Writers' Offices

This is an interesting website with photos of the offices of a number of science fiction and fantasy authors. Thanks to Brian Earl Brown for the link.

17 Again

From ZULU in one post to Zac Efron in the next. Just goes to prove that you never know what you’re going to get from this blog.

17 AGAIN is a good-hearted little film about a middle-aged guy full of regrets who, through some magical means, gets to go back and experience life as a teenager again, only knowing what he knows now. Matthew Perry plays the adult version, Zac Efron the teenager. And both of them are pretty good. The movie is more amusing than funny. There aren’t many laugh-out-loud moments, and it intentionally borders on creepy at times. But it has some interesting things to say about redemption and finding your place in the world, and it’s surprisingly serious for what you’d expect to be a throwaway teen comedy. I enjoyed it and think it’s well worth watching.

Movies I've Missed (Until Now): Zulu

ZULU is a John Ford cavalry Western. Oh, I know John Ford didn’t direct it, and there’s not an Apache in sight, but scene after scene in ZULU plays as if the filmmakers had watched FORT APACHE, SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON, and RIO GRANDE a dozen times each before making ZULU. Take the opening scene, as the camera pans over a destroyed British regiment, then the victorious Zulu warriors come into the shot and one of them picks up a fallen rifle and thrusts it exultantly into the air over his head. That really plays like a John Ford scene to me. There are even several of Ford’s signature low-angle shots later in the film.

For those few of you who haven’t seen it, ZULU is the story of less than two hundred British soldiers trying to defend an isolated mission in Africa against four thousand Zulu warriors in 1879. I guess that makes it an Alamo movie, too, in the same way that David Gemmell’s LEGEND is an Alamo novel. The first half of the movie, before the attack begins, is really slow. It didn’t help matters for me that I had trouble telling the various soldiers apart, and the DVD didn’t have captions on it, so I understood only about half the dialogue. (Worst case scenario for a deaf old geezer like me: British accents and no captions.) The second half is full of action, though, and it’s well-staged. Given the movie’s age, all the fighting is pretty bloodless despite the rampant death and destruction, which seems a little odd after seeing so many war movies with such graphic gore, but I can’t say that the lack of blood splattering everywhere really bothered me. At least there was none of that blasted close-up, quick-cut editing.

Stanley Baker plays the engineer who winds up in command of the defenders, an impossibly young Michael Caine is his second-in-command, and Jack Hawkins is a Swedish missionary. All of them do good jobs. The photography and the scenery are spectacular. Going back to my John Ford comparison, that part of Africa really does look like the American West. Overall, ZULU is okay, a war movie that just tells a story without any heavy-handed messages. That makes it worth watching in my book.

The Lassiter Series by Jack Slade

In the comments a couple of posts back, John Hocking mentions the Lassiter novel A HELL OF A WAY TO DIE, which was published in at least a couple of different editions under the Jack Slade house-name. Years ago someone – and at this late date I don’t recall who it was – told me that Ben Haas had written this early entry in the Lassiter series. I read it and thought it was possible, but at that time I hadn’t read as many of Haas’s novels as I have now.

Then there was some discussion on the WesternPulps group about the series, and someone pointed out a website put up by relatives of the late Peter Germano (better known under his pseudonym Barry Cord) that included A HELL OF A WAY TO DIE in a list of Lassiters written by Germano. I had forgotten about that until John’s comment, so I checked my shelves and found that I have a copy of A HELL OF A WAY TO DIE, as well as THE MAN FROM LORDSBURG, another Lassiter written by Germano, according to the website. I skimmed through them, and they certainly appear to be by the same author. The styles are very similar. So I’m thinking that maybe I made a mistake attributing A HELL OF A WAY TO DIE to Ben Haas.

That’s not the end of the story, though. This German website has a list of the Lassiter novels, and it attributes a different book to Haas. Here’s the list of the Lassiter series from that website, along with the best guesses for the actual authors:

LASSITER, W.T. Ballard
BANDIDO, W.T. Ballard
THE MAN FROM YUMA, Peter Germano
THE MAN FROM CHEYENNE, W.T. Ballard
A HELL OF A WAY TO DIE, Peter Germano
HIGH LONESOME, Ben Haas
SIDEWINDER, Peter Germano
THE MAN FROM DEL RIO, Unknown
THE MAN FROM LORDSBURG, Peter Germano
GUNFIGHT AT RINGO JUNCTION, Peter Germano
FUNERAL BEND, Peter Germano
THE MAN FROM TOMBSTONE, Peter Germano
GUERRILLA, Unknown
THE BADLANDERS, Tom Curry
GUTSHOOTER, Unknown
HELL AT YUMA, Unknown
RIDE INTO HELL, Unknown
BLOOD RIVER, Unknown
RIMFIRE, W.T. Ballard
APACHE JUNCTION, Unknown
DURANGO KILL, Unknown
THE MAN FROM PAPAGO WELLS, Unknown
LUST FOR GOLD, John M. Flynn
HANGMAN, John M. Flynn
CATTLE BARON, John M. Flynn
WOLVERINE, John M. Flynn
FIVE GRAVES FOR LASSITER, Peter Germano
BIG FOOT’S RANGE, Unknown
BROTHER GUN, Unknown
REDGATE GOLD, Unknown

W.T. Ballard has generally been credited as the creator of the series and the author of the first four novels, but this list attributes the third book to Germano, based on his records, so that’s probably accurate. I wonder if RIMFIRE, coming quite a few years after Ballard’s other books in the series, might be a retitled reprint of one of the early books. As for THE BADLANDERS, I’ve read it and I’m convinced it actually is by Tom Curry. I was reading a lot of Curry’s pulp work at the time, and a lot of his style tags show up in the Lassiter novel as well. Curry wrote two books in the Sundance series at about this same time, also under the Jack Slade house-name, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if some of the other Lassiters where the author hasn’t been identified were his as well. John M. Flynn, author of four books in the series, was better known as mystery writer Jay Flynn. I believe Bill Pronzini knew Flynn and has written about him in MYSTERY SCENE. Of course, I’m most interested in reading HIGH LONESOME to see if I think it was written by Ben Haas. I don’t believe I have a copy of that one right now, but I’ll be keeping an eye out for it. The Lassiter novels still show up fairly regularly in used bookstores.

By the way, some of these books were reprinted with “Zane Grey’s Lassiter” on the cover, which I think was just a marketing ploy on the part of the publisher. This Lassiter is not the same character as the hero of RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE . . . although there was a series of novels featuring that character ghosted by Dean Owen and perhaps others under the name Loren Zane Grey.

Now, at this point the real question is: who cares about any of this stuff? Well, me, for one, and I hope at least a few of you reading this. But I still have vivid memories of buying my first Lassiter novel, THE MAN FROM DEL RIO, brand-new off the spinner rack at Lester’s Pharmacy and reading it one summer day in 1969. I’d been reading Zane Grey, Max Brand, and Clarence E. Mulford, so that Lassiter novel, with its grittier violence and slightly graphic sex, was a big change for me. The Lassiter books, not the Jake Logan series, are the first true “Adult Westerns”, as the genre came to be known, and as such, they have some historical importance in the Western field. Over and above that, though, some of them are pretty darned good books and worth checking out if you happen to run across any of them. (Fair warning, though: some of them are pretty bad, too.)

Race to Witch Mountain

The other day I wrote about a movie with fictional wrestlers, and today it’s a movie with a real former wrestler. Dwayne Johnson isn’t billed as The Rock anymore, because he’s made a respectable career for himself as a movie star in both action movies and family comedies and dramas. His latest film, RACE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN, manages to merge a couple of those genres. It’s a family-friendly science fiction adventure yarn that’s a remake of a Disney movie from the Seventies.

I never saw the original, so I can’t compare this one with it. In the new version of RACE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN, Johnson plays Las Vegas cab driver Jack Bruno, a former wheelman for the mob who’s trying to go straight even though his old boss wants him to return to a life of crime. That ambition gets complicated when a couple of aliens on a mission from space wind up in the back of his cab. The aliens have taken on human guises, of course, and look like brother and sister teenagers. Jack winds up helping them on their quest to retrieve some important information, and along the way they’re pursued by sinister government operatives and a nearly unstoppable robot assassin from the alien’s planet. Action ensues. Stuff blows up real good. Lessons are learned.

Yes, RACE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN is predictable, but it’s also pretty darned entertaining. Johnson has turned into a good actor, and early on I sort of wished this had been a straight, hardboiled crime film about his cab driver character. I’d like to see him make a movie like that. But RACE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN is what it is, and despite the script’s tendency to take the easy way out by overplaying the “evil government, evil military” card, it races right along and is enough fun to be worth watching.

Forgotten Books: Exile's Quest - Richard Meade (Ben Haas)

Regular readers of this blog know that I’m a fan of the late Ben Haas, who wrote Westerns as John Benteen, Thorne Douglas, Richard Meade, and possibly other names, in addition to historical and mainstream novels under his own name. Some of you may not be aware, though, that he also wrote three sword-and-sorcery novels, two as by Richard Meade and one under the name Quinn Reade. One of the Meade novels is our Forgotten Book this week.

By the time EXILE’S QUEST was published in 1970, the Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and J.R.R. Tolkien booms had been going on for several years, and editors were looking for those sorts of action-packed fantasy novels. EXILE’S QUEST actually has some science-fiction trappings to it, because, like Robert Silverberg’s CONQUERORS FROM THE DARKNESS from several weeks ago, it takes place on Earth. In EXILE’S QUEST, it’s a barbaric Earth thousands of years after a nuclear war. Civilization has worked itself back up to a medieval level, so there are kings and barons and lots of swordplay. The hero of this one, a young nobleman named Gallt, is the Baron of the Iron Mountains and swears his allegiance to Sigreith, King of Boorn and Emperor of the Gray Lands. (About where Germany used to be, I’d say.) In a fight with another nobleman over a woman, Gallt accidentally kills his opponent, and so the king strips him of his title and sentences him to death . . . only there’s a way out for Gallt. He just has to agree to lead an army of prisoners from the king’s dungeons on an expedition into the Unknown Lands, discover what happened to a previous expedition that never came back, and retrieve a mystical and mysterious Stone of Power.

I’m well aware that this is a pretty stereotypical plot, but I don’t think it was quite as much of a cliché nearly forty years ago when Haas wrote this novel. What elevates it to a level worth reading is his ability to craft a gritty, fast-moving story using those traditional elements, just as he does in his Westerns. There are some vividly bizarre images as Gallt and his men encounter several different sorts of mutants left over from the nuclear war, and as always in a Haas novel, the action scenes are good, especially the one-on-one battles.

When it comes to heroic fantasy, EXILE’S QUEST is nowhere near the level of Robert E. Howard, but I’d say it’s as good as John Jakes’ Brak novels and better than Lin Carter’s Thongor and Gardner Fox’s Kothar and Kyrik novels. Haas’s Westerns are better than his sword-and-sorcery novels, but EXILE’S QUEST is well worth reading. Had he lived longer (he died of a heart attack just a few years later at a relatively young age), and had Signet put a better cover on this book and the other Meade fantasy novel, THE SWORD OF MORNING STAR, Haas might have developed into a much bigger name in that field. That wasn’t to be, but we can enjoy the books of his that we do have, and this isn’t a bad place to start if you haven’t sampled his work.

The Wrestler

I know some of you have seen this movie already, because I remember reading your blog posts about it. For those of you who haven’t, it’s the story of a has-been professional wrestler, Randy “the Ram” Robinson (played by Mickey Rourke in a great performance), who is still hanging on in the fringes of the business. At the same time, he’s dealing with all the damage he’s done to his body over the years, as well as the damage in his personal life, such as his relationship with his estranged daughter. Plot-wise, it’s pretty standard stuff. I doubt if there’s much in THE WRESTLER that will really surprise you. What makes it a fine film are the performances by Rourke and Marisa Tomei as the stripper who winds up as Randy’s reluctant girlfriend, along with the well-staged wrestling scenes. The sense of camaraderie among the wrestlers is very effective, too, and for a movie that’s fairly bleak overall, there are quite a few humorous moments. The set-up is maybe a little too long – we get it that professional wrestling is a brutal business – but not enough so to be a real problem. Overall, this is a very, very good film, and well worth watching.

On a personal note, there’s a great scene where Randy takes part in an autograph show at an American Legion post, but not many people show up. So you have about a dozen wrestlers sitting around at folding tables, bored, waiting for somebody, anybody, to come along and buy their autographs, their DVDs, their T-shirts, and as I watched it, I thought, “Hey! I’ve been at book signings just like that!” In fact, the whole movie, with its seediness and scrounging for jobs, with its characters clinging desperately to the hopes of either a big break or a big comeback, made me aware that being a freelance writer is a lot like being a professional wrestler . . . minus the blood and the broken bones, of course.

Fake I.D. - Jason Starr

I’ve seen a lot of positive comments from Juri Nummelin and others about this book, which previously had been published only in England, and I’ve enjoyed the other Jason Starr novels I’ve read (including PANIC ATTACK, just a few weeks ago), so when Hard Case Crime recently reprinted it, I picked up a copy. FAKE I.D. is narrated by Tommy Russo, a bar bouncer and would-be actor in New York who’s struggling with a compulsive gambling problem. One of Tommy’s racetrack acquaintances invites him to join a syndicate that’s being put together to buy a race horse. All Tommy has to do is come up with $10,000 to buy in. Being the confident kind of guy he is, he’s sure he’ll be able to do that.

Of course, it doesn’t turn out to be that easy. Every plan Tommy comes up with seems to go wrong, and sometimes they go wrong in spectacular ways. But Tommy plows right ahead, always sure that he’s doing the right thing and that it’s all going to work out for him.

I’m not sure there’s anybody better than Jason Starr at creating likable characters the reader will root for, then having them turn out to be absolute monsters. Tommy is maybe the best example of that I’ve come across yet. He struggles along through his life and you actually start to hope that things will work out for him, and then, with no sign whatsoever of remorse, he does something totally despicable. And this happens more than once along the way to a really powerful ending.

I could see this same set-up working for one of the late Donald E. Westlake’s comic crime novels, but of course Starr takes the story in very different directions. His prose is smooth and he keeps the pace racing right along, and the result is one of the more enjoyable novels I’ve read recently. FAKE I.D. veers into some pretty dark territory at times, but I was glad to go along for the ride. I think it’s the best Jason Starr novel I’ve read so far. Highly recommended.

Movies I've Missed (Until Now): Memento

This one isn’t actually old enough to fall into the Movies I’ve Missed category, but it’s close enough, and anyway, that ten-year-cutoff I mentioned a while back isn’t a hard and fast rule. Even if it was, it’s my rule, so I can change it.

As for the movie itself, I’ve wanted to watch it ever since it came out and finally got around to it. As someone who struggles with short-term memory myself from time to time, I can sympathize with the protagonist, who has no short-term memory at all and is still trying to track down his wife’s killer. MEMENTO got as much notice for its structure as for anything else, I think, and it’s certainly odd, since each scene ends where the previous scene began . . . or something like that. I watched it last night, and I’m still a little confused. But the plot basically runs backwards, and given that, you’d think it would be impossible to have a surprise ending. MEMENTO manages to do just that, though, and it’s quite an achievement in storytelling.

I like Guy Pearce and Joe Pantoliano, and they’re both fine here. Director Christopher Nolan has gone on to much bigger things (Batman movies). I think he could have picked up the pace a little in this one. Overall, MEMENTO is one of those movies that I admired quite a bit, but it’s hard to say that I actually enjoyed it. It’s so odd that that mixed reaction may be the best I can do. But I’m glad I saw it after all this time.

Fast & Furious

We watched and enjoyed the first three movies in this series, so it was inevitable that we’d watch the fourth one, too. When it came out, some reviews called it a remake of the first one (maybe because of the similarities in title), but it’s not at all. True, all the characters from the original are back, but it’s a completely different story.

And while the background from the other movies is touched on, there’s a lot that’s not explained, so if you’ve never seen any of the Fast and Furious movies I wouldn’t recommend starting with this one. For those who have seen them, FAST & FURIOUS once again features FBI agent Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) and crook Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel) teaming up to take down the bad guys, in this case the head of a drug cartel. Since all the movies are set in the world of street racing, you know what you’re going to get: lots of chase scenes, spectacular stunts, and beautiful women in skimpy outfits. There’s plenty of that in FAST & FURIOUS. But you also get morally conflicted but stalwart heroes, really evil villains, tragedy, and a little humor.

Much like the UNDERWORLD series, if these movies had been made in the Sixties I think they would have gone straight to the drive-ins. They don’t pretend to be anything other than what they are, slickly-made action/adventure yarns where everyone involved seems to be having a great time. I did, too. I think FAST & FURIOUS is maybe the best entry in the series so far, and if you’ve seen the others, you definitely need to watch this one, too.