Favorite Short Stories - The Judges of Hades by Edward D. Hoch

I first turned to Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine in the late '70s. They were in the mix and progression of interesting and eclectic things to which I was drawn once the comic books were taken away by the Eckerd Drugs powers that were of the day. 

I met Micahel Morbius on those magazine racks and Doc Savage on the nearby paperback display, so those old Eckerd bean counters nudged my reading tastes, I suppose.

I was unaware of Simon Ark's legacy in that moment. I just started to notice the contributions of Edward D. Hoch in every issue of EQMM and frequently in AHMM. I came to like police detective Captain Leopold and thief-of-obscure-and-worthless-objects Nick Velvet among Hoch's wide mix of characters. 

When Ark came to the pages of EQMM and AHMM a while after, I started reading of him as well. An introduction noted Hoch had written of him for some time, but I just picked up with the newly arriving tales. 

I sadly never ran across the 1971 paperback edition in my used book store dives. I would have snatched it up, of course. Paperbacks sold for half their cover price back then, not collector's prices. I would have snatched up a 1973 re-introduced Weird Tales too that included an Ark story too. It never made it to Eckerd's that I noticed. 

Ark might almost have fit in the original Weird Tales alongside Seabury Quinn's Jules de Grandin, I suppose. As explained by Ark's nameless Watsonesque first-person narrator from the publishing industry,  Ark was a Coptic priest, thousands of years old. But his mysteries, while hinting at the bizarre or the mystical, were of the "fantastic uncanny" school. Like The Hound of the Baskervilles or Scooby Doo, while things might seem ghostly or otherwise supernatural, the explanation was rational.

I enjoyed the Ark stories. My old man, who'd take a turn toward less fantastic tastes later in life, read them as well along with other Hoch stories. "Anything by Edward Hoch is good," he declared. 

 SEE ALSO: Favorite Short Stories: The Hospice by Robert Aickman

He liked the clever twists and turns of Hoch's plots, frequently locked rooms with Dr. Sam Hawthorne and more violent crimes with Leopold.  Often, they'd hinge on technology of some sort. I decided Hoch must read a lot about new developments as well as the inner workings of older devices. He was no stranger to minute details in other realms such as myth and folklore either. 

That hint of the arcane in Ark stories probably appealed to me more as my interest in Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft grew. The delight when Hoch revealed how a man trapped in a revolving door all alone could perish at another's hand grabbed both my dad and me, however.

Things weren't as accessible in those days as they are now. I had to wait for ebooks to bring back early Ark tales including Hoch's first published story, I believe, "Village of the Dead." In that one an entire village plunges lemming-like over a cliff. 

SEE ALSO: Ray Bradbury's October Game

"The Judges of Hades," probably novelette length, is in the Mysterious Press/Open Road ebook of The Quests of Simon Ark as well. It's nice to backtrack a bit now that so much is at our fingertips.

According to this handy list, the story first appeared in the February 1957 Crack Detective and Mystery. It's fun to have a sense at least of a tale's original trappings. 

The story takes Ark's publishing-industry friend plus wife Shelly back to his hometown, Maple Shades, Indiana. Kids are wont to strip Maple S from local welcome signs, but it seems to be one of those quiet picket-fences places, though the narrator's much happier in the canyons of New York. 

The friend's father, Richard, and sister Stella, have died in a head-on collision, each alone in a separate car. 

The narrator's strict father was a strict local judge as well. He and his brother, Uncle Phillip, also a judge, had been dubbed judges of hades by the local press, inspired by vase depicting the mythological Greek guardians of the underworld.

What made either the Stella or the Richard decide to ram the other? Dad had ruled against the sister's husband, but would that have triggered a dark impulse on her part?  

The narrator persuades Ark to look into the matter and his interest is piqued by the mythological reference. Was supernatural evil to blame? And what's up with the fact that there were three mythological judges of Hades?

Ark's interest grows as the potentially spookier side of things becomes evident.

The solution's wrapped up in fifties small town repression and more character texture than usual. All is revealed as the narrator contemplates choices and contrasts between life in Maple Shades with the glitzy life of the city. 

Are there a couple of stretches? Perhaps, but it's all clever enough and anticipates what's ahead for Ark who's a tall and heavy-set man not yet showing some of the signs of age mentioned in later tales. So is he really who he claims to be?

It should be enjoyable to fans for the likes of Carnacki, though he might have found a ghost or a logical explanation.

And, if we'd have run across it while he was alive, I'm pretty sure my old man would have liked it and held to his Hoch contention. We had our tiffs, but we got along better than Ark's narrator and his dad Richard. 

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.

The Reading Lessons Cover Reveal

Carole Lanham, who once featured me in her Apron Hall of Fame, asked me to share in the joy of the cover reveal on her new book The Reading Lessons. (View The Making of The Apron Pic post)

It's really beautifully done artwork as you can see above.

Sounds like a really interesting Southern novel. Here's the synopsis from the publisher, Immortal Ink,  and you can view the trailer below:

Mississippi 1920: Nine year old servant, Hadley Crump, finds himself drawn into a secret world when he is invited to join wealthy Lucinda Browning’s dirty book club. No one suspects that the bi-racial son of the cook is anything more to Lucinda than a charitable obligation, but behind closed doors, O! she doth teach the torches to burn bright. What begins as a breathless investigation into the more juicy parts of literature quickly becomes a consuming and life-long habit for two people who would not otherwise be left alone together. As lynchings erupt across the South and the serving staff is slowly cut to make way for new mechanical household conveniences, Hadley begins to understand how dangerous and precarious his situation is.

The Reading Lessons follows the lives of two people born into a world that is unforgiving as a Hangman’s knot. Divided by skin color and joined by books, Hadley and Lucinda are forced to come together in the only place that will allow it, a land of printed words and dark secrets.

It's coming Summer 2013.

Favorite Short Stories - The Emissary by Ray Bradbury

In an essay from J.N. Williamson's How to Write Tales of Horror, Fantasy and Science Fiction,"  Ray Bradbury discussed the writing of many of his chilling stories collected in Dark Carnival from Arkham House, his first book. Many would later go into The October Country (1955).

In that piece, "Run Fast, Stand Still, Or The Thing at the Top of the Stairs, or New Ghosts from Old Minds,"  Bradbury wrote that he developed a list of nouns in his early writing life and set out to pen a story for each of those. "The Dwarf," "The Crowd," "The Jar" and many others followed.

One of my favorite of his noun tales is "The Emissary," a touching and beautifully written story that chills.

It's tells of a young boy with an illness that keeps him in bed, and the emissary of the title is his dog. Since he can't get out, he sends his the pet on missions, to bring back scents and signs and occasional friends from the outside world.

Of course, being a Bradbury story, it features the crisp and vivid sense display of autumn.

 Lying there, Martin found autumn as in the old days before sickness bleached him white on his bed. Here was his contact, his carry-all, the quick-moving part of himself he sent with a yell to run and return, circle and scent, collect and deliver the time and texture of worlds in town, country, by creek, river, lake, down-cellar, up-attic, in closet or coal-bin. Ten dozen times a day he was gifted with sunflower seed, cinder-path, milkweed, horse-chestnut, or full flame-smell of pumpkin. Through the loomings of the universe Dog shuttled; the design was hid in his pelt. Put out your hand, it was there…

It's a tale with touching moments, and it creates well the feeling isolation and illness in a past era.

Things go well until Dog fails to come home. There's worry, of course, and much more before the brief tale concludes. To say anything beyond would be to give away too much, but it is perfect reading for Halloween and for the fall and for the late night when the mind is open to suggestions of things not otherwise accepted.

It's a story to be read not with jaded, nothing-scares-me rigidity, but with a sense of dark wonder and willingness.

Check it out. It's a must in the original prose form, but it can be found in many adaptations. It was a Ray Bradbury Theater episode, was read by Tom Baker as a Late Night Story on British television and is a part of many other collections including The Stories of Ray Bradbury. Go on, give it a look, and come back and tell me what you think.

Bradbury's essay also appears in his Zen in the Art of Writing. 

What's on the Kindle?: Fer-de-Lance - A Brief Appreciation of a Mystery Classic

I probably read about Nero Wolfe and his leg man Archie Goodwin long before I ever read a Wolfe story. Sherlock Holmes was plentiful in school libraries when I was a kid, but, despite creator Rex Stout's output, the Wolfe titles weren't as accessible.

Ironically, in the first story I encountered--a reprint in an issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine--Archie became embroiled in a case and actually convinced Wolfe to leave their Brownstone. Threw the whole armchair detective business into question for me.

Wolfe's rigid schedule and other eccentrics are entact in Fer-de-Lance, the first novel in the series from 1934. I read it recently on my Kindle, having purchased it a few months back. (At the moment it seems to be unavailable, not sure what that's about.)

Pricing on the Wolfe novels is unfortunately a little high for e-books, especially since the paperback editions can be had much cheaper, but I'm glad I bought the first title.

Everything from Archie's Panama hat, which Timothy Hutton duplicated in many of the A&E series adaptations, to Wolfe's orchid and appetite obsessions are in evidence along with a plot that twists as much as the Fer-de-lance of the title.

The Plot
Wolfe is drawn to the novel's core murder in a twisting opening that notes Depression era conditions and introduces a specially-designed golf club, one of those devilish devices so often found in classic mysteries.

Wolfe's faced not just with solving a murder but also with getting paid for his investigation, an effort that makes for a rollicking ride for Archie. He has to yank the chains of D.A.s and other public officials, provide Wolfe with an array of clues and face down life-threatening situations.

The title, incidentally, has a dual meaning, but the literal instance makes for an intense scene.

A few non-PC moments are found since this novel is from a different era, but it's generally a blast.  I read recently that Stout said he knew he was not a great writer, but that he was a great story teller.

The latter's definitely true here. 

Poe Returns

Note: This series didn't get picked up by ABC, but happily The Raven with John Cusak as Poe is coming to theaters in Fall 2011.

News that ABC's considering a series with Edgar Allan Poe as its detective lead is intriguing and exciting, especially with dark mystery investigations on the agenda.

 I'm sure the style, while the setting is historic, could resemble The X-Files and The Night Stalker revival with a little C. August Dupin-style ratiocination thrown in, but it's a little off-beat and innovative, and pays homage the father of many of the things I enjoy. I'll certainly sample it.

While it's to be written by Chistopher Hollier who's worked on Alias, the concept reminds me of a  novel I enjoyed as a kid, a time when the idea of  Poe and Poe's work were particularly thrilling.

I have mentioned it briefly here before though only in passing.

It's called Poe Must Die by the versatile Marc Olden who wrote thrillers of many stripes including a paperback series in the seventies, police procedurals and some wonderful Asian-themed thrillers including Dai-Sho, pitting a journalist against a Yukio Mishima-like adversary.

In Poe Must Die, the troubled Edgar Allan Poe is paired with boxer Pierce James Figg who's on the trail of a black magician. Said magician's in pursuit of an artifact known as the Throne of Solomon. It's legendary power is said to surpass Lucifer's, so its falling into the wrong hands could have dire consquences.

Poe's detective skills are utilized and ultimately Figg's pugilistic prowess comes into play, aided by a bit of mysticism. It's been years, but I remember it as a great, atmospheric adventure with mystical elements.

I suppose it's too much to hope that the pilot will be a 90-minute extravaganza based on the book. I'm sure it's possible to arrive at Poe as detective with paranormal cases independent of other sources, but it would be fun to see Poe Must Die brought to life.

Either way, Poe on TV is a good thing.

Ouroboros - A New Book That Intrigues Me

They really had me at "small coastal town," when the announcement from Dark Regions press hit my in-box.

Ouroboros, co-written by Michael Kelly and Carol Weekes, is coming out in trade paper soon, and it's going on my wish list.  

It's set in said small coastal town, and revolves around  "an ancient force" that  "stirs, drawn by the cumulative power of life and death, grief and sorrow, and ultimately, endless love."

Coastal towns, those post-card-familiar places, have always seemed perfect for tales of fright. Maybe it's because one of the first scary stories that captured my imagination was "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," title story in a Scholastic book club collection, though Captain Company in the back of Famous Monsters of Filmland had teased me with H.P. Lovecraft
titles for some time before that.


It was OK with my parents to order from TAB, The Teen Age Book Club, if not from Famous Monsters back pages.

Dark Regions reports Ouroboros  is the tale of Tom Christiansen whose wife of 35-yearshas passed away. As he grieves, the lines blur between real and unreal, and a strange, pale girl shows up in his back yard.

Sounds like a perfect autumn read, so maybe I'll get it for my birthday

Absalom, Absalom!

I had the idea years ago that I should read more Faulkner, for my own edification if nothing else. "A Rose for Emily" is one of my favorite short stories, and you can pick up Faulkner novels and thumb through them and find brilliant passages, imagery that literally makes things real. 

I had trouble with Absalom, Absalom!, though.  Couldn't get through it in 1984 when I was just out of college and picked it up on vacation from my first job. I put it down shortly afterwards.

I'm older and wiser now, and recently, for school, I had to read it. Had to i.e. a course requirement. 

No way out. Useless to struggle.

OK, I possibly could have begged my advisor, but "had to" offered a nice push, and that's a good thing.

Masterpiece is the right term for Absalom, Absalom!, and while it's what might be called inaccessible, it's worth the effort to penetrate the long, winding sentences of Miss Rosa Coldfield, and to follow the exploits of Thomas Sutpen and his establishment of his plantation empire in Yoknapatawpha County, MS and the aftermath of his attempts to further his design.

His story is told not just by Rosa, his sister-in-law, who's sharing with 2o-year-old Quentin Compson, who gets a little further explanation of events from his father and finally re-examines events told in the first two thirds of the book for his friend at Harvard.

In the latter portion, events that we've already witnessed are illuminated, as if Poirot were explaining what was early seen but not understood, and it all transpires with a dark, Southern Gothic flavor that, if not chilling, is still disturbing in the way the best non-supernatural horror manages to be.

I recommend everyone pursue a degree that requires the reading of Absalom, Absalom!, or, if you're better disciplined than me, just pick it up and read.

An ARC Arrives: Any Given Doomsday

I received an ARC in the mail yesterday of Any Given Doomsday via Library Thing's early reader program. I will be fitting the reading of it in soon and hope to report back.

Looks like an interesting new series kickoff in the Urban Fantasy realm. It introduces Elizabeth Phoenix, a woman with a touch of psychic ability facing the end of the world and an assortment of demons and other dangers.

The ARC's letter from author, Lori Handeland, explains she had always wanted to write about a "character who rises and falls, moves forward, steps back and who lives and learns and loves like the rest of us--but in a world very different from our own."

Looks like it will include some laughs and chills. It's due for release in November.

My First Packet

My first packet of critical and creative writing for my MFA is back, and, happily, after a lot of anxiety, I received a positive response from my adviser who reviewed my materials.

It's almost time to do it again, so I'm feverishly working on my second packet which will include more of my creative piece, more annotations of books I've been reading and one longer examination of a book.

I've been re-introduced to the world of literary research, tapping into online databases, which is kind of exhilarating and exciting even though the task of writing critical analysis that can count on my permanent record is daunting.

Head rush
The research is even a bit addictive. While I've decided not to write my longer paper this time about We Have Always Lived in the Castle, I found a piece called "The Hero is Married and Ascends the Throne": The Economics of Narrative End in Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Honor McKitrick Wallace. That, I think, may require more blood flow to my brain than my organs can produce and pump.

Still it's fascinating to delve into the different ways a work can be dissected, and to follow trails of thought here and there.

It's also interesting to see how hard-core critics can disagree, with me at least, on other works I've been pondering including The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. I'm exploring that in part because it's such a cornerstone of the mystery genre.

Oh well, onward and upward. It's kind of interesting to be staring down a new packet deadline and Hurricane Ike.

I'm far, far inland, but the weatherman is scary. I'm charging my laptop so I can keep working if we lose power and generally hoping for the best.

Addendum
It's looking by the maps now, that the storm will be downgraded further than first expected before it reaches my neck of the woods. It should be a tropical storm and no longer a Category 1 force storm.

Why Didn't Somebody Tell Me About Breakheart Hill?

Years--make that eons--ago my next door neighbor at the time mentioned Thomas H. Cook's Blood Innocents. I'd seen it on the stands, but it had a cover that made it look like a routine police thriller.

A few good words made me change my mind and I read it and enjoyed the story of a homicide cop working on a pair of murders which resemble the killings of a pair of zoo animals. It featured a strange solution and a few character flourishes that shined.

I've picked up more Cook novels over the years, and he's picked up Edgars and accolades, but for some reason I've never made it a point to pick up every title.

I'm not sure what prompted me back into the Cook fold, perhaps an interesting synopsis on a book called The Interrogation, but my new interest recently led me to Breakheart Hill.

It's a stunner, a literary mystery that as the first-person narrator puts it is "the darkest story that I ever heard."

A Small Town in Alabama
We learn that he is Dr. Ben Wade, a doctor in the small town of Choctaw Ala. He once wanted to leave about as bad as Jimmie Stewart's character in It's a Wonderful Life, though this is sort of an anti-Frank Capra story.

He returned to serve as a general practitioner after medical school. In the mid-90s he is looking back to 1962 and events surrounding Breakheart Hill where he still envisions a teen-age Kelli Troy whose battered body was found there one summer afternoon.

Kelli, we learn, at the beginning of that school year, was the new girl in school and we follow the course of Ben's unrequited love. He and Kelli are thrust together to edit the school paper, and he and we find her to be a beautiful, remarkable girl with a socially conscious spirit and a desire to change the world.

Civil rights and social consciousness
Ben tells of how they visited a nearby town where some of the earliest civil rights protests were taking place and how that affected her, and gradually he reveals how--even as he tried to prevent it--she fell in love with another student.

Cook tells the story with a masterful skill, revealing facts carefully yet not with contrivance, building to a discovery of what really happened that is chilling and affecting.

I suppose this book may resonate with me for a couple of reasons. I and I suppose everyone can recall high school unrequited loves and how those emotions feel.

While I was in high school in the '70s, my mother was a high school teacher in the '60s and Cook, who is from the South, captures a keenly accurate sense of what those days were like both in the day to day and in the gradual awakening of social consciousness and change.

I'm working my way now through other Cook novel's I've missed including The City When It Rains, but if you've never read Cook Breakheart Hill will make a fine introduction.

What's On The Reading List - Martin Caidin

This could be subtitled books I should have read in the '70s.

As I've probably mentioned here, I'm a biblioholic. When I'm not pouring over Proust, I am constantly working to read volumes from my vast collection of paperbacks.

The Sword of Damocles
It's a little frightening now that I think about it, looking up at the stacks that ascend from the top of the bookshelf beside my desk. If they tumble I'm a goner.

But I'm gaining on the stacks, and at the moment I'm enjoying some titles acquired many moons ago, works by author Martin Caidin, an aviator turned author best known for creating Steve Austin, Cyborg, who would become the Six Million Dollar Man on TV.

The Bionic Woman remake--which I thought was a bit of all right--didn't really prompt it. I'm not sure what compelled me to pick up the title from my shelf.



My buddy and his book
My buddy had a paperback of Cyborg when The Six Million Dollar Man TV movie debuted on ABC in the '70s. We couldn't get ABC at my house. Did I mention before the local station aired mostly Homer Formby in off hours?

Anyway my buddy had a copy of Cyborg which he read back then. I didn't. Don't know why I didn't borrow it, but we had distinct protocols of ownership as I recall. We both bought the Battle for the Planet of the Apes novelization from T.A.B. the Teen Age Book Club and then raced to see who could read it first.

You couldn't find any book in the universe in those days like you can now. You were limited to what was at the drugstore or the mall or the grocery with the paperback rack where your dad was the butcher, as in my friend's case. So in 1973 I didn't get to read it or see The Six Million Dollar Man except with a lot of snow, and the world marched on.

The Writing Life
Down the road, I read an interview with Martin Caidin in Writer's Digest--the interview mentioned here, in fact--and that put Caidin on my radar. I picked up a copy of Cyborg when I ran across it used and also Wingborn, and I'm reading those books now. Cyborg first.

Wingborn's next and then I probably need to get around to the later books in the Cyborg series, slightly more intense adventures for Steve Austin than he experienced on TV, encountering Bigfoot and aliens and thwarting robberies while dressed as Robin Hood on roller skates. That was the point where I always thought the series jumped the shark. I did eventually get to see reruns.

But anyway I'm reading Martin Caidin's rather fascinating novel that introduced bionics, with an s--it's Latin or something not plural, into contemporary fiction.

A lot of the Cyborg is devoted to the treatment of Austin following his injuries while piloting a test craft, the introduction of artificial limbs and the psychological toll it all takes. Oscar Goldman is on hand to pay the six million dollars to fix Steve up. I can't think of Oscar Goldman without thinking of the scene from The 40-Year-Old Virgin where Seth Rogen looks at Steve Carrel's action figure collection and asks: "Isn't that The Six Million Dollar Man's boss? Why do you have that?"

Oscar is about like he was in the series, I guess. Steve Austin is a little different, though maybe some of the luxury features for the bionics limbs--such as self-contained breathing apparatus--were used in television episodes I missed.

All in all, I like Caidin's writing style, and Cyborg is cool sort of '70s mainstream science fiction.

Tough guy tackles sexism
Wingborn, which I haven't started, is Caidin's '79 novel focusing on Kate Brandon, a skilled pilot who struggles against sexism and other challenges. Looks like it's also a promising page-turner.

After that I may need to look to Book Mooch for more titles for Caidin, who died in 1997. I guess that defeats the purpose of working through my collection, but he was a prolific author and I really want to get around to some other works including his "Messiah Stone" series and a title called Aquarius Mission.

Check out his bibliography here.

Books I Should Have Read in the '80s: Kane by Douglas Borton

Do you have books waiting around for you to read them? Doesn't everybody?

Kane by Douglas Borton has been on my shelf, or actually various shelves in various residences since it came out in 1990, so technically it's not an '80s book but it is part of that '80s horror wave.

I bought it new because I was intrigued by the premise and had liked Borton's Manstopper, but in spite of its great premise I've just kept not getting around to it until now.

But it's a great read. I'm not finished but I trust it will all come together well. It's about a mysterious stranger who wanders from the California dessert into a dying town and decides to speed the process along.

Only about 25 people still live in Tuskett, Calif., once known as Desolation. After a brief pause to get his bearings, the mysterious Kane starts picking off the population. Why was this never made into a movie? Could have been a great, gritty documentary-style chiller.

The novel offers some great characters along with page-turning chills. It's broad, small town cast of characters reminds me of the flavor of Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot.

If it's on your shelf but neglected, pick it up, or look for it and see what you think.

The Intruders

One of the good things about holiday down time is getting caught up on some reading. I sat up until I finished Michael Marshall's The Intruders last night. It was not an arduous task because it is an engrossing book, similar in flavor to the author's Straw Men trilogy yet filled with its own twists and thrills.

Like The Straw Men, The Upright Man and Blood of Angels, the tale revolves around a first-person narrator who is struggling to unravel a complex conspiracy linked to a loved one.

In this case it's Jack Whalen, a cop turned writer who's settled into a seemingly blissful existence in a small Pacific Northwestern town. It provides him a nice place to write while his wife, an ad agency trouble shooter, commutes to cities where her services are required.

Meanwhile...
Meanwhile, triggered by events that are a bit foggy, a young girl named Madison begins a strange odyssey through Portland's mean streets and beyond.

Whalen is approached by an old school friend to investigate a strange double murder in Seattle, but he turns down the opportunity only to be dragged in when Amy, his wife, loses her cell phone and he discovers she's not staying the hotel in Seattle where he though she was registered.

Strange events swirl together and Jack gradually begins to uncover a shadowy group linked to his wife. To say more would spoil the fun, but suffice it to say it's more than just a conventional suspense thriller.

The solution may not be totally new territory, but it's handled with the same deft touch that kept me reading through the entire Straw Men experience, and that provides the same rewarding experience again.

I'll be waiting for the next Michael Marshall book for sure.

Books I Found at Wordstock

I'd just wandered into the main room at Portland's Wordstock--I made it home last night by the way--when I met William L. Sullivan, author of several hiking and travel books including Listening for Coyote and now a novel, The Case of Einstein's Violin, a thriller with humor and science backed by input from his son, who is a scientist.

The premise is that Einstein left behind a theory in a violin case he once owned. Ana Smyth inherits it and sells it on eBay, a mistake that soon puts her on the run from spies and other nefarious types.

She's soon globe trotting to places such as Germany, Italy and Greece, all places Sullivan has visited and hiked as well so there's authenticity to the locales.

I've read only the first chapter so far but it looks like loads of fun.

Christine purchased a couple of other books by Mr. Sullivan, a non-fiction account of how he and his wife built a log cabin over about 25 summers, Cabin Fever: Notes from a Part Time Pioneer.

The account has a real-life murder mystery built in, so I'll hopefully get to that after Christine.

More books
I picked up Life on the Ledge: Reflections of a New York City Window Cleaner by Ivor Hanson at the table of its publisher, Two Dollar Radio, which seems to be a cool house with a cool mission.

The book is Hanson's memoir about window cleaning but also a meditation on his life after playing in a band and realizing rock stardom was not on his horizon.

More stuff I bought
It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want to Be by Paul Arden from the Portland Museum of Art gift shop.

The Rough Guide to Crime Fiction from Murder by the Book.

The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox from Powell's on Hawthorne Street.

Turing's Delirium by Edmundo Paz Soldan from the big Powell's on Burnside

What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the New by Eric Alterman, a staff pick at the big Powell's.

City of Tiny Lights by Patrick Neate from Powell's Burnside

Becoming Vegetarian by Vesanto Melina, Brenda Davis and Victoria Harrison.

And again a big thank you to City of Readers for getting me around town and pointing me in the right direction many times.

Notes From the Road - Wordstock Moments - Avi on Writing

Wordstock is lacking in mud, though Charles' quip was a funny one. What we did find plenty of yesterday were books and authors.

Christine got to see Roscoe Orman aka Gordon of Sesame Street read from his children's book, Ricky and Mobo, based on his own childhood. It's a possible gift item for our nephews this Christmas.

We also sat in on a session with young adult author Avi, which was loads of fun. I'd read some of his books when preparing to write Deadly Delivery, so I was anxious to see him speak.

He discussed his writing of a new YA on the Monitor and the Merrimack, part of a series called I Witness, then took questions.

One young audience member asked "What should you do if you want to be a writer?"

"Read, read, read, read," he answered. "Then read, read, read, read and when you've done that, read, read, read and read some more. ... If a writer took a year and did nothing but read his writing would improve."

Sounds like fun to me!

Pay It Forward - Thriller Writing Tips

I haven't seen the new Kevin Bacon thriller Death Sentence yet, but reading about it led me to an item I thought I'd share - Brian Garfield's Ten Rules for Suspense Fiction. Word up is they helped John Grisham with The Firm, so they can't hurt.

The new movie is based--loosely, I think--on Garfield's sequel to Death Wish, the novel and not the movie, and when I discovered that I bounced around Garfield links and found the thriller tips.


Unseen wonders
I can't tell you if the movie is any good, but once upon a time I liked the book. I found it in paperback on a variety store's rack. I'd read Death Wish because I couldn't see the movie. There was a time when I was too young for things.

I'd also read interviews in which Garfield expressed his dismay over Charles Bronson's portrayal as a hero in the film adaptation of Death Wish.

"Fill your hand," Bronson as Paul Kersey née Benjamin utters in the brutal final action set piece of the film, harkening back to a host of Western gunfighters.

Based upon
As I read, I discovered Death Sentence was Garfield's answer to his concern. Asides even featured characters voicing some of the same things he said about vigilantism in newspaper interviews.

Sentence focuses on Paul Benjamin's move to Chicago where he continues his vigilante ways until his notoriety spawns another vigilante more vicious than he.

He ultimately has to track down and face the other shooter and come to terms with his life and his losses.

It's far better than the inexplicably brutal Death Wish II, and worth a look if you enjoy a thoughtful page turner.

Other Garfield works I've enjoyed include Hopscotch inexplicably adapted for film by Garfield himself as a comedy; Recoil and if you can find back issues of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine look for his spy stories featuring cold war operative Charlie. Those are a load of fun.

58 Minutes and Other Thrillers

My reading flavor-of-the-month is thrillers. I have the Die Hard movies to thank. I re-watched Die Hard 2: Die Harder and Die Hard With a Vengeance around the time I went to see Live Free or Die Hard, which I thought was a pretty good action movie.

All of that reminded me I'd picked up but never read 58 Minutes, the novel by Walter Wager that provided the plot for Die Hard 2.

Several of Wager's books became action films in the '70s including the Charles Bronson vehicle, Telefon, but 58 Minutes got a John McClane injection for the big screen.

In the novel the hero is a New York counter-terrorism cop whose daughter is on an incoming flight when terrorists jam radar and cause other havoc in order to demand the release of five political prisoners.

It reads somehow like a thriller of another era, though its from the late eighties. It's an interesting book.

It's fun to play - how'd they deal with this on the big screen while reading it, too. McClane is an outsider in the film, while Frank Malone, the novel's hero, works to marshal available resources to deal with the problem at hand.

It's still white-knuckle territory with loads of physical action and a wrap-up that makes you say: Cool!.

I cracked open Ignition by Kevin Anderson and Doug Beeson over the weekend, a thriller that might have been a McClane movie. I believe it was actually optioned before the plot for was Live Free discovered in Wired, via another screenplay.

It focuses on terrorists who take the space shuttle hostage while it's on the launch pad. A tough but downed-astronaut has to fight them and save the crew, which includes some Russians as well.

We'll see where this trend takes me after that.

What I'm Reading Now - A Walk on the Nightside

I've been reading urban fantasy a bit of late. My reading tastes are cyclical, I suppose, caroming from genre to genre and author to author.

Karen Chance's first novel nudged me onto this current path, though I have a history as far back as Mike Resnick's Stalking the Unicorn. Of late, every couple of books, I pick up something from the contemporary fantasy scene. And I've been recording "Blood Ties" and "The Dresden File" based on some urban fantasy novels, but I guess that's another story.

I like urban fantasy because the flights of imagination are wonderous and intriguing, perhaps moreso because they occur in universes slightly to the left of the real world vs. far flung galaxies.

I discovered Simon R. Green's tales of the Nightside while browsing collections of people with whom I have books in common on Library Thing, and I'm now about halfway through the second novel, set in a shadowy city within London where things are just weird.

Dead singers are on hand in the clubs, demons masquerade as gangsters and larger, more shadowy types are on hand to menace John Taylor, the main character who's essentially a private eye with a psychic gift for finding things. In the first novel, Something from the Nightside, he returns after five years in the real world, rekindling old rivalries and acquaintances.

There's a subplot running through his activities related to the identity of his mother and his potential to bring about a dark future.

It reminds me of "Sandman" as well as a host of current television shows i.e. "Heroes" not to metion the aforementioned cable shows. I think I'll stick with it through the following volumes, then I have to get back to the Weather Warden series.

Books I'm Embarassed To Say I Haven't Read Yet II: All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By

I discovered John Farris as a reader with the paperback publication of "Son of the Endless Night." I knew of "The Fury" but I hadn't felt compelled to read another psychic story when it was released.

SOTEN, on the other hand, promised an excitingly different twist on the demonic possession story. It focuses a young man commits a murder while possessed by a demon.

He's tried and a "demonic possession" defense is mounted. Of course-- need I say it--all hell breaks loose at the trial.

After reading that I rushed right out and found a used--hey, all I could get at the time, we didn't have no Amazon in the '80s--copy of "All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By."

As Charles noted recently that phrase is a magnificent combination of words, and the book was touted as remarkable in many Farris articles. It's on many Top 100 Horror lists.

I proceeded to not read it.

That's a super power of mine, even though I knew it was supposed to be fantastic. (David J. Schow discusses just how fantastic it is in this review.)

I read "Shatter" and "Minotaur" and "Scar Tactics" by no "AHTWTHGB."

I don't have an excuse other than the "I was busy defense."

So I've been deprived of the intricate tale of families and history and voodoo it promises. It's one more selection on my shelf of must-read-horror, and I hope to rectify the situation soon.