F.C. Schaefer's Blog, page 15

My thoughts on Summer of Night.

After reading THE TERROR a few years ago, I knew Dan Simmons could write, but I didn’t know how well he could write until I finished SUMMER OF NIGHT, a book that was a Christmas gift which sat on my shelf a few years too long – I was really denying myself a great read. Simmons’ mastery of character, place and time is among the best, and the traits of a true storyteller.

At first glance, SUMMER OF NIGHT appears to be nothing more than another nostalgic coming of age horror story set in a small town in 1960; the kind where only the adolescent protagonists catch on to the supernatural evil in their midst and have to fight it on their own. This plot is an old horror trope, same for the small town in America with dark secrets no one will talk about, where and ancient evil has lain dormant until just the right moment to come back to life, but these seeming clichés are so well handled by Simmons, the reader hardly notices. The central characters are a group of boys around the age of 12, some slightly older, others slightly younger, who are best buds in the 6th grade at the Old Central Elementary School in Elm Haven, Illinois. Their home situations are varied and different, so are their temperaments and personalities; one of the great strengths of this book is how much Simmons makes you care about and fear for Duane, Jim, Mike, Kevin, Dale and Lawrence. And their small town world is so well laid out that the reader will come to see it perfectly in their minds: the tree lined streets and the stores on Main, the dirt country roads with cornfields on either side. We can feel the heat and smell the humidity ahead of a thunder storm. One of the essentials of these stories is a well established sense of mood and place and Simmons pulls it off with flying colors.

Though it is set in the summer of 1960, Simmons does not turn it into a trip back to AMERICAN GRAFFITI, instead the nostalgia the author evokes is for a time when the most priceless thing a boy could own was a second hand bicycle, followed by a baseball glove. A time when kids had the freedom on summer vacation to walk out the door first thing in the morning and not come back until dinner was on the table and no one thought anything of it. It’s a nostalgia for a time when kids were expected to amuse themselves for hours on end in a time before childhood and adolescence were overwhelmed by a loud, overbearing and ostentatiously sexy popular culture that treated kids like consumers; a time when small towns still thrived, long before automation, outsourcing, globalization and Wal Mart were even on the horizon. It might be the summer of ‘60, but the nomination of JFK is mentioned maybe twice as an event that is happening very far away.

On the last day of school, one of the boy’s classmates, Tubby Cook, goes missing in Old Central, the same day that the peal of a long silent bell is heard. Soon our young protagonists begin to suspect that their teachers and principle were involved in the disappearance. As they try to get to the bottom of the mystery, a figure in a World War I uniform is seen lurking on the back roads, faces appear at windows in the night while other figures lurk in the darkness; shadows dart out of closets and hide under beds, things stir inside crawlspaces and basements; holes leading to tunnels under the earth are found, and as they learn more, a huge rendering truck begins to stalk the kids. Though they might be scared as hell, they also have plenty of grit, and knowing that the adults would not believe them, the boys – along with one girl - decide take on the evil in their midst, a battle that ultimately becomes a war – one that claims casualties before the final confrontation.
There is a twist about half way through the book, one that will leave many readers picking their jaws up off the floor, while others will be profoundly grief stricken. The fact that so many fans of this book have commented on their emotional reaction to this event is one sign this book has really connected. My favorite scene is when Jim and Dale turn the tables on the town’s punk ass bully and back him down when they are forced to turn to him for help in a particularly desperate moment. The section of the book where the kids attempt to bait the evil rendering truck into a showdown is among the best things I’ve read in a horror novel in a very long time. And among the well drawn supporting characters, none stands out better than Cordie Cook, one tough piece of white trash; only tell her that at your peril.

The book is not perfect, one flaw is the villain, whose motivation and objective is never made clear – it’s just an ancient evil that takes possession of those closest to it. But that is a weakness of many, many horror tomes. At least one character, Mink Harper, the town drunk, is brought in at one point to just relate, in great detail, pertinent information from the past to Mike; another trope that many horror writers use. SUMMER OF NIGHT can be described as a slow build, it takes it’s time setting the stage, but it is so well written by Simmons, that I didn’t mind; the chapters are just as long as they need to be, the character POV’s are will established and the sentence structure flows naturally, helped along with a great ear for metaphor and simile.

SUMMER OF NIGHT is often compared to Stephen King’s IT, and it is an apt comparison, but for me, SUMMER might just be the better book. It’s much shorter than King’s work and the story stays within the past, my paperback copy comes in just under 500 pages. It has been a few decades since I read IT, and though the book is one of King’s most popular, I remember it as bloated and indulgent in some parts; all of the contemporary story elements could have been edited out, leaving just the story of the kids in Derry, Maine in the 50’s, and it would have been a better book. And Simmons never lets his young heroes go off the rails like King lets his young protagonists do – I’m talking about that certain scene in the sewers, and if you’ve read King’s book, you know what I mean. One thing IT has over SUMMER is villains; nothing can top Pennywise the Clown.

One last thing, why hasn’t SUMMER OF NIGHT not been made into a movie? Its cast of young characters would be perfect for Stephen Spielberg; would love to have seen what POLTERGEIST era Tobe Hooper could have done with it. Someone in Hollywood has dropped the ball.

My book, BIG CRIMSON 1: THERE'S A NEW VAMPIRE IN TOWN, can be found on Amazon at: https://amzn.to/3GsBh2E
and on Smashwords at: https://bit.ly/3kIfrAb

My alternate history novel ALL THE WAY WITH JFK: AN ALTERNATE HISTORY OF 1964 can be found on Amazon at: http://amzn.to/2jVkW9m
and on Smashwords at: http://bit.ly/2kAoiAH

Visit my Goodreads author's page at:
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How would JFK have fought the Vietnam War?

One of the great – if not the greatest – What If of the 1960’s is, What would have happened in Vietnam if John F. Kennedy had lived? In my new novel, ALL THE WAY WITH JFK: AN ALTERNATE HISTORY OF 1964, where the President survived that November day in Dallas, I touch on this question. I posit a world where JFK had to confront the same Communist aggression in Southeast Asia in an election year that confronted his successor, Lyndon Johnson. LBJ would order in the bombers following the Gulf of Tonkien incident and then quickly escalate ground troops to widen the war. It would prove to be a disastrous policy, one that would ultimately force Johnson to quit the Presidential race four years later. Would Kennedy have followed the same path? Most of the men who worked closely with him in the White House would adamantly insist that JFK would never have gotten us into the quagmire that Vietnam became, that he was simply too smart and perceptive to have blindly followed the recommendations of the Pentagon as LBJ did. Most alternate histories that touch on this question usually have Kennedy pulling the plug on the conflict early on, and damn the consequences (though I do give Stephen King credit for not going down this road in 11-12-63). So I really had to make a choice when I sat down to plot out my own book. No way did I want to follow the same path as so many other writers of similar counterfactuals – I’m talking to you Jeff Greenfield – while knowing at the same time that I needed to come up with something unique that was also believable and plausible. When putting forward my own version of this What If scenario, I kept in mind two things, one being that JFK was by all accounts, a President with enough confidence to question the conventional wisdom of the Pentagon and his intelligence services and still be a very practical politician and tough Cold Warrior, one who well knew the costs of being thought of as “soft on Communism” by the American public. These two conflicting sides of his nature make for wonderful dramatic tension. In the excerpt from my book below, President Kennedy has to make a decision on the deteriorating situation in South Vietnam in the spring of 1964. I hope it rings true to the reader.



Excerpt:

The first crisis would come from Southeast Asia, where the nasty bush war between the South Vietnamese and the Communist Viet Cong guerrillas had been raging for years, with the latter getting the full support from the Communist government in the North. The South had really been on the ropes since an army coup had deposed and then executed President Diem the previous November. Diem had been losing the support of his own people and was suspected by a lot of men in the Administration of secretly going behind our backs to make a deal with the Communists after America sent a lot of aide, money and advisors to his country to prop him up - so I thought it was no great loss when the ingrate went down on November 2nd of ‘63. And for a few weeks, South Vietnam was a big story; it looked as if it would be the next big test of our resolve to stop the spread of Communism in Asia.
Then came the events in Dallas and South Vietnam disappeared from the front pages and the evening newscasts. It also ceased to be anything close to a priority for the Administration as the assassination conspiracy investigation led back Havana and the ensuing confrontation with Castro. Still, the brush war in the countryside of Vietnam simmered and spewed; more than once during the winter, there were reports of intense fighting in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam which got the attention of the Pentagon and the State Department for a day or so before some development elsewhere, almost always Cuba, grabbed the spotlight.
Vietnam came back into focus on May 16th when General William Westmorland, the newly installed commander of the American mission in South Vietnam, sent an urgent cable to the Pentagon informing them that not only had the Viet Cong captured two provincial capitals in the critical Central Highlands, but they had also wiped out a large contingent of the South Vietnamese Army just outside of Saigon. Not only that, but there were a number of details concerning these defeats which were especially ominous, not the least of them being the latest version of the Type 56 variant of the AK47 the Viet Cong irregulars were armed with, along with the short range surface to surface missiles they used as well. Somebody was sending their best arms and ammo to Ho Chi Minh. Equally bad was the report from the Highlands that Russian advisors were spotted on the ground, aiding the Viet Cong in battle; if true, this was a serious escalation; it could also mean Moscow was fishing in more troubled waters than just Iran.
In tandem with Westmorland’s message was one from Ambassador Lodge, stating that the junta in Saigon which had replaced Diem was in disarray and on the verge of collapse, completely unable to mount an effective defense of the country. In unusually blunt words, Lodge said that if the present circumstances did not change, the whole country would likely be past the point of saving within 30 days.
An emergency meeting was called by the President on May 17th in response to these developments. John Kennedy was not a happy man at the prospect of yet another foreign policy crisis; his frown grew even more pronounced when Walt Rostow, an assistant to the NSC director, made an impassioned talk on the strategic importance of Southeast Asia as it fit into the Cold War and as a roadblock to Communist expansion. Rostow urged the President to immediately bomb the port of Haiphong to prevent the Soviets and the Chinese from resupplying Hanoi, while sending at least an infantry combat brigade to take on a combat role until the South Vietnamese Army could get back on its feet.
“I wasn’t aware they were ever on their feet to begin with,” was the President’s comeback to Rostow.

I am an indie author and my latest novel is ALL THE WAY WITH JFK: AN ALTERNATE HISTORY OF 1964. It is available at the following:
http://amzn.to/2jVkW9m on Amazon
http://bit.ly/2kAoiAH at Smashwords

And the first book of my vampire trilogy, Big Crimson 1: There's a New Vampire in Town, is available for preorder on Amazon at https://amzn.to/3GsBh2E.

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JFK and George Wallace and 1964

In the many books written about the Kennedy years by men who served with him and by admiring historians, there are those who have been designated as villains. In an earlier piece, I wrote about Curtis LeMay, the Air Force Chief of Staff who urged the President to bomb the Soviet missile sites in Cuba without warning and opposed JFK’s plan to blockade the island in October of 1962. Besides the Joint Chiefs who embodied the Military Industrial Complex, there was another group who often found themselves in opposition the 35th President, Southern politicians determined to fight to the death against any attempt to end the system of segregation that had been in place since the end of Reconstruction. Kennedy himself was a slow convert to the cause of Civil Rights during his short term, but his views shifted with events, driven by a grass roots movement determined overthrow a police dictatorship that denied them their basic rights as Americans and the cunning Southern politicians who vowed no compromise or retreat in their defense of white supremacy. There were many such men, but the most vocal and the most public was Alabama Governor George Wallace, a man who vowed “Segregation forever” in his inaugural address in 1963. But Wallace was not just another Southern demagogue, hell bent on staying in office by whipping up racial strife, he had national ambitions, and the road to them led through the school house door.
Wallace would enter several primaries in 1964 and run against Lyndon Johnson’s surrogates, winning respectable numbers in some states and doing very well in Maryland. This was just a dry run for a third party effort in 1968, where the Alabama Governor would win millions of working class votes class along those of his fellow Southerners and do more than a little to shatter forever the political consensus that had governed America for generations. The man was clearly on to something, even if he represented to worst of American democracy. In my new novel ALL THE WAY WITH JFK: AN ALTERNATE HISTORY OF 1964 where Kennedy survives the events of November 22nd, 1963 and goes on to run for re-election, I portray what would have happened if the ambitions of the Alabama Governor and the 35th President had collided in the Democratic primary contests in ’64. In the excerpt below, a young trouble shooter for the Kennedy re-election effort finds himself in Wisconsin a few weeks before the primary election and has been informed by local Democrats that the President might actually have a fight on his hands despite what over confident White House believes.


Excerpt:


To see if things were really as bad as they were being portrayed, I went to a Wallace appearance the next day at a VFW hall in Milwaukee. If I wasn’t convinced Kennedy had a problem before going inside, I was more than persuaded by the time I left. The room was packed like sardines, at least a crowd of 700, and when the bantam-sized Wallace first took the stage he looked distinctly uncomfortable in front of this distinctly northern crowd. But something electric happened when the MC, a Marine veteran and bar owner, began his introduction by ordering the few Negroes in the crowd to leave and then excoriated them by recounting how they beat up old ladies, raped white women, refused to work and lived on relief. He ended this with an emphatic, “I didn’t survive months of hell on Iwo Jima to come home to this!”
The crowd went wild when they heard this and when Wallace finally spoke, he clearly realized he was among the like-minded. His message was simple and direct: the Federal government in Washington wanted to take away your freedom and if it could force the people of Alabama to integrate against their will, then what could they do to good people of Wisconsin. “It’s time for the pointy-headed bureaucrats in Washington to get the message,” he said at one point, “we want them to leave our homes, our jobs, our schools, our farms, our businesses alone. They belong to us, not them.” Then he added, “I wish the President cared as much about the freedom of the citizens of Alabama and Wisconsin as he does about the freedom of a bunch of foreigners in Cuba.” The crush of admirers was so great it took Wallace more than an hour to get out of the hall.

Back in my hotel room, I placed a call to Steve Smith and did my best to convince him we had a potential problem in Wisconsin. My words fell on deaf ears; there was no way the President
could be having a hard time against a two-bit demagogue.

My book, BIG CRIMSON 1: THERE'S A NEW VAMPIRE IN TOWN, can be found on Amazon at: https://amzn.to/3GsBh2E
and on Smashwords at: https://bit.ly/3kIfrAb

My alternate history novel ALL THE WAY WITH JFK: AN ALTERNATE HISTORY OF 1964 can be found on Amazon at: http://amzn.to/2jVkW9m
and on Smashwords at: http://bit.ly/2kAoiAH

Visit my Goodreads author's page at:
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The King of the Nudies

This book had sat on my shelf for a year or so after getting it as a Christmas gift and I finally got around to reading it and can say with authority that it was well worth the wait. I am a life-long movie buff and I especially like to read books about the creative process of film making, my last such book was a bio of John Ford, and I can say with absolute certitude that though Russ Meyer was about a million miles from the great Master of the Western Genre, they shared a few things in common, mainly a cantankerous disposition, which they used to get their way, and a great passion for movie making.

BIG BOSOMS AND SQUARE JAWS by Jimmy McDonough is an in depth look at the great renegade film maker and King of the Nudies, one that does not spare his subject his less than flattering attributes, but also lets the reader come away with a true understanding of this unique man. McDonough, a journalist in the mode of Hunter S. Thompson, finds just the right voice to tell Meyer’s story, from his lowly beginnings to his glory days through his eventual sad decline.

Meyer was born in California in 1922 and raised by a single mother after his police man father left the family when Russ was an infant. Like many of his generation, the defining event of Meyer’s life was service in World War II, where an early love of cameras landed him in the 166 Signal Photographic Company. As a combat photographer, he would see plenty of action and make the life-long friendships that would become a sort of first family for Meyer as he would remain close to his army buddies for the rest of his life. His wartime experience got him a job making industrial films, while working a sideline as a photographer for the many skin magazines of the era. It was a sideline that brought him in contact with strippers and budding actresses and allowed Meyer to indulge his fetish for the well-endowed and full-figured female form. At the same time, he was learning everything about the film making process, so by the time he was ready to make a low budget picture of his own in the late 50’s, the he was virtually a one man film crew all his own.

Starting with THE IMMORAL MR. TEAS and continuing for the next two decades, Russ Meyer would churn one low budget “nudie” film after another, filled with gorgeous women, the men they drive crazy, and the violence that ensues when his combustible characters meet. MUDHONEY; COMMON LAW CABIN; FASTER PUSSYCAT! KILL KILL; VIXEN, HARRY, CHERRY, AND RAQUEL; BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS and BENEATH THE VALLEY OF THE ULTRA VIXENS are among his titles that have developed a true cult following. Though he would often be called a pornographer, Meyer was nothing of the kind, his movies had actual plots, and the nudity in many of them would barely qualify for an R rating these days. The women in his films were anything but passive victims, most of them being able to handle anything a man dished out and then give back to him twice over, Some, like Tura Satana’s Varla in PUSSYCAT, are down-right man destroying killing machines; when it came to the kick ass female protagonist, Russ Meyer was way ahead of everyone else. He would briefly work at 20th Century Fox in 1970, and would produce a profitable X-rated epic for them before a change in studio management ended any chance of mainstream success. Which was a shame, one wishes he could have found a producer in the 70’s who could have raised the kind of money that would allowed Meyer to take it too another level; yet one gets the feeling that he would not have traded away the freedom to make his movies, his way, for any amount of money. And if truth be told, there were probably many Academy Award winning directors working within the studios who must have envied Meyer his freedom.

We meet Meyer’s second family, the varied individuals with whom he made his movies, especially the women, most of them characters in their own right: the aforementioned Tura Satana, Haji, Lori Williams, Erica Gavin, Rena Horton, Alaina Capri, Babette Bardot, Uschi Digard and Edy Williams. What a loss it was that most of them never found mainstream success. The famously square jawed Charles Napier was the one Meyer regular who went on to a real career, co-starring in RAMBO and becoming a regular in the late Jonathan Demme's movies. And of course there is Roger Ebert, the film critic and passionate Meyer fan who wrote screenplays for him and become a lifelong friend. McDonough wrote this book in 2005, and sadly, a number of these people have passed away in the years since.

Meyer was among those, like Hugh Hefner, who in post war America, helped bring the notion of a sex life out from behind bedroom doors and closed curtains; it was an attitude that met with more than a little resistance. The author details Meyer’s battles with the censors and decency crusaders, like the arch-hypocrite, Charles Keating, where he knocked down doors for the others to enter. McDonough doesn’t spare any details in describing Meyer’s sad last years when dementia ravaged his mind and he was taken advantage of by some less than scrupulous hanger-ons. The culture had moved on, and Meyer’s peculiar brand of sex and violence had become the normal.

Meyer, the man, could be rude and crude, a real 20th Century American male who detested Communists, and despite his reputation, preferred straight missionary style sex according to his many bed mates. He was a great self promoter who knew what he liked, and believed many of his fellow Americans would like the same things if given a half a chance. He was proven right and made millions in the process. Why should we remember him? Because his influence has been enormous. John Waters, Tim Burton and Quentin Tarantino have sung his praises; as a faithful watcher of TRUE BLOOD, I can say for certainty that Mayer’s presence is still being felt. Whether you are member of the cult of Meyer or just merely interested in movie history, BIG BOSOMS AND SQUARE JAWS is a must read. Thank you, Jimmy McDonough for writing it; I think Russ would be pleased.

I am an indie author and my latest novel is ALL THE WAY WITH JFK: AN ALTERNATE HISTORY OF 1964. It is available at the following:
http://amzn.to/2jVkW9m on Amazon
http://bit.ly/2kAoiAH at Smashwords

And the first book of my vampire trilogy, Big Crimson 1: There's a New Vampire in Town, is available for order on Amazon at https://amzn.to/3GsBh2E.

Visit my Goodreads author's page at:
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The villains of Camelot.

My novel, ALL THE WAY WITH JFK: An Alternate History of 1964, is a speculation on what might have happened (‘might’ being the operative word) if John F. Kennedy had survived the assassination attempt in Dallas and run for re-election. In laying out my saga, I had a huge cast of historical personages to work with, one of the most colorful and varied of any period in American history. Not only that, but it one of the most written about as well, with virtually every participant writing their memoirs of their time with Kennedy, especially JFK’s men, who worked hard on the printed page to paint their now deceased boss in the most heroic terms. But if JFK was the hero then there had to be a villain, and outside of a Nikita Khrushchev and a large cast of Southern politicians, one of the chief bad guys has been General Curtis LeMay, the Chief of Staff of the Air Force and a hard core Cold Warrior who reportedly ordered a USAF squadron to fly over Vladivostok at high noon in an attempt to provoke a confrontation with the Soviets. LeMay has been described as a 20th Century Ulysses Grant, a man who believed that when faced with an enemy, you went all out with everything you had at your disposal. If war is inevitable, LeMay believed, then the sooner you fought it, the better, why wait for years while the Soviets grew that much stronger. He was a man with a large personality, the cigar chomping personification of the Military Industrial Complex, a persona honed since World War II when he ran the air war against Japan, a campaign that reduced most Japanese cities to smoldering ruins and killed millions. At the height of his career, he was a presence in popular culture: George C. Scott’s General Buck Turgidson in DOCTOR STRANGELOVE was supposedly modeled on LeMay; Thunderbolt Ross in THE INCREDIBLE HULK, which came out in 1962, is clearly a comic book take on LeMay. In the eyes of Kennedy’s men and admirers, LeMay’s great crime was to vociferously support a first strike on the missile sites in Cuba in October of 1962 and to hell with any negotiations with the Soviets. It all came down to peace and survival with Kennedy or World War III with Curt LeMay.

It’s all very simple black and white in many an account, yet a hard look at the historical record reveals that the truth may not be so straightforward. Many of Kennedy’s supporters imply that the Air Force Chief of Staff was a troglodyte holdover from the Eisenhower years; in truth, JFK appointed LeMay to the Joint Chiefs in 1961 and reappointed him in 1963 after the General had been near insubordinate to Kennedy’s face in the White House during the Cuban Crisis. What few want to say is that John Kennedy knew that if war with the Soviets were to come ( a real possibility in the early 60’s) then he would need a warrior like LeMay to win it, and if the man had some sharp edges, then they more than worth putting up with. When Kennedy’s infant son died in the summer of 1963, LeMay wrote the President a heartfelt handwritten note of condolence; hardly the actions of an enemy. Ultimately, LeMay retired, considered running for office and ended up on the ticket with George Wallace in 1968, an act from which his reputation never recovered. LeMay wanted a platform from which to criticize the Johnson Administration’s conduct of the Vietnam War, yet he was lumped with the racists who flocked to the Wallace banner. This was unfair, for unlike more than one senior commander from World War II, there are no racist or anti-Semitic remarks on the public record attributed to him. LeMay was also an avid hunter and outdoors man, and became an early supporter of what was to become the environmental movement, try to find a right winger with similar sentiments today.

How did I approach LeMay when I wrote my novel? What I didn’t want to do was make him cartoon caricature; while I might disagree with the man’s politics and his world view, I do think Curtis LeMay was a true patriot, a military professional who served his country well in war and peace. Yet his great out-sized personality makes him a wonderful foil for the President and the men around him. He really was a unique man, so much more than the buffoon in Kubrick’s classic movie.

In the except below, the General takes the floor in an Oval Office meeting in the wake of the invasion of Cuba where an off limits enclave of Soviet soldiers has become a bone of contention.



Excerpt:

I delivered the Oval Office briefing on Sunday, April 12th, with LeMay and the rest of the Joint Chiefs in attendance where the plans for ground operations on Cuba were discussed. General LeMay sat quietly through my positive report on the success of the air campaign so far, and the number of targets taken out, but when I mentioned the concentration of Russian forces at Camaguey and the need for this area to remain off limits, LeMay spoke up. “Cuba is a theater of war where Americans are engaged,” he said to the President, “and those Russian personnel are enemy combatants and should be treated as such. It makes no sense to allow the enemy a safe haven on their home ground.” The General was not privy to the information we had, and the President did his best to explain the arrangement reached with Andreyev. LeMay would have none of it. “The only thing the President should have done when he was on the line with this Russian General was demanded his total surrender,” LeMay said to me with the sharpest glare I’ve ever received from a superior officer in my entire career. “We have him outnumbered ten thousand to one; those Russians would be nothing but a grease spot within an hour if I could just give the order.” At this point the President reminded the General of the obvious, that the Kremlin had a say in this and Russian casualties were sure to provoke a military response from them in Europe or elsewhere; so far the only thing coming out of Moscow were fierce denunciations of American aggression which killed no one, but that could change.

“Khrushchev hasn’t mobilized one single soldier since the first bomb fell on Havana, there’s nothing he can do, and he knows it. There are tons of munitions, artillery and ordinance there with those Russian personnel in Camaguey and it will all be handed over to the Cubans as soon as the first American GI hit the beach. A lot of good boys are going to die when we go into Cuba; some them could be saved if I’m allowed to act right now.” It was how LeMay laid it out, but the President would not budge, and no bombs would fall on Camaguey. There are many differing versions of the exchange between President Kennedy and the General on the second Sunday in April, and I’ll put my hand to God that is how it happened. Curtis LeMay was the man who reduced Tokyo and Yokohama to ashes and built the Strategic Air Command, and I would never dare call him a liar, just certain other historians and hacks.

My book, BIG CRIMSON 1: THERE'S A NEW VAMPIRE IN TOWN, can be found on Amazon at: https://amzn.to/3GsBh2E
and on Smashwords at: https://bit.ly/3kIfrAb

My alternate history novel ALL THE WAY WITH JFK: AN ALTERNATE HISTORY OF 1964 can be found on Amazon at: http://amzn.to/2jVkW9m
and on Smashwords at: http://bit.ly/2kAoiAH

Visit my Goodreads author's page at:
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Visit my Amazon author's page at: https://amzn.to/3nK6Yxv

Smells like Teen Dystopia

There are many rules that writers can pick from to follow, but one of the most popular has to be: if you can’t come up with an original idea, then its fine to steal one and make it your own. The operative phrase being, “make it your own.” QUARANTINE: THE LOSERS is the first in a series of books that takes its premise from freely from LORD OF THE FLIES. It’s another in a long line of YA Teen Dystopia books where all the adults die, civilization vanishes and the kids are in charge, which is usually about as bad as it sounds.

I am not even close to the target demographic for this book, but I really like the GONE books, similar YA series by Michael Grant, so I thought I’d give this one a try. I’ll give the authors credit, they don’t waste time plunging the reader into the action by page 25 as a typical first day at a large suburban Colorado high school ends catastrophically when a deadly infectious virus is accidently released into the student body, killing everyone over a certain age and forcing the survivors to live in a government enforced quarantine. No one comes in and no one goes out.

Of course in this dire situation, the utter worst in almost everybody comes out, and this being a YA book, it means the survivors all join up with whatever rigid social caste they belong in and prey on the others. Naturally the Jocks (or the Varsity as they’re called here) are the worst, along with a clique of hot girls naming themselves The Pretty Ones. Just like every other YA fiction, high school is forever. And for YA book, the violence is quite graphic at times and so is the language, let parents be warned.

The main characters are a pair of brothers and a girl they both develop feelings for as the story develops; they’re flawed but likable kids who are not part of any gang at the start. By sticking up for others, they earn the loyalty of more than a few outcasts and sit themselves on a collision with the story’s villains. One of the reasons why I hung with this book was because the authors do a good job of making you care for the characters and come to root them to not only survive, but escape the hell on earth they’re stuck in through no fault of their own.

I will give it to them, the writers practice well the mumbo jumbo pseudo science needed to pull these kind of stories off; here we have a virulent virus that is deadly only to people conveniently over the age of graduation and seems to act with the precision of a deadly nerve gas. It’s one of those things that secret government labs are cooking up all the time in fictional horror; it worked for Stephen King in THE STAND didn’t it.

Anyway, the first book of the QUARANTINE series is an easy read, and the ending is a satisfactory one in that it sets everything up quite well for the sequel, which I will check out and find out what hath William Golding wrought.

My book, BIG CRIMSON 1: THERE'S A NEW VAMPIRE IN TOWN, can be found on Amazon at: https://amzn.to/3GsBh2E
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My alternate history novel ALL THE WAY WITH JFK: AN ALTERNATE HISTORY OF 1964 can be found on Amazon at: http://amzn.to/2jVkW9m
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My review of Watergate by Thomas Mallon

One would think that there is nothing new to say about the Watergate scandal, now ancient history to most Americans, but Thomas Mallon’s historical novel proves this point wrong by a considerable margin. His book, WATERGATE, is an utterly enthralling look back at events and a Presidency that altered American history forever, from some never before considered perspectives. Mallon’s book is a re-imagining of the scandal, told from the view of many characters, all principle players to some extent in the scandal. I think the genius of the book is that Mallon creates fictional versions of Nixon and his people which seem totally real, they live and breathe and rage and hurt, all while feeling utter dismay that things have taken such a turn.

Mallon’s book is not a particularly long one and the narrative flows smoothly from one character to the next; this is not a “and then this happened” retelling of historical events, it does help if the reader has at least a working knowledge of the scandal and who was who and where they were at certain points in the story. Those unfamiliar with history may have to do a lot of wiki-ing before they reach the last page, but Mallon does provide a list of players at the beginning of his book that helps a lot.

What I found so striking about WATERGATE was Mallon’s sympathetic portrait of so many characters who have been written off as villains or worse, fools, by most historical accounts; he does not apologize for their actions or carry water like so many of the “Nixon didn’t do anything wrong” bitter enders, but lets us see them as they, perhaps, saw themselves. It is a refreshing take; one thankfully free of the snark and irony so prevalent in much contemporary political fiction.

In the pages of Mallon’s book, we meet a flawed Richard Nixon who lives in perpetual fear that his many, many enemies will yet find a way to bring him down, a fear that infected his White House and all who were part of his inner circle. There is a fascinating portrait of Pat Nixon, the woman who was always so reserved in public, never letting her mask slip, yet capable of surprising secrets in private. There is John and Martha Mitchell, an incredible mismatch of a marriage, one that crumbled under the weight of revelations of his criminal activities as head of Nixon’s re-election campaign. Equally memorable is Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s long time and ever loyal secretary, the person responsible of the infamous 18 ½ minute gap on one Nixon’s incriminating tapes. Mallon comes up with a surprising and poignant explanation for this act and what was on the tape, one of the enduring mysteries of the 20th Century. Another interesting relationship explored is the marriage of outward tough guy E. Howard Hunt and his formidable wife, Dorothy, who skillfully negotiated with the men in the Nixon White House to get hush money for her family after her husband’s arrest for his role in the break in. Every reader’s favorite is Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the daughter of Theodore and Washington’s long time Grande Dame, who sees through everyone, yet holds a deep affection for Richard Nixon, whose act of kindness in an hour of need is not forgotten. Mallon does an exceptional job with his women characters, making them every bit as compelling as the men who were on the front pages.

Much space is given to Fred LaRue, the genial Southerner who became the White House’s bagman after the Watergate break in; in Mallon’s hands, this relativity minor character in history, takes front and center often in the narrative. Like many of the others involved in Watergate, LaRue simply cannot understand how his life, which was on such a successful trajectory, has taken such a wrong turn, but is helpless in the face of impending disaster as one illegal act and lie leads to another with the inevitable set down with the Federal Attorney waiting at the end. Like most of the characters in Mallon’s book, LaRue suppresses a private pain they would never dare show in public; only a brief reunion with long ago love offers him any solace as the firestorm engulfs the Nixon Administration.

If there is a real villain in this book, it is the fatuous Elliot Richardson, who thinks he will walk over Richard Nixon’s political corpse to the Oval Office.

I would never claim that Mallon’s book is history, there is plenty in the historical record that condemns Nixon and his crew as the most corrupt, venal and downright mean group of characters to ever hold power in America (and I include Donald Trump in that judgment), but as historical fiction, the book is of the highest order, making us see very familiar history in a different light. I am a self published author of two alternate history novels, both featuring a fictional Nixon among others, and I fully respect the hard work and attention to detail Thomas Mallon must have put in to write this book. All readers of good fiction should seek it out.

My book, BIG CRIMSON 1: THERE'S A NEW VAMPIRE IN TOWN, can be found on Amazon at: https://amzn.to/3GsBh2E
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My alternate history novel ALL THE WAY WITH JFK: AN ALTERNATE HISTORY OF 1964 can be found on Amazon at: http://amzn.to/2jVkW9m
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Coming up with Kennedy's secret intelligence network

Coming up with Kennedy’s secret intelligence network.

While he was President, John F. Kennedy liked to go outside the chain of command to get intelligence, especially after the Bay of Pigs debacle, where he felt the CIA let him down. This I learned from the various Kennedy books I read for research before writing my latest novel, ALL THE WAY WITH JFK: AN ALTERNATE HISTORY OF 1964, where the President survives Dallas and lives to run for re-election. This info was of real use to me when I was plotting out my book since much of the action takes place behind closed doors and in secret meetings where plots are hatched and deals are struck between various individuals, not all of whom possess noble motives. From representatives of the Administration meeting with the Mafia to plan Castro’s assassination to Bobby Kennedy meeting with a Soviet diplomat at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, there was a real “secret history” of the Kennedy years, most of which saw the light of day only years later. In my story, these clandestine activities continued into the election year as the Kennedy brothers go for broke with a plan to take out Castro and win a resounding re-election in November. One of my principle witnesses to all these machinations is Colonel Martin Maddox, a Marine officer on the staff of the National Security Council who impresses the President with his keen intelligence analysis on the day of the assassination attempt. When he gets a promotion, and an office in the basement of the White House; in the excerpt below, Colonel Maddox learns some interesting things about how JFK operated.

Excerpt:



This new position came without a standard job description and list of duties written down in black and white; no problem, I just jumped in with both feet when I walked into my new office in the basement and discovered four cardboard boxes filled with papers, some of them handwritten, sitting in the middle of the floor, having been delivered on the Attorney General’s order the night before. These boxes came with the request that a report on their contents be ready for the President no later than 2:00 p.m. The first thing I picked up was from Paris Stafford, an old Harvard classmate of the President’s who owned a dozen car dealerships, and who did a large amount of business in Europe, some of it on the other side of the Iron Curtain, where there was a small, but lucrative, market for American-made farm equipment. There were other opportunities as well, for it seemed there were members of the Soviet elite who had an appetite for the finer things of American life like Hi-Fi stereos, Coca-Cola, bedroom furniture, Kentucky Bourbon, paperback novels and Playboy magazine - all of which came into the Worker’s Paradise by way of crates marked Medical Supplies and shipped from Stafford’s warehouse in Atlanta, Georgia. All of this was kept far from Khrushchev’s eyes and those of the more orthodox Marxists in the Kremlin, who had no idea how many of their comrades were enjoying the evil fruits of capitalism. The Russian end was handled by Vladimir Roykov, the #2 man to Leonid Brezhnev, a high-ranking member of the Politburo, who was fattening his wallet every time a crate from Stafford off-loaded at the airport in Moscow and passed through customs without being inspected. By the fall of 1963, they were working on a deal by which certain Soviet bigwigs could indulge their passion for high-end Ford and Chevy automobiles while keeping fat old Nikita in the dark about it.

Stafford found a reason to fly to Moscow at least once a month, always meeting Roykov while he was there; and as soon as he got back stateside, a detailed hand written note on what he‘d learned while there would be delivered to the President’s desk. Most of what was in those notes could be called gossip, but after reading a half dozen of them, it was crystal clear much of it was better than anything the CIA station chief in Moscow reported. Now I had a year’s worth of such reports to read over and see if I could find anything in retrospect which might lead back to Oswald.

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Bringing JFK to life on the page.

How did John F. Kennedy talk when he was behind closed doors? That was the problem I encountered when I wrote my latest alternate history novel, All the Way with JFK, which deals with a 1964 Presidential campaign where the President survived the assassination attempt in Dallas. Unlike Kennedy’s immediate successors, LBJ and Nixon, there is not a lot a raw material for a writer to research. Both Johnson and Nixon, whom I have used as characters in this book and a previous novel, left a very public record of how they behaved behind the doors of the Oval Office, including tape recordings of private conversations both men never thought would become public, along with lengthy memoirs and interviews where they explained and defended their often very controversial actions while in office. But John F. Kennedy died before he could tell his side of the story and while there are some taped phone conversations of JFK in the White House available on Youtube, there isn’t much else. I was forced to rely on memoirs and histories of the early 60’s, which contained accounts of meetings between the President and his advisors and with other world leaders. This presented a problem in that Kennedy books usually fall into two camps: those that idolized the man and built up the myth of Camelot and those that attempted to reduce the man and the myth to rubble. The former consisted to books by Kennedy stalwarts like Arthur Schlesinger and Theodore Sorenson, whose accounts of their years of service to JFK could be charitably described as adoring, while the latter is best exemplified by Seymour Hersh’s The Dark Side of Camelot, a well written hatchet job. Then there is the devious and self centered fictional Kennedy of James Ellroy’s novel, American Tabloid. All books that I read in order to find my own take on the man and get some feel for how he interacted with others. What I wanted was not some secular saint played by Martin Sheen in a TV movie or the devious playboy and adulterer from the imaginations of his die hard political enemies. In all the accounts I read, I looked for consistent traits and a couple did emerge, the foremost being that JFK was cool under pressure and that when he did lose his temper, it was for a good reason and with purpose. The other thing I took away was that he was a man comfortable in his own skin and secure in his abilities, possessing a sense of history along with a skeptical mind that questioned the face value of what he was told. He could be arrogant and much too self assured at times, but that could be said of any man elected President of the United States, for even to attempt such a feat requires a big ego. I also had to keep in mind that I did not have to create a totally historically accurate Kennedy, that I was writing a piece of fiction, that my John F. Kennedy is a character in my novel, responding to events which never occurred, while doing and saying things he never did in real life; in other words, I was creating A John F. Kennedy, not THE John F. Kennedy.

In the excerpt from All the Way with JFK below, the President is enlisting the help of Colonel Martin Maddox, USMC, who serves on the White House staff, in helping stop a conspiracy by Kennedy’s political opponents to expose some of his darker secrets right before Election Day in 1964. I hope my efforts to make the 35th President of the United States live again, if only on the pages of my novel, ring true.

Excerpt:


“Colonel,” the President said, coming right to the point, “there is a conspiracy at work in this city, a conspiracy whose purpose is to destroy this administration, to undermine all the hard work we have done in the last four years. It is a conspiracy that is about to come together and succeed because it is about to get possession of evidence which could expose our dealings with certain dubious individuals who were in a position to give us aid in our efforts the rid Cuba of Castro. To the public at large these dealings will make it appear as if this administration is morally compromised; if made known, there will be lengthy investigations, Congressional hearings, which will likely be televised, grand juries impaneled and indictments issued. This could all end in trials, convictions, huge legal bills, and reputations irrevocably ruined, not to mention a jail sentence.”

Thanks to the message from Harlow, I knew all about it, some rat was selling us out, and if that happened, my future would be grim.

The President continued, “If this conspiracy does succeed, I will not be re-elected, there will be no summit with Khrushchev and a hard-won opportunity to change the direction of Cold War, and make the world a much safer place for our children will be lost for good. This cannot be allowed to happen, and we must do everything possible to make sure it does not happen. And to do that, Colonel Maddox, I will need your help. Earlier today, you assured me of your silence when it could be most critical; now I’m asking you to do whatever it will take to help me stop this conspiracy in its tracks before any damage is done. Can I count on you to do just that?”

My book, BIG CRIMSON 1: THERE'S A NEW VAMPIRE IN TOWN, can be found on Amazon at: https://amzn.to/3GsBh2E
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My alternate history novel ALL THE WAY WITH JFK: AN ALTERNATE HISTORY OF 1964 can be found on Amazon at: http://amzn.to/2jVkW9m
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The best book about the greatest director about one of my favorite directors

Searching for John Ford by Joseph McBride

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


SEARCHING FOR JOHN FORD was another tome that sat on my shelf for too long without being opened, but after reading Glenn Frankel’s excellent book on the making of THE SEARCHERS, I thought it was time to read Joseph McBride’s in depth look at man who routinely makes every Top Five list of greatest American directors of all time. At more than 700 pages, it is truly an in depth look at the man and the dissection of a career that began in the early days of silent movies and ended in the tumult of the mid 1960’s. In between we get the lowdown on the making of such classics as THE INFORMER, YOUNG MR. LINCOLN, STAGECOACH, THE GRAPES OF WRATH, HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY, MY DARLING CLEMENTINE, FORT APACHE, THE QUIET MAN, THE SEARCHERS and THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE along with a host of other films beloved by movie buffs the world over. The book is also the portrait of a man who could be called “difficult” on his best days as the reader is treated to stories of his legendary irascible temperament on the set.

McBride is a critic and film historian who clearly did exhaustive research for this biography, truly doing a search for the man behind the image, a search that included speaking with the director himself late in his life despite Ford being a notoriously bad subject for an interview. Far more revealing were the many friends and close associates of Ford that McBride was able to talk to while they were still alive, many of whom, like Olive Carey, the widow of actor Harry Carey, and Admiral John Bulkeley, the real life hero who THEY WERE EXPENDABLE was based on, were able to offer truly revealing insights into Ford’s character and his life, often seeing through the public persona the man worked so hard to project and giving us a glimpse at the vulnerabilities and insecurities that lurked underneath. McBride does offer a lot of opinion on Ford’s work, breaking down and deconstructing his films to reveal what this most visual of film makers was trying to convey. There is a lot of supposition and arm chair analysis, and if I didn’t necessarily agree with all of it, I will give McBride credit for backing up his arguments.

The book begins in Ireland, the land from which his parents immigrated to America from in the 1870’s, and the place that gave Ford his firm identity as an Irish American; born in Portsmouth, Maine, in 1894 with the name John Martin Feeney, his origin would bequeath him an outsider’s keen eye for hypocrisy and injustice, as well an understanding of human nature and its attendant flaws. He was also a young man with a sensitive artistic streak, one that he would spend a lifetime trying to hide behind a macho facade. He followed an older brother’s path to the stage and from there to the fledgling film industry, where he learned the business from D.W. Griffith himself – Ford is a Klansman in BIRTH OF A NATION. He eventually settled into directing and found his niche, making his first classic western, THE IRON HORSE, in 1924. By the time sound arrived, Ford was well on his way to becoming a one of the top directors in Hollywood, winning the first of his record four Academy Awards for THE INFORMER in 1935. He would come to see himself as a chronicler of American history with such films as DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK and YOUNG MR. LINCOLN, but it would be the western genre where Ford’s talent would really shine, starting with STAGECOACH in 1939, the movie that made John Wayne a star. It would be the western where Ford would really shine, ultimately producing a string of classics in the years after World War II that would seal his reputation as the foremost master of the horse opera. Yet one of his greatest films, and the one for which he won his second Academy Award, THE GRAPES OF WRATH, was set in contemporary times and tackled an urgent social issue. When asked about his films, Ford would shrug them off as “a job of work” as if he were nothing more than a journeyman director.

One of the revelations of this book is Ford’s service during World War II; he had joined the naval reserve in the mid 30’s and was commissioned an officer after Pearl Harbor. During the war, he would come under fire at the battle of Midway and on D-Day, in both cases leading teams of film makers on the front line to get some of the finest and most harrowing footage ever taken from combat, footage used in documentaries made to boost the war effort and to explain to the public in a pre television era what the war was all about. His years of service to his country were undoubtedly the high point of Ford’s life and would cast a shadow over his work for the remainder of his career. It would also color an increasingly bleak vision of America in the post war years.

For film buffs like me, McBride’s book gives us a fascinating look at Ford’s creative process and his collaborators, including frequent screen writers Frank Nugent and Dudley Nichols, along with producers Merian C. Cooper and Sonny Whitney, not mention studio heads like Daryl F. Zanuck. We are treated to such tidbits as how Ford would routinely cross out lines exposition from each script as soon as it was in his hands; how he instinctively knew how to stage a scene, whether it be set around a table in a log cabin or an Indian attack in the open country of Monument Valley; the tricks he would use to make sure a movie would be edited in the way he wanted it be by the studio. We meet the many beloved members of the “John Ford stock company,” including Victor McLaglen, Ward Bond, Maureen O’Hara, Barry Fitzgerald, Harry Carey Jr., Mildred Natwick, John Qualen, Hank Worden, Ben Johnson, Woody Strode, Jack Pennick, Andy Devine, George O’Brien, Ken Curtis, not to mention the biggest star in the history of Hollywood, John Wayne, who started out a prop man on one of Ford’s silent movies in the late 20’s. In his director’s role, Ford clearly saw himself as the commanding officer, there to lead his crew of actors, stuntmen, and technicians to the successful completion of their mission. And in this he was not a gentle commander, for to work for Ford was to feel the lash of his sharp tongue and be on the receiving end of his short temper; the two most frequently to get the rough treatment being Wayne and Bond, “Pappy” Ford’s surrogate sons. Yet there was always a method to the man’s madness as he made one classic movie after another and got terrific work out of all of his actors, who always returned for the next picture because to work for Ford was a guarantee you’d do your best. With few exceptions, he was loved by all who worked with him and considered their films made with him to be the high point of their careers.

The family is often at the center of many of Ford’s films, and it figures in the themes of most of them, yet in real life, he was a failure as a husband and father, a man who only felt at home on a movie set or the deck of his yacht; as the years went by, his increasing alcoholism would result in benders once a film was completed. The close bonds of the Joads in THE GRAPES OF WRATH or the Morgans in HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY could not be replicated in reality. It was one of the many contradictions McBride documents well. So too Ford’s politics, for the man could be a staunch liberal, voting for FDR and Truman and publicly taking a stand against loyalty oaths in Hollywood during the McCarthy era, yet becoming conservative enough later on that he remained silent as Wayne and Bond led efforts that blacklisted many in the movie industry and overseeing the production of a pro Vietnam War documentary for the Johnson Administration in 1968.

In the later years of his career, Ford took an increasingly pessimistic view of modern America, his last great western, THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE is one of the saddest movies to ever come out of Hollywood, yet unlike The Duke and Ward Bond, he did not retreat into reactionary super patriotism and publicly support politicians who promised to turn the clock back, he seemed to sense that what was lost was gone for good. But to his credit, he took chances in his old age, starting with THE SEARCHERS and continuing through CHEYENNE AUTUMN, he tackled to subject of racism in his own way. And for this director who is most famous for his male dominated films, his last movie, 7 WOMEN, has a mostly female cast, with one character clearly suppressing lesbian tendencies; hardly the stuff of an old man chasing past glory. Even though Hollywood considered him over the hill and no longer box office, Ford was still trying to get back behind the camera and get another project going right up until terminal illness struck him down in the early 70’s.

Yet as his career behind the camera faded into the sunset, his influence only grew larger, as a new generation of directors watched and learned from the master; Sergio Leone, Peter Bogdanovich, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese are among the few who would openly pay homage to Ford in their films, many made long after the man had left the scene. For us movie buffs, his gallery of vivid characters, live and breathe still, as real today as the first time we were introduced to them: Gypo Nolan from THE INFORMER; The Ringo Kid and Dallas from STAGECOACH; the Joads from THE GRAPES OF WRATH; Huw Morgan and his coal mining father from HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY; Ole and Drisk from THE LONG VOYAGE HOME; Wyatt Earp, Doc Holiday and Chihuahua from MY DARLING CLEMENTINE; Colonel Owen Thursday from FORT APACHE; Kirby and Kathleen Yorke from RIO GRANDE; Travis Blue and Elder Wiggs from WAGON MASTER; Sean Thornton and Mary Kate Danipher from THE QUIET MAN; Ethan Edwards and Martin Pauley from THE SEARCHERS; Liberty Valance and Tom Doniphon from THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE. In the course of reading this book, I ran across most of them at one time or another on TCM, AMC or any of the other movie channels in my cable package. Blu Rays and DVDs of his films can found in every true cinephile’s library. More than that, when I saw HELL OR HIGH WATER (released in 2016) a few months ago, I could see echoes of John Ford’s poetry in nearly every scene. In the great hereafter, I’m sure Ford would be mightily pleased by all this, not that he would ever let you know it.

Joseph McBride’s biography, first published in 2001, is the definitive book on John Ford, truly doing justice to the man and his vibrant legacy. A must read for anyone who loves movies.

My book, BIG CRIMSON 1: THERE'S A NEW VAMPIRE IN TOWN, can be found on Amazon at: https://amzn.to/3GsBh2E
and on Smashwords at: https://bit.ly/3kIfrAb

My alternate history novel ALL THE WAY WITH JFK: AN ALTERNATE HISTORY OF 1964 can be found on Amazon at: http://amzn.to/2jVkW9m
and on Smashwords at: http://bit.ly/2kAoiAH

Visit my Amazon author's page at: https://amzn.to/3nK6Yxv

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