Nice Guys Finish Dead

The Bride Wore Black, by Cornell Woolrich (1940)

2012-02-20T12:38:00.000-08:00

The others broke, came milling down off the steps, fluttering around her. In the middle of them all his face peered up at her, like a white pebble lying at the bottom of a deep pool. There was a tiny fleck of red, a comma, so to speak, down near the bottom of her snowy veil. She kept staring at it as if hypnotized. His face didn't move. Not a comma, no; a period.

Death somewhat poetic, by Cornell Woolrich.

A woman stalks four separate men. We know its the same woman despite the fact that her hair color, her personality, and sometimes even her accent changes. And her method of killing each one. But there is a fifth target. And then she will be done.

I had been putting off my next Cornell Woolrich book. I haven't disliked anything he's written. I just haven't been blown away by anything he's written either. That stopped with this one.

Okay. I wasn't blown away by Bride. But this was still a REALLY GOOD book.

The Case of the Chased and the Unchaste, by Thomas B Dewey (1958)

2012-02-17T11:53:00.000-08:00

Mac leaves the comfortable environs of Chicago to basically bodyguard a Hollywood producer's five year-old daughter. It seems there have been some threatening letters recently hinting about the tot's impending abduction.

Mac takes the Hollywood lifestyle as easily as he can, although the producer's wife doesn't make things easy what with her completely-in-the-nude morning swims. He develops a friendship with the little girl he's charged to protect and an attraction to the girl's nanny.

There is a murder (not the little girl), and a couple of Hollywood coppers don't make Mac's life any easier. They contrive to get Mac beat up by a boxer so they can a.) force him to give up any info implicating the producer's wife as the murderer, and b.) rough Mac up but leave them blameless to their police brutality via proxy. It's a tense, ugly scene.

There is finally an abduction. But it and the murder are eventually solved by Mac. The cops take Mac back to his hotel so he can pack and fly home. But if Hollywood hadn't already left a sore impression on the guy, the knife is twisted a little when one of the detectives accompanying him leers and asks for any dirt on his producer client.

He would be hurt again. The newspapers would hurt him. I would hurt him myself if I had to go to court, if the question got past the bench, if I had to answer it. But I would not hurt him in the back seat of a shiny car purchased by the taxpayers of Los Angeles County, out of a loose mouth to a strange cop for the dingy sake of a solid-pack case tied with red ribbon. After a few minutes of silence, the sergeant knew I wouldn't.
I let myself out of the car at the hotel and said good night. The sergeant nodded and slammed the door.

Which puts mac up there alongside Lew Archer as far as I'm concerned.

I've been looking all over for Dewey's Mac novels. Looks like this one used to be a library book. It was in fair condition for a fifty-four year-old novel.

RIP John Severin

2012-02-16T11:05:00.000-08:00

Severin will probably best be known as the artist who drew about a kajillion movie parodies for Cracked magazine (he was very good at likenesses). He was also a semi-regular inker for The Incredible Hulk in the 60s.

I was never really wowed by Herb Trimpe's art unless Severin was inking it. The Hulk was less cartoon-ish and a little more...gritty.

Wax Apple, by Donald E Westlake writing as Tucker Coe (1970)

2012-02-14T11:53:00.000-08:00

Life is ten percent carrot and ninety percent stick.

Someone is setting traps at a halfway house. Traps, that at first glance, look like accidents. No one has been killed or fatally wounded. But after the fourth "accident" the psychiatrist who runs the place needs answers. Which is where poor Mitch Tobin enters. Tobin goes in under the manufactured cover of a halfway house resident. By the end of the first chapter he becomes Victim #5 of an "accident" and spends the rest of the book with a broken arm.

It's a good hook.

And it's a good book. I just didn't find it as strong as the first two in the series.

There is an extremely gratifying moment where Tobin loses his typical composure and socks an irritating person in the face. I glee'd with glee.

#nerdworldproblems

2012-02-13T09:20:00.000-08:00

Setting aside the stigma of being a forty year-old man who still buys comics, there's something twice as demeaning as going to a comic book store to buy some bad-ass back issues of a Viking comic, then having said back issues put in a shopping bag emblazoned with My Little Pony by the store clerk...

Stamped For Death/Three For the Gallows, by Emmett McDowell (1958)

2012-02-10T11:57:00.000-08:00

Couple of things going for this already: the cover. At first I thought the guy hovering in the background was bandaged up, but its actually a stocking. Still, a cool image. Also, the cheeky tagline, which doubly works because of the postage-related title. And has the word "philatelist" ever appeared on the cover of a pulp novel? NO, I DARESAY.

The actual story, however, is just...okay. Jonathan Knox - the lead character - is unliekable from page 1. He's young. And owns a successful auctioneering business. But he also seems forever pissy and grumpy. Also, not that helpful when it comes to facing guns around ladies. In one scene, he distracts a gunman by ripping off an jnconscious woman's blouse and bra in one go just so he can punch the guy out. At the climax, our hero shields himself from another gunman by hiding behind a nude woman. It gets a little "Benny Hill" at that point when the gunman figures he can just move to the side to get a better shot at Knox, so Knox keeps moving in a circle with the poor woman constantly in front of him. Such is life when you find yourself in the white, hot, searing Underworld of...stamp collecting.

Fortunately...

the "other side" is a little better. Basically three short stories. The first - All She wants is Money - features the Jonathan Knox character again. But he acquits himself better this time.

The second - Set-Up For Murder - features a deputy sheriff visiting another small town and gets involved in a murder/kidnapping caper. There are some ugly murders in this one, but there is also an undertone of humor. Every time the deputy gets into a public bust-up with the criminals, the newspaper story the next day portrays him in a humorously negative light. One day, he opens the paper to see the headline: "VISITING SHERIFF GOES BERSERK".

Bloodfeud - the last story - is the best of the bunch, and features a private detective returning to his home town to visit his father's murder. It's dark and brutal at times, with the highlight being when a cuckolded husband kills the man who was sleeping with his wife by shooting him point blank with a shotgun. In broad daylight. In the town's main street. Like a boss.

The Paper Pistol Contract, by Philip Atlee (1966)

2012-02-08T11:38:00.000-08:00

A woman was getting out of a new Simca sedan. "Hello," she called up, swinging long legs out of the car. I nodded, and she made the immemorial gesture - smoothing the dress over her hips - and came up the steps toward me, smiling. As her high heels spiked at the tiles, I thought without volition that this one was meant for burning, but not before she took a good many men before her.

And in just a few hours, Mister Durden (our first-person narrator) will be consummating his relationship with the bored Cincinnati housewife in the Tahiti underbrush before being shot at by Chinese assassins. But that's because Mister Durden is actually an agent by the name of Joe Gall, posing as a wealthy industrialist vacationing in the islands.

Gall's (eventual) mission is to kidnap a French scientist, then sabotage a French nuclear test being held in the Pacific and sabotage it on the Chinese government.

As a character he's pretty laid back, charming and witty when there are things like pretty, bored housewives to distract him. But when it comes to the job he can be ruthless and professional. He's also got a descriptive turn of phrase when it comes to locales. Should he ever quit his day job, he could go into the guide book business.

I have heard experienced merchant-marine captains swear that they can smell their way into the major harbors of Asia and the Pacific. I can believe it about most of these seaports, and especially about Suva. You enter the channel, and suddenly the pleasant aroma of copra, the meat of the coconuts, drying under sheds becomes sickly sweet. India is in this largest Fiji island, so you have curry and garlic, rotting fish, and decaying cane. Faintly, too, comes the pepper smell, and frangipani, the things featured on travel brochures. Then the big stink hits you like a mallet; it is the rank and pervading odor of human excrement. You shake your head in disbelief, and are afraid it is clinging to your clothes and skin.

Poo smell aside, the Joe Gall series is pretty fun.

Night of the Living Trekkies, by Kevin David Anderson and Sam Stall (2010)

2012-02-06T08:31:00.000-08:00

"This is the situation," Jim explained. "Cannibal zombies* have overrun Houston and maybe the entire planet. This hotel is completely infested. We're trying to reach the seventh floor, where my sister and some of her friends are holed up. If the zombies bite you, you become one. Any questions?"

Number of Star Trek references I got: All of them.
Number of Deep Space Nine references I got: All but one (there weren't that many, predictably**).
Number of Next Generation and Voyager references I got: About 50/50.
Number of Enterprise references I got: THERE WERE NONE (Heh).

* Zombies are, by their nature, cannibalistic. So this is like an oxymoron. Isn't it time for a novel featuring vegetarian zombies?

** Forever the Black Sheep Spin-off. [SAD GIRLFRIEND-LESS ADMISSION] I am currently in the middle of a DS9 marathon. [/SAD GIRLFRIEND-LESS ADMISSION]

Square in the Middle, by William Campbell Gault (1955)

2012-02-03T11:31:00.000-08:00

A bar isn't the only refuge from boredom; it's just the easiest.

Jim Gulliver is an average joe making a living in the loan business. He's happily married, but at the same time a little bored. When the wife and kids go away for a little vacation, Gulliver decides to step a little out of his comfort zone by eating his meals at a local tavern and subsequently hanging out with a group of partiers who are regulars at said bar. They aren't exactly barflies and they aren't exactly beatniks. But split the difference and you're close.

On the second night, Jim sleeps with one of the women in the group - a girl named Lynn. A few hours later, Lynn's pseudo-boyfriend is found murdered and Jim is somehow high on the list of suspects. A jerk of a police detective even sics the press onto Jim and Lynn, getting their pictures in the local tabloid.

Here is where the book started to lose me.

Jim is a local, trusted businessman. And even after his and Lynn's insinuating photograph along with an even more insinuating byline of "LOVE NEST!" is printed in the local rag, he continues to hang out with the group of pals in general and Lynn in particular (but only as a friend-friend and not a genital-friend, mkay?). Jim then spends most of the rest of the book estranged from his wife and secretly hoping that the police will come up with a better suspect than him. It's only in the last two or three chapters that he finally does something proactive about his situation.

"Square in the middle" is an expression. But the "square" in the title also refers to Jim. He considers himself a square in comparison to the hepcats he briefly hung out with and is even proud of it by the end of the book. He hung out with them because he was bored, and then cheated on his wife with one of them. So when - in the final chapter, when he clears his name and gets back together with his wife - he starts feeling superior to them, it feels rather high-handed and hypocritical. Tsk.

Gault went on to write better things. Including the Brock Callahan series.

DC Announces Upcoming Watchmen Prequels

2012-02-01T13:44:00.000-08:00

Simpsons already did it.

Killer on Argyle Street, by Michael Raleigh (1995)

2012-02-01T12:08:00.000-08:00

A street kid goes missing, and a woman who was briefly the kid's guardian hires Paul Whelan to find him. Whelan soon discovers that a cop friend floated the case in his direction. Neither the cop nor Whelan hold any hopes that the kid is still alive, because there are connections to some nasty underworld killings that have recently occurred.

A good book with an unusual twist. I also enjoyed it for...say, superficial (?) reasons. Most of the legwork Whelan goes through is in my current neighborhood (AKA "Little Chinatown"):

Looking up and down both sides of Argyle, he saw Hong Kong Fashion, Pho Xe Lua Restaurant, Hoang Kim Fine Jewelry, Sunny Supermarket, Viet Hoa Grocery, Mai's Fashion and Bridal Shop, Lucky Garden Market and a dozen more businesses, most of them Vietnamese.

A few of those establishments (if they ever existed) have gone out of business since the book was written. A few have undergone a slight name change. Pho Xe Lua still exists. I shopped in Viet Hoa Grocery this past weekend (and not for the first time).

Some of the more...touristy stores along the stretch of Argyle have an idea of what Asian "fine art" is supposed to include, though.

Spider-Man.

Remember when he fought Godzilla? With Hello Kitty's help?

LOLCheetah

2012-01-31T05:50:00.001-08:00

I was bored.

And I am sorry.

"May I kill him?" :nods head blearily:

2012-01-30T11:11:00.000-08:00

Haven't read the original "Millennium trilogy". Haven't seen the original movies, so I don't have a vested interest here, but I really enjoyed Fincher's Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Craig is good. My future ex-wife Rooney Mara is good. Another actor I thought was amazing, but I can't really specify who without (probably) spoiling things.

This movie's been out for at least a month and yet the 3:00 pm Saturday showing I attended was 75% full of people I assumed would be watching Liam Neeson punching wolves instead.

Black Money, by Ross Macdonald (1965)

2012-01-27T13:52:00.000-08:00

Around twenty-five pages to the end of this book Lew Archer does something I don't think I've ever read him do before: he gets stinking drunk. It's not even for the cliched reasons (i.e. a dame). The case he is on has kind of half solved itself/half fizzled out. His employer has angrily fired him. He's at a loose end. So he gets drunk. And Ross Macdonald/Lew Archer doesn't even make a big 'to do' over it. In a brief paragraph, he describes it away as "a mild stupor". By the next paragraph, the following day has started and Archer is having a late breakfast.

I just thought it was different.

The case: a young, pampered, whiner wants Archer to find out the background of a suspicious young foreigner (described as "more nouveau than riche.") who has stolen away his fiancee, and, if possible, discredit him. In the course of his investigations, Lew finds out (of course) that there is more to this guy than meets the eye. The fun - for me, at least - is how Macdonald writes Archer's encounters with the various sundry people in the case. To wit, a professor's wife who is bored of her professor and is constantly on the lookout for something more (this is their second encounter, and she has prepared for his arrival):

Bess Tappinger had on a good-looking blue dress, fresh lipstick, and too much perfume. I didn't like the purposeful look in her eye, and I began to regret the pink champagne. She took it from my hands as if she planned to break it over the prow of an affair.

Great book. Did Ross Macdonald ever have an off day?

God's Back Was Turned, by Harry Whittington (1961)

2012-01-25T12:25:00.000-08:00

At least three different story strands going on here. At the heart of it all is the Cook family - farmers based in Georgia. Pa Cook is asked by his good friend Lucien about a problem he is having. The local rich brat - a Miss Lovely Clayborn (yes, that is her real first name) - keeps making untoward advances on Lucien as he does work around her family's house. Two problems. 1. Lucien is married. 2. Lucien is black. And what with it being backwoods Georgia in the early 1960s, Lucien would be lynched if he were to allow himself to be led by temptation. And his willpower is fading.

Local fool Tom Bascom brings home his new trophy wife - a woman young enough to be his own daughter. The new wife takes an instant shine to the youngest Cook brother, Jaime. Jaime has been mute all of his life due to a psychological condition.

The main storyline involves the return of the oldest Cook brother, Walter. Walter left home twelve years previously to preach the word. He has become nationally famous as a faith healer, but has finally come because of allegations of being a fraud as well as having his own crisis of faith.

Beyond the plot synopsis, it's somewhat hard to describe the tone of the novel. It's a melodrama. It's also something of a comedy. At times very dark and somewhat twisted. A character drops dead at a social gathering. Sister Helen Cook is visibly distraught, crying and blubbering - but, at the same time, stuffing her mouth with food that had been set out at the party, lamenting that it will all go bad if nobody eats it.

Two plot strands converge when Pa asks weary Walter to talk to Miss Lovely for Lucien's benefit. She is combative.

     "I've heard about you," Miss Lovely said. "In fact, these past few days, I've heard nothing else. Father says you're a menace because you keep that road blocked from dawn to dark." She stared at the poster and newspaper photo of him pinned to the wall. "You carry your own advertising?"
     "Sister Helen is proud of me." His flat tone offered no apology.
     "Well, they look quite lovely on the wall, I'm sure," Miss Lovely said. "They give the room a touch - almost early primitive, wouldn't you say?"
     "No," Walter said. "You would say that. I wouldn't."
     "Well." Miss Lovely smiled in a cold way. "How nicely you tell me I'm a snob."

I won't go into the subplots (although there is a lynch mob, at one point, and it is very ugly), but there is a conclusion to Walter's story.

And then there is a coda to that plot in a final chapter that is set a whole month and another state later. He has another "stumble" with his faith and then another resolution. It feels protracted, maybe unnecessary.

Fast One, by Paul Cain (1933)

2012-01-23T11:12:00.000-08:00

There was a woman. She sat on one side of the desk with a large glass in her hand. She was very drunk - but in a masculine way.

Just the facts, Jack. According to the foreword in this edition, Paul Cain never actually wrote a novel. Just short stories for the pulps. A handful of them (written in '32) featured a gambler/gunman by the name of Gerry Kells. And these stories were compiled the following year and made into this novel.

The stories seem to flow together seamlessly in novel form, but there's very little plot - just a series of episodes. Kells is double-crossed or framed by a Big Shot Gambler. Kells gets rid of or defeats said Gambler with quite a lot of violence, in the process he absorbs whatever political power or muscle the Gambler had and moves another rung up the Los Angeles underworld. Along the way, he gets some allies - a newspaper man by the name of Beery; a dipso pseudo-girlfriend named Granquist (last name); Borg, the tough-guy. They are all heading toward an inevitable conclusion.

This was decent.

A Streetcar named Desire, by Tennessee Williams (1947)

2012-01-20T10:16:00.000-08:00

I hadn't read this before for some reason but I like the design of the Signet paperbacks of this period - somewhat uniform with the top and bottom borders framing the cover art and such, so what the hey.

A genteel Southern dipsomaniac comes to live with her younger sister and working class husband in New Orleans and generally makes a pain of herself. Stuff happens.

I almost didn't make it past the foreword, written by Williams on the third anniversary of the show, where he laments on his sudden fame and the sheer awfulness of suddenly living in a super nice Manhattan hotel room. As time went by he started to drop ash from his cigarette on the carpet (what a rebel!) and finally ran off to Mexico to be amongst the Common Man. Woe. It was like I was reading a character description of Barton Fink.

The Busy Body, by Donald E Westlake (1966)

2012-01-19T11:25:00.000-08:00

The nice thing about the trunk of a Lincoln Continental, it's roomy. The bad thing about this particular Lincoln Continental was that Engel had to share it with a spade, a pick, a flashlight, a jack, a set of tire chains, and something small and round and cold and hard that kept sticking him in the small of his back.

Aloysius Engel (what a name) is the "right hand man" of a mob boss by the name of Nick Rovito. After the two attend the funeral of a lower level flunky, Rovito tells Engel to return to the gravesite much later that night. He has to dig up the body.

It turns out the flunky was accidentally buried in a suit which had a secret (and expensive) cache of heroin in it. When Engel returns to the gravesite in the wee hours with another flunky (who he is to bump off and leave in the coffin for being a police informer - two birds, one stone), he finds the coffin empty. The police informant flunky freaks out and runs off. Oh ho.

Further complications ensue. At one point Engel is wrongfully accused of murdering a mortician, which leads to around thirty cops chasing him through several blocks in Manhattan. A widow of another dearly departed takes interest in his "gangster" activities. Engel is then framed for extorting money privately. Rovito isn't too fond of that and sends two more flunkies to grab Engel.

     "Shut up," Fox offered, "or I'll break your head."
     Engel looked at him. "I thought I was your friend."
     "I got a dog instead."

Yes, this (despite "our hero" being a mob guy) is a Westlake comedy. Not one of his better ones, sure. But "lesser" Westlake is still better than most...well, anything.

It is a silly cover, though.

I have finally watched season 1 of Boardwalk Empire on DVD and NOW WISH I HAD CABLE

2012-01-19T08:33:00.000-08:00

Also, Richard Harrow is da man.

Unknown Man #89, by Elmore Leonard (1977)

2012-01-17T13:40:00.000-08:00

The girl with the stringy blond hair over her shoulders and the trading beads and the black turtleneck and Levis and the half-filled water glass of domestic wine in front of her on the bar said, "Do you like sex?"
     Ryan hesitated. He said, "Sure."
     The girl said, "You like to travel?"
     Ryan said, "Yeah, I guess so."
     The girl said, "Then why don't you fuck off?"

And so begins a tender love story. Think I'm joking?

Jack Ryan is a process server with little ambition. Until he's hired by a Mr. Perez to find one Bobby Lear, who is sitting, unknowingly, on some decades-old accumulating stock. Ryan finds Lear's lush of a wife instead. Throw in a shotgun-toting felon who's nursing a grudge towards Bobby Lear (AKA Number Eighty-Nine) and the fact that Mr. Perez himself is not a reputable businessman.

Bad things happen. Also, there is a vivid autopsy scene and an improbably named police officer by the name of Dick Speed (snicker).

I enjoyed this.

Nathan Fillion hexes "Community" just by visiting the set

2012-01-17T09:53:00.000-08:00

We're gonna get that show back on the air, buddy.

The Poacher's Son, by Paul Doiron (2010)

2012-01-13T11:55:00.000-08:00

The lead character - Mike Bowditch - is a relatively strait-laced Maine game warden. The irony is his father is a poacher and "saloon-brawling logger with a rap sheet of misdemeanors and the public persona of a Tasmanian devil."

A deputy and the man he was protecting - an executive for a company that's been buying up land and forcing landowners to relocate - are murdered, and dear old dad goes from being lead suspect to fugitive from justice after beating up a deputy and leaving him handcuffed to a tree.

Despite the fact that his father has been of the absentee variety most of his life, Bowditch is dogmatic in proving his innocence. He wants to help bring his father back into custody, but he is hugely shut out by the authorities and met with hostility by them as well as every one his dad has rubbed the wrong way. Which seems to be just about everyone in the state of Maine.

With my father on the run, I was the closest thing people had to a punching bag around here. Well, at least I was performing a public service.

I can't really go further without ruining a few surprises, but I really enjoyed this book. It was the author's first and was an Edgar nominee. After finishing it, I could see why.

The Blonde on the Street Corner, by David Goodis (1954)

2012-01-12T11:35:00.000-08:00

"...What are you? What do you do? You stand on a corner. You're one of the bums. You're thirty years old and what do you have?"
     "Nothing."
     "Is that what you want?"
     "It gives me very little to worry about. I don't have to think about losing it. There's nothing to lose."

Last Saturday marked the anniversary of Goodis' passing. This was in my TBR pile. I figured, Why not?

It's not really a crime novel, although there are some noir elements. The story focuses on four men in their early thirties who haven't really matured beyond high school (sadly familiar) who are perpetually broke, spend their days leaning against a store front and their nights calling random women in the phone book in the hopes of setting up blind dates for all four of them (fortunately, not at all familiar).

The primary character of the four is Ralph, who is obsessed with the title character. His family is well-realized in the book. There's also Ken, a half-assed musician who writes songs with Ralph. But when the songs are finished, he has no interest in doing anything else with them. There's George, who's just...there. And Dippy, who comes off initially as the comic relief. Dippy is a goofball. Or a clever guy pretending to be a goofball.

The three of them hurried back to Ken's house and feasted. When they were puffed with the soup and the bread, Ken showed Dippy the liquor.
     "Now we'll have cocktails," Dippy said.
     "You fool you. They don't drink cocktails after they eat. They drink them before," Ken said.
     "What's the difference?" Dippy said.
     Ken opened the bottle of gin. He said, "Straight gin is the correct thing to drink after eating. Anybody who knows anything about it will tell you that. You gotta know how to live."
     He poured three glasses of gin.
     "This tastes like perfume," Dippy said.
     "You're not kidding," George said.
     Ken glared at them. "A lot you guys know about it," he said. "The whole trouble is, you don't know how to drink. You're not drinking men."
     "I know how to drink," Dippy said. "I put it in my mouth and let it go down my throat. That's all there is to it."

A very sad, bleak book at the end, but already one of my favorites by Goodis. I wonder how long Edna waited for Ralph on her doorstep.

Ellison Wonderland, by Harlan Ellison (1974)

2012-01-10T12:43:00.000-08:00

Purchased during the five minutes that I got into Harlan Ellison. I started to stray away from the guy because of passages like this:

Each man carried, in a drop-pouch, a charge of ferro-atomic explosive on a time fuse. As they whipped over the batteries, the men released their deadly cargos, directly into the barrels of the thread-disruptors, and sped up and away, back for their own lines. It was futile, of course, for sonorad had caught them, and trackbeams snaked out across the sky, picking each man off like moths caught in a flame. The jato units were snuffed out in midair, even as the ferro-atomics went off inside the disruptor barrels.

I could have found a "denser" example of that sort of writing, but I didn't have the time or inclination.

I love science fiction. I do. But - with the exception of some examples - I prefer my science fiction to stem from the mundane, the ordinary, the every day*. Some of the best Twilight Zone episodes are the ones that are set in ordinary surroundings - a diner, a bus depot, a 747 at 20,000 feet. So when I read science fiction like the above quoted, my eyes start to glaze over and I start to compose grocery lists. That's not Mister Ellison's fault. That's just the way I'm programmed.

But just about every story in the previous collection I read (The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World) featured page after page of prose like this.

Not so with this collection. (Again) The above quoted is from this book, but prose like this is the exception. Much of the settings and situations have a mundane anchor. For example, in one story, a hapless man accidentally finds out that Earth is a suburb for aliens.

You can't get more mundane than that.

* There's nothing more alarming than coming home and finding a Yeti sitting on your loo in Tooting Bec. - Jon Pertwee

Draw the Curtain Close, by Thomas B Dewey (1947)

2012-01-09T10:35:00.000-08:00

A private detective only referred to as "Mac" visits a potential client at his upscale Chicago estate. The client - who is basically an Al Capone stand-in (had he retired and stayed wealthy) - wants Mac to follow his wife and make sure she's safe. When he won't get any less vague than that, Mac turns down the job and walks out. He returns back to his shabby office/apartment, turns on the lights and finds two guys waiting for him. He plays things coolly.

     There were two of them, nicely built, clean-shaven chaps, all dressed up in black coats and hats. One of them leaned against my desk with his arms folded. The other one, a fat lad, leaned against the mantel over the fake fireplace, smoking a cigar. There wasn't any expression in their faces. There never is.
     I stood there slapping a newspaper against my knee. I looked first at one of them, then at the other. Then I looked back over my shoulder.
     The third one came slowly toward the front of the building, out of the shadows at the end of the hall. He looked like the other two, more or less. He kept coming till he stood directly behind me. There was a pause and then he put his hand in the middle of my back and pushed, very gently. I walked in and he followed me, closing the door behind us. After he'd closed it he leaned against it, facing the room.
     I dropped my hat and newspaper on the desk and sat down in the swivel chair.
     "All right," I said. "Tell me a story."

This is more like it.

I had only been familiar with the fact that Thomas Dewey wrote a series of novels featuring a private eye named Pete Schoefield. Schoefield was an easy-going character who was also married. His wife tended to get involved with his cases. The one Schoefield that I read (Too Hot For Hawaii) was good, but I wasn't in a hurry to seek out more. Married couple-detectives don't really float my boat. That's probably unfair, but I can't help it.

It just shows, though, that I didn't seek hard enough. Dewey had another character (one the interwebs tell me he wrote more for) - an unattached Chicago-based P.I. of the sympathetic-yet-capable type (very capable - the last chapter is a freaking bloodbath). Mac stands along Marlowe, Archer, and even Paul Pine in that regard. It also helps that this was an entertaining book.

1. Too cold outside to play. 2. tv show marathons. 3. PROFIT.

2012-01-04T12:14:00.000-08:00

I have no available tv signal. No cable either. Not that it matters much. The only network show I watch is Community. And that's on hiatus until the month of Wheneverber. On basic cable, there's Doctor Who and Justified and...gosh, I can't think of anything else. Which brings up a wonderful coincidence: I usually catch up with "my shows" via DVD. And season 2 of Justified came out on DVD yesterday. I zoomed through four episodes last night and I can see why Margo Martindale got a lot of notice by viewers and critics. She's scarily good.

I should easily wrap this up by next week, when coincidentally (again) two Doctor Who stories get their DVD release. It's good for my OCD viewing habits, bad for my wallet. After Who, I dunno. I'm thinking of trying It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

11/22/63, by Stephen King (2011)

2012-01-03T13:36:00.000-08:00

Was going to make a snarky comment along the lines of, "Oh, a time travel story about the JFK assassination. How ORIGINAL!" But King says in the afterword that he had the idea for this back in 1972. And if he had gone through with this back then, that probably (maybe) would have made him the first. I don't know. I'm too lazy to do a wikipedia search on "JFK time travel stories".

This is an intriguing twist on it. Jake Epping is introduced to a "rabbit hole" by another friend, who is too ill to use it himself. The rabbit hole takes you to September of 1958 in the same Maine town. No matter how much time you spend in the past, its always two minutes later when you return to 2011. And when you use the rabbit hole again it takes you back to the same date and place in 1958. So each trip to the past is a reset.
So if you change history in one trip, the change is rendered invalid on your next journey.

The other thing: the past doesn't want to be changed. A theme that keeps cropping up. Jake starts with little things before moving on to saving a President's life. And the past keeps throwing the proverbial monkey wrench in his plans. From freak weather conditions to machine failure to a really bad cold.

I caught the references to "IT" even though I've never read that one.

This was pretty good.

Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D'Urbervilles, by Kim Newman (2011)

2011-12-29T10:56:00.000-08:00

You all know Professor Moriarty and, by extension, Colonel Sebastian Moran? The Anti-Holmes & Watson. This is their story. And, like Watson, the "sidekick" narrates. The opening paragraph:

I blame that rat-weasel Stamford, who was no better at judging character than at kiting paper. He later had his collar felt in Farnham, of all blasted places. If you want to pass French government bonds, you can't afford to mix up your accents grave and your accents acute. Archie Stamford earns no sympathy from me. Thanks to him, I was first drawn into the orbit, the gravitational pull as he would have said, of Professor Moriarty.

Stamford. You already get a sense of how cool this is going to be and where you may be headed from that one paragraph alone. This book is set in the same universe as Doyle's stories, but at the same time there is a Bizarro world feel to the proceedings. Par exemple, Holmes will keep bees in his retirement. Moriarty breeds wasps. Watson is a chivalrous gentleman who is a blushing - sometimes naive - romantic. Moran wants to shag just about every woman he meets. Moriarty and Moran share rooms. They have a housekeeper whose name begins with "H". But she's also the madame for the brothel which operates on the first floor.

Et cetera and so forth.

There's also a plethora of references to other works and the fact that they're set in the same universe, from (of course) Tess of the D'Urbervilles to Sweeney Todd. I especially liked the connection to The Maltese Falcon.

Sherlock Holmes isn't even mentioned until some time after page 160. And even then its not by name. But by that point I didn't even care if the Great Detective ever made an appearance. Moran is such an entertaining storyteller. He shouldn't be likable. But he is. Extremely.

If they complained, he had them killed. That was my job, by the by - show some bloody respect or there's a rope, a sack and a stretch of the Thames I could introduce you to.

From experience, I knew he had an idea of what was going on. But frequently it suited him to keep it all to himself, and just tell me to shoot someone.

The book is basically a handful of loosely linked short stories/novellas that start with Moriarty and Moran's meeting and ends at the Falls. The idea of centering a story completely on the partnership of the two M's seems such an obvious yet ingenious idea. Although Mister Newman concedes in the Afterword that it's been done a handful of times in the past, I'd be up for more of these if they're even half as entertaining as this one.

Epitaph For A Tramp & Epitaph For A Dead Beat, by David Markson (1959/1961)

2011-12-21T10:33:00.000-08:00

The first novel begins with private eye Harry Fannin relaxing in bed with a book. He hears a sports car screech up to the curb outside his apartment. He then hears a woman stagger out of the car and drunkenly slur her words. The bell to his apartment rings. Fannin smiles. Someone - possibly from his black book - has dropped by to party. He buzzes her through and opens his apartment door. As he goes into his kitchen to mix some drinks he hears her clomp noisily up the stairs. Some party! He waits expectantly in the living room with a glass in each hand and then a woman he hasn't seen in a year - a woman he's tried very hard to forget - walks through the door. She collapses to the floor, a bloody knife wound in her abdomen. She mumbles a few words before she dies. It's his ex-wife.

And there's the hook.

Everything you need to know about why their marriage failed is there in the title and needs no further explanation here. The wound is still raw for Fannin as evinced in a scene where he catches up with one of her crummy associates in the search for the killer.

     "Where'd Duke meet her? How'd she get into it?"
     I was leaning forward. I wasn't sure whether I was going to hit him on principle or just throw up. I could feel sally watching.
     "Harry?"
     "Yeah?"
     "Do you really want to hear it? Does it make any difference now?"
     "Sure," Bogardus said, "why all the interest anyhow? What is she, your ex-piece or somethin'?"
     It's nice when other people make your decisions for you. The back of my hand took him across the jaw and the cigarette shot out of his mouth like something researched by Wernher von Braun. He let out a yelp like an unpaid madam.

The second novel is about the death of a beatnik-type. Beatniks, in general, are very prevalent in both stories as they're both set in the heart of Greenwich Village. And despite the fact that the first novel is basically a quest for vengeance, Harry Fannin really isn't really in the Tough Guy private detective mold. Oh, he can handle himself in tough situations, but he's more of a quipster.

He bent to pick them up with the same sick-of-it-all expression that he probably had when he made love to his wife.

He stared at the cuffs as glumly as a stripteaser confronting a low thermometer.

I tried to remember when I had held a girl as breathtaking. It had been the week before they knifed Julius Caesar.

     She gave me a smile that could have paid her rent for a year.

More a Shell Scott type than a Mike Hammer. Speaking of which, there are some cool references in both novels to the genre; sort of a knowing wink that you usually don't find in novels of this period. Mike Hammer gets name-checked, along with Raymond Chandler, Casablanca, and Ross Macdonald's The Way Some People Die.

Dead Beat is the stronger of the two, but they're both pretty enjoyable.

"This stop: six."

2011-12-20T13:34:00.000-08:00

Not enough movies are set in creepy old hotels, I've decided. There's The Shining and Barton Fink. And I think that's about it. Oh, Psycho doesn't count. That's not a hotel. It's a roadside motel.
And then there's that tv show "Angel" that - barring the first and last seasons - was based in an abandoned 1950s Los Angeles hotel.

I actually want to find an old hotel. One that has furniture and fixtures dating back to at least the 1920s and spend a few nights in one. Call it research for a book or a story or what-have-you. But I don't care about the fucking "life of the mind".

I thought I'd almost found one in the suburbs a few weeks ago. But it turned out to be an old building renovated into a modern condo. Ugh.

Sinful Woman, by James M Cain (1947)

2011-12-20T11:16:00.000-08:00

The only thing sinful about her is "her figure" specifies the first page. Beyond that, Hollywood actress Sylvia Shoreham is innocent and wholesome.

Sorta.

At the beginning of the novel she's also a bit jaded. She's in a small town in a southwestern state (never specified, but it must be Nevada) to get a divorce from her Lithuanian baron husband. The marriage started as a lark, but hubby decided he wanted to be a Hollywood producer. She signed a few contracts and wound up starring in a few stinkers produced by his film company and as a result her career has hit a major slump.

As the divorce is being finalized, hubby wanders into town with absolutely no qualms - he'll marry Sylvia's little sister Hazel instead. Sylvia's mentally unstable little sister. An hour later, the husband is dead of a gunshot wound.

It's a little hard to describe the novel beyond this. There are attempted cover-ups, not only by the just-as-Lithuanian producer (for publicity reasons) but by the sheriff (who's fallen in love with Sylvia). Sylvia wants to fess up to the shooting, but it doesn't seem kosher. The insurance people want the truth to out, but not out of justice, but because it relieves them of having to pay out a lot of money.

So it's a bit of a comedy.

And a weird one.

The Girl From Las Vegas, by J.M. Flynn / To Have and to Kill, by Robert Martin (1960)

2011-12-19T10:38:00.000-08:00

Probably the most awkward-looking seductive pose ever. Also: clown pants.

Matt Tara owns a bar in Monterey California (Carmel, or thereabouts). When a friendly rival goes out of business, he buys his bar. Not the building, but the actual bar inside the building. It has a history, see, going all the way back to the previous century and was even shot up a bit during prohibition.

But once the actual transaction is made, certain parties (re: hoods) start expressing an interest as well - in the braining-you-over-the-head or running-you-off-the-road kind of interest. Say, maybe somethings hidden in this bar?

There is. And yadda-yadda, and so forth and so on. I started to tune out after awhile. Matt Tara is only a bar owner in little ol' Carmel, California, but everyone - from the local snitch(!) to a used car dealer to the comedy relief town drunk to even the local mafiosi (!!) - seems to go out of their way to help the guy. Sure, he seems a likable fellow, but I found it hard to believe that half the town populace goes out of their way to help him for nothing in return and at great risk to themselves. Eh...small towns.

Also, at one point in the story, Tara breaks two ribs in a car crash. And then spends the rest of the book throwing corpses off of a cliff, swimming underwater with a breathing apparatus, making "whoopee" with a the love interest, and getting into a few fistfights with just a taped-up chest. I'm no doctor...

Cleveland private detective James Bennett and his girlfriend travel up to their rich friend's Lake Eries mansion to attend to be in said rich friend's wedding.

The bride-to-be is thoroughly unpleasant from her very first paragraph. Other guests include a nice young woman who the rich cad led on a few weeks ago while visiting Chicago. She thinks he's still a bachelor when she unexpectedly arrives and so is devastated when she finds out the truth. Also visiting is a deaf-mute author who is secretly in love with the bride-to-be (and also not deaf-mute), and the rich friend's mother, who hates the bride-to-be and wants to stop the wedding. You can all see where this is heading.

Retroactively, though, as the book opens with the bride-to-be's death, and then circles back for a few chapters to the week leading up to it and the introduction of all those characters.

The mystery is interesting and straightforward, but still nothing to write home about. I've read a handful of the Ace Doubles and I'm starting to get the feeling that they are watered-down versions of the real hard-boiled thing. I loved Robert Martin's (AKA Lee Robert's) The Little Sister when I read it a few months ago, but something felt...off when reading To Have and to Kill (and, yes, I noticed the "Abridged" on the cover). Even Gil Brewer's The Squeeze (which was half of an Ace) lacked his typically seamy, sleazy style. Maybe the Aces were supposed to be "safer" than their single-volume counterparts.

I Like 'Em Tough, by "Curt Cannon" (1958)

2011-12-16T09:32:00.000-08:00

Background: Curt Cannon is a washed-up ex-P.I. He came home and found his girl in flagrante with one of his underling/operatives. In a rage, he pistol-whipped the guy. And then he lost his girl and his P.I. license, in that order. Cannon now spends his time propping up bars, and not much else. But trouble seeks him out, in these half-a-dozen very hard-boiled stories originally published in '53 and '54.

In Die Hard (!) a worried old man asks Cannon to rescue his son from heroin dealers. Cannon brusquely tells him to go away, and then the old man is shot to death as he's leaving the bar. The next morning, the son's ex-fiance knocks on his hotel door, repeats the old man's request, then has sex with Cannon just for the hell of it. The P.I. winds up trying to get information from another junkie, but she's too far strung out to give him any info.

     Nothing can help a junkie but the junk.
     When I left her, she was still moaning on the bed, still crying for The Man who could put her out of her misery. On the way down, I passed a short, dark guy in a loud sports shirt, a package under his arm.
     "You'd better hurry," I told him. "You're about to lose a customer."
     He grunted and kept walking up the steps...

Dead Men Don't Dream opens with Cannon attending the wake of a childhood friend. A small group of toughs are bullying the neighborhood businesses for protection money and the friend got himself killed when he tried to defy them. Cannon winds up breaking the arm of one of the tough guys. In probably the book's darkest sequence, that tough guys' girl - a dangerous gun moll herself - corners Cannon and begins to pistol whip him. He gains the upper hand, takes away her gun, rips some of her clothes off, has his way with her, and then throws a crumpled five dollar bill at her feet when he's done.

He has better persuasive skills with the next tough guy he encounters:

I walked up behind him and grabbed one arm, yanking it up behind his back.
     "Hello," I said. "My name is Curt Cannon."
     "Hey, man, you nuts or something?" He tried to pull his arm away but I held it tightly.
     "Take me to the cheese," I said. "The head punk."
     "Man, you've flipped," he whined. I still couldn't see his face, but it sounded like a kid talking, a big kid who'd once lifted weights.
     "You want to carry your arm away?" I asked.
     "Cool it, man. Cool it." He tried to turn but I held him tightly. "What's your gripe?" he asked at last.
     "I don't like shakedowns."
     "Who does? Man, we see eye to eye. Loosen the flipper."
     I yanked up on it and he screamed. "Cut the jive," I shouted. "Take me to the son of a bitch behind all this or I'll leave a stump on your shoulder."

By the time Now Die In It starts, Cannon has transferred from a cheap hotel to a flophouse, and his drinking has gotten worse. Enough to provoke him into beating a pencil-pushing bureaucratic cop in his own office. Surprisingly, he gets away with it.

Good and Dead, which is probably the weakest of the stories, has him investigating the death of a fellow down-at-luck drinking buddy in Chinatown.

In Death of Me, Cannon gets involved in a small-scale mob war brought about by the supposed newspaper story of his own death. At this point in his pathetic life, he's sleeping in the park, and the only way he's alerted to the newspaper story is because he's wadding up bits of newspaper to plug up the hole sin his shoes.

I honestly didn't plan this. I had no idea the subject matter of the stories, but the final story - Deadlier Than the Mail - is a Christmas-themed one and sees Cannon tracking down someone who's stealing welfare checks from the needy. Its the only story in the collection that has a happy ending per se. Sure, he's drinking in the end - again. And he's still living on the streets, and his future doesn't look very bright. But he's ...somewhat happy. He got to play Robin Hood.

And he'll probably forget about it a week later.

Later in 1958, Curt Cannon (AKA Ed McBain, AKA Evan Hunter) wrote his one and only full-length novel featuring the character - I'm Cannon-For Hire. In 2005, it was reprinted by HCC as The Gutter and the Grave. It was my first HCC actually. And my "gateway" into crime fiction over the last few years. So reading this book was like coming full circle.

Kinda sorta. Probably.

The Instant Enemy, by Ross Macdonald (1968)

2011-12-14T12:17:00.000-08:00

Lew Archer is hired by some worried parents to find their daughter, who's been AWOL for the past 24 hours or so. He finds her "shacked up" with a rather intense young man named Davy.

     "You take orders from me, bird. From nobody else." He turned on me. "As for you, I want you to be out of sight in one minute. That's an order."
     "You're not old enough to be giving orders to anybody. When I leave, Miss Sebastian goes along."
     "You think so?" He pushed her inside and shut the door. "She's never going back to that dungeon."
     "It's better than shacking up with a psycho."
     "I'm not a psycho!"
     To prove it he swung his right fist at my head.

Poor, Lew. He's usually better at dealing with people. Especially with those who are about to fly off the handle.

Later on in the book, another man shoots and kills someone because he appears to be harming his pregnant wife. Its a gut reaction. And because this man - who isn't at all violent and doesn't even have a criminal record - has helped - intermittently - with the case, Archer feels compelled to sit with the man for awhile. But the man is far too rattled over what he has done. And so Archer can do nothing but sit and observe.

The second self that most of us have inside of us had stepped into the open and acted out its violence. Now he had to live with it, like an insane Siamese twin, for the rest of his life.

It seems almost redundant to say this - because I've been saying this with every new Macdonald I read this year - but I have a new favorite Ross Macdonald book. Very dark. And yet I smiled at the last paragraph. Its going to sound very corny, but Lew Archer is reminding me more and more of Morgan Freeman's character at the end of Seven, particularly the final line he has in the movie...

Murder Among Children, by Donald E Westlake writing as Tucker Coe (1967)

2011-12-12T11:14:00.000-08:00

The first Tucker Coe novel that I bought was Don't Lie To Me. About two months ago. It dutifully went into one of my TBR piles (I currently have five of them, and there is s system. Oh yes.). I figured I would get around to it sooner rather than later. Then, about a week after that, I picked up Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death. I noticed that it had an earlier publication date. Did I have to read them in order?

Well, yes and no. According to the handful of websites I checked, all five of the Mitch Tobin mysteries are self contained, but the character himself has an "arc". I only discovered this after I had started reading Kinds of Love.

The internets isn't all bad. In between all the lolcats and 4chan pages, you occasionally find INFORMATION. And it is INFORMATIVE.

So, book two in the series sees a heretofore unknown, slightly younger cousin knocking on Tobin's door. She and a group of her friends (the "children" of the title) have recently opened a coffee shop in Greenwich Village. But they are being harassed by a police detective. Could Tobin - an ex-cop himself - come down and sort the matter out? He agrees to do so, but on the day that he shows up, a double homicide has occurred in the coffee shop. And his cousin is implicated.

At this point, Tobin wants nothing further to do with the situation. He refuses any further entreaties to help in a way that seems almost cowardly. Its only at the urgings of his wife and that one of the other "children" is killed in an apparent hit-and-run that he finally agrees to clear his cousin's name.

The mystery has an unexpected conclusion, but for me, the best part of the book occurs towards the end, when Tobin is arrested, grilled and sneered at by police officers in an interrogation room, booked and fingerprinted, and finally thrown in a police cell. In his former life as a cop, all of that became a matter of boring routine to him. Now, on the other side of it, it has a psychological effect on him.

This was a great book. Even better than the first.

Choke Hold, by Christa Faust (2011)

2011-12-09T13:01:00.000-08:00

"Get dressed, willya?" I whispered. "Before you put someone's eye out."

Faust's sequel to her previous HCC Money Shot opens with the ex-porn star Angel Dare waitressing in a diner in Yuma, Arizona; the identity established for her by the Witness Protection program already demolished months earlier. In short order, she bumps into someone from her past who just happens to be in the diner to meet his son for the first time. He barely has enough time to say, "Hey, I'm your dad." before some toughs walk in and turn the diner into swiss cheese with their various guns.

This is no way to maintain a low profile.

Things snowball from there, and Angel and her new friends are on the run from Yuma to Mexico and then on to Las Vegas where Very Bad Things Indeed happen.

Here We Go Again...

2011-12-08T11:55:00.000-08:00

Characterization is awful and all-over-the-place.

The Hulk makes the flimsiest of cameos, bringing the problem to the Defenders, but not sticking around because ~~it would interfere with the Jade Giant's new creative team~~ he basically doesn't want to ruin his already tarnished reputation. Huh? Since when does the Hulk care what "puny" humans care about him? Oh, and he also says at one point that he wants to die (out of shame?).

Doctor Strange is basically a more debonair Tony Stark. The issue begins with a one-night stand of his going on the "walk of shame". Later on, he hits on Betty/Red She Hulk. I couldn't really tell, but Namor calls him on it. How classy is it to hit on the ex-wife of one of your best friends?

Namor. Probably my biggest gripe. In the past, Namor had to be dragged practically kicking and screaming to help his fellow Defenders, and even then he'd bicker (primarily with the Hulk). Here, he has no problems in dropping what he's doing (stopping humans from slaughtering endangered aquatic life) to help the Defenders because he feels sympathy with the Hulk. I can't really see The Avenging Son having infinite patience while the Defenders travel (mostly) by train all over Europe. But he does.

Dialogue: Is basically TRYING REALLY HARD TO BE QUIRKY AND ODDBALL HERE, GUYS! And its obvious. In the old Defenders series the various Defenders acted completely in character. It was the situations themselves that were oddball and quirky.

Makes me glad that the Hulk's involvement with this title goes no further than this issue. I don't have to be invested in it anymore.

Who Is That?, by Warren B Meyers (1967)

2011-12-07T13:37:00.000-08:00

Long before "Hey, It's That Guy!" there was this, from an age when older movies were starting to play on the tube, but before the public had access to those futuristic things called VHS tapes.A pretty comprehensive gallery of familiar character actors, and all divided into sub-sections:

The Tough Tomatoes (such as Mayo Methot)
The "Other Woman" (such as Mary Astor and the Divine Miss Trevor, and some dame who'd later solve crimes in a small town in Maine)

Society Ladies; Motherly Types
Children, young and teenagers (Dean Stockwell! And Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer, et cetera)
Snoops and Gossips (I'm perplexed as to why Whit Bissell is included in this section. He always seemed to play the Worried Bureacrat Type)
Male Schemers and Con Men (My favorite section. There's John Carradine, Jack Elam, and Rondo Hattan. Sticking out like a sore thumb is Lee Van Cleef. Not that he doesn't belong in the section. He does. But as you can tell from above, pretty much all of the star stills are "glamour shots" from the 30s, 40s and 50s. The one used for Van Cleef is an on-set still from The Good, The Bad & The Ugly)
Perpetual Losers (Represented first and foremost by their Patron Saint, Elisha Cook Jr)
Windbags; Grandfatherly types and
Miscellaneous "Ethnic Types" (from Conrad Veidt to Allen Jenkins to Alphonso Bedoya to Butterfly McQueen to Keye Luke and so on)

Great used book store find!

RIP Colonel Potter

2011-12-07T11:29:00.001-08:00

They Don't Dance Much, by James Ross (1940)

2011-12-06T13:48:00.000-08:00

     Smut got up and stretched. 'Okay,' he said. 'Pull off his shoes.'
     While I was taking off his shoes Smut picked up the tongs that were standing beside the fireplace. He reached inside the fireplace and took a red coal by the tongs. He came back to Bert and sat down across his feet. He put the coal to Bert's right foot, just above the toes. I could hear it frying in a minute. Bert lay there with his mouth open and his eyes shut. His face was twisted around to one side. I wished we could think up some other way of making money.

And so Jack McDonald becomes the unwilling accomplice torture, robbery and finally murder of a harmless old man who had the misfortune of blabbing his mouth about the thousands of dollars he had buried on his farmland.

This is 1930s North Carolina. And Smut Milligan has just opened a brand new roadhouse with Jack as his senior employee. For about a hundred pages nothing much happens. Oh, some colorful characters are introduced - there's Badeye the bartender, so nicknamed because he has one glass eye and a generally bad disposition (but he seems to see more than others). There's an old man who's a regular at the roadhouse who gets a little teary whenever a particular song plays on the nickelodeon. It reminds him of a lynching he once attended. He's not teary because he feels guilty, but because he feels wistful.

So an old man is savagely beaten and tortured in what must have been shocking for a book in 1940. But that's not all. Smut and Jack take the still-alive Bert and dump him into a moonshine still. Bert taking his last gulp before expiring isn't even an afterthought to Smut as he drives off. Days later, they remove the body. And then they bottle up the beer that marinated poor ol' Bert to be drunk by those none the wiser.

Pretty soon Jack realizes he is less a partner in crime and more of another obstacle to Smut. He's not going to get his share of the money. Then Smut tries to poison him. Then Smut pins the murder charge on another roadhouse employee.

     'I want to apologize to you,' I said.
     He kept on looking at the floor. 'For what?' he said.
     'For saying you didn't have the guts to kill me. I know now you've got the guts to do anything,' I said.

I had been aware of this novel for years, but I didn't have any hope in finding it. Its terribly out of print. And what copies you can find online fetch for astronomical prices. So when I found this 1976 reprint (which, based on the quotation marks, was probably issued in the UK, but then there's that US price on the cover, so what do I know?) in the cranky old man's store for four bucks, I didn't look a gift horse in the chompers.

One of the best noirs I've read. Definitely has a seamy side to it, with equal portions of dark humor.

The Curious Eat Themselves, by John Straley (1993)

2011-12-05T11:27:00.000-08:00

     "We want you to bring him in?"
     "What?"
     "We know you don't carry a gun. We know you aren't violent. We're not asking you to do anything illegal or even vaguely unethical. Just locate him and keep him in one place long enough so we can speak to him and perhaps have him transported down to Global's national office."
     The way he said "national office" made me think of a long tunnel of light with New Age music playing.
     "What makes you think I would do anything like that? I've seen a few too many corpses in the last several days."
     "You've got shit for a reputation, Mr. Younger, but I think you can handle this simple errand."
     I was searching for that perfect comeback that I knew I would think of days later; that concise phrase that would turn his arrogance to curdled milk and reflect the fifty thousand dollars my parents spent on my education. But the words jumped out unedited: "You can blow me."

Cecil Younger doesn't play well with others. Especially fat cats representing Big Oil. And this is a detective series set in Alaska. That's almost like baiting a lion by wearing your brand new three-piece suit made entirely out of bacon.

The book actually begins with his most recent client's body being fished from a river. It just somehow gets even worse than that. For Cecil that is. Not for the reader. This is John Straley's second Younger novel, and its even stronger than the first.

Playback, by Raymond Chandler; Adapted by Ted Benoit & Fracois Ayroles (2004)

2011-12-02T09:48:00.000-08:00

Graphic novel adaptation of Chandler's "lost" screenplay by ze French, translated in English. Set in Canada. Yay, Multiculturalism!

It's a good story. Chandler obviously thought so, too, as he later pillaged it for his last novel (of the same name). There is a police detective, but he's not really the central character.

Art ranges from good to somewhat iffy. The police detective looks perpetually sleepy, while one of his underlings has crazy eyes all the time. His mouth may be saying, "I've followed up that lead, sir." but his eyes are saying, "I'M GOING TO MURDER YOU IN YOUR SLEEP."

Napalm & Silly Putty, by George Carlin (2001)

2011-11-30T06:40:00.000-08:00

If it's true that our species is alone in the universe, then I'd have to say the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little.

Basically if Andy Rooney wrote a book, and in amongst the observations and complaints, there were dick jokes and f-bombs.

It really is a stream-of-consciousness type of book. I like Carlin. And I liked portions of this book. But, if you already have some of his CDs, there isn't anything here that you already know about the guy and his outlook on things.

The Muppets (2011)

2011-11-29T08:55:00.000-08:00

The negative stuff out of the way: Got a bit schmaltzy for me there near the end. I mean, it's a Muppet movie. You expect the schmaltz. And I'm guessing I'm a bit of a hypocrite: I misted up slightly during the "Rainbow Connection". But still...got a near overdose of it at the very end.

The cameos were very hit-and-miss for me. For some reason I kept expecting Steve Martin. Don't ask me why. Maybe its because he was in the first movie and was a memorable host of the original show. But why certain celebrities appeared until I looked on the interwebs Monday and discovered that since this movie is Disney produced, they got guest stars from Disney projects and/or ABC shows (ABC being owned by Disney). So Jim Parsons was a good cameo. But when Selena Gomez walked onscreen half of the audience groaned, and the other half (which included me) made "Who the hell is Selena Gomez?" noises.

Not enough Swedish Chef.

Also, did you know CARS 2 was coming out soon? Yes, CARS 2 is coming out on CARS 2 at a CARS 2 nearest you CARS 2! Are you CARS 2-ing me? Ugh.

The positive. Well, most everything else. But the highlight would be the Barbershop Quartet rendition of "Smells Like Teen Spirit".

Deadly Edge, by Donald E Westlake writing as Richard Stark (1971)

2011-11-28T10:48:00.000-08:00

The heist goes off without a hitch. But then the corpse of someone who backed out of the heist during the planning stage is found in the house where Parker and his fellow crooks had planned to hole up immediately after said heist.

Parker's girlfriend Claire - needing some form of stability in her life, wants a permanent place of residence as opposed to the string of hotels they usually occupy. Parker could care less, but he recognizes the fact that Claire does. So he gives her some money and a list of requirements for the house. She winds up getting them a lakeside cabin in upstate New York (which is their permanent address for the rest of the series). The chapter ends with the two of them relaxing in front of a chimney fire. The next chapter opens with Parker finding one of his recent associates dead and nailed to a wall. It's a jarring, wonderful transition.

You can't have a new house without a housewarming present, and Claire's is to be terrorized by a a pair of psychos trying to get their hands on Parker's recent loot. Even if they have to nail him to a wall to get it.

But Parker has the "deadly edge" of the title.

My one super extravagant purchase this Black Friday Weekend.

2011-11-28T07:41:00.000-08:00

I AM PART OF THE PROBLEM.

Look Behind You, Lady; by A.S. Fleischman (1952)

2011-11-23T10:13:00.000-08:00

She had slim ankles and her legs were long and willowy like America grows for the whistle trade.

Another Fleischman crime novel featuring a perpetually out-of-his-depth character; this time a struggling American magician headlining in a Macao casino who gets inadvertently falls foul of the local opium trade.

At times it got a little confusing as to who was double-crossing who, but this was still an entertaining read.

The Consummata, by Mickey Spillane & Max Allan Collins (2011)

2011-11-22T10:11:00.000-08:00

You try holding a two-hundred-pound bastard upside down in a john and see if you don't come out wiped.

Heh.

The majority of this book - the 40+ year old sequel to Spillane's The Delta Factor - takes place in Miami. And most of the supporting cast are Cuban immigrants. Said immigrants' first language is not English so a great many of them interrupt their own speeches with the occasional "what is the word?" or "as you say" asides to make sure they're getting the local idioms right. Seriously. You can do a drinking game of it.

Because I'm a jerk, I started to make a tally of them. There are four "what is the word?"s with one variation ("is that the word?"); two "what is the expression?"s; and four other variations of the phrase ranging from "what is the phrase?" to "how you say". I clearly have too much time on my hands.

Anyway. This was a pleasant enough time waster, with a climax that takes place at an S & M orgy on a private island off the coast of Florida.

Dear Handful of People Who Have Commented On This Blog

2011-11-22T06:44:00.000-08:00

For some damn reason I can't comment on my own damn blog (in response to any comments you might have made). I can't figure out why. I used to be able to when I first set this up, but even then I had to log in as a different "John W".

Just wanted to say I appreciate the comments/feedback. Just wanted you guys know I'm not being a snob or anything...

Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death; by Donald E Westlake writing as Tucker Coe (1966)

2011-11-21T12:25:00.000-08:00

Background: Mitchell Tobin is a disgraced ex-cop because his partner was shot and killed. Tobin was not there to back him up because he was sleeping with another felon's wife at the time. Tobin's own wife forgave him. The New York police force did not. He now fills his days by building a brick wall in his backyard.

Then one day a gentleman gangster by the name of Ernie Rembek wants to hire Tobin. His girlfriend fled with a lot of money, but later turned up dead in a ratty hotel in Pennsylvania. The boodle was nowhere to be found. Rembek wants Tobin to find the money and identify the killer, who must be someone in Rembek's organization. Tobin, initially, wants nothing to do with the job at first, but money is tight, so he soon swallows his pride and starts with the Sam Spade impression.

     "What are you, some kind of Sam Spade?"
     "You mean, a private detective? No. I have no license, no official position at all. I'm working for Rembek as a private citizen."
     "But you're out to get a killer," he said, being sardonic. "You're doing the Humphrey Bogart bit."
     "If you say so."
     He shook his head. "You're wrong for it," he said. "You're overweight. The face is all wrong. You look more like a football coach."
     I smiled, in spite of myself. "Not that bad, I hope."
     "You're more the Barton MacLane type," he said.

Awwwww, ye-eahhh! Shout out to my main man, Barty McL!

Ahem...sorry. Its nice to see the character actor get the occasional "props".

Mitchell Tobin is a great character. Unwavering and relentless, but mostly unemotional in his dealings with criminal types. He bottles a lot in, which might lead to bad things further down the road (there are four more books in the series). But, at the moment, he must remain detached and cold-blooded.

They always look dead. That may be a stupid thing to say, but it's true. I've seen the imitations, in the movies and on television, and I've seen the real thing in the course of my former job, and there's never any question about it. The real corpse looks like something that never was alive.

Great mystery. Great overall book. When I was done, I immediately went to abebooks and ordered the next one.

Everything Old is Recycled Again. But at Twice the Price.

2011-11-18T14:07:00.000-08:00

Marvel's widely hyped event has just concluded. When the dust cleared, Bruce Banner and the Hulk had been separated - a profound character development that you'd think would occur in his own title, but nope.

Instead, a month later (in his own title), we find a Banner-less jade giant living a primitive yet tranquil existence with a bunch of apparent savages, going the full "Tarzan" route. Of course, the peace doesn't last long as a bunch of interlopers threaten to invade the Hulk's new paradise.

It's the plot to the recent Hulk reboot from a month ago. But its also the plot to something that happened back in the title in 1997.

Makes you wonder what sort of difference fourteen years will make. Well, for one thing the protagonist back then was Wolverine, a character as overexposed then as he is now (so far, so whatever). We also had Peter David writing the series. One of the title's definitive writers, he was entering the final year as regular scribe (even if he probably wasn't aware of it at the time). The Banner-Hulk separation/Heroes Reborn nonsense was foisted upon him and, apparently, mucked up a few story lines he had in mind. But David is well known for making kick-ass lemonade out of the lemons Marvel was constantly lobbing at him (see also: John Byrne, or How to Almost Ruin a Flagship Title in A Mere Six Issues), and this issue, and the ones that followed, are no exception.

Also: debut of Adam Kubert on the title. Best damn artist the Hulk ever had AFTER Sal Buscema.

Issues 454 all the way through to 467 (David and Kubert's last) mark one of my favorite eras on the title. It's up there alongside the initial six-issue run (by Lee, Kirby and Ditko), and issues 245 through 270 (the first half of Mantlo's and Buscema's run). Comic book comfort food.

Now we have another unnecessary re-numbering re-launch after the events of "Meh, Itself". Instead of Wolverine, we get a new character of Amanda Von Doom (yawn), who, along with her robot pals, deliberately rile the Hulk into fighting them. After several pages of wham-bam-sokko the fight subsides with Von Doom chiding the Hulk for thinking only with his fists and ruining her expensive robots (you know, forgetting the fact that she started the fight in the first place).

In issue two, we get Gamma Sharks. Oh, and Bruce Banner is now an insane mad doctor type. Whatever.

Whate I don't understand is the massive number of artsists credited with this thing. The primary draw is a guy named Marc Silvestri, who I guess is BIG. But, in addition to him, issue one is also credited to one other penciller and three inkers. Issue two credits four other pencillers and five artists and a "syndicate" as inkers. [OLD MAN VOICE] Why in my day, Smilin' Sal Buscema inked his own pencils while also working on half a dozen other titles! Without any delays! [/OLD MAN VOICE] And apparently Silvestri is off the title beginning with issue four. Why, if I was a jaded individual, I'd swear a Big name Talent was being put on a newly relaunched title only to drum up sales...

Grouse grouse grouse. I get it. I'm no longer the type of reader Marvel is trying to reach. I realized that years ago. But I still spend my money on their "stuff". I figure I got a right to grouse.

Think maybe I'll dig out those old David/Kubert issues this weekend...

Hammett Homicides, by Dashiell Hammett (1946)

2011-11-17T11:44:00.000-08:00

"I know not," he said merrily. "I employ a detective."
"Yeah?" I scowled at him. "You employ one to find out who killed and robbed Main - and for nothing else. If you think you're employing him to dig up your family secrets, you're as wrong as prohibition was."

Topical! The above quote is from a short story printed during Prohibition. In fact, all six stories that comprise this book are from that period. Four of said six feature Hammett's nameless Continental Op character.

I love the names Hammett does give some of his characters. Especially the villains. They're loopy, but without being too loopy. One in particular goes by the sobriquet of Leonidas Doucas and is described as a perfumed, asthmatic fat man, a sort of amalgamation/prototype of the Kaspar Gutman and Joel Cairo characters from The Maltese Falcon.

This was pretty fun.

I, Lucifer; by Peter O'Donnell (1967)

2011-11-15T11:55:00.000-08:00

There's an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 that taxed even Mike and the 'bots' patience. It was called "The Wild Wild World of Batwoman" and it's a real stinker. The movie has essentially ended, but the cameras are still rolling. A scene or two of exposition while all the good guys and girls start partying away. The dialogue is a combination of forced and (badly) ad-libbed. The humor is unfunny to the Nth degree. Finally, the calm, laid-back Tom Servo screams, "End! End!" at the screen.

So, apparently the character of Modesty Blaise and her cockney companion Willie Garvin began life, first, as a comic strip, then in a handful of movies, both series still going when the creator Peter O'Donnell decided to give them a third life in novels. This I only found out as I started reading this book. No biggie. I wasn't put off. For the first two or three pages.

You see, Modesty and Willie are ex-criminals-turned-adventurers, sometimes working for the British government (furrows brow; okay, I'll go with it). Despite not yet having reached their thirties, they are both semi-retired because they're both super-rich (rolls eyes). Members of the aforementioned Bristish governement as well as the French government, assorted criminals, and heads of business speak of the duo with awed respect and an almost reverence (rolls eyes again so hard that pupils are in danger of developing carpal tunnel).

I wasn't buying it.

By page 55, the only thing this superhuman Modesty Blaise had done was play second-fiddle in defusing a car bomb and kick down a door while running away from a group of killers.

Sure, then there was a fight scene. But it was so vaguely described - and from another character's point of view - that I felt an extreme level of not-caring.

By page 83, Modesty and her government "friend"/handler have a picnic while watching Willie Garvin jump out of a plane. Just for the helluvit.

On page 90, Willie and the government guy get involved in a snooker game with a bunch of country club cads. Bracing stuff.

Finally, on page 110, the two finally become actively engaged with the plot. The plot, the plot, it's, uh - something about a group of blackmailers who are in the possession of a psychic (who thinks he's Lucifer, don't ask) who extort money from government and/or rich types, and if they aren't paid up, they kill 'em. And I so wanted to throw this book against the wall at this point but for the pretty cover.

I really don't care for perfect, flawless characters. They're boring. And so are Modesty Blaise and Willie Garvin. Setting aside the fact that they don't have any personality (besides smugness). They're proficient with just about every weapon and martial arts known. They speak about eleventy billion known langauages. At one point in the book, Willie must cut open Modesty's back to remove a cyanide capsule but doesn't have any painkillers. Thankfully, Modesty knows how to put herself into a trance which, I guess, shuts off her pain receptors or some other Star Trek-like bullshit.

I really was rooting for the bad guys at this point.

But the bad guys are thwarted, the day is saved. But the cameras are still rolling for some unknown reason. Two secondary male characters - men who have loved and are still in love with the superwoman who is Modesty Blaise - ponder her from a short distance away, and come to the realization that they were lucky enough to just have their lives briefly touched by her.

This went on for the final two pages of the book. And all I could hear was Tom Servo screaming, "End! End!"

Still, its a nice cover...

Riddle Me This, by Mike Roscoe (1952)

2011-11-10T13:01:00.000-08:00

Opening sentence:

It was raining, Goddamnit.

P.I. Johnny April is nothing if not coarsely blunt. Unsubtle, but still pretty interesting to read about.

Goddamnit.

A fellow private detective and friend of April's is shot. Summoned by the police, Johnny quickly hurries to the dying man's side, the crime scene a crummy apartment building reeking of urine. Seconds later, the guy is dead. Its a crummy way and a crummy place to die.

The dead private detective/friend was a black man. And what with this story taking place in the early 50s, and Kansas City, Missouri not exactly being an enlightened mecca, a lot of bystanders - policemen, reporters, taxi cab drivers, etc - tend to not be entirely respectful of a dead black man. The n word is thrown around casually. When it does, Johnny April tends to punch whoever uses it.

He punches a lot of people in this book.

When he punches one of the reporters who corners him in the lobby of his own apartment building, said reporter whines that April shouldn't get away with that sort of thing. One of the building staffers primly tells him "Mr. April may strike whomever he chooses here in our lobby". Ho ho ho.

There is a love interest. Their "courtship" begins in a witty manner

     She stopped as a held the door open. Stopped and stretched.
     And my skin did the Australian crawl. Good lord. Then she got in the car. The skirt moved up as she sat down. She straightened it out and smoothed it over her full thighs. Then she looked up and caught me in bed with her. She laughed.

But it quickly becomes evident that she's kind of a superfluous character. She adds nothing really to the story. She's with Johnny when a couple of goons attack him at his apartment. She gets the heebie-jeebies when she witnesses how fiercely he defends himself and runs away. She then later returns, tells him that he's no good for a girl like her, but she'll sleep with him a grand total of two more times (how gracious!) before cutting ties with him for good. It's during that second "visit" that Johnny has figured out who the killer is and starts to leave. She tries to stop him in the most hysterical fashion:

     "Johnny - Johnny, don't." She made a sudden, frantic movement with her clothing. In a second she was bare. She stretched proudly.
     "There," she said heavily, "look at me. Look at me and tell me you've forgotten."
     "I haven't forgotten, Susan. My only curse is perfect memory." I pushed around her and walked into the living room. I had to move fast, and shake a tail in the process.
     "Johnny!" It was a scream she threw at me from the bedroom door. "Johnny, you're not leaving!"
     I wheeled to look.
     She was still naked. All except her right hand. It held my .38 and I knew it was loaded.

Stretched proudly? "My only curse is perfect memory"? Oh, THE HUMANITY!!!!!

I keed. I keed. It's dopey and over-the-top. By I still enjoyed this. The gestalt writing duo behind the Mike Roscoe psuedonym write entertaining stuff.

24 Being Remade in India

2011-11-09T11:25:00.000-08:00

'Slumdog Millionaire's' Anil Kapoor to Play Indian Jack Bauer (via Hollywood Reporter)

"The hero of Fox's 24 is making his way to India.
Slumdog Millionaire's Anil Kapoor, who played Kamistan President Omar Hassan in the final season of the long-running counterterrorism action series, will star in a local iteration of the show and help usher Jack Bauer into his home country.
"The timing could not be better," says Kapoor, noting that such topics as terrorism and upheaval are top-of-mind for Indian viewers. "It's very, very relevant over here."
The adaptation was born out of Kapoor's passion for the series, which he brought to the attention of showrunner Howard Gordon during filming on the U.S. version's eighth season. Kapoor recalls Gordon telling him that he would help under one condition: that Kapoor play the Indian Jack Bauer."

Will there be a group dance number in each episode?

The Difference Between Guys and Gals

2011-11-09T09:21:00.000-08:00

Don't know if it's fake or not, but its good for a laugh.

Virginia City (1940)

2011-11-08T09:46:00.000-08:00

Virginia City is one of the only two westerns Bogie thankfully did (the other being The Oklahoma Kid with Cagney). Both were made during that period post-The Petrified Forest but pre-High Sierra. Occasionally a decent role would come up for Bogart. But more often than not they were like this: the movie was lacking an actor to play the heavy, so Jack Warner drafted a reluctant Bogie to play the character who'd get knocked off by the hero in the final reel.

Here, he's miscast somewhat amusingly as a half-breed Mexican bandit with a pencil thin moustache (his first line is, "What is your business, meester?"). This is an Errol Flynn vehicle first and foremost. he plays a Union officer trying to track down and stop a Confederate gold shipment. Randolph Scott plays the primary heavy (Bogie's second-tier, even as a baddie, in this) a Confederate officer, and he's not real convincing, to be honest. In addition to being somewhat wooden, he doesn't sound southern. At one point he says, "I just hope it works!" But his "works" sounds like "woiks" by way of Brooklyn (In another sequence, a little girl picks up a rifle to defend her camp from Bogie's Mexican marauders, and in her best Jimmy Cagney impression snarls, "You dirty rat!" before snapping off a shot).

Of further note, are Alan Hale, who plays one of Flynn's compatriots, and Frank McHugh, who plays the most nervous life insurance salesman of the Ol' West. Showing up in uncredited cameos are Ward Bond as a Confederate sergeant (a year after this he'll be playing Sam Spade's best friend, Sgt Polhaus, in The Maltese Falcon) and George (tv's Superman) Reeves as a Union telegrapher.

Behold This Woman, by David Goodis (1947)

2011-11-07T12:23:00.000-08:00

     Drunken and disorderly conduct had put Frobey in jail many times, and he had also been in frequently for assault and battery and resisting arrest. Frobey had been married several times, but when he was drunk he liked to use his fists on a woman's face and none of the marriages had lasted very long. Frobey was now living with a woman whom he was afraid to hit. He hated her, but he could not pull himself away from her, and he could not subdue her.
     She resembled a buzzard. Her hair was as black as the river at midnight and her body was thin and hard. She was just about all bone, straight up and down, but there was something about her that made men burn inside and Frobey knew that when he worked at night she was having other men. Tonight he had accused her of that and she laughed at him. He walked toward her and she took a long knife from somewhere in his dress and showed it to him. Then she spit in his face.
     Frobey had walked out of the room. Walking down the street toward the parked truck, he had picked up a milk bottle and hurled it at a cat.

Frobey is only in one chapter. And not even in the entire chapter. His buzzard/girlfriend is only mentioned in passing. But they get a wonderfully rich introduction/background. I suddenly wanted to read a book starring them and not the primary cast of characters in this story.

There's really nothing wrong with the story as it is by David Goodis, the noir laureate of the filthy, foggy docklands of Philadelphia. The setting threw me off, initially. A middle class family. A meek statistician. A conniving stepmother. They seemed out of Goodis' normal territory. But then the stepmother makes her first proper debut at the top of chapter three, opens her mouth, and - hello - she's probably the most evil, most calculating woman in noir fiction.

...she was thinking now that matters had reached the stage where this man could no loger satisfy her. Very well, at least he could amuse her. He could amuse her while she took the necessary steps to procure someone who would satisfy her.

Frobey did a good job of upstaging everyone for a chapter, though.

The Left Hand of God (1955)

2011-11-04T14:10:00.000-07:00

I will grouse and grouse about how under-represented Bogart is on DVD. Sure, its easy to get Casablanca or The Big Sleep, but I had to play hide-and-seek with The Harder They Fall. And The African Queen wasn't available as a Region 1 until 2010. 2010!

I know some of his earlier movies are considered duds, but there's still some fascination with them. The plot descriptions are off-beat and tantalizing. He gets killed by an octopus in Isle of Fury. He plays an Ozarks wrestling promoter in Swing Your Lady. He gets in unconvincing martial arts fights in Tokyo Joe. (and wins!)

And they can't all be duds. Having seen Deadline USA on the big screen recently, I can't understand why its never been released on DVD. Its a bonafide 50s classic.

Grouse grouse grouse however...

The Left Hand of God is released on DVD next week. And probably only through the Screen Archives website. However, I managed to find an a used copy in Reckless Records last week. I chose not to look that gift horse in the mouth.

The movie is, sadly, not good. Its not godawful, either. But by the halfway point, I was already doing some cleaning in the apartment while leaving this on as background noise. Not a good sign. Humphrey Bogart as fake priest Joe Carmody and Gene Tierney as a widower/nurse/missionary type share little-to-no chemistry, but its hardly their respective faults. Tierney was going through a nervous breakdown at the time and Bogart wasn't in the best of physical health (he only did two more films after this). They both supported themselves as best they could.

There are a lot of clunky lines about faith and religion that are about as subtle as ACME brand sledgehammers. Some unintentional (or offensive, if you're that sensitive) humor can be derived by Lee J Cobb, shaved bald and shaded yellow as a Chinese warlord. He almost looks the part. Until he opens his mouth and speaks.

A real curate's egg. I still don't regret getting it. But I am somewhat mollified by the fact that I got a used, marked-down copy of it.

Jason Statham as Parker

2011-11-04T12:12:00.000-07:00

I love the Parker books.

I like Jason Statham as an action star.

I honestly like the idea of Jason Statham playing Parker. It seems like a natural fit.

Photos of the actor playing Parker have surfaced on the actor's facebook page.

What the hell?

The Chill, by Ross Macdonald (1963)

2011-11-03T10:38:00.000-07:00

I went into the washroom and looked at my face in the mirror above the row of basins. Someone had written in pencil on the wall: Support Mental Health or I'll kill you.

Lew Archer has literally stepped off the witness stand in a trial and is making his way out of the court room when a young man by the name of Alex Kincaid approaches him with a new case: his wife Dolly went missing the day after they were married. There was no sign of foul play. She appeared to have taken off on her own shortly after being approached by a stranger. Archer's initial impulse is to say no, but against his better judgement he takes the case anyway.

He finds the wife attending a local college. This is one of those twisty-turny moments where he comes to the attention of a flirty, curvaceous female professor who approaches Archer with another problem entirely, while turning up the innuendo to Factor Ten.

     "You're the man I have in mind. What would you say if I told you that I'm likely to be killed this weekend?"
     "I'd advise you to go away for the weekend."
     She leaned sideways toward me. Her breast hardly sagged. "Will you take me?"
     "I have a prior commitment."
     "If you mean little Mr. Alex Kincaid, I can pay you better than he can. Not to mention fringe benefits," she added irrepressibly.
     "That college grapevine is working overtime. Or is Dolly the source of your information?"
     "She's one of them. I could tell you things about that girl that would curl your hair."
     "Go ahead. I've always wanted curly hair."
     "Why should I? You don't offer a quid pro quo. You don't even take me seriously. I'm not used to being turned down flat, by the way."
     "It's nothing personal. I'm just the phlegmatic type..."

It's not often you hear a gumshoe use the word phlegmatic.

A few hours later, the college professor has been shot dead. Right between the eyes. Out of a sense of guilt, for not taking her seriously, Archer takes it upon himself to track down her killer. And would you be surprised if her murder was somehow linked to the initial missing wife case?

Almost every time I read a new Ross Macdonald I wind up saying its my new favorite book of his. And, again, I'm going to have to sound like a skipped record.

And, as always, its worth reading less for the mystery (which is typically labyrinthine and has a shovel-to-the-face twist near the climax), but more for the human interactions and drama Archer finds himself swept along in.

Halloween: Resurrection (2002)

2011-11-01T12:22:00.000-07:00

Weary. I'm so weary.

I should have spaced them out throughout October rather than impulsively watch all of them in a row. Or maybe I was still suffering through how awful parts five and six were. Part Seven was mildly better, but there was also Josh Hartnett and Michelle Williams and their characters failing to die somehow.

And now we have Busta Rhymes and Tara Banks (it physically hurts to type her name, so henceforth I will refer to her as Tuberculosis - TB stands for - oh, you get it).

There is a fifteen minute prologue that has nothing to do with the rest of the movie other than to establish that this is a movie franchise. Then its back to Haddonfield where some unscrupulous producers have rigged up the old Myers homestead with cameras and convinced a group of sexy young ~~victims~~ pretty people to spend the night. Relevant! And this won't date the movie at all!

Michael Myers last opponent before the reboot was Busta Rhymes.

Let that sink in a moment.

MICHAEL MYERS' KILLS

0:08:30 Security Guard 1 - (offscreen) decapitated

0:09:56 Security Guard 2 - throat slit with a butcher knife

0:14:10 Laurie Strode - butcher knife to the back. Pour out a little for the original Final Girl, ladies and gents.

0:30:05 Cameraman - stabbed through the neck with a camera tripod

0:45:10 Creepy Dude - butcher knife repeatedly in the chest and then, finally, through the skull

0:58:20 Heather Graham-a-like - impaled on a metal spike

1:03:40 Katee Sackhoff - decapitated with a butcher knife

1:04:40 Serial Killer Groupie - Michael crushes his head with his bare hands

1:06:30 Token Chef Character - impaled to a wall with three butcher knives (irony?)

1:17:00 Tuberculosis - (offscreen) stabbed repeatedly

I think I'll go watch some Disney flicks now...

Halloween: H20 (1998)

2011-10-31T11:42:00.000-07:00

It's a stupid title. Really it is.

Movie chooses to act like Halloweens Four through Six didn't happen. Depending on how you feel about those sequels, this is either a good or bad thing.
The Michael Myers mask has been altered a little to be scarier, which seems unnecessary. Its deliberate blank unemotional stare was kinda creepy anyway. And, I swear, in one scene it looks as if its been altered digitally.
At one point in the movie Laurie Strode and her boyfriend (played by Adam Arkin) are trying to get out of the school without bumping into Michael. "What do we do?" he snivelingly asks. "Try to live!" she snarls. Awful line. Worse delivery. Beer came out of my nose.

MICHAEL MYERS' KILLS

0:07:30 Hey! It's Joseph Gordon-Levitt! - (offscreen kill) Ice-skate through the face

0:07:40 Hey! It's an actor playing Joseph Gordon-Levitt's friend - (offscreen) kitchen knife through the back

0:08:40 Dr Loomis' Nurse Colleague From the First Two Films - throat slit with a butcher's knife

0:59:05 Generic Student - (offscreen) throat cut

1:01:00 Goth Student - stabbed repeatedly in back with a butcher knife (in one of the series' most prolonged sadistic sequences)

1:06:30 Adam Arkin - butcher knife to the abdomen

This has to be the smallest body count in a slasher movie ever.

Halloween - The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)

2011-10-29T13:54:00.000-07:00

This movie - the sixth in the Halloween movie franchise - introduced Paul Rudd to the movie-going public.

MICHAEL MYERS' KILLS

0:05:10 Nurse - skull shoved into a metal spike

0:06:38 Mulleted Compound Dude - neck snapped 180 degrees

0:18:25 Recast Character From the Previous Two Movies - impaled on some farm/threshing machine (which seems even more mean-spirited than the norm for a slasher flick, but I won't go into it...)

0:38:44 The mom - axe to the chest

0:52:15 A Caricature of the Meanest Dad Ever - Impaled onto a circuit box with a butcher's knife and electrocuted

0:55:20 Sleazy DJ - eviscerated

0:59:40 Horny Dude - neck slit with a butcher's knife

1:00:30 Horny Dude's Girlfriend - stabbed repeatedly with a butcher's knife

1:17:00 Three Evil Druid Surgeons - via surgical saw

1:18:22 Yet Another Evil Druid Surgeon - massive head trauma

1:24:40 Doctor Loomis (offscreen)

Halloween 5 (1989)

2011-10-28T13:43:00.000-07:00

The recap of the ending of Part 4 kicks off this movie with a few new bits added. After Michael falls into a mineshaft, do the local police force try to recover his body? No. They throw a couple of sticks of dynamite down the shaft. Mob mentality trumps police procedure any day!

Cut to a year later as an un-blowed up Michael Myers hacks various and sundry Haddonfield natives into bits and pieces. Its a fairly easy task as the local water supply appears to have turned everyone stupid. Myers walks around the town in broad daylight in his trademark mask and costume. Considering his notoriety and infamy, you'd think somebody would notice. Nope.

No, seriously. Plot advancement occurs because people act stupid in this movie. There are even two comedy relief chuckleheaded cops who have their own Comedy Music Theme. Give me strength...

The one standout: Doctor Loomis. He isn't stupid. Just gloriously unhinged. According to imdb, Donald Pleasence was 70 years old when he made this. Guy was pretty spry for 70. He runs, he jumps, he shoots, he beats Michael with a wooden plank and then rolls around on the floor with him trying to kill the guy. He probably had a stunt double in this flick. But in the majority of the shots, its obviously him. Donald Pleasence = Action Hero at 70 years old. Fuck. Yeah.

MICHAEL MYERS' KILLS

0:08:20 Mountain Hermit - looks like Michael beats him to death with something. Bad editing.

0:20:55 Stepsister Who Survived the Previous Movie - stabbed in the chest with some scissors

0:38:20 The Fonz - Some sort of farm/gardening tool to the forehead

0:59:30 Horny Dude - pitchfork through the back

1:00:5 Horny Gal - Scythed

1:02:47 The Two Comedy Cops (offscreen) - pitchforked to death

1:06:50 Wacky Friend - butcher knifed

1:14:40 Patrol Car Cop - beaten to death

1:19:35 Nice Cop - strangled with a rope

1:20:00 Undercover Cop (offscreen)

1:25:40 Family Dog (offscreen; this franchise doesn't love dogs)

He Rode Alone, by Steve Frazee (1958)

2011-10-28T09:11:00.000-07:00

Ed Cushman's parents died when he was thirteen. They died on the trail (as it were) of the dreaded cholera. Subsequently, the family that was travelling with the Cushmans abandoned Ed and his little sister, taking most of their possessions with them. Ed's little sister also dies of cholera about a day later. Ed manages to survive by scavenging on rodents and even a bird. He is eventually taken in by a kindly couple who run an outpost.

Flash forward past the Civil War and Ed is now a capable, independent young man, but still bitter about the past. It has informed his character and made him distant and stand-offish with others.

And that's it, really. From the back blurb I was kind of expecting a revenge tale where the adult Ed Cushman hunted down and killed the father and three sons of the family who abandoned him and let his little sister die. But it's not. He knows they were headed to California and purposefully avoids the state.

The book primarily focuses on his time spent in a mining town in Arkansas, trying to fit in with strangers and falling in love with the sole headstrong woman in town. Basically a touchy-feely story of a cowboy loner trying to let people into his heart.

Okay, I deliberately corned up the last sentence as Hallmark Card-y as possible, but it's still true. There is a shoot-out at one point (which Ed feels bad about afterwards), and a brawl in another chapter. And he does accidentally bump into the jerkwad dad and one of the sons who left him behind, but the confrontation doesn't go as expected.

Oh well. I'm not really having any luck with western novels...

Hallowen 4 - The Return of Michael Myers (1988)

2011-10-27T13:57:00.000-07:00

I remember enjoying this when I first saw it back in college. Not so much this time around.

The first high point is the opening credits. No John Carpenter theme this time around. Just shot after shot of Halloween decorations in pastoral, farm-like settings with eerie toneless music playing in the background. Very evocative. Then its off to the looney bin where two paramedics with DOOMED practically stencilled on their foreheads arrive to transfer an apparently comatose Michael Myers to who-really-cares. One of them looks at his surroundings and mutters, "Jesus!" The security guard who's come to greet them exclaims, "Jesus ain't got nothin' to do with this place!"

And then I muttered, "Jesus!"

The security guard exposits the events of the first two flicks in a way that no one would normally do, the paramedics take Myers off in the ambulance and blah blah blah slaughter-cakes, Doctor Loomis is hot on Michael's trail. And somewhere along the way, the second high point arrives in the form of a crazy, drunk preacher that Loomis hitches a ride with. Crazy preacher guy has obviously wandered in from another movie by mistake (he even says he's hunting a monster, but its not the one in this movie), but who cares? He's interesting. He even gets Sam "Evil! Can't You See it's EVIL?!!" Loomis to crack a rare smile.

So, yeah, the flick has not aged well. And speaking of age: so 80's. The feathered hair. The shoulder pads. And I'm only talking about the dudes. The ending is also a rip-off of Friday the 13th Part 5 (or Part 4 if you prefer).

MICHAEL MYERS' KILLS
0:06:30 Male Paramedic - thumb through the forehead (welcome to the movie!)

0:16:20 Three other paramedics (offscreen)

0:18:35 Garage Mechanic - crowbar through the chest

0:20:40 Diner waitress (offscreen)

0:40:55 Family dog (offscreen)

0:42:00 Tough Talkin' City Electrician - thrown onto a generator and electrocuted

0:47:00 At least one cop (offscreen)

1:04:15 Deputy (offscreen; enough with the offscreen kills, already!)

1:04:25 Sheriff's Skanky Daughter - impaled with a shotgun into a wall

1:07:45 Jerkwad Cheating Boyfriend - Neck broken (his fluffy mullet did not save him)

1:18:20 Three lynch Mobbers - via butcher knife

1:18:45 Lynch Mob Leader - throat ripped out

A Lonely Way to Die, by Art Bourgeau (1980)

2011-10-27T11:40:00.000-07:00

     The "Newlywed Game" was on. The host asked four men to tell the most embarrassing thing their wives did in public. Two of the four said their wives picked their noses in public. They were right. It was embarrassing, but not as embarrassing as being married to a man who was a big enough asshole to say it on a coast-to-coast television program.

Believe it or not, the random passage I read that convinced me to buy it from the used bookstore (Myopic in Wicker Park). Also: 80's Hair! Huge 80's hair!

Snake and F.T. have both just gotten out of the marines. They've also just met. With nothing better to do, they decide to visit Snake's home town of Cannibal Springs in Tennessee. It only has five churches, one bar, and one stop light. But it's showing signs that its progressing in the form of a female mayoral candidate.

Really, all Snake and F.T. want to do is fish and drink beer. But the lady candidate gets some threatening letters. And then someone close to her is murdered in a trap that was obviously set for her. The two boys figure its their job to step in.

     "You know we owe it to Cindy and Jessie to catch the bastard that did it," said F.T.
     "How are we going to do that? It could have been anyone in town," I said.
     "That's not true. Now settle down. You're not thinking straight. Remember what Sherlock Holmes said-"
     "What did Sherlock Holmes say?" I asked.
     "When you eliminate all the shit, whoever you're left with has got to be it," said F.T.

This was pretty funny. And the ending was devious. I went out and got two more Snake and F.T. novels.

Halloween III - Season of the Witch (1982)

2011-10-26T09:07:00.000-07:00

Very much a "like it or hate it" movie. I like it. In a nutshell, this Michael Myers-less "sequel" stars Tom Atkins as a medical doctor who inadvertently stumbles across a novelty company fronting for a druidic cult that wants to unleash some gross techno-cthulhuesque mayhem on children on Halloween night via their cursed Halloween masks. The Druidic cult is chiefly comprised of mucus-filled clockwork Autons.

Got all that?

The presence of Tom Atkins already improves whatever movie you're watching. Fact. Dan O'Herlihy is also awesome as the villain of the piece, all gleeful Irish geniality. The movie's got a great Carpenter composed soundtrack and a downer of an ending. The critics and fans mostly hated it, which seems a shame. Here was a horror movie franchise trying to do something different and paying audiences wanted more of the same ol', same ol'. Which would do so well once they went back to the Michael Myers storyline.

That last sentence at least.

I'm up to Part 6 on the Halloween movie marathon and, so far, it looks as if Part 3 might be the last good one.

Halloween II (1981)

2011-10-25T13:54:00.000-07:00

Set the same night as the first flick, but shot three years later. The first Halloween may have been the first "slasher" flick, but at this point there were already two Friday the 13th movies and a few other imitators. The second movie had to "up" their game.

Carpenter co-wrote and co-produced the flick, but that's about it. Jamie Lee Curtis reprised the role of Laurie Strode, but then spent most of the movie lying in a hospital bed, either unconscious or awake but delirious from painkillers (what a job!). An actress who played one of the victim's in the first flick returns for a two-second cameo as her corpse (what dedication!).

I remember the Celtic/Druidic element cropping up in Part 5 and how silly it seemed, but forgot that it actually started here, when Dr Loomis and the cop in charge find "SAMHAIN" scrawled in blood on a classroom chalkboard (Why?), but since nothing more is made of it, I'm not surprised that I forgot it.

MICHAEL MYERS' KILLS

0:12:18 Concerned Teenage Girl - kitchen knife to the chest (horror of horrors, it has mayonnaise on it - an easy way to get salmonella)

0:40:00 Comedy Security Guard - Hatchet to the forehead!

0:50:32 Horny Paramedic - Garrotted with...something.

0:51:50 Horny Nurse - Scalded to death in a boiling hot tub

0:57:00 Drunk Doctor (offscreen) - syringe through the eye

0:57:25 Nice Nurse - syringe through the eye

1:05:40 Head Nurse (offscreen) - hooked up to an IV and drained of blood (seems overly elaborate, Mr. Slasher McShowoff...)

1:08:40 Nurse With No Personality Whatsoever - Scalpel through the back, then lifted up in the air with said scalpel (I call no way!)

1:17:00 The Last Starfighter - Unknown; appears to have had the crap beat out of him

1:20:40 Stupid Federal Marshall - throat slit with scalpel

Ladyfingers, by Shepard Rifkin (1969)

2011-10-25T11:43:00.000-07:00

I really really liked the Shepard Rifkin novel Hard Case reprinted a few years ago, so when I spotted another book with his name on the spine I snatched it up. And giggled just a little bit, internally, when I saw the title juxtaposed with the cover image.

Everything you need to know about the plot is right there on the cover blurb/illustration. The tone, initially, is grim.

     I got a cab in nothing flat. That's an advantage of coming out of the morgue. There's always some crying woman getting out of a cab at some hour like 3:00 A.M.

Detective Sergeant Pablo Sanchez got a quick promotion by basically solving the right crimes at the right times and places (if that makes any sense). He's downright cynical for his years, and he's weary, too. Literally. He's thrown this assignment seconds after he's finished another by a chief of detectives who wants Sanchez to fail. He's already functioning on very little sleep.

     I lit a cigarette and slid down in the seat and smelled the cool salt air and closed my eyes.
     The car sagged suddenly. I opened my eyes. There were two kids sitting on each fender, all about sixteen or seventeen. They were grinning at my surprised look. They slid off and came crowding in at the window. They wore sneakers. The sneakers were not for basketball. Two of them were looking around to see who might be nearby. They were casing me for an easy mark.
     I took the .38 out of my shoulder holster, shook out all the shells, examined them, and then I inserted them carefully back into the cylinder. I did not look up once. When I finished I straightened up in the seat.
     The kids were all off the pier.

Sanchez is a no-nonsense capable cop whose patience starts to crack when he comes to the attention of a young Latina duchess (No. Really.). Her husband is cheating on her and Sanchez fascinates her. She starts calling his apartment and following him. In one chapter, she shows up at his apartment after he's gone to bed, drunk and in the mood to party. He drags her in before she can make a scene, so she turns on his record player and starts dancing suggestively.

I went to the kitchen and put on some water. I stood by the stove while it boiled. It was safer. She kept dancing. From time to time she ran her palms over her breasts. I asked God for help. I took out two cups full of boiling water and a jar of instant coffee.
     "I don't like that stuff," she said, narrowing her eyes. "I like it freshly ground."
     "Don't drink it and good-bye."
     "Don't you ever get tired of that routine of yours?"
     "Don't you?"

It was around this halfway point that the story started to skirt the edge of comedy. It, still, never forgets its about a reprehensible would-be-murderer who is sawing digits off a woman who's probably still alive, and mailing them to the police, but some of the grimness that set the early tone of the book is gone.

That's fine. I still enjoyed it.

Halloween (1978)

2011-10-24T13:43:00.000-07:00

I did something similar to this re: the Friday the 13th flicks on my old livejournal a few years ago. There's every possibility I will half-ass this as I never watched past the fifth Halloween film years ago (it was awful), and I heard that the follow-ups, as well as the Rob Zombie remakes, were various degrees of shitburger. But I will perservere anyway.

Still not watching the Rob Zombie flicks, though.

Anyways...

The original. The template for all slasher flicks to follow. The yadda-yadda. It would never be made today, because its more suspense than gratuitous gore and boobs (I am not invoking his name a third time). It isn't MTV-style quick-cuts and blah.

It features the credit "And Introducing Jamie Lee Curtis" (who already looks too old to be a high school student). It features that iconic music. And it stars Donald Pleasance, bless him, as the most lunatic psychiatrist EVAR. Doctor Loomis earned his degree in Scenery Chewing with a side major in Portentous Dialogue (every time he says the words "Death" or "Evil", you can hear the capital letters). It's a wonder the Haddonfield police take him at all seriously.

MICHAEL MEYER'S KILLS

0:05:45 Meyer's sister (in 1963) - stabbed repeatedly with a butcher knife

0:19:35 Garage mechanic (offscreen kill) - means unknown, but there's a sucking chest wound

0:43:43 A German Shepard - choked? (boo! hiss!)

0:53:30 Babysitter - initially strangled, then throat slit

1:05:10 Horny Dude - impaled through chest and into a wall with a butcher knife (which seems physically impossible, but hey, it looks cool)

1:07:30 PJ Soles - strangled with a phone cord

Also, loved the nods to The Thing From Another World.

Beast of Burden, by Ray Banks (2009)

2011-10-24T08:29:00.000-07:00

Not even thirty years old and Cal Innes is a shell of his former self. After a debilitating stroke, he gets around with a cane and it takes awhile for him to finish sentences. And he's still a private detective. Although at one point in this book he asks for a job application at Starbuck's. The shocked and uncomfortable barista thinks he's shitting with her, but he's really not.

A pretty grim book, but it still gave me the occasional chuckle. The motif is revenge. And for various spoilery reasons I can't go fully in to the details. The ending left me a bit angry, but that was the point.

I look forward to Banks' next book.

And then

2011-10-24T06:35:00.000-07:00

When the dude at the bike shop saw it; he was all, "Aw, man. The pedals are toast. The brakes are definitely toast. The front wheel is toast as well."

Suddenly, I was in the mood for baked bread.

"Welcome to L.A." Staged Reading

2011-10-21T14:13:00.000-07:00

Press Release Type Thingy

Welcome to LA

by Howard Casner, Los Angeles, CA

directed by Derek Bertelsen

In this black comedy, Adam's first few days in Los Angeles are greeted by a continual discovery of dead bodies in his building; an amorous police officer who wants to have sex with him, then wants Adam to read his screenplay; and a mentor whose main advice is not to masturbate more than once a day.

Welcome to LA features Samuel Drew Brown, Ethan Dubin, Julie Johnson, Shane Kalminiski, Michelle McKenzie-Voigt*, Jack Sweeney, and John Wilson.

Welcome to LA, Saturday, October

22, 4:30 pm. at the Hoover-Leppen Theater at Center on Halsted.

I play the amorous cop.

Doctor Who - "Horror of Fang Rock" (9/3/1977 - 9/24/1977)

2011-10-21T09:27:00.000-07:00

A bit of a cheat, this, as Doctor Who didn't really have an official Halloween episode. Although (1.) what was originally slated in this story's slot probably would have been, and (2.) this story was about as Halloween as the series got. To expand:

(1.) Story writer Terrance Dicks had originally written a story about a planet of vampires set in the future. The BBC nixed the idea as they were doing an adaptation of Dracula which would have aired around the same time. So Dicks was asked to come up with an entirely different story at the eleventh hour. He was an old hand at this sort of thing. He had been the series script editor from 1968 to 1974 as well as writing (or co-writing) three other stories at this point. Creativity under pressure brought forth Horror of Fang Rock.

(2.) The Doctor and Leela (think "Alien Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle with a knife") land on the coast of England during the Edwardian era. They investigate a lonely looking lighthouse. Soon thereafter a sailing yacht with some upper class lords and lady crash onto the rocks and they also seek sanctuary in said lighthouse.

There is a monster that can change shape and appear human. There is fog. 99% of it is set inside a gloomy, claustrophobic lighthouse. Victims are picked off one by one.

By all accounts, nobody had fun while working on this due to the last minute script changes and several other factors (such as Tom Baker still not getting along with Louise Jameson - the actress playing Leela - who had recently joined the show). Moods and temperaments were frayed. It only adds to the atmosphere.

Baker is still playing the Doctor like a moody alien traveller (a year later he'll be playing the Doctor as TOM BAKER). It's Hammer Horror on a budget. It's John Carpenter's The Thing. But five years beforehand. And set on the coast of England and not Antarctica. It's the second best Doctor Who story (after Inferno).

Tough Without a Gun: The Life and Extraordinary Afterlife of Humphrey Bogart, by Stefan Kanfer (2011)

2011-10-20T11:45:00.000-07:00

I've already read/own three other Bogie biographies, so I didn't expect to gain any new insights here. But I did learn a few more facts. At least I hope they were facts.

I didn't notice it at first. It was - I guess - around the halfway point that I found myself rolling my eyes after every other page. The author is a bit...emotional with the text. Or given to "colorizing" events. He says that Bogie snarls in one scenario. Edward G Robinson frowns in another. At one point - and I'm loosely paraphrasing here - Kanfer tells the reader that Bogie and studio head Jack Warner warily viewed each other, and their relationship, as two prize-fighters about to go at it.

Maybe its just me, but I think that stuff is kind of unnecessary. Unless you are directly quoting somebody, I think non-fiction/histories/biographies/what-have-you should be written as flat and unemotional as possible.

If the subject matter is interesting enough, you don't need to spruce it up with dramatic plumage.

Another example(s): Whenever a contemporary of Bogie's - be they actor or director or studio head - is quoted as saying something negative about him, they are portrayed in a passive-aggressively negative way. This is kind of leading the reader.

Bogie's my favorite actor. But I know he had his faults. Don't we all?

Couple things - well, I don't want to say "saved the book" or "turned it around". But I would say "kept my interest". Paradoxically, the antepenultimate chapter - the one in which Bogie passes away. I knew how Bogie died. I knew it was lingering. I know the poignant story of his and Spencer Tracey's last meeting. But I didn't know how truly awful things were towards the end. The phrase "stench of death" chilled me.

The final two chapters discuss Bogart's timeless appeal and legacy, and it is best summed up with Kanfer's own:

...every other Hollywood celebrity had been subject to the whims of time and fashion. As it turned out, though, Bogart was immune [to them].

Bogart, himself, would have said that was pretty screwy.

The Italian Secretary, by Caleb Carr (2005)

2011-10-19T12:15:00.000-07:00

Holmes and Watson are summoned by brother Mycroft to investigate a probable attempt on the Queen's life at the royal residence in Edinburgh, Holyroodhouse. Along the way, their train is attacked by what appears to be Scottish Nationalists.

Holyroodhouse apparently has a ghost hearkening back to the days of Mary (Queen of Scots), and it was totally a coincidence that I read a haunted castle story during the month of October, swear to Joseph Bell.

This book was okay. It had some good moments such as when Holmes lets Watson take the lead in an officer's bar in Edinburgh. Or when the palace is attacked at the climax of the book with some gruesome, er...missiles. Mister Carr does something, though (as a writer), that annoys me (as a reader). He'll take a page or two to describe something or to outline what Watson is thinking what could probably be done in a few paragraphs. The book clocks in a little over two hundred pages, but it could have been pared down some.

A Love/Hate Relationship With My Mode of Conveyance

2011-10-18T09:46:00.000-07:00

The Crazy Crackhead Lady was the Portent of Doom.

(Actually I had been aware of the problem with my bike pedal for three days now, but Crazy Crackhead Lady adds color to the story...)

I was biking home Sunday night after auditioning for a play in Wicker Park by way of the L & L afterwards. I was stopped at the corner of Addison and Sheridan (Wrigley field to you non-Chicago types) when two crackhead ladies approached me. The dominant one immediately asked if I wanted to buy tickets to the Bears game. I told her, "No thanks." She berated me, telling me "my lady" would break up with me by midnight if I didn't get her tickets to the Bears game. I repudiated her specious argument by informing her that I didn't have a lady.

She immediately gave me her name and number, while trying to sit in my lap. I'm still sitting on my bike at this point of the story.

Anyway, I resisted her charms and was able to get away when the light turned green. I had just cleared the intersection when BAM.

There went my right pedal. And since it gave away as I was pushing down on it with my foot, gravity and physics conspired that I would continue my downward trajectory until I kissed the pavement with my face.

Around a month ago, I made the major life decision of going from wearing contacts back to glasses (last time I had worn glasses on a full-time basis was 1988), mainly because I'd just run out of disposable contacts, but basically because I was lazy. The plan that I was on said that if there was anything wrong with my new pair of specs I could get them fixed or replaced, free of charge, within the first 30 days. The day of my accident - the accident which dinged my glasses and made them now crooked - was Day 31.

Typical. Absolutely typical.

Physically, I didn't do too badly. My left shoulder and my right side still smarts. But muh bike. Muh poor poor bike...

Like I said. It's my fault. I noticed something wonky with the pedal Friday night, and had all day Saturday to do something about it. Instead, I went to Evanston and spent money on used books, used DVDs, and unused cheese bread.

Oh well. The next three days are supposed to be rainy. And I generally try to avoid biking during rainy weather anyway. But still. I got doored this past March. I got pushed off my bike by an asshole with anger management problems while I was going a good twenty mph in June. Now this. Sometimes it feels like someone is trying to tell me something.

Motherless Brooklyn, by Jonathan Lethem (1999)

2011-10-14T12:16:00.000-07:00

Lionel Essrog works at a Brooklyn-based limousine service/detective agency ("stooge work for a penny-ante hood" another character elucidates). Lionel Essrog's boss - a man who has sort of looked after him and three other men since their orphanage days - is murdered while Lionel and another operative are meant to be tailing him. Believing himself an amateur detective, despite working at a faux detective agency, Lionel Essrog feels compelled to solve the murder of his boss.

Lionel Essrog has Tourette's.

And a few other obsessive compulsive quirks, such as tapping or touching others or mimicking their gestures (he simply cannot help himself when, after a police detective pats him down for weapons he starts to return the favor).

People underestimate him because of his condition; think him an idiot. But Lionel has an interesting, funny, sometimes poetical way of narrating his actions. He will sometimes assign a nickname to someone, whether he knows their name or not ("Kumquat Killer", "Garbage Cop"), such as when he's briefly kidnapped by a group of doormen. They, pathetically, let him go because they don't have it in them to intimidate him. He follows them to their workplace armed only with the name Fujisaki as a lead, but runs afoul of more doormen.

Their propriety was terrifying. I didn't see Pinched, Pimples, Chunky or Indistinct among them, but it was a big building. Instead I'd drawn Shadowface, Shadowface, Shadowface, Tallshadowface, and Shadowface.
"I'm here to see Fujisaki," I said. "Man, woman or corporation."

I just loved this book from beginning to end. Its not often you can go from feeling uncomfortable, to deeply embarrassed for the lead character to laughing all in the same paragraph. And yet it happened a bunch of times while I was reading this.

And the language - the prose - is just beautiful. Lionel has a inspired, poetical (there's that word again) way of talking to the reader. He goes though most of the private detective tropes and offers his opinion of them, from a character you've yet to meet dying offpage (guilty relief) to being knocked unconscious (he has nothing profound to add) to being stuck in a car during an all-night stake-out.

A minute later the 67 bus rolled like a great battered appliance down Bergen, empty apart from the driver. Public transportation was the night's pulse, the beep on the monitor at the patient's bedside. In a few hours those same trains and buses would be jammed with jawing, caffeinated faces, littered with newspapers and fresh gum. Now they kept the faith. Me, I had the cold to keep me awake, that and the liter of Coca-Cola and my assignment...

I was chilled through, my head throbbed, and my tongue felt as if it had been bound in horseradish-and-cola-soaked plaster and left out on the moon overnight.

Probably the best book I've read all year. I don't think I'm doing it justice.

Die Hard 5 Announced/The Expendable 2 Filming

2011-10-13T11:40:00.000-07:00

Working Title: A Good Day to Die Hard

Premise: John McClane and John McClane Jr

Release Date: Valentine's Day weekend (2013)

Possible Rating: PG

All the successful ingredients for an action blockbuster!

Meanwhile, the Universe is in danger from imploding as a metric buttload of action stars gather to film another flick:

(?; Lundgren; ?; ?; Willis; some kid/small person; Crews; ?; ?; ?; CHUCK NORRIS; ?; Schwarzenneger; ?; Statham)

I was a bit disappointed with the first Expendables, but this picture is kinda cool...

Buffy the Vampire Slayer - "Halloween" (10/27/1997)

2011-10-12T11:48:00.000-07:00

Halloween costumes that turn the wearer into whatever the costume is supposed to represent. Sounds almost like a plot from the Friday the 13th tv series, although I'd probably take Alyson Hannigan over Robey any day.

The episode saw the introduction of Chaosmonger* Ethan Rayne, who had all the makings of an interesting recurring villain, but he only appeared a handful more times over the next two-and-a-quarter seasons. An early scene features Angel and Cordelia awkwardly chit-chatting at the Bronze. Having just finished an Angel marathon last month, it seemed weird to see Cordelia flirt with him here. Even weirder is when a visibly jealous Buffy is complaining about the two hanging out, Willow reassures her friend that Angel would never fall for a girl like Cordy ("Always remember that the integrity of your universe's reality must be maintained -- unless you think of something cool." - Joss Whedon)

There's a nice little nod to The Prisoner in the final scene.

* New word. Just made it up.

Quantum Leap - "The Boogieman" (10/26/1990)

2011-10-10T13:51:00.000-07:00

So, ho-hum, doing a marathon of "It's A Very Halloween Episode Of" various tv shows since its that month and started with this, Quantum Leap's only contribution (during its third season). Sam leaps into "a second-rate H.P. Lovecraft". Freaky things start to happen and people start dropping like flies. The clues are there (certain sound effects employed whenever Al zaps around or opens/closes the Imaging Chamber door aren't heard). Its not at all scary (although my ex-fiance was deeply disturbed by it when I played it for her in '91), but it does give Dean Stockwell to chew up the scenery.

Some things of note:

Chris Ruppenthal - writer of this and many other QL eps - portrayed the Mirror Image (AKA "The guy Sam sees when he looks in the mirror").
A continuity error only a nerd like me would catch: Al's new handlink device(a chunkier gizmo that looks like a bunch of flashing gummi bears) makes an appearance three episodes before its proper debut when the older, slimmer model goes kaput, possibly as a result of the episodes being shot and/or this episode being moved up so it would air around Halloween.
The cliffhanger is another opportunity to put Scott Bakula in a dress (he leaps into a southern beauty pageant contestant).
I really gotta stop relying on parentheses.

Little Sister, by Robert Martin writing as Lee Roberts (1952)

2011-10-07T13:22:00.000-07:00

Private detective Andrew Brice is summoned to the house of one Vivian Prosper. When he shows up, he finds her sunbathing topless in the backyard. A promising start!

So, being a gentleman, he tiptoes back to the front yard and then back again, making as much noise as possible so to give her time to cover herself. He finds her this time putting on a sweater. She stares at him archly and tells him that she saw him the first time. Whoops.
The case: Vivian's little sister, Linda, is a bit of a hellion. She parties - mostly with a lower-class cad named Arthur who Vivian thinks is only after the Prosper family fortune. She wants Brice to scare him off. With perfect timing, Linda - after a long night of partying - pulls up in the driveway and falls unconscious on the steering wheel. When Brice opens the blood-smeared trunk, he finds a dead man inside. Double whoops.

After removing Linda to her bedroom, Brice is for the cops. But Linda isn't. She throws her (sweatered) feminine wiles at him, threatens to shoot him with a .32, and finally breaks down crying.

     I stared at her helplessly. First kisses and promises of more than kisses, then a gun pointed at me, now tears. Women.

Its not often that I'm surprised by a find like this. I still consider myself a "noob" at the crime genre. But at the same time I thought I'd heard of all the notable authors. Then a Howard Browne/John Evans or a Robert Martin/Lee Roberts will come along and I'll be pleasantly surprised.

There's a lot going on in this slim 160 page book. Nothing is wasted. The characters are vivid. The mystery is well done without being too overly complicated. And its got a great sense of humor, such as this scene where an already exasperated Brice is trying to get information out of a secretary working at the local college.

     She took one look and gasped, "Oh, my goodness! Don't tell me! You really are a detective?"
     I nodded and wondered if I should start talking out of the side of my mouth.
     "Like in the movies and books?" she breathed.
     "No, miss, but it happens to be the way I make a living. Now, if you will please just check your list of students..."
     She removed her glasses again. Her eyes were friendly now. "Why didn't you tell me in the first place? My goodness, but I think this is interesting. A real live private detective.I never met one before. Do you carry a gun in a shoulder holster?"
     "No, miss. Now-"
     "Do you drink double shots of bourbon at every whipstitch, and get all beat up, and wounded in the shoulder? Why do they always get shot in the shoulder? Do sexy blondes keep making passes at you, and are you always fighting with the police because you withhold important evidence, and they threaten to take away your license, only all along the police are dumb? But in the end you corner the killer, and he confesses, and then tries to get away, and you are forced to kill him, and-"
     "My God, no!" I almost shouted.

It just escalates from there, with Brice finally going through the file cabinets himself while the secretary natters on in the background about movie private detectives.

Usually when I come across a new/old writer like this, I try to do a little internet research on him. And I found this amongst others. And it really saddened me. I skimmed most of it, until the end. The last decade-and-a-half was a very lonely time for the guy.

I have some more books to find.

The Automatic Detective, by A Lee Martinez (2008)

2011-10-06T11:00:00.000-07:00

The Learned Council had an official name for Empire City.
     Technotopia.
     Yeah, it wasn't a real word, but that was kind of the point. The Council loved to reinvent things, improve them, make them new and snazzy. Of course Empire had a lot of unofficial nicknames as well.
     Mutantburg. Robotville. The Big Gray Haze. The City That Never Functions.

When an android in Empire develops sentience it is allowed to file for full citizenship. But only after a trial probation period. Mack Megaton - former war machine to a mad scientist - is nearing the end of his probation period. as a hard-working taxi driver, he tries to stay out of trouble. But its kind of hard when the nice family next door is kidnapped by some unfriendly mutants (further backstory: the industrial pollution in Empire is such that any individual human can mutate without warning - gills, a third eye, telepathy - so there is such a thing as "friendly" mutants in this book).

What starts off as a crime story in a science-fiction setting, escalates into something more. Still, Mack has a perfectly jaded, cynical, hard-boiled voice. For a 'bot.

A bot had to find his own way, and I'd figured out that functioning for function's sake was pointless. The real question was finding a directive worth getting scrapped for.

His allies in this story are a brilliant female robotics expert with more than a passing interest in Mack's schematics, a hyper-intelligent gorilla named Jung, and an android that talks like James Cagney. This was, simply, a fun book.

RIP Charles Napier

2011-10-06T06:15:00.001-07:00

Monty Python Turns 42

2011-10-05T06:57:00.000-07:00

Which, as it turns out, is a very important number, universally speaking.

Lemon curry?

Time For A New Camera

2011-10-03T12:42:00.000-07:00

Quite unexpectedly, my mom and sis got me a ticket to this past weekend's Creation Entertainment convention because it was to be Leonard Nimoy's last convention appearance, but with the proviso that I was to take pictures.

As you can see from the above, I failed miserably, due to being too far back, not holding still, and/or having an inferior camera. That's Spock within the first few seconds of walking onstage, giving everyone a two-handed Vulcan salute.

I haven't been to too many conventions, but this one seemed very low key, kinda small (it was a Star Trek-only event). At one point, as I was walking through the dealer's hall, Brent Spiner walked by me, humming a tune. I could have said something but instead I didn't even acknowledge him. And all that is because Lou Ferrigno acted like a jerk when I met him at another convention years ago. Thanks, Hulk. Any time I might bump into a celebrity I like, I'll clam up thanks to you.

Nimoy was a a very classy dude when he was onstage. Went through his career highlights, told some interesting stories.

It didn't hit me until about 45 minutes into his talk, but I didn't hear a cell phone go off once. Not during the entire talk. Okay, I did hear some beeping towards the end, but that was somebody fiddling with their camera and not a talkity-talk device.

Still:

Nerds. They know proper phone etiquette.

Thieves' Dozen, by Donald E Westlake (2004)

2011-09-30T12:08:00.000-07:00

...this horse heist was looking less and less like what the newspapers called a "well-planned professional robbery" and more and more like hobos sneaking into back yards to steal lawn mowers. Professionally, it was an embarrassment.

This collection of eleven stories (get it?) stem primarily from the eighties and nineties and is basically wonderful and indispensable and just about any other adjective you could use to describe Westlake's work. And all of them very very funny.

All of the stories have a very good "hook" to them, too. The quotation from the story above features Dortmunder and Kelp trying to steal a prize-winning racehorse thats been set out to stud. The beginning of another story sees the two tunneling into a bank vault via the sewers, only to find the bank employees and customers locked in because the bank is already being robbed and the bank itself surrounded by SWAT teams. Another story simply begins with:

It was hard to run, Dortmunder was discovering, with your pockets full of bronze Roman coins. The long skirt flapping around his ankles didn't help, either.

Favorite story would have to be "Now What?", which basically follows Dortmunder on a trip to a fence just to unload a valuable ~~brioche~~ brooch and continually being sidetracked by forces beyond his control.

The final story in the collection isn't "technically" a Dortmunder story. It features his parallel universe equivalent, John Rumsey. Rumsey came from a period where it looked like Westlake was going to lose copyright of the Dortmunder name to an Evil Hollywood studio. Such a thing never came to pass, thankfully.

Getting Off, by Lawrence Block writing as Jill Emerson (2011)

2011-09-29T13:49:00.000-07:00

She was crisscrossing the country, trying to regrow her psychic hymen by killing every man who ever had sex with her, and she was involved in a wildly exciting lesbian affair with a woman she'd never laid a hand on.

Hard Case Crime officially relaunches with a book whose title and cover art are the literary equivalent of a "Hello, sailor!" In the pre-publicity and interviews leading up to this, range editor Charles Ardai has been unashamedly gleeful about how dirty this novel is. And it is.

Dirty that is.

Our lead protagonist Kit is - for reasons I won't go into here - compelled to kill each and every man she sleeps with. Sometimes during (ideally during the climax), other times afterwards (usually when the guy is asleep). And all in a variety of different ways. As Block himself writes in the novel at one point: "The bed a man shared with her was his deathbed."

But a handful of guys have "escaped" without knowing it (either they left the hotel room before she could find a weapon, or Kit fell asleep because she'd had a little too much to drink), so now she has to play detective in hunting her escaped victims down so she can continue the job.

I wasn't as into the love story. I was content to read chapter after chapter of Kit doing her Black Widow impression, but this is still a demented little read.

Did I say little? This one's over 300 pages, and hard backed to boot.

I'm going to miss their paperback-sized format, but I'm just glad Hard case is back.

Sin Doll, by Orrie Hitt (1959)

2011-09-28T11:47:00.000-07:00

When you actually name your lead female character Cherry (yes, its her actual name, not a nickname), you've kinda pre-destined her fate already, I should think.

Ho-hum. Not one of Hitt's best. Some characters are laughably ...erm, characterized; the name of the city locale is humorously generic (Northtown!); and there's some not-too-nice views on lesbianism. But Orrie Hitt - on average - wrote about eleventy billion books a year. So its only understandable the odd duffer would crop up...

No More Heroes, by Ray Banks (2008)

2011-09-27T11:21:00.000-07:00

Up until two weeks ago I hadn't used my library card in at least half a decade. I hang my head in shame.

Its simple, really. I'm a bit OCD about books. I have to own the books that I read. As the years pass I realize that this isn't the best idea. The apartment starts to look smaller as the stacks of read and unread books grow (and there's probably room for one more bookcase, but even that wouldn't be enough). I could feature on one of those depressing A & E shows.

The fourth Ray Banks book to feature Cal Innes came out in the states recently, but I never could find the third. Whenever I entered a bookstore it was always in the back of my mind to look for (along with Allan Guthrie - another author from across the pond who's hard to find).

So I finally walked into a library with something on my mind other than tax forms. I hang my head in shame.

I've been trying all this time to live up to that fucking label they gave me, so I reckon maybe it's time I either live up to it, or die trying.
Sounds dramatic, but what the fuck.

Its another bleak but occasionally funny trip through Manchester's seamier side, as Innes - who still hangs out his shingle for the private detective profession - has stooped to evicting tenants for a slumlord. Its a lousy job, but Innes desperately needs the money for painkillers after his "accident" in America.

Somebody is torching the slumlord's properties, though. So he hires Innes to look into that as well. The whole thing escalates into a race/class riot that Innes finds himself in the middle of. Then things get worse.

And now I want to read the fourth book - which I already have in the queue - but I'm thinking maybe I should pace myself.

Northlanders Cancelled?

2011-09-22T08:58:00.000-07:00

As of Issue #50. The news was announced back in June apparently, but I only found out yesterday.

I just picked up the Plague Widows trade...

A Shot in the Dark, by Richard Powell (1952)

2011-09-21T12:26:00.000-07:00

The hotel where he was staying had one of those bars where the light is kept dim so that you can't see what brand of liquor or women you're getting.

After World War II, professional born-with-a-silver-spoon-in-his-mouth rich boy Johnny Edwards chooses to spend his time fishing, gadding about, loafing around and generally feeling sorry for himself (he received a Dear John letter).

He then receives a different sort of letter from an old Army buddy stranded in Havana - an appeal for help. Johnny tries to ignore it by fly-fishing some more, but after a day of feeling guilty about that he breaks his reel and rod, and flies out to Cuba. He misses saving his friend's life by mere minutes (the body is still warm and the killer has is still near enough to make a go at Edwards). This, of course, leads to a lot of guilt and a sudden lack of loafing around. Edwards is not only determined to find his friend's killer, but to avenge his death. His initial (bumbling) attempts to do so get him kicked out of the country by the Cuban police.

Five months later, with a better plan and a clearer head Edwards starts again.

Powell is best known for successfully mixing humor with hard-boiled action. And the style is a nice hook at first. But the plot starts to drag down at the halfway point (when the setting switches from Cuba to Florida).

I Am Assembling a Team

2011-09-20T13:37:00.000-07:00

The Mission: Steal Nicolas Cage's time machine.

The End of Everything, by Megan Abbott (2011)

2011-09-19T10:23:00.000-07:00

One summer, a thirteen year-old girl by the name of Evie goes missing. This book is told from the point of view of her best friend Lizzie (also aged thirteen).

A hundred times, you would see him pay the newspaper boy, or filling his gas tank, and he was just a man, and now he's the one who took Evie in that Buick. He has taken her away and has maybe done things to her and done, done, done.
A hundred men like him in the five blocks on either side, and I never noticed one.

A book about love and the different forms it takes. A book about how over the course of a few weeks, a thirteen year-old girl became the oldest woman in the world.

This book really unsettled me. And I'm not easily unsettled.

Bring Him Back Dead / There Was a Crooked Man, by Day Keene (1954/1956)

2011-09-15T13:11:00.000-07:00

Two previously published novels about Louisiana law enforcement-types caught in a tangled web of tangly webby proportions. The former features a squeaky clean deputy in a corrupt police force who is framed/accused of murdering an older gentleman and raping/beating his considerably younger bride.

The latter is about a plainclothes detective who starts off with the noblest of intentions, but as the bills and medical problems of his little daughter stack up he starts to slide into murkier waters.

I'm still undecided on Day Keene. I've read one really good book of his (Home is the Sailor) and one really bad book of his (Chicago 11). Both of these (obviously abridged) works fall somewhere down the middle, although I did enjoy Bring Him slightly over Crooked Man. Mainly because the latter features an early plot twist that even a grade schooler could figure out, and the whole thing felt like an old Hollywood B "Message" picture.

Bring Him Back Dead features more interesting characters and - at one point - our lead innocent protagonist has to escape from a lynch mob.

The Galton Case, by Ross Macdonald (1959)

2011-09-13T13:42:00.000-07:00

She had...a look on her face you don't see too often any more, the look of a woman who hasn't been disappointed...

Lew Archer is hired by a wealthy-yet-dying matriarch (through a lawyer friend) to find an estranged son who has been missing for nearly twenty years. The lawyer confides to Archer that there probably isn't any hope in succeeding and that he (Archer) shouldn't really break his back trying. But within twenty minutes of accepting the case, the lawyer's smart-alecky manservant - a man by the name of Culligan - is killed by an intruder. And the prime suspect makes a getaway in Archer's car.

Not believing in coincidences, Archer ploughs on.

before the book's halfway point, the moldy bones of the missing son are found, and so is his alleged son - the matriarch's hitherto unrevealed grandson. And further complications ensue. In trying to determine in whether he's legitimately the heir, Archer is savagely beaten up and spends a week in Reno sipping his meals through a straw.

Misleading photo cover of this edition aside, Archer rarely gets mad. And he rarely takes things too personally. He does both when he comes across one of his tormentors in Canada (!) a few chapters later.

     Without giving the matter any advance thought, I set myself on my heels and hit him with all my force on the point of the jaw. He went down and stayed. His brother knelt beside him, making small shocked noises which resolved themselves into words:
     "You had no right to hit him. He wanted to talk to you."
     "I heard him."
     "He's been drinking, and he was scared. He was just putting on a big bluff."
     "Put away the violin. It doesn't go with a knifing rap."
     "Tommy never knifed anybody."
     "That's right, he was framed. Culligan framed him by falling down and stabbing himself. Tommy was just an innocent bystander."
     "I don't claim he was innocent. Schwartz sent him there to throw his weight around. But nobody figured he was going to run into Culligan, let alone Culligan with a knife and gun. he got shot taking the gun away from Culligan. Then he knocked Culligan out, and that's the whole thing as far as Tommy's concerned."
     "At which point the Apaches came out of the hills."

One of the better Lew Archers. Of course, I really haven't come across a dud Macdonald yet...

Halo For Satan, by Howard Browne writing as John Evans (1948)

2011-09-06T13:37:00.000-07:00

She blinked at me wanly and worked up a smile that was bankrupt before it was born.

Paul Pine is hired by a Chicago bishop to locate a man who claims to have a two thousand year-old manuscript written by Jesus Christ himself. And every time Pine comes close to finding the guy, he stumbles over a new dead body. Soon, the missing guy's estranged wife and a dying Prohibition-era mob boss (not the one you're thinking of) hires Pine for the same seek-and-locate job as well.

There's a really cool twist that ends the penultimate chapter, smacking you upside the head in the process. Then there's a second twist towards the end of the final chapter that's a wee bit melodramatic, but what the hell.

There was also a line (a Pine-ism?) in the middle of the novel that seemed a bit familiar. As Pine is sitting in his office, mulling over the case he thinks - paraphrasing here - that no one cared if he lived or died or even moved to Terra Haute. That's Chandler! I double-checked and a variation of that line appears in Chandler's The Little Sister (1942?), except he used El Paso instead of Terra Haute.

I felt a little depressed over the pseudo-plagiarism until I read the Thrilling Detective write-up on Howard Browne. He was gleefully, wilfully, unashamedly derivative of Raymond Chandler, even telling him when they finally met: "I've been making a living off you for years."

For some reason that made it all right.

The same write-up also notes that the John Evans pseudonym that Browne used when writing the Pine novels is a direct lift from one of the proto-Philip Marlowe characters Chandler wrote for. I felt I should know that. My brain cells, they are getting dumber.

"I bet you're a big Lee Marvin fan, aren't ya?"

2011-09-02T09:57:00.000-07:00

If the time ever comes that I break down and get a credit card it'll be because of Warner Archives - an online-only resource of hard-to-find movies. I begged mom to get me The Outfit (based on a Richard Stark novel, with Robert Duvall standing in for Parker) for Christmas last year. Recently, though, I've been finding a few in used video stores, so score!

The first being Pretty Maids All In a Row, a bizarre 70s black comedy/exploitation movie penned by Gene Roddenberry of all people. Maids stars Rock Hudson as a high school football coach/guidance counselor who is sleeping with half the female students, Roddy McDowall as the school principal, pre-Kojak Telly Savalas as the cop investigating the sudden slew of murders on campus and Roddenberry alums James "Scotty" Doohan and William "Squire of Gothos" Campbell as Savalas' partners.

Oh, and Angie Dickinson as the World's Greatest Substitute Teacher.

More disappointing was Avalanche Express, a dreary Cold War caper featuring a very tired and bored-looking Lee Marvin ferrying a defecting Robert Shaw (dubbed throughout the movie by an uncredited Rich Little) across Europe via train. Or a train model. Seriously, there are so many unconvincing unnecessary toy train model shots in scenes that don't feature that promised avalanche. What, the studio couldn't afford a few extra days of location shooting?

The ensemble is rounded out by Maximilian Schell (the baddie), Linda Evans - as Marvin's CIA partner and improbable love interest (with which he shares zero onscreen chemistry) - and fading football star and wearer of women's hosiery, Joe Namath.

The movie dared me to press the stop and/or fast forward buttons so many times. And its less than ninety minutes! A feat.

Sometimes it sucks to be a completist.