Ed Gorman's Blog, page 48

nice girls gone bad Libby Fischer Hellmann

I Dear Ed,"Short stories are the poetry of prose. They are precise, cut to the bone, 
every word a necessity. Not many authors develop that control. Libby 
Fischer Hellmann has the hand of a master. Take it from a guy 
who knows her well: Libby is a nice girl. But she writes noir with a 
savvy edge honed on the hard, dark knowledge of the evil possible 
in us all." - William Kent KruegerWhile Kent's words are meant to be flattering, I do have to
 confess something: I love writing short stories. I often say t
hat a novel is like a marriage, but a short story is an affair: passionate, 
all-consuming, wonderful, and brief. So I've written lots of short stories, 
and continue to. I've collected fifteen of them in Nice Girl Does 
Noir. Volume I includes 
five Ellie Foreman and Georgia Davis stories; Volume II has
 ten stand-alone stories that span different territories, 
characters, and times. You'll find them all here.And if you'd like to know why I think writing short stories 
are critically important for a writer's career, take a look at this article.Reviews"I don't usually like short stories, but these are terrific! 
I roared through them. Hellmann had a good mix of Chicago 
historicals and contemporaries. My highest recommendation here."- Molly Weston, Meritorious Mysteries"When Hellmann explores the less sunlit areas of Chicago, 
 her canvas becomes not only more universal but has greater 
depth and emotional value. Aspiring short-story writers 
would do well to pay attention."- Naomi Johnson, The Drowning Machine

Howard Browne on Words and Writing

Howard Browne on Words and Writingfrom Pulp Serenade
Before he was writing Halo for Satan, Halo in Blood, and The Taste of Ashes, Howard Browne was like the rest of us (well, maybe his life was a little more colorful and exciting than mine -- ok, a lot more). In his own words, here is the inauspicious beginning of Howard Browne's career as a writer.
In 1937 I was in my early thirties, and I told my wife, "I'm going to be a rich and famous writer."
She laughed, saying, "You never finished high school . . . "
"I can read – I figure I can write," was my reply. I had read Jack Woodford's Trial and Error, a book about how to become a professional writer, in which he makes it look so easy, and he said the easiest people in the world to write for were the newspaper syndicates -- if you could spell correctly, they'd buy it.
I'd seen that in the Chicago Daily News they ran a daily short story -- a thousand words. I thought, lemme try it, I ought to be able to write a simple little plot, and I wrote a couple. I wrote them in longhand, but had my secretary type them up at the office. I sent them to Pat Lowry, and soon had a phone call telling me to come in and see him. I thought maybe I'd plagiarized something unconsciously, but I went in to see him. He said, "I'm buying these two stories, and I'll pay you $15 a piece, but don't write any more for me." The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.
I said, "Why not?"
He said, "You write too well for this market -- try the pulp magazines."
I went home and thought, "Pulps? Fuck that, I'll write a novel!" I'd been an avid reader of Edgar Rice Burroughs, so I thought, hell, I'll write a Tarzan story -- I know 'em backwards. But I had to prepare myself for it. I took his books and made lists of adjectives -- describing jungle, describing animals, action, etc. -- and I categorized them. So, if I'm writing and I want to describe the jungle, I turn to this list of fine adjectives -- I handled it like I'd handle a problem in school! And I wrote Warrior of the Dawn – it took me 52 Sundays, because that was the only day of the week I had the time to write. A local bookseller, Max Siegel, sent it to a publisher, and he got ahold of the publisher's reader's report, the opening line of which was: "Take the typewriter away from this man before he hurts himself." Now that doesn't exactly fill you with confidence! Then it got nasty. I could have killed the guy. His name was Lawrence Dwight Smith. Later on I wrote a book in which I killed off a Lawrence Dwight Favelle, so I got him.
--Howard Browne, "A Brief Memoir"

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Libby Fischer Hellman's Great Spring Sale

Hi Ed, 
Did you move your clocks forward for Daylight Savings Time this morning? Unfortunately, we still have snow on the ground in ChicagoBut if moving my clock forward will help spring get here any sooner, I'm all for it. 
In fact, I'm so excited about the prospect of warmer weather that I thought I'd have a sale: a Spring 
Forward Sale! For you, your friends and family, and everyone, I'm discounting two of my novels: Nobody's Child and Havana Lost for your reading pleasure. 

From today through next Friday (the 13th), Nobody's Child is just 99¢ at Amazon. Remember, Nobody's Child is the natural sequel to An Image Of Death (available for free on my  home page  if you haven't read it yet).  
And from March 13-29, Havana Lost will be just $1.99 also at Amazon.Hope you'll take advantage of the sale and enjoy the reads. Maybe by the time you've finished them, spring will REALLY be here...
Warmly, 
Libby
P.S. Join me tonight on  Second Sunday Crime  at 6 PM Central for a trip to Paris with author Cara Black!
P.S.S. If you're in Tucson next weekend, come on over to the Festival of Books and say, "Hi!"

one the the essentials Ron Goulart's An Informal History of Pulp Magazines

This is from: the geek library keithroysdon essential geek https://keithroysdon.wordpress.com/20...
By the time Ron Goulart’s “An Informal History of the Pulp Magazine” was published in 1972, the pulp magazine – the art form and industry that gave millions of readers cheap thrills on cheap pulp paper and gave us all such heroes as “The Shadow” and “Doc Savage” – was already more than two decades dead. In the 40 (!) years since the prolific Goulart’s book was published, “Pulp Fiction” has come to mean little more than a Quentin Tarantino film.But in 1972, when Goulart’s book came out, it was a bible to me, a look back into a colorful world of avenging heroes and penny-per-word writers that had been eclipsed by comic books.Here in Muncie, a bookstore – long gone now – had shelves and shelves of old pulp magazines, which were so named because of the rough-edged, cheap paper they were printed on. I never bought any, although I wanted to. But I couldn’t even begin to start.By the 1970s, I was enjoying the paperback reprints of pulp magazine stalwart Doc Savage, with those great James Bama covers, and that helped me appreciate the pulps in general and Goulart’s book.In a relatively slim volume, Goulart gives an overview of pulps but concentrates on the best and brightest, the pulps featuring Doc Savage – precursor to Superman – and the Shadow, one of Batman’s contemporaries and inspirations.Goulart gives us Tarzan and cowboys and detectives and jingoistic Yellow Peril villains and, best of all, a glimpse of the (mostly) men who created all those characters, working anonymously under pen names and turning out literally hundreds of novel-length yarns that were eagerly consumed by adventure-seeking readers.
Goulart interviewed many of the surviving writers and artists and even devotes the last chapter to their unfiltered memories.

Great essay on ON Dangerous Ground

On Dangerous Ground (1952)




Editor's note: This edition of Noir of the Week is by clyderfro. He has an amazing website devoted to classic films that shouldn't be missed.

Posted by clydefro
Superlatives are easy and get us nowhere. In intellectual property law, the dilution of a brand name to the point where it's synonymous with the actual product is commonly referred to as "genericide." The result is for the trademarked name to become essentially worthless, harboring no actual value due to its overuse. The same should go for sliced-out blurbs that deem something, often a movie, to be "great" or "amazing" or, heaven forbid, "powerful." If you hear these words enough, they lose any and all meaning. It tells us nothing aside from one person's struggle with a limited vocabulary of populist signal phrases.
If Nicholas Ray still made movies today, considering the vast number of blurb-happy reviewer monkeys, he'd have no problem rounding up a few eager admirers with bylines. Lot of good that does him now. Those guys were nary to be found during his time in Hollywood. When he started out at RKO in the late 1940's, audiences hardly noticed the unique auteur stamp he applied to his very best films. His debut  They Live by Night  sat on the shelf for months before getting a quiet, unnoticed release. Critics too were not entirely enthusiastic in his native country. If he had a champion among the American contingent of reviewers, I'm not aware of who it'd be. Years later, Andrew Sarris picked up the ball, but he didn't originate the play. Overseas, it was the French, specifically the lads at Cahiers du Cinema, who were responsible for elevating Ray to the status of major filmmaker. Jean-Luc Godard put Ray's Bitter Victory as his top film of 1957, ranked The Savage Innocents #2 in 1960, and had Bigger Than Life at number 7 in his list of the best American sound films that was published in the last issue of 1963. The periodical also put Johnny Guitar, Rebel Without a Cause and Bigger Than Life in its year-end top 10 lists. How did Ray fare stateside? He picked up an Oscar nod for Best Writing on Rebel in 1956. That's it. By the end of the decade he was done in Hollywood, essentially unemployable and on his way to a heart attack on the set of his last studio-financed film, 1963's 55 Days at Peking. He'd go on to teach at New York University, where his most famous alum was the director Jim Jarmusch, before succumbing to cancer in the summer of 1979.
The movies, of course, remain, and gloriously so. Ray's decade was the 1950's. You can look at and appreciate the output of Hitchcock or Billy Wilder or anyone from Sam Fuller to Douglas Sirk, but the '50s were Nick Ray's. No other director working in Hollywood was able to place America on the screen like Ray did. Our postwar fears, the veneer of happiness when disenchantment lurks barely beneath the surface, the basic decency we all struggle to maintain and the mistakes we're doomed to make - these subjects fascinated Ray and they reveal themselves in the subtext of all his best efforts. After They Live by Night, Ray got kicked around by RKO and eventually jumped to Columbia for a couple of Humphrey Bogart pictures. He made one of his best films there, arguably his masterpiece, with  In a Lonely Place  in 1950. He then returned to his home turf of Howard Hughes' RKO to helm On Dangerous Ground, inspired by a British novel by Gerald Butler called Mad with Much Heart, which Ray had read prior to filming  Born to Be Bad  in 1949.

for the rest go here:http://www.noiroftheweek.com/2008/11/...

"Don't Look Behind You" by Fredric Brown Gravetapping

by Ben Boulden Gravetapping
Justin and Harley operate a small printing shop on Amsterdam Ave in New York City. The two only take enough business to keep the facade of legitimacy in place, but their real business is the printing of counterfeit five- and ten-dollar bills. A business that is doing quite well until Harley is murdered in an Albany hotel and Justin is called in and held by the police. The cops seemingly care less about Harley’s murder and more about the counterfeit shop the two men operate.
When the police finally release Justin he discovers the police are not alone in their interest in the Amsterdam printing shop—Harley had partners who want the printing plates, and they treat Justin as poorly as the upstate cops did. In fact, they don’t seem to care much what happens to Justin if it leads them to the plates.
“Don’t Look Behind You” is a cleverly plotted story that takes you in one direction only to quickly and smoothly swerve into another, and then another. It opens with a raw slash of narrative:
“Just sit back and relax, now. Try to enjoy this; it’s going to be the last story you ever read, or nearly the last. After you finish it you can sit there and stall awhile, you can find excuses to hang around your house, or your room, or your office, wherever you’re reading this; but sooner or later you’re going to have to get up and go out. That’s where I’m waiting for you: outside. Or maybe closer than that. Maybe in this room.”
It is told in first person with a twist—the narrator isn’t necessarily who you think it is and the story doesn’t necessarily lead you where you think it is will. The prose is spot on; re-read the passage above and if you don’t want to read more you’re crazy. But the best part of the story is its plot and the affect it has on the reader. The narrator speaks directly to the reader—not as an audience member, but as a principle character—and it has a chilling effect that made me shudder with bliss in the closing paragraphs.
“Don’t Look Behind You” was originally published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine in May 1947. I read it in the fine anthology A Century of Noir edited by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins.
I have been slowly cleaning up some of my older reviews—blogger tends to mess-up the formatting from time to time—and I decided this one should have new life at the top of the blog. It is truly a wonderful story.

Book Review The Silence by Tim Lebbon

The apocalypse is hot right now. While the trend for zombies has crested and the young adult dystopian boom is dying out, today's fiction continues to wonder about what happens after the end of the world. The appeal of the concept is simple: what would you do if society crumbled?Tim Lebbon's The Silence brings a new interpretation of the apocalypse that plays deftly with the tropes of the genre. When a cave-diving expedition in Moldova accidentally unleashes a fast-multiplying swarm of batlike beasts, the world struggles to respond: panic spreads across Europe with the monsters in its wake. In a small English village, a fourteen-year-old girl named Ally watches the growing chaos, monitoring it via social media and gathering information about the creatures and their behavior. As the danger grows closer and Ally's family must leave their home, Ally herself may be the key to their survival. The creatures hunt by sound and Ally, who has been deaf for years, can teach her family to live silently.

Though this is being published as a Young Adult novel the elegance of the language, the intensity of the situations and the sophistication of the psychology make this a book for adults as well.

Even if you've tired of end times fiction in all its forms, let Tim Lebbon prove to you that the genre was just waiting for a master to turn it into something fresh, vital and memorable.

Yesterday’s Adventure: 'Red Belts' (1920)

Yesterday’s Adventure: 'Red Belts' (1920)by Fred Blosser           
Like the great Talbot Mundy and Harold Lamb, Hugh Pendexter regularly contributed rugged outdoor fiction to ADVENTURE magazine in the periodical’s heyday -- the World War I era and the early 1920s.  Where Mundy wrote about derring-do in contemporary India and Palestine, and Lamb favored the Middle East of the Crusades and the Russian steppes of the Cossacks, Pendexter staked claim to early American history for his subject matter.  
One of Pendexter’s best, RED BELTS, was serialized in ADVENTURE in 1919 and appeared in hardcover from Doubleday in 1920.  The setting is the Old American Southwest of 1784, when the "Southwest" comprised the territory between the southern Appalachians and the Mississippi.  The settlers along North Carolina’s western frontier hope the mother state will send fresh militia troops over the mountains to deter attacks from hostile Cherokees and Creeks.  Their hopes are dashed when they learn that North Carolina has ceded the region to the fledgling federal government to pay the state’s Revolutionary War debt.  The national government doesn’t have the resources to defend this distant territory, which will later become Tennessee.
Left to their own resources, the settlers face a choice.  They can rely on their own sparse numbers as frontiersman John Sevier insists, and take pre-emptive action against the Indians if necessary.  Or -- as the sinister Major Tonpit and his co-conspirators suggest -- they can leave the union and seek the protection of Spain, which still rules a goodly part of the continent, including the southern waterways that lead to the rich markets of New Orleans.
Pendexter had the narrative gift of bringing early American history vividly to life.  There are enough chases, double-crosses, and shootouts to keep action fans engaged, but the strongest scenes are those in which the wily John Sevier matches wits rather than bullets or steel with Chief John Watts of the Cherokees and “Emperor” Alexander McGillivray of the Creeks to extricate himself from their hostile strongholds, where his hosts would like nothing better than take his scalp.  The story underscores a lesson that bears repeating: the early politics of America were fragile and contentious.  To appreciate where we are as a nation, we need to know where we were in the beginning.
Stylistically, much of  RED BELTS (the title refers to red wampum belts, the Indians’ signal for war) will strike modern readers as emphatically old-fashioned:
As in other stories from the early days of ADVENTURE, profanities and obscenities are strictly censored.  “By God!” is written as “By ---!”Historical information that today would be incorporated into the action or the dialogue, or put into an afterword, or simply kept in the author’s head, is spooned into the narrative.  Clearly, Mr. Pendexter invested a lot of research into the book, and he wasn’t reluctant to share the results with his readers.The narrative focus meanders a bit.  Although the first couple of chapters suggest that young frontiersman Kirk Jackson will be the protagonist of RED BELTS, he disappears for much of the rest of the book.  John Sevier takes center stage instead.  It would have been a great movie role for the late Rod Taylor in his prime.
Along those same lines, some of Pendexter’s cultural views would have been inoffensive to readers in 1920, but now carry considerable baggage.  Accepted in the context of the author’s times, they don’t bother me too much.  Others may be more sensitive.  Regardless, Pendexter tells a crackling good story.  It’s a shame that this kind of fiction -- U.S. history with a jigger of bourbon -- isn’t as popular as it once was.  Black Dog Books recently reprinted the novel as RED TRAILS, along with some other vintage Pendexter titles.

“Hawksbill Station” by Robert Silverberg

“Hawksbill Station” by Robert Silverberg
Ben Boulden at GravetappingPosted: 28 Feb 2015 11:03 AM PST

I’m a new arrival to the school of Robert Silverberg. I read The Book of Skulls in 2005 and I’ve made a point to read at least some Silverberg every year since. A few weeks ago I found a TOR Double—No. 26—that featured “Press Enter” by John Varley on one side and Robert Silverberg’s “Hawksbill Station” on the other. The TOR Double contained the text of the original story published in Galaxy in 1967. The story was expanded and published as a novel in 1968. A novel I have not yet read.Hawksbill Station is a penal colony used to segregate political dissidents from the general population. It is much like the Soviet gulags of the mid-Twentieth Century, except there are no guards, no fences and no returns. A wall of time, two billion years long, separates Hawksbill and the society that created it. It is on an Earth that has yet to witness its fish crawl from the sea. The camp’s only connection with the future, what the men call “Up Front,” is a device called the Hammer and Anvil—a time machine that only operates from the future to the past. And it is the lifeline of the small penal colony. It is where the new inmates, and the meager supplies arrive from.“Hawksbill Station” is an intriguing story. It alters the Cold War prison tale into dystopian science fiction. While the model of the prison is clearly based on the Soviet-style gulag, the story is as much about capitalism as it is about communism. The idea: oppression is oppression no matter its wrappings. With that said the politics of the story are less important, much less, than the story itself. The setting, as dark and desolate as it is, has a beautiful surreal sense—picture an Earth with no mammals and no flora inhabited by trilobites, a wild ocean, and several dozen men.The story is only 86 pages in mass market, but Mr Silverberg, with a sparse and seemingly simple prose, is able to create both the world and the characters in a detail that many writers are unable to do in three- or four-hundred pages. He makes the characters, all of them, sympathetic and likable. The antagonist is two billion years from where the story is told and is really nothing more than the shadow of a bogeyman.“Hawksbill Station” is the real deal. It is a science fiction story that tells something of who we are as a culture, and more importantly, what we are as individuals.  It is a truly excellent story.This review originally went live June 20, 2012 in, mostly, the same form. I still haven’t read the expanded novel version, but it is very much on my reading list.

Joseph Lewis

Joseph Lewis
I watched Gun Crazy last night and was struck as always by the folk tale power of the story and the bravado with which it was directed. Mystery writer Mike Nevins has written a long and to me definitive piece-interview on Lewis' career and through it I came to understand Lewis' notion that to have suspense you first need to have characters who are slightly askew. You never quite understand their motives so you never quite know what to expect from them.
Most evaluations of Lewis' career speculate what he would have done with A picture budgets. He ended up doing a lot of TV work. He made a good deal of money but presumably wasn't as satisfied with his Bonanza stories as he was with his more personal work. He started in westerns and finished in westerns. 
As for what he would have done with A-picture money...who knows. But there's at least a chance that he was most comfortable working with the money he was given. Hard to imagine that pictures as gritty as Gun Crazy and The Big Combo could have been shot the way he wanted them to be in an A-picture environment. These are films that took no prisoners and Hwood, especially in those days, wasn't real keen on grim movies.
I found this evaluation of Lewis by David Thomson, my favorite film critic: 
"There is no point in overpraising Lewis. The limitations of the B picture lean on all his films. But the plunder he came away with is astonishing and - here is the rub - more durable than the output of many better-known directors...Joseph Lewis never had the chance to discover whether he was an "artist," but - like Edgar Ulmer and Budd Boetticher - he has made better films than Fred Zinnemann, John Frankenheimer, or John Schlesinger." - David Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 2002)
POSTED BY ED GORMAN AT 2:15 PM 6 COMMENTS: LINKS TO THIS POST 


SUNDAY, DECEMBER 09, 2007