Ed Gorman's Blog, page 41

Seven Obscure TV Shows That I Curiously Remember Classic Film TV Cafe

Seven Obscure TV Shows That I Curiously Remember from the great website http://www.classicfilmtvcafe.com/
Blue Light (1966) – With gadget-laden secret agents dominating the TV landscape, ABC offered an old-style spin on the genre. Robert Goulet starred as David March, an American correspondent supposedly working for the Nazis at the start of World War II. But, hey, Robert Goulet can’t be a bad a guy—so it turns out March is really an uncover agent. Larry Cohen (The Invaders) co-created it. Q.E.D. (1982) - Quentin E. Deverill was a Harvard University professor who had various adventures (e.g., thwarting a rocket attack on London) in England circa 1912. Sam Waterston (as Deverill) and Julian Glover (as the villainous Dr. Kilkiss) headed a fine cast and the show had plenty of style. Alas, it lasted only six episodes.
Search (1972-73) – I’m not sure I’d want to work for the World Securities Corporation, a private firm that outfitted its “probe agents” with implanted audio devices and tiny telemetry/camera devices. Talk about no privacy! Still, this series recruited Hugh O’Brian, Tony Franciosa, and Doug McClure to play the lead agents on a rotating basis. Burgess Meredith ran the Probe Control Unit with Angel Tompkins. Leslie Stevens (The Outer Limits) created this entertaining show (which also featured a catchy theme). The pilot film was called Probe—a better title in my opinion.
Strange Report (1969) – Anthony Quayle starred as Adam Strange, a forensics-minded criminologist, in this British import that aired on NBC. Kaz Garas played his associate Hamlyn (Ham) Gynt. Some of the mysteries were conventional, but others showed some flair—such as the one where a 30-year-old murder was covered up by a World War II bomb explosion.
The Senator (1970-71) – Long before The West Wing, Hal Halbrook played a crusading American senator that battled air pollution, the use of National Guard troops to squelch anti-war protests, and the displacement of Native Americans. This show was part of the umbrella series The Bold Ones, and rotated with The New Doctors and The Lawyers.
The New People (1969-70) – A 45-minute TV series? Yes, networks were more adventurous in the old days! This oddity was about a plane crash on a deserted Pacific island that killed all the adults over 30 years old. That left a bunch of college students to establish a new society in this obvious ode to Lord of the Flies. The show’s creators included Rod Serling (who wrote the pilot) and Aaron Spelling. I don’t recall the series being particularly good, but, hey, it’s one I’ve never forgotten.
Coronet Blue (1967) – One of my fellow Café contributors wrote a fine post about this show and offered this concise description: “In the pilot episode, Frank Converse portrays a young man who is attacked aboard a luxury liner and tossed overboard. He is rescued, but with no memory of his past except for the words ‘coronet blue.’ He is taken to a hospital for treatment of his memory loss, where he adopts the name Michael Alden, and sets out to determine the truth about his identity.” I remember enjoying this series, though an episode I watched on YouTube was only so-so. Incidentally, Larry Cohen created this show, too.
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Mystery Writers Key West Fest Announces Competition and Award to Honor Acclaimed Late Author Jeremiah Healy

Mystery Writers Key West Fest Announces Competition and Awardto Honor Acclaimed Late Author Jeremiah HealyKey West, Florida Keys -- The inaugural Jeremiah Healy Mystery Writing Award - “The Jerry” – will be presented at the 2 nd Annual Mystery Writers Key West Fest, August 14-16 in Key West, Florida. The winner will claim a book-publishing contract with Absolutely Amazing eBooks, free Mystery Writers Key West Fest registration, hotel accommodations for two nights, and a bobble-headed Jerry trophy.Sponsored by Absolutely Amazing eBooks, the award salutes the author’s legacy as a beloved and influential mentor credited with helping and advising many aspiring writers. Candidates wishing to compete for the Jeremiah Healy Mystery Writing Award are invited to submit the first three pages of a finished, unpublished manuscript no later than June 30, 2015. There is no fee to enter, finalists will be notified August 1, and will have until August 10 to submit full manuscripts."Jerry Healy was a terrific mystery writer and a good judge of mysteries,” notes Shirrel Rhoades, co-founder of Key West Writers Bloc, producer of the Mystery Writers Key West Fest. “Jerry often said a book either captures a reader in the first three pages … or it doesn’t. We agree and have decided to use that as a yardstick for a writing competition in Jerry’s honor. He helped us get the first Fest off the ground, and this way we will keep him as a part of it in future years.”Healy served as moderator and panelist at the first Mystery Writers Key West Fest in 2014.  He is the late acclaimed author and creator of the John Francis Cuddy private-investigator series and the Mairead O'Clare legal thriller series (under the pseudonym Terry Devane). A graduate of Rutgers College and Harvard Law School, his career path included stints as a military police lieutenant and a trial attorney. He launched his writing career while a professor at the New England School of Law, where he taught for almost two decades.  Subsequently, he established himself as a multi Shamus-Award winning mystery writer, penning eighteen novels and more than sixty short stories. The award judging committee will be led by Healy's fiancé, mystery author Sandra Balzo, and includes Shirrel Rhoades, author, film critic, media consultant and publisher of Absolutely Amazing eBooks; Ted Hertel, attorney, author, reviewer and immediate past executive vice president of Mystery Writers of America; and Gary Warren Niebuhr, library director, reviewer and author of numerous nonfiction works on crime fiction, including Make Mine a Mystery: A Guide to Mystery and Detective Fiction and Read 'em Their Writes: A Handbook for Mystery Book Discussions.“Jerry introduced me to Ted and Gary, who became my writers group, as well as close friends,” says Balzo.  “It was the kind of thing that Jeremiah Healy was known for in mystery circles—unflagging kindness and making newcomers feel like they belonged. I think Jerry would be thrilled that Gary and Ted are joining us in judging the award that bears his name.”This year’s Mystery Writers Key West Fest –“Murder & Mayhem in Paradise” –includes multiple workshops, presentations, panel discussions and social events with acclaimed crime fiction and true crime writers. For information on the 2 nd Annual Mystery Writers Key West Fest and complete Jeremiah Healy Mystery Writing Award competition guidelines and submission details, visit www.mysterywriterskeywestfest.com.###

Jeff Pierce's tremendous Ross Macdonald interview with Tom Nolan

On the Case with Tom Nolan The Rap Sheet
Fore the entire interview go here:http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/

What does it say about 20th-century crime novelist Ross Macdonald that he finally--as of this week--has a Library of America volume dedicated to his early work? “That he’s taking his rightful place amongst the acknowledged masters of American literature,” says Tom Nolan, the Los Angeles writer and Wall Street Journal books critic who gave us Ross Macdonald: A Biography (1999), certainly the best-yet study of this author’s life and literary endeavors. As Nolan told me during a recent interview--the first part of which was Even for somebody as familiar with Macdonald’s work as I am (the first crime novel I remember consuming was 1949’s The Moving Target , which introduced his series protagonist, L.A. private eye Lew Archer, and I’ve since enjoyed reading and re-reading the entirety of Macdonald’s oeuvre), holding the brand-new, 900-plus-page Library of America collection in my hands is a treat. Macdonald wasn’t only a terrific crime novelist; he was a terrific novelist who used fictional illegalities as his entry into telling stories--sometimes braided with Freudian issues and Greek tragedy--about families in trouble. As author-playwright Gordon Dahlquist opined in HiLobrow: Simply in terms of the hard-boiled mystery, the books are audaciously accomplished. Macdonald’s intricate plots are like Sophocles by way of a boa constrictor. His subtle reconfiguration of the detective character tips the Archer books toward social portrait and social critique without the burden of any particular axe being ground. Archer isn’t an avatar of tough virtue for the reader’s vicarious thrill. He may be a catalyst within the stories, but most profoundly and more simply he’s a witness. If [Raymond] Chandler’s novels are about [gumshoe Philip] Marlowe, then Macdonald’s--despite Archer’s fuller realization--are about California. But most remarkable is the compassion with which these unsparing tales are unwound. The compassion is never soft, but feels truthful without being cruel.Macdonald made Archer a sharp observer of the social condition, a questioner who unpeeled layers of familial strife, jealousy, and disappointment even as he sought answers to whatever obvious mystery lay at the heart of his current yarn. The author, having endured ample woes himself (both as a youngster and as the father of a “wild” daughter, Linda, who killed a 13-year-old boy in a car wreck and later disappeared from college for more than a week) and undergone psychoanalysis as a result, could--through Archer--empathize with his hardship-plagued characters. Not all imaginary shamuses on the clock during the first three quarters of the 20th century demonstrated such understanding. National Public Radio’s Maureen Corrigan, recalling the opening of The Doomsters--in which “a troubled young man bangs at Lew Archer’s door in the wee hours of the morning”--suggests that “Sam Spade would have rolled over in bed and ignored the knock; Philip Marlowe would have been out walking the L.A. streets in the rain; later on, Mickey Spillane would have just shot that annoying predawn visitor. But Lew Archer is as much a social worker, a counselor, a father confessor as he is a private eye. Macdonald gave us a detective with psychological depth; a gumshoe capable of throwing around words like ‘gestalt.’”
That capacity for compassion, Archer’s willingness to excavate the tumbledown remains of a family’s history (and in so many of Macdonald’s later novels, the roots of contemporary misfortunes are traceable to injustices and failures in the past) was one thing that drew me, as it did so many other readers, to Lew Archer’s adventures. After managing--through some miracle that could only have been available to an individual as young and callow as I was at the time--to arrange an interview with Millar/Macdonald in 1980, what I wanted to do most as I sat with him in the dimly lit study of his Santa Barbara, California, home was ask him for a deep analysis of his sleuth-cum-shrink, and inquire where Archer’s path might lead him in the future. Unfortunately, by that point Macdonald was already enduring
the affects of the Alzheimer’s disease that would kill him (in July 1983), and he couldn’t always remember the nuances of his fiction.






(Left) Editor Tom Nolan, photographed by Hal Boucher








Much later, in 1999, when I first had the opportunity to interview Tom Nolan, about his Macdonald biography, I asked him how much his subject’s troubled past had influenced his choice of a career writing about troubled people. “Oh, enormously,” said Nolan. “I think that initially he read certain kinds of books--not just fiction, but non-fiction, psychology, philosophy--to some extent, because he was trying to find ways to deal with life and with his problems. As far as fiction, I'm sure that [Charles] Dickens and that sort of fiction appealed to him because he could identify with the travails of Oliver Twist, and I think authors like [Edgar Allan] Poe and [Nathaniel] Hawthorne, people who probed the psychology of good and evil, or good and bad choices, appealed to him because he was wrestling with these things himself. Eventually, he tried to take the detective story and make it more interesting psychologically, able to explore some of these things that he was very interested in.”
More than a decade and a half has passed since then. But when I learned that the Library of America planned to issue a selection of Ross Macdonald’s early Archer cases--to help celebrate this year’s centennial of the author’s birth (he came into the world in Los Gatos, California, on December 13, 1915)--and that Nolan had served as its editor, I knew I had to interview him again. I also wanted to ask Nolan, though, about his work on a second volume, Meanwhile There Are Letters: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and Ross Macdonald , which Arcade Publishing will debut in July. Co-edited with Eudora Welty biographer Suzanne Marrs, it draws on an abundance of letters--more than 300 of them!--exchanged during the 1970s and early ’80s between Macdonald and Mississippi Pulitzer Prize winner Welty (The Optimist’s Daughter). “Though separated by background, geography, genre, and his marriage,” explains the back-jacket copy on my bound galley of this book, “the two authors shared their lives in witty, tender, and profoundly romantic letters, each drawing on the other for inspiration, comfort, and strength.”

And Nolan’s centennial-year offerings don’t stop there. He’s also awaiting this summer’s paperback release of an expanded version of The Archer Files , his 2007 collection of Macdonald’s previously unpublished Archer short stories and story fragments.
for the entire piece go here:http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/

Thrift Shop Book Covers: "Needle in a Timestack" Gravetapping

Posted: 26 Apr 2015 04:50 PM PDTNeedle in a Timestack was a paperback original published by Ballantine Books in 1966, which is the very edition that caught my attention. It is a collection of ten early Robert Silverberg stories. The artwork is intriguingly reminiscent—to my naïve eye—of Wassily Kandinsky’s expressionist paintings. It is vivid, stark, and muted; a contradiction that works well. The artist: Richard Powers (1921 – 1966).





















The opening paragraph, of the story “The Pain Peddlers”:
“The phone bleeped. Northrop nudged the cut-in switch and heard Maurillo say, ‘We got a gangrene, chief. They’re amputating tonight.’”
Needle in a Timestack includes the following stories: “The Pain Peddlers” (1963), “Passport to Sirius” (1958), “Birds of a Feather” (1958), “There was an Old Woman—“ (1958), “The Shadow of Wings” (1963), “Absolutely Inflexible” (1956), “His Brother’s Keeper” (1959), “The Sixth Palace” (1955), “To See the Invisible Man” (1963), and “The Iron Chancellor” (1958).
This is the fourteenth in a series of posts featuring the cover art and miscellany of books I find at thrift stores and used bookshops. It is reserved for books I purchase as much for the cover art as the story or author.You are subscribed to email updates from Gravetapping
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Charles Paris by Simon Brett

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 07, 2008

-------------------------CHARLES PARIS
Gillian Reynolds Telepgraph UK

"Charles Paris, the original creation of Simon Brett, exists in 17 novels. Brett was 28, working as a producer at BBC radio, when he first imagined him. Surveying his small pile of unpublished manuscripts he thought he’d try writing something other people might want to read. Up to then he’d been terrified of crime fiction, the perils of holes in the plot, the matching of character to dialogue. From his day job, working with lots of actors, came the idea of a fictional actor, middle-aged, resting more often than working, with a hopeless private life but the kind of cunning that solves crimes."

for the rest go here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main....

Ed here: F. Scott Fitzgerald once noted that his sometime friend Ernest Hemingway spoke with the "authority of success" while he, Fitzgerald, spoke "with the authority of failure."

I've always imagined that Charles Paris was a background player in Fitzgerald's best work--a man of no particular note who drank at Gatby's mansion, perhaps. A bit old for the rest of the crowd but earnestly pursuing young women who, like him, were of no particular note, either, his charm not nearly as frayed as his suits. A man who knows all about "the authority of failure."

Most of us have favorite fictional detectives and Charles Paris has always been one of mine. He's a decent man adrift in drink and long years, the very things that help him solve crimes. He's drunk it all and seen it all so it's dfifficult to deceive him.

Most of the early Paris novels I've read three or four times over the years. The later ones are very good, too, but I'm partial to the first five because Simon Brett was learning about Charles right along with his readers. If Charles was a bit inconsistent from book to book on occasion, that just made him more human.

The books are packed with the lore of theater and radio in particular. Brett is such a deft storyteller that his backgrounds never slow the pacing even though they always play vital roles in the plot itself. Brett obviously reveres working actors like Charles. The pubs where they drink, the dusty offices of their agents, the old friends who still manage to get the kind of work that eludes Charles... Brett makes the workaday world as interesting and entertaining as the murders.

Brett has a good ear and a good heart and it's always amusing to watch him go up against some of the more irritating aspects of modern media culture. God knows he never wants for targets.

It's a funny thing about Charles Paris. Of all the fictional detectives I've encountered over my lifetime he's the only one I imagine to be a real person. Brett has given him vivid life and me a long shelf of excellent mystery novels.POSTED BY ED GORMAN AT 2:51 PM 1 COMMENT: LINKS TO THIS POST 

From Pulp Serenade: "North Beach Girl" (1960) and "Scandal on the Sand" (1964) by John Trinian

now available from Stark House


Cullen Gallagher Pulp Serenade:

"North Beach Girl" (1960) and "Scandal on the Sand" (1964) by John Trinian


John Trinian is not your typical Gold Medal author, and North Beach Girl (1960) and Scandal on the Sand (1964) are not your typical Gold Medal paperback originals. Far from ordinary, these two titles are among the most unique and extraordinary Gold Medal originals I’ve had the pleasure to encounter. Once again, thanks must be given to the team at Stark House Books for rediscovering these should-be classics, and collecting them in new volume with three illuminating essays by historian Rick Ollerman, close friend Ki Longfellow, and daughter Belle Marko.
A radical blending of 1960s counterculture and noir sensibilities, Trinian’s novels evoke the West Coast spirit of the times with the doomy melancholy of Goodis. The plots vaguely touch on murder, but they're more like hangout books, with the characters drunk or stoned most of the time. Booze, drugs, and art flow freely through these pages—at times the inebriation is a pure high, at others it’s a hazy attempt to block out reality. But unlike something like Lawrence Block’s A Diet of Treacle, these books aren’t Beatnik-sploitation, or caricatures of the scene. Trinian, who was pals with Richard Brautigan, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac, lived the lives he writes about. With each passing page, there’s an authenticity to North Beach Girl and Scandal on the Sand that can’t be faked—it gives the books their realism, but it also gives them their sadness. Trinian feels for his characters, their troubled pasts, their hazy futures, and their lost present.
Though at first glance, the title North Beach Girl might sound like some Frankie and Annette sandstorm, it is nothing of the sort. Erin, the main character, just quit her job as an artists’ model. She crashes as a garage paid for by another woman named Bruno, who runs a local art gallery. The gallery has attracted a local crew of beatniks, drunks, artists, wannabes and has-beens, including Riley, a painter who comes knocking on Erin’s door late one night, piss drunk, wanting to hire her as a model. Bruno, who obviously has some sort of affection for Erin, is resentful and jealous. Deep in debt and looking for a way out, Bruno wants Erin to borrow money from her dying grandmother in order to invest in a larger gallery space. And Erin, indecisive in life and love alike, hasn’t made up her mind what to do about anything.
“The bitter confusion of her life became magnified and it seemed to melt into a solid lump of nothingness. Why should she think about it? Life was wretched and disgusting. It was mean for the stupid idiots who could swallow its lies and shadowy promises. Only fools lived in peace. She thought of the cemetery where her mother was buried. Give and take, old ashes to even older ashes … have another drink and the hell with it. One negated the other.”
It’s as gloomy as any of Goodis’ gutter monologues, a pure mainline dose of 100% noir.

Trinian’s first line in North Beach Girl establishes the theme of entrapment that runs throughout the novel: “Erin covered herself with the pale green robe and sat on the empty packing crate by the narrow barred window.” From her workplace to the garage to the gallery to her grandmother’s house—and of course the variety of places where she goes to drink—Erin never has a place of her own. Always in between, borrowing, crashing, or killing time, she lives in a permanent state of impermanence. While she may be an anti-establishment figure of the time who has dropped out from mainstream society, Erin isn’t a romantic or idealistic character at all. She’s realistic as hell. Most of us have either known an Erin, or been like her (at least for a little bit). And that’s where the power of North Beach Girl is—in the characters. Unlike Riley who likes his “entertainment real simple,” where “the good guy wears a big white hat and the bad guy wears a black one,” Trinian writes ambiguous characters who are neither good nor bad, neither heroes or villains, nor even anti-heroes. They’re screwy people who drink too much and say stupid things and waste time and never seem to figure out what they’re supposed to do. And that’s why Trinian’s characters are among the most recognizably human—and modern—in all of the Gold Medal paperbacks.
Though sex, drugs and murder are very much a part of the story North Beach Girl, the novel isn’t plotted like your standard head-first-into-the-action thriller. Trinian takes his time, slowly developing the characters, their relationships, and their inebriated trajectories. North Beach Girl is structured like an extended bender, coming out of the haze for brief moments of recognition and sobriety, only to drive back into the fog once they see the bleakness of their circumstances.
“Hell,” Erin said softly, “people drink a lot.”
One aspect of Trinian’s writing that does remind me of Lawrence Block, and also anticipates the work of Ed Gorman, is the portrayal of alcohol and drugs. These aren’t people who drink to have fun, or get high to have a good time—they’re just sad wrecks of people. Trinian has great sympathy for them and their constant need substances—and he never pities them, perhaps because he was something like them, himself. As his daughter, Belle Marko, writes, “He was popular and unreliable, his own worst enemy in many ways, getting in his own way with self-sabotage and isolation, depression and bouts of rage and horrible remorse. He was plagued with demons …” One of the biggest clichés of noir literature is its senseless and unrealistic celebration of alcoholism. Trinian, on the other hand, hammers home the unpleasantness of what it really is like.

The second book in the anthology, Scandal on the Sand, also sounds like a Frankie and Annette movie, but it is even less like one than the preceding novel. It begins with a great, and totally surreal, first line:
“In the deep, in cold darkness, a hundred feet below he rocky cliffs and half-hidden among the fan fronds and greenly-waving fields of sea grass, the great gray whale hovered, his tail fins moving now and then to maintain his depth.”
The first couple pages are all from the whale’s point of view—an unorthodox narrative as exciting and it is insane, and yet Trinian pulls it off perfectly. The story is set into motion when the whale washes up on the beach, gets stuck, and can’t get back to the ocean.
An ensemble narrative like John D. MacDonald’s Cry Fast, Cry Hard, Scandal on the Sand follows a group of characters on a single afternoon that all come together because of the spectacle of the beached whale. There’s Karen and Hobart, a hookup from the night before that Karen resents and that Hobart thinks will lead to marriage. There’s Joe Bonniano, a wanted hitman whose picture is on the front page of the newspaper and who is hanging around for a delivery of money. Also near by is Mulford, a cop whose stupidity is matched by his ego and quick temper. Out for a stroll are Fredric, a one-time Hollywood star-turned-dope addict, and his wife, Becky; Riley, an ex-con tow truck driver; and even a sleaze photographer named Earle and his two bikini models. And overseeing all of this is Alex, a lifeguard too hungover to notice what is unfolding on his beach.
Scandal on the Sand is, in my eyes, an even greater accomplishment than North Beach Girl. Structuring the novel around the beached whale is just a magnificent, maverick concept that borders on the avant-garde. The whale functions as a unifying symbol for all the characters: a manifestation of their collective problems, disappointments, uncertainties, and pains. Confronting the whale brings out their true character—in some it reveals compassion, in others indifference, opportunism, and violence.
Like in North Beach Girl, Trinian’s characters are distinguished by their waywardness and uncertainty. In Scandal on the Sand, the action may be compressed into a single afternoon, but the characters experience years of life through their reveries and regrets. Unable to actualize any change in their lives, they’re stuck in a limbo consisting always of nights-before and nights-after-next; days are spent forgetting and planning, and rarely doing. Of Karen, Trinian writes, “She felt a terrible need to search for something, anything, inside or outside herself that would help erase the idiotic outcome of the night before.” Trinian also has Fredric ask his wife, “Becky, do you think that if I can manage it on pills today, pills alone, without anything else, that I’ll still be all right by this evening?” These aren’t characters living for the day so much as they’re struggling to just make it through. As Earle sums it up, “Sometimes I do good; sometimes I don’t. Beer one day, champagne the next. Up and down, and down and up. That’s life.”
Scandal on the Sand also has its moments of hardboiled noir philosophy, like this line that reads like something out of Richard Hallas’ You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up:
“What had Herb said? That Joe wouldn’t even break away from the post? That the odds weren’t in his favor? That was a laugh and a half. Joe had known that all along. Because that’s the way it had always been. Not matter what. Dice, roulette, poker, the horses. Everything always ended with a bust-out.”
North Beach Girl and Scandal on the Sand have whetted my appetite for Trinian, and convinced me that he is one of the true unheralded greats of the Gold Medal canon.

You might also like:

Two Classic Shows, Two Unusual Takes on Jack the Ripper classicfilmtvcafe.com

Two Classic Shows, Two Unusual Takes on Jack the Ripper From the great website classicfilmtvcafe.comhttp://www.classicfilmtvcafe.com/
The suspense master Robert Bloch 
Numerous TV series and films have offered imaginative twists on the mysterious murderer that terrorized the Whitechapel district of London in the late 1880s. Two of my favorite big screen versions are the time travel fantasy Time After Time (1979), which pits H.G. Wells against the Ripper and A Study in Terror (1965), which has Sherlock Holmes facing off against Jack (a premise borrowed by the later Murder By Decree). Two of the most intriguing small-screen Ripper tales appeared as episodes of Thriller and the original Star Trek. Interestingly, Robert Bloch--best known for writing the novel that became Psycho--had a hand in both TV series.

John Williams in Thriller.The Thriller episode "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper" starred John Williams (a Hitchcock semi-regular) as an expert engaged by the Washington, D.C. police to help apprehend a modern day Ripper-like murderer. As the gruesome killings mount, a fantastic theory emerges: Is the murderer actually Jack the Ripper himself, who has used black magic rituals to defy ageing? It’s a clever premise and the big twist at the end works pretty well (even though you’ll guess it). Although Bloch wrote several episodes of Thriller, this teleplay was written was Barré Lyndon and based on a Bloch short story. Published in 1947, the story “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” originally appeared in Weird Tales. It was the first of several literary works in which Robert Bloch incorporated Jack the Ripper.
This episode also features several Hitchcockian connections. First, it was directed by Ray Milland, who played the killer in Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder. The police inspector in that film? That would be John Williams. Decades earlier, Hitchcock also tackled Jack the Ripper with his 1927 silent film The Lodger, which was adapted from a short story and play by Marie Belloc Lowndes. And, for one final connection, the Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode “The Hands of Mr. Ottermole” boasts some Ripper overtones with its plot about a strangler running amok in a very foggy London.

John Fiedler in Star Trek.Star Trek seems like an unlikely destination for Jack the Ripper, which is precisely what makes “Wolf in the Fold” a compelling season two episode. While on shore leave on the planet Argelius II, a bewildered Scotty is  found—bloody knife in hand—standing over the corpse of a nightclub dancer. He has no recollection of what happened, but the evidence is damning and chief administrator Hengist (John Fiedler) seems convinced that Scotty is guilty.
For many years, I listed this as one of my favorite Star Trek episodes. I viewed it recently, though, and while still good, it hasn’t aged as well as others. Still, Fiedler is very good (he’s perhaps best remembered as Piglet in Disney Winnie the Pooh movies and TV shows). This time around, Bloch wrote an original teleplay and borrowed the central premise of “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper.” There are some nice touches, too, such as the foggy streets on Argelius substituting for London and Kirk’s use of the ship’s computer in revealing the murderer’s identity.
Television continues to sporadically visit the Jack the Ripper murders, with season one of the 2009-2013 British TV series Whitechapel focusing on a copycat  killer.

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Gravetapping: ROUGH RIDERS by Charlie Stella

Reviewer: Ben Boulden Gravetapping

Rough Riders is a follow up to Charlie Stella’s 2001 novel Eddie’s World. This time around Eddie Senta spends the bulk of his time in a coma. His old nemesis James Singleton, called Washington Stewart since he snitched for a new identity, put a hit on Senta that went sour. Senta’s wife hires former NYPD detective, and current private eye, Alex Pavlik to find Singleton. The trail leads to North Dakota where there is something of a cold spell—30 below and holding—and a crime wave.
There is also a cast of real characters: a former Miss North Dakota tending bar, an ice cold Air Force Colonel who is both a pilot and M. D., a drug dealing airman about 20 points shy of a hundred, a couple gangsters, and a lineup of lawmen. Not to mention a college kid dead of a heroin overdose, and his strung out girlfriend.
The plot has a bunch of moving parts, and the action sprawls between New York and North Dakota. The bad guys, with Singleton at the center, cleverly plot their riches and ultimately their escapes. The good guys are mainly trying to get in the game, or even worse figuring what the game is, and who the players are. It is something close to humorous absurdity—the good and bad guys occupy the same places, but their paths rarely cross; Washington Stewart is missing an eye and one side of his face is caved in, but he is hard to find.
The dialogue, as always with Mr Stella, is something special. It is sharp, humorous, and revealing. The prose is stark as a Dakota winter, and the journey is a pleasant, entertaining, and involving distraction. Rough Riders is great fun. 

Rough Riders was published as a trade paperback by Stark House Press in 2012, and  Eddie’s World  is scheduled to be republished in mass market by Stark House’s imprint Black Gat Books in May 2015. You are subscribed to email updates from Gravetapping
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NOW Available THE MEAN STREETS BUNDLE

Ed here: There were technical glitches when the Bundle was first put up for sale but now things are fine.  
A few words about my novel The Serpent's Kiss. I wrote some less than wonderful horror novels when I started out in the late Seventies. This one I'm proud of. 
In addition to the story there are two themes relevant to today--one the plight of old female news anchors (I used to do advertising for news stations) who were always getting dumped or demoted and the scourge of AIDs. This was written at the peak of the scourge.  I had three editors die of it while working on my books.  So I included a sympathetic gay character. 
   It was also the only time I actually scared myself while writing. Late at night I became aware of the shadows and creaks of the house and would stop to look around.  
 And as for the bundle itself, are you kidding me? Bill Pronzini, David Morrell and Stephen Gallagher among the others. How can you go wrong?
THE MEAN STREETS BUNDLE
Curated by Steven SavileWhen we were first mulling over the name of this bundle, Mean Streets, I had a very focused vision on what I thought it was going to be. I'd just finished working on the collaboration with Prodigy (the hip-hop artist from Mobb Deep's The Infamous fame, not the Firestarter) HNIC and was thinking very much edgy and dark stuff, hardcore, maybe not the poets of our generation but certainly a voice for a slice of society that's been disenfranchised by the system of living. It was a great starting place, the back alleys of Brooklyn Heights or Across Hundred and Tenth Street into Harlem, but they aren't the only mean streets. What we've got here, we're talking the pheromones of the city, the detritus of a nation. We're talking about the criminal elements that move and shake just below the surface, unseen but everyone is aware they're there… We're talking seminal TV shows like The Wire and The Shield. We're talking about outcasts forced to live hard or die harder. We're talking about the Lone Ranger or Shane riding into town and fix that shit even as it explodes all around them. We're talking primarily about heroes and villains where the cities they do battle in are as important as any character.The first book I picked for this bundle, Stephen Gallagher's Down River, is one of those books that made me want to be a writer. Hell, I think I emulated if not outright copied elements of it for a dozen (unpublished and never to be published) stories. I make no bones about it, I adore this man's work. On any list of favourite authors I've written down from the age of 19 (when I first discovered his novel Rain) right up until today, Steve would be one of the first names down. You might not be familiar with his stuff. I could embarrass him by saying he wrote the Warrior's Gate and Terminus episodes of the classic Doctor Who era (Staring Tom Baker and Peter Davison respectively), or talk about the pure excitement in the Savile household reading copies of FEAR MAGAZINE in preparation for the release of his first creator-driven show Chimera, which was something of an event for a fanboy like me… I could mention The Eleventh Hour TV show with Captain Picard at the helm in the UK and Rufus Sewell playing Hood in the US, or the reimagining of Robinson Crusoe from a few years back, or that short lived Christian Slater vehicle, The Forgotten. If you're an anglophile I could mention some pretty devastating episodes of Silent Witness…But instead, I'll tell you a little story about the first time I met Steve. It was at a dealer table at a convention, and I'd got a copy of a signed limited edition of his short story collection in my hand. We'd talked a lot before this, even exchanged old fashioned letters, and he'd been in my anthology Redbrick Eden which raised money for homelessness in the UK, but this was the first time we'd seen each other face-to-face… and what sentence preceded that auspicious event? Me saying 'Jesus Christ, thirty five fucking quid for a book, that's ridiculous!' and a voice behind me saying 'I know… it's rather embarrassing, but I didn't set the price…' as you can imagine… I did a very good impression of the Incredible Shrinking Man at that point. Suffice it to say, Steve is top man, and a terrific writer. I read Down River, the story of Johnny Mays, back in 1989 and I have never forgotten it. That should tell you something very important about just how good this guy is.***The second book I picked for the bundle was an easy choice, Ed Gorman. I've never had the pleasure of meeting Ed, but I consider him right there with John D. McDonald, Robert B. Parker and Mickey Spillaine's Mike Hammer when it comes to crime fiction. Ed is the very definition of a writer's writer. He's nothing short of brilliant. When I emigrated back in 1997 I spent a few days in Copenhagen with nothing to read, but found this wonderful little bookstore that had a single rack of English paperbacks. That was where I met Ed for the first time. It was his first Robert Payne novel, Blood Moon. I read it in a single sitting and ran around the city looking for anything else by the guy. I was hooked. That summer I read no less than fifty Ed Gorman novels, and every single one of them paid off. Seriously. There wasn't a single one of them I came away from thinking, well, that was okay. Ed leapt straight to the top of my oh my god I want to be him when I grow up charts… It was incredibly difficult to choose one of his books for this bundle, I wanted them all. I kept thinking Payne, hook you the same way I was hooked… but in the end, picked The Serpent's Kiss, which I think may very well be Ed's finest novel. It was a tough call, believe me, but in keeping with the notion of those gritty noiresque mean streets, it's the one that best matches my vision for this set – a small town being ripped apart at the seams by a serial killer.***I'm throwing in a curveball on number three, Clive Barker's Cabal, which is in many regards a perfect horror novel, the story of Boone and the Nightbreed. So how can this be 'mean streets' you ask? Boone's an outsider, he doesn't fit in anywhere but he's heard of this place, Midian, where the monsters are welcome. Midian itself is a powerful feature of the novel, really taking centre stage along with its monstrous cast. It's very much a novel of its time and could be read as an allegory, the monsters having a different kind of blood that marks them as outsiders, they're tainted, and there's a killer hunting them, looking to wipe them out. It's not hard to see this as a novel of fear and revulsion from the community at large against the gay community and the killer that was the all-terrifying AIDS back in what we can call less-enlightened days. But that's selling Cabal incredibly short. It's so much more than that. It's an incredibly tight novel, unlike the sprawling fantasies that came directly before and after it, and yet it has more imagination in it, and more visceral fear than both of them combined. There aren't any meaner streets in the world than those of Midian… believe me. And with the long awaited Scarlet Gospels finally appearing next month this is the perfect introduction to the great imaginer of my generation.***Sean Black's long been a favourite of mine, and, I confess, has become a friend thanks to the joys of the internet. I was on a Jack Reacher kick, and looking around for anything and everything that would satisfy that Lone Ranger need when a friend of mine, Jeremy Dunns, mentioned Sean's Ryan Locke series. I'd just bought a dozen Robert Crais novels and devoured them, one a night, during a lazy summer vacation and was trying to decide what next, when I saw the first Ryan Locke novel, Lockdown, pop up on the 'also boughts' on my Kindle and thought, what the hell, it's not hideously expensive, I'll give it a shot. Now, it must have been around midnight and I was looking to read maybe 2-3 chapters before going to sleep. I didn't go to sleep that night. I kept on reading and reading and reading… compulsively… bought the second and third the next day… then had to wait a year for the fourth to appear. What's great about them is they're all perfect entry points into the series. Book four though… that's how me and Sean first met. It's another me and my big mouth thing… I was chatting with Matt Hilton, another great exponent of the Lone Ranger genre of crime fighting, and happened to say how fucking furious I was about a scene in the book I'd just read… naming the author and the scene… and why I wanted to throw the Kindle out of the window. I made a very good case for why I thought it was a terrible call as a writer… and who popped up to say he agreed with all my points… but…? Yeah, Sean. See, me, I've got social skills… heh. Trust me, this guy's compulsively readable, and it's a massive honour to have the very latest Ryan Locke novel in this bundle, believe me.***The next one… I don't have any cute-meet story… but I can tell you how Tony Black came to my attention. It's not what you'd expect. James Grant, the lead singer of one of my favourite 80s bands, Love & Money, served as go-between. He never actually said, hey, Steve, meet Tony, though we're both friends of James'. Actually, I was watching the video for James' song My Father's Coat (which you can see here) and as you'll note in the description it stars tartan noir superstar Tony Black… yep, Tony Black, author of some of the very best Scottish crime of the last decade—and you don't get meaner than the streets of Edinburgh, where Truth Lies Bleeding is set. Want to know how good this guy is? Irvine Welsh (remember Trainspotting?) has called him his "favourite British crime writer". That's some high praise. His streets are the very definition of mean, but he shines a stark light on the sins of the city, and no crime goes unpunished in his world. You're in for a treat. Me, every time I go back to Edinburgh (which is only about an hour from where I grew up) I look over my shoulder. That's down to these tartan noir chaps.***Bill Pronzini's novel Carmody's Run might well be considered the template for a generation of Jack Reachers and Joe Pullers. Pronzini's most well known creation is the Nameless Detective series, but before that there was Carmody, a sometimes detective who also works as a freelance bodyguard and smuggler, operating off the Mediterranean island of Majorca. We're talking streets riddled with thieves, smugglers, murderers, and other desperate men. As Kirkus said, in Carmody's world, "The women are sexy, the villains blackhearted ("The best kind of day—one filled with bright green money and bright red blood"), and the action fast and fleshed out with some shading of Carmody's stony character."***Tom Piccirilli is one of the quiet gems of both crime and the supernatural. I've been a fan of his very dark fiction of a long time; the guy has a poet's soul. That makes the nastier aspects of his work all the more dazzling, because when you can describe the macabre so incredibly viscerally, with so much poetry, the horrors stay with you much longer. Over the last couple of years Pic's made a name for himself in the crime world with books like The Last Kind Words, but I first read him a decade before, when he was making his breakthrough with novels for Leisure's horror line, including Hexes which was one mind-fuck of a novel, to be blunt. But something happened around the time Pic wrote A Choir of Lost Children. He went from being good to being brilliant. Nightjack is right there with his best.***Now, I'm going to break from character here and basically tell you why you need to buy this bundle, and just how it can make a difference in a man's life. Several years ago Pic put this post on Facebook: "tWO WORDS, BITCCHES: brain tumor! gOING IN FOR FIVE HOURS OF SURGERY ON mONDAY TO REMOVE A TENNIS BAL-SIZED GROWTH. tHEN icu FOR RADIATION AND CHEMO FOR A FEW WEEKS. NO AY DO I JUST GET CANCER, NO MOFOS, I GET BRAIN CANCER!"Well, Pic beat it. Survived the surgeries, the radiation and chemo and came up cancer free. It was brilliant news for everyone who knows and likes him as a guy, for his wife and family, I mean he's a young guy, this kind of thing is beyond being a bitch, but he won.Only he didn't. Less than two weeks ago Pic's wife announced that the brain tumor had returned and with it the nightmare of medical bills. I don't mind saying that despite adoring Pic's writing I think he's a pretty fantastic guy and every single bundle we sell goes towards making some cash for him in a time of desperate need. So there's that.***Back into character… Maynard Sims… or Len and Mick to me, being a couple of my oldest friends, are pretty important characters in the career of Young Sav. Way back, they bought a story of mine, Painting Blue Murders, which may have been my second or third sale, I'm not 100% sure. I'd written it as a competition entry for The Horror Writer's Association and won (I think) second prize… which was to be Tuckerized by Robert Walker, which is why if you ever pick up his novel Blind Instinct, you'll encounter a one-legged leacherous copper's narc, Steve Savile, from Stockholm… yeah, be careful what you wish for hah! Len and Mick published it in their magazine Enigmatic Tales, then went and bought a chapbook from me, containing what is still one of my favourite stories, Remember Me Yesterday. So, yeah, we go back… way back. But to most people their inclusion here will be a bit of a surprise as they're better known for creeping dread and ghostly tales, but they're versatile writers to say the least, and over the last couple of years have turned their hands to crime, and using their dark imaginations to really offer up that famous Brit Grit.***This next one, I can't quite believe I'm getting to introduce the Father of Rambo, but that's exactly what David Morrell is, amongst so many other things. I'm not going to talk about First Blood. I'm going to digress, because I can. When I was fifteen years old my dad came into my bedroom with a battered—and I mean falling apart, glue gone, pages poking out of the binding—copy of a book he'd just finished reading. Dad wasn't one for lending me books. The first time he'd tried it had been with Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, as he wanted to impress upon this Star Wars loving geek kid that money was important and for God's sake give up those hair-brained ideas about being a writer… the second had been The Totem by David Morrell, and he'd had a lot more luck with that one. He'd brought it in and put it on my desk, simply saying "I think you might like this one." Not if he'd enjoyed it, not any sales pitch as to why it was better than thinking and growing into a corporate Fat Cat. Just I think you might like this one. So I did what all stubborn kids do, I didn't read it. I was stuck reading Henry IV part one and Great Expectations for school, some Nevil Schute and another book about naval warship in trouble that I forget. Suffice it to say, with exams and my English teacher leaning on me to turn out for the First Eleven Cricket team and the Second Eleven (because I my age I could play in the juniors) I wasn't getting time to study let alone read for fun… and somehow the book ended up at the bottom of my bookcase, ignored.Weirdly, I didn't pick up another Morrell for fifteen years… and I know it was fifteen years because it was my 30th birthday. At the party my mate Patric and I stood in the corner not mingling, just chatting about stuff, and he started to tell me this incredible story he'd been reading—which just happens to be the novel presented here, Brotherhood of the Rose—and after about fifteen minutes of spoilers he finally says, "Hell, I'll just lend you the book when I'm done…" He couldn't remember the name of the author, so it wasn't until another very battered paperback turned up on my desk at work the next day that I realized with a wry smile that David Morrell was coming back into my life. It felt like a sign, twice people had brought these battered books and said I'd love them, how many times did I need the universe to hit me over the head with it?Sometimes the universe is smart like that.David Morrell was an author I needed to be reading.He's also an author you need to be reading, so if you haven't encountered him yet, all I can say is I am jealous. There's nothing like discovering a truly magnificent novel for the first time.***Which only leaves David Niall Wilson, who is one of my oldest friends in this game, a terrifically talented chap, and co-writer with yours truly on a weird western, Hallowed Ground, which came about because of a typo, where my novella Hollow Earth, was referred to constantly as Hallowed Earth then Hollow Ground by both Dave and the publisher, and through some quirk of fate it turned out that Hallowed Ground was one of our favourite songs – though mine was by The Alarm and his was by Depeche Mode… so it was only natural we sit down to write something of that name… of course I thought we were writing a novel set in central park with a modern day snake oil salesman/preacher guy, Dave thought we were writing in the Old West… funny how we always seemed to see the same things completely differently, but that made for a great time collaborating as it became an adventure. And as with the best collabs, what came out was something that neither one of us would have written on our own. Sins of the Flash has had a tortured history, but it's one wonderful novel, and that cover, seriously, how beautiful is that?***I feel weird about introducing myself, so instead I'm going to use a very short piece one of the bundle members wrote for the book – but was never published – Tom Piccirilli."Okay, so I admit it...I came late to the party.While you were all down at the beach doing the right thing, waving welcoming banners to the new wave of British writers hitting our shores, I was off reading Gold Medal mysteries from the fifties and drooling over copies of Harry Whittington's LOVE CULT and Charles Williams' THE DIAMOND BIKINI.My priorities may have been a bit skewed, but listen, I finally pulled my head out of the dim recesses of the hole-in-the-wall second-hand bookshops and started spending more time perusing the specialty stores that carry real fire. We're talking about scorching books published by Headline, Silver Salamander Press, Razorblade, Vista, the Do Not Press, the late Tanjen, and Gargadillo. I'm here to join the meet-and-greet for the likes of Simon Clark, Graham Joyce, Mark Chadbourn, Tim Lebbon, and the whole slew of others.Most definitely including Steve Savile.Laughing Boy's Shadow is a novel without boundaries, one that spans genres and sub-genres. I mean, which space on the shelf do you fit into when you write about how the Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz cuts somebody's eyeballs out? Witness the breakdown of reality and sanity. Here you'll find outright horror merged to offbeat mystery, dark fantasy married with the bend of Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Manly Wade Wellman, and Lovecraft.The supernatural madness Declan Thomas Shea journeys into begins with a car accident in which he strikes an old man...Or does he?The doctors claim it was just a lamppost, but hell, we all know that something freaky is going on. Soon mental uncertainty turns into a hallucinatory atmosphere of mental uncertainty. Are we watching the descent into insanity, or the drop off an edge into a place even more horrifying?Laughing Boy's Shadow explores those deep crevices of the soul and recesses of darkness where so many fear to venture, showing us the gross and the grotesque, the fantastic and the evocative, even while holding high the magic and championing the exploration of wild fantasies and still more savage sins.So you think you've got a firm grip on the world?An unshakeably stable life?A perfectly realized line between the dark and the light?Turn the page and let Steve Savile show you just how wrong you are."***Hopefully what you've noticed by now is that while these streets are all mean, while they are laced with crime and horror, there's a huge spectrum of stories here, moments of the paranormal or outré, moments of ball-clenching fear, moments of dazzling imagination, and truly a diverse selection of dangerous territories…The initial titles in the bundle (minimum $5 to purchase) are:Carmody's Run by Bill PronziniSins of the Flash by David Niall WilsonSerpent's Kiss by Ed GormanFalling Apart At The Edges by Maynard SimsLaughing Boy's Shadow by Steven SavileTruth Lies Bleeding by Tony BlackIf you pay more than the bonus price of just $15, you'll get another five titles:Cabal by Clive BarkerThe Innocent by Sean BlackDown River by Stephen GallagherNightjack by Tom PiccirilliBrotherhood of the Rose by David MorrellThe bundle is available for a very limited time only, via http://www.storybundle.com. It allows easy reading on computers, smartphones, and tablets as well as Kindle and other ereaders via file transfer, email, and other methods. You get multiple DRM-free formats (.epub and .mobi) for all books!It's also super easy to give the gift of reading with StoryBundle, thanks to our gift cards – which allow you to send someone a code that they can redeem for any future StoryBundle bundle – and timed delivery, which allows you to control exactly when your recipient will get the gift of StoryBundle.Why StoryBundle? Here are just a few benefits StoryBundle provides.Get quality reads: We've chosen works from excellent authors to bundle together in one convenient package.Pay what you want (minimum $5): You decide how much these fantastic books are worth to you. If you can only spare a little, that's fine! You'll still get access to a batch of exceptional titles.Support authors who support DRM-free books: StoryBundle is a platform for authors to get exposure for their works, both for the titles featured in the bundle and for the rest of their catalog. Supporting authors who let you read their books on any device you want—restriction free—will show everyone there's nothing wrong with ditching DRM.Give to worthy causes: Bundle buyers have a chance to donate a portion of their proceeds to charity. We're currently featuring Mighty Writers and Girls Write Now.Receive extra books: If you beat our bonus price, you're getting eleven total books!StoryBundle was created to give a platform for independent authors to showcase their work, and a source of quality titles for thirsty readers. StoryBundle works with authors to create bundles of ebooks that can be purchased by readers at their desired price. Before starting StoryBundle, Founder Jason Chen covered technology and software as an editor for Gizmodo.com and Lifehacker.com.


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THE MEAN STREETS BUNDLE Great bargains!

THE MEAN STREETS BUNDLE
Curated by Steven SavileWhen we were first mulling over the name of this bundle, Mean Streets, I had a very focused vision on what I thought it was going to be. I'd just finished working on the collaboration with Prodigy (the hip-hop artist from Mobb Deep's The Infamous fame, not the Firestarter) HNIC and was thinking very much edgy and dark stuff, hardcore, maybe not the poets of our generation but certainly a voice for a slice of society that's been disenfranchised by the system of living. It was a great starting place, the back alleys of Brooklyn Heights or Across Hundred and Tenth Street into Harlem, but they aren't the only mean streets. What we've got here, we're talking the pheromones of the city, the detritus of a nation. We're talking about the criminal elements that move and shake just below the surface, unseen but everyone is aware they're there… We're talking seminal TV shows like The Wire and The Shield. We're talking about outcasts forced to live hard or die harder. We're talking about the Lone Ranger or Shane riding into town and fix that shit even as it explodes all around them. We're talking primarily about heroes and villains where the cities they do battle in are as important as any character.The first book I picked for this bundle, Stephen Gallagher's Down River, is one of those books that made me want to be a writer. Hell, I think I emulated if not outright copied elements of it for a dozen (unpublished and never to be published) stories. I make no bones about it, I adore this man's work. On any list of favourite authors I've written down from the age of 19 (when I first discovered his novel Rain) right up until today, Steve would be one of the first names down. You might not be familiar with his stuff. I could embarrass him by saying he wrote the Warrior's Gate and Terminus episodes of the classic Doctor Who era (Staring Tom Baker and Peter Davison respectively), or talk about the pure excitement in the Savile household reading copies of FEAR MAGAZINE in preparation for the release of his first creator-driven show Chimera, which was something of an event for a fanboy like me… I could mention The Eleventh Hour TV show with Captain Picard at the helm in the UK and Rufus Sewell playing Hood in the US, or the reimagining of Robinson Crusoe from a few years back, or that short lived Christian Slater vehicle, The Forgotten. If you're an anglophile I could mention some pretty devastating episodes of Silent Witness…But instead, I'll tell you a little story about the first time I met Steve. It was at a dealer table at a convention, and I'd got a copy of a signed limited edition of his short story collection in my hand. We'd talked a lot before this, even exchanged old fashioned letters, and he'd been in my anthology Redbrick Eden which raised money for homelessness in the UK, but this was the first time we'd seen each other face-to-face… and what sentence preceded that auspicious event? Me saying 'Jesus Christ, thirty five fucking quid for a book, that's ridiculous!' and a voice behind me saying 'I know… it's rather embarrassing, but I didn't set the price…' as you can imagine… I did a very good impression of the Incredible Shrinking Man at that point. Suffice it to say, Steve is top man, and a terrific writer. I read Down River, the story of Johnny Mays, back in 1989 and I have never forgotten it. That should tell you something very important about just how good this guy is.***The second book I picked for the bundle was an easy choice, Ed Gorman. I've never had the pleasure of meeting Ed, but I consider him right there with John D. McDonald, Robert B. Parker and Mickey Spillaine's Mike Hammer when it comes to crime fiction. Ed is the very definition of a writer's writer. He's nothing short of brilliant. When I emigrated back in 1997 I spent a few days in Copenhagen with nothing to read, but found this wonderful little bookstore that had a single rack of English paperbacks. That was where I met Ed for the first time. It was his first Robert Payne novel, Blood Moon. I read it in a single sitting and ran around the city looking for anything else by the guy. I was hooked. That summer I read no less than fifty Ed Gorman novels, and every single one of them paid off. Seriously. There wasn't a single one of them I came away from thinking, well, that was okay. Ed leapt straight to the top of my oh my god I want to be him when I grow up charts… It was incredibly difficult to choose one of his books for this bundle, I wanted them all. I kept thinking Payne, hook you the same way I was hooked… but in the end, picked The Serpent's Kiss, which I think may very well be Ed's finest novel. It was a tough call, believe me, but in keeping with the notion of those gritty noiresque mean streets, it's the one that best matches my vision for this set – a small town being ripped apart at the seams by a serial killer.***I'm throwing in a curveball on number three, Clive Barker's Cabal, which is in many regards a perfect horror novel, the story of Boone and the Nightbreed. So how can this be 'mean streets' you ask? Boone's an outsider, he doesn't fit in anywhere but he's heard of this place, Midian, where the monsters are welcome. Midian itself is a powerful feature of the novel, really taking centre stage along with its monstrous cast. It's very much a novel of its time and could be read as an allegory, the monsters having a different kind of blood that marks them as outsiders, they're tainted, and there's a killer hunting them, looking to wipe them out. It's not hard to see this as a novel of fear and revulsion from the community at large against the gay community and the killer that was the all-terrifying AIDS back in what we can call less-enlightened days. But that's selling Cabal incredibly short. It's so much more than that. It's an incredibly tight novel, unlike the sprawling fantasies that came directly before and after it, and yet it has more imagination in it, and more visceral fear than both of them combined. There aren't any meaner streets in the world than those of Midian… believe me. And with the long awaited Scarlet Gospels finally appearing next month this is the perfect introduction to the great imaginer of my generation.***Sean Black's long been a favourite of mine, and, I confess, has become a friend thanks to the joys of the internet. I was on a Jack Reacher kick, and looking around for anything and everything that would satisfy that Lone Ranger need when a friend of mine, Jeremy Dunns, mentioned Sean's Ryan Locke series. I'd just bought a dozen Robert Crais novels and devoured them, one a night, during a lazy summer vacation and was trying to decide what next, when I saw the first Ryan Locke novel, Lockdown, pop up on the 'also boughts' on my Kindle and thought, what the hell, it's not hideously expensive, I'll give it a shot. Now, it must have been around midnight and I was looking to read maybe 2-3 chapters before going to sleep. I didn't go to sleep that night. I kept on reading and reading and reading… compulsively… bought the second and third the next day… then had to wait a year for the fourth to appear. What's great about them is they're all perfect entry points into the series. Book four though… that's how me and Sean first met. It's another me and my big mouth thing… I was chatting with Matt Hilton, another great exponent of the Lone Ranger genre of crime fighting, and happened to say how fucking furious I was about a scene in the book I'd just read… naming the author and the scene… and why I wanted to throw the Kindle out of the window. I made a very good case for why I thought it was a terrible call as a writer… and who popped up to say he agreed with all my points… but…? Yeah, Sean. See, me, I've got social skills… heh. Trust me, this guy's compulsively readable, and it's a massive honour to have the very latest Ryan Locke novel in this bundle, believe me.***The next one… I don't have any cute-meet story… but I can tell you how Tony Black came to my attention. It's not what you'd expect. James Grant, the lead singer of one of my favourite 80s bands, Love & Money, served as go-between. He never actually said, hey, Steve, meet Tony, though we're both friends of James'. Actually, I was watching the video for James' song My Father's Coat (which you can see here) and as you'll note in the description it stars tartan noir superstar Tony Black… yep, Tony Black, author of some of the very best Scottish crime of the last decade—and you don't get meaner than the streets of Edinburgh, where Truth Lies Bleeding is set. Want to know how good this guy is? Irvine Welsh (remember Trainspotting?) has called him his "favourite British crime writer". That's some high praise. His streets are the very definition of mean, but he shines a stark light on the sins of the city, and no crime goes unpunished in his world. You're in for a treat. Me, every time I go back to Edinburgh (which is only about an hour from where I grew up) I look over my shoulder. That's down to these tartan noir chaps.***Bill Pronzini's novel Carmody's Run might well be considered the template for a generation of Jack Reachers and Joe Pullers. Pronzini's most well known creation is the Nameless Detective series, but before that there was Carmody, a sometimes detective who also works as a freelance bodyguard and smuggler, operating off the Mediterranean island of Majorca. We're talking streets riddled with thieves, smugglers, murderers, and other desperate men. As Kirkus said, in Carmody's world, "The women are sexy, the villains blackhearted ("The best kind of day—one filled with bright green money and bright red blood"), and the action fast and fleshed out with some shading of Carmody's stony character."***Tom Piccirilli is one of the quiet gems of both crime and the supernatural. I've been a fan of his very dark fiction of a long time; the guy has a poet's soul. That makes the nastier aspects of his work all the more dazzling, because when you can describe the macabre so incredibly viscerally, with so much poetry, the horrors stay with you much longer. Over the last couple of years Pic's made a name for himself in the crime world with books like The Last Kind Words, but I first read him a decade before, when he was making his breakthrough with novels for Leisure's horror line, including Hexes which was one mind-fuck of a novel, to be blunt. But something happened around the time Pic wrote A Choir of Lost Children. He went from being good to being brilliant. Nightjack is right there with his best.***Now, I'm going to break from character here and basically tell you why you need to buy this bundle, and just how it can make a difference in a man's life. Several years ago Pic put this post on Facebook: "tWO WORDS, BITCCHES: brain tumor! gOING IN FOR FIVE HOURS OF SURGERY ON mONDAY TO REMOVE A TENNIS BAL-SIZED GROWTH. tHEN icu FOR RADIATION AND CHEMO FOR A FEW WEEKS. NO AY DO I JUST GET CANCER, NO MOFOS, I GET BRAIN CANCER!"Well, Pic beat it. Survived the surgeries, the radiation and chemo and came up cancer free. It was brilliant news for everyone who knows and likes him as a guy, for his wife and family, I mean he's a young guy, this kind of thing is beyond being a bitch, but he won.Only he didn't. Less than two weeks ago Pic's wife announced that the brain tumor had returned and with it the nightmare of medical bills. I don't mind saying that despite adoring Pic's writing I think he's a pretty fantastic guy and every single bundle we sell goes towards making some cash for him in a time of desperate need. So there's that.***Back into character… Maynard Sims… or Len and Mick to me, being a couple of my oldest friends, are pretty important characters in the career of Young Sav. Way back, they bought a story of mine, Painting Blue Murders, which may have been my second or third sale, I'm not 100% sure. I'd written it as a competition entry for The Horror Writer's Association and won (I think) second prize… which was to be Tuckerized by Robert Walker, which is why if you ever pick up his novel Blind Instinct, you'll encounter a one-legged leacherous copper's narc, Steve Savile, from Stockholm… yeah, be careful what you wish for hah! Len and Mick published it in their magazine Enigmatic Tales, then went and bought a chapbook from me, containing what is still one of my favourite stories, Remember Me Yesterday. So, yeah, we go back… way back. But to most people their inclusion here will be a bit of a surprise as they're better known for creeping dread and ghostly tales, but they're versatile writers to say the least, and over the last couple of years have turned their hands to crime, and using their dark imaginations to really offer up that famous Brit Grit.***This next one, I can't quite believe I'm getting to introduce the Father of Rambo, but that's exactly what David Morrell is, amongst so many other things. I'm not going to talk about First Blood. I'm going to digress, because I can. When I was fifteen years old my dad came into my bedroom with a battered—and I mean falling apart, glue gone, pages poking out of the binding—copy of a book he'd just finished reading. Dad wasn't one for lending me books. The first time he'd tried it had been with Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, as he wanted to impress upon this Star Wars loving geek kid that money was important and for God's sake give up those hair-brained ideas about being a writer… the second had been The Totem by David Morrell, and he'd had a lot more luck with that one. He'd brought it in and put it on my desk, simply saying "I think you might like this one." Not if he'd enjoyed it, not any sales pitch as to why it was better than thinking and growing into a corporate Fat Cat. Just I think you might like this one. So I did what all stubborn kids do, I didn't read it. I was stuck reading Henry IV part one and Great Expectations for school, some Nevil Schute and another book about naval warship in trouble that I forget. Suffice it to say, with exams and my English teacher leaning on me to turn out for the First Eleven Cricket team and the Second Eleven (because I my age I could play in the juniors) I wasn't getting time to study let alone read for fun… and somehow the book ended up at the bottom of my bookcase, ignored.Weirdly, I didn't pick up another Morrell for fifteen years… and I know it was fifteen years because it was my 30th birthday. At the party my mate Patric and I stood in the corner not mingling, just chatting about stuff, and he started to tell me this incredible story he'd been reading—which just happens to be the novel presented here, Brotherhood of the Rose—and after about fifteen minutes of spoilers he finally says, "Hell, I'll just lend you the book when I'm done…" He couldn't remember the name of the author, so it wasn't until another very battered paperback turned up on my desk at work the next day that I realized with a wry smile that David Morrell was coming back into my life. It felt like a sign, twice people had brought these battered books and said I'd love them, how many times did I need the universe to hit me over the head with it?Sometimes the universe is smart like that.David Morrell was an author I needed to be reading.He's also an author you need to be reading, so if you haven't encountered him yet, all I can say is I am jealous. There's nothing like discovering a truly magnificent novel for the first time.***Which only leaves David Niall Wilson, who is one of my oldest friends in this game, a terrifically talented chap, and co-writer with yours truly on a weird western, Hallowed Ground, which came about because of a typo, where my novella Hollow Earth, was referred to constantly as Hallowed Earth then Hollow Ground by both Dave and the publisher, and through some quirk of fate it turned out that Hallowed Ground was one of our favourite songs – though mine was by The Alarm and his was by Depeche Mode… so it was only natural we sit down to write something of that name… of course I thought we were writing a novel set in central park with a modern day snake oil salesman/preacher guy, Dave thought we were writing in the Old West… funny how we always seemed to see the same things completely differently, but that made for a great time collaborating as it became an adventure. And as with the best collabs, what came out was something that neither one of us would have written on our own. Sins of the Flash has had a tortured history, but it's one wonderful novel, and that cover, seriously, how beautiful is that?***I feel weird about introducing myself, so instead I'm going to use a very short piece one of the bundle members wrote for the book – but was never published – Tom Piccirilli."Okay, so I admit it...I came late to the party.While you were all down at the beach doing the right thing, waving welcoming banners to the new wave of British writers hitting our shores, I was off reading Gold Medal mysteries from the fifties and drooling over copies of Harry Whittington's LOVE CULT and Charles Williams' THE DIAMOND BIKINI.My priorities may have been a bit skewed, but listen, I finally pulled my head out of the dim recesses of the hole-in-the-wall second-hand bookshops and started spending more time perusing the specialty stores that carry real fire. We're talking about scorching books published by Headline, Silver Salamander Press, Razorblade, Vista, the Do Not Press, the late Tanjen, and Gargadillo. I'm here to join the meet-and-greet for the likes of Simon Clark, Graham Joyce, Mark Chadbourn, Tim Lebbon, and the whole slew of others.Most definitely including Steve Savile.Laughing Boy's Shadow is a novel without boundaries, one that spans genres and sub-genres. I mean, which space on the shelf do you fit into when you write about how the Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz cuts somebody's eyeballs out? Witness the breakdown of reality and sanity. Here you'll find outright horror merged to offbeat mystery, dark fantasy married with the bend of Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Manly Wade Wellman, and Lovecraft.The supernatural madness Declan Thomas Shea journeys into begins with a car accident in which he strikes an old man...Or does he?The doctors claim it was just a lamppost, but hell, we all know that something freaky is going on. Soon mental uncertainty turns into a hallucinatory atmosphere of mental uncertainty. Are we watching the descent into insanity, or the drop off an edge into a place even more horrifying?Laughing Boy's Shadow explores those deep crevices of the soul and recesses of darkness where so many fear to venture, showing us the gross and the grotesque, the fantastic and the evocative, even while holding high the magic and championing the exploration of wild fantasies and still more savage sins.So you think you've got a firm grip on the world?An unshakeably stable life?A perfectly realized line between the dark and the light?Turn the page and let Steve Savile show you just how wrong you are."***Hopefully what you've noticed by now is that while these streets are all mean, while they are laced with crime and horror, there's a huge spectrum of stories here, moments of the paranormal or outré, moments of ball-clenching fear, moments of dazzling imagination, and truly a diverse selection of dangerous territories…The initial titles in the bundle (minimum $5 to purchase) are:Carmody's Run by Bill PronziniSins of the Flash by David Niall WilsonSerpent's Kiss by Ed GormanFalling Apart At The Edges by Maynard SimsLaughing Boy's Shadow by Steven SavileTruth Lies Bleeding by Tony BlackIf you pay more than the bonus price of just $15, you'll get another five titles:Cabal by Clive BarkerThe Innocent by Sean BlackDown River by Stephen GallagherNightjack by Tom PiccirilliBrotherhood of the Rose by David MorrellThe bundle is available for a very limited time only, via http://www.storybundle.com. It allows easy reading on computers, smartphones, and tablets as well as Kindle and other ereaders via file transfer, email, and other methods. You get multiple DRM-free formats (.epub and .mobi) for all books!It's also super easy to give the gift of reading with StoryBundle, thanks to our gift cards – which allow you to send someone a code that they can redeem for any future StoryBundle bundle – and timed delivery, which allows you to control exactly when your recipient will get the gift of StoryBundle.Why StoryBundle? Here are just a few benefits StoryBundle provides.Get quality reads: We've chosen works from excellent authors to bundle together in one convenient package.Pay what you want (minimum $5): You decide how much these fantastic books are worth to you. If you can only spare a little, that's fine! You'll still get access to a batch of exceptional titles.Support authors who support DRM-free books: StoryBundle is a platform for authors to get exposure for their works, both for the titles featured in the bundle and for the rest of their catalog. Supporting authors who let you read their books on any device you want—restriction free—will show everyone there's nothing wrong with ditching DRM.Give to worthy causes: Bundle buyers have a chance to donate a portion of their proceeds to charity. We're currently featuring Mighty Writers and Girls Write Now.Receive extra books: If you beat our bonus price, you're getting eleven total books!StoryBundle was created to give a platform for independent authors to showcase their work, and a source of quality titles for thirsty readers. StoryBundle works with authors to create bundles of ebooks that can be purchased by readers at their desired price. Before starting StoryBundle, Founder Jason Chen covered technology and software as an editor for Gizmodo.com and Lifehacker.com.For more information, visit our website at storybundle.com, Tweet us at  @storybundle , Like us on  Facebook , and Plus us on  Google Plus . For press inquiries, please email  press@storybundle.com .