From Ray Richmond
"I was caught offguard hearing about the passing today of longtime CBS News and "60 Minutes" correspondent Ed Bradley at 65 after battling leukemia. The man was a consummate newsman and the classiest of acts, an African-American who was quietly a news pioneer without ever calling attention to the fact. When CBS needed someone to interview Spike Lee or the Rev. Jesse Jackson, it was Bradley who got the assignment. But he was hardly a token black face in the network news world. He was a pro with a smooth delivery and well-honed instincts. You never got the feeling that Bradley was either mailing it in or tossing softballs.
"But what I'll probably remember most about Bradley is the fact he was able to pull off wearing a shiny diamond earring stud -- alternated with a hoop -- better than any older dude I've ever seen. He was low-key and he was unflappable, but he was also uncommonly hip. Can you imagine Andy Rooney trying to wear an earring? How about Morley Safer? Not bloody likely. But on Bradley, it was a perfect fit.
He will be missed." -- Ray Richmond Past Deadline (another excellent blog you should be reading) http://www.pastdeadline.com/
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A SAMPLE FROM THE RAP SHEET, MIGHTY FINE SITE FROM J. Kingston Pierce http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/
Here's a sample:
Role of Honor
With all the news media’s attention now focused on yesterday’s dramatic overturn of the U.S. Congress by Democrats and today’s resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, there’s just not a lot of material out there from which to draw.
Which is why we turn, as the world so often does, to James Bond.
Cinematical contributor Kevin Kelly asks that immortal question: Which Bond is the best Bond? Of course, he’s talking about actors, not split personalities or some such. With the new Agent 007 flick, Casino Royale, due to hit movie theaters worldwide next week, Kelly observes that of the six men who’ve portrayed Bond on screen, most moviegoers select either Sean Connery or Roger Moore as their favorite. (“Does anyone actually pick George Lazenby?,” he writes. “I always end up feeling sorry for him. He went from hunk-of-the-moment in a chocolate bar commercial to potentially being one of the biggest stars on the planet.”) But then Kelly goes on to say many nice things about Pierce Brosnan. (“Brosnan did a great job of channeling both Connery and Moore, making his superspy both mirthful and cocky.”) I happen to agree with Cinematical’s assessment that “Brosnan makes the grade as the second-best Bond ...,” though outside of the lovely Halle Berry (in Die Another Day) and Izabella Scorupco (in GoldenEye), I was disappointed with the caliber of “Bond girls” Brosnan’s 007 either bedded or battled, or both. (I have somewhat higher hopes for Eva Green in Casino Royale. You can see a bit of her performance in the film trailer, found here.)
So, who does critic Kelly say is the best Bond ever? Well, I’m not going to give it away here, but I bet most Bond watchers will understand when I say that the winner is the guy who looks beset in a white dinner jacket.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
From Mystery*Files -- Ed Gorman
ED GORMAN RAMBLES
Wednesday, July 20, 2006
Mary Astor in ACT OF VIOLENCE.
I usually eat lunch around twelve thirty, catch the news and then go back upstairs to my office to write again.
Yesterday I happened to be channel surfing when I saw the billboard for a Turner movie called ACT OF VIOLENCE. I’d never seen it but as soon as I saw Robert Ryan (my favorite noir actor) l knew I’d watch the whole thing.
I’m going to be lazy and let a reviewer from the Internet Movie Database do the heavy lifting for me but I do want to remark on Mary Astor’s performance. Astor is famous for two things, being in THE MALTESE FALCON with Bogart and having her diaries admitted as evidence in a divorce case. She certainly got around.
ACT OF VIOLENCE is hijacked in the middle of act two. Previously the picture belonged to Van Heflin and Ryan. But Astor, who figures prominently in the action far into act three, just walks off with the picture. TCM ran several movies of hers a while back and she was usually a giddy spoiled heiress or somesuch in a glitzy comedies. She was always approriately irritating (the movies encourage us to hate giddy spoiled heiresses).
But in VIOLENCE we see a side of Astor that is, to me at least, astonishing. As a middle-aged hooker, she manages to be a decent person and a con job at the same time. Her faded looks are spellbinding. She’s got those great facial bones and the still-slender body but she plays against them with a weariness that makes her the most interesting character in the movie. I couldn’t stop looking at her. She’s every bar floozie you ever met and yet she transcends the stereotype by having a kind of hardboiled street intelligence. And at least a modicum of honesty. And, to my taste anyway, she’s sexy as hell.
This is one of those movies you enjoy because you soon realize that you have no idea where it’s going. It’s the standard three-act structure but the writers and director Fred Zinnemann aren’t afraid to introduce new plot elements right up to mid-way in the third act. That rarely works but it sure works here.
The only melancholy part for me was knowing how bitter Ryan was about playing psychos. He needed the work but considered it his jinx. He was among the finest film actors of his time but never really got his due. It’s his savaged face (he was dying of cancer at the time) that haunts the final moments of THE WILD BUNCH. Grim Sam Peckinpah knew what he was doing.
Thursday, November 09, 2006
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
Jealousy; Norm Partridge; Old vs. New
Ed here: I have no interest in country western music (I like the old stuff) but we did once catch a Faith Hill interview on the tube. She came off as dim, sour and obviously jealous of not selling as well as Shania Twain. Anyway, I just caught up with this story today and watched it on YouTube. Wow. Nobody wears jealousy well.
Faith Hill Denies Being Disrespectful at CMA Awards
Says Carrie Underwood "Is a Talented and Deserving Female Vocalist of the Year"
By: CMT.com staff
Faith Hill denies that she was disrespectful when the female vocalist of the year was announced Monday night (Nov. 6) at the 40th annual CMA Awards show in Nashville.
Hill, who was nominated in the category with Sara Evans, Martina McBride,
Carrie Underwood and Gretchen Wilson, was shown on a backstage camera at the ABC telecast when newcomer Underwood was announced as the winner. Hill responded with a frown and mouthed "What?!" to the camera and then stormed away.
By Tuesday morning (Nov. 7), a backstage photo of Hill was online on the Drudge Report's home page -- along with a link to a brief story in USA Today. Nationally syndicated radio host Don Imus referred to Hill's reaction during his morning show that is simulcast on MSNBC. Message boards at CMT.com remained active with fans speculating on the reasons for the singer's reaction.
xxxxxxxxxxxxx
For two days now I've misspelled Normm Partridge's name. Here are the results:
Hey Ed:
You've gotta watch those flyin' fingers, amigo... ya typo'd both Partridge and Norman in that piece!
To tell you the truth, that's not the first time I've been called "Norma" in print. Way back when, before we'd even met let alone got hitched, Tia dedicated a story to me for an antho called YOUNG BLOOD edited by Mike Baker. When the book appeared, I went out and bought it... only to find that the dedication in the book was typo'd as (you guessed it): "For Norma Partridge."
As Charlie Brown used to say: "AKKKK!" Mr. Baker was embarrassed, but nothing could be done. Of course, in those glory days of the Dell Abyss line, I should have gone with it. Ya never know. Maybe if I'd put on a little black dress and some fishnets, it would have done wonders for my career.
Norm
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I'll be reprinting some of my columns from Mystery File. Here's the first.
ED GORMAN RAMBLES
Sunday, August 27, 2006
Last Sunday’s Boston Globe carried its usual fine book column by James Sallis. This time Sallis discussed old books versus new ones.
“The problem with new books is that they keep us from reading old ones,” Sallis writes. “Every serious reader has a list of neglected writers. And perhaps it’s proper that writers be in a sense kept down: that they stay hungry, remain outsiders. There’s quite a gulf, however, between that and going unread.”
I don’t seem to have the problem Sallis cites. The older I get, the more appealing the old books seem to me. Not that I neglect new books entirely. But keeping up with all the flavors of the months, important new trends, and sweatily promoted newbies gets to be taxing.
I guess I rely mostly on recommendations. If somebody whose judgement I respect says you should read so-and-so, I generally do. Same with reviewers I respect. If they push hard, I tend to pick up the book they’re touting. You learn pretty quickly which reviewers you trust and which you don’t.
And yet there’s comfort in the books I’ve read and reread over much of my life. Gatsby and Tender is The Night, Day of the Locusts, Of Mice and Men and In Dubious Battle, Ethan Frome, The Martian Chronicles and Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Lady in the Lake and Farewell My Lovely, virtually all of Graham Greene, The Maltese Falcon, virtually all of Evan Hunter and Ed McBain, Double Star, Ross Macdonald and Margaret Millar, Greener Than You Think and Bring The Jubilee, virtually all of Fritz Leiber and Robert Bloch and Charles Williams and John D. MacDonald, much of Day Keene and Harrry Whittington, much of Joyce Carol Oates, most of Wm. Goldman, Three Hearts and Three Lions (Poul Anderson’s sly definition of science is or should be immortal), much of Charles Bukowski, Kerouac and on and on.
Graham Greene did an essay on the books he read as a youth and commented that these probably shaped him more than anything he read later on in life. I don’t know if I’d agree with that absolutely but I suspect there’s a good deal of truth to it. In his case he talked about the H. Rider Haggard view of existence, Haggard being the favorite author of his youth, and the romance of She as a metaphoric view of mysterious womanhood. (He talked about how Haggard late in life still wept openly about his son who had died something like fifty five years earlier.)
I suppose my Haggard was Hemingway. I first read A Farewell To Arms in eighth grade and it had an almost crushing effect on me. It certainly disabused me of my boyish sense of heroics and how so much popular fiction is a lie.
I’m not sure any book I pick up tody could have the same impact one me. And I suppose, for that reason, I seek the solace of the old ones.
Of course, this afternoon I spent $30 on new paperbacks so I guess I’ve never quite gotten over my fascination of seductive covers and the smell of fresh ink.
Faith Hill Denies Being Disrespectful at CMA Awards
Says Carrie Underwood "Is a Talented and Deserving Female Vocalist of the Year"
By: CMT.com staff
Faith Hill denies that she was disrespectful when the female vocalist of the year was announced Monday night (Nov. 6) at the 40th annual CMA Awards show in Nashville.
Hill, who was nominated in the category with Sara Evans, Martina McBride,
Carrie Underwood and Gretchen Wilson, was shown on a backstage camera at the ABC telecast when newcomer Underwood was announced as the winner. Hill responded with a frown and mouthed "What?!" to the camera and then stormed away.
By Tuesday morning (Nov. 7), a backstage photo of Hill was online on the Drudge Report's home page -- along with a link to a brief story in USA Today. Nationally syndicated radio host Don Imus referred to Hill's reaction during his morning show that is simulcast on MSNBC. Message boards at CMT.com remained active with fans speculating on the reasons for the singer's reaction.
xxxxxxxxxxxxx
For two days now I've misspelled Normm Partridge's name. Here are the results:
Hey Ed:
You've gotta watch those flyin' fingers, amigo... ya typo'd both Partridge and Norman in that piece!
To tell you the truth, that's not the first time I've been called "Norma" in print. Way back when, before we'd even met let alone got hitched, Tia dedicated a story to me for an antho called YOUNG BLOOD edited by Mike Baker. When the book appeared, I went out and bought it... only to find that the dedication in the book was typo'd as (you guessed it): "For Norma Partridge."
As Charlie Brown used to say: "AKKKK!" Mr. Baker was embarrassed, but nothing could be done. Of course, in those glory days of the Dell Abyss line, I should have gone with it. Ya never know. Maybe if I'd put on a little black dress and some fishnets, it would have done wonders for my career.
Norm
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I'll be reprinting some of my columns from Mystery File. Here's the first.
ED GORMAN RAMBLES
Sunday, August 27, 2006
Last Sunday’s Boston Globe carried its usual fine book column by James Sallis. This time Sallis discussed old books versus new ones.
“The problem with new books is that they keep us from reading old ones,” Sallis writes. “Every serious reader has a list of neglected writers. And perhaps it’s proper that writers be in a sense kept down: that they stay hungry, remain outsiders. There’s quite a gulf, however, between that and going unread.”
I don’t seem to have the problem Sallis cites. The older I get, the more appealing the old books seem to me. Not that I neglect new books entirely. But keeping up with all the flavors of the months, important new trends, and sweatily promoted newbies gets to be taxing.
I guess I rely mostly on recommendations. If somebody whose judgement I respect says you should read so-and-so, I generally do. Same with reviewers I respect. If they push hard, I tend to pick up the book they’re touting. You learn pretty quickly which reviewers you trust and which you don’t.
And yet there’s comfort in the books I’ve read and reread over much of my life. Gatsby and Tender is The Night, Day of the Locusts, Of Mice and Men and In Dubious Battle, Ethan Frome, The Martian Chronicles and Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Lady in the Lake and Farewell My Lovely, virtually all of Graham Greene, The Maltese Falcon, virtually all of Evan Hunter and Ed McBain, Double Star, Ross Macdonald and Margaret Millar, Greener Than You Think and Bring The Jubilee, virtually all of Fritz Leiber and Robert Bloch and Charles Williams and John D. MacDonald, much of Day Keene and Harrry Whittington, much of Joyce Carol Oates, most of Wm. Goldman, Three Hearts and Three Lions (Poul Anderson’s sly definition of science is or should be immortal), much of Charles Bukowski, Kerouac and on and on.
Graham Greene did an essay on the books he read as a youth and commented that these probably shaped him more than anything he read later on in life. I don’t know if I’d agree with that absolutely but I suspect there’s a good deal of truth to it. In his case he talked about the H. Rider Haggard view of existence, Haggard being the favorite author of his youth, and the romance of She as a metaphoric view of mysterious womanhood. (He talked about how Haggard late in life still wept openly about his son who had died something like fifty five years earlier.)
I suppose my Haggard was Hemingway. I first read A Farewell To Arms in eighth grade and it had an almost crushing effect on me. It certainly disabused me of my boyish sense of heroics and how so much popular fiction is a lie.
I’m not sure any book I pick up tody could have the same impact one me. And I suppose, for that reason, I seek the solace of the old ones.
Of course, this afternoon I spent $30 on new paperbacks so I guess I’ve never quite gotten over my fascination of seductive covers and the smell of fresh ink.
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
ONE MORE REASON TO FEAR DEATH...BOOKDADDY
Ed here: One more reason to fear death...you can't defend yourself when your accusers attack!
In Online Mourning, Don’t Speak Ill of the Dead
Sally Ryan for The New York Times
Screeners for Legacy.com in Illinois monitor obituary guest books to weed out inappropriate remarks.
By IAN URBINA
Published: November 5, 2006
EVANSTON, Ill. — Long-silent mistresses, disgruntled former employees, estranged family members — Katie Falzone has seen them all.
Enlarge This Image
Sally Ryan for The New York Times
Legacy, which gets more than six million visitors a month and one comment every five seconds, says it vets everything before it is posted.
They turn to the online guest books at the obituary Web site where she works, Legacy.com, to convey unflattering thoughts about the recently departed.
It is Ms. Falzone’s job to stop them.
In a room here full of glowing computer terminals and hushed conversations, she and 44 other screeners pore over the 18,000 notes sent daily about the newly deceased, hoping to catch the backhanded compliments, meanspirited innuendo and airing of dark family secrets.
Dissing the dead, as these screeners call it, has become a costly and complicated problem for Legacy and other Web sites where people gather to mourn online. Legacy, which is now eight years old, carries a death notice or obituary for virtually all the roughly 2.4 million people who die each year, but few foresaw how nasty some of the postings to its guest books would be.
Some of the snubs are blunt. “Everyone gets their due,” a former client writes of an embezzling accountant. Or, “I sincerely hope the Lord has more mercy on him than he had on me during my years reporting to him at the Welfare Department.”
Others are subtler: “She never took the time to meet me, but I understand she was a wonderful grandmother to her other grandchildren.”
for the rest of the piece log on here http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/05/us/05memorial.html?em&ex=1162962000&en=c9c67a442c99c551&ei=5087%0A
I'LL SOON BE ADDING JEROME WEEKS' FINE BOOKDADDY SITE TO MY LINKS--AS SOON AS I CAN FIGURE OUT HOW TO USE THE LINKS DIRECTIONS--HERE'S A SAMPLE--HIS TOP TEN LIST--YOU'LL HAVE TO LOG ON TO GET THE LIST ITSELF AT
http://www.artsjournal.com/bookdaddy/
« Wizardly | Main | This isn't going to be easy »
October 25, 2006
THRILLERS AND LISTS, the finale
Many readers will note (or "violently object to the fact") that on my Top 10 Favorite Literary Thrillers (see below), there's a passel of writers normally on such lists who don't appear here: Dennis Lehane, James Ellroy, James Lee Burke, George Pelecanos, Robert Parker, Michael Connelly.
A chief reason I have trouble with individual examples from these writers is their reliance on the exotic mastermind serial killer, a device to maintain suspense that is so overused the killer's knife hand must be tired by now from murdering every nubile young thing in sight. Even Thomas Harris should have retired Hannibal Lecter after Silence of the Lambs. His follow-up, Hannibal, was a complete botch, a dreadful book.
And the fact is that such serial killers are extremely rare; most are just pathetic screw-ups unable to relate to others without resorting to violence. What makes the serial killer novel worse is its reliance on that other cliche: the profiler or the brilliant detective who must steep himself in violence and madness to understand the killer's thinking and thus risk his own sanity. Again, a writer has to do something with style and voice or upending these conventions to keep me interested.
It has been so long since I read anything by Robert Parker; I could imagine including an early Spenser -- before Spenser's narrative voice became smug and self-satisfied. James Ellroy's hammer-handed, hard-boiled hipster jive drives me up a wall -- that and the fact that his books always seem to be on the verge of sheer hysteria as a way of keeping up interest/suspense. For someone so jaded, the narrator seems to be constantly screaming at us. James Lee Burke? Again, one of the earlier ones, if I re-read them and reminded myself why I once liked his books.
I would have to go back and re-read some of John D. McDonald, too, to find which one of his stands out, although everyone generally cites The Dreadful Lemon Sky. I happily chose Ross Macdonald's The Underground Man, but I could have picked half a dozen -- the quality of his Lew Archer novels was very high, very consistent. Instead of the aggressively hard-boiled wisecracker, Archer was an innovation among private eyes -- a world-weary guy but a thoroughly decent (not necessarily 'noble') man, a shrewd and sensitive listener, something of an apprentice shrink. This, and the fact that many of Archer's mysteries revolved around old family history and wounded psychology, were Macdonald's great advances in the hard-bitten form.
I admit to a twinge of white liberal guilt for not including a title by Chester Himes. But although I found his Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones novels highly entertaining, notably The Real Cool Killers and Cotton Comes to Harlem, they are far too cartoony-satiric for me to enjoy reading them again. Or taking them entirely seriously.
Much the same, by the way, goes for some of Elmore Leonard's later books. I've read every one of his books, admire many of them, but Get Shorty may have been his last fine one before his recent return to form with The Hot Kid. In between, the books had become mannered, the plots a little too obviously improvised and the characters, particularly the bad guys, too cute and dim.
I also admit to a twinge of white male guilt for not including a female writer/detective. Sara Paretsky's V. I. Warshawski has come the closest. Much of the hard-boiled form is akin to male sentimentality: "It's an evil world and a guy has to be tough to survive, but inside, beneath the wounds and bitterness, lies a noble heart," etc. For the male hard-boiled hero, the easy motivational/audience sympathy trigger is revenge -- which is why many second-rate writers race to 'make it personal.' The detective's helpless client or partner or love interest just happens to get murdered by this week's villain and so he takes on the case with righteous anger. Or the rampaging serial killer directs his taunts to the detective.
On the other hand, the form most readily available to female protagonists in an evil setting is the gothic -- the imperiled young woman. And the easy emotional trigger here is obvious: Put the detective herself in danger. This is why, I suspect, Patricia Cornwell -- whose work I dislike -- keeps getting her protagonist personally tangled up as a target. But if it's relatively unrealistic for a detective to be directly involved as an act of revenge, it's just as unrealistic (and tedious) to see the detective as always a potential victim. I'm still waiting for the great female hard-boiled noir heroine or author, and I'm willing to be convinced she's arrived . . . somewhere. Look at Patricia Highsmith, perhaps the closest thing the noir novel has to a female master -- and her greatest creation is Ripley, a morally ambiguous, cold-hearted male. A number of readers have already enthusiastically touted Denise Mina: I'll take a look.
As for the last inclusions: The other justification for such lists, after prompting debate, is getting readers intrigued by titles they may have never heard of, certainly never heard of in the same breath as such masters as Hammett and Macdonald. Clevenger's The Contortionist's Handbook and Garland's The Tesseract are both very intense, very spare, yet they do inventive things with point of view and time sequence, unfolding their narratives in ways that aren't just ingenious, they're often mind-bending. And Meek's The People's Act of Love is a dark, highly atmospheric marvel -- a historical novel set in Siberia at the end of the Russian Revolution, involving mystic cults, a trapped regiment of Czech soldiers and a possible madman. Enjoy.
In Online Mourning, Don’t Speak Ill of the Dead
Sally Ryan for The New York Times
Screeners for Legacy.com in Illinois monitor obituary guest books to weed out inappropriate remarks.
By IAN URBINA
Published: November 5, 2006
EVANSTON, Ill. — Long-silent mistresses, disgruntled former employees, estranged family members — Katie Falzone has seen them all.
Enlarge This Image
Sally Ryan for The New York Times
Legacy, which gets more than six million visitors a month and one comment every five seconds, says it vets everything before it is posted.
They turn to the online guest books at the obituary Web site where she works, Legacy.com, to convey unflattering thoughts about the recently departed.
It is Ms. Falzone’s job to stop them.
In a room here full of glowing computer terminals and hushed conversations, she and 44 other screeners pore over the 18,000 notes sent daily about the newly deceased, hoping to catch the backhanded compliments, meanspirited innuendo and airing of dark family secrets.
Dissing the dead, as these screeners call it, has become a costly and complicated problem for Legacy and other Web sites where people gather to mourn online. Legacy, which is now eight years old, carries a death notice or obituary for virtually all the roughly 2.4 million people who die each year, but few foresaw how nasty some of the postings to its guest books would be.
Some of the snubs are blunt. “Everyone gets their due,” a former client writes of an embezzling accountant. Or, “I sincerely hope the Lord has more mercy on him than he had on me during my years reporting to him at the Welfare Department.”
Others are subtler: “She never took the time to meet me, but I understand she was a wonderful grandmother to her other grandchildren.”
for the rest of the piece log on here http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/05/us/05memorial.html?em&ex=1162962000&en=c9c67a442c99c551&ei=5087%0A
I'LL SOON BE ADDING JEROME WEEKS' FINE BOOKDADDY SITE TO MY LINKS--AS SOON AS I CAN FIGURE OUT HOW TO USE THE LINKS DIRECTIONS--HERE'S A SAMPLE--HIS TOP TEN LIST--YOU'LL HAVE TO LOG ON TO GET THE LIST ITSELF AT
http://www.artsjournal.com/bookdaddy/
« Wizardly | Main | This isn't going to be easy »
October 25, 2006
THRILLERS AND LISTS, the finale
Many readers will note (or "violently object to the fact") that on my Top 10 Favorite Literary Thrillers (see below), there's a passel of writers normally on such lists who don't appear here: Dennis Lehane, James Ellroy, James Lee Burke, George Pelecanos, Robert Parker, Michael Connelly.
A chief reason I have trouble with individual examples from these writers is their reliance on the exotic mastermind serial killer, a device to maintain suspense that is so overused the killer's knife hand must be tired by now from murdering every nubile young thing in sight. Even Thomas Harris should have retired Hannibal Lecter after Silence of the Lambs. His follow-up, Hannibal, was a complete botch, a dreadful book.
And the fact is that such serial killers are extremely rare; most are just pathetic screw-ups unable to relate to others without resorting to violence. What makes the serial killer novel worse is its reliance on that other cliche: the profiler or the brilliant detective who must steep himself in violence and madness to understand the killer's thinking and thus risk his own sanity. Again, a writer has to do something with style and voice or upending these conventions to keep me interested.
It has been so long since I read anything by Robert Parker; I could imagine including an early Spenser -- before Spenser's narrative voice became smug and self-satisfied. James Ellroy's hammer-handed, hard-boiled hipster jive drives me up a wall -- that and the fact that his books always seem to be on the verge of sheer hysteria as a way of keeping up interest/suspense. For someone so jaded, the narrator seems to be constantly screaming at us. James Lee Burke? Again, one of the earlier ones, if I re-read them and reminded myself why I once liked his books.
I would have to go back and re-read some of John D. McDonald, too, to find which one of his stands out, although everyone generally cites The Dreadful Lemon Sky. I happily chose Ross Macdonald's The Underground Man, but I could have picked half a dozen -- the quality of his Lew Archer novels was very high, very consistent. Instead of the aggressively hard-boiled wisecracker, Archer was an innovation among private eyes -- a world-weary guy but a thoroughly decent (not necessarily 'noble') man, a shrewd and sensitive listener, something of an apprentice shrink. This, and the fact that many of Archer's mysteries revolved around old family history and wounded psychology, were Macdonald's great advances in the hard-bitten form.
I admit to a twinge of white liberal guilt for not including a title by Chester Himes. But although I found his Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones novels highly entertaining, notably The Real Cool Killers and Cotton Comes to Harlem, they are far too cartoony-satiric for me to enjoy reading them again. Or taking them entirely seriously.
Much the same, by the way, goes for some of Elmore Leonard's later books. I've read every one of his books, admire many of them, but Get Shorty may have been his last fine one before his recent return to form with The Hot Kid. In between, the books had become mannered, the plots a little too obviously improvised and the characters, particularly the bad guys, too cute and dim.
I also admit to a twinge of white male guilt for not including a female writer/detective. Sara Paretsky's V. I. Warshawski has come the closest. Much of the hard-boiled form is akin to male sentimentality: "It's an evil world and a guy has to be tough to survive, but inside, beneath the wounds and bitterness, lies a noble heart," etc. For the male hard-boiled hero, the easy motivational/audience sympathy trigger is revenge -- which is why many second-rate writers race to 'make it personal.' The detective's helpless client or partner or love interest just happens to get murdered by this week's villain and so he takes on the case with righteous anger. Or the rampaging serial killer directs his taunts to the detective.
On the other hand, the form most readily available to female protagonists in an evil setting is the gothic -- the imperiled young woman. And the easy emotional trigger here is obvious: Put the detective herself in danger. This is why, I suspect, Patricia Cornwell -- whose work I dislike -- keeps getting her protagonist personally tangled up as a target. But if it's relatively unrealistic for a detective to be directly involved as an act of revenge, it's just as unrealistic (and tedious) to see the detective as always a potential victim. I'm still waiting for the great female hard-boiled noir heroine or author, and I'm willing to be convinced she's arrived . . . somewhere. Look at Patricia Highsmith, perhaps the closest thing the noir novel has to a female master -- and her greatest creation is Ripley, a morally ambiguous, cold-hearted male. A number of readers have already enthusiastically touted Denise Mina: I'll take a look.
As for the last inclusions: The other justification for such lists, after prompting debate, is getting readers intrigued by titles they may have never heard of, certainly never heard of in the same breath as such masters as Hammett and Macdonald. Clevenger's The Contortionist's Handbook and Garland's The Tesseract are both very intense, very spare, yet they do inventive things with point of view and time sequence, unfolding their narratives in ways that aren't just ingenious, they're often mind-bending. And Meek's The People's Act of Love is a dark, highly atmospheric marvel -- a historical novel set in Siberia at the end of the Russian Revolution, involving mystic cults, a trapped regiment of Czech soldiers and a possible madman. Enjoy.
Monday, November 06, 2006
CSI:1600; Norm Partidge
New World Explorers Sought to Explain Death
By David Chanatry
Special to The Washington Post
Monday, November 6, 2006; Page A12
In June 1604, fur traders led by Samuel de Champlain and Pierre Dugua found a site they thought would be ideal for the first settlement in New France. The tiny island in the middle of the St. Croix River, now part of Maine's Acadia National Park, had high bluffs and a clear view downriver to watch for their English rivals.
But winter that year came early and hard, and St. Croix Island proved to be a prison. The men were stuck, trapped by dangerous ice floes moving on the tremendous tides from the nearby Bay of Fundy. By February, they began to die of scurvy; in all, 35 of 79 colonists perished.
Forensic anthropologists have unearthed a skull that is the earliest known physical evidence of an autopsy in the New World, performed on a French settler who fell victim to scurvy in 1605.
The disease was known, but not its cause. In his desperation to find
out what was happening to his men, Champlain took the unusual step of ordering autopsies.
"We could find no remedies to cure these maladies," Champlain wrote in his memoirs in 1613. "We opened several of them to determine the cause of their illness."
Now forensic anthropologists studying the St. Croix burial ground have found a cranium with the skullcap cleanly sawed off, along with shallow cut marks they say would have been made by the expedition's barber-surgeon while removing the scalp. Although there are written records of earlier autopsies by European settlers in the New World, the St. Croix find is the earliest skeletal evidence of one.
"It's the holy grail for a forensic physical anthropologist or historical archaeologist to find this kind of evidence" said Thomas Crist of Utica College, the lead anthropologist on the team that re-excavated the site in 2003. "It just doesn't happen every day."
for the rest of the article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/05/AR2006110500765.html
FROM NORM PARTRIDGE
(Norm was just informed that his new novel has been selected as a PW Best Book of The Year. PW said:" Dark Harvest
Norman Partridge (Cemetery Dance) Set on Halloween night in 1963 in Anytown, U.S.A., this dark fantasy and coming-of-age parable holds its own with the best of contemporary American writing."
Norma responding to my take on Bill Pronzini's suggestion that non star writers are th equivalent of character actors--and my statement on how desperate things are getting for mid-listers in the business:
Norm:
Ed: Bill Pronzini once wisely said that all of us who aren’t stars are the character actors of the writing business. If we’re lucky and good enough we rise to the level of a Robert Duvall as a character actor. We can make a book a lot more interesting just by our slant on things.
Norm: Hadn't thought of it that way, but I really think that's true... and it may be the secret to having a career at all anymore.
What I notice about a lot of the guys who do get the big NY deal isn't any prettier, though. Most of those books never earn out, and then it's kind of a "one and done" situation. And with the guys who've been toiling for years in the ranks, you keep hoping they'll get a publisher behind one of their books and turn the corner to stardom, the way Bronson did in Hollywood after years of being a dependable character guy. Doesn't seem to happen anymore, tho. Guys in NY are just like guys in Hollywood. They want the blockbuster.
Ed: But the market is so bad we’re really functioning the way actors do today. We have to audition in ways we’ve never had to before. At least some of us. I remember that DeNiro wanted Charles Grodin for Midnight Run. Grodin (despite DeNiro’s angry objections) had to audition thee fing times. Can you imagine that picture without Charles Grodin in it? But he wasn’t bankable they said and so they put him through what to me was a pretty humiliating process.
Norm: Yep. I know you never go to conventions, Ed, but the last one I went to? Man. Desperation of the tangible variety whenever a NY editor walked into the room. It weren't a pretty sight.
By David Chanatry
Special to The Washington Post
Monday, November 6, 2006; Page A12
In June 1604, fur traders led by Samuel de Champlain and Pierre Dugua found a site they thought would be ideal for the first settlement in New France. The tiny island in the middle of the St. Croix River, now part of Maine's Acadia National Park, had high bluffs and a clear view downriver to watch for their English rivals.
But winter that year came early and hard, and St. Croix Island proved to be a prison. The men were stuck, trapped by dangerous ice floes moving on the tremendous tides from the nearby Bay of Fundy. By February, they began to die of scurvy; in all, 35 of 79 colonists perished.
Forensic anthropologists have unearthed a skull that is the earliest known physical evidence of an autopsy in the New World, performed on a French settler who fell victim to scurvy in 1605.
The disease was known, but not its cause. In his desperation to find
out what was happening to his men, Champlain took the unusual step of ordering autopsies.
"We could find no remedies to cure these maladies," Champlain wrote in his memoirs in 1613. "We opened several of them to determine the cause of their illness."
Now forensic anthropologists studying the St. Croix burial ground have found a cranium with the skullcap cleanly sawed off, along with shallow cut marks they say would have been made by the expedition's barber-surgeon while removing the scalp. Although there are written records of earlier autopsies by European settlers in the New World, the St. Croix find is the earliest skeletal evidence of one.
"It's the holy grail for a forensic physical anthropologist or historical archaeologist to find this kind of evidence" said Thomas Crist of Utica College, the lead anthropologist on the team that re-excavated the site in 2003. "It just doesn't happen every day."
for the rest of the article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/05/AR2006110500765.html
FROM NORM PARTRIDGE
(Norm was just informed that his new novel has been selected as a PW Best Book of The Year. PW said:" Dark Harvest
Norman Partridge (Cemetery Dance) Set on Halloween night in 1963 in Anytown, U.S.A., this dark fantasy and coming-of-age parable holds its own with the best of contemporary American writing."
Norma responding to my take on Bill Pronzini's suggestion that non star writers are th equivalent of character actors--and my statement on how desperate things are getting for mid-listers in the business:
Norm:
Ed: Bill Pronzini once wisely said that all of us who aren’t stars are the character actors of the writing business. If we’re lucky and good enough we rise to the level of a Robert Duvall as a character actor. We can make a book a lot more interesting just by our slant on things.
Norm: Hadn't thought of it that way, but I really think that's true... and it may be the secret to having a career at all anymore.
What I notice about a lot of the guys who do get the big NY deal isn't any prettier, though. Most of those books never earn out, and then it's kind of a "one and done" situation. And with the guys who've been toiling for years in the ranks, you keep hoping they'll get a publisher behind one of their books and turn the corner to stardom, the way Bronson did in Hollywood after years of being a dependable character guy. Doesn't seem to happen anymore, tho. Guys in NY are just like guys in Hollywood. They want the blockbuster.
Ed: But the market is so bad we’re really functioning the way actors do today. We have to audition in ways we’ve never had to before. At least some of us. I remember that DeNiro wanted Charles Grodin for Midnight Run. Grodin (despite DeNiro’s angry objections) had to audition thee fing times. Can you imagine that picture without Charles Grodin in it? But he wasn’t bankable they said and so they put him through what to me was a pretty humiliating process.
Norm: Yep. I know you never go to conventions, Ed, but the last one I went to? Man. Desperation of the tangible variety whenever a NY editor walked into the room. It weren't a pretty sight.
Sunday, November 05, 2006
Women at fault; Sore loser; Buster Keaton; Nelson Bond
The InHuman Comedy
I’m not sayin that bitch is TOTALLY responsible but…
(Huffington Post)
Pastor Driscoll blames Pastor Ted Haggard’s WIFE for Haggard’s indiscretion:
Writing in his personal blog, Driscoll offers his fellow pastors "some practical suggestions" on how to avoid the type of temptation that consumed Pastor Haggard. And near the top of his list?
"Most pastors I know do not have satisfying, free, sexual conversations and liberties with their wives. At the risk of being even more widely despised than I currently am, I will lean over the plate and take one for the team on this. It is not uncommon to meet pastors' wives who really let themselves go; they sometimes feel that because their husband is a pastor, he is therefore trapped into fidelity, which gives them cause for laziness. A wife who lets herself go and is not sexually available to her husband in the ways that the Song of Songs is so frank about is not responsible for her husband's sin, but she may not be helping him either."
I remember when Tony Bennett did this to Andy Williams in `63
(From the AP)
COPENHAGEN, Denmark Rap star Kanye West was named Best Hip Hop artist but still came off as a sore loser at the MTV Europe Music Awards.
Kanye apparently was so disappointed at not winning for Best Video that he crashed the stage Thursday in Copenhagen when the award was being presented to Justice and Simian for "We Are Your Friends."
In a tirade riddled with expletives, Kanye said he should have won the prize for his video "Touch The Sky," because it "cost a million dollars, Pamela Anderson was in it. I was jumping across canyons."
"If I don't win, the awards show loses credibility," Kanye said.
The rapper grabbed the Best Hip Hop award earlier in the night in a star-studded event hosted by Justin Timberlake in the Danish capital.
Good Folks
I salute Mark Evanier and News From Me
Mark has one of the three or four best blogs of any kind on the web. His subject is generally show biz in all its aspects.
Here he’s found some Buster Keaton commercials from the Fifties. These are sensational. As a major Keaton fan (a far more important comedian-director than Chaplin, in my book—but then I like Harold Lloyd more than I do Chaplin anyway)
http://www.newsfromme.com
Mark:
I could watch Buster Keaton in anything...though some of the work he did late in his career makes that rather difficult. Not so with a batch of Alka-Seltzer commercials he did in 1958 and 1959, when he was in his early sixties. Your link today will show you six of them in a row, and the best one is the last of the six.
The first five also feature the voice work of Dick Beals, who has been mentioned before on this weblog...here, for instance. And here and here and a few other times, to boot. Dick is still working and still sounds just like he did then when he did the voice of Speedy Alka-Seltzer and every adolescent boy in all of animation. He and Buster make a great team, as you'll see. And doesn't Buster have the perfect face to be selling an antacid?
------------------------
From Locus:
SF/fantasy writer Nelson S. Bond, born 1908, died today at the age of 97 following complications from heart valve problems. He sold stories beginning in 1935, writing extensively for Amazing Stories, Fantastic Adventures, Weird Tales, and other magazines. His books include collections The Remarkable Exploits of Lancelot Biggs, Spaceman (1950), Mr. Mergenthwirker's Lobblies and Other Fantastic Tales (1946), Nightmares and Daydreams (1968), and Other Worlds Than Ours (2005), and he published one novel, Exiles of Time (1949). He was a rare book dealer for several decades, and was named Author Emeritus by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 1998.
Ed:
Carol and I had a fine fun dinner with Al (Max) and Barb Collins Friday night. Abut the time we were wrapping up, Al and I started talking about how full-time midlist book writers like us would soon be no more. The exception will likely be romance. I think that’s become a staple by now.
The generations coming up now (my son is 40, Al’s is 22) have video games, graphic novels, anime etc. and etc. to sustain themselves as writers and creators. Those fields ain’t exactly looking for 60 year olds.
I was reminded of this when I saw the Nelson Bond obit in Locus the other day. This guy sold fiction from 1935 through 2005. And supported himself. He was one of the few who survived the death of the pulps and moved smoothly (or so it appeared) into paperback originals.
A very snotty guy I had the misfortune of knowing once said of a Rex Stout novel he’d read, “Of course, this isn’t literature it’s show biz.”
I basically told him to fuck off, something I’d wanted to do for a long time. But years later I ‘ve come to think he’s right about the context we work in. Most literary writers have teaching jobs to support them. And/or grants. But popular fiction full-timers live and die by the market. So in that sense it is show-biz.
Bill Pronzini once wisely said that all of us who aren’t stars are the character actors of the writing business. If we’re lucky and good enough we rise to the level of a Robert Duvall as a character actor. We can make a book a lot more interesting just by our slant on things.
But the market is so bad we’re really functioning the way actors do today. We have to audition in ways we’ve never had to before. At least some of us. I remember that DeNiro wanted Charles Grodin for Midnight Run. Grodin (despite DeNiro’s angry objections) had to audition thee fing times. Can you imagine that picture without Charles Grodin in it? But he wasn’t bankable they said and so they put him through what to me was a pretty humiliating process.
I say this because a friend of mine who had three NY Times bestsellers was told by his publisher that he’d have to write his next novel completely before they’d look at it. A full ms. With no guarantee they’d buy it.
Nelson Bond, you were a man among. So long, friend.
I’m not sayin that bitch is TOTALLY responsible but…
(Huffington Post)
Pastor Driscoll blames Pastor Ted Haggard’s WIFE for Haggard’s indiscretion:
Writing in his personal blog, Driscoll offers his fellow pastors "some practical suggestions" on how to avoid the type of temptation that consumed Pastor Haggard. And near the top of his list?
"Most pastors I know do not have satisfying, free, sexual conversations and liberties with their wives. At the risk of being even more widely despised than I currently am, I will lean over the plate and take one for the team on this. It is not uncommon to meet pastors' wives who really let themselves go; they sometimes feel that because their husband is a pastor, he is therefore trapped into fidelity, which gives them cause for laziness. A wife who lets herself go and is not sexually available to her husband in the ways that the Song of Songs is so frank about is not responsible for her husband's sin, but she may not be helping him either."
I remember when Tony Bennett did this to Andy Williams in `63
(From the AP)
COPENHAGEN, Denmark Rap star Kanye West was named Best Hip Hop artist but still came off as a sore loser at the MTV Europe Music Awards.
Kanye apparently was so disappointed at not winning for Best Video that he crashed the stage Thursday in Copenhagen when the award was being presented to Justice and Simian for "We Are Your Friends."
In a tirade riddled with expletives, Kanye said he should have won the prize for his video "Touch The Sky," because it "cost a million dollars, Pamela Anderson was in it. I was jumping across canyons."
"If I don't win, the awards show loses credibility," Kanye said.
The rapper grabbed the Best Hip Hop award earlier in the night in a star-studded event hosted by Justin Timberlake in the Danish capital.
Good Folks
I salute Mark Evanier and News From Me
Mark has one of the three or four best blogs of any kind on the web. His subject is generally show biz in all its aspects.
Here he’s found some Buster Keaton commercials from the Fifties. These are sensational. As a major Keaton fan (a far more important comedian-director than Chaplin, in my book—but then I like Harold Lloyd more than I do Chaplin anyway)
http://www.newsfromme.com
Mark:
I could watch Buster Keaton in anything...though some of the work he did late in his career makes that rather difficult. Not so with a batch of Alka-Seltzer commercials he did in 1958 and 1959, when he was in his early sixties. Your link today will show you six of them in a row, and the best one is the last of the six.
The first five also feature the voice work of Dick Beals, who has been mentioned before on this weblog...here, for instance. And here and here and a few other times, to boot. Dick is still working and still sounds just like he did then when he did the voice of Speedy Alka-Seltzer and every adolescent boy in all of animation. He and Buster make a great team, as you'll see. And doesn't Buster have the perfect face to be selling an antacid?
------------------------
From Locus:
SF/fantasy writer Nelson S. Bond, born 1908, died today at the age of 97 following complications from heart valve problems. He sold stories beginning in 1935, writing extensively for Amazing Stories, Fantastic Adventures, Weird Tales, and other magazines. His books include collections The Remarkable Exploits of Lancelot Biggs, Spaceman (1950), Mr. Mergenthwirker's Lobblies and Other Fantastic Tales (1946), Nightmares and Daydreams (1968), and Other Worlds Than Ours (2005), and he published one novel, Exiles of Time (1949). He was a rare book dealer for several decades, and was named Author Emeritus by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 1998.
Ed:
Carol and I had a fine fun dinner with Al (Max) and Barb Collins Friday night. Abut the time we were wrapping up, Al and I started talking about how full-time midlist book writers like us would soon be no more. The exception will likely be romance. I think that’s become a staple by now.
The generations coming up now (my son is 40, Al’s is 22) have video games, graphic novels, anime etc. and etc. to sustain themselves as writers and creators. Those fields ain’t exactly looking for 60 year olds.
I was reminded of this when I saw the Nelson Bond obit in Locus the other day. This guy sold fiction from 1935 through 2005. And supported himself. He was one of the few who survived the death of the pulps and moved smoothly (or so it appeared) into paperback originals.
A very snotty guy I had the misfortune of knowing once said of a Rex Stout novel he’d read, “Of course, this isn’t literature it’s show biz.”
I basically told him to fuck off, something I’d wanted to do for a long time. But years later I ‘ve come to think he’s right about the context we work in. Most literary writers have teaching jobs to support them. And/or grants. But popular fiction full-timers live and die by the market. So in that sense it is show-biz.
Bill Pronzini once wisely said that all of us who aren’t stars are the character actors of the writing business. If we’re lucky and good enough we rise to the level of a Robert Duvall as a character actor. We can make a book a lot more interesting just by our slant on things.
But the market is so bad we’re really functioning the way actors do today. We have to audition in ways we’ve never had to before. At least some of us. I remember that DeNiro wanted Charles Grodin for Midnight Run. Grodin (despite DeNiro’s angry objections) had to audition thee fing times. Can you imagine that picture without Charles Grodin in it? But he wasn’t bankable they said and so they put him through what to me was a pretty humiliating process.
I say this because a friend of mine who had three NY Times bestsellers was told by his publisher that he’d have to write his next novel completely before they’d look at it. A full ms. With no guarantee they’d buy it.
Nelson Bond, you were a man among. So long, friend.
Saturday, November 04, 2006
Howdy
Back in business again. Will be posting most if not all nights. Subjects will be defined by whim--whatever interests me on a given day. Will do my best to avoid politics. Lots of other sites cover that gnarly subject better than I do.--Ed
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