One Last Post for 2009

Now this is very cool, even if a lot of people won't have any idea who these guys are.

The Wrap Up

2009 has been better than 2008 around the Reasoner house, if for no other reason than it’s been calmer. Livia and I have been able to keep our writing careers rolling along, our daughters are doing well in their second year of teaching, and we added a couple of min/pin puppies named Nicki and Nora to the family who have provided much hilarity and adorability. Now, it’s on to my annual recap of how the writing, reading, and watching movies went this year.

WRITING

As I mentioned earlier this month I topped a million words again this year, with a final total of somewhere around 1.1 million. That added up to 16 books, rounding a little since I was in the middle of a manuscript when the year started and am also in the middle of one now. Somewhat coincidentally, because it doesn’t always work out the same, there were also 16 of my books published this year, under eight different names including my own, sort of, that being the Gabriel Hunt book. As I’ve probably mentioned until you’re all sick of it, that Gabriel Hunt book got a starred review in Publishers Weekly and very nice reviews in many other places, and the reception it’s received has been one of the most gratifying events in my career. It was great fun to write and I’m glad it’s been fun for most of the readers. I also wrote several short stories, one of which has already appeared on the excellent BEAT TO A PULP website and others that will show up in various places in due time. I continue to have a fine time writing and plan to keep at it for as long as anybody will buy my books.

READING

I read 113 books this year, slightly up from 2008, and there were so many good ones that picking a Top Ten was extremely difficult. But for what it’s worth, here are the books I most enjoyed this year, in alphabetical order by author, with some brief comments:

BURY ME DEEP, Megan Abbott – while QUEENPIN is still my favorite of her books, this one is a vivid, beautifully written fever dream of a novel, and very compelling reading.

LOSERS LIVE LONGER, Russell Atwood – a deliberately old-fashioned private eye novel, and great fun.

HELL TO PAY, J. Lee Butts – as noirish a Western as you’ll ever find, as bleak as anything by Jim Thompson or H.A. DeRosso, and a tale told in a wonderfully distinctive voice.

THE GRAVEYARD BOOK, Neil Gaiman – the first Gaiman novel I’ve read, and the winner of the Newbery Award for best juvenile novel, it’s a great, spooky, suspenseful yarn.

SPADE & ARCHER, Joe Gores – a pastiche that truly reads like Hammett could have written it, if I didn’t know better, I’d swear that this collection of linked novelettes really was published in BLACK MASK in 1928.

THE NICK ADAMS STORIES, Ernest Hemingway – a reread of a classic. Some of the all-time great short stories by any author are here.

HOLMES ON THE RANGE, Steve Hockensmith – the most entertaining classical detective novel I’ve read in a long time. I have the others in the series and have to get to them soon.

HIRED LOVER, Fred Martin (probably Orrie Hitt) – Hitt in James M. Cain mode, with a fast-paced story and a real gut-punch of an ending that I didn’t see coming until the last minute.

OTHER SPACES, OTHER TIMES, Robert Silverberg – a collection of autobiographical essays about Silverberg’s life as a writer, illustrated with hundreds of photos and wrapped up with an exhaustive bibliography of his SF.

FAKE I.D., Jason Starr – about as effective a depiction of an anti-hero as you’ll ever find, with a great final line. Read this back-to-back with Butts’ HELL TO PAY if you want to overdose on bleak.

There were a number of other books very close to the same level, such as Orrie Hitt’s TABOO THRILLS, Gaiman’s graphic novel MARVEL 1602, Leigh Redhead’s stripper/private eye yarn PEEPSHOW, Silverberg’s early SF novel CONQUERORS FROM THE DARKNESS, Ed Gorman’s latest novel TICKET TO RIDE, and Jason Starr’s most recent book PANIC ATTACK, not to mention numerous collections of Silver Age comics I really enjoyed. If I had to pick a favorite from that Top Ten list, it would probably be Gores’ SPADE & ARCHER, which made me feel like I was reading actual pulp stories. This may well be the only such list posted on the Internet that includes books by both Ernest Hemingway and Orrie Hitt, but what can I say? I like what I like, and I think that’s the way it should be for all of us.

MOVIES

I didn’t keep a list of all the movies we watched this year (I really need to start doing that) or even blog about a lot of them, so I can’t do a Top Ten for them. We watched a lot of romantic comedies, a considerable number of raunchy college comedies, some superhero stuff, quite a bit of action/adventure where Stuff Blows Up Real Good, the occasional inspirational, based-on-a-true-story drama, some movies based on plays by Tennessee Williams (when Livia was writing her Tennessee Williams book), the very occasional horror movie, and some Westerns both old and spaghetti. I like movies, and I’m sure we watched well over a hundred of them. We’ll probably watch that many next year, too.

So that wraps it up for 2009. Thank you all for continuing to be part of this blog, and I’ll see you next year.

One More Reason I Love the Internet

Here’s part of an email I received the other day:

“I found your blog, posted January, 2009, about the ACE paperback book title, "Odds Against Linda." I was very pleased to read what you had to say. Steve Ward was a pseudonym for Norman Rosenthal, who also
wrote "Silenced Witness." They are the same person and that I know because it is my dad. He loved to write and wrote on the side while holding down a regular job. Unfortunately he had no other books published. He was working on several, but died before any could be
completed.”

And here’s some information from a follow-up email:

“If you would like, here's some biographical information on my father. During WWII my dad was a bombardier on a B-24. He flew out of Italy and while on a mission over Vienna was shot down and became a POW. He
spent his time in the famous Stalag Luft III until General Patton liberated the camp at the end of the war.

In 1947, he graduated with a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri. He and my mother lived in California for almost 20 years where he worked as a general manager for an established newspaper publisher. While in California he belonged to the Northern California Chapter of the
Mystery Writers of America and at one time held an officers position in the chapter. Such people as Lenore Glen Offord and Anthony Boucher
also belonged at that time.

My parents then moved to Ohio where he became Advertising and Marketing Director for Jacobs, Visconsi & Jacobs, a shopping center developer. (Yes, the same Jacobs that owned the Cleveland Indians, but not until several years after my dad
retired).

My dad not only loved to write, but to read and listen to
music. He had a very extensive library and record collection. Writing
was a passion of his, but it's hard to support a family on writing
alone. "Silenced Witness" was published in 1955. He then wrote "Odds
Against Linda" under the name of Steve Ward which was published in 1960. Both were written while living in California. Over the years he had worked on several novels but because of work, was never ever able to finish any of them to his satisfaction. However, after his retirement, he did have two short stories published in the Sunday magazine section of the "Cleveland Plain Dealer." He retired in the
late 1980s and really started to delve into his writing. Unfortunately shortly afterwards he became ill with Alzheimer's and it progressed rather rapidly before he could finish any other books. He died in November, 1998.”

I really enjoyed ODDS AGAINST LINDA and did a Forgotten Books post about it earlier this year. I’ve ordered Norman Rosenthal’s other book, SILENCED WITNESS, and I’m sure I’ll have some comments on it in due time. I think it’s great that members of his family know there are still people out here reading and appreciating his work, and I always enjoy finding out more about the writers whose work has entertained me. It’s a shame Rosenthal wasn’t able to publish any more books. From what I’ve read, he was a pretty good writer.

Night at the Museum 2: Battle of the Smithsonian

I know the critics don't like these movies, but the humor in them is so bizarre and over-the-top, and there are so many movie trivia in-jokes (watch for Clint Howard in a cameo role), that I find them pretty funny. But the best part of this one is Amy Adams as Amelia Earhart. Dressed in an aviator's outfit and spouting goofy Thirties slang almost like a female version of Dan Turner, she's really swell and definitely easy on the optics.

Almost a Third of a Century

It was 33 years ago today that I made my first professional fiction sale, a bright, sunny day like this one, as I recall, although a bit warmer than it is today. I've written about that sale, and other things about my early writing career, here and here, and if you haven't read those posts before, I invite you to go take a look at them. There have been peaks and valleys in my career since then (mostly peaks, for which I am profoundly grateful), but I can honestly say that I've had a great time being a writer and hope to continue at this crazy business for a long time to come, despite all the recent upheavals in the publishing industry. It's the only job I know of where you can sit around in your pajamas drinking coffee and eating doughnuts and tell people that you're working . . . and they'll believe you.

The 12 Dogs of Christmas

This is one of the Christmas movies we watched yesterday, and it turned out to be pretty good. It’s set in 1931 and is about a girl from Pittsburgh whose father has to send her to live with her “aunt” (really an old girlfriend) in a small town that has a local ordinance against dogs. Naturally the girl winds up with an adorable dog and makes friends with a family that provides a “dog orphanage” just outside the town limits. The mayor’s brother is the dogcatcher and rides around in a motorcycle sidecar while his assistant drives the motorcycle. There’s a lot of mild danger and adventure and plenty of cute little kids and dogs.

This is a family-friendly movie, very sweet and heart-warming and inspirational, but the Depression-era setting is portrayed in an appropriately dark and gritty manner. The cast, all of whom were unfamiliar to me except for character actors John Billingsley and Richard Riehle, does a good job, and the period detail is good with one exception: I don’t think the football term “Hail Mary pass” had been coined in 1931. That’s a pretty minor quibble, though.

Since Christmas is over, you probably won’t want to run out and find a copy of THE 12 DOGS OF CHRISTMAS. But next year, if you want to watch a decent little holiday movie you probably haven’t seen before, you should keep it in mind.

Christmas Recap

I don't know what the official snowfall was around here, but we had five or six inches in our front yard, making this the whitest White Christmas in my memory. Most of it melted off the roads during the day, but there's still quite a bit in the pastures. Some of the drifts were several feet deep, something we don't get around here very often.

It was a quiet, peaceful day. We opened presents, ate some good food, watched TV (the Mythbusters Christmas Special on DVD, as well as some made-for-TV Christmas movies), ate some more, napped, just generally took it easy and enjoyed the day.

I like calendars and usually get at least a couple for Christmas. This year I got a wall calendar with cover reproductions from assorted science fiction pulps (PLANET STORIES, THRILLING WONDER STORIES, etc.), a GET FUZZY desk calendar for upstairs in my writing room, and a PEARLS BEFORE SWINE desk calendar for downstairs. There were some CDs, a DVD history of the Dallas Cowboys (apologies to all of you who dislike the Cowboys, but they've been my team for more than forty years and it's too late for me to stop rooting for them now), and an excellent stack of books: Robert Lesser's PULP ART, the coffee table book from a few years back that I've never owned until now; a couple of Spider reprint volumes by Norvell Page, CITY OF DOOM, the mass-market paperback from Baen, and THE SPIDER VS. THE EMPIRE STATE from Age of Aces Books, each of which reprints three novels; THE COMPLETE ADVENTURES OF THE SECRET 6, from Altus Press, which reprints all four novels from the short-lived pulp series by Robert J. Hogan; THE ADVENTURES OF SMOKE WADE, VOL. 1, pulp aviation stories also by Robert J. Hogan, published by Age of Aces; SWORDS FROM THE WEST, the latest Bison Books collection of Harold Lamb stories from the pulp ADVENTURE; and finally HONEY IN HIS MOUTH, the Hard Case Crime novel by the great Lester Dent, creator of Doc Savage. If you're counting, that's more than 2500 pages of pure pulp goodness! It may take me a while to work my way through all those books, but I know I'll enjoy them tremendously.

Christmas Day is always a time of reflection for me, rather than New Year's. I always look back on what's happened since last Christmas and wonder what will happen between now and next Christmas. It's also a reminder of how truly blessed I am to have a wonderful family and great friends and the opportunity to do work that I enjoy and that brings pleasure to other people. I hope it was a wonderful holiday for each and every one of you.

Merry Christmas

Christmas Eve

It's snowing lightly outside, we're supposed to have three to five inches by tomorrow morning (White Christmases are rare around here, but not unheard of; I can remember several in my lifetime), both girls are here, I have all my present-wrapping done (except for one that I forgot about), and I've been to the store to pick up a few last things we needed. In other words . . .

Okay, Christmas, bring it on.

(Seriously, Merry Christmas to all of you, and thank you for being part of this blog.)

Another Christmas Song I Like

I usually hear this song on the radio every Christmas season, but I don't think I've heard it even once this year. Of course, I haven't actually had a chance to listen to the radio much lately.

I took today off from writing, did some almost-last-minute shopping, and wrapped some presents. It was a nice break from the work.