I wrote about Ross MacDonald's Lew Archer, P.I. series here several months ago and how my interest was spurred by a reviewer's favorably comparing my novel THIS ROUGH OLD WORLD to them. Without rehashing what I wrote then, suffice it to say that I am a fan of Ross MacDonald and when I saw two of his non-Archer crime novels (both stand-alones) on my most-recent trip to the used bookstore, I snatched them up. MacDonald only write a very small number of non-Archer novels, so I was excited to check these out.

​Now, let's talk a little about MEET ME AT THE MORGUE.

Originally published in 1953 (the year between the publications of the third and fourth Lew Archer novels) under a semi-pseudonym (using his full name, John Ross MacDonald), MEET ME AT THE MORGUE has a very different feel from the MacDonald works I'm familiar with.

For one, it doesn't feature a P.I. or even a cop as the protagonist. Howard Cross is a parole officer who is convinced that his model parolee (on parole for a drunken vehicular manslaughter and seemingly punishing himself more than the courts did) is innocent when he's accused of a kidnapping, even though Cross himself saw the man with the boy only hours before the ransom note was delivered to his parents. From there, an extremely-tangled, but in the end, entirely logical mystery begins to unfold.

The interesting thing about this novel, at first, is that Cross has neither any experience as an investigator nor any business investigating this crime. Almost everyone believes Fred Miner committed the crime, or at least was an accomplice to it. Cross has nothing but his certainty that Miner is a good man who made a mistake and not a hardened criminal capable of stealing a child. And as he performs his initial investigation, he's certain of nothing else - not his methods or even his own motives. It lends a sort of charm to the story as we feel out Cross's character as he feels out his own situation.

Within forty pages, though, that all evaporates and Cross is solving the mystery like Lance Lawson on adderall. Each decision he makes turns out to be the exactly correct one and each step leads him unerringly to a bigger, more important piece of the puzzle and he seems to expertly weave them together in solving the crime. 

I really don't know what happened there, but it affected my enjoyment of the novel. Don't get me wrong, the mystery is, as I said, complicated and tangled and fantastically spun, but Cross starts out as an interesting character and is quickly relegated to another generic, tough and smart guy solving a seemingly-impenetrable crime as easily as he'd tie his shoes. It was a disappointing development.

That said, the novel is very solid in terms of plot and if you care more about the mystery than character development, it should be right up your alley. 

I think I've written about Harry Whittington here before. I've certainly read enough of his crime novels. Some are excellent (like his swamp-noir A MOMENT TO PREY) and some are atrocious (like DON'T SPEAK TO STRANGE GIRLS), but most are fairly average. However, Whittington also wrote a number of westerns. Until recently, I'd never read one, but a friend gave me three for my birthday a couple of weeks ago. The first I read was SADDLE THE STORM and I have to say, it's so good, it almost seems hard to believe Whittington wrote it. 

As I said, I've read a number of Whittington's crime novels - ten or twelve, probably. While the subject matter varies widely, they almost all have one thing in common: they are very simple, very straightforward. That's not a bad thing, per se. His most complex book I'd previously read was A HAVEN FOR THE DAMNED, which reads less like a novel and more like a single-set-piece stage-play with a large number of characters moving on and off stage. That felt like Whittington being more ambitious than was typical, but it's nothing compared to SADDLE THE STORM.

SADDLE THE STORM is a western, but it's really not like any western I've read before. It's immensely, incredibly densely-packed with both named characters and plot. When I first started it and I realized how quickly characters were being introduced, I feared it would be a case of a huge cast being used to obfuscate a thin plot, but it's exactly the opposite. None of the characters Whittington introduces are filler nor are their words or actions wasted.

The entire novel takes place during a three-day Independence Day celebration in the small town of Malpais and features three main, interwoven plots about: a young couple whose marriage is falling apart; a Bible-thumping bully who terrorizes his wife and children as an outlet for his own anger at being pushed around by larger ranching outfits; and a young gunfighter who wants to get away from a life of violence and bloodshed. Each of the three plots could have supported a typical Whittington novel on its own, but here, Whittington weaves them together so skillfully, each character and plot playing off of and adding to, moving along, the others, that it's truly incredible. The endings don't wrap up as realistically as I'd hoped, but each has an ending that works and even if they're a little anti-climactic, they don't take away from the overall experience.

The thing about this book is that it was so good that it makes me wonder why Whittington didn't devote this kind of skill to his other works. SADDLE THE STORM was published in 1954, early on in Whittington's career. Almost all of his work in the 50s and early 60s was published by Gold Medal, who paid fairly small amounts for initial print runs (though they paid fair royalties on additional print runs and many of their books went through multiple runs and/or editions). Many GM authors produced large bodies of work simply to make a living. Whittington himself was incredibly prolific--at one point, he produced a 50k novel a month for more than three years--and I suppose at some point, he made the decision between a steady income from potboilers and a more uneven income from more-artfully-produced novels. Clearly, he chose the steady work.

It's too bad, really, because Whittington, while not forgotten, is not as widely remembered as he deserves to be and I truly believe that if his crime novels were as skillfully produced as SADDLE THE STORM, he would have been able to break into the more mainstream, larger publishers and gain more lasting recognition.

That being said, if you've never read Whittington, there's no time like the present to start and you can certainly do worse than start with this one.

Just a quick note: I've sold another western, a second story featuring Ernie Farrar, the town marshal of Aldensville. The first story, "A Hanging Matter" was published this past spring in Crimson Streets Magazine, and this new story, entitled "Noose-Hungry", will appear late this year in CSM's pages, as well. It's another cow-town mystery, so if you liked "A Hanging Matter", I think you'll like this one, too.

And if you haven't read Marshal Farrar's first case, fear not - it's available online.

Click here or the image below and enjoy! 

I don't normally post reviews; if you follow this site at all, you know that the stuff I write about here is usually more my thought process on a work. I almost made this a Literary Legacy post, but it isn't - that wouldn't be fair to Ovid DeMaris as A. I haven't read enough of his work to write such a post and B. his literary legacy is the important journalism and non-fiction works he wrote for decades, covering the Mafia quite extensively. But I do want to write about this novel, so let's just call this what it is: a review.

In his early years as a writer, and sporadically later on, as well, he wrote crime fiction. And while I had known of DeMaris as both a fellow New Englander and an important journalist, I was delighted to find he'd published a number of these crime novels through Gold Medal, probably my favorite publishing company of all time.

Well, let's say that enthusiasm faded quickly. In fact, I was disappointed in THE EXTORTIONERS.

As I mentioned earlier this year, I sold a story to Eric S. Fomley's newest anthology, DRABBLEDARK, a collection of 101 horror and dark fiction drabbles and now it's been released!

Amazon reader Maura Y says:

A well-written drabble can deliver great emotional impact and demands great reader engagement, because every word matters. Luckily for us readers, Drabbledark contains many well-written drabbles... I greatly enjoyed reading Drabbledark. Owing to the breadth of topics, which were presented within an elegant, reader-friendly layout, I would highly recommend Drabbledark as a quick introduction to the genre of dark fiction. However, beware: a likely side effect of reading this ambitious anthology of blood-curdling gems is a frighteningly deep, almost otherworldly attachment to microfiction.

Get your own copy in print or on Kindle right here!

Found on my hard-drive - a video file simply titled KillKiss-FULL. 

Yes, it's Kubrick's early work, his second film (though just barely; Killer's Kiss is barely an hour). Is it good? No, it is not. The plot is boring, the actors wooden and the sound was all done on a sound-stage, so it comes off as unnatural and at times, off-speed with the actors' mouths.

The plot revolves around a loser boxer, Davey, who sees his neighbor Gloria, a dancehall girl, attacked by her boss, who is obsessed with her. Davey rescues her from his abusive boss, Vincent, but the sleazebag is undeterred and kidnaps her, and attempts to kill Davey, only to mistake Davey's manager for him. Davey is blamed for the murder by the police and has to clear his name while rescuing Gloria. It's a pretty good noir set-up, but the execution falls flat.

For all that, though, Kubrick's talent for scene composition is brilliant and his choice of locations inspired. He reportedly only had a budget of about seventy thousand dollars to make this film. His solution? Make the city of New York his real star.

A few screenshots to illustrate:

Is it a good movie? As I said, no, but it's a beautifully shot movie for all that and it is fascinating to see some of Kubrick's early work and what he could do on a small budget. 

​Seeing it again, I remember why I kept the file. Think I'll keep it around to rediscover in another six or seven years.

Recently, a friend nominated me for one of those "post the covers of seven books you love, one a day, without comment or explanation" deals on Facebook. Tuesday was the final day, so I thought I'd share them here, as well.

​Posted without comment.

And for good measure, an eighth book. ;)

Click here to snag yourself a copy in print or on Kindle!

As happens, I was looking for something else and stumbled across this movie. It didn't catch my interest based on what I'd read about it, until I saw it was based on a novel of the same name, by William Irish, which was a pseudonym of Cornell Woolrich, one of the masters of noir.

The story is a variant on the classic noir plot, "Did I do it?" in which a sailor, Alex, wakes up in NYC from a night of drinking to find he's considerably cash-richer than he was. He only barely remembers the night, but does remember a mysterious woman gave him the cash.

In seeking to find her and return the money, Alex, discovers his dubious benefactor, Edna, is dead and since he can't remember the night, he himself is an obvious suspect. With the help of a dance-hall girl, June, Alex sets out to find out who really killed Edna. The title comes from the fact that he has only a few hours before he needs to catch a bus to report to his naval station for duty. 

Now, any time you stumble across a minor noir film, there's always people claiming it's a masterpiece and the public just doesn't understand it. This isn't a masterpiece, but it's unusual, for the time, in that the main "detective" is a woman - June. Now, June is not your typical noir frail, neither is she a femme fatale. Instead, she embodies the kind of world-weariness you usually see in cops or P.I.s. The world is terrible and she's just along for the ride because she has no choice, although in her case, her jadedness comes from her lot in life as a dance-hall girl--constantly being hit on by strange men, etc--it's no less real than that of the men who usually lead these films.

Why, then, does she take pity on Alex? Well, you get the feeling that he's just big and dumb and innocent-looking enough that she takes pity on him and maybe thinks he's even slightly worse off than she is. After that, she takes the lead and they get things done.

The movie itself isn't anything particularly special: a lot of wandering around, talking to people (almost at random) piecing together clues. Edna, it seems, was in the blackmail business and finally crossed the wrong person. Same old story, right?

Well, it's a B-movie certainly, but not cheaply nor unskillfully made. From what I've read, this was director Harold Clurman's first and only film, and it's obvious that he put time and consideration into it, rather than just hacking it out and what he ended up with, while not spectacularly, is perfectly solid - especially for a first effort. For that alone, I think it deserves to be remembered. 

In 1969, writer Don Pendleton published his novel War Against the Mafia, a novel of a Vietnam vet's (initially) one-man war against the Mafia, in retaliation for their tangential killing of his parents and sister. Mack Bolan, the Executioner, sounds very Punisheresque, no? Well, that's because he's actually the direct inspiration for the Punisher, per creator Gerry Conway, though less-well known by the public.

Pendleton certainly made his mark, however, as, in addition to the 38 Executioner novels he wrote himself, more than five-hundred additional novels have been written by various writers and published under published by Gold Eagle (a division of Harlequin).

Read on.

I bought this novel on a whim because I enjoy a lot of Japanese fiction and the elevator pitch--"Rashomon in an all-girl's high school"--sounded like it might have potential. Not only did it have potential, it blew away my expectations. 

Read on.

If you haven't seen the Akira Kurosawa film Rashomon, the story is essentially six characters telling subjective, contradictory and very self-serving accounts of their own recollection of a murder. Each character's story paints themselves in a positive light and casts suspicion on someone else.

The Dark Maidens is very similar, albeit a modern day version set in a Catholic missionary, all-girl's private high school in Japan. 

Itsumi, the beautiful, kind, intelligent and exceptionally popular (think benevolent queen of the school) president of the school's literature club has died - violently. Whether it is is suicide or murder, the police have not yet determined, but rumors fly around the school that one of the six other members of the school's literature club has murdered her.

One week later, the literature club is meeting for its annual mystery stew slash original short-story-reading event, the event last of the school-year. Itsumi's best friend, Sayuri, formerly the vice-president and now president of the club, has decided to go on with the event despite Itsumi's death, knowing her best friend would want her beloved club to continue this tradition. The twist is that Sayuri has asked each girl to write, instead of a piece of original fiction, a story about their relationship with Itsumi.

What follows is, like in Rashomon, six stories, one for each girl, detailing how close each was with Itsumi, how wonderful Itsumi was to her and casting suspicion on another member of the club. Throughout these stories, bits and pieces (unbeknowst to the girls) of the truth are interwoven. They're not things you can easily pick up on while reading the stories for the first time, but by the end of the novel, I was genuinely impressed with how Akiyoshi seeded "facts" among the fiction.

Aside from that, the last arc of the novel, Sayuri's story, actually written by Itsumi before her death, threw several twists into the narrative. One, I suspected, but others I never saw coming and was not only surprised, but delighted. The last few pages of the work, especially, throw all the shadows and murkiness of what's come before into stark relief - and in a brutal fashion I could never have expected from the rest of the novel.

If it wasn't obvious, I greatly enjoyed the work. If I have any complaint, it's a personal one rather than a real critique of the work and it's only because I am a westerner reading a novel originally written for Japanese audiences, that being that there's a great deal of space devoted to explaining various Christian holidays and Catholic ceremonies. This is entirely understandable for a Japanese audience, as very few would be familiar with these concepts, but as a westerner, they sort of dragged the narrative down in a few places.

Don't, however, let that deter you. Overall, this is a great novel. I literally couldn't put it down as I read and ended up reading it in one sitting. Very much recommended.