From Our Closing Borders Store Over the Last Two Weeks

HOW I CAME TO WRITE THIS STORY: Richard Godwin

HOW I CAME TO WRITE ‘THE BUTCHER’S DAUGHTER’, Richard Godwin.

‘The Butcher’s Daughter’ was originally published at A Twist Of Noir

One long Summer I unwittingly rented a villa off a Mafia lawyer in the heart of Sicily. It was bakingly hot, over 100 degrees all the time and I was in the interior. It is a strange and beautiful country steeped in bloodshed.

Olive groves shimmer in a constant haze and the Mafia still run the place. The teenagers are well behaved because they are too scared not to be.

One night I was eating out in a small and extremely good restaurant when three men, who were too sharply dressed for the area walked in, brushed the manager aside and went through to a back room behind a curtain.

You get the picture, all in expensive suits, the heavy, the good looking son, the lawyer with glasses and the papers in his case. It used to be called the Pizza connection. Hanging out the wash.

The landscape and the entire place left an imprint on me.

A few days after I returned Berlusconi was deposed.

Bernardo Provenzano, otherwise known as Il Tractore or The Tractor for his brutal methods, was known as the Cappo di Tutti and was arrested at a farmhouse near where I was staying.

He had been on the run since 1963. He was hard to find since he had no mobile phone, no computer, and communicated by pizzi which means a bird dipping its beak in the water. It is also a piece of paper which he would write on and fold up until it was no bigger than your small fingernail. He used a Bible code the Italian police are still trying to crack and he would write his orders on his pizzi.

They would go out in his laundry bag. He was found in a farmhouse with a ricotta machine and some red wine. You will smell lemon groves as you drive through the countryside. The Mafia started out exporting lemon and bergamot.

The interior of Sicily is steeped in history and Sicilian itself is incomprehensible to most Italians, being a mix of many languages including the languages of their invaders.

I remember going out for a drink one Saturday night. The local Piazza was lined with old men on wooden chairs drinking Grappa. No women, and I felt I was not in the twentieth century.

The interior of Sicily is a strange place. Go there and you will never forget it.

I never heard another word of English spoken during my entire time there. And I have never seen so many dead dogs rotting by the roadside, the Sicilians just run them over.

Richard Godwin is a crime and horror writer as well as a produced playwright. His stories have been widely published in magazines such as A Twist Of Noir and Pulp Metal Magazine. His works in print include ‘Chemical’, published in the Anthology Back in 5 Minutes (Little Episodes Publishing 2010), ‘Doll’, published in Howl: Tales of the Feral And Infernal (Lame Goat Press 2010), 'Face off' in CrimeFactory Issue #5 (CreateSpace 2010), 'Pike N Flytrap' in Needle Magazine (Lulu 2010) and 'Mother' in Tainted Tea (Lulu 2011).

His crime novel ‘Apostle Rising’ is out and can be bought at all good bookstores and online at Amazon and here http://www.blackjackalbooks.com/order Go to his site to watch a video trailer for ‘Apostle Rising’ and visit his blog for his Chin Wags At The Slaughterhouse, which are the interviews he conduct with other authors

http://richardgdowin.net

Bye, Bye, Blackbird

WIN WIN

I was not intending to post a piece today but as usual something jumped into my head so here I am. WIN WIN is a movie that almost anyone would like. I liked it (and will review it more fully on Crimespree Cinema) but I would not call it an art house movie. Yet that is where it's playing in my neighborhood. At an art house theater along with two movies in foreign languages.

WIN WIN is not an art house movie. It is a mainstream movie. If it has any faults, it's that it is too ordinary to be in an art house. See the dilemma.

Why? When did this happen. When did the multiplexes stop showing movies that concern anything smaller (and quieter) than action movies or comedies about adolescent men. It used to be that movies like this or for instance Hoosiers played in every town.

I bet if you live in a small town, this movie will not even show up.

A few years ago, Little Miss Sunshine got the same treatment and eventually burst out of its arthouse confines. Same with Junebug. The studios always seem surprised that movies like this can draw an audience. I am surprised that some of the junk that came out this weekend can.

I bet WIN WIN would make a nice profit for the film-makers if they gave it a chance. Are you disappointed in the fare Hollywood puts on for the multiplexes?

Soundtracks

Do you prefer a song or score soundtrack?

What are some of your favorite soundtracks that emphasize score over songs. What about song soundtracks? They are quite different when you think about it? As I have said in the past, a lot of movie music goes right by me. But I very much enjoyed the music for 5x2, an Orzon film. It was a song soundtrack, but most of the songs were new to me (French and Italian) so it functioned as a score for me.

I am more likely to enjoy a score with songs familiar to me. But perhaps such a soundtrack takes me out of the movie more than one written to fit seamlessly. It I am spending my time thinking now where did I hear that song before, doesn't my attention get fractured by it?

THE SUMMING UP, Friday, April 8, 2011

I have a couple of movie reviews up at Crimespree Cinema.







THE SUMMING UP, Friday, April 8, 2011

Patti Abbott, Julian's House, Judith Hawkes
Yvette Banak, Window on the Square, Phyllis Whitney
Joe Barone, Hardly A Man is Now Alive, Herbert Brean
Paul Bishop, Goodey's Last Stand, Charles Alverson
Bill Crider, The Elmore Leonard Reader, Elmore Leonard
Scott Cupp, Big Rock Beat, Greg Kihn
Martin Edwards, Shadow on the Wall, Henry Christopher Bailey
Ed Gorman, The Broker, Max Allan Collins
Randy Johnson, Forgive Me, Killer, Harry Whittington
George Kelley, Battle in the Dawn, Manly Wade Wellman
Margot Kinberg, Loophole. Robert Pollock
K.A. Laity, Skeem Life, Gary Robertson
B.V. Lawson, This Rough Magic, Mary Stewart
Evan Lewis, Secret Agent X-A History, Tom Johnson and Will Murray
Todd Mason, Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia, John Clute; The Age of Rock, Jonathan Eisen
J.F. Norris, The Naked Sun, Isaac Asimov
David Rachels, Hell Can Wait, Harry Whittington
Richard Robinson, The Star Trek Reader, James Blish
Gerard Saylor, Come Closer, Sara Gran
Ron Scheer, The Taming of Red Butte Western, Francis Lynde
Kerrie Smith, Death in the Back Pocket, Peter Fitzpatrick and Barbara Wenzel
Kevin Tipple, The Jesus Thief, J.R. Lankford

Friday's Forgotten Books, April 8, 2011

Ed Gorman is the one of the authors in TOP SUSPENSE GROUP as well as the creator of many fine series of western and crime fiction series. You can find him here.

MAX COLLINS – The Broker. Berkley, paperback original, 1976. Paperback reprint: Foul Play Press, 1985, as Quarry.

Now that Max Collins' Quarry novels have been reissued by Perfect Crime in truly impressive trade paperbacks, I thought I'd look at again at a review of mine from the mid-Eighties when Foul Play Press reissued the first four from the original Berkley editions.

Collins has always made hired hit-man Quarry believable to me for two reasons. One because he makes the convincing case that the only people he kills are scum, often mobbed-up scum, anyway. And second because of Quarry's sardonic voice. Humor has a way of making things real and Collins is a master of it.

In The Broker, the first in the series, we meet Quarry shooting a man in an airport men’s room. Quarry’s assignment is to bring what the man is holding (heroin) back to his employer, an icy sort called the Broker. Quarry complies.

After complaining that he does not like to deal in drug killings, he reluctantly takes another Broker assignment, this one working with a homosexual killer named Boyd. In the rest of the novel, Collins shows us an abundantly unpleasant world peopled with all sorts of characters, from cuckolded husbands to porno-crazed geezers who look like Gabby Hayes.

The Broker and the other three novels in the first series — The Broker’s Wife (1976), The Dealer (1976), and The Slasher (1977) — depict the waning hippie/flower-power days with a great deal of historical accuracy. The Quarry books are therefore an important part of the crime fiction of the Seventies — a quirky, idiosyncratic look at the Midwest during the Gerald Ford regime.

The Quarry novels belong the shelves of every hardboiled fan. Max Collins is one of the finest artists of the form and these are vivid and compelling books that can be read again and again.

Patti Abbott

JULIAN'S HOUSE, by Judith Hawkes


I have this book starred in my log of books read twenty years ago. I was surprised to find that my library system no longer had it because I wanted to read it again. Hawkes no longer seems to be writing books. A shame because I know I liked this one.

Praised by the New York Times for its "passages rich with descriptive beauty, complex with philosophical theorizing and seductive with hard (and tantalizing) information"--Julian's House is the story of a husband and wife paranormal team, newly married, who move their high-tech (for the time) equipment into a Victorian house and stumble on the requisite history of bumps in the night.

Over the years, many home owners have reported various. phenomenon. Each tenant seems to encounter ghosts subtly suited to him/her.

The couple is prepared to encounter supernatural phenomena, but not clearly to confront what their own problems are. Is the house a mirror reflecting back the problems of its current tenants? Are the ghosts more than a projection? It is this issue that Julian's House examines. The writing in this book certainly is of a higher caliber than that found in many such books. But the horror level may not be high enough for devotees of Dean Kuntz or Stephen King. It got it just right for me.

Yvette Banek
Joe Barone
David Rachels
Margot Kinberg
Gerard Saylor
Paul Bishop
Bill Crider
Scott Cupp
Martin Edwards
Randy Johnson
George Kelley
K.A. Laity
B.V. Lawson
Evan Lewis
Todd Mason
J.F. Norris
James Reasoner
Richard Robinson
Ron Scheer
Kerrie Smith
Kevin Tipple

These were the blogs that had FFB posts as of 9:00 AM. EST. I will add any others midday.

HOW I CAME TO WRITE THIS BOOK: THE HANGING WOOD, Martin Edwards

"How I came to write this book"

The inspiration for THE HANGING WOOD, the fifth in my series of Lake District Mysteries, came from my increasing fascination with sibling relationships. As an only child, I’ve often found the ways in which brothers and sisters inter-act together to be slightly mysterious. In the past, I never found it easy to imagine what that kind of relationship would be like – but of course, one of the joys of being a novelist is that it gives you the chance to stretch your imagination in fresh directions.

A question I asked myself was what it would be like if your brother or sister disappeared, and was never found again. What if the commonly held view was that a relative had murdered the missing child – but you didn’t accept that was true? What if you clung to the belief that your sibling was still alive?

In the story, Orla Payne has never been able to come to terms with the idea that her older brother Callum was murdered by their uncle, who then committed suicide. The body was never found. She meets Daniel Kind, the historian, and when she confides in him, he urges her to talk to DCI Hannah Scarlett. But then a shocking tragedy occurs.

The book is set in the Keswick area of the Lake District, one of the most beautiful places in Europe. Much of the action takes place in a tightly-knit community surrounding old Mockbeggar Hall – there is a farm, owned by Orla’s father, a caravan park where her mother used to live, a residential library, where she has been working, and the Hanging Wood of the title. The library, by the way, was inspired by a real-life library in North Wales – St Deiniol’s Residential Library, a magical place built by a Victorian Prime Minister and full of atmosphere; it was also the setting for the launch of my last Lakes book, THE SERPENT POOL.

This story develops the slow-burning relationship between Hannah Scarlett and Daniel Kind, and as well as exploring family connections, it is also concerned with the nature of justice. ‘Don’t you care about justice?’ Orla asks Hannah. Of course, Hannah does, but she finds that few things are harder in life than making sure that justice is truly done. I really enjoyed writing THE HANGING WOOD and I hope that enjoyment is very evident to the people who matter most – my readers.

Martin Edwards is the author of two series, set in Liverpool and the Lake District. At the CWA Daggers Awards 2008, he received the award for best short story of the year for 'The Bookbinder's Apprentice'. The eighth Liverpool book, Waterloo Sunset, and The Arsenic Labyrinth,(shortlisted for Lakeland Book of the Year 2008) have both recently appeared in paperback. So has Dancing for the Hangman, a novel about Dr Crippen. The fourth Lake District Mystery, The Serpent Pool, was published in February 2010.

YoYo Men

In the late fifties, when I was about ten, every spring yoyo men showed up in our schoolyard. I can't say why this was allowed. The men demonstrated various tricks during recess, and like the automatons we were, we went out and bought Duncan yoyos after school, never managing to do more than make the thing go up and down. Another slinky or hula hoop in the hall closet. Rocking the baby, give me a break.

Now did the schools believe yoyos were a worthwhile way to spend our time. Did they seem them as a skill? Or were they in kahoots with Duncan? I'm not sure but today at a toy store I saw rows of them, glittering now, in fabulous colors and beckoning to me like they did fifty years ago. It doesn't take a yoyo man to make a sucker. What say you on yoyo men?

First Wednesday Book Review: MILDRED PIERCE, James Cain

I've talked about reading this book on here already, but it continues to reverberate in my mind a week later. And here is my mini review for Barrie Summy's Book Review Club.

MILDRED PIERCE is different from Cain's other work in that there are no murders, no crimes at all. It's a portrait of a woman in the years during the depression trying to support her two daughters and find some happiness for herself.

She turns out to be very good at supporting them financially and she parlays her skills for pie making into a small restaurant chain. She is less successful in supporting her family in other ways though and allows her unbridled love for her older daughter undo everything.

The men are not admirable; no one comes off very well. Economic distress may have a hand in this, of course. This book provides the reader with a good portrait of life in southern California during the depression. These are not the same people we see in THE GRAPES OF WRATH, of course. But they struggle too.

One of the biggest fascinations for me was how Cain laid out the details of life for Mildred Pierce: how a restaurant is run, how a waitress learns her craft, how people dress, decorate their homes, all of these things. And it also has four strong women as characters. Pretty unusual. It's the men who are weak in MILDRED PIERCE.

Mildred is one of the more enigmatic characters in fiction. Was she a monster herself? Did she turn the people in her lives into monsters? Would Vida have been the way she was if raised by someone else? Certainly Mildred's admiration for Vida's worst flaws, traits she saw as fine and noble rather than cruel and superficial, allowed them to flourish. Validated them. Would she have lost her husband had she provided him with more emotional support? These are the questions that make this book work so well.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED for those who like dark characters.

For more book reviews today, check out Barrie Summys blog right here.

HOW I CAME TO WRITE THIS Book, Anonymous 9

HOW I WROTE THIS BOOK by Anonymous-9

Synopsis of HARD BITE, the novel

The hit-and-run driver took everything—his wife, child and legs. Now a paraplegic, Dean Trahearn unleashes payback on suspected hit-and-runners in Los Angeles. Helper-monkey Sid is his deadly assistant as a satisfying conglomeration of dirtbag-corpses piles up. Until Dean kills an innocent man by mistake. The revelation is agonizing—just as the Mexican Mafia figures out that his first murder victim was one of them. Carnales kidnap Marcie, his home-visit nurse, so Dean uses himself as bait—armed with only Sid, his wits, and a last chance at honor—to save Marcie.

How I Wrote the Book

Terry Pratchett said, “You need the darkness to let the light show up.” Triumph of the human spirit enthralls me, so I made my main character disabled, with a limited amount of life left, and burning with ambition to avenge his own hit-and-run accident. The big challenge? Making him a serial killer. Dean had to be human and sympathetic enough that you’d actually care about him, not just watch at a distance and wait for him to get caught. Obviously, this is a razor’s edge of writing, a very fine moral line, and each reader will decide if I pulled it off or crashed.

I decided Dean would follow a vigilante code of honor, and I delved into the code of the bushido plus “the officer and a gentleman” credo to get a handle on it. I got so into Miyamoto Musashi, the original badass samurai, born in 1584, that I started waking up and writing every day at 4am, just like he says he did, in the preface to THE BOOK OF FIVE RINGS. However, I didn’t stop bathing, like he did. I tried, but it was hell on my social life.

If the book doesn’t make enough money to buy me a private island with servants I don’t know what I’ll do. Probably write another one, I guess.

Check out my website www.anonymous-9.com. I’d love to hear from you.

Thanks for this forum, and the invitation to write, Patti!

My Heroes#1

Yes I am stealing this idea from George Kelley's postings.

Vanessa Fluker was a graduate student who breezed through the WSU program to get her M.A. degree, and worked a bit with Phil. She was smart and likable and we all groaned inwardly when she forsake doing her PH.d to go to law school.

Another one lost to corporate greed we thought.

Well no! Vanessa has turned into a hometown hero by using her law degree to help the poor, the elderly, the handicapped, the homeless. She has given up any hope of a lucrative practice to go to court, week after week, to defend the people no one else will.

A recent story:

Vanessa Fluker, an attorney well-known for her determined advocacy on behalf of homeowners facing foreclosure, was recently fined $12,200 along with her client by Michigan Wayne County Judge Robert Colombo, for a "vexatious appeal" of a client's foreclosure/eviction.

Support Attorney Fluker's efforts to fight this outrageous attack on the right of aggressive representation of homeowners against the banks. Please contribute funds to aid in the appeal of Judge Colombo's sanction decision. Please send checks to Vanessa G.Fluker, Esq. PLLC/Appeal Fund c/o 2920 E. Jefferson, Ste. 101, Detroit, MI. 48207. Attend a fundraiser scheduled this Friday, March 25, 7pm, at Central United Methodist Church, 23 E. Adams.

Vanessa can't afford to defend herself. Fund-raisers are springing up all over to help a woman who only asked to practice the kind of law she attended law school for.

A nicer woman would be hard to find. Vanessa, you are a hero.

What Does Your Neighbor Do to Drive You Crazy?

Ours is one of six townhouses built in a the shape of an L. They are large townhouses but we live very close to our neighbors and this makes our "sins" more annoying than in the usual housing situation. We all share the back driveway and the garages are also connected. We share walls, roofs, and grass.

One of our neighbors has three cars that are always parked on the street. They never use their garages. Snow plows can not clear our street. If they have any visitors (often), they take up even more of the street. Sometimes their cars don't move for days, and I mean days. What do they do inside their house for all those hours. They also keep their large recycling bin in front of their front door. They stack fire wood there too. They have set up everything to require the least amount of effort. There are a lot of other issues, but you get the idea. Plus side: they are quiet.

Another neighbor missed the final pickup last fall for leaves. A bin of leaves has sat in back of their house since November. As I look out my kitchen window, it's the first thing I see. They could move it inside their fence, they could put it in the garage, they could put the debris in a bag and put it out with their trash. But no it sits there. It also makes our way in and out of the back more difficult. Whew! Plus side: this family is as nice as can be. So nice, we just can't bring it up to them. I bet they stopped seeing that bin of dead leaves and limbs long ago. I bet they also don't notice we rake up the leaves outside their fence every fall.

Another neighbor now moved tortured the neighbor closest to him to the point they moved. Every day brought confrontations with him over wind chimes hanging two feet from their windows, parties that went far into the night, issues over car placement, problems over the garage.

What drives you crazy about your neighbors? Or do you live in harmony?

THE LINEUP, 4

It is hard to believe THE LINEUP is issuing its fourth volume of poetry already. Gerald So was kind enough to give me an advance look since I was a contributor to the third volume.

I think this is the strongest issue yet. I had a difficult time deciding which poem to talk about here. But one poem jumped out at me and that is "Prayer for the Man Who Mugged My Father, 72." Its author, Charles Harper Webb, is a professor, a psychiatrist, and author of poetry collections.

His poem was impressive because of the brilliant way it was organized as well as its command of the language and vivid images. It captured the physical elements of an attack in a stark and affecting way. But it interrupted these passages with remembrances of a son's love for his father.

Nearly every line begins with the word May, a word often used in prayers or in good wishes for someone. "May your day be sunny and bright."

But in Webb's poem, he stands the word on its ear by wishing that the person it's addressed to experience the hurt and harm he's dealt out to the subject's father.

May the bushes where you hid be there again, leaves ripped with razor-blades and acid
May the rifle butt you bashed him with be in his hands.

In this way the subject insists on a cathartic moment for himself, picturing first his father and then himself as taking revenge on this demon. He also captures important moments he and his father have shared.

May those hands, which taught his son to throw a curve and drive a nail and hold a frog, feel like cannonballs against your jaw.

Brilliant images throughout.

Now I would like to contrast briefly the active if not acted upon way Webb's character deals with his misfortune compared to the character in my poem of of last year "Articulating Space," a far less successful poem and passive response to mistreatment.

In "Articulating Space," an abused woman turns her pain inward and loses her mooring altogether. In her case, of course, her victimizer is a husband and not a stranger in the night.

I wish I had written a poem about her articulating her anger rather than absorbing it. But in the meantime, we have Mr. Webb's fine poem to release us.

On April 30th, Keith Snyder will an audio post for this poem, right here.

The Lineup #4 (2011) | What's the buzz?

Edited by Gerald So with Reed Farrel Coleman, Sarah Cortez, and R. Narvaez

Poems by Ken Bruen, Michael Casey, Reed Farrel Coleman, David Corbett, Mary Agnes Dalrymple, Mary Christine Delea, Jeanne Dickey, H. Palmer Hall, Paul Hostovsky, David Jordan, Laura LeHew, Thomas Michael McDade, Peter Meinke, Keith Rawson, Chad Rohrbacher, Stephen Jay Schwartz, Nancy Scott, Kieran Shea, J.D. Smith, J.J. Steinfeld, John Stickney, Caitlin Elizabeth Thomson, Randall Watson, Charles Harper Webb, Steve Weddle, Germaine Welch

Print $7.00 from Lulu.com, or purchase signed copies from Murder By the Book (Houston, TX), Once Upon a Crime (Minneapolis, MN), The Mysterious Bookshop (New York, NY), M is for Mystery (San Mateo, CA).

Library Availability: Library of Congress (Washington DC), The Turtle Lake (Wisconsin) Public Library.

The Scariest Non-Horror Movie

The scariest movie I have ever seen that was not meant to be a horror movie was THE MAGDALENE SISTERS. I am sure most of you are familiar with the plot. Girls in Ireland, labeled as troublesome by their family, school or neighbors, are put into "schools" to effect a change in behavior.
Some of them for life. Treatment was no different from that at a prison, but at the hands of nuns and priests. It scared me to death.

What about you? What movie, not found in the horror section, scared you most?

KIDS' MOVIES

This takeoff on Mary Poppins is a riot, but I am using it to make a point.

Why are almost all kids' movies scary? Why do they have to have a villain? Kids like to laugh as much as anyone, but their movies are always scary or sad.

All three of the TOY STORY movies were scary and sad. Adults wept through them. Really, having the beloved toys about to go into an incinerator. Having them imprisoned? What were these guys thinking?

Many adult movies are just plan funny. Why can't we afford kids the same treat. I can hardly get my four-year old grandson to watch a movie because he just doesn't want to wait out the scary parts.

He'd rather watch the show WORD WORLD on PBS, which is about spelling. And incidentally he now thinks spelling rather than reading is the ultimate goal. I hear him muttering D-U-C-K all the time.

I know fairy tales had the same transgression. Why does this never change? Why is everyone seems to recognize that scary may not be such a good thing except film makers?

Why are kids' movies scary so often?

THE SUMMING UP, FRIDAY, April 1. 2011

Check out my review of THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU on Crimespree Cinema,

From the Stephen Birch Aquarium
in La Jolla, CA

The Summing up, Friday, April 1, 2011

Patti Abbott, Murder Ink and Murderess Ink, Dilys Winn
Yvette Banek, Great Detectives, Julian Symons
Paul Bishop, The Three Worlds of Johnny Handsome, John Godey
Bill Crider, The Eleventh Hour, Graeme Base
Scott Cupp, Slan, E.E. Van Vogt
Mike Dennis, The Celebrated Cases of Dick Tracy, (Chelsea House Publishers)
Martin Edwards, The Burning Court, John Dickson Carr
Ed Gorman, Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson
Jerry House, Ghosts Along the Mississippi, Clarence John Laughlin
George Kelley, The Lost Files of Nancy Drew
Kate Laity, The Pillow Book of Eleanor Bron
B.V. Lawson, The F.B.I., a Centennial History (U.S. Dept. of Justice)
Evan Lewis, Pulp Art, Robert Lesser
Todd Mason, OUR AMAZING WORLD OF NATURE; David Kyle's THE PICTORIAL HISTORY OF SCIENCE FICTION; THE ART OF JAIME HERNANDEZ
J.F. Norris, Crime Club Compendium, Ellen Nehr
Richard Pangborn, The April Robin Murders, Craig Rice and Ed McBain
Eric Peterson, Swedish Sensations Films, Daniel Ekeroth
James Reasoner, Attack, Leland Jamieson
Richard Robinson, The D.C. Comics Wildstorm: THe Art of Jim Lee
Gerard Saylor, Photography Books from the Lake Mills, Wisconsin Public Library collection
Kerrie Smith, Angel Hunt, Mike Ripley
Kevin Tipple/Barry Ergang, Strip for Murder, Richard Prather

Friday's Forgotten Books, April 1, 2011

From Gerard Saylor

Forgotten Coffee Table Books

Patti Abbott

These two books no longer sit on my coffee table. I wore them both out long ago. The first MURDER INK, the Mystery Lover's Companion, was published in the seventies and the second MURDERESS INK followed a bit later.

For years, I thumbed through these books several times a week, enjoying the articles Winn had collected, learning about new crime fiction I might want to try. I doubt there has ever been a book I spent more time with. And suddenly, there were dated, both in condition and in content and they disappeared. But they introduced me to the genre I still love.

Imperfect though the articles or selections might be, none of the books I now have on my coffee table come near to meaning this much to me. None of them have brought me more joy or knowledge. Thanks Dilys Winn.

Ed Gorman is the author of numerous fine crime and western stories. He edits anthologies and contributes to them You can find him here. He is a member of the TOP SUSPENSE GROUP.

Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson

I like to read while I eat. Lately I've been working my way through David Thomson's enormous Biographical Dictionary of Film at lunch time. Thomson is the most interesting and entertaining flm critic since Pauline Kael--and every bit as frustrating. When I disagree with him, I want to call him up and read him his rights--before violating every one of them.

Today I read his take on Edmond O'Brien. Thomson notes going in that movie stars aren't supposed to sweat. That makes them too much like everybody in the audience. Part of movie stardom is inaccessability, fantasy. But what a clever hook because beefy O'Brien sweated all the time, especially in his most memorable movie DOA. He was also fat, frequently out of breath, devoutly neurotic and often frightened. He was, in other words, pretty much like the people in the darkness watching him on the big screen. An Everyman of sorts.

In the course of his entry on O'Brien, Thomson makes clear that he enjoys the odd-ball actors and actresses far more than he does the stars. Thus he finds Warren Oates vastly more compelling than Robert Redford and Jeff Goldblum more intriguing than Paul Newman.

When I was a kid I rarely wondered about the lives of the stars. But I was always curious about character actors such as Elisha Cook, Jr. and J. Carrol Naish. There was a vitality to their performances that the stars were rarely capable of matching. And in the case of Cook, there was a melancholy and weariness that I recognized even then as being much like my own.

Same with the women. The ones I was always excited about were the second- and third-leads. They were the ones I got crushes on. They were often as pretty as the leading ladies, sometimes even prettier. And they frequently had more interesting roles, the bitch, the tart, the victim.

Barry Gifford once remarked that when you see a musical with all those young gorgeous girl dancers you have to wonder what became of them. The majority probably became housewives; more than a few probably took to the streets as parts became harder and harder to come by; and a lucky handful became the wives of powerful Hwood men.

I've been watching a lot of silent films of TCM and the same impulse grabs me then, too. Who were they? What happened to them? Did they know they'd become immortal? A full century later I sit in our family room and watch them as--most likely anyway--another century from now people will still be watching them. This is probably heresy of sorts but to me film immortality is far more imposing than literary immortality.

Yvette Banek
Paul Bishop
Bill Crider
Scott Cupp
Mike Dennis
Martin Edwards
Jerry House
George Kelley
K.A. Laity
B.V. Lawson
Evan Lewis
Todd Mason
J.F. Norris
Richard Pangborn
Eric Peterson
James Reasoner
Richard Robinson
Kerrie Smith
Kevin Tipple

HOW I CAME TO WRITE THIS BOOK: Grant Jerkins

How I Came to Write (and Publish) this Book, Grant Jerkins

A Very Simple Crime started out as a vignette—just two or three pages of narrative.

That tiny seed actually sprouted several plants. One branched out into an eighty thousand-word novel. Another shed its leaves and became a feature-length screenplay (a version by me alone as well as a version written by two other people.) What ended up being published was a short, fifty thousand-word novel—my favorite draft, and the one most often condemned by publishers as being too dark and having no likable characters.

That vignette (now the first half of chapter one) was simply a retelling of an incident from my childhood. Getting lost in the dark. My bedroom was in the basement of our house, and one night I got up to go to the bathroom. I didn’t bother to turn on the lights because I knew the way upstairs. I’d made the trip a thousand times before. That night though, I grew conscious of the pitch darkness of the basement and became disoriented. I got lost. I had a little panic attack and just stood there and screamed my head off until someone heard me and turned on a light. It was just one of those weird experiences we all have as kids.

Sometime after writing that down, my mind returned to it and latched onto the idea of a man who was never able to escape the darkness, that it infected every aspect of his life. And Adam Lee was born.

To that memory of being lost, I added a punch line (the second half of chapter one.) What if on the other end of that black night the boy grew into a man, and that man was on trial for murder? And in switching from remembrance to fiction, I found that I wanted to know what happened to that man in the intervening years, what had brought him to this accusation of murder. Was he guilty or innocent? (I didn’t know.) But mostly, I wanted to know what the boy who became the man would find at the end of that dark path. Would he, at long last, emerge into the light? Would Adam Lee have a happy ending? Did he deserve one?

I ended up with a short novel that I thought was fairly good—that I believed captured something that others might find compelling. The New York publishing community disagreed with me. Repeatedly. Ad nauseum. Over and over I heard the words, “It’s too dark.” At one point I turned the book into a screenplay, certain that this would be the key to my success. Hollywood, however, was likewise unimpressed. Ad nauseum. So I added thirty thousand words to the original manuscript (let in a little light, so to speak) and set my sights back on New York. Still no go.

Ultimately, it took over a decade to find a publisher. I was delighted when I heard that Penguin’s Berkley Prime Crime imprint wanted to publish the book. The final punch line to this odyssey was a good one. The last twist, the surprise ending, was that my too dark, too mean-spirited, and too twisted crime novel was put out by a publishing house known primarily for their line of cozies.

Lillian Jackson Braun and I have the same editor. Go figure.

Are You Going To Bouchercon?

Well are you?

Despite my dread/fear of conferences, I am thinking of going again. I have my hotel reservations made.

You can find out more about the 2011 Bouchercon here.

It's certain to be a treat because the amazing Jordans/Judy Bobalik are planning it. The flight prices are good right now. Hotel reasonable. St. Louis-well when Phil went there and visited the courthouse they recruited him to play the baliff in an re-enactment of the Dred Scott decision. With that and the arch, what do you have to lose?

Come on.