Renegade

This is another movie I picked up cheaply on DVD not long ago. Not as cheaply as THE WHITE GORILLA. And as it turns out, not cheaply enough.

RENEGADE is based on the series of French graphic novels written by Jean-Michel Charlier and drawn by Jean "Moebius" Girard featuring Mike Blueberry, who gets involved in all sorts of classic Western situations. In various stories Blueberry has been a lawman, a cavalry officer, a bounty hunter, a government agent, and I don't know what else. I've read several of the graphic novels and enjoyed them quite a bit. But the makers of RENEGADE have taken out everything that made the character and the stories fun.

As a result, we're left with a movie that's murky, pretentious, slow, hard to follow, and almost devoid of plot. The story, such as it is, involves an attempt to stir up trouble between the Indians and the white settlers so that the villains can steal the Indians' gold . . . or some psychedelic drugs . . . or something. None of it makes much sense. Vincent Cassell is totally miscast as Blueberry. The only somewhat redeeming moments feature Ernest Borgnine as a crippled lawman and Michael Madsen chewing the scenery as a bad guy.

This may well be the worst movie I've ever watched all the way through. Even THE WHITE GORILLA is better. Tons better. Trust me on this.

A Soul in a Bottle -- Tim Powers

For whatever reason, I’m not a big fan of ghost stories and seldom read them. But this isn’t a hard-and-fast rule. I just read A SOUL IN A BOTTLE, a novella by Tim Powers that was published last year in a very nice limited edition by Subterranean Press, one of the best of the small-press publishers devoted to science fiction, fantasy, and horror. The illustrations are by J.K. Potter and are very, very good.

But what about the story itself? Well, it’s set in Hollywood and concerns a rare book dealer’s encounter with the ghost of a beautiful young poet who committed suicide nearly forty years earlier. Or was she murdered? That question gives this book a bit of a mystery feel, and the literary angle is appealing to me, too. I’d never read anything by Powers before (although I have quite a few of his books on my shelves), but I like his writing here. It’s lean and effective and zips right along. The twist ending isn’t really that much of a surprise, but it works pretty well anyway. Overall I enjoyed this book quite a bit, and I wouldn’t hesitate to read something else by Powers.

The White Gorilla

This 1945 jungle adventure movie is half of a double feature dollar DVD I picked up a while back. (The other movie on it is BELA LUGOSI MEETS A BROOKLYN GORILLA.) This one stars Ray "Crash" Corrigan fairly late in his career, in the dual role of jungle guide Steve Collins and the mysterious white gorilla, who is shunned by his fellow gorillas because of his color.

That's only part of the story, though. THE WHITE GORILLA makes extensive use not only of stock African wildlife footage but also entire sequences from a 1927 silent serial called PERILS OF THE JUNGLE. Corrigan's character narrates those scenes, which have shots of him as an observer cut into the old footage, which is recut and rearranged to form a completely new storyline from the original version. That sounds crazy, but it actually sort of works in a bizarre way. According to IMDB, the scenes involving Corrigan and a few other characters were shot in three days, and I believe it. Poor old Crash was never a great actor, but by this time he was a far cry from the athletic action hero of UNDERSEA KINGDOM and the Three Mesquiteers movies. The whole conglomeration is pretty awful but oddly interesting. As I commented to Livia, "At least you've never seen anything else exactly like this movie before."

I guess I'm just a sucker for movies that feature guys in gorilla suits. There are some really clumsy battles in this one between the white gorilla and a black gorilla who's evidently his sworn enemy. If I'd seen this for the first time when I was six years old, I probably would have loved it. Or it might have seemed pretty dumb to me even then. Hard to say.

The 13th Warrior

I saw this movie several years ago when it first came out, but when my daughter Shayna brought a copy of it home from the library I decided to watch it again. Based on the novel EATERS OF THE DEAD by Michael Crichton (which I haven't read), it's the supposedly true story of how the legend of Beowulf came about, told by a wandering Arab who falls in with a bunch of Vikings.

I think this is a borderline great film. The photography and scenery are beautiful, with lots of striking images, the action scenes are well-done (except for a little bit of that modern-day choppy editing), and the quiet moments between all the battles really shine, too. Some Robert E. Howard fans claim that this movie is very Howardian in spirit, and I think I agree with that. What I had forgotten is how much of a Western it is, in the same way that Howard's Conan yarn "Beyond the Black River" is also a Western. Much of THE 13TH WARRIOR plays like it could have been retitled THE MAGNIFICENT THIRTEEN. Of course there's nothing wrong with that as far as I'm concerned. I'm glad I watched this one again. It certainly holds up well to a second viewing.

Scribe Award Nominees

From Lee Goldberg:

The International Association of Media Tie-In Writers is pleased to announce the nominees for the first annual Scribe Awards, honoring excellence in licensed tie-in writing for books published in 2006.

Our first annual GRANDMASTER AWARD, honoring career achievement in the field, will go to DONALD BAIN, author of the MURDER SHE WROTE novels and the ghostwriter behind COFFEE, TEA OR ME and other bestsellers.

The 2007 Scribe awards will be given out at a ceremony in late July at Comic-Con in San Diego. The details on the event, and how to attend, will be announced in the near future. Congratulations to all our nominees and special thanks to all our judges for their time, dedication and hard work!

SPECULATIVE FICTION

BEST NOVEL – ADAPTED

SLAINE: THE EXILE by Steven Savile
SUPERMAN RETURNS by Marv Wolfman
TOXIC AVENGER: THE NOVEL by Lloyd Kaufman & Adam Jahnke
ULTRAVIOLET by Yvonne Navarro
UNDERWORLD: EVOLUTION by Greg Cox

BEST NOVEL – ORIGINAL

STAR TREK CRUCIBLE: McCOY – PROVENANCE OF SHADOWS by David R. George III
STARGATE ATLANTIS: EXOGENESIS by Elizabeth Christensen & Sonny Whitelaw
THIRTY DAYS OF NIGHT: RUMORS OF THE UNDEAD by Jeff Mariotte & Steve Niles
WARHAMMER: FAITH AND FIRE by James Swallow
WARHAMMER: ORC SLAYER by Nathan Long

GENERAL FICTION

BEST NOVEL - ADAPTED

SNAKES ON A PLANE by Christa Faust
THE PINK PANTHER by Max Allan Collins

BEST NOVEL – ORIGINAL

CSI NEW YORK: BLOOD ON THE SUN by Stuart Kaminsky
LAS VEGAS: HIGH STAKES by Jeff Mariotte
MR. MONK GOES TO HAWAII by Lee Goldberg
OAKDALE CONFIDENTIAL: SECRETS REVEALED by Alina Adams

YOUNG ADULT – ALL GENRES

BEST NOVEL

ALIAS APO: STRATEGIC RESERVE by Christina York
BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER: PORTAL THROUGH TIME by Alice Henderson
DRAGONLANCE: WARRIOR’S HEART by Stephen Sullivan
KNIGHTS OF THE SILVER DRAGON: PROPHECY OF THE DRAGONS by Matt Forbeck

I was one of the Scribe judges, and it was a great experience. The overall quality of the submissions was very high. There's some fine work being done in the tie-in field these days.

The Sex Ladder -- Anthony Gordon (Robert Leslie Bellem)

Lawrence Block isn’t the only author getting his Sixties soft-core porn novels reprinted these days. I just read a brand-new Pulpville Press edition of THE SEX LADDER by Anthony Gordon, originally published by Beacon Books in 1964, just like Block’s LUCKY AT CARDS. And as in the case of Block’s pseudonym “Sheldon Lord”, “Anthony Gordon” turns out to be an author best-known for his mysteries, too – Robert Leslie Bellem, the prolific creator of private eye Dan Turner.

Unfortunately, THE SEX LADDER isn’t up to the same standards as LUCKY AT CARDS. Instead of a noirish crime novel like Block’s book, THE SEX LADDER is pretty much a run-of-the-mill, fairly sordid soap opera about a young engineer and his ambitious girlfriend, who will do just about anything to help advance his career, if you know what I mean and I think you do, wink, wink, nudge, nudge. It has none of the goofy charm of the Dan Turner stories or the other mystery and weird menace stories that Bellem turned out by the hundreds for the Spicy pulps during the Thirties and Forties. Bellem was a fine wordsmith and the writing here is certainly smooth enough, reading very fast, but it doesn’t seem to me that his heart was really in this job. There was at least one other Beacon Book by “Anthony Gordon”, DOCTOR OF LESBOS. I assume that Bellem wrote it, as well. There are a few listings for it on ABE, but Pulpville Press also plans to reprint it in the future. Despite my reservations about THE SEX LADDER, I’ll probably read DOCTOR OF LESBOS, too. That’s just the kind of guy I am.

My Private Eye Stories

My post the other day about the Markham stories has prompted several people to ask me about my other private eye stories, so I got my records out and put together the following list of all my PI stories, not just the ones that appeared in MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE (and not including the Mike Shayne stories I wrote for that magazine). The name in parentheses is the private eye who appeared in the story. I’ll expand on some of them following the list.

“Three Birds”, MSMM, January 1979 (Delaney)
“The $100,000 Collar”, MSMM, March 1979 (Delaney)
“All the Way Home”, MSMM, April 1979 (Markham)
“Death and the Dancing Shadows”, MSMM, March 1980 (Markham)
“The Man in the Moon”, MSMM, April 1980 (Markham)
“The Golden Bear”, SKULLDUGGERY, May 1980 (Delaney)
“Outback”, MSMM, April 1981 (Allen Garver)
“The Double Edge”, SKULLDUGGERY, Summer 1981 (Delaney? Markham?)
“War Games”, MSMM, April 1982 (Markham)
“Dead in Friday”, SPIDERWEB, Summer 1982 (Cody)
“Kemidov’s Treasures”, MSMM, September 1982 (Nicholas Lake)
“The Elephant’s Graveyard”, MSMM, January 1985 (Cody)
“The Spanish Blade”, HARDBOILED, Spring 1987 (Cody)
“The Safest Place in the World”, AN EYE FOR JUSTICE – PWA Anthology, 1988 (Cody)
“In the Blood”, A MATTER OF CRIME #3, 1988 (Cody)
“Terran Girls Make Wonderful Wives”, GRYPHON DOUBLE #8, 1995 (Wes Holman)
“Woollies”, TIN STAR – Western anthology, 2000 (Dan Boyd)
“The East Wind Caper”, A DATE WHICH WILL LIVE IN INFAMY – alternate history anthology, 2001 (Nicholas Lake)

I just don’t remember whether the story “The Double Edge” features Markham or Delaney, can’t find a copy of the magazine with the story in it, and the manuscript is God knows where. And I don’t remember a blessed thing about the story itself. Pathetic, I know.

SKULLDUGGERY was a nice little small-press magazine that eventually renamed itself SPIDERWEB. Author and pulp fiction expert Will Murray was the editor, at least part of the time. HARDBOILED was an excellent, fondly remembered magazine published and edited by my friend Wayne Dundee, a fine writer himself. A MATTER OF CRIME was a trade paperback anthology series that started out calling itself THE NEW BLACK MASK. That was still the title when I sold a story to it, and I was excited about having a story I wrote in something with BLACK MASK on the cover. But the title changed before the story came out.

The Delaney stories were low-key, private eye procedural tales. Delaney was even more dour and world-weary than Markham and Cody. Allen Garver, who appeared in only one story, was another attempt at a more realistic PI. Nicholas Lake was just the opposite, a modern-day PI who modeled himself more on the private eye myth. Without going back to reread the story I seem to remember that he wore a white suit and a fedora. The first story in which he appeared, “Kemidov’s Treasures”, used the old “The Maltese Falcon was real!” plot. Nearly twenty years later I brought him back, transplanted him to Honolulu in December 1941, and used him for a yarn in an anthology of “alternate history” Pearl Harbor stories. I gave him a Hawaiian stand-up comic for a sidekick/assistant and had a great time with the whole thing. “Terran Girls Make Wonderful Wives” was one of my few forays into science-fiction and took place in a colony on the Moon. Gary Lovisi published it as half of one of his Gryphon Doubles series, with a Richard A. Lupoff story on the other side (I think). “Woollies” is a cross-genre story, too, a Western about a railroad detective named Dan Boyd, who has appeared as a supporting character in several of my Western novels as well.

I believe that’s all of my private eye stories, eighteen in all. I would have guessed that there were more than that. Of course, if you include the novel TEXAS WIND and the 36 Mike Shayne stories I wrote, the total is a little more impressive. Sometime in the mid-Eighties I started a second Cody novel but didn’t get very far with it before setting it aside to do something else. I never got back to it and have no idea where the manuscript is now.

The Guardian

Other than a few cuss words, an occasional bit of rap music, and the special effects, this movie about Coast Guard Rescue Swimmers could have been made in the Forties, probably starring John Wayne or Gary Cooper as the grizzled veteran who’s haunted by a failed marriage and a past tragedy during a mission at sea. Kevin Costner is just fine in the part here. I’m not sure who would have played the cocky new recruit, who also has tragedy in his past. But again, Ashton Kutcher does a good job in this movie, making me forget, for the most part, his goofy persona from TV and most of his other movies. There’s not a thing in the script that a savvy movie-watcher won’t see coming a mile off, but that’s all right. This is a well-made, well-acted, and pretty doggoned entertaining film.

The Markham Stories, and Other MSMM Memories

Yesterday on his blog Ed Gorman had some nice things to say concerning a story I wrote, oh, about a thousand years ago. It feels that long ago, anyway. “The Man in the Moon” appeared in MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE and was the third of four stories I wrote for MSMM that featured a private investigator named Markham. Reading Ed’s comments prompted a fit of reminiscing, so I hope you’ll bear with me.

The four Markham stories are:

“All the Way Home”, MSMM, April 1979
“Death and the Dancing Shadows”, MSMM, March 1980
“The Man in the Moon”, MSMM, April 1980
“War Games”, MSMM, April 1982

At first Markham was sort of a dry run for my private eye character Cody, who appeared in the novel TEXAS WIND and several short stories of his own. “All the Way Home” was written in June 1978, four or five months before I started writing TEXAS WIND. Like Cody, Markham has only one name and is the same sort of world-weary, cynical, tough but sentimental slob that Cody turned out to be (along with a lot of other PIs created by other authors; I wasn’t exactly breaking any new ground here). Markham’s first case finds him trying to find a mobster’s runaway daughter. Yep, it was a wandering daughter job. I still like the opening.

I put the gun against Jack Parker’s forehead as soon as he opened the door and said: “You yell and I won’t have one damn reason for keeping you alive.”

I’d probably rewrite that a little now, but it’s not bad.

That April ’79 MSMM is a pretty good issue overall, by the way. The Mike Shayne novella, “The Scent of Death”, is by pulp veteran Sam Merwin Jr., who was the magazine’s editor at the time. It also includes the first appearance of one of Joe R. Lansdale’s Ray Slater stories, “One Blonde, Well Dead” (great title), and stories by Edward D. Hoch and Richard Moore.

“Death and the Dancing Shadows” is probably the best-known of the Markham stories because it was anthologized once, in THE BLACK LIZARD ANTHOLOGY OF CRIME FICTION. When I wrote the story it was just called “Dancing Shadows”. Charles E. Fritch, who had taken over the editorship of MSMM by the time it appeared, added the “Death and the” part. The plot revolves around an old cowboy actor. Western B-movies are an abiding interest of mine. I wrote the Shayne story in that issue, “Payoff in Blood”, and there are also stories by Edward D. Hoch, again, Gary Brandner, and horror author Richard Laymon. Chuck Fritch made a habit of buying crime stories from writers better known for their horror fiction, which gave his editorial run on the magazine a distinctive and offbeat flavor.

“The Man in the Moon” is probably the most Ross Macdonald-influenced entry in the Markham series, since it’s about the damage that different generations of a family inflict on each other. I don’t recall it being deliberate, but the Markham stories seem to get more bleak as they go along. That issue of MSMM also features a Major Lansing story by W.L. Fieldhouse. Bill Fieldhouse was a regular in MSMM at the same time I was, and his stories about Major Lansing, an Army CID investigator in Europe, are outstanding. Fieldhouse was a fine writer and had a good career for a number of years as a novelist in the men’s adventure genre, and also wrote some pretty good Westerns. The last I heard of him, though, he had retired from writing. That issue also includes stories by Edward D. Hoch (man, was he in every issue or something?), William F. Nolan, and a collaboration between Joe R. Lansdale and Robert Fester. I don’t recall who Fester was, probably a friend of Joe’s.

The Markham stories also got longer with each one. The final Markham, “War Games”, is about 15,000 words. I don’t remember much about it except that it’s set at an exclusive military academy/boarding school and ends with a fairly tense sniper situation. I recall that Chuck Fritch liked it a lot but because of its length had a hard time finding space to run it. It was written in 1979 but not published until more than two years later. I wrote the Shayne story in the same issue, “Deadly Queen”, about a teen-age chess prodigy, and it’s actually shorter than “War Games”. No Edward D. Hoch in that issue, but there are stories by Michael Avallone and Mort Castle, another of those horror authors Chuck liked.

That was the end of the line for Markham. He was the second private eye character I created for MSMM. The first was called Delaney (what is it with these guys and their single names?), who appeared in a handful of short, very minor stories. Cody came along after Markham and I used both of them in stories for a while, but Cody last appeared in 1988, nearly twenty years ago. I’ve thought at times that a volume collecting all the Cody, Markham, and Delaney stories would make a nice little book. Maybe one of these days.

The Case of the Sleepwalker's Niece -- Erle Stanley Gardner

Erle Stanley Gardner piles up the complications early on in this Perry Mason novel from 1936, when Mason was still a grinning, wise-cracking tough guy, at least part of the time. In this one we have a millionaire with the bad habit of sleepwalking with a bloody carving knife in his hand; his beautiful, astrology buff niece; a hypochondriac, black-sheep-of-the-family half-brother; a golddigging ex-wife; a crackpot inventor who may be a crook; and assorted other hangers-on and shady characters. Everybody winds up spending the night in the millionaire’s Hollywood mansion, including Perry Mason, and in Gardner’s version of an Agatha Christie/old English house sort of mystery, somebody winds up dead. Mason’s sleepwalking client is charged with the murder, so Mason, Della Street, and Paul Drake plunge right in with the usual mix of snappy banter and questionable legal shenanigans to prove the client innocent and uncover the real murderer.

Gardner is in pretty good form in this one. The story zips along really fast, the wisecracks are funny, and there are some nice long courtroom scenes in the final third of the book. I had the murderer pegged pretty early on, which is unusual for me when it comes to Gardner’s books. I sometimes have trouble figuring out what happened even after Mason has explained everything. But I’ve discovered over the years that for books that are so plot-heavy and supposedly light on characterization, it’s not the plots I remember from them. The fun is in the pace and dialogue and the interaction among Mason, Della, and Paul Drake. And, of course, in watching Mason confound the long-suffering Hamilton Burger and Lt. Tragg (or in this case, Sergeant Holcomb, who hadn’t been replaced by Tragg yet). THE CASE OF THE SLEEPWALKER’S NIECE is only an average entry in the series but a perfectly enjoyable way to spend some time.