I finished reading HOLD 'EM BACK!, a Larry and Stretch Western by Marshall Grover (Leonard F. Meares). I read a bunch of Meares' books in the Sixties when they were published by Bantam under the pseudonym Marshall McCoy and really enjoyed them. They were short, fast-paced Westerns with likable characters, surprisingly complex plots, and plenty of action. It wasn't until many years later that I discovered Meares' real name, the fact that he was Australian, and that he had written over 700 Westerns for Cleveland and Horwitz, a couple of Australian paperback publishers. I even got in touch with him through an Australian friend of mine, Graeme Flanagan, and corresponded with him for four or five years before he died unexpectedly in '92 or '93. Len was the pro's pro, as far as I'm concerned. He flat-out loved writing and never lost his enthusiasm for it. For forty years he wrote at a killer pace, never made much money, and yet never stopped caring about the books and never stopped trying to produce the best work he could. HOLD 'EM BACK! is a good example of that. Published in 1990, late in Len's career, it finds his two drifting troubleshooters, Larry Valentine and Stretch Emerson, helping a small handful of soldiers and civilians defend a besieged fort from hundreds of Comancheros. Good stuff all the way through, with some great battle scenes and an epic feel to the story that must have been difficult to achieve in a novel that's probably not more than 45,000 words, if that much. I said above that Len never lost his enthusiasm, but that's not strictly true. At the end of his career, his publisher cancelled the Australian editons of his books but insisted that he continue writing new ones for the Scandanavian market, where they had sold subsidiary rights. Many of Len's last books were never published in English, and I think that bothered him. At the same time, though, he was writing a couple of new series for Robert Hale in England, and that kept him energized to a certain extent. While some of the books from a forty-year career are better than others, of course, I've never read a Len Meares book that failed to entertain me.
I was able to get back to work today and had a fairly productive day. The current book is a little past the halfway point, so I hope it rolls right along to the finish from here.
This was another day when real life reared its ugly head and kept me from working any. Maybe tomorrow.
Meanwhile, we watched the DVD of THE GIRL NEXT DOOR (the unrated, even sleazier version, of course). I don't recall what sort of reviews this movie got, but I enjoyed it. It takes a lot of its inspiration from RISKY BUSINESS (basically decent kid gets involved with a beautiful, more experienced young woman and winds up doing lots of crazy, dangerous stuff). At times the movie descends a little too far into silliness, and some of the plot twists make no sense at all (very common in modern movies, whether from a lack of plotting ability or a tendency to edit so ruthlessly that important stuff gets left out, I don't know), but there are some funny lines and situations, the cast is good, and for a movie that's really smutty, it's also rather kind-hearted. Worth watching, I'd say.
Still reading that Larry and Stretch book. There's just not enough time in the day anymore. Books that I used to read in an evening now take me two or three days.
I didn't even set foot in my studio today, first day this month I didn't work any. But I'll be back at it tomorrow, I'm sure. Ran errands instead, couple of libraries, the post office, Wal-Mart (or as I call it when I'm in a bad mood, Hell-Mart).
I finished Merwin's "House of Many Worlds", which also finished off that issue of STARTLING STORIES. This is a pretty good parallel universe/alternate history novel, written long before such things were as popular as they seem to be now. (Although alternate history seems to have faded a bit in the past year or so.) It's a little slow at times, especially for a pulp novel, but the characters are good and the set-up interesting. There are also a couple of things that are pretty daring for 1951, such as an offhand mention that the heroine is bisexual and an interracial romance. Nothing is done with the former and the latter doesn't go anywhere, but still, just the fact that they're there at all took me a little by surprise. After all these years, Sam Merwin is still one of my favorite editors. He bounced a lot of my early stories when I sent them to MSMM, but he never sent me a printed rejection slip. Instead, he would scrawl a personal note on any scrap of paper he could find or tear off of something else and tell me why he was rejecting the story. I learned a lot from Sam about keeping my stories believable and not letting the plots get away from me. And after he'd bought a few stories from me, he asked me to try my hand at a Mike Shayne novella. That led to my first regular writing job. I wouldn't go so far as to say that if not for Sam Merwin Jr. I wouldn't be a writer today, but he sure helped me get started.
Now I'm reading a Larry and Stretch Western by my old buddy, the late Len Meares, called HOLD 'EM BACK! Very entertaining so far. But then, Len's books nearly always are.
I thought Blogger had eaten yesterday's post, but it's finally up tonight, along with a comment or two I posted yesterday as well. I hope all the glitches are out of the system for now.
I'm still reading that Merwin novel in STARTLING STORIES, didn't have much time to read today. Yesterday I forgot to mention that I finished reading LIFE IN THE BIG CITY, a trade paperback collection of the first six issues of Kurt Busiek's great comic book series ASTRO CITY. I'd read these stories before, when they originally came out, and loved them then. I think I liked them even better on rereading them. ASTRO CITY is my favorite comic book of the Nineties. Well, come to think of it, MARVELS would have to be right up there, too. And Busiek wrote that, too. Then there was the great UNTOLD TALES OF SPIDER-MAN, also written by Busiek. Definitely a pattern there. (But then, CONCRETE was a great comic book, too, and it was written and drawn by Paul Chadwick, so Kurt didn't quite have the market cornered.)
My dad moved into a nursing home today. It's close, it's a good place, and the fellow in charge is a family friend, so the whole thing went smoothly. We've known this was coming but tried to put it off. It'll be an adjustment for him, but we're hoping he'll like it once he gets used to it. For one thing, there are all those people there who have never heard all his stories. And he's already discovered he can get around all over the place in his wheelchair. We're hoping for the best.
Meanwhile, I've been reading that issue of STARTLING STORIES I mentioned last night and thoroughly enjoying it. There's quite a line-up of authors in it: Jack Vance, John D. McDonald, William Campbell Gault, and a full-length novel by Sam Merwin Jr., "House of Many Worlds" (I also have the Galaxy Novel version of this book and a later Curtis Books PB reprint; there's an Ace omnibus edition of it and the sequel, THREE WORLDS OF TIME, but I don't have it). Merwin was my first editor, back when I started selling short stories to MSMM in the Seventies, so I have a real soft spot for him and his work. The Vance story and the JDM story could have been published now with only minor changes. The Gault story hasn't aged as well, but it was still fun. I think the Forties and Fifties are my favorite decades for science fiction.
The past few days I've been reading the double-sized October/November issue of THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION. After two pretty good issues in a row, I was a little disappointed in this one. There was no stand-out story like Cowdrey's "The Tribes of Bela" or Denton's "Sergeant Chip", and most of the stories were fantasy rather than SF. I like fantasy; I just like SF better most of the time. And too many of them were plotless, literary-type stories that just left me saying, "Hunh?" Still, there were several stories I liked quite a bit, such as Lisa Goldstein's "Finding Beauty" and Michael Bishop's "The Angst of God". My plan now is to read the September 1951 issue of STARTLING STORIES next, which I suspect I'll find more enjoyable overall. What can I say? I'm just a pulp kinda guy.
I spent a lot of the day at my folks' house and got a little work done on the laptop. I also checked on those jigsaw puzzles, which Cap'n Bob Napier asked about in a comment on a previous post. I said I thought they were made by Whitman, but I stand corrected. They were actually made by Built-Rite.
I'm reading a novelette by George Harmon Coxe called "Guiana Gold" in the August 1935 issue of BLUE BOOK. Coxe probably doesn't qualify as one of those almost forgotten authors I was talking about a while back. His career lasted a long time and he was reasonably prolific, so a lot of older mystery fans probably remember him. But I'd wager he has a lot lower profile now than he used to. I've read some of his pulp stories -- he appeared in BLACK MASK quite a bit with a character called Flashgun Casey -- and maybe a dozen of his novels about crime photographer Kent Murdock. My favorite of the ones I've read is THE JADE VENUS. Coxe could be depended on for solid plots and good terse writing. Characterization wasn't as important in mysteries in his era, but he did okay with that, too. I need to read more of his novels.
Tonight we watched the DVD of NEW YORK MINUTE, starring Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. My daughter has been a big fan of theirs since they were on the TV show FULL HOUSE and has seen all their movies. This was their first attempt to play slightly more grown-up roles. The movie is a silly, contrived time-waster, largely a rip-off of FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF, with a couple of scenes that are direct swipes. But I sat there and watched the whole thing, didn't fall asleep or wander off to do something else. The Olsens were pretty good in it, and I've never been impressed with their acting. This is one of those odd movies where you wind up saying it's pretty good because it's not nearly as terrible as you thought it would be. And like in 13 GOING ON 30, New York City is clean and non-threatening and just about the spiffiest place in the world to be.
My brother stayed over at my parents' house this weekend, so I was able to get in two good days in a row on the writing. I needed them, too. The current book is going well, which encourages me to hope that it'll be done on time and the next one will only be a little late.
It occurs to me to ask, where else are you gonna find a blog entry discussing both George Harmon Coxe and the Olsen Twins? And why would you want to?
I finished THE CONCRETE BLONDE earlier today. I was right: I didn't have it figured out. Every time I thought I did, Connelly threw in another twist. I'm not sure I liked the ending, but I liked the book and will continue to read the series. One thing I wondered about: several times in the course of the book the phrase "the black heart" is used by one of the characters, and Bosch broods about it quite a bit. I think maybe Connelly intended at first to call this one THE BLACK HEART, following up on the first two books, THE BLACK ECHO and THE BLACK ICE, but either he changed his mind or somebody else persuaded him not to get tied down in the pattern of using "black" in all his titles. Since then, there's no pattern at all to his book titles, at least none that I can see.
I had to spend the day at my folks' house, but this time I was able to take the laptop and some of my research books with me and get some work done here and there. I wound up with 18 pages for the day, although I'm not quite sure how. My dad and I also put together a Buffalo Bill Jr. jigsaw puzzle that was still there from when I was a little kid. Copyright date on it was 1956. Boy, talk about life being a big circle. Funny thing is, I have no memory of that TV show. (There's also a Range Rider puzzle over there. I do remember the Range Rider.)
I'm still reading THE CONCRETE BLONDE. Unlike the first two books in the Harry Bosch series, where I had all the major plot twists figured out well ahead of time, I don't have a clue what's going to happen in this one. I'd like to finish it tonight, but I'm afraid I'll probably fall asleep first.
Ah, this was one of those days where I kept trying to write but never could get any traction going for one reason or another. I wound up with 6 pages, but it took all day to get them.
Still reading and enjoying Connelly's THE CONCRETE BLONDE. Also, today's mail brought a copy of Leland Jamieson's novel ATTACK! that I got on eBay. Looking forward to reading it.
