Theme Music: Planet of the Apes

What is Peculiar About Your State?

People in Michigan always use their hands to show you where something is located in the state.  What is something peculiar to your state?

Tuesday Night Music: MY BOYFRIEND'S BACK

Criminal Element's MALFEASANCE OCCASIONAL GIRL TROUBLE

is now officially available on Amazon. Thanks to all the great people involved in this endeavor.

Forgotten Movies: DIABOLIQUE

Not exactly forgotten, but perhaps not seen in a long time. This is a cracking good suspense film made in 1955. Simone Signoret, Vera Clouzot, and Paul Meurisse play a violent schoolmaster, his frail wife and his sexy mistress, all employed at the same school and caught up in a deadly game. The details are perfect, the suspense, palpable. Henri-Geogres Clouzot directed his wife and she is pitch perfect as the fragile vessel. Simone, only in her early thirties, seems much older. Is it the hair style?

The detective does not make an appearance until the final third of the film and is very Columbo-ish. But there is nothing light-hearted here except for the antics of the school children in the background.

The same writing team (Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac) wrote VERTIGO. One so French, the other so Californian.

The nineties remake lacks the atmosphere, tension, everything.  See the real thing.

Opening Credits: EXPERIMENT IN TERROR

The Most Evil Character in Fiction

I saw OTHELLO for the second time this year last Friday. It is hard to imagine a more evil character than Iago, and we have very little idea of why he does what he does--although scholars have posited many reasons.

At the end of the play, when he has been responsible for great unhappiness and several deaths, and he is to be taken away to be tortured, he says only

"Demand me nothing. What you know, you know. From this time forth I never will speak a word."

In this way, Iago even triumphs at the end of the play, by giving no one the satisfaction of his motive.

Who rivals Iago for pure villainy? 

PLEASE REMIND ME IF YOU WILL HAVE  A FLASH FICTION STORY ON THURSDAY. 

Sunday Night Poetry: Rupert Brooks

Does your personality affect your book choices?

Day after day, I look at George's blog and see that he is reading books laying out  the demise of almost every facet of our society. I am very sure these books have it right, but I could never do this because it would make me an even gloomier person than I naturally am. I write dark stories because my view of humanity and especially the direction we are headed in is so despairing of mankind.

If I read this sort of book (both fiction and non-fiction) I would not be able to get through the day. This is why I have always steered away from dystopian literature or non-fiction analyses of what we are doing wrong to the environment, the educational system, our health, etc.

Does your personality affect what you read? Are you able to separate yourself from a dire prediction? The farther I stay from the newspaper, news shows, predictions of the future, the better I function. Some might say I am sticking my head in the sand but I say if the sand's going to cover me, I don't want to know about it now.

Saturday Night Music: Chet Baker

How 'Bout a Car Chase: BLUES BROTHERS

Friday's Forgotten Books, Friday, September, 20, 2013

B.V. Lawson will have the links right here. Thanks!

Next Thursday: FLASH FICTION DAY

Next Friday: Patricia Highsmith Day

Last Scene: THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR

Theme Music: Paris, Texas

HOW I CAME TO WRITE THIS BOOK: Thomas Pluck

First let me thank Patti for having me today. She's one of the crime writers who made me realize that I wrote crime fiction, when I read her excellent story "The Perfect Day," at All Due Respect.

My debut novel, Blade of Dishonor, begins when MMA fighter 'Rage Cage' Reeves returns from Afghanistan to find his WW2 vet grandfather embroiled in a centuries-old war between ninja and samurai over a treasured Japanese sword.

I hate when that happens.

I came to write this action-adventure tale when David Cranmer, editor of Beat to a Pulp, approached me with the idea of an MMA fighter tangling with a ninja clan over a sword. He had the basics, and the character's name: Reeves.

Just Reeves. An action movie premise. High concept. A drifter. I'd written a tale for David's magazine called "A Glutton for Punishment," where an MMA fighter's coach is trying to talk him out of taking a fight. It was well received. Heck, before the website crashed, there was a comment from Lawrence Block. (How I wish I'd taken a screenshot!)

I was in the middle of another novel, but David's idea kept poking at me. It needed to be written. I read up on famous Japanese swords, and found that the Honjo Masamune, the sword handed down to the Tokugawa shoguns, went missing in World War 2. That's a story, right there. With my background in mixed martial arts--I train in Kachin Bando, a Burmese form of boxing and grappling--and my great-uncle's tales of service in World War 2, my imagination went into overdrive.

When the wheels stopped turning, Reeves' grandfather Butch was a veteran of the Devil's Brigade, the 1st Special Service Force, a US-Canadian joint commando group who went head to head with the SS in the Italian Alps. Reeves was a drifter, and he needed a ride. He found Tara, a former ambulance driver with a hot-rod Toronado. And he had enemies: The Black Dragon Society, a real Japanese espionage organization that pulp historians will recognize.

It is a pulp tale of big characters with big emotions and lots of action, but it is based in fact and on real people. Fighters I knew in Japan, real war heroes, and the samurai and shadow warriors I grew up watching Kurosawa films and the baby cart movies.

Blade of Dishonor is available for Kindle and in Trade Paperback.

Part 1 is also available as a standalone novella for .99 cents on Kindle: The War Comes Home

Tuesday Night Music: Nina Simone

Forgotten Movies: THE FALCON AND THE SNOWMAN

This is the theme music by Pat Metheny.

I am not sure how this would hold up--or even if it was ever a good film. But Sean Penn and Timothy Hutton were both hot properties then, so the film got a lot of attention. Especially since they played somewhat murky figures.John Schlesinger directed this movie, based on a true story in 1985.

Two guys, one a disgruntled federal employee and one a druggie, childhood friends, are recruited by the Soviet Union. It seemed properly moody and cynical then but perhaps I was under the influence of their star power.

Opening Credits: BAND OF BROTHERS

THE MASTERMIND as a plot device.

Here is a good piece about the way this plot device is creeping into a lot of TV shows, someone pulling all the strings behind the scene with all the other characters being dupes or fools.I think almost every season of DEXTER has featured a mastermind serial killer.

I really dislike this denouement to an arc. I dislike it in movie as well--where it is used repeatedly in Bond movies, Star Trek movies, and almost any Superhero film. These superhuman villains can outhink anyone--until, of course, they can't because the audience won't allow a show or movie to end like this.So no matter how clever, you know they are going down.

What do you think? Is a mastermind interesting to you? Like serial killers, have they run their course.

Sunday Night Poetry: Shelley, Ozymandias