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.