Music I Like: Good Night - The Beatles

This series comes to an end, at least for now, with a pretty song that I've always liked ever since I first heard it in college. The radio station I listened to played it every night when they signed off the air.

I never really intended for this series of music posts to continue for this long. I started it to have something to do when I was up in the middle of the night with our old dog who's in poor health. The old boy's still hanging in there, still as contrary as ever, but I've decided that it's time to wind this up for a while. It's been fun, and it's confirmed something I already suspected, that my musical tastes are really wide-ranging. I hope some of you have been entertained by it as well. I'm sure I'll still post some music from time to time, just not on an every night basis. Now, as Ringo says in the song, good night . . . 

Paperback Confidential - Brian Ritt

I was fortunate enough to read an advance copy of this book and thought it was wonderful, but now I've been going through the actual book and I have to say, it's even better. For one thing, there are photos of most of the authors covered in the incisive profiles by Brian Ritt, and while some of them are pictures that you've probably seen before, many of them aren't. Do you know what Edward S. Aarons looked like? I didn't, but I do now. And fittingly enough, he bears a resemblance to how I've always pictured Sam Durell. Others were more surprising, as some of the authors of really tough fiction don't look anything at all like the two-fisted brawlers that their characters are.

But the best parts of this book are still the perceptive comments of Brian Ritt and the excellent lists of books and pseudonyms. As others have said, I would have loved to have a copy of PAPERBACK CONFIDENTIAL on hand as I browsed through all the used bookstores I used to haunt in the Seventies and Eighties. This is the best book of its sort since the classic HARDBOILED AMERICA. I think I've read the whole thing a couple of times already just from picking it up to browse through it for a few minutes and then reading or rereading big chunks of it.

If you have any interest at all in vintage paperbacks or hardboiled crime fiction, you really can't afford to be without this book. It's funny, it's poignant, it's informative, and it's hugely entertaining. Brian Ritt's PAPERBACK CONFIDENTIAL gets the highest possible recommendation from me, and I'm sure it'll be on my top ten list at the end of the year.

Music I Like: What a Wonderful World - Louis Armstrong

This was one of my father's favorite songs. My dad's been gone for quite a few years now, but I miss him every day and think of him whenever I hear this one. It's a classic for plenty of other reasons, too. 

Tuesday's Overlooked TV: Shaky Ground

This sitcom lasted only one season back in the early Nineties and I haven't seen it since then, but I remember it being pretty good. Matt Frewer, still probably best known as the star of the oddball virtual reality series MAX HEADROOM, played a nice guy who worked in the aerospace industry and had the usual sitcom trials and tribulations at home with his wife and three kids. With such a stereotypical set-up, for a show to be good it has to have a distinct voice, and SHAKY GROUND did. Certainly not a great series, but I remember some of the dialogue and scenes after twenty years, so it had to have something going for it. The cast included a young Jennifer Love Hewitt as Frewer's teenage daughter, which seems to be the only reason a number of episodes are available on YouTube.

Music I Like: Have I Told You Lately - Van Morrison

For Livia. Simple as that.

Music I Like: Carry On - Pat Green

"Everybody's gotta get away sometime" . . . I like the sentiment expressed in that lyric. This is a nice, bouncy song that I always turned up when it came on the radio in the car.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: The Green Ghost Detective, Spring 1941

I've read several of the mystery novels featuring magician/detective George Chance that were published in this pulp, and they're pretty good, as you'd expect from author G.T. Fleming-Roberts, who contributed some excellent Secret Agent X novels earlier in his career. This issue also features stories by Hugh B. Cave and Ray Cummings, so it must have been a pretty good one.

Music I Like: Nick of Time - Bonnie Raitt

Always liked it when this one came on the radio.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: 5 Western Novels, February 1951

This entry from the Thrilling Group was primarily a reprint magazine. In this issue, only the story by prolific pulpster Larry A. Harris is new. But Lee Bond and L.P. Holmes were consistently entertaining authors, and the story by Bradford Scott is a reprint of a Walt Slade yarn from THRILLING WESTERN. Sure, the Walt Slade stories are formulaic, and so are the paperbacks that came later, but I've always enjoyed them anyway.

Music I Like: Gives You Hell - The All-American Rejects

I just like the way this one sounds.