End-of-the-Month Update

I went from having the most productive month of my entire career in October to having my worst month so far this year in November. That’s probably not too surprising. Sooner or later the gas always starts to run low in the tank. The good news is that while I wasn’t getting as much written, I was still pleased with the quality of the pages I was turning out. As I think I’ve said before and no doubt will say again, a writing slump is just like a batting slump in baseball. The only solution is to hit your way out of it.

These are the books I read in November:

THE BLACK ANGEL, Cornell Woolrich
LONGARM AND THE WOLF WOMEN, Tabor Evans (Peter Brandvold)
PITY THE DAMNED (apa SLUM SINNERS), Andrew Shaw (Lawrence Block)
FURY ON SUNDAY, Richard Matheson
THE EMBEZZLER, James M. Cain
RIDE THE NIGHTMARE, Richard Matheson
THE GREATEST BATMAN STORIES EVER TOLD, VOLUME 2
HAVEN: SECRETS RISING, Suzanne McMinn

I’ve been in a bit of a reading funk lately and half the time can’t figure out what I want to read next. That leads to stopping and starting a lot of books. When that happens to me, I usually read short stories until the mood breaks, but this time I’m finding it difficult even to concentrate on short stories. All it takes to fix that, though, is finding the right book, and I’m confident that I will soon.

Since we’ve been back home, we’ve been able to watch more movies than we did down at the coast. Here are the ones we watched this month:

TRANSFORMERS
SHREK THE THIRD
SPIDER-MAN 3
RATATOUILLE
MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET
THE MYTH
LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD

No question which of these I liked the best: MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET. There’ll probably be some more Christmas classics coming up in December. It’s been a long time since I watched IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE and WHITE CHRISTMAS, and I think I’m in the mood for them.

Live Free or Die Hard

And I thought that Jackie Chan movie strained believability! LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD has enough “Oh, come on!” moments for three or four normal movies. But I’ll bet you can guess what I’m going to say next: I liked it anyway.

I enjoyed the original DIE HARD a lot, the second one was okay, and the third one was still watchable. I’ll go along with the general consensus on this fourth entry in the series, which if I recall correctly was that it was not as good as the first one but better than #2 and #3. I could drag out my usual complaints about most modern movies – too badly lit, too choppily-edited, too hard to follow in places – and they certainly apply to this film, too. The plot finally made sense, I guess, but for too much of the movie it was a matter of “There are these bad guys, see, and for some reason they want this computer nerd dead, and Bruce Willis has to protect him. Stuff blows up.” What saves the film for me is its sheer audacity in asking the audience to believe in what’s going on, and the fact that Bruce Willis is just so damned likable. To continue the comparison to Jackie Chan’s THE MYTH, I don’t think I’ve ever seen Willis in a movie where I didn’t like him at least a little. He’s possibly the most believable movie tough guy in the business today, although at times he seems to be parodying himself (THE WHOLE NINE YARDS and its sequel). His world-weary cop role in LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD doesn’t ask him to do much except run and shoot and jump on or off of things as they’re about to explode, but he manages to bring something more to it anyway in the quieter moments.

If you liked the other DIE HARD movies, you’ll probably enjoy this one quite a bit. If you didn’t, you’d be better off giving it a pass.

The Myth

It’s difficult to categorize Jackie Chan’s THE MYTH. It’s part ancient Chinese historical epic, part modern-day archeological thriller, part fantasy, and part knockabout martial arts comedy of the sort that Chan is best known for. He plays duel roles: a Chinese general assigned to protect a princess, and in good old Roy Rogers fashion, a modern archeologist named Jack Chan. It’s obvious from the first that the storylines are going to wind up being connected, but that’s not enough for the filmmakers. They also throw in a bunch of levitating priests, hollowed-out mountains, an anti-gravity machine, and immortality pills, with most of the action taking place in, to borrow a line from Woody Allen, a fictional-but-real-sounding country. Believe it or not, though, by the end of the movie everything gets tied together into a somewhat coherent plot.

Speaking of believing it or not, this movie requires a considerable suspension of disbelief. More than once while watching it I said out loud, “Oh, come on!” But if you can just go with it and not ask for things to make much sense, it winds up being pretty enjoyable. I like most of Jackie Chan’s movies and THE MYTH is no exception. The historical parts of this film are probably the best, featuring some nice battles staged with what appear to be hundreds of actual stuntmen and extras, rather than CGI. Chan plays it straight in these scenes and does a fine job.

Overall this one gets a recommendation from me, with the reservations that you probably ought to be a Jackie Chan fan to start with and that sheer goofiness in a plot doesn’t bother you too much.

Dust Devils Nominated for Spinetingler Award

DUST DEVILS has made the shortlist for the Spinetingler Awards in the Best Novel -- Legend category. You can read about it and see how to vote here. Considering the competition -- Ken Bruen, James Lee Burke, Laura Lippman, and Ian Rankin -- you can be sure of two things: I'm tremendously honored to be included, and I don't expect to win. There are some very worthy nominees in all the categories, so you should definitely go and vote. I would tell you to vote early and vote often, especially if you're voting for DUST DEVILS, but, uh, they don't allow that, drat the luck. There's even a category for Best Cover, and all five of the nominees are great. Voting ends December 30, so get those votes in.

Another William Heuman Western

Prompted by the previous post, a friend of mine sent me a scan of the cover from this William Heuman novel. I like it so much I decided to go ahead and post it. I feel like I ought to know who the artist is, but I can't read the signature on the scan. I own a copy of this book but have never read it. I may have to dig through the stacks and piles of books and see if I can find it. In addition to Westerns, Heuman also wrote some YA sports novels, and I'll bet they're worth reading.

UPDATE: Thanks to Steve Lewis, I can confirm that the cover of this book was painted by Lou Kimmel.

Public Readers

I confess, I'm always interested when I see somebody reading in public, and I usually try to sneak a look at the book so I can see what they're reading. Most of the time it's something by Danielle Steel, James Patterson, etc., but today while I was walking in one of the local malls I spotted an older fellow (older than me, anyway) sitting on a bench reading a paperback called WAGON TRAIN WEST. I could see the title but not the author. It looked to be a pretty beat-up copy, but the yellow spine was distinctive enough I thought it was a Gold Medal. Sure enough, when I got home I had to look it up, and it was indeed a Gold Medal, from 1959, by a pretty good Western writer named William Heuman. I was going to post a cover scan but couldn't find one on-line. I have no idea why I find stuff like this fascinating, but I do.

Batman: The Greatest Stories Ever Told, Volume 2

The second volume of this on-going series collects ten more stories of the Batman, ranging from 1940 to 2003. I had read several of these before, either in their original appearances, in the case of the ones from the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties, or in other reprint volumes. They’re all entertaining, although none of them would be among my picks for the greatest Batman stories ever told. (As I think I’ve said before, those would be “Night of the Reaper” by Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams, and the Batman/Enemy Ace crossover, also by O’Neil and Adams, the title of which I can’t recall at the moment.) This volume features the extra-long story in which Jason Todd first became the infamous “second Robin”, a character so despised by the fans that he was eventually killed off. I’d consider this collection worth reading, since almost any story about Batman is going to be pretty good, but it’s a bit of a letdown after the excellent first volume in the series.

Redhead -- Duane Swierczynski

Earlier this year I read and raved about Duane Swierczynski’s novel THE BLONDE, which is still one of the best books I’ve read this year. Well, THE BLONDE has just come out in trade paperback, and as a bonus the book includes a new novella entitled “Redhead”, which is a direct sequel to the novel.

Anybody who liked THE BLONDE certainly won’t be disappointed in “Redhead”. It features the same blend of near-non-stop action with great dialogue and black humor that made the novel so much fun. In “Redhead”, two of the main characters from THE BLONDE are on the run from a team of vicious assassins and a mysterious, sinister woman. The action bounces back and forth in time, a technique that allows Swierczynski to play a neat trick or two on the reader while still being very fair about it. All of it leads up to a very satisfying ending that leaves the reader (well, me, anyway) hoping there may be more sequels to come.

If you haven’t read THE BLONDE, I highly recommend buying the trade paperback so you’ll get “Redhead”, too. That’s a one-two punch I don’t think you’ll be able to beat. But if you have read THE BLONDE, Duane has very kindly made it possible for you to read “Redhead” without buying the new edition. Check out the details on his blog, which I also highly recommend.

Ride the Nightmare -- Richard Matheson

RIDE THE NIGHTMARE, originally published by Ballantine in 1959, is the third and final suspense novel by Richard Matheson reprinted in the Forge Books collection, NOIR. It’s also my favorite of the three, although I admired and enjoyed SOMEONE IS BLEEDING and FURY ON SUNDAY, too.

RIDE THE NIGHTMARE has a fairly typical set-up for a novel of this sort: Chris and Helen Martin are living a happy suburban life with their young daughter Connie when something happens to disrupt it and put them all in mortal danger, in this case a phone call from someone who claims to know Chris . . . and who also wants him dead. Chris’s past contains a dangerous secret that Helen never knew about, and once that barrier is breached, things just get worse and worse for both of them.

There’s nothing in the plot you won’t see coming, but what makes it work so well is purely a matter of style and pacing. Poor Chris and Helen hardly ever get a breather before something else terrible comes barreling down on them, and Matheson is a master at keeping the reader flipping the pages to find out what’s going to happen next. In lesser hands, this technique can get a little silly. Not in this case, though, as Matheson pulls it off just fine. I highly recommend this novel, and for that matter, the entire collection . . . although I might quibble a little with the title, since I don’t consider any of the novels to truly be noir. As examples of straight suspense, though, you won’t find many that are better.

Miracle on 34th Street

After watching the dog show this afternoon I decided to stick around and watch NBC’s telecast of MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET, since I haven’t seen it in quite a few years. I’ve liked this movie ever since I first saw it as a kid, and I still think it’s not only a good Christmas movie but a very good film, period. Of course, I like just about any movie with the gorgeous Maureen O’Hara in it (MIRACLE’s one drawback is that it’s in black-and-white, so you can’t see her red hair). But the rest of the cast is great, too, with Edmund Gwenn and John Payne being backed by a fine stable of character actors, many of whom, like Jack Albertson and Percy Helton, are unbilled. The script is sharp and funny and touching. Other than the abundance of commercials, I had a great time watching this one again.

All this reminds me that the first time I saw MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET was almost certainly not at Christmas-time, but more than likely in the summer. When I was a kid one of the local TV stations ran an old movie at 8:30 every morning during the week, and another one at 3:30 in the afternoon. I was a regular viewer of those movies when I was out of school during the summer. Since this was the Sixties, most of those “old” movies were from the Thirties and Forties. Whoever picked the movies didn’t care whether or not they were seasonal, so you might see MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET or IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE or any other Christmas movie at any time of year. I didn’t care. If the movies were good I liked ’em anyway.

And while I’m on the subject of Christmas movies, I don’t know if we’ll have a white Christmas this year – they’re rare around here – but today we got something even more rare: a white Thanksgiving. That’s right, it snowed here today, two days after we set a record on Tuesday when the high temperature was 84. That’s Texas weather for you. Of course, the snow didn’t stick since it’s not below freezing, but it was coming down pretty thick for a while, and great big flakes, too. Made for a nice beginning to the Christmas season.