End-of-the-Month Update

Writing

The demands of real life, plus the fact that February is a shorter month, kept me from reaching my goal again this month. For a while there it looked like I wasn't going to come anywhere close, but then I had a good last week. As it stands now I'm 80 pages behind the pace I wanted to maintain. I can't make up that much in a month's time, but I'm hoping that I can whittle down the deficit some in March.

Reading

I read eight books in February:

MOMENT OF TRUTH, Lisa Scottoline
SEASON OF THE MACHETE, James Patterson
THE AVENGER #12: THE FLAME BREATHERS, Kenneth Robeson (Paul Ernst)
THE TWO MINUTE RULE, Robert Crais
LUCKY AT CARDS, Lawrence Block
THE BLONDE, Duane Swierczynski
THE GUARDS, Ken Bruen
THE CASE OF THE SLEEPWALKER'S NIECE, Erle Stanley Gardner

I'll probably have some comments about the Perry Mason book to post tomorrow. Normally I read more than I've been managing this year.

Movies

I watched four movies this month: CRANK, GRIDIRON GANG, AMERICAN PIE: BAND CAMP, and LOVEWRECKED. I think I can do better than that.

Cassidy's Girl -- The Movie

I've been trading emails with writer/producer/director Edward Holub, who's working on a film version of David Goodis's novel CASSIDY'S GIRL. I've read only a few of Goodis's novels, but CASSIDY'S GIRL is my favorite so far, and I think it'll make an excellent film. Ed's put up a website about the movie, which you can find here. If you're a David Goodis fan, you need to check it out.

Ed's first feature film, NIGHT RUNS RED, sounds pretty intriguing, too. I'm going to have to see if I can hunt up a copy of it to watch.

Two More Movies

Well, I said that I would at least mention every movie I watched this year, and since I'm a man of my word, I have to tell you that this weekend we saw AMERICAN PIE: BAND CAMP and LOVEWRECKED, a romantic comedy with Amanda Bynes that my daughter taped off one of the cable channels she gets at school. We live too far out in the sticks to even get cable. Anyway, I sort of like the AMERICAN PIE franchise. Yes, they're crude, sleazy, and inappropriate, but then, I'm a guy who never missed a PORKY'S movie back in the Eighties. BAND CAMP is the fourth in the series and the most lightweight one so far -- which is saying quite a bit -- but there are a few nice moments. LOVEWRECKED is much more innocuous but just as predictable. Amanda Bynes is just as cute and perky as she can be, though.

Just think, I could have been watching BABEL and THE QUEEN.

Got the new book started today and the work went pretty well. Since this is a house-name Western, I'm experimenting with my style, trying to stretch a few different writing muscles. I have a terrible tendency toward run-on sentences, so I'm trying to eliminate them in this manuscript right from the start. We'll see how it goes.

The Guards -- Ken Bruen

I didn’t take to Ken Bruen’s fiction when I first tried to read it. I think it took me some time to warm up to his very distinctive style. But once I did, I found myself enjoying his books quite a bit.

In fact, I’ve just gone back and read THE GUARDS, the first book in his Jack Taylor series, which I’d started before and didn’t finish. This time through, I liked it quite a bit. The rhythm of the prose is remarkable, and Bruen has a way of capturing a character with only a few words. True, there’s not much plot, and what there is kind of sprawls around (like real life). But I doubt if many people read Bruen’s novels for the plots, anyway.

I’m coming at these Jack Taylor books out of order, which bothers the obsessive-compulsive in me. The first one I finished was actually the fourth in the series, THE DRAMATIST. But I also have copies of the second and third, THE KILLING OF THE TINKERS and THE MAGDALEN MARTYRS, so at least I can read them in the proper order and then try to keep up with the series from now on.

In other news, I’ve been pushing hard on the writing the past few days and finished up a book yesterday, always a good thing. So I’ll be starting a new one today, also a good thing. Yesterday we had worst dust storm I’ve seen around here in probably thirty years or more. It looked like half of West Texas was blowing past outside. The strong wind (gusts of 60+ mph) also did some minor damage to our roof, so it looks like I’ll be up there hammering on new shingles sometime this week.

The Blonde -- Duane Swierczynski

And I thought the movie CRANK was weird.

Duane Swierczynski’s THE BLONDE looks like a hardboiled crime novel, but early on it becomes obvious that’s not really the case. Reporter Jack Eisley is in Philadelphia for a meeting with his wife’s divorce lawyer, when a good-looking blonde he’s setting next to in the airport bar calmly informs him that she’s just poisoned his drink and that he’ll die by the next morning if he doesn’t do what she wants him to. Jack doesn’t believe her at first, but he becomes convinced when more crazy things start happening. A government-sanctioned assassin on a mission of personal vengeance gets involved, then a human head in a gym bag becomes important to the plot. Throw in assorted sleazy characters, a lot of unrelenting action, and some technology so advanced that it sort of pushs this book over into science-fictional territory. All of it is told in prose so fast that it hardly ever stops to take a breath, along with fine dialogue and numerous touches of dark but very funny humor.

THE BLONDE is a great thriller and easily one of the best books I’ve read so far this year. It’s also the first thing I’ve read by Duane Swierczynski, but it sure won’t be the last.

Kolchak: The Night Stalker Casebook

Today I received my author’s copies of KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER CASEBOOK, a new anthology of stories featuring the character from the short-lived but iconic Seventies TV series. My story “Pirate’s Blood” is one of them, and I had a great time writing it. I recall watching the original made-for-TV movie THE NIGHT STALKER and its sequel THE NIGHT STRANGLER while I was in college. I was a regular viewer of the series, too. This was just my second experience at doing TV tie-in work (I wrote the three WALKER, TEXAS RANGER novels some years ago), and I enjoyed it quite a bit. I hope I did a good job of capturing Kolchak’s unique voice. The anthology also features stories by Robert J. Randisi, Gary Phillips, Rick Hautala, Christopher Golden, P.N. Elrod, and numerous other writers, and it looks like a fine collection, as was the first volume of Kolchak stories published by Moonstone Books KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER CHRONICLES. If you’re a fan of the TV show or of good mystery/horror yarns in general, I don’t think you can go wrong with either of these books.

Lucky at Cards -- Lawrence Block

Originally published by Beacon Books in 1964 under the title THE SEX SHUFFLE and the pseudonym Sheldon Lord, Lawrence Block’s novel LUCKY AT CARDS has been resurrected by Hard Case Crime, and we should be thankful to Charles Ardai for that because it’s a fine book.

Bill “Wizard” Maynard was once a stage magician, but as the book opens he has long since turned his sleight-of-hand skills to making a living as a card sharp who can cheat at just about any sort of game. Unfortunately for him, he was caught at it by some guys who took offense. After being beaten up and run out of Chicago, he finds himself in a medium-sized, unnamed city somewhere between Chicago and New York, where he runs into a beautiful woman who’s every bit as shady as he is. Problem is, she’s currently married to a rich, successful tax attorney. Bill begins an affair with her anyway, and anyone who’s read very many books in this genre knows where that’s going to lead. The lawyer’s will is structured in such a way that they can’t just murder him, so they have to come up with a more elaborate plot to separate him from his money. But wouldn’t you know it, once they embark on this scheme – say it together with me, kiddies – Things Go Wrong.

I don’t mean to sound sarcastic. Yes, the plot’s a little formulaic and the ending might have been a tad more dramatic. But Block writes so well I don’t care about any of that. This is a beautifully rendered picture of the late Fifties/early Sixties era, with skillfully drawn characters and a pace that just rockets along in some of the best prose of anybody around, then or now. You won’t find a better example of the books that were published as soft-core sex novels back in those days but were really nice little crime yarns. Run right out and find a copy of this one if you don’t have it yet, and let’s hope that Block and Hard Case Crime decide to bring more of his early, pseudonymous work back into print.

The Kubla Khan Caper

Continuing with my Shell Scott reminiscing for a moment, I believe this was the second Scott novel I read, shortly after DEAD MAN'S WALK. I checked my copy of this book and since it came out in 1967 (after originally being published as a hardback by Trident Press in 1965), that means it was probably the summer of '67 when I started reading Richard S. Prather's books.

That means I was fourteen years old. Could there have been a better age to discover Shell Scott?

And this one's got a McGinnis cover, to boot.

Gridiron Gang

My daughter Joanna loves inspirational sports movies based on true stories, so this one was a natural for us to watch. And it's a pretty darned good film, too. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson (as he's now billed) plays a former football star working as a counselor at a juvenile detention facility in Los Angeles who decides to form a football team from the inmates who are housed there, most of them gang members who have been convicted of violent crimes. It's true that this movie indulges in all the cliches we've come to expect from this sort of movie. At one point Joanna said, "I knew they'd have the scene where he makes them run back and forth." We also get slow-motion (but not too much) and the team of misfits coming together and the climactic play-off game against the arch-rival team, including one gaffe that made me bite my tongue to keep from saying, "They've got that all wrong!", which is also a staple of this sort of film. But the movie has a little harder edge than some in this genre, not surprising considering the subject matter, and it's very well-made. I like The Rock, too, and he does a fine job here. He's turned into a pretty good actor. So, yeah, it's a formula film, but there are a lot worse things in the world. This one is well worth watching.

Dead Man's Walk

Compared to some of the magnificent covers on the Shell Scott novels done by artists like Robert McGinnis and Barye Phillips, this cover's not so great. But it's important to me because it's the cover of the first Shell Scott novel I ever read. As I've mentioned before, my dad was a television repairman for more than thirty years, and when I was a kid I sometimes went on his service calls with him. But instead of watching what he was doing and learning about resistors and capacitors and things like that, I usually took a book along and either sat in the car or found a chair in the house where he was working and read while he fixed somebody's TV. In the summer of either 1966 or '67, I can't recall which, one of the books I took along to read while he was making a service call was DEAD MAN'S WALK. I even remember the neighborhood where we went that day, although I couldn't tell you exactly which house it was where the TV was broken. What I recall very vividly, though, was the effect that reading that book had on me. I was out hunting for more Shell Scott books the very next day.