Ed Gorman's Blog, page 32

Bad Reviews

Bad ReviewsThere' have been some particularly intelligent discussions lately about writers responding to bad reviews. When I first began publishing novels thirty years ago negative reviews ruined not just my day but my week and sometimes my month.

Back then my friend Charlotte McLeod was still vividly alive. I asked her about a nasty review I'd gotten and told her that I wanted to write the reviewer a letter. She said don't do it. She'd been at it for a quarter century longer than I had so I took her advice. In the ensuing years I've only once alluded to a reviewer in print. He made a moral judgement about my characters that I felt was pretty high-handed. But after I made the reference I realized that that's his job, to make judgements like that, even though I may think they're pretty damned stuffy. I apologized to him. This is a man who has done so much important work in the field that I felt I owed it to him. He wrote me a very pleasant response. Not that I changed his mind. I hadn't expected to.

Things have changed today of course what with the internet and the other means of communication I don't understand--Blackberries and Twitter etc. This, I think, has changed the relationship between writer and reviewer. I'm told there are a number of sites where reviewers write under pseudonyms. I'm also told that there are such things as flame wars. And I've witnessed a number of grudges being carried on under false names.

I guess I feel this way: though there are a handful of reviewers in newspapers and news stand magazines I don't care for, they generally conduct themselves professionally. Their reviews are signed, they write literate reports on what they've read and they rarely make their judgements sound personal. There are some tics I hate of course--this direct please to the writer "C'mon, Ed, you're not a mastermind but you can do better than this." This makes the reviewer equal to the writer and no matter how bad the book might be, the writer is the star here. There are also reviewers--and we've all caught them--who obviously haven't read the book. All they've reviewed is the flap copy. You have your own list of professional reviewer tics that really irritate you.

On my blog I list the sites that I think are thoughtful and entertaining in their reviews. I'd use any of them as an example of how I think net review sites should be run. On the other hand I've accidentally bumped into a few sites that pissed me off. None of them were mystery sites. The so-called reviewers slipped into that "C'mon, Dave, you know you can do better than that. You're a moron but even you have done better books than this." And the letters that followed were of a similar tone. Inane, childish. Paul Levine recently got an online review that was inane and childish to the highest degree.

If you get a negative review that is thoughtful and well-written and the reviewer's name is a real one, I don't see any justification in writing the reviewer. Hard as it is to imagine, some people just don't like our books. On the other hand if the review has the feel of an axe job or obviously reveals that the reviewer hasn't read the book or even makes up things about the book--you can ask Max Collins about that--hell, yes, I think it's legitimate to register a complaint on your blog or in a private letter. Personally, I've been treated to a couple of shots like that but all I did was boil for a few hours and forget about them. But if I ever got something that sounded as if I'd slept with the reviewer's wife and then shot both of his puppies...yeah, he'd hear from me. He'd hear from me real good.

Spree by Max Allan Collins

Y, FEBRUARY 04, 2013

Ed here: I'm such an Al Collins fan that it's impossible for me to choose a favorite. But this may be it or at least is very close. Character, plot and writing impeccable. Read it to enjoy and writers read it to learn.

This is my favorite of Collins' Nolan series. Formerly a man associated with the mob, though reluctantly, now trying to go straight with a restaurant in the Quad Cities on the Mississippi River. Things are going along nicely until Cole Comfort and his dim son catch up with him. They hold him resposible for some of their serious bad luck.

To fully appreciate Cole you have reach back to William Falkner and Erskine Caldwell. Outwardly he's something of a haydseed, right down to his flannel shirts and bib overalls. But he's hard to peg, as one of his early victims learns. She wonders about a man who says "ain't" then a few sentences later uses the word "conduit." Go figure.

Cole Comfort is one of the great bad guys of hardboiled fiction. A man who has used his family to help him run every kind of scam, con and robbery you see on those WANTED posters in the post office. And not a sentimentalist. Oh, no. If he has to lose a loved one in the process of getting what he wants so be it.

Son Lyle is a twenty-three year old pretty boy who is in effect his father's robot. He doesn't want to kill anybody but just as the book opens he's about to off his sixth victim. He has flashes of remorse but they don't last longer than any of his other thoughts, around thirty seconds.

In broadstroke the story is a confrontation between Nolan and the Comforts. They are nasty sumbitches and make some of the mob men who tried to kill Nolan years earlier seem like nice guys.

What makes the book memorable is its successful balance of hard boiled suspense and wit. No easy task. Nolan is just detached enough to function as a mercenary when he goes after the Comforts for kidnapping his woman (Collins partially modeled him after Lee Van Cleef) but believable enough to really care about her. Collins' description of their relationship is winning and unique.

But the Comforts take the book. Loathsome as they are--Cole is a combination of Bubba and Richard Speck--you can't look away no matter how grotesque they become. Most of the Comfort scenes have me smiling all the way through. Several have me laughing out loud.

Spree is pure twisty pleasure and a major book in Collins' career.
POSTED BY ED GORMAN 

The Perry Mason TV series

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 30, 2006Perry Mason DVD; New York TimesThe Case of the Canny Counsel


Article Tools Sponsored By
By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: December 31, 2006

IN memory the old “Perry Mason” was campy and obvious. At the end of each hour Raymond Burr would rise commandingly from his courtroom chair and, with just a question or two and perhaps a peeved glare, elicit a detailed and tearful confession from a witness with more aptitude for murder than for perjury.

Those Perry Mason moments are as awkward and unrewarding today as they were in 1957, when CBS began broadcasting the series. But almost everything else about the show is splendid, and the 39 episodes from the first season recently released on DVD are a box of L.A. noir chocolates, well constructed and satisfyingly dark.

They start with that swaggering theme music, by Fred Steiner, and some irresistible episode titles (“The Case of the Cautious Coquette,” “The Case of the Restless Redhead,” “The Case of the Vagabond Vixen,” “The Case of the Lazy Lover”). The setups are brisk and racy, usually involving an attractive young woman, the suggestion of ill-considered intimacy and, in short order, a corpse.

Beautifully filmed in black and white, the shows have become period dramas over time, stuffed with relentless smoking, skinny ties, hard-to-get divorces, propeller planes and the threat of the gas chamber. All this was just scenery at the time, but it has now imbued the show with a real sense of place, of a California draped in shadows and suffused with gaudy ambition and sexual jealousy.

“Perry Mason” was also, week in and week out, a well-made television show, the work of professionals. It moves a little slowly for modern tastes, but it was precisely constructed, sophisticated and intricate enough to reward careful attention.

For the rest of the article log on here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/31/art...

Ed here:

Owing to various hospital stays over the past five years, I logged a lot of hours watching the Perry Masons referred to here. This Litvak review is excellent. And I certainly agree with it. Most of the hokum came at the end when the light bulb appeared above Perry's head.

What struck me most about the shows was how adult and seedy they were.. A lot of the seediness is between the lines but boy is it there. As I mentioned here last week writing about the early Mason novels (those still influenced by Black Mask), the stories are packed with sex and the villains are frequently business men. You could be forgiven for thinking you're reading Upton Sinclair or Sinclair Lewis in sections of the early Masons. He sure didn't trust trust big business and he he had an almost socialistic scorn for the greed success inspires (I watched Treasure of Sierra Madre earlier today--a pure straight shot of B. Traven's rage was something Gardner would likely have understood).

Litvak's best point is that the early Mason TVs have become historical dramas. They are one of the most accurate depicitions of the Fifties I've ever seen. Man, the fetishes we made of our clothes, cars, home furnishings. And the way we looked at poor people--rarely to be trusted, rarely able to speak with any clarity, lost in booze or self-pity or just plain despicable laziness. The Lonely crowd, The Man in The Grey Flannel Suit, The Status Seekers--some of the observations in the Masons are as acute as these bestsellers of the Fifties. There's a whole book waiting to be read on the sociology of the first three or four Mason years--not that I'd read it, you understand. But it's mildly interesting to think about up there on my Unread shelf.
POSTED BY ED GORMAN AT 7:45 PM NO COMMENTS: LINKS TO THIS POST 

Charles Runyon, R.I.P.

Ed here: This is an interview I did with Charles twelve years ago:
(Thanks to Jeff Pierce for remembering it)





1 The obvious mystery to those who were following
your career--when did you stop publishing and why?  

In 1980, Jove published my novel, The Gypsy King, which I thought represented my highest effort, a cut above the genre sf and mystery novels I had been publishing. I was never content with working at the level of my last published work, but at the same time I wasn't sure which way to go with my future work. To fill in the time while deciding, I went back to the University of Missouri and picked up a Master's in Creative writing, in case I might need to work before my sales picked up again. However, the hiatus stretched on, and teaching did not blend with writing as well as I had hoped. Writing was still my preferred profession, but the path back to publishing was a rocky one, and nobody laid down a red carpet for me any more than they had at the beginning. Somehow the word got out that I had "passed on" in 1987, and the thought intrigued me, much as it once intrigued Tom Sawyer. What if I tried to reenter the field, not as an older writer reentering the field after a long lay-off, but as a fresh new face with reams of new ideas? However, thanks to you, Ed, that experiment has now been abandoned, or left to others to carry out. 

2 Can you give us a sketch of your life?

A rough sketch would show the young writer growing up on a farm in Worth County, Missouri, the most insignificant county in a not-too-significant state. I couldn't wait to grow up and leave the farm like most boys, but ran away from home at age 16 to work on a ranch in West Texas. 
So we come full circle; 60 nears later I am back in Texas. The intervening years included army service in Korea, Germany and Indiana, J-school at Missouri University. I just missed a job on the National Geographic and instead went into industrial editing. It was either that or poetry which paid nothing. While working for Mr. Rockefeller's old outfit in Chicago an agent to whom I had been paying readers' fees for five years -- Scott Meredith -- suddenly started making sales. I lost no time in quitting my job and announcing that I was now a full-time writer. With a new baby and no income, I borrowed a lakeside cabin and sat down to write my first book. After sending it off to my agent, I took off for the West Indies, found an almost deserted island, and lay back to await the gentle shower of royalties. It didn't quite happen that way, but it was only a few months before the book sold to Ace; my reaction was to charter a yacht and take the wife and kid on a tour of the islands. I returned to New York suntanned but broke, still expecting the gilded life of a best-selling writer.  

3 How about a sketch of your publishing career? Was
writing something you'd always wanted to do? 

Since I was about 8 years old, and realized how easily (comparatively) words came to me. Before that I wanted to be a doctor, until somebody told me you had to go to school for endless years. I was already making preparations when in High School I took typing; the only other "boy" in my class was a pianist. (For the rest of the nitpicking career details, I'm sending an updated bio out of Contemporary Authors.)  

4 Do you recall your first sale?  

Of course; it was a short story called "First Man in a Satellite" to Super Science Fiction in 1957 -- fifty years ago! This was about the time the Russians sent up Sputnik so I was undeservedly credited with being a harbinger of the Space Age. I got a personal rejection from John W. Campbell, with his signature slanting across the bottom of the page as if tracing the path of a tumbling tumbleweed. He disparaged the whole idea of a midget in a space ship, adding that Lester del Rey had already done it -- better. Editors didn't care about writer's sensibilities in those days. I still treasure the letter.  

5 Had you been selling novels and stories for a longtime before you decided to go full-time? 

I think I answered that in the earlier questions.  

6 Which gave you more satisfaction as a
writer--science fiction or crime novels?

It's the sf novels and stories that I remember with the most affection. The crime stories and novels were more neatly wrapped up, while the sf novels and stories open onto worlds of other plot possibilities. I'll get this back to you now and await the next half-dozen questions. I assume they will cover the background of the novel itself

Requesting Information About Ron Faust

Gravetapping


Requesting Information About Ron FaustBen Boulden Gravetapping
Posted: 02 Jul 2015 10:08 AM PDTI’m planning to start a permanent page—as part of this blog—dedicated to the work of Ron Faust. Mr. Faust wrote 15 novels between 1974 and 2013; his final novel, Jackstraw, was published posthumously. He died in 2011, and information is difficult to find.
I’m looking for information about Mr. Faust and his work: firsthand stories, interviews, articles, etc. The information will be used to develop a better understanding of both the man and his work. If you have memories, knowledge of his biography, bibliography, or know of any magazine and newspaper articles featuring Mr. Faust I would love to hear them. Please send an email to zulu1611@yahoo.com.
I have written what I know about Ron Faust in the post “Ron Faust: An Unforgettable Writer,” and I have reviewed three of his novels: Nowhere to Run , Split Image , and The Long Count .

Forgotten Books: The Handle Donald E. Westlake

The HandleHard to know if a book was a fairly easy go for the writer or if it drove him to drugs and e-porn. I hope The Handle by Richard Stark was a pleasure for Donald Westlake to write because it sure is a pleasure to read.

The Organization has decided that it's tired of this German guy running his big casino on an island in the Gulf of Mexico. He's beyond the jurisdiction of the Feds and it's unlikely Cuba will do much about him. Thus Parker is hired to take the casino and its other buildings down--literally. To blow them up.

Now while The Handle is every bit as tough as Dick Cheney's heart, the hardboiled aspect is played off against the sorriest group of human beings Parker may ever have had to work with. And the sardonic way Westlake portrays them had me laughing out loud at several points.

Take your pick. There's the alcoholic hood who talks as if he's auditioning for a Noel Coward play; the mob gun dealer who had to quit drinking several months ago and has increased both his cigarette intake (four or five packs a day) while maintaining both his cancer cough and his enormous weight; the pedophile who turns out to be a ringer sent to spy in Parker and his friends; the Feds who are so inept both Parker and Grofield play games seeing who can lose their tails the fastest. And then there's the the married Grofield, Parker's professional acting buddy, who never passes up a chance to impose his charms on willing women. In this case he endeavors to put the whammy on the very sexy blonde Parker himself has been shacking up with. Isn't that called bird-dogging?

And then we have Baron Wolfgang Freidrich Kastelbern von Alstein, the man who owns the island and the casino and who, over the years, has managed to make The Third Man's Harry Lime look like a candidate for sainthood. Westlake spends a few pages on the Baron's history and it becomes one of the most fascinating parts of the book, especially his days in Europe during the big war.

The book is filled with the little touches that make the Stark books so memorable. My favorite description comes when Parker and the sexy blonde sit down to a dinner that Westlake describes as "viciously expensive."

A fine fine novel.POSTED BY ED GORMAN AT 4:39 PM 2 COMMENTS: LI

Charles Willleford "Citizen's Arrest"

From Gravetapping by Ben Boulden
 good citizen; honest, upstanding, with a certain 
civic-mindedness that compelshim to find a clerk when he sees a man 
hoplifting. The store is called Gwynn’s, and it has an 
odd shoplifting policy. Since an employee didn’t see the actual snatch, 
they are loath to stop the man for fear, if he didn’t steal 
anything, of alienating a customer. They ask Mr. Goranovsky 
to be a witness when the man is approached. 
He hesitantly agrees, but quickly regrets his decision.
“Citizen’s Arrest” is deceivingly simple 
and overtly ironic. It takes the expected
—crime, punishment, and possible retribution—and twists it into something unexpected. 
It is humorous, charming—in a hardboiled way—
nd exemplifies the idea that no good deed goes unpunished. The prose is simple—
“My fingers trembled as I lit a cigarette.”
—and, unusually, there are no first names.
 It is Mr. Goranovsky, Mr. Levine, Mr. Sileo, which gives the 
story an uptight formality. A formality that acts as a foil to the climactic twist. And the twist is what makes the story good. 

“Citizen’s Arrest” originally appeared in 
Alfred Hitchcock MysteryMagazinein 1966. I read it in 
the anthology The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fictionedited by Maxim
 Jakubowski, which I recommend wholeheartedly.

Purchase a copy of Pulp Fiction at Amazon. You are subscribed to email updates from Gravetapping
To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now.Email delivery powered by GoogleGoogle Inc., 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States

from the great mystery.file.com & the great david vineyard-john mcpartland

Reviewed by DAVID VINEYARD:          
JOHN McPARTLAND – The Face of Evil. Gold Medal #393, paperback original, 1954. BlackMask.com, softcover, 2006.    There’s always a little trouble. Some lad from New York’s midtown or Chicago decides to make himself a score for ten thousand or so with a touch of blackmail or extortion. “Call Bill Oxford. He’ll handle it. The kid’s tough and smart and he knows everybody.”
   Bill Oxford is tough as nails and not very nice. He used to be a hot shot newsman during the war, worked on the legendary military paper  Yank  with people like Marion Hargrove ( See Here Private Hargrove , well known screen and television writer), then, still young, he went to the city, got a job as a ‘sharpshooter’ on a big paper, the kind of guy who knew people and things, the kind of guy who would put a blackmailer or extortionist in their place for you, fix a scandal, break a few skulls. Then he went to work in advertising for the Agency, for Roger Mooney …With Roger Mooney you say, ‘Sure, Roger,’ and jump through whatever hoops he’s holding.   Roger Mooney has a client running for office in Balboa, California. He’s not a very good candidate, in fact he’s a very bad one, and he has some problems, namely an honest lawyer named Ringling Black, who has the goods on the client and is about to broadcast them. All Bill Oxford has to do is fix things.   “You go down to Balboa. Frame this Black. Frame him hard and fast. Maybe with a woman. Something like that, something plenty nasty.”
   You don’t have to be all that clever to figure out this is a paperback original from Gold Medal by the underrated John MacPartland, whose books like  Big Red’s Daughter ,  The Kingdom of Johnny Cool , and  Tokyo Doll  were hardboiled in the vein of John D. MacDonald or Charles Williams — not just a rehash of Hammett, Chandler, and Cain, but a new vision of the hard-boiled nineteen fifties, suburban rather than urban, small town or small city politics instead of Chi town or NYC.   MacPartland’s mean streets were often in such settings. His prose was hard and tight with flourishes of dark beauty, but never showy:    Two women called to me, “Bill!” Nile’s voice and Ann’s. I walked along the night-black street alone.

   Outside it was cool and dark with a fresh wind from the bay. I left the car in the parking lot and walked toward the couple of blocks that were downtown Balboa.   Downstairs for a drink at the bar. It was crowded now, and there was the laughter of women, the low voices of men. A good bunch — the women all beautiful or close to it, the men rich-man brown and with good clothes.   I went to her, quietly, and put my arms around her, hunted her mouth with mine. She pushed at me with her hands, tried to say something, and then I found her. It was stepping out of reality into something I had never known before. This was the whirlpool.   Sometimes I would try to say something, a fragment of a word, a quick whisper of “Nile!” Nothing else. The drunkenness burned away, and I forgot everything but Nile.   There was no exhaustion, no satiety. In time, a long time, there was a gray light on the long row of windows, a rim of light over the roundness of the hills.
   There are two women, Nile Lisbon, widow of well loved John Lisbon, friend of Ringling Black, girlfriend of tough sadistic King McCarthy, and Balboa’s assistant district attorney, a woman too dangerous to be with and too beautiful to ignore. In anyone else’s hands Nile would be a femme fatale, in MacPartland’s she is bruised and lost and hard to resist, good and bad, sweet and sour. You would know Nile if you saw her, be attracted, but unless you were Bill Oxford you would likely back away:   She was the kind of woman a man noticed, mostly because of her eyes. Dark, almost black pools, they had a warmth that I felt could turn to fire. She had turned her head, looking over the shoulder of the man she was with, and we looked at each other. The third or fourth time it happened he noticed it and I paid some attention to what he was like.
   Nile gets Oxford in a fight with King the first thing. It doesn’t seem to bother him much. Then there is Ann Field. Six years earlier there at been a thing between them:   Yeah, sure, Ann. Cute and trim as a palomino colt, that girl. 
   Not now though. Ann has changed and how she feels about Bill has changed:    Now she was sleek, a jungle animal who’d been caught and caged in a filthy zoo too long, the kind of girl who describes herself as a model but who does no modeling. Her eyes weren’t wide, nor was the world new and good to her. Any man could see all that.
   Ann doesn’t have good memories of Bill: “Don’t hello me, you son-of-a-bitch. I’ll kill you and spit on your corpse.”   Then to round things out there are the hard drunk kids in town for spring break and Mooney’s enforcer Whitey D’Arcy, who owns a car dealership and owns more than a few cops. Mooney and D’Arcy play hard:   Mooney had used hired killers where it had been necessary years ago. California had been a rough state in the late 1930’s. The chips were down for Mooney today.

   Whitey D’Arcy was not an idiot. We both knew what it was about. If I gave him trouble I’d pay for it, hard, but not here and not now. Likely I’d get my kidneys broken; it was the number-one big payoff for trouble guys.
   Bill finds himself suddenly with a conscious and a need to pay back for his sins. Redemption could get him killed when Ringling Black is shot and the evidence against Mooney’s client goes missing. The cops work for D’Arcy and want Bill, and his only allies are the seductive Nile and the wounded Ann.   Maybe the ending is a little sentimental. Maybe it should have been harder and with less hope, more Woolrich’s doomed fate haunted heroes or one of David Goodis hopeless losers, Jim Thompson’s amoral heroes would have handled things differently.    I like how MacPartland ends it. He writes hard-boiled movie prose and writes well. You can hear the music rise and see John Payne or Robert Mitchum and maybe Liz Scott or Gloria Grahame walk away, a little less hard, a bit wiser, a touch more human than they began:   Ann and I left the Hut and walked toward the ocean. We could hear the music and the young voices of the nine days of Easter through the night.
   The roar of the long combers breaking into the surf was loud and the moon was rising in silver over the sea blackness. “This is what I wanted to do with you six years ago, Bill. Walk along the dunes and wait for the night to end.”    “We can do it now, Ann. It’s not too late for us.”
   Maybe it is, maybe not, MacPartland clearly likes the idea they can be saved, but he hasn’t sugar coated who Ann is or what Bill was. He has portrayed them as who they were, shown us what they could do and did do. He’s taken us down darker and meaner streets than the romantic private knights of Chandler or the tough birds Hammett gave us. These streets are inhabited by people we know and people we saw in the towns we lived in. Those of us who worked on newspapers or advertising knew the Bill Oxfords of the world. Some of us have known Nile Lisbon and Ann Field in one guise or another.   If you worked in advertising you knew Roger Mooney, maybe not quite so lethal, and you surely knew of Whitey D’Arcy if you never knew him personally if you grew up in a certain size city.    The Face of Evil , sometimes it is in a mirror, sometimes it is someone we know, a power broker like Mooney, a big fish in a small pool like D’Arcy, sometimes a bully like King. Sometimes it is just the corruption of small town America. John MacPartland captures the loss of innocence, the yearning for something that never really was, the hope of redemption, and the cost of making a stand finally.   This isn’t a great book, but it’s a very good one. It will keep you up to finish in a single reading and leave you satisfied. It’s one of those Gold Medal novels that you recall with real fondness and if you write yourself a touch of awe. Maybe he isn’t in the very first rank, but he isn’t far off it either. It’s nice to read a book once in a while that just reaffirms why you started reading in this genre in the first place. There are times you don’t want a masterpiece, just a master at his best.2 RESPONSES TO “REVIEWED BY DAVID VINEYARD: JOHN MCPARTLAND – THE FACE OF EVIL.”Steve Says:
June 29th, 2015 at 2:07 pmFrom Ed Gorman’s blog:From Time Magazine‘s Milestones : “Died. John McPartland, 47, husky, bushy-haired chronicler of suburban sex foibles (No Down Payment), successful freelance journalist; of a heart attack; in Monterey, Calif. McPartland, who once wrote, “Sex is the great game itself,” lived as harum-scarum a life as any of his characters, had a legal wife and son at Mill Valley, California, a mistress at Monterey who bore him five children and who, as “Mrs. Eleanor McPartland,” was named the city’s 1956 “Mother of the Year.” Later, McPartland’s legal widow submitted the daughter of an unnamed third woman as one of the novelist’s rightful heirs. (9/14/58)”For more:http://newimprovedgorman.blogspot.com/2013/11/bob-randisi-forgotten-books-john.htmlBill Crider Says:
June 29th, 2015 at 3:11 pmI have this one but haven’t read it. I need to get it onto the stack.LEAVE A REPLY

A great interview with Carole Nelson Douglas

  
 from the blog 'Thoughts in Progress' 
(http://www.masoncanyon.blogspot.com/) -- 



> 1. Have you always wanted to write or was there an event that lead you to writing?
I always loved to write . . . and draw . . . and act and direct. In grade school I wrote and "produced" plays and created a neighborhood newsletter. I tried writing Hollywood to get a movie made of my favorite book, quick, before I outgrew the role of the 8-year-old girl. In Desert and Wilderness by Noble-winning novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz did become a movie decades later, but in Poland. Was I ahead of my time!
Nowadays, young talent can break out from home computer podcasts and YouTube posts. Then  . . the common wisdom was no one could make a living at any of the arts. So adults were discouraging.
I majored in theater in college anyway, (double major in English Lit ), but on graduation, I was lucky to land a flunky job in the local daily newspaper's advertising department.(An employment agency told me I could be a tutor for the Famous Writers' School, which I thought would constitute fraud on my part and theirs. . . )
I was loved my job, put out a monthly ad newsletter . . . then I saw an unfairly negative theater review. Indignant, and to be fair, I took a lunch hour to see if I could review another play I'd seen on deadline. A friend suggested I show it to the intimidating managing editor. He growled, but bought it instantly for five dollars! He mentored me, and within six months I was the only reporter there hired without a journalism degree.
Fast-forward ten years. I was impacting the glass ceiling daily, my refused story ideas showing up on 60 Minutes six months later. (When Garrison Keillor's first Lake Wobegon book came out I wanted to interview him, but was told he'd "had enough publicity." Eyes rolling.)
When an editor gutted an article I thought was national magazine-level, I enrolled in a YWCA writing course to learn the how-to-submit to national magazines information in a social setting. I was ridiculed for taking a "rinky-dink" class when I had a metropolitan daily newspaper byline. 
I didn't know class members read from projects. Inspired by the creative ideas of these despised "amateurs," I dug out the first chapter of novel I'd started in college to read. When I finished, after a long, stunned silence, the instructor, children's author Judy Delton, said, "Get out of this class and finish that novel!" A couple years later Amberleigh sold, thanks to Garson Kanin taking it to his publishers, and became my first New-York published novel of sixty. Thank you Judy and classy classmates. And Garson, forever!
> 2. When you first began to write the Midnight Louie Mystery Series did you envision that you would one day be releasing the 23rd installment?  Now 27th!
I knew Midnight Louie had the right stuff to be a long-running character so I surrounded him with a character-rich human cast: two men; two women; two pro and two amateur detectives. After finishing the ninth book I realized it was "the season ender" and I was writing a three-year ensemble TV show. 
The alphabet title pattern was set only with the third book (B as in Blue Monday), so I'd fearlessly committed to 27 books. There'll be 28. The 27th, Cat in a Zebra Zoot Suit comes out Aug. 25 in print, digital, and audiobook. The final book will be Cat in an Alphabet Endgame in August, 2016. Then there's Louie's new series. Readers have been publicly mourning his alphabetic demise for the past few years. What's a mother of invention to do? 
Louie is to me what Archy, the typing cockroach, was to newspaper columnist Don Marquis, a wry commentator on human foibles, only Louie is also a homage and critique of that American icon, the male noir PI. (Archy's best pal is Meh itabel the alley cat, of course. )
My goal was to create a parallel feline universe that satirizes the human one in both normal life (in abnormal Las Vegas) and in the mystery/crime genre, to provide murder mysteries in each book, and to follow four thirty-something characters coming to terms with issues from their pasts and in the murder cases they solve, such social issues as women in the workplace, domestic abuse, unwed motherhood, birth control (also a cat issue along with homelessness), celibacy and sexual addiction, religious and ethnic hatred, mob-related crime, sex, lies, and trust, etc. etc. Oh, and humor too.> 3. For someone new to your series, do the books need to be read in order or is each a stand alone book?
Each book's main murder mystery is stand-alone, but the series is richer if you read it all in order because rereaders (and many fans tell me they do that) will discover clues in early books to situations that develop much later. I love characters that grow (or trip themselves) in unexpected ways and I love to wrap mysteries within mysteries. 
One reader called it "the epic Midnight Louie cat mystery series." Continuing character arcs and even unsolved murders abound. I took some flack for that, so halfway through did what TV series do, prefaced books with "Previously in Midnight Louie's Lives and Times" . Read ing  from the beginning will be much easier by New Year's, when all the earlier books will be available in ebook. T he series order is listed in my annual newsletter, available in e-mail or snail mail format at http://www.carolenelsondouglas.com, also on the website Louie area.
> 4. How do you go about doing research for your books?
Midnight Louie and his noir detective voice belong in a city with nightlife and chorus girls and crime and entertainment, like Damon Runyon's Depression Broadway tales, another inspiration for Louie's voice, character, and arena of operation. I'd have never visited Las Vegas (honest) if I'd hadn't had to research it for the books since 1985, when it was a sleepy town compared to the massive entertainment mecca of today. I now keep up-to -date with occasional visits and via the Internet. 
So the Vegas background morphs with changes since 1991, while the storyline only covers two or so years. Midnight Louie is a fantasy construct in a bad human behavior world. I reserved the right to be whimsical about time in Louieland, as well as serious about the social issues. I'm very pleased they've remained relevant, especially terrorism (IRA) and Irish girls imprisoned in brutal Magdalene asylums for unwed mothers. When Dame Judi Dench recently filmed the Oscar-nominated Philomena on that topic, I could fold mention of the film right into a long-running character arc and subplot. I'm still the crusading reporter, wanting to inform on social atrocities.
I 've sometimes created fictional Vegas elements that came about later, like the interior lobby canal with gondolas called the "Love Moat" in an early book. First the Luxor, and now the Venice, has one. No royalties for me on that, though. :)
> 5. Is research a fun part of writing or just a part of the process?
I love research. I'm looking for the incredibly fascinating obscure weird fact nobody knows I can work a whole book and mystery around, and they are always there to be found. Cat in a Zebra Zoot Suit has one of those.
> 6. If you could go back and do one thing differently at the beginning of your writing career, what would it be?>I've only recently concluded that I moved to the wrong Sunbelt state when leaving Minnesota 30 years ago to write full time. We considered North Carolina and Texas. Publishing is an East Coast-centric industry. With nearby East Coast corridor access , I could have stayed on top of what happened to my books, and a lot of bad, stupid things can happen to books inside publishing houses. My third book was a "sleeper" national Top 25 mixed fiction and nonfiction bestseller in a series on the brink of the New York Times list. Within three years, three editors at two publishing houses managed to ruin the "gift" of momentum. I was forced to change genres to survive, and lucky to do so.
Some things that were "a problem" then have proved advantageous now. I always used my own name, no matter the genre, and blended genres somewhat. Writing an Irene Adler Sherlockian historical novel and aMidnight Louie novel every year challenged the publishers' sales force and booksellers, who had trouble categorizing a literary chameleon differently every six months. I was asked to stop the Adlers for a time, and did for seven years .
Nowadays, they call using the same name "being a brand " and now there are onscreen "shelves" where everything I did and will do is together at long last .
B  moving on when I encountered barriers, I developed more aspects of my writing, with the result that I've written books and stories in pretty much every genre, including "mainstream" and horror.
I've now moved on to self-publishing, although my publisher offered a tempting advance. Now that eBooks give all writers a literary "legacy" for 70 years after their death, I want to get my 62 books so far in order for my own satisfaction. I'm doing all the writing, acting, producing I did as a child within my books and have put out an annual newsletter in print and now also digital since 1995. I'm even "drawing", by designing my own covers. Thanks to all the things that "went wrong" on my publishing path, I have a huge backlist, and a truly silver lining.  


       
  


  

Fresh Meat: Elimination by Ed Gorman TERRIE FARLEY MORAN from criminal element

Fresh Meat: Elimination by Ed GormanTERRIE FARLEY MORAN from criminal elementElimination by Ed Gorman is the final political thriller in the Dev Conrad series where the investigator must figure out who tried to kill a Congress member running for re-election (available July 1, 2015).It seems possible that my lifelong interest in the American political process is what drew me to read Sleeping Dogs, the first in the political mystery series featuring Dev Conrad, a seasoned political consultant with a background as an investigator for the U. S. Army.But I freely admit that the appeal for me was the author’s name:  Ed Gorman . I’d been a Gorman groupie for years, and the thought of a new series written by the master of mystery, horror, and westerns had me running to the nearest bookstore. Every few years over the past decade, a new Dev Conrad book would be released, bringing the combined allure of politics and murder. I relished each one.Still, many of my favorite series have come to an end and this one is no exception. I must confess that I had more than one tear in my eye when I finished reading Elimination, the final mystery in the Dev Conrad series.When the story opens, Dev’s political consulting firm is engaged in securing the re-election of Congress Member Jessica Bradshaw. Her opponent, Michael Dorsey, and his supporters are far to the right of Bradshaw’s positions, and the fight promised to be a strenuous one. Dev fears the worst right before a scheduled debate between the two candidates.

We’d heard rumors that men (and maybe women) with guns would show up that night to protest against the appearance of our congresswoman, who had apparently just returned from ‘Islamia’ where she’d learned how to implement Sharia law and had helped to plan the ultimate invasion of Islamists on the red, white and blue soil of the USA.

Sure enough, before the auditorium was full, before the debate even had a chance to begin, the trouble started. But trouble is something Dev Conrad takes in stride. He only hopes that there will be no real damage done:

I heard the shouting before I was able to see, far down the wide central lane, what was going on. A pair of men toting AK-47s were walking fast toward the building. They were being pursued by another pair of men, these two happening to be police officers.Let the drama begin.

Once the police had the men and their guns well in hand, Dev turned his focus on the audience and the debate. He was pleased with the performance of his candidate, but her opponent’s behavior irritated Dev to no end, and he defined it with deep political cynicism.

The son of a bitch never managed to answer a question straight on; in boxing that was called slipping a punch. In politics that was called making your case.

With his candidate coming out of the debate looking like a winner, Dev takes a few hours off for drinks with a campaign colleague but his respite doesn’t last too long—someone has taken a shot at Congress Member Bradshaw. Rumors quickly circulate that the shooting was a set-up, a plan to round up sympathy for the candidate.Then the weapon is found in the car of a campaign intern, a kid who Dev believes couldn’t possibly have anything to do with any political chicanery. Dev plunges in; ready to use his finely hones skills, both political and investigative to find out what is really going on.This is politics so nothing is as it seems, and no person is exactly who he pretends to be. Through it all, the one person you can count on to be true to his own personal code of ethics is Dev.Elimination is Ed Gorman at his finest. The writing is sharp, the tone is witty, and the people are exactly what they should be—political beings who we can’t quite like and can’t quite hate. Dev Conrad leaves us on an extremely high note.With a tear and a smile I say goodbye to Dev Conrad. But we have a new cycle of Presidential election politics staring us in the face, so I am sure that I will speculate “what would Dev think” more than once between now and November 2016. See more coverage of new releases in our Fresh Meat series. To learn more or order a copy, visit: