New Stephen King Novel Coming from Hard Case Crime

JOYLAND to be published in June 2013

New York, NY; London, UK (May 30, 2012) – Hard Case Crime, the award-winning line of pulp-styled crime novels published by Titan Books, today announced it will publish JOYLAND, a new novel by Stephen King, in June 2013.  Set in a small-town North Carolina amusement park in 1973, JOYLAND tells the story of the summer in which college student Devin Jones comes to work as a carny and confronts the legacy of a vicious murder, the fate of a dying child, and the ways both will change his life forever.  JOYLAND is a brand-new book and has never previously been published.  One of the most beloved storytellers of all time, Stephen King is the world’s best-selling novelist, with more than 300 million books in print.
Called “the best new American publisher to appear in the last decade” by Neal Pollack in The Stranger, Hard Case Crime revives the storytelling and visual style of the pulp paperbacks of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s.  The line features an exciting mix of lost pulp masterpieces from some of the most acclaimed crime writers of all time and gripping new novels from the next generation of great hardboiled authors, all with new painted covers in the grand pulp style.  Authors range from modern-day bestsellers such as Pete Hamill, Donald E. Westlake, Lawrence Block and Ed McBain to Golden Age stars like Mickey Spillane (creator of “Mike Hammer”), Erle Stanley Gardner (creator of “Perry Mason”), Wade Miller (author of Touch of Evil), and Cornell Woolrich (author of Rear Window). 
Stephen King commented, “I love crime, I love mysteries, and I love ghosts. That combo made Hard Case Crime the perfect venue for this book, which is one of my favorites. I also loved the paperbacks I grew up with as a kid, and for that reason, we’re going to hold off on e-publishing this one for the time being. Joyland will be coming out in paperback, and folks who want to read it will have to buy the actual book.” 
King’s previous Hard Case Crime novel, The Colorado Kid, became a national bestseller and inspired the television series “Haven,” now going into its third season on SyFy.
“Joyland is a breathtaking, beautiful, heartbreaking book,” said Charles Ardai, Edgar- and Shamus Award-winning editor of Hard Case Crime.  “It’s a whodunit, it’s a carny novel, it’s a story about growing up and growing old, and about those who don’t get to do either because death comes for them before their time.  Even the most hardboiled readers will find themselves moved. When I finished it, I sent a note saying, ‘Goddamn it, Steve, you made me cry.’ ”
JOYLAND will feature new painted cover art by the legendary Robert McGinnis, the artist behind the posters for the original Sean Connery James Bond movies and “Breakfast At Tiffany’s,” and by Glen Orbik, the painter of more than a dozen of Hard Case Crime’s most popular covers, including the cover for The Colorado Kid.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movie: The Last Jaws

The Finnish DVD cover says the title for this is The Last Jaws, but the opening credits say it's The Last Shark. Be it as it may, the original Italian title is L'ultimo squalo. I'm sure this film has other names as well. It was banned in the US for being such a blatant rip-off of Spielberg's Jaws.

This epic falls not very neatly somewhere between a schlock horror thriller and a solid turkey. It's not as camp as it should be, nor as shocking as it should be, so it's pretty mediocre. Some very funny moments throughout, as the YouTube link shows (it's with Spanish dubbing). More Overlooked (is this "overlooked"?) Movies at Todd Mason's blog here.

Joseph Koenig on False Negative

Titan Books - Joseph Koenig on False Negative

New Hard Case Crime writer shares some of his memories of working for the true crime papers. Horrifying stuff.

Patricia Highsmith: The Cry of the Owl

Seems to me that people mostly remember Patricia Highsmith from her Tom Ripley books (which are very good, so I'm not complaining) and Strangers on a Train (would they if Hitchcock hadn't made the film?). Her other stand-alones can also be very effective, and The Cry of the Wolf from 1962 is indeed very effective.

The book's a story about a young man who seems to dislike other people and stalks a young woman who's living alone in a house some miles away from the city. The girl does have a boyfriend, but when she spots the young stalker and responses to him kindly, a very strange relationship starts to develop. It seems for quite a while that this is a rare murderless crime novel, but in the end there's one. I won't say anything more. This is a good example of female noir, the subgenre Highsmith shared with the likes of Margaret Millar, Doris Miles Disney, Elizabeth Sanxay Holding, Ursula Curtiss and others. Higsmith might be the cruellest of them all.

I see only just now that there is a rather recent movie based on this. Anyone seen it? Is it any good?

Edit: I was told that Claude Chabrol also made a film out of this, called Le cri du hibou (1987).

Turned 40 last Thursday

Since the thing mentioned in the headline happened last Thursday, I wanted to mention some of the things I've been up to:

- I just compiled and sent to the printers a small booklet that will come out next Friday, when I'm having a ball with some friends of mine (see the photo), it contains 40 items, mainly pictures and photos, from my life and the title means simply: Juri: 40 things.

- last Friday I finished doing layouts for the new anthology I edited: it reimagines the Finland's most famous soldier, the national hero Mannerheim as a pulp hero with a secret life, mission and whole new adventures no one has ever heard of; the book will come out in the sixth of June

- the anthology of old Finnish horror stories is finally coming out, it may be out already as I write this

- I've been trying to gather some stuff for the book on the history of misanthropy, but there have been some complications with the publisher that was supposed to do this

- my project for the history of animated cinema went busted, but I'll be resurrecting it as a book for children of 10-14 years; I don't really know how that will turn out

- I've been editing the manuscript of my coming sleaze novel, called this time Runkkuloma Rivieralla (hardly translatable, as the pun in the title makes no sense to anyone outside Finland), it didn't come out as well as I had wished, but I have hopes that with corrections I can make it work

There are also two fictionmags I'm hoping to put out, the other being the fifth and final issue of my Seikkailukertomuksia/Adventure Stories and the other being an aviation mag, with two new Finnish stories, one old Finnish story and one old translated story from a pulp mag. Details later, the title will be The Sky of Adventures (or, in Finnish, Seikkailujen taivas). I've also got some book ideas for the next Autumn, but more on them later.

PointBlank Reader

Anyone remember this? Could've been a contender. The anthology never came about. I wonder if the stories found other places to be published in.

The Raid: Redemption

I saw this new Indonesian action movie earlier today and I can echo Vince Keenan's sentiments when he wrote this piece on his blog. I thought some of the kung fu scenes were a bit too long (for some reason I like it better when a guy tackles 20 other guys, but less when there are only two or three, as in the longest battle scene of the film), but nevertheless this was great entertainment. I liked especially how the important plot points were hidden in quick, snappy dialogue. They didn't develop the things for too long, which is alway good. (Someone actually complained me just yesterday that my novel Jumalten tuho is too quick in introducing the characters. What, you wanted to hear two pages of telling what he eats and did twenty years ago?)

Sheldon Lord: Kept

As you've noticed, I've been reading Lawrence Block's old sleaze novels lately. The quality hasn't been as good as Block's reputation would indicate, but as I'm writing an article about the reprint boom of old sleaze paperbacks, I wanted to try another one: Kept, as by Sheldon Lord (Midwood, 1960). Lord was a pseudonym Block used in his novels (such as Pads Are For Passion, reprinted as A Diet of Treacle), but then again this website says Kept was actually written by Donald Westlake.

I couldn't tell. Kept could be by either one as the prose is smooth and very readable, just as both Westlake and Block can deliver. I read the book in Finnish translation (it was published as Maksettu rakastaja in the mid-sixties by Finnbooks in their short-lived series called Domino) and for all I know, it could be abridged or altered in any other way.


I was rather disappointed in Kept, because I went in looking for a criminous content, but there was none! This could've been a romance paperback, save for the fact that there are some candid sex scenes (candid for their own time, mind you) and that the lead character is a man. The book starts off promisingly, a bit like Postman Always Rings Twice, with a beautiful, young woman picking up a hobo man off the side of the road. But in the end nothing much happens: the boy gets the girl and that's about it. There's some fascinating Mad Men territory being covered here, though: penthouse luxury, new hi-fi stuff, well-cut suits, bossing women around at the office, drinks consumed almost at all times, all that.

But all in all, I'm not sure if I share the Vintage Sleaze Paperbacks conviction this should be reprinted. (But take this with a grain of salt, since I read the translation.)

The great original cover is by Paul Rader.

By the way, here's a link to the Finnish Domino series. Any comments on the books published in it?

Lawrence Block: A Diet of Treacle

This is one of the old Lawrence Block sleaze titles Hard Case Crime has been reprinting. Killing Castro was somewhat disappointing, and so was this. A Diet of Treacle is a ménage à trois between two beatnik guys (one a loser, other a criminal) and a girl who'd like to be a beatnik. The book is not really a crime novel, it's more a novel with a crime. The actual plot starts only after the middle part, but Block writes so smoothly it's not a huge problem. The problem lies with the fact that the plot is too thin after all - and that there's too much of the beatnik slang, with everything being cool, solid or hip. The ending is good, though, real noir stuff.


The book was first published as Pads Are For Passion (Beacon, in the early sixties), but A Diet of Treacle (name snatched from Lewis Carroll) was Block's original title. This kind of information is something I'd really like Hard Case Crime would tell at their website. The book was first published under the Sheldon Lord by-line and I already started reading Sheldon Lord's Kept that was written also by Block. Seems pretty solid (sic) by the first 50 pages.

The Thrill Kill Books: Getting Off and Bad Thoughts

 I finished two books last weekend that shared the same theme: the thrill of a good kill. Both dealt the theme very differently, the other one was very humorous and free-wheeling and the other one developed some real horror out of it.

The latter was Dave Zeltserman's Bad Thoughts that was first published in hardcover by Five Star, but is now available as an e-book. Zeltserman sure knows how to spin a dark tale, as has been witnessed by his earlier books (of which I think Killer is the best - at least of those I've read). And boy oh boy, is Bad Thoughts dark! The killer in Bad Thoughts has a dubious gift of being able to work in the dreams of the people he wants to hurt and seems like there's no escape out of the situation. There are some moments that ask for the suspension of disbelief, but Zeltserman brings the thing to a well-balanced conclusion and does it with verve, through a simple-looking style that maintains the hardboiled noir style that's so familiar to Zeltserman's readers. In the hands of a mediocre serial killer writer, this would merely be a thriller. Now it's something else entirely.

Lawrence Block's hardcover Hard Case Crime outing Getting Off makes the same thing very differently. It tells about a young and attractive woman who kills men to revenge the abuse her father inflicted upon her and does it with great pleasure, first having sex with the men. Block pulls no punches in this tale that develops into a parody of serial killer novels. He turns the clichés upside down: there's nothing inherently bad in getting your joy out of killing people. The book's highly erotic at the same time and it's no wonder Block has used his early Jill Emerson pseudonym in this (though this is much seedier stuff than anything by "Jill Emerson"). There are some moments in the book that feel forced, as a couple of details in the lesbian romance, but I can see Block chuckling to himself while writing those scenes.

The books are very different in depicting the reasons for the thrill kill violence: Zeltserman says there's no reason, the guy was just born broken and it was a pity no one made anything to stop him, Block claims the abuse of the young girl made her what she is today. Seems like the Zeltserman explanation is more fashionable now, as the psychoanalytic-tinged theory of traumatized sexual behaviour has faded out of academic fashion.

Dave Zeltserman's Bad Thoughts has also the distinction of being the first e-book I've read. I loaded the free Kindle Reader on my portable and I've been snatching some free e-books whenever they've been available. As a reading experience I thought it was okay, but something I'd think should be done with the real device. But as of yet, I don't own one. As more and more interesting noir and hardboiled books are coming out only as e-books, getting a Kindle or a Nook or something similar seems something I need to do. Just too pity e-books are so expensive here in Finland.

Tuesday's Overlooked Film: Blazing Magnum

This is an outrageous Italian crime flick with an insane plot about a police lieutenant's sister who gets killed in a party and some pretty interesting secrets start to unravel. Directed by veteran Alberto De Martino, this boasts some hilariously ridiculous scenes, such as Stuart Whitman beating up three transvetites. The long car chase in the middle of the film is one of the best and one of the stupidest I've seen - yes, at the same time.

If you enjoy stupid films that aren't bad, this is especially for you.

More Overlooked Films at Todd Mason's blog here. (Seems like they are not up yet, as the Americans are not up yet.)

Hard Case Crime cover for James M. Cain

And what a cover it is! Take a look at the never-before-published The Cocktail Waitress here. There's also a chapter to read for a taste.

Lawrence Block: Grifter's Game

I've never actually read much Lawrence Block. I once read one of his later Matt Scudder novels and I really didn't care for it. I'll have to try one of them again. I've liked two of his Tanner novels, even though they are very light. A Bernie Rhodenbarr I had to quit in the middle. And then I've read Killing Castro.

I finally got around to reading the first book Hard Case Crime put out, Block's Grifter's Game that was originally published as Mona (Fawcett Gold Medal 1961). It really shows Block was a good writer even when he was very young (he was 23 when this was published, and I think this is his first, at least under his own name), the text is fluent and very readable. Block's dialogue is paced well and crispy. It's too bad there's so little of it in the middle parts - the narrative turns pretty much into the protagonist's monology. The protagonist is a con man in his late twenties. He's quite sympathetic, though he's a heel of the worst kind, seducing women to to live on their money for days or for months and then dropping them. There are no good people in the world of Grifter's Game, which, combined with the pretty nasty ending, makes this a worthwhile noir novel.

Next off I'll be reading Block's Getting Off and Lucky at Cards. Why? I'm working on an article for a Finnish journal about sex and sleaze paperbacks. And because it's about time I start reading Lawrence Block.

Anthology of men's adventure magazine stories

Bob Deis who organizes a very nice Facebook group called Men's Adventure Magazines and maintains a blog about the same issue, is compiling an anthology of the stories from men's adventure mags, take a look here. The list of writers includes Larry Block, Walter Wager, Harlan Ellison, Bruce Jay Friedman and Mario Puzo.

Fidel Castro assassinated

Hard Case Crime has put out some very interesting reprints and obscurities. Lawrence Block's Killing Castro is probably of the latter kind. It's entertaining, but I'm not sure whether I could call it a forgotten classic. It's a story about five Americanos trying to kill Fidel Castro and trying to get 20,000 dollars as a reward. Some of them are professionals, some of them are idealists, some of them are just waiting around to die and trying to do something useful while dying.

Unlike another blogger said, I didn't find this tightly knit or narrated. It's more like a loose narrative, with just episodes following each other. Some of the episodes are more entertaining than others and Block creates some pretty good characters through dialogue and action. The fate of some of the characters was also entertaining and not something I anticipated.

In a weird narrative technique Block also interweaves the story with the history of real-life Castro and his rise to power. Without those parts the book would be one third shorter and I guess Block just typed them up to fill up the standard book-length. Block's view of Castro and Cuba before him seems pretty solid, though, and even if those bits irritated me, they provided some new information! 

The book is one of Block's rarest early pseudonymous efforts, published as "Lee Duncan" under the title Fidel Castro Assassinated. The publisher was Monarch, the year is 1961, and I think in this case the new cover is much better than the original! 

Orrie Hitt's two-fer

As I've said earlier, the momentum of old sleaze and sex paperbacks has arrived. There are numerous reprints and I think there will be even more of them, which is just great, if the books are as good as the ones in the Robert Silverberg double and in the Orrie Hitt double Stark House Press published last year.

Orrie Hitt was pretty much deemed to obscurity in the 1980's and 1990's, but there were some mentions of his name here and there, for example in Lee Server's book on old paperbacks. It seems his star is on the rise - has actually been awhile -, mainly due to the blogs dedicated to the pulp school of writing and vintage sleaze. Stark House did recently a great double volume of his work, with two long-lost titles The Cheaters and Dial "M" for Man. It's a great read and I recommend it highly.

The Cheaters (Midwood 1960) tells about a young man, pretty much down on his luck, taking a job as a bartender in a seedy bar. The guy falls in love with the gorgeous wife of the bar's fat and obnoxious owner, who wants the guy to take over the bar. Dial "M" for Man (Beacon 1962) is about a TV repair man running his own business in a small town. He also falls in love with the gorgeous wife of the town's big man who in his turn tries to run the TV man down in every way he can.

Both books, published originally as cheap and cheap-looking paperbacks, are about ordinary men in bad situations. They just end up in them, even though they try to shy away from bad stuff. It just happens. They fall in love and start to scheme killing a man, albeit rather reluctantly. This is classic noir stuff, exemplified by this quote from Dial "M" for Man: "Here I was, just a little guy with everything to lose - everything that I had not already lost, that is." You care for these guys, that's why these two little books (Dial "M" for Man is just over 100 pages) have stayed alive.

The other reason for their vitality is Hitt's narrative drive. Even though nothing much happens and the prose isn't very refined or stylish, Hitt really knows how to keep the story moving. You keep flipping the pages, though, as I said, nothing much happens. In this Hitt reminds me of Jason Starr, one of my favourite new noir writers, who also writes about ordinary people and in whose books nothing much happens. Especially in Dial "M" for Man Hitt really keeps the shit piling up on his protagonist.

The endings in both books are bad, though, like Hitt didn't really know how to keep up the dark pessimism of the earlier pages.

New Hammett in the works

Snatched from the Rara-Avis e-mail list earlier today:

Otto Penzler has announced a new book coming from The Mysterious Press: "The Return of the Thin Man" by Dashiell Hammett. It will include Hammett's 1935 original story that became the movie "After the Thin Man," his 1938 story for "Another Thin Man" (based on his Continental Op story "The Farewell Murder"), and the brief parody treatment he wrote in 1938 for a fourth Thin Man movie.

The "After the Thin Man" story was previously published issues 5 and 6 of the paperback magazine "The New Black Mask" in 1986 and in the 1987 U.K. paperback anthology "Crime Wave" published by Robinson and edited by Richard Layman and Matt Bruccoli. The other two stories have never been published anywhere.

The book will also include notes by Hammett scholar Layman and Hammett's granddaughter Julie Rivett. Penzler didn't announce an exact publication date, just "late fall."

Lots of overlooked movies

I was going to do this on Tuesday, but I just haven't had time for this kind of thing lately as I've been teaching at the university (creative writing? what do I know about that?) and it seems to take away the energy and everything. So, the thing was that I spent weekend at the cabin with six friends of mine watching movies all the time and drinking booze and not much else. Here's the list of the film we watched, with my starred reviews and Wikipedia and other links. Any of these could be a contender for Todd Mason's Overlooked Movies blog meme!

William Witney: Master of the World (1961) **½ (Vincent Price, Charles Bronson, Jules Verne and Richard Matheson, but still pretty dated)
Allen Baron: Blast of Silence (1961) ***½ (here's my earlier blog post about the film)
Jack Sholder: Alone in the Dark (1982) ** (could've benefited from sticking to the weirdness it starts out with)
Eli Craig: Tucker & Dale vs. Evil (2010) *** (quite funny at times)
Mario Bava: Rabid Dogs (1974) *** (pretty suspenseful and nasty [see the photo], stays cinematic even though set inside one car for about 80 % of the running time)
William Klein: Mr. Freedom (1969) ***½ (very funny political oddity, very outrageous and purposefully stupid and in-your-face)
Peter Bogdanovich: Targets (1968) **** (pretty effective and well made early portrait of a mass killer, Boris Karloff is great in this)
Narciso Ibanez Serrador: House that Screamed (1969) *** (slow-moving but effective piece of erotic Euro-horror)
Neil LaBute: Wicker Man *½ (might've been something if Nicholas Cage didn't chew up the scenery so (in)famously, still - or because of that? - very funny)
Elliot Silverstein: The Car ** (always wanted to see this, but isn't actually much, the titular car is quite good)
Antonio Margheriti: Cannibal Apocalypse ** (sounds great, but doesn't amount to much of anything, the beginning in Vietnam is good, though)
Tommy Wiseau: The Room * or ***** (unbelievable narcissistic crap, poorly done, weirdly written and very strangely acted, very, very, very funny almost all the time)

We also started Manos, the Hands of Fate, but it was so goddamn awful we had to stop 15 minutes in. Plus we watched several short subjects, like Jacques Drouin's animations and Tex Avery and episodes of  Family Guy etc. So, you can pretty much gather we had a good time!

Tuesday's Overlooked Movie: The Honeymoon Killers

I'm not really sure if this merits as an overlooked movie, since it's quite of a cult classic. Leonard Kastle's The Honeymoon Killers from 1969 is what's usually called a "sleeper", a film whose status has grown over the years, a film that pretty much went by everyone during its initial release. And it's also a film whose status really deserves that growth: it's an excellent crime film with lots of dark overtones and with an artistic touch that makes it stand out amongst its contemporaries.

The story's about the real case of Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck, two unlikely lovers who got each other mixed up in a scam of marrying stupid elderly women and ending up in killing them. It's an ugly story and Kastle doesn't shy away from it. He gives no clues as to what drives these two people, which makes the movie even more chilling. Kastle denies the easy identification from the viewers. This is intensified by a rather Godardesque use of music - Gustav Mahler whom Kastle admired very much.

The film is shot in murky black and white, some of the set pieces are pretty clumsy, but there's also some great photography and mise-en-scène. Kastle shines out the best as a director of actors: all of them give marvellous examples of great acting. The script must've given them plenty to work with, since the characters are full-blown human beings, even in short sequences - they are not caricatures. It makes The Honeymoon Killers touching and very humane at heart, even though on the surface it's a ruthless story about two ruthless - and rather clueless - killers. But I really, really love Shirley Stoler and Tony Lo Bianco in this. Marvellous! Excellent! And ahead of their time, I should say. You didn't see this kind of acting in Hollywood films in the late sixties.

Highly recommended, if you ever run across it. More Overlooked Movies at Todd Mason's blog.

The last issue of Pulp

Earlier I put the shades on my crime fiction webzine Isku, today I did the same for my non-fiction webzine, Pulp. Here you can read the latest issue that will also remain the last. It's a large issue, with almost 20 articles and reviews. I wrote all of them, save for one review...

Pulp was published in paper from 2003 to 2009, it moved to the web in 2010, but I couldn't find time anymore to do it, so I decided to pull it off. How then could I write almost 20 articles for it? I happen to have a good grant at the moment, but it's entirely for something else, so I'm walking on thin ice here...

So, it's bye-bye, Pulp. (Here you can read my farewell to the printed Pulp from two years back. Seems like I didn't think of going the web-version at the time!) I'm thinking of compiling a collection of articles and essays that were mainly published in Pulp, so all this work wasn't for nothing!