August 2011 Book Round-Up

151: CR: Black Diamond – Martin Walker

152: SF: The Isotope Man – Charles Eric Maine

153: WE: Scream of Eagles – William W. Johnstone

154: TH: Cold Vengeance – Preston & Child

155: FA: Other Kingdoms – Richard Matheson

156: WE: Massacre of Eagles – William W. Johnstone with J. A. Johnstone

157: GR: Wyatt – Garry Disher

158: CR: The Siege of Trencher’s Farm – Gordon Williams

159: TH: L. A. Mental – Neil McMahon

160: CR: Dagger of Flesh – Richard S. Prather

161: WE: The Loner: The Blood of Renegades – J. A. Johnstone

162: AD: Operator 5: The Yellow Scourge – Curtis Steele

163: CR: The Ivory Grin – Ross Macdonald

164: AD: The Motion Menace – Kenneth Robeson

165: MY: Brass Knuckles – Frank Gruber

166: WE: The Traditional West – A Western Fictioneers Anthology

167: CR: Nick of Time – Tim Downs

168: WE: Rancho Diablo: Hell On Wheels – Colby Jackson(Mel Odom)

169: CR: The Shell Scott Sampler – Richard S. Prather

170: WE: Under Outlaw Flags – James Reasoner

171: TH: The Devil Colony – James Rollins

172: CR: Bad Moon Rising – Ed Gorman

173: CR: The Shadow: Vengeance Is Mine! – Maxwell Grant

174: CR: The Shadow: Battle of Greed – Maxwell Grant

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August 2011 Movie Round-Up

The Mummy(1932)

The Mummy’s Hand(1940)

Whistling In The Dark(1941)

The Mummy’s Tomb(1942)

The Mummy’s Ghost(1944)

The Mummy’s Curse(1944)

The Curse of The Faceless Man(1958)

The Professionals(1966)

Zone Troopers(1985)

Back To The Future(1985)

Back To The Future II(1989)

Back To The Future III(1990)

The Doors(1991)

Goodnight For Justice(2011)

Bad Moon Rising – Ed Gorman

Tags

Ed Gorman, mystery, Sam McCain

I’ve always loved Ed Gorman’s Sam McCain series. What’s not to like? Good mystery with a rock and roll twist and some of the best writing going these days. Sam McCain started back in the early days of rock and has been moving up through the years. BAD MOON RISING lands old Sam in 1968, an era I was just reaching my maturity(like most teenagers I thought I was “gown up” at the exalted age of eighteen). It’s a time I remember. The time of most of the earlier novels I was to young to remember much about the time, to busy being a kid.

The Viet Nam War. Nixon. Hippies. All that was there. I was never a hippie, but I did cultivate the long hair and the quiet dislike of most adults(one extremely minor incident with a cop showed me where I stood in that respect, a ticket simply because of the long hair).

Wandering to much here. Get back on track.

Sam McCain gets called to the local commune outside of Black River Falls by the leader, Richard Donovan, on a matter he can’t discuss over the phone. Sam had represented the commune a few times in harassment matters. There were a few in town that didn’t like them and wanted them gone. The sheriff, Cliff Sykes(Cliffie as Sam calls him), in addition to being a bigot as not especially competent and the local “radio” preacher who focuses on them come to mind.

He’s shown a body in the barn of a young woman, Vanessa, daughter of Paul Mainwaring, one of the richest men in town, and knows a shit storm will hit the commune over this one.

The distraught father hires Sam to find the killer. The one who comes under suspicion almost immediately is a troubled young man, Neil Cameron, who’d fallen for the victim, a notorious tease among the local males and been rebuffed, a member of the commune, a man broken from the war.

Sam doesn’t believe him guilty, which puts him in the middle of opposing sides as usual as he continues to investigate the death and those that follow, much to the displeasure of most of the folks involved.

Ed Gorman does his usual fine job of painting small town life and the folks who inhabit it, getting the period details right in a town in which I would feel completely at ease, one about the size of the one I grew up in. BAD MOON RISING was a lot of fun with me remembering incidents of my own, laughing out loud a time or two at McCain, almost an everyman, with his antics and reaction to folks in the course of his poking around.

Highly recommended. The book is due for release on October 11th.

Overlooked Movies: Whistling In The Dark(1941)

Tags

Ann Rutherford, Eve Arden, Overlooked Movies, Red Skelton, Virginia Grey

WHISTLING IN THE DARK was supposed to be red Skelton’s star vehicle and I suppose it worked after a fashion. He is a beloved figure(by me anyway) and I sat down to watch this one with great anticipation. It was based on a play and a previous 1931 film. I was expecting a bit better, but I’ve seen worse. Dark was the first of three films with the character in the Whistling series(in Dixie and in New York the other two).

Wally Benton(Skelton) is the star of a radio crime program, The Crime Fox, on the air for two years. Negotiations are on for a new contract with the sponsor(he wants a quiz show). Benton’s manager(played by Eve Arden)wants him to go out with the sponsor’s daughter(he already has a time or two) in an effort to help their case. He’s not happy because he’s planning to get married that night and his fiance(Ann Rutherford) is already unhappy that he’s gone out with the other woman(Virginia Grey).

There’s a phony religious cult, Silver Haven, that specializes in bilking rich old ladies out of their fortunes. They throw the word radiant out a lot in their ceremonies(radiant light, radiant happiness, etc.) They have a problem though. They learn from their lawyer that one of their victims, just deceased, had a codicl added to her will. They got the money after her only relative, a nephew, died. Until then, he got the interest on the estate.

A murder would just get the police looking into things and, admittedly, the cult couldn’t take too much looking over.

They hear the early show of the Crime Fox(two live shows three hours apart, one for each coast) as Benton’s credits are listed. Writer, actor, producer, and concoct the idea to get him to contrive the perfect murder plot, so perfect no one will realize it is murder. Hastily attending the second performance, they pose as prospective sponsors who want to discuss contract. That gets him away from the studio.

He asks them to send two messages, when they are in to big a hurry to allow him to do it, one to his fiance to explain he’ll be late and one to the current boss’s daughter that he will be late(a night club set up by his manager). A bad mistake as the cult grabs the two women to force him to dream up their murder plot.

Benton spends the night devising his plot and asks them to get certain things(chemicals to mix up an undetectable poison and arrange a plane ticket beside the victim flying to the reading of the will). His plan, which he carries out, is to switch out the poison after they tested it on one of the less important members(dead in four seconds) for a harmless powder. Things go awry when the man to carry out the plot walks off and leaves his brief case with the poison(convenient for the plot) and the cult hires a chemist on the other end to recreate the poison.

Now Benton and the two women have to escape and save the innocent man. That doesn’t go well.

Next we’re introduced to the most marvelous radio in existence(LOL). Benton comes up with a new plan and uses the phone wires(the instrument has been ripped out) and a radio for their amusement to rig a phone, calling the operator and through an elaborate switching of the wires back and forth gets the operator to call the airport to get a message to the victim. The killer on the plane hears the announcement to get the victim up front for an important message and manages to find and cut the radio wires(another convenient plot twist).

Here’s where it gets good(sort of).

Now Benton gets the operator to call the studio, where they’re anxiously looking for him for the live broadcast, and hooks up a live, remote show where he starts spilling the beans, with the girls, over the airwaves. They even have the help of the guy left guarding them, an ex-boxer who must have received a few too many head blows as he buys their “fake broadcast for amusement” gag.

I’m no radio expert(beyond the on/off button), but I’m not certain commercial radios of that period had transmitting capabilities. I could be all wrong and, if so, anyone with that knowledge, please let me know.

Skelton’s rubber face is in full mode here and the big fight scene when the ex-boxer finally catches on is loaded with his patented pratfalls. Rapid fire one liners dot the script.

I had fun watching this, but it wasn’t a great film. A fan of Skelton, I liked the featuring of his comedy throughout. But, despite his appearance, I’d expected more crime/mystery. I’ve not seen the other two films in the series, but one description likened them to the slick production, but not much body, of the Thin Man films after the first two.

For more overlooked goodness, and other things, check out Todd Mason\'s SWEET FREEDOM.

New In The House

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New In The House

1: Bad Moon Rising(ARC): Ed Gorman: the latest Sam McCain novel. looking forward to this one.

2: Nick of Time(ARC): Tim Downs: Nick Pochak, The Bug Man, a forensic entomologist, is getting married in a week. His fiance, Alena, lives on a mountain top and raise cadaver dogs. When he gets a call a week before the wedding from his best man with an invitation to sit in on an interesting case, he can’t resist. His fiance is upset. He promises to be only gone a day(famous last words). When he doesn’t come back and misses a few calls, she takes three of her dogs and goes looking for him. Funny with a murder mystery. nd from a North Carolina writer too.

3: Dead of Night(ARC) – Jonathan Maberry: a zombie novel. The conceit here is a doctor gives a convicted serial killer an injection that keeps his brain alive as his body rots. But he wakes up before burial and escapes. And he’s infectious.

Under Outlaw Flags – James Reasoner

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James Reasoner

UNDER OUTLAW FLAGS is one the author’s early novels recently released to ereaders. Good thing. I have a fair chunk of his books, but chasing down all of them would be a full time job.

It’s 1917 and the old west is not as wild as it once had been. Not dead though. The Tacker gang was one of the last horse riding bands that specialized in robbing banks. The make a mistake when they hit a bank in Reno. The law was waiting for them and they were arrested and convicted. The judge gave them a choice: twenty years in prison or enlist in the army to go fight the Germans. The U.S. had just entered the war and the race was on to train and send troops over.

Five of them survived the aborted bank robbery. Roy and Jace Tacker, Big Boy Guiness, Aaron Gault, and the narrator of our story, Drew Matthews.

Two, Jace and Aaron, end up aviators, loving the feel of being up in the air. The other three became cavalry, preferring to get no higher off the ground than the back of a horse.

The novel covers their training, the deployment to Europe, and their adventures there, the battles, the losses, the loves.

Reasoner mixes his fictional characters with real people of the era(Black Jack Pershing and Frank Luck) and other fictional folk(I couldn’t help but grin at a chance meeting between our heroes and a couple of fliers named Wentworth and Allard).

I had a lot of fun reading this one.

Reading Forgotten Books: Brass Knuckles

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Forgotten Books, Frank Gruber

I’ve had this one in the TBR pile for a while now. Don’t why it took so long to get to it. Frank Gruber is a particular favorite of mine and I’ve frequently posted on his westerns and mysteries. Evan Lewis first posted on BRASS KNUCKLES a good while back. You should read his post if you haven’t before. Evan does a thorough job of covering the book. The tales of The Human Encyclopedia were a lot of fun and I won’t comment on them, but to urge you to find this book if you don’t have it.

As much as I liked these murder mysteries, I liked the forward even better. In it, Gruber gives us a forty pages or so look into his history writing for the pulps. It was a precursor to his later book, THE PULP JUNGLE, which is another favorite of mine.

This book was worth the brief time spent reading it. Gruber’s style of writing pulls one in(those old pulp sensibilities) and I devoured the book once I finally got to it.

Forgotten Music: Cheap Trick

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Cheap Trick, Forgotten Music

Cheap Trick is a band that rose to prominence in the mid-1070s, though the earliest version of the band started in 1967 with everybody but Robin Zander(called something else of course). They never reached the same heights as some bands of the period, but i thought they were better than most of them. Never saw these boys live, but a friend told me about a great show I missed. In a nearby city, where I saw most of my live shows, Cheap Trick and AC/DC co-headlined a concert(and this was before either band received any kind of notoriety.

Their uniqueness, I guess you might say, was the contrast of members of the band: geek versus rocker. Guitarist Rick Neilson, who I always thought looked like Huntz Hall of Bowery Boys and Dead End Kids fame(the young whippersnappers out there may not get that reference. Even down to the flipped up baseball cap. It had to be deliberate) and drummer Bun E. Carlos were the self-styled geeks and were usually regulated to the back cover in the days of vinyl. Vocalist Robin Zander and bassist Tom Petersson(who gets generally gets credit for the idea of a twelve string bass) were always front and center as the rockers.

Theirs was a blend of metal and pop music that was the perfect sop for us that hated pop music in general. It gave us an excuse, me anyway, for listening to certain radio stations back then. They’re still around these days, though you don’t hear as much. A recent show(July 18th) at the Cisco Ottawa Bluesfest nearly bought disater when the stage collapsed while they were playing. Fortunately, no one was hurt.

Heaven Tonight is considered by many their best album and contained maybe their best song, Surrender. But they had a lot of good ones. below are some of my favorites.

Hell On Wheels – Colby Jackson

Tags

Colby Jackson, Rancho Diablo, western

HELL ON WHEELS is the fourth entry in the RANCHO DIABLO series, this one by the able hand of Mel Odom.

Sam Blaylock and his family, along with the the hands that worked for them(more family than employees) were building the ranch into something to be proud of. The sulfur smell that gave it it’s name had been figured out and dealt with, the saw mill built and making a profit, and the beginnings of a cattle ranch in place. Not without effort and making a few enemies along the way.

One of the hands was young Mike Tucker, a fair cattle hand, but getting better. What he was good at were the guns on his hips.

Sam’s wife, Jenny, was always nervous around him. The cold eyes, the detached demeanor, the fear that he might influence her children. That fear was only exacerbated in town when three men from Tucker’s past threatened her oldest boy’s life before the Tucker killed them. To be sure, the boy had rushed into the store with his rifle, with her right behind him. Still, if Tucker wasn’t around, these things wouldn’t happen.

She wanted him gone. Sam and she had argued about it.

Then, when Sam and the boys were away buying a bull, Jenny is forced into a partnership with the young gunman on a mission of rescue. There, she learns some things about Tucker, things even her husband didn’t know, and Tucker didn’t want him to know. She learns some thing about herself as well.

A fine new addition to the series. I like the brevity of the book, and the breezy style. I read this one this morning while eating breakfast and drinking coffee. Oh, and I mustn’t forget to mention Keith Birdsong’s excellent cover art.

I’m ready for the next one.

Overlooked Movies: Curse of The Faceless Man(1958)

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Overlooked Movies

When I first started watching CURSE OF THE FACELESS MAN, i was sure this would be another candidate for Movies That Need To be Overlooked. Then it started to veer into that territory of so bad that they become good. The story here is a gladiator killed in the eruption of Vesuvius that buried Pompeii and an undying love that stretches over nearly two thousand years.

An excavation of of Isis’s temple uncovers a small cache of jewelry and a petrified human body which are returned to the local museum. Inside the container with the jewels is a bronze medallion that threatens death to anyone that stands between Quintillus Aurelius and his love. You see, a slave/gladiator had dared to fall in love with a daughter of nobility.

Richard Anderson, of Six Million Dollar man and Bionic Woman fame, stars as Dr. Paul Mallon, a medical researcher, and Elaine Edwards is Tina Enright, his fiancee/artist, and the focus of the stone man’s affections, what with her being the reincarnation of his long ago love. She begins to have dreams of a man coming for her and starts painting them, a vague looking figure. She eventually adds straps9more about that later).

The stone man has the disturbing ability to come to life at inopportune times, usually when some poor fool is alone with him, and strangle the life out of them. Then go back into his rock-like state whenever his work was done. The hoot was when old stone face came to life. As he rolls over and climbs to his feet, arms still locked in a forty-five degree position, you can see the rolls in the cheesy rubber suit(either that or he was having a mid-life bulge around the middle: perhaps a little too much lava for lunch).

Anderson, as the evidence mounts up, is the disbelieving man of science(amid the Italian archeologists with the opposite beliefs. The idea of a two thousand year old petrified body coming to life.

Now, all the really bad stuff:

the excavation of Pompeii at the beginning of the film: one man with a pick ax digging in the hillside. Certainly guaranteed to preserve anything hit.

When one of the stone man’s live episodes is witnessed, they restrain him, after he returns to solid state, with straps. Remember, his arms are eternally in a forty-five degree, out thrust angle. He has no trouble moving his arms together and producing slack.

When on one of his walkabouts, after his love, the lovely Tina Enright, the police and the good fiance surrounding her apartment, the stone man manages to sneak into the building. They seem to miss the sound of him him smashing through several solid wood doors, standing oblivious on the street, only reacting when she screams loud and long at sight of the monster.

He takes her and heads for the Mediterranean. You see, in his mind, the eruption of Vesuvius is just happening and he must get her into the water to save her.

There’s always clueless scientists in this sort of film. Here’s an exchange between two of them:

Dr Carlo Fiorillo: “One more of these killings and they will hold me criminally responsible.”

Dr. Emanuel: “The fools! Here we are so close to solving the mystery of life and death and they worry about their precious laws!”

CURSE doesn’t have a bad pedigree. Directed by genre veteran Edward L. Cahn, the script was by Jerome Bixby, an SF writer who did a lot of Hollywood work. He wrote four episodes of the original Trek series, but he’s most known for his short story IT’S A GOOD LIFE, which the Science Fiction Writers of America voted as one of the twenty best ever written. Billy Mumy starred in the 1961 TWILIGHT ZONE episode as the six year old boy with remarkable powers that terrorized the adults and also did the sequel as the adult version, still in charge, whose own daughter starts to exhibit similar powers in an episode on one of the later versions of Twilight… And of course Richard Matheson used the story as one of the segments in the film version of the show.

On it’s original release, it was paired in a double feature with It! THE TERROR FROM BEYOND, a much more remembered film, not to mention a better one(though cheesy in it’s own right).

Yes, CURSE goes into that vault in my mind of those films so bad that I love them(joining PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE and LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS). Check out the trailer below:

http://youtu.be/61yLyj18IbM

As always, for more good stuff, check out Todd Mason\'s SWEET FREEDOM.