retroCRUSH: The World's Greatest Pop Culture Place

retroCRUSH: The World's Greatest Pop Culture Place: "VERONICA GOES TOPLESS!
ARCHIE'S GAL SHOCKS FANS IN LATEST COMIC BOOK!"

OK, I'll admit it. I had to check this out. It's been a long time (a loooooooooong time) since I looked at an Archie Comic. Things have changed

Thrilling Days of Yesteryear : Thrilling Days of Yesteryear

Thrilling Days of Yesteryear : Thrilling Days of Yesteryear : "Mandrake the Magician (1939) concludes with this twelfth and final chapter, as our heroes manage to stumble out of the rubble that was once stately Mandrake Manor."

I'm sorry that we've come to the end of MANDRAKE on the THRILLING DAYS OF YESTERYEAR site. Reading the daily chapter summary was almost as good as seeing the serial. In some ways, it was better, since the commentary is often quite funny.

When I jogged by Alvin High School this morning, the streets were jammed with cars parked along both sides, block after block. It's the annual Pre-School Workshop for the teachers. It reminded me that 41 years ago, I attended my first workshop in Corsicana, Texas, where I was going to begin teaching high school for the princely sum of $4050 a year. I have many vivid memories of that first year of teaching, and it's hard for me to believe that the kids who were in my classes are now nearly 60 years old. I wonder what they look like and what they did with their lives, but I doubt that I'll ever find out.

Dennis Lynds

Dennis Lynds, Michael Collins, Mark Sadler. All the same guy, a terribly underrated writer. I just re-read Circle of Fire (1973), which was published under the Mark Sadler name in 1973. Solid plotting, interesting characters drawn in varying shades of gray (including Paul Shaw the first-person narrator), and good writing. So why isn't Lynds better known? My guess would be that it's because his books aren't action-oriented. There's action, quite a bit, but it isn't ramped up the way it is in many current books. And there's a lot of introspection. It seems pretty clear to me that this is a Ross Macdonald-influenced book. While it's not as good as the best Macdonald (but that's a pretty high standard), it's a solid novel. The other day I found two Sadler books that Berkley reprinted the 1980s. I plan to read the other one Real Soon Now.

Author! Author!

I'm sure many of you know that Pamela Anderson has written a novel. It's called Star, and there's a a brief excerpt from it being reprinted in articles around the 'Net. Here it is:

"'You're not dying, you're just growing up,' her mother tells Star according to an excerpt. "'Looks like you're finally going to get some boobs. You're becoming a woman, honey. You're blooming!'"

"And bloom she did. Her breasts came on suddenly and tenaciously, as if trying to make up for lost time."

Now that's what I call writing! Pure poetry.

Something Old, Nothing New

Something Old, Nothing New : "Things That Suck: '50s Novelty Songs"

Maybe because I was a kid in the 1950s, I didn't think those songs sucked. In fact, "If I'd Known You Were Coming, I'd've Baked a Cake" was one of my favorites. I even liked "Mambo Italiano." I probably never even thought of it as a "novelty song." That designation was reserved (by me) for things that came along later, like Buchanan and Goodman's "Flying Saucer Parts 1 and 2," "The Witch Doctor," and "Purple People Eater," all of which I also liked, though I was older and probably should have known better. Anyway, it turns out that I liked a lot of songs that Bob Merrill wrote, and I still do. I didn't know about his suicide, and learning about it four or five months after the fact still makes me sad.

A few Websites

Through a site called Pop Culture Junk Mail (http://popculturejunkmail.com/), I learned about another one called Avacado Memories (http://wesclark.com/am/). You might want to have a look at both of them, but Avacado Memories is the one that anybody who grew up in the 1960s will enjoy. It's got tons of essays (and photos) that detail Wes Clark's life (I'm assuming that he's no relation to the general who ran for president). There are also a number of pages about the house he grew up in, and for some reason I found all of this stuff interesting. And I didn't even grow up in the 1960s.

For you spy fans, Clark's take on some of my favorite spies is here: http://wesclark.com/am/spy_game.html

BSP

Some of you might not be on DorothyL, the mystery listserv, so for your benefit (don't you feel special?), I'm reprinting a message I sent to the list today:

You remember Walter Satterthwait, don't you? What about Miss Lizzie? Which brings me to the point of this message. Walter has recently completed the sequel to Miss Lizzie, and he let me read the manuscript. So I've read it, and you haven't. Neener, neener, neener.

I'm sorry. That was rude, and I apologize. The tentative title is New York Nocturne, and all I can say is that it's great. New York in the roaring '20s, Amanda and Miss Lizzie on the trail of a killer, cameos by the famous and infamous, and prose that sings. What more could you ask? It's making the publishing rounds now, so if you have the ear of any influential editors, you might want to clue them in.

And Cavalcade, the third book in Walter's series that began with Escapade and Masquerade, is coming from St. Martin's in February.

Notice how I'm modestly not mentioning my own books.

Rough Edges

Rough Edges: "26 pages today finished the current book, which is #166 overall."

James Reasoner continues to amaze me. I knew him before he'd published a single novel, and now he's completed 166. Soon enough, he'll pass the 200 mark. How does he do it? If he were writing crap, I could understand. Maybe. But I don't think he's ever written a bad book. I particularly enjoyed his WWII trilogy and the Civil War series, but everything he's done is classy work.

Welcome to Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine!

Welcome to Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine!

Here's a little of what Jon Breen has to say about Robert B. Parker's latest Spenser novel in his review for EQMM: "*** Robert B. Parker: Bad Business, Putnam, $24.95. Boston private eye Spenser, hired to get the goods on a wandering husband, encounters sexual and corporate malfeasance and, of course, murder. Parker’s minor classics God Save the Child (1974) and Mortal Stakes (1975) were followed by a series of socially significant, always well- written, but seriously underplotted sequels. More recent wisecrack-driven Spenser novels are pure entertainment, less reminiscent of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald than of old radio shows like Blake Edwards’s Richard Diamond."

I hadn't thought about before, but Jon has a point. I've probably mentioned that I still read Parker, though a lot of people have simply given up on him because he no longer writes the kind of books he did earlier in his career. One reason may be that I grew up listening to radio shows like RICHARD DIAMOND, SAM SPADE (I knew him as Howard Duff on radio long before I saw THE MALTESE FALCON on film or read the novel), and BARRY CRAIG, PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR. My father was a particular fan of the latter show because Barry Craig got hit on the head and knocked out so often. He thought that was the sign of a good program. At any rate, the wisecracking on those shows, and on others, particularly Jack Webb's PAT NOVAK (I think that's right), was part of my growing up, and I still enjoy it when I read Parker's books or when I listen to one of the old radio programs on tape.

I also happen to think that even Parker's recent novels have a certain amount of social significance in them, but I could easily be wrong about that.

Steve Mertz

Gotta agree with much of what Steve Mertz says in his comment below about the James Bond movies and the actors who played Bond. And I even agree about George Lazenby. He coulda been a contender. Steve and I may be the only ones who believe that, however.

Which reminds me: Could there have been a worse choice to play Matt Helm than Dean Martin? Now I like Dean Martin. I liked him especially in Rio Bravo and in Some Came Running. And The Young Lions. But I didn't like the idea that he was playing Matt Helm. Those movies were awful, just awful. The TV series with Tony Franciosa ("Matt Helm? Gotta find us some Italian guy to play him") was pretty bad, too.

Cutthroat Island

Speaking of action movies, I've often wondered why I'm the only one who likes Cutthroat Island. It's true that I'm a big Geena Davis fan, but I might have liked the movie even if she hadn't been in it. I first saw the movie at a sneak preview in Houston, and as soon as the DVD came out, I got a copy. I've watched it a couple of times, and I like it even better now than I did the first time.

I mean, what's not to like? You have your pirates, your treasure map, your sword fights, your chase scenes on land and sea, your Geena Davis . . . oh, yeah, I've already mentioned Geena Davis. You also have Matthew Modine, and I'll admit that he's no Errol Flynn. But then who is? Orlando Bloom? Gimme a break.

Another thing I like is the color. It might not be Technicolor, but it's close. There are some beautiful shots.

And the action scenes are great. You can tell what's happening all the time, as you can't in so many movies these days. Gladiator is the one that comes to mind. My theory used to be that nobody knew how to film action these days. But my new theory is that the actors and stuntpersons just can't cut it, so they do all that quick cutting to make you think something's happening when it isn't. Basil Rathbone and Errol Flynn would be appalled.

Anyway, no matter what anybody else says, I like Cutthroat Island a lot. (I also like The Long Kiss Goodnight, and not just because it has Geena Davis in it. But she's really good.)

Something Old, Nothing New

Something Old, Nothing New : "
Bond, James... Ah, To Hell With It
I'm sure you've all heard, and become kind of sick of hearing about, the rumor that Pierce Brosnan might not be playing James Bond any more. Whenever a change in Bonds is made, the real question is, will this be a chance for the series to go in a new direction?"

Vince Keenan pointed me in the direction of this blog, so he has a lot to answer for. One thing I didn't need was another blog to read. Anyway, I was reading along and came to this comment about the James Bond series. I like the idea of doing a movie as a '60s nostalgia piece, but I also liked the direction the series took a long time back when Timothy Dalton took over as Bond for two movies. The old jokey Roger Moore style was dumped for a darker, more serious Bond. LICENSE TO KILL was probably the darkest in the whole series. I think it was also the one of the least popular. Maybe I'm the only one who liked these, which is why they replaced Dalton and lightened up again.

Thrilling Days of Yesteryear : Thrilling Days of Yesteryear

Thrilling Days of Yesteryear : Thrilling Days of Yesteryear : "Credit where credit is due"

I got a mention today on THRILLING DAYS OF YESTERYEAR, one of the blogs I read every day. Some great stuff on Old Time Radio, and right now a chapter-a-day synopsis of MANDRAKE THE MAGICIAN, a Republic serial. This is a well-written and entertaining blog that you should put on your list if you care at all about The Good Old Stuff. Click on the link above and take a visit.

The Bourne Supremacy

Judy and I went to see THE BOURNE SUPREMACY on Friday, and we both liked it. I've been told that the sound track irritated some people, but I didn't even notice it. Now I need to see the movie again and find out what I missed.

When I saw THE BOURNE IDENTITY, I wasn't entirely convinced that Matt Damon had what it takes to be an action star, but after seeing SUPREMACY, I think he just might. He didn't crack a smile during the entire movie. That takes acting chops, right?

The movie reminded me of why I read so many spy novels back in the early 1960s. Ian Fleming, Donald Hamilton, Len Deighton, John Le Carre, and a myriad lesser lights. I guess I liked the resourcefulness of the protagonists, the hairbreadth escapes, the shady half-world that they moved in. Interestingly enough, I read only one book by Robert Ludlum, and it wasn't in the Bourne series. I didn't much care for his writing; for me, the movie is much more fun than his book was.

What irritated me about the movie was the quick-cut action scenes. I have no idea why directors these days seem to think that the audience doesn't want to be able to tell what's going on. I like my action the old-fashioned way, but in BOURNE, as in so many movies these days, it's chopped into so many little pieces that (for me at least) it's incoherent.

Ludlum wrote the Bourne books as a trilogy, so I'm sure that a movie of THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM is in the planning stages. And I've read that Eric Van Lustbader is continuing the series with a new book called THE BOURNE LEGACY. (Lustbader has bestsellers of his own, so the money he's getting for taking Ludlum's place must really be good.)

Doris Piserchia

Doris Piserchia started publishing around 1972. She published 13 novels from 1973 to 1983. That was it. For some reason (from what I've found on the 'Net, a severe family illness might be the answer), she stopped writing in 1973. When she started again a few years ago, nobody would buy her stuff. She seems to have been pretty successful during her productive years, and her short fiction appeared in some prestigious publications. She was to have a story in LAST DANGEROUS VISIONS, but apparently we'll never see that one.

I got interested in Piserchia because of a review of MR. JUSTICE, which I included in an earlier post. I'd read only one book hers previously, BLOOD COUNTY, a DAW book that came out under the name "Curt Selby." (Piserchia says that the pen name was adopted because Donald Wollheim published four books by her in the year that BLOOD COUNTY appeared.) It's a very unusual vampire book in which, if I'm remembering correctly, the word "vampire" is never used.

But I wanted to talk about MR. JUSTICE. This was Piserchia's first novel, and Wollheim published it as half of an Ace Double. After reading it, I have to wonder what readers must have thought in 1973. Maybe the New Wave was in full flower (or whatever waves do) then. At any rate, it's a very strange book. I'm not sure I can describe the plot, but I'll give it a try.

Mr. Justice is a vigilante who can travel in time. He witnesses murders and other crimes, but he can't do anything to affect them. He can, however, take photos. Then he accosts the criminals in "real" time and doles out justice. Naturally something has to be done about this guy, but what can you do to stop a time traveller? The government singles out one kid and sends him to a special school. He's going to be their Mr. Justice hunter. Meanwhile the government agency that's running him is still hunting on its own.

At the same time there's another time traveller, Arthur Bingle, who's decided to use his power to take over the world. (You'd think he'd take a cool name for himself, like The Mastermind, but he doesn't.)

So far, so good, except that you don't get all this in a straightforward narrative, and there's also a lot more going on. A whole lot more, including a love story and some pretty weird family stuff, much of it undeveloped or cut short. It's almost as if Piserchia wrote 200,000 words and cut it to 60,000.

Some of the book is written in a semi-pulp style (the opening section, for example), while others are, well, less readable. It makes for an odd combination. If you go into this looking for something like an old Republic serial, you're going to be very disappointed. (But it might have worked better if it had been more like one of those serials.)

Some people think of this book as an undiscovered classic. I'm not convinced. But it's certainly different.

Jayme Lynn Blaschke's Gibberish

Jayme Lynn Blaschke's Gibberish: "Winston cover gallery
Lookie here what I found. I swear, there's something on the web devoted to everything. In this case, it's a cover gallery featuring the retro-cool illustrations from all 35 of those classic Winston Science Fiction series juveniles."

I checked this site out, and it's great. Those Schomburg endpapers (be sure to click and enlarge them) are for me the essence of SF art. Wow. Here's the link:
http://home.comcast.net/~ea4tr/wsb/html/view.cgi-home.html-.html

Donald A. Wollheim

Once upon a time, long, long ago, I actually met Donald A. Wollheim. It was at the World Fantasy Convention in 1979, the first fan convention I ever attended, and to my way of thinking one of the best. It was probably the last convention a lot of the great writers I loved when I was a kid ever attended, but there were plenty of others as well. Manley Wade Wellman was there. Frank Belknap Long. Evangeline Walton. Fritz Leiber, who gave the banquet speech (and that's another story). Lin Carter. Harlan Ellsion. Stephen King (this was just before he became so popular that he couldn't attend conventions without being mobbed; he was just another writer). Joe Lansdale was there, though I didn't actually meet him.

And of course Wollheim. He was a big influence on my life because he edited the Ace Double line, but I didn't know that when I was reading the Ace Doubles. The science fiction doubles were my favorites, and Wollheim published some interesting stuff. A lot of it was space opera, which I loved, but sometimes you'd turn the book over and there on the other side would be a novel by Philip K. Dick. Or, later on, Samuel R. Delaney or Ursula K. LeGuin. Wollheim gave them all their starts in long fiction.

I did a by-mail interview with Wollheim for Billy Lee's great little zine, PAPERBACK QUARTERLY, but I never thought to ask him how he came to be the publisher of such great works as DR. BLOODMONEY or THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION (I know, it's not part of a double), but he was friendly and happy to respond to a request for an interview for a magazine with a circulation of maybe 200 copies.

And if you're wondering why I was thinking of Wollheim, it's because I've now read MR. JUSTICE by Doris Piserchia. (See the post on her below.) When I get a chance, I'll tell you some more about my reactions to the book.

I got a swell new Dell computer for my birthday, and it took me a little while to get it all hooked up and to get on-line.

OK, to tell the truth, I still haven't hooked everything up. But I am on-line. At least I am if this post appears in my blog. I need to hook up the scanner, printer, ZIP drive, and so on. Then I'll be all set. I'm not too thrilled by the Dell mouse, but maybe I'll continue to use it. I preferred my Logitech cordless, so I may go back to that one.

This new computer plays DVDs. Maybe I'll watch a few when I should be working. Steve Stilwell sent me one called Python, starring Casper Van Dien and Robert Englund. You can tell right that that it's a classy product. Steve got it from Walter Satterthwait. These are guys with way too much time on their hands.

OUT OF THE PAST

OUT OF THE PAST: "Film noir is known for its wise-guy dialogue, but the screenplay for 'Out of the Past' reads like an anthology of one-liners. It was based on the 1946 novel Build My Gallows High by 'Geoffrey Homes,' a pseudonym for the blacklisted Daniel Mainwaring, and the screenplay credit goes to Mainwaring, reportedly with extra dialogue by James M. Cain.

But the critic Jeff Schwager read all versions of the screenplay for a 1990 Film Comment article, and writes me: 'Mainwaring's script was not very good, and in one draft featured awful voice-over narration by the deaf-mute. Cain's script was a total rewrite and even worse; it was totally discarded. The great dialogue was actually the work of Frank Fenton, a B-movie writer whose best known credit was John Ford's 'Wings of Eagles.''"

I always enjoy reading what Roger Ebert has to say about movies, even if I don't agree with him. In the case of OUT OF THE PAST, I do agree, and I found the information quoted above really interesting. The whole review, in fact, is great reading, and I recomend it.

Jayme Lynn Blaschke's Gibberish

Jayme Lynn Blaschke's Gibberish: "BATTLE ON MERCURY, or, Victory is mine! "

I can't blame Jayme for celebrating his purchase of BATTLE ON MERCURY. I loved those Winston SF novels when I was a kid. I had several of them, including FIND THE FEATHERED SERPENT by Evan Hunter. Somehow that one disappeared, and the ones on eBay have been too pricey to tempt me. I also had MISTS OF DAWN by Chad Olilver. It's gone, too. But I still have my copy of SONS OF THE OCEAN DEEPS by Bryce Walton. My books by Evan Hunter and Chad Oliver disappear, but I still have the one by Bryce Walton. Story of my life.

The Coolest Sci-Fi

The Coolest Sci-Fi: "MISTER JUSTICE-Doris Piserchia (Ace, 1974, oop). Crammed into half of an Ace double and never reprinted, Mister Justice remains in a class by itself: hardboiled America, Sci-fi-style. Here the 2030s appear as a mutated 1930's, complete with an economic catastrophe that threatens evolution itself. The Shadow, the Green Hornet, the Untouchables-they never had what Mr. Justice has going for him. Sprung from humanity's threatened altruistic genes, this masked vigilante has the ability to travel into the past, where he can witness, but not prevent, murders. He then returns to the present, where he arranges 'an eye for an eye' treatment for the slayers, including full-scale gangland rub-outs. But he can't easily dispose of one Arthur Bingle, global crime archon' who has the same powers as Mr. J. and then some. Bingle feels about the human race in general what Mr. Justice feels about criminals, and he plans to thin us out and 'empty the world.' With the help of his powers, his syndicates of henchman and corrupt cops, and his dreadful lady friend Godiva-she of the constrictor thighs-Bingle gets the drop on humanity. But justice is just a matter of time. Piserchia relates this furious folktale with Chandler soul, Hammett snap, and not a trace of camp."

I ran across this review while surfing the 'Net the other day, and naturally it made me curious about the book. There are many bad things about having a house cluttered with thousands of books, but there's at least one good thing: When you run across a review like this, you can go to the Ace Double shelf and pull down the book. I'll have to read it and find out whether it's as good as the reviewer seems to think, and I'll give you a report. It does have a nice Freas cover, as does the other side, a novel by John Philliphent.

NON SOLO BLUES

NON SOLO BLUES

Now this is just scary: Steven Segal is a musician? Who would've guessed? And his first single is #1 in France? Where is Jerry Lewis when you need him?

HoustonChronicle.com - Raskin: Vanishing: 'Go Greyhound and leave the driving to us'

HoustonChronicle.com - Raskin: Vanishing: 'Go Greyhound and leave the driving to us'

When I entered The University of Texas at Austin back in 1959, freshmen weren't allowed to have cars. I went to school in the middle of the first week of September, and I wasn't able to get a ride home until the week before Thanksgiving. Because I met a girl named Judy Stutts during the Christmas break, I decided I wanted to go home more often than every two or three months, so I occasionally hopped the bus.

Couldn't do that now. I suppose the Greyhound station is still where it used to be in downtown Austin, on Congress Avenue a few blocks from the Capitol Building, the bus hasn't stopped in Mexia in many years. Maybe it doesn't matter, but 45 years ago, it would have mattered to me. When my grandfather died later my freshman year and I had to get home in a hurry, I took the bus. I remember walking with my suitcase all the way from the dorm on the UT campus to the station.

I always bought a book to read before I left Austin. Once it was something by Jack Douglas, maybe the classic MY BROTHER WAS AN ONLY CHILD. Once it was the Fawcett edition of THE WIZARD OF OZ. A little girl saw me reading it and told her mother, who gave me a suspicous look, as if she thought I might be some kind of child molestor.

I haven't ridden a bus in years, probably not since 1960. But it was always nice to know it was there.

A few days ago Ed Gorman gave an all-out no-reservations rave review to James Siegel's Derailed.  Naturally I figured I should read it, so I went directly to my local bookseller (Wal-Mart) and bought a copy.

I can see why Ed liked the book.  It's a juiced-up version of a Gold Medal original: ordinary guy gets into deep doo-doo.  He does everything wrong, and things keep piling up until it seems they just can't get any worse.  And then they get worse.  It's the sort of thing Harry Whittington excelled at, except hyped to the tenth power.

So I sort of enjoyed it, but I had some problems.  One is that if you've ever read more than a couple of Gold Medal books, the "big surprise" is going to come as no surprise at all.  Maybe that's OK.  Maybe Siegel doesn't really expect us to be surprised.  But another problem is that Siegel uses a deus ex machina that would make Euripides blush.  It's just too much.  Or maybe I'm just being picky.  You'll have to read the book and decide for yourself.

Ed said he thinks the book might well become a classic.  I don't.  To me it's just another disposable best seller.  Well executed, but not that memorable.

Plots With Guns - Boiled Harder Than Your Mother's Corned Beef

Plots With Guns - Boiled Harder Than Your Mother's Corned Beef

The new PLOTS WITH GUNS is up, and it's a Brit noir issue. If you've never experienced Ken Bruen, now's your chance, for free. And be sure to read Sara Weinman's introductory essay.

I'm told by those in the know that next to BLACK MASK the best of the mystery and crime pulps was DIME DETECTIVE.  For years I've had on my shelves a collection of stories from that magazine.  It's HARD-BOILED DETECTIVES, edited by Stefan R. Dziemanianowicz, Robert Weinberg, and Martin H. Greenberg.

The collection doesn't have a theme, but it has a plan.  The editors reprint one story from each year of the magazine's existence, from 1931 to 1953.  There are plenty of big names present, including some (C. M. Kornbluth, William Tenn, and Murray Leinster) likely to be more familiar to SF fans than to mystery readers.

I should have looked into this collection long ago, but it got stuck away on a shelf and covered with other books, and I more or less forgot about it.  I came across it yesterday while I was looking for something else.  I read a couple of stories in it last night, "The Crime Machine" by Carroll John Daly and "Ding Dong Belle" by Hugh B. Cave. 

I was interested in reading something by Cave because I'd seen James Reasoner's review of the new Cave bio (check it out at http://jamesreasoner.blogspot.com/) and because I hadn't read any of Cave's crime fiction.  This story features Peter Kane, a alcoholic p.i. who used to be a cop but who left the force because he couldn't control his drinking.  He's in love with a woman who also loves him but who refused to marry a drunk.  So she married his best friend, Captain of Detectives Moe Finch.  Moe's a good guy, but a little slow.  When he's faced with a tough case, his wife always calls in her old flame to solve it.  This time the case involves a woman who's shot dead while playing ping pong in a bathing suit.

"The Crime Machine," which I'd read before, is the first in Daly's series about Vee Brown, who's just as tough and ruthless as Race Williams, but not as burly.  He writes popular songs in his spare time.  Not long ago, Walter Satterthwait and I had an idea for a pulp detective who hums show tunes while he kicks the crap out of the malefactors.  I guess we were thinking of someone like Vee Brown, so we're about 70 years too late.

Ed's Place: "Letters; Mystery*File; Tuesday Weld
July 23, 2004"

Ed Gorman's blog is back, and he's writing about Tuesday Weld. Check it out.

As for me, I'm still in my nostalgic mode and reading some old SF magazines. Last night I had a look at AMAZING STORIES for July 1957. I was probably about to turn 16 when I read this issue for the first time. I'm sure I thought the stories in it were classices of world lit. This time I'm a little more skeptical.

Robert Silverberg's "The Blue Plague" is a story of the Venusian invasion of Earth, and it's as preposterous as anything I've read in years, even though I'm sure I loved it when I was 16. Apparently Venus and Earth have about the same kind of atmospheres, but Venusians don't look anything like us earthlings. They can, however, assume our forms. And they can be killed with very virus they're planning to use to destroy us.

"Brief Hunger" is by G. L. Vandengurg, which I believe is a Silverberg pseudonym. It's a humorous fantasy that might have been intended for AMAZING's companion magazine, FANTASTIC. When an actor in a play removes his dental bridge, his thoughts are broadcast aloud to the audience. This happens because his tongue is touching the sensitive nerve where his tooth used to be. Hey, I believe it. Or I'm sure I did when I was 16. Those were the days, my friends.

"The wrath of the King of Orion flamed across the void.  Out from the Hyades sped his hunters, and from Mintaka and Saiph and Aldebaran, grim ships of war sped headlong between the stars in vengeful search for the small and secret ship that had dared violate their domain."

That's the opening paragraph of Edmond Hamilton's "The Star Hunter" from SPACE TRAVEL for September 1958.  Either you like that kind of thing or you don't, and there was a time when I liked it very much indeed.  I was a teenager in a small Texas town, and in reality I'd  never been much farther away from home than the 90 miles to Dallas.  But in the pages of the SF digests that I read by the metric ton, I travelled all over the known universe and to galaxies far, far away, thanks to writers like Edmond Hamilton and magazines like SPACE TRAVEL, the descendant of IMAGINATION and IMAGINATIVE TALES.   Editor William Hamling tried to save his SF line by putting factual articles into SPACE TRAVEL, but it didn't work.  The magazine lasted only a few issues, more's the pity.

Re-reading stories like "The Star Hunter" now, 46 years (!) later, I don't get quite the same charge that I did when I was 17.  The old sense of wonder that I was fairly bristling with in those days has dwindled.  But it's still there, somewhere,  and now and then there's nothing for it but to get out one of those old digests and read a story by Hamilton or Dwight V. Swain or Calvin M. Knox or "Alexander Blade," "S. M. Tenneshaw," "Ivar Jorgenson."  I always wanted to write stories like those, but I never did.  Never could.  But boy did I love to read 'em.

And now for something completely different.  The other day a friend gave me a copy of Christopher Buckley's LITTLE GREEN MEN.  He said it was hilarious, and he was right.  This is the funniest book I've read in a good while.  It's not exactly political satire, but it's not exactly NOT political satire, either.  When a powerful TV talk-show host is abducted by aliens on the golf course of an exclusive D. C. country club, his life is turned around.  He starts a crusade to get the government to investigate the existence of extraterrestrials, and of course everyone who supported him before drops  him like a hot horseshoe.  Ironically, he becomes more powerful than ever, although with an entirely different audience.  Sometimes it's hard to tell who's more bizarre, the abductees or the denizens of congress and the White House.  I highly recommend this book if you ever feel the need of a good laugh.

Army rations rehydrated by urine New Scientist: "Would you eat food cooked in your own urine? Food scientists working for the US military have developed a dried food ration that troops can hydrate by adding the filthiest of muddy swamp water or even peeing on it."

I'm sure enlistment will be up by the thousands as soon as word about this wonderful breakthrough gets around. As David Letterman would say, "That's good eatin'!"

Blogger has been "interesting" again today.  I've tried posting once, and the post disappeared.  Then I couldn't get back on blogger.  So we'll see what happens this time.

One of my eBay purchases is a copy of DOUBLE-ACTION DETECTIVE, issue #6, from July 1957.  It's a  Columbia Publication, edited by Robert A. W. Lowndes, so it looks a lot like the SF digests I have from the same publisher.  And Lowndes has some of his usual writers here: Robert Silverberg, Margaret St. Clair, and Sam Merwin, Jr.

St. Clair's story is another one of those "this is the solution to the Jack the Ripper case" tales.  It's OK, but it doesn't offer a real historical personage as the Ripper.  He's "The Courier" of the title.  The hook is that he's working for Eleanor Marx, daughter of Karl, and a member of the party.  Except that he's working both sides.  An OK story, nothing more.

And then there's Silverberg.  His story is a competent police procedural in the DRAGNET vein.  I know he was writing  whole issues of some of the SF digests around the time of this issue's publication (sometimes in collaboration with Randall Garrett), but he was apparently also writing mysteries, sports stories, book reviews, and the occasional nonfiction article.  He must have been writing 18 hours a day.  I'm in awe of him.

Reuters | Latest Financial News / Full News Coverage: "Singing Japanese plants
Tue 20 July, 2004 11:44

TOKYO (Reuters) - People who like talking to their plants can now enjoy a musical accompaniment, thanks to a Japanese invention that turns petals and leaves into amplifiers.

Called the 'Flower Speaker Amplifiers', the gadget made by Let's Corp is hidden in a vase or a potted plant and sends music at just the right frequency to vibrate up the stems and then be converted into audible sound by the plant as a whole.

A device such as a CD player or radio can be connected to it."

I'm not sure what I think of this, but at the moment I'm thinking "scary." Do I really want a pot of begonias playind and singing "Stairway to Heaven"? Or even "Mystery Train"? Would plants grow better if they played the Beatles or Barry Manilow?

Rough Edges: PROGRESS

"Today was another pretty good work day, 23 pages, giving me a little over a hundred for the week. This is a pace I need to maintain."

My admiration for James Reasoner knows no bounds. I don't see how he maintains a blog, reads all kinds of books, visits Sam's Club, watches DVDs, and still manages to write 23 pages a day. What's even more amazing, as you know if you've ever read James's work, is that they're quality pages. Which reminds me that James's first novel, the legendary TEXAS WIND is back in print. If you haven't read this p.i. classic, you should order it right now from PointBlank:  http://www.oivas.com/pointblank/tw.html.  You can thank me later.
 

I mentioned down below that I did an article on Clifton Adams for Steve Lewis's Mystery*File.  After the article was published, Bill Pronzini told Steve that Adams had done a novel for Berkley Books under the name "Nick Hudson."  The title is THE VERY WICKED (1960), and since Bill said it was worth looking for, I naturally had to have a copy.  Back in the Olden Days, I'd have looked in vain in little out-of-the-way used-book stores for years before finding one.  In the Age of the Internet, all I had to do was go 0n-line, where I had several copies to choose from.
 
The book is very different from Adams's other crime novels.  It's a noirish Jack-the-Ripper riff, in which a vice cop named Bill Creel goes over the edge and starts killing prostitutes.  There's no gore, and no sensationalism, even though most of the book is told from the cop's point of view.  We find out a lot about the cop and his attitudes toward women, and a lot about his unhealthy state of mind.  We know, or suspect, that he's going to end badly, so the interest is in how long he can keep fooling people, and how many women he'll kill, before he slips up.
 
I didn't like this book quite as much as Adams's work for Gold Medal, but as an early entry in the serial killer category, it's worth a read.  And it has a great redhead on the cover.

My eBay habit recently brought me a gaggle of mystery-story digests, including THE EXECUTIONER MYSTERY MAGAZINE from August 1975.  The bookend stories in this issue are by Stephen Mertz and Margaret Maron, and I figure they must be among the first stories these two writers published.  I'm just guessing, though.
 
Steve's story is "The Busy Corpse," and if the title is a bow to Westlake's "The Busy Body," the story is more WEEKEND AT BERNIE'S.  And I'll bet the makers of that movie didn't pay Steve a penny in royalties, the swine.  The story is a clever "tables turned" or "biter bit" riff, with the Mafia, a private-eye, and a cop, all done in under 7 pages.
 
Maron's story is "When Daddy's Gone," a noirish story from the naive point of view, if you can imagine such a thing.  Or maybe the pov isn't so naive, after all.  Nice southern setting, the kind Maron has done so well in her novels. 
 
Turning up magazines like this, the kind you should have bought and kept the first time around, is what makes eBay so much fun.
 
UPDATE: I see by Steve's comment below that this was indeed his first national sale.  He must've been just a kid at the time.  I've also learned from a "reliable source" that this was the final issue for the magazine.  No fault of Steve's, of course!

IOL: Dunst vetos 'gigantic' boobs: "Dunst vetos 'gigantic' boobs"

Talk about integrity! What more can I say?

: RevolutionSF - Spider-Man 2 : Review: "Even with the movie's flaws (such as Kirsten Dunst's clunky acting and some of the inane dialog), Spider-Man ranks as one of the top two or three comic book films of all time. "

Rick Klaw's review of SPIDERMAN 2 is mostly on target. As to his remark about Kirsten Dunst, I have this response: "And your point is?"

Judy and I saw the movie yesterday, and I thought it was terrific. My only complaint is that it wasn't rated "R." So the theater was full of little kids who had no clue as to what was going on and spent the entire time running up and down the aisle, except for the one who was rolling down the aisle. He ran up it, though. Little wuss wasn't tough enough to roll up it, I guess. It's a good thing I'm not issued a sidearm.

And I know I'm not supposed to think about stuff like this, but when Doc Ock is building his tritium fusion generator in his secret undisclosed location, wouldn't someboy notice he was stealing a million mega-gigawatts of power? I know he robbed a bank to get money to fund his fiendish endeavors. And of course Peter Parker and Aunt May just happened to be in there when he did. Out of all the banks in New York City, he had to walk into that one. But I digress. My question is, where did he buy the equipment to build it with? I mean, even the clerks at Radio Shack might be a little suspicious of him. Sure, he had on those sunglasses. Maybe that threw them off. And he probably wore a raincoat, but in that disguise he'd make the Hunchback of Notre Dame look like a male model.

Yesterday I read MY FLESH IS SWEET (Lion, 1951) by Day Keene.   Maybe not one of Keene's best, but certainly not without interest.  For one thing, the main character is a pulp writer named Ad Connors.   Connors has been in Mexico writing his "breakthrough" book, and he's just found out that the SATURDAY EVENING POST has rejected it.  He's on his way to hock his typewriter for money to get home when he witnesses an auto accident.  One of the drivers is a beautiful American woman who can't speak Spanish.  Connors, however, is fluent, and so he steps in.  And once he does, we're off to the races: a lecherous Mexican general, a mysterious veiled women, a murdered Mexican lawyer, another murder buried 20 years in the past, and more.
 
Connors manages to get in a number of comments about the life of a pulp writer along the way, and in fact he has to write two 15,000 word stories in order to get enough money to get out of Mexico.  But when he escapes the country, he finds  his troubles are just beginning.   His agent sells the novel that the POST rejected to a hardcover publisher for big bucks, but Connors is now wanted for murder in Mexico.  To clear himself, he has to find the beautiful woman again.  Which is plenty complicated, since she's about to marry a millionaire and doesn't want to see Connors.  And then there's another murder.
 
Keene, like another of my favorites, Harry Whittington, wrote a lot of books.   Like Whittington, he wrote fast, and he worked cheap, for just about any publisher that would have him.  And like Whittington, his books rarely disappoint me.  They might not be great literature, but they're entertaining, fast moving, and fun.

Now that a request has poured in, I'm posting the subscription information for Steve Lewis's great print fanzine, MYSTERY*FILE.  It's published approximately every six weeks, and single issues can be had for $3.50.  A four-issue subscription is $13.00.  and well worth it, too, if you ask me.  Send your dough to Steve at 62 Chestnut Rd., Newington, CT  06111.
 
The current issue has a letter column, lots of reviews of mystery novels both old and new by people like Vince Keenan, Dan Stumpf, Walter Albert, Bob Briney, Gary Warren Neibuhr, Richard Moore, and many more.  Articles by Bill Pronzini (on Gardner), Marv Lachman, Bob Adey, Ed Lynskey, and others.   Try it.  You'll like it.

For a while now, I've been writing columns on Gold Medal Books for Steve Lewis's MYSTERY*FILE. I've done articles on Day Keene, Clifton Adams, Malcolm Douglas, and John McPartland. The one I've just turned in is on John Farris, who wrote for Gold Medal as "Steve Brackeen."

I've been interested in Farris almost as long as I've been interested in being a writer, having read HARRISON HIGH way back in 1950. I was really impressed that a guy not much older than I was had written a bestselling novel, and one that I really liked. (I read it again a couple of years ago, the same old Dell paperback first printing, and I still liked it.) If I'd known that Farris was writing cime novels under a pen name at the same time, I'd have been even more impressed, if that's possible.

I wasn't doing any writing in those days except for a little adolescent poetry. I never really dreamed I could actually write a book, which seems kind of silly now that I've published so many of them (though there are no doubt those who would argue that that still hasn't proved I can write one). It took me almost twenty more years to get really serious about writing, though there were a few attempts in the interim (see earlier posts for a few words on a couple of them). And then I did it only because Jack Davis talked me into collaborating on a Nick Carter book with him. Jack's been dead a good while now, but I still owe him. I'm pretty sure I'd never have published a book without his goading me into it.

Last night Judy and I went to the Houston Museum of Natural Science to hear a lecture by Dr. John W. Verano from Tulane. His topic was Machu Picchu, and we'd been led to expect that he'd be talking about the site, who built it, and what its purpose was. Which he did. But his perspective was different from what we'd expected. Dr. Verano, it turns out, is a forensic anthropologist, or, as he put it, "a bone man." He was called in by Yale University to examine the skeletons found by Hiram Bingham on his 1911 expedition. The skeletons were examined at that time, but no one had looked at them since. Dr. Verano's conclusions about them differed a little from the original ideas.

For one thing, the original examiner (I've forgotten his name, I'm sorry to say) concluded that the skeletons were mostly female (more than 75%). Dr. Verano says that it's more like 50/50. Why is that important? Because one of Bingham's main ideas about Machu Picchu is that the site was a holy place for the "virgins of the sun." The large number of female skeletons would support that idea. Verano doesn't agree. Also Verano pointed out that there are a number of skeletons of small children. These were explained away by earlier theorists as "accidents." Verano doesn't agree there, either. The skeletons also indicate a wide variety of ethnicity in Machu Picchu.

So what's Verano's conclusion? That Machu Picchu was another in a series of royal palaces or resorts built by the emperor Pachacuti. The skeletons are the remains of the servants and workers who kept up the resort. Sounds pretty reasonable when Verano goes over it. Sure, there were altars and other sacred places at Machu Picchu. The emperor was believed to be the "son of the sun." So naturally he would have kept up appearances. But worship wasn't the main purpose of the site.

Verano also pointed out a number of other interesting things he'd learned. For one, there was tuberculosis in Machu Picchu. But no syphillis. Tooth decay was rampant and somtimes even fatal.

All in all, a very interesting evening.

Yesterday's mail brought me a copy of a new Stark House double volume. This one reprints two of Vin Packer's Gold Medal novels, SOMETHING IN THE SHADOWS and INTIMATE VICTIMS. It's a nice package, and one I highly recommend. Packer (whose real name is Marijane Meaker) was one of the few women writing paperback originals in the 1950s, and she was right up there with the best. Anthony Boucher consistently praised her books in his NYTBR column, and with good reason.

Besides the two novels, this new volume has a short introduction by Packer that touches on her relationship with Patricia Highsmith and tells a little about the envy Highsmith had of Packer's income and reviews. Packer, the lowly paperback writer, was making a lot more money for her novels than Highsmith was with her prestigious hardcovers. And Packer was getting reviews in the New York papers just as Highsmith was. Highsmith didn't think it was fair for a paperback writer to get the same kind of attention that a hardcover author received.

There's also a reprint of Jon Breen's essay titled "The Novels of Vin Packer," also highly recommended reading.

Lately I've been browsing the capsule movie summaries in Arthur Lyons' book called DEATH ON THE CHEAP: THE LOST B-MOVIES OF FILM NOIR, and I find them highly entertaining.

But here's something that's really bothering me. It has nothing to do with the movies or the book itself. It's a sentence in the blurb from Robert Crais in the front of the book. Here it is: "Written with the sure hand of a gifted novelist, Arthur Lyons has opened an entertaining treasure chest that will have you racing to your local video rental joint." As a former English teacher, all I can say is, "Arrrgggghhhh!" And to think that Crais out-sells me about a million to one.

Since I'm far from a film noir geek, or even a film geek of any kind, I don't have too many nits to pick with Lyons himself. However (you knew there was going to be a "however," right?) there's this on page 122 in Lyons' comment on THE MYSTERIOUS MR. VALENTINE (1946): "This film was a new kind of role for Linda Stirling, who up to this time had spend most of her time at Republic dressed in a leopard cat suit and beating up bad guys in THE TIGER WOMAN serials (sic). Tristram Coffin, in contrast, was right at home, having been a staple minor villain in many a Republic feature. In 1951, he finally got a taste of what it was to play a good guy when he starred as Commando Cody in LOST PLANET AIRMEN, Republic's feature release of its serial KING OF THE ROCKETMEN."

As I said, I'm no expert, but this wrong on so many levels.

As far as I know, for example, there was only one TIGER WOMAN serial (Lyons is right about the leopard costume, though. Why they didn't call her the Leopard Woman is a still-unanswered question.) She certainly hadn't spent all her time at Republic in that one serial, either. How can one forget her sparkling performance in another serial, ZORRO'S BLACK WHIP? (Alas, I'm pretty sure it wasn't Linda wielding the whip in several scenes, which sort of takes away the fun of it if you know what I mean, and I think you do.) Or THE PURPLE MONSTER STRIKES, for that matter?

And if Tristam Coffin played Commando Cody in the feature release of KING OF THE ROCKETMEN, wouldn't he have played good-guy Cody in the serial itself? (You'd think so.) But wait. Since the title of the serial is KING OF THE ROCKETMEN, wouldn't Coffin have played a guy named "King"? (Darned right. Jeff King.) And wasn't Commando Cody in a completely different serial? (Darned right: RADAR MEN FROM THE MOON. He was played by George Wallace [not the Governor of Alabama]. And by some other guy in COMMANDO CODY: SKY MARSHAL OF THE UNIVERSE.)

Sort of makes a fella wonder about the rest of Lyons' commentary.

OK, so I have this eBay habit. Or addiction. Whatever. Anyway, not long ago I bought six or eight men's sweat magazines from the late 1950s. Issues of CAVALCADE and SIR! There were lots of others on the market in those days, too: REAL MAN, TRUE MEN, MAN'S ADVENTURES, and on and on. They must have sold hundreds of thousands of copies a month. Sure, they had photos of scantily clad women, but the pictures aren't all that revealing, and they're of pretty low quality. (I mean the pictures, not the subjects, though come to think of it, the subjects aren't exactly Grade A, either.)

So my conclusion is that guys actually read these things. The articles in the ones I bought are typical: "I Was a White Slaver!,"The Brute Who Turned Bordello Boss," "The Lonely Women of Lesbos Isle." You get the idea. There was fiction, too, by guys like Mickey Spillane and Bob McKnight, along with some reprints from, of all things, WEIRD TALES, by Henry Kuttner and Manley Wade Wellman. The stories and articles aren't short, and the print is small. The paragraphs are long. But, as I said, guys read these things, or at least bought a ton of them.

When I started writing in 1981, there were still lots of books for guys. I broke in with a Nick Carter novel myself, and later I had a hand in series like THE M.I.A. HUNTER, THE TUNNEL RATS, and CODY'S ARMY. These were the tail-end of a huge boom in men's series books that started with Don Pendleton's THE EXECUTIONER. Like I said, books for guys. The Executioner and the Destroyer are still around, along with a couple of others, but the rest are long gone.

"So what?" you're probably saying. Well, I read the other day that in 2002, only 38% of American men read a book. Even one book. (And I'm guessing that one was by either Tom Clancy or John Grisham.) What that says to me is that guys don't read any more, which explains why there aren't any magazines like SIR! around these days. And why The Assassan and The Coxeman and The Sharpshooter and dozens of others have disappeared.

My theory is that guys watch videos now, but what do I know? I wish they'd all start reading books again.

Yesterday I read Robert B. Parker's latest Spenser novel, BAD BUSINESS. It's got all the usual elements. Spenser is hired, and someone gets killed. Bad guys come to Spenser's office to threaten him, and Spenser says, "Eeek!" Women melt when Spenser unleashes his killer smile. Spencer and Hawk shuck and jive. Spenser cooks. Spenser drinks beer. Spenser and Susan talk about sex. Spenser and Susan have sex (but not in front of Pearl the Wonderdog). Spenser is insolent to people in positions of power. Spenser cracks wise. Women come on to Spenser, but he rebuffs them because of his love for Susan. Spenser proves he's tougher than anybody (except Hawk, of course).

I've seen it all before, but, God help me, I enjoyed the heck out of it. I know that most people seem to think that Parker long ago achieved the alchemical miracle of turning his gold into lead, after which he sank below their notice. I, on the other hand, still look for every book of his as it appears. Which no doubt proves that I have poor, or to put the best face possible on it, indiscriminate taste.

I read an interview once in which Parker was asked what made his books so popular. He said, "I think people like the sound of the words on the page." Works for me.

Yesterday I mentioned THE DOMINIO PRINCIPLE, and last night I finished reading it. I thought it was good when I first read it nearly 30 years ago, and I still think so. A dandy paranoid thriller. It's written in very short chapters (a techinque now used by big-time bestsellering writers like Dan Brown and James Patterson). The pacing is fast, and the writing is smooth (much better than either Brown's or Patterson's). It's also got strong tinges of noir, what with the narrator's pretty much hopeless situation and the idea that he's at the mercy of forces he can't really control. (Noir and literary naturalism, a dissertation topic if there ever was one.)

I seem to remember reading a sequel to this book and thinking that it bit the moose.

(And if I thought Blogger was nutty yesterday and the day before, it was just getting warmed up. I have no idea if this post will appear on the blog or not.)

Yesterday I mentioned THE DOMINIO PRINCIPLE, and last night I finished reading it. I thought it was good when I first read it nearly 30 years ago, and I still think so. A dandy paranoid thriller. It's written in very short chapters (a techinque now used by big-time bestsellering writers like Dan Brown and James Patterson). The pacing is fast, and the writing is smooth (much better than either Brown's or Patterson's). It's also got strong tinges of noir, what with the narrator's pretty much hopeless situation and the idea that he's at the mercy of forces he can't really control. (Noir and literary naturalism, a dissertation topic if there ever was one.)

I seem to remember reading a sequel to this book and thinking that it bit the moose.

Blogger is again trying to confuse me. Or frustrate me. Or both. I posted earlier today, but the post hasn't shown up yet. I've noticed that several other bloggers are having the same problem, and I'm glad to know it's not just me.

I've been re-reading Adam Kennedy's THE DOMINO PRINCIPLE. I read it back when it appeared in paperback for the first time, around 1976, and thought it was great. I'm about halfway through, and it holds up very well. Oddly enough, as much as I enjoyed the book, I never saw the movie version, which has a great cast, including Gene Hackman and Richard Widmark. Maybe it got bad reviews.

OK, now the earlier post is there where it belongs. I have no idea what's going on.

Ed's Place: "ABOUT ROBERT SILVERBERG by Ed Gorman"

This is getting spooky. I'm beginning to think Ed Gorman is me, what with the things he's writing about writers I admire. I started reading Robert Silverberg at the same time Ed did, and in the same magazines, and there's at least one of his stories from those early SF digests that I've never forgotten. I can still quote the whole story nearly word for word. It might not be literature, but it sure did work for me. The funny thing is, I can't remember the title. Even the novels that Ed mentions are the very ones I'd name if asked for my favorites by Silverberg. And some of those Calvin M. Knox titles were wonderful. LEST WE FORGET THEE, EARTH is one that comes to mind. Now I'm going to have to dig through some of my old copies of SCIENCE FICTION ADVENTURES and do some reading.

Blogger has been really blinky the last couple of days. But I'll try this and see if it gets posted.

I was thinking the other day about the way I connected with music when I was a lot younger than I am now. Or maybe it was the way music connected with me. Here's just one example of what I mean: I can remember vividly the first time I heard Robin Luke's "Susie Darlin'" on the radio. I was with Margaret Stubbs in her '54 Pontiac. It was night, and we were driving down Titus Street in Mexia, Texas. I remember the exact block. I can't rememeber the radio station, but it was a distant one, not coming in too well. I made Margaret stop the car right there in the street while I listened to the song, and as soon as I could buy the 45, I did. (And, yes, I still have it. It's in a box in the closet, along with all my other 45s.) Do kids still connect with music that way? I can't imagine anybody having that reaction to a rap number, but then I'm a hopeless old poop and what do I know? What always grabbed me was melody and harmony and sheer pop exuberance. In fact, they still do.

This 4th of July weekend I drove around what's left of the downtown area of my old hometown of Mexia, Texas. The old depot is long gone because the city council refused to give Southern Pacific a tax break on the empty building. So S. P. just bulldozed it. The theater where I saw Roy and Gene and Allan "Rocky" Lane on Saturday afternoons is now just one more vacant building among many, and the last picture show at the "new" Mexia Theater (built around 1952 or '53) was shown a long time ago. That theater's still there, though. It's a church. I kind of like that.

Many of the old buildings have literally fallen down because of lack of maintenance. The rubble has been cleared away, so there's a lot of bare concrete. A bbq restaurant and a doctor's office were built on one block after the old buildings were removed. Both lasted about a year before closing for good.

What's sad to me about all this is that I remember all too well going downtown on Saturday afternoons when the streets were nearly as crowded with people, shoulder to shoulder. No vacant parking spaces. (The street preacher who set up with an amplifier on the hood of his old Ford had to get there at 7:00 in the morning to get his spot.) Two movie theaters (the Palace, where they showed the cowboy movies, and the National, where the classier flicks played; I hardly ever went to the National). Four drug stores. A bookstore where I bought copies of Amazing and Fantastic and Astounding, not to mention paperback books galore. Three five and dime stores. Two hardware stores. Two barbershops. A shoe store. Three or four clothing stores. And so on. Gone now, every one.

And probably nobody out at the Super Wal-Mart either remembers or cares. Dang, but I feel old.

Ed's Place: "Ed here: Speaking of Samuel R. Delaney"

Once again, Ed expresses my own feelings better than I could. This is getting scary. Anyway, I still remember the excitement of reading THE ENISTEIN INTERSECTION and other early Delaney books for the first time. But I could never get through DHALGREN, although I understand others consider it a great work of the imagination. I tried twice. I figure that's enough.

So why isn't AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS a hit?

That's the question I found myself asking after leaving the theater yesterday. I thought it was a terrific comedy/adventure movie. It was fast, it was funny, it had Jackie Chan's martial arts, and Cecile de France is the kind of woman anybody would want to travel around the world with. And some of the cameos are very amusing, especially the one by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Even his wig is funny. Owen and Luke Wilson play the Wright Brothers as surfer dudes (and in the middle of a desert). There's a Chinese villain named Fang, a direct descendant of Sumuru. What's not to like? If you want to avoid the crowds at SPIDERMAN 2, give AROUND THE WORLD a try.

I just read that Marlon Brando died.

When he was young, he was one good-looking dude. A hunk. Check out THE MEN if you don't believe me. And of course my generation will always remember THE WILD ONE and A STREET CAR NAMED DESIRE and ON THE WATERFRONT.

A little later there was ONE-EYED JACKS, after which we all went around calling each other "scum-sucking pigs."

Much later on I really enjoyed his work in THE FRESHMAN (in which he did a parody of his GODFATHER role) and DON JUAN DE MARCO.

He was apparently a rotten human being, but then who among us is going to cast that first stone? Not me. He left some great movies behind.

Ed's Place: "
Ed here: ABOUT STUART WOODS"

Ed Gorman has nailed Stuart Woods perfectly. He's said exactly what I think about Woods' books, but he's said it better than I could. I finally quit reading the Stone Barrington books a couple of years ago. Judy still reads them, but she's about ready to throw in the towel. The reason that both of us kept reading them for so long is that they were like potato chips. We knew they weren't good for us, but we gobbled them down because, even though they weren't nourishing, they gave us a quick fix.

After my first two stabs at writing a novel, I entered graduate school at The University of Texas at Austin (the school considers the word "The" part of the official title, so the capital "T" is appropriate, in case you were wondering, which you probably were not). I didn't make any attempts at fiction because I was so busy writing term papers, teaching classes, and starting a family that I didn't have time.

Also, I was reading. Boy, was I reading. Not only did I read books for class (and if you like reading, sign up for a class in the Victorian novel sometime), but I read books for fun. And what books! I discovered that the library had bound issues of THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, so I read all of Anthony Boucher's review columns from the beginning. And like a good grad student, I took notes. What interested me were the paperback originals that he reviewed, and I started haunting the used-book stores, trying to find every one of them. When I found an author I liked, I then wanted every one of his books. (There's no end to this sort of thing, of course, and most of you know it as well as I do.) I wasn't worried about condition (to my sorrow at the present time). I just wanted the books.

The good news is that I managed to accumulate quite a pile of books for half the cover price, or sometimes even less, that would cost me a bundle today. Jim Thompson, John D. MacDonald, Charles Williams, Harry Whittington, Day Keene, and on and on. Great stuff. I was familiar with some of the writers already (the Gold Medal ones, especially, and I'd already read Thompson's THE KILLER INSIDE ME in the GM edition), but the others were equally interesting. How I managed to read all those books, and all those Victorian novels, and other stuff that interested me (John Barth was a big favorite at the time), I'll never know. I wish I had time to read that much now. Those were great days.

Someone e-mailed me to say that this is a somewhat "amorphous" blog. He's right. There are political blogs, OTR blogs, movie blogs, and all kind of blogs devoted to specific topics. Not this one. It's amorphous. Or, as I prefer to think of it, stream-of-consciousness. I just write about whatever is on my mind when I turn on the computer.

And today it's Max Byrd's novel SHOOTING THE SUN (Bantam 2004). Back in the late 1970s or early '80s, Byrd wrote a handful of Chandleresque private-eye novels that I liked quite a bit. FLY AWAY, JILL and CALIFORNIA THRILLER are a couple of titles that come to mind. Then he turned to historical fiction, concentrating on some big names and producing titles like GRANT, JACKSON, and JEFFERSON. I wasn't interested in those. But when SHOOTING THE SUN turned up on the NYTBR's list of notable books a while back, I thought I'd have a look.

It's a historical novel, all right, but it's a sort of "alternate universe" book. The idea is that Charles Babbage sponsors an expedition to the Great Southwestern Desert in 1840 to take photographs of a total eclipse that has been predicted by his Difference Engine. No one else seems to believe the eclipse will take place, but the photos will prove that the Difference Engine works and win Babbage some much-needed financial backing.

The expedition into the desert includes a beautiful young scientist, Selena Cott, along with an artist, an explorer, a petty mathematician, a crusty wagonmaster, a suave overseer, and assorted others. It becomes apparent early on that there's more to the expedition's purpose than just getting some photographs, and there are a few twists in the plot as it moves along. Plenty of accurate historical details, interesting characters, and graceful writing. I'd say check it out. But I liked the p.i. novels more.

After my first attempt at writing a book fizzled, I didn't try again for a while. Then, in the summer of 1966, under the influence of Gold Medal Books and Mickey Spillane, I had another go. This boook was going to be a first-person private-eye novel set in Austin, Texas. (As usual, I was 'way ahead of my time.) I don't remember much about it except that at one point the narrator throws a guy off the tower of the University of Texas' main building. I didn't finish the book, but I did write several chapters and an outline, which I submitted to Gold Medal. I got a very nice rejection letter, but both that and the manuscript have long since disappeared. I'd sort of like to have a look at the manuscript just to see what I included, but I know it's gone forever. No great loss to literature, but it's something that I think would be fun to read again. (Fun for me, not for anybody else.)

It occured to me yesterday that it's been almost exactly 40 years since I first attempted to become a writer. (40 years! Good grief.)

In the summer of 1964 I was going to graduate school at North Texas State (now the University of North Texas) and living in an apartment with two guys named Fred Williams and Bob Tyus. One weekend Fred and I went to visit a friend in Kilgore, Texas. We were both hugely impressed by the stories of the Kilgore oil boom, by the number of millionaires in the town, and by the Frank Lloyd Wright houses we saw. So naturally we decided to write a book.

We thought the thing to do would be to write a sweeping historical novel in the manner of, say, Frank Yerby, a writer we'd both read in high school. We'd write about the discovery of oil, the crooked dealings in leases, the families (black and white) who got cheated, and the ones who got rich. It would be a best-seller for sure.

We started writing in ballpoint pen on notebook paper. I can't remember whether we wrote alternating chapters or alternating scenes. Or whether one of use would write until he stopped and the other picked up. In fact, I can't remember much about the proposed masterpiece at all.

The good news is that we soon got tired of it. I don't know how many pages we'd written, but it was certainly fewer than 100. I thought for years that I still had the pages in an old notebook, but when I looked for them one day, I couldn't find them. That was a long time ago, and I think we can safely assume that the manuscript is lost forever.

And the world is no doubt a better place because of that.

Lee Goldberg has discovered Harry Whittington: A Writer's Life: "I'm supposed to be concentrating on writing my next MISSING script, which preps in a week. But I made the mistake of picking up Harry Whittington's A MOMENT TO PREY and couldn't stop reading it until I was through. Wow. What an amazing book."

It always cheers me up when someone discovers one of the great old paperbackers. I've been collecting Whittington's books for nearly 40 years now, and I think I have most of them. I'm still looking for a couple he wrote as Henry (or possibly Henri) Whittier, and there may be others. It's hard to know for sure. For anyone who's interested in reading Whittington, I'd recommend BRUTE IN BRASS and A NIGHT FOR SCREAMING as a couple of other great places to begin.

Since I've enabled comments on this blog, I've gotten exactly one comment. One. I'll bet Harlan Coben and Lawrence Block get more comments than that, assuming they have blogs.

And what's even more humiliating is that the one comment reads: "This comment has been removed by the author." So I get one lousy comment, and it's immediately removed. How pathetic is that? (Rhetorical question, no answer required.)

Why I won't be buying Bill Clinton's MY LIFE:

1. It's too long.

2. I don't care.

I do wish that Bill wrote mysteries. If he did, his books would be shelved right next to mine, and maybe someone would buy my books by mistake. But probably not. Agatha Christie is next to me, and that hasn't helped me a bit.

Judy and I went to see THE TERMINAL yesterday. We liked it a lot. Another winning performance by Tom Hanks, but the rest of the cast was terrific as well. (My main complaint is that Catherine Zeta-Jones wasn't in the movie enough.) The movie was a welcome change from the slam-bang summer movies we usually see. No car chases, no explosions. Just a cast of characters that you can care about, going about their daily lives. Stanley Tucci is the villain, except that villain is much too strong a word. I'm not sure how Tucci does it, but he does it very well. There are plenty of laughs, but there's no straining for them, and some of the best jokes are the quiet ones. Judging from the box-office receipts, the movie's a flop. I guess everybody wants car chases and slapstick. But for me this is one of the best movies of the year so far.

A good while back Richard Moore gave a big thumbs' up to Roger Torrey's 42 DAYS FOR MURDER on rara-avis. I'd heard about the book before and wanted to read it, so when it turned up on eBay, I nabbed a copy.

Torrey is one of those BLACK MASK writers like Paul Cain about whom not much is known. There's no mention of him in my editions of 20TH CENTURY CRIME AND MYSTERY WRITERS. He wrote a number of short stories for BLACK MASK, but only one novel.

The book is fast-paced, which you'd expect from a BLACK MASK GUY, and there's a bit of forced humor that might not have seemed so forced back in the day. But I didn't really see the point of the narrator's teen-aged partner. He doesn't do much to advance the story, and his "romance" didn't amuse me. The plot seems simple: a man whose wife has gone to Reno for a divorce wants the p.i. to find out why. Naturally it gets a lot more complicated, and the resolution is pretty hard to believe. That being said, I enjoyed reading the novel. Breezy narration, some interesting characters that are more complex than you might have thought at the beginning, and a brisk pace. Not a classic, maybe, but worth looking for if you like the old pulpsters. And I do.

Jayme Lynn Blaschke's Gibberish: "I am, quite simply, astonished. I had no idea an archaeological discovery of this magnitude would be possible anywhere in the world, much less in the United States. I seriously considered going into anthropology/archaeology in college, so this Range Creek find gets my blood pumping. By golly, there's the remains of an entire civilization dating back 3,000 years in Utah: Rancher keeps ancient Indian settlement secret for 50 years

Hidden deep inside Utah's nearly inaccessible Book Cliffs region, 130 miles from Salt Lake City, the prehistoric villages run for 12 miles and include hundreds of rock art panels, cliffside granaries, stone houses built halfway underground, rock shelters, and the mummified remains of long-ago inhabitants.

The site was occupied for at least 3,000 years until it abandoned more than 1,000 years ago, when the Fremont people mysteriously vanished."

So I learn this morning from Jayme Blaschke's blog that there's been a huge archelological find in Utah that I hadn't heard about. I'm almost as excited as Jayme about this, so went to the source just to be sure that Jayme wasn't kidding. He wasn't. And according to the article, the site remains "virtually untouched by looters." Actually, it's many sites, "pristine" according to people who've been there, and just like they were 4500 years ago. Astonishing. The former owner had owned the land since 1951 and allowed very limited access. He didn't sell stuff off piecemeal, and he kept his secret very close. That something like this could turn up in 2004 is almost beyond belief. Restores my faith in Romance.

I got up this morning at the usual time, primed for a run. But it's raining, and it's been raining ever since I got out of bed. When I was younger, I didn't mind running in the rain, and I've actually been out in some terrific downpours. When we lived in Brownwood, in fact, I'd go out even in the snow and freezing rain. I remember coming in with a belt of ice around my waist and icicles hanging from the brim of my hat. These days, it just doesn't seem worth it. Just another sign that I'm getting old, I guess.

When I go to fun runs, which I don't do much these days, I get passed by men, women, kids, and the occasional snail (and yes, Dave Barry fans, I'm aware that The Occasional Snail would be a great name for a rock band).

Here's a definition, or rather a distinction, that I read years ago. It still works for me:

Jogging: Your speed or slower.
Running: My speed or faster.

OK, probably no one with a smidgen of self-respect would admit to having watched HOOTENANNY HOOT on TMC last night. But since I'm widely known to have no self-respect at all, I might as well say that I not only watched it but that I enjoyed it besides.

The plot pretty much sucks, so I won't bother to mention it. It's the musical numbers that matter, and what you get are a bunch of lip-synching folkies from 1963. And a few rockabillies thrown in for good measure.

The folkies include Joe and Eddie (for me, the standout number of the movie is their "There's a Meetin' Here Tonight"), Judy Henske (another standout is her "Wade in the Water"), the Brothers Four, and the Gateway Trio. The moviemakers had no clue what to do with Henske, so the staging of her scenes is almost an embarrassment. But her voice really carries the day. The Johnny Cash scene was also good. Cash was very cool.

As for the rest of the movie, the cars and the hair-do's were great. And so were Ruta Lee's lounging pyjamas. Hubba-hubba!

Once again I'm slightly bitter about an eBay purchase. Well, not about the purchase but about the old shipping and handling rip-off. I bought three magazines from the same guy, and he's charging me $5.00 to mail them by media mail. It'll cost him $1.42. Now I know he has to wrap'em and go to the P.O., but the $5.00 seems excessive to me. He could send them first class for that amount. Less than that, actually. Oh, well.

VinceKeenan.com: "Book: Death on the Cheap: The Lost B Movies of Film Noir, by Arthur Lyons (2000)"


This sounds like a great book. Lyons also wrote a darn good series of private-eye novels, well worth looking for in the used-book stores.

This week I read Al Guthrie's TWO-WAY SPLIT. Good stuff. Set in Scotland (Edinburgh), with some tough characters that include an ex-con and some armed robbers. There's a not-so-tough private-eye who got into the business because he liked reading p.i. fiction. His heroes are Max Thursday and Johnny Killain. You gotta like a guy like that. The title's one of those jokey ones that works about three different ways.

The book was published by PointBlank, an imprint of Wildside, and they're going to be reprinting the Truman Smith books. Looks like I'll be in good company.

I was reading about Harry Whittington's A MOMENT TO PREY over at Ed's Place the other day, and I couldn't quite figure out what the original title must have been. I finally got around to looking at my Black Lizard copy of the book and discovered that Gold Medal had published it as BACKWOODS TRAMP. I have to admit that Whittington's original title is classier, but there's just something about a title like BACKWOODS TRAMP that's hard to beat. And the cover of the Gold Medal edition beats the one on Black Lizard by a backwoods mile.

It's still hard for me to believe it's been 45 years since I graduated from high school, even after having a reunion with some of my classmates. We all still look young to me. OK, maybe not young, but we don't look old. OK, some of us do, but not all of us.

The funny thing is that I really don't remember much at all about the graduation ceremony. I do remember walking across the stage and getting the diploma, but that's it. For years, I sat in the orchestra pit and played in the band for graduation, and I remember some of those times better than my own graduation.

I do remember that outside the city auditorium, shortly before we marched in, Mike Leary said, "Do you need to take a nervous weechie?" I assured him that I didn't. I felt fine. Little did I realize what I was getting into by actually graduating. I tried to solve the problem by staying in college forever, but that didn't quite work out.

Thrilling Days of Yesteryear : Thrilling Days of Yesteryear
I have no idea what I'm doing, except that I'm trying out a new feature of blogger.com called "Blog This." One blog that I read nearly every day is Thrilling Days of Yesteryear, where I learned some really interesting biographical stuff about Brian Donlevy. Maybe it will show up here, and maybe not. We'll see. OK, it works. All you have to do to see what I'm talking about is click on the link at the beginning of this entry.

Ray Charles has died. I've been listening to his music for nearly 50 years, and I still remember the first time I ever heard "What'd I Say." I was in a car full of teenagers driving down the highway between Mexia and Corsicana, Texas. We were listening to WRR, a station out of Dallas, and the song came on. We nearly went nuts. They called Ray Charles "The Genius." When it came to music, I guess he was.

Tomorrow I'm going to a high school reunion. I know some people hate those things, but I happen to enjoy them. I went to a small high school, and there were about 60 people in my graduating class. When we graduated in 1959, many of us had been attending school together since the first grade. If you count the time that we spent together outside the classroom (band, football games, and other school activities, not to mention dating), you'll realize that for 12 years I spent more time with a lot of those people than I did with my family. So it's no wonder that they still mean a lot to me and that I enjoy seeing them whenever I can. I'm always interested to hear how they've spent their lives and what they're doing now. It happens that 45 years have passed since our graduation, a fact that's hard for me to wrap my mind around. I still remember certain things from those days with a crystal clarity. Good times.

OK, I know you've been on tenterhooks while waiting for me to talk more about my favorite doo-wop groups. Certainly one of them is the Drifters. Here's a group that went through so many personnel changes that I can't remember them all, including changing the lead singer again and again, yet for ten years or so they remained reliable hitmakers. My favorite configuration was the one with Clyde McPhatter singing lead, and I also like McPhatter's singles a lot. Other groups I really like are Dion and the Belmonts, chiefly for two or three recordings, including one of the all-time best, "I Wonder Why." I also like the Crests quite a bit. "16 Candles" is the one everybody seems to remember, but they did some other great stuff as well.

When it comes to music, I'm hopelessly stuck in the past, just another example that proves I'm a case of arrested development. I listen mostly to music from the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s, though there are some notable exceptions. I have a weakness for vocal group harmony, particularly of the doo-wop variety, which might explain why I liked the music from the late 1950s folk book so much. Not that there was any resemblance to doo-wop. The harmony was what drew me in. The folk era group that I liked most was the Kingston Trio, and I still like them. (Click on the G-Strings link for more.) I'm partial to the first configuration of the trio, the one that featured Dave Guard, Nick Reynolds, and Bob Shane. Tomorrow, I'll write a little about my favorite doo-wop groups.

One of the blogs I read every day is Ed Gorman's, found a www.edgorman.com. Just click on "Ed's Place." Recently he's given out the good news that several of Stephen Marlowe's books will be coming back into print through Ed's new imprint with Wildside Press. More good news (for me, at least) is that Wildside, through its PointBlank imprint will be bringing back my Truman Smith series. But I digress. I was talking about Stephen Marlowe. When I was a kid, I loved his stories under various names in the old SF digests I read, particularly the "Johnny Mayhem" series he did as, I think, Milton Lesser. A little later on, I started reading his Gold Medal books about a private-eye named Chester Drum. Not to mention his books as "Andrew Frazier" and "Jason Ridgway." He's still writing, so I have even more books of his to look forward to.

From 1971 until 1973 I taught English at Howard Payne University in Brownwood, Texas. I was department chair from 1977 until 1983, having taken over from Dr. George C. Pittman, who had gone to be the chair at Mississippi College. Last weekend, George and his wife, Alicia, who have moved back to Texas, had a reunion of some of the HPU faculty from the early 1970s. Judy and I hadn't seen some of them in 25 years or more, and it was terrific to see them again. We were all great friends in the '70s, and we picked up as if no time at all had passed. The photos that some people brought from those long-ago days proved something about the ravages of time, but I'd rather not dwell on that. I thought everyone looked great. There was a little more gray hair, and a couple of us had gained a pound or two, but that was all. We had some wonderful times at Howard Payne, thanks mainly to the people we met there. Seeing them again was a rare treat.

As always, I'm years behind on my reading. When new SF writers come along, I'm lucky even to hear of them until everyone else has read several books by them or they've won major awards. A case in point is China Mieville. A big name these days, apparently, but I'm just now reading King Rat, published back in 1996. I'm glad I finally caught up with it, though. I'm a sucker for books set in the sewers of London (or anywhere else), adn this one has some great sewer stuff. Grunge is the word, and there are some scenes that might turn the stomachs of people who are easily disgusted with improper eating habits. I think this book would qualify as "urban fantasy," and its basis in the Pied Piper story is fun. Lots of rats and spiders and birds, not to mention a number of gruesome murders. There's just one nagging question, but I won't say what it is and spoil things for anybody who might want to read the book. I hear that Mieville's other novels are much longer and more complex than this one, but I might have to try one of them, much as I hate long books.

I picked up a copy of Donald Wollheim's anthology The Macabre Reader on eBay the other day because I remembered having read it as a kid and liking most of the stories in it. Last night I reread "The Cairn on the Headland" by Robert E. Howard. I still enjoyed the story, but what surprised me most was the fact that practically nothing at all happens in the story. There's not much of a plot, and it's pretty easy to see from the beginning just exactly how things are going to work out. (I probably didn't find it that easy when I first read the story more than 40 years ago, however.) Howard's writing is what carries the story, and it's still as full of energy as ever, at least for me. The Howard story that really knocked me out all those years ago was one called "Valley of the Worm," or something like that. I should look around for it and see if it still works for me.

Judy and I went to see The Day After Tomorrow yesterday. The theater was pretty crowded for a Tuesday afternoon, so I guess the movie's a hit. I was reminded all the way through not of the disaster movies like The Towering Inferno or Earthquake but of the old B&W SF movies of the 1950s. In those movies it was always The Bomb (or some variation thereof) that was wreaking havoc with nature, and all the familiar tropes are present in The Day After Tomorrow: the good-looking lead scientist, the diagrams, the pseudo-scientific explanations for what's happening, the guy you know is gonna die (sacrificing himself for the others, of course), the doubting Thomas who's finally converted when he sees the giant grasshoppers -- I mean when he sees the horrible results of the massive storms -- and all the rest. What's not to like? And the special effects were fun, too.

All reet! All reet!

Last night I reread, for the umpteenth time, Alfred Bester's "Fondly Fahrenheit," and it was just as fresh as it was when I read it for the first time in THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION nearly 50 years ago. It's the story of a man and his android, one of whom is psychotic. It's gruesome and funny and stylistically inventive. Bester was writing "new wave" SF before anybody even knew there was such a thing. A classic.

So jeet your seat!

So we went to see Troy the other day. I wanted to see The Day After Tomorrow, but that one was sold out. Judy refuses to go to an early movie, so we have to compete with the crowds. Luckily, Troy was just starting, so I bought tickets for that. Having taught the source material for the movie for thirty years or so, I was naturally a little taken aback by some of the changes the movie-makers made, but I wasn't surprised by them. I thought Orlando Bloom was a bit wimpy as Paris, and while he made a great blonde elf bowman in the LOTR movies, I wasn't impressed with his arrow-shooting scene in Troy. Whenever he and Helen were onscreen, I thought I'd stumbled into a movie called Troy 90210.

October 21, 2003: We got in from the Bouchercon about 6:00 yesterday. We had a pretty much hassle-free flight, which was a surprise, considering the recent box-cutter
incidents. I thought we'd be trapped in lines all day, but it didn't happen.

We didn't gamble much. We got a roll of nickels in each registration
packet, and I quit when I was up by a quarter. Judy lost the roll and
another couple of bucks. That was it. A friend of ours bet $200 on the
University of Texas to cover the spread in their game on Saturday, so he did
all right. He also won over $400 at the blackjack tables. He had a much
more profitable weekend than we did.

Since we were there mainly for the convention, we took in only one show, the
Lance Burton magic show. It was amazing and terrific. I couldn't figure
out how he did any of it. I'm a big fan of magic shows, and I wasn't
interested in seeing any of the other stuff, like Wayne Newton.

We did walk down most of the Strip and visit most of the big hotels. I know
some people don't like Las Vegas, but I liked it just fine. The
extravagance and glitz were overwhelming, but I like the idea that there's a
place like that where people can go if they want to. There were lots of
youngsters there, barely into their twenties. By that age I'd been to
Dallas and Waco.

For us the convention is more about visiting with friends than about the
programs, but we did attend a few panels, all of which were pretty good. We
had a great time.

October 14, 2003: Tomorrow Judy and I leave for Las Vegas where this year's Bouchercon is being held. I was Fan Guest of Honor at the convention last year, and Judy and I won the Anthony Award for "Best Short Story." So this year's convention might be a bit of a let-down. Maybe we'll win Big Bucks at the casnio to make up for it.

October 13, 2003: I propose this simple test for Rush and the Dittohead Nation. I'll pick a celebrity's name at random. OK, Alec Baldwin. Now let's assume that Alec Baldwin is in Rush's exact situation: popping hillbilly heroin for years, turned in by his housekeeper, takes responsibility after being exposed on the cover of National Enquirer in supermarkets all over the nation.

So. How would Rush and the Dittoheads respond?

(A) By urging tolerance and compassion because "Alec's only human" and "we all make mistakes."

(B) By entering full attack mode and saying that Alex is "typical liberal scum" and "typical Hollywood elite" (a group that includes everyone except Arnold S. and Dennis Miller, since the Repubs want to run them for office), who deserves to be ridiculed today and every day for months.

I'm betting it would be (B), and all I'm asking is the same treatment for El Rushbo.

October 13, 2003: The latest National Enquirer has another big article on Rush Limbaugh. I haven't bought a copy, and so far nobody on the 'Net has had anything to say about it. So I don't know if it adds anything to the original article or is just more of the same to sell the magazine. I'm eager to find out, though.

October 11, 2003: Let's see if I have this right: Rush Limbaugh used drugs, abused drugs, and bought drugs illegally. He concealed his drug use. He confessed, but not until he was caught. And on the air he ranted against drug abusers. That spells massive hypocrisy to me, but apparently he's already been forgiven by legions of dittoheads, who're already buying into the spin that "he didn't use those nasty recreational drugs," so that makes everything all right.

October 10, 2003: Well, it's true. Rush Limbaugh has fessed up to being a drug user. He hasn't said anything about being a World-Class hypocrite, but he certainly is. He's made plenty of public comments about how drug users should be treated, some of them made while he was on drugs. But of course he won't be treated as he said others should be treated. He'll take 30 days off to break his addiction, and then he'll return, no doubt to cries of huzzah! from his ditto-headed millions, who won't see they hypocrisy in their actions any more than he sees it in his own.

October 8, 203: Rush Limbaugh has hired Roy Black as his attorney. Here's some info:

"Defense Attorney Roy Black said on MSNBC at 1:34am PST on Dec-5: '. . . John Ashcroft is no friend of civil liberties or the Constitution.'"

And this:

"[Black's] achievements include his successful defense of William Kennedy Smith on a rape charge in Palm Beach; Eller Media in charges stemming from the bus-bench electrocution of a 12-year-old boy in Miami; and the Albertsons supermarket chain, which the state of Florida charged with manslaughter in the death of a shoplifter."

Looks like Rush doesn't care whom he hires. After all, could a guy who said that about Ashcroft or who defended William Kennedy Smith really be Rush's kind of guy?

October 6, 2003: I have two hardcover books out this month. Not a wise move from the standpoint of people who are going to buy them. Who can afford two hardbacks by the same guy? I blame the publishers.

October 4, 2003: Is this a great country or what? The right wingers are vociferously supporting a huge budget deficit, a sex addict, and drug abuser. It doesn't get any better than this.

October 2, 2003: Well, it's really been a while, hasn't it? What's brought me out of my self-imposed exile? Rush Limbaugh. Old El-Rushbo, as he likes to call himself, has stepped in it with both feet. First his comments about Donovan McNabb, and now his apparent drug habit. All within a few days. Wow.

The racism first. Anybody who listens to Rush knows he's made racist remarks in the past, telling one caller to "take the bone out of your nose and call me back." He uses fake dialect ("Let me ax you something) and so on. But so what? Certain black sports figures make racist remarks all the time, and nobody fires them. What about Barry Bonds' comments on breaking Ruth's homerun record? What about nearly anything Charles Barkley says? Rush is an idiot, so why pick on him?

As for the drugs, well, if this is true, the Rush is a bigger hypocrite than I thought. And I thought he was a big one. He's always been a hardliner when it comes to drugs. If he's a user, then he should have kept his fat yap shut. If it's true and they can make a criminal case against him, then he should get off the radio and live in his Florida mansion (if he gets probation; otherwise, make him do hard time with a big black cellmate named Bubba).

August 17, 2003: I've registered to be a "Reader Reviewer" at the New York Times site. Now I, too, can be powerful and influential!

August 16, 2003: Judy and I both thought OPEN RANGE was terrific. Of course I'm a sucker for
westerns, and there are all too few of them these days. That may be
changing, as we saw the previews for THE MISSING (Boy, does Tommy Lee Jones
look rugged) and for THE ALAMO. Both of them look darned good, but I'm
afraid to get my hopes too high for THE ALAMO. But I digress. Some
reviewers have criticized OPEN RANGE for bad dialogue, but I didn't seen a
bad line in it. Some awkwardness maybe in the love scenes, but that was
about it. And Costner isn't afraid to take his time setting things up and
letting the story play out at its own pace without juicing it up. I like
movies that move that way if they don't bore me, and this one didn't bore me
at all. Robert Duvall was, as usual, really good, and Michael Jeter has the
Gabby Hayes part down pat. Too bad he died soon after the movie was
finished.

August 7, 2003: I have to go to the dentist this afternoon and get a tooth crowned. All the hard stuff has been done, so this part shouldn't be too bad.

I see that Arnie is running for Gov. of California. That's it. I give up. I mean, what are his qualifications? And aren't many of his supporters the same ones who were, only a few weeks ago, calling for Hollywood stars to sit down and shut up? Of course we all knew they meant "Hollywood stars who don't agree with us," but they didn't say that. Hypocrisy rears its head again. I think I'll just try not to care any more. The Republicans are going to redistrict Texas and take over California, so they'll own the world. I might as well get used to it.

August 6, 2003: Seems as if it's getting to be longer and longer between postings here. I guess I'll have to either do better or give up. We're going to the ArmadilloCon on Friday, so it's likely that I won't be posting there. I'd post more, but I have nothing to say. I lead a very boring life.

Yesterday the Fabulous G-Strings practiced at the college. Rochelle sounds great, and her song should bring the house down. We don't have to worry about the other songs since that one's so strong.