A friend of mine drew my attention to these, and I'm glad he did. These webcomics are samples posted as part of a contest run by DC, with the prize being, as I understand it, a contract to continue the story as regular comics. ISLAND, ALONE is leading in the current contest, which ends February 26th. It's a really nice piece of pulpish Victorian adventure, with a zeppelin, a mysterious island, and a beautiful, redheaded jungle girl. What more do you need? You can read it, and vote for it if you're of a mind to, here. ISLAND, ALONE is written by Shawn Aldridge and drawn by Rich Fuchsia.
VIC BOONE was the runner-up in a previous contest, and even though it didn't win, it's a lot of fun, a private eye yarn set in a world of Fifties science-fiction movies. Like ISLAND, ALONE, it's written by Shawn Aldridge. The art is by Jeff Winstead. Even though the voting on that one is closed, you can still read it here. I recommend both stories.
I would have sworn that we watched every high school comedy movie made in the Eighties, but somehow we never got around to this one. It’s what I call a “bad day” movie, where things start out wrong for our decent, everyman hero Jerry Mitchell and keep getting worse as the day goes on. The low point, though, is when a new student who happens to be a psychopathic bully decides that he and Jerry are going to have a fight on the parking lot as soon as school is out at three o’clock.
Jerry and his best friend, who’s the editor of the school newspaper, try to figure out a way for Jerry to avoid getting beaten up, but every scheme they try just backfires on them. Eventually, of course, the showdown, the moment of truth, arrives, and the question is whether Jerry will step up and at least survive.
THREE O’CLOCK HIGH is a pretty good film, with a funny script co-written by Richard Christian Matheson. The cast is populated by actors who hadn’t done much then and didn’t go on to do much, although there are a few exceptions (Mitch Pileggi, Jeffery Tambor, and Yeardley Smith, to name three). Jerry is played by Casey Siemazko and Richard Tyson plays the bully, and while both of them have worked steadily over the years, neither is what you’d call a big name. But they’re fine in their roles, as are most of the other people in the movie.
I’m glad we finally got around to watching this one. It’s no FERRIS BUELLER, mind you, but it’s pretty entertaining and well worth investing an hour and a half of your time if you haven’t seen it.
So, why watch a movie when you know how it’s going to end? Well, in this case, when I was a kid I read a book about famous disappearances and found it pretty interesting, so I’ve always been a little curious about what happened to Amelia Earhart. Curious enough to watch this movie, anyway.
In classic biopic fashion, AMELIA begins at a pivotal moment as she’s about to take off her around-the-world flight with Fred Noonan, and then uses flashbacks to tell the story of how she became a famous aviator (or aviatrix, in the parlance of the day) and married publisher George Putnam. There are some soap operatics along the way about Amelia’s affair with flying instructor Gene Vidal (Gore’s daddy – who knew?) and some stuff about how celebrities were merchandised during the Thirties. Hilary Swank plays Earhart and really does look like her. Richard Gere is her publisher/husband, and Ewan McGregor has what amounts to an extended cameo as Gene Vidal.
This is a movie that looks great. The photography and the scenery work really well together. It’s well-acted, too. But it never seems to generate any real drama. The only suspense comes toward the end, and that’s diluted because we know how things are going to turn out. This is another case of a film that’s not terrible, but there’s no compelling reason to watch it, either, unless you’re really interested in the subject matter.
The winner of the free copy of Philipp Meyer's AMERICAN RUST is Steve Oerkfitz. Steve, email me with your mailing address and I'll pass it along to the book's publicist. Thanks to everyone who entered, and more contests will be coming up soon.
Here's a book I'll have to buy. It's already available from Amazon and soon will be from the publisher, Perfect Crime Books. According to Bob, it includes "Henry Po stories, Truxton Lewis stories, Val O'Farrell stories and a few more, plus an intro from Ed Gorman." Sounds like good stuff.
Don't forget, today's the last day to throw your name in the hat for a free copy of Philipp Meyer's fine novel AMERICAN RUST. I'll be doing the random drawing shortly after midnight tonight (that's Central Standard Time), or first thing in the morning if I'm already asleep by then. US or Canadian entrants only, please, since the copy will come from the publisher, not me.
David Cranmer and Richard Prosch had some posts on their blogs recently about the Lone Ranger. Well, as it so happens, I’m a big fan of the Lone Ranger and have been since childhood. I always watched the TV show and read many of the novels by Fran Striker that were published by Grosset & Dunlap. In fact, I remember visiting some relatives one summer when I was about ten years old and going with my cousins to the local public library, where I was thrilled to discover about half a dozen of the Lone Ranger novels that I hadn’t read. My cousins checked them out for me using their library cards, and I was able to read all of them before we had to go home. Along about the same time, I began listening to syndicated reruns of the Lone Ranger radio show (along with The Shadow, The Green Hornet, and Gangbusters) and enjoyed those, too.
Later on, when I was in high school and college, I started watching reruns of the TV series and discovered that I still liked it, maybe even more than when I was younger. I even sat down one summer and wrote more than 25,000 words of a Lone Ranger novel that I never finished. (Yes, I know, fanfic. That’s not the only one I wrote, either. I actually finished my Tarzan novel.) Sure, I can see some of the cheesiness in the show (like the giant plastic rock and the fake trees that are in so many of the supposedly exterior scenes that were really shot on a soundstage), but the series as a whole just works for me, for whatever reason. I can still sit down, watch an episode I’ve seen many times before, and thoroughly enjoy it.
I hadn’t revisited the novels in quite a while, though. Last year for my birthday, Livia bought the entire set of novels from a collector friend of mine who was selling them, and gave them to me for my birthday. Those recent posts by David and Richard prompted me to get out the first one and read it for the first time in more than forty years.
First of all, despite what the cover says, this book wasn’t written by Fran Striker, who was the primary scripter of the radio show. It’s actually by Gaylord Dubois, as the title page admits, adding that it’s “based on the famous radio adventures by Fran Striker”. Later printings attribute the book itself to Striker, “based on the famous Lone Ranger adventures created by Geo. W. Trendle”. Trendle was the radio executive who came up with the idea, but I think most of the actual creation of the character came from Striker. Regardless of all that, Dubois is the real author of this one.
So how does it hold up? Well . . . I’m not going to lie and pretend it’s a great book by modern standards. Dubois’s prose is long-winded and just plain slow in many places. The plot, which involves sabotaging the building of the transcontinental railroad, has more whiskers than Gabby Hayes. And the Lone Ranger himself is off-screen for long stretches of the book that concentrate on the rather vapid and not-too-bright proxy hero and heroine.
But there are moments . . . moments like the one where the Ranger is racing to catch a runaway train to prevent a head-on collision with another train . . . or when he breaks up a lynch mob about to hang an innocent man . . . or when he has a showdown with a gang of outlaws that involves dynamite, railroad flares, and a bow and arrows . . . well, let’s just say that at those moments, I can hear the William Tell Overture playing faintly in the back of my head. If you’ve ever had that experience, you know what I mean.
A couple more interesting things about this book. It was originally published in 1936, which means it’s based solely on the radio series. Clayton Moore, Jay Silverheels, and the TV version were still more than a dozen years in the future. So the characterization and descriptions of the two main characters are a little off from what you might expect if you grew up on the TV series, as I did. Even though this is the first novel in the series, it’s not an origin story at all, and there’s no mention of how the Lone Ranger came to be. It does, however, begin with a lengthy sequence about how the Ranger found his horse Silver, which is at odds with the TV continuity. Then it goes on to the main story about the railroad sabotage.
I remember that even when I read these books as a kid, I thought there was something not quite the same about the first one. The edition I read then was credited to Striker, but it just didn’t seem as good as the other books in the series, which I liked better. Later on, of course, I found out why. Gaylord Dubois was actually one of my favorite writers when I was a kid, although I never knew anything about him at the time. But he was the writer on long runs of the TARZAN comic book (with the Jesse Marsh art), and also wrote the back-up feature in TARZAN, “Brothers of the Spear”. In addition, he created and wrote the comic book TUROK, SON OF STONE, which I also read every time I could find an issue. Dubois wrote a bunch of other stuff, too: more than 3000 comic book stories, Big Little Books, juvenile novels based on other radio shows and comic strips, like DON WINSLOW OF THE NAVY, which Dubois ghosted for series creator Frank V. Martinek, and probably a lot of other things I’m not aware of. I have to wonder if he really wrote that TERRY AND THE PIRATES novel I read a couple of years ago. There’s even a blog devoted to him and his work that’s maintained by his granddaughter, and it’s well worth checking out if you’re a fan of Twentieth Century pop culture.
So, should you run right out and find a copy of this book? If you’re not already a Lone Ranger fan, probably not. But if you are and you’ve never read it, I think it’s worthwhile, as a piece of history if nothing else. I enjoyed it, and I’m sure some of you would, too.
Meanwhile, I have all the other books in the series, the ones actually written by Fran Striker, sitting right here on the shelf beside me, just waiting for me to get to them. The next one is THE LONE RANGER AND THE MYSTERY RANCH. All I have to do is look at it, and I hear the William Tell Overture again, playing its siren song . . .
Livia picked up this book for research purposes (she’s writing a proposal in which one of the main characters is a Secret Service agent), and it looked interesting, so I decided to read it, too.
I admit, my knowledge of the Secret Service comes mostly from movies and TV and the occasional political thriller. I know some of the history (founded by Allan Pinkerton during the Civil War, etc.), but IN THE PRESIDENT’S SECRET SERVICE focuses on both the more recent past (assassination attempts in the Twentieth Century and beyond) and the day-to-day activities of the Secret Service, as well as their training and procedures.
Somewhat surprisingly, much of the book is an indictment of Secret Service management, which, the author claims, is asking its agents to do more and more without giving them the resources to perform their jobs at the highest possible level. Much of the agents’ equipment, including the weapons they carry, verges on being obsolete and can’t match up with the firepower possessed by modern-day terrorists. Severely overworked, the agents don’t have time for the necessary training, either. Kessler pulls no punches in this part of the book, although the actual field agents come in for plenty of praise.
But let’s face it, what we’re all really interested in is the gossip, and Kessler delivers, again pulling no punches as he tells how the agents who work with them every day feel about the high-level politicians that it’s their job to protect. From JFK on, Kessler dishes the dirt about all the presidents (and their families) and reveals who was really a phony and a big jerk, who was a lot smarter than he seemed, who cooperated with and respected the Secret Service, who went out of their way to make the agents’ jobs a lot more difficult than they had to be, and who was just downright weird. Some of it is very surprising, some of it not at all.
The big question with any book like this, of course, is how accurate it is. And my answer is: I don’t have a clue. I’m no Washington insider. Kessler is, having been a long-time journalist for the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, as well as the author of more than a dozen previous books about politics, espionage, and business. No doubt some of the things in this book are spin and exaggerations, but my hunch is that there’s a considerable amount of truth in it as well.
Regular readers of this blog know that I hardly ever venture into the realm of politics. IN THE PRESIDENT’S SECRET SERVICE is remarkably non-partisan, though, and more than that, it’s very entertaining and informative. You can take some of what Kessler has to say with a grain of salt if you want, but that’s true of anyone who writes about politics, history, or current events. I enjoyed the book, and if you have any interest in the subject matter, I don’t hesitate to recommend it.
When I was asked if this blog could be one of the stops on the virtual tour for the trade paperback edition of Philipp Meyer’s novel AMERICAN RUST, I didn’t hesitate to say yes. I recalled that Vince Keenan read the book and liked it, and while Vince’s tastes and mine don’t agree 100% of the time, the percentage is high enough that I was glad to give this novel a try. I’m glad I did, because it’s excellent.
I suppose any novel about a smart little guy and a dumb big guy will be compared to John Steinbeck’s OF MICE AND MEN somewhere along the way, and so it is here. And yet, as if aware of that, Meyer puts some subtle yet distinctive spins on that formula to create a book that’s very different from Steinbeck’s novel. (Which, come to think of it, I’ve never read. I guess it’s just that OF MICE AND MEN is so ingrained in the public consciousness that I know what happens in it, whether I’ve read it or not. But I really ought to remedy that, and not rely on the references to it in old Bugs Bunny cartoons.)
I didn’t mean to digress. The protagonists of AMERICAN RUST, a pair of young men named Isaac English and Billy Poe, have that Mutt-and-Jeff quality to them, size-wise, but while Isaac, the little one, is book-smart (he wants to be an astronomer), he’s sometimes lacking in common sense. And Poe, the big galoot of the duo, may lack Isaac’s IQ, but he’s more grounded in real life.
Meyer also sets up his novel so that you think you know what’s going to happen, but he starts pulling plot twists early on and never really stops. These aren’t dramatic, turn-on-a-dime twists, mind you, but they keep steering the novel in directions you don’t really expect.
The plot is fairly simple. Isaac wants to get out of the place where he grew up, a steel mill town in Pennsylvania where the mill has closed down and the resulting economic depression has settled over the entire area. His friend Poe agrees to go with him part of the way, to a place where Isaac can hop a freight and head west. But something happens along the way that keeps them from leaving, and that violent incident overshadows the rest of the novel as the two of them and the circle of people around them, including Poe’s mother and the local sheriff, are forced to deal with it.
The story itself is fine, but where AMERICAN RUST really shines is in its characters and its grim yet beautiful depiction of the setting. Meyer does an excellent job of capturing the desperation smoldering inside all these people. Some of that desperation is rooted in economics, but for the most part it’s just sheer humanity, the longing to connect with other people and the inability to do so, the easy falling back into a pattern of mistakes, the futility of best efforts wasted by events beyond our control. Meyer also paints a vivid picture of the ruined and dying Pennsylvania towns.
AMERICAN RUST isn’t a particularly pleasant book, but it’s very well-written and tells a compelling story, and it builds to a fine ending. One of the best books I’ve read recently, and highly recommended. I have one copy to give away, so if you'd like to enter the drawing for it, send me an email or let me know in the comments. The deadline is midnight Friday, and this one is open to only to readers in the United States and Canada.
As I’ve mentioned before, when it comes to movie-watching these days, I’m making an effort to sample other things besides big, noisy action movies and crude sex comedies. And I like Clive Owen, so THE BOYS ARE BACK seemed like a good possibility. It’s based on the true story of an Australian sportswriter who’s forced to raise his young son alone after his wife dies of cancer. Things are complicated by the arrival of the guy’s older son from a previous marriage. He’s also befriended by a divorced mom he meets at his younger son’s school.
And there’s your whole plot right there. There’s an occasional mildly amusing line and a few times when something dramatic almost happens, but for the most part this movie is so slow, grim, and depressing that I was never able to warm up to it. Owen does a good job, as does the rest of the cast, but I just didn’t get involved in the film. I guess it needed some carrots. (You SHOOT ‘EM UP fans know what I mean.)
I don’t think THE BOYS ARE BACK is a terrible movie at all. It just didn’t work very well for me. Call me shallow if you want, but by the time I finished watching it, I was ready to look over my Netflix list and find something with boobs and explosions to move to the top. I probably won’t do that . . . yet.
