Saturday, January 25, 2014
Robert J Randisi joins Piccadilly Publishing
Robert J Randisi joins Piccadilly Publishing
This is exciting news!
We have obtained the electronic books rights to the first twelve GIANT GUNSMITH novels Robert wrote as J.R. Roberts. They will be released with specially-commissioned covers by Tony Masero (the Searcher, The Sergeant and Herne the Hunter).
We are so thrilled that Robert, who has a prestigious track record, has allowed us to bring back this wonderful series.
Robert says: "I'm very excited to have Piccadilly Publishing bringing the first twelve Giant Gunsmith books to a new audience. And, hopefully, some of Clint Adams' old readers will want these new electronic editions, as well. And to think they'll have Tony Masero covers just adds to the excitement."
Clint Adams, The Gunsmith #1 Trouble in Tombstone will be released on May 1 2014 with forthcoming titles published every two months.
This is exciting news!
We have obtained the electronic books rights to the first twelve GIANT GUNSMITH novels Robert wrote as J.R. Roberts. They will be released with specially-commissioned covers by Tony Masero (the Searcher, The Sergeant and Herne the Hunter).
We are so thrilled that Robert, who has a prestigious track record, has allowed us to bring back this wonderful series.
Robert says: "I'm very excited to have Piccadilly Publishing bringing the first twelve Giant Gunsmith books to a new audience. And, hopefully, some of Clint Adams' old readers will want these new electronic editions, as well. And to think they'll have Tony Masero covers just adds to the excitement."
Clint Adams, The Gunsmith #1 Trouble in Tombstone will be released on May 1 2014 with forthcoming titles published every two months.
Doc Savage: Phantom Lagoon -- Will Murray
In Murray's novel, Hornetta is rescued from an otherwise deserted Caribbean island. She gets to New York, where she tries to hire Doc Savage. Doc doesn't work for hire, but Hornetta's presence brings down serious trouble, with the bad guys pretty much wiping out Doc's headquarters in the Empire State Building and his Hidalgo Trading Company warehouse. Then Hornetta tries to kidnap Doc, Ham, and Monk, all the while refusing to tell them why she was on the island and what's going on, other than that it's of world-shaking importance.
It's all action all the time, and as you can see from the cover of the book, Doc gets involved with some odd-looking creations when he finally does arrive at the titular lagoon. Will Murray has the Lester Dent style down pat, and he captures the spirit of the original stories perfectly. Doc Savage fans will eat this one up and be ready for more.
Ireland?
Historians Face Off: Where Is Cowboy Ground Zero?: Most of us agree the American Cowboy was born somewhere in Texas but metaphorically speaking, where were his parents from? If we ride the backtrail in search of the origins of that legendary breed of horsemen where would that trail lead us? Three passionate historians, Lee Anderson, Alan Huffines and Stuart Rosebrook make their case for the true location of Cowboy Ground Zero.
Free for Kindle for a Limited Time
Amazon.com: Saturday's Child: A Cal Innes Novel eBook: Ray Banks: Kindle Store: The first novel in Ray Banks's highly acclaimed Cal Innes series. Cal Innes is fresh out of Strangeways, playing PI and running from a past muddied with ties to local ganglord Uncle Morris Tiernan. When Tiernan tells him to track down a rogue casino dealer who's absconded with a hefty chunk of cash, Innes is thrust into a cat-and-mouse game with Tiernan's psychotic son. Finding the thief proves potentially fatal as the case points north to Newcastle and the sordid truth threatens to put blood on his hands. With Tiernan's son on his tail, and a Manchester cop determined to put Innes back on the spurs, Saturday's child definitely has to work hard to keep living.
Debut Novels from Literary Legends
AbeBooks: Before They Were Famous: Debut Novels from Literary Legends: J.D. Salinger, William Golding, J.R.R. Tolkien and Ian Fleming are some of the biggest names in the literary world. Salinger caught the attention of an entire generation with The Catcher in the Rye in 1951, while Golding made a name for himself with Lord of the Flies in 1954. Tolkien launched into a life of fame with the release of The Hobbit in 1937, and Fleming introduced the world's most famous spy in 1953 when he published Casino Royale. While the stories are vastly different from one another, they do have one thing in common - they are all debut novels and arguably their author’s best known work.
Friday, January 24, 2014
Pimpage: An Occasional Feature in Which I call Attention to Books of Interest
Eliot Ness Update from Max Allan Collins
They Should Name A Building For Him | Max Allan Collins: Recently U.S. Senators Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) proposed naming the Washington headquarters of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives after Eliot Ness, leader of the famed "Untouchables."
FFB: 5th Annual Edition The Year's Best S-F -- Judith Merril, Editor
At some point Judith Merril's anthologies originated in hardback, but they were reprinted by Dell, where the series started. This one is typical in that Merril didn't confine herself to looking for stories in the usual suspects and in fact didn't confine herself to fiction. A John W. Campbell editorial and a newspaper article are included.I read a lot of these stories when they were first published, and it's surprising how much of them I remembered when I started rereading them. Some of them seem just as fresh now as they did 50-something years ago, though of course some are quite dated. I'm pretty sure Jack Finney couldn't get away with "The Other Wife" now, though in 1960 it was published in The Saturday Evening Post, which in those days must have sold well into the millions of copies. Time changes everything.
"Make a Prison" is, I believe, Lawrence Block's only SF story. It's short and clever, but it has a point to make. So do a lot of these stories, and I suspect many of you are familiar with them. "Flowers for Algernon," for example, and "The Man Who Lost the Sea." I'm a Clifford D. Simak fan, so of course I liked "A Death in the House," which is a bit different from some of his work, but still the same in others. And Leiber's "Mariana" is another good one. Well, they're all good.
And then there are Merril's introductions to the stories, which are distinguished by the strength of her animus for Kingsley Amis, whose New Maps of Hell had recently been published. She makes many catty remarks about him as she goes along.
Copies of the book are available cheap from the usual Internet sources if you want to read some of the good old stuff.
CONTENTS: “Introduction” by Judith Merril;
“The Handler” by Damon Knight (1960);
“The Other Wife” by Jack Finney (1960);
“No Fire Burns” by Avram Davidson (1959);
“No, No, Not Rogov!” by Cordwainer Smith (1958);
“Shoreline at Sunset” by Ray Bradbury (1959); “The Dreamsman” by Gordon R. Dickson (1959);
“Multum in Parvo” by Jack Sharkey (1959);
“Flowers for Algernon” by Daniel Keyes (1959);
“’What Do You Mean...Human?’” by John W. Campbell, Jr. (1959);
“Sierra Sam” by Ralph Dighton (1960);
“A Death in the House” by Clifford D. Simak (1959);
“Mariana” by Fritz Leiber (1960);
“An Inquiry Concerning the Curvature of the Earth’s Surface” by Roger Price (1958);
“Day at the Beach” by Carol Emshwiller (1959);
“Hot Argument” by Randall Garrett (1959);
“What the Left Hand Was Doing” by Darrel T. Langart (1960);
“The Sound-Sweep” by J. G. Ballard (1960);
“Plenitude” by Will Worthington (1959);
“The Man Who Lost the Sea” by Theodore Sturgeon (1959);
“Make a Prison” by Lawrence Block (1958);
“What Now, Little Man?” by Mark Clifton (1959);
“Me” by Hilbert Schenck, Jr. (1959);
“The Year’s S-F: A Summary and Honorable Mentions” by Judith Merril.
Thursday, January 23, 2014
“Cold in July”: Michael C. Hall’s unforgettable Texas thriller
“Cold in July”: Michael C. Hall’s unforgettable Texas thriller: Built around nifty yin-yang paired performances by Michael C. Hall and Sam Shepard, along with a huge comic-relief assist from Don Johnson and his fire-engine red Caddy, “Cold in July” is tense, gripping, gruesome, often hilarious, brilliantly engineered and highly satisfying.
First It Was the Thin Mints Melee
Live5News.com: Upstate woman stabbed by co-worker during argument over hog stomachs
Las Vegas Leads the Way
Machine gun tourism in Sin City: Irwin and his 40-plus employees sell packages, ranging in price from $100 to $1,000, for bachelor parties and even weddings. The range has a wedding chapel, and one of his staffers is an ordained minister.
I Was Going to Post This Yesterday, but I Forgot
UPI.com: Gender differences found in memory; men have more problems remembering
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
How Apple's '1984' Ad Was Almost Canceled
How Apple's '1984' Ad Was Almost Canceled: Thirty years ago today, Apple defined the Super Bowl Commercial as a cultural phenomenon. Prior to Super Bowl XVIII, nobody watched the game "just for the commercials" -- but one epic TV spot, directed by sci-fi legend Ridley Scott, changed all that. Read on for the inside story of the commercial that rocked the world of advertising, even though Apple's Board of Directors didn't want to run it at all.
I Want to Believe!
Brains of elderly slow because they know so much: The brains of older people only appear to slow down because they have so much information to compute, much like a full-up hard drive, scientists believe.
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
A Charity Anthology for a Very Worthy Cause
Amazon.com: Iron Head & Other Stories (Fight Card) eBook: Jack Tunney, Paul Bishop, Jeremy L. C. Jones, Jory Sherman: Kindle Store Fight Card Presents: Iron Head & Other Stories is the first in a series of charity anthologies from the Fight Card authors cooperative – a writers community featuring many of today’s finest fictioneers, including Jory Sherman, Ryan McFadden, Mark Finn, Troy D. Smith, Ed Greenwood, Jack Badelaire, James Scott Bell, James Hopwood, Bowie V. Ibarra, and Matthew Pizzolato. Compiled by Paul Bishop and Jeremy L. C. Jones, 100% of the proceeds from these anthologies will go directly to an author-in-need (in this case, revered western writer Jory Sherman) or a literacy charity. Words on paper are the life blood of a writer. The writers in this volume were willing to bleed in order to give a transfusion to one of their own – and then continue to bleed to give a transfusion to literacy charities in support of that most precious of commodities ... readers. They are true fighters, every one ...
It's a Dead Man Serial!
Sarah Marshall, R. I. P.
Deadline.com: The British actress was a familiar face on TV and on Broadway during the 1950s and early ’60s, earning a Tony nom for her supporting role in 1959’s Goodbye, Charlie. Sarah Marshall died Saturday of cancer in Los Angeles. She was 80.
Get Your Copies Now!
Overlooked Movies -- Love at First Bite
The movie provides by far the best role ever for Susan St. James' hair. Check out the trailer down below. As for St. James herself, she's very good. I liked her in the TV series McMillan and Wife, and I liked her even better in this movie. Richard Benjamin was hilarious in one of my favorite TV shows, He and She, and he's even funnier here. I crack up just thinking about some of his scenes in this movie.
The setting is the late '70s. If you think times haven't changed, just watch the film. It should be shown in classes on cultural history. I've seen it several times, and I'd watch it again in a heartbeat.
Monday, January 20, 2014
The Country I Lived In -- Boston Teran
Nobody seems to know who Boston Teran is or whether the name is a pen name. Not that it matters. It's the books that count, and many will remember Teran's impressive first novel, God is a Bullet, and The Country I Lived In is cut from the same cloth. It's hard, fast, and lean.The book is set in 1955, so I'm predisposed to like it, what with the period details. My kind of music. But it's a lot more than the surface details. There's a great conspiracy plot, and it involves some real historical spooks whose names you might recognize.
The protagonist is John Rawbone Lourdes, son and grandson of Texas gunmen (in one way or another) and a Korean war vet who's on his way to visit a friend in Laredo, Texas, at the friend's request. When he arrives, the friend has been murdered. Lourdes is involved whether he wants to be or not. He begins looking for the truth, a search that leads him deep into Mexico and into involvement with a beautiful woman and violent men bent on stopping him. The violence in the book isn't frequent, but when it comes, it comes down hard. Teran is very good at writing about it, so it's harsh and effective.
What is a man's country, really, and to what does he owe his ultimate loyalty? Lourdes is looking for the answers to those questions as well as a lot of others. Fans of hardboiled fiction are going to root for him to find them. Read the book for yourself to see if he does. It's a trip worth taking.
So You Want to Be a Rich & Famous Writer?
Most writers earn less than £600 a year, survey reveals: Figures show the vast majority of authors, both traditionally and self-published, are struggling to make a living from their work
New Poem at The 5-2
The 5-2 | Crime Poetry Weekly, Annual Ebooks - Gerald So, Editor: William G. Rector
ADVICE FOR THE MODERN MASS KILLER
Uh-Oh
NBC orders 'Wizard of Oz'-based drama: Based on the 14-book series that first created the Land of Oz, Emerald City is further described as a “dramatic and modern re-imagining of the tales that include lethal warriors, competing kingdoms, and the infamous wizard as we’ve never seen him before.” The project stars a “head-strong 20-year-old Dorothy Gale” who is “unwittingly sent on an eye-opening journey that thrusts her into the center of an epic and bloody battle for the control of Oz.” Writer Matt Arnold and Josh Friedman will serve as executive producers.
Sunday, January 19, 2014
Pimpage: An Occasional Feature in Which I call Attention to Books of Interest
Amazon.com: Hollow Road eBook: Troy D. Smith: Kindle StoreA chilling story of love and terror… Tom Jarvis felt certain that no man had ever loved a woman as deeply, as truly, as fully, as he loved his wife. Marcia had found him just as he was losing himself, and pulled him back from the precipice. Their years together were not just the best years of his life, they were the only years of his life, because his world had begun with her smile.
This is why Tom’s decision had been so long in coming. Marcia had been dead for over six months before Tom finally—reluctantly—admitted to himself that he was going to have to kill her.
PaperBack
John Wyndham (John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Benyon Harris), The Midwich Cuckoos, Ballantine, 1966
It's the Birthday of Edgar Allan Poe
The Raven (excerpt) by Edgar Allan Poe | The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor: Today is the birthday of Edgar Allan Poe (books by this author), born in Boston, Massachusetts (1809). His poem "The Raven" is one of his best-known works, and it is also one of the most popular poems in the English language. Even people who have no interest in poetry can usually recite a line or two. It's narrated by a studious young man who is mourning the loss of his lover, Lenore. When a talking raven visits him on a bleak December night, we follow his descent from amusement into madness. At the time he was writing the poem, Poe's young wife, Virginia, was slowly dying of tuberculosis. Poe may have gotten the idea for a talking raven from a Dickens novel: Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty (1841). There was a talking raven in the Dickens book too, but it didn't bear much resemblance to the sinister bird of Poe's poem.
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