Saturday, March 04, 2017
There Is Nothing Lower than a Crocnapper
Crocodiles stolen from mobile zoo in Sydney’s south west: Crocnapping: Where are Snap and Crackle?
“The Bees Knees and the Cat’s Galoshes” (by Olive-Ann Tynan)
“The Bees Knees and the Cat’s Galoshes” (by Olive-Ann Tynan) | SOMETHING IS GOING TO HAPPEN: An Irish writer whose first work of fiction appeared in EQMM’s Department of First Stories in 2013, Olive-Ann Tynan has lived in Italy for many years. She currently works as a translator from Italian to English and was at one time editor for an Italian-language golf magazine. Despite her long immersion in another culture, she continues to find her native Ireland in the period of her childhood the most fertile soil for her fiction, something she talks about in this post. Olive-Ann’s latest EQMM story, “Alive, Alive-Oh,” is in our current issue, March/April 2017.—Janet Hutchings
Miriam Colon, R. I. P.
NY Daily News: Miriam Colon, a pioneering actress in U.S. Latino New York theater who starred in films alongside Marlon Brando and Al Pacino, died Friday.
Hat tip to Jeff Meyerson.
Hat tip to Jeff Meyerson.
Friday, March 03, 2017
Paula Fox, R. I. P.
The New York Times: Paula Fox, a distinguished writer for children and adults whose work illuminated lives filled with loss, dislocation and abandonment, conditions she knew firsthand from a very early age, died on Wednesday in Brooklyn. She was 93.
Hat tip to Jeff Meyerson.
Hat tip to Jeff Meyerson.
It Already Has a Great Band Name
Music Matters, Listen: The music composed by slime mould: The composer Eduardo R. Miranda tells Tom Service how he uses single-cell organisms to improvise music at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research in Plymouth.
Hat tip to Michael Bracken.
Hat tip to Michael Bracken.
Some Reviews of Interest (To Me, Anyway)
Gravetapping: Bullet Reviews: A smattering of praise
The stuff covered here doesn't get reviewed often.
The stuff covered here doesn't get reviewed often.
The Will To Kill -- Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins
In his intro to this posthumous collaboration with Mickey Spillane, Max Allan Collins explains that the more substantial Spillane manuscripts have now all been completed. The one Collins worked with to write The Will to Kill was about thirty pages rather than a hundred as in previous collaborations. He goes on to say that Spillane had set things up just fine, with a premise that brings to mind Agatha Christie. He should know, and of course he's right. There are elements of the English country-house mystery here, and having seen the movie version of And Then There Were None recently, I was immediately reminded of it as members of a prominent inventor's family, all living in the same house, are being knocked off one by one.Things are set in motion by the death of the family chauffeur, and Hammer is involved because he discovers the body (well, half of it) while out for late-night stroll. The victim is a former cop, a good friend of Pat Chambers, who hires Hammer to look into things. Many are still suspicious that the death of the inventor several years before, an apparent accident, wasn't an accident at all. and of course they're right. There's something else going on in the area, too, something even more sinister: young women are disappearing and presumed dead.
Hammer moves though this double plot in a kinder, gentler fashion. He's not personally involved, as he almost always is, and so vengeance isn't involved, and the kill music isn't singing in his head. In fact, although he beats up a few guys now and then, he kills only one of them. He helps out the members of the family, solving some of their problems for them, and and puts the pieces together like a classical detective (not that he hasn't done this in other books, as Collins points out; it's just not often remarked on because critics emphasize other parts of the novels). All this is satisfactorily resolved, with a kind of two-fer surprise ending that seems just right.
It was fun to read this book, not just because it's a bit of a different outing for Hammer that shows a side of him that's not often noticed, but because Collins pulls it off so well, with a compelling story that keeps you reading right along even though the sex and violence are downplayed. It's another hit for a great writing team.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)