Ed Gorman's Blog, page 38

One of Bill Crider's best-Outrage At Blanco

Outrage at Blancohttp://linearreflections.com/index.ph... Linear Reflections 
Written by: Bill CriderPublished by: Brash Books
When Ellie Taine set out home from Blanco, Texas with a wagonload of supplies, she was expecting nothing more than a long and dusty ride. In 1887 there were no real conveniences, especially outside of town. Turns out she’s about to be a little bit of frosting on the cake for a couple of psychopathic bank robbers headed in to clean out the bank. 
The bad guys are idiots, and make a grave mistake at this point - Ellie Taine is left alive after being brutally raped. 
Ellie makes her way home, numb and rather dazed, where he husband straps on his Colt and heads out looking for justice. He never makes it home. 
With a burning deep in her soul for justice, Ellie Taine sets out after the murdering criminals. The trail leads her to Jonathan Crossland, a dying rancher who see Ellie’s quest as a chance to die honorably and not waste away in bed. Turns out Crossland has a past that will come in handy, and Ellie, while concerned for his health, welcomes the company.
Blanco’s yellow-bellied deputy is quite content to let Ellie ride off and take care of the manhunt without him. Together she and Crossland set out seeking both justice and vengeance, with neither one of them expecting to survive. 
Westerns are a wonderful way to relax for me, just kick back and fall into a story whose genre was one of the first to find its way into my heart. However, Crider doesn’t just deliver a typical Western, this one keeps you turning pages to find out what’s going to happen next.
Article by: Naomi De Bruyn posted:18 May 2015

Brash Books Party and Great Reviews

Hi Ed,
You're Invited to the PartyBarnes & Noble at The Grove, the chain's flagship Los Angeles store, is hosting a launch party and signing for Craig Faustus Buck's GO DOWN HARDand Phoef Sutton's FIFTEEN MINUTES TO LIVE at 7 PM on June 9th. There will be food, drinks (non-alcoholic), and we're sure that these two talented writers will have lots of funny and fascinating stories to share. You're invited to attend! Please RSVP to brashbooks@gmail.comThe Praise Keeps ComingOur books have been getting a ton of great reviews over the past few days. Publishers Weekly  says our reissue of Jack Lynch's YESTERDAY IS DEAD"ought to be on the radar of any enthusiast for American private eye fiction." And CrimeSpree Magazine notes that the Bragg series is "straight up some of the best California hard boiled writing you will ever read. Lynch is a natural story teller and has such a wonderful style it is impossible to put the book down. If you like reading noir-ish books or are a fan of hardboiled detectives, grab this book now."



Bookgasm loved Gerald Duff's MEMPHIS RIBS... here's a taste of the fabulous review that they cooked up:"Reminiscent of the best of Joe R. Lansdale and the late Elmore Leonard. Duff also effectively illustrates the very thin line that separates religion and barbecue in the minds of many southern U.S. natives. Along with the humor and insight, Duff includes no small amount of suspense as Ragsdale and Tyrone get closer to the main instigators of the crime and attempt to foil their grand scheme without losing their lives along the way. And if all this weren’t enough, it also succeeds in something few novels do: it will make you hungry for a huge slab of ribs grilled slow and low, or for the biggest sandwich of sauced pulled pork you can get your hands around. All of these combine to make MEMPHIS RIBS a crime fiction entrée well worth ordering up."How can you beat that? You can't. But we can season it with some praise we got last week from the Memphis Flyer , which says:"Duff’s recipe is a kind of reverse love letter to the Bluff City—a city with some big issues mixed in with good times and a city to make a novelist feel, as Duff once did, not only inspired but, hell, right at home."









And if that wasn't enough, Bookgasm also had some very nice things to say about Carolyn Weston's SUSANNAH SCREAMING... the second book in the series that became the TV show THE STREETS OF SAN FRANCISCO."Weston masterfully guides us through the complexities of the but convincing plots, and especially for her deft characterizations"We're absolutely thrilled that so many people are loving these great crime novels as much as we do... and we hope you're among them!

Gravetapping: Thrift Shop Book Covers: "Montana Bad Man"

Thrift Shop Book Covers: "Montana Bad Man"Montana Bad Man was a paperback original published by 
Pocket Books’ imprint Perma Books in 1957, which is the 
very edition that caught my eye. The artwork is starkly 
creepy as it washes from the muted color of a face to 
an ink drawing of a crumpling gun hand. A splash of red 
bandanna crosses both elements, and adds an intriguing 
abstraction of violence. The artist: Jerry Allison.































The opening paragraph:
“The big Schuttler freight wagon rocked along the 
ungraded road in the thickening gloom, creaking 
and rumbling ponderously behind the six-mule team.”
Roe Richmond was a pseudonym for Roaldus Frederick 
Richmond (1910 – 1986). He spent his life in New England; 
Vermont and New Hampshire, specifically. He started 
as a pulp writer—writing sports stories—and moved 
to paperbacks in the 1950s. His novels were primarily
 westerns. Contemporary Authors, in its brief biography of 
Mr Richmond, quotes the following—
“I have loved writing from boyhood. I cared for 
no other career once I learned I couldn’t make 
the Biggies in baseball, but most of my life I’ve had t
o work at other jobs in order to support myself and family.”   
This is the fifteenth in a series of posts featuring the 
cover art and miscellany of books I find at thrift 
stores and used bookshops. It is reserved for books 
I purchase as much for the cover art as the story or author.
Posted by Ben Boulden at 9:36 AM 

Key West Competition, Award to Honor Jeremiah Healy

Key West Competition, Award to Honor Jeremiah Healy

In addition to becoming an annual event, the second Mystery Writers Key West Fest will launch a writing award to honor an author who made Florida his home.The first Jeremiah Healy Mystery Writing Award—“The Jerry”—will be presented during the event, August 14-16 in Key West, Florida. The winner will receive a book publishing contract with Absolutely Amazing eBooks, free Mystery Writers Key West Fest registration, hotel accommodations for two nights, and a bobble-headed Jerry trophy (shown at left).Healy, who died in August 2014, was the author of 13 novels about Boston-based private detective John Francis Cuddy and, under the pseudonym Terry Devane, wrote the Mairead O'Clare legal thriller series. Healy’s writing career began while a professor at the New England School of Law, where he taught for almost two decades. Healy wrote 18 novels and over 60 short stories, 15 of which won or were nominated for the Shamus Award.A graduate of Rutgers College and Harvard Law School, Healy’s career path included stints as a military police lieutenant and a trial attorney.For nearly 20 years, Healy lived in Fort Lauderdale, where he was active in the Florida chapter of Mystery Writers of America and the writers conference Sleuthfest. He also served as moderator and panelist at the first Mystery Writers Key West Fest in 2014.

“The Jerry” is sponsored by Absolutely Amazing eBooks. Candidates for the Jeremiah Healy Mystery Writing Award should submit the first three pages of a finished, unpublished manuscript no later than June 30, 2015. There is no fee to enter, finalists will be notified August 1, and will have until August 10 to submit full manuscripts.The award judging committee will be led by Healy's fiancée, mystery author Sandra Balzo, and includes Shirrel Rhoades, author, film critic, media consultant and publisher of Absolutely Amazing eBooks; Ted Hertel, attorney, author, reviewer and immediate past executive vice president of Mystery Writers of America; and Gary Warren Niebuhr, library director, reviewer and author of numerous nonfiction works on crime fiction, including Make Mine a Mystery: A Guide to Mystery and Detective Fiction and Read 'em Their Writes: A Handbook for Mystery Book Discussions.

This year’s Mystery Writers Key West Fest—“Murder & Mayhem in Paradise”—includes multiple workshops, presentations, panel discussions, and social events with crime fiction and true crime writers.
For information on the Second Annual Mystery Writers Key West Fest and complete Jeremiah Healy Mystery Writing Award competition guidelines and submission details, visit www.mysterywriterskeywestfest.com.

the late show-one of my all time favorite movies of any kind

Familiar Yet Foreign Noir: The Late Show
SCOTT ADLERBERG from Criminal Element

The opening of Robert Benton’s private eye film The Late Show is chock-full of deception. We first see the Warner Brothers logo, but it’s not the Warner logo of 1977, the year the film was released. It’s a sepia colored 1940’s era Warner logo, and right away we hear soft 40’s style piano music playing and a woman’s voice that starts a song. It’s a melancholic, romantic song that a singer in the background of a 40’s film noir lounge scene might have crooned. The logo fades to give us a shot of an old manual typewriter, an Underwood, with a sheet of paper in the carriage. “Naked Girls and Machine Guns,” the title on that page says. “Memoirs of a real private investigator, by Ira Wells.” As the camera pans, it passes a small framed photo of Martha Vickers, who played Carmen Sternwood in Howard Hawks’ adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. It shows us a somewhat shabby room that has an unmade bed and a little bit of mess and a black and white wall picture of two younger men in natty suits and fedora hats. The movie’s coloring is subdued – everything from the wallpaper to the furniture seems to be done in some shade of brown – and by the time we get to a beefy, older man, Art Carney, seated in a recliner chair as he studies a racing form, his back to an old-fashioned black and white television set, we’d be forgiven for thinking we’re going to see a film that is either a film noir parody, an exercise in noir style nostalgia, or perhaps a straight-on pastiche, imitative in the extreme. But surprise, surprise. The Late Show is none of these. Benton’s film adheres to the classic structure of private eye film and literature, but within that structure, it mixes its components in a way not quite like anything else. The film is a reflective character study with a first-rate plot, continual tension, and comedy worthy laughs. Its dialogue crackles, at times fast and furious, but underneath the banter there's a melancholy mood. The pace seems unhurried, but at 93 minutes long, the movie is air tight. In a decade that saw a revival of private eye films, some more revisionist in intent than others – Chinatown, Night Moves, The Long Goodbye, Farewell My Lovely, to name a few – The Late Show remains one of the very best.

The plot kicks off fast. A moment after we first see Ira Wells (Carney) sitting in his recliner, his land-lady Mrs. Schmidt says that he has a guest. So late at night? The man there to see him opens his mouth to say Ira’s name and blood comes out. He’s been shot point blank in the stomach. It’s clear the man, about Ira’s age, is a former partner of Ira’s, and Robert Benton has some cultural reference fun here also: this man, named Harry, is the veteran actor Howard Duff, radio’s Sam Spade from 1946 to 1950. I first saw The Late Show when it opened, at age 15, and even though I had no idea who Duff was, my parents instantly recognized him and chuckled, getting the joke. In any event, the former tough guy dies in Ira’s room, but not before giving Ira information that will be of great importance later. At Harry’s funeral, an old friend of them both named Charlie (Bill Macy) introduces Ira to Margot, an oddball, 70’s style New Age woman played by Lily Tomlin. A male acquaintance of Margot’s has taken her cat because Margot owes him money, and Charlie has touted Ira as just the guy, a total pro, who can track down her acquaintance and get her cat back. Ira scoffs at the “two bit job” offered, but when he finds out more about the case, and how it ties in to Harry’s death, he says he’ll take it. Not that Margot is impressed. Besides his gut, Ira has a slight limp, a hearing aid, and a crotchety personality that shows no respect for the young. Margot voices her doubts about Ira, but Charlie, who oozes two bit chiseler through his every pore, reassures her. Ira may not look like much, but he’s been around and you’re not going to find a better gumshoe. Still, taking him on will cost her. He’s no amateur. As Ira tells her, “I’m the best and I get paid like the best.” Oddly, it’s this assertion of his prowess that sways Margo, and she hires him.



http://www.criminalelement.com/blogs/...

An Amazing Tribute to Glen Orbik by Jeff Pierce

“Glen Was a Shooting Star, a Miracle”

by Jeff Pierce The Rap Sheet

I was shocked to read this morning that Glen Orbik, an artist now best known for the exceptional, pulpish fronts he created for the Hard Case Crime line of paperback mysteries and thrillers, died yesterday from cancer. He was in his early 50s.
Although biographical information about Orbik runs rather thin on the Web, it seems he was born in 1963. He moved with his mother to western Nevada in the early 1970s, and graduated in 1981 from Douglas High School in the town of Minden. Orbik went on to study art at the California Art Institute (then located in the Los Angeles County community of Encino), receiving at least part of his instruction from Fred Fixler, an advertising illustrator, movie-poster painter, and book-cover artist who had founded the school. On his Web site, Orbik explained that his original intention had been to draw superheroes for a living,
but his horizons were soon expanded. “After a few years,” he writes,” I took over many of Fred’s classes at the school … when he retired from teaching and have continued off and on for over 20 years.”

Orbik eventually did win the opportunity to paint superheroes, working for DC Comics on its Aquaman series in particular, but also contributing to its Detective Comics, Batman, Flash, and American Century lines. In addition, he took on assignments for Marvel Comics. Although Orbik listed among his influences Gil Elvgren and Norman Rockwell, he had a particular interest in vintage crime-fiction paperback covers of the 1950s and ‘60s, especially those created by Robert McGinnis, Robert Maguire, and Robert E. Schulz. Not long after the 20th century became the 21st, he got the chance to follow boldly in their footsteps by signing on to paint covers for Hard Case Crime. Founder-editor Charles Ardai sent me a note today, recalling his experience with Orbik: 

http://killercoversoftheweek.blogspot...

Gavetapping: THE VIOLENT ENEMY by Jack Higgins (Hugh Marlowe)

Gravetapping: Ben BouldenSean Rogan is an Irishman serving 12 years in a British prison. He is “Irish” to his is prison mates, and on the outside he is an Organization man, which is to say IRA, convicted of arranging prison breaks for his compatriots. The troubles are largely over, the Organization faded away, and Rogan is awaiting a pardon from the Home Secretary. The pardon never arrives, and Rogan’s old boss, Colum O’More, arranges the logistics for his final break out.
O’More has a plan to get the Organization moving again, but he is ill and desperately needs Sean Rogan’s help to pull it off. The plan is to steal a load of paper currency marked for destruction in a rural town in England’s Lake District. The job is simple, but the talent O’More brought in are the kind for treachery, which, along with betrayal, is the novel’s main tenant.
The Violent Enemy is something of a transitional novel in Harry Patterson’s work. It is similar in story and style to his early novel  Cry of the Hunter —the lead characters are similar and the plots are mirror images—but Enemy’s characters, particularly Sean Rogan, are developed more expertly. There is much in Rogan that would appear in Mr Patterson’s later character Liam Devlin, and the female lead, Hannah Costello, is a composite for Mr Patterson’s abused, but lovely, strong, and virtuous woman featured in many of his best novels. A character that, more than any other, I associate with Harry Patterson’s work.
It is also transitional in its use of language. The prose is less adorned with elegant, striking and almost beautiful, passages than most of the early novels. It is starker, and standard. It fits the novel, but I wanted for a passage that forced itself to be reread. There were a few very nice moments, mostly dialogue, which is unusual for Mr Patterson—
“‘A fresh start makes old friends of bad ones,’ he said. ‘A proverb my grandmother was fond of.’”   And, in response to a prison guard’s optimistic job satisfaction—
“‘I’d rather be the devil,’ Sean Rogan said with deep conviction.”
The Violent Enemy ’s plot is, as always with Harry Patterson, smooth, complete with nothing left dangling, and familiar. Its pace is not perfect—it builds slowly with a few hiccups, but the climax is executed brilliantly. It is far from Mr Patterson’s best work, but it is a very capable and enjoyable thriller.
The Violent Enemy was produced as a film in 1967. It was directed by Don Sharp (Alistair MacLean’s Bear Island, 1979), and starred two pretty good actors as Sean Rogan and Colum O’More—Tom Bell and Ed Begley, respectively. 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

STAMPEDE by Lev Levison

STAMPEDE
I’m pleased to see that Piccadilly is e-publishing STAMPEDE this month.  This was my favorite western out of the 26 westerns I’ve written so far, originally by my pseudonym Josh Edwards, published by Charter Diamond in 1992.  It is number 7 in my SEARCHER series currently being resurrected by Piccadilly.
STAMPEDE is about a cattle drive from Texas to Kansas, fighting outlaws, injuns and a tornado along the way, not to mention conflict among cowboys on the drive, some of whom are outlaws themselves, and the complication of a woman named Cassandra, supposedly in charge.  It’s her herd and she’ll be ruined if the herd doesn’t make it to the railhead.  Unfortunately she knows very little about cattle drives, and constantly is being pranked by cowboys whom she fears, although they all love her including Truscott the hardbitten ramrod.
Riding the drag is a former Confederate cavalry officer named John Stone, now impoverished and searching the Wild West for a woman to whom he was engaged before the Civil War, a woman who somewhat resembles Cassandra.  And then there’s the small matter of peyote to which the cowboys and Cassandra are introduced by some friendly Osage Indians.
It was a wild ride and I really enjoyed writing it.  Sometimes it felt like I was on the cattle drive.  I extensively researched cattle drives, so every detail was authentic.
Some years later I was contacted by a collector of westerns named Acklin Hoofman from Michigan, who had collected and read a huge number of westerns.  He asked me to autograph some of mine, which I did.  In a phone conversation, he said that a western like STAMPEDE didn’t come along every day, which I considered a tremendous compliment from a man who'd read tons of westerns.

Forgotten Books Great Duane Swierczynski take on Heist novels from Alan Guthrie's NOIR ORIGINALS

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 31, 2011Great Duane Swierczynski take on Heist novels from Alan Guthrie's NOIR ORIGINALS


LET'S BOOK 'EM: A SURE-FIRE SURVEY OF BANK ROBBERY NOVELS FROM 'THIS HERE'S A STICK-UP'

by Duane Swierczynski

Consult this survey of sure-fire bank robbery novels and curl up with a good 211.

"Parker is very popular in prison," wrote 1960s-era bank robber Al Nussbaum. "Despite the fact that almost everyone can find some nit to pick with the criminal methods he describes, the strength of the Parker character overshadows any small flaws." Nussbaum was referring to the hardboiled crime series by Richard Stark (a pseudonym of mystery writer Donald Westlake) featuring a professional heister named Parker—no first name, thankyouverymuch. The Parker novels are crisp, cold, suspenseful—and apparently, inspirational. "I’ve not only read them," wrote Nussbaum, "I’ve even tried to live a couple of them."

Of course, Nussbaum wasn’t your average crime buff—he had a vested interest in the topic. But what might modern-day Nussbaums be reading in the slammer these days?

Blood Money (1927) by Dashiell Hammett. The hero of this short novel—and many other short stories, first published in Black Mask magazine during the 1920s—is a balding, middle aged operative who works for the Continental Detective Agency (think: Pinkerton Agency). In Blood Money—which is actually two related novellas, "The Big Knockover" and "$106,000 Blood Money"—the Continental Op tangles with a criminal mastermind named Popadopalous who organizes an audacious double-bank heist perpetrated by no less than 150 (!) criminals. The $106,000 refers not to the take from the robbery, but rather the bounty on Popadopalous's head. Hammett's seminal hardboiled novel Red Harvest also features a bank robbery as a subplot.

Thieves Like Us (1937) by Edward Anderson. Three escaped convicts resume their careers as bank robbers in Oklahoma, but things become complicated when the youngest bandit, Bowie A. Bowers, falls in love with a cousin of one of the older robbers and decides to make a run at the straight life. Anderson got the idea for the novel after interviewing his cousin Roy Johnson, who was in the Huntsville State Penitentiary for armed robbery; the original title was They’re Thieves Like Us. The novel was later filmed as Nicholas Ray’s They Live By Night (1949) and Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us (1974), starring Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall.

Hell Hath No Fury (1953) by Charles Williams. A drifter named Madox wanders into a small town and finds work at a used car lot, but is just biding his time until he can devise the perfect bank robbery by setting diversion fires all over town. But someone’s already set a fire for Madox: the used car lot owner’s wife. In 1990, Hell was turned into a Dennis Hopper-directed movie called The Hot Spot starring Don Johnson (as Madox), and Virginia Madsen (as the boss’s wife, Dolly Harshaw).

The Big Caper (1955) and Steal Big (1960) by Lionel White. White was the king of pulp caper novels—his racetrack robbery thriller, Clean Break, was the basis for Stanley Kubrick's early film noir The Killing. In The Big Caper, White details a complex bank heist, complete with a safecracker, an arsonist, a pair of tough guys, and a phony husband and wife whose job it is to case the bank. But what happens when that couple decides they'd rather live as man and wife for real than pull the bank job? White described another bank heist gone south five years later in Steal Big, where a hardened con named Donovan puts together what he considers the ultimate bank robbing gang—but all of them turn out to be the ultimate collection of sociopathic losers. White has some fun with in-jokes; one Manhattan black market gun dealer operates under the front, "Kubric Novelty Company."

The Getaway (1958) by Jim Thompson. A bank heist perpetrated by a pair of married ex-cons—Doc and Carol McCoy—goes sour, and suddenly a clean getaway is the only thing that matters. Of course, this is a Jim Thompson novel, and in Thompson’s sordid little corner of the universe, nothing is clean or easy. Still, Doc McCoy has a few clever heist techniques up his sleeve. Explains one thug named Rudy early in the novel: "First, [Doc] looks for a bank that ain’t a member of the Federal Reserve System."

"Oh. Oh, I see," says another criminal. "The Feds don’t come in on the case, right, Rudy?"

"Right," says Rudy. "So anyway, he checks that angle, and then he checks on interest rates. If a bank’s paying little or nothing on savings, y’see, it means they got a lot more dough than they can loan out. So that tips Doc off on the most likely prospects, and all he has to do then is check their statements of condition—you’ve seen them printed in the newspapers, haven’t you?"

for the rest of this vey groovy (that's right--I said groovy) article go here http://www.allanguthrie.co.uk/pages/n...

Hey, Ed: 

Allan Guthrie's Noir Originals site seems to have been taken down some time ago, unfortunately. But thanks to the Wayback Machine Archive site, readers can still access the entirety of Duane Swierczynski's piece here: 

http://web.archive.org/web/20110519030542/http://www.allanguthrie.co.uk/pages/noir_zine/articles/lets_book_em.php 

Cheers, 
Jeff 

Publish 
Delete 
Mark as spam 

Moderate comments for this blog. 

Posted by J. Kingston Pierce to Ed Gorman's blog at 1:47 PM
  THANKS  JEFF-GOOD TO KNOW. THERE  ARE SOME GREAT POSTS THERE.
POSTED BY ED GORMAN AT 10:33 AM 2 COMMENTS: LINKS TO THIS POST 

Dark Screams: Volume Three Featuring Peter Straub, Jack Ketchum, Darynda Jones, Jacquelyn Frank, and Brian Hodge!

Dark Screams: Volume Three
Featuring Peter Straub, Jack Ketchum, Darynda Jones, Jacquelyn Frank, and Brian Hodge!
Just $2.99 and Available For Immediate Download!Hi Folks!As you might remember, Richard Chizmar and Brian James Freeman of Cemetery Dance Publications have joined forces with the cutting edge team at Hydra, a division of Random House, to launch a series of horror eBook anthologies called Dark Screams that will feature the best horror authors working in the business today. Dark Screams: Volume Three  is now available for IMMEDIATE DOWNLOAD and we hope you'll check it out! ( Dark Screams: Volume One  and  Dark Screams: Volume Two  are also still available!)About Volume Three:
Peter Straub, Jack Ketchum, Darynda Jones, Jacquelyn Frank, and Brian Hodge contribute five gloomy, disturbing tales of madness and horror to Dark Screams: Volume Three,  edited by Brian James Freeman and Richard Chizmar of the celebrated Cemetery Dance Publications.THE COLLECTED SHORT STORIES OF FREDDIE PROTHERO by Peter Straub
A mere child yet a precocious writer, young Freddie records a series of terrifying encounters with an inhuman being that haunts his life . . . and seems to predict his death.GROUP OF THIRTY by Jack Ketchum
When an award-winning horror writer on the downward slope of a long career receives an invitation to address the Essex County Science Fiction Group, he figures he’s got nothing to lose. He couldn't be more wrong.NANCY by Darynda Jones
Though she's adopted by the cool kids, the new girl at Renfield High School is most drawn to Nancy Wilhoit, who claims to be haunted. But it soon becomes apparent that poltergeists—and people—are seldom what they seem.I LOVE YOU, CHARLIE PEARSON by Jacquelyn Frank
Charlie Pearson has a crush on Stacey Wheeler. She has no idea. Charlie will make Stacey see that he loves her, and that she loves him—even if he has to kill her to make her say it.THE LONE AND LEVEL SANDS STRETCH FAR AWAY by Brian Hodge
When Marni moves in next door, the stale marriage of Tara and Aidan gets a jolt of adrenaline. Whether it's tonic or toxic is another matter.       Thank you, as always, for your continued support and enthusiasm!