"I have been away for a week at Hearts's ranch. He owns 440,0000 acres, more than the whole of Long Island!...

"The house is enormous, and there are always at least 50 guests staying there. All the furniture is period, and you probably sleep on a bed originally occupi

Thrill-A-Minute

A week ago I picked up the galley of a novel that will be published later this year. I'd read a few of the writer's other books and liked them. Good writer. This was clearly his shot at a breakout novel, the kind of book that came into fashion with James Patterson. Breathless pace and surprises galore.

Two things. 1) The whole thing is ridiculous. All fiction is a contrivance of some kind but the burden of the writer is to keep the contrivances hidden from sight. You really have to stretch to m

Drawn To Murder

I'm not a big fan of true crime. The only show I ever followed was the one Paul Winfield narrated and to me his voice was always the star of the show. But last night, bored, all I could surf up was the CBS 48 Hours Mystery. It turned out to be a powerful and frightening show. It was called Drawn To Murder.

A fifteen year old boy, a boy who draws horrorific sketches of women being mutilated (among many many other types of sketches) lives on the edge of town. In the field he crosses to get to the s