End-of-the-Month Update

Well, obviously, my mother's situation dominated the month. We realized today that she passed away on her and my dad's wedding anniversary. They were married 66 years ago yesterday. Seems pretty appropriate to me.

Other things were going on as well. Here are the books I read in June:

BEGGARS OF LIFE, Jim Tully
JONAH HEX: GUNS OF VENGEANCE, Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray
THE OTHER SIDE OF ME, Sidney Sheldon
MIAMI PURITY, Vicki Hendricks
JOHN O'HARA'S HOLLYWOOD, John O'Hara
THE WOUNDED AND THE SLAIN, David Goodis
WEST TEXAS WAR, Gary Lovisi
THE CELEBRATED CASES OF DICK TRACY, Chester Gould
VALLEY OF JEWELS, Max Brand (Frederick Faust)
CIRCUS PARADE, Jim Tully
VOLUNTARY MADNESS, Vicki Hendricks

Plus I read several manuscripts for a contest I'm judging, but I can't really talk about those.

On the movie front, we watched:

BRIDGET JONES'S DIARY
FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS
ISLAND IN THE SKY
JOHN TUCKER MUST DIE
THE PALE HORSE
KING SOLOMON'S MINES
HOLLYWOODLAND
GHOST RIDER
STRANGER THAN FICTION
MUSIC AND LYRICS (look for a post on this one in a day or two)

I have to say that I enjoyed every one of those movies.

As far as writing goes, this was my least productive month of the year so far, but I still got quite a bit done and think I turned out some pretty good work. The goals that I was trying to meet have gone by the wayside, but that's all right -- they were crazy to start with. I'm not trying to break any records anymore. Now all I'm worried about is getting things done in a timely manner and producing well-written books and stories. Seems simple, doesn't it?

Lastly, many thanks to everyone who's written to me about my mom, both here on the blog and directly. Your kind words are all appreciated, and they definitely do make a difference.

Voluntary Madness -- Vicki Hendricks

After being so impressed with Vicki Hendricks’ first novel, MIAMI PURITY, I had to try something else by her. VOLUNTARY MADNESS is narrated by Juliette, a young woman living in Key West with her somewhat older boyfriend Punch. An aspiring novelist, Punch is in poor health due to diabetes and heavy drinking, so he and Juliette make a suicide pact: for one year, they will live a wild, exciting life in Key West while Punch writes a novel about their experiences -- and then they will kill themselves while riding on one of the Fantasy Fest parade floats on Halloween. It’s a crazy plan, of course, and it becomes even crazier when violence and murder become involved.

The plot of VOLUNTARY MADNESS is sort of episodic and wanders around a little, which is why I didn’t like it quite as much as MIAMI PURITY. But the characterization and that distinctive Hendricks voice -- a blend of eroticism, despair, and wry, very dark humor -- are excellent. She also does a great job with the colorful Key West setting. I can recommend this one very highly, and I think it’s a safe bet to say that I’ll be reading more of Vicki Hendricks’ novels.

Ora Strickland Reasoner, 1916 - 2007

My mom passed away early this afternoon. In her 91 years and almost three months she was a schoolteacher, a library volunteer, raised three kids, and helped out immensely with numerous grandchildren. For a while after her stroke back in January she was making enough progress that we thought she might be able to move out of the rehab facility and go back to regular assisted living someday. However, over the past couple of months it's become obvious that wasn't going to happen. I saw her around the middle of the day today and knew it wasn't going to be much longer, but I really thought we were looking at another week or so. However, the call came from my brother about an hour later, letting me know that she was gone.

I'll still be blogging. I finished reading a book yesterday that I want to talk about, and there are still movies to be watched and writing news to report. So I'll be around.

Circus Parade -- Jim Tully

Having read and enjoyed Jim Tully’s memoir BEGGARS OF LIFE, about his life as a hobo during the early part of the Twentieth Century, I decided to try another of his books. CIRCUS PARADE is set during the same time period but focuses on a season that Tully spent traveling with a rather disreputable circus. It’s well-written and filled with circus lore, colorful characters, and both comedy and tragedy. Tully makes it seem as if the circus world was populated mostly by brutal, dishonest thugs, and to a certain extent that’s probably true. But there are a few sympathetic characters, such as Hilda, the 400-pound Strong Woman; Whiteface the Clown; and Jock, the livestock handler who was probably Tully’s best friend despite being a morphine addict.

CIRCUS PARADE is pretty episodic, and some of the episodes are so grotesque and over-the-top that you have to wonder if Tully made them up or at least embellished them. His books are supposed to be non-fiction, but I have a feeling that he didn’t always let the facts get in the way of a good story. Also, the sex and violence in this book must have been pretty shocking to readers in 1927, when it was originally published. Even a cynical old Adult Western writer like me was shocked a few times.

I didn’t like CIRCUS PARADE as much as I did BEGGARS OF LIFE, but I did enjoy it and found it to be well worth reading. I’m sure I’ll read more of Jim Tully’s books, too, but I’ll probably wait a while before trying another one.

By the way, I read the original edition, but the retitled paperback reprint has a better cover, so that's the one I've posted above.

Stranger Than Fiction

When comedians make serious movies, sometimes it works (most of Bill Murray’s efforts along those lines) and sometimes it doesn’t (most of Jim Carrey’s). In STRANGER THAN FICTION, Will Ferrell tries on a more serious role and succeeds pretty well. He plays IRS agent Harold Krick, whose life is suddenly disrupted by a voice-over narration that only he can hear, coming from some woman with a British accent. Eventually Harold discovers that he’s a character in a novel being written by an author (played by Emma Thompson) who’s struggling with writer’s block. But is he only a character on a page, or does he really exist? That’s the question on which most of the movie turns.

While most of the humor in this film is of the whimsical variety, there are a couple of laugh out loud moments, too, and they’re achieved without Ferrell having to run around naked as he does in most of his other movies. One of the questions plaguing Ferrell’s character is whether the novel about him will turn out to be a tragedy or a comedy, and the same question hangs over this movie until the end. The script is well-written and includes some interesting observations about the nature of fiction; the cast, which includes Dustin Hoffman as an English professor, is good all around; the minimalist sets fit right in with the characters and story; and the music, which is in the same vein most of the time, works well. I enjoyed this one quite a bit, more than I expected to, really. Well worth a look.

The Celebrated Cases of Dick Tracy -- Chester Gould

When I was a kid (funny how many of my posts start out that way), one of the features on the front page of the comics section in the Sunday newspaper was DICK TRACY. So I grew up reading this comic strip about the square-jawed police detective. Unfortunately, that was during an era in which the strip’s creator, author, and artist Chester Gould had taken it in some weird directions, getting away from the hardboiled police action and bringing in more and more science-fictional elements, such as hidden civilizations on the Moon. I read DICK TRACY anyway and enjoyed it, although it was never one of my favorites.

THE CELEBRATED CASES OF DICK TRACY, an oversized volume containing more than a dozen storylines ranging from Tracy’s first case in 1931 to episodes from the late Forties, is an excellent introduction to this classic strip, featuring numerous examples of the things that made DICK TRACY a success: hardboiled, even brutal, action with fistfights, elaborate death traps, and shoot-outs in which characters, both good and bad, actually died; grotesque villains with colorful names like Flattop, Mumbles, and the Brow; and at least an attempt to be realistic when it comes to police work, making TRACY an early example of the police procedural.

Chester Gould’s plotting, writing, and willingness to pull no punches in his stories are what made this strip work. The artwork starts off pretty crude, and while it improves some with time, it never comes close to the level of, say, Milton Caniff, Alex Raymond, or Hal Foster. But by the Forties it’s good enough not to detract from Gould’s fast-moving storylines. My main complaint about this volume is that it reprints only the daily strips, leaving out the Sunday pages that were part of the continuity. As a result, there are some jarring gaps in the action where the reader has to figure out what happened on Sunday from the context of Monday’s strip. This isn’t a huge problem, but it can be annoying.

Overall, I enjoyed this book quite a bit. I have another Dick Tracy collection, THE THIRTIES: TOMMYGUNS AND HARD TIMES, which reprints practically the entire first two years of the strip, and I’m looking forward to reading it, too.

Ghost Rider

Forget what the critics said. GHOST RIDER is a good movie. Not a great film, not a sterling example of cinematic art, but just a darned good piece of entertainment.

If you’re interested in this movie at all, you probably already know the story: motorcycle stunt rider Johnny Blaze sells his soul to the Devil in an attempt to save someone he loves and ultimately becomes the Ghost Rider, Satan’s bounty hunter who collects evil souls and zips around on a motorcycle with a flaming skull where his head should be. If that sounds silly to you, you might as well avoid this movie. If it sounds like a great comic book, that’s because it was, back in the Seventies, courtesy of writers Roy Thomas and Gary Friedrich and artist Mike Ploog (all of whom are featured in one of the extra segments on the DVD, by the way).

Nicholas Cage does a fine job as Johnny Blaze, but to me, the highlight of the film is Sam Elliott’s performance as the mysterious caretaker of a cemetery. Elliott’s real identity won’t come as a big surprise to anyone paying the least bit of attention, but still, several of his scenes with Cage near the end of the movie sent chills down my spine and put a big grin on my face. You’ll know the sequence I’m talking about when you come it, if you’re anything like me.

Of course, I do have a few complaints. The lighting is so dark at times that it’s almost impossible to tell what’s going on, and the actors mumble so much that about halfway through we gave up and turned the captions on so we could understand what they were saying. Despite that, I enjoyed this movie as much as anything else I’ve seen lately, and I highly recommend it.

Robert E. Howard Article

There's an interesting article about Robert E. Howard -- and Mark Finn's recent REH bio, BLOOD AND THUNDER, to be found here. The author is Michael H. Price, an old acquaintance of mine who did an interview with me in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram when TEXAS WIND came out -- the first time! That's how far we go back. Good stuff about Howard, so check it out.

(Thanks to Ed Gorman for the heads-up.)

West Texas War -- Gary Lovisi

I’ve known Gary Lovisi for many years as the publisher of the excellent small-press imprint Gryphon Books, as well as the long-running magazines Hardboiled and Paperback Parade. I’ve also read many of his mystery stories. In recent years, though, he’s started to make a name for himself as a Western writer, with stories appearing in several anthologies (some of which also feature stories by Livia and me, I might add). But I wasn’t aware until now that Lovisi had written a Western novel, WEST TEXAS WAR, which was published in England by Robert Hale Ltd. as part of the Black Horse Western line.

That novel has been reprinted by Ramble House in a fine volume that also includes a half-dozen of Lovisi’s Western short stories. WEST TEXAS WAR is a good solid traditional Western, with an action-packed plot and a few nice twists that lift it out of the realm of the formula Western. (As an aside, this is true of most of the Black Horse Westerns, whose authors generally do a great job of finding fresh variations on traditional plots.)

It’s in the short stories that Lovisi really shines, though. In a distinctive voice that mixes wry humor, colorful language, and terse action, Lovisi spins yarns that range from the supernatural (“Enough Rope to Hang”) to the quiet and poignant (“Old Aunt Sin”). He comes up with great titles like “Tombstones Are Free to Quitters”, which could have come right out of an issue of a Popular Publications Western pulp like Dime Western or Big-Book Western during the Forties, and “There Ain’t No Men in Heaven”, another of the more touching stories in this volume. “After the Great War” is a more modern-day Western, a Texas Rangers tale set during the period following World War I, and “My Brother of the Gun” features a more traditional Western plot elevated by Lovisi’s swiftly-paced writing.

I was familiar with Ramble House more as a publisher of mysteries, most notably those by the notorious Harry Stephen Keeler. I don’t know if WEST TEXAS WAR is the company’s first foray into Westerns or not, but it’s a good one, and I hope it’s not the last we see along these lines from Gary Lovisi.

Adventure Stories Cover

Juri Nummelin has posted the cover for the second issue of his magazine Adventure Stories on his blog. I mention this for two reasons: 1) it's a really good cover; and 2) this issue features the Finnish translation of my story "Devil Wings Over France", which was originally published in RETRO PULP TALES. Check out the cover if you like World War I aviation action. (Which I obviously do, or I never would have written the story in the first place.)