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.