On a recent used bookstore trip, I intentionally collected a number of paperbacks from authors I'd only read a few books from (as well, of course, as favorites). One of those was Stuart Kaminski's MURDER ON THE YELLOW BRICK ROAD, featuring P.I. Toby Peters. I think I'll have to read more of these.

​Read on for why.

Previously, I'd read some of Kaminski's Inspector Rostnikov novels, featuring a Soviet police detective behind the Iron Curtain, as well as his Kolchak the Nightstalker tie-in works. I wasn't familiar with the Toby Peters series (Kaminski's longest) until I saw this.

The Toby Peters novels predate the Rostnikov novels by several years (Kaminski's first two novels, I now know, Kaminski continued to write about the character until his passing in 2009). Written in a very different style than I'm used to from Kaminski, this work is both lighter and in a way, more entertaining as far as I'm concerned.

The year is 1940, the place is Los Angeles, and Toby Peters is both a  former cop and former trouble-shooter for Warner Brothers, now turned private eye. Called to MGM (Metro Goldwyn-Meyer) by none other than Judy Garland, Peters is tasked with investigating the murder of one of the little people who played a Munchkin in the film adaptation of Oz, over a year after the film has wrapped, all while being charged with keeping it quiet to avoid damaging the studio's reputation.

As I mentioned, the tone of the book is very light and the pace brisk. Toby Peters is a typical wisecracking, underpaid P.I., and both he and the book remind me of a lighter version of Max Allan Collins's Nate Heller mysteries, as both are filled with real locations and people (including Clark Gable, Raymond Chandler and others), though of course the events in this novel are entirely fictional. 

I don't need to go too much into the plot, as it's more functional than anything else, but as I said, the tone is light, the pace is brisk, the dialogue is often funny and I enjoyed it a great deal. There's something like two-dozen of these mysteries and I plan to read more at some point in the future. It'll be interesting to see how the books evolve over the 30 plus years Kaminski was writing.

​Recommended if you see copies!

JACK HAMMER: PAPER HERO is in stores TODAY!
Ask at your local comic shop or order online!

Jack McGriskin, cranky, super-strong private eye, is back in an all-new one-shot!

One of Jack's oldest foes, Monkey Business, has finally been caught red-handed, but when his trial turns into a circus, Monkey Business goes on a murderous rampage! It's up to Jack to bring the sinister simian to heel - but when things go from bad to horrific, is Jack up to the challenge posed by a super-human with nothing to lose?

Feast your eyes, folks, it's mail-day:

After months of distributor-level delays (please be assured that no fault lies with the publisher or any member of the creative team), JACK HAMMER: PAPER HERO, the first new Jack Hammer book since 2015 will be in comic book shops and your hot little hands on Wednesday, April 11th.

Jack McGriskin, cranky, super-strong private eye, is back in an all-new one-shot!

One of Jack's oldest foes, Monkey Business, has finally been caught red-handed, but when his trial turns into a circus, Monkey Business goes on a murderous rampage! It's up to Jack to bring the sinister simian to heel - but when things go from bad to horrific, is Jack up to the challenge posed by a super-human with nothing to lose?

Click here to read a preview and if your comic shop didn't get any copies, click here to order online!

Like a lot of people, I remember OUTLAW STAR from the late 90s/early 00s as a seminal sci-fi anime - one of the series everyone had to watch. Unlike many, however, I somehow never got around to watching it (I never finished COWBOY BEBOP, either, but that's another story). The DVD collection was in my Amazon wishlist for the last several years, and then, by luck, Toonami re-ran the series. Huzzah!

I'm glad I got a chance to watch this series finally. It won't make my all-time-favorites list, but I enjoyed it.

The series follows the crew of the Outlaw Star, a cutting-edge space-ship built by a mysterious criminal organization for unknown purposes, and then stolen by an outlaw (those who are neither outright criminals, but also don't adhere strictly to the law) named Hilda and later given over to Gene Starwind and his friends after her death. Nominally, the series is about trying to find the legendary Galactic Leyline, the nexus point of the galaxy (and possibly the universe), where literally anything is possible. Melfina, the beautiful amnesiac girl who is somehow part and parcel with the Outlaw Star's navigational system, is also somehow connected to the Galactic Leyline and, like the hero he aspires to be, Gene has promised to find this legendary place and solve the mystery of Melfina's past. That is almost immediately pushed aside, however, and doesn't really pick back up until the last few episodes of the series.

I enjoyed OUTLAW STAR quite a lot and it reminded me of simpler times. The characters are delightfully 90s-nostalgic anime stereotypes (the maverick who's often in over his head; the boy-genius; the beautiful-intruder who doesn't have any memories of her own past; the cool beauty who can kick your ass; even a cat-girl), and the individual story-lines range from epic space opera to goofy fan-service. One of the complaints people often have of the series is that there's little originality to it, and that's true - it really doesn't do anything a dozen (or more) other series haven't. But that doesn't mean it isn't a fun time, and really, that's all I was looking for from this series. I'd like to mention, too, that the stunning job (presumably) Funimation did in upscaling the 20-year-old animation to high-def. It just looks gorgeous, especially the space-scapes.

Recommended if it's a series you enjoyed the first time around or if you are simply a fan of 90s anime.

Just a short one today, as I don't think I've ever done a music post here, but there's a first time for everything.

Today, I ramble a little about Finnish hard rock/light metal/horror-show band LORDI.

I became aware of Lordi way back in 2006 when they won the Eurovision contest with their song "Hard Rock Hallelujah", the first metal band and only Finnish band to win, and listened to them sporadically online via streaming services for a while, then they fell off my radar. A few weeks ago, however, their song "Would You Love a Monster Man?" came up in an old playlist I created, and I realized what I'd been missing.

I found a copy of their album "The Arockalypse" for a decent price and away we go.

LORDI, while superficially resembling American band GWAR in both look and sound, have more in common with the hard rock/light metal bands of the 70s and early 80s, such as KISS (who they cite as influences), Alice Coooper and Twisted Sister (Dee Snider of TS actually does guest vocals on Arockalypse), often with horror-themed lyrics. Songs include lighthearted, but hard-driving, anthems such as "Bringing the Balls Back to Rock" to full-on horror-themed songs such as "The Kids Who Want to Play with the Dead" or "Chainsaw Buffet", and the style vacillates back and forth between hard rock and lighter metal. Other albums, though, such as "To Beast or Not to Beast" are full-on metal, while albums such as "Babez for Breakfast" is hard-rock right out of the mid-80s. At no point, however, does LORDI not rock, whether playing metal or anything else.

Definitely not a band for everyone, but I think with driving guitars, metallic harmonies and tongue-in-cheek, fun-loving lyrics, LORDI is a band that anyone who likes metal or rock can appreciate.

 Way back in 2012, a comic packager asked me to create a female-lead, supernatural comic series. The concept I came up with was "Night & Days", an adventure/humor series about an occult investigator named Dr. Antonia Harper, derisively called "Dr. Night" (as in "things that go bump in the"), by her more mainstream colleagues, and Nathan Days, the curator of the Arkham Museum of Art and Artifacts, home of occult items great and small. The concept was that the museum was a magnet for weirdness and, after Days brought Dr. Harper in to help with a particular issue initially, she would have ended up using it as her base of operations. It was high concept enough to allow for many possibilities and the folks who asked me to create it loved the concept so I worked up a script for a short graphic novel that would have served as the introductory storyline. A four-page sample story was also created as part of a proposal to send to larger publishers (or possibly use as part of a Kickstarter campaign).

Unfortunately, the project fell through for various reasons, but that four-page story, called "Real Deal", was completed and it seems a shame not to let anyone else ever see it, so here it is.

(Click the image below to read the comic)

If you follow me on twitter, or have been reading this blog for a while, you'll know I'm a fan of Erle Stanley Gardner's detective team of Cool and Lam. Gardner's more famous creation, though, Perry Mason, is another character I've read a fair bit about and am coming to enjoy more and more.

​Read on.

I am a fan of detective fiction, primarily private-eye and hardboiled stuff. Whodunnits and cozies are not usually my cup of tea. Gardner's Cool & Lam novels are sort of a half-way point between whodunnits and traditional P.I. stories and I enjoy them. Save for the very first Perry Mason novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws, I hadn't read any of the PM novels until fairly recently when someone gave me five of them they'd found at a garage sale and bought for me, remembering I liked Gardner's work. 

Well, they are definitely more in the vein of traditional mystery stories, but I have come to enjoy them quite a bit.

First, if you aren't familiar with the character, Perry Mason isn't a typical mystery novel protagonist. Like Gardner himself, Mason is actually an attorney, though one who professes to love mysteries and, in the words of Hamilton Burger, the Los Angeles County District Attorney Mason frequently comes into conflict with, Mason is a great attorney but an even better detective. Mason is rather mercurial and will turn down big-paying clients he knows are guilty or whose cases don't interest him in favor of working for, or with, people accused of crimes who can't pay, but whose circumstances interest him. Mason, in his own words, detests boredom and paperwork and craves puzzles, making him perfectly suited to the role of mystery novel protagonist.

Very little is shown about Mason himself in the novels and he's more or less used as a spotlight to shine on interesting puzzles Gardner has created. One of the things that new readers of PM novels must be aware of is that the plots of all the novels are, in a sense, all the same. Gardner found a formula that worked very well and stuck with it for more than eighty of these novels. Where the works shine, however, is in the sheer, vast variety of characters, circumstances and twists that Gardner invented and crammed each story chock full of.

These are true whodunnits, too, and clever readers paying attention can puzzle out the solution along with Mason. One of the hallmarks, in fact, of Gardner's PM novels is that there are usually at least two completely plausible solutions: one in which Mason's client is guilty (the theory espoused by the police or district attorney, generally) and one in which they are innocent. Mason, of course, fights for his client and only if he is convinced of their innocence, but there are a few times when I've found myself wondering if the other, equally possible, solution isn't the factual one. It's part of the fun.

As I said, I'm not normally into whodunnits, but I've come to develop an affection for these Perry Mason mysteries. Because the plots are always so similar in many ways, though, these are not novels I can binge on, rather they have become an occasional reading treat and I think that's how to best enjoy each mystery: one at a time, with ample breaks in between for the hard stuff. 

Just a few notes I'd like to share:

I've sold a new weird tale/semi-occult-detective story featuring a very different kind of exorcist, entitled "Shadow's Angle," to Occult Detective Quarterly, the very fine publication in which my Carnacki story, "The Arcana of the Alleys," appeared last summer. This new story features a new character I hope to write more about in the future, hit-man-turned-exorcist Azuma Kuromori​, operating in modern-day Tokyo. I believe the story is slated to appear in issue #5 of ODQ, coming this May.

​More on that closer to publication.

I've also sold a straight western story, entitled "A Hanging Matter," to Crimson Streets, a pulp-dedicated ezine, the mission of which is to keep alive the style of pulp magazines of the 30s, 40s and 50s. I am a big fan of the western genre and it's difficult to find paying markets for westerns these days, so I'm very glad CS exists and that they liked my story. The story is a cow-town murder-mystery in which Marshal Ernie Farrar must simultaneously solve a bushwhack murder while keeping peace in a town ready to boil over with racial tensions. Marshal Farrar is another character I hope to do more with in the future.

The story is scheduled to be in the July issue of Crimson Streets.

Lastly, I'd like to ask of anyone who's read my novel This Rough Old World to please take a moment to leave a review on Amazon, Goodreads or Barnes & Noble. Reviews are heavily-weighted by Amazon especially in how they promote and recommend works to potential readers and every new review has tremendous impact. 

I'd also like to remind reviewers for websites and magazines that review copies can be obtained through the publisher, Electric Pentacle Press. Please let me know if you're someone interested in reviewing the book for a site or magazine.

​Stay tuned, more news soon.

Recently, a reviewer likened my novel THIS ROUGH OLD WORLD ​to the works of Ross MacDonald, an author with whom I was only familiar with by name. As a noir buff, I'd of course heard of him, but I'd also been told that MacDonald's Lew Archer, P.I. series was simply a pastiche of Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlowe. I've read (nearly) all of the Marlowe stuff, so I didn't feel I needed to read MacDonald.

Well.

For Christmas, I was given a large-denomination gift-card to a chain bookstore and while browsing it, I didn't find much I was interested in that day. Nothing against the store--far from it, I spend a lot of time and money there--I just wasn't feeling anything that caught my eye. I was about to leave until I saw a copy of THE WAY SOME PEOPLE DIE, the third Lew Archer novel (though I didn't know it at the time). Since I had a gift-card, I figured why not.

I wish I hadn't waited so long to check out MacDonald.

Read on below.

First, it's true to a degree that Lew Archer is a pastiche of Phillip Marlowe. The tone of this novel is very similar to Chandler's works. However, there are important differences, and in reading more later on, it seems like THE WAY SOME PEOPLE DIE is the point where MacDonald ceased simply aping Chandler and began to evolve his own style.

Firstly, the plot starts off simply: Archer is hired by a concerned mother who hasn't seen or spoken with her daughter in months, a daughter whom she describes as "man-crazy". It isn't just that she isn't contacting her mother, either; the girl has walked away from a good-paying job as a nurse and has even moved out of her apartment without leaving a forwarding address. She's understandably concerned, though Archer isn't - not at first, anyway.

Of course, it isn't as simple as that, either. Archer isn't the only one looking for the girl, who supposedly has a package everyone from mobsters to druggies to supposedly-legitimate businessmen want (yes, it's a MacDonald MacGuffin!), and it turns out that the girl isn't any damsel in distress. She's as hard-boiled as any of the other characters. As a detective story, the novel is quite complicated, but still manages to skirt the line between being too complicated and by the end, all the many twists and turns make sense. It's an impressive bit of plotting on MacDonald's part.

What sets this novel apart from simple Chandler pastiche, though, is MacDonald's ability to suffuse it with, and impart to the reader, the sense of world-weary sadness that these characters are steeped in. They are doing the things they do less because they want or even need to, but because it's simply something to stave off the malaise for a while. They're all damaged people and MacDonald makes a great case for even the monsters being human.

Take the mobster Dowser, for example: he's short, so short that even when he's lounging by the pool, he wears sandals with two-inch heels. And he's insecure. He hates being alone. After Archer's interview with him, he doesn't want to be alone; he asks Archer to stay with him, at least until one of his cronies returns. He doesn't say so in as many words, but it's pretty clear that he he can't stand being alone with his own thoughts. MacDonald makes him out to be a pitiful figure, despite the amount of money and power he has.

One of the greatest weaknesses of Chandler's Phillip Marlowe is that he's a barely a two-dimensional character: he's almost not even a part of the stories about him, he's simply the vehicle Chandler uses to steer us from character to character as we ride through each mystery. And that's fine, but Lew Archer is more than that. He's got a humanity--a wearied, beaten-down humanity, granted--that shows through as he feels for the people he interacts with, rather than simply observing them and their foibles. MacDonald makes it clear that Archer isn't a mystery-solving robot, but a human being who wishes this wasn't the way it has to be, but can't figure out a way to make it otherwise. And that makes a big difference in the reading experience.

Last year, I had the great pleasure of reading my good friend Patrick Shawn Bagley's rural noir novel BITTER WATER BLUES. Now, it's due out in March and you can pre-order it from Down & Out Books.

​Read on and I'll tell you why you should.