Long Waltz Cover Reveal Coming Soon - Get An Early Peak

 The sequel to Fool's Run is called Long Waltz, and it's coming soon. Final touches are being put on the cover, so the full reveal will be in the near future.

Meanwhile, here's a bit of a look. This book's going to find Si Reardon in Florida and wrangling with a fresh group of powerful men. This time they're from Hollywood. While stars and producers are busy shooting a sequel to a film lensed in Florida years ago, Si is called on to find out what he can about a girl who disappeared after working briefly on the first movie.

Of course he'll find himself plunged into a maelstrom of drama and corruption that will call on all his wits and resourcefulness. Friends Jael and the McCluskey brothers will be on hand too.

Wednesday Reads Fool's Run YouTube Review

Should have shared this a while back. It's a nice review of Fool's Run by E.G. Stone at QuillandPen.com.

Biblioholic's Bookshelf - Death Trap - John D. MacDonald with a Gothic Adjacent Look

When the paperback gothics were hot in the women running from houses era, many other paperbacks got similar looks, even tales from crime novelists like John D. MacDonald, creator of the Travis McGee series and tough tales with gritty covers earlier from Gold Medal. 

This stand-alone originally released in 1956 has a distinct gothic look with trees that resemble castle-stone and a flowing overcoat for the woman resembling the Victorian dresses on historical gothics. 

SEE ALSO: Biblioholic's Bookshelf - Dark of the Moon by Dan Ross

SEE ALSO: John D. MacDonald, The Crossroads

Biblioholic's Bookshelf - The Scarf by Robert Bloch

The Fawcett Gold Medal edtion 1947 novel by Robert Bloch that's clearly a stepping stone on his path to Psycho. 

SEE ALSO: Favorite Short Stories - Talent by Robert Bloch

Yes, Fool's Run Author Copies Arrived

 Unboxing is always an exciting time. UPS moved them fast. 

Flash of Fear - Come Sunday - Crime/Horror Flash Fiction Reading

Here's an all new Flash of Fear installment, "Come Sunday, recorded to coincide with the release of Fool's Run. 

This little tale set in the Great Depression was written for a crime fiction flash contest, and I later wrote a 10-minute play that brought in a couple more characters. I think it works best with just the narrator telling her story.

SEE ALSO: FOOLISH FIRE

Biblioholic's Bookshelf: Malko No. 1

Billed at times as "The French James Bond," Prince Malko Linge starred in the SAS (French for His Serene Highness) series created by Gérard de Villiers.  

To my knowledge, only a handful have been translated into English. Those were published by Pinnacle in it's early incarnation that focused heavily on men's adventure series. 

6 of My Favorite Hardboiled Detective Tales

 I've often mentioned in online musings that I discovered the detective novel via a bit of young reader's naïveté. In the wake of Chinatown, a host of new detective films rolled out of Hollywood. I was a little young to catch them in theaters, but movie-tie-in editions or re-issues led to my dipping a toe into the water of the hardboiled reading universe, starting probably with Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely. 

I ran across Lew Archer around then as well in a combo of The Drowning Pool movie tie-in and the TV movie based on The Underground Man, and those books tipped the line of dominoes.

Since I'm blogging again with a little more frequency, I thought I'd throw out a few of my favorite hardboiled novels, maybe obvious or maybe not. I'm working from memory, so my fondness above all is what prevails here. This is by no means a definitive list nor is it a complete list. 

1. The Chill by Ross Macdonald

Far from my first Lew Archer, it remains a standout for me. It's post Galton Case and Macdonald's transitional period where his style and psychological themes matured as he dealt with the pain of his troubled daughter's struggles. 

As a younger reader, it struck me most for it's pace and the momentous twist that often gets a classical reading by scholars. It's the tale of a
young bride who takes a powder on her honeymoon. Lew's hired to find her and warns us early he should have walked away from the job offer. He's soon embroiled with university professors, a murder, possibly false testimony and a great deal more. All of the Archers are slim books. This one reads like lightning yet never seems rushed or condensed. 

I guess it's special too because my old man read it first and liked it a great deal. We clashed on some topics but rarely books, and he read much of my collection back in the day and liked a good detective tale himself. 

SEE ALSO: ARCHER AT THE BEACH

2. “The Gutting of Couffignal” by Dashiell Hammett

I found The Maltese Falcon somewhere in the mix of paperbacks at Waldenbooks when browsing other
titles. I was gaining a knowledge of the hardboiled school when I gave it a try. I didn't like Sam Spade and The Continental Op--who I met first in The Dain Curse--quite as much as I did Chandler's Marlowe as my tastes were developing. I sensed what I've come to call the romance of Chandler. Granted he had crime in the hands of criminals and all that, but the style, the humor, and elements that would shape film noir appealed to me more. Hammett seemed a little more pragmatic, at least as I thought of it. However, I found a battered used 1967 Dell paperback copy of The Big Knockover at my favorite used book shop, The Book Nook in Alexandria, LA. 

I know it's a story and not a novel, but many of Hammett's novels, like Chandler's, took shape in novellas. (Chandler, of course, called it cannibalizing.) It's kind of Die Hard on a private island. This one's an island of the very rich. The Op is on hand to guard wedding presents when the only bridge to the island's dynamited and a band of robbers with machine guns mounted on a car rush in on a raid. The Op has to take them on, and he's up for the job. It's a men's adventure tale. There's a mystery twist, of course, but I read it as action first as a kid. It took time for it to grow on me in other ways. It was really in re-reading with more mature and sophisticated eyes that I've come to see the magic Hammett had going on and to appreciate the Hammett style. 

SEE ALSO: Where Bush Street Roofed Stockton

3. The Judas Goat by Robert B. Parker  

A review of this one, the fifth book in Parker's Spenser series, popped up in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine as I was finding my way in understanding the mystery genre. 

Spenser had been around for a while by then and his friend Hawk had been introduced as a respected adversary in earlier books. Spenser doesn't take assassination cases, the review noted, but he is up for a bounty hunt. Hired to track down a group of terrorists responsible for the death of a client's loved one, Spenser does some globe hopping with Hawk helping out. The humor is powerful in this one, and the action is plentiful and brutal at times. EQMM reviews used to grouse about a lack of detection in Spenser books, but I always found them engaging with or without a puzzle, and this one was a great introduction. Everything culminates in a brutal battle with bad guys in an Olympic village.

5. When the Sacred Ginmill Closes by Lawrence Block

I discovered Matthew Scudder by way of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and the fabulous story

"A Candle for the Bag Lady." He's an ex-cop, driven to "serious drinking" by the accidental death of a child as he stopped a holdup and one of his bullets ricocheted. Via the gateway of that story and Block's column in Writer's Digest, I moved on to the early Scudder novels, and back to the novella "Out the Window" via a second hadn AHMM. After a significant character arc culminated in Eight Million Ways to Die (1982), the series paused until the prequel, Ginmill (1986) that grew out of the novella "By the Dawn's Early Light" in the collection The Eyes Have It edited by Bob Randisi. 

It's set in Scudder's serious drinking days. There's a holdup at an after hours club, and Scudder's pressed into tracking down the perpetrators while simultaneously working on other cases. Dave Van Ronk's song "Last Call" that provides the book's title, is a core element as Scudder contemplates his existence and his drinking life. Happily that's readily found online these days. You can listen along with Matt as he experiences the song's spiritual resonance.

SEE ALSO: THE BOOKTAKER: A NAMELESS DETECTIVE STORY

6. S is for Silence by Sue Grafton

When I was teaching horror, mystery and suspense in the classroom, I could never get through a lecture slide about Sue Grafton without tearing up as I read her daughter Jamie Clark's remark upon her mom's death and the culmination of the alphabet detective series about female P.I. Kinsey Millhone: 

“...out of the deep abiding love and respect for our dear sweet Sue, as far as we in the family are concerned, the alphabet now ends at Y.”

Z is for Zero was never to be, but the twenty-five book series documenting Kinsey's adventures is quite substantial. For me, S, No. 19, is a standout. 

It's a character study with Kinsey's 1987 case harkening back, via alternating chapters, to the 1953 disappearance of a woman named Violet Sullivan. Flashbacks paint a picture of the fifties world and a snapshot of Violet's rebellious nature with a new car a pivotal element. It's a little different and definitely a great glimpse of Kinsey at work. 

Again, those are just a few, but they, for me, are great excursions into the hardboiled world. 

For more hardboiled fiction thoughts, visit my guest post over at Charles Gramlich's Razored Zen. 

Cover Reveal: Fool's Run - A Si Reardon Novel

 Coming November 24, 2020

Pre-order now on Amazon

#coverreveal #cover #thriller #mystery

Flash of Fear - Pilgrim Crime Story Reading

Don't know that I'll be maintaining a weekly pace for these, but here's a new installment in my little Flash of Fear series of readings for You Tube.



This time around it's a crime story with horror elements that originally appeared in Heater magazine. It's a dark little tale of a detective called to a brutal crime scene.

Biblioholic's Bookshelf - The D.A. Goes to Trial

Erle Stanley Gardner's best known for his defense attorney detective Perry Mason, but he wrote a few books about young district attorney Doug Selby, who deals with murder cases and the politics surrounding his job. 

The late Jim Hutton played Selby in a TV movie, They Call It Murder. Ed Asner and Leslie Nielsen also appeared. I watched it when it aired back in the day when my old man worked late and I hung out in the living room waiting for him to come home. Didn't know the character history nor of the Perry Mason-tie at the time. Hutton played detective Ellery Queen later in an NBC series that lasted a season. His son, Timothy, would later play Archie Goodwin in the wonderful and sadly only two-season A&E series A Nero Wolfe Mystery. 

New Thriller Novella Dark Hours Now Available

Dark Hours, my new novella which follows a student journalist on her own descent into a personal labyrinth to confront a twisted player of games, is rolling out on ebook platforms.

It should soon be available for most readers, so check the links below or do a search wherever you buy ebooks.

This book began as a short story years ago called "The Exclusive." It was published in Cemetery Dance, and it appears in Scars and Candy. 

A couple of years ago, a producer optioned my book New Year's Evil with an eye toward turning it into a cable movie and pilot. That didn't happen. Money didn't come through etc. So it goes.

In the wake of that process, however, I did wind up talking to a Hollywood agent. Not the first time, but it looked more promising for a while.

"The Exclusive" bubbled to the top of discussions about properties in my backlist that might generate interest the way New Year's Evil had. Strong heroine, tight, dark, crisp situation. Could be shot economically.

As we talked, and the agent temporarily became obsessed with calling it Cemetery Dance, an idea for expanding the story came to me.

I'd read accounts of campus violence and sexual assaults at a number of universities where no action was taken or where victims were blamed and sometimes expelled. It made me angry, and I decided to explore it.

This was before the unfortunate Rolling Stone matter that clouded the issue, but clearly problems continue and are far from resolved across America today.

I couldn't quit thinking of Allison Rose, my obsessive student journalist, and how an attempt to address similar matters at her small college might lead her into danger as she worked to hold authoritarian administrators to their responsibilities.

Dark Hours developed, taking the story beyond the original ending and deeper into darkness with the villain more fully realized.

It's a thriller, an adventure with some mystery elements, and hopefully it's an interesting ride as Allison deals with the twisted little mastermind at the heart of her labyrinth.


Dark Hours is published by Crossroad Press and available from these sellers:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• Google Books
• iBooks - iTunes 
• Smashwords

RIP Elmore Leonard

I picked up Unknown Man No. 89 by Elmore Leonard sometime in the eighties. I was a young reporter, covering the police beat on occasion and intrigued by his take on cops and criminals.

I zipped through Unknown Man about a process server who gets embroiled in crime and moved on pretty quickly to 52 Pick Up and Split Images. Great reads in that easy-going prose that took you into the minds of good guys and bad guys alike.

Gold Coast, The Switch, Swag aka Ryan's Rules, Stick. I can remember cracking them open late at night after my 1 p.m. to 10 p.m. news gig ended and reading into the wee hours.

I can vividly remember opening The Switch as the night air grew a little cooler that autumn, the window cracked just a little to let in the breeze.

On the radio, Toney Carey's "A Fine, Fine Day" about an old gangster getting out of prison after a long stretch, seemed like a perfect sound track for Leonard.

I've read many of Leonard's novels since, Get Shorty, Out of Sight, Rum Punch and some of the Westerns, but there's a special chunk of my reading life that I'll always remember as Leonard time.

It seemed like he'd go on forever, churning out great stories.

RIP,  Mr. Leonard. 

The Blackhouse by Peter May - An Immersion in Character and Culture

 Once in a while you pick up a book and find it far exceeds expectations. I was intrigued reading the jacket flap of Peter May's The Blackhouse. It summarized the story of a Scotland detective called back to his childhood home in The Hebrides to investigate a murder similar to a case he's recently dealt with in Edinburgh. It sounded like an engaging procedural.

I didn't get from that how rich in character and setting the tale would be.

The Blackhouse scrutinizes the life of Fin Macleod, both in the present as he proceeds through his investigation, and in the past, through first-person remembrance.

Fin has known tragedy. He's almost plagued by tragedy. He lost his parents at a young age. He's just lost a son and seen his marriage unravel in the aftermath. He's also been party to a good deal of misery either dealt out by harsh circumstances of island life or from nature itself.

The case he's called on to investigate opens old wounds and revisits jagged relationships, many swirling around the victim, Angel Macritchie, a bully as a boy and as a man.

Macleod's past is inextricably linked to the murder. Those detailed relationships and past regrets channel him toward answers, shocks and heightened regrets.

Many are linked to the island's annual guga hunt, an almost ritualistic culling of gannets on a rock island. May, who lived in the Hebrides while film a television series there, offers a fascinating look into life and culture and the role of the hunt to island life.

The components converge in a thrilling and tortured climax in which Fin confronts present, past, himself, and, of course, the killer.

It's a well plotted mystery, a study of a man and a voyage to a unique and intriguing place. It reminds me a bit in its combinations of Jane Campion's New Zealand in Top of the Lake.

It's well worth the time to turn the pages. Has Fin been party to almost too much tragedy and has he seen too much first hand? Perhaps one red herring's a bit of a stretch, but it generally fits, and the whole is a solid, intricate work.

Happily, though it took the book a while to find a home, it's the first in a trilogy, that I hope to continue reading soon.

Peter May discusses the road to publication for The Blackhouse:

Three Graves Full - A Crime Drama

In this debut novel, Jamie Mason introduces a compelling group of characters then puts them through sometimes comic, sometimes tragic and sometimes suspenseful paces.

I suppose the central conceit requires a little buy-in from the reader, but it's not terribly hard with Mason's smooth narrative touch.

Jason Getty has killed a man and buried him in his yard. 

After a period of fretting about that circumstance, he hires a crew for lawn maintenance lest an overgrown homestead draw undue attention.

In the midst of their cleanup, they stumble on an unmarked grave.  No wait, two unmarked graves. Neither is occupied by the guy Getty buried.

It seems a pair of bodies were planted on the property before he moved in and sunk another.

Just accept it.

From there, the story unfolds in a nicely paced and quirky manner as Getty encounters a pair of decent and conscientious local cops who solve the murders in short order but find Jason acts a little suspicious.

CSI determines another death might have transpired in Jason's house, which makes them curious  and means Jason's going to need to move his former friend Harris to a new location.

Jason's the most compelling character in the cast, and the extended flashback in which we learn the circumstances of the killing he committed is engrossing. It builds empathy for his milquetoast spirit. He's a widower after all, and good intentions  entangled him with a biker and burglary ring leader, who doesn't like to be called Harris, who drove Jason first to despair then dire deeds.

When Jason starts to unearth his victim for transport prior to the police bringing in cadavar dogs, things really get complicated as the suspect for the other killings, the fiance of one of the victims and others converge on Getty's house.

Jason's faced with trying to protect himself, help one of the good cops and somehow makeing an ally of a woman he's instinctively brained with a shovel.

I think it's safe to say you haven't seen this all before. Mason really delivers a fresh voice and a fresh perspective to the crime novel.

Three Graves Full is a fast and exciting excursion, and you'll probably be surprised at how things turn out.

What's on the iPod - Miami Purity - Feminine Noir

I'm not sure how I missed Vicki Hendricks' dark, noirish Miami Purity (1995), often dubbed a feminine The Postman Always Rings twice, but I was happy to discover the audiobook recently. That's due to a mention in a Salon article about what to read after Gillian Flynn's brilliant  Gone Girl.

Miami is brilliant also, a steamy--in more ways than one--and grim crime excursion told by the protagonist, Sherri Parlay. She's a former stripper who's maintained a vestige of innocence in spite of her rough thirty-six years and a deceased husband. He's deceased because she clipped him with a boom box while he was being abusive.

After her husband's death and some suspicion about it by the cops, Sherri lands a job in a Miami cleaner  called Miami Purity. She's hired by the owner, Brenda Mahoney.

Before long she's discovered the owner's son, Payne,  and fallen deeply into lust for him before she learns Brenda doesn't really care for Payne having a love life.

Things spiral downward as Sherri pursues Payne anyway and catches his interest. Once she's fallen for him, she learns just how twisted his relationship with Brenda is. With the best of intentions, she smothers Brenda with a plastic bag.

Things tumble around after that like towels in a dryer as Sherri strives for a healthy relationship with Payne that, as astute readers know, just isn't going to happen.

The question is, of course, how are things going to fall apart and what's going to happen with Sherri who has an affection for drink and men?

To say more would spoil the fun of the second part of the tale, but it unwinds nicely with a fairly intricate plot and plenty of twists and surprises.

The audio version is nicely suspenseful, and it's well narrated by Linda Borg, who invests Sherri with just the right mixture of sultry and innocent.

It's profanity-laced and loaded with graphic sexual descriptions, so be warned, but it's a great, seedy crime excursion.

Extra
A blogtalk radio interview with Vicki Henricks

It's Alive - by Loren D. Estleman

Somehow I missed the Valentino series from Loren D. Estleman until browsing the other day and hitting on the latest book, Alive!

Happy to be aboard.

Valentino is a film archivist for UCLA, and he becomes embroiled in murder mysteries that swirl around lost films. We're talking things like Eric Von Stronheim's Greed or, happily, the lost screen test of Bela Lugosi as the Frankenstein monster in Alive!

The screen test is real and really lost, cleared away to make storage space in a time before its importance and value were recognized at Universal Studios. But Estleman imagines a world where the footage still exists, two reels shot with Lugosi hot off the success of 1931's Dracula and targeted for a role in the next big Universal monster movie. Of course the role went to Boris Karloff, but collectors and film fans would love to see what might have been, or what went wrong.

Estleman offers up an interesting blend of film history and fiction as Valentino races to find the lost footage after he realizes it's at the core of an old friend's murder.

His pal, a washed up star with addiction issues,  has come upon the footage, but criminal elements are involved. There's also a collector who's an homage to the late great punster and editor Forrest Ackerman of Famous Monsters of Filmland.

Estleman's imagined a rich world of supporting characters for Valentino including an intern who's into Steampunk and a department secretary from hell plus a fun pair of San Diego detectives. They're fun for the reader, not so fun for Valentino. The bad cop of the duo is on bad cop overdrive.

There's a nice and fairly twisty mystery plot woven through the tale, and tension builds as Valentino strives to solve the case and keep the film footage from decaying in a police evidence room.

The tale's also a fabulous look into film preservation with even a few contemplations on Steampunk's importance. Van Helsing qualifies, and Valentino's intern and friends watch with the sound turned down for the enjoyment of the production design.

All in all, it's nice mystery read and great book to pick up if you're an aficionado of Universal Horrors.

Must check out the other tales in the series as well including a collection of short stories. 

Louisiana Thriller Midnight Eyes - Audiobook Now Available

I was pleased to learn this week that the audiobook for my Louisiana-based thriller Midnight Eyes is now available.

It's narrated by A.C. Fellner, and you can get a great sample listen via the Amazon listing.

If you're not an Audible subscriber, you could actually get it free with their 30-day-trial offer, which you already know about if you've ever listened to a podcast.

 This book began as a dream I had once upon a time. In the dream, I imagined an FBI profiler walking down a hillside in his hometown to view a brutal crime scene. It was actually a nightmare I guess.

Somehow, in that dream, I knew that Wayland Hood was the son of the local sheriff, that he was an expert on serial killers and that the killings were some of the worst anyone involved had ever seen.

I tried to write it not long after that, but things didn't come together.

A few years later, after working a while as a reporter, covering crime scenes, talking to cops and watching how cops and reporters interacted, the dream came back to me.

The nucleus of a couple of real murder cases began to converge, and Wayland became a former FBI agent called back into service to help his estranged father.

The dream re-emerged. Investigators converged at a crime scene on the banks of the Red River, and Wayland walked down that hill to help out.

Also available on iTunes.

Awake Early

I heard talk of "Awake" a few weeks back. It's an NBC series starring the great Jason Isaacs of Harry Potter etc. Until recently it didn't have a slot on the network's schedule.

That's changed. It's due now March 1, or you can watch the pilot ahead of time on Hulu.

Seems to have a cool if complicated premise. Isaacs is a cop who has the misfortune to crash his car. When he awakens after the wreck, he faces two realities, or perhaps a reality and a dream state that seems real.

In one, his wife is alive, his son a victim of the crash. In the other, his son lives, and his wife is gone.

Amid the confusion, he solves crimes.

Watching the opener, you start to see how it call all work, and how you can follow it. It's not as hard as it sounds.

The realities are just different enough, and there are enough cues to help you keep things straight.

Couple the slightly surreal set up with stunning visuals and Isaacs on the side of the angels, and it makes for interesting viewing.

Will it catch on? I'm afraid odds are against it, but it certainly would be fun to see it get a decent run. 

The Boy Who Shoots Crows

The Boy Who Shoots Crows by Randall Silvis is set in a small Pennsylvania town, but its style and grim tone make me think of atmospheric British crime fiction, or perhaps a little of Patricia Highsmith.

Silvis, author hisotrical thrillers including On Night's Shore and other novels, introduces his small cast of characters quickly, starting with Charlotte Dunleavy, an artist who's fled a bitter divorce to recover in the quiet countryside.

She's familiar with the boy of the title, a sullen youngster given to taking out frustrations in nearby woods by blasting at crows and shattering Dunleavy's peace, especially on days she suffers migraines.

When the boy, Jess Rankin, disappears, Sheriff Marcus Gatesman arrives on Dunleavy's doorstep, to begin an investigation that opens a study of dark  places within each character's soul.

Dunleavy is damaged by her divorce, Gatesman by the deaths of his wife and child years ealier. Loss, regret and sadness are explored as the disappearance triggers grief and suspicion.

Perhaps, under other circumstances, the two might have become lovers, but life has dealt them different cards. Silvis explores the depths of regret as he sprinkles clues about what might have happened to Jess throughout the narrative.

It makes for an immersive reading experience that may not be for fans of action-packed mystery thrillers, but it's a rewarding for those who appreciate a literary tale with dark shadows.