Thursday, December 29, 2016
Monday, December 26, 2016
The Art of Adam West
Batdog
An email from MeTV told me that Adam West, now 88, has a bunch of paintings on exhibit in an art gallery in Ketchum, Idaho. The examples here are priced between $3000 and $8500.
Penguin
Alfred
Joker Evening Makeup
Christmas Surprise
Riddler
Liberace
The Mad Hatter
Sunday, December 25, 2016
Christmas with the Stars
This post is a re-run from a couple three years ago, but worth another look.
Saturday, December 24, 2016
Christmas with the Beatles? Almost.
I posted some of these Christmas songs by The Fab Four a few years back. Here are all 20 tracks, with a couple of extras thrown in. Some are more listenable than others, but they're all mighty dang interesting. My thanks to music mogul Mr. Drew Bentley for turning me on to them.
Thursday, December 22, 2016
Wednesday, December 21, 2016
Tuesday, December 20, 2016
Steve Mertz rides again with BLAZE! THE CHRISTMAS JOURNEY
If you’re hankerin’ for a new-fangled Old West Christmas, it’s
available right this minute in The Christmas Journey, the latest Blaze! adventure
by series creator Stephen Mertz.
This one has everything anyone could want in a Christmas story: Santa
Claus, religion, sex, love, shootouts, goodwill towards men, bank robberies, motherly
love, wild Indians and a hat tip to The Grateful Dead.
It begins with J.D. Blaze (fastest gunslinger in the West) playing
Santa Claus at the insistence of his nubile wife Kate (the second fastest), and gets crazier by the minute. Next thing they
know they’re on a two-horned quest, committed to catching a couple of
bank robbers and rescuing an innocent boy from the hangman’s noose.
That’s when the Journey (of the title) begins, first with a stagecoach
ride (complete with echoes of the John Wayne flick), then onto a train attacked by redskins (complete with a fight on the roof) and finishing in a prairie
schooner (with Three Wise woMen). Along
the way, we meet a large cast of quirky characters, including smart and stupid
outlaw brothers, a preacher who’s lost his faith (and never gets it back) and a
good-guy Injun chief named Iron Eyes.
Everyone exhibits the Christmas spirit in their own way—even the Apaches.
Recognizing that the season is special to the white eyes, they deem it a bad time
for shedding blood. “Well,” says one, “could we at least raise a little hell?” The
answer is yes, so in attacking the train they shoot over passengers’ heads,
laughing all the way.
And, this being and adult Western series, we have a deftly handled sex
scene:
Kate knew that no woman
could ever tame a man like J.D.—but she could handle him in the oldest way known to the species. She consciously
shifted the way she sat against the headboard. Her legs stretched out before
her beneath the clinging bed sheets, parted ever so slightly.
She smiled and said in a
throaty whisper, “It sure would please this girl if her husband would oblige
her this one single favor in keeping with the holiday spirit.”
J.D. could not restrain his
eyes from appraising her naked curves so clearly outlined beneath the thin
sheet concealing her from the neck down. He said, “Uh, are we negotiating?”
“Maybe we’re just
celebrating Christmas early. Maybe this girl would like Santa to come down her
chimney.”
J.D. shucked his trousers.
He climbed into their bed.
He said, “Ho Ho Ho.”
The author (at right) even manages to slip in a sly bit of autobiography. This
passage with Kate Blaze ruminating about southeastern Arizona comes straight from the heart:
Kate, born in the East, had
come to love this country. When it was her time, when God came looking for her,
He would find her in these southernmost borderlands of the U.S. where mountain
ranges—the Huachucas, the Whetstones, the Mules—were already dusted with snow
above the tree line. Big sky country where a soul could breathe.
This was her home. A land of
open prairie and rugged mountains and isolated pockets of what they called
civilization; small towns like Horseshoe. Beyond the town limits, beyond the
mountains lush with pine and game, home of the Apache, the vistas swept clear
to the distant horizon, where you could roam free. She led a free range life
with J.D. and she could never again live any other way.
One of the things Kate loved
out here was the weather. She could recall snow blizzards that had hammered the
desert right around Christmastime but more often the season was like today. The
daytime air crisp but pleasant in the sunshine. It beat hell out of the harsh
winters she’d endured growing up as a kid back east.
J.D. Blaze sums up Blaze! The Christmas Journey with the borrowed lyric, “What a long, strange trip it’s been.” That’s true. It’s also a tribute
from Mr. Mertz to the land he loves, a celebration of the Christmas spirit, and
a rollicking good time. Minus the sex stuff, it would make a great TV movie.
Are you listening, Hallmark Channel?
The book, or eBook, can be had HERE.
Monday, December 19, 2016
Orson Welles in THE GLASS KEY (Radio, 1939)
I've seen both film versions and a rare live TV production, but didn't know about this.
Friday, December 16, 2016
Peter Lorre and Barry Nelson in the first CASINO ROYALE (1954)
Here's "Jimmy" Bond, only a year after the book was published.
Wednesday, December 14, 2016
New from Stark House: Shanghai Flame // Counterspy Express by A.S. Fleischman
Having
enjoyed Stark House’s earlier A.S. Fleischman duo, The Sun Worshippers /
Yellowleg. I welcomed the arrival of this new volume. And I wasn’t
disappointed.
Shanghai
Flame, a Gold Medal orginal from 1951, is a corker of an adventure set in (you guessed it) Shanghai and at
sea during the Chinese Revolution. The Commies are taking over the town, and it’s
no place, as the author tells us, “for an American journalist without a gun in
pocket.” But recently canned reporter Alex Cloud is obsessed with finding and
regaining the love of the woman he wronged, a red-haired fellow reporter he
calls “Flame.” Trouble is, she hates Cloud, is obsessed with a lost love of her
own, and may have turned Red.
In
his pursuit of Flame, Cloud gets entangled with smugglers, thieves, cops, killers
and spies, and saddled with microfilm that must—at all costs—be kept out of the
hands of the bad guys. Fleischman supplies a multinational cast of well-drawn
characters, each with his or her own agenda. There’s a treacherous French
tavern owner, an all-knowing German with fingers in every evil pie, a mysterious
Italian, and any number of murderous Chinese. And: an Irish ship captain of
uncertain loyalties, a White Russian vamp with a killer bod, a French-Chinese
wife who steals the key to her chastity belt, a snooty French filmmaker, a
Mexican attorney/juggler, and a black Irish mercenary. All this, and (shades of
Terry and the Pirates) pirates too.
Plot-wise,
there are echoes of The Maltese Falcon (a good book to echo), with a conniving
mastermind, a Joel Cairo stand-in, and a Captain Jacobi-like scene, where a guy
comes through the door with a knife in his back.
The
book is an interesting snapshot of the political climate. One character nicely
sums up the situation in Shanghai: “China was opened up like a melon one
hundred years ago for the profit of our world. Now she closes the melon, picked
and rotted. But a few remain, like flies.” So the flies are flying away, as
fast as they can. In one scene, anti-American protestors are rampaging through
the streets carrying grotesque effigies of Uncle Sam and wearing dogs-head (as
in “running dogs) masks.
Counterspy
Express, featuring a CIA agent, was first published as half of an Ace Double in
1954, only a year after James Bond made his debut in Casino Royale. It’s an
interesting look at an American spy novel of the same era. The spy in this one,
who uses the alias of Jim Cabot, is sent to Italy to find and rescue a Russian
defector with info vital to the Cold War. Among his many obstacles are an
Italian Commie intelligence officer, a smug Brit turncoat who sells secrets to
the highest bidder, and the gorgeous Italian babe Cabot tries hard not to fall
for.
Bond-like,
the tale features a sequence of exotic locales and foreign villains, a harrowing
drive over the Austrian Alps and a deadly train ride.
In
the Introduction by the esteemed Mr. George Kelley, we learn that Fleischman deliberately
modelled his prose on Hemingway, but there are numerous lines that would have
been at home in a Hammett story.
I
never take good advice.
I
didn’t smuggle myself into this Red squirrel cage to do business with you.
I
looked at her breasts, full and breathing apprehensively. I liked what I saw
and it made me angry. I didn’t want any entanglements.
She
stared at me.
“You
bastard,” she breathed.
“You
meddling idiot,” she growled.
“You
goddam newspaperman,” she spat.
We
walked out of each other’s lives once. I wanted you to keep walking. I still
do.
The
brittle edge came back into her voice. “I’m trying hard not to be a bitch.”
“You
must not be trying very hard.”
He
spent the rest of the afternoon in the pilot house boiling over with oaths.
Rage did not die easily within him.
I
threaded my way to the main deck, where several hand-to-hand fights had broken
out. I got in one.
Shanghai
Flame/Counterspy Express will be published this Friday, and is now available for pre-order from Amazon and other fine retailers.
Tuesday, October 11, 2016
Saturday, October 8, 2016
It's Out! The Best American Mystery Stories 2016
My thanks to the folks at Publishers Weekly for the kind words. The book is now on sale. Here's what's in it:
"The Little Men" by Megan Abbott (from Bilbiomysteries)
"Okay, Now Do You Surrender?" by Steve Almond (from Cinncinati Review)
"Toward the Company of Others" by Matt Bell (from Tin House)
"Fool Proof" by Bruce Robert Coffin (from Red Dawn: Best New England Crime Stories)
"Safety" by Lydia Fitzpatrick (from One Story)
"Christians" by Tom Franklin (from Murder Under the Oaks)
"A Death" by Stephen King (from The New Yorker)
"For Something to Do" by Elmore Leonard (from Charlie Martz and Other Stories)
"The Continental Opposite" by Evan Lewis (from Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine)
"Street of the Dead House" by Robert Lopresti (from nEvermore!)
"Lafferty's Ghost" by Dennis McFadden (from Fiction)
"The Tank Yard" by Michael Noll (from Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine)
"Trash" by Todd Robinson (from Last Word)
"Christmas Eve at the Exit" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (from Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine)
"The Mountain Top" by Georgia Ruth (from Fish or Cut Bait: A Guppy Anthology)
"Mailman" by Jonathan Stone (from Cold-Blooded)
"Rearview Mirror" by Art Taylor (from On the Road with Del & Louise)
"Border Crossing" by Susan Thornton (from Literary Review)
"Entwined" by Brian Tobin (from Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine)
"God's Plan for Dr. Gaynor and Hastings Chiume" by Saral Waldorf (from Southern Review)
plus:
A Foreword by Otto Penzler and an Introduction by Elizabeth George
Thursday, September 22, 2016
Literature Rock: THE RAVEN by E.A. Poe (& Kenny and the Fiends)
From 1965. The flip-side, Part 2, ain't on YouTube. A shame.
Wednesday, September 14, 2016
The Continental Nomination
"The Continental Opposite" and I are honored to be noticed by the Private Eye Writers of America. The winner will be announced this Friday night in New Orleans. Wish I could be there. With four other fine tales in the running, the odds ain't good, but my fingers will be crossed. Toes too.
Tuesday, August 30, 2016
Tuesday, June 21, 2016
Forgotten Books: THE EARP CURSE by Glenn G. Boyer (1999)
Boyer lists his serious Earp publications (in order) as Suppressed Murder of Wyatt Earp, I Married Wyatt Earp, Wyatt Earp by Wyatt S. Earp, and Wyatt Earp's Tombstone Vendetta.
His first book Illustrated Life of Doc Holliday, he insists was written as a "spoof" in the tradition of Mark Twain.
Without his work, Boyer says, "there would be a remarkable amount that we wouldn't know today. The work has now been accepted as a "given," in the why-everyone-knows-that manner. Such writers as Paula Mitchell Marks in her And Die In The West and Richard Erwin's The Truth About Wyatt Earp, both proceeded as though that were the case--due I suspect--due to profound ingornace-- as though what I'd discovered had always been known. This could also have been partly deliberate, to repay me for declining to help either of them. My work, whatever criticisms are made of it, has added to our sum of knowledge, rather than simply rearranged it, which is what such writers as Casey Tefertiller and Don Chaput have done."
"Most readers today, like the above writers, take my discoveries for granted. They proceed as though everyone had always known the details regarding Wyatt's second wife, who had been a suicide, and his third, who until I collected and edited her memoir had been no more than a name. They appear to believe that everyone always knew all about Doc Holliday's Woman, Big Nose Kate, Morgan Earp's wife, Lou, the true identity of Sheriff Johnny Behan and his extensive discreditable record, etc. The fact is that prior to my digging up their pasts and often their families, had been little but names and had been allowed to remain little more than that, as though the writers and historians concerned believed the world could never learn more about people who had lived so long ago."
"To the contrary, I brought all of those shadowy figures into the spotlight, with books on some and extensieve articles on others that contained information now firmly planted in the body of Earpiana. I usually did this by finding the still living families of the parties concerned, and for the most part found them wondering how writers could tell their stories without consulting them. The use of this material without attribution to my research helped make reputations for some."
Boyer goes on to mention many of the people he met and befriended, including several who had known Wyatt and Josie Earp well. These included family members and relatives of both those individuals, plus relatives and descendants of Johnny Behan, Big Nose Kate, Tombstone Epitaph editor John Clum and many others.
Boyer's wife Jane Candia Coleman made great use of his research in her historical novels xxx and sss.
Boyer goes on to name twelve of these enemies, most of whom receive a full chapter detailing their sins against him. Several others also come in for some heat. 40% of the book is devoted to appendices, presenting supporting evidence in the form of letters, book promotion flyers, cancelled checks and other ephemera. In many places Boyer notes that events and conversations he describes have been preserved on video tape.
While he frequently attests that these betrayals and attacks have not perturbed him, the tone of the book makes it clear that they bothered him a great deal. Though he projects a sense of humor and personality throughtout, the overall tone of the book is bitter.
His first book Illustrated Life of Doc Holliday, he insists was written as a "spoof" in the tradition of Mark Twain.
Without his work, Boyer says, "there would be a remarkable amount that we wouldn't know today. The work has now been accepted as a "given," in the why-everyone-knows-that manner. Such writers as Paula Mitchell Marks in her And Die In The West and Richard Erwin's The Truth About Wyatt Earp, both proceeded as though that were the case--due I suspect--due to profound ingornace-- as though what I'd discovered had always been known. This could also have been partly deliberate, to repay me for declining to help either of them. My work, whatever criticisms are made of it, has added to our sum of knowledge, rather than simply rearranged it, which is what such writers as Casey Tefertiller and Don Chaput have done."
"Most readers today, like the above writers, take my discoveries for granted. They proceed as though everyone had always known the details regarding Wyatt's second wife, who had been a suicide, and his third, who until I collected and edited her memoir had been no more than a name. They appear to believe that everyone always knew all about Doc Holliday's Woman, Big Nose Kate, Morgan Earp's wife, Lou, the true identity of Sheriff Johnny Behan and his extensive discreditable record, etc. The fact is that prior to my digging up their pasts and often their families, had been little but names and had been allowed to remain little more than that, as though the writers and historians concerned believed the world could never learn more about people who had lived so long ago."
"To the contrary, I brought all of those shadowy figures into the spotlight, with books on some and extensieve articles on others that contained information now firmly planted in the body of Earpiana. I usually did this by finding the still living families of the parties concerned, and for the most part found them wondering how writers could tell their stories without consulting them. The use of this material without attribution to my research helped make reputations for some."
Boyer goes on to mention many of the people he met and befriended, including several who had known Wyatt and Josie Earp well. These included family members and relatives of both those individuals, plus relatives and descendants of Johnny Behan, Big Nose Kate, Tombstone Epitaph editor John Clum and many others.
Boyer's wife Jane Candia Coleman made great use of his research in her historical novels xxx and sss.
Boyer goes on to name twelve of these enemies, most of whom receive a full chapter detailing their sins against him. Several others also come in for some heat. 40% of the book is devoted to appendices, presenting supporting evidence in the form of letters, book promotion flyers, cancelled checks and other ephemera. In many places Boyer notes that events and conversations he describes have been preserved on video tape.
While he frequently attests that these betrayals and attacks have not perturbed him, the tone of the book makes it clear that they bothered him a great deal. Though he projects a sense of humor and personality throughtout, the overall tone of the book is bitter.
Wednesday, May 4, 2016
Wednesday, April 6, 2016
DEATH by ELECTION
Along with two Dan Turner stories and a Little Jack Horner adventure (as by Jerome Severs Perry), Robert Leslie Bellem provided this "Harley L. Court" novelette for the May 1944 issue.
Tuesday, April 5, 2016
Tuesday, March 29, 2016
Overlooked Films: William Campbell Gault's DEAD END FOR DELIA (1993)
In the premiere episode of Showtime's Fallen Angels, Gary Oldman stars in this Gault tale from the November 1950 issue of Black Mask.
Wednesday, March 23, 2016
Tuesday, March 22, 2016
Tuesday, March 15, 2016
Overlooked Films: "A Dime a Dance," from a BLACK MASK story by Cornell Woolrich (1995)
Based on the story "The Dancing Detective" from the February 1938 issue of Mask. This one stars Jennifer Grey and Eric Stolz, and was directed by Peter Bogdanovich.
Saturday, February 27, 2016
Wednesday, February 24, 2016
Braggin' Time: BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES 2016
Yeah, I've been slacking for the past few months. It's a cryin' shame, and I'm dutifully embarassed. But I got a jolt in the arm the other day with word from Otto Penzler that "The Continental Opposite" has been selected for this year's volume of The Best American Mystery Stories. Who else will be in it? I don't know, but I've seen Internet leaks naming Megan Abbott, Todd Robinson and Robert Lopresti, so I know I'll be in good company. The book is several months away, but Amazon is already taking pre-orders. That's here:
The Best American Mystery Stories 2016
Tuesday, February 23, 2016
Tuesday, February 16, 2016
Friday, February 5, 2016
Forgotten Books: CONAN THE DEFENDER by Robert Jordan (1982)
Jeez, I was going to write a review but I was too lazy. Sorry.
Tuesday, February 2, 2016
Tuesday, January 26, 2016
Tuesday, January 19, 2016
Tuesday, January 12, 2016
Thursday, January 7, 2016
Forgotten Music: Howlin' Wolf
xxx
Hidden Charms
Little Red Rooster
Wang Dang Doodle
Wang Dang Doodle London sessions
How Many More Years
Shake It for Me
Dust My Broom
Do the Do
I Ain't Superstitious
Hidden Charms
Little Red Rooster
Wang Dang Doodle
Wang Dang Doodle London sessions
How Many More Years
Shake It for Me
Dust My Broom
Do the Do
I Ain't Superstitious