Ed Gorman's Blog, page 86

Libby Fischer Hellman NOBODY'S CHILD

Dear Ed:
This has got to be a record for me —sending you two notes in as many weeks. But there's a lot happening in my corner of the universe.  This time I want to offer you a free review copy of my upcoming crime novel, Nobody's Child, which will be released September 2nd.After writing 3 stand-alones, I've returned to the Georgia Davis PI series. Nobody's Child is a very dark story, probably the darkest I've ever written. I've been describing it like Karin Slaughter or Tess Gerritsen on steroids. It's somewhat graphic as well, so if that isn't your cup of tea, be forewarned. Here's the book description:
A bloodstained note left for Chicago PI Georgia Davis reveals the shocking existence of a half-sister she never knew about. That sister, Savannah, is pregnant and begging for Georgia's help.Determined to track her down, Georgia finds herself heading deep into the dangerous underworld of Chicago's illegal sex trafficking business. She soon discovers that trafficking is just a small part of the horrifying and deadly situation in which her new sister is caught up. Even worse, as Georgia tries to extricate Savannah, she comes up against an old enemy determined to make sure neither woman will escape alive. In the fourth novel of the Georgia Davis series, she faces her toughest challenge yet-and one she might not survive.
If you do like dark, I'm offering you a free PDF ARC (advanced reading copy) in exchange for an honest review on Amazon, Goodreads, Barnes and Noble, and/or any other place you like to post by August 15. To get the free copy (and thanks to those of you who've already downloaded it), just go to my website and sign up. Since you're already on my email list, don't worry about being on there twice (the list is very smart). You will get the download as a PDF file.Just so you know, any review you post on Goodreads will be published immediately. You can upload anytime to Amazon too, but it won't will appear until August 15, the day of the "soft launch."I do hope you'll take advantage of the free copy, and I'll keep my fingers crossed you think it's a worthy addition to the Georgia series. Btw, the book will be available in print, ebook, and audio. Thanks so much for your support and friendship. It means the world to me.BestLibbyPlease add my email address to your safe sender list so my emails don't get trapped in the netherworld of your spam box.

Connect with me and let's get social.

BestLibbyPlease add my email address to your safe sender list so my emails don't get trapped in the netherworld of your spam box.


Connect with me and let's get social.


  
Connect with me and let's get social.

The Getaway Car A DONALD WESTLAKE NONFICTION MISCELLANY

A DONALD WESTLAKE NONFICTION MISCELLANYEd here: A serious, hilarious, penetrating lookat the process of writing and the soul of the person creating it. Westlake's analysis of genre fiction, especially crime fiction, is unmatched. Levi Stahl should win the edgar for his magnificent work. a masterpiece.
COMING IN SEPTEMBER FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS.



Paper $18.00ISBN: 9780226121819Will Publish September 2014E-book $18.00Available for pre-order.ISBN: 9780226121956Will Publish September 2014


DONALD E. WESTLAKE

Introduction by Lawrence Block256 pages | 6 x 9 | © 2014Over the course of a fifty-year career, Donald E. Westlake published nearly one hundred books, including not one but two long-running series, starring the hard-hitting Parker and the hapless John Dortmunder. In the six years since his death, Westlake’s reputation has only grown, with fans continuing to marvel at his tightly constructed plots, no-nonsense prose, and keen, even unsettling, insights into human behavior.

With The Getaway Car, we get our first glimpse of another side of Westlake the writer: what he did when he wasn’t busy making stuff up. And it’s fascinating.


Foreword by Lawrence Block
Editor’s Introduction

1 My Second Life: Fragments from an Autobiography2 Donald E. Westlake, a.k.a. . . .
Hearing Voices in My Head: Tucker Coe, Timothy J. Culver, Richard Stark and Donald E. Westlake
Living with a Mystery Writer, by Abby Adams
Writers on Writing: A Pseudonym Returns From an Alter-Ego Trip, With New Tales to Tell3 So Tell Me about This Job We’re Gonna Pull: On Genre
The Hardboiled Dicks
Introduction to Murderous Schemes
Introduction to The Best American Mystery Stories, 2000
Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You4 Ten Most Wanted: Ten Favorite Mystery Books5 Returning to the Scene of the Crime: On His Own Work
Introduction to Levine
Tangled Webs for Sale: Best Offer
Introduction to Kahawa
Light
Hooked
Letter to Howard B. Gotlieb, Boston University Libraries6 Lunch Break: May’s Famous Tuna Casserole7 The Other Guys in the String: Peers, Favorites, and Influences
Lawrence Block: First Sighting
On Peter Rabe
Playing Politics with a Master of Dialogue: On George V. Higgins
On Rex Stout
Introduction to Jack Ritchie’s A New Leaf and Other Stories
Foreword to Thurber on Crime
Introduction to Charles Willeford’s The Way We Die Now
On Stephen Frears
John D. MacDonald: A Remembrance8 Coffee Break: Letter to Ray Broekel9 Anything You Say May Be Used against You: Interviews
An Inside Look at Donald Westlake, by Albert Nussbaum, 81332-132
The Worst Happens: From an Interview by Patrick McGilligan10 Midnight Snack: Gustatory Notes from All Over11 Side Jobs: Prison Breaks, Movie Mobsters, and Radio Comedy
Break-Out
Love Stuff, Cops-and-Robbers Style
Send In the Goons12 Signed Confessions: Letters
To Judy ?
To Peter Gruber
To James Hale
To Stephen and Tabitha King
To Brian Garfield
To David Ramus
To Pam Vesey
To Gary Salt
To Henry Morrison
To Jon L. Breen13 Jobs Never Pulled: Title Ideas
Crime Titles
Comic Crime Titles14 Death Row (Or, The Happily Ever Afterlife): Letter to Ralph L. Woods

Acknowledgments
Credits
Name Indexn.

PAPERBACK PARADE FULL COLOR NEW FORMAT OUT NOW! by Gary Lovisi

PAPERBACK PARADE FULL COLOR NEW FORMAT OUT NOW!by Gary Lovisi    It's an exciting time here at Gryphon Books in Brooklyn, New York. We are recovered now from the disaster of Hurricane Sandy and moving ahead boldly. The good news now is that my book collector magazine,  Paperback Parade  (#86) is just out and it is in a new format as a trade paperback, 114 pages, and in glorious FULL COLOR! The issue begins with 20 pages of "Paperback Talk" (news, new books, letters, etc) and continues with long detailed article by Dan Roberts on The Best of Lion Books Paperback Original Noir; next is the sexy gal spy series of Eve Drum, "That Lady From L.U.S.T"; then a fascinating cover swipe by Art Scott, and finally a detailed article on the medical science fiction of James White by Graham Andrews. The magazine went to Full Color with issue #85 and the response was terrific, now we have changed the format from a stapled binding to a more attractive and professional trade paperback format, loaded with more glorious color covers of rare, fascinating and sexy collectable paperbacks of all kinds and printed on quality paper. The covers are just gorgeous, but the articles are all well-written, well-researched also. It is a dream-come-true for me to produce this magazine in this simply lovely package.  Thanks go out to my designer Richard Greene for his help. This is a magazine I think you will not want to miss and I hope you will spread the good word to your reader and book collector friends and try a copy. I know you will enjoy it!     Paperback Parade  #86 is available now for $15.00 + $3 postage (a 3-issue subscription in the USA is just $40, outside USA inquire), fromGryphon Books, PO Box 280209, Brooklyn, NY 11228, or you can order through the Gryphon Books website at www.gryphonbooks.com or via email at gryphonbooks@att.net. VISA, Mastercard, checks, MO, and Paypal are all accepted. 

BRASH BOOKS PRESENTS-PRO-FILE with/ Maxine O'Callaghan

BRASH BOOKS MAXINE O`CALLAGHAN


Maxine O'Callaghan's ground-breaking Delilah West PI stories and novels are widely credited as being the first to feature a female private eye--- blazing the trail that Sue Grafton, Marcia Muller and others would follow.  Brash Books (www.brash-books.com) is republishing them all, including a collection of the short stories that began her series...

Tell us about your book / books that Brash is publishing. Brash is republishing the entire Delilah West series.  Currently that will be the first, DEATH IS FOREVER, and second, RUN FROM NIGHTMARE.  They are also publishing a collection of my Delilah West short stories as BAD NEWS AND TROUBLE.  The collection includes A Change of Clients, the story that introduced Delilah in Alfred Hitchcock's Magazine.  This story appeared before Marcia Muller's first book.  Marcia jokes about that, saying that if she's the mother of the female detective in fiction then I must be the grandmother.  All three books will be available Sept. 2nd in both digital and paperback.
Can you give us a sense what you are working on now?
Right now I'm working with Lee and Joel on getting the series up and running again.  I'm also working with my son, editing a book for him on Jerry Goldsmith's film music for Planet of the Apes.  In addition, I am babysitter-in-chief for my three-year-old granddaughter, who was a wonderful surprise from my son and his wife who finally heard the reproduction clock ticking.  And, I have to admit, I'm playing with ideas for a new Delilah West novel.  Always planned to write it, but have had some major health battles, some ongoing.
What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?  
Well, the creative part of course, but really:  Having written!  Nothing like seeing those pages pile up and the sense of accomplishment in knowing that it turned out better than you'd hoped, that you'd captured and revealed the characters and made the story and settings come alive.  
What is the greatest displeasure?  
Has to be dealing with the business side, especially the emphasis on the what's-hot mentality of publishing.  I understand it, but I don't have to like it.
If you have one piece of advice for the publishing world, what is it?
Get back to relying on the editors more in choosing books rather than the sales people.   As if...
Tell us about selling your first novel. Most writers never forgetthat moment.
I remember the sale of my first story even more vividly that the first novel.  “Sorry, Frank,” was the first submission I ever sent out.  The acceptance came a few weeks later.  The kids were at school, and I was home alone.  I think I did a few dance steps and waved around the letter with glee. Just the thought that somebody was giving me money for something I wrote. I really was a writer.  Of course, the sale of my first novel was a thrill, although a bigger thrill was seeing it on the shelf at Crown Books.

-- www.leegoldberg.com

GOLD MEDAL IN THE ‘70s: THE TRIGGER MAN by Richard Posner

A Review by Fred Blosser


GOLD MEDAL IN THE ‘70s: THE TRIGGER MAN
THE TRIGGER MAN, Richard Posner’s third Mafia novel for Gold Medal, following THE MAFIA MAN and a movie novelization, THE SEVEN UPS, was published in May 1974.  I think this was one of the last Gold Medal ‘70s Mafia novels to carry the cover blurb, “From the publishers of THE GODFATHER,” if not the very last.  In real life, Richard Nixon was holding on to the Presidency by his fingernails.  In Posner’s story, the aging Dons of the Five Families maintain a similarly tenuous control over organized crime in New York City.  
Like Mario Puzo’s Don Corleone, Don Pietro Adorante supervises an uneasy peace among the gangs, but “he’s sick, and he’s old.” the ambitious Don Vincenzo Sgambati reckons.  “The day Don Pietro dies, we can move in and take it all.”
Sgambati’s secret weapon is Gaspare Marugo, a veteran hit man.  When Marugo arrives in New York, one step ahead of a dragnet for a murder in Europe, Sgambati recruits him to assassinate Don Pietro. Marugo is the “trigger man” of Posner’s title, in two senses of the phrase.  In the literal sense, he pulls the trigger in Sgambati’s  subsequent hit on Don Pietro.  Symbolically, in doing so, he precipitates the reprisals, ambushes, and massacres that drive Posner’s violent plot.
As in THE MAFIA MAN, Posner puts a conflicted character at the center of the story.  Elliot Cohn, an undercover detective, infiltrates the Adorante family in the aftermath of Don Pietro’s murder and simultaneously takes steps to get next to Sgambati.  He likes the testosterone high of the job, but he’s also at risk of being turned.  He savors being close to big money, and he’s grown restless with his family life of a wife, two kids, and a house in the suburbs:
“We little guys shit around our whole lives and watch other men take the marbles.  Why? . . . It’s just having the balls to take things.”
Elliot begins an affair with Don Pietro’s granddaughter Mary, incurring the anger of Mary’s lover Johnny Russo, the violent Underboss of the Adorante Family, and the wary suspicion of the Consigliere, Frank Sabatino.  The reader isn’t quite sure whether the cop has gone full tilt to the dark side.  Neither, it seems, is Cohn himself.  
Fans of classic gangster drama may like THE TRIGGER MAN better than THE MAFIA MAN.  It has more tommy guns, more hits, and more scenes of backroom intrigue between the rival Dons than the earlier novel did.  Both books are distinguished by Posner’s pungent prose, narrative energy, and dramatic control.  I particularly liked the way that he weaves all of the strands of the sprawling story into the violent final chapters, where the reader realizes that Elliot Cohn and Gaspare Marugo are more alike than different in a fundamental way, and Cohn makes a pivotal decision about the course of his life.
Posner is as good as Peter Rabe, Dan J. Marlowe, and other Gold Medal stalwarts who have enjoyed renewed attention in past years after decades of unfortunate critical neglect.  He is due for similar reappraisal.

GREAT INTERVIEW with James Bama on Men's Adventure site

for the interview go here:
http://www.menspulpmags.com/

Jeff Pierce & Tightrope

Last night on the great The Rap Sheet Jeff Pierce made reference to the Mike Conners TV series "Tightrope." (Five or so years before "Mannix.") I commented that the series had its own pulp magazine. A young Donald Westlake was a contributor.  I bought this at a drug store that had a huge selection of mags and pbs. I'm betting a certain dude named Bill Crider also bought it.
This is from http://www.donaldwestlake.com/bibliog.../

Now Available From Rough Edges Press: The Healer's Road - James Reasoner and Livia J. Washburn

For more than thirty years, bestselling authors James Reasoner and Livia J. Washburn have chronicled the story of America in their award-winning historical novels. THE HEALER'S ROAD is one of their greatest sagas, the sweeping story of a family dedicated to the practice of medicine and caught up in the violence and heartbreak of America's bloodiest war. 

Thomas Black rose from poverty, superstition, and tragedy to become a respected physician. His son John is reluctant to follow in those footsteps but is forced to do so by the madness of war. And Thomas's daughter Sara is the most devoted of all to healing the sick and injured, despite living in a world that opposes her every ambition. 

From Boston to Washington D.C. to the battlefields of the Civil War, THE HEALER'S ROAD is a tale of triumph and loss, of courage and despair, of life and death and love and hate vividly portrayed by a pair of master storytellers. Long out of print, THE HEALER'S ROAD is now available again in this newly revised e-book edition. (Also available at Smashwords andBarnes & Noble.)

(And the sequel, HEALER'S CALLING, is coming soon.)

Interview with JA Jance – THE OLD BLUE LINE

Kindle $1.99


Butch Dixon has been taken for a ride …Not a jump in the car, see the sights kind of ride. He's been taken for everything he has. He's lost his house, his restaurant business, his savings, his car, his best friend, his faith—all to his conniving ex-wife. But that was seven years ago. He picked himself up, left Chicago, and started over in Peoria, Arizona, running the Roundhouse Bar and Grill. He doesn't look back on those bad years; there's no point. Not until two curious cops show up at the Roundhouse.Faith, Butch's ex-wife, has been murdered, and the evidence points to him. Stunned, Butch quickly realizes that the black-hearted woman is going to ruin him again, from her grave. Lucky for Butch, the Old Blue Line, a group of retired—but still sharp and tenacious—former legal and law enforcement coots, have taken it upon themselves, as a favor, to make sure he doesn't cross that thin line. After the dust settles, Butch's life is again upended—when a little red-haired ball of fire, Sheriff Joanna Brady, takes a seat at his bar.

MYSTERY SCENE MAGAZINE – online Interview with JA Jance – THE OLD BLUE LINE


1. Tell us about your current novel/collection.JAJ:  The Old Blue Line came about due to a conversation with a fan who wanted to know what Butch Dixon is writing.  A few days later, someone who had suffered a painful breakup asked if I could write a book that knocked off his ex.  In a matter of days, Old Blue was leaking out through my fingertips onto my keyboard.2. Can you give a sense of what you're working on now?JAJ:  I’m finishing the next Ali Reynolds book and getting ready to go on a book tour for the next Joanna Brady book, Remains of Innocence, due out July 22.3. What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?JAJ:  My commute:  From the bedroom, to the coffee pot, to my writing chair.  No traffic.4. What is the greatest Displeasure?JAJ:  Can’t think of any.5. If you have one piece of advice for the publishing world, what is it?JAJ:  Don’t give up and don’t listen to the people who say it’ll never happen.6. Are there two or three forgotten mystery writers you'd like to see in print again?JAJ:  I’d like to reread the OLD Carolyn Keene books—the one with the red roadster.7. Tell us about selling your first novel. Most writers never forget that moment.JAJ:  My agent called and said they would buy Until Proven Guilty as long as it could be the first in a series.  That phone call meant my first two books were sold and only one was written.  My next call was to the school principal, Ed James.  He called my kids down to the office to tell them the news.

BRASH BOOKS PRESENTS PRO-FILE:Barbara Neely BLANCHE ON THE LAM

http://www.mysterythrillerbooks.com/book/blanche-on-the-lam/
1. Tell us about your book / books that Brash is publishing? Brash is publishing the first four books in the Blanche White series, beginning withthe initial book, Blanche on the Lam, which introduces Blanche White, apoor, working-class, big, dark-skinned black woman who makes her livingcleaning houses, and who solves crimes that crop up in her life or those shecares about. In addition to the mystery, the book explores Blanche'sirreverent, snarky, funny, and insightful take on race, class, and gender. Ithink of her as a cousin of Langston Hughes' Jesse B. Semple.
2. Can you give a sense of what you're working on now? I'm writing a short story about two elderly sisters, one with Alzheimer's,as well as a short story about class tension within an African-Americanmarriage. When they're done, I hope to finish the play I began some timeago.
What is the greatest pleasure of a writing career?3. Writing is what I do to create my own order out of chaos; it allows me toget under life's clothes to try to figure out what it's about. Writing isalso what I do to at least pass for sane.The greatest pleasure is writing.
4. What is the greatest Displeasure?The displeasure is not writing - those moments when my internal critic tellsme that just because I did it yesterday doesn't mean I can do it today, andthose even worse few moments when  I believe I can't do it. Gives me goosebumps just thinking about it.
5. If you have one piece of advice for the publishing world, what is it?My Uncle Charlie said, "Advice is just a fancy way of saying 'spitting inthe wind,'" so I'll pass.
6. Are there two or three forgotten mystery writers you'd like to see inprint again?Dick Cluster. He was a member of the writing group that played a major rolein my getting Blanche on the Lam finished. He's a fine writer, and not justof crime fiction.
7. Tell us about selling your first novel. Most writers never forget thatmoment.It was a euphoric moment. It felt like a validation.
--www.leegoldberg.com

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