I am claiming APRIL EVIL since I have had it on my shelf for ten years at least. I don't know if we should coordinate books or not, but I hate being chairmany so if we have multiple reviews, we have multiple reviews. I hope this turns out even half as well as the Westlake one. And speaking of John D. MacDonald, Ed has used his amazing psychic powers to come up with this.
though and I liked it very much. The very young female detective, Cordelia Gray, was something new to me. And she was just about my age.
We saw this at the Century Theater in Detroit in November. It was a two-person play about a possible meeting between Freud and C.S. Lewis in the late thirties in London where they mostly debated the existence of God.
e Evolution of Prologue Books, Greg ShepardWe all know that when you’re a kid, if you don’t have something, you make do. So I poured over these drug store spinner racks. I was a science fiction reader then, so all those great John D. MacDonald and Carter Brown and Frank Kane and Brett Halliday and Mickey Spillane books were just a tease to me. They seemed to promise so much—a forbidden world of adult problems, adult concerns….and sex. Tempting, but…..
Science fiction was escape. This mystery stuff looked scary real. At the time, I kept to the safe stuff. Even the mysteries I read were safe: Phyllis A. Whitney, Conan Doyle, E. Phillips Oppenheim. But I still remember those paperback covers. Dell had all the best covers, dark and alluring. Signet was a close second. Later I discovered that Gold Medal had the best writers. Maybe they just didn’t have the best distributor in my town. That may have been the case. I don’t remember seeing them at the drug store. When I think of those spinner racks, I always think of Dell Books.
Eventually, I found out what I had been missing when I didn’t buy the hot, new Johnny Liddell mystery but kept to the latest Ace Double Science Fiction instead. By this time, sf (we never called it sci-fi) had discovered sex, too, so that wasn’t the big deal. But all the time, I had been right—these forbidden fruit books really were pretty damn dark: cynical, subversive, not always delivering a happy ending, sometimes taking the hero down at the end in a spray of lead. Most of the time the main character was just a screwed up mess.
First I discovered Cornell Woolrich because Ace started reprinting them and I was a big Ace Books collector back then. Weird, twisted stories they were: nightmarish. Then came the hardboiled period. I read all the Raymond Chandler novels. And Dashiell Hammett. And James Cain.
I started reading Jim Thompson and David Goodis in the mid-80’s when I discovered the Black Box Thrillers from England. And quickly graduated to W. R. Burnett and Horace McCoy, Peter Rabe and Gil Brewer, Vin Packer, Fletcher Flora, Harry Whittington, Charles Williams. Dark stuff, tortured heroes, crimes gone wrong, thwarted desires, lots of drinking, lots of smoking. I had found my heroes. And bought up every old mystery paperback I could find, everything I had said no to back in my youth.
Eventually I was able to translate that love affair into a reprint publishing house, Stark House Press. And even more eventually, I was able to team up with Ben LeRoy and help get these authors into the modern ebook format via a new website, Prologue Books. It’s been a long trip from a town without a bookstore to today’s internet-saturated world where everything is available. Yes, it’s all available, but Prologue just made it a whole lot easier. It’s almost like having a new bookstore in town…..
Greg Shepard
Sad, lovely, romantic, despairing, hopeful--all of these in this portrait of a marriage and what can go wrong and right with it. Just great stuff. There is no better contemporary writer (ahem, well maybe one) for me.
pretty much out of favor in fiction writing, but here is where it trips me up.
Dirk Bogarde was a real favorite of mine. And when you throw Harold Pinter and Joseph Losey into the mix...well, it's gonna be interesting.
e one of the most versatile actors Hollywood produced. He was credible in comedies, westerns, romances and serious dramas. If Cary Grant is my favorite golden era actor, Cooper comes in a close second.
ngs into the room, change the look. Update the dining room on one side of the hall and living room on the other. Perhaps have a more minimalist look.
Timothy Hallinan is the Edgar- and Macavity-nominated author of the Poke Rafferty Bangkok Thrillers and the Junior Bender Mysteries. His next Poke Rafferty book, The Fear Artist, will come out in July.
Gitana, Dominic Martell
Gitana is the third and final book in an unhappily short series (the others are Lying Crying Dying and The Republic of Night) by Dominic Martell. The hero, Pasqual Rose, lives a life on the margins in Barcelona, working at a small bar in a dicey neighborhood. This isn't the Barcelona of Gaudi or even Woody Allen, it's a much tougher town, populated by Gypsies, skinheads, and the occasional slumming tourist, a maze of ancient alleyways, dark enough to cloak the worst of misdeeds.
Pascual is shielding an enormous secret: a more than a decade ago, as a young, impressionable man, he fell in with the Palestinian cause and committed acts of terror in its name before he recoiled from what he'd become and fled into hiding. He's ridden with guilt and hopelessly seeking some kind of absolution—but he's still got the reflexes and instincts developed by years spent looking over his shoulder. When an American man comes into the bar and calls him by name, alarms go off in Pascual's head; and when the American is murdered shortly afterward, Pascual knows that someone or something is sniffing him out.
And then there's Sara, who sings in the bar where Pasqual works, and whom he's fallen in love with, and there's Serrano, the cop who knows part of Pasqual's story, and there's Campos, the journalist who may know nearly all of it and wants to write a book. And back behind all of it, cranking on clockwork Pascual can only guess at, is someone who wants him dead and who doesn't care about collateral damage. And there's also the secret in Sara's past, that Pascual can't even guess at.
Gitana is beautifully plotted and written. Martell obviously knows Barcelona inside out, because I've rarely read a book with a stronger and more persuasive sense of place. The triumph of the book for me, though, is characterization—there isn't a character in the book, who doesn't leap off the page, who doesn't seem to possess a genuine subconscious. I read the book for the skill with which it's written and the spell of the setting, but I loved it because of the people in its pages, Dominic Martell, who also writes crackerjack Chicago thrillers as Sam Reaves, is (I think) a criminally underrated writer, and I'm delighted to see the Pascual trilogy gradually becoming available in ebook form. The first one, Lying Crying Dying is available now here on Amazon.
Ed Gorman
is the author of the new Dev Conrad novel, BLINDSIDE.
Sergio Angelini, The Mugger, Ed McBain
Yvette Banek, Cat and Mouse, Christianna Brand
Joe Barone, Cast a Blue Shadow, P.L. Gaus
Bill Crider, I'll Cry When I Kill You, Peter Israel
Scott Cupp, Ballroom of the Skies, John D. Macdonald
Martin Edwards, Dead Man's Watch, G.D.H. and Margaret Cole
Ed Gorman, Blackmailer, George Axelrod
Tim Hallinan, Gitano, Dominic Martell
Jerry House, Necropolis, Basil Copper
George Kelley, The Chalice of Death, Robert Silverberg
Randy Johnson, The Caballero's Way, O. Henry
Rob Kitchin, Incompetence, Rob Grant
B. V. Lawson, Murder Ink, Revised, Dilys Winn
Evan Lewis, A Princess of Mars, Edgar Rice Burroughs
Steve Lewis, The Language of Cannibals, George C. Chesbro
J.F. Norris, The Hollow Skin, Virginia Swain
David Rachel, Blue Spring, Taiyo Matsomoto
James Reasoner, Bowie Knife, H. Bedford Jones
Richard Robinson, Playgrounds of the Mind, Larry Niven
Gerard Saylor, Wolves Eat Dogs, Martin Cruz Smith
Ron Scheer, The Fate of a Fool, Emma Ghent Curtis
Kerrie Smith, Eric Ambler, The Mask of Dimitrios
Kevin Tipple/Barry Ergang, The Clock Strikes Thirteen, Herbert Brean
TomCat, The McCone Files, Marcia Muller
Zybahn, The Erasers, Alain Robbe-Grillet
How I came to write OLD SCHOOL,
How did I come to write this collection? You got a lot of nerve asking Patti, ‘cause when you get down to it, it’s your own damn fault.
Up until a couple years ago, I’d never written any short fiction. None. Zip, zero, zilch. Hell, up until maybe five years ago, I hadn’t written any fiction at all, not really.
Always wanted to be a writer, only problem being I already was one. Had a pretty comfortable career freelancing, business and financial writing, mostly about taxes. Writing fiction on spec? Told myself I didn’t have time. Told myself I couldn’t blow hours I should be investing in paying work on fun and games.
Told myself all sorts of crap to justify pissing on my own dreams.
Shit happened. I got older. People I cared about died. It sunk in that anything they hadn’t gotten around to doing, any dreams they’d skipped because they needed another paycheck, those died with them.
So I made the time and I wrote.
But I wasn’t weaned in this online writing world I’ve discovered since. I didn’t know about any of the e-zines, the flash fiction contests, none of that. My education concerning the market for fiction was what I saw on the shelves at the local Borders. All I saw there were novels. So I wrote one.
Fortunately, an agent liked it – Stacia Decker. So I signed with her, and she was the one that told me I should think about Twitter and blogs and Facebook. Well, OK, I knew about Facebook, but as far as I was concerned, that was just a way to recon any boys that might be sniffing around my teenage daughter.
And that’s how I met you, Patti.
I was just getting my feet wet in this new virtual world when you tossed out this flash fiction challenge. Write a story, a thousand words or less, something to do with Walmart.
A thousand words? That’s crazy. I had this novel mindset. It was all I knew. But I gave it a shot.
Here’s what I learned.
You can tell a hell of a story in a thousand words, but you have to break some bad habits. Gotta turn the verbosity meter all the way down. Gotta have a damn clear idea, and then get to the point in a straight line. Because that wiggle room you have when you’ve got 100K words to play with? That’s all gone.
That first story, Black Friday? People liked it. Hell, I liked it. Then you and Steve Weddle went and pulled that Discount Noir anthology together and it got included in there. That was pretty cool.
How I Came to Write This Collection: Chris Rhatigan, WATCH YOU DROWN
In May 2010, I sent a short story to Christopher Grant at A TWIST OF NOIR. He wrote back a few short hours later saying the piece was exactly the kind of thing he was looking for. It was the first time I'd been published—and I was thrilled. Earning the support of a writer and editor who I respected was awesome.
From there, I became immersed in the online crime fiction community. I published stories at a lot of different sites that I dug, places like YELLOW MAMA and PULP METAL MAGAZINE and SHOTGUN HONEY. Pretty quickly, I built up a nice cache of stories, and I considered releasing a collection.
But I wanted to do it right. There were a lot of ebooks coming out. Some were fantastic. Others were terrible. And a good number were decent, but maybe not ready for prime time.
Obviously, I wanted mine to be in that first category.
After talking with a few trusted sources, I decided to keep my collection 1) short, 2) in one genre, and 3) only stories that I really believed in. I even went back and polished already published stories.
I took my leanest crime/noir stories and put them together. Found an order that made sense. Some of these stories are published, some are unpublished. I sent the collection out to those trusted sources and got some excellent suggestions. Then I sent it over to Jason Michel with Pulp Metal Fiction, who made all the formatting and cover art happen.
So what category will my ebook belong in? Well, the reviews have been good so far!
Chris Rhatigan is the editor of ALL DUE RESPECT. WATCH YOU DROWN is available at Amazon and Amazon UK for 99 cents/63 pence. If you dig short fiction, check out his blog, Death by Killing.
nest Dealer by Frank Gruber
