Rancho Diablo #1 is Now Available!

RANCHO DIABLO #1: SHOOTER'S CROSS is now available on Amazon.  I'm hardly an unbiased observer since I had a hand in the series' creation, but I think Mel Odom did a spectacular job on this book, especially considering that this is his first Western novel.  If you like action-packed Westerns with great characters, this one is highly recommended.

Wipeout - The Surfaris

Another song I like, and some good music to get me up and working on a Saturday morning!  I've never forgotten my friend Dale Sacco playing this song on his drums at a high school talent show more than forty years ago and doing a great job on it.

Forgotten Books: Tickets for Death - Brett Halliday (Davis Dresser)

I’m pretty sure I’ve told some of this story before, so those of you who have already heard it please bear with me. In the spring of 1978, I had been selling short stories to Sam Merwin Jr. at MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE for a little over a year. Sam and I corresponded frequently – no email in those days, of course – and in one letter I asked him who was currently writing the Mike Shayne stories that appeared in the magazine under the Brett Halliday by-line. Honestly, I wasn’t angling for work, I was just curious. I’d been reading the stories and wanted to know who wrote them, since I knew by then that the original Brett Halliday, Davis Dresser, didn’t write the magazine stories. (In fact, by 1978 Dresser had passed away.)


Sam replied that he had been writing most of the stories himself and named several recent entries that he’d done. Then he asked me if I would like to try my hand at one, since he liked the short stories I’d been writing for him. The Shayne yarns ran 20,000 words, he told me, and paid “a flat, lousy three hundred bucks”.

Well, to a 24-year-old freelancer struggling to build a writing career, the idea of writing a 20,000-word story seemed a little daunting, but $300 didn’t sound lousy at all. In fact, it sounded like a fortune. That would pay the rent for two months on the apartment where Livia and I were living, with some left over to buy groceries. Plus I had been a reader and fan of the Mike Shayne novels ever since I was ten years old and checked out a copy of THIS IS IT, MICHAEL SHAYNE from the bookmobile that came out to our little town every Saturday from the big library in the county seat.


So of course I wrote back immediately to Sam and told him I’d love to write a Shayne story. He was pleased and said he would send me a copy of the Mike Shayne “bible”. He also instructed me to “just get the story down” and not worry too much about making sure everything was consistent with what had come before. He could go through it and make it sound like a Shayne if he needed to, he said.


But I’d been reading the Shayne novels off and on for years and was confident that I knew the characters, the setting, and the right style for the series. This was the biggest opportunity I’d had so far in my career, though, so I wanted to make sure I got it right. In order to do that, I quickly rounded up the first ten or twelve novels in the Shayne series (I already owned some of them, and the others were still very easy to find back then) and read them one after the other, totally immersing myself in the world of Michael Shayne before I ever wrote a word of my first story, which was published in the December 1978 issue of MSMM under the title I had given it, “Death in Xanadu”. As far as I remember, Sam changed one word in the manuscript, so I think I did a pretty good job of making it sound like a Shayne yarn was supposed to sound.

This is why, with a few exceptions, my Mike Shayne stories read a lot like they were written in the Forties. Those first dozen or so novels by Davis Dresser were my model for all the ones I wrote. (One of my Shaynes was actually set in the Forties, but that’s a whole other story.)

All of which is my nostalgic, very long-winded explanation for why it’s been 32 years since I last read the 1941 Shayne novel TICKETS FOR DEATH. After all that time, it seemed new to me when I recently reread it.

Mike Shayne has been accused of being the generic hardboiled private eye, and in some of the later books that may have been the case, but the early books were something totally different. Those novels are a highly appealing blend of hardboiled action, screwball comedy, and fair-play detection. Imagine Sam Spade marrying Pam North and solving cases like Nero Wolfe with a gathering of suspects at the end and a detailed explanation of who the killer is, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what the early Shayne novels are like. Phyllis Shayne, Mike’s beautiful young wife, was killed off in the series in the mid-Forties, but she’s still around in this one and is, in fact, the reason Shayne gets mixed up in a case involving counterfeit tickets being cashed in at a greyhound racing track in a resort town north of Miami. When the two of them arrive in town, they’ve barely checked in at their hotel when a couple of gunmen working for a local mobster ambush Shayne and try to kill him. Naturally, they wind up dead for their trouble, although Shayne is wounded in the exchange of gunfire. It’s nothing that guzzling down a few glasses of cognac at every opportunity won’t cure, though.

From there, it’s not long until one of the people involved in the counterfeit ticket racket is murdered. Several more murders occur in fast and furious fashion, because this is one of those books where all the action occurs in the space of five or six hours. You’ll probably think you have things figured out – it seems pretty obvious what’s going on – but things are seldom as simple as they seem in Mike Shayne novels, and that’s certainly the case here. Dresser throws in twist after twist, and I’m reminded of the fact that the plots in these early Shayne novels often rival those of Erle Stanley Gardner’s for complexity. Shayne, of course, is two jumps ahead of everybody else (and three jumps ahead of the reader most of the time), and always figures out not only who the killer is but also how he can collect the biggest fee.

TICKETS FOR DEATH is one of the most entertaining books I’ve read this year, and if you’ve never sampled a Mike Shayne novel, it wouldn’t be a bad place to start, although the early ones probably are best read in order.

Howard Days Photo

This morning my friend Tom Johnson posted this photo on one of the Yahoo Groups we belong to.  It was taken in Cross Plains, Texas, at one of the annual Howard Days get-togethers.  The absence of the pavilion behind the house tells me the picture was taken sometime around 1996 or 1997.  Left to right in the photo are Charles Gramlich, Tom Johnson, Aaron Larson, and me.  Those were great times, but then, any visit to Howard Days is a lot of fun.

Death Notice - Todd Ritter

DEATH NOTICE is Todd Ritter’s first novel, and it’s a really good one. The small, picturesque Pennsylvania town of Perry’s Hollow is rocked by the murder of local farmer George Winnick, whose body is found in a homemade coffin beside the road. One of the most bizarre things about the murder is that the victim’s lips are sewn shut, which soon leads to the arrival of a special state police task force on the trail of a serial murderer known as the Betsy Ross Killer. But that’s not all. It seems that a death notice for the victim was faxed to the obituary writer at the newspaper before George Winnick was killed.


Ritter gives us several point-of-view characters in this novel. There’s Kat Campbell, the chief of the local two-person police force, who’s also a single mother with a son who has Down’s Syndrome. The head of the task force is Nick Donnelly, whose own sister was murdered by a serial killer when Nick was a boy. Then there’s the obituary writer, Henry Goll, also known as Henry Ghoul because he shuns much human contact and carries terrible scars from a tragic accident in his past.


Yes, this is one of those modern mystery novels filled with much angst and brooding and tragic pasts. It’s to Ritter’s credit that he gets past this set-up that’s rapidly becoming a cliché and succeeds in making them believable characters, as well as making the reader care about them. It helps that he’s come up with a good plot as well. Several times during the course of the book, it appears that the mystery has been solved, only to have a new twist crop up, along with fresh murder victims, of course. Everything leads up to a wonderful, over-the-top climax that’s reminiscent of something out of a weird menace pulp from the Thirties. (For those of you unfamiliar with them, the weird menace pulps were a lurid, very entertaining sub-genre featuring stories filled with grotesque horror trappings and endings that featured rational, rather than supernatural, explanations. In other words, they were the forerunners of the basic Scooby-Doo plot, only played seriously for the most part.)


But to get back to DEATH NOTICE, yes, I figured out who the killer was, but that didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the novel. Good characters, a great pace, enough clues to satisfy fans of fair play detective yarns, enough gore for horror readers, and that dynamite ending . . . what’s not to like? This doesn’t strike me as the first of a series, but it could be. Whether it is or not, it’s a very strong debut and has me looking forward to Todd Ritter’s next book. DEATH NOTICE will be out in about a week, and I highly recommend it.

Down Here on the Ground - Wes Montgomery

If you need chillin' out -- and I often do -- this song'll do it for ya.

Iron Man 2

Critics generally praised this movie, but many of them thought it was too busy and had too much plot. Well, let’s see . . . On the side of the good guys, you’ve got Iron Man, War Machine, Nick Fury, The Black Widow, Happy Hogan, and Pepper Potts versus the baddies Justin Hammer and Whiplash, plus throwaway bits setting up at least three more superhero movies to come (unless I missed a few, which is possible). I think that covers just about everything. And so I say to the critics who complained about this movie being too much . . . have you never actually read any comic books? This is classic Silver Age plotting. And in a nice bit buried in the closing credits, the filmmakers actually thank all the writers who came up with the source material in comics published in the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties, plus one or two who are currently writing Iron Man stories.


As usual in these superhero movies, the story is a mixture of plot elements and characterizations from several decades worth of comic book continuity. Tony Stark is dying because the element that powers the Iron Man suit keeping him alive is also slowly killing him, so he has to find a new element to replace it. At the same time he’s plagued by rival weapons manufacturer Justin Hammer, who teams up with rogue Russian physicist Ivan Danko (wasn’t he originally the Crimson Dynamo in the comics, instead of Whiplash?) to make life even more miserable for Tony, who is also having to cope with friction between him and the government. Yeah, there’s a lot going on. There are plenty of fights and special effects. Stuff, you guessed it, Blows Up Real Good. Plot developments fly by so fast that if you haven’t read the comics, I suppose you could get confused by what’s going on.


Of course that didn’t bother me. In fact, those little moments setting up things for later on were probably my favorite parts of the movie. Overall, I loved IRON MAN 2 and thought it was better than the first one. Your mileage may vary, as the old saying goes. But I’m very happy with what the movies are doing with the Marvel Universe these days, and the trademark closing moment after the end credits really has me looking forward to the movies still to come. If you’re a comics fan and haven’t seen this one yet, I highly recommend it.

Filthy Rich - Brian Azzarello

Brian Azzarello is the author of the very good hardboiled crime comic book series 100 BULLETS, which has been collected in a number of trade paperbacks, and if you haven’t read them, I recommend the series. FILTHY RICH is a stand-alone, hardcover graphic novel set in the early 1960s, and the Gold Medal influence in it is obvious. The protagonist is Richard “Junk” Junkin, a former high school football star and three-time All-American at Notre Dame who is drafted to play pro football, only to tear up his knee in the final preseason game of what would have been his rookie year. Unable to play ball anymore, he winds up selling cars – or at least trying to sell cars – for the top dealership in the state. Unfortunately, he’s not very good at it, so the owner of the dealership decides to have Junk work as the bodyguard of his wild, beautiful daughter, who has a tendency to wind up in the tabloids.


Well, you know the mix of embittered protagonist, beautiful but amoral young woman, flashy nightclubs, and greed isn’t going to work out well, and sure enough, it doesn’t. Murder rears its proverbial ugly head, and Junk, in true noirish fashion, like a guy in a Charles Williams novel, keeps getting in deeper and deeper.


Azzarello’s script is good, capturing that early Sixties feel for the most part. However, I felt like something was a little lacking in it, and I think that’s due to the fact that Junk comes across as pretty unsympathetic, despite the bad deal that life has given him. In the best noir novels, you want to be able to at least hope the protagonist won’t screw up everything completely (even though you know he probably will). It’s hard to work up that feeling for Junk, and the ending seems more like what he’s got coming to him, rather than a tragedy. I have to admit, though, it’s pretty chilling, especially the final page, thanks in part to Victor Santos’ art, which seems to have been influenced by Frank Miller’s SIN CITY. I really didn’t like Santos’ art that much, since a lot of the time it’s hard to follow, but he caught the mood of the ending perfectly.


So FILTHY RICH gets a qualified recommendation from me. It didn’t really work for me part of the time, but there’s still some good stuff in it. If you love those old Gold Medal novels like I do (and I know a lot of you fall into that category), I think there’s a good chance you’ll find things to like in this one. If Azzarello does any more of these hardboiled graphic novels, I certainly won’t hesitate to read them.

Cowboy Dreams - Prefab Sprout

I don't post much about music because basically I'm just not a real musical guy.  But Paul Brazill did a Forgotten Music post earlier this week about the group Prefab Sprout, which is mostly singer/songwriter Paddy McAloon.  I'd heard one Prefab Sprout song, a rather odd cover of Marty Robbins' "Streets of Laredo", and liked it, so I took a listen to some of their other songs and liked them, too.  Continuing the Western theme, here's one of their best, a song called "Cowboy Dreams".  Some nice music for a Saturday evening.

Texas Wind Now Available for the Kindle

Not a forgotten book this week, but one that was almost impossible to get hold of for a good many years.  It's my first novel, the first private eye novel set in Fort Worth, Texas (that I know of), and now you can get it not only in hardback and trade paperback but also as an ebook for the Kindle, and at a very reasonable price, too, I might add.  Livia and I are working on getting the rest of our backlist available for the Kindle, so I should have some more announcements along those lines soon.