Ed Gorman's Blog, page 44

Bargain of the Century: 20 Mystery Novels for Kindle $2.99

Bargain of the Century: 20 Mystery Novels for Kindle $2.99


A Murder of Mysteries: A Twenty-Novel eBook Bundle of Mystery and Suspense - Kindle edition by Bill Crider, Ed Gorman, William Bayer, Robert J. Randisi, T.J. MacGregor, Bill Pronzini, Dave Pedneau, David Niall Wilson, Patricia Lee Macomber, Raymond Benson. Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com. : Too Late to Die - by Bill Crider - Book 1 of the Dan Rhodes Mysteries Death is a Cabaret - by Deborah Morgan - Book 1 of the Antique Lover's Mysteries A. P. B. - by Dave Pedneau - Book 1 of the Whit Pynchon Mysteries Switch - by William Bayer - Book 1 of the Janek Series Blood Moon - by Ed Gorman - Book 1 of the Robert Payne Mystery Series The Turner Journals - by Robert J. Randisi - Book 1 of the Detective McQueen Series The Hanged Man - by T.J. MacGregor - Book 1 of the Mira Morales Series Pink Vodka Blues - by Neal Barrett, Jr. - Book 1 of the Blues Series Dead on the Island - by Bill Crider - Book 1 of the Truman Smith Mysteries A Hard Day's Death - by Raymond Benson - Book 1 of the Spike Berenger Rock 'N' Roll Mysteries Prophecy Rock - by Rob MacGregor - Book 1 of the Will Lansa Mysteries The Changing - by T.M. Wright - Book 1 of the Biergarten Series A Minor Case of Murder - by Jeff Markowitz - Book 1 of the Cassie O'Malley Mysteries Sins of the Flash - by David Niall Wilson Case File - by Bill Pronzini - part of the Bill Pronzini Mystery Collection Rough Cut - by Ed Gorman - Book 1 of the Jack Dwyer Mystery Series Murder, Sometimes - by Patricia Lee Macomber - Book 1 of the Jason Callahan Mysteries Tango Key - by T.J. MacGregor - Book 1 of the Tango Key Mysteries One Dead Dean - by Bill Crider - Book 1 of the Carl Burns Mysteries Tangier - by William Bayer - Book 1 of the Foreign Detective Series

Ben Boulden's Gravetapping: Nowhere to Run by Ron Faust

NOWHERE TO RUN by Ron FaustBen Boulden
Ed here: Ben's long overview on Ron Faust's career is a excellent take on an ignored and misunderstood career.
Here's Ben:
Ron Faust published 15 novels in a career that spanned nearly 40 years. The first, Tombs of Blue Ice, appeared in 1974 and the last, Jackstraw, was published posthumously in 2013. His work never gained the commercial success it deserved; maybe it was too atmospheric and literary for the genre crowd, and too plot-driven for the literati. Or maybe he didn’t put enough titles on the shelves, or maybe it was pure blind bad luck. Whatever the reason, his work is deserving of a revival.
Mr Faust’s work appeared in three distinct bursts. The first, and his most productive as far as number of titles published, was between 1974 and 1981. This period saw the publication of six novels, which tended to adventure with exotic locations and solitary heroes. Lean, beautiful, descriptive prose, linear storylines, and violence.
The final novel of this early writing period is titled Nowhere to Run, and its publication in 1981 would be Mr Faust’s last for 12 years. It is also one of a few Ron Faust novels I hadn’t read, until very recently, and while it isn’t as mature and ambitious as much of Mr Faust’s later work—In the Forest of the Night, When She Was Bad, etc.—it is an excellent adventure story with a strong sense of place, character, and a beautifully nuanced awareness of humanity.
David Rhodes is something of a bum. He was a professional tennis player, ranked as high as 147 in the world, living illegally in the Mexican coastal town of El Jardin de los Reyes, Garden of the Kings. He makes a meager living teaching tennis and raiding lobster traps. In the beginning, he meets an American girl who calls herself Strawberry Lassitude—
“Her eyes seemed illuminated from within. They were bright and metallic with craziness.”
—who is later found strangled at the bottom of a rocky cliff. The local police, in the form of one Captain Vigil, are desperate to solve the murder in a manner to reassure the town’s primary economic driver: tourism. Specifically, American tourists. The simplest solution. One American killing another, and, better, the killer an illegal guest of the seaside town, which makes David the ideal suspect.
Nowhere to Run is stylistically flashy, thematically subtle, and plotted for surprise. The natural, smooth flow of language is beautiful in its sparse and rich tones. It equally defines the characters, the landscape, and the story.
“Vigil half turned in his chair, raised a hand, and when the waiter arrived he ordered two more bottles of the mineral water. He smiled at David. He was not an ugly man until he smiled.”
“Brown pelicans folded their wings and made clumsy crosswind landings in the troughs between waves. The tops of the coconut palms were greenly incandescent in the sunlight but it was cool and dim in the shade below. Here, there was a soothing opacity, a rippling underwater sheen, while beyond the grove of trees the morning sun glazed the air and slowly devoured the shadows it had created.”
Nowhere to Run is simple, or appears so at its surface. The tale is straightforward—murder, man accused, and, after much turmoil, killer exposed—but its simplicity is misleading. The story is dependent less on plot than character. The actions of the characters, and the motive for those actions, are dominant and the plot becomes a rational extension to that dominance rather than the characters a prisoner of the plot. Its language is sharp, almost poetic in its descriptive prowess, and its building blocks are human morality, psychology, and frailty. The psychology, and morality, and frailty, are summarized quite nicely in the closing pages—
“He had spent most of that evening in the lounge of the Hotel El Presidente, drinking and playing liar’s poker with a couple of his pals. They had gambled with one-hundred-peso notes and Harry had lost about forty dollars. Not much money, but enough to sour his mood a little; he had never learned how to accept losing, hated it, regarded it as a little death—every time you lost, whether a dime or an argument or what the Asians call face, a chip was taken out of your self-esteem and you entered the next contest with that much less confidence. Losing was an accumulative poison like lead or arsenic; small doses did not appear to cause much harm, but they collected and in time…”
Nowhere to Run was originally published as a paperback original Fawcett Gold Medal in 1981, and it is currently available from Turner Publishing as a trade paperback and ebook. The essay “Ron Faust: An UnforgettableWriter” provides a bibliography and a little detail about Mr Faust’s work. 


Ron Faust published 15 novels in a career that spanned nearly 40 years. The first, Tombs of Blue Ice, appeared in 1974 and the last, Jackstraw, was published posthumously in 2013. His work never gained the commercial success it deserved; maybe it was too atmospheric and literary for the genre crowd, and too plot-driven for the literati. Or maybe he didn’t put enough titles on the shelves, or maybe it was pure blind bad luck. Whatever the reason, his work is deserving of a revival.
Mr Faust’s work appeared in three distinct bursts. The first, and his most productive as far as number of titles published, was between 1974 and 1981. This period saw the publication of six novels, which tended to adventure with exotic locations and solitary heroes. Lean, beautiful, descriptive prose, linear storylines, and violence.
The final novel of this early writing period is titled Nowhere to Run, and its publication in 1981 would be Mr Faust’s last for 12 years. It is also one of a few Ron Faust novels I hadn’t read, until very recently, and while it isn’t as mature and ambitious as much of Mr Faust’s later work—In the Forest of the Night, When She Was Bad, etc.—it is an excellent adventure story with a strong sense of place, character, and a beautifully nuanced awareness of humanity.
David Rhodes is something of a bum. He was a professional tennis player, ranked as high as 147 in the world, living illegally in the Mexican coastal town of El Jardin de los Reyes, Garden of the Kings. He makes a meager living teaching tennis and raiding lobster traps. In the beginning, he meets an American girl who calls herself Strawberry Lassitude—
“Her eyes seemed illuminated from within. They were bright and metallic with craziness.”
—who is later found strangled at the bottom of a rocky cliff. The local police, in the form of one Captain Vigil, are desperate to solve the murder in a manner to reassure the town’s primary economic driver: tourism. Specifically, American tourists. The simplest solution. One American killing another, and, better, the killer an illegal guest of the seaside town, which makes David the ideal suspect.
Nowhere to Run is stylistically flashy, thematically subtle, and plotted for surprise. The natural, smooth flow of language is beautiful in its sparse and rich tones. It equally defines the characters, the landscape, and the story.
“Vigil half turned in his chair, raised a hand, and when the waiter arrived he ordered two more bottles of the mineral water. He smiled at David. He was not an ugly man until he smiled.”
“Brown pelicans folded their wings and made clumsy crosswind landings in the troughs between waves. The tops of the coconut palms were greenly incandescent in the sunlight but it was cool and dim in the shade below. Here, there was a soothing opacity, a rippling underwater sheen, while beyond the grove of trees the morning sun glazed the air and slowly devoured the shadows it had created.”
Nowhere to Run is simple, or appears so at its surface. The tale is straightforward—murder, man accused, and, after much turmoil, killer exposed—but its simplicity is misleading. The story is dependent less on plot than character. The actions of the characters, and the motive for those actions, are dominant and the plot becomes a rational extension to that dominance rather than the characters a prisoner of the plot. Its language is sharp, almost poetic in its descriptive prowess, and its building blocks are human morality, psychology, and frailty. The psychology, and morality, and frailty, are summarized quite nicely in the closing pages—
“He had spent most of that evening in the lounge of the Hotel El Presidente, drinking and playing liar’s poker with a couple of his pals. They had gambled with one-hundred-peso notes and Harry had lost about forty dollars. Not much money, but enough to sour his mood a little; he had never learned how to accept losing, hated it, regarded it as a little death—every time you lost, whether a dime or an argument or what the Asians call face, a chip was taken out of your self-esteem and you entered the next contest with that much less confidence. Losing was an accumulative poison like lead or arsenic; small doses did not appear to cause much harm, but they collected and in time…”
Nowhere to Run was originally published as a paperback original Fawcett Gold Medal in 1981, and it is currently available from Turner Publishing as a trade paperback and ebook. The essay “Ron Faust: An UnforgettableWriter” provides a bibliography and a little detail about Mr Faust’s work. 

treat for the day rundgren & oates sing can we still be friends

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Richard Powers' Pulp Surrealism

Richard Powers’s Pulp Surrealismfrom The Daily Beast
Ed here: One of the great pleasures of my science fiction years was staring in awe at the latest Richard Powers sf cover. He was a true master.
In the first installment of a series celebrating book cover art and design, Mark Dery introduces the ’50s sci fi mash-ups (Dali meets Asimov) of the extraordinary Richard Powers.Haunted moonscapes. Alien cenotaphs whose shadows stretch from here to forever, tracing the geometry of dreams. Emissaries from the unconscious, their features running like melting wax. Cancerous cities a trillion light years from now, the undifferentiated growth of their lumpy, tumorous sprawl now silent, still as a fumigated wasp’s nest. Richard M. Powers’s science-fiction book-jacket landscapes are usually depopulated but not always: sometimes, a splinter of a man—an inch-high relative of one of Giacometti’s stick figures—stands alone in the emptiness, contemplating infinity.Richard Michael Gorman Powers (1921-1996) was the Yves Tanguy of the pop unconscious. By the ’50s, publishers who just a decade earlier had scoffed at the suggestion that Americans would be caught dead reading cheap, paperbound books were doing a land-office business in the things. Robert de Graff had launched the paperback revolution with his Pocket Books in 1939 and now publishers like Jason Epstein at Doubleday and Ian and Betty Ballantine at Ballantine Books were in the thick of it. In one of those conjunctions of commerce and art that make this nation of grifters, pitchmen, and mountebanks great, paperback publishers understood that a mass audience whose returning vets were going to college on the G.I. bill—a mass audience that would buy 2,862,792 copies of Pocket’s Five Great Tragedies by Shakespeare—was sophisticated enough to be put off by the lurid covers publishers were slapping on their wares. The time was right for visual seduction that, while still doing the job of selling books, elevated book-jacket illustration to a popular art form, using the four-by-seven cover as its canvas.
Ballantine BooksThe Ballantines believed in science fiction as a literature of ideas, not gadget porn for ham-radio buffs, so when they opened their doors in 1952 they thought of Powers. His modernist sensibility, steeped in things seen at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, set him apart from the pulp-magazine style—astronauts rippling their pectorals at bug-eyed aliens while space babes cowered in fear—that had dominated the genre for decades. “One of the things that appealed to me about science fiction,” he says, in The Art of Richard Powers , “is that it was possible to do Surrealist paintings that had validity ... in their own right, and not necessarily functioning as the cover of a book.”
Initially, he paid lip service to genre conventions, sneaking his modernist sympathies in by the side door, as gaseous, abstract backgrounds for rocketships and space cadets. But as soon as he saw what he’d gotten away with, he upped the ante. His cover for Childhood’s End (1953) by Arthur C. Clarke was an industry game-changer: who knew SF readers would snap up a book whose cover features a reptilian god’s eye in a pulsating, blood-red sky, a naked man caught in its pitiless gaze? In his jacket art for A Case of Conscience (1958) by James Blish, Powers pushed the envelope of mass taste (and sales-rep tolerance) even further: a generic guy in a black suit (the priest in the story, presumably) stands, hands clasped, head bowed; a tangle of spatters and blobs writhes overhead. The contrast between the clip-art man and the Jackson Pollock nebula, or whatever it is, is startling, to say the least. In 1958, it must have been a mind-scrambler.
for the rest go here:
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Marvin Lachman on Chain of Witnesses by Phyllis Bentley

A mystery reader since 1943, Marvin Lachman is co-author of the Edgar-winning Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection (1976). His A Reader’s Guide to the American Novel of Detection (1993) was nominated for the Edgar, Anthony, Agatha, and Macavity Awards. Marv's The American Regional Mystery(2000) won the Macavity Award.  His The Heirs of Anthony Boucher: A History of Mystery Fandom (2005) won the Anthony Award. Marv's latest book,The Villainous Stage, a history of crime plays on Broadway and in London's West End, was published by McFarland in 2014.

FROM CRIPPEN & LANDRU PUBLISHERS
Tell us about Phyllis Bentley1. At a time when it was unusual for women to obtain a college degree, Bentley received a B.A. from the University of London in 1914. She was unhappy as a teacher and worked for the Ministry of Defense during World War I and also was a volunteer ambulance driver then. She had long wanted to be a writer and in a tradition still being followed today, she self-published a collection of short stories with money borrowed from her family. She lived in Yorkshire and mostly wrote about that region of England.
2. Did she have a following as a detective novelist?
2. She never did become a detective novelist. She only wrote one crime novel, a Gothic suspense story. She also wrote a juvenile mystery that was nominated for an Edgar. Her detective writing consisted almost entirely of short stories.

3. What were her strengths as a writer?
3. Her strengths as a mystery writer were her ability to plant physical and psychological clues leading to a fair and interesting solution. She wrote of believable settings.
4. Was she in the mainstream of UK mystery writers?
4. She was virtually unknown in the mystery world in the UK in the 1930s. She wrote a few detective stories and Frederic Dannay as the editor of EQMM read one of these, which he enjoyed. He encouraged her to write and submit more stories to EQMM. She eventually had 24 stories published there, most after the mid-1950s.
5. What about her detective?
5. Her series detective Miss Phipps displays a deep knowledge of human nature, allowing her to help her friend Detective-Inspector Tarrant to solve many of his cases. Many of her cases depend upon a fair-play presentation of evidence that allows the perceptive mystery reader an opportunity to arrive at the solution before Miss Phipps.
6. Did she write till late in her life?
6. She did write until late in life, but mainly the Miss Phipps stories and juvenile novels during her last ten years.
7.  If you were to recommend her to casual mystery readers what would you say? 
7. Since I assume that even “casual” mystery readers know Miss Marple, I would say, “If you like Miss Marple, you’ll like Miss Phipps.” Having said that, I’d also say that I think Phipps is a more fully realized character, one with a sense of humor who does not suffer fools gladly. The settings for the Phipps stories are more varied, including theaters, art festivals, and movie sets. She even visits the United States in at least one story.

Thanks very much, Marvin Lachman.

Lost Classics of Noir: Whip Hand by W. Franklin Sanders (and/or Charles Willeford) BRIAN GREENE

Lost Classics of Noir: Whip Hand by W. Franklin Sanders (and/or Charles Willeford)BRIAN GREENE  FROM CRIMINAL ELEMENT
In case you’re confused by the author credit in the heading here, let me just say that I join you in your befuddlement. This 1961 noir novel was originally published as a Fawcett Gold Medal paperback original, with W. Franklin Sanders tagged as the writer. But over time it came to be revealed that Charles Willeford wrote some, if not all, of the book. Sanders may have been his co-author, but then Sanders may have also been a make-believe person. If you’re interested in reading up on that intrigue, there is no shortage of material available on the web. I’m going to leave that subplot alone and just focus on the book, which is a gem of a read.
But first a couple words on Willeford. I doubt I need to sell many readers of this site on the merits of his writing. Some Willeford fans might think of his Hoke Moseley series as his finest work, while others might prefer his earlier titles such as Cockfighter (1962) or The Burnt Orange Heresy (1971). Of the Willeford books I’ve read, it’s his second novel, Pick-Up (1955), that I value the most. When I first started this column, I drew up a shortlist (well, it was actually long) of books I might cover, and Pick-Up was among those. I haven’t gotten around to writing an appreciation of it, and maybe I never will for this series, as I have purposely been avoiding covering the same writer twice, in order to spread the hardboiled love. In any case, Pick-Up is a hell of a noir novel. If you like this kind of stuff and haven’t read it, do so. And while you’re at it, read the one I’m about to discuss; because whether it was written by Willeford or this Sanders guy, or some combination of the two of them, it’s pure.
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BOOKMARK

A letter from David Vineyard in Mystery-File

April 3rd, 2015 at 12:53 amYes, I mean Deaver, sorry that wasn’t clear.We’ve talked about this but there is something missing in many of todays best known writers, some quality I can’t quote define, that won’t let me get into them or their work even when it is interesting.They seem to hold me at arms length as a reader as if they are only letting the reader so far in so that reading them is like wading in the baby pool when you want to go in over your head with the full experience.In some cases they are better writers technically than the ones who I may have read earlier, but they don’t involve me. The characters seem to lack dimension and the there is something shallow that lesser writers from the past still managed to convey.I can’t get involved with a Patterson or Grisham, its all surface cleverness, but with no real depth even when the plot should be more involving at that level. I rely too much on the analogy, but too often the characters have no more depth that those on an average television series with even soap opera elements continuing from book to book not involving me.I was no fan of Dell Shannon as a writer or her politics, but Luis Mendoza, whether I liked him or not, had a kind of reality about him I see too seldom in books today. The same even for a writer as mechanical as Erle Stanley Gardner could be — at least in the later Mason’s.There is a conviction missing in too many of the big names writing that even minor writers seemed to capture in the past. Maybe because in the past they were writing books, and today you are getting screenplays with narrative too often.
Lately cinematic is no longer a compliment from me if they don’t also manage literary.

from Criminal Element:m The Obscure, Peculiar, and Clairvoyant Black Rainbow BRIAN GREENE

The Obscure, Peculiar, and Clairvoyant Black Rainbow BRIAN GREENE

Ed here: A minor favorite of mine--I'm a big Hodges fan



Brian GreeneI first watched the 1989 film Black Rainbow a few years ago, and I took an interest in the movie for three reasons: 1. It was directed by Mike Hodges. Hodges is the auteur behind what are, to me, two superbly-made films: 1971’s Get Carter and 1998’s Croupier. I’m up for seeing anything the guy directed. 2. It stars Rosanna Arquette. I have a soft spot for her, and not just because I think she’s pretty. I like her acting, particularly in John Sayles’ 1983 title Baby, It’s You and Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985). If she’s in a movie, I’m curious about it. 3. The film’s obscurity. You almost never hear or read anything about Black Rainbow, even in quarters where you might expect it to come under discussion. I’ve read lengthy overviews of Hodges’s career, that don’t even mention the film. It only got a limited theatrical run at the time of its release and doesn’t appear to have scored any notable rave reviews or awards nominations, but still... it’s a film directed by a living legend and that has a big-name star (two, actually, as Jason Robards plays another lead role). So I wanted to know why is it so forgotten despite all of that, and despite its having been released on DVD in 2004 and on VHS before that. [
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From Lev Levinson-Another Movie About Women

Lev Levinson:
I watched another movie about women last Sunday (3/29):   “Memoirs of a Geisha” released in 2005, directed by Rob Marshall from a novel of the same name by Arthur Golden, based on extensive interviews with surviving Geishas. 
This movie is haunting me - I can’t forget it - perhaps because it was so lushly exotic, representing an entirely different world from Western Civilization, beautifully photographed and with many powerful scenes.  The backdrop is Japan in the 1930s to late 1940s, which includes World War Two.  It can be considered historical drama although it’s also much more than that.
It tells of an eight-year-old girl Chiyo Sakamoto who is sold to a geisha house by her impoverished parents and trained to become a geisha.
The movie makes clear that geishas aren’t prostitutes per se.  They’re entertainers whose audiences consists of wealthy men in loveless arranged marriages who are looking for feminine companionship and hopefully a bit of romance.
The goal of every geisha is to become supported in grand style by a wealthy preferably royal patron with whom she hopefully falls in love.  These relationships are depicted as secondary marriages, similar to the old European custom of royal men in loveless arranged marriages maintaining long-term mistresses on the side.
A geisha house was an all female environment when men weren’t being entertained.  As depicted in this movie, sometimes the women are very supportive and sisterly to each other, which was lovely and quite touching to observe.  But unfortunately the women also could be vicious, exploitive, diabolical and vengeful to each other.  One geisha even sets fire to a building in the hope of incinerating a rival. 
Young girls training to be geishas are taught how to dress, apply cosmetics, singing, dancing, the tea ceremony, and how to conduct interesting conversations, which is to say they’re taught the art of diplomacy.  Girls needed above-average intelligence to become suitable companions for successful men, many of whom were royals with advanced educations.
Although geishas aren’t presented as prostitutes, their female owners auction the teenaged geishas’ virginities in order to recoup their investments.  The geishas compete with each other for the highest bids, to prove their desirability and superiority, like a boxer winning the heavyweight championship of the world.
Geishas “come out” like American debutantes.  Each is given a big party in which she must dance in a room full of men.  Chiyo’s coming out was the most smashing scene in the film for me.  Fully clothed in traditional style, her dance was nothing like ballet, Broadway chorus routines, thoroughly modern interpretive dance, or hootchy-kootchy burlesque dances.  Instead it consisted of weird highly stylized movements to strange (to American ears) music, dramatic lighting, and a background of what looked like undulating strips of red fabric.  I’ve never seen anything like it during my 42 years in New York City, where I attended all manner of dance programs.  It was enchanting, hypnotic, like teleportation to a strange land.
The movie also was a very complicated love story, but I won’t provide details because I don’t to spoil it for you.  I never heard of any of the Asian actresses and actors, all of whom were excellent.  I think it’s fair to say this was one of the best movies I’ve ever seen in my life, up there with “Gone With the Wind”, “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Apocalypse Now”.  I cannot recommend it highly enough.  Watching it was like living another incarnation.

from The Criminal Element Ed Gorman’s Relentless Western Noir EDWARD A. GRAINGER

Kindle 99 centsFree on Kindle Unlimited



Ed Gorman’s Relentless Western Noir EDWARD A. GRAINGER
Relentless by Ed Gorman was published in 2003 and has now been rereleased in eBook format through Rough Edges Press.As a marshal working in Skylar, Colorado, Lane Morgan sees it all and then some. His day has him separating two old timers with medical conditions to keep them from beating each other up, relaying the good news to an old woman that the county assessor is going to reappraise her property, and teaching a tinhorn hell-bent on being a shootist a valuable lesson. 
He even finds time to debunk the flourishing myths about a lawman’s occupation to the kids at the local school (being the 1890s, this is one of the first generations corrupted by the sensationalism of the dime novels) where his wife Callie is the schoolmarm. Lane Morgan is an honorable lawman trying to do what’s right in the waning days of the Old West. His life, more or less, is one of routine.
That’s about to change.
He’s scheduled to testify against the young, unprincipled Trent Webley who had tried to kill him. Should be easy enough except Trent’s father pretty much owns the town. But daddy Webley doesn’t own Lane Morgan, and the sheriff rejects a bribe of nearly $10,000. Webley then goes for the jugular by informing the sheriff that he had The Pinkerton’s dig up dirt on Callie’s first marriage to a lout named David Stanton.
The Pinkerton ruse fails. But Stanton, who is in Skylar under Webley’s employ, ends up murdered, and the evidence points close to Lane’s home when he finds blood stains on Callie’s dress and a button from her sleeve at the crime scene. Webley is one step ahead and threatens that he knows Callie had visited Stanton’s hotel room before the murder, and he can round up two witnesses to corroborate his account—even the wannabe shootist is claiming to have seen Callie exit the dead man’s room. Webley bullies, “How do you think all this would sound if the county attorney presented it to a grand jury, Marshal?”
The late Stanton had been quite the philanderer and was romancing a married woman named Sylvia Adams who had also visited him the night of his misfortune. Though she had strayed a time or two before, she’s no longer able to live with the thought of what she had done to her husband and two children. Lane approaches her but is unable to save the distraught woman from committing suicide.She was slumped over in a rocking chair. The six-shooter hung from two of her fingers, angled down across her bosom. She’d put the barrel to her temple. Not even death could destroy the small, perfect, almost doll-like features of her face. The eyes looked stunned and sad at the same time.
Now with at least three suspects having motive to kill Stanton—one of them being Lane’s wife— Gorman constructs tighter and tighter nooses for Lane Morgan to escape. For example, a lieutenant governor is due to visit, and the town council is more interested in settling matters before the VIP’s arrival than uncovering the truth. They give Lane twenty-four hours to solve the murder of David Stanton, but he doesn’t kowtow to their demands and abruptly resigns. Free, to an extent, of the shackles of the marshal’s office, Lane still has a murder to solve especially when his replacement almost immediately arrests Callie for her ex-husband’s death.
With Relentless, Gorman transcends the Western genre akin to what writer Jack Schaefer did with Monte Walsh and film director Robert Altman accomplished with McCabe & Mrs. Miller. No mythological posturing between these pages but real individuals on the edge with seemingly no way out. Ernest Hemingway said, “When writing a novel, a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.”
Ed Gorman writes living people. Their hopes and dreams and the high costs of turning a blind eye to social justice. Relentless doesn’t have a lot of action per se but that makes sense in this noir Western that eschews fabled clichés and instead builds strong, riveting passages in the formation of these desperate lives.To learn more about, or order a copy, visit:



Edward A. Grainger aka David Cranmer is the editor/publisher of the BEAT to a PULP webzine and books and the recent Western novella, Hell Town Shootout .Read all of Edward A. Grainger's posts for Criminal Element.
Historical Mysteries and Westerns Colorado | Ed Gorman | Marshal | Old and New WestRELATED POSTS
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6.06: "Alive Day"Subscribe to this conversation (must be logged in):<input type="submit" value="Submit" /> Individual - You will receive an alert for each comment added to this post.<input type="submit" value="Submit" /> Digest - You will receive an end-of-day alert for all comments added to this post.6 comments
1. BillCriderWEDNESDAY APRIL 01, 2015 08:05PM EDTEd Gorman's westerns are just as good as his crime novels, and Relentless is a great combination of both. Glad to see it getting some ink here.
2. EdwardAGrainger VIEW ALL BY EDWARDAGRAINGER | WEDNESDAY APRIL 01, 2015 08:20PM EDTI couldn't agree more, Bill. A fabulous mixture of both genres.
3. Evan LewisWEDNESDAY APRIL 01, 2015 08:38PM EDTDamn. Sounds good.
4. EdwardAGrainger VIEW ALL BY EDWARDAGRAINGER | THURSDAY APRIL 02, 2015 02:04AM EDTThis noir hit is out of the park, Evan.
5. matesTHURSDAY APRIL 02, 2015 09:21AM EDTMy son, Kyle, enjoyed reading Ed Gorman's "The End of It All" Short story collection.
6. EdwardAGrainger VIEW ALL BY EDWARDAGRAINGER | THURSDAY APRIL 02, 2015 10:27AM EDT"The End of It All" has some of the very best of Ed Gorman's writing. Stories that once again defy easy categorization. Good taste, Kyle!Post a commentNameEmail(<a href="http://newimprovedgorman.blogspot.com..." onclick="window.open('/page/481?tmpl=component', 'bbcode', 'menubar=0,resizable=1,scrollbars=1,width=500,height=650');return false;" target="_blank">bbCode</a> allowed):
    

   

  



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