Opening Credits: THIRTY SOMETHING

Tuesday Night Music: THE MAGNETIC FIELDS

Forgotten Movies: Mr and Mrs. Bridge

Although the movie can no way compare to the brilliant novels written by Evan S. Connell, perhaps two of the finest character studies on the 20th century, the movie is pleasing because of the chance to see Newman and Woodward on the screen together. Mr. Bridge is a hopelessly old-fashioned 19th century man between the two wars of the 20th century and Mrs. Bridge is only a step ahead. The two are lost in a world changing far faster than they can tolerate.

Directed by James Ivory, the screenplay can't compete with the novels. And perhaps Paul Newman is miscast here. But it looks lovely and gives one a taste of the novel. But read the novels if you can.

Movie Themes: BORN FREE

Your Favorite Elmore Leonard novel

A few weeks ago, I said I had never read a Bill Pronzini novel and got some fabulous recommendations and read a great book.

Now I have read only one Elmore Leonard book (hangs head in shame), so tell me what your favorite book of his is and I will read that one.

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By DWIGHT GARNER

Published: May 27, 2007

LEONARD’S FINAL FOUR: What’s Elmore Leonard’s best novel? In the right bar, that question could start a rumble. But Mark Reiter tackles it with elegance and wit in his recent book “The Enlightened Bracketologist: The Final Four of Everything,” which he wrote with Richard Sandomir and Nigel Holmes. According to Reiter, the novels that make it to Leonard’s final four are “Hombre” (1961), “Swag”(1976), “LaBrava” (1983) and “Killshot” (1989). It’s hard to quibble with that list. “LaBrava” got there by defeating, in the second round,“Get Shorty.” (Reiter calls this “an ironic matchup, since Leonard wrote ‘Get Shorty’ to get back at Dustin Hoffman for torturing him during the writing of the ‘LaBrava’ screenplay.”) The final matchup, in Reiter’s bracket, is between “Swag” and “Killshot.” I’ll let Reiter describe which book wins: “ ‘Swag’ is great because you root for the crooks. ‘Killshot’ goes it one better with Leonard’s best-ever opening chapter, a cast of kinky characters who are both menacing and sympathetic, and the rarity of a happily married couple as the novel’s action heroes. Even the blunt title is perfect.” Leonard’s new novel, “Up in Honey’s Room,” is at No. 15.

Say Something Good About Detroit: HELLENIC MUSEUM

(From several newspapers)

The Detroit area has a large Greek population and although Greektown itself might lack authenticity, the Detroit Greek population deserves the attention this museum might bring.

Housed in a 1912 red brick mansion right across East Kirby from the Detroit Institute of Arts, the museum — with a total investment so far of about $2 million raised from foundations and individual donations — will add yet more oomph to the Cultural Center at the north end of Midtown, joining the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History as the district's other ethnically focused institution. With eventual plans for exhibits, lectures, films, cooking classes and music and dance performances, the Hellenic Museum will round out weekend entertainment options for the culturally inclined.

The museum is starting small, however, and many of those plans will take shape slowly over the next year. For the foreseeable future, the museum will only be open Saturday afternoons while work, mostly out of sight, continues.

"Keep in mind that this building was vacant for 10 years," says executive board president Ernest Zachary, whose real-estate development firm is located just a few blocks away. "So we had to put it back together. And we're still doing that. There were a lot of leaks, buckling floors and cracked plaster."

Visitors strolling through the galleries, however, are unlikely to be aware of that. The house, with a renovation plan by Elisabeth Knibbe — the same architect who did the Inn on Ferry Street right behind the museum — will feature a first-floor exhibition on the history of Detroit's Greektown that Wayne State University students compiled, while the wider story of Greek history, complete with a useful timeline from 4,000 B.C. to the present, will be presented in three rooms on the second floor.

Upstairs, don't miss the dark green, 19th-century wedding dresses in a room devoted partly to examples of the national costume. Downstairs, in addition to its own timeline and historical photographs, the Greektown exhibit will include colorful artifacts such as the actual front door — complete with a bas-relief sculpture of a 19th-century Greek freedom fighter — from the old New Hellas Restaurant on Monroe Street that closed several years ago.

Stephanie Vlahakis, past president of the National Hellenic Museum in Chicago, helped advise the Detroit founders, and tips her hat to their feat in pulling off a new museum in the midst of a down economy. "Tenacious individuals make miracles happen," she says.
The museum has also benefited from the generosity of its neighbors. The College for Creative Studies sent students over to help with labor, while students at the University of Michigan's landscape architecture program worked up a plan for the grounds that Zachary says will be implemented. And for the past several months, 12 students from Marilyn Zimmerman's Art as Activism course at Wayne State University have undertaken much of the archival research to pull together the Greektown exhibit.

Wayne State junior Che-Lin Aldridge, who went through hundreds of historic photos for the museum, sees it all as part of the dizzying ethnic tapestry that comprises the greater Detroit area.

"It's so interesting how cultures blend together," she says. "I'm African-American but spent lots of time in Greektown while growing up, whether playing pinball, going to Pegasus or," she adds with a laugh, "the Golden Fleece for breakfast at 2:30 in the morning."
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Sunday Night Poetry: Ozymandias

Saturday Night Music: Luke Winslow-King

Saving Books

Does anyone else save books they know they are going to love for a special occasion? I am saving DOGS OF THE SOUTH and the final book in the Hoke Mosley (Willeford) series for such a time. What are you saving?

My story READING MOTHER is up for Mother's Day on the Huffington Post.

Dirty Old Town: The Pogues

My review of UPSTREAM COLOR is up at Crimespree Magazine. 

Fridays Forgotten Books, Friday, May 10, 2013

Be back in the P.M. to add links. Todd will do the duties next Friday.

SHACKLES, Bill Pronzini

This was the book that the most of you recommended when I asked which Namesless Detective book I should read first, and I could not be happier. It was a thrill ride of a book and a primer on how to write a crime novel without too much violence,  but with a high quotient of excitement and suspense. I was won over by page one and sped through the book, which is  unusual for me. I am especially drawn to this sort of story--where someone has to cope alone with a difficult circumstance. Where his ingenuity and fortitude allow his success.

The Nameless Detective is leaving his girlfriend's apartment when he is abducted by a man who speaks to him in a whisper. He is chloroformed and tied up for the very long car ride ahead of him. Here he is left in a primitive cabin in an icy terrain, shackled, with only enough food and warmth to survive for a few months. (I did chuckle that he is left with reading material). To a reader, to do less would be too cruel.

His captor refuses to divulge his reasons for the abduction, and in fact, only returns once to taunt him.

Months pass and the N.D. loses weight, wrestles with the reason for his imprisonment, and tries to build his body. He keeps a journal, trying to remain sane.

The second half of the book deals with his attempt to find his captor and take his revenge. Each step in this process is laid out as meticulously as his routines of the first half.

To repeat myself, there is no false step in this book. The method of escape is entirely plausible and you follow his tracks eagerly as he figures out who is behind it. I wish he had contacted his girlfriend immediately to tell her he was alive, but that is not the way of the N.D. Great book indeed.

Ed Gorman is the author of the Dev Conrad series of political crime fiction. 

THE HIDDEN by Bill Pronzini

Bill Pronzini is not only a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America, he's a Grand Master of the dark and sinister noir novel. He demonstrates this again in one of his finest (perhaps the finest) books in his long career.

Jay Macklin is a failed man. A career as a baseball player was ended early by injury. As were other attempts at establishing himself. His decade-plus marriage to Shelby was so solid and good for a long time but unemployment and heart trouble (the latter something she doesn't know about) have taken their toll. Shelby finds herself attracted to a doctor at the hospital where she works as a paramedic. 

The novel brings Jay and Shelby together in an anxious attempt to find their old love and respect. They travel to a cottage in rugged Northern California only to meet Brian and Claire Lomax, a married couple who has even more problems than they do. They also become aware of a serial killer who has been traveling this same area. A power failure seems symbolic of their marriage's final days. 

Pronzini has always been at his best dealing with smashed lives. HIs descriptions of violent weather and pitiless nature only enhance the emotional turbulence that make the drama so rich. Gripping, sinister, unpredictable, The Hidden is a masterful novel of treachery and terror by a true master of the form.

Joe Barone, MURDER DOWN UNDER, Arthur Upfield
Brain Busby, MANHANDLED, Russell Stringer, Arthur Holman
Bill Crider, OUR MAN IN WAHINGTON, Roy Hoopes
Martin Edwards, THE MURDERS OF MONTY, Richard Hull
Curt Evans, TEN PLUS ONE, Ed McBain
Elisabeth Grace Foley, MISS BUNCLE'S BOOK, D.E. Stevension
Jerry House, CAGES, Ed Gorman
Randy Johnson,  THE OUTSIDER, Lou Cameron
Nick Jones, FROM HERE TO MATERNITY, Peter Rabe, and congrats to our friend.
George Kelley, THE EXECUTIONErS, John D. MacDonald
Margot Kinberg, FELLOWSHIP OF FEAR, Aaron Elkins
Rob Kitchin, BOGMAIL, Patrick McGinley
B.V. Lawson, THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CLASSIC DETECTIVE FICTION, ed. Delamater and Progyzy
Evan Lewis, GANGLAND'S DOOM, Frank Eisengruber, Jr.
Steve Lewis, SCATTERSHOT, Bill Pronzini
Todd Mason, Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
Neer, THE LAST LABYRINTH, Arun Joshi
J.F. Norris, THE KIND MAN, Helen Nielsen
Richard Pangburn, THE WINTER OF FRANKIE MACHINE, Don Winslow
James Reasoner, HAWKE, Ted Bell
Gerard Saylor, PLUGGED, Eoin Colfer
Ron Scheer, THE TROLL GARDEN, Willa Cather
Michael Slind, THIN AIR, Howard Browne
Kerrie Smith, THE BROTHERS CRAFT, Peter Coris
Kevin Tipple, DYING VOICES, Bill Crider
TomCat, ZOMBIES OF THE GENE POOL. Sharyn McCrumb

My Life in the Theater: PERFECt CRIME

We saw this one in New York with Catherine Russell about a million years ago. It is good fun and is still playing as far as I know.  Clearly this makes its living from tourists that want an inexpensive show that is well done.

How I Came to Write This Book: STIFFED, Rob Kitchin

http://www.amazon.com/Stiffed-Rob-Kitchin/dp/1484903765

How I came to write this book ... Stiffed by Rob Kitchin

Stiffed is a screwball noir set in New England about a group of friends trying to get rid of a dead body but, in so doing, plunge themselves into deeper and deeper trouble.  There were two inspirations for the story.  The first was a single line that I stumbled across - ‘Friends help you move, true friends help you move bodies’.  A light bulb immediately sparked into brightness.  The second, was a blog post by Donna Moore that I’d been thinking about for a while in which she gave her definition of noir:

“Noir fiction has our protagonist spiraling down into the pit of despair, thrown there by a mocking Fate, who then stands at the edge of the pit shoveling dirt onto the head of the protagonist until he is half-buried. Fate then throws the shovel down into the pit and the hapless protag reaches out for that glimmer of hope, only for it to whack him on the head and kill him.”

From these two seeds I had my premise:

Take an ordinary guy.  Put him in an impossible situation by giving him a dead body and a very good reason not to go to the police.  Add his friends.  Dump a ton of crap on them.  Keep dumping crap on them until they’re buried up to their eyeballs.  Give them a glimmer of hope, then dump more crap on them.  Wait until they’re buried alive then give them a small shovel.

I had the first chapter written within a couple of hours.  Over a weekend I mapped out the rest of the story, aiming to keep the narrative fast paced and humorous, with lots of action, twists and general mayhem.  This is basically achieved by throwing in a bunch of bad guys and ensuring that the central character and his friends face or commit just about every crime on the statute book in a twenty four hour period in an effort to get rid of the body and keep themselves alive.


An initial review by Paul Brazill does a good job of capturing the essence of the tale: “Stiffed is a massively enjoyable, fast-moving and very funny black comedy of errors that comes across like Hitchcock’s The Trouble With Harry directed by the Coen Brothers.”  Though some might say it is more Farrelly Brothers than the Coens.

Check out SPINETINGLER for some additional praise for STIFFED.

STIFFED is published in paperback, kindle and other formats by SNUBNOSE PRESS. 

Grandparent's Day

I have to leave here at 7:30 tomorrow morning. I will get the links up later in the day. Sorry for the last minute notice. If you get yours up really early or the night before, I may get it up before i go. Due to return mid-afternoon.

Opening Credits: DOG DAY AFTERNOON

New York in the Seventies was a little different.

DO MEN READ WOMEN?

An article in SLATE said yes they do. But when I see lists of favorite books from men, women are rarely on them. How many of the forgotten books we have mentioned here are female-authored if we eliminate Bonne, Kerrie, Deb and me. Not many if I look back.

If I look across the room, Phil has read GONE GIRL and BURIAL RITES (Hannah Kent) in the last few months but could think of no more.

What books by women writers have you read recently?

A Stop By from Bill Pronzini

 Bill Pronzini said...

Wow. All the glowing comments greatly appreciated, the more so since I have now officially reached geezerhood. It's good to know Nameless and I have so many loyal readers. Couldn't prove it by my royalty statements, so you're all among the select few.

For the record, these are what I consider my best -- or at least my favorite --novels, in no particular order:

THE CRIMES OF JORDAN WISE
BLUE LONESOME
THE RUNNING OF BEASTS
SHACKLES
MOURNERS
FEVER

Tuesday Night Music: Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers: A NIGHT IN TUNISIA

HOW I CAME TO WRITE THIS BOOK: PENANCE

Where PENANCE came from

When you ask the question “Where did this story come from?” and it’s a story that’s been rattling around my head for almost forty years, that’s a tough one to answer. 

I went to a peculiar high school – a Catholic military academy.  Great training for cognitive dissonance. One period we’re discussing the Beatitudes, the next period a sergeant who’d spent a little too much time in country during Vietnam is demonstrating how to kill somebody with a copy of Sports Illustrated. Even the school motto kinda freaked me out. Crede de Deo, Luctari pro Eo – To Believe in God and to Fight for Him.  I always figured if there was one guy who could handle his own beefs, it was the almighty. Hell, ask Noah’s neighbors. As the good folks of Sodom.

Anyway, one fine spring day back in 1976 one of the monks who ran the place pops this question in the middle of theology class. If you were going to die unexpectedly – say you were going to be murdered, when and where would you want that to happen?  I was leaning toward never and nowhere. Turns out the answer he was looking for was stepping out of the confessional. Seems you’d be in a state of grace, seems you take the A-train to Elysium. 

I was already having my issues with Catholicism, and that didn’t help. But I do remember thinking “That might make a cool place to kick off a story.”

OK, if you’ve seen any of my other interviews, you know the whole tale of woe. How I always wanted to write fiction, but I ended up writing technical financial copy, marketing copy, how I decided that fiction writing was a childish dream and that I should act like a grown up and follow the money. Which I did for decades.

A few years back when I finally had my epiphany, realized I’d spent my adult life pissing on my own dreams, and I decided I was actually gonna by-god write me a novel, the confession idea is what I went back to. Really, at first, that was all I had.

See, I don’t do the whole outlining thing. The only way writing works for me is to just start and then follow the characters around my head and take notes. So everything grew out of that beginning.

I decided I wanted the killer to be a sniper, so I had to figure out where and when he would have learned to shoot like that. I had to give him a backstory that would account for his bizarre religious motivations. Things snowballed from there.

But it all started with a strange question in Theology class at Marmion Military Academy almost forty years ago.

Forgotten Movies: JOE

Bill Compton (Dennis Patrick) accidentally kills his daughter's (Sarandon) hippie boyfriend after an argument. Panic-stricken, he escapes to a bar, and meets Joe Curran (Peter Boyle), a loud-mouthed, angry, bigot who is bitter over what he feels his country has become. A bond between two men from disparate classes forms. Both are livid over changes in American society. Director John G. Avidsen ("pre-Rocky"), directs this low-budget film fearlessly, and at the time, people found the sentiments expressed here shocking and difficult to watch. Today, not so much. Opinions like this are now aired in the seats of government. 




I really enjoyed Megan's review of the new book on Ripley of Believe It or Not fame in the LA REVIEW OF BOOKS, so I am sharing it with you.