Ed Gorman's Blog, page 51

Great Kirkus piece on Captain Video

thanks to bill crider for the link

Ed here: This was my "wow" TV show. So cool in every respect. Never missed it. Probably dreamed about it. Helped a lot that I was eleven and twelve years old. Here are excerpts Andrew Liptak's fine article. for the entire piece go here https://www.kirkusreviews.com/feature...

Captain Video and his Science Fiction AuthorsBy Andrew Liptakon February 12, 2015Science fiction has a long history in the pages of pulp magazines and paperback novels from the early days of the 20th century. Beyond magazines such as Weird Tales , Astounding Science Fiction and Galaxy Science Fiction , the genre enjoyed popularity in comic books, and, beginning in 1949, on television. Throughout its history, science fiction has kept up with the various technological advances which it trumpeted, whether it was better printers in order to print paperback books cheaply and efficiently; better infrastructure and computerized inventory systems; or a newfangled device which brought the motion picture into homes. Captain Video and his Video Rangers, written by some of the best authors in the business, is one such program that took advantage of the home television and brought science fiction into a promising new world.(more)
Agent Scott Meredith brought in some of the authors he worked with, including Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Damon Knight, C.M. Kornbluth, Walter Miller, Robert Sheckley, Jack Vance, and Dan Wilcox, all major figures in the sci-fi marketplace who had plenty of experience in the areas in which Captain Video was lacking. Their presence helped to improve the quality of the daily show, allowing them to "tell complex stories that tackled concepts like freedom, democracy and scientific ethics." Jack Vance recounted in his autobiography that "when I arrived at [Druce’s] office in New York, I found myself part of a group which included Robert Sheckley, Arthur C. Clarke and a few others." He was to be paid $1500 per episode (almost $15,000 in 2014), and set to work, thrilling (producer) Druce with his scripts. 
(more)In the meantime, Jack Vance soon ran into trouble with the show's producers: "On my last script or two, I had been letting my imagination range too far, injecting humor into the scripts and putting the characters into amusing predicaments. I got a call from Olga Druce complaining that I was turning Captain Video into a farce, and that my scripts would get her fired. Instead, she fired me."Captain Video and his Video Rangers, despite its cheap production, was a forerunner of what would become a major television genre: the science-fiction television show. Its follow-up show, Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, went through several network changes before also ending in 1955. Other television shows blossomed at this time, like Buck Rogers and Space Patrol, and major anthology shows such as Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone found incredibly successful runs in the late 1950s and 1960s. However, it was in 1966 that the best-known space program of them all appeared on CBS: Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek. Like Captain Video, Roddenberry hired prominent science-fiction authors, including Richard Matheson, Theodore Sturgeon, Fredric Brown, Harlan Ellison, Robert Bloch and others, to help with the show.

Unfortunately, most of the episodes of Captain Video have since been lost: much of the content from DuMont and other early television networks were destroyed in the 1970s, although some episodes still remain online. The show likely had some lasting impacts on some of the authors who helped create it: Arthur C. Clarke collaborated on another sci-fi film venture, 2001: A Space Odyssey, with Stanley Kubrick over a decade later. He heavily consulted on the story’s development alongside Kubrick.Andrew Liptak is a freelance writer and historian from Vermont. He can be found online at his site and on Twitter @andrewliptak.

the great Jake Hinkson-Margaret Millar at 100

HALL OF FAMERSDo Evil in Return: Margaret Millar at 100JAKE HINKSON









Note: This post kicks off a series celebrating the career of one of mystery fiction’s true giants, beginning with the novel Do Evil in Return.This month marks the centennial of the great Margaret Millar. At her peak, Millar was about as successful as a mystery writer could be. She published 27 books, won the Edgar for best novel (twice), served as president of the Mystery Writers of America, and won the Grand Master Award for lifetime achievement. Her fan base was so notoriously fervent it caused one critic to remark, “Millar doesn’t attract fans; she creates addicts.”All of which makes it remarkable that Millar isn’t as well known today as she should be. The reason for this, ironically enough, is bound up in one of her strengths as a writer: she did a little of just about everything. She wrote noir novels, hardboiled novels, classical whodunits, suspense novels, and pitch black comedies. She wrote books about women. She wrote books about men. One of the primary joys of being a Millar addict is that you never know what you’re going to get, and this very unpredictability is probably the reason that she remains a cult figure today. You can’t pin her down the way you could with—oh, just to pick an author completely at random—Ross Macdonald.  Yet the personality, the authorial voice, of her work remains remarkably consistent. Mordant, inventive, and psychologically curious—the chief characteristic of her writing is quality. That’s why Millar attracts addicts. You never know what you’re going to be get, but you know it’s going to be pretty damn good.Her best noir novel is probably 1950’s Do Evil In Return. It tells the story of a doctor named Charlotte Keating who turns away a young woman looking for an illegal abortion. Later that night, Keating starts to feel bad about it and tries to track down the girl, Violet O’Gorman, only to discover that she’s missing.Soon after, Violet’s body is found washed up on a beach, dead of an apparent suicide.
The book follows Keating as she attempts to find out what happened, but the deeper she goes, the more her life seems to intertwine with the history of the dead girl. As is so often the case in a Millar novel, the hero has a complicated personal life. Unlike the relatively autonomous protagonists of so many mystery novels, Millar’s characters tend to be locked into a series of complex relationships (in something like 1945’s The Iron Gates, they seem absolutely trapped). Keating is sleeping with Lewis Ballard, the husband of one of her patients, Gwen—and their already shaky liaison gets thrown further off balance when Keating starts to get close with Lt. Easter, the cop assigned to the case.Charlotte Keating is one of Millar’s most compelling protagonists. She’s smart and capable, but like all noir heroes, she’s at the mercy of her own decisions—not just her decision to turn away a young woman in need, nor the decision to have an ill-advised affair with a married man, but the accumulated decisions of a lifetime. And hers is not a life that’s been lived particularly poorly, either. Keating isn’t a burn-out or a deadbeat, just a normal woman at the mercy of time and loss, a victim of the reality that everything we do has unforeseeable consequences. At one point, the cop Easter is trying to talk her out of her suspicions. “I think the real reason you don’t want to believe that Violet killed herself,” he tells her, “is that it would leave a scar on your conscience.” Her response is an almost perfect distillation of Millar’s worldview:

“That’s what a conscience is made of, scar tissue,” Charlotte said. Little strips and pieces of remorse sewn together year by year until they formed a distinctive pattern, a design for living.

One of the great strengths of Do Evil In Return is the aura of dread that hangs over everything. At the opening of the book, this overhanging anxiety is quite literal:

The afternoon was still hot but the wind carried a threat of fog to come in the night. It slid in through the open window and with curious, insinuating fingers it pried into the corners of the reception room and lifted the skirt of Miss Schiller’s white uniform and explored the dark hair of the girl sitting by the door. The girl held a magazine on her lap but she wasn’t reading it; she was pleating the corners of the pages one by one.

Here Millar sets up a world that will prove to be a relentlessly sinister place, a place where even a hot California afternoon is menaced by an encroaching darkness. The craft is impeccable—evocative and economical, establishing a tone of unease while introducing the scene of a nurse and a patient awkwardly sharing space together, landing finally on the small nervous image of the girl turning down the pages of a magazine.As is so often the case with a Millar novel it’s difficult to talk too much about the plot without giving away the pleasure to be had in all its twists and turns. While a Millar novel will often end (sometimes in the final sentence) on a sudden revelation that reconfigures everything that has gone before, this is not the case with Do Evil In Return. Yes, the final chapter reveals the solution to several outstanding mysteries, but the feeling at the end isn’t a sense of relief so much as a permanent melancholy. Far more than most mystery writers, Margaret Millar knew that life itself was a mystery without a solution. Jake Hinkson is the author of several books, including the novel The Big Ugly and the newly-released short story collection  The Deepening Shade .Read all of Jake Hinkson's posts for Criminal Element.

Richard Price Finds His Pseudonym for ‘The Whites’ Annoying

Richard Price Finds His Pseudonym for ‘The Whites’ AnnoyingBy ALEXANDRA ALTER FEB. 10, 2015  NEW YORK TIMESPhoto   
for the complete article go here:http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/11/boo...
“I knew how to dress down, but I didn’t know how to write down,” said Richard Price, who wrote “The Whites” under the pseudonym Harry Brandt.

Richard Price is a skilled literary ventriloquist, with a pitch-perfect ear for deadbeat street slang and sardonic cop banter. But when he tried impersonating another writer, with the aim of writing a fast-paced, plot-driven crime novel under the pen name Harry Brandt, he couldn’t quite pull it off.His new novel, “The Whites,” about a New York City detective haunted by a mistake in his past and a criminal who got away, took him four years to write instead of the roughly four months he had planned on, and proved just as intricate as the sprawling urban portraits in his celebrated novels “Lush Life” and “Clockers.”In spite of himself, Richard Price wrote a Richard Price novel.“You realize you only know one way to write,” Mr. Price said during an interview at his home, a five-story Harlem brownstone built in the mid-1880s, where he lives with his wife, the novelist Lorraine Adams. “I knew how to dress down, but I didn’t know how to write down.”Mr. Price had good reasons for going undercover for “The Whites,” which will be published next Tuesday by Henry Holt. He wanted to inoculate himself against literary critics who might sneer at him for writing a slicker, more commercial book. He was already late on delivering a separate novel, set in Harlem, that he owes a different publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and hoped to hide the fact that he was moonlighting. And he wanted to see if he could write a stripped-down, heavily plotted best seller, without sacrificing his literary credentials.Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately for Richard Price fans, it didn’t work out that way.“I thought I was going to write according to a certain number of rules for the genre, then the rules went to hell,” Mr. Price said. “Everything seemed to beg for more complexity.”“The Whites” centers on Billy Graves, a middle-aged New York City detective who works the overnight shift on the felony squad, and who’s still obsessed with a suspect who escaped charges in a triple murder case. The novel weaves together multiple plotlines, as Billy and his old detective buddies stew over past crimes that haunt them, and Billy’s own family comes under threat from a stalker with a grudge.

Coming in the fall from Cemetery Dance

Forgotten Books Killer by Dave Zeltserman

For gotten Books: Killer by Dave Zeltserman


Before I say anything about Dave Zeltserman's novel I have to note that a) Dave is a friend of mine b) the novel is dedicated to me and c) somebody not unlike me makes a brief appearance in the book.
Leonard March is a mob hit-man who turns state's witness to avoid a lifetime in prison. Despite giving evidence he serves fourteen years and emerges a much older man and not just physically. People familiar with his case are amazed that his former employers didn't manage to have him killed while behind bars. And only now, as he emerges from prison, is the public told of just how terrible a man he is. His photograph is everywhere. He is a pariah. He is even dragged into court on civil charges instituted by the loved ones of some of the people he killed. The press, loving a good story, depicts the victims as good citizens even though they were scum just like March. His prison counselor arranges for March to work quietly as a janitor at nights so he can pay rent on a seedy apartment and buy a few groceries.
Several times while reading Killer I forgot I was reading a novel. The book has the feel of an autobiography. Laid out in alternating chapters of present and past we see March at virtually every stage of his life. His father, his mother, his wife, his children are vividly and vitally portrayed here. His quiet father was a blue collar worker whose sixty and seventy hour weeks led only to a melancholy cynicism about the capitalist system. March's wife's death by cancer while March is in prison is especially haunting. She and the children spurned him after the DA's office revealed that he was a hit man. March in his early twenties was a street punk who, despite his self-denials, savored the deaths he visited on his targets.
All the mob tropes are here to be sure. Sleazy stupid parasites who do with pistols and knives what Wall Street and others do with computers and fancy boardrooms. Zeltserman makes you feel each death and there are plenty of them.
But what you take away from the novel is not the mob melodrama but the rich details of March's life. Zeltserman forces the reader to grant March his intelligence, his occasional eloquence and the remorse he feels but cannot understand. In some respects the man who took all these lives is even more monstrous because he's not a psychopath--as he reminds us several times--but a man who has convinced himself that he's just doing a job. His painful love for the children who have deserted him; the last time he spoke to his dying wife on the phone, her laughing despite her enormous pain, always trying to keep everything "nice;" the young waitress who comes to like this "crazy old man" until she finds out who he is--and is then horrified and angry--grueling, perfectly realized scenes . And then then are the shopping scenes where March buys a new bed, sheets, towels, etc. to make his tiny apartment tolerable--the homeliness of the shopping and the cleaning he has to do is the kind of touch that gives the books its unique truth. You don't find many hit-men scrubbing bathtubs and buying used furniture.
These are just a few of the indelible scenes that make the book so fresh and powerful. Killer is a major novel of crime and likely the book that will win Dave Zeltserman a much wider audience.

POSTED BY ED GORMAN AT 1:43 PM 5 COMMENTS: LINKS TO THIS POST 

Now Available: Lone Star Fury - James Reasoner (writing as Jackson Cole)

Now Available: Lone Star Fury - James Reasoner (writing as Jackson Cole)




A plea for help from a woman he thought was dead brings Texas Ranger Jim Hatfield to the ghost town of Palminter. What he finds waiting for him is a storm of outlaw bullets—and an even deeper mystery that leads him to a mansion on top of a sinister mesa overlooking the Rio Grande. To survive, the legendary Lone Wolf will need his keen wits—and all his deadly gun skill! 
Bestselling author James Reasoner brings his masterful storytelling talent to the iconic Western character Jim Hatfield, star of the long-running pulp magazine TEXAS RANGERS. "Lone Star Fury" is a 7000 word novelette originally published in CLASSIC PULP FICTION STORIES nearly twenty years ago and now available again from Rough Edges Press.
(Some of you know that I'm a long-time fan of TEXAS RANGERS and the Jim Hatfield novels. It was great fun getting to write about the character, similar to when I was able to write Mike Shayne stories. I never wrote any more Hatfield yarns after this one, but maybe I will again one of these days...)


Lone Star Fury
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Girlie mag writers wanted

I'm editing an anthology of stories culled from the girlie magazines of the sixties and seventies before hard core took over. You know when the mags published STORIES with a little sex in them. So far six mystery writers have sent me stories. If you're a published writer with some girlie mag stories in your past please e mail me at ejgorman99@aol.com  This'll be published by PS Publishing in the UK. Numerous big name writers wrote for these mags. We hope to snag a few of them. I know women wrote for them, too. So if you're one of them please contact me.

New from Stark HouseElisabeth Sanxay Holding Speak of the Devil / The Obstinate Murderer

Elisabeth Sanxay HoldingSpeak of the Devil / The Obstinate Murderer978-1-933586-71-7  $17.95Holding has been hailed by such wide-ranging tastes as that of Raymond Chandler, Sarah Weinman and Christopher Morley. Her novels have been filmed, her stories collected into year’s best anthologies. Stark House Press presents two more of her superlative suspense classics, the first one a story of murder at a Caribbean resort hotel, the second the story of an aging alcoholic who is called in to solve a murder that hasn’t happened yet. Includes a new introduction by Ed Gorman. Out now!
“Before the term “roman noir” had even been coined, her specialty was isolated and desperate characters with profoundly poor decision-making skills.”—Jake Hinkson, Criminalelement.com“Holding’s name doesn’t even appear in many standard reference works … but remains a writer ripe for rediscovery.”—Sergio Angelini, Tipping My Fedora

Perfect Crime Double Header

John Boland is one of the finest crime writers working today. I'm going to let the description below do the heavy lifting for his latest novel but I do want to say that Touch of The Sun is one of the most surreal, savage and compelling crime novels I've ever read.  Edgar worthy. It is wholly original in story and so witty and elegant and brutal by turns you just don't want to let go of it. A masterpiece is what we have here.
Retired to a Florida trailer park, Clete hasn't wondered who owns the place, or how they deal with nosy old men. By Edgar- and Shamus-nominated author. Product DescriptionA new novel by the author of Hominid. Less than a year after the death of his wife, Clete Dowski has sought refuge from his loss in a quiet Florida trailer park. Heron Isle, on the Gulf coast, isn’t where he expected to end up—riding a three-wheeler to the local pharmacy and the community pool, killing afternoons with gossip and beer. For McClosky & Sons, of St. Paul, Clete had bossed construction jobs in parts of the world his new neighbors never heard of. And he hadn’t expected to end his days among these people. His friend Ralph Hopper can’t remember the cards he holds as he bets at poker. Al Baumgarten, a retired stockbroker, won’t stop pitching investment schemes—"Make some dough," he tells Clete, "live it up on the Cote d’Azur among the topless broads." Muscular Danny Martel, an eighty-something with Frankie Avalon hair, boasts of having been a kept man at a Manhattan whorehouse. Edith Harslip reads Edgar Cayce and imagines she channels the deepest truths of the universe. Liz Matthews, a semi-retired lawyer, lives a tidy life keeping secrets that Clete would like to learn. And Clete Dowski, at sixty-seven, rides what he disparagingly recognizes as a tricycle. An idyllic and hopeless place, Heron Isle. And it hasn’t occurred to Clete to wonder who owns the trailer park, or where they recruit their help--or to wonder how the owners might deal with a nosy old man. John C. Boland’s diverse stories and novels have been nominated for Edgar, Shamus, Derringer and International Thriller Writers awards. Publishers Weekly’s starred review of his 2012 novel Hominid called that book a “superior science . . . thriller.” His other Florida mysteries featuring young sleuth Meggie Trevor include Last Island South and Out of Her Depth.


2015 Edgar Finalist in Criticism
The rivals of Perry Mason
Two-time Edgar winner Francis M. Nevins exploresthe role of law in crime novels, cinema and TV inthis mammoth scholarly work.
From early tales of frontier justice to the courtroomdramas of Perry Mason and Atticus Finch,we see the role of timely legal issuesin shaping mystery fiction and popular  culture.
By the author of Ellery Queen: The Art of Detection
JUDGES & JUSTICE & LAWYERS & LAWExploring the Legal Dimensions of Fiction and Film466 pages  6 pages photos Trade Paperback (oversized)  $24.95ISBN: 9781935797692
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Quinn was introduced in the 2004 novel Darker Than N...

Quinn was introduced in the 2004 novel Darker Than Night published as a paperback original by Pinnacle Books. A novel that is more than ten years old, but a novel I left unread until recently. “The Night Prowler” is something of a fetish killer. He relives a powerful incident fifteen years earlier. He stalks his prey—seemingly happily married couples—focusing his attention on the wife. He leaves anonymous gifts: expensive jackets, candy, gourmet jam, roses. He does all this as a twisted foreplay to his end game, which is the violent death of both partners.
Frank Quinn is a disgraced former NYPD detective who was chased from the force with nothing except his pension. He molders in a decrepit Manhattan apartment. His ex-wife and daughter are gone. His reputation is broke, and his only comfort is from the bottle. Everything changes when he is approached by the upwardly mobile and very ambitious Harley Renz. Renz has an offer—find The Night Prowler and get his job back, and maybe his reputation, too.
Mr Lutz plays the serial killer plot perfectly—developing both the protagonist and antagonist with relish while holding back the killer’s identity until late in the game. The plot is an example of oversized perfection. It is tricky, smooth, and, even better, believable. Believable because of the strong character development, and the hardnosed blue collar police procedural aspect to the investigation. The detective work seems real and workable, which grounds the expansiveness of both the crimes and the perpetrator.
Darker Than Night is the real thing. It is entertaining, intriguing, and over the top without ever losing its footing. It is Mr Lutz’s old school approach—logical scene to scene plotting, character development cum character motive—mixed with the heady spectacular plot of the large serial killer novel that makes it work. And it works very well.You are subscribed to email updates from Gravetapping
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