My Life at the Theater: Freud's Last Session

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.

It was well done although perhaps a bit static and didactic. But certainly well worth the small price we paid for it.

Greg Shepard from Prologue Books

Made it to the final four in the Spinetingler ebook contest, but I am likely to go down to Neil Smith. If you want to keep MONKEY JUSTICE afloat, vote here.


The Evolution of Prologue Books, Greg Shepard

When I was a teenager, I didn’t have a bookstore in my town. So the only place I ran across new books was in the wire and spinner racks in the corner drug store and Sprouse-Reitz (too young yet to be visiting the liquor stores). We didn’t even have a used bookstore. For that I had to talk my dad into driving all the way over to Sacramento to Beer’s Books, a dusty little den where my allowance went a little further. But that didn’t happen too often.

We 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

Stark House Press
Prologue Books

Wednesday Night Music: A. A. Bondy

Fiction Forms

Reading a short story a day, I am often taken aback by how a good novelist doesn't always write a good short story. And you can see why; he/she needs another 175 pages to develop the ideas.

Most short story writers go for a moment more than a quick solving of a murder case or the story of a life. Likewise, a good short story writer writing a novel often seems to be at a loss at what details are needed-how to keep the excitement level up over the course of an entire book

Who does both well? I don't always like Joyce Carol Oates's novels and stories-but I think her talents are great in both forms. Who else?

First Wednesday Book Review Club: THE ODDS, Stewart O'Nan

Another brilliant novel by the master.

A middle-aged couple, headed for divorce, decides to spend their final weekend together (Valentine's Day) at Niagara Falls, where they spent their first one.

They also decide to take the money left in the bank after some disastrous decisions and see if they can solve some of their troubles at the casino tables. This is not a travelogue of Niagara Falls but one that winds through their past a bit. They seldom leave the hotel, restaurants and casino in this book.

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.

Check out other reviews at Barrie Summy's place.

Tuesday Night Music: Regina Spektor

What Would Elmore Do?

I learned this morning, MONKEY JUSTICE reached the elite eight in a contest for best ebook of 2011 on Spinetingler. I fear and dread contests (why can't we all win) but if you liked MONKEY JUSTICE and wish to vote for it--here it is.

http://www.spinetinglermag.com

It is Super Tuesday after all
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Adverbs are pretty much out of favor in fiction writing, but here is where it trips me up.

She smiled.
She smiled slightly.
She smiled broadly.
She smiled ironically.
She smiled maliciously.
She smiled hesitantly.

Now these are very different smiles. And of course, to avoid the adverb, I could say something like "Her smile was a slight one." Or spend several sentences getting that across.

But how is making it an adjective any better? And is embedding the sort of smile it was in a lot more words to avoid an adverb a good choice. Is the occasional adverb really so bad? Doesn't it cut to the chase sometimes?

What would Elmore do? What would Joe Konrath do?

Forgotten Movies: ACCIDENT

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.

In this film, a professor, feeling at odds with his middle-class, middle-aged life, becomes involved in the lives of his students. And one, in particular. This became a cautionary story for me when marrying a professor.

That panicky air British films of this era have always make my heart pound. Was it the music?

For more forgotten movies, see Todd Mason.

The Best TV Drama of the Last 25 years.

I was going to discuss this soon, but this site is doing it for me with greater minds than mine.

http://www.vulture.com/2012/03/the-best-tv-drama-of-the-last-25-years.html

Today is THE SOPRANOS V. SIX FEET UNDER. (Wow, I must say Tony et al have sort of faded for me)

The site will go on with head to head choices for several weeks.

My choice for the best TV drama ever is Friday Night Lights, which didn't have crime as a crutch to lean on. Just pure Texas football and the greatest cast, writing, and direction I have ever seen.

Thanks to Jason Pinter for pointing this out.

Your Favorite Gary Cooper Movie

Check out a new website and publishing venture: Prologue. Hundreds of older genre books are being converted to ebooks by Prologue. Plus it will function as a website with articles and information about forgotten books and authors. More than 250 books are currently being made available for e-readers.

"I envision Prologue Books not simply an e-book publisher for out-of-print titles, but as a living record of the crime, science fiction, and fantasy genres,” said Ben LeRoy, publisher of Tyrus Books who is spearheading the project along with Greg Shepard.
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Cooper has to be 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.

I choose BALL OF FIRE as my favorite Cooper movie. In BALL OF FIRE, Cooper plays one of seven professors studying how common people speak. They hire Barabara Stanwyck for the job. She becomes a Snow White to the seven men. Just charming and directed by Howard Hawkes. Which Cooper film do you like best. IMDB has the whole list.

Sunday Night Humor: Louis C.K.

Hard to find a PG rated one. Love his show.

A Question?

What is the difference between speculative fiction and science fiction?
A discussion by Joyce Carol Oates of Margaret Atwood's latest book of essays obfuscates rather than explains it for the lay person. (Or at least me).

If it's set in the future but does not employ aliens as a plot device, is that enough to make it speculative?

****I just read a story from STORIES, edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio, an anthology, which purports to be composed of imaginative and speculative stories. The first story I read, "Unwell" chosen by me because I had just put a book by her on reserve at the library, was by Carolyn Parkhurst. It was about a woman who subverts every chance her sister has at happiness through very ordinary and if I might say so, familiar means.

I don't see how this story "reinvigorates, redefines and expands" the boundaries of imaginative fiction. It is a very ordinary story on any terms. Gaiman's statement that "we wanted to read stories that used a lightening-flash of magic as a way of showing us something we have already seen a thousand times as something we have never seen at all" would not apply here for me at all.

So I guess I also need a definition of imaginative fiction.

Saturday Night Music: Alissa Weilerstein

The Things We Carry

Check out the second story, an excerpt from the Cash Laramie series with a Nik Morton penned episode, on FIRES ON THE PLAIN.

(Not our hallway)

We recently redid our front hallway and the job necessitated taking down a lot of stuff and storing it for two weeks because it was a dusty dirty job. When the time came to restore order, it seemed like a good time to sort through the accessories, artwork, books, and plants and discard some, bring some new things 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.

I was very surprised to find how many items, we disagreed on. Paintings I liked, Phil was tired of. Plants he liked were dull and messy to me. He was sick of a quilt I hung in the dining room and found no charm in my magic ball that changes colors. He was tired of the vases across the fireplace, I thought a lot of the books could go upstairs or better still to a charity. He wanted to bring back a ceramic piece we had over the fireplace a few years back. None of this amounted to a fight (okay, maybe the quilt did) but we seemed to have very different ideas of what to change.

Would this be true in your house? Do you and your housemate differ on how the rooms should look. Most of you men could probably care less, but would you let your wife pick the paint color and hang the paintings without any input from you?

Is redecorating as combative as putting the lights on a Christmas tree used to be?

THE SUMMING UP, Friday, March 2, 2012

A review of Chico and Rita, right here at Crimespree Cinema Magazine.

At the suggestion of a reader, I am going to try and do this differently. I will post the author and titles on the original post late in the day. That way all the information will appear together. Hope it works okay.

On March 16th, we can either take a week off or someone else can do the duties. Thanks.

Friday's Forgotten Books, March 2, 2012

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.

Forgotten Books: BLACKMAILER by George Axelrod

BLACKMAILER by George Axelrod
There were few cooler guys on TV in the Fifties than George Axelrod. I didn't see him that often--he did a few talk shows; a few arts shows--but I always thought Now that's the kind of guy I wish I could be. Hip but accessible.

Not only had Axelrod produced such fine B'way and movie hits as "The Seven Year Itch" and "Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?," he'd adapted such novels as "The Manchurian Candidate" and "Breakfast at Tiffany's" to the screen.

And on TV he was slick and and funny and serious about his craft.

Oh, and one more thing. He was the author of a genuine Gold Medal novel.

I bought BLACKMAILER a few years after it appeared...say forty-five years ago. Now you can get a Hard Case edition and even after all this time it holds up well, albeit as a tribute to a time long past but fondly remembered by some portions of my generation.

What Axelrod did here was take the elements of the standard hardboiled crime novel--good bad girls and bad bad men, the prospect of lots of cash--and mix them up with talent agents and movie stars. And relate all this in a voice that is both literate and a bit larky at times--and works surprisingly well, even in the scenes of violence. There's a faux Hemingway (who was God at that time), a faux Marilyn Monroe (who was Goddess at that time) and enough double-crossing to make you cross-eyed.

This is one of those kick-back novels. A beer or two, a night with nothing to do, a devout desire for pure escape. I enjoyed the hell out of it. Axelrod is one of those seminal figures of the fifties and early sixties (along with people such as David Suskind) who made talk show appearances lively and always at least a bit controversial. Intellectually controversial that is...as opposed to today with its Snookis and Kardashians.

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

Todd Mason, The American Folk Scene, ed. De Turk and Paulin, Boby Dylan: Don't Look Back (Pennebaker), Dangerously Funny, Bianculli

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

My Life at the Theater: Doubt

We saw DOUBT at the Performance Network in Ann Arbor in 2008, an intimate venue for a play like this one. I thought it was very well done and left some room for DOUBT, more than the eventual film with Streep and Seymour Hoffman did. DOUBT questions whether a priest has been abusing children at a Catholic School. A nun goes toe-to-toe with him. It really was a riveting play.

How Long Did You Know Your Spouse Before Marrying?

I am often taken aback at how quickly people got married several generations ago compared to the time they seem to spend together before marriage today. I know of engagements that last years after relationships that lasted years.

We met the summer of '65, weeks after I graduated from high school and married in January of '67. No one told us this was a short engagement although they did remark we were awfully young.

How long did it take you to tie the knot if there is a knot? From the first date to the wedding--how long was it?

HOW I CAME TO WRITE THIS COLLECTION: Dan B. O'Shea

How I came to write OLD SCHOOL,

Dan O'Shea

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.

Duets: Alison and John