Paul Bishop's Blog, page 74
March 31, 2013
THE TROUBLE WITH BLONDES!
MISSION INCREDIBLE: BRING OUT THE BLONDE CAPTIVE OF HELL HOUSE
March 27, 2013
March 25, 2013
March 18, 2013
HARDBOILED CORNER: THE DRIFTER DETECTIVE!
HARDBOILED CORNER: THE DRIFTER DETECTIVE!GARNETT ELLIOT
Jack Laramie, grandson of the legendary US Marshal Cash Laramie, is a tough-as-nails WWII vet roaming the modern West. He lives out of a horse trailer hitched to the back of a DeSoto, searching out PI gigs to keep him afloat.
With his car limping along, Jack barely makes it to the sleepy town of Clyde, Texas, where he stops at a garage. While waiting for repairs, he accepts a job from the sheriff, pulling surveillance on a local oilman allegedly running liquor to Indian reservations in Oklahoma. When Jack runs afoul of several locals and becomes dangerously close to the oilman’s hot-to-trot wife, he wonders if the money is worth his life.
Garnett Elliott writes in the best hardboiled tradition of the masters and turns out a tour-de-force novelette, clocking in at a trim, fighting 9k words. Take a chance on this new series … and experience a Jack Laramie beat.
March 12, 2013
AUTHOR JOSEPH GRANT ON FIGHT CARD: THE LAST ROUND OF ARCHIE MANNIS!
AUTHOR JOSEPH GRANT ON FIGHT CARD: THE LAST ROUND OF ARCHIE MANNIS!Boxing, I suppose, was the humane alternative to ancient blood sports. It is a controlled gladiatorial evolution in some ways. As man became more civilized, so too did his sports. Rules were put into place with football and baseball and even in the case of the sweet science. In that manner it has become tradition. It is a tradition passed down from father to son and, in some cases, daughters as well.
Boxing was always on the tv in my house. My dad, like many fathers before him, taught his sons to box at an early age. It is important to note that my father did not teach his sons how to fight or to be a bully, but more how to protect themselves and put up their dukes when needed.
I have fond memories of watching the ABC Wide World of Sports and seeing legends like Ali, Norton, Foreman, Quarry, among countless others, scrap it out. No matter how many years go by, I can still hear Howard Cosell calling the fights, telling it like it was, so to speak: "This isn't the Muhammad Ali we used to know …Wait! … He's up, he's back! … This is the Ali from the Thriller in Manila!" and so on.When my father would bring me along for a haircut (and there were many as he was a former Army sergeant), I would always pick up a boxing magazine and read through it as I waited my turn on the butcher's block. Sometimes, when my father wasn't looking or was in the chair himself, I would sneak a peek at the disgusting wrestling magazines with all the blood and gore spewing out of the combatant’s mouths and sometimes eyes – little realizing it was all for show.
Growing up with three older brothers, we got into our fair share of mixing it up in the old school style, without gloves! When I was a little older, me and a few friends would go down into somebody's basement, or wherever there was room, and put on the gloves and spar with each other. We'd knock each other around, sending an opponent this way or that, into the washroom door, usually hearing one of the mothers scream, "What the hell are you kids doing down there?" As a boxer, I knew I wasn't going to win any titles, but it was good, clean fun and nobody was any worse the wear for it, except maybe the door.
Then there were the Golden Gloves bouts at Madison Square Garden. In our family, they were tradition, just as my father would take us to football games, West Point, Yankees and Mets games, and wrestling matches.
My love of boxing continued while watching new fighters come up. Every four years there would be the Olympic Games to watch and this provided some of the very fighters who would turn professional right after the Games were over.
Around this time, HBO and Showtime came into being and prize fights were beginning to become even bigger money and be televised on cable networks. I have distinct memories watching legends like Larry Holmes, Sugar Ray Leonard, Roberto Duran, Thomas "Hit Man" Hearns, Marvin Hagler, Wilfred Benitez, and Michael Spinks fight – no, not all at the same time.
The older champs, such as Foreman and Frazier were retiring from the sport, sometimes going on the other side of the microphone. It seemed there was an excess of fighters waiting to replace them. Evander Holyfield, Hector Camacho, and Buster Douglas started to come up as well as the Golden Boy himself, Oscar De La Hoya. And with Mike Tyson, a new era of boxing icons began.
But some eras were ending. My father passed away in the late 1990's. Through him, I was given a love of boxing. I carry it with me as a sort of tribute to the man. Ali came down with dementia -- even though he was no longer the boxer he had been, he was still the Greatest, just as my father had been.
I have never completely lost interest in boxing as I have other sports. It seems as I grew up, I outgrew the statistics laden conversations of my youth regarding one sports star or another. I couldn't see the sense of grown men being so passionate about the numbers. But boxing was a different story. To this day, I still will watch a fight airing on cable or regular TV.
That's the amazing thing about boxing, I guess. If you watch baseball, football or any other sport, you will see the same thing over and over. With boxing, it's different. You never know what you're going to get. It's an ever-changing sport. Boxing is the only real sport there is, I think. In any other sport, there is equipment and many, many rules. In boxing, there are only a handful of regulations and the only gear fighters receive are gloves, a mouth piece, a towel, a spit bucket and their own brute strength.
I once watched a fight where the fighter had the annoying habit of boxing and then feinting. Feinting is normal, but the way this guy did it was different than any other boxer I ever saw. He would hit, go in for a combination or what have you, and then immediately back up a step or two. It was almost like an old boxing movie where the comedian acted out hit and run. But this was for real and I couldn't take my eyes off of the fight, feeling the other boxer's frustration as well as the crowd's – who were quickly booing.
Needless to say, the boxer lacked the finesse you need in the ring and was knocked out. But you'd never see the batter in baseball hitting the ball and getting on base and then staying on the bag as his team mate hit the ball. That's what this was like, as it was so unorthodox. Boxing, like I've said, is ever-changing.
For the Fight Card series, I chose to write a story unlike any I'd read so far. I'll admit I did a fair amount of research on some of the older fighters. I knew a bunch of them and wanted to do justice to them. I didn't want the story to read false so there lies the research. I watched as much on social networks and video websites as I could and chose to look at it from a reporter's standpoint of the era.
In the end, I hope I mentioned the real boxers in an honorable way. Other boxers from the era, I made up just for the fun of it, and for the reader to maybe decipher which one was real, which one was a composite, and that sort of thing.
I came to write for the Fight Card series upon the request of a writer friend of mine, Kevin Michaels. He wrote his own novella, Fight Card: Hard Road, which was published this year. He is a first-rate writer and pugilist aficionado, and it would be in any boxing enthusiast's best interest to pick up a copy of the excellent Fight Card: Hard Road, as well as any other entries in the Fight Card series.
Boxing is about men not being afraid to be men. In this age, where a man is, in essence an endangered species with feminist crosshairs trained upon it, it is revitalizing to see there are writers willing to write about boxing unapologetically. In the last few decades, there has been a spate of apologies from people (not just men) for just having an opinion. It's fine to have an opinion, but they should have some conviction and some cajones as well. That's why the Fight Card series of books works so well – there are no apologies, nor should there be.
These men spit, bleed, curse, drink, fornicate and sometimes die. Most of all, they punch, get punched and defend themselves. There's no Deconstruction of Man to be found here. I am honored to be a part of this tome.
AVAILABLE NOW! FIGHT CARD: THE LAST ROUND OF ARCHIE MANNIS!
AVAILABLE NOW! FIGHT CARD: THE LAST ROUND OF ARCHIE MANNIS!Chicago, 1925
Amidst the violent, bloody boulevards of gangland Chicago, Archie Mannis uses his fists to rise from the shadows of St. Vincent's Asylum For Boys. Forging a reputation from his earliest amateur bouts, Archie’s fists carry him through the Great Depression and into the heat of The War In The Pacific. Back home, his fistic skills put him once again on a championship road. But there are dangers lurking – the sweet taste of morphine, crooked fight promoters, and a bitter enemy whose hatred has festered since their hardscrabble childhood.
As Archie Mannis faces his last round, legendary boxers, famous writers, Hollywood celebrities, and notorious mobsters are all part of the mix – waiting to see if Archie will still be standing in the ring when the final bell clangs ...
Written in the style of the great fight biographies found in the sports pulps of the ‘40s and ‘50s, The Last Round of Archie Mannis will have you cheering from ringside ...
March 11, 2013
JAMIEE PAUL ~ BONDED!
JAMIEE PAUL ~ BONDED!JAMIE PAUL IS A SWINGING STANDARDS SINGER. I'VE ENJOYED ALL THREE OF HER PREVIOUS CDS AND AM REALLY LOOKING FORWARD TO HEARING HER TAKE ON THE BOND CLASSICS ...
The James Bond movie franchise is celebrating 50 years of exciting entertainment and one key aspect of the Bond movies are the unforgettable theme songs. Shirley Bassey, Carly Simon, Tina Turner, Madonna, Adele - the biggest names in music have graced these timeless compositions with their voices over the last half century.
Multiple Grammy Award winning producer, keyboardist and arranger, Michael Omartian, has joined forces with producer and award winning, jazz guitarist, Jack Jezzro, to bring new life and a fresh approach to these iconic songs.
Powerhouse jazz vocalist, Jaimee Paul, shows her range both stylistically and technically, as she impressively steps into the shoes of the vocal luminaries of the original recordings with stunning results. TRACK LISTING :1. Skyfall 2. Nodody Does It Better 3. Diamonds Are Forever4. Goldeneye5. From Russia With Love6. For Your Eyes Only7. A View To A Kill8. Goldfinger9. Moonraker10. Live And Let Die11. Tomorrow Never Dies12. You Only Live Twice13. James Bond Theme
COMING SOON: FREE WESTERN PULP!
COMING SOON: FREE WESTERN PULP!FREE MARCH 17TH/18TH, RANCHO DIABLO: SHOOTER’S CROSS ...
FIRST BOOK IN THE RANCHO DIABLO SERIES CREATED AND WRITTEN BY BILL CRIDER, JAMES REASONER, AND MEL ODOM UNDER THE NAME COLBY JACKSON.
RANCHO DIABLO: SHOOTER’S CROSS.
Army Scout Sam Blaylock wasn’t looking for trouble when he rode into Shooter’s Cross, a small Texas town with a colorful history, but he found trouble in spades. After being nearly killed in an ambush, Sam discovers a patch of land where he thinks he can settle his family, put down roots, and build a future. Unfortunately, that land has poisoned water and rumors of ghosts. Sam’s figured a way to fix the water problem, and he’s never been a big believer in ghosts, but he hadn’t planned on running up against newspaperman Mitchell McCarthy, who’s willing to kill to take Rancho Diablo now that Sam has turned the land into a profitable enterprise.
Sam enlists the aid of two friends from the army – fast talking Duane Beatty and gunhawk and fellow scout Mike Tucker – and digs in tighter than a tick to fight back.
COLBY JACKSON IS: Bill Crider, James Reasoner, and Mel Odom – cumulatively the authors of HUNDREDS of books including westerns, mysteries, suspense stories, horror stories, and anything else that catches their fancy. Check them out at www.billcrider.blogspot.com, www.jamesreasoner.blogspot.com, and www.melodom.blogspot.com.
AND DON’T FORGET TO PICK UP RANCHO DIABLO: SHOOTER’S CROSS FREE ON MARCH 17TH/18TH ...
