Ed Gorman's Blog, page 39

A GREAT Ken Levine SHOCKING NEWS: Some celebrities still water their lawn!

SHOCKING NEWS: Some celebrities still water their lawn!
http://kenlevine.blogspot.com/
Half the fun of living in LA is how fucking crazy it is (the other half is the weather). In a country where everything has became franchised and standardized, there are precious few unique population centers. My town is one.
We have billboards for TV shows hoping to win Emmys. And billboards for actresses with giant breasts hoping to get noticed. We offer tours to celebrity graves. The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills do not stand out. Neither do Maseratis in the drive-through lane at McDonalds. Doctors offer vaginal tightening procedures -- and in some parts of LA that's not considered elective surgery. 
So the free time we have not shoveling snow can be used to appreciate just how goofy this locale is. 
One need only to watch the local news in Los Angeles. And the genius of it is that it's presented without even a shred of irony. How does a local news anchor say the following recent headline with a straight face? 
Fight Over Chuck E. Cheese Parking Spot Leads To Murder
I mean, really?! 
Last Sunday night I was watching THE GOOD WIFE and the CBS affiliate broke in with this news teaser:
If California Is In A Drought Why Are Some Celebrity Lawns So Green?
The report featured aerial shots of Kardashian homes and other major “celebrities.” And then, because they’re fair and balanced, they did report that Jennifer Aniston ripped out her vineyard. 
This is a news story? 
Another news tease promised a look at new wardrobe celebrities are using to hide from the paparazzi. Basically it’s rain gear with hoods. 
Nothing’s going on in the Middle East? I don’t think ENTERTAINMENT TONIGHT bothers with these stories. 
And weather is another major topic. Whenever we get rain in Southern California, all local channels break into “Storm Watch 2015” complete with team coverage from the same street corner that gets flooded during morning mist, and huge animated Doppler maps.
It’s not unusual for a weather person (usually with breasts the size of the actress who has the billboards) to break into programming and breathlessly announce, “Rain is in the forecast. Details at 11.” This is on a Sunday night. You come to learn the rain is not expected until Friday. And then it’s only showers that are predicted. And only a 20% chance of even that. 
The extensive coverage that Baltimore stations gave to the riots we give to afterparties. 
I may not be informed, but I am amused. 
But perhaps the greatest example of how this town takes itself waaaay too seriously is this. A blazing headline in one of the local trade papers on March 31,1981. 
Academy Awards Postponed.
Underneath it, in much smaller print:
The President Shot.
Sing it with me now. Everybody. “I Love L.A.”

By Ken Levine at 6:00 AM 
9 comments

From Gravetapping-No Comment: "Save the Last Dance for Me"

—Ed Gorman, Save the Last Dance for Me. Worldwide paperback, 2003 (© 2002); page 118. Dialogue between John Parnell and Sam McCain.
No Comment is a new series of posts featuring passages from both fiction and non-fiction that caught my attention. It may be the idea, the texture, or the presence that grabbed my eye. There is no analysis provided, and it invariably is out of context—since the paragraph before and after are never included. 

Ken Levine on Avengers: Age of Ultron

Review: AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON by Ken Levinehttp://kenlevine.blogspot.com/
There was a story arc in a Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoon adventure where they encounter an island that hovers in the sky. This is explained by the ground infused with Upsidaisium, an anti-gravity metal. I’ve also just explained the basic plot for THE AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON. 
And the similarities continue. One of the heroes of each can fly. In the cartoon you have Badenov. In the movie you have Romanoff. Both sets of heroes need assistance from an outside authority figure; be it Nick Fury or Captain “Wrong Way” Peachfuzz. 
I won’t spoil the ending. You’ll have to see for yourself how Rocky saves the day. But the point is, we often watch dramatic works that remind of us past masters – Shakespeare, Chekhov, Dickens, Moose & Squirrel. THE AVENGERS: THE AGE OF ULTRON falls into that category. 
On its own, written and directed by Joss Whedon, AVENGERS AND HIS FRIENDS is a rip-roaring film filled with dazzling special effects and our favorite characters from the Marvel Universe. In a nod to Mr. Peabody they even go to the Wayback Machine to fetch us Captain America. There are also the customary one liners although no one in the movie has the comic timing of Natasha Fatale (who does?).  
And here’s the best part of the new AVENGERS movie. You can play the reels in any random order and the movie will make just as much sense. Don't worry about arriving late, or ducking out for ten minutes in the middle to take a leak, or catching the second half first when it eventually comes to HBO.   The fight scenes will be just as thrilling. Cobie Smulders will be just as hot (and superfluous), and Samuel L. Jackson’s arrival with Capital One cards will be just as timely.  
AVENGERS is entertaining (not as entertaining as the first), but I would still have to give the Rocky cartoon the edge. They had all those great episode titles. To put AVENGERS over the top they needed a narrator to day, “Stay tuned for our next episode: “With Thor you get eggroll” or “A Hulk-a Hulk-a burning love.”

The Bowery Boys' Oscar Nomination

THURSDAY, MAY 7, 2015 The Bowery Boys' Oscar Nomination


from the great websiteClassic Films & TVhttp://www.classicfilmtvcafe.com/

Leo Gorcey as Slip and Huntz Hall as Sach.
I'm sad to say that the Bowery Boys were never nominated for an Academy Award--not even Leo Gorcey or Huntz Hall individually. That would have certainly made for an entertaining ceremony (imagine Slip bopping Sach with the gold statuette!). However, screenwriters Edward Bernds and Elwood Ullman were nominated for an Oscar for Best Writing (Motion Picture Story) for the 1955 Bowery Boys pic High Society.

This was the script votersmeant to nominate.


 Their nomination is one of the biggest gaffes in the history of the Oscars. The voters intended to nominate the writer of the Bing Crosby-Grace Kelly-Frank Sinatra musical High Society (1956). That would be John Patrick, who received a nomination earlier in his career for The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1947).Bernds and Ullman contacted the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences and graciously acknowledged that they were nominated by mistake. However, the Academy's rules prohibited replacing them with another writer. Therefore, if you look up the 1956 nominees for Best Writing (Motion Picture Story) on the official Oscar website, you'll see this blurb alongside the accidental nomination:
NOTE: THIS IS NOT AN OFFICIAL NOMINATION. Edward Bernds and Elwood Ullman, the authors of this Bowery Boys quickie, respectfully withdrew their own names and the nomination, aware that voters had probably mistaken their film with a 1956 MGM release with the same title written by John Patrick and starring Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly and Frank Sinatra. (Even so, MGM's High Society would only have been eligible for adapted screenplay.)
The last line of that paragraph shows the magnitude of the error: the 1956 High Society was not an original work. It was based, of course, on Philip Barry's stage play The Philadelphia Story, which was adapted for the screen in 1940.

Frankly, 1956 was an embarrassing year for the Oscars, especially in the Best Writing (Motion Picture Story) category. The winner was a mysterious screenwriter named Robert Rich for The Brave One. Never heard of him? Well, the Oscar website clears up his identity with this note:
NOTE: The name of the writer credited with authorship, Robert Rich, turned out to be an alias. Two decades later, the mystery was officially solved and the Academy statuette went (on May 2, 1975, presented by then Academy president Walter Mirisch) to its rightful owner, screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, blacklisted in 1956 by the industry for political affiliations. Robert Rich (who had nothing to do with the film industry) is a nephew of the King Brothers, producers of the film. They chose his name to be the alias for Dalton Trumbo on the screenplay. 

This was the script thatwas nominated.For the record, the Bowery Boys' High Society was one of the last films in the series, but it is also considered to be among their best. The plot has Sach (Huntz Hall) learning that he's the heir to a family fortune--although he and Slip discover a young boy is the rightful recipient.
As for writers Edward Bernds and Elwood Ullman, they were never nominated for an Oscar again. Still, Bernds, who also directed, became a favorite among science fiction fans for penning 1950s cult classics World Without End (1956), Return of the Fly (1958), and Queen of Outer Space (1959). He was even interviewed in Tom Weaver's entertaining book Interviews with B Science Fiction and Horror Movie Makers.

Bernds teamed frequently with Ullman, with their best known collaboration being the Elvis Presley musical Tickle Me (1965). Still, Ullman is best known as a writer for The Three Stooges. Wouldn't it have been cool if they had shown up to support him at the Oscar ceremony?

An excellent new issue of Clues

Geoffrey Household, Richard Stark, Elmore Leonard, Arthur Conan Doyle and much more--how can you miss it?

Lev Levinson The Fast Life

From the Glorious Trash Review:
Great historical website
http://glorioustrash.blogspot.com/


The Fast Life, by Cynthia Wilkerson
No month stated, 1979  Belmont Tower Books

The second of two novels Len Levinson wrote as Cynthia Wilkerson, The Fast Life is nothing at all like its predecessor,  Sweeter Than Candy . Whereas that earlier novel was a sleazy yet goofy tale of a Manhattan-based harlot, this novel is more akin to a category romance, or at the very least something like Jacqueline Susann might’ve written. It’s also longer than the average Belmont Tower book of the day, coming in at only 318 pages but with fairly small print. 

Like Sweeter Than Candy, The Fast Lifefeatures a female protagonist, but this novel is told in third person. Our hero is Roni Woodward, a 22-year-old blonde knockout from Savannah, Georgia who has just graduated college and is taking a leisurely tour of Europe with her wallflower of a cousin. On the first page of the novel Roni is in Paris and meets Chaz Razzoni, an Italian in his 40s who is internationally famous as a Grand Prix racer, though Roni has never heard of him. 

Chaz is described as a sort of European dandy, a veritable greasy lothario, but he has his European ways with women and Roni, despite herself, feels drawn to him. He promptly begins hitting on her; the first several pages are comprised of their first conversation, in a café on the Champ Elysees. Chaz for his part feels drawn to Roni, and not just due to her stunning looks and awesome boobs. He senses something different about her, a fire burning within her that is much like his own. She’s also, he later professes, just as self-involved as Chaz himself is. 

I might not be an internationally-famous sports celebrity or an Italian lothario, but I am around the same age as Chaz, and I at least would know that Roni spells nothing but trouble. When Chaz picks her up in his Guastalla 450 GT (Guastalla being the Lamborghini-like manufacturer Chaz races for) for their first date, Roni claims that she used to drive her now-dead brother’s stock car, back in Georgia, and says she wouldn’t mind driving Chaz’s car. When Chaz doubts her skills, this leads to a huge breakdown on Roni’s part, demanding that Chaz let her out, even grabbing hold of his wrist and tearing into him so savagely that she draws blood. 

At this point I would’ve hooked a U-turn and dropped her ass back off at the hotel. 

But Chaz shrugs it off and indeed feels bad about it. Wanting to get this off their collective chests as soon as possible, he forgoes the party they were headed for and instead takes Roni to a nearby racetrack. There he allows her to take his Guastalla for a few spins around the track. One thing to note about The Fast Life: unlike the other novels I’ve read with racing protagonists, such as the  Don Miles  and  The Mind Masters  books, this book actually does have a lot of racing stuff in it. In fact there are racing scenes that go on for several pages. 

The first quarter of the novel documents Roni’s introduction to the European jet set of the mid ‘70s. (Interestingly, we aren’t informed until page 212 that all of this is occuring in 1974, the same year as a few of Len’s other books, for example  The Bar Studs  and  Bronson: Streets Of Blood .) She instantly butts heads with most of them, in particular the Countess to whose castle Chaz takes her to on their first date. Here also Roni meets other characters who will gradually become important in the narrative, in particular Bobby Barnes, a 23 year-old American Grand Prix champion who races for a British team, and Gilles Cachen, a mean-looking Frenchman who races for Guastalla. 

Roni’s brother Allan was as mentioned a stock car racer, and died in a wreck; Roni due to this (and other reasons) has kept herself from being interested in racing or from letting herself go and enjoying life. But Chaz opens this world back up for her, and she finds that she still wants to race, especially after driving his Guastalla. And after, uh, driving Chaz himself (in the first of the novel’s few graphic sex scenes – which by the way are nowhere as sleazy and explicit as in Sweeter Than Candy), Roni not only becomes Chaz’s new woman but also talks him into letting her drive one of his starter race cars. 


Len offered to write his current thoughts on The Fast Life, and I was especially interested to read them, given that he hadn’t read the book since he wrote it so long ago: 


Lev Levinson:
As I write these words, I have no idea what Joe will think of The Fast Life by Cynthia Wilkerson, who in real life is none other than me. He probably hasn’t completed his review yet, but asked in advance for my thoughts on this old novel of mine. 

So I read it for the first time in around 37 years and actually considered it great. In fact, it was so great I couldn’t believe I wrote it. 

That’s not to say it’s perfect. It’s far from perfect. It’s main problem is some sentences carrying unnecessary words. I should have tightened those sentences, or perhaps they were tighter in my original manuscript but line editors added words to comply with grammatical rules no longer considered necessary by me. 

I was especially pleased to note that The Fast Life lacked the extreme vulgarity that has undermined some of my other novels. Evidently I tried to take the high road this time, but that doesn’t mean the narrative lacks melodrama or even a few choice romantic or erotic interludes. 

The genesis of The Fast Life started with another of my novels,Sweeter Than Candy also by Cynthia Wilkerson. And Sweeter Than Candy began with a meeting in the office of my then editor at Belmont-Tower, Milburn Smith. He asked me to write an erotic story from a woman’s point of view, similar to Blue Skies, No Candy by Gael Greene which was on bestseller lists and considered a great feminist novel, much discussed and chewed over in the media. Essentially, Milburn was asking me to knock off Blue Skies, No Candy. 

So I wrote Sweeter Than Candy and delivered it to Milburn, who some time later said he was pleased with it. The novel eventually was published, and several months later I was again sitting in Milburn’s office. In the course of conversation he said: “Why don’t you bring back Cynthia Wilkerson? She was a good old gal.” He specified a word count longer than usual, probably around 90,000 words as I recall, so they could charge a higher price. Evidently Sweeter than Candy was selling well enough to justify another Cynthia Wilkerson extravaganza. 

So I walked home from Milburn’s office on Park Avenue South to my pad on West 55th Street near 9th Avenue, wondering what in the hell to write about. Finally I decided to take on Danielle Steele, Jackie Collins and all the other soap opera literary queens, and beat them at their own game, writing a contemporary women’s novel that would surpass anything they did, thus propelling myself to the top of the best-seller lists, earning millions of dollars for myself and my various insatiable appetites. 

Then I made what might have been my first mistake. I had long been interested in Grand Prix racing, and decided to set the narrative against that glamorous background. It didn’t occur to me that potential women readers of The Fast Life probably weren’t as passionate about exotic cars as I. 

If I had any brains, I would have set the narrative in the movie world in which I used to be a press agent, which also was the world of Jackie Collins. But I’d recently written a novel about that world entitled  Hype!  by Leonard Jordan and didn’t want to travel the road again so soon. 

For research, I had long subscribed to Road and Track magazine and knew a lot about Grand Prix racing. One of my closest friends had raced on the same team as Paul Newman. Sports car racing seemed incredibly exciting and sexy, because there were lots of gorgeous international jet set groupies. 

So I sat down and wrote The Fast Life about an ambitious young American woman named Veronica Woodward, or Roni for short, whose brother had been a NASCAR driver, and she’d also driven NASCAR cars. As the novel opens she’s touring Europe with a cousin, meets a famous Italian racing car driver at a Paris cafe, and eventually he helps her get into Grand Prix racing herself after they fall in love or lust. 

In my opinion, the narrative moves swiftly and never slacks off. Yes, The Fast Life is as melodramatic and lurid as any other Len Levinson novel, but thankfully not in the sewer like some of them. I thought Roni was a complex character, not just a silly chickie with delusions of grandeur. Having not read the novel for so long, I forgot its twists and turns and how it ended. Reading it yesterday and today, I thought it suspenseful, realistic and psychologically engaging. I couldn’t put it down. The actual racetrack scenes were especially exhilarating. What a wonderful movie it would make. 

I admit that I’m proud of this novel. With slightly better editing, a high class cover, and a more prestigious publisher with greater marketing power, it might have sold a few hundred thousand copies and accelerated my career in an entirely new direction. I’ll bet people who read it never dreamed that Cynthia Wilkerson had (and still has) a beard. 

Unfortunately The Fast Life no longer is in print or available as an ebook. I just googled it and discovered a used copy going for $26.00. 

Finally, here’s a bonus cover – in March 1985 Belmont Tower reprinted The Fast Lifethrough their Leisure Books imprint, something Len was not aware of until I brought it to his attention. Here’s the cover:

Gravetapping: SPLIT IMAGE by Ron Faust

From Gravetapping by Ben Boulden
Split Image is best read cold, and this review is loaded with spoilers. Read ahead at your own peril and rest assured it is fantastic.
“It occurred to me—and this was my first conscious thought upon ‘awakening’—that the crows did not object to the carnage. Of course not. They were scavengers and were impatiently waiting their opportunity. Even so, I could not entirely dispel the notion that they were judging me—small black magistrates, feathery clerics.”
The idea is Andrew Neville’s; a failed playwright, three early critical successes and nothing since, making his living as an editor of a corporate newsletter. On a whim he travels to the woods of northern Wisconsin to the primitive hunting cabin of a friend. It is autumn, and deer are in season. He takes an old bow and its matching arrows from the cabin. He doesn’t expect a kill, but when a buck cuts his trail a lusty greed overtakes him. The deer is wounded, and while tracking it Andrew comes to a man cleaning a buck.  
Andrew believes the deer is his, but the man calmly and reasonably claims it. The two have a cold exchange of words; at the end Andrew kills the other. He doesn’t remember the actual killing, but Andrew knows he did. He cleans up the cabin, disposes of the clothing and other evidence and returns to Chicago. A few days later he learns the man’s identity, and realizes, for the first time, he once knew the man. They were in the same theater company, and while Andrew failed as a writer his victim found significant success in Hollywood.
Andrew, after meeting his victim’s widow at the funeral, calculatingly insinuates himself into the dead man’s life. He moves into the boat house on his wooded estate, wears his clothes, befriends his only child, and smoothly woos his wife. The only hold up is a despicable man named Roland Scheiss—
“‘ Scheiss means ‘shit’ in German, doesn’t it?’”
—hired by the murdered man’s parents to prove his widow, and by extension, Andrew Neville killed him. Scheiss is loathsome. He is filthy, crude, and corrupt. His game is blackmail, and he begins calling Andrew at odd moments of the night threatening, cajoling, taunting. Andrew remains calm, but his sanity begins to unravel; he converses with his victim in the dark hours, and small meaningless events begin to weigh heavily, and finally his narrative turns suspect; is the tale truly as it is being told, or is the reader being deceived?
Split Image is a fine novel. It is dark, riveting, and curious. It is as much literature as commercial. It weaves an enticing mixture of Edgar Allan Poe—think “The Tell-Tale Heart”—Alfred Hitchcock, and a 1950’s Gold Medal novel. Andrew Neville is a cold, almost empty narrator, who is as interesting, and enigmatic as any character in popular literature. The prose is sparse, poetic and meaningful. It is also satisfying, thought-provoking, and damn good.      
Split Image is Ron Faust’s tenth published novel. It was published in 1997 by Forge as a hardcover. It is currently available as a trade paperback and ebook from Turner Publishing.

FRANK KANE An Introduction by Robert J. Randisi

Frank KaneLiz / Syndicate Girl978-1-933586-59-5  $20.95Stark House Press trade paperback -- OUT NOW!
FRANK KANEAn Introduction by Robert J. RandisiIt starts with the name.Frank Kane.Frank.Kane.Two syllables.Tough and lean, like the man’s writing.No nonsense.Plus, I think Frank Kane came along at the right time.The private eye may have been born in the pages of the pulps. But he was formed, fine-tuned and perfected in the pages of the paperbacks (both original and reprint) of the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s. Kane’s contemporaries were Brett Halliday, Mickey Spillane, Harry Whittington, Lionel White, Gil Brewer, Frederic Brown, William Ard, and many others, including the other Kane, Henry. Of course, Spillane was at the head of the class, but all of these authors made their contributions to the genre, and certainly Frank Kane’s contribution was significant.###My own personal introduction to Frank Kane was a novel called BULLET PROOF, a 1961 reprint of one of his Johnny Liddell books. Liddell was a New York private eye who appeared in 29 novels from 1947 to 1967. Liddell is drawn in the quintessential P.I. mode—smart, tough, clever, good with the ladies and while Kane has been criticized for being formulaic, I find him to be at the top of the P.I. food chain. Yes, the P.I. genre is largely formulaic, but that formula was invented in the paperbacks of the 50’s (forgive me for repeating myself, but I believe in this point). It can be looked back on as—to use another word—“cliché,” but it wasn’t so at the time. Kane was right in there with the best of them, putting his stamp on the genre.For me, the series had much in common with Brett Halliday’s Mike Shayne novels—beyond the fact that they were both reprinted in paper by Dell Books with great covers by the Roberts McGinnis, McGuire and Stanley, Ron Lesser and Harry Bennett, among others—in that New York was as much a character in the Liddell books as Miami was in the Shayne novels.Also similar in style, tone and substance, was Henry Kane’s Peter Chambers series, which was also set in New York. Frank Kane, however, came to writing New York based P.I. novels armed with a wealth of experience and knowledge. He wrote for New York newspapers, eventually penning a column called “New York from Dusk to Dawn,” which followed Hollywood movie stars visiting Broadway.  The column later led to a radio show. He also spent some time working in Washington D.C. on the efforts to end prohibition, and spent much time writing radio scripts for THE SHADOW, GANGBUSTERS, MR. KEEN, TRACER OF LOST PERSONS, and many more popular programs of the time.Kane also had a brother who was a New York City cop, which meant that his cops—unlike those in many private eye novels—smacked of more realism than most, rather than just being the private eye’s “chum.”  In ’47 he quit his radio job to start writing his Johnny Liddell novels. Johnny also appeared in countless short stories that appeared in pulp magazine and paperback collection such as JOHNNY LIDDELL’S MORGUE.(Dell, 1956). Later still, he went on to write for t.v..CBS had approached him about a Johnny Liddell t.v. series, but they could not come to an agreement on terms. They did, however, form a working relationship and Kane wrote for the Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane series starring Darren McGavin—many of the scripts being adapted from Kane’s own short stories. He also wrote for shows such as Special Agent 7 and The Investigators.The other similarity between the Mike Shayne and Johnny Liddell books is that they were both written in the smart alecky, almost arrogant vein that many of the 50’s and 60’s private eye series adopted—and fiddled with--and Richard Prather perfected with his Shell Scott series.  Kane, however, had more than that to offer, and that is what is represented herein with these two novels, SYNDICATE GIRL and LIZ.###SYNDICATE GIRL is a hard-edged crime novel that is significantly darker than the Johnny Liddell books. With this tale Kane shows his dexterity with the truly hardboiled form. No smart aleck wise cracks, no over the top gunsels or babes. It’s not forced, and the light touch of the Liddell novels is not missed. The cops, gangsters, the lawyers and politicians ring true, all drawn from Kane’s past experiences. He draws a successful, realistic picture of a city being crushed beneath the fist—not just the thumb--of a powerful syndicate, and not a private eye in sight to save the day. Instead, that task falls to a young district attorney.With LIZ, still another side of Kane’s talent is shown. The main character is not a P.I., not a cop, lawyer, gangster or politician. It’s a beautiful young girl, fending for herself in a word of brutal men and venal women. Once again Kane illustrates the scope of his skill, telling most of the story from the point of view of the girl, Liz, who adapts to her surroundings, and becomes a girl who almost always gets her way.And so the appeal of Frank Kane—to me, anyway, and perhaps to you—is that he is not a one-trick pony, as many of the others of his time were. Oh, they were all very good at that one trick, but Kane was facile with all of his. He proves this with SYNDICATE GIRL and LIZ, as you will see as you move forward.My advice is to read and enjoy these two books, then go out and keep reading Frank Kane.Frank.Kane.Good name.Great writer.
Frank KaneLiz / Syndicate Girl978-1-933586-59-5  $20.95Stark House Press trade paperback -- OUT NOW!   [image error]

Dean Wesley Smith Calling Dead A Cold Poker Gang Mystery

Calling DeadA Cold Poker Gang Mystery
The retired Las Vegas detectives in the Cold Poker Gang work hard to solve cold cases. Sometimes, those cases bring back personal nightmares.
Deciding to tackle one of the coldest cold cases in the files, retired detectives Lott, Rogers, and Andor uncover far more than simple murder, and possibly the worst serial killer ever.
[image error] A twisted mystery that will keep you reading to the last page.
“…Dean Wesley Smith draws a royal straight flush by making the hand he deals readers seem possible with this exhilarating political poker thriller…”—Midwest Book Review on Dead Money

ANDY STRAKA: A BIRD’S EYE VIEW OF THE PRIVATE EYE GENRE

05.06.15 ANDY STRAKA: A BIRD’S EYE VIEW OF THE PRIVATE EYE GENREWritten byAndy StrakaShare on facebookShare on twitterShare on emailShare on pinterest_shareShare on google_plusone_shareMore Sharing Services2







Andy Straka is the author of the award-winning and beloved Frank Pavlicek series… about an ex-NYPD cop who becomes a PI and falconer in Virginia… which kicks off with our new Brash Books’ releases of  A Witness Above and A Killing Sky. Here he talks about how he created the series…How did I fall into this gig anyway? All I ever wanted to do was write the world’s greatest private eye novels and have someone pay me gazillions of dollars to live happily ever after. But I had two problems.Problem number one: How could I possibly contribute anything new to such a classic private eye genre replete with masterful voices?Problem number two: Private eye novels most often feature colorful urban settings. While I’d worked in big cities as an adult, I wasn’t raised in a city. I grew up in a small town. Setting my private eye novels solely within the confines of an an urban landscape just didn’t feel right to me. I needed to create a detective who could be comfortable in the city but whose soul was tied to a more rural environment.Enter Frank Pavlicek. Like a lot of fictional private eyes, he’s struggling with demons from his past and even more from his present. But, unlike a lot of other fictional PI’s, instead of turning to a bottle or some other form of solace, Frank find’s his solace through falconry, hunting in the woods with a hawk.Frank’s an ex NYPD homicide detective compelled to leave the force and relocate to Virginia to work as a private investigator after he and his partner, in what they thought was self-defense, shoot and kill an apparently unarmed African-American teen. If that doesn’t supply enough guilt and angst for him, he has an estranged teenage daughter named Nicole and a rich ex-wife who is far along in the process of succumbing to her own demons. In Virginia, Frank is introduced to the ancient art and sport of falconry by his old NYPD partner Jake Toronto, who has traveled a similar path to Frank’s after leaving New York.I knew little to nothing about falconry when I started to write the Pavlicek novels. My wife, a lifelong birdwatcher, encouraged me to join in with her, and one day as I sat looking out from our deck toward the ravine behind our house, I heard the cry of a large bird and looked up to see a red-shoulder hawk. The idea occurred to me then and there to pair my fictional private investigator with a bird of prey. I was so taken by the allure of working with such a bird, in fact, that I eventually decided to become a licensed falconer myself.Maybe it’s the spirit of the hawk–a survivor on the hunt, desperate to find its quarry in order to live another day–that embodies the Pavlicek novels. As fans of the genre will know, pairing some sort of a falcon with a fictional private eye isn’t even really a new idea at all. Dashiell Hammett had his Maltese Falcon of course. And while I would never pretend to try to approach Hammett’s genius, maybe in the end Sam Spade’s mysterious black statue and Frank Pavlicek’s real falcons each come to symbolize the same thing.So I accomplished part of my goal. I created a new and unique private eye character in Frank Pavlicek and its led to a series of books, all of which are being republished by Brash Books (a new one, A Talon Dancer, is coming soon!). I’m still trying to figure out the “world’s greatest” and “gazillions” part…