Charles Beckman (1920-2015)

I just heard from James Reasoner that Charles Beckman died two weeks ago. He was probably the last real pulp magazine writer alive - I can't think of anyone else, after Hugh B. Cave, Jack Williamson, Frank Kelly, Ray Bradbury, and Elmore Leonard have all passed away.

Beckman's career wasn't straight-forward. He wrote for the crime and western pulps, he wrote for the sleaze houses in the mid-to-late sixties, he wrote for the men's magazines, he wrote for the romance publishers with his wife, he also wrote some non-fiction on jazz - he was a jazz drummer first. Beckman's first published short story was "Strictly Poison" in Detective Tales, October 1945.

Beckman got active just before the end, compiling two collections of his old pulp tales: Suspense, Suspicion & Shockers, and Saddles, Sixguns & Shootouts. I have the first one, but haven't had time to check into it. Note also the new biography Pulp Jazz available from CreateSpace. The book also seems to have a bibliography of Beckman's writing, but I thought I'd also include one myself, here at my bibliographic sidekick blog.

I also published Beckman myself. I put out a small booklet (see above) containing two of his stories, a noirish hardboiled pulp story "Die Dancing, Kid!" (Detective Tales, January 1947) and a more thoughtful "Class Reunion" (AHMM, June 1973). The first one was published originally in Finnish in a magazine called Seikkailujen Maailma (The World of Adventures) and the translator remains unknown. The latter one was translated by my friend Tapani Bagge and published in a short-lived crime fiction mag RikosPalat (CrimeBits) in the late eighties. Both were republished by permission from Mr. Beckman himself, with thanks to James Reasoner and Walker Martin!

Interview on Women Crime Writers

Here's Cullen Callagher's nice interview with Sarah Weinman on her 2-volume anthology Women Crime Writers. Check it out, it's a very good interview with interesting points.

Friday's Forgotten Book: Jack MacLane: Goodnight, Moom

I was lucky to find this almost ancient paperback from a junkyard sale at a comics book store here in Turku. Goodnight, Moom, published originally in 1989, is a cult item, cherished by few aficionados. And it deserves to be.

It's a sort of Frankenstein tale, set amongst the white trash of Texas. Victor Frankenstein of the book is Ed Leach, a car mechanic who abuses his wife and does nothing else but work at his garage and drink beer with his loser buddies. The monster of the book is his son, Harry, whom Ed throws against the wall when the kid is very small. Something happens to the baby and he grows up weird, not saying anything to anyone. He goes to school, but learns nothing. At one point, Harry tortures a kitten. Then he kills another child, a girl who's taken to liking him, since he's so quiet all the time. Ed decides to lock Harry up in the cellar. His mother, Harriette, takes care of the boy, but is afraid of him. And she should be... Harry breaks free and goes on a killing spree, repeating "moom" everytime full moon is up. Ed goes
after him, just like Victor Frankenstein does in Shelley's novel. It develops into a nasty mess, with Ed wanting to keep his son's misdeeds hidden.

Goodnight, Moom is a well-paced horror novel with a ghastly plot and ghastly details, but what's more important is that Jack MacLane can make Harry an interesting character, even though Harry can't speak and doesn't know any words for his strange emotions. You care for the sick, silent bastard. And you care for Harriette, his mother, and you even might care for Ed - you almost surely care for his loser buddies whom he takes with him to catch Harry.

Jack MacLane is really Bill Crider, the Texan writer, paperback collector and blogger. He used the pseudonym Jack MacLane in a string of horror books written for the now-defunct Zebra. The Texas landscape comes alive with many telling details about the wasted life of the small-town Texans. At times Crider goes into a tall-tale territory, like his friend Joe Lansdale also often does.

Goodnight, Moom is available as an e-book alongside the other Jack MacLanes Crider wrote.

One of the Jack MacLanes, Keepers of the Beast, was translated in Finnish in 1989 as Paholaisen opetuslapset in the short-lived horror series by the Viihdeviikarit publishers. There's a sheriff called Jay Reasoner in the book, but that's about all I remember from the book. Might be the time to reread it.

More Forgotten Books at Patti Abbott's blog here or at Todd Mason's blog here.

Jason Starr: Savage Lane

As I've said a hundred times before, Jason Starr is one of my all-time favourite writers: nasty, twisted, funny, fluent. He's very readable and catchy, yet there's nothing amiable about his book. At the same time you really care for his characters, they are not mere pawns in the game.

Starr's newest book Savage Lane marks his return to noir thriller and does it with a wicked punch. Starr treads the same ground as Gillian Flynn, but there's nothing to suggest he's just going after a trend. This is his territory, pure and simple. 

There's something different this time, however. Savage Lane is set in the healthy suburbs, not the seedy downtown and the facile city of his earlier novels. Savage Lane is about the not-so-healthy relationships born out of the shallowness of suburban life and the self-treachery of the people inhabiting the nice homes. Starr's stablemate, sociopathic liars, figure greatly in the novel, and Starr's use the unreliable narrator is matchless. The shifts in the narration and what they reveal about the characters is laugh-out-funny. The timing is perfect. Yet there's no crime almost halfway in. When it comes, it's almost a shock - and after we've gotten over it, we start to laugh. 

Savage Lane is actually a pretty savage book. It's Desperate Housewives meets Psycho. Megan Abbott is right saying: "Who but Jason Starr could render suburban vice pitch black, sneakily endearing and wickedly funny all at once? Like James M. Cain meets Tom Perrotta, Savage Lane shows, in grand style, how twisted the hearts of All-American families can be, and how those picket white fences can be dangerously sharp."

Read more about the book at the Polis Books site (they seem to be doing good work bringing out new noir and hardboiled thrillers, alongside the more traditional ones) and at LitReactor where Keith Rawson has some nice things to say about the book. 

Gil Brewer: The Red Scarf

A Crest reprint

Gil Brewer was one of the best crime and noir paperbackers of the fifties and early sixties. I've read several of his novels in Finnish translation and liked them all. They are fast and plausible, and the protagonists have to overcome some heavy obstacles in their way.

Same goes for The Red Scarf (1958). It was published in hardcover by Mystery House, a cheap lending-library publisher that paid $300 for the book, after it was rejected by Brewer's usual publisher, Fawcett Gold Medal, and other paperback publishers. Still it's an outstanding book, one of Brewer's best, which is saying a lot. This is one of those books where your typical lower middle-class working person gets into a trouble, can't find his (or her) way out of it and just digs his hole deeper and deeper. In The Red Scarf the protagonist is a nice young man who runs a motel with his wife. They have no money and it seems there won't be the new highway that was promised when they bought the motel. Then a femme fatale comes in, with loads of money. It's just that the money belongs to the mob. (You'll find a longer description of the book at Mystery*File, by Bill Pronzini and Lynn Munroe.)

The Red Scarf is very well paced and tightly written little monster of a book. Before I read it, I was struggling with another book from the same era and thinking they must be all like this, but I was delighted to find Brewer's book just blew me away. I couldn't stop reading. The most important thing about this kind of a book is that it remains believable through the end - and the ending is not the most happy one.

By the way, Gil Brewer doesn't have a Wikipedia article! Quick, someone!

Friday's Forgotten Book: Old issues of Paperback Parade

Paperback Parade is (was?) a periodical magazine devoted to the study of old paperbacks and the culture surrounding them. It is (or was) published by Gary Lovisi, author and the head honcho of Gryphon Books. One could actually call it a fanzine, since there are lots of fannish elements in the magazine, such as a long letter column in the start of each issue. It's an interesting magazine, full of intriguing info and tit-bits on obscure authors. Some of the articles in Paperback Parade were the first ones to praise such now classic authors such as Peter Rabe and Bruno Fischer.

I've had six issues on loan from my friend Tapani Bagge for several years now, and taking a break from work, I decided to finally read them. I think I've read some of the articles earlier and used them in my books Pulpografia and Kuudestilaukeavat (Six-Guns). There's stuff in the articles that I don't recall reading, though, so it was good to go back to them anyway.

Popular Library reprint

Paperback Parades are a mixed bunch. Some of the articles are very well done and thorough, others are mere scratches, with bibliographical listings (they are sometimes pretty difficult to follow, but I know it's difficult to do a good bibliography). Some of the texts really don't tell much about the books themselves, as they deal more with dates, editions and cover illustrations. Same goes for the authors. There's a short review by Lovisi of a book called Shadow of a Hero by Allan Chase (Popular Library, 1951). We learn nothing about Allan Chase, we get only a synopsis of the book and a recommendation: "an exceptionally well-written book, hardboiled, fascinating - and a very plausible look at big-town politics." Maybe there wasn't much information on Chase available in 2001, when the issue #55 came out. (BTW, I'm wondering if this is our Chase.)

One thing kept sticking in my eye: Lovisi and other contributors often refer to paperback reprints of the earlier hardcover editions as if they are the true first editions. This happens for example in the interview with crime writer Henry Slesar, Lovisi seems to be more interested in the Zenith reprint of Slesar's crime novel The Gray Flannel Shroud than the fact it's not really paperback fiction. Luckily Slesar steers Lovisi on the right route and mentions the book came out first from Random House in hardcover. (The Zenith reprint has a great cover, though!) And Shadow of a Hero was also a reprint, hardcover coming out in 1949.

The Zenith reprint

But aside from this, it's an absolute delight to have interviews with writers such Peter Rabe, Bruno Fischer, Jonathan Latimer, William F. Nolan, A. S. "Sid" Fleischmann, Ted Gottfried (AKA Ted Mark, the writer of The Man from O.R.G.Y.) and Slesar. Also the British paperbacker and editor Laurence James is interviewed.

There's also a fascinating look at writing for lower markets in the interview with Morris Hershman. The interview with Peter Rabe by George Tuttle was very interesting and possibly one of the first instances where Rabe was taken seriously. Rabe mentions in the interview that he wrote some short stories in his later years, but didn't aim for publication. I started to wonder whether the manuscripts have survived and could be publishable. There's also Tuttle's essay on Rabe. By the way, Rabe mentions he really appreciated Donald Westlake's essay on Rabe in Murder Off the Rack, a very good book with ten essays on paperback crime writers. Get it if you don't already have it. Alongside Rabe there are also essays on Jonathan Latimer and W. R. Burnett. The interview with Bruno Fischer mentions his socialist affiliations (he was the editor of Socialist Call), but doesn't go further into the issue, I'd really like to hear more about this.

Some other points of interest: Graeme Flanagan's article on the Australian paperback series Marc Brody (though nothing I hadn't read before, must be noted that there probably wasn't much info on the Brody books before this), interviews with illustrators Gil Cohen and Bertil Hegland (the Swedish paperback artist), a look at Holloway House (containing lots of info, though it's a bit too fannish to my taste), an article on the Gold Eagle headquarters (they seem to be closing down, not sure if I knew this before). I also enjoyed Philip Harbottle's articles on British western paperbackers and how Harbottle got them back in print through Robert Hale's Black Horse imprint, though Harbottle doesn't really say much about what the books are about and what they are like and how they compare to their American counterparts. There's also some stuff on early Australian paperbacks I could use for an upcoming book I've been planning for years.

One of the more interesting articles in Paperback Parade (in the issues I have) is "Carny Cuties and Killers" by Kurt Brokaw (he must be same guy as the film critic of The Independent, he seems to be curating the course called "Killer Movies: Lost Films"). Though the article is a bit heavy on synopses, the article is full on information on books I hadn't earlier known about. Especially Edward Hoagland's first novel Cat Man (1956, in hardcover) seems very interesting.

Paperback Parade reminds me of my own magazine, called Pulp, that I published for several years (been dead for some years now). It was smaller in size (Paperback Parade is a sturdy, almost book-like object), but I do know the effort one has to make to this kind of thing possible and to happen. Some of the articles in Pulp were not very good or even interesting, but some of them have ended in some of my books (and some still will!). There are lots of articles and essays in Paperback Parade I'd like to see reprinted in an anthology!

The issues I had in chronological order:

# 19 (1990): Bruno Fischer, Gold Eagle
# 25 (1991): Peter Rabe, Gil Cohen, Marc Brody, Arthurian saga in paperbacks,
# 29 (1992): Jonathan Latimer, William F. Nolan, Ace Capelli (British house pseudonym)
# 45 (1996): Laurence James, W. R. Burnett, Morris Hershman
# 55 (2001): Sid Fleischmann, Bertil Hegland, Holloway House
# 56 (2001): Henry Slesar, Hank Janson, Carny Cuties, Ted Mark

More Forgotten Books at Patti Abbott's blog! 

Swedish paperback covers

I found some Swedish paperbacks and other books in our house's trash bin. Took them out, but decided that I had no use for them, so tossed them back. I scanned the covers, included are some tidbits on the books and writers.

Two crime covers for American paperbacks.
The right one is by the great Bertil Hegland. 

James Morris was, if I recall, the pseudonym of Niels Meyn (in the other photo),
under which he wrote a series of Tarzan copies with Jukan.
I don't know who Jack Morris was.
Alibi-magazinet was a Swedish digest-sized fictionmag,
devoted to crime stories. Each issue had one story.

Niels Meyn was a Danish author, mainly of children's books.
This scifi title means "Around the World in 80 Hours".
See his Wikipedia page here.

Vernon Warren wrote pseudo-American private eye books
in the fifties, his hero was called Brandon. Not quite bad, actually,
I've read one and would possibly read another.

Tuesday's Overlooked Film: Black Rainbow (1989)

I watched this unknown gem from a VHS cassette I bought from a thrift store. The quality of the cassette was better than could be expected, no one had probably watched the film before me, which kind of makes me sad.

Black Rainbow tells about a medium (Rosanna Arquette) and her alcoholic father (Jason Robards), who travel somewhere in the forgotten parts of the United States, and put up shows where Arquette takes contact with the dead people, normally the loved ones of the members of the audience. Two things take place: Arquette starts talking with the dead persons who are not yet dead, and someone starts killing them at the same time. The premise is clever and it's pretty well developed, taking the story to directions one wouldn't easily guess. There are some very good scenes between Arquette and Robards, and some of the scenes from the clairvoyance show are silently thrilling, getting close to horror. Tom Hulce plays a reporter, who suddenly starts to believe in Arquette's powers. The main actors are believable.

Black Rainbow was directed by the English Mike Hodges. Hodges has done some very good films, like Get Carter and Croupier. Then he has done some outrageous camp classics, such as Flash Gordon (though it was done intentionally, I'm sure). Black Rainbow is surely one of his better films, a serious look at abuse and exploitation, not only at the clairvoyance shows, but also on a larger scale. It's a pity the film is not better known, as it didn't get a proper release at the time (Hodges seems to be suffering from this even now, since the same thing happened to Croupier). The film has been released on DVD, but some of the editions are no better than a VHS cassette.

More Overlooked Films at Todd Mason's blog here (as soon as he gets the post done, I'm sure).

Friday's Forgotten Book: Martin M. Goldsmith: Detour (1939)

The film made from Martin M. Goldsmith's novel Detour is far from forgotten. Detour by Edgar G. Ulmer from 1945 is actually one of the better-known film noirs of its era, though it's been erroneously labeled as an extra-cheap quickie. It's now known that Ulmer exaggerated his tight budget and claimed the film was shot in a week, although it took longer than that. This is all well explained even in the Wikipedia article for the film. It also states that the film was shown regularly on television throughout the sixties and seventies, which explains why it was picked up by the first American critics of film noir, such as Paul Schrader, when other equally interesting films were neglected.

But the original novel by Martin M. Goldsmith is a different story altogether. The book was published in 1939 by Macaulay (a lending library publisher, if I'm not mistaken) and getting no reprints until the small press did it in 2005. This is astonishing, given the quality of the book. It's a moving tale of two persons living during the depression, trying to make ends meet. The other one, Alexander Roth, is a violinist trying to get to Hollywood to meet his girl friend living in Los Angeles. The girl, Sue Harvey, is a wanna-be actress, who hates her agent and is working in a diner. Alexander hitches his way across the continent, looking like a bum. He's picked up by a strange man, who has lots of cash and smokes joints. The man dies in his sleep and Alexander is left on nothing. He suspects that if he notifies the police, no one would believe he's innocent. He takes the money and the car, but meets a strange girl, named Vera. Vera reveals he also travelled with the dead man and hence know Alexander is not who he says he is. Vera is one of the meanest bitches in written word, and I'm not saying this lightly. The way Goldsmith paints her with words just makes your blood go chilly. The hate and lack of interest in anything (but money) ooze from her.

The first edition from 1939

Alex Roth is an amiable young man, if not something of a bore, and Goldsmith gives him a plausible voice. Sue, on the other hand, is not so amiable. She's a bit of a gold-digger, but also very earnest at that. The novel is written in terse and hardboiled vernacular, and the story races along smoothly largely through point-of-view narration. The depression era with all its worn-out ramblers comes alive in the pages of the book. When the film was made in 1945, the story of Sue Harvey was dropped alongside with references to sex and drugs. The book ends in an open note, in the end of the film the police pick up Al (changed from Alexander). Otherwise the film is pretty faithful.

Detour was republished, as I said, by a small publisher called O'Bryan House. They seem to have done only two books, according to this. Detour has its share of formatting errors, seems like they haven't done enough editing for the scanned text. Nevertheless, this was a very welcome reprint, a forgotten classic that should stay in print.

Here's Bill Pronzini on Goldsmith's two other crime novels, and here's Steve Lewis's review of Detour. And here's (also on Mystery*File) the foreword by Richard Doody for the O'Bryan House reprint.

More Forgotten Books for Friday found at Todd Mason's blog!

Megan Abbott on why women love crime

This nice essay by Megan Abbott is related to the wonderful-looking collection The Women Crime Writers, edited by Sarah Weinman, that just came out. And Abbott's essay is worth reading as well.

Sarah Weinman was wondering in one of her Crime Lady e-mails whether there have been substantial female domestic suspense writers outside the US and UK. I got to thinking about this (lazily, I must admit), and I haven't come up with any contenders. Many female Finnish crime writers of the time period of Weinman's book dabbled mostly in puzzle mysteries, but there must be some. Anyone?

Jason Starr: Twisted City

Jason Starr has long been one of my favourite writers, and I can't help but fall in love with his plots. I picked up his Twisted City that I hadn't previously read and showed the back cover copy to my wife, grinning widely and saying: "This sure sounds like my kind of book!" It says: "Times are tough for David Miller, a journalist for a second-rate financial magazine who hates his boss, is tired of supporting his girlfriend's partying lifestyle and recently lost his sister to cancer. But things are about to get much worse."

David loses his wallet in a bar after a failed attempt at picking up a woman, and some days later a woman calls him and says she's got his wallet. David goes to a seedy neighborhood and meets Sue, who seems to be a junkie. She's asking lots of money for David's wallet. David goes to a bank to raise money and when he gets back, he's attacked by Sue's maniacally jealous boyfriend. After that, things really go wrong. It's a hell of a ride for David, and while everything's pretty dark and hopeless for our hero, you can't but laugh at his tribulations. Everything goes worse no matter what David does, even though there's one chance he could make things right, but he blows it too. The end is really, really nasty.

Jason Starr writes and plots with ease, and he's deceptive. Every time you think you miss a hole in the plot, it gets explained. The book moves with a breakneck pace and there's no empty page. This is a brilliant noir novel, once again. It's a damn shame my efforts to get Starr translated in Finnish have proven futile, but I'm still trying.

I read the 2005 printing from No Exit with a pretty bland cover, but their new covers for Starr's backlist are so stupendous (see above) I'm almost thinking I'd buy the whole set.

Cornell Woolrich's "It Had to Be Murder" and Hal Jeffries

I read Cornell Woolrich's short story "It Had to Be Murder" yesterday due to my book project on books (and seemingly short stories also) that were filmed. Woolrich's story (that, by the way, doesn't differ so much from Hitchcock's subsequent film Rear Window as is usually thought) was published in Dime Detective in February, 1942. It features Hal Jeffries (L.B. "Jeff" Jeffries in the film) as the hero, stuck in a wheelchair just like James Stewart in the film. Stewart's Jeffries is a photographer, but Woolrich doesn't give his hero any professional traits, but he knows the police and the lieutenant is his personal friend. The ending climax is a bit different from the film, as Jeffries of the short story doesn't have the photographic equipment Stewart uses in the film to distract Raymond Burr's Thorwald. One notable difference: Jeffries's hired help is an African-American man, not Thelma Ritter of the film.

I just got to thinking Woolrich may have written more stories that feature Hal Jeffries. There's something about the story to make me think he was familiar to the readers of Dime Detective. I can't find any info on this, however. There's no Hal Jeffries in the series index at the Crime, Mystery, & Gangster Fiction Magazine Index, so I'm must surely wrong, but I'd really appreciate if someone could confirm.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movie: Split Second (1992)

Split Second is a B- or C-grade action/horror flick that should've been made in the eighties, but it came out only in 1992. For some reason or another, the film came to Finnish cinema theaters and I managed to see it. I remember thinking it was somewhat entertaining, but I also remember everyone else saying it was pure crap.

I picked the VHS up free from a thrift store and wanting to see something light, I decided to watch Split Second. It didn't very well hold up my interest this time, even though I'm ready to admit it was still somewhat entertaining. I found myself Googling bits of info on the film and its director, Tony Maylam, on my phone throughout the film, so I wasn't actually glued to the screen.

The story takes place in a near future, and the climate change has made London flood all over the place. An alien is on a killing spree and leaving mysterious signs behind, and tough loner cop Rutger Hauer is the only one who realizes they are not up against an ordinary man. The signs aren't however satisfactorily explained, maybe they were just a red herring. There's some banter between Hauer and his partner, a nerdy young guy who's just fresh from the academy (some fresh ideas in the film, huh?), but overall it's disappointing. Hauer's cop acts at times like an incompetent moron. I'm not sure I would assign him to any case. The alien, when it finally reveals itself, is quite poorly and badly made. Editing and shooting in darkness help a little, but not much. The monster in this film should've been huge! If I were rating this, I'd give it a ** or even *½.

However, I got to thinking that Split Second might have influenced my writing, at least on a subconscious level. My debut novel (well, my commercially published debut novel), called Jumalten tuho in Finnish (meaning "Twilight of the Gods") is about an alien (not a space alien, though, more like a monster from Christianity's darkest secrets) on a killing spree, ripping its victims wide open. There's also a tough cop almost alone working on a case. Of course there are dozens of films and books written about similar stuff, but maybe I saw Split Second during a sensitive phase (insert smiley here). If I saw it in 1992, that's about the same time I started writing the short story that gradually became my novel.

Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin as domestic suspense

Domestic suspense is a sub-genre that I've been long interested in. I've earlier dubbed it female noir, but I've never really been satisfied with that moniker, so "domestic suspense", coined by mystery maven Sarah Weinman, comes really handy. Weinman writes in her website dedicated to her excellent anthology Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives:

It’s a genre of books published between World War II and the height of the Cold War, written by women primarily about the concerns and fears of women of the day. These novels and stories operate on the ground level, peer into marriages whose hairline fractures will crack wide open, turn ordinary household chores into potential for terror, and transform fears about motherhood into horrifying reality. They deal with class and race, sexism and economic disparity, but they have little need to show off that breadth.

Instead, they turn our most deep-seated worries into narrative gold, delving into the dark side of human behavior that threatens to come out with the dinner dishes, the laundry, or taking care of a child. They are about ordinary, everyday life, and that’s what makes these novels of domestic suspense so frightening. The nerves they hit are really fault lines.

I recently read, due to a book project I've been working, Lionel Shriver's best-selling novel We Need to Talk About Kevin. I saw the film earlier, and I liked both a great deal. They are somewhat different, the film being a condensed version of the slightly too long novel, but very effective nonetheless. I got to thinking that Shriver's novel is a very good example of contemporary domestic suspense: it's about the concerns and fears of women, it operates on the ground level, peers into a marriage whose hairline fractures will crack open, et cetera. You get the drift. The suspense, the horror of the novel comes out with the dinner dishes, the laundry and especially taking care of a child. And this particular child is horrendous.

I won't spoil the book (or the film), there's enough information on it in the web, but even though I'd seen the film earlier, I was very captivated by the novel and its slowly unfolding secrets, to the very end.

The crime fiction issue of the Human Journal

Seems interesting, at least the lengthy interview with Michael Connelly. There's also an article about John P. Marquand's Mr. Moto series. Check it out here!

By the way, I got this link from one of Sarah Weinman's delightfully informative posts on her The Crime Lady e-mail list. Do subscribe to it here! 

For a Raymond Chandler completist

Raymond Chandler just had a birthday couple days back. Here's a book I ran into, looks like a must have for any Chandler completist. It's a Finnish school book for students of English language, published in 1986, with a pulp magazine story by Chandler up front! The texts are in original English, though they may have been slightly edited. There's also the table of contents, it seems like a nice collection of varied crime stories. I don't know who did the cover.

Randy Johnson

Only now I notice this. Naturally I never met Randy Johnson, but his blog and Facebook posts sure felt like he was a nice buy. Certainly he was knowledgeable and supportive. Here's to him!

PS. Sorry for not posting anything on my own for the past months or so. Even during the holidays I find myself swamped with work. 

Woody Haut on James Ellroy

Woody Haut's excellent piece on James Ellroy and his politics of paranoia.

Ten best noir novels of the 21st century

Eric Beetner has a pretty good list. I've read five (Starr, Phillips, Zeltserman, Rector, Max Phillips), and also two of the ones bubbling under (Megan Abbott and James Sallis).

Megan Abbott interviewing Patti Abbott

I really loved this small item: Megan Abbott interviewing her mother, Patricia Abbott, on their family reading habits, her (Megan's) tuition into crime fiction and lots of other matters. I still have Patricia's first novel, Concrete Angel, to read, but I will in the near future.