Bill Wouldn't Lie to You

You can see what he has to say about HUNT AT THE WELL OF ETERNITY here. (And for good measure, here's the cover art without the logo and title.)

Charles Ardai Interview

There's a good interview with Charles Ardai on TheRaider.net, a site devoted primarily to Indiana Jones but also to adventure movies and fiction. Naturally, the subject of Gabriel Hunt comes up. You can check it out here.

Y: The Last Man: Unmanned - Brian K. Vaughan

Brian K. Vaughan is now a writer/producer on LOST, but before that he was well-known as an author of comic books and graphic novels. His series Y: THE LAST MAN, with art by Pia Guerra, ran for sixty issues, all of which have been collected in a series of ten trade paperbacks. I’ve just read the first one, UNMANNED. Vaughan takes the old “last man on earth” plot literally: his protagonist Yorick Brown is the only man left alive after some mysterious plague kills every other man on Earth in a matter of seconds, leaving all the women alive. It’s not just the male humans who die, though. Every mammal with a Y chromosome does. Chaos ensues.

Yorick manages to get from New York to Washington, where he finds his mother, who’s a congresswoman. He makes the acquaintance of a woman he knows only as Agent 355, who works from a top-secret government intelligence operation. Together, they try to find a biochemical researcher who may be able to figure out what happened and what to do about it. There are some other characters, like Yorick’s sister who falls in with a group of fanatics called the Amazons, who believe all the men were justly struck down by fate because of their crimes against women. Oh, and Yorick has a monkey, too.

As you may have gathered, there’s ample room here for satire and political incorrectness along with the action, and Vaughan provides plenty of all three of those things. I thought early on in UNMANNED that the writing was going to get so heavy-handed I’d have to set the book aside, but I stuck with it and wound up enjoying it. The story is fast-paced and occasionally funny. Vaughan has an especially good touch with the dialogue. The art by Pia Guerra is excellent. She co-created the series with Vaughan and has a stronger feel for clear layouts and storytelling than a lot of modern comics artists.

I have all ten volumes of this series, and I enjoyed the first one enough that I’m sure I’ll read through the others fairly quickly. I probably won’t post about all of them, but if the quality holds up to the end, I think I can safely say that Y: THE LAST MAN will get my recommendation.

The Last Cop Out Cover

In response to a comment from John Hocking two posts back, here's the paperback edition of THE LAST COP OUT, the second novel to feature Mickey Spillane's wife on the cover. I remember liking this book about the same as THE ERECTION SET, which means it was pretty entertaining but not in the top rank of Spillane's work. I think my least-favorite Spillane novels are the Tiger Mann books. I still liked them, just not as much as the others.

Bookgasm Weighs In

You can read Rod Lott's review of HUNT AT THE WELL OF ETERNITY here.

The Erection Set Cover

Bob Randisi mentions this cover in his comment a couple of posts down. For the one or two of you out there who have never seen it, here it is. (I imagine a lot of you have this book on your shelves.) This is the paperback edition. The hardcover edition is uncensored, but I'm a little leery about posting it. Don't want Rough Edges to get a reputation as a nudie blog. (Does anybody under the age of 50 use the word "nudie" anymore?) That's Sheri Spillane, Mickey's wife at the time. I believe she's also on the cover of THE LAST COP OUT, the novel that came after this one. I remember thinking that THE ERECTION SET was an okay novel, but not up to the level of the Mike Hammer books.

Bluebonnets

My daughter Joanna shot these pictures around Ennis, Texas, today, and I thought they were pretty enough to post. This has been a good year for bluebonnets.

The February Doll Murders

Bob Randisi mentioned this book in the comments to the previous post. I thought I remembered the cover, but I had to find a scan of it to be certain. Yep, this is the same book I bought off the paperback rack in Buddie's Grocery Story in 1967. I was thirteen years old. No wonder I never forgot it.

Forgotten Books: Dead Game - Michael Avallone

In the spirit of full disclosure, Mike Avallone was my friend. When I was a kid, he was one of my favorite writers as soon as I read my first novel by him, which was also the first novel in Ace's MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. series. As I may have mentioned before, that was the book that made me realize a writer could have a distinctive voice, that the work he produced could sound so unique that it couldn't possibly have been written by anybody else. And to this day, I love a book like that, even goofy little gems like the ones Avallone so often produced, like his MANNIX tie-in novel and his entries in the Nick Carter series.

Years later, a mutual friend put me in touch with Mike, and we corresponded for years after that, off and on all the way up to his death. I know the stories are legion in the publishing business about how hard he was to work with. I know how quick-tempered he was and felt the brunt of it myself on occasion. I know that a lot of his books, especially the later ones, weren't very good. But he was still my friend, a guy who loved pulps and movies and baseball, and a lot of his books, especially the early novels about his most famous character, private eye Ed Noon, are pretty darned good.

Which brings us to DEAD GAME.

I thought I had read all of the Ed Noon novels except for a few late ones that were published only in England, but when a friend of mine sent me a copy of this one, the third in the series, I realized I hadn't read it. Sitting down to read an Ed Noon novel that was new to me is a treat I figured I'd never have again. DEAD GAME didn't disappoint me, either.

It starts simply enough, with Ed being hired to tail a cheating husband. That's what the guy's wife tells Ed, anyway. But instead of visiting a girlfriend, the man heads for the Polo Grounds instead, to take in an exhibition baseball game between the New York Giants and a visiting minor-league team. Then in the ninth inning, in the middle of the action, the minor-league team's third baseman is somehow stabbed to death, and the guy Ed's been following rushes onto the field to search the dead man's uniform before getting away. Ed is left with the questions of who murdered the third baseman, and what was the man he was tailing was looking for.

Well, things get even more complicated than that, of course. A cop gets killed along the way, putting Ed on the bad side of his old friend, Captain Michael Monks. Ed runs into a beautiful redhead and an equally beautiful brunette, the latter named Mimi Tango, one of the great, oddball character names Avallone could come up with. There's a lot of banter, a few fistfights, and Ed gets hit on the head and knocked out a couple of times, a private eye cliché but one that I happen to enjoy. Finally, there's even a gathering of all the suspects where Ed explains what happened and why, leading up to one last burst of action. The "impossible crime" nature of the murder in the middle of the baseball game sort of gets lost in the shuffle along the way, and when the explanation does come, it's hardly what you'd consider a "fair play" solution. But I don't think that's what Avallone was going for. A book like DEAD GAME is supposed to be fast, flippant, and fun . . . and it is.

Somebody's Zero Key Stuck

There's a used copy of HUNT AT THE WELL OF ETERNITY listed on Amazon for $1000.00. That's right, a cool grand. Heck, if you're interested, I know places where you can beat that price and get a copy for, oh, say, $995.00. I'm just sayin' . . .