How About a Dance Scene: TAKE THE LEAD

My review of OMAR is up at CRIMESPREE MAGAZINE

Friday's Forgotten Books, Friday, March 7, 2014

From the archives

Ed Gorman is the author of Ticket to Ride, Stranglehold, and stories in DISCOUNT NOIR, Beat to a Pulp: Second Round and DAMN NEAR DEAD 2. You can find him here.

Forgotten Books: Darker Than You Think by Jack Williamson

Let's begin with a tale of woe. Mine.

Years ago I was asked to contribute a forty thousand word novella to a YA series about shapeshifters. You know, beings humans and otherwise who can transform themselves into other kinds of creatures. I immediately thought of Jack Williamson's The Wolves of Darkness, a grand old pulp novella set in the snowy American West and featuring enough creepy
violence and tangled romance to make it memorable. It even has its moments of sweeping poetry.

Reading Williamson's piece showed me how to write my own. A few days after the young editor received it he called to rave. And I do mean rave. The best of the entire series. Eerie and poetic. Yadda yadda yadda. For the next forty-eight hours I was intolerable to be around. It
was during this time our five cats learned to give me the finger. My swollen head was pricked soon enough. The young editor's older boss hated it. He gave my editor a list of reasons he hated it. I was to rewrite it. I wouldn't do it. I said I'd just write another one, which I did. Old editor seemed to like this one all right but he still wasn't keen on how my "characterizations" occasionally stopped the action. Backstory--verboten.

Shortly after this werewolves began to be popular. I spoke to a small reading group one night and told them about Wolves of Darkness and then about Williamson's novel Darker Than You Think. Everything I love about pulp fantasy is in this book. The werewolf angle quickly becomes just part of a massive struggle for the soul of humanity. As British reviewer
Tom Matic points out:

"According to its backstory, homo sapiens emerged as the dominant species after a long and bitter struggle with another species, homo lycanthropus, whose ability to manipulate probability gave it the power to change its shape and practise magic. These concepts, fascinating as
they are, might make for dry reading were they not mediated via a gripping thriller riddled with startling plot twists, that blends scientific romance with images of stark bloodcurdling horror, such as the kitten throttled with a ribbon and impaled with a pin to induce Mondrick's asthma attack and heart failure, and the pathetic yet fearsome figure of his blind widow, her eyes clawed out by were-leopards. With its scenes of demonic mayhem in an academic setting and the sexual and moral sparring between the two main characters, it almost feels like a prototype of Buffy, The Vampire Slayer in a film noir setting."

Williamson couching his shapeshifters in terms of science fiction lends the story a realistic edge fantasies rarely achieve. The brooding psychology of the characters also have, as Matic points out, a noirish feel. And as always Williams manages to make the natural environment a
strong element in the story. He's as good with city folk as rural. And he's especially good with his version of the femme fatale, though here she turns out to be as complicated and tortured as the protagonist.

This is one whomping great tale. If you're tired of today's werewolves, try this classic and you'll be hooked not only by this book but by Jack Williamson' work in general..  

Sergio Angelini, THE CASE OF THE LUCKY LEGS, Erle Stanley Gardner
Joe Barone, THREE TIMES LUCKY, Sheila Turnage
Brian Busby, SEPARATION TWO, Richard Rohmer
Bill Crider, OMNIBUS OF SCIENCE FICTION, Groff Conklin, editor
Martin Edwards, THE ANATHEMA STONE, John Buxton Hilton
Curt Evans, "VOODOO'D" Kenneth Perkins
Ed Gorman, SCANDAL ON THE SAND, John Trinian
Jerry House, THE CITY ON THE EDGE OF FOREVER, Harlan Ellison
Rich Horton, GUYFFORD OF WEARE and MONEY MOON, Jeffrey Farnol
Nick Jones ASHENDEN, Somerset Maugham
George Kelley, KITTEN WITH A WHIP, KISS HER GOODBYE, Wade Miller
Margot Kinberg. A CALAMITOUS CHINESE KILLING, Shamini Fling
Rob Kitchin, PIETR, THE LATVIAN, Georges Simenon
B.V. Lawson, AN AMIABLE CHARLATAN, E. Phillips Oppenheim
Evan Lewis, THE PRIVATE EYE, Cleve F. Adams
Steve Lewis, DEAD HERO, William Campbell Gault
Todd Mason, Assorted Forgotten Magazine issues
Neer, A LIST OF FORGOTTEN BOOKS
J.F. Norris, NINE DOCTORS AND A MADMAN, Elizabeth Curtiss
James Reasoner, PLEASURE GROUND, Orrie Hitt
Richard Robinson, THE MYSTERY MILE, Margery Allingham
Gerard Saylor, THE TENTH PLANET, Kit Pedler
Ron Scheer, THE BIOGRAPHY OF A PRAIRIE GIRL, Eleanor Gates
R.T., THE CLERKENWELL TALES, Peter Ackroyd
Kevin Tipple, Barry Ergang, BAR-20, Clarence E. Mulford
TomCat, DEATH IN A DECK CHAIR, K.K. Beck

Final Scene: THE APARTMENT: SPOILERS

Theme Songs. LOVE AMERICAN STYLE

First Wednesday Book Review Club: GHOST TOWN, Ed Gorman

I have not read all that many westerns. LONESOME DOVE comes to mind. THE SISTER BROTHERS is another. A few years ago, Ed Gorman sent me two of his. 

GHOST TOWN was a great story, well-told, with interesting characters in an unfamiliar setting. Don't let the "notion" of reading a western fool you. This story could have been set in many different venues.

The book takes places in a small Wisconsin town overrun by both malaria and a few suspicious types who run the bank and the town. It's the story of Bryce Lamont, who comes here to get his share of the take from a jewelry theft that put him in prison. (Do you see how similar this is to a crime story set in say, Chicago?) What he finds in that Wisconsin town will lead him down a bloody trail, jeopardizing himself and the people he loves.

I don't want to give away too much of the plot here, but let me say this--nearly every character in Ghost Town is complex--neither all good or bad, and this includes, of course, the protagonist. Although there is a lot of action in the novel, it never feels overdone. There is plenty of time to look around at the scenery, the clothes, medical practices, woman's issues, the news of the late 1800s in a small mid-western town. Despite this, the book is succinct, fast-moving and exciting.

Its greatest asset is-- this book has heart. You can feel it beating on every page. And that's not easy to pull off in any genre of writing. Grit and heart in one slim volume is a gift.

Ed Gorman had written dozens and dozens of book and edited many others. You can find him at http://newimprovedgorman.blogspot.com. Or on Amazon, of course.

You can read more reviews at Barrie Summy's blog.

Lucinda Williams: Are You Alright?

Forgotten Movie: THE APARTMENT

THE APARTMENT (Billy Wilder) won the best picture Oscar in 1960. The other nominees were OK (ELMER GANTRY was one) but this is a very strong movie that holds up quite well. Directed by Billy Wilder, it was long seen as a comedy and there are certainly comic interludes in it. And it can certainly be seen as a satire. But basically it is a study of the American male circa 1960.

The treatment of women in this film closely resembles their treatment in MAD MEN. It is almost painful to watch at times. C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) is working his way up the corporate ladder by loaning his apartment to corporate philanderers. This was not initially his intention, but it is how it worked out. It is just too conveniently located.

He has to decide if the price is worth it.

When he falls for an elevator operator, (Shirley MacLaine), things begin to shift. Fred MacMurray excels at playing the bigwig who seduces, abandons, seduces, abandons her. Hard to imagine him running off to play Steve Douglas in MY THREE SONS, in between.

Now much of what makes this movie seem comic is Jack Lemmon's style of acting. I asked myself repeatedly if another actor in the role would have made it an even darker film and the answer is yes. But perhaps it didn't need to be any darker. Would as many people have seen it without him? Did he serve to lighten the mood of a very sad film?

Highly recommended if you've never seen it.

Ferrante and Teicher wrote the brilliant theme song, which still brings me to tears.