Monday Memories: My Home Town

I’m never going to write an autobiography. For one thing, I don’t have the time and energy, and for another, it seems a little pretentious for a hack writer to be doing such a thing. Also, let’s be honest here. I’ve read a lot of books, watched a lot of movies, and spent a lot of time in a room by myself typing. There you go. JAMES REASONER: HIS LIFE AND TIMES. The End.

However, if you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know I wax nostalgic from time to time, and in doing so quite a bit lately it occurred to me that I ought to start a series of such posts that are sort of autobiographical in nature. If nothing else, it gets some of my memories down in a bit less transitory form, and they might provide a little entertainment for some of you or make you think back to your own younger years. And of course, one of the great advantages of doing these as blog posts is that you can roll your eyes and skip them and I’ll never know the difference.

I’m going to begin with the picture above. That’s an aerial photo of Azle, Texas, taken in 1938. Now, before you think, “Just how old are you, anyway?”, let me say that my parents didn’t move to Azle until the early Fifties, right after I was born. So that photo predates me by more than a decade. However, some of those buildings were still there when I was growing up in Azle in the Fifties and Sixties, and some of them are still there.

The two-story white building in the lower right portion of the picture? That’s one of the oldest buildings still standing in Azle. I believe it was originally MacDonald’s Grocery Store, and after that it was Stribling’s Drug Store. By the early Sixties, it was Tompkins’ Drug Store. There was a spinner rack of comic books, and I bought a bunch of DENNIS THE MENACE comic books there, along with issues of the DC war comics OUR ARMY AT WAR and OUR FIGHTING FORCES. The Odd Fellows lodge met on the second floor, and around on the side, for a while, there was a small lending library where you could check out books for, I think, ten cents a week.

After the drug store moved to a new strip shopping center at the other end of town (where I bought even more comic books and paperbacks), the building became the home of C&W Electronics, a TV repair shop. Azle had three such shops for a long time: C&W on Main Street downtown, Jimmy Chandler’s out on the Boyd Highway, and my dad’s shop, where he worked out of our house on Hankins Drive. C&W was there for a long time, and after it went out of business the building sat vacant for ages. A few years ago, a For Sale sign went up on it, and I thought, “Crap. Somebody’s going to buy it and tear it down.” They’d already torn down the Red Top Café, just up the street, which dated back to the 1870s and started its existence as a saloon. But no, the building is still there, and these days it’s Red’s Burger House. I go in there to pick up burgers sometimes, and I still know approximately where the comic book spinner rack stood. It’s a good feeling.

Now, diagonally across the street on the corner is a two-story stone building. It was fairly new when that photo was taken in ’38, I believe. A local couple named Jim and Eula Nation built it. I don’t know the original purpose, but in the early Sixties there was a barber shop on the first floor and a snow cone stand on the corner of the parking lot during the summer. I never went to the barber shop (my dad and I got our hair cut at Hukill’s, across the street, in a building that wasn’t there yet in ’38), but I did eat a lot of snow cones from that stand. Then the building was vacant for a while, and in the mid-Sixties, the Azle Public Library, which had gotten started a few years earlier in a small space also across the street, moved in. Mrs. Nation, who still owned the building, was the librarian. I was already working at the library by that time, first as a volunteer and then as a modestly salaried employee (I made enough to buy more comic books and paperbacks!), so I worked there until, I think, 1969. In the mid-Seventies, the library moved into a new building out on the highway, not far from the hospital. The stone building on Main Street is now the Azle Historical Museum, where the original of this aerial photo now hangs, or at least it did the last time I was in there.

See the road that turns off of Main Street next to the museum building and curves up and to the left out of the picture? The second building on the right, the little white house, was still there as recently as a year or two ago, but I believe it was jacked up and moved out. I don’t know where it is now.

Across from that house, on the left side of the road (Church Street), you can see the steeple and part of Azle Christian Church. The building still sits on that property, although in a slightly different place now, and is the church’s Fellowship Hall. Follow Church Street on around, and that clump of trees and cluster of buildings on the left is what was then Azle’s only school. It’s a sprawling stone building famous in these parts as the Rock School. When I went there in the Sixties for sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, it was Azle Junior High. When my daughters attended fifth and sixth grade there, it was Azle Elementary. But whatever its official name, it was and always will be the Rock School.

There are a few other buildings in Azle old enough to have been in this picture that are further out. About half a mile to the south is Ash Creek Baptist Church, where a building that dates from 1898 is now Fellowship Hall. When I was a kid it was still the church’s main building, and that was where I attended the first church services I remember. Livia and I also had our wedding shower in that building. Farther out the same road the church is on is an old house that was built in the 1850s, within a decade after the first settlers moved into the area. When I was a kid, an old log cabin built in the 1840s was still standing on property belonging to the family of a friend of mine. I remember seeing it. I don’t know if it was torn down or fell down, but it’s long gone, like the Red Top up on Main Street. I’m sure there are other private homes in the area that date back that far, but I don’t know the details on all of them.

Since the Sixties, a four-lane highway runs right through the middle of the area in the picture. Most of that farm land you see stretching into the distance? Covered with houses, of course. Things changed a lot during that era, but in the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies, Azle was still a darned good place to live and grow up. One thing about living in one place all your life, every time you go anywhere, you drive right past all those old memories and they come alive again in your mind.

At least they do in mine.

Best, Bill

So there I was, sometime in 1978, reading a copy of ELLERY QUEEN’S MYSTERY MAGAZINE, which had a small section of classified ads on the last page. Among those tiny-print listings, there was an ad for something called THE NOT SO PRIVATE EYE, which seemed to be a fanzine devoted to private eye fiction, my long-time favorite sub-genre of mystery fiction. Back issues were available, so I sent off a check to the editor/publisher, Andy Jaysnovitch, and in due time I got a box in the mail containing all the issues that had been published up until then. I was only vaguely aware of what fanzines are, and that was because I’d read about ones devoted to science fiction, although I’d never seen one. The small Texas town where I grew up wasn’t a place where you would run into such things.

But when I started reading TNSPE, as it was known to its subscribers, I knew right away that I loved this sort of thing: articles about private eye fiction and its authors; reviews of books new and old; and maybe best of all, a letters section where fellow fans could get together. A prehistoric version of Facebook, if you will.

As I looked through those letters and saw the names and addresses of the guys who had written in, I noticed one thing right away. Some of them were from Texas! There were fellow fans of the stuff that I loved! I had never met or even corresponded with any. As far as I could tell, I was the only person who read Mike Shayne or Shell Scott novels anywhere in the vast Lone Star State.

Not only was one of those fans in Texas, he actually lived in Brownwood, a town I knew quite well because I had relatives all over that part of the country. Bill Crider, his name was. So I acted on impulse and wrote him a letter introducing myself. (The other two Texas fans who had letters in TNSPE were Joe Lansdale and Tom Johnson, and I could write a lot about them, too, but this is Bill’s day.)

Bill wrote back immediately. He recognized my name from a story I had published in MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE, “Down in the Valley”. That started a pattern that went on for years: I’d write a letter to Bill, and five or six days later, I’d get one in return. (The post office was a little more efficient and dependable in those days, or at least so it seemed.) We talked about books we’d read and movies we’d seen and got to know about each other’s families. After a while, since Brownwood was only a two-hour drive away from where I lived, I drove down there one Sunday and had lunch with Bill, his wife Judy, and their kids Allen and Angela. Later, Bill took us all out to Greenleaf Cemetery and showed me the grave of Robert E. Howard, a writer both of us admired greatly. And he gave me a bunch of duplicate paperbacks from his collection, great old Gold Medals and other vintage paperbacks.

Later, I made another trip to Brownwood and delivered a VCR to him. They had just started selling those to the public, and my dad sold them at his TV shop, so I was able to get him a good deal. The thing was enormous and heavy, had a corded remote, and would record a whole two hours on a videotape. But for the early Eighties, it was a pretty cool deal. On that same trip, Bill took me to a couple of used bookstores in Brownwood, so I went home with more books again.

Around that same time, Bill sold his first book, a Nick Carter novel written with a friend of his named Jack Davis. I remember unfolding one of Bill’s letters and seeing the first line: “The Nick Carter book SOLD!” From that beginning, he went on to become one of the most beloved and acclaimed mystery writers of the past three decades with his Sheriff Dan Rhodes series as well as other mystery series and stand-alones. And while he was doing that, he published a bunch of critically acclaimed Western and horror novels and became one of the most reliable authors of house-name men’s adventure and Western novels. We worked together on six books, four in the Cody’s Law series under the name Matthew S. Hart and two in the Trailsman series as Jon Sharpe.

We saw each other fairly often at conventions like Aggiecon and Armadillocon and best of all, the annual Cluefests in Dallas. On the Friday evening of Cluefest, Dallas mystery fan Barry Gardner (who, as it turned out, was the son of Bennie Gardner, aka Gunnison Steele, one of the Western pulp authors I greatly enjoyed) held a barbecue at his house for a small group of fans and writers that included at various times Bill, Scott Cupp, Marv Lachman, Richard Moore, Steve Stilwell, Bruce Taylor, and others I know I’m forgetting. Those evenings are some of the best convention-related memories I have.

With the rise of the Internet, Bill and I traded emails instead of letters, but we stayed in touch. He started a blog (which in the early days featured frequent posts about how much he disliked mowing his lawn) and that blog inspired me to start one of my own. By this time he had moved from Brownwood to Alvin, near Houston, to teach at Alvin Community College. We still ran into each other at conventions but not as often since real life kept us away from them more than it used to. But every time we saw each other, it was like the proverbial no time at all had passed. We could sit down and pick right up talking about books, writing, movies, and anything and everything else.

The trials that Bill has gone through over the past decade are probably well known to everyone reading this. He helped his wife Judy battle cancer and then, after losing her, fought the disease himself. Through it all, he’s continued to turn out fine books, kept producing his blog until very recently, and adopted three kittens whose luckiest day ever was the day Bill found them. He’s been able to make it to a few conventions. I saw him at Armadillocon in Austin in 2016, and again, the times we spent together there will always be favorite convention memories.

At the bottom of that very first letter from Brownwood all those years ago was the signature, “Best, Bill”. That’s exactly what everyone who knows Bill has gotten from him: his best friendship, and it’s very good indeed. Here’s to you, Bill, with thanks for the past forty years. It’s been my honor and my great pleasure.

Best,

James 

Catching Up

So, I had to take a week off from social media. There were a variety of reasons for this, some medical (nothing to worry about at this point, more of an annoyance than anything else), some work-related. I hated breaking my streaks on the Forgotten Books and weekend pulp posts. I'd already missed a few Overlooked Movies/TV/etc. posts in recent weeks and those may continue to be sporadic for a while, as will posts in general. But I'm back on the blog and Facebook and plan to be around on both for the foreseeable future.

100 Years Ago Today

On February 5, 1916, my dad Marion Reasoner was born in the community of Indian Creek, Texas. Like most rural Texans at the time, he and his family had a pretty hardscrabble existence. As a young man, he helped on the family farm, worked as a cowboy, and eventually became the manager of a bowling alley in nearby Brownwood. He was one of the top amateur bowlers in the country at the time. Later, after marrying my mother, he worked as an aircraft mechanic, first as a civilian employee at Randolph Field in San Antonio during World War II and then later at Convair/General Dynamics in Fort Worth. In between those two stints, he served in the U.S. Army and was in the Signal Corps, going overseas to Austria right after V-E Day. As he put it years later, he strung telephone wire all over Austria and developed a lifelong affection for the country. He always wanted to go back and visit, but he never did.

While working at Convair in Fort Worth in the early Fifties, he took a correspondence course that taught him how to repair televisions and radios. This was in the early days of TV, of course, so he was in almost on the ground floor of the TV repair business. This became his second job for many years, and he worked at it full-time after he retired from General Dynamics in the mid-Seventies, opening a business that sold and serviced TVs and appliances. (This is the shop where I worked for five years.) After closing that shop he continued to work on TVs part-time for his old customers for several years, before finally retiring to devote his time to gardening, his grandkids, and volunteer work such as delivering Meals on Wheels. He decided to put in a garden at my house, and I can still see him in my mind’s eye, 85 years old, wearing khakis and a long-sleeved shirt and a battered old hat, wrestling with a gas tiller out there in that garden in the middle of summer.

As a kid, my dad loved to read, but as an adult he devoted most of his time to working, as many in his generation did, and didn’t read much for many years. But when he got older and slowed down some, he began to read again and went through hundreds of books, mostly Westerns and historical novels, but really, he would read almost anything he could put his hands on. The fact that I was a writer had something to do with his renewed interest in reading, I’m sure, and he became a fan of my books and a great salesman for them. He would carry around copies of them when he was making his TV service calls and sell them to his customers. Often when he’d stop by our house, he would take a $20 bill out of his pocket and give it to me, saying, “Sold some books.” Actually, I suspect he gave away a lot of them and just used that as an excuse to feed me a little extra cash, since he knew we were struggling financially a lot of that time and had two kids. That’s exactly the sort of guy he was.

He loved telling stories and jokes, watching baseball on TV, and whistling along with gospel music. He could whistle a version of “Amazing Grace” that would make chills go up and down your spine, it was so beautiful. His favorite TV shows were Westerns. Saturday night in our house meant HAVE GUN – WILL TRAVEL and GUNSMOKE, and Sunday night was BONANZA, if we got home from church in time. He could spend hours in his back yard pulling weeds and “dopin’ them red ant beds”. He hated weeds and red ants with equal passion.

His health began to deteriorate as he entered his late 80s. Eventually he had to move into a nursing home, which he hated worse than weeds and red ants. The last time I visited, when I started to leave I commented that I had some pages to get written. He said, “Better get your work done.” Those were his last words to me. They summed up his life pretty well. He was a man who believed folks better get their work done.

His passing wasn’t unexpected, but it still left a hole in the lives of everyone who knew him. For several years after that, almost every day I had the urge to ask him about something or other, before catching myself and realizing I couldn’t. Even now, more than a decade later, that still happens every now and then. The ones who’ve passed on are still supposed to be there, damn it, so that when we think, “Oh, I’ll just ask him; he’ll know”, we’re not left with that sudden feeling of loss.

A few years after he died, the phone rang at my house one day, and when I answered, the caller said, “Is this the TV man?” I used to get those calls all the time, people looking for him, while he was in the business and after he retired, too. That was the first such call I’d gotten in a long time, though. Even though I had to say, “No, I’m sorry, that was my dad and he passed away,” I had a smile on my face, glad that people still remembered him. I have to suspect I won’t get any more such calls. Too much time has passed, and anyway, TVs are throwaway items now. If it doesn’t work, chunk it, go down to Wal-Mart, and buy another one. But if the phone does happen to ring someday and somebody says, “Is this the TV man?”, I won’t be totally surprised, either.

This is a bit disjointed and probably a little too maudlin, but right now I’d give a lot to be able to stand out in my driveway with him, leaning on his car, talking for hours about everything under the sun like we used to. I still have a lot of questions I’d like to ask him. But there are pages to be written, and like he said . . .

I’d better get my work done.

The Wrap Up

Not to start this on too much of a downer, but it's no secret that on a personal level, 2014 sucked. I don't want to even think about how many friends and loved ones we lost, and far too many people we know went through the same thing. Add in Livia's broken arm and some lingering health issues affecting several people in the family, and you've got a pretty lousy year.

But we're still here, still working, and why dwell on the negative when some good things happened, too?

Like the fact that I wrote more than a million words for the tenth year in a row. This is something I started thinking about several years ago, and I'm very glad that I made it despite the fact that it looked pretty doubtful for a while. Of course, it really doesn't add up to a hill of beans in this crazy world, but it's a nice accomplishment anyway.

In case you're wondering, that million-plus words took the form of thirteen novels and four novellas. That's a good year's work, I think.

I also launched Rough Edges Press, my publishing imprint, this year, and brought out sixteen books and stories, a mixture of reprints and originals that I'm very proud of, and next year should be even better with the impending launch of the BLAZE! Adult Western series and more work from some of the best writers in the business.

Writing, editing, and publishing cut into my reading time, of course, but I still managed to read 116 books this year, and here are my ten favorites, in the order in which I read them:

JASON EVERS: HIS OWN STORY, Frank Roderus – one of the best Western noir novels I've ever read and a beautiful example of the unreliable narrator.

THE YEAR WHEN STARDUST FELL, Raymond F. Jones – from the classic line of science fiction juvenile novels published by Winston, and even though I didn't read it until this year, it's exactly the sort of book that made me a science fiction fan to start with.

HALF A KING, Joe Abercrombie – a gritty heroic fantasy novel with great narrative pace, from an author I really need to read more of.

LIGHTS IN THE DEEP, Brad R. Torgersen – a collection of, once again, the sort of classic science fiction that made me an SF fan.

CANNIBAL GOLD/BLOOD RED TIDE, Chuck Dixon – I have to put these first two volumes in Dixon's SF/adventure series BAD TIMES together, since it's becoming obvious that what he's doing here is writing one gigantic novel. And it's a superb one, too, full of action and interesting ideas.

THE CHAPLAIN'S WAR, Brad R. Torgersen – greatly expanded from two of the stories in LIGHTS IN THE DEEP, this is the rare "fix-up" novel that works spectacularly well.

DOC SAVAGE: THE ICE GENIUS, Kenneth Robeson (Will Murray and Lester Dent) – I've enjoyed all of the new Doc Savage novels I've read so far, but THE ICE GENIUS takes the series to a new level. It satisfies a long-time fan (more than fifty years reading Doc Savage for me!) while at the same time being a classic, sprawling adventure novel of epic scope.

McKENNA'S HOUSE, Robert J. Randisi – a fine private eye yarn and a novel with, as Bob puts it, "a lot of heart". Poignant, well-plotted, with one of the most likable protagonists you'll ever find, this is the best Randisi novel I've ever read.

FORBIDDEN RIVER, Frederick Nebel – a fantastic collection of Northerns from one of the best pulp writers, Frederick Nebel, and one of the best pulp reprint publishers, Tom Roberts of Black Dog Books. This one is pure adventure goodness from start to finish.

I read plenty of other really good books, too, and a lot of comic books and graphic novels I enjoyed. Speaking of comic books, most of the movies I liked wound up on the critics' Worst of the Year lists, but two films I loved that were almost universally well-received are CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER and GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY. They really got it right. I've gotten away from posting about movies except for the Tuesday's Overlooked series, but I'm going to try to do better about that next year and at least mention most of the stuff we watch.

I don't make New Year's Resolutions, but another thing I'm going to try to do in 2015 is spend a little less time on-line and more time reading. I have a lot of books and pulps waiting for me to get to them.

This blog is more than ten years old now, and my sincere thanks to those of you who have been reading it from the first and everyone who has discovered it along the way. I'll close by saying that I hope 2014 wasn't too bad for you, and I really, really hope 2015 will be better for all of us. Happy New Year!

Ka-Boom

I got to visit a fireworks plant today, and I might get to go help set off some of the giant fireworks displays sometime.  Pretty cool stuff.  I didn't realize that some of the big shells they use are two feet in diameter.  That's a big firecracker!


And while this is definitely a feeble excuse, it's still an excuse to post a Katy Perry video in a blatant, shameless attempt bump up my blog traffic numbers. I've actually become fond of Katy Perry's songs.  Not great music, but certainly catchy.

Birthday

I've knocked off work early today since it's my birthday, and I was in a good place in the current manuscript to stop.  Earlier, had an excellent lunch and birthday cake, finished with some fine presents:  clothes, CDs, DVDs, a pair of binoculars (for some reason, I've always liked binoculars), and three books:  BITTER STEEL, the new collection by Charles Gramlich; THE COMPLETE KI-GOR, VOLUME 1, the first six Ki-Gor novels from the pulp JUNGLE STORIES; and THE BLACK BAT OMNIBUS, VOLUME 1, the first three Black Bat novels from BLACK BOOK DETECTIVE.  Great stuff, all around, and a day like today reminds me how lucky I am to have such a great family.  Topped off with a multitude of birthday wishes from friends, and it's been a fine day.  Thanks to one and all.  Now to read some Black Bat.

Newspaper Article Update

The article about Livia and me that was published in the West Texan News is now on-line. You can check it out here.

Newspaper Article

For those of you in northwest Tarrant County, northeast Parker County, and southern Wise County, there's a nice article about Livia and me in today's Star-Telegram, in a new supplement section called West Texan News. I don't think it's on-line, at least not yet, so you'll have to look in the paper for it if you're interested. Thanks to Brett Weiss and Julie Thibodeaux for doing a great job!

Blog Therapy

Remember when I posted a few weeks ago about my frequent nightmares? Well, since posting that I've woken up yelling only twice, which is a vast improvement and probably the best such stretch I've had in years. Now, I don't seriously believe that posting about it on the blog cured me, but I have to wonder . . . Now, Doctor, let me tell you about my other problems . . .

Nightmares

Going on the assumption that a large group of well-educated, well-read people will know something about everything, can anybody tell me why I wake up yelling from nightmares at least twice a week and have for years, and more importantly, what the heck can I do to stop it? (I generally don't remember my dreams, but the ones that wake me up tend to linger in my memory.)

Under the Weather

I've been dealing with some minor medical issues the past few days (nothing to worry about, I assure you), and that's why the blog hasn't been updated. But we have a guest blog from Brian Ritt coming up later today if I can get it posted, and I should be back at full speed soon. Until then . . . watch the skies!

50 Questions for Grown-ups

(A friend sent this to me, so I thought I'd give it a shot. As usual, I'm not tagging anybody, but if you want to play along, feel free.)

Tired of all of those surveys made up by high school kids? ‘Have you ever kissed someone?’‘Missed someone?’ ‘Told someone you loved them?’ ‘Drank alcohol?’ Here are 50 questions for the people who are a little more “mature”…

1. What bill do you hate paying the most? Quarterly payment to the IRS.
2. Where was the last place you had a romantic dinner? Charlotte Plummer's Restaurant in Rockport, Texas.
3. Last time you puked from drinking? Never.
4. When was the last time you got drunk and danced on a bar? Again, never.
5. Name of your first grade teacher? Mrs. Simmons (she was also my next-door neighbor)
6. What do you really want to be doing right now? Fishing off the pier at Rockport Beach.
7. What did you want to be when you were growing up? History teacher, librarian, then writer.
8. How many colleges did you attend? Two
9. Why did you choose the shirt that you have on right now? Comfort
10. Gas prices? I don't pay that much attention to 'em, because I don't drive much.
11. If you could move anywhere and take someone with you? The Texas coast, and Livia, of course.
12. First thought when the alarm went off this morning? "Not today. I can't do it today."
13. Last thought before going to sleep last night? I have no idea.
14. Favorite style of underwear? Boxers
15. Favorite style of underwear for the opposite sex? Skimpy.
16. What errand/chore do you despise? Paying bills (which is why Livia does it, plus the fact that she's more organized and efficient)
17. If you didn't have to work, would you volunteer? Probably.
18. Get up early or sleep in? Get up early, at least these days.
19. What is your favorite cartoon character? Bugs Bunny.
20. Favorite non-sexual thing to do at night with a girl/guy? Watch a good movie.
21. Have you found real love yet? Yes.
22. When did you first start feeling old? When we had kids.
23. Favorite 80s movie? Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
24. Favorite lunch meat? Sliced turkey.
25. What do you get every time you go into Sam's Club or Wal-Mart? Ice cream.
26. Beach or lake? Beach.
27. Do you think marriage is an outdated ritual? No.
28. How many people do you stalk on Facebook? Not sure what this means. I don't think I stalk anybody.
29. Favorite guilty pleasure? Soapy TV dramas.
30. Favorite movie you wouldn't want anybody to find out about? None. I have no shame when it comes to movies I like.
31. What's your drink? Root beer.
32. Cowboys or Indians? Cowboys. (What can I say, I grew up in the Fifties when there were dozens of Westerns on TV.)
33. Cops or robbers? Cops. ("Just the facts, ma'am.")
34. Who from high school would you like to run into? My old buddy Gary Looney.
35. What radio station is your car radio tuned to right now? Platinum 97 (97.9 FM) (oldies)
36. Norm or Cliff? Norm.
37. The Cosby Show or The Simpsons? The Simpsons, no contest.
38. Worst relationship mistake that you wish you could take back? Too many to list.
39. Do you like the person who sits directly across from you at work? Not applicable.
40. If you could get away with it, who would you kill? I can't think of anybody.
41. What famous persons would you like to have dinner with? Drawing a blank on this one, too. Probably a bunch of writers.
42. What famous person would you like to sleep with? Come on, I thought these were questions for grown-ups.
43. Have you ever had to use a fire extinguisher for its intended purpose? No, and what else could you use a fire extinguisher for?
44. Last book you read for real? PEEPSHOW by Leigh Redhead.
45. Do you have a teddy bear? No.
46. Strangest place you have ever brushed your teeth? A hotel room. (I haven't been in many strange places, obviously.)
47. Somewhere in California you've never been and would like to go? Death Valley. (I've used it as a setting in numerous novels and would like to see if I got it at least somewhat right.)
48. Do you go to church? Only for funerals and weddings.
49. At this point in your life would you rather start a new career or a new relationship? A new career, if I have to choose, but neither, really.
50. Just how old are you? 56, but I've always felt older than I am.

Another One: Honest Scrap

Nathan Cain over at the excellent Independent Crime blog tagged me with this one, and as usual, I'm going to be contrary enough not to tag anyone else. However, I will play along to the extent of listing ten honest things about myself:

1. I really don't like pork chops, and the rest of my family does.
2. When I was a little kid, I was afraid that a bear was going to come up from the creek behind our house and get me. This was totally my grandfather's fault for telling me that there were bears down there. (There weren't. Bobcats and possums, yes.)
3. It's hard going into a bookstore and seeing ten or twelve books on the shelves that I wrote, and my name isn't anywhere on them.
4. I'm very grateful to have the work, no matter what name is on the books.
5. I wake up yelling from a nightmare at least once a week.
6. Some days I will do almost anything to avoid writing, even for a little while.
7. I watch too much TV.
8. The only type of music I simply cannot listen to, even for a few minutes, is opera.
9. I once drove off the road, through a fence, and into a field to avoid hitting an armadillo. (Or was it a possum? I don't remember.)
10. When I was a kid, I had a dog named Egbert. And yes, I'm the one who named him that.

There you have it. Books, nightmares, possums, and a dog named Egbert. If you didn't think I was odd before, you do now. If you decide to play this game, I'd appreciate a mention of it in the comments, so we can all go over to your blog and see how odd you are.

John R. Baker, R.I.P.

I found out today that my friend John Baker from Charleston passed away last night. John and I never met in person, but we corresponded for nearly thirty years. I don't recall for sure how we got in touch, but he may have gotten my address from Mike Avallone. John was a mystery fan who read all sorts of books, but he had a special fondness for hardboiled private eye novels and had read everything by Avallone, Richard S. Prather, Mickey Spillane, and dozens of other authors. He traded letters with a lot of them, too, typed or handwritten letters because while John eventually gave the Internet a try, he still preferred the old-fashioned way of corresponding.

Like many of us, he kept a list of everything he read and was always on the lookout for new authors he might like, or old authors whose books he wanted to reread. In one of his last letters to me, he asked if I remembered the author of a private eye series set in Tokyo and featuring an ex-G.I. who was a karate expert. I suggested he might be thinking about the Burns Bannion series by Earl Norman, and that turned out to be right.

Not surprisingly, John was also a Mike Shayne fan, and in 1984 I came out of my "retirement" as Brett Halliday to write one final Shayne story, "Fishing for Murder", which featured John and a friend of his as characters and used some of his plot suggestions. I think he enjoyed appearing in a Shayne story like that.

It hasn't quite soaked in on me that next week or next month, there won't be an envelope in the mailbox with John's distinctive handwriting on it. He sometimes signed his letters, "Your faraway friend, John". Maybe a little farther away now, John, but still a friend.

Brownwood

Livia and I drove down to Brownwood today for my Uncle Sidney's 90th birthday party. It was really good to see him and visit with some other relatives we don't see that often. During World War II, Sidney was a medic in Burma, and I always enjoyed listening to his stories about those days, although I imagine it wasn't nearly as enjoyable living through them.

I like Brownwood, and I like the drive down there. There's usually not much traffic and the countryside is pretty. I spent a lot of time in that area as a kid because we had a ton of relatives there. I probably drove Livia a little crazy by constantly telling her where things used to be, like in Stephenville where I pointed to a strip mall and said, "There used to be a little used bookstore there, but I only went to it once." Then it was, "There used to be a drugstore there where I bought an Ellery Queen paperback and a Thomas B. Dewey paperback and a Walt Slade novel." We stopped at the Hastings in Brownwood, and I said, "This used to be a grocery store, and when it was, the paperback rack was right over there, and I remember buying Louis L'Amour's FLINT here, and some Donald E. Westlake book that I can't remember the title of, but I can see the cover in my head . . ." And I didn't even tell her about the time I sat in the car outside a nursing home in Brownwood and read Edward S. Aarons' ASSIGNMENT - SCHOOL FOR SPIES. She probably thinks I'm a little nuts, and I'm sure some of you do, too, but I'll bet some of you know exactly what I'm talking about.

Yeah, it was a good trip . . . the real one, and the one into the past inside my head.

Four Play

Patti Abbott tagged me with this, and I’m happy to play.

Four Movies You Can See Over and Over

The Comancheros
Casablanca
Citizen Kane
Shane

Four Places You Have Lived

Azle, Texas
Denton, Texas
River Oaks, Texas
San Marcos, Texas
(I haven’t gotten around much.)

Four TV Shows You Love to Watch

The Simpsons
The Bob Newhart Show
The Big Bang Theory
One Tree Hill

Four Places You Have Been on a Vacation

Rockport, Texas
Carlsbad Caverns, New Mexico
El Paso, Texas
Grand Isle, Louisiana

Four of Your Favorite Foods

Spaghetti
Hamburgers
Ice Cream
Nachos
(A gourmet I ain’t.)

Four Websites You Visit Daily

Pulp Serenade
Not the Baseball Pitcher
The Tainted Archive
Mystery File

Four Places You Would Rather Be

The fishing pier at Rockport
The Big Fisherman Restaurant between Rockport and Aransas Pass
The old man’s bookstore just down the street from Lockheed in White Settlement, Texas (it’s not there anymore, but I wish it was – Livia and a few others are probably the only ones who know the place I’m talking about)
The pavilion beside the Robert E. Howard House in Cross Plains, Texas

Four Things You Hope to Do Before You Die

Be able to slow down a little
Catch up on my reading
Spend another month at the coast
Learn how to grill

Four Novels You Wish You Were Reading for the First Time

A Princess of Mars, Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett
The Last Hero, Leslie Charteris
Hopalong Cassidy, Clarence E. Mulford

Tag Four People You Believe Will Respond

Cullen Gallagher
Randy Johnson
Gary Dobbs
Steve Lewis

Too Many Pages?

For some reason, I'm dumb as a rock these days. Some of you (and you know who you are) must have been shaking your head and asking yourselves, "What the hell's wrong with that boy?" So consider this an apology and a pledge to try not to be such a maroon in the future. (Note: Stupidity will not keep me from posting. Why start now?)