I am taking off Friday, December 23, Friday, December 30th and Friday, January 6th. If anyone wants to collect links, please let me know but.... maybe we could all use a breather. Nearly four years of FFB now. AMAZING!!Nicolas Freeling, best known for producing some of the finest of modern crime fiction, began his working life as an apprentice cook in a large French hotel. He continued cooking professionally for many years, and his enthusiasm for, and interest in, gastronomy in its broadest sense is at least equal to his passion for crime. Here, reprinted in a single volume, are his two splendid books of gastronomical memoir drawn from those experiences. Each is a delicious blend of the culinary and the literary, and include such recipes as cinnamon lamb stew and bouillabaisse, all charmingly floating about in a consistently entertaining text. The work is illustraited by the witty and winsome pen of John Lawerence, the perfect visual sauce for Freelin's savouries. Funny, wise, full of inspiration and delight, The Kitchen Book & The Cook Book will find a place close to every cook's hearth and heart.
That's from AMAZON not me because....
This is a book I bought for Phil last Christmas, thinking it would be right up his alley. I think it's still sitting on the bookshelf where I placed it then. Too bad. A good lesson. You can't always predict what books will capture someone's fancy. I may read it myself, liking Freeling as much as I do.
Picking out a book for anyone but my son is risky business. He reads it all. A very nice man, my son.
Ed Gorman is the author of BAD MOON RISING and many other novels. You can find him here.
Fake I.D. by Jason Starr
Jason Starr i
s the poet of pathological lives. In Fake I.D. he gives us Tony Russo, gambling addict and bartender/actor, who believes, despite enormous evidence to the contrary, that someday real soon now he will reap a bonanza with his gambling just as he knows that he will soon enough be King of Hollywood. Gold at the track and movie star pussy forever.One of the ways he hopes to hurry his dreams along is by stealing ten thousand dollars from the bar where he works. He has a chance to buy a share of a race horse and thus become a (another fantasy) a gentleman of the horsey set (his daydream about standing in the winner's circle with a movie star lady practically going down on him is especially embarrassing and pathetic). But being the good businessman he is he takes the ten grand and goes to Vegas where he is real real sure he will play this into much much more. He returns home broke of course.
Being a good sociopath Tony must now replace the money he lost in Vegas. This quest, and it is nothing less, involves more stealing and not incidentally murder. Starr gives us a trio of women who become indelible in the reader's mind. My favorite is Janene. Like Frank, the man who owns the bar where Tony works, she is sensible, intelligent and honest. It is from her that he lifts jewelry.
Starr has one of those quintessential New York voices. Because Richard Price's Ladies' Man is one of my favorite novels I kept hearing riffs on that in this book especially when Starr was writing about the bar and the people who work there and hang out there. Starr has an almost surreal eye and ear for manners and he can be both witty and chilling at the same time. He's excellent with boozy conversation.
Starr is on record acknowledging his debt to certain of the paperbacks of the 1950s and 1960s and the pace and punch of his novel certainly demonstrate that affection especially when all of Tony's sweaty plans begun to unravel. But the book is wholly Starr's and it's a sound strong good one. So many writers try hard to replicate Jim Thompson by using similar material. Tony Russo's heart is as dark as any of Thomson's sociopaths but his environment and his style could not be more disimilar. Lew Ford wouldn't know what to make of him.
Because of his social eye and because of his ambition to include the wider world in his work, Jason Starr is among my favorites of the neo-noir writers. Fake I.D. is a gem of treachery.
Yvette Banek
Joe Barone
Brian Busby
Bill Crider
Scott Cupp
Martin Edwards
Cullen Gallagher
Glenn Harper
Jerry House
Randy Johnson
George Kelley
Margot Kinberg
Rob Kitchin
K.A. Laity
B.V. Lawson
Evan Lewis
Steve Lewis/Richard and Karen LaPorte
Doug Levin
Todd Mason
J.F. Norris
Juri Nummelin
Richard Pangburn
Eric Peterson
James Reasoner
Gerard Saylor
Ron Scheer
Kerrie Smith
Kevin Tipple
TomCat
James Winter
9 comments:
Once again I am late. I'm sorry.
With the passing of my friend Milton T. Burton last week, I am doing again his most recent novel "Nights of the Red Moon."
Late here as well, but mine just went up!
I will collect links on those weeks. People love to do their weekly citations, and I certainly don't mind assembling the lists (though I've been informed recently that some recipients of my lists have been puzzled as to what the lists meant, apparently even as to what hyperlinking is...I've rarely felt so Ahead of the Curve [or at least some curves]). However, I might or might not have time, as sadly of late, to comment much on others' citations.
I may have to read the Nicholas Feeling book, Patti. It sounds like just the sort of thing I'd like to add to my kitchen bookcase collection. :)
Thanks, Todd. I think Kerrie is going to join me for a break. Not sure who else. I am going to be on a plane two of those days so literally can't do it.
I did one, but when I put it up it wasn't Friday yet for you, LOL.
The Holiday break sounds good to me, I've had a hard time getting things (qualifying books) read and written up lately anyway.
Patti, the problem with buying books as a gift is it is often like setting someone up with a blind date. Thank goodness for gift cards, let them find their own next love.
Patti - How very nice of you to include my post in with all of these great 'uns! Thanks!
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