Henchmen

Butch with his henchman, Worm in OUR GANG. Or THE LITTLE RASCALS.



Who are some of the best henchmen in movies? Certain actors specialized in playing the muscle. But sometimes it's a pathway to something better. For instance, Arnold S. played a henchman in Altman's THE LONG GOODBYE. And Martin Landau specialized in them early on (North by Northwest and many TV shows)

Who else? Did Bogart begin as a henchman? Here are some of the best.

Who did you like most as the muscle?

A Book That Meant a Lot to You

First a question, men out there: do you put on a sport's coat to go to the dentist if you are not going to work before or after your visit?



Laurie Colwin's HAPPY ALL THE TIME is one of those books you force on other people. She also wrote some great books about cooking and several other novels. When she died suddenly of a heart attack at an early age (48) , it made the book seem even more special.

What book means a lot to you? Not necessarily the best book you ever read, but the one that spoke to you long ago and still does.

ENDINGS

If you want to read about the process of putting together the collection MONKEY JUSTICE with SNUBNOSE PRESS, you can find an interview by Elaine Ash with Brian Lindenmuth right here.



I am sure I've asked this question before but it came up when I read a book review that liked many things about a novel, but found fault with the ending in that the reviewer claimed to have seen it coming.

This sort of surprised me because I almost never expect to be surprised by the ending unless I am reading classic mysteries or cozies. This book was neither. In a way, endings should be inevitable--given what we know about the characters.

If the writing is good, the characters interesting, I am never trying to see past the writing to the ending. Unless, as I said, the story is set up like an Agatha Christie whodunnit where the ending trumps everything.

What about you? As you read, are you trying to anticipate the ending? Can an ordinary ending ruin a good book? Does an ending out of left field, leave you cold?

HOW IMPORTANT ARE ENDINGS? HOW IMPORTANT IS BEING SURPRISED?

THE DEAD NARRATOR

I am reading a book now where the narrator is dead. I don't need to say which book because that would constitute a spoiler. I guess there are several recent uses of this device--it seems especially popular in YA.

"Death" itself narrates in THE BOOK THIEF. How does that work for you?

Back to dead narrators, LOVELY BONES comes to mind. And the William Holden character in SUNSET BOULEVARD. I am sure we can come up with many more. I used it myself in a recent story but found it troubling. I am too literal a person not to be vaguely annoyed.

What do you think of this device? If you know the narrator is dead from the beginning, does it seem less of a cheat than if you don't find out he's dead to the end? Certainly skillful hands are essential.

Also does a ghost constitute a dead narrator? What about a vampire?

When is dead truly dead?

MONKEY JUSTICE:STORIES

Monkey Justice


Hope some of you with ereaders will give this a try. Thanks to Snubnose Press for giving me this opportunity and thanks for the kind folks who wrote blurbs.

Been Vacilating

On whether to take the plunge and order PULP INK on amazon. It is now $.99 so how can you pass it up. You can find it right here.

D*CKED

This book should be loads of fun.

Thanks to Kieran Shea, Greg Bardsley and Jed Ayres for bringing it to fruition and including me.

You can buy D*CKED here. I am sure mine ("Are You Going To Take Care of This Guy or Not") is the tamest one of the bunch.

Fictional Characters

Reading my first Jack Reacher novel (61 HOURS) and I am knocked out by the plot, but even more so by Childs' evocation of Jack Reacher. Of course, no one as sure-footed and unstoppable as Jack ever existed, but I don't mind that at all. We have plenty of Jim Rockford's who get bounced off walls.

Please don't tell me Tom Cruise is going to play him.

Who was the last fictional character who knocked you out? I don't mean romantically but rather as a unforgettable creation?

Author on Author Insults

http://flavorwire.com/188138/the-30-harshest-author-on-author-insults-in-history

Hat tip to Jim Chalmers for this list

I think this is my favorite quote although Curtis Sittenfield's review yesterday in the NYT of Monica Alli's book about Princess Di in suburban America may compete for overall nastiness. Could it really be that bad? Okay, the concept suggests yes, but still... She made the earlier review by "she who shall remain nameless" look kind.

Vladimir Nabokov on Joseph Conrad

“I cannot abide Conrad’s souvenir shop style and bottled ships and shell necklaces of romanticist cliches.”

If you can't say something nice, let someone else say it. That's my motto.

THE MOST PERFECT NOVEL

In an interview on Al Guthrie's blog Sandra Scoppettone said the two novels she found most perfect were Elmore Leonard's GET SHORTY and Anne Tyler's DINNER AT THE HOMESICK RESTAURANT.

I concur with both of these choices, but especially the later. For a book to be perfect to me, it must reveal an important truth in it. For a long time Tyler was able to do this for me. She wrote about a world I felt she got exquisitely right. And beyond that, she moved me.

What book comes as close as possible to being perfect for you? Sandra picked two, but you only get one.

Who Haven't You Read, But Should?

I am picking William Gay. I have heard for years about how great a writer he is and I just never find my way to him.

How about you? What writer do you mean to read but haven't?

Let's make a pledge to read this writer (whoever yours is) by Labor Day. At least one book. What do you say. Any genre, any writer--as long as you haven't gotten around to reading him/her yet.

THE BOOK SHOW with Charles Ardai

A WIDOW'S STORY

I thought this was a very interesting book for a lot of reasons, one of them being that JCO never really mentioned the fact that she had remarried by the time she was done writing the book. A review of it in THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS took her to task a bit for this and in today's issue, she responded. She admitted she should probably have included that information in an afterword, but also said that it didn't change the experience of grieving for her husband.

She compared it to a memoir about cancer. If the writer recovers does it make his/her experience less valid.

Does she have to continue to grieve for us to give credence to this book?

Where does the story end--I guess that's the question? Does her happiness now make her unhappiness after her husband's death then a lesser one than someone who never married again?

Historical Fiction

I just finished THE PARIS WIFE and it just didn't work for me. Much like LOVING FRANK didn't work a few years ago. I feel very uneasy about a book centered on imagined conversations between real people.

I think I have talked about this before. I don't mind "real" people in the background such as with works by Doctorow, but when the entire work is about two "real" people and all their "real" friends, I am uneasy. Certainly the portraits of characters like Fitzgerald and Zelda are stereotypical in this book as is the one of Gertrude Stein. Maybe the Fitzgeralds were always drunk and Stein always judgmental and imperious, but geez.

The author is creating a voice for her protagonist and it may very well be inauthentic. Perhaps Ernest was not the shit this book made him out to be and perhaps Hadley was more interesting or even troublesome than this book painted her. You could feel the author paging through other books to find where the couple went next, who they met and what happened. It never felt organic the way a good novel should feel. It felt like research disguised as fiction.

I am sure there is a book like this that did it better. Have any such books worked for you?

Cops

I was watching an old movie, late forties, and in it an Englishman accused two Americans on being too hard on cops after they made a derogatory remark about one. He said in England, they looked to cops to straighten things out whereas we accuse them of making things worse. (Now this was long before the sixties--when cops picked up the word pigs to describe their behavior in demonstrations).

I wondered if this was true in crime fiction too. Do American novels generally treat cops in a different way than British (or European) novels do? What about movies and TV? Or is it only in real life that we give cops a hard time.

Same Old

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/dec/12/genre-versus-literary-fiction-edward-docx?CMP=twt_iph

In the article linked above from the Guardian newspaper, the author, finding everyone on a train reading the Larsson books, has a hissy fit and says that no genre books can stand up to a good literary novel because genre novels have a blueprint in hand. In other words, the genre novel does not start from square one like a literary novelist does. (He says other things too but this was my area of interest).

Now I am not a big fan of the Dragon novels myself. But they have one great strength-an enormously appealing, yet not treacly, heroine. Beyond that there is too much chasing about and torture for my taste. Yes, I know that was his point. That men hate women and will pretty much do anything to them.

1) what other strengths did you find in the novels 2) is Dock right-is having a blueprint most of the struggle? Does the genre novelist get to skip over the difficult parts of writing a "literary" novel.

Horror or Fantasy?

I'm having trouble discerning the difference between fantasy and horror.
If a man turns into a moth and is appalled by it, that's horror. If he likes the transformation and takes off happily into the night, that's fantasy? Or is it? Is his acceptance or enjoyment of it enough to plant the story in the fantasy camp. Is it necessary that the reader be scared to qualify as horror?
I ask this because I wrote what I thought was a horror story and sent it off to a venue publishing horror and was told my story was fantasy. I am putting a similar story on here tomorrow and I bet you will call it fantasy.
I always thought of fantasy as stories with dragons or supernatural themes.
How do you define the two?

DISCOUNT NOIR, Videos 1 & 2 Daniel O'Shea, Gerald So

Beat to a Pulp--Round One

Beat to a Pulp-Round One is now available on Amazon. I have a copy and have read half a dozen stories-all great. David Cranmer took a chance on publishing this book himself--giving it the best cover, font, and editing all on his own dime.

Make his faith that it would find an audience be justified.

THE END OF EVERYTHING, Megan Abbott

On Amazon now.

In stores, July 2011. Little Brown, Regan Arthur Books


Thirteen-year old Lizzie Hood and her next door neighbor Evie Verver are inseparable. They are best friends who swap bathing suits and field-hockey sticks, and share everything that's happened to them. Together they live in the shadow of Evie's glamorous older sister Dusty, who provides a window on the exotic, intoxicating possibilities of their own teenage horizons. To Lizzie, the Verver household, presided over by Evie's big-hearted father, is the world's most perfect place.

And then, one afternoon, Evie disappears. The only clue: a maroon sedan Lizzie spotted driving past the two girls earlier in the day. As a rabid, giddy panic spreads through the Midwestern suburban community, everyone looks to Lizzie for answers. Was Evie unhappy, troubled, upset? Had she mentioned being followed? Would she have gotten into the car of a stranger?

Lizzie takes up her own furtive pursuit of the truth, prowling nights through backyards, peering through windows, pushing herself to the dark center of Evie's world. Haunted by dreams of her lost friend and titillated by her own new power at the center of the disappearance, Lizzie uncovers secrets and lies that make her wonder if she knew her best friend at all.