Tuesday's Overlooked Movies: Dark City

(This post originally appeared on March 28, 2010.)

Somehow this movie came and went a dozen years ago without me ever hearing of it. It starts out like a Forties film noir: a guy (British actor Rufus Sewell) wakes up in a sleazy hotel room with no memory and a dead hooker. Even not knowing who he is or what happened, he’s smart enough to figure that he needs to get out of there, so he escapes just ahead of several creepy, sinister guys in trenchcoats. Then he gets involved with a mad doctor (Kiefer Sutherland, of all people, who at times seems to be doing a Peter Lorre impression). There’s a sultry torch singer (Jennifer Connelly, as always yowza!) who may or may not be the amnesiac’s wife. The fugitive is also being pursued by a dogged police detective played by William Hurt, who believes that Sewell’s character is a serial killer responsible for murdering half a dozen prostitutes. The whole thing takes place at night, hence the dark city of the title, where the streets are always wet and everything has a sort of bizarre art deco look.

Then things start to get weird.

This is one of those movies where you really can’t discuss the plot without giving away too much for people who haven’t seen it. About halfway through I was thinking that the filmmakers should have just stuck with a straight film noir homage, the way it starts out, but by the end the rest of it had won me over. DARK CITY is a good film that ultimately makes sense, even though for a while you’ll probably wonder. The version I watched was the expanded director’s cut. Since I never saw the theatrical release, I don’t have anything to compare it with. But I liked it, and if you haven’t seen it and have a fondness for oddball movies and film noir, you ought to give it a try.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Ten Detective Aces, October 1940

Another action-packed Norman Saunders cover on this issue of TEN DETECTIVE ACES. I realized recently that one of the featured authors, Carl McK. Saunders (no relation to Norman, since it's a pseudonym) was really Philip Ketchum. There's a collection in the works of some of Ketchum's detective stories under the Saunders by-line, and I'm looking forward to reading it. Also in this issue are stories by Harold Q. Masur, better known as a hardcover mystery novelist with a long series about lawyer Scott Jordan, the prolific and genre-hopping Joe Archibald, and a lead novel by Donald E. Keyhoe (yeah, the flying saucer guy).

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Story, July 13, 1940

Stampede! That's a fine cover by H.W. Scott, one of the most prolific cover artists for WESTERN STORY during this era. There's a good bunch of authors inside, too: Walt Coburn, Cliff Farrell, James B. Hendryx, and Frank Richardson Pierce with a story under his name and another under his Seth Ranger pseudonym. I'd like to see some of Pierce's work reprinted, especially the novels he did under the Seth Ranger name.

Forgotten Books: The Traditional West - Western Fictioneers

I don't know if this massive anthology is actually forgotten, but it's been out for almost four years now and I haven't mentioned it lately. Not only that, but it's on sale for a limited time for only 99 cents, and you can't beat that price. At approximately 120,000 words, I'm pretty sure THE TRADITIONAL WEST is the biggest anthology of original Western fiction ever published. Several stories in it either won or were nominated for Peacemaker and Spur Awards, including Livia's "Panhandle Freight", an excellent Western mystery featuring Lucas Hallam. My story is a short, odd piece called "Rattler". The other authors in the book are Steven Clark, Phil Dunlap, Edward A. Grainger, James J. Griffin, Jerry Guin, C. Courtney Joyner, Jackson Lowry, Larry Jay Martin, Matthew P. Mayo, Rod Miller, Clay More, Ross Morton, Kerry Newcomb, Scott D. Parker, Pete Peterson, Cheryl Pierson, Kit Prate, Robert J. Randisi, Dusty Richards, Troy D. Smith, Larry D. Sweazy, and Chuck Tyrell. That's quite a line-up. Check it out!

Now Available: Holt County Justice - Richard Prosch

Lines are being drawn in the unorganized territory west of Holt County, but deputy sheriff Whit Branham is still the law, still the man they called to clean up after a killing. But are the remains hanging from a tree in the middle of the Niobrara River the result of vigilante justice –or murder? And who, in the remote village of Slocum is a friend and who’s a deadly enemy? In order to uncover the secrets of the dead, Branham might just have to join them!

Now Available: Blaze! #4: Six-Gun Wedding - Jackson Lowry

The only thing J.D. and Kate Blaze planned to do in the settlement of Wilderness, Wyoming, was attend the wedding of one of Kate's friends. Instead outlaws launch a bloody raid on the church in the middle of the ceremony and kidnap the groom. It's up to J.D. and Kate, the wild West's only husband-and-wife gunfighters, to track down the gang, rescue the groom, and find out the reason behind the shocking violence. 

Acclaimed Western author Jackson Lowry (THE SONORA NOOSE and WEST OF THE BIG RIVER: THE ARTIST) spins a colorful, action-packed yarn in SIX-GUN WEDDING, the fourth book in the bestselling Adult Western series BLAZE!

Now Available: Wading Into War - Scott Dennis Parker

Houston, 1940 

Benjamin Wade is a laid back private investigator whose jobs are so mundane that he doesn't even carry a gun. He thought his latest job was going to be easy. 

He thought wrong. 

Hired by beguiling Lillian Saxton to find a missing reporter with knowledge of her brother’s whereabouts in war-torn Europe, Wade follows a lead and knocks on a door. He gets two answers: bullets and a corpse. 

Now Wade must unravel the truth about the reporter’s death, Lillian’s brother, and the whereabouts of a cache of documents that reveal a shocking story from Nazi-controlled Europe and an even more sinister secret here at home.

(I was fortunate enough to read an advance copy of this book, and it's an excellent period private eye yarn with a great pace. Scott nails the setting and the time period as well. Highly recommended. It's available on the various platforms and I believe a print edition is in the works as well.) 

Tuesday's Overlooked Movies: Australia

(This post originally appeared on March 14, 2009)

This movie is a good example of how out of sync I am with the critical establishment (and most of the viewing public, too, for that matter). It was roundly panned, and I enjoyed the hell out of it. Yes, it’s hokey. Yes, it’s extremely predictable. I don’t care. It worked for me. That’s probably because it’s the sort of big, historical soap opera that I used to write for various book packagers.

Nicole Kidman is Lady Sarah Ashley, an English noblewoman who arrives in Australia in 1939 to visit her husband’s cattle station, only to find that her husband has been murdered and the local cattle baron had his greedy eye on the station. Her only ally is the mysterious Drover (Hugh Jackman), who helps her save the ranch . . . I mean the cattle station. Nah, hell, I mean the ranch, because the first half of this movie is pure Western. It’s the John Wayne/Maureen O’Hara movie that the Duke and Maureen never made. I’m sure James Edward Grant could have come up with some reason for an American cowboy to be in Australia. I knew everything that was going to happen, right down to the way many of the scenes were staged. The only real difference is that there’s a little Aboriginal mysticism thrown in.

The second half of the movie turns into a World War II epic, as the Japanese attack northern Australia, but that’s all right with me because I like World War II movies, too. It’s slightly less predictable than the Western half, but only slightly. Stuff blows up. Heartstrings are tugged. Bad guys get their comeuppance. What’s not to like?

Some critics even blasted the look of the film. The colors are too bright, they said. Well, why wouldn’t they be bright? This is a Fifties Technicolor movie, a big, sweeping, melodramatic potboiler. Why criticize a movie for being exactly what it sets out to be? I’m not saying that AUSTRALIA is a great film, but it’s nearly three hours long and I was wide awake the whole time. Take that for what it’s worth. AUSTRALIA is as old-fashioned as a movie can get, and sometimes that’s just what I want.

Beating the Bushes - Christine Matthews

Vincent Lloyd and Baylor Kracher have something in common nobody would want: each of them has had a child disappear. In Lloyd's case, it happened several years earlier when his six-year-old daughter was abducted, raped, and murdered. The killer was never found, and a cloud of suspicion has hovered over Lloyd ever since. With Kracher, it's his fifteen-year-old son who vanishes without a trace. Haunted by his own tragedy, Lloyd volunteers to help in the search for Stevie Kracher, and a friendship forms between the two men that lasts for years, beyond the death of one of them, leading to a search that won't end until the survivor finally uncovers the truth about Stevie's disappearance.

BEATING THE BUSHES is an excellent suspense novel from Christine Matthews, dark and twisty, written in a number of different but equally powerful voices. The two protagonists are compelling characters with plenty of flaws and virtues, and throughout their search, Matthews does a great job peeling back the layers of the plot, which is a lot more complex than it might seem at first. BEATING THE BUSHES is a grim book, no doubt about that, but it's also uplifting in its own way and demonstrates the power of hope and persistence in even the worse circumstances. If you like top-notch psychological thrillers, this one gets a high recommendation from me.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: All Detective Magazine, February 1934

An early Norman Saunders cover that's certainly striking, plus stories by Lester Dent (a Foster Fade yarn), Erle Stanley Gardner, Hugh B. Cave, and Norman A. Daniels. That strikes me as a pretty darned good detective pulp.