Thomas Pluck's Blog, page 45

Fresh Kill: The Black Label Burger

Had one of these at the Minetta Tavern in Greenwich Village the other day, right around the corner from Todd Robinson’s watering hole, Shade. The Minetta is a fancy brasserie which serves an excellent Manhattan and Sazerac and delicious appetizers like salt pond oysters with truffled pork sausage. The oysters were fresh and sweet. Having read Mannahatta, about the original forested wilderness of Manhattan island, I know the Minetta was a brook that still exists underground. There was a huge salt pond in the area as well, and both the Natives and the Dutch settlers ate enough oysters that the shells form a sedimentary layer all over the tip of the island. Nowadays if you ate a New York bay oyster, an alien will pop out of your chest.

The burger is twenty six bucks and ground from aged beef. They have a standard burger for seventeen bones. You do get fries with that. Sorry, frites. The fries are good, not as good as Bourdain’s at Les Halles. The burger is one of the few that tops the Les Halles burger, which is ground to order from sirloin trimmings. The Black Label one-ups it by using only dry-aged beef, giving the crust a distinct mineral tang that steakivores will appreciate. Inside it’s just a balanced, excellent burger- not too fatty but certainly not lean or dry. I will name it my new favorite, but let’s be honest- I’m not gonna lay down $26 for a burger that often. Krug’s is still my go-to.

Here’s the list for you new folks.

1. Black Label Burger, Minetta Tavern NYC

2. Les Halles burger, John St. NYC (the one on Park Ave’s burger is not as good)

3. Krug’s Tavern, Newark NJ

4. The Ghetto Burger, Ann’s Snack Bar, Atlanta GA

5. White Manna sliders, Hackensack NJ

6. HB Burger, NYC

7. The Frenchy, DBGB, NYC.

8. The Baconeator, Morris Tap & Grill, Randolph NJ

9. Triple Smokehouse Burger, Cloverleaf Tavern, Caldwell NJ

10. Jucy Lucy, Matt’s Bar, Minneapolis MN.

(if you like looking at Cheeseburgers, check out my buddy Mike’s blog www.cheeseburgerpictures.com )

These are opinions. Ray’s Hell Burger in VA closed; I haven’t been to Kuma’s in Chicago. In-N-Out and Elevation Burger, Shake Shack and the Joint at the Le Parker Meridien hotel are all up there as well. And I plan on a long road trip on the west coast eating nothing but cheeseburgers next year, so my opinions WILL change. If you have recommendations… please leave a comment. I will travel for a good burger, and I save places I’ve visited or want to visit in a Google Map: Tommy Salami’s Hidden Treasures.

Tagged: Burgers, Minetta Tavern, New York City

Interview with Reed Farrel Coleman in The Big Thrill

I interviewed Reed Farrel Coleman in The Big Thrill about his upcoming (and penultimate) Moe Prager mystery, ONION STREET. We talk old NYC, writing, and a lot more.

Interview with Reed Farrel Coleman for The Big Thrill

Tagged: Interviews, Reed Farrel Coleman, The Big Thrill

White Sandy Beach of Hawai’i – Israel Kamakawiwo’ole

I first heard Iz in Hawai’i at a music shop where I bought a gourd. I can’t play music for shit, sadly. I was born with a heart murmur, and I blame it for my musical arrhythmia. That and my chronic honkitude… I grew up in the town where Martha Stewart is from. Did you hear she’s dating on match.com? Thanks to CNN for broadcasting that ‘news.’

Iz died in 1997, only a few years after achieving fame with his amazing covers of “Over the Rainbow” and “Country Roads.” His album FACING FUTURE has all the songs I mentioned and for me, is as soulful and talented an album you are likely to find.

Tagged: Hawaii, Israel Kamakawiwo'ole

Adios, Bonnie & Clyde…

Adios, Bonnie & Clyde…

I visited the ambush site of Bonnie & Clyde with a relative of Sheriff Henderson Jordan, who participated in the attack. The article is on Criminal Element today. I spoke with relatives who lived in Gibsland at the time, who remember the car and the bodies paraded through town. 

Tagged: Bonnie and Clyde, Criminal Element, History, Louisiana, Smooth Criminals

Join PROTECT… or this Sasquatch will eat all your food.

The H.E.R.O. Corps – hiring disabled veterans to assist the fight in tracking online predators so local police can move in – is just one thing PROTECT does. Be a Protector. Join us today.

You can also make a bold statement and wear a PROTECTOR shirt! Available here.

Make a donation at www.protect.org or purchase Protectors: Stories to Benefit PROTECT – all proceeds go to help PROTECT fight child abuse and lobby Washington to enforce existing laws to protect children.

Tagged: PROTECT

Vodka O’Clock with Amber Unmasked

Vodka O’Clock with Amber Unmasked

Amber Unmasked – that east coast avenger who champions the down and the dirty and the nerdy, was gracious enough to interview me about all things geekalicious- books, movies, comics, the business of writing, and charitable work with PROTECT and to help victims of superstorm Sandy. 

I had a blast- and a Hellhound on my Ale brew by Dogfish Head- and if you want to enjoy a virtual beer with me, drop on by … it’s always

VODKA O’CLOCK.

She didn’t need the lasso of truth to get me talking…

Tagged: Amber Unmasked, Comic Books, Interviews, podcasts

Belly Up to the Bar with Dan O’Shea

Dan O’Shea is the author of PENANCE , an epic thriller of family secrets and Chicago corruption, his long-awaited debut novel hits the streets on April 30th from Exhibit A books . Dan’s story “Done for the Day” appears in Protectors: Stories to Benefit PROTECT , and “Thin Mints” is a favorite of mine, from Crimefactory, collected in Dan’s collection OLD SCHOOL . I got acquainted with Dan through his story challenge to benefit tornado victims. He’s got a big heart only rivaled by his talent, and when they get together there’s a story worth reading.

Welcome to Belly Up to the Bar, Dan. What’ll you have?

 

 

 

A proper Manhattan – so two parts bourbon (or better yet, rye whiskey if you have it), one part sweet vermouth, a splash of bitters, a cherry (and a little bit of that sugary juice from the cherry jar please, ‘cause I’m so sweet). Serve that in a rocks glass over ice. When I go to a bar and order a Manhattan and they bring it neat in a Martini glass, then I know the place is too precious for me by half.

I think we bonded over charity and our bent noses. How many times have you busted yours? The first picture I saw of you looked like you went a round with Tyson before turned actor.

 

Three. And I’m hoping to give up the habit. First time was playing sandlot ball as a kid. Nobody remembered to bring a catcher’s mask, but I figured what the hell, I’d played catcher plenty of times, couldn’t remember ever taking one square on the mask. That ended predictably. Then there was my abortive boxing career, something I messed around with in my callow youth. I was in the Joe Frazier, destroy-the-body-and-the-head-will-fall school, so I ate a lot of jabs with my beak trying to get inside. Made the mistake of eating a hook instead. The picture you saw was from the famous squirrel incident. Out riding my bike and a suicidal squirrel jumped right into my front tire at point-blank range. I broke my fall with my face, which was just as well. No point messing up any of my better features. Actually, the first couple busted noses left my schnoz a tad off center. This last one seems to have straightened it out a bit. So this would be an excellent time to quit.

Ha, that’s my strategy. I got no reach, so I get in the pocket and hook the liver. Tell us a little about PENANCE, your crime thriller set in Chicago. Your tales of the old town make your blog a joy to read. I imagine you’ve spun some of that history into the book.

 

 

PENANCE is divided between Chicago in 1971 and Chicago today (well, my version of Chicago). The backstory deals with some fictional events following up on the very real murder of Fred Hampton, head of the Black Panther party, by the Chicago police, with an assist from the FBI. OK, nobody was charged with murder or convicted of murder, but that’s what it was. I was a kid at the time, and I remember how Hampton was demonized in the media. Actually, the whole civil rights era movement made quite an impression on me. I remember the rioting after King was assassinated, watching my grandparents’ old neighborhood go up in flames.  PENANCE has a couple of intersecting story lines in which the sins of the fathers come back to haunt the sons a generation later, and the city’s history and its culture of corruption feed into both of those.

You also wrote a book with Shakespeare as sleuth, ROTTEN AT THE HEART. And a short story written in Elizabethan English, in Needle Magazine. What intrigues you about that setting, and writing in that voice? Will we see more of your historical crime tales from this era?

 

The Shakespeare stuff grew out of a conversation with my daughter when she was taking a Shakespeare class in college. She asked what would happen if Shakespeare wrote noir. The easy answer is Othello, ‘cause it don’t get much more noir than that. But I’ve always been a bit of a Shakespeare fan boy and that gave me an itch, which I scratched with the story for NEEDLE (The Bard’s Confession on the Matter of the Despoilment of the Fishmonger’s Daughter). Thing is, the scratching just made the itch worse, so the story turned into a whole novel, my first first-person detective tale, except the detective is none other than Billy Shakespeare forced into the unhappy role of Elizabethan gumshoe by his patron.

Now, you give me way too much credit when you say “Elizabethan English.” Pretty much my own low-rent version of faux Elizabethan English. But I love having an excuse to dump the stripped-down, Mies Van Der Rohe less-is-more verbiage that is the lingua franca of crime fiction and get a little Rococo. What I noticed writing it was that the faux Elizabethan language isn’t just an exercise in translation. It’s not like I write a scene in “regular” English and then translate into my fake Elizabethan. I have to actually get into a different mindset. Language is the medium of thought. When you change the way you use language, you end up changing the way you think. Because the language in the Shakespeare book is fuller, more discursive, so is the thinking.

Part of that, too, is writing in first person. Up until now, all my novel writing has been in third person. It’s been dialog driven. I moved the story along using multiple points of view and cutting between regularly and rapidly. My style doing that is almost ADD. First person is far more introspective. Where my style previously had been pretty terse, with a lot of very short sentences and even sentence fragments, this took on a flowing, almost stream of consciousness feel.

I thought the Shakespeare thing would be a quirky experiment, something I’d end up doing for my own gratification just to scratch an itch, but when I ran it past Stacia Decker (who’s one hell of an agent, by the way) she thought it was worth shopping around. Turned out she was right. Not quite ready for a formal announcement on the Shakespeare front yet, but I’ll just say you can count on seeing more from the Bard soon. (I’m such a tease. Here, let me flash a little thigh for you.)

 

 

My favorite crime film, THIEF, is set in Chicago, based on crook Frank Hohimer’s self-aggrandizing memoir, THE HOME INVADERS. And Eugene Izzi is one of my big influences. Still think PROWLERS is one of the best reads out there. Who are some of your favorite Chicago writers?

Izzi’s great. Saul Bellow wasn’t born here, but he was a long-time Chicago guy and he’s a personal favorite. Nelson Algren of course. Studs Terkel. Scott Turow and Sara Paretsky are probably the reigning royals so far as crime fiction goes, though Turow’s also done other stuff. There is the irrepressible Joelle Charbonneau of not-quite-cozy fame (she’s got two series, one set around the misadventures of a Chicago woman sucked into running a downstate roller rink and the other mixing the world of Glee with murder and mayhem. And she’s about the take the YA world by storm with her Testing trilogy.) Kent Gowran’s a guy to watch – he’s the one that got Shotgun Honey up and running.

Your story “Done for the Day” was one of my favorites from Protectors. There is a gripping emotional undercurrent in it, and all your work. What’s the well you draw from for your fiction?

 

 

Two of my kids have developmental disabilities, so I know the challenges involved with that, know some of the bad shit that can happen. That’s what gave rise to Done for the Day, the idea that you can try to do everything right and still have it all go wrong. I don’t know that I can define any wellspring for my fiction. I know I’ve always preferred stories where the characters matter more than, or at least as much as, the plot. The types of thrillers where the characters are just props that shoot guns and drive cars fast, I hate those. Give me a textured, sometimes tortured, character like James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux over a one-note tough guy like Mike Hammer any day. Give me one of Le Carre’s morally confused and confusing operatives whose weapon is his mind over Jason Bourne and his quasi-ninja antics.

Beyond that though, I don’t know how to explain what comes from where. Life isn’t simple, neither are people. Stories shouldn’t be either.

I’m with you. Everything starts with a character, for me. You shared several stories from PENANCE’s tough Chicago world (you can read them here). But what’s next in store for John Lynch?

 

I’m wrapping up the second book in the Lynch series (though I think of them more as the Chicago series – the books have pretty sizable casts, so it feels a bit off to refer to them as just the Lynch series). Book two is entitled Mammon and centers on what happens when a guy who’d grown up in the Chicago area and the left town for the Marines, then the Foreign Legion and then a long, checkered career in Africa comes home with some stolen blood diamonds, and with Al Qaeda, the Chicago mob and the head of a Mexican drug cartel on his tail. Lynch and much of the cast of Penance are back, trying to make sense of – and clean up – the mess.

The man. The legend. The jacket.

Sounds fantastic. Before you go, choose one album, one book, and one meal as if they’d be your last.

 

 

So many crime writers I know are into the whole heavy metal thing, but if I’m going with one album, it’s probably Late for the Sky by Jackson Browne. (Catch me on another day when I’m in a louder mood and it would be Quadrophenia by The Who. For the book, I’m gonna give you a high-brow, low-brow combo of Herzog by Saul Bellow and Dirty White Boys by Stephen Hunter.  Last meal’s gotta be St. Louis style ribs and really good sweet corn on the cob.

Jackson Browne is a favorite. His songs have the weary sadness of a continually disappointed optimist. And I do believe we shared such a meal at Pappy’s in St. Louis, no? Or was I in a euphoric stupor? Thanks for dropping in, Dan. If you go to Bouchercon, Dan’s the man in the techni-paisley stud-coat. You cannot miss him, nor should you. He’s a fine gent to jaw with.

Dan will be reading from PENANCE on May 3rd at Lake Forest Bookstore in his mellifluous baritone. The Velvet Fog may be gone, but the Thunder-Dome has risen to take his place. You can hear Dan read his story “Done for the Day” here.

“You shoulda seen the squirrel.”

Tagged: Chicago, Dan O'Shea, Daniel B. O'Shea, Joelle Charbonneau, John LeCarre, Kent Gowran, Penance, Shakespeare

Evil Dead

Disclaimer: my cousin Lou Taylor plays Eric in this film. Some of my enjoyment was derived from watching him suffer demonic abuse from a Home Depot aisle of deadly implements, but I genuinely loved this “redo” of the classic and think it is one of the best modern horror films to be released of late, and certainly the best remake since Dawn of the Dead.

my cousin being a wuss

If you don’t know the original The Evil Dead, it is an extremely low budget brutal horror film made by fans of the Three Stooges. There is a bit of extremely dark humor. The original is pretty bare bones. Guy shows up at deserted cabin with his girlfriend. Demons of the forest possess their friend in the most repugnant way imaginable, and Ash, played by Bruce Campbell, cuts up the baddies and his demonic love with a chainsaw.

The “sequel/remake”Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn is superior in every way, and EVIL DEAD (2013) takes from both and makes the bloodiest, goriest horror film I’ve seen in a long time. Is it scary? It’s gut wrenching. There is plenty of tension. I do not jump or get scared at horror films anymore. But during EVIL DEAD, I gasped and cheered and laughed and groaned.

Jane Levy from Suburgatory in purgatory

The basics are all there. The Necronomicon (never so named) bound in human skin, full of medieval woodcuts and guttural prayers for the summoning of demons. A small group of hapless young innocents about to succumb to ancient evil. And a cabin built to resemble the iconic one from The Evil Dead (down to a rusty Oldsmobile, “the Classic,” that appears in most of Raimi’s films).

Eric, played by Lou, is the dumb-ass who reads the evil book. I recently toured Bourbon Street with my cousin and know his tics and behavior. His Eric is so damn good I didn’t recognize my own blood up there. The rest of the cast is equally impressive, and the director Fede Alvarez approaches the material with just enough respect. There is no obvious gushing wankery. No one does anything completely and unutterably stupid to advance the plot, other than read from a strange book. And let’s face it, I’d read the book. I’m that kind of dummy. I read books full of naked witches that I found in houses my father was demolishing. I could have summoned a Candarian demon.

The gore is unrelenting. There are just enough laughs- one poor bastard loses a lot of limbs, and a nailgun is used to great effect. But you never know who will survive and who will get a chainsaw up the ying-yang. And that is the movie’s power. Unlike the goofiness of FEAST, which shot its “anyone can die!!” wad in the first five minutes, EVIL DEAD plays with our expectations but always by its own rules. If you like horror, forget the first film. Accept that Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell gave their ideas to a fresh new director, who eschewed CGI and jump-cut scares to make the same kind of movie they did thirty-plus years ago.

And pray that they make a sequel that merges Ash from the end of Army of Darkness as a bitter old one-armed crank with the survivor of this film to battle Candarian hellbeasts in Evil Dead 2: Hell on Earth. or something. I’ll write the script, Fede. Just tell Lou to call me.

With that smile I might be possessed by a Candarian demon…

 

 

Tagged: Bruce Campbell, Evil Dead, Fede Alvarez, Horror, Jane Levy, Lou Taylor Pucci, Sam Raimi

Parker

“There are times when tools won’t serve, not hammers or guns or cars or telephones, when only the use of your own body will satisfy, the hard touch of your own hands.”

-Donald Westlake, The Hunter (aka Point Blank)

I think I need a tattoo.

This and Ferdinand the Bull. My versions of “LOVE” and “HATE”

Tagged: Donald Westlake, Ferdinand the Bull, Parker, tattoos

cherry blossoms fall

 

Branch Brook Park in Newark (and Belleville) New Jersey has the largest collection of Japanese cherry blossom trees in America, over 4300. They are in bloom now, blush clouds of pink and puffs of white mist. In a few days the blossoms will blanket the ground and the trees will be bare for another season.

I wrote about them in “The Forest for the Trees.” In Japan, they are called sakura, and it has been a tradition to picnic beneath the blossoms for well over a thousand years. During the second World War, they became a nationalist symbol, a “blossom of death,” and pilots painted the blossoms on their planes, the final naval battle at Leyte Gulf was a suicide mission to protect the mainland as the ships “exploded like blossoms,” and poets said the thousands of dead young soldiers were “reincarnated” as sakura blossoms.

The bombs in Boston had no such beauty. Those clouds of smoke were the voice of cowardice, from whoever detonated them. It is in our nature to pin the blame on those we hate. Terrorist jihadists or terrorist militias, the government, lone psychos, whatever. We will know the perpetrators soon enough. It took months to locate the Olympics bomber from 1996, and a hero’s life was nearly ruined when he was falsely accused. We do not need anger or hatred now, we need calm. And donations of blood. And vigilance without panic.

My thoughts go to the victims of this cowardly, hateful attack.

散る桜心の鬼も角を折る

chiru sakura

kokoro no oni mo

tsuno wo oru

cherry blossoms scatter–

even the devil in me

has lost his horns

Tagged: Cherry Blossoms