Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Forgotten Movies: THE SWIMMER
I have talked about this movie before in some context but here it comes again.
In 1968, Frank Perry took a great John Cheever story and made a terrific film. It is the story of a man, living in suburban Connecticut, who comes up with the idea he can swim from pool to pool in his neighborhood, finally arriving home. The element of time in this movie makes it especially interesting. The time of year, the state of the swimmer, the time of life, changes that occur as he makes his swim. Only Burt Lancaster could look so fetching in his late fifties. An amazing little film. One of my favorite small films for sure.
I bet Todd Mason has some other links for you.
Monday, February 20, 2012
SPEED CHRONICLES NY Launch
Hey, if you're in the NY area, stop by St. Mark's Bookshop and see Megan and other writers from THE SPEED CHRONICLES. St. Mark's recently was saved from disappearing. Show up and show your support.
https://www.facebook.com/events/319412248109716/
St. Mark's Bookshop presents:An evening with Akashic Books featuring editor Joseph Mattson and contributor Megan Abbott plus Ishrat Syed, contributor to Mumbai Noir. TUESDAY, February 21th at 7PM The reading will take place at:St. Marks Bookshop31 Third Avenue (at 9th Street)New York, NY 10003 subway: 6 to Astor Place, N/R to 8th Street, L to 14th St/3rd Avenuethis is a free event for more information please visit the shop, call (212)260-7853 or email stmarksbooks@gmail.comAn evening with Akashic Books featuring editor Joseph Mattson and contributor Megan Abbott plus Ishrat Syed, contributor to Mumbai Noir. Following the international success of the Noir Series, The Speed Chronicles marks the launch of a new drug-based sister series - THE SPEED CHRONICLES! "The perfect stocking stuffer for your uncle in AA."--New York Observer "Just reading the table of contents for this fucker makes me want to hop in my time machine, zoom back to 1966, and find those two dubious physicians who used to write me scripts for Dexedrine, even though I was too tall and skinny to live already. Mainline this book now!"--James Ellroy
What was the most recent piece of music you bought?
I removed word verification. Let's see how that works.Mine was the soundtrack from the dance movie Pina, but I know most people don't buy entire CDs anymore. I downloaded music on my MP3 when I got it, and four years later the same tunes are on there and I never play it. The energy involved in downloading a whole new repertoire seems too great. So I still buy CDs. And friends burn me ones they think I will like. (Thanks, Kathy).
Now that you can usually listen to samples from all the songs on a CD on Amazon, I don't buy as many duds as I used to.
Anyway, what was the last piece of music you bought?
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Saturday, February 18, 2012
An Idiot Abroad
(Someone's bucket list)An Idiot Abroad is a British show, which I noticed on Fleur's blog, is an amusing and interesting show on the Science channel. The idea is that a list of 100 things that would appear on many bucket lists takes our guide to various places and challenges. It's basically a travel show played for laughs.
Do you have a bucket list--things you want to do before you die? I hope some of you are more daring than I am.
I have almost no sense of adventure in me. Or at least adventure that demands physical or dare- devil acts. I am working on a list but so far I am stuck. How about you? I could say I would like to learn to play the piano but I know that isn't going to happen. I would think there has to be some sense I might do it to put it on the list. Some chance I would at least try to make it happen.
Okay, I thought of one. Drive the car. You can see where I am coming from.
Friday, February 17, 2012
THE SUMMING UP, Friday, February 17, 2012-Donald Westlake Day
Just a few more...
Originally I had thought of getting everyone's title beforehand so we'd not have repeats, but then I thought it would be more fun just to see how many titles we could cover. We only have two repeats out of all the reviews.
THE SUMMING UP, Friday, February 17, 2012-
Patti Abbott, MEMORY
Sergio Angelini, KINDS OF LOVE, KINDS OF DEATH
Yvette Banek, KAHAWA
Jack Bates, SOMEBODY OWES ME MONEY
Bill Crider, CAMPUS DOLL
Scott Cupp, TOMORROW'S CRIMES
Cullen Gallagher, THE JUGGER
Ed Gorman, THE COMEDY IS FINISHED
Naomi Johnson, HIGH ADVENTURE
Randy Johnson, JIMMY, THE KID
Nick Jones, JIMMY, THE KID
George Kelley, SLAYGROUND
Rob Kitchin, NOBODY'S PERFECT
B.V. Lawson, A GOOD STORY
Evan Lewis, THE PARKER TRILOGY
Todd Mason, ENOUGH and the film, ORDO
Jeff Meyerson, DANCING AZTECS
J.F. Norris, A JADE IN ARIES
Anita Page, TRUST ME ON THIS
Eric Peterson, DANCING AZTECS
Deb Pfeifer, WHAT'S THE WORST THING THAT CAN HAPPEN
David Rachels, PLUNDER SQUAD
James Reasoner, GANGWAY (with Brian Garfield)
Trent Reynolds, MONEY FOR NOTHING
Kerrie Smith, THE HOT ROCK
Kevin Tipple/Barry Ergang, GOD SAVE THE MARK
John Weagley, GOOD BEHAVIOR
Martin Edwards: A Collection of Reviews by Ross Macdonald
Jerry House: Uncollected short stories of John D. MacDonald
Ron Scheer: Gwendolen Overton, The Heritage of Unrest
Richard Pangburn: Stephen Dobyns' SARATOGA BACKTALK
Karyn Reeves: Cakes and Ale, W. Somerset Maugham
DONALD E. WESTLAKE DAY on Friday's Forgotten Books
Join us today in celebrating the publication of Donald E. Westlake's final book, THE COMEDY IS FINISHED by Hard Case Crime.
Mr. Westlake was born in 1933 and died in 2009. He published more than 100 books under several names and won the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of American three times as well as many other awards. He is certainly one of the pivotal writers in crime fiction.
Thanks to Naomi Johnson for this link to an interview with Westlake from 1973.
Jeff Meyerson
Donald Westlake’s Trust Me On This (Mysterious Press, 1988)
Reviewed by Anita Page
Reporter Sara Joslyn, driving down a deserted road on the way to her new job, passes what looks like a body hanging out of a car. She makes a U-turn, because she is, after all, a reporter, and discovers that the person halfway out of the car is better than dead—he’s been murdered. First day
on the job and she’s going to walk in with a story about a man with a bullet in his brain.
Poor Sara. She fantasizes accolades when she presents her discovery to her new editor, Jack Ingersoll, but instead gets: “On what series is he a regular?”
As you may have guessed, this isn’t The New York Times. It’s the Weekly Galaxy, a supermarket tabloid with a hunger for celebs and a very relaxed attitude toward truth in journalism. Forget the body, Jack tells Sara, and assigns her instead to a piece on the beer and potato chip diet.
Sara will eventually do some sleuthing, and Westlake pulls off a nice suspenseful climax, but the murder is an afterthought. We’re here to hang out in a newsroom where editors pace their squaricles—taped lines on the floor delineating walls and doors—trying to stay alive and earn their enormous salaries by pitching stories like “Jogging Causes Nymphomania” and “Desperate Aliens Search for Rogue Planet Earth.”
The characters are an appealing mix of evil, lunatic and charming: the despot publisher whose office is an elevator; the three perpetually drunk Australians known as the Down Under Trio; Sara and Jack, whose initial antipathy guarantees that they’ll end up together.
And then there are the wildly comic scenes that read like something out of a Marx brothers movie. Here’s a glimpse of the Down Under Trio in the Veterans’ Bar & Grill:
“The sight of a fairly respectable-looking, neatly dressed in suit and tie, fifty-one-year-old Australian leaping about the bar, up onto chairs and back down onto the floor, suitcoat tail flying, hand firmly holding drink as both hands pretended to be tiny kangaroo paws boxing, the whole while honking, was so captivating that everybody had to do it, beginning with the retirees and finishing with the widows.”
In the end, the murder is solved, of course, and Jack and Sara go off into the sunset, but you’ll be glad to know you can meet up with them again in Westlake’s Baby, Would I Lie?
Part of this review ran previously at Women of Mystery.
Deb Pfeifer was a technical writer in the financial and software industries for alm
ost 20 years. After a few years as a stay-at-home mom, I went back to work in the public school system. I now work in a classroom with autistic students. It is very challenging, but also very rewarding, work. I love to read across all genres, but mysteries are my favorite.
With the frequent appearance of those latest technological marvels, the cell phone and the fax machine, Donald Westlake's WHAT'S THE WORST THAT COULD HAPPEN? places itself firmly in the mid-1990s. What I found interesting, reading the book some 16 years after its publication, is not so much the story's rather naive reliance on things like fax machines or its Ocean's Elevenish Vegas heist plot or its rogues gallery of Dortmunder and his associates, but Westlake's far-sighted view of media moguls like Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump, upon whom Max Fairbanks, the villain of the piece, is clearly based.
Amoral, assured, wealthy beyond measure, with plenty of politicians in his pocket, Max Fairbanks is also posessed of a petty vindictiveness that, the reader knows with pleasure, will be his undoing. It is this pettiness that compels Fairbanks take Dortmunder's "lucky ring" (left to Dortmunder's girlfriend May by her late uncle) when Dortmunder is being arrested for burglarizing Fairbanks's house. (A house that, in all fairness to Dortmunder, Max shouldn't have been in either.) The theft of the ring sets the plot in motion. Dortmunder only wants to get his ring back, but his ever-expanding circle of associates have other ideas: If Dortmunder is going to break into Fairbanks's various residences anyway, why shouldn't they come along and see what else is available? So while Dortmunder makes several unsuccessful attempts to retrieve his ring, his "colleagues" stage ever-more successful thefts of Fairbanks's property.
Eventually (thanks again to the marvelous fax machine), Dortmunder tracks Fairbanks to a flashy hotel and casino in Vegas, and Dortmunder must leave his comfort zone of New York and head west--with "friends" in tow, of course. Dortmunder's attempts to blend in with the Vegas crowds by wearing bright bemuda shorts and shirts is one of the book's funniest scenes. Meanwhile, the friends execute an elaborate plan to steal millions from the casino and an NYPD detective takes a suspicious look into the previous robberies of Fairbanks's homes, which, to the cop's eyes, appear to be inside jobs.
It will be no spoiler for those familiar with Westlake's work to say that by novel's end Westlake has masterfully pulled all these plot points together: The good are rewarded, the bad are punished, and Dortmunder gets back his lucky ring, although--considering the "luck" it gave Max Fairbanks--Dortmunder's not sure he's going to wear it again.
The story goes that Westlake's agent advised him against pursuing publication of this novel because it would derail his reputation as a crime writer. What a loss.
MEMORY is a classic mid-20th century American novel. I think it would stand quite credibly with novels like THE MOVIEGOER and STONER.
The only crime in the novel occurs on page one when Paul Cole is badly beaten by the husband of a woman he's slept with while on the road with a touring show.
The beating affects his memory. Each day, his past becomes murkier and the necessity of supporting himself more difficult. His situation takes him to strange and unpredictable places. We feel sorry for this man although we suspect from that first page that we wouldn't have liked the first Paul Cole.
One of the many charms of the book is the way that Westlake allows the reader to take this journey with Cole. We put our foot down right behind his as he suffers this debilitating condition. Nearly every action, Cole takes, we can imagine taking too.
Nothing untoward happens; this is a very realistic book. And when the end comes, it is entirely fitting and right for the story. Heartbreaking yet never maudlin. This is the work of a master.
I am so happy that Hard Case Crime rescued this novel from oblivion.
And for the new one. Here's Ed.
THE COMEDY IS FINISHED by Donald E. Westlake
"The rediscovered Donald E. Westlake novel, THE COMEDY IS FINISHED, is getting some great reviews. Regular readers of these updates know that I had the manuscript for the novel in my basement (actually a drawer in a cabinet in my basement, with other Westlake materials). Don and I had explored revising the novel for publication under both our names (or possibly a joint pseudonym) after he had difficulty finding a publisher for an unfunny Westlake novel about a Bob Hope-style comedian. The book didn’t really need any work, but he was sick of looking at it, and I had some ideas about streamlining, and addressing some complaints editors had expressed about the political content. But when the similarly plotted film “King of Comedy” came out, Don called me and scrapped the project." Max Allan Collins from http://www.maxallancollins.com/blog/
Yes, thanks to Max and Charles Ardai at Hard Case Crime we're now able to read what may well be the last original Donald Westlake to see print.
Comedy deals with the comedian Koo Davis (think Bob Hope) being kidnapped just after taping another one of his uninspired and frequently self-congratulatory TV shows by a small group of mismatched hippie would-be revolutionaries.
The novel cuts back and forth between Koo using his captivity to relive his life and his captors arguing among themselves about how to best use the comedian as a bargaining chip with the powers that be. Westlake (and the readers) have a good time with Koo. Westlake avoids caricature and gives us a man who no longer understands the entertainment world--not even hanging out with generals and sports stars gives him much cache anymore--and must now face what a lousy father and husband he's been. He even wonders if he's "worth" kidnapping.
The captors are headed up by a secretive young man named Peter who is constantly being prodded by Mark, a sociopath who is dangerous even to the group itself. The others include a wistful theorist named Larry and two women, Liz, deeply troubled and confused and Joyce who held the studio job that secured the kidnapping.
Westlake makes all the charactersindividuals and it is their sniping, arguing even fighting that make the novel a real page turner.
These are the children of the faux Revolution as well as the Revolution of hippie Los Angeles with all the bravado and naivete that marked their fury. It's interesting to contrast their portraits here with an earlier novel Westlake wrote, Murder Among Children as by Tucker Coe. This appeared at the start of the Flower Power days and his take on hippies was much more benign.
Westlake was frequently a social critic in his novels and he is no less so here. He captures the late 70s perfectly, the waning times of Up Against The Wall Motherfucker as disco music played in the background. The kidnappers here are stranded in time--the cops were now killing Black Panthers in cold blood and getting away with it. The Revolution, such as it was, was long over.
While there are similarities between The Comedy is Finished and King of Comedy, King is entertaining and admirable but cold; Westlake's book is hot with fear, remorse, lust and violence. The reader is constantly speculating on how it'll end and who'll still be alive on the last page. The tight structure--we basically have the house the hippies are ensconced in and the scenes with the lawmen--embellishes the suspense and heightens the twists.
A fine novel in all respects. And all thanks to Max Collins and Charles Ardai for giving it to us.
Sergio Angelini
Yvette Banek
Jack Bates
Bill Crider
Scott Cupp
Cullen Gallagher
Naomi Johnson
Randy Johnson
Nick Jones
George KelleyRob Kitchin
B.V. Lawson
Evan Lewis
Todd Mason
J.F. Norris
Eric Peterson
David Rachels
James Reasoner
Trent Reynolds
Kerrie Smith
Kevin Tipple/Barry Ergang
John Weagley
You can find more FFB reviews of other authors at Jerry House, Martin Edwards, Ron Scheer, Richard Pangburn.
Thursday, February 16, 2012
My Life at the Theater-ART
We saw ART in New York at the Royale Theater in 1998. It was a big hit and starred Alan Alda, Victor Garber, and Alfred Molina. Yasmina Reza, the playwright went on to write other plays including THE GOD OF CARNAGE. ART was a meatier play than CARNAGE IMHO.
Ghost Stories
In a recent issue of THE NEW YORKER, in a review of a new collection of M.R. James' stories, Anthony Lane quotes Virginia Woolf as saying, "it is pleasant to to be afraid when we are conscious that we are in no kind of danger." This was a quote from a longer essay by Woolf entitled " The Supernatural in Fiction."
This quote explains to me why some people are able to read and watch ghost or horror stories without feeling threatened. Part of their brain tells them that they are safe. They have a certain detachment from the goings on.
It is not like this for me. If the story is well done, I cannot tell myself that because my entire brain believes I am in danger like the people in the story.
How is it for you? Are you able to step outside the story? Can you watch or read it without feeling threatened?
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
How I Came To Write This Story" Loren Eaton
"King Flounder" Loren Eaton, GRIMM TALES
If you’d told me five years ago that I’d publish a crime story based off of a Grimm’s fairy tale, I’d have laughed. For some reason, I never read many fairy tales as a child, and speculative fiction replaced crime fiction in my reading stack soon after graduating from college. Back then, I didn’t see myself getting much exposure to either in the future. But a funny thing happened: I found Patti’s blog, Peter Rozovsky’s Detectives Beyond Borders blog and the fairy-tales-retold anthology Black Swan, White Raven. Suddenly, I had new (and old-become-new) reading material. Then John Kenyon of Things I'd Rather Be Doing issued a call for what would eventually become the Untreed Reads anthology Grimm Tales. How could I miss the opportunity?
Even though I possessed scant knowledge of fairy tales beyond the Disney-fied versions, I knew one I wanted to adapt -- “The Fisherman and His Wife.” In the story, a henpecked husband keeps asking a magical flounder for more and more blessings at the command of his greedy wife. If you haven’t read it, let’s just say its ending feels about as bleak as anything in noir. I’d also recently watched The Godfather and knew I wanted to plunk a semi-likeable Mafioso down in the Florida Keys, a place not too far geographically speaking from where I live. I once fished the salt flats around Key West and knew that flounder sometimes made it that far north. And the ending, well, I always liked that bit where Michael Corleone flagrantly plugs Sollozzo and McCluskey in an Italian restaurant. Hopefully, I captured some of that bravado in the conclusion of “King Flounder.”
Anyway, I suppose that’s how I came to write this story!
