Saturday, February 01, 2014
Maximilian Schell, R. I. P.
ABC News: Austrian-born actor Maximilian Schell, a fugitive from Adolf Hitler who became a Hollywood favorite and won an Oscar for his role as a defense attorney in "Judgment at Nuremberg," has died. He was 83.
Arthur Rankin Jr., R. I. P.
Animation Legend Arthur Rankin Jr. Dies at 89: Arthur Rankin Jr., the animator, producer and director behind the whimsical holiday stop-motion TV specials Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Frosty the Snowman, has died. He was 89.
Hat tip to Doc Quatermass.
Hat tip to Doc Quatermass.
Gary Arlington, R. I. P.
Gary Arlington, a Force in Underground Comic Books, Is Dead at 75 - NYTimes.com: Gary Arlington, who died this month at 75, did not open the San Francisco Comic Book Company because he wanted to create a place where the city’s underground comic artists could meet to mine one another’s unusual minds. He really just needed money, and he hoped to make some by selling thousands of comic books he had been hoarding in his parents’ basement since he was a little boy.
Hat tip to Jeff Meyerson.
Hat tip to Jeff Meyerson.
Friday, January 31, 2014
It's not a movie. It's a novel.
Amazon.com: Sharcano (Sharkpocalypse #1) eBook: Jose Prendes: Kindle Store: A burnt and half-eaten megalodon shark corpse is found beached. A priest commits suicide. A previously unknown volcano rises from the China Sea and brings about a tsunami that destroys Shanghai. Yellowstone erupts after 640,000 years of silence. A pit in Nicaragua known as the "mouth of hell" begins violently spewing lava. When reporter Mick Cathcart and marine biologist Agnes Brach set out looking for answers, they never expected to stumble upon the biblical end times. Yet when sharks made of molten magma start erupting from the volcanoes to devour everything and everyone in their way, how could they deny it?
With the help of a beleaguered priest and a billionaire industrialist, Mick and Agnes scramble to extinguish the volcanoes and blow away the lava sharks before the whole world burns to a cinder.
Hat tip to Mel Odom.
Here's the Plot for Your Next Grisly Dismemberment Thriller
thetimesherald.com: Police are looking for a woman in connection with the grisly discovery Thursday afternoon of multiple bags containing human body parts scattered along snowy roads in St. Clair Township.
Free for Kindle for a Limited Time
PaperBack
+Phantom+Lady+Dell+1957+1.JPG)
+Phantom+Lady+Dell+1957.JPG)
William Irish (Cornell Woolrich), Phantom Lady (#10 of the Dell Great Mystery Library), Dell, 1957
FFB: Son of Fletch -- Gregory Mcdonald
A while back I mentioned running across three books by Gregory Mcdonald in a thrift shop. Two of them were about a young man named Skylar, and I commented on them here and here. The third book was Son of Fletch. I read it when it came out, about 20 years ago, and as is sometimes the case, the more I reread, the more I remembered. I always hoped that the later books about Fletch would recapture some of the snap and excitement of the earliest ones, but they never quite did. I can't explain why, since they still have some of the same qualities , the snappy dialogue, the interesting characters, the clever plots. But for me something is missing. It's like hearing the cover version of a favorite song. Same words, same melody, but it's not the same. Maybe it's just me.
In this one, a young man shows up at Fletch's house and claims he's Fletch's son, whose name is Jack Faoni. He also claims that he's just escaped from a nearby prison, along with three other men, all of them very bad. His own crime was trying to shoot a cop. Or so he says. After all, if he's Fletch's son, he might have his father's disregard for the truth.
Fletch goes along for the ride (literally and figuratively) and finds himself mixed up with a bunch of neo-nazi racists, and as so often happens in Mcdonald's books, things turn very dark. There's always an interesting contrast between the light and breezy style of the books and some of the content, and that adds to their interest.
If you've never read Fletch and Confess, Fletch, you're missing some of mysterydom's great pleasures. Son of Fletch is okay, and I enjoyed reading it again, but I wish I'd read one of the earlier ones instead. What some enterprising filmmaker should do is get Chevy Chase to play Fletch again and some whippersnapper to play Jack.
Thursday, January 30, 2014
11th Annual BookFinder.com Report Out-of-print and in demand
11th Annual BookFinder.com Report: 11th Annual BookFinder.com Report
Out-of-print and in demand
Wednesday, January 29, 2014
Pimpage: An Occasional Feature in Which I call Attention to Books of Interest
I Want to Believe!
Man who claims he killed Bigfoot releases more pictures of the mythical creature Hat tip to Jeff Meyerson.
Free for Kindle for a Limited Time
PaperBack
Paul Kupperberg, The Amazing Spiderman: Crime Campaign (Marvel Novel Series #8), Pocket Books, 1979
No Surprise to Readers of this Blog, However
Alligator in grow house, poses danger: A big surprise discovery over the weekend during a grow house bust.
It was green and it was alive, and we're not talking about marijuana plants. This weekend, along with the weed, law enforcement found a live alligator inside the house
It was green and it was alive, and we're not talking about marijuana plants. This weekend, along with the weed, law enforcement found a live alligator inside the house
Luis Avalos, R. I. P.
'Electric Company' Actor Luis Avalos Dies at 67: Luis Avalos, the Cuban-born character actor best known for his work on the PBS kids show The Electric Company, died Wednesday after suffering a recent heart attack. He was 67.
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
Pimpage: An Occasional Feature in Which I call Attention to Books of Interest
'Wearable' book
'Wearable' book allows reader to feel emotions of characters - Telegraph: Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created a "wearable" book which allows the reader to experience the protagonist’s emotions.
Using a combination of sensors, the book senses which page the reader is on and triggers vibration patterns through a special vest.
Using a combination of sensors, the book senses which page the reader is on and triggers vibration patterns through a special vest.
Once Again Texas Leads the Way
Texas Becomes Second Most Populous State, Adds More Than 387,000 Residents: Texas now moves into the No. 2 spot and has achieved the greatest growth of any state in the U.S. over the last 10 years.
Pete Seeger, R. I. P.
NYTimes.com: Pete Seeger, the singer, folk-song collector and songwriter who spearheaded an American folk revival and spent a long career championing folk music as both a vital heritage and a catalyst for social change, died Monday. He was 94 and lived in Beacon, N.Y.
Hat tip to Jeff Meyerson.
Hat tip to Jeff Meyerson.
Overlooked Movies: The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother
He didn't, not really, but he came close enough to make this worth watching if you're into off-the-wall humor and slapstick. Which I am. Scroll down to the trailer and watch it. If you get a laugh from that, you'll get even more from the movie.
The smartest thing Wilder did was hire some of the cast members from other Brooks movies: Madeline Kahn, Marty Feldman, and Dom DeLouise. They're all very funny in this one. Wilder wrote the script himself, and that's a problem. It's goofy, all right, but it doesn't work as well as Brooks' best scripts do. It has some very funny moments, but it doesn't hang together (not that all of Brooks' do, either).
I remember that Judy and I took the kids to see this one in the theater a long time ago. They loved one particular scene and giggled about it all the way home. It's in the trailer, but you don't get to see what they found so funny. Too bad.
Monday, January 27, 2014
A Kickstarter Project of Interest
Slingers: A Fantasy Western by R. Bryant Francis — Kickstarter: A short film about two Bounty Hunters in the Fantasy Old West getting in over their heads on a rescue mission gone way south.
Hat tip to John DeNardo at SF Signal.
Hat tip to John DeNardo at SF Signal.
Atlantis Found! Sort of!
Swedish divers unearth a 'Stone Age Atlantis': 11,000-year-old ancient settlement discovered under the Baltic Sea | Mail Online:
- Swedish divers unearth a 'Stone Age Atlantis': 11,000-year-old ancient settlement discovered under the Baltic Sea
- Divers found a harpoon, tools, horns and the bones of ancient cattle
- The bones belonged to the animal auroch last seen in the early 1600s
- Archaeologists believe these relics date back to the Stone Age
- It is said to be the oldest settlement in the area - dubbed Sweden’s 'Atlantis'
Free for Kindle for a Limited Time
The Ape Man's Brother -- Joe R. Lansdale
In an alternative world, an Ape Man and his "brother" (Bill, a superior form of australopithecus or something along those lines) are taken from their lost world by way of a zeppelin. The Ape Man is quite willing to go, thanks to the fact that he's met The Woman, who's a passenger on the zeppelin. Well, "met" isn't adequate to describe their first encounter, but this is, after all, a family blog.
The adventures of Bill, the Ape Man, and The Woman when the reach New York are chronicled by Bill (nice name), the brother, and they're sometimes ribald (and even vulgar), often hilarious, occasionally touching, and always entertaining. The story is also a meditation on civilization and what it means to be civilized. You get an idea of what the novella's leading up to from the cover.
This novella was written in response to Joe's challenge at an Armadillocon a few years back. Some panelists and the audience were challenged to write a story based on this pulp cover. I wrote two stories. One story is in the current issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. The other is available here, and you can't go wrong at the price. You can't go wrong with Lansdale's novella, either.
Hard Case Crime Update
Hard Case Crime Announces Two New Editions
of Stephen King's #1 Best-Seller, JOYLAND
Edgar Award-nominated novel to be published in
mass-market paperback and e-book
New York, NY; London, UK (January 27, 2014) – Hard Case Crime, the award-winning line of pulp-styled crime novels published by Titan Books, today announced it will release two new editions of Stephen King's JOYLAND, the acclaimed coming-of-age story set in 1973 in a small-town amusement park that is the scene of an unsolved murder. First published last June, and recently named a finalist for the Edgar Allan Poe Award (the mystery genre's most prestigious honor), JOYLAND has appeared on the New York Times Best-Seller list for more than 24 weeks. On May 27, Hard Case Crime will publish the book for the first time in the classic rack-sized "mass-market" paperback format typical of pulp crime novels in the 1940s and 50s. The company will also release the novel for the first time in an e-book edition, in April 2014.
"Joyland is a look back at a long-gone time, and I wanted people's initial experience of the book to be like my experiences reading crime stories when I was growing up, back when a book was always something made of paper and ink and glue," said Stephen King, one of the most beloved storytellers of all time, with more than 300 million books in print. "I'm thrilled that Hard Case Crime is going back to its roots with a paperback edition that'll fit in your jacket or the back pocket of your jeans. And now that Joyland is coming up on its second year, I'm also happy to bring it out as an ebook for people who prefer reading that way."
Since its publication, JOYLAND has won raves worldwide. The Washington Post called it "a moving, immensely appealing coming-of-age tale" while Canada's National Post called it "a small marvel of a book, a novel of loss and heartbreak, of growth and discovery…one of the writer's finest works." Entertainment Weekly called it "some of King's most graceful writing"; the New York Times wrote, "The book delivers chills [and] a mournful sense of life's fragility"; and the Guardian in the U.K. called it "a far gentler, deeper, more thoughtful book…and all the more intriguing for it."
Described as "the best new American publisher to appear in the last decade" by Neal Pollack in The Stranger, Hard Case Crime revives the storytelling and visual style of classic pulp fiction. The line features an exciting mix of lost pulp masterpieces from some of the most acclaimed crime writers of all time and gripping new novels from the next generation of great hardboiled authors, all with new painted covers in the grand pulp style. Authors have included James M. Cain, Mickey Spillane, Pete Hamill, Madison Smartt Bell, Lawrence Block, Ed McBain, and Donald E. Westlake, to whom JOYLAND is dedicated. Stephen King's first Hard Case Crime novel, The Colorado Kid, also became a national bestseller and inspired the television series "Haven" on SyFy.
of Stephen King's #1 Best-Seller, JOYLAND
Edgar Award-nominated novel to be published in
mass-market paperback and e-book
New York, NY; London, UK (January 27, 2014) – Hard Case Crime, the award-winning line of pulp-styled crime novels published by Titan Books, today announced it will release two new editions of Stephen King's JOYLAND, the acclaimed coming-of-age story set in 1973 in a small-town amusement park that is the scene of an unsolved murder. First published last June, and recently named a finalist for the Edgar Allan Poe Award (the mystery genre's most prestigious honor), JOYLAND has appeared on the New York Times Best-Seller list for more than 24 weeks. On May 27, Hard Case Crime will publish the book for the first time in the classic rack-sized "mass-market" paperback format typical of pulp crime novels in the 1940s and 50s. The company will also release the novel for the first time in an e-book edition, in April 2014.
"Joyland is a look back at a long-gone time, and I wanted people's initial experience of the book to be like my experiences reading crime stories when I was growing up, back when a book was always something made of paper and ink and glue," said Stephen King, one of the most beloved storytellers of all time, with more than 300 million books in print. "I'm thrilled that Hard Case Crime is going back to its roots with a paperback edition that'll fit in your jacket or the back pocket of your jeans. And now that Joyland is coming up on its second year, I'm also happy to bring it out as an ebook for people who prefer reading that way."
Since its publication, JOYLAND has won raves worldwide. The Washington Post called it "a moving, immensely appealing coming-of-age tale" while Canada's National Post called it "a small marvel of a book, a novel of loss and heartbreak, of growth and discovery…one of the writer's finest works." Entertainment Weekly called it "some of King's most graceful writing"; the New York Times wrote, "The book delivers chills [and] a mournful sense of life's fragility"; and the Guardian in the U.K. called it "a far gentler, deeper, more thoughtful book…and all the more intriguing for it."
Described as "the best new American publisher to appear in the last decade" by Neal Pollack in The Stranger, Hard Case Crime revives the storytelling and visual style of classic pulp fiction. The line features an exciting mix of lost pulp masterpieces from some of the most acclaimed crime writers of all time and gripping new novels from the next generation of great hardboiled authors, all with new painted covers in the grand pulp style. Authors have included James M. Cain, Mickey Spillane, Pete Hamill, Madison Smartt Bell, Lawrence Block, Ed McBain, and Donald E. Westlake, to whom JOYLAND is dedicated. Stephen King's first Hard Case Crime novel, The Colorado Kid, also became a national bestseller and inspired the television series "Haven" on SyFy.
New Poem at The 5-2
The 5-2 | Crime Poetry Weekly, Annual Ebooks - Gerald So, Editor: H.B. Ussach
LITERATI
Blackbeard: The history of the pirate’s last days
Blackbeard: The history of the pirate’s last days: An exclusive account of the final raid and political maneuvers of history’s most notorious pirate
Link via Neatorama.
Link via Neatorama.
Mesolithic Man Update
DNA test of 7,000-year-old tooth overturns popular image of light-skinned European hunter-gatherers: DNA taken from the wisdom tooth of a European hunter-gatherer has given scientists an unprecedented glimpse of modern humans before the rise of farming. The Mesolithic man, who lived in Spain around 7,000 years ago, had an unusual mix of blue eyes, black or brown hair, and dark skin, according to analyses of his genetic make-up.
Morrie Turner, R. I. P.
www.ktvu.com: Morris "Morrie" Turner, the creator of the Wee Pals comic strip and the first African American artist to have a column syndicated nationally, has died. He was 90.
Sunday, January 26, 2014
Riz Ortolani, R. I. P.
Variety: Italian soundtrack composer Riz Ortolani, who won a Grammy for his “Mondo Cane” theme “More,” and whose wide range of music for movies was featured in three Quentin Tarantino films and on the Dino Risi-directed classic “The Easy Life” (Il Sorpasso), among dozens of other titles, died in Rome on January 23.
A Great Story
The Guardian: Fifty years ago, the governor of Indiana banned the Kingsmen's Louie Louie for being obscene. The FBI then spent two years investigating its lyrics, cementing the song's reputation as rock's ultimate rebel anthem, recorded by everyone from the Stooges to the Clash
Flash! He's a Miracle!
The Golden Age: FLASH GORDON
Be sure to scroll down for the great spread on the serial in an old LOOK magazine.
Be sure to scroll down for the great spread on the serial in an old LOOK magazine.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)