Guilt (A Noah Milano novella) - Kindle edition by Jochem Vandersteen. Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com. Years ago Noah Milano was the son and bodyguard of gangster boss Robert Milano. He was forced to shoot Lisa Waxman's father, turning her into an orphan, saddling him with a lifetime of guilt.
Now, Noah Milano has broken off all ties to his father and tries to make an honest living as a security specialist. He finds out Lisa's stepfather is accused of being one of the vilest, most sadistic serial killers of California. This is Noah's chance to find redemption. He swears to prove his innocence. It seems not everyone agrees with his quest, though. Soon not only Noah but his dearest friends are in mortal danger...
Longmont Times-Call: The 'Literary Litterbug," an Arvada man ticketed in April for dumping thousands of books along a section of U.S. 287 south of Longmont pleaded guilty in Boulder County Court on Thursday to three counts of littering.
Hat tip to Deb.
Radu Florescu, In Search of Frankenstein, Warner Books, 1976
Phoenix Press: Depression Era Pulp on AbeBooks: New York’s Phoenix Press was a publisher of mysteries, westerns, and other light fiction in the 1930s and 1940s. We were alerted to this company’s literary history by a loyal AbeBooks customer called Paul Rollinson, who encouraged us to feature Phoenix’s fantastic Depression-era pulp, if only for the amazing dust jackets. Phoenix was one of many lending-library publishers of the era, and fought to rise above the others of its ilk to make a name for itself in the tough economic climate.
The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest: 2015 Contest Winners
Hat tip to Don Coffin.
Black Dog: A Cooper & Fry Mystery (Cooper & Fry Mysteries Book 1) - Kindle edition by Stephen Booth. Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com. Who killed Laura Vernon?
The helicopters are halted. The dogs are called off. The search for beautiful, teenaged Laura Vernon is over. Her body is found, mutilated, in the forest.
When he takes on the case, Ben Cooper is paired with a new partner: Diane Fry, a woman as tenacious as she is alluring. The two detectives are like fire and gasoline. But they must learn to work together to apprehend a killer who is hiding in plain sight.
This relentless, atmospheric thriller is perfect for readers of New York Times bestselling authors Ian Rankin and Peter Robinson, and for viewers of the hit TV series The Killing.
A. Merritt, The Metal Monster, Avon Muder Mystery Monthly, 1946
Bad to the Bone: The Worst Children in Literature on AbeBooks: Children can be innocent, inquisitive and the embodiment of hope. But those characteristics make for boring stories. Sometimes authors enjoy creating a fictional child that is just plain nasty. Draco Malfoy might be a bigot and a bully, but he’s rarely dull and is a vital ingredient in the Harry Potter novels. Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory would not be such a tasty read without greedy Augustus Gloop, bratty Violet Beauregarde and the spoiled Veruca Salt.
Once upon a time, kiddies, there was a popular radio show called Dragnet. It moved to television and became equally popular there. A couple of novelizations appeared, but they weren't nearly as popular as the shows on radio and TV. Crime writers also tried to capture something of the feel of the show in their own novels, and two of the best were Ed McBain (Evan Hunter), with his books about the 87th Precinct, and Jonathan Craig (Frank R. Smith), who wrote about the 6th Precinct. We all know whose books were the most popular. I love McBain's books, and I've mentioned them in my own work a number of times. But I'm here to tell you that if you're looking for books that come the closest to capturing the Dragnet feeling in prose, Jonathan Craig is your man. I've liked his books since reading the Gold Medal originals long ago, and in re-reading The Case of the Nervous Nude, I found that I still liked them just as much.
What inspired the reread was an eBay purchase. While looking at the site not long ago, I saw a collection of 8 of Craig's books that had been reprinted by Belmont-Tower in the middle 1970s. They were unread. The batch was under $10, postage paid. Now as I said, I have the Gold Medal editions. I even have some of the BT editions. But nobody was bidding on these great books. I felt they needed a good home, and I was just the guy to give it to them. And when I got them, I thought I should read one.
Craig's approach was a lot different from McBain's. Whereas McBain set his novels in a fictional city (that we all knew was New York), Craig used the actual city. Whereas McBain wanted to use the squad of different characters and have different protagonists now and then, Craig used Pete Selby as his first-person narrator. Selby has a partner named Stan Rayder, and there are other recurring characters, but Selby is always the focus. The emphasis on police procedure is heavy, just as it is on Dragnet, and the dialog between Selby and the other characters could often have been inserted in Dragnet without anybody knowing it hadn't been written for the show. Or so it seems to me.
A big difference in Craig's books and Dragnet is the emphasis on sex. Everything in the Selby stories seems connected to sex, of all kinds. And in this particular book leprosy even plays a part. So that makes two crime novels that I know of that bring leprosy into the story, Richard Sale's Lazarus #7 being the other.
In this story, Selby and Rayder see a naked woman on the street, but she disappears before they can catch up to her. This leads to their discovery of a dead man, murdered by an unusual method. That discovery leads to as sleazy a bunch of characters as you're ever likely to encounter in a novel. I won't say anything about them other than to mention that if you think closing abortion clinics is going to stop abortions, then you don't remember the 1950s.
Let me give you a little sample of the dialogue so you can judge for yourself if it has that Dragnet feel, assuming you remember that show:
I reached for the knob, but she beat me to it.
"Thank you," I said.
"It's what I get paid for," she said.
"How about eavesdropping? You get paid for that, too?"
"Only cops get paid for that. I do it for free."
"You got any free ideas about Nancy?"
"Sure I got ideas. You want one?"
"Why not?"
"I figure she shacked up with some guy, and now she's afraid to come home."
"Any man in particular?"
"Sure. This Greer you were jawing about. Who else?"
I could just quote the whole book. It's great stuff. If you haven't read any books in the series, I recommend them all highly.
Over 150 Alligators and Crocodiles Rescued From Toronto Area Home: It is being called the largest ever crocodilian rescue in North America.
Like everybody else who talks about Go Set a Watchman, I feel the need to mention something about its publication history, even though you already know the story. The manuscript was discovered in a safety deposit box, and now it's a book. Some people are upset by this because they feel it's an inferior book, a rejected manuscript that a sharp editor saw something in that caused him to tell the author to go in another direction. She followed his sage advice and wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, a much-loved American novel. Other people are upset because the novel shows presents Atticus Finch as a racist. Others are upset because they believe Harper Lee is old and maybe senile and would have prevented the publication if she'd been hale and hearty. That's a lot of baggage for a book to carry.
What I wonder is why nobody's upset in the least, and in fact there seems to be great rejoicing, that a newly discovered manuscript by Dr. Seuss will be published. It was probably written around the same time as Go Set a Watchman, in fact. He set it aside for some reason and never went back to it. Did he feel it was an inferior work? We'll never know. It's going to be published, anyway. Dr. Seuss, by the way, seems to have a racist skeleton or two in his closet. Nobody seems bothered by that, and he's a real person, not a fictional character.
And does anybody really believe that Go Set a Watchman would never have been published? Virgil on his deathbed asked that The Aeneid be burned. He really didn't want to be preserved. Kafka burned some of his work and gave the rest to a friend before he died with the request that it be burned, too. Nabakov asked that Laura be destroyed. It wasn't. Andrew Gulli of The Strand has unearthed an unpublished F. Scott Fitzgerald story that he'll soon publish. J. R. R. Tolkein's estate is going to publish a very early story by Tolkein. George MacDonald Fraser's heirs have uncovered the manuscript of his first novel, which is soon to be published. Even T. S. Eliot is getting into the act. And does anybody really think that J. D. Salinger's unpublished works (assuming that there are any) won't find their way into print eventually? Writers who have actively sought to keep their works away from the public have been thwarted before. Harper Lee wouldn't have been any different had the manuscript been found after her death, so why not publish it now and let her enjoy the fame and the money? Not that she needs any more of either of those things.
As for Atticus and his racism, well, he's a fictional character, and this book isn't To Kill a Mockingbird. It's a different book with a different story. Atticus still believes in the law in this book, but, sure enough, his attitudes about race aren't good ones by today's standards. They weren't even good ones when the book was written, but I was alive back then and living in the south. His attitudes are better than most were. One of the whole points of the book is Jean Louise's calling him and her friend Hank on their racism. [BIG-TIME SPOILER ALERT] Then she gets slapped around by her Uncle Jack and sees that you can still love someone who's wrong and that maybe people aren't as bad as she thinks they are. I can see why some readers might not like this accommodation or Hank's "you gotta go along to get along" attitude. But Hank has a point. He can do some good living in Maycomb, Georgia, and following the law even with his attitudes about race. So can Atticus. That doesn't make them right, but it does make them human. [END OF SPOILER ALERT]
The way I see it is that Atticus in this book could very well be the same as in Mockingbird. In Watchman Jean Louise goes on and on about how much she's admired him in the past, but we don't really know why. The answer's in Mockingbird. The editor to whom Lee sent the manuscript of Watchman must have said something like, "The scenes from Jean Louise's childhood are great. Why don't you write a book about why she admires her father so much? What incident incited that admiration?" So Lee wrote a different and better novel and put Watchman in a trunk.
What about the book other than that? As an old retired English teacher, I have to start with the title, Go Set a Watchman, and with commas. The bible verse that the title comes from is quoted in the book. It begins like this: "Go, set a watchman; . . ." So why did the comma disappear in the title? Or does it even matter?
Aside from that, I think the book needed a good editor. The first 100 pages are sort of like a '50s romance novel. Young, free-spirited woman who's worked in New York returns to her hometown and picks up with her childhood sweetheart. Will they marry or not? Do we even care? Things change when Jean Louise slips into a meeting of the Citizens' Council and, the book becomes a treatise on race relations in the South, with lots of long dialogues (or lectures). There are those fine scenes of growing up in the small town that I mentioned, but those are pretty much tossed in at random, it seemed to me. They're the best things in the book, but there are a couple of other powerful scenes as well. There's no doubt that Harper Lee was a good writer right from the start. She just needed an editor to tell her what her subject was and to guide her a little bit.
In the end, this book is of interest mainly because of its historical connection to another book. It's a middling novel that's become a huge bestseller because of interest in that other book. I don't see a bit of harm in its being published or a bit of harm in reading it. I'd wait for the remaindered copies to turn up, though, if I were you.
Isle of Man News: A pensioner who pulled his snake out in front of a frightened teenage girl has been jailed.
A. Merritt, The Ship of Ishtar, Avon Murder Mystery Monthly, 1945
Stephen Mertz channels Dr. Watson. That should be enough to get your interest, right there. But in case it's not, there's plenty more in this steampunk adventure. Zombies. Steam-powered aircraft. H. G. Wells. Albert Einstein. Inspector Lestrade. Murder. Betrayal. Explosions. Moriarty. Mycroft. The Baker Street Irregulars. Sex (of the polite variety). Humor. And did I mention zombies?
Sherlock Holmes has a really tangled web to unravel here, but he does so with his usual calm rationality. Watson proves more than once to be a man of action who's handy with a pistol. It all adds up to a fine evening's diversion. Check it out.
And now it's the Karaoke Bar Altercation -- Daily Star: Man has 10-inch TORCH removed from anus 'after karaoke bar altercation'
Hat tip to Jeff Meyerson.
Dean Martin Knocks the Beatles out of the #1 Spot on the Chart
This article refers to record producer "Jimmy Bowden," but I think the guy's name is "Bowen." Bowen was a singer with Buddy Knox's band and had a big hit of his own with "I'm Stickin' with You" in the '50s.
The New York Times: Ann McGovern, a prolific author for children whose work ranged over women’s history, adaptations of folk tales and her own exploits as a globe-trotting adventurer, died on Saturday at her home in Manhattan. She was 85.
Hat tip to Jeff Meyerson.
“The Kerplunk Syndrome” (by Ed Wyrick) | SOMETHING IS GOING TO HAPPEN: After an absence of sixteen years, Ed Wyrick (who formerly wrote as E.L. Wyrick) returns to EQMM’s pages with stories in our upcoming December 2015 and January 2016 issues. The Georgia native is a retired high-school counselor and the author of the novels A Strange and Bitter Crop and Power in the Blood. His most recent book, My Reclaimed Life, is nonfiction and is due to be available in e-book format from Amazon next week. In this post Ed writes about an experience I suspect every writer has had at some time or other. —Janet Hutchings
A. Merritt, The Face in the Abyss, Avon Murder Mystery Monthly, 1945
Waiting For a Comet (Jo Harper Book 1), Richard Prosch - Amazon.com During the long, hot spring of 1910 it seemed all 12-year-old Jo Harper could do was wait. Wait for her father, wait for her friends, wait for the comet that might appear in the sky and wipe out the whole town of Willowby, Wyoming once and for all. But when wild west legend Abby Drake arrives in town lugging an orphaned baby calf, an old-fashioned revolver, and a mystery shrouded with superstition, it’s up to Jo to take action. Why is Abby in town? Who is she after? And what secrets can Jo coax out of her own arch enemy, Emily Bly?
Action, humor, and real life history combine for an exciting mystery about one girl’s summertime quest for family, friendship, and justice on the windburnt Wyoming range at the dawn of a new century.
Variety: Mark Sheeler, known for his roles in horror TV and film, such as “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” died Aug. 6 following complications of a stroke. He was 92
Sheeler acted primarily in the 1950s and early ’60s. He appeared in low budget B pictures like “Why Must I Die?,” “Speed Crazy” and “Korean Attack.” His appearance in the schlock horror film “From Hell It Came,” which featured his battle with a tree monster, brought him acclaim when it won a Golden Turkey Award and appeared in the horror movie clip film “It Came From Hollywood.”
A. Merritt, Dwellers in the Mirage, Avon Murder Mystery Monthly, 1944
The Sun |News: A UFO has been spotted close to the International Space Station – sparking fears it is an alien spy mission.
I read once that Barbarosa didn't get much of a theatrical release, but Brownwood, Texas, where I was living at the time, was the target audience for a western with Willie Nelson back in the early '80s. So were Judy and I, so we got to see it in the theater. We both thought it was great.
Willie Nelson plays the legendary outlaw Barbarosa, and while he might not be the world's best actor, he can play Willie Nelson better than anybody. That's what he does here. Gary Busey plays Karl, the young man who comes of age in the story with Willie as his mentor. This was back in the days when Busey was mostly sane and a good actor. He's very good indeed in this movie.
Busey is running away from a family feud. He's accidentally killed his brother-in-law, whose father has sworn that Karl has to die. Barbarosa's own feud is with the Zavala family, led by Gilbert Roland. So the two are on the run from both the law and the Zavalas and the two families. There are a number of encounters with outlaws and the family members, and Karl is hesitant to kill anybody or to steal. Barbarosa is pretty disgusted with him throughout.
Eventually Karl returns home. Things do not go well, and soon he's on the run again. He meets up with Barbarosa for the climactic scenes, which I won't discuss here because you really need to see them for yourself.
There's a lot of humor in this movie, and the scenery (mostly the Big Bend country of Texas, I think) is great. So is the story, and you can't beat the camaraderie between Busey and Nelson. There's some fine stuff about families and what makes a legend and what kind of lives people choose to lead, too. If you're looking for a good western and haven't seen this one, check it out.
Books | The Guardian: "I apologise to anyone who bought my on-sale ebook of Baby, I'm Yours and read on pg 293: 'He stiffened for a moment but then she felt his muscles loosen as he shitted on the ground'," says Andersen. "Shifted - he SHIFTED!"
Variety: Terrence Evans, who appeared in TV shows and movies including Clint Eastwood’s “Pale Rider” and “Terminator 2: Judgement Day,” died August 7 in Burbank at 81.
NBC News: Former football player and veteran sports journalist Frank Gifford has died in Connecticut, his family announced on Sunday. He was 84.
The New York Times: Coleen Gray, an actress who dreamed of playing femmes fatales but was repeatedly cast as innocents in noir films like Stanley Kubrick’s “The Killing,” died on Monday at her home in the Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles. She was 92.
Hat tip to Jeff Meyerson.
Belli Luigi, Master-Mind Menace, World Distributors, 1950
Phoenix Press: Depression Era Pulp on AbeBooks: New York’s Phoenix Press was a publisher of mysteries, westerns, and other light fiction in the 1930s and 1940s. We were alerted to this company’s literary history by a loyal AbeBooks customer called Paul Rollinson, who encouraged us to feature Phoenix’s fantastic Depression-era pulp, if only for the amazing dust jackets. Phoenix was one of many lending-library publishers of the era, and fought to rise above the others of its ilk to make a name for itself in the tough economic climate.
Black Dog: A Cooper & Fry Mystery (Cooper & Fry Mysteries Book 1) - Kindle edition by Stephen Booth. Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com. Who killed Laura Vernon?
Bad to the Bone: The Worst Children in Literature on AbeBooks: Children can be innocent, inquisitive and the embodiment of hope. But those characteristics make for boring stories. Sometimes authors enjoy creating a fictional child that is just plain nasty. Draco Malfoy might be a bigot and a bully, but he’s rarely dull and is a vital ingredient in the Harry Potter novels. Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory would not be such a tasty read without greedy Augustus Gloop, bratty Violet Beauregarde and the spoiled Veruca Salt.
Once upon a time, kiddies, there was a popular radio show called Dragnet. It moved to television and became equally popular there. A couple of novelizations appeared, but they weren't nearly as popular as the shows on radio and TV. Crime writers also tried to capture something of the feel of the show in their own novels, and two of the best were Ed McBain (Evan Hunter), with his books about the 87th Precinct, and Jonathan Craig (Frank R. Smith), who wrote about the 6th Precinct. We all know whose books were the most popular. I love McBain's books, and I've mentioned them in my own work a number of times. But I'm here to tell you that if you're looking for books that come the closest to capturing the Dragnet feeling in prose, Jonathan Craig is your man. I've liked his books since reading the Gold Medal originals long ago, and in re-reading The Case of the Nervous Nude, I found that I still liked them just as much.
Stephen Mertz channels Dr. Watson. That should be enough to get your interest, right there. But in case it's not, there's plenty more in this steampunk adventure. Zombies. Steam-powered aircraft. H. G. Wells. Albert Einstein. Inspector Lestrade. Murder. Betrayal. Explosions. Moriarty. Mycroft. The Baker Street Irregulars. Sex (of the polite variety). Humor. And did I mention zombies?
I read once that Barbarosa didn't get much of a theatrical release, but Brownwood, Texas, where I was living at the time, was the target audience for a western with Willie Nelson back in the early '80s. So were Judy and I, so we got to see it in the theater. We both thought it was great.
Joe R. Lansdale short story: The Steel Valentine 1.0, Joe R. Lansdale - Amazon.com
