Ed Gorman's Blog, page 3

Bill Pronzini on Elliott Chaze

Ed here: Bill Pronzini's contributions to the genre of crime fiction have been enormous. First he created the groundbreaking Nameless series (stronger than ever) second he wrote numerous stand-alones and stories that have won praise and awards world-wide and third he has compiled a body of excellent literary biography and criticism that needs to be collected and published. Here is an example from Mystery*File.

ON ELLIOTT CHAZE
by Bill Pronzini


Elliott Chaze (1915-1990) was an old-school newspaperman who began his journalism career with the New Orleans Bureau of the Associated Press shortly before Pearl Harbor, worked for a time for AP’s Denver office after paratrooper service in WW II, and then migrated south to Mississippi where he spent twenty years as reporter and award-winning columnist and ten years as city editor with the Hattiesburg American.


In his spare time he wrote articles and short stories for The New Yorker, Redbook, Collier’s, Cosmopolitan, and other magazines, and all too infrequently, a novel. In an interview he once stated that his motivation in writing fiction, “if there is any discernible, is probably ego and fear of mathematics, with overtones of money. Primarily I have a simple desire to shine my ass — to show off a bit in print.”

His first two novels were literary mainstream. The Stainless Steel Kimono (Simon & Schuster, 1947), a post-war tale about a group of American paratroopers in Japan, was a modest bestseller and an avowed favorite of Ernest Hemingway.

The Golden Tag (Simon & Schuster, 1950), like most of his long works, has a newspaper background, contains a good deal of autobiography, and is both funny and poignant; it concerns a young wire service reporter and would-be novelist in New Orleans who becomes involved with two women, one of them married, while reporting on a sensational murder case.

His third novel was the one for which he is best remembered today, Black Wings Has My Angel (Gold Medal, 1953; also published as One for My Money, Berkley, 1962 and as One for the Money, Robert Hale, 1985).


for the rest go here:http://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=142

Gravetapping: Reading Ed Gorman

"The Autumn Dead, with its depth, its heartbreak, and its melancholy hope, is
a new and important kind of American mystery."
Dorothy B. Hughes

Ben Boulden:This is an introduction I wrote for the Stark House omnibus edition of Ed Gorman’s fine novels, The Autumn Dead and The Night Remembers, published in December 2014. The Autumn Dead features private eye Jack Dwyer and The Night Remembers features private eye Jack Walsh. The Stark House edition is still available, and all of the novels—both Jack Dwyer and Jack Walsh—are available as bargain priced ebooks. There are links to each novel’s Amazon page at the bottom of this essay.  
Ed Gorman is an unheralded writer of uncommon ability. He is a writer with a conscience—his characters reflect the world and he has an uncanny ability to make them sympathetic—but he is also an immensely entertaining storyteller. Mr. Gorman’s work has ranged wide, but he is particularly good at the first person detective story and two of his best are collected in this omnibus: The Autumn Dead and The Night Remembers.
In 1985 Ed Gorman, in his second published novel, introduced his first private detective, Jack Dwyer. Dwyer is a former cop who got the acting bug after being cast in a local public safety commercial. He started acting lessons, quit his job, applied for his private investigator’s license, and took a security job to keep the wolves away. Jack Dwyer appeared in five novels and The Autumn Dead is the fourth.
The Autumn Dead is the definitive Jack Dwyer novel. It fulfills the potential and promise of both Dwyer as a character and Ed Gorman as a writer. It is a richly detailed detective novel strong on story and scored with a thought provoking working class commentary. Jack Dwyer is the principal instigator of the novel’s action, but he is also a spectator of the melancholy and hard world he inhabits. He is not a saint, and is unable to right many, if any, wrongs, but he notices the humanity around him. More importantly, he understands humanity in all its beauty, frailty and brutality. In an early scene from The Autumn Dead,Dwyer describes a housing development built in the 1950’s.
“They’d built the houses in the mid-fifties and though they weren’t much bigger than garages, the contractors had been smart enough to paint them in pastels—yellow and lime and pink and puce, the colors of impossible flowers, the colors of high hard national hope—and they were where you strived to live in 1956 if you worked in a factory and wanted the good life promised by the Democrats and practiced by the Republicans.”    
It is a neighborhood forgotten by time and left to crumble and tarnish new generations with a hard scrabble existence. It is a place where dreams die, girls become hard and old before they reach maturity, and a place where the lowest rung of humanity struggles to survive. In the novel this hopelessness and poverty is juxtaposed with the comparatively well off.  The professional classes and the downright wealthy. Dwyer is unable to claim membership in either class—he was raised in one and has never been able to fully gain access to the other. The conflict of class is personified by an old classmate and friend named Karen Lane.
Karen seemingly escaped her childhood poverty, but she gave herself away in the attempt. She is described much like Truman Capote’s Holly Golightly. She is a woman-girl desperately trying to erase her own bitter world with her sex, and while her surroundings changed, for a time at least, she was never able to completely overcome the poverty of her childhood. A passage describing Karen’s borrowed room in the home of a friend captures the rub between the dream of something more and reality.
“The clothes—fawns and pinks and soft blues and yellows, silk and linen and organza and lame and velvet—did not belong in the chill rough basement of a working-class family. There was a sense of violation here, a beast holding trapped a fragile beauty.”           
There is a bitter melancholy in much of Ed Gorman’s work and The Autumn Dead is no different. It is a narrative of loss and disappointment; the loss of time, the slow crawl to death, and the disappointment of failure.
“‘You know what his problem is?’
“‘What?’
“‘He isn’t a boy anymore.’”   
In 1991, Ed Gorman introduced his second private eye, Jack Walsh, in  The Night Remembers . Jack appeared in only one novel, and while he would have made a wonderful serial character, his story is seemingly complete in a single volume. Jack is 62, a World War II veteran who fought at Salerno, a retired cop—Linn County Sheriff’s Department headquartered in Cedar Rapids, Iowa—and a live-in manager of a rundown apartment building in a decaying neighborhood. Jack operates a one man private investigation shop, smokes six cigarettes a day and has an on again off again relationship with a woman nearly half his age named Faith Hallahan.
Faith is a major player in both the novel and Jack’s life. She is the mother of an 18-month old boy named Hoyt—she claims Jack is the father—and Faith is nearly certain she has breast cancer. Faith, like many of Mr. Gorman’s female characters, has a gentle sadness, an almost broken quality, about her. She is described with an intimate fondness.
“[R]egal, imposing, and, even at times such as these, a little arrogant. The hell of it is—for her sake anyway—she’d had one of those terrible childhoods that robbed her of any self-confidence her looks might have given her. ‘I’m only beautiful on the outside,’ she’s fond of saying in her dramatic way.”
Amazingly Jack takes Faith’s indecision about their relationship in stride. He truly loves Faith and Hoyt. There are several tender scenes between the three, which develops a visceral intimacy. Jack has an indistinct role in Faith’s life. He is a mixture of father, priest and lover, which summarily describes his outsider role in society.
Jack’s personal strife is a backdrop to the mystery, but it is an important and rewarding element because it focuses an understanding of his viewpoint, and it is Jack’s view of the world that shimmers in the narrative. It is offhand references to real world people like Lyndon LaRouche, George McGovern and Jimmy Carter—“…Carter I never could stand. Maybe it was that psychotic smile.”—and the sympathetic brush Mr. Gorman paints his characters with that pushes the novel beyond. He is particularly good at capturing a mood, a sorrow, an ill, in a few simple, sparse sentences.
“The little girl watched me as I started down the stairs. She looked sadder than any child her age ever should.”
In another scene, a rambling bigot who justifies his hate with religion, is described with a keen sense of understanding—or maybe pity—without allowing for credibility or justification of the hate.            
“In his plaid work shirt and baggy jeans and house slippers, he looked like the sort of melancholy psychotic you saw roaming the halls of state mental institutions just after electroshock treatment, the pain and sorrow only briefly dulled by riding the lightning.”
Jack, like Dwyer, is an observer of a world he doesn’t quite understand, but a world he has a wistful empathy for. A world filled with desperate, scared people behaving in ugly and malicious ways, but allowances are nearly always provided. Small understandings, if not always completely satisfactory, are conveyed in the narrative explaining the ugliness.   
“She enjoyed making you despise her. I suppose she hoped that somebody would despise her almost as much as she despised herself.”  
The Night Remembers and The Autumn Dead are similar—first person narrative with a sentimental, intelligent, and watchman-like protagonist—but beneath the surface both are very different novels. The Night Remembers is a wistful, sentimental novel filled with betrayal and an exhausted weariness while The Autumn Dead is very near angry. The novels are both dark, but there is humor. Jack Dwyer is a self-deprecating wise-ass. There is a Jim Rockford moment in The Autumn Dead when a bartender wants five dollars to tell Dwyer where he can find a man.
“‘It worth five bucks to you?’
“‘That’s only in the movies. Just call Chuck.’
“‘I need some grease to do it because I got to walk all the way down the basement stairs. The intercom is on the blink.’”
Jack Walsh is less smart-alecky than Dwyer, but the humor pops up unexpectedly—the reference to Jimmy Carter’s “psychotic smile” and an exchange between Walsh and the owner of the building he manages. A man he refers to as “young Mr. Banister.” His description of Banister is one of the highlights.
“He was approximately thirty-five with a short earnest haircut, black earnest horn-rim glasses, an earnest white button-down shirt, an earnest blue five-button cardigan sweater, and a pair of earnest chinos that complemented his very earnest black and white saddle shoes. It was the wrong sissy touch, those shoes on a man his age, and told me more than I wanted to know about young Mr. Banister.”
Jack Walsh also appeared in the 1990 short story “Friends,” but he was disguised under the name Parnell. The primary backup players were there—Faith and Hoyt—and the story is worth finding. Jack Dwyer appeared in five novels, New, Improved Murder (1985),Murder in the Wings (1986), Murder Straight Up (1986), The Autumn Dead (1987), and  A Cry of Shadows  (1990), and three short stories, “Failed Prayers” (1987), “The Reason Why” (1988), which is the basis of The Autumn Dead, and “Eye of the Beholder” (1996).

Antiques Fate by Barbara Allan

     "In my rendition, I play all the parts in a sixty minute condensation of my own creation. Shakespeare was a good writer, but he runs to the long-winded and needs occasional editing."
  The speaker here could only be Vivian Borne aging bi-polar diva (and antiques expert) and mother of Brandy Borne (co-owner of the family antique store back in Serenity, Iowa), long suffering thirty-two year old daughter who must follow her mother around to keep her out of amateur theater trouble but also murder trouble. Vivian does love a mystery.
   Antiques Fate is, for me, the funniest yet in the series. As usual Brandy narrates and spends a fair share of the time directly addressing the reader:
   "Yes, we were a pill-happy little group--lithium for Mother's bi-polar disorder, Prozac for my depression, and insulin for (shih tzu) Sushi's diabetes."
   When a  New York troupe has to cancel because performing "Macbeth" at a weekend festival at town that celebrates its its carefully crafted resemblance to a quaint English village, Vivian steps in as a substitute. She will perform all the roles herself, changing hats each time she changes character. Simply by changing hats the audience will be able to identify who each character. Is Vivian ever wrong?
   The village of Olde York is having problems. Some of its citizens want to modernize it and some want to leave it as it is. Feelings run deep and dangerous as Vivian and Brandy discover when people start to die.
   I really like the writing here. For all the humor Barbara Allan (husband and wife Barbara and Max Allan Collins) are able to create not just suspense but numerous ominous scenes especially inside the theater. The past here has rotted; there is an almost decadent gloom among those work operate it.
  Vivian remains the star of course as she bulldozes her way into disinterring old secrets that ultimately lead to the true murderer (several enticing suspects.)
   Five star fun. I can't wait for Vivian to drive all of us crazy again.

Shadow Games and Other Sinister Stories of Show Business available for pre-order!

Shadow Games and Other Sinister Stories of Show Business available for pre-order!"Shadow Games is a page-turning, gut-wrenching barnburner of a book."—Robert Bloch
 
Ed here: My first cousin Bobby Driscoll was a major child star of the late 1940s and early 1950s. He died at thirty of drugs. While I don't use any of Bobby's life in this novel I do look at child stardom here. Theses a slightly revised edition of Shadow Games (1992) which I wrote at the time I was writing scripts for  two different directors and learning a little about the ways of Hwood. 



Cover art © by JT Lindroos

"Shadow Games unflinchingly examines the dark side of humanity and reaches a finale that is both moving and terrifying."
—Ramsey Campbell


"What keeps you reading is not the traditional question of whodunit but the slick and artful ease with which Gorman portrays the alienated, uncaring world of his creation."--The London Sunday Times
Cobey Daniels had it all. He was rich, he was young and he was the hottest star in the country. Then there was all that messy business with the teenage girl . . . and it all went to hell for Cobey.

But that was a few years ago. Now Cobey's pulled his life together again they're letting him out of the mental hospital and he's ready for his big comeback, but the past is still out there, waiting for him. Waiting to show Cobey a hell much more terrible than he could ever have imagined.

The American 90s come brutally alive: "Gorman knows how to shunt electricity into the raw nerve endings buried far below the reader's already clammy skin."
— Locus

© Ed Gorman


PRAISE FOR SHADOW GAMES

"Ed Gorman's is a strong and unique voice."
—Richard Matheson

"(Gorman) should be required reading for anyone who wants to experience the art of the short story as practiced by a master craftsman."
— Mystery News

"Gorman is the poet of dark suspense."
— The Bloomsbury Review

"John D. MacDonald meets Jim Thompson in a maelstrom of malicious evil and perverse maipulation that doesn't let up until the final few pages...thoughtful, tightly knit and elegantly structured."
—Million (UK)

"This is a bleak moral tale but written with such hot feeling and such cool style that it entertains even as it keens."
—Morning Star (UK)


Title Details:

RRP Price: £11.95
Publisher: Short, Scary Tales Publications
Release Date: May 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-909640-52-8 (6" x 9" Trade Paperback)
First Edition
Pages: 354

This brand new edition is available for pre-order from the Short, Scary Tales website. The first 100 copies sold direct from the site will be signed by me and the cover artist, JT Lindroos!

New titles from Stark House Press and Black Gat Books

STARK HOUSE PRESSMarch Newsletter, volume 5, issue 3 2016
April is Charlie Stella month, and the reviews are already starting to come in on TommyRed, Stella’s first new novel in four years. Don Kirkendall at the Men ReadingBooks blog, had this to say: “Holy crap. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Why thehell isn’t Stella on every mystery lover’s must-read list… This taut, tightly presentedstory of misplaced loyalties and retribution is nicely tied up in a fast-paced tale that,once you get used to the rhythm of the dialogue, just begs you to turn the next page.”These comments were mirrored by Bill Crider’s review in Pop Culture Magazine: “If youmiss Elmore Leonard, give Charlie Stella's Tommy Red a look. It has dumb bad guys,bad good guys, great dialogue, humor, and a plot that'll have you guessing about who'sgoing to survive… Good stuff and highly recommended.”Tommy “Red” Dalton is a freelance Irish hit man. He takes on a job for the Mob, butunfortunately, the Mob boss orders a clean-up afterword that includes Tommy Red. Theclean-up is botched, and now Tommy is out for revenge. It’s to Stella’s credit that hetakes such an unlikely character and gets us to care about him.For Stella, it’s all about character and dialog. Tommy Red is another brilliant example ofwhat Stella does best: create a plethora of carefully delineated characters, then bouncethem off each other and watch the sparks fly. Because the Mob is only one of Tommy’sproblems. His ex-wife has got it in for him and tells their oldest daughter what dad doesfor a living. So Tommy’s got it coming at him every which way, both professionally andpersonally.Stark House is proud to present Tommy Red by Charlie Stella asour April book, and suggests you contact your local bookstoreimmediately to reserve your copy today.Charlie StellaTommy Red978-1-933586-96-0$15.95

April needs nothing more than Tommy Red, so let's talk about May, when we have twobooks to offer our Crime Club members. The main release for the month is Scratch aThief/House of Evil by John Trinian, pen name for the author also known as ZekialMarko. Marko was the pulpster of the Beats, a friend of Jack Kerouac and RichardBrautigan, and a great tale spinner to any and all that he met.Ki Longfellow knew him as Marko, and she provides a wildly impressionistic essay ontheir days together in the San Francisco area. In fact, she was the basis for the femaleprotagonist in House of Evil, not the horror book it might appear by its title, but a sendupof the horror B-film, which Marko knew all too well. He’d been involved in a few localfilms himself.Scratch a Thief was originally published by Ace Books in 1961. Director Ralph Nelsonturned it into a film with Alain Delon and Ann-Margret and Marko wrote the screenplay.Some of the stories behind that filming are to be found in Longfellow’s introduction. Thebook itself is a noir masterpiece of crime fiction, the story of a reformed thief who findshimself caught between a revengeful cop and his criminalbrother’s gang, forced into one more job. The writing is as lean asits gets as the story takes us around the back alleys andwarehouse districts of San Francisco. Whether you call himMarko or Trinian, this is definitely “John Trinian” at his best.John TrinianScratch a Thief / House of Evil978-1-933586-99-1$20.95Paired with these 1960s treasures is the next mass market volume from Black GatBooks: the exquisite satire, The Girl on the Best Seller List by Vin Packer. As Trinianplays with the tropes of the B-film, so does Packer with salacious bestsellerdom. Just asGrace Metalious created her own small town scandal in Peyton Place by exposing thesecrets of the people around her, so too does Gloria Whealdon reveal all the foibles ofher friends and neighbors in her thinly-veiled tell-all called Population 12,360. Herfriends are savaged. Even her own husband is lampooned.But, of course, with Vin Packer, there is always a twist. Gloria’s friends all had a reasonto hate her—but only one had a reason to kill her. The secret at the heart of the novel iswhat makes Packer’s book such a zinger.Packer is, of course, Marijane Meaker, perhaps better known today as M. E. Kerr, authorof many classic young adult novels such as Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack and the FellTrilogy. The Girl on the Best Seller List is one of 19 “Vin Packer” novels she wrotebetween 1952 and 1969, primarily for Gold Medal Books, that offered wicked socialsatires in the same vein as Patricia Highsmith. Prologue Books made this novel availableas part of their ebook program a few years ago, but Stark House is proud to finally bringthis book back in paperback for the first time in 56 years.It’s a welcome addition to our collectible Black Gat line—this is #7—that recreates theformat of the 4.25” x 7” paperback of the past. It’s been funputting this list together, and we look forward to #8 in August,when we re-introduce an early Orrie Hitt novel. More on thatlater.Vin PackerThe Girl on the Best Seller List978-1-933586-98-4$9.99In the meantime, we are surprised that the current bestseller from Stark House Press isour new edition of No Orchids for Miss Blandish/Twelve Chinamen and a Woman byJames Hadley Chase. Who knew that vintage gangster fiction would be in such demand?You should be happy to know that more Chase is on the way.And if by now it seems we have jumped the gun, so to speak, in presenting both Apriland May titles together in one newsletter, well, so be it. April is late, and May is early.Honestly, we couldn’t wait to let you know what we have planned, and we hope youenjoy the continued variety we bring you, both new and old, as we continue to “BringBack the Mystery.”—Greg Shepard, publisher
Stark House Press

Forgotten Books: The Crimes of Jordan Wise, by Bill Pronzini.

The Crimes of Jordan Wise, by Bill Pronzini.

Actuary Jordan Wise tells a joke on himself a third of the way through the novel: (paraphrase) an actuary is somebody who doesn’t have the personality to be an accountant.

If you watch many true crime shows, you see a lot of Jordan Wises. People who fall into crime through circumstance rather than those who go looking for it.

Jordan becomes a criminal only after meeting Annalise, a troubled and very attractive young woman who needs two things badly – sex and money. But in order to get the sex on a regular basis, Jordan must first provide the money. He embezzles a half million dollars and flees with Annalise to the Virgin Islands. In this first part of the novel, there’s nice James M. Cainian detail about how Jordan comes alive for the first time in his life. Some of this is due, whether he admits it or not, to the danger of committing a serious crime. But most of it is due to Annalise and his profound sexual awakening.

The central section of the book reminds me of one of Maugham’s great South Seas tales – lust, betrayal, shame played out against vast natural beauty and a native society that, thanks to an old sea man named Bone, Jordan comes to see value in – even if Annalise, her head filled with dreams of Paris and glamor, does not. Old Maugham got one thing right for sure – as Pronzini demonstrates here – a good share of humanity, wherever you find them, is both treacherous and more than slightly insane.

There are amazing sections of writing about sea craft and sailing that remind me not of old Travis McGee but of the profoundly more troubled and desperate men of Charles Williams who find purity and peace only in the great and epic truths of the sea. That they may be as crazed and treacherous as everybdy else does not seem to bother them unduly.

There are also amazing sections (almost diaristic sections) where Jordan tells of us his fears and desires, his failings and his dreams. In places he deals vididly, painfully with his secret terror of not being enough of a man in any sense to hold Annalise.

The publisher calls this a novel and so it is. Pronzini brings great original depth to the telling of this dark adventure that is both physical and spiritual. He has never written a better novel, the prose here literary in the best sense, lucid and compelling, fit for both action and introspection.

You can’t read a page of this without seeing it in movie terms. The psychologically violent love story played out against a variety of contemporary settings gives the narrative great scope. And in Jordan Wise and Annalise he has created two timeless people. This story could have been set in ancient Egypt or Harlem in 1903 or an LA roller skating disco in 1981. As Faulkner said, neither the human heart nor the human dilemma ever changes.

BACKSHOT: 2012 by Tom Piccirilli from Gravetapping

Ben Boulden:
Backshot: 2012is the second of two related novellas. 2012was written by Tom Piccirilli and Backshot:1902 was written by Ed Gorman. The connection between the two is Marshal Delmar Royce who is a minor, but key, player in the latter parts of 1902 and the great3-grandfather of 2012’s antihero, Royce.
Royce is a professional thief lying in a hospital bed with a broken back and useless legs. His lifelong friend and partner, Quill, punched a bullet in his back after their last job and now Royce is looking at a painful future and a five-year prison stretch. The doctor tells him he won’t walk for a year, but Royce is on his feet in six months; it’s another three years before his release from prison and his planned revenge against Quill.
2012is a touch Richard Stark, but wholly Tom Piccirilli. The plotline is Stark—Royce is betrayed by his partner and spends the rest of the story getting even—but it is stylistically and thematically Piccirilli. Mr. Piccirilli’s literate, smooth, stark style is, perhaps, the finest in modern crime fiction—
“DeKooning sighed. It was the sigh that said you couldn’t believe people were so clichéd, so obvious, so average. You heard the story a thousand times before and here it was again, and you just couldn’t believe you were going to have to sit through it one more time. DeKooning frowned. It said more about him than anything before.”  
It is thematically complex with a heaviness of the past’s influence on the present. Royce is haunted by the image of a man he will never meet, Delmar Royce, and Quill is tormented by the shadow of his abusive father. The story never strays into predictability, and Royce is, if not exactly likable, understandable and even familiar.

Tom Piccirilli died in July 2015 from brain cancer. He was a talented writer who started his career in horror and then migrated to crime. He won multiple Bram Stoker awards for his horror fiction, including best novel for The Night Class, and he won the Thriller Award for best paperback original for his crime novels The Midnight Road and The Coldest Mile. Backshot: 2012 was published posthumously, and as I read it, I wondered if it is the last of Mr. Piccirilli’s original work.   
Purchase a copy of Backshot:2012 at Cemetery Dance’s website.

Heart and Soul Pt. 2 March 29th, 2016 by Max Allan Collins

Heart and Soul Pt. 2March 29th, 2016 by Max Allan Collins

Parody cover courtesy of Gene Eugene





























The week I spent on the fifth floor – the rehab area – I remember clearly. The days weren’t bad, with Barb again visiting me from late morning till early evening, and bringing me in real food for lunch. Every day had me receiving a mildly demanding schedule, with O.T. (Occupational Therapy) and P.T. (Physical Therapy) sessions every morning and afternoon.
P.T. concentrates on the waist down, getting you walking again, building your strength up, utilizing such things as parallel bars, stationary bikes and a little flight of stairs. The P.T. trainers tended to be young, several of them working on their grad degrees. The one in charge was an attractive blonde named Tessa who had a deadpan sense of humor that Buster Keaton might have envied (not that Tessa would have any idea who Buster Keaton was). She took voluminous notes on her laptop while her grad school charges worked with me, and I accused her of moonlighting on a blog, which I speculated was called “Fit to Fit,” concentrating on fashion tips for the gym.
Another young woman, one of the grad students (whose name I unfortunately don’t recall), attempted to teach me how to get into and out of bed, without disturbing my chest incision (a big concern at the hospital). She demonstrated easily, using her abs since you’re not allowed to push up on your hands. I asked her how old she was, and she said, “Twenty-two.” Then I asked her how much she weighed, and she said, “One-hundred twenty.” I said last year I’d eaten 120 pounds of doughnuts.
The O.T. trainers who I worked with were all women, of various ages. The youngest, in her early twenties, had never heard of Bela Lugosi. I don’t remember how that came up, but she also had never heard of Boris Karloff. Nor Vincent Price. A somewhat older young woman was passing by, and I asked her about Lugosi and Karloff, and she’d never heard of them either. She did know Vincent Price, and explained to the younger woman that he was “the guy at the end of ‘Thriller.’”
O.T. concentrated on my hand, putting me to work with a Silly Putty-like substance and having me insert tiny pegs into slots. Early on we discovered I had lost my signature and could not use a computer keyboard. But we stayed at it.
One of the things various O.T. females did was guide me through my morning shower. This embarrassed me for about ten seconds. I looked like forty miles of bad road and humiliation was a way of life by now. The point was to demonstrate that I could do my own showering and such without help, or anyway much help. I did this pretty well, despite my dislike of showers (also, I had to sit on a bench in there). My funky right hand had me using my left for shaving, at first, but shortly I began forcing myself to use the right for that (electric razor, not straight razor!) and started brushing my teeth with my right hand as well. A big part of getting my hand back (I’m at about 80% now) has been forcing the right hand to do its work, as with eating utensils.
The bathroom had an oddity that I still can’t figure. The sink was narrow and long, putting way too much distance between your face and the mirror, making shaving very tricky indeed. I described this to one O.T. female as being like watching your neighbor across a courtyard shave out the window.
Another oddity, not in the bathroom, was the reclining chair in which a patient spent a lot of time, since the bed was so uncomfortable. The lean-back lever was incredibly hard to utilize – particularly for somebody who was not supposed to strain his chest incision. I think the guy who bought the sinks also bought the chairs. Musta got a deal.
Between the physical therapy sessions and my lovely wife’s presence, the days weren’t bad at all. Seeing Barb come in the door always lit up my world. But oh those nights, those endless, endlessly interrupted nights.
One of the worst began when my heart surgeon stopped by to ask about, well, my regularity since the surgery. It was a week since then and there hadn’t been any. He said cheerfully, “Well, we’ll hit it from both ends.” I will allow your imagination to help you interpret that, as well as spare you the discomfort and embarrassment that made that particular night the longest of all. But God bless the nurses who saw me through it.
The next day I was so weak and dehydrated that I couldn’t leave my room. The O.T. and P.T. people came to me and we soldiered on.
The last straw that led to Barb and me insisting on a release came on an even longer night. I was alternating short bouts of sleep with reading books and watching DVDs, and a nurse suggested that I take a sleeping pill.
A sleeping pill called Ambien.
Let me do a quick sidebar here, having to do with a gift my son gave me for Christmas, one of the best presents I ever received – a Blu-ray box from Japan of the complete COLUMBO in a cigar box. Fantastic! Barb and I, in the weeks preceding my surgery, watched a COLUMBO episode each evening.
Thus it was that during my hospital stay I dreamed my own brand-new COLUMBO episodes almost every night. Sometimes I was Columbo, sometimes I was the killer, other times I just watched. The most memorable episode was about identical twins who’d both had heart surgery and were sharing a room in the hospital. One brother sneaked out to kill somebody, and Columbo caught him because the two urine jugs in the room had both been filled by one brother.
Nate told me he doubted that would play very well on TV.
But you get the idea of the nature of my dreams in that place. Under the first-time influence of Ambien, I dreamed not of Columbo but of Miss Marple and her two talented nephews. Remember those great Christie characters? Me either. But they got themselves caught up in a gauzy European horror film right out of Dario Argento, with a serial killer slaughtering everybody left and right. I was suddenly in the midst of it all, trying to move through one sheer curtain after another while the killer pursued me.
Now understand that I was not allowed to get out of bed without assistance. That I was essentially in the process of learning to walk again. That I was required to ring for help to use the bathroom. Nonetheless, I apparently ran out into the hall, shouting, “Murder! He’s killing everyone! Murder! Save me!” I don’t think I fell down – I certainly had no signs of that, after – but I remember vividly being on the floor while a nurse bent down before me like she was giving a water bowl to her dog.
“Do you know where you are?” she asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “But I think I’m in Max Allan Collins’ room.”
Time to go home.
NEXT WEEK: HOME AGAIN HOME AGAIN
– – –Check out the Wikipedia page for the QUARRY TV series.
And the official QUARRY series web site.
Speaking of Quarry, top writer Mike Dennis provides this great QUARRY’S VOTE review at his web site.
M.A.C.Tags: Quarry, Quarry TV, Quarry's Vote
Posted in Message from M.A.C. |  4 Comments »

Can't we all just get along? Actors who hate other actors

Ed here: There's a long list of these on Movie Morlocks today - here are some highlights. For the rest go here:

3. Joan Crawford on Bette Davis: “She has a cult, and what the hell is a cult except a gang of rebels without a cause. I have fans. There’s a big difference.”
4. Bette Davis on Joan Crawford: “I wouldn’t piss on her if she was on fire.”
5. Sterling Hayden on Joan Crawford: “There’s is not enough money in Hollywood to lure me into making another picture with Joan Crawford. And I like money.”
”
7. Carol Lombard on Vivien Leigh: “That f–king English bitch.”

19. Walter Mattheu to Barbra Streisand during an on set argument while making HELLO DOLLY!: “I have more talent in my farts than you have in your whole body.”

25. Richard Harris on Michael Caine: “An over-fat, flatulent, 62-year-old windbag. A master of inconsequence masquerading as a guru, passing off his vast limitations as pious virtues.”
26. Frank Sinatra on Shelley Winters: “A bowlegged bitch of a Brooklyn blonde.”
27. Shelley Winters on Frank Sinatra: “A skinny, no-talent, stupid, Hoboken bastard.”

28. John Gielgud on Ingrid Bergman: “Ingrid Bergman speaks five languages and can’t act in any of them.”
29. William Holden on Humphrey Bogart: “I hated the bastard.”
30. Humphrey Bogart on William Holden: “A dumb prick.”

These insults were compiled from various books, magazines, newspapers and IMDB.com.
Feel free to share some of your own favorite insults from classic actors below. I’m sure there are plenty more that I haven’t mentioned.

Malcolm Braly False Starts: A Memoir of San Quentin and Other Prisons

Rick Ollerman's intro to False Starts by Malcolm Braly, our February release:


Malcolm BralyFalse Starts: A Memoir of San Quentin and Other Prisons978-1-933586-94-x  $17.95
“Each morning you know where evening will find you. There is no way to avoid your cell. When everyone marched into the block you would be left alone in the empty yard. Each Monday describes every Friday. Holidays in prison are only another mark of passing time and for many they are the most difficult days.”—from False Starts, by Malcolm Braly
Following in the footsteps of men such as Jack Black and Jim Tully, prisoners and writers both, Malcolm Braly started out free but quickly fell into a sort of trap. He was born in Portland, Oregon in 1925. Like Black and Tully, Braly was cut adrift by his parents, in his case by a father who ran out on him and a mother that eventually simply gave him up. All three of these men grew up in the system, all three of them left it, and all three of them took up various degrees of the criminal life. Most importantly, all three of them grew up to write about their lives and experiences. They’ve given us the words that summon their ghosts.Black was born in 1871, Tully in 1886. All three came from the same sort of broken families, all three took to the road early in life. But out of them all, only Tully avoided becoming the hard-core sort of criminal embraced by Black and later by Braly. They began their vagabond careers by taking to the road and falling in with the characters who rode the rails, both the bums and the hoboes, and had turned their backs on conventional life. Tully likes to tell us the difference between hoboes and bums is that hoboes, or ’boes, will work, and bums will not. However close a distinction this may be, it is the bums that turn to heavier lives of crime. Begging, burglary, theft, holdups, safecracking—these are ways not only to make money, but serve as training to become true vocations. And once taken hold, all too often they become the young vagabond’s only picture of life.Tully found his love of books and literature early and this is perhaps what saved him from following the same path as Black before him and Braly afterward. He is often credited with founding the “hard-boiled” school of writing, which brought him notice by such men as H. L. Mencken, founder of Smart Set magazine, and later of that immortal pulp, Black Mask.In his autobiography, False Starts (1976), Braly wrote, “The frontier is gone and the moon is a dead rock, but the dream of our old freedom dies hard.” This echoes Jim Tully, who in his first volume of memoir, Circus of Life (1924), said, “He sees the moon, yellow ghost of a dead planet, haunting the earth.” The difference between the two statements is that by the time Braly had written those words, he had spent nearly twenty years in various prisons.


   ...It wasn’t until 1967 that On the Yard came out, bringing to Braly a certain amount of celebrity, including television and magazine appearances. The longshot he had long ago decided to take in prison had well and truly paid off. Felony Tank was published in 1961, Shake Him Till He Rattles in 1963, and then It’s Cold Out There in 1966. In 1976 his autobiography, False Starts, was published, sandwiched by novelizations of a pair of movie scripts (The Master in 1973 and The Protector in 1979).Aside from a short story called “An Outline of History” (about a sort of prison experiment gone wrong) that appeared in Thomas M. Disch’s 1973 anthology Bad Moon Rising, Braly’s writing career was over. In April of 1980, Braly was involved in a traffic accident in Baltimore, Maryland. He was dead at the age of 54.
“I had served more time for a handful of inept burglaries than most men would have served for killing a police officer, and the prison, which I had hated so deeply and scored so bitterly for its every failing, was only my chosen instrument in the willful destruction of my own life.”—from False Starts, by Malcolm Braly
Both the novel On the Yard as well as his memoir False Starts will live on as classic examples of both the “prison novel” as well as the memoir. Braly’s relatively small body of work will last because it is real. The characters are based on real people, their actions based on real actions, their consequences based on real consequences. One can’t help but wonder what Braly would have written as an entirely free man, a writer who may have finally been able to shed all of his ghosts.

For Jim Tully, writing was quite possibly his pass away from being more than the occasional jailbird. He moved to his literary career much earlier in his life than either Jack Black or Malcolm Braly. Jack Black reflected on why he hadn’t been able to go straight. In You Can’t Win, he wrote:
I was wrong. I knew I was wrong, and yet I persisted. If that is possible of any explanation it is this: From the day I left my father my lines had been cast, or I cast them myself, among crooked people. I had not spent one hour in the company of an honest person. I had lived in an atmosphere of larceny, theft, crime. I thought in terms of theft. Houses were built to be burglarized, citizens were to be robbed, police to be avoided and hated, stool pigeons to be chastised, and thieves to be cultivated and protected. That was my code; the code of my companions. That was the atmosphere I breathed. “If you live with wolves, you will learn to howl.”
It is almost as though he was saying once started in the wrong direction, he couldn’t manage to turn. Braly put it this way in False Starts:
My problem is I can’t get up in the morning. I want, but can’t believe I deserve. My problem is I’m a rational and good-hearted man who does irrational and harmful things. My problem is there is no one out there in the wilderness who can tell me what my problem is. My problem is my life is already half over and I haven’t allowed myself to begin living it. My problem is I’m terribly afraid I can’t solve my problem. I feel I can, though I tremble for myself, and I live in this hope, but I have felt so, hoped so before and I have been wrong. My problem is that I don’t know what to say to you to explain myself. I meant no harm. I mean no harm. Please let me go now before it is too late for me.
Tragedy unfolded in the lives of all these men, and no less so for many of their victims. It is instructive to be able to read the words these men have left behind, to understand the truths they have to tell us, not only about the characters in their novels but about themselves. These works live on precisely because they contain the grains of that thing that all of us, throughout most of our lives, strive to understand: what is it that makes us do what we do?
I no longer brood over the right or the wrong of what was done to me—it happened—and I wonder if it isn’t the effort to contain our lives in a morality so simple which leads some of us into such terrible trouble. I can’t answer my own question. At the end of his long life, Jung wrote that the individual was the only reality. If I sense this truth precisely, it says my life, as all lives are, is unique. For myself, I would change nothing because it has all led me to become the man I hoped to be.—from False Starts, by Malcolm Braly

… my life passed as a dream that never quite came true—from “The Road,” an unpublished poem by Malcolm Braly, 1946
Beyond his books, Braly eventually proved a very important thing to himself. Though his life may have been cut too tragically short for him to realize it in full, his writings show that all of us, even the worst of us, can learn to live with our ghosts.
[Excerpts from the Introduction to False Starts: CITY OF CLOSED DOORSDO YOUR OWN TIME: Malcolm Bralyby Rick Ollerman]