Elmer Kelton, R.I.P.

I'm sure many of you have already heard about this, but we've lost a legend today. Elmer Kelton crossed the divide this morning. He wasn't just a fine writer, he was also one of the most genuinely decent men I've ever met. I interviewed him in front of a packed house at the Bouchercon in Austin several years ago, and his easygoing grace and charm made it a fine experience for me as well as for everyone in the audience. We also visited at every WWA convention I attended and I saw him numerous times at the annual TCU Press group book signing in Fort Worth. He got his start writing fiction by selling stories to the pulp RANCH ROMANCES, and we had several conversations about the pulps and what a fan of them he was as a kid, citing WILD WEST WEEKLY as his favorite. He'd been in bad health recently, but the last I'd heard, he had improved some, so while this doesn't come as a shock, it's certainly a surprise.

Nearly twenty years ago, I attended the WWA convention in San Angelo, Elmer's hometown. Someone at that convention, in talking about Elmer said, "He's the genuine article." I can't say it any better than that.

33 Years Ago Today . . .

Still here. Still together. Smartest thing I ever did.

Livia's Vampire Cover

Here's the cover for Livia's vampire romance that's coming out from Silhouette Nocturne in a couple of months. Pretty cool, I think. I love the title THE VAMPIRE AFFAIR because that's also the title of my favorite Man From U.N.C.L.E. novel (#6 in the series, by David McDaniel), and as I've mentioned before, I was a huge U.N.C.L.E. fan. I remember buying that paperback in a gas station in El Paso in late May or early June of 1966. My brother-in-law John (who loaned me my first Edgar Rice Burroughs book, A FIGHTING MAN OF MARS, as some of you may recall from a Forgotten Books post a few months ago) was in the army then and had been on leave after finishing basic training at Fort Polk in Louisiana. He had to report to Fort Bliss in El Paso, so my parents and I took him and my sister out there, stopping along the way to visit Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico (not as far out of the way as you might think). I bought THE VAMPIRE AFFAIR (the U.N.C.L.E. version) while my dad was filling up the tank for the trip back home. The first day we drove only as far as my uncle Sidney's house in Goldsmith, near Odessa (remember Uncle Sidney from last Saturday's post about his birthday party? Same guy), and spent the night there. I remember reading that U.N.C.L.E. novel in one sitting that evening and loving every minute of it.

So what does this have to do with Livia's book? Well, nothing, really, but if you've been reading this blog for very long you know I seldom miss a chance to wallow in nostalgia about books I've read. However, I've read THE VAMPIRE AFFAIR (Livia's version) several times now, and it's a heck of a yarn, with a lot of humor and action to go with the romance. In fact, there's one scene that wouldn't be at all out of place in an U.N.C.L.E. novel. She's writing about bad-ass vampires here, not soulful, tormented ones. I had a great time reading the book. Of course, I'm not the most unbiased reader in the world . . .

Water Witch - Deborah LeBlanc

I’m a sucker for books with swamps in them, and I love a good opening line, too. Much of Deborah LeBlanc’s novel WATER WITCH takes place in the Louisiana bayous, and how’s this for an opening line:

After soaking his father with three gallons of gasoline, Olm lit a match and tossed it onto the old man’s body.

Nothing like getting right to it, I say.

The rest of the book is pretty good, too. The protagonist is a young woman named Dunny Pollock who has a secret: she has an extra finger on her left hand, and that finger allows her to find things. Sometimes it turns cold, sometimes it gets hot like it’s on fire, and sometimes it jerks around and points in different directions, depending on what Dunny is trying to find. She’s always considered herself a freak and tries to hide her ability, but she has to use it when her sister, who’s a schoolteacher in a small Louisiana town, asks her to help find a couple of young children who have disappeared in the swamp.

Of course, the reader knows there’s more going on than just a couple of missing kids. There’s a supernatural evil at work in the swamp, too, as Dunny eventually comes to realize. LeBlanc provides a lot of humor and small-town local color and a little romance, interspersed with scenes of creepy, graphic violence, and while it’s an odd blend, it’s certainly effective. She keeps the pace moving along nicely, throws in a plot twist near the end that I didn’t see coming, and builds everything up to a satisfying climax. WATER WITCH is the first novel I’ve read by LeBlanc, but it definitely won’t be the last. Recommended.

Another One: Honest Scrap

Nathan Cain over at the excellent Independent Crime blog tagged me with this one, and as usual, I'm going to be contrary enough not to tag anyone else. However, I will play along to the extent of listing ten honest things about myself:

1. I really don't like pork chops, and the rest of my family does.
2. When I was a little kid, I was afraid that a bear was going to come up from the creek behind our house and get me. This was totally my grandfather's fault for telling me that there were bears down there. (There weren't. Bobcats and possums, yes.)
3. It's hard going into a bookstore and seeing ten or twelve books on the shelves that I wrote, and my name isn't anywhere on them.
4. I'm very grateful to have the work, no matter what name is on the books.
5. I wake up yelling from a nightmare at least once a week.
6. Some days I will do almost anything to avoid writing, even for a little while.
7. I watch too much TV.
8. The only type of music I simply cannot listen to, even for a few minutes, is opera.
9. I once drove off the road, through a fence, and into a field to avoid hitting an armadillo. (Or was it a possum? I don't remember.)
10. When I was a kid, I had a dog named Egbert. And yes, I'm the one who named him that.

There you have it. Books, nightmares, possums, and a dog named Egbert. If you didn't think I was odd before, you do now. If you decide to play this game, I'd appreciate a mention of it in the comments, so we can all go over to your blog and see how odd you are.

100 Books

Several people have tagged me with this, so I thought I should give it a try. The books marked with an X are the ones I’ve read, 21 out of 100. There are several others on the list I was supposed to read in college, but I didn’t actually read them. There was heavy skimming involved on those. I tend not to tag people, so if you have any interest in this, have at it.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible X
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell X
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma-Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins X
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert X
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac X
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad X
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams X
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

John R. Baker, R.I.P.

I found out today that my friend John Baker from Charleston passed away last night. John and I never met in person, but we corresponded for nearly thirty years. I don't recall for sure how we got in touch, but he may have gotten my address from Mike Avallone. John was a mystery fan who read all sorts of books, but he had a special fondness for hardboiled private eye novels and had read everything by Avallone, Richard S. Prather, Mickey Spillane, and dozens of other authors. He traded letters with a lot of them, too, typed or handwritten letters because while John eventually gave the Internet a try, he still preferred the old-fashioned way of corresponding.

Like many of us, he kept a list of everything he read and was always on the lookout for new authors he might like, or old authors whose books he wanted to reread. In one of his last letters to me, he asked if I remembered the author of a private eye series set in Tokyo and featuring an ex-G.I. who was a karate expert. I suggested he might be thinking about the Burns Bannion series by Earl Norman, and that turned out to be right.

Not surprisingly, John was also a Mike Shayne fan, and in 1984 I came out of my "retirement" as Brett Halliday to write one final Shayne story, "Fishing for Murder", which featured John and a friend of his as characters and used some of his plot suggestions. I think he enjoyed appearing in a Shayne story like that.

It hasn't quite soaked in on me that next week or next month, there won't be an envelope in the mailbox with John's distinctive handwriting on it. He sometimes signed his letters, "Your faraway friend, John". Maybe a little farther away now, John, but still a friend.

12 Rounds

I thought THE MARINE, the previous action thriller starring the WWE’s John Cena, was a surprisingly good, smartly written, and well-acted film. So I hoped that Cena’s latest film, 12 ROUNDS, would be pretty good, too.

In this one, Cena plays a New Orleans beat cop who stumbles into an FBI operation to catch a notorious international arms dealer. He winds up catching the guy and getting promoted to detective along with his partner. But a year later, the brilliant, ruthless villain escapes from prison and returns to New Orleans bent on revenge. He takes Cena’s girlfriend hostage and starts making our hero deal with all sorts of intricately plotted, deadly challenges (the twelve rounds of the title) in order to save her. Needless to say, mayhem ensues. Stuff blows up real good. Cena does a lot of runnin’, jumpin’, and fightin’. But then . . .

Ah, but then 12 ROUNDS turns into one of the most cleverly plotted movies I’ve seen in a long time, and as far as I could tell, all the twists were set up fairly. Some of them you’ll probably be able to predict, but all I can say is that I was surprised a number of times, and I love being surprised by a movie.

Cena handles the action scenes just fine, and he’s a pretty darned good actor, too. He has a very capable supporting cast in this one including Ashley Scott and Steve Harris. The director is Renny Harlin, who may not be the A-list director he was fifteen or twenty years ago but still knows how to put together a pretty entertaining film. (And doggone it, I still think CUTTHROAT ISLAND and THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT are good movies!)

So not only was I not disappointed by 12 ROUNDS, I was very impressed by it, and if you enjoy intelligent action thrillers, I highly recommend it. And I’m looking forward to Cena’s next film.

Brownwood

Livia and I drove down to Brownwood today for my Uncle Sidney's 90th birthday party. It was really good to see him and visit with some other relatives we don't see that often. During World War II, Sidney was a medic in Burma, and I always enjoyed listening to his stories about those days, although I imagine it wasn't nearly as enjoyable living through them.

I like Brownwood, and I like the drive down there. There's usually not much traffic and the countryside is pretty. I spent a lot of time in that area as a kid because we had a ton of relatives there. I probably drove Livia a little crazy by constantly telling her where things used to be, like in Stephenville where I pointed to a strip mall and said, "There used to be a little used bookstore there, but I only went to it once." Then it was, "There used to be a drugstore there where I bought an Ellery Queen paperback and a Thomas B. Dewey paperback and a Walt Slade novel." We stopped at the Hastings in Brownwood, and I said, "This used to be a grocery store, and when it was, the paperback rack was right over there, and I remember buying Louis L'Amour's FLINT here, and some Donald E. Westlake book that I can't remember the title of, but I can see the cover in my head . . ." And I didn't even tell her about the time I sat in the car outside a nursing home in Brownwood and read Edward S. Aarons' ASSIGNMENT - SCHOOL FOR SPIES. She probably thinks I'm a little nuts, and I'm sure some of you do, too, but I'll bet some of you know exactly what I'm talking about.

Yeah, it was a good trip . . . the real one, and the one into the past inside my head.

Forgotten Books: The Man from Lordsburg -- Jack Slade (Peter Germano)

Since I had this book out for the post I wrote the other day about the Lassiter series, I decided to go ahead and read it as this week’s Forgotten Book. In his comment on the previous post, John Hocking mentions that in some of the books, Lassiter shows certain similarities to Parker, the late Donald E. Westlake’s professional thief character. That’s certainly true in THE MAN FROM LORDSBURG. (By the way, Lassiter is in Lordsburg when he gets the telegram that opens the book. Other than that, the entire novel takes place in and around Abilene, Kansas.)

Lassiter is summoned to Abilene by an old girlfriend who has a plan to steal a small fortune being brought in by a cattle buyer to pay for the largest herd to ever come up the trail from Texas. In order to carry out this robbery, Lassiter brings in a handful of other hardcases and outlaws, and the first half of the book is concerned with the planning and preparations for the robbery, which involves stampeding six thousand longhorns right into the middle of Abilene. The robbery takes place in the middle of the book, then the rest of THE MAN FROM LORDSBURG is about the aftermath and the inevitable violent complications.

Lassiter certainly isn’t a heroic character in this one (check out that front cover copy), although he’s slightly more honorable than most of the other characters. He has a code, too, which consists mostly of going after anybody who’s dumb enough to doublecross him. He really does remind me a lot of Parker, although the writing isn’t as good as you’ll find in a Westlake book.

Speaking of the writing, THE MAN FROM LORDSBURG is supposed to be one of the novels written by Peter Germano under the Jack Slade house-name. I’ve read quite a few of Germano’s books, both his traditional Westerns as Barry Cord and his Jim Hatfield novels published in the TEXAS RANGERS pulp as by Jackson Cole. His style was always rather hardboiled, and it’s even more so in this Lassiter novel. The pace is fast, the action scenes are well-written, and there’s a toughness about both the character and the writing that works very well. I think most readers of hardboiled crime fiction would enjoy THE MAN FROM LORDSBURG.