Ed Gorman's Blog, page 4
March 27, 2016
New works from Dean Wesley Smith!
A dead alien ship appears close to human space. But in millions of years, no alien race managed to leave its own galaxy.The alien ship originated in a galaxy over two hundred thousand years of travel away. But the Seeders need to know about the alien race, in case they are a threat.
Star Mist takes on the vast scale of the Seeders Universe and expands it even more.
- See more at: http://www.deanwesleysmith.com/series...
A dead alien ship appears close to human space. But in millions of years, no alien race managed to leave its own galaxy.
The alien ship originated in a galaxy over two hundred thousand years of travel away. But the Seeders need to know about the alien race, in case they are a threat.
Star Mist takes on the vast scale of the Seeders Universe and expands it even more.
- See more at: http://www.deanwesleysmith.com/series... dead alien ship appears close to human space. But in millions of years, no alien race managed to leave its own galaxy.
The alien ship originated in a galaxy over two hundred thousand years of travel away. But the Seeders need to know about the alien race, in case they are a threat.
Star Mist takes on the vast scale of the Seeders Universe and expands it even more.
- See more at: http://www.deanwesleysmith.com/series...
A dead alien ship appears close to human space. But in millions of years, no alien race managed to leave its own galaxy.
The alien ship originated in a galaxy over two hundred thousand years of travel away. But the Seeders need to know about the alien race, in case they are a threat.
Star Mist takes on the vast scale of the Seeders Universe and expands it even more.
Learn more about the Seeders Universe!
Learn more about the Ghost of a Chance series!
In this WMG Writer’s Guide, Dean takes you step-by-step through Heinlein’s Rules and shows how following those rules can change your writing—and career—for the better.
Simple rules, yet deceptively hard to follow. Do you have the courage to take a hard look at your writing process and follow Heinlein’s Rules? Dean shows you how.
Get valuable tips on fiction writing and fiction sales writing!
The Cold Poker Gang consists of a group of retired Las Vegas Police detectives getting together once a week to play cards and work to solve cold cases.
Retired Detectives Bayard Lott and Julia Rogers stand at an unmarked grave in the desert, about ready to close a thirty-year-old cold case of a missing woman.
But what appears from that grave keeps their case very much open, and shines a light on many other cold cases.
Another twisted mystery that only the Cold Poker Gang can solve.
Find out more about the Cold Poker Gang!
Visit the official Dean Wesley Smith website for more information about these and other works!
March 25, 2016
Gravetapping DOUBLE FAULT by Jack M. Bickham
Gravetapping
Ben Boulden:
Double Fault is the fifth novel featuring Brad Smith. It was published in 1993 by Tor. It is Brad’s most personal adventure, focusing on his, and America’s, experience with Vietnam. It is less espionage and more suspense than the other titles and it is the best of the Brad Smith novels.
Arnie Tubb is a head case. He has been in and out of military mental hospitals since leaving Vietnam. After his transfer to the cancer ward of Walter Reed hospital, Arnie takes advantage of its lax security and escapes. During the war Arnie was involved in the massacre of a Vietnamese village, very much like My Lai, which the Army wants to keep secret and Arnie wants to avenge. His vengeance is focused on a group of soldiers who refused to participate in the slaughter and his final target is a helicopter pilot named Kevin Green. Kevin was Brad’s mentor on his college tennis team and he is officially listed as missing in action. His name appeared on a manifest of returning prisoners at the conclusion of the war, but he never came home.
Brad unknowingly gets involved when a member of Tubb’s group, disguised as an Army official, contacts him looking for Kevin and his copilot, Dave Wentworth. Brad insists, sincerely, Kevin Green is dead and he is unaware of Wentworth’s location. After the imposter leaves, Brad telephones Wentworth at his Kansas home and gets an odd reaction. Dave is frightened and abruptly ends the call. A few days and several dozen unanswered telephone calls later, Brad travels to Kansas where he finds Dave dead, his throat slashed, in his apartment. Brad, feeling responsible for Dave’s death, decides to start an amateur investigation and finds himself Arnie’s primary target and a useful tool of the U.S. Army.
Double Fault is a nicely developed suspense novel. The pacing creates something of a funnel. The early scenes rolling along the top, progressing deeper and deeper, narrower and faster until its climactic finale. Mr. Bickham expertly stalls the details of the Vietnam massacre, particularly Kevin Green’s role, until the final scenes, which keeps both Brad and the reader off balance. The unknown factors, Arnie’s motive, Kevin Green’s role, generate believable tension and allow Brad to be played by all sides—Tubb’s group and the government (Army, F.B.I. and to a lesser extent C.I.A.) But what separates this novel from the others is its rendering of Vietnam’s long term impact on the soldiers who fought, in a larger than life manner, and the consequence, or responsibility, of friendship. Brad’s friendship with Kevin Green and his C.I.A. pal Collie Davis at its center.
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Ben Boulden:
Double Fault is the fifth novel featuring Brad Smith. It was published in 1993 by Tor. It is Brad’s most personal adventure, focusing on his, and America’s, experience with Vietnam. It is less espionage and more suspense than the other titles and it is the best of the Brad Smith novels.
Arnie Tubb is a head case. He has been in and out of military mental hospitals since leaving Vietnam. After his transfer to the cancer ward of Walter Reed hospital, Arnie takes advantage of its lax security and escapes. During the war Arnie was involved in the massacre of a Vietnamese village, very much like My Lai, which the Army wants to keep secret and Arnie wants to avenge. His vengeance is focused on a group of soldiers who refused to participate in the slaughter and his final target is a helicopter pilot named Kevin Green. Kevin was Brad’s mentor on his college tennis team and he is officially listed as missing in action. His name appeared on a manifest of returning prisoners at the conclusion of the war, but he never came home.
Brad unknowingly gets involved when a member of Tubb’s group, disguised as an Army official, contacts him looking for Kevin and his copilot, Dave Wentworth. Brad insists, sincerely, Kevin Green is dead and he is unaware of Wentworth’s location. After the imposter leaves, Brad telephones Wentworth at his Kansas home and gets an odd reaction. Dave is frightened and abruptly ends the call. A few days and several dozen unanswered telephone calls later, Brad travels to Kansas where he finds Dave dead, his throat slashed, in his apartment. Brad, feeling responsible for Dave’s death, decides to start an amateur investigation and finds himself Arnie’s primary target and a useful tool of the U.S. Army.
Double Fault is a nicely developed suspense novel. The pacing creates something of a funnel. The early scenes rolling along the top, progressing deeper and deeper, narrower and faster until its climactic finale. Mr. Bickham expertly stalls the details of the Vietnam massacre, particularly Kevin Green’s role, until the final scenes, which keeps both Brad and the reader off balance. The unknown factors, Arnie’s motive, Kevin Green’s role, generate believable tension and allow Brad to be played by all sides—Tubb’s group and the government (Army, F.B.I. and to a lesser extent C.I.A.) But what separates this novel from the others is its rendering of Vietnam’s long term impact on the soldiers who fought, in a larger than life manner, and the consequence, or responsibility, of friendship. Brad’s friendship with Kevin Green and his C.I.A. pal Collie Davis at its center.
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
March 24, 2016
Forgotten Books: HIS NAME WAS DEATH by Fredric Brown
HIS NAME WAS DEATH by Fredric Brown
After the big war American lives were in flux. Millions trekked to the suburbs to begin an entirely new way of life. And many of the prohibitions that had been common before the war were now relaxed.
Kurt Vonnegut once remarked that the novels of John D. MacDonald charted the Fifties and early Sixties so well that students of sociology would be able to read them decades later and get a true feel for the era.
I feel the same thing is true of several of Fredric Brown’s novels, including His Name Was Death, a novel so cunningly crafted that Anthony Boucher in the New York Times said on publication, “You’ll be compelled to read through in one sitting to one of the very few endings that have genuinely surprised me in a long time.”
In addition to the stunning story there’s also Brown’s take on mid-Fifties. His mid-Fifties. While suburban mysteries came into fashion Brown frequently wrote about life in small cities, in this case a Midwestern burg where a series of murders has baffled police and terrified the citizenry. The city resembles aspects of Brown’s Milwaukee. The characters likely resemble the people he knew in his earlier life.
Fredric William Brown was born into the working class, educated in public schools and night school as well as a year at college. Brown spent nearly twelve years working as an office worker during the Depression. From there he became a proofreader at the Milwaukee Journal. Given his penchant for drinking and his fondness for bars, Brown certainly encountered the types—if not the actual people—he uses in His Name Was Death.
The prototype for Darius Conn, small-time businessman, might well have been one of Brown’s drinking buddies. Successful but not as much as he lets on; likes his nights out with the boys because frankly his marriage has gone stale; and talks a lot about the same kind of useless dreams/fantasies heavy drinkers always talk about.
That’s the façade Conn presents anyway. In truth he murdered his wife over a year ago. The police accepted it as an accident. And his plan for becoming an important businessman is being financed by his turning his printing business into a forgery operation.
But then one afternoon the fetching Joyce Dugan, his trusted Girl Friday, talks to a man who stops in to see Conn so he can pick up some money Conn owes him. Dugan calls around and finally locates Conn who tells her, yes, use the desk fund to pay him. And then have a nice weekend. Well, turns out the desk fund doesn’t have enough so she opens the safe and takes the extra money from there. Not knowing of course that it’s counterfeit.
Brown was clearly one of those writers who enjoyed amusing himself. This story could have been told in a straight-forward fashion but it wouldn’t have near the power it does. Brown tells his tale from nine different points of view. And with a dark chuckle up his sleeve, he shows how each one of them meets his or her fate because of Joyce Dugan giving the man (an old high school boy friend, as it turns out; and a far more preferable mate than the bullying gambler she married) just a few counterfeit bills. A remarkable narrative structure that Brown used at lest twice again.
In true page-turner fashion, Brown sets up his story in an intricate set of inter-locking cliff hangers. His depictions of raw fear, terror, rage, betrayl are played off against moments of black humor and even sweet romance.
This is one of Brown’s true crowd-pleasers and should have been one of his biggest sellers. But Brown, who was often referred to as a “writer’s writer,” was never a big seller. I once talked to the man who’d been the sales manager of Bantam Books during the Fifties. His favorite writer bar none was Fred Brown. He said he did everything he could to break him out but it never happened.
So I go back to my thesis at the top. Brown did the realistic every day of the working class so well it may have limited his appeal. The time was dominated by private detectives and the romance of the mean streets. Brown’s streets were mean all right but they were filled with many of life’s losers, the kind of in-laws most of us dread having. Philip Marlowe was handsome, brave and witty. Brown’s good guys were sixty dollar a week salesmen whose ambition was to move out of their sleeping rooms into real apartments. Getting laid in a sleeping room ain’t easy.
But time has been kind to the best of Fredric Brown’s novels and stories. He has yet to develop the cult he deserves but at least his name and discussions of his work are appearing with more and more frequency on websites of film and noir.
This is one of the finest crime novels of the Fifties, a decade rich with many true masterpieces.
--Ed Gorman
After the big war American lives were in flux. Millions trekked to the suburbs to begin an entirely new way of life. And many of the prohibitions that had been common before the war were now relaxed.
Kurt Vonnegut once remarked that the novels of John D. MacDonald charted the Fifties and early Sixties so well that students of sociology would be able to read them decades later and get a true feel for the era.
I feel the same thing is true of several of Fredric Brown’s novels, including His Name Was Death, a novel so cunningly crafted that Anthony Boucher in the New York Times said on publication, “You’ll be compelled to read through in one sitting to one of the very few endings that have genuinely surprised me in a long time.”
In addition to the stunning story there’s also Brown’s take on mid-Fifties. His mid-Fifties. While suburban mysteries came into fashion Brown frequently wrote about life in small cities, in this case a Midwestern burg where a series of murders has baffled police and terrified the citizenry. The city resembles aspects of Brown’s Milwaukee. The characters likely resemble the people he knew in his earlier life.
Fredric William Brown was born into the working class, educated in public schools and night school as well as a year at college. Brown spent nearly twelve years working as an office worker during the Depression. From there he became a proofreader at the Milwaukee Journal. Given his penchant for drinking and his fondness for bars, Brown certainly encountered the types—if not the actual people—he uses in His Name Was Death.
The prototype for Darius Conn, small-time businessman, might well have been one of Brown’s drinking buddies. Successful but not as much as he lets on; likes his nights out with the boys because frankly his marriage has gone stale; and talks a lot about the same kind of useless dreams/fantasies heavy drinkers always talk about.
That’s the façade Conn presents anyway. In truth he murdered his wife over a year ago. The police accepted it as an accident. And his plan for becoming an important businessman is being financed by his turning his printing business into a forgery operation.
But then one afternoon the fetching Joyce Dugan, his trusted Girl Friday, talks to a man who stops in to see Conn so he can pick up some money Conn owes him. Dugan calls around and finally locates Conn who tells her, yes, use the desk fund to pay him. And then have a nice weekend. Well, turns out the desk fund doesn’t have enough so she opens the safe and takes the extra money from there. Not knowing of course that it’s counterfeit.
Brown was clearly one of those writers who enjoyed amusing himself. This story could have been told in a straight-forward fashion but it wouldn’t have near the power it does. Brown tells his tale from nine different points of view. And with a dark chuckle up his sleeve, he shows how each one of them meets his or her fate because of Joyce Dugan giving the man (an old high school boy friend, as it turns out; and a far more preferable mate than the bullying gambler she married) just a few counterfeit bills. A remarkable narrative structure that Brown used at lest twice again.
In true page-turner fashion, Brown sets up his story in an intricate set of inter-locking cliff hangers. His depictions of raw fear, terror, rage, betrayl are played off against moments of black humor and even sweet romance.
This is one of Brown’s true crowd-pleasers and should have been one of his biggest sellers. But Brown, who was often referred to as a “writer’s writer,” was never a big seller. I once talked to the man who’d been the sales manager of Bantam Books during the Fifties. His favorite writer bar none was Fred Brown. He said he did everything he could to break him out but it never happened.
So I go back to my thesis at the top. Brown did the realistic every day of the working class so well it may have limited his appeal. The time was dominated by private detectives and the romance of the mean streets. Brown’s streets were mean all right but they were filled with many of life’s losers, the kind of in-laws most of us dread having. Philip Marlowe was handsome, brave and witty. Brown’s good guys were sixty dollar a week salesmen whose ambition was to move out of their sleeping rooms into real apartments. Getting laid in a sleeping room ain’t easy.
But time has been kind to the best of Fredric Brown’s novels and stories. He has yet to develop the cult he deserves but at least his name and discussions of his work are appearing with more and more frequency on websites of film and noir.
This is one of the finest crime novels of the Fifties, a decade rich with many true masterpieces.
--Ed Gorman
March 23, 2016
Early reviews of the Warner Bros. release claim Zack Snyder tries to do too much in establishing cinematic universe
Early reviews of the Warner Bros. release claim Zack Snyder tries to do too much in establishing cinematic universe“Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” better hope that bad reviews are not as dangerous as kryptonite.The first in a planned series of DC Comics cinematic universe films currently holds a mere 40 percent approval rating on
Rotten Tomatoes.
Of the 65 reviews counted at the time of this publishing, 39 are “Rotten” and 26 are “Fresh.”Early reviews for the film, which opens this Friday, rip director
Zack Snyder
for cramming in as much story as possible, while also overdoing it with the visual effects.
Also Read: 'Batman v Superman' Review: Ben Affleck's Got the Cool Car, But Wonder Woman Steals the Show
TheWrap ‘s Alonso Duralde wrote, “That face-off between two comics legends becomes but one in a series of big things bashing into other big things, which is what Snyder and writers Chris Terrio and David S. Goyer mistake for storytelling.”Here are five more disappointing reviews.Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune :“‘You don’t owe this world a thing,’ [Diane] Lane tells Superman at one point. Maybe so. But at this point in the twinned mythologies of two extremely hardy DC heroes, humankind deserves a better blockbuster.”Adam Graham of Detroit News :“The movie crams together a Batman story, a Superman story and lays the groundwork for several side tales, all in the space of a cluttered two-and-a-half hour collision that aims to bludgeon viewers into submission.”
Also Read: 'Batman v Superman' Is Fandango's Top Pre-Selling Superhero Movie Ever
Mike Ryan of Uproxx :“Honestly, I can’t remember the last time I was legitimately looking this forward to a movie that I found this dull. About halfway through this over two-and-a-half hour movie, I had to stop my brain from thinking about other things, like what groceries I needed to pick up at some point.”Fionnuala Halligan of Screen Daily :“Gorging on bombast and self-importance, swamped by its own mythology, ‘Batman v Superman’ is loud, sprawling, and distracted. The action jumps around almost as fast as a man can fly, but nowhere near as smoothly.”Lou Lumenick of the New York Post :“While ‘300’ maestro Snyder puts together some very striking scenes — which may be enough for many fanboys — they never really cohere into a whole. He literally throws in the kitchen sink in a film that frantically introduces characters and concepts while never clearly establishing the rules of the DC Comics universe.”
Also Read: 'Batman v Superman' Red Carpet Canceled in London After Brussels Attacks
But chances are, bad reviews will do nothing to deter audiences from flocking to the tentpole feature. The film will skyrocket to north of $150 million in its much-anticipated opening in the U.S. and Canada this weekend, industry analysts projected on Tuesday.
PRE ORDER SHADOWS GAMES
"Shadow Games is a page-turning, gut-wrenching barnburner of a book."—Robert Bloch
[image error]
Ed here: My first cousin Bobby Driscoll was a major child movie star of the late 1940s and early 1950s. He died at thirty of drugs. While I don't use any of Bobby's life in this novel I do look at child stardom here. This is a slightly revised edition of Shadow Games (1992) which I wrote at the time when I was writing scripts for two different directors and learning a little about the ways of Hwood. BTW Bobby is the star of the great film noir "The Window."
Cover art © by JT Lindroos
"Shadow Games unflinchingly examines the dark side of humanity and reaches a finale that is both moving and terrifying."—Ramsey Campbell
"What keeps you reading is not the traditional question of whodunit but the slick and artful ease with which Gorman portrays the alienated, uncaring world of his creations."--The London Sunday Times
Cobey Daniels had it all. He was rich, he was young and he was the hottest star in the country. Then there was all that messy business with the teenage girl . . . and it all went to hell for Cobey. But that was a few years ago. Now Cobey's pulled his life together again they're letting him out of the mental hospital and he's ready for his big comeback, but the past is still out there, waiting for him. Waiting to show Cobey a hell much more terrible than he could ever have imagined. The American 90s come brutally alive: "Gorman knows how to shunt electricity into the raw nerve endings buried far below the reader's already clammy skin." — Locus © Ed Gorman PRAISE FOR SHADOW GAMES "Ed Gorman's is a strong and unique voice." —Richard Matheson "Gorman is the poet of dark suspense." — The Bloomsbury Review "John D. MacDonald meets Jim Thompson in a maelstrom of malicious evil and perverse maipulation that doesn't let up until the final few pages...thoughtful, tightly knit and elegantly structured." —Million (UK) "This is a bleak moral tale but written with such hot feeling and such cool style that it entertains even as it keens." —Morning Star (UK) Title Details: RRP Price: £11.95 Publisher: Short, Scary Tales Publications Release Date: May 1, 2016 ISBN: 978-1-909640-52-8 (6" x 9" Trade Paperback) First Edition Pages: 354
This brand new edition is available for pre-order from the Short, Scary Tales website. The first 100 copies sold direct from the site will be signed by me and the cover artist, JT Lindroos!
Also Read: 'Batman v Superman' Review: Ben Affleck's Got the Cool Car, But Wonder Woman Steals the Show
TheWrap ‘s Alonso Duralde wrote, “That face-off between two comics legends becomes but one in a series of big things bashing into other big things, which is what Snyder and writers Chris Terrio and David S. Goyer mistake for storytelling.”Here are five more disappointing reviews.Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune :“‘You don’t owe this world a thing,’ [Diane] Lane tells Superman at one point. Maybe so. But at this point in the twinned mythologies of two extremely hardy DC heroes, humankind deserves a better blockbuster.”Adam Graham of Detroit News :“The movie crams together a Batman story, a Superman story and lays the groundwork for several side tales, all in the space of a cluttered two-and-a-half hour collision that aims to bludgeon viewers into submission.”
Also Read: 'Batman v Superman' Is Fandango's Top Pre-Selling Superhero Movie Ever
Mike Ryan of Uproxx :“Honestly, I can’t remember the last time I was legitimately looking this forward to a movie that I found this dull. About halfway through this over two-and-a-half hour movie, I had to stop my brain from thinking about other things, like what groceries I needed to pick up at some point.”Fionnuala Halligan of Screen Daily :“Gorging on bombast and self-importance, swamped by its own mythology, ‘Batman v Superman’ is loud, sprawling, and distracted. The action jumps around almost as fast as a man can fly, but nowhere near as smoothly.”Lou Lumenick of the New York Post :“While ‘300’ maestro Snyder puts together some very striking scenes — which may be enough for many fanboys — they never really cohere into a whole. He literally throws in the kitchen sink in a film that frantically introduces characters and concepts while never clearly establishing the rules of the DC Comics universe.”
Also Read: 'Batman v Superman' Red Carpet Canceled in London After Brussels Attacks
But chances are, bad reviews will do nothing to deter audiences from flocking to the tentpole feature. The film will skyrocket to north of $150 million in its much-anticipated opening in the U.S. and Canada this weekend, industry analysts projected on Tuesday.
PRE ORDER SHADOWS GAMES
"Shadow Games is a page-turning, gut-wrenching barnburner of a book."—Robert Bloch
[image error]
Ed here: My first cousin Bobby Driscoll was a major child movie star of the late 1940s and early 1950s. He died at thirty of drugs. While I don't use any of Bobby's life in this novel I do look at child stardom here. This is a slightly revised edition of Shadow Games (1992) which I wrote at the time when I was writing scripts for two different directors and learning a little about the ways of Hwood. BTW Bobby is the star of the great film noir "The Window."
Cover art © by JT Lindroos
"Shadow Games unflinchingly examines the dark side of humanity and reaches a finale that is both moving and terrifying."—Ramsey Campbell
"What keeps you reading is not the traditional question of whodunit but the slick and artful ease with which Gorman portrays the alienated, uncaring world of his creations."--The London Sunday Times
Cobey Daniels had it all. He was rich, he was young and he was the hottest star in the country. Then there was all that messy business with the teenage girl . . . and it all went to hell for Cobey. But that was a few years ago. Now Cobey's pulled his life together again they're letting him out of the mental hospital and he's ready for his big comeback, but the past is still out there, waiting for him. Waiting to show Cobey a hell much more terrible than he could ever have imagined. The American 90s come brutally alive: "Gorman knows how to shunt electricity into the raw nerve endings buried far below the reader's already clammy skin." — Locus © Ed Gorman PRAISE FOR SHADOW GAMES "Ed Gorman's is a strong and unique voice." —Richard Matheson "Gorman is the poet of dark suspense." — The Bloomsbury Review "John D. MacDonald meets Jim Thompson in a maelstrom of malicious evil and perverse maipulation that doesn't let up until the final few pages...thoughtful, tightly knit and elegantly structured." —Million (UK) "This is a bleak moral tale but written with such hot feeling and such cool style that it entertains even as it keens." —Morning Star (UK) Title Details: RRP Price: £11.95 Publisher: Short, Scary Tales Publications Release Date: May 1, 2016 ISBN: 978-1-909640-52-8 (6" x 9" Trade Paperback) First Edition Pages: 354
This brand new edition is available for pre-order from the Short, Scary Tales website. The first 100 copies sold direct from the site will be signed by me and the cover artist, JT Lindroos!
March 22, 2016
From Max Allan Collins
Heart and Soul Pt. 1March 22nd, 2016 by Max Allan Collins
First off, I want to say how thrilled I am that QUARRY’S CHOICE has been nominated for a Barry Award (Best Paperback Original). Toward the bottom of this update will be links to the full list as well as some reviews.
Also, note the cover art for the audio of MURDER NEVER KNOCKS – just finished listening to Stacy Keach’s reading of the book, and it’s fantastic. Speaking of MURDER NEVER KNOCKS, if you’ve read and liked it, please post an Amazon review.
I am back writing these updates (after the four canned entries that appeared during the month following my open-heart surgery). For the next several updates, I am going to talk about my experiences of late, and you are welcome not to read them and to wait until I get back to books and movies and other “funner” topics. But this is on my mind, and I need to purge some.
A month ago today (as I write this) I had my operation, which involved a valve replacement, two bypasses and a couple of other let’s-keep-this-bastard-alive-while-we’re-in-here items. Of that first day, I remember nothing apart from getting wheeled in the operating room. Barb reports that several hours after the operation, I said, “I made it…I made it….” Shortly after that, like most of us with a pulse, I began complaining.
That night, in the ICU, I hallucinated that I was on a spacecraft and being held prisoner. I could see a long windowed-off corridor where futuristic nurses strolled, ignoring my cries of “Help!”
I remember little of the next two days. I know Barb and Nate were with me as much as possible. Apparently I was not a stellar patient. At some point I learned that my right arm and hand were (to use the medical term) fucked up. Basically the arm was weak and the hand felt like a bunch of sausages sticking out of a wad of mashed potatoes. After initial alarm, I wasn’t worried because I figured it would be temporary.
Various nasty things happened during the ICU stay, including getting tubes yanked out of me and the removal of a catheter. But nothing was nastier than the food. I am considering writing a cookbook called HOW TO SCREW UP TATER TOTS. What saved me was Barb, who was spending every afternoon with me, bringing me food from the outside.
The nurses were nice, very helpful, supportive and even sweet. My heart surgeon dropped by every day, and assured me my hand would “come back.” I gradually came to understand that this would include me working very hard to make that happen.
The worst part of the stay was the long nights. Something about my sleep cycle got screwed up as a side-effect of the heart surgery, so that I would sleep for half an hour and then wake up, thinking it was morning. I spent the nights alternating between reading and sleeping and watching movies on a portable blu-ray player and sleeping some more. Of course due to the surgery I had to sleep on my back. The bed was every bit as comfortable as a hotel-room couch fold-out affair. Nurses came in about once an hour to check vitals and give me tests on my lungs and the occasional pills. I hated these long nights and began begging Barb to take me home.
That wasn’t to be – my hand/arm problem required physical therapy and that meant I was headed to the fifth floor. While still on the seventh floor, I began walking (with a walker at first) and had some preliminary work on my hand. Barb spent many hours with me.
The night of the move I hallucinated again. I thought I was sleeping in a bed in a department store showroom that a nurse and an orderly were disassembling. Then they rolled me out of the showroom onto an elevator and down a hall and into a dark room where I was abandoned. I felt afraid, in fact terrified. I began to shout for help and when a kindly older nurse came in, I said I wasn’t comfortable staying here and wanted to call my wife on the phone. The nurse settled me down and I somehow got back to sleep.
NEXT WEEK: THE BEST HALLUCINATION YET
– – –Here is a fantastic MURDER NEVER KNOCKS review from the great Ed Gorman (glad to have him back reviewing again!).
Here, at the Rap Sheet, is the complete list of Barry Award nominees.
There are several nice mentions of Nate Heller and me in this wonderful piece by Jeff Pierce at the Kirkus blog.
Here’s a short but nice piece on Mickey.
Finally, here’s a good if patronizing review of CARNAL HOURS. The reviewer seems put off by the sexual content – this continues to baffle me, and must be generational. One of the commenters, apparently a Heller fan, finds the novel the “weakest” of the series. I certainly disagree, and have often given it to readers who wanted to sample Heller, because it’s highly self-contained and has a real-life locked-room mystery.
M.A.C.Tags: Awards, Carnal Hours, Mike Hammer, Murder Never Knocks, Nathan Heller, Quarry, Quarry's Choice, Spillane
Posted in Message from M.A.C. | 3 Comments »
First off, I want to say how thrilled I am that QUARRY’S CHOICE has been nominated for a Barry Award (Best Paperback Original). Toward the bottom of this update will be links to the full list as well as some reviews.
Also, note the cover art for the audio of MURDER NEVER KNOCKS – just finished listening to Stacy Keach’s reading of the book, and it’s fantastic. Speaking of MURDER NEVER KNOCKS, if you’ve read and liked it, please post an Amazon review.
I am back writing these updates (after the four canned entries that appeared during the month following my open-heart surgery). For the next several updates, I am going to talk about my experiences of late, and you are welcome not to read them and to wait until I get back to books and movies and other “funner” topics. But this is on my mind, and I need to purge some.
A month ago today (as I write this) I had my operation, which involved a valve replacement, two bypasses and a couple of other let’s-keep-this-bastard-alive-while-we’re-in-here items. Of that first day, I remember nothing apart from getting wheeled in the operating room. Barb reports that several hours after the operation, I said, “I made it…I made it….” Shortly after that, like most of us with a pulse, I began complaining.
That night, in the ICU, I hallucinated that I was on a spacecraft and being held prisoner. I could see a long windowed-off corridor where futuristic nurses strolled, ignoring my cries of “Help!”
I remember little of the next two days. I know Barb and Nate were with me as much as possible. Apparently I was not a stellar patient. At some point I learned that my right arm and hand were (to use the medical term) fucked up. Basically the arm was weak and the hand felt like a bunch of sausages sticking out of a wad of mashed potatoes. After initial alarm, I wasn’t worried because I figured it would be temporary.
Various nasty things happened during the ICU stay, including getting tubes yanked out of me and the removal of a catheter. But nothing was nastier than the food. I am considering writing a cookbook called HOW TO SCREW UP TATER TOTS. What saved me was Barb, who was spending every afternoon with me, bringing me food from the outside.
The nurses were nice, very helpful, supportive and even sweet. My heart surgeon dropped by every day, and assured me my hand would “come back.” I gradually came to understand that this would include me working very hard to make that happen.
The worst part of the stay was the long nights. Something about my sleep cycle got screwed up as a side-effect of the heart surgery, so that I would sleep for half an hour and then wake up, thinking it was morning. I spent the nights alternating between reading and sleeping and watching movies on a portable blu-ray player and sleeping some more. Of course due to the surgery I had to sleep on my back. The bed was every bit as comfortable as a hotel-room couch fold-out affair. Nurses came in about once an hour to check vitals and give me tests on my lungs and the occasional pills. I hated these long nights and began begging Barb to take me home.
That wasn’t to be – my hand/arm problem required physical therapy and that meant I was headed to the fifth floor. While still on the seventh floor, I began walking (with a walker at first) and had some preliminary work on my hand. Barb spent many hours with me.
The night of the move I hallucinated again. I thought I was sleeping in a bed in a department store showroom that a nurse and an orderly were disassembling. Then they rolled me out of the showroom onto an elevator and down a hall and into a dark room where I was abandoned. I felt afraid, in fact terrified. I began to shout for help and when a kindly older nurse came in, I said I wasn’t comfortable staying here and wanted to call my wife on the phone. The nurse settled me down and I somehow got back to sleep.
NEXT WEEK: THE BEST HALLUCINATION YET
– – –Here is a fantastic MURDER NEVER KNOCKS review from the great Ed Gorman (glad to have him back reviewing again!).
Here, at the Rap Sheet, is the complete list of Barry Award nominees.
There are several nice mentions of Nate Heller and me in this wonderful piece by Jeff Pierce at the Kirkus blog.
Here’s a short but nice piece on Mickey.
Finally, here’s a good if patronizing review of CARNAL HOURS. The reviewer seems put off by the sexual content – this continues to baffle me, and must be generational. One of the commenters, apparently a Heller fan, finds the novel the “weakest” of the series. I certainly disagree, and have often given it to readers who wanted to sample Heller, because it’s highly self-contained and has a real-life locked-room mystery.
M.A.C.Tags: Awards, Carnal Hours, Mike Hammer, Murder Never Knocks, Nathan Heller, Quarry, Quarry's Choice, Spillane
Posted in Message from M.A.C. | 3 Comments »
March 21, 2016
13 of the Best Female Sleuths from Pop Culture SADIE TROMBETTA
13 of the Best Female Sleuths from Pop CultureSADIE TROMBETTA FROM CRIMINAL ELEMENT FOR THE ENTIRE PIECE GO HERE http://www.criminalelement.com/blogs/...-
sleuths-from-pop-culture-dana-scully-miss-marple-agatha-
christie-jessica-fletcher-murder-she-wrote
Everyone knows Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, and the Hardy Boys, but what about the best female sleuths from pop culture? Women have been solving crime and catching bad guys in books, television, and movies just as long as men—only they’ve been doing it better. Let’s face it, women do almost everything better.Call it female intuition, call it women’s instinct, call it whatever you like—women are natural problem solvers. It’s unsurprising we make great cops, detectives, spies, and amateur mystery solvers. We’re great at finding clues, we can get anyone to talk, and we always know when someone is lying to us.We’re smart, sly, and experts in the art of manipulation (hey, we’re girlfriends and mothers, it’s part of the job description), so even the sneakiest, most dastardly criminals can’t escape our clutches. Combine that with our ability to kick ass and take names, and you can understand why the best sleuths from television, movies, and books are always women.Don’t believe me? Let me prove it to you with this list of 13 amazing female sleuths from pop culture. Trust me, these ladies will have you convinced.1. Miss MarpleWhen you think of great sleuths, you probably don’t think of elderly spinsters, but Miss Marple will change all that. One of Agatha Christie’smost famous detectives, this little old lady’s nosy nature is good for more than just the week’s hottest gossip. Clever and intuitive, Miss Marple never misses a clue—proving that not only do women make great detectives, but the elderly can, too.2. Dana Scully
FBI Special Agent Dana Scully may be a skeptic when it comes to monsters and aliens, but luckily for us, it hasn’t stopped her from solving case after mysterious case. Highly intelligent and analytical, there is no situation, no baddie bad enough, to scare Scully away, and no matter the case, she doesn’t stop until it’s solved. If you ever find yourself in the midst of a government conspiracy or alien abduction, just ask yourself:“What would Scully do?”3. Nancy DrewEvery little’s girls first favorite detective, Nancy Drew has evolved a lot over her 86-year history as a girl detective—but no matter what changes she goes through, one thing is always certain: she’s an inspiring character and one smart woman. From the paperbacks to the movies to the graphic novels, Nancy Drew’s intelligence, independence, and kind heart make her not only a great crime solver, but also a wonderful role model and one of the best female sleuths ever created.4. Olivia BensonIf ever you’re in New York and find yourself victim to a crime, your only hope is that there is a real life detective as persistent, committed, and thorough as Olivia Benson. One of the longest serving characters in the extensive Law & Order universe, Benson continually proves herself an asset to the SVU team, rising through the ranks from junior detective to leadership positions—and now, as the squad’s commanding officer—we can only assume more amazing things will come from this incredible detective.5. Jessica FletcherThis author isn’t just good at writing mysteries, but she’s great at solving them, too. With a knack for finding murder wherever she travelled, Murder She Wrote’s Jessica Fletcher—one of the greatest TV characters of all time, and one of the best detectives to ever grace the screen—was even named “most prolific sleuth” by Guinness World Records. Yes, she really is that amazing, and if you don’t believe me, there are 12 seasons and 4 TV movies you can binge-watch for proof.
sleuths-from-pop-culture-dana-scully-miss-marple-agatha-
christie-jessica-fletcher-murder-she-wrote
Everyone knows Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, and the Hardy Boys, but what about the best female sleuths from pop culture? Women have been solving crime and catching bad guys in books, television, and movies just as long as men—only they’ve been doing it better. Let’s face it, women do almost everything better.Call it female intuition, call it women’s instinct, call it whatever you like—women are natural problem solvers. It’s unsurprising we make great cops, detectives, spies, and amateur mystery solvers. We’re great at finding clues, we can get anyone to talk, and we always know when someone is lying to us.We’re smart, sly, and experts in the art of manipulation (hey, we’re girlfriends and mothers, it’s part of the job description), so even the sneakiest, most dastardly criminals can’t escape our clutches. Combine that with our ability to kick ass and take names, and you can understand why the best sleuths from television, movies, and books are always women.Don’t believe me? Let me prove it to you with this list of 13 amazing female sleuths from pop culture. Trust me, these ladies will have you convinced.1. Miss MarpleWhen you think of great sleuths, you probably don’t think of elderly spinsters, but Miss Marple will change all that. One of Agatha Christie’smost famous detectives, this little old lady’s nosy nature is good for more than just the week’s hottest gossip. Clever and intuitive, Miss Marple never misses a clue—proving that not only do women make great detectives, but the elderly can, too.2. Dana ScullyFBI Special Agent Dana Scully may be a skeptic when it comes to monsters and aliens, but luckily for us, it hasn’t stopped her from solving case after mysterious case. Highly intelligent and analytical, there is no situation, no baddie bad enough, to scare Scully away, and no matter the case, she doesn’t stop until it’s solved. If you ever find yourself in the midst of a government conspiracy or alien abduction, just ask yourself:“What would Scully do?”3. Nancy DrewEvery little’s girls first favorite detective, Nancy Drew has evolved a lot over her 86-year history as a girl detective—but no matter what changes she goes through, one thing is always certain: she’s an inspiring character and one smart woman. From the paperbacks to the movies to the graphic novels, Nancy Drew’s intelligence, independence, and kind heart make her not only a great crime solver, but also a wonderful role model and one of the best female sleuths ever created.4. Olivia BensonIf ever you’re in New York and find yourself victim to a crime, your only hope is that there is a real life detective as persistent, committed, and thorough as Olivia Benson. One of the longest serving characters in the extensive Law & Order universe, Benson continually proves herself an asset to the SVU team, rising through the ranks from junior detective to leadership positions—and now, as the squad’s commanding officer—we can only assume more amazing things will come from this incredible detective.5. Jessica FletcherThis author isn’t just good at writing mysteries, but she’s great at solving them, too. With a knack for finding murder wherever she travelled, Murder She Wrote’s Jessica Fletcher—one of the greatest TV characters of all time, and one of the best detectives to ever grace the screen—was even named “most prolific sleuth” by Guinness World Records. Yes, she really is that amazing, and if you don’t believe me, there are 12 seasons and 4 TV movies you can binge-watch for proof.
March 20, 2016
Gold Medal Writers-John McPartland
Ed here: I've reprinted my own piece on John McPartland two or three times in the past five years. Thought I'd let you see what a real critic has to say about him. This is John Fraser's take on McPartland, one of the Gold Medal boys who never got his due. What made him interesting to me was that he had a great Fitzgeraldian social eye for every strata of society, from blue collar all the way up to the gated communitiy folks.
McPartland was no genius but he came to writing with a voice and social take all his own and neither had anything to do with the hardboiled material then flooding the market. As John Fraser said to me in a recent letter, "McPartland deserves the attention. He seems rather to have slipped through the critical net, maybe because he didn't deal in cliched noir depressiveness, with the inevitable failure of love."
.
John McPartland by John Fraser copyright 1998
The Face of Evil (1954)
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.
He was a type. You find guys like him driving ten-wheeler transport trucks, or flying, or sometimes as chief petty officers in the Navy, on a sub or a destroyer. Square-built, tough tanned skin, big hands with knuckles that are chunks of stone.The type—what makes him recognizable as a wanderer, a fighter, sometimes a killer—shows in his face.
Big white teeth, yellow a little from cigarettes like his fingers, and he smiles with his teeth closed, talking through them when he’s angry. A thin line of short black hairs for a mustache, sideburns of curling hair, hair black and curly, a face that is rough and yet young, and it won’t change much if he lives to be fifty. The eyes are fierce, amused, hard.
It’s a special breed of man, and the breed are men. Maybe a mixture of German, Irish, French-Canadian, with a streak of Comanche, Ute, or Cheyenne in there about three generations back. You meet men like this one in the truck-stop cafés along U.S. 40, with the diesels drumming outside; or you meet them walking toward the plane on the airstrip; or in jail, still smiling, still ready for a fight.
This guy was laughing as he swung off the bar stool. He was still laughing as he walked over to me.
The Face of Evil (1954)
I
McPartland is that rarity, a writer of tough novels who feels tough himself. (Was Spillane a barroom brawler? If so, did he win?)
McPartland was one of the Gold Medal blue-collar writers; had served in Korea; obviously knew the black-market milieu of that war; came back and wrote raw, rugged, at times very powerful novels; obviously drank, lived with a mistress and illegitimate kids before it was OK to do so; and died young of a heart attack. He was the kind of person who knew what it meant to be in trouble with the law, doing dumb impetuous things, getting into fights.
What comes across again and again in his novels is his understanding of power, the hard masculine will to dominate others, break them, destroy them. His bad guys are some of the most frightening in thriller fiction: Southern rednecks, syndicate “troopers,” the Mob. His fights are fights in which the loser can get hurt very badly.
When a black-marketing non-com says he’s going to scramble someone’s eggs with his combat boots (crush his testicles), or the middle-echelon syndicate enforcer Whitey Darcy tells the fixer Bill Oxford, “We’re going to make you cry, feller,” or when Buddy Brown, the twenty-year-old petty crook in Big Red’s Daughter (1955) tells Jim Work that he’s going to make him crawl, we know that’s just what they intend to do.
They are hard men.
King McCarthy in The Face of Evil (1955) is a natural fighter. Buddy Brown wins his first two fights with the hero—knocks him down with a sucker punch; gets a painful lock on his knuckles and punches him in the throat while they’re sitting drinking beer in a barroom booth. And the Syndicate, the Mafia, punish offenders ruthlessly. Oxford knows what it will be like to go to prison and have your kidneys smashed by an inmate, crippled with pain for the rest of your life every time you pee. Johnny Cool’s end in The Kingdom of Johnny Cool is dreadful.
However, in most of the novels there isn’t just violence, there’s also love, and things work out all right in the end for the hero and heroine. They very easily couldn’t, though. A strong, focussed counter-energy on the part of the heroes is necessary.
II
McPartland’s best book is The Face of Evil, about the fixer Bill Oxford, who’s been on the long downward slide of compromise, complicity, corruption, and has been sent to Long Beach by the PR agency to which he’s attached to ruin a genuinely decent reform candidate, upon pain of being stripped of all his high-living perks and slammed into prison. It is tense and well-made throughout.
The Kingdom of Johnny Cool is his other best novel. When it appeared, I wrote to Ross Macdonald (a total stranger, but he’d done a Ph.D. in English himself) to ask him to review it for a student journal I was co-editing. He declined, saying that it seemed to be simply Spillane-type melodrama. He was wrong.
The novel is a powerful account of a Sicilian criminal’s rise and fall in America—a more interesting one than W.R. Burnett’s Little Caesar (1929)—and it takes us into dark cold waters full of predators. McPartland was on to the Mafia as a subject twelve years before The Godfather, and his attitude towards it is far healthier than Puzo’s sentimental power worship. There’s nothing cute or admirable about McPartland’s Italianos.
McPartland was no genius but he came to writing with a voice and social take all his own and neither had anything to do with the hardboiled material then flooding the market. As John Fraser said to me in a recent letter, "McPartland deserves the attention. He seems rather to have slipped through the critical net, maybe because he didn't deal in cliched noir depressiveness, with the inevitable failure of love."
.
John McPartland by John Fraser copyright 1998
The Face of Evil (1954)
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.
He was a type. You find guys like him driving ten-wheeler transport trucks, or flying, or sometimes as chief petty officers in the Navy, on a sub or a destroyer. Square-built, tough tanned skin, big hands with knuckles that are chunks of stone.The type—what makes him recognizable as a wanderer, a fighter, sometimes a killer—shows in his face.
Big white teeth, yellow a little from cigarettes like his fingers, and he smiles with his teeth closed, talking through them when he’s angry. A thin line of short black hairs for a mustache, sideburns of curling hair, hair black and curly, a face that is rough and yet young, and it won’t change much if he lives to be fifty. The eyes are fierce, amused, hard.
It’s a special breed of man, and the breed are men. Maybe a mixture of German, Irish, French-Canadian, with a streak of Comanche, Ute, or Cheyenne in there about three generations back. You meet men like this one in the truck-stop cafés along U.S. 40, with the diesels drumming outside; or you meet them walking toward the plane on the airstrip; or in jail, still smiling, still ready for a fight.
This guy was laughing as he swung off the bar stool. He was still laughing as he walked over to me.
The Face of Evil (1954)
I
McPartland is that rarity, a writer of tough novels who feels tough himself. (Was Spillane a barroom brawler? If so, did he win?)
McPartland was one of the Gold Medal blue-collar writers; had served in Korea; obviously knew the black-market milieu of that war; came back and wrote raw, rugged, at times very powerful novels; obviously drank, lived with a mistress and illegitimate kids before it was OK to do so; and died young of a heart attack. He was the kind of person who knew what it meant to be in trouble with the law, doing dumb impetuous things, getting into fights.
What comes across again and again in his novels is his understanding of power, the hard masculine will to dominate others, break them, destroy them. His bad guys are some of the most frightening in thriller fiction: Southern rednecks, syndicate “troopers,” the Mob. His fights are fights in which the loser can get hurt very badly.
When a black-marketing non-com says he’s going to scramble someone’s eggs with his combat boots (crush his testicles), or the middle-echelon syndicate enforcer Whitey Darcy tells the fixer Bill Oxford, “We’re going to make you cry, feller,” or when Buddy Brown, the twenty-year-old petty crook in Big Red’s Daughter (1955) tells Jim Work that he’s going to make him crawl, we know that’s just what they intend to do.
They are hard men.
King McCarthy in The Face of Evil (1955) is a natural fighter. Buddy Brown wins his first two fights with the hero—knocks him down with a sucker punch; gets a painful lock on his knuckles and punches him in the throat while they’re sitting drinking beer in a barroom booth. And the Syndicate, the Mafia, punish offenders ruthlessly. Oxford knows what it will be like to go to prison and have your kidneys smashed by an inmate, crippled with pain for the rest of your life every time you pee. Johnny Cool’s end in The Kingdom of Johnny Cool is dreadful.
However, in most of the novels there isn’t just violence, there’s also love, and things work out all right in the end for the hero and heroine. They very easily couldn’t, though. A strong, focussed counter-energy on the part of the heroes is necessary.
II
McPartland’s best book is The Face of Evil, about the fixer Bill Oxford, who’s been on the long downward slide of compromise, complicity, corruption, and has been sent to Long Beach by the PR agency to which he’s attached to ruin a genuinely decent reform candidate, upon pain of being stripped of all his high-living perks and slammed into prison. It is tense and well-made throughout.
The Kingdom of Johnny Cool is his other best novel. When it appeared, I wrote to Ross Macdonald (a total stranger, but he’d done a Ph.D. in English himself) to ask him to review it for a student journal I was co-editing. He declined, saying that it seemed to be simply Spillane-type melodrama. He was wrong.
The novel is a powerful account of a Sicilian criminal’s rise and fall in America—a more interesting one than W.R. Burnett’s Little Caesar (1929)—and it takes us into dark cold waters full of predators. McPartland was on to the Mafia as a subject twelve years before The Godfather, and his attitude towards it is far healthier than Puzo’s sentimental power worship. There’s nothing cute or admirable about McPartland’s Italianos.
March 19, 2016
MURDER NEVER KNOCKS by Max Allan Collins
MURDER NEVER KNOCKS is such a superior example of Great American Pulp Fiction I suspect many readers will have the same problem I did. I couldn't stop reading it. The set-up is masterful. A number of hit men attempt to kill Mike Hammer. Given their mission they seem odd choices for assassins. They look more like small city insurance men for one thing and their kill skills are no match for Hammer's. Their peculiarity lends the novel its first stroke of darkness. As if they are not quite human. A fantastical touch I really enjoyed. What the hell is going on? This question propels the novel from first page to last. Not only are Hammer and Velda in mortal danger throughout the book so are a number of other people who seem to have no connection with each other or with the mystery assassin.
The city scenes of violence stay with you from the savage death of a cabbie to a hit-and-run at a newsstand. They remind us how easily civilization can be violated. Hammer even picks up a security gig, something he rarely agrees to. A Hollywood producer's fiance, a beautiful woman Collins creates carefully and perfectly, is having a pre-wedding party. Given the swells who'll be there there will be a king's ransom worth expensive gifts. Hammer's hand (and gun) is the protection the producer needs. The portrait of the producer is spot on. Easy to imagine that Max used some of his own Hollywood experiences in creating the guy. The party is just one of several set pieces that demonstrate Collins' writerly gifts. Throughout the book he gives us indelible glimpses into the Manhattan of the mid-Fifties, even including the presence of then fashionable gossip columnist Hy Gardner who helps in sussing out some of the murky showbiz angles of the story. And this certainly includes an unexpectedly gentle scene with a young hippie woman Hammer comes to like. But as I said it is the mystery--coupled with the shadowy violence--that drives the novel. The resolution stunned me. Though Manhattan is a long way from Agatha Christie's British countryside, I'd put the ending (and the motive for the killings) of MURDER NEVER KNOCKS in league with hers. It's that fresh and startling.
March 18, 2016
Gravetapping: GOIN' by Jack M. Bickham
Ben Boulden:
1971 was a big year for Jack M. Bickham. He turned 41, published six novels, including his novel The Apple Dumpling Gang, and his much lesser known novel Goin’. Goin’ is different than much of Mr Bickham’s work. It is a mainstream novel. Or at least something approaching a mainstream novel. Perhaps a hybrid between a straight hippie novel and a modern western is more apt.
The year is 1969. Stan Pierce is 40, newly divorced—
“CONGRATULATIONS, STAN. YOU’RE FREE. BARBARA”
—and going through a mid-life crisis. His hair has grown to his collar, he purchased a little Honda 450 street bike, and as the novel opens Stan is headed for the road. He has no clear destination, but he knows what is behind him; an ex-wife, a young daughter, and a seething personal unhappiness.
Once on the road Stan joins two bikers who are short on cash, and he tags along to a farm outside the rural city of Kirkerville (likely Arizona, but it is never identified as such), and hires on as a fruit picker. In Kirkerville he meets a young married woman named Elizabeth Faering. She is everything he wants. Young. Beautiful. Independent. Free. The two lovers concoct a future together, but the dream is interrupted by a fruit pickers’ strike. A strike Stan agrees with, but a strike that is commandeered by a man who is less interested in getting the workers’ better pay and working conditions, and more interested in starting a revolution.
Goin’is a pretty great novel. It fits its time and place; think back to an age when motorcycle riders were considered hooligans, smoking reefer was an unconscionable sin, free love was the opposite of “up-tight”, and Eugene McCarthy was a saint of liberalism.
The tension is generated both by plot—the strike and the population’s reaction to it—and Stan’s inner turmoil. He is an everyman outsider. He attempts to fit, but he is ostracized by Kirkerville’s residents as an outside agitator, it is not uncommon for him to be called a “pinko,” and the strikers, particularly his two friends, view him as a traitor. His affair with Liz ends badly, although not unexpectedly, and it is written with a powerful simplicity, which makes Stan’s emotional pain visceral.
Goin’ was published as a paperback original by Paperback Library in July 1971, and to my knowledge it has never seen print again.
This review originally went live April 4, 2014, and I've been thinking about it again the last few weeks. It is a very good novel that should have an audience.
March 17, 2016
Forgotten Books-They Shoot Horses Don't They
(from 2010)
Ed here: Whenever anybody begins arguing for or against crime fiction being real literature various titles are always put forth immediately and vociferously. It seems the same book can be used by either side. I am personally tired of the argument but I will say that one of the books I'd use to demonstrate how noir can compete in the class of world literature is They Shoot Horses, Don't They? by Horace McCoy. This is crime fiction's version of The Great Gatsby, a perfect utterance. There is no other novel in the canon like it and it is as savage today as it was in the Thirties. (To me the film was a corny Hwood failure.)
What prompts this post is a recent review of its reissue by Laura Wilson in the UK's Guardian. Quick and deft.
They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, by Horace McCoy (Serpent's Tail, £7.99)
Forget Raymond Chandler and his overrated ilk – Horace McCoy's 1935 novel (filmed in 1969, under the same title) is the best example of American noir ever written. Set in the great depression, amid the desperation, barbarity and pathos of a dance marathon, it is an extraordinary achievement and every bit as shocking and moving today as it must have been for its original readers. Gripping from the beginning – when we are given to understand that the narrator is being condemned to death for an unknown crime – it's the story of two losers stumbling endlessly round a grotty Hollywood ballroom in a grotesque and ultimately futile struggle for survival. The characters are both more, and less, than human, the writing is tersely perfect, and the ending almost unbearably moving. This timely reissue comes complete with an excellent introduction from the veteran British crime writer John Harvey.
Ed here: Whenever anybody begins arguing for or against crime fiction being real literature various titles are always put forth immediately and vociferously. It seems the same book can be used by either side. I am personally tired of the argument but I will say that one of the books I'd use to demonstrate how noir can compete in the class of world literature is They Shoot Horses, Don't They? by Horace McCoy. This is crime fiction's version of The Great Gatsby, a perfect utterance. There is no other novel in the canon like it and it is as savage today as it was in the Thirties. (To me the film was a corny Hwood failure.)
What prompts this post is a recent review of its reissue by Laura Wilson in the UK's Guardian. Quick and deft.
They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, by Horace McCoy (Serpent's Tail, £7.99)
Forget Raymond Chandler and his overrated ilk – Horace McCoy's 1935 novel (filmed in 1969, under the same title) is the best example of American noir ever written. Set in the great depression, amid the desperation, barbarity and pathos of a dance marathon, it is an extraordinary achievement and every bit as shocking and moving today as it must have been for its original readers. Gripping from the beginning – when we are given to understand that the narrator is being condemned to death for an unknown crime – it's the story of two losers stumbling endlessly round a grotty Hollywood ballroom in a grotesque and ultimately futile struggle for survival. The characters are both more, and less, than human, the writing is tersely perfect, and the ending almost unbearably moving. This timely reissue comes complete with an excellent introduction from the veteran British crime writer John Harvey.
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